Note: this item is cross-posted from Beliefnet.com.
One of the most animated discussions involving faith communities that’s underway in the wake of November 4 is about abortion policy. To put it simply, the conservative drive to take a first step towards a national abortion ban via an overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court has now stalled, perhaps for a long, long time, particularly if Barack Obama has the anticipated opportunity to replace three pro-Roe Justices with younger counterparts (barring major Republican Senate gains in 2010, that seems very likely).
The proposition that an Obama administration would be objectively “pro-life” by reducing the actual number of abortions through better health care and aggressive contraceptive policies will not cut much ice with Right-to-Lifers who view anything like current levels of abortions as equivalent to the Holocaust, and who typically regard many methods of contraception as representing chemically or mechanically induced abortions (not just “Plan B” but the most often-utilized regular “pills” which may destabilize the implantation of fertilized ova).
So where will the abortion debate move next?
One theory in the RTL community is that an aggresively pro-choice administration will help galvinize anti-abortion sentiment. But that may depend on a delusional view of public sentiment on this issue.
The most immediate issue will be Obama administration policy on embryonic stem-cell research. The Bush policy of banning government support for such research has been famously unpopular, even among many Republican, and some self-consciously pro-life, voters. So long as Obama links a change in policy to an explicit requirement that donors of the frozen embryos from which stem cells are derived certify that they will otherwise be destroyed without any research benefits, then it’s hard to understand why this issue will hurt him politically. But the pushback to such a policy change, from such intelligent observers as Ross Douthat, indicates that the RTL community has not yet gotten a whiff of the coffee.
Here is the real deal on abortion policy: activists on both sides of the abortion debate understand yet rarely acknowledge that a critical plurality of Americans don’t much like abortion but care a whole lot about when and why abortions occurr. That plurality position, especially from the point of view of anti-abortion activists, is morally and metaphysically incoherent; if a fertlized ovum is a full human being with an immortal soul, and putative constitutional rights, then it doesn’t much matter when or why it is aborted; the result is homicide.
The RTL movement’s focus over the last decade on restricting late-term abortions has thus been morally dishonest, but politically smart. But they’ve missed the connection between “when” and “why” concerns. Much of the popular support for so-called “partial-birth” abortion bans has flowed from a common-sense concern that unwanted pregnancies could and should have been avoided in the first place through birth-control methods that many RTL activists view as abortifacients, or through earlier-term clinical abortions. In other words, from a RTL point-of-view, the prevailing popular opinion is that women seeking late-term abortions should have instead committed homicide earlier, through either pharmaceutical or surgical means.
But there’s still another disconnect between RTL and popular opinion that goes beyond “when” questions: “why” questions. While public opinion research on this subject is terribly insufficient, I think it’s plain that Americans care as much about why as when abortions are undertaken. Abortion-as-birth-control is unpopular (again, excepting the RTL presumption that many birth-control methods actually involve abortions). So, too, are “convenience” abortions: those undertaken for “lifestyle” reasons. But short of mandatory sodium pentathol doses for applicants for abortion services, it’s very hard to legislate against the kinds of abortions that a majority of Americans would actually want to prohibit. And among the more objective measurements of intent, the “health exception” for otherwise objectionable abortions is actually very popular, as measured by polls, and more recently, by the negative reaction to John McCain’s sneering reference to the “health exception” in a debate with Barack Obama.
All in all, the abortion debate has shifted decisively, on both strategic and tactical grounds, against the RTL movement during this election year. I personally worry that some hard-core anti-abortion activists will embrace extra-legal extremism. I hope instead they will embrace theological and moral nuances on the subject, and maybe even listen to their opponents.

As a staff post earlier today noted, we’re all a bit tired of staring at state-by-state presidential results from November 4. But there’s one simple piece of analysis posted yesterday by brownsox at DailyKos that demands some attention.
As brownsox notes, the national “swing” from 2004 to 2008 was roughly ten percentage points (from +3 Republican to +7 Democratic). Looking at the states, it’s very interesting to see which exceeded or fell short of that national swing.
You’d normally expect the battleground states to come pretty close to that national average swing, or perhaps fall a bit short of it, since that’s where the McCain-Palin campaign made virtually all its efforts down the stretch. And indeed, Iowa hit the mark perfectly; Pennsylvania and New Hampshire fell just 2 points short; Florida and Minnesota were 3 points short; and Ohio 4 points short. Meanwhile, Obama’s performance exceeded the national swing in Wisconsin by 2 points; in Colorado and North Carolina by 3 points; in Virginia by 4 points; in Nevada by 5 points; in New Mexico by 6 points; and in Indiana by an astonishing 12 points. Remember, however, that the “battleground” map was skewed towards Obama down the stretch; VA, and certainly NC and IN, weren’t in play in 2004, while 2004 war zone MI was conceded by McCain in September.
Non-battlegound 2004 “blue states” where Obama exceeded his national average swing included Hawaii (by 26 points); Michigan (8 points); Delaware (6 points); California and Maryland (5 points); Illinois (4 points); and Connecticut (3 points). Among non-battleground 2004 “red states,” the big “swingers” were North Dakota (9 points over the national “swing”); Montana and Utah (7 points); Nebraska (6 points); Idaho (4 points); Texas and South Dakota (3 points); and Georgia (2 points).
Meanwhile, there were three states where McCain actually improved on Bush’s 2004 percentage, despite the 10-point national swing: Arkansas (an 11-point pro-GOP swing); Louisiana (4 points); and Tennessee (1 point). In two other states, Oklahoma and West Virginia, McCain matched Bush’s percentage. It’s noteworthy that all of these states other than TN (which does still mine some coal) are major energy-producing states where the GOP’s pro-exploitation message undoubtedly resonated; three have significant mountain regions notoriously resistant to the Obama appeal; and LA, of course, was affected by post-Katrina demographic changes.
Brownsox’s take on these findings focuses on the West as a region trending heavily D, and on the really vast margins Obama ran up in “moderately-blue” states ranging from NJ and CT to CA, OR and WA that were battleground states not that long ago. I’d say overall the results were a vindication of, if not a 50-state strategy, then something very much like a 40-state strategy. There is no longer any major region of the country that’s a Republican “lock,” while the northeast, the upper midwest, and the Pacific Coast are increasingly deep blue. And if you consider the “energy-producing states” factor a bit of a temporary anomaly, the map looks really bad for the GOP going forward.

For all the talk about the impact of the financial crisis and the growing recession on the federal government’s balance sheet, the real nightmare is unfolding almost hourly in state capitals around the country.
Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times penned a brisk and depressing summary of state fiscal conditions yesterday. Basically, state revenues, whether based on income or sales taxes, are plunging, as demands for services rise and borrowing costs skyrocket. And most states were in bad shape even before the events of September, having already run through the easier ways to restrain spending, such as hiring freezes and travel bans.
California’s the real trendsetter for fiscal catastrophe. The state went through a protracted budget fight during the summer, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seeking huge layoffs and salary reductions for state employees before finally reaching a deal with legislators that aimed to close a $15 billion budget gap. Now there’s a new $11 billion budget shortfall, and the Golden State is in real danger of defaulting on its obligations.
Up until recently, states with large oil and gas reserves had been largely insulated from the torrent of red ink. Lower oil pricies may have been a “silver lining” in the recent economic disaster for the country as a whole, but they’ve also pushed oil-producing states into the same muck as their less resources-blessed counterparts.
All but one state (Vermont) has some sort of constitutional or statutory requirement to maintain balanced budgets. With credit tight, and resistance to tax increases very high, significant cuts in services are happening very rapidly. And with health care, education and infrastructure investments dominating state budgets, these three big priorities for the incoming Obama administration are being compromised at a dangerous pace. We may soon face the irony of a big brawling debate in Washington over universal health care coverage as the existing health care safety net is being shredded in the fifty states.
That’s why President-elect Obama, and most congressional leaders, have been making it clear that the next economic stimulus package will provide a significant level of state fiscal assistance. The simplest way to do that is through “super-matches” that at least temporarily raise the federal share of expenditures for federal-state programs ranging from Medicaid to bridge repairs. Emergency assistance to shore up unemployment insurance funds–even as eligibility is expanded to help people whose benefits have already run out–may be another “must-do.”
The political implications of the state fiscal crisis are hard to calculate, but could be profound. One of the least-discussed aspects of the “Clinton Boom” of the 1990s was how easy it made life for the host of Republican governors and state legislators elected in the 1994 landslide, who were often in a position to expand services while cutting taxes. It’s possible that the Bush administration’s parting gift to the GOP will be a national economic climate that makes life very difficult for the Democrats who now hold a majority of governorships and state legislative chambers.

Policy Review editor Tod Lindberg has a habit of telling his fellow conservatives uncomfortable truths at key moments of political history. Back in 1999, he scolded conservatives for refusing to acknowledge that Democrats–and center-left progressives internationally–had reinvigorated their political tradition via a “Third Way” movement that relied equally on effective governance and conservative failure to adjust:

This movement on the part of the world’s center-left parties is the most important political development of the
decade. They have decided to bury large enough swaths of their old ideology to obtain power and govern….
The truth is that Third Way politicians are perfectly happy to have cast conservatives as an anti-government menace whose message for people who fall down is “Get up.” The conservatives are even useful, in their way: Their political salience makes it possible (in fact, necessary) for Third Way politicians to shackle their taste for activist government to market principles, thus reinvigorating governments ossified by old-style liberalism.
If conservatives don’t like the role Third Way politicians have assigned them, they are going to have to articulate a different one. It’s probably going to have to include a sense of what government is for, a question to which conservative parties don’t really have an answer now.

Nine years later, Democrats are on the rise again, and again, conservatives are in denial, claiming that America is still a center-right country that has only turned to progressives reluctantly, due to the non-conservative sins of George W. Bush. One of the first to rebuke them has been Tod Lindberg, in today’s Washington Post:

We are now two elections into something big. This month’s drubbing is just the latest sign that the country’s political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.
Here’s the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, “The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats.” This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.

Lindberg also addresses the one major piece of evidence being repetitively cited for the “center-right country” rationalization:

True, the percentage of voters describing themselves as “liberal” and “conservative” has held relatively constant over many election cycles, with self-described liberals checking in at 22 percent this time around (up one percentage point over 2004) and self-described conservatives at 34 percent (unchanged from 2004). The numbers may not have changed, but the views behind those labels certainly have. Nowadays, it’s a fair bet that most of those calling themselves “liberal” support gay marriage. In 1980, those same liberals were, no doubt, cutting-edge supporters of gay rights, but the notion of same-sex marriage would have occurred only to the most avant-garde. In 1980, having a teenage daughter who was pregnant out of wedlock would have ruled you out for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket. This year, it turned out to be a humanizing addition to the conservative vice presidential nominee’s résumé.

As a Democrat, I’m reasonably happy that so many conservatives want to remain in denial, and comfort themselves that nothing’s really changed over the last two electoral cycles that a return to a more rigorous ideological fidelity can’t fix. But it’s probably not that good for the country to have a major political party living in a parallel universe that’s more and more remote from reality. So we should all probably appreciate Tod Lindberg’s stubborn efforts to provide some reality therapy to his political comrades.

This often gets lost in the buzz over cabinet appointments and other high-profile issues, but one of the more fateful decisions Team Obama will need to make over the next few months involves the disposition of his remarkable field organization and volunteer/donor network. As noted in an LA Times story today by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, one approach is to fold the Obama organization into the Democratic National Committee and state party affiliates, which is normally what happens after a successful presidential campaign. The other is to keep his organization intact as something of a personal army that will work with, but not under, the national and state parties.
Advocates of the latter approach include key figures in the Obama campaign:

“If it’s in the party,” said Marshall Ganz, a Harvard University lecturer who helped design the training curriculum for Obama’s organizers, “that’s a way to kill it.”
Steve Hildebrand, Obama’s deputy campaign manager and an architect of the grass-roots network, has been warning the president-elect’s team that it risks turning off activists who were inspired by Obama but who never considered themselves a part of the Democratic Party.
These people, Hildebrand said, could be inspired to fight for Obama’s proposals to overhaul healthcare or combat global warming, but would reject appeals that sounded like old-fashioned partisan politics.

Hildebrand’s comments are especially interesting since his name as come up a lot in the last week as a potential quarterback at the DNC (probably under a more visible “figurehead” general chairman).
There are those who say the formal arrangements may not ultimately matter:

“At the end of the day, they own the DNC,” said one party advisor familiar with the internal debate who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing deliberations. “Whether they merge their mailing lists or keep Obama for America as a separate entity doesn’t really matter,” the strategist added, using the campaign’s official name.

Well, that may be true so long as Obama’s agenda and that of Democrats generally remain closely yoked together. But part of the new administration’s strategy may be to try to build grassroots bipartisan and nonpartisan support for his initiatives, redeeming his post-partisan rhetoric through action around the country rather than through deal-cutting or accomodation in Washington.
This is an issue with more complex strategic implications than might at first appear, and bears watching as the transition turns into governing.

One of the things we have heard incessantly from conservatives since Election Day is that America is “still a center-right country.” Thiis claim is almost entirely based on exit poll findings that self-identified conservatives still outnumber self-indentified liberals, by the same margin as in 2004.
It’s good to see TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg and Campaign for America’s Future’s Bob Borosage take this claim on directly in an article for The American Prospect:

The conservative claim to a center-right majority comes from addition. More voters say they are conservative than liberal (by a margin of 34 to 22 in this election). Add conservatives to the 44 percent who say they are moderates and you’ve got the majority.
But the addition doesn’t hold up under any analysis. It assumes that moderates are without definition and more likely to swing right than left. This simply ignores reality. In 2008, self-described moderates, about 44 percent of the electorate, voted 60 to 39 for Obama. And, as has been increasingly true in polling going back to 2004, broad majorities have a world view far closer to liberals and Democrats than to conservatives or Republicans.
In this poll, for example, when asked if homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged by society, moderates and liberals agree that it is a way of life that should be accepted by society by 65- and 33-point margins respectively, compared to conservatives who believe it should be discouraged by 32 points. When asked if our security depends on building strong ties with other nations or on our own military strength, both liberals and moderates agree with multilateralism by double-digit margins, while conservatives disagree. On values and on issues, moderates — with one large exception — swing toward liberals.

The “large exception” that Greeberg and Borosage point to is that moderates are significantly more skeptical about the competence of government than liberals. All that means, ultimately, is that Democrats in power need to govern well, particularly after eight years of “big” but inept government under George W. Bush:

[P]rogressives needn’t be defensive about the majority that is dubious about government spending. Making government work effectively is at the heart, not the capillaries of the progressive agenda. This test doesn’t distract; it focuses us on our task. No progressive majority can ever be consolidated for long if it doesn’t demonstrate that government can be an effective ally for everyone.
And that is all moderates are looking for. They aren’t skeptical about the need for government. By large margins, they think regulation does more good than harm. They want investments made in education and training. They favor a concerted government-led drive for energy independence. They far prefer a health-care plan with a choice between their current insurance and a public plan like Medicare, rather than one that would give them a tax credit to negotiate with insurance companies on their own. Their concern is less that government will do too much and more that government will fail to do what it must and waste their money in the process.

The other big reason for the liberal/conservative ratio in exit polls, of course, is that most Democrats stopped using the “liberal” label decades ago, typically preferring “progressive” or “moderate” or even “center-left.” So the self-identification numbers aren’t particularly revealing.
All in all, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have a major window of opportunity to puruse initiatives the majority of Americans, including “moderates,” favor, along with the responsibility of providing, as the Clinton administration did to some extent, that government can get things right and avoid excessive bureaucracy.
The really challenging thing is that at some course over the next two years, the Democratic Party will become the “track” party, in the sense that it will be held responsible for “right track” and “wrong track” sentiments. Maybe Americans will cut Democrats some slack in the understanding that the consequences of Republican misrule cannot be reversed overnight. But we shouldn’t count on too much of a honeymoon if we truly want to solidify a center-left majority before the next elections.

Yesterday we published an impressive analysis of the “No on 8” campaign in California by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara. She offered not only a constructive critique of the campaign, but also a strategy going forward for future ballot intiative battles.
I mention all this because Jasmine’s article is precisely the kind of work from “outside writers” that TDS exists to publish. If you have it in you to write something like this that focuses carefully on a particular campaign or other election event, with a strongly strategic bent, please do send it along via the “Contact Us” link at the top right of this page, with all your own contact information.

Whenever there is a change of party control of the executive branch of the federal government, lots of jobs come open, and lots of ambitious and/or dedicated folk start scheming for ways to join the new administration. There’s even a handy-dandy publication–known as the “Plum Book”–put out by the House Committee on Government Reform that lays out available positions.
But in this particular transition, it’s becoming clear that job aspirants, and their family members, better be exceptionally tidy record-keepers, whether or not they’ve got potential conflicts-of-interest or the odd drunk-driving charge in their background. According to a Jackie Calmes article in The New York Times today, the basic questionnaire being distributed by the Obama transition team to those seeking “high-ranking positions” is a 63-point monster of a request for disclosure that goes beyond the usual have-you-been-a-lobbyist-or-felon stuff. Ever sent a potentially embarassing email? (Who hasn’t!). Cough it up. Ever done a blog post or set up a Facebook page? Send that along, please. Some questions clearly relate to issues that came up during the last Democratic transition in 1992. There’s one on “domestic help” that asks about the immigration status and witholding tax arrangements of nannies, housekeepers, and yard workers–a stumbling block, you may recall, for at least two potential Clinton administration Attorneys General. Notes Calmes:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

It’s not clear from the article exactly how far down the food chain this questionnaire is being applied. But those who face it must understand that after they past this test, there’s additional vetting by the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics.
As one of the worst record-keepers you’ll ever meet, I’m sure glad I’m not interested in a high-ranking job with the feds. But for those with that aspiration, perhaps the Obama vetting process will keep the crowds down.

Senate Democrats wil soon decide whether Joe Lieberman should be allowed to retain his Senate seniority, including a major committee chairmanship, after not only endorsing the other party’s presidential candidate, but campaigning for him, joining in attacks on Barack Obama, and speaking at the Republican National Convention.
I said my piece back in April, in a post at TPMCafe. An excerpt:

This argument [for tolerating Lieberman’s apostasy out of “bipartisanship”] conflates “bipartisanship” with abandonment of party. It’s one thing to cross party lines to support this or that policy initiative or legislation. It’s another thing altogether to oppose your supposed party in the contest that more than anything else, defines “party” to begin with. And it has ever been thus.
Back when Lieberman first endorsed McCain, Ken Rudin of NPR did a useful analysis of precedents. The last example he could find of a Member of Congress endorsing the opposing party’s presidential candidate without retribution was in 1956, when Adam Clayton Powell, at that point the only African-American Member of Congress, endorsed Eisenhower. You can understand why Democrats might have refrained from punishing him. But since then, three congressional Democrats endorsed other candidates (John Bell Williams of Mississippi and Albert Watson of SC in 1964, and John Rarick in 1968), and all were stripped of their seniority in the House. Unlike Lieberman, all three were, if nothing else, faithfully reflecting the views of their constituents.
Since 1968, there have been, quite literally, hundreds if not thousands of Democratic and Republican officeholders who in one election or the other, privately preferred the other party’s presidential candidate. A huge number of Republicans didn’t endorse or campaign for Barry Goldwater in 1964, but nor did they endorse or campaign for Lyndon Johnson. And despite the incredible weakness of the national Democratic Party in the South and West during the 1984 and 1988 presidential cycles, you didn’t see any public defections from the then-robust ranks of elected Democrats, either.
This is, in sum, the Line You May Not Cross if you choose to identify yourself as a Republican or as a Democrat. John McCain surely understands that; had he followed the entreaties of some of his own staff in 2004 by endorsing–much less joining the ticket of–John Kerry, he would have been stripped of his party prerogatives instantly and eternally.

President-elect Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have suggested that Lieberman shouldn’t be automatically booted from the Democratic Caucus. Reid has reportedly offered Lieberman a different, less influential committee chairmanship. But Lieberman has made it clear it’s “my way or the highway”: he retains his seniority and his Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee chairmanship, or walks across the aisle.
This isn’t about “bipartisanship” or “putting the election behind us.” Barack Obama has promised to reach out across party lines to work with Republicans when possible; he could still reach out to Joe Lieberman if he chooses to join the GOP Caucus. It’s also not about the famous “collegiality” of the Senate. The decision on Lieberman will affect the rights and prerogatives of the 23 current Democratic senators with less seniority, who somehow managed to support their own party’s presidential candidate.
Make no mistake: if Lieberman is allowed to retain his seniority and current committee chairmanship, Senate Democrats will be setting an entirely new and incredibly low standard for party loyalty. This would set a precedent that is offensive not only to “activists” or “the base,” but to those with heterodox views who felt enough moral obligation to the Donkey Party to at least keep their mouths shut and stay away from Republican campaign rallies and the Republican convention. Lieberman made his own choices, and that’s fine; it’s a free country and all. But the idea that it’s Democrats who are offending him by insisting that his choices have consequences, particularly when they are bending over backwards to keep him in the Caucus when they no longer need his vote to control the Senate, is simply bizarre.