Buried in a sloppy, whiny column today by Bill Kristol was a fairly interesting proposition:

In 1948, a Republican Congress, which had taken power two years before with great expectations after a decade and a half of Demoratic control, had become unpopular. Harry Truman lambasted it as a no-good, do-nothing Congress — and he rode that assault to the White House. We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.
And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year.

Now I understand that Congress’ steadily plummeting approval ratings this year have been a source of endless consolation to Republicans. But the idea that excessive liberal activism on the part of Democrats in Congress (the planted axiom of Kristol’s argument) is a big reason for public discontent has significantly less evidence to support it than the dubious belief of some progressives that the failure to cut off war funding, block FISA, or impeach Bush, is the problem. And if, conversely, McCain does indeed take the “do-nothing Congress” tack, he’s going to have to deal with the fact that offshore oil drilling and the surge are considerably less popular than, say, expanding children’s health care and providing housing relief, which McCain has helped obstruct.
Kristol’s other implicit argument is that McCain can batten on the alleged desire of voters to position a Republican president to “restrain” a Democratic Congress. I’ve never much bought the concept that Americans love partisan gridlock and split tickets to achieve it. And with ticket-splitting down significantly in recent years, it’s unlikely to be the dominant feature in this general election. Moreover, there have been exactly two presidential campaigns in living memory where a candidate overtly and successfully appealed to voters to “counter-balance” Congress: Truman in 1948, of course, and Clinton in 1996. And to emulate either of these examples, McCain would have to make up his mind (as Kristol clearly has not made up his own) whether to charge Congress with trying to do too much or too little.
And there’s the rub: Congress’ abysmal approval rating are something of a statistical anomaly, produced by Democratic unhappiness with too little progress against Bush, Republicans unhappy with Democratic control, and many weak partisans and independents simply registering unhappiness with “Washington” and with the general direction of the country. With Democrats almost certain to increase their margins in both Houses, it’s hard to imagine why the same voters determining that result would be excited about canceling its effect by voting for a presidential candidate promising to deadlock Congress even more than Bush has, or to move it back towards its pre-2006 direction.
On top of everything else, of course, John McCain has served continuously in Congress for a quarter-century, and is trying to paint Barack Obama as insufficiently experienced to serve as president. Overall, the strategy that Kristol is both urging and predicting would at a minimum require a candidate and a campaign far more sure-footed than anything we’ve seen from Team McCain. I doubt these plodding checkers players will become chess masters overnight, particularly with a smart and tough opponent like Obama.

If there’s a siller right-wing preoccupation today than the WSJ column extolling George “Batman” Bush (see staff post below), it would have to be the reported efforts of conservative “investigators” to uncover Barack Obama’s senior thesis from Columbia University. Seems he doesn’t have a copy, and his professor doesn’t have a copy (hardly shocking since it was 25 years ago, and believe it or not, in a less documented pre-Internet era), and though everyone remembers it had something to do with nuclear proliferation, certain bloodhounds are apparently convinced it could include politically damaging material.
Well, whatever. But I was amused by the innocent puzzlement of Noam Scheiber at TNR over Obama’s spotty memories of his college work:

For what it’s worth, I also had a semi-strange experience involving the Obama thesis back in February. An aide happened to mention that Obama had written his thesis on nuclear deterrence. When I went back to verify it in a subsequent conversation, the aide told me he’d have to double-check. He subsequently e-mailed to say Obama couldn’t remember whether it was his actual thesis or just a paper for a class, so it was probably best to drop the reference altogether. It wasn’t a particularly big deal either way–just a minor detail in the context of a much larger piece–but it did leave me scratching my head a bit. I mean, who doesn’t remember their senior thesis?

I’m not sure exactly how old Noam is, but I suspect his senior thesis was written a lot more recently than Obama’s, while my own Emory senior thesis was submitted (and was promptly destroyed, more than likely) much earlier than either. And all I really remember with any specificity is that I decided I had to reinterpret the history of Western Thought at least back to the Nominalists and Realists in order to explain the prose works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even today, I cringe with embarassment every time I hear a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I realize we’re all supposed to be endlessly curious about every detail of the lives of candidates for president, and also recall the odd “joke” by the Clinton campaign earlier this year suggesting that a perusal of Obama’s elementary school scribblings showed a lifelong lust for high office. But if Obama’s senior thesis didn’t make it into the extensive self-revelations he’s offered in two books, then it probably wasn’t worth remembing.
John McCain has basically said he didn’t grow up until the crucible of his experience in Vietnam, when he was over 30, and George W. Bush famously referred to the foibles of his drinking days as a matter of being “young and irresponsible,” though he didn’t dump his buddy Jack Daniels until he was 40. So let’s give that 22-year-old scholar Barack Obama a break.

Last month, we published an authoritative table-setting article about the Hispanic vote and the 2008 presidential election by R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, that concluded the Democratic ticket needed to hold Republican support among Hispanics at or below about 35%.
It’s good to know from a new Pew Hispanic Center survey that Barack Obama is currently leading John McCain among Hispanics by a 66%-23% margin. The widespread fear that Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic supporters might defect to McCain in significant numbers also seems to be abating:

[M]ore than three-quarters of Latinos who reported that they voted for Clinton in the primaries now say they are inclined to vote for Obama in the fall election, while just 8% say they are inclined to vote for McCain. That means that Obama is doing better among Hispanics who supported Clinton than he is among non-Hispanic white Clinton supporters, 70% of whom now say they have transferred their allegiance to Obama while 18% say they plan to vote for McCain, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

Moreover, the pro-Obama trends among Hispanics is being strongly reinforced by a pro-Democratic shift in party preferences:

In addition to their strong support for Obama, Latino voters have moved sharply into the Democratic camp in the past two years, reversing a pro-GOP tide that had been evident among Latinos earlier in the decade. Some 65% of Latino registered voters now say they identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with just 26% who identify with or lean toward the GOP. This 39 percentage point Democratic Party identification edge is larger than it has been at any time this decade; as recently as 2006, the partisan gap was just 21 percentage points.

All these findings are obviously a snapshot rather than a portrait of Hispanic political dynamics. But they are an encouraging sign.

There’s a delightful article up at The New Republic by Alaska-based writer Charles Wohlforth about the startling effect the Obama campaign is having on Democratic morale and participation in his state.
Obama’s efforts in the state are extraordinary, to put it mildly:

We’re so used to losing at the top of the ticket that we think about the presidential nominee mainly in the context of how Republicans can use him to shoot down our state candidates–as they did to torpedo former Governor Tony Knowles’s run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, with an ad that showed his head floating next to John Kerry’s. As Knowles said, “Hanging the national Democratic label on somebody was worth 4 or 5 points right there.”
So, how could it be that a Democratic presidential candidate was opening field offices all over our state, hiring a staff similar in size to the largest in-state campaigns, and going on the air with TV commercials in June?

Wohlforth is appropriately skeptical about talk that Obama could actually win Alaska, but says there’s no doubt that the campaign’s effort there (building on a foundation first set by Howard Dean’s commitment of money for state party staff as part of his Fifty States Strategy) is having a tremendous positive impact on down-ballot prospects, especially the even-money challenges to incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young. It doesn’t hurt that Alaska Democrats are already on the upswing thanks to a massive corruption scandal that’s split the long-dominant GOP.

Democrats, even national ones, look a whole lot better in this light–and Obama has already benefitted. The first sign that he had tapped into something fundamental here was the Super Tuesday caucuses. I’ve caucused before. It’s been an irrelevant and slightly absurd affair. One year, too few people from my district showed up to fill our party officer positions. In 1988, Alaska’s Democratic caucuses chose Jesse Jackson while the Republicans picked Pat Robertson.
This year, I couldn’t get to the caucus site because the entire east side of Anchorage was suffering from massive gridlock. People abandoned their cars in below-zero darkness and walked miles to the site. Organizers at voter registration desks finally gave up and began waving people in. Similar stories–such as a fire marshal who closed down an overcrowded caucus in the conservative Mat-Su area–came in from 41 locations across the state, including sites where Democrats from tiny Alaska Native villages attended by telephone or Internet. The turnout was at least 12 times higher than the previous record.

Being from conservative Georgia, I can relate to a lot of Wohlforth’s experience. In 1972, as a college student, I was Democratic precinct chairman in an Atlanta suburb, and spent election night in shock, as Nixon carried the county 4-1, sweeping all sorts of fools and knaves into local offices. This was the third straight shellacking for Democratic presidential candidates in Georgia. Four years later, with Jimmy Carter running for president, most of the fools and knaves were swept right back out, as Carter won the county, the state and the White House. Just being competitive had a tremendous effect on morale and interest levels among Democrats.
It’s possible that in retrospect the Obama campaign’s devotion of resources to places like Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and for that matter, Georgia, will look foolish, if he winds up locked in a photo finish race where the outcome revolves around Ohio, just as it did four years ago. But that won’t matter much to the red-state beneficiaries of the Dean/Obama Fifty State Strategy, who may well look back on this year as a big turning point that vindicated their years of work in the wilderness.

Political analysts are naturally drawn to historical analogies for current political developments. It gives us a chance to show off our knowledge, and of course, the past can be very instructive since many political dynamics are either of continuing relevance or are simply timeless.
There’s been an undercurrent in 2008 of talk about which past presidential election this one most resembles. At The New Republic today, John Judis addresses the most-discussed analogy, 1996. But he then counter-intuitively argues that the analogy, despite the favorable outcome, should not provide much comfort to Democrats, since Barack Obama has nothing like the big lead Bill Clinton had at this point twelve years ago.
As Judis notes, the main reason ’96 keeps coming up is because of the similarities between Bob Dole and John McCain, most notably their age, their personalities, their military records, their constant invocations of the past, and their rather clumsy campaign styles, both as candidates and as managers.
Beyond that, of course, the analogy quickly breaks down. Bill Clinton was an incumbent president running for re-election at a time of peace and growing prosperity. He had just earned the gratitude of the electorate by thwarting the crazier ideas of the Republican majority said electorate had elevated two years earlier, and also neatly disassociated himself from the less popular ideological tendencies of his own party on a variety of fronts, most notably by signing (in the middle of the general election campaign) controversial but very popular welfare reform legislation. He also benefitted from a significant third-party candidacy that split the anti-incumbent vote. Nearly everything about the political climate that year was different from this one.
Finally, the partisan dynamics in 1996 were not nearly as favorable to Clinton as those today favoring Obama. His re-election was more a personal endorsement and a rejection of GOP hegemony than any pro-Democratic trend.
Another analogy you hear (I’ve cited it myself on occasion) is 1980, a big “change” election. While John McCain is not, like Jimmy Carter, an incumbent with a lot of problems, he’s close enough to the actual incumbent and his deeply unpopular views and record to get very contaminated by him. And Barack Obama, like Ronald Reagan, is a candidate whose main challenge seems to be overcoming a relatively low threshold of acceptability by an electorate that wants a party change in the White House. It’s sometimes forgotten that the 1980 race was actually quite close until the last couple of weeks, when Reagan appears to have crossed that threshold and voters broke decisively in his direction (a factor that’s not relevant this year was the interesting phenomenon of a once-powerful third-party candidacy, that of John Anderson, whose shrinking base of support changed during the campaign from center-right to center-left). All in all, 1980 is a very reassuring scenario given Obama’s resources and skills in an even more change-oriented year.
Still another analogy sometimes cited–mainly by Republicans but also by a few panicky Democrats–is 1988, when Ronald Reagan’s successor reversed a huge Democratic lead and trounced Mike Dukakis, who let himself be defined as a cultural elitist with no qualifications to become Commander-in-Chief. While 1988 is an eternal reminder of the power of negative campaigning (when it’s ignored by its target), conditions in the country in 1988 weren’t remotely as troubling for the incumbent party as they are now. And any comparison of Dukakis and Obama as personally appealing political figures doesn’t pass the laugh test.
The analogy that’s scariest for Democrats is 1976. Two years after a major Democratic “wave” election, a Republican candidate who had managed to somewhat distance himself from a vastly unpopular two-term incumbent came very close to beating a charismatic Democratic outsider with a short resume and personal traits and associations that troubled some voters. And in fact, the only thing that saved Jimmy Carter from defeat was his powerful homeboy appeal in the South, where he won the bulk of former Wallace voters, most of whom probably had no business voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.
The economy in 1976 was in deep trouble, and the Republican candidate then didn’t have much of a grip on what to do about it (viz. Ford’s feckless “Whip Inflation Now” campaign). While there was not a war on in 1976, the Vietnam disaster, whose messy and disturbing end occurred on Ford’s watch, was a very recent memory. Ford, like McCain, had a lot of issues with unhappy conservatives; indeed, he nearly lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan, who, unlike McCain’s conservative primary rivals, pretty much sat on his hands during the general election. And while Ford did a good job of presenting himself as a post-Nixon, healing figure, his pardon of Nixon tied him to his predecessor much as McCain has tied himself to so many Bush policies.
Still, Ford nearly won. The main reason to reject the 1976 analogy is that the country was in a period of ideological realignment that gave any Republican candidate strengths that were temporarily obscured by Watergate and the 1974 Democratic landslide. The Ford-Carter race was, after all, preceded and succeeded by Republican landslide wins (followed by two more landslide wins). That doesn’t seem to be the trend-line today. Moreover, Ford did benefit as well as suffer from his incumbency, and Carter had nothing like Barack Obama’s financial resources and trend-setting campaign organization.
I’d be remiss in failing to note that the most popular analogies among conventional political analysts are 2000 and 2004, those razor-close general elections that turned on a variety of factors in specific states, and in the former contest, in the Supreme Court of the United States. So much has changed since 2000 and 2004 that while the outcome may be as close this year as in the recent past, the election dynamics are very different. McCain may be running for “Bush’s third term,” but his campaign persona is different, and few would argue that Obama is just like Al Gore or John Kerry.
All in all, there’s not really any overwhelming evidence that 2008 is actually 1996, 1980, 1988, 976, 2000 or 2004, though I’d argue that 1980 comes closest to reflecting this year’s dynamics, with 1996 being a possible analogy if John McCain continues to act like Bob Dole.
Let’s hope I’m right about that, since either scenario would portend a big Obama win.

If you want a good glimpse at the contortions being undertaken by Iraq War enthusiasts in response to recent political events in that country, look no further than Max Boot’s Washington Post op-ed today.
Retreating somewhat from the Bush/McCain/conservative position of a few days ago that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki didn’t actually say what he said about a timetable for ending the U.S. combat role in his country, Boot moves to a long, acidic attack on Maliki as a slippery pol who’s stabbing his U.S. patrons in the back. He reminds readers that Maliki didn’t support the original U.S. decision to invade Iraq, and horror or horrors, hasn’t embraced the “undeniable” success of the surge, citing other factors as contributing to the recent reduction in violence. That’s two more points on which Maliki appears to agree with Barack Obama, which is probably what’s really bugging Boot.
Americans shouldn’t listen to this treacherous and ungrateful puppet, Boot suggests, but should instead talk to Iraqi military professionals, particularly one who recently said he hoped U.S. combat troops would stick around at least until 2020. He doesn’t come right out and call for a military coup in Iraq, but the suggestion is in the air.
Perhaps realizing that his assault on Maliki and other Iraqi elected leaders is a bit nakedly imperialistic, Boot adds a disclaimer in his last graph: “Of course, if the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we will have to leave.” Nice of him to make this grudging concession to Iraqi sovereignty. But if “the Iraqi government” means whatever military man we can find who’ll support the idea of an endless U.S. troop presence and quasi-occupation of the country, then “sovereignty” becomes a pretty empty concept.

Nestled in a Kathleen Parker column at RealClearPolitics today on Republican vice presidential speculation (the headline was about Bobby Jindal) was this interesting tidbit:

New polling in Michigan by Ayres, McHenry & Associates shows that Romney gives McCain a significant jump — “off the charts,” as someone familiar with the still-unreleased poll described it — and makes him competitive in a state that hasn’t voted Republican since 1988.

This caught my attention because I had just read a short article at The New Republic by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver suggesting that his analysis showed Michigan and Ohio as the “tipping-point states”–those most likely to decide a very close general election.
Assessments of Romney as a McCain running-mate typically focus on his popularity among conservative elites, his looks and money, and his Mormonism. But no one should forget his family’s very high profile in MI, a state whose primary Romney won in one of the few bright spots for his campaign.
Mitt, of course, is a Michigan native, as is his wife, Ann. His father, George Romney, is remembered nationally (if at all) for his dithering indecision about running for president in 1964 (he ultimately didn’t), and for the “I was brainwashed about Vietnam” gaffe that destroyed his 1968 candidacy before the primaries even began. But he was a popular three-term governor of MI, and before that, president of American Motors. His wife, Lenore, ran for the Senate in 1970.
This sort of homeboy factor may not matter to that many voters, particularly those too young to remember Mitt’s father. Michigan in many ways should be a tough state for McCain: it has large African-American, union, Arab-American and student populations, along with profound economic problems, including a very hard hit from the housing crisis. McCain’s free-trade enthusiasm is anathema to many voters there. Obama has consistently held a modest lead in general-election polling in MI (the latest RealClearPolitics polling average has him up 47-41).
I haven’t seen the poll Parker mentions, but if the Mittster indeed would give McCain a big push in Michigan, it will be very tempting for him to move in that direction, since Romney’s one of the relatively short list of viable candidates that won’t create heartburn among the institutional Right (with the exception of a few Christian Right leaders who don’t like Mormons).
The single biggest problem with a McCain-Romney ticket isn’t Mitt’s religion or the mockery he often attracts from the news media. In a general election campaign in which McCain will apparently focus on accusing Barack Obama of being a callow, slippery flip-flopper, can he really afford a running-mate whom he constantly attacked as a flip-flopper during the nomination contest? I suspect both men would be reminded a lot of that exchange in New Hampshire back in January when Romney did a long, redundant litany about “change,” and McCain smirkingly responded: “I do agree you are the candidate of change.”

As noted in the staff post earlier today, there are rumors that John McCain’s about ready to pull the trigger on his running-mate choice, maybe as early as this week. But as Noam Scheiber of TNR points out, the “window” for Barack Obama’s veep decision is closing too, since there will be only ten days between his return from his overseas trip and the beginning of the media-and-audience-sapping Olympic Games, which will last until the day before the Democratic Convention.
In other words, we will probably know both tickets within the next two weeks, and maybe earlier.
In that connection, HuffPo had a good catch today when it noted, buried in a short, two-day-old New York Times piece, the news that Hillary Clinton was indeed being vetted for the running-mate position, despite recent indications to the contrary.
Nobody knows if that means anything, but it’s interesting that the intense veep speculation of the last couple of months has largely abated precisely at the time when it’s actually appropriate. The earlier talk has, of course, previewed a lot of the likely reaction to this or that choice in this or that party. But the deals are about to go down, and there’s not a lot of confident betting about the results on either ticket. Anticipatory leaks can be expected any time now, but until then, it remains a bit of a dual mystery.

My brief posts earlier on the Netroots Nations gathering in Austin this weekend probably caught the mood (particularly the organizers’ efforts to downplay conflicts with Barack Obama) pretty well, but didn’t do justice to the variety of the workshops and panels.
A few highlights:
On Friday afternoon, I attended a panel called “How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backwards to Please the Right.” It featured historian Rick Perlstein, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and blogger Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios), moderated by “Digby” Parton. Perlstein focused on the roots of the MSM fear of looking too “liberal,” citing passages from his new book Nixonland on how political reporters in 1972 would only write about Watergate if they could match the story with trumped-up and petty allegations of McGovern campaign rules violations.
Krugman talked about the very human tendency of political journalists–more thin-skinned than you’d think–to respond to heavy criticism of their “liberal bias,” even if it doesn’t actually exist.
And Black discussed the skewed and self-reinforcing perceptions that sensible Iraq War critics were marginal or even radical.
Refreshingly absent from this discussion were suggestions that the MSM’s drift to the right was attributable to some corporate conspiracy, or to the seductive insularity of Georgetown Cocktail Parties. What came across is that the conservative movement’s relentless efforts over decades to convince journalists that they had to counter-balance their own “liberal” biases paid off handsomely in self-conscious “on the other hand” reporting that sacrificed facts and reasons to a spurious “balance.”
Later on Friday, I also attended a very substantive workshop on “Iraq in Strategic Context” featuring Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent, Ilan Goldenberg and A.J. Rossmiller of the National Security Network, and Matt Yglesias of The Atlantic. This was a wide-ranging discussion of the surge, Iraq’s future, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and the overall U.S. strategy in the Middle East. The most haunting comment, IMO, was Ilan Goldenberg’s answer to a question about Iraq’s likely trajectory. The best-case scenario, he said, was “Lebanon.” The worst-case scenario was “Sudan.”
On Saturday, most attention was focused on the Nancy Pelosi forum with surprise guest Al Gore. But afterwards, I attended what was billed as a first-of-its-kind public presentation on the Obama’s campaign’s field organization philosophy, past, present and future. It featured deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, New Media director (and former Blue State Digital founder) Joe Rospars, former South Carolina and now Ohio field director Jeremy Byrd, and former Georgia field director and now chief of the Obama Organizing Fellows program Joy Cushman.
The two major thrusts of the presentation were that (1) the Obama field effort is thoroughly based on the candidate’s own community organizing experience (both Byrd and Cushman were professional community organizers before joining the campaign), focused on finding and developing authentic community leaders, not just volunteers for cavassing and phone-banking; and (2) its objectives go beyond the campaign towards creating a 50-state infrastructure for progressive political mobilization in the long haul.
Having watched and listened to this presentation, I have to say this: if, as Obama-skeptics charge, his campaign is “selling Kool-Aid” about its revolutionary methods and goals, its sales staff have clearly drunk the Kool-Aid themselves. They were very convincing. I was particularly impressed by Cushman, who’s in charge of the “fellows” program that’s enlisting the campaign’s most effective primary-season community organizers for the general election and beyond. As she explained, she cut her teeth as an organizer for a right-wing religious group up in rural Maine some years ago (before evolving into progressive, but still faith-based and very local causes), and like Byrd, was attracted to the Obama campaign because of its organizing philosophy as much as for the candidate’s positions or ideology.
The one newsy thing the Obama folk disclosed is that they are building towards a voter registration drive for the week after the convention that will surpass anything of this nature that we’ve seen before.
If, down the road, the Obama campaign abruptly abandons its field program in all but a few very close battleground states, as campaigns before theirs have usually done, and as they could be forced to do in a tight race, then maybe the sort of talk I heard on Saturday can be discounted as a mid-summer-afternoon’s dream. But for the present, I’m sold on their determination to “leave something behind” in communities all over the country, if, for no other reason, to give an Obama administration a base of enduring support.

Those who expected a good, cathartic, intraparty brawl here at Netroots Nation during a session featuring Markos Moulitsas and Harold Ford went away disappointed. It was all very civil. Ford said a lot of very positive things about the value of the netroots, and argued that the party needed to “suspend” internal conflicts at least until Barack Obama is elected president. Markos said of widespread anger about Obama’s FISA vote that “we’ll get over it,” and also said FISA showed the netroots wasn’t strong enough to beat a small group of telecomm lobbyists. Ford mentioned Al From’s name and didn’t get booed. Markos cut off a couple of questioners who tried to make Ford get down in the weeds of FISA details.
Best I can tell, Markos’ equanimity about what some have called Obama’s “betrayal” on FISA is shared more broadly at this assemblage than I would have guessed. And Ford’s decision to appear here and pay his respects to the netroots role in the party seemed to do him, and maybe even the DLC, some good.
All in all, I’m not seeing many signs of party disunity. But I am reminded of an anecdote from the 1924 Democratic Convention (no, I wasn’t there) wherein someone said to Will Rogers that the convention seemed pretty quiet. “Be patient,” said Rogers. “That will change. Those are Democrats down there.” He was certainly right. It took that convention 103 ballots to nominate a candidate.
Good thing we’ve already got a nominee this year (presumptively, as they say).