(Note: this item is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room, where I’m guest-blogging this week).
One of the firmly established theories about contemporary partisan political dynamics is that Republican strength among white working-class voters has been offset by Democratic gains among upper-middle-class suburban voters. The relative value of these categories of voters was the explicit subject of the smartest recent Democratic take on political demographics, the Ruy Teixeira/Alan Abramowitz Brookings study titled “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.”
Interestingly, the two young conservative theorists most thoroughly identified with the argument that Republicans need a new, pro-public-sector strategy to consolidate their white working-class vote have now come out with a parallel strategy to reclaim the upper-middle-class surburbs.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors of the recent book “Grand New Party,” focused on “Sam’s Club” voters, have now offered an analysis at National Review of how GOPers can appeal to upper-middle-class suburbanites.
Their prescription suggests four policy/message thrusts: support for public-school choice (as opposed to vouchers), a nonregulatory approach to alternative energy sources, an agenda to encourage telecommuting, and a more-cops response to reemerging violent crime trends.
As with the Douthat/Salam argument for appealing to “Sam’s Club” voters, their pitch to Starbucks voters is long on message but less compelling in policy proposals. It’s not clear to me that any of their four policy prescriptions can really be clearly distinguished from Democratic policies.
But it is refreshing to see a proposed conservative appeal to suburbanites that is not focused on tax-cut bribes or national security fear-mongering. Unfortunately for Douthat and Salam, but fortunately for Democrats, most GOP politicians are still addicted to selfishness and fear as all-purpose political messages.

(Note: this item is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room site, where I’m guest-blogging this week)
Progressive healthcare wonks are haunted by memories of 1994, when the last major effort in Congress to enact something approaching universal healthcare, the Clinton health plan, went down in flames.
Some blamed the plan’s design, or the secretive process that created it, for the fiasco. But there’s no question another key factor was that the Clintons and their allies were outgunned on the public relations front, thanks to an insurance-industry-funded campaign that famously filled the airwaves with those “Harry and Louise” ads.
As Ezra Klein explains in his blog at The American Prospect today, an impressive array of progressive labor and advocacy groups are already coming together to plan and execute a pre- and post-election push for universal healthcare. Called Health Care for America Now, the coalition is broad and deep:

The primary partners — which is to say, those who put up $500,000 to join — include The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America’s Future, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, MoveOn.org, National Education Association, National Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, and USAction. Within that list are old guard groups like Labor and new wave organizations like MoveOn. Both Change to Win and the AFL-CIO are represented. Standing behind them are a much larger list of coalition partners that include the American Nurses Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Women’s Law Center. It’s about as broad a progressive coalition as you can imagine, and exactly what didn’t exist in 1994.

They’ve already raised $40 million, have already run one major political ad and have already begun to deploy organizers in key congressional districts. Just as important, they plan to continue the initiative long after the electoral dust settles; totally aside from Health Care for America Now, SEIU has already pledged $75 million to long-range efforts to enact universal healthcare.
As Klein notes, the campaign for universal healthcare won’t necessarily be any easier than it was in 1994. But “you’re looking at a simply fearsome organizing drive. It may, of course, prove insufficient. But unlike in 1994, it won’t be non-existent. And that’s a huge, and promising, difference.”

Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent has been writing an extensive series of articles about counterinsurgency theory, a relatively new defense “movement” that is rapidly gaining adherents throughout the military (viz. Gen. David Petraeus) and in policy and political circles. His installment yesterday focused on an interesting phenomenon: the striking number of women among counterinsurgency theory’s leading lights.

While women are still underrepresented in the national-security apparatus — and at the Pentagon specifically — counterinsurgency, more than any other previous movement in defense circles, features women not just as equal partners, but leaders.
There’s no one answer for why that is. In a series of interviews, leading woman counterinsurgents, and some of their male colleagues, discussed how the unconventional approach to military operations calls for skills in academic and military fields that have become open to women in recent decades. Others contend that counterinsurgency’s impulse for collaborative leadership speaks to women’s “emotional IQ,” in the words of one prominent woman counterinsurgent. Another explanation has to do with coincidence: the military’s post-Vietnam outreach to women has matured at the same time as counterinsurgency became an unexpected national imperative.

Ackerman introduces us non-defense-experts to such luminaries of counterinsurgency theory as Erin Simpson of the Marine Corps University at Quantico; Janine Davidson, until recently at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities unit; Sarah Sewall of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights (and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense); Michele Flournoy and Tammy Schulz of the Center for a New American Security; and Montgomery “Mitzi” McFate, who’s worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Office of Naval Research.
Though much of Ackerman’s piece involves discussion of why women are so prominent in this particular field, there’s no question it’s a very welcome trend. As Erin Simpson said to Ackerman:

The reason we need women working national security is the same reason we need women in medicine and engineering: this stuff is really hard. And we aren’t going to win by telling half the population they can’t play. It’s always important that we have the sharpest, most creative minds working on defense and security issues as possible.

(Note: this is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room site, where I am guest-blogging this week).
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s startling call yesterday for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from his country has been slow to draw the kind of attention here that it deserves. Perhaps that’s because his announcement was made in the context of complex negotiations over a temporary authorization for the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, and perhaps it’s because the precise meaning of “timetable” isn’t yet clear.
Still, as Juan Cole explains today, Maliki’s announcement reflects the widespread feeling in Iraq that demands by the Bush administration in the course of Status of Forces negotiations represent an offensive infringement of Iraqi sovereignty, requiring a reminder that U.S. troops aren’t necessarily indispensible. Maliki may also be signalling his understanding that he may be dealing with a new president next year named Barack Obama.
In terms of the implications for U.S. politics, Maliki’s timetable gambit exposes the vulnerability of George W. Bush, John McCain, and other “surge” enthusiasts to the argument that conditions in Iraq have improved enough that U.S. combat troops can soon be pulled out. After all, if the political leadership of that surge-blessed country seems to think it’s time to contemplate a withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops, why should Americans resist?
This illustrates the double-bind that Bush, McCain, and the conservative commentariat have created for themselves with their relentless surge-o-mania. If they’re wrong and the surge has failed to significantly change the fundamental realities of Iraq, then it’s time to get out. If they’re right and the surge is succeeding brilliantly, it’s also time to get out. Moreover, if Iraqis agree with either assessment, it’s definitely time to get out.
Theoretically McCain, if not Bush, could get out of the box by agreeing with Maliki that things are going so well that a withdrawal timetable is in order. But having staked a lot on the argument that Barack Obama is flip-flopping on the terms of withdrawal, McCain’s not in a great position to change his tune now.

(Note: this is a cross-post from Salon’s War Room, where I am guest-blogging this week).
John McCain’s campaign has released a repackaged “economic plan,” which will be the focus of a series of events this week.
I put the term in quotes because it’s not so much a “plan” as a hodge-podge of McCain’s domestic policy agenda, and it’s less about the economy than about the candidate’s decision to re-embrace a pledge–abandoned in April–to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term.
In fact, the economic and fiscal implications of McCain’s “plan” are inextricably entwined, since most of his concrete budget savings depend on highly dubious and very ideological assumptions about the impact of tax cuts on growth, of pro-oil-and-nuke policies on energy costs, and most of all, of subsidies for individual health insurance purchases on health care costs. Moreover, even a cursory glance at the fiscal math of McCain’s plan shows a vast number of “magic asterisks”–vague but savings-rich goals trucked up as proposals, ranging from nondefense budget freezes and “comprehensive reviews” of federal programs to some sort of latter-day peace dividend contingent on “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But there’s one fundamental aspect of McCain’s “plan” that ought to be drawing the most immediate attention: nearly all of it would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Congress that he will definitely face should he be elected president. Barring some wildly unlikely change in the political winds, Democrats will increase their margins in both Houses of Congress, perhaps significantly, as even the most spin-happy Republicans admit. The idea that congressional Democrats are going to even consider health care, energy, or “entitlement reform” policies that are increasingly hard to distinguish from those of George W. Bush is laughable.
And that simple reality illustrates the enduring dilemma of the McCain candidacy. He needs an “economic plan” right now in order to deal with the strong impression that his national-security-and-character focused message thinly disguises Bush-style cluelessness or indifference about Americans’ economic anxieties. But the overarching thrust of his “plan,” and most of the details, appear focused on pleasing conservatives who have convinced themselves that the political disaster of the Bush presidency is mainly attributable to the incumbent’s insufficient fidelity to The True Cause, particularly in terms of fiscal policy.
So here we are in July of 2008, and John McCain’s still struggling to consolidate his electoral “base,” and devoting much of his domestic policy agenda to that effort. Should he somehow win in November, his administration would provide an acid test of the theory that Americans love gridlock.

In a coincidental timing that undoubtedly pleased a lot of his fans, former Sen. Jesse Helms died early this morning after a long, debilitating illness.
I don’t have much to say about Helms’ career beyond what I wrote earlier this year in a Washington Monthly review of a new Helms biography. He was a political pioneer in lots of ways, some having to do with the mechanical practice of politics, but mostly involving the racial and sexual wedge politics of the late twentieth century, which are still with us.
By all accounts Helms had his good points as a person if not as a politician, living a modest life of devotion to family and friends, and to his particular notion of the demands of God and country. That God alone can judge him now, and may he, as well as those he unjustly tormented, now rest in peace.

Each Independence Day, a lot of empty words are spilled, some honorably, some less honorably. But it’s important to understand that different people define the term “patriotism” quite differently.
Peter Beinart’s essay on patriotism in Time this week seeks to distinguish “conservative” from “liberal” patriotism:

[C]onservatives tend to believe that loving America today requires loving its past. Conservatives often fret about “politically correct” education, which forces America’s students to dwell on its past sins. They’re forever writing books like America: The Last Best Hope (by William J. Bennett) and America: A Patriotic Primer (by Lynne Cheney), which teach children that historically the U.S. was a pretty nifty place. These books are based on the belief that our national forefathers are a bit like our actual mothers and fathers: if we dishonor them, we dishonor ourselves….
If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama’s original answer about the flag pin: “I won’t wear that pin on my chest,” he said last fall. “Instead, I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.” Will make this country great? It wasn’t great in the past? It’s not great as it is?
The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn’t about honoring and replicating the past; it’s about surpassing it.

Beinart goes on to make the pat and uncompelling argument that the two brands of patriotism are not only distinct, but precisely of equal value, presumably at all times and all places. Obviously, a lot of liberals share a reflexive pride in their country that’s not calibrated emotiionally to their precise assessment of America’s validation of its ideals and promise. And there are conservatives who stress the need for America to apply its ideals–sometimes to terrible effect, as in the neoconservative fantasy of a Middle East made over in our image. More importantly, he doesn’t really grapple with how we should think when conservative and liberal models of patriotism are in direct conflict.
But Beinart is definitely onto something, and I would argue that America today particularly needs the form of patriotism he identifies with liberals. To the extent that our country’s past has been characterized by true greatness, it has been when we did take our founding ideals seriously, at the expense of blind obedience to tradition or the kind of sentimental self-praise that is natural to people everywhere. And if we want people everywhere, and future generations of Americans, to consider this country something unique in the annals of nations, it’s a very good time to recommit ourselves to freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, and the wise and generous use of the blessings we have been given by our forebears.

Today, as Matt Yglesias earlier reminded us amnesiac Americans, is Canada Day–the Canadian parallel, though not exact, to our Independence Day.
I confess that I am an inveterate Canadaphile, and not for such ideological reasons as its health care system or the striking fact that even its current conservative leaders have chosen to mark this Canada Day with apologies to its aboriginal population. No, it’s the basic decency, civility, and sense of humor of most Canadians that has long attracted me. And their highly sophisticated knowledge of our own political system has always put us to shame.
Back in 2000, our then-Ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin (an old friend) arranged for me to speak about Al Gore’s policy views to an Ottawa meeting of deputy ministers–the people who more or less ran the Canadian government. They asked far better questions–and not just on issues affecting Canada–than you’d probably get from anything like a similar audience in the U.S.
It’s been a few years since I’ve had an opportunity to go north of the border, but I miss it, from PEI to BC. I wish all our friends and neighbors there a very happy Canada Day.

Today in Ohio Barack Obama announced that he would promote a much more robust initiative than George W. Bush to involve faith-based organizations in anti-poverty and other worthy public works, while insisting that public funds not be used to proselytize or discriminate.
As Steve Benen explains, there was some initial confusion due to a wire story–quickly corrected by the Obama campaign–that Obama would not insist on non-discrimination in the hiring and firing of staff for publicly-funded services.
And that clarification won’t satisfy those who believe that public dollars should not be extended to any organization, religious or ortherwise, that discriminates in any of its activities, however remote from publicly-funded activities.
It hasn’t drawn as much initial attention as the discrimination issue, but Obama also made it clear that recipients of public dollars under his initiative would be required to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs. That proviso was undoubtedly motivated by the widespread perception that much of Bush’s faith-based dollars were distributed as ill-disguised payoffs to ministers who supported the administration’s broader political and policy goals.