During the DLC event I attended in Chicago over the weekend, I heard a lot of talk (most of it positive) about Barack Obama’s various efforts to “move to the center” in preparation for the general election. In other precincts of the Democratic Party, this alleged phenomenon is being greeted with unhappiness and even panic. A case in point is Arianna Huffington’s post today arguing that pursuing “fickle” swing voters is a disastrous mistake that undermines the enthusiasm and inspiration that has characterized the Obama campaign up until now. Indeed, says Huffington, centrist pandering to swing voters is what ruined the Gore and Kerry campaigns (a highly counter-intuitive take on 2000 and 2004, I’d say).
Since we are likely to hear a lot of this sort of talk in the immediate future, it’s helpful to question some of the assumptions that proponents and antagonists of a “move to the middle” are making.
First of all, a candidate doesn’t really have to “move” at all to create the perception of a different message and strategy once the primary season is over. The general election issue landscape is inevitably going to be different, for the simple reason that the candidate and partisan debate will be different. An example: Barack Obama spent a significant amount of time during the primaries arguing with Hillary Clinton about the relative utility of an individual mandate as part of any plan for universal health coverage. Nobody would expect that issue to matter much in a general election competition with John McCain, who opposes public-sector enabled universal health coverage altogether. Much more broadly, the Democratic nomination contest was in part “about” the various candidates’ applications of progressive principles to policy and political challenges, in detail. The general election is a contest between progressive and conservative agendas, and both candidates will naturally stress those aspects of their agendas that have the widest electoral appeals. That’s not a matter of “moving,” but simply of recontextualizing to a different audience and a different debate.
Second of all, as the TDS Roundtable on swing and base voters earlier this year illustrated, there’s plenty of disagreement about the definition and nature of “swing voters.” They don’t necessarily all reside in the ideological “center” of the electorate on every issue, and moreover, “base” voters don’t necessarily have inconsistent or antagonistic points of view from “swing voters.” The two things that are pretty hard to deny are that (1) undecided “very likely” voters are indeed a disproportionately important electoral prize because winning each of them produces two net votes, and (2) most successful campaigns in a competitive environment manage to energize the partisan base while expanding it into the ranks of independents and even the other party’s base. Huffington’s horror at swing-voter pandering, and her manifest contempt for swing voters themselves, probably reflects the fashionable but very dubious Lackoffian belief that swing voters are cognitively confused, perhaps even stupid or amoral people who can only be appealed to by an even more strongly expressed partisan “frame.”
Third of all, it amazes me that anyone should be surprised by Barack Obama’s willingness on occasion to stray from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship. It has been an important part of his political persona from day one. And those who accuse him of cynicism for expressing heretical thoughts on FISA or gun control or the death penalty now are perhaps the real cynics, who somehow thought he didn’t really mean all his early talk about transpartisan politics or overcoming the stale debates of past decades.
Since 1948 (a complicated, multi-candidate contest), there’s been exactly one successful presidential candidate whose strategy was focused overwhelmingly on base mobilization. That was George W. Bush in 2004, and we’ve seen how well his political capital held up since then. You can make the argument that the partisan landscape this year is positive enough that Barack Obama could run a similar campaign and win. But a lot of what has attracted so much enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy is precisely the belief that he can “break the mold” and win a victory that enables him to achieve things in office that will produce a genuinely overwhelming progressive and Democratic majority in the electorate of the future.
Personally, one of the things I like about Barack Obama as a politician is that he refuses to campaign according to anybody’s playbook but his own. Inevitably, he’s going to disappoint or even anger Democratic activists of every stripe on occasion. Those on the left who fear he’s “blurring the lines” or “moving to the middle” really do need to concentrate on the vast differences between Obama and McCain on a vast number of prominent issues that actual voters as opposed to activists care most about (telecomm immunity or the nuances of gun control not being among them). Those in “the center” who want him to repudiate key elements of his past record to “signal” he’s safe to swing voters are barking up the wrong tree as well.
It’s fine to debate and second-guess Obama’s strategy and message; we do a lot of that here at TDS. But trying to pigeon-hole Barack Obama as a member of one Democratic faction or another, or praising or damning his campaign in terms of our own notions of the strengths and weaknesses of past Democratic efforts, really does run the risk of missing the larger point about this remarkable man.
Let Obama be Obama.

I didn’t choose to “live-blog” the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation this year, partly because I was too busy (moderating three Sunday workshops on election reform, new social media, and “a look ahead to November”), and too ill with a flu-like bug, and partly because internet access in the conference areas of the cavernous Chicago Hyatt was so poor.
But as usual, the focus of the DLC event was on the three-hundred-plus state and local elected officials who attended, and who filled nearly every room in the nineteen Sunday workshops on issues ranging from immigration and poverty to pre-K education and state greenhouse gas initiatives. Attendees were unsurprisingly disappointed that presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama didn’t show up (he didn’t do any public events on Sunday), but there was a strong sense of unity and optimism about the general election.
I had one very unusual experience in Chicago: introducing Markos Moulitsas. The fiery founder of DailyKos, a noted DLC-hater in the past, agreed to speak at the event as part of a agreement he struck with DLC chairman Harold Ford during a joint appearance on Meet the Press last year (Ford will reciprocate by attending the DKos-oriented Netroots Nation event in Austin later this month).
Markos was on a panel I moderated with Jennifer Duffy and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report to discuss the general election outlook (mostly at the congressional level), which all agreed was very rosy for Democrats. You can read Markos’ take on the appearance here, but as I told him after the session, I didn’t share his surprise at the applause he received for referring to Sen. Joe Lieberman as an “asshole.” Whatever residual admiration of Lieberman in DLC circles that existed after 2006 vanished the moment he endorsed John McCain for president. Like them or not, DLCers are committed Democrats, not, as Markos has been in the habit of calling them, “Liebercrats.”
I have to share a small but hilarious moment that occurred after the session. As moderator, I thought it was only right that I buy Markos, Duffy and Wasserman a drink in the hotel bar. At one point, Markos drew our attention to a television monitor over the bar that was displaying one of those blue-and-red-colored maps of the states, and said, in shock, “Where did that map come from?” (It had much of the South colored blue). Turns out it was a map of salmonella outbreaks. We all got a good laugh at our mutual political-junkie inability to look at the states as anything other than bearers of electoral votes.

It’s been pretty clear for a while that the conservative assault on Barack Obama as a scary, radical, racially threatening figure is going to rely in part on subsidiary calumnies against his wife. I’ve got an article up on the New Republic site today that tries to place the attacks on Michelle Obama in a historical context of political spousal abuse, while examining the aggressive steps the Obama campaign is taking to respond, which I think will be successful.

It’s been a very active week in the interplay between Barack Obama and certain Christian Right leaders, who are clearly afraid he will have some appeal to their flocks.
Most notably, the religio-political warhorse James Dobson devoted a Focus on the Family radio broadcast to an attack on a speech (a very, very good speech, BTW) Obama delivered two years ago, in which Obama had the temerity to suggest that James Dobson’s interpretations of the moral imperatives of scripture weren’t self-evidently true.
Obama, said Dobson, was “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible,” as defined, of course, by Dobson himself.
As Amy Sullivan of Time observed, there was a pretty swift backlash against Dobson’s attack on Obama from evangelical leaders manifestly tired of self-important thunderbolts from Colorado Springs.
A few days earlier, a more sophisticated attack on Obama’s Christianity was launched by conservative evangelical syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, who said that “there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement.” Picking over a 2004 interview, Thomas anathemized Obama for denying that salvation was limited to those who expressly embrace Jesus Christ as God and Savior, and for expressing doubts about his personal fate after death.
As Sullivan pointed out in her commentary on the Obama-Christian Right dustup:

A new Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of 35,000 Americans reports that 70% agree with the statement “Many religions can lead to eternal life,” including 57% of Evangelicals. No less a figure than George W. Bush responded “no” when asked in 1999 if he believed heaven is open only to Christians.

So if what Thomas calls Obama’s “universalism” (an epithet often hurled at all sorts of Christians with an expansive idea of God’s plan for salvation, including the new Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt) disqualifies him as a Christian, what does that make George W. Bush?
Thomas is on stronger ground in suggesting that most Christians don’t have Obama’s reluctance to visualize a heavenly afterlife for themselves. But while belief in “eternal life” is fundamental to Christianity, that’s not the same, theologically, as confidence about individual immortality in any specific sort of way.
Here’s what Karl Barth, perhaps the dominant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and the “neo-orthodox” scourge of theological liberals, had to say on the subject shortly before his own death:

We have no idea either of the life beyond, or of the passage of this life into the other. We have only what came to pass in Jesus Christ, which is present with us through faith.

Barth also, by the way, was often accused of “universalism,” and did explicitly teach that restrictive ideas about salvation reflected a rejection of the sovereignty of God.
It’s clear that Obama’s in pretty good orthodox Christian company, despite efforts by Dobson and Thomas to cast him out.

I haven’t had a chance to get hold of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s new book, Grand New Party, the latest offering in the “Whither Conservatism?” genre. But I have a pretty good sense of the thrust of the book from reviews , from the highly influential Douthat/Salam Weekly Standard article in 2005 entitled “The Party of Sam’s Club,” and from Douthat’s fine blogging at The Atlantic.com. And as a veteran of many “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” it’s a relief to spend some time examining the other party’s dilemmas.
Grand New Party got its biggest media boost to date with today’s David Brooks column in The New York Times, wherein the book is hailed as “the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head.”
The argument that the GOP can rebuild an electoral majority by shrugging off its anti-government mentality and strategically accepting key elements of the New Deal/Great Society legacy is not new, though it hasn’t been heard in a while (discounting the brief flurry of unfocused talk, much of it from David Brooks himself, about “national greatness conservatism” that accompanied John McCain’s 2000 campaign). Indeed, this was the animating idea of the “moderate” or even “liberal” Republicans of yore, who struggled with the conservative movement for control of the GOP for decades, and didn’t completely succumb until 1976, 1980, or even 1994, depending on how you measure these things.
Nowadays, we are so accustomed to thinking of the mass base of the GOP as being largely held together by anti-government convictions that it’s tough to imagine a more “centrist” brand of conservatism representing what the rank-and-file GOP Republican voter actually wants, as Douthat and Salam argue, with polling data to back them up. But back in the day, pro-government Republicans also claimed a mass base, and thought of conservative movement activists as a narrow, cultish clan out of touch with popular opinion.
By total coincidence, last night I happened to be re-reading portions of Teddy White’s classic campaign book, The Making of the President 1960. Here’s what White had to say about the last-minute “Draft Rockefeller Movement” at the 1960 Republican National Convention:

[W]hat the Citizens for Rockefeller did achieve in the last week end before the convention, was, in its own terms, a spectacular demonstration of what the citizen spirit can evoke. Within twenty-four hours of the week-end TV appeal, 260,000 pieces of mail had arrived at the Chicago convention, accompanied by an outpouring of telephone calls and telegrams of unprecedented volume. Within fifty-six hours after the appearance of the advertisements, more than a million pieces of mail and telegrams poured into the hotels, special post offices and Convention facilities, to swamp mail delivery, so that by Wednesday of the Convention some hotels were still sorting mail forty-eight hours late.

I mention this long-forgotten incident because the immediate product of this “citizens movement” was the notorious Pact of Fifth Avenue, wherein Richard Nixon accepted a variety of demands for platform modifications (mostly on civil rights and defense policy) in order to head off a Rockefeller candidacy–one in a long series of “betrayals” that fed the nascent conservative movement which four years later awarded Barry Goldwater the presidential nomination. (If you haven’t read Rick Perlstein’s brilliant account of this uprising, Before the Storm, you should).
To conservatives, Rockefeller was the perfect embodiment of an elite, anti-grass-roots tradition of Eastern Seabord Republicanism, and popular support for him was no more genuine than the manufactured “We Want Willkie!” demonstrations in 1940 that representated an earlier form of the same “betrayal.” Indeed, the successful effort to force Gerald Ford to dump the New Yorker as his running-mate in 1976 was perhaps the most satisfying achievement of Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge that year.
But looked at from another angle, Rocky (along with other prominent Republicans of the 1960s and 1970s, such as George Romney, Chuck Percy, and Bill Scranton, in a tradition that went back through Ike and Tom Dewey, all the way to Alf Landon) was a Republican “modernizer” who believed, like Douthat and Salam, that the anti-government habits of GOP conservatives bred during the long era of opposition to the New Deal were keeping Republicans from harvesting a vast number of middle-class votes.
Teddy White wasn’t alone in viewing pols like Rockefeller as representing a vibrant future-oriented option for the GOP, and not the elitist symbol of surrender to Big Government so familiar in conservative polemics. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s, the Ripon Society, promoting a distinctive blend of social liberalism and market-oriented public-sector activism, was a happenin’ place within the Republican Party (if you’re really interested, check out Ripon’s fine series of post-election analyses published after the 1964, 1968 and 1972 elections). And while Richard Nixon’s Disraeli-style experiments in public-sector activism may have been motivated by sheer political opportunism, they were as legitimate an expression of a certain brand of Republican philosophy at the time as his better-known pioneering of a harsh and divisive cultural conservatism, and did contribute to his 1972 landslide victory.
I’m not suggesting that Douthat and Salam’s prescriptions are simply an updated version of the Ripon Society playbook; for one thing, they are clear about wanting to use public-sector solutions for rigorously conservative social ends, particularly the strengthening of the traditional family. And to the extent that they laud particular politicians, they are people like Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee, who won’t remind anyone of mandarins like Nelson Rockefeller or Chuck Percy. Rocky did get a lot of votes from the kind of folk who would today shop at Sam’s Club, but he probably went slumming at Barney’s.
The bigger question is whether Douthat and Salam are offering a course of action for the GOP that has any better prospects for acceptance than that of past Republican “moderates” or “modernizers” or “realists.” For all the buzz that this book is going to get, the overwhelming sentiment among the GOP chattering classes is that the contemporary crisis of their party is attributable to insufficient conservatism, and particularly insufficient fidelity to the limited-government ideal. And they are already well-prepared to explain away a McCain defeat this year as attributable to a combination of Bush’s fiscal profligacy and incompetence and McCain’s inability to excite the conservative base. If anything, most conservatives seem inclined to make items like Social Security privatization, a big no-no to Sam’s Club Republicans, an even larger and more central element of their future agenda.
So if you’re interested in the future of the GOP, pay some attention to how Grand New Party is received among serious conservatives. My guess is that they are at least two electoral fiascos away from taking Douthat and Salam’s advice.

In the occasional discussion of congressional gerrymandering and redistricting reform, it’s generally taken for granted that noncompetitive elections negatively affect voter interest and thus turnout. But until now, there have been few if any efforts to actually measure that effect. Today the Democratic Leadership Council released a study by Marc Dunkelman that suggests that truly competitive House districts could generate as much as 11 million additional votes, heavily concentrated in those states (Dunkelman calls them the “dirty dozen”) with particularly egregious gerrymandering practices. (David Broder favorably wrote the study up in his column today).
The study’s methodology is fairly simple: it compares turnout across House districts nationally in terms of the margin of victory in the two most recent offyear elections, 2002 and 2006. And while Dunkelman acknowledges that factors other than competitiveness affect turnout (most notably “up-ballot” statewide contests, which are isolated in the study), the turnout disparaties between competitive and noncompetitive House contests are indeed too vast to be an accident.
It’s also no coincidence that seven of the twelve states with the worst recent record of compeititive House races are in the South (VA, SC, GA, FL, AL, LA and AR), where turnout has typically been lower due to a host of historical factors, and where Voting Rights Act considerations have often contributed to minority-vote “packing” and “bleaching,” practices deliberately designed to produce “safe” districts. GA has been something of a laboratory for both racial and political gerrymandering during the last two decades. And FL, along with PA and TX, was the site of an egregious partisan gerrymandering effort by the GOP during the last round of redistricting.
What is to be done about gerrymandering? The DLC study doesn’t much get into prescriptions, but having spent quite a bit of time on this subject, I can say with some confidence that there ain’t no easy fix. The most common reform, the creation of “independent” redistricting commissions, does directly deal with the conflict of interest involved in state legislators drawing up their own maps. But the record of such commissions on congressional redistricting is mixed at best, tending to produce political compromises more than competitive districts. The problem is that it requires positive action, not just an alleged absence of “partisan politics,” to create a truly competitive map. And indeed, truly competitive schemes often run afoul of “traditional redistricting principles” like compact districts that respect jurisdictional lines as much as gerrymandering does. The fate of competition-focused redistricting ballot initiatives in OH and FL in 2006 (the former was trounced at the polls; the latter succumbed to a constitutional challenge before making it to the ballot) showed the difficulty, both technical and political, of such efforts.
Still, with the next decennial round of redistricting on the near horizon, it’s time to start thinking about redistricting reform in a serious way. And Dunkelman’s study helps establish that this isn’t just some goo-goo issue of interest only to wonks, or inversely, an unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of partisan politics. Gerrymandering, which can roughly be defined as elected officials choosing voters, is an important and corrosive contributor to our country’s dubious record of low voter participation and civic disengagement.

In a New York Times op-ed piece today, Michael Cohen suggests that John McCain may be fatally overplaying his criticisms of Barack Obama’s lack of experience. And he cites a historical analogy that may well be highly relevant:

[B]y continually attacking Mr. Obama’s understanding of policy issues, John McCain runs the risk of actually helping the Democrat neutralize the experience issue. In 1980, supporters of President Jimmy Carter regularly intimated that Ronald Reagan was an intellectual lightweight not to mention a warmonger and a racist. But when the two men debated, and Americans saw that Reagan wasn’t the caricature that he was being presented as, poll numbers showed a huge shift toward the Republican.

I’d go further than Cohen on the Reagan-Obama parallels. Like 1980, this is an election year in which Americans emphatically want change. As in 1980, the “out-party” challenger, who’s carefully identified himself with the case for decisive change, has a relatively low threshold of acceptability to meet. The constant suggestions by McCain and the GOP that Barack Obama couldn’t find his way around a world map should be easy to rebut for a candidate who at his best can match Reagan’s communications skills, while comfortably exceeding the late president’s ability to demonstrate intelligence and a clear grasp of issues.

I did something today I almost never do: carefully read a Richard Cohen column. It’s rarely worth the effort, an observation I’d make, out of general civility, about almost no one in print other than the man who’s regularly wasted some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world–A Washington Post column–for decades.
Today Cohen executed an uncharacteristically original stunt, sort of a double-back flip. Clearly stung by a recent James Wolcott Vanity Fair article lampooning him along with David Broder and David Brooks as having a “man-crush” on John McCain, Cohen latest column contains what might initially look like a refreshing acknowledgement that McCain has repudiated much of the record that gained him his (exaggerated) reputation as a “maverick.” But before you could say “false moral equivalency,” Cohen went on to treat Barack Obama’s decision against accepting public financing in the general election as just as large a retreat to “politics as usual” as McCain’s extensive acceptance of the worst of conservative orthodoxy.
And then–here’s the second back-flip–Cohen says McCain can be indulged in his flip-flops, and Obama can’t, because the Republican “paid his dues” as a POW and a political war-horse, while Obama hasn’t done either.
You’d never know from reading Cohen’s shocked account of Obama’s “selfish” abandonment of public financing and his “socialist realist” explanation of same that Obama has already done more to delink big money and special interests from political campaigns than all the campaign finance initiatives ever enacted. Nor does Cohen seem aware that the public, if asked directly, would almost certainly, and by vast margins, prefer Obama’s approach to that of using taxpayer dollars to supplant large contributions. And worse still, Cohen contemptuously rejects the indisputable assertion by Obama that expenditures by “independent” 527 organizations, which McCain is counting on and Obama has of his own initiative shut down, make a mockery of the current campaign finance laws.
By such a wandering course does Richard Cohen wind up where he started: in the tank for John McCain, whose war record and once-upon-a-time, journalist-inflated “maverick” reputation apparently means his actual views and policy agenda for the country don’t much matter. “A presidential race is only incidentally about issues. It’s really about likability and character,” says Cohen breezily. That’s not a terribly surprising assertion coming from a man whose column is only incidentally journalism.

If you’re at all confused or in doubt about the anger being expressed towards the Democratic Party and the MSM by some HRC supporters, check out Rebecca Traister’s exhaustive summary at Salon today. She cites twelve specific things these folks–who call themselves PUMAs (an acronym for “Party Unity My Ass”)–are angry about, with particular objects of ire being Keith Olbermann, Howard Dean, and the idea of Barack Obama choosing a female running-mate not named Hillary Clinton.
I found number twelve particularly interesting, having heard it myself from several people unhappy with a post I did a while back arguing that a McCain presidency would be the wrong kind of “punishment” for the Democratic Party’s alleged sins towards HRC and her supporters:

12. And finally, they are angry because they feel they are held hostage by the party by their reproductive organs.
As many people have already observed: What are they going to do, vote for John McCain? No. The truth is, they’re really not. Not if they care about their freedoms to control their own reproductive lives. And they are acutely aware that party leaders know this and that, thus, despite all this anger, Democratic women remain a sure thing.
In a recent New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann, MSNBC chief Phil Griffin described how Clinton voters felt alienated from Olbermann’s anti-Clinton coverage: “He turned out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Exactly. These angry people have nowhere else to go. So the safe expectation is that they will fall in line without much kicking and screaming. And that, ultimately, is why many of them are kicking and screaming. Yes, they’re going to vote for Obama. Of course they’ll vote for him. The truth is, they’ll probably love voting for him. But after what they feel has been done to them — the way in which they were written off, marginalized and resented, their hopes mocked and their history-making ambitions dismissed as retrograde identity politicking — damned if they’re going to be nice girls about it.

So any smug talk that Democrats need not take HRC’s supporters seriously because they’ll “come home” without encouragement delays, at a minimum, the day when that homecoming actually happens.

As a follow-on to the staff post about McCain’s limited female choices for running-mate, Swampland’s Joe Klein reports insider gossip that McCain is “frustrated” that he can’t go with any of his three personal favorites for the ticket: Tom Ridge, Mel Martinez or Jeb Bush.
Ridge is pro-choice, and Republicans can’t have that. Martinez is constitutionally disqualified, having been born in Cuba. And Jebbie, of course, has that unfortunate last name. You can’t much deny you’re running for “Bush’s third term” if you’re positioning your running-mate to run for the fourth and fifth Bush terms, or fifth and sixth if you count Poppy.
More and more, it looks like McCain will be driven to pick some boring white guy in a suit who isn’t offensive to the Right but won’t do much to help the GOP actually win. For many conservatives, it’s more about control of the party than of the White House.