As the general election contest begins to take shape, a lot of the early talk from the Obama campaign about “changing the map” has been symbolized by its much-broadcast interest in going after my home state of Georgia. It’s an audiacious move, or perhaps even a feint, on the surface. Yes, Georgia went comfortably for native son Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, and narrowly for Bill Clinton in 1992. But beginnng in 1996, Georgia trended heavily Republican (mainly because of the population explosion in the Atlanta suburbs), with Bush winning the state by 12% in 2000 and 18% in 2004.
The Obama campaign’s been listing Georgia as a potential target for a while, on the theory that a massive increase in African-American turnout (and in the Democratic margin there) could significantly narrow the gap. And indeed, the last big Democratic year in Georgia was in 1998, when black tunout (motivated in part by an overtly racial GOP statewide campaign) exceeded white turnout for the first time ever, and leapt from about 19% of the statewide vote to 29%.
But there’s another factor in play, which the first recent general election poll for Georgia has illustrated: Bob Barr. The former Republican Congressman for Georgia, and now the Libertarian candidate for president, gets 6% in an Insider Advantage poll of the Peach State, clearly cutting into John McCain’s vote, who leads Obama 44%-43%. (There’s actually another Georgian running for president, Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, but under current conditions she’s unlikely to dent Obama’s African-American support).
This data led Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com and TNR, who earlier mocked the idea of targeting Georgia, to recant a bit. But it’s all very, very early. Every presidential campaign talks about expanding the battleground at this stage, before focusing its resources down the home stretch to the states that are clearly winnable. But having money to burn, the Obama campaign has every reason to throw a scare into the relatively cash-strapped McCain campaign in places like Georgia. If McCain fails to rise to the bait, and banks Georgia as a sure thing, he could get a nasty surprise if Georgia looks dead-even in late October. If against the odds, Obama’s running-mate is Sam Nunn (who’s still well-known in his native state if not elsewhere), Obama could actually be the favorite in GA, which would indeed scramble the map.

In a gloss on some Gallup numbers on preferences for Obama and McCain among different age categories, Matt Yglesias makes a point that can’t be repeated too often:

[T]he accompanying analysis says “Barack Obama’s appeal to younger voters and John McCain’s support among older voters may have created a situation where the outcome will turn on the preferences of middle-aged voters — particularly those in their 40s.” You see analysis of this sort all the time, but it’s all based on a mistake — there’s not a demographic electoral college where “winning” particular sub-samples of the population is the key to victory and therefore it’s important to focus attention on the most evenly divided demographic groups. If John McCain persuades an Obama-supporting 25 year-old to switch to his camp, that has just as big an impact as one 45 year-old one 65 year-old or one 85 year-old.

Now, as Matt notes, there are voting categories that merit targeting more than others, because they have more persuadable voters than others. And due to the vagaries of geography, some voting categories are very important in determining who wins key states in the actual Electoral College. Finally, a vote that will otherwise certainly be cast for your major-party opponent is more valuable to capture than one which may otherwise not be cast at all, or will be cast for a minor-party candidate.
But the general rule is: a vote’s a vote.

In an almost universally anticipated move, Barack Obama today officially announced he would “opt out” of public financing for the general election, despite a statement early in 2007 that he intended to pursue a public financing agreement with the GOP candidate if he ran for president and won the Democratic nomination.
You can expect John McCain to leap on this announcement to suggest that Obama’s flip-flopped on public financing, and is playing the game by the old Washington rules. As evidenced by the nature of his announcement, Obama will likely respond by saying (1) his 2007 statement was general and tentative, and he never once promised McCain he’d accept public financing; (2) public financing is a meaningless reform so long as non-regulated dollars–particularly those spent by 527s–still come from special interests; and (3) Obama’s own internet-based and heavily small-dollar donor base represents a “parallel system” of public financing.
This last argument may actually work better with the public than you might initially think. Taxpayer-funded public financing of political campaigns has never been that popular, even though voters do seem to be worried about the influence of lobbyists. That’s one reason regular folks don’t typically share the aversion of “reformers” to self-funded candidates. So a candidate like Obama who has figured out a way to displace special-interest dollars with tons of small donations from plain citizens may well hit something of a sweet spot in terms of his positioning on campaign finance reform. We’ll know soon enough.

Sarah Posner of The American Prospect devotes most of her weekly FundamantaList column today to various political developments within or affecting that hardy redoubt of the Christian Right, the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some of you may recall the buzz a couple of years ago when a South Carolina pastor named Frank Page was elected president of the SBC. Because he wasn’t a member in good standing of the insider “conservative resurgance” leadership that took over the SBC nearly three decades ago, some observers (erroneously) thought Page’s election might signal a retreat from the intense politicization of the denomination. Page’s successor, Rev. Johnny Hunt, pastor of a megachurch in Woodstock, Georgia, offers no such false hope of a big change in the SBC’s Christian Right identity. The only unconventional thing about Hunt is that he is a Native American (not completely unusual in northwest Georgia, my own familial stomping grounds, where many folks have Cherokee ancestry).
In truth, outsiders tend to confuse factional maneuvering within the SBC with serious disagreements over the denomination’s radical course in U.S. politics. Best I can tell, the big argument among Southern Baptists right now is over a neo-Calvinist movement rooted in the seminaries that frowns on some of the more exuberant quasi-universalist evangelical utterances of many Baptist preachers.
But Southern Baptist conservative political activism hasn’t abated. Posner notes a recent poll of SBC pastors that shows a preference for John McCain over Barack Obama by the rather comfortable margin of 80% to 1%. The good news is that Baptist conservatives don’t seem that fired up about McCain, as witnessed by this less-than-enthusiastic explanation of support for the GOP candidate by the SBC’s chief political commissar, Richard Land:

“My explanation of that is that I have heard variations of this theme too many times to count and the theme is, ‘I’d rather have a third-rate fireman than a first-class arsonist,'” Land said, echoing what people have told him.

The little-noted irony here is that the “third-rate fireman” John McCain is the first self-identified Southern Baptist presidential nominee of the Republican Party. But given the recent positioning of the denomination, it’s even more ironic that five of the last eight Democratic presidential nominations have gone to a Southern Baptist.
McCain, of course, could double down on his Baptist identity by choosing the Rev. Mike Huckabee as his running-mate. But as Posner explains today as well, Huck’s not terribly popular with the leadership of his SBC brethren. Partly that’s because Huckabee was long identified with the so-called “moderate” wing in the SBC factional wars, but the bigger problem is his highly public coziness with pentecostal Protestants, who represent a dire theological and membership challenge to the Southern Baptists. Doctrine and politics aside, the SBC’s chief problem is declining membership, which ought to give pause to those who assume that theological “liberalism” is the sole source of the membership losses of the non-fundamentaltist Protestant churches.

The headline in yesterday’s Bumiller/Zeleny piece on John McCain in the New York Times had to make the GOP candidate’s handlers feel all warm and cuddly inside: “McCain Seeks to Break With Bush on Environment.” It was, indeed, a rather counterintuitive take on McCain’s speech in Houston to a passle of oil executives, in which he flip-flopped on his longtime support for a moratorium on offshore oil drilling.
Today George W. Bush announced he’s asking Congress to remove the offshore drilling moratorium. Since you have to assume that McCain was informed of this step in advance, what on earth was he thinking in anticipating it by less than twenty-four hours, and in front of an oil-industry audience?
The Bumiller/Zeleny article quotes this reaction from Barack Obama:

“His [McCain’s] decision to completely change his position and tell a group of Houston oil executives exactly what they wanted to hear today was the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades,” Mr. Obama said in a statement.

Now that the Bush-Cheney administration has headed in exactly the same direction, McCain’s in the position of flip-flopping towards the oil company point of view in tandem with the president from whom he is supposedly trying to distance himself.
There may be some logic to this maneuver, but it certainly eludes me.

It was just a matter of time before some progressive blogger got alarmed about the possibility of Sam Nunn being Barack Obama’s running-mate. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft filled the vacuum yesterday with a post that calls Nunn a “worse Vice Presidential choice than Joe Lieberman” and half-seriously proposes a “stop Nunn” movement.
I’m a big fan of Chris Bowers, but he goes way over the top with this piece. Yes, Nunn would be an offensive choice to many gay and lesbians, and no, he’s not exactly Mr. Change. But Chris’ suggestion that Nunn has done nothing since leaving the Senate other than serving on corporate boards is a pretty egregious refusal to note the Georgian’s yeoman work towards avoiding the fiery annihilation of the planet. Sam Nunn is to the nuclear proliferation issue what Al Gore is to the global climate change issue, and you could make the argument that these are the two most urgent challenges facing the country and the world. It’s encouraging that both these men have endorsed Obama for president (Nunn back in April, Gore yesterday).
The invidious comparison of Nunn with John McCain’s close friend and supporter Joe Lieberman is more than a bit odd, too, since the Georgian shares none of Joe’s adoration of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy (au contraire), of the Iraq War, or of John McCain’s neo-Cold War posturing towards Russia, China and Iran. Indeed, as a surrogate if nothing else, Nunn could do Barack Obama a lot of good by getting under John McCain’s thin skin on his dangerous approach to national security.
One final thing about Chris’ post: in an effort, I guess, to bring out the Big Berthas on the Nunn Veep idea, he says that “the DLC was originally founded in order to elect Sam Nunn President. I’m not kidding.” Chris’ authority for this assertion is a disputed, agit-proppy Wikipedia entry on the DLC which says the group’s “original focus was to secure the 1988 presidential nomination of a southern conservative Democrat such as Nunn or [Chuck] Robb.”
You know, I somehow don’t think that founding DLC chairman Dick Gephardt (who ran for president in 1988), or founding members Al Gore (ditto) and Bill Clinton (who nearly ran that year) were “focused” on elevating Sam Nunn to the presidency in 1988. But this and other bad and good arguments for and against Nunn will be heard a lot if his apparent short-listing for the vice presidency continues.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Now that Barack Obama’s quietly but steadily taking over the Democratic Party infrastructure, there are probably more than a few Democrats who are publicly heaving sighs of relief but privately feel some regret that they won’t get to witness the exhilirating chaos of a Brokered Convention.
For a vicarious taste of said chaos, they should check out Michael Idov’s ha-larious New Republic article on the Memorial Day weekend convention of the Libertarian Party in Denver.
I watched part of that convention live on CSPAN, but missed all the great backstage stuff Idov caught: Mike Gravel’s Wiccan floor leader; the ginsu-knife-salesman pitch of the eventual Veep nominee, bookie Wayne Allyn Root; and the final sad spectacle of Libertarian “purists” swallowing their defiance and shuffling into Bob Barr’s victory party for the free beer.
It’s quite funny, but I must admit I have some sympathy for Libertarians, having gone through a brief, flu-like infatuation with the works of Ayn Rand (now, Idov reports, Bob Barr’s “favorite thinker”) in high school. And in truth, it’s hard to dislike the breed, who distinguish themselves from other politically impossible folk by a powerful lack of interest in jailing other people or invading their countries.
But the inveterate Libertarian suspicion of authority and collective action makes it an unlikely source of effective political action, as the cat-herding exercise in Denver abundantly illustrated.

I did a post this morning linking to and quoting liberally from an AP story on the sad state of the federal Election Assistance Commission, though taking the subject in a different direction in my own remarks. Only later did I discover there was a big brouhaha over the weekend caused by some legal saber-rattling by AP aimed at bloggers quoting content from AP stories. Indeed, AP appeared to be taking the very restrictive line that anything beyond links and “summarizations” were a violation of copyright law. Bloggers, naturally, responded with a call for a boycott of AP altogether: no quotes, no traffic-driving links, either.
AP has subsequently backed down a bit and appears to be reconsidering its policies towards quotes. But until this is all sorted out, I’ll go with my blogger colleagues and ignore AP stories.

I swear, dear readers, that I am by no means obsessed with the less-than-universally-popular idea of an Obama-Clinton Unity Ticket. But the nice folks at Salon asked me and my friend Tom Schaller to write contrasting columns on the subject, and so I obliged. (Tom’s column is here).
Our exchange went up at the top of the Salon site late last night, and as of this moment, my argument has generated 204 comments, most of them hostile to the Unity Ticket concept. I don’t know how much I was able to add to my earlier case for the Unity Ticket, beyond pointing out that it must be weighed against Obama’s actual alternatives, many of which are as controversial as an HRC veepship. Indeed, some folks who are currently fulminating against Clinton as running-mate could find themselves expressing buyer’s remorse if their own suggestions are ultimately rejected, as many of them will have to be.
In the end, it’s obviously Barack Obama’s call, and I have few doubts that the party will rally around whatever ticket he decides to create. But while all the passion brought to the subject by us self-appointed advisers may seem like a waste of time and energy, I do think it helps ensure that Obama makes his choice with a clear understanding of the implications. And we are, happily, light-years away from the relatively recent practice of choosing a running-mate with little thought or vetting, at the very last moment.

As we look forward to another presidential election in the autumn–one that could be very close–political observers are beginning to wake up to the fact that relatively little has been done to reform the creaking, state-controlled, crazy-quilt system of election administration whose shortcomings were so graphically demonstrated in 2000.
In the wake of the 2000 fiasco, Congress enacted the Help American Vote Act (HAVA), but the reform machinery it put it place, the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, has spent much of its brief existence wandering in the political wilderness. That’s the upshot of a depressing AP story by Deborah Hastings yesterday.
The lede tells you everything you need to know:

It was not an auspicious beginning. The year was 2004 and the newest federal agency had no desks, no computers, and no office to put them in. It had neither an address nor a phone number. Early meetings convened in a Starbucks near a Metro stop in downtown Washington.
Somehow, Congress had neglected to fund the Election Assistance Commission, a small group with a massive task: coordinating one of the most sweeping voter reform packages in decades.

It hasn’t gotten any better of late:

In the run up to November’s presidential election, the commission continues to grapple with hot-button topics such as how to test and certify voting machines. Voting advocates say the lack of such standards contributes to malfunctioning touch-screen equipment and long waits, as evidenced in Ohio in 2004, when presidential results were delayed for days.
The agency remains stalemated on other important issues, including whether states can require people to provide proof of citizenship before they can register to vote — an especially touchy subject exacerbated by a Supreme Court decision this spring upholding Indiana law demanding voters present a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.
Both past and present commissioners complain they were granted little power to force states to implement reforms, and that they often are battered by the brutal nature of partisan politics in the nation’s capital.
“It was the worst experience of my life. It was obvious going in that we weren’t going to accomplish much,” says former chairman DeForest Soaries, a Baptist minister who served as New Jersey’s secretary of state under GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. Soaries, also a Republican, quit the commission 15 months after taking the job in January 2004.
“No one took the agency seriously,” Soaries said. “All of the passion and all of the commitment to ensure that 2000 would never be repeated — that was all Washington theatrics.

A big part of the problem, of course, is that the two parties approach the issue of election reform from vastly different perspectives; Democrats are typically concerned about vote suppression, while Republicans continue to claim, without much evidence, that voting fraud is the bigger issue.
In my own opinion, the obsession of many Democrats with electronic voting systems–how votes are counted–has distracted attention from the more pervasive problem of how voters exercise their right to cast ballots in the first place. Thus, we are heading into another national election in which it will be largely up to private groups to police illegitimate state and local practices, including selective purges of voting rolls, capricious last-minute changes in polling sites, the deliberate underdeployment and understaffing of precincts, and minority voter intimidation.
We’d better get ready for all that, without any help from Washington.