The fascinating thing about New York Times columnist David Brooks is his ability to faithfully serve the interests of the Republican Party while maintaining a stance of ironic detachment and independence. His column today is a small masterpiece of the genre. Entitled “The Education of McCain,” it is devoted to the story-line that the GOP candidate is deep down the same unconventional and wholly admirable man he’s always been, but who has been forced by contemporary political realities to slavishly follow the party line and personally attack Barack Obama.
Touting McCain’s “long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship,” Brooks says there’s just no question that McCain’s current campaign rubs against his very nature:

In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity. He’s done it through self-mockery, by talking endlessly about his own embarrassing lapses and by keeping up a running patter on the absurdity all around. He’s done it by breaking frequently from his own party to cut serious deals with people like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s done it with his own frantic and freewheeling style, which was unpredictable, untamed and, at some level, unprofessional.

But alas, alackaday, McCain had to abandon the Straight-Talk Express because of “too many 25-year-old reporters and producers seizing on every odd comment to set off little blog scandals.” And he had to run a nasty, negative campaign because “McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama.”
Poor, poor John McCain, forced to behave like a regular politician, even though he’s not.
This story-line is of inestimable value to the McCain campaign, which is engaged in a high-stakes gamble that its candidate can talk out of both sides of his mouth to conservatives, who must be convinced that McCain is if anything a more principled right-winger than Bush, and to swing voters, to whom he is being marketed as a reforming centrist with no loyalty to anyone other than his country. McCain has taken this game to a new level of duplicity in recent weeks. The man who relentlessly channeled the conservative message at Saddleback Church over the weekend is hard to reconcile with the subject of his current network ad, which describes him as the “original maverick” always ready to reach across party lines to battle drug and tobacco companies and Big Oil. (This last assertion must have spawned some head-scratching or cynical belly-laughs among the oil executives who have been showering McCain with campaign contributions after his flip-flop on offshore oil drilling.)
Brooks would have us believe that all the glaring contradictions and vicious tactics characterizing the McCain campaign are just the unfortunate byproduct of our benighted political system–which, presumably, the Real McCain will deal with in office, when he’s not defeating evil somewhere overseas.
One way or another, Democrats need to take on the “Original Maverick” story-line and expose it as a deceptive and hypocritical stunt.

As Barack Obama prepares to announce his running-mate (insisting, characteristically, on a “no-leaks” policy until the decision is revealed to supporters via text-message, probably tomorrow), one name has dropped out of contention: former Sen. Sam Nunn of GA. Indeed, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway yesterday, Nunn said the Obama campaign had not vetted his finances, which means he’s definitely not on the final short-list.
But in that same interview, Nunn shared some thoughts on the Georgia-Russia crisis that Obama and others should listen to carefully. In the bipartisan rush to identify with beleagured Georgia, support for expanding NATO to include Georgia and other eastern European nations has become reflexive. That’s a bad idea, Nunn suggests:

[C]learly the United States need to pause, look and listen before we rush into making Georgia and Ukraine part of NATO. If we’re going to do that, we have to understand that this is a military commitment. And we have to back it up militarily.
Right now, we’re not doing well in Afghanistan. Our NATO allies seem to be reluctant to put in more forces. NATO’s got a lot of credibility at stake in Afghanistan. And the defense spending by most of our European allies is way down.
And if you look at the map, you can see pretty quickly that defending Georgia will require enormous expenditures unless we’re going to go back to a Berlin sort of situation, where we threaten to use nuclear weapons in response to conventional progression by the Soviet Union….
A wounded bear is going to defend itself. I think Russia’s made a profound mistake, and they’ve got to correct it. [But] we have a real reason to avoid compounding the problem.

With John McCain running around the country demanding immediate NATO expansion in combination with promises to “defeat evil” wherever it arises, consequences be damned, it’s good to know that someone with Nunn’s credibility is willing to talk about those consequences. It was the failure to do so that led to the invasion of Iraq, which McCain continues to champion as a model for U.S. foreign policy in the future.

The New Republic is doing a colloquoy this week on its blog site The Plank about how to improve party conventions.
TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston was the first up with some typically lucid thoughts focused on how to make conventions not only more interesting but more substantive.
I was asked to contribute as well, and below is a cross-post from The Plank of my own submission:
This year’s Republican and (especially) Democratic conventions are likely to have some novel touches, particularly in the deployment of new technologies to make it easier for citizens to follow and gain a sense of participation in the proceedings. Indeed, between streaming video and social media like YouTube, the number of people who watch, live or nearly-live, significant portions of the Democratic convention is likely to increase substantially for the first time in years, despite very limited network television coverage. And it’s worth noting that Barack Obama’s acceptance speech will likely be one of the most widely watched, read and generally observed political speeches in history.
But looking forward to future conventions, it’s now obvious that significant changes will require a long-overdue and fundamental rethinking of the form and function of the national party convention.
With the virtual extinction of the original deliberative function of conventions (this year’s controversy over unpledged Democratic “superdelegates” will probably produce “reforms” reducing the probability of an “open convention” to near zero), these events really have just two major functions: strengthening party unity and enthusiasm, and framing the message (including the candidate’s personal “story”) for the presidential campaign. These remain important responsibilities, despite the quadrennial grousing among journalists and many activists that conventions no longer make news or offer “excitement” or “spontaneity.”
But if you were going to develop from the ground up an event to achieve these two objectives, would anyone conclude that the best available vehicle was four days mainly characterized by hundreds of politicians making speeches from a podium? Okay, a few “real people” or non-political celebrities now get stage-time, and the occasional politician gets to do a podium-free “stroll,” and there are even videos shown now and then. But the basic model for conventions remains the annual state party fundraising dinner, those Jefferson-Jackson and Lincoln Day marathons featuring a couple of big speeches and many short remarks by a lot of politicians, to burnish the Cause’s unity and diversity while paying some bills.
There’s nothing wrong with speechifying, though the message discipline associated with today’s conventions wrings a lot of the color and all of the unpredictability out of hearing from a wide array of candidates and elected officials from Maine to Alaska. But if speeches were the best or only way to convey a political message, campaign ads would consist of nothing else; candidates would never do another town hall meeting or photo op; and debates would end with the opening statements.
It’s worth noting that successful political and non-political conferences typically include panel discussions, sessions on specialized topics, and workshops that provide opportunities for more customized presentations. Sacrificing a hundred or so set speeches on the same general party and campaign message to provide for diverse voices on diverse topics would be a small price to pay.
Moreover, even if conventions could be staged to provide the perfect message delivery system, American politics is—thank God—rapidly becoming more interactive, just like the technologies that are changing media coverage, advertising, fundraising, and organizing. If the Obama campaign’s many innovations are truly the wave of the future, there’s no reason future conventions should follow the pattern of giving citizens constant opportunities to become participants in, not simply consumers of, these party-defining and candidate-defining events. A small straw in the wind is the plan to enlist many of the 75,000 people standing in line for Obama’s acceptance speech next week to make cellphone calls to unregistered or undecided voters. Integrating grassroots party-building and voter persuasion efforts—long an ancillary activity at conventions—into the convention itself could be far more fruitful than redundant message delivery via speeches. And once the mould is broken, there’s almost no limit to the interactivity that could be introduced to convention proceedings through online forums, Q&A sessions, state and local “virtual” mini-conventions, and other techniques. It’s all about rethinking the basic form and function of these events.
As I write these words, I am preparing to work in the speech/script operation for my sixth consecutive Democratic Convention. After each of the last five, convention professionals invariably said to each other: “Well, that’s the last time we’ll do this kind of convention!” But this time, I think that may finally be true.

The unusual event Saturday night wherein Rick Warren of the Saddleback megachurch quizzed Barack Obama and John McCain on a variety of “values” issues has generally been rated as a win for McCain. That may turn out to be a premature assessment.
Yes, in terms of the event itself, McCain did very well, wowing the largely conservative audience with clear expressions of very conservative positions nicely complemented with anecdotes. But in doing so, he staked out positions that are less than ideal in terms of the broader audience of undecided general election voters.
There’s no question that McCain’s objective Saturday night was to solidify his conservative base and remove any doubt about his hard-line commitment to the agenda of the Christian Right. Indeed, if there was a secondary audience he had in mind, it was conservatives generally, as witnessed by his very revealing insistence on sneaking in a reference to “the secret ballot in union elections” while rambling through an answer to a question about privacy rights. This is code for conservative opposition to “card-check” legislation that would allow unions to be certified on submission of statements of support from a majority of employees in a given workplace.
Obama certainly could have been crisper and less defensive in some of his answers. But with the immediate audience, and perhaps with other voters who have heard that he’s a hard-core lefty, he earned a lot of brownie points simply by showing up on “enemy turf.” And his issue-positioning was a lot closer to national opinion than McCain’s.
Moreover, McCain will never again obtain a format and issue-landscape so favorable to him. Aside from the conservative framing of many questions (e.g., “When does a baby become entitled to human rights?”), the “character” questions teed him up for his favorite anecdotes about his POW experience. There were virtually no questions about the economy, and McCain was able to say some preposterous things, particularly about Iraq, without being challenged.
The bottom line is that McCain may have won the battle of Saddleback, but the war’s another matter.

To the surprise of most observers, Barack Obama pushed his announcement of his running-mate into the supposedly sancrosanct Olympics period, and may now push it into the Democratic Convention (the Olympics end Sunday, and the convention begins the next day). Apparently determined to “go second,” John McCain may now be forced to unveil his running-mate relatively late as well.
Alexander Burns of The Politico has a nice summary today of the timing of recent veep announcements. Dan Quayle in 1988 was the last running-mate in either party to be announced during the convention itself.
As is reflected in a separate Politico article this morning which wanders all over the place in speculating about Obama’s choice, his campaign has done a masterful job of maintaining suspense on the Veepship. A long list of potential candidates have taken turns as supposed front-runners, giving Team Obama a good sense of the likely reaction if any of them is actually chosen. In the end, no one really knows what Obama has decided on any of the key variables surrounding this decision: “outsider” versus “insider;” national security street cred versus fellow-war-opponent; “reinforcing” his message or complementing his weaknesses; newsgrabbing “controversial” choice or reassuring conventional choice. That’s why a relatively large number of people are stiill considered possibillities.
There’s less suspense on the Republican side, particularly after McCain emphasized the hard-line pro-life nature of his candidacy and future administration in the Rick Warren event over the weekend. Speculation increasingly revolves around Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney.

Since I seem to be writing about the history and contemporary nature of national party conventions today, I wanted to point you to two separate pieces over at the New Republic site.
The first, by Eric Zimmerman (who earlier wrote a very useful analysis of the behind-the-scenes struggle over the Democratic platform’s abortion plank), provides an affirmative answer to my own question as to whether the platform drafters had indeed pulled off an amazing feat of wordsmithing on abortion.
According to Zimmerman, both pro-choice activists and “abortion reduction” advocates signed off on the language understanding completely the tradeoffs involved (staff from the centrist group Third Way, he reports, provided some key intermediary services). Sure, Democrats wanting “room” for anti-abortion advocates didn’t get the “conscience clause” they wanted, respecting dissenters from the party’s fundamental pro-choice commitment. But perhaps the agreement to give notable pro-life Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., a convention speaking slot will take care of that particular concern.
Speaking of platforms, Seyward Darby has a brief, amusing piece describing platforms as an anachronistic “corncob pipe” at conventions, and reviewing some famous platform fights of the past.
As it happens, he didn’t mention my all-time favorite platform fight: the struggle at the 1924 Democratic convention over a plank specifically condemning the Ku Klux Klan (“three little words,” as Willliam Jennings Bryan dismissed them in opposing the plank as divisive), which failed by one-half-of-one-vote after a delegate from my home state of Georgia was physically intimidating into changing her vote by Klansmen in her delegation. This fight epitomized the party divisions that led to the longest convention deadlock of all time (taking 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis) and a disastrous general election. [Note: I am very happy to report that used copies of Robert K. Murray’s brilliant but out-of-print book on this convention, The 103d Ballot, can now be bought for peanuts via Amazon].
While some political people complain about the lack of drama at modern party conventions, there are worse things than unity and quiet.

As a student of, and frequent worker-bee at, national party conventions, I’m a bit amused by the small controversy aroused by Mark Warner’s selection as “keynote speaker” for the upcoming Democratic gathering in Denver. In part, I suppose, because of the deserved fame of Barack Obama’s “keynote address” in 2004, Warner’s selection to deliver a featured Tuesday night speech is being kicked around as a sign of Warner’s presidential future, or as a good or a bad thing depending on your opinion of the Virginian’s oratorical skills and messaging.
That’s all well and good, but does the “keynote” designation really mean as much as it used to?
Traditionally, when conventions were actually deliberative in nature, the “keynote” address, invariably held on the first night of the event, was a brief, guaranteed moment of rousing party unity before delegates moved on to more potentially divisive discussions revolving around rules, platform planks, and candidates. It was the one time you could be sure that the convention was focused outward, towards the hated partisan enemy, rather than inward, toward the party’s own issues.
Nowadays, there can be multiple keynote addresses (there were officially three at the 1992 Democratic convention) or none at all (as in the 2000 GOP convention). They can occur at almost any juncture, and the tone of the keynote isn’t necessarily different from that of any other convention speech. Obama’s 2004 effort, for example, certainly wasn’t the slash-and-burn partisan diatribe of keynotes past.
“Keynote addresses” aren’t the only anachronistic features of contemporary party conventions, of course. The central moment in every convention, the presidential “acceptance speech,” was once (prior to 1932, when FDR became the first major-party nominee to actually appear at the convention) delivered offsite, weeks and even months after the formal nomination was made. Going back even further, the “acceptance” was traditionally a published letter rather than a speech, which sometimes made “acceptance” conditional on rejection of certain planks in the party platform (most famously George B. McClellan’s rejection of the Civil War “peace plank” in the 1864 Democratic platform).
None of this history matters a great deal, other than to remind us that the structure and terminology of national party conventions remain haunted by the ghosts of conventions long past. That’s even true of the central organizing principle of conventions: the idea that they should primarily consist of speeches–increasingly redundant in this era of message discipline and centralized vetting–by hundreds of politicians.
I’ll have more to say about that in an upcoming New Republic piece on the future of conventions. But no no one should hyperventilate over the selection of a particular speaker to deliver a particular “address.”

In his new perch at ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias is back to his prodigious blogging, and today offers a good reminder (in the contest of a new AFL-CIO direct mail piece) that Social Security could be a big problem for John McCain in the stretch-drive of the campaign.
I can’t recall a competitive major-party presidential candidate who was as dependent on the votes of older voters as John McCain is today. His past and prospective support for Social Security privatization (in the context of an overall fiscal plan that guarantees perpetual raids on Social Security revenues), and his recent attacks on the basic pay-go structure of the program as “disgraceful,” expose him to some very real problems with seniors.
But the time bombs ticking away in the substructure of McCain’s campaign go far beyond Social Security, and extend to issues that currently may be working in his favor. Sure, the present Russia-Georgia conflict may be giving him a good opportunity to talk tough. But it also will increasingly draw attention to his overall foreign policy posture of wanting to fight in Iraq until “victory,” while increasing troop levels in Afghanistan and rattling sabers against Iran, and now Russia. The unsettling reality about John McCain is that his foreign policy thinking combines the pre-9/11 conservative obsession with a new cold war against superpower rivals (then China, now Russia and China) with the post-9/11 neocon obsession to fight a new world war against “Islamofascism.” How many wars, cold or hot, regional or global, are Americans really ready to undertake?
Similarly, McCain is getting some traction from his flip-flop favoring offshore oil drilling. But that’s about all he has to say about the economy, other than the same cut-taxes-and-deregulate-and-promote-free-trade message Republicans have offered for eons. At some point, the fact that his health care plan is even worse than the status quo will get noticed, along with regressive and pro-corporation tax policies that blow up his credibility as a fiscal hawk, and an unconditional pro-trade-liberalization commitment that should represent a deep political problem for him in battleground states like Ohio and Michigan.
And for those of you who may believe policy really doesn’t matter to voters because it’s all about “character” and “trust” and “likeability” and so forth, McCain’s vulnerabilities go beyond wonky subjects like the fate of the country domestically and internationally. His much-vaunted “maverick” persona continues to be threatened by a vast track record of solidarity with George W. Bush and the GOP, and his reputation for a positive, transpartisan approach to politics may not survive his campaign’s steady descent into negative attacks on Barack Obama. And if his past behavior is any indication, there’s also a good chance that McCain will do or say something on the campaign trail, or in the debates, that makes him a lot less “likable.”
It’s always possible that McCain will successfully navigate all these potentially lethal problems, or that Obama and Democrats will fail to fully exploit his many vulnerabilities. But he’s got a tougher path to victory than a lot of nervous Democrats seem to realize.

With the publication (and quick rise to the top of the bestseller lists) of The Obama Nation, a nasty anti-Obama screed penned by Jerome R. Corsi, the same bird who co-authored the 2004 anti-Kerry book, Unfit to Command, Democrats are quite naturally worried that the “swift-boating” of John Kerry is about to be replicated. Kerry himself seems to share this concern; his PAC has just launched an anti-smear website devoted to defending Obama and other Democrats from “swift-boating,” citing his own experience as a cautionary tale.
This is all perfectly understandable, and obviously, no one should have any illusions about the willingness and ability of GOP-allied operatives to pull off Big Smears. Corsi’s 2004 book was indeed the immediate precursor to the Swift Boat ads, and featured some of the same Kerry-hating personalities. And both phenomena fed directly into the frenzy of attacks on Kerry’s credibility and defense views at the Republican National Convention.
But there are reasons to think that the past won’t be repeated.
As Byron York of National Review pointed out today, Corsi’s 2004 book got attention in no small part because his co-author, John O’Neill, and most of the people “speaking” in the book via interviews, had actually served on Swift Boats in Vietnam. Corsi’s anti-Obama book has none of that ostensible credibility or news value; it’s just a collection of attacks on Obama by a thuggish right-wing hack, no different from what you’d hear on a right-wing talk show.
Secondly, and more importantly, the Swift Boat smears were perfectly aimed at the soft strategic underbelly of the Kerry campaign. They occurred immediately after a Democratic Convention that placed enormous emphasis on Kerry’s Vietnam War record as his preeminent credential for the presidency, without, unfortunately, presenting his record of Vietnam War protest (a big part of the Swift Boat attacks) in the right context as the other side of the same patriotic coin that led him to volunteer to fight in the war in the first place. The “revelations” in the Swift Boat assault were effective not just because Kerry didn’t challenge them aggressively enough, but because his campaign didn’t prepare for them in advance in how the candidate was presented to the public.
For all the talk about Obama’s “charisma” and “story,” he actually may be less vulnerable than Kerry was to attacks on his “personal narrative.” As a new Pew survey today illustrates, Obama’s credibility as a candidate is heavily based on the popularity of his policy positions. McCain is the candidate who is dangerously dependent on “character” and “biography” as a credential.
Finally, of course, there is zero chance that anti-Obama smears will go unchallenged. The Obama campaign decided a long time ago to abandon the once-prevelant belief that responding to smears gives them too much attention. And the fact that most attacks on Obama’s “story” inevitably go over the line into thinly disguised racism is a problem for the smear artists as well, as is evidenced by all the disengenuous whining from the McCain camp about Obama’s willingness to play “the race card.” Racist appeals are far more effective when they are subtle and implicit, not over-the-top. The fact that the whole political world is aware that race is a factor in this election means it won’t be as easy to deploy racial weapons under the radar screen.
So: I just don’t think this sort of crap is going to work for Republicans this time around. It doesn’t mean they won’t try it, but Democrats should skillfully fight back instead of panicking.

In what could be good news for Barack Obama’s campaign, Ohio election officials have announced plans to establish a one-week window from September 30 until October 6 when eligible voters can simultaneously register to vote and then cast early ballots. The window seems tailor-made to facilitate a strong turnout among first-time voters, particularly college students, of whom there are an estimated 470,000 in the Buckeye State. In national polls, Obama has been beating McCain by better than a two-to-one margin among younger voters (66-30 among voters 18-29 years old in the latest Washington Post/ABC poll).
There’s another small but potentially significant Ohio opportunity for Obama that I’ve been meaning to write about. One of the odd data points contributing to George W. Bush narrow win in 2004 in Ohio was his relatively strong performance among African-Americans: 16%, as compared to 11% nationally. (A gay marriage ballot initiative is generally thought to have been a factor in skewing the black vote in a conservative direction). Black turnout wasn’t particularly impressive, either (African-Americans accounted for 10% of the statewide vote, as compared to 12% in the Ohio Senate race two years later). There’s every reason to think that Barack Obama will improve on Kerry’s 84% support-level among African-Americans, perhaps by a significant margin, with much higher turnout. For all his appeal to certain categories of Democratic and independent voters, John McCain probably has less of a natural connection with black voters than Bush, if only because of the latter’s famous religiosity. If McCain’s campaign and/or supporters are perceived as engaging in race-baiting (a pretty good bet, as Peter Beinart argues today in the Washington Post), , then Obama’s advantage among African-Americans could become a real factor in a close statewide contest.
All in all, this supports Tom Schaller’s contention that a major investment in minority voter registration and turnout in Ohio by Democrats would be a very good idea.