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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m in Austin today attending the annual Netroots Nation gathering (formerly known as YearlyKos), along with roughly two thousand bloggers, activists, wonks, politicians and reporters. This is the third of these events; the first, in Las Vegas, was a bit of a netroots “family reunion;” the second, in Chicago, featured a presidential candidates’ forum. The Austin conference doesn’t quite have the obvious central focus of the first two, particularly given Barack Obama’s absence (he’s beginning his big overseas trip tomorrow). But as usual, there will be a vast number of panels and workshops on about every topic you can imagine.
My own focus here will be party unity. A lot of the buzz here is over the recent FISA vote, which most if not all netroots activists are regarding as a development somewhere on the scale that runs from “major disappointment” to “calamity.” Aside from the issues directly involved in FISA, the controversy (and especially Barack Obama’s FISA vote), has revived a lot of old conflicts in the Democratic Party, not to mention the more recent conflicts that occasionally surfaced during the long presidential nominating contest.
A lot of talk about the nature and future of the party will be percolating around Austin throughout this event. But one obvious lightning rod will be the forum today featuring DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas and DLC chairman Harold Ford, Jr. This is a sequel to Markos’ appearance at the DLC annual meeting in Chicago last month (on a panel I happened to moderate). And while the ostensible topic of the Markos-Ford discussion (being referred to by some attendees, anticipating a Markos demolition of Ford, as the “Texas Smackdown”), party infrastructure, is one on which the two men can probably find a lot of common ground, there will be questions from the audience, and no telling where it will go from there.

Most political observers are generally aware that Democrats have been benefitting from a surge in party registration this year. But Rhodes Cook has offered a clear statistical look at the Democratic registration advantage, going back to the 2004 election.
Keep in mind that only 29 states (plus DC) register voters by party. So Cook’s national numbers–a total increase in Dem registration of about 700,000, and a decline in GOP registration by about a million–just show part of the picture.
But far more significant are the trends in some of the battleground states. Combining D and R numbers, the net shift towards Democratic as opposed to Republican registrations since November of 2004 has been 124,000 in Oregon, 94,000 in Iowa, 60,000 in both Colorado and Nevada, 33,000 in New Hampshire, and 30,000 in Arizona. But it’s the trend in Pennsylvania–a battleground in both the presidential and House races–that jumps off the page: Democratic registration is up 266,000 since ’04, while Republican registration is down 220,000. That’s a net shift of 486,000; Democrats now enjoy a plurality in registrations of more than a million in PA.
A number of big battleground states (notably OH, MI, VA, MN and WI) don’t register voters by party. But you’d have to guess the underlying partisan dynamics don’t differ massively from those in the party registration states. And that’s a major reason for Democratic optimism this year.

My review of Rick Perlstein’s remarkable history of the period between LBJ’s 1964 landslide and Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Nixonland, is finally available on the Washington Monthly site.
A chunk of my review debates the proposition that the politics of middle-class resentment of liberal “elites” and minorities epitomized by Nixon may be running out of gas; hence the title assigned by the editors: “The End of Resentment.” Given the ongoing conservative effort to demonize Barack Obama as an out-of-touch lefty elitist, and his wife as a black militant, I wish the title had included a question mark. But still, for anyone who remembers the Nixon Era at its peak, the contemporary drive to batten on cultural resentments has the feel of a nostalgic Broadway revival rather than a new and vibrant production. One small but significant bit of evidence of the changing mood which I only mentioned in passing in the review is that the recent abuses at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib have been generally condemned, while the far more shocking My Lai massacre of the Vietnam Era made one of its chief perpetrators, Lt. William Calley, a popular hero feted at mass “Rallies for Calley,” particularly in my home state of Georgia.
We’ll learn soon enough the extent to which we are still living in Nixonland. But in the meantime, if you haven’t read Perlstein’s book, you really should. Its length will be daunting to some, but it’s more than worth the effort.