One of John McCain’s favorite themes is to cast himself in the role of a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican “reformer” with a taste for an aggressive military posture, who’s not allergic to public sector activism on occasion. Indeed, in a recent New York Times interview, asked to name a conservative “model” for his politics, McCain said: “I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.” This has also been a favorite talking-point for a variety of McCain fans and advisors, ranging from the former “Bull Moose” blogger Marshall Wittmann (a longtime McCain associate who’s currently Joe Lieberman’s press secretary) and columnist David Brooks.
Inevitably, he was going to get some conservative grief for the TR-as-model claim, and it came in abundant and even hilarious measure from historian Michael Knox Beran today at National Review.
Beran’s piece is a long excoriation of TR as an anti-capitalist, a statist, an egomaniac, an emotionally erratic opportunist, and even a proto-fascist. His message to McCain is very blunt:

In advertising his hero-worship of Teddy, Sen. McCain exhibits a little too blatantly an aspect of his own psyche that would best be kept under wraps. He, too, has been accused of political narcissism. If he wants to reassure conservatives, he needs to persuade them that, unlike Roosevelt’s, his own policies will be grounded in something more solid than expediency and a canny reading of the whimsies of the moment.

If you’re interested in Beran’s analysis of TR as representing “the degenerate philosophy of late romanticism,” you can read the whole thing. But his conclusion is funny enough:

All in all, John McCain would do best to talk more about Ronald Reagan, and less about Theodore Roosevelt. And while he is at it, he might come up with a new “favorite book,” one that isn’t, like For Whom the Bell Tolls, a maudlin lament for a socialist bridge-bomber.

From the “true conservative” point of view, you see, Papa Hemingway backed the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. McCain needs to flip-flop on that issue as well.

It was Primary Day in my home state of Georgia yesterday, yielding two results of national interest in a very low-turnout event.
In the Democratic primary to choose an opponent for incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, a scattered and low-spending field produced a runoff (in three weeks) between Dekalb County CEO Vernon Jones (40%) and former state Rep. Jim Martin (34%). Jones benefitted from a strong African-American vote, particularly in rural areas of the state, while Martin got some mileage from his statewide race for Lieutenant Governor in 2006, along with a host of endorsements. Jones gained a lot of notoriety from boasting that he’d voted twice for George W. Bush, but also tried to link his candidacy (via some photo-shopped images on fliers) to Barack Obama’s. Martin, a much more conventional national Democrat, should be favored in the runoff, but anything could happen given the very low turnout characteristic of runoffs in Georgia.
Meanwhile, down in the 12th congressional district, which runs from Augusta to Savannah, Democratic incumbent John Barrow beat a challenge from state senator Regina Thomas by better than a three-to-one margin. Barrow had drawn the ire of a lot of national progressives as a “Bush Dog” who supported war funding and FISA, and opposed SCHIP expansion. But he was also endorsed by Barack Obama, and had a huge funding advantage. He will be a solid favorite in November to retain his seat against Republican John Stone, a longtime congressional staffer.

In the same issue of The New Yorker that features the questionable cartoon cover of Barack and Michelle Obama, and a less-than-entirely flattering profile of Obama’s Chicago roots by Ryan Lizza, there’s another piece that probably won’t get the attention it deserves: Hendrik Hertzberg’s analysis of the recent charge against Obama of serial flip-flopping.
Hertzberg goes through the issues on which Obama has supposedly flip-flopped or “moved to the right” and makes some astute judgments:
Iraq policy? “A marginal tweak.”
Abortion? No change.
Faith-based programs? “A shift of emphasis.”
Death penalty? “A substantive tweak,” but still a tweak.
On public financing of campaigns, Hertzberg suggests that Obama broke an ill-advised promise, but didn’t really change positions.
It’s on FISA that Obama most obviously did a “U-turn,” though Hertzberg seems as baffled as I am as to whether it was politics or substance that led him to do so. Hertzberg notes the broad spectrum of civil libertarian opinion about the gravity of FISA, but leaves it to the reader to decide how much this matters.
But in general, all the talk about Obama’s “flip-flops” obscures a basic reality:

Meanwhile, McCain has been busily reversing his views in highly consequential ways. He opposed the Bush tax cuts because they favored the rich; now he supports their eternal extension. He was against offshore oil drilling as not being worth the environmental damage it brings; now he’s for it, and damn the costs. He was against torture, period; now he’s against it unless the C.I.A. does it. He keeps flipping to the wrong flops

Flip-flopping is bad politically. But flip-flopping to the wrong position is worse. Maybe Obama’s done that on FISA. But McCain’s made a habit of it, and even where he hasn’t, he tends to wind up with positions that should disturb any voter unhappy with the Bushian status quo.

I did a post this morning noting the gathering campaign to force John McCain to disclose his (probably scary) views on Social Security, and suggesting that it presented McCain with some bad choices in terms of his rep as a straight-talker, a fiscal hawk, and a paragon of principle.
I should have mentioned a more fundamental political issue: the importance of Social Security to seniors.
In a post today on the close divisions between the two candidates in the latest Newsweek poll, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called attention to the vast “age gap” between supporters of Obama and McCain:

Another interesting finding from the Newsweek poll is that there seems to be a massive age gap forming around the choice between Obama and McCain. Among voters aged 18 to 39, Obama led McCain 56 percent to 33 percent; voters 40-59 were essentially a wash (44 percent McCain/41 percent Obama) while those 60 years of age or older went for McCain by a 48 percent to 37 percent margin.

McCain’s appeal to seniors is in no small part because he’s a familiar figure who has long been perceived by many older voters as trustworthy. If Democrats can spend some time showing seniors that McCain is a weasly flip-flopper on Social Security who would love to gut the program while accelerating tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, those perceptions could significantly change. Watch for it in future polls.

For a politician who likes to style himself as a straight-talking conservative fiscal hawk, John McCain has been rather evasive on what he proposed to do about Social Security.
He supported Bush’s politically disastrous 2005 privatization plan. His new “economic plan” calls reform of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid the key to long-term fiscal responsibility. And at roughly the same time, he called the “pay as you go” structure of Social Security a “disgrace.”
But he’s dancing around anything terribly specific right now. And that’s deliberate:

McCain and his aides say the lack of specificity is intentional — the result of lessons from 2005, when Bush tried to sell a skeptical public on private accounts.
“There’s a really careful recognition of the history,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s economic advisor.
“The history on Social Security has been if you put out specific proposals or preconditions, you polarize the debate and the deal doesn’t get done.”

So much for “straight talk.”
As Peter Wallsten of the L.A. Times reports today, Democrats have decided to smoke out McCain’s position on Social Security, by using the available evidence attributing Bushian views or worse to him, and then challenging him to come out with contrary views if he can. It’s a classic “smoke-out” operation, and it’s coming very soon.

On Tuesday, a coalition of Democratic strategists, labor unions and liberal activist groups that helped defeat Bush’s efforts in 2005 plans to launch a similar campaign. They intend to target McCain and dozens of GOP congressional candidates who have supported proposals to allow workers to divert some of their payroll taxes out of the Social Security system and into private investment accounts….
This week, the coalition — which began laying its plans Friday in a conference call arranged by the DNC — will start demonstrating at McCain’s events and offices, particularly in key states with many seniors. The group has ordered thousands of signs with “Hands Off My Social Security” on one side and “My Social Security Is Not a Disgrace” on the other.

This campaign is intended to force McCain either to confirm the politically dangerous views he has embraced in the past, or to admit another flip-flop, or to look like just another mealy-mouthed Washington pol–all mirroring attack lines his campaign has taken against Barack Obama, who does happen to have a specific Social Security proposal, albeit one just focused on boosting revenues.
This should be another lively week on the campaign trail. But at least Phil Gramm won’t be the one speaking for the McCain campaign on Social Security.

(Note: this is a cross-post from Salon.com’s War Room, where I’m guest-blogging this week)
Amidst the anguish being expressed in the progressive netroots about Barack Obama’s vote for FISA legislation (and to a lesser extent, his recent positioning on the death penalty, Iraq, abortion, and faith-based initiatives), there’s an interesting subtext of resignation about the presumptive Democratic nominee’s basic ideological nature.
This is nowhere more evident than at the influential site OpenLeft, whose founders, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, have long argued that Obama is a centrist pragmatist rather than a reliable progressive.
Stoller was particularly blunt in a post yesterday entitled “Why It’s Important to Note that Obama is NOT liberal or progressive.”
After assesssing Obama’s policy positions, Stoller has this to say about the attitude progressives should have towards his candidacy going forward:

Obama isn’t ours, he never was, and we shouldn’t pretend he is or else we are throwing away the opportunity to have real progressive policies enacted sometime over the next few years.
Once you absorb this state of affairs, it’s a fairly optimistic path forward. All of the work going into getting Obama elected is helping to build the progressive movement and teaching millions of people to get involved, give money, run for office, etc. These people have progressive sympathies and are attaching themselves to important political networks. Some of them paid attention to FISA who were not paying attention in 2006, which is good. The network is just bigger and stronger.

Today Bowers reinforces the point, playing off my War Room post from yesterday questioning the assumption that Obama’s FISA vote was a matter of political calculation:

[O]verall I have to conclude that Obama’s position back in December, not his position today, was the actual political calculation. As Matt argued yesterday, we should consider the strong possibility that Obama isn’t moving to the center at all, but rather that he was in the center all along. Maybe it is the nomination campaign where we saw the political calculations, not the general election. Obama isn’t moving anywhere: he is simply reasserting himself.

DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas comes at the issue from a different, less ideological perspective, but winds up in a similar place, as illustrated by his July 1 post explaning a decision to withold a financial contribution, but not his support, from Obama:

Ultimately, he’s currently saying that he doesn’t need people like me to win this thing, and he’s right. He doesn’t. If they’ve got polling or whatnot that says that this is his best path to victory, so much the better. I want him to win big. But when the Obama campaign makes those calculations, they have to realize that they’re going to necessarily lose some intensity of support. It’s not all upside. And for me, that is reflected in a lack of interest in making that contribution.

What Markos was really getting at here is that he thought netroots activists needed to adopt a more distant and critical posture towards Obama without going over the brink into hostility, trying to influence his “behavior” without illusions about his underlying ideological nature.
To understand where Stoller, Bowers, Markos and other netroots leaders are coming from, it’s important to remember that there have long been concerns in those quarters about Obama’s positions on a variety of issues: his “bipartisan” rhetoric; his claim that Social Security is in “crisis”; his support for a residual troop commitment in Iraq; his relationship with anti-gay ministers; even his health care plan; have all drawn fire. He didn’t become the preferred candidate of the progressive netroots until the contest became a one-on-one fight with Hillary Clinton.
Even then, netroots enthusiasm for Obama was mainly attributable to appreciation for his revolutionary use of internet technologies to raise money and organize volunteers, and his early opposition to the Iraq war (compounded by hostility towards Clinton), rather than any general approbation of him as a progressive stalwart.
So all the current talk we are hearing, much of it from chortling conservatives, about the netroots love affair with Obama coming to an end, should be tempered with the understanding that for many, it was always a complicated relationship. Maybe some love has now been lost, particularly for netroots activists who did back Obama from the beginning. But what’s really emerging, or re-emerging, now is a partnernship based on cold political realities.

It’s now pretty clear that Jesse Jackson’s exploitation by Fox News for saying some crude and angry things about Barack Obama during a commercial break will if anything help Obama politically, while deeply humiliating Jackson himself (how bad is it to be publicly denounced by your own son?).
But via TNR’s The Stump, it’s interesting to read an African-American take, from Ebonyjet.com, about the mixed sentiments behind Jackson’s outburst:

When Obama uses a Black church pulpit to send his message of responsibility, he is preaching to the choir both literally and figuratively. The people who need to hear that message are neither on the choir nor in the church, which of course, is part of the problem.
But that particular speech was not in just any church. It was in the first Chicago church Obama attended after repudiating Jeremiah Wright and after resigning Wright’s Trinity Church after incendiary comments made by Father Micheal Pfleger. The press and the world was watching and hanging on every word.
The fear among critics is that the real audience that day was not the Black people in the pews at all, but the white people in middle America looking for a strong signal that Obama was rejecting the politics of racial division and animosity. By choosing that moment to castigate Black fathers, some worry that Obama gave public voice to what white people whisper about Blacks in their living rooms and cemented his image as a post-racial savior at the expense of Black men.

If that worry is true, then Obama wasn’t “talking down to black people,” as Jackson suggested, but talking past them to a different audience. And the irony is that Jesse Jackson ensured that message got through loud and clear.

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

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

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

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