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.

It certainly came as a shock to everyone involved in politics or journalism to learn that Tim Russert suddenly died today. He was 58, relatively young, and professionally, in the prime of life.
I didn’t know him personally, but know lots of folks who did, and you never really heard an unkind word said about him. Sure, people had issues with his interviewing style (particularly politicians terrified that he would skewer them), but in an industry overpopulated with, well, self-centered and half-educated jackasses, Russert was by all accounts remarkably decent and knowledgeable, despite an iconic position that would have led many others to get puffed up or lazy.
Having watched MSNBC for a while today, I have to say that it’s a tribute to the genuine affection his colleagues had for him that they have managed to talk lovingly about him without a single false note, though none of them could have possibly had more than a few moments to prepare.
But much as the tributes to Russert’s professional qualities are warranted, the real tragedy is that a wife, a son, and a father, have so suddenly lost him, without (it appears) even a chance to say good-bye. May they be comforted, and may he rest in peace.

Editor’s Note: We are proud to publish today an original article by two noted academic experts on the highly relevant topic of Hispanic voters in 2008. The authors are R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at Caltech in Pasadena, and Jonathan Nagler, a professor of politics in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at NYU. Together they have studied voting behavior in recent presidential elections, and have written a number of papers on Hispanic political behavior. In 2004 they were involved in Hispanic research for the Kerry campaign, and have worked on a number of Hispanic research projects in association with Greenberg, Quinlan and Rosner Research.
We also anticipate recieving and publishing some comments and rejoinders from other experts in this field over the next couple of weeks, and intend to continue this discussion until election day and beyond.
Winning the Hispanic Vote in 2008
by R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler
Introduction
Historically, Democratic presidential candidates have done quite well with Hispanic voters (with some exceptions, such as Cuban-Americans). For the past three decades, Democratic presidential candidates have typically received more than 60% of the votes cast by Hispanics.
But in the 2004 presidential election, Hispanic support for John Kerry was lower than the historic norm. While there has been much debate over the exact percentage of support that Kerry received from Hispanic voters in 2004, a consensus has emerged that at best Kerry might have received 60% of the Hispanic vote. But no matter what we think the exact percentage was, Hispanic voters were attracted to Bush in greater percentages in 2004 than to any previous Republican presidential candidate in recent history (See David L. Leal, Matt A. Barreto, Jongho Lee, and Rodolfo O. de la Garza, “The Latino Vote in the 2004 Election”. PS: Political Science and Politics, v. 38, 41-49, 2005; Marisa A. Abrajano, R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, “The Hispanic Vote in the 2004 Presidential Election: Insecurity and Moral Concerns”, Journal of Politics, forthcoming (April, 2008); David L. Leal, Stephen A. Nuno, Jongho Lee, and Rodolfo O. de la Garza, “Latinos, Immigration, and the 2006 Midterm Elections.” PS: Political Science and Politics, v. 41, 309-317, 2008.).
There are two questions that Kerry’s performance with Hispanic voters in the 2004 presidential election raises. One question is why — what was it about the context of the 2004 presidential election, and the messages articulated by Kerry and Bush, that caused more Hispanics to support Bush than is normal for a Republican presidential candidate? The second question is what does this imply for the 2008 presidential election — what strategies should the Barak Obama, the presumptive Democrat nominee, pursue to insure a stronger performance among Hispanic voters in November 2008?
In this article we provide answers for both of these questions.
What Happened in 2004?
The Kerry campaign appeared to treat the Hispanic vote seriously in the 2004 election. Just prior to the Democratic National Convention in late July 2004, the Kerry campaign announced an unprecedented financial investment aimed at targeting Hispanic and African-American voters. At that point in the 2004 campaign, the stage seemed to be set for Kerry to devise a strong appeal to Hispanic voters.
But that appeal failed to take into consideration the potential Republican election strategy, as well as the particular context of the 2004 presidential race. In research we have done with Marisa A. Abrajano (The Journal of Politics, 2008), we found that despite their concerns about the national economy and the war in Iraq, Hispanic voters were attracted to Bush because of two appeals: first, his stance on moral values; and second, his national security message.
In our paper, “The Hispanic Vote in the 2004 Presidential Election: Insecurity and Moral Concerns”, we used exit poll data from most of the states with large Hispanic electorates to develop a statistical model to determine the issues that motivated Hispanic voters to support Kerry or Bush (We used respondents from Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and New Jersey. These were the states where the Hispanic population was at least 6% of the state population, and where the necessary questions were asked on the Exit Poll. In Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas respondents were not asked what they felt the most important issue was.)
We then used our model to examine support for Kerry or Bush in two different hypothetical scenarios. In the first scenario we simulated one aspect of campaign strategy: what if Kerry had been successful in completely neutralizing particular issues, that is – convincing all Hispanic voters that the issue was not important? In the second scenario we considered what would have happened if instead of completely neutralizing issues, one of the candidates had persuaded all Hispanic voters that a particular issue was the most important issue of the election to them? So for example, in scenario one, what if Kerry had successfully persuaded all Hispanic voters that moral values were not a concern, or that national security issues were not a concern? Or, for scenario two, what if Kerry had convinced all Hispanic voters that education was the most important concern for the election, or that health care was the most important concern for the election?
This analysis revealed that had Kerry managed to neutralize select issues, two issues would have been powerful in moving Hispanic votes into his column: terrorism and moral values. Our statistical model predicts that if had Kerry completely neutralized the moral values issue, his vote share among Hispanics in the states we analyze would have increased 2.2 percentage points, from 60% to 62.2%; had he done the same with terrorism, his vote share among Hispanics would have increased 2.7 percentage points, from 60% to 62.7%. As Kerry lost the popular vote by less than 2.5 percentage points, obviously these are meaningful swings in the vote.
Compared to moral values and terrorism, traditional Democratic issues such as education and health care played relatively little role in 2004. Performing similar counterfactual analyses to those we describe above, our model predicted that had no Hispanic voters felt that education or health care was the most important issue, then Kerry’s vote share would have dropped by only 0.5 percentage points and 0.6 percentage points respectively (from 60.0% to 59.5% and 59.4%, respectively).
This does not bode well for a Democratic candidate: the alternative way to frame this is that Kerry only convinced enough Hispanic voters to believe that education or health care were the most important issues in the campaign to raise his vote share less than one percentage point compared to an electorate where no Hispanics thought either of these were the most important issue. Yet these are issues that Hispanics have traditionally claimed were
important. This suggests Kerry was simply not winning enough votes in an issue area that has traditionally favored Democrats. Our model predicts that if Kerry had done well in this area and convinced all Hispanic voters that education or health care was the most important issue, then his vote share would have risen by 5.3 or 11.6 percentage points, respectively. Obviously convincing all Hispanic voters that either of these was the most
important issue was not feasible. But in the states we examined, only 8.4% of Hispanics listed education as the most important issue, and only 6.8% of Hispanics listed health care as the most important issue. These percentages are well below the percentages of Hispanics who have listed these as major concerns in polling conducted prior to the election contest.
What Does This Mean For 2008?
Clearly, much has changed since the 2004 presidential election. The second Bush term, the 2006 Democratic successes in the midterm elections, the continued war in Iraq, turmoil in the housing market, rising prices, and signs of economic recession all will help to shape the context of the 2008 general election. And since 2004 the issue of illegal immigration has also risen in national concern; recent surveys of Hispanic voters show immigration and in particular efforts to deal with illegal immigration to be an important concern. Recent polling has shown the immigration issue to be an important one for other voters as well, especially white voters across the nation.
Given the prominence of the immigration issue, especially for Hispanics, and the failure of federal efforts to devise legislative solutions to help resolve the problem of illegal immigration, many have argued that the immigration issue might be one that the Obama and the Democratic Party could use to their advantage in the 2008 presidential race. But now that the context of the presidential race is becoming clearer, it is no longer the case that the immigration issue will necessarily be important in the 2008 general election, nor an issue that the Obama can easily use to win Hispanic votes. There is one reason for this — the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.
McCain has in the past has backed comprehensive immigration reform, most recently in the Senate bill he cosponsored with Ted Kennedy that would have, among other reforms, created an “essential worker visa program.” While risking the possibility that he will anger the more conservative elements in the Republican party that desire strong action on immigration (such as building a wall along the US-Mexican border, etc), McCain’s past stance on immigration will make it difficult for Obama to easily draw clear distinctions on this issue, and may effectively reduce the prominence of the immigration issue in the general election.
If that happens, we believe that McCain will draw directly from the 2004 Republican playbook when it comes to the Hispanic electorate. He is likely to turn again to national security (an issue where his background as a Vietnam veteran, his support for the surge in Iraq, and his legislative career in Congress give him strong credibility) and moral values as issues in his messaging to Hispanic voters. As in the 2004 election, we believe that this may again erode Hispanic support for Obama. But there are ways in which the Democrats can develop messages that can mitigate, if not eliminate, the potential threat which moral values and national security issues may pose in November 2008.
Consider the current context: continued fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis; plummeting housing values, soaring numbers of foreclosures, and a lack of credit for purchasing homes. Basic costs of living for food and especially gasoline are rising dramatically, with $4 per gallon gas common across the country. We have clear signs of an ongoing economic slowdown, if not recession. Consumer confidence is sagging. Many families, including many Hispanic families, cannot afford adequate health care, and in many instances have no health care coverage at all. The American casualty count in Iraq has passed 4,000, and there are no signs that the Iraq War will end soon.
Data from Hispanics who participated in the recent Super Tuesday primaries, as compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center, shows that this basic trilogy of issues are of importance to Hispanic Democratic voters: the economy (53%), the war in Iraq (24%), and health care (21%). Importantly, both white and African-American Democratic voters on Super Tuesday perceived these same three to be of importance, in the same relative order; the economy, the Iraq War, and health care.
Thus, there is a basic narrative that Democrats can – and must – develop in order to have a strong Hispanic strategy in 2008. That narrative needs to focus on the core strengths that the Democratic candidate will bring to the table: a progressive message that articulates how the federal government will bring the nation economic growth, how it will provide affordable housing and credit to middle and lower income families, how it will deal with skyrocketing costs for food and energy, how it will make health care available and affordable, how it will make quality education a priority, how it can bring high-quality jobs to all those who want them, and how they will end the war in Iraq.
We think that for Democrats to retake the White House in 2008, they must work to get strong Hispanic support — and keep Republican Hispanic support at or below the 35% threshold. Doing this will not be easy, but will require that the Democrats take advantage of the constellation of domestic issues that work so strongly in their favor with Hispanic voters: the economy, education and health care.