The always-interesting Mark Schmitt has penned a fine essay for The American Prospect on the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary conservatism, and the strong likelihood that the Republican Party is about to enter a period of significant decline, until such time as it can generate new ideas and leaders.
Unlike Mark, I haven’t had the time or patience to slog through the raft of recent books on the future of conservatism, so I’ll take his word for it that would-be conservative “reformers” like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, David Frum and Mickey Edwards haven’t come up with anything revolutionary, and that Republican politicians and “base” voters aren’t willing to embrace much change in any event.
But Mark makes an observation about the current Republican Party and the McCain campaign that is spot-on and very important: given the discredited nature of such conservative ideological frameworks as supply-side economics and neocon foreign policy, and in the absence of anything that could be described as “McCainism,” the GOP this year is being driven to a primal, bare-bones appeal to “American identity.”

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus “pluribus,” unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain’s slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn’t salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else–ideas, competence, governance–is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, “The American President Americans Are Waiting For.”

Mark doesn’t come out and say it, but he’s explained why the McCain campaign is almost certain to be one of the most negative and nasty in living memory, despite McCain’s alleged “centrism.” Theoretically, an “American identity” campaign could be unifying, uplifting, and communitarian in tone. But that’s Barack Obama’s theme, not John McCain’s. And in the current political climate, and for a candidate of the Right, an “American identity” appeal is bound to be exclusive, fearful and even vengeful. McCain really has no other option.
Think about it. McCain’s war record, “character,” and occasional exercises in “independence” might be enough to get him over the hump in an election year where Americans really wanted a Republican president, though perhaps one not named “Bush.” But that’s obviously not how 2008 is shaping up. McCain isn’t going to win the presidency with his foreign policy views. Given how terribly out of alignment he is with public opinion on Iraq, the amazing thing is that he’s doing as well as he is in assessments of him as a commander-in-chief; the numbers are unlikely to improve the more voters get to know McCain’s essentially neocon position on foreign policy.
On domestic issues, McCain at best offers a slightly sanitized version of Bush-era conservatism: he doesn’t like pork-barrel spending and torture; isn’t a global-warming denier; and doesn’t strike anyone as the kind of man who will wake up every morning in the White House scheming to criminalize abortion or demonize gays and lesbians. That’s not a lot of “change.” As for McCain’s reputation for bipartisanship, there’s not much left there these days beyond the echo chamber he shares with Democratic apostate Joe Lieberman.
So like it or not, John McCain is going to be relentlessly driven in the direction of a negative effort to make the contest about his Democratic opponent rather than his own or his party’s merits, and in Barack Obama, he’s got an opponent tailor-made for a gutter campaign aimed at convincing swing voters that he simply represents too much change, and too much risk, in the very visceral sense of embodying so many unfamiliar things.
There’s a pretty clear historical precedent for the strategy that McCain is likely to pursue: Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign. Carter faced a political landscape just as forbidding as McCain’s today: a weak economy, plunging U.S. strength and prestige around the world, an exceptionally sour public mood, and a restless and uninspired party “base.” Unsurprisingly, Carter staked his re-election on an effort to make the contest a referendum on all the doubts and fears raised by Ronald Reagan. His Convention Acceptance speech was built on the theme of “The Two Futures,” a forthright appeal to voters to forget about the previous four years and focus on the scary prospects of a Reagan presidency. That was also Carter’s approach in the one 1980 presidential debate, in which his “two futures” argument was decisively trumped by Reagan’s simple “are you better off?” formulation of the case for change.
Perhaps John McCain is in a better position than the 1980 incumbent Carter to offer a minimum case that he represents some degree of “change,” but the odds are that his candidacy will depend on doing a better job than Carter at frightening voters about his opponent. So buckle in for a tough, unsavory GOP campaign, sports fans. When you’re wrong on the issues, your party and ideology have been discredited, and the whole sweep of history seems to conspire against you, dragging the campaign deep into the mud may be the only option left.

Can anyone recall a presidential election cycle in which there has been so much speculation and argument about Veep choices so very early? The only one that comes to mind is 1964, when LBJ conducted a very extended and very public “search” for a running-mate that seemed to include virtually every Democratic elected official in the country.
There are obvious reasons for this Veep-o-mania. On the Republican side, John McCain’s age, and his less-than-perfect relationship with the GOP’s dominant conservative wing, have made his choice of running-mate a very big deal, leading to a common assumption (which I share) that conservatives will enjoy an implicit veto over the decision.
On the Democratic side, early Veep speculation has been spurred by perceptions that the long nomination contest has divided the party, and that Barack Obama has some very specific weaknesses in his biography and his electoral appeal that a running-mate might help address. Moreover, the idea that he could heal the intraparty wounds and broaden his appeal by forming a “Unity Ticket” with Hillary Clinton has acceletated the discussion, since there’s some sense that an early move in that direction by Obama might bring Clinton’s challenge to a decisive and amicable end.
In any event, we are beginning to hear the opening salvoes of the argument over a prospective Obama running-mate, beyond the strong negative reaction of many Obama supporters and progressive pundits to the Unity Ticket talk. And it’s not surprising that the name of Virginia Sen. Jim Webb is already arousing some very passionate pro and con feelings.
A lot of this sentiment hasn’t quite gone public yet, but there’s a sizable group of progressive activists and bloggers who viscerally identify with Webb’s staunch opposition to the Iraq War, his high-octane brand of economic populism, and (I might as well come out and say it, since Webb’s most avid promoters are almost invariably male) his testosterone-heavy approach to politics generally.
On a more rational level, at a time when there’s a lot of disagreement about what Obama most needs in a running-mate, Webb is rivalled only by Bill Richardson in the number of “boxes” his potential candidacy would check.
As a war hero and former Secretary of the Navy, Webb abundantly possesses the national security credentials that–on paper at least–Obama largely lacks.
He’s from a medium-sized red state that most Democrats consider potentially winnable.
As a former Republican, Webb could shore up Obama’s once-formidable and now-vulnerable ability to reach out to disaffected GOPers and GOP-leaning independents.
And Webb is the distinguished expert on and personal embodiment of a particular demographic group–the Scotch-Irish Americans who populated Appalachia and eventually migrated through the South and all the way to California–among whom Obama has done especially poorly in the Democratic primaries.
There are a few other factors that Webb boosters sometimes cite in his favor. One is his stellar performance delivering the 2007 Democratic response to Bush’s State of the Union Address, often contrasted with the understated effort this year by Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a frequently-mentioned Veep possibility for Obama. And another is the talent for expression Webb has evidenced in his long literary career in fiction and nonfiction works, most recently his well-timed new book, A Time to Fight, which lays out a comprehensive agenda for the Democratic Party and the country.
But the case for Webb as Veep (even if he wants the gig, which is not at all clear from his recent comments on the subject) is by no means going to go unchallenged, as shown by a guest post today on Matt Yglesias’ site by feminist blogger Kathy G., who deems Webb “unacceptable.”
Kathy G. devotes some attention to disputing the positive case for Webb. She cites his relatively poor performance among white voters in VA in 2006, in a strong Democratic year against a wounded Republican incumbent; and his reputation as an indifferent campaigner and a difficult person generally. She also examines the downside of Webb’s ex-Republican status, including his past support for Republican candidates and policy positions, and his very recent endorsement of conservative revisionist theories about the Vietnam War.
But the heart of her post, in an exposition that we will hear again and again if Webb gets “short-listed” by Obama for the Veep position, is about Webb’s history on gender issues, dating all the way back to a highly controversial 1979 magazine piece in which the future Secretary of the Navy denounced the admission of women to the military academies, and opposed any consideration of allowing them anywhere near combat.
Webb, says Kathy G., became an enabler of all sorts of torments aimed at women in the military:

Webb’s writings on women did a hell of a lot of damage. It gave invaluable ammunition to the enemies of women’s presence in the military and helped stall and perhaps even roll back women’s progress there. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 academy graduate who went on to become a commander in the Navy, said of Webb’s screed: “This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us.”

And Webb’s controversial utterances about women in the military didn’t abate much later on.

At a 1991 convention of naval aviators called Tailhook, 83 women were reported to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by military personnel. From the beginning, Webb’s concern for the victims was merely perfunctory. But he gave many speeches and wrote many articles vociferously defending the accused. In a 1992 article in the New York Times, he called the investigation of Tailhook a “witch hunt.” In a 1997 article he wrote for the conservative Weekly Standard, he was highly critical of what he termed “ever-expanding sexual mixing” in the military and he referred to feminist efforts to improve the status of women in the military as merely “salving the egos of a group of never-satisfied social engineers.”

In a preliminary and atypically defensive response to Kathy G. today, pro-Webb blogger Spencer Ackerman cites some examples of how Webb promoted significant if non-combat assignments for women as Secretary of the Navy. But it’s still a problematic record, particularly, as Kathy G. notes, when it comes to the impact of a Webb Veep nomination on pro-Hillary Clinton women:

[I]n practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I’m not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I’m not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.
But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn’t win. But for Obama to choose — out of all the well-qualified candidates out there — the one person who has a really awful record on gender issues would be like rubbing salt in the wound. It would be seen as a big “screw you” to Hillary’s supporters and to feminists in general.

That’s the really key argument that stands in the way of a prospective Obama-Webb ticket.
And more generally, the passionate arguments for and against Jim Webb as Veep show that rejecting the Unity Ticket won’t take Barack Obama out of the thick woods on this issue. One of the main reasons I eventually came around to Unity Ticket advocacy, despite serious misgivings, is that there’s really no obvious alternative that doesn’t raise a lot of questions as well, without the upside of a quick resolution of the nominating contest and a balm on the wounds it created. Maybe the whole subject of the vice-presidential nomination is being overrated as a factor in the general election. But no matter: among the chattering classes at least, it’s going to hang fire for quite a while.

Each Memorial Day, you hear a lot of earnest and sometimes angry talk about the debasement of this holiday into a mere long weekend devoted to beaches, barbecues, sporting events, and celebration of the onset of of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. (Indeed, at church yesterday I listened to a sermon dedicated to this very theme).
But if you listen carefully to these complaints, there are two very distinct ideas about the “true meaning” of Memorial Day that emerge (try googling “true meaning Memorial Day” and you’ll see what I mean). The first is about remembering the dead, most generally, and more specifically recalling in somber detail the sacrifices of those who died in the service of our country. The second is about honoring that service by exalting its purpose, making Memorial Day a patriotic holiday dedicated to retroactive and prospective dedication of Americans to the justice and selflessness associated with this country at war.
This second idea is inevitably political, particularly at a time when young Americans are being exposed to death each day in a very unpopular “war of choice.” Sure, there are some antiwar folk who encourage an examination of patriotic ideology on days like Memorial Day in the hopes that America will “live up” to the principles it proclaims. But far more common are conservative excoriations of those who out of malice or ignorance fail to endorse the unique and universal benevolence that characterizes each resort to arms by the United States.
Consider this excerpt from a long Memorial Day piece at National Review Online by Mackubin Thomas Owens:

[W]hile the individual soldier may focus on the particulars of combat, Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view, giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted of some but offered by all, not only acknowledging and remembering the sacrifice, but validating it.
In the history of the world, many good soldiers have died bravely and honorably for bad or unjust causes. Americans are fortunate in that we have been given a way of avoiding this situation by linking the sacrifice of our soldiers to the meaning of the nation. At the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln fleshed out the understanding of what he called in his First Inaugural Address, the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gives universal meaning to the particular deaths that occurred on that hallowed ground, thus allowing us to understand Memorial Day in the light of the Fourth of July, to comprehend the honorable end of the soldiers in the light of the glorious beginning and purpose of the nation. The deaths of the soldiers at Gettysburg, of those who died during the Civil War as a whole, and indeed of those who have fallen in all the wars of America, are validated by reference to the nation and its founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

According to this point of view, you can’t honor fallen servicemen and servicewomen without honoring the specific and general causes for which they were thrown into battle. And it’s no surprise that those who maintain this point of view also believe that you can’t “support the troops” in Iraq without supporting the justice and necessity of the war itself, and its past and present conduct by the current administration in Washington.
This is an understandable if very dangerous emotion. No one is happy to acknowledge the possibility that they, or their loved ones, or for that matter, their fellow-citizens, are walking in the valley of the shadow of death “in vain” (as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address) or “for a mistake” (as John Kerry put it in his Senate testimony for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War). Owens is a Vietnam Vet, and he makes plain his opinion that the dishonoring of American war dead began with the anti-Vietnam War movement:

The posture Americans took toward Memorial Day started to go awry with Vietnam. The press, if not the American people, began to treat soldiers as moral monsters, victims, or both. The “dysfunctional Vietnam vet” became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war. Thanks to the press’s preoccupation with the anomaly of My Lai, Lt. William Calley became the poster boy for Vietnam. The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.

Owens’ citation of My Lai and Calley is interesting. I don’t know how Calley was regarded by his former brothers-in-arms fighting in Vietnam, but in Georgia, where I was growing up at the time, he was turned into a hero–a “poster boy for Vietnam” among war supporters. “Ralleys for Calley” were held all over the state (and the country). After Richard Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence for violating military law, he adopted Columbus, Georgia, as his new home town, and was soon appearing in ads for a car dealer. Sure, some Calley supporters considered him a “scapegoat” who was being punished for the sins of higher-ups (the ex post facto rationalization that Jimmy Carter offered for his pronouncement encouraging Georgians to turn on their headlights for a day to show support for the convicted mass murderer). But what I heard most often was a very different conviction: Calley was an honorable soldier doing the dirty work that most Americans didn’t want to think about, in a war against a savage opponent who deployed women and children to kill GIs–a war that all Americans were honor-bound to support in its most horrifying moments. That was certainly the sentiment conveyed by the 1971 pop song “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley,” which won vast radio airplay and sold 300,000 copies in the three days after its release:

While we’re fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street
While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat
While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat–
as we go marching on….
When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun
And the great commander asks me, “Did you fight or did you run?”
I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun
And this is what I’ll say:
Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could
It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good
Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood

With all due respect to Mackubin Thomas Owens, this is the moral hazard invited by those who insist all of America’s wars have been sacrifices on the altar of freedom and democracy, or who treat dissenters against war policies as unpatriotic. Was “the press” really more responsible for the mixed legacy of the Vietnam War than an administration that cynically kept the war going for political purposes years after Richard Nixon had privately admitted it was lost?
And in truth, the necessity of honoring the troops while denying the perfect justice of The Cause didn’t begin with Vietnam. As Owen notes at the very beginning of his article, Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) began as a partisan commemoration in the northern states of the sacrifices made by Union troops in suppression of “the late rebellion” (i.e., the Confederacy). That’s why a parallel system of Confederate Memorial Days quickly developed in the South, which, following Owens’ own logic, were devoted more to celebration of the Lost Cause than to the individual sacrifices of Confederate troops and their families. Well into my own lifetime, Confederal Memorial Day was the occasion for an annual exercise in regional defiance, self-pity and rationalization, which whitewashed “the rebellion” as being “about” states rights, the agrarian lifestyle, neoclassical culture, the Cavalier tradition–indeed, everything other than human bondage and the refusal to even coexist with Americans who wanted to prevent its extension to new territories.
So put me firmly in that first camp of those who feel strongly that Memorial Day should be a day of remembrance devoted to respectful contemplation of sacrifice in national service, not a political holiday aimed at national self-congratulation or the vengeful settling of scores with those who fail to “support the troops” by supporting the policies of men like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. In this era of an all-volunteer military and of “preemptive wars” that most of us follow on television, it is very important for those of us who haven’t risked death or injury to take some time to understand the horrors of war–the fear not just of death but of leaving families behind to fend for themselves, the randomness of the Grim Reaper in choosing his victims in modern warfare, and the courage of troops who not only defy death, but the temptations of indiscriminate total war to which William Calley (for whatever reason) succumbed. I do agree with Owens that all Americans should acknowledge and take pride in the distinguished traditions that have led many millions of Americans in uniform to increase their own odds of death or defeat by observing limitations on the scope of violence in war. But that’s all the more reason that we should resist the idea of extending to warmakers the Memorial Day remembrances we owe to warriors.
For our much-blessed country, war is occasionally necessary, sometimes preferable to the alternatives, but usually represents a failure of statecraft and the structures of peace, stability and collective security that American men and women in uniform have in recent decades defended as much as the homeland itself. On Memorial Day, we should be reminded not only of the wealth and leisure and safety we owe to those who served, but also of the terrible price that some Americans have paid for our occasional failure to give our brave troops the leadership they deserve.

A pet peeve of mine is the tendency of some political observers to dismiss adverse public opinion data as “meaningless” because it’s not reliably predictive. Recently I attended a political panel in which two speakers were harping on primary exit poll numbers about potential “white-working-class” defections to John McCain if Obama is the nominee, and also stressing the Jeremiah Wright saga as a huge general-election problem for Obama. I asked them how they squared this belief with general election polls showing (1) Obama generally running ahead of McCain; (2) Obama generally running even or close with McCain among white voters; and (3) little evidence that voters cared that much about Wright. Both speakers responded by saying that general election polls this far out from November were “meaningless.”
This point of view is even more prevelent when it comes to state-by-state general election polls. That’s why I was interested in Brendan Nyan’s recent post summarizing the research on state-by-state polls in 2004, which suggested they are not precise when it comes to predicting close states, but are otherwise pretty much spot-on in terms of broader results.
And that, folks, means they are not “meaningless.”

It’s been pretty lonely at the Unity Ticket bar lately, as Armando of TalkLeft has noted. Sure, a reported 60% of rank-and-file Democrats like the idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket, but among the chattering classes, and particularly pro-Obama bloggers, the idea is often denounced with an unusual vehemence as stupid, wrong, stupid, insulting, stupid, suicidal, and stupid. Even in all the “What Does Hillary Want?” stories bouncing around the MSM the last week or two, we typically read that of course, Obama can’t’ pick HRC, but maybe he should think about placating her supporters by going with somebody like Ted Strickland or Evan Bayh.
But now comes the estimable Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, whose commitment to a post-Clintonian progressive Democratic Party can’t much be doubted, saying he’s concluded the Unity Ticket is a good idea. Why?Because, he suggests, a sizable general election win is the key to the kind of “realigning election” that could move the Democratic Party to the left (by making its legislative goals less dependent on Blue Dog types), and combining the electoral strengths of Obama and Clinton is the best (if hardly certain) way to produce a big victory.
Chris’ argument (or my own, for that matter) for the Unity Ticket doesn’t deal with certain threshold problems with the idea, such as possible personal friction between Obama and Clinton, the What To Do With Bill issue, and all sorts of questions about how HRC walks herself back from some of the things she’s said about Obama this year. If these problems can’t be resolved, then we might as well forget about it. But there is zero consensus in the Obama Camp or elsewhere about an alternative idea for strengthening the ticket or healing the very real divisions created by the primary competition. Those with different ideas need to talk to each other and begin developing some agreement, instead of angrily dismissing the Obama-Clinton option as stupid.

Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton’s recent appropriation of Florida 2000 rhetoric (“Every Vote Must Count”) as part of her argument for ratifying that state and Michigan’s primaries, you’ve got to admire her timing. Seems like every cable news show I watched last night or this morning alternated between reports about her speechifying on the subject with hype about Sunday’s HBO movie, The Recount, often with live interviews with actor Kevin Spacey, who plays Gore aide Ron Klain in the flick. If this keeps up another couple of days, some viewers may tune in on Sunday expecting HRC to do a cameo.

I realize that criticizing Sen. Joe Lieberman’s recent behavior is like shooting fish in a barrel, but his latest outrage, an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, really does demand some attention, if only because the man remains a member of the Democratic Senate Caucus, and could wind up with an important job if John McCain’s elected president.
You can read the piece yourself, but its basic thrust is that somehow, between 9/11 and today, the entire Democratic Party, with the exception of Lieberman himself, has abandoned its foreign policy legacy and surrendered to a horde of America-hating leftists. He hasn’t changed at all, he says; everybody else has.
I would recommend that Sen. Lieberman talk to a psychologist about the implications of thinking that he exclusively represents a tradition that many millions of other people define differently. Perhaps the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, and perhaps Joe Lieberman is not the only true Democrat in America.
Until recently, I thought the saddest spectacle I had seen in politics was Zell Miller’s willingness to let himself be so thoroughly used by people who had nothing but contempt for him and everything he had ever stood for in public life. This is worse, if only because of the contrast between Miller’s extended stormy relationship with the national Democratic Party, and the honor that party bestowed on Lieberman less than eight years ago. After he visits the psychologist, Sen. Lieberman might want to take a long look at Miller’s post-apostasy political career. Last time I saw his name in the papers, in the autumn of 2006, Miller was speaking at the gala launch of a Pennsylvania group called Democrats for Santorum. In other words, he was pretty much just talking to himself.
Joe Lieberman’s within his rights to say what he thinks and support whomever he wants to support for president. But he really needs to stop pretending he speaks for Democrats, or for Democratic traditions. To be sure, Lieberman’s value to McCain and his other new Republican buddies would drop dramatically if he dropped the “D” from his title altogether. But honor ought to account for something, even in politics, and next time Lieberman is inclined to call his former colleagues and former supporters anti-American extremists, he should admit he’s not the still point in a turning world.

My home state of Georgia has contributed more than its share of interesting personalities to the political life of this country, but none was more unlikely than Hamilton Jordan, who died yesterday at the age of 63. In one amazing decade from 1966 to 1976, Jordan started as the driver for a long-shot gubernatorial candidate and eventually engineered a successful presidential campaign, before becoming White House chief of staff at the tender age of 32.
It’s often forgotten that Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential bid was one of the most improbable victories in U.S. political history, based in no small part on a mind-bending coalition of African-Americans, evangelical Protestants, and former Wallace supporters. The campaign’s blueprint was very much Ham Jordan’s work.
Like Carter, Jordan didn’t fare as well in the White House as in its pursuit, and like Carter, his later life took some unexpected turns. Afflicted with three different kinds of cancer, Jordan devoted much of his time to work as an advocate and philanthropist for children with cancer and diabetes.
I didn’t really know Jordan, beyond brief encounters when I served as a low-level policy advisor to his unsuccessful 1986 Senate campaign. But those who did know him described him as tough, canny, and completely unpretentious, in the best Georgia tradition. After a turbulent and remarkable life, may he rest in peace.

HRC’s landslide win in KY today was almost exactly what one might have expected based on last week’s results in WV. In other words, two weeks of media talk about Obama’s inevitability aren’t moving any votes in states where both demography (a predominance of relatively less educated and less affluent white voters, many of them Appalachians, along with the familiarly huge HRC margins among white women) and ideology (relatively large numbers of self-identified Democratic moderates and conservatives) are cutting against him. This latter factor is somewhat new; in most of the early primaries, there was virtually no ideological factor dividing Clinton and Obama voters. Obama did post one of his better performances in KY among the 11% of voters who were self-identified indies, losing them only by 7 points. But Clinton crushed him among moderates (67-30) and conservatives (73-18). These two categories reresented 63% of primary voters. And the stated willingness of Clinton voters to support Obama in the general election, while a bit better than in WV, remained low, with about a third saying they’d vote for McCain, and only a half saying they’d stick with the Democrat.
Oregon, of course, will be a different story; early media hints about the exit polls (or more accurately, phone polls of mail-in-ballot voters) indicate a very comfortable Obama win that will, according to his campaign’s math, and that of most media observers, clinch a majority of pledged delegates (excluding MI and FL). But going forward, the Obama campaign definitely needs to come to grips with the potential threat of an odd combination of progressive women, older voters of various ideological hues, and self-identified Democratic moderates and conservatives, who are at least open to the idea of defecting or taking a dive in November. There’s plenty of time to deal with this challenge; potential Democratic defections will undoubtedly decline as McCain’s views become more apparent; and Lord knows Barack Obama will have the rhetorical and financial resources to change the dynamics of a general election in which he’s already running ahead of or even with McCain in early polls. And moreover, the putative-nominee-loses-late-primaries phenomenon is hardly new or unique. But Obama’s team would be well advised not to completely dismiss the implications of HRC’s recent wins.

Over at TPMCafe, we’re having a conversation about Eric Alterman’s new book, Why We’re Liberals, a sweeping analysis of liberalism, its successes and failures, and its future as a successful political ideology. Eric offers an introduction to his book in an opening post, and so far, rejoinders have appeared from Joan McCarter of DailyKos, from libertarian Brink Lindsey, and from yours truly. (Digby will participate at some point as well).