With another Democratic candidate debate on tap in Nevada later today, you can bet Barack Obama is going to get questions about his proposal for modifying the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes. But it’s important to understand why this is such a big deal for a lot of progressive Democrats. His proposal isn’t the controversial thing (though it certainly would be in a general election campaign, where it would be hammered by Republicans as a tax increase); it’s his decision to raise the subject at all, and particularly his use of the word “crisis” to describe the status of the Social Security system.
The immediate reason for this reaction is obvious enough; by the well-earned end of Bush’s 2005 drive to divert payroll tax funds to create private retirement accounts, Democratic critics of his plan were devoting just as much time denying there was a Social Security solvency problem as they were attacking the plan’s baleful consequences. So ironically, a proposal by Obama that’s “Left” in terms of its specifics (avoiding any benefit changes while making the payroll tax burden more progressive) is drawing fire from the Left itself as a heretical concession to the rationale for Bush’s proposal, and to those much-derided “Centrist” media types who like to talk about entitlement reform. And for that reason, the reaction among left-bent Democrats to Obama’s Social Security rap provides a microcosm of the exquisite ambivalence they are experiencing over the Obama candidacy in its entirety.
For an idea of the significance invested in this issue by many progressive netroots activists, check out this person-to-person grilling that Obama received from MyDD’s Jonathan Singer:

Barack Obama: I think the point you’re making is why talk about it right now. Is that right?
Jonathan Singer: Yeah. And why use the term “crisis”?
Obama: It is a long-term problem. I know that people, including you, are very sensitive to the concern that we repeat anything that sounds like George Bush. But I have been very clear in fighting privatization. I have been adamant about the fact that I am opposed to it. What I believe is that it is a long-term problem that we should deal with now. And the sooner the deal with it then the better off it’s going to be.
So the notion that somehow because George Bush was trying to drum up fear in order to execute [his] agenda means that Democrats shouldn’t talk about it at all I think is a mistake. This is part of what I meant when I said we’re constantly reacting to the other side instead of setting our own terms for the debate, but also making sure we are honest and straight forward about the issues that we’re concerned about.

Singer’s take on this conversation?

In all it’s not everything that I wanted to hear. But perhaps more importantly, Obama had the opportunity to hear that folks don’t want him talking about a non-existent “crisis” in Social Security. And hopefully, he will pay heed to that sentiment.

There, in a nutshell, is the lingering concern a lot of folks on the Left have with Barack Obama: his policies are suitably progressive, but his framing of those policies, from his constant invocation of bipartisanship to his occasional violation of progressive taboos (e.g., lecturing teachers about their opposition to merit pay, and bloggers about their “incivility”, and consorting with anti-gay gospel singers), makes them suspect he’s really talking past them in order to appeal to the David Broders of the political world.
The recent buzz surrounding the possibility that Obama’s on course to provide a real challenge to Hillary Clinton has brought these conflicted feelings about Obama on the Left to a head once again. And the “crisis” over Obama is heightened by the fact that John Edwards is simultaneously offering, not just the progressive “steak” but all the netroots-style “sizzle” any Broder-hating blogger could ever ask for, line for line and word for word.
As we get closer to actual voting, the Left’s “Obama Problem” is becoming acute. At one site alone, OpenLeft, and on one day, you have Matt Stoller citing the candidate’s new package of technology proposals as the reason he’s now leaning towards support for Obama, and Chris Bowers hoping against hope that Obama, despite himself, could marshal the creative class/minority working class coalition that Chris considers the future of progressive politics. Both these gents have strongly criticized and (in Chris’ case) written off Obama in the very recent past, mainly for the heresies cited above.
I’m discussing this phenomenon mainly to crystallize the subtext of much of the netroots debate on Obama, Edwards, and the entire Democratic nominating contest. Does it really matter in terms of actual voters? You’d have to guess John Edwards thinks so, given his ever-more-faithful channeling of netroots-approved rhetoric these days. And to the extent that everyone agrees media coverage of the campaign does move votes, it’s not so strange that New Media coverage would have an impact as well.
But votes will move media, too. If Edwards wins in Iowa, it will inevitably be viewed as an ideological as well as organizational triumph, and even if Obama survives to fight again, his support on the Left will rapidly dissipate. If Obama wins Iowa, and gets the desired one-on-one with HRC, the Left’s Obama Problem may be resolved in the opposite direction, though the agony inflicted by Obama’s “centrist” rhetorical tendencies could grow with the realization that the Left has nowhere else to go.
In the meantime, this “primary within the primary” will continue. And so, too, will the quieter but still very interesting internal debate among Democratic “centrists” about Obama and his rivals, a topic I’ll write about in the near future.

It’s been an interesting week for Fred Thompson. New polls have shown him declining towards fringe status in Iowa and New Hampshire. But yesterday he got a big boost from a National Right to Life Committee endorsement. And today he received a blessing from the Osservatore Romano of U.S. conservatism, the Editors of National Review.
Interestingly enough, the National Review editorial ranks Fred’s views on abortion as the least compelling aspect of his candidacy, instead lauding him for his positions on Social Security, immigration and defense spending.
It will be interesting to see over the next few weeks whether Thompson’s elite supporters can attach enough helium balloons to his candidacy to lift it from its rank-and-file lethargy.

There have been two reactions to my earlier post on “Partisan Differentiation on National Security” that are well worth noting and discussing.
The first, by Matt Yglesias at the Atlantic site, agrees with my basic framework but suggests that only those Democrats who opposed the Iraq War are positioned to make what he calls the “strategic focus” argument, which is my Option #5 (“Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions.”). He uses the Kerry campaign as an example of the difficulty of reconciling a pro-war vote–even if it’s now rationalized as justified by false intelligence and other lies from the Bush administration–with an argument that Iraq and the policies behind it reflected a dangerous diversion from real national security needs.
I obviously agree that a candidate like Obama–who opposed the war–or even one like Edwards–who now says he was just flatly wrong in supporting it–will have an easier time here. But to the extent that the national debate now is more about what to do in Iraq and elsewhere going forward, than about the original Iraq decision, I don’t think candidates like HRC and Biden are incapable of making a successful argument that the Republicans are fatally mired in a series of delusions about our actual security needs that must be abandoned. Yes, they will be vulnerable to the flip-flop attack that damaged Kerry so much, but the rejoinder that Kerry adopted after (unfortunately) the election isn’t bad: it’s better to flip-flop than to flop, and continue to flop.
On a smaller point, Matt thinks my option #3–conveying “strength” by acting “tough” in opposition to the war–is a straw man. I disagree. It was over and over again cited in the runup to 2006 by countless bloggers as an argument for making an end to the war the sole Democratic message item on national security. Sure, a lot of them went on to say that Iraq was getting in the way of capturing Osama or securing Afghanistan, but the basic thrust was that the main vulnerability of Democrats was looking “weak” towards Bush rather than “weak” towards terrorists or other real threats.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein makes an excellent point by suggesting that Democrats may never succeed in fully shaking the “weak on national security” label until a Democrat successfully deals with a foreign policy crisis as commander-in-chief. This comports with my strong belief that Bush’s hole-card in 2004 was the simple fact that there had not been another 9/11 on his watch, leading a lot of voters to conclude “he must be doing something right.” Recall that Bill Clinton went a long way towards defusing long-standing perceptions of Democrats as a “big government” party while in office–indeed, perceptions of government itself improved significantly. Likewise, a Democratic president who keeps America relatively safe–while restoring our much-damaged prestige in the world–will do more than any candidate or Congress could ever do to dispel negative perceptions of Democrats on national security.

So, faithful readers, if you did your homework about the extraordinary perils of polling Iowa, you’re ready to digest today’s big public opinion news, a new poll of Iowa and New Hampshire by CBS and the New York Times.
There’s another bit of threshold info necessary here: this is the first CBS/NYT poll of these two states, so given the methodological variations between polling outfits, it’s not very useful in terms of establishing trend lines with any precision. Thus, the finding that the Big Three Dems are essentially tied in Iowa, while some polls have shown a big HRC lead, or a relatively poor third-place Edwards position, isn’t particularly illuminating, other than by reinforcing what pretty much everyone actually believes. Similarly, the poll shows John Edwards at 9% in NH, while other polls have shown him in the low-to-mid teens. This won’t much matter until we see another poll from the same source.
But even in a “first poll” like this, some big trends may have real value. They are all basically on the GOP side. Mike Huckabee’s 21% standing in Iowa represents a large enough shift to reflect something happening on the ground, particularly since the poll’s internals show that his support levels are “harder” than those of front-runner Mitt Romney. And Fred Thompson’s dismal sixth-place position in NH, well below Ron Paul, along with his single-digit showing in Iowa, isn’t a good sign for the Big Fred Machine.
Poll internals from IA on the Democratic side are pretty interesting, since many published polls don’t go into the deeper dynamics of candidate preference that particularly matter in that state’s Caucuses. For example, the poll tests secondary preferences among voters supporting the lower-tier candidates (who presumably will struggle to meet the 15% threshold for winning delegates in any particular precinct), and both Edwards (30%) and Obama (27%) are winning more than double the percentage of such voters as compared to HRC (14%). Another set of interesting internals have to do with Caucus composition. Obama and Edwards are basically mirror images, with Obama’s strength among the categories of voters (e.g., younger voters and self-identified independents) likely to matter the most if overall turnout is high, and Edwards doing especially well (though not much better than HRC) with the likeliest participants in a lower-turnout scenario: seniors, self-identified Democrats, and prior Caucus-attenders.
None of these IA Dem findings directly challenge the CW, though HRC’s apparent second-choice weakness could pose a challenge to her Caucus-night tactics, where candidate-driven or spontaneous alliances with “nonviable” candidates are always a big deal in a large field. But such speculation depends on the accuracy of the poll in the first place, and to come full circle, we won’t really know whether this or other IA polls are on mark until the results are in.

There’s been an interesting kerfuffle over the last day in the Democratic presidential contest, after the New York Times The Caucus blog reported that John Edwards had in an interview twice refused “at this time” to answer a question about supporting Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination.
The story got picked up in various places in the blogosphere. Kevin Drum called Edwards’ behavior “very mysterious.” Jason Zengerle at The Plank begs to differ: “As the Democratic candidate who’s been most unsparing in his criticism of Clinton, Edwards would look like a total hypocrite if, in the midst of offering his whithering Clinton critiques, he pledged his future support to her.”
I’m with Kevin on the basic issues here. “Will you support the Democratic nominee if you lose?” is an incredibly standard question for presidential candidates, sort of on the order of “Why do you want to be president?” It’s been asked of Republican candidates in debates this year, in terms of a hypothetical Giulani nomination (disguised as “a pro-choice nominee”). Probably no one has asked Democrats before because nobody thought there was any question about it, given the similarity of most of their policy views and their common hostiilty towards Republicans.
But Jason is correct that the vectors of Edwards’ criticism of HRC have been heading in a direction that would make his support for her as the nominee questionable. That’s what I was worried about back in August when I drew attention to the first Edwards speech that implicitly said a Clinton nomination would continue the corrupt Washington politics of the Bush administration. The Bush Lite/Corporate Stooge line of attack from Edwards has only gotten more intense since then.
In any event, in a press availability today, Edwards “clarified” his no-comment by saying: “I fully expect to support the Democratic nominee, and I fully expect to be the Democratic nominee.”
One wag (named franklyO) commenting on this news at TPMElectionCentral said: “For the logically minded, this could be interpreted as saying nothing more than that Edwards will support himself as Democratic nominee.”
For some of us old-timers, the Edwards formulation was evocative of the highly calculated mantra repeated endlessly by Ted Kennedy in 1980, before he decided to challenge Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination: “I expect President Carter to be renominated, and I intend to support him.”
Any way you look at it, Edwards has guaranteed he’s going to get asked this question again until he specifically says he’ll support the nominee no matter who it is, much as Obama has already done–and perhaps until he gets into the habit of saying that much as he dislikes HRC, she’s far preferable to anyone the opposition can nominate.

The emerging CW on the Republican presidential race over the last few weeks has been that it was developing into a two-candidate contest between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, with McCain stuck in neutral, Thompson fading, and only Mike Huckabee providing any suspense (aside from the financial pyrotechics of Ron Paul).
With today’ surprising endorsement by the National Right To Life Committee, Fred Thompson appears to have become the Undead. The nod was a particular blow to Mitt Romney and to Mike Huckabee.
But via Todd Beeton, we learn that Romney got some good news yesterday as well: an endorsement by the California Republican Assembly, an important conservative factional group in the Golden State. From all accounts, he won the endorsement pretty much the way he won last August’s Iowa State Republican Straw Poll: with elbow grease and big sacks of cash (many “delegates” to the CRA conference were recruited by the Romney campaign and had no prior association with the group).
Since California was supposed to be Rudy Giuliani’s stomping grounds, this could be a relatively large deal.
In general, this week’s events reinforce the impression that the GOP presidential field remains very unsettled, with no one exactly making a move to lock things down.
And today’s news also makes me wonder if Robert Novak is losing his touch as an analyst of conservative Republican infighting. Just last week he did a column suggesting that Fred Thompson had profoundly, perhaps irreversibly, alienated right-to-lifers in an appearance on Meet the Press. Not so much, it appears. And about three weeks ago, he did another column documenting the deep satisfaction of California conservatives with Rudy Giuliani, his positions on abortion and gay rights notwithstanding. Wrong again, Batman.
I’ll certainly look for second-source verification next time I read a breathless proclamation from the Prince of Darkness about the course of the GOP nominating contest.

Word is Governor Sonny Perdue is going to lead a group of legislators and ministers in prayers for rain on the Georgia State Capitol steps tomorrow, as the Great Drought moves closer each day to shutting down water taps in Georgia and Alabama.
Church-state separation advocates are criticizing Sonny for leading prayers on state property. Maybe instead he just should have asked radio stations in Georgia to simultaneously broadcast the great indie rock classic by Georgia’s own Guadalcanal Diary, Pray for Rain, which was occasionally played during weather reports amidst an earlier drought in the 1980s:
Don’t call for love
Don’t ask for gold
our daily bread
or no more pain
pray for rain
Perdue could also pray for serious study of the impact of climate change on weather patterns, or for a reconsideration of metro Atlanta’s endless development sprawl. But I’m guessing he thinks the Almighty is a Republican.

As a Veterans Day meditation, I thought it might be a good idea to take a fresh look at one of the most contentious subjects in intra-party discussions: How Democrats can clearly differentiate themselves from Republicans on national security issues without falling into the “weak on defense” stereotypes conservatives have spent many years and billions of dollars promoting.
To make a very long story short, there have been at least five basic strategic takes on this subject among Democrats in recent years:
1) Ignore national security as “enemy territory” and focus on maximizing Democratic advantages on domestic issues (the default position of Democratic congressional campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s).
2) Agree with Republican positions on national security to “take them off the table” and then seek to make elections turn on domestic issues where Democrats have an advantage (the Dick Gephardt strategy for congressional Dems in 2002 and for his own presidential campaign in 2004; also common among Democrats running for office in conservative areas).
3) Vociferously oppose Republican positions on national security (and particularly the use of military force) in order to convey “strength,” on the theory that “weakness” is the real message of conservative “weak on defense” attacks (a common assumption among bloggers and activists arguing that a single-minded focus on ending the Iraq War is a sufficient national security message).
(4) Oppose Republican positions on national security while focusing on Democratic respect for, and material support for, “the troops” and veterans, on the theory that a lack of solidarity with the armed services is the real message of conservative “undermining our troops” attacks (a common theme in the Kerry 2004 campaign and in post-2004 Democratic messaging).
(5) Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions (e.g., the 2002-2004 Clark/Graham “right idea, wrong target” criticisms of the Iraq invasion as distracting and undermining the legitimate fight against terrorists).
There are obviously variations on and combinations of all five strategies, and one could add two relatively marginal approaches: the “anti-imperialist” position that explicitly denies the value of a strong national security posture, and the occasional suggestion that Democrats should “move to the right” of Republicans by supporting military actions more fervently than the opposition.
This entire subject was brought to the forefront of the Democratic presidential contest over the weekend by Barack Obama’s well-received Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech, which, inter alia, criticized Democrats (implicitly, Hillary Clinton) for failing to maintain partisan differentiation on national security:

I am running for president because I am sick and tired of Democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security by talking and acting and voting like George Bush Republicans. When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say I voted for the war in Iraq or gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran or that I support Bush/Cheney policies of not talking to people we don’t like.

This rap is obviously a direct appeal to those Democrats who believe HRC is guilty of strategy #2, and also to those who favor strategy #3. But Obama also makes a gesture towards strategy #5 by going on to say:

I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century – nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

The hard thing about strategy #5 is that it’s complicated, requiring an overall vision of U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy that is difficult to sharply and simply convey while maintaining partisan differentiation. The tendency to simply substitute “diplomacy” for “use of force” in dealing with every conceivable security challenge arguably plays into Republican taunts that Democrats are allergic to the use of force, period.
But there is one national security topic on which Democrats have a built-in advantage wherein they could not only conveys “toughness” and seriousness on national security, but also rebut years of Republican attacks: military readiness. As Steve Benen points out today at TalkingPointsMemo, the “Clinton hollowed out the military” myth was not only a staple of Bush’s 2000 campaign, and a subtext of attacks on Kerry’s defense record in 2004, but is still being monotonously repeated by 2008 Republican candidates:

Bush has stretched the military to the breaking point, and Republican presidential candidates want to emphasize rebuilding the Armed Forces as part of their platforms. But to acknowledge the incredible strains on the current military is to implicitly hold the president to account for his irresponsible policies.
What to do? Blame Clinton, of course.

For Democrats, talking about rebuilding the U.S. military in acknowledgement of an era of asymmetric warfare, and the limits on military power we’ve painfully learned in Iraq, is a good way simultaneously to draw attention to Bush’s assault on military readiness (a source of considerable ongoing grief within the military itself), to deride the national security “thinking” behind the Iraq War and the drive to war with Iran, and to identify with “the troops.” That doesn’t necessarily mean support for an increased defense spending or even an expanded active military. But it does clearly indicate that a Democratic commander-in-chief will pursue a defense strategy markedly different from the GOP contenders, who are still trying to win unwinnable wars (and perhaps start others) based on the “world’s sole superpower” illusion of the immediate post-Cold War period.
The political futility, and unprincipled nature, of Democratic strategies #1 and #2 on national security are pretty apparent by now. Strategy #4 is a good defensive measure, but often sounds evasive, and on occasion runs the risk of treating troops as victims rather than as heroes. Perhaps strategy #3 will work politically, but it’s hard to imagine a Democratic candidate getting through an entire general election campaign saying little or nothing about national security other than the desire to reverse every single decision made by George W. Bush. So strategy #5 might well be essential, as well as prinicipled (giving voters a clear idea of what a Democratic commander-in-chief would do, not just undo), and military readiness might be a good place to start a message of “differentiation with strength.”

At John Hopkins’s School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered a speech on foreign policy and partisanship that seemed designed to validate everything his Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him (and I count myself in this group, though not since his loss to Ned Lamont in Connecticut in the Democratic primary last year).
Press accounts reported that at some point (probably a post-speech Q&A) Lieberman said he might not support the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. But the speech itself pointed more than sufficiently in that direction. Its essence was to define a “muscular” FDR/Truman/JFK Democratic foreign policy, on which the two parties have repeatedly reversed roles, with Republicans currently “for” and Democrats “against.” Joe Lieberman himself, the speech suggests, seems to be the only consistent advocate for that tradition, emulating the brave example of Democrat-turned-Republican-advisor Paul Nitze, whose name is attached to SAIS.
I really encourage Democrats who have defended Lieberman in the past to read this speech. It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were “good” from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be “bad.” Democrats were “bad” from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were “good.” During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were “good” and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were “bad,” and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman’s running-mate Al Gore “good,” the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush “bad”). Both parties were “good” from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were “good” and Democrats turned “bad” (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely “bad” in opposing the war).
These judgments appear based on an interpretation of the “muscular” Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law–all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support. You’d also never know, since Lieberman never acknowledges it, that the leading Democratic presidential candidates don’t simply identify themselves with opposition to Bush on Iraq and Iran, but have offered their own detailed national security plans which take Islamic jihadism quite seriously as a threat.
In other words, Lieberman’s speech is less a rebuke to the “‘antiwar” Democrats who helped deny him the party’s nomination to the Senate in 2006, than a challenge to liberal internationalists whom he places on the wrong side of a choice between preemptive unilateralism and isolationism and chaos. This is one occasion on which so-called “liberal hawks” need to take the lead in repudiating Joe. As Sam Boyd at TAPPED suggests, in an essentially accurate if exaggerated view, Lieberman is saying “you’re either with Norman Podheretz, or with Noam Chomsky.”
Democrats who vehemently deny this false choice should be in the forefront of those vehemently denouncing Joe Lieberman’s latest descent into full-bore neoconservatism, which isn’t just about foreign policy, but about the wilfull subjection of every progressive instinct on every issue to the monomaniacal drive for warfare against every enemy, foreign or domestic.