Over at TAPPED, Dr. Tom Schaller has suggested that Barack Obama and John Edwards should supplement their attacks on Hillary Clinton’s policy positions by making a parallel political argument: that “the Clintons” presided over the destruction of the Democratic Party during the 1990s:

On her health care debacle and war vote, Edwards and Obama are making the case that she used bad policy and/or personal judgment, but they ought to try a new, politically-themed tack: Hillary and (they should be more careful here) Bill Clinton fought the Republicans but the GOP was stronger, not weaker, when they left office in 2001 than the Republicans were when the Clintons arrived in 1993.

Also at TAPPED, Dana Goldstein doubts that actual Democratic voters will be persuaded by a political narrative of the 1990s that doesn’t accord with their own memories. I agree.
But the discussion of the political viability of Schaller’s hypothesis avoids a more fundamental question: Is it true?
This question isn’t just a matter of historical interest. Schaller is faithfully expressing a revisionist take on the 1990s that has become an article of faith in many Left-netroots circles, with an implication that is of immediate importance to Democrats. The idea is the Clinton-style centrism was an electoral as well as an ideological disaster, producing at best two less-than-majority presidential wins at the price of the erosion of Democratic support in congressional and state elections. The 2006 Democratic comeback, according to this theory, proves that a more base-oriented, left-bent Democratic strategy is the key to a long-term Democratic majority.
But what really happened to Democrats in the Clinton years? And why?
The first essential step in answering that question is to isolate the effects of the 1994 Republican landslide. In the three Clinton administration elections after that (plus some off-year state elections), it’s hard to argue there was any significant erosion of Democratic support. After the 1994 elections, there were 204 Democratic House members and 47 Democratic Senators. After the 2000 elections, there were 212 Democratic House members and 50 Democratic Senators. Between 1995 and 2000, Democrats made a net gain of one governorship, and a net loss of one state legislative chamber.
So the case for Clinton’s disastrous effect on the Democratic Party’s national standing–if you are willing to overlook or minimize his two presidential wins–really comes down to the one calamitous election of 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats, 8 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 18 state legislative chambers.
There are, of course, two divergent narratives that hold Clinton partially or wholly responsible for the 1994 debacle. One often heard on the Left is that his support for deficit reduction and NAFTA, and an insufficiently progressive health care plan, “discouraged the Democratic base” and gave Republicans a victory by default. Another, often heard among party centrists, is that Clinton disappointed voters–most notably 1992 Perot voters–looking for a “different kind of Democrat” with unpopular early-term positons on gays-in-the-military and fetal tissue research, and above all, a decision to devote much of his second year in office pursuing what looked like a vast new health care entitlement instead of welfare reform.
Aside from the inherent improbability that Clinton’s brief record in office could have alone produced this kind of adverse landslide, the intensity of the pro-GOP wave in state elections undermined both blame-Clinton narratives. After all, Democrats had managed to hold their own at the state level through periods of national GOP victories in the 1980s, and going back further, even in the vast Nixon landslide of 1972. Something deeper must have been going on that had little to do with Clinton or perceptions of “Clintonism.”
The two theories most often accepted by analysts at the time were (1) an unusually toxic “wrong-track” feeling in the electorate, which helped boost both Clinton and Perot in 1992, was taken out on the dominant congressional and state party of the previous two decades; and (2) a slow but steady realignment of the two parties on sharper left-right ideological lines finally “flipped” conservative Democrats towards the GOP, and reduced split-ticket voting, particularly in the South, where the 1994 losses were particularly large. Ephemeral circumstances, particularly a record number of U.S. House retirements and a pattern of racial gerrymandering in the South, intensified both effects in U.S. House races.
It’s entirely possible that structural issues that Bill Clinton had little control over, and administration policies he did control, both played a role in the 1994 debacle, just as it’s possible that both “blame-Clinton” interpretations had some truth with respect to different categories of voters. But it’s hardly a simple story, and hardly provides any clear ideological direction for Democrats today, much less an effective talking-point against Hillary Clinton.
What about the one Clintonian episode that obviously did have an impact on post-1994 dynamics, the Lewinsky scandal? Aside from the fact that the scandal had no obvious ideological underpinnings, other than to bond Republicans to a hard-right cultural message, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in the end, the scandal didn’t hurt Democrats, unless you believe that’s what kept Al Gore from being inaugurated as president. In that connection, Schaller’s post suggests that the political case against the Clintons includes the “legacy election” of 2000, wherein their failure to “fight” for Al Gore made a crucial difference. Well, it’s hard to “fight” for a candidate who is doing everything possible to distance himself from you, and one of the most commonly heard complaints about the Gore-Lieberman campaign at the time is that it largely refused to deploy Clinton or his record.
Schaller makes one additional argument in his post that bears some discussion: The Clintons failed to build the sort of ideological institutions (e.g., CAP, Media Matters) necessary to combat the right-wing uprising of the 1990s. For one thing, the White House itself was a stronger pro-Democratic message-purveyor than any private-sector institution could have ever managed; indeed, it was the loss of the White House that made the construction of an alternative infrastructure so important. And for another, Clintonians have played a pretty conspicuous role in the Bush Era progressive “noise machine” scene. It’s a bit hard to cite John Podesta’s work as evidence of a general Clintonian lack of interest in institution-building.
All in all, I think Dr. Schaller’s barking up the wrong tree, but he is certainly fostering an important discussion of a set of beliefs about the recent political past that lurks just under the surface of most intra-party disputes.

I wrote yesterday about the significance of Paul Weyrich’s endorsement of Mitt Romney as an indication of Cultural Right determination to stop Rudy Giuliani. But ol’ Rudy certainly offered his own rebuttal today, with the announcement that his candidacy was being endorsed by the Rev. Pat Robertson.
In an interview with Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post after the endorsement, Robertson seemed to embrace the idea that cultural issues just aren’t that important right now:

Robertson said although he and Giuliani disagree on social issues, those disagreements “pale into insignificance” when measured against the import of the fight against global terrorism and radical Islam. “We need a man who sees clearly how to deal with that issue,” said Robertson.

Since the other Republican candidates (other than Ron Paul) ain’t exactly doves, this sure looks likes a repudiation of almost everything Robertson’s ever said about the importance of abortion, gay rights, and other cultural issues. I mean, it’s one thing to say you’ll be loyal to the ticket if Giuliani is the nominee. It’s another to endorse him as your own candidate.
I’ve tried to think of a Democratic analog for the unlikeliness of this particular endorsement, and the best I can come up with is Cindy Sheehan joining Hillary Clnton’s campaign out of admiration for her energy proposals.
To be sure, Robertson’s pretty long in the tooth, and doesn’t have anything like the political clout he used to enjoy before the Christian Coalition imploded. But as a symbol of social conservative surrender to Rudyism, he’s pretty important, and it will be a bit tougher now for his colleagues to publicly contemplate a third-party campaign against Pat’s candidate.

While candidate endorsements rarely move actual votes, they are sometimes influential in signalling the acceptability of this or that contender to particular constituencies. And that’s definitely true with respect to the GOP candidates for president, who are all struggling to lay claim to what’s left of the party’s once-invincible conservative factions.
Yesterday Mitt Romney got the nod from a especially significant validator of his conservative bona fides: the ultimate Right Wing War Horse, Paul Weyrich.
In case you’re not familiar with Weyrich, he’s been the great instituton builder for the Right over a period of three-and-a-half decades. He played the main role in snagging Coors family money to create the Heritage Foundation and the less-well-known but very important American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is sort of the Johnny Appleseed of bad state policy ideas. Weyrich is generally credited with giving the late Jerry Falwell the name “Moral Majority” for that briefly influential group. And more recently, he helped set up the Council for National Policy, the Cultural Right’s politburo.
For all his contributions to the Right Wing Noise Machine, Weyrich himself is a crotchety maverick forever finding fault with the GOP”s fidelity to The Cause. He has been among those threating to take a dive or go third party if Rudy Giuliani gets the Republican presidential nomination. And so his endorsement of the Mittster will be widely interpreted as signalling a Stop Giuliani effort that brushes aside concerns over Romney’s Mormonism and late-life conversion to cultural conservatism.
Elsewhere on the endorsement front, Michael Shear has a very entertaining front-page article at the Washington Post today running through the presidential preferences of the Bush family. While virtually everyone in former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s political operation seems to be involved in Romney’s campaign, two of his sons have take the famous name elsewhere. George P. Bush, the bilingual heart-throb generally expected to be the next vehicle for the Bush Dynasty, has joined the Big Fred Machine. But Jeb Bush, Jr., has just endorsed Rudy.
Endorsments aside, you’ve got to figure that Jeb Bush, Sr., is looking at developments in the Republican presidential campaign with a strong feeling of What Might Have Been. Universally considered the smarter, tougher and more ideological of the Bush scions, Jebbie lost his Heir Apparent status in 1994, when he narrowly lost the Florida governorship while W. narrowly won in Texas. His brother’s train wreck of an administration made another Bush presidential run in 2008 a political impossibility. And though Jeb’s name used to come up often as a possible Veep candidate, the desire of Republicans to use the anti-dynasty card against Hillary Clinton has all but eliminated that sort of talk.
When you look over the deeply flawed Republican presidential field, and watch conservatives like Weyrich struggle with their bad options, you have to conclude that if the former governor of Florida were named Jeb Smith, he’d wipe up the floor with these bozos and cruise to the nomination. Irony of ironies, The Name has turned out to be more a curse than a blessing for Jebbie.

Believe it or not, the next decennial round of congressional and state legislative redistricting activity is just around the corner. It’s actually been a factor in the huge amounts of time and money the two parties have poured into Virginia’s legislative elections, where the state senators elected today will still be in office when redistricing occurs (Democrats have a good shot at retaking the senate).
I’ve published a brief piece at the DLC’s Ideas Primary site on the many lessons learned from the last round of legal and political jousting over redistricting. The bottom line is that the environment for redistricting reform isn’t particularly good in most states, despite the green light federal courts have given to political gerrymandering.

Atlantic magazine has made available an advance copy of a December article by Andrew Sullivan about Barack Obama. And whatever you think of this convoluted piece, it does nicely capture two very different takes on why the Illinois senator might be a “transformative” politician.
Sullivan begins by tying Obama’s post-baby-boomer rap, and his apparent appeal to Republicans, to a narrative of recent politics in which all the polarization is illusory:

The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.

Sullivan’s follow-up account of the “minor” policy differences between the two parties leads to the equally ridiculous, if more familiar, claim that polarization is purely the product of inflated baby-boomer cultural conflicts. And therein lies his initial argument for Obama, as the post-boomer candidate who could resolve all the petty, artificial differences between Ds and Rs. This High Broder case for Obama is hardly new, and hardly persuasive.
But Sullivan goes on to make an international case for Obama that’s a lot more compelling:

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

In general, Sullivan’s piece captures the MSM fascination with Barack Obama in its two basic dimensions: Obama as transcending American conflicts, and Obama as transcending America’s conficts with the world. My own view is that Barack Obama can acheive the former mission only if Americans begin to care about the latter.

We all know that George W. Bush’s promises in 2000 to become a “uniter, not a divider” have been broken over and over again. And moreover, his Texas-based claims of interest in bipartisanship have been limited to “my way or the highway” inducements to Democratic surrender.
The one, and only one, truly bipartisan initiative Bush engaged in was the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, based largely on prior moderate Democratic proposals, and relying heavily on support from Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller.
NCLB has been steadily bleeding support from local-control Republicans and anti-testing Democrats, and from all sorts of folks unhappy with the administration’s serial refusals to keep its funding promises.
Today’s WaPo has a solid summary by Peter Baker about the current landscape of support for and opposiition to NCLB. Given this administration’s history, the fact that any progressive Democrats are willing to renew support for NCLB is a good indication that they are looking beyond the doomed Bush presidency, and are trying to salvage a few things from the wreakage.

Michael Crowley has an interesting article up on the New Republic site discussing the unsavory past and present of South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary, featuring an array of consultants and operatives who apparently learned the dark arts of smearing opponents at the knee of the late Lee Atwater. Unlike 2000, when virtually all of the nasty stuff was aimed at John McCain, it looks like most of the candidates this time around are getting down into the gutter, or at least allowing their Palmetto State supporters to do so. (BTW, I was dismayed to learn that one of the “haunts” of S.C. Republican operatives is Lizard Thicket, that excellent Columbia-based purveyor of southern fried foods).
But the really scary note comes at the end of Crowley’s piece:

As [GOP consultant Rod] Shealy notes, “The anonymity of the Internet is going to take the whole game to a new and much lower level than thought possible.” Last April, one anonymous blog–“McCain SC,” the “Unofficial Home for Palmetto State McCainiacs”–hawked a New York tabloid story alleging that Giuliani’s wife Judith was “involved in a program that killed innocent puppies” to test medical products. It sounds like the McCain team may have learned its lesson back in 2000, and now knows the secret to victory: When in South Carolina, do as the South Carolinians do.

We’re all used to conservatives calling their pro-choice fellow citizens “baby-killers.” But puppy-killers? That’s cold.

The tension on the Right between conservative evangelical Christians and conservative Jews–particularly those of the Neoconservative variety–is an old phenomenon, most famously exposed by the so-called Neocon-Theocon dispute of 1996, in which a variety of prominent Neocons took sharp exception to Christian Right suggestions that judicial approval of abortion and gay rights might justify a revolutionary stance.
This tension didn’t, of course, prevent Neocons and Theocons from cheerfully cooperating to develop some of George W. Bush’s most disastrous international and domestic policies. But the bad feelings are re-emerging in the context of Rudy Giulani’s presidential campaign, which has drawn conspicuous Neoconservative support while tempting Christian Right leaders to threaten a third-party run if Rudy is the GOP nominee.
Interestingly enough, the most direct expression of the Neocon-Theocon dispute over Giuliani comes from a Jewish writer, David Klinghoffer, who has penned a National Review article accusing Rudy’s conservative Jewish supporters of elevating the Islamic terrorist over domestic moral-issues considerations in a way that is unfaithful to the Jewish tradition.
Klinghoffer performs this provocative bit of Neocon-baiting by appealing to the example of the Jewish prophets revered by both Christian and Jewish conservatives. As he notes quite cogently, the Prophets typically warned Jews that faithfulness to divine commandments was the best, and indeed the only, defense against foreign threats to Israel, and often treated such threats as God’s punishment for wickedness (though Klinghoffer naturally doesn’t mention it, this was the biblical basis for the infamous reaction of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to 9/11 as retribution for America’s tolerance of abortion and homosexuality).
You certainly don’t have to agree with Klinghoffer to admire his savage use of the prophetic example to skewer the Neocon obsession with the Clash of Civilizations:

Consider Jeremiah, about whose life we know more (from his own writing), than any of his prophetic colleagues. He lived through the sacking of Jerusalem and the leading away to captivity of her people by the empire of Babylon.
In the run-up to this tragedy, was he out banging the drum for a tough anti-Babylonian stance, sponsoring a “Babylo-Fascist Awareness Week” a-la-David Horowitz? No. On the contrary, he was accused of treason by the war party among his fellow Jews. He warned that, in the context of Israel’s corrupt moral culture, it was useless to resist Babylon.
He taught that purifying the culture was the real priority, of which the defense against Babylon was merely a secondary expression.

If and when Rudy Giuliani gets really close to nailing down the Republican presidential nomination, I suspect we will hear echoes of Klinghoffer’s argument from elements of the Christian Right. They may hate and fear Islam, but their deepest hatred is reserved for America’s “holocaust” (to use Mike Huckabee’s recent term) of abortion and its alleged assaults on the family and people of faith.

There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the latest Pew Research Center national political survey, and I’ll probably write about it some more later. But one set of findings that fairly jumped off the page involved the internal dynamics of Hillary Clinton’s 51-43 lead over Rudy Giuliani in a hypothetical general election matchup.
Pew compared the two candidates’ support levels in a variety of demographic categories to those of John Kerry and George W. Bush in 2004. And there were some surprises about where HRC is currently doing better than Kerry.
The categories in which HRC’s advantage over Kerry as measured by total percentage of the two-party vote is highest are these: Southern voters (+13); voters believing the invasion of Iraq was the right decision (+12); and white evangelical Protestant voters (+11). She also bests Kerry by 9% among those reporting weekly church attendance, and by 7% among self-identified Republicans (as opposed to no advantage among independents and a drop of 2% among self-identified Democrats).
These aren’t the only categories where the HRC does much better against Giuliani than Kerry did against Bush. Others include voters with no college education (+10); voters in both the top and bottom income categories (+8 for each); and least surprisingly, women (+8). But they certainly don’t comport with the stereotype that HRC is a candidate whose entire appeal is to rank-and-file Democrats.
There are two ways to look at findings like these. One is to suggest that preconceptions aside, HRC is fully capable of harvesting votes from pro-Republican segments of the electorate who are souring on the GOP, and even its strongest current candidate, Giuliani. The other is to dismiss Clinton’s surprisingly positive showing in such segments as an ephemeral phenomenon that would vanish in the course of a highly polarizing general election campaign.
Standing back from all the numbers for a moment, the most astonishing–perhaps even incredible–finding in the Pew poll is that the South is HRC’s strongest region in a contest with Giuliani. No one really thinks she or any other Democrat would come close to winning the region, or winning more than a handful of states, barring a blowout. But even if the findings are off significantly, they certainly aren’t consistent with the widely held view that HRC would be a down-ballot disaster for Democrats in the South. And they are in fact reinforced by a variety of single-state general election polls (particularly those conducted by SurveyUSA) that show HRC running as well as any other Democrat in most southern states, and running ahead of Republican candidates in several.

As my last post noted, last night wasn’t exactly a shining moment for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But today brought news that should cheer her up: an endorsement by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
This is a pretty big deal, given AFSCME’s size and political clout. And it’s a particularly big deal in Iowa, where AFSCME is generally considered the most politically important union. Because it’s a national endorsement, she will also be able to draw on AFSCME heft from other states in the final drive towards the Caucuses.
I’m sure the Edwards campaign was praying for a “no endorsement” vote by AFSCME, but the North Carolinian did get a consolation prize of his own on the labor front: an endorsement from SEIU’s state council in New Hampshire. Since Edwards has already been endorsed by a dozen or so SEIU locals elsewhere (including neighboring Massachusetts), he, too, can draw on out-of-state help from the union in NH, just as he can in IA. But it was apparently a very near thing: according to various stories leaking out today, the executive council of the NH SEIU actually voted last week to endorse Obama, and then reversed the vote on murky procedural grounds, citing a membership straw poll that gave Edwards plurality support. An Obama endorsement would have been a really big deal, giving him a key boost in NH while locking Edwards’ SEIU supporters out of active campaigning in the state.