I’m not sure I can remember the last time David Broder of the Washington Post broke a major political story. But it’s certainly appropriate that he was the first out of the gate with the news of a bipartisan cabal of Former Big Names who appear to be coalescing around a third-party presidential run by Michael Bloomberg next year.
In case you missed it, Bloomberg’s attending a meeting next Sunday, hosted by former sorta-Democratic Senator David Boren of Oklahoma, to discuss “bipartisan” options for 2008. Other past or present Democrats billed as part of the cabal include Chuck Robb, Alan Dixon and my old boss Sam Nunn. The two more surprising Democratic names on the attendance list are Gary Hart and Bob Graham. The one sitting elected official on the list is soon-to-retire Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, with fellow GOPers John Danforth, Bill Brock, Jim Leach and Christine Todd Whitman.
According to Broder, the meeting is intended to send a signal to presidential candidates of both parties to immediately announce support for a National Unity Government or risk a Bloomberg run. So it should be understood as positioning Bloomberg and his wallet to offer the American people a High Broderist bipartisan option next November.
I pretty much agree with Digby’s take on the objective case for High Broderism, most obviously its fatuous assumption that the two parties are equally responsible for polarization and gridlock. I do not, however, share the popular progressive netroots view that big majorities of voters actually like polarization and want a lot more of it, or the corresponding theory that a Broderist option is so politically puny that Democrats should, as Digby puts it, “tune out” and ignore it. The massive and persistent wrong-track numbers represent something beyond a coalition of those who hate Republicans and those who are mad at Democrats for not fighting them enough. There are those who out of conviction, ignorance or simple fatigue might vote for a reasonable-sounding third option, and the billion smackers that Bloomberg is alleged to be willing to spend will buy you a whole lot of credibility.
In the end, a serious Bloomberg run may not materialize. And if it does, history suggests he wouldn’t come close to winning, and would hurt the Republican more than the Democratic ticket (third parties generally get more votes from major parties in decline, such as Democrats in 1968 and Republicans in 1992). But Democrats shouldn’t’ just laugh it all off, even if they justifiably laugh at Broder and his confederates.

Jim Geraghty makes a good if limited point about the Republican presidential Caucuses in Iowa at National Review today: anything other than a sound victory by Mike Huckabee will be heavily spinned by the campaigns and the news media in the effort to influence trends in NH and later states. And in those spin wars, Huckabee doesn’t have many friends. This, indeed, could represent the “revenge of the establishment” against Huckabee that so many observers have been expected.
But will Huckabee lose? He’s not running away with the contest in polls at this late date, and Mitt Romney’s reached near-maniacal levels of paid media in Iowa. But somehow or other, Huckabee’s managed to come up with the jack for a respectable TV campaign of his own, so he could well hang on for a win that would be difficult to spin away.

Yesterday, I briefly wrote about the highly debatable theory that the Bhutto assassination will greatly affect the Democratic presidential race, and J.P. Green briefly touched on it today. But I want to return to it now in a bit more detail, after appearing on the syndicated public radio show To the Point earlier today, where speculation was rampant that the Bhutto Factor will be the ball game for the Iowa Caucuses specifically.
To be clear, it’s all close enough among the Big Three candidates in Iowa that all sorts of factors–the weather, the impact of the final Des Moines Register poll, and most of all candidate “second-preference” deals–could be decisive, And in that respect, heavy news coverage of the Bhutto assassination and its aftermath, along with candidate interaction on the subject, could have a key impact as well. But as for the idea that the assassination has suddenly made foreign policy street cred and experience an overriding factor in Iowa–sorry, I just don’t buy it.
You have to remember that Iowans have been watching and listening to these candidates for about a year, many of them through personal contact, and hearing their pithy views on virtually every topic, foreign and domestic. Most likely caucus goers are not just now “tuning in” (unlike their counterparts in later states). Yes, they will be exposed to relatively heavy news coverage of events in Pakistan and the remarks of the candidate on same, but news coverage in Iowa will be dwarfed by paid campaign media (which has reached unprecedented levels this year), phone calls, door-to-door campaigning and personal lobbying from friends and family. There are also Iowans who will go to the Caucuses undecided, and will pick a candidate based on the dynamics (and campaign pleas) in the room.
In other words, it’s the last place on earth where tangential news-cycle developments are likely to play a really major role. And come to think of it, that’s the first good argument I’ve thought of for Iowa’s primacy in a good long while.

In the confused aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, it didn’t take more than about five minutes for political media types to begin speculation about the potential impact of the event on the U.S. presidential contest. The staff of the Politico, unsurprisingly, had the most complete initial guesstimate on the subject, suggesting that Senate Armed Services Committee members Hillary Clinton and John McCain, full-time terrorism opportunist Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, would get a boost. The Politicos also reported that the “C.W. will say that the candidates most damaged will be Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R).”
As I type this, MSNBC has Joe Scarborough on arguing that Giuliani’s whole campaign might be revived by this development, and could fatally hurt Obama in the run-up to Iowa.
Not so fast, folks. We obviously don’t know what’s going to happen next in Pakistan. I understand that if Pakistan melts down in the next few days, at a time when the holidays limit other political news, it could get a lot more attention than would otherwise be the case. And I also understand that instability in the Greater Middle East might reinforce the campaign messages of those Democrats or Republicans who stress their foreign policy experience and/or anti-terrorist credentials.
But who really knows? International instability can reinforce both status quo and “change” sentiments, and the most proximate contest, in Iowa, features a small electorate that is probably more focused on the campaign unfolding right in front of it than on news events. But media interpretations of political trends have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, so how the candidates react in the next day or two could be very important.
No matter how it plays out, it’s really disgusting to watch the White House’s efforts to spin the Bhutto assassination as a vindication of its own anti-terrorism efforts. As Spencer Ackerman of TalkingPointsMemo reports in a conversation with Pakistan expert Barnett Rubin, the administration’s strategy was to promote a Bhutto/Musharraf “moderate” coalition after the January 8. That strategy is now “in tatters.”

In case it’s not obvious, The Daily Strategist is on a bit of a holiday hiaitus for a day or two, and to tell you the truth, it’s nice to go for an extended period of time without reading polls or pondering the fate that Iowans are planning for the rest of us. I wish everyone a blessed Xmas or holiday season, and a happy New Year.

Credit Matt Stoller of OpenLeft with one of the best one-liners in recent memory, in a post deriding wildly varying media assessments of the competence of various presidential campaigns: “At best, campaigns are garbage moving in the right direction.” Certainly anyone who thinks about it can remember reading assessments of ultimately disastrous nomination campaigns (e.g., Kennedy 1980 and Dean 2004) as brilliant and irresistable, and of successful nomination campaigns (e.g., Reagan 1980 and Kerry 2004) as disorganized and faction-ridden nightmares. (It’s also worth noting that the two Republican presidential campaigns that seem to be doing well right now, those of Huckabee and McCain, were both written off not long ago as completely inept and hopeless). And a lot of the excessively positive talk about specific campaigns is a function of campaign spin and the endless desire of the chattering classes to identify the Next Big Thing and Next Big Gurus in politics. The truth is, as Stoller suggests, that campaigns are a messy business full of guesswork and unintended consequences.
But I would issue one demurral about the current Democratic contest in Iowa. Best I can tell from talking to people with experience there, the Big Three candidates’ ground-level organizations are all exceptionally well-run by historical standards, benefitting from a lot of prior Caucus experience. But even so, guesswork and such accidents as the weather on January 3 may ultimately determine the outcome by confirming or rejecting the turnout models on which campaigns must inevitably rely.

If readers will allow me a moment of home-state parochialism, I want to note the passing of Tom Murphy, the Democratic Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives for nearly thirty years (1974-2003).
Murphy first emerged as a factor in Georgia politics as House floor leader for the zany segregationist Governor Lester Maddox (whose chief of staff, BTW, was Murphy’s longtime rival Zell Miller), who wound up having a relatively progressive record despite his nutty right-wing rhetoric. As Speaker, Murphy’s career tracked the gradual evolution of the southern Democratic party from its conservative past to its eventual condition as a moderate biracial coalition.
But unlike such former Dixiecrat-types as George Wallace, he never had to apologize for racial demagoguery, and never abandoned the Democratic Party. Indeed, the one great constant of Murphy’s career was an inveterate hostility to the GOP.
Murphy finally lost his power, and his seat, when his once-rural West Georgia district (where most of my mother’s family still lives) became a Republican-trending Atlanta exurb, at about the same time that demographic changes finally flipped Georgia into the Republican column in state as well as national elections.
But Georgia resisted the region-wide GOP trend longer than any other state, electing Democratic governors and controlling the state legislature throughout the post-Civil Rights Act era, right up until 2002. It was no coincidence that this remarkable period in which Georgia Democrats defied the inevitable coincided with the Speakership of Tom Murphy. May he rest in peace.

On the American Prospect site, Mark Schmitt today offers a fascinating analysis on the most fundamental differentiation among the Big Three Democratic presidential candidates:

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. It’s the first “theory of change” primary I can think of.
Hillary Clinton’s stump speech is built around the speechwriter’s rule of three, applied to theories of change: one candidate believes you achieve change by “demanding” it, another thinks you “hope for it,” while she alone knows that you have to “work for it.”
That’s accurate as a rendering of the candidates’ language: Her message of experience and hard work, Obama’s language of hope and common purpose, Edwards’ insistence that those with power will never give it up willingly.

Schmitt goes on to defend Obama’s own “theory of change,” suggesting that only a “common purpose” approach can build the political capital necessary to defeat conservatives and special interests and deliver real change. But whether you agree with him about Obama or not, Schmitt does nicely define the battleground which the candidates have chosen.

Adding his own rock to the establishment conservative assault on Huckabee, Robert Novak did a column today disclosing that the Rev. Mike has lost some Southern Baptist endorsements because he backed–or at least didn’t oppose–the “liberal” side in the fights for control of the denomination back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Maybe some Baptists do resent that Huckabee wasn’t a foot soldier in the takeover of the SBC by those favoring a centralized drive for dogmatic purity and right-wing political engagement. But calling their opponents “liberals” is highly misleading, sort of like talking about conservative Unitarians based on some intra-denominational fight. Some opponents of the takeover were simply defending Baptist traditions of state convention and congregational autonomy, and hardly any of them could be described as “liberals” in any theological, much less political, sense. So tarring (or from a more progressive perspective, crediting) Huckabee with the L-word in this context is ridiculous, and I suspect the Prince of Darkness is smart enough to know that.

A few days ago, New York Magazine published an article by John Heilemann that, as the title “Huckabuchanan” suggested, explored the parallels between Mike Huckabee’s alleged fusion of social conservatism and economic populo-nationalism with that of Pat Buchanan, who briefly frightened establishment conservatives during his two presidential runs in 1992 and (especially) 1996. I thought of it again today after reading George Will’s jeremiad against Huckabee as representing a complete repudiation of conventional conservatism.
After suggesting the parallel between Preacher Mike and Pitchfork Pat, Heilemann doesn’t completely buy it, noting that much of the “economic populism” attributed to Huckabee is exceptionally vague or primarily rhetorical. He doesn’t go on to note the contrasting precision and detail associated with Buchanan’s economic thinking, but it’s worth remembering that Pat basically called for a revival of Henry Clay’s American System in its entirety. Moreover, you can’t really assess Buchanan’s appeal without mentioning his foreign policy views, which echoed a slightly more recent conservative icon, Robert Taft. Huckabee has occasionally made heterodox noises on foreign policy, but nothing that would remind you of Charles Lindbergh.
It says a lot about the insecurity of contemporary conservatives that Huckabee seems to be scaring them as much as Buchanan did. And I also hope that those Democrats who squint sideways at Huckabee, and setting aside his views on social issues, see him as a congenial “populist” spirit, take a much closer look. He’s like Buchanan in all the wrong ways.