In another example of The American Prospect‘s recent interest in the subject of politics and religion, their online edition has just published a poignant report by Michal Lumsden about the efforts of mainline Protestants to mobilize opposition to the war in Iraq. Focused mainly on the story of a UCC minister whose son, a Marine deployed to Iraq, signed up for sniper training (and whose husband, a retired career Marine, admits he “turned off religion and turned on duty” when called on to fight), the piece goes on to discuss the emphatic anti-Iraq-war position of virtually every mainline Protestant denomination.
You can read between the lines in Lumsden’s account her frustration with what she calls the “black-and-white world of secular versus conservative that the mainstream media perpetuates,” one of those conservative “memes” that also gets far too much acceptance from progressives who don’t happen to be religious themselves. You probably know the story: “liberal, relativistic” Christian denominations are declining or even dying, while conservatives–the real Christians–thrive.
This is not the time or place for an argument about religious trends in the United States, which do not neatly fit into the liberal-decline, conservative-growth pattern unless you really think the growth of nondenominational and charismatic church membership is all about cultural or political conservatism. But the fact remains that an estimated 44 million Americans belong to the National Council of Churches “mainline” family of denominations, which is a lot of folks to ignore, and a lot of folks whose leadership is in some ways more united on issues of war and peace–and united on this subject with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church–than their loud and much-discussed Christian Right rivals.

Yesterday J.P. Green discussed the dilemma facing Democrats in Florida and Michigan over their decision to bend the knee to the DNC-ordained nominating contest calendar, or risk losing delegates at the next convention.
But on the broader issue of where candidates are actually spending their time, the FL/MI challenge to the IA/NH Duopoly has already failed, and not just because (on the Democratic side, at least) candidates recently agreed to boycott the two rebellious states.
As Chris Bowers at OpenLeft explained over the weekend, using the Washington Post‘s useful “Campaign Tracker” map, candidates for president in both parties have “made more trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, a combined 1,811, than [to] every other state and territory combined.” And many of the trips to other states (especially California) are simply for fundraisers, not public events.
It appears all the Democratic candidates are calculating that the impact of IA and NH on later states makes any post-NH strategy simply too risky. And the Republicans who have given the Duopoly less than full attention–namely Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson–are clearly playing with fire.

With the failure in the Senate of a long series of amendments aimed at forcing a change of strategy on Iraq, we’re on the cusp of what looks likely to be a fractious intraparty debate among Democrats about what to do now. Though many antiwar activists have long feared that congressional Democrats will retreat to some sort of toothless bipartisan resolution urging Bush to change his unchangeable mind on Iraq, there’s actually little or no sentiment on either side of the partisan aisle for such an approach. But on the other hand, there’s no particular reason to think that repeating the maneuvering Congress went through with Bush in May–passing a war appropriations bill with a deadline, and inviting a presidential veto without the votes to override it–would turn out differently in the end.
Still, as a new post from McJoan at DailyKos makes clear, it looks like a netroots-based campaign to demand a return to a no-appropriations-without-a-binding-deadline strategy is about to get fully underway, with a lot of the pressure coming not only from rank-and-file Democrats but from presidential candidates. Dodd, Richardson and Edwards have been demanding this approach for months; Barack Obama signed on to such an effort last week; and with Hillary Clinton still to be heard from (though she voted against the post-veto funding bill earlier in the year), only Joe Biden has rejected it.
Moreover, advocacy of this harder-line strategy overlaps significantly, in the netroots and among the candidates,with efforts to get Democrats to abandon any commitment to a residual troop presence in Iraq (with Obama and Clinton, and to a lesser extent Edwards, the targets of that effort).
While it’s important not to completely conflate the no-funding and no-residuals campaigns (I am sure there are other Dems beyond Obama who favor one but not the other), advocates of both do tend to make the same political argument: that Democrats must more sharply distinguish themselves from Republican on the war to maintain confidence–in the Democratic “base,” among antiwar independents, or in the electorate generally–that they represent “change” on Iraq as on other issues. This dovetails with a less political argument that Democrats have a moral obligation to make every effort to stop the war prior to the 2008 elections, and to ensure if they win that the war is ended firmly, finally and quickly. And both sets of arguments, political and moral, on funding and residuals, coincide with a widely held belief–articulated this week by Dr. Drew Westen at of all places The New Republic–that taking a hard line on the war in all its aspects is the only “emotionally compelling” approach that will excorcise the ghosts of past Democratic surrenders to Bush.
There are a lot of assumptions about public opinion on Iraq and on the Democratic Party underlying the maximum-confrontation point of view, and I’ll address them in a later post. Suffice it to say that today three-fifths to two-thirds of Americans continue to oppose Bush’s war policies, even after the Petraeus Week shenanigans, while support for a no-funding or no-residuals position is clearly lower, but very difficult to measure.
But there are two fundamental questions Democrats need to ask themselves before falling on each other in anger on the subject of what to do now about Iraq. Are no-funding or no-residuals hardliners ready to deal with the consequences of the Democratic divisions likely to emerge from such internal fights, including “Bush beats Democrats again” and “Democrats in disarray” headlines? And do those Democrats who oppose them have a better idea other than praying that election day gets here fast?

Amidst a lot of general recriminations among Democrats over their inability to force a fundamental change in the Iraq war, and a specific, white-hot controversy over Republican efforts to demonize MoveOn.org, there’s also a growing realization that on one issue, health care, there’s an impressive convergence of views.
With the release of the “coverage” piece of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan earlier this week, it’s now clear the “big three” Democratic candidates for president have very similar approaches, with Edwards’ and Clinton’s plans being notably congruent. And for the most part, Democrats of all stripes are applauding.
Some progressives–e.g., Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times–credit Edwards for helping pressure his rivals into abandoning a timid, incremental approach to health care. Some centrists–e.g., the DLC–praise the Clinton-Edwards-Obama consensus as representing a sensible alternative to an unworkable status quo and to single-payer approaches. Everyone seems to agree that the vast gap between Democratic plans for universal health coverage and Republican advocacy of atavistic efforts to force Americans into individual health insurance or medical services purchasing will give voters an unmistakable choice in 2008.
E.J. Dionne suggests today that the Democratic health care convergence represents a broader Democratic agreement on domestic issues that resolves many of the intraparty arguments of the 1990s. He concludes that “the Democrats’ 2008 struggle is not about how to shape a new consensus but over who can take charge of the one that already exists.”
That’s worth pondering as the nominating contest heats up over the coming weeks.

One of the more interesting back-stories of the 2008 presidential campaign is the palpable state of crisis within the leadership of the Christian Right, whose “marriage of convenience” with the GOP isn’t working out too well. Divided internally on political strategy and specific issues (e.g., the environment, poverty and Iraq); chronically disappointed with the payoff from its alliance with Republicans; and struggling with generational challenges to its aging leadership, the politicized Christian Right is now facing the additional burden of having no consensus candidate for president to illustrate its residual power.
There has been some talk that Fred Thompson might be the solution to this last problem. But not according to Christian Right warhorse James Dobson, whose leaked emails blasting Fred as unacceptable on a variety of personal and ideological grounds have been making news this week.
Via Jason Zingerle, we have this pungent take on the story from Christian Broadcasting News blogger David Brody:

So for those scoring at home, let’s keep track shall we? Dr. Dobson says no to Thompson, no to Giuliani, no to McCain. Who does that leave? Oh, wait…who’s raising their hand and jumping up and down in the back of the room? Hey, that’s Mitt Romney! He says “what about me?”. It may be very hard for Dr. Dobson to come out and support Romney because many of his devoted listeners have a problem with Mormonism. Sorry, hate to bring that topic up again but I’m just “keeping it real” Now, as for Huckabee, that’s a possibility but can he win and is he only thought of as VP material? Maybe Dobson will put his individual support behind Huckabee but everybody wants to back the eventual winner so there’s a gamble there. I’m told that Dobson likes Newt Gingrich but Newt doesn’t look like he’s running.

Brody goes on to make the obvious point that this division of opinion about various candidates mainly benefits the one candidate with virtually no support among Christian Right elites, Rudy Giuliani. And Giuliani’s nomination, if it occurs, would create tensions in the GOP/Christian Right “marriage” as severe as those in Rudy’s own nuptial history.
If, God forbid, I were in the leadership of the Christian Right, I’d try to organize an effort to raise some serious jack for Huckabee, who’s the one theoretically viable Republican candidate with none of his competitors’ handicaps. (I’d also work the phones to get Iowa religious conservatives to abandon Sam Brownback, whose hopeless campaign is hampering Huckabee’s bid). Huckabee might not make it in the long run, but he’d serve as a convenient place-holder for theocons until they are forced to make a Decision for Christ between his flawed rivals.
While we are on this topic, I’m happy to report that The American Prospect has a new weekly feature up online called The FundamantaList, by Sarah Posner, reporting on political developments within the Christian Right. You might want to check out an earlier Posner piece on growing pentecostal support for Huckabee.

We published a staff post earlier this week briefly discussing Dr. Tom Schaller’s Salon piece suggesting that Democrats should stop “pandering” to white male voters, especially in the South. Schaller’s essay is continuing to draw attention, probably because Salon chose to give it a provocative title (“So Long, White Boy”), and also because conservatives are predictably beginning to pick up on Schaller’s rhetoric to suggest that Democrats hate Bubba.
A closer look at the Salon piece reveals a well-written article using impeccable empirical data in the service of an intraparty argument against a position that hardly anyone actually takes.
Schaller’s absolutely right to point out that the white male working-class preference for Republican presidential candidates can no long be written off as a temporary aberration. He’s also correct that white men are a declining percentage of the electorate, albeit a rather large one for the foreseeabe future. And he’s right as well that “Super-Bubba” Bill Clinton didn’t win in 1992 or 1996 by working any particular magic with white male voters north or south.
So who, exactly, is Schaller arguing with? Apparently, with “centrist Democrats [who] continue to urge the party to find new ways to lure white male voters back into the fold. Bill Galston, former domestic policy advisor to Bill Clinton and one of Washington’s sharpest analysts, is a proponent of a Democratic reinvestment in white male voters.”
Schaller then takes a brief look at a six-year-old article by Galston (a co-editor here at TDS) from Blueprint Magazine analyzing the collapse of Democratic support among white male voters in elections through 2000, mainly in order to turn Galston’s numbers on their head. But he doesn’t seem to have noticed that Galston’s main point was to suggest a conflict between progressive moral commitments and major gains among white male voters that simply couldn’t be wished away. Here’s the money quote from Galston’s piece:

In sum, the most realistic strategic objective is to diminish the intensity of white male opposition to the national Democratic Party while retaining the support of key minority groups and bolstering suburban gains, especially among white women. To execute this strategy, embracing moderate positions on cultural issues based on mainstream values is a necessity. But for today’s Democratic Party, neither cultural conservatism nor an anti-government stance is an option. If that is what it takes to regain full competitiveness among white men, the price is too high.

As in much of Schaller’s writing about Democrats and the South, he seems eager to suggest that anyone interested in cutting disastrous Democratic losing margins in certain segments of the electorate is arguing for “pandering,” the abandonment of Democratic constituencies, or a “turn to the right” on key issues. The only choices on the table are to lust after Bubba or spurn him.
There’s actually plenty of variation among Democrats, centrist or non-centrist, in their assessment of whether and if so how Democrats can do a bit better among white men. The only notable Democratic figure who actually seems to match Schaller’s account of “centrists” demanding a Bubba-centric political message is Mudcat Sanders, who often serves the same straw man function in Schaller’s writings about the South.
And that’s why it’s interesting to note that Schaller considers John Edwards’ refusal to engage in Bubba-lust one of the leading indicators that Democrats are finally wising up about the political incorrigibility of white men. Edwards’ campaign often suggests that its candidate might do better among white men than his leading female, African-American, and Latino rivals, particularly in the South. And the Edwards spokesman most often making this argument is none other than Mudcat Sanders.
Maybe Schaller and Sanders should just take their argument outside.

Today we’ll be publishing a post from guest blogger James Vega, who will probably appear here now and then in the future. Vega is is a strategic marketing consultant whose clients have included some of America’s leading nonprofit institutions and high-tech firms.

Lord ‘a’ mercy! For the self-styled Party of the Godly, the GOP is certainly having a lot of religious issues with its presidential field. There’s Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. There’s Rudy Giuliani’s rather tenuous relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. There’s the question as to whether Fred Thompson is a member of the conservative Church of Christ or the progressive United Church of Christ, or doesn’t go to church at all. There’s Sam Brownback’s conversion from Methodism to Catholicism via the controversial Opus Dei organization. And for those Republicans, if there are any, who are scrupulous about separation of church and state, Mike Huckabee’s position as an ordained Southern Baptist minister might raise a few eyebrows.
And now we learn via AP that John McCain has suddenly started telling people in heavily Baptist South Carolina that he’s not, as he has always been identified, an Episcopalian, but a Baptist, having attended a Phoenix-area Southern Baptist Church for about 15 years.

The Associated Press asked McCain on Saturday how his Episcopal faith plays a role in his campaign and life. McCain grew up Episcopalian and attended an Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Va.
“It plays a role in my life. By the way, I’m not Episcopalian. I’m Baptist,” McCain said. “Do I advertise my faith? Do I talk about it all the time? No.”

This news apparently led AP reporter Bruce Smith to do a little googling, and he promptly turned up a rather interesting personal tidbit about McCain from a few months ago:

In a June interview with McClatchy Newspapers, the senator said his wife and two of their children have been baptized in the Arizona Baptist church, but he had not. “I didn’t find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs,” he said.

Well, you’d think anyone who’s been attending a Baptist Church for 15 years might have caught wind of the fact that the denomination, as its name suggests, believes rather adamantly that baptism is necessary for salvation, a reasonably important “spiritual need” by most measurements.
And no, it wouldn’t cut any ice with his fellow-Baptists if it turns out that McCain, like most Episcopalians, was baptized via sprinkling as an infant. Any kind of Baptist I’ve ever heard of holds that only a “believer’s baptism” (i.e., at an age of consent) through full bodily immersion is valid. That’s why their theological ancestors in Europe were contemptuously dubbed “Re-baptizers,” or “Anabaptists.”
I don’t know why McCain has chosen to wander into this particular thicket. But the only way out I can imagine is if he asks Huckabee to baptize him during the next candidate debate.

This is indeed a busy Monday morning in the political world. The White House is likely to announce retired federal district court judge Michael Mukasey as its nominee to succeed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, having backed off more controversial possibilities such as Michael Chertoff and Ted Olsen.
Mukasey’s close relationship to Rudy Giuliani will raise a lot of Left and Right eyebrows, and his outspoken support for the Patriot Act will probably spur some netroots talk about opposing his confirmation. But the immediate reaction among Democrats has been fairly conciliatory (reflected most notably by positive comments from Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, as quoted in the Post article linked to above), and the best bet is that Dems will use the confirmation hearings to pin down Mukasey on Gonzales’ various misdeeds and prevarications, most notably the U.S. Attorneys scandal (Mukasey was himself a federal prosecutor under Giuliani back in the day).
On the presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton is releasing the “coverage” piece of her health care proposal today, and all indications are that she will embrace an “individual mandate” to ensure universal coverage, joining John Edwards and differing from Barack Obama on that wonky but important point. Initial reaction in the progressive blogosphere is likely to be positive. One things’s for certain sure: any similarities between HRC’s plan and the Massachusetts initiative (which also includes an individual mandate) signed into law by Mitt Romney will be used by the Mittster’s GOP presidential rivals to label him as an advocate for HillaryCare, probably forcing him to discuss the MA plan more frequently.
But while HRC is making news on health care, Barack Obama moved a major chess piece in the politics of Iraq, coming out clearly yesterday for the no-war-funding-without-deadlines approach, earning cheers from Markos Moulitsas. Obama’s statement (in Iowa, of course) aligned him with Edwards, Dodd and Richardson on the funding cutoff strategy (Biden is stridently opposed to it), and shifted the focus to HRC, who in the past has moved in tandem with Obama on this particular issue. But Obama, like HRC (and to a lesser extent Edwards) remains exposed to demands by Dodd and Richardson that he disclaim support for a significant residual troop presence in Iraq after combat brigades are withdrawn.
In the Republican presidential contest, Newt Gingrich made a lot of Democrats happy late last week by renewing talk of a last-minute bid.
And in celebrity-culture-meets-politics news, last night Al Gore picked up an Emmy (for his role in launching the Current channel) to go with his Oscar, while the Fox Network may be open to charges that it censored Sally Fields’ Emmy acceptance speech for profane anti-war comments.

One of the strange shifts in its public posture on Iraq that’s been made by the Bush administration in recent weeks is the idea that total lack of progress on a national political settlement doesn’t matter, because progress towards a more orderly existence is being made on a local level here and there, a development that will somehow perculate up to Baghdad. The fact that Iraq’s sectarian fault lines are incredibly resistant to this kind of simple bottom-up solution, or that local “empowerment” may be completely inconsistent with national unity, doesn’t seem to enter into the equation. There’s a good, full analysis of the incoherence of what now passes for a Bush political strategy in Iraq by Dennis Ross up at the New Republic site.
Bush’s celebration of developments in Anbar Province is highly reminiscent of an earlier, grossly premature celebration over Iraq’s first “national” elections, back in January of 2005. All those GOP politicians waving purple fingers didn’t seem to be aware that the vast majority of Iraqi voters rejected every available inter-communal political option. And like Bush’s basic course of action in Iraq, that’s something that hasn’t changed at all.