Yesterday’s Iowa Republican Party Staw Poll is being generally billed as a win for Mitt Romney (who finished first), a potential breakthrough moment for Mike Huckabee (who finished second), death for Tommy Thompson (who finished sixth), a big missed opportunity for Sam Brownback (who finished third despite significantly outspending Huckabee) and pretty much a wash for everybody else, including non-attendees Rudy Giuliani and John McCain.
But the other story line was a sharp drop in participation (from nearly 24,000 to just over 14,000) as compared to the last competitive Straw Poll in 1999. Giuliani’s spinners will undoubtedly try to claim that his supporters depressed turnout by staying home. But in truth, Iowa Republicans have been in a deep funk since their terrible November 2006 election night (when they lost two U.S. House seats, both chambers of the state legislature, and the governorship), with attendance notably sagging at most GOP events in the state. Add in the palpable unhappiness with the 2008 presidential field, and you’ve got a party that is in trouble in what has been one of the most competitive states in the country.
Ed Kilgore
We all know that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has become an issue in the Republican presidential nominating contest, as has Sam Brownback’s Opus Dei-assisted conversion to Catholicism, and Rudy Giuliani’s tenuous links to Rome. But now there’s a fourth GOP candidate whose faith is in question: Fred Thompson.
It probably started with James Dobson’s infamous statement back in March about Thompson that he “didn’t think he was a Christian.” Focus on the Family later issued a weasily “clarification” suggesting that Dobson had actually meant he didn’t know one way or another about Fred’s faith.
Inquiring minds wanted to know, so (as explained in an illuminating article in The Christian Chronicle) it soon came out that Thompson was baptized in, and has occasionally been identified with, the Churches of Christ. But his second marriage, in 2002, was performed in a United Church of Christ service in Illinois.
As you may or may not know, the similar-sounding Churches of Christ and United Church of Christ are about as similar as a hound dog and a chili dog. The former is a very conservative but loosely organized quasi-denomination that split off from the mainline Disciples of Christ in the early twentieth century, mainly over opposition to the use of musical instruments in church. The latter, formed from the Congregationalist and certain German Reformed churches in the 1940s, is the most liberal of trinitarian American protestant denominations; the UCC happily ordains openly gay and lesbian clergy, and performs same-sex unions. (Indeed, its position casts an interesting light on active UCC member Barack Obama’s own position that denominations, not the state, should determine access to “marriage.”) Ironically, the denomination the UCC is closest to is the Disciples of Christ.
Having spilled a ridiculous number of words at NewDonkey.com back in October 2005 (sorry, link is not available but you can find it in the archives of that site, in case you’re interested) trying to explain Harriet Miers’ relationship to the Churches of Christ, I can tell you that the CofC’s intensely decentralized nature and hostility to creeds and theological speculation have made it difficult to divine its members’ views on much of anything other than biblical inerrancy and liturgical primitivism. Indeed, other conservative evangelicals have been known to complain the CofC’ers are laggards in the fight to ban abortion.
So where does Fred fit in? I dunno, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to have to start showing up at church somewhere. And he probably won’t be rubbing elbows with Barack Obama in the UCC.
He invited me to post this diary to respond.
The quote, which appeared in a Ron Brownstein piece in The National Journal, was this:
“We are more of a coalition party than they are. If we put a gun to everybody’s head in the country and make them pick sides, we’re not likely to win.”
The context of the quote was a long conversation with Brownstein about how Democrats needed to deal with the Rovian “polarization” strategy. And all I was trying to say was that counter-polarization was an insufficent response for Democrats, given the enduring ideological tilt of the electorate, for many decades, towards the center-right. I did not say, imply or mean that Democrats needed to “move to the right” or “blur the differences between the two parties.” Au contraire. The whole point was that Democrats had to complement a mobilization strategy with a persuasion strategy designed to pull swing voters in our direction over time. “Standing up” to Bush and the GOP, and offering clear choices between the two parties, I thought then and think now, is essential, but the choices we offer have to be attractive to people who aren’t reflexively on our side.
As it happens, today, as opposed to 2005, we’d likely win the “gun to the head” test. But that’s not just because Democrats are suddenly “standing up to Bush;” it’s because his record, and his party’s complicity in that record, are abysmal, and the whole world knows it. The tangible consequences of Republican misgovernment are at least as important as the “noise” we make about it. That matters because Bush is going to leave office soon, and like it or not, if Democrats want to build an enduring progressive majority, we’ll have to seal the deal with millions of voters who will be vulnerable to Republican arguments that W., like Nixon before him, failed because of personal incompetence and imperial delusions rather than conservative ideology.
Ironically, a fair number of netroots folk seem to be buying into the same kind of triumphalism that New Democrats were sometimes guilty of during and just after the Clinton administration: we’ve found the keys to the kingdom about how Democrats can win elections now and forever, world without end. The netroots played a crucial role in the 2006 victory, just as the DLC undoubtedly played a crucial role in Clinton’s 1992 victory. But in both cases, Republican failures had as much to do with the outcome as Democratic successes, and the enduring challenge is how to not only moblize but expand the Democratic base, bringing back a natural Democratic majority that really expired way back in the 1960s.
There are a variety of sub-issues I could get into here, most notably the peculiar belief that Clintonian “triangulation” was the primary cause of the 1994 debacle, and of the stupid “change the subject” campaign strategies of congressional Democrats during the long struggle back to a majority.
But I’ll leave it here for now, resisting my old-guy tendencies to get into historical debates. If my perspective is truly the prime example of netroots/New Dem disagreements, then maybe we’re more united than you might think.
It’s been apparent for a good while that the Florida legislature’s decision earlier this year to move its 2008 primary date to January 29 would likely set off a domino-effect series of changes in the nominating calendar. Well, the first domino will fall today, according to The Washington Post, which is reporting that the South Carolina Republican Party will announce it has moved its primary to January 19.
Under New Hampshire state law, its Secretary of State is not only authorized but required to ensure that the Granite State’s primary is at least a week before any others. And Iowa state law requires that its caucuses be held at least eight days prior to the first primary.
Assuming NH wants to stick to its ancient tradition of voting on a Tuesday, the SC decision basically forces NH to move to January 8 at the latest. Count back eight days from that, and you have Iowa caucusing on December 31, 2007, which isn’t terribly likely. So the best guess is that Iowa would move to a date prior to Christmas. (On the other hand, as David Yepsen, Iowa’s top political reporter, notes today, there’s some legal precedent for the parties being able to preempt state law and hold the caucuses less than eight days prior to NH, avoiding the December scenario. But the decision will be fraught with controversy, and could also produce different caucus dates for the two parties.)
What does all this mean in terms of the 2008 presidential election? It will almost certainly create the longest general election campaign in living memory (unless, as a few observers think, the heavy concentration of early primaries creates the first contested convention since 1976). Beyond that, the consequences really depend on whether you believe the current calendar magnifies or reduces the impact of Iowa and New Hampshire. Either way, expect the calendar craziness to lead to a lot of talk about comprehensively reforming the nominating process prior to 2012.
For obvious reasons, I”ve been blogging about Democrats lately, so it might be a good time to take a quick look at what’s happening on The Other Side.
This coming Saturday will feature the first semi-real Event in the Republican nomination contest, with the Iowa Republican Party Straw Poll in Ames. Giuliani and McCain have already written off the event (to the great annoyance of Iowa Republicans who count on it as a fundraiser for the operation of next year’s Caucuses), so it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Mitt Romney will win. But that means second place in the straw poll is a heaven-sent opportunity for lower-tier candidates to emerge from the pack and get themselves viable.
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post blog “The Fix” has a nice write-up of the stakes this weekend for the perennial insider Dark Horse favorite Mike Huckabee, using data from WaPo’s new Iowa poll that shows the Arkansan tied with John McCain for fourth place. WaPo also has an article explaining the history and character of the Straw Poll, including the basic fact that campaigns pay for most of the attendees to attend, and the fascinating historical note that Iowa Republicans felt it necessary in 1999 to require Iowa residence for the event because campaigns were busing in supporters from other states (a tactic Ron Paul has often employed for less momentous Iowa events).
And the Des Moines Register has a piece up today on Sam Brownback’s prospects in the Straw Poll. He’s the other GOPer with a reasonable chance to finish second in Ames and get known by America.
One of the things that has happened in the runup to the Straw Poll has been some questionable phone calls on the religious views of various candidates. Michelle Cottle at The New Republic has the details, which involve Mitt’s Mormonism, Brownback’s conversion from Methodism to Catholicism, and the much-debated question of whether Fred Thompson is a member of the Church of Christ or the United Church of Christ (who differ on religio-cultural issues nearly as much as Jews and Jews-for-Jesus). Cottle suggests that the beneficiary of this sort of religious kulturkampf may be Rudy Giuliani, whose own religious and cultural non-credentials place him outside the pale, irrelevant to the effort to identify a True Believer alternative to Hizzoner.
And that may be the ultimate meaning of the Iowa Straw Poll: will Mitt Romney, Mormon and former pro-choice and pro-gay rights governor of the godless state of Massachusetts, be the only alternative to Rudy? Or will a true Son of Right-teousness, in the eyes of the GOP’s conservative base, soon emerge?
As the latest WaPo poll showed, Republicans are far less satisfied with their presidential field than Democrats. So expect more fireworks on that side of the aisle, maybe beginning this weekend.
I promised to offer a few ruminations comparing and contrasting the DLC National Conversation in Nashville and the YearlyKos conference in Chicago, as one of a very few people who attended both events (though the National Education Association was a co-sponsor of both conferences).
Both events were well-attended, with probably 700 people in Nashville and 1500 (swelling to perhaps 2000 for the presidential candidate forum) in Chicago. They were pitched to very different audiences, with the DLC focusing on state and local elected officials (about 350 of whom showed up, from 45 states) and YKos billing itself as a bit of a netroots family reunion. Both events were very wonky on one level, with lots of workshops on a variety of policy and political topics. And in both Nashville and Chicago, there was plenty of Republican- and Bush-bashing; a sense of disdain for the horse-race/money-race coverage of the presidential campaign by the MSM; and a lot of optimism about Democratic prospects next year.
In terms of presidential preferences, there were no straw polls, but I’d guess that in Nashville the bulk of participants would lean towards Obama or Clinton (not sure which would actually lead), with Richardson, Edwards and Biden enjoying pockets of support. In Chicago, Obama and Edwards had the most visible support, but Clinton got a warmer welcome that most expected, and Richardson and Dodd clearly had support as well.
Neither event developed any sort of formal policy pronouncements or political manifestos. But in the workshop sessions, both dwelled on issues like global climate change, universal health coverage, and economic insecurity and inequality. The Nashville event, focused as it was on state and local electeds, didn’t have workshops on Iraq or national security issues (though there was one on homeland security), but during the public session, there was some talk of what might be described as a post-Iraq national security strategy. There was plenty of talk about Iraq in Chicago. But on the issues dividing Democrats (residual troop commitments and a funding cutoff strategy), the presidential forum was notably muted.
The major “tone” difference between the two conferences–aside from the natural excitement in Chicago over the presidential forum, and the frank disappointment in Nashville that the presidentials didn’t show up–was really about the nature of the fears underlying the general optimism going into 2008. In Nashville, the oft-expressed concern was about Democratic overconfidence, particularly in terms of the party’s credibility on national security, leading to an insufficient focus on swing voters and yet another close election. (This fear was articulated quite clearly today in a Washington Post op-ed by DLC Chairman Harold Ford, Jr., and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who spoke in Nashville). And in Chicago, the big fear (often linked to the FISA reauthorization which occurred, with significant Democratic support, the night before the presidential forum) was about Democratic temerity in the face of Republican efforts to once again play the “fear” card in 2008.
A subset of this difference in basic outlook towards the party’s problems is reflected in the general assumption made at each event about long-term Democratic strategy. In Nashville, the feeling was that Democrats needed to win big in 2008 and then “solve problems across party lines” in order to build a durable progressive majority. In Chicago, long-term Democratic prospects were most often linked to movement-building efforts, ranging from new media sophistication to mobilization of potential constituencies.
A final point of comparison, inevitably, is the extent to which these two Democratic gatherings fired bullets at each other.
In Nashville, there was plenty of grumbling about the presidentials tripping over each other to get to Chicago, balanced with observations that it actually made sense for them to do so, given the netroots’ importance in the nominating process. But the only “named” villain at the event (he was even rebutted by Bill Clinton) was, ironically, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, whose thank-you-now-go-away assessment of the DLC appeared in The New York Times the very day the conference began. It’s also worth mentioning that one of the featured speakers was Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who has been something of a netroots favorite for years.
In Chicago, I’m sure there was some DLC- and centrist-bashing going on in the various workshops, but it wasn’t terribly visible, and the general tenor was that the netroots represented all of the party, united in partisanship and a commitment to grassroots activism if not in ideology. New Dem types (e.g., Andrei Cherny, Ken Baer, Rob Shapiro, Austan Goolsbee, Gene Sperling) were sprinkled amongst the official speakers. There appeared to be a semi-conscious collective effort to ensure that Hillary Clinton got a respectful hearing at the presidential forum. Interestingly, forum co-moderator Joan McCarter did a post today listing some of the prepared questions that didn’t get asked, and one was to HRC about her feelings towards the DLC. But by the same token, Dennis Kucinich got booed for uttering one of the ancient Left intra-party arguments that “voters don’t think there’s much difference between the two parties.”
In the end, I came away from my Nashville-Chicago swing impressed more than ever by what unites Democrats against Republicans even among these two particularly different groups, and frustrated by the Dialogue of the Deaf that so often supplants healthy intra-party debate over real issues.
Self-conscious New Democrats need to understand that the netroots can no longer be dismissed as marginal, or unserious, or simply as a small group of people with a big internet megaphone. And they should also realize that there’s as much diversity of opinion in the netroots as in any other element of the party.
By the same token, netrooters should not let preconceptions about the DLC and its fellow-travelers blind them to what they are actually saying and doing. The spirit of partisanship in Nashville was very intense (viz. their extremely positive reaction to Drew Westen, the one speaker equally popular at both events). These are people who want Democrats to win very badly, and as Bill Clinton said there, the challenges the DLC helped him meet in 1992 are not irrelevant today. And though Markos Moulitsas did a post today mocking the “350 or so members” of the DLC, it’s worth remembering that these are elected officials who represent a lot of other Democrats and swing voters as well, and who have been largely ignored for many years by a DC-Centric national party.
In the end, if you eliminated the factional emblems in Nashville and Chicago and paid attention to the bottom line, there’s a lot of unity apparent on the surface and even underneath it. And attending both events gave me a better overall view of the current state of the debate among Democrats, and a renewed hope that it can be refocused on differences that actually matter instead of those that really don’t.
The audience itself was interesting. I gather official registration for YearlyKos topped out at around 1500, but with the media and campaign worker hordes present, the forum may have drawn close to 2000 people. At the very beginning of the forum, Bai announced they would not follow the usual rule of seeking to suppress audience reactions. That turned out to be a useful if counter-intuitive decision. The audience reacted in some form to almost every candidate comment, including subtleties that would usually not elicit much response. It felt a bit like being in the middle of a huge focus group of political junkies.
When the candidates first trooped onto the stage, Obama won the initial applause-o-meter contest. But every candidate, including Hillary Clinton (who didn’t draw the initial boos some had anticipated) had at least one moment of heavy applause during the debate. Perhaps the most unusual development, as compared to previous debates, was the feral roar that met several of Mike Gravel’s patented screeds, though at least in my section of the room, quite a few people were laughing and grimacing as they applauded, clearly viewing Gravel as prime entertainment (and the Alaskan got his own share of hisses and groans when he was asked about his support for a national sales tax).
There was not a whole lot of overt audience-pandering during the forum. Clinton mentioned her support for “net neutrality” a couple of times. Kucinich clearly thought this particular audience needed to be reminded repeatedly of his support for a single-payer health care system. Dodd managed to work in a reference to his appearance last week on Bill O’Reilly’s show to challenge the host’s attacks on this very conference. And Edwards (generally considered the debate “winner” if there was one) followed a very consistent tack of stressing his combative attitude towards lobbyists (more about that in a minute) and Republicans; at one point, he even said his campaign was not being guided by a “political strategy,” a clever allusion to the netroots aversion to “poll-driven centrists.”
As you probably know if you saw any of the TV or newspaper coverage of the forum, the one “gotcha” moment occurred when Matt Bai directly asked HRC to respond to Edwards’ demand (which he repeated a second time to make sure the trap got properly baited) that all candidates follow his and Obama’s example by refusing to accept “a single dime from lobbyists.” After curtly refusing to give her fundraisers heart attacks by suddenly ruling out PAC contributions, Clinton did something I’ve never seen her do: she flubbed an answer. Instead of immediately touting her support for public financing (which Dodd did in a follow-up, to rapturous applause), or citing the need to match Republican campaign dollars, or even blurring the issue by reminding everyone that progressive causes have lobbyists, too–she basically said lobbyists represent real people, and she wants to represent everybody. It did not go over well.
But other than that, HRC, like all the candidates, were well-received. (At one point, McCarter was asking her a question about the current administration’s policies, and mistakenly said “President Clinton” instead of “President Bush.” HRC immediately quipped: “A Freudian slip.”) Efforts by Richardson, Dodd and Kucinich to hit Clinton and Obama over residual troop deployments in Iraq or a funding cutoff strategy fizzled, as they did in the CNN-YouTube debate.
Obama started slowly, but warmed up as the debate proceeded, and won high marks for a very substantive answer to an unusual question about how to deal with China. Richardson did as well as he could with the very first question of the debate (from McCarter), about his infamous debate citation of Whizzer White as a model for his Supreme Court appointments. (“I screwed up there,” he admitted, before going into a comfortingly conventional statement of commitment to pro-choice judges). After that, the New Mexican looked more relaxed than usual in the debate format, and got his share of applause. He also drew lusty boos after going out of his way to repeat his pledge to support a balanced budget constitutional amendment (via Ezra Klein, I just read Ben Smith’s great quip that this was “the first fiscal policy booing on record.”) Chris Dodd got a higher percentage of questions than in past debates, and took good advantage of them.
The perception that Edwards probably did himself more good than his rivals was reinforced by his answer to a question that was definitely the softest softball of the forum: an audience inquiry as to whether the candidates would appoint an Official White House Blogger. “I will,” he said. “And her name will be Elizabeth Edwards.” Clearly, the man didn’t win all those trials by being slow on the uptake.
Somehow or other, there were no questions about energy policy (which much as I think global climiate change is an overriding issue, I didn’t mind that the candidates didn’t soak up a third of the debate reciting their 35-point energy plans), and not much about health care. But it was a good event, with positive vibes attributable in no small part to the feeling that the netroots had “arrived”‘ by attracting the candidates.
Not having worked in the 2004 Dean or Clark campaigns, or lived in Montana, my personal acquaintance with bloggers has been pretty much limited to those in Washington, and even there, given the ever-shrinking amount of time I spend in the Emerald City, there are many I haven’t met.
I struck partial paydirt my first night in Chicago, at a party sponsored by Time Magazine’s Swampland blog at some sushi bar. After a few minutes of random conversation with people who weren’t particularly amused by my ancient and unoriginal joke about southerners inventing sushi (“We called it ‘bait'”), I found myself chit-chatting with a mild-mannered middle-aged guy who turned out to be Duncan Black, better known as the fiery Atrios. Within minutes, I also made the acquaintance of MyDD’s Adam Connor, TAPPED’s Ben Adler, not to mention Joe Trippi and two editors of realclearpolitics.com. Later that night, at an informal gathering at the conference hotel, I met Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation, a blogger and wonk whose work I have admired for eons. And then I spent some time talking and drinking Jim Beam with a tall young man who finally introduced himself as Bob Brigham, formerly of Swing State Project and now a political consultant in California. Brigham, you see, has probably written more abusive stuff about me than anybody else in the blogosphere. But we wound up trading war stories and even talking about possible projects we could cooperate on in the future.
On Saturday, after the presidential forum, I grabbed a very late lunch at a cookout sponsored by the Teamsters, risking the possibility that the sponsors, offended by my DLC-free-trade associations if not my pink polo shirt, would figure out who I was and beat me up. Instead, I ran into Joan McCarter (better known as the DailyKos front-page blogger McJoan), who was getting well-earned props from everyone there for her role in co-moderating the forum. Joan, whom I’d never met, is far and away the Kossack who’s been friendliest to me (succeeding Armando Llorens as my personal link to KosWorld), and she was generous enough to spend some time introducing me to other Kos front-pagers (e.g., Georgia10, DavidinNYC), not to mention several congressional candidates who were there in hopes of getting endorsed for ’08.
I didn’t have a chance to finally meet Markos Moulitsas himself (with whom I’ve exchanged many an email). Closest I got to him was at the Teamsters event, when he performed the unlikely task of introducing James Hoffa.
None of this personal outreach experience matters much to anyone other than me, but I have to say that all the folks I met at YearlyKos, including the people familiar with my background, were unfailingly polite and often positive about my own work (though sometimes only relatively, as in “Yes, you’re one of the reasonable ones Over There”). It’s often said that the relative anonymity of the blogosphere sharply reduces the perceived need for civility. Whether or not that’s true, “downloading” bloggers into real people can’t hurt.
After sitting through a couple of panels, I decided to “float” for a while in order to get a better sense of all the topics under discussion.
One of the largest panel discussions (never did quite figure out the distinctions between panels, workshops and roundtables) was entitled: “Ned Lamont for Senate: What really happened?” This session was enlivened by an apparently unexpected appearance by Lamont himself, who credited the blogosphere with the initial viability of his candidacy.
During the time I was in the room, all the discussion of the Lamont campaign focused on his primary win rather than his general election loss. This brought home once again that the whole Lamont-Lieberman experience can be used to reinforce diametrically opposed points of view about the future direction of the Democratic Party (personally, I think the contest was entirely sui generis, and of limited predictive value).
I also stopped by a session called “Blogging While Female,” featuring Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte (one of the famous former Edwards bloggers), TAPPED’s Garance Franke-Ruta, Feministing’s Jessica Valenti, and YearlyKos organizer Gina Cooper. The talk there focused to a large extent on the hate mail and very personal threats of violence many women in the blogosphere routinely encounter, to the point where some have felt constrained to enlist protection from law enforcement officials. The chilling examples the panelists provided certainly shamed people like me who have in the past gotten agitated and aggrieved by the occasional email or comment-thread insult (you know, corporate whore, AIPAC stooge, Republican Lite, etc., etc.).
There was also some discussion of the overall lack of diversity in the blogosphere, which has been a source of general anxiety at this and at the first YearlyKos. To tell the truth, the overall gender (and for that matter, age) balance at the conference, as measured subjectively, seemed to be better than I would have expected. But it was most definitely a highly honkified event, with less racial diversity than, say, the DLC conference in Nashville (something the DLC has worked on for many years). Diversity concerns were reportedly one reason YearlyKos organizers have decided to rename next year’s event “Netroots Nation,” as part of an effort to expand participation well beyond the readership of DailyKos.
Trippi’s rap mainly dealt with the vast growth of internet-based campaign organizing and fundraising in the current presidential cycle, and especially with the concentration of this growth on the Democratic side of the partisan
divide. The Democratic nominee in ’08, he argued, will enter the general election battle with an extraordinary advantage over the GOP nominee in terms of pre-mobilized citizens (including campaign contributors) and new media savvy.
Armstrong got into the nuts and bolts of how internet-based politics was affecting the internal organization of campaigns, beginning with small “internet-outreach” efforts and quickly changing the structure of most campaigns’ political, communications, and fundraising departments.
All the panelists agreed that the long era of domination of campaigns by paid broadcast media strategies was coming to an end.
In answering a question from a Texan about technology and Hispanic voter outreach, Rosenberg talked about last year’s monster pro-immigrant rallies as an example of where new media trends may go next. These rallies, said Rosenberg, were largely organized, almost overnight, via Spanish-language talk radio (the third largest radio format in the U.S. today) and text messaging. With the continued evolution of cell phone technology (e.g., the I-phone), it is increasingly likely that this will become the dominant medium for political communications in the near future.
