The resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, coming after many months of typically stubborn Bush refusals to consider his removal, is getting puzzled reactions for its timing. But I’d say it’s par for the course for a president who has never minded flip-flopping so long as he didn’t have to admit it.
Reports that Bush is going to nominate Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as Gonzales’ replacement, however, raise a different kind of timing problem. This week will be full of reminisicences of Hurricaine Katrina, which occurred two years ago. As Douglas Brinkley’s book The Great Deluge recently reminded us, Chertoff played an especially ignominous role in the indifferent and incompetent federal response to that disaster. So I’d guess if Chertoff is the choice, the announcement will be delayed for a week or so.
But even if Bush goes with a less controversial nominee like Larry Thompson, the confirmation hearings will obviously be dominated by all the questions Gonzales has refused to answer about Justice Department political practices and the administration’s Divine Right approach to its legal prerogatives. Perhaps this will serve as a distraction to the impending Iraq debate, or perhaps it will simply intensify an atmosphere characterized by an out-of-control presidency that refuses accountability for any of its works and any of its agents. This is one moment where virtually all Democrats will agree on a full-throttle, no-holds-barred fight.

While it doesn’t represent as big a challenge as that facing Republicans in dealing with the undead legacy of George W. Bush, Democratic presidential candidates, past and present, have had to take some position on the very different legacy of Bill Clinton.
The subject was obviously central, and occasionally debilitating, to Al Gore in 2000. In 2003, Howard Dean, then the Democratic front-runner, did a speech characterizing the Clinton administration as a semi-successful exercise in “damage control” in a right-tilting Washington.
Today the Democratic candidates’ take on the Clinton legacy is complicated by the fact that the 42d president’s wife is the front-runner for the nomination.
Part of Barack Obama’s stump speech suggests that all the controversies of the Clinton Years are part of a baby boomer generational conflict that the country should simply get beyond. But he doesn’t criticize The Big He in any particular way.
Two marginal candidates have been willing to voice the semi-submerged hostility in some Left/netroots precincts to Bill Clinton’s political and policy views. Mike Gravel comes right out and says he thinks Clinton sold out the party to corporations. And Dennis Kucinich frequently suggests that Clintonism has made it hard for voters to tell the difference between Ds and Rs (an assertion, BTW, that got him booed at the YearlyKos conference a few weeks ago).
But until yesterday, no major presidential candidate Went There. In Hanover, New Hampshire, John Edwards delivered a speech that combined Obama’s anti-nostalgia rap with a Gravel/Kucinich-style assault–implicitly at least–on Clintonism, past and present, as representing a corporate-dominated Washington culture of corruption and impure compromise.
To be sure, Edwards doesn’t mention either Clinton by name. But the speech is loaded with all sorts of dog-whistle code phrases for Left-activist criticisms of the Clinton administration’s politics and policies, denouncing “triangulation,” “legislative compromises,” “corporate Democrats,” “Democratic insiders,” “Washington establishment,” and a “corrupt system” that was prevelant long before Bush took office. And these phrases were generally deployed in a way that suggests moral equivalence between Bush and both Clintons (“We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.”).
Lest someone think he was talking about, say, Ben Nelson, Edwards broke code with one phrase: “The American people deserve to know that…the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent.” And the MSM certainly hasn’t had any problem understanding what Edwards was talking about.
IMHO, this should be troubling to any Democrats concerned about party unity and winning in 2008. It’s one thing for Edwards to argue that his (often-impressive) policy platform is more thoroughly progressive than HRC’s, or even that HRC is captive to a timid, incremental approach appropriate to the 1990s but not to today’s circumstances. And had Edwards couched his remarks with one-sentence acknowledgements of the vast differences between Clinton and Bush administration policies, and the even vaster differences between HRC’s approach to every major domestic issue (the sole subject of the speech) and that of every GOP candidate, nothing he said would be objectionable to unity-minded Democrats.
But he didn’t do that. And speaking as someone with no personal stake in anybody’s campaign, I hope he backs off this tack and at least gets into the habit of defending all Democrats against the sure-to-emerge Republican claim (especially if they nominate a candidate with no prior congressional service) that Bush’s sins were attributable to a Washington culture he shared with his predecessor and his predecessor’s wife. Edwards can emulate Obama and simply argue it’s time for a new politics and new policies. But if Hillary Clinton winds up being the Democratic nominee, it will not be helpful if her GOP opponent can quote John Edwards to the effect that she can’t possibly offer change.

Louisiana politics is never dull, and rarely conventional. And we’re seeing a fresh example of that in an ad being run by the state’s Democratic Party criticizing Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal for his hostility towards–you’ll never guess this one–Protestants.
The ad, part of a series aimed at cutting into Jindal’s lead over the gubernatorial field heading towards the October 20 open primary, focuses on a 1996 Jindal article published by the New Oxford Review, that hardy outlet for Catholic “traditionalist” polemics. According to the ad, Jindal called Protestants depraved, selfish and heretical. It directs viewers to a web page offering links to that and other Jindal writings on religion, much of it also from NOR.
The 1996 piece basically reads like a first draft of Catholic Apologetics For Dummies. Relying heavily on scriptural citations, Jindal trudges through a defense of Catholic teaching on such topics as justification-by-faith, tradition-versus-scripture, the sacraments, the papacy, the apostolic succession of bishops, and Rome’s claims to universality. Other than its leaden, pre-Vatican II writing style, the only jarring thing about the article is that a guy like Jindal–at the time the wunderkind secretary of health services for Louisiana–is the author.
Unsurprisingly, the Democratic ad is running in three Northern Louisiana media markets. This is a heavily Protestant (especially Baptist and Pentecostal) region, and also where Kathleen Blanco exceeded expectations in her upset win over Jindal in 2003. Indeed, Jindal and other Republicans are probably screaming bloody murder over the ad in order to make sure the heavily Catholic population of southern LA knows he’s being attacked for his fidei defensor scribblings. Since Louisiana Democrats knew they couldn’t really microtarget the ad, you have to figure they calculated that many Catholics ain’t that jazzed about old-school Catholic-Protestant polemics, either.
My own feeling is that having forced some poor grad student researcher to read back issues of the New Oxford Review, the state Democratic Party might have done better to contrast that publication’s–and for that matter, the Vatican’s–chronic hostility to the Iraq War and Bush foreign policies generally with Jindal’s thousand-percent support for same. But perhaps the whole thing is just an effort to suggest that Bobby is, well, just a strange dude, because of, not despite, his remarkably precocious career. We’re talking about a twenty-five-year old running a Medicaid program in one of America’s poorest states, who apparently has enough spare time from his day job to pen a 16th-century style theological tract for a publication considered a extreme even by other right-wing Catholics.
Louisiana Democrats are clearly trying to suggest Jindal’s “not one of us” without getting into the vieled racial issues that likely played a role in Bobby’s loss in 2003. I’m skeptical that this latest tack will work, but Jindal had best be careful that in reacting to such criticisms, he doesn’t reinforce the larger point.

It’s become a simple truism that the aftershocks of 9/11 had a lot to do with the Republican electoral victories of 2002 and 2004, supposedly because voters suddenly made national security, a cluster of issues on which the GOP had a natural advantage, an overriding concern, with the absence of additional terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Bush’s watch being the clincher
But something a bit deeper was going on, according to John Judis, who has a fascinating piece up on the New Republic site, drawing on research from a small band of political psychologists.
To make a long story short, these psychologists conducted a variety of experiments showing that voter perceptions of George W. Bush after 9/11 dramatically improved after they had been “cued” to think about their own mortality. Moreoever, and most strikingly, these shifts were not produced by reflection on Bush’s actual record of “keeping America safe,” or even by a preoccupation with terrorism or national security. Instead, it appeared, invoking the fear of death stimulated a general lurch towards conservative sentiments on a whole range of issues, as part of what the psychologists call “worldview defense.”
It’s hardly a novel insight to suggest that an atmosphere of national or cultural crisis tends to promote authoritarian political views. This was the central theme of Fritz Stern’s famous analysis of German fascism, The Politics of Cultural Despair. But it’s another thing altogether to demonstrate that insight empirically, as the political psychologists Judis cites have done.
So what happened in 2006? Aside from the fading proximity of 9/11, Bush’s many palpable failures made him “less of a useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death,” says one of the psychologists. Thus, pre-9/11 priorities and policy preferences re-emereged, to the benefit of Democrats. This, of course, is also the major hypothesis of the recent re-evaluation of their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority published by Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The American Prospect.
But while Judis finishes his TNR essay on a hopeful note for progressives, it leaves the troubling impression that the whole phenomenon of memento mori politics is largely outside the control of Democrats. What if Republicans nominate a more “useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death” in 2008? And what if there is another major terrorist attack on the United States? Will the environment of 9/11 return? And what if anything can progressives do the counter the proported tilt of politics that might produce?

Read more…

During the brief period of Mike-o-mania last month that broke out over reports that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg might run for president on a third party ticket, some eager pundits went so far as to speculate about Hizzoner’s potential running mate, and the name Sam Nunn came up. Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a story by Jim Galloway based on interviews with Nunn and several close associates, and reported that the former Senator had ruled out being anyone’s running mate, but was exploring a presidential bid of his own, presumably in conjunction with the Unity ’08 third-party project, in which two Georgians, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon, are playing a prominent role.
Before I go any further, I should disclose that I was Nunn’s speechwriter and legislative counsel from 1989-92, and will always respect him tremendously. Indeed, his post-Senate career, focusing largely on dealing with the nuclear proliferation threat (one that the Bush administration has been almost criminally slow to tackle despite its alleged national security obsession), has been especially admirable, given the opportunities he had to instead devote himself to the accumulation of personal wealth or become a super-pundit.
But the Nunn-run talk stimulates a strong sense of deja vu. He gave some thought in 1984 to the possibility that Walter Mondale might tap him as a running mate. He seriously considered a presidential bid going into the 1988 and 1992 cycles. And in 1996, the year Nunn retired from the Senate, Ross Perot tried to get him involved in the Reform Party at some high level, perhaps even as a candidate. In every case, Nunn demurred.
During the 1992 runup, when Nunn was asked about his presidential ambitions, he sometimes cited the “Reagan Rules” as making it possible for him to delay a run until his late sixties. He’s now 68. So it probably is now or never, but which will it be?
In some respects, Nunn is the perfect vehicle for a High Broderist third-party run based on rejection of partisan polarization and a sort of Government of National Salvation designed to end gridlock in Washington. He was always as popular among Republicans as among Democrats in the Senate, and with the exception of a brief period after his successful opposition to John Tower’s confirmation as Defense Secretary and his unsuccessful effort to deny Bush 41 the right to invade Iraq, was also very popular with Republican and independent voters in Georgia (he was re-elected three times with no serious Republican opponent). While he never strayed from fidelity to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, he insisted on calling himself a conservative, and wasn’t very happy when the Democratic Leadership Council, which he chaired for two years just prior to Bill Clinton, decided to name its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute.
Moreover, Nunn’s domestic policy views (which never got much attention) during the latter stages of his Senate career never fit neatly into either party’s agenda. He was (after 1990) pro-choice, but mainly because he considered abortion bans unenforceable. He was the principal architect of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell compromise on gays in the military. Always a fiscal hawk (he spent some time as co-chairman of the Concord Coalition after leaving the Senate), his long-standing belief that “entitlement reform” is a critical national challenge has never sat well with Democrats. And right around the time of his Senate retirement, he became a prominent advocate for a consumption-based income tax scheme–an unpopular idea among Democrats as well as Republicans, who typically want to scrap income taxes altogether.
The overriding rationale of a Nunn run would probably be the argument that Democrats are too allergic to the use of force to be entrusted with national security, while Republicans have proven to be both incompetent and excessively ideological, seriously damaging U.S. credibility. Nunn would be very attractive to neo-realist elites in both parties who think the Bush-style Global War on Terror has been a disaster, but who do not favor a significant retraction in U.S. overseas commitments.
Does Nunn have the political chops to run a serious third-party campaign? That’s hard to say. He’s been in a grand total of one competitive electoral contest in his career (his first election to the Senate way back in 1972). He’s always been highly disdainful of modern media-oriented campaigns (one of his closest friends was the late Lawton Chiles of Florida, famous for his throwback style of campaigning). And while he’s actually a lively and even witty man, his public persona has always been high on gravitas but low on charisma. Most importantly, Nunn is just not that well known anymore, outside Georgia and elite circles in Washington.
On the positive side, if Nunn were to run a serious campaign with Unity ’08 backing, he would presumably have a chance to seriously contest southern states, where neither national party is particularly popular at the moment; it’s sometimes forgotten that Perot’s political achilles heel in 1992, even at the height of his campaign, was his inability to make a mark in the South. And unlike, say, Michael Bloomberg, Nunn would not likely be dismissed as a vanity candidate with no real qualifications for the presidency.
My own hunch is that Nunn probably won’t take the plunge; he’s a notoriously cautious man, and despite his unquestioned passion about issues like nuclear proliferation, it’s hard to imagine him maintaining a fire in his belly throughout the drudgery of a presidential campaign. And Nunn aside, I personally think the whole Unity 08 effort represents a fundamental misreading of the American electorate, which is likely to produce a sizable Democratic majority in 2008 if we let them (i.e., don’t do anything stupid). Today’s third-party enthusiasts are reminiscent of the group of former Labour politicians who launched the British Social Democratic Party even as Tony Blair was beginning to position Labour to win a landslide victory.

Beginning this week, TDS will be expanding its blogging corps to include three young thinkers and activists who will periodically provide fresh new content to The Daily Strategist. We are proud to welcome:
Austin Bonner: Austin has worked in communications on Capitol Hill and at a DC think tank, a congressional campaign, and, currently, a nonprofit that uses technology to connect low-income people around the world with the economic mainstream. She has also written for publications including the Austin American-Statesman, SPIN and TPMCafe.com. Austin is a graduate of the University of Texas and a proud Ann Richards Democrat.
Matt Compton: Matt Compton is an editor for the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute. In 2006, he was appointed by Governor Mike Easley to serve on the North Carolina Progress Board. Compton worked for the North Carolina Democratic Party during the 2004 election as a member of the House Caucus campaign committee. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sam Drzymala: Sam is a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, who currently works as an online organizer for a progressive nonprofit group. He is an avid student of politics and social science, as well as a dedicated campaigner and advocate. You are as likely to meet him canvassing for Democratic candidates as at a live blues or jazz show. In his free time, Sam enjoys reading only the nerdiest political science literature and playing kickball with his friends.
We’ll be adding additonal voices in the future, but all will continue to promote the TDS mission of Democratic unity and civil debate on the long-term issues affecting Democratic strategy.

The big political news this morning–announced, appropriately, via an exclusive interview with Paul Gigot on the Wall Street Journal editorial page–is that Karl Rove is leaving the White House at the end of this month.
There’s already some speculation that Rove is leaving to get out of the spotlight of congressional (and perhaps criminal justice system) scrutiny of the Bush administration’s many crimes and misdemeanors–or, to follow a very different theory, to join the presidential campaign of Fred Thompson, due to announce next month. We’ll know soon enough about that proposition. But it’s as good a time as any to assess the legacy of this strange, frightening, and ultimately defeated man.
Tne first place to stop in understanding Rove’s legacy is the masterful profile of Rove published in The New Yorker by Nicholas Lemann in August of 2003 (indeed, the title of today’s Gigot piece, “The Mark of Rove,” alludes to a term used by Lemann to denote acts of political skullduggery not directly attributable to Rove, but bearing his “mark”).
Lemann’s main thesis is that Rove’s M.O. was perfected in a series of campaigns in Texas (and I could add, in Alabama) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led to a Republican takeover of the state, top to bottom. From a strategic point of view, the “marks of Rove” were: (1) an abiding belief in ideological polarization, particularly on highly emotional issues, as the One True Way to win elections, not only by solidifying the conservative base but by forcing swing voters to pick sides on favorable terms; (2) a direct-mail specialist’s attention to electoral segmentation and what is now known as “micro-targeting;” (3) an insistence on the use of policy initiatives to attract, reward or punish specific constituencies; (4) an intense focus on the nexus between politics, policy and partisan funding sources; (5) a complete lack of inhibition about nasty, negative political tactics; and (6) a taste for secrecy and indirection.
It’s hard to identify any political or policy triumph or defeat during the Bush administration that is not essentially attributable to one of Rove’s characteristic traits. It’s true that Rove probably had little to do directly with the failed occupation of Iraq or the abandonment of New Orleans after Katrina. But on the other hand, rewarding Republican campaign contributors and activists with fat contracts and jobs in Iraq certainly bore some “mark of Rove,” as did the administration’s favoritism towards Republican-governed Mississippi and Alabama after Katrina.
In the end, all Rove’s designs ultimately backfired. Rovian polarization ultimately united the Democratic Party in intense opposition to Bush. Failed politically-driven policies, and the corruption borne of constituency- and funder-tending by the White House and Congress, ultimately drove independents into the arms of Democrats, And one of Rove’s prize swing-voter initiatives, immigration reform, blew up spectacularly, alienating the GOP’s conservative base and Latino voters as well.
It is sometimes forgotten that the peak era of Rove’s influence, the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, produced a no-margin-for-error win and narrow Republican majorities in Congress, despite the unexpected windfall to Rovian politics provided by 9/11. It’s seemed like a long way down for Bush and the GOP since then, but in truth, Bush’s popularity was never high except in a few crucial moments.
As an American citizen, I am personally happy that this man will soon no longer be on the public payroll. But for political analysts, it will be important to deconstruct the various theories of the “boy genius,” which seemed so darkly brilliant not that long ago, to identify the fatal arrogance and folly that was there all along.

The much-anticipated face-off between DLC chairman Harold Ford, Jr. and DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas on Meet the Press happened this morning. And it wasn’t quite the slugfest most people expected. Ford nicely undercut the netroots-demonizing reputation of the DLC by repeatedly praising the importance of the netroots to recent Democratic successes, and pledging to attend next year’s Netroots Nation (nee YearlyKos) gathering. And Markos abandoned his usual DLC-is-dead line by treating Ford’s organization as representing a serious faction in the Democratic Party–and indeed, by agreeing to debate Ford in the first place. Both men made a lot of billing and cooing noises, and ended the session with a handshake.
Each of them did, on the other hand, try to land a low blow.
Ford ill-advisedly (if briefly) referenced allegedly anti-semitic diaries and/or comments at DailyKos, a red herring reflecting a misunderstanding of the site’s open operating method, and misrepresenting its main content. He should not have gone there.
And Markos sought to illustrate the DLC’s alleged Republic Lite nature by tying it to “DLC Chairman” John Breaux’s role as “the architect of the Bush tax cuts.” But (1) Breaux’s DLC chairmanship ended in 1993; (2) the DLC relentlessly and totally opposed Bush’s tax cuts (viz. here), and has argued for repeal of high-income tax cuts ever since; (3) Breaux was not the “architect” of the Bush plan, but simply a senator who unfortunately traded support for the final plan in exchange for concessions that increased the payoff to low-income Americans; and (4) the DLC’s comment on Breaux’s compromise product was to compare it to putting earrings on a warthog: “Sure, it looks better, but it’s still a warthog.” I don’t have any idea why Markos tried this particular tack, but it showed some very shoddy research.
There were a couple of classic “dialogue of the deaf” moments, as when Ford touted Jon Tester and Jim Webb as centrist Democrats who won in 2006, and an incredulous Markos–who has long viewed both candidates as living refutations of the DLC–spluttering a bit. (Tester did beat a primary opponent who was long identified with the DLC, but it was hardly a netroots/DLC referendum, and best I could tell, most DLC-types in VA supported Webb from the beginning).
Over at DailyKos, the general take, unsurprisingly, is that Markos destroyed Ford, mainly because of a short moment when Markos chided the Tennessean for criticizing Harry Reid on Fox News (not being a Fox News viewer, I can’t referee that one). And I’m sure DLCers will react just as positively to Ford’s performance.
In the end, most of the real arguments between Ford and Markos were scrambled in cross-talk, or were conducted in such “code” that most viewers probably had no idea what they were talking about. The residual impression was of two people arguing about who most desparately wants Democrats to win, and who is most open to the other’s point of view–and then that handshake.

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.

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.