Week before last, Matt Compton posted a review here of Matt Bai’s influential book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle To Remake Democratic Politics.
For those who enjoyed Matt’s review, or have read the book, or have simply heard the buzz about it, I recommend you go over to TPMCafe, where there’s an extensive discussion of it, including Bai himself, Mark Schmitt, Joan McCarter (a.k.a. McJoan), Garance Franke-Ruta, Nathan Newman, The Reapers (Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger) and yours truly.
To my surprise, much of the discussion (largely driven by the ever-thoughtful Mark Schmitt) has been not about the internal “argument” among Democrats on the direction of the party, but about the external “argument” Democrats need to present concerning the big challenges facing the country. It’s perhaps the most extensive discussion of a book I’ve seen at TPMCafe, and it’s still expanding. Check it out.

For those of you interested in where the Christian Right winds up in the 2008 presidential campaign, there’s an article by Jonathan Martin up at The Politico that provides an excellent overview.
While Martin frames his piece as a discussion of Fred Thompson’s lost opportunity to become the consensus candidate of the Christian Right (mainly because of his unwillingness to support a constitutional nationwide ban on gay marriages), the sense you get is that this community of would-be kingmakers is in real disarray, united in their opposition to Rudy Giuliani but unable to agree on an alternative. The case for Thompson’s candidacy made by big-time Christian Right activist Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention is revealingly defensive, and, well, about as enthusiastic as Big Fred himself.
There’s not much doubt that a viable Mike Huckabee campaign would be the answer to these folks’ prayers. But it’s not clear they are willing or able to do anything tangible to make that a reality. We’ll know more about the Arkansan’s prospects next week, when the third-quarter fundraising numbers start leaking out. If Huckabee continues to struggle in the money department, then he probably won’t have a prayer of answering the Christian Right altar call.

As Congress continues to debate a sure-to-be-vetoed reauthorization and expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), you have to admire, in a sick sort of way, the audacity of the rhetoric emerging from the White House and its conservative allies on this issue. It was best expressed in this morning’s Robert Novak column, entitled “Socialized Medicine’s Front Door.”
In this column, the Prince of Darkness chops and channels a variety of Republican speeches warning that the S-CHIP expansion represents a “government takeover of health care” (the hardy perennial sound-bite at the center of the successful effort to derail the Clinton health care plan back in 1994), and of course, “socialized medicine” (a term used less successfully a generation earlier by conservative opponents of the original Medicare legislation).
You’d think terms like “socialized medicine” might be reserved for systems in which most health care providers work for the public sector. And “government takeover,” as applied to health insurance, not the health care system itself, is a phrase that might reasonably be applied to a single-payer system that abolishes or radically limits private insurance plans
But in reality, S-CHIP, in the expanded as well as in the existing version, typically purchases private health plans for those it covers. And far from being some Washington leviathan, S-CHIP is run by the states, who make a wide variety of decisions about coverage, and also help finance the program.
When you really think about what Novak and other conservatives actually mean when they talk about “socialized medicine” or a “government takeover of health care,” the terms could and would be applied to any public-sector-financed effort to expand health care coverage, including the one Mitt Romney signed into legislation in Massachusetts. That’s why we should all get used to the anti-socialism campaign unfolding in Washington this week, because we’re going to hear it over and over again on the 2008 presidential campaign trail. And it deserves derision and contempt every time it pops up.

Inadequate disclosure of methodology, as Pollster.com has reminded us, is one common problem with political polls. But another is in how poll results are reported.
CNN provides a good example today, in a story headlined: “Giuliani Has Caught Up With Romney in New Hampshire,” based on a new CNN/WMUR poll of the Granite State conducted by the University of New Hampshire. The underlying data is that Mitt Romney’s nine-point lead over Giuliani in UNH’s July poll is now down to just one point.
So Rudy’s surging in NH, right? Well, not exactly. In July the numbers were Romney 34, Giuliani 20, Thompson 13 and McCain 12. Now they are Romney 25, Giuliani 24, McCain 18 and Thompson 13. So Rudy’s “surged” by four points, in a poll whose margin of error is 5.5%. The real news in the poll is a decline in Mitt’s support, and the most dramatic gainer was McCain, not Rudy.
From a pure horse-race perspective, the CNN story is accurate. But it’s also misleading unless you look at the actual numbers and particularly the margin of error. Still, I’m sure Rudy’s campaign is happy to take the gimme.

In her new and very useful American Prospect weekly feature The FundamentaList, Sarah Posner scores an interview with Southern Baptist Convention president Frank Page (a South Carolinian), who talks about growing evangelical conservative support for Mike Huckabee. She also reports that Huckabee’s just won the presidential straw poll at a gathering of the Palmetto Family Council, a state-based satellite of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family empire.
The locus of these developments is significant because South Cackalacki is crucial to the long-shot scenario for a Huckabee nomination. His hopes would depend on a very strong showing in Iowa (a second place finish to Mitt Romney would do the trick nicely), a decent finish in NH (where his radical views on the federal tax system might strike a chord), and then a real breakthrough in SC, a state perfectly designed for his candidate profile. SC is also crucial, of course, to fellow-southerner Fred Thompson, and one big question is whether Fred’s standing will be heavily damaged in earlier contests.
On the other hand, the Michigan and Florida side-shows, which will apparently go forward as significant contests among Republicans if not Democrats, are a real problem for a candidate like Huckabee, who probably won’t have the money to compete in either. And that’s why it’s crucial for him that the calendar shift to move NH ahead of MI, and SC ahead of FL. If the stars all align for the Arkansan, strong and visible support from SC conservative evangelicals could be a matter of political life or death for him.

SurveyUSA subscriber Marcos Moulitsas has shared with us the latest SUSA general election poll testing the Big Three Democrats (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) against the Big Three Republicans (Giuliani, Thompson and Romney), this time for Virginia.
I’ve been anticipating this poll in part because I was curious about the depth of the pro-Democratic trend in Virginia, and in part because the numbers might test my theory that John Edwards’ strong showing in national general election polls is not, contrary to the CW, due to any special appeal in the South.
The “purplish” color of Virginia–a state no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since Lyndon Johnson in 1964–was certainly reinforced by this poll. Of the nine matchups, only one (Obama versus Thompson) showed a Republican ahead (47-45).
As for Edwards, his numbers are difficult to distinguish from HRC’s. In nearly every matchup, she gets a higher percentage of the vote, while his margins over the GOP are better. If Edwards is benefitting from any “southern comfort,” or Clinton is suffering from a regional disability, it’s hard to tell here.

For serious political junkies, nothing’s more frustrating than reading about some striking poll results, and then discovering that the reliability of the poll is in question because the polling firm (or the campaign or media enterprise sponsoring the survey) won’t tell you much of anything about its methodology.
To deal with this persistent problem, Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal’s indispensible site, has started a “Disclosure Project” aimed at eliciting the kinds of information necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff, or at least to compare divergent results:

Starting today we will begin to formally request answers to a limited but fundamental set of methodological questions for every public poll asking about the primary election released in, for now, a limited set of states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or for the nation as a whole. We are starting today with requests emailed to the Iowa pollsters and will work our way through the other early states and national polls over the next few weeks, expanding to other states as our time and resources allow.

The questions focus on “screening” for likely participation in primaries or caucuses; sample size and composition; and polling techniques. And as Blumenthal pointedly mentions, pollsters are actually required by the code of ethics of their profession to make such information available on request.
This project isn’t just of concern to us junkies. Like it or not, polls affect media coverage, donations, volunteer activity, campaign strategies, and sometimes, even election results. (I can remember a gubernatorial election in my home state of Georgia many years ago when a candidate kept releasing “internal poll” results showing a late surge towards a runoff position, creating considerable media coverage and momentum. It was generally believed by political insiders that the campaign was literally just making the numbers up.)
The least we can expect is that pollsters and their paymasters let the rest of us in on their methods if they expect us to take the results seriously.

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?