There’s been quite a buzz in the blogosphere and elsewhere recently about the likelihood that the Bush administration’s ultimate fallback goal in Iraq is to establish permanent U.S. military bases, as a sort of shriveled imperial booby-prize for our disastrous policies towards that country. Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED has a good summary of the latest talk. You’d think that maybe this was an issue nobody had noticed until recently. But I happen to remember that clearly and publicly abandoning any intention to set up permanent bases was one of the major recommendations made by Larry Diamond (an original opponent of the Iraq War, but whose unhappy service in the Provisional Coalition Authority made him suspect in some antiwar circles) in his 2005 book, Squandered Victory. As it happens, the DLC endorsed that position–not only opposing permanent bases, but making a clear, presidential renunciation of permanent bases a critical step in salvaging the disaster–at about the same time.I mention this very simply as a reminder of little-noticed Democratic unity on Iraq, obscured by the original decision to go to war; the more recent obsession with withdrawal deadlines; and the latest fight over troop funding and residual troop commitments after combat troops leave. The really big picture is that Republicans want to keep fighting this war and stay in Iraq forever; Democrats want to end the combat role very quickly and make it clear that any permanent military presence in Iraq is way out of bounds. Maybe that’s not everybody’s favorite way to draw the partisan lines on Iraq, but it’s a pretty clear line–the line between fighting a war and supporting a quick transition, and the line between soon and forever.

As you probably know if you’ve been following the presidential campaign news, Barack Obama released his long-awaited health care reform proposal earlier this week, and it’s getting decidedly mixed reviews from the chattering classes. Two progressive blogger/journalists with pretty good street cred on health care issues, Ezra Klein and Jon Cohn, have published quite similar takes, praising many of the details of the plan but decrying its timidity in challenging the health care status quo–most particularly its failure to provide universal coverage (other than for children). On the positive side, it does indeed seem that Obama’s plan represents sort of a greatest hits collection of incremental health care reform ideas. It picks up John Kerry’s underappreciated 2004 proposal for federal reinsurance of catastrophic health costs, which could have a big impact on rising insurance premiums. It adopts the federal employee health plan model for a national insurance purchasing pool, which makes abundant good sense substantively and politically. It calls for a federally-driven shift towards prevention and chronic disease management, along with IT investments to help control costs and improve quality, which ought to be a point of agreement among those who may disagree on financing mechanisms and/or the role of public and private sectors. It includes a direct assault on health care industry abuses through federal regulation, instead of treating such abuses as an unavoidable byproduct of for-profit involvement in health care. It does cover all kids, which makes sense if you aren’t going to cover everybody. And it provides very robust subsidies to make voluntary health insurance affordable to as broad a segment of the uninsured as possible, along with an employer mandate to avoid erosion of existing coverage. Those are a heap o’ positives, but the negatives, most especially the plan’s failure to include a universal individual mandate for health insurance, and its complexity, are likely to get more attention, on both substantive and political grounds. Substantively, the plan obviously fails to fundamentally overhaul the current system, with its patchwork of public and private programs, its heavy reliance on economically damaging and arguably regressive employer-based coverage, and its failure to cover everyone. And politically, the plan will reinforce claims that Obama isn’t quite the transformative, great-leap-forward progressive so many have seen in him. One particular problem for Obama is that his plan superficially resembles the Massachusetts initiative signed by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, with the crucial exception that Massachusetts did include a universal individual mandate for coverage (underfunded, to be sure, but still in place). Another is that Obama’s plan achieves less than universal coverage at a pretty steep price tag, given its lavish subsidies to tempt rather than force individuals into obtaining insurance. Beyond the initial reactions, perceptions of Obama’s plan will be crucially influenced by his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. John Edwards is already in a position to exploit Obama’s incrementalism on health care, given his own comprehensive universal plan, which not only embraces an individual mandate for coverage but also provides a stronger Medicare-style public option attractive to Democrats who favor a single-payer system. Given Edwards’ competition with Obama for the support of left-leaning Democrats, this could become an important point of distinction between the two candidates, at least among activists. But the other shoe that will soon drop is Hillary Clinton’s; she’s slowly rolling out a very thorough and comprehensive health care reform proposal, building on her unquestioned expertise in this field. Still under wraps is what she would do to achieve expanded coverage. If she goes for a universal plan (which is quite likely), then Obama will begin to look like an incrementalist outlier among those who care about policy details.

It’s rare these days to find a blog post by someone calling him or herself a New Democrat, and rarer still when that someone is a member of the post-Clinton generation of political activists and analysts. So I have more than a passing interest in the Table For One guest blogs being posted by Scott Winship (former managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, and now with Third Way) over at TPMCafe. Scott’s talking about the need for empiricism among progressives, and secondarily, defending the progressive credentials of what used to be called the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. I’ll be doing a post or two myself in that discussion, but for the time being, Scott is certainly holding his own without reinforcements. Check it out.

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers has an important post about one of the most fundamental but insufficiently discussed lessons of the 2006 elections: the collapse of the supposedly invincible Right Wing Machine.

One of the nice side effects from our great electoral success in 2006 is that the tide of books, speeches, and studies by progressives with conservative movement envy has been significantly reduced. No more do we have to hear about how great Republicans are at virtually everything political: language crafting, staying on message, voter identification, GOTV, paid media quality, free media booking, etc. Now that Republicans and the conservative movement have been historically trounced on the electoral front, their political sophistication no longer appears all that profound. We beat them at the height of their fundraising prowess, the height of their early voting programs, the height of their voter contact programs, and basically the height of their everything. Republicans did not lose in 2006 because of mistakes. In fact, their machine was working so well that supposed uber-genius Karl Rove was convinced that Republicans would do just fine in the 2006 elections.

That’s all quite true. But I’d go a bit deeper on why the machine crashed, and what progressives should infer not simply about the quality of that machine, but about the seeds of destruction that were inherent in its very nature. The “conservative movement envy” Chris is talking about, and that I’ve deplored on many occasions, was all about admiration for the unity, discipline, ideological rigor, “base” orientation, and sheer ruthlessness of the conservative apparatus in all its many subelements. Progressives who were convinced that Democrats as a whole were losing elections because they were disunited, ideologically heterodox, disloyal to the “base,” and cowardly, looked across the great divide and often expressed a desire to make Democrats more like Republicans in every one of those respects. To put it simply, many progressives reflexively thought that a coalition party like the Democrats was at a permanent disadvantage against an ideological party like the GOP, and moreover, that its coalition character made even electoral victories bittersweet, given the necessity for both internal and external compromise. But as we’ve seen over the last few years, “machine” politics, particularly of the conservative variety, are largely incompatible, except in very unusual circumstances, with any sort of effective government. When ideology drives policy, and partisan unity is made an end in itself, there’s no internal debate, no respect for empirical reality, no interest in genuine persuasion, no flexibility, no room for error, and no feedback mechanism other than the demands of “base” activists and opinion-leaders and the money-lenders who feed the whole beast. And when the ideology in question denies a positive role for government, favors unilateral violence as the sole instrument for American influence in the world, and views half of the U.S. population as complicit in a domestic Holocaust (legalized abortion) and in the destruction of all the norms of western civilization–well, it’s not surprising that you wind up with a record of folly, malicious mendacity, incompetence, corruption and authoritarianism like Bush’s. It’s very important that progressives understand that the results in 2006 were largely dictated by that record, not by strategic or tactical errors in the GOP campaign, or for that matter, by the strategic or tactical brilliance of Democrats. Yes, the expanded playing field and “fighting spirit” adopted by Democrats, and the hard work and enthusiasm evident at the grassroots (and in the netroots) were crucial in exploiting the opportunity created by the GOP “machine,” but when you look at the freshman congressional class of 2006, it’s clear we are still a coalition party, notwithstanding efforts to describe last year’s winners as a new breed of “populists.” All this is immediately relevant in view of the anger and despair (and those words are no exaggeration) of many progressive activists over last week’s Democratic divisions on Iraq funding. Such divisions are inevitably going to happen in a coalition party, and for all its sometimes maddening disadvantages, it’s still better than a party whose unity and ideological rigor can sometimes lead it down the road to perdition, with no road back (viz., a Republican Party still chained to its conservative base and its domestic and international delusions).

I’m just old enough to actually remember a time when large elements of the American male population had died or risked death in uniform, and just young enough to have legally avoided military service myself. I was lucky, while many of my Vietnam-era peers weren’t, and part of the emotion properly felt on Memorial Day has to do with the recognition of young men and women who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and paid the ransom for the good luck the rest of us enjoyed. Life and death in modern war are rarely a simple matter of skill or courage; brave individuals often die with no opportunity to actually face their enemies. That was true in the trench warfare of World War I; the Total War of World War II; the jungle war of Vietnam; and the shadow war in Iraq. And that is why in modern war, the System–the government, the generals, the war plans, and the war aims–are so culpable for unnecessary deaths when they occur.So it is entirely appropriate on Memorial Day to remember not only the sacrifices of Americans who died for their country, but to remember the specific reasons they died, and the leadership, good and bad, that sacrificed them, and is sacrificing them today.

Yesterday Chris Bowers of MyDD did a long, interesting post about the Third Way organization, and wondered aloud why he should treat as comrades-in-arms people whose name, he suspects, represents a commitment to extinguish his and his friends’ influence over Democratic politics.Here’s the key section:

To be perfectly blunt, why would I want to speak to a group that seems to have been created for the purpose of reducing the influence over public policy of those with whom I share like-minded legislative ideals? Even their very name directly implies that I am wrong when it comes to public policy, and must be stopped, as it seems to me that I may very well be one of the two “ways” from which they are overtly, and equally, distancing themselves. However, at the same time, all of their members seem to be Democrats, and the group self-identifies as “progressive.” What’s going on here?

Now the Third Way folks are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, and I in no way represent them. But I do know a fair amount about the historical meaning of “the Third Way,” and can answer at least parts of Chris’ basic question.First of all, the term “Third Way,” used most often in the U.S. and in the U.K. to describe the New Democrat movement associated with Bill Clinton, and the New Labour movement associated with Tony Blair, referred not to some middle-point between Left and Right, but to a modernizing and self-consciously progressive effort to create a new Left capable of competing with the New Right of the U.S. conservative movement and of the British neo-liberal ascendancy of the early 1990s. In the U.S., the Third Way was aimed at transcending not the Left per se, but the paleo-liberals of the Democratic establishment of the 1970s and 1980s, who were temperamentally reactionary in that their sole purpose in political life seemed to be the preservation of every legislative and bureaucratic detail of the New Deal/Great Society accomplishment of the distant past, regardless of changing times or perverse outcomes.What really started the “Third Way” movement in the U.S., and led immediately to the creation of the DLC, was Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign, which was a direct challenge to “the groups,” the vast coalition of single-issue advocacy organizations united behind the candidacy of Walter Mondale. “The groups” were focused almost exclusively on taking the party and the country back to the pre-Reagan 1970s; the proto-Third Wayers thought that progressives needed to stand for something, well, progressive, even if the media insisted on calling any alternative to the prevailing Democratic orthodoxy “moderate” or “centrist” or “neoliberal” or even “conservative” (and yes, some advocates of the alternative went by each of these monnikers, along with just plain “liberal”). Mondale’s disastrous general election defeat gave the new movement a lot of momentum.In 1988, Dukakis basically straddled the lines of division in the Democratic Party, but did, it is sometimes forgotten, perform a lot better than Mondale. And in 1992, Clinton campaigned from beginning to end as a “different kind of Democrat,” without notably sacrificing any basic progressive principles or for that matter, progressive support.Throughout his presidency, when Clinton talked about “the Third Way,” he invariably meant it not as a compromise between Left and Right, but as a pursuit of progressive values and goals focused on legitimate issues often raised by conservatives (e.g., welfare reform or crime reduction), and sometimes using nontraditional means (e.g., markets or state-based initiatives). Just to set one chesnut aside, Clinton (and for that matter, the DLC) never embraced the idea of “triangulation,” a deliberate effort to marginalize or even campaign against those in the party (again, mainly the “paleoliberals”) who differed from him on policy grounds. That term was the construct of one man, Dick Morris, who had a much-exaggerated effect on one relatively short phase of Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. And even Morris defined “triangulation” as developing progressive approaches to issues monopolized by conservatives.In Britain, the Third Way referred to the Labour Party’s abandonment of some of the shibboleths of the Labour Party past–such as a commitment to nationalization of much of industry–along with a more immediately relevant agenda that dealt with post-industrial social issues in a progressive way, and, emulating Clinton, with progressive approaches to “conservative” issues like crime.While the “Third Way” monniker was very controversial outside the U.S. and U.K., it came to be used by many observers as a shorthand for the center-left revival of the mid-to-late 1990s, which in country after country involved a self-conscious revision–not abandonment–of the social democratic orthodoxy of the Left in much of the twentieth century. And despite the electoral reverses of the Left in the current decade, and the divisions, at least in the U.S. and Europe, created by differences of opinion about how to deal with the corrupto-Right of the Bush administration and its overseas allies–much of the Third Way reform effort has been internalized by the Left.So I would say to Chris: the term Third Way is not aimed at marginalizing you or what you consider to be the contemporary Left. Yes, it does represent the belief that the progressive reform effort of the 1990s is still alive and is still needed. But its main enemy continues to be the Right, and its main goal remains the conversion of progressives to a point of view that transcends base-tending, preservation of old government programs, and reflexive opposition to progressive approaches to “conservative issues.” Like that or not, it’s a legitimate exercise that cannot be rejected out of hand as somehow apostate. Moreover, genuine Third Wayers, including the organization that has chosen to take that name, are generally open to empirical discussion of the value of their political analysis and policy ideas, and don’t get into silly attacks on “liberals” or “the Left.” If they basically live up to that standard of intra-party comity and rational discussion, sure, Chris, you should at least talk to them, and compare notes. You should assume you are on the same side, until convinced otherwise.

In a bit of a surprise, former Lt. Gov. Steve Beshear won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Kentucky today, winning just over the 40% of the vote necessary to avoid a runoff. He enters the general election contest as a heavy favorite over scandal-plagued Republican incumbent Ernie Fletcher, who easily beat former U.S. Rep. Anne Northrup for the GOP nomination.Until very recently, Beshear trailed self-funded businessman Bruce Lunsford in most polls, and even after pulling ahead in the stretch run, was expected to face a runoff. The Louisville Courier-Journal credited Beshear’s late momentum to his endorsement by State Treasurer Jonathan Miller, who withdrew from the race two weeks ago. (Miller happens to be a friend of mine and a long-time DLC activist. If he couldn’t win, I’m glad he made a decisive difference in the race by withdrawing. He’s still under 40, and will be heard from in the future, I’m sure). If you’ve been following the race, you may know that Lunsford’s early lead in the polls gave a lot of Democrats heartburn, in no small part because of his endorsement of Fletcher in 2003 after he ended his own campaign that year. Tonight Lunsford endorsed Beshear relatively early in the evening, and said he’d withdraw if Beshear missed the 40% threshold. Beshear’s running-mate is Dr. Dan Mongiardo, who nearly upset Republican Sen. Jim Bunning in 2004. Fletcher also won his primary on a burst of late momentum, having trailed Northrup–who was endorsed by Bunning and by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell–in most early polls. But few observers think he can win the general election, after compiling an ethics record that would embarrass Jack Abramoff. So it’s looking good for Kentucky to turn blue this November.

The new immigration deal, which has barely been revealed in its details, survived a simple vote to proceed in the Senate, but amidst signs that it will be buffeted from almost every direction.39 Democrats and 30 Republicans voted for cloture on the motion to proceed on the deal; 5 Democrats and 18 Republicans voted against it. But all over the chamber, senators who voted both yea and nay vowed to change the deal in incompatible ways, as the Washington Post explained:

One of the first Republican amendments, by Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.), would seek to make English the official language of the United States.An amendment by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) would impose a hefty surcharge on illegal immigrants granted legal status to help states pay for the medical and educational services such immigrants would claim. Another from Cornyn would allow federal law enforcement agents to use information from visa applications to investigate allegations of fraud in the legalization process.Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) said she wants any immigration legislation to require illegal immigrants to return to their home country to apply for legal status.On the other side of the aisle, the biggest threats revolve around a temporary-worker program that would grant two-year work visas, renewable up to three times, as long as foreign workers leave the country between each two-year stint. Labor unions contend that the program would depress U.S. wages and create an underclass of abused foreign workers. Business groups say the structure of the program is unrealistic, since it guarantees instability in the labor supply.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), with the backing of Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), will move as soon as today to slash in half the number of temporary work visas, to 200,000 a year. Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will try to strike the program from the bill altogether, and they are likely to pick up support from the Senate’s most liberal and most conservative members.

Senate managers of the bill have already given up on earlier plans to race the bill through the chamber before the Memorial Day recess. All hell is likely to break loose during the ensuing debate. And it looks less and less likely that the bill will survive the amendment battles with the 60 votes necessary to break a certain filibuster. And even if all that happens, Speaker Pelosi has made it clear the House is likely to pass a bill that doesn’t much resemble the Senate deal.I think we’re looking at 2009 for any genuine immigration reform effort.

A couple of days ago, I did an unhappy post lengthily taking issue with something Ezra Klein had to say at TAPPED about polls and Democratic “centrists,” and wanted to report that Ezra subsequently apologized for the whole thing, in terms that went far beyond anything necessary to satisfy me or anyone else. I hope that next time I say something that might unintentionally cause offense, I have half the decency and good grace Ezra’s showing here.

As a useful summary over at RealClearPolitics shows, initial response to last week’s immigration deal in the nation’s editorial pages has been relatively positive. But today, the New York Times came out with guns blazing and urged that the deal be rejected if it’s not significantly improved, with the vast “guest-worker” program contemplated in the proposal being the major flashpoint. Given the incredibly hostile reaction to the deal among so many Republicans, it won’t take many Democratic defections to bring it down in Congress, if not in the Senate, then in the House. So the Times’ position could wind up being pretty influential, particularly given the widespread if muted Democratic sentiment that a big Democratic year in 2008 could produce a better deal.