It’s increasingly obvious that Mitt Romney’s “second interview” to become the Conservative Alternative to McCain and Giuliani in the GOP presidential contest is working out a lot better than his first. Having jumped into a lead or strong second place in several recent polls in NH, the Mittster is now moving up fast in Iowa as well. Via TPMCafe’s Election Central, we learn that Romney’s opened up a surprisingly big lead in the latest Iowa Poll by the Des Moines Register. Among likely caucus-goers, he’s at 30%, with McCain at 18%, Giuliani at 17%, and nobody else in double digits (the poll does not include Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich).In both IA and NH, Romney seems to be benefitting from his recent ad blitz, and from the troubles of his top-tier rivals.On the Democratic side, the Register poll has John Edwards maintaining his lead at 29%, with Obama (23%) edging ahead of Clinton (21%) for second place, and Bill Richardson hitting double digits at 10%. In general, recent polls in Iowa and NH show a relatively stable three-way race among Edwards, Clinton and Obama, with Richardson (whose own recent ads have been well-received) overcoming his questionable debate performances to occupy the second tier by himself.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

The immigration deal cut last week by the White House and key Senate leaders will probably have the votes to get through the Senate, unless there’s a full-scale Democratic revolt against the size of the obnoxious “guest worker” program. But I tell you what is absolutely clear: this deal is rapidly becoming a toxic, divisive problem for Republicans, potentially as large as divisions over the Iraq War among Democrats in the not-so-distant past. If you don’t believe me, go spend some time over at the National Review site, where the deal and its Republican supporters are being savaged in increasingly intemperate terms. Aside from a very angry editorial and several columns, over at The Corner, NR’s internal blog, they’ve been discussing little else from the moment the deal was announced. There we learn that over this weekend, pro-deal Republican senators Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Saxby Chambliss of GA were lustily booed at Republican Conventions in their states. We read comparisons of pro-deal GOPers to the leaders of Vichy France. And over and over, we’re told that the deal will decimate Senate Republican prospects in 2008, and perhaps bring down the whole ticket. NR’s not alone in this extreme assessment. In his broadcast yesterday, Rush Limbaugh called the deal the “Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act.”In terms of the presidential nominating contest, all this angst is mainly bad news for John McCain, whose support for this deal compounds conservative heartburn over his cosponsorship of the earlier deal that passed the Senate. The only good thing for McCain is that the latest bill is being referred to as “Kennedy-Bush,” not “Kennedy-McCain II,” though that may be temporary. But the immediate and certain-to-grow exploitation of this issue by McCain’s rivals will make immigration front-and-center in Republican politics in a way that the Arizonan probably won’t be able to survive. Already, Mitt Romney’s running anti-immigration-deal ads. Fred Thompson’s done a radio commentary calling for it to be scrapped. The candidate in the most delicate position is probably Rudy Guiliani, who’s been trying to reposition himself on immigration by saying he wouldn’t support any deal that didn’t include a national database of illegal immigrants, but whose long record of pro-immigration comments in New York, arguably to the left of most Democrats, will not go away. Given the fact that even those Democrats who may grudgingly support the immigration deal don’t particularly like it, it’s almost certain that the growing furor will even further depress Bush’s approval ratings, perhaps dramatically. And at the risk of beating a dead horse, that means John McCain will be strongly identified with Bush’s two most controversial policies: the Iraq surge, and this immigration deal. If he’s not toast at this point, he’s surely getting a bit crispy.

In case anybody is under the misapprehension that my last post reflected disrespect towards Ezra Klein (which wasn’t my intention, though I do think he showed some disrepect to “centrists” in the subject of my unhappy response), let me say his three (so far) TAPPED posts on the immigration “deal” are the best immediate reactions I’ve seen: a good analysis of the pros and cons of the deal itself, and some real information on where it all might go next. Check them all out.

In his contribution to the TAPPED/Third Way colloquoy on the 2006 elections (see my last post), Ezra Klein goes off into a digression about the alleged “obsession” of centrist groups with polling, adding this unhelpful “hunch” about its origins:

My hunch is that both liberals and conservative intuitively understand that their philosophies have a certain instinctual resonance with the broader public, while the DLC-types are similarly aware that nobody-but-nobody wakes up in the morning yearning for a ruling class of reflexively cautious technocrats, and so they spend endless time trying to prove their support among voter’s heads because they know they’re not in sync with their guts.

This being a broadly-held and (to me) maddening stereotype of “centrist” Democrats, I’m going to try to go through this real calm-like.First of all, there’s a big difference in importance and reliability between “polls” and “exit polls,” since the former are subject to all sorts of hidden agendas, differential methodologies, questioning techniques, and timing issues, while the latter, while hardly flawless, provide a common factual base for discussion about how and why people have actually voted. The Third Way report is based on exit polls, and whatever you think of it, ought to be debated and critiqued, not dismissed as representing some sort of invidious attempt to cook the books and justify the unjustifiable.Second of all, Ezra’s impressions notwithstanding, it’s just not true that “DLC-types,” as he calls them, spend “endless time” conducting and analyzing polls while those good, principled liberals wouldn’t descend to such pedantry. Looking around the blogosphere, I see endless discussion of polls and endless assertions about electoral trends; there’s a reason so many progressive bloggers can claim to be far more interested in winning elections than in any liberal ideology. Meanwhile, the DLC has conducted exactly one poll in the last four years. It was on attitudes towards globalization and it produced results that didn’t nicely reinforce any “centrist” point of view. And third of all, the whole invidious head/gut distinction Ezra cites is, well, rather obviously anti-intellectual. It reminds me a lot of the debates back in the 1980s over the relevance of the statistical analysis of baseball, with baseball “traditionalists,” especially in MLB itself, endlessly dismissing the geeks who hadn’t played the game themselves and thus needed their silly statistics to claim a place at the table with the professionals who knew the game in their “gut.”As pioneering baseball analyst Bill James often observed at the time, everyone connected to baseball carried around certain assumptions about what mattered in measuring success and failure; the difference was that “traditionalists” valued less-reliable stats like batting averages and RBI, because they knew them to be right in their “gut,” while others actually wanted to find other measurements that told a larger and more accurate story, based on empirical evidence.And so it also goes in political analysis. I don’t know about Ezra, but in the run-up to the 2006 elections, I must have read fifteen newspaper columns, thirty magazine articles, and maybe 100 blog posts asserting that there were no longer any such thing as “swing voters,” and that this would be a “base mobilization” election in which differential turnout patterns, not persuasion, would be critical. With the frequent and honorable exception of MyDD’s Chris Bowers, few of these “analysts” bothered to offer much in the way of empirical data for this claim, before or after the election. They apparently knew it in their “gut.” I see no reason to assume there’s some sort of conflict between having ideological principles and being interested in public opinion research. As for the suggestion that “centrists” are so out of touch with the hearts and values of Democrats that they have to rely on sophistry in an effort to get them to betray their principles–well, it must be nice to just know, in your gut, that you are the values-bearer of the progressive tradition and that others aren’t, without having to look at any contrary evidence (e.g., that a sizable majority of Democratic voters, for some perverse reason, persistently identify themselves as “moderate” or “conservative,” not “liberal,” or that “DLC-type” Bill Clinton is adored by the Democratic base). As it happens, I’m never been happy with the “centrist” label, and don’t consider myself squarely in any intra-Democratic “camp.” But when anyone in the party comes forward with a fact-based case for a point of view about policy or politics, I’m willing to look at it without immediately deriding their credibility or doubting their motives.

An extended and rather heated exchange has broken out over at TAPPED regarding Third Way’s recent analysis of electoral trends between 2004 and 2006, which, to make a long story short, suggests that Democrats main vote gains last year were in “red” elements of the electorate, especially white men and high earners. The report drew criticism from Tom Schaller, Mark Schmitt and Ezra Klein. Then TAPPED let the Third Way folks respond in a guest blog, and Schaller came back at them once again.For all the fire in these posts, I have to say both sides of the argument have important, legitimate points to make. In particular, Schmitt is right, generally, about the different nature of the electorate in midterm versus general elections (though I don’t know that there’s much to gain from staring at comparisons of 2006 with 2002, given the anomylous nature of the latter). But Third Way’s right that there’s something significant about the ability of Democrats to do so well in a less congenial electorate. Schaller’s right that looking at percentage performances among different subelements of the electorate shows a different picture than Third Way’s, and avoids some of the pitfalls of the “normalization” methodology Third Way used to create its raw vote comparisons. But Third Way’s right that comparing percentages is misleading as well, since small gains in large segments of the electorate often produce more votes than large gains in small segments.I do have a couple of observations to add based on my own unpublished, unscientific analysis of 2004 and 2006 House exit polls a few months back. First of all, trends in some of the subgroups of the electorate partially undermine the assumption that Democratic gains among whites, men, marrieds, upscale voters and self-identified independents (all of which definitely occurred) can be interpreted as gains in “red” or “red-leaning” voters. In particular, when you break the electorate down into self-identified liberals, moderates and conservatives, Democrats gained roughly the same percentages across the board, without any significant change in the ideological composition of the electorate.Second of all, and more importantly, the national exit poll trends disguised some very striking regional variations. In the Northeast, Democratic gains strongly reflected the trends Third Way talks about, concentrated among white upscale suburbanites. But ideologically, Democrats gained an amazing 10 points among self-identified liberals, more than twice the gain among moderates. The West, Democrats’ second-best region, was like a different country, with gains heavily concentrated among less-educated white men, and in rural areas. In the Midwest, Democrats made no gains among suburbanites, and made surprisingly strong gains among African-Americans. And in the South, Democrats actually lost ground with suburbanites and gained nothing from moderates, while the African-American percentage of the electorate dropped significantly.Topping off all these confusing variations is the fact that the 2006 exit polls showed double-digit Democratic gains among Latinos. But virtually everyone thinks the 2004 exit polls significantly understated the Democratic Latino vote, so it’s hard to know how seriously to take that “trend.”All in all, probably the safest thing to say is that Democrats’ fine year in 2006 owed itself to a variety of national, regional and local factors; that Dems did pretty well in categories of the electorate where they’ve been struggling recently; and that the single most important trend was the strong showing Democrats made among self-identified independents, who may be “swing” voters but aren’t necessarily “moderates.” It was neither the base-mobilization election so many people predicted; nor the classic Clintonian seize-the-center election others suggested after the fact.

The big news in Washington today is that the White House and Senate leaders have agreed on another version of immigration reform legislation that would supersede the stalled Kennedy-McCain bill, and maybe stand an outside chance of enactment in the House. I’m not inclined to immediately follow Nathan Newman in labeling this a “crappy deal.” But there are clearly some problems with it. Personally, I have no inherent objection to a modification of “family unification” as the main principle in immigration preferences; this and every other country should be able to consider its own economic needs in immigration policy, so long as immediate families are able to stay together, and so long as we acknowledge that there’s obviously a need for unskilled as well as skilled labor in our workforce. More problematic is the idea, much expanded from Kennedy-McCain, of a vast “guest worker” program that would encourage immigration without any path to citizenship. It’s a prescription for officially creating the kind of alienated class of “non-persons” evident in some European countries. And the silly requirement that those obtaining “guest worker” visas have to leave the country and return periodically will simply guarantee noncompliance on an extraordinary scale.Maybe such bad provisions are necessary to get something through Congress that’s not simply punitive, but my guess is that the “deal” probably won’t fly.

I did a post over at TPMCafe about the death of Jerry Falwell, mainly dealing with my own perceptions of his less-than-titantic domination of his home town of Lynchburg, Virginia. More generally, it’s pretty clear that Falwell’s national role as anything other than a symbol of, and as an occasional embarassment to, the Christian Right ended a long time ago. Still, he was indeed a pioneer in the fateful decision of far too many evangelical leaders to subordinate their spiritual missions to a largely secular agenda of cultural reaction and Republican factional politics. I hope that like anyone who’s died, he rests in peace, but you also can’t blame me for hoping that against Falwell’s own beliefs, there’s such a thing as purgatory, and that he spends some time–no more than a few million years–getting straightened out before getting past the pearly gates.

Over at The American Prospect, Tom Schaller goes through the various reasons that conservatives are unhappy with the Big Three Republican front-runners for the 2008 presidential nomination–Giuliani, McCain and Romney–and comes up with an interesting suggestion: GOPers could decide it’s more important to make a “statement” of conservative principle than to win, and may prove it by uniting behind a second-tier candidate that they, but not general-electorate voters, like.I’m with him on his brisk diagnosis of the problems conservatives have about the Big Three. Giuliani is unacceptable to social conservatives on the issues social conservatives most care about. McCain has accumulated a long record of heresies, concluding with his terrible mispositioning on the emerging hot-button issue of immigration. And Romney’s Massachusetts record and Mormon religion are big millstones.But the problem with Schaller’s hypothesis is that there’s not an obvious vehicle for the let’s-take-a-dive-for-conservatism bandwagon. Looking at the GOP field, Tancredo for sure, and probably Brownback, have views too extreme to qualify them for the consensus-conservative mantle.Huckabee and the Thompson Twins could each serve as conservative lighting rods, but they’d probably become viable general election candidates if they got within striking distance of the nomination.The only potential candidate who meets Schaller’s congenial-loser profile is Newt Gingrich. And just today, on Good Morning America, the Newtster invited speculation that he may indeed toss his well-worn tinfoil hat into the ring.But in order to emerge as the Good Loser candidate, Gingrich would need to make a big splash in Iowa. He’s repeatedly said he won’t announce any candidacy before the end of September, and Iowa is the worst possible place for a late start.So Schaller’s hypothesis is interesting as an abstract exercise in what a conservative party might do given a not-so-conservative field of front-runners, but perhaps not terribly relevant to the actual conditions of Campaign ’08. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Fred Thompson’s still the New Candidate To Watch. Check out the large, puffy profile of Ol’ Fred that recently appeared in The Weekly Standard. Remember that his proto-campaign was first launched in the media by that reliable sounding board for cultural conservatives, Bob Novak. Check out today’s report that religious conservatives are active in promoting his candidacy.And remember–particularly if you, like Tom Schaller, believe that Republicans have become the Party of Southern Identity–that Fred Thompson is from the South, and unlike Newt Gingrich, looks and sounds the part.Fred’s underwhelming by many measures, but he’s not an obvious general-election loser, and he may be the best the Right’s got in their spring of discontent.

Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder has been frequently barbecued in the progressive blogosphere in recent years for epitomizing the Beltway Establishment mindset, and particularly its reflexive support for bipartisanship in an era of Republican-driven polarization. But he’s also long harbored a quirk that is decidedly and unfortunately unusual among bigfoot journalists: an abiding interest in political and policy developments in the states. This interest leads Broder periodically to take up state grievances with Washington, and he does so today in a blistering column about pending election reform legislation in Congress, a high priority for House Democrats. Broder lauds the objectives of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act (cosponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Rush Holt), particularly its demand for a paper trail for electronic voting systems. But then he touts a variety of state government complaints about the legislation, and gets snarky towards the end in suggesting that House Democrats don’t really care if the bill works or not. The headline assigned the column by the Post–“A Paper Trail Towards Chaos?–decisively tilts the piece. It may well be that the bill’s deadlines and independent audit requirements need some work, and there will be plenty of time to refine it in the Senate if it gets that far. But it’s clear the states’, and thus Broder’s, main complaint is that Congress will never get around to fully funding the changes the bill’s demands. And that’s where I think Broder, and his state friends, are missing a very basic point. In our constitutional system, states have an independent and fundamental responsibility to operate elections fairly. If they choose to purchase voting machines that raise questions about the fairness and reliability of vote counts, it is their independent and fundamental responsibility to answer those questions. Lest we forget, state failures to competently administer elections, ensure the right to vote, and ensure that every vote is accurately counted, have for decades forced the federal government into this arena. This isn’t one of those government functions where the feds have intervened inappropriately. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the fiscal concerns of state governments in implementing federal mandates. I’ve spent a good part of my own career advocating for those concerns, and as it happens, back in the early 1980s, actually drafted a bill, subsequently adopted, creating a point of order against budget amendments that created unfunded mandates on state and local governments. And yes, Congress should fully fund this latest effort at election reform if it wants the reforms to work. But still, this ain’t a matter of Washington telling states how to fill potholes. A mandate to require states to fulfill one of their most important constitutional responsibilities is something states should welcome, or at least not carp about, and David Broder, given his credibility with state officials, should remind them of that.

One of the perennial issues kicked up in the discussion of Jon Chait’s TNR cover article on the netroots was the abusive language frequently encountered in blogs and particularly in comment threads. To summarize a whole lot of posts by a whole lot of people, the theory among some is that MSM types are hostile to the blogosphere because they aren’t used to getting criticized up there in their comfortable perches, and/or they resent losing their oligopoly on published opinionating.That may well be true for some MSM folk (though not for Jonathan Chait), but Kevin Drum probably got closer to the more general truth in Political Animal yesterday:

This isn’t really apropos of much of anything, but it was prompted by the conversation on a variety of blogs today about why so many mainstream reporters fear and loathe the blogosphere. It was, for my taste, a wee bit disingenuous: bloggers could probably do themselves a favor by stepping back once in a while and trying to understand the impact of being on the receiving end of a hundred furious blog posts, a thousand livid comments, and five thousand enraged emails telling you in very personal terms why you’re a corrupt, sniveling, lying sycophant merely because you said something nice about Joe Lieberman or opposed net neutrality or opined that Harry Reid was wrong about the war. It’s really not the same thing as mere “blunt criticism.”

Exactly. Sure, some journalists and pundits may well be offended that the blogospheric hoipolloi aren’t simply meditating on the brilliance of their columns as though internalizing the lessons of a particularly good Sunday sermon. But for the most part, their revulsion towards bloggers is often a reaction to the speed with which their utterances are met with attacks on their character, honesty and motives, not their intelligence or (supposed) credentials. And no, it’s not just about blogospheric profanity or “style.” As someone who is a blogger, and not really much of a pundit, but who occasionally gets this sort of treatment, I can say it’s a lot easier to read that I’m a bleeping idiot, or bleeping ill-informed, than that I am (to quote one recent comment on my fine work) a “Wal-Mart fellator,” or to be informed (which has happened many times) by total strangers that I spend my free time attending Georgetown Cocktail Parties and rubbing elbows with David Broder. Having said that, I would ask, just as Kevin Drum did, whether these sort of blogospheric sins are less important than the extraordinary infusion of new voices and new viewpoints enabled by blogs. And the answer, of course, for me as well as for Kevin, is yes, by many miles.As it happens, I’m old enough to remember what it was like in the pre-Internet days when there really wasn’t any opportunity for political analysis or expression outside a very small segment of the journalistic guild. In the mid-80s, I was sorta stuck in my federal-state relations and speechwriting careers. I tried to do a lateral transfer into journalism, but was quickly informed my experience and writing ability were worthless without a journalism degree and entry-level apprenticeship. Not having the time or money to start all over, I developed the habit of writing pseudonymous letters to the editor, becoming something of a regular in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with occasional appearances in places like The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. It was all good clean fun, but I felt like a crank. And as I’ve reflected on more than one occasion since then, what I was looking for would have been perfectly and more honestly accomodated by a blog. I am abundantly aware there are many, many people out there blogging and commenting who have more to say, and who express it better, than I did back then, or than I do today, for that matter. Many of them labor in obscurity, but some, including quite a few who are now Big Wheels in the blogosphere, started as nobodies and gained attention purely on the merits, not by climbing the greasy pole of any journalistic or political profession. You don’t have to buy into the whole People-Powered Movement idea that the netroots are turning politics upside down to accept that blogs have indeed turned journalism and political discourse generally upside down. And that’s unambiguously a good thing, for my money, and worth far more than all the verbal sticks and stones aimed by bloggers and commentors towards thee or me.