It’s been an interesting day here at the DLC. This morning we hosted an event featuring an array of top union officials to announce the DLC’s endorsement of the labor movement’s current top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Speakers at the event included Al From; our chairman, Gov. Tom Vilsack; AFL-CIO president John Sweeney; Change to Win Federation chair Anna Burger; AFSCME president Gerald McEntee; and Steelworkers’ Secretary-Treasurer James English.The EFCA, colloquially known as “card check,” would require recognition of unions as collective bargaining agents if a majority of workers in a particular workplace sign verifiable statements supporting the organization of a union. Under current law, employers can (and generally do) request a formal election before recognizing unions, a requirement that often creates long delays, expensive election campaigns, and, because the penalties for illegal employer activities are so light, all sorts of intimidation tactics against pro-union employees, ranging from firings to threats of layoffs and plant closings. This system has contributed materially to the decline of union membership, despite constant polls showing sizeable majorities of workers would join unions if given a fair chance.The labor movement is making a major push for EFCA this fall, while also seeking to make it a significant campaign issue in Congressional and even state elections. Nearly half of the House, along with 43 senators, are cosponsors, so the timing is right to show a united progressive front on this legislation.As Gov. Vilsack said at the event:

The DLC has come together today with the nation’s top labor leaders to speak with one voice guarding a worker’s right to choose to join a union without fear or intimidation. We believe that worker protection is a concern to all Americans and will work together to ensure the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. I am pleased we have found common ground on this very important issue and look forward to a productive and on-going dialogue between organizations.

As this last comment indicated, the EFCA endorsement represented the first fruits of a dialogue between the DLC and a broad range of unions on economic issues–a dialogue created by Vilsack along with long-time DLC-supporting unions like the Firefighters and the Sheet Metal Workers (the discussions have also included a recent addition to the ranks of DLC donors, the National Education Association). Having been in some of the discussions, I can tell you that for every issue like trade that divides the DLC from some labor movement representatives, there are quite a few others that unite us, aside from the overriding goal of getting rid of the country’s current economic leadership.And this common ground is not that surprising. Back in 2004, a similar dialogue between the Progressive Policy Institute and a diverse group of union-oriented journalists and policy wonks (convened by Donkey Rising chief Ruy Teixeira and then-PPI veep Rob Atkinson) produced a remarkable joint op-ed by PPI president Will Marshall and American Prospect founding co-editor Bob Kuttner laying out a common economic agenda for the Democratic Party and the country.Regular readers of this blog probably know I love this sort of stereotype-busting development that serves as a reminder of how much progressives, for all their wrangling, have in common. The Marshall-Kuttner op-ed got very little attention; maybe today’s event will be enough of a dog-bites-man story to turn a few heads.

Although Autumn doesn’t officially begin for another two-and-a-half weeks, Labor Day is semi-officially the transition from Vacation Time to the resumption of school, work, and serious politics. On the last point, I intend to blog regularly from now until November about the midterm elections. It is shaping up as a great year for Democrats across the board, and I personally think the abandonment of the all-politics-is-local GOP congressional strategy in favor of a classic Rovian attack on godless pacifist Democrats may well backfire. I may also comment now and then on another obsession: college football. My Georgia Bulldogs won a tune-up game against I-AA Western Kentucky on Saturday, but next week will have to go to Columbia, South Cackalacki to take on the Old Ball Coach, whose Gamecocks shut out Mississippi State in their first contest. Most Georgia fans don’t want to admit it, but Steve Spurrier had a lot to do with the Dawgs’ SEC title last year, mainly because of his upset win over his alma mater, the Florida Gators. This year, the Roosters are legitimate SEC East contenders. Beating them at home would be satisfying in terms of tormenting Georgia’s ancient enemy in the smirk and the visor. But it would also help replicate last year’s dynamic of forcing Spurrier to knock off Tennessee and Florida to complete a successful season. I’m glad Labor Day has come and gone, and look forward to the real autumn season when the heat and humidity retreat and the turning leaves remind us all of the passing nature of life, and its perennial beauty.

I have to admit I was a bit stricken by a question posed at TAPPED today by my young and much esteemed friend Matt Yglesias: “Have I ever mentioned that I hate baby boomers?”Matt was reacting to a particularly confused NYT column by baby boomer Andrew Rosenthal complaining that today’s antiwar crowd does not know how to do protests–an argument complicated somewhat by his use of an antiwar concert by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to show that the boomer example of how to sing and chant wars away has been lost. I couldn’t agree more with Matt’s assessment of Rosenthal, or with his broader argument that “protest politics,” as opposed to the more conventional kind, is largely ineffective.But I have to say that Rosenthal’s silly claim that boomers were politically superior to their children is no more objectionable than Matt’s silly claim to the contrary. I’m certainly glad that after twenty years of post-boomer coherts of young folks who tended to vote Republican, the arrows turned during the Cinton era and have tilted left ever since. And I am more than aware that boomer progressivism has been vastly overrated; Nixon, after all, carried the Youth Vote in 1972 after the McGovern campaign pioneered direct appeals to first-time voters.But more generally, it’s time to bury the idea that any generation–past, present or future–embodies virtue or vice in any great measure. We all know about the “greatest generation” of WW2, and its contributions to democracy are rightly praised; but I am more impressed with the previous generation of Americans who suffered through the Great Depression. They were just as moral and hard-working as any previous or later generation, but due to forces far beyond their control, roughly one-third of them were regularly unemployed, and an even higher percentage saw their dreams shattered and their lives blighted. Indeed, the example of that generation–along with the hard-working analogous people around the world who happen to live in dysfunctional societies and economies–is the main reason I reject the whole conservative and Republican social and economic philosophy.Virtue and success are not, in the end, identical, or even close to identical. Politics and policy do really matter, in terms of how life is actually lived by most of us. There are no great or lesser generations of Americans. There are just lucky and unlucky Americans, and whatever our generational background, the challenge is to make life a better bargain. I’m happy to be told that my twentieth-century experience makes it hard for me to understand twenty-first century realities. But let’s don’t claim any superiority for any generation, and let’s hope a combination of new and old experiences will help progressives understand the complicated perspectives of an electorate that straddles the centuries.

You have to figure George W. Bush would have preferred to be anywhere else (with the exception of Iraq) today other than in New Orleans. But on the first anniversary of the virtual destruction of a city beloved by the whole world, had Bush been anywhere else, it would have reminded that whole world of his administration’s absence when the levees broke.Now his marginally repentant words in New Orleans will simply be fodder for news reports that not only bring back the horrific images of 2005, but explain to a forgetful nation how bad things still are in the Crescent City. Here’s CNN’s wrap-up on that topic:

Only half of New Orleans has electricity. Half its hospitals are closed. Violent crime is up. Less than half the population has returned. Tens of thousands of families still live in trailers and mobile homes with no real timetable for moving to more permanent housing. Insurance settlements are mired in red tape. The city still has no master rebuilding plan. And while much debris has been cleared, some remains as if the clock stopped when the storm struck.

For more detailed reports on the disaster after the disaster–and the culpability of the administration for failing after its initial failures–you should check out the special section at TPMCafe.com called “After the Levees.” It will likely make you, as it did me, angry all over again.

I know that criticizing Katherine Harris, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida, is sorta like shooting fish in a barrel. But Lord, does she ever flop arond in that barrel!Her latest nutquest is in an interview with a Florida Baptist periodical, wherein she goes way out of her way to attack the very idea of separation of church and state, and to suggest a religious test for candidates for office:

The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or a lawyer, but in government and we have to have elected officials in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended….If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.

Nobody ever accused Katherine Harris of any original thoughts, so we’re offered up sort of a right-wing theocratic greatest hits: If you’re Christian, you have to be obsessed with banning abortion and gay rights. Any political action that does not focus on these eccentric causes is un-Christian. And any silly constitutional scruples about religion-based policies offends the Founding Fathers, and leads to “legislating sin.”I don’t know whether this pronouncement is more offensive for its ignorance of Christianity, its ignorance of the Founding Fathers (particularly Jefferson, for whom freedom of and from religion was paramount in his constitutional thinking), or its affrontary to the significant majority of Americans who do not share her particular views of God’s Will for Public Policy.Harris’ rant reminds me of a moment back in the 1980s, when the House was doing one of those silly late-autumn round-the-clock sessions. As always, a junior Member from the majority was in the chair, and it happened to be Rep. Barney Frank at some wee-hours moment when a Republican was making a speech about America’s status as a Christian Nation. Frank quickly replied from the chair: “If this is a Christian Nation, how come some poor Jew has to get up in the middle of the night to preside over the House of Representatives?”Katherine Harris decided a long time ago that her strategy for heading off any primary competition for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate was to combine total fidelity to the Christian Right with her GOP folk-hero status as the woman who helped hand the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000.But she hasn’t quite gotten the Bushian knack of pandering to the Christian Right without coming right out and endorsing theocracy. There are actually still a lot of Baptists particularly, and conservative evangelical Christians generally, who are a little queasy about condemning the separation of church and state–a doctrine that has obviously had a lot to do with the freedom and growth of evangelical Christianity in this country, and used to be a mainstay of Baptist identity as well. Katherine Harris misses all the nuances, and like a woman sporting a lavish mink coat in warm weather, manages to raise tackiness to new levels every time she goes public.

The big news out of Washington today is that the FDA, after years of politically motivated foot-dragging, suddenly approved over-the-counter sales of the emergency contraceptive Plan B, a so-called “morning-after” pill. According to the Washington Post, this decision was part of a deal that will allow Bush FDA appointee Andrew von Eschenbach obtain a permanent position (the nomination had been held up by Sens. Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray precisely to obtain this result).Predictably, social conservatives blasted the decision and the underlying deal as another sell-out by the administration to business interests.

The group Concerned Women for America has led the opposition to wider availability of Plan B, and its president, Wendy Wright, criticized the administration last week for its apparent change of position. She called for von Eschenbach’s nomination to be withdrawn, citing his “pandering to political activists and a drug company.”

Whatever its motivation, the decision will presumably take distribution of Plan B out of the hands of those self-styled Pharmacists of Conscience around the country who have refused to fill prescriptions for panic-stricken and clock-watching women seeking emergency contraception.I guess now we can expect to see a new movement among Clerks of Conscience who refuse to ring up the over-the-counter drug.One thing is clear. Over on the demand side of the equation, the decision should encourage Men of Conscience to exercise a little responsibility for their own contributions to potential unwanted pregnancies by trotting their own butts down to the pharmacy and buying Plan B for their worried partners. Let them deal with the disapproving glares at the drug store counter for a change.

After reading Matt Taibbi’s second straight Rolling Stone column about the satanic conspiracy I am apparently working for here at the DLC, I’ve decided he’s a lot of fun, much like a particularly twisted roller coaster ride. You never quite know where he’s going next, but he gets there pretty fast, with all sorts of dizzying upside-down turns.Taibbi’s Big Insight, with which I suspect he will bludgeon readers regularly, is that American politics generally, and Democratic Party politics in particular, are fundamentally rigged by “the holy trinity of the American political establishment — big business, the major political parties and the commercial media.” In Taibbi-land, moreover, this Establishment is not simply benighted or corrupt; it is fundamentally determined to destroy democracy by denying actual voters any say in the political affairs of either party.And here’s where the roller coaster ride gains momentum. Taibbi goes off on a loop-de-loop suggesting that the Holy Trinity is the only thing standing between Hillary Clinton’s obscure primary opponent, Jonathan Tasini, and a Lamont-style upset. And then, suddenly, he goes upside-down:

It’s a simple formula for running one-half of American politics; you decide on John Kerry two years before the presidential vote, raise him $200 million bucks, and let CNN and The New York Times take care of any Howard Deans who might happen to pop up in the meantime.

The People, according to Taibbi’s logic, would have chosen Dean as the Democratic nominee if the Holy Trinity had not already decided on Kerry.This hypothesis is pretty interesting, to say the least. Maybe I’m just old and have a fading memory, but I seem to recall a very different situation in late 2003, the period just before The People had any say over the Democratic nomination for president in 2004–when the Holy Trinity really had a lot of power, and it was all about buzz and conventional wisdom and money.This last, pre-voter phase of the nomination contest was actually the high point of the Dean campaign and the low point of the Kerry campaign. Unless I’m just imagining this, Dean was kicking butt on the money front; he was raking in endorsements; the mainstream media had all but crowned him as the nominee; even Al From and Bruce Reed felt compelled to make it clear they would loyally support him if he won. Kerry had been gleefully, joyously left for dead by a Media Establishment that never liked him to begin with. Those bigfoot political reporters who had not already called the nomination for Dean, before a single vote was cast, were hyping Edwards or Clark.Then the Iowa Caucuses happened, in a state and on a terrain that were entirely friendly to the kind of activist-based, antiwar, energized People Power of the Dean campaign. Yet the Doctor began his decline while John Kerry rose from the dead. You’d have to be stone crazy to think the Holy Trinity scripted this series of events two years in advance.Don’t get me wrong: I’m not bashing Dean here. His 2003-2004 take on Iraq–it was a mistake, but one that the U.S. was morally required to carry through to victory–would today put him on the right wing of Democratic opinion on the war. Moreover, Dean’s campaign was very important in changing how campaigns are organized, run and financed, largely for the better. We’ll never know whether he would have been a better general election candidate than Kerry.But what we do know is that for whatever reason, the Democratic electorate consistently chose John Kerry over Howard Dean, even when money, media, and the party establishment dictated otherwise. And we also know that people like Matt Taibbi who respect The People when they agree with him, and consider them disenfranchised and deluded when they don’t, are just as elitist as anybody in DC. But Matt has to take us on quite a crazy ride to square that particular circle.

I may not agree with Charles P. Pierce of TAPPED about St. Paul, but I sure do agree with his assessment of a peculiar op-ed by Michael Barone posted at RealClearPolitics. It’s sort of a Cliff Notes version of the ancient conservative argument that Moral Relativism is Destroying America, linked to a vague neo-McCarthyite suggestion that the shadowy academic missionaries of said Relativism are The Enemy Within in the war against jihadism.After rightly praising Barone’s enduring contributions as co-founder and editor of The Almanac of American Politics, Pierce ends his post by saying:

Sorry, Michael, but I’m going to be subjecting the next Almanac to what you would call “fine-tooth-comb” analysis, just to make sure you haven’t slipped any unicorns in there.

Well, I had the same thought last year, and took a close look at the 2006 Almanac in Blueprint magazine, concluding that Barone the conservative pundit was beginning to seriously undermine Barone the brilliant political analyst. It’s a sad devolution; here’s hoping Barone somehow snaps out of it and regains his grip.

In a presumably tongue-in-cheek comment on a Baptist church that cited the First Epistle to Timothy as grounds for dismissing a woman from a Sunday School teaching post she’d had for 54 years, Charles P. Pierce of TAPPED proposed a little radical surgery on the New Testament:

Life would be so much better for a lot of us folks of faith if we could just run St. Paul’s sorry ass out of the New Testament the way they snuffed the Gospel of Thomas. Granted, the Book of Revelation has caused an awful lot of trouble, but it has the saving grace of being gorgeously written. Not so with the Bill O’Reilly of Tarsus.

Now there’s plenty of precedent for proposals to expurgate troublesome bits of scripture. The great heresiarch Marcion wanted to get rid of the Old Testament along with three of the four Gospels. Luther expressed a desire to expel the Book of Revelation as “fundamentally un-Christian.” And more recently, Thomas Jefferson published a “Bible” that junked all the “dogma” interspersed amongst the sound ethical teachings.But before Mr. Pierce gets too far with his anti-Pauline crusade, he should be aware that there’s a lot of doubt about the authorship of I Timothy. In fact, the late Fr. Raymond Brown, perhaps the preeminent New Testament scholar of recent years, suggested that about 90% of biblical experts thought that Paul did not write this epistle.This scholarly consensus does not, of course, cut much ice with biblical “inerrancy” fans, including the offending Baptist church in question, since the (probable) anonymous author of I Timothy identified himself as Paul. As my own grandmother back home in Georgia used to say when I ventured my own youthful sandbox theories of religion: “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”But given Paul’s knack for allegorizing and reinterpreting the Law and the Prophets in the epistles, like Romans, that are indisputably his, I have a sneaking suspicion that despite his reputation as the favorite source for conservative abuse of scripture, Paul himself was no fundamentalist. And given his true legacy as the great and revolutionary advocate of Christian liberty, it makes little sense to consider him a conservative, either.

Yesterday’s New York Times included a brief but useful summary by John Broder about Sen. John McCain’s progress in reinventing himself from the brave maverick of GOP politics into the Chosen One of Republican elites, including many key veterans of George W. Bush’s two campaigns.I’ve long been a skeptic about McCain’s ability to propitiate the conservative ideologues that still own the Republican Party without losing the reputation that would make him a formidable nominee in 2008. But he’s off to a pretty good start, given his consistent front-running status in early GOP ’08 polls; his love-fest with prominent Bushies; and the high esteem he still enjoys from many mainstream media types. And lest we forget, the combination of very high and relatively positive name ID and insider backing is what lifted McCain’s former nemesis, George W. Bush, to the nomination in 2000.Broder’s summary of McCain’s pivot does not mention one factoid that the photo accompanying it illustrates: McCain yukking it up with attendees of the Iowa State Fair. He famously skipped the Iowa Caucuses in 2000, after conspicuously disrespecting the Ethanol Subsidy that ranks just behind the State Fair’s Butter Cow sculpture as Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow. McCain has now flip-flopped on ethanol, and is spending a lot of time in Iowa.McCain’s pivot, of course, most depends on the panic of Republicans who see the White House slipping away in 2008, and figure only a “maverick” like the Arizonan can save their bacon. The same underlying dynamic may doom a McCain general election candidacy, and thus his “electability” appeal, particularly if he continues to flip-flop on domestic issues, while championing the Bush administration’s disastrous course of action in Iraq.And even if McCain goes into the presidential cycle as the clear GOP front-runner, there’s no question many conservative movement types will continue to cast about for an alternative. At one point, Sen. George Allen of VA looked like a strong possibility for the Anybody-But-McCain (ABM) effort, but his sparse positive qualifications are clearly being overwhelmed by his current troubles. Right now the big debate about Allen is whether he’s a racist obnoxious jerk, or an equal-opportunity obnoxious jerk. No less an authority than Charlie Cook is already saying Allen’s presidential star has fatally fallen, and for that matter, Georgie is now in danger of losing his Senate seat.At present, the insider buzz about GOP alternatives to McCain revolves around Mitt Romney of Massachussets. Aside from the improbability of the Right readily embracing a guy once thought of as a northeastern moderate, whose most notable recent accomplishment was signing a quasi-universal health insurance bill, there’s the Mormon Issue. Last year Amy Sullivan wrote an important article examining probable conservative evangelical concerns about a Mormon candidate, but the problem could go deeper, since the unusual nature of LDS doctrines could discomfit some Catholics, mainstream Protestants and secular conservatives as well as evangelicals.The real darkhorse for the ABM mantle remains Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Expect a boomlet to form around him at some point in the near future.