As a baby boomer, I have a lingering affection for The Rolling Stone, and not only because I read its music reviews obsessively back in the day. The Stone also gave Hunter S. Thompson a platform for his brilliant quasi-political ravings.Musical trends being what they are, I stopped reading Rolling Stone a good while ago, but after getting quoted briefly in a piece about MoveOn last year (an event that impressed my teenaged stepson more than all the NPR appearances imaginable), the DLC press office gave me a copy. What struck me most was the 10-1 ratio of upscale apparel ads to all the other content put together, but what the hell, somebody’s got to pay the bills.Still, I was moderately intrigued a few weeks back when my colleague Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, told me he had taken a call originally intended for me, from a Matt Taibbi, who was writing a piece for the Rolling Stone.”Jesus, Will,” I replied. “Don’t you remember Matt Taibbi? He’s the guy who did the New York Press piece a while back exposing you as the author of the ‘loathsome’ NewDonkey blog. You know, that fine bit of reportage accompanied by the crude grade-school drawing of Marshall Wittmann being sodomized by a moose.””Wish I had remembered his name,” said Will. “I’ve done hundreds of interviews with hostile reporters over the years, but nothing like this. The guy apparently just wanted to shriek at me; he already knew the answers to all his questions.”Taibbi’s piece, which appeared last week, was about what you’d expect from a guy who knows all the answers before he asks the questions. The crux of his “analysis” was a lurid interpretation of the use of the terms “liberal fundamentalism”and “purge” in a New Dem Dispatch (which I drafted as editor of the NDD, but which, as always, reflected an institutional take, not necessarily my own) about the national campaign against Joe Lieberman. Check this out:

Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don’t repeatedly use words like “purge”and “fundamentalist” — terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism — by accident. They know exactly what they’re doing. It’s an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off.

Aside from the fact that Taibbi appears to be perpetually P.O.’d without any particular encouragement, his “reasoning” on this point is a classic example of a smear posing as the exposure of a smear. As the NDD in question explicitly noted, the DLC started warning about the perils of “liberal fundamentalism” back in the 1980s, when nobody outside the CIA had ever heard of Osama bin Laden; then as now, “fundamentalism” refers to any set of intolerant, self-righteous beliefs. And I don’t know where Matt Taibbi gets the idea that the word “purge” is any more associated with communism than with any other political movement. I probably know as much as any blogger in Christendom (with the exception of my colleague The Moose) about the history of communism, and I sure as hell don’t “obviously associate” the term with Reds of any hue.But nevermind. Taibbi’s shrewd explanation of my nefarious intentions was the necessary windup to the mighty anathema that concludes his piece:

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we’re talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists.

The fact that nobody at the DLC has ever actually “gone on television” to say anything like that is inconvenient to Taibbi’s “analysis,” and thus not worth researching, much less modifying or discarding. As for the tedious “corporate paymasters” crap, Taibbi does not bother to find out, much less explain, why an organization “paid by the likes of Eli Lilly” opposed its top legislative priority of the last decade, the Medicare Rx drug bill. Or why us “paid agents of the commercial interests” have loudly, consistently, and repeatedly opposed Bush’s economic policies, most especially each and every one of his tax cuts. Or why the “organization founded to help big business have a say in the Democratic platform” practically invented the term “corporate welfare,” and has endlessly and redundantly called for ridding the federal budget and tax code of corporate subsidies.But why bother with such complications when you already know what the DLC is up to?Maybe the editors at The Rolling Stone, or some of its readers, think of people like Matt Taibbi as successors to the explicitly non-objective political commentary of Hunter Thompson. And to be sure, HST was capable of prophetic abuse like no one else. But he generally relied on his own interpretation of actual facts, not just his prejudices, and was more than capable of non-predictable positions, like his early support for Jimmy Carter’s nomination for president in1976 (a position that would, if extrapolated to today’s inter-progressive politics, undoubtedly be excoriated as support for Holy Jimmy, a reactionary corporate-backed warmongering southerner).Matt Taibbi’s style of gonzo journalism, if that’s what he’s trying to practice, is more reminiscent of The Doctor’s sad declining years, when he could still write the abusive catch-phrases, but forgot how to give them life, or a sense of decency and truth. Taibbi’s sophomoric jibes are only ha-larious to people who already agree with him, and aren’t particularly interested in any sort of nuance or persuasion. And the cheerleading for his piece in various segments of the progressive blogosphere is far more discouraging than all the fact-based DLC- or Lieberman-bashing past, present or future.

Having just praised a Kevin Drum post, I have to register a dissent from another one. Reacting to a blogospheric colloquoy, extending to Matt Yglesias and Noam Scheiber, about generational differences in perceptions among Dems that I seem to have sparked with a recent post or two about Lieberman, Kevin scolds us old folks for worrying about the influence of the Left in the Democratic Party at a time when we should all be focused on the opposition:

Why should anyone even moderately left of center spend more than a few minutes a week worrying about a barely detectable liberal drift in the Democratic Party? Will the tut-tutters not be happy until CEOs make 1000x the average wage instead of the mere 400x they make now and the 200x they made during the Reagan years? How much farther to the right do they want Dems to go?….Worrying about lefties in the Democratic Party when the GOP is led by a guy named George Bush is like worrying about the Michigan Militia when a guy named Osama is driving airplanes into your buildings. The fogies need to get real.

Let’s put aside the slur about “fogies” wanting Democrats to move “farther to the right.” I sure as hell don’t, and I don’t think the quite young Noam Scheiber does, either. And I plead innocent as well to the charge, made by Kevin elsewhere in his rather angry post, that Democrats whose formative experiences were in the 1980s and early 1990s are obsessed with the need to play off lefty excesses to establish their mainstream credibility. Maybe Mickey Kaus feels that way; clearly my colleague The Moose–who is not, for the record, even a Democrat–thinks that’s what Democrats should do. But I don’t. And let’s remember why we are having this conversation. It’s not because hysterical centrists are scouring the political landscape looking for lefties to demonize or expel; it’s because there is a large and vocal body of opinion in the Democratic Party, some of it ideologically driven, some of it just partisan, that is deeply wedded to a particular interpretation of how the two parties got to their current condition. This interpretation heavily relies on the belief that in the 1990s and the early years of this century, a centrist, Clintonian Establishment sold out progressive principles, refused to fight against a disciplined Right, happily gave up Congress and a majority of the states, and essentially conceded defeat, in the pursuit of power and comfort, and the praise of David Brooks and David Broder. This is, indeed, a narrative widely shared in the netroots, and it has helped energize netizens to enlist in a conscientious effort to cleanse the Democratic Party of the centrist malefactors who let this happen.To the extent that this narrative is based on “facts” that some of us old fogies find to be empirically wrong, I don’t think we should be blamed for pointing that out. Because in the end, this is really and truly a debate among Democrats about how–not whether–to drive Republicans from power in Washington and elsewhere. I’m happy to “get real” about that, but reality does involve an honest discussion of how we got where we are today.

Props to Kevin Drum of Political Animal for noticing that the GOP’s minimum wage-estate tax abomination increases (to $10 million) and then indexes for inflation the exemption from the estate tax, but does not index the mimimum wage at all. I guess that’s not surprising, since most GOPers want to kill the estate tax altogether, and many would be happy if the minimum wage went away as well. Still, it’s an interesting contrast: it’s okay to let the value of the minimum wage continuously erode, affecting the most vulnerable working Americans, but not okay to let inflation snag a few wealthy families into paying the estate tax each year. I’m reminded of the term used by the character Jones in A Confederacy of Dunces for the statutory floor set on his earnings as a janitor at a New Orleans strip-joint: “the minimal wage.” That’s what it is, all right, and where it will remain if Republicans get their way.

At TAPPED, Matt Yglesias wrote a typically acute reaction to my post about the very different perceptions among Democrats of Joe Lieberman, the “D.C. Democratic Establishment,” and the Clinton legacy. Matt thinks the disconnect is primarily generational.I agree in part. It has certainly occurred to me before that people coming of political age in recent years have experienced a truly weird series of events: (a) the first impeachment of an American president since 1867; (b) the first presidential election to go into overtime since 1876; (c) the first quasi-military attack on the continental U.S. since 1812; (d) the first successful presidential candidacy since 1948 wherein the winner eschewed the political center and appealed mainly to his ideological base; (e) two consecutive midterm elections that broke all the rules about the performance of presidential parties; (f) the first unsuccessful major U.S. military engagement since Vietnam; and of course, (g) the rise of a whole host of hyper-partisan media outlets, from Fox News to the blogosphere.But I have to dissent in part as well. It’s not the reaction to recent events that gives me pause about the netroots interpretation of political life; it’s the ex post facto take on much older political developments. There are two tenets held fiercely in the netroots that are particularly suspect: (a) the development of the “right-wing noise machine” of conservative think tanks and media outlets was the primary reason for the conservative ascendancy associated with the rise of George W. Bush; and (b) Clintonian “centrism” was primarily responsible for the loss of congressional and state-level Democratic majorities in the 1990s.This is not the time or place to supply a systematic smack-down of these two premises, beyond the observations that (a) both the rise of the GOP and the decline of the Democratic Party in the 1990s were rooted in an ideological realignment of the two parties that favored the Right, and (b) the pre-Clinton Democratic orthodoxy had much more to do with the decline of down-ballot Donkey fortunes than anything Clinton did or did not do.But the big point is that even if you think us old guys don’t get it in terms of the current political climate (as a consistent chronicler of GOP responsibility for polarization, I plead nolo contendere), when it comes to the netroots pre-history of how Democrats got to where they are today, my g-g-g-eneration deserves a hearing.

The psychodrama involving Mel Gibson’s admitted anti-Semitic and sexist outbursts during a DUI arrest is one of those few occasions wherein celebrity antics reveal something a bit deeper than the fatuousness of Celebrity Culture generally.Gibson has owned up to what he said to arresting officers during the bust, including a plenary indictment of Jews for being “responsible for all the the wars in the world,” and at least one nasty comment about a female officer on the scene. He’s abjectly apologized and all. But his suggestion that his bigoted remarks were attributable to Demon Rum, and to a “struggle with alcoholism,” are a bit strange, and represent an appeal to the Therapeutic Culture in whichno one is responsible for what they say or do Under the Influence of anything.It’s a well-established truism, based on millennia of human experience with hootch, that the kiss o’ the hops tends to peel back inhibitions and expose the true feelings of inebriants. Some would even say that up to a point (and Gibson’s blood-alcohol rating during the bust did not indicate black-out levels of drunkenness at all), inebriation tends to cultivate a certain clarity and honesty about Life in the Big Picture. So it’s not at all clear to me how taking the cure for booze-o-holia is going to cure Gibson of atavistic attitudes towards Jews or women.The whole issue, of course, stems from the well-founded concerns of Jews and Christians alike that Gibson’s self-proclaimed cinematic masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ, played into anti-Semitic stereotypes of the relationship between Jesus Christ and his fellow Jews–the very sterotypes that fed many centuries of Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Gibson decided to interpret the rejection of The Passion of the Christ by mainstream Hollywood as motivated by Jewish hostility to the lurid associations reinforced by his film. But given the vast profits he made, and the pervasive influence he’s had on the conservative Christians who flocked to the cineplexes to see the flick and held showings in their sanctuaries, he’s hardly in a position to pose as a victim.So: fine, let’s all accept Gibson’s apologies for what he said, and give him a chance to make amends. But it would be nice if ol’ Mel would stop blaming John Barleycorn for his issues, and maybe admit his ongoing complicity in the most ancient and horrific of Christian heresies: anti-Semitism. It comes out of an entirely un-Christlike heart, not out of a bottle.

Over at MyDD, Matt Stoller poses one of the first interesting questions I’ve read in weeks amidst the hourly torrent of abuse towards Joe Lieberman. Prompted by a Josh Marshall post depicting Lieberman’s current political travails as “tragic,” Matt wants to know, basically, why anybody out there ever thought highly of Lieberman:

To me, Lieberman’s vicious and reactionary nature seems quite clear and consistent. Everything from his right-wing culture warring against Hollywood to his sandbagging of Clinton’s health care initiative in 1994 to his fights with Arthur Levitt at the SEC to ensure that accounting loopholes could remain to his preening about Lewinsky to his undermining of Gore in 2000 indicate that he was never the stalwart and principled man his supporters imagine. I hated each of these events separately, though I never put them together until 2001, when I really started paying attention to politics. I just sort of thought, even as a kid, who are those putzes on TV grilling carnival freak Dee Snyder? I hated the culture war nonsense, I always thought it was fake pandering.The thing is, there are too many folks I respect who say he was once a great and likeable man to just discount these opinions. What’s going on here? I’m honestly curious. Why was Lieberman ever considered a good man? Was it just that our moral universe is totally different now because of Bush’s extremism? If you have insight on this, please let me know.

Now I have no particular reason to believe Matt Stoller respects me, so maybe I’m responding to a question posed to others. But the question itself reflects a whole lot of the dialogue of the deaf–not just about Lieberman, but about his record, the nature of progressivism, and the political history of the Democratic Party in the 1990s–surrounding this primary.I will take seriously the claim, reflected in Matt’s post, that hostility to Lieberman is not just about his position on Iraq–which I strongly disagree with myself. So let’s take a look at the broader indictment of Lieberman as a politician who has always embodied the qualities so hated by the netroots.To take the easy stuff first, the caricature of Joe Lieberman as a typical, egomaniacal Washington blowhard is really hard to accept if you’ve ever spent any time around the man. He is routinely self-deprecating in a city, and an institution (the U.S. Senate) where this quality is seen as a sign of weakness. He is notorious within the Senate itself primarily for his civility to colleagues, and his entirely atypical decent treatment of his own staff (he stands at one end of the spectrum that ranges across stern indifference and routine abuse to the ultimate Washington Boss from Hell, Arlen Specter). And while I don’t have any real knowledge about the quality of Lieberman’s constituent services operation, I do know that during the five-plus years he was DLC chairman, he and his staff were vigilant about any DLC pronouncement that compromised Connecticut interests.No, I’m not saying any of this is an important reason for supporting Joe Lieberman in the August 8 primary; but it is germane to Matt’s question about why anyone should like the guy at all, and to the general netroots take on Joe as some sort of avatar of the Washington Establishment.Matt’s recitation of Lieberman’s ancient sins against progressive orthodoxy is almost as easy to swat down. This is the first time I’ve read anywhere that Lieberman was a serious obstacle to the Clinton Health Plan in 1994. Lord a’mighty, much of the Senate Democratic Caucus, most notably the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, presented a far bigger obstacle. And the Plan itself, and particularly its marketing, were bigger problems than anything any Democratic senator said or did.The slam about Lieberman’s “preening about Lewinsky” reflects another odd anti-Lieberman talking point: the idea that Joe Lieberman stabbed Bill Clinton in the back by making a speech suggesting that the Big He had done something blameworthy. At the time, Joe’s “Lewinsky speech,” while hardly pleasant to the White House, was considered an effort to pave the way to a censure resolution in place of impeachment. And that’s of course what happened. Clinton’s own endorsement of, and campaign appearance with, Lieberman should lay this slur to rest.And the stuff about Lieberman “undermining Gore” is really bizarre. I will never forget watching the Lieberman-Cheney debate, and literally scratching the TV screen in frustration that Joe wasn’t hammering Cheney on this or that point. But I also knew that this approach was totally scripted by the Gore high command, which erroneously expected Cheney to do his Darth Vadar routine instead of playing the avuncular grandfather. Point B in the “Joe undermines Al” case generally revolves around the small incident during the Florida recount saga when Lieberman disclaimed any intention of challenging overseas military ballots. Again, Joe was totally doing what the Gore campaign told him to do; some of Gore’s lawyers dissented from the decision, and later said so, but it wasn’t Lieberman’s fault. And more importantly, Gore clearly would not have been in the position to lose the election in overtime had Lieberman not been on the ballot; Joe’s incredible popularity in South Florida gave the ticket its surprising strength in that state in the first place. Gore’s inability to carry his own home state was a much bigger problem than anything Joe Lieberman did or did not do.The larger point raised by Matt’s post is perhaps the biggest disconnect between Lieberman’s supporters and detractors:

Josh isn’t the only one talking as if Lieberman were once Ghandi; it’s a trend among men I know that are in their thirties or above, and had a strong connection to the political establishment prior to 2001.

The suggestion here is that anyone defending Lieberman’s past, as well as his present, record, is blinded by “a strong connection to the political establishment.” And the planted axiom is that Lieberman has always been the embodiment of “the political establishment.”I don’t know if Matt Stoller can understand or accept this, but Joe’s popularity among Clintonites in the 1990s was precisely a function of the belief that he did not represent “the political establishment.” While he had a strong progressive record dating back decades, he was not a slave to party discipline. He was willing to innovate left and right on policy issues, just like Bill Clinton. He was willing to engage in what Matt calls “culture warring on Hollywood” because he wasn’t willing to give the avaricious multinational corporations of the entertainment industry a pass on accountability for their products, any more than oil companies or HMOs. Joe Lieberman, like Bobby Kennedy, was not afraid to defy the elites in his own party in the pursuit of a broader progressive vision. And putting aside the Lewinsky Speech, Lieberman was without question the most resolute and consistent supporter of Bill Clinton’s vision and agenda in the national party, at a time when “the political establishment” still viewed Clinton as a triangulating heretic.Maybe he was right, and maybe he was wrong, but the idea that Joe Lieberman has always been some sort of lifelong quasi-Republican just isn’t factual. And the contradictory idea that Lieberman is the American Beauty Rose of the DC Democratic Establishment is equally off-target.The moment in the current campaign that most raised this particular issue was the sudden appearance of California Rep. Maxine Waters in Connecticut to stump for Lamont. For anyone with a political memory, this was striking: when Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman as his running-mate, the main trap that had to be run was Maxine Water’s objection to Joe’s mildly expressed view that maybe class-based affirmative action should ultimately replace race-based affirmative action. Lieberman was forced to kowtow to Waters personally and publicly,
and the ultimate sign that Joe was acceptable to the entire party was his widely circulated photo kissing Maxine just before the Convention.That “kiss” has been forgotten in all the furor over Lieberman’s “kiss” from Bush.So who represented the “party establishment” in 2000 and who represents it now? Joe Lieberman or Maxine Waters?I pose this as a real question, not as a rhetorical question. From one point of view, Lieberman represents a DC Democratic establishment that is addicted to bipartisanship, obsessed with power in Washington, and disinterested in progressive policymaking. From another point of view, Lieberman represents a progressive tradition that needs to be modernized, not abandoned–against the perpetual opposition of entrenched Democratic incumbents in Washington like Maxine Waters, who never face electoral opposition and set themselves up as guardians of this program or that. This disconnect represents a broader disagreement between those who think of the Gore and Kerry campaigns as the disastrous denouement of Clintonism, and those who think these campaigns were crippled by the older Democratic orthodoxy of interest-group liberalism.I frankly do not agree with either side of the Lieberman-Lamont fight in their contention that this is some sort of Democratic Gotterdammarung that will perpetually resolve every intraparty dispute. Much as I stubbornly admire Joe Lieberman, it’s clear he is a clumsy politician who lives in the pre-Karl-Rove atmosphere that permitted genuine bipartisanship. The Clinton New Democrat tradition in the party would survive his defeat.But I also think the savaging of Lieberman as “vicious and reactionary” is a terrible sign of the defection of many progressives from reality-based politics. And to respond specifically to Matt Stoller’s questions, the idea that Joe is the epitome of the “Democratic establishment” is a krazy-kat reflection of the false belief that Clintonism completely conquered Washington, and is the source of every D.C. establishment vice. If you took a straw poll of the consultants, the DNC types, and safe-seat House Members who surely represent an important part of the D.C. Democratic Establishment, I doubt you’d find anything like majority support for Joe Lieberman. He’s only the embodiment of the Establishment when viewed through the looking glass of those who view all their friends as brave insurgents, and all their enemies as The Man.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

I’ll try to move on to other topics directly, but wanted to do one more post about politics in my home state of Georgia. There was good news and bad news today for embattled incumbent Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was surprisingly forced into an August 8 runoff by Dekalb County Commissioner Hank Johnson. The good news was her endorsement by Andrew Young, who remains a Georgia icon, and who cited a national police union contribution to Johnson (presumably motivated by her recent run-in with a Capitol Hill cop) as angering him into supporting McKinney. The bad news was a post-primary poll from Insider Advantage showing Johnson leading McKinney among likely runoff voters by a 46-21 margin.Figuring out who’s actually going to vote in this kind of runoff is obviously very tricky, so the IA poll should be taken with several grains of salt. But you have to wonder how much room for growth in support the highly polarizing incumbent really has. Aside from her national notoriety, she’s been in Congress for twelve of the last fourteen years, most of it representing pretty much the same district.On another front, I received an email from a Georgia observer who suggested the rumor I repeated earlier this week–about Johnson raising a ton of dough, especially from Jewish Democrats–is actually disinformation being circulated by the McKinney camp in an effort to fire up her base and to depict Johnson as a puppet of shadowy outside forces (not a new tactic for her, based on past races). I have no idea who’s right about this; we’ll have to see whether Johnson suddenly starts appearing on Atlanta metro television screens.The 4th congressional district runoff could have a big effect as well on two statewide Democratic runoffs, since turnout every where else is likely to be infinitesimal. In the contest to succeed Secretary of State Cathy Cox (who lost her gubernatorial race to Mark Taylor), the likelihood of a relatively high turnout in the majority-black 4th is giving new hope to second-place finisher Darryl Hicks, who is African-American, against Gail Buckner, who is white.In the other statewide runoff, for Lt. Gov., former state Rep. Jim Martin (who edged former state sen. Greg Hecht 42-38 in the primary) is running radio ads touting his endorsement by Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, who is very popular among Democrats of all races. You have to feel a bit sorry for Martin and Hecht; they were able to draw a lot of attention and money on the theory that they would be facing Ralph Reed in a race that would have overshadowed everything else in Georgia politics. Running against Casey Cagle is a whole ‘nother thing, though Cagle’s own right-wing record, and perhaps residual anger over the harsh ads he ran against Reed, could provide some traction for a Democrat. More immediately, you wonder if either Martin or Hecht held some money back for the runoff. If not, Georgians may soon see them selling boiled peanuts on the side of the road to raise enough moolah for that last-minute runoff push.In non-runoff Georgia political news, DKos reports that a new poll for Republican candidate (and former Rep.) Max Burns shows him trailing Democratic incumbent John Barrow by one percentage point (44-43) in the always-tight 12th congressional district which runs from Augusta to Savannah. The district was originally drawn to favor Democrats, but Burns was able to beat ethically challenged Champ Walker in 2002; he then lost to Barrow 52-48 in 2004. The notorious Georgia re-redistricting of 2005 didn’t reduce the Democratic advantage in the 12th, but it did remove Barrow’s home town of Athens, which means he’s having to solidify name ID elsewhere.Barrow’s race is of national import because he is one of just a handful of incumbent Democratic House members considered vulnerable this November. Another is also from Georgia: 3d district Rep. Jim Marshall. After easily dispatching a heavily financed Republican in 2004, Marshall had to deal with a new map that significantly boosted the Republican vote. He also drew a serious challenger in former Rep. Mac Collins, who lost a Senate primary in 2004. But Marshall has had good leads in all the public polling, and like Barrow, is narrowly favored going into the general election.All in all, the politics in my home state will be as hot and sticky as the weather over the next couple of months.

It’s pretty safe to say the progressive blogosphere is saturated with endless commentary and cheerleading about the August 8 Connecticut Primary involving Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont. But a very interesting runoff election will occur that same day in my old stomping grounds, the 4th Congressional District of Georgia. The inimitable Rep. Cynthia McKinney will face little-known Dekalb County Commissioner Hank Johnson, who stunned observers by denying McKinney a majority in the July 18 primary (she won 47 percent to Johnson’s 44 percent, with a third, anti-McKinney candidate taking the balance of votes). And from what I’m hearing, it ain’t looking good for the fiery lefty veteran.The rumor down in Dekalb is that Johnson is raising enormous sums of money for the runoff, some of it, no doubt, from Jewish Democrats who have always resented McKinney’s outspoken pro-Palestinian views. (The night before McKinney lost her seat in 2002 to primary challenger Denise Majette, her father, then-state Rep. Billy McKinney, told a television audience that Cynthia’s only problem was spelled “J-E-W-S.” In a nice touch of irony, McKinney pere lost his own legislative seat the next day, in a huge upset, to a Jewish primary opponent.) McKinney has never been much of a fundraiser, and the voting patterns in the primary led a lot of observers to conclude that her once-legendary GOTV prowess is not what it used to be.Aside from money, McKinney has two big political problems. The first is that Georgia has no party registration, and her notoriety may tempt some of the district’s small but significant Republican electorate to cross over; so long as they did not vote in the Republican primary on July 18, which had a very low turnout, they are free to do so. Indeed, McKinney blamed her 2002 loss to crossover voters, though the size of her defeat indicated she lost a majority of Democrats as well.But her bigger problem is her weakness among the district’s large and growing African-American middle- and upper-middle-class population. They represent the political fulcrum of Dekalb County, and are much more likely to turn out for a runoff than the poorer black voters who have always served as McKinney’s base.Given her situation and her personality, I’d expect some real fireworks from McKinney between now and August 8. She has always been fast to play the race card (viz. her immediate suggestion that her recent dustup with a Capitol Hill cop was motivated by racism and sexism), and the fact that her opponent is a fellow African-American won’t deter her. Indeed, she won her first primary back in 1992 in no small part by charging that her two African-American opponents were puppets of the state’s white political establishment.And there’s no question she will allege a conspiracy to purge her from Congress. McKinney loves conspiracy theories the way a drunk loves a belt of Ten High before breakfast. Her suggestion that perhaps the White House had advance warning about 9/11 and deliberately let it happen helped paint a political bullseye on her back in 2002. And on this latest primary night, even as Cynthia was line dancing with her new friend Cindy Sheehan in front of the cameras, her staff and supporters were muttering darkly about a Diebold Conspiracy orchestrated by Secretary of State Cathy Cox to shift votes from McKinney to Johnson. (You’d think if Cox had the capacity to manipulate votes this way, she might have stolen enough votes from Mark Taylor to keep the Big Guy from narrowly winning a majority against her in the gubernatorial primary, eh?).But my guess is that McKinney has finally run out of luck. She got back into Congress in 2004 thanks to an extraordinary stroke of luck: Denise Majette’s abrupt decision, shocking her own staff and certainly dismaying supporters who knew McKinney was mulling a comeback, to abandon her seat and launch a doomed Senate campaign. (In a side note, Majette has launched her own comeback effort, winning the Democratic nomination for state school superintendant).The word back home in 2004 was that McKinney had learned her lesson, and though her views were as lefty-lefty as ever, she kept a much lower profile on the campaign trail, and in Washington–until the little incident at the metal detectors in the Cannon Building. For the record, I think the whole brouhaha was ridiculous, especially the serious consideration apparently given to indicting McKinney for biffing the Capitol Hill officer with her cell phone. But it served as a reminder to many of her constituents that she remains a bit of a loose cannon in Cannon, and gave Hank Johnson the opening he needed to take advantage of the large if latent anti-McKinney vote.In any event, even as every hep blogger in Christendom obsessively follows the vote count in Connecticut on August 8, Georgia will be very much on my mind. No matter what happens, I’ll relish the returns from my old neighborhood in Stone Mountain like a Varsity chili dog. Maybe McKinney will find a way to save her career one more time, but I personally doubt she and Cindy Sheehan will have much to dance about that night.

Just returned very early this morning from the DLC’s annual meeting in Denver, exhausted but happy at how the event turned out. As I noted in yesterday’s brief post, the National Conversation had a record turnout of state and local elected officials, which should help, among anybody paying attention, rebut the “DC Establishment” stereotype about the DLC. As always, it was refreshing to spend some time among electeds who are actually trying to solve problems; congressional Dems, for all their virtues, have no power to do that. And Monday’s public event, including the rollout of Hillary Clinton’s American Dream Initiative, was quite coherent and upbeat. Lord knows there were plenty of reporters in Denver who would have loved to ignore what was actually going on at the DLC meeting and instead written about intra-party fights, and plenty of bloggers and other DLC-detractors who would have loved to pile on. But they weren’t given a hook for it, and I’m relieved and grateful for that.Tom Vilsack’s and Hillary Clinton’s speeches in Denver are already available on the DLC web site, and they are well worth reading. Vilsack offered a good quick summary of what the DLC is about these days. And Clinton combined an effective critique of Bush domestic policies with a very focused and specific set of counter-policies that would get the country back to what it was accomplishing when her husband was in office: expanding the middle class and dealing with supposedly intractable social and economic problems. Vilsack mentioned, as he always does, his efforts to build bridges between the DLC and the labor movement, which will begin to bear fruit in a visible way in a few weeks (stay tuned). And Clinton’s economic/social agenda managed to attract praise from none other than Bob Borosage of Campaign for America’s Future, who pioneered DLC-bashing long before it was cool.Last time I checked, the DLC event had not attracted much attention in the progressive blogosphere. Sure, Markos of DKos dismissed the whole deal as irrelevant in a throwaway line in a broader post on Bill Clinton’s Lieberman appearance in Connecticut yesterday; but he would have done so even if we had revealed the cure for the common cold. That’s his story and he’s going to stick to it.Chris Bowers of MyDD, with whom I sometimes have a friendly sparring-partner relationship, did a long post cherry-picking press reports on the Denver event in order to argue that the DLC was focused on poll-driven political arguments for doing this or that.I would agree with Chris if that was what had really happened. But here’s the thing: this was the most wonkified DLC gathering I can remember. The whole event was organized around a collection of 22 essays on national security; a book on state and local policies to deal with globalization; and a big and specific agenda (the aforementioned American Dream Initiative) on middle-class opportunity. I was there the whole time, and didn’t hear any polling data. Yes, there was one session focused on a DLC paper about electoral and demographic trends. But that’s the kind of stuff Chris normally loves; it’s pure data and political analysis. He singles out for particular opprobrium the discussion of faith and politics he read about; presumably this refers to the workshop on this subject I moderated in Denver. But having been there and all, I can assure him that the main thrust of the discussion was “authenticity” in connecting progressive principles with faith traditions. And my own remarks focused on the misreading of public opinion research that leads some Democrats to say damaging things about religion and politics.I can understand the lefty impulse to describe any DLC event as revolving around poll-driven injunctions to Democrats to abandon their principles and drift to the center and right. But it’s still a little odd to get bashed within the poll-and-elections-obsessed blogosphere for simply acknowledging a political dimension to the question of how progressives should pursue their values and policy goals. You can’t take the politics out of politics, no matter how you want to prettify it. But anybody who was actually in Denver will agree that the big message was that Democrats need principled big ideas to take full advantage of the ongoing disaster of Republican misgovernment.

Sorry for the hiaitus in posting, but I’ve been heads-down getting ready for and participating in the DLC’s annual meeting in Denver, which concludes in a couple of hours. I’ll have a fuller report tomorrow, but suffice it to say this has been the largest collection of state and local elected officials the DLC has ever attracted to this event (about 375 from 41 states). I ran three breakout sessions yesterday–on Connecting With People of Faith, Values-Based Messaging, and The Politics of Fast-Growing Areas. The first two were SRO, and the third, late in a long day, still filled a large room. What you will probably read or hear about this event in the national media is that four possible presidential candidates spoke–Tom Vilsack, Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson. But in many respects, it was the crowed listening to these worthies who represented the real story.