I waited for some of the dust to settle before commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech to Jim Wallis’ Christian Left assemblage last week, but here’s a simple summary of the reaction:1) Some folks praised Obama for calling on Democrats to reach out to people of faith, and for denying Republicans had any natural monopoly on their support.2) Some folks attacked Obama for either (a) reinforcing “Republican talking points” by suggesting Democrats had a problem with people of faith, or (b) suggesting that Democrats reach out to people who are part of the conservative base, which can’t be done without compromising progressive principles.Among the critics, Chris Bowers of MyDD managed to tie himself in knots by making both negative arguments simultaneously.Lots of the critics and even some of the fans don’t seem to have paid sufficient attention to what Obama actually said. Over at TPMCafe, Nathan Newman, quoting liberally from Obama’s remarks, pretty decisively refutes the claim that the Illinois senator was piling onto Republican attacks on Democrats, or calling for any sort of “tilt to the right” on policy issues (beyond the single issue of church-state-separation absolutism).But uniquely, and not suprisingly, Amy Sullivan, in an article at Slate, noted a very different aspect of Obama’s speech that in the long run may make it more significant: an intra-Christian argument about the connection between faith and political commitment that suggests any simple claim that God wants the faithful to vote this way or that is spiritually dangerous. Here’s how Sullivan puts it:

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush’s version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don’t have the answer key to divining God’s will any more than conservatives do.

In other words, Obama was fighting something of a three-front battle in this speech:(1) against conservative claims that God’s Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture. The political import of Obama’s speech is that he is engaging in an intra-Christian debate that is already undermining the Christian Right every day. In essence, the James Dobsons of the religious world have sought to lead their flocks into a prophetic stance that stakes their spiritual lives to a series of specific and highly questionable political commitments. More and more, even the most conservative evangelical Christians are chafing against this bondage, while the less conservative faithful, including the largely apolitical attendees of rapidly growing non-denominational megachurches, never bought into it much to begin with. This is an enormous potential political constituency that is waiting to hear from Our Side, not with Conservative Lite policy prescriptions; not with Christian Left counter-prophetic-absolutism; but with credible and authentic appeals to the holy fear that the faithful should respect when confronting those who make exclusive claims to represent God’s Will on Earth.This is precisely the appeal Barack Obama made last week, and as a Christian, and as a Democrat, I am grateful for it.

This headline from today’s Washington Post says it all: “GOP Seeks Advantage In Ruling On Trials.” In other words, now that the Supreme Court has denied that George W. Bush has virtually monarchical powers to deal with terrorist suspects as he sees fit, Republicans want to suggest that any Democrats who recommends legislation complying with the decision is a terrorist-lover. Here’s a sample of what we’re going to hear real soon:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) criticized House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi‘s comment Thursday that the court decision “affirms the American ideal that all are entitled to the basic guarantees of our justice system.” That statement, Boehner said, amounted to Pelosi’s advocating “special privileges for terrorists.”

You know what this line of “reasoning” reminds me of? Many years ago I happened to be in one of those states with no limitations on campaigning for judicial positions, and to my horror, I watched a TV ad where some craggy old buzzard cast a steely eye at the camera and said: “Elect me to the bench, and I’ll always rule against the criminals. I’ll be the hangin’ judge.”Now you don’t need a law degree to understand that the reason we have safeguards and procedures for criminal proceedings is that you don’t know who the criminal is until after the trial. Same goes for terrorist suspects. If some sort of evidence-based system for figuring out who terrorists actually are before you punish them is a “special privilege,” then I’m all for it, and you should be, too.

The long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court review of the Tom Delay-orchestrated re-redistricting of Texas congressional districts finally came down today, and a splintered Court continued its recent habit of disarray on redistricting principles. It’s clear a sizeable majority of the Court has decided that mid-decade reversals of redistricting plans are not barred by the federal constitutution, and a less-sizeable majority refuses to consider re-redistricting as grounds for strong suspicion that illicit political gerrymandering has occurred. But the Court appears to be all over the place, as it has been for more than a decade, in determining when if ever political gerrymandering can violate the Constitution. Meanwhile, a 5-4 majority of the Court ruled than one of the districts in the DeLay Map violates the Voting Right Act as a straightforward dilution of Hispanic voting strength. But the decision about how to deal with it was dumped back to a District Court in Texas, which must now decide whether there is anything they can do about it between now and November. Obviously, fixing one district could affect many others. You have to try, as I did, to slog through the whole 132 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions to see how divided and tentative the Court is on this whole subject. I’m no fancified constitutional or elections lawyer, and praise the Lord I left behind this sort of preoccupation when I decided to go into politics, but still, you don’t have to put “Esquire” after your signature to figure out when the Supremes are a herd of kitty-cats. More troubling is the fact that the ruling on re-redistricting may not get the attention it deserves in political circles because it’s becoming moot for this particular decade.Looking back, Republicans got away with re-redistrictings in Texas and Georgia. Democrats tried to retaliate in Ohio and Florida, but the former effort failed dismally last year at the ballot box, while the latter foundered in the Florida courts (it could possibly be revived and placed on the ballot in 2008, but that’s awfully close to the next regularly scheduled redistricting anyway). A Republican-backed California re-redistricting measure also failed last year, but that was a bit of a special case, since it was poorly designed, and in any event was backed by a lot of non-Republicans. But no one should forget that the one place in which a DeLay-style GOP partisan re-redistricting foundered was Colorado, for the simple reason that the state’s own constitution banned mid-decade redistricting. Looking ahead to the next decade, states should strongly consider emulating Colorado’s ban on the practice of overturning congressional and state legislative maps every time partisan control of state government solidifies or flips. No one can any longer foster the illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court will do anything to stop the madness.

As you may have seen or read, the Washington, DC area is under what looks to be a semi-perpetual flash flood watch, with roads all over the place becoming impassable and basements flooding on everything other than high ground. Rain will more or less continue for the next few days, and there’s a potential tropical storm brewing up off the Carolina coast that could really make things biblical in these parts. I don’t know this for sure, but as The Nation’s Capitol continues to get battered, those on both ends of the political spectrum who think of this city as the source of all iniquity may become quietly pleased that Big Beltway Types may be knee-deep in muddy water just like disaster victims elsewhere. For us small fry in the Emerald City, it will be a good time to hunker down, read and sleep, turn on some bad TV, get right with God, get together with dear friends, or just watch the rain pelt the windows and hope that mudslides are primarily a west-coast phenomenon. And let’s hope that the Good Lord is not deep down a neo-populist of the Left or Right, and is visiting upon us a modern Plague of Frogs.

Last week the editor of Blueprint Magazine and I had a casual conversation about a New York Times article about a mammoth new publication entitled American Conservatism: An Encylopedia. I just as casually agreed to review the book, not realizing the deadline was, well, now, and that the tome would land heavily on my desk the next morning. Thus, I spent a good part of the weekend slogging through the book and trying to get a handle on it.I won’t scoop my own review, but suffice it to say that this encyclopedia is, among other things, a solid repudiation of much of the political and theoretical success of the very movement which inspired it. In the introduction, the editors flatly say they “do not see in the history of conservatism the inevitable development of an increasingly powerful and coherent ideology of any kind.” And the book expresses a very lukewarm attitude towards virtually every conservative politician other than Taft, Goldwater and Reagan. The entry about W. says: “The presidency of George W. Bush has proved problematic for conservatives and the conservative movement,” and concludes: “Bush’s presidency revealed starkly the philosophical cleavages in the conservative movement as much as it also helped redefine political conservatism in the public mind.” I acknowledge and agree with those who view the current disenchantment of conservative journalists and activists with Bush and the GOP in general as in no small part an exercise in denial based on the failure of their policies and the unpopularity of their agenda. But American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia illustrates a more systematic disillusionment among conservative intellectuals with politics generally, and with the unity and integrity of their own tradition. For those on the Left who still believe in the elan of the Right Wing Machine, and want to emulate it, this book is a good reminder that the Machine’s design is flawed, and the engine is sputtering.

When I wrote on Friday that the Bush administration was probably planning troop withdrawals to begin shortly before the fall elections, I didn’t know this is precisely what the U.S. Commander in Iraq, General George Casey, was discussing with his superiors in a classified Pentagon briefing written up today in the New York Times. It appears the Pentagon is planning troop withdrawals later this year, and substantial troop withdrawals next year, even as the White House and congressional Republicans blast Democrats for thinking along the same lines. Michael Gordon of the Times connects the dots:

[A]fter criticizing Democratic lawmakers for trying to legislate a timeline for withdrawing troops, skeptics say, the Bush administration seems to have its own private schedule, albeit one that can be adjusted as events unfold.If executed, the plan could have considerable political significance. The first reductions would take place before this falls Congressional elections, while even bigger cuts might come before the 2008 presidential election.

So there you have it: the administration’s secret plan for Iraq, all ready for a fall rollout. Amazing.

The big non-congressional political story of the last week here in the Emerald City was Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan’s announcement that he was dropping out of the Maryland gubernatorial race due to a recent diagnosis of clinical depression. Duncan also emphatically endorsed his former primary rival, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who will now get a clear shot at incumbent Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich, and vice-versa. I used to live in MoCo, and have also been around Duncan at DLC events, and appreciate him as a first-rate administrator who has come to dominate political life in a jurisdiction whose citizens, heavily including top-level federal employees, have extremely high standards for local government services. I obviously wish him well in his recovery from depression, but at the same time am relieved that he has abandoned an uphill fight against O’Malley that definitely required a negative campaign for which Duncan was temperamentally unsuited, and that would have helped Ehrlich in the general election. As for O’Malley, he has his detractors in Baltimore and elsewhere, but the man really does possess a notable “it” factor that led a lot of people to start talking about him as a potential presidential candidate about two minutes after his first election as mayor. His personal charisma is authentic and strong, and not only because women tend to find him very attractive (I once asked a young female colleague what she thought about O’Malley, and she simply smiled and said: “Meeow!” Appropriately, O’Malley is very scrupulous about avoiding situations where he is alone with women to whom he is not married). In fact, O’Malley, along with Barack Obama, has long been a candidate for the much-longed-for Bobby Kennedy role in the Democratic Party: a politician whose appeal transcends party or faction and potentially could create a new majority. Like RFK and Obama, O’Malley is hard to shoehorn ideologically; he’s always been close to the DLC (hosting two of our annual meetings), but he also endorsed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Like Bill Clinton, the closest thing we’ve had to Bobby since his assassination, O’Malley is a policy innovator who is completely open to new ideas, wherever they come from. But now he must face Ehrlich, the guy who in 2002 snuffed the potential national political career of RFK’s actual daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Ehrlich will almost certainly run a nasty negative campaign against O’Malley, and the mayor’s ability to rise above the fray and seek new allies for the progressive cause will be tested as never before.

Now that the Senate’s had its debate on Iraq policy, the GOP spinmeisters are working overtime to draw attention to Democratic divisions. It’s true there’s a difference of opinion between the 13 senators who voted for the Kerry-Feingold fixed deadline resolution and the rest of the Caucus. But in the end, all but six Senate Dems voted for the Levin resolution calling for a beginning of troop withdrawals by the end of this year and demanding some sort of public strategy for the Iraq endgame.I have to strongly disagree with my colleague The Moose, who characterized the Levin resolution as “withdrawal lite.” Last year a majority of senators from both parties voted for a resolution calling 2006 “a year of transition” for the U.S. military presence in Iraq, which means some troop withdrawals. The administration’s own position is that we should all look forward to troop withdrawals as soon as is possible; the Bushies simply want to keep their plans a secret until that first photo op of soldiers and marines coming home, probably right before the November elections. And this is not just a matter of focusing exclusively on U.S. needs: it’s clear Iraqis overwhelmingly want a tangible indication that the build-up of Iraqi security forces, which will soon meet its original targets, will produce a reduction in the U.S. military presence, if not a full withdrawal.The idea that the Levin resolution represents some sort of party-wide tilt to the antiwar cause strikes me as simply wrong. Nobody can accuse, say, Sen. Hillary Clinton of being unwilling to upset a large number of Democratic activists by remaining committed to the possibility of a successful conclusion to the horribly botched Iraq occupation. Yet she was a cosponsor of the Levin resolution and spoke forcefully for it in the Senate (as did DLC Vice Chairman Sen. Tom Carper).It’s certainly true that the Levin resolution is worded in an ambiguous way, leaving open the timetable for withdrawal depending on conditions in Iraq. But the situation on the ground in Iraq is ambiguous as well. Our military leadership is clearly ambiguous about our future role in Iraq. For all its happy-talk, the administration is ambiguous about the political stability of Iraq. And the American people–a majority of whom favor a decisive shift towards Iraqi responsibility for Iraq’s security, even as they oppose a quick withdrawal–are about as ambiguous as you can get.In the end, the Levin resolution reflected a simple call for a change of course and a strategy for moving towards the goal we all share: an end to this war. A large majority of Senate Democrats supported it. And I am personally convinced Republicans will rue the day when they decided to draw even greater public attention to the Bush administration’s record in Iraq, and the GOP’s united support for its incompetent leadership. They’re just not as crafty as they think they are.

In case you’ve missed it, there’s an increasingly toxic conflict going on in the blogosphere between Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jason Zengerle of The New Republic. Without going into the numbing details, suffice it to say that Jason leaked some Kos comments from an off-the-record blogger email exchange about the brouhaha over Jerome Armstrong’s supposed conflicts of interest and then accused him of trying to silence discussion of the issue, and Markos responded about like you’d expect him to.Personally, I’m not supportive of all the follow-the-money innuendo being aimed at lefty bloggers in recent days. I don’t like these kind of ad hominem attacks when David Sirota aims them at anybody who dares disagree with him, and don’t like it any better when the arrows are being fired towards the left instead of the center-left. But unfortunately, instead of just barbecuing Zengerle, Markos went ballistic on his employers:

[Th]e New Republic betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners; that it stands with the National Review and wingnutoshpere in their opposition to grassroots Democrats.

He goes on at considerable length to mock TNR as a “dying” institution (which in Kos Speak presumably ranks it a bit above the “dead” DLC), just before encouraging readers to write letters to the allegedly moribund journal complaining about Zengere. But just as Markos picked a bad time (shortly before an annual meeting that will attract record numbers of state and local elected officials from around the country) to declare the DLC dead, he picked an especially bad day to label TNR a self-conscious organ of the Right Wing Conspiracy. After all, TNR just posted an article by its editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, endorsing Al Gore for president in 2008. As regular readers of Daily Kos know, Gore has become the runaway favorite for 2008 among Kossacks. Inconvenient but true, eh?I had an immediate mental image of Markos and Marty sitting uncomfortably together on an Al Gore campaign bus (perhaps emblazoned with signs reading “Re-Elect Gore To A Third Term”) rolling through rural Iowa a year or so down the road. That’s probably cynical of me, but I gotta tell you, if Gore does run it looks like he’ll have the most incongruous set of supporters since Mo Udall and George Wallace both endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976.

There are two new publications just launched on the web that merit special attention this week. The first is The Democratic Strategist, edited by three of my favorite people, Bill Galston, Ruy Teixeira and Stan Greenberg, which offers a unique place for far-ranging and inclusive debates on–you guessed it–Democratic political strategy. The first issue offers essays by Democrats ranging from Will Marshall to Bob Borosage, which pretty much spans the ideological spectrum of the party. There’s also a daily blog on the site. The second new entry is Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, edited by two well-known Class of ’92 New Democrats, Andrei Cherny and Ken Baer. This quarterly is notable for the fact that it solicits gigantic (5,000 word!) articles on public policy, which is virtually unheard of these days, but which might supply a future Democratic Congress or administration with some serious brain food. At a time when so much progressive cyber-journalism is balkanized into factional camps, both these offerings can help provide a welcome opportunity for genuine, open debate. Please do check them out.