There was a light, funny article in yesterday’s Washington Post about the growing phenomenon of church marquees sporting nuggets of folksy wisdom and spiritual encouragement. (Examples included: “Prayer is the best wireless connection,” and “Pessimists need a kick in the can’ts.”)It prompted me to recall my personal favorite in this genre, spotted in South Georgia some years ago: “Read the Bible daily. It will scare the hell out of you.”But the marquee wisdom, while growing, is not universal, particularly in my own Episcopal Church, whose typically traditional and often gorgeous church architecture does not alway lend itself to bright signs with therapeutic messages. I remember a parish meeting I attended a few years back at an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church, in which one parishoner suggested a welcoming message on the wooden mass-schedule board outside. When another parishoner objected, she said: “Look, I’m not asking for much. Just that the first thing a passerby sees isn’t ‘Confessions Available On Request.'”

As those of you who read a lot of blogs undoubtedly know by now, there’s been a firestorm in every corner of the blogosphere this week over the hiring by washingtonpost.com of a prominent young conservative blogger, Ben Domenech, one of the founders of redstate.org (where his handle has been Augustine), to do a new blog called Red America. At first the furor was over (1) why the Post site (independent of the newspaper, BTW) felt the need to set up an abrasive conservative blog, without at least creating a progressive counterpart, (2) various aspects of Domenech’s background as the scion of a well-connected conservative family, and (3) several dumb and offensive things he’s said, such as calling Coretta Scott King “a communist” the day after her death. In this early phase of the controversy, it was a classic left-right battle. But almost effortlessly, several progressive bloggers came up with an ever-escalating series of examples of plagiarism by Domenech going back to college newspaper work, but continuing with pieces for professional organizations like National Review Online. Conservative bloggers quickly split between some who defended Domenech, and others who distanced themselves. And the fracas ended today with Domenech’s resignation from washingtonpost.com, and a statement by the site’s managing editor wishing him good riddance and apologizing for the fiasco. Considering how long it took for earlier plagiarism scandals at major newspapers to come to light and bite the perpetrators and enablers in the butt, the lightning speed of the whole affair was impressive. To the extent you care about exposing plagiarists, it’s a good argument for the value of a wide-open blogosphere that can often serve as the enforcer of journalistic ethics, not just as a rules-free zone. As for Domenech’s underlying sin, I generally dislike getting too self-righteous about other people’s destructive habits, especially after they are exposed, since the Good Lord has a strong tendency to punish first-stone-throwers. But I have to say, plagiarism–like, say, upper-class kleptomania–is one sin I really have a hard time accepting. It combines sloth, avarice, and pride–three of the Seven Deadly Sins, no less–and is especially incomprehensible for someone who, like Mr. Domenech, does not seem to have been under any kind of extreme deadline pressure. Plagiarism, of course, is a lot easier than it was back in the day. For Old Folks like me who learned the writing craft on a Selectric II typewriter, and had to go to an actual library to do research, plagiarism would have been entirely too much work. Why not just write the thing yourself? (The parallel sin Old Folks tend to commit is self-plagiarism, which is the literary equivalent of telling your friends, family and colleagues the same damn stories over and over again). The ease of cutting-and-pasting, and the vast candy-store of online stuff to steal, has to increase the temptation. But technology giveth, and technology taketh away, and as Ben Domenech has now discovered, it’s real easy to search your online writing, pick out a few passages, google the words, and see if anything identical or very similar pops up. If it does, and it was published earlier–kaboom!Whatever it means for Domenech, for washingtonpost.com, or for a large number of disappointed and embarassed conservatives, this fiasco will probably result in a sharp drop in new incidents of plagiarism, at least among those bloggers and/or journalists who invite scrutiny.

An apology to faithful readers for the dearth of posts this week. In part, it’s because I’ve been blogging around on you. I’m participating in a TPMCafe Book Club discussion on Kevin Phillips’ latest provocative tome, American Theocracy. As my post indicates, I was certainly provoked by Phillips’ hypothesis that the “southernization of politics and religion” is largely responsible not just for the Bush Era, but for its most egregious excesses: huge public and private debt, an oil-focused energy policy, and the bungled war in Iraq. I probably pulled my punches in commenting on this hypothesis; one of the interesting features of TPMCafe Book Club is that it involves a direct discussion with book authors. It’s a useful structure, but one that inhibits me (unlike the brave Kevin Drum) a bit. No matter what he’s writing now, I will always esteem Kevin Phillips for his very first book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which did for political analysis what Bill James did for baseball analysis: create a statistical foundation for a truly comprehensive understanding of trends over many, many decades. In particular, Phillips consolidated an enormous amount of data on the non-economic determinants of voting behavior, especially religion, ethnicity, and amazingly persistant regional patterns based on large, traumatic events (most famously the Civil War). To this day, whenever I encounter one of those neo-populist Democrats who assume that today’s cultural politics represent an aberration from “natural” class-based politics, I direct them to Phillips book for a decisive rebuttal. Though The Emerging Republican Majority is generally regarded as a true classic, its influence took quite a while to develop. It was published in 1969, based in part on Phillips’ work in the 1968 Nixon campaign. Nixon’s subsequent re-election in 1972 seemed to confirm the title of the book, but the ’72 landslide was so enormous and national–and Republican non-presidential performance that year was so weak–that it didn’t do much to validate Phillips’ analysis. And then, of course, came Watergate, the Agnew and Nixon resignations, the Democratic landslide of1974, and the election of a Democratic president from the very region stipulated by Phillips as the hinge of the Republican majority. By the time of Reagan’s election in 1980–which really did validate his hypothesis–Kevin Phillips was largely a forgotten prophet. There’s another book that suffered a similar initial fate–one that in fact was explicitly modeled on Phillips’ classic. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority had the misfortune of being published just before the decisive Republican midterm victory of 2002, followed by Bush’s re-election. It will be interesting to see if they turn out ultimately to be prophets as well. I certainly hope they are.

I’m sure Ezra Klein’s cover story on the “reborn” Al Gore will get a lot of attention in the blogosphere and perhaps well beyond it. In case you don’t have time to read it, Ezra’s basic take is that Gore’s post-2000 political career has represented a thoughtful and integrity-filled repudiation of the Veep’s own cautious, centrist past; of the failed strategy of his 2000 campaign; and most especially, of the “old media” mindset that did him so much damage in 2000. I obviously don’t share Ezra’s characterization of Gore’s New Democrat heritage as one of “equivocating” and playing the mainstream media’s game. (I sometimes despair of convincing bloggers that people like me support what we support and oppose what we oppose for reasons of principle). Nor do I think it’s a particular badge of honor if Ezra’s right in saying that Gore has evolved from the 1990s cool-kids prefererence for New Democrats to the contemporary cool-kids attachment to the Dean Campaign legacy.But there’s no question Ezra is right about one thing: whether or not he’s campaigning for president (we should probably take him at his word that he’s not), Al Gore is clearly campaigning against his own past, about as systematically as anyone could do. Unlike Ezra, I think that reversal began during, not after, the 2000 campaign, when Gore could not bring himself to consistently campaign on the successful record of his own administration (his real blunder, IMO, not his occasional “populism,” which if a bit disembodied was fine). And that, not his previous loyalty to Clinton and his policies, was his real moment of “equivocation.”

Like, well, a fourth of the U.S. adult/adolescent population, I participated in a NCAA tournament pool in my office, and like a lot of people, my brackets were completely busted on the first two days. Actually, I participated in a second pool in which four of us “drafted” teams, on a seed times round basis, and I’ve completely bombed in that one as well.I’ll get over it within the next few hours, but for the record, my fate is a good example of how stupid the Conventional Wisdom is in any sport, including politics.The principles that guided my picks included:1) Don’t be a homer. My beloved Georgia Bulldogs were not in the tournament, so I had to be wary of the temptation to irrationally favor the teams from my work-place home of Washington, D.C. I picked the three “Georges”–Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason–to lose in the first round. All three won, and the Hoyas and Patriots actually advanced to the Sweet 16. I wish this result could be noted by the various people who email me now and then to accuse me of being a Washington Insider.2) Go for the hot young teams. Everybody’s Hot Young Teams were Kansas and North Carolina. The former lost in the first round; the latter in the second.3) Don’t pay attention to irrelevant traditions. Alabama has a great basketball tradition, but had a lousy, underachieving season. All the cool kids had them losing in the first round, while all the ignorant pickers chose them to beat Marquette, whose own tradition was too remote to be of interest to those ignorant pickers. Alabama won, of course. Same thing happened with Indiana and San Diego State and N.C. State and Cal: “smart guys” picked SDSU and Cal; dumb guys rightly picked IU and N.C. State.4) Pick judicious upsets: Most pools give bonuses for picking first-round upsets. Three years ago I was briefly in the running in my office poll for picking lots of those upsets. The last two years, I bombed by picking just as many upsets. This year was supposed to be another Year of the Upset, and it was, but I generally picked them wrong, going with San Diego State, Northern Iowa, Marquette, Seton Hall, UNCW, UAB, instead of Bradley, George Mason, Northwestern State, Montana or N.C. State.5) Focus on coaches’ tournament records: Tom Izzo has an incredible tournament record at Michigan State; I picked them to go to the Elite Eight, and the Spartans lost in the first round. Same scene with Kansas and North Carolina: their coaches never underachieve, except when they do, as in this year.The bottom line at this point is that people who filled out their brackets intuitively, or even ignorantly, are doing a lot better than us pseudo-sophisticates. Next year I’m probably going with the system of “whose mascot would win in a fight,” which at least presents some interesting metaphysical issues of how a Blue Devil would fare against a Bruin.

As you may have heard by now, Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris spent a good part of last week leading (relieved) Republicans to believe that she was going to withdraw from her can’t-lose-the-primary, can’t-win-the-general race against Sen. Bill Nelson. She would make a “major announcement” this Tuesday, she said. But instead of getting out of the race and giving Florida GOPers a prayer against Nelson, she went on Hannity and Colmes and announced she was about to dump $10 million in money inherited from her father into her campaign.Leave it to Harris to think that a lack of money was her main problem–and, for that matter, to think that her difficulty in attracting other people’s money might not be a indication of a deeper set of problems.But if she had to do what she had to do, then she should have probably gone to the trouble to pay some hush money to her top political strategist (prior to this week), the ol’ vote-suppressor Ed Rollins, who proceeded to tell the Orlando Sentinel that he and everybody else around the campaign had urged her to withdraw.

Harris’ chief strategist, Ed Rollins, gave a sober assessment of her chances a day after her television appearance, revealing that he and other key advisers concluded it probably would be best if she abandoned the race against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.Rollins said they worried about Harris’ sluggish fundraising, her inability to generate excitement among top Republicans and future fallout from illegal campaign contributions she took from a defense contractor who has since pleaded guilty to bribing a California lawmaker.

And that wasn’t the only less-than-enthused reaction to the Harris announcement. Quoth Gov. Jeb Bush: “I think for Congresswoman Harris to win, this has to stop being about her and has to start being about Senator Nelson and about the future of our country and the future of the state.”

I think Jeb should save his breath. For America’s most notorious political Drama Queen, it will never “stop being about her.”

Via Kevin Drum, and a report from ThinkProgress, I was interested, and literally angry, to learn that House Republicans blocked a budget resolution amendment today that would have provided money for U.S. customs agents to inspect high-risk cargo at overseas ports which ship directly into this country, and to set up radiation monitors at all U.S. ports. The amendment was sponsored by Martin Sabo (D-MN); all 194 House Democrats who were present and voting supported it, while 210 of 222 House Republicans present and voting opposed it, enough to defeat it on a tie vote.Were House GOPers simply worried about the money involved ($1.25 billion)? Not hardly, since they are in the process of approving a $781 billion increase in the public debt limit.This is an especially outrageous vote in the wake of widespread concerns about port security raised by the aborted Dubai Ports World lease of U.S. port operations. But it does explain one thing. Bush’s reaction to the firestorm raised by disclosure of the Dubai deal was to angrily accuse his critics of anti-Arab and/or anti-Muslim prejudice. Maybe he did that because mere prejudice was precisely what he was hearing from his congressional Republican allies. Presumably most of the House Republicans who voted against beefed-up port security today were also lined up to oppose the Dubai deal. And clearly their motivation had little or nothing to do with national security.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Having implicitly accused Chris Bowers of MyDD of failing to thoroughly read the writings of Steve Waldman and Amy Sullivan on Democrats and religious outreach, I must confess that I did not thoroughly read Chris’ latest post on the subject. Yes, I noted his argument against targeting evangelical voters, but he went on to make the rather different complaint that people who called for a different Democratic strategy towards such voters were reinforcing the Republican meme that Democrats were anti-religious.Now this is a complicated argument for Chris to make, since he has invested a fair number of words to the proposition that Democrats ought to build a “non-Christian coalition.” But the more important issue is that this exchange illustrates the Dialogue of the Deaf within the Democratic Party about “reinforcing opposition talking points,” which is what Chris accuses “third way types” like me of doing, and which I suggested Chris was doing in the coda of my own post.This is truly classic: “centrists” worry that lefties or hyper-partisan netroots types are feeding Republican stereotypes about our party, and then the objects of this criticism respond that “centrists” are helping the opposition by making such arguments. You see this sort of exchange all the time, though most of the anger these days is coming from the non-“centrist” side of the debate.I’ve personally come to the conclusion that all of us in the progressive camp have gotten a little too obsessed with the “enemy is listening” fear.Yes, I know about the Right-Wing Noise Machine and its influence. Yes, I’ve seen the famous Rob Stein presentation; yes, I’ve read and agreed with Off Center, and as a matter of fact, I’ve written a fair amount on my own dime about the novel nature of today’s conservative movement and Republican Party. But all of this does not really justify the totalitarian power we sometimes attribute to the opposition, and the corresponding, guerilla-like belief that anyone on our side whose words can be used by the State Police needs to be immediately repudiated, if not liquidated. Difficult as it is to accept, the truth is that nothing said by Chris, or Markos, or Amy Sullivan, or Marshall Wittmann, or me, is likely to turn up in Republican television ads, or affect actual voters in any major way. We’re all on the periphery of politics, not at its heart.Moreover, a lot of this is really about fighting the last war. The famous Machine is crumbling, by all accounts. Democrats need to talk honestly about how to administer the coup de grace in the next two election cycles, without resorting to secret meetings in smoky (or more likely, non-smoking) revolutionary bars.This brings me to Garance Franke-Ruta’s astute comment about Chris Bowers’ concerns over the Sullivan/Waldman critiques of Democrats:

If progressives can’t have honest conversations in their own magazines and blogs, where are they supposed to do it? Voters can scarcely recall what is said directly to them in advertisements during the height of election season; articles like those in the Monthly are unlikely to swing elections one way or another any more than are Bower’s own extremely frank blog items. At best, they may make political actors think more about certain issues over time.

Amen. We need to define an intra-party free speech zone that includes political arguments that one position or another hurts us or helps them, but does not begin or end with the assumption that the only possible sin is to fail to flail Republicans with the maximum force on every topic. That might have been a superior tactic to what Democrats did in 2002 or even 2004, but its wisdom, or that of any particular strategy being offered by “centrists,” is not self-evident today.Let’s really talk about it.

One of my favorite progressive bloggers is Chris Bowers of MyDD, in no small part because he is impeccably honest and open to new evidence, and willing to admit (a rare quality in political discourse generally) on occasion that he’s been wrong. After reading his post today endorsing Tom Schaller’s assault on the idea that Democrats should reach out to Christian religious folk, including evangelicals, and on Steve Waldman and Amy Sullivan for advancing that idea, I hope this is one topic he is willing to rethink.Here’s Chris’ main argument:

Internalizing and following the obviously poor election strategy offered up for Democrats by pundits within the established news media is one of the greatest problems we face when trying to win elections. The basic problem is that we are repeatedly told, and repeatedly believe, that in order to win, we must not go after either swing votes or rev up our own base, but instead focus our main strategy on actually trying to win over the Republican base itself. I call this the “Democrats Must Court The Limbaugh Vote” strategy syndrome, both because we tend to follow the election advice given to us by Rush Limbaugh types, and because that advice invariably means that we must target the hard-core Rush Limbaugh audience.

Now, as someone who’s probably read just about everything published by Steve Waldman and Amy Sullivan on this subject, I have to say that Scheller and Bowers do not know what they are talking about. Amy Sullivan’s many writings on religious outreach have one exceptionally consistent message: there are millions of voters attending “conservative” churches who are not in any meaningful sense part of the “Republican base.” They do not, in fact, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or for that matter, James Dobson. They attend the churches they attend for reasons that have nothing to do with the agenda of the Cultural Right. They have all sorts of political, moral and civic beliefs that are entirely consistent with the values and policy positions of Democrats. But they have voted, and will vote, Republican if there’s no real competition for their votes, and if they perceive, erroneously, that Democrats live in a different moral universe than theirs, or have contempt for their beliefs.Steve Waldman has actually written very little in the way of direct pitches for Democrats to appeal to “conservative” Christians. But as someone who discarded a successful career as a Washington journalist–first, to help run AmeriCorps, and then, as an Internet entrepreneur, to pursue his insight that Americans increasingly view religious options from a consumer’s point of view–he has a keen understanding of the complicated and unpredictable connection between religion and politics. And like Sullivan, and myself, he’s convinced there is a segment of the electorate among self-consciously religious people that is just waiting to be harvested by a progressive message that takes them seriously.Take a look at the latest issue of The Washington Monthly, which includes (a) a piece by Amy Sullivan reporting on the open and increasingly avid willingness of some key evangelical Christian leaders to defect from the Republican Coalition; (b) a more historical article by Steve Waldman reminding evangelicals of the heritage of religious liberty their leaders have forsaken in their recent “marriage” to the conservative movement and the GOP; and (c) a straight reportorial job by yours truly predicting impending doom for that great symbol of the Christian Right, Ralph Reed.Search in vain for any argument that exploiting the political opening created by the impending crack-up of the Christian Right machine requires Democrats to compromise core convictions or become, as Chris invidiously put it in a recent post, the “second white Christian party.” We’re talking about picking up low-hanging political fruit simply by deploying the language and respecting the values and lifestyles of people who are half-way to Democratic voting habits already.In fairness to Chris, his argument on this subject gets into a very technical set of views about voter targeting, which frankly, though I respect them, create all sorts of false choices. Democrats do not have to choose between energizing the base and reaching out to obvious or potential swing voters; you can do both, keeping in mind that turning swing voters (defined not as “undecideds,” BTW, but as persuadable voters) has double the electoral value of turning out people who will vote for you if they vote at all.I have less sympathy for Chris’ argument that the progressive future lies with cultivating a “non-Christian coalition” based on demographic projections that conflate (a) increases in non-Christian but religiously affiliated voters, who are often likely to welcome the same religious outreach that might help Democrats with “conservative” Christians, and (b) indications that young voters aren’t religious, which ignores life-stage patterns of religious observance and non-observance that have gone through predictable cycles among the baby boomers and Gen-Xers who are now flocking to megachurches. Maybe Chris is right that something more fundamental is suddenly going on, but the idea that Democrats will flourish by flouting their credentials as the Party of Baal, or whatever, strikes me as implausible, and more to the point, irrelevant. Are irreligious voters really in danger of defecting to the theocratic GOP, or for that matter, refusing to vote, if Democrats open a dialogue, without sacrificing their principles, with religious voters? I don’t think so.And that’s why I think the backlash against sensible advice from progressives like Amy Sullivan and Steve Waldman is misguided. As a person of faith myself, the only thing that aggrieves me more than the claim by conservatives that God is a Republican, is to hear progressives, however few, say they are right. This, my friends, is an example of “reinforcing the opposition’s talking points” that should be taken just as seriously as any other boon to Fox News–and to Rush Limbaugh.

Today, reading a recent edition of the excellent Political Insider column by Atlanta Journal-Constitution political reporters Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter, I ran across this revelation into the little-known nexus between two issues cultural conservatives often focus on, abortion and immigration, as expressed by a Georgia Republican legislator:

Democrats have been buzzing about comments made by state Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R-Turnerville) at a recent eggs-and-issues breakfast in Hart County. We quote from the Hartwell Sun newspaper: “Commenting on illegal immigration, Schaefer said 50 million abortions have been performed in this country, causing a shortage of cheap American labor. ‘We could have used those people,’ she said.”

Now that’s a novel talking point that even the eager abortion-criminalizers of South Dakota haven’t thought of yet: overturn Roe v. Wade, and replenish the supply of cheap, English-speaking help.