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.

It is, as sports fanatics everywhere know, Selection Sunday, when the 65-team field of the NCAA basketball tournament is revealed, and–thanks to an entire industry of “bracketology”–the one or two remaining mysteries about “bubble teams” and seedings are resolved. I will not watch the official Selection Sunday show on television, with its endlessly tedious references to “dancing” and “dance cards,” and its sadistic focus on live coverage of a team or two that will be left out. I will view the brackets online, however, and try to finally figure out which team or teams I will embrace during next week’s frenetic first and second round games. My beloved Georgia Bulldogs will not, of course, be in the mix; they are still rebuilding from the calamity of the Jim Harrick years, and after a brief spate of exciting success earlier in the year, finished 15-15, probably not qualifying for an NIT bid. But their future looks bright. (The Georgia women’s team will, as always, be in the tournament, and perhaps they won’t break my heart with an early upset loss this time around). Selection Sunday always brings back fond memories of the one time I actually attended NCAA tournament games: it was in 1990, in New Orleans’ Superdome (ah! how painful it is to type those words today!). Georgia Tech was playing in the regional semifinals and finals, and I decided to put aside my usual disdain for the Dirt Daubers and cheer for them as a matter of home-state chauvinism. I managed to get tickets through a media contact for seats better than that enjoyed by Tech’s president, and was rewarded with two incredibly exciting games: the Jackets beat Michigan State in the semis on a controversial last-split-second shot by Kenny Anderson, and then beat Minnesota in overtime for the championship. Aside from the games themselves, my most vivid memory was of the young woman from Minnesota who sat behind me in the Final, dressed up as a gopher, and constantly recited the school’s charmingly atavistic cheer, which sounded like something out of an early Mickey Rooney college movie (Sota! Sota! G-o-o-o-o Gophers! Rah!). That was sixteen years ago, and I wonder: where is that woman today? Does she still dress up as a gopher? And does she blog? The whole scene was a nice reminder of the essential silliness of the tribal loyalty so many of us assign to sports teams. Years after this event, I learned that my paternal grandfather, who died when my father was an infant, actually attended Georgia Tech for a brief while before the money ran out and he had to get a full-time job. Nobody in my extended, and generally non-college-educated family, attended the University of Georgia. My father was largely indifferent to sports, and my mother, good southern liberal that she was, reserved her loyalities for the Dodgers baseball team that played Jackie Robinson. Yet I was a confirmed Georgia Bulldog fan from early childhood. Why is that? I couldn’t possibly have known that I would wind up attending law school in Athens. Was it the mascot, UGA? The school colors? I have no clue.And so, on this Selection Sunday, I cast about for an irrational attachment to other peoples’ tribes. Should I risk further identification as a Washington Insider by supporting Georgetown or George Washington? Choose a Southern Surrogate for the absent Bulldogs? Get into an emotionally satisfying and vaguely progressive Mid-Major obsession? Speaking for God knows how many other people who face this particular dilemma, I must say, dear friends, that this is why they call it March Madness.

As regular readers of this blog know, there is no political subject that fascinates me more than party politics in my native South–both the historical question of how the region became “red,” and the immediate question of whether and how Democrats can become more competitive.Earlier this week a colleague sent me a book review that provides a good excuse for revisiting that first, historical topic. The New Republic‘s Clay Risen reviewed The End of Southern Exceptionalism for the Boston Globe, and concluded that the book offers fresh evidence that economics, not race, was the central factor in the rise of southern Republicanism.I’ve ordered, but have not yet received, a copy of the book, written by Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin and Richard Johnston of the University of British Columbia. But the surprising thing to me about Risen’s review is that the book’s hypothesis seems to be so controversial, “one that few observers of the postwar South will agree with.”This is not to say I believe in a purely economic interpretation of the South’s Republican resurgence, but given the apparent supremacy of a purely racial interpretation, it’s a good corrective.Certainly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were decisive events in breaking down the ancient alliance between the National Democratic Party and a whites-only regional Democratic Party that had dominated most of the South since the Civil War. But the civil rights revolution did not necessarily, and did not in fact destroy state and local Democratic parties. And if you look at the dynamics of two-party competition in the South, even today, the picture is too complicated to support the claim that race, or any other one factor, has caused the rise of southern Republicanism.My own informed-amateur “wave theory” of party politics in the South places great emphasis on the efforts of each party, and especially my own Democratic Party, to constantly create and recreate new coalitions, depending on the demographics of individual states. But this improvisational coalition-building was a big part of the originial post-World-War-II Republican effort to create a viable two-party system in the South.According to Risen, Shafer and Johnston focus on the rapid urbanization that occured thoughout much of the region from the 1940s through the 1960s, which created a self-conscious urban and suburban white middle-class that voted Republican just like similar places elsewhere (indeed, a heavy in-migration of already-Republican voters from the northeast and midwest, already a large factor in Florida in the 1940s, spread throughout southern suburbs in later decades). But in four states, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia, there was already a sizable Republican voter base among Appalachian whites (until quite recently, the very poorest people in America) who had been voting that way since the Civil War. The pre-Civil Rights strength of Republicans in any given state was largely a function of the size of these two very different elements of the population. Moreover, states with few Appalachian voters and smaller cities and suburbs had weak Republican Parties that did ultimately depend on their occasional success in reaching large numbers of rural white voters through race-based appeals.It should come as no surprise, then, to discover how well Eisenhower did in relatively-urbanized states like Florida (which he carried twice) or Texas (won in 1956), and in states with both growing suburbs and cities and Appalachian pockets (Tennessee and Virginia, which he won twice, and North Carolina, where he narrowly lost twice). In 1960, Richard Nixon, then considered a liberal on racial issues by southern standards, did nearly as well in precisely the same places.This complicated picture was confirmed, not obliterated, by Barry Goldwater’s race-based rural southern breakthrough in 1964. Although he swept the Deep South, he lost all the border states, including those carried by Ike and Nixon, and even within the states he carried, he ran behind the previous GOP candidates in many urban and suburban areas.At both the presidential level and–especially–the state and local level, Republican fortunes have ebbed and flowed according to the same shifting of coalitions in the ensuing decades. And even in the contemporary era, where Republicans have an advantage in most, though not all, statewide elections in most of the region, the components vary from state to state. In places like South Carolina and Mississippi, the party system represents a widespread racial polarization, and you can definitely say the basic partisan dynamics point straight back to the civil rights revolution. But in my own home state of Georgia, while race has been a factor, the explosive growth of the suburban population has clearly tilted the state to the GOP, which also means the Democratic counter-trend that has so often set in as suburbs mature could be a big factor in Georgia’s political future.In other words, there is no universal theory that really explains the past, present or future or southern politics, and that is why I am more optimistic than most in predicting that Republican hegemony in the South is far less than inevitable or permanent.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

One of the great rituals of American politics is the First Big Profile of a potential presidential candidate in one of the Newspapers of Record. This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine’s cover story is Matt Bai’s initial take on Mark Warner. (You can read a summary, and down in the comment thread, the actual text, here.)The piece is generally interesting, and fair to its subject, but it suffers from an obsession with Warner’s potential rivalry with Hillary Clinton. Much of Bai’s analysis looks at Mark Warner as a non-Clinton, an anti-Clinton, and even as a Clintonian Not Named Clinton. It would have been nice if Bai had devoted a few graphs to what Warner might represent if Hillary does not run, just as an analysis of Hillary’s husband in 1990 might have benefitted from the assumption that Mario Cuomo might not run.But IMO, Bai redeems himself with a very solid paragraph about Warner’s particular appeal to rural voters in the South and elsewhere:

Warner’s constant theme, which a lot of Washington politicians talk about but few seem to actually understand, was the need to modernize for a global economy. The days when you could walk down the streetand get a job at the mill were over, Warner would say,and new jobs — the state gained more than 150,000 ofthem on his watch — would require new skills and infrastructure. So Warner, working with Nascar, pushed through an accelerated program that enabled 35,000 more Virginians to get high-school equivalency degrees, and he introduced a program to deliver broadband capacity to 20 Southern counties. “In the 1800’s, if the railroad didn’t come through your small town, the town shriveled up and went away,” he told me once, explaining his rural program. “And if the broadband Internet doesn’t come through your town in the next few years, the same thing will happen.” If he ultimately decides to run for president, Warner will try to build a national campaign around this same technology-driven approach.

This take on Warner’s potential appeal to southern and rural voters is a nice corrective to the conventional wisdom that in Virginia he just seduced the folks by hiring bluegrass bands and Nascar teams and coming out for huntin’ and fishin’. All these things mattered, but his real pitch to rural Virginians tired of losing in the Old Economy was that the New Economy offered new hope, not a new threat. This is a message that could resonate in “backward” areas all over the country. And ironically, Hillary Clinton has spent a lot of time mining this very promising vein as well.Bai rightly suggests that Warner, like any governor, has to come up with a clear message and agenda on national security. But it would be helpful if journalists profiling Warner, or Hillary Clinton for that matter, would contrast potential 2008 Democrats not just with each other, but with the former governor in the White House who is so thoroughly screwing up international and domestic policy every single day.

It will take a while to completely unravel the meaning of today’s announcement by Dubai Ports World that it intended to divest itself of its leases to run six major U.S. ports. The only really clear thing is that it will probably buy the Bush administration some time to regroup and save face when it was cruisin’ for a bruisin’ in threatening to veto bipartisan legislation to stop the deal. But my own hope is that none of us get so hung-up about the identity of port operators, or are so tempted to declare victory if a U.S. firm replaces Dubai Ports World, that we forget the underlying security issue this brouhaha exposed.The federal government is doing a really crappy job of conducting security at all U.S. ports, with only five percent of cargoes being inspected. If that doesn’t change, then I won’t feel much better if the companies operating our ports–wide open invitations to the kind of materials that could feed a nuclear 9/11–are as American as apple pie.

If I may brieflt interrupt the debate I’ve apparently helped catalyze about the definition and political importance of universal health coverage (go check out the TPMCafe.com site and follow the links if you are interested), Amy Sullivan has written and long and important cover story for the Washington Monthly about the growing openness of younger evangelical Christian leaders to a divorce with the Republican Party, if not a marriage with Democrats.Amy’s poster boy for this phenomenon is Randy Brinson, an Alabama-based evangelical leader who has rapidly evolved from his role as (1) a cutting-edge GOTV operative for Republicans in 2003 and 2004, to (2) a spokesman for evangelicals unhappy about the compromises being made on issues of domestic and global equality in exchange for empty GOP promises on such subjects as abortion, and then (3) an open dissenter against the Christian Right and an advocate of cooperation with Democrats in Alabama and nationally.Whatever you think of Brinson, or of his nationally better-known fellow heretic Richard Cizick of the National Association of Evangelicals, there is a political and cultural opening they offer that Democrats would be fools to spurn or ignore. The tactical alliance forged during the 1990s between older conservative evangelical leaders and the Republican Party has had doleful consequences for American politics and religion alike. Busting this alliance up would have similarly positive results.

All of a sudden, two bloggers I respect, Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, seem to be identifying me as a rare and lonely voice who needs to explain why Democrats shouldn’t unanimously embrace a single-player approach to universal health coverage. And some people say the DLC isn’t relevant any more.In my public exchange of posts with Kevin late last night, I suggested that a whole lot of credible people across the range of party opinion didn’t think much of the single-payer approach, and sure didn’t think it was the only way to get to universal coverage. I mentioned the six leading candidates for the presidential nomination in 2004, and asked: “Were they all compromising wimps? Did they all privately acknowledge that single-payer was the goal, and just cringe from saying it publicly?”Today Kevin did a post that answered these questions affirmatively:

Here’s my guess: in private, I’ll bet all of these gentlemen do acknowledge that a simple single-payer national healthcare plan is the best policy. But for tactical political reasons, they think it’s more effective to talk about incremental solutions.

Well, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about six very different politicians, eh? I mean, did each and every one of them, from Dean to Lieberman, sit down with his advisors and basically say: “Dennis Kucinich is right, of course. But we need to be tactical about this, and in fact, that means talking more, not less, about the value of private health insurance in a universal system.”I don’t much see it, but there are a lot of people out there, including some bloggers, who were closer to the campaigns than I was, so how about a little help? Hey, netroots Deaniacs: did the Doctor deliberately wimp out on health care policy as a “tactical” thing, in the midst of an audacious campaign to defy the Washington Conventional Wisdom? Or did he actually think Dr. Dinosaur was a decent model for where we ought to go nationally on health care? You tell me, and tell Kevin.Matt Yglesias provides a more direct challenge, accepting my suggestion that the differences among Democrats is about means rather than ends, and expressing disappointment that I did not make a plenary argument for alternatives to single-payer.I’ll be happy to respond in a day or two, when I can digest and deal with my new responsibilities as a lonely progressive defender of a path to univeral coverage that includes choice, competition and individual responsibility. But the burden of proof among progressives on heath care remains with those who think the single-payer approach–so seductively simple, but so systematically at odds with past Democratic and national principles about health care–is the self-evident Silver Bullet. “Everybody who denies it believes it in their hearts” is not an argument that meets this burden of proof.