Tonight I happened to stumble on a MyDD post by Matt Stoller that tries to grapple with a Zogby poll indicating that a majority of Republican and Democratic voters, and virtually all Independents, support politicians willing to compromise their principles to get things done.Matt writes an eloquent and agonized essay on these findings, but somehow winds up deciding that progressives should ignore them, and in fact, gird up their loins to change the minds of such voters by demonstrating that principles are more important than getting things done.My first impulse after reading this post was to cite Bertolt Brecht’s famous sardonic suggestion to the East German government in a time of turmoil that it “dissolve the people, and elect another.” But that’s probably not fair. Matt’s trying to figure out why Democratic voters in particular, despite all the polarization of the last few years, still support the idea of compromise with the hated partisan enemy.I think this is a matter of placing the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. Matt’s worried about the willingness of voters to “compromise principles,” and should be focusing on their desire to “get things done,” which in the end, is what politics is all about.”Getting things done” is a yardstick for contemporary politics that’s just as damning to George W. Bush and the Republican Party as all the partisan rhetoric you could hope for about their evil motives–rhetoric I engage in myself all the time.It’s actually very good news that a majority of voters in every category seem inclined to apply that yardstick to their political choices. That’s a competition progressives generally, and Democrats specifically, ought to be able to win. And in fact, using the public sector to “get things done” on the vast array of national challenges that Republicans are ignoring or screwing up is a pretty important matter of principle in itself.

While there’s not really a “war on Christmas” going on in this country, there is a “war on the Christmas spirit” going on in Washington, courtesy of the Republican leadership in Congress and their perverse priorities on budget and tax issues. Check it out in today’s New Dem Dispatch.

Ah, yes, it’s another Christmas season, and another opportunity for elements of the Cultural Right to start up their fatuous whining about the “War on Christmas.” I did a post on this last year which I won’t repeat now. But I must say that I am ashamed of those of my fellow-Christians–surely a small if noisy minority–who purport to be crushed by the burden of equality; offended by the demands of interfaith respect; victimized by the injustice of state neutrality; and oppressed by the tyranny of the naked public square.When you consider the vast march of martyrs through the centuries who have suffered and died for Christ against the real, physical, limb-rending, heretic-burning, death-dealing power of state discrimination, what weak and faithless successors we are if we pretend the Gospel is threatened by “Happy Holidays” cards or Kwanzaa songs or “winter carnivals.” It’s especially absurd to see some conservative Protestants joining this self-pitying display, given the nurturance they have long enjoyed from America’s liberal and pluralistic traditions. Indeed, those among them whose roots are in the Calvinist Reformed tradition seem to have forgotten that the celebration of Christmas itself was illegal in Calvin’s Geneva, John Knox’s Scotland, and even in Puritan New England, and frowned upon by many Presbyterians until well into the twentieth century. So please, if you truly want to “put Christ back into Christmas,” do that in your homes, your churches, and your hearts. But you are missing the “reason for the season” if you continue this uncharitable and altogether un-Christian agitation for the fool’s gold of special privileges and a martyr’s crown you have not earned.

I don’t have a lot to add to the appraisals of Eugene McCarthy–who died this weekend–being offered by others, but do want to riff on a theme suggested by former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet over at The New Republic‘s site.Kusnet usefully focuses on McCarthy’s real breakthrough moment in national Democratic politics, his fiery nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 convention in Los Angeles. This now-forgotten incident was at the time a very big deal: as Teddy White explained in The Making of the President 1960, the draft-Stevenson movement, underscored by a very noisy demonstration of activists around the convention site, was momentarily a threat to the pre-ordained nomination of John F. Kennedy.But while Kusnet focuses on the temperamental aspects of the tradition that linked Adlai and McCarthy to such later liberal activist heroes as Mo Udall and Bill Bradley–candidates who sometimes conveyed the sense they were too good to actually win–I think there’s a more obvious strain that runs from Stevenson to McCarthy to McGovern to Gary Hart to Paul Tsongas to Howard Dean (and could include Russ Feingold if he emerges as a major candidate in 2008). It’s a tradition of candidates who expanded the Democratic appeal into previously Republican or independent upscale professional territory, but at the risk of losing touch with the old Democratic coalition of working-class and minority voters.For those of you who tend to think this trend began much more recently, it’s sobering to recall that the term “egghead” was first popularized as an anti-intellectual slur against Stevenson supporters in 1952. And each of “Adlai’s children” in later Democratic candidacies drew his signature support from social and economic elites determined to overthrow some aspect of mass culture or politics, from Stevenson’s implicit attacks on the philistinism of Ike’s America, to McCarthy’s ironically detached refusal to play “politics as usual,” to McGovern and Hart’s crystallization of discontent with old-line Democratic “machine” politics, to Tsongas’ mix of social liberalism and economic conservatism, to Dean’s antiwar-fed revolt against the Washington Democratic Establishment.All these candidates struggled, to one degree or another, to attract much support from blue-collar and minority voters, though arguably they might have pulled together a broader coalition if they had actually won the nomination (the one who did, George McGovern, performed credibly among minority voters but lost catastrophically among union households). Before you hit the button to send me a nasty email about lumping Howard Dean together with “Adlai’s Children,” we obviously don’t know how a Dean general election campaign might have fared, though the disproportionately upscale and non-minority nature of his original movement was beyond dispute, and a source of much hand-wringing among Deaniacs at the time.Ironically, it was probably McCarthy’s great rival, Robert F. Kennedy, who offered the best potential fusion of a New Politics appeal that attracted New Class voters, while keeping together the traditional Democratic coalition. After all, RFK’s primary campaign of 1968 did indeed draw a mind-boggling coalition from Wallacites to lunch-bucket ethnics to African-Americans and Latinos. But it’s worth remembering that RFK’s popularity among liberal intellectuals and anti-war professionals was much higher after his assassination than when he was an actual candidate (when he ran for the Senate in 1964, virtually the entire Manhattan liberal intelligentsia endorsed his Republican rival).On purely empirical grounds, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000 have been the two nominees who were best able to consolidate upscale support while hanging onto much if hardly all of the old coalition. And Kerry did as well as Gore among highly educated voters, while losing more at the other end of the spectrum.Gene McCarthy, a temperamentally conservative man much more likely to quote Thomas Aquinas than Thomas Jefferson, was hardly the ideal fusion candidate. And a lot’s changed, politically and demographically, since 1968. But the challenge of adding to the coalition without subtracting from it elsewhere remains.

I spent most of the weekend driving around Virginia attending to various chores, and didn’t see or hear any news, so it wasn’t until today, when I was driving my kid, Jack, back to school in Richmond, that I learned that Richard Pryor had died. Jack broke the news to me in a quiet way, knowing how much I adored this man. In fact, Jack bought me a Pryor box set for Christmas last year, after discovering for himself that this icon of the 70s and 80s was a lot funnier than the people that come and go on Comedy Central these days.That was appropriate, since I bought my own father a couple of early Pryor albums–yes, the ones with the n-word in the title, which provided some additional comedy as I struggled to find a way to ask for them from an African-American store clerk–back in the mid-1970s.You want to know how powerfully funny Richard Pryor was? After memorizing these albums, my father, a middle-aged southern white man from a very conservative background, became Richard Pryor for about a year. Everytime I’d see him, we’d go through a complex call-and-response greeting based on some Pryor routine. (And Pryor also supplied the right thing to say for virtually every occasion; if I’d screwed up in some way, my father was likely to lightly rebuke me with the words of Pryor’s wino accosting a Martian: You done landed on Mr. Gilmore’s property!)And to this day, nearly thirty years later, we both know the whole oeuvre by heart. And so does Jack.A lot’s been said, and is being said today, about how Pryor stretched the boundaries of taste in comedy, and in particular, how he confronted the realities and absurdities of race, and that’s very true. Indeed, his routine on the experience of being a black man pulled over by a white traffic cop (Get out of the car; raise yo’ hands, drop yo’ pants, spread yo’ cheeks. A gas station’s been robbed, and you look just like the n—- who done it!) probably provided a lot of white people with their first understanding of racial profiling, and what it’s like to be a permanent suspect in your own country.But Pryor was ultimately not just a “great black comic;” he was simply the funniest man alive, by a large margin. If, like me, you agree with the late Hunter Thompson that “a sense of humor is the only prima facie evidence of sanity,” then Richard Pryor was, for all the foibles in his personal life, one of the sanest men alive, and one who helped keep the rest of us sane as well.May God give him rest, and return to him the joy he gave so many others.

Michelle Cottle over at The New Republic’s site provides a simple but elegant case against the U.S. House of Representatives’ ability, certainly under current management, to police its Members’ ethical practices. She suggests its ethics committee be abolished as toothless and misleading, and I tend to agree.Giving congressional ethics rules the power of law, with criminal sanctions for those abuses that involve the selling of influence and the extortion of bribes, would be a good way to replace the current system. And for policing the less criminal but still important ethics violations, creating an indepedent ethics body for Congress, as Bruce Reed has suggested, is another good idea.But the key point is to understand that what we are experiencing these days is not a sound system being overwhelmed or undermined by egregious behavior, but an inadequate and dysfunctional system being exploited by the wolves who always thrive when the sheep have no real shepherd.

The twin obsessions in Washington right now about Iraq and the continuing pandemic of GOP scandals have obscured the once and future obsession of George W. Bush’s efforts to reshape the Supreme Court. To be sure, Samuel Alito’s nomination has yet to undergo Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, which is why few senators from either party have taken definitive positions. But as Ryan Lizza points out on The New Republic‘s site today, the gradual build-up of evidence about Alito’s strong antagonism to Roe v. Wade is taxing the abilities of administration spinmeisters who want to keep this nomination in The Roberts Zone.Like a lot of observers, I’ve long felt Alito’s prospects for a relatively easy confirmation depended on whether he is perceived as another Scalia (scary conservative judicial activist) or as another Roberts (reassuring conservative judicial incrementalist). His handlers have done a pretty good job of keeping the dial turned towards the Roberts model, mainly by stressing his calm temperament and geniality; I guess the planted axiom is that Nice Guys Don’t Overturn Abortion Rights.But as Lizza notes, Alito’s growing paper trail of outspoken hostility to Roe, and especially the internal memo he wrote his colleagues at the Justice Department laying out a stealth strategy for ridding the Constitution of abortion rights, are stepping on his current message. And the rejoinder that Alito’s appeals court decisions upholding Roe as precedent show his deep respect for stare decisis is, as Lizza also notes, a crock: lower courts do not have the option of overturning Supreme Court decisions, but Supreme Courts most definitely do.Thus, even as Washington and the whole political world look elsewhere, the probability that the Alito nomination will hang fire is slowly growing. And after the Miers fiasco, accompanied by a growing sense among conservatives that time’s beginning to run out on their tainted ascendancy, Alito’s handlers may not have the wiggle room to make too many dubious assurances that the putative justice might well turn out to be a vote to sustain Roe. Another nice feature of Lizza’s analysis is that he shares my redundantly expressed view that any judicial, much less cultural, conservative reflexively thinks of Roe as the mother of all abominations. There’s absolutely no reason to think Samuel Alito thinks otherwise, and a lot of evidence to suggest his views on Roe are exactly what you’d expect.Now, there are two arguments you often hear in Democratic circles on this subject that sound initially plausible but which, in my opinion, are dangerously off-course. The first is that Republicans actually don’t want to overturn Roe because it would produce a political backlash once state legislatures and governors had to actually decide whether to support or repeal basic abortion rights. The second is that Democrats should smile upon a reversal of Roe, for the same reasons.The first argument, even if you buy it, suggests that Republican politicians can perpetually keep cultural conservatives running around the political track like greyhounds chasing a rabbit that can never be caught. Sure, some GOP pols may hope that’s true, but now, at the moment the Right has prayed and dreamed about for a generation, I just don’t think Republican cynicism on abortion will be allowed to prevailAnd the second argument, while defensible in theory, just doesn’t make any sense in the real world. Whatever you think of the constitutional provenance of Roe, the idea that a post-Roe world would somehow entail a sort of national referendum on basic abortion rights, with a dignified debate and simple up-or-down votes in every state, defies everything we know about the politics of abortion and the nature of state legislatures. The reality is that the reversal of Roe would turn state politics across the country into an endless, 24/7 battleground over a vast array of abortion legislation, perhaps indefinitely. At worst, it could produce the kind of reasoned debate associated with the Schiavo case, every single day, across the country. At best, abortion policy would overshadow many compelling issues most of the time, and some compelling issues all of the time.So you don’t have to be an abortion rights ultra to shudder at the prospect of Roe‘s reversal. Yet Alito’s confirmation will likely bring us face-to-face with that contingency.If the genial Jersey judge conducts a pitch-perfect balancing act in the Judiciary hearings, maybe none of this will matter. And even if he doesn’t, Senate Democrats obviously don’t have the votes to block him, and face an agonizing decision about using a filibuster weapon thatwill likely be snatched away from them immediately–and permanently–through the invocation of the Nuclear Option.But no matter what happens next, Alito is probably not going to be confirmed without serious controversy, and is probably going to face a fight. And the fight will likely, and naturally, wind up revolving around the constitutional status of abortion, which much as we might wish otherwise, is truly hanging in the balance, if not right now, then in a future so near that we should all soberly consider its baleful nature–terrible for women, and bad for democracy.

One of those low-grade-fever, under-the-radar discussions that often consume the chattering classes involves the possibility that the Republican Party will offer up John McCain as the successor to George W. Bush in 2008. It’s an especially interesting topic to us political junkies who know (a) how much savage hatred was built up in 2000 between McCain and the movement conservative/K Street/theocon establishment backing Bush; (b) how often McCain has violated conservative litmus tests on domestic issues ranging from tax cuts to global climate change to ethics legislation; and (c) how tempting it is to McCain’s old GOP enemies to bring him back into the establishment to save it from total immolation in 2008.I’ve already weighed in on a TPMCafe discussion of McCain’s future, but was prompted to say more here by an interesting assessment of McCain’s rapproachment with conservatives written by Byron York of National Review, published by The New Republic.York is a very good old-school reporter who knows the conservative world intimately, so I’ll take his word for it that McCain’s efforts on Bush’s behalf in 2004; his base-pleasing outspokenness about the righteousness of the war in Iraq; and the recent conservative convergance with the Arizonan on the fiscal profligacy of the congressional GOP; are all factors that cover a multitude of McCain’s past and present heresies against Republican orthodoxy. But I submit those heresies–which include McCain’s sponsorship, with Joe Lieberman, of the climate change legislation conservatives hate passionately–remain a bar to a McCain run in 2008, unless he goes far out of his way in the future to tack back to the Right. The other factor, of course, is exactly how desperate Republicans are becoming when they think about 2008. Do they embrace their ancient intraparty enemy over their friends? Will they demand McCain bend the knee on a variety of conservative litmus tests? How many assurances will they require about the shape and the staffing of a potential McCain White House? (Will my colleague The Moose, for example, be banned from grazing among the canapes at White House receptions?).My own gut feeling about the current conservative flirtation with McCain is that it’s all a matter of hedging bets. The Right will look high and low for a presidential alternative to McCain, but the big priority is to make sure they get a sufficiently clear set of commitments from him to make the competition as insignificant as possible.For us very interested outsiders in this Republican debate, the major question is how big a piece of his own persona McCain has to repudiate to attract GOP forces who’d rather try to tame and train him, than to actually listen to his words. And for McCain, the question is how far he’s willing to go to make his own proud and independent words meaningless.

Rick Perlstein, author of Before The Storm, the fine 2002 book about the 1964 Goldwater campaign, is getting some blogospheric buzz after posting a speech he did to a conservative confab at Princeton. In his acerbic remarks, which undoubtedly discomfited hosts who expected him to regale the group with AuH2O war stories, he examined the parallels between the Goldwater zealots who got caught up in the manifold ethical and legal problems of the Nixon administration, and those who today are distinguishing themselves likewise in scandals and other violations of conservative principle, such as fiscal profligacy.Rick’s observations about the corruption of conservative ideologues into what they once disparaged as mere “Republicans” are acute and on-target, but I’d add an additional thought about the second-generation conservatives who are now running and ruining our country.I wrote a review for Blueprint magazine earlier this year that compared and contrasted Perlstein’s book with Craig Shirley’s hagiography of Reagan’s failed but seminal 1976 campaign, Reagan’s Revolution. And Shirley’s book made it plain that most of the people who now control Washington made their bones in that and subsequent Reagan campaigns, not in Goldwater’s or Nixon’s efforts.If you compare the Goldwater and Reagan generations of conservatives, the first thing that jumps out at you is that the latter became convinced that conservatism needed for political reasons a much sunnier disposition, and a more popular agenda, than that offered bt the dour but principled Arizonan. The second thing that jumps out at you is that Reagan himself won the GOP nomination and the presidency after embracing a supply-side economic doctrine that made it easy to be conservative, offering tax cuts that paid for themselves without forcing any real decisions about the role of the federal government in national life.This doctrine has largely been discredited economically, but it’s had a sensational and still-vibrant run as the political underpinning of Republican fiscal policies that promise to square every circle, and invite every corruption of traditional conservative principles.The transition from supply-side theory to corrupt practices has been devious if predictable. But the big jump was supplied by Grover Norquist’s “starve the beast” concept (the phrase itself borrowed from Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, who ultimately deplored the idea), that conservatives should embrace tax cuts without worrying about spending cuts, since the former would eventually force the latter. In my own article about Norquist’s significance, I described “starve the beast” as offering Republicans the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: you could support both tax cuts and spending increases, and use both to buy votes and reward favored constituencies, because it would all come out in the wash someday, when future administrations and Congresses would be forced to balance the books.The ready embrace of “starve the beast” ideology by the Republican Party of the W. era has also exposed another rotten underpinning of conservatism in power: if you don’t believe in the actual ability of the federal government to do anything of real value, then why not turn federal agencies into patronage machines and well-paid holding pens for rising young ideologues?This question, I suspect, explains how you get from Reaganesque critiques of bureaucratic incompetence to Brownie, in less than a generation.In other words, I believe the endemic corruption of conservatives in power we are witnessing today is not just a morality play about power’s corrupting influence, or about the descent of ideologues into the practical swamps of politics. Worse than that, it’s about the consequences of entrusting government’s vast power to people who can’t think of it as a force for the common good, and thus, inevitably, treat it as a force for private gain.

With all the obsession in Washington over (brightening) Democratic prospects for retaking the U.S. Congress, it’s good to see the Washington Post taking notice of the other big battleground for 2006: governorships.In yesterday’s WaPo, Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza note that 22 Republican governorships will be up next year, as compared with 14 Dem seats. They cite New York, California, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Arkansas and Colorado and Maryland as Republican-held state chief executive postions potentially vulnerable in 2006, with Massachusetts as an add-on if Mitt Romney decides not to go for another term. For some reason, they miss Alabama and Georgia, where Republican incumbents got a temporary boost from their reaction to Hurricane Katrina, but remain vulnerable. ‘Bama’s Bob Riley still has to get past Judge Roy Moore, R-Hysteria, and then will probably face Democratic Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley, a candidate with almost no negatives. And Georgia’s Sonny Perdue remains a shaky pick against Democrats Cathy Cox and Mark Taylor, both of whom were running ahead of the GOPer in pre-Katrina polls.I’d add to the mix Alaska, where profoundly unpopular incumbent Republican Frank Murkowski’s acting like he will run again, at a minimum creating a messy and negative GOP primary. House Democratic leader Ethan Berkowitz (disclosure: a friend of mine) is already in the field, and could be joined by former Gov. Tony Knowles, but anyway you slice it, this is not a safe seat for GOPers.The WaPo report cites Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm, Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle, and Illnois’ Rod Blagojevich as potentially vulnerable incumbent Dems, with Iowa’s open seat (vacated by Tom Vilsack) as another GOP target. But the Dem incumbents have yet to draw any kind of world-beating rivals, and the Iowa situation remains very fluid.Add it all up, and it looks like the Donkey party is in a great position to regain a majority of governorships (we currently trail 28-22). And that’s great news for a party that came out of the 2004 elections afraid that it was becoming ghettoized into a small number of states.