Over at Ruy Teixeira’s Donkey Rising site, he’s posted a summary of the current standing of the two parties on major issues. It’s mostly good news–in some cases spectacular news–for us Donkeys, but with a few exceptions that deserve attention, especially in terms of our credibility in fighting terror and the clarity of our overall message.On this last point, Ruy concludes:

In short, voters are still much surer of what they don’t like (Republican policies and Bush’s job as president) than of what they might like (Democratic policies and leadership). It’s up to Democrats to clarify that situation, starting with, finally, convincing the American public they know what they stand for.

That’s true, but we all have to remember one very important thing about “message clarity”: the only thing worse than leaving voters unsure about “what you stand for” is to resolve their doubts by “standing” for positions and/or values they don’t like. I’m not saying Democrats are in imminent danger of doing that, but given the influence of Lackoffian “framing” in high party councils, it’s worth reminding ourselves that “clarity” is not in itself a definitive answer to lingering public doubts about our party. Like everyone reading this blog, I have my own ideas about “what we believe in” and “what we stand for,” and we should not be shy about debating differences and then uniting behind the best and most accurate reflections of our values. That’s why we have intra-party discussions, and ultimately, why we have party primaries. You could make a good case that the current GOP meltdown is partly the result of an “our team” mentality that until recently has thwarted any real intra-party Republican debate, or any honest Republican discussion with the rest of the country. I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice a few points in polls on “message clarity” in order to keep my party from following this authoritarian pattern.

It’s always nice when the New York Times looks beyond its prime readership and takes notice of the rest of the country. And that’s why I applaud Timothy Egan’s Week in Review piece today on successful Democratic governors west of the Mississippi. Those of you who read Democratic blogs probably know all about Montana’s Brian Schweitzer, and Egan gives him his due. But he also focuses on Wyoming’s Dave Freudenthal, Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, and New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, and more generally makes the point that 12 of the 22 current Democratic governors have been elected in states carried by George W. Bush in 2004. The success of Democratic governors in “red states” is one of the most under-reported political stories of our decade. And the ranks of those red-state Donkeys may well increase significantly next year. So read Egan, but also get ready to make a New Year’s Resolution to pay more attention to gubernatorial politics in 2006, and join the debate as to why Democrats are able to win in states where our presidential candidates are losing. This is one subject on which the DLC–which is close to many of these red-state governors–and anti-Washington-Establishment Democrats, should be able to see things the same way.

Recovering somewhat from Thanksgiving lethargy, I dragged myself in front of the tube yesterday to get some non-food news. I did see a report on Michael Brown’s new consulting career, that supplied the material for my last post. But for most of the day, I was treated to Black Friday “coverage”–breathless on-location reports of mall parking lot conditions and mini-riots among avid consumers, mostly from CNN’s digs in my home town of Atlanta.I understand that the Christmas Rush is incredibly important to retailers, and I also understand this is a capitalist economy in which being “in the black” is generally important to all of us. But still, Lord have mercy: do Americans have to be spun by the news media to make the Spirit of Christmas one of acquisitive frenzy? I mean, really, absent high-profile encouragement to get out there and fight for the latest baubles, is there any serious risk that our countrymen will turn Christmas back into a religious holiday?Digby has a good rant on the subject you can read, but more generally, it seems to me that it would be healthy to limit Black Friday coverage to the business report.

So here I am, the day after Thanksgiving, exhausted and visibly gaining weight, the soul of sluggishness, unable to respond to the large number of people in my house with much of anything other than a noncommittal grunt. And I haven’t blogged since Tuesday.But ah, as I slumped in the living room wondering if I had the energy to watch a football game, easy inspiration arose on CNN: Michael Brown’s announcement of his new “disaster preparendness” consulting firm. The idea, it appears, is that having made every mistake in the book in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, Brownie is just the guy to tell companies what kind of mistakes they should look out for in dealing with natural disasters.After pocketing a “Political Turkey of the Year” designation by CNN’s Bill Schneider, ol’ Brownie seems determined to win some sort of Profiles in Chutzpah award. This goes well beyond such obvious analogies as Elizabeth Taylor becoming a marriage counselor, Terrell Owens holding seminars on “teamwork,” or Ozzie Osbourne starting a new “straight edge” anti-drug band. After all, Brownie’s accomplishment was to turn disaster response and relief into almost as big a disaster as the disaster he was “responding” to. And he did that with resources his potential clients are not likely to have, such as a multi-billion dollar budget, an entire federal agency, and the ear of the President of the United States.So what is Brown going to tell the corporate CEOs who are allegedly expressing interest in his services? Perhaps: “If you have no clue what you’re doing, be sure to hire some people who do.” Maybe: “Don’t let George Bush give you a nickname on national television.” Or finally: “Pick one person to shift blame to, and stick to your story.”The only thing I can think of that rivals Brownie’s self-salvage project is one once undertaken by William Calley, the guy who admitted ordering the cold-blooded murder of dozens of women and children at a hamlet named My Lai in Vietnam. In 1978, some television network aired a ten-year retrospective on the various convulsions that struck America in 1968, and the sections on Vietnam were narrated by Calley, who posed as some sort of anti-war martyr.At least he waited ten years.

The headline, when I saw it early this afternoon, nearly knocked me out of my chair: “Iraqi leaders call on U.S. to set withdrawal schedule.” And the text of the story, reporting that an Iraqi government (and Arab League) sponsored “unity conference” of Sunnis and Shi’a in Cairo had called for a “timetable” for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops–accompanied by a sunny statement from the Iraqi Interior Minister saying it could happen by the end of next year–was even more startling. After spending months arguing with my fellow Democrats over the arcana of a “benchmarked withdrawal” as opposed to a “timetable withdrawal,” my initial reaction was: Hell, that settles it for me.And I’m not the only one who reacted this way. Kos said: “Every person that opposes a US withdrawal timetable is now operating in direct opposition to the wishes of the Iraqi government.”But when you drill a bit deeper into the news from Cairo, you discover that the “unity statement” did not specify any dates for the immediate, intermediate, or ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops. In other words, it called for a “timetable” without “times.” In that respect, it tracked the Democratic Iraq resolution that was defeated in the U.S. Senate last week, which used the symbolic “T-word” without specifying any dates, though it did call on the administration to announce “estimated dates” for withdrawals based on the anticipated achievement of “benchmarks.” (The successful Republican-sponsored resolution was nuanced to the point of sophistry: it urged the administration to announce a “schedule” for withdrawals, based on “benchmarks,” but avoided the “T-word,” which the administration tried to spin as a gigantic victory).I have no clue whether these words have the same meaning in Arabic as in English, but I do know that train timetables are a pretty universal phenomenon. Whether you are in Washington or in Baghdad, when you consult a “timetable,” you don’t want to discover that your train will leave the station at some point after it has arrived, when the equipment and the crew are ready and the passengers are loaded.One thing, and perhaps only one thing, is clear: up until now, the Bush administration has refused to acknowledge, much less embrace, any specific scheme of “benchmarks” for withdrawal of U.S. troops, beyond its general bromides that we’ll leave when “the job is done” and when “Iraqis are able to provide their own security.” And despite widespread hints that the Pentagon is already planning significant troop withdrawals next year, the Bushies have not only refused to talk about any “schedule” for withdrawal; they have in fact demonized anyone who tried to force them to do so.Presumably, that line of argument ended today. After all, 85 U.S. Senators (if you count those who voted for either Senate resolution last week) called for a benchmarked withdrawal and for the idea, if not the specifics, of a timetable or a schedule or whatever you wish to call it. Now the Iraqi government and a wide-ranging coalition of Iraqi political factions have done the same.Moreover, and this is probably the implicit compromise achieved in Cairo, everybody understands that the first big “benchmark” is the December elections in Iraq. If they are successful in creating a popularly-backed permanent government, with significant support from Arab Sunnis, then it will become a lot easier to talk about real “timetables” for the withdrawal of U.S.troops.In terms of domestic U.S. politics, the only problem then will be to deal with the likely administration flip-flop, whereby Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly embrace and even take credit for this development, while still attacking those who were “prematurely” calling for withdrawals, benchmarked or timed. But hey, that’s a small price to pay for the possibility that we can get out of Iraq soon, without encouraging a civil war or a permanent terrorist outpost. It’s not as though Bush’s record is clean on Iraq even if he does draw down troops quickly, and his and his party’s record on absolutely everything else richly deserves more attention.

For those of you who, like me, just can’t get enough of the November 8 gubernatorial election in Virginia, there’s a significant quantity of sliced and diced analysis piling up, much of it focused on Tim Kaine’s impressive performance in Virginia suburbs and exurbs.The Big Study everyone’s citing comes from Robert Lang and Dawn Dhavale of Virginia Tech, which (1) divides Virginia into four regions, and shows Tim Kaine improving on John Kerry’s 2004 performance across the board; and (2) provides a detailed analysis of the Northern Virginia suburbs, segmenting them into Urban Suburbs (Arlington and Alexandria), Mature Suburbs (gigantic Fairfax), Emerging Suburbs (Loudon and Prince William) and true exurbs (Fauquier and Stafford).Kaine carried three of four of this study’s major regions (Northern Virginia, the Capitol Region and Tidewater) and lost the fourth, sprawling Shenandoah (which includes The Valley, Southwest, Southside, and the central Virginia Piedmont). Within NoVa, he won all but the “true exurb” counties and cities. While the big news was Kaine’s overwhelming victory in NoVa and the Richmond area, the study suggests he ran ahead of Kerry uniformly across the state.The major shortcoming of the Tech study is that it mainly compares Kaine’s performance to Kerry’s, but not to Mark Warner’s in 2001. That comparison would have shown Kaine running far behind Warner in Shenandoah, and a bit ahead in Tidewater, but doing impressively better in the other two urban-suburban regions, and especially in the areas outside the urban cores of Richmond and Arlington-Alexandria.I understand why the Hokie researchers did what they did: Everybody’s interested in Kaine’s win as a possible leading indicator of Democratic gains between 2004 and 2008.But personally, being focused a bit more on Virginia as a leading indicator for 2006, I’m interested in the 2001-2005 trend, and in the ability of Democrats to put together new and different majority coalitions in difficult terrain, just as Mark Warner did in 2001 and Tim Kaine did this year.There’s a Washington Post analysis of the “emerging suburbs” category of voters that includes data from a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner study of Loudon County, interpolated somewhat dubiously with national data on the unhappiness of moderate Republicans.The GQR study showed that Loudoun voters cared a lot more about transportation and education issues than about the death-penalty and immigration topics Jerry Kilgore emphasized down the home stretch. And they preferred Kaine by 23 percentage points on education and by 16 points on transportation.The Post‘s national data on moderate Republicans, while of questionable relevance to the Virginia race, are still striking: between August and November, moderate GOPer approval ratings for Bush’s job performance dropped from 85% to 59%, with the percentage registering strong support being halved, from 60% to 30%. That’s a big and important trend.Ruy Teixeira offers a good general summary of the evidence supplied by Virginia. But it’s important to keep straight the in-state and national trends we are talking about.For a bunch of reasons, Tim Kaine could not replicate Mark Warner’s stunning 2001 coalition of rural, urban and suburban voters. He had to do better in the suburbs, and he did, lifted in part by Warner’s popularity; in part by a national suburban trend against the Bush administration and the GOP generally; and in part by his own suburban-friendly message of smart growth management and educational improvements. Democratic “red state” candidates in 2006 need to look at all aspects of the Kaine victory, and look back, where they can, to Warner’s strategy as well. They may benefit from a national tide against Republicans, and may batten on expanded “blue” areas of the suburbs. But they need to exploit rural and small-town opportunities as well, just as Mark Warner did four years ago.The national GOP meltdown means Democrats can become competitive, or at least more competitive, everywhere, and it’s everywhere that they should look for new votes.

By the time most of you read this, the papers will be full of accounts of the weird vote House Republicans forced tonight on a truncuated version of Rep. John Murtha’s call yesterday for a quick U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.The snap-vote decision, reportedly suggested to the House GOP Caucus this morning by conservative attack-dog Hunter Duncan, is one of those too-clever-by-half things that sound good at first suggestion, but which grownups usually eschew in the end.Guess there aren’t that many grownups in the House Republican Caucus.The debate on Hunter’s version of Murtha’s resolution was one of the more dreadful displays I’ve seen in many years of House-watching. Everybody knew that House Democrats had decided to urge its members to vote against the resolution, making the whole exercise a waste of time (the final vote was 3-402). Listening to House Republicans scream about staying the course, fighting the terrorists on their turf, bringing democracy to the Middle East, etc., etc., you’d never know their Senate counterparts had voted overwhelmingly to repudiate the administration’s strategy in Iraq earlier this week. For his part, Murtha (appropriately, the only speaker on the Democratic side), put in the impossible position of leading the opposition to what Republicans were describing as his resolution, pretty much limited himself to reading letters from troops and their families supporting his earlier statement. There was no real debate.It’s not surprising, given Murtha’s credentials, that Republicans gave most of their time to Vietnam vets, but what was surprising was how often they expressed the opinion that America “cut and run” in Vietnam, and how angry they still seem to be that we didn’t stay there until, well, eternity.If I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be encouraging Vietnam analogies, but what the hell, the whole scene was so surreal that you half expected the ghost of Richard Nixon to arise from the House well and demand vindication.We’ll see how the whole ploy spins out over the weekend, but here’s a quick reaction from one conservative, National Review’s K-Lo over at The Corner:

I have a very bad feeling about this GOP vote-force tonight. Listening to the emotional debate on the floor now…well, there was just some screaming, to give you an idea. Prediction: Dems vote no on a Republican resolution for immediate withdrawal. Dems easily frame the whole exercise as Republicans caricaturing sensible concerns about Iraq–and more specifically a mocking of Vietnam vet Marine Jack Murtha.

Ms. Lopez was right about the vote. And I think she’s right about how the whole thing goes down. It was a bad idea that House Republicans, typically, could not resist.

You may have already read about the remarks made yesterday by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) in response to Rep. John Murtha’s call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. If not, here they are:

Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can’t do that there, so they’ve brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.And, frankly, the liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound, fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.

In case anyone needs a translation here, Davis basically charged Murtha (and unnamed “liberal leaders,” since the label hardly applies to the quite conservative Pennyslvanian) with being an agent of Zarquawi and of al Qaeda, and of cooperating with our country’s enemies.I haven’t seen video of the House GOP press conference, convened by Rep. Duncan Hunter of CA, in which Davis made these remarks, so I don’t know if any of his colleagues had the decency to wince or blush when he called another colleague a terrorist collaborator and a traitor.But the rest of this crowd (including Kay Granger, Mike Conaway, Louie Gohmert and John Carter of TX, Joe Wilson of SC, Bob Beauprez and Tom Tancredo of CO, David Dreir of CA, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of FL, and Jean Schmidt of OH) was pretty awful as well, making constant assertions that everything would be peachy-keen in Iraq if everybody just shut up and trusted the administration, and in particular repeating incessantly the fatuous assertion that if we weren’t in Iraq, the terrorists would be blowing up the United States. (Perhaps they’d start with blowing up San Francisco, as Bill O’Reilly invited them to do on national television last week).These smears of Murtha–a heavily decorated Marine Corps veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, who supported both Iraq wars, and has always been a staunch supporter of a robust national security posture and especially the needs of our troops–are impossible to properly characterize in a family-friendly blog. Their perpetrators are teetering on the line that divides people who deserve angry contempt, and people who are beneath contempt.And I say this as someone who doesn’t agree with Murtha’s position on Iraq, but who understands this is a guy that has no possible reason for taking it other than that he believes it’s right–for the country, for the troops, and for our national security.When the President of the United States started this crap a few days ago by accusing critics of his Iraq policies of aiding and abetting the terrorist enemy, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska issued this tart response: “The Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years.”This isn’t a terribly complicated proposition. Disagree with or even deplore Murtha’s or anybody else’s position on Iraq all you want. Make your case about why you think the consequences would be dreadful.But at a time when a majority of Americans have lost confidence in the administration’s Iraq policies–and when a majority of Republican Senators cast a vote this week questioning them as well–to impugn the patriotism of Bush’s critics is an act that manages to give demagoguery a bad name.

Dick Cheney’s bizarre speech last night accusing Democrats of violating the sacred canons of Washingtonian candor and honesty is drawing the catcalls it deserves, but it does help raise an issue that’s been percolating just between the surface about the nature of this administration’s obstinant mendacity. Have these guys been consciously lying through their teeth all this time about Iraq, about the economy, about the budget, about, well, all those things they are getting so egregiously wrong? Or is there an element of self-deception going on? Now, for many Democrats, this very question is provocative: of course they are consciously lying, every day, on every subject, and to suggest otherwise is to go soft and concede some decency to people who will just see this as a sign of Democratic weakness. But as Mark Schmitt usefully points out over at TPMCafe, self-deception in high office is arguably more dangerous and damning than conscious deception. His post lays out the idea that the White House under Bush has been dominated by an “ideology of information” that sorts evidence into “useful” and “not useful” categories based on a pre-conceived agenda, essentially filtering out any empircal data interfering with the administration’s agenda in a way that creates a hermetically sealed echo chamber of self-validation. Even as the bloodhounds continue to search out and find multiple examples of conscious White House mendacity, the one truly incontrovertible thing about this administration is its incredible intolerance for anything like internal debate and self-criticism. Sure, there are differences of opinion, but only at the margins, and only on occasions where The Line is not dictated by ideology or the dark political calculations of Karl Rove. In the Bush White House, the only deadly sin has been anything like a continuing internal, much less external, dissent (see O’Neill, Paul and DiIulio, John for Object Examples of what happens to people who violate this rule). This is an inherently disastrous approach in any executive operation, much less one commanding a multi-trillion dollar budget, the world’s most powerful military, and to be blunt about it, the power to ruin and end lives, and shape a society for decades to come. There are very few costless mistakes in the White House. In my first government job, working for a Georgia Governor (recently deceased) named George Busbee, anyone briefing the Governor knew he would have to run the gauntlet of an incredibly smart young lawyer named Cecil Phillips, whose job was to sit in on any policy discussion and raise tough questions about anything proposed. This Policy Ombudsman approach always struck me as one of the smartest and simplest quality control arrangements I’ve ever seen. Nobody went into that Governor’s office without marshalling facts and thinking about contrary opinions. And a lot of bad policy decisions were probably avoided as a result of that process. In the White House of George W. Bush’s predecessor, you didn’t need an Official Devil’s Advocate, because free-flowing debate went on every day on every subject, and nobody shut up until The Big He made a final decision. And even then, dissenters did not get sent to Siberia. Moreover, Bill Clinton’s intellectual voracity–so different from Bush’s remarkably unreflexive nature–drove him to seek out advice from people who were not on his payroll, over and over again.Many of the failures of the Bush administration are easily and directly attributable to this huge blind spot: a White House hostile to debate, dissent and contrary evidence on issues large and small, and where all the incentives pointed to lockstep conformity and demonization of any divergent point of view. And this attitude of “don’t-confuse-me-with-facts” has been echoed among the Republican regime on Capitol Hill, especially in Tom DeLay’s House.Given the overwhelming evidence that Republican self-deception is feeding its attempted deceptions of the American people, why do some Democrats insist on proving that these people are consciously lying to us? After all, it’s easier to prove criminal negligence than criminal intent, and even though the latter carries heavier penalities in courts of law, the former is if anything more damaging in the court of public opinion.It’s entirely possible that some key White House players are in fact cynical liars, and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are obvious suspects in this case. But in general, a president and an administration so isolated from reality that they don’t even know when they are lying to themselves or to us, is a bigger danger and a bigger target for Democrats.

As you probably know, the U.S. Senate reared up on its hind legs yesterday and passed a resolution demanding that the Bush administration cut out the happy talk, explain its exit strategy for Iraq, link troop withdrawals to specific benchmarks of progress towards Iraqi self-sufficiency, report regularly to Congress, and generally, stop B.S.-ing the American and the Iraqi people.The vote on that resolution was 79-19, with 41 Republican Senators going over the side.Even more remarkably, this resolution, drafted by Republican Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, was largely a carbon-copy of Sen. Carl Levin’s Democratic resolution, which went down 58-40 earlier in the day. The supposed Big Difference was Levin’s language urging the administration to come up with “estimated dates” for withdrawal of U.S. troops, contingent on everything going on as planned, etc., etc. Check out this colloquoy on the Senate floor between Levin and Warner, and tell me if you think it’s a Big Difference at all. Warner basically agrees Levin’s language doesn’t require any sort of fixed “timetable” or “deadline” for withdrawal of U.S. troops, but worries it might be misunderstood as such. We’re into angels-dancing-on-a-pin country here.But upon this parsing of really small words, the Bushies have staked their entire, and even for them, unusually mendacious, spin operation. The Senate rejected a “timetable,” they crow. The resolution endorsed our policies! If you read the Warner resolution, and understand what it means, that’s a completely crazy reading of what happened, which is that a large majority of Republican Senators suddenly but clearly repudiated the administration line on Iraq, for the very first time. The fact that the Senate also recently passed, for the second time, and this time on a voice vote, the McCain Amendment rejecting the Cheney Torture doctrine, which the White House has indicated is so important that it might generate Bush’s first-ever legislative veto, is another major straw in the wind.The Bushies aren’t the only people exaggerating the difference between the Levin and Warner resolutions on Iraq: some Democratic voices, whom I will not name out of collegiality, are fretting that the Republican defection to a “benchmarked withdrawal” position means our guys must get more rigid and fervent about a timetable and deadline for withdrawal to maintain the requisite partisan differentiation.Ironically, these are among the same folks who have been arguing for a while that the secret of the GOP Machine is its ability to maintain Republican unity while battening on Democratic disunity. On Iraq, we are currently witnessing massive Republican disunity and relatively clear Democratic unity. What, if anything, is wrong with this picture politically?More broadly, let’s look at what’s happening to Bush and to the Republican coalition. After the conservative uprising against Harriet Miers, the White House decided that it had to have “base” support in these troubled times. Hence, Bush substituted Alito for Miers; began supporting right-wing budget proposals in Congress; and most recently, went Nixonian on Iraq, attacking its critics as allies of al Qaeda.The jury’s still out on Alito, but the conservative budget offensive has been derailed by Republicans, and now the “stay the course” offensive on Iraq has been derailed by Republicans as well. Meanwhile, the ethics problems of the GOP and its friends are just beginning. The whole Rove/Neocon/Norquist/Theocrat/Plutocrat alliance that elected George W. Bush is in shambles. Republican office-holders are running for the hills, and for heretofore unimaginable cooperation with the hated partisan enemy.This is a very good thing for Democrats. And while partisan differentiation is always important, we shouldn’t be worried about that to the exclusion of taking every opportunity to let Republicans fall out like thieves, and re-establish ourselves clearly as the party that can best govern the country. I mean, really, if the 2006 elections turn into a referendum on which candidates can most thorougly separate themselves from George W. Bush’s policies, does anyone really doubt the Donkey will prevail? I sure don’t. Let the Republicans fight, and let’s don’t go out of our way to take positions that make it easier for them to pretend they are united.