For many younger Americans who may have noted in passing short news reports about the commemorations in Atlanta and elsewhere of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this may seem like a bit of ancient if important history. For southerners of any race who were old enough to know what was going on 40 years ago, this event was as cataclysmic as its more famous antecedents, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The drive for voting rights exposed the fundamental anti-Americanism of Jim Crow society even more decisively than the struggle against segregated schools, buses and lunch counters. For all its immorality, segregation could hide behind the fig-leaf of “separate-but-equal,” and the pretense that African-Americans were somehow protected from the violence that might accompany abrogation of the South’s cultural codes. But the denial of the right to vote could only be defended by lies, or an open rejection of the U.S. Constitution.Over at TPMCafe, I’ve done a post raising some questions about the future of the Voting Rights Act, but here, I simply want to honor it–and its architects, from John Lewis to Lyndon Johnson–as one of the key developments in the moral redemption of my native region.

Americans inveterately use sports metaphors in talking about everything from politics and economics to personal development and sex. But sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a game is just a game.I mention this because John Judis, one of my few journalistic idols, posted a meditation at TNROnline yesterday on Ryne Sandburg’s Hall of Fame induction speech last weekend. Judis’ purpose was to suggest that baseball is falling prey to the same erosion of community and responsibility as corporate America at large.While I agree with Judis’ broader point about the decline of mutuality in the modern corporate workplace, I’m not sure baseball is a particularly apt example of it. For one thing, baseball, as a highly regulated competitive game, has self-correcting features not generally prevalent in other markets. And for another, the game has gone through similar problems many times before.In suggesting the Pastime’s association with the sturdy virtues of the past, Judis says: “baseball itself is a very conservative game.” I disagree. But there’s something about baseball that certainly brings out the conservative instincts of its fans.Indeed, what struck me most about the preoccupation of both Judis and Sandberg with the alleged ruination of the game by one-dimensional sluggers was a strong sense of déjà vu: their complaint closely tracked the very first book I read about baseball, more than a generation ago, My Life In Baseball: The True Record, by Ty Cobb and Al Stump. Cobb and Stump similarly fretted about the domination of the game by “humpty-dumpty strong boys pulling the ball over the fences,” and echoed every old-timer’s paen to the Total Players of the past. As it happens, they were writing near the end of a relatively brief period of home-run-oriented baseball not fundamentally different from the 1990s. By the mid-1960s, pitchers began controlling the game, and soon after, thanks to the construction of large, multi-purpose stadiums with artificial turf, the game devolved back towards something resembling the old-timers’ fantasies, with high levels of stolen bases, sacrifice bunts and other one-run strategies, and strong defenses characterizing many winning teams.Yet baseball “traditionalists” generally deplored those boring, sterile stadiums and the fake grass. In one of the great ironies of the game, the most self-consciously conservative trend in baseball history, the construction of a new generation of intimate, baseball-only, retro parks, did a lot to produce the “ruinous” and revolutionary home run derby of the 1990s. And now, though you wouldn’t know it from the Judis/Ryneberg argument, there’s been another reaction, and home run totals are steadily heading down towards historic norms.The point is that baseball moves in cycles, and it’s only the tendency of so many fans and sportswriters to idolize the real and imagined past that makes the movement look unprecedented and negative.If you want a much more balanced and nuanced view of the game and its development, along with a more measured series of suggestions about current excesses, you should read The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. As James shows, the game has always featured greedy and sometimes stupid owners; narcissistic superstars; cheaters of one variety or another; and over-evaulations of the contributions of one-dimensional players, from sluggers to batting champs to acrobatic infielders to “closers.”And while the economics of the game have indeed gone nuts, the most recent trends in baseball may well be slowly but surely producing a correction. Look at the standings today. Most of the big-payroll, big-market teams are struggling. The hottest team in baseball right now is the Oakland A’s, a team (as detailed by Michael Lewis in his 2003 book, Moneyball) that has applied Bill James’ empirical measurements of player value to win with a relatively tiny payroll. James himself is a consultant to the World’s Champion Red Sox, working for a whiz-kid disciple of his. The most successful franchise in recent history is the Atlanta Braves, who have won 13 straight division titles with stable management, a strong farm system, and a very balanced offense and defense–a very old-timey approach.Perhaps salary insanity and steroids are truly producing an irreversible crisis in baseball, but I doubt it. And while I don’t endorse this regulated industry as a model for American capitalism, I also don’t think it’s typical of capitalism’s worst features, either.Let’s continue to treat baseball as a game; as a metaphor, it’s usually overplayed.

Those of you who frequent the more intensively political regions of the Democratic blogosphere undoubtedly know about Paul Hackett‘s campaign in a special congressional election in Ohio, and his impressive 48 percent showing yesterday. It doesn’t require spin to call this a large moral victory, given the overwhelmingly Republican nature of the district and the difficulty of mounting a successful insurgency in a special election, where turnout is usually abominable. In terms of its broader implications, the result is being widely interpreted as (a) a very good sign for Ohio Democrats looking forward to ’06; (b) a very good sign that Democrats nationally can compete in very red districts in ’06, with the right kind of candidates and committed support; and (c) a vindication of the power of the “netroots,” which raised a lot of money for Hackett and all but coerced the DCCC into a serious effort in this race. Taking these interpretations in order:(a) Absolutely, Ohio Democrats can and should have a spectacular year in 2006. The state’s entrenched GOP leadership, which controls all aspects of state government, has thoroughly worn out its welcome with Buckeye voters, combining bad policies and rampant corruption on a scale that seems to expand endlessly. And Ohio Democrats have properly made reform their mantra. Polls consistently show either of the current Democratic candidates for Governor, Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman or U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, with sizeable leads over the most likely Republican candidates. Sen. Mike DeWine’s increasingly obvious vulnerability will almost certainly attract an A-list opponent in the next few months. The legislature is poised to flip. It’s all blue skies at this point.(b) It’s trickier to assume the Ohio Special is a 2006 bellweather nationally, though I obviously hope it is. As I recall, Dems did pretty well in Specials in 2003 and 2004 as well; Stephanie Herseth won in a South Dakota at-large district that was nearly as “red” as Ohio-2. On the other hand, the Hackett race was much more of a referendum on GOP policies in Columbus and in Washington than those earlier Specials. The real question is whether Dems nationally can win big with the kind of reform/anti-corruption message that worked well in Ohio. Yes, Ohio presents an especially lurid example of the consequences of total Republican control, but Ohio GOPers do live in the same debased moral and ideological universe as their brethren elsewhere, especially in Washington. So it’s definitely worth a try in ’06.(c) The “netroots” deserve a lot of credit for making the Hackett race competitive financially and organizationally, and for drawing larger attention to it. But obviously, a quasi-nationalized Special Election is an almost ideal playing-field for netroots-based fundraising and organizing. Replicating their disproportionate Ohio-2 impact in a national campaign with hundreds of targets and a plethora of local factors won’t be easy. The best sign, IMO, is that all this excitement was generated on behalf of a candidate nicely tailored to a “red” district, whose policy views probably were at odds with those of a lot of the folks generating the excitement and the cash. And I gather the national groups and bloggers involved in Hackett’s campaign let the candidate and his staff call all the important shots. In any event, it was a great effort in tough terrain, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing again soon from Paul Hackett.

Josh Marshall asked today why Ralph Reed’s not in more trouble back home in Georgia for his central involvement in the Abramoff/Scanlon Indian Casino Shakedown Scam. As a native Georgian who’s watched this thing develop for a while, my answer is: Be patient, Josh. Ralph’s political problems may not be shaking, but they’re baking. You have to remember:He’s running for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, which may be Ralph’s stepping stone to an eventual presidential run, but is not a matter of gripping interest to Georgians at this point. Indeed, and ironically, Reed’s Republicans stripped the office of virtually all its once-formidable powers in 2003 after taking over the state senate.He may be a legendary figure nationally, but he’s actually not universally known among Georgia voters, and even those who recognize him mostly identify him vaguely with the Christian Coalition, which is rapidly shrinking in the rear-view mirror as a major player in Georgia and national politics. Sure, many Republican activists know he was a spectacularly successful state party chair in 2002, but others remember him as the political consultant whose ham-handed negative campaign for another GOP candidate for Lieutenant Governor, one Mitch Skandalakis, helped take down the whole ticket in 1998. And most of all, Reed’s slow-motion-riot of a scandal is clearly going to be the centerpiece of the primary opponent he wasn’t able to intimidate into withdrawing, state senator Casey Cagle. To be sure, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has given the Tribal Gaming scam a lot of attention, and Georgia Democrats have joyfully piled on, but it’s Cagle’s campaign that’s made it Daily Bread. In fact, the failure, so far, of Georgia Democrats to recruit a truly top-tier opponent for Ralph is not attributable to fear of Ralph, but mainly to the fear that Reed will implode well before the 2006 primary.Personally, if I were a gambling man, I’d bet big money that Ralph Reed is not going to capture the empty prize of the Lieutenant Governorship of Georgia in 2006, much less grab the brass ring of higher office. Beyond that, I don’t know what his future holds, other than to observe that the Lord does tend to reserve special punishment for self-righteous hypocrites.

With the news of Crown Prince Abdullah’s formal accession to de jure as well as de facto power in Saudi Arabia on the death of long-incapacitated King Fahd, I should mention I’ve been struggling my way through Stephen Schwartz’s 2002 history and polemic about Wahhabism (the harsh Sunni faction in charge in Saudi Arabia, with important links to al Qaeda), The Two Faces of Islam.It’s been a struggle for two reasons. The first is that Schwartz’s book begins with a full and sometimes idiosyncratic history of Islam in order to frame his indictment of Wahhabism as a betrayal of “traditional” Muslim faith. And the second is that the author’s fury at the Saudi Royal Family leads him into some murky waters, such as an extended defense of the Shi’a theocracy of Iran.I supposed I’ve also mistrusted Schwartz’s account because the primary outlets for his views have been American conservative magazines, particularly The Weekly Standard and National Review. But that hasn’t kept him from denouncing the Bush administration’s ties to the Saudi regime; he particularly seems to detest Dick Cheney as a virtual agent of Riyadh.In any event, Schwartz’s otherwise baleful view of Saudi policies softens a bit when he talks about Abdullah, whom he views as a potentially decisive figure in reigning in the activities of Wahhabi clerics at home and abroad. And here’s what Schwartz has to say today:

Abdullah himself has long been rumored to detest Wahhabism, which he considers dangerous for Islamic and Arab unity. In a surprising development, Crown Prince Abdullah appeared at the funeral of Syed Mohamed Alawi Al-Maliki, a non-Wahhabi cleric, late last year, praising al-Maliki for his devotion to Islam and to the welfare of the nation. Al-Maliki, a devotee of Sufism as well as a leading Sunni jurist, had previously suffered heavy repression under the Riyadh authorities.

Abdullah is 81 years old; the next three princes in the succession are Defence Minister Sultan, Interior Minister Nayef, and Riyadh governor Salman, all “conservatives” according to Guardian correspondent Brian Whitaker, and all, according to Schwartz’s book, part of a Royal Family faction with close ties to Wahhabi clerics.If Abdullah’s the one to truly institutionalize genuine reforms in Saudi Arabia, he needs to get a move on.

I know I was kinda busy last week, but still, it was no excuse for missing the news that the Global War On Terrorism was officially ended by the Bush administration. No, they didn’t unveil a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier; they simply let it be known that GWOT would henceforth be replaced by the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, or GSAVE. Why the startling change? Eric Schmitt and Tom Shanker of the New York Times explain it as follows:

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.” He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that “terror is the method they use.”Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require “all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities’ national power.” The solution is “more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military,” he concluded.

There are two rather obvious comments to make about Myers’ explanation. First, isn’t it fairly well established that wars are prevented, begun, waged, won and lost through non-military as well as military means? And second, hasn’t the use of “all instruments of national power” and “all instruments of the international communities’ national power” been appropriate all along, and certainly since 9/11?Indeed, Myers’ line of reasoning might have come in pretty handy before the Pentagon decided to invade Iraq without a post-Saddam plan for the country, and before the White House decided to let DoD supervise the political and economic reconstruction effort.Indeed, the richest passage in the Times report is a graph about the deep thinking that went into the change of terminology:

Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush’s senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush’s own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It’s probably going to come as a deep shock to Bush’s conservative base of support that his “thinking” is subject to “evolution,” and I don’t mean just those who support scientific creationism. After all, his entire re-election effort was based on marketing him as an unshakable Man of Resolve, as opposed to the dangerously reflective John Kerry. And speaking of Kerry, Matt Yglesias over at TAPPED rightly points out that the same people responsible for suddenly declaring We’re Not At War savaged Bush’s Democratic opponent for allegedly failing to understand that it was all about the military use of force.These are the people, of course, who never admit mistakes on either side of a flip-flop. But it’s going to take a lot of revisionist history to pull this one off. Matt also notes that GWOT is a term in constant use all over the Pentagon website. I’ll go him one better: it may take a supplemental defense appropriations bill to rewrite the millions of pages of DoD documents that stipulate GWOT as the long-term underpinning of every aspect of national security policy.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been big developments on redistricting reform in three states: California, Ohio and Colorado.In Calfornia, a state judge tossed a Schwarzenneger-backed redistricting initiative off the ballot for a November special election. A federal district judge stayed the order pending a hearing, but it doesn’t look good for the much-hyped but (IMHO) flawed proposal, which mainly relies on a procedural mechanism of turning redistricting over to a panel of retired judges, without much in the way of new guidelines for map-drawing. Ah-nold has been negotiating with Assembly Democrats on a plan to displace the initiative with a legislatively sponsored reform plan, but there hasn’t been much news about that of late.In Ohio, a group of good-government groups and (mostly Democratic) legislators are conducting a frantic and potentially successful petition drive (which must succeed by August 1) to get a package of three initiatives on the November 2005 ballot that includes a redistricting reform plan, along with a campaign finance reform effort and a provision seeking to de-politicize Ohio’s highly suspect election administration system. The redistricting initiative is interesting: in sharp contrast to California’s initiative, it places a very high premium on competitive districts (while respecting Voting Rights Act considerations), and essentially solicits a variety of plans that will be rated according to the extent that they create the maximum number of competitive congressional and state legislative districts, while ensuring overall partisan balance statewide. The package of reforms in Ohio is being fueled by widespread public disgust with the ongoing and ever-escalating news of scandals implicating the state’s entrenched Republican leaders in the executive and legislative branches.And in Colorado, a three-judge federal panel yesterday rejected a suit by Republicans to reinstate a 2001 re-redistricting of congressional districts by what was then a GOP-controlled legislature. And though I haven’t been able to find the opinion yet, it sounds like the judges expressed more than a little contempt for the Republicans’ argument that their First Amendment rights were violated when a court drew an earlier map after the legislature failed to enact a plan, triggering a state constitutional ban on re-redistricting.Meanwhile, down in Florida, my informants say the effort there to get a package of redistricting reforms on the November 2006 ballot is rolling along nicely on a wave of positive newspaper editorial endorsements and a solid petition drive, led by former Education Secretary and Senate candidate Betty Castor. As in Ohio, the Florida reforms would take place immediately upon enactment. And if you recall that Florida and Ohio represent two of the five states (the others being Pennsylvania, Michigan, and thanks to the Great Texas Power Grab of 2003, the Lone Star State) whose peculiar map-drawing has had a lot to do with GOP control of the U.S. House, this is good news on both small-d and big-D democratic grounds.

The big news today was from Northern Ireland, where the Irish Republican Army announced it was abandoning its “armed struggle” to end British rule, and called on its members to scrap their weapons.Specifically, the IRA issued an order to “dump arms.” Nicholas Watt explained the symbolism of that wording in the Guardian:

Eamon de Valera, the father of modern day Irish republicanism, would probably allow himself a wry smile. More than 80 years after the Irish civil war, the IRA today echoed his famous declaration of 1923 when it ordered all units “to dump arms”.With his impeccable republican lineage, Gerry Adams will have known the huge symbolic importance of using the exact words of the hardliners who refused to accept the partition of Ireland in 1921.

De Valera, of course, ultimately won power for his Fianna Fail Party through the ballot box. And that’s what Adams is predicting for his own Sinn Fein, which could gain partial power through coalition governments in both Dublin and Belfast within the very near future.Whether or not that happens, it will be very difficult for the IRA to renege on this announcement or turn back to violence in the immediate future, especially if it redeems its pledge to allow independent verification of its disarmament. And that’s what makes this moment even more significant than the 1998 Good Friday Accord that ended The Troubles.For most of my adult lifetime, the violence in Northern Ireland ranked with the Cold War and the Israeli-Palestinian impasse as interminable battles that would apparently extend infinitely into the future. If today’s news from Ireland doesn’t prove illusory, then we’re two-thirds of the way towards the end of these endless struggles.

As some of you may have heard, there’s a big assault underway on the DLC in certain precincts of the blogosphere. And here’s my response: Whatever, Nothingburger, De Nada, Yawn, Zen Zen, and above all, Who Cares?If you want to know what the DLC is about, go to our web page, read the big speeches our leaders gave on Monday, and decide for yourself whether this organization is focused on criticizing and providing an alternative to Bushism, or arguing with other Democrats. I think it’s pretty clear. But just so you know, I’m not going to go there in the blogospheric argument about the DLC. It’s not real, it’s surreal; and the Bush administration is providing enough surreal estate in politics and policy to satisfy our imaginations in perpetuity.

I won’t do a full post on the Monday session of the DLC’s National Conversation in Columbus until the transcripts and video of the major speeches are up on our web page, so I can link to them and you can figure out if I’m spinning or truth-telling. But I will offer a few quick observations. And you can check out some of the media reports on the event here.I guess the most notable common threads at the event were: (a) a very sharp and often angry critique of the Bush administration and the GOP; (b) a sense of agreement that security, opportunity, values and reform are the four big issues where Democrats ought to focus their work and their message; and (c) a concern that Democrats must soon begin to offer positive alternatives to the Republicans so that their pain will produce our gains (which isn’t much happening yet, according to most polls). Evan Bayh, generally considered a national security hawk, offered a truly acidic critique of the administration’s handling of the war on terror, concluding: “That’s not strength, that’s incompetence.”Tom Vilsack systematically decimated the GOP’s fidelity to values, especially that of community. Hillary Clinton squarely accused Republicans of trying to return the country to the policies and political practices of the 19th century. And Mark Warner scorned the Bushies for choosing to intervene in the medical decisions of the Schiavo family while choosing to do nothing about the 45 million Americans without health insurance. But the same speakers consistently warned that Democrats can’t simply offer negative critiques or counter-polarize, even if that makes unity a bit easier. Bayh described the need for positive alternatives as a party responsibility to the country. Vilsack suggested it’s the only way to truly contrast Democratic with Republican values. And Clinton argued that we need to remind voters Democrats did govern the country in a vastly better manner in the 1990s, and can do it again. I can tell you authoritatively that the DLC did not script these speeches at all. Their consistency on both the positive and negative aspects of the Democratic message are mainly attributable to objective reality, and the common conclusions that smart and principled pols tend to reach from their different perspectives. It’s a very good signpost for our political future.