I haven’t seen any snap polls showing the impact, if any, of Bush’s big Iraq speech last night, but the circumstantial evidence seems pretty negative.1) Here he was doing a highly emotional speech, full of tributes to the troops, at Ft. Bragg, and he got one ovation other than at the end.2) Republican praise of the speech tended to focus on its rejection of a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but rarely mentioned its other alleged functions, such as laying out a clear strategy for victory and reassuring the American people that he knows what he’s doing.3) I checked out National Review’s The Corner, a reliable Bush Amen Corner (at least on national security issues) which offers near-24/7 commentary, and was impressed by the subdued tone. Sure, the tireless Kathryn Lopez tried to break out the pom-poms once or twice, but most of the discussion focused on attacking media criticism of the speech, and some regular posters actually expressed concern about Bush’s “strategy” for Iraq.4) Most ominously for Bush, his speech pretty much uniformly exasperated the “Blair Democrats,” those who supported the war initially and who now oppose a fixed timetable for withdrawal. Indeed, some of the harshest criticism of the speech came from this quarter.In this connection, you should check out the DLC’s take on Bush’s effort, which may be the most thorough critique I’ve seen to this point.One point it makes is a really interesting question: why didn’t Bush appeal explicitly to anti-Iraq-war Americans to put aside their disagreements over his original decision to invade Iraq and focus on the broadly accepted negative consequences of abandoning the country to chaos? He could have quoted a long string of Democratic opponents to the original war resolution, including Howard Dean, who are on record as emphatically saying we can’t accept defeat in Iraq now that we’re there, rightly or wrongly. He could have helped marginalized the fixed-deadline advocates. He could have been a “uniter, not a divider.” And he could have probably bumped up support for his current Iraq policies, not just for a moment but for a while, by decisively severing the link between support for past Bush policies and support for what he’s doing now.Instead, Bush strengthened the link between past, present and future Iraq policies by repeatedly returning to a rationale for the original decision to invade that, frankly, is losing credibility every day: it was all about 9/11. Yes, yes, I know, that was his strategy for deflecting criticism about Iraq in the 2004 campaign, but now Bush isn’t trying to get re-elected; he’s supposedly trying to avoid a nosedive in public support for what he’s doing in Iraq today. And the fact that he still cannot let go of his dubious ex post facto rationalizations of the Iraq venture is a bad sign about what we can expect between now and the day he finally goes home to Crawford.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Garance Franke-Ruta has an interesting and in-depth article on the Democratic Party’s creaky minority outreach efforts up on the American Prospect site. By way of emphasizing the Democratic habit of underinvesting in targeted media and messaging, as opposed to more mechanical GOTV efforts, she passes along this factoid: “Kerry spent less on targeted Hispanic media–$3 million–than he did on political strategist and consultant Bob Shrum.” Well, just about any way you look at it, had Shrum’s fees gone to targeted Hispanic media, Kerry would be president today.Of course, some might argue that Kerry would be president today if Shrum’s fees had been stuffed in a paper bag and tossed into the Potomac River, but there’s no question more targeted Hispanic media would have been helpful as well.

One of the things we Democrats use to rock ourselves to sleep at night in these politically perilous times is the hope that demographic trends are working in our favor. And the central source of that hope is the belief that the Latino population of the United States is growing so rapidly that the future shape of the electorate is morphing rapidly in a more progressive direction.Totally aside from the fact that Democrats would be foolish to assume our current performance among Latinos can be counted on in the future, there’s the troubling fact that the total Latino vote is a relatively small segment of the electorate, and will remain so for a while. That’s the important and sobering message provided by Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, in today’s Washington Post.Suro nicely summarizes his argument in one sentence: “Because of a combination of lack of citizenship, a big youth population, and voter apathy, only one-fifth of Hispanics went to the polls in 2004. In other words, it took five Latino residents to produce one voter.” Of those three factors depressing the Latino vote, only the third is one we can theoretically do something about in the near term. So why all the excitement about percentage increases in the Latino vote?Here, too, Suro offers an important distinction in commenting on the “record turnout among Latinos” recently generated by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa: “[G]iven the low baseline, it wasn’t hard. When it comes to counting people in almost any category, Latinos break their own records every day.” But as my friend Mark Gersh, the number-crunching wizard of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, always points out, percentages don’t win elections; votes do. And small percentage increases from large groups generate more votes than large percentage increases from small groups. That’s why the little-recognized but central story of the 2004 presidential election was that a smaller percentage increase in ballots from non-Latino white voters more than exceeded the votes produced by near-record turnout among minority voters as a whole. This does not–let me repeat this–does not mean that Democrats should stop worrying about, or working among, minority voters. It specifically does not mean that Democrats should stop obsessing about now to reach Latino voters. Even if the Latino vote is growing less rapidly, in absolute terms, than some Democrats seem to assume, maintaining the current Democratic advantage is well worth every effort, and moreover, the Latino voting boom will definitely arrive in the relatively near future. What Democrats cannot do, however, is to comfort ourselves with the illusion that Latino voter growth will offset our ever-increasing weakness among white middle-class voters generally, or white married voters with kids specifically. (In fact, the upwardly mobile Latinos most likely to vote largely share the values and aspirations of middle-class non-Latino white voters). We need a strategy, a message, and an agenda that will make inroads into Republican majorities in those groups while continuing to attract and energize minority voters as well. We can’t simply wait for demography to save us.

ARG just released a national poll that suggests Bush’s plunging approval ratings are actually being propped up by persistent Republican loyalty, which disguises an astonishing free-fall among independents:

Among Republicans (36% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 84% approve of the way Bush is handling his job and 12% disapprove. Among Democrats (38% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 18% approve and 77% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job. Among Independents (26% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 17% approve and 75% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

In other words, the views of Independents about Bush’s job performance are identical to those of Democrats.Karl Rove’s polarization strategy depends on building up hyper-loyalty among Republicans, raiding conservative Democrats, and getting close to an even split among Independents who don’t like either party.At present, Independents ain’t buying it, and that’s really bad news for the GOP so long as Democrats are smart enough to promote a message Indies can like.

A couple of days ago Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick testified before the House International Relations Committee about the situation in Sudan, and particularly Darfur. And I found his comments a profoundly depressing repetition of every hoary rationalization about our failure to intervene in ethnic cleansing operations in the past.Rationalization #1 is the “sitting duck” hypothesis, summarized in an AP story about Zoellick’s testimony as follows:

The Bush administration is opposed to the dispatch of U.S. or European forces to help enhance security in Sudan’s Darfur region because they could be vulnerable to attack by terrorists, the No. 2 State Department official said Wednesday.The region is populated by “some bloodthirsty, cold-hearted killers,” Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said, mentioning Somalia in particular as one possible source.

It’s ironic that Zoellick cited Somalians as an unacceptable threat to Western troops, since it is generally acknowledged that trauma over the “Black Hawk Down” attack on U.S. troops in Mogadishu had a lot to do with the Clinton administration’s much-regretted refusal to intervene in Rwanda.Rationalization #2 also reflects the same chain of thinking that kept the West out of Rwanda:

NATO and the European Union now provide support in transport, logistics and planning for Darfur operations.Zoellick said any expansion in these roles to an on-the-ground presence could lead to charges by some Africans that “the U.S. or the colonial powers are telling Sudan what to do.”

Rationalization #3 is more subtle, but you can clearly see it in the PowerPoint presentation Zoellick offered the House Committee. Zoellick repeatedly stresses connections between the Darfur genocide and the long-standing (though recently, for the time being, settled) North-South civil war in Sudan, and notes civil conflict in that nation goes back more than a century. This reflects another golden oldie excuse for non-intervention, heard often with respect to Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo: these people have been killing each other for eons, so what can we do about it?I find all this especially depressing coming from Zoellick, who (a) is one of the Bush administration’s most competent diplomats; (b) has been willing to call genocide, genocide; and (c) has spent quite a bit of time in the area recently. Mark Leon Goldberg over at TAPPED has suggested that the administration is crab-walking its way over to a general rapproachment with the Khartoum government, based on its purported cooperation with U.S. intelligence on Islamic terrorism. As Mark aptly says: “It seems that we are back to the bad old days of cold Cold-War calculations: The United States doesn’t care what happens inside the borders of a cooperative regime.” But even then, I don’t remember senior U.S. officials explicitly condoning genocide by “allies.”

Having spent much of yesterday morning in Constitution Hall watching the happy and inspiring ceremony of my kid’s high school graduation, I was brought back to the unhappy and dispiriting realities of contemporary American politics by press accounts of Karl Rove’s pithy remarks to the New York Conservative Party the other night.I want to read the whole transcript (if it’s ever made available) before commenting at length. But it sure sounds like a Rove classic, combining his well-known habit of deliberately outrageous behavior designed to obliterate real debate in a storm of polarized rhetoric, and his more specific approach in national security to suggest any criticism of Bush’s record in Iraq or anywhere else must reflect a refusal to take 9/11 seriously.Perhaps the most interesting question about this speech’s “message” is why Rove chose to scuttle out of the shadows and deliver it himself instead of employing surrogates. You have to wonder if the Boy Genius was frustrated with the limited effects of the GOP’s counteroffensive on Iraq and Gitmo, and decided to put on a cap and whistle and go out there and personally show his team how to execute a Big Smear.’Til I have the opportunity to put on some rubber gloves and pick up Rove’s speech with sterilized tongs, I’ll just endorse the concise assessment made yesterday by Sen. John Kerry, who knows Karl’s tactics well from painful experience:

For Karl Rove to equate Democratic policy on terror to “indictments” and “therapy” is an outrageous attempt to divide the nation at just the moment we must be unified. Just days after 9/11 the Senate voted 98-0 and the House voted 420-1 to authorize President Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against terror. After the bipartisan vote, President Bush said, I quote: “I am gratified that the Congress has united so powerfully by taking this action. It sends a clear message – our people are together, and we will prevail.”Karl Rove also said last night, quote: “No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”Well, I think a lot more needs to be said about Karl Rove’s motives, because they’re not the people’s motives, and if the President really believed his own words of unity, then he should fire Karl Rove.

Kerry’s right, but I’m sure he’s not holding his breath waiting for Bush to cut Karl loose. After all, there’s no way W. would be quarterbacking Team America without Coach Rove.

I know some Democrats are still mad at him for criticizing Howard Dean, and some, indeed, are still mad about his vote on the bankruptcy bill, but I tell you what, nobody can quite unload on the administration’s foreign policies like Senator Joe Biden.He did a major speech on Iraq over at Brookings yesterday, and here’s what he had to say about Dick Cheney’s “last throes of the insurgency” line, by way of talking about his own recent trip to Iraq:

When you arrive in Baghdad, you’re in a C-130. You do a corkscrew landing to make it more difficult for an enemy ground-to-air launched missile to take you down. When you land, you immediately have body armor placed on you. You are hustled quickly into a Black Hawk helicopter. In the helicopter, there are two brave young soldiers with 30-caliber machine guns hanging out the bays of those doors. You travel from the Red Zone to the Green Zone. The Green Zone is the supposed safe zone. You travel roughly 150 miles per hour, not a whole lot over 100 feet off the ground so as not to provide those on the ground with a profile [so they can shoot you down].You get off the Black Hawk in the Green Zone, which has redundant great cement blocks and walls to keep it secure. You are hustled in your armor into a beefed up Chevy van….

In short, I did not come away with the impression that the insurgency was, as the Vice President of the United States suggeested, in its last throes. And unlike the President of the United States, I am not, quote, “pleased with the progress,” end of quote, we’re making as I recently saw it.

You should read the whole speech, including Biden’s unhappy but honest assessment of our future options if the Iraqi government cannot soon get control of the country.

Many of you are probably familiar with the work of Amy Sullivan (who half-jokingly calls herself Bible Girl in reflection of her tireless devotion to the cause of making it clear the Cultural Right has no monopoly on Christianity), who gave up her blog, Political Aims, a while back to work as an editor at Washington Monthly. I’m happy to report that the fine folks over at Beliefnet have signed up Amy for a brief stint of blogging on religion and politics. You can tell she’s missed the blogosphere, because she’s knocking out several posts a day, and it’s good to see she hasn’t lost her distinctive tone of exasperated reasonableness. These are exasperating times for reasonable people. Be sure to check out Amy’s posts on the John Hostettler outrage on the House floor, the heavy-handed GOP effort to Foxify public radio and television, and Tom Monaghan’s rather creepy campaign to build a conservative Catholic gated utopia in Central Florida. I expect to weigh in on at least a couple of these subjects myself in a bit.NOTE: I know this is getting old, but I’m continuing to experience serious Wi-Fi problems, which have interfered with my ususal nocturnal blogging habits, but the techies are working on it.

Although it doesn’t break much new ground, Russell Shorto’s profile of hard-core anti-gay-marriage activists in the Sunday New York Times is notable for getting to the very heart of the matter. Unlike many Americans who dislike the idea of gay marriage while generally accepting gays and lesbians as people with a right to follow their sexual orientation, the activists (typically conservative evangelicals) Shorto interviews oppose gay marriage precisely because they cannot accept the idea of homosexuality as a biologically determined orientation. Indeed, he says, they seem to understand that any chink in the argument that homosexual behavior is a “libertine lifestyle,” a mental illness, or a disease, will expose them to a terrible series of moral and even theological dilemmas:

For them, the issue isn’t one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual — being black, say, or a woman — and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can’t be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue.

Indeed it is. Accepting the scientific evidence that homosexuality is biological would turn the religious argument on the subject upside down, since discrimination against people because of their God-given nature is defiance of God’s will rather than obedience. And the self-condemnation involved would be unavoidable, since they could not simply cite the marginal scattering of scriptural condemnations of homosexuality from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to Paul; these authorities, after all, knew nothing about biology other than their own observations. In this light, the anti-gay “prophetic stance” of so many politically active conservative evangelicals is another spiritually dangerous submission of religious truth to cultural conservatism and partisan politics.And that’s why they can’t compromise: they’re out on a limb with their souls on the line, secular to the core but unable to see it.

I didn’t do a post yesterday because the WiFi card in my antiquated laptop shut down; I must’ve forgotten to feed the hamsters again. Before that happened, I did do a long post over at TPMCafe.com, proposing six rules for intra-party etiquette, that you might find interesting. And my enforced inability to cyber-jabber did encourage me to listen to some other voices.Over at Bullmooseblog.com, my colleague Marshall Wittmann indulged in one of his periodic fantasies about a John McCain/Bob Kerrey third party ticket. Upon encountering him today, I suggested The Moose was grazing amongst the funny mushrooms again.On a more serious note, I attended a Progressive Policy Institute event (a link to the video should be up on the CSPAN2 site later today) featuring Larry Diamond, whose new book about the Iraq occupation, Squandered Victory, is a riveting account of the Bush administration’s “arrogance, ignorance, isolation and incompetence” in post-invasion Iraq, and the consequences we are facing now and for the immediate future.And just a few minutes ago, I read a powerful piece in The Weekly Standard by Matthew Continetti about the deeper origins of Ralph Reed’s latest troubles, which suggests his involvement in the Abramoff/Indian Casino scandal may turn out to be the tip of the ethical iceberg. Continetti runs through a whole series of questionable lobbying and p.r. campaigns Reed has taken on during his relatively brief but extremely lucrative career as a consultant (e.g., several contracts with Enron), and notes that Reed’s past ability to disguise his sources of income cannot survive the scrutiny he’s invited by running for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. “For once,” says Continetti, Reed’s “political timing is off.”Reed remains the front-runner for the GOP nomination, with an array of GOP establishment figures in Georgia and in Washington in his corner. And he did manage to intimidate one potential primary opponent, State Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, into backing off, even though Oxendine was leading Reed in early polls. But he still faces state Rep. Casey Cagle, who has won the support of a large number of Republican legislators. And they aren’t being bashful about going after Reed on his ethics record and his unsavory Washington associations. In an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed piece earlier this week, Bob Irvin, a former GOP legislative leader, called on Reed to drop out, with this prophecy: “If you should win the nomination, many thousands of Republican voters will desert us for the Democrats in 2006, defeating not only you but also many other good Republican candidates, maybe even Gov. Sonny Perdue.”Now there’s an eminently achievable political fantasy that The Moose and I can share.