Noam Scheiber at The New Republic’s &c blog posted a less-than-friendly comment today on the political value of Teddy Kennedy’s big speech yesterday on the future of the party. He focused on Kennedy’s rhetoric on Social Security. I don’t personally have a big problem with that, and moreover, have gotten used to just ignoring all the shadow-boxing in Democratic speeches aimed at the non-existent internal enemy who’s telling Democrats to “move to the right” or “surrender” or whatever.
The problem I have with Kennedy’s suggested message for Democrats is his full-throated advocacy of dealing with America’s health care crisis by just expanding Medicare to cover everybody.
Given Medicare’s many problems, making it universal is probably the least appealing, and by far the most expensive, way to expand coverage. This idea (which Dick Gephardt promoted for a while in the ’90s under the exciting label of “Medicare Part C”) has all the flaws of a single-payer system without any of its virtues, other than a bogus “simplicity.”
Beyond the dubious merits of the idea, there’s a bit of a message discipline problem here. One of the arguments that most Democrats are using in opposing Bush’s Social Security plan is that the retirement program that’s truly in crisis and in need of immediate reform is Medicare, whose long-term cost spiral is frightening, and whose solvency problem is immediate, not remote. So here’s the White-Haired Lion of Democratic Senators arguing that Medicare is actually the solution to all our problems, if we just make it immeasurably larger.
That dog truly won’t hunt, and Ted Kennedy should not expend his well-earned political capital on it.

Jeez, it seems to just run in the family, this desire to take a big safety net program and do something completely irresponsible and deceptive with it.
Even as W. continues to tout his Social Security “reform” plan, little bro’ Jeb down in Florida is rolling out a really bad proposal to “reform” Medicaid in his state. It’s basically a block grant to private health plans to let them figure out what to do with low-income families on a “defined contribution” basis. Read all about it in today’s New Dem Daily.

Speaking of Christian Right leaders who have traded their religious birthright for a mess of secular political pottage…The Moose reported the other day that his ol’ buddy Ralph Reed, lately a state Republican Party chair and political consultant in my home state of Georgia, is considering a run for the office of Lieutenant Governor.
There’s plenty of irony in this ambition of Reed’s. For one thing, the Republican takeover of the Georgia Senate in 2002, which Reed masterminded, led the GOPers to strip the Lootship, held by Democrat Mark Taylor, of most of its longstanding powers. For another, Reed is known to have dreamed since childhood of becoming Governor of Georgia, but is temporarily blocked from achieving that dream by the nonentity he did so much to lift to the Chief Executive Office of the Peach State, the incumbent Sonny Perdue. That’s gotta gall Ralph, since ol’ Sonny was laboring as an undistinguished conservative Democrat in the backwaters of Georgia politics back in those days when Reed was walking tall and talking big on national television as the Svengali of the Christian Coalition.
But the bigger point is that Ralph Reed is trying to cross the invisible but very real line between campaign consultant and candidate; staff and elected official; operative and Talent; organ-grinder and monkey. It’s always the private belief of every political staffer that he or she could vastly exceed The Boss in every conceivable accomplishment if the old fool would get out of the way and let the real brains of the operation take over. Putting aside a number of U.S. House chiefs of staff who have succeeded doddering Members after semi-publicly performing their duties, remarkably few pols have actually succeeded in crossing the Great Divide. Robert F. Kennedy and Gary Hart were big exceptions to this general rule. Reed may think he’s another.
But something else may be going on that transcends politics: the age-old desire of all successful people to prove they can succeed in radically different roles. It’s especially common in the political world’s first cousin, the acting profession, where comics are forever trying to prove they can win an Oscar for drama, and bimbos of both genders are forever struggling for acceptance as Serious Artists.
In the end, Ralph Reed’s desire to become the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia is the political equivalent of Racquel Welch’s decades-long, futile drive for Critical Acclaim. Eventually Welch gave up and ultimately achieved a sort of odd dignity as a celebrity who made peace with her cheesy destiny. When he gets tired of begging for an audition to show he can play a supporting role to Sonny Perdue, maybe Ralph Reed will make his own peace with God, or with his demons.

There’s a brief but pungent op-ed by Boston University’s Stephen Prothero in today’s LA Times that Kevin Drum brought to all our attentions, and it’s obviously catnip to me. Citing a bizarre 1997 poll that showed only a third of Americans could name the four Gospels, while 12 percent of us identified Noah’s wife as Joan of Arc, Prothero goes on to make an important if familiar point. We live in the most religiously believing and observant advanced industrial nation, but our level of actual knowledge about religious doctrines–our own and others–is significantly lower than in religiously indifferent countries elsewhere.
Prothero focuses on inter-religious ignorance, and also suggests that our very religiosity makes it difficult to dispassionately teach about religion without promoting a particular doctrine or offending a particular religious minority, in a country where, from a denominational point of view, we are all religious minorities.
But as the 1997 poll illustrates, Americans aren’t just ignorant about Muslims or Sikhs or Hindus or even Mormons–they often know little about the doctrines or history of their own faith communities.
In his deservedly acclaimed 2003 book on American Catholics, A People Adrift, Peter Steinfels notes with alarm the avid interest of his co-religionists in Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code, despite the fact that Brown’s theological pot-boiler implicitly treats the basic doctrines of Christianity as a fraud, and the Church as an ongoing conspiracy to conceal that fraud.
This indifference to history and doctrine definitely extends to Protestants. How many Southern Baptists know that their Convention endorsed liberalized abortion laws prior to Roe v. Wade? Or even that an ACLU-style absolutism about separation of church and state was long the most distinctive trait of their community, dating back to Roger Williams and to the early English Separatists? How many contemporary Presbyterians know that John Knox opposed the celebration of Christmas? And how many American Congregationalists really understand that the same tradition that made their community so notably progressive on issues like slavery and civil rights also made them for many decades the very fountainhead of nativist and anti-labor sentiment?
Maybe a lot of them, but I doubt it. At one point in our history, religious pluralism created a way to define ourselves distinctively within the common American civic creed. Now the arrow seems pointed in the other direction, with religious identity being less and less a matter of heritage, doctrine and liturgy, and more and more a matter of consumer choice–and of secular values.
It’s this last point that compels me to write about this subject. To be blunt about it, millions of those Americans who can’t name the four Gospels probably have no doubt that those Gospels demand that they oppose abortion, gay rights, or feminism. More than a few Catholics who thrill at Dan Brown’s bogus expose of the machinations of Opus Dei probably think the litmus test for being a “good Catholic” is pretty much the same menu of “cultural conservatism” and “moral values.” And no telling how many Americans who can’t distinguish Muslims from Hindus or Sikhs–much less Sunni from Shia or Arabs from Persians–have probably bought into the idea of George W. Bush’s foreign policy as a religiously-based effort to vindicate Western values against an undifferentiated heathen horde.
This is not an accident, and is not the fault of the religious rank-and-file, who are not historians or theologians, and have complicated lives to lead. But the rampant secularization of much of the American faith tradition in the not-so-sacred cause of cultural and political conservatism must be laid at the parsonage door of those religious leaders who have abused the prophetic function of their ministry to acquire a “seat at the table” of secular power.
In particular, Christian Right leaders in every denomination who abet and exploit the doctrinal and historical indifference of The Faithful to promote an agenda of intolerance and self-righteousness are the true Secularists of contemporary American society, and far more dangerous to the integrity of our faith communities than all the honest unbelievers in our midst or in Europe or Asia.
To quote from the Gospel According to Somebody, or perhaps it was the Epistle of Joan of Arc to the Alabamans: “None of those who cry ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father.”
This is verily, verily Word Up.

Despite my deep respect for my colleague The Moose, I’ve got to call him on something. He ended a recent post by urging Democrats to “Dare to struggle, dare to win,” a well-known dictum of Chairman Mao.
Having unsuccessfully used the same motto in a high school student body presidency campaign eons ago, I have to caution the Moose that Maoist rhetoric is not what is meant by “reaching out to Red Voters” these days.
And if this choice of words was a blatant ploy for Hard Left support in The Moose’s virtual campaign for the DNC chairmanship, then he should understand that nobody will be fooled, so long as he works at the Revisionist-Hegemonist DLC, and thus is objectively a Liveried Lackey of the Wall Street Profiteers and a Paper-Tiger Imperialist. Workers, peasants and progressive intelligentsia will unite to smash the capitalist-roader Moose and his discredited social-fascist “populism,” exposing the petty-bourgeois class origins of his call for “reform” rather than revolution. Marching together behind the vanguard of the proletariat, the toilers of America will consign the Right-Deviationist DLC to the dustbin of history.
So the Moose should hunt in a different part of the woods.
(NOTE TO THE CREDULOUS AND THE HUMORLESS: THIS WAS ANOTHER JOKE! HAD TO FIND SOME USE FOR ALL THAT MARXIST RHETORIC I LEARNED IN MY YOUTH!)

Like many of you, no doubt, I haven’t exactly been paying a lot of attention to polls (other than exit polls) since November 3, sort of like a guy who can’t stand the thought of red meat after a year on the Atkins diet. But after forcing myself to read tonight’s story on the new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, and then backtracking to read Ruy Teixeira’s post yesterday on the latest Ipsos-AP poll–well, I guess it’s time to get a little protein back on the menu.
CNN’s headline trumpets a rise in Bush’s job approval rating. But the real news (reinforced by the Ipsos poll) is that Bush actually isn’t getting the post-election, pre-inaugural “bump” that winners usually get, and in terms of the two big stories that will likely dominate political discourse in the immediate future, Iraq and Social Security, he’s doing more poorly than ever.
In the Gallup poll, which gives Bush an overall job approval rating of 52 percent, only 42 percent of respondents favor his handling of Iraq, while 56 percent disapprove. Similarly, only 41 percent give a positive evaluation of his handling of Social Security, while 52 percent disapprove. Only 18 percent agree with Bush’s characterization of Social Security as a program “in crisis” (though, as just-say-no Democrats should note, 53 percent believe it “has major problems.”).
As Ruy reports, Bush’s numbers are even weaker in the Ipsos-AP poll, including an anemic 50 to 48 approval/disapproval ratio in his overall handling of “foreign policy issues and the war on terrorism.”
Sure, GOPers will try to use the Inaugural hoopla, and a no-doubt-well-rehearsed Inaugural Address full of Gerson’s finest uplift, to create a sense of momentum going into the Iraqi elections (if they occur) and a highly fractious congressional session. But they don’t simply face a determined Democratic opposition–they face a public that’s not likely to mistake Bush’s narrow election as any kind of mandate for doing the stuff they dislike even more than the stuff he did before.

Kevin Drum of Political Animal beat me to the punch on this today, but I want to echo his suggestion that you read the New Republic’s editorial on the tilting of the National Labor Relations Board during the Bush era.
Labor guys are forever talking about the need for labor law reform, and those of us who don’t follow this issue regularly probably half-assume they are just worried about the general erosion of union membership, and/or want better safeguards against the kind of corporate practices (e.g., offshoring) that didn’t exist when the industrial-age regime of labor laws was created in the 1930s. But as the TNR Editors show, there’s a deliberate GOP effort under way to undermine those laws as they have generally been applied all along.
Organizing to collectively bargain is tough enough these days without the officials responsible for ensuring the rights of employees trying to rig the game. This is an issue on which all Democrats need to show some solidarity with the labor movement.

Many kudos to Amy Sullivan for the public service she performed in her new Washington Monthly piece about why the cast of big-time Democratic political consultants never seems to change, no matter how often their advice is bad and their candidates lose.
She hit all the right notes: the popularity of consultants who pander to their clients by telling them what they want to hear; the huge conflict of interest involved when party committees hire staff who peddle their consulting businesses to the candidates who dare not offend Those Who Write the Checks; the particularly sleazy practice (abandoned by the Bush-Cheney campaign this year, in one step Democrats should emulate) of “strategic consultants” deciding to run ads which they then place for a fat percentage rakeoff; the persistent “Peter Principle” of successful pollsters or speechwriters or direct mail operatives graduating to message and strategy roles they are incompetent to carry out; and of course, the cozy inter-connections between consultants who make sure nobody new gets into The Club.
The only thing I can add to Amy’s tale is one slightly different insight about why candidates keep hiring unsuccessful consultants. Here’s the way it often works, especially for new candidates for the House or Senate. Unless they are already political titans and/or self-funded, the first thing they need to do is to establish themselves as “credible,” and one easy way to do that is to retain a “name consultant.” Then they have to raise the money necessary to pay them, and also to implement their “strategy,” which may well involve additional dollars for the consultants. At that point, the candidate feels extremely stupid not taking that expensive advice, even if he or she suspects it’s the same cookie-cutter crap the consultants are selling to their other clients, or indeed, have been recycling for years. It’s a perfect vicious circle that leads predictably to Palookaville, though the losing consultant will typically shrug and blame the loss on the candidate or on the “mood of the Midwest” or something.
I vividly remember one particular Senate candidate a while back who admitted privately that he went through exactly that vicious circle, accepting his consultant’s bone-headed strategy because he’d be a bone-head to admit he hired the wrong guy in the first place. It made me wonder if Democrats should rethink the standard practice of mentoring prospective candidates by letting them talk to current electeds who’ve won. Maybe we need a Losers School of defeated candidates who can warn their successors of the mistakes they made, and tell them very directly which Loser Consultants they should avoid like the plague.

In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, National Journal political columnist Chuck Todd adds his not-insignificant voice to a bit of emerging Conventional Wisdom about recent political history: the idea that Bill Clinton was responsible for the decline of the Democratic Party over the last decade or so, especically at the non-presidential level. He concludes by suggesting that Democrats begin their recovery by avoiding close association with anybody or any organization contaminated by excessive identification with “Clintonism.”
You can read the thing yourself, but I found Todd’s take sadly typical in that he constructs his argument on the foundation of two highly questionable planted axioms and one big straw man.
First, the planted axioms:
(1) Clintonism was about “triangulation” and “splitting the differences” with conservatives; and
(2) Democrats controlled the House and Senate before Clinton was elected and controlled neither when he left office; thus, he, and his strategy of “triangulation” and “splitting the differences” must have caused this decline.
Now I realize that many Republicans and some lefty Democrats believe that Clinton stood for nothing other than playing off traditional liberalism and “splitting the difference” with conservatives, but that’s sure as hell not what Clinton himself claimed he was doing. The term “triangulation” was invented by the ephemeral 1996 Clinton advisor Dick Morris, and even he never claimed it just meant moving to some position half-way between liberalism and conservatism, but instead devising progressive answers to issues previously dominated by the opposition: “using your tools to solve their problems,” as Morris put it in the last book he wrote before becoming a full-time Rupert Murdoch flack.
And even if you think Todd’s characterization of Morris’ term is accurate, there’s the little problem that the big, unmistakable Year of Decline for down-ballot Democrats was not 1996, but 1994. And it is very hard to make the case that Clinton had done much of any “triangulation” in the two years prior to 1994, while it’s very easy to make the case that Clinton’s own contribution to the ’94 debacle was a pattern (outside the trade arena) of insisting on pursuing the priorities of conventional liberalism, in harness with the conventional politicians of the House Democratic Caucus (There is a revisionist argument that the ’94 results can be explained by disappointment of the “Democratic base” with Clinton’s failure to embrace something like a single-payer health care proposal, but that’s pretty much a joke when you look at the southern districts where Democrats lost the most ground). And lest we forget, the White House political guru going into the ’94 elections was not Dick Morris, but the hyper-conventional Tony Coelho, who consistently told Democrats that early signs of a conservative surge were not worth worrying about, and that Congressional Democrats in particular shouldn’t panic and do anything dangerous like, say, supporting campaign finance reform. This is the same guy, BTW, whose post-1994-election White House political strategy was simply to scream about proposed cuts to the school lunch program.
Beyond that little problem with Todd’s hypothesis, it represents a good example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy, really no different than the assumption that George Bush’s foreign policy has thwarted Jihadist Terrorism because there have been no strikes on the U.S. since 9/11.
That becomes more obvious when you look at the alternative explanations for 1994, which include (a) many years of pent-up popular frustration with a Democratic-dominated Congress, skllfully exploited by the GOP’s dishonest but resolute alliance with the term-limits and balanced-budget movements; (b) a huge number of Democratic retirements; (c) the racial gerrymandering that guaranteed big southern losses in the House; and (d) the first big mobilization of the Christian Right.
And then there’s the Big Bertha of factors, which I’m sure Todd is familiar with: 1994 as the culmination of a gradual but steady trend towards realignment of the two parties on roughly ideological lines, which gave the GOP its big opportunity (in conjunction with the four factors mentioned above) to make huge gains in areas of the country previously represented and governed by relatively conservative (certainly far more conservative than Clinton-style) Democrats. In this context, “Clintonism” can at worst be described as a less-than-successful, last-minute holding action against a Republican Majority, but not as its cause. The gains that Democrats made during the last six years of the Clinton administration–most notably after the Lewinsky scandal–certainly don’t fit into the hypothesis that Clinton himself was the problem.
Now you can make the case that Clinton, like most presidents, was more interested in his own political fate than that of his party, and that he did too little, not too much, to try to change its structure and default-drive ideology–with a big assist from Republicans who relentlessly promoted partisan and ideological polarization almost every day of his presidency. And there is no question the Lewinsky scandal reinforced claims from both the Right and the Left that “Clintonism” was nothing more than poll-driven “triangulation” or “splitting the difference.”
But the idea that the Democratic Party was weaker when Clinton left office–with extremely high job approval ratings and after a record of accomplishment that showed Democrats could be trusted to produce remarkable results–than it would have been under any other plausible approach to strategy or ideology, is questionable in the extreme.
And that leads me to the Big Fat Straw Man in Todd’s argument: the idea that “Clintonism” is responsible for the post-Clinton problems of the party because of the iron grip of his failed political strategy (and strategists) over the last two presidential candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry.
Aside from the fact that Al Gore sorta kinda won, Todd seems to have forgotten that Gore (a) managed to put together a campaign team largely bereft of Clinton ’96 alumni, and (b) made a decisive if counter-intuitive choice not to run on the record of the Clinton-Gore administration.
Kerry’s campaign, meanwhile, was guided by a Democratic strategist involved in every presidential run since 1972 other than Clinton’s two campaigns. And for all the candidate’s virtues, his effort was notably devoid of most of the distinctive hallmarks of “Clintonism,” including a clear overarching message, a determination to look like “a different kind of Democrat,” a willingness to say things uncomfortable to Democratic interest groups, or an ability to connect with culturally traditionalist voters.
Finally, you really have to look at where Democrats lost ground in 2002 and 2004 to see how truly laughable it is to suggest that “centrism” was some kind of fatal curse for our congressional and presidential candidates. Does anybody really think that, say, Max Cleland would have won re-election in 2002 had he been more of a loud-and-proud old-fashioned pre-Clinton Democrat? Or that Brad Carson could have won Oklahoma last year if he had come out for a single-payer health care system? Give me a break.
Todd does say one thing that I agree with, though probably for different reasons than his: that Democrats need to do more on the policy and message front than simply recycle Clinton’s ideas and phrases. But it’s an indictment of Clinton’s Democratic successors–all of us–that the current options or Democrats seem to be limited to asking WWBD? or defining ourselves simply and mindlessly through 100% opposition to whatever it is Bush says he’s for. But see, I would argue that actual “Clintonism” involved a constant effort to come up with new ideas based on the enduring values of our party, focused on actually improving the lives of the American people, as the actual Clinton administration succeeded in doing so well. And that’s one legacy we’d be fools to abandon.

Speaking of books, I mentioned in a Christmas post that I had been given a book entitled Enslaved By Ducks about a pet owner’s gradual loss of autonomy, but didn’t know the author’s name because one of my dogs had already chewed up the cover and title page.
Thanks to the readers who googled the book and gave me the author’s identity, but by then I had received a very nice note from The Enslaved Himself, Bob Tarte. I’ve now started the book (betwixt and between boning up on my knowledge of The Whigs), and so far it is both wise and hysterically funny. And at the point of the book I’ve reached so far, Tarte only has a couple of parrots and a deceased rabbit, far short of the menagerie he ultimately assembles. But he’s already captured the odd psychology of the Pet Owner, while amply illustrating one of my own favorite maxims: a long series of logical decisions can add up to an absurd conclusion.