Maybe I just don’t browse around enough, but so far today, I haven’t seen any blogo-references to an interesting little note buried in the Washington Post about a survey on exactly how many people pay attention to us.

[A] new CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll…found that nearly three-quarters of the public — 74 percent — is “not too” or “not at all” familiar with the sites. Blogs (short for “Web logs”) are online journals in which amateur, and sometimes, not-so-amateur, pundits discuss whatever is on their minds, from television shows to political candidates. The remainder of those polled were divided between those who said they were either “somewhat familiar” (19 percent) or “very familiar” (7 percent) with blogs.Three percent of the respondents said they read blogs every day; 12 percent said they visit them at least a few times a month. Forty-eight percent said they never look at the sites, and 24 percent said they do not have access to the Internet.

(I can’t seem to find this survey on the CNN or Gallup sites, but will assume the Post didn’t just make it up).I’m sure the number of people reading, and for that matter, writing, political blogs is going up rapidly. And quite certainly, the percentage of politically active people who read blogs is much higher, and among political journalists, much higher still.But the overall degree of penetration at the moment should perhaps give pause to those who have made quasi-totalitarian claims about the collective importance of blogs and other internet-based political activity to politics in general, and to Democratic politics in particular.The “netroots,” significant as they are, simply are not synonymous with the “grassroots” of the Democratic Party, particularly if “grassroots” means the broad universe of elected officials, activists, and rank-and-file voters around the country. And in judging particular claims to speak for the “grassroots,” we should remember this ain’t horseshoes, where “closer” wins the contest. Even the largest and fastest-growing activist groupings are basically islands in a very large sea. That’s why we have primary and general elections, as opposed to online referenda or early-nineteenth century style party caucuses to figure out what the true “grassroots” want, and that’s why public opinion surveys, infernally misleading as they sometimes are, still matter.I write this knowing that for some bloggers, “disrespecting the netroots” is the political Sin Against the Holy Ghost, the one truly unforgivable act. But the political potential of the netroots, and more importantly, the political prospects for the Democratic Party, require some perspective, and at least a bit of the humility which “netroots” advocates rightly demand from everybody else claiming to speak for Democrats. Nobody other than Democratic voters has the standing to decide who is and isn’t a “real Democrat.” While we can argue back and forth about who’s right and who’s wrong, and whose advice should be accepted or rejected, we’ll never be a majority party again if we forget about the 74% of Americans who don’t know a blog from a frog.

The Style Section of today’s Washington Post has a typically odd but interesting Hanna Rosin feature about how Christian Right activists are settling down and getting in touch with their Inner Moderate now that they are landing serious day jobs in George W. Bush’s D.C. The poster people for this alleged domestication of the Christian Right are a couple named Jeff and Lyric Hassler, whose grinning, wholesome visages are displayed on both the cover and jump page of Style. She’s a political consultant who worked on the Bush campaign; he’s a staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (the somewhat-less-crazy of the two Republican Senators from Oklahoma).The basic idea is that people like the Hasslers, although they haven’t changed their views on much of anything, now view the extremist tactics of the Movement’s salad days as, well, kind of embarrassing. “No more thundering sermons on Wiccans and floods and child molesters,” Rosin says in summarizing the change of tone. “They may believe all the same things,” evangelical scholar Michael Cromartie tells her, “but they aren’t going to go on ‘Larry King Live’ and say all homosexuals should die. They’ve learned how to present themselves.”You get the idea from the piece that folks in the Christian Right have been engaged in their own form of Lackoffian “re-framing,” now that they are, well, partially in charge of running the country and all. But you wonder how deep the makeover has really gone.The climax of Rosin’s feature is the revelation that the Hasslers have become Episcopalians, of all things, after settling down in Fairfax County. Indeed, she quotes Lyric Hassler burbling about how much she’s come to love “High Church” stuff like vestments and traditional hymns.Smart as Rosin is, she seems to miss the joke: the particular church the Hasslers are attending is the notorious Truro evangelical Episcopal parish, home to Ollie North and Clarence Thomas, and one of the main protaganists of the right-wing movement to pull congregations out of the Church to protest the ordination of a gay bishop, and other offenses to cultural conservatism. Entering mainline Protestant Christianity through Truro is sort of like getting to know African-American opinion by listening to a lot of Armstrong Williams. I noticed looking at the church’s calender that it’s featuring a Jews-for-Jesus presentation on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday). That shows a fine sensitivity to Jewish concerns about the supercessionist themes that have so often led to anti-Semitic violence during Holy Week, eh?Maybe the Hasslers and hundreds of their peers who have laid down their fetus posters and picked up the reins of power have mellowed, but in part that’s because Washington has moved in their direction. Speaking of how a superior in the Bush campaign looked at her, Lyric Hassler commented that she no longer “stood out,” saying: “Ten years ago she [her boss] might have thought I was a total freak. But now she just thought I was a little weird.”

Like my colleague The Moose, I was stunned by press accounts of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s testimony to the administration’s tax reform study commission yesterday. Back in 2001, you may recall, Greenspan endorsed Bush’s tax cuts on the bizarre theory that otherwise the national debt might disappear and the federal government would have to start buying equity in private businesses to dispose of excess cash. More recently he has returned to his pre-Clinton administration doomsaying about federal budget deficits. So what does he propose now? Draining more revenues from Washington by creating big, fat tax-free savings vehicles to enable high earners to shelter investment income from taxation.To be sure, what Greenspan actually wants is a national consumption tax, and endorses tax-free savings vehicles as a back-door means to that goal. This approach, of course, is a big part of the Grover Norquist “starve the beast” strategy of deliberately engineering large budget deficits in order to force big cutbacks in federal spending, or a shift in the tax base towards wage income or consumption, or all of the above.And the convergence of the Norquist and Greenspan approaches represents a stunning demonstration of how politics has completely debased a large part of the U.S. libertarian tradition.In Grover’s case, the big deal with the devil was his acceptance of the idea that repealing any sleazy corporate tax break represented a verbotin “tax increase.” Thus, instead of championing a level playing field for business competition and for tax policy, Norquist is now the tribune for corporate favoritism and reverse-Robin-Hood fiscal strategies, which help finance and politically drive an agenda that is “libertarian” only to the extent that it screws up government in a way that might eventually cause its general demise.Greenspan’s own Faustian Bargain stems from his famous “pragmatism”–barred by the limited role of the Fed, and by political realities, from actively promoting the free-market paradise he has long espoused, he consistently reaches out to endorse “politically feasible” policies that indirectly achieve his ends–typically, the free candy of tax cuts and tax breaks.Thus, both men embrace a stealth libertarianism that isn’t libertarian at all in its means. We all know Grover’s many ideological and rhetorical vices, but for all his legendary power and influence, he’s essentially just another Washington jive-ass thriving at the intersection of money and politics. But it’s beginning to become more apparent every day that the oracular Chairman has an equally twisted agenda.The Moose’s post today linked to an AEI article by Bill Bradford aboutGreenspan’s much-reported but oft-forgotten association with the Objectivist cult of novelist and proto-libertarian Ayn Rand. I thought I knew the story pretty well, but two things really startled me in Bradford’s piece: (1) Greenspan went straight from Rand’s inner circle (ironically but accurately known as “The Collective”) into the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon. In fact, Greenspan was already knee-deep in conventional Republican politics when he signed onto Rand’s bizarre excommunication of her protege and former lover Nathaniel Brandon. (2) When asked during various Senate confirmation hearings over the years if he still adhered to Randian dogmas like abolition of all regulations and a return to the gold standard, Greenspan gave no sign of a change of heart or mind.Given Greenspan’s current status as a close ally of George W. Bush, you kinda wish someone had recently asked him if he still regards belief in God as a deadly “mysticism of the mind” (corresponding to socialism, the “mysticism of the muscle”), a key tenet of the Objectivist canon. But whatever his political prudence and well-rehearsed routine as a mere economic technocrat, it is becoming clear that his formative extremism has not gone away–just the candor with which his mentor always expressed her oppressively dogmatic views about ends and about means.

One thing that most Democrats–or at least those of us who are not in denial about last year’s election results–seem to agree on is that we must become known as a “party of reform.” “Reform” may mean different things to different people, but as regular readers of this blog know, for me it means a commitment to a complete, root-and-branch progressive agenda for fixing our political system, our budget processes, our tax code, and generally, a federal government that has descended to Harding-era standards of special interest-tending and partisan featherbedding under the stewardship of George W. Bush’s GOP. For us New Democrat types, embracing this kind of reform agenda represents a return to our insurgent roots prior to the 1992 Clinton campaign, and that’s the subject of an interesting article published today on the New Republic site by by Kenny Baer.As Kenny suggests, New Dems got a little fat and happy during the Clinton administration, and also got a little too loose about loaning the “brand” to Democrats who were more interested in positioning themselves to get business contributions than in supporting any real agenda for change. But that’s all over now, and for those of you who are more interested in what we stand for as a party than in the usual Kabuki Theater of left and center stereotypes, give Baer’s take a close look.

There’s some interesting ferment going on in evangelical Christian circles at the moment which may spell trouble for the God-Mammon Alliance the Republican Party has so painstakingly put together. As Rob Garver explains in an American Prospect online piece, the National Association of Evangelicals, with 50,000 church affiliates representing 30 million or so people, is meeting next week in Washington, where it will consider a manifesto on “civic responsibility” that might cause Karl Rove some heartburn. To be sure, the manifesto reiterates familiar Christian conservative positions on abortion, gay marriage, and so forth, but also has surprisingly bold sections on economic justice, environmental stewardship, and even war and peace. This is a development worth watching. I’m sure GOP leaders think of these folk as reliable foot soldiers in the conservative movement. But they do, ultimately, report to a Higher Authority, who once said:”The wind blows where it wants to, and you hear its sound, but don’t know where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8).

As you may know, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case today involving a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds. But you probably don’t know–I certainly didn’t until I collapsed into hysterical laughter at the NPR report on the subject this morning–where the monument really came from: Hollywood!That’s right: the organization (called the Fraternal Order of Eagles) that actually put up the monument, and several hundred like it around the country, was being massively subsidized by Cecil B. DeMille as part of his effort to promote his movie, The Ten Commandments. In fact, DeMille sent Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner out to appear at a number of the monument dedications. So when guys like Judge Roy Moore haul around their Ten Commandments monuments for the edification of a chastened populace, they are unwittingly carrying on the last stages of a Tinseltown Promo. Talk about worshipping golden calves….

Unfortunately, the report is in the subscription-only Roll Call today, but here’s the dish: Georgia Republican legislators have agreed on a re-redistricting of the state’s Congressional districts that’s basically designed to mess with two Democratic incumbents and shore up a vulnerable Republican incumbent.Freshman Dem Rep. John Barrow’s home county of Clarke (Athens) is moved out of his district, though his staff makes it clear he’ll run for re-election in the 12th anyway. Interestingly enough, the map-drawers managed to actually increase the African-American percentage of the voting age population in the 12th while reducing its Democratic performance level. That’s because Athens (home of the University of Georgia) probably has more white Democrats than any city in the state. Still, it remains a majority-Democratic district, and it’s hard to call Barrow a carpetbagger when the carpet’s actually been pulled out from under him.More serious damage was done to 3d District (central-west central GA) Rep. Jim Marshall, whose district goes from 40% African-American to 33%, with Bush having won 58% of the 2000 vote (the measure of GOP performance since the population figures are from the 2000 census) in the new map as opposed to 52% in the old. Since Marshall waxed Calder Clay, a well-funded and hand-picked GOP challenger in 2004, by a 63-37 margin, Georgia Dems think he should be able to hold the district. But it’s worth noting that the home of former Congressman Mac Collins, who lost the GOP Senate nomination in ’04, has been quietly slipped into Marshall’s district, which may mean Collins is considering a comeback.Meanwhile, 11th District (northwest GA) Rep. Phil Gingrey would get a district radically reshaped in his favor, with the African-American population dropping from 28% to 12%, and Republican performance being boosted from 51% to 64%. This is no huge surprise, since the 11th was originally designed as a very competitive district. And while I wouldn’t want to call the Gentleman from the 11th a wingnut or anything, it is rumored he has to wear special weights to keep him from keeling over on his right side while walking.The lawyers who follow this sort of thing think the Power Grab will probably survive Voting Rights Act scrutiny, because its authors were careful to avoid any direct impact on Georgia’s four African-American House incumbents. But there’s a possible legal hook in the murky doctrine of “minority-influence districts,” wherein the Voting Rights Act can be violated if action is taken to dilute a high if not majority percentage of minority voters, which arguably is the case with both the Marshall and Gingrey remaps.According to Roll Call, some Georgia Dems are reportedly relieved that the re-redistricting was not as drastic as some had feared. Perhaps the threat of retaliation elsewhere had a mitigating effect. But the principle of the thing remains outrageous, and for my money, Democrats should wheel out the lawyers and write up the talking points to fight it.

Thanks mainly to Kevin Drum, last week was “Before the Storm” Week in parts of the blogosphere, with a lot of people weighing in on the genius of Rick Perlstein’s 2001 book about the early days of the conservative movement, culminating in the Goldwater candidacy of 1964.Perlstein’s book has been on my reading list for a while, but keeps getting bumped down to the second tier, not because of any misgivings I have about his widely acclaimed brilliance in recounting the events of those days, but simply because I sorta kinda lived through this in detail and prefer to spend my limited reading time on stuff I don’t know much about.As the most obsessive little political junkie you’d ever want to avoid in the early 60’s, I paid a lot of attention to the Goldwater movement at the time, and in ensuing years, read a lot about its antecedents: the early National Review, the Sharon Statement, the rightward tilt of the YR’s, the YAF, the Democrats-for-Goldwater, the Cliff White organization–the whole enchilada. I’m sure Perlstein has important insights about these phenomena that would never occur to me, but right now my top priority is reading Ted Widmer’s new biography of Martin Van Buren, who basically founded the Democratic Party.I do find the Democratic blogospheric debate over the Goldwater campaign, via Perlstein (nicely sliced and diced by Mark Schmitt), fascinating and sometimes horrifying.The idea that today’s Democrats should model themselves on Goldwater Republicans is by any standard, well, a bit nuts. They lost spectacularly in 1964, losing states like Vermont and Kansas that Republicans never lost, by big margins. They destroyed an African-American GOP vote that had been there since Lincoln. That was hard, but they accomplished it. They discredited conservative opposition to the Great Society, which had tangible results in the four years after Goldwater’s nomination. And the magnitude of the loss marginalized movement conservatives in the Republican Party for a long time.A number of participants in the blogospheric discussion of Perlstein’s book note that some of liberalism’s most notable victories occurred under Richard Nixon, particularly the enactment of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the first major federal affirmative action program. But Nixon’s most important insults to the conservative movement were his wage and price controls–a truly satanic posture in the eyes of market conservatives–and his repudiation of Taiwan in the recognition of mainland China, which struck at one of the most emotional and original heart-throbs of the pre-Goldwater and Goldwater Right.The chronic estrangement of movement conservatives from the GOP after 1964 has been understated by many Left and Right enthusiasts.They often forget Reagan’s insurgent effort to forge an anti-Nixon alliance with Nelson Rockefeller at the 1968 GOP Convention. They rarely know about the 1971 manifesto by conservatives (led by William F. Buckley) deploring detente with the Soviet Union, which nakedly offered to support a Democrat like Scoop Jackson in 1972. And nobody seems to remember the period after Reagan’s failed 1976 campaign, when National Review’s publisher, William Rusher, was promoting a “Producers’ Party” that would combine Republican conservatives with Wallacite Democratic conservatives.Mark Schmitt’s comments on the subject nail one point entirely: that the main lesson Republicans ultimately learned from the Goldwater movement was to hide their aims.It’s no accident that conservatives finally conquered the GOP, and won the presidency, under the sign of Ronald Reagan’s embrace of supplyside economics–i.e., the belief that you can promote massive tax cuts and deregulation without really demanding major retrenchment of New Deal/Great Society programs. David Stockman’s brilliant if long-forgotten memoir, The Triumph of Politics, confirmed the final unwillingness of conservatives to accept the fiscal logic of their philosophy. And this basic dishonesty remains a heavy legacy for Republican conservatives today–a characteristic, of course, that would horrify Barry Goldwater.So: what do Democrats have to learn from the early conservative movement? How to lose elections, lose influence, and ultimately win by losing your soul?It’s a good question, the night before a big snowstorm is expected to hit Washington, a place Barry Goldwater wished God or man would smite with every available plague.

This is getting to be really interesting. Armando of DailyKos has done a second post responding to my latest optimistic epistle on the future of Southern Democrats, and poses a few more questions and challenges that I’m happy to try to answer. Maybe I should apply for a Sympathy for the Devil diary on the Kos site, as a combined party unity/missionary effort.The main question Armando poses is why, exactly, Dems cratered between ’96 and ’04 among Southern self-identified moderates. He answers his own question by suggesting that 9/11 made all the difference, elevating the national security issue.Certainly that answer has something to do with it. Maybe it’s all those military bases; maybe it’s the disproportionate number of black, white and brown southerners who sign up to fight for their country; maybe it’s even that fightin’ frontier Jacksonian Scotch-Irish heritage that Walter Russell Mead writes about–but there’s no question national security matters more in the South than in, say, Iowa.But the problem with attributing the Dem decline between ’96 and ’04 to national security is the intervening election: ’00, when the Democratic presidential vote among white southerners collapsed, even though the candidate was, technically, a Southern White Guy (and, technically, a Baptist to boot) named Al Gore.In another section of his post, Armando suggests that Clinton’s personal qualities as a candidate, not his message or his positioning on issues, explains his relative success in the South. As I have argued at some length elsewhere, I don’t think you can separate the message and the messenger so cleanly, especially in the South, where Clinton’s communications gifts were considered natural, not supernatural.Personalities aside, the biggest difference between Clinton ’96 and Gore ’00 had to do with how each candidate dealt with two sets of issues: culture, and role-of-government–both big “trust” issues in the South. Clinton was thoroughly progressive, but went well out of his way to make it clear that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal and rare,” that he supported a modest gay rights agenda because everyone who “worked hard and played by the rules” should be treated the same; and that he fought to maintain and even expand the social safety net on condition that it truly represented a “hand up, not a handout.” Everyone in Washington laughed at Clinton’s “micro-initiatives” on supporting the family–V-chips, school uniforms, youth curfews, etc,–but they sent big messages in the culturally-sensitive South. And in general, Clinton’s whole ’96 message was that he was willing to reign in government’s excesses, while fighting to defend its essentials–the famous M2E2 (Medicare, Medicaid, Education and the Environment).Compare that message to Gore’s, and you go a long way towards understanding why the guy lost nearly half of Clinton’s southern white support. Gore was forever bellowing about partial-birth abortion legislation (supported by about three-fourths of southerners) representing a dire threat to the basic right to choose. While Clinton called for “mending, not ending” affirmative action, Gore pledged to defend every aspect of affirmative action with his life. Clinton talked about balancing gun ownership rights with responsibilities. Gore talked about national licensing of gun owners. Clinton talked about making government “smarter, not bigger.” Gore never mentioned his own role in the “reinventing government” initiative, and boasted an enormous policy agenda that added up to a message that he wanted to expand government as an end in itself.Moving forward four years, Kerry tried to avoid Gore’s mistakes on specific cultural and role-of-government issues, but never talked about these themes more than occasionally, and never came across with any kind of authenticity in his efforts to project himself as a man of faith, a hunter, a government-reformer, or a family guy. While Gore got killed by his positioning and the lack of a compelling message, Kerry got killed by the lack of a compelling message and by those personal characteristics–distorted and exaggerated by GOP propaganda–that made him seem alien to southern voters. And without any question, the polarization of the entire election pushed southern moderates, like moderates elsewhere, to pick sides instinctively rather than think it all through.(At the risk of gnawing this question to death, I might add that Clinton in ’96 was advancing an increasingly successful national policy agenda; Gore in ’00 perversely ran a campaign that avoided references to that success; and Kerry, of course, had to campaign as a critic, not as an achiever).The downward trajectory of the southern Dem vote between ’96 and ’04 also reflected demographic trends which I discussed in my earlier answer to Armando–trends that may not help Republicans that much in the immediate future, as the aging pains of new suburbs and bad GOP governance create a natural backlash that Democrats can exploit if they are smart enough.Armando seizes on my commentary about southern suburban moderates as a Dem target to suggest that maybe the belief that “values voters” are the key to the South is wrong.Well, that depends on your definition of “values voters.” If it means people who want to criminalize abortions, demonize gays and lesbians, or institutionalize evangelical Christianity, then no, suburban southerners don’t generally fit that category, and I’d personally write them off as targets even if that were the case, on both practical and moral grounds.My own (and generally, the DLC’s) definition of “values voters” is quite different. They are people who: (a) don’t must trust politicians, and want to know they care about something larger than themselves, their party, and the interest groups that support them; (b) don’t much trust government, and instinctively gravitate towards candidates who seem to care about the role that civic and religious institutions can play in public life; (c) don’t much trust elites, whom they suspect do not and cannot commit themselves to any particular set of moral absolutes; (d) don’t much like the general direction of contemporary culture (even if they are attracted to it as consumers), and want to know public officials treat that concern with respect and a limited agenda to do something about it; (e) are exquisitely sensitive about respect for particular values like patriotism, parenting and work; and (f) have a communitarian bent when it comes to cultural issues, and dislike those who view them strictly through the prism of the irresistable march towards absolute and universal individual rights without regard to social implications.By that definition, I think southern suburban moderates, and especially women in that demographic, are definitely “values voters.” In answer to Armando’s particular question about how suburban southerners would react to that wingnut in Kansas who wants to explore the sexual histories of women seeking abortions, I think the simple answer is that they would say: “Mind your own business, boy! Aren’t there some criminals out there you ought to be chasing?”Somebody at Vanderbilt once wrote a book entitled “The South’s Compulsive Need to Explain.” In that spirit, I hope the debate over the region and its political future continues. Clearly, Earle and Merle Black need some real competition.

Over a month ago I did a long, complicated post on prospects for some sort of Democratic comeback in the South, and probably lost a lot of readers halfway through with a “three-wave” theory and a tangent on the need for two-way biracial coalitions (an ensuing exchange with Armando of DailyKos got even further down into the weeds).So thanks to Ruy Teixeira of Donkey Rising for doing a post yesterday that zeroed in on the biggest sign for Southern Democratic hope on the toughest landscape, the presidential level: a set of statistics I cited but buried in too much prose.

In 1996, Clinton split the southern vote, 46-46, with Bob Dole. One of the keys to his strong performance was this: he actually carried southern white moderates by 46-44.In 2004, however, Kerry got beaten by 15 points in the south (57-42). So where have all the southern white moderates gone?In a sense, nowhere. The ideological profile of the southern electorate has barely changed since 1996: it was 17 percent liberal/44 percent moderate/39 conserative then; it is 17 percent liberal/43 percent moderate/40 percent conservative now. And among whites, the ideological profile was 15 percent liberal/43 percent moderate/43 percent conservative in 1996; it is 14 percent liberal/41 percent moderate/45 percent conservative now.Not much change. But what has changed is a big swing from Clinton’s 46-44 support among southern white moderates in ’96 to Kerry’s 58-41 deficit among the same voting group, whose size and electoral weight remains as potent as ever, in 2004.There’s your target. Move southern white moderates back toward parity and the Democrats are back in the (southern) ballgame.

The odds of making serious gains among Southern white moderates–and also of cutting modestly into the massive GOP margins among conservatives–are even better in non-presidential-year state races, like those coming up in 2006. Already, two strong potential Democratic gubernatorial candidates in the Deep South are focused on winning by swaying suburban moderate voters. Alabama Lieutenant Governor Lucy Baxley could benefit from a cultural-issues split between backers of incumbent Governor Bob Riley and his likely primary opponent, Ten-Commandments-toting former Judge Roy Moore. And Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox cites her ability to win key Atlanta suburban counties in 2002 as a major credential in her bid to topple incumbent Gov. Sonny Perdue.Just goes to show: sometimes the regional stereotypes can be misleading. Given all the talk in national Dem circles about the need to appeal to NASCAR-obsessed, pickup-truck driving rural Bubbas, it would be especially rich to see two women take over state houses by winning suburban moderates.