Need a break from the “nuclear option” debate? So do I, so please allow me talk about, and recommend, a truly remarkable book I just finished reading.When Steve Oney’s massive book, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, was published in the fall of 2003, I made a mental note to read it but didn’t get around to buying it until a couple of weeks ago, when I stumbled on a paperback copy in New Orleans.For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Phagan/Frank saga, these are the basic facts: in Atlanta in 1913, on Confederate Memorial Day, a 13-year-old pencil factory worker named Mary Phagan was gruesomely murdered at her place of work. Within days, the factory’s manager, an Ivy League-educated member of Atlanta’s hyper-respectable German Jewish community, Leo Frank, was arrested for the murder, and ultimately convicted and sentenced to death by hanging after a trial that revolved around the testimony of an alleged accomplice-after-the-fact, an African-American janitor at the factory named Jim Conley.During a long and unsuccessful series of legal appeals of the conviction, Frank’s case became a national and international sensation, and a source of bitter sectional and religious animosity. At the last possible moment, Frank’s execution was commuted to life imprisonment by an outgoing Governor with close links to the defense attorneys, sparking widespread public outrage in Georgia. And finally, in August of 1915, a group of men from the Phagan family’s ancestral home in Marietta, Georgia, kidnapped Frank from a state prison farm, drove him halfway across to state to a spot near Marietta, and lynched him–an event that was met with wild celebrations in many parts of Georgia and much anger up north, especially among New York’s rapidly growing Jewish immigrant population.This story is generally remembered as an American Dreyfus Case, with Frank being framed and then lynched primarily because he was Jewish. But as Oney explains, in his painstakingly detailed but lively account, there was a whole lot more going on than simple antisemitism. Among the many dimensions of the case he illuminates, there were these:(1) Journalistic competition. As it happens, the Phagan murder coincided with an intense newspaper circulation battle in Atlanta, sparked by the appearance of a Hearst paper called The Georgian, which initially viewed the case through the prism of Hearst’s nationwide battle against child labor abuses. With The Georgian and its Atlanta rivals, The Journal and The Constitution, all hyping the case with constant extras, the police and legal authorities were under enormous pressure to make a quick arrest even before the evidence had been sifted. Much later in the saga, journalism again became a big factor, with many northern papers, most especially The New York Times, leading a crusade for Frank’s release and/or commutation.(2) Primitive criminal investigation procedures. Oney’s account provides a shocking demonstration of the shortcomings of criminal investigations and forensic science in the early twentieth century. Most of the physical evidence in the Phagan case was ignored or mishandled. Some of Georgia’s best physicians could never conclusively determine whether the child was raped or violated in any way, though the prosecution’s case completely relied on a sexual motive for the murder. Frank’s (and for that matter, Conley’s) guilt or innocence basically came down to conflicting circumstantial evidence and the credibility of the two principals’ eyewitness testimony. Ultimately one piece of physical evidence–“murder notes” admittedly written by Conley in the guise of an accusation by the victim, but which Conley claimed were composed by Frank–became the centerpiece of the case for Frank’s commutation, and years later, for his posthumous vindication–but was not central in the trial or the appeals.(3) Race. Oney also untangles the racial aspects of Frank’s conviction and lynching. At the time, a big part of the sensation surrounding the Frank trial was that a respectable white man was being convicted primarily on the testimony of a disreputable black man–in Jim Crow Georgia. And there’s no question Frank’s attorneys, and some of his journalistic supporters, played the race card aggressively, describing the murder as a classic “Negro crime.” But racist assumptions about Jim Conley also hurt Frank, because jurors believed Conley incapable of conceiving, executing, and covering up the murder, or of composing the “murder notes.” The central figure in Oney’s account of the racial implications of the case, and the book’s only real hero (other than Governor Slaton) is Conley’s attorney, William Smith. Smith signed onto the prosecution team out of an unusual but lifelong concern for racial equality for African-Americans, and a fear that Conley would become a convenient scapegoat for the murder. But after brilliantly defending Conley by prosecuting Frank, Smith realized that his client was a very intelligent and relatively well-educated man who was entirely capable of hiding his crime and framing Frank. This soon led Smith to re-investigate the case on his own and passionately advocate Frank’s innocence.(4) Sex. Although the physical evidence of a sexual motive for Phagan’s murder was botched, Oney leaves no doubt that everyone involved assumed such a motive was central. And despite widespread stereotypes about the sexual interest of African-American men towards white women, Conley was able to deflect this suspicion elsewhere by explicitly suggesting that Frank’s sexual proclivities were “unnatural,”–i.e., not revolving around “normal” intercourse. That was a “vice” that was associated not with African-Americans but with “cosmopolitan” sybarites from alien places like France or New York, and thus, with men with backgrounds like Leo Frank’s. The belief that Frank was a sexual predator with outsized and perhaps perverse appetites was reinforced by questionable but not completely refuted testimony at his trial by a number of Phagan’s “factory girl” peers that he sometimes took occasion to enter their dressing room without notice or otherwise press his attentions on them. In a long and interesting interview with WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi during his book tour, Oney acknowleges that although he is fairly certain Frank was innocent of the murder, the factory manager may have been guilty of what we now think of as sexual harrassment.(5) Class. Long before race became a factor in the Phagan/Frank case, economic class loomed very large. Phagan was a living example of the extent to which Atlanta’s entry into the Industrial Age depended on cheap child labor; she began working full-time at the age of ten. And there’s little question that the big villain in inciting Frank’s lynching, the aging paragon of radical southern populism, Tom Watson, first treated the Frank trial as a parable of rich capitalists seeking to escape responsibility for the physical, as well as economic, exploitation of poor southerners forced off the land into factories. Eventually, Watson descended into blatant antisemitism, but his constant attacks on the rich northern Jews fighting for Frank’s freedom generally emphasized the adjectives rather than the noun. And Watson’s fury was really directed at Frank’s defenders in Georgia–men like Frank’s temporary savior, Governor Slaton–who in his view represented a long and dishonorable tradition of “scalawag” surrender to the Northern Capitalism that defeated the Confederacy and dominated Reconstruction.(6) The Conspiracy of Silence. The most original contribution of Oney’s book is his excavation of the plot to lynch Leo Frank, and his explanation of why, after all the furor, the case vanished from the public eye for many decades. As he makes plain, the lynching was the product of a well-coordinated plan involving many of the leadin
g citizens of Marietta, encompassing a takeover of the state administration of prisons, and utilizing a series of threats and bribes to secure the passive complicity of Frank’s custodians. And the plan included the subversion of the only forum in which the lynchers could have been brought to justice: a Marietta grand jury on which seven members of the lynch mob served, guided by a prosecutor who helped design the whole scheme.Oney documents the rich political rewards earned by many of those who worked to hang Leo Frank, from the chief prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, who was soon elected governor, to Tom Watson, who ended his erratic career as a U.S. Senator, to suspected lynch mob participant John Wood, who survived into the 1950s to serve as chairman of the notorious U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. But he also explains why Frank’s defenders fell silent. The New York Times stopped publishng articles and editorials on the case when publisher Adolph Ochs became convinced his earlier crusade had contributed to the climate that produced the lynching. And in Georgia, virtually everybody–the lynch mob’s supporters and abbetters, the chastened Atlanta newspapers, and a deeply traumatized Jewish community–agreed to put the case behind them.The Phagan/Frank case would probably have become a mere historical footnote, and an occasional source of grievance for Jewish Americans, except for the fact that in the early 1980s a previously unknown witness appeared: another African-American employee of the pencil factory named Alonzo Hall. In a near-deathbed disclosure, Hall confessed that on the day of the murder he had seen Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan’s body towards the factory basement, where it was later found.The Hall confession led to a resurgence of interest in the case, and ultimately, to an unsuccessful 1983 effort to get the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to posthumously pardon Frank. While the Board ultimately decided that the Hall revelation was insufficient to clearly establish Frank’s innocence (in part because much of the original evidence had been lost or destroyed), it did later issue an official apology for the State’s failure to protect Frank from lynching. But Hall’s testimony had another effect: it convinced a Georgia-bred Southern California journalist named Steve Oney to get obsessively interested in the case.Now I admit my fascination with this book is partly parochial. I spent nearly four decades living near or in Atlanta, where most of “my people” still live. My mother recently told me my grandmother used to sing “The Ballad of Mary Phagan”–a protest song against the commutation of Leo Frank’s death sentence, and later, the anthem of pro-lynching advocates across Georgia. I graduated from high school in Cobb County, not far from the lynching site, at a time when the community was just beginning to abandon the rural pineywoods heritage Oney vividly describes. My in-laws hail from the mountain town of Dahlonega, where William Smith began and ended his quixotic lifelong search for justice, equality and honor. And I have long been very interested in the career of Tom Watson as a cautionary tale about the dangers of assuming that economic populism is inherently a progressive impulse.But even if this saga did not call up so many familiar ghosts, I’d be tempted to write about this book and the 17-year struggle of its author to research and write it. It’s the kind of tribute that we unreflective and impulsive bloggers ought to occasionally pay to those who say not a word until they’ve got the story right.

I can’t even imagine how dreadful it must be to work in the U.S. Senate right now. Just watching the runup to the “nuclear option” from a safe distance is dispiriting enough. I thought the Schiavo thing was the most bizarre, contrived and self-destructive congressional fiasco I’d ever seen, but this is worse, and Lord only knows how long it will last, since the maestro of this production, Bill Frist, dare not go for a vote until he’s sure he’s got 50. Frist does, of course, have to worry that every hour of fresh debate will tempt the Rick Santorums in his ranks to go over the brink into another offensive Nazi analogy.But the thing about Frist (and his buddies over at the White House) that I’ve been struggling to understand is this: if he gets his “nuclear option,” one bad thing will happen to the Republican coalition right away, because the business community (whose lobbyists, best I can tell, generally think the whole idea of making judicial confirmations an Armageddon issue is as dumb as a sack of hammers) is going to be really honked off at the goodies they’ll lose when Democrats shut down non-essential Senate business.But it’s unlikely that bad thing is going to be balanced by any good thing for the GOP. Sure, the Cultural Right will be grateful for the win after years of being played for suckers, but they’ll also actually increase their demands for right-wing judicial nominations. Without the excuse of needing 60 votes for a confirmation, how can Republicans possibly argue against, say, ensuring that any Supreme Court nominee is someone who’s got a garage full of fetus posters?I ran this line of questioning by a very shrewd friend of mine who knows the Senate and its Leader pretty well, and this was his response:

Look, if you’re Bill Frist, you know you’re out of here in eighteen months, and then you’re on the presidential campaign trail, having punched your ticket with the Right. He doesn’t give a damn about the long-term consequences for the Senate or the Party. If he thinks about them at all, he probably figures, “I’ll fix it once I’m in the White House.”

We all know strange things happen in the minds of people who start seeing the Next President of the United States in the bathroom mirror each morning, or humming “Hail to the Chief” over breakfast. Hunter Thompson once compared presidential wannabes to “bull elks in rut,” crashing through the woods blindly and self-destructively at the first sound of an cow elk call.But ol’ Bill must have a pretty advanced case of the presidential hots to willingly go down in history not only as the guy who made the Supreme Court safe for wingnuts, but as the Majority Leader who sought to turn the U.S. Senate into a less representative version of the U.S. House, while reducing the constitutional powers of the Congress as a whole with respect to the executive branch. That’s a real trifecta of irresponsibility.

I’m not much in the habit of praising articles about the Democratic Party that appear in The Nation, but they’ve just posted an article about Hillary Clinton by New York Magazine columnist Greg Sargent that is really essential reading. Debunking the “Hillary’s moving to the center to defraud voters” line that people like Dick Morris have been peddling, Sargent offers a nuanced view of Clinton’s recent policy and political positions that depicts her as a complex thinker who pursues progressive goals through flexible means appropriate to middle-class values and what’s actually doable.Here’s the money quote:

In essence, she’s triangulating against herself: she’s revealing the common-sense-solution-embracing Hillary, in contrast to the left-wing ideologue her caricaturists gave us. It helps that Hillary, while extraordinarily shrewd and calculating, also really is hard-working, hard-headed and culturally moderate. In the end, the irony is that her effort is working not just because it’s smart politics but also because it’s largely genuine.

Read the whole thing, but the passage above suggests that Sen. Clinton’s effort to redefine herself as herself is a pretty good reflection of the challenge facing a complex, progressive-minded, but essentially hard-headed and moderate Democratic Party as a whole.

I know my colleague The Moose has already blogged about this story, but being a native of Georgia, there are a few additional ironies I’d like to point out about the latest Indian Casino Shakedown revelation, which puts Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, in more trouble than a wounded rooster in a cockfight.In a nice bit of relay journalism, the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have pieced together this fascinating tale of hypocrisy, deception, and political insider trading:In 2000, then-Governor Don Siegelman arranged for a referendum in Alabama to create a state lottery for education, the centerpiece of his entire agenda. A certain Casino operating Mississippi tribe (probably the Choctaws) didn’t want the competition of public gaming in Alabama. The Native Americans’ Best Friend, Jack Abamoff suggested they channel money through Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which would then send the cash down to ‘Bama to help kill the lottery. Norquist subsequently sent checks totaling $1.15 million to an anti-lottery group and to the campaign’s top backer, the Christian Coalition of Alabama, which vocally refuses to take gambling money. The anti-lottery folks then channeled the same money to Ralph Reed’s Atlanta-based political consulting firm, which used it to run the (successful) anti-gambling campaign.This tale is remarkably similar to the 1999 Texas anti-gambling gambit that’s part of the broader Abramoff/Scanlon Casino Shakedown scandal, except for Norquist’s role as the launderer, and the size of Ralph Reed’s take: his firm received $4.2 million in gambling money for the Lone Star anti-gambling initiative. And there’s one more crucial wrinkle as well: even though Reed is again protesting that he had no idea where the money came from, this time the president of the Alabama Christian Coalition, John Giles, is getting pretty close to accusing Reed of lying.

“On at least a couple of occasions, John Giles called to ask if I was absolutely sure there was no gambling money — direct or indirect — in any money they had received,” said John Pudner, then a senior project manager at [Reed’s firm] Century Strategies. “Giles even told me he wanted to issue a press release stating this — and I went and asked Ralph to make sure, and Ralph assured me there was no gambling money involved.”

In other words, Reed made an affirmative assurance the money was clean, and he based that on an assurance from–you guessed it–Jack Abramoff. Now as many of you may already know, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed go way, way back together: Grover and Ralph were Abramoff’s deputies when Casino Jack ran the College Republicans in the early 1980s. The idea that Reed didn’t have a clue his old boss was making tens of millions of dollars representing tribes with casions, and/or it didn’t occur to Ralph that the millions Abramoff was sending his way might have something to do with those associations, is just beyond belief. The involvement of John Giles in this money triangle adds the final twist of irony. Not only is Giles one of the most visible leaders in what’s left of Ralph’s old stomping grounds, the Christian Coalition; he’s also best known in Alabama for his insanely strong belief that Jesus hates taxes like the devil himself. Giles was a powerful figure in the successful campaign to drub a referendum sponsored by Republican Governor Bob Riley in 2003 to reform the state’s antediluvian tax code to help improve Alabama’s dreadfully underfinanced public education system (a campaign, BTW, in which Norquist’s ATR played a national role). More recently, Giles’s Christian Coalition helped defeat another referendum to amend the Alabama Constitution to take out a section mandating segregated schools, on grounds that the step would create a right to public education (imagine that), and hence, according to his logic, higher taxes.So you’ve got Casino Jack giving gambling money to anti-tax zealot Norquist who gives it to anti-tax-zealot-Christian-Right activist Giles who gives it to Christian-Right-activist-politician Reed. Even as they point fingers at each other, they’re all living in the house that Jack built by shaking down tribes.And that brings me back to the campaign of Ralph Reed. After the original Abramoff scandal broke, with Ralph professing ignorance and innocence about his pivotal role, some politically knowledgeable people in Georgia figured he’d brazen it out, while others thought it would eventually derail his campaign. Now he’s got a whole new set of allegations to deal with, exhibiting a clear pattern, and a guy as smart as Reed will be hard-pressed to explain why a man as dumb as he claims he was in these capers should be elected to statewide office.

Now and then an issue comes along that really forces politicians to deal with the internal contradictions of their supposed principles. Today’s lopsided Senate passage of a $295 billion highway bill will provide a nice test for Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.Note for the record that the Bush administration has thundered for some time about the transcendent necessity of holding this bill down to $284 billion. And indeed, the implicit veto threat aimed at this bill–recognizing that Bush, well over four years into his presidency, has yet to use the veto pen even once–is the tiny fig leaf disguising the White House’s continuing devotion to fiscal profligacy of the highest order, as evidenced by still more demands for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and a Social Security privatization scheme that would add still more trillions to the national debt.Recall as well that in the recent campaign, Bush was treated by his handlers and his party as a Churchillian World-Historical Figure dominating the planet–a figure who presumably might have the clout to convince his hand-picked Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, to pare $11 billion from a highway bill ($12 billion of which, by the way, were for congressional “earmarks”).Yet Frist was one of 46 Republican Senators who voted for this bill. For the most part, these are the same folks who not only are insisting on more tax cuts for the wealthy, but who very recently were claiming that the fiscal situation required deep cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, affecting both the states and the most vulnerable Americans.The whole issue casts a large and useful spotlight on the contemporary GOP’s efforts to have it both ways on fiscal policy: supporting spending restraint in the abstract, but flip-flopping on any occasion when restraint might impair their image as Big Dogs in Washington capable of bringing home the bacon, or, worse yet, affect some Republican constituency.This will be interesting to watch.

Like the rest of you who aren’t privy to the internal doings of the U.S. Senate, I do not know about the political prospects of the current effort towards a compromise that would limit filibusters to five of the ten Bush Court of Appeals appointees, while preserving it in the Senate rules, which means preserving it for future Supreme Court nominees. I also don’t know if, absent a compromise, Bill Frist can get the votes to “go nuclear” and ram through approval of all ten judges while paving the way for a right-wing activist reshaping of the Supreme Court.But I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to take the risk that a hard line by Senate Democrats won’t completely backfire, either. If enough Republicans can be convinced to go for this deal to guarantee the failure of the nuclear option, Democrats would be well advised to jump on it. Personally, while I’m not a big fan of any of the ten proposed Court of Appeals judges, I am really worried about two of them: Owens and Brown, who happen to the be two Frist intends to use as the vehicle for getting to the nuclear option. The chance to keep these two–plus three more, in theory–off the Court of Appeals, along with a sure vote against the nuclear option, is not only a good deal for Democrats, but will represent a definitive defeat for Bush, Frist, and their Cultural Right allies who don’t give a damn about the Court of Appeals and who are praying for the opportunity to present GOPers with an all-or-nothing approach to judges. I say this because there will be some Democrats who will argue for rolling the dice on the entire judiciary, either because they think we will win, or because they are just opposed to any compromises with the Republicans on any topic whatsoever. It would be a shame to throw away victory in this fight simply because the word “compromise” is attached to it. The deal reportedly in the works would be a victory, all right, and no one should be criticized for accepting it.

In reading Garance Franke-Ruta’s account of the Tribute to Tom DeLay dinner, which I just posted about, one name among the many attending the event jumped off the page: public-relations flack Craig Shirley, described as a “spokesman” for the dinner.As it happens, I recently read Shirley’s January 2005 book, Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All. In fact, the next issue of Blueprint magazine will include a review I wrote of that book and the much-better-known Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s study of the Goldwater campaign.Most non-conservatives looking at Shirley’s title will probably assume it’s about the 1980 campaign that signalled the conservative movement’s conquest of the GOP, and lifted Ronald Reagan to the presidency. But no: the book is about Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential effort, and as Shirley makes abundantly clear, that campaign, not Goldwater’s, was the defining moment for the younger wave of conservative activists who are now dominating the GOP and the Bush administration.Unlike Perlstein, Shirley is not a gifted writer or a particularly deep thinker, but he does cover the 1976 Reagan campaign in great detail and with considerable balance, despite his obvious intention to provide a sort of intra-movement scrapbook of the bittersweet moment that marked the transition of latter-day conservatism from noble futility to national power. And his account is replete with the names of minor campaign figures who later emerged as Washington big-timers, such as Haley Barbour, Charlie Black, Martin Anderson, and Ed Meese. Interestingly if not surprisingly, Shirley singles out Dick Cheney, then White House Chief of Staff, as both the most effective operative in Gerald Ford’s successful effort to turn back the Reagan drive, and as the one key figure in Ford’s circle who understood the conservative movement and its needs and goals.And while Shirley goes well out of his way to refute the revisionist belief of many conservatives that Reagan’s 1976 effort was ruined by his non-ideological campaign manager, John Sears, he also makes it clear that the Jesse Helms/Congressional Club zealots saved Reagan’s career by designing and managing the Gipper’s breakthrough victory in the North Carolina primary, and had the best strategy for prevailing during the Republican Convention.My Perlstein-Shirley review will focus on the dangerous belief of some Democrats that we should emulate the 1964 and 1976 conservative “noble defeats,” and one of my arguments is that Reagan’s survival in 1976 and his apotheosis in 1980 were far more fortuitous than anyone, including Shirley, seems to be willing to admit.Shirley does concede, and even emphasize, that if Reagan had lost the 1976 nomination early on, he would not have been a candidate in 1980. But he doesn’t really address the likelihood that a Reagan nomination in 1976 would have been equally ruinous to the actor’s political career, and perhaps to the conservative movement as well. For a whole host of reasons, Reagan would almost certainly have been a weaker candidate than Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter in 1976. And by 1980, almost any Republican could have beaten Carter, given the condition of the country domestically and internationally.There’s no telling what a slightly different course of events might have meant for the conservative movement that now, in its maturity or senescence, depending on your point of view, finds itself lionizing Tom DeLay.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth discussion in the news media and on the blogs about last week’s famous Tribute to Tom DeLay event. Some cynics have suggested that this kind of “tribute” is generally a sign that the tributee is about to get thrown to the sharks. But the intrepid Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect did us all a favor by attending the dinner herself and providing a spin-free take on its meaning, and she’s quite sure the event represented a gesture of Conservative Movement solidarity with the Hammer, and implicitly a shot across the bow at any Republicans tempted to abandon him.

Now that John Bolton’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations is heading to the Senate floor, albeit without a positive recommendation from the Foreign Relations Committee, Democrats have a fresh and final chance to make a case against him that doesn’t reinforce every GOP-fed stereotype about whiny “global test” liberals whose first concern is to placate “world opinion.” I understand the “Mean Man” argument was dictated by Foreign Relations Committee politics, and especially the need to give Republican waverers like Chafee and Voinovich a reason for opposing the nomination that did not involve a broad attack on Bush administration policies. But now, on the floor of the Senate, Democrats need to understand that this debate has implications beyond the question of whether or not Bolton gets his job. As Kenny Baer and I, among others, have argued earlier in this process, Democrats need to make a national security case against Bolton, and fortunately, there is a clear case to be made.I strongly urge everyone interested in the Bolton nomination to read a report by Michael Hirsch and Eve Conant that appeared in Newsweek last week. Through extensive interviews with current and past Bush administration officials, they learned that Bolton completely botched preparations for a critical five-year review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They also cast new doubts about Bolton’s involvement in the one (if inadequate) big advance the administration has made in preventing nuclear terrorism, the Proliferation Security Initiative. In other words, as the point man for what Bush and Cheney have repeatedly called the most important front in the war on terror–the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists–Bolton has done a dangerously lousy job. He’s not just a Mean Man–he’s a Mean Man blinded by ideology and ambition from promoting the steps we need to take internationally to prevent a nuclear 9/11, or for that matter, a fully nuclear Iran and North Korea. And the question Democrats need to finally start asking on the Senate floor is why this administration has entrusted Bolton with this crucial responsibility, and why it is now insisting on making him our country’s most visible representative in world affairs. If that’s not enough of an argument to make, then maybe Senate Democrats should also raise a question about U.N. reform that barely got mentioned in the Foreign Relations Committee: does Bolton, and does the Bush administration, support or oppose the Annan Commission recommendation to amend the U.N. Charter to make it clear “sovereignty” does not extend to the right to commit genocide within one’s own borders? Given Bolton’s much-expressed contempt for risking any U.S. lives or dollars in preventing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or Rwanda, it’s a very pertinent question as the debate over Darfur continues.

To the delight of the chattering classes of Washington, Andy Kohut’s fine folks at the Pew Research Center have released a new Political Typology study. It purports to divide the electorate into nine categories, with three each for Democrats, Republicans and “the middle,” though it turns out Bush won “middle” voters handily in 2004. Now you have to understand that political junkies love typologies like drunks love cheap whiskey. Why? Well, to be cynical about it, typologies make it easy to sound sophisticated about the deeper currents of political behavior, and the subtle but real differences between voters who in any given election may vote for the same candidate or identify with the same party. Moreover, typologies are often used to identify some hot new “swing” voter category that one party or the other is supposed to pursue or cherish: thus, the famous “soccer moms” of the 1990s and the “NASCAR dads” of more recent vintage.But there’s another feature of the new Pew study that’s creating some buzz: right there on the site you can answer 25 questions and find out which of the nine categories you supposedly fit into. And that’s where I began to lose a lot of confidence in Pew’s understanding of the electorate.Question after question, the survey lays out a long series of false choices that you are required to make: military force versus diplomacy; environmental protection versus economic growth; gay people and immigrants and corporations and regulations G-O-O-D or B-A-A-D. Other than agreeing with a proposition mildly rather than strongly, there’s no way to register dismay over the boneheaded nature of these choices. For the record, the Typology Test identified me as a “liberal,” probably because the only question on which I registered any strong feeling was about the need to treat homosexuality as an acceptable way of life. But I absolutely reject the idea that this test captures much at all of how I actually think about domestic and foreign policy issues, and several people I tend to agree with wound up being tossed into some other category. To be fair, the Typology Test does not include all the questions Pew used in the actual surveys on which the typology depends; the full questionnaire does at least get into more nuanced issues like the budget and tax policy, Iraq, Social Security and so forth. But still, it made me a lot less excited about the prospect of slogging through 119 pages of analysis of “Disadvantaged Democrats,” or “Enterprisers” or “Upbeats.”So all of you out there in political junkieland, do yourself a favor: before you start enthusing about the strategic implications of the Pew typology, take the test yourself and see if you think it helps identify types, or just stereotypes.