It’s being overshawdowed by the GOP Convention, but Floridians went to the polls today and nominated each party’s strongest candidate for the Senate seat being vacated by Bob Graham.
The White House’s guy, former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez, surprised many observers by thumping former Congressman Bill McCollum by a comfortable 45-31 margin. Martinez is a Cuban-American who will probably help the GOP get a desperately needed high turnout in that reliably Republican community; his pull among the fast-growing non-Cuban Hispanic population of Florida is more questionable. His background as a trial lawyer will also complicate Bush-Cheney campaign’s loud efforts to suggest that litigation costs are the main drag on the U.S. economy.
On the Democratic side, former state education commissioner Betty Castor’s win over Rep. Peter Deutsch and Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Pinelas was no surprise, but her margin was impressive, beating the lavishly financed Deutsch by a 59-27 margin. Castor has long been considered the strongest possible Democratic candidate, and she’s been running even with or a bit ahead of Martinez in most polls.

The Governor of California, featured along with First Lady Laura Bush on “Compassion Night” of the Republican National Convention, did a workmanlike job in lending his glamor and moderate reputation to George W. Bush. As he said at the beginning of the speech, it was sorta like an Oscar Ceremony, and on this stage as in the Academy Awards, he didn’t win any big prizes.
The most interesting part of Arnold’s pitch was something that’s emerging as the major theme of this convention: the conflation of America with its president, and the identification of patriotism with Republicanism. America’s a great place, so it must have a great chief executive. Americans have been reminded of their pride in their country since 9/11, so America must re-elect the guy who was given the opportunity to emblemize that pride immediately after 9/11. Republicans are more jingoistic than Democrats, so voters feeling a bit more jingoistic than in the past should vote Republican. It’s simple, and simple-minded stuff, but it’s clearly what Karl Rove thinks will win.
Arnold didn’t pay much attention to John Kerry, though both his references to the opposition were guaranteed media play because they included allusions to his movie career: the “True Lies” shot at the Democratic Convention, and the inevitable “girly man” line about Democratic critiques of Bush’s economic record. It’s interesting, if you think about it. In 2000 Republicans whined about the few dark corners they could find in the dazzling economic record of Bill Clinton, but nobody accused them of a lack of patriotism. This whole GOP Convention is about making George W. Bush so intimately connected with post-9/11 national pride that voters are literally unwilling to use their minds in assessing the incumbent’s record.

If you want a reasonable analysis of the first night of the GOP Convention, check out today’s New Dem Daily. But I’m not feeling very reasonable after watching John McCain and Rudy Guiliani last night.
I think Saletan pretty much nailed it in his convention blog in Slate. Guiliani’s speech, in particular, was a masterpiece of loose reasoning and false analogies, leading to the bizarre conclusion that George W. Bush is the Churchill of our era. You know, Churchill stood up to Hitler, Bush stood up to Saddam, and the appeasers didn’t like either one of them. I especially like Saletan’s dissection of the “offensive/defensive” rhetoric used by Guiliani. It’s no secret that Neocons tend to think that worrying about homeland security is kinda wussy; real men go out and “take it to the enemy” (which is a bit problematic when the enemy is a stateless terrorist network). But this kind of reasoning is particularly strange coming from the living symbol of New York’s response to 9/11. Maybe Guiliani will take the next step and call on New Yorkers to turn back their federal homeland security money. After all, with W. at the wheel, there’s nothing to worry about, right?
There was a kind of rough logic to the McCain and Guiliani speeches, however. These guys basically disagree with Bush on just about everything other than his decision to invade Iraq. So in order to make the case for his re-election, they had to pretend that’s the only issue that really matters. Never mind that about half the delegates they were addressing think abortion or gay marriage is the only issue that matters, while the other half get up in the morning determined to abolish the income tax and destroy the federal government. I’m beginning to think that Bush’s main political asset is to serve as the empty vessel for other people’s obsessions.

Before undertaking the herculean effort of watching and then analyzing the Republican National Convention, I can’t resist the opportunity to flog one of my favorite political books, about a Convention held at the original Madison Square Garden 80 years ago.
Robert K. Murray’s 1976 book, The 103d Ballot, focused on the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York, which took, yes, 103 ballots to nominate a doomed ticket of John W. Davis for president and Charles Bryan (younger brother of The Commoner) for vice-president. The book has been out of print for decades, but is probably available at any decent university or big-city library. Here’s a link to a big PDF file that includes a longer take on the book and the ’24 Convention, under the title of “Unhappy Warriors.”
Today’s conventions are tightly controlled, relentlessly timed affairs aimed at conveying partisan messages through the ever-narrowing lens of network television coverage. 80 years ago, the new medium of radio offered gavel-to-gavel coverage of conventions, while most newspapers devoted massive coverage to all the speechifying. And as Murray amply demonstrated, the uncontrolled nature of the 1924 Convention, and the disastrous impressions it created, began the long, slow, uneven trend towards submerging party differences during the Big Show of party conventions.
At The Garden in 1924, Democrats were deadlocked between the rural, prohibitionist, anti-Wall Street forces that united behind William Gibbs McAdoo, and the urban, wet forces symbolized by New York’s favorite son, Al Smith. There was a frenetic and toxic platform fight on the floor about whether or not to specifically condemn the Ku Klux Klan, considered a “progressive” organization by the populists of that time. It was William Jennings Bryan’s last convention, and it helped make Franklin D. Roosevelt (already the vice-presidential candidate in 1920) a national political figure after his “Happy Warrior” speech nominating Smith.
If nothing else, Murray’s book amply shows that cultural issues did not somehow emerge in 2000 as a source of partisan identification against a “normal” background of class-based divisions. The real aberration in American political history occurred in and after 1932, when the emergency of the Great Depression enabled FDR to create the first grand coalition of low-to-middle income voters since Andrew Jackson.
Check out Murray’s book if you can, and then stock up on the caffeine to watch the latest Garden Party, if you must.

It’s become a truism that David Brooks, the most entertaining sort-of-conservative commentator of the last decade, has lost his edge since becoming a regular columnist for the New York Times. Part of his problem has been the discipline of a 1000-word column, which prohibits the leisurely tours of American political sociology that have been his signature.
But he has no such excuse today. The New York Times Magazine gave Brooks plenty of space, and cover billing, to analyze the future direction of Brooks’ political party, on the eve of its convention in The Big Apple. And Brooks responds by demonstrating exactly how out of touch he is with the GOP, and how out of touch the GOP is with any sort of mainstream political point of view.
Check it out yourself. Brooks offers a devastating if mildly worded critique of today’s Republican Party as an ideologically bankrupt enterprise. But in the search for a “new, progressive conservatism,” he goes back to the “national purpose” ideology that Brooks and Bill Kristol famously proposed as the centerpiece of John McCain’s failed presidential campaign of 2000.
Harkening back yet again to the long-lost activist Republican tradition of Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, Brooks now seems to suggest that the barrenness of George W. Bush’s GOP means that by 2008 something like a “progressive” ideology will have to re-emerge.
But when it comes to specifics, Brooks proposes that Republicans embrace ideas that have long been identified with New Democrats, and that the Kerry-Edwards campaign has largely appropriated. They range from waging a wider, non-military war against Islamic extremism and rebuilding multilateral institutions and alliances, to advocating a stronger national role in education reform, energy and environmental policy; reforming entitlement programs; attacking corporate subsidies; lifting working families above the poverty line; and expanding national service opportunities.
If Brooks were simply proposing a reconstruction of the Republican Party after a Bush defeat, his agenda would be constructive, if not practical. But he pretends, against all evidence, the Bush himself can become the sponsor of a “progressive conservative” revival. And after four years of identifying himself with the failed traditional conservatism that Brooks denounces in this piece, there’s no reason to believe that George W. Bush can or will do anything else.

There’s another major presidential poll that was released today: the highly regarded “Battleground” poll jointly conducted by the Democratic firm of Lake Snell Perry, and the Republican firm The Tarrance Group, sponsored by George Washington University. The data’s a little over a week old.
Among LVs, the poll shows Kerry up 44-43, with Nader at 1 and 12 percent undecided. But after quizzing respondents about the candidates and then including leaners, their “aided ballot” shows Kerry up 49-47 without Nader in the mix, and 48-47-3 with Nader in.
Interestingly enough, the poll has Bush winning a big 5 percent of Democrats, as opposed to the 15 percent reported by the LA Times poll. It also shows Kerry up by 5 among households with veterans, and only down 3 among vets themselves.
One of the fun things about the Battleground polls is you get to read “strategic analysis” memos from both Celinda Lake and Ed Goas: in other words, Democratic and Republican spin on the same data. And it’s about what you’d expect, with Celinda emphasizing Bush’s failure to get majority support after four years and Ed suggesting that Kerry’s missed an opportunity to seal the deal. With the particular relish of so many partisans, both predict a result determined mainly by turnout patterns. It’s so much neater than the messy process of actually persuading voters rationally, doncha know.
At any rate, this poll may offset some of the insider buzz about the LA Times survey. In the past, Battleground polls have been known for an unusually tight “screen” for likelihood to vote, and have often shown results more favorable to the GOP than other major surveys.
And finally, it should be noted that Zogby Interactive released a big batch of polls of 16 battleground states the other day, all conducted from August 16-21. They show Kerry leading in 14 of these states. But Zogby’s erratic rep in state polling makes that scorecard questionable, and the specific results don’t exactly inspire confidence. He’s got Kerry up by 2 in Tennessee, and Bush up by more than 5 in Ohio, and by nearly 8 in West Virginia.
In general, state polling in a presidential race is a very tricky thing, with small samples and widely varying methodologies complicating the picture. Much as I appreciate RealClearPolitics‘ effort to provide all the polling, their effort to summarize the race each day by averaging poll results is definitely misleading, especially when they include blatantly partisan polls by outfits like the GOP firm Strategic Visions.
Maybe we’ll be better able to separate the sheep from the goats among state polls when we get a little closer to November 2.

Expect to hear lots of crowing among GOPers going into their convention about a new LA Times poll showing Bush moving ahead of Kerry by 3 among RVs. The last Times poll, held just before the Democratic Convention, had Kerry up by 2, so it’s not a seismic shift, and both leads are within the poll’s MoE.
Moreover, the poll’s extensive questioning on the Swift Boat Veterans ads smearing Kerry’s war service (the poll was conducted in the midst of the ads, and before the current backlash began to develop) does not provide much evidence that this is a significant factor in Bush’s slight boost.
As Ron Brownstein’s analysis of the poll suggests, Kerry’s major problem is that he’s not yet securing the votes of people who are unhappy with Bush’s policies or the direction of the country. “Nearly 1 in 5 voters who say the country needs to change policy direction is not supporting Kerry, according to the poll.” And with a remarkable number of respondents (39 percent) saying they don’t know much about Kerry’s proposed policy agenda, that gives the challenger an opportunity down the stretch. After all, he’s got a 263-page book detailing his policy proposals, while the incumbent has an unpopular record and no second-term agenda so far other than sound bites.
Perhaps the most interesting finding in the poll involves self-identified independents, who split right down the middle (45 percent for each candidate, with 10 percent undecided). Indies think the country is on the wrong track by a 57-31 margin. They favor a “new direction” as opposed to continuing Bush’s policies by a 59-34 margin. They are more likely than voters as a whole to oppose the incumbent’s handling of Iraq and of the economy, and reject, by better than a 5-1 margin, the suggestion that Kerry didn’t really earn his Vietnam war medals.
There are several frustrating gaps between Brownstein’s analysis of the poll and the data made available by the Times. Most notably, Ron reports that Bush is drawing 20 percent of Democrats who call themselves moderates or conservatives. It would be nice to know how they respond to a variety of questions about the two candidates. Brownstein does say Kerry is “suffering his greatest defections among Democrats without college degrees, those who own guns, and those who call themselves conservatives, live in rural areas or are married.” Looks like Kerry’s efforts to reassure voters that he’s no quiche-eater could use a little more work.
The Times also didn’t publish data on undecided voters. But Brownstein says they are “overwhelmingly negative on the direction of the country, the impact of Bush’s policies and the decision to invade Iraq.” In other words, Bush better hold a lead going into October; undecideds are very unlikely to break in his direction.
The bottom line is that this remains a very close race in which the challenger has the greatest potential for gains. The Times poll suggests Kerry can do that if he clarifies his message and agenda, deals with lingering doubts about his party’s values, and crosses the invisible threshold that makes him acceptable to the majority of voters unhappy with the incumbent.

Here among the chattering classes of Washington, you hear a lot of talk, most of it off-the-record, about developments that could change the dynamics of the presidential contest. This talk mostly involves the war on terrorism: What would happen if there’s another major attack on the U.S. between now and November 2? What would happen if Osama bin Laden is captured or killed?
But every time I talk to serious conservatives (yes, I do), another topic usually comes up: the lurid possibility that a bishop or priest will deny the first Catholic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy access to Holy Communion on grounds that his pro-choice views decisively separate him from Church teachings.
It could happen. Kerry regularly attends Mass and generally takes Communion; indeed, as Amy Sullivan has often pointed out, the Democratic nominee seems to participate in organized worship services a lot more often than the famously religious incumbent. And while I’m sure the Kerry campaign is acutely aware of those dioceses where bishops have publicly said pro-choice politicians should be denied Communion, there’s no way they can keep up with the views on this subject of every single priest.
But if it does happen, it’s not at all clear that Kerry would suffer politically from this sort of confrontation. A new Pew Research Center poll on politics and religion finds that Catholics, including the very observant Catholics who have been the special objects of the President’s political ministrations over the last few years, take a dim view of the idea of fencing off the altar from politicians who disagree with the Church on abortion.
U.S. Catholics as a whole dislike the idea of a “pro-life” test for politicians seeking Communion by a margin of 72-23. Those attending Mass weekly oppose it 63-29. And even self-identified Republican Catholics say “no” to the idea by more than two-to-one (65-31).
I suspect that even those bishops who support a litmus test for Communion are aware of this sentiment, and will be wary of defying it.

Boy, if the President’s re-election really does depend on an excited conservative base, today’s news is not very helpful to The Cause. You got Dick Cheney dissing Bush’s position on a gay marriage amendment, at considerable length, perhaps subtly undermining the Right’s claim that Western Civilization hangs in the balance. You got Bill Frist, once on the conservative short list for the succession to Bush, co-authoring an op-ed on health care with Hillary Rodham Clinton. And you got conservative pundit and author of Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” sound-bite, David Frum, advising pro-choice, pro-gay-rights Mayor Rudy Guiliani on how to become the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 (sorry, no link here; it’s in the subscription-only Wall Street Journal).
The Cheney statement appears to have taken culture-warriors by surprise. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins (no relation to the star of “Psycho”) was reduced to whining about the Vice President’s lack of message discipline, which is rather disturbing given Cheney’s stature as the administration’s Great Big Grownup. And the Veep sure stepped all over the Republican Platform Committee’s decision to enthusiastically endorse the idea, if not the ontological necessity, of a constitutional gay marriage ban.
I decided not to include today’s other big story–the blue-ribbon panel report drawing a direct link between the Pentagon’s poor post-war planning and the prisoner abuses at Al Ghraib–in the litany of base-deflating developments. That’s because my unscientific sampling of rank-and-file conservative opinion, particularly in my own extended family, has convinced me that a fair number of people on the Right think torturing and humiliating prisoners is on balance not that bad an idea, so long as we don’t let the womenfolk get involved.

Noam Scheiber, author of The New Republic’s “&c” blog, took notice of the same Ron Browstein piece on Bush’s base-o-centric strategy that I highlighted yesterday. But while I cast cold water on the idea that BC04 could make up for its weakness among undecided voters by winning the turnout wars, Noam’s take is that the GOPs attention to the base is defensive, aimed at dealing with conservative disgruntlement over administration policies. Either way, it’s not a good sign for Bush.
But Scheiber also suggests that Brownstein is buying into some sort of devious GOP spin by taking seriously their talk of writing off swing voters. If that’s the case, he says, “Then why’d the White House even bother with things like prescription drugs, immigration reform, and the Mars mission–things they knew had a high probability of pissing off conservatives?”
Well, Noam, the answer’s simple: Karl Rove did have a swing voter strategy, but it has failed.
It had four prongs:
(1) Winning over married women with kids through the No Child Left Behind education reform initiative. Thanks to its poor implementation of NCLB, the White House has managed to anger anti-testing zealots on the left and local-control freaks on the right, without getting much credit from those who like the basic idea but think it’s been bungled.
(2) Buying the votes of seniors with a Rx drug benefit. That’s been an even bigger woofer. Seniors hate the new initiative, and won’t even sign up for the least controversial part, the drug discount cards.
(3) Making gains with Latinos through a “guest worker” proposal. Best I can tell, the proposal hasn’t moved a single Latino voter in the President’s direction, though it did royally honk off the ever-present if quiescent xenophobic wing of the Republican Right. That’s probably why you haven’t heard anything about it lately.
(4) Cutting into the Democratic margin among Jews by conspicuously identifying the administration with the embattled Israeli government of Ariel Sharon. According to the one relevant poll of American Jews, released just last week, Bush is running no better with this constituency than he did in 2000–which is to say, horribly.
In other words, the Bushies may be resorting to a “conservative turnout” strategy because they don’t have any other choice at this late date. Karl Rove, whom the President reportedly likes to call “the man with the plan,” had a plan for swing voters, but it hasn’t worked, and there’s no Plan B.