We’re not all that into mystic prognostication at TDS, but we nonetheless feel compelled to share an interesting fact from a CNNpolitics.com post, “Midsummer polls often provide early glimpse of election results.” You’ve heard it said here, among other places, that early horse-race polls don’t mean much. Turns out that is not always true. In Gallup Polls taken 100 days before the presidential election, the leading candidate has won in November in all but two presidential elections since 1960, Nixon-Kennedy (’60) and Dukakis-Bush (’88). That would be 10 of the last 12 presidential elections. Heck, why not calculate it from ’64 on — that would be 10 of the last 11 presidential elections. (Queue up Twilight Zone music). Gallup presently has Obama up by 8. May their streak continue.

The popular everything-about-religion site Beliefnet has launched a new blogging site today for religious progressives called “Progressive Revival.” The charter participants are a pretty interesting group, ranging from best-selling authors like Marianne Williamson and Michael Lerner, to religious scholars like Randall Balmer and Susannah Heschel. I’m in the small cadre of mainly-political folk, along with Mike McCurry and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
My first Progressive Revival post was a brief item on Tim Kaine’s faith background, reflecting today’s buzz about him as a potential running-mate for Barack Obama:

As Barack Obama gets closer to his choice of a running-mate, speculation today is focusing on Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, whose allies are letting it be known that he’s being fully vetted as a short-lister.
Kaine’s political strengths and weaknesses are pretty well known. He’s a very successful politician in a state that hasn’t gone Democratic in a presidential election since 1964, but that may be winnable this year. He’s a civil rights lawyer by profession, but has built on Mark Warner’s efforts to reach beyond party lines for both electoral and legislative support. On the other hand, he’s still in his first term of office (and ineligible to run for re-election in 2009), and has no significant foreign policy experience.
It’s Kaine’s faith background that makes him an interesting option for Obama.
He’s not only a practicing Catholic (an area of relative weakness for Obama during the primaries); he once served as a missionary in Central America. (His Spanish-language fluency is definitely an asset beyond Virginia). And in his 2005 gubernatorial campaign, he provided an interesting example of how faith can provide a defense against wedge-issue attacks.
His Republican opponent, Jerry (No Relation!) Kilgore, launched a barrage of ads attacking Kaine’s opposition to the death penalty, as part of an effort to convince Virginians that the Democrat was well to the left of the popular Warner. Kaine responded by attributing his death-penalty position to Catholic teaching, and then argued that he could be trusted nonetheless to enforce the death penalty after he took the oath of office on a Bible. By most accounts, Kaine won this exchange decisively, without changing his position or acting evasively.
If Obama and his team are fully familiar with this incident, it may add to Kaine’s appeal as a running-mate, given the avalanche of wedge-issue attacks the Democratic ticket is going to undergo in the fall.

As Kaine’s name has bounced around the blogosphere today, there’s definitely a bit of a backlash developing, not only because of the resume-limitations mentioned above, but also because of misgivings about his position on abortion (supporting Roe v. Wade, but also supporting some abortion restrictions–including those on so-called “partial-birth” abortions, with a “health” exception–and strongly favoring demand-side “abortion reduction” strategies).
But if it’s true, as the CW holds today, that Obama’s pretty much down to a choice of Kaine, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, or Kathleen Sebelius, there’s not a name in that group who wouldn’t displease a significant number of people.

As regular readers know, one of the missions of TDS is to promote civil, empirically based discussion of intra-Democratic Party issues, with the aim of fostering principled party unity.
With all the recent, FISA-fueled talk of holding congressional Dems more accountable for their votes and views, Salon published an exchange today between Glenn Greenwald and yours truly about the advisability of threatening or carrying out primary challenges to selected Dems, particularly the Blue Dogs.
Glenn’s piece is here; my response is here. For the record, the thrust of my hold-your-fire argument was that (1) it’s not that easy to divine the views of the “Democratic base” in order to construct the limits of acceptable Democratic opinion; and (2) if Obama wins, we’ll be dealing with an entirely new, post-Bush environment in which today’s intraparty discontents may need to be reviewed, and may be moot.
Much of the reaction on the Salon site followed the Kabuki Theater of “center” versus “left” tendencies on the subject; Glenn and I both got trash-talked an awful lot. For a more nuanced reaction, check out Big Tent Democrat’s take at TalkLeft.

At HuffPo this morning, Sam Stein has a thorough account of the Obama campaign’s impressive deployment of field resources to Florida, putting it “months ahead” of the organizing efforts in the Sunshine State by the Gore and Kerry campaigns.

Already with fully staffed offices in three major cities, the Illinois Democrat is formally opening additional headquarters in five other cities this week and eight others next week, bringing the total amount of Obama for America offices in the state to 16.

And Florida’s not even a state that most observers consider critical to Obama’s chances of winning.
As Stein notes, Obama’s got 15 field office up and running in Wisconsin, and an astonishing 24 in Virginia.
Whatever the Obama campaign ultimately accomplishes, it’s certainly making its mark as representing a much greater commitment to grassroots organizing than we’ve seen in a long, long time.

Print Version
In recent days the press has clearly noted one major misunderstanding John McCain has regarding the “surge” – his mistaken belief that it made possible alliances with Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq when those arrangements actually preceded the surge by some time.
But in the same period McCain expressed an even more profoundly and shockingly mistaken notion — that we have now actually achieved “success” in Iraq.
In a July 22nd town meeting in New Hampshire, McCain said:

“We have succeeded. Sadr city is safe. Basra is safe. Mosul is safe. The people of Iraq are now leading normal lives.”

This is an absolutely extraordinary claim. In fact, it could very easily be dismissed as just another of McCain’s increasingly frequent “gaffes” or “blunders” except that it has actually become a critical pillar of the basic Republican “party line” – one that is particularly emphasized by the Wall Street Journal and other Rupert Murdoch-owned media.
Until a few weeks ago the standard way this was expressed was that the US was “on the verge of” success or victory. In the last 10 days, however, the rhetoric has actually been ratcheted up to an even higher level. In a major Wall Street Journal op-ed commentary on July 16th – one titled “The New Reality in Iraq” — Fredrick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Jack Keane, all major military analysts, made the following quite breathtaking assertion:

All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended.

They then elaborated:

The fighters have not simply hidden their weapons and gone to ground to await the next opportunity to kill each other. The Sunni insurgency, as well as AQI, has been severely disrupted. Coalition and Iraqi forces have killed or detained many key leaders, driven the militants out of every one of Iraq’s major cities (including Mosul), and are pursuing the remnants vigorously in rural areas and the desert..The Shiite militias have also been broken apart, sending thousands of their leaders scurrying for safety in Iran.

This conclusion was echoed in a July 18th editorial in a the New York Sun:

“A fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack… [But] the Iraq war is over. We won.”

These are remarkably bold assertions. Yet only three days earlier one of the three authors of the Wall Street Journal piece – Kimberly Kagan – wrote a commentary that was also published in the Wall Street Journal. Titled “Moving Forward in Iraq,” it presented a radically different picture.

[Since June 15th] Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno have encircled Baghdad with a double cordon of U.S. and Iraqi forces… U.S. forces have begun blocking major road, river, and transportation routes around Baghdad. They are also deployed in critical neighborhoods around the outskirts and the interior of the city…
“Phantom Thunder” is the largest operation in Iraq since 2003, and a milestone in the counterinsurgency strategy. For the first time, U.S. forces are working systematically throughout central Iraq to secure Baghdad by clearing its rural “belts” and its interior, so that the enemy cannot move from one safe haven to another.

This hardly seems compatible with McCain’s assertion that “success” has already been achieved, that the major cities are at peace or, in fact, with the assertions Kagan herself makes in the article she co-authored or at least co-signed three days later. The US military leadership would hardly be launching the largest military operation since the invasion if all of the most important objectives of the surge had already been accomplished
The notion that the surge has successfully produced something resembling “normal life” becomes even more grotesque when one reviews the on-the-scene descriptions of conditions within Baghdad itself. In an article entitled “Baghdad’s Walls Keep Peace but Feel like Prison,” AP writer Hamza Hendawi describes conditions as follows:

Read more…

Buried in a sloppy, whiny column today by Bill Kristol was a fairly interesting proposition:

In 1948, a Republican Congress, which had taken power two years before with great expectations after a decade and a half of Demoratic control, had become unpopular. Harry Truman lambasted it as a no-good, do-nothing Congress — and he rode that assault to the White House. We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.
And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year.

Now I understand that Congress’ steadily plummeting approval ratings this year have been a source of endless consolation to Republicans. But the idea that excessive liberal activism on the part of Democrats in Congress (the planted axiom of Kristol’s argument) is a big reason for public discontent has significantly less evidence to support it than the dubious belief of some progressives that the failure to cut off war funding, block FISA, or impeach Bush, is the problem. And if, conversely, McCain does indeed take the “do-nothing Congress” tack, he’s going to have to deal with the fact that offshore oil drilling and the surge are considerably less popular than, say, expanding children’s health care and providing housing relief, which McCain has helped obstruct.
Kristol’s other implicit argument is that McCain can batten on the alleged desire of voters to position a Republican president to “restrain” a Democratic Congress. I’ve never much bought the concept that Americans love partisan gridlock and split tickets to achieve it. And with ticket-splitting down significantly in recent years, it’s unlikely to be the dominant feature in this general election. Moreover, there have been exactly two presidential campaigns in living memory where a candidate overtly and successfully appealed to voters to “counter-balance” Congress: Truman in 1948, of course, and Clinton in 1996. And to emulate either of these examples, McCain would have to make up his mind (as Kristol clearly has not made up his own) whether to charge Congress with trying to do too much or too little.
And there’s the rub: Congress’ abysmal approval rating are something of a statistical anomaly, produced by Democratic unhappiness with too little progress against Bush, Republicans unhappy with Democratic control, and many weak partisans and independents simply registering unhappiness with “Washington” and with the general direction of the country. With Democrats almost certain to increase their margins in both Houses, it’s hard to imagine why the same voters determining that result would be excited about canceling its effect by voting for a presidential candidate promising to deadlock Congress even more than Bush has, or to move it back towards its pre-2006 direction.
On top of everything else, of course, John McCain has served continuously in Congress for a quarter-century, and is trying to paint Barack Obama as insufficiently experienced to serve as president. Overall, the strategy that Kristol is both urging and predicting would at a minimum require a candidate and a campaign far more sure-footed than anything we’ve seen from Team McCain. I doubt these plodding checkers players will become chess masters overnight, particularly with a smart and tough opponent like Obama.

Here, from Politico’s David Paul Kuhn, is an interesting nugget based on the recent Pew Hispanic Center survey of the presidential race:

McCain’s problem looks to be most pronounced among Protestant Latinos, who had seemed to be the GOP’s doorway into the Hispanic population. From 2000 to 2004, Protestant Latinos increased their share of the total Hispanic electorate from 25 percent to 32 percent, in large part because of Bush’s evangelical outreach and strategic microtargeting of the community. Even as turnout increased, support for Bush among the group rose from 44 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2004.
The Pew poll, however, shows that only a third of Protestant or Evangelical Hispanics intend to vote for McCain, while 59 percent support Obama — who also enjoys a 50-percentage-point lead among Catholic Latinos, long a solid bloc of the Democratic coalition.

You have to wonder if this poor showing by McCain among one of the truly critical swing voter groups will have an effect on the remainder of his general election campaign, including his veep choice. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight notes today that Mitt Romney appears terribly weak among Hispanic voters, probably thanks to his efforts to pose as a tough guy on immigration during the nominating contest.

Frank Rich has a gem of a column in the Sunday New York Times, “How Obama Became Acting President.” Rich shows why he is one of the better hires the ‘newspaper of record’ has yet made. He explains the politics of the moment with perceptive observations, among them:

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

After watching a replay of Senator Obama’s Berlin speech (See it here), I wondered “what’s this, an American politician being cheered in Europe? Haven’t seen that for a few decades” Rich nailed the historical meaning more succinctly:

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

In stark contrast, Rich illuminates McCain’s ill-fated plan to visit an offshore oil-rig:

The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.

Rich’s column goes on to evoke a palpable sense of dread about what a McCain presidency would feel like, and a tantalizing taste of the alternative. Real pride in our President? What a radical concept.

If there’s a siller right-wing preoccupation today than the WSJ column extolling George “Batman” Bush (see staff post below), it would have to be the reported efforts of conservative “investigators” to uncover Barack Obama’s senior thesis from Columbia University. Seems he doesn’t have a copy, and his professor doesn’t have a copy (hardly shocking since it was 25 years ago, and believe it or not, in a less documented pre-Internet era), and though everyone remembers it had something to do with nuclear proliferation, certain bloodhounds are apparently convinced it could include politically damaging material.
Well, whatever. But I was amused by the innocent puzzlement of Noam Scheiber at TNR over Obama’s spotty memories of his college work:

For what it’s worth, I also had a semi-strange experience involving the Obama thesis back in February. An aide happened to mention that Obama had written his thesis on nuclear deterrence. When I went back to verify it in a subsequent conversation, the aide told me he’d have to double-check. He subsequently e-mailed to say Obama couldn’t remember whether it was his actual thesis or just a paper for a class, so it was probably best to drop the reference altogether. It wasn’t a particularly big deal either way–just a minor detail in the context of a much larger piece–but it did leave me scratching my head a bit. I mean, who doesn’t remember their senior thesis?

I’m not sure exactly how old Noam is, but I suspect his senior thesis was written a lot more recently than Obama’s, while my own Emory senior thesis was submitted (and was promptly destroyed, more than likely) much earlier than either. And all I really remember with any specificity is that I decided I had to reinterpret the history of Western Thought at least back to the Nominalists and Realists in order to explain the prose works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even today, I cringe with embarassment every time I hear a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I realize we’re all supposed to be endlessly curious about every detail of the lives of candidates for president, and also recall the odd “joke” by the Clinton campaign earlier this year suggesting that a perusal of Obama’s elementary school scribblings showed a lifelong lust for high office. But if Obama’s senior thesis didn’t make it into the extensive self-revelations he’s offered in two books, then it probably wasn’t worth remembing.
John McCain has basically said he didn’t grow up until the crucible of his experience in Vietnam, when he was over 30, and George W. Bush famously referred to the foibles of his drinking days as a matter of being “young and irresponsible,” though he didn’t dump his buddy Jack Daniels until he was 40. So let’s give that 22-year-old scholar Barack Obama a break.

If you enjoy the journalistic genre of unintentional self-parody, there’s a true classic available in today’s Wall Street Journal: an op-ed by right-wing thriller author Andrew Klavan arguing that the new box office smash Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” is actually “at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.” Why?

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Klavan goes on at considerable, turgid length in this vein. Read Michael Cohen’s account if your heart can’t stand the belly-laughs associated with ploughing through the original. But I’m sure the Batman movie’s producers are happy they’ve raked in so much money before moviegoers realized they were participating in a referendum on the Bush administration with every popcorn purchase.