It’s been pretty clear for a while that the conservative assault on Barack Obama as a scary, radical, racially threatening figure is going to rely in part on subsidiary calumnies against his wife. I’ve got an article up on the New Republic site today that tries to place the attacks on Michelle Obama in a historical context of political spousal abuse, while examining the aggressive steps the Obama campaign is taking to respond, which I think will be successful.

It’s been a very active week in the interplay between Barack Obama and certain Christian Right leaders, who are clearly afraid he will have some appeal to their flocks.
Most notably, the religio-political warhorse James Dobson devoted a Focus on the Family radio broadcast to an attack on a speech (a very, very good speech, BTW) Obama delivered two years ago, in which Obama had the temerity to suggest that James Dobson’s interpretations of the moral imperatives of scripture weren’t self-evidently true.
Obama, said Dobson, was “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible,” as defined, of course, by Dobson himself.
As Amy Sullivan of Time observed, there was a pretty swift backlash against Dobson’s attack on Obama from evangelical leaders manifestly tired of self-important thunderbolts from Colorado Springs.
A few days earlier, a more sophisticated attack on Obama’s Christianity was launched by conservative evangelical syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, who said that “there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement.” Picking over a 2004 interview, Thomas anathemized Obama for denying that salvation was limited to those who expressly embrace Jesus Christ as God and Savior, and for expressing doubts about his personal fate after death.
As Sullivan pointed out in her commentary on the Obama-Christian Right dustup:

A new Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of 35,000 Americans reports that 70% agree with the statement “Many religions can lead to eternal life,” including 57% of Evangelicals. No less a figure than George W. Bush responded “no” when asked in 1999 if he believed heaven is open only to Christians.

So if what Thomas calls Obama’s “universalism” (an epithet often hurled at all sorts of Christians with an expansive idea of God’s plan for salvation, including the new Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt) disqualifies him as a Christian, what does that make George W. Bush?
Thomas is on stronger ground in suggesting that most Christians don’t have Obama’s reluctance to visualize a heavenly afterlife for themselves. But while belief in “eternal life” is fundamental to Christianity, that’s not the same, theologically, as confidence about individual immortality in any specific sort of way.
Here’s what Karl Barth, perhaps the dominant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and the “neo-orthodox” scourge of theological liberals, had to say on the subject shortly before his own death:

We have no idea either of the life beyond, or of the passage of this life into the other. We have only what came to pass in Jesus Christ, which is present with us through faith.

Barth also, by the way, was often accused of “universalism,” and did explicitly teach that restrictive ideas about salvation reflected a rejection of the sovereignty of God.
It’s clear that Obama’s in pretty good orthodox Christian company, despite efforts by Dobson and Thomas to cast him out.

I haven’t had a chance to get hold of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s new book, Grand New Party, the latest offering in the “Whither Conservatism?” genre. But I have a pretty good sense of the thrust of the book from reviews , from the highly influential Douthat/Salam Weekly Standard article in 2005 entitled “The Party of Sam’s Club,” and from Douthat’s fine blogging at The Atlantic.com. And as a veteran of many “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” it’s a relief to spend some time examining the other party’s dilemmas.
Grand New Party got its biggest media boost to date with today’s David Brooks column in The New York Times, wherein the book is hailed as “the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head.”
The argument that the GOP can rebuild an electoral majority by shrugging off its anti-government mentality and strategically accepting key elements of the New Deal/Great Society legacy is not new, though it hasn’t been heard in a while (discounting the brief flurry of unfocused talk, much of it from David Brooks himself, about “national greatness conservatism” that accompanied John McCain’s 2000 campaign). Indeed, this was the animating idea of the “moderate” or even “liberal” Republicans of yore, who struggled with the conservative movement for control of the GOP for decades, and didn’t completely succumb until 1976, 1980, or even 1994, depending on how you measure these things.
Nowadays, we are so accustomed to thinking of the mass base of the GOP as being largely held together by anti-government convictions that it’s tough to imagine a more “centrist” brand of conservatism representing what the rank-and-file GOP Republican voter actually wants, as Douthat and Salam argue, with polling data to back them up. But back in the day, pro-government Republicans also claimed a mass base, and thought of conservative movement activists as a narrow, cultish clan out of touch with popular opinion.
By total coincidence, last night I happened to be re-reading portions of Teddy White’s classic campaign book, The Making of the President 1960. Here’s what White had to say about the last-minute “Draft Rockefeller Movement” at the 1960 Republican National Convention:

[W]hat the Citizens for Rockefeller did achieve in the last week end before the convention, was, in its own terms, a spectacular demonstration of what the citizen spirit can evoke. Within twenty-four hours of the week-end TV appeal, 260,000 pieces of mail had arrived at the Chicago convention, accompanied by an outpouring of telephone calls and telegrams of unprecedented volume. Within fifty-six hours after the appearance of the advertisements, more than a million pieces of mail and telegrams poured into the hotels, special post offices and Convention facilities, to swamp mail delivery, so that by Wednesday of the Convention some hotels were still sorting mail forty-eight hours late.

I mention this long-forgotten incident because the immediate product of this “citizens movement” was the notorious Pact of Fifth Avenue, wherein Richard Nixon accepted a variety of demands for platform modifications (mostly on civil rights and defense policy) in order to head off a Rockefeller candidacy–one in a long series of “betrayals” that fed the nascent conservative movement which four years later awarded Barry Goldwater the presidential nomination. (If you haven’t read Rick Perlstein’s brilliant account of this uprising, Before the Storm, you should).
To conservatives, Rockefeller was the perfect embodiment of an elite, anti-grass-roots tradition of Eastern Seabord Republicanism, and popular support for him was no more genuine than the manufactured “We Want Willkie!” demonstrations in 1940 that representated an earlier form of the same “betrayal.” Indeed, the successful effort to force Gerald Ford to dump the New Yorker as his running-mate in 1976 was perhaps the most satisfying achievement of Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge that year.
But looked at from another angle, Rocky (along with other prominent Republicans of the 1960s and 1970s, such as George Romney, Chuck Percy, and Bill Scranton, in a tradition that went back through Ike and Tom Dewey, all the way to Alf Landon) was a Republican “modernizer” who believed, like Douthat and Salam, that the anti-government habits of GOP conservatives bred during the long era of opposition to the New Deal were keeping Republicans from harvesting a vast number of middle-class votes.
Teddy White wasn’t alone in viewing pols like Rockefeller as representing a vibrant future-oriented option for the GOP, and not the elitist symbol of surrender to Big Government so familiar in conservative polemics. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s, the Ripon Society, promoting a distinctive blend of social liberalism and market-oriented public-sector activism, was a happenin’ place within the Republican Party (if you’re really interested, check out Ripon’s fine series of post-election analyses published after the 1964, 1968 and 1972 elections). And while Richard Nixon’s Disraeli-style experiments in public-sector activism may have been motivated by sheer political opportunism, they were as legitimate an expression of a certain brand of Republican philosophy at the time as his better-known pioneering of a harsh and divisive cultural conservatism, and did contribute to his 1972 landslide victory.
I’m not suggesting that Douthat and Salam’s prescriptions are simply an updated version of the Ripon Society playbook; for one thing, they are clear about wanting to use public-sector solutions for rigorously conservative social ends, particularly the strengthening of the traditional family. And to the extent that they laud particular politicians, they are people like Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee, who won’t remind anyone of mandarins like Nelson Rockefeller or Chuck Percy. Rocky did get a lot of votes from the kind of folk who would today shop at Sam’s Club, but he probably went slumming at Barney’s.
The bigger question is whether Douthat and Salam are offering a course of action for the GOP that has any better prospects for acceptance than that of past Republican “moderates” or “modernizers” or “realists.” For all the buzz that this book is going to get, the overwhelming sentiment among the GOP chattering classes is that the contemporary crisis of their party is attributable to insufficient conservatism, and particularly insufficient fidelity to the limited-government ideal. And they are already well-prepared to explain away a McCain defeat this year as attributable to a combination of Bush’s fiscal profligacy and incompetence and McCain’s inability to excite the conservative base. If anything, most conservatives seem inclined to make items like Social Security privatization, a big no-no to Sam’s Club Republicans, an even larger and more central element of their future agenda.
So if you’re interested in the future of the GOP, pay some attention to how Grand New Party is received among serious conservatives. My guess is that they are at least two electoral fiascos away from taking Douthat and Salam’s advice.

Mike Dorning of the Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau reports on a new study by his newspaper indicating big gains in store for Dems if they can produce a modest increase in turnout of youth and African American voters. Dorning’s article, flagged by Facing South‘s Chris Kromm, has this to say about Obama’s prospects for picking up nine states Bush won in ’04:

If Obama could inspire just 10 percent more Democratic voters under 30 to go to the polls than did four years ago, that alone could be enough to switch Iowa and New Mexico from red to blue, the analysis suggests.
Just a 10 percent increase in turnout among blacks would make up more than 40 percent of George W. Bush’s 2004 victory margin in Ohio and more than 20 percent of the Republicans’ 2004 victory margin in Florida.
Turnout increases of 10 percent of both young voters and African-Americans could virtually eliminate the Republicans’ 2004 victory margin in Ohio and go a long way to closing the gap in Colorado, Nevada, Missouri, Virginia and—a bit more of a stretch—possibly North Carolina.
…A host of Republican states would come into play, while Democratic leads would be substantially cushioned in major blue states that the presumed Republican candidate John McCain has targeted: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Dorning points out that Black registration and general election turnout increased 11 percent in 1984, when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for President in the primaries — even though Walter Mondale was the nominee. In addition, African American turnout in the ’08 primaries is double the ’04 figures, according to David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political Studies. (See also J.P. Green’s recent post on Black turnout) Dorning adds,

That potential helps explain why the Obama campaign chose to forgo federal funding and also why it is engaged in a massive voter registration drive. With its unprecedented resources, the campaign can fund an array of specific targeting operations, and Obama exploited early versions of those to great success during the primary campaign.

Dorning cautions that the Republicans are also improving their micro-targeting turnout operation that was so successful in key states like Ohio in ’04. However the scale of the Obama campaign’s voter registration drive and turnout effort will likely be unmatched.

You probably heard the furor over the recent remark in an interview with Fortune by McCain’s chief strategist Charlie Black–the uber-lobbyist who began his political career as an operative for Jesse Helms–that a fresh terrorist attack on the country this year would boost his candidate’s electoral prospect. At The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg retorts that Black was just repeating the conventional wisdom, but then offers this twist on the subject:

Therefore, a terrorist outrage shortly before the election—or, more cost-effectively, a terrorist video attacking McCain and/or praising Obama—would be powerful evidence that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win, in hopes that he would continue such policies as bleeding American military strength into the Iraqi desert, facilitating the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, promoting Islamist extremism by vowing to occupy Iraq permanently, and confirming “blood for oil” suspicions by arranging no-bid petroleum contracts for American energy corporations. In 2004, remember, an Al Qaeda video of this type put Bush over the top.
Obviously, this is not something that Obama or his people can say. But commentators can say it, and I hereby do so.

Hertzberg goes on to suggest that the argument doesn’t cut both ways:

Could one also argue the converse—i.e., that the absence of a terrorist act or video in the closing weeks of the campaign would prove that Al Qaeda is rooting for Obama? Perhaps, but far less plausibly. In any case, it would be an awkward argument for anyone to make who also argues that the absence of such attacks proves that the “war on terror” has been a success.

In the occasional discussion of congressional gerrymandering and redistricting reform, it’s generally taken for granted that noncompetitive elections negatively affect voter interest and thus turnout. But until now, there have been few if any efforts to actually measure that effect. Today the Democratic Leadership Council released a study by Marc Dunkelman that suggests that truly competitive House districts could generate as much as 11 million additional votes, heavily concentrated in those states (Dunkelman calls them the “dirty dozen”) with particularly egregious gerrymandering practices. (David Broder favorably wrote the study up in his column today).
The study’s methodology is fairly simple: it compares turnout across House districts nationally in terms of the margin of victory in the two most recent offyear elections, 2002 and 2006. And while Dunkelman acknowledges that factors other than competitiveness affect turnout (most notably “up-ballot” statewide contests, which are isolated in the study), the turnout disparaties between competitive and noncompetitive House contests are indeed too vast to be an accident.
It’s also no coincidence that seven of the twelve states with the worst recent record of compeititive House races are in the South (VA, SC, GA, FL, AL, LA and AR), where turnout has typically been lower due to a host of historical factors, and where Voting Rights Act considerations have often contributed to minority-vote “packing” and “bleaching,” practices deliberately designed to produce “safe” districts. GA has been something of a laboratory for both racial and political gerrymandering during the last two decades. And FL, along with PA and TX, was the site of an egregious partisan gerrymandering effort by the GOP during the last round of redistricting.
What is to be done about gerrymandering? The DLC study doesn’t much get into prescriptions, but having spent quite a bit of time on this subject, I can say with some confidence that there ain’t no easy fix. The most common reform, the creation of “independent” redistricting commissions, does directly deal with the conflict of interest involved in state legislators drawing up their own maps. But the record of such commissions on congressional redistricting is mixed at best, tending to produce political compromises more than competitive districts. The problem is that it requires positive action, not just an alleged absence of “partisan politics,” to create a truly competitive map. And indeed, truly competitive schemes often run afoul of “traditional redistricting principles” like compact districts that respect jurisdictional lines as much as gerrymandering does. The fate of competition-focused redistricting ballot initiatives in OH and FL in 2006 (the former was trounced at the polls; the latter succumbed to a constitutional challenge before making it to the ballot) showed the difficulty, both technical and political, of such efforts.
Still, with the next decennial round of redistricting on the near horizon, it’s time to start thinking about redistricting reform in a serious way. And Dunkelman’s study helps establish that this isn’t just some goo-goo issue of interest only to wonks, or inversely, an unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of partisan politics. Gerrymandering, which can roughly be defined as elected officials choosing voters, is an important and corrosive contributor to our country’s dubious record of low voter participation and civic disengagement.

Do read Robert Novak’s column in today’s WaPo which riffs interestingly on Bruce Bartlett’s article “The Rise of the Obamacons” in The New Republic. Novak, Like Bartlett, is mostly concerned about conservatives in leadership positions who have either endorsed Obama or have expressed disappointment with McCain. Novak believes that,

Reports listing additional Obamacons do not add up to tides of conservative Republicans leaving their party… Nevertheless, Obamacons — little and big — are reason for concern by McCain. They also should cause soul-searching at the Bush White House about who made the Republican Party so difficult a place for Republicans to stay.

Novak shares Bartlett’s funny quote from inside-the-beltway supply-sider Larry Hunter:

The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of ‘Weekend With Bernie,’ handcuffed to a corpse.

They said it. We didn’t.
Both writers touch obliquely on a couple of things I have noticed in conversations with conservative acquaintances who have expressed admiration for Obama. First, Obama projects a sense of prudence. He just seems more thoughtful than McCain, who has some of that knee-jerk ideologue quality that defines Bush. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war is based more on a sense of prudence about military entanglements, than pacifist/ideological beliefs, while McCain is more of an ideologue. True conservatives are not big on the notion of elective war, nor on open-ended occupations that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars a week and overextend our military resources to the point where it imperils our military options in crises elsewhere. It’s easier to envision Obama engaging in productive diplomacy than McCain.
The other thing that makes Obama appealing to true conservatives is his flexibility. Obama’s switch in favor of telecom immunity, for example, may anger some of his progressive supporters. But to a conservative, it may show that he is not anti-business and he is open to changing his mind to adapt to new realities. Ditto for his reversed policy on receiving public funds. Yes, Obama has a strong liberal record. But he is not a rigid ideologue. It’s not so easy to say the same for McCain. His flip-flops seem more driven by rank political opportunism than thoughtful ruminations about policy.
I’m not so sure Obamacon opinion leaders are having all that much of an impact. More likely they are a reflection of what is going on in the minds of many conservatives who are troubled by the Bush mess and McCain’s inability to separate himself from it. At the same time, many conservatives are impressed with Obama’s work ethic, management skills, flexibility and refusal to dwell on racial injustice as a central issue. I would expect that Obama will get some of their votes, while others will vote third party or stay at home on election day.

In a New York Times op-ed piece today, Michael Cohen suggests that John McCain may be fatally overplaying his criticisms of Barack Obama’s lack of experience. And he cites a historical analogy that may well be highly relevant:

[B]y continually attacking Mr. Obama’s understanding of policy issues, John McCain runs the risk of actually helping the Democrat neutralize the experience issue. In 1980, supporters of President Jimmy Carter regularly intimated that Ronald Reagan was an intellectual lightweight not to mention a warmonger and a racist. But when the two men debated, and Americans saw that Reagan wasn’t the caricature that he was being presented as, poll numbers showed a huge shift toward the Republican.

I’d go further than Cohen on the Reagan-Obama parallels. Like 1980, this is an election year in which Americans emphatically want change. As in 1980, the “out-party” challenger, who’s carefully identified himself with the case for decisive change, has a relatively low threshold of acceptability to meet. The constant suggestions by McCain and the GOP that Barack Obama couldn’t find his way around a world map should be easy to rebut for a candidate who at his best can match Reagan’s communications skills, while comfortably exceeding the late president’s ability to demonstrate intelligence and a clear grasp of issues.

Time‘s Amy Sullivan has an important article out that illustrates a very specific challenge for the Obama campaign and its supporters: informing pro-choice women that John McCain’s position on the right to choose is one of lock-step agreement with anti-abortion extremists, up to and including constitutional amendments to overturn Roe v. Wade and then to ban virtually all abortions.
She highlights a new poll from NARAL Pro-Choice America:

The NARAL survey found that when pro-choice women are told that McCain believes the Roe v. Wade decision should be overturned, their support for him drops substantially. Among pro-choice independent women, who are already more inclined to back Obama, information about the two candidates’ abortion positions improves Obama’s edge from 53-35 to 66-26, for a net gain of 22 percentage points. Even pro-choice Republican women shift their support after hearing about McCain’s opposition to Roe: 76% initially say they will vote for McCain in November, but that number drops to 63%.

Sullivan explains that holding hard-core anti-abortion views while encouraging the impression of “moderation” on the subject is an old game for GOP presidential candidates, including George W. Bush. One big factor in this game has been the under-the-radar-screen, dog-whistle manner in which Republicans have reassured their culturally conservative base, in contrast to Democrats:

In essence, while the G.O.P. has largely tried to keep its base quietly comforted, Democrats have seemed compelled to make public shows of allegiance to pro-choice activists. The result is that pro-choice voters hear little from Republican candidates to upset them, even as pro-life voters have their differences with the Democratic Party’s abortion stance highlighted for all to see. Not surprisingly, the two approaches show up at the ballot box: in 2000, 38% of Bush’s voters were pro-choice while only 22% of Gore’s were pro-life. Those percentages closed in 2004, but only slightly.

Amy clearly thinks Democrats would be wise to supplement their pro-choice commitments with policy initiatives aimed at reducing abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies, a position identified with Hillary Clinton but not so much with Barack Obama. But in any event, McCain should not be allowed to become yet another stealth anti-abortion candidate who succeeds in having it both ways on this most emotional issue.

Republicans believe they can now make the issue of energy security a winner for them by attacking Obama and Democrats for opposing drilling in environmentally-sensitive areas. In the New York Times political blog The Caucus, Michael Falcone writes about the new GOP meme launched by McCain, labeling Obama the “Dr. No” of energy policy and blasting him for opposing McCain’s proposals for expanded oil exploration, a summer gas tax holiday, more investment in nuclear energy and a $300 million prize to whoever creates a better car battery.
The GOP knows energy security is a potentially lethal issue for them, with gas prices so high and because they have done so little to promote energy independence. So they are following the Karl Rove playbook, which calls for full scale assault on the adversary’s strongest positions. They know that there is a well-documented link between low presidential approval scores and rising gas prices. But the Republicans have also noted a public opinion trend in favor of more oil exploration. An L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll conducted 6/20-23, for example, indicates 55 percent of respondents say drilling for oil in environmentally-important areas should be “allowed with proper controls,” compared to 24 percent opposed.
McCain’s comment that “exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial” provoked an incisive response from Senator Obama:

Psychological impact’?” In case you’re wondering, that’s Washington-speak for ‘It polls well.’ It’s an example of how Washington politicians try to convince you that they did something to make your life better when they really didn’t.

As for McCain’s proposal to have a $300 miliion prize for a scientist who builds a better battery, Obama said:

When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the Moon, he didn’t put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win. He put the full resources of the United States government behind the project.

Of course the cheerleader-in-chief joined the fray in support of McCain, blaming Democrats for high gas prices and calling for more drilling anywhere that even smells like oil. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman nailed him eloquently:

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is…This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who’s done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the E.P.A. today seems to be in a witness-protection program…But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn’t lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America’s energy profile right now — unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow — and create good tech jobs to boot.

Friedman cites the GOP’s obstruction of the renewable erergy reforms as exhibit ‘A’:

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines — because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.
That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans — sorry to say, with the help of John McCain — have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times….That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

The Republicans’ scam to exploit discontent about rising gas prices to undermine the Obama campaign will work only if Dems fail to educate the public about McCain’s and the GOP’s long history of obstructing conservation and renewable energy reforms. Obama is responding well to the latest attacks. What’s needed from now until November is a barrage of Democratic ads that make it clear that (1.) energy independence is a cornerstone of our national security; (2.) that Republicans have failed repeatedly to defend our national interest on this critical issue; and (3.) Obama has the more credible reforms for lasting energy security.