I’ve written a review for the latest issue of the Washington Monthly of a new biography entitled Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, by William A. Link.
You can judge the review, and the book, for yourself. But I did want to note here that it’s astonishing how much impact the crazily extremist Helms had on the contemporary conservative movement and Republican Party. The politics of cultural reaction, partisan polarization, legislative obtructionism, and foreign policy unilateralism were all pioneered by Helms, who also helped create the Right’s ideological small donor base. He was the living link between the Old Right (including its racist and isolationist wings) and the modern Right. And it’s only in the context of the radicalized Republican Party Helms helped create that politicians like John McCain can be perceived as “centrist.”
Helms also personally mentored a host of young conservative zealots, among them Charlie Black, the Super Lobbyist who is now in McCain’s inner circle.
Jesse did a lot of damage to the body politic in his long career, but I’m afraid his legacy lives on.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has a useful item today listing the top ten states that might flip from one party to the other in the November presidential election. Eight of the ten (IA, NM, NV, CO, OH, VA, FL, and MO) went Republican in 2004; only NH and MN are viewed as (unlikely) prospects to go the other way.
Cillizza doesn’t get into this, but most observers would add a second tier of potential battleground states, including three carried by Bush in 2004 (AZ, AR and WV) and three carried by Kerry (MI, PA and WI).

As the eulogies for Bill Buckley give way to more cerebral discussions of modern day conservatism, it is worth stopping for a moment to insist upon a basic fact – one that Democrats should never allow the mainstream media (or themselves) to forget.
Despite the frequent use of the term “movement” by the press, the “conservative movement” that has provided the Republican Party with its basic ideology since the Reagan- Gingrich era is profoundly different from the two major social movements whose viewpoints are deeply embedded in the basic outlook and philosophy of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party’s economic perspective comes not simply from the legislation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, but from the epic struggle of the American trade union movement in the 1930’s. Equally, at the heart of the modern Democratic Party’s social philosophy lies the historical experience of the civil rights movement and the legacy of Martin Luther King.
These two social movements had three things in common. They were struggles of profoundly disadvantaged and oppressed groups for basic social and economic justice, they were grass-roots, bottom-up movements in which leaders emerged from the rank and file, and they were led by dedicated militants who made huge personal and human sacrifices.
Both trade union and civil right organizers lived with the constant fear of death, vicious beatings, or imprisonment and both movements had many famous martyrs killed in the struggle (the Haymarket victims and Joe Hill for the trade unionists; Emmet Till, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Three, (Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner) and the children of the Birmingham bombing for the civil rights movement). Many of the leaders of both movements spent significant time in jail — it was, in fact, a proud badge of honor and a symbol of their commitment to the cause.
Sadly, for many people under the age of 40 these realities — which everybody knew perfectly well at the time — now sound like melodramatic exaggerations. But they are not; they are simple statements of fact.
The modern “official” conservative movement on the other hand – although in some respects indeed a social movement – was and is to a significant degree a movement of the “haves” rather than the “have-nots” and as a result has never had any of the three characteristics above.
The modern conservative movement was heavily subsidized by foundations and wealthy individuals from its beginnings. By the 1980’s there was a substantial network of think-tanks, book publishers, house-organ magazines, scholarships and internships that recruited and financially supported young conservatives. Communication with ordinary people was overwhelmingly conducted by very sanitary, “no getting the hands dirty” methods – largely direct mail and television (particularly televangelist programming) – rather than by any actual door-to-door, grass-roots organizing.
Now to be sure. there have indeed been a number of genuine right-wing, grass roots activist movements since the 1970’s. There have been skinhead/racist/survivalist groups (like “The Order” and “White Power” in 1980’s, the militia movement in 1990s, the Minutemen today), and also broader grass-roots movements to fight local gun control initiatives, to infiltrate local school boards to mandate creationism and to conduct civil (and also very uncivil) disobedience against abortion clinics.
All of these movements shared two characteristics – they were authentically bottom up, grass-roots movements and they were all treated like embarrassing, party-crashing, beer-drinking, trailer park trash phenomena by the official beltway conservative “movement”.
On the other hand when the current generation of “official” conservative spokesmen – the Gingrichs, D’Souzas, Laffers, Murrays, Limbaughs, O’Reillys and Coulters– were in college in the 70’s and 80’s, the worst injustice most of them suffered was having to listen to pompous tenured radicals talk endlessly about Foucault and Germaine Greer rather than Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.
It is important for Democrats to point this out whenever the media casually equate the modern conservative “movement” with the genuine social movements that underlie the Democratic coalition because it creates a false equivalence between the moral authority of the two. It artificially imbues official “inside-the-beltway” conservatism with connotations of a genuine grass-roots social movement – traditions of altruism and self sacrifice, identification with the struggle for justice and solidarity with the underdog.
Let’s face the facts. The conservative movement indeed recognized and capitalized upon a number of genuine and sincere grievances of working-class and other ordinary Americans. But the middle-class and upper-class, white American men who compose the official conservative movement have never in their “custom-tailored-suit- and- tie”, “better-side-of town” lifetimes been the oppressed victims of systematic social injustice.
This is illustrated by an ironic fact. Genuine grass-roots social movements of the oppressed always have songs and anthems that express their deepest social ideals. At the end of every union organizing meeting trade unionists would always sing “Solidarity Forever”. Every civil rights rally concluded with the singing of “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome”.
There is nothing remotely comparable in the well-funded, “inside the beltway” conservative so-called “movement”. In fact, it is hard to even visualize exactly what kind of spiritual anthem could properly express the social philosophy of the audiences who attend meetings of groups like the Conservative Political Action Council, the Heritage Foundation, the College Republicans or the US Chamber of Commerce.
Oh, wait a minute. Come to think of it, there is one. All these groups could kick off their conferences with a few lusty choruses of “Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, A Pirates’ Life for Me”. It would fit them like a glove.

In one of his mysterious unsourced reports, TIME’s Mark Halperin suggests there’s a deal in the works that would avoid a do-over in MI and FL.
The FL portion of the supposed “deal” would let the earlier primary stand, but would reduce the total Florida delegation (and thus HRC’s net pledged delegate gains) by half. MI’s delegates would be split down the middle between the two candidates. Over at The Plank, Isaac Chotiner wonders why (according to Halperin) HRC might well agree to that, and why Obama might not, since Clinton would be denied both a significant delegate haul and the momenutm from a do-over.
Well, Isaac, here’s why: HRC’s not going to catch Obama in pledged delegates, but she might catch him in total popular votes if the MI and FL primaries are in any way retroactively legitimized (she won FL by 278,000 votes, and MI by 99,000). That’s her best possible rationale for convincing Democrats that superdelegates should be able to decide the whole deal.
As for the deal itself, the FL portion makes some sense, given the vast obstacles (financial, logistical, and even legal, given the strong possibility, as Marc Ambinder has pointed out, of a Voting Rights Act challenge to a FL mail-in vote) to a do-over. The MI deal, as reported by Halperin, does not make much sense, however–particularly the idea that the whole delegation would be seated. MI Democrats are far more culpable than their FL brethren in this mess, and their primary was far less legitimate. Moreover, a firehouse caucus do-over in MI is much more feasible than any sort of do-over for FL.
More and more, I think a do-over in MI and a reduced-delegate scheme in FL is the only solution that might actually get done. And as Halperin suggests, it is the Obama campaign that will likely have the most issues with this type of deal, since any departure from the status quo could give HRC an outside chance–as opposed to a prayer–of winning the nomination. It may all come down to how much Obama fears the potential loss of these two states in November.

Sara Robinson has a three-parter at Tom Paine.com, “Learning from the Cultural Conservatives,” which should be of interest to Dems concerned with longer-range political strategy.
Part I, subtitled “Messing With Their Minds,” examines the animating vision that powered the conservative political takeover of the 1980’s. Part II, “Talking Up The Worldview,” takes a thoughtful look at “the specific communications strategies conservatives adopted to increase the appeal of their ideas, and embed them deeply in American mass culture.” In Part III, “Taking It To The Street,” Robinson discusses how the ideological right sank roots in local institutions to hardwire their messaging and how we might go about creating new progressive traditions to promote a more favorable worldview. Robinson’s series is more focused on strengthening progressive movements than building the Democratic Party. But she does provide some interesting ideas for Dems interested in Party-building.

It’s nearly all been said about the Spitzer affair. But I vote we give the last word to Robert Scheer, who puts it this way in his aptly titled Alternet post “Spitzer’s Shame Is Wall Street’s Gain“:

Tell me again: Why should we get all worked up over the revelation that the New York governor paid for sex? Will it bring back to life the eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq that same day in a war that makes no sense and has cost this nation trillions in future debt?

On the GOP/Wall St. demonization of Spitzer, Scheer notes:

Will it save those millions of homes that hardworking folks all over the country are losing because of financial industry shenanigans that Eliot Spitzer, as much as anyone, attempted to halt?…It was Spitzer, as much as anyone, who sounded the alarm on the subprime mortgage crisis, the obscene payouts to CEOs who defrauded their shareholders and the other financial scandals that have brought the U.S. economy to its knees…..he best rule of thumb these days is that ordinary Americans should be mightily depressed over any news that Wall Street hustlers cheer.

And Scheer’s overarching point:

…George W. Bush and Dick Cheney remain in office despite having violated enormously more serious laws.

Almost 24 hours after the polls closed on March 4th, Barack Obama finally released his fundraising totals from the month of February. To no one’s surprise, he broke his own fundraising record in smashing fashion. The Clinton campaign had released their numbers a week earlier, and the $35 million she raised was impressive by any standard — except for that of Barack Obama. In the shortened month of February, he pulled in $55 million.
More than 80 percent of Obama’s donations were raised online ($45 million). More than 90 percent of the online donations were for $100 or less; more than half were for $25 or less. For a candidate in a party that not so long ago had very little in the way of a small donor base, that’s amazing.
727,972 people gave money to the Obama campaign in February. Of those, 385,101 were first-time contributors. At some point during the month, Obama broke another important milestone: his total number of contributors passed 1 million. As of last week, the number stood at 1,069,333 and counting
Micah Sifry is the one observer I’ve seen who put those numbers into context:

In 2004, when the total US population was about 296 million, the total number of donors giving $200 or more to all federal campaigns and committees–that is, to all presidential and congressional candidates, PACs and party committees–was 1,140,535, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is, about .4% of the US population made a contribution of more than $200.
In 2000, when the total population was about 281 million, just 777,877 made a $200+ contribution, just over one-quarter of one-percent of the population.
Barack Obama’s campaign has already mobilized more individual donors than the entire large donor pool of 2000, and they are closing rapidly on the entire large donor pool of 2004. This is breathtaking.

As he notes later in the post, it’s not a completely fair comparison because 90 percent of Obama’s donors are giving less than $200. But still, one million contributors is an extraordinary number and an important one.
For starters, despite the overheated rhetoric from the McCain campaign and many in the mainstream media about Obama’s reluctance to commit in advance to public financing in the general election, his donor base represents “public financing” in the broader sense of the term: a million citizens supporting a candidate with whatever they can give, whenever they can afford it. That McCain — who has championed campaign finance reform — cannot accomplish something similar and must instead rely on the same old bundlers and corporate sources as the GOP campaigns of the past speaks volumes.
On the other side of the coin, Obama’s (and to a lesser extent, Clinton’s) small-donor success has the potential to move the Democratic party away from a need to rely on moneyed interests. Eight years ago, the Gore campaign worked the big dollar network extensively. Four years ago, Democrats pushed big money into 527s like America Coming Together in order to level the playing field with Bush. Now, that’s no longer necessary. It appears that for Democratic presidential campaigns in the future, money from big donors is just going to be gravy.
And the potential of electing a president who isn’t beholden to anyone but the citizens of the country could be a huge deal for our national political process.

The L.A. Times has an insightful article, “Democrats Seek to Strengthen Grip on Blue-Collar Workers” by Janet Hook and Tom Hamburger. The article addresses the relative strengths and weaknesses of both Senators Obama and Clinton in campaigning for blue collar votes in the context of McCain’s candidacy, and reports on new Labor and Democratic’ initiatives to solidify working class votes. The concern, in a nutshell:

The AFL-CIO became concerned after polls and focus groups found considerable willingness among union members to consider supporting McCain, regardless of which Democrat won the nomination…Looking toward the general election, labor strategists were alarmed by polls and focus groups of undecided union members that showed McCain doing well in match-ups with either Democratic candidate, said Karen Ackerman, political director of the AFL-CIO. But those focus groups also found that union members knew very little about McCain’s economic positions, including those the labor federation opposes.

The authors also quote John Edwards’s former campaign head David Bonior on the problem of white working class political drift in November:

“That vote is up for grabs,” said David Bonior, campaign manager for John Edwards’ failed Democratic presidential bid. “We will have to work incredibly hard,” he said, to blunt McCain’s potential appeal to working-class voters, which is based on his status as a war hero and his reputation as a political moderate….Bonior argued that Obama has had trouble winning that constituency — a problem he shares with past Democratic candidates John F. Kerry, Al Gore and Michael S. Dukakis

The Oregon AFL-CIO web page has three good companion pieces to the LA Times article, featuring some useful information for addressing the McCain problem. For example:

First elected to the Senate in 1986, McCain has a lifetime AFL-CIO rating of 17 percent through 2006. During the first session of the 110th congress, McCain voted with the AFL-CIO only 3 times out of 34 votes taken…He’s voted with the President 88 percent of the time.

The web page also points out that McCain voted against: extending temporary unemployment benefits; raising the minimum wage; overtime rights protection; the Federal Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). He’s voted for legislation that exports American jobs, promotes privatization and would provide permanent tax cuts for the wealthy. There is more than enough in McCain’s track record to stop him from winning support from working families — if the Dems and unions do a good enough job in publicizing it in blue collar America.

Usurprisingly, Barack Obama won yesterday’s presidential primary in Mississippi, by a healthy 61-37 margin. The win will glean him six net pledged delegates, and add to his cumulative popular vote lead (potentially a very big deal) by nearly 100,000.
Much is being made today of the racial breakdown in the MS vote. Nobody should have been surprised. MS, like SC and AL, is a state where racial polarization is a fundamental political reality. Obama has done relatively well among white voters in those southern states (GA and VA) where biracial coalitions are far more common. I suspect he’ll do pretty well among white voters in NC as well.
A couple of other exit poll findings are of interest. Despite the racial bent of the vote, age was also a big factor, with Obama’s success declining systematically up the age ladder. Fully 12 percent of the primary turnout was among self-identified Republicans, who went for HRC by more than a three-to-one margin; this undoubtedly added to the racial polarization of the overall results.
Now it’s on to the long, hard slog towards Pennsylvania on April 22.

It’s pretty clear that John McCain has a lot of strategic thinking to do. He’s won the GOP nomination, but not the trust of most “movement conservatives.” He’s doing well in most trial heats against Hillary Clinton and (less so) Barack Obama, but he’s fighting an underlying Democratic wave. He’s benefitting from the extended Democratic contest, but is in danger of becoming somewhat irrelevant, and also has serious financial issues. He enjoys a lot of positive media, but has nowhere to go but down in that dimension of presidential politics.
Naturally enough, there’s a whole cottage industry of speculation about what McCain might do with the largest symbolic token he can offer to his own party and to the electorate at large: his running-mate–an issue his age makes especially compelling.
We’ve reported here repeatedly on the standard-brand, white-bread conservative options McCain can consider. But there’s an enduring theory, as popular among fearful Democrats as among hopeful Republicans, that McCain will do something unpredictable, particularly if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. And this theory often centers on Condoleezza Rice.
The New Yorker‘s intrepid Hendrik Hertzberg offers the latest argument for a McCain-Condi ticket:

If McCain really wants to have it all—to refurbish his maverick image without having to flip-flop on the panderings that have tarnished it; to galvanize the attention of the press, the nation, and the world; to make a bold play for the center without seriously alienating “the base”—then he can avail himself of a highly interesting option: Condoleezza Rice.

Hertzberg makes some sense. But the case he makes applies a whole lot more to another Hail Mary possibility, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Like Condi, Bobby’s non-white and crazy smart. Like Condi, he represents a great American up-from-adversity story. But unlike Condi, Bobby Jindal is simon-pure on every imaginable conservative litmus test–particularly tests associated with the Christian Right–and has the blend of federal and state experience, along with youth, that a McCain ticket needs.
The only real arguments I’ve heard against Bobby as McCain’s running-mate are that he’s so young he’d show up his boss’s age, and that many Americans would think he’s a Muslim (he’s actually a Catholic convert from Hinduism) or would identify him with the smart kids from the Indian Subcontinent who are allegedly hoovering up so many U.S. service industry jobs.
Well, sure, if McCain is not inclined to take risks, Jindal won’t be considered for the ticket, but nor will Condi Rice. There are plenty of conventionally conservative white men available, and he’ll probably pick one.
But I’d be surprised if Bobby Jindal doesn’t make the ultimate short list, and might actually be considered if the GOP goes into the general election on a wing and a prayer.