About a month ago I wrote about the phenomenon of African-American voters (specifically in SC) who don’t support Barack Obama because they are convinced white folks won’t vote for him, making him unelectable. I theorized that a strong Obama showing in the very pale states of IA and NH might take care of at least part of that problem.
Well, even a rise in the polls among white folks for Obama may be having an effect. As Kate Sheppard points out at TAPPED, the trend lines in the last two Rasmussen polls of SC Democrats show Obama narrowing a long-standing deficit to Clinton in that state, mainly because he now leads her among African-Americans by a 51-27 margin, after trailing her in that voter category 46-45 last month.
John Edwards, BTW, continues to be an afterthought among Democratic voters in his native state, pulling 13% in the latest Rasmussen poll as compared to 36% for Clinton and 34% for Obama.

Tom Hayden’s latest article in The Nation, “How the Peace Movement Can Win in ’08,” is an extremely important read – not only for those Democrats who want to accelerate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, but also for any Democratic political strategists who think the only coherent political strategies are those that are designed to win elections.. Hayden, one of the most lucid strategic thinkers in the peace movement, rolls out an action plan for political and protest activists, linked to key upcoming events in the political calendar, both short and long-term. It is, in effect, the plan for a parallel campaign to the 2008 elections, one aimed at mobilizing the already existing peace constituency and influencing public opinion.
Hayden sees the peace movement having “the best-funded antiwar message in history” and “an opportunity to solidify public opinion behind a more rapid withdrawal–regardless of what the national security advisers think.” He urges Dems favoring a faster withdrawal to make stronger and more effective use of the 527 committees and fully deploy financial resources in broadening the anti-war movement.
In fact, Hayden sees electoral activism as even more important than traditional protest methods. On the one hand he says:

The peace movement can succeed only by applying people pressure against the pillars of the war policy–public opinion, military recruitment and an ample war budget–through marching, confronting military recruiters and civil disobedience.

But, at the same time,

The tactics that are most likely to accelerate the process are greater efforts at persuading the ambivalent voters. [we need]..skilled organizers and volunteers across the electoral battlegrounds of 2008…to identify, register and turn out voters through door-to-door work combined with radio and television spots. A massively funded voter-identification and -registration drive and a get-out-the vote campaign have enormous potential to tip not only the presidential election but also the scales of public opinion. Rather than merely pounding away at a simplistic message–Republicans dangerous, Democrats better–such an effort would require, as a foundation, resources to educate voters and involve them in house meetings. The house-meeting approach allows for voter education and participation on a scale that cannot be achieved by hit pieces or TV spots. It is also critical for cultivating grassroots leadership capacity for election day turnout and beyond.

Hayden touches on the pros and cons of Iraq withdrawal plans of the Dem presidential nominees and gives Edwards the edge among front-runners, while crediting Obama with strengthening his withdrawal proposal.. Hayden says Clinton’s “centrist” proposals are too vague, but he believes “bird-dogging” all Dem candidates on the trail can help move the Democrats toward faster withdrawal from Iraq.
Progressive Democrats like myself who are convinced that we should withdraw from Iraq as promptly as feasible but who also believe the most important priority for the future of America is a democratic victory in 2008 and the creation of an enduring Democratic majority will find Hayden’s article provocative reading. In fact, it forces both peace activists and Democratic campaigners alike to think more deeply about the potential conflicts and trade-offs between anti-war activism and pro-Democratic advocacy and to explicitly consider how the two forces can work as much as possible in parallel rather then across purposes. There are no easy answers to this strategic challenge, but Hayden’s article is an excellent place to start.

I’m coming a bit late to the analysis of Mitt Romney’s Big Religion Speech, being in travel purgatory much of the day, but the reaction is almost as interesting as the speech.
Nobody much denies that it was well-staged and well-delivered, but that’s pretty much where the agreement ends.
Hugh Hewitt regards the speech as “on every level…a masterpiece,” a “brilliant exposition of the American political theory of faith and freedom,” and even says anyone who doesn’t agree with him about this “is not to be trusted as an analyst,” a remark whose arrogance matches the hyperbolic tone of his whole post.
Nobody else I read got quite that hyterical in praise, but quite a few folks thought Romney did a good job of threading the needle by avoiding some obvious pitfalls in addressing this subject. He didn’t do a purely anodyne and impersonal tribute to “faith” without any specificity. He didn’t try to make the case for Mormonism. He didn’t (God forbid for a Republican!) suggest that religion should be irrelevant in politics.
At least a couple of conservative commentators were a lot less enthusiastic. The Editors of National Review pointed out that Romney was just wrong in asserting that those who wanted him to justify his faith were guilty of violating the constitutional ban on religious tests for holding office. David Frum quickly catches the contradiction between Mitt’s aggressive confession of belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his argument that specific Mormon beliefs about the nature of Jesus were somehow off-limits to discussion, and sugggested, accurately I think, that many conservative evangelicals wouldn’t buy it.
On the Left, there’s a lot of justifiable attention being paid to the obvious point that Romney again and again identified religious freedom in a way that excluded the irreligious. “Religion requires freedom, and freedom requires religion,” was one of the speech’s big catchphrases. Thomas Jefferson is surely rolling in his grave.
In that respect, Michelle Cottle at the Plank is very impressed, in a horrified sort of way, by Romney’s phrase, “The religion of Secularism” in deploring aggressive church-state separation. Actually, this has been a hoary meme of the Christian Right for decades, central to its claim that any limitation on government support for religion is itself a form of religious oppression by the Church of Secularism (BTW, Romney hit a lick on another such hoary convention, the identification of the anti-abortion movement with abolitionism and civil rights as essential faith-based crusades for human rights).
And that’s why of all the reactions I’ve read, Ezra Klein’s seems to get at the essential point most directly:

What Romney’s speech today seeks to do is construct a new “us versus them.” Where Huckabee was having some success making the us equal “Christians” and the them equal “Mormons,” Romney is making the us equal “believers” and the them equal “atheists.” The bet is that voters hate “secularists” more than they’re unsettled by Mormons, and that if Romney can set himself up as the foremost opponent of atheists in public life, that will be more important than precisely which version of Jesus he believes in, or how many planets he’ll be given to rule after his death. It’s a speech calling for tolerance, that hinges on a public display of intolerance. It’s classic Romney, and totally disgusting.

Before the speech, I suggested that Romney’s best bet politically was to do everything possible to establish solidarity between Mormons and conservative evangelicals as comrades in culture warfare with secularists and even “liberal” Christians. I also doubted he could pull that off. But it looks like he at least made an eloquent effort in that direction.

Mike Huckabee began this week as the hot commodity in presidential politics, surging in IA and nationally, and inspiring a host of positive media attention. But in a striking illustration of how rapidly worms turn in the current political environment, he’s had a really bad week so far.
One problem had been lurking in the background for ages, and probably made its way from some rival campaign’s oppo-reasearch file into the media just as he emerged from the second tier into major-candidate viability. That would be the Wayne DuMond case. You can read all about it in the linked article, but basically, Huckabee appears to have personally lobbied the Arkansas parole board to releasee DuMond, a convicted rapist, in 1999, in response to right-wing political pressure (strangely, DuMond appears to have become a cause celebre among some conservatives who believed his original life-plus-20-years sentence was influenced by the fact that his victim was a distant relative of Bill Clinton). DuMond proceeded to rape and murder another woman in Missouri, and upon dying in prison in 2005, was the prime suspect in another rape and murder.
This is potentially the Willie Horton case on steroids, since Huckabee, unlike Mike Dukakis in Massachusetts, knew about the specific case and seems to have personally intervened, disregarding pleas from DuMond’s earlier victim’s family.
A second bad development for Huckabee is probably less damaging, but is still an indication of his and his campaign’s shortcomings. A full day after the release of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and at a time when it was the leading news story in several major media outlets, Huckabee was asked about it, and clearly had no clue about the report or its significance. It goes to show that even if you can overcome a small budget and a shoestring campaign operation in places like Iowa, it’s still helpful to have a staff to keep you aware of big breaking news, especially if one of your main vulnerabilities is lack of expertise in international relations.

David Yepsen of The Des Moines Register today recites all the indicators of a record Democratic turnout at the January 3 Iowa Caucuses, and guesses it will help Clinton and Obama, perhaps at the expense of Edwards. Meanwhile, signs of a less-than-impressive Republican turnout may help Mike Huckabee, who has the most motivated supporters.

Rich Lowry of National Review, who’s not a big fan of Mike Huckabee, did an interesting brief meditation today on the larger meaning of the Arkansan’s recent rise to relevance in the Republican presidential contest:

Remember how evangelicals had “matured”? Remember how the war on terror had replaced social issues? It shouldn’t be hard, since all those things were being said a couple of weeks ago (heck, still being said maybe even a few days ago). Part of what seems to be going on with the Huckabee surge is evangelicals sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the chattering class—we’re still here, we still matter, and we still care about our signature issues. Remember the lack of excitement in the Republican race, especially among dispirited social conservatives? Well, now there is some excitement, and it isn’t over free market economics or the war on terror, but a candidate who doesn’t speak compellingly about either of those things but instead about social issues. As a friend I was talking to a little earlier points out, the most important moment of the campaign so far came when a social conservative excited a social conservative audience—Huckabee with his “I come from you” speech at the “values summit.” This friend argues that the Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they’ll have to settle for a pro-choicer. I don’t know about that, but Huck has certainly trashed about nine months-worth of conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters.

This is probably a useful reminder of the source of Huckabee’s core vote for those progressives who view him as some sort of economic populist. In Iowa, at least, and probably nationally, Mike Huckabee’s “surge” is primarily a product of his success in remobilizing–and de-marginalizing–the Christian Right.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics has an interesting take on the five biggest mistakes made in the presidential campaign up until now. One was Fred Thompson’s decision not to participate in the first GOP debate in NH, for which Granite State voters appear to be punishing him. A second was Mitt Romney’s failure to do his Big Religion Speech earlier in the cycle, making it now look like an act of desperation. A third was Hillary Clinton’s refusal to consider skipping Iowa, where she’s now in a difficult struggle that could destroy her national lead.
Bevan attributes a fourth and fifth big mistake to a single candidate, John McCain, for his notably unsuccessful “front-runner” strategy early in the race, and for his poor handling of the immigration issue.
20-20 hindsight is often easy, but now that voters are on the brink of finally weighing in, it is interesting to think about how the race might have been reshaped.

A staff post here yesterday mentioned an Iowa State University poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers that showed a relatively big lead for Hillary Clinton, along with a surprisingly poor third-place standing for Barack Obama. We noted that the polling data was a bit stale. But now, via Chris Bowers, we learn that the ISU poll also had a strange sample bias: self-identified independents were excluded. Since these voters are expected to provide about one-fifth of the Democratic Caucus participants, this is a pretty important distortion.
To be clear, no amount of indie love for Obama would enable him to overcome HRC’s 11-point lead in this poll, but it’s a good reminder that all polls are not created equal, even if their headlines get reported that way.

My post on Romney’s impending speech dealing with his Mormonism drew the ire of Ross Douthat at The Atlantic, who judged my suggestion that Mitt stress the successful LDS model of cultural conservatism as “exactly wrong.”
Douthat strongly subscribes to the theory that the most important reason for evangelical Christian hostility towards Mormonism is competitive pressure: Mormons “tend to offer a similar sociological appeal to religious seekers, and thus are in direct competition for converts.” Thus, he concludes, anything that reminds evangelicals of the similarity of that appeal to their own–much less that celebrates Mormon moral values–will horribly backfire.
Gee, I dunno. Douthat’s a lot closer to evangelical opinion than I am these days, but I suspect this competition factor is more prevalent among religious leaders than among the rank-and-file in the pews. But even if your typical Southern Baptists look at your typical Mormons and see zealous members of a rapidly-growing cult that’s stealing souls, they also inevitably see deeply conservative, godly folk who are renowned for clean living, patriotism, an intense devotion to family, and who dislike abortion, homosexuality and booze and drug use to a fault. You’d think that anything Mitt Romney could do to elevate the latter perception as opposed to the former would be helpful to the cause of conservative evangelical tolerance for Mormons, who after all, are comrades-in-arms in the larger fight against liberal Protestants and secularists.
If, on the other hand, I’m “exactly wrong” and Douthat is “exactly right,” then Mitt Romney is truly screwed. What is he supposed to say about his religion? He can’t do the JFK separation-of-church-and-state bit; he’s in the wrong party at the wrong time of history for that approach. He can’t educate evangelicals about the tenets of the LDS church; aside from being a complex endeavor, that would probably alarm listeners even more than their current vague suspicions about the Mormon “cult.” So if he also can’t even appeal to the deep cultural conservative consanguinity of Mormons with evangelicals, he might as well cancel the speech and hope for the best.

The release of a startling new National Intelligence Estimate showing that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 was a timely reminder that real-life events can trump politics. The document has clearly put the kibosh on the administration/neocon campaign to justify, if not execute, a preemptive military strike–perhaps in conjunction with Israel–on Iran. And the extreme irritation being expressed towards the report by such noted saber-rattlers as John Bolton and Norman Podheretz is as good a measure as any of its enormous impact.
The weird thing, of course, is that George W. Bush knew about this intelligence well before his inflammatory “World War III” remarks about Iran in October. This makes today’s spin effort by the White House to cite the report as a validation of the administration’s Iran policy especially laughable. More seriously, Bush’s decision to ignore as long as he could his own government’s best information on Iran is yet another blow to U.S. credibility around the world.
Aside from its impact on the administration, the intelligence estimate should have a salutory effect on the Republican presidential campaign, where discussion of military action against Iran has been (with the obvious exception of Ron Paul) kicked around as a matter of “when,” not “if.” It’s less clear that Iran will subside as an issue on the Democratic side, with the Edwards and Obama campaigns already citing the report as evidence that Hillary Clinton was again misled by Bush in voting for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution.
However it shakes out politically or diplomatically, the intelligence estimate clearly puts up a big roadblock on the path to preemptive war with Iran, and should lessen fears that Bush will be able to double-down on his Iraq disaster before he finally heads home to Crawford.