We’re pleased to introduce another addition to our TDS blogging stable, J.P. Green. He’s written on political issues and social change for newspapers, magazines, television and websites. He has also worked as a speechwriter, lobbyist and activist/organizer in labor, civil rights and other progressive organizations since the 1970’s.
This seasoned voice is the perfect one to offer some ruminations on the current role of the labor movement in progressive politics. His post will be up momentarily.

Aside from the primary date manueverings noted in today’s Staff post, there are other political calendar items worth noting. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times offers a useful if hardly comprehensive list of upcoming political “moments” that we already know about, including three in the next week (Fred Thompson’s announcement on 9/6, Oprah Winfrey’s “house party” fundraiser for Obama on 9/8, and the release of the Petraeus report on Iraq on 9/10). You get the feeling–if only from the frequent references to not-so-viable candidate John McCain–that Nagourney and/or his research assistants put this item into the can some time ago. But it merits a look.

That six Democratic presidential candidates, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Obama, and Richardson, have agreed not to campaign in states that violate the DNC’s rules about primary scheduling should come as welcome news to anxious Democrats. If reason prevails, that should put an end to the states’ early primary leapfrogging. States violating the rules will now lose much of the economic benefit and media spotlight they would otherwise receive, as well as the political clout of voting delegates at next year’s Democratic convention in Denver. It’s hard to imagine Michigan and Florida going forward with their early primary plans with such a costly penalty now locked in place.
There will be grumbling about privilege and fairness. At present, rules permit only four states — Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina — to vote in January. In his statement supporting the pledge not to campaign in states violating the Party’s rules, John Edwards addressed the issue this way, according to Mark Z Barabbak’s L.A. Times report:

The four “need to be first because in these states ideas count, not just money,” Edwards said in a written statement. “This tried-and-true nominating system is the only way for voters to judge the field based on the quality of the candidate, not the depth of their war chest.”

But the agreement of a majority of the Democratic presidential field should help, and the Democratic Party’s national leadership is committed to holding firm. As DNC member and Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile, who had an op-ed on the topic in yesterday’s Washington Post, explained,

Failure to apply the rules would have been an affront to the states that adhered to them — and an invitation for more states to break them…the nominating system should not be determined by a state’s economic development plan or a desire to have candidates focus on parochial issues.

In her New York Times report, Sarah Wheaton explains why the less well-funded candidates may have been the first to sign the pledge not to campaign in the states violating the Party’s early primary rules:

…To campaign in large states like Michigan and Florida, while also stumping in the approved early states, would probably require significant ad buys in expensive media markets. The campaigns of Senators Obama and Clinton may be able to afford that — the others can’t, regardless of strategic priorities for either retail politics or mass messaging.

There is some talk of Michigan and Florida going ahead with non-binding early primaries, detaching the delegate-selection process to a later date to comply with the rules. But it is unclear whether the candidates’ pledge not to campaign in early primary states would still apply under those circumstances.
The GOP rules currently penalize early primary (before Feb. 5) states — including New Hampshire — with the loss of some, but not all delegates, thereby setting the stage for what may prove to be an even more contentious dispute.

Karl Rove’s last day, Tony Snow bails, Gonzales probed, mounting calls for Senator Craig’s resignation and worst of all for the pachyderms, the retirement announcement of Senator John Warner — a likely pick-up for the donkeys, especially if former Virginia Governor Mark Warner decides to run. And for a nice kicker, check out John Judis’s TNR article (well-flagged by Open Left’s Matt Stoller), predicting a Democratic pickup of as many as seven U.S. Senate seats in ’08. Makes for a sweet last weekend of summer.

It’s increasingly obvious that proto-candidate for president Fred Thompson is joining Rudy Giuliani in basically writing off the traditional first two states of the nominating contest–IA and NH–and staking his candidacy on a breakthrough later on.
If that’s not the case, then Fred’s campaign is in even worse trouble than we thought. As Marc Ambinder reminds us, Thompson’s initial foray into Iowa, an appearance at the State Fair a couple of weeks ago, got panned by none other than Fox News, which noted that Thompson had offended Iowans by tooling around the fairgrounds in a golf cart (a prerogative reserved for people with disabilities, or for major Fair donors, but not for politicians), wearing Gucci loafers, no less.
And in NH, Thompson was publicly warned the other day by the powerful Manchester Union-Leader that he’d best declare in candidacy in time to participate in the first Republican candidate forum in the state on September 5. His campaign promptly let it be known that he’d finally announce on–you guessed it–September 6.
Over at DailyKos, Adam B usefullly explains that September 6 is the earliest day on which Thompson can announce and still avoid having to file a third-quarter financial report with the FEC (which among other things, might show an embrassingly poor total).
Meanwhile, the Michigan legislature has expressed even greater disrespect for the IA/NH duopoly tradition, overwhelmingly approving a move to a January 15 presidential primary for both parties. Gov. Jennifer Granholm has said she will sign the bill immediately. Democratic state party chairman Mark Brewer has held out the possibility that delegates will be selected at a later caucus, which would avoid DNC sanctions and turn the primary into a non-binding “beauty contest.” But MI Republicans, like their counterparts in FL, seem inclined to go ahead and dare the national party to sanction them.
If the MI decision sticks, then it’s increasingly likely that we’ll be looking at a nominating contest calendar that begins right after the New Year in IA, continues to NH on January 8, MI on January 15, SC on January 19, FL on January 29, and then to a state near you on the February 5 mega-primary (lost in the shuffle has been the DNC-sanctioned Nevada Democratic Caucus on January 19, the same day as SC). For that to happen, IA will have to modify a state law requiring an 8-day window between its Caucuses and NH, but IA Democrats are pledging to do just that to avoid slipping back into December.
In terms of the MI decision’s impact on the contest itself: who knows? On the Republican side, IA/NH front-runner Mitt Romney has long-standing ties to the state due to his father’s tenure as governor. But it’s also likely to be friendlier territory for Rudy Giuliani than IA or NH, giving him a chance to interrupt Romney’s momentum well before the February 5 primaries when Rudy’s expected to make his big push.
On the Democratic side, all of the Big Three candidates (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) have natural strengths in MI. If it does emerge as a legitimate battleground, it’s mainly bad news for the other candidates, given the cost of campaigning there.
Here’s hoping that MI’s gambit will be the last calendar surprise for 2008.

Read more…

Today marks the second anniversary of Hurricaine Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast, and in New Orleans, retrospectives quickly turn into assessments of how much damage–material and human–remains unaddressed.
George W. Bush is in New Orleans today, and as usual, he is combining an event highlighting conservative policy prescriptions for New Orleans–in this case, school “choice”–with numbing recitations of the amount of money Washington has provided for Katrina relief and recovery.
But the locals aren’t buying it. Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune features an editorial entitled: “Treat Us Fairly, Mr. President,” which notes the administration’s favoritism towards Republican-governed Mississippi in Katrina recovery funding:

Louisiana had three times more damaged homes and seven times more severely damaged homes than Mississippi. Universities in this state had three times as many students displaced and had four times the losses of Mississippi’s campuses. Louisiana fisheries suffered almost 75 percent of the damage done by Katrina, and our hospitals lost 97 percent of the hospital beds closed by the storm.
Yet in every case, Mississippi ended up with a disproportionate share of aid. Housing grants, for instance: Mississippi got $5.5 billion in Community Development Block Grant money for its 61,000 damaged homes. Louisiana, with 204,000 damaged homes, got $10.4 billion. If the aid were given out proportionately, this state would have gotten twice that much….
All Louisiana wants is to be treated fairly. But that hasn’t happened.

But that’s a mild assessment compared to many others. In last Sunday’s Washington Post, historian Douglas Brinkley, whose book The Great Deluge stands as the most comprehensive account of Katrina, penned an op-ed reporting his discussions with New Orleans volunteers stunned by the devastation of neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth War:

The stalled recovery can’t be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I’ve concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine….
Still unfinished is the overhaul of what some call the “Lego levees,” the notoriously flawed 350-mile “flood protection system” that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers starting building in 1965.
The Corps has been busy fixing the three principal holes that opened in August 2005. Its hard work has, in fact, paid a partial dividend. A decent defensive floodwall is now on the east side of the Industrial Canal, attempting to protect the Lower Ninth Ward.
Unfortunately, that is where the upbeat news nosedives. The federal government has refused to shut the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal that helped cause the Katrina “funnel effect” flooding two years ago. In addition, entire neglected neighborhoods still have no adequate flood control.

In other words, despite all the promises and all the tardy presidential visits, the Bush administration continues to treat New Orleans as a low priority, and also continues to blame state and local officials for the slow recovery, even as it implicitly endorses a policy of abandonment for neighborhoods in low-lying areas.
Several Democratic presidentials candidates (and even one Republican, Mike Huckabee) have been in New Orleans over the last few days, deploring the administration’s inaction and offering their own plans. There’s a lot of overlap, with some distinctions. Hillary Clinton’s plan forcuses on Cat-5-proof levees. Edwards is proposing a so-called “Brownie’s Law” to require that political appointees in agencies like FEMA demonstrate they are qualified for their jobs. Obama has promised to shut down the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal.
More generally, memories of Katrina’s aftermath and how it was handled by the current administration will continue to operate as a backdrop to the presidential campaign, serving as a reminder of the positive role of domestic government and of the consequences of decades of conservative anti-government rhetoric. It’s a bit of a cliche by now, but still arguably true, that in 2005, events in two cities–New Orleans and Baghdad–permanently damaged George W. Bush’s credibility and paved the way to the Democratic midterm victory of 2006. And it will be a long time before either city’s scars can be hidden or removed.

After decades of snarky Republican comments besmirching the masculinity of Democratic politicians, Dems can hardly be blamed for a little schadenfreude, watching Republicans squirm when members of their ranks are outed for various transgressions of their much-trumpeted “family values.”
On sober reflection, however, there is probably not much benefit for Dems in the latest GOP scandal involving Senator Craig. For one thing, if Craig resigns, Idaho has a Republican Governor. And, guilty or innocent, Senator Craig will likely be replaced by another Republican, as Stuart Rothenberg reports:

Even though it’s an open seat, Democrats still face a very difficult bid in Idaho. George W. Bush won the state with 67% in 2000 and 68% in 2004, behind only Wyoming and Utah. Idaho hasn’t gone Democratic for President since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 when Barry Goldwater (R) won only a handful of states. The last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race was legendary Sen. Frank Church (D) in 1974. But he lost reelection six years later.

MSNBC’s national affairs writer Tom Curry speculates that the scandal may even help Republicans — “Perhaps he will opt for retirement and open the way for another Republican to run for his seat.” But Curry also notes:

…Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network said “the direct impact of this is that its going to mean a couple of million dollars early” for [Idaho] Democratic Senate contender Larry LaRocco.
…Among Democratic donors nationwide, Rosenberg said, “There’s an enormous amount of money waiting to be deployed. This race goes to the front of the pack in Democratic Senate fundraising.”

While it may seem unlikely that there will be a Senate seat pick-up for Dems in Idaho, the cumulative piling on of GOP disasters could give LaRocca an unexpected edge. Barring the revelation of conclusive proof that Craig was somehow “framed,” the incident will further tarnish the GOP’s image and brand it as the party of hypocritical intolerance. The more Craig protests, the longer the media speculation about his past continues, and he becomes the GOP’s unwelcome poster boy for “family values.”

The end of the Gonzales era at the Justice Department has spurred a lot of spin-off stories, most notably about the Bush administration’s systemic habit of politicizing the executive branch of the federal government, with the U.S. Attorney scandal being the most recent example. This is a phenomenon that has been apparent from the very beginning of the Bush presidency, driven from the very top (see Bruce Reed’s amusing and insightful 2004 Washington Monthly piece on the “hack/wonk” imbalance in the Bush White House).
But it’s useful to drill a bit deeper and sort out the various types of political appointments that Bush and his predecessors–and indeed, executives at the state and local government levels–often make, in order to assess their actual impact.
I’d suggest three categories: true hacks; commissars; and ideological transformers.
True hacks are political people (operatives, supporters, even donors, or sometimes their family members) who are given public employment as a reward or as an inter-campaign holding pen, regardless of their qualifications. This is old-fashioned “patronage” of the sort that various waves of civil service reforms dating from the nineteenth century were intended to rein in (leading most often to the creation of even more lavish political jobs at the top of the bureaucratic pyramid). It’s no secret that latter-day Republican administrations in Washington have infested federal agencies with a disproportionate number of true hacks, for a simple reason: if you don’t believe in various agencies’ missions, and don’t have the guts or political capital to abolish them, then it’s tempting to treat them as jobs programs for your friends and supporters.
The Bush administration’s most notable exercises in mass hack hirings were at FEMA during the Michael Brown era, and in Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority occupation regime in Baghdad. It’s probably not an accident that these agencies were responsible for two of the more spectacular failures of the entire Bush presidency.
Commissars are appointees placed in key agency positions to ensure that the political and ideological goals of the administration are pursued regardless of the agency’s formal mission. These are invariably the most hated of political appointees, since they are by definition disloyal to their ostensible superiors, and often spend most of their time keeping tabs on their colleagues. Monica Goodling, the Justice Department White House liaison who’s been in hot water over the U.S. Attorney Scandal, was the perfect example of the Commissar. (Going back a ways, Paul Craig Roberts, now a scourge of the neocons, was installed at Treasury in Ronald Reagan’s first term to ensure fidelity to the supply-side gospel, as noted in David Stockman’s definitive account of the era).
Ideological transformers are appointees, usually at a very high level, whose job is to actively subvert or fundamentally change an agency’s mission, without benefit of legal authorization. If you look at the high subcabinet posts for virtually every agency that regulates corporations in every Republican administration since Reagan’s election, you find a lot of such appointees. Bush 43 has famously made a habit of appointing people to regulatory commissions and science review boards who are foxes-in-the-henhouse, fighting their jobs instead of performing them.
(One of the most bizarre examples of this kind of appointee occurred in 1983, when Reagan named Alfred S. Regnery–of the right-wing publishing family–to head the Office of Juvenile Justice, responsible for anti-child-abuse programs. During Regnery’s confirmation hearings, someone spotted his car at the Capitol sporting a bumper sticker that read: “Have you slugged your kid today?”).
While the current administration hasn’t, to my knowledge, created any new categories of political appointees, there is one unique aspect to its deployment of them. Typically, political appointments soar at the beginning of a presidency, when there are tons of campaign staff to offload; high levels of paranoia about the loyalities of holdover officials; and all sorts of ambitious ideological goals to implement. They tend to tail off later on, though sometimes you see a fair number of true hacks who haven’t gotten rewarded yet get last-minute placeholder jobs. But as the U.S. Attorney scandal itself has illustrated, this administration seems to be engaging in wholesale politicization of the executive branch at an undiminished pace nearly seven years into its tenure. Perhaps the Bushies think the next president will be a Republican who will continue these practices. Or perhaps they simply want to do as much damage to the integrity and competence of the federal government as they possibly can, out of sheer spite and habitual recklessness.

One well-subscribed scenario for the 2008 Republican presidential contest has been that Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson will compete early on for the True Conservative Candidate mantle and an opportunity to take on Rudy Giuliani in the February 5 mega-primary, with Mike Huckabee possibly emerging as a dark-horse alternative.
Romney continues to lead all polls in IA and NH, and Huckabee’s duly made his appearance on Stage Right with a second-place showing at the Iowa Republican Straw Poll earlier this month. But where’s Fred?
There’s a corrosive article by Jonathan Martin up today at the Washington insider publication The Politico suggesting that Thompson’s just too disorganized and dispirited to run a serious presidential campaign.
Back in early summer, one very smart conservative with presidential campaign experience told me that Thompson’s decision about seriously contesting Iowa–one way or another–might well be the biggest turning point in the entire GOP nominating process. Fred’s shown every indication of giving Iowa a pass, instead staking almost everything on breakthrough wins in SC and FL. And the decision might have made sense if he had used the time gained by the delayed announcement of candidacy to create a tight, efficient, well-funded campaign organization.
Instead, says Martin:

Thompson’s plunge into the race, which aides once indicated would happen around the Fourth of July and is now planned for after Labor Day, comes amid increasingly public hand-wringing by supporters over whether he has waited too long to capitalize on the surge of interest that accompanied reports of a potential candidacy more than five months ago.
Beyond the mere anxiety of the waiting game, he has suffered through a summer of stumbles. In a short period of time, Thompson has already been hit with the sort of problems that it takes most campaigns months longer — not to mention a full-blown candidacy — to accrue.

These problems include a whole host of staff departures; infrequent and lackluster candidate appearances; and most of all, money shortages. Even Thompson himself is sending out signals that fundraising isn’t going that well. And potential donors can’t be too happy about writing checks to pay for staff who are likely to hit the bricks after a few weeks of exposure to the proto-campaign.
Still, Fred’s running second in virtually every national poll of Republicans, illustrating the powerful unhappiness of GOPers with the field. And he’s neck and neck with Rudy in SC.
But he’d best get a move on. As an actor, Thompson surely understands that his assigned role in the campaign narrative is as the Establishment Conservative: a safe alternative to his flawed rivals who also has some general-election potential. And that’s why for Fred-Heads, reading articles like Martin’s in a beltway outlet like The Politico must feel like hearing (to borrow a phrase from a very different Thompson, the late Hunter) the Hound of the Baskervilles snuffling and howling on your front porch.