The emerging CW on the Republican presidential race over the last few weeks has been that it was developing into a two-candidate contest between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, with McCain stuck in neutral, Thompson fading, and only Mike Huckabee providing any suspense (aside from the financial pyrotechics of Ron Paul).
With today’ surprising endorsement by the National Right To Life Committee, Fred Thompson appears to have become the Undead. The nod was a particular blow to Mitt Romney and to Mike Huckabee.
But via Todd Beeton, we learn that Romney got some good news yesterday as well: an endorsement by the California Republican Assembly, an important conservative factional group in the Golden State. From all accounts, he won the endorsement pretty much the way he won last August’s Iowa State Republican Straw Poll: with elbow grease and big sacks of cash (many “delegates” to the CRA conference were recruited by the Romney campaign and had no prior association with the group).
Since California was supposed to be Rudy Giuliani’s stomping grounds, this could be a relatively large deal.
In general, this week’s events reinforce the impression that the GOP presidential field remains very unsettled, with no one exactly making a move to lock things down.
And today’s news also makes me wonder if Robert Novak is losing his touch as an analyst of conservative Republican infighting. Just last week he did a column suggesting that Fred Thompson had profoundly, perhaps irreversibly, alienated right-to-lifers in an appearance on Meet the Press. Not so much, it appears. And about three weeks ago, he did another column documenting the deep satisfaction of California conservatives with Rudy Giuliani, his positions on abortion and gay rights notwithstanding. Wrong again, Batman.
I’ll certainly look for second-source verification next time I read a breathless proclamation from the Prince of Darkness about the course of the GOP nominating contest.

Word is Governor Sonny Perdue is going to lead a group of legislators and ministers in prayers for rain on the Georgia State Capitol steps tomorrow, as the Great Drought moves closer each day to shutting down water taps in Georgia and Alabama.
Church-state separation advocates are criticizing Sonny for leading prayers on state property. Maybe instead he just should have asked radio stations in Georgia to simultaneously broadcast the great indie rock classic by Georgia’s own Guadalcanal Diary, Pray for Rain, which was occasionally played during weather reports amidst an earlier drought in the 1980s:
Don’t call for love
Don’t ask for gold
our daily bread
or no more pain
pray for rain
Perdue could also pray for serious study of the impact of climate change on weather patterns, or for a reconsideration of metro Atlanta’s endless development sprawl. But I’m guessing he thinks the Almighty is a Republican.

As a Veterans Day meditation, I thought it might be a good idea to take a fresh look at one of the most contentious subjects in intra-party discussions: How Democrats can clearly differentiate themselves from Republicans on national security issues without falling into the “weak on defense” stereotypes conservatives have spent many years and billions of dollars promoting.
To make a very long story short, there have been at least five basic strategic takes on this subject among Democrats in recent years:
1) Ignore national security as “enemy territory” and focus on maximizing Democratic advantages on domestic issues (the default position of Democratic congressional campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s).
2) Agree with Republican positions on national security to “take them off the table” and then seek to make elections turn on domestic issues where Democrats have an advantage (the Dick Gephardt strategy for congressional Dems in 2002 and for his own presidential campaign in 2004; also common among Democrats running for office in conservative areas).
3) Vociferously oppose Republican positions on national security (and particularly the use of military force) in order to convey “strength,” on the theory that “weakness” is the real message of conservative “weak on defense” attacks (a common assumption among bloggers and activists arguing that a single-minded focus on ending the Iraq War is a sufficient national security message).
(4) Oppose Republican positions on national security while focusing on Democratic respect for, and material support for, “the troops” and veterans, on the theory that a lack of solidarity with the armed services is the real message of conservative “undermining our troops” attacks (a common theme in the Kerry 2004 campaign and in post-2004 Democratic messaging).
(5) Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions (e.g., the 2002-2004 Clark/Graham “right idea, wrong target” criticisms of the Iraq invasion as distracting and undermining the legitimate fight against terrorists).
There are obviously variations on and combinations of all five strategies, and one could add two relatively marginal approaches: the “anti-imperialist” position that explicitly denies the value of a strong national security posture, and the occasional suggestion that Democrats should “move to the right” of Republicans by supporting military actions more fervently than the opposition.
This entire subject was brought to the forefront of the Democratic presidential contest over the weekend by Barack Obama’s well-received Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech, which, inter alia, criticized Democrats (implicitly, Hillary Clinton) for failing to maintain partisan differentiation on national security:

I am running for president because I am sick and tired of Democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security by talking and acting and voting like George Bush Republicans. When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say I voted for the war in Iraq or gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran or that I support Bush/Cheney policies of not talking to people we don’t like.

This rap is obviously a direct appeal to those Democrats who believe HRC is guilty of strategy #2, and also to those who favor strategy #3. But Obama also makes a gesture towards strategy #5 by going on to say:

I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century – nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

The hard thing about strategy #5 is that it’s complicated, requiring an overall vision of U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy that is difficult to sharply and simply convey while maintaining partisan differentiation. The tendency to simply substitute “diplomacy” for “use of force” in dealing with every conceivable security challenge arguably plays into Republican taunts that Democrats are allergic to the use of force, period.
But there is one national security topic on which Democrats have a built-in advantage wherein they could not only conveys “toughness” and seriousness on national security, but also rebut years of Republican attacks: military readiness. As Steve Benen points out today at TalkingPointsMemo, the “Clinton hollowed out the military” myth was not only a staple of Bush’s 2000 campaign, and a subtext of attacks on Kerry’s defense record in 2004, but is still being monotonously repeated by 2008 Republican candidates:

Bush has stretched the military to the breaking point, and Republican presidential candidates want to emphasize rebuilding the Armed Forces as part of their platforms. But to acknowledge the incredible strains on the current military is to implicitly hold the president to account for his irresponsible policies.
What to do? Blame Clinton, of course.

For Democrats, talking about rebuilding the U.S. military in acknowledgement of an era of asymmetric warfare, and the limits on military power we’ve painfully learned in Iraq, is a good way simultaneously to draw attention to Bush’s assault on military readiness (a source of considerable ongoing grief within the military itself), to deride the national security “thinking” behind the Iraq War and the drive to war with Iran, and to identify with “the troops.” That doesn’t necessarily mean support for an increased defense spending or even an expanded active military. But it does clearly indicate that a Democratic commander-in-chief will pursue a defense strategy markedly different from the GOP contenders, who are still trying to win unwinnable wars (and perhaps start others) based on the “world’s sole superpower” illusion of the immediate post-Cold War period.
The political futility, and unprincipled nature, of Democratic strategies #1 and #2 on national security are pretty apparent by now. Strategy #4 is a good defensive measure, but often sounds evasive, and on occasion runs the risk of treating troops as victims rather than as heroes. Perhaps strategy #3 will work politically, but it’s hard to imagine a Democratic candidate getting through an entire general election campaign saying little or nothing about national security other than the desire to reverse every single decision made by George W. Bush. So strategy #5 might well be essential, as well as prinicipled (giving voters a clear idea of what a Democratic commander-in-chief would do, not just undo), and military readiness might be a good place to start a message of “differentiation with strength.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Cynthia Tucker shows why she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in her Sunday op-ed, “Democrats must lead way on immigration.” Any Dems thinking about going all wobbly on the issue should first give Tucker’s eloquent essay a read. Tucker gives the GOP a richly-deserved blistering for their nativist position on immigration and adds:

…here’s some counterintuitive advice for the Democratic ranks: Don’t hedge. Lead. Do the right thing. Come out clearly and forcefully for putting illegal immigrants already in the country on a path to citizenship. This is no time to trim or triangulate. Show some spine. America is ready for reasoned leadership on this issue.
…So let the GOP be the party of fear and division. Democrats ought to stand for something else. The modern Democratic Party also made its choice in the 1960s, choosing hope over fear, tolerance over division and the beloved community over bigotry.
…This is no time for Democrats to turn their backs on that heritage. America is too generous and compassionate to expel millions of productive and otherwise law-abiding people. The nation has taken advantage of their labor for decades, and it would be inhumane (and outrageously expensive) to round them up and send them back.

Tucker suggests a reasonable alternative:

But Americans also want to be assured that this is the last time a broad legalization option is offered to illegal immigrants. Democrats ought to make it clear that they’ll enforce the borders and crack down on employers who hire illegally, a cheaper and more effective strategy for addressing the problem than building fences. After a few CEOs have done the perp walk for illegal hiring, they’ll stop offering jobs to those without proper documents. And when word gets across the border that U.S. companies have stopped hiring, those laborers will stop coming. They come for jobs, after all, not jihad.
This is a win-win platform. Not only is it wise and honorable, calling on the highest ideals of a nation of immigrants, it can also produce victories at the ballot box. Last week, Virginia Democrats made gains in state and local elections even though the state has been embroiled in fiery debate over illegal immigration. As an analysis by the Washington Post concluded, voting trends didn’t benefit “those who campaigned the loudest for tough sanctions against illegal immigrants.”
Let Republicans take the low road. It doesn’t end in a place the rest of the country wants to go.

This debate is just getting started, and Tucker’s challenge merits consideration.

Timothy Noah’s Slate article “Decoding David Brooks,” sheds some fresh light on the New York Times columnist’s most recent screed attempting to rescue Reagan’s legacy from the taint of racism (See also J.P. Green’s post on the topic here and The Atlantic.com‘s discussion lead by Matthew Yglesias here). Noah says that Brooks’ column was really a bank shot at fellow New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has often noted Reagan’s endorsement of “states’ rights” at his 1980 campaign launch in Philadelphia, MS. Apparently there is some sort of unwritten code that Times columnists can’t attack each other by name.
Big mistake for Brooks, whose regular shtick is more in the vein of wry/snarky op-eds about American culture and class. In his ‘Conscience of a Liberal’ blog, Krugman fillets and shreds Brooks’ implied message that Reagan was innocent of racial antagonism, and Krugman does it all without mentioning Brooks’ name. Yglesias comments on the whole Brooks-Krugman dust-up and his readers join the fray here.

No Democratic Presidential candidate has won Virginia since 1964. But a combination of demographic trends, local issues, Republican screw-ups and some solid rebuilding work by the state Democratic Party have combined to give Dems new hope for winning VA’s 13 electroral votes next year.
For those who want to savor or better understand the Democrats victories in the Virginia elections last week, we have a trio of articles from Virginia websites. First, most Dems won’t relish her conclusion — that a “right-of-center message” will win VA’s electoral votes next year — but there is some interesting detail on key issues pertaining to local Democratic victories in Margaret Edd’s “6 lessons from the 2007 ballot” in the Virginian-Pilot. Also check out Michael Sluss’s Roanoke Times piece “Democrats see a possible blue Virginia,” arguing that a centrist appeal is the key to future Democratic victories in the state. Finally, Tyler Whitley and Jeff E. Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch have the oppo take in their interesting article “Va. GOP debates direction to take: Party’s conservatives and moderates disagree on why Senate shifted to Democrats.”

Noam Scheiber’s “The Stump” blog at The New Republic echoes an observation noted in our staff post a week ago — that Mitt Romney’s campaign is gathering some serious momentum, as indicated by recent polls in NH, IA and SC. Scheiber has the numbers, and it looks like Iowa is Romney’s to lose, with a 14 point lead. He also has a 7.4 percent lead in New Hampshire and is gaining in South Carolina.
His growing lead is not as deep or broad as Senator Clinton’s Democratic numbers, and may have more to do with his well-timed ad buys, as John B. Judis has suggested:

Romney, on the other hand, continues to run strongly in the first three states, including South Carolina. In the American Research Group polls, Romney leads Huckabee by 27 to 19 percent in Iowa, he leads Giuliani by 30 to 23 percent in New Hampshire, and leads Giuliani by 29 to 23 percent in South Carolina. If Romney can win these states and Michigan, which also votes early, he could get a boost that would allow him to defeat Giuliani in the South and to compete with him in the big states in the West, Middle West and Northeast.
The question about Romney is how much his current popularity depends on an extensive ad campaigns that he has been running. Will his popularity hold up once the other candidates begin competing on the airwaves? According to polls, Romney’s support is far from solid. In the Marist poll in New Hampshire of likely voters, only 37 percent of Romney’s supporters back him “strongly.” By comparison, 48 percent of Giuliani’s supporters, and 56 percent of McCain’s are strong backers.

Romney would bring some significant negatives as a nominee, including his flip-flopping track record — you can almost see the ‘weather vane’ ads. However, Romney, a cum laude grad of Harvard Law and a top 5 percent grad of the Harvard Biz School, has a lot of experience dealing with progressives. He may be the shrewdest strategist of the comparatively weak GOP field, having been elected Governor of Massachusetts as a Mormon and Republican and spearheaded Massachusetts’ health care reform legislation. His sneering reference to New York as a ‘sanctuary city’ suggests he intends to use immigration as a wedge issue to win support from swing voters. Although Clinton still polls well against Romney, his campaign clearly knows how to push polls and deploy campaign resources. Whoever we nominate, I would prefer any other Republican opponent.

At John Hopkins’s School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered a speech on foreign policy and partisanship that seemed designed to validate everything his Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him (and I count myself in this group, though not since his loss to Ned Lamont in Connecticut in the Democratic primary last year).
Press accounts reported that at some point (probably a post-speech Q&A) Lieberman said he might not support the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. But the speech itself pointed more than sufficiently in that direction. Its essence was to define a “muscular” FDR/Truman/JFK Democratic foreign policy, on which the two parties have repeatedly reversed roles, with Republicans currently “for” and Democrats “against.” Joe Lieberman himself, the speech suggests, seems to be the only consistent advocate for that tradition, emulating the brave example of Democrat-turned-Republican-advisor Paul Nitze, whose name is attached to SAIS.
I really encourage Democrats who have defended Lieberman in the past to read this speech. It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were “good” from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be “bad.” Democrats were “bad” from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were “good.” During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were “good” and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were “bad,” and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman’s running-mate Al Gore “good,” the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush “bad”). Both parties were “good” from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were “good” and Democrats turned “bad” (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely “bad” in opposing the war).
These judgments appear based on an interpretation of the “muscular” Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law–all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support. You’d also never know, since Lieberman never acknowledges it, that the leading Democratic presidential candidates don’t simply identify themselves with opposition to Bush on Iraq and Iran, but have offered their own detailed national security plans which take Islamic jihadism quite seriously as a threat.
In other words, Lieberman’s speech is less a rebuke to the “‘antiwar” Democrats who helped deny him the party’s nomination to the Senate in 2006, than a challenge to liberal internationalists whom he places on the wrong side of a choice between preemptive unilateralism and isolationism and chaos. This is one occasion on which so-called “liberal hawks” need to take the lead in repudiating Joe. As Sam Boyd at TAPPED suggests, in an essentially accurate if exaggerated view, Lieberman is saying “you’re either with Norman Podheretz, or with Noam Chomsky.”
Democrats who vehemently deny this false choice should be in the forefront of those vehemently denouncing Joe Lieberman’s latest descent into full-bore neoconservatism, which isn’t just about foreign policy, but about the wilfull subjection of every progressive instinct on every issue to the monomaniacal drive for warfare against every enemy, foreign or domestic.

Scott Helman of the Boston Globe reports from South Carolina on a wrinkle in the “electability” debate that especially affects Barack Obama: the strong belief of many African-Americans that their white fellow citizens will never elect a black president, at least any time soon.
Unsurprisingly, this feeling is particularly strong in the South, where such attractive African-American statewide candidates as North Carolina’s Harvey Gantt and Tennessee’s Harold Ford have succumbed to racially-charged negative campaigns.

“Personally, I don’t think he has a chance in hell,” said Leah Josey, a 20-year-old English major at Morris College, a Baptist school in Sumter. “All those white people? Come on.”
Such sentiments are prevalent among black South Carolinians, who are expected to make up nearly half of voters in the Democratic primary in January. Nearly a third of black voters surveyed in a statewide poll in September said white Americans would not vote for a black presidential candidate.

This helps explain why Obama is running no better than even with, and in many polls, well behind, Hillary Clinton among African-American Democrats nationally, and also why he’s running behind her in South Carolina. And I’d have to say that anecdotally, Helman’s report comports with what I’ve personally heard from some African-American elected officials who express negative opinions about Obama’s electibility not as a fear, but as a bedrock conviction.

“Obama’s chief opponents are ‘Mr. and Mrs. He-can’t-win,’ ” said I.S. Leevy Johnson, a lawyer and power broker in Columbia who is active in Obama’s campaign. “You hear it a lot because historically that has been the case.”

Now it’s true that this sort of ambivalent feeling is common towards “pioneer” candidates. Elizabeth Edwards has not-so-subtly appealed to the fears of some women that Hillary Clinton would actually set back the cause of gender equality in politics by losing a general election. And going back a while, many Catholic opinion-leaders in 1960 openly opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on grounds that it would become a lightning rod for anti-Catholic prejudices.
But in the end, an overwhelming majority of Catholics did vote for Kennedy, and the question is whether the excitement of a viable campaign would dispel electibility concerns about Clinton among women and Obama among African-Americans.
Fortunately for Obama, by the time the primary calendar rolls around to SC, the question will either be moot, or he will have already demonstrated strong support in the exceptionally pale electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire. Just as JFK’s landslide primary win over Hubert Humphrey in profoundly Protestant West Virginia in 1960 helped dispel fears that he couldn’t win Protestants, an Obama win in Iowa would be hard to ignore. In general, if the millstone of African-American skepticism about Obama is as strong as Helman’s report suggests, and if he can dispel it, then Obama’s “upside” against Clinton in the South and in other states with large African-American populations may be higher than many analysts realize.

David Brooks has the latest installment in the never-ending effort to sanitize the late President Ronald Reagan’s track record. In his op-ed column in today’s New York Times, Brooks makes his case that the charge “that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion,” referring to Reagan’s 1980 campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, most famous as the site where three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were murdered in 1964.
It is impossible to prove what Reagan intended to do on that occasion. Certainly, those who were involved in the decision and who are still alive would be unlikely to admit that it was a deliberate effort to exploit racial animosity. For the same reason, it is equally-impossible to disprove his intentions. What is known is what Reagan said on that day, and Brooks quotes him:

Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.

Brooks expects his readers to believe that the use of the term ‘states’ rights’ in that town was not intended to evoke segregationist sympathies, even when the previous sentence makes it clear that education is the primary issue here. What Brooks doesn’t provide is a little more background on Reagan’s views on racial justice, as does Sydney Blumenthal in his article in The Guardian:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it “humiliating to the South”), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” he said, “he has a right to do so.” After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: “I believe in states’ rights.

Alec Dubro points out in his TomPaine.com article ‘Reagan White As Snow” that Reagan also vetoed anti-apartheid legislation and did what he could to screw up it’s implementation after the veto was overridden.
The reason Reagan’s record has any relevance to today’s politics is that the current GOP field is so weak that they feel a need to repeatedly invoke Reagan’s name as a touchstone to recall better times for their Party. Brooks and other Republicans, however, would be wiser to say as little as possible about Reagan’s racial views and policies.