Terrence McNally has posted an illuminating interview with Drew Westen, author of this year’s influential political strategy book “Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” McNally’s intro to the Alternet interview notes Kenyan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo’s incisive summary of Westen’s book:

Westen has studied elections over the years, and found an inconvenient truth: People almost always vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the one who presents the best arguments

Of course Westen also summarizes his book in several exchanges throughout the interview and provides some alternative responses for Democratic candidates. See also TDS’s posts on Westen’s book here and here.

If you have any reason to care about web traffic, you might want to check out a New York Times piece (via Matt Yglesias) that explains why it’s always hard to answer the question: “Who reads your blog?”
Aside from the basic problem of sorting out hits, unique visits, and pageviews, and determining their relevance, there are a host of technological and even philosophical issues that have prevented the emergence of any “gold standard” for internet site traffic measurement. And the variety of measurement tools complicates the picture immensely.
Back when I was writing NewDonkey.com, I neglected to look at site traffic reports for a couple of months, and when I did, nearly had a heart attack, due to what appeared to be a calamitous drop in traffic for no apparent reason. Turns out we had shifted from one measurement tool to another, and I never did quite figure out whether the old, good numbers were more reliable than the new, not-so-good numbers.
I’ve been tempted to conclude that web traffic stats are like poll numbers: the important thing to watch is the trend-lines within measurement tools using the same methodology. But there are a host of problems that make that approach unreliable as well, viz., the use of RSS feeds, which in some incarnations boost actual traffic while reducing measurable traffic. And as the Times piece, by Louise Story, explains, you also have to pay attention to technological issues on the consumer end, particularly large server software that makes individual usage impossible to measure, and “cookie deletion” by individuals that thwarts tracking.
Story suggests, accurately, that this problem is probably inhibiting the growth of internet-based advertising, which relies on accurate understanding of target audiences. But it also affects a vast number of internet-based political voices, whose reach is hard to assess. Sometimes you have to measure impact by quality as well as quantity, and by how well you reach the destination through the traffic you encounter.

A couple of interesting morning reads focus on the Democratic presidential field. The Washington Post, as part of its occasional “Gurus” series, has a feature by Chris Cillizza on Edwards consultant Joe Trippi, with a rather provocative title: “The Dean-ing of Edwards.” The main point of the piece is that Trippi’s influence is attributable to a kindred-spirits relationship he enjoys with Elizabeth Edwards.
And over at the Wall Street Journal, an article billed as being about the hope dark horses draw from the retail politics of Iowa turns out to focus almost exclusively on Joe Biden, though it does mention that Chris Dodd recently moved his family to the state.
Oddly, enough, the piece doesn’t mention one of Biden’s hidden advantages: he campaigned in Iowa in 1988, before his candidacy folded due to a plagiarism flap. Too bad for him he didn’t retain two of his 1988 Iowa supporters: former governor Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie, who are key cogs in Hillary Clinton’s Iowa campaign this year.

In their Rockridge Institute multi-part post “The Logic of the Health Care Debate,” George Lakoff, Eric Haas, Glenn W. Smith and Scott Parkinson dissect the rationales, assumptions and arguments behind the debate over health care reform. It’s very much a Lakoffian exercise, contrasting the psycholinguistics behind “progressive, conservative, and neoliberal” verbiage on health care. Democratic campaigns should find the insights helpful in addressing Republican spin on one of the top-ranking concerns of voters. For example, from the section on “The Conservative Mode of Thought”

In the conservative mode of thought, securing health insurance is a matter of individual responsibility. In this view, health care is a commodity that should be bought and sold through insurance policies in the market. If someone wants a commodity, they should work hard to afford it. In a free market economy — given that America is a land of opportunity — they will be able to do so. Anyone without health insurance for himself or his family just isn’t working hard enough and doesn’t deserve it. It’s just like plasma TVs; if you want one, work hard to afford one. Otherwise, you won’t get it, because you haven’t worked hard enough, and you don’t deserve it.
From the principle of individual responsibility, it follows that employers should never be forced to provide health insurance for their employees. They might choose freely to do so in order to attract talent, but that should be their free choice.
Within the conservative mode of thought, the market is both natural and moral. Natural in that people instinctively seek their own profit and moral in that those who are most disciplined will be most likely to prosper. Market outcomes are therefore always moral and most practical, since the market optimizes the fair and efficient distribution of goods and services. Government interference compromises both the efficiency and morality of market processes.
In conservative thought, health insurance should be a money-making business; it will be most fair and efficient that way. Conservative thought also supports private medical accounts on two similar grounds. First, they are moral because they make the individual responsible. Second, they are practical in that the money can be invested in the market, thereby creating more profits for more people.
What about the denial of care or coverage? In conservative thought this is inevitable and necessary. Your lack of coverage is your own fault. You have not been self-disciplined. You have failed in your individual responsibility to earn it. It’s not the fault of the market or insurance companies. Insurance companies provide a service at a profit, and when they cannot provide that service at a profit, they should not do so. Moreover, those who are uncovered have an incentive to work harder and earn coverage. People do not have the moral right to have someone else pay for their health care coverage; indeed it would be immoral to do so, since that promotes dependency.
Promoting dependency — whether by patients, doctors, or plan administrators — is the root of the conservative fear of health care for all Americans. Conservatives label this as “socialized medicine” or “government health care,” and they argue that health care for all Americans will undermine our self-discipline and make us weak. This is, above all, a moral issue for conservatives, which is why economic efficiency arguments alone will not carry the day with them. For example, we already know that U.S. Medicare and Canada’s single-payer health care system are more efficiently managed than U.S. private, profit-maximizing insurance companies.3 There is also compelling evidence that savings on the profit and administrative costs of the current private insurance companies could pay for health care for all Americans, if it were run as a single payer system.4 From the conservative perspective, these plans are still viewed from top to bottom as unearned entitlements — automatic care for patients, guaranteed income for doctors, and lifetime jobs for government administrators — and so promote dependency and are immoral.
Finally, once health care is understood as a commodity, then the logic of the market sets the value of human life and limb. Therefore, there should be a limit — a cap — on the value that can be claimed in a lawsuit when medical error causes disability or death.
This conservative logic fits perfectly the practice of health insurance companies and makes sense of the following quotes from conservative leaders.

The authors then quote Nixon, Guiliani, Romney and the National Review to prove their point. In their equally-eloquent section on “The Neoliberal Mode of Thought,” they discuss the “Surrender-in-Advance Trap” that they feel some Democrats have blundered into, noting:

With an exaggerated emphasis on system-based solutions, neoliberal thought may lead one to surrender in advance the moral view that drives an initiative in the first place. Those who pragmatically focus on appeasing what they assume will be unavoidable political opposition to their proposals also run the risk of moral surrender…They deeply believe that progressive moral principles can be served through neoliberal methods and forms of argument. We want to stress, however, that the consequence is dire whatever the motivation. The failure to articulate a clear progressive morality in favor of more technocratic solutions to profit-maximizing markets puts the progressive cause at a disadvantage on health care and other policy issues as well. It doesn’t matter whether one is simply trying to avoid conservative and insurance company opposition or whether one truly believes in one’s heart that the market will cure us. The progressive moral basis for providing health care for all — empathy and responsibility, protection and empowerment — is not stated. As a result, Americans don’t get to hear the progressive moral basis for extending health care to all Americans, and they don’t get to decide whether they agree with that moral premise. Americans only hear the conservative moral view. That moves them in a conservative direction, not only on this issue, but on all issues.

Lakoff et al see the neoliberal approach as a poor substitute for comprehensive reform, and one which has deadly consequences:

System tinkering — eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions, adding mandatory coverage for this or that ailment, subsidizing (substandard) health care for the poor — will make a difference for many, but not for all. It will leave many more people with the kind of dissatisfaction that those with present health insurance have rightly been complaining about. Tinkering like that is more concerned with saving a system that has already failed than it is with the health of a society, indeed, with saving lives.

The authors’ argument is moral at the root, but they do offer an important strategic consideration:

The best way to proceed is to keep what we care the most about at the center of the discussion of health care security. What we care the most about is the actual health and well-being of flesh-and-blood people. Keeping this care in our hearts does not mean that temporary compromises will not be necessary. It means only that we don’t begin with compromise.

Lakoff and his co-authors have made a compelling argument for a bold strategy for comprehensive health care reform, and they have a lot more to say about the terms of the debate than can be recounted here. Democratic candidates would do well to give due consideration to their challenge on the road to November ’08.

Check out this column from St. Pete Times political editor Adam C. Smith, and tell me if you buy it. Its subject is the alleged advantage Republicans are going to get, now and apparently forever, due to the Democratic presidential candidate boycott of next year’s Florida primary. (Republicans are merely going to strip Florida of half its delegates).
Sure sounds dubious to me. We are supposed to believe that Floridians have instantly acquired the self-referential obsession with their role in the nominating process that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have developed over many moons. Given Florida’s size and perpetual general-election relevance, it’s hard to believe its citizens think a well-attended primary is important to either the state’s economy or its political standing. But when I was in the state recently, it’s true you heard a lot about this from Democrats as well as Republicans.
In any event, I’m glad I read Smith’s piece, if only to marvel at this quote from state GOP chair Jim Greer: “Our party, because of what the Democrats have done, has an opportunity that it has never had before to step forward and say every vote will count…”
Yeah, that would be a first.

Open Left’s Matt Stoller riffs on Jeff Zeleny’s Sunday New York Times review of Howard Dean’s performance at the helm of the DNC, and Stoller adds some perceptive insights of his own, including:

The DNC’s fundraising has been horrific, and Dean has completely lost control of the primary calendar. There are some good spots in his record, but in my opinion, the lessons to learn here are about what not to do with a party institution when you gain power. First, let’s go over the good parts. The technology platform that Dean oversaw to handle voter files is terrific; DNC data geeks are cleaning up data, forcing accountability on vendors, and working to ensure that officials will have the ability to make smart political decisions. That’s not a small problem to solve, since keeping lists of who will vote and why they will vote is complicated and had not been solved in twenty five years of fretting by DNC Chairs about technology. Dean has also served as a good moral inspiration to activists. Emphasizing the ability of individuals to get involved, pushing power and funding to the state parties, and branding the 50 state strategy are clearly useful transformative qualities for a party.

Stoller has more to say, pro and con, and his assessment seems balanced enough. Some of the comments responding to Stoller’s blog add perspective, although it would be good to see a response from Dean or someone in the DNC. Now seems like a good time to address internal criticism of Democratic Party institutions, conducted in a constructive spirit and moving towards greater Party unity in the home stretch.

For politics-as-sheer-fun, you might want to check out Joshua Green’s Atlantic piece offering a mock-serious strategy for a mock-serious Stephen Colbert primary run in South Carolina.
Like Colbert at his best, Green eerily comes close to “truthiness” now and then, as when he suggests that the media coverage the comedian would soak up might be bad news for lower-tier candidates, and particularly for Ron Paul, whose young-white-male-internet-based supporters (“pot smokers,” says an unnamed Republican consultant) are probably Colbert-watchers as well. Leaping over the top, Green offers a brief discussion of the often-overlooked “drunken college student” demographic.
But I’m guessing Josh is dead serious in offering his services to Colbert as campaign manager. The cool-factor alone–not to mention future book deals and television bookings–would make the gig invaluable.

GOPers continue to dominate the political news after a candidate debate in Florida yesterday. Noam Scheiber has a good analysis, which focuses on candidates’ efforts to pursue their own strategies rather than “winners” and “losers” handicapping. Ryan Lizza does a big profile on Mitt Romney for The New Yorker, and stresses the Mittster’s experience as a management consultant as a source of his strengths and weaknesses.
Meanwhile, Robert Novak probably raised some right-wing eyebrows this morning by penning a valentine to Rudy Giuliani, via an upbeat description of his base of support among conservatives in California. And Fareed Zakaria reviews the largely fact-free case conservatives have been making for a preemptive war against Iran, which requires, among other things, a sunny retroactive take on the “rationality” of Stalin and Mao.

There’s much rejoicing on the Right today after Bobby Jindal’s unsurprising win in yesterday’s Louisiana open primary for Governor. I guess I don’t blame them: Jindal’s a welcome poster-boy for alleged GOP ethnic diversity, and his win provides a rare Republican success story on a bleak overall electoral landscape. The reality is that he won with relative ease due to the combo platter of the post-Katrina demographic change in Louisiana, and an opposition that was badly hurt by the late decisions of Kathleen Blanco, John Breaux and Mitch Landreiu to stay out of the race (Landreiu, BTW, won re-election as Lt. Governor by a larger margin than Jindal managed).
But some of the Republican reaction has been a little over-the-top. My favorite is this bit from prominent right-wing blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.org, a native Louisianan who now lives in Georgia:

I cannot really express what this means to me.
It’s like how the exiled English felt when Mary I died and Elizabeth was crowned. It was safe to go home again.

Somehow I don’t think more-Catholic-than-the-Pope Bobby Jindal would be too jazzed about this analogy.

The conclusion of the Family Research Council’s Value Voters Summit got a lot of ink, not only from venerable conservative Right-watcher Byron York, but from Kate Sheppard of TAPPED (with some help from Sarah Posner), here, and at TNR’s The Stump blog.
The general consensus about the Christian Right panderfest was that the winnner was Mike Huckabee, who won the most applause for his speech, and who also overwhelmingly won the onsite straw poll (even as Romney edged him in the online FRC straw poll that’s been underway since August).
Rudy’s “reaching-out” effort to evangelical conservatives got mixed reviews. York thinks Rudy might have done himself some good, not in terms of nominating-contest support, but in convincing some Christian Right folk not to head for the exits if he’s the Republican nominee.
Fred Thompson–once the Great Right Hope of some Christian conservatives–seemed to lose ground at the event, delivering a languid and empty speech, and not doing that well in the straw poll (scoring 8 percent in the onsite survey, and a bit under 10 percent in the online version).
But while Huckabee gave himself a much-needed boost at the FRC event, it may come at a price: his speech was a masterpiece of extremism. Aside from firmly identifying himself as “from” the Christian Right; echoing demands for constitutional amendments to ban all abortions and gay marriage; thundering about “Islamofascism;” and hurling anathemas at Republican cultural dissenters as violaters of “God’s values;” Huck adopted the bizarre Zell Miller/Tom DeLay argument about the connection between abortion and illegal immigration:

“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

The abortion-denies-us-cheap-domestic-labor idea will probably get less attention than Huckabee’s use of Holocaust imagery for legalized abortion, though the latter has long been a staple of Christian Right rhetoric. In any event, the more Huckabee articulates his actual views, the more we might hope the honeymoon he’s enjoying with mainstream media types will eventually fade.