This report from Byron York on National Review‘s The Corner blog about the ongoing “Values Voter Summit” sponsored by the Christian Right group, the Family Research Council, is interesting and self-explanatory:

The most buzz-making speech of the session so far was from Tom Tancredo’s. Family Research Council insiders expect that to turn into some votes when the straw poll results are tallied, but how many can’t be predicted. What can be predicted is that the members will likely hear a barnburner from Mike Huckabee tomorrow, so if the votes are determined simply by speechmaking polish, Huckabee will be up there. However, one FRC insider told me, speaking of Huckabee, “He came here last year and talked about the environment and obesity. That’s not gonna work this year.”
Nobody was unhappy with Fred Thompson’s speech, but nobody was thrilled with it, either. Thompson “pushed all the right buttons,” the FRC insider told me, but there remains a certain lack of excitement surrounding his presence.
There’s a lot of anticipation about Rudy Giuliani’s appearance here tomorrow. It’s not terribly positive – “I don’t think there’s any danger of him winning the straw poll,” said the FRC insider – but it is palpable. There’s no belief that Giuliani will change many minds, although insiders say he will have a certain level of support. Rather, it’s just that he’s the big cheese at the moment, and people want to see him. Also, his coming here is a either a show of respect for the FRC members or a recognition of their influence – either way, it makes the people gathered here feel good. “He can’t not come,” says the insider.

Since my beloved Georgia Bulldogs aren’t playing tomorrow, I may pop a No-Doz and check out Huckabee’s and Giuliani’s speeches tomorrow, if they are on CSPAN. If they aren’t televised, I doubt I’ll pony up the $9.95 being charged by the American Family Association for streaming video of the panderfest. I’d rather watch Iowa-Purdue for the drama of figuring out who’s going to get a bid to the Poulon Weedeater Bowl or whatever, and let Byron York tell me what happened at the FRC.

One of the more interesting strategic issues in the Democratic presidential contest is John Edwards’ simultaneous effort to cast himself as the most progressive candidate, and as the most electable candidate. And a big part of his electability argument is that he’s the only candidate with southern regional appeal.
I’ve been quite skeptical of this last assertion, given the lack of any objective evidence that Edwards is particularly popular with southern Democrats, much less southern voters generally. But as part of its latest “electability” p.r. drive, the Edwards campaign today released a list of endorsements from my home state of Georgia. And at the elite level at least, it sure looks like Edwards is hanging on to a lot of Peach State supporters who backed him in 2004, when he was running a DLC-ish campaign.
The list includes a lot of center and center-right Democrats who probably wouldn’t fit in real well at an Edwards netroots event. There’s former governor Roy Barnes, former Lt. Governor (and 2006 gubernatorial nominee) Mark Taylor, and former congressman Ben “Cooter” Jones. There’s the Democratic leaders of both chambers of the state legislature. There are a number of other elected officials whom no one would ever describe as lefties.
But the list also includes a host of endorsements from people described as “attorneys,” and that gets to an affinity Edwards enjoys in the South that may be as important as his southern identity. I’m not sure if non-southerners are aware of this, but trial lawyers play an outsized role in the financial and logistical infrastructure of the Democratic Party in the Deep South. In no small part that’s because the labor movement, in both the public and private sectors, is relatively weak in the region, and also because recent Republican victories in the South have significantly eroded business support for Democrats. So trial lawyers are a really big deal down South, and Edwards’ rep as one of the best trial lawyers ever to smile at a jury provides him with an enduring base of support, no matter what he’s saying at any given moment about Iraq or health care.
It’s unclear, of course, whether this elite support for Edwards is communicable to actual voters. In 2004, he lost the Georgia primary to John Kerry despite a pretty robust effort. One of his problems is chronically low levels of support from African-Americans in the South in a field with one African-American and another candidate with unusual appeal to African-Americans.
But he’s certainly giving it the college–or maybe law school–try in the South, and if he survives to compete there, it could get interesting.

E.J. Dionne has a nice wrap-up of the buzz coming out of Tuesday’s special congressional election in Massachussets, in which Democrat Niki Tsongas won a less-than-overwhelming victory over Republican Jim Ogonowski.
The “surprise issue” of the election, says Dionne, was illegal immigration, with Ogonowski getting some traction from attacks on Tsongas for supporting in-state college tuition rates for the children of illegals. More generally, Ogonowski’s efforts to separate himself from Bush and congressional Republicans by posing as an anti-Washington “outsider” are likely to provide a template for Republican challengers next year.
But in the end, Dionne suggests, the Republican could not distance himself from the profoundly unpopular Iraq War and Bush’s S-CHIP veto, and those two issues gave Tsongas her crucial advantage.

I have no idea how many of the readers of this site also read The Washington Monthly magazine, or at least read the blog they sponsor, Kevin Drum”s Political Animal. But they are both special to me
During my first interview for a Washington political job back in the late 1980s, I was asked to define myself ideologically, and replied that I was a “Washington Monthly Neo-Liberal.” My interviewer looked at me as though I had just identified myself with the Rosicrusians or something, but the term did mean something. The Monthly was known as a very effective incubator of young journalistic talent (just look at the alumni list represented by their Contributing Editors, whose current output is continuously displayed on the left side of the magazine’s site), and also as the seedbed of an ideas-based reform movement in the Democratic Party that combined cultural liberalism with a healthy disrespect for the totems of the New Deal programmatic legacy, and a particular focus on civic engagement and government reform. If Gary Hart’s seminal 1984 presidential campaign, which came up a couple of states short of winning the Democratic nomination, had any real home, it was The Monthly.
More recently, under the editorship of Paul Glastris, the Monthly has continued its tradition of attracting good young talent, who have produced some truly important in-depth articles on the underpinnings of the politics of the new century (e.g., Nick Confessore’s definitive analysis of the K Street Project). And I’m very proud that I’ve gotten to do some work for the magazine, on subjects ranging from William Jennings Bryan to Ralph Reed.
And in Kevin Drum, the Monthly is sponsoring one of the best, and definitely one of the most intellectually rigorous, progressive bloggers.
Throughout most of its history, like most political magazines, the Monthly has struggled financially, and that’s why Kevin’s encouraging direct contributions to keep Political Animal alive.
Maybe Paul Glastris’ appearance earlier this week on the Colbert Report will get the nickel and dimes flowing, but I encourage everyone to dig under the sofa cushions and pitch in. The Monthly is one of the few Washington institutions that is never arrogant or conventional, and is always underappreciated.

So here’s the best evidence yet of the much-discussed possibility that Mike Huckabee could, despite his money problems, emerge as a viable Republican presidential candidate: he’s getting blasted from the Right. The legendary hard-right activist and direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie has issued a fatwah attacking Huckabee as a “wishy-washy Republican”‘ who is unreliable on both economic and cultural issues.
This is interesting in part because Viguerie might have been expected to Like Mike. Viguerie published an article in The Washington Monthly a year ago that advocated a Republican defeat in 2006 as the best possible tonic for the conservative troops that had been ignored in the Bush-DeLay Washington Republican Establishment. As the only presidential candidate (this side of Ron Paul) willing and able to challenge that establishment, Huckabee has some real conservative insurgent street cred. But his sins of omission and commission as Governor of Arkansas–particularly his “compassionate conservative” tendencies–apparently make him unacceptable, to Viguerie at least, as a vehicle for a resurgance of the heartland Right.

Confused by all the numbers about presidential candidate fundraising? Check out this AP summary (discovered via Trapper John at DailyKos), which breaks it all down nicely for all the candidates in both parties.

Sam Brownback, whose campaign has generally been considered doomed since his poor finish in the Iowa GOP Straw Poll in August, is reportedly dropping out of the race tomorrow, citing money problems.
This is probably good news for fellow-social-conservative Mike Huckabee, and perhaps even for Mitt Romney.
A new Rasmussen poll of Iowa shows Huckabee at 18% of likely Caucus-goers, one point behind Fred Thompson, and seven points behind Romney.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is doing a quick trip to Iowa, which is spurring all sorts of speculation as to whether he’s modifying his earlier decision to write off the Caucuses. The consensus take seems to be that he thinks it would look bad to finish fourth in IA, and could perhaps sneak into second place with a minimal effort.

Every now and then, all of us political types need to be reminded that we’re not exactly experiencing current events in the same way as most Americans.
A couple of weeks ago, I made a big deal out of three posts on John Edwards by Markos Moulitsas that drew a total of 2400 comments.
Well, earlier this week, Ellen Degeneris’ web site posted a note and a video about her now-famous confrontation with a local animal rescue league over the fate of a small dog named Iggy. Virtually overnight, it attracted 14,971 comments, most of them, naturally, taking Ellen’s side in the dispute.
I guess you could say that Ellen really energized her base, eh?

In the course of a series of posts about the alleged lack of appeal among Democrats of Barack Obama’s frequent calls for bipartisanship at the new TNR campaign blog “The Stump,” Noam Scheiber poses an interesting question: “Can You Be a Partisan Moderate?”
He answers the question affirmatively, citing Hillary Clinton as an example, but that the question even needs to be asked reflects a common assumption that partisanship is essentially, or at least primarily, a function of sharp ideological differentiation between the parties. And that, historically and empirically, is not necessarily borne out by the evidence.
By most standards, the most viciously partisan presidential elections in our history were during the period between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Populist uprising (1880-1892). By and large, the main issue dividing the parties in those elections was tariff policy. And lest anyone suggest these largely non-ideological contests failed to energize voters, it should be noted that they set a high plateau of eligible voter turnout–ranging from 74% to 79%–far above twentieth-century levels.
A more recent, if general, example of the divisibility of ideology from partisanship is in the contemporary politics of the South. Anyone paying real attention to southern elections these days would have to concede that despite the relative conservatism of many Democrats in the region, campaigns are generally as combative and sometimes down-and-dirty as anywhere else in the country.
And to be much more specific, despite all of Bill Clinton’s supposed “triangulating” and the deals he cut with Republicans on trade, welfare reform, and the budget, anyone who lived through the Clinton administration would have a hard time accepting that this period represented a low point in partisanship, on either side.
One of the sources of this disconnect between theory and practice in terms of the correlation between ideology and partisanship is simply disagreement over the degree of differentiation that is needed to produce partisan energy. For decades prior to 1980, conservatives argued that Republican acceptance of the main tenets of the New Deal drained elections of any real reason to vote for one party over another. And today, some Democrats sincerely believe that their party’s acceptance of, say, a private-sector role in health care or a legitimate U.S. national security role in the Middle East, leaves voters with no real choice and no real excitement over the outcome. Yet voters have less trouble finding significant differences between Ds and Rs.
This is not to say, I must emphasize, that ideologues don’t have legitimate grounds for decrying “moderation” in either party. Agreement between the two parties to fight elections on some issues but not others, even if it doesn’t reduce partisanship, could in theory and sometimes does in practice take important issues off the table. The extreme example was during the period prior to the founding of the Republican Party, when Democrats and Whigs fought violently partisan elections on a foundation of a system that avoided disputes over slavery whenever possible.
But that’s precisely why those on the Left of the Democratic Party today should simply make their case that party “moderates” are wrong on real-life policy grounds, instead of arguing that they aren’t partisan enough, or are cowards when it comes to opposing Republicans. Indeed, when John Edwards suggests (as Barack Obama has come close to suggesting) that the Clintons are part of the same corrupt system that produced George W. Bush, he’s really saying there are some things more important than partisanship, which is undoubtedly true. Confusing this argument, as many netroots activists have done, by asserting that any Democrat who fails to oppose the GOP on every conceivable issue is actually, secretly, indifferent to partisan control of government, requires conspiracy-theory reasoning about the D.C. Democratic Establishment that loses whatever power it has when you start looking at those many Democratic centrists who work and live outside Washington and have no stake in the Beltway status quo.
For that reason, the partisanship-versus-ideology debate in the blogosphere that sites like OpenLeft is promoting is very healthy, even for “centrists.” You can definitely be a highly partisan centrist, and if you take seriously claims that there’s not a sufficient difference between the two parties right now, you can be a bipartisan, nonpartisan, third-partisan, or post-partisan ideologue (that, in fact, is a position that could theoretically justify Barack Obama’s appeals to a new kind of bipartisanship based on a complete overturning of the current system, if he were clearer about the ideological underpinnings of his “new politics”). But the idea that all “centrists” or “moderates” or whatever you choose to call them don’t want to win elections and don’t viscerally dislike the other side, just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Also on the intraparty unity front, there’s a fascinating discussion going on over at OpenLeft (a site devoted to making the netroots more of an ideological force in the Democratic Party) spurred by Mike Lux, who suggests that any of the likely Democratic nominees are going to be more “Center” than “Left.” The question he then poses is whether those on the Left are willing to accept a coalition “deal” for limited but real influence over the next Democratic administration, similar in some respects to the “deal” their ideological predecessors struck during the Clinton administration.
So far, the comment thread on Lux’s post seems to indicate general acceptance of “The Deal,” with discussion centering on those issues deemed non-negotiable (typically action on climate change, movement towards universal health coverage, rejection of war with Iran, and refusal to retreat on social issues).
While you are at OpenLeft, you should also check out Chris Bowers’ post, which reviews the lack of any post-Nobel public demand for a Gore candidacy, and concludes Gore is more useful outside the presidential campaign. As it happens, Gore has already made a post-Nobel comment which, though it falls short of full Sherman Statement, indicates a continuing lack of interest in a presidential run.