On the day after the midterm elections, a lot of Republicans undoubtedly consoled themselves with visions of a 2008 comeback. After all, the electorate’s thorough repudiation of George W. Bush eliminated any political obligation for 2008 candidates to run on the Bush legacy. A Democratic Congress would probably start sharing in the opprobrium of Wrong Track voters. And most important, early trial heats showed at least two 2008 Republican candidates, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, running ahead of all potential Democratic rivals.Eleven weeks later, GOPers are beginning to take a long, realistic look at their 2008 field, and they aren’t happy about it any more. A galvanizing example (via The Plank’s Michael Crowley) is a recent post by RedState’s Erick Erickson, an influential conservative blogger, entitled “They All Suck.” A sample:

Every one of the thus far announced Republican candidates for President sucks. From the lecherous adulterer to the egomaniacal nut job to the flip-flopping opportunist with the perfect hair to the guy who hates brown people to the guy we’ve never heard of to the guy who has a better chance of getting hit by a meteor while being consumed by a blue whale being struck by lightening.They all suck. (Well, okay, Brownback doesn’t suck at all, but I perceive no viability for his candidacy.)

Over at The Politico, Jonathan Martin has a more conventional account of conservative unhappiness with the 2008 batch, but it adds up to the same story.To sum it up, from my own reading of the field:John McCain looked like a hold-your-nose-cause-he-can-at-least-win choice for GOPers until his own poll numbers started sliding, thanks to his choice of Iraq esalation as his bonding device with conservatives. And conservative disgruntlement with McCain is not just a matter of his past apostasy on campaign finance reform, taxes, and cultural issues. Right now he is in the uncomfortable position of being the primary Republican cosponsor, with Ted Kennedy, of immigration legislation roundly loathed by rank-and-file conservatives, and also, with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, of legislation creating a cap on carbon dioxide emissions, another highly visible non-starter with the Right. For all his money, his success in recruiting big-time campaign operatives, and his continuing love affair with the media, McCain is increasingly in danger of falling between two stools in his attempted Shift to the Right.If McCain’s problems are quite visible, Rudy Giuliani’s are just beneath the surface, but larger. Less than a year before the Iowa Caucuses, Rudy has yet to deliver the Big Speech everyone says he must do to become acceptable to social conservatives, somehow changing his long-standing positions on abortion and gay rights. The later it comes, the less credible it will be. And worse yet, Giuliani’s many years of negotiating the straits of New York politics, and of a, well, rather complicated personal life, offer a gold mine for opposition researchers. I wonder exactly when grimly serious conservative activists are going to find themselves staring at images of “America’s Mayor” in drag in 1997, calling himself (a la Victor/Victoria) a “Republican pretending to be a Democrat pretending to be a Republican.” If he survives that, he deserves the nomination, but don’t hold your breath.Meanwhile, the audition for the “true conservative alternative” to McCain and Giuliani ain’t going so well.After a good start with conservative opinion-leaders, Mitt Romney’s checkered ideological past, and his sometimes vapid current message, aren’t wearing very well. And on top of everything else, he has the burden of detoxifying his religion, which decades of those soft- focus LDS television ads apparently failed to do.I know a few smart Republicans who think the Newtster will catch fire. But aside from his marital baggage (which rivals Giuliani’s) and his late-1990s record as a national pariah and punching bag for Bill Clinton, Gingrich is stubbornly refusing to commit to a candidacy until September, at which point his rivals will have all but taken up residency in Iowa.Brownback? Aside from being to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage on abortion and gay rights, the Kansan has recently taken positions on immigration and Iraq that will repel many conservatives (I also wonder about the Da Vinci Code factor, since Brownback is an Opus Dei convert to Catholicism). Hagel? He’s McCain without the hawkishness or the media buzz. Tancredo? Hunter? Gilmore? Give me a break.Tommy Thompson might have been an intriguing possibility in the past, but his recent gig heading up what conservatives consider an out-of-control-welfare-state at HHS doesn’t bode that well for his long-shot candidacy. Mike Huckabee has been many insiders’ favorite dark horse for a while, but he’s off to a slow start, and must also deal with a tax increase on his watch as governor of Arkansas.The crowning irony, as Martin’s Politico piece explains, is that the candidate conservatives really pine for in 2008 is named Bush–not W., of course, but Jeb:

In separate interviews, two prominent Republican strategists in Washington used almost identical language to lament that the incumbent president’s brother will spend 2008 on the sidelines.”If his last name was ‘Smith’ instead of ‘Bush,’ Jeb would be the front-runner,” said one. “If he were ‘Jeb Smith’ instead of ‘Jeb Bush’ he’d probably be at the top of the pack right now,” said the other.

Cry me a river, folks. After all, W. made it into the finals in 2000 in no small part because of poll ratings inflated by rosy memories of Bush 41, whom many respondents actually confused with his son. There’s some rough justice in the fact that Jebbie’s now being disqualified by his last name, which has become a millstone. Live by the dynasty, die by the dynasty, eh?Meanwhile, GOPers slouch towards 2008, grumbling the whole way.

It’s hardly surprising that analysis of Barack Obama’s sudden viability as a presidential candidate dwells on race. He is, after all, a black man whose main source of popularity at present seems to be with white voters. Like Colin Powell, moreover, he is often described as a black man almost perfectly engineered to appeal to white voters, at potential risk to the “authenticity” deemed essential to attact the African-American voters who are so important in the Democratic presidential nominating process, at leasts when it pivots beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.Peter Beinert has an article up on the New Republic site examining the Powell parallel in detail, suggesting that Obama represents an implicit repudiation of other, more “authentic” African-American politicians, which could create a backlash among black voters generally. And last week Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post examined African-American ambivalence towards Obama, as reflected in his little-known congressional primary loss to Bobby Rush in 2000.There’s also the simple data point that national polls currently show Hillary Clinton trouncing Obama among black Democrats, which makes his overall robust poll numbers that much more remarkable.But while fascinating, these race-based takes on Obama don’t come to grips with the genesis of his startling appearance on the national political scene in August of 2004, when few Americans knew much about his personal story, or had experienced his “charisma” or marveled at his political skills. Ever since his famous Democratic Convention speech, Obama has been articulating what might be called the Great Alternative Democratic Message, and it clearly has some clout.What is that message? It could be described as “The New American Patriotism,” or “The Politics of Higher Common Purpose,” or “Towards One America,” or even “Meeting the Big Challenges.” But whatever the precise rhetoric, its core is to suggest that Democrats can and will lift politics and government out of the slough of polarization, culture wars, smears and sheer pettiness characterized by the Bush-Rove era, transcending party and ideology to unite the country around an agenda that really matters.This was the meta-message Stan Greenberg urged Democrats to embrace in 2004 in his pre-election book, The Two Americas. It was the original theme of John Kerry’s campaign, until Bob Shrum convinced him to shift in the autumn of 2003 to a message focused on the candidate’s biography (with fateful, perhaps fatal, consequences a year later). It was then picked up (or perhaps, according to insiders, accepted as a gift from former Kerry advisor Chris Lehane) by Wes Clark, whose campaign never really got its act together. And it was echoed in some respects by John Edwards, though his “one America” aspiration drew much less attention than his neo-populist “two Americas” indictment of the status quo.But this alternative message never got a full test until Barack Obama, at the time still a state senator, made it the core of his “Red, White and Blue America” speech in Boston. And it’s still Obama’s distinctive message.That’s one important reason for the half-submerged skepticism about Obama in some precincts of the progressive blogosphere, where all his talk about unity and civility sometimes sounds uncomfortably like the much-despised “bipartisanship” of party centrists. But it still strikes a chord in the electorate, I suspect.Obama must, of course, soon begin to fill out a more detailed message and agenda that explains exactly what Democrats should do to transcend the counter-polarization of the 2006 campaign and expand the party base, without repudiating principles or sacrificing unity. His success or failure in doing that may in the end have a greater impact on his candidacy than his alleged role in some great national psychodrama about race and identity.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Over the weekend Atrios (a.k.a., Duncan Black) named Fred Hiatt, governor of the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, “Wanker of the Day” for publishing Dinesh Dsouza’s piece defending his new book, The Enemy At Home. I have to disagree. Dsouza nicely illustrates the dark underside of the conservative case for what we ought to do in response to 9/11 that we are going to hear a lot more about if and when the disaster in Iraq ever leaves center stage.You can pretty much dismiss the first half of Dsouza’s op-ed as a long whine about the assaults on his book in various liberal publications; it’s Exhibit Z in the bizarre conservative argument that the Right is a persecuted minority in this country. But when he gets that out of the way, Dsouza gets down to the heart of his book’s argument: Islamists and other defenders of “traditional cultures” are legitimately outraged by the spread of “liberal” American culture, and that’s the real source of al Qaeda’s strength. Thus, repudiating the “cultural left” is the only way to win the war with Jihadism.In case you think I’m exaggerating, check out this passage from Dsouza’s op-ed:

What would motivate Muslims in faraway countries to volunteer for martyrdom? The fact that Palestinians don’t have a state? I don’t think so. It’s more likely that they would do it if they feared their values and way of life were threatened. Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values. The liberal “solution” to Islamic fundamentalism is itself a source of Islamic hostility to America.

In one of the reviews of his book that Dsouza whines about, Alan Wolfe explains where this line of “reasoning” leads:

America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not … Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.

Identifying yourself with America’s great detractors is obviously a risky endeavor when you are a “scholar” at the conservative Hoover Institution, so Dsouza tries to pull a “so’s your old man” maneuver by claiming that the self-same “cultural left” that’s despoiling the world perceives the larger battle just as he does:

Indeed, leftists routinely portray Bush’s war on terrorism as a battle of competing fundamentalisms, Islamic vs. Christian. It is Bush, more than bin Laden, they say, who threatens abortion rights and same-sex marriage and the entire social liberal agenda in the United States. So leftist activists such as Michael Moore and Howard Zinn and Cindy Sheehan seem willing to let the enemy win in Iraq so they can use that defeat in 2008 to rout Bush — their enemy at home.

This isn’t, of course, what most hard-core Left antiwar activists “routinely” say; they tend, in fact, to ascribe economic or militarist motives to Bush’s foreign policies, and often view the cultural aspects of the conflict with Jihadism as phony window-dressing for oil-lust or military contracts. But here’s Dsouza’s most ridiculous misrepresentation of reality:

Now I fear that the extreme cultural left is whispering into the ears of the Democratic Congress. Cut off the funding. Block the increase in troops. Shut down Guantanamo Bay. Lose the war on terrorism — and blame Bush.

This is, to use a technical term, complete crap. If anyone’s “whispering in the ears of the Democratic Congress,” it’s the American people, many of whom have become convinced that Bush’s Iraq policies, not our liberal cultural traditions, are risking defeat in the broader struggle with Jihadism. And if anyone’s being defeatist here, it’s people like Dsouza, who believe this country should blame itself for Jihadism, repudiate our own culture, curtail our own freedoms, and align ourselves with people whose main dissent from al Qaeda’s doctrines is merely tactical.

During a recent solitary drive, I did something I hadn’t done in a long, long time: listened to Rush Limbaugh for thirty minutes or so. I was curious to learn if Rush’s recent extracurricular problems, and/or the November election results, had made him a tad humbler.Of course not. The first few minutes of Rush were devoted to redundant and completely idiotic assertions (on the authority of some British journalist, no less) that “liberals” were demanding the presidency for Hillary Clinton as compensation for her endurance of a troubled marriage. (Guess Rush doesn’t read many “liberal” blogs, eh?). But it got a lot worse: Limbaugh then started reading, verbatim, a long blog post by a Selwyn Duke entitled “Soft People, Hard People.” Aside from making Sigmund Freud stir in his grave, Duke basically argues that the “feminization” of American society, and our “weak” and sentimental attachment to things like civil liberties, sexual equality and independent media, doom us to extinction by the “hard people” of the Third World, especially Islamists, who laugh, laugh, laugh at our “soft” refusal to fight fire with fire.This is, of course, an argument about the indefensibility of “civilized” impulses that goes all the way back to Gibbons’ suggestion that Christianity fatally undermined the martial spirit of Rome. More recently, it was an essential element of the fascist contention that bourgeois liberal parliamentary democracy was too weak and “soft” to prevail against Bolshevism.Since Duke, and his publicist Limbaugh, don’t explicitly call for imprisonment of what Duke calls the “enemy inside the gates,” (though he does indulge in the “disease” metaphor for domestic enemies that the Nazis were so fond of, implying as it did a license to exterminate them as an act of biological self-defense), maybe a fairer analogy would be the Cold War argument that civil liberties should not be extended to communists, and that “hard” anti-communist authoritarian regimes beyond our borders deserved our maximum support. Indeed, Dinesh D’Souza recently extended that argument into the post-Cold War era by claiming that Jimmy Carter’s human rights fetish destabilized Reza Pahlavi and led to the Islamic Revolution in Iran and every Middle East calamity since then.Aside from confirming that Rush Limbaugh is as nutty and dangerous as ever, his reading of Duke’s jeremiad provided a timely reminder that there is and always has been a vast and momentous difference in world-view between Left-Center and Right, even among those who thought the Cold War was worth fighting, and among those who now think we are in a war with Jihadism. Some folks on the Left appear to believe there’s really no fundamental difference between Dick Cheney (who clearly thinks only “soft people” care about Abu Ghraib or Gitmo) and, say, Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, or Peter Beinart or Thomas Friedman (who clearly think the universal values of liberalism are America’s best weapons in any war).If the only thing that matters to you is being right or wrong on the original decision to go into Iraq, or if your litmus test is whether this or that person favors immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, maybe such subtle distinctions as this or that person’s basic orientation on civil liberties, sexual equality, human rights, independent media, or the ultimate meaning of Western Civilization, represent nothing more than a lot of elitist talk. But in the long run, when it comes to electoral choices between the Hard Boys of the Right who think liberal values should be discarded as self-destructive baggage, and the Soft Men and Women of the Center-Left who think they are the essence of any civilization worth fighting for–maybe it will matter a whole lot.

Former Congressman Harold Ford became chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council last week. It didn’t get much attention, other than from the Stonewall Democrats, who want to know if the DLC still opposes a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (short answer: yes) even though Ford voted for it (short explanation: the DLC is not a monolith). It’s probably a good sign that nobody much was surprised when an African-American takes over an organization once stereotyped as the homeland of Southern White Good Ol’ Boys. One well-known progressive blogger, Digby of Hullabaloo, checked out Ford’s appearance on CNN and proclaimed herself pleasantly surprised.There were a couple of notably weird drive-bys about the DLC that didn’t have much to do with Harold Ford. Markos of DailyKos strings together a bunch of quotes about the fighting spirit of freshman Dems and decides that means they are “refusing to follow” the “out-Republican-the-Republicans” “playbook” of the DLC. All of this is simply delusional, but maybe it reflects Markos’ apparent decision to upgrade his diagnosis of the DLC’s condition from “dead” to “dying.” And then at MyDD, Matt Stoller did a long, long post on various aspects of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, none of which have much of anything to do with the DLC (though Matt does seem to be laboring under the extremely mistaken impression that the DLC designed the 1993 Clinton Health Plan), and then titles the whole rambling thing “Hillary Clinton’s DLC Problem.”I’m no longer an officer, a spokesman, or even a full-time employee, at the DLC, but this crap still drives me crazy. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for people to disagree with or dislike the organization or what it allegedly stands for, without just making stuff up or implicitly buying into the loony idea that the DLC is some sort of Bavarian Illuminati that secretly controls the world through its vast [sic!] piles of money and its occult influence in the punditocracy.

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers has the best early analysis of the ’08 presidential contest I’ve seen so far. He understands that Obama’s rise, by muddling Clinton’s front-runner status, ironically liberates HRC to run a campaign-by-attrition in which her money and broad base of support may mean she doesn’t have to win right away. He notes how important winning in Iowa is for Edwards. He suggests that beating expectations may be critical for Obama. And he rightly indicates that for the “rest of the field,” the token of their seriousness as candidates is whether they have a plausible chance to win or come close to winning anywhere in the early going (Vilsack’s target is Iowa; Richardson’s is Nevada; Dodd’s is New Hamphsire; Biden’s, apparently, is South Carolina).It’s obviously early, and lots could change. For one thing, threats by California and Florida to move up their primaries could alter the landscape crucially by tossing two expensive, delegate-rich states into a mix now dominated by small, inexpensive states. The rumbling in New Hampshire about moving up its primary to protect its ancient status could produce a nightmarish leapfrogging process (both Iowa and New Hampshire have state laws aimed at guaranteeing their one-two positions) that could start the whole show crazy early. And most obviously, what the candidates say and do, and that ol’ devil, external events, could trump everything.I don’t agree with Chris about the real possibility of a brokered convention. Just about everything about the nominating process makes that a science fiction proposition; remember that the last multi-ballot Democratic Convention was in 1952, when most delegates were still selected by home-state poohbahs and many delegations remained uncommitted until the convention.But lots of other unusual contingencies are entirely possible, including one that’s always right under the surface: an early running-mate deal between a top-tier and lower-tier candidate with strength in a particular state.In general, Chris’ handicapping is a lot better than most of the stuff being published in the MSM at this stage of the campaign.Incidentally, I don’t personally have any dog in the hunt at this point. If that changes, I’ll shut up about ’08.

Those of you who don’t immediately get annoyed when I go off onto one of my theological benders may want to check out a piece I did that just came out in the Washington Monthly about the Anglican schism over ordination of gay bishops. My purpose was to slice through all the lazy rhetoric about “liberals” and “traditionalists” in the fracas, and talk about the older split between Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals, since the latter, who are hardly “traditionalists” when it comes to liturgy and scriptural interpretation, are the main base of support for the effort to expel the U.S. Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion.But in doing so, I may have gotten a bit too far into the weeds of Anglican history, with tangents off onto subjects like Elizabeth I’s frustration of evangelical efforts to deny the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and the relative “catholicity” of the current Book of Common Prayer’s Rite I and Rite II. If you are interested in this sort of thing, or just want a less predictable take on the Anglican Wars, give it a look.

John Kerry announced yesterday that he’s not running for president in 2008.As a from-the-beginning Kerry supporter in 2004, and as someone who’s been doing some writing work for him more recently, I think it was the right decision, painful as it was for a guy who clearly wishes he could re-do the last presidential election and get it right (not to mention a guy who was told he had won early on Election Night, based on what appeared to be clear evidence from unusually flawed exit polls). JK is especially haunted by the Swift Boat smears, which he views not only as a key turning point in the campaign, but as a dangerous precedent for blatant character assassination working at the highest levels of American politics. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like (for Al Gore, as well as for John Kerry) to wake up every day thinking how the course of world and national events might be very different had a handful of votes gone the other way in 2000 and 2004. It doesn’t help that under our winner-take-all system, that handful of votes (in the case of Al Gore, a couple of votes on the Supreme Court) meant the difference between being Commander in Chief and Leader of the Free World, and having, well, no real power at all.Anyone who’s spent any time around John Kerry knows he is a tireless, endlessly energetic man. He will remain very active in the Senate and in Democratic politics. And even if he never gets to enter a room to the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” he can now say what he thinks and get a hearing for the content of his words, not for the political motives others are so quick to ascribe.

I tried to watch the State of the Union Address from a Washington hotel bar last night, but could barely hear it through the noise of drinkers who were completely ignoring the tube. And the fact that even in Political JunkieLand, people were ignoring the speech, probably tells you everything you need to note about the impact of this SOTU.This is at least the second SOTU in a row where the White House kept signalling in advance that Bush was going to unleash some big, meaty domestic proposals. Instead, we got a sentence on climate change, a vague endorsement of better fuel efficiency standards, and a content-free call for reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. The one interesting idea in the speech–for limiting the tax subsidy for Cadillac employer-sponsored health plans and using the savings to subsidize health insurance for everyone else–was offset by dollops of the usual conservative pablum about Health Savings Accounts and medical malpractice lawsuit limits.I admit my attention was wandering during the Iraq sections of the speech, but I heard enough to wonder why the White House thought that repeating the same arguments Bush made during his recent prime-time speech on the subject was going to work any better than it did the first time around.Most of all, the speech reminded me of that moment back in 1995 when Republicans were calling Bill Clinton “irrelevant.” It didn’t turn out that way for Clinton, but it’s increasingly true of Bush.If Bush was largely wasting his breath, Jim Webb’s Democratic Response to SOTU was truly a breath of fresh air. Instead of the usual pallid laundry list of Mark Mellman’s poll-tested bromides about work that works for working families, Webb focused on the two overriding points of difference between Democrats and Bush–the economy and the war in Iraq–and kept his arguments clear and simple. I was particularly impressed by his repeated efforts to turn around the central rationale for Bush’s war policies, arguing that the war in Iraq has been a damaging distraction from the broader war with jihadists, not its central theater.

I’m not in the habit of calling people who disagree with me stupid or shallow. But I have to admit the impulse to mutter intelligence-based insults grabbed me pretty hard this morning when I read Liz Cheney’s op-ed in the Washington Post petulantly suggesting that opponents of the administration’s escalation strategy in Iraq just don’t want to win badly enough.An example of Ms. Cheney’s “analysis” is her “refutation” of the argument that the administration is defying public opinion on Iraq:

In November the American people expressed serious concerns about Iraq (and about Republican cor:ruption and scandals). They did not say that they want us to lose this war. They did not say that they want us to allow Iraq to become a base for al-Qaeda to conduct global terrorist operations. They did not say that they would rather we fight the terrorists here at home.

You half-expected the graph to end: “They did not say they endorsed treason.” I felt a lot better about my reaction to the piece when I read Josh Marshall’s take: “Is it just me or does this column read like it was written by someone in junior high?” But Josh also knew something I should have known but didn’t: Liz Cheney is not only a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (one of those titles that remind me of the old Rolling Stones song, “Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”), but Dick Cheney’s daughter. And there I was wondering how Ms. Cheney managed to get her gibberish published in the ever-so-picky op-ed pages of the Post.