Some readers may recall I had a genial if pointed exchange in the cyber-pages of Salon last November with University of Maryland professor Tom Schaller about his hypothesis, broadcast in his recent book Whistling Past Dixie, that Democrats need to not only write off the South, but maybe spit at it now and then.I’ve now engaged in another exchange at Salon in response to a Schaller post spitting at Harold Ford as the soon-to-be chairman of the DLC. This is a less genial exchange, insofar as I think Schaller is abandoning the rigorous empiricism of his case against Dixie, and indulging himself in a predictable, audience-pleasing, paint-by-the-numbers assault on the DLC. You’d think a guy who’s obsessively worried about Democrats playing into implicit southern racism might be impressed by an organization like the DLC choosing an African-American chairman; but no–Schaller comes pretty close to implying that Harold Ford himself is some sort of reincarnation of the Dixiecrats. And then there’s his whole weird thing about Bill Clinton as the reincarnation of Grover Cleveland…. well, check it out yourself.I have to say at this point that I am exceptionally weary about the amount of time I seem to be spending online defending the DLC, and defending the Clinton tradition in Democratic politics. I don’t think the DLC has any sort of monopoly on political wisdom, and I also understand the misgivings many sincere progressives have about Clinton and his legacy. But so long as people keep attacking the DLC and Clinton for things they did not do, do not say, and don’t stand for today, while wilfully ignoring what they did, what they say, and what they stand for today, then I guess I’ll keep on keeping on, at the expense of whatever little bit I can contribute to a common progressive debate. I’m loyal and stubborn that way. I hope you are too.

After all the interminable talk about Democratic disunity on Iraq since 2002, it’s worth noting that congressional Democrats are lining up against the Bush escalation plan with impressive near-unanimity. Think Progress is keeping a running scorecard of public positions on the plan among all 535 Members of Congress. At present, of the 282 Democrats in the House and Senate, 210 publicly oppose the plan, 23 are leaning towards opposition, and a grand total of two support the plan (none are currently leaning that way, though 47 have not made any position known, including just one Senator, Blanche Lincoln).Of the two announced pro-escalation Democrats, one name will raise eyebrows: Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, recently appointed chairman of the Intelligence Committee by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But it should be noted that Reyes voted against the original Iraq War resolution, which probably gives him a bit of slack. (The other announced pro-escalation Dem is Rep. Jim Marshall of GA, who just survived a near-death-experience in a Republican-tilting district in November). If you add in Joe Lieberman as a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, you still just get three Democratic Members favoring the Bush plan, out of 235 stating a position.Meanwhile, and despite relatively strong support for the Bush plan among rank-and-file Republicans, it’s the GOPers on the Hill who are all over the place. Of the 251 Republicans in Congress, 128 support or are leaning towards support of the Bush plan; 50 oppose it or are leaning towards opposition, and a whopping 73 have not indicated a position. 12 Senate Republicans oppose or are likely to oppose the plan (and 8 others have taken no position), which guarantees a large majority vote for whatever resolutions of opposition the chamber ultimately takes up.

The discussion at TPMCafe on the netroots took a strange turn yesterday, when Scott Winship of Democratic Strategist, a rare post-Clintonian self-described New Democrat, did a post that immediately got demonized and dismissed in a way that failed to come to grips with what he was trying to say.Best I could tell, Scott was suggesting that Netroots Progressives had bought into a revisionist take on Clintonism that was, well, inaccurate and strategically misleading. But partly because Scott plunged into a discussion that had earlier been skewed by Max Sawicky’s blunt argument that the Internet Left was ignorant and ideologically empty, he got definitively bashed, not just at TPMCafe, but over at MyDD, by Chris Bowers, for suggesting that Netroots Lefties didn’t know their history.But in skewering Scott for his alleged disrespecting of netroots intelligence and knowledge, Chris and others didn’t come to grips with Scott’s underlying argument about the anti-Clinton worldview of the Netroots Left. And that’s a shame.There’s little question that many if not most Left Netroots folk buy into the some variation on the following take on the Clinton legacy:1) Bill Clinton got elected by accident (a combination of Bush 41’s political stupidity, and Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy), and then spent much of his first term betraying his core progressive constituency by focusing on deficit reduction, supporting free trade, and refusing to fight for single-payer universal health care;2) After his first-term record discouraged the Democratic base and created a Republican landslide, Clinton got re-elected by “triangulating,” caving into Republicans on welfare reform in particular.3) Clinton’s apostasy from progressive principles led to a meltdown of the Democratic Party in Congress and in the states.4) Clinton’s political guidance snuffed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, and his “centrist DLC” acolytes led Democrats into an appeasement strategy that killed the party in 2002 and 2004. Moreover, it became obvious that Clintonism represented not just appeasement of the political Right, but a subservience to corporate interests that Clintonites relied on for campaign contributions.5) The revival of the Left and of the Democratic Party in 2006 involved an implicit repudiation of Clintonism.I won’t go into a refutation of these contentions until someone in the Left Netroots openly admits to them. But as Scott suggests, this isn’t a distinctive Netroots take.Throughout and beyond the Clinton years, there persisted an enduring hostility to Clintonism in the establishment DC Democratic Party. It was evident in congressional (especially in the House) Democratic opposition to many of Clinton’s signature initiatives; it got traction in Al Gore’s rejection of Clintonism and everyone connected with it in his 2000 campaign; and reached fruition in 2002, when Democrats went forward with the anti-Clinton, Bob Shrum-driven message that we were “fighting” for prescription drug benefits at a time when the country was absorbed with national security concerns.Indeed, the primacy of Shrum–the only major Democratic strategist with no involvement in either of Clinton’s’ campaigns–in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 Democratic campaigns, is a good example of how the hated DC Democratic Establishment hasn’t been Clintonian for a good while.So: let’s talk more about Clintonism, the Left, the Democratic establishment, and the netroots.Scott Winship is onto something important here, and dissing his views because he seems to be dissing the intelligence or historical knowledge of netroots folk is no excuse for refusing to talk about it.

If you stay in politics long enough, you’ll have the wonderful experience of finding yourself reading a “news”‘ story that you infallibly, personally know to be utter crap. That happened to me yesterday when I followed a link at DailyKos to an “exclusive” story at Radar Online entitled: “DLC Shakeup Comes To Fruition.” Written by a Jeff Bercovici and posted last Friday, the piece suggested the DLC had forced Gov. Tom Vilsack out of its chairmanship because it favored Bush’s Iraq plan and Vilsack opposed it:

But while Vilsack’s statement cited “the precedent established by former DLC Chair Bill Clinton,” who resigned in advance of his 1992 White House bid, a Washington source says there was an additional factor in his departure: the widening rift between Vilsack and DLC’s permanent leadership over what to do about the crisis in Iraq.Al From, the group’s founder and CEO, and Will Marshall, head of its policy arm, have called for an escalation in troop levels, while Vilsack has spoken of his “fundamental opposition to leading more troops into harm’s way in Iraq.”With President Bush outlining a plan to send fresh forces to Baghdad this week, the divergence of thinking was at risk of becoming untenable, says the source. “Vilsack and the DLC talking heads have been heading in different directions on this for some time,” he adds.

There are only two problems with this “story.” The first paragraph is absolutely wrong, and so is the second. No one at the DLC “called for” an escalation in troop levels in Iraq, or supports Bush’s plan; the same day Bercovici posted his story, in fact, the DLC put out a New Dem Dispatch opposing the escalation. And Vilsack’s resignation was decided upon, by him, in November, when he decided to run for president; as a courtesy, he simply held off announcing it until the DLC had time to decide on a successor.Presumably the author of this “exclusive” could have learned all this with a phone call, instead of relying on one of those unnamed “Washington sources” who in this case didn’t know his butt from page eight.So who cares? Nobody but me, probably, and even I wouldn’t be writing about it if it hadn’t popped up in a major blog site. When a BS story gets linked to and repeated a couple of times, it might as well be fact. So it’s occasionally worth the trouble to shoot one down.

There’s an interesting whirligig underway over at TPMCafe where a bunch of us bloggers are debating the extent to which the “netroots” represent a new Left-bent political movement. (My own post mainly suggests that the very nature of internet-based political discourse creates limits to its utility as an ideological vehicle, which is a good thing).But because the kicker-offer of the debate, MyDD’s Matt Stoller, conducted a drive-by dissing of the 60s-era New Left and its ultimate influence, the discussion veered off into all sorts of odd historical byways. It then exploded with a post by labor-left economist Max Sawicky, who defended the comparative value of the New and Old Lefts as compared to the Progressive Netroots. Two Max-imalist sound bites really got the juices flowing:”The ‘Internet Left’ is mostly a brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.””The 60s left read Marx, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs, Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Ernest Mandel, Joan Robinson, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Harrington, Saul Alinsky. What does the netroots read? Don’t Think of an Elephant?”The furor Max unleashed spilled out of the comments threads and onto other sites, where battles over the obscure legacy of various New Left and Marxist organizations rage on.It’s good clean fun. And it’s interesting to see criticism of the netroots from the left. Check it all out.

Given the raging debate over Iraq, it’s not surprising that on this particular Martin Luther King holiday, various observers are drawing parallels between King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and today’s anti-Iraq War movement. The most striking example was John Edwards’ direct evocation of King’s signature anti-war speech at New York’s Riverside Church nearly forty years ago–delivered by Edwards yesterday from the same pulpit, in which he called on Democrats to show moral fortitude by cutting off funding for an increased troop deployment in Iraq.Entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence,” King’s sermon was indeed about a lot more than the Vietnam War. And the “silence” he spoke of did not refer simply to reluctance to oppose the war–the anti-war movement was, after all, fully underway in 1967–but to those who in his view refused to see or talk about the connections between oppression of African-Americans in this country and oppression of “Asians, Africans and Latin Americans” by the United States and its allies in the name of the Cold War.From what we know of the historical context for King’s Riverside sermon, he was likely conducting a sort of two-front offensive aimed at two very different sets of critics of his leadership within the civil rights movement. On one side were those who urged him to mute his growing criticism of LBJ’s foreign policy–and even some aspects of domestic policy–as a distraction from the civil rights cause, and as a corrosive influence on establishment liberal support for that cause. And on the other side were more radical civil rights voices–e.g., Malcolm X and some of the early SNCC firebrands–who wanted to discard King’s strict policy of nonviolent protest. For King, the response to both was to underline the necessity of nonviolent social progress at home and abroad.What comes across from a reading of the sermon today is its consistent radicalism. Yes, King made some prudential arguments against the Vietnam War, including the resources it sapped from domestic priorities, the war’s disparate impact on minorities, and its essential futility in terms of conditions on the ground in Vietnam itself. But King’s real mission was a root-and-branch attack on the fundamental assumptions of Cold War liberalism. Calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King unsubtly suggested that his country had gotten itself on the wrong side of a “world revolution” for political and economic self-determination in which leadership had often been tacitly ceded to communists:

All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated.

The Riverside sermon is a sharp reminder that the core of King’s public ministry was the rigorous advocacy of a Gandhian nonviolence philosophy that he believed to be a practical extension of he Gospel of Jesus Christ. Reading it anew, I have little doubt that if MLK were alive and active today, he would not just be calling for a “redeployment” of U.S. troops from the Iraq civil war, but would be challenging the entire framework of the war with jihadist terrorism, including the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.I wouldn’t personally agree with him on that broader vision of world events, any more than I would have agreed with him that the Cold War was essentially the product of U.S. arrogance and militarism. But there’s not much point in honoring King’s memory without grappling with the full and (to use his own word) “disturbing” integrity of his prophetic stance.Progressives have long deplored the tendency of conservatives to selectively quote from King’s writings, and to use them to support policies (e.g., “color-blind” opposition to affirmative action measures) that arguably would subvert everything he fought for. But progressives need to beware of a similar, if more benign, temptation to quote King out of context. Citing MLK’s Riverside sermon as moral authority for demanding that Democrats support a cut-off of funding for an expansion of the U.S. presence in Iraq is a bit like citing the Sermon on the Mount in talking points for a minimum wage increase. It’s true as far as it goes, but it misses the larger points, and reduces prophecy to politics.

I deliberately waited a while to write anything about Bush’s latest “big speech” on Iraq, because it’s generally more interesting to weigh reactions after the spin has died down and public opinion has begun to congeal. But I don’t think there’s any possible conclusion to reach other than that the whole Bush “new direction” has been a dismal and completely unnecessary flop.The speech itself was most notable in that it did not even remotely live up to the White House’s own advance billing. We were told Bush was finally and fully going to embrace the counter-insurgency strategy that so many military experts had been urging on him for at least a year. Instead, we got nothing on that front other than a ritual recitation of the barest bones of the strategy, the clear-hold-build formula (supplemented by a lame-o dollop of money to throw at unemployed Iraqis). We were told he’d admit the failure of his old policies. Instead, he allowed as how 2006 wasn’t exactly a great year in Iraq.I personally expected Bush to provide one “surprise,” by announcing some token of a political breakthrough in Iraq–a “benchmark” actually met–such as an impending deal on distribution of oil revenues, but we didn’t get that, either. And that’s a reflection of Bush’s weird and continuing inversion of the growing feeling in this country that we should withdraw sooner rather than later if Iraqis don’t begin to live up to their own responsibilities for self-government. Bush is essentially saying we’ll withdraw later rather than sooner–and maybe never withdraw–if they continue to polarize along sectarian lines. He’s not stopping or preventing civil war; he’s enabling it.For that reason, the most bizarre feature of the speech was Bush’s insistence that the whole “surge” was simply an effort to support an Iraqi government initiative to control violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province; indeed, he expressed great confidence that Maliki was finally biting the bullet and was willing to remove “restrictions” on troop operations that might involve conflict with Shi’a militias. But right up to the moment of the speech, Maliki’s staff was out there constantly saying they didn’t want or need more American troops. And if they said or did anything new to suggest a sudden willingness to mess with the Mahdi Army, it didn’t make the news.Add in the factor that the new troop deployments are not that large, and will take a while to execute, and you’ve got a formula for almost certain military and political failure. So why did Bush do this? And why all the hype?You’d have to guess he seized upon the one vaguely new-sounding thing he could do that didn’t cross the self-imposed line that has divided him from Democrats, from many Republicans, from the Iraq Study Group recommendations, from Iraqi public opinion, and from U.S. public opinion; he couldn’t bring himself to begin withdrawing troops. He couldn’t realistically get the troops he needed for the kind of big-time escalation that many on the Right favored, and that commanders in the field considered essential for an actual victory over insurgents and militias. So he went with a pallid proposal linked to overblown rhetoric.I know a large and growing number of fellow progressive bloggers have seized on Bush’s saber-rattling towards Iran and Syria, followed by several mysterious military maneuvers and one weird confrontation with Iranian embassy employees in Kurdistan, to suggest with alarm that the administration is about to deliberately widen the Iraq war by provoking Tehran and Damascus into armed conflict. I have a hard time believing that; where the hell is the Pentagon going to get the resources for a regional war?But in any event, the pallid support levels, even among Republicans, for Bush’s Iraq plan, could derail it even without even affirmative action by Congress to get in the way by, say, restricting funds. The pending “no confidence” resolution now in the works could effectively reinforce the clear judgment of voters in November.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

At the risk of stating the semi-obvious, George W. Bush’s decision to go on national television tomorrow night and announce a plan to deploy 20,000 more U.S. troops in a long-term operation to “secure” Baghdad and some Sunni territory as well, is as mystifying as anything “the decider” has done in the course of his mystifying presidency.Hardly anyone thinks this deployment will work, even within the Pentagon and the White House, as the vast number of blind quotes in the news media questioning the decision makes clear. (Fred Kaplan’s exhaustive review of the operational implausibility of the Bush plan is definitely worth reading). It’s also clear the Maliki government, on whose willingness to fully commit Iraqi forces the slim chances of the whole enterprise rest, is being dragged kicking and screaming into line with Washington’s edict. And that’s hardly a surprise, since “clearing” Baghdad of “terrorists” or “extremists” or whatever Bush chooses to call them, will inevitably involve armed clashes with the Mahdi Army, one of the pillars of Maliki’s political base.Even fans of the idea of deploying more troops typically think the troop levels Bush is talking about will be insufficient to make a difference, other than convincing Iraqis that we’ll never, ever leave. And then there’s the little matter of Bush’s willingness to give American public opinion a big middle finger; as new polls indicate, despite relatively strong (if probably temporary) Repubublican rank-and-file support for the escalation, it’s anathema to the coalition of Democrats and independents that flipped Congress in November.The big symbolic factor in Bush’s decision is supposedly this: he’s finally abandoned the old stay-the-course rap, even if he doesn’t acknowledge the shift tomorrow night. But the strange timing of the escalation strategy helps illustrate something about the administration’s post-invasion Iraq policies that has often been obscured by the consistent happy-talk: they’ve repeatedly flip-flopped, but almost always far too late.Think about it. Rumsfeld took us into Iraq absolutely determined not to conduct an occupation, assuming instead that he could turn over the country to Iraqi exile politicians. That determination barely outlasted the invasion itself. When chaos broke out, administration talking heads first welcomed the phenomenon as the natural exuberance of a liberated people, and savaged anyone who suggested an organized insurgency. When that claim became increasingly absurd, the Bushies described the insurgency as a temporary rear-guard action by Baathists with no real popular base. Then they shifted to a description of the newly-recognized insurgency as composed primarily of “foreign fighters” recruited by al-Qaeda (which, BTW, was thereby “pinned down” in the “flypaper” of Iraq, and couldn’t conduct terrorism operations anywhere else, until they did). When the indigenous Sunni insurgency was finally acknowleged, the administration suggested its increasing ferocity was a sign of desparation. For many months, the president’s men dismissed intra-Pentagon arguments for adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy. And they finally started talking about “clear, hold and build” strategies–and have now placed their chief advocate, Gen. David Petraus, in charge of the “new direction” in Iraq–when the conditions necessary for successful counter-insurgency have all but vanished.What has united all these horribly belated “decisions,” of course, has been the administration’s remarkably consistent resistance to empirical evidence of failure and folly. And by that standard, there’s nothing about the “new direction” that really breaks new ground.

Props to Markos and the New York Times’ Carl Hulsey for noting something in the just-enacted Democratic House rules package that I missed: the retention of Newt Gingrich’s one good idea–term limits on committee chairmen.Neither of them get into the grittiest problem with this idea: the understandable reluctance of African-American chairs to give up their newfound power in the same seniority system that was used for so very long to obstruct and delay civil rights, and to marginalize and even humiliate minority Members.And by explaining the term limits issue strictly in terms of Caucus and leadership discipline, Markos and Hulsey also miss another well-identified problem with Perpetual Chairmanships: the tendency of Perpetual Chairmen to get trapped in the Iron Triangle uniting the executive-branch programs they supposedly oversee, the special-interest and advocacy groups that exist to defend and/or expand those programs (most of whom are avid campaign contributors), and their own professional committee staffs, who are typically cycling through the other sides of the triangle.According to Hulsey, Speaker Pelosi has privately indicated that the term-limits decision could be reversed later on. Let’s hope that’s not the case. There are other ways to ensure that minority voices in the House Caucus are heard; for one thing, “term-limited” committee and subcommittee chairs can be moved to equally influential perches. In any event, it will certainly be hard for this Democratic Congress to pose as a vehicle for “reform” if it backtracks on one of the most ancient and well-abused privileges of the Old Order.

It’s undoubtedly a good thing that the newly Democratic House finally passed lobbying reform (and less noticed but equally important, budget reform) legislation in its first moment in power.:But as today’s DLC New Dem Dispatch noted, lobbying reform won’t mean much if Congress doesn’t go on to deal with the real source of special-interest abuse in Washington–our crazy system of financing elections:

The much-anticipated new restrictions on lobbyist relationships with members, which were enacted late yesterday with only one dissenting vote, are fine so far as they go, though a willingness to strictly enforce bans on the worst abuses (e.g., “revolving door” arrangements that tempt members to lobby the lobbyists for future jobs) will be critical. Moreover, since most of the banned activities will be permitted if conducted as part of campaign fundraisers, we think it’s important that House Democrats signal a renewed interest in cutting the link between campaign contributions and legislation, preferably by jump-starting progress toward serious campaign finance reform, including public financing of congressional elections. A good place to start might be a fresh look at the voluntary public financing plan proposed by Al Gore in 2000, which is one of the few proposals certain to pass constitutional muster.

Aside from those on both the demand and supply sides of campaign contribution checks who prefer the current system, the main sources of indifference to the kind of public financing in place in virtually every other democratic nation are twofold: the immovable object of the Supreme Court’s infinitely regrettable doctrine that political contributions are hyper-constitutionally-protected “free speech,” and the movable but daunting obstacle of public opposition to the use of taxpayer funds for political campaigns. There are many possible if unsatisfying paths around the Supreme Court’s roadblock, as illustrated by the various state systems of voluntary but politically coercive public financing schemes. And at the federal level, as the New Dem Dispatch suggests, Al Gore’s long-forgotten but promising proposal for a public financing fund for congressional campaigns, developed by then-Gore-advisor and now Progressive Policy Institute scholar Paul Weinstein, is worth another look. The key thing for progressives is not to give up, for even a moment, on public campaign financing as a goal. It may take a while to get there, but leadership requires, well, leadership, and succumbing to the current crazy and corruption-feeding system is not acceptable. This is something on which progressives who disagree on many other topics ought to be able to unite.