As regular readers of this blog know, I’m from Georgia, and have been c-r-a-z-y obsessed with Ralph Reed’s race for Lieutenant Governor, the intended first stop of the crafty operative on the way to the White House. It’s finally primary day in Georgia, and I have an unaccustomed feeling: there are no exit polls in this race, and thus we all have to wait for the actual votes to be counted. What an indignity, eh?To tell you the truth, it’s a blessing. I’m one of the many fools who got hold of the general election exit polls in 2004, and “knew” John Kerry had been elected president before the actual polls had closed anywhere. Hell, I was calling up friends and family members late into the evening, and telling them to ignore that red tide on the network television electoral maps, because the exits had already decided it. Reality finally set in when I called one of my buddies working for Kerry in FL (a state carried by the Democrat, if narrowly, in the exit poll election), and he said: “We’re done here, and we’re done nationally.” So while I wish I had access to the afternoon exits from Georgia today, it’s a lot safer to just wait for the results. Who knows: maybe Ralph Reed will hear from his campaign manager at some point tonight those very words: “We’re done here, and we’re done nationally.”

The growing conflagration in the Middle East has more dimensions than any of us can count, and I don’t pretend to be an expert on the history, politics and culture of that region. But while watching the latest developments unfold like the worst of recurring nightmares, I was drawn to re-read the ominous Washington Post op-ed by Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, published on July 11. Here’s the key passage:

If Israel will not allow Palestinians to live in peace, dignity and national integrity, Israelis themselves will not be able to enjoy those same rights…. If Israel is prepared to negotiate seriously and fairly, and resolve the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967, a fair and permanent peace is possible.

Haniyeh could not have made it much plainer that the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank–the “secondary” issue created by the Six-Day War of 1967–is not the main Palestinian grievance with Israel. Thus, the particular way in which Israel has sought, unilaterally, to end this occupation–exactly which Jewish settlements remain, and exactly where the famous “fence” will run–is not really the cause of the latest attacks on Israel from Gaza. And the central “1948 issue” isn’t even so much where a Palestinian capital will be established, and how much territory it will possess: it’s the so-called “Right of Return” of displaced Palestinians and their successors, which is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of a Jewish State. Keep in mind that the refusal to compromise on the “Right of Return” was the primary argument Yasir Arafat advanced for his fateful rejection in 2000 of a territorial settlement far more generous than any Israeli government will ever again offer. It remains a fundamental tenet of the Fatah Movement’s “peace” platform. In that light, all the rhetorical differences between Fatah and Hamas on recognizing Israel may not much matter in the end. There seems to be an unspoken assumption among American policymakers that all the talk about the “Right of Return” is little more than a bid by Palestinians for huge sacks of money–presumably offered up by the U.S. and European countries–to permanently settle refugees and offer some sort of compensation to the families of former landowners who left or were expelled from Israel during the 1947-48 war. I hope there is some truth to that, but sometimes you have to believe that people mean what they say and say what they mean. Remember that the event that precipitated Arafat’s rejection of the last peace deal, and his launching of the Second Intifada, was Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, hailed as a military victory by Hezbollah and widely interpreted by Palestinians as an object-lesson in how to defeat the Jews instead of negotiating with them. The central delusion of the Arab Middle East, then, is that Israel can somehow be forced to concede what her enemies have failed to wrest from her in three separate wars dating back more than a half-century. No one sane really believes any combination of Arab or even Iranian conventional forces or terrorist cadres can defeat Israel militarily. No one sane should really believe an unconditional Right of Return can be achieved through any other path. So it all does come back to those “1948 issues,” and it’s not suprising that more and more people on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide are reaching the conclusion that Israel’s War of Independence has never ended, and may now be breaking out anew.

With six days to go until the Georgia Primary, Ralph Reed’s plan to get to the White House via the Lieutenant Governorship and then the Governorship of his adopted state ain’t looking like a very good bet, even for real gamblers. Two new polls came out today showing Reed trailing state senator Casey Cagle. And one of them, released by Insider Advantage, shows a really bad trend for Ralph: in just two weeks, he’s gone from leading Cagle 32-27 to trailing him 41-36, indicating that late deciders are breaking towards Cagle.Yesterday there was also news casting a harsh light on Reed’s troubles: the final campaign finance figures showed Cagle outraising Ralph by nearly a 3 to 1 margin in the last quarter, forcing Reed to loan a cool half million to his campaign. This is really a roll of the dice for Ralph: it’s not like he’s going to recoup this “loan” on the back-end if he loses next week. Given Cagle’s Ralph’s-a-lying-sellout -who’s-supporting-gambling-and-forced-abortions-and-prostitution ad campaign, I sorta doubt he’ll go out of his way to help his opponent retire his campaign debts after the primary. And Ralph’s past benefactors, his ol’ buddies Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist, are not in a very good position to toss any more cash his way.Maybe Reed’s legendary mobilization skills will enable him to pull this out in a low-turnout primary, but if I were him, I’d spend some time petitioning the Lord for forgiveness and redemption. Insofar as the Lord seems to treat the self-righteous with special disdain, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ralph gets a busy signal if he calls for divine intervention on his behalf.

Allow me to join the chorus of praise for Scott Winship’s blog on the Democratic Strategist site. He slices and dices the numbers in a dispassionate way that should appeal to all Democrats.Yesterday Winship did a post reviewing all the evidence about voters’ identifications as conservatives, liberals and moderates, and as Republicans and Democrats. You should definitely read the whole thing, but a lot of his analysis revolves around swing voters defined as: (a) genuine independents; (b) conservative self-identifiers who tend to agree with Democrats on key policy issues; and (c) liberal self-identifiers who tend to agree with Republicans on key policy issues. Here’s what Scott says about the evidence on how to appeal to these voters:

[A]ttracting swing voters means emphasizing values and national security. These issues are crucial to improving performance among inconsistent identifiers and liberal-identifying conservatives. Values issues also appear key to keeping and improving performance among conservative-identifying liberals.It is possible that an economic populist message would be effective among inconsistent identifiers, who appear primed for both economic and cultural populism. Populism doesn’t appear particularly likely to resonate among liberal-identifying conservatives, who became much more likely to support Bush between 2000 and 2004, during which time the al Qaida attacks seem to have pushed them toward Bush. Nor does it appear to be promising as a strategy aimed at conservative-identifying liberals who, after all, call themselves “conservative” mostly on the basis of their views on values issues.Finally, increasing turnout could be successful, but I found that nonvoters had pretty much the same ideological distribution as voters did. So it wouldn’t necessarily yield a bumper crop of new Democratic votes.

Scott’s whole analysis happens to coincide with the DLC’s longstanding views on how to appeal to swing voters, and how to assess nonvoters. But don’t let me taint his words with association with any particular faction in the Democratic Party; read it yourself and decide. Maybe Democratic prospects ultimately depend on obtaining a deeper understanding of popular culture, such as the national obsession with American Idolatry, but for the moment, it’s good to have some empirical data on where the stubborn Donkey should go.

I know I posted about the Ralph Reed primary in Georgia just last Friday, but with the election just eight days ahead, I will continue to blog about it as events warrant. And the latest news is that Ralph’s primary opponent for the Lite Governor gig, state senator Casey Cagle, has launched a TV ad that gets pretty down ‘n’ dirty, using phrases like “lying about his record,” and “selling out our conservative values,” and “lying about Casey Cagle.” The ad also gets heavily into the forced abortion and forced prostitution allegations about that libertarian paradise, the Northern Mariana Islands, which Reed promoted at the behest of his buddies Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter understated the situaton by saying: “In the Republican race for lieutenant governor, Casey Cagle has crossed into Point of No Return Land. There’s no shaking hands and wishing best of luck after a TV ad like this.”The same Galloway/Baxter column provides a link to a robo-call for Ralph Reed by none other than Zell Miller, who talks about how long he’s known Ralph, five or six Miller political personalities ago.

Somebody in my office forwarded a piece from Hotline today citing a Chris Bowers MyDD post in which Chris, sort of stamping his foot, once again decries the hypocrisy of those who criticize netroots types for going after Joe Lieberman while “conservative Democrats” and “the DLC” are trying to purge Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, via a primary challenge by Rep. Ed Case. This is the third time Chris has made this argument, and after the second one, I did a response making it clear that the DLC has nothing at all to do with Case’s challenge to Akaka, which is, best I can tell, mainly about Akaka’s advanced age (81) and the possibility that he could be replaced at some point during the next six years by a Republican apointee. The rationale for Case’s candidacy is not one for the squeamish, to be sure, but it certainly does not reflect some sort of national centrist “purge” of Akaka, whom I barely knew anything about until I started reading that I was apparently involved in a plot to drive him from office.Now I don’t expect Chris Bowers to read this blog regularly, but he’s pretty influential in some circles, and insofar as he seems to have lurid ideas about the DLC’s trans-Pacific reach, he might want to actually find out if this DLC- goes-after-Akaka story line has any basis in reality. It doesn’t.

Boy, the calendar really snuck up on me like a crafty pick-pocket: the Georgia primary that will, among other things, determine Ralph Reed’s political fate is just eleven days away.The Man Who Would Be Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, as part of a Master Plan to stroll into the White House in 2016 or so, is fighting for his life against primary challenger state senator Casey Cagle. A poll taken by the Georgia-based firm Insider Advantage on June 26-27 has Reed ahead of Cagle 32-27, with a gigantic 41 percent still undecided. According to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter, here’s what Insider Advantage’s savvy Matt Towery had to say about the poll:

Those who are shocked at the large undecided percentage in this survey should understand that these two candidates have only been up on broadcast television for under a week. As we’ve noted in the past, Reed may be well known in political circles, but the average voter has little if just a hazy idea of who he is and what office he is seeking. And Sen. Cagle suffers from the same anemic name identification.

Towery thinks the dynamics help Reed. I dunno. The release of the final Senate Indian Affairs Committee report on the Abramoff scandal, which toted up Reed’s take from casino tribes to campaign against competitors at more than 5 million smackers, did not come at a good time for Ralph. And Cagle’s final TV blitz is all about Reed and Abramoff (Reed is retaliating with ads claming Cagle got fat and happy from his own state legislative service).As a Democrat, I hope Reed wins the primary; his nomination will not only give likely Democratic nominee Jim Martin a good shot in November, but could wreak holy havoc on the whole GOP ticket, headed by Governor Sonny Perdue, whose private opinion of Ralph is unprintable in a family-friendly blog.But as an expatriate Georgian, who bleeds Bulldog red-and-black, yearns for the sight of landmarks like the Big Chicken, and goes home pretty regularly to get re-crackerized and eat some decent grits–I don’t want my home state to do much of anything to facilitate Ralph Reed’s visions of grandeur. His exposure as part of the Abramoff scam, along with long-time buddy Grover Norquist, is a perfect reflection of his role in the mutual corruption of social and economic conservatives in the latter-day GOP. Whether he loses on July 18 or in November, he needs to lose, and it will be a fine day in Georgia when the chickens all come home to roost, and Ralph Reed’s political ambitions finally expire.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

I know us progressive bloggers are supposed to be boycotting The New Republic these days, but hell’s bells, I’ve always been a bit contrary by nature, and the magazine is, well, actually very good on a regular basis.Today’s TNR posts offer two very interesting takes on the way that the misuses of language can make politicians here and everywhere literally crazy.The estimable John Judis, after a whirlwind tour of modern epistemology (no kidding), suggests that the Bush administration is pursuing an insane foreign policy based on the assumption that America’s enemies are insane. It’s a fine piece, though I do think he should have acknowledged the odd psychopath in power (see Hitler, Adolph, and Stalin, Josef) who provides the exception to the rule of semi-rational statecraft.Meanwhile, the equally estimable Leon Wieseltier offers an assessment of Hamas’ bizarre denial of Israel’s formal existence, suggesting an unusually Orwellian use of language by some Palestinians about words like “exist.” At the height of Leon’s diatribe, he describes Hamas’ position towards Israel this way: “Israel is to be accepted as just another nasty fact of life, like toxic waste or Tom Cruise.”Selah.

I waited for some of the dust to settle before commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech to Jim Wallis’ Christian Left assemblage last week, but here’s a simple summary of the reaction:1) Some folks praised Obama for calling on Democrats to reach out to people of faith, and for denying Republicans had any natural monopoly on their support.2) Some folks attacked Obama for either (a) reinforcing “Republican talking points” by suggesting Democrats had a problem with people of faith, or (b) suggesting that Democrats reach out to people who are part of the conservative base, which can’t be done without compromising progressive principles.Among the critics, Chris Bowers of MyDD managed to tie himself in knots by making both negative arguments simultaneously.Lots of the critics and even some of the fans don’t seem to have paid sufficient attention to what Obama actually said. Over at TPMCafe, Nathan Newman, quoting liberally from Obama’s remarks, pretty decisively refutes the claim that the Illinois senator was piling onto Republican attacks on Democrats, or calling for any sort of “tilt to the right” on policy issues (beyond the single issue of church-state-separation absolutism).But uniquely, and not suprisingly, Amy Sullivan, in an article at Slate, noted a very different aspect of Obama’s speech that in the long run may make it more significant: an intra-Christian argument about the connection between faith and political commitment that suggests any simple claim that God wants the faithful to vote this way or that is spiritually dangerous. Here’s how Sullivan puts it:

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush’s version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don’t have the answer key to divining God’s will any more than conservatives do.

In other words, Obama was fighting something of a three-front battle in this speech:(1) against conservative claims that God’s Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture. The political import of Obama’s speech is that he is engaging in an intra-Christian debate that is already undermining the Christian Right every day. In essence, the James Dobsons of the religious world have sought to lead their flocks into a prophetic stance that stakes their spiritual lives to a series of specific and highly questionable political commitments. More and more, even the most conservative evangelical Christians are chafing against this bondage, while the less conservative faithful, including the largely apolitical attendees of rapidly growing non-denominational megachurches, never bought into it much to begin with. This is an enormous potential political constituency that is waiting to hear from Our Side, not with Conservative Lite policy prescriptions; not with Christian Left counter-prophetic-absolutism; but with credible and authentic appeals to the holy fear that the faithful should respect when confronting those who make exclusive claims to represent God’s Will on Earth.This is precisely the appeal Barack Obama made last week, and as a Christian, and as a Democrat, I am grateful for it.

This headline from today’s Washington Post says it all: “GOP Seeks Advantage In Ruling On Trials.” In other words, now that the Supreme Court has denied that George W. Bush has virtually monarchical powers to deal with terrorist suspects as he sees fit, Republicans want to suggest that any Democrats who recommends legislation complying with the decision is a terrorist-lover. Here’s a sample of what we’re going to hear real soon:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) criticized House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi‘s comment Thursday that the court decision “affirms the American ideal that all are entitled to the basic guarantees of our justice system.” That statement, Boehner said, amounted to Pelosi’s advocating “special privileges for terrorists.”

You know what this line of “reasoning” reminds me of? Many years ago I happened to be in one of those states with no limitations on campaigning for judicial positions, and to my horror, I watched a TV ad where some craggy old buzzard cast a steely eye at the camera and said: “Elect me to the bench, and I’ll always rule against the criminals. I’ll be the hangin’ judge.”Now you don’t need a law degree to understand that the reason we have safeguards and procedures for criminal proceedings is that you don’t know who the criminal is until after the trial. Same goes for terrorist suspects. If some sort of evidence-based system for figuring out who terrorists actually are before you punish them is a “special privilege,” then I’m all for it, and you should be, too.