One of the great rituals of American politics is the First Big Profile of a potential presidential candidate in one of the Newspapers of Record. This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine’s cover story is Matt Bai’s initial take on Mark Warner. (You can read a summary, and down in the comment thread, the actual text, here.)The piece is generally interesting, and fair to its subject, but it suffers from an obsession with Warner’s potential rivalry with Hillary Clinton. Much of Bai’s analysis looks at Mark Warner as a non-Clinton, an anti-Clinton, and even as a Clintonian Not Named Clinton. It would have been nice if Bai had devoted a few graphs to what Warner might represent if Hillary does not run, just as an analysis of Hillary’s husband in 1990 might have benefitted from the assumption that Mario Cuomo might not run.But IMO, Bai redeems himself with a very solid paragraph about Warner’s particular appeal to rural voters in the South and elsewhere:

Warner’s constant theme, which a lot of Washington politicians talk about but few seem to actually understand, was the need to modernize for a global economy. The days when you could walk down the streetand get a job at the mill were over, Warner would say,and new jobs — the state gained more than 150,000 ofthem on his watch — would require new skills and infrastructure. So Warner, working with Nascar, pushed through an accelerated program that enabled 35,000 more Virginians to get high-school equivalency degrees, and he introduced a program to deliver broadband capacity to 20 Southern counties. “In the 1800’s, if the railroad didn’t come through your small town, the town shriveled up and went away,” he told me once, explaining his rural program. “And if the broadband Internet doesn’t come through your town in the next few years, the same thing will happen.” If he ultimately decides to run for president, Warner will try to build a national campaign around this same technology-driven approach.

This take on Warner’s potential appeal to southern and rural voters is a nice corrective to the conventional wisdom that in Virginia he just seduced the folks by hiring bluegrass bands and Nascar teams and coming out for huntin’ and fishin’. All these things mattered, but his real pitch to rural Virginians tired of losing in the Old Economy was that the New Economy offered new hope, not a new threat. This is a message that could resonate in “backward” areas all over the country. And ironically, Hillary Clinton has spent a lot of time mining this very promising vein as well.Bai rightly suggests that Warner, like any governor, has to come up with a clear message and agenda on national security. But it would be helpful if journalists profiling Warner, or Hillary Clinton for that matter, would contrast potential 2008 Democrats not just with each other, but with the former governor in the White House who is so thoroughly screwing up international and domestic policy every single day.

It will take a while to completely unravel the meaning of today’s announcement by Dubai Ports World that it intended to divest itself of its leases to run six major U.S. ports. The only really clear thing is that it will probably buy the Bush administration some time to regroup and save face when it was cruisin’ for a bruisin’ in threatening to veto bipartisan legislation to stop the deal. But my own hope is that none of us get so hung-up about the identity of port operators, or are so tempted to declare victory if a U.S. firm replaces Dubai Ports World, that we forget the underlying security issue this brouhaha exposed.The federal government is doing a really crappy job of conducting security at all U.S. ports, with only five percent of cargoes being inspected. If that doesn’t change, then I won’t feel much better if the companies operating our ports–wide open invitations to the kind of materials that could feed a nuclear 9/11–are as American as apple pie.

If I may brieflt interrupt the debate I’ve apparently helped catalyze about the definition and political importance of universal health coverage (go check out the TPMCafe.com site and follow the links if you are interested), Amy Sullivan has written and long and important cover story for the Washington Monthly about the growing openness of younger evangelical Christian leaders to a divorce with the Republican Party, if not a marriage with Democrats.Amy’s poster boy for this phenomenon is Randy Brinson, an Alabama-based evangelical leader who has rapidly evolved from his role as (1) a cutting-edge GOTV operative for Republicans in 2003 and 2004, to (2) a spokesman for evangelicals unhappy about the compromises being made on issues of domestic and global equality in exchange for empty GOP promises on such subjects as abortion, and then (3) an open dissenter against the Christian Right and an advocate of cooperation with Democrats in Alabama and nationally.Whatever you think of Brinson, or of his nationally better-known fellow heretic Richard Cizick of the National Association of Evangelicals, there is a political and cultural opening they offer that Democrats would be fools to spurn or ignore. The tactical alliance forged during the 1990s between older conservative evangelical leaders and the Republican Party has had doleful consequences for American politics and religion alike. Busting this alliance up would have similarly positive results.

All of a sudden, two bloggers I respect, Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, seem to be identifying me as a rare and lonely voice who needs to explain why Democrats shouldn’t unanimously embrace a single-player approach to universal health coverage. And some people say the DLC isn’t relevant any more.In my public exchange of posts with Kevin late last night, I suggested that a whole lot of credible people across the range of party opinion didn’t think much of the single-payer approach, and sure didn’t think it was the only way to get to universal coverage. I mentioned the six leading candidates for the presidential nomination in 2004, and asked: “Were they all compromising wimps? Did they all privately acknowledge that single-payer was the goal, and just cringe from saying it publicly?”Today Kevin did a post that answered these questions affirmatively:

Here’s my guess: in private, I’ll bet all of these gentlemen do acknowledge that a simple single-payer national healthcare plan is the best policy. But for tactical political reasons, they think it’s more effective to talk about incremental solutions.

Well, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about six very different politicians, eh? I mean, did each and every one of them, from Dean to Lieberman, sit down with his advisors and basically say: “Dennis Kucinich is right, of course. But we need to be tactical about this, and in fact, that means talking more, not less, about the value of private health insurance in a universal system.”I don’t much see it, but there are a lot of people out there, including some bloggers, who were closer to the campaigns than I was, so how about a little help? Hey, netroots Deaniacs: did the Doctor deliberately wimp out on health care policy as a “tactical” thing, in the midst of an audacious campaign to defy the Washington Conventional Wisdom? Or did he actually think Dr. Dinosaur was a decent model for where we ought to go nationally on health care? You tell me, and tell Kevin.Matt Yglesias provides a more direct challenge, accepting my suggestion that the differences among Democrats is about means rather than ends, and expressing disappointment that I did not make a plenary argument for alternatives to single-payer.I’ll be happy to respond in a day or two, when I can digest and deal with my new responsibilities as a lonely progressive defender of a path to univeral coverage that includes choice, competition and individual responsibility. But the burden of proof among progressives on heath care remains with those who think the single-payer approach–so seductively simple, but so systematically at odds with past Democratic and national principles about health care–is the self-evident Silver Bullet. “Everybody who denies it believes it in their hearts” is not an argument that meets this burden of proof.

Having just done two adulatory posts about articles in The Washington Monthly, and planning another for tomorrow, I guess it’s a matter of balance to take serious issue with the Monthly’s blog, Political Animal, wherein Kevin Drum just posted a petulant and abusive attack on the Progressive Policy Institute’s proposal for universal health coverage.All you really need to know about Kevin’s point of view is this statement about the PPI proposal:

[I]t’s far too timid about at least acknowledging that our eventual goal should be a full-fledged, single-payer national healthcare system.

Well, hell, Kevin, if that’s the case, I would agree with you that the PPI plan is too complicated, too compromising, too infeasible, etc., etc. Sure, PPI proposes one very simple idea–making the federal employee health plan a national model–but if the only definition of “universal health care” is to abolish private health insurance and cover everyone publicly, then obviously, anything short of that earns all those abusive adjectives. But I somehow missed the moment when single-payer became not only progressive orthodoxy, but the only way to achieve universal coverage. As recently as 2004, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and Joe Lieberman offered health care plans that would take the country pretty damn close to UHC without embracing a single-payer system at all. I’m not sure any of those plans could have been described in the seven points you consider so incredibly complex. Were they all compromising wimps? Did they all privately acknowledge that single-payer was the goal, and just cringe from saying it publicly?As I suggested in my first comment on UHC a few days ago, the big debate among progressives isn’t so much about whether to cover 90 percent, or 89 percent, or 100 percent of Americans, but the relative role of public and private insurance in getting there. That’s a debate we have to have, and it’s not advanced by those who deny there’s anything to talk about.

Another fine feature of the new issue of the Washington Monthly is a carefully reasoned and solidly researched article by BeliefNet founder Steve Waldman about the all-but-forgotten history of evangelical Christians’ passionate support for the most radical notions of religious liberty during the founding period of the Republic.What makes Waldman’s account especially valuable is that he directly comes to grips with a whole generation of conservative evangelical revisionist history on this topic, particularly the claim that the First Amendment was only intended to prevent establishment of a particular Church, and should not be understood as prohibiting general public support for Christianity. As Waldman explains, Virginia had a very clear and specific debate on this proposition in the years immediately following the Revolution, when Patrick Henry proposed a system allowing citizens to designate a tax to support the church of their choice, and James Madison, soon to become the “Father of the Constitution,” strongly opposed it. Madison ultimately prevailed in this debate, in no small part because of vocal support from evangelicals, and especially the Baptist forefathers of today’s most avid opponents of the “wall of separation” interpretation of the Establishment Clause.Waldman’s evocation of Madison’s key role in promoting a more radical idea of religious liberty is also useful because another revisionist theory often suggests that the whole idea of church-state separatism was little more than a typically heretical quirk of the notoriously heterodox Thomas Jefferson. If Madison, who once trained for the Anglican priesthood, and remained faithful to that communion throughout his life, shared Jefferson’s Deist tendencies, he left little record of it. And for that matter, even Jefferson himself raised his children as Anglicans, and was a vestryman for an Anglican parish outside Charlottesville until his death (I know this personally, having attended a church in that parish for a while). These were not men determined to fight respect for religion.Yet Jefferson and Madison were jointly responsible for Virginia’s radical religious liberty laws, and clearly sought to implement them nationally in the First Amendment. It’s more than slightly odd that the descendants of their strongest allies in that fight have so decisively changed sides.

For those of you who share my interest in the fate of one Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor in my home state of Georgia, you might want to check out a piece I did for the Washington Monthly, just out today.The bottom line is that Ralph finally appears to be in deep trouble, not just because of his continuing embroilment in the Abramoff scandal, but because, well, a lot of Georgia Republicans just don’t like the guy, and haven’t for years. Some of it has to do with the disastrous campaign he helped run for another candidate for Lieutenant Governor back in 1998, which helped drag down the entire GOP ticket. And some of it has to do with his behavior as Georgia state party chair in 2002, when he took a little too much credit for a big year, and disrespected gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue a little too much for his own good. My own conclusion is that Ralph is probably going down, if not in the August primary, then in November, even if he doesn’t get a lethal visit from the process servers in the meantime. We’ll know soon enough, but this is clearly a guy who is having to live with the consequences of his past misdeeds, ethical and political.

I’m still far too cold-remedy-fogged to offer any cogent thoughts on universal health coverage on this Sunday, but did want to point you to a couple of interesting articles about poll numbers from today’s Washington Post.Alan Abramowitz, from my undergraduate alma mater of Emory, probes Bush’s lagging approval ratings and suggests that W.’s systemic lack of credibility is finally and perhaps irreversably infecting the conservative base that has sustained him all these years.More playfully, but no less meaningfully, Richard Morin compares Dick Cheney’s current 18 percent approval rating and compares it to other current and past public figures commonly thought to be loathsome.The bad news for Cheney is he’s:

Less popular than singer Michael Jackson, bedmate of little boys and world-class screwball. One in four Americans — 25 percent — told Gallup polltakers last June they were still Jackson fans after the onetime King of Pop was found not guilty of child molesting.Less popular than former football star O.J. Simpson was after his arrest and trial for murdering his estranged wife and her companion. Three in 10 — 29 percent — of all Americans had a favorable view of Simpson in an October, 1995 Gallup poll.Less popular with Americans than Joseph Stalin is with Russians. In 2003, fully 20 percent said Stalin, blamed for millions of deaths in the former Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, was a “wise and humane” leader. Thirty-one percent also said they wouldn’t object if Uncle Joe came back to rule again, according to surveys conducted by Russian pollsters.Much less popular than former Vice President Spiro Agnew in his final days in office. Forty-five percent approved of the job that Agnew was doing as President Richard Nixon’s veep in a Gallup Poll conducted in August 1973, little more than a month before Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to a criminal tax evasion charge arising from a bribery investigation.

The good news for Cheney? Here it is:

Even at 18 percent you’re not the least popular public figure in America. You’re slightly better liked than that fabulously blond and brainless party girl Paris Hilton. She was viewed favorably last June by 15 percent of the public, according to Gallup.

That must be an enormous consolation to the man who used to be thought of as the colorless grownup of the Bush administration, forever lending his great credibility to W.Thus endeth today’s lesson.

A vibrant debate over the political and substantive aspects of a Democratic recommitment to Universal Health Coverage has broken out all over the wonkier avenues of the progressive blogosphere (especially at TAPPED, where Ezra Klein and Garance Franke-Ruta have a bunch of recent posts). I plan to cautiously weigh in on this debate over the weekend, if and when my current vicious cold allows me to emerge from my mental fog. But for the time being, I just wanted to let you know about the Progressive Policy Institute’s plan for UHC, which combines some of the smarter recent ideas about how to deal with the triple problems of cost, coverage and (especially) quality. Today’s New Dem Dispatch briefly lays it all out, and the main DLC web page currently features a nice little box that combines links to PPI’s critique of the atavistic Bush health care agenda and its positive progressive alternative.

The well-known advocate of “intelligent design” theories, George W. Bush, is not a guy you would normally associate with Charles Darwin. But when it comes to social policy, Bush has no particular problem with Social Darwinism.That’s particularly true of his health care agenda, which may seem light and lame-o to casual observers, but actually reflects a systematic effort to unravel the whole system of risk-sharing on which not only public programs but private insurance pools depend, and make access to health care a matter of “survival of the fittest.” Read all about it in today’s New Dem Dispatch.