For anyone interested in political history generally, or in contemporary debates about “populism,” Michael Kazin’s new biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, is essential reading. It’s being officially released tomorrow, and if this plenary endorsement doesn’t encourage you to check it out, here’s a sneak preview of my review of the book, which appears in the March issue of The Washington Monthly. If you’re smart enough to be a subscriber to TWM, you probably got this issue in the mail today, or will momentarily, with lots of stuff you can’t get online.

I generally don’t pay attention to the Super Bowl, especially when, as has generally been the occasion in recent years, I have no particular attachment to either team. The vast and endless hype over the game does provide an excellent opportunity to do things, like grocery shopping, in pleasantly uncrowded circumstances (if only the DMV were open on Super Sundays!).This particular year, as it happens, I was on the road during the entire game, driving from Amherst, Virginia, to Richmond, to Arlington. As a result, I actually listened to the Super Bowl on a variety of AM radio stations, beamed at me from Lynchburg, Charlottesville, St. Louis, New York and Cincinnati. That means I was able to follow the football game, qua football game, while avoiding the ridiculous spectacle of the Big Commercials that are invariably premiered during the most expensive network television segment of the year. Indeed, I got to hear Dr. John, Aaron Neville and Aretha Franklin do the National Anthem, and even heard a bit of the Rolling Stones halftime show, but without the attendant hype, since the radio commentators were relentlessly focused on football. From the privacy of my car, I was able to assess the game itself as a comedy of crucial errors, with the one real star, to my delight, being Georgia Bulldog Hines Ward.So when it comes to Super Bowl XLI, I recommend getting on the road and disrespecting the television sponsors of the Big Show. It becomes obvious in the light traffic of Super Sunday that it’s really just a football game.

During one week, we’ve lost two of the most influential, and even iconic, American women of the 20th century, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan. Both had long and complicated careers in public life, and together represented the drive for the equality of all human beings that redeemed the last century from its horrific and bloodstained legacy of totalitarianism–a legacy for which women, it is important to note, bear virtually no blame.I’ll try to offer additional thoughts on Coretta Scott King on Tuesday, on the occasion of her funeral in Atlanta, and on Betty Friedan later in the week. But for now, may they both rest in peace.

For pure fun, I recommend you read an article by conservative foreign policy pundit Robert Kagan on the Weekly Standard site entitled “I Am Not A Straussian.” Pleading that he could not be a disciple of Leo Strauss because “I have never understood a word the political philospher wrote,” Kagan notes that’s not what you’d think from reading his clips:

I feel the need to set the record straight because I am routinely called a Straussian by students of what is known as neoconservatism, and at the very least this is an insult to true Straussians, who presumably do understand what they’re talking about. There isn’t room here to list all the places where I have been called a Straussian–a Google search for “Robert Kagan” and “Leo Strauss” turns up 16,500 hits. Suffice to say that the immensely erudite Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has referred to me as a “student” of Strauss and Bloom, as has the columnist William Pfaff, and a half dozen other equally learned folk. A professor somewhere named Anne Norton has written a whole book assuming that I am a Straussian. You may ask why didn’t she call me, just to confirm. But that would have been journalism, not scholarship.

The whole piece, which gets into all sorts of anecdotes involving Kagan’s father and Allan Bloom, is hilarious, but it raises a serious point about the tendency of an awful lot of people to think they intimately know the inner motivations and backgrounds of complete strangers they’ve read or read about, or typecasted for some reason.I first encountered this phenomenon personally back in the days when I used to occasionally agree to be the Token Democrat on conservative talk radio shows. Invariably, I’d have to deal with callers who, instead of responding to my cogent and witty representation of the Progressive Cause, would authoritatively announce and denounce my true intentions of imposing socialism, atheism, baby-killing, and general mayhem on an unsuspecting populace. Their general perspective, reinforced by the power of semi- and selective education, was: I’m on to you, bucko.You get the same weird and self-confident omniscience pretty often in the blogosphere. For example, there’s one particular twisted dude (I won’t dignify his ravings by naming him) who pops up in comment threads all over the left and center-left who is certain that the DLC basically exists in order to serve as a front for the American Israel Public Affairs Committte (AIPAC). As it happens, the DLC comments on Israeli-Palestinian issues about once a year, and I’m almost always the guy who writes these comments. I don’t know anybody at AIPAC and have never once read their talking points, so it’s really kind of odd that somebody out there knows that I go to work everyday determined to serve AIPAC’s will.Along the same lines, I cannot tell you how often I get emails and even phone calls from people earnestly informing me of the nefarious activities and actual motives of Al From, Bruce Reed, Will Marshall, and Marshall Wittmann, all of whom work right down the hall from me. I mean, thanks for the tips and all, but I’m not stupid, and probably have pretty good sources of my own for what my colleagues are up to, right?Lest I be accused of elitism, let me make it clear that this kind of I’m on to you, bucko stuff is not confined to comment threads or emails from regular folks; it’s often retailed by bloggers running sites that get a lot more traffic than this one; by diarists on those same sites; and sometimes even by Mainstream Media types who can’t be bothered with real research. They’re all opinion leaders, in their own communities. For example, everybody at the DLC gets a big laugh out of the regular assertions by bloggers, occasionally reflected by print or online journalists, that we spend our evenings at Washington cocktail parties conspiring with the DC Democratic Establishment to maintain control of the Party and keep the outside-the-beltway rabble out. Aside from the fact that the DLC’s political base is largely outside-the-beltway, we ain’t exactly A-list society people here, and are about as likely to frequent Georgetown Salons as Michael Moore. Actually, a lot less likely, and vastly less likely than presumed anti-Establishment figures such as Arianna Huffington or George Lackoff.To be clear, and fair, the tendency to think we know people and institutions we don’t really know is universal. I did a post a while back that in passing mentioned the reputation of The New Republic as a preserve for Ivy League grads, and was immediately informed by someone there that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I posted a correction, but still felt bad for promoting a stereotype of an institution that I thought I knew pretty well.More recently, I entered the moral hazard zone by getting into a colloquoy over at TPMCafe wherein I criticized a trend among some progressives focused on the NSA surveillance story to speak fondly of people like Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich. In responding to Matt Yglesias’ suggestion that Norquist’s position against the NSA program indicated that Grover wasn’t all bad, I said: “Matt, Grover Norquist is all bad; if you look up ‘bad’ in the dictionary, you see his photo.”Now I’m perfectly willing to stand by the argument that Norquist’s politics are all bad, and indeed, that his opposition to NSA surveillance is based on well-articulated Norquistian positions that are bad as well. But I probably implied that I knew Norquist was an evil person, and that’s a judgment that should be consigned to his actual friends and associates, and to the Almighty. I’ve met the guy exactly once, when I debated him on CSPAN after writing a very hostile profile of him in Blueprint magazine, which now seems more accurate than ever. Up close, I did observe that he looked remarkably average physically, given his self-identification as a macho guy who likes gunplay, uses violent language in attacking his enemies, and once spent a lot of time hanging out with guerillas in Angola and Mozambique. But I didn’t smell the brimstone, see the horns, or hear anything that made me certain I knew the dark depths of his soul.Some bloggers, if they bothered to read this long post, would probably think I’m exhibiting weakness here–an unwillingness to smite the foe, whoever it is, with every weapon of abuse at hand, reflecting a Moderate Milquetoast reasonableness that invites contempt from The Enemy, and that leads down the road to the moral equivalency and “both sides are wrong” perspective of the David Broders of the political world. I plead innocent to the charge. My allegiances are clear; my conviction of the moral superiority of progressivism and the Democratic Party is unequivocal. But if we are, to use the overworn but useful phrase, the “reality-based community,” it’s important that we stick to what we actually know, and let the other side become the party of know-it-alls who really are know-nothings.

I haven’t read any blogs this morning, so I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of other people have already used the above title to describe George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address last night. You don’t have to be a Democrat to realize how strangely empty and disjointed this speech truly was: twenty minutes of abstract uplift; another twenty minutes or so restating his 2004 Fear Offensive on national security and using it to justify everything he’s doing in Iraq and at home; and then a fifteen-minute drive-by on everything else. I have no clue why the White House spent so much time over the last couple of weeks, and especially yesterday, signalling that Bush would do some heavy lifting on health care and energy. The former got one completely unoriginal graph; and the latter, which could have been lifted directly from a very brief summary of a 2004 John Kerry speech on energy independence, was a joke when you look at the administration’s actual energy policies.Corruption? An “everybody does it” sentence that seemed to suggest Bush was still a newcomer to Washington who’s not responsible for anything that happens there (oh yeah, there was that other sentence where Bush lumped together influence-peddlers and “activist judges”). Katrina? Just a spending number. The economy? Everything’s coming up roses, so long as Bush can keep “isolationists” at bay. Like a lot of people, I was wrong in anticipating the content of this speech. I figured it would be a vast exercise in damage control on all those issues the admininstration and the GOP has either screwed up or ignored. But the White House has apparently decided not to bother with anything beyond the barest kind of lip service to any topic other than national security, in the belief that this one issue trumps everything else combined. At an early morning breakfast meeting today, I heard Gov. Tom Vilsack compare Bush to a football coach who is so convinced the opposition is incapable of stopping a particular play that he’s arrogantly announcing it in advance. That play, which is sort of the Single Wing of latter-day GOP politics, is “terrorism” right up the gut. And so it should be abundantly clear to Democrats looking forward to the midterm elections that this is the play the Republicans are going to run, until we learn how to stop it.

So yesterday’s cloture vote against the Alito confirmation didn’t work out that well. Scanning the comment threads of some of the really big left-of-center blogs last night, I didn’t have to go too far to discover there are some really, really angry folks out there. But here’s the deal, now that this particular deal has gone down:You can focus on the 19 Democrats who voted for cloture, or focus on the 40-odd Democrats who are going to vote against the actual confirmation today. You can read the whole Alito story as one of Democratic disunity, weakness and perfidy, or you can read it as a high-water mark of unity in the face of a confirmation that was never seriously in danger, in a U.S. Senate with a Republican ten-vote margin. You can look around for villains, blaming the failure of a too-little, too-late filibuster effort on some sort of DLC plot (yeah, our influence with senators like Inouye and Rockefeller and Dorgan and Conrad is well-known, and it’s a good thing we have no links to Bayh or Clinton). Or you can just accept that it just wasn’t going to happen no matter what anybody did, especially at the last moment, and note the remarkable unity of Democratic organizations (including the DLC) in opposing Alito. You can, if you wish, channel your disappointment and anger into an effort to purge Democratic senators in primaries, or you can realize our biggest problem is the limited quantity of Democratic senators, not their “purity” or willingness to make every fight in the Senate the fight of their lives. You can consider the glass half-full, or more than half-full, or you can pour it all out.And in making each of these choices, remember there are plenty of folks out there with the motive and the means to trumpet the colture vote into a disaster for the Democratic Party. It’s a free country, and a free party, so do whatever your conscience dictates, but do it pretty soon, because there are many other political fish to fry, and as a party, we have to (with apologies to the organization by that name) move on.

Yesterday’s Washington Post Outlook section featured a jeremiad by Lewis Gould arguing for the elimination of State of the Union addresses. As I read it, I was nodding along at his list of the absurdities that have come to accompany this annual ritual: the imperial entrance of the Almighty POTUS, the Real People in the gallery, the forced upbeat tone, the pressure to create phony proposals the administration has no intention of pursuing, the bloviating television commentary, etc., etc.Hell, I could add a few annoyances, such as the bizarre calesthentics of the vice president, the speaker of the House, and Congress itself (more amusing when the two figures behind the president are from different parties) in deciding when to clap, cheer, stand, sit, smile, laugh, or glower.Still, Gould undermines his own argument for banning the SOTU in examining George W. Bush’s current dilemma:

Bush must now give his sixth State of the Union Address message without the accompanying drama of recent terrorist attacks such as those that preceded the 2002 address and without being on the brink of a war in Iraq, as we were in 2003. Like the sixth or seventh husband of an oft-wed screen star, the president knows what is expected of him. But how does he make the minutiae of health savings accounts or enhanced tax deductions for medical expenses interesting for his audience at home? The mysteries of copays and the “doughnut” in the Medicare drug benefit are not likely to bring viewers to the edge of their sofas.

Well, I’m not sure that last part is true if you happen to be a Medicare beneficiary who could use a little explanation of why the administration has foisted this fiasco upon them, but aside from that, who cares if this creates a difficult bit of stagecraft for Bush and his handlers? I mean, it’s not as though the administration has this wonderful but wonky domestic agenda that poor Bush has to dumb down for the folks, is it? On health care, on energy, on ethics, on the budget, on Katrina, just to mention a few topics, Bush’s problem is that his administration does not have anything new to say, but has to dress up the same old stuff as an agenda, which undermines his usual habit of justifying himself as the embodiment of the war on terror.So I’m glad Bush has to do this speech. Otherwise, this president who thinks his re-election was the only “accountability moment” he need suffer through would enjoy the power to appear before Congress and the American people only when it suits his own purposes.

As my last post indicated, I made my peace with the reality of a filibuster against Samuel Alito pretty quickly. After all, I am really unhappy about the impending reality of Justice Alito, and the likelihood that he will be cheerfully unravelling constitutional protections until well past the time when I’ve been trundled off to a nursing home.And though I doubted and still doubt the political wisdom of a suicide filibuster effort against him, once the genie was out of the bottle yesterday, I figured: What the hell–it should produce some serious political entertainment and some new pressure on waverers. And who knows: maybe a significant number of Americans will get bored with Big East basketball or bass tournaments tomorrow, channel surf to CSPAN, and experience judicial satori.So you can imagine my chagrin when I discovered this afternoon that after a few brief speeches, Senate Dems had agreed to adjourn the chamber until Monday, when a cloture vote is scheduled.On reflection, I realized that the lore of filibusters–the round the clock sessions, the cots in the hallways, the boxes of complimentary No Doz on every desk, and the orgy of unbuttoned speechifying–was associated with efforts to break a filibuster in the absence of enough votes to invoke cloture. In this case, the cloture motion had already been filed, and the votes to carry it were clearly there, so I can understand on a rational level why we aren’t being treated to the spectacle of an oratorical Alitofest.But still, it’s disappointing to realize that the big lurch towards the fateful decision to “filibuster Alito” actually just means a number of Democrats have pledged to vote against cloture on Monday.Maybe Dems are planning some serious rhetorical pyrotechnics then, even though Bobby Byrd is on the other side of the issue. And maybe the six gazillion calls Senators will get over the weekend will have some impact.Yet it makes me nostalgic for the days when announcing a filibuster meant the Senate was about to invert its staid and bipartisan image and go nuts, and the outcome depended on whether some septuagenarian could succesfully hold the floor when a Call of Nature threatened to overwhelm the Call to Service.

Well, by now it’s obvious that the title of my last post on Democratic unity in the Alito debate should have ended with a question mark, now that several Senators have vowed to begin a filibuster, without the votes to defeat a cloture motion.But you have to play the hand that’s dealt you. I can only hope Senate Dems make a serious effort to stay focused on the Big Case against Alito during the debate, and not provide the GOP with any negative ad material. It’s especially important that they deal with the GOP “obstructionist” talking point by relentlessly reminding people that Bush deliberately picked this fight by giving conservative activists their very own Supreme Court nominee. And it wouldn’t hurt to spend some time exposing the hypocrisy of “pro-choice” Republican Senators who are deliberately giving the anti-abortion movement the fourth vote they need–just one short of a majority–to erode and then overturn Roe v. Wade.If we are to have a filibuster, let it be one that is short on senatorial bloviation, and long on clear and concise persuasion. And if nothing else, maybe the debate will complicate Bush’s State of the Union Address.

I know I’m late in officially registering opposition to the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, but I’ve said enough negative stuff about him to make my position clear. I agree with the arguments for opposing Alito mentioned in yesterday’s New Dem Dispatch. But I would add to them my particular concern that he is almost certain to do his best, or worst, to undermine or reverse Roe v. Wade, not only eliminating every woman’s constitutional right to choose, but also turning the politics and legislative process of many states into an obsessive, nightmare struggle on abortion restrictions for many years to come. The Senate debate on Alito’s confirmation is fully underway now; it appears Democrats have chosen an “extended debate” as a compromise between the short discussion and quick vote Republicans preferred, and the filibuster at least some Democrats wanted. I hope Democrats now make a more coherent and judicial-philosophy centered argument than was made during the Judiciary Committee hearings. Forget about Princeton. Don’t get too obsessed with the arcana of “unitary executive” theory. The big point is that given a chance to nominate anybody he wanted to the Supreme Court, George W. Bush chose a lifelong movement conservative whose judicial philosphy will tilt the Court to the Right for many years, and will directly threaten the erosion or reversal of constitutional protections that really matter to the American people, beginning with the reproductive rights of women. And Bush did so as a blatant pander to the conservative activists who brought down Harriet Miers, and whom he now needs to defend his wretched record. As of now, only one Senate Democrat has announced support for Alito, and at a minimum, the vote against him will be much higher than against Chief Justice Roberts. Democrats are united on an important point of principle and politics, and while that will not keep Samuel Alito off the Court, it will matter down the road.