By the time most of you read this, the papers will be full of accounts of the weird vote House Republicans forced tonight on a truncuated version of Rep. John Murtha’s call yesterday for a quick U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.The snap-vote decision, reportedly suggested to the House GOP Caucus this morning by conservative attack-dog Hunter Duncan, is one of those too-clever-by-half things that sound good at first suggestion, but which grownups usually eschew in the end.Guess there aren’t that many grownups in the House Republican Caucus.The debate on Hunter’s version of Murtha’s resolution was one of the more dreadful displays I’ve seen in many years of House-watching. Everybody knew that House Democrats had decided to urge its members to vote against the resolution, making the whole exercise a waste of time (the final vote was 3-402). Listening to House Republicans scream about staying the course, fighting the terrorists on their turf, bringing democracy to the Middle East, etc., etc., you’d never know their Senate counterparts had voted overwhelmingly to repudiate the administration’s strategy in Iraq earlier this week. For his part, Murtha (appropriately, the only speaker on the Democratic side), put in the impossible position of leading the opposition to what Republicans were describing as his resolution, pretty much limited himself to reading letters from troops and their families supporting his earlier statement. There was no real debate.It’s not surprising, given Murtha’s credentials, that Republicans gave most of their time to Vietnam vets, but what was surprising was how often they expressed the opinion that America “cut and run” in Vietnam, and how angry they still seem to be that we didn’t stay there until, well, eternity.If I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be encouraging Vietnam analogies, but what the hell, the whole scene was so surreal that you half expected the ghost of Richard Nixon to arise from the House well and demand vindication.We’ll see how the whole ploy spins out over the weekend, but here’s a quick reaction from one conservative, National Review’s K-Lo over at The Corner:

I have a very bad feeling about this GOP vote-force tonight. Listening to the emotional debate on the floor now…well, there was just some screaming, to give you an idea. Prediction: Dems vote no on a Republican resolution for immediate withdrawal. Dems easily frame the whole exercise as Republicans caricaturing sensible concerns about Iraq–and more specifically a mocking of Vietnam vet Marine Jack Murtha.

Ms. Lopez was right about the vote. And I think she’s right about how the whole thing goes down. It was a bad idea that House Republicans, typically, could not resist.

You may have already read about the remarks made yesterday by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) in response to Rep. John Murtha’s call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. If not, here they are:

Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can’t do that there, so they’ve brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.And, frankly, the liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound, fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.

In case anyone needs a translation here, Davis basically charged Murtha (and unnamed “liberal leaders,” since the label hardly applies to the quite conservative Pennyslvanian) with being an agent of Zarquawi and of al Qaeda, and of cooperating with our country’s enemies.I haven’t seen video of the House GOP press conference, convened by Rep. Duncan Hunter of CA, in which Davis made these remarks, so I don’t know if any of his colleagues had the decency to wince or blush when he called another colleague a terrorist collaborator and a traitor.But the rest of this crowd (including Kay Granger, Mike Conaway, Louie Gohmert and John Carter of TX, Joe Wilson of SC, Bob Beauprez and Tom Tancredo of CO, David Dreir of CA, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of FL, and Jean Schmidt of OH) was pretty awful as well, making constant assertions that everything would be peachy-keen in Iraq if everybody just shut up and trusted the administration, and in particular repeating incessantly the fatuous assertion that if we weren’t in Iraq, the terrorists would be blowing up the United States. (Perhaps they’d start with blowing up San Francisco, as Bill O’Reilly invited them to do on national television last week).These smears of Murtha–a heavily decorated Marine Corps veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, who supported both Iraq wars, and has always been a staunch supporter of a robust national security posture and especially the needs of our troops–are impossible to properly characterize in a family-friendly blog. Their perpetrators are teetering on the line that divides people who deserve angry contempt, and people who are beneath contempt.And I say this as someone who doesn’t agree with Murtha’s position on Iraq, but who understands this is a guy that has no possible reason for taking it other than that he believes it’s right–for the country, for the troops, and for our national security.When the President of the United States started this crap a few days ago by accusing critics of his Iraq policies of aiding and abetting the terrorist enemy, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska issued this tart response: “The Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years.”This isn’t a terribly complicated proposition. Disagree with or even deplore Murtha’s or anybody else’s position on Iraq all you want. Make your case about why you think the consequences would be dreadful.But at a time when a majority of Americans have lost confidence in the administration’s Iraq policies–and when a majority of Republican Senators cast a vote this week questioning them as well–to impugn the patriotism of Bush’s critics is an act that manages to give demagoguery a bad name.

Dick Cheney’s bizarre speech last night accusing Democrats of violating the sacred canons of Washingtonian candor and honesty is drawing the catcalls it deserves, but it does help raise an issue that’s been percolating just between the surface about the nature of this administration’s obstinant mendacity. Have these guys been consciously lying through their teeth all this time about Iraq, about the economy, about the budget, about, well, all those things they are getting so egregiously wrong? Or is there an element of self-deception going on? Now, for many Democrats, this very question is provocative: of course they are consciously lying, every day, on every subject, and to suggest otherwise is to go soft and concede some decency to people who will just see this as a sign of Democratic weakness. But as Mark Schmitt usefully points out over at TPMCafe, self-deception in high office is arguably more dangerous and damning than conscious deception. His post lays out the idea that the White House under Bush has been dominated by an “ideology of information” that sorts evidence into “useful” and “not useful” categories based on a pre-conceived agenda, essentially filtering out any empircal data interfering with the administration’s agenda in a way that creates a hermetically sealed echo chamber of self-validation. Even as the bloodhounds continue to search out and find multiple examples of conscious White House mendacity, the one truly incontrovertible thing about this administration is its incredible intolerance for anything like internal debate and self-criticism. Sure, there are differences of opinion, but only at the margins, and only on occasions where The Line is not dictated by ideology or the dark political calculations of Karl Rove. In the Bush White House, the only deadly sin has been anything like a continuing internal, much less external, dissent (see O’Neill, Paul and DiIulio, John for Object Examples of what happens to people who violate this rule). This is an inherently disastrous approach in any executive operation, much less one commanding a multi-trillion dollar budget, the world’s most powerful military, and to be blunt about it, the power to ruin and end lives, and shape a society for decades to come. There are very few costless mistakes in the White House. In my first government job, working for a Georgia Governor (recently deceased) named George Busbee, anyone briefing the Governor knew he would have to run the gauntlet of an incredibly smart young lawyer named Cecil Phillips, whose job was to sit in on any policy discussion and raise tough questions about anything proposed. This Policy Ombudsman approach always struck me as one of the smartest and simplest quality control arrangements I’ve ever seen. Nobody went into that Governor’s office without marshalling facts and thinking about contrary opinions. And a lot of bad policy decisions were probably avoided as a result of that process. In the White House of George W. Bush’s predecessor, you didn’t need an Official Devil’s Advocate, because free-flowing debate went on every day on every subject, and nobody shut up until The Big He made a final decision. And even then, dissenters did not get sent to Siberia. Moreover, Bill Clinton’s intellectual voracity–so different from Bush’s remarkably unreflexive nature–drove him to seek out advice from people who were not on his payroll, over and over again.Many of the failures of the Bush administration are easily and directly attributable to this huge blind spot: a White House hostile to debate, dissent and contrary evidence on issues large and small, and where all the incentives pointed to lockstep conformity and demonization of any divergent point of view. And this attitude of “don’t-confuse-me-with-facts” has been echoed among the Republican regime on Capitol Hill, especially in Tom DeLay’s House.Given the overwhelming evidence that Republican self-deception is feeding its attempted deceptions of the American people, why do some Democrats insist on proving that these people are consciously lying to us? After all, it’s easier to prove criminal negligence than criminal intent, and even though the latter carries heavier penalities in courts of law, the former is if anything more damaging in the court of public opinion.It’s entirely possible that some key White House players are in fact cynical liars, and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are obvious suspects in this case. But in general, a president and an administration so isolated from reality that they don’t even know when they are lying to themselves or to us, is a bigger danger and a bigger target for Democrats.

As you probably know, the U.S. Senate reared up on its hind legs yesterday and passed a resolution demanding that the Bush administration cut out the happy talk, explain its exit strategy for Iraq, link troop withdrawals to specific benchmarks of progress towards Iraqi self-sufficiency, report regularly to Congress, and generally, stop B.S.-ing the American and the Iraqi people.The vote on that resolution was 79-19, with 41 Republican Senators going over the side.Even more remarkably, this resolution, drafted by Republican Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, was largely a carbon-copy of Sen. Carl Levin’s Democratic resolution, which went down 58-40 earlier in the day. The supposed Big Difference was Levin’s language urging the administration to come up with “estimated dates” for withdrawal of U.S. troops, contingent on everything going on as planned, etc., etc. Check out this colloquoy on the Senate floor between Levin and Warner, and tell me if you think it’s a Big Difference at all. Warner basically agrees Levin’s language doesn’t require any sort of fixed “timetable” or “deadline” for withdrawal of U.S. troops, but worries it might be misunderstood as such. We’re into angels-dancing-on-a-pin country here.But upon this parsing of really small words, the Bushies have staked their entire, and even for them, unusually mendacious, spin operation. The Senate rejected a “timetable,” they crow. The resolution endorsed our policies! If you read the Warner resolution, and understand what it means, that’s a completely crazy reading of what happened, which is that a large majority of Republican Senators suddenly but clearly repudiated the administration line on Iraq, for the very first time. The fact that the Senate also recently passed, for the second time, and this time on a voice vote, the McCain Amendment rejecting the Cheney Torture doctrine, which the White House has indicated is so important that it might generate Bush’s first-ever legislative veto, is another major straw in the wind.The Bushies aren’t the only people exaggerating the difference between the Levin and Warner resolutions on Iraq: some Democratic voices, whom I will not name out of collegiality, are fretting that the Republican defection to a “benchmarked withdrawal” position means our guys must get more rigid and fervent about a timetable and deadline for withdrawal to maintain the requisite partisan differentiation.Ironically, these are among the same folks who have been arguing for a while that the secret of the GOP Machine is its ability to maintain Republican unity while battening on Democratic disunity. On Iraq, we are currently witnessing massive Republican disunity and relatively clear Democratic unity. What, if anything, is wrong with this picture politically?More broadly, let’s look at what’s happening to Bush and to the Republican coalition. After the conservative uprising against Harriet Miers, the White House decided that it had to have “base” support in these troubled times. Hence, Bush substituted Alito for Miers; began supporting right-wing budget proposals in Congress; and most recently, went Nixonian on Iraq, attacking its critics as allies of al Qaeda.The jury’s still out on Alito, but the conservative budget offensive has been derailed by Republicans, and now the “stay the course” offensive on Iraq has been derailed by Republicans as well. Meanwhile, the ethics problems of the GOP and its friends are just beginning. The whole Rove/Neocon/Norquist/Theocrat/Plutocrat alliance that elected George W. Bush is in shambles. Republican office-holders are running for the hills, and for heretofore unimaginable cooperation with the hated partisan enemy.This is a very good thing for Democrats. And while partisan differentiation is always important, we shouldn’t be worried about that to the exclusion of taking every opportunity to let Republicans fall out like thieves, and re-establish ourselves clearly as the party that can best govern the country. I mean, really, if the 2006 elections turn into a referendum on which candidates can most thorougly separate themselves from George W. Bush’s policies, does anyone really doubt the Donkey will prevail? I sure don’t. Let the Republicans fight, and let’s don’t go out of our way to take positions that make it easier for them to pretend they are united.

This weekend I finally finished reading two important recent books on Africa: Martin Meredith’s massive The Fate of Africa: From The Hopes of Freedom To The Heart of Despair, and Gerard Prunier’s relatively short but intense Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Both books are already helping fuel a growing debate in the U.S. and in Europe about what if anything “the international community” can do to solve Africa’s general problems, and the immediate and deadly crisis in Darfur.Meredith’s book, which attempts a panoramic history of post-colonial Africa, is fascinating, instructive, and impressively well-written, but as the subtitle suggests, his tale is one of unremitting woe and disillusionment. As you read through his roughly chronological account which shifts from region to region, the bright spots of independent Africa steadily blink out, and country after country devolves into corruption, tyranny, bankruptcy, and savage armed conflict (Botswana is the only country earning unqualified praise from Meredith, with South Africa being judged a qualified success).Indeed, I fear that Meredith’s book may have an impact on general readers similiar to that of Robert Kaplan’s 1993 book Balkan Ghosts, a cautionary tale about the depth of ethnic confilicts in the post-communist Balkans that reportedly influenced Bill Clinton to avoid U.S. intervention in the Bosnian civil war. Why bother trying to do anything about impossible people in impossible places?But Meredith has a very distinct point of view about what’s gone wrong in Africa, and what that means for non-Africans who want to do something constructive about it. As he relentlessly tells us, Africa’s failure is above all a failure in political leadership, and until its elites figure that out and do something fundamental about it, nothing else matters. As Andrew Rice usefully explained in The Nation a few weeks ago, this position places Meredith near one extreme, with Jeffrey Sachs on the other, in the ongoing chicken-and-egg debate on whether Africa’s poverty causes misgovernment, or its misgovernment causes poverty. (You should also read Sam Rosenfeld’s October interview with Meredith on the American Prospect site, wherein Meredith makes it clear he is indeed skeptical of the current Blair-and-Sachs-led effort to dramatically boost no-strings aid to Africa). Like Meredith, the French ethnographer Gerard Prunier focuses on political factors in his complex and ultimately angry book about Darfur. And even more than Meredith, he is disdainful of those who think humanitaritan assistance will solve the conflict that has probably killed over 300,000 people and displaced–while destroying the livelihoods of–more than two million people. But Prunier certainly doesn’t counsel international inaction until such time as the Sudanese get their act together. Au contraire: the major thrust of his book is to explain how Darfur was dragged into the current nightmare by the conflicts and intrigues of its neighbors, and then to indict the many excuses “the international community” has given itself from taking the diplomatic and military steps that could have stopped the killing, and still could.I’m writing a full review of Prunier’s book for Blueprint Magazine, but I encourage anyone interesed in Africa to read it, and to read Meredith as well.

I promise my next post will be a serious one (actually, a very serious one on two books about Africa I recently finished), but what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t occasionally share personal experiences with ten thousand or so total strangers? Saturday night I had a perfectly abysmal sporting experience. I was down at the home place in central Virginia, and since the ground hogs had apparently chewed up the wires from the satellite dish, I had to soujourn to the nearest city, Lynchburg, to watch my Georgia Bulldogs try to wrap up the SEC East against Auburn. Having googled up a “sports bar” in the ‘Burg, I sallied forth, pursued by my wife’s demands that I swear I would not touch Demon Alcohol before returning to the countryside. Forty-five minutes later, I settled in at the “sports bar,” where two screens directly in front of me were supposed to be showing my game, and then, of course, both sets were changed to the NASCAR Classic Channel or something, with the bartenders shrugging and alluding to shadowy robo-managers who programmed the sets two months ago. Finally, after exercising several complex moves I learned while riding Metro, I got to a seat where I could watch the Dawgs and the War Eagles from a 60 degree angle, and settled down with a non-alcoholic beer (dreadful stuff; it helps explain W.’s cranky disposition).About half-way through a tense second quarter, I suddenly saw bright flashing lights and heard a hideous wall of noise. Was I having a stroke? An allergic reaction to O’Doul’s? Had I died and gone to hell? No, I soon discovered, it was Karaoke Night in the “sports bar,” and for the next two hours I tried to watch a football game while being practically blown off the bar stool by bad music from every available genre, badly performed. And my fellow “sports bar” patrons, who were multiplying by the minute, were enraptured with the noise, greeting the first notes of Play That Funky Music, White Boy and Baby Got Back and even Rocky Top with bellows of sheer delight. And these were largely kids: is this what they are listening to on their I-Pods? In any event, I stuck it out to the bitter end, when Auburn beat Georgia on a last-minute field goal after an improbable long pass on a fourth-and-ten, just as the “sports bar” exploded with hormonal delerium to Fight For Your Right To Party. I paid off my tab for an evening of buzzless beer, and wandered off into the packed parking lot–somehow missing the army of Designated Drivers preparing to shepherd the drunken crowd inside safely home–and made a firm resolution never again to mix football with Karaoke. The funny thing is, I sort of like Lynchburg, despite its association with Jerry Falwell’s Church of the Angry God. The other city reasonably close to my Amherst digs is Charlottesville, whose snooty pretensions must torment Thomas Jefferson’s soul each and every day. Lynchburg is a cheerfully unpretentious old river town with impressive architecture and genuine southern food. But you just don’t want to go to its “sports bars.” Not unless you want to watch a game while protecting your non-alcoholic beer from a twenty-two-year-old Baptist strutting her stuff to Baby Got Back.

Veterans’ Day, unlike Memorial Day, is not essentially a celebration of those who have died or been injured in war, or even of war itself: it’s a commemoration of everyone who has “worn the uniform” and served his or her country. And in effect, it’s a memorial service for those days when most male Americans, at least, did indeed “wear the uniform,” even if they never fired a shot in anger or risked their lives.Like most baby boomers who went to college, I never wore the uniform, though I did come very close. At the end of law school, I decided to go into the Air Force JAG Corps. I survived the document review, the background check, the physical. I even got through the final interview, when I was asked: “How do you feel about nuclear war?” My impulsive response was: “Do you mean as a victim, or as a perpetrator?” Fortunately, the officer interviewing me had a sense of humor, and I was offered a commission as a USAF captain.As it happened, I deferred my commission for a year, because my girlfriend at the time, who was a year behind me in law school, wanted to go into the JAG Corps with me. In the interim, I stumbled into my first political job, and never looked back.But I regret never having “worn the uniform,” and I regret the fact that it’s become a rarer experience for the generations that followed the baby boomers.I’ve spent a considerable part of my professional life promoting the idea of universal access to national service: in the military, and in civilian occupations. I don’t support a return to the draft, but do believe that every American, male or female, should be encouraged to give a year or two to their community and their country, in exchange for the blessings we enjoy as Americans.My father, most of my uncles, and just about every man I know above the age of 60 did wear the uniform, often in supporting roles in wartime: as motor pool mechanics, as military police, as clerk-typists, as administrative staff. Virtually all of them say they benefitted from the experience of being intermingled with people from every part of the country, from every race and ethnic group, all their prejudices being burned off in the crucible of a common cause, and a common exposure to the ultimate sacrifice, even if they never went into combat.We should all honor that service, and better yet, spend days like Veterans’ Day pondering the value of univeral service and universal sacrifice, and considering ways to make national service once again a general experience for future generations.

Several alert readers have emailed me to make sure I know that the day-labor site in Herndon, Virginia, that was the object of Jerry Kilgore’s unsuccessful demagoguery in the late governor’s race is not, as I keep writing, in Loudoun County, but is instead in Fairfax County. (It’s actually near the Loudoun-Fairfax border, but facts are facts).Anyway, this correction enables me to point out that ol’ Jerry’s message resonated even less in the mega-suburb of Fairfax than it did in the smaller if faster-growing Loudoun. Kaine won Fairfax County by an astounding 60/38 margin, a plurality of more than 60,000 votes (or about 58% of his statewide margin), a big improvement over Mark Warner’s 54/45 win in 2001 (which produced a 25,000 vote plurality, or about 26% of Warner’s statewide margin).There’s a broader lesson here, that transcends suburban distaste for Jerry’s antics: Tim Kaine provided positive economic message to Northern Virginia, which harkened back to the days when Democrats made gains in high-growth areas by talking about balanced growth and “quality of life” issues. As the DLC noted today in a meditation on the Kaine suburban breakthrough, the middle-class and increasingly diverse residents of high-growth suburbs around the country are just as responsive to this message as they were in the 1990s. And “quality of life” is not just an issue for Starbucks patrons, by any means. Indeed, Democrats need to rediscover their voice on the real-life concerns of working stiffs who worry as much about traffic, sprawl, property taxes, and overcrowded schools as they do about offshoring or globalization. Check it out.

My colleague The Moose greeted the Virginia gubernatorial results with the headline: “Warner Defeats Bush!” And indeed, Warner deserves a lot of credit for Kaine’s win, not only because he campaigned effectively for his chosen successor, but because his record gave the Democrat a big leg up while reacquainting Virginians with the virtues of the Donkey.There’s also no question George W. Bush was a big loser yesterday, after having intervened in the Virginia governor’s race at the last moment. At the rate he’s going, Republican candidates next year may echo the words of Bob Dole in 1974, who, when asked if he wanted an embattled Richard Nixon to campaign for him in Kansas, said: “I wouldn’t mind if he flew over.”But there’s another Republican George whose repuation took a hit yesterday: Sen. Allen of Virginia.Back before it became fashionable to view the Kaine-Kilgore contest as a test of the relative appeal of Warner and Bush, it was often thought of as a shadow war between Warner and Allen, two Virginians eyeing a White House run in 2008. Allen certainly campaigned for Kilgore as much if not more than Warner campaigned for Kaine. Allen appeared in Kilgore’s ads, vouching for the natty mountaineer’s alleged sturdy folk virtues. The way things turned out, Allen’s lucky Bush flew in to take the fall for Kilgore’s debacle, but the race sure hasn’t burnished his own presidential credentials.That’s certainly bad timing for the junior senator. Up until now, he was the Washington Insider’s hot pick for the guy who might become the consensus conservative choice to block the awful prospect of a McCain nomination in ’08. Indeed, he didn’t seem to have much competition for that role. The nascent Bill Frist bandwagon has blown all four tires. Brownback’s views are too crazy. Santorum probably won’t hang onto his Senate seat. None of the GOP governors seem to be standing out (Bill Owens of Colorado was once the Rising Star of the Right, but he’s managed to alienate the Christian Right with his marital problems and then was recently excommunicated by the No Tax Church of Grover Norquist). Guiliani’s less acceptable to conservatives than McCain. Haley Barbour? Give me a break.On paper, Allen looks pretty good. He’s been a governor, then a senator. He’s obnoxiously conservative on most issues, but has managed to avoid making too many enemies, and always did surprisingly well in Virginia among minority voters. He won rave reviews for his tenure as chairman of the Republican senatorial campaign committee.But he sure couldn’t drag ol’ Jerry across the finish line in his own state. And worse yet, Kilgore got trounced in George’s old stomping grounds of Albemarle County (Charlottesville)–the very place where the son of the legendary Redskins coach once quarterbacked the Cavaliers.Now, as a relative newcomer to Virginia, I’ve never quite fathomed the Allen Mystique. He was a fairly successful one-term governor during an economic boom. Sure, he’s got the pseudo-populist rap down–he wears cowboy boots and chews tobacco–but he’d also give George W. Bush a strong run in a smirking contest, and has not exactly stood out as a senator, a policy innovator, or even much of an ideologue. My most searing impression of Allen was in a campaign ad he ran against Chuck Robb in 2000, wherein he seized on some anodyne Robb quote from ages earlier about the essential meaningnlessness of the Social Security Trust Fund, and accused his opponent of disrespecting the Lock Box! I had to check the channel to make sure I wasn’t watching Saturday Night Live.But all that aside, the bigger question about George is whether the country is ready for a presidential candidate whose entire world view and frame of reference is based on football metaphors.I mean, I like football as much as the next cracker, but Allen’s in his own league on this subject, as illustrated by a savage Dana Milbank profile of the senator earlier this year:

Sen. George Allen (Va.) contemplates a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, his prospects could come down to this key question: How many football metaphors can one nation stand?Last month on the Senate floor, Allen, a former quarterback for the University of Virginia and son of the late Redskins coach of the same name, said critics of Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, “have used some bump-and-run defenses and tactics against her.”Talking about the Iraq war, he criticized Democrats for “Monday-morning quarterbacking.”When the GOP won a Senate seat in Louisiana in November, he said it “was like a double-reverse flea-flicker and a lateral.”As head of Senate Republicans’ campaign efforts in 2004, he called his candidates in the southern states the “NFC South.”In Allen’s world, primaries are “intrasquad scrimmages,” his Senate staff is the “A-team,” Senate recess is “halftime” and opponents are flagged for “pass interference.”If the electorate awarded points for football imagery, Allen would get the Heisman Trophy. But will voters find all this football talk to be presidential? That’s a wild card.

After yesterday’s results, I guess you could ask if Republicans want to go with a coach who’s just lost a crucial home game by letting his quarterback get intercepted on a bomb thrown into triple coverage, when he should have just controlled the ball and run out the clock.After all, at this point, Republicans don’t want to follow up George W. with George L., for Loser.

Ring the town hall bell and sing a Te Deum: Tim Kaine soundly beat Jerry Kilgore in the Virginia governor’s race yesterday, and in the process showed that sometimes nice guys finish first. Sorry I’m posting a bit late this morning, but I was up until the wee hours savoring the county-by-county and city-by-city returns. And the outlines of the Kaine victory are very clear. Kilgore ran well ahead of 2001 GOP candidate Mark Early in southwest Virginia, in much of southside Virginia, and in the southern parts of the Shenandoah Valley. Yet Kaine ran ahead of Mark Warner’s winning 2001 performance just about everywhere else (the Richmond area, Hampton Roads, and Northern Virginia) and in the end, actually exceeded Warner’s statewide margin, beating Kilgore by nearly six percent. Aside from burying Jerry, Kaine’s big win buried a whole host of myths in ways that may reverberate nationally:1) The Myth of the GOP Turnout Machine: plenty of people, including a lot of Democrats, were nervous about Kaine’s small lead in the polls going into this election, on the theory that GOP superiority in the “ground game,” buttressed by its success in 2004, would lift Kilgore to victory. Didn’t happen. Turnout in heavily Republican areas was no higher than in heavily Democratic areas. And if the GOPers did indeed do a better job than Democrats in cherry-picking individual voters around the state, then there are a lot less of them than we realized.2) The Myth of Bush’s Power To Energize the Base: according to one popular theory, the Republican “conservative base,” excited about Bush’s flip-flop on the Supreme Court and his recent discovery of the idea of spending restraint, would snake-dance to the polls to congratulate him, especially after he zoomed into Richmond on the eve of the election to appear with ol’ Jerry. Again, it didn’t happen. If Bush’s presence was going to matter anywhere, it would have been in the key Richmond suburb of Chesterfied County, but as it transpires, Kilgore ran three points behind Early’s 2001 performance there. I somehow don’t think vulnerable Republican candidates in 2006 are going to line up outside the White House gates to demand Bush’s presence on the campaign trail. 3) The Myth of the Old Cultural Wedge Issues: 75% of Virginians favor capital punishment. Tim Kaine doesn’t, and hasn’t hidden it. It’s clear Virginia GOPers thought they’d be half-way to victory if they simply intoned “Death Penalty;” southern politicians simply don’t oppose it. Instead, the issue wound up hurting Kilgore more than Kaine. Now, that obviously doesn’t mean Democratic politicians should hasten to embrace unpopular positions on cultural issues, or minimize their potential impact. But it does mean a candidate can get away with an unpopular position if he or she is clear about it; bases the position on faith or other respected values; and exhibits a willingness to defer to majoritarian opinions. Kaine did all those things very effectively.4) The Myth of the New Cultural Wedge Issues: perhaps the single most important national consequence of the Kaine victory is that it may forestall a heavy emphasis by Republican candidates in 2006 and 2008 on immigrant-bashing themes. GOPers are flirting with this issue all over the South, and indeed, in every state where there are enough immigrants to be visible, but not enough to defend themselves politically. Down the stretch run, Jerry Kilgore’s campaign in Northern Virginia was all about immigration, focused relentlessly on the decision of a town in exurban Loudoun County to build a shelter for casual day laborers, most of them immigrants. But yesterday, Jerry got waxed all over Northern Virginia (where he was running even with Kaine in polls as recently as September). And most importantly, Kilgore lost Loudoun County by a 51-46 margin (Early beat Warner there 53-46) . Any Republican operative who believes this issue is an electoral silver bullet should take a long look at those results, and repent. 5) The Myth That Going Negative Always Works: this myth, beloved of campaign tacticians in both parties, took a big hit in Virginia yesterday. Recent polling (most notably in the Washington Post) showed that the tone of Kilgore’s campaign was turning off voters, even Republicans, and generating sympathy for Kaine. Yet Jerry pretty much stayed on the low road to the bitter end, providing connoisseurs of this sort of thing with an assortment of last-minute dirty tricks (fake brochures, fake “pro-Kaine” phone calls, etc.). And it’s this last factor that, for me at least, makes Kaine’s victory so very sweet. You could make a pretty good case that Jerry Kilgore would have won yesterday if he hadn’t gone negative on Kaine and introduced divisive cultural wedge issues. He had a geographical advantage, being from a region of the state that had been crucial to Mark Warner’s victory in 2001. He had a united party behind him. He was ahead in most of the polls right down to the last few weeks. With a lighter touch, he could have drawn attention to Kaine’s unpopular views on capital punishment and even exploited the immigration issue, while maintaining a positive campaign. But he and his handlers just couldn’t resist the opportunity to go medieval. Kilgore’s infamous death penalty ads achieved a sort of evil perfection in their shock value and production qualities. You can easily envision Jerry and a roomful of Young Republican rottweilers sitting around watching that first tape, and being overwhelmed by its “kill” potential.And that’s why in the end it was an election where the winner earned his victory, and the loser richly earned his defeat. God’s in His heaven, and all’s right with the world.