This weekend the DLC National Conversation (our annual meeting) got under way in Columbus, Ohio. Today’s public session, featuring speeches by Hillary Clinton, Tom Vilsack (our new chairman), Evan Bayh, Mark Warner, and Tom Carper, will undoubtedly get some serious national press, but in some respects, the heart of the meeting was yesterday, when we held 22 workshops on a variety of policy and political topics. We knew there would be more than 300 state and local elected officials here from more than forty states, but the interesting thing was that every one of them seemed to show up for a full menu of three workshops. I moderated three of them. The first, on “values and frames” (a discussion of the Lackoffian theory of message development, and others, including our own) had to be moved to an auditorium after about 80 people showed up. The second, on Religion and Politics, was SRO. And even in the shank of the afternoon, we had a full room for a discussion of that wonkiest of political topics, election reform and redistricting reform. And best as I could tell, every other workshop was pretty much sold-out as well. These folks (about half of whom were attending their first DLC national event) are hungry to learn and win.Those folks who think of the DLC as an inside-the-beltway organization of old white guys would probably have been surprised by the sheer number of state and local attendees, and their diversity in terms of race and gender (about half the attendees were women). Even ideologically, I think we drew a fairly representative cross-section of state and local Democratic elected officials. The tone of most sessions, though infused with a sense of urgency, was upbeat. There was no talk of litmus tests or purges (please take note, Kos), and as usual with these events, a lot of networking and best-practices exchanges in small gatherings between the formal meetings. We were picketed by a local activist group called the Spine Project which pretty much shows up at every Democratic gathering in Ohio to express their displeasure at the Party’s failure to challenge the presidential outcome in this state. But it was reasonably friendly. All in all, the vibes have been good, and I expect that to continue today.

Well, I’ve been horribly remiss in posting, but being as how I’m supposedly on vacation, have been involved heavily in preparations for the DLC’s annual meeting, and am getting dragged into a discussion of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas on the TPMCafe site, I’m not exactly violating the Protestant Work Ethic or anything.At any rate, I wanted to say a word about a new book that’s recently gotten a couple of major reviews, in the New York Times and in The New Republic: Fred Siegel’s Prince of the City, which is ostensibly a biography of Rudy Guiuliani. I say “ostensibly,” because Fred Siegel’s take on Rudy is really a take on New York’s peculiar political culture in the distant and recent past. And it’s a take worth reading and absorbing in detail.By way of full disclosure, I should mention that Fred’s a friend and mentor of mine, and the most remarkable polymath I have ever known. For years I used to play “stump Fred” by asking him questions about any and every conceivable topic of social, political, literary, and even sports history, and never found a subject he didn’t know a lot about. His particular area of expertise is American urban history, and he brings the full weight of his knowledge to bear on that subject in Prince of the City.Both the reviews I linked to above treat Fred’s book as a lionization of Guiliani. But I disagree. While he has a lot of positive things to say about Rudy’s initial assault on New York’s entrenched problems and powers, and later, about Hizzoner’s famous apotheosis on and after 9/11, I think the book’s theme is essentially tragic: by the end of his two terms in office, Guiliani was beginning to succumb to the same temptations of fiscal profligacy and interest-group tending as his predecessors. And he was succeeded by a Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, who exhibited the same vices without many of Rudy’s virtues. Fred’s a lifelong Democrat, if often a heretical Democrat, and I think the most important message of his book is about how a city with a 4-1 Democratic registration margin has voted three straight times for Republican mayors, and if current polls are any indication, may do so again later this year. It takes a lot of Democratic dysfunction to make that happen, even if the beneficiary is a man with so many progressive impulses as Rudy, and especially if it’s Mike Bloomberg. Prince of the City is, more than anything else, a matchless cautionary tale for Democrats everywhere.

Well, after an extended campaign of indirection, George W. Bush tonight named D.C. Court of Appeals Judge John Roberts as his nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.It’s an interesting choice, politically and philosophically. Roberts obviously doesn’t get any diversity points, particularly since he would replace one of the two women on the Court. He’s not, by general assent, a crazy person; liberal legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen has categorized him as a “principled conservative,” free of “Constitution-in-Exile” hubris. But Rosen was evaluating him as a replacement for Rehnquist, not O’Connor; it’s likely Roberts would move the Court to the Right.On abortion, Roberts’ record is unclear. Yes, as Deputy Solicitor General under Bush 41, he wrote a brief in an abortion case that in passing referenced the administration’s support for reversing Roe v. Wade. But that was his job as a lawyer representing his client, and is not a reliable indicator of his position as a Supreme Court Justice. Conservatives tonight seem happy with the appointment, but Democrats should let things sift for a while before taking a definitive position. Without question, the confirmation hearings could produce some questions and answers that might either discomfit the Cultural Right or create legitimate concerns for everybody else.

This week &c, the New Republic’s blog, is performing an extremely important public service: a weeklong tutorial on the Darfur genocide by Eric Reeves of Smith College, one of the best U.S. experts on the subject.It’s easy to forget about Darfur, given the grindingly consistent if murky bad news, the lack of interest in official circles much of anywhere, and the usual crypto-racist impulses many people have to write it off as just another African massacre. But I strongly urge you to stick with Reeves’ posts all week. If enough Americans do that, then maybe Darfur will become something more than a third-tier issue in U.S. and world politics.

With all the attention that’s been paid this year to Bush’s stalled Big Plan in domestic policy–Social Security privatization–there’s been little talk in political circles about the fate of his last Big Plan–the Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 after an enormous amount of GOP arm-twisting.Opponents of the plan–which included the DLC–pointed to a wide variety of problems, ranging from its exceptional and much-disguised cost, to its relatively meager benefits, to its incredibly complex structure, to the windfalls it might provide to drug companies, especially given the bill’s failure to authorize government negotiations over prices.But now, two years later, the big problem is simply that seniors, and more specifically a broad cross-section of seniors, might not sign up.That’s the news from Robert Pear of The New York Times, who wrote up the first stop–in Maine–of an administration road show aimed at promoting the benefit.Pear succinctly describes the major fear gripping administration officials:

The economics of the new program depend on the assumption that large numbers of relatively healthy people will enroll and pay premiums, to help defray the costs of those with high drug expenses. Insurers say the new program cannot survive if the only people who sign up are heavy users of prescription drugs.

Ah, but there’s the rub. The better-off and healthier seniors are among those who look at the benefit and its costs in premiums and aren’t exactly excited about it:

People who said they were healthy said they saw no immediate need to buy the Medicare drug coverage. People who said they were ill said the benefit seemed meager. And local insurance counselors said they shuddered at the complexity of the program.

The road show, which will soon be supplemented by a publicity blitz by a wide array of senior and health care organizations, may get seniors who will clearly benefit from the Rx coverage to sign up. But the underlying problems with the whole plan are not going to go away, and could make its costs go even higher than previously assumed. If so, Republicans will be left holding the bag for a genuinely unique accompishment: a new and very expensive government entitlement that its intended beneficiaries don’t like.

I’m not much in the habit of reading the RNC’s web page, so I’m glad Josh Marshall gave a heads-up about the special cavalcade of quotes defending Karl Rove that went up on the site today.Each of these quotes has its own special taste of unintended humor, but there are two big howlers running throughout: (1) Senate Democratic criticism of the silly little business about Rove is detracting from all the big, important things the GOP is trying to do for The People; and (2) Democrats are unaccountably and without provocation acting partisan.The “tempest in a teapot” argument, made most explicitly by Orrin Hatch, is certainly interesting. If true, the Rove allegations involve (a) a deputy White House chief of staff, and the president’s acknowledged political guru, with enormous access to classified information; (b) a possible felony violation of federal law; (c) an act compromising our national security, and motivated by personal spite, as part of a larger coverup of information related to the invasion of Iraq; (d) a deliberate leak in an administration where leaking is a far worse sin than, say, gross incompetence in office. This certainly sounds as important to me as the so-called agenda of the Senate Republican leadership, which at present is focused on a semi-filibuster of stem-cell research legislation. But it’s the second claim that’s really mind-blowing: that those bad, partisan Democrats have gone medieval on that poor, respected civil servant Karl Rove. This is just bizarre. Whatever you think of the man, it’s incontrovertible that Rove has devoted his entire political career to a strategy of partisan and ideological polarization. He’s also been deeply and consistently implicated in a long series of truly savage “politics of personal destruction” campaign tactics, and has evinced a sort of giggling adolescent pleasure in those dark arts. The idea of Karl Rove as a victim of partisanship is sort of like the idea of Ken Lay as a victim of corporate malfeasance. He may or may not be guilty of the specific allegations against him in the Plame outing, but give me a break: you have to really go through the looking glass to consider him an innocent lamb among the wolves. Rove is one wolf who dare not don sheep’s clothing.

The latest issue of The Washington Monthly features twinned articles by Amy Sullivan and Carl M. Cannon on the favorite perennial topic of political junkies everywhere: is Sen. Hillary Clinton a potential general election winner in 2008? Cannon says “yes,” and Amy says, “maybe not.”My friend Amy is by no stretch of the imagination a Hillary-basher; it’s clear she thinks Clinton would be a fine president, but that the public’s fixed opinions of Hillary, and the high negatives she would take into a tough general election, might be perilously difficult to overcome. Cannon responds by comparing Clinton to Ronald Reagan, another politician who was thought to be too ideological, and carry too much baggage, to turn any new heads in the electorate.I agree with Carl’s conclusion, if not with all his talking points, but his crucial argument is this one:

She has paid her dues to the Democratic Party, and she doesn’t have to prove her bona fides to anyone. From now on, she only need emulate Reagan, a fellow Illinois native, who campaigned with positive rhetoric and a smile on his face, trusting that the work he’d done cultivating his base would pay off, and that he needed mainly to reassure independent-minded voters.

That’s true, but Hillary’s positioning is even better than Reagan’s. After all, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a key figure in an earlier, more moderate Republican administration. In other words, Sen. Clinton has a unique strategic flexibility at a time when other potential Democratic candidates are going to have to spend a lot of time establishing their street cred with different elements of the party, including those who are deeply suspicious of anything that looks or sounds like “centrism,” and those who fear Democrats may be lurching too far to the Left. And that’s also why she has another asset that neither Sullivan nor Cannon really talked about: her ability to unify the Democratic Party. Sure, there are some moderate Democrats who still think of her as the left axis in her husband’s administration, and some folks on the Left who never liked Bill, or who can’t forgive Hillary for supporting the Iraq War Resolution. But they are a small minority when it comes to rank-and-file Democratic voters.Moreover, the fixed opinions of Clinton that Amy writes about create opportunities as well as obstacles. Republicans have invested so much time, money and noise in stereotyping Democrats that the image of the party as a whole, both good and bad, is converging with Hillary’s image. That makes her unusually capable of challenging those stereotypes, and of surprising voters, and making them think–something her husband did to great advantage.To be clear about it, I’m not endorsing Sen. Clinton for president in 2008, and I’m among those who doubt she’s made up her mind to run in the first place. I like a lot of other potential candidates, especially my Governor, Mark Warner, but also the man who should be president today, John Kerry, along with Bayh, Biden, Richardson, and Schweitzer. But early as it is, nobody’s allowed to not have an opinion of a potential Hillary Clinton candidacy, and so mark me down as one Democrat who looks at that possibility with much more hope than trepidation.

This sure ain’t a good week for Republican self-righteousness. Aside from the firestorm over Karl Rove’s possible involvement in outing a CIA agent, a federal crime against national security, it looks like the most visible and vociferous convert to Roverie, Zell Miller, may have gotten caught pocketing state funds when he left the governorship of Georgia back in 1999. The story, broken by an Atlanta television reporter named Dale Cardwell, is that Miller took home a $60,000 balance in the Governor’s Mansion account upon leaving office. Speaking through a flack, Miller admitted taking the money, and claims it was part of his compensation as Governor. But Cardwell quickly and definitively established otherwise, by contacting every other living former Governor, along with legal and budget officials from both political parties. Looks like Miller is totally busted, though it’s not yet clear he’ll be prosecuted so long as he coughs up the funds pronto.As regular readers know, I worked for Miller during his first term as Governor, back when he was a loud ‘n’ proud Democrat. And I personally never saw any signs that the man had a greedy or crooked streak, or was into conspicuous consumption of anything other than pride and bile. Still, it’s hard to understand how he’d think he could pocket Mansion funds. In most states, and certainly in Georgia, Governors’ Mansions are clearly public property, used frequently for public business; that’s why they are staffed by public employees and benefit from public funds. And the Governor lives there as a public employee as well. Converting “excess” Mansion funds to private use is about as clearly wrong as selling off the furniture.But whatever Miller thought he was doing, he sure as hell should have reconsidered it before setting himself up in recent years as a paragon of virtue and a scourge of alleged Democratic “indecency.” Instead, here he is, a favorite of a White House awash in mendacity and scandal allegations, and most recently, a big supporter of the scandal-ridden Ralph Reed–and now he’s got his own scandal to contend with.Whether or not Zell Miller has committed any crime or misdmeanor, he’s certainly living down to the reputation of his new political friends, just when they are almost daily getting caught in all sorts of unsavory gigs. If he manages to get out of his own mess, he should finally and definitively retire from the business of telling other people what to do.

I have an almost superstitious fear of getting too caught up in the unfolding story of Karl Rove’s possible involvement in outing a CIA agent, and/or lying about it. In the Abramoff-Reed-Norquist Indian Casino Shakedown Scandal, we’re already being richly treated to a Morality Play of epic proportions, wherein in which the extraordinary arrogance, hypocrisy and greed of key players in the current conservative Ascendancy have led them steadily to sordid acts of self-destruction.But ah, could it be possible that the man who has raised dirty tricks, poltical intimidation, and character assassination to the highest levels of geopolitical strategy could be laid low by a cheap act of personal spite aimed at an obscure former diplomat who threw a minor monkey wrench into the run-up to the war in Iraq? Could the top operative in a leak-proof White House be brought down by a leak? Is the Boy Genius capable of such stupidity? If so, and Rove falls from power, it will be another sign that the legendary discipline and self-confidence of the Bush administration during W.’s first term represented little more than an unusual ability to ignore the consequences of their irresponsible acts. You can’t do that perpetually, of course, and that’s why the air now seems filled with the squawking of so many chickens coming home to roost.

I’m posting from a vacation spot on Daufuskie Island, South Cackalacki after an immensely complicated trip involving cabs, planes, cars, ferries, and golf carts, not to mention a major crisis involving internet access. But it’s nice to be here, on an island still partly populated by Gullahs, who are, I hope, benefitting in some ways from the upscale honky development of recent decades. Being an American, as opposed to a vacation-entitled European, I’m still slavishly reading the news sites, and intend to blog more often than the day job has allowed recently. And the first cookie on the plate I sampled after getting in late today was an important article in the New York Times that helps demolish the myth that the “death tax” is a threat to family farms. Check it out:”The number of farms on which estate tax is owed when the owners die has fallen by 82 percent since 2000, to just 300 farms, as Congress has more than doubled the threshold at which the tax applies, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released last week.”You wouldn’t know that from the GOP’s drive to entirely abolish the federal estate tax, which has already passed the House and is pending in the Senate. Much of the propaganda supporting the Total Repeal idea, of course, revolves around bogus Family Farm nostalgia. Every time a GOP politician mounts a soapbox to rail about the Death Tax, it’s like those scenes from Green Acres when (the recently deceased) Eddie Albert would rhaposidize about Our Agrarian Heritage while fife and drum music played in the backround, as his listeners invariably noticed. As David Cay Johnston’s report in the Times notes, the true beneficiaries of a total estate tax repeal are not terribly likely to have dirtied their hands farming, or even ordering farm hands around, at least in the last couple of generations. So we should look coldly and rationally, not warmly and nostalgically, when we consider the prospect of abolishing taxes on billionaires and shifting the national tax burden even further towards people who earn an income from their own work, rather than the work of their ancestors.