Like all of us, I’m still in shock and horror about the terrorist attack on London earlier today. No, the death count may not reach the levels of 9/11, Bali or Madrid, but the indiscriminate savagery of the attacks is the same. I did a post over at TPMCafe.com that represented a preemptive strike on the idea that Britain was targeted strictly because of its involvement in Iraq, because I am quite sure that’s what we are soon going to hear from all sorts of circles, especially in Europe, where there has long been an illusion that it’s possible to strike a separate peace with Jihadist terrorism by engaging in anti-American posturing now and then. Today’s New Dem Dispatch deals with the significance of the attacks more generally.Virtually the whole world expressed simple solidarity with our country after 9/11. I hope the differences of opinion about how to fight terrorism that have arisen since then will not inhibit a similar expression of solidarity–especially from Americans–with Britain today.

This is a post I wanted to do yesterday; but then decided I didn’t want to profane the Fourth by writing anything political. For at least one day a year, we ought to be able to show some unity.But I just finished reading Larry Diamond’s fascinating and disturbing book: Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort To Bring Democracy To Iraq. And it left me absolutely livid about the fact that Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense.You should read Diamond’s book; if you don’t have time, he wrote an earlier and much briefer version of his basic argument in Foreign Affairs last fall.Diamond, probably America’s top expert on democracy-building, spent several months working for the Coalition Provisional Authority (the Pentagon-run U.S. occupation entity) in early 2004. And he came away with an indictment of the early and continuing mistakes, mostly attributable to Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides, that we and the Iraqis continue to pay for today.Most of his litany of errors is familiar, but Diamond puts them, and their consequences, together in a way that takes your breath away. Totally aside from the decision to invade in the first place (which Diamond opposed), Rumsfeld’s Big Mistake was his stubborn determination to go into Iraq with about one-third the number of troops that every military and civilian expert told him would be necessary to secure the country. As a result, Coalition troops could do little or nothing to deal with (a) the systematic looting and lawlessness that destroyed what was left of Iraqi civil authority, and paralyzed the economy; (b) a massive influx across unprotected borders of Iranian and Sunni Jihadist agents and fighters; (c) the formation of a vast array of sectarian armed militias, fueled by another bad administration decision to disband the Iraqi army; (d) a decisive erosion of Coalition credibility among Kurds and Shi’a who remember their abandonment by the U.S. to Saddam’s vicious reprisals after the First Gulf War; and (e) a security situation that made reconstruction efforts physically impossible.Aside from that Big Mistake, Diamond catalogues a bunch of subsequent blunders, including an inability to take seriously and accomodate the pro-democracy views of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, probably the most important figure in Iraq; an abrupt 180-degree shift in policy from a breezy assumption that the U.S. could turn Iraq over to exiles like Ahmed Chalabi, to a reluctance to relinquish control at all; and a consisent pattern of doing the right thing, if at all, several months too late.Even the famous “purple-finger” election of January 2005, Diamond says, carried the potential seeds of disaster, thanks to a Bush administration decision in favor of a national proportional representation system, with no provision for local districts. This decision guaranteed Sunni under-representation in Iraq’s first popularly elected government, while eliminating any incentive for the kind of inter-communal political parties that might have emerged in mixed-population areas of the country.Diamond hasn’t give up hope about prospects for the ultimate emergence of a stable Iraqi government, but has laid out an urgent series of U.S. policy changes (which the DLC recently endorsed) necessary to make it possible, including a decisive repudiation of the idea that we want a permanent military presence there.We all know George W. Bush cannot admit mistakes, though he is capable, now and then, of unacknowledged flip-flops. His single biggest mistake with respect to Iraq, before, during and after the invasion, was his and Dick Cheney’s categorical trust in Donald Rumsfeld and the people around him. I for one will have trouble expecting things to get better in Iraq until such time as Rummy walks the plank. Maybe the White House will suddenly announce that Rumsfeld is desperately needed for another job–perhaps some presidential commission on what the military should look like if and when we colonize space. After all, they’ve already found ways to offload Wolfowitz, Feith and Bolton.But any way you look at it, Rummy’s got to go, especially if this president ever intends to make something other than a very bad joke of his 2000 pledge to introduce “a responsibility era.”

Today’s retirement announcement by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, aside from ruining the vacation plans of the people who work for advocacy groups on both sides of the judicial divide, created two immediate political questions. The first is what Bush will do now that he finally has the opportunity to make an appointment that could reshape the Court. I did an extensive post over at TPMCafe predicting he had little choice, and probably even less inclination, to do anything other than give the Cultural Right what it wants: a sure vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. So I won’t recapitulate the whole argument here.But the second question remains open: exactly how much should Democrats, and particularly pro-choice Democrats, invest in trying to stop Bush from doing what he’s probably going to do? More to the point, do Senate Democrats launch a filibuster, risk triggering the “nuclear option,” and pretty much shut down Washington for the rest of the year?Scanning the Left and Center-Left blogosphere today, I was a bit surprised to discover more doubt on this question than I expected.The main reason for debate is the recognition that replacing O’Connor with a Justice determined to reverse Roe would still leave right-to-lifers one vote short, based on the lineup in the last big case where the Court reaffirmed basic abortion rights, Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992). The confusion on this subject probably flows from a misunderstanding over Justice Kennedy’s dissenting vote in the 2000 Stenberg case, which struck down a state “partial-birth” abortion ban. The decision of leading abortion rights activists to make the “partial-birth” issue a litmus test for qualifying as “pro-choice” led to a lot of commentary after Stenberg that Kennedy had flipped to the dark side. But while Kennedy may support some erosion of Roe on the margins, it’s hard to imagine him contradicting his position in Casey, which flatly accepted abortion rights as a matter of settled precedent.So: the O’Connor replacement is not necessarily a direct threat to abortion rights. But for the same reason, this appointment truly is a crisis point for those who want to overturn Roe. They need to flip the O’Connor vote, maintain Rehnquist’s anti-Roe vote (assuming he’s forced to retire at some point), and then hope John Paul Stevens, who’s 85, will quit before Bush’s second term ends. Otherwise, they’ll have to count on another Republican president to get the job done, and right now, 2008 is hardly looking like a GOP slam dunk.The asymetrical stakes of the two sides on the abortion issue with respect to this particular nomination provides Democrats with several options. They can simply spot Bush a fourth vote to overturn Roe, and focus on the broader constitutional issues particular nominees might pose (this may well be Harry Reid’s strategy in suggesting several anti-abortion Republican Senators that Democrats could accept). They can play rope-a-dope by opposing Bush’s appointment and dragging it out, without resorting to a filibuster. Or they can go to the mattresses.I have no settled opinion at this time about what Democrats should do. But it’s nice for once to have our side enjoying some tactical flexibility, while the all-powerful GOP is lashed to the mast of its alliance with the Cultural Right.

Yesterday’s DLC commentary on the president’s big Iraq speech suggested that yet again George W. Bush is demonstrating he’s the ultimate one-trick pony as a leader in time of war. He’s capable of communicating “resolve,” and not much of anything else.So I was more than a little interested in today’s Washington Post front-pager by Peter Baker and Dan Balz reporting that Bush is pursuing this we-make-no-mistakes tone of “confidence” on the advice of a political scientist who recently joined the National Security Council staff.The staffer in question, former Duke poli sci professor Peter Feaver (who also worked at the NSC early in the Clinton administration), is best known for a study he did with Duke colleague Christopher Gelpi on war leadership and U.S. public opinion. According to Baker and Balz, their big conclusion, based especially on Vietnam, is that the key factor in public support for a war is the perception that we’re winning, with presidential assurances on this front being particularly important.It’s not completely clear to me whether this characterization of Feaver and Gelpi’s views is accurate; some of it seems to be coming from unnamed “Bush aides.” And the piece also quotes Gelpi as saying that Bush’s latest speech was insufficiently specific in laying out a strategy for success in Iraq.But still, it’s more than passing strange that the White House would hire a political scientist to tell Bush exactly what he wants to hear in terms of his communication strategy on Iraq. It sounds sort of like scouring the earth for a dietician willing to tell a fat man that his habit of eating five pounds of ice cream a day is a good weight management technique.More importantly, it’s troublesome to learn that the White House thinks presidential spin on Iraq is more important to public support than the actual facts on the ground. All the “resolve” in the world won’t help Bush if the insurgency cannot be quelled, and if the Iraqis cannot achieve a political settlement that will make it possible for a stable government to function.The initial reaction to Bush’s speech doesn’t seem to indicate it had much of a positive effect on public opinion, and in part that’s because his expressions of “resolve” were insufficiently linked to the kind of specifics that could make them credible. Maybe it’s time for someone on the White House staff to break through the atmosphere of willful self-deception and suggest a communications strategy that’s based more on facts and less on spin. In other words, maybe Bush should be told to lay off the ice cream.

I haven’t seen any snap polls showing the impact, if any, of Bush’s big Iraq speech last night, but the circumstantial evidence seems pretty negative.1) Here he was doing a highly emotional speech, full of tributes to the troops, at Ft. Bragg, and he got one ovation other than at the end.2) Republican praise of the speech tended to focus on its rejection of a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but rarely mentioned its other alleged functions, such as laying out a clear strategy for victory and reassuring the American people that he knows what he’s doing.3) I checked out National Review’s The Corner, a reliable Bush Amen Corner (at least on national security issues) which offers near-24/7 commentary, and was impressed by the subdued tone. Sure, the tireless Kathryn Lopez tried to break out the pom-poms once or twice, but most of the discussion focused on attacking media criticism of the speech, and some regular posters actually expressed concern about Bush’s “strategy” for Iraq.4) Most ominously for Bush, his speech pretty much uniformly exasperated the “Blair Democrats,” those who supported the war initially and who now oppose a fixed timetable for withdrawal. Indeed, some of the harshest criticism of the speech came from this quarter.In this connection, you should check out the DLC’s take on Bush’s effort, which may be the most thorough critique I’ve seen to this point.One point it makes is a really interesting question: why didn’t Bush appeal explicitly to anti-Iraq-war Americans to put aside their disagreements over his original decision to invade Iraq and focus on the broadly accepted negative consequences of abandoning the country to chaos? He could have quoted a long string of Democratic opponents to the original war resolution, including Howard Dean, who are on record as emphatically saying we can’t accept defeat in Iraq now that we’re there, rightly or wrongly. He could have helped marginalized the fixed-deadline advocates. He could have been a “uniter, not a divider.” And he could have probably bumped up support for his current Iraq policies, not just for a moment but for a while, by decisively severing the link between support for past Bush policies and support for what he’s doing now.Instead, Bush strengthened the link between past, present and future Iraq policies by repeatedly returning to a rationale for the original decision to invade that, frankly, is losing credibility every day: it was all about 9/11. Yes, yes, I know, that was his strategy for deflecting criticism about Iraq in the 2004 campaign, but now Bush isn’t trying to get re-elected; he’s supposedly trying to avoid a nosedive in public support for what he’s doing in Iraq today. And the fact that he still cannot let go of his dubious ex post facto rationalizations of the Iraq venture is a bad sign about what we can expect between now and the day he finally goes home to Crawford.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Garance Franke-Ruta has an interesting and in-depth article on the Democratic Party’s creaky minority outreach efforts up on the American Prospect site. By way of emphasizing the Democratic habit of underinvesting in targeted media and messaging, as opposed to more mechanical GOTV efforts, she passes along this factoid: “Kerry spent less on targeted Hispanic media–$3 million–than he did on political strategist and consultant Bob Shrum.” Well, just about any way you look at it, had Shrum’s fees gone to targeted Hispanic media, Kerry would be president today.Of course, some might argue that Kerry would be president today if Shrum’s fees had been stuffed in a paper bag and tossed into the Potomac River, but there’s no question more targeted Hispanic media would have been helpful as well.

One of the things we Democrats use to rock ourselves to sleep at night in these politically perilous times is the hope that demographic trends are working in our favor. And the central source of that hope is the belief that the Latino population of the United States is growing so rapidly that the future shape of the electorate is morphing rapidly in a more progressive direction.Totally aside from the fact that Democrats would be foolish to assume our current performance among Latinos can be counted on in the future, there’s the troubling fact that the total Latino vote is a relatively small segment of the electorate, and will remain so for a while. That’s the important and sobering message provided by Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, in today’s Washington Post.Suro nicely summarizes his argument in one sentence: “Because of a combination of lack of citizenship, a big youth population, and voter apathy, only one-fifth of Hispanics went to the polls in 2004. In other words, it took five Latino residents to produce one voter.” Of those three factors depressing the Latino vote, only the third is one we can theoretically do something about in the near term. So why all the excitement about percentage increases in the Latino vote?Here, too, Suro offers an important distinction in commenting on the “record turnout among Latinos” recently generated by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa: “[G]iven the low baseline, it wasn’t hard. When it comes to counting people in almost any category, Latinos break their own records every day.” But as my friend Mark Gersh, the number-crunching wizard of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, always points out, percentages don’t win elections; votes do. And small percentage increases from large groups generate more votes than large percentage increases from small groups. That’s why the little-recognized but central story of the 2004 presidential election was that a smaller percentage increase in ballots from non-Latino white voters more than exceeded the votes produced by near-record turnout among minority voters as a whole. This does not–let me repeat this–does not mean that Democrats should stop worrying about, or working among, minority voters. It specifically does not mean that Democrats should stop obsessing about now to reach Latino voters. Even if the Latino vote is growing less rapidly, in absolute terms, than some Democrats seem to assume, maintaining the current Democratic advantage is well worth every effort, and moreover, the Latino voting boom will definitely arrive in the relatively near future. What Democrats cannot do, however, is to comfort ourselves with the illusion that Latino voter growth will offset our ever-increasing weakness among white middle-class voters generally, or white married voters with kids specifically. (In fact, the upwardly mobile Latinos most likely to vote largely share the values and aspirations of middle-class non-Latino white voters). We need a strategy, a message, and an agenda that will make inroads into Republican majorities in those groups while continuing to attract and energize minority voters as well. We can’t simply wait for demography to save us.

ARG just released a national poll that suggests Bush’s plunging approval ratings are actually being propped up by persistent Republican loyalty, which disguises an astonishing free-fall among independents:

Among Republicans (36% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 84% approve of the way Bush is handling his job and 12% disapprove. Among Democrats (38% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 18% approve and 77% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job. Among Independents (26% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 17% approve and 75% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

In other words, the views of Independents about Bush’s job performance are identical to those of Democrats.Karl Rove’s polarization strategy depends on building up hyper-loyalty among Republicans, raiding conservative Democrats, and getting close to an even split among Independents who don’t like either party.At present, Independents ain’t buying it, and that’s really bad news for the GOP so long as Democrats are smart enough to promote a message Indies can like.

A couple of days ago Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick testified before the House International Relations Committee about the situation in Sudan, and particularly Darfur. And I found his comments a profoundly depressing repetition of every hoary rationalization about our failure to intervene in ethnic cleansing operations in the past.Rationalization #1 is the “sitting duck” hypothesis, summarized in an AP story about Zoellick’s testimony as follows:

The Bush administration is opposed to the dispatch of U.S. or European forces to help enhance security in Sudan’s Darfur region because they could be vulnerable to attack by terrorists, the No. 2 State Department official said Wednesday.The region is populated by “some bloodthirsty, cold-hearted killers,” Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said, mentioning Somalia in particular as one possible source.

It’s ironic that Zoellick cited Somalians as an unacceptable threat to Western troops, since it is generally acknowledged that trauma over the “Black Hawk Down” attack on U.S. troops in Mogadishu had a lot to do with the Clinton administration’s much-regretted refusal to intervene in Rwanda.Rationalization #2 also reflects the same chain of thinking that kept the West out of Rwanda:

NATO and the European Union now provide support in transport, logistics and planning for Darfur operations.Zoellick said any expansion in these roles to an on-the-ground presence could lead to charges by some Africans that “the U.S. or the colonial powers are telling Sudan what to do.”

Rationalization #3 is more subtle, but you can clearly see it in the PowerPoint presentation Zoellick offered the House Committee. Zoellick repeatedly stresses connections between the Darfur genocide and the long-standing (though recently, for the time being, settled) North-South civil war in Sudan, and notes civil conflict in that nation goes back more than a century. This reflects another golden oldie excuse for non-intervention, heard often with respect to Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo: these people have been killing each other for eons, so what can we do about it?I find all this especially depressing coming from Zoellick, who (a) is one of the Bush administration’s most competent diplomats; (b) has been willing to call genocide, genocide; and (c) has spent quite a bit of time in the area recently. Mark Leon Goldberg over at TAPPED has suggested that the administration is crab-walking its way over to a general rapproachment with the Khartoum government, based on its purported cooperation with U.S. intelligence on Islamic terrorism. As Mark aptly says: “It seems that we are back to the bad old days of cold Cold-War calculations: The United States doesn’t care what happens inside the borders of a cooperative regime.” But even then, I don’t remember senior U.S. officials explicitly condoning genocide by “allies.”

Having spent much of yesterday morning in Constitution Hall watching the happy and inspiring ceremony of my kid’s high school graduation, I was brought back to the unhappy and dispiriting realities of contemporary American politics by press accounts of Karl Rove’s pithy remarks to the New York Conservative Party the other night.I want to read the whole transcript (if it’s ever made available) before commenting at length. But it sure sounds like a Rove classic, combining his well-known habit of deliberately outrageous behavior designed to obliterate real debate in a storm of polarized rhetoric, and his more specific approach in national security to suggest any criticism of Bush’s record in Iraq or anywhere else must reflect a refusal to take 9/11 seriously.Perhaps the most interesting question about this speech’s “message” is why Rove chose to scuttle out of the shadows and deliver it himself instead of employing surrogates. You have to wonder if the Boy Genius was frustrated with the limited effects of the GOP’s counteroffensive on Iraq and Gitmo, and decided to put on a cap and whistle and go out there and personally show his team how to execute a Big Smear.’Til I have the opportunity to put on some rubber gloves and pick up Rove’s speech with sterilized tongs, I’ll just endorse the concise assessment made yesterday by Sen. John Kerry, who knows Karl’s tactics well from painful experience:

For Karl Rove to equate Democratic policy on terror to “indictments” and “therapy” is an outrageous attempt to divide the nation at just the moment we must be unified. Just days after 9/11 the Senate voted 98-0 and the House voted 420-1 to authorize President Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against terror. After the bipartisan vote, President Bush said, I quote: “I am gratified that the Congress has united so powerfully by taking this action. It sends a clear message – our people are together, and we will prevail.”Karl Rove also said last night, quote: “No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”Well, I think a lot more needs to be said about Karl Rove’s motives, because they’re not the people’s motives, and if the President really believed his own words of unity, then he should fire Karl Rove.

Kerry’s right, but I’m sure he’s not holding his breath waiting for Bush to cut Karl loose. After all, there’s no way W. would be quarterbacking Team America without Coach Rove.