I’m not much in the habit of praising articles about the Democratic Party that appear in The Nation, but they’ve just posted an article about Hillary Clinton by New York Magazine columnist Greg Sargent that is really essential reading. Debunking the “Hillary’s moving to the center to defraud voters” line that people like Dick Morris have been peddling, Sargent offers a nuanced view of Clinton’s recent policy and political positions that depicts her as a complex thinker who pursues progressive goals through flexible means appropriate to middle-class values and what’s actually doable.Here’s the money quote:

In essence, she’s triangulating against herself: she’s revealing the common-sense-solution-embracing Hillary, in contrast to the left-wing ideologue her caricaturists gave us. It helps that Hillary, while extraordinarily shrewd and calculating, also really is hard-working, hard-headed and culturally moderate. In the end, the irony is that her effort is working not just because it’s smart politics but also because it’s largely genuine.

Read the whole thing, but the passage above suggests that Sen. Clinton’s effort to redefine herself as herself is a pretty good reflection of the challenge facing a complex, progressive-minded, but essentially hard-headed and moderate Democratic Party as a whole.

I know my colleague The Moose has already blogged about this story, but being a native of Georgia, there are a few additional ironies I’d like to point out about the latest Indian Casino Shakedown revelation, which puts Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, in more trouble than a wounded rooster in a cockfight.In a nice bit of relay journalism, the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have pieced together this fascinating tale of hypocrisy, deception, and political insider trading:In 2000, then-Governor Don Siegelman arranged for a referendum in Alabama to create a state lottery for education, the centerpiece of his entire agenda. A certain Casino operating Mississippi tribe (probably the Choctaws) didn’t want the competition of public gaming in Alabama. The Native Americans’ Best Friend, Jack Abamoff suggested they channel money through Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which would then send the cash down to ‘Bama to help kill the lottery. Norquist subsequently sent checks totaling $1.15 million to an anti-lottery group and to the campaign’s top backer, the Christian Coalition of Alabama, which vocally refuses to take gambling money. The anti-lottery folks then channeled the same money to Ralph Reed’s Atlanta-based political consulting firm, which used it to run the (successful) anti-gambling campaign.This tale is remarkably similar to the 1999 Texas anti-gambling gambit that’s part of the broader Abramoff/Scanlon Casino Shakedown scandal, except for Norquist’s role as the launderer, and the size of Ralph Reed’s take: his firm received $4.2 million in gambling money for the Lone Star anti-gambling initiative. And there’s one more crucial wrinkle as well: even though Reed is again protesting that he had no idea where the money came from, this time the president of the Alabama Christian Coalition, John Giles, is getting pretty close to accusing Reed of lying.

“On at least a couple of occasions, John Giles called to ask if I was absolutely sure there was no gambling money — direct or indirect — in any money they had received,” said John Pudner, then a senior project manager at [Reed’s firm] Century Strategies. “Giles even told me he wanted to issue a press release stating this — and I went and asked Ralph to make sure, and Ralph assured me there was no gambling money involved.”

In other words, Reed made an affirmative assurance the money was clean, and he based that on an assurance from–you guessed it–Jack Abramoff. Now as many of you may already know, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed go way, way back together: Grover and Ralph were Abramoff’s deputies when Casino Jack ran the College Republicans in the early 1980s. The idea that Reed didn’t have a clue his old boss was making tens of millions of dollars representing tribes with casions, and/or it didn’t occur to Ralph that the millions Abramoff was sending his way might have something to do with those associations, is just beyond belief. The involvement of John Giles in this money triangle adds the final twist of irony. Not only is Giles one of the most visible leaders in what’s left of Ralph’s old stomping grounds, the Christian Coalition; he’s also best known in Alabama for his insanely strong belief that Jesus hates taxes like the devil himself. Giles was a powerful figure in the successful campaign to drub a referendum sponsored by Republican Governor Bob Riley in 2003 to reform the state’s antediluvian tax code to help improve Alabama’s dreadfully underfinanced public education system (a campaign, BTW, in which Norquist’s ATR played a national role). More recently, Giles’s Christian Coalition helped defeat another referendum to amend the Alabama Constitution to take out a section mandating segregated schools, on grounds that the step would create a right to public education (imagine that), and hence, according to his logic, higher taxes.So you’ve got Casino Jack giving gambling money to anti-tax zealot Norquist who gives it to anti-tax-zealot-Christian-Right activist Giles who gives it to Christian-Right-activist-politician Reed. Even as they point fingers at each other, they’re all living in the house that Jack built by shaking down tribes.And that brings me back to the campaign of Ralph Reed. After the original Abramoff scandal broke, with Ralph professing ignorance and innocence about his pivotal role, some politically knowledgeable people in Georgia figured he’d brazen it out, while others thought it would eventually derail his campaign. Now he’s got a whole new set of allegations to deal with, exhibiting a clear pattern, and a guy as smart as Reed will be hard-pressed to explain why a man as dumb as he claims he was in these capers should be elected to statewide office.

Now and then an issue comes along that really forces politicians to deal with the internal contradictions of their supposed principles. Today’s lopsided Senate passage of a $295 billion highway bill will provide a nice test for Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.Note for the record that the Bush administration has thundered for some time about the transcendent necessity of holding this bill down to $284 billion. And indeed, the implicit veto threat aimed at this bill–recognizing that Bush, well over four years into his presidency, has yet to use the veto pen even once–is the tiny fig leaf disguising the White House’s continuing devotion to fiscal profligacy of the highest order, as evidenced by still more demands for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and a Social Security privatization scheme that would add still more trillions to the national debt.Recall as well that in the recent campaign, Bush was treated by his handlers and his party as a Churchillian World-Historical Figure dominating the planet–a figure who presumably might have the clout to convince his hand-picked Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, to pare $11 billion from a highway bill ($12 billion of which, by the way, were for congressional “earmarks”).Yet Frist was one of 46 Republican Senators who voted for this bill. For the most part, these are the same folks who not only are insisting on more tax cuts for the wealthy, but who very recently were claiming that the fiscal situation required deep cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, affecting both the states and the most vulnerable Americans.The whole issue casts a large and useful spotlight on the contemporary GOP’s efforts to have it both ways on fiscal policy: supporting spending restraint in the abstract, but flip-flopping on any occasion when restraint might impair their image as Big Dogs in Washington capable of bringing home the bacon, or, worse yet, affect some Republican constituency.This will be interesting to watch.

Like the rest of you who aren’t privy to the internal doings of the U.S. Senate, I do not know about the political prospects of the current effort towards a compromise that would limit filibusters to five of the ten Bush Court of Appeals appointees, while preserving it in the Senate rules, which means preserving it for future Supreme Court nominees. I also don’t know if, absent a compromise, Bill Frist can get the votes to “go nuclear” and ram through approval of all ten judges while paving the way for a right-wing activist reshaping of the Supreme Court.But I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to take the risk that a hard line by Senate Democrats won’t completely backfire, either. If enough Republicans can be convinced to go for this deal to guarantee the failure of the nuclear option, Democrats would be well advised to jump on it. Personally, while I’m not a big fan of any of the ten proposed Court of Appeals judges, I am really worried about two of them: Owens and Brown, who happen to the be two Frist intends to use as the vehicle for getting to the nuclear option. The chance to keep these two–plus three more, in theory–off the Court of Appeals, along with a sure vote against the nuclear option, is not only a good deal for Democrats, but will represent a definitive defeat for Bush, Frist, and their Cultural Right allies who don’t give a damn about the Court of Appeals and who are praying for the opportunity to present GOPers with an all-or-nothing approach to judges. I say this because there will be some Democrats who will argue for rolling the dice on the entire judiciary, either because they think we will win, or because they are just opposed to any compromises with the Republicans on any topic whatsoever. It would be a shame to throw away victory in this fight simply because the word “compromise” is attached to it. The deal reportedly in the works would be a victory, all right, and no one should be criticized for accepting it.

In reading Garance Franke-Ruta’s account of the Tribute to Tom DeLay dinner, which I just posted about, one name among the many attending the event jumped off the page: public-relations flack Craig Shirley, described as a “spokesman” for the dinner.As it happens, I recently read Shirley’s January 2005 book, Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All. In fact, the next issue of Blueprint magazine will include a review I wrote of that book and the much-better-known Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s study of the Goldwater campaign.Most non-conservatives looking at Shirley’s title will probably assume it’s about the 1980 campaign that signalled the conservative movement’s conquest of the GOP, and lifted Ronald Reagan to the presidency. But no: the book is about Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential effort, and as Shirley makes abundantly clear, that campaign, not Goldwater’s, was the defining moment for the younger wave of conservative activists who are now dominating the GOP and the Bush administration.Unlike Perlstein, Shirley is not a gifted writer or a particularly deep thinker, but he does cover the 1976 Reagan campaign in great detail and with considerable balance, despite his obvious intention to provide a sort of intra-movement scrapbook of the bittersweet moment that marked the transition of latter-day conservatism from noble futility to national power. And his account is replete with the names of minor campaign figures who later emerged as Washington big-timers, such as Haley Barbour, Charlie Black, Martin Anderson, and Ed Meese. Interestingly if not surprisingly, Shirley singles out Dick Cheney, then White House Chief of Staff, as both the most effective operative in Gerald Ford’s successful effort to turn back the Reagan drive, and as the one key figure in Ford’s circle who understood the conservative movement and its needs and goals.And while Shirley goes well out of his way to refute the revisionist belief of many conservatives that Reagan’s 1976 effort was ruined by his non-ideological campaign manager, John Sears, he also makes it clear that the Jesse Helms/Congressional Club zealots saved Reagan’s career by designing and managing the Gipper’s breakthrough victory in the North Carolina primary, and had the best strategy for prevailing during the Republican Convention.My Perlstein-Shirley review will focus on the dangerous belief of some Democrats that we should emulate the 1964 and 1976 conservative “noble defeats,” and one of my arguments is that Reagan’s survival in 1976 and his apotheosis in 1980 were far more fortuitous than anyone, including Shirley, seems to be willing to admit.Shirley does concede, and even emphasize, that if Reagan had lost the 1976 nomination early on, he would not have been a candidate in 1980. But he doesn’t really address the likelihood that a Reagan nomination in 1976 would have been equally ruinous to the actor’s political career, and perhaps to the conservative movement as well. For a whole host of reasons, Reagan would almost certainly have been a weaker candidate than Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter in 1976. And by 1980, almost any Republican could have beaten Carter, given the condition of the country domestically and internationally.There’s no telling what a slightly different course of events might have meant for the conservative movement that now, in its maturity or senescence, depending on your point of view, finds itself lionizing Tom DeLay.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth discussion in the news media and on the blogs about last week’s famous Tribute to Tom DeLay event. Some cynics have suggested that this kind of “tribute” is generally a sign that the tributee is about to get thrown to the sharks. But the intrepid Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect did us all a favor by attending the dinner herself and providing a spin-free take on its meaning, and she’s quite sure the event represented a gesture of Conservative Movement solidarity with the Hammer, and implicitly a shot across the bow at any Republicans tempted to abandon him.

Now that John Bolton’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations is heading to the Senate floor, albeit without a positive recommendation from the Foreign Relations Committee, Democrats have a fresh and final chance to make a case against him that doesn’t reinforce every GOP-fed stereotype about whiny “global test” liberals whose first concern is to placate “world opinion.” I understand the “Mean Man” argument was dictated by Foreign Relations Committee politics, and especially the need to give Republican waverers like Chafee and Voinovich a reason for opposing the nomination that did not involve a broad attack on Bush administration policies. But now, on the floor of the Senate, Democrats need to understand that this debate has implications beyond the question of whether or not Bolton gets his job. As Kenny Baer and I, among others, have argued earlier in this process, Democrats need to make a national security case against Bolton, and fortunately, there is a clear case to be made.I strongly urge everyone interested in the Bolton nomination to read a report by Michael Hirsch and Eve Conant that appeared in Newsweek last week. Through extensive interviews with current and past Bush administration officials, they learned that Bolton completely botched preparations for a critical five-year review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They also cast new doubts about Bolton’s involvement in the one (if inadequate) big advance the administration has made in preventing nuclear terrorism, the Proliferation Security Initiative. In other words, as the point man for what Bush and Cheney have repeatedly called the most important front in the war on terror–the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists–Bolton has done a dangerously lousy job. He’s not just a Mean Man–he’s a Mean Man blinded by ideology and ambition from promoting the steps we need to take internationally to prevent a nuclear 9/11, or for that matter, a fully nuclear Iran and North Korea. And the question Democrats need to finally start asking on the Senate floor is why this administration has entrusted Bolton with this crucial responsibility, and why it is now insisting on making him our country’s most visible representative in world affairs. If that’s not enough of an argument to make, then maybe Senate Democrats should also raise a question about U.N. reform that barely got mentioned in the Foreign Relations Committee: does Bolton, and does the Bush administration, support or oppose the Annan Commission recommendation to amend the U.N. Charter to make it clear “sovereignty” does not extend to the right to commit genocide within one’s own borders? Given Bolton’s much-expressed contempt for risking any U.S. lives or dollars in preventing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or Rwanda, it’s a very pertinent question as the debate over Darfur continues.

To the delight of the chattering classes of Washington, Andy Kohut’s fine folks at the Pew Research Center have released a new Political Typology study. It purports to divide the electorate into nine categories, with three each for Democrats, Republicans and “the middle,” though it turns out Bush won “middle” voters handily in 2004. Now you have to understand that political junkies love typologies like drunks love cheap whiskey. Why? Well, to be cynical about it, typologies make it easy to sound sophisticated about the deeper currents of political behavior, and the subtle but real differences between voters who in any given election may vote for the same candidate or identify with the same party. Moreover, typologies are often used to identify some hot new “swing” voter category that one party or the other is supposed to pursue or cherish: thus, the famous “soccer moms” of the 1990s and the “NASCAR dads” of more recent vintage.But there’s another feature of the new Pew study that’s creating some buzz: right there on the site you can answer 25 questions and find out which of the nine categories you supposedly fit into. And that’s where I began to lose a lot of confidence in Pew’s understanding of the electorate.Question after question, the survey lays out a long series of false choices that you are required to make: military force versus diplomacy; environmental protection versus economic growth; gay people and immigrants and corporations and regulations G-O-O-D or B-A-A-D. Other than agreeing with a proposition mildly rather than strongly, there’s no way to register dismay over the boneheaded nature of these choices. For the record, the Typology Test identified me as a “liberal,” probably because the only question on which I registered any strong feeling was about the need to treat homosexuality as an acceptable way of life. But I absolutely reject the idea that this test captures much at all of how I actually think about domestic and foreign policy issues, and several people I tend to agree with wound up being tossed into some other category. To be fair, the Typology Test does not include all the questions Pew used in the actual surveys on which the typology depends; the full questionnaire does at least get into more nuanced issues like the budget and tax policy, Iraq, Social Security and so forth. But still, it made me a lot less excited about the prospect of slogging through 119 pages of analysis of “Disadvantaged Democrats,” or “Enterprisers” or “Upbeats.”So all of you out there in political junkieland, do yourself a favor: before you start enthusing about the strategic implications of the Pew typology, take the test yourself and see if you think it helps identify types, or just stereotypes.

A remarkable amount of media attention has been devoted this week to an incident at a small Southern Baptist Church in Waynesville, North Carolina. That’s where a pastor, the Rev. Chan Chandler, known for strident sermons about the religious obligation of Christians to support George W. Bush allegedly tried to expel nine church members who objected to his politicization of the pulpit, and then resigned, apparently leading a group of “young adult” newcomers to the church towards some sort of split-off congregation, presumably to worship according to strict Republican principles.For those of you unfamiliar with the Baptist tradition, congregational and even denominational splits are hardly unusual. Baptists have angrily parted ways over the scripturally prescribed quantity of water to be used in baptismal fonts. Down in North Georgia, the ancestral church of my in-laws split over the issue of admitting divorced persons, with the “conservatives” opening a new church about half-a-mile away. An entire denomination, the Primitive Baptists (which two of my great-grandfathers served as ministers) developed out of an objection to the missionary activities of the Southern Baptists. These are not people who put a high premium on unity, and who traditionally resist any higher authority than the individual congregation communing with the lively Word of God.What’s ironic about the outcome of the East Waynesville saga is that the schismatic preacher in question represented the point of view that has gone a long way towards snuffing out that robust sense of Baptist independence.The “conservative” (i.e., biblical literalist and quasi-theocratic) takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that occurred during the 1980s involved a constant guerilla war against the independence of state Baptist Conventions, Baptist seminaries and colleges, and individual congregations. Its centralizing focus was alien to the historic ecclesiology of Baptists, much as its political agenda was alien to the historic devotion of Baptists to the principle of strict separation of church and state.To be sure, most “conservative” Baptist leaders have stopped short of the ultimate religio-political stance of anathemizing every single individual churchgoer who might be inclined to support the heathen Democratic Party, just as some “conservative” Catholic Bishops have so far failed to carry out their threats to deny communion to those who vote for pro-choice Democrats. Time will tell if Chan Chandler is simply a few steps further along the current trajectory of the Baptist wing of the Christian Right, or represents a flashing warning sign to those who have subjected the Gospel to the fortunes of the GOP.

The Democratic blogosphere has been abuzz this week over a giant batch of polls released by SurveyUSA measuring the approval/disapproval ratings of all 50 Governors (as of May 6-8). So far I haven’t seen anyone look at them from the perspective of Democrats in red states, but once you do it really leaps off the page. Here are the numbers for the twelve Democratic Governors of states carried by Bush in 2004, beginning with their ranking among the 50:(3) David Freudenthal WY (67/20)(6) Joe Manchin WV (64/24)(8) Janet Napolitano AZ ((59/32)(10) Brad Henry OK (59/30)(11) Brian Schweitzer MT ((58/27)(12) Kathleen Blanco LA (55/36)(13) Mark Warner VA ((55/31)(16) Kathleen Sebelius KS (54/34)(20) Bill Richardson NM (54/39)(22) Mike Easley NC (52/34)(23) Phil Bredesen TN (52/40)(25) Tom Vilsack IA (50/39)Amazing, huh? All 12 are in the top half of Governors, all have approval ratings of 50 or above, and all have solid approval/disapproval ratios.The other interesting optic I wanted to draw attention to is the ragged popularity of Republican Governors in the South. As regular readers of this blog know, one of my theories about Southern Republicans is that they don’t do as well in office as in opposition, which creates perennial opportunities for Southern Democrats even in the toughest terrain. Here are the rankings and numbers for Southern GOPers:(21) Mark Sanford SC (53/35)(24) Mike Huckabee AR (51/41)(28) Jeb Bush FL (49/46)(30) Sonny Perdue GA (47/40)(38) Rick Perry TX (38/48)(40) Haley Barbour MS (37/55)(41) Bob Riley AL (36/52)(43) Ernie Fletcher KY (36/50)If you add in the border state of MO, you also get:(48) Matt Blunt MO (33/57)None of these numbers, of course, guarantee future Democratic success in red states, but things are definitely looking up.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey