After two weeks of non-stop travel, I’m finally back among the chattering classes of Washington. So I guess it’s appropriate to do an immediate post about a particular DC gabfest on the future of the Democratic Party that I participated in a few weeks ago over at The Washington Monthly. The quality of the session was quite high, including as it did E.J. Dionne, Mike Tomasky, Walter Shapiro, Jim Pinkerton, and the Monthly’s own Paul Glastris and Amy Sullivan. A mini-jumbo version of the transcript is in the latest issue of the Monthly, and is available on its web site. Check it out.

Today’s big political story is the preliminary FEC report on spending in the 2004 presidential elections. And the numbers are just stunning, in two respects: (1) the total spent on behalf of the two major-party candidates was a staggering $1.7 billion, up from an estimated billion four years ago; and (2) Democrats, for the first time in living memory, outspent Republicans.
According to the FEC, $925 million was spent on behalf of John Kerry from all sources, while the total for Bush was a mere $822 million. The latter number, of course, doesn’t even begin to match the free publicity available to Bush as Chief Executive, but still, Democratic fundraising, particularly given the party-wide panic about the likely impact of Feingold-McCain, was amazing. The WaPo report on the FEC numbers doesn’t get into the breakdown of donor categories, so it might be a little early to endorse the widespread assumption that small donations, including those over the Internet, were the major source of all this new Democratic money. And I’d be willing to bet that Republicans still retained their traditional advantage in small-donor dollars, though by a narrowed margin.
But amidst all the well-justified self-congratulations we’ll soon hear about Democratic fundraising in 2004, there’s an important point that should never be forgotten, and no, it’s not just that we lost despite all that money. It’s how that money was spent: basically, in ads and in voter registration and GOTV efforts–in other words, in marketing. But despite all that marketing, in the end, about 40% of voters couldn’t tell you what John Kerry and John Edwards wanted to do if elected.
It may be time for Democrats to make a collective decision to spend a few sheckels on the product development side of the political biz along with all the hundreds of millions they spend on marketing. That’s even more important given the fact that Democrats have for too long lived off the ideas and messages developed during the Clinton administration–many of them still relevant, but now beginning to recede a bit in the rear-view mirror. Without control of the White House or either branch of Congress, where, specifically, is the Democratic institutional capacity for creating, refining, and messaging good and politically salient policy ideas? Academics? MeetUps? The new breed of talking-points distribution organizations that sprang up in 2004? Yeah, all of these can be sources of something to say, but in a party capable of raising a spending close to a billion dollars, there ought to be a little spare change under the sofa for real-live think tanks like those who have served the GOP so well over the years. We’ve got a few good ones, including our own Progressive Policy Institute, which gave the Clinton administration many of its best ideas, but they are pretty small operations compared not only to their conservative rivals, but to the vast array of Democratic groups focused on everything other than policy content.
So: whether you’re someone who squeezed $100 out of the family budget this year to try to beat George Bush, or someone with serious jack to burn, give a thought going forward to making at least a small investment in the intellectual side of progressive politics, before the well runs dry and all we are marketing is that we are not Republicans.

A thousand apologies, dear readers, for the absence of posts over the last two days, but I’ve spent most of them on planes travelling indirectly from Birmingham, Alabama to Aspen, Colorado, for two different DLC training events. And as you can imagine, the transition from The Heart of Dixie to Ski Country has been pretty jolting from a cultural as well as geographical point of view.
Not being a skier (where I grew up, you pretty much had to be a Republican to indulge in skiing, golf or tennis–bowling was the Democratic participatory sport of choice and financial necessity), most of what I knew about Aspen before arriving here was derived from the various accounts of Hunter Thompson’s Freak Power campaigns in 1969 and 1970, which culminated in the Gonzo Journalist’s near-election as sheriff of Aspen County. The most memorable plank of the Freak Power platform was to change the name of the community to “Fat City,” theoretically forcing private enterprises using the name “Aspen” to adopt the new monniker, a very early example of negative branding, I suppose.
I haven’t been into the town proper yet, and thus don’t know if Thompson’s prophecies of a natural wonder consumed by “greedhead” development have been fulfilled over the last three decades, though I’m reasonably sure The Doctor did not anticipate the Latte Town phenomenon of private capital being harnessed to a cultural outlook not unlike his own. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Thompson’s own name and likeness emblazoned across the gates of trendy local businesses, just as his Rolling Stone co-conspirator Ralph Steadman has lent his unsettling art to Colorado microbrew bottles and ads.
Politically, if Colorado wasn’t exactly being swept by Freak Power in the 1970s, it was trending sharply Democratic, as reflected most notably by the Senate victory of Thompson’s ol’ buddy Gary Hart in 1974. And thirty years later, even though George W. Bush won the state handily, the down-ballot races here were a notable Democratic success story, with Dems picking up a Senate seat, a House seat, and regaining control of both Houses of the state legislature. This performance, moreover, gives local Democrats high hopes of toppling Gov. Bill Owens (if he runs for another term) in 2006; Owens is perhaps the national Right’s true favorite for the 2008 presidential nomination.
After a couple of days of conversations here, I hope to be able to offer some comparative observations on Red State Democrats in the South and the West. I won’t be spending any time on the slopes, and if there’s a bowling alley in these parts, it’s well-hidden.
CORRECTION: Bill Owens is actually term-limited, and cannot run for another term in 2006. And his “availability” as the national Right’s presidential champion in 2008 is currently being clouded by rumored problems with his marriage.

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to spend some time in Alabama at a training event for state legislators, and aside from the practical work these solons did in pursuing the DLC’s values-based messaging and agenda-setting methodology, they reminded me why I’m proud to be a red-state, southern Democrat.
You have to appreciate how embattled Alabama Democrats feel right now. Yes, they still control both Houses in the state legislature, and yes, in Lieutenant Governor Lucy Baxley, they have a potentially successful 2006 gubernatorial candidate. But aside from John Kerry’s dismal performance this year, Democrats got clobbered in statewide contests on November 2, and Republicans have generally dominated the issue landscape in the state in recent years, as reflected by the popular obsession with former Judge Roy Moore’s campaign to defy the U.S. Constitution by displaying the Ten Commandments on public property, and by the vociferous anti-tax, anti-government views of a majority of Alabama voters. According to exit polls, nearly half of this state’s electorate self-identifies as conservative.
But precisely because Alabama Republicans have made cultural issues and low- or no-government themes central to their political message, Democrats here have the painful but honorable burden of being the only people who actually talk about the challenges facing their state. Alabama remains a relatively poor state, with a regressive tax system, struggling public schools, and an corporate-welfare-based economic development strategy straight out of the 1950s. And every political issue in Alabama remains colored by the legacy of slavery and segregation; Republicans continue to indirectly but unmistakably tell white voters that decent public services are a “black thing” that they should not understand or support.
And that’s the ultimate handicap and opportunity that Alabama Democrats, like their counterparts all over the South, live with: their status as a biracial coalition in a biracial society.
Southern Democrats stand alone in their willingness to project a message and agenda that unites their people, as my experience in Birmingham confirmed. Even the most conservative Alabama Democrats are extraordinarily proud of their party’s civil rights and equal opportunity heritage. And African-Americans in this state are extraordinarily pragmatic about the need for a broad party message that appeals to white moderate and moderately conservative voters. They also tend to share the culturally conservative views that seem so alien to a blue-state-dominated national party.
What you really learn by spending time with southern Democrats is the importance of projecting a party message that unites people across racial, class, and cultural lines, instead of competing with Republicans in an effort to build a coalition of selfish interest and identity groups. The more the GOP abandons its heritage as a party of national unity, the more this common ground is open to Democrats.
Alabama Democrats understand this implicitly, and that’s why this year’s, and this decade’s, political misfortunes down here are not some demographically determined permanent realignment, but a new challenge to a party that has consistently found ways to build new broad coalitions based on ideas that unite people rather than dividing them.
Ultimately, the theme song for Southern Democrats is the familiar and optimistic refrain:
Black and white together
We shall overcome some day.
Deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day.

So, you think it’s tough to be a Democrat in your red state, huh? Consider Alabama, where political life in recent years has gone into a toxic downward spiral characterized by a deep and self-fulfilling mistrust of government and a preoccupation with such pressing contemporary issues as the public posting of The Ten Commandments.
Alabama’s latest agony involves the apparent failure (an automatic recount of the November 2 results will be conducted this week) of a constitutional amendment, sponsored by my friend Ken Guin, the Democratic Leader in the Alabama House, that would have removed Jim Crow language about segregated schools from the state constitution. The amendment was opposed by the Christian Coalition and other conservative Republicans because it would have also removed a Jim Crow clause denying Alabama children the right to public education, reflecting the temporary 1950s segregationist strategy of shutting down public schools altogether. Much of the Christian Right, of course, is as committed to the destruction of public schools as their seggie predecessors, if for ostensibly different reasons. The public argument against the amendment was rather different, based on a conspiracy theory that “activist judges” would somehow use the constitutional right to a public education to require tax increases.
The irony in all this is that Alabama conservatives are deeply devoted to the idea that the state’s economic future strictly depends on doing everything imaginable to attract business investment. But a lot of businesses aren’t terribly crazy about committing themselves to a community that can’t quite bring itself out of the 1950s. So the defeat of Guin’s amendment was really an atavistic two-fer: establishing a lack of interest in quality public education at a time when employers care more about a skilled workforce than ever before, and reminding the whole country of Alabama’s unsavory history of race relations.
I’ll be in Alabama later today for a training event, and intend to spend some time helping my Democratic friends plot righteous retribution for the damage the GOP is doing to their state.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving with my extended family, and hope you’ve had the chance to do the same.
Getting back to the newspapers today was like a slap in the face. There’s a Charles Babington article in the Post today that makes it clear that House Speaker Dennis Hastert put the kibosh on the 9/11 commission bill because he’s applying a general principle that he won’t bring anything to the floor unless a majority of House Republicans support it.
Like a lot of Democrats, I tend to view Hastert as a mild-mannered, inarticulate high school wrestling coach who’s sort of a figurehead for the real power in the House, Tom DeLay. But Hastert has gone considerably out of his way to put his personal stamp on this Republicans-only policy, and to make it clear he’s doing this to protect his own position in the House. Whether he’s the organ-grinder or the monkey on this decision, it shows exactly how far today’s GOP is willing to go to make narrow partisanship a higher priority than good government, loyalty to the alleged views of the president, or even patriotism. To put it another way, unless things change, the wingnuts in the House GOP caucus now have a virtual stranglehold on the government of the United States of America. And that gives me far more heartburn than yesterday’s Thanksgiving leftovers.

As I used to hear old people say years ago: “You just can’t get good help these days.” That seems to be the refrain of the Republican Party this week, what with a $338 billion omnibus bill crashing and burning, and with intelligence reform legislation being stalled yet again–and unidentified low-level staffers appearing to take the blame in both cases.
After an elaborate game of hot potato in which House and Senate GOP leaders, Rep. Ernest Istook and the IRS took turns pointing fingers and denying responsibility, everybody seems to have agreed to blame House appropriations committee staffers for the language authorizing access to taxpayers’ returns that derailed the omnibus bill until December. According to CNN, “Senate GOP leader Bill Frist said Sunday that ‘accountability will be carried out’ against whoever slipped in the provision.” Guess somebody will be leaving the Emerald City posthaste and going back to toil in Daddy’s law firm.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indignantly denied widespread reports that he had lobbied against intelligence reform. This leaves reform-smashers James Sensenbrenner and Duncan Hunter, who made it clear they were acting to protect DoD’s turf in this matter, looking kind of exposed, at least until such time as Rumsfeld and the White House figure out which low-level staffers at the Pentagon can be blamed for this perfidious disloyalty to the President’s position.
Ah, the staff makes such good scapegoats, and opportunities like these give politicians an excellent opportunity to vent their underlying irritation at having to rely on whippersnappers whom they suspect of forgetting Who’s the Boss.
Back when I worked in state government, every time the National Governors’ Association met they would hold Governors-only sessions where staffers were strictly banned. I once asked one of my bosses what they talked about in these sessions, and he looked me in the eye and said: “We sit around and complain about our staffs.”

When you’re down south, you can’t twirl the radio dial without running across sports talk, so I’ve been listening to endless discussions of the Big Brawl in Detroit last Friday night. Some gabbers think Ron Artest got a raw deal, losing roughly a million dollars per punch for his foray into the stands after those beer-and-popcorn hurling Pistons fans. Others think he should be strung up by sundown.
I couldn’t help but think about extending the civility rules from basketball to politics. What if Tom DeLay was subject to a suspension-without-pay for his next ethics violation? I know House Members don’t get paid as well as NBA stars, but maybe DeLay could pony up some cash from one of his political action committees when he goes into the stands back home in Texas and roughs up some innocent Democrat, eh?
Some kinds of poor political sportsmanship, however, deserve a penalty that goes beyond the deepest wallet. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to toss a beer right now at the Honorable James Sensennbrenner of Wisconsin, or the Honorable Duncan Hunter of California, the two solons who are risking all our lives by gumming up bipartisan intelligence reform legislation in Congress over a stupid turf fight with the Senate and the White House. (A note to any zealous law enforcement agents who may be reading: this is a fantasy, not a terroristic threat).
Right now the only person in a position to punish these guys for their bad behavior is the President of the United States, who in a statement from Chile, allowed as how he’d like to get things worked out when he gets home (assuming he doesn’t have one of those Crawford vacations previously scheduled). This is one time I truly wish Bush was the swaggering cowboy his publicists claim he is, and that he’d hogtie these boys and drag them to the House floor to do their jobs for the American people.

I’m down in Georgia for an extended Thanksgiving holiday with family, so the shenanigans in Washington seem a little remote. But when the wind blows south, I can catch a distinct whiff of Republican hubris, which smells like brimstone inadequately covered by overpriced perfume.
Last week we all gazed in awe at the House GOP’s passage of the DeLay Rule, which proffered the unprecedented idea that Republicans in Washington had the power to decide which state legal proceedings were legitimate or not.
This was followed by the passage of one of those obnoxious omnibus appropriations bills that treat all investments of taxpayers’ dollars as pretty much identical knots on rolling logs. There’s no telling how many legislative stinkbombs were included in this unread and undebated mess of a bill, though thanks to vigilant Democratic staffers and Josh Marshall, we do know about a provision sponsored by the reliably scary Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK), which would allow the chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees access to anybody’s federal tax returns.
And for dessert, House Republicans decided to block action on a desperately needed intelligence reform bill, loosely modeled on the 9/11 commission recommendations, because they wanted to protect the turf of the massive, shadowy, and unaccountable proliferation of intelligence operations being run out of the Pentagon.
But the supreme act of hubris is now under consideration by Republican Senators: the first modification of filibuster rules in 20 years, and the most significant enhancement of raw majority power in the Senate since 1917. Republicans, of course, had no problem with filibusters, and often used them, until the moment when (1) they gained control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, and (b) their top priority became stocking the federal judiciary with conservative judges requiring Senate confirmation.
There are hundreds of legitimate arguments for and against the Senate tradition of unlimited debate, and the limited but real power of the minority to slow down legislation and force compromise through actual or threatened filibusters. But there’s no question that the power of a party controlling both executive and legislative branches to control another branch for decades through a host of lifetime appointments to the federal bench is one of those contingencies that make filibusters respectable. And the willingness of today’s Republicans to throw out more than two centuries of precedent, and subject the Senate to raw majority power like the House, makes you wonder how they can continue to call themselves “conservative.”

As we all know, the Christian Right has now made defense of the institution of marriage, as defined as a union of a man and woman, not only its top political priority, but the very touchstone of Christian moral responsibility.
I’ve always found this rather ironic, since the Protestant Reformation, to which most Christian Right leaders continue to swear fealty, made one of its own touchstones the derogation of marriage as a purely religious, as opposed to civic, obligation. Virtually all of the leaders of the Reformation denounced the idea of marriage as a scripturally-sanctioned church sacrament, holding that baptism and the Eucharist were the only valid sacraments. Luther called marriage “a secular and outward thing,”which he did not mean as a compliment. Calvin treated marriage as a “union of pious persons,” and while he did consider marriage a “covenant,” he used the same term for virtually every significant human relationship.
More tellingly, throughout Protestant Europe, from the earliest days, one of the most common “reforms” was the liberalization of divorce laws. And even today, in America, conservative Protestants have the highest divorce rates of any faith community, or un-faith community.
My point is not to accuse today’s conservative Christians of hypocrisy, though there’s room for that; it’s that the Christian Right has made a habit of confusing secular cultural conservatism–the simple and understandable impulse to resist unsettling change–with fidelity to their own religious traditions. “Defending marriage” is far down the list of concerns, historically, of the Reformation tradition, and indeed, that tradition has done far more to loosen the bonds of matrimony, for good or for ill, and to “de-sanctify” the institution, than all the gays and lesbians who have ever lived.