Joan Walsh’s post, “Can right-wing hate talk lead to murder?” at Salon asks an important question that merits a thoughtful response. Walsh writes and talks in a “Hardball” video clip about the murders of Dr. George Tiller and Steven Tyrone Johns, a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, both by right wing extremists. Walsh focuses more on the murder of Tiller, because it was preceeded by some extreme rhetoric by Bill O’Reilly. As Walsh explains,

O’Reilly more than demonized Tiller; night after night he called him a baby killer, compared him to the Nazis, and suggested that he must be stopped. Roeder stopped him, all right. If I were O’Reilly I’d feel terrible for putting a private figure in my public sights night after night, simply for doing his lawful job. But O’Reilly has no conscience, so he’s proud of it.

Walsh goes on to cite the demonization of President Obama and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomajor as current concerns. Walsh is on to something with her point about demonization nurturing future violence. It’s too easy to dismiss the murder of Dr. Tiller as the work of a religious nutcase and the killing of Mr. Johns as the act of a neo-Nazi, and let it go at that. Violent extremists don’t exist in a vacuum; they are nourished in a culture or subculture.
I always felt that Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 launched his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi , known primarilly as the place where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and Newt Gingrich, both went way over the top in their wholesale bashing of government. They ratcheted up the rhetoric of hatred and contempt for government, perhaps to an all-time high. Such a climate of hatred for government helped to nurture Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Walsh rightly points out that not all conservatives are violence-prone. In fact, I would argue that true conservatives don’t like extremist rhetoric. And I have to admit that I have on occasion heard my fellow liberals parroting hateful denunciations of conservatives. But I do believe that the problem of hateful rhetoric is growing among right-wing ideologues, particularly public figures, and seems to be undergirded by racist attitudes, religious bigotry and xenophobia. Conservative intellectuals have a responsibility to provide a little leadership to tone down the hate-mongering. There is probably not much that can be done about ideologues like O’Reilly and Buchanan, other than boycott O’Reilly’s sponsors. But it couldn’t hurt for serious conservatives to urge a little more civility and fewer ad hominem attacks.
The important thing for Democrats and progressives to keep in mind is that we also have to clean up our own act and discourage nasty personal attacks from liberal spokespersons. Vigorous criticism of ideas and policies, yes. A little snark is even OK in debating ideas and policies, but ease up on the name-calling and personal put-downs. In so doing, we will help make clear which party is being lead by the grown-ups.

So what really happened in yesterday’s Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary? In a sentence, Creigh Deeds trounced the two early front-runners in nearly every part of the state, despite notable disadvantages in organization and (versus Terry McAuliffe, at least) money. His campaign saved the money it had, spent it on well-placed TV ads, and peaked at exactly the right time, winning the bulk of undecided voters down the stretch and battening on growing voter dissatisfaction with his rivals.
As Ari Berman points out today at The Nation, there was almost certainly an element of the old murder-suicide scenario at play: Brian Moran spent a lot of time attacking Terry McAuliffe, driving up T-Mac’s already high negatives and souring voters on himself as Deeds quietly went about campaigning.
But it’s not enough to intone “murder-suicide” and forget about the whole thing. The remarkable aspect of the contest was that Deeds defied the heavily-subscribed-to belief that the “ground game” is what matters most in low turnout primaries. Yes, turnout was a bit higher than expected (320,000 votes instead of 250,000), but was still low by almost any standard other than VA’s weak history of competitive primaries. Moran was all about “mobilization” and McAuliffe threw lots of his money into the “ground game,” even as Deeds was laying off field staff. Yet Deeds won ten of eleven congressional districts (losing narrowly to the Macker in the majority-black 3d district that runs from Richmond to Hampton Roads), winning NoVa against two rivals from that region. Some pundits attribute Deeds’ success in NoVa to his endorsement by the Washington Post, but while that endorsement was well-timed and helped provide a psychological boost to the Deeds campaign, everything we know about elections suggests that newspaper endorsements don’t matter a great deal.
In other words, what the candidates actually had to say in their ads, their mailers, their debates, and their personal appearances actually had a lot to do with the results–an once-popular idea that deserves a second look now and then. (See Amy Walters’ breakdown on the percentage of candidate expenditures on direct voter contact via ads and mail, where Deeds excelled).
Was there an ideological twist to this primary? That’s hard to say, without exit polls. Moran definitely tried to position himself as the “true progressive” in the race, opposing a big coal plant in southeast VA, stressing his eagerness to overturn the state’s gay marriage ban, and hiring some high-profile netroots figures like Joe Trippi and Jerome Armstrong. Moran also tried to identify himself with those who supported Barack Obama against McAuliffe’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, in last year’s presidential primaries (not very successfully, given T-Mac’s relatively strong showing among African-Americans yesterday). And both Moran and McAuliffe went after Deeds very hard during the last week or so on Deeds’ record of opposition to gun control measures.
In a state like Virginia, though, even self-conscious progressives tend to cut statewide candidates a lot of slack, so the ideological issues with Deeds may have helped him marginally.
The silliest conclusion I’ve heard since last night, though, is that McAuliffe’s defeat somehow represents the “end of Clintonism” in the Democratic Party. Sure, the Big Dog himself campaigned for McAuliffe to no apparent avail, and if “Clintonism” means no more than the personalities connected with the Clintons in the past, then maybe the results were a blow to “Clintonism.” But if, as I suspect is the case, those who are celebrating the “end of Clintonism” are talking about “centrism” or efforts to appeal beyond the progressive Democratic base, it’s kinda hard not to notice that the winning candidate yesterday seems to most resemble that profile. And there’s no question at all that the areas of Virginia actually won by HRC in 2008 went heavily for Deeds.
If you missed all the very brief excitement over VA last night, you can check out the liveblogging that Nate Silver and I did over at 538.com. And I also did some analysis of turnout patterns in VA today. Now it’s on to November, and no matter what you think of Creigh Deeds, he does enter the general election contest with some momentum and a demonstrated ability to pull votes from pretty much everywhere.
UPDATE: John Judis povides a more thoroughgoing analysis of the “end of Clintonism” interpretation of yesterday’s results than I did, but reaches a similar conclusion. In the meantime, given the prominent roles played in Brian Moran’s campaign by netroots gurus Trippi and Armstrong, and his adoption of many elements of netroots CW on how to win a low-turnout primary, you have to wonder why nobody’s asking if Moran’s third-place finish signals the “end of the netroots.” Maybe that’s because this whole “death by association” theme is ridiculous, whether we are talking about Moran or McAuliffe.

Editor’s Note: we’re very happy to feature this item, originally published at The Huffington Post, by Mike Lux, founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, LLC, and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be. This is an important contribution to our ongoing discussion of intraparty and intraprogressive debates.
There has been some interesting writing lately on the whole Obama and the left thing, a wave of discussion that started when Obama declared his candidacy for president, and won’t end until humans stop writing history books.
The first was kind of a silly article by Josh Gerstein in Politico, which basically described the left as being Rachel Maddow, some civil liberties groups, and some LGBT activists. Not surprisingly given that definition, all “the left” in Gerstein’s article cared about were civil liberties, gay rights, and having a Supreme Court Justice picked.
Now don’t get me wrong, all of those are incredibly important issues and activists, but to describe “the left” in that way seems like pretty bad reporting. Doesn’t mention the labor movement, health care advocates, advocates for low-income people, environmentalists, bloggers, community organizers, progressive think tanks, feminists, progressive activists of color, MoveOn and other online activists, the progressive youth movement, the peace movement, or any other parts of the remarkably diverse and interesting progressive movement. He didn’t mention how progressives had both pushed for the stimulus package to be bigger but also were an essential part of getting it passed in the end; or how progressives have been organizing big coalitions on behalf of helping Obama get health care, immigration reform, climate change reform, and a re-write of banking legislation passed; or how progressives have expressed concern on a range of issues like trade and banking.
There have also been articles in the Washington Post about how Obama’s election and the sausage making of passing legislation had deadened progressive excitement, and the excellent grasp of the obvious file — one about how progressive groups now had more power in lobbying than they had under Bush.
Easily the most thoughtful pieces of all have been two recent pieces by members of the progressive movement themselves (both personal friends, so I’ll admit my bias upfront). The first, by Gara LaMarche of Atlantic Philanthropies, was a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the challenges of both Obama and progressives, and was fairly hopeful in general, both about Obama and about the relationship between him and the movement. The second, by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, was a more frustrated discussion of the way progressive leaders aren’t challenging Obama enough, and the distancing of Obama from progressives.
From my experience in the Obama transition as the Obama team’s liaison to the progressive community, and in all my conversations with folks both inside and outside of Obamaland before and since, the tension between being hopeful about the possibilities and upset that better things aren’t being realized will always be there. If managed right by both Obama and progressive leaders, it can be the kind of constructive, creative tension that leads to the kind of big breakthrough progressive changes we saw in this country at key moments in our history- the 1860s, the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s (the Big Change Moments I write about in my book, The Progressive Revolution). If managed poorly, it can lead to the kind of presidential meltdowns we saw with the LBJ and Jimmy Carter presidencies, and on the Republican side with the first Bush presidency: Presidencies that started with high hopes but ended with destructive conflicts between the base and the presidency, tough primary challenges, and lost re-election hopes.
So far, I’m feeling quite good about Obama’s chances for the former. After some initial stumbles, he pushed through the stimulus package — and the biggest progressive public investment package — in history. His budget was very bold and as strongly progressive as any budget at least since 1965, and it has made its way through the first rounds of the congressional budget process in good shape. He has so far handled the politics around his first big legislative initiatives, health care and climate change, very pretty, giving us a solid chance at success.
Progressive leaders have handled themselves well on balance, too. A lot of us thought the stimulus was too small, but we pushed hard to get it passed once the die was cast. A lot of us prefer a single-payer health care system, but are also pushing hard to see a strong public option kept in this reform package, and are putting big resources into the passage of a good plan. Progressive groups and leaders are working hard and constructively to push Obama and other Democrats to improve the climate change bill that came out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and to move forward on the strong financial regulation and immigration reform legislation. And where Obama has disappointed many of us — on civil liberties, on LGBT issues, on Afghanistan, and on financial regulation — we have pushed back strongly but generally not been destructive in doing so.
Going forward, though, there are certain things history and common sense teach us that both sides need to understand very clearly:
1. We need each other. Progressives need to understand that our fates for several years to come are tied, fundamentally and completely, to Obama’s success as president. If he loses his big legislative fights, we won’t get another chance at winning them for a generation (see health care, 1993-94), and early losses will make the Democrats more cautious, not more bold (see health care, 1993-94). If Obama’s popularity fades, Democrats will lose lots of seats in Congress. If he loses re-election, Republicans and the media will say he was a failed liberal and run against him for many elections to come, even if his actual policies are more centrist (see Jimmy Carter). But Obama’s team needs to understand that they need a strong progressive movement as well, and as Jane alluded to, they haven’t generally acted like they do. Without progressives’ passion, activism, lobbying, and money, Obama can’t win those incredibly challenging legislative battles. Just as Lincoln never would have won the civil war or ended slavery without the passion of the abolitionists, just as FDR never would have won the New Deal reforms without the labor and progressive movement, just as LBJ would never have passed civil rights bills without the civil rights movement, Obama can’t win these big fights alone. And he can’t win re-election either without the passion of his base: see LBJ, Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush, and many other presidents for more info on that topic.
2. Obama needs a left flank. It is a natural tendency of any White House to be dismissive of criticism, and to play hardball when people disagree with you. The Obama team should not hesitate to defend itself when being pushed from the Left, but I would caution against playing too hard at hardball. The Obama team needs a vibrant and vocal Left flank, because the stronger their Left flank is, the more Obama seems solidly in the middle. The White House would be well-served to fully support and empower progressive groups, media, and bloggers — even when they sometimes disagree with Obama.
3. There needs to be both an inside and an outside strategy for progressives. Progressive leaders who get jobs in the administration are sometimes derided as sell-outs, and progressive groups who are not openly critical of the Administration are sometimes criticized as being too cozy with those inside. At the same time, insiders get very worked up about “irresponsible” bloggers and outside activists who they say don’t understand the system and the challenges they are facing.
Having been both on the inside and the outside, I see the grain of truth in both sides’ perspective, but also respectfully disagree with both sides.
We need progressive people in government, even if the cost of that is that they have to trim their sails on issues where they disagree with administration policy. We need progressive groups in regular in-depth policy meetings with the administration, even if that means they have to soft-pedal their criticisms some of the time to keep that access. And we need outsiders who will push like crazy for doing the right thing now no matter what.
Change and progress never happened in this country without both insiders and outside agitators playing a strong role. The administration needs to respect the role of those outsiders, and those working for progress from the inside and the outside need to respect each other. There is no other way this is all going to work for the good.

Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ post at the Center for American Progress strongly suggests that the conservative wing of the GOP has lost its cred with voters on one of their party’s most reliable issues, national security. As Teixeira explains:

In a May Democracy Corps poll, 57 percent said they supported Obama’s national security policies, compared to just 30 percent who were opposed…In the same poll, 58 percent endorsed the idea that America’s security depends on building strong ties with other nations, compared to 37 percent who believed America’s security depends on its own military strength.

And when it comes to former VP Dick Cheney’s broadsides against President Obama’s national security policy, the Republicans have little to smile about:

…When asked in an early June Democracy Corps poll whether Obama or Cheney has better ideas for keeping the country safe, they chose Obama’s ideas over Cheney’s by 54-39.

Teixeira credits the tanking of the conservative’s national security cred to President Obama’s “progressive approach to our nation’s foreign policy that provides a sharp break with the belligerent, go-it-alone practices of the Bush administration.” Perhaps progressives should also give a pat on the back to Cheney, for providing a timely reminder of the failed policies of Republican rule.

As numbers-oriented folk here at TDS, we can’t resist a shout-out for Paul Waldman’s article for The American Prospect today, which examines why the extraordinary availability of good data these days hasn’t translated into a rejection of bad data, at least in the United States.
Waldman blames some of the bogus credibility of bad data on the media, where the quality of data is rarely policed::

How many times in recent years has [the press] treated some bogus figure put out by one side of a political debate as though it might be true, depending on how you look at it? To take just one example, consider the gift that The New York Times offered up to anti-union forces last November, when a now notorious article by Andrew Ross Sorkin claimed that Big Three autoworkers were being paid $70 per hour. It was false — the average worker was actually making $28 an hour. The $70 figure came from disingenuously combining four separate expenses incurred by the automakers, only one of which is actual wages. But that didn’t stop conservative opponents of aid to the automakers from turning factory workers into the villains of the story, a bunch of greedy layabouts sucking the companies dry and driving them to ruin. The truth didn’t much matter — the idea ricocheted around the media for weeks.
The right thing for any reporter to do when confronted with the claim would have been to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Conservative Think Tank guy, but you and I both know that autoworkers don’t make $70 an hour. Is there anything else you’d like to add — that’s not a lie — that I can use in my story?” But reporters don’t necessarily say that sort of thing. And this is just one case. Journalists’ lack of even the most rudimentary understanding of statistics is evident on the news pages and broadcasts nearly every day.

But Waldman goes on to suggest that cultural factors are at play, including the taste for quackery evidence in popular culture; the poor math and statistical skills of the American population; and a general inability to differentiate between those questions “the numbers” can help answer, and those they can’t.

Let’s say you’re running a gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, and you want turnout in Northern Virginia to be relatively high. This is probably not the early-morning headline you want to see in the Washington Post: “Severe Thunderstorms Hit As Polls Open in VA.” The story beneath that headline says that in some areas experiencing hail, radio stations are telling residents to stay indoors, presumably even if that van shows up to take you to the polls.
For whatever reason, it looks like God had some definite ideas about turnout patterns in Virginia today.

Virginia’s Democrats are holding a primary today, and the headliner event is the contest to see who will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November in an effort to secure a third straight Democratic governorship. As Jonathan Martin of Politico explains this morning, there are scenarios under which each of the three candidates–Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran–could win, with turnout being a crucial variable. But Deeds has been the surprise leader in all four of the polls released during the last week.
I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com that explores some of the issues we may be discussing when the returns are in, including the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies; the role of timely media endorsements; and Virginia’s relatively restrictive early voting rules, which Gov. Kaine unsuccessfully tried to change this year.
The polls in VA close at 7:00 p.m.; the whole state’s in the eastern time zone; and given the expected low turnout, we may have a result pretty early unless it’s very close.

Al Quinlan, president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research has a post up at gqrr.com on their new survey (PDF here), which reveals overwhelming public support for investing in illness prevention as a leading priority of health care reform. Among the findings of the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies bi-partisan report, which was commissioned by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

When we asked people whether or not we should invest more in prevention , a big majority (76 percent) said yes, against just 16 percent who said no. This is truly an overwhelming level of support for any initiative—it’s rare to get three-quarters of the country to agree on anything these days (much less on something that involves spending more money)—and it underscores the importance Americans place on prevention as part of their health care and their lives.
Now for those of you who would ask if it is just certain parts of the population who support this, our answer would be, “No.” At least 65 percent of every demographic subgroup supports increasing our investment in prevention. From coast to coast (79 percent in the Northeast, 78 percent in the South, 76 percent in the West, and 72 percent in the Midwest) and across the political spectrum (86 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans, and 70 percent of Independents), people believe we should invest more in prevention. Even two-thirds of the least healthy among us want a greater investment in prevention.
The importance the country places on prevention represents a real change in attitudes toward health in this country over the past couple decades. In 1987, 45 percent of the country believed we should be giving more emphasis to prevention (11 percent wanted more emphasis on treatment). Today, 59 percent say we need more emphasis on prevention, an increase of 14 percentage points in the prevention column (a real shift, albeit occurring over 20 years).

And the public views prevention as a highly cost-effective investment, as Quinlan notes:

No good discussion of any type of program would be complete without discussing the always-burning question—what about the costs? Does the cost associated with investing in prevention dampen support for it? It doesn’t appear to. By a wide margin (77 – 16 percent), Americans believe that prevention will save us money, rather than cost us money. But saving money isn’t the real reason they want more prevention—health is. Seventy-two percent say that “investing in prevention is worth it even if it doesn’t save money, because it will prevent disease and save lives,” while only 20 percent feel that investing in prevention is not worth it if it doesn’t save money. When it comes to prevention, it’s less about cost and more about reducing disease, keeping people healthy, and improving quality of life.

When it comes to building a consensus in support of health care reform, it appears that investing in prevention as a central priority may be the focus that can unite Americans.

Every martyr needs her hagiography, and according to David Weigel at the Washington Independent, the Governor of Alaska is getting her own, tentatively entitled The Persecution of Sarah Palin. Penned by The Weekly Standard‘s Matthew Continetti, it’s due out in 2010, just in time for the launch of a Palin presidential run.
I don’t know how smart it is to make your first big political biography an extended whine, but then again, there is definitely a persecution-complex faction in the GOP that loves St. Joan of the Tundra not so much for the enemies she has made, but for the mockery she has inspired. The Torquemada of the Palin Passion, Tina Fey, ought to demand a cut of the book’s proceeds. Or if Continetti has a taste for historical puns, he could entitle the chapter on Palin’s Saturday Night Live ordeal: “Auto da Fey.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Normally American conservatives don’t much care what happens in Europe. But there are already signs that they will interpret this weekend’s European Parliamentary elections, which produced poor results for social democratic parties and an outcropping of far-right victories. The leading indicator was a Drudge Report banner that read: “USA Moves Left, EU Moves Right.”
You know how this will go, of course: Obama is “driving” the US towards “European-style socialism” just as Europe is abandoning it.
There’s only one big problem with this story-line: Europe ain’t abandoning what passes for “socialism” among American conservatives. Indeed, the kind of social policies that largely dwarf anything proposed by Obama in this country are so much a part of the landscape that parties of the Left can’t find traction in hard times, as the Financial Times‘ Tony Barber explains:

[I]n France, Germany and Italy, voters preferred to stick with ruling centre-right parties, even though economic conditions are as severe as anything in living memory.
One reason is that centre-right leaders, alert to the risk of being portrayed as defenders of a heartless or irresponsible capitalist system, have sought to protect citizens against the worst effects of the recession by preserving jobs where possible and letting the welfare state take care of those in need.
Unemployment benefits, access to medical care and other forms of social expenditure, which come into effect automatically during a recession, form a large part of the €400bn fiscal stimulus that EU policymakers claim to have been implementing over the past six months.
This Franco-German model, criticised in the US and UK in the boom years as an unaffordable, bloated welfare system, has turned out to be exactly what most voters want during the recession.

You can understand why conservatives here would want to seize on any evidence from any source to create optimism for their embattled cause and their shrinking party vehicle, the GOP. But unless they want to associate themselves with the relative success of anti-immigrant or neo-fascist parties in the EU elections, they should probably look somewhere else.