Sarah Posner at The American Prospect‘s FundamentaList offers up this fine quote from U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), delivered at the Conservative Political Action Committee confab last week:

A nation that raises its children in government schools cannot expect its people to stand for the principles of freedom.

Without question, DeMint seems to be in a strange competition with Gov. Mark Sanford to become the contemporary standard-bearer for the Palmetto State’s rich tradition of right-wing extremism. But the habit of invidiously referring to public schools as “government schools” is one that has in the past been largely limited to the more exotic precincts of libertarians and home-school activists. There is something a bit refreshing about a Republican who frontally attacks public education instead of pretending to cherish it while undermining it through chronic underfunding or vouchers. Still, Americans probably aren’t quite ready to be lashed by any politician for their effete, socialist willingness tolerate Big Government involvement in the education of their children.

I doubt there’s a Democrat much of anywhere who hasn’t enjoyed the contretemps between RNC chairman Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, which ultimately produced an apology by The Chairman for suggesting that Rush isn’t exactly a serious and constructive figure in American politics. It’s always fun to observe the godlike status assigned by conservatives to a man considered despicable by, well, pretty much everybody who doesn’t think he’s godlike.
But the brouhaha is also raising broader questions about Steele, who occupies a singular niche in a Republican Party that doesn’t have any obvious set of consensus leaders this side of Limbaugh.
From his new perch at the DC Examiner, veteran conservative reporter Byron York suggests today that Steele’s drawing a lot of behind-the-scenes flack for spending most of his time making questionably effective TV appearances while a host of key positions at the RNC remain empty:

Shortly after his January 30 victory in the chairman’s race, Steele fired virtually everyone at the RNC — a move many outsiders applauded after the party’s back-to-back losses in 2006 and 2008. But Steele has yet to replace many of the people he sacked. Now, as Steele enters his second month in the chairman’s office, there is no chief of staff for the RNC. There is no political director. There is no finance director. There is no communications director. Many lesser positions remain empty as well.
“I think it’s been a disaster of a first month,” says one Republican who has served on Capitol Hill and the RNC. “He needs to disappear for 60 days, go and staff the building, put his personal energy into making sure he has the people he wants, and go from there. That’s what people are hoping he will do.”
“It’s not good,” says another GOP politico. “People feel that it’s been very erratic at a time when we really need some sort of stabilizing force.”

Over at National Review Online, Jim Geraghty gives a soapbox to an unnamed “Steele ally” who shares the sentiments reported by York, and also to Steele aide Kurt Anderson, who pretty much dismisses and and all criticism as emanating from job-seekers and hacks. Real Republicans, suggests Anderson, dig Steele deeply. This line of argument led a correspondent of Geraghty’s to respond:

What the heck is this guy smoking? It’s one thing to screw up. It’s another to screw up and insist “people love me”. I see nothing but dismay from Steele supporters on the blogs.”

I personally have no idea whether Steele is a comically inept bozo or just the temporary victim of unrealistic expectations among people in dire need of some leadership. But it’s never a particularly good sign when a national party chairman has to spend this much time explaining himself.

I have a suggestion for anyone who wants to understand how far adrift the GOP has become in its efforts to regain political footing after the Age of Bush.
First, read James Crabtree’s succinct but informative profile of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron from The American Prospect. As Crabtree explains, Cameron’s current status as a man well-positioned to become the next Prime Minister of his country brought the Tories back from oblivion through a systematic effort to overcome its attachment to the old right-wing Thatcherite ideology. Sure, the Tories tried just about everything and everybody else before resorting to an ideological sea-change, but finally began to turn the corner under Cameron.
Second, read this post from the popular conservative site RedState. I choose this as suggested reading not because it’s extreme, but because it is extremely typical of what grassroots conservatives are saying these days. It not only tells conservative critics of the GOP’s stubbornly rigid ideological direction to STFU, but gets pretty hysterical about the very idea that the Right should be “thoughtful” instead of simply howling at the moon with Rush and company. The writer seems to be covering his or her ears and shouting “La la la can’t hear you!”
Looks like Republicans are pretty much where the Tories were not that long ago, when they were so out of touch that they were incapable of taking advantage of Tony Blair’s mistakes. They should maybe think about that before assuming that they can stick with the old-time religion of the Right and simply pray to an angry God that Obama fails and hands them self-vindication and power.

Bob Rosenblatt’s L.A. Times article “A National Healthcare Reform Primer” is a good place to start getting up to speed on the major issues of the current debate on health care refom strategy. In the Q&A section of his article, Rosenblatt does a good job of explaining how health care reform would be financed:

How can the country pay for a reworking of its health insurance system?
Obama has proposed a down payment of $630 billion. Most of the money would come from an increase in federal income taxes by limiting deductions for people making more than $250,000 a year…He also wants to cut payments to Medicare HMOs, saving about $175 billion over 10 years, according to the budget plan issued Thursday. This program, known as Medicare Advantage, requires enrollees to get their hospital and doctor care within a network of providers. In return, they get extra benefits, such as dental care, which are not included in the regular Medicare program. Under regular Medicare, called fee-for-service, the beneficiary can see any doctor or hospital where Medicare payments are accepted.

Rosenblatt also discusses other funding mechanisms under consideration, including: capping the federal income tax deduction for health insurance; creating a special tax dedicated for healthcare; and finding ways to make the system more efficient.
For an interesting look at the key health care strategy players, read “On Health, President Takes Team Approach” by Robert Pear and Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times. The authors focus on the following members of Obama’s health care reform team: Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the President’s nominee for Secretary of HHS; Nancy-Ann DeParle, counselor to the president and director of the White House Office for Health Reform, is not subject to Senate confirmation; Peter R. Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, “a dominant voice on health policy within the administration” ; Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist and “kibitzer-in-chief on health policy”; Melody C. Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, and Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council
In her Wall St. Journal article, “Tough Questions Dog Health-Care Overhaul,” Laura Meckler focuses on Obama’s proposed “system in which people could buy insurance through a government-organized marketplace, where private plans and a new government-run plan would compete.” and notes:

If the government were to require businesses to offer insurance, it would have to set a standard for what counts as insurance. Would a bare-bones plan with limited coverage qualify? Businesses and others would likely wince at the idea of government setting standards for the benefits they must offer….During his campaign, Mr. Obama proposed that large businesses be required to offer coverage or pay into a fund, while small businesses that offer coverage would get a tax credit…Many Democrats insist that there be a public option. Some say it would provide a test for whether Americans prefer a government-run system similar to what exists in Canada. But opponents say it would skew the playing field because government will always be able to undercut private insurers’ prices.

What I crave most as a health insurance consumer is simplicity. I don’t want to be what the insurance companies call “an educated consumer,” who has to spend a lot of time reading their brochures and making cafeteria-style decisions about my “benefit options” based on their constantly changing coverage and too often dishonored promises. I want everything covered — a little card that guarantees that any illness or health issue that befalls me or my family will not entail ruinous medical expenses, and requires nothing more than a modest co-payment from me for anything. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for in the most prosperous nation in world history.
Right now, I have to believe goverment is likely to be the more credible provider of such a promise, since private insurers have only cut benefits and raised prices in recent years. Theoretically, at least, it should be possible for insurance companies to compete on the basis of who can provide the most affordable insurance that truly covers every illness, without the expensive “optional” add-ons like “cancer insurance” private providers offer today. If one of the big companies had the guts to offer such a truly comprehensive package, I suspect they would bury the competition.
Health security for millions of Americans has always been discussed as something separate from “national security,” and I sometimes wonder if that’s a key reason why comprehensive health insurance that covers everyone and every illness has been such a tough sell. When it comes to saving the lives of Americans, the failures of our health care delivery system have probably done more real damage to our citizens than all of the terrorists threatening America put together. Yet it’s politically easier to dump $5 billion a week into the Iraq quagmire than it is to spend about the same amount– $250 billion a year — to provide coverage for all of the uninsured (American Enterprise Institute maximum estimate, quoted in Rosenblatt’s article).
The same is true to some extent for the relationship of health care reform to the success of the economic reform package. As Governor Jennifer Granholm noted on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Sunday, Ontario produced more cars than Michigan last year — for the first time ever. Conservatives can’t blame it on their traditional boogeymen, taxes and regulation, since Canada has more of both. As Granholm explained about the auto companies, “They were going there because of health care.” Ontario’s edge for auto companies is due to Canada’s more efficient health care system, which makes cars produced there less expensive than in the U.S., where health insurance adds $1200-1500 to the price of every car, according to Granholm. Regardless of the specific policies at issue, clearly health care reform should be pitched more assetively as a critical component of both economic and national security.

David Brooks penned a column for The New York Times today that is destined to become a classic of its type. His editors seem to think so as well, titling his essay: “A Moderate Manifesto.”
Its main thrust is to agree with conservative arguments that the Obama administration’s budget proposal is a radical big-government, class-warfare, tax-and-spend package that would remake the country in a horrifying fashion. Indeed, “moderates” are explicitly called upon by their would-be chieftain to join the Right in opposing the whole thing. But what makes the argument both distinctive and incoherent is Brooks’ concession that the key components of the proposal all make sense:

We [moderates] sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and energy innovation. We support health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs.

So what’s the huge beef? It’s just all too much:

[T]he Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once….
We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

And with that assertion, Brooks is off to the races, providing a lurid spin on specific Obama proposals that are apparently “unexceptional” in themselves, but are somehow terrifyingly radical when attempted in combination. Consider his treatment of the Obama tax proposals which, as I am sure he knows, are basically designed to restore the structure of federal income tax rates as they existed prior to 2001.

The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.

Then there’s this howler:

The U.S. has always had vibrant neighborhood associations. But in its very first budget, the Obama administration raises the cost of charitable giving. It punishes civic activism and expands state intervention.

Brooks appears to be referring here to a relatively minor Obama tax proposal that would further limit (they are already limited now) the total value of deductions for high earners, a very conventional way to ensure effective progressive rates of taxation. To hear Brooks, this is a direct assault on the Tocquevillian concept of voluntary association.
He doesn’t bother to extend the argument much further than these pathetic examples of Obama’s alleged radicalism, pivoting instead to his trumpet call to “moderates” to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” He does make this observation that pretty much exposes the underlying “thinking” of his position:

[Moderates] will have to take the economic crisis seriously and not use it as a cue to focus on every other problem under the sun. They’re going to have to offer an agenda that inspires confidence by its steadiness rather than shaking confidence with its hyperactivity.

David Brooks is not a stupid man. He knows that progressives aren’t simply “using” the economic crisis to “focus on every other problem under the sun.” They believe, as Brooks sometimes appears to believe, that you cannot separate “the economic crisis” from health care costs, an inefficient and unsustainable energy system, an underperforming education system, or indeed, from a tax code that undermines middle-class work and rewards upper-class wealth. If moving towards universal health care is the best way to restrain uncontrolled health care costs (a huge burden for both the public and private sectors) while mitigating the real-life damage wrought by the
economic crisis, why would you not want to do that? If a retooled energy system does indeed position the United States to dominate a huge and fast-growing global market in alternative energy technologies, does it make any sense to wait on initiatives to achieve that in the pursuit of “moderation?” And if addressing the fundamental causes and dire consequences of poorly regulated financial institutions requires “more government,” what’s the point in insisting on “less government”–the supposed “Hamiltonian” principle Brooks insists Americans cherish–at the risk of producing the same disastrous results?
The “moderation” Brooks is championing seems to represent little more than an instinctive reaction against any coherent plan of action, and a horror of following through with the logic of progressive–and actually, “moderate”–analysis of why the economy has collapsed and what, specifically, needs to be done to revive the country.
In the title of this post, I’ve called Brooks’ essay today “The Ultimate David Brooks Column.” That’s because it epitomizes two key Brooksian vices that have always maddeningly accompanied the virtues of his fluid and interesting writing and his revulsion against Movement Conservatism: “moderation” is defined as compromise, any kind of compromise, and “moderates” are invariably urged to pursue a course of action that coincides with the immediate political needs of the Republican Party.
On this latter point, Brooks may well continue to ventilate his disdain for the Rush Limbaughs of the world. But you will note that this column essentially urges “moderates” to join Rush in derailing Obama’s agenda, with an asterisk suggesting that somewhere down the road, they will need to develop and support an “alternative” agenda that represents the better angels of Barack Obama’s nature. The whole thing reads like an extended rationalization for “moderate” Republicans and Blue Dogs to cower in fear before the savage Obama-hatred of the Right, comforting themselves that they will eventually rule the country when the equally-extreme Left and Right have finally become exhausted.
Anyone tempted to agree with Brooks’ “manifesto” needs to have his or her head and conscience examined.

I’ve finished reading Stan Greenberg’s new book, Dispatches From the War Room, and will have more to say later this week about a couple of big strategic issues it raises that merit considerable discussion.
But for today, thinking about the remarkable chapter in Stan’s book about his interactions with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the intense period of negotiations with the Palestinians in 1999 and 2000, I’m struck by some of the echoes easily heard in the frantic efforts of Bibi Netanyahu to form a government in the wake of the recent Israeli elections. It’a all particularly ironic since Bibi was a major player in that fateful period of Middle East history as well.
As Stan explains in detail, Barak won the prime ministership of Israel in 1999 after a campaign that focused on craven attitude of Netanyahu towards ultra-orthodox parties who kept him in power in exchange for heavy subsidies to religious schools and a continuing exemption of yeshiva students from Israel’s otherwise-universal military service obligation. At Greenberg’s urging, Barak successfully tied these Likud political concessions to serious problems in the Israeli economy, and to deep cultural resentment of the ultra-orthodox death grip on family policy.
After the election, however, Barak formed a government with the assistance of the ultra-orthodox Shas Party, and sacrificed much of his domestic agenda in the pursuit of stunningly bold but eventually unsuccessful peace negotiations with Syria and with Yasir Arafat.
This year Netanyahu’s trying to form a government after an Israeli election defined not by domestic but by Israel-Palestine issues, but is running into familiar problems in trying to put together a coalition of right-wing parties who are at odds over cultural and economic policies. As Gershom Gorenberg explains for The American Prospect:

“Right wing,” in Israeli terms, is defined by attitudes toward land and peace. It translates as unwillingness to give up any significant portion of West Bank territory, unqualified support for settlement-building, and disinterest in reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s own Likud and the other parties of the right share that stance, with gradations in their bellicosity. In other respects, they have much to fight about.
Economically, Netanyahu is a free-market fundamentalist. As finance minister under Ariel Sharon between 2003 and 2005, he cut income tax, particularly on top earners. In parallel, he slashed government payments to large families — a blow to the ultra-Orthodox minority. Two of the right-wing parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, represent the ultra-Orthodox. To regain their support, Netanyahu has apparently promised to backpedal his stance on aid to families. But the budget battles won’t end there.
There’s a cultural fault line as well. Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Israel Is Our Home Party, is best known for demagogy against Israel’s Arab minority. But Lieberman’s platform also includes introducing a form of civil marriage. That plank is crucial to his key constituency, former Soviet immigrants, many of whom aren’t Jewish under religious law and can’t marry through the state rabbinate. The change is anathema to Netanyahu’s other presumed coalition partners. Before the election, Shas’ aging rabbinic leader, Ovadiah Yosef, saidthat anyone who backed Lieberman “supports Satan.” Shas has 11 Knesset seats; Lieberman’s party has 15. If either bolts a coalition of the right, Netanyahu will need to call new elections.

According to Gorenberg, Netanyahu is desperate to get out of this box by forming a “national unity” government including the ex-Likud “centrists” of Kadima, along with Labor–now headed again, ironically, by Ehud Barak–that will not only bypass the intra-right-wing fights over economic and cultural parties, but could help insulate Bibi from international and particularly U.S. hostility to his foot-dragging over peace talks.
It doesn’t look like this will happen, but the contrast between Barak in 1999 and Netanyahu ten years later is fascinating. Barak wanted a broader coalition to take audacious steps towards peace-with-security. Bibi wants a broader coalition to maintain the status quo.
Read Dispatches From the War Room if you want to see the differences between these two models of leadership.

Today’s official announcement that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius would replace Tom Daschle as the designee for Secretary of Health and Human Services was no surprise, but as someone who’s watched her career pretty closely since well before she was elected governor, I certainly think she’s a very good choice. She’s smart, focused, fully in control of her ego, and has a wealth of relevant experience. Like any governor, she knows public health care programs quite well, and as a former state insurance commissioner, she understands the perilous intersections of public policy and private markets in health care as well.
Anyone considering her too much of a “centrist” should be aware of how effectively she’s made herself anathema to hard-core anti-abortionists in a state that used to be one of their playgrounds. And she’s a very good politician, as her success in hyper-Republican Kansas attests. No, she hasn’t been able to get the GOP-controlled Kansas legislature to go along with her efforts to expand public health care coverage, but she now joins an administration that’s in a stronger position to overcome Republican resistance, and can probably help pull a few GOPers across the line (it’s interesting that both Bob Dole and Pat Roberts chose to appear at her White House announcement ceremony).
Some of you may know this from the speculation over Sebelius as a possible Obama Veep back during the summer, but she’s also from a pretty notable political family. She’s the daughter of John J. “Jack” Gilligan, who was governor of Ohio back in the 1970s, and a much revered figure in Buckeye Democratic circles before and after that. They are, in fact, the first father-daughter combo who have both served as governors.
My favorite moment with Kathleen Sebelius was the time I had the opportunity to tell her an anecdote about her father she had never heard before, told to me by a friend who was his press secretary during a failed U.S. Senate run in 1968. Gilligan is famously a cerebral sort, and his campaign staff was trying to make him more of a regular guy for the benefit of blue-collar swing voters. So they arranged a photo op wherein he would go to a serious working-class bar in some seriously working-class community like Parma and consume a shot-and-a-beer.
Gilligan wasn’t that happy with the idea, but gamely went to the bar, trailing cameras and reporters, on the appointed night, when the joint was full of sweaty, beefy factory workers. On cue, the bartender asked him to name his poison, and looking right at my friend the press secretary, he said: “I’ll have a glass of sherry.”
Let’s hope Secretary Sebelius fully inherited that sense of humor. With health care reform on tap, she’ll need it.

It’s safe to say that a new conventional wisdom arose in Washington last week, which solidified over a weekend of gabbing: Barack Obama’s budget proposal does indeed reflect an effort to implement a generation of progressive policy thinking–nothing more, nothing less. It’s all there, and it’s all that’s there, from restored progressivity in income tax rates, to a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, to a step towards a privately-delivered but publicly-guaranteed universal health care system, to a big increase in the federal involvement in elementary and secondary education, and so on through a long list.
That the budget is being almost universally denounced by Republicans as the work of the devil, or of Lenin and Stalin, is a sign of how little progress progressives have made towards implementing their consensus agenda over the last couple of decades.
One reason for conservative shrieking about the Obama budget is that they may be at an institutional disadvantage in defeating it, as opposed to the economic stimulus package. If Obama and his congressional allies are able to get the bulk of the legislation contained in a budget “reconciliation” package, it will be subject to special time limitations and will be immune from a Senate filibuster. That’s how Ronald Reagan got much of his agenda enacted in one bill in 1981. If, as the Right has been saying lately, Obama is determined to end the Reagan era once and for all, it’s certainly appropriate that he use the same fast-track procedures as the Gipper.

It’s hard to see a downside to having the most charismatic Democratic Party leader since JFK. But there is one, and it’s well-stated in Daniel J. Galvin’s article in The Forum, “Changing Course: Reversing the Organizational Trajectory of the Democratic Party from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama,” written during the ’08 campaign. As Galvin’s opening graphs explain:

In a 2005 New York Times op-ed now considered a “classic essay,” former senator Bill Bradley observed a peculiar trade-off in party politics between charisma and structure. Over the previous 40-plus years, he wrote, each party dealt with this tradeoff differently and met with different degrees of success. Republicans, he argued, gained a competitive advantage over the Democrats by emphasizing structure over charisma. They “consciously, carefully, and single-mindedly” built a “stable pyramid” of money, ideas, organization, and action,where “all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.” Because the structure was stable, the personality of the party’s titular leader was of secondary importance. Charisma was a decidedly second-order concern.
Democrats, meanwhile, were “hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality.” While searching for the next JFK, Democrats neglected the less glamorous but ultimately more important work of organization-building. The problem was that “a party based on charisma has no long-term impact,” Bradley wrote. Bill Clinton’s charisma, for example, “didn’t translate into structure,” and while “the president did well,” he wrote, “the party did not.” Now, Democrats found themselves with “no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on” and with a grim outlook for the future

Most of Galvin’s article is optimistic about Obama’s commitment to party-building and the accomplishments of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy during his tenure at the helm of the DNC (For another positive assessment of Dean’s tenure at the DNC, see Alexander Zaitchick’s recent Alternet post).
However, Democratic gains in November, ’08 can be as credibly attributed to a host of other factors, like Obama’c coattails, the economic meltdown, an edge in internet fund-raising or voters’ general weariness of the GOP, to name a few. Geographic saturation is an important aspect of party-building, but the discussion should be broadened to include concerns like structural reform, the role of a strengthened labor movement (a hallmark of strong progressive political parties in Europe), candidate recruitment and training and how to get rank and file Democratic voters organized into lobbying groups. There is also room for an expanded discussion about party discipline, including the role of pro-Democratic reform initiatives like the Accountability Now PAC.
Galvin’s article was written before Governor Tim Kaine was appointed as Dean’s successor, and it’s too early to evaluate Kaine’s track record thus far. Kaine’s plan for building the Democratic Party will be rolled out in April, according to Zaitchick. Democrats face a different kind of party-building challenge now, with the enormous advantage of the President’s bully pulpit. Much depends on the eventual success of the stimulus and other Obama reforms.
Most of the recent debate about the pros and cons of bipartisanship has centered around it’s effect on the quality of legislation. But there is also a legitimate concern about how it impacts the growth and development of the Democratic Party, as noted in this comment, from a poster named Steve at The Last Chance Democracy Cafe:

I know it isn’t politically correct to say it right now, but the truth is that helping to build a strong Democratic Party — one that can win consistently — is the single biggest contribution Barack Obama can make to achieving positive progressive change in this nation. A single gifted president, even serving for the full eight years, can only do so much to improve this nation. A strong progressively rooted Democratic Party, able to effectively fight the good fight for a generation or more, on the other hand, can change the world.
I think Obama knows this: but, to be honest, he’s starting to scare me a little. He played the GOP masterfully during the stimulus bill debate. But there’s a danger in his incessant talk of bipartisanship. It has the effect of putting the GOP — and its response to Obama’s proposals — into the very center of the story, while at the same time marginalizing other Democrats. Why should anyone care what congressional Democrats have to say about the economy, when the whole storyline has become how the GOP will respond to Obama’s proposals?
…I understand the siren song of bipartisanship sounds loudly in the spirit of our new president. And making a public show of reaching out to the GOP is probably good politics — at least for Obama himself. But building a strong Democratic Party is better politics. And it is also an essential element to building a better and more just America over the long haul.
So two words, Barack: party building. Press them to your chest and put them under your pillow at night. Never forget them and never neglect them. Because when all is said and done, they may just represent the single most important inheritance you can give this nation.

Not that sparingly applied bipartisanship, and party-building are necessarily antithetical. But Steve’s concern about media ‘storyline’ is well-taken as is his challenge to Obama to keep focused on strengthening his party. Same goes for Sen. Bradley’s point about the focus on charisma, which is media-driven.
While there is not much the Democratic Party can do about lazy or shallow msm reporting, the growth of the pro-Democratic blogosphere and the telecommunications revolution hold out the hope that we can make better use of our own media. The explosion of streaming video, for example, means that there is no longer much of an excuse for Democrats not having their own 24-7 television station. As this technology becomes more seamlessly interwoven with television, the possibilities for educating voters will multiply dramatically. Ditto for a Democratic Party 24-7 internet radio station, long overdue.
A lot of interesting questions could be addressed, including: How do we make the party platform more of a unifying force? What is the future role for party-related interest groups, such as Dean’s Democracy for America or perhaps some future green Democrats caucus? What sort of ad campaign would attract young voters to become active in local Democratic groups?
It’s a lot to think about. But a broader, ongoing and inclusive discussion of future directions in party-building would help lay a solid foundation for a new era of progressive reform.

I’m among the many folks who didn’t think very highly of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s decision to make a lengthy anecdote about Hurricaine Katrina the centerpiece of his official GOP response to President Obama’s address to Congress the other night. I did suggest it made some sense in terms of the weird conservative belief that even in that emergency government tried to do too much. It was nonetheless an unfortunate choice of topics.
But it gets worse. Turns out the anecdote was, well, sort of made up. Thanks in part to some bulldogging by a Daily Kos diarist and by TPMMuckraker, Jindal’s spokesman is now allowing as how the supposed Harry Lee rant interposing himself and Jindal between heroic rescuers and “bureaucrats” didn’t actually involve Bobby, who overheard Lee a week later recounting his own experience over the phone to somebody else.
I have no idea how somebody as smart and experienced as Bobby Jindal would let these lines get into a featured place in his first nationally televised appearance, before a vast audience pre-assembled by Barack Obama. But it’s not only a gaffe of a high order; it also sears into the popular and media memory Jindal’s blunder in bringing up Katrina in the first place. He’s digging himself quite a hole here.
By coincidence, CNN’s out today with a poll on early Republican preferences for the 2012 presidential nomination. The poll, taken prior to Jindal’s big speech, has him running fourth, at 9%, below Sarah Palin (29%), Mike Huckabee (26%), and Mitt Romney (21%). Bobby’s low standing in part, no doubt, reflects a relatively low level of name ID. That’s now less of a problem for him, but not necessarily in a good way.