As a total political history junkie, I love strolling down memory lanes for precedents that might offer insights as to how contemporary political developments might unfold. But for that very reason, one of my pet peeves is the use of half-baked or outdated “lessons of political history” that get cited in the chattering classes as though they came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
Over at fivethirtyeight.com a couple weeks ago, I challenged one of the most settled “lessons of political history,” that the party controlling the White House might as well forget about winning the governorships of New Jersey or Virginia. And yesterday I took on a much-cited “rule” in my home state of Georgia suggesting that former governors can’t win “comebacks.”
I’m always on the lookout for such “lessons of political history” to examine, so any readers with some examples, either national in nature or from your own neck of the woods, please feel free to post them as a comment.

As part of the endless efforts of conservatives to treat the last two election debacles as aberrations in a “center-right nation” (or as somehow-conservative reactions to that godless freespending liberal George W. Bush), you can expect some reaction to the latest Gallup survey of the ideological self-identifications of Americans. It shows a slight uptick in “conservative” self-identification during 2009, up to 40% from 37% last year. But it’s basically the same findings almost always found in recent decades when voters are offered the three choices of “conservative,” “liberal” and “moderate.” Self-identified “conservatives” have been bumping around 40% since 1992, with “liberals” around 20% and “moderates” holding the balance. Moreover, Gallup confirms the very old news that Republicans are heavily conservative (73% “conservative,” 24% “moderate” and 3% “liberal”), while Democrats are more ideologically diverse (40% “moderate,” 38% “liberal” and 22% “conservative”).
There’s no real evidence here that anything’s changed since November of 2008.
And as always, the C-M-L choice doesn’t seem to tell us as much as more nuanced measurements of ideology. The big recent Center for American Progress study released in March, State of Political Ideology, 2009, added “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual menu of self-identification options, and after pushing leaners, found that 47% of Americans think of themselves as progressive or liberal, while 48% self-identify as conservative or libertarian. The CAP survey also found that when you probe deeper in terms of more specific statements of values and beliefs, there’s a reasonably solid progressive majority when it comes to most matters of international and domestic policy. The conservative “brand” may still be relatively strong, but it doesn’t always translate into issue positions, much less voting behavior.
Virtually everyone agrees that the long-stable C-M-L findings disguise generational trends that are worth watching closely. The new Gallup survey finds that “liberals” outnumber “conservatives” by a 31%-30% margin among voters under 30. And a May analysis by CAP on “millennials” shows 44% self-identifying as progressive or liberal, and just 28% as conservative or libertarian.
None of this, of course, will deter “center-right nation” fans from claiming the latest Gallup survey as evidence that Americans were misled during the last two election cycles, or were offered insufficiently stark ideological choices, or were simply tired of George W. Bush and will return to the Republican Party almost automatically in 2010 or 2012. This argument is essential to the conservative project of keeping the GOP firmly on the Right, or driving it even further Right. When you are a hammer, everything–and certainly every poll–looks like a nail.

In The Hill today, Aaron Blake has a story about an important but little-discussed phenomenon that’s shaping the landscape for U.S. House campaigns in 2010: candidate calculations about the impact of redistricting after 2010:

As they enter a key decision-making phase of the 2010 election cycle, the chance that they will encounter a very different map in 2012 could serve as both a deterrent and motivation to go for it.
For some, 2010 might be their last best hope to win a given district before it is shored up by redistricting, while others might want to wait for the post-redistricting election, when the grass could be greener thanks to a friendly reapportionment process.

The go-for-broke temptation that Blake mentions refers to the strong tendency of legislatures to protect congressional incumbents, sometimes including those from the opposite party (often voters from the same party of a strong incumbent are “packed” into his or her district to make neighboring districts friendlier to the other party). Incubment-protection is a particularly strong impulse in those many situations where neither party completely controls redistricting.
But sometimes circumstances cut in the opposite direction:

Since redistricting often aims to shore up incumbents, it’s rare that it leads to better takeover opportunities. But that could be the case with members like Reps. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), Peter King (R-N.Y.) or any number of vulnerable Illinois Republicans.
King and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are weighing Senate runs, could actually be encouraged to run for statewide office because of the upcoming changes to their tenuous districts, which are likely to be handled by Democrats.

All in all, the wait-and-see tendency is naturally strong, since incumbents tend to settle into their districts between redistricting cycles. Moreover, among challengers, no one wants to risk an entire career to win a House seat and then see the district become unwinnable after just one term. Here’s Blake’s bottom line for 2010:

Overall, history shows that the number of quality challengers who emerge to run for Congress declines as redistricting maps become more entrenched, with the final election before redistricting – 2010, in this case – having the fewest quality challengers.
Vanderbilt political science professor Marc Hetherington, who has also studied redistricting’s effect on candidates, said the upcoming election cycle could be something of an exception, given the number of Republican seats that have flipped Democratic the last two elections.

It’s worth remembering that state legislatures are also redistricting themselves even as they draw congressional district lines. And that can have strange and interesting impllications, as Blake explains:

In perhaps the weirdest redistricting conundrum in the country, state Sen. Darrel Aubertine is a Democratic favorite to run in the upcoming special election for Army Secretary-designate Rep. John McHugh’s (R) upstate seat. But Aubertine could be risking his party’s control over redistricting by giving up his state Senate seat to run for Congress.
The Democratic majority in the Empire State’s upper chamber was always tenuous, but Monday’s coup by 30 Republicans and two Democrats put everything in focus. The 30 remaining Democrats will be fighting hard to regain their majority status and, provided Democrats retain the governor’s mansion, control congressional redistricting.
Aubertine’s district is one of the most difficult they hold. So, in effect, he could actually help his party win more congressional seats by staying in the state Senate.

As is often the case with redistricting cycles, candidate calculations going into 2010 may well involve many games of three-dimensional chess around the country. That complicates the national picture significantly.

Most Democrats understand the downside of winning elections and then being held accountable for conditions in the country they did not produce. Consider the endless talk about the federal budget deficits in the Obama administration’s first budget. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday, Obama inherited most of the red ink from Bush policies and from the recession (indeed, as Jonathan Chait argues, Leonhardt may have actually underestimated that inheritance). But it’s considered poor form for Democrats to keep “blaming Bush,” doncha know.
One often underestimated benefit of holding the White House, though, is the extraordinary power and visibility of the Bully Pulpit. And that factor is nicely illustrated by a new Gallup survey that shows Americans clearly think of Barack Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party, while having little idea whom to treat as the leader of the opposition.
Worse yet, the three people most often cited by Gallup respondents in an open-ended question about the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today” are Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich; 29% named one of these three gents (as did 29% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats). These are precisely the three “spokesmen” most Democrats would wish on the GOP. But that may overstate their prominence: a remarkable 46% of Republicans and GOP-leaners in the poll either couldn’t name a party leader or asserted there wasn’t one.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is considered the main Democratic spokesman by two-thirds of Democrats and 58% of Americans generally. The latter number is as low as it is because fully 20% of Republicans (but only 6% of Democrats) named Nancy Pelosi as the main Democratic voice, reflecting the obsession of conservative media with the House Speaker.
This situation obviously helps the president serve as a messenger and agenda-setter for the Democratic Party. But it also helps explain the hyper-partisan and ideologically rigid atmosphere among would-be Republican “spokesmen,” who are competing for attention by focusing on the hard-core conservative base. It’s enough to drive a party crazy.

For liberals and progressives, one of the most baffling — and indeed also infuriating — aspects of the response of conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin to the recent murders by right wing extremists is the way that — in the space of just a few paragraphs — they manage to shift the discussion away from the events themselves back into an attack on liberals and progressives for “exploiting” the situation.
Rather than interpreting the actions of violent extremists as requiring a reconsideration of their own rhetoric and positions, for many conservative commentators the violent acts become instead the basis for renewed descriptions of conservatives as the innocent and aggrieved victims of liberal injustice and slander.
It is worth taking a moment to dissect the internal structure of this particular rhetorical and psychological line of argument because it leads to a somewhat counterintuitive strategy for responding to it.
Here, in outline, is the way the argument above is developed by conservative commentators:

1. We conservatives know perfectly well that we are not all homicidal maniacs. Murder is a terrible act that no sane person approves. Therefore, to suggest that the acts of isolated, mentally ill criminals should somehow reflect on all of us conservatives is deeply unfair.
2. The truth is that the acts of deranged extremist individuals do not further the conservative cause. On the contrary, they inflict catastrophic damage on it by allowing our opponents to paint all of us as mentally unstable. No sane conservative – in fact, not even the majority of white supremacists – really believe that lurid murders actually help the larger cause.
3. As a result, for liberals and progressives to attack conservatives as somehow responsible for the acts of one or two isolated maniacs is utterly unfair. It is, in fact, a transparently cynical attempt to exploit the tragedy. That liberals actually stoop to use such tactics is thus vile and unforgivable.

By this train of logic it becomes possible for the commentator to end up – often only 30 or 45 seconds after beginning – delivering an angry attack on liberals and an impassioned depiction of conservatives as the innocent victims of unjust persecution. The sheer audacity of the strategy leaves liberals aghast and fuming.
In fact, to liberals and progressives, this line of argument appears so obviously like a cynical debater’s trick aimed at misdirecting the attention of the audience that the immediate reaction is to adamantly reassert the original accusations.
But note what happens psychologically when this is done:

1. The audience of an O’Reilly or Malkin knows with absolute certainty that they personally as individuals absolutely do not approve of murder. They therefore find the remaining steps in the conservative argument logical and convincing.
2. In contrast, liberal arguments that begin with the premise that there is a relationship between the acts of violent extremists and the opinions expressed by O’Reilly and Malkin are not only rejected – they actually become proof of the conservative charge that liberal critics are unfair and unjust. Thus, paradoxically, instead of refuting the conservative narrative, arguments of this type are absorbed into it and actually validate and become evidence for it.

The alternative, more effective strategy is to appeal to what Drew Westen calls people’s “better angels.” In talking to the audiences of commentators like O’Reilly and Malkin, liberals and progressives should begin by immediately reassuring these audiences that liberals and progressives emphatically do not believe that the audience in any way actually condones violent acts. Quite the contrary, it is precisely because they do not approve of violence that they should want to show their rejection of violent acts by joining together with all reasonable Americans in supporting President Obama’s call for a new tolerance and civility in political discourse. The acts of violent madmen should make all decent Americans want to commit themselves even more firmly to seeking common ground with, and rejecting demonization of, other Americans with whom they may disagree.
Notice what this does:

1. It deprives the conservative narrative of the “we are being unfairly smeared” argument and keeps the focus on the evil of the violent acts themselves. (This, it should be noted, is most emphatically not the topic upon which the conservative commentators wish to linger).
2. It places the O’Reilly’s and Malkins’ of the world in the position of having to either directly endorse or reject Obama’s call for greater civility and tolerance (This, it should be noted, is most emphatically not the question they want to debate).

It requires a certain degree of discipline to argue along these lines when, on an emotional level, many people’s primary desire at times like these is to express outrage and assign blame.
The main purpose of political debate, however, is not to provide therapeutic outlet for the debater, but to win the struggle to convince other Americans. For this purpose, the strategy of “appealing to people’s better angels” will invariably prove far more productive than the more viscerally satisfying alternative.

Conservatives hoping to get traction from the “Obama’s government activism is bad” meme are not going to like Alan I. Abramowitz’s latest column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In his column “Who’s Afraid of Big Government? Not Us,” Abramowitz explains:

Do Americans, despite the current economic crisis, continue to oppose governmental activism and prefer reliance on the free market to solve the country’s problems as the President’s conservative critics argue? Some of these critics have selectively cited results from recent media polls to support this claim. However, this conclusion is not supported by the best available evidence about attitudes toward the role of government in the American public-evidence that comes from the 2008 American National Election Study.
The 2008 ANES is the most recent in a series of election surveys that have been conducted in every presidential election year and most midterm election years since 1948. These surveys have provided much of the data used by political scientists to study elections and voting behavior in the United States. The 2008 survey involved in-depth personal interviews with a representative sample of more than 2000 eligible voters touching on a wide variety of issues and other election-related topics. Among the questions included in the survey were three that dealt directly with the role of government. Each question asked respondents to choose between a pair of statements about the proper role of government in dealing with the nation’s problems.

Among the findings of the survey, Abramowitz notes,

…A majority of Americans came down on the side of governmental activism. Fifty-six percent said that government had gotten bigger because the country’s problems had gotten bigger, 68 percent said that we need a strong government to handle complex economic problems, and 59 percent said that there were more things government should be doing.
…64 percent of eligible voters came down on the activist side of the scale and almost 40 percent were consistent supporters of activist government. In contrast, less than 20 percent of eligible voters were consistent opponents of activist government. These findings clearly contradict the claims of conservative pundits that Americans today have more faith in the free market than in government programs for dealing with the country’s problems. They indicate that support for activist government is alive and well in the American public.

Interestingly, most of the respondents made a distinction between government activism in addressing economic issues and “intrusion into the personal lives of Americans,” as Abramowitz explains:

…According to the data from the 2008 ANES, support for government regulation of personal conduct was associated with opposition to government intervention in the economic sphere. For example, 80 percent of respondents who consistently opposed governmental activism wanted to maintain a government ban on same sex marriage while only 53 percent of respondents who consistently supported governmental activism wanted to maintain the ban.

Abramowitz concludes that President Obama is in synch with the views of a majority of voters on the topic of ‘government activism.”

…Fully 80 percent of Obama voters came down on the pro-government side of the governmental activism scale and over 50 percent consistently took the pro-government side. It remains to be seen whether the President will succeed in convincing Congress to enact his policy agenda and whether those policies will actually work. However, in proposing to use the power of the federal government to address the nation’s problems, Mr. Obama is clearly doing what a majority of Americans voted for in 2008.

Clearly, after 8 years of impotent government and corporate looting of taxpayers financial assets, “activist government” to serve the interests of working people, for a change, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to most voters.

Perhaps this is a dog-bites-man story these days, but remarks by putative 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in Iowa yesterday really do illustrate the delusional belief of Republican conservatives that they are struggling against high odds to keep their party from completely endorsing Barack Obama’s agenda:

“I hear people who give advice that the Republicans need to moderate. They need to be a little more to the left,” Huckabee said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It sounds like advice that Democrats would give to us so that we’d never win another election ever.”
Some argue that Republicans have lost Congress and the White House because they’ve turned the party over to social and religious conservatives, driving away moderates and independents. Huckabee made precisely the opposite argument.
“It’s when they move to the mushy middle and get squishy that they get beat,” he said….
“Historically, the way we’ve found our way back to winning, having clear convictions that are conservative and then when elected, act like it,” he said. “In every election, when Republicans have had clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative, they win.”
He warned that many Republicans have gone astray by buying into President Barack Obama’s big-spending effort to stimulate the economy, a move he called “a big, colossal, utterly disastrous mistake.”

It’s hard to know where to begin in mocking this nonsense. Let’s start with Huckabee’s understanding of what’s true “historically.” As I recall, Republicans had a “clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative” in 1964, and they lost in a very big landslide. Four years later, Richard Nixon ran as a sort of center-right “unity” figure, and won in a narrow plurality. In 1972, Nixon got his landslide after instituting wage and price controls, recognizing China, pumping up the economy with his own version of “stimulus,” cutting a major arms deal with the Soviet Union that led conservatives to “suspend” their support for him, and supporting clean air and clean water legislation (he also lied about the war, demonized “liberal elites” and bugged and harrassed his “enemies,” but he was nothing if not inconsistent on every ideological issue). Yes, Reagan won a bare majority in 1980, and then won his own landslide after approving two taxes increases and “caving” to “liberals” on major cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Bush gained office in 2000 with the help of the Supreme Court after promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” who would make conservatism “compassionate,” and then was narrowly re-elected after promoting all those things (No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx Drug Benefit, immigration reform) that are now being denounced by conservatives as a “betrayal” of principle.
Huckabee’s peddling revisionist history of the rankest kind.
But even more ridiculous is the claim that lots of Republicans are clamoring to move to the “mushy middle.” Since the last presidential campaign got underway, Republicans have abandoned their long-time support for the earned income tax credit (now called “redistribution” or “socialism”) and their reluctant acceptance of global climate change as real (now denounced once again as a hoax), and have thoroughly exterminated any GOP interest in comprehensive immigration reform. They have adopted a partisan rhetoric that makes Karl Rove look temperate, punctuated by an actual debate by their national committee of the idea of demanding that Democrats start calling themselves the “Democrat Socialist Party.” As for the stimulus package, no House Republicans voted for it; one of the three Senate Republicans who voted for it after securing major concessions has since left the GOP. Two GOP governors, routinely denounced as RINOs, endorsed it (Ah-nold and Charlie Crist). For Huckabee, these tiny signs of dissent are a terrible threat. To use an old southern expression, he and other conservatives are goosing a ghost.
I don’t know why conservatives persist in this delusion, and just acknowlege that they are totally calling the shots in the Republican Party today. But the fiction of a major ideological battle is getting pretty old.

The murder yesterday at the Holocaust Museum, following so soon after the murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, is rightly making people wonder what’s going on in our country. Are two politically motivated homicides in so short a period a coincidence? And if not, how do we avoid falling into paranoid states of mind that lead us to unfairly associate non-violence Americans with violent acts?
As it happens, James Vega did a prescient and useful piece on this subject for TDS back in April, entitled: “What is ‘right-wing extremism,'” motivated by the now-famous Department of Homeland Security study that had conservatives howling in outrage. Here was his most fundamental point about the distinction between “extremist” and “non-extremist” politics.

Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

In terms of right-wing extremism, says Vega, there are separate but mutually reinforcing military and religious world-views that can lead to this treatment of opponents as “enemies” who merit annihilation, the first adopting the rules of engagement of warfare, and the second involving a literal demonization of opponents. And this process of legitimizing violence can begin with the sort of violent rhetoric heard so often on the airwaves and across the internet.
It’s important, as Vega reminds us, to separate the sheep from the goats and not blame conservatives for right-wing violence. But no matter how respectable the voices involved, when people adopt the language of warfare, they need to be called out:

Many conservative groups object to being lumped together with violent extremists, and argue that even their most intense and radical opposition to Obama does not make them violent political extremists.
In fact, they are entirely correct. What distinguishes “political extremism” from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism” is the following:
1. The two ideological pillars on which genuine political extremism rests are the notions of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as “enemies”. Groups which reject these notions are not political extremists,
2. Political extremism becomes dangerous and violent whenever and wherever these two notions are taken literally.
What should Democrats do? Basically, there needs to be clear and resolute pushback against these two notions. When politicians or others use the notions of “politics as war,” and “liberals and Democrats as enemies”, Democrats have to clearly and forcefully object. They have to stop the discussion dead in its tracks and say.
“No, you are profoundly wrong. Politics is not warfare and Americans with whom we disagree are not “enemies”. We totally reject these ideas. In fact, that’s one of the most fundamental differences between you and us and we think it is a major reason why most Americans now support Obama. You actually believe that you are literally at war with every single American who does not agree with you. We don’t think that way, and most Americans don’t either.

Let’s hope this way of stopping the incitement of violence in politics catches on before tragedies and outrages become all too common-place.

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.