Micheal Teitelbaum of CQPolitics reports on a new study by Election Data Services indicating an uptick in population trends favoring southern and western states in congressional reapportionment. As Teitelbaum explains:

Based on its analysis, EDS says Texas would be the big winner among the six states that would gain House seats, with three added to its current 32. If that occurs, Texas — already the nation’s second most-populous state behind only California — would gain multiple House seats for the fourth consecutive decade.
The era of huge population growth for California appears to have peaked, with the EDS projections showing the state holding at 53 House seats. California, which first surpassed long-time population leader New York in the 1970 census, enjoyed a one-seat gain as a result of the 2000 census after taking a huge seven-seat gain in the 1990s. If the projection holds, the 2010 census will be the first that doesn’t produce a House seat gain for California since it achieved statehood in 1850.
The other projected gainers, though, are from among those states that have expanded their congressional rosters in recent years. Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Utah would each gain one seat according to EDS’ reapportionment projections.
Of those eight seats that would shift south and west, seven would come from states in the North where thriving industries diminished long before the nation’s economic downturn: Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania would each lose one seat.

Teitelbaum notes that the trend seems to have accelerated from last year, when the EDS study projected Texas picking up only 2 seats and Michigan and New Jersey would hold their current delegation numbers.
Teitelbam’s article didn’t say whether the expected gains in the south and west were being driven more by birth rates or migration patterns. But the Election Data Services study notes that a new report by the Pew Research Center, “American Mobility: Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home?,” indicated that “only 13% of Americans changed residences between 2006 and 2007, the smallest share since the government began tracking this trend in the late 1940s.”

I’m a big fan of Chris Bowers, and am sympathetic to the goals of the OpenLeft site, which seeks greater ideological clarity (and accountability) within the Democratic Party. But his latest effort–building on another OpenLeft post by Matt Stoller–to conduct an ideological assessment of the Obama Cabinet by way of connections, direct or indirect, with the Democratic Leadership Council, is, I believe, something of a waste of time.
As a former DLC policy director for quite a few years, I can speak with some authority in saying that the Democratic elected officials who have been involved in that organization are an ideologically diverse bunch; conversely, there are Democrats with no history of involvement in the DLC who probably agree with Al From or Bruce Reed more often than not. It’s not a membership group; it has no membership cards or creeds anyone has to swear to; and particularly at the state level, which is the DLC’s center-of-gravity these days, people participate because it’s an ideas-oriented center-left group that takes state and local government issues seriously.
More importantly, the factional stereotypes of this or that grouping of Democrats formed in the 1990s or even in 2004 are increasingly misleading and/or irrelevant. Is “DLCer” Tom Daschle really antagonistic to an aggressive push for universal health care? Will “non-DLCer” Eric Holder pursue an agenda at the Justice Department that’s different from what “DLCers” Artur Davis or Tim Kaine would have pursued as AG? Is “non-DLCer” Steven Chu distinguishable on energy policy from DLCers–or the DLC itself–on the need for a radical reorientation to deal with climate change? And are there any signs that the “DLCers” on Obama’s economic team have any less sense of urgency about the need for a big, public-sector-investment-oriented stimulus package than the “non-DLCers” with whom they are closely working?
I think the obvious answers to these questions are negative. And the fact that the notably “non-DLC” politician Barack Obama has chosen a goodly number of “DLCers” for his administration is less an indication of ideological heresy than of the impressive convergence and (at least temporary) unity of the Democratic Party.
Intra-Democratic factions may reemerge, later if not sooner, and again, I don’t blame Chris or Matt for trying to get a grip on the ideological character of the Obama administration. But there’s no telling whether the factions of the future will be congruent with those of the past. Given the current circumstances, it’s not a bad idea to begin with the assumption that Team Obama will reflect the common values and priorities of all “progressives” and “centrists,” and bend us all to the urgent tasks at hand on which we generally do agree.

In the brouhaha over Rick Warren’s role at Barack Obama’s inauguration, unhappy progressives have not always appreciated the extent to which Warren’s fellow fundamentalist evangelicals are just as unhappy as they are about this development.
And that raises the question whether, from a purely tactical point of view, Warren’s presence at the inauguration could represent or at least create the potential of a split in the Religious Right.
This is an argument that the much-esteemed Alan Wolfe offers at The New Republic today. Indeed, Wolfe goes on to suggest that Warren’s decision to bless Obama’s presidency could help promote a more general relaxation of the political and cultural self-marginalization of conservative evangelicals that might usher in a more tolerant posture on all sorts of issues:

Warren’s decision to accept an invitation from a liberal president is as clear a symbol of the entry of evangelicals into mainstream culture as one can imagine. In the conservative Christian subculture, liberals are treated with scorn. In the real world, they control the White House and Congress. How many evangelical preachers will be able to demonize Obama once Mr. Evangelical himself has blessed him?

Wolfe goes on to argue that evangelicals like Warren and Richard Cizik may represent a more centrist wave of the future among conservative evangelicals, who might ultimately accept gay marriage, though probably not legalized abortion.
The problem with this argument, as Wolfe himself acknolwedges, is that on the cultural issues that most divide progressives from the Christian Right, Warren is no “centrist.” He is a fundamentalist evangelical who believes the literal language of the Bible is definitively and unchangingly normative on all issues of morality. Accordingly, he thinks of gay relationships as morally akin to incest or sexual abuse. And he thinks abortion, any abortion, is homicide, making legalized abortion a “holocaust.”
Warren’s critics from the Christian Right quite naturally believe that in invoking God’s blessings on a “liberal” administration, he is consorting with sexual predators and, well, the contemporary equivalents of the Nazis. And not surprisingly, many of Obama’s progressive critics on the subject of Warren think it’s a bridge too far to exhibit fellowship with people who appear to think that they are predators and Nazis.
I’m not casually throwing around words like “Nazis,” by the way. This is the natural consequence of believing, as most conservative evangelicals leaders, including Rick Warren, say they believe, that each and every abortion (according to a very expansive idea of abortion as meaning any destruction of a zygote from the moment of conception) is morally indistinguishable from herding Jews into death camps. When the Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie comes out in a few days, a lot of movegoers will be asking themselves if they would have killed Hitler given the opportunity, with most answering in the affirmative. For all their quite sincere protestations against violence, I am sure that a fair number of people who agree with Rick Warren on the “fundamentals” have privately wondered what they’d do if it could save millions more of the unborn from the extermination clinics abetted by a liberal government. Given their assumptions, it would be amazingly weak and lazy of them not to think about that on occasion.
Since even Alan Wolfe says he doubts that conservative evangelicals will ever “moderate” on the subject of abortion, it’s a very good question whether there can ever be genuine comity and fellowship between those who view abortion as homicide and those who view it as the exercise of a fundamental right. And that’s before you even get to the issue of LGBT rights, which folks like Warren quite logically consider at the very best an evil–a defiance of God’s law and the order of the universe–to be tolerated only when necessary.
So if that’s all true, it’s reasonable to ask what both Obama and Warren are up to in their by-now-routine habit of cooperation.
Warren’s motivation seems to be to reestablish the political independence of conservative evangelicals. Best I can tell, he dislikes the “marriage” between his religious flock and the secular-conservative GOP because (a) he is a more thoroughgoing fundamentalist than others, and takes seriously biblical injunctions like “creation care” and anti-poverty efforts, along with the usual social-conservative agenda, and (b) he thinks the Christian Right hasn’t gotten much from its relationship with the GOP, and needs to regain some leverage.
If Alan Wolfe is right, and Obama is trying to split the conservative coalition, and perhaps tempt its membership into a more moderate position, then both Warren and Obama have very similar motives: cooperating with the enemy of their enemy for purely tactical purposes.
That’s important to understand. Maybe Barack Obama is the United States of the 1970s, Rick Warren is Red China, and James Dobson is the Soviet Union. Obama and Warren have lots of reasons to make nice with each other, with an eye towards the maddening effect it’s having on Dobson. But let’s don’t confuse this with some real convergence of views, actual or probably even potential. Obama’s and Warren’s views on some very fundamental aspects of moral and political life are irreconcilable. They are seeking to use each other. And that, not some imaginary surrender by either man to the other’s position on abortion or gay marriage or anything else, is what we need to consider in assessing Warren’s presence on the inaugural podium.

Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, one of America’s largest trade unions, has a L.A. Times article, “UAW Busting, Southern Style,” that sheds light on the opposition of southern Republican Senators to the Auto industry bailout and really, unions in general. As Raynor explains:

Last week, Senate Republicans from some Southern states went to work trying to do just that, on the foreign car companies’ behalf. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Bob Corker ( R-Tenn.) and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) — representatives from states that subsidize companies such as Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota and Nissan — first tried to force the UAW to take reductions in wages and benefits as a condition for supporting the auto industry bailout bill. When the UAW refused, those senators torpedoed the bill.
They claimed that they couldn’t support the bill without specifics about how wages would be “restructured.” They didn’t, however, require such specificity when it came to bailing out the financial sector. Their grandstanding, and the government’s generally lackluster response to the auto crisis, highlight many of the problems that have caused our current economic mess: the lack of concern about manufacturing, the privileged way our government treats the financial sector, and political support given to companies that attempt to slash worker’s wages.

Raynor also cites a “staggering” double standard in the way southern Republicans treat workers in the auto industry, compared to employees in the financial sector, and notes,

In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. According to the New York state comptroller, it accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York.
At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Hundreds of billions were given to the financial-services industry with barely a question about compensation; the auto bailout, however, was sunk on this issue alone.

He explains that the UAW has already made major concessions:

Its 2007 contract introduced a two-tier contract to pay new hires $15 an hour (instead of $28) with no defined pension plan and dramatic cuts to their health insurance. In addition, the UAW agreed that healthcare benefits for existing retirees would be transferred from the auto companies to an independent trust. With the transferring of the healthcare costs, the labor cost gap between the Big Three and the foreign transplants will be almost eliminated by the end of the current contracts.
These concessions go some distance toward leveling the playing field (retiree costs are still a factor for the Big Three). But what the foreign car companies want is to level — which is to say, wipe out — the union. They currently discourage their workforce from organizing by paying wages comparable to the Big Three’s UAW contracts. In fact, Toyota’s per-hour wages are actually above UAW wages.
However, an internal Toyota report, leaked to the Detroit Free Press last year, reveals that the company wants to slash $300 million out of its rising labor costs by 2011. The report indicated that Toyota no longer wants to “tie [itself] so closely to the U.S. auto industry.” Instead, the company intends to benchmark the prevailing manufacturing wage in the state in which a plant is located. The Free Press reported that in Kentucky, where the company is headquartered, this wage is $12.64 an hour, according to federal labor statistics, less than half Toyota’s $30-an-hour wage.
If the companies, with the support of their senators, can wipe out or greatly weaken the UAW, they will be free to implement their plan.

The southern Republicans have long parroted the meme that the wage and benefits gains won by the UAW over the years have somehow “artificially” inflated wages of union workers, while non-union southern auto workers receive “fair” compensation. It’s all about blaming the workers, instead of Big Auto’s crappy management. They would like to keep millions of Americans ignorant of the UAW’s historic role as the nation’s cutting edge union in terms of wages, benefits and working conditions, which did more to expand the middle class than has any other institution in American life. As Harold Meyerson explaned in his recent WaPo op-ed, “Destroying What the UAW Built“:

In 1949, a pamphlet was published that argued that the American auto industry should pursue a different direction. Titled “A Small Car Named Desire,” the pamphlet suggested that Detroit not put all its bets on bigness, that a substantial share of American consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and burned fuel more efficiently.
The pamphlet’s author was the research department of the United Auto Workers.
By the standards of the postwar UAW, there was nothing exceptional about “A Small Car Named Desire.” In its glory days, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the UAW was the most farsighted institution – not just the most farsighted union – in America. “We are the architects of America’s future,” Reuther told the delegates at the union’s 1947 convention, where his supporters won control of what was already the nation’s leading union.
Even before he became UAW president, Reuther and a team of brilliant lieutenants would drive the Big Three’s top executives crazy by producing a steady stream of proposals for management. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Reuther, then head of the union’s General Motors division, came up with a detailed plan for converting auto plants to defense factories more quickly than the industry’s leaders did. At the end of the war, he led a strike at GM with a set of demands that included putting union and public representatives on GM’s board….by the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations – annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance – that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II….The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today – which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.

Meyerson concludes,

In a narrow sense, what the Republicans are proposing would gut the benefits of roughly a million retirees. In a broad sense, they want to destroy the institution that did more than any other to raise American living standards, and they want to do it by using the power of government to lower American living standards – in the middle of the most severe recession since the 1930s. The auto workers deserve better, and so does the nation they did so much to build.

With the nomination of Hilda Solis to head the Department of Labor, the incoming Obama Administration has sent a clear signal to the southern Republicans that their plan to gut the UAW and weaken trade unions will be blocked. Solis is a strong champion of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) needed to get more workers union representation and an unflinching advocate of trade union growth. If the Obama Administration — along with a coalition of congressional Democrats and a few moderate Republicans — give Solis the support she needs, a strengthened trade union movement could serve as the engine that drives economic recovery and expanded prosperity.
American progressives and the blogosphere in particular have a critical role in building this coalition. It starts with more effectively debunking, in simple, cogent terms, the GOP’s bogus meme that EFCA is a threat to our national tradition of “secret ballots.” With that accomplished, we can help revitalize the trade union movement and light the path forward to a new era of hope and broadly-shared opportunities.

It is apparently incumbent on every blogger to express an opinion on the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. I guess this is a byproduct of Gothamcentricity: no other place in America has several thousand people who consider themselves preeminently qualified to serve in the U.S. Senate, and many thousands more people who want to write about it. Indeed, the two categories probably overlap.
Having only dipped my toe in the sea of ink that has been spilled on this subject, I can only guess that someone by now (on the mathematical principle that a thousand monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Hamlet) has noted that the last time there was this much caterwauling about an unqualified Senate aspirant, his name was Edward Kennedy, in 1962. Caroline’s Uncle Ted, of course, has gone on to earn virtually universal regard as one of the greatest Senators ever.
That’s not to say that we should assume Ted’s niece has similar virtues; America has had sufficiently mixed experience with Kennedys in office to avoid any preconclusions.
The salient point most often made by Ms. Kennedy’s defenders is that there have been lots of people in politics who started on third base thanks to their name, their (non-political) fame, or their money. This last point is worth dwelling on: the very rich are frequently run for high office because their dough is a tangible political asset that would otherwise have to be rustled up from somewhere else. And if we’ve learned anything over the last few months, wealth, even “self-earned,” is hardly an infallible indicator of competence or wisdom.
Ross Douthat probably offers the best case for the peculiar offensiveness of CK’s candidacy:

I can live with legacy politicians, underqualified appointees, and entitled rich people. I just think the Senate can do without an rich, underqualified legacy appointee whose press coverage would lead you to believe that she’s a cross between Florence Nightingale, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Princess Diana and Princess Leia.

But it’s easy to get carried away with that sort of stuff; if Caroline Kennedy’s resume isn’t overwhelming, it’s not as though she’s a exactly a political Paris Hilton who is simply famous for being famous.
I am sure that Governor Paterson and New York Democrats could come up with another Senator who is better qualified, capable of raising big sacks of cash (from their own assets or from others), and a lead-pipe cinch to beat anybody the GOP is likely to put up. But let’s not get too self-righteous about high political office as a meritocracy. Americans love their celebrities, and their weaknesses (viz. Celebrity Rehab) and their strengths, and that’s not changing anytime soon. Many years ago I used to joke that maybe we should just re-establish a monarchy and turn it over to the Kennedys, or alternate it between the Kennedys and the Buckleys, freeing electoral politics of the craving for family glamor and drama. Until we’re ready for something like that, I don’t quite know by what higher law we can bar Caroline Kennedy from office, unless she really does represent some sort of Celebrity Culture tipping point.

Whatever the outcome in the Senate vote recount, one of the big winners is the Twin Cities local rag of record, the Star Tribune, which has provided impressively innovative coverage of the U.S. Senate Race recount.
Today, for example, the Star Trib has above-the-fold links on its front web page to: live streaming video from the canvassing board; a “place our recount widget on your site” link, a running tally (Franken +70 as we go to press), along with reports on the MN Supreme Court’s order to count rejected absentee ballots; a review of Thursday’s votes by the canvassing board; and an invitation to “take the Coleman-Franken ballot challenge” and make your own determination.
For those who want to skip the excruciating minutia of the recount, and cut to the chase, there’s also Paul Walsh’s continuously updated “Franken Passes Coleman in Recount, But …” noting that “the first rush of ballot rulings has unofficially put the challenger in the lead.”
The MN Supreme Court Order to count the improperly-rejected absentee ballots is a bit of a wash-out, since it requires Franken and Coleman to agree on which ballots should be recounted. That part of the ruling didn’t sit well with Associate Justice Alan Page, who complained that “the court’s order will arbitrarily disqualify enfranchised voters on the whim of the candidates and political parties.” (That would be former all-pro Viking defensive tackle Alan Page, who is also the “biggest vote-getter in MN history.”)
For Dems, the good news is that Franken has an excellent chance to win, although the outcome may not be decided before the new congress reconvenes in January.

Paul Weyrich, the legendary conservative institution-builder and avatar of what was once, in his heydey, called the New Right, died yesterday after a long illness.
I’m not the one to assess Weyrich’s career, and thus recommend Marc Ambider’s brisk summary of his triumphs back in the day and his long, ornery decline.
I can offer one personal anecdote that offers some insight into the man’s personality. One of his less-successful projects was a cable network, National Empowerment Television (later America’s Voice), that represented something of an earnestly amateurish dry run for Fox News. Virtually all the shows on NET featured call-ins, and viewers were about as rabidly conservative as you can get. I once appeared as a Token Democrat on Weyrich’s own show, back when I’d accept just about any media opportunity this side of the Sunrise Farm Report. The first caller made a snarky remark about my (then) long hair, and Weyrich proceeded to use much of the balance of the show lecturing his viewers about civility.
That was fairly typical of the man. He spent a good part of his long career appealing to and often speaking for extremists, but he didn’t much like his “friends” any more than his enemies. He was undoubtedly one of the Founding Fathers of the Cultural Right; he reportedly is the one who suggested the monniker “Moral Majority” to Jerry Falwell for his first-generation Christian Right group. But in every personal respect, Weyrich was wildly different from the slick, weasily hacks like Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins who eventually displaced him as the public faces of his own movement.
Paul Weyrich didn’t have a phony bone in his body. And though he very productively served causes I abhor for many decades, I have to say that his old-school style, which he pursued to the point of self-marginalizing eccentricity, is a trait that tradition-honoring conservatives ought to respect and miss every time they turn on Fox to watch and hear the automatons drone.

At Politico, Alexander Burns has a good basic rundown of the contest for Republican National Committee chairmanship, which will culminate next month.
Current RNC Chairman Mike Duncan is considered the front-runner, partly because of his fundraising ability, and partly because none of the other five candidates has a whole lot of momentum. Burns rates Michigan GOP chief Saul Anuzis, who’s sort of the symbol of blue-state Republicans, and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, as running neck-and-neck in second place. But he agrees with Ed Kilgore’s recent assessment that the entry into the campaign of former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has destabilized the contest–particularly now that Blackwell has formed a “ticket” with another hero of the Cultural Right, national co-chairwoman aspirant Tina Benkiser of Texas.
Ideology isn’t much of a factor in this competition, beyond the suggestions of Steele’s rivals that his (largely repudiated) relationship with the puny but totemic Republican Leadership Council makes him suspect. All the candidates are running as hard-core pro-life conservatives.
As Burns’ account suggests, inside-baseball factors like the relationship of candidates to actual RNC members will likely determine the outcome. Democrats should probably welcome a win by Duncan, which would nicely symbolize the conservative conviction that nothing’s really wrong with the GOP, or by Blackwell, who was famously described by George W. Bush as “a nut.”

I think it’s safe to say that no decision by Barack Obama since his vote for FISA legislation much earlier this year has aroused as much authentic anger among progressives as his invitation to evangelical superstar Rick Warren to provide the invocation at his inauguration next month.
Some of the backlash over Warren reflects broad-based concerns that Obama’s style of religious outreach has, well, overreached by embracing a religious leader who considers homosexuality a sin, evolution a hoax, legalized abortion a holocaust, and “evildoers” like the elected president of Iran a target for a righteous assassination. Sarah Posner has articulated these concerns in a typically thorough piece at The Nation:

Warren represents the absolute worst of the Democrats’ religious outreach, a right-winger masquerading as a do-gooder anointed as the arbiter of what it means to be faithful. Obama’s religious outreach was intended, supposedly, to make religious voters more comfortable with him and feel included in the Democratic Party. But that outreach now has come at the expense of other people’s comfort and inclusion, at an event meant to mark a turning point away from divisive politics.

Damon Linker, known mainly for his aggressive and informed criticism of the Religious Right, offers publicly what I’ve privately heard a fair number of Democrats say in defense or dismissal of the Warren choice:

Obama’s a politician, and the Warren pick is just the latest sign that he’s an exceedingly shrewd one (as Andrew concedes). Warren is beloved by mainstream evangelicals, who have helped him to sell millions of books extolling a fairly anodyne form of American Protestantism. (Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell he is not.) It is in Obama’s interest (and the Democrats’) to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP as he can. Giving Warren such a prominent (but purely symbolic) place in the inauguration is a politically cost-free way of furthering this partisan agenda.

As Linker’s post indicates, part of the disagreement over this issue reflects deeper disagreements on several points. What is the symbolic value, positive or negative, of Warren’s role in the inauguration? What is the source and significance of Warren’s cult-like celebrity? Is he, as Posner calls him, a “culture warrior wolf” in “sheep’s clothing,” or, as Linker suggests, a purveyor of Oprah-style lifestyle advice that can be separated from his deeper theological and political positions? And who is legitimizing whom here? Is Warren blessing Obama’s progressive agenda, or is Obama blessing Warren’s reactionary views?
All these are legitimate arguments to have, this day or any day, but there’s not much question that what makes this dispute red-hot at present is Warren’s visible role, as a California-based megapreacher, in support of California’s Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage.
It is abundantly clear that LGBT activists view the passage of Prop 8 as representing the dark underside of what is generally being treated by progressives as a Jubilee event on November 4. That it happened in a state that Barack Obama carried by a huge margin is especially troubling, and is understandably being interpreted as a sign that LGBT folk are being excluded from the Obama coalition. No one should be surprised that Obama’s decision to give an avid Prop 8 supporter a central role in his inauguration–offering, in fact, the blessings of Almighty God to the new presidency–would feel like salt poured into fresh wounds.
But the backlash to the Warren designation illustrates something else about Prop 8 that hasn’t gotten much attention in progressive circles: a real sea-change in LGBT acceptance of half-loaf Democratic commitments to equality. Put aside, if you can, the motives and underlying agenda of the most important Prop 8 proponents, and the lies they told to push the initiative over the line to victory. The actual language of Prop 8–“no” to gay marriage, along with “yes” or at least “maybe” to everything short of that–is highly congruent with the default-drive position of many, and probably a majority, of Democratic pols in the very recent past. The Democratic nominee for president in 2004 took this position. So, too, did the 2008 candidate for president often thought of as most “progressive,” John Edwards. And it’s within shouting distance of Obama’s own position, even though he did make clear his own opposition to the initiative. And it’s hard to find a prominent Democratic elected official in culturally conservative parts of the country who hasn’t followed the no-to-gay-marriage, yes-to-domestic-partnerships template, though it’s not so hard to find some who haven’t even gone that far in a progressive direction.
Why is that postion now being deemed so insultingly unacceptable in progressive company? I’d say it’s mainly because Prop 8 overturned established marriage rights that upwards of 20,000 couples joyfully took advantage of during the five-month regime of legalized gay marriage in California. Whereas in previous gay marriage struggles Democrats might be grudgingly forgiven for failing to have the political courage to blaze new trails, Prop 8 represents a (literally) reactionary step back, and in a state that is so often described as a cultural and political trend-shaper. Even as Prop 8 has galvanized the argument that gay marriage should be regarded as a fundamental right indicative of basic equality, not as a negotiable sign of “progress” or “tolerance,” Prop 8 has almost certainly changed, probably forever, the terms on which LGBT folk will participate in the progressive coalition and the Democratic Party, despite the obvious lack of political alternatives.
I think it’s actually a testament to progressive faith in Team Obama’s political acumen that it’s generally assumed he invited this controversy deliberately by paying Rick Warren the honor of a role in his inauguration. But it’s a conflict that will persist after the echoes of Warren’s invocation have long died.

As Democrats look ahead to the challenges that await the Obama administration, one step they should take right away is to completely set aside any further discussion over whether or not the thing that the Bush administration’s PR team named a“ surge” either succeeded or failed. There is, in fact, no specific military strategy that is called a “surge” or that can meaningfully be described as “succeeding”, “failing” or “offering lessons for future conflicts.” Lumped together inside the term “surge” – which is essentially a public relations term and not a military term — are two specific military operations and two distinct military strategies that were actually employed in Iraq in the period from 2007-2008. It is only by looking at those actual operations and strategies that Democrats can draw any lessons for the future.
To begin with, neither of the two actions most directly related to the common-sense meaning of the word “surge” — the increase in the number of troops in 2007 and their deployment to empty houses in central urban locations rather than remote bases – can be properly defined as “military strategies”. They are both specific military operations conducted within the framework of some larger military strategy. As a result, their success, failure or ultimate value can only be determined in relation to that larger strategy
The two broader military strategies that were actually employed during the “surge” were (1) a classic military strategy that the Romans called “divide et impera” (divide and rule) and which was quite frequently employed by the later colonial empires of Spain and Britain and (2) a very specific military doctrine for conducting counterinsurgency warfare – a doctrine developed in 2006 and codified in the military manual FM-3-24- The US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
The strategy of “divide et impera” — the notion of funding and arming one or several competing groups within a country and balancing them against each other in order to maintain social order — can be found in Julius Caesar’s accounts of his conquest of Gaul and Hernan Cortez’s account of the conquest of Mexico. It reappears frequently in the history of the later Spanish, French and British empires. The sight of an American general in 2007 simultaneously overseeing the funding and support of both the Shia government of Nouri al Maliki and the Sunni “Awakening Councils (while also honoring a tacit truce with the Shia nationalist forces of Muqtada al-Sadr) in order to control a sectarian civil war fits perfectly well within the framework of this long strategic tradition.
At the present time there is little if any serious opposition among Americans to the use of such divide et impera tactics in Iraq or Afghanistan if they can provide viable alternatives to a prolonged, high-casualty anti-guerilla campaign such as the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. But history shows that these kinds of opportunistic alliances buy only very temporary loyalty. As a July 11, 2008 US News and World report noted, “Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed by the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns on U.S. Troops”

… two of the most dangerous players [in Afghanistan] are violent Afghan Islamists named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to U.S. officials. In recent weeks, Hekmatyar has called upon Pakistani militants to attack U.S. targets, while the Haqqani network is blamed for three large vehicle bombings, along with the attempted assassination of Karzai in April.
Ironically, these two warlords—currently at the top of America’s list of most wanted men in Afghanistan—were once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.

Providing funds and support to local tribal chieftains and warlords is a powerfully attractive alternative to having US troops become bogged down in bitter anti-guerilla warfare, but Democrats should always remember that “divide and rule” strategies also have to be guided by some viable longer term plan and ultimate exit strategy.

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