The big transition news so far today is that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a highly-regarded sitting governor who supported Barack Obama during the primary season, has apparently agreed to leave office to become Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Napolitano had been on the short list for Attorney General before Eric Holder’s designation for that position.
Personally, my first reaction to this news was surprise. To put it simply, DHS is a big fat mess: a poorly-designed deparment encompassing a vast array of missions, and suffering from considerable drift under indifferent Bush administration management. While Napolitano has been a highly visible governor on border issues like immigration and drug enforcement, there are big chunks of the department that deal with many other things, most notably anti-terrorism activities and emergency management. As you can read in Dana Goldstein’s fine profile of Napolitano earlier this year, she’s an extraordinarily competent person who won’t shirk from big challenges, but still, this one would be tough for anybody.
But if you think about it: is there any challenge harder than being a governor right now? Like most (soon to be virtually all) states, Arizona is facing a large, recession-driven budget shortfall, exacerbated by the fact that greater Phoenix has been especially hard-hit by the housing bubble collapse. The Arizona legislature is controlled by Republicans. Napolitano’s immediate prospects in Arizona were for two years of wall-to-wall grief, before being term-limited out of office in 2010.
Compared to that, even DHS probably looked interesting and managable.
Indeed, you have to wonder why just about every sitting Democratic governor isn’t burning up the phone lines to Washington seeking an Obama administration job. It’s a matter of leaping from the fire to the frying pan.

There’s some serious heartburn slowly developing in certain precincts of the progressive blogosphere, and in Obamaland, about the character of high-level administration appointees so far. But it’s important to sort them out.
To hear some of the talk in the comment threads of blogs, the best way to get a high-ranking job under Obama is to have supported Hillary Clinton in the nomination contest this year. In fact, unless I am missing something, not a single senior White House staff appointment or (rumored) Cabinet pick has gone to anyone who endorsed Clinton, aside from the possibility that Clinton herself will become Secretary of State.
All these “Clintonistas” you are hearing about are people who served in Bill Clinton’s administration, and who either backed Obama this year, or remained conspicuously neutral. The latter category includes White House Chief of State Rahm Emanuel and transition chief John Podesta. Another “Clintonista” who’s been appointed, vice presidential chief of staff Ron Klain, actually supported Joe Biden’s presidential bid.
Indeed, some of the touchiest appointments involve former Clinton administration foreign policy officials who supported Obama, but who might not get along with the Secretary of State if her initials are HRC. That seems to be the case with the two top Obama campaign foreign policy advisors, Susan Rice and Gregory Craig. Rice’s position in the administration is on hold pending HRC’s decision about State, and Craig wound up being designated for the position of White House Counsel. Here’s the background from the New York Times:

Susan Rice, one of the earliest foreign policy advisers to sign on with Mr. Obama, also gets a new lease on life if Mrs. Clinton is out of the running for Secretary of State. Like Mr. Craig, Ms. Rice worked for the Clinton administration, handling Africa policy during the 1990s.
But the two of them formed a tag team to debunk Mrs. Clinton’s claim to foreign policy experience during the campaign.

The reality is that there’s only been one Democratic administration in Washington since 1980, and thus anyone with any executive-branch experience served in it. This has little or nothing to do with personal loyalty to the Clintons.
But that does point to the legitimate issue being raised by some in Obamaland: where are all the “outsiders” who were supposedly going to ride into Washington to clean out the Augean Stables?
It’s logical, of course, that Obama’s first appointments, particularly to the transition team and to his own putative White House Staff, would be people with experience in Washington, which means the Clinton administration. Later appointments will probably be more balanced. Still another factor is that Obama, unlike his two predecessors, was not a governor with a large retinue of state-level policy advisors accompanying him to Washington. For all the talk about Obama’s “Chicago Gang,” it’s pretty small compared to George W. Bush’s Texans and Bill Clinton’s Arkansans.
So those worried about the “Clintonian” or “insider” nature of the early appointments should probably wait a while before drawing any fixed conclusions.

Sarah Posner, author of the indispensible weekly American Prospect feature “The FundamentaList,” spendt a day hanging out in the hallways outside a meeting of the Council for National Policy, the shadowy umbrella group where Religious Right leaders often coordinate efforts with other elements of the conservative movement. She came back with all sorts of interesting experiences:

While the CNP was trying to look to the future last week, it seemed hopelessly enamored of its aging leaders. When I arrived to meet Warren Smith, the conservative evangelical activist and journalist who had invited me to chat, we ambled past anti-evolutionist Ken Ham, who was holding court to a small but rapt audience in the hallway; eyed Left Behind author and CNP co-founder Tim LaHaye, who was shuffling in and out of the “CNP Networking Room;” caught a glimpse of Rick Santorum, who since being booted out of his Senate seat has led the charge against “radical Islam” from his perch at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center; and spotted the religious right’s anti-feminism doyenne Phyllis Schlafly, 84, who had earlier that day delivered a speech to the CNP Youth Council on how to “find your place in the conservative movement.”

Posner talked Smith into giving her a sense of what was being said in CNP’s closed-door sessions:

“What I’m hearing is that there is no loyalty to the Republican Party,” said Smith, meaning no loyalty to the party as constituted but loyalty to one purged of insufficiently conservative members. “What Richard Viguerie talks about is not a third party but a third wave. Basically there needs to be a flowering of grass-roots conservative activism and local groups, local PACs. He’s basically saying you’ve got a Republican county commissioner in Buzzard’s Breath, Texas, and he’s not a conservative? Run a conservative against him.”

Well, that’s a new and refreshing conservative strategy, eh? But it’s certainly in accord with what’s being said and heard across much of the conservative movement: there’s nothing wrong with the GOP that a more consistently conservative message can’t fix.
What’s missing from the usual conservative talk, however, is the upbeat, we’re-the-wave-of-the-future sentiment so common prior to 2006. They know that they and the GOP are in serious trouble now, and there’s not much time for laughter.
The best bon mot in Posner’s column was this:

I wanted to ask [Tim] LaHaye if he thought the end-times would happen during Obama’s presidency, but when I circled back to where I had seen him, he was gone. Rapture, anyone?

No, I don’t think there’s a lot of rapture in Religious Right politics these days.

One small but interesting phenomenon during the 2008 campaign season was the infighting that broke out at the flagship of conservative political opinion, National Review. To make a long story short, a couple of NR contributors, Kathleen Parker, and the founder’s son, Christopher Buckley, said some heretical things; the former called for the resignation of Sarah Palin from the GOP ticket, while the latter went over the brink and endorsed Barack Obama. Buckley simultaneously quit his NR column.
After the election, David Frum, another Palin-o-skeptic, and moreoever, an advocate of major reforms in the conservative message, announced he was shutting down his own NR-based blog.
In an after-action report on these developments for the New York Times the other day, Tim Arango assesses the damage, and quickly asserts that it was “the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse” that not only produced the defections from NR, but is threatening “its reputation for erudition.”
I know nothing about Tim Arango, but I’d have to guess he knows next to nothing about the history of the opinion-magazine world, where defections, purges, changes in managment, changes in ideology and strategy, and regular turnover in contributors, editors and publishers, has been more the norm than the exception. If anything, NR is relatively stable by those ancient standards. Two or three defections in the course of an election cycle that represented a huge crisis for the GOP and the conservative movement? Par for the course, I’d say.
But the specific claim that the internet is ruining National Review strikes me as simply fatuous. Arango is presumably referring to The Corner, NR’s unique group blog that is something of an inter-office water cooler where people connected to the magazine exchange views all day, every day. Arrows were indeed aimed at Parker, Buckley and Frum on The Corner this year, and to be sure, many opinions are expressed there that don’t quite live up to NR’s traditions of “erudition.”
But I’m with the American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein on this: the Corner is a valuable institution, and whatever conflicts it has engendered is attributable not to its form or its internet-based conveyance, but to the coarsening of conservative opinion generally at the end of the Bush Era. I’m personally fine with picking through obnoxious Corner posts in search of a witty or insightful gem from Ramesh Ponnuru, or a surprising concession to unorthodox political opinion by Rich Lowry. And if the atmosphere at the Corner encourages off-the-cuff comments that enrage me, it also encourages off-the-cuff comments that give me hope that conservatives aren’t all just drinking the koolaid and reinforcing each other’s prejudices. In general, the Corner exhibits a free-flowing style of conversation that’s only found in the comment threads of most blogs, left, right or center.
So spare me, Mr. Arango, for laments about how the internet is destroying yet another bastion of journalistic “erudition.” Back in its pre-digital days, NR published just as much obnoxious content as it does today, but without often letting us see the internal debates that were definitely going on under the surface. Maybe it’s lost some of its capacity for the deft use of latinates and arcane references to Oakeshott or Thomas Aquinas, but that’s something it will probably never recover now that William F. Buckey, Jr. is gone. For better or worse, NR is what it is, and the internet is a positive force in its present and future.

In a small but significant development that virtually no one would notice without the blogosphere, Chris Bowers is drawing attention to impending layoffs by the Democratic National Committee of 200 state-embedded field operatives. These operatives are the beating heart of Howard Dean’s famous 50-state-strategy. You can read Chris’ post yourself, but it seems the DNC assumed all along that the field staff would be terminated immediately after the election. And ironically, Chris’ contact at the DNC hastened to reassure him that they were trying to get the embeds jobs in Washington, as though the whole program were nothing more than a DC internship network.
That’s a distressing throwback to the past habit of thinking of state party organizations as nothing more than adjuncts to campaign organizations. Anyone who’s worked with state parties over the years, especially in smaller and/or “red” states, probably shares my impression that they were largely either completely moribund, or served as dumping-grounds for incompetent castoffs from specific campaigns or even from state governments. The idea of the 50-state-strategy, or so I thought, was to encourage steadier year-in-year-out state party infrastructures, staffed by professionals with a particular expertise in field organizing. You’d think this program should have represented a small down payment on a bigger investment in state parties, not a temporary experiment to be terminated the minute the votes were counted in this particular cycle.
I realize this issue is dwarfed in significance by the separate question of what happens to the large and well-trained Obama field organization. If that organization is ultimately folded into the DNC/state party apparatus, then the problem of state party infrastructure may be solved for the immediate future. But if it’s not, we may be back to square one.
In any event, it’s disappointing to see that Howard Dean’s signature initiative at the DNC may not outlast his personal tenure as chairman.

Media Matters’ Paul Waldman suggests that Team Obama is determined to shift the ratio of “wonks to hacks” (to use Bruce Reed’s useful dichotomy of the two types of people you tend to get in high-ranking White House jobs) from the hack-heavy habits of the Bush White House, where Karl Rove was what passed for a policy intellectual.
Meanwhile, Dayo Olopade has a good summary of the vast amount of advice being hurled at the Obama transition operation by progressive think tanks, which have learned from conservatives how to hit the ground running when there is a change of administration.
I had a spasm of nostalgia while reading Olopade’s reference to the Progressive Policy Institute’s 1992 transition tome, Mandate for Change. This effort, to which I contributed a chapter on crime policy, was so unique at the time that it was translated into several languages, and was reportedly a best-seller in Japan for a while. This time around, there are so many books, pamphlets and memos coming out with suggestions for the Obama administration that you can’t stir ’em with a stick. And that’s a good thing.

Dan Ancona, whose article on “Power to the Edge” we excerpted almost in toto yesterday, has another interesting post he brought to our attention in response to TDS’s request for strategic analysis. Ancona’s “Echoes of the Future” at Calitics emphasizes the importance of reaching out to diverse constituencies, running a vigorous field campaign and being bold about “dimension three,” — “shifting worldviews, ideologies, values, common sense and assumptions.” (More on ‘dimension three’ at Mark Schmitt’s American Prospect Post on “Big Picture Power.”)
Ancona then reveals what he calls “Obama’s Secret Sauce,” and describes the ingredients this way:

The first ingredient is to get the overall strategy right. OFA built a highly distributed, social network-oriented operation built on trust. The best phrase I’ve seen to describe this is “Empowered Accountability.” The one social network we all have is our neighborhood, and that’s where it starts, but they were also very savvy about getting people to tap whatever networks they had. This part has to come from the top, from the campaign leadership and the candidate. As a complex system, a good field campaign is very sensitive to initial conditions. The reason Barack’s campaign was so good had a lot to do with Barack. We have to figure out how to build this kind of leadership at the state and local level, but my guess is we’ve already started.
The second ingredient is training. The way the Camp Obamas were set up was key in getting folks not just to do useful work, but to feel like they were a real part of the campaign. This sense of ownership then drove people to make bigger and bigger commitments in both time and in small donations. Whether it was a 2 hour, all day or two-day training, the format was built around three main components: Cesar Chavez/Marshall Ganz-style storytelling, a campaign update, and then training on tools and techniques. All of these components were designed to be scaled up or scaled down to fit the available amount of time; this flexibility made it possible for the California primary campaign to hook and train hundreds of people at a time the few weekends before February 5th.
The third ingredient is having the right tools. (the usual full disclosure here: I’m going to say nice things about the VAN, which my organization, CA VoterConnect, offers to campaigns of all sizes on a sliding scale.) Coming out of our experience in the 2004 primary, we knew that the main web-based toolset a campaign would need included first, a social networking system of some kind to enable meetups and self-organization, and second, an easy-enough to use voter file to turn that self-organization into a usable electoral force. The tools are important, because if they’re designed and deployed right, they help give activists an upward path towards becoming ever more effective and more involved. [Update: I forgot better targeting, somehow. Better targeting tools, including reiterative targeting that could be used as a force multiplier for a field campaign, are absolutely crucial. Improvement in this area probably would have won us the three close races we’re losing by under 1% handily.]

Ancona names some of the specific tools that can add proficiency to 21st century campaigns:

On the social networking side, a local organization can use a mishmash of the DNC’s PartyBuilder or the Courage Campaign‘s social network, as well as tools like Google Groups & Google Docs, and to some degree Facebook (although sometimes it seems like Facebook has gone out of their way to make it impossible to use it to organize). On the voter file side, while of course I’m a big proponent of the VAN (the Voter Activation Network, a web-based voter file tool), as long as the system has fresh, high-quality baseline data, supports local control, local ownership and ongoing storage of the contact data, and can be used for social-network and neighborhood organizing, it will do. This may be the direction that Political Data, Inc. OnlineCampaignCenter and MOE tools that the CDP uses are going. My feeling is that the VAN is still superior and will become more so over the next few cycles, but all that’s required of a tool is for it to meet those basic requirements. There will also likely be new tools and new innovations in this area that campaigns and organizations can and should experiment with as they’re developed and released.

But the secret sauce is not all wonk and no heart. Ancona conveys an infectious spirit of inclusiveness that sets a tone all campaigns should emulate:

People want to get involved, and if we can create satisfying roles for them and walk them along a path of deepening commitment, they will get involved and stay involved… If we can show people how their efforts are effective, how they are helping to build the functional and participatory next version of our democracy, they’ll build it. It gets easier to imagine that future every year: for the first time, we have a big, national campaign (and a glorious victory) to point to as an example.

It’s the TLC in the secret sauce that brings it all together.

As you probably have heard by now, Senate Democrats today voted by a considerable margin to let Joe Lieberman retain his chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and thus secure his continued participation in the Senate Democratic Caucus. His “punishment” for endorsing John McCain for President, for campaigning for him, for speaking at the Republican National Convention, and for repeating and even amplifying GOP talking points against Barack Obama, was to give up his spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee, including chairmanship of a climate change subcommittee. Off-the-record (of course), Senate Democrats were saying that President-elect Barack Obama’s encouragement of tolerance for Lieberman was a key factor in their decision.
Since everyone in the chattering classes will have an opinion on this development, I will note my longstanding personal opposition (here, and most recently here) to anything like a free pass for Joe Lieberman’s apostasy. While I’ve never been a Lieberman-hater, I simply think he crossed a line that incredibly few sitting members of Congress in either party have ever crossed, and even fewer (you have to go all the way back to 1956 for an parallel) have crossed without losing their seniority entirely. And this line–you do not endorse the other party’s presidential candidate–represents the absolute irreducible minimum of what we must expect of federal elected officials who want to affiliate in any way with the Democratic Party. The refusal to apply this principle–not angrily, or vengefully, but resolutely–is not some sort of signal of a “Big Tent” party; indeed, it most offends moderate-to-conservative Democrats past and present who have respected this one simple rule, and somehow managed to avoid Republican presidential campaign rallies. Reimposing this rule in the future will be difficult, and we all may come to regret that.
As it happens, I wound up appearing this afternoon on the syndicated public radio program “To the Point,” with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, and Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic, to discuss the Lieberman issue. I was rather lonely with my simple “minimum requirement to be a Democrat” argument, since Jane maintained that Lieberman’s poor handling of his committee chairmanship, not his endorsement of McCain, was the reason he should be relieved of his gavel. Meanwhile, Kirchick (generally an abrasive bait-the-left neocon zealot, and best I can tell, not any sort of Democrat) made the novel argument that having run against the Democratic nominee for the Senate in 2006, Lieberman had no obligation to support the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, on the theory, I suppose, that one act of apostasy justifies another. It had to make you wonder this: if John McCain had gotten his (apparent) wish, and Lieberman had been his running-mate and lost, would Senate Democrats still welcome him back into the fold? Are there any limits at all to the elastic definition of who can join the Democratic Caucus?
Well, whatever. While I remain upset at this decision to exempt Joe Lieberman from the most basic standards of party loyalty, I don’t plan to obsess about it; Senate Democrats, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party have much bigger fish to fry. There’s some private talk in progressive circles in the wake of this event that Lieberman might now become slavishly loyal to Senate Democrats, and particularly to Obama, understanding that he’s dodged the very bullet he fired by his support for McCain. Maybe it will all work out for the best. And perhaps the political value of a Christlike gesture from Obama, to the benefit of a politician so recently spurned by the dominant conservative wing of the GOP, outweighs its cost. But no one is required to be happy about it.

There’s an interesting discussion underway between Pollster.com’s Charles Franklin and fivethirtyeight’s Nate Silver about variable rates of white voter support for Obama, particularly in the South. Franklin plots a graph and notes that there does seem to be an inverse relationship (in the South at least) between the size of the African-American population and Obama’s support levels from white voters. Silver notes the very different rates of white support for Obama within the South, and wonders if it might have to do with voter exposure to Obama; he did a lot better in states where he actually campaigned.
I think Nate’s on to something, based on some very specific numbers. In 2004, Kerry’s share of the white vote in Mississippi and Alabama was 18%, and was 22% in South Carolina. This year Obama’s share of that vote sank to 11% in Alabama, and 10% in Mississippi, yet rose to 26% in South Carolina.
That’s interesting, because these three states traditionally have behaved a lot alike politically. Way back in 1948, the great historian V.O. Key referred to MS and SC as “the super-south”: places where the racial politics of the post-Confederacy trumped all other considerations. Alabama certainly qualified as a fellow member of the “super-south” during and after the racial conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s. And in the post-civil-rights era, SC, AL and MS invariably exhibited high levels of racial polarization between the two parties in ways that weren’t always characteristic of other southern states.
Perhaps SC’s recent economic growth, accompanied by a significant if not overwhelming number of transplants, has separated it a bit from the rest of the “super-south.” But if so, not by much, and there’s nothing there like NoVa’s large and essentially non-southern voting base, or NC’s Research Triangle concentration of “latte class” professionals and students.
So why did the white vote in SC go in exactly the opposite direction in 2008 as MS’s and AL’s? Nate thinks it may be because South Carolinians had a heavy personal exposure to Obama (and his family; his wife’s roots are in the state) during the primary campaign, and thus saw him as less alien than did southern white voters elsewhere in the Deep South.
No other plausible theory comes to mind. And if, as Nate hypothesizes, “familiarity erodes contempt” when it comes to a voting demographic most suspicious of Barack Obama, it’s a very good sign for his presidency.

Dan Ancona’s article “Power to the Edge: Obama’s California Field Operation from the Future” at Personal Democracy Forum‘s ‘techPresident’ tab contains valuable insights about the strategy and tactics that empowered Obama’s quest for the Democratic nomination. Although Obama did not get a majority of CA delegates, the tactics his campaign deployed there proved critical in his other primary victories, winning the Democratic nomination and building the coalition that elected him.
Ancona, Project Director of California VoterConnect, likens the Obama primary campaign to the British victory in the Battle of Trafalgar and Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasions, both of which involved unconventional techniques of precision targeting to overcome “a largley centralized and monolithic force.” The strategic and tactical implications for politics are far-reaching. As Ancona writes:

The Obama campaign is distributed and bottom-up in a way that is the clearest example of what a post-broadcast, distributed and participatory democracy is going to look like. The evolution in campaign tactics happening right now closely parallels what’s happening in the military, corporations, government and other large organizations. The dropping costs and increasing reliability and flexibility of information technology is having profound effects on how these organizations make things happen.
This transformation was dubbed “Power to the Edge” in 2003 by David Alberts and Richard Hayes, two Department of Defense researchers with the Command and Control Research Program. Their book is surprisingly readable and engaging, and available in its entirety on-line at that link. It may be the best written government document of the 21st century so far. The authors are unabashedly aware of their book’s broader ramifications, stating in the preface that “[T]his book explores a leap now in progress, one that will transform not only the U.S. military but all human interactions and collaborative endeavors.”
A good political analog to Alberts & Hayes is Joe Trippi’s too-often overlooked post-2004 tell-all, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, where he laid out the broad contours of the transformation from the transactional, broadcast, TV-based political era to the relational, participatory, distributed, internet-based one. Trippi’s a terrific storyteller and it’s packed with exactly the kind of inside dirt that both serious and armchair politics junkies love. But it goes beyond that, becoming something of a handy guidebook and roadmap grassroots activists working to align their local efforts into something larger. (Dean campaign veteran and TechPresident contributor Zephyr Teachout’s widely recommended new Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope looks like it takes up the similar line of argument.)

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