Now that Barack Obama’s quietly but steadily taking over the Democratic Party infrastructure, there are probably more than a few Democrats who are publicly heaving sighs of relief but privately feel some regret that they won’t get to witness the exhilirating chaos of a Brokered Convention.
For a vicarious taste of said chaos, they should check out Michael Idov’s ha-larious New Republic article on the Memorial Day weekend convention of the Libertarian Party in Denver.
I watched part of that convention live on CSPAN, but missed all the great backstage stuff Idov caught: Mike Gravel’s Wiccan floor leader; the ginsu-knife-salesman pitch of the eventual Veep nominee, bookie Wayne Allyn Root; and the final sad spectacle of Libertarian “purists” swallowing their defiance and shuffling into Bob Barr’s victory party for the free beer.
It’s quite funny, but I must admit I have some sympathy for Libertarians, having gone through a brief, flu-like infatuation with the works of Ayn Rand (now, Idov reports, Bob Barr’s “favorite thinker”) in high school. And in truth, it’s hard to dislike the breed, who distinguish themselves from other politically impossible folk by a powerful lack of interest in jailing other people or invading their countries.
But the inveterate Libertarian suspicion of authority and collective action makes it an unlikely source of effective political action, as the cat-herding exercise in Denver abundantly illustrated.

I did a post this morning linking to and quoting liberally from an AP story on the sad state of the federal Election Assistance Commission, though taking the subject in a different direction in my own remarks. Only later did I discover there was a big brouhaha over the weekend caused by some legal saber-rattling by AP aimed at bloggers quoting content from AP stories. Indeed, AP appeared to be taking the very restrictive line that anything beyond links and “summarizations” were a violation of copyright law. Bloggers, naturally, responded with a call for a boycott of AP altogether: no quotes, no traffic-driving links, either.
AP has subsequently backed down a bit and appears to be reconsidering its policies towards quotes. But until this is all sorted out, I’ll go with my blogger colleagues and ignore AP stories.

I swear, dear readers, that I am by no means obsessed with the less-than-universally-popular idea of an Obama-Clinton Unity Ticket. But the nice folks at Salon asked me and my friend Tom Schaller to write contrasting columns on the subject, and so I obliged. (Tom’s column is here).
Our exchange went up at the top of the Salon site late last night, and as of this moment, my argument has generated 204 comments, most of them hostile to the Unity Ticket concept. I don’t know how much I was able to add to my earlier case for the Unity Ticket, beyond pointing out that it must be weighed against Obama’s actual alternatives, many of which are as controversial as an HRC veepship. Indeed, some folks who are currently fulminating against Clinton as running-mate could find themselves expressing buyer’s remorse if their own suggestions are ultimately rejected, as many of them will have to be.
In the end, it’s obviously Barack Obama’s call, and I have few doubts that the party will rally around whatever ticket he decides to create. But while all the passion brought to the subject by us self-appointed advisers may seem like a waste of time and energy, I do think it helps ensure that Obama makes his choice with a clear understanding of the implications. And we are, happily, light-years away from the relatively recent practice of choosing a running-mate with little thought or vetting, at the very last moment.

As we look forward to another presidential election in the autumn–one that could be very close–political observers are beginning to wake up to the fact that relatively little has been done to reform the creaking, state-controlled, crazy-quilt system of election administration whose shortcomings were so graphically demonstrated in 2000.
In the wake of the 2000 fiasco, Congress enacted the Help American Vote Act (HAVA), but the reform machinery it put it place, the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, has spent much of its brief existence wandering in the political wilderness. That’s the upshot of a depressing AP story by Deborah Hastings yesterday.
The lede tells you everything you need to know:

It was not an auspicious beginning. The year was 2004 and the newest federal agency had no desks, no computers, and no office to put them in. It had neither an address nor a phone number. Early meetings convened in a Starbucks near a Metro stop in downtown Washington.
Somehow, Congress had neglected to fund the Election Assistance Commission, a small group with a massive task: coordinating one of the most sweeping voter reform packages in decades.

It hasn’t gotten any better of late:

In the run up to November’s presidential election, the commission continues to grapple with hot-button topics such as how to test and certify voting machines. Voting advocates say the lack of such standards contributes to malfunctioning touch-screen equipment and long waits, as evidenced in Ohio in 2004, when presidential results were delayed for days.
The agency remains stalemated on other important issues, including whether states can require people to provide proof of citizenship before they can register to vote — an especially touchy subject exacerbated by a Supreme Court decision this spring upholding Indiana law demanding voters present a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.
Both past and present commissioners complain they were granted little power to force states to implement reforms, and that they often are battered by the brutal nature of partisan politics in the nation’s capital.
“It was the worst experience of my life. It was obvious going in that we weren’t going to accomplish much,” says former chairman DeForest Soaries, a Baptist minister who served as New Jersey’s secretary of state under GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. Soaries, also a Republican, quit the commission 15 months after taking the job in January 2004.
“No one took the agency seriously,” Soaries said. “All of the passion and all of the commitment to ensure that 2000 would never be repeated — that was all Washington theatrics.

A big part of the problem, of course, is that the two parties approach the issue of election reform from vastly different perspectives; Democrats are typically concerned about vote suppression, while Republicans continue to claim, without much evidence, that voting fraud is the bigger issue.
In my own opinion, the obsession of many Democrats with electronic voting systems–how votes are counted–has distracted attention from the more pervasive problem of how voters exercise their right to cast ballots in the first place. Thus, we are heading into another national election in which it will be largely up to private groups to police illegitimate state and local practices, including selective purges of voting rolls, capricious last-minute changes in polling sites, the deliberate underdeployment and understaffing of precincts, and minority voter intimidation.
We’d better get ready for all that, without any help from Washington.

Bart Jansen’s CQPolitics post “Softer-Touch Marketing Woos Cross-Party Voter” reports on Democratic consultants’ soft-sell approaches to win GOP-held House districts trending purple. As Jansen explains:

This new breed of campaign consultants typically hews to sotto voce campaign themes: guarded, post-ideological messages that are calculated to reassure cross-party and independent voters…Democrats have to campaign in purple districts ever so softly. A key element of the strategy to hang on to these “majority maker” districts is to downplay any suggestion that the incumbents — mostly members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition — might rub their constituents the wrong way, ideologically speaking, and to highlight the ways they’ll be fighting on behalf of their districts in more crucial everyday struggles.

Jansen cites the recent victories of Travis W. Childers in N.E. Mississippi and Bart Cazayoux in Baton Rouge as emblematic wins by Blue Dog Dems using soft sell strategies. He quotes retiring Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, former head of the NRCC:

The Democrats have cracked the code, and we still have an admissions test to get into the party and be a candidate…Democrats are smart. They want to win. Our guys still want to be right.

Jansen reports that many of the new Blue Dog candidates are quite conservative, particularly on social issues, though usually more progressive than their Republican opponents on key economic issues. While some liberal Dems have concerns about over-stretching their party’s “Big Tent,’ fortunately the Republican establishment remains hell-bent on pursuing their incredible shrinking tent strategy.

It certainly came as a shock to everyone involved in politics or journalism to learn that Tim Russert suddenly died today. He was 58, relatively young, and professionally, in the prime of life.
I didn’t know him personally, but know lots of folks who did, and you never really heard an unkind word said about him. Sure, people had issues with his interviewing style (particularly politicians terrified that he would skewer them), but in an industry overpopulated with, well, self-centered and half-educated jackasses, Russert was by all accounts remarkably decent and knowledgeable, despite an iconic position that would have led many others to get puffed up or lazy.
Having watched MSNBC for a while today, I have to say that it’s a tribute to the genuine affection his colleagues had for him that they have managed to talk lovingly about him without a single false note, though none of them could have possibly had more than a few moments to prepare.
But much as the tributes to Russert’s professional qualities are warranted, the real tragedy is that a wife, a son, and a father, have so suddenly lost him, without (it appears) even a chance to say good-bye. May they be comforted, and may he rest in peace.

Yesterday we published a post by James Vega predicting that conservatives are beginning a “stab in the back” propaganda effort aimed at arguing that Democrats threaten to squander an ongoing military victory in Iraq, partly by using lots of action verbs attributing every positive development in the country to the force of arms.
As commenter Joe Corso pointed out, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer abundantly confirmed Vega’s prediction this very morning, with a piece that described a long series of events in Iraq as part of an invincible surge-related campaign.
Interestingly enough, Krauthammer’s heroic spin was ostensibly aimed at convincing John McCain to make the victory-or-disgrace argument on Iraq the very centerpiece of his entire general-election campaign.
Let’s hope McCain is listening.

One of the fascinating aspects of the upcoming presidential general election is that it will offer highly contrasting organizational models. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft nicely describes the Obama campaign’s M.O.:

The Obama campaign is clearly obsessed with maintaining a tight, top-down organizational and message structure. So far, as TPM Election central notes, the Obama campaign has been “famously devoid of (publicly visible) infighting and/or leaking.” Last month, they put the clamps on progressive 527’s, and now they are taking over the DNC. Virtually the entire general election messaging will run through the senior leadership of the Obama campaign, and no one else. This makes the Obama campaign something of a living paradox, as it sports the largest grassroots corps in electoral history, combined with the tightest top-down message structure in recent Democratic presidential election history.

Meanwhile, John McCain’s campaign has yet to show any signs of grassroots energy, and its own organizational structure is regional, not national. Furthermore, McCain will have to rely on the RNC and 527s for a significant portion of its message-delivery function.
It’s part of the CW of the 2004 campaign that Bush’s ability to centrally control his message, and distribute it via a sophisticated grassroots network, gave him a big advantage over John Kerry. This may also represent a largely hidden but important advantage for Obama.

In the last few days editorials in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have started laying the foundations for a new two-pronged propaganda campaign – one that will serve to support McCain’s candidacy during the campaign season and then seamlessly convert into a “the perfidious Democrats stabbed our troops in the back” campaign in the event Obama wins the election and troops begin to be withdrawn.
The key to this new campaign is the assertion that the Sunni and Sadrist “insurgents” in Iraq are actually now on the very verge of collapse – shattered, demoralized and reeling from recent setbacks in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul. It is therefore only if the weak-kneed Democrats start withdrawing troops that the insurgents can possibly win.
Now anyone who has carefully read the articles about events in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul in the New York Times, Washington Post and major wire services is well aware of three facts:
1. The insurgent pullbacks in all three of these cities were carefully negotiated withdrawals with the entering government troops obeying mutually agreed-upon conditions (in Sadr City, for example, one element of the agreement was that US troops would not be part of the entering forces) In Mosul, the Times reported that “the Iraqi military appears to have allowed many insurgents to slip out after scores of negotiations with militias and their leaders.”
2. While preceded by periods of serious combat, the actual withdrawals or negotiated surrender/amnesties did not involve significant casualties for the insurgents or the unplanned abandonment of weapons, ammunition, supplies or materials.
3. The press reports gave no indication that the withdrawals were accompanied by any widespread demoralization, panic or breakdown of discipline among the insurgent forces.
(This last item may seem surprising to Americans because our military culture almost automatically identifies retreat or withdrawal with humiliation and failure while heroism is identified with standing fast (e.g. “not one step backward,” “fight to the last man” etc.). Arab-Persian martial culture is different, however, with withdrawal often envisioned as a specific kind of military operation that includes feigned retreats and false surrenders. The most famous historical example of this style of battle was the Parthian archers who would feign retreat and then decimate the pursuing cavalry by twisting around and firing arrows while their horses still raced ahead. Similar tactics of feigned retreat and false surrender were also a significant element in the reputation Arab and Persian generals gained during the Middle Ages of being uniquely “cunning” and “devious” compared to their more “upright” and “chivalrous” European opponents)
In short, while the insurgents’ loss of their bases in the three cities represented a significant setback, there is absolutely no reason to take seriously the idea that the events in Basra, Sadr City or Mosul have pushed them to the literal verge of collapse.
Now let us look at the exact words the Wall Street Journal and New York Post editorials used to characterize the events:
The New York Post, “Eat Crow, Iraq War Skeptics,” June 9, 2008
The Iraqi army “forcefully reoccupied” the three cities.
The Iraqi army “compelled insurgent militias to lay down their arms.”
The Wall Street Journal, “Iraq and the Election,” June 6, 2008
The Iraqi army “routed insurgents in three of their most important urban strongholds.”
Basra was “liberated from Sadrist goon squads.”
The Sadr City truce “had all the hallmarks of de-facto surrender.”
In Mosul, “the remaining terrorists were forced to scatter to the countryside or flee for Syria”
All these phrases – “forcefully reoccupied,” “routed,” “forced to lay down their arms,” “surrender,” “scatter,” and “flee” are extremely misleading as descriptions of what actually occurred during the negotiated withdrawals from the three cities and give ordinary Americans an utterly false visual image – an image of broken, panic-stricken and demoralized insurgents dropping their weapons and fleeing in terror.
This exaggerated image is of course vital for the Stab in the Back narrative to seem plausible. The enemy has to be on its “last legs” and “certain to fall if we can just stay firm a tiny little bit longer.” If, on the other hand, the Sadrists and Sunni insurgents are more accurately described as “playing possum,” “keeping their power dry,” “biding their time,” or “waiting for the right moment,” then the events of this spring appear more like a positive but not decisive trend in a long war of attrition with no end necessarily in sight. In this case, the Stab in the Back narrative falls apart.
What should the Dems do?
First, they should directly challenge the distorted view of events which underlies the “stab in the back” narrative whenever it is presented so that it does not become unconsciously accepted on the basis that “I’ve heard it so often that I guess it must be true.” Independent media watchdog groups as well as specifically Democratic sources should consistently quote articles from the major papers and wire services showing that the picture of “insurgents on the verge of total and complete collapse” is simply not supported by the facts to date.
Second, when the Republicans do roll out the “stab in the back” argument – as they inevitably will – the Democrats answer should be categorical.
Neither the Sadrist nor Sunni insurgencies were decisively shattered or broken by the events in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul and it is a genuinely shameful betrayal of the incredible sacrifice of our brave and dedicated men and women in uniform – and their families back home — for writers and commentators – for whatever partisan political motive — to deliberately sugarcoat that reality and distort the facts about how difficult the real conditions are that our soldiers are facing in Iraq and what it will actually take to pacify the county . Our men and women in uniform deserve better.
Before writers and commentators make vile assertions about Democrats stabbing our troops – our brave and dedicated troops and their families — in the back on the basis of misleading characterizations of the actual military situation in Iraq, they should look at themselves in the mirror.
And they should be ashamed.
James Vega is a strategic marketing consultant whose clients include leading nonprofit institutions and high-tech firms.

Editor’s Note: We are proud to publish today an original article by two noted academic experts on the highly relevant topic of Hispanic voters in 2008. The authors are R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at Caltech in Pasadena, and Jonathan Nagler, a professor of politics in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at NYU. Together they have studied voting behavior in recent presidential elections, and have written a number of papers on Hispanic political behavior. In 2004 they were involved in Hispanic research for the Kerry campaign, and have worked on a number of Hispanic research projects in association with Greenberg, Quinlan and Rosner Research.
We also anticipate recieving and publishing some comments and rejoinders from other experts in this field over the next couple of weeks, and intend to continue this discussion until election day and beyond.
Winning the Hispanic Vote in 2008
by R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler
Introduction
Historically, Democratic presidential candidates have done quite well with Hispanic voters (with some exceptions, such as Cuban-Americans). For the past three decades, Democratic presidential candidates have typically received more than 60% of the votes cast by Hispanics.
But in the 2004 presidential election, Hispanic support for John Kerry was lower than the historic norm. While there has been much debate over the exact percentage of support that Kerry received from Hispanic voters in 2004, a consensus has emerged that at best Kerry might have received 60% of the Hispanic vote. But no matter what we think the exact percentage was, Hispanic voters were attracted to Bush in greater percentages in 2004 than to any previous Republican presidential candidate in recent history (See David L. Leal, Matt A. Barreto, Jongho Lee, and Rodolfo O. de la Garza, “The Latino Vote in the 2004 Election”. PS: Political Science and Politics, v. 38, 41-49, 2005; Marisa A. Abrajano, R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, “The Hispanic Vote in the 2004 Presidential Election: Insecurity and Moral Concerns”, Journal of Politics, forthcoming (April, 2008); David L. Leal, Stephen A. Nuno, Jongho Lee, and Rodolfo O. de la Garza, “Latinos, Immigration, and the 2006 Midterm Elections.” PS: Political Science and Politics, v. 41, 309-317, 2008.).
There are two questions that Kerry’s performance with Hispanic voters in the 2004 presidential election raises. One question is why — what was it about the context of the 2004 presidential election, and the messages articulated by Kerry and Bush, that caused more Hispanics to support Bush than is normal for a Republican presidential candidate? The second question is what does this imply for the 2008 presidential election — what strategies should the Barak Obama, the presumptive Democrat nominee, pursue to insure a stronger performance among Hispanic voters in November 2008?
In this article we provide answers for both of these questions.
What Happened in 2004?
The Kerry campaign appeared to treat the Hispanic vote seriously in the 2004 election. Just prior to the Democratic National Convention in late July 2004, the Kerry campaign announced an unprecedented financial investment aimed at targeting Hispanic and African-American voters. At that point in the 2004 campaign, the stage seemed to be set for Kerry to devise a strong appeal to Hispanic voters.
But that appeal failed to take into consideration the potential Republican election strategy, as well as the particular context of the 2004 presidential race. In research we have done with Marisa A. Abrajano (The Journal of Politics, 2008), we found that despite their concerns about the national economy and the war in Iraq, Hispanic voters were attracted to Bush because of two appeals: first, his stance on moral values; and second, his national security message.
In our paper, “The Hispanic Vote in the 2004 Presidential Election: Insecurity and Moral Concerns”, we used exit poll data from most of the states with large Hispanic electorates to develop a statistical model to determine the issues that motivated Hispanic voters to support Kerry or Bush (We used respondents from Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and New Jersey. These were the states where the Hispanic population was at least 6% of the state population, and where the necessary questions were asked on the Exit Poll. In Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas respondents were not asked what they felt the most important issue was.)
We then used our model to examine support for Kerry or Bush in two different hypothetical scenarios. In the first scenario we simulated one aspect of campaign strategy: what if Kerry had been successful in completely neutralizing particular issues, that is – convincing all Hispanic voters that the issue was not important? In the second scenario we considered what would have happened if instead of completely neutralizing issues, one of the candidates had persuaded all Hispanic voters that a particular issue was the most important issue of the election to them? So for example, in scenario one, what if Kerry had successfully persuaded all Hispanic voters that moral values were not a concern, or that national security issues were not a concern? Or, for scenario two, what if Kerry had convinced all Hispanic voters that education was the most important concern for the election, or that health care was the most important concern for the election?
This analysis revealed that had Kerry managed to neutralize select issues, two issues would have been powerful in moving Hispanic votes into his column: terrorism and moral values. Our statistical model predicts that if had Kerry completely neutralized the moral values issue, his vote share among Hispanics in the states we analyze would have increased 2.2 percentage points, from 60% to 62.2%; had he done the same with terrorism, his vote share among Hispanics would have increased 2.7 percentage points, from 60% to 62.7%. As Kerry lost the popular vote by less than 2.5 percentage points, obviously these are meaningful swings in the vote.
Compared to moral values and terrorism, traditional Democratic issues such as education and health care played relatively little role in 2004. Performing similar counterfactual analyses to those we describe above, our model predicted that had no Hispanic voters felt that education or health care was the most important issue, then Kerry’s vote share would have dropped by only 0.5 percentage points and 0.6 percentage points respectively (from 60.0% to 59.5% and 59.4%, respectively).
This does not bode well for a Democratic candidate: the alternative way to frame this is that Kerry only convinced enough Hispanic voters to believe that education or health care were the most important issues in the campaign to raise his vote share less than one percentage point compared to an electorate where no Hispanics thought either of these were the most important issue. Yet these are issues that Hispanics have traditionally claimed were
important. This suggests Kerry was simply not winning enough votes in an issue area that has traditionally favored Democrats. Our model predicts that if Kerry had done well in this area and convinced all Hispanic voters that education or health care was the most important issue, then his vote share would have risen by 5.3 or 11.6 percentage points, respectively. Obviously convincing all Hispanic voters that either of these was the most
important issue was not feasible. But in the states we examined, only 8.4% of Hispanics listed education as the most important issue, and only 6.8% of Hispanics listed health care as the most important issue. These percentages are well below the percentages of Hispanics who have listed these as major concerns in polling conducted prior to the election contest.
What Does This Mean For 2008?
Clearly, much has changed since the 2004 presidential election. The second Bush term, the 2006 Democratic successes in the midterm elections, the continued war in Iraq, turmoil in the housing market, rising prices, and signs of economic recession all will help to shape the context of the 2008 general election. And since 2004 the issue of illegal immigration has also risen in national concern; recent surveys of Hispanic voters show immigration and in particular efforts to deal with illegal immigration to be an important concern. Recent polling has shown the immigration issue to be an important one for other voters as well, especially white voters across the nation.
Given the prominence of the immigration issue, especially for Hispanics, and the failure of federal efforts to devise legislative solutions to help resolve the problem of illegal immigration, many have argued that the immigration issue might be one that the Obama and the Democratic Party could use to their advantage in the 2008 presidential race. But now that the context of the presidential race is becoming clearer, it is no longer the case that the immigration issue will necessarily be important in the 2008 general election, nor an issue that the Obama can easily use to win Hispanic votes. There is one reason for this — the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.
McCain has in the past has backed comprehensive immigration reform, most recently in the Senate bill he cosponsored with Ted Kennedy that would have, among other reforms, created an “essential worker visa program.” While risking the possibility that he will anger the more conservative elements in the Republican party that desire strong action on immigration (such as building a wall along the US-Mexican border, etc), McCain’s past stance on immigration will make it difficult for Obama to easily draw clear distinctions on this issue, and may effectively reduce the prominence of the immigration issue in the general election.
If that happens, we believe that McCain will draw directly from the 2004 Republican playbook when it comes to the Hispanic electorate. He is likely to turn again to national security (an issue where his background as a Vietnam veteran, his support for the surge in Iraq, and his legislative career in Congress give him strong credibility) and moral values as issues in his messaging to Hispanic voters. As in the 2004 election, we believe that this may again erode Hispanic support for Obama. But there are ways in which the Democrats can develop messages that can mitigate, if not eliminate, the potential threat which moral values and national security issues may pose in November 2008.
Consider the current context: continued fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis; plummeting housing values, soaring numbers of foreclosures, and a lack of credit for purchasing homes. Basic costs of living for food and especially gasoline are rising dramatically, with $4 per gallon gas common across the country. We have clear signs of an ongoing economic slowdown, if not recession. Consumer confidence is sagging. Many families, including many Hispanic families, cannot afford adequate health care, and in many instances have no health care coverage at all. The American casualty count in Iraq has passed 4,000, and there are no signs that the Iraq War will end soon.
Data from Hispanics who participated in the recent Super Tuesday primaries, as compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center, shows that this basic trilogy of issues are of importance to Hispanic Democratic voters: the economy (53%), the war in Iraq (24%), and health care (21%). Importantly, both white and African-American Democratic voters on Super Tuesday perceived these same three to be of importance, in the same relative order; the economy, the Iraq War, and health care.
Thus, there is a basic narrative that Democrats can – and must – develop in order to have a strong Hispanic strategy in 2008. That narrative needs to focus on the core strengths that the Democratic candidate will bring to the table: a progressive message that articulates how the federal government will bring the nation economic growth, how it will provide affordable housing and credit to middle and lower income families, how it will deal with skyrocketing costs for food and energy, how it will make health care available and affordable, how it will make quality education a priority, how it can bring high-quality jobs to all those who want them, and how they will end the war in Iraq.
We think that for Democrats to retake the White House in 2008, they must work to get strong Hispanic support — and keep Republican Hispanic support at or below the 35% threshold. Doing this will not be easy, but will require that the Democrats take advantage of the constellation of domestic issues that work so strongly in their favor with Hispanic voters: the economy, education and health care.