Robert Creamer has a HuffPo must-read “How Obama Can Win Over Seniors and Turn the November Election Into a Democratic Landslide.” Noting that Obama trails McCain by 22 percent among white Seniors in current polls, Creamer has some creative suggestions to close the gap. Here’s a teaser:

Democrats should not attempt to “soften” their opposition to the Iraq War by trying to sound more like Republicans. We need to be clear that the Bush-McCain policies have failed precisely because they have made America less safe, weakened our military, strengthened our adversaries and isolated America in the world. Seniors fear that Obama might not be “strong” enough personally in dealing with world issues. He – and Democrats generally – need to show them that we are “strong” by standing up forcefully for our own view of the policy that can make us safer – and that we are more patriotic in that regard than reckless right-wingers who have in fact made us less secure.
* The “cost of war” frame is particularly powerful with seniors. They agree strongly that it is outrageous that Bush and McCain have spent hundreds of billions on the War in Iraq, but can’t find the money to pay for health care….Democrats need to repeatedly go right at McCain’s competency and judgment when it comes to Iraq — to remind them that his judgment about going to war in Iraq in the first place was wrong.

It’s a good read for all Dem candidates who want to get a bigger piece of a critical high-turnout constituency. See also J. P. Green’s recent TDS post “Beating McCain — With Seniors” for more on this important topic.

It was just a matter of time before some progressive blogger got alarmed about the possibility of Sam Nunn being Barack Obama’s running-mate. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft filled the vacuum yesterday with a post that calls Nunn a “worse Vice Presidential choice than Joe Lieberman” and half-seriously proposes a “stop Nunn” movement.
I’m a big fan of Chris Bowers, but he goes way over the top with this piece. Yes, Nunn would be an offensive choice to many gay and lesbians, and no, he’s not exactly Mr. Change. But Chris’ suggestion that Nunn has done nothing since leaving the Senate other than serving on corporate boards is a pretty egregious refusal to note the Georgian’s yeoman work towards avoiding the fiery annihilation of the planet. Sam Nunn is to the nuclear proliferation issue what Al Gore is to the global climate change issue, and you could make the argument that these are the two most urgent challenges facing the country and the world. It’s encouraging that both these men have endorsed Obama for president (Nunn back in April, Gore yesterday).
The invidious comparison of Nunn with John McCain’s close friend and supporter Joe Lieberman is more than a bit odd, too, since the Georgian shares none of Joe’s adoration of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy (au contraire), of the Iraq War, or of John McCain’s neo-Cold War posturing towards Russia, China and Iran. Indeed, as a surrogate if nothing else, Nunn could do Barack Obama a lot of good by getting under John McCain’s thin skin on his dangerous approach to national security.
One final thing about Chris’ post: in an effort, I guess, to bring out the Big Berthas on the Nunn Veep idea, he says that “the DLC was originally founded in order to elect Sam Nunn President. I’m not kidding.” Chris’ authority for this assertion is a disputed, agit-proppy Wikipedia entry on the DLC which says the group’s “original focus was to secure the 1988 presidential nomination of a southern conservative Democrat such as Nunn or [Chuck] Robb.”
You know, I somehow don’t think that founding DLC chairman Dick Gephardt (who ran for president in 1988), or founding members Al Gore (ditto) and Bill Clinton (who nearly ran that year) were “focused” on elevating Sam Nunn to the presidency in 1988. But this and other bad and good arguments for and against Nunn will be heard a lot if his apparent short-listing for the vice presidency continues.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

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.