The Democratic Convention Platform Committee formally approved a draft 2008 platform in Pittsburgh over the weekend, and though the final version isn’t presently available online, the draft they were working from is here. It’s true that party platforms don’t matter remotely as much as they used to (it will almost certainly be approved at the Convention on a voice vote with no real discussion), but they do occasionally reflect party positioning on certain hot-button issues.
According to press reports, the only major changes approved involved the health care language, where a compromise was worked out to accomodate Clinton supporters wanting something closer to HRC’s own plan, and also to head off a proposed amendment endorsing a single-payer system.
Assuming the draft platform’s language on abortion was retained (a good guess absent any publicity about proposed amendments), it appears pro-choice activists prevailed over those calling for a clear endorsement of “abortion reduction” strategies. The brief abortion plank begins with the most unambiguous statement of the party’s pro-choice principles I can recall, and while the nuts and bolts of “abortion reduction” are supported, they are contextualized as measures that might reduce the “need for abortion” rather than the number of abortions, a formulation acceptable to pro-choice activists. The “safe, legal and rare” mantra about abortion first popularized by Bill Clinton in 1992 does not appear in this draft, and there’s also no “conscience clause” explicitly expressing respect for, and acceptance of, differing views on this subject. This is probably the most forthright pro-choice plank in party history.
On another front, there was an unsuccessful effort by some Clinton supporters in Pittsburgh to promote a platform plank condemning caucuses as opposed to primaries as means for selecting future Convention delegates. The proposal was ruled out of order and referred to the Rules Committee, where it probably belonged. In any event, there was never any possibility that the platform committee would retroactively adopt the Clinton campaign’s late-spring effort to deligitimize Obama’s string of caucus victories. But this is an issue that will come up again after Election Day, when–win or lose–Democrats begin looking ahead to the nominating process for 2012.

So on a day when Democrats could use some good news, they got it: contradicting earlier reports that he’d be in an undisclosed secure location, Republicans announced that Vice President Dick Cheney will join George W. Bush in speaking on the first night of the GOP Convention next month.
Know what this may mean? McCain’s revealing his running-mate choice some time that afternoon.

With today’s news that John Edwards is going public on Nightline to admit he’s been lying for a couple of years about an affair he had with a woman who was on his campaign’s payroll, many Democrats are in a state of shock and anger. Aside from sympathy for Edwards’ family (especially his brave wife, Elizabeth) and astonishment at Edwards’ chutzpah at running a presidential campaign knowing the National Enquirer was onto this story, the main reaction has been relief that Edwards didn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination and wasn’t under serious consideration for a second Veep bid. Can you imagine if the presumptive Democratic nominee for president was the object of this story? Talk about a brokered convention!
Jane Hamsher probably spoke for most Democrats today:

I don’t really care what people do in their private lives and nobody can know what the relationship is between two people, so unless their personal lives are at odds with their voting records — demanding that people do one thing while they do another (like being, you know, not gay or something) — I figure that’s their business.
But Edwards did play the family card quite heavily during his campaign, and if he’d gotten the nomination, the Democrats would be sunk right now and we’d be looking at four years of John McCain. So on that count, I’m profoundly grateful that he didn’t get it. He was risking a lot for all of us by doing this stuff and running at the same time. It was incredibly stupid.

And it’s all incredibly sad.

Over at The New Republic, Eric Zimmerman has a brief but interesting report on the behind-the-scenes struggle going on over proposed “abortion reduction” language in the Democratic platform. A small band of anti-abortion Democrats want language committing the party to measures ranging from prenatal health care to greater access to contraceptives in order to tangibly reduce the number of abortions occurring in the country. And while many pro-choice activists have no problems with some of the specific proposals, and wouldn’t mind language about reducing the need for abortion, they unsurprisingly tend to reject formulations that treat abortion as an unambiguous evil.
This particular controversy has become a common one in recent Democratic platform deliberations, and is generally conducted within the boundaries of Democratic support for the constitutional right to choose. Among Republicans, of course, abortion platform fights tend to revolve around radical proposals not only to reverse Roe v. Wade, but to create constitutonal prohibitions that would eliminate the state role in abortion policy.
Speaking of abortion, I’ve strirred up a bit of a blogospheric debate on the question of why white evangelical Protestants consistently provide greater support for restrictive abortion policies than Catholics. My original piece at Beliefnet is here. Ross Douthat of The Atlantic has responded twice, here and here. Those commenting on the exchange have included Steve Waldman and Rob Dreher.

With the recent appointment of Steven Schmidt and several other staffers to the highest levels of the McCain campaign, the political protégés of Karl Rove have now taken almost complete control. As a result Rove’s basic political strategy has been elevated to the core approach of the campaign.
At its heart, Karl Rove’s approach for the last 20 years has been an essentially class-based attack on Democrats – one that portrays them as representing an out-of-touch, educated elite who have little in common with average Americans. In this strategy, individual Democrats are not simply wrong about specific issues; their errors all arise from deep, pathological defects in their basic values and character.
This general strategy can be traced back to the campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. But one of Rove’s distinct additions was to recognize that attacks on a candidates’ character must be psychologically plausible – they must be fine-tuned to exploit weaknesses the opposing candidate actually appears to reflect in his behavior.
In this regard, Rove has always had an exceptionally sinister aptitude (one that is reminiscent of Hannibal Lector’s perverse but penetrating form of psychological insight) for being able to recognize subtle human weaknesses and frailties. For example, although Al Gore and John Kerry were both products of relatively advantaged, prep school environments and were clearly not working class “ordinary guys”, they were nonetheless quite distinct. On the one hand Gore was vulnerable to being portrayed as somewhat pompous, self-important and egotistic. Kerry, in contrast, invited the caricature of being a long-winded, detached, emotionally remote New England Yankee. The overall class-based frame worked for both men, but the political hit-man’s art lay in recognizing and exploiting the subtle variations between them.
Obama presents an even more complex challenge. Although meditative, professorial, articulate and elegant, he nonetheless does not fit the image of a typical left-wing college professor (or, for that matter, of a Black militant, a well-to-do New York limousine liberal or corrupt Chicago pol).
The solution the Rove team developed, only days after taking control of the McCain campaign, was to portray Obama as a resident of the rarified world of the “Hollywood movie star liberals” – a pampered universe of exclusive health and exercise clubs, expensive hotel suites and fancy bottled water. The implication was that, like other Hollywood stars, Obama must be “self-infatuated and effete” or “vain and out of touch” or “effete, elite and equivocal” – in short, a weak and vain man without real character; a male fashion model living a movie stars’ life and not the real life of ordinary Americans.

Read more…

With the Summer Olympics opening ceremony on tap for tomorrow, it’s obvious by now that the hoary tradition of viewing August, and particularly Olympic Augusts, as “down-time” for presidential campaigns has been abandoned, as Carrie Budoff Brown explained in The Politico yesterday. Both campaigns (first Obama, then McCain) have made heavy media buys for NBC’s broadcast and cable coverage of the Games. While Obama will personally take the first week of the Olympics off for a vacation, his campaign won’t miss a beat, and McCain will continue to hit the trail throughout August.
The idea of an “Olympic Hiaitus” probably died once and for all four years ago, when the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry–considered by many Democrats to have been the pivotal moment in the entire general election–broke out in the middle of the Games.
The big remaining question is whether either candidate will defy the old CW to the extent of announcing vice presidential selections during the Olympics. Heavy rumors that either or both would move on this front prior to the Opening Ceremony have not, obviously, proved accurate. The Olympics don’t end until the day before the Democratic Convention, and only four days separate the Denver gathering from the Republican Convention in the Twin Cities. So the odds have significantly increased that Obama and/or McCain will announce their veeps during the Conventions themselves–an ancient tradition that has been largely abandoned by both parties after 1988, on the theory that a pre-convention announcement will earn “bonus” media attention and avoid distractions from the Main Event.
Still, I wouldn’t be too shocked if either or both candidates (and McCain appears to have decided to let Obama “go first”) unveiled the Veep during the abandoned “Olympic Hiaitus.” For one thing, the theory that you need unobstructed media attention for the Veep announcement is based on the assumption that the choice will be an unambiguous positive development. It’s pretty obvious by now that the most likely options for both parties are vulnerable to reactions of disappointment, either because they are considered underwhelming safe-and-sound figures (e.g., Evan Bayh for Obama, Rob Portman for McCain), or because some element of the party faithful will react poorly. In Obama’s case, any Veep other than the exceedingly improbable Hillary Clinton will generate some heartburn among the HRC supporters who will be heavily represented at the Convention. Veep possibilities like Tim Kaine or Sam Nunn could produce an ideological backlash. And McCain is walking a tightline among GOP conservatives who view his Veep selection as a critical indicator of the party’s future direction, particularly on limus test issues like abortion.
If I’m right about that, then it makes abundant sense for both candidates to get the Veep issue out of the way before the Conventions, if only to let the inevitable grumbling subside. And a mid-Olympics announcement that gets less than total attention from Games-watching voters or vacation-going political reporters might not be a bad thing, either. We’ll see soon enough.

Today Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics conducts another of his impressive county-level analyses of a swing state, in this case Pennsylvania.
His bottom line is that the Keystone State has maintained a very consistent Democratic advantage (compared to the national vote) of about 4 percentage points over the last four decades, despite internal shifts. Basically, growth of the Democratic vote percentage in Philadelphia and its closer suburbs has been offset by a Republican trend in western PA, and the Philly exurbs. Cost identifies northeast PA (where Obama did very poorly in the primary) as an opportunity area for McCain, and the Philly exurbs as one for Obama.
Cost does not get into another X-factor: the astonishing pro-Democratic trend in voter registration in PA since 2004, a net shift of 486,000 votes, according to a recent study by Rhodes Cook. Ds now enjoy a party-registration plurality in the state of more than a million votes.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine Obama losing PA if he’s running even nationally.

As the McCain campaign has rolled out its new, “Karl Rove style” personal attack on Barack Obama, Democrats have begun to feel a very familiar sense of frustration.
On the one hand, for many Democrats the “high road” taken by the Barack Obama campaign in replying to the attacks until several days ago did not seem adequately aggressive. At the same time, the DNC and other third party Democratic attacks on McCain’s close financial ties to oil companies and other lobbyists and his subservience to the policies of the Bush administration seem somehow to be glancing blows that do less damage to his personal image than do his attacks on Obama.
There is a reason for this. One fundamental element of the Karl Rove approach is to focus the most visceral and aggressive attacks on the opposing candidate’s character and personality rather than his policies. The recent Democratic attacks on McCain criticize, sometimes very bitterly, his positions and actions, but the Republican attacks on Obama are directly aimed at impugning his character.
In the past, Democrats often felt that focusing one’s attacks on an opposing candidates’ character was inappropriate – that politics should be about issues and policies, not personalities. But repeated muggings by the Rove Republicans have made many, if not most, Democrats now quite willing to respond to personal attacks in whatever way seems required.
The more difficult problem is that McCain is not, at first glance, an easy target for attacks on his character. His youthful military experience as a pilot and POW and his well-cultivated media reputation as an occasional “maverick” in the 80’s and 90’s present no obvious vulnerabilities. Current characterizations of him as old, ill-tempered, easily flustered and prone to blundering, while certainly true, are also essentially trivial. Comparing McCain to “The Simpsons’” Mr. Burns or to a clichéd grouchy grandpa simply has no meaningful political effect.
But, in fact, McCain is actually profoundly vulnerable to a powerful, aggressive and damaging attack on his character. McCain’s actions in recent weeks have provided compelling evidence for three genuinely disturbing propositions about his character, core values and integrity.

1. That John McCain has become desperate to win this election and is willing to sacrifice his deepest principles and his personal honor in order to do it
2. That the John McCain we see today is only a pale, diminished shadow of the man he once was in his early years.
3. That John McCain is allowing men he once despised and held in complete contempt to manipulate him and tell him what to do – to literally put words in his mouth and tell him what to say.

At first glance these statements are so strong that they sound almost defamatory. But each is supported by McCain’s recent actions (as described below) and they fit together into a single coherent narrative of ambition overcoming integrity and moral character.
Here is how this narrative can be presented in the format of a typical 45-60 second TV spot

Read more…

David Brooks’ New York Times column yesterday riffed extensively on a familiar theme in anti-Obama polemics: his status as a “soujourner” who’s wandered through an extraordinary life without putting down the sort of roots in any community or point of view that voters can recognize or identify with.
Salon’s Joan Walsh published a sound rebuttal of Brooks’ suggestion that successful American politicians are those who are unambiguously rooted in a clearly defined geographical, cultural, or temperamental mileiu. She cites John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and most of all, the synthetic cowboy George W. Bush, as presidents with complex and often self-contradictory backgrounds that rival anything “rootless” or confounding about Barack Obama.
Walsh could have gone further, insofar as complicated people have been the rule more than the exception among residents of the White House.
There was Richard Nixon, whose entire career (as best documented by Rick Perlstein’s brilliant book Nixonland ) involved an endless ambivalence towards the elite circles he despised and longed to join. There was LBJ, who aside from the ambiguities involving his views on race and economics, was a pathologically domineering personality whose political ascent was based on playing the submissive son to a series of powerful father figures (FDR, Rayburn and Russell most notably). Even an ostensibly “simple” figure like Eisenhower was actually a master Machiavellian who deliberately cultivated the false image of a genial and apolitical national father-figure.
Herbert Hoover? This paragon of sturdy heartland conservative values spent much of his adult life roaming the globe as a do-gooding cosmopolitan. FDR? The very symbol of progressive principle was generally considered a supreme opportunist, and a bit of a conservative, well into his presidency. TR? Hard to imagine a more complicated figure shaped by vastly conflicting personal and ideological impulses. Wilson? A born-and-bred fanatic who ultimately became identified as the epitome of global liberalism.
And you can go all the way back to the Founding Fathers, typified by the slave-holding egalitarian Jefferson.
In the last century, Coolidge, Truman and Ford are about the only presidents who stand out as what-you-see-is-what-you-get figures completely rooted in a particular and familiar time, place and culture.
All in all, Barack Obama’s in fine company as an unusual man seeking the unusual power of the presidency in this unusual country. Tomorrow James Vega is planning to post a follow-up to today’s piece on defining John McCain, with suggestions on how Obama can best define himself. It’s in the context of our long history of exceptional political personalities–of sojourners in a sojourner nation–that these suggestions should be understood.

Eric Kleefield of TPM Election Central has the new Obama ad — now playing on gas pump video screens.
Target shoppers much prefer Obama, while McCain wins the Wal-mart crowd, according to John Zogby’s HuffPo post comparing various department store shopper’s political preferences — a survey which might actually prove useful for voter registration campaigns.
Speaking of Wal-Mart, in his AFL-CIO Now Blog, James Parks puts their voter intimidation/campaign to stop the Employeee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in perspective.
MoJo/CQ Politics scribe David Corn features an 8-point plan for an Obama victory — and it comes from a former editor of The National Review, no less.
Southern Political Report‘s ace Tom Baxter has an inside look at Jim Martin’s big win in the GA Democratic senatorial primary, and he explains why it boosts Obama’s hopes of winning GA’s 15 electoral votes.
Maureen Dowd has a good NYT column today, offering some perceptive insights about McCain’s Obama-envy and hypocricy.
Politico‘s Ben Smith reports on the 50-state Obama Voter Protection Program.
Paul Waldman makes the case at The American Prospect that Obama should name his cabinet now, as a way of cooling out those who will be unhappy about his vp choice and strengthening Democratic solidarity by showing diverse Dem factions will be well-represented in his administration.
Michael Connery has a revealing post at The Nation explaining the barriers that diminish youth voter turnout and some possible solutions.
Dem candidates and campaigns will find some good talking points about the ‘War on Terror’ in this Consortiumnews.com post by Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Eland discusses the new Rand Corporation report on U.S. anti-terrorism strategy.