I’m in Austin today attending the annual Netroots Nation gathering (formerly known as YearlyKos), along with roughly two thousand bloggers, activists, wonks, politicians and reporters. This is the third of these events; the first, in Las Vegas, was a bit of a netroots “family reunion;” the second, in Chicago, featured a presidential candidates’ forum. The Austin conference doesn’t quite have the obvious central focus of the first two, particularly given Barack Obama’s absence (he’s beginning his big overseas trip tomorrow). But as usual, there will be a vast number of panels and workshops on about every topic you can imagine.
My own focus here will be party unity. A lot of the buzz here is over the recent FISA vote, which most if not all netroots activists are regarding as a development somewhere on the scale that runs from “major disappointment” to “calamity.” Aside from the issues directly involved in FISA, the controversy (and especially Barack Obama’s FISA vote), has revived a lot of old conflicts in the Democratic Party, not to mention the more recent conflicts that occasionally surfaced during the long presidential nominating contest.
A lot of talk about the nature and future of the party will be percolating around Austin throughout this event. But one obvious lightning rod will be the forum today featuring DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas and DLC chairman Harold Ford, Jr. This is a sequel to Markos’ appearance at the DLC annual meeting in Chicago last month (on a panel I happened to moderate). And while the ostensible topic of the Markos-Ford discussion (being referred to by some attendees, anticipating a Markos demolition of Ford, as the “Texas Smackdown”), party infrastructure, is one on which the two men can probably find a lot of common ground, there will be questions from the audience, and no telling where it will go from there.

Not going to Denver, but wishing there was some way you could be more involved in the Democratic convention? The DNC is holding 1,300 Party Platform meetings in all 50 states between July 18 to 27th (nitty-gritty here). A broad range of programs, including “town hall-style meetings, radio call-ins, and web chats” have already been scheduled. The Obama campaign has a ‘plug-in-your-zipcode‘ tool identifying local meetings. As National Platform Director Michael Yaki says, “The renewal of America begins with listening to the hopes, fears, and dreams of the American people..”
As Senator Obama prepares for his trip abroad, Elizabeth Bumiller of The New York Times has a report on his large, ok huge, team of foreign policy advisors, organized into issue areas and briefing him via email on a daily basis.
Chris Bowers’ latest Open Left forecast sees a 5-6 seat pick-up for Dems in the Senate. Perceptive reader comments on individual races follow his post.
Hotline‘s Matthew Gottlieb says the latest St. Louis Post-Dispatch/KMOV-TV poll data indicates that Missouri “has become a solid Obama state,” which is good news, considering the Republicans never win the white house without it. As a result Gottlieb sees Obama’s Electoral College lead upgraded to 292-234 (270 wins).
Lest we wallow in unbridled optimism, former Dukakis campaign director Susan Estrich writes in her Real Clear Politics post that her candidate was 20 points ahead of Bush I in mid-July ’88, and still lost. Despite abundant Democratic advantages this cycle, Estrich argues that Dems must now put aside internecine bickering: “it’s time to stop whining and start working. Otherwise, it will be hello President McCain.”
E.J. Dionne, Jr. reviews Al Gore’s buzz-generating speech on energy independence at Constitution Hall, which may begin the “compelling narrative” on the topic Democracy Corps says Dems need.
Michael Sean Winters has an interesting TNR article advising Obama how to win Catholic voters, who are 23 percent of the electorate and even more influential in swing states, like PA, NV, NH and WI. Winters, author of “Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats,” says “Catholics are ripe for Obama to pick if he can master the distinctive ways they view economic issues. Unlike the gloom-and-doom preaching of Calvin’s heirs, Catholicism has a more positive take on the possibilities of human culture and politics that would fit Obama’s politics of hope nicely.”
Here’s a simple, but very effective video ad that could be broadly-used by Democratic candidates for the white house and Congress — and making a point that merits repetition.

Most political observers are generally aware that Democrats have been benefitting from a surge in party registration this year. But Rhodes Cook has offered a clear statistical look at the Democratic registration advantage, going back to the 2004 election.
Keep in mind that only 29 states (plus DC) register voters by party. So Cook’s national numbers–a total increase in Dem registration of about 700,000, and a decline in GOP registration by about a million–just show part of the picture.
But far more significant are the trends in some of the battleground states. Combining D and R numbers, the net shift towards Democratic as opposed to Republican registrations since November of 2004 has been 124,000 in Oregon, 94,000 in Iowa, 60,000 in both Colorado and Nevada, 33,000 in New Hampshire, and 30,000 in Arizona. But it’s the trend in Pennsylvania–a battleground in both the presidential and House races–that jumps off the page: Democratic registration is up 266,000 since ’04, while Republican registration is down 220,000. That’s a net shift of 486,000; Democrats now enjoy a plurality in registrations of more than a million in PA.
A number of big battleground states (notably OH, MI, VA, MN and WI) don’t register voters by party. But you’d have to guess the underlying partisan dynamics don’t differ massively from those in the party registration states. And that’s a major reason for Democratic optimism this year.

My review of Rick Perlstein’s remarkable history of the period between LBJ’s 1964 landslide and Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Nixonland, is finally available on the Washington Monthly site.
A chunk of my review debates the proposition that the politics of middle-class resentment of liberal “elites” and minorities epitomized by Nixon may be running out of gas; hence the title assigned by the editors: “The End of Resentment.” Given the ongoing conservative effort to demonize Barack Obama as an out-of-touch lefty elitist, and his wife as a black militant, I wish the title had included a question mark. But still, for anyone who remembers the Nixon Era at its peak, the contemporary drive to batten on cultural resentments has the feel of a nostalgic Broadway revival rather than a new and vibrant production. One small but significant bit of evidence of the changing mood which I only mentioned in passing in the review is that the recent abuses at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib have been generally condemned, while the far more shocking My Lai massacre of the Vietnam Era made one of its chief perpetrators, Lt. William Calley, a popular hero feted at mass “Rallies for Calley,” particularly in my home state of Georgia.
We’ll learn soon enough the extent to which we are still living in Nixonland. But in the meantime, if you haven’t read Perlstein’s book, you really should. Its length will be daunting to some, but it’s more than worth the effort.

The June fundraising figures for the Obama campaign finally came out yesterday, showing a $52 million haul for the month, and rebutting rumors that the Obama Money Machine had ground to a virtual halt.
John McCain’s campaign raised $22 million in June, about the same amount received by Obama in May. Last week the Wall Street Journal predicted that Obama’s June totals would be around $30 million, an estimate that was only off by about 70%. More generally, and vaguely, there was considerable behind-the-scenes speculation in political circles that Obama’s alleged “move to the middle” might be discouraging his small-donor base. That doesn’t appear to have been the case in June.
Just as importantly, as of June Obama was still tapping donors who hadn’t “maxed out” in terms of the $2,300 contributions limit for the pre-general-election period. As Jim Kuhnhenn of HuffPo explains, only $2 million of Obama’s $52 million for June was “general election” money. Overall, Obama has raised about $340 million, with $12 million being designated for the general election. He can roll over any unused “primary” money to the general election if he wishes, but the key thing to remember is that his campaign hasn’t even begun to go back to its one-and-a-half-million primary donors for general election contributions.
Meanwhile, the DNC had its first good fundraising month in a long while, raising $22 million (as compared to less than $5 million in May). In terms of cash-on-hand, combining personal and party funds, Obama and McCain are roughly even right now. McCain, of course, will receive $84 million in public financing after the convention, but Obama does seem to be back on track towards his goal of raising about $300 million for the general election.

Meteor Blades over at Daily Kos has a riff, “Poll Finds Massive ‘Whining’ in Florida, Ohio,” discussing the new NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health poll (toplines here) in relation to Phil Gramm’s “whiner”-driven “mental recession.” Blades does a nice job of presenting the data, which shows majorities of respondents in both states worried about real-world economic problems.
The poll is interesting in that it gets respondents to break down the sources of their economic discontent into categories such as “Problems paying for gas” (55%); “Problems getting a good-paying job/raise in pay” (39%); “Problem buying/selling home/home losing value” (36%); “Problems paying for health care and insurance” (32%); “Problems paying for college/education cost” (26%); and “Losing a job” (26%) and other problems. Respondents also saw a connection between the Iraq mess and their economic problems:

…according to the poll, the top two things people in Florida say would help the most are stopping American jobs from going overseas and pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.

As Dee Moskona, a 47-year-old attorney and mother in Miami, quoted in Blades’ report puts it, “Iraq is draining everything.”
If Democratic registration meets high expectations, swing state voters will elect leaders who will address their very real economic concerns and bring home our troops — and our money.

One of John McCain’s favorite themes is to cast himself in the role of a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican “reformer” with a taste for an aggressive military posture, who’s not allergic to public sector activism on occasion. Indeed, in a recent New York Times interview, asked to name a conservative “model” for his politics, McCain said: “I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.” This has also been a favorite talking-point for a variety of McCain fans and advisors, ranging from the former “Bull Moose” blogger Marshall Wittmann (a longtime McCain associate who’s currently Joe Lieberman’s press secretary) and columnist David Brooks.
Inevitably, he was going to get some conservative grief for the TR-as-model claim, and it came in abundant and even hilarious measure from historian Michael Knox Beran today at National Review.
Beran’s piece is a long excoriation of TR as an anti-capitalist, a statist, an egomaniac, an emotionally erratic opportunist, and even a proto-fascist. His message to McCain is very blunt:

In advertising his hero-worship of Teddy, Sen. McCain exhibits a little too blatantly an aspect of his own psyche that would best be kept under wraps. He, too, has been accused of political narcissism. If he wants to reassure conservatives, he needs to persuade them that, unlike Roosevelt’s, his own policies will be grounded in something more solid than expediency and a canny reading of the whimsies of the moment.

If you’re interested in Beran’s analysis of TR as representing “the degenerate philosophy of late romanticism,” you can read the whole thing. But his conclusion is funny enough:

All in all, John McCain would do best to talk more about Ronald Reagan, and less about Theodore Roosevelt. And while he is at it, he might come up with a new “favorite book,” one that isn’t, like For Whom the Bell Tolls, a maudlin lament for a socialist bridge-bomber.

From the “true conservative” point of view, you see, Papa Hemingway backed the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. McCain needs to flip-flop on that issue as well.

It was Primary Day in my home state of Georgia yesterday, yielding two results of national interest in a very low-turnout event.
In the Democratic primary to choose an opponent for incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, a scattered and low-spending field produced a runoff (in three weeks) between Dekalb County CEO Vernon Jones (40%) and former state Rep. Jim Martin (34%). Jones benefitted from a strong African-American vote, particularly in rural areas of the state, while Martin got some mileage from his statewide race for Lieutenant Governor in 2006, along with a host of endorsements. Jones gained a lot of notoriety from boasting that he’d voted twice for George W. Bush, but also tried to link his candidacy (via some photo-shopped images on fliers) to Barack Obama’s. Martin, a much more conventional national Democrat, should be favored in the runoff, but anything could happen given the very low turnout characteristic of runoffs in Georgia.
Meanwhile, down in the 12th congressional district, which runs from Augusta to Savannah, Democratic incumbent John Barrow beat a challenge from state senator Regina Thomas by better than a three-to-one margin. Barrow had drawn the ire of a lot of national progressives as a “Bush Dog” who supported war funding and FISA, and opposed SCHIP expansion. But he was also endorsed by Barack Obama, and had a huge funding advantage. He will be a solid favorite in November to retain his seat against Republican John Stone, a longtime congressional staffer.

This morning’s most important read, by John Judis at The New Republic, is about the kind of foreign policy John McCain would likely operate as president of the United States. It’s not a very reassuring picture. McCain’s neoconservative advisors are one problem, and his League of Democracies fixation is another:

[T]he greatest problem with McCain’s division of the world is that it threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. McCain isn’t advocating a new cold war, but, if he initiated a global struggle against autocracy by founding a League of Democracies, the resulting split would roughly reproduce the cold war confrontation between West and East. By building a new organization that excludes Russia and China, the United States would create gratuitous tensions with these countries. Even without such provocation, U.S. and European relations with Russia have been growing more fractious since 2002, and McCain’s approach threatens to exacerbate them in particular.

But perhaps the biggest problem, says Judis, is that McCain’s highly temperamental personality tends to disproportionately affect his foreign policy thinking, leading him to “personalize foreign policy conflicts.” His powerful hatred of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, could have a big impact on a McCain presidency’s behavior.
Please read the whole thing, particularly if you are one of those folks who flirts with the idea of voting for McCain because of his experience in foreign policy.

Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis has an instructive post on poll interpretation. Sher discusses three new polls that have Obama ahead by 9, 8 and 6 points. Contrary to MSM spin that he should be “doing better,” however, Sher argues that “a final victory with that margin would be earth-shifting.” Of today’s New York Times article ,”Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn’t Closing Divide on Race,” Sher says the headline:

…makes it sound like massive numbers of whites have an unfavorable opinion of Obama.
The complete poll data shows that 1) 31% said they are “undecided” or “haven’t heard enough,” and 2) McCain doesn’t do much better, only scoring a 35% favorable rating from whites, with a similar number also not expressing an opinion.
The article also notes that McCain leads Obama among whites 46%-37%, a 9-point margin. (The other two polls today have McCain up 8 and 7 points among whites.)
But it doesn’t tell you that in 2004, President Bush beat Sen. John Kerry among whites by 17 points.
Obama runs at least 8 points better among whites than Kerry, not to mention performing vastly better among Latino voters (39 point lead) than Kerry (9 points).

An equal opportunity debunker, Scher has this to say about WaPo‘s article on its poll, noting

…this line buried at the bottom of the Washington Post analysis of its poll: “The candidates are tied among whites who earn less than $50,000 a year, while McCain leads by 10 percentage points among those earning more than that.”
Yes, Obama runs better among white working-class voters than other whites.
Not a half-bad step forward for race relations, in my book.

Amazing what a little clear thinking can do.