In the occasional discussion of congressional gerrymandering and redistricting reform, it’s generally taken for granted that noncompetitive elections negatively affect voter interest and thus turnout. But until now, there have been few if any efforts to actually measure that effect. Today the Democratic Leadership Council released a study by Marc Dunkelman that suggests that truly competitive House districts could generate as much as 11 million additional votes, heavily concentrated in those states (Dunkelman calls them the “dirty dozen”) with particularly egregious gerrymandering practices. (David Broder favorably wrote the study up in his column today).
The study’s methodology is fairly simple: it compares turnout across House districts nationally in terms of the margin of victory in the two most recent offyear elections, 2002 and 2006. And while Dunkelman acknowledges that factors other than competitiveness affect turnout (most notably “up-ballot” statewide contests, which are isolated in the study), the turnout disparaties between competitive and noncompetitive House contests are indeed too vast to be an accident.
It’s also no coincidence that seven of the twelve states with the worst recent record of compeititive House races are in the South (VA, SC, GA, FL, AL, LA and AR), where turnout has typically been lower due to a host of historical factors, and where Voting Rights Act considerations have often contributed to minority-vote “packing” and “bleaching,” practices deliberately designed to produce “safe” districts. GA has been something of a laboratory for both racial and political gerrymandering during the last two decades. And FL, along with PA and TX, was the site of an egregious partisan gerrymandering effort by the GOP during the last round of redistricting.
What is to be done about gerrymandering? The DLC study doesn’t much get into prescriptions, but having spent quite a bit of time on this subject, I can say with some confidence that there ain’t no easy fix. The most common reform, the creation of “independent” redistricting commissions, does directly deal with the conflict of interest involved in state legislators drawing up their own maps. But the record of such commissions on congressional redistricting is mixed at best, tending to produce political compromises more than competitive districts. The problem is that it requires positive action, not just an alleged absence of “partisan politics,” to create a truly competitive map. And indeed, truly competitive schemes often run afoul of “traditional redistricting principles” like compact districts that respect jurisdictional lines as much as gerrymandering does. The fate of competition-focused redistricting ballot initiatives in OH and FL in 2006 (the former was trounced at the polls; the latter succumbed to a constitutional challenge before making it to the ballot) showed the difficulty, both technical and political, of such efforts.
Still, with the next decennial round of redistricting on the near horizon, it’s time to start thinking about redistricting reform in a serious way. And Dunkelman’s study helps establish that this isn’t just some goo-goo issue of interest only to wonks, or inversely, an unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of partisan politics. Gerrymandering, which can roughly be defined as elected officials choosing voters, is an important and corrosive contributor to our country’s dubious record of low voter participation and civic disengagement.

Do read Robert Novak’s column in today’s WaPo which riffs interestingly on Bruce Bartlett’s article “The Rise of the Obamacons” in The New Republic. Novak, Like Bartlett, is mostly concerned about conservatives in leadership positions who have either endorsed Obama or have expressed disappointment with McCain. Novak believes that,

Reports listing additional Obamacons do not add up to tides of conservative Republicans leaving their party… Nevertheless, Obamacons — little and big — are reason for concern by McCain. They also should cause soul-searching at the Bush White House about who made the Republican Party so difficult a place for Republicans to stay.

Novak shares Bartlett’s funny quote from inside-the-beltway supply-sider Larry Hunter:

The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of ‘Weekend With Bernie,’ handcuffed to a corpse.

They said it. We didn’t.
Both writers touch obliquely on a couple of things I have noticed in conversations with conservative acquaintances who have expressed admiration for Obama. First, Obama projects a sense of prudence. He just seems more thoughtful than McCain, who has some of that knee-jerk ideologue quality that defines Bush. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war is based more on a sense of prudence about military entanglements, than pacifist/ideological beliefs, while McCain is more of an ideologue. True conservatives are not big on the notion of elective war, nor on open-ended occupations that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars a week and overextend our military resources to the point where it imperils our military options in crises elsewhere. It’s easier to envision Obama engaging in productive diplomacy than McCain.
The other thing that makes Obama appealing to true conservatives is his flexibility. Obama’s switch in favor of telecom immunity, for example, may anger some of his progressive supporters. But to a conservative, it may show that he is not anti-business and he is open to changing his mind to adapt to new realities. Ditto for his reversed policy on receiving public funds. Yes, Obama has a strong liberal record. But he is not a rigid ideologue. It’s not so easy to say the same for McCain. His flip-flops seem more driven by rank political opportunism than thoughtful ruminations about policy.
I’m not so sure Obamacon opinion leaders are having all that much of an impact. More likely they are a reflection of what is going on in the minds of many conservatives who are troubled by the Bush mess and McCain’s inability to separate himself from it. At the same time, many conservatives are impressed with Obama’s work ethic, management skills, flexibility and refusal to dwell on racial injustice as a central issue. I would expect that Obama will get some of their votes, while others will vote third party or stay at home on election day.

In a New York Times op-ed piece today, Michael Cohen suggests that John McCain may be fatally overplaying his criticisms of Barack Obama’s lack of experience. And he cites a historical analogy that may well be highly relevant:

[B]y continually attacking Mr. Obama’s understanding of policy issues, John McCain runs the risk of actually helping the Democrat neutralize the experience issue. In 1980, supporters of President Jimmy Carter regularly intimated that Ronald Reagan was an intellectual lightweight not to mention a warmonger and a racist. But when the two men debated, and Americans saw that Reagan wasn’t the caricature that he was being presented as, poll numbers showed a huge shift toward the Republican.

I’d go further than Cohen on the Reagan-Obama parallels. Like 1980, this is an election year in which Americans emphatically want change. As in 1980, the “out-party” challenger, who’s carefully identified himself with the case for decisive change, has a relatively low threshold of acceptability to meet. The constant suggestions by McCain and the GOP that Barack Obama couldn’t find his way around a world map should be easy to rebut for a candidate who at his best can match Reagan’s communications skills, while comfortably exceeding the late president’s ability to demonstrate intelligence and a clear grasp of issues.

Time‘s Amy Sullivan has an important article out that illustrates a very specific challenge for the Obama campaign and its supporters: informing pro-choice women that John McCain’s position on the right to choose is one of lock-step agreement with anti-abortion extremists, up to and including constitutional amendments to overturn Roe v. Wade and then to ban virtually all abortions.
She highlights a new poll from NARAL Pro-Choice America:

The NARAL survey found that when pro-choice women are told that McCain believes the Roe v. Wade decision should be overturned, their support for him drops substantially. Among pro-choice independent women, who are already more inclined to back Obama, information about the two candidates’ abortion positions improves Obama’s edge from 53-35 to 66-26, for a net gain of 22 percentage points. Even pro-choice Republican women shift their support after hearing about McCain’s opposition to Roe: 76% initially say they will vote for McCain in November, but that number drops to 63%.

Sullivan explains that holding hard-core anti-abortion views while encouraging the impression of “moderation” on the subject is an old game for GOP presidential candidates, including George W. Bush. One big factor in this game has been the under-the-radar-screen, dog-whistle manner in which Republicans have reassured their culturally conservative base, in contrast to Democrats:

In essence, while the G.O.P. has largely tried to keep its base quietly comforted, Democrats have seemed compelled to make public shows of allegiance to pro-choice activists. The result is that pro-choice voters hear little from Republican candidates to upset them, even as pro-life voters have their differences with the Democratic Party’s abortion stance highlighted for all to see. Not surprisingly, the two approaches show up at the ballot box: in 2000, 38% of Bush’s voters were pro-choice while only 22% of Gore’s were pro-life. Those percentages closed in 2004, but only slightly.

Amy clearly thinks Democrats would be wise to supplement their pro-choice commitments with policy initiatives aimed at reducing abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies, a position identified with Hillary Clinton but not so much with Barack Obama. But in any event, McCain should not be allowed to become yet another stealth anti-abortion candidate who succeeds in having it both ways on this most emotional issue.

Republicans believe they can now make the issue of energy security a winner for them by attacking Obama and Democrats for opposing drilling in environmentally-sensitive areas. In the New York Times political blog The Caucus, Michael Falcone writes about the new GOP meme launched by McCain, labeling Obama the “Dr. No” of energy policy and blasting him for opposing McCain’s proposals for expanded oil exploration, a summer gas tax holiday, more investment in nuclear energy and a $300 million prize to whoever creates a better car battery.
The GOP knows energy security is a potentially lethal issue for them, with gas prices so high and because they have done so little to promote energy independence. So they are following the Karl Rove playbook, which calls for full scale assault on the adversary’s strongest positions. They know that there is a well-documented link between low presidential approval scores and rising gas prices. But the Republicans have also noted a public opinion trend in favor of more oil exploration. An L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll conducted 6/20-23, for example, indicates 55 percent of respondents say drilling for oil in environmentally-important areas should be “allowed with proper controls,” compared to 24 percent opposed.
McCain’s comment that “exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial” provoked an incisive response from Senator Obama:

Psychological impact’?” In case you’re wondering, that’s Washington-speak for ‘It polls well.’ It’s an example of how Washington politicians try to convince you that they did something to make your life better when they really didn’t.

As for McCain’s proposal to have a $300 miliion prize for a scientist who builds a better battery, Obama said:

When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the Moon, he didn’t put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win. He put the full resources of the United States government behind the project.

Of course the cheerleader-in-chief joined the fray in support of McCain, blaming Democrats for high gas prices and calling for more drilling anywhere that even smells like oil. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman nailed him eloquently:

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is…This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who’s done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the E.P.A. today seems to be in a witness-protection program…But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn’t lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America’s energy profile right now — unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow — and create good tech jobs to boot.

Friedman cites the GOP’s obstruction of the renewable erergy reforms as exhibit ‘A’:

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines — because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.
That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans — sorry to say, with the help of John McCain — have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times….That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

The Republicans’ scam to exploit discontent about rising gas prices to undermine the Obama campaign will work only if Dems fail to educate the public about McCain’s and the GOP’s long history of obstructing conservation and renewable energy reforms. Obama is responding well to the latest attacks. What’s needed from now until November is a barrage of Democratic ads that make it clear that (1.) energy independence is a cornerstone of our national security; (2.) that Republicans have failed repeatedly to defend our national interest on this critical issue; and (3.) Obama has the more credible reforms for lasting energy security.

I did something today I almost never do: carefully read a Richard Cohen column. It’s rarely worth the effort, an observation I’d make, out of general civility, about almost no one in print other than the man who’s regularly wasted some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world–A Washington Post column–for decades.
Today Cohen executed an uncharacteristically original stunt, sort of a double-back flip. Clearly stung by a recent James Wolcott Vanity Fair article lampooning him along with David Broder and David Brooks as having a “man-crush” on John McCain, Cohen latest column contains what might initially look like a refreshing acknowledgement that McCain has repudiated much of the record that gained him his (exaggerated) reputation as a “maverick.” But before you could say “false moral equivalency,” Cohen went on to treat Barack Obama’s decision against accepting public financing in the general election as just as large a retreat to “politics as usual” as McCain’s extensive acceptance of the worst of conservative orthodoxy.
And then–here’s the second back-flip–Cohen says McCain can be indulged in his flip-flops, and Obama can’t, because the Republican “paid his dues” as a POW and a political war-horse, while Obama hasn’t done either.
You’d never know from reading Cohen’s shocked account of Obama’s “selfish” abandonment of public financing and his “socialist realist” explanation of same that Obama has already done more to delink big money and special interests from political campaigns than all the campaign finance initiatives ever enacted. Nor does Cohen seem aware that the public, if asked directly, would almost certainly, and by vast margins, prefer Obama’s approach to that of using taxpayer dollars to supplant large contributions. And worse still, Cohen contemptuously rejects the indisputable assertion by Obama that expenditures by “independent” 527 organizations, which McCain is counting on and Obama has of his own initiative shut down, make a mockery of the current campaign finance laws.
By such a wandering course does Richard Cohen wind up where he started: in the tank for John McCain, whose war record and once-upon-a-time, journalist-inflated “maverick” reputation apparently means his actual views and policy agenda for the country don’t much matter. “A presidential race is only incidentally about issues. It’s really about likability and character,” says Cohen breezily. That’s not a terribly surprising assertion coming from a man whose column is only incidentally journalism.

Thomas F. Schaller hosts a Salon roundtable today on “The swing states of 2008.” His guests include pollster Paul Maslin (Dean’s ’04, Richardson ’08), Andres Ramirez, v. p. for Hispanic Programs and director of the Hispanic Strategy Center at NDN; and conservative blogger Ross Douthat, sr. editor at The Atlantic. Their discusssion is largely speculative and the panel is wary of taking early horse-race polls too seriously. But their insights about registration trends in the SW, the candidates’ age difference in PA, the effect of the Democratic Party’s decision on MI delegates, the benefit to McCain from picking Crist or Condi and other topics are informative. One of the things they seem to agree on is that NM is the state most likely to flip to Blue, with NH the best candidate to flip red. But they see VA, IA, PA, MI and FL as very much in play and have a couple of surprises that may be up for grabs.

There was an interesting exchange on ‘Hardball‘ Sunday when host Chris Matthews gave WaPo writer Kathleen Parker a chance to plug her new book, “Save the Males.’ Matthews quoted a couple of lines from Parker’s book to provoke comment:

Bush won the presidency against Al Gore and John Kerry in part because enough Americans considered him to be more manly than his effete opponents. How did a college cheerleader beat two Vietnam vets? Bush oozed regular guyness

Parker, quick to point out that this political insight was a tiny part of her book, added “…I would say that George Bush has probably retired regular guyness in politics for all time.” She then related a discussion she had about the Bobby Jindal phenomenon in Louisiana to illustrate her point, observing of Jindal :

He’s kind of physically slight. He’s of Indian descent. He’s always the smartest guy in the room. And I was interviewing this guy Jack Stephens, he’s the sheriff of St. Bernard’s Parish, very big, 6’5″. All the sheriffs in New Orleans–I mean, in Louisiana, except for seven, are Democrats and yet they shifted to Bobby Jindal. So I said, `How do you explain that? What’s –how do you explain this devotion to this guy?’ And he said, `Well, Katrina taught us that brains matter.’…So I think the new model of masculinity and manliness is going to be the intellectual. And surely that’s going to benefit Obama.

The conversation went downhill from there, with jabber about what constitutes manliness or the perception thereof. Putting the stereotype aside, Jindal may prove to have less to offer in the way of solutions than Parker suggests. But what resonated was the idea that a large number of voters may be sobering up to the need for increased brainpower in the white house. I know, that will happen regardless of who wins, since the bar has been set so low. But, if enough voters are saying to themselves, “Well, the regular guy thing hasn’t worked so well. It’s time to let the better thinkers run the show,” then Parker is right that Obama will have an edge. McCain is no dummy, but his policies are full of holes, and Obama should be able to win the minds, if not hearts, of voters seeking more credible answers than failed neo-con approaches.
As for ‘regular guy-ness,” I think it may be more about class than the manly man thing. Indeed, there are plenty of women who project the quality. The one political gift Bush had, other than a rolodex full of oil barons willing to subsidize his political ambitions, was an ability to mimic regular guy conversation, a skill largely unknown to his two opponents. It’s not about chugging brewskis, munching brats and wearing NASCAR hats on the campaign trail. It’s more about the way they talk. Bush, Gore and Kerry were all preppies from the upper class. Bush was arguably the preppiest of all. But somehow Bush had a better ear for parroting regular guy talk. I don’t know how many votes this is worth. But it doesn’t take many in a close election.
McCain has a preppy background too. But he also has a good ear for regular guy speak. Outside of the military and politics, however, his real-world work experience is very thin, compared to the much younger Obama. Ironically, Obama, who has genuine working-class roots is frequently characterized by pundits as having an aloof Harvardesque demeanor. He could probably warm it up a little, but he seems friendly and real enough. JFK and FDR, both aristocrats, projected both warmth and intellect as well as anyone. It came natural to Bill Clinton, who was raised by a working mom.
The whole ‘regular guy’ notion has always been based more on image or bogus persona, than reality. Blogger mikeplugh said it well in concluding his Kos post “The Myth of the Regular Guy” a couple of months ago:

…there is no such thing as a “regular guy.” The myth of the regular guy sells all of us short. It counts on us all being zombies. It counts on men favoring their more base selves and women favoring their submissive side. Humanity is best for its complexity and we demean our American culture by boiling it down to false choices. Reinforcing these choices by framing our national political discourse as a battle between the regular guy and the elitist intellectual class is a distortion of the truth and robs us all of a deeper vision of who we are and what problems face us as a people. Next time you hear someone playing this “regular guy” game, ask yourself what the truth is. Ask yourself what’s missing in their portrayal of the issues and the culture itself. I’m sure you’ll find it lacking.

If Parker is right, increasing numbers of voters are starting to ask versions of that question, and it should translate into Democratic advantage.

In New York magazine, Sam Anderson offers the first of what will be many, many previews of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. It concludes with this thought:

Convention speeches are by definition conventional: overproduced, stadium-sized, riddled with ritualized applause, cheese-ball taglines, balloon drops, and coded appeals to key demographics. Under the g-forces of so much demographic and institutional pressure, Obama could easily surrender to the occasion and be a little less impressive. His greatest speech, in this situation, might actually be a bad one. But, for a candidate whose entire reputation is built on freshness and change and inspiration, ordinariness could be a death blow. Obama’s only real option here is to find a third way: to fundamentally reimagine the occasion, as he did with the race speech, and blow the roof off the building without scaring anyone inside, to give the soaring speech of his lifetime that somehow doesn’t leave behind anyone on the ground.

Anderson generally suggests that if anyone can pull this off, it’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, “the first candidate in many cycles for whom speeches were not purely formal, schedule-plugging cliché-orgies but potent and densely written tactical weapons—and even occasionally, minor literary achievements.”

If you’re at all confused or in doubt about the anger being expressed towards the Democratic Party and the MSM by some HRC supporters, check out Rebecca Traister’s exhaustive summary at Salon today. She cites twelve specific things these folks–who call themselves PUMAs (an acronym for “Party Unity My Ass”)–are angry about, with particular objects of ire being Keith Olbermann, Howard Dean, and the idea of Barack Obama choosing a female running-mate not named Hillary Clinton.
I found number twelve particularly interesting, having heard it myself from several people unhappy with a post I did a while back arguing that a McCain presidency would be the wrong kind of “punishment” for the Democratic Party’s alleged sins towards HRC and her supporters:

12. And finally, they are angry because they feel they are held hostage by the party by their reproductive organs.
As many people have already observed: What are they going to do, vote for John McCain? No. The truth is, they’re really not. Not if they care about their freedoms to control their own reproductive lives. And they are acutely aware that party leaders know this and that, thus, despite all this anger, Democratic women remain a sure thing.
In a recent New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann, MSNBC chief Phil Griffin described how Clinton voters felt alienated from Olbermann’s anti-Clinton coverage: “He turned out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Exactly. These angry people have nowhere else to go. So the safe expectation is that they will fall in line without much kicking and screaming. And that, ultimately, is why many of them are kicking and screaming. Yes, they’re going to vote for Obama. Of course they’ll vote for him. The truth is, they’ll probably love voting for him. But after what they feel has been done to them — the way in which they were written off, marginalized and resented, their hopes mocked and their history-making ambitions dismissed as retrograde identity politicking — damned if they’re going to be nice girls about it.

So any smug talk that Democrats need not take HRC’s supporters seriously because they’ll “come home” without encouragement delays, at a minimum, the day when that homecoming actually happens.