At the Politico today, Ben Adler has an article assessing the three women (all governors) most frequently mentioned as possible running-mates for Barack Obama: Janet Napolitano of AZ, Kathleen Sebelius of KS, and Claire McCaskill of MO. As the headline and lede suggest, Adler’s hypothesis is that these three women differ from Hillary Clinton in that they are not “polarizing,” as though this is somehow a typical gender problem. That annoying detail aside, the piece is interesting in that Adler chooses to assess the governors through the eyes of Republicans in their states. And while it’s obvious from the tone of their comments that there’s not a lot of genuine bipartisan affection in play in any of the three states, the governors do get high marks from their opponents for having world-class political skills. It’s worth a read.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Senator John McCain’s campaign fairs poorly in CNNPolitics.com‘s story, “GOP strategist: Democrats outmaneuver GOP over GI Bill.” The legislation, which McCain opposed, provides for a modest expansion in benefits for veterans with three years of post 9-11 service.
McCain argued that the bill would reduce military retention by 16 percent and discourage service members from becoming noncommissioned officers. However, GOP strategist and former Mike Huckabee campaign chairman Ed Rollins reportedly said of McCain’s opposition to the bill, which last week passed the U.S. Senate by a hefty 75-22 margin:

I think John McCain has been outmaneuvered…Sometimes in politics, there are intellectual issues and emotional issues…John McCain is going against veterans groups; he is going against a constituency that should be his. … But I think he is on the wrong side of this issue.

As for the political fallout, CNN quotes Rollins:

A lot of Republicans are voting for this, and I think to a certain extent as it moves forward there will be more and more. There will be tremendous pressure from veterans groups past and present and I think you will see a lot of bipartisan support for this as well…Intellectually, John McCain may be right, the president may be right. Emotionally, you are on the wrong side, you can never win an emotional battle in an intellectual argument.

While the occasionally insightful Rollins may have a point about intelllectual arguments rarely winning emotional battles (ala Drew Westen), I have doubts that McCain is on very solid intellectual ground with his argument about the bill hurting military “retention rates” by 16 percent. It just sounds a little too precise. Can any study accurately predict what military personnel will decide to do out of context? If our trained soldiers perceive a real threat to national security, would we really lose 16 percent? With respect to Iraq, on the other hand, we ought to be scaling back a lot more than 16 percent of those soldiers who put in three very tough years, anyway. It seems a lame excuse for opposing a bill that would help America’s veterans.
McCain has tried to distract attention from the issue by bashing Obama for not having served in the military. As for veteran status as a pivotal factor, Rollins points out that “George Bush’s father was a war hero lost the veterans’ vote to Bill Clinton…Same way with Bob Dole, a war hero lost the vote.”
In other words, military service is a significant plus for any political candidate. But it does not necessarily protect a candidate from the consequences of exercizing poor judgment on major issues, especially at a time when the candidate’s political party is having its own very serious problem with “retention rates.”
McCain has an alternative veterans’ benefits bill that would base education benefits on a sliding scale according to an individual’s years of service, and some version of it may eventually pass. His opposition to a military benefits bill supported by 75 Senators nonetheless puts him squarely in league with the out-of-touch Bush-Cheney ideologues who have a tight fist for vets, while squandering billions of taxpayer dollars on military contractors of questionable integrity to prolong a horrific military quagmire, with no end in sight. “Hey, I’m a vet” and even a war hero narrative may have less political resonance in such a context.

This seems to be Jim Webb Week in the political media, in part due to the publication of the Virginia Senator’s new book, A Time To Fight. In my post yesterday reciting the pros and cons of Webb as a potential running-mate for Barack Obama, I mentioned the theory of some that the distinguished historian of the Scots-Irish-American people might help Obama with those Appalachian voters among whom he has famously been trounced by Hillary Clinton in a series of Democratic primaries. This matters because of the political clout of Appalachians in at least four potential general-election battleground states (OH, PA, WV and VA).
I thought it might be useful to examine Webb’s own electoral pull among Appalachian voters in his one electoral contest, his narrow victory over George Allen in 2006. And as I suspected, Webb didn’t do that well among his Scots-Irish lundsmen, winning mainly due to his electoral strength in urban Virginia and the Northern Virginia suburbs.
It’s particularly interesting to compare Webb’s electoral profile in Appalachia to that of the previous two successful Democratic statewide candidates, Mark Warner (a WASPY neoliberal gazillionaire from NoVa), and Tim Kaine (a Catholic civil rights lawyer from Richmond). Here are links to county-by-county maps (with clickable popular vote numbers and percentages) for Warner in 2001, Kaine in 2005, and Webb in 2006.
Webb did a bit better than Kaine in Appalachia, winning five counties to Kaine’s four, and running slightly ahead of him in several other counties. But that differential must be offset by the fact that Kaine was running against a Republican (Jerry “No Relation” Kilgore) whose electoral base was in SW Virginia.
Moreover, Webb’s peformance lagged far behind that of Mark Warner, who (astonishingly) actually carried SW Virginia in a key component of his statewide win over Jim Gilmore (the man he also faces in this year’s Senate contest).
Now personallly, it comes as no surprise to me that Jim Webb’s strong personal identification with the Scots-Irish heritage didn’t pull a lot of votes. The Scots-Irish are probably this country’s least self-conscious identifiable ethnic group. As it happens, my own background is pretty similar to Webb’s, and I can tell you that none of my extended family have any idea that they are Scots-Irish. Yes, in Appalachia proper, a lot of people self-identify as “mountain folk” or even “hillbillies,” but most have little more than a dim idea that many of their ancestors were lowland Scots who spent a century or two doing England’s dirty work in Northern Ireland, before emigrating to America through Pennsylvania and scattering down through the mountain passes southward and westward. And in the vast Scots-Irish diaspora that stretches from the uplands of South Carolina across the continent to central and southern California, those with any self-conscious identity at all are much more likely to think of themselves as “crackers” or “peckerwoods” or “Okies” than as the subjects of Jim Webb’s loving literary attentions.
But what impresses me most about the Virginia electoral numbers above isn’t Jim Webb’s relative weakness in Appalachia, but Mark Warner’s overwhelming strength in a region where he had no natural advantages. Outside Virginia, Warner’s 2001 rural voter coup was almost invariably attributed (with a lot of encouragement from the celebrity redneck strategist Mudcat Sanders) to cultural “cues”‘ like his sponsorship of a NASCAR entry, his bluegrass campaign song, and those “Sportsmen For Warner” signs that sprouted up far off the interstates. As a resident of rural Virginia in 2001, my own very strong impression is that the cultural stuff kept the door open for Warner, but he sealed the deal with a fiscal and economic message that appealed to people who felt left behind by the go-go economy of the 1990s, and ignored by the politicians in Richmond. People, in other words, a lot like those Appalachian voters who are up for grabs in the 2008 presidential election.
What you say to Appalachians, in other words, may matter as much or more than who you are–a lesson taught by Warner, and for that matter, by Hillary Clinton, the Seven-Sisters-Educated feminist daughter of suburban Chicago, who has done pretty well among mountain folk this year. And in the end, that’s good news for Barack Obama, who ought to be able–with or without Jim Webb’s help–to articulate an economic message more appealing to the forgotten people of the uplands than anything John McCain can muster.

The always-interesting Mark Schmitt has penned a fine essay for The American Prospect on the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary conservatism, and the strong likelihood that the Republican Party is about to enter a period of significant decline, until such time as it can generate new ideas and leaders.
Unlike Mark, I haven’t had the time or patience to slog through the raft of recent books on the future of conservatism, so I’ll take his word for it that would-be conservative “reformers” like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, David Frum and Mickey Edwards haven’t come up with anything revolutionary, and that Republican politicians and “base” voters aren’t willing to embrace much change in any event.
But Mark makes an observation about the current Republican Party and the McCain campaign that is spot-on and very important: given the discredited nature of such conservative ideological frameworks as supply-side economics and neocon foreign policy, and in the absence of anything that could be described as “McCainism,” the GOP this year is being driven to a primal, bare-bones appeal to “American identity.”

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus “pluribus,” unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain’s slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn’t salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else–ideas, competence, governance–is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, “The American President Americans Are Waiting For.”

Mark doesn’t come out and say it, but he’s explained why the McCain campaign is almost certain to be one of the most negative and nasty in living memory, despite McCain’s alleged “centrism.” Theoretically, an “American identity” campaign could be unifying, uplifting, and communitarian in tone. But that’s Barack Obama’s theme, not John McCain’s. And in the current political climate, and for a candidate of the Right, an “American identity” appeal is bound to be exclusive, fearful and even vengeful. McCain really has no other option.
Think about it. McCain’s war record, “character,” and occasional exercises in “independence” might be enough to get him over the hump in an election year where Americans really wanted a Republican president, though perhaps one not named “Bush.” But that’s obviously not how 2008 is shaping up. McCain isn’t going to win the presidency with his foreign policy views. Given how terribly out of alignment he is with public opinion on Iraq, the amazing thing is that he’s doing as well as he is in assessments of him as a commander-in-chief; the numbers are unlikely to improve the more voters get to know McCain’s essentially neocon position on foreign policy.
On domestic issues, McCain at best offers a slightly sanitized version of Bush-era conservatism: he doesn’t like pork-barrel spending and torture; isn’t a global-warming denier; and doesn’t strike anyone as the kind of man who will wake up every morning in the White House scheming to criminalize abortion or demonize gays and lesbians. That’s not a lot of “change.” As for McCain’s reputation for bipartisanship, there’s not much left there these days beyond the echo chamber he shares with Democratic apostate Joe Lieberman.
So like it or not, John McCain is going to be relentlessly driven in the direction of a negative effort to make the contest about his Democratic opponent rather than his own or his party’s merits, and in Barack Obama, he’s got an opponent tailor-made for a gutter campaign aimed at convincing swing voters that he simply represents too much change, and too much risk, in the very visceral sense of embodying so many unfamiliar things.
There’s a pretty clear historical precedent for the strategy that McCain is likely to pursue: Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign. Carter faced a political landscape just as forbidding as McCain’s today: a weak economy, plunging U.S. strength and prestige around the world, an exceptionally sour public mood, and a restless and uninspired party “base.” Unsurprisingly, Carter staked his re-election on an effort to make the contest a referendum on all the doubts and fears raised by Ronald Reagan. His Convention Acceptance speech was built on the theme of “The Two Futures,” a forthright appeal to voters to forget about the previous four years and focus on the scary prospects of a Reagan presidency. That was also Carter’s approach in the one 1980 presidential debate, in which his “two futures” argument was decisively trumped by Reagan’s simple “are you better off?” formulation of the case for change.
Perhaps John McCain is in a better position than the 1980 incumbent Carter to offer a minimum case that he represents some degree of “change,” but the odds are that his candidacy will depend on doing a better job than Carter at frightening voters about his opponent. So buckle in for a tough, unsavory GOP campaign, sports fans. When you’re wrong on the issues, your party and ideology have been discredited, and the whole sweep of history seems to conspire against you, dragging the campaign deep into the mud may be the only option left.

Can anyone recall a presidential election cycle in which there has been so much speculation and argument about Veep choices so very early? The only one that comes to mind is 1964, when LBJ conducted a very extended and very public “search” for a running-mate that seemed to include virtually every Democratic elected official in the country.
There are obvious reasons for this Veep-o-mania. On the Republican side, John McCain’s age, and his less-than-perfect relationship with the GOP’s dominant conservative wing, have made his choice of running-mate a very big deal, leading to a common assumption (which I share) that conservatives will enjoy an implicit veto over the decision.
On the Democratic side, early Veep speculation has been spurred by perceptions that the long nomination contest has divided the party, and that Barack Obama has some very specific weaknesses in his biography and his electoral appeal that a running-mate might help address. Moreover, the idea that he could heal the intraparty wounds and broaden his appeal by forming a “Unity Ticket” with Hillary Clinton has acceletated the discussion, since there’s some sense that an early move in that direction by Obama might bring Clinton’s challenge to a decisive and amicable end.
In any event, we are beginning to hear the opening salvoes of the argument over a prospective Obama running-mate, beyond the strong negative reaction of many Obama supporters and progressive pundits to the Unity Ticket talk. And it’s not surprising that the name of Virginia Sen. Jim Webb is already arousing some very passionate pro and con feelings.
A lot of this sentiment hasn’t quite gone public yet, but there’s a sizable group of progressive activists and bloggers who viscerally identify with Webb’s staunch opposition to the Iraq War, his high-octane brand of economic populism, and (I might as well come out and say it, since Webb’s most avid promoters are almost invariably male) his testosterone-heavy approach to politics generally.
On a more rational level, at a time when there’s a lot of disagreement about what Obama most needs in a running-mate, Webb is rivalled only by Bill Richardson in the number of “boxes” his potential candidacy would check.
As a war hero and former Secretary of the Navy, Webb abundantly possesses the national security credentials that–on paper at least–Obama largely lacks.
He’s from a medium-sized red state that most Democrats consider potentially winnable.
As a former Republican, Webb could shore up Obama’s once-formidable and now-vulnerable ability to reach out to disaffected GOPers and GOP-leaning independents.
And Webb is the distinguished expert on and personal embodiment of a particular demographic group–the Scotch-Irish Americans who populated Appalachia and eventually migrated through the South and all the way to California–among whom Obama has done especially poorly in the Democratic primaries.
There are a few other factors that Webb boosters sometimes cite in his favor. One is his stellar performance delivering the 2007 Democratic response to Bush’s State of the Union Address, often contrasted with the understated effort this year by Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a frequently-mentioned Veep possibility for Obama. And another is the talent for expression Webb has evidenced in his long literary career in fiction and nonfiction works, most recently his well-timed new book, A Time to Fight, which lays out a comprehensive agenda for the Democratic Party and the country.
But the case for Webb as Veep (even if he wants the gig, which is not at all clear from his recent comments on the subject) is by no means going to go unchallenged, as shown by a guest post today on Matt Yglesias’ site by feminist blogger Kathy G., who deems Webb “unacceptable.”
Kathy G. devotes some attention to disputing the positive case for Webb. She cites his relatively poor performance among white voters in VA in 2006, in a strong Democratic year against a wounded Republican incumbent; and his reputation as an indifferent campaigner and a difficult person generally. She also examines the downside of Webb’s ex-Republican status, including his past support for Republican candidates and policy positions, and his very recent endorsement of conservative revisionist theories about the Vietnam War.
But the heart of her post, in an exposition that we will hear again and again if Webb gets “short-listed” by Obama for the Veep position, is about Webb’s history on gender issues, dating all the way back to a highly controversial 1979 magazine piece in which the future Secretary of the Navy denounced the admission of women to the military academies, and opposed any consideration of allowing them anywhere near combat.
Webb, says Kathy G., became an enabler of all sorts of torments aimed at women in the military:

Webb’s writings on women did a hell of a lot of damage. It gave invaluable ammunition to the enemies of women’s presence in the military and helped stall and perhaps even roll back women’s progress there. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 academy graduate who went on to become a commander in the Navy, said of Webb’s screed: “This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us.”

And Webb’s controversial utterances about women in the military didn’t abate much later on.

At a 1991 convention of naval aviators called Tailhook, 83 women were reported to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by military personnel. From the beginning, Webb’s concern for the victims was merely perfunctory. But he gave many speeches and wrote many articles vociferously defending the accused. In a 1992 article in the New York Times, he called the investigation of Tailhook a “witch hunt.” In a 1997 article he wrote for the conservative Weekly Standard, he was highly critical of what he termed “ever-expanding sexual mixing” in the military and he referred to feminist efforts to improve the status of women in the military as merely “salving the egos of a group of never-satisfied social engineers.”

In a preliminary and atypically defensive response to Kathy G. today, pro-Webb blogger Spencer Ackerman cites some examples of how Webb promoted significant if non-combat assignments for women as Secretary of the Navy. But it’s still a problematic record, particularly, as Kathy G. notes, when it comes to the impact of a Webb Veep nomination on pro-Hillary Clinton women:

[I]n practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I’m not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I’m not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.
But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn’t win. But for Obama to choose — out of all the well-qualified candidates out there — the one person who has a really awful record on gender issues would be like rubbing salt in the wound. It would be seen as a big “screw you” to Hillary’s supporters and to feminists in general.

That’s the really key argument that stands in the way of a prospective Obama-Webb ticket.
And more generally, the passionate arguments for and against Jim Webb as Veep show that rejecting the Unity Ticket won’t take Barack Obama out of the thick woods on this issue. One of the main reasons I eventually came around to Unity Ticket advocacy, despite serious misgivings, is that there’s really no obvious alternative that doesn’t raise a lot of questions as well, without the upside of a quick resolution of the nominating contest and a balm on the wounds it created. Maybe the whole subject of the vice-presidential nomination is being overrated as a factor in the general election. But no matter: among the chattering classes at least, it’s going to hang fire for quite a while.

It’s safe to say that no subject has preoccupied political analysts over the last month or so than the relative support levels of Barack Obama among white working-class voters in the late Democratic primaries.
But in yesterday’s New York Times, John Harwood reports on a discussion with TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira that places this issue in a broader and calmer perspective.

Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic analyst of voting trends, wrote the book on the core issue in the endgame of the party’s nomination fight. Its title is “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.”
One might conclude that Mr. Teixeira is troubled by Senator Barack Obama’s performance in recent primaries against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton among the voters known by nicknames like Joe Sixpack or Nascar Dad or Waitress Mom.
Actually, he is not.
Mr. Obama, who leads the delegate count, “is clocking in where he needs to be” with white, working-class voters to win the White House in November, Mr. Teixeira said.

What about the argument, emanating from both the Clinton campaign and from many Republicans, that her solid advantage over Obama among non-college educated white voters spells disaster for Obama in a general election?

Mr. Teixeira, who is not backing either candidate, does not buy that argument. He dismisses intraparty contests as “pretty poor evidence” of whether Mr. Obama, as the Democratic nominee, could attract the blue-collar support he would need against Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.
And how much blue-collar support would Mr. Obama need? Not a majority, said Mr. Teixeira. Though blue-collar Democrats once represented a centerpiece of the New Deal coalition, they have shrunk as a proportion of the information age-economy and as a proportion of the Democratic base.
Al Gore lost working-class white voters by 17 percentage points in 2000, even while winning the national popular vote. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts lost them by 23 points in 2004, while running within three points of President Bush over all. Mr. Teixeira suggests that Mr. Obama can win the presidency if he comes within 10 to 12 percentage points of Mr. McCain with these voters, as Democratic candidates for the House did in the 2006 midterm election.
In recent national polls, that is exactly what Mr. Obama is doing.

And that’s actually a bit comforting, given the relatively early stage of the electoral cycle, and the proximity of a big media frenzy over remarks made by Jeremiah Wright.

Mr. Teixeira argues that Mr. Obama’s standing with working-class whites may be artificially low in the wake of his skirmishing with Mrs. Clinton and the controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
“Yes, he has a problem,” Mr. Teixeira said. “But it’s a solvable problem.”

So going by “the book”–Ruy Teixeira’s cutting-edge analysis of demographic trends in the electorate–it’s no time for panic about Obama and the White Working Class, and there’s plenty of time for the likely Democratic nominee to build a winning coalition.

Political Animal‘s Neil Sinhababu spotlights Nick Beaudrot’s Cogitamus posts featuring demographic analysis for assessing Obama’s perfomance in key GOP-held districts and Dems’ chances for winning those districts in November, both open seats and those with incumbents running. Beaudrot has confidence in Obama’s coattails and sees more than two dozen Dem pick-ups as a good bet. As Sinhababu explains of Beaudrot’s methodology:

The thinking is that demographics predict Obama’s performance…and Obama’s performance serves as a rough proxy for how Democrats will do this time around. It’s a neat way to identify races that may become unexpectedly competitive with Obama at the top of the ticket.
So if you’re represented by a Republican in the House, take a look at the spreadsheets (embedded into the page by the magic of Google Docs) and take a look at how the demographics project Obama’s performance, and how winnable your district is. We’ve won three straight special elections in places where Democrats don’t usually win, so it’s a good year to go after the local GOP congressman.

A lot of assumptions undergird Beaudrot’s model, but they are not out of line with recent polls. This could be a helpful tool for DNC/DCCC resources allocation.

Trial heats with prospective veeps probably don’t mean too much at this stage. But just for fun, check out SurveyUSA‘s horserace-with-various-veeps chart for swing-state Ohio (flagged by leftcoaster Steve Soto). The chart’s list is a little too short — OH Gov. Ted Stickland is not on it, maybe because he has sort of dissed the idea, albeit with a good sense of humor. But one former Dem candidate smokes the admittedly limited competition. NYT pundit David Brooks, on the other hand, would not be pleased by the performance of one of his GOP shortlisters, MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Each Memorial Day, you hear a lot of earnest and sometimes angry talk about the debasement of this holiday into a mere long weekend devoted to beaches, barbecues, sporting events, and celebration of the onset of of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. (Indeed, at church yesterday I listened to a sermon dedicated to this very theme).
But if you listen carefully to these complaints, there are two very distinct ideas about the “true meaning” of Memorial Day that emerge (try googling “true meaning Memorial Day” and you’ll see what I mean). The first is about remembering the dead, most generally, and more specifically recalling in somber detail the sacrifices of those who died in the service of our country. The second is about honoring that service by exalting its purpose, making Memorial Day a patriotic holiday dedicated to retroactive and prospective dedication of Americans to the justice and selflessness associated with this country at war.
This second idea is inevitably political, particularly at a time when young Americans are being exposed to death each day in a very unpopular “war of choice.” Sure, there are some antiwar folk who encourage an examination of patriotic ideology on days like Memorial Day in the hopes that America will “live up” to the principles it proclaims. But far more common are conservative excoriations of those who out of malice or ignorance fail to endorse the unique and universal benevolence that characterizes each resort to arms by the United States.
Consider this excerpt from a long Memorial Day piece at National Review Online by Mackubin Thomas Owens:

[W]hile the individual soldier may focus on the particulars of combat, Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view, giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted of some but offered by all, not only acknowledging and remembering the sacrifice, but validating it.
In the history of the world, many good soldiers have died bravely and honorably for bad or unjust causes. Americans are fortunate in that we have been given a way of avoiding this situation by linking the sacrifice of our soldiers to the meaning of the nation. At the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln fleshed out the understanding of what he called in his First Inaugural Address, the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gives universal meaning to the particular deaths that occurred on that hallowed ground, thus allowing us to understand Memorial Day in the light of the Fourth of July, to comprehend the honorable end of the soldiers in the light of the glorious beginning and purpose of the nation. The deaths of the soldiers at Gettysburg, of those who died during the Civil War as a whole, and indeed of those who have fallen in all the wars of America, are validated by reference to the nation and its founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

According to this point of view, you can’t honor fallen servicemen and servicewomen without honoring the specific and general causes for which they were thrown into battle. And it’s no surprise that those who maintain this point of view also believe that you can’t “support the troops” in Iraq without supporting the justice and necessity of the war itself, and its past and present conduct by the current administration in Washington.
This is an understandable if very dangerous emotion. No one is happy to acknowledge the possibility that they, or their loved ones, or for that matter, their fellow-citizens, are walking in the valley of the shadow of death “in vain” (as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address) or “for a mistake” (as John Kerry put it in his Senate testimony for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War). Owens is a Vietnam Vet, and he makes plain his opinion that the dishonoring of American war dead began with the anti-Vietnam War movement:

The posture Americans took toward Memorial Day started to go awry with Vietnam. The press, if not the American people, began to treat soldiers as moral monsters, victims, or both. The “dysfunctional Vietnam vet” became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war. Thanks to the press’s preoccupation with the anomaly of My Lai, Lt. William Calley became the poster boy for Vietnam. The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.

Owens’ citation of My Lai and Calley is interesting. I don’t know how Calley was regarded by his former brothers-in-arms fighting in Vietnam, but in Georgia, where I was growing up at the time, he was turned into a hero–a “poster boy for Vietnam” among war supporters. “Ralleys for Calley” were held all over the state (and the country). After Richard Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence for violating military law, he adopted Columbus, Georgia, as his new home town, and was soon appearing in ads for a car dealer. Sure, some Calley supporters considered him a “scapegoat” who was being punished for the sins of higher-ups (the ex post facto rationalization that Jimmy Carter offered for his pronouncement encouraging Georgians to turn on their headlights for a day to show support for the convicted mass murderer). But what I heard most often was a very different conviction: Calley was an honorable soldier doing the dirty work that most Americans didn’t want to think about, in a war against a savage opponent who deployed women and children to kill GIs–a war that all Americans were honor-bound to support in its most horrifying moments. That was certainly the sentiment conveyed by the 1971 pop song “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley,” which won vast radio airplay and sold 300,000 copies in the three days after its release:

While we’re fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street
While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat
While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat–
as we go marching on….
When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun
And the great commander asks me, “Did you fight or did you run?”
I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun
And this is what I’ll say:
Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could
It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good
Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood

With all due respect to Mackubin Thomas Owens, this is the moral hazard invited by those who insist all of America’s wars have been sacrifices on the altar of freedom and democracy, or who treat dissenters against war policies as unpatriotic. Was “the press” really more responsible for the mixed legacy of the Vietnam War than an administration that cynically kept the war going for political purposes years after Richard Nixon had privately admitted it was lost?
And in truth, the necessity of honoring the troops while denying the perfect justice of The Cause didn’t begin with Vietnam. As Owen notes at the very beginning of his article, Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) began as a partisan commemoration in the northern states of the sacrifices made by Union troops in suppression of “the late rebellion” (i.e., the Confederacy). That’s why a parallel system of Confederate Memorial Days quickly developed in the South, which, following Owens’ own logic, were devoted more to celebration of the Lost Cause than to the individual sacrifices of Confederate troops and their families. Well into my own lifetime, Confederal Memorial Day was the occasion for an annual exercise in regional defiance, self-pity and rationalization, which whitewashed “the rebellion” as being “about” states rights, the agrarian lifestyle, neoclassical culture, the Cavalier tradition–indeed, everything other than human bondage and the refusal to even coexist with Americans who wanted to prevent its extension to new territories.
So put me firmly in that first camp of those who feel strongly that Memorial Day should be a day of remembrance devoted to respectful contemplation of sacrifice in national service, not a political holiday aimed at national self-congratulation or the vengeful settling of scores with those who fail to “support the troops” by supporting the policies of men like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. In this era of an all-volunteer military and of “preemptive wars” that most of us follow on television, it is very important for those of us who haven’t risked death or injury to take some time to understand the horrors of war–the fear not just of death but of leaving families behind to fend for themselves, the randomness of the Grim Reaper in choosing his victims in modern warfare, and the courage of troops who not only defy death, but the temptations of indiscriminate total war to which William Calley (for whatever reason) succumbed. I do agree with Owens that all Americans should acknowledge and take pride in the distinguished traditions that have led many millions of Americans in uniform to increase their own odds of death or defeat by observing limitations on the scope of violence in war. But that’s all the more reason that we should resist the idea of extending to warmakers the Memorial Day remembrances we owe to warriors.
For our much-blessed country, war is occasionally necessary, sometimes preferable to the alternatives, but usually represents a failure of statecraft and the structures of peace, stability and collective security that American men and women in uniform have in recent decades defended as much as the homeland itself. On Memorial Day, we should be reminded not only of the wealth and leisure and safety we owe to those who served, but also of the terrible price that some Americans have paid for our occasional failure to give our brave troops the leadership they deserve.

A pet peeve of mine is the tendency of some political observers to dismiss adverse public opinion data as “meaningless” because it’s not reliably predictive. Recently I attended a political panel in which two speakers were harping on primary exit poll numbers about potential “white-working-class” defections to John McCain if Obama is the nominee, and also stressing the Jeremiah Wright saga as a huge general-election problem for Obama. I asked them how they squared this belief with general election polls showing (1) Obama generally running ahead of McCain; (2) Obama generally running even or close with McCain among white voters; and (3) little evidence that voters cared that much about Wright. Both speakers responded by saying that general election polls this far out from November were “meaningless.”
This point of view is even more prevelent when it comes to state-by-state general election polls. That’s why I was interested in Brendan Nyan’s recent post summarizing the research on state-by-state polls in 2004, which suggested they are not precise when it comes to predicting close states, but are otherwise pretty much spot-on in terms of broader results.
And that, folks, means they are not “meaningless.”