Brave New Films has produced a must-see video-clip at therealmccain.com, depicting John McCain’s amazing record of flip-flops on key issues and shattering his “straight talk” image. Viewers are left with the indelible impression that this guy will say anything to get elected, and thinks nothing of contradicting himself within seconds. The flick has gone viral and reached #1 in YouTube’s “News & Politics” category, and has elicited more than 600 reader comments at the website thus far.
In addition to the devastating main feature, the website also presents a collection of video clips of McCain’s ‘greatest hits,’ including “Bomb, Bomb Iran” and spotlighting his cozy relationships with fat cat lobbyists and his failure to support educational benefits for vets.

Having gone out on a shaky limb to endorse the idea of an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket,” I will hasten to raise objections to the very different idea of a “unity ticket” between Obama and a non-Democrat.
This idea was raised most recently by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who argues that Obama’s post-partisan campaign pitch can best gain credibility through a ticket that includes Chuck Hagel or Mike Bloomberg.
Ignatius clearly doesn’t understand that Obama’s own “unity” message is about mobilizing voters across party lines to demand change, and then to extend to Republicans in Washington an iron fist/velvet glove proposition, offering political cover for cooperation and threatening retribution for obstruction. It’s not about organizing some big barbecue of Democratic and Republican solons and striking split-the-difference compromises on legislation. To put it another way, Obama has embraced High Broderist goals, but not High Broderist methods, when it comes to bipartisanship.
Sure, you can make the argument that putting a Republican like Hagel or an ex-Republican like Bloomberg on the ticket would resonate with those non-Democratic voters Obama really does want to reach. But these names don’t necessarily perform magic outside Nebraska, which Obama can’t win, and New York, which Obama can’t lose. And such a gesture would legitimately honk off a lot of Democrats, who figure that an all-Democratic ticket ought to be able to win in a strongly pro-Democratic election year.
To be crassly political about it, there’s no percentage in excessively angering the Democratic base with a vice-presidential choice unless it’s a clear game-changer. Had John Kerry convinced John McCain to leave the GOP and run with him in 2004, the step would have produced a king-hell backlash from Democratic activists, particularly those in the labor and feminist movements. But arguably, it would have pretty much ended the general election in Kerry’s favor, and victory, like love, covers a multitude of sins. None of the names being kicked around by people like Ignatius have anything like the electoral clout that McCain might have had four years ago. Sure, Bloomberg has an incredible amount of personal wealth, but money isn’t exactly Barack Obama’s biggest handicap in a general election.
The odd thing I can tell you about from personal conversations with Obama supporters after my Obama-Clinton pitch is that a lot of the same people who would seriously consider hara-kiri if HRC’s on the ticket seem entirely open to a non-Democratic running-mate. And some of these same people dislike the Clintons in the first place because of their supposed lack of loyalty to the Democratic Party and its principles.
For all the legitimate objections to an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket,” it would be decidedly strange if a coalition of Beltway Bipartisans and lefty Obama-ites convinced the putative nominee to diss Democratic unity in favor of a “unity ticket” that compromised Obama’s case for progressive change, without a whole lot of return on a questionable investment.

MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer flags a Poblano post discussing a scenario in which, Nebraska, as one of two states (yes, Maine is the other) that do not have the anti-democratic winner-take-all system of allocating electoral votes, could actually cast the decisive electoral vote that puts Obama in the White House.
It’s an unlikely scenario, admittedly, since Dems haven’t won a Nebraska electoral vote since LBJ. But it is not an implausible one. Although McCain is up 11 points state-wide in a new Rasmussen poll, Poblano and Singer crunch the poll numbers, including the 2004 election data, and see Obama running close to even in NE’s 2nd district (Omaha), with an outside chance to take NE-1 (Eastern Nebraska). Poblano then plugs these potential wins into one plausible scenario, and voila, Nebraska is a king-maker.
In any event, hats off to Nebraska and Maine for rejecting the winner-take-all electoral votes system — which ought to be a high priority for democracy-loving state legislatures everywhere. Plaudits to NE, also, for their unicameral state legislature, arguably more democratic with a small “d.” Now, if Nebraskans will just vote right in November…
Photo Alert: Campaign ’08 is not likely to produce more glorious photographs from a Democratic perspective than the shots of the huge Obama rally (75K) at Portland’s gorgeous Waterfront Park (See here, here and here.).

There’s a front-page story by Krissah Williams in today’s Washington Post that focuses on Democratic women who say they’d rather see John McCain become president than vote for Barack Obama, mainly due to anger over perceived insults to Hillary Clinton during the nominating process.
Any of you who happen to fall into the category of feminists-for-McCain should give a gander to a new article by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker slicing and dicing a recent speech by the putative Republican nominee that represented an extended dog whistle to anti-choicers and other cultural conservatives regarding judicial appointments.
Toobin begins by noting that McCain’s May 6 speech at Wake Forest University was timed to draw extremely limited attention from the news media and the public at large. Moreover, Mr. Straight Talk’s pithy remarks were loaded with code language explicable only to lawyers and to conservatives obsessed with the supposed liberal conspiracy to use the courts to destroy faith, family and country. Aside from the usual stuff about “activist judges” and “separation of powers” (the latter being pretty rich at a time when the primary threat to the separation of powers is coming from the Bush administration), you’ve got an oblique reference to a Supreme Court decision that laid the constitutional groundwork for Roe v. Wade, and another oblique reference to an opinion by Justice Kennedy that conservatives love to cite as evidence that the Court is determined to extinguish U.S. sovereignty.
Here’s the money quote from Toobin:

Might [McCain] really be a “maverick” when it comes to the Supreme Court? The answer, almost certainly, is no. The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement. With the general election in mind, McCain had to express himself with such elaborate circumlocution because he knows that the constituency for such far-reaching change in our constellation of rights is small, and may be shrinking. In 2004, to stoke turnout among conservatives, Karl Rove engineered the addition of anti-gay-marriage voter initiatives to the ballots in Ohio and other states; last week, though, when the California Supreme Court voted to allow gay marriage in that state, only hard-core activists were able to muster much outrage. When it comes to the Constitution, McCain is on the wrong side of the voters, and of history; thus, his obfuscations.

It’s been obvious for a while that John McCain’s presidential ambitions depend on maintaining the exaggerated and ephemeral reputation for “moderation” and “independence” bestowed on him by the news media in 2000, while quietly reassuring conservative activists that he’s their man. That’s why exposing the dishonesty and implicit extremism of McCain maneuvers like his Wake Forest speech are important. And it’s also why Hillary Clinton supporters who think it makes sense to help McCain become president are actually in danger of betraying everything the New York Senator stands for.

Print Version
To summarize the argument thus far:
There is an important “pro-military, but anti-Bush’s war” voter group. Winning their vote is critical for Democratic candidates at every level of the 2008 election.
To win the support of these voters Democrats need do three things:

1. Democrats must demonstrate to these “pro-military” voters that they sincerely honor and respect the value system of the American military.
2. Democrats must distinguish and clarify to these voters that they completely support what most members of the armed forces see as their basic mission – protecting America from another terrorist attack. They must make clear that this is emphatically not the issue on which Democrats and Republicans disagree.
3. Democrats must learn how to express their ideas in the language and framework of military strategy – to win the debate with the Republicans within the “strategic” conceptual framework in which “pro-military” voters want policies regarding Iraq to be discussed.

In previous sections three basic ideas about America’s military strategy in Iraq have been presented.

1. That the conflict in Iraq is now a full-scale civil war, not an insurgency
2. That in many civil wars. short-term cease fires often just temporarily postpone deeply-rooted religious and ethnic conflict – and even make the ultimate violence even worse
3. That “staying the course” or “finishing the job” in Iraq implies not only refereeing the bitter civil war for many years but also profoundly changing the nation’s society and culture. These are objectives that will require long years, more soldiers, constant casualties and that – without using brutality, reprisals and direct US military rule – probably still will not be achieved.

Many “pro-military, anti-Bush’s war ” voters have already reached some version of these key conclusions by themselves, based on their own common sense and their daily observation of the news on TV. This is what underlies their view that (1) “the surge was a mistake”, (2) that Bush’s policies have “undermined America’s security” and (3) that we should “reduce the number of troops”.
So how can Democrats present speak to these voters — offering them an approach expressed in the language and conceptual framework of military strategy?
Most pro-military Americans will agree that there are three basic things any politician owes to the American people — and even more to the men and women of the armed forces themselves — before he or she proposes to send or keep American troops in combat.

1.A clearly defined mission and objectives
2. Sufficient resources to do the job
3. An explicit exit strategy

Most Americans, whether pro-military or not, will agree that if a politician cannot or will not provide these three things, he or she simply does not deserve the support of the American people.
Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Read more…

If you like insider accounts of political campaigns, you’ll probably love Michelle Cottle’s latest TNR report on her soundings of Hillary Clinton staffers about “what went wrong.” What’s remarkable about this article is how little agreement there appears to be among folks “on the inside.” There’s a fair amount of anger expressed towards former chief strategist Mark Penn and former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle (which you’d expect, since they were the people in charge of message and organization, respectively, during HRC’s fall from inevitability to second place), but beyond that, the explanations of “what went wrong” are all over the place.
This analytical disarray may just reflect the small and probably random sample of HRC staffers willing to talk to Cottle, even on a strictly off-the-record basis. But another factor is probably in play: the natural human tendency to play what-if, and attribute political setbacks to correctable internal “mistakes” rather than uncontrollable external forces.
What’s largely missing from the insider accounts quoted by Cottle is a recognition that Barack Obama’s campaign surprised virtually everybody in politics. It’s hard to remember this, but there was an extended period a few months after Obama entered the race when the CW was that he was a flavor-of-the-month who had created some excitement but was rapidly losing steam against the powerful, disciplined Clinton Machine. One of the post-mortems quoted by Cottle suggests that HRC’s big mistake was in not going nastily negative on Obama from the get-go. But that’s pure hindsight: a negative campaign made no sense for a candidate with Clinton’s poll standings and resources prior to Iowa, a state whose Democratic caucus-goers are notoriously averse to intraparty attacks. And after Iowa, when it became obvious that Obama’s was generating previously unimaginable numbers of volunteers and cash, and building a never-seen-before electoral coalition, Clinton’s campaign was already in desperate survival mode. Another little fact that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that a couple of days before the NH primary, the chattering classes were busy writing HRC’s political obituary, in anticipation of a blowout Obama victory that would have nailed down the nomination then and there.
Perhaps the Obama phenomenon was predictable, but not many political experts actually predicted it in any detail. (I certainly include myself in this assessment; the only aspect of Obama-mania I anticipated was the rapid and massive shift of African-American support to him after Iowa). So it’s a little strange that so many people inside and outside the Clinton campaign are so sure her initial strategy should have been based on improbable developments instead of the lay of the land as it first appeared. Sure, the acid test for any political campaign is the ability to adjust to the unforeseen, but given HRC’s success in avoiding electoral extinction again and again during the primaries, you have to admit she showed some deft footwork.
The bottom line is that “what went wrong” with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the emergence of a once-in-a-lifetime politician whose particular assets made him very nearly unbeatable once he established himself as a viable candidate. Here’s hoping that John McCain’s brain trust goes with a high-percentage game plan like HRC’s, and underestimates Barack Obama’s ability to change the rules.

Adam Nossiter and Janny Scott have an important New York Times article “In the South, a Force to Challenge the G.O.P.” The authors are primarily interested in the how the historically high turnout of African American voters in the south will help Obama’s chances, and they have this to say about his influence in the primaries thus far:

…turnout in Democratic primaries this year has substantially exceeded Republican turnout in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia…Some analysts suggest that North Carolina and Virginia may even be within reach for the Democratic nominee, and they point to the surprising result in a Congressional special election in Mississippi this week as an indicator of things to come.

Scott and Nossiter note that Black primary turnout in SC more than doubled over ’04 and nearly doubled in GA. MD, VA and LA also had large gains in Black turnout. The Black turnout was pivotal in Mississippi this week in electing
Democrat Travis Childers, after Republicans tried to drum up racial animosity over Obama’s campaign. The authors acknowledge that the deep south, especially Mississippi, is still forbidding territory for Dems, but they believe the Childers victory provides “a case study in the effects and consequences of focusing on Mr. Obama.”
And Georgia, tied at 10th rank among the states in electoral votes with NJ and NC, could be added to the list of states in play if Bob Barr gets any traction as a siphon of GOP votes from McCain and/or Obama picks Sam Nunn as his running mate. In the February 5th primary in GA, Dems cast nearly 53 percent of the votes, and Black voters cast 55 percent of the Democratic ballots — an all-time high.
Whether Dems win or lose the presidency in November, it’s a safe bet that there will be an unprecedented turnout of African American voters nationwide, if Obama is nominated. Although most Black voters reside in the south, they can be a decisive margin of victory in Senate, House and state legislative races in many other states. As Josh Goodman notes at Governing.com:

It seems unlikely that solid red states will suddenly become swing states solely on the basis of more African-Americans showing up at the polls…But, even if Obama doesn’t win these states, the implications of increased black turnout for down-ballot races could still be significant. Plus, many swing states do have substantial African-American populations, including Virginia (19.6%), Florida (15.4%), Michigan (14.1%), Ohio (11.8%), Missouri (11.3%) and Pennsylvania (10.4%).

It’s never been more important for the DNC, DSCC, DCCC and national and community-based organizations to work together in getting Black citizens registered to vote. Writing at The Hill, David Hill explains:

…Even if non-voting blacks came out this election in numbers twice that of every other group of non-voters, it would not turn the election upside-down. There is a ceiling effect on how influential a surge in black turnout can be because of African-Americans’ comparatively small share of non-voters.
The development that would make black turnout more significant would be a surge in registration of African-Americans. This is a realm where the black population still lags in a meaningful way. According to the Census survey, only 69 percent of African-Americans are registered. While this compares very favorably to registration rates of other ethnic and racial minorities (52 percent of Asians and 58 percent of Hispanics are registered, according to the Census Bureau), it significantly trails the 75 percent rate of registration among non-Hispanic whites.
Because of non-registration, the electoral participation of all black adults is 60 percent, trailing whites by seven percentage points. If blacks closed that gap completely, it would bring 1.7 million additional African-American voters to the polls this fall. Scattered out across 50 states and 435 congressional elections…

Hill and Goodman are more skeptical about the effects of Black turout in November. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers cited by Nossiter and Scott and the implications of Childers’ victory, driven as it was, by Black voter turnout. In any event, another safe bet is that the GOP’s Black voter suppression machine will soon go into maximum overdrive.

Print Version
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was not the first time in history that a western army won decisive military victories in the Middle East and then found itself bogged down in a tenacious guerilla war. As the military historian Archer Jones noted in his book, “The Art of War in the Western World”, the same fate befell Alexander the Great 2,500 years earlier. After winning decisive victories against the Persian army in two major battles, he found himself unable to defeat the tribes of northern Afghanistan:

(Alexander’s) opponents essentially followed a raiding strategy, attacking his outposts and, except for their strong points avoiding contact with large contingents of his army…they sought to avoid strong Macedonian forces, concentrating on overwhelming weak detachments and then withdrawing.
(Alexander) established and garrisoned a large number of fortified military posts throughout the settled part of the county…although the measures taken by the Macedonians strengthened the defense… they failed to prevent the guerillas raids. The invaders had too few soldiers to stop the raids in a large country in which the guerillas had political support among the population.

Alexander was the first of the great conqueror-generals of western history. But the classic description of how a war of occupation should be conducted – one that was read by every British schoolboy learning his Latin in the era of the British Empire and by every modern graduate of West Point — is Julius Caesar’s narrative of his conquest of Gaul. Caesar’s dispatches to the Roman senate about his campaigns in what is now France, Belgium and Germany provided a model that all subsequent generals sought to emulate.
Western Europe in Caesar’s time was a vast patchwork of small tribes, each controlling areas of one hundred or two hundred square miles, along with some 20 or 30 much larger cultural groups. Caesar, in contrast, had only a handful of legions under his command. But the Roman legion was a formidable fighting force that could routinely defeat Gallic armies two, three or four times its size. It was a highly trained and disciplined formation of about 5,000 men that could fight as a single cohesive unit, standing literally shoulder to shoulder, or it could quickly divide into smaller groups that could maneuver and battle independently. A Roman legion could march all day at a pace almost twice as fast as most of its opponents and then build a walled, fortified camp before the sun had set. Roman military technology was far in advance of Gallic techniques and included the ability to build river spanning bridges, catapult artillery, siege towers and vast encircling walls around resisting Gallic cities within a matter of days.
But with only four legions when he began, Caesar could not hope to control the vast region from the Italian Alps to the English Channel by sheer military force alone. The key to his strategy was a complex network of alliances with some Gallic tribes and the deliberate fomenting of conflict between others – a method the Romans called divide et impera — divide and rule.
As the leading military monograph on Caesar’s Gallic campaign notes:

(Caesar’s) task was made easier by the inability of the Gallic tribes to unite to form a combined resistance to the invaders. Indeed some tribes supported the Romans, and the Romans played one tribe off against another, exploiting the territorial ambitions of different Gallic tribes and even political divisions within tribes.

Caesar (who frequently referred to himself in the third person in his dispatches) described one such maneuver as follows:

He (Caesar) impressed upon Diviciacus the Aeduan the importance, alike for Rome and the general safety of Gaul, of preventing the junction of the various enemy contingents, in order to avoid the necessity of fighting such powerful forces at once. He explained that the best way of effecting this was for the Aedui to invade the land of the Bellovaci and start devastating it.

In fact, reading Caesar’s dispatches is almost like looking over the shoulder of a skilled chess player as he moves his pieces – legions, garrisons and allies – across a map of Western Europe, placing garrisons at strategic locations, rapidly moving troops to quell outbreaks of rebellion and negotiating a careful network of alliances and “treaties of friendship” with tribal leaders. Caesar’s readers in the Roman senate were engrossed by his descriptions of how he maintained control over such a vast territory with his relatively small force.

Read more…

One of the lesser-appreciated Dark Arts of modern politics is counter-scheduling: the anticipation of an opponent’s Big Event with a Bigger Event that sops up media attention. We witnessed a classic example yesterday, when the Obama campaign arranged a flag-waving rally as a backdrop to John Edwards’ endorsement just before Hillary Clinton appeared on all three major networks for interviews in the wake of her landslide win in West Virginia.
John Nichols at The Nation has a good summary of how this particular deal went down, which not only stole the media spotlight from HRC, but made her remarks sound less like a victory statement than an implicit admission of ultimate defeat.
I’m sure the Obama folks spent much of the day chuckling over this coup, but it’s not so clear that the Edwards endorsement will bring that many tangible benefits to the front-runner. He can’t “deliver” pledged delegates, and a lot of his early superdelegate support had already bled away to Obama (particularly in NC). And those who expect the endorsement to cause a rush of white-working-class voters in KY to Obama will probably be disappointed, given the very limited impact of earlier “key endorsements” in this contest.
But Edwards’ move, like that of a growing number of previously uncommitted superdelegates, does increase the perception that Obama is the putative nominee, and that does have value. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Obama overperforms expectations in KY and OR next week by attracting voters who simply want to be with a winner. In this odd, momentum-less nomination contest, that would be something of a first.

Print Version
During his opening remarks at the recent Senate hearings on Iraq, John McCain described the situation as follows:

At the beginning of last year…full scale civil war seemed almost unavoidable… (But) since the middle of last year sectarian and ethnic violence, civilian deaths and deaths of coalition forces have all fallen dramatically. This improved security environment has led to a new opportunity, one in which average Iraqis can in the future approach a more normal political and economic life.
…Today it is possible to talk with real hope and optimism about the future of Iraq and the outcome of our efforts there…we’re no longer staring into the abyss of defeat and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success.”

McCain’s optimism was somewhat dampened by the fighting in Basra and Sadr City that was occurring even as he spoke, but most of the discussion of Iraq during the Senate hearings indeed accepted the basic proposition that the generally falling level of violence during the preceding months did represent undeniable proof of “progress” or “success”. Up until the week before McCain’s testimony, most journalistic reports about Iraq quite optimistically described formerly empty streets now filled with pedestrians and markets and stores that had been closed and shuttered now open and filled with customers. On the surface, it certainly seemed plausible to assume that if the relative calm could be maintained, Iraq could steadily advance toward stability.
This corresponds with the average person’s conception of civil or urban warfare — that if the streets of an area can be made safe, the local population will rapidly come to support the authorities and reject the forces seeking to create violence. For this reason, the citizens of western nations almost always approve of temporary cease-fires to stop violence.
Many military historians and strategists, however, disagree most strongly with this view. There is, in fact, a very substantial body of opinion which holds that temporary cease fires in civil wars very often do not permanently reduce violence, but simply postpone the fighting and can even make it worse when it recurs.
One of the leading contemporary military theorists, Edward N. Luttwak, Senior Fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is a prominent advocate of this perspective. In his influential book, “Strategy – The Logic of War and Peace” he notes that many civil wars are “low intensity” conflicts that do not automatically escalate to major set-piece battles. Rather, they proceed for long periods of time with a low, constant level of violence punctuated with occasional flare-ups and clashes.
As he says:

…in civil wars the intensity of the fighting is often low, the scale small with violence localized within a wider environment that the fighting might affect only marginally if at all…civil wars can therefore last for decades. No intense, large scale war can last for many years, let alone decades and some have burned themselves out in weeks or even days.
…But if war is interrupted before its self-destruction is achieved, no peace need ensue at all. So it was in Europe’s past when wars were still fought intermittently during spring and summer campaigning seasons, each time coming to an end with the arrival of winter – only to resume afresh in the spring…

Luttwak then proceeds to argue his main point, using the Balkans as one example:

Since 1945 wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to follow their natural course. Instead they have typically been interrupted long before they could burn out the energies of war to establish the preconditions of peace…cease fires merely relieve war-induced exhaustion, favoring the reconstitution and rearming of the belligerents, thus intensifying and prolonging the fighting once the cease-fire comes to an end.
…Dozens of UN imposed cease-fires interrupted the fighting between Serbs and Croats in the Krajina borderlands, between the forces of the Serb-Montenegrin federation and the Croat army and among the Serbs, Croats and Muslims of Bosnia. Each time the belligerents exploited the pause to recruit, train and equip additional forces for further combat. Indeed it was under the protection of successive cease fires that both the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims were able to build up their own armed forces to confront the well-armed Serbs….the overall effect was to greatly prolong the war and widen the scope of its killings, atrocities, and destructions.”

Read more…