Just wanted to note, for the record, a couple of things I was involved in outside this site.
Yesterday I was one of 41 journalists (I’m pretty sure the list has grown since it was first published) signing onto an open letter to ABC deploring the tone and content of the Democratic presidential debate the network sponsored on Wednesday. Given what I’ve posted here on the subject, it seemed like a natural step to take. But I do want to make it clear I was acting solely for myself, and not for TDS or its co-editors.
I also did a post at TPMCafe commenting negatively on an effort by Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic (disputed on their site by Jonathan Chait and Isaac Chotiner) to defend the proposition that Sen. Joe Lieberman’s endorsement and active campaigning for John McCain is compatible with his past protestations of loyalty to the Democratic Party. I wrote this because I thought it would be useful to hear a Joe’s-Crossed-the-Final-Line argument from someone who’s never been accused of Lieberman-hatred or TNR-hatred–particularly someone who doesn’t accept the idea that Lieberman’s been some sort of crypto-Republican all along.

I’d be remiss in failing to end this week of political commentary without mentioning Jonathan Chait’s fine and definitive smackdown on Republican arguments (especially those expressed by self-styled-ultra-elitist George Will) that Barack Obama or Democrats generally don’t respect the cultural views of white working-class voters:

To urge the white working class to vote on the basis of economic policy is itself considered an act of elitism. When Obama and other liberals reproach blue-collar whites for voting their values over their wallet, argues Will, they are accusing those workers of “false consciousness.” A Wall Street Journal editorial took umbrage that Obama “diminishes the convictions of those voters who care more about the right to bear arms, or faith in God, than they do about the AFL-CIO’s agenda.”
But nobody’s challenging the validity of caring more about your religion, or even your right to hunt, than your income. The objection is whether it makes sense to vote on that basis. There are, after all, stark differences between the two parties on economic matters. Republicans do want to make working-class voters pay a higher proportion of the tax burden, restrain popular social programs, erode the value of the minimum wage, and so on.
Democrats, on the other hand, have no plans to keep anybody from attending church or hunting. A few years ago, their gun-control agenda revolved around issues like safety locks, banning assault weapons, and other restrictions carefully designed to have virtually no impact on hunters or average gun owners. Now Democrats have abandoned even those meager steps. The GOP’s appeal on those “issues” rests on cultural pandering rather than any concrete legislative program.

It’s much the same point I tried to make earlier this week: it’s bad to dismiss non-economic voter concerns as irrelevant. It’s far worse to dismiss economic concerns, which by and large do have a direct connection with public policy, unlike religion and gun ownership.
The idea that Democrats as compared to Republicans are the “elitists” when it comes to working-class concerns is just laughable–particularly when the supposed anti-elitists are folks like American Tory George Will or the editors of The Wall Street Journal.

FDR wasn’t the first president to use the wonder of radio for a political advantage, but that is how history remembers him. More and more, it seems likely that this year’s Democratic nominee will carve out that same historic possibility by using the Internet.
We’ve written a lot about that story here, but Ron Browstein has a must-read cover story in the National Journal, which offers a bunch of examples in vivid detail:

In scope and sweep, tactics and scale, the marathon struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton has triggered such a vast evolutionary leap in the way candidates pursue the presidency that it is likely to be remembered as the first true 21st-century campaign.
On virtually every front, the two candidates’ efforts dwarf those of all previous primary contenders — not to mention presumptive GOP nominee John McCain. It’s easy to miss the magnitude of the change amid the ferocity of the Democratic competition. But largely because of their success at organizing supporters through the Internet, Clinton and, especially, Obama are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying television ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout. They are producing changes in degree from prior primary campaigns so large that they amount to changes in kind.

Today brought the surprising news that my old boss, former Sen. Sam Nunn, has endorsed Barack Obama for president, along with his frequent collaborator in politics and policy, former OK Sen. David Boren.
Nunn and Boren last made news back at the beginning of the year, when they presided over a confab hosted by Boren that seemed to be designed to signal support for a “unity” third-party presidential run, probably by Mike Bloomberg. Back in August of last year, Nunn let it be known that he might himself be available for a third-party candidacy.
Since Bloomberg decided not to spend his dough on a presidential run, while the Unity ’08 “grassroots” effort to draft a third-party candidate sputtered out some time ago, it appears that Nunn and Boren looked at the presidential field and made their choice emphatically.
Maybe I’m prejudiced here, but I think Nunn’s support could be a reasonably big deal for Obama in a general election contest, if he uses the Georgian appropriately. Nunn’s national security street cred couldn’t be much higher, and in combination with his well-earned reputation for bipartisanship, should give pause to those chattering-class types who think John McCain is the “centrist” in the race, or is the clear choice for those who value national security above all other issues. If nothing else, he would be a pretty handy surrogate to put on the airwaves if and when Joe Lieberman attacks Obama’s national security views at the Republican National Convention in September. (I say this because one of the lost opportunities of the Kerry campaign was the failure to reach out to Nunn as the perfect person to answer Zell Miller’s attacks on the Democrat’s defense record in the Senate).
Not having been in touch with Nunn for a good long while, I have no idea whether his support for Obama would extend to support for HRC if she somehow wins the nomination. He did supply Bill Clinton with an important early endorsement in the 1992 cycle. But a lot’s happened since then, and Nunn and Boren clearly take Obama’s post-partisanship posture quite seriously. In any event, I don’t agree with those who may think these endorsements can’t matter because these guys aren’t superdelegates.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Barack Obama has had to spend a lot of time this last month demonstrating his mastery of damage control:
–A controversial sermon by Jeremiah Wright goes viral on YouTube? Obama delivers a forceful, historic speech about race (which has now been viewed 4 million times).
–Obama describes small town voters as “bitter” and immediately catches flak for it? He responds with a relaxed and witty counter, clarifying his remarks and likening Hillary Clinton to Annie Oakley.
–Obama gets roughed up in a national debate televised by ABC? Again the response is impressive — but perhaps this time, it’s worth explaining why.
In Raleigh, Obama is smooth, charming, and funny. He’s critical of the debate yet ties his objections back to the campaign’s larger theme of change — it becomes an opportunity for Obama to talk about the problems with politics as they are currently practiced.
Then check out what he does at the 2:20 mark.
He acknowledges that he expects these kinds of attacks — he pauses, reaches up, brushes off his shoulders, and smiles for the camera. The crowd immediately reacts to it with cheers and a standing ovation.
The gesture is universally recognizable. But I’m going to guess that some older members of the press pool didn’t quite get the crowd’s enthusiasm — “Why would they cheer so loud for that?”
The answer is generational. For observers of a certain age, it’s just impossible to see that clip and not think of this song (a word of caution — some might find the lyrics profane). Among Obama’s young, multicultural base, it’s probably fair to say that Jay-Z is a universal touchstone. This, then, was a wink and a nod to his strongest supporters — a private gesture of encouragement. And it was effortless.
How much money do we think that Obama raised off of the perceived unfairness of this debate — $2 million? $3?
If I was a betting man, after this particular allusion, I’d say the sky was the limit.

George Stephanopoulos has addressed criticism of his and Charles Gibson’s conduct as moderators in last night’s ABC-sponsored Democratic candidate debate, in the form of an interview with TalkingPointsMemo’s Greg Sargent. And George went straight to the “electability” defense:

Stephanopoulos strongly defended his handling of the debate. He dismissed criticism that it had focused too heavily on “gotcha” questions, arguing that they had gone to the heart of the “electability” that, he said, is forefront in the minds of voters evaluating the two Dems.

Ah yes, “electability,” which makes discussion of any criticism of a candidate, frivolous or serious, instantly relevant, on the theory that the opposition will hit the nominee with all this crap, so we might as well see how they handle its endless repetition today.
There are several problems with this line of “reasoning” that arrogates to journalists (not to mention the candidates themselves) the right–nay, the responsibility–to ape the nastiest hit tactics they can imagine emanating from conservatives later this year.
First of all, why is Stephanopoulos all that sure that “electability” is in the “forefront in the minds of voters evaluating” Obama and Clinton? Maybe he thinks that’s the only significant difference between the two candidates, and maybe he’s tired of hearing their substantive pitches, but that’s not necessarily true of actual voters who have heard far less of their policy ideas lately than any manner of gotcha stuff or “symbolism.”
Second of all, “electability” is a highly speculative concept at this stage of the presidential election cycle. Who knows how “electable” Obama, Clinton or McCain is going to look in October? I don’t; you don’t; George Stephanopoulos doesn’t; and grilling the candidates on their alleged “vulnerabilities” doesn’t cast much real light on that question, either.
Third of all, to the extent that we can measure “electability,” there’s a form of evidence that’s a lot more persuasive than how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton answer nasty, contrived questions. It’s called general election trial polling. And so far, both candidates remain highly competitive, in roughly equal measure, with John McCain, even though McCain is benefitting from (a) an early nomination win, (b) years of positive media attention, (c) a heavy media focus on Democratic infighting, and (d) relatively low levels of scrutiny of the relationship between his current platform and his record. Unless the entire general election is going to be fought out over Barack Obama’s attitude towards flag pins or Hillary Clinton’s experience one day in Kosovo, then it’s hard to understand why such matters are the key to measuring “electability” for the Democratic voters of Pennslyvania.
And last of all, if “electability” was indeed the focus of ABC’s moderators last night, did it occur to them that asking the candidates how, exactly, they’d criticize McCain and his platform and record on this or that issue might be relevant to the topic? After all, the general election isn’t going to be merely an extended interview of the two candidates by the news media over their personal “stories.” What do they think of McCain’s new tax plan? How about his difficult-to-reconcile position on torture by the military and torture by the CIA? How will they handle his profession of being simultaneously a “maverick” and a rigorous foot-solider of the conservative movement? What if anything will they say about his foreign policy advisors? And on and on.
The more you look at it, the “electability” defense for endlessly superficial debates–and media “coverage” of campaigns in general–doesn’t make much sense. If George just came right out and said his network needed “fireworks” to boost ratings, it would sound more plausible.

Ross Douthat is a conservative, albeit of a somewhat heretical temperament, so his assessment of John McCain’s new “economic agenda” is particularly interesting insofar as he thinks the whole thing is, well, pretty poorly thought out and essentially a box-checking exercise.

McCain’s speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP’s supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there’s a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there’s a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there’s a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there’s a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency’s budget. For entitlement reformers, there’s a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There’s even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

In other words, it’s all pretty much a politically-motivated grab-bag, with the desire to shower tax benefits on voters struggling rather painfully with McCain’s long-time theme of demands for fiscal discipline. McCain does seem to have figured out that it’s not exactly the right moment to pose as Dr. Root Canal (to use the term of abuse supply-siders have traditionally applied to fiscal hawks). But it’s not especially clear that offering something to everyone will work politically, either. As Douthat says:

This is almost certainly a wiser approach than campaigning as the prince of budgetary rectitude and nothing else, but by leaving McCain without a signal theme, it runs the risk that the media will end up deciding which aspects of his program get highlighted, and what narrative he ends up saddled with.

Well, yeah, insofar as one of those “media narratives” could involve getting out the calculator and figuring out that McCain’s tax proposals will once again shower corporations and the wealthy with the bulk of benefits, while dwarfing the negative fiscal consequences of even Bush’s tax plans. And maybe that’s why Ross concludes by suggesting that McCain could wind up vulnerable to claims than on economic issues, he’s “George W. Bush redux.” It might even, you know, be true.

For a variety of logistical reasons, I wasn’t able to watch last night’s Democratic candidate debate, sponsored by ABC. But I did watch some highlights–or as they put it, lowlights–put together by TalkingPointsMemo, and it does indeed look like the terrible reviews are justified. Here’s what Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales had to say:

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

The main complaint is that the moderators spent an inordinate amount of tiime on substance-free gotcha questions and querelous follow-ups, mostly aimed at Obama. The whole show, which also featured constant commercial breaks, was generally so bad that the audience booed the moderators at the end.
This will probably be the last debate between the Democratic contenders in this cycle, and it is devoutly to be hoped that the news media have learned some things about how to conduct a debate that will be used during the general election. Last night’s event wasn’t, however, a good sign.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

I wrote the other day (in a post that was reprinted by RealClearPolitics) about the motives of the Clinton campaign and the Right-Wing Noise Machine in inflating a few ambiguous remarks made by Barack Obama about rural voters in Pennsylvania into a major feeding frenzy. But now it appears every political writer on earth feels constrained to use “Bitter-gate” to expound on some Big Theory or other about elitism or the future of the Democratic Party.
Consider Michael Lind’s vast article in Salon today. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr. Lind, let me just say that the two adjectives his work most often conjures up are “brilliant” and “cranky.” He is indeed one erudite dude, but he has chosen to deploy his intelligence and learning in the obsessive service of various Big Revisionist Theories, invariably served up in a tone of anticipatory anger towards the fools and knaves he knows will mock or ignore him (he was briefly a Charter Blogger at TPMCafe, but bowed out quickly when he predictably got barbecued in the comment threads).
One of Michael’s big obsessions is the ethnic dimension of political allegiances. He once wrote an entire book that was ostensibly “about” George W. Bush, but was actually an elaborate and passionately rendered reinterpretation of Texas political history through the lens of the ethnic rivalry between Germans and Scotch-Irish (the Scotch-Irish were the villians of this tale, as in much of Lind’s earlier work; that makes it even odder that he’s now treating this evil group as part of a virtuous anti-Yankee coalition essential to Democratic victory).
Given his ethnic preoccupations, it didn’t particularly surprise me to learn that Lind’s take on “Bitter-gate” is to associate Barack Obama with the sneering elitism and moralism of the Greater New England Yankee diaspora, whose landing-points across the country more-or-less coincide with those lily-white states where Obama has done especially well in the nominating contest. And this association, he says, is politically disastrous.

The question, then, is not why Greater New England progressives would vote for Obama. He presses all their age-old buttons: opposition to war, nonpartisan reform. The question is why anyone would assume that such a candidate would appeal to other Democratic constituencies, other than blacks (voting in this case for the favorite-son candidate).
Indeed, the Greater New England moralist culture has been rejected by practically every other substantial subculture in the United States: Irish-Americans in Northeastern cities, Appalachian white Baptists and now, evidently, Mexican-Americans. And this has always been the case.

So: the unwilliingness to vote for Barack Obama by some working-class white voters isn’t about race and isn’t about Hillary Clinton, really. It’s about the instinctive knowledge of these voters that Obama represents the hated New England ethic, which his “bitter” comments simply illustrated.
Lord-a-mercy.
As it happens, the Greater New England Theory is hardly novel. It was one element of Kevin Phillips’ ethnic-based analysis of political trends in The Emerging Republican Majority, nearly forty years ago. Lind’s version of the theory superimposes an ethnic take on the famous “wine-track, beer-track” distinction that is so often used to distinguish the followings of Democratic presidential candidates
The problem with Lind’s exposition, and many others that share its fundamental premise if not its ethnic bitterness–if you will excuse the term–is that it endows one group of voters with almost supernatural political power not necessarily justified by their size or strategic importance. Sure, Obama’s relative weakness–at least in Democratic primaries–among white working-class voters in Appalachia or heavily Catholic areas would be a problem for him in winning states like Pennsylvania and Ohio in a general election. But Hillary Clinton’s relative weakness in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa would be a problem as well. And you know what? It’s really not all that accurate to assign whole states to ethnic categories. One of the successful non-Yankee Democrats Lind cites as a role model was a guy named Jimmy Carter from my home state of Georgia. His appeal to southern regional pride helped him a lot, not only in the South, but in southern-inflected areas of the midwest. But he damn near lost Ohio, and the presidency, because of his relative weakness in the heavily Yankeefied Western Reserve area of the state.
A vote is a vote; the Democratic Party is at present a coalition party that includes both “wine-track” and “beer-track” voters, and Yankees and non-Yankees. Even if Michael Lind is entirely right about the ethnic underpinnings of the current Democratic nominating contest, attributing moral or political superiority to one element of the coalition at the expense of another represents exactly the sort of contemptuous type-casting that Obama has been accused of in “Bitter-gate.”
It is time, folks, for Democrats and the chattering classes to calm themselves about the Greater Meaning of this or that demographic group’s preference for one candidate or the other in the nominating contest. Lest we forget, the whole “identity-based” pattern of voting we have seen is to a large part attributable to the scant policy differences separating Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton, and also to the historic nature of both candidacies. The idea that “losing” groups are going to migrate en masse to John McCain in November is not only a dubious proposition, but one that Democrats should fight like sin. Burn off all the chaff of “analysis,” and the fact remains that Barack Obama has a much better idea (as Mark Schmitt usefully points out today) of how to help those “bitter” working-class white voters than John McCain, while Hillary Clinton offers a much better prospect for the reforms desired by “wine-track” voters than any Republican, including McCain.
The endlessly discussed idea that either Democratic candidate represents one element of our coalition at the definitive expense of the other is frankly the best and perhaps only hope for a Republican victory in November. The persistence of these manichean assumptions about our candidates, whether delivered as horse-race analysis or as Big Theories like Lind’s, are beginning to make me feel–yes–bitter.

What’s the point of giving a candidate’s spouse a place on the campaign website for his or her favorite recipes? It’s a tradition that I just don’t understand or appreciate.
It seems fraught with peril. What if voters don’t enjoy your food? What if it makes them sick? What if an intern steals a couple recipes from the Food Network, adds them to your website verbatim, and calls them family favorites?
Turns out that last thing is exactly what just happened to John McCain:

This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network’s site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain’s campaign site.

At least 7 recipes that the campaign once said belonged Cindy McCain were taken from celebrity chefs (including 30 Minute Meal star Rachel Ray who — bless her heart — immediately invited the Republican candidate and his wife onto her show). The unpaid intern fingered with the plagiarism has apparently been “dealt with” by the McCain higher-ups.
This is obviously only a scandal at the height of silly season. (Let’s just see if FarfalleGate gets the same kind of media play as BitterGate!)
Still, it does allow me a chance to reiterate a point about the Internet — Authenticity matters more than anything else.
If you simply must share the recipe for the candidate’s favorite apple cobbler, for the love of Julia Child, make sure that it contains a list of ingredients that has been in your family since well before Mario Batali got on television.
For instance, way back in the fall of last year, John Edwards organized a little fundraiser for his birthday using his mother’s pecan pie. Joe Trippi and Jonathan Prince made a little video about it. That was cute.
But if even your interns won’t invest the time into doing this kind of thing the right way, then there is just no reason to include a culinary corner on your website. Because let’s face it, the fate of a restless nation does not turn on a passion fruit mousse.