In the confused aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, it didn’t take more than about five minutes for political media types to begin speculation about the potential impact of the event on the U.S. presidential contest. The staff of the Politico, unsurprisingly, had the most complete initial guesstimate on the subject, suggesting that Senate Armed Services Committee members Hillary Clinton and John McCain, full-time terrorism opportunist Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, would get a boost. The Politicos also reported that the “C.W. will say that the candidates most damaged will be Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R).”
As I type this, MSNBC has Joe Scarborough on arguing that Giuliani’s whole campaign might be revived by this development, and could fatally hurt Obama in the run-up to Iowa.
Not so fast, folks. We obviously don’t know what’s going to happen next in Pakistan. I understand that if Pakistan melts down in the next few days, at a time when the holidays limit other political news, it could get a lot more attention than would otherwise be the case. And I also understand that instability in the Greater Middle East might reinforce the campaign messages of those Democrats or Republicans who stress their foreign policy experience and/or anti-terrorist credentials.
But who really knows? International instability can reinforce both status quo and “change” sentiments, and the most proximate contest, in Iowa, features a small electorate that is probably more focused on the campaign unfolding right in front of it than on news events. But media interpretations of political trends have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, so how the candidates react in the next day or two could be very important.
No matter how it plays out, it’s really disgusting to watch the White House’s efforts to spin the Bhutto assassination as a vindication of its own anti-terrorism efforts. As Spencer Ackerman of TalkingPointsMemo reports in a conversation with Pakistan expert Barnett Rubin, the administration’s strategy was to promote a Bhutto/Musharraf “moderate” coalition after the January 8. That strategy is now “in tatters.”

Jason Zengerle reports in TNR’s The Plank that Biden will hold a press conference on the Bhutto assassination
Swing State Project‘s DavidNYC has DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen’s target list of 40 GOP-held House of Reps seats, with “leading” Dem challengers and ’04 and ’06 D-R percentages. Reader comments are also worth a gander.
Progressives considering making a contribution to Ron Paul’s campaign should first read Kos‘s post, “The overt racist in the GOP field” (with more than 700 comments this far). Digby elaborates here.
Larry J. Sabato’s “Senate Sensibilities” (posted 12/13) update on the ’08 Senate campaign has interesting maps, charts and commentary on key Senate races.
Paul Starr, co-editor of The American Prospect, rolls out a post-election “road map for the start of a new America” in his article, “The Democrats’ Strategic Challenge.”

In his Tapped post “The English Major Defense,” Mark Schmitt hones in on the most salient point about Mitt Romney’s claim that “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.” It’s not so much that Mitt, well, stretched the truth about what he actually saw, to put it charitably. Looking at the larger picture, his father really was an extraordinarily-progressive Republican, as Schmitt points out, along with a few others of his era, including Senators Jacob Javits and Lowell Weicker. Schmitt asks a more relevant question:

Is there the slightest reason to believe that in the same position as his father, as it was becoming clear that the Republicans’ path to the presidency ran through the South (Goldwater secured the nomination in 1964 in part by opposing the Civil Rights Act, and Strom Thurmond switched parties that year), he would have shown similar courage?

Schmitt cites Romney the younger’s “shape-shifting adaptation to whatever the Republican prejudice of the moment is (anti-immigration rhetoric, or denouncing the kind of health plan he enacted as “socialized medicine”),” in stark contrast to his father’s principled stand for racial justice. The strategy of drawing broad distinctions between the GOP of an earlier era — when a few of its leaders actually demonstrated a concern for social justice — and the Republican Party of today is more rewarding than simply pointing a finger and saying a particular candidate lied.

It’s been said before, but Truthdig‘s Bill Boyarsky sums the argument up nicely in his Alternet post “Iowa Caucuses: Not the Battle of the Century.” Noting the guestimate of a worker in Dubuque’s Georgia Pacific plant that about 10 percent of the 125 union members at the plant are expected to attend the caucuses, Boyarsky adds:

That is in line with a Des Moines Register poll estimate of 12 percent Republican and 10 percent Democrat attendance at caucuses around the state. That figure is substantially above the numbers for past caucuses reported by Pollster.com: Just 5.5 percent for Democrats in 2004 and 3.9 percent for Republicans in 2000. That is a tiny percentage of the 57,204 people living in Dubuque and the 2,944,062 residing in Iowa. Such a low level of involvement makes me wonder about news accounts that portray this as the battle of the century.

Boyarsky calls the Iowa caucuses “a travesty of the American political system” and describes the whole exercise as “undemocratic, unfair, unrepresentative and overly complicated.” While Boyarsky is stone cold right about the caucuses being unrepresentative of the Iowa electorate as a whole, perhaps the real travesty is the “news accounts” he cites — the MSM media, and even some blogosphere writers hype the Iowa caucuses as the ‘make or break’ event for any number of presidential campaigns. Worse, some of the candidates themselves have affirmed this view.
The good people of Iowa can’t be blamed for enjoying all of the media attention and commerce the caucuses bring — any other state would do the same, given the opportunity. In terms of political strategy, it is true that no candidate who has finished worse than third in Iowa has won the Party’s nomination, as noted in my 12/23 post below. However, the Democratic field is unusually strong this year, and that alone should be a good enough argument for hanging in there for a few more days until New Hampshire, a state whose citizens enjoy confounding pollsters, has its say.

In case it’s not obvious, The Daily Strategist is on a bit of a holiday hiaitus for a day or two, and to tell you the truth, it’s nice to go for an extended period of time without reading polls or pondering the fate that Iowans are planning for the rest of us. I wish everyone a blessed Xmas or holiday season, and a happy New Year.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution‘s Aaron Gould Shenin reports on a bellwether county in Georgia that has picked 28 winners out of 29 contests in primaries since 1996 (The tally includes state-wide, as well as presidential candidates). Muscogee County, which includes the city of Columbus, is diverse, but with a larger proportion of African Americans (about half) than the state as a whole (about 30 percent). The only miss was Muscogee’s pick for state Labor Commish back in ’88. Says Shenin, “If the Democratic candidates for president want to win the Feb. 5 Georgia primary, they best win Muscogee County.”
Scott Martelle has an L.A. Times update on the tenacity of “second tier” presidential candidates Richardson, Biden and Dodd. What keeps them going, you wonder? Martelle quotes Senator Dodd’s answer:

Iowa’s always about expectations. . . On the night of Jan. 3, the results come in, and if all of a sudden I’m in third or fourth place here, you’re going to have two candidates ahead of me whose campaigns may be over with because they failed expectations. . . . So all of a sudden this changes.

Adds Drake University political analyst Dennis Goldford, “The old rule of thumb is that there are three tickets out of Iowa. Nobody who has ever finished worse than third has gotten the nomination.” According to Martelle, Senator Biden will stay if he finishes “a close fourth.”
The article underscores what an outstanding field we have, especially in comparison to the opposition. Might be a good thing for the Democratic Party if one of these guys makes the cut and becomes a serious player on 2/5.
New Republic Senior Editor John Judis and TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira have a WaPo op-ed “Get Ready for a Democratic Era” featuring an informative look at key constituencies now leaning Democratic, including single women, professionals, Independents and white working-class males. They also discuss the growth of the ‘ideopolis’ as an influential Democratic stronghold, nation-wide, and have an optimistic vision for Dems, both short and long-term:

In 2006, the new Democratic coalition — women, professionals and minorities, augmented by disillusioned Reagan Democrats — retook Congress. In 2008, it’s poised to do even better….Republicans, who grew fat and happy during Bush’s first term, anticipating decades of rule, face some lean years ahead.

Teixeira and Judis do wave one flag, noting that the tilt to Dems among key groups “doesn’t necessarily translate into voter registration.” Notwithstanding inadequate voter turnout efforts, they believe Dems can expect “a striking political advantage over the next decade, and perhaps longer.”

Credit Matt Stoller of OpenLeft with one of the best one-liners in recent memory, in a post deriding wildly varying media assessments of the competence of various presidential campaigns: “At best, campaigns are garbage moving in the right direction.” Certainly anyone who thinks about it can remember reading assessments of ultimately disastrous nomination campaigns (e.g., Kennedy 1980 and Dean 2004) as brilliant and irresistable, and of successful nomination campaigns (e.g., Reagan 1980 and Kerry 2004) as disorganized and faction-ridden nightmares. (It’s also worth noting that the two Republican presidential campaigns that seem to be doing well right now, those of Huckabee and McCain, were both written off not long ago as completely inept and hopeless). And a lot of the excessively positive talk about specific campaigns is a function of campaign spin and the endless desire of the chattering classes to identify the Next Big Thing and Next Big Gurus in politics. The truth is, as Stoller suggests, that campaigns are a messy business full of guesswork and unintended consequences.
But I would issue one demurral about the current Democratic contest in Iowa. Best I can tell from talking to people with experience there, the Big Three candidates’ ground-level organizations are all exceptionally well-run by historical standards, benefitting from a lot of prior Caucus experience. But even so, guesswork and such accidents as the weather on January 3 may ultimately determine the outcome by confirming or rejecting the turnout models on which campaigns must inevitably rely.

If readers will allow me a moment of home-state parochialism, I want to note the passing of Tom Murphy, the Democratic Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives for nearly thirty years (1974-2003).
Murphy first emerged as a factor in Georgia politics as House floor leader for the zany segregationist Governor Lester Maddox (whose chief of staff, BTW, was Murphy’s longtime rival Zell Miller), who wound up having a relatively progressive record despite his nutty right-wing rhetoric. As Speaker, Murphy’s career tracked the gradual evolution of the southern Democratic party from its conservative past to its eventual condition as a moderate biracial coalition.
But unlike such former Dixiecrat-types as George Wallace, he never had to apologize for racial demagoguery, and never abandoned the Democratic Party. Indeed, the one great constant of Murphy’s career was an inveterate hostility to the GOP.
Murphy finally lost his power, and his seat, when his once-rural West Georgia district (where most of my mother’s family still lives) became a Republican-trending Atlanta exurb, at about the same time that demographic changes finally flipped Georgia into the Republican column in state as well as national elections.
But Georgia resisted the region-wide GOP trend longer than any other state, electing Democratic governors and controlling the state legislature throughout the post-Civil Rights Act era, right up until 2002. It was no coincidence that this remarkable period in which Georgia Democrats defied the inevitable coincided with the Speakership of Tom Murphy. May he rest in peace.

On the American Prospect site, Mark Schmitt today offers a fascinating analysis on the most fundamental differentiation among the Big Three Democratic presidential candidates:

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. It’s the first “theory of change” primary I can think of.
Hillary Clinton’s stump speech is built around the speechwriter’s rule of three, applied to theories of change: one candidate believes you achieve change by “demanding” it, another thinks you “hope for it,” while she alone knows that you have to “work for it.”
That’s accurate as a rendering of the candidates’ language: Her message of experience and hard work, Obama’s language of hope and common purpose, Edwards’ insistence that those with power will never give it up willingly.

Schmitt goes on to defend Obama’s own “theory of change,” suggesting that only a “common purpose” approach can build the political capital necessary to defeat conservatives and special interests and deliver real change. But whether you agree with him about Obama or not, Schmitt does nicely define the battleground which the candidates have chosen.

Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a look at the Dems’ House prospects, both specific and general, and provides snapshots of key races. Sabato presents some interesting “leaning” and “likely” House race charts and ventures what we hope is a conservative prediction:

every initial indication suggests that 2008 will be a consolidation election for the Democrats. They may add a few seats, or lose a few, but their majority is unlikely to be threatened…it appears more likely that Democrats will gain seats in the House, thus padding their new majority. How many seats are added, or indeed whether this tentative prediction holds up at all, will depend partly on the identity of the presidential candidates and the coattails they generate..

The Cook Political Report‘s House of Reps guru David Wasserman sees Democrats picking up between two and seven House seats in ’08. MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer guestimates a 10-15 seat pick up. He reasons:

the National Republican Congressional Committee remains mired in debt less than a year out from election day while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is as flush with cash as it has ever been with a net $29 million in the bank. This magnitude of this feat cannot be overstated…Not only are the Democrats enjoying a real advantage in the money race, the Democrats have also seen a lot more success in recruitment than the Republicans.

Dividing the difference between Singer and Wasserman gives Dems a 8-9 seat pick-up, which is still way short of a working majority without a Dem President. Even more disturbing, if this pick-up percentage applies to the Senate, the Dems’ one-seat Senate majority seems even more fragile, especially with Lieberman cosying up to Republicans. Maybe it’s too much to expect another wave election, but a presidential landslide with coattails ought to be doable in a war-weary nation.