It’s now pretty clear that Jesse Jackson’s exploitation by Fox News for saying some crude and angry things about Barack Obama during a commercial break will if anything help Obama politically, while deeply humiliating Jackson himself (how bad is it to be publicly denounced by your own son?).
But via TNR’s The Stump, it’s interesting to read an African-American take, from Ebonyjet.com, about the mixed sentiments behind Jackson’s outburst:

When Obama uses a Black church pulpit to send his message of responsibility, he is preaching to the choir both literally and figuratively. The people who need to hear that message are neither on the choir nor in the church, which of course, is part of the problem.
But that particular speech was not in just any church. It was in the first Chicago church Obama attended after repudiating Jeremiah Wright and after resigning Wright’s Trinity Church after incendiary comments made by Father Micheal Pfleger. The press and the world was watching and hanging on every word.
The fear among critics is that the real audience that day was not the Black people in the pews at all, but the white people in middle America looking for a strong signal that Obama was rejecting the politics of racial division and animosity. By choosing that moment to castigate Black fathers, some worry that Obama gave public voice to what white people whisper about Blacks in their living rooms and cemented his image as a post-racial savior at the expense of Black men.

If that worry is true, then Obama wasn’t “talking down to black people,” as Jackson suggested, but talking past them to a different audience. And the irony is that Jesse Jackson ensured that message got through loud and clear.

(Note: this item is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room, where I’m guest-blogging this week).
One of the firmly established theories about contemporary partisan political dynamics is that Republican strength among white working-class voters has been offset by Democratic gains among upper-middle-class suburban voters. The relative value of these categories of voters was the explicit subject of the smartest recent Democratic take on political demographics, the Ruy Teixeira/Alan Abramowitz Brookings study titled “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.”
Interestingly, the two young conservative theorists most thoroughly identified with the argument that Republicans need a new, pro-public-sector strategy to consolidate their white working-class vote have now come out with a parallel strategy to reclaim the upper-middle-class surburbs.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors of the recent book “Grand New Party,” focused on “Sam’s Club” voters, have now offered an analysis at National Review of how GOPers can appeal to upper-middle-class suburbanites.
Their prescription suggests four policy/message thrusts: support for public-school choice (as opposed to vouchers), a nonregulatory approach to alternative energy sources, an agenda to encourage telecommuting, and a more-cops response to reemerging violent crime trends.
As with the Douthat/Salam argument for appealing to “Sam’s Club” voters, their pitch to Starbucks voters is long on message but less compelling in policy proposals. It’s not clear to me that any of their four policy prescriptions can really be clearly distinguished from Democratic policies.
But it is refreshing to see a proposed conservative appeal to suburbanites that is not focused on tax-cut bribes or national security fear-mongering. Unfortunately for Douthat and Salam, but fortunately for Democrats, most GOP politicians are still addicted to selfishness and fear as all-purpose political messages.

The strangest article of the day has to be Karl Rove’s Wall St. Journal piece “Barack’s Brilliant Ground Game,” in which he compliments the Obama campaign. Says Rove:

Sen. Obama’s organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille’s plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros’s 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Rove’s central argument, however, is that Obama’s campaign strategy owes much of its success to “the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004,” which were designed by you know who. For example:

Barack Obama’s manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an “army of persuasion” modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor “Victory Committee” of ’00 and ’04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote…The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP’s “microtargeting” program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.

While there is a grain of truth to that part of Rove’s argument, low-tech versions of such GOTV tactics have been around for a while. Rove is on even shakier ground in claiming credit for pioneering the use of internet tools, and when he critiques elements of Obama’s strategy, you have to wonder if he’s really afraid it is working.

Mr. Obama’s people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can’t rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won’t suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter…Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon’s advice, to cater to his party’s extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.

The article concludes, predictably enough, with a barrage of cheap shots about the perils of flip-flopping, as if McCain was immune to the charge. Coming from the architect of the GOP’s ’06 debacle, it’s another encouraging sign that the Obama campaign is on the right track.

(Note: this item is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room site, where I’m guest-blogging this week)
Progressive healthcare wonks are haunted by memories of 1994, when the last major effort in Congress to enact something approaching universal healthcare, the Clinton health plan, went down in flames.
Some blamed the plan’s design, or the secretive process that created it, for the fiasco. But there’s no question another key factor was that the Clintons and their allies were outgunned on the public relations front, thanks to an insurance-industry-funded campaign that famously filled the airwaves with those “Harry and Louise” ads.
As Ezra Klein explains in his blog at The American Prospect today, an impressive array of progressive labor and advocacy groups are already coming together to plan and execute a pre- and post-election push for universal healthcare. Called Health Care for America Now, the coalition is broad and deep:

The primary partners — which is to say, those who put up $500,000 to join — include The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America’s Future, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, MoveOn.org, National Education Association, National Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, and USAction. Within that list are old guard groups like Labor and new wave organizations like MoveOn. Both Change to Win and the AFL-CIO are represented. Standing behind them are a much larger list of coalition partners that include the American Nurses Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Women’s Law Center. It’s about as broad a progressive coalition as you can imagine, and exactly what didn’t exist in 1994.

They’ve already raised $40 million, have already run one major political ad and have already begun to deploy organizers in key congressional districts. Just as important, they plan to continue the initiative long after the electoral dust settles; totally aside from Health Care for America Now, SEIU has already pledged $75 million to long-range efforts to enact universal healthcare.
As Klein notes, the campaign for universal healthcare won’t necessarily be any easier than it was in 1994. But “you’re looking at a simply fearsome organizing drive. It may, of course, prove insufficient. But unlike in 1994, it won’t be non-existent. And that’s a huge, and promising, difference.”

On Monday, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley ordered all flags at government agencies throughout the state to be flow at half staff in honor of former Sen. Jesse Helms, and L.F. Eason III — a laboratory manager in the state Department of Agriculture — refused to comply with the directive at the facility he supervised.
His superiors then gave him a choice: Eason could change his mind or he could retire from the only job he’d ever held, effective immediately. Eason chose to resign:

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.
“Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week,” Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.
He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his “doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice” and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

While I have a hard time bringing myself to say something bad about the dead, I appreciate a certain degree of symmetry here. For 16 days, Helms — standing alone — manage to thwart the passage of a holiday honoring the memory of Dr. King. For most of the time that it mattered, Eason managed to delay an action honoring Helms. How’s that for a tribute to Senator No?

Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent has been writing an extensive series of articles about counterinsurgency theory, a relatively new defense “movement” that is rapidly gaining adherents throughout the military (viz. Gen. David Petraeus) and in policy and political circles. His installment yesterday focused on an interesting phenomenon: the striking number of women among counterinsurgency theory’s leading lights.

While women are still underrepresented in the national-security apparatus — and at the Pentagon specifically — counterinsurgency, more than any other previous movement in defense circles, features women not just as equal partners, but leaders.
There’s no one answer for why that is. In a series of interviews, leading woman counterinsurgents, and some of their male colleagues, discussed how the unconventional approach to military operations calls for skills in academic and military fields that have become open to women in recent decades. Others contend that counterinsurgency’s impulse for collaborative leadership speaks to women’s “emotional IQ,” in the words of one prominent woman counterinsurgent. Another explanation has to do with coincidence: the military’s post-Vietnam outreach to women has matured at the same time as counterinsurgency became an unexpected national imperative.

Ackerman introduces us non-defense-experts to such luminaries of counterinsurgency theory as Erin Simpson of the Marine Corps University at Quantico; Janine Davidson, until recently at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities unit; Sarah Sewall of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights (and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense); Michele Flournoy and Tammy Schulz of the Center for a New American Security; and Montgomery “Mitzi” McFate, who’s worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Office of Naval Research.
Though much of Ackerman’s piece involves discussion of why women are so prominent in this particular field, there’s no question it’s a very welcome trend. As Erin Simpson said to Ackerman:

The reason we need women working national security is the same reason we need women in medicine and engineering: this stuff is really hard. And we aren’t going to win by telling half the population they can’t play. It’s always important that we have the sharpest, most creative minds working on defense and security issues as possible.

In a rare occasion, John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared today before the United League of Latin American Citizens’ convention in Washington. Here’s Dana Goldstein’s take on their speeches over at TAP:

John McCain enjoyed a friendly reception here at the Washington Hilton, but the crowd went absolutely wild for Obama, who greeted them with an enthusiastic “Si se puede!” and shouted out his “homies” from LULAC’s Illinois chapter. And unlike McCain, who gave a tired speech on conservative tax policy, Obama focused on civil rights, frequently leaning into the microphone and shouting with passion. This was one of the best deliveries I’ve seen from Obama since early in the primaries. Toward the end of the speech, he even did a bit of call and response with the audience of states where Latino votes can make a difference in November.

Sounds like McCain and Obama were equally befriended by the audience, but Obama wound up a lot more equal.

(Note: this is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room site, where I am guest-blogging this week).
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s startling call yesterday for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from his country has been slow to draw the kind of attention here that it deserves. Perhaps that’s because his announcement was made in the context of complex negotiations over a temporary authorization for the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, and perhaps it’s because the precise meaning of “timetable” isn’t yet clear.
Still, as Juan Cole explains today, Maliki’s announcement reflects the widespread feeling in Iraq that demands by the Bush administration in the course of Status of Forces negotiations represent an offensive infringement of Iraqi sovereignty, requiring a reminder that U.S. troops aren’t necessarily indispensible. Maliki may also be signalling his understanding that he may be dealing with a new president next year named Barack Obama.
In terms of the implications for U.S. politics, Maliki’s timetable gambit exposes the vulnerability of George W. Bush, John McCain, and other “surge” enthusiasts to the argument that conditions in Iraq have improved enough that U.S. combat troops can soon be pulled out. After all, if the political leadership of that surge-blessed country seems to think it’s time to contemplate a withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops, why should Americans resist?
This illustrates the double-bind that Bush, McCain, and the conservative commentariat have created for themselves with their relentless surge-o-mania. If they’re wrong and the surge has failed to significantly change the fundamental realities of Iraq, then it’s time to get out. If they’re right and the surge is succeeding brilliantly, it’s also time to get out. Moreover, if Iraqis agree with either assessment, it’s definitely time to get out.
Theoretically McCain, if not Bush, could get out of the box by agreeing with Maliki that things are going so well that a withdrawal timetable is in order. But having staked a lot on the argument that Barack Obama is flip-flopping on the terms of withdrawal, McCain’s not in a great position to change his tune now.

Adam Doster’s Alternet/In These Times post “How Obama Could Radically Alter the Election Map This Fall” sheds light on the Obama campaign’s “grow the pie” voter registration mobilization.
Peter Nicholas’s “David Plouffe is the man steering Obama’s campaign” in today’s LA Times profiles Obama’s strategy wizard.
On a related topic, Peter Dreier has a Dissent article, “Will Obama Inspire a New Generation of Organizers?“, which explores how Obama’s activist experience informs his candidacy.
Oppo Alert: Those following the book buzz about “How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam should check out Matthew Continetti’s Weekly Standard review article “Here’s My Plan: Winning blue-collar votes in red states.”
The Economist post “White Men Can Vote” ponders several theories as to why Dems’ don’t get more traction with a pivotal constituency.
George Lakoff’s HuffPo article “The Mind and the Obama Magic” makes the cognitive/brain sciences case that Obama should resist “nuanced” adjustments of his policies that drift toward the center.
Well, they’re at it again, the National Black Republican Association. This time it’s billboards, at least 7 in FL and one in SC, claiming against all reason and evidence that MLK was a Republican. You can see the grotesque things right here and read about the controversy here. What did MLK really think about Republicans? Read what he actually said here.

Today Virginia Sen. Jim Webb joined Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland as much-discussed running-mate possibilities for Barack Obama who have formally taken themselves out of consideration.
This may have come as something of a relief to Team Obama. Webb was second only to Hillary Clinton as a galvanizing veep prospect, considered the obvious choice by a lot of people and “unacceptable” by others. But even some of his fans (viz. Ezra Klein) thought he was ill-suited for the vice presidency.
So Barack Obama’s “short list” for a running-mate just got a bit shorter. And Webb will stay, for the present, in the Senate, where (as the above Klein article reports) he’s making quite an impression.