My post on Romney’s impending speech dealing with his Mormonism drew the ire of Ross Douthat at The Atlantic, who judged my suggestion that Mitt stress the successful LDS model of cultural conservatism as “exactly wrong.”
Douthat strongly subscribes to the theory that the most important reason for evangelical Christian hostility towards Mormonism is competitive pressure: Mormons “tend to offer a similar sociological appeal to religious seekers, and thus are in direct competition for converts.” Thus, he concludes, anything that reminds evangelicals of the similarity of that appeal to their own–much less that celebrates Mormon moral values–will horribly backfire.
Gee, I dunno. Douthat’s a lot closer to evangelical opinion than I am these days, but I suspect this competition factor is more prevalent among religious leaders than among the rank-and-file in the pews. But even if your typical Southern Baptists look at your typical Mormons and see zealous members of a rapidly-growing cult that’s stealing souls, they also inevitably see deeply conservative, godly folk who are renowned for clean living, patriotism, an intense devotion to family, and who dislike abortion, homosexuality and booze and drug use to a fault. You’d think that anything Mitt Romney could do to elevate the latter perception as opposed to the former would be helpful to the cause of conservative evangelical tolerance for Mormons, who after all, are comrades-in-arms in the larger fight against liberal Protestants and secularists.
If, on the other hand, I’m “exactly wrong” and Douthat is “exactly right,” then Mitt Romney is truly screwed. What is he supposed to say about his religion? He can’t do the JFK separation-of-church-and-state bit; he’s in the wrong party at the wrong time of history for that approach. He can’t educate evangelicals about the tenets of the LDS church; aside from being a complex endeavor, that would probably alarm listeners even more than their current vague suspicions about the Mormon “cult.” So if he also can’t even appeal to the deep cultural conservative consanguinity of Mormons with evangelicals, he might as well cancel the speech and hope for the best.

The release of a startling new National Intelligence Estimate showing that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 was a timely reminder that real-life events can trump politics. The document has clearly put the kibosh on the administration/neocon campaign to justify, if not execute, a preemptive military strike–perhaps in conjunction with Israel–on Iran. And the extreme irritation being expressed towards the report by such noted saber-rattlers as John Bolton and Norman Podheretz is as good a measure as any of its enormous impact.
The weird thing, of course, is that George W. Bush knew about this intelligence well before his inflammatory “World War III” remarks about Iran in October. This makes today’s spin effort by the White House to cite the report as a validation of the administration’s Iran policy especially laughable. More seriously, Bush’s decision to ignore as long as he could his own government’s best information on Iran is yet another blow to U.S. credibility around the world.
Aside from its impact on the administration, the intelligence estimate should have a salutory effect on the Republican presidential campaign, where discussion of military action against Iran has been (with the obvious exception of Ron Paul) kicked around as a matter of “when,” not “if.” It’s less clear that Iran will subside as an issue on the Democratic side, with the Edwards and Obama campaigns already citing the report as evidence that Hillary Clinton was again misled by Bush in voting for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution.
However it shakes out politically or diplomatically, the intelligence estimate clearly puts up a big roadblock on the path to preemptive war with Iran, and should lessen fears that Bush will be able to double-down on his Iraq disaster before he finally heads home to Crawford.

Gerald F. Seib’s Wall St. Journal column makes the case that the 45 percent of NH voters who are Independents are kingmakers. Nut graphs:

These independents, able under New Hampshire rules to vote for either party in the nation’s first primary on Jan. 8, may represent the most important group of voters in the land. They are likely to determine, among other things, whether John McCain’s candidacy can be revived, whether Barack Obama can sustain whatever momentum he gets out of Iowa’s caucuses, whether Mitt Romney actually is best-positioned to win the Republican nomination and whether Mike Huckabee’s rise in Iowa will turn out to be just a flash in the pan.
…Here’s why: Under New Hampshire’s rules, undeclared voters can show up on primary day and choose a party in which to vote. In essence, they can simply move to whichever primary looks more interesting or important.

Also in the WSJ, Jackie Calmes and Michael M. Phillips have a stats and quotes roundup making a persuasive case that the economy is now a/the top issue of concern to Americans heading into the holidays and the last month before primary mania grips the nation. Calmes and Phillips explain:

Fifty-two percent of Americans say the economy and health care are most important to them in choosing a president, compared with 34% who cite terrorism and social and moral issues, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. That is the reverse of the percentages recorded just before the 2004 election. The poll also shows that voters see health care eclipsing the Iraq war for the first time as the issue most urgently requiring a new approach.

Edwards followers can take some heart from E. J. Dionne’s WaPo op-ed, limning a victory scenario for the N.C. populist going into his home stretch. Dionne’s key insight on how Edwards can outflank Clinton and Obama:

The Edwards campaign has a theory of how he can beat both of them. As Trippi sees it, Clinton has relied on support from less affluent voters, particularly women, who are especially engaged on economic questions.
Trippi argued in an interview that some of these soft Clinton voters could eventually move to Edwards because his message of economic populism and his background as a mill worker’s son will trump Clinton’s arguments that are based on her experience. Trippi claims to see “lots of potential” among “blue-collar women who are currently leaning her way.”

Dionne also quotes what may be Edwards’ most resonant and defining one-liner. “Standing before a large American flag, the former North Carolina senator insists that the country shouldn’t ‘trade a crowd of corporate Republicans for a crowd of corporate Democrats.'”

Many months after he had been urged to take this step, Mitt Romney is finally going to do his Big Religion Speech on Thursday, addressing his Mormonism in some manner or other.
He’s running the risk that The Speech will be interpreted as a panicky reaction to his Huckabee problem in Iowa, and more fundamentally, that talking about his faith will make exploitation of its more eccentric (to most Americans) features fair game on the campaign trail.
But he’s decided to do it, and has picked an interesting venue: The George H.W. Bush presidential library at Texas A&M, with Bush 41 himself performing the introduction. It’s in the same state where John F. Kennedy delivered his famous Big Religion Speech in 1960, though Romney hasn’t staged the kind of clever inquisitorial trappings JFK chose (a panel of evangelical Protestant ministers).
What’s not clear at this point is how Romney will approach the subject. He could take JFK’s tack of suggesting that his religion is an “accident of birth” that’s not germane to his public persona. He could try to educate voters about Mormonism (though his campaign has said he won’t do “Mormon 101”). Or he could, as he’s more or less done up until now, suggest that having a faith, any faith, is the issue, and stay completely vague about the content of his own faith.
If I were Romney, I’d go right at the conservative evangelical Protestant suspicions about Mormonism by stressing and restressing its culturally conservative teachings and practices, ignoring the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and formal theological issues altogether. Theology aside, Mormons could be perceived as evangelicals with a much better track record of worldly accomplishments and moral fidelity. And in many respects, the LDS church has built the sort of conservative commonwealth in Utah that many evangelicals dream of for the whole country. I happen to have a family member, a longtime Southern Baptist Deacon, who’s travelled to almost every corner of the world. The only place I ever heard him wax rhapsodic about was Salt Lake City. “It’s so clean!” he kept saying, reflecting a tanglble envy for what Mormons have wrought in comparison to the messy and hypocritical cultural milieus in which most evangelicals live.
But somehow I doubt that the Mittster, whose own native cultural milieu is the corporate boardroom, is capable of pulling off this sort of visceral appeal to people who think Mormonism is weird, but who wouldn’t have much of an argument with Mormonism’s more practical implications. So I’m guessing he’ll do a very abstract take on the importance of religion generally, suggest that anyone who questions his own faith is in alliance with godless liberal secularists, and then flee the podium, ever after dismissing the subject as something he’s already addressed down at Texas A&M.

Just in time to offset the negative buzz from the new Des Moines Register poll showing Barack Obama narrowly ahead of her in Iowa, two new polls came out today showing Hillary Clinton leading among likely caucus-goers in the state. A Pew/AP poll put her ahead of Obama 31%-26%, with Edwards trailing at 19%, and more strikingly, an Iowa State University poll had her with a comfortable 31%-24% lead over Edwards, with Obama third at 20%. Pew also showed Clinton as having robust leads in NH, SC and nationally.
But these two new polls of IA have to be reported with an asterisk: some of their data is a bit old. The ISU poll was conducted from November 6-18 (as compared with November 25-28 for the Register poll), while the Pew survey (see a discussion of the unusually long field range for this survey at Pollster.com) was run from November 7 until November 25.
On the Republican side, the ISU survey had Romney leading Huckabee 25%-22%, with the same asterisk. I’m sure that both Obama’s and Huckabee’s handlers will say the poll missed their candidates’ most recent surges.

We’re now one month out from the Iowa Caucuses, and it’s no longer possible to say it’s “too early” to get a handle on what may happen on January 3. That’s why yesterday’s new Des Moines Register poll of likely Democratic and Republican caucus-goers is worth a look. (Another reason is that Iowans pay a lot of attention to Caucus coverage by the Register; more than you might think in this post-print-media era. The Register‘s own candidate endorsements, likely to come out on the eve of the Caucuses, could actually matter, as evidenced by the boost the paper gave John Edwards in the Des Moines area in 2004).
The poll confirms Barack Obama (leading Clinton and Edwards 28-25-23) and Mike Huckabee (leading Mitt Romney 29-24) as the “candidates on the move” in Iowa. It also indicates that lower-tier candidates in both parties aren’t in a very good position to make a last-minute surge (among Democrats, Richardson’s stuck at 9% and Biden at 6%, and among Republicans, Giuliani, at 13%, is the only other double-digit candidate), at a time when caucus-goers are likely to begin firming up their preferences.
Typically, the Register isn’t very forthcoming in releasing internal poll findings, though sometimes they publish them later. According to a David Yepsen column, Obama’s now leading Clinton among women, and has apparently moved ahead of Edwards among those most likely to participate in the Caucuses. And another Register article tells us that on the Republican side, Romney’s more dependent than Huckabee on support from the younger voters who are traditionally least likely to show up.
Yepsen makes the obvious point that the unprecedented proximity of the Caucuses to the holidays could have an inhibiting effect on negative advertising. But the more salient fact is probably that a high percentage of Iowans will be spending a lot of time in front of the tube in the period between Christmas and January 3, and many will also be off work and at home to take or ignore campaign robo-calls.
Speaking of television, my favorite question in the Register poll asks likely Caucus-goers if they are “tempted” to stay home and watch the Kansas-Virginia Tech Orange Bowl game on the evening of January 3 instead of bundling up and discharging their civic obligations. Only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats report that they are struggling with this decision, which would be a huge factor if an Iowa team was playing in Miami. Maybe regional solidarity will convince a few Iowans to watch the Jayhawks play, and you have to figure that Gov. Chet Culver, a former Hokie football player, will be casting a few glances at the scoreboard. But overall, it shouldn’t matter much.

Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel have a L.A. Times op-ed “The Gentry Liberals,” arguing in essence that the Democratic Party is being taken over by wealthy liberal elitists who care little about the concerns of the working class. As the article’s subtitle states “They’re more concerned with global warming and gay rights than with lunch-pail joes.” Kotkin and Siegel explain it this way:

But what kind of liberalism is emerging as the dominant voice in the Democratic Party?
Well, it isn’t your father’s liberalism, the ideology that defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes. The old liberalism had its flaws, but it also inspired increased social and economic mobility, strong protections for unions, the funding of a national highway system and a network of public parks, and the development of viable public schools. It also invented Social Security and favored a strong foreign policy.
Today’s ascendant liberalism has a much different agenda. Call it “gentry liberalism.” It’s not driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy — though it does pay lip service to them.
Rather, gentry liberalism reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the “financialization” of the economy. Its strongholds are the tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and West Los Angeles.

The authors roll out some income by party-i.d.statistics that support their argument and note that “Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts.” They also point out that Dems now get more than the GOP in financial contributions from the securities industry, including hedge fund managers. Their argument is somewhat undermined by the fact that no current Democratic presidential candidate can fairly be identified as the standard-bearer for “gentry liberalism.” All of the current Democratic field have strong cred with labor unions, and all are protectionist on trade to one degree or another. Even at the congressional level, the Dems who won Senate seats in ’06 are all strong protectionists. Gentry liberals have been around for a long time in the Democratic Party, but the evidence that they are “ascendant” in running the Party is pretty thin.
Siegel and Kotkin venture out on to even thinner ice in describing the role of the internet as a vehicle for “gentry liberalism”:

Gentry liberalism has established a strong presence on the Internet, where such websites as MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post are lavishly funded by well-heeled liberals. These and other sites generally focus on foreign policy, gay rights, abortion and other social issues, as well as the environment. Traditional middle-class concerns such as the unavailability of affordable housing, escalating college tuitions and the shrinking number of manufacturing jobs usually don’t rank as top concerns.

Here the authors overstate their case. The issues they cite, especially foreign policy, do have a significant impact on the quality of middle class life. I mean, hello, Iraq is kind of important to the middle class. And while both of those websites may not emphasize ‘lunchpail’ concerns as a central theme, they do run some articles on bread and butter issues of interest to working people. In addition, suggesting that HuffPo and MoveOn adequately represent the focus of liberal/progressive websites in general indicates that the authors’ net-surfing habits are a little on the narrow side.
Kotkin and Siegel do better when they turn their focus on the conflict between environmentalists and the economic interests of working people:

But gentry liberalism’s increasingly “green tint” distances it the furthest from the values and interests of the middle and working classes…The gentry liberal crusade to tighten U.S. environmental regulations to slow global warming could end up hurting middle- and working-class interests. U.S. industry needs time and incentives to develop new technologies to replace carbon-based energy. If it doesn’t get them, and an overly aggressive anti-carbon regime is instituted, the shift of manufacturing, energy and shipping jobs to developing countries with weak environmental laws and regulations could accelerate.
Ignoring these potential Third World environmental costs would result only in shifting the geography of greenhouse gas emissions without slowing global warming — and at a terrible cost to jobs in the U.S.

As the environmental crisis accelerates, so will the clamor for action. Democrats will be expected to provide the needed leadership to address global warming and our dependence on mid-east oil with policies that don’t decimate jobs in the process.
Environmental advocates and unions have engaged in conflicts over the employment effects of environmental reforms for decades. Timber workers, auto unions, oil industry employees and other workers have clashed with Greens over environmental reforms, and Democratic unity has too often suffered as a consequence. Environmentalists often argue that reforms they champion produce net job creation. But they miss a key distinction — workers affected by reforms need to know that jobs at an equivalent wage will be secure for them when the reforms are implemented. The smarter Democratic leaders are well-aware of this challenge. Making it policy should be a top priority for Democratic candidates at every level.

Aside from each candidate’s “electibility” as president, a related issue affecting Democratic presidential candidates for 2008 is how each would affect “down-ballot” races for Congress, governorships, and so on. At The New Republic today, Tom Schaller takes on the strong if under-documented belief that Hillary Clinton would be a “down-ballot” disaster for Democrats, particularly in red states or red regions.
As Schaller notes, this belief appears to be based mainly on polls that persistently show HRC with high “negatives,” reinforced by anecdotal evidence (which is everywhere) of the amazing, pathological intensity with which many conservatives hate her.

[W]hile Americans view Clinton about as favorably as they do her two chief rivals, Democrats think she is a better leader, Republicans think she’d make a worse leader, and a greater share of voters who do not approve of her actually disapprove of her–which sounds like a redundancy, but is not when you realize that many voters have neither a favorable nor unfavorable view of Obama or Edwards. If either of them wins the nomination, however, don’t doubt for a second that the Republican machine can’t or won’t ratchet up their negatives later.
Still, is there something unique about Clinton that could put other 2008 Democratic candidates at risk? The strongest claim to that is she’s an uncommonly unifying figure–for Republicans and the right. So while the intensity of Clinton hatred may not multiply a voter’s vote, it could motivate citizens to engage in other ways, such as donating to Republican candidates, walking precincts, or persuading their friends and co-workers to vote against Clinton and other Democrats.

Negative as well as positive enthusiasm towards candidates is often overrated, since “bonus votes” are not rewarded for the intensity of voter preferences. And as Schaller notes, Obama-hatred or Edwards-hatred might well emerge on the Right if either of those men won the nomination. But the anecdotal case you often hear about Clinton is that she is polarizing in an unbalanced way: her nomination would strongly motivate conservatives who think she’s a dedicated socialist and one-worlder, while discouraging progressives who think she’s a warmongering corporate puppet. (You even hear the reverse argument made about Edwards, i.e., that he’s usefully perceived by Republicans and independents as more “centrist” than he actually is).
Interesting as they are, such theories about HRC’s effect on the electorate would have more power if there was any objective evidence for them. So far, polls testing various Democratic candidates against Republican rivals in specific states (mainly those conducted by SurveyUSA) show her doing as well as or better than Obama and Edwards in most states, and doing quite well in red and purple states. To be a “drag” on the ticket down-ballot in a lot of states, you have to actually lose them, and lose them badly. To put it most simply, it’s hard to get too obsessed about the down-ballot “damage” that might be inflicted by a candidate who’s currently running four points ahead of Rudy Giuliani in Kentucky.

Janet Elder’s “On Polling “column at the Grey Lady has a cautionary comment on the pitfalls of recent horse-race poll reporting that should be of interest to readers and reporters alike, “When a Poll Changes the Way People Think About the Race.”
Also at The Times, Paul Krugman’s “Mandates and Mudslinging” column makes a persuasive case that Senator Obama needs to tweak his health care plan to make everyone pay into it and cover everyone and resist the temptation to use Republican arguments against his Democratic rivals.
Bob Moses has an Alternet post addressing a critical question for Democratic strategy “Have Democrats Already Lost Florida?”
The purpose-driven Hillary courts moderate evangelicals, and apparently shows how it’s done, according to Carla Marinucci’s San Francisco Chronicle report.
Chris Bowers has a pair of interesting articles up at Open Left, a report on a new poll of the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual constituency’s political views and a thoughtful look at endangered Democratic Senate seats.

So the big buzz in the progressive blogosphere yesterday and today is about Ben Smith’s story in The Politico revealing that Rudy Guliani billed a lot of travel and security expenses to the City of New York (processed through a vast array of minor agencies) for trips to the Hamptons that might have been associated with opportunities for Private Time with his then-girlfriend, later-wife, Judith Nathan.
You can read about this virtually anywhere (Josh Marshall has gone into major campaign mode on the subject, which is a clear sign the story has legs), but it’s important first to connect the dots. This is a classic example of a development that links a “personal” scandal involving a political candidate–in this case, Rudy’s semi-public adultery, not to mention his serial marriages, the last of which self-excommunicated him from the Catholic Church–with a legitimate public policy issue. It’s an even more lurid version of the “lying under oath” charge that converted many years of smoke about Bill Clinton’s sexual behavor into the fire that got him impeached.
In Rudy’s case, The Nexus between personal and public behavior is particularly strong because it touches on two of his major rationales for candidacy. The guy who ostensibly cleaned up the most corruption-laden and spending-addicted city in America appears to have corruptly spent public money to feather his own nest, so to speak. Moreover, there’s fresh speculation that his decision to site a doomed emergency management command post in the World Trade Center might have had more to do with sexual than with law enforcement logistics.
And then there’s the whole impact of the story on Rudy’s wife. I personally find the whole obsession Americans have about vetting the families of political candidates atavistic, distasteful, and irrelevant, and God alone could fairly compare the Giuliani family’s ethics to those of others. But the fact remains that Republican primary voters probably won’t react very well to information that seems to depict the Next First Lady of the United States as some sort of hoochie mama.
No matter how much of the details of the scandal turn out to be accurate, this story will likely unleash the hounds of hell on Rudy, precisely because the “personal” stories he’s so far brushed off just got very “political.” At this point, his Republican presidential rivals are leaving it alone, but that won’t last, and unless Giuliani comes up with a solid way to squelch the story, he’s in big trouble.