Linda Hirshman (yes, the self-same Linda Hirshman who recently roiled progressive circles with her critique of “choice feminism”) has a new piece up on the New Republic’s website arguing that Democrats—a party she says is living without an organizing principle—need to re-embrace both the word and the underlying philosophy of liberalism.
I think most Democrats sense the void of which Hirshman writes, despite recent electoral success. If you don’t know what I mean, try asking a newly minted candidate what it means to be a Democrat and see if you don’t get a list of programs (or even ideas!) instead of a governing philosophy. What people may not realize it the detriment that brings to day-to-day Democratic governance.
“Rather than embrace this bedrock commitment, however, Democrats shy away from it. The best example of this failure is their talk about the cost of health care,” Hirshman writes. “Most sensible analysts agree that, even with efficiencies of scale, any of the Democrats’ health care plans is going to cost more than it saves. So the dreaded government is going to have to use its taxing power.”
It’s not just health care. Democrats frequently have a great, liberal idea…that costs money. But instead of balancing it with other priorities and then telling people how much this new thing they want is going to cost, we bend to the conservative governing philosophy. We try to conceal the cost, do it on the cheap, or make it look like a painless trade-off.
But it never is painless. Programs implemented this way—even the really popular ones—end up costing more than we said and not working as well. Every Communications 101 class learns about “managing expectations”; not dealing forthrightly with the costs of our ideas and moral and philosophical reasons for them sets expectations at a place that will always leave the American people disappointed.
Recent conversations about our national infrastructure are a great opportunity to talk openly in the language of collective action to solve a national problem. Our aging bridges and roads represent an asset that should be benefit us all and a problem we need to deal with together. (Anti-tax crusaders should be referred immediately to examples of what happens to economic growth when these problems are ignored.) Call it a liberalism moment.
But remember, if we are going to reclaim the “brand,” that liberalism has many edges, some of them no more perfectly consistent with “left” than with “centrist” perspectives. The ambiguous legacy of liberalism is one reason, along with its demonization by the Right, that contemporary “progressives” aren’t always comfortable with it.

This is being referred to as Petraeus Week by many in Washington, with the General’s testimony (along with that of U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker) to Congress being the long awaited focal point. And in anticipation of this well-previewed event, we’ve seen some predictable lines of attack, with many antiwar Democrats hotly disputing Petraeus’ sunny-side-up assessment of the “surge” and its alleged impact on levels of violence in Iraq, and many conservatives claiming Democrats hate the armed services and don’t care what they have to say about the military situation.
Speaking not as an Iraq specialist, but simply as someone who has observed D versus R national security dynamics for a long time, I’m getting a bit worried that Dems are behaving as though Petraeus’ military assessment is the ball game in determining what happens next in Iraq. If it’s not discredited, some seem to assume, then the case for getting out of Iraq somehow crumbles.
Here’s a pretty simple series of questions that Dems ought to ask in the wake of this testimony: Wasn’t the whole point of the “surge” to make quick progress towards a political settlement in Iraq possible? Doesn’t everyone pretty much admit that no such progress has been made, whether or not the security environment has improved? If that’s right, and it is, then how much does it really matter (other than for humanitarian reasons) whether or not violence has gone marginally up or marginally down, or (as seems likely) has been temporarily shifted from one battleground to others? Indeed, if an “improved” security situation has had no material effect on the sectarian civil war in Iraq (and to address the peculiar talking point we keeping hearing from the Right, turning some Sunni tribes into enemies of Al Qaeda in Iraq has little real impact on the Sunni-Shi’a stalemate), isn’t that actually an argument for the hypothesis that offensive military engagement by the U.S. is no longer defensible?
Maybe I’m missing something, but Petraeus’ military assessment seems pretty irrelevant to me. And making challenges to his credibility as a military leader the be-all and end-all of Iraq War criticism strikes me as a mistake. Perhaps the right response to his testimony would be a shrug rather than a shriek. The war can never be “won,” and will inevitably be “lost” if Iraqis can’t reach a political settlement. They certainly can’t and won’t so long as we are involved in combat operations in their country. And the events of the last six month, whatever else they show, do show that abundantly.

They must be doing the Happy Dance over at the DSCC, with the Hagel retirement announcement added to those of Sens. Warner and (likely) Craig. With the right candidates, Dems should be able to win at least 2 out of 3 of these seats.
MyDD‘s Senate2008guru has the latest run-down on some key races, with lotsa links providing more information. Charles Babington of the Associated Press also has a good wrap-up of the ’08 Senate campaign’s latest scuttlebut and points out that investigations of Republican Sens. Stevens and Domenici are underway. Babington adds:

Meanwhile, anti-war sentiment is giving Democrats serious hopes of denying re-election to Republican senators in competitive states including New Hampshire, Maine, Minnesota and Oregon.

Paul Bedard of U.S. News reports that former Governor Jean Shaheen is leading John Sununu in NH by more than 25 points in recent polls. DSCC Chair Chuck Schumer conceeds that a lot can happen in the 14 months ahead. For now, however, the ’08 Senate race big picture is beginning to look very sweet indeed.

Chris Cillizza’s “The Fix” (WaPo) has an interesting ranking of the ” top ten House races.” Cillizza doesn’t spell out his criteria, except to say that #1 was chosen because it is “most likely to switch parties in 2008.”
According to Cillizza, They are, in order: CO-4; KS-2; CA-11; TX-22; GA-8; FL-16; AZ-1; OH-15; CA-4 and; VA-11, with half of the districts in Cilliza’s list currently held by each party.
It would be wrong to infer from the list that Republicans are more or less even with Dems in congressional races. The most current opinion poll shows Dems with a strong and growing lead in generic House races. The latest Rasmussen telephone survey (conducted 9/4) shows Dems with an 18 point lead in the generic congressional ballot, up from 10 points a month ago. A George Washington University Battleground Poll, conducted by the Tarrance Group (R) and Lake Research Partners (D) 7/15-18, found that likely voters preferred the Democratic candidate in their congressional district by a margin of 7 percent. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll, conducted 6/22-24, showed a similar (8 point) lead. MyDD’s Jonathan Singer has calculated the average of seven recent generic congressional ballot polls, and concludes:

Although the margins have shifted from month to month, probably as a result of statistical noise, the overall appearance of the poll has been remarkably stable, with the Democrats varying within 2.5 points above or below 47.5 percent and the Republicans varying within 3 points above or below 35 percent.

Cilliza’s topic is really more along the lines of each Party’s “five best chances for pick-ups,” not the “most competitive” races. He provides some link-rich insights about each race, and some of the more than 170 readers submitting comments about particular races disagree with his facts and/or analysis. (Wading through such lengthy comments is a chore, but it does yield some perceptive insights and useful information for political strategy).
House race junkies will find another useful resource in Wikipedia’s House “Race Tracker 2008,” which links to state by state, then district run-downs identifying candidates and their announced opponents, with district maps and links to pertinent state and local websites.

Just as fall is the start of the Oscar movie hunt — when the studios shelve their popcorn features and roll out their character dramas — September marks the return of the serious book. While much of the literary buzz will be focused on bright, new novels, the autumn calendar is loaded with political nonfiction. Among the highlights this month:
Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper. In late 2006 and early 2007, Draper — a journalist with GQ and a former writer for Texas Monthly— was granted six hour-long interviews with the President. During the writing of this book, he also interviewed more than 200 source close to Bush. What emerges is an attempt to give an intimate view of the Bush White House from the perspective of an outsider without an ax to grind. Excerpts from the book are already running on Slate. Early reviews say that the general picture is familiar to readers of the Woodward books (Bush at War, Plan of Attack, etc.) but that the details are fresh and revealing.
Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark Penn. Any kind of book by Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster released this close to the 2008 elections is intriguing for reasons beyond the particular content. But Penn’se ffort to identify the national cultural trends in religion, leisure, politics, and family life is interesting on another order of magnitude. He uses decades of research to produce the data and numbers which make up his trends, and much of what he writes is fascinating (for instance — he notes that 57 percent of journalists are women, and that in the fields of public relations and the law, gender proportions are trending the same way). If that sort of thing isn’t your cup of tea, you can always read every page looking for insight into Sen. Clinton’s campaign strategy, and if I’m a high-level guy for Obama or Edwards, that’s exactly what I’m doing this week.
Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton. We all know that President Clinton’s current gig is philanthropist-in-chief, and Giving is a call to action for individuals to develop creative solutions to combat the problems of the world. It will be fascinating to see how the publicity for this book develops. Remember, Clinton’s memoirs set a worldwide record for single day non-fiction book sales, and he won a Grammy for the audio-version he recorded. You can be sure that each of his media appearances (starting with his appearance earlier this week on Larry King Live) will be closely coordinated with his wife’s campaign. My guess is that you can start queuing up for the book signing at the Barnes & Noble in Des Moines now.
The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgement Inside the Bush Administration by Jack Goldsmith. This weekend, the New York Times Sunday Magazine will publish a profile of Goldsmith, former chief of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, charged with telling the president what he is legally allowed to do. In 2003. In his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith came across the infanous “terror memos.” For the rest of his tenure in the White House, he tried to bring the administration back under what he saw as the rule of the law, fighting entrenched Bush officials on everything from trials of suspected terrorists to domestic surveillance. The preview of the NYT Magazine piece is already on the paper’s Most Emailed Articles list, and Goldsmith’s book hits the shelves on Sept 17th. Given that this thing comes out after Gen. Petraeus gives his report, I suspect it’s going to be in the news — a lot.
Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics by Jonathan Chait. Big Con, by the LA Times columnist and New Republic veteran Chait, is already getting debated on economics and politics blogs all over the Net. The book’s hypothesis is that reverse-Robin-Hood economic policies have been the most consistent feature of the Bush-era GOP. Chait offers a history of supply-side economists and a study of the baleful influence they’ve had on the Republican Party and public policy. The book is being excerpted on TNR’s web page, and the first sentence begins, “American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane.” While I’m not sure Big Con will convince any card-carrying Club for Growthers of the error of their ways, for the rest of us, I imagine this will be a good introduction to a subject we could all know a little more about, delivered in Chait’s trademark acidic style.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Iraq debate in Congress later this month will revolve around a big political strategic question: which party will split?
The Democratic congressional leadership, having abandoned a bipartisan approach during the last Iraq debate, seems now inclined to return to it. It’s unclear at this point whether this calculation is aimed at producing a Republican split (via a non-binding resolution urging a change of strategy in Iraq and an immediate drawdown of troops), or avoiding Democratic defections from a more hard-line stance of denying appropriations without a withdrawal commitment and timeline.
Whatever it represents, the leadership strategy is producing some serious blowback among antiwar Democrats generally and the progressive blogosphere specifically, as the Kos post linked to above reflects.
And the question wll inevitably be reflected in the presidential contest, though last time around, four of the five candidates who had to vote on the May Iraq suppmental appropriations bill (a.k.a. in blogger parlance, the “Iraq capitulation bill”) voted “no,” with Joe Biden the conspicuous exception.
Perhaps because this issue isn’t producing much clash in the presidential debate, wary antiwar Democrats continue to focus on a separate issue: how many “residual” troops do Democratic candidates plan to leave in Iraq even after the conventional combat troops are withdrawn?
In that connection, Chris Bowers at OpenLeft has put up two very useful posts, the first slicing and dicing the Democratic candidates’ positions on post-combat-troop-withdrawal “residuals,” and the second analyzing a poll showing that rank-and-file Democratic perceptions of the candidates’ Iraq withdrawal plans aren’t necessarily accurate. But aside from their informational value, Chris’ posts will help reinforce an emerging blogospheric CW that Bill Richardson’s rise into double digits in IA and NH is attributable to his obsessive talk about the “residuals” issue, and could produce a shift towards a more categorical get-out-of-Iraq posture from Edwards and Obama, if not HRC.
Getting back to the congressional debate, the growing netroots anger at the congressional leadership’s bipartisan talk about Iraq is complicating the “Bush Dog” campaign–begun by OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller–to isolate, intimidate, and in certain cases “primary” Democrats unwilling to challenge Bush to the maximum extent on Iraq and on FISA. Will Harry Reid eventually be labeled a “Bush Dog?” Will Nancy Pelosi? And if so, then what does that say about the authority to identify party orthodoxy and heresy?
Here’s hoping the Iraq debate does not go in this direction. As most Democratic commentators would agree, all but a few Democratic Members of Congress, and all of our presidential candidates, would deal with Iraq in a decisively different way than Bush or any of the Republican presidential candidates (other than Ron Paul). Just last night, we saw a GOP candidate debate in which one of the decisive moments was an argument as to whether the Bush “surge” was simply improving the security situation, or instead portended Final Victory. And the Final Victory advocate was adjuged as winning the debate.
Within the limits of acknowledging the basic and abiding differences of Ds and Rs on Iraq,, it’s obviously legitimate to choose between Democratic presidential candidates on their specific Iraq plans, which do differ.
But whatever Democrats can do to keep this month’s Iraq debate focused on Bush and the GOP, rather than themselves, would be very helpful in the fight to rid America of its horrific current management.

Last night Fred Thompson skipped the Fox News candidate debate in New Hampshire in order to finally announce his presidential run on Jay Leno’s show. And today we learn, via Garance Franke-Ruta, that word’s getting around Iowa about a blog post penned last month for The Hill last month by the deputy communications director for Fred’s campaign, suggesting that the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses were, well, basically unpatriotic.
With the subtle title “Put America First: Make Iowa Go Last,” Karen Hanratty accurately says Iowa’s political power has helped preserve federal ethanol subsidies. But she goes on to argue that money currently spent on these subsidies might better be used for infrastructure construction and repairs. Given the date of the post (August 10), it’s pretty clear Hanratty is alluding to the Minnesota bridge disaster. So her message is really this: the Iowa Caucuses Kill.
Hanratty wasn’t officially aboard the Big Fred Machine when she wrote this toxic little love note to Iowans, but you have to wonder if it came up in her job interview. Here’s guessing she won’t be chowing down on corn dogs in Des Moines any time soon.

The Democratic candidate boycott of the outlaw Michigan and Florida presidential primaries that was negotiated last week theoretically takes those states off the table. But as Robert Novak notes in a column today, the vote will still be held in MI and FL, and the results are likely to reflect the national standing of the various candidates, absent any personal campaigning.
The Dark One, quoting Bob Shrum (who is also being boycotted by the presidential candidates, and thus gets plenty of exposure as a “neutral” pudit), goes on to suggest that could help Hillary Clinton offset possible losses in IA and NH, which are still certain to move their dates back to the first week of January, in part because there is at this point no Republican boycott of MI and FL.
What Novak and Shrum seem to miss, oddly enough, is the extraordinary impact that results in the first two states typically have on the national standing of presidential candidates, most notably in 2004, when John Kerry went from single digits in national polls to an overwhelming lead after NH. If Edwards or Obama or Richardson, or some combination of the three, beats Clinton in IA and NH, then her current big lead in national polls is likely to vanish, and the perfect mirror of the national race offered by a campaign-free Michigan will reflect that. FL is also likely to reflect the cumulative state of the race after SC.
The larger issue is whether anyone will care what happens in these two pariah states. It will be an interesting test for the chattering classes: if Republicans do compete for MI and FL, it will be impossible to simply ignore them, as unauthorized “beauty contest” primaries have sometimes been ignored in the past. And it’s also likely that the Democratic candidates will find some way to run surreptitious under-the-radar campaigns in IL and FL, even as the candidates themselves stay aloof.

To follow up on yesterday’s post on the need to build some bridges of cooperation between environmentalists and labor, can we have a lusty “Amen” to the point made in the concluding couple of sentences? For many years, not a few environmentalists seemed to be saying, in essence, to workers “The bad news is that your particular job would be toast as a result of the reforms we advocate. But take heart, good fellow, the good news is that there will be net job creation.” Tough sell, that one.
Jock Young’s Kos post touched on one such highly difficult conflict — between the advocates of tougher CAFE standards and auto workers. This conflict is especially troublesome because of the central importance of America’s auto industry in our economy, and also because stricter CAFE standards can help cut our addiction to mid-east oil and thereby reduce the propensity of knuckleheaded political leaders to get bogged down in military quagmires in oil-rich countries. Not incidently, it’s also one of the key reforms needed to reduce air pollution and global warming. This conflict HAS to be resolved in a way that both protects America’s auto industry and it’s workers and drastically reduces U.S. oil consumption. The science has arrived. Now it’s time for the best thinkers in the Democratic Party to do their part to resolve the conflict, and there isn’t a hell of a lot of time.
“Energy Independence” is a great rallying cry. But somebody’s got to take the lead. One possibility is Al Gore, who deserves a lot of credit for raising the level of environmental concern in the Democratic Party, as well as in America and worldwide. It’s bitterly ironic that the Green Party’s presidential candidate prevented Gore from winning the presidency, according to one popular analysis of the 2000 election. But as grown-ups, we have to face the fact that the Green’s constituency didn’t come from nowhere, and Nader’s Florida vote wasn’t all about Nader. The Democrats’ track record on environmental concerns has not always been impressive — that’s why there is a Green Party.
But Gore’s emergence as one of America’s preeminent environmentalists, along with his savvy as a seasoned political leader who understands Labor’s agenda and just grievances, affords an opportunity to strengthen the Dems’ claim on Green votes. Gore isn’t running for President, but he can nonetheless play a pivotal role in building a bridge of solidarity between unions and workers on the one hand and environmentalists on the other — all under the banner of the Democratic Party. Give Dems a sharper profile as protectors of the environment, as well as jobs, and we will win the votes of Americans concerned about environmental degradation, including many Green Party members, Independents, swing voters — and even some Republicans.