Timothy Noah’s Slate article “Decoding David Brooks,” sheds some fresh light on the New York Times columnist’s most recent screed attempting to rescue Reagan’s legacy from the taint of racism (See also J.P. Green’s post on the topic here and The Atlantic.com‘s discussion lead by Matthew Yglesias here). Noah says that Brooks’ column was really a bank shot at fellow New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has often noted Reagan’s endorsement of “states’ rights” at his 1980 campaign launch in Philadelphia, MS. Apparently there is some sort of unwritten code that Times columnists can’t attack each other by name.
Big mistake for Brooks, whose regular shtick is more in the vein of wry/snarky op-eds about American culture and class. In his ‘Conscience of a Liberal’ blog, Krugman fillets and shreds Brooks’ implied message that Reagan was innocent of racial antagonism, and Krugman does it all without mentioning Brooks’ name. Yglesias comments on the whole Brooks-Krugman dust-up and his readers join the fray here.

No Democratic Presidential candidate has won Virginia since 1964. But a combination of demographic trends, local issues, Republican screw-ups and some solid rebuilding work by the state Democratic Party have combined to give Dems new hope for winning VA’s 13 electroral votes next year.
For those who want to savor or better understand the Democrats victories in the Virginia elections last week, we have a trio of articles from Virginia websites. First, most Dems won’t relish her conclusion — that a “right-of-center message” will win VA’s electoral votes next year — but there is some interesting detail on key issues pertaining to local Democratic victories in Margaret Edd’s “6 lessons from the 2007 ballot” in the Virginian-Pilot. Also check out Michael Sluss’s Roanoke Times piece “Democrats see a possible blue Virginia,” arguing that a centrist appeal is the key to future Democratic victories in the state. Finally, Tyler Whitley and Jeff E. Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch have the oppo take in their interesting article “Va. GOP debates direction to take: Party’s conservatives and moderates disagree on why Senate shifted to Democrats.”

Noam Scheiber’s “The Stump” blog at The New Republic echoes an observation noted in our staff post a week ago — that Mitt Romney’s campaign is gathering some serious momentum, as indicated by recent polls in NH, IA and SC. Scheiber has the numbers, and it looks like Iowa is Romney’s to lose, with a 14 point lead. He also has a 7.4 percent lead in New Hampshire and is gaining in South Carolina.
His growing lead is not as deep or broad as Senator Clinton’s Democratic numbers, and may have more to do with his well-timed ad buys, as John B. Judis has suggested:

Romney, on the other hand, continues to run strongly in the first three states, including South Carolina. In the American Research Group polls, Romney leads Huckabee by 27 to 19 percent in Iowa, he leads Giuliani by 30 to 23 percent in New Hampshire, and leads Giuliani by 29 to 23 percent in South Carolina. If Romney can win these states and Michigan, which also votes early, he could get a boost that would allow him to defeat Giuliani in the South and to compete with him in the big states in the West, Middle West and Northeast.
The question about Romney is how much his current popularity depends on an extensive ad campaigns that he has been running. Will his popularity hold up once the other candidates begin competing on the airwaves? According to polls, Romney’s support is far from solid. In the Marist poll in New Hampshire of likely voters, only 37 percent of Romney’s supporters back him “strongly.” By comparison, 48 percent of Giuliani’s supporters, and 56 percent of McCain’s are strong backers.

Romney would bring some significant negatives as a nominee, including his flip-flopping track record — you can almost see the ‘weather vane’ ads. However, Romney, a cum laude grad of Harvard Law and a top 5 percent grad of the Harvard Biz School, has a lot of experience dealing with progressives. He may be the shrewdest strategist of the comparatively weak GOP field, having been elected Governor of Massachusetts as a Mormon and Republican and spearheaded Massachusetts’ health care reform legislation. His sneering reference to New York as a ‘sanctuary city’ suggests he intends to use immigration as a wedge issue to win support from swing voters. Although Clinton still polls well against Romney, his campaign clearly knows how to push polls and deploy campaign resources. Whoever we nominate, I would prefer any other Republican opponent.

At John Hopkins’s School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered a speech on foreign policy and partisanship that seemed designed to validate everything his Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him (and I count myself in this group, though not since his loss to Ned Lamont in Connecticut in the Democratic primary last year).
Press accounts reported that at some point (probably a post-speech Q&A) Lieberman said he might not support the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. But the speech itself pointed more than sufficiently in that direction. Its essence was to define a “muscular” FDR/Truman/JFK Democratic foreign policy, on which the two parties have repeatedly reversed roles, with Republicans currently “for” and Democrats “against.” Joe Lieberman himself, the speech suggests, seems to be the only consistent advocate for that tradition, emulating the brave example of Democrat-turned-Republican-advisor Paul Nitze, whose name is attached to SAIS.
I really encourage Democrats who have defended Lieberman in the past to read this speech. It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were “good” from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be “bad.” Democrats were “bad” from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were “good.” During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were “good” and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were “bad,” and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman’s running-mate Al Gore “good,” the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush “bad”). Both parties were “good” from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were “good” and Democrats turned “bad” (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely “bad” in opposing the war).
These judgments appear based on an interpretation of the “muscular” Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law–all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support. You’d also never know, since Lieberman never acknowledges it, that the leading Democratic presidential candidates don’t simply identify themselves with opposition to Bush on Iraq and Iran, but have offered their own detailed national security plans which take Islamic jihadism quite seriously as a threat.
In other words, Lieberman’s speech is less a rebuke to the “‘antiwar” Democrats who helped deny him the party’s nomination to the Senate in 2006, than a challenge to liberal internationalists whom he places on the wrong side of a choice between preemptive unilateralism and isolationism and chaos. This is one occasion on which so-called “liberal hawks” need to take the lead in repudiating Joe. As Sam Boyd at TAPPED suggests, in an essentially accurate if exaggerated view, Lieberman is saying “you’re either with Norman Podheretz, or with Noam Chomsky.”
Democrats who vehemently deny this false choice should be in the forefront of those vehemently denouncing Joe Lieberman’s latest descent into full-bore neoconservatism, which isn’t just about foreign policy, but about the wilfull subjection of every progressive instinct on every issue to the monomaniacal drive for warfare against every enemy, foreign or domestic.

Scott Helman of the Boston Globe reports from South Carolina on a wrinkle in the “electability” debate that especially affects Barack Obama: the strong belief of many African-Americans that their white fellow citizens will never elect a black president, at least any time soon.
Unsurprisingly, this feeling is particularly strong in the South, where such attractive African-American statewide candidates as North Carolina’s Harvey Gantt and Tennessee’s Harold Ford have succumbed to racially-charged negative campaigns.

“Personally, I don’t think he has a chance in hell,” said Leah Josey, a 20-year-old English major at Morris College, a Baptist school in Sumter. “All those white people? Come on.”
Such sentiments are prevalent among black South Carolinians, who are expected to make up nearly half of voters in the Democratic primary in January. Nearly a third of black voters surveyed in a statewide poll in September said white Americans would not vote for a black presidential candidate.

This helps explain why Obama is running no better than even with, and in many polls, well behind, Hillary Clinton among African-American Democrats nationally, and also why he’s running behind her in South Carolina. And I’d have to say that anecdotally, Helman’s report comports with what I’ve personally heard from some African-American elected officials who express negative opinions about Obama’s electibility not as a fear, but as a bedrock conviction.

“Obama’s chief opponents are ‘Mr. and Mrs. He-can’t-win,’ ” said I.S. Leevy Johnson, a lawyer and power broker in Columbia who is active in Obama’s campaign. “You hear it a lot because historically that has been the case.”

Now it’s true that this sort of ambivalent feeling is common towards “pioneer” candidates. Elizabeth Edwards has not-so-subtly appealed to the fears of some women that Hillary Clinton would actually set back the cause of gender equality in politics by losing a general election. And going back a while, many Catholic opinion-leaders in 1960 openly opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on grounds that it would become a lightning rod for anti-Catholic prejudices.
But in the end, an overwhelming majority of Catholics did vote for Kennedy, and the question is whether the excitement of a viable campaign would dispel electibility concerns about Clinton among women and Obama among African-Americans.
Fortunately for Obama, by the time the primary calendar rolls around to SC, the question will either be moot, or he will have already demonstrated strong support in the exceptionally pale electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire. Just as JFK’s landslide primary win over Hubert Humphrey in profoundly Protestant West Virginia in 1960 helped dispel fears that he couldn’t win Protestants, an Obama win in Iowa would be hard to ignore. In general, if the millstone of African-American skepticism about Obama is as strong as Helman’s report suggests, and if he can dispel it, then Obama’s “upside” against Clinton in the South and in other states with large African-American populations may be higher than many analysts realize.

David Brooks has the latest installment in the never-ending effort to sanitize the late President Ronald Reagan’s track record. In his op-ed column in today’s New York Times, Brooks makes his case that the charge “that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion,” referring to Reagan’s 1980 campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, most famous as the site where three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were murdered in 1964.
It is impossible to prove what Reagan intended to do on that occasion. Certainly, those who were involved in the decision and who are still alive would be unlikely to admit that it was a deliberate effort to exploit racial animosity. For the same reason, it is equally-impossible to disprove his intentions. What is known is what Reagan said on that day, and Brooks quotes him:

Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.

Brooks expects his readers to believe that the use of the term ‘states’ rights’ in that town was not intended to evoke segregationist sympathies, even when the previous sentence makes it clear that education is the primary issue here. What Brooks doesn’t provide is a little more background on Reagan’s views on racial justice, as does Sydney Blumenthal in his article in The Guardian:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it “humiliating to the South”), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” he said, “he has a right to do so.” After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: “I believe in states’ rights.

Alec Dubro points out in his TomPaine.com article ‘Reagan White As Snow” that Reagan also vetoed anti-apartheid legislation and did what he could to screw up it’s implementation after the veto was overridden.
The reason Reagan’s record has any relevance to today’s politics is that the current GOP field is so weak that they feel a need to repeatedly invoke Reagan’s name as a touchstone to recall better times for their Party. Brooks and other Republicans, however, would be wiser to say as little as possible about Reagan’s racial views and policies.

Back in April, I did a NewDonkey post noting a Robert Novak column that put the official Right-Wing imprimatur on the proto-candidacy of Fred Thompson. Indeed, the column was reminiscent of The Novak’s highly influential epistle back in 1998 designating George W. Bush as the “ideological heir of Ronald Reagan.”
Now the Dark One appears to have withdrawn the imprimatur from Big Fred, because of his “astounding lack of sensitivity on abortion,” as reflected in Thompson’s Meet the Press appearance last Sunday.
In Novak’s account, Thompson’s specific sins were (1) a blunt refusal to support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution, a longstanding demand of the Cultural Right that has been a staple of Republican Party platforms since 1980; and (2) an association with the idea that a reversal of Roe v. Wade might mean a “criminalization” of abortion.
The Prince is definitely right in his political analysis of the price Fred may pay for these comments; he should have known that sounding even vaguely reasonable on the “Holocaust” of abortion is something Republicans only dare essay in general elections.
But the sweeping nature of his excommunication of Thompson made me wonder anew about a Novak column a few weeks ago that read like a valentine to Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that California conservatives weren’t that worried about Rudy’s heresies on social issues.
If Fred’s off-limits for opposing a Human Life amendment, what should cultural conservatives think about a candidate who still supports legalized abortion in its entirety?
I don’t know quite what’s up with Novak, but his column on Thompson did offer one tantalizing hint of the current hard-right zeigeist. After demolishing Thompson, noting Rudy’s pro-choice stance, side-swiping Romney for his late-life conversion to The Cause, and dismissing Huckabee as a member of the “Christian Left,” the Prince of Darkness concludes:

That leaves McCain, no favorite of the right, but the major candidate with the clearest longtime position against abortion.

I don’t want to get into any conspiracy theories here, but it is interesting that Novak penned these words shortly after his fellow Opus Dei convert to Catholicism, Sam Brownback, endorsed McCain over the rest of the field.

Over at TAPPED, Dr. Tom Schaller has suggested that Barack Obama and John Edwards should supplement their attacks on Hillary Clinton’s policy positions by making a parallel political argument: that “the Clintons” presided over the destruction of the Democratic Party during the 1990s:

On her health care debacle and war vote, Edwards and Obama are making the case that she used bad policy and/or personal judgment, but they ought to try a new, politically-themed tack: Hillary and (they should be more careful here) Bill Clinton fought the Republicans but the GOP was stronger, not weaker, when they left office in 2001 than the Republicans were when the Clintons arrived in 1993.

Also at TAPPED, Dana Goldstein doubts that actual Democratic voters will be persuaded by a political narrative of the 1990s that doesn’t accord with their own memories. I agree.
But the discussion of the political viability of Schaller’s hypothesis avoids a more fundamental question: Is it true?
This question isn’t just a matter of historical interest. Schaller is faithfully expressing a revisionist take on the 1990s that has become an article of faith in many Left-netroots circles, with an implication that is of immediate importance to Democrats. The idea is the Clinton-style centrism was an electoral as well as an ideological disaster, producing at best two less-than-majority presidential wins at the price of the erosion of Democratic support in congressional and state elections. The 2006 Democratic comeback, according to this theory, proves that a more base-oriented, left-bent Democratic strategy is the key to a long-term Democratic majority.
But what really happened to Democrats in the Clinton years? And why?
The first essential step in answering that question is to isolate the effects of the 1994 Republican landslide. In the three Clinton administration elections after that (plus some off-year state elections), it’s hard to argue there was any significant erosion of Democratic support. After the 1994 elections, there were 204 Democratic House members and 47 Democratic Senators. After the 2000 elections, there were 212 Democratic House members and 50 Democratic Senators. Between 1995 and 2000, Democrats made a net gain of one governorship, and a net loss of one state legislative chamber.
So the case for Clinton’s disastrous effect on the Democratic Party’s national standing–if you are willing to overlook or minimize his two presidential wins–really comes down to the one calamitous election of 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats, 8 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 18 state legislative chambers.
There are, of course, two divergent narratives that hold Clinton partially or wholly responsible for the 1994 debacle. One often heard on the Left is that his support for deficit reduction and NAFTA, and an insufficiently progressive health care plan, “discouraged the Democratic base” and gave Republicans a victory by default. Another, often heard among party centrists, is that Clinton disappointed voters–most notably 1992 Perot voters–looking for a “different kind of Democrat” with unpopular early-term positons on gays-in-the-military and fetal tissue research, and above all, a decision to devote much of his second year in office pursuing what looked like a vast new health care entitlement instead of welfare reform.
Aside from the inherent improbability that Clinton’s brief record in office could have alone produced this kind of adverse landslide, the intensity of the pro-GOP wave in state elections undermined both blame-Clinton narratives. After all, Democrats had managed to hold their own at the state level through periods of national GOP victories in the 1980s, and going back further, even in the vast Nixon landslide of 1972. Something deeper must have been going on that had little to do with Clinton or perceptions of “Clintonism.”
The two theories most often accepted by analysts at the time were (1) an unusually toxic “wrong-track” feeling in the electorate, which helped boost both Clinton and Perot in 1992, was taken out on the dominant congressional and state party of the previous two decades; and (2) a slow but steady realignment of the two parties on sharper left-right ideological lines finally “flipped” conservative Democrats towards the GOP, and reduced split-ticket voting, particularly in the South, where the 1994 losses were particularly large. Ephemeral circumstances, particularly a record number of U.S. House retirements and a pattern of racial gerrymandering in the South, intensified both effects in U.S. House races.
It’s entirely possible that structural issues that Bill Clinton had little control over, and administration policies he did control, both played a role in the 1994 debacle, just as it’s possible that both “blame-Clinton” interpretations had some truth with respect to different categories of voters. But it’s hardly a simple story, and hardly provides any clear ideological direction for Democrats today, much less an effective talking-point against Hillary Clinton.
What about the one Clintonian episode that obviously did have an impact on post-1994 dynamics, the Lewinsky scandal? Aside from the fact that the scandal had no obvious ideological underpinnings, other than to bond Republicans to a hard-right cultural message, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in the end, the scandal didn’t hurt Democrats, unless you believe that’s what kept Al Gore from being inaugurated as president. In that connection, Schaller’s post suggests that the political case against the Clintons includes the “legacy election” of 2000, wherein their failure to “fight” for Al Gore made a crucial difference. Well, it’s hard to “fight” for a candidate who is doing everything possible to distance himself from you, and one of the most commonly heard complaints about the Gore-Lieberman campaign at the time is that it largely refused to deploy Clinton or his record.
Schaller makes one additional argument in his post that bears some discussion: The Clintons failed to build the sort of ideological institutions (e.g., CAP, Media Matters) necessary to combat the right-wing uprising of the 1990s. For one thing, the White House itself was a stronger pro-Democratic message-purveyor than any private-sector institution could have ever managed; indeed, it was the loss of the White House that made the construction of an alternative infrastructure so important. And for another, Clintonians have played a pretty conspicuous role in the Bush Era progressive “noise machine” scene. It’s a bit hard to cite John Podesta’s work as evidence of a general Clintonian lack of interest in institution-building.
All in all, I think Dr. Schaller’s barking up the wrong tree, but he is certainly fostering an important discussion of a set of beliefs about the recent political past that lurks just under the surface of most intra-party disputes.

John Bresnahan has a Politico piece on a new funding strategy for Democratic congressional campaigns that should arch a few brows: Here’s the nut graph:

With a huge cash advantage over the National Republican Congressional Committee, Van Hollen and Emanuel are cautioning their colleagues that the DCCC wants to have money to put into 40 challenger races next year — and if these vulnerable Democrats are not facing serious races or any effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee to unseat them, the DCCC will spend its resources elsewhere.

It’s a bold move, and one which appears to be based on the confident assumption that a mega-victory in ’08 is in the making for Donkeys. May it prove to be so.

Williams College proffs James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have a provocatively-titled op-ed in the L.A. Times, “How to win elections, FDR style.” Burns and Dunn argue that front-runner Hillary Clinton is on the right track in emulating FDR’s strategy — “he purposefully sought to be elusive, vague and to appear to be all things to all people.” The authors say her critics complaint that she should be “more candid and genuine” is “a sensible and astute formula — for losing elections.” Although demographics have changed somewhat since FDR’s day, say Dunn and Burns, the Dems’ winning formula still requires a ‘big tent’ perspective. An interesting article, and one sure to generate a healthy measure of disagreement.