Louisiana politics is never dull, and rarely conventional. And we’re seeing a fresh example of that in an ad being run by the state’s Democratic Party criticizing Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal for his hostility towards–you’ll never guess this one–Protestants.
The ad, part of a series aimed at cutting into Jindal’s lead over the gubernatorial field heading towards the October 20 open primary, focuses on a 1996 Jindal article published by the New Oxford Review, that hardy outlet for Catholic “traditionalist” polemics. According to the ad, Jindal called Protestants depraved, selfish and heretical. It directs viewers to a web page offering links to that and other Jindal writings on religion, much of it also from NOR.
The 1996 piece basically reads like a first draft of Catholic Apologetics For Dummies. Relying heavily on scriptural citations, Jindal trudges through a defense of Catholic teaching on such topics as justification-by-faith, tradition-versus-scripture, the sacraments, the papacy, the apostolic succession of bishops, and Rome’s claims to universality. Other than its leaden, pre-Vatican II writing style, the only jarring thing about the article is that a guy like Jindal–at the time the wunderkind secretary of health services for Louisiana–is the author.
Unsurprisingly, the Democratic ad is running in three Northern Louisiana media markets. This is a heavily Protestant (especially Baptist and Pentecostal) region, and also where Kathleen Blanco exceeded expectations in her upset win over Jindal in 2003. Indeed, Jindal and other Republicans are probably screaming bloody murder over the ad in order to make sure the heavily Catholic population of southern LA knows he’s being attacked for his fidei defensor scribblings. Since Louisiana Democrats knew they couldn’t really microtarget the ad, you have to figure they calculated that many Catholics ain’t that jazzed about old-school Catholic-Protestant polemics, either.
My own feeling is that having forced some poor grad student researcher to read back issues of the New Oxford Review, the state Democratic Party might have done better to contrast that publication’s–and for that matter, the Vatican’s–chronic hostility to the Iraq War and Bush foreign policies generally with Jindal’s thousand-percent support for same. But perhaps the whole thing is just an effort to suggest that Bobby is, well, just a strange dude, because of, not despite, his remarkably precocious career. We’re talking about a twenty-five-year old running a Medicaid program in one of America’s poorest states, who apparently has enough spare time from his day job to pen a 16th-century style theological tract for a publication considered a extreme even by other right-wing Catholics.
Louisiana Democrats are clearly trying to suggest Jindal’s “not one of us” without getting into the vieled racial issues that likely played a role in Bobby’s loss in 2003. I’m skeptical that this latest tack will work, but Jindal had best be careful that in reacting to such criticisms, he doesn’t reinforce the larger point.

Time was, even uttering a favorable comment about normalization of relations with Cuba resulted in a political death sentence for aspiring candidates in Florida. But it looks increasingly like those days may be coming to a close, according to recent opinion survey data and comments by presidential candidates.
Obama is leading the charge toward normalization for Democrats, calling for an easing of travel restrictions for Cuban-American family members and increasing the amount of money they can send to relatives back in Cuba. Obama also has indicated a willingness to meet with Cuban leaders. Edwards agrees that travel restrictions should be eased for family members, but supports a “cap on remittances to use as leverage against the regime,” according to an article by Beth Reinhard and Lesley Clark in yesterday’s Miami Herald. Clinton opposes any easing of travel restrictions, except for “humanitarian cases,” until Castro’s rule ends, but she supports allowing family members to send more money to Cuban relatives. The Herald article did not discuss views of “second tier” Democratic candidates.
Obama’s postion appears to be closest in line with current political opinion among south Florida’s Cuban American population, according to the 2007 Florida International University poll. Among the findings reported in the executive summary of the 2007 FIU annual survey:

Approximately 65 percent of respondents signal that they would support a dialogue with the Cuban government, up from 55.6 percent in the 2004 Cuba poll. The percentage of survey respondents supporting such a dialogue has risen from approximately 40% in the 1991 poll to the current year’s mark which is the highest in the history of the poll.
Approximately 57.2 percent would support establishing diplomatic relations with the island.
55.2 percent would support allowing unrestricted travel to Cuba .
Although only 23.6% feel that the embargo has worked well, 57.5 percent of the Cuban-American population expressed support for its continuation. The percentage of the respondents supporting the embargo declined from 66 percent in the 2004 poll. In fact, this is the lowest percentage of the population ever expressing support for the embargo.

However,

About 65 percent of the respondents are U.S. citizens. Of these, 91.1 percent report being registered to vote. And of these, 66.1 percent are registered with the Republican Party 18.3 percent are registered Democrats and 15.2 percent are registered as Independents.

Florida is always tricky for presidential candidates. But the stakes may be even higher this year, thanks to Florida joining the early primary states — Florida will likely be the first of the ten largest states to hold a primary.
Democrats interested in supporting change in U.S. Cuba policy should check out Paul Waldman’s post at American Prospect’s Tapped blog. Waldman offers this frame for Obama’s policy, which might also work for anyone else who supports a decisive change in our Cuba policy:

“After 45 years, we know the embargo is not working. My opponents are too afraid of losing a few votes to tell you the truth. But I’m not afraid. I will tell you the truth. Let’s do what we’re doing with China: engage the Cubans, trade with them, show them the virtues of capitalism and democracy. I’d like to see any of my opponents tell us just how continuing a policy that has failed for nearly half a century is in our interest or the interest of the Cuban people. This is why the public gets cynical about politics: when politicians won’t do what they know is right because they’re scared they’ll lose a few votes. That’s the kind of politics we need to put behind us.”

Presidential candidates are often reluctant to stake out such bold positions on controversial topics like Cuba-U.S. relations. This is a mistake, Waldman believes:

The reason the candidates can’t see the political advantage in this is that they’re still taking a reductionist view of the electorate and their own candidacies. They look at an issue like this and say, the only voters who care about the embargo are the ones that favor it, so there’s no advantage in opposing it. But doing so communicates something about who you are — brave, innovative, etc. — to everyone, whether this is their most important issue or not. It’s a political winner.

An interesting point of view — one which merits serious consideration by Democratic candidates who want to be seen as strong innovators. For background information on Florida’s Cuban-American demographic, see FIU’s Cuban Research Institute web page here.

Here’s a surprising statistic from a recent U.S. Census report, which has significant implications for Democratic electoral strategy and immigration policy. Of the 25 fastest-growing cities in the nation, 24 are located in the sunbelt (sole exception: Joliet City IL). Even more striking, few of the top 258 cities are not in the sunbelt. It appears that time is not on the side of the “northeastern strategy.”
The tremendous influx of Hispanics into sunbelt states is a large part of the story, recounted here and elsewhere. But it also appears that African American “reverse migration” back to the south is another phenomenon of increasing interest to Democrats. New York City, for example, had 30,000 fewer African American residents in 2004 than in 2000. An estimated 70 percent “left the region altogether” and most of them went south, according to Democratic Underground.com.
And, as William Frey of the Brookings Institution reports:

Hispanic and Asian populations are spreading out from their traditional metropolitan centers, while the shift of blacks toward the South is accelerating…Fully 56 percent of the nation’s blacks now reside in the South, a region that has garnered 72 percent of the increase in that group’s population since 2000.

Strategy-wise, reasonable Democrats can disagree about whether or not Democratic presidential candidates should invest significant time, money and effort in winning southern electoral votes in this cycle. By ’12, however, the argument should be over.

One of the defining moments of the 2006 congressional elections was when Sen. George Allen of Virginia interrupted his own campaign speech, looked into a handheld camera, and mockingly referred to the young man behind it as “Macaca.”
That young man, of course, was a campaign operative for now-Sen. Jim Webb — fulfilling a role that has come be called a tracker. He was hardly the first to catch a bad moment on video, but because of YouTube, he changed the modern campaign.
Trackers are now ubiquitous — politicians see them at every public campaign stop, and smart campaigns have begun filming their own events so that they can respond quickly to any “macaca” moment and have the chance to put quotes back into context.
In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins is running a tough race for reelection. She’s a Republican in New England – already an endangered species. As such, she’s one of the Democrats’ top targets for 2008. And her opponent, Rep. Tom Allen, already has more than $2 million in the bank.
Sen. Collins has a tracker; the Maine State Democratic Party begun sending someone to record her public events. And Collins’ handlers would like to see that stop. In an open letter sent last week to the Allen campaign, Collins’ chief of staff, Steve Abbott, says, “Tactics such as tracking demean the political process, contribute to voter cynicism, and have no place in the type of substantive issues-oriented campaigns that our voters deserve.” For the next 15 months, Abbott suggested that both campaigns agree to keep the cameras turned off.

Read more…

This ABC video breaks the little press secretary heart in me. Not only is President Bush on yet another vacation. Not only is the traveling press corps sitting around Crawford, TX doing nothing. Now ABC has tried to turn the press—and their tedious adventures in Crawford—into a story.
ABC: What do you do between stories?
BLOOMBERG REPORTER: I write poetry. You know, short form… and haiku.
Democrats generally don’t like attacking the press; I think we have a stronger than average belief in the institution and its possibilities. But this kind of nonsense shakes the confidence, no?
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that in spite of the revolutions in broadband technology and 24-hour cable, Americans aren’t noticeably better informed about current affairs.
Democrats could do well to be both stronger advocates for a better press corps and to train our grassroots advocates to take full advantage of the avenues out there for influencing the mainstream media. Democracy for America’s Night School provides an excellent tool kit for reaching the media. It’s clear that even ABC is badly in need of material.

In this month’s edition of the Forum, a free online political science journal, D. Jason Berggren, a doctoral candidate at Florida International University and a lecturer at the University of Georgia, delivers a fiery review of Thomas Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, which outlines a “non-Southern strategy” for the Democratic Party. Schaller has previously written on the same subject for TDS. And our managing editor, Ed Kilgore, has conducted a friendly but pointed joust with Schaller at Salon.
Berggren’s 26-page jeremiad is notable not only for its extraordinary length, and its emotion, but for its slant. Unlike Kilgore, he rarely if ever disputes Schaller’s empircal claims about the irrelevance of the South to future Democratic victories. Instead, he focuses obsessively on the long line of progressive observers who have preceded Schaller in criticizing southern culture and arguing that Democrats should actively campaign against the region’s values. In other words, he basically calls Schaller a bigot, and implicitly ties the Maryland professor’s argument to the anti-southern sectionalism that in southern eyes helped touch off the Civil War.
Schaller’s response to the review, in the same publication, not only repeats his (largely unrefuted) arguments about the 2006 Democratic coalition, but hotly denies any anti-southern animus, suggesting that his book only talks about “southern conservatives” as the enemy.
But here’s the irony of the debate Schaller touched off and Berggren continued with such heat: will it matter in 2008?
For the vast majority of Americans, a presidential standard-bearer defines his or her party. Unless Jeri Thompson is a much better campaign manager than she appears to be at the moment, the GOP will likely go into 2008 under the banner of Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, neither of whom come off as even remotely Southern. With either of them at the helm, the Republican Party might be losing it’s very public Southern twang for quite a while.

It’s become a simple truism that the aftershocks of 9/11 had a lot to do with the Republican electoral victories of 2002 and 2004, supposedly because voters suddenly made national security, a cluster of issues on which the GOP had a natural advantage, an overriding concern, with the absence of additional terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Bush’s watch being the clincher
But something a bit deeper was going on, according to John Judis, who has a fascinating piece up on the New Republic site, drawing on research from a small band of political psychologists.
To make a long story short, these psychologists conducted a variety of experiments showing that voter perceptions of George W. Bush after 9/11 dramatically improved after they had been “cued” to think about their own mortality. Moreoever, and most strikingly, these shifts were not produced by reflection on Bush’s actual record of “keeping America safe,” or even by a preoccupation with terrorism or national security. Instead, it appeared, invoking the fear of death stimulated a general lurch towards conservative sentiments on a whole range of issues, as part of what the psychologists call “worldview defense.”
It’s hardly a novel insight to suggest that an atmosphere of national or cultural crisis tends to promote authoritarian political views. This was the central theme of Fritz Stern’s famous analysis of German fascism, The Politics of Cultural Despair. But it’s another thing altogether to demonstrate that insight empirically, as the political psychologists Judis cites have done.
So what happened in 2006? Aside from the fading proximity of 9/11, Bush’s many palpable failures made him “less of a useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death,” says one of the psychologists. Thus, pre-9/11 priorities and policy preferences re-emereged, to the benefit of Democrats. This, of course, is also the major hypothesis of the recent re-evaluation of their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority published by Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The American Prospect.
But while Judis finishes his TNR essay on a hopeful note for progressives, it leaves the troubling impression that the whole phenomenon of memento mori politics is largely outside the control of Democrats. What if Republicans nominate a more “useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death” in 2008? And what if there is another major terrorist attack on the United States? Will the environment of 9/11 return? And what if anything can progressives do the counter the proported tilt of politics that might produce?

Read more…

Which political action committee gave the most money to congressional campaigns in 2006?
MoveOn.org? EMILY’s List? The National Rifle Association?
Nope, nope and nope.
ActBlue – the web-based bundler – was the single biggest PAC contributor in the last cycle. It delivered some $17 million to candidates in 2006, with about $15.5 million going directly to congressional campaigns. t’s proving to have an even bigger presence in the presidential election, and the organization’s founders are predicting that they will move $100 million dollars during the 2008 cycle.

Read more…

Matt Bai’s new book, “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics” is not getting the warmest of receptions from blogosphere critics. Bai’s book is reviewed at length by Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh, who explains in Salon‘s lead article today:

Bai’s written a fascinating but ultimately bewildering book that offers occasional insight, since he was smart enough to pay attention to Howard Dean before he was “Howard Dean,” and then to follow the netroots story Dean introduced, in frequent pieces for the New York Times Magazine since 2003. So we get firsthand reporting, exclusive access to early meetings (not all of which, sadly, are that interesting), and some compelling small portraiture — the Democracy Alliance’s Rob Stein, Yearly Kos organizer Gina Cooper, blogfather Jerome Armstrong, plus a damning look at the abortive presidential campaign of former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who in Bai’s telling decided to cut and run rather than fight the lefty blogosphere “mob.”
But for all its love of big bold ideas, “The Argument” is premised on a big, bold idea that’s simply wrong: that Republicans seized and held power in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I generation by selling Americans on a positive platform of new programs for national renewal, while Democrats, by contrast, are now winning merely by not losing, bashing Bush for wrecking the country while never explaining to voters what they’d do instead.

Walsh has a lot more to say about Bai’s take on the netroots, MoveOn, Mark Warner, Joe Lieberman and Bill Clinton, and doesn’t find much agreement. Still, she recommends reading it, but says readers should “draw completely different conclusions” than Bai.
Alternet also leads today with a long review of Bai’s book. Alternet‘s Executive Editor Don Hazen says of Bai and his book:

…he’s spent too much time inside the Beltway to get the story right. …Whether you agree with Bai’s critique or not likely depends on your vantage point. Beltway insiders and the largely elite think tanks that are seeking a “third way” probably agree wholeheartedly. If you are a blogger, a grassroots activist or otherwise outside of the D.C. insiders’ clique, you’re likely to take major umbrage with what Bai has to say.
At its most fundamental level, Bai’s “no new ideas” argument seems flawed. He has organized his book around a false dichotomy; nobody is against smart ideas, but what good are ideas without political power and without the fundamental vision that has been the foundation of progressive values for decades?
…And Bai never fully digests the essential point of the new internet-facilitated democratic revolution. He doesn’t appear to grasp the significance of the transformation that is occurring in politics today — from the hierarchical political machines of yesterday to a grassroots, bottom-up, person-to-person model that involves millions of new people who are fed up with the so-called wisdom from the top…Bai doesn’t get that this aim to democratize the political process is itself a vital and worthy idea.

Hazen credits Bai with an “enjoyable” chapter on Howard Dean and a strong account of Dean’s ascension. He also describes Bai’s book as a “fun read,” however flawed in its overall perpective.
Bai seems to have a unique ability among print journalists to provoke strongly-felt blogosphere critiques, which has been the case long before this book was published. It’s not fair to make him poster-boy for all that’s wrong with the MSM, but understandible, given his influence as a top writer for the New York Times Magazine. Simon Rosenberg has a shorter, more favorable review at his New Democratic Network post here, as does the LA Times‘s Jon Wiener here.

During the brief period of Mike-o-mania last month that broke out over reports that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg might run for president on a third party ticket, some eager pundits went so far as to speculate about Hizzoner’s potential running mate, and the name Sam Nunn came up. Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a story by Jim Galloway based on interviews with Nunn and several close associates, and reported that the former Senator had ruled out being anyone’s running mate, but was exploring a presidential bid of his own, presumably in conjunction with the Unity ’08 third-party project, in which two Georgians, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon, are playing a prominent role.
Before I go any further, I should disclose that I was Nunn’s speechwriter and legislative counsel from 1989-92, and will always respect him tremendously. Indeed, his post-Senate career, focusing largely on dealing with the nuclear proliferation threat (one that the Bush administration has been almost criminally slow to tackle despite its alleged national security obsession), has been especially admirable, given the opportunities he had to instead devote himself to the accumulation of personal wealth or become a super-pundit.
But the Nunn-run talk stimulates a strong sense of deja vu. He gave some thought in 1984 to the possibility that Walter Mondale might tap him as a running mate. He seriously considered a presidential bid going into the 1988 and 1992 cycles. And in 1996, the year Nunn retired from the Senate, Ross Perot tried to get him involved in the Reform Party at some high level, perhaps even as a candidate. In every case, Nunn demurred.
During the 1992 runup, when Nunn was asked about his presidential ambitions, he sometimes cited the “Reagan Rules” as making it possible for him to delay a run until his late sixties. He’s now 68. So it probably is now or never, but which will it be?
In some respects, Nunn is the perfect vehicle for a High Broderist third-party run based on rejection of partisan polarization and a sort of Government of National Salvation designed to end gridlock in Washington. He was always as popular among Republicans as among Democrats in the Senate, and with the exception of a brief period after his successful opposition to John Tower’s confirmation as Defense Secretary and his unsuccessful effort to deny Bush 41 the right to invade Iraq, was also very popular with Republican and independent voters in Georgia (he was re-elected three times with no serious Republican opponent). While he never strayed from fidelity to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, he insisted on calling himself a conservative, and wasn’t very happy when the Democratic Leadership Council, which he chaired for two years just prior to Bill Clinton, decided to name its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute.
Moreover, Nunn’s domestic policy views (which never got much attention) during the latter stages of his Senate career never fit neatly into either party’s agenda. He was (after 1990) pro-choice, but mainly because he considered abortion bans unenforceable. He was the principal architect of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell compromise on gays in the military. Always a fiscal hawk (he spent some time as co-chairman of the Concord Coalition after leaving the Senate), his long-standing belief that “entitlement reform” is a critical national challenge has never sat well with Democrats. And right around the time of his Senate retirement, he became a prominent advocate for a consumption-based income tax scheme–an unpopular idea among Democrats as well as Republicans, who typically want to scrap income taxes altogether.
The overriding rationale of a Nunn run would probably be the argument that Democrats are too allergic to the use of force to be entrusted with national security, while Republicans have proven to be both incompetent and excessively ideological, seriously damaging U.S. credibility. Nunn would be very attractive to neo-realist elites in both parties who think the Bush-style Global War on Terror has been a disaster, but who do not favor a significant retraction in U.S. overseas commitments.
Does Nunn have the political chops to run a serious third-party campaign? That’s hard to say. He’s been in a grand total of one competitive electoral contest in his career (his first election to the Senate way back in 1972). He’s always been highly disdainful of modern media-oriented campaigns (one of his closest friends was the late Lawton Chiles of Florida, famous for his throwback style of campaigning). And while he’s actually a lively and even witty man, his public persona has always been high on gravitas but low on charisma. Most importantly, Nunn is just not that well known anymore, outside Georgia and elite circles in Washington.
On the positive side, if Nunn were to run a serious campaign with Unity ’08 backing, he would presumably have a chance to seriously contest southern states, where neither national party is particularly popular at the moment; it’s sometimes forgotten that Perot’s political achilles heel in 1992, even at the height of his campaign, was his inability to make a mark in the South. And unlike, say, Michael Bloomberg, Nunn would not likely be dismissed as a vanity candidate with no real qualifications for the presidency.
My own hunch is that Nunn probably won’t take the plunge; he’s a notoriously cautious man, and despite his unquestioned passion about issues like nuclear proliferation, it’s hard to imagine him maintaining a fire in his belly throughout the drudgery of a presidential campaign. And Nunn aside, I personally think the whole Unity 08 effort represents a fundamental misreading of the American electorate, which is likely to produce a sizable Democratic majority in 2008 if we let them (i.e., don’t do anything stupid). Today’s third-party enthusiasts are reminiscent of the group of former Labour politicians who launched the British Social Democratic Party even as Tony Blair was beginning to position Labour to win a landslide victory.