Adding his own rock to the establishment conservative assault on Huckabee, Robert Novak did a column today disclosing that the Rev. Mike has lost some Southern Baptist endorsements because he backed–or at least didn’t oppose–the “liberal” side in the fights for control of the denomination back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Maybe some Baptists do resent that Huckabee wasn’t a foot soldier in the takeover of the SBC by those favoring a centralized drive for dogmatic purity and right-wing political engagement. But calling their opponents “liberals” is highly misleading, sort of like talking about conservative Unitarians based on some intra-denominational fight. Some opponents of the takeover were simply defending Baptist traditions of state convention and congregational autonomy, and hardly any of them could be described as “liberals” in any theological, much less political, sense. So tarring (or from a more progressive perspective, crediting) Huckabee with the L-word in this context is ridiculous, and I suspect the Prince of Darkness is smart enough to know that.

A few days ago, New York Magazine published an article by John Heilemann that, as the title “Huckabuchanan” suggested, explored the parallels between Mike Huckabee’s alleged fusion of social conservatism and economic populo-nationalism with that of Pat Buchanan, who briefly frightened establishment conservatives during his two presidential runs in 1992 and (especially) 1996. I thought of it again today after reading George Will’s jeremiad against Huckabee as representing a complete repudiation of conventional conservatism.
After suggesting the parallel between Preacher Mike and Pitchfork Pat, Heilemann doesn’t completely buy it, noting that much of the “economic populism” attributed to Huckabee is exceptionally vague or primarily rhetorical. He doesn’t go on to note the contrasting precision and detail associated with Buchanan’s economic thinking, but it’s worth remembering that Pat basically called for a revival of Henry Clay’s American System in its entirety. Moreover, you can’t really assess Buchanan’s appeal without mentioning his foreign policy views, which echoed a slightly more recent conservative icon, Robert Taft. Huckabee has occasionally made heterodox noises on foreign policy, but nothing that would remind you of Charles Lindbergh.
It says a lot about the insecurity of contemporary conservatives that Huckabee seems to be scaring them as much as Buchanan did. And I also hope that those Democrats who squint sideways at Huckabee, and setting aside his views on social issues, see him as a congenial “populist” spirit, take a much closer look. He’s like Buchanan in all the wrong ways.

If you are interested in the deeper dynamics of the Democratic presidential contest, I strongly recommend you set aside a half-hour and read Matt Bai’s thumb-sucker for next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “The Clinton Referendum.”
Much of the material here will be familiar to those who read Bai’s recent book The Argument, which also made ambivalent feelings about Bill Clinton’s legacy the big unstated subtext of intra-Democratic tensions. The new piece updates Bai’s hypothesis by dealing with the specific impact of this issue on 2008 Democratic politics.
The most interesting passage is Bai’s take on how HRC’s rivals have appealed to the semi-submerged anti-Clintonism of Democratic activists, focusing on Edwards’ “culture of corruption” indictment of Clintonian Democrats, Obama’s anti-baby-boomerism, and both candidates’ condemnation of “triangulation.” He goes on to suggest that Edwards and Obama, and all Democrats, have incorporated Clintonian policies and rhetoric quite thoroughly, even if they won’t acknowledge it during a competition with the Big Dog’s wife.
For what it’s worth, I think Bai is oversimplifying the ways in which Edwards and Obama do and don’t reflect a “no vote” in a “Clinton referendum.” Edwards is channeling the purest form of anti-Clintonian Democratic analysis–the argument that Democratic “centrists” deliberately and consciously sold out progressivism for a mess of corporate pottage, treacherously serving as enablers of Bush-era conservatism. That’s why his campaign often comes perilously close to a Naderite plague-on-both-houses message. Obama, meanwhile, has out-Clintoned Hillary in the use of classically Clintonian “third way” themes, even, ironically, in his “turn the page” repudiation of boomerism, which sounds like an updated version of Bill Clinton’s 1992 modernization message (a point made most clearly by Armando at TalkLeft in his reaction to Bai’s piece). (For those really interested in the subject, I did a post back in September that went into considerable detail in comparing the takes on Clintonism–and the old and new anti-Clintonian strains in the party–by Edwards and Obama).
But quibbles aside, I think Bai’s article is important reading. A lot of bloggers seem perpetually irritated at Bai for his strong empathy with Bill Clinton’s self-evaluation as a misunderstood reformer, but they are actually proving his larger point about the very different ideas Democrats have about the pre-Clinton progressive tradition. Bill Clinton looks at a lot of progressive critics of his own legacy (and of his wife’s record and agenda) and sees 1970s-era mossbacks who think progressivism is purely defined by the New Deal-Great Society programs and an unapologetic ethic of entitlement. Those same critics look at Clinton-style politicians and see an embarassingly outmoded and corrupt accomodation of a once-ascendant conservatism. The mutual mistrust often really does resemble that of old hippies and their kids.

One-fourth of potential NH voters did not live in the Granite State in 2000, reports Clynton Namuo in the Union Leader. More than a third of the new residents came from Massachusetts. Namuo adds that many of them are retirees and tax refugees, a fact which may have a pivotal impact on the NH GOP primary.
Rep. Tom Tancredo is probably going to pull out of the GOP presidential race on Thursday, according to M.E. Sprengelmeyer’s report in the Rocky Mountain News. Hard to say who Tanc will endorse, but his withdrawal should produce a slight boost for immigration hawk Romney. No doubt Tancredo will take credit, with some justification, for making immigration the GOP’s pet issue. Sort of “anger, resentment and xenophobia are now rising — my work here is done.”
Liz Mair has a report on the effort to crank up the youth vote in The Politico. Mair sees Obama as the prime beneficiary of the increased interest of young voters in the ’08 campaign, and his campaign is more focused on mobilizing young voters than any other.
Bill Scher’s TomPaine.com post “Record-Breaking Obstruction: How It Screwed You,” makes it easy for Democratic congressional candidates looking for a good litany of the Republicans’ obstruction of needed legislative reforms. As Scher concludes “…we know we can’t rely on the media to tell the full story, it’s up to us to spread the word.”
Those bored with the Iowa horse race polls should take a break and check out Paul Waldman’s American Prospect article on best v.p. choices for the leading presidential candidates of both parties. Waldman also discusses the strategic benefits of picking a running mate right friggin’ now.

Count me among those who think Mike Huckabee’s “Merry Christmas” ad, which is running in Iowa and two other states, is very clever. It identifies him with the undoubtedly growing ranks of voters who are getting weary of political ads, while allowing him to get across a forthrightly (if understated) Christian holiday message. It won’t offend anyone who would consider voting for him in the first place, and it represents a nice dog-whistle appeal to those conservative evangelicals who think anodyne holiday greetings represent a “war on Christmas.”
It’s weird to watch conservatives–even religious conservatives–try to get indigmant about this ad. Like Bill Donahue, the heavily hackish chief of the heavily politicized Catholic League, some of them are claiming the ad features a subliminal religious message in the form of a bookshelf in the background that forms a cross-like image. Huckabee’s reaction to that theory was truly priceless:

Huckabee said the bookshelf is just a bookshelf and shrugged off the controversy: “I will confess this: If you play the spot backwards it says, ‘Paul is dead. Paul is dead.'”

The odd thing is that there are plenty of things Huckabee has said and done over the years that are ripe targets for legitimate criticism from both the left and right, including his gubernatorial record and his nutty tax proposal. Sarah Posner offers a rich menu of such Huckabisms in today’s FundamentaList at The American Prospect. But accusing him of being too Christian ain’t going to cut it among the kind of people he’s appealing to in the early Caucus and primary states. Indeed, such attacks let him indulge in the kind of bogus martyrdom that conservative evangelicals are all to prone to embrace these days.

One new poll of Iowa Democrats, by InsiderAdvantage, came out yesterday, and another, by Washington Post/ABC, came out late last night. The former created a big buzz among Edwards supporters, because it showed him up 4 over Clinton and up 6 over Obama among likely Caucus-goers. The latter had Obama up 4 over Clinton, and 13 over Edwards. InsiderAdvantage hasn’t done a previous Iowa poll, so there are no trend-lines to look at; the WaPo/ABC poll shows small trends towards Obama and Clinton and a small drop for Edwards since last month.
The top line aside, the two polls agree on some things, most notably John Edwards’ increasingly strong performance in second-choice preferences, and the now-familiar Obama dominance among younger and highly-educated voters. As Chris Bowers at OpenLeft points out in an excellent analysis, the InsiderAdvantage poll stipulates an extremely low turnout among voters under 45, even by Iowa standards, making its numbers for Obama especially suspect (the WaPo/ABC poll isn’t accompanied by age breakouts).
So: while campaigns can be expected to spin any given favorable poll as indicating a “surge” or a “comeback” or whatnot, the real deal remains very hard to measure. Typically, “likely voter” screens become more accurate as the actual event approaches, but the legendary difficulty of determining likely participation in the Iowa Caucuses makes even that prediction perilous. About the only statements that can be made with any degree of confidence based on a variety of recent polling are that John Edwards will probably do better than his first-preference polling suggests, and that young voter turnout will probably be decisive, one way or another, for Obama.

Though it was no real surprise, the Senate vote yesterday to give the administration new, unconditional funding for the Iraq War was another landmark, especially given the vows of Democratic congressional leaders that the bucks would stop this time around. There’s another shoe left to drop, since the House omitted Iraq funds in its version of the appropriations bill, but it’s unlikely that position will prevail when the Senate version is voted on in the House. 20 Democrats (plus Joe Lieberman) joined with all the Republicans to give Bush a portion of his Iraq request.
While many precincts in the progressive blogosphere are already treating this news with angry denunciations of Democratic caving and cowardice, it’s not clear if or how it will affect the presidential campaign. Biden, Clinton, Dodd and Obama all missed the vote, though all but Biden voted “no” in a similar circumstance last spring. Recent polling has shown Iraq gradually declining as the central issue in the presidential race, but those candidates (notably Edwards and Obama) who are implicitly or explicitly running against “politics as usual” in Washington can be expected to make some hay over the vote–particularly Edwards, who doesn’t have to explain why he missed it.

The fine folks at DemocracyCorps devoted all of their latest batch of polling and strategic analysis to the single issue of immigration. And they are once again sounding an alarm that this could be a dangerous wedge issue for Democrats in 2008 if they mishandle it.
The tone of urgency in the DCorps report is probably a reaction to a subtle but very real sense of relief among many Democrats that immigration hasn’t, so far, been an election-decider much of anywhere in 2006 or in 2007 special elections. Indeed, there’s even been something of a backlash against the idea that Democrats should change their rhetoric on the subject at all (viz. this recent Markos Moulitsas post that treats Democratic fears about immigration as part of a general pattern of timidity and unprincipled weakness). Another factor feeding this backlash is the belief that harsh Republican rhetoric on illegal immigration is creating a pro-Democratic trend among Latino voters that will offset or even dwarf any benefit the GOP gets from emphasizing the issue, though presumably polls like those done by DCorps take that into account in measuring net effects.
Confusing the matter even more, of course, is the fact that the political fallout over the immigration issue varies tremendously from place to place; DCorps emhasizes that its impact may be greatest in hotly contested Congressional elections (typically in states and districts where immigrants are numerous enough to represent a perceived cultural threat, but not numerous enough to constitute an important voting bloc–e.g., much of the Midwest and South).
In any event, the latest DCorps research suggests that anti-immigration sentiment is getting more, not less, pervasive and intense; that big majorities of Americans are rejecting anything other than an enforcement-first message, while equivocating a bit on the choice between enforcement-only and “comprehensive” approaches; and, most importantly, that immigration messages could for better or worse turn a significant number of votes, especially among less-educated Democrats and all sorts of independents.
Like many previous polls, the DCorps survey shows about two-thirds of respondents favoring a very stringent-sounding version of a “path to citizenship” proposal, including fines and English proficiency requirements before allowing applications for citizenship. But since an actual majority of respondents (52%) support “deporting all illegal immigrants”–and 35% support that “idea” strongly–it’s natural to infer that support for a citizenship path would be contingent on “touch back” provisions that require undocumented people to leave the country first. Moreover, DCorps suggests that the public has simply and perhaps irreversibly made up its mind to oppose non-essential benefits for illegal immigrants and their children; anyone supporting drivers’ rights or taxpayer-subsidized college aid is barking up a very tall tree.
After arguing that Democrats should make enforcement a strong and threshold issue in addressing the issue, DCorps also explores distinctive Democratic talking points, and suggests that support for tough employer sanctions is a very good idea.
In many respects, the DCorps analysis parallels that of TDS contributor Andew Levison, whose strategy memo on immigration suggests a message that combines support for serious enforcement measures with a distinctive Democratic counterattack on the Republican position. DCorps does not test the specific sub-messages Levison recommends, such as drawing attention to Republican economic policies that have exacerbated the immigration problem, or denouncing enforcement-only approaches for dividing families. But DCorps’ polling does suggest that moral arguments on immigration are more powerful than economic arguments, which again indicates that the power of any Democratic argument depends on first addressing the “rewarding lawbreakers” issue.
It’s all pretty complicated, and I’m sympathetic to those who say Democrats should just go with their pro-immigrant heritage and let the chips fall where they may. But to the extent that both sides of the intra-Democratic immigration debate appeal to political considerations, DCorps’ data and analysis, and Levison’s own strategic take, should be read carefully.

One of those habits in political journalism that makes me absolutely crazy is the tendency to engage in competing exaggerations every time the subject of “swing voters” comes up. There’s a good example in today’s Washington Post, where Alec MacGillis has a piece entitled: “In N.H., the Swing Vote Is Vanishing.”
A big chunk of the the article is devoted to the argument that while the percentage of voters registering as “undeclared” (i.e., independent) in NH has ballooned to 44 percent, a lot of those folks actually vote for one party or the other. This is hardly a novel observation, for NH or anywhere else. And it is useful to correct the impression that the number of swing voters is rapidly increasing, which some journalists erroneously fall for by conflating self-identified independents with swing voters.
But are swing voters really “vanishing?” To make his point, MacGillis cites estimates that “at most a third of those voters are seen as true independents.” If that’s so, then maybe 14 percent of the NH electorate is composed of true, unattached, swing voters. That’s a lot of folks, and hardly a “vanishing” category.
The real point of MacGillis’ piece is that the differences between Democratic and Republican candidates are a lot sharper than in 2000, meaning that John McCain and Barack Obama aren’t in direct competition for undeclared voters, as McCain and Bill Bradley appeared to be in 2000. Moreover, the Democratic contest is the real indie-magnet this year. For that very reason, McCain’s own staffers admit that the universe of undeclared voters they are trying to attract is smaller than in 2000.
But they are still there, and still matter, for candidates in both parties. And down the road, their numbers and nature might change in a competitive general election, when candidate rhetoric is less controlled by the need to compete for highly partisan “base” voters.
In other words, the topic of swing voters, and the closely related topic of base voters, require a lot more nuanced analysis than that afforded by ax-grinding “they are everything” and “they are nothing” exaggerations. And that’s why The Democratic Strategist is planning a special roundtable discussion of the subject for the beginning of the New Year. Stay tuned.

At Salon, Walter Schapiro offers a good description of the sharply diverging rhetoric of the Big Three Democratic presidential candidates on the campaign trail in Iowa. He notes that their varying “strategies for change” have displaced policy arguments as differentiators, but doesn’t hazard a guess as to which one is currently working.