Mark Schmitt

The Communitarian

(Cross-posted from TAPPED.)

My first reaction to reading the text of Obama's speech on race and Rev. Wright was that it was too long and defensive. And echoing in my ears was still the insistence of a colleague on the subway this morning that "white people don't want to hear a long lecture about the complexities of race. They want to feel good about themselves." (In other words, they want to "purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.")

But it was a very good speech, in part because it was delivered in such a relatively flat and straightforward way, and because just when you thought he would dodge a point (even having read the text), he stepped up and dealt with it. I've really appreciated that each Obama speech has become slightly more mundane, workmanlike, and thus presidential, because you can't build a long campaign and a presidency on incandescent moments.

Like Ed Kilgore, I'm continually fascinated not by the content of Obama's religious experience but by how he got there. Most politicians talk about religion from the perspective of having been raised in families that are somewhat more observant than they are as adults, so they are elevating religion from their childhood and their parents or grandparents. Others, like George W. Bush, found in religion a private salvation. Obama's experience is unlike either one, and frankly unlike anyone's I know: His work as an organizer led him to the church, the church was the heart of the community in which he was working, he became religious because of his commitment to social change. It was neither personal, nor familial, but part of his forming an identity, but not just as an individual, as a member of a community. And thus, race, his public life, and religion are intertwined in a way that they are not for most people, even people whose social values and work originates in their faith.

Kilgore comments that this "won't make a lot of sense to those Americans who view church membership as an expression of consumer choice, and ultimately, of the spiritual discrimination and good taste of the religious consumer." Indeed, this was the viewpoint of my colleague this morning -- if you don't agree with what you hear in a church, go to another church. But Obama's analogy to family answered that about as well as could be answered -- the church wasn't serving just a personal function for him, it was situating him in a community in which he had chosen to live and work -- and work on behalf of.

I'm mystified when people talk about Obama as if he were pure ego, as if he believes that the "Barack Obama brand" itself delivers change. He is in fact the most deeply communitarian politician (in the sense of Michael Sandel or Charles Taylor's point that our identities cannot exist outside of our of social interactions and networks) I have ever seen. His identity -- as African-American, as Christian -- is chosen and it is chosen because it situated him within a community.

For Sandel and others, "communitarianism" was a critique within liberalism to the overly "atomistic" and legalistic view of identity of rights-oriented liberalism and particularly John Rawls. There was an attempt in the 1990s to build a kind of political movement around the idea, and Bill Clinton adopted some of the language, but it didn't really go very far, partly because, as Paul Starr writes in Freedom's Power, "it has at best been a supplement or corrective to tendencies within liberalism." But in Obama that supplement or corrective can be quite substantive, as I thought was shown in Alec McGillis's comparison of Obama and Edwards in their approaches to poverty -- for Edwards poverty is about not having enough money, and the solutions are economic, including helping people move to where jobs are, where Obama was attracted to comprehensive efforts to rebuild community, including the non-economic aspects of life.

In today's speech, community played a role of lifting the question out of the stale argument about identity politics, and remind us that it's about much more than who's black, who's a woman, who said something that might be considered racist, who has an advantage because of their identity. One's identity is indeed the sum of your experiences and social interactions and where you situate yourself in a community. I thought Obama basically did that for everyone in his speech: himself, Rev. Wright, his own white grandmother, and even Geraldine Ferraro.

I guess I liked the speech a lot more than I thought I was going to on first read.

-- Mark Schmitt

Why Clinton Doesn't Want a Revote.

(Cross-posted from TAPPED.)

There aren't many windows into a strongly pro-Clinton/anti-Obama view in the blogosphere, making TalkLeft invaluable, where "Big Tent Democrat" (the former Armando of DailyKos) has been focused like a laser on the issue of how to deal with the Michigan and Florida Democratic delegations. The claim made there, and on some of the other pro-Clinton blogs like Taylor Marsh, has been that it is Obama who is blocking re-votes in Michigan and Florida, raising legalisms or obstructing agreement, but that the Clinton campaign should be more aggressive in pushing for revotes. Big Tent Democrat puts it in the context of the argument about the popular vote:

[T]he problem with the Clinton campaign's refusal to fight for revotes in Florida and Michigan [is that] to be perceived as the popular vote winner, Clinton needs revote wins in Florida and Michigan. I do not understand the Clinton campaign strategy at all on Florida and Michigan.

But it's actually easy to understand. What would happen if an agreement were announced today that there would be re-votes in Florida and Michigan? Immediately, the previous primaries in those states would become dead letters. Instead of being 200,000 votes down in the popular vote (by her campaign's count), or 500,000 down (by my count, which gives Clinton her Florida votes), Clinton would be down in the popular vote by almost 1 million. And 193 delegates that they are currently counting would suddenly disappear.

And at that point, the magnitude of Clinton's deficit would be too obvious to spin away. Yes, there would be two additional large-state contests in which to win back the million popular votes and hundreds of delegates. But unless she did significantly better in both states than she did in the illegal primaries, she would lose, not gain, ground, by her own calculations. Since she was on the ballot alone in Michigan before, it's highly unlikely that she will do better there. It's very possible that she could do better than the 50 percent she won in Florida in January, but since it would now be a two-person race, it's a dead certainty that Obama would do significantly better than the 32 percent he got in January, thus adding to his total popular vote margin and delegate count even if he lost again, and so it would be a net loss for Clinton. Re-votes cannot help Clinton be "perceived" as the winner of the popular vote.

Contrary to the gullible media's belief that "time" is a "powerful ally" on Clinton's side, in fact, Clinton's only ally is uncertainty. The minute it becomes clear what will happen with Michigan and Florida -- re-vote them, refuse to seat them, or split them 50-50 or with half-votes, as some have proposed -- is the minute that Clinton's last "path to the nomination" closes. The only way to keep spin alive is to keep uncertainty alive -- maybe there will be a revote, maybe they'll seat the illegal Michigan/Florida delegations, maybe, maybe, maybe. In the fog of uncertainty, Penn can claim that there is a path to the nomination, but under any possible actual resolution of the uncertainty, there is not.

So far, Obama is playing this situation well -- agreeing to abide by any rules the party establishes, but not pushing to embrace any particular solution other than the existing rules. But soon it will make more sense to call the question: Move toward some certain resolution of Michigan and Florida. I think my seat Florida/re-vote Michigan scheme makes sense and now seems a likely outcome, but the specific resolution doesn't matter, because whatever it is, it will introduce certainty and finiteness, and without the comfort of ambiguity, the Clinton spin-campaign cannot survive. The Clinton campaign began -- unwisely -- by spinning inevitability; it ends, equally unwisely, by spinning cosmic uncertainty. In between the two spin campaigns, they apparently forgot to give people enough of a positive reason to actually vote for Senator Clinton.

UPDATE: Commenter weboy [at TAPPED] complained that I should have sought out more pro-Clinton blogs, and recommends a few, so I will link to Tom Watson's recent post, "The Few, the Proud, the Pro-Clinton Bloggers," and to riverdaughter, as well as his own.

Nothing to See Here

Sorry, haven’t been posting here much. But not for lack of writing. You might be interested in:

* A post today on TAPPED, revisiting an argument I made a year ago that the Republican takeover in 1994 is not the model for this year’s elections.

* Two articles that just came out in the Washington Monthly, which had the brilliant idea of printing alternate covers, front and back, one assuming Republicans win next Tuesday, the other Dems win, with mostly the same writers on both sides.

Here’s my pre-election post-election speculation on a Democratic victory.

And here’s what I think follows from a Republican victory.

And finally, a contribution from last week to a fascinating discussion of Jacob Hacker’s new book, The Great Risk Shift.

Enjoy!

Of Coups, Their Plotters, and the Next Era of Politics

At moments like these, as I watch the civil war among the Republican congressional leadership, I’m glad that a long time ago I worked my way through all three volumes of John Julius Norwich’s history of the Byzantine Empire. When was the last bloodless, orderly transition in the Republican leadership? Like the Byzantines (and apparently, according to an e-mailer, like the Klingons, but that’s never been my thing) it’s been all coups, beheadings, indictments and instant resignations, as far as I can tell, going back at least to Newt Gingrich’s victory in the race for Republican whip in 1989. There was the failed coup of 1997, which resulted in at least one coup-plotter, Bill Paxon of New York, being exiled (opening the seat now held by the equally ambitious Tom Reynolds.) There was the successful defenestration of Gingrich in 1998, followed within days by the elimination of his successor, Bob Livingston, by Tom DeLay, who replaced him with the more malleable Denny Hastert. While Hastert recently became the longest-serving Republican Speaker in history, he was also by all accounts the most impotent. When DeLay’s inevitable fall came, it was followed by the unlikely victory of John Boehner -- a throwback to the original Gingrichites -- over a DeLay protege, and an actual ideologue, both of whom remain ready to pounce. Without DeLay, Hastert could not lead on his own, and in the months since DeLay’s resignation, the House has been basically paralyzed (thankfully!) except to pass legislation permitting their president to torture people. As my wife points out -- and she gets out more than I do -- when Republican members of Congress go out to campaign over the next month, they inevitably are asked some version of, "So, you Republicans control both houses of Congress? Why couldn’t you pass something on immigration reform?" And they hate not having an answer to that.

So who knows what happened now? Robert Novak wrote this morning that there has always been "distance" between Reynolds and Hastert. As of last week, Reynolds was perhaps scheming to depose Hastert, by pulling victory in the House races from the jaws of defeat and being "heralded as asavior" -- in Novak’s words. Last week for a moment that seemed possible. Today, Reynolds and his (former) aide Kirk Fordham are succeeding all too well in bringing down Hastert, but will destroy themselves as well. Leaving the Republican campaign committee rudderless, and a leadership election in the spring that has no easy answers. If the Republicans lose, will they let Boehner -- their leader during the annus horribilus -- become minority leader? Will they let whip Roy Blunt, rejected in the last showdown and as shamelessly corrupt as DeLay, remain? What other potential leaders -- such as Conference Chair Deborah Pryce of Ohio -- will themselves lose reelection? If they go outside of leadership, usually it’s with a committee leader, as they tried to do with Livingston, who chaired Appropriations. Oh, too bad -- all their major committee leaders are at risk of indictment at any moment: Jerry Lewis, Duncan Hunter -- or already indicted: Ney, or generally disagreeable: Bill Thomas. (Rules Committee chair David Dreier is still available, but they are still homophobes after all.) The Mike Pence wing of so-called fiscal conservatives could take power, which would only further alienate voters who expect government to do something besides cut taxes.

The big question in my my mind is whether the revelations about Foley were merely the spark that ignited the war within leadership, or whether they were actually a tactical move on the part of some faction. There’s no obvious beneficiary -- certainly not Fordham/Reynolds -- so I can’t flesh out this theory, but maybe when we know more it will make sense.

Much more interesting to me about this leadership crisis is not what it heralds for the election, but what it means for the next era of American politics. I’ve generally operated under the assumption that if the Dems win the House, they actually don’t win much besides subpoena power. (Not that there’s anything trivial about subpoena power, except why would an administration that believes in absolute presidential power obey a subpoena?) I’ve assumed that the narrow Democratic House majority would face off against an extraordinarily disciplined and fierce opposition party, working with the Republicans in the Senate whether minority or not, that would continue to frame the agenda and define the fights much as they did in the early Clinton years. In many ways the modern Republicans are a machine constructed for opposition, and far less effective as a governing party that has to make choices based on consequences. I want the Democrats to win, but I’m terrified of it at the same time. I’m worried that to win they will promise things they intend to "do," but they will not have the power to do anything.

But what happens if the Republican structure is not capable of discipline, if it’s riven by infighting and finger-pointing?? That’s going to be a very different story. If the White House can’t count on loyal and effective allies in the House, even in the minority, they are even more stuck than they already are. Tony Snow’s comments yesterday on the scandal attracted a lot of attention for his dismissal of Foley’s abuse as "naughty e-mails." But there was more to the statement than that. He also basically dismissed Congress entirely, saying "there are a lot of scandals up there," and basically treating Congress as if it was already controlled by another party. Members of Congress think Bush is dragging them down; Bush thinks its Congress dragging him down, and he’s got numbers on his side.

If Bush rejects "Congress" altogether, without regard to party, at some point he has to come back and deal. And if the GOP doesn’t get its act together to form the fierce opposition that protects Bush, then I think there’s a real possibility that Bush and the Senate Republicans have to think about a different approach, a kind end-of-life turn to "triangulation," actually working with the congressional Democratic majority to find some common ground and get things done. That’s still a long-shot, but I’m more optimistic not just about the election, but about the possibility that we don’t have to wait until 2009 for this whole Byzantine approach to politics to come to an end.

It's All the Liberals' Fault, or Maybe George Soros's

So far there are two versions of right-wing spin to make the Mark Foley scandal and the cover-up go away. First there’s the complex postmodern pseudo-politically correct spin from the Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich and the Family Research Council: "Senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices...Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts’ decision to ban gay scoutmasters?"

As the FRC said, Hastert and his colleagues "probably did not want to appear homophobic" by taking on Foley. A friend commented last night that, "We know the avoidance of homophobia is the guiding principal for the house leadership."

One of the stories that the right likes to tell about itself is that they believe in moral absolutes, that there is such a thing as good and bad, while liberals are all relativists, we have no "foundation" for our views of what’s good and bad. This comes in lots of versions, from the bumper sticker to the erudite, Alisdair MacIntyre-wanna-be’s like Princeton professor Robert P. George, but that one sentence sums up the argument.

But when it comes to Foley, this is a case where it is us liberals who have the absolute moral value: Don’t mess with kids sexually. Adults must not mess with kids, people in positions of authority should not mess with kids. It’s not about the legal line or the age of consent in Florida or DC. It’s morality: Fifty-two year olds must not mess with 16 year olds. Remember that rule and all this complexity falls away. Don’t tolerate people who mess with kids, gay or straight. Not complicated. As Robert George would say, it’s "foundational." If you know that basic rule, and don’t hesitate to take action if people break it, or raise alarms if you suspect them of breaking it (as in, asking for a picture) then guess what?: Life gets a little simpler. Gays can be Scoutmasters because, like any other Scoutmaster, they know that you don’t mess with the kids. Straight men can be high school teachers of girls because they maintain that boundary, they treat it as a moral absolute. And so on.

So what do you call the belief that gay people somehow by their nature cannot respect that rule, that they in fact can’t appreciate moral absolutes? Yep, that’s it.

While that spin on the cover-up is disturbing, the other spin is actually funny. It’s all George Soros’s fault. This is the story behind the "dirty trick" theory being peddled by Katherine Harris, Gingrich again, Hugh Hewitt, and apparently now being peddled on Fox News. Whenever the right runs into trouble, it seems their first move is to play a game of "Six Degrees of George Soros": What’s the fewest number of moves we can make to blame this on George. You can imagine them testing out various theories: How about this one: Soros’s operatives in Eastern Europe starting in the 1980s bred a super-race of sexually irresistible young men, taught them perfect English, had them placed as congressional pages and programmed them to tempt Mark Foley. Hmm, nice try, but a little more Blofeld than Soros.

No, the new line, from Gingrich to Katherine Harris, and the weirder corners of the right-blogosphere, is that it’s all George Soros’s fault because a "Soros-funded organization" had the e-mails and waited until just this critical moment in the election cycle to release them. Meanwhile, kids were put at risk. Someone named Clarice Feldman who writes at The American Thinker (modesty in blog naming has never been the right’s strong suit) seems to have figured this one out. Drat. If it weren’t for Clarice, Scooby and the rest of those meddlesome kids, George would have gotten away with it, too! Unfortunately there’s one loose end to the theory -- the organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which does get a small grant from Soros’s foundation, although the right referred to CREW as "Soros-funded" even when it wasn’t), immediately turned the e-mails over to the FBI, and released them only after ABC News made the story public.

So get back to the drawing board guys: Connect Mark Foley to George Soros in six moves or less!

Dude Look Like an Echo

I’m obsessed, but don’t really know what to say, about the torture bill passing the Senate. But then I come across this, and fortunately for my sanity, I know exactly what to say. This is the third paragraph, the third paragraph of the New York Times’ front-page story about the self-destructing candidacy of Westchester County attorney Jeanine Pirro for attorney general of the state:

But to many people who have been watching the couple for decades, the Pirros look a lot like an echo of that other Westchester power couple, the Clintons, who are also political and financial partners whose fates and fortunes are profoundly intertwined. The Pirros live in Rye, the Clintons in Chappaqua.

"Look a lot like an echo of" is one of the great weasel phrases of modern journalism, even apart from the simple fact that echoes don’t "look" like anything. Here are the "echoes" between the Pirros and the Clintons:

* Apparently they live in towns that are a mere sixteen miles apart.

What are the odds of that? My family lives about two miles from Karl Rove. Echo? You be the judge. We used to live about a mile from Jennifer Connelly. I like that echo better.

* Hillary Clinton is an attorney. Jeanine Pirro? Also an attorney. What are the odds? Not to mention, both are attractive and dress well.

Why don’t we just stop here? The echoes are blinding me.

* Apparently, Mr. Pirro had some extra-curricular dalliances. Well, more than a few, since at least one resulted in the birth of a child, and another one resulted in his wife hiring Bernie Kerik to bug their yacht, pleading, "“What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f--k her every night?" Mr. Clinton apparently has also been unfaithful to his wife.

Such activity is highly unusual, of course, and to find it in two families living a mere sixteen miles apart, both of them lawyers, is quite obviously something that "looks a lot like an echo." . Or maybe it sounds a lot like a shadow.

* Mr. Clinton has a secretary named Pirro, and Mr. Pirro has a secretary named Clinton.

Holy cow! Oh, never mind, I was thinking of Lincoln and JFK.

Sadly for the perfection of the analogy, there are some very minor notes that don’t quite fit with "look like an echo." For example:

* According to the Times, "Two decades ago [Ms. Pirro] dropped her bid for lieutenant governor in the face of questions about her husband’s ties to a company in the garbage-hauling business, an activity that was often linked to the mob."

Bill Clinton was an extremely successful two-term president of the United States, and presided over a period of near-full-employment and peace in the world. Mr. Pirro was in the mob-run garbage-hauling business.Maybe if we just say that each was near the top of his chosen profession, then "looks like an echo" would still work.

* "In terms of bad publicity, probably nothing compared to Mr. Pirro’s tax evasion case. In 1998, the Pirros paid close to $1 million in back taxes, but Mr. Pirro was indicted the following year, basically for billing personal expenses to his businesses and taking tax deductions on them.

Among the purchases were a portrait of the Pirro children commissioned by Ms. Pirro, the set for her cable television show when she was a judge, furniture for their vacation home in West Palm Beach, Fla., and drivers and maids (in uniforms) to tend to the children, the wine cellar and the family’s pet pot-bellied pigs.

In June 2000, a jury convicted Mr. Pirro on 34 counts of conspiracy, tax evasion and filing false returns. His brother, Anthony, an accountant, was also convicted. Albert Pirro served 11 months in federal prison."

Okay, well, Bill Clinton never did anything like that. Never even came close. His half-brother Roger got into some trouble, though, just like Pirro’s brother. That sure "looks like an echo."

When I read something like that third paragraph, and consider the fact that it can wind up on the front page of the most thoroughly edited paper in this country, I can’t help but think of Michael Kinsley and David Broder and all the others who this week seem to be losing it about "foul-mouthed bloggers" and people getting their news from "some acned 12-year-old in his parents’ basement recycling rumors from the Internet echo chamber" or from "myleftarmpit.com." I wonder not so much what blogs are they reading, but what newspapers?

The byline on this story, by the way, is Leslie Eaton and Mike McIntire.

The Pure Centrists of America / Go Crazy

David Broder is a complete head case -- consumed by the convoluted efforts to square the circle of his own conflicting impulses.

Why would I say such a terrible thing? Is it because I’m a “vituperative, foul-mouthed blogger,” as he described people like me in the first of his two columns saluting the “independence party” of Democratic and Republican insiders that he wishes to see reelected?

No, I use that phrase because those are the very words - “a complete head case…” and the rest -- that Broder himself used to describe Rep. Chris Shays in a column a week ago Sunday. Everyone outraged by the dean’s last two columns in which he salutes the “independence” of a set of politicians characterized primarily by their incumbency, should add the one that preceded that pair as well. Perhaps you’ll come away with a little more sympathy for just what’s going on in the minds of the people who think they know how American politics works.

I’m not one to treat Broder with contempt. He’s worn out more shoe leather than I’ll ever see trying to understand American politics. And he’s written a bunch of books that I’ve learned a lot from (the book he wrote with Haynes Johnson about the politics of the Clinton health care plan, The System, is still the best book of the last several decades on the inner workings of Washington.) There are more than enough journalists out there who obviously don’t work as hard and aren’t as open-minded as Broder, many of them a third his age. It’s true, he doesn’t really get what’s going on in American politics right now. But that says less about Broder himself than about the craziness of the situation.

And that was my reaction to Broder’s column about the centrist Shays. Broder recounts a Washington journalists’ breakfast with Shays, at which the congressman tries to say what he really thinks about Iraq: he still supports the war, but thinks we should get out, but not on a timetable (he has a scheme instead whereby every time one Iraqi policeman is trained, one U.S. soldier goes home). He also thinks that the “president has no credibility,” but that Bush’s second inaugural address, in which he promised to make democracy the primary criterion of American foreign policy, was brilliant. And most important to Shays, no one should ever suggest for a minute that these complex positions were influenced in the least by his reelection race.

All Broder’s vituperative invective was well earned: “tortured,” a “self-absorbed soliloquy,” a “bundle of contradictions.” And Shays is, even by politician standards, unusually self-absorbed. But it seemed to me a week ago that Broder was seeing the problem as if it were a mental disorder in Shays’s head rather than a reasonable tortured reaction to the external situation as faced by a centrist Republican in 2006. Sometimes R.D. Laing is right: what we call mental illness might be a rational reaction to the double binds and cognitive dissonance of a situation.

And so I don’t think Broder is a head case, even though his salute-to-incumbency columns are filled with at least as many tortured contradictions as in Shays’ breakfast ramble. There is, for example, his insistence that Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio must be reelected because opponent Sherrod Brown is “a loud advocate of protectionist policies,” followed without a pause by a declaration that the Independence Party incumbents are those who listen to public opinion: “Americans are saying no to excess greenhouse gases and no to open borders; yes to embryonic stem cell research, yes to a path to earned citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and yes to a living wage.” Needless to say, the “protectionist policies” Brown advocates (such as incorporating labor and environmental standards into trade agreements) are also things that Americans say yes to; it is elite Washington opinion that rejects them. And have any of the conservative Republicans he salutes as independent ever said a kind word about living wage proposals? Of course not; these are provisions championed not just by Democrats, but by the very ultraliberals that Broder thinks must be rejected.

And we could go on. It’s tough out there for a centrist. Like Shays, Broder has to try to fit the world into a paradigm in which each party is driven equally by extremists, in which there are responsible centrists in both parties who can lead us to hope. And yet, just as with Shays, none of the facts - including the more recent datum that his heroes McCain and Lindsay Graham caved on torture - fit this mental model. And the result may be Broder’s madness, or Shay’s, or perhaps the singularity of our current political situation.

The Last Refuge

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the Republican congressional campaign committees plan to spend "more than 90%" of its funds on negative attacks on Democratic challengers based on local issues and scandals.

I’ve seen two reactions to this. First, the suggestion that it contradicts Republican threats to nationalize the election around security. And, second, that it’s more or less business as usual, because the party in power always wants to treat elections as local fights between individual incumbents and challengers, while the party out of power always wants to use a national tide to give its challengers a boost.

Neither response recognizes quite how unusual this is. And the article doesn’t quite say it either.

The article is missing a key phrase. Cosider the conventional wisdom that the party in control of Congress wants to keep the focus on local races. Usually, the saying goes, it’s because "People hate Congress but they like their own congressman." But the article tells a very different story.

If you take a basic course on congressional politics, you’ll be taught that there are two possible rhythms to a congressional election. In most elections, the national trend, whatever it is, doesn’t quite cross over into local races, and 98% of incumbents are reelected. In 1988, for example, George H.W. Bush won a solid victory but Democrats actually gained two seats in the House.

But every so often, the national trend is so strong that it breaks the back of incumbents who have held on to their districts for years through the usual incumbent advantages: name recognition, constituent service, delivering pork, an advantage in campaign money. 1994 was such a year.

Those advantages of incumbency are typically positive advantages. But not only is the national trend this year strong enough to overwhelm them, most of the natural positive advantages of incumbency aren’t there for Republicans. They can’t count on Americans liking their own congressman, because people don’t like their congressmen. They can’t count on ribbon-cutting ceremonies and pork-barrel spending because large forces have been unleashed that make those things look -- as they are -- trivial. (The ultimate irony of big-government conservatism is that it may have no political payoff.) And they can no longer count on the basic fundraising advantage that incumbents have. And that will get worse as the K Street Project turns on itself. (An acquaintance who runs a sizable trade association PAC told me the other day that their giving up to now had been 70:30 Republican, and her job between now and November was to get it to 50:50, so that they’re not shut out in the next Congress.)

Without the usual local advantages of incumbency, the Republicans’ second choice is to nationalize the election themselves, as the incumbent party, making it a referendum on the Bush-defined "War on Terror." That’s an unusual move, but to some extent it’s what they did to win the 2002 elections. And certainly until the Post article, this is what they promised. But it’s getting old.

And the Post article is an indication that, at least from the point of view of those following congressional races most closely, it’s not working. And so, time for Plan C. There’s nothing new about negative campaigning in congressional races, of course, and nothing per se wrong with it. But if your opponent is unknown and underfunded, and you are a well-liked incumbent, the last thing you want to do is even mention your opponent. You don’t debate, you don’t do anything that brings the challenger into the same zone. And so a systematic negative campaign by incumbents against challengers, across the board, is highly unusual. But it may be the only option available.

And it may well work, at least in just enough congressional districts to avoid a Democratic takeover of the House or at least keep it vanishingly close. The strategy of aggressively disqualifying a challenger before the race even begins, defining the challenger before she can define herself, worked against Kerry and its worked in some Senate races. I wouldn’t write it off. But have no doubt -- it is the strategy of a party and a movement that is on its last legs.

Who is "Serious" About Terrorism?

Can someone explain what Senator Lieberman could possibly mean when he says the following:

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

First, there’s no antecedent to the word "threat" or "enemy" so we have no idea what threat he’s referring to. Is it al-Qaeda alone? Al-Qaeda plus Hezbollah and Hamas, plus Syria and Ahmadinejad? Or that thing out there that Little Green Footballs the President now calls "Islamic fascists"?

Who knows. But under any possible definition of "threat" or "enemy" it cannot possibly be as dangerous than the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, with multiple thermonuclear devices pointed at every one of our cities and towns. And, I don’t know exactly how to score "evilness," but not much matches Hitler. I suppose in some way bin Laden and Zawahiri’s hearts may be as filled with evil as Hitler’s or Stalin’s, but they don’t have the SS and Luftwaffe at their disposal. Maybe they would send us all to concentration camps if they controlled half of Europe, but thankfully, they live in caves and can’t use the phone. Is Ahmadinejad "more evil, or as evil" as Hitler? Maybe the potential is there, with his holocaust denial and all that, but so far it’s mostly talk.

I’m sorry, but this is just a deranged, or at best deeply confused and manic, thing to say. It shows a lack of perspective and reality and responsibility, even in its lack of clarity about what exactly the threat is and how to defeat it. Why does anyone accept that this kind of blather can be considered taking the threat more "seriously"? It’s not. It’s hugely unserious in its trivialization of the great moral challenges of the Twentieth Century and it’s bald politicization of the current challenge.

And I’m interested in examples -- I know there are people from Paul Berman to the Malkin wing of the right blogosphere who like to say that Islamic extremists are sort of like fascism, or there’s a debate going on now on National Review Online about whether "Islamo-Nazi" is a better word than Islamofascist. But is there anyone else who has used that framework: "more dangerous than the Soviet Communists" or "more evil, or as evil, as Nazism."??

This is a man who has become so deeply unserious that I don’t think he should be a U.S. Senator, from either party.

Vietnam Analogies Everywhere!

The Vietnam War was a long one, so those devoted to finding exact historical parallels can usually find something to fit into their proof that the nomination of Ned Lamont is a disaster for Democrats.

Jacob Weisberg mines 1972, as usual: "In 1972, the Democrats repudiated their flawed Cold Warriors and chose as their standard-bearer a naive and honorable anti-war idealist...In a similar way, the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad."

(Earlier in the piece, Weisberg makes clear that the Cold Warrior "repudiated" in 1972 was Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. I’m going to make it my special mission to knock this one down as often as I have to: Scoop Jackson wasn’t "repudiated" or robbed of something legitimately his. He just, like dozens of Senatorial would-be-presidents before and since simply Didn’t Get Any Votes. He’s not a martyr, just a guy who No One Voted For. A lot like Joe Lieberman in fact, although Saint Scoop’s performance in 1972 fell short even of Joe’s famous "three-way tie for third place." -- more conventionally known as "fifth place.")

Like McGovern’s naively isolationist supporters, who didn’t appreciate the actual Communist threat, Weisberg says that Lamont supporters and other anti-war Dems "see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict."

I think it’s fair to call Vietnam a "tragic misstep" within a larger Cold War conflict, and probably fair to say that some McGovernites let the tragedy of Vietnam blind them to the obligations of American strength in the postwar conflict.

But is Iraq really a "tragic misstep in a bigger conflict"? As opposed to "a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11"? Read the history of Vietnam, and it’s hard not to be somewhat sympathetic -- within the limits of what men like McNamara knew and assumed, you can see how each little step made sense to them at the moment, and before you know it, you’ve got 50,000 dead and no way out. But Iraq is not a "misstep" in the same way, or series of missteps. It was a very considered, aggressively sold choice to pursue a war that had little to with "the fight against global jihad," for reasons that we may never fully understand. It is a perfectly reasonable position to support ending the U.S. involvement in Iraq as quickly as possible, while strongly advocating the sort of engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere that would be part of "the fight against global jihad," if you want to put it that way. As Kevin Drum pointed outthe other day, General Clark’s proposal on this from a couple years ago was good, so are any number of others, including Peter Beinart’s. Yes, we should make full use of American power -- economic, cultural, military, and the power of example.

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, did a wonderful thing this morning: They realized that the history of Dems and Vietnam is not reducible to 1972. The Lamont victory is not the McGovern nomination, but "arguably the most important victory for the American left since the Watergate rout of 1974." YES! That’s the metaphor we’re looking for: 75 new Democrats elected to the House, many of them from Republican districts which they held for many years, a group of serious, hard-working non-extremists like John Murtha, George Miller, and Chris Dodd.

Ah but that’s where all the trouble began: "If Democrats retake Congress, we will be back where we were in Vietnam circa 1975. Early that year the Congressional left blocked funds for our allies in the government of South Vietnam...within weeks... the last American helicopters were leaving Saigon [and] the Soviet Union was clearly emboldened to assert itself via proxies from Afghanistan to Central America."

The stab-in-the-back theory! Ah, if only we had just stuck it out for a few more years in Vietnam.

But I think the Journal is right. This is more like 1974 than 1972. And 2008 will be even more so. In 1974/75, everyone understood that U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a decade after Tonkin, had to end. That’s where we are with Iraq, and the only people who don’t seem ready to be part of figuring out how to end it are George Bush, Joe Lieberman and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But folks like Weisberg, who see everything as 1972 all over again, aren’t making it any easier to get to that point.