• Barack Obama gave a major speech on patriotism today in Independence, Missouri, designed to convey the same transcendence as his speech on race back in March.
  
• The Obama speech was also a retort to Wesley Clark, who, on Face the Nation yesterday, accused John McCain of implicitly arguing his military service is a qualification for the office of the President. McCain's surrogates accused Clark of "swiftboating" McCain, although it's clear the remarks were meant to question the relevance, rather than the veracity, of McCain's military experience. Obama formally distanced himself from Clark today, claiming that he would never question anyone's patriotism on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, ThinkProgress reports that McCain's "truth squad," designed to defend McCain's military record from swiftboating, employs an actual former swiftboater.
• Veep watch: Ben Smith reports that Mitt Romney's chances for being VP might be greater than widely assumed. Bobby Jindal, who ran for and won the governorship of Louisiana on a promise to root out corruption and waste, already has a scandal on his hands as his legislative director resigned today over controversies stemming from payraises in the state legislature.
• Barack Obama has released a second general election ad today, touting the "dignity of work" and his support for working families. The spot is running in the same 18 campaign-defined battleground states as his previous general election ad.
• The Wall St. Journal has an informative article on the Obama campaign's GOTV effort amongst Southern blacks.
• Amanda Marcotte does some digging and discovers that the founder of the PUMAs -- female Hillary Backers who plan to vote for McCain out of spite -- never even donated money to the Clinton comapaign. She did donate $500 to John McCain, however.
• Freedom's Watch, the Sheldon Adelson-funded outfit determined to make sure America stays in a 9/11 mindset throughout the 2008 election, has begun running radio ads in 13 Congressional districts attacking Democrats for high gas prices.
• After three straight days being tied with McCain, Gallup's daily tracking poll now reports Obama with a five-point national lead, 47-42. Rasmussen has McCain with a healthy 10 point lead in Georgia, 53-43, and Survey USA has Obama up by two in Virginia, 49-47.
• And finally, Nate Silver runs laps around the pundits today, including Paul Krugman, with this excellent analysis of Obama's recent moves towards the political "center."

--Mori Dinauer

I've always liked Lewis Carroll; my father used to recite "Jabberwocky" to me before I went to bed. Glad to see Lewis put to good use by the U.S. Court of Appeals in their first review of the military tribunals at Guantanamo:

The three-member court, which was made up of two Republican judges and one Democrat, was particularly pointed in its criticism of the logic that evidence is reliable because it appears on multiple documents.

"The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case," the court wrote. "This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true."

The judges compared the argument to the logic in Carroll's nonsense poem ["The Hunting of the Snark"]. The Bellman lead his crew across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeat himself.

"I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true," the Bellman says in the poem.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true," the court wrote.

The court held that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, should either receive a new hearing or be released.

--Phoebe Connelly

It's perfectly clear that claims that Wes Clark attacked John McCain's war record or "Swift-Boated" him are entirely bogus. Unlike the attacks on Kerry, Clark did not question the veracity of his war record; he attacked its relevance. Clark's argument that getting shot down in a plane doesn't constitute executive experience is simply true, and his claim that a history of sound foreign policy judgment is more important than having been a POW is at the very least fair argument (and I think also correct.)

Obviously, the key here is that Obama and other Democrats cannot surrender an inch to this kind of ridiculous narrative. It's entirely without merit, and backing off from the comments or undermining Clark would be to cede considerable ground to McCain. One would have thought that having already been involved in an election with a candidate claiming that dubiously relevant "experience" was more important than making good judgments, Obama would have understood the need to stand his ground and not pretend that McCain being captured in Vietnam somehow makes him more qualified to be president irrespective of his substantive positions. Alas, he seems to have caved to the hysteria, a move that is both unfair to Clark and extremely bad politics.

--Scott Lemieux

The final panel of "McCain University" dealt with the Senator's energy policy, which is based entirely on gimmickry and a false reputation as a moderate, according to Joe Romm. Fast facts:

• Romm refers to McCain's stance as "The Placebo Energy Policy" because of his tendency to discuss the psychological boost provided by his announcements, without mentioning that they will have very little affect on the cost, supply or side affects of energy production.
• Case in point: Saudi Arabia has announced plans to produce 700,000 more barrels of oil a day by the end of the year, with no discernible affect on oil prices. McCain's proposal to increase offshore drilling has the potential to increase our capacity by 200,000 barrels a day ... in 20 years. Sounds like that'll help.
• Navin Nayak of the League of Conservation Voters points out that McCain's lifetime LCV voting score is 24 percent.
• The panelists observed that, while McCain and other conservatives often promote technology as the solution to environmental problems, they rarely make serious efforts to encourage investment to develop those technologies. For an example, see McCain's (gimmicky) plan to offer an award of $300 million to the developers of a "super battery" at a time when private companies are already spending over 1$ billion each year to develop one. Or consider that, although the Department of Energy released report saying that 20 percent of our energy could come from wind power if it was further developed, McCain has never voted for a national renewable energy standard. Meanwhile, he refused to support the most recent iteration of this bill because it didn't contain enough subsidies for nuclear power, which already commands a 20 percent market share.

Although that's the end of "McCain University," have no doubt that here at TAPPED we will be moving on to earn post-graduate degrees in McCainology, and sharing the results with you.

--Tim Fernholz

Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola's attempts to break the Anglican Communion apart continue:

Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared Sunday that they would defy historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the communion led by a council predominantly of African archbishops.

[...]

They insisted that they were not breaking away from the Anglican Communion or creating a schism. But their plans, if carried out, could create severe upheaval in the communion, the world’s third largest grouping of churches, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches.

Akinola has been essential to the break. He defied the requests of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Episcopal presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and installed the Virginian Martyn Minns as a bishop of the Nigerian church, after Minns broke from the Episcopal one. Just as critically, he has been a mouthpiece for the most homophobic tendencies within the church, telling the New York Times that he jumped back in horror the first time he met a gay couple, comparing homosexuality to everything from pedophilia to zoophilia, and pushing for Nigeria to enact a five-year mandatory sentence for homosexual acts or "associations", a bill so broad that it could lead to the imprisonment of AIDS caregivers. While there would surely be conservatives fighting against Robinson and the liberalization he represents without Akinola, he has increased their power and influence tremendously.

In no small part because of these retrograde social views, Akinola has wide support among American conservatives. After Minns' installation, the Washington Post published a mash note to Akinola by Michael Gerson, calling his Christianity "undeniably alive" and denouncing Williams and Schori's "condescension". Rick Warren even compared him to Nelson Mandela. Warren would do better to head the words of Mandela's ally, and Akinola's fellow Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu: "If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God."

--Dylan Matthews

If you're Republican House minority leader John Boehner, or for that matter National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Cole, the main reason you're so nervous about this November -- maybe resigned is the more fitting term -- is because so an eye-popping total of 30 GOP House members have thrown in the towel. That's more than one in every seven members of the GOP caucus.

(I would be remiss if I didn't note that just six of these 30 are in the 11 former Confederate states, or just 20 percent -- despite the fact that more than 40 percent of the caucus is southern; that means a disproportionate share of the Democrats' opportunities are outside the South, again.)

For some time now, sites like Swing State Project have been tracking the retirements and related Republican failures to recruit decent candidates for the newly-open seats or to challenge incumbent Democrats. But now, with both presidential primary contests done, the Beltway chattering classes are finally starting to take note. This Associated Press story quotes NRCC communications director admitting: ""This is a challenging environment. Any Republican running for office has to run basically on an independent platform, localize the race and not take anything for granted. There are no safe Republican seats in this election."

The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes too, is concerned "This is a serious problem for Republicans in the 2008 election," writes Barnes, recognizing the slim-to-none chances of a near-term Republican recapture of the House. "The retirees have created an unusually large number of open Republican seats, exciting Democrats."

Add to this the headline-grabbing comment by former NRCC chair Tom Davis of Virginia, who said compared the Republican brand to a dog food that would have to be removed from shelves. He's predicted a tidal wave of GOP losses in November, too.

--Tom Schaller

There are not a lot of surprises in the Foreign Policy panel, since McCain considers it his strength and talks about it frequently. Indeed, Faiz Shakir quoted from Matt Yglesias' excellent cover story on McCain's foreign policy when introducing the panel.

One recurring theme of this entire event is that McCain has not explained the actual details of his proposals. And even on foreign policy, which is meant to be his best issue, he hasn't answered basic questions such as what conditions would have to be like on the ground in Iraq before he would be comfortable withdrawing troops.

--Tim Fernholz

As he did in his disquisition on race, in today's patriotism speech Obama gives Americans a fairly detailed history lesson ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. When it comes to more recent history, pundits have long admired Obama for his ability to rise above the Boomer culture wars, and today he broached the topic himself, saying, "What is striking about today’s patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s -- in arguments that go back forty years or more. ... Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views -- these caricatures of left and right."

But the most powerful part of Obama's speech is not his litany of patriotic childhood memories, nor his exhortations that to live up to its greatest ideals, the United States must pursue more progressive public policies. Those are to be expected. Rather, Obama is able to describe one of the most central struggles of liberalism: the tension between loving one's country and holding it to ever-higher standards of decency:

As I got older, that gut instinct – that America is the greatest country on earth – would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections: it’s ongoing racial strife; the perversion of our political system laid bare during the Watergate hearings; the wrenching poverty of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia. Not only because, in my mind, the joys of American life and culture, its vitality, its variety and its freedom, always outweighed its imperfections, but because I learned that what makes America great has never been its perfection but the belief that it can be made better. I came to understand that our revolution was waged for the sake of that belief – that we could be governed by laws, not men; that we could be equal in the eyes of those laws; that we could be free to say what we want and assemble with whomever we want and worship as we please; that we could have the right to pursue our individual dreams but the obligation to help our fellow citizens pursue theirs.

For a young man of mixed race, without firm anchor in any particular community, without even a father’s steadying hand, it is this essential American idea – that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will – that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans.

--Dana Goldstein

Aziz Huq writes that the greatest critic of Justice Antonin Scalia's recent opinion on guns is... Antonin Scalia:

Consider first the two opinions' methodologies. In the Guantánamo case, Scalia accuses his colleagues of having "blatantly misdescribe[d]" a key precedent and of having misread history. Yet in Heller, Justice Scalia simply discarded the key 1939 precedent of United States v. Miller, which rejected the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment in Heller. Worse, reminded by Justice Stevens of the literally "hundreds of judges" who had relied on Miller's holding, Scalia offered only a footnote mocking their "erroneous reliance." Judicial precedent, in short, bites only when he wants it to.

Dana Goldstein reports on new organizations aiming to help women who've had abortions without stigmatizing their decisions to have them:

The anti-abortion rights movement has become more sophisticated in recent years, co-opting themes of female empowerment to argue that women are abortion's central victims -- a line of reasoning that reached the Supreme Court in last year's Gonzales v. Carhart decision. In response, some reproductive health advocates have decided to deal head-on with the psychological aftermath of abortion. And though they're winning over skeptical elements of the pro-choice movement, these younger activists are having trouble convincing donors to fund their cause.

And Terence Samuel has some pointed words for Ralph Nader:

But what Nader showed with his comments is that he, like many political operatives, activists, pundits, and journalists, fundamentally misunderstands the times that have produced Barack Obama. In the words of the great American philosopher Marvin Gaye, "things ain't what they used to be."

Nader, in a single stroke, managed to reveal his own irrelevance and that of a whole generation of people who are arguing about issues that, this election campaign has shown, are not especially important to the vast majority of Americans. "Talking white" is one of them. "White guilt" is another. "The ghetto" is a third.

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--The Editors

Peter Harbage introduces the discussion of McCain's healthcare proposals by pointing out that the Senator's goal is cost containment, not universal healthcare. Two nuggets:

• Karen Pollitz outlines how McCain's campaign will essentially deregulate the insurance industry by allowing insurers to choose which state they are licensed in (and regulated by), giving them the opportunity to pick states with the most lenient regulations (think of the credit card industry's love affair with Delaware). He also wants to eliminate tax preferences that allow people to obtain insurance through their employers, forcing them into the individual health insurance market. The nature of insurance -- that companies make money by insuring people who are not sick -- means that regulation is neccessary to ensure that sick people, who need insurance most, are covered. Without it, well, there's trouble. It will also make group plans more expensive as the healthiest people are poached by competing insurers, creating higher-risk insurance pools for others.
• Karen Davenport notes that McCain's proposals for healthcare savings -- better chronic and preventive care programs and the use of information techology to ease administrative costs -- are only effective when coverage is as wide as possible. Healthcare providers who serve uninsured patients, especially patients who are forced to use Emergency Rooms for care, are unable develop the long term relationships necessary for chronic and preventive care or make the infrastructure investments necessary for electronic medical records, etc.

Foreign Policy coming up next...

--Tim Fernholz

Here at McCain University (a Wonk Room production) the message is clear: A McCain presidency would be a third term for the Bush administration. Our first panel is on economic policy, with Robert Gordon moderating a discusion between Gene Sperling and Jared Bernstein. Some notes:

• The number to know is $300 billion, a conservative estimate of the tax cuts McCain supports on top of the Bush tax cuts. It breaks down to about $110 billion in tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year, $110-$130 billion a year in corporate tax cuts and $75 billion in corporate expensing tax cuts. To put that in perspective, Bob Dole proposed $80 to $120 billion in tax cuts in 1996, considered a sweeping plan at the time, and Newt Gingrich's Congress passed $80 billion a year in tax cuts in 1999 (the bill was vetoed by Bill Clinton.)
• Sperling says this is "the mother of all flip flops" because McCain decline to support the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, saying both times that he could not "in good conscience" support massive tax cuts for three reasons: they targeted the most fortunate, would exacerbate the problems of the budget deficit, and they would take effect during a time of war. Have you seen any of these problems disappear since then?
• On corporate taxes, Sperling dispels the myth that the U.S. tax policy deters corporate investment by pointing out that the current effective marginal rate of corporate tax rates is 24 percent for equity financing (in the middle of G8 countries) and negative 46 percent for debt financed investments, the second most generous rate among the 19 largest industrial countries. John McCain would lower these rates further.
• The real problem in the economy is the broken linkage between productivity growth and income. Looking at the last decade, it's clear that though the economy had been improving prior to the sub-prime crisis, worker income is not. Therefore, tax incentives for corporations are not going to affect working families unless they are specifically tiled toward job creation.
• Though it's been highlighted before, Sperling offers a useful analogy for John McCain's plan to focus his spending cuts on earmarks (where the maximum cut is likely only $19 billion): A father drives his Hummer to the grocery store, checks the label on gourmet peanut butter, and exclaims "No wonder my paycheck isn't going far enough, with peanut butter this expensive!" Like the father, McCain misses the point.

The healthcare panel is coming up next...

--Tim Fernholz

At The Plank, John Judis reports that when the AFL-CIO endorsed Obama this week, one union president resisted: Thomas Buffenbarger of the Machinists. Among Buffenbarger's complains is that Obama initially supported the Pentagon's decision to buy a new tanker from Northrop-Grumman. The company would've done construction partially in France, while Boeing had submitted a competing proposal to build a tanker in Illinois with Machinist labor.

But while it's true that Obama didn't say much about the contract when it was initially awarded, he's been a strong supporter of the GAO's audit of the process, which suggested the Pentagon buckled to lobbying by John McCain and other politicians in awarding the contract to Northrop-Grumman.

Buffenbarger's larger claim, though, is that Obama simply doesn't understand the economic crunch facing "blue collar Democrats." I'm skeptical. To be sure, Obama's economic policies are moderate and Clintonian in many ways, but that's not what we hear Buffenbarger objecting to. Rather, he makes an almost cultural critique of Obama's "change" and "unity" inspired campaign, saying it doesn't appeal to Machinist members.

I can understand why the leader of a relatively small union would want to make a headline-grabbing statement by refusing to endorse the Democratic nominee, thus preserving, to some extent, his ability to pressure the campaign. But reviving arguments that Obama -- a former community organizer -- is elitist just borrows conservative talking points. And that's not helpful to Buffenbarger's constituents, especially if they already hold misconceptions about Obama.

--Dana Goldstein

Following up on Tim's post below, there are a couple of important things to note about McCain's allegedly courageous acts of apostasy. First of all, why exactly is it that going against your party is "courageous"? It's courageous if your goal is to rise within your party to become, say, Senate Minority Leader. But that was never McCain's goal. If your goal is to become president, as McCain's has always been, then there is a relatively minor cost to bucking your party - you might have some trouble picking up future endorsements, for instance. But there are much more substantial benefits to be gained.

McCain certainly knows that when he votes with Democrats, he will be almost guaranteed to earn the admiration of the press, which worships "rebels." He also knows that unlike other members of the Senate who actually buck their party much more often than he does (Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, etc.), when he crosses the aisle he will become the starring player in the story the press will write. Instead of a conflict between Democrats and Republicans, it becomes a conflict between Republicans and the courageous rebel John McCain, complete with interviews on the Sunday shows.

Finally, if you look at the instances in which McCain has bucked his party, in nearly every case it has been when his party was on the wrong side of public opinion. So he's doing the popular thing, winning the praise of his primary constituency (the press), ensuring a wave of positive media coverage, and reinforcing his "maverick" brand. Yeah, that sure takes guts.

-- Paul Waldman

Well, it's not quite a crisis, but this piece chronicling the Senator's support for failing affordable housing that is publicly funded and privately managed is certainly problematic for the Senator's campaign. It brings to the fore, once again, his connection to jailed developer Antonin Rezko, it sullies his former-community organizer/good government image and it raises problematic questions among his base of liberals and particulary African-Americans—is he, like Bill Clinton, a candidate whose liberal campaign will be replaced by business-focused governing? (Which isn't to say business friendly is necessarily negative, though it certainly seems to have been in this case.)

I'm not sure the story proves that shoddily run public-private affordable housing partnerships are any worse than shoddily run public housing -- it does seem that at least some affordable housing activists see promise in this kind of approach to the issue. (A glance at this Urban Insitute one-sheet suggests that there isn't any one silver bullet approach to the issue).

The Obama campaign has already created a pushback website that doesn't contradict the main narrative of the article, but does identify broader support for the policies in contemporary press report. The biggest concern for Obama is his failure to adequately respond to the failures of the initial policy with adjustments to make privately-run housing projects more responsive to tenant needs through independent audits or regulation. He should also worry that some of his supporters made a good deal of money off his legislation at the expense of his constituents (there's no evidence of anything unethical in this case, yet).

I haven't seen a statement from the McCain campaign dealing with the issue, and there doesn't even seem to be a policy statement on public housing issues at his website.

I'll be spending most of today blogging from CAP's "McCain University" but when I have some free time later I'll see if someone on Obama's campaign will shed some more light on this story and how it affects his approach to public housing ...

--Tim Fernholz

• The much-touted Obama/Clinton unity event went off well in Unity, NH, today. The Clintons each maxed out on contributions to the Obama campaign, and even Terry McAuliffe gushed, "I love Barack Obama!" That's sweet. Facing major Clinton donors last night, however, Obama was repeatedly grilled on the prospects of a real unity ticket featuring VP Hillary Clinton.
• John McCain released a new campaign ad today, focused on putting "Country first" and the candidate's supposed willingness to be innovative on energy solutions. McCain himself spent the day in Ohio, where the LA Times reports on McCain's efforts to reassure conservatives. Survey USA has Obama up by only 2 points in Ohio, 48-46.
• With Time's new national survey showing Obama up over McCain by 5 points, 43-38, Nate Silver wonders whether we should be discounting Obama's national lead, John Fund argues that McCain is far, far from being "doomed" and Charlie Cook lays out the likelihood of an Obama or McCain landslide.
• Obama beefed up his staff today, as Dylan notes. Obama also added a "religious affairs" adviser in the form of Shaun Casey.
• Debra Bartoshevich, the Wisconsin delegate who swore she'd vote for John McCain if Hillary Clinton wasn't the Democratic nominee, has vowed to fight the DNC on her status as a delegate to the convention.
• A victim of its own success, a my.barackobama.com social networking group has formed to challenge Obama on his FISA position.
• And finally, the John McCain campaign website has a Space Invaders-esque "Pork Invaders" that allows you to shoot at (veto) pork to stop government waste. Never one to turn down a chance at slacking and play classic arcade games, I managed to get to level 4 with $6,400 million in saved tax dollars, though I was only able to shoot down 2 of the elusive pork barrel bonuses.

--Mori Dinauer

The big debate this week, certainly in presidential campaign press releases and conference calls, centers around which candidate is more bipartisan. Both candidates claim it's them. Pundits, inevitably, have their own opinions.

Marc Ambinder argues that "Obama's record is solid, but he simply hasn't risked as much as McCain has." Obama has worked with conservatives to achieve more or less liberal ends (ethics reform, healthcare in Illinois, working to curtail nuclear proliferation with Dick Lugar) while McCain has worked with liberals to achieve more or less liberal ends (campaign finance reform, environmental bills, etc.). Because McCain's compromises irritated his own party, Ambinder suggests, he's the more courageous one.

I'm not sure why this brave but incoherent bipartisanship is so highly valued. Isn't a good politician one who works with the opposition to achieve their own ends? Obama appears relatively skilled at convincing conservatives to support a liberal policy agenda, while McCain seems good at gracefully conceding to liberal priorities in such away that he looks tough and independent (often, he can serve special interests at the same time). A liberal would certainly prefer Obama's leadership. A conservative wouldn't be too impressed with McCain. A true independent might wonder how coherent McCain's ideas actually are.

This fetish for "courageous" bipartisanship comes from the media's well-known dislike of partisanship. In part, they see partisanship as a block on effective governance, which can be true. But more often than not, it's simply much more difficult to cover substantive policy debates than to write process stories, an incentive for the press to reward conventional wisdom and centrist compromise. But, as Michael Kinsley writes here, partisan ideology is necessary for effective and coherent policymaking. Some bickering is a natural result, and there's nothing wrong with it as long as it doesn't get too out of hand.

--Tim Fernholz

This morning I caught up with Jim Wallis' spokesperson, Jason Gedeik, who tells me that Wallis is "not actively campaigning" for the inclusion of an abortion reduction plank in the Democratic Party platform. Gedeik added that Wallis and Barack Obama have known each other for ten years, and that Wallis has tried for a number of years "through backdoor channels," including in discussions with Obama, to get the Party (and the Republicans as well) to address "abortion reduction."

I asked Gedeik if Wallis, or his organization, Sojourners, had a position on any proposed legislation, including the Democrats for Life 95-10 bill that Dana referred to below. He said that Sojourners supported 95-10 in 2006, but has not taken a position on any other proposed legislation, and is not supporting any particular proposal right now. And what about contraception as an element of any "abortion reduction" proposal? Gedeik said that "we are not publicly commenting" on contraception.

--Sarah Posner

To follow up on Dana's excellent analysis of Jim Wallis's latest bit of abortion concern-trolling, I continue to be irritated by these kinds of assertions:

Without calling for restrictions such as parental consent laws, Wallis believes that if the Democrats were to alter their abortion platform, it could help them make inroads among young evangelicals and Catholics.

“Taking abortion seriously as a moral issue would help Democrats a great deal with a constituency that is already leaning in their direction on poverty and the environment,” said Wallis. “There are literally millions of votes at stake.”

In addition, even if this mythical group of single-issue-anti-abortion-voters-who-don't-care-about-abortion-policy existed, there are potential strategic (as well as normative) costs to Wallis' strategy. Shouldn't we consider the many voters who have had abortions and don't appreciate people like Wallis implying that they did something grossly immoral? In addition, as even Amy Sullivan has conceded, McCain's entirely unearned reputation for moderation on the abortion issue seems to be worth a significant number of votes. The Democrats would be much better off emphasizing McCain's extensive history of unpopular anti-abortion extremism (including support for the draconian ban in South Dakota) than further muddling their position to chase after unicorns.

--Scott Lemieux

Today the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court injunction, allowing South Dakota's "informed consent" legislation to take effect. The legislation requires doctors to inform women seeking abortions that the procedure "ends a human life." In the 7-4 decision, the dissenters say the law meddles with doctors' rights because the state is forcing them to make value-laden statements. The case now goes back to the lower court.

Last April, Sarah Blustain wrote about this case and other "informed consent" laws for TAP:

This line of thinking makes clear that women are too ignorant to realize that they are carrying some sort of nascent life in them, and too weak to possibly decide for themselves whether to have an abortion. Even worse, drafters of the South Dakota law do not think women are competent to state whether they have absorbed all of this helpful state information properly: The law would require the doctor to certify, in writing, that he "believes she [the pregnant woman] understands the information imparted."

"Informed consent is good," says Yale's Reva Siegel (who wrote about these issues with me in TAP last year), "but not if the only abortion decision the movement recognizes as 'informed' is the decision to carry a pregnancy to term; if this is the premise on which the regulation and litigation rests, then the law is premised on an offensive view of women seeking abortion -- weak and confused and failing to conform to their natural role as mothers -- and will function to pressure and intimidate those women."

Blustain also interviewed Harold Cassidy, an anti-abortion lawyer who has made a career of advancing the line of argument that women should not be allowed the right to an abortion because they are poor decision-makers. (Cassidy penned a friend-of-the-court brief in this South Dakota case, on behalf of crisis-pregnancy centers.)

--Ann Friedman

There's something of a curious disconnect between two passages of Scalia's opinion in Heller:

After an exhaustive discussion of the arguments for and against gun control, Justice Breyer arrives at his interest-balanced answer: because handgun violence is a problem, because the law is limited to an urban area, and because there were somewhat similar restrictions in the founding period (a false proposition that we have already discussed), the interest-balancing inquiry results in the constitutionality of the handgun ban. QED.

We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding “interest-balancing” approach.

[...]

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

That aside, the second passage is of course the critical one: what this decision means will be determined by how the Court applies the right in the future, and especially since the Court didn't articulate a clear standard for evaluating future regulations we simply don't know how this will affect more reasonable types of regulation. One could be concerned that the precedent will lie around like an, er, loaded weapon and will have much broader consequences.

Taking Scalia's assertions at face value, though, I don't see anything objectionable about the Court's judgment: the D.C. gun ban is too ineffective and overbroad to justify the restriction of a constitutional right. And since I generally take the Stevens/Marshall position that dividing rights into discrete categories of scrutiny isn't useful in itself and often fails to accurately describe what the Court actually does in practice, I'm not concerned that the Court left a lot of unanswered questions per se. Even if the Court had tried to develop a standard, the direction of the Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence would be determined by future presidential elections and other political developments in any case.

--Scott Lemieux

I have to agree with Noah; the evidence for inter-service tension between the Army and the Air Force in this article is largely inferential. Shanker relates some anecdotes about Army frustration with the performance of the Air Force, notes that the Army is developing a UAV force, and concludes that the former must have brought about the latter. But of course the Army doesn't need to be frustrated with the Air Force to seek to augment its own capabilities; the dynamics are complicated, but it's hardly unusual for organizations to try to seize new turf and pursue greater autonomy, even absent bureaucratic tension. Moreover, Noah correctly notes that Odin (the Army UAV project) has been in the open for quite some time, in contrast to the picture that Shanker tries to paint.

As everyone is aware, I'm all for augmenting the tactical capabilities of the Army at the expense of the Air Force. However, I suspect that Shanker is inferring something that isn't there. It's possible that people on the inside are telling him something that he's not relating to us, but we need to see that evidence before jumping to conclusions.

See also Peter.

--Robert Farley

Over at his new place, Spencer points out that the latest iteration of the bill to create an amendment "protecting" the institution of marriage is cosponsored by none other than David Vitter and Larry Craig.

What with the election going on and all, I'm sure everyone's forgotten all about last summer, when they were both outed as philanderers (Vitter in July and Craig in August).

--Ann Friedman

The Obama campaign is adding more former Clinton people to its staff, and the latest hire is Neera Tanden, the Clinton campaign's former policy director, who'll be running domestic policy for Obama. One of Tanden's more notable roles in the Clinton campaign was helping to develop her health care proposal.

Between this and Obama health advisor Kavita Patel's hints today, noted by Ezra, that Obama may reconsider his opposition to an individual mandate, it seems that the Obama camp may be reformulating its health care plan to move it closer to Clinton's. This is pretty savvy; it became clear over the course of the primary that opponents of individual mandates are generally less invested in the issue than proponents, many of whom backed Clinton or Edwards primarily because of this issue.

The hire may also indicate, ironically, a repudiation of Bill Clinton's approach to health care reform in 1994. His cardinal sin, in the eyes of Obama and many other Democrats, was a lack of openness with Congress and the public in the formulation of his plan. By hinting at a willingness to amend his own plan, both with Patel's comments and with the Tanden hire, Obama is challenging this approach, and indicating that his priority is getting a plan, rather than his plan, passed.

--Dylan Matthews

Dean Baker and Robert Kuttner debate how to deal with the housing crisis:

Baker: Unfortunately, these sleepwonkers are still designing policy. Their current bailout proposal, the Dodd-Frank bill, would help many of the banks whose bad lending practices fueled the bubble. It will do little to help the homeowners and communities most affected.

Kuttner: However, it is a mistake to think that the best policy is one of benign neglect, for there is nothing benign about a situation in which American homeowners stand to lose two trillion dollars of their net worth, and foreclosures proceed at the rate of 25,000 a week. Most Americans losing their equity, and sometimes their homes, are innocent bystanders; they did not take out sub-prime loans and they were not speculators. Some of the hardest hit victims are hard working blue collar Americans whose only sin is to be homeowners in neighborhoods with large numbers of foreclosures.

Dean Baker also has the latest Meltdown Lowdown:

The new Case-Shiller housing data showed that prices kept plummeting in April. Real house prices in the 20-city index were falling at close to a 26 percent annual rate over the months from January to April. Since their peak in the summer of 2006, real house prices have dropped by more than 23 percent. This means that we're probably a bit more than halfway to the bottom of the bubble.

And Courtney Martin writes about celebrities and politics:

A recent survey by California-based E-Poll Market Research gave 1,100 voting-age men and women nationwide a list of 46 attributes and asked them to identify which of these traits they believe applies to a given celebrity or candidate. McCain's closest celebrity match was, believe it or not, Bill Cosby. And Barack Obama's? Ronald Reagan. Seeing the first black Democratic presidential candidate matched with a Republican -- and his Republican opponent matched with a black man -- is enough to make you believe that, just like in Hollywood, anything could happen.

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--The Editors

Ross Douhat discusses post-Surge/post-Election Iraq strategy and seems to posit that, even though a McCain presidency would have more full-throated imperialists in positions of influence, his administration represents a more modest direction in foreign policy because ... he'd reduce troops a little bit over time (a doubtful claim since his website says that the preconditions for any troop withdrawal are a functioning Iraqi government that can protect it's people, something not likely to emerge soon), while Obama would take them out quickly.

Ross thinks that McCain's hawkish tendencies -- both in Iraq and, presumably, all the other places where he'd like to start a war -- will be constrained by facts on the ground, leaving long-term strategy to be dealt with by a future administration. In Ross' mind, a vote for McCain is a vote for putting off deciding the "long-term question of the size and scope of America’s entanglement in the Middle East" some four to eight years.

But that's not responsible! This is a question that needs to be debated and resolved now so that in four to eight years we don't have soldiers dying without a strategy to justify the loss.

--Tim Fernholz

The Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners is making noise about pressuring Barack Obama to include "abortion reduction" in the Party's official platform this year. This provides a good excuse to remind ourselves of what exactly the Partly platform said about abortion in 2004, and what the state of abortion reduction efforts currently are within the Democratic Party.

Here is the full extent of the Party's 2004 pro-choice platform:

We will defend the dignity of all Americans against those who would undermine it. Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman's right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

Looks like, barring major changes, abortion reduction through encouraging adoption and preventing unplanned pregnancy is already a part of the Democratic Party platform. A Democratic Senator -- Hillary Clinton -- led the fight to ensure over-the-counter access for emergency contraception, a pragmatic way to reduce the need for abortions. Rep. Henry Waxman's office authored two ground-breaking reports: One on how federally-funded abstinence-only education denies teens the information they need to avoid pregnancy and STIs, and another on how federally-funded "crisis pregnancy centers" mislead women about the supposed health "risks" of abortion.

There's more Democrats can do, such as finally de-funding abstinence only education, on which they've continued to capitulate despite the overwhelming evidence that it's bad for kids. With a Democratic president, Congress can also move to require pharmacists to fill birth control prescriptions for any woman with a legitimate one, regardless of her age or marital status.

But my guess is that what Wallis really has in mind is something along the lines of the 95-10 Initiative, legislation proposed by Democrats for Life. That bill does not focus on family planning, but rather on directing women to crisis pregnancy centers and scaring them with medically questionable "informed consent" requirements that talk-up abortion's so-called negative after effects. It's been said before and I'll say it again: Carrying a pregnancy to term is far more dangerous to a woman's physical and psychological health than having an abortion. The Democratic Party platform could benefit from more specificity on reproductive health, but ideologically, I think it's exactly where it needs to be.

--Dana Goldstein

We're happy to announce that Mark Schmitt is joining us as executive editor of The American Prospect on July 14. (Happy Bastille Day!) You already know Mark from his prescient observations about small-donor democracy, his smart analysis of 2008 as the theory of change primary, and his long-running Prospect print column "The Out Years." Mark currently serves as a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He was previously director of the Governance and Public Policy program at the Open Society Institute, as well as policy director to Senator Bill Bradley. We'd like to note that he's available via Gchat at all hours of the night, and is a confirmed reader of Crappy Hour.

But we're also pleased to report that we're not losing our current executive editor Harold Meyerson, who will be staying on board as editor-at-large, where he will occasionally opine for the blog, write features, and perhaps most importantly, draw those key political/musical theater comparisons.

Welcome Mark. We're glad to have you.

--Phoebe Connelly

It's nice to wake up and see North Korea destroying a nuclear tower on the New York Times frontpage. It's even nicer to (belatedly) see Bush administration officials waking up to reality—

“I think one of the things we did in this process, to be honest, is I think we learned a bit,” Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said at the White House on Thursday.

You don't say -- patient multilateral negotiations with an adversary state can produce results? While this is by no means the end of our nuclear discussions with North Korea, it is also major step forward and practical example for our dealings with Iran (admittedly a tougher nut to crack in terms of its stronger economy and less oppressive government.)

A conservative critic of the new direction quoted in the same article described Bush's previous, unsuccessful policies as "core Republican Party principles." Talk about a brand in distress!

--Tim Fernholz

If you, rightly, count Sen. Joe Lieberman as a half-Republican, there are only 5.5 Republican members of Congress left among the 34 who represent the six New England states: Maine's two female senators; New Hampshire's two male senators; the sole GOP House member who survived 2006, Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays; and you know who.

As Rothenberg Report's Nathan Gonzales points out, one of the four senators looks all but doomed: NH's John Sununu. As Gonzales points out, there is an eerie similarity to the poll tracking for the Sununu-Jeanne Shaheen matchup and last cycle's Pennsylvania race between another Republican who found himself increasingly out of step with the political-partisan preferences of the state he represented: Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum. "Through this point last cycle, two-dozen polls showed exactly the same thing; Santorum trailed Casey by an average of 11 points and the incumbent failed to top 43 percent in the ballot test," notes Gonzales. "Indications are that Sununu will suffer the same fate as Santorum."

The clearing out of moderate Republicans from the Rust Belt is strikingly similar to what Republicans did to moderate Democrats in the South. But with two key differences: It took longer for Democrats to get around to blueing the Northeast and Midwest, a project they could have commenced much sooner; but, second, now that that this conversion is underway it is moving along quite speedily.

--Tom Schaller

SCOTUS' decision in D.C. v. Heller aside, I've always felt that the presence of a gun in one's home just significantly raises the probability of someone getting shot. When I had a particularly creepy landlord during my senior year of college, I told my small-town Ohio-bred roommate (hi Lauren!) that I simply didn't think the solution was for her to keep a shotgun under her bed. She rolled her eyes.

Suffice to say, feminists can have differences of opinion on this topic. Yesterday Megan McArdle said guns are a feminist issue, and indeed, they are -- but not because they equalize power between men and women. In actuality, in a physical altercation the stronger of any two people is more likely to gain control of any weapon that is present. As the Violence Policy Center reports, homes with guns are clearly more dangerous homes for women:

A 1997 study that examined the risk factors for violent death for women in the home found that when there were one or more guns in the home, the risk of suicide among women increased nearly five times and the risk of homicide increased more than three times. The increased risk of homicide associated with firearms was attributable to homicides at the hands of a spouse, intimate acquaintance, or close relative.

Granted, correlation does not imply causation. But it's a lot easier for a violent, abusive, anger-prone man (or woman) to kill his partner with a gun than without one.

--Dana Goldstein

• A new Quinnipac poll has Obama beating McCain in Colorado (49-44), Michigan (48-42), Minnesota (54-37), and Wisconsin (52-39). Chris Cillizza spots interesting nugget: A large number of Democrats and independents in these four states would consider Bill Clinton to be "a problem" for an Obama administration If Hillary Clinton became Vice President.
• From yesterday's David Plouffe briefing: Obama campaign plans to dispatch "persuasion armies" to battleground states, Mike Dorning sees a "10 percent solution" paving the way to an Obama victory, and Marc Ambinder distills the campaign's central assumption: "Never will a campaign predict a landslide, but if only, say, half of the assumptions that guide Obama's general election strategy are true, his campaign is, in essence, preparing for a landslide in the popular vote. There's no way that 10,000 Obama volunteers in Texas won't influence his vote totals there even if he doesn't win."
• Both the Politico and the Huffington Post have stories on the falling out between the netroots and Obama on FISA.
• Perhaps reflecting a lack of things to talk about, the blogosphere is all abuzz about this Robert Novak column that strongly suggests "Obamacons" like Colin Powell could support Barack Obama this Fall even though this prospect was raised as recently as June 13. I do think, however, this overstates the power of Powell (or the Obamacons) to fundamentally reshape the political landscape.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger describes the right wing's new-found obsession with offshore drilling: "America is so addicted to oil that it will take years to ween ourselves from it. To look for new ways to feed our addiction is not the answer. Anyone who tells you this would bring down gas prices anytime soon is blowing smoke" Couldn't have said it better myself.
• Senate '08: Big Bad John Cornyn (R-TX) is only two points ahead of challenger Rick Noriega, a Republican pollster describes Gordon Smith (R-OR) as "clearly quite vulnerable," Mark Udall leads Robert Schaffer 48-38 in Colorado and incumbent Norm Coleman (R-MN) leads Al Franken 51-41.
• As Dylan noted earlier, LA Gov. Bobby Jindal signed legislation today that would punish sex offenders with castration.

--Mori Dinauer

Editors' Note: We're thrilled to introduce our new writing fellow Tim Fernholz. His work has been published by The New Republic, The Nation, American Lawyer, and the Washington City Paper. He is also a contributing writer at Campus Progress.

After Barack Obama opted out of public financing, it was a little worrisome to see John McCain achieve fundraising parity in May. Want another scare? Try this profile of Sheldon Adelson, the overweening gambling czar whose goal in life is literally buying influence. For example, this attempt to bribe Democratic Representative Shelley Berkley:

“I have unique personal knowledge of how Mr. Adelson seeks to dominate politics and public policy through the raw power of money. Shortly before I was fired from the Sands by Mr. Adelson in 1997, he made me an offer. It was a bizarre proposition, but it was simple and it was direct. He told me if I would switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party he would provide all the campaign funding I would need to run for Congress.” Berkley won her first race by only three percentage points. In 2006, she won a fifth term with sixty-five per cent of the vote, and today is a popular representative with a seemingly safe district; but Adelson has continued to try to defeat her.

Do you need a better argument for Obama's choice? Adelson, a principal funder behind conservative 527 Freedom's Watch and the Republican Jewish Committee (which has already launched attacks against Obama), can pump millions of dollars into stopping the Senator's campaign. If Obama hadn't opted out of public financing, his ability to respond in kind would be severely limited (See Kerry, John). These groups could even get away with coordinating with the Republican campaign as long as they pay a fine a few years later. Hey, as long as you win, right? Meanwhile, McCain has gone from complaining about 527s to all but winking at their activities.

Neither strategy -- abandoning public financing or waving it like a flag while your supporters deploy unregulated money -- is ideal. Without a better system, there's no way to be completely virtuous.

--Tim Fernholz

Barack Obama may be campaigning in notoriously red Alaska at the end of this summer. Even if he can win there, why does he care about a measly three electoral votes?

Well, perhaps because those votes can easily be obtained by swaying a small number of voters -- Alaska has 221,089 people per electoral vote while California, for example has 664,603. Winning over a state that has not elected a Democratic candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson would also make a strong political statement -- exhibiting not just Obama's commitment to the state, but his unwavering dedication to appeal to the whole country. Finally, Obama may be hoping his campaign will help the Democrats running against the state's endangered Republican Senator, Ted Stevens, and congressman, Don Young (a strategy he's pursuing in other states). 

--Rachel Stern

You'd think both John McCain and Barack Obama would support competition for government contracts, alongside every other reasonable person. A healthy competition means the end product is the best possible, right? Consider the the Northrop Grumman vs. Boeing competition to build a fleet of refueling tankers for the Air Force. Originally the Air Force awarded the contract to Northrop Grumman. Boeing appealed to the Government Accountability Office, which found that the Air Force had not been thorough enough in its decision making; the Grumman planes were not superior in cost or design. The GAO recommended the Air Force reopen the bidding process.

Obama agreed, but surprisingly, McCain didn't, siding with Northrop Grumman. McCain had actually been trying to sway the Air Force in favor of Grumman for a while -- among McCain's staff are lobbyists for the manufacturing contractor. It's ironic that McCain, who flaunts his military and defense positions like nobody's business, would not want the Air Force to have the best possible equipment available. It seems he's more interested in making his friends happy.

--Daniel Strauss

Louisiana governor, McCain vice presidential prospect, and accomplished exorcist Bobby Jindal had an, ahem, interesting response to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling prohibiting capital punishment for child rape: he wants to castrate child rapists instead. No, really:

Today, Gov. Jindal signed the “Sex Offender Chemical Castration Bill,” authorizing the castration of convicted sex offenders. They get a choice: physical or chemical. Oh, and they don’t just get castrated and leave - they still have to serve out their sentence.

If this guy is who conservatives have to turn to as “the next Ronald Reagan”, I’m beginning to think that even the next Walter Mondale could beat him.

—Dylan Matthews

Yesterday, many conservatives managed to work themselves into a lather about a plausible interpretation of the Constitution with exceptionally few real-world consequences. I noticed much less outrage about the Court's opinion in Exxon Shipping v. Baker, which read the justice's public policy preferences into the law with considerably less textual support in order to protect poor, defenseless Exxon from the conequences of the Exxon Valdez spill. (Four justices held that the corporation was not liable at all.)

The majority argues that the potentially arbitrary nature of punitive verdicts requires a fairly strict upper limit, with punitive damages virtually never permitted to exceed a 1-1 ratio with compensatory damages damages. However, the fact that punitive damages will vary to some degree is an inevitable consequence of the American system of relying on torts rather than regulation to create disincentives for corporate behavior. Limiting punitive damages with an arbitrary upper end -- even in what, as even the usually sympathetic Breyer notes, were quite unusual circumstances -- makes punitive damages a highly ineffective means of constraining bad behavior. That would be fine if people who agreed with the majority wanted to move to a more European-style regulation-based system, but needless to say that won't happen.

The key to the case is that Scalia and Thomas, who haven't joined past attempts to find limits on punitive damages in the constitutional text (and still disagree with these holdings), joined this time, presumably because of the majority's reliance on maritime law. In dissent, however, Stevens points out quite compellingly that the limits on compensatory damages in maritime law make arbitrary upper bounds on punitive damages even less appropriate.

--Scott Lemieux

The only real suspense about D.C. v. Heller was how exactly the right to bear arms would be defined and what the lineup would be. The D.C. gun ban was clearly doomed. Scalia, writing the lead opinion, made a broader coalition less likely, and indeed the Court split 5-4, along typical ideological lines. And yet, based on a quick stand, Scalia's opinion wasn't exceptionally broad -- while striking down the D.C. ban it emphasized that the reasonable regulation of gun ownership was permissible.

Stevens' lengthy and detailed dissent, meanwhile, immediately conceded that the Second Amendment conferred an "individual" right in some sense, but argued that text and history compelled the conclusion that -- given the constitutionally stated purposes of the right the D.C. gun ban was a reasonable restriction of the right. Breyer's dissent, as you might expect, was more pragmatic, focusing on what he claims to be the reasonableness of the ban.

More on the decision later.

--Scott Lemieux

Well, this seems like a naked pander to me: Barack Obama says he disagrees with yesterday's Supreme Court decision striking down the death penalty for child rapists. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“I disagree with the decision. I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes,” Obama told reporters at a press conference in Chicago.

The expected Democratic nominee said he believed the rape of a child “is a heinous crime” that fits the circumstance, siding with the four conservative justices who sit on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

Alito's reasoning in his dissenting opinion, though, was quite flawed, as Scott explains so ably. Alito wrote that child rape evidences a depravity deeper and far more disturbing than that of, for example, a guy who holds up a convenience store and stands by while his accomplice shoots the clerk. Therefore, Alito wrote, the child rapist should be subject to the death penalty, just like the robber. But as Scott points out, couldn't this also mean that the robber shouldn't be subjected to the death penalty? Secondly, Alito argued that the fact that several states allow the death penalty for child rapists proves the practice is backed by public consensus. But at the time of Brown v. Board, or Miranda, or Loving v. Virginia, dozens of states allowed practices that the Court deemed unacceptable.

If Obama has a separate, deeper reasoning for opposing the Court's decision yesterday, he should have out with it. Otherwise, I'll be forced to believe this is a pander. After all, about two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty.

--Dana Goldstein

Barack Obama isn't going to win much more than Virginia, and maybe Florida, in the South, but you might be surprised to learn that I think Obama should spend money and resources in the region. I do, and this is not a reversal of anything I wrote in Whistling Past Dixie, but in fact a confirmation. How can that be?

Easy: Because now that he has foregone public financing, and is thus expected to have a financial advantage over John McCain and the Republicans, the whole notion of spending money in losing states to "keep honest" one's opponent turns is turned inside out for Obama and the Democrats in 2008. As I explain in the third tactical recommendation in the concluding chapter of the book, it never makes sense for the resource-disadvantaged candidate or party to spend money in no-win states to "keep honest" the opposing party because the resource-advantaged party can spend the same amount -- and, given their other advantages in that state/region, probably less -- and probably suffer no damage electorally.

Indeed, even if the resource-advantaged party plays it conservatively with a dollar-for-dollar match, because they have more resources to begin with and because subtracting equal amounts from both sides of any ratio always widens that ratio (that is, worsens it further for the resource-disadvantaged party) the "keep them honest" actually worsens the resource-disadvantaged party's situation in the swing states. (That is, 99:98 is actually a better ratio for the disadvantaged party than 98:97, which is better than 97:96…and so on. Eventually one reaches 2:1, see?)

However, because Obama and the Democrats should be the resource-advantaged party this cycle (they certainly are in congressional races), they can and should spend money in some states they expect to lose and bleed McCain and the Republicans. If this Politico piece is any indication, that is exactly what David Plouffe and the Obama camp have in mind, putting staff and some money into places like Georgia and Texas and Montana they probably won't win but where they can bleed McCain and help Democrats downballot -- and without jeopardizing Obama's electoral chances. Smart, smart.

--Tom Schaller

• Sam noted this Ben Smith article in today's Politico demonstrating the Obama campaign's determination to be competitive in 14 Red states, helping local Dems downticket. The Chicago Tribune ran a similar story today, detailing voter resgistration drives in nine states that could significantly boost turnout amongst youths and African Americans. Tom Edsall has an informative piece at the Huffington Post today, drawing upon recent literature in political science and applying it to the 2008 election.
• Chris Cillizza and Bob Beckel each make the case for an Obama/Clinton ticket today. I'm with Ezra on the Beckel analysis: he's right that Clinton would be excellent in the capacity of VP-as-attack-dog, but adding Clinton carries additional baggage that might confuse the message and discipline of the Obama campaign.
• Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith, facing a difficult reelection battle, cut a remarkable ad yesterday that focused on how often he voted cooperates with Barack Obama in the Senate. The Obama campaign shot back immediately, clarifying that the presidential nominee backs Smith's opponent, Democrat and state house speaker Jeff Merkley.
• Ralph Nader, rapidly degenerating into a caricature of Lyndon LaRouche, today described Obama as "half African-American," adding that "I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?" Matt Yglesias helpfully reminds us that Obama has, actually, vowed to crack down on predatory lenders, race-based financial exploitation, and yes, even lead and asbestos removal.
• Obama urged his donors to help retire Hillary Clinton's campaign debt today, although in calls to Clinton's donors, there were apparently still some bad feelings left over from the primaries. The goodwill flowed in Hollywood, however, with Obama raking in $5 million from celebrities at a posh L.A. fundraiser.
• David Plouffe observed that the so-called Barr Effect could extend not only to Georgia but Alaska as well. According to Marc Ambinder, Plouffe also hinted that the VP selection process would be based on merit, not geography.
• Think Progress observes that McCain hasn't voted in the Senate since April 8, while Obama's most recent vote was on June 4.
• And, finally, the Southern Poverty Law Center discovered in a survey of white supremacists that many of them are open to a Barack Obama presidency.Noted racist David Duke explained: "My bet is that whether Obama wins or loses in November, millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it."

--Mori Dinauer

Today's decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana is a fairly typical Eighth Amendment case. The relevant textual language -- "nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" -- can evidently accommodate multiple outcomes in any case sufficiently interesting to get to the Supreme Court, and this case is no exception. The Court's four more liberal members and the moderate conservative found that the Eight Amendment categorically bars the death penalty for cases of sexual assault "where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in death of the victim." The Court's four doctrinaire conservatives dissented.

One interesting aspect of Alito's dissenting opinion, however, is the particular way in which he made his argument. One could imagine an argument to the effect that the text of the Eighth Amendment as originally understood did not prohibit the death penalty for the rape of a child. This would be true, but even Scalia has said that cruel and unusual punishment is an area where he is a "faint-hearted" originalist who would not actually hold flogging for minor property theft to be constitutional even though the founders wouldn't have objected to it.

Instead, Alito takes on Kennedy's standard analysis of whether there is a national consensus against the death penalty for the sexual assault of children. Here, Kennedy's case is pretty strong, given that the few states with such statutes are clear outliers (this is roughly the same number of states that didn't provide lawyers for criminal defendants at the time of Gideon). Alito attempts to explain this away:

...dicta in this Court’s decision in Coker v. Georgia, 433 U. S. 584 (1977) , has stunted legislative consideration of the question whether the death penalty for the targeted offense of raping a young child is consistent with prevailing standards of decency. The Coker dicta gave state legislators and others good reason to fear that any law permitting the imposition of the death penalty for this crime would meet precisely the fate that has now befallen the Louisiana statute that is currently before us, and this threat strongly discouraged state legislators—regardless of their own values and those of their constituents—from supporting the enactment of such legislation.

Alito also makes an argument that there is no reason to assume that murderers achieve a unique level of moral depravity, which on its face is more reasonable:

Consider the following two cases. In the first, a defendant robs a convenience store and watches as his accomplice shoots the store owner. The defendant acts recklessly, but was not the triggerman and did not intend the killing. In the second case, a previously convicted child rapist kidnaps, repeatedly rapes, and tortures multiple child victims. Is it clear that the first defendant is more morally depraved than the second?

Fair enough as far as it goes. However, there's another way of approaching this: to question whether the death penalty should be applicable in cases of felony murder. A categorical prohibition on the death penalty for people who did not intend to cause the death (or their personal actions could not foreseeably have caused) of another person seems the better way of resolving the conflict to me.

--Scott Lemieux

Today the Campaign to End Torture unveiled a declaration, signed by a wide-ranging coalition of religious leaders, former military officers, former Defense and State Department officials, national security and counterterrorism experts, and others, calling on President Bush to sign executive order unequivocally banning the use of torture in interrogations. Military signatories include Alberto Mora, the former Navy lawyer whose efforts to end torture from inside the Pentagon were thwarted, and Paul Kern, who led the military's internal investigation of Abu Ghraib.

David Gushee, president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, described many of the evangelicals signing on to the Declaration as "theologically conservative, not very politically inclined, a mix of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents," who didn't expect to get involved in such a campaign but "we cannot endorse or accept the cruel treatment of another human being."

The Campaign now is soliciting more signatories to the Declaration, and is launching grassroots efforts in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, three states rich in evangelicals (but, I'm told, not targeted for any reason related to the presidential campaign). The organizers intend to present the Declaration to Bush because getting an executive order, said Mora, "is the fastest . . . most dramatic, powerful, and immediate way, the most powerful signal we could give to the world." Even if the next president has to sign it.

--Sarah Posner

Ilan Goldenberg writes that talking to Iran is not as controversial as people seem to think:

If two years ago you were to tell me that the Democratic presidential nominee would make engaging with Iran a central element of his campaign, I would have thought you were joking. After all, talking to a country that has historically enjoyed a favorability rating of a whopping 10 percent in the United States and has a president known for his anti-Western rhetoric probably isn't going to be all that popular. Not to mention the fact that the most substantive interaction Americans have had with Iran over the last 30 years involved watching blindfolded hostages and burning American flags on their television screens.

Julian Sanchez explains why Democratic leaders supporting the House's FISA bill are wrong when they say it protects civil liberties:

One might think, as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) does, that the proper word for this is "capitulation." After all, Republicans got precisely what they had wanted all along, and Democrats seem not to have wheedled even a mess of pottage in trade for the rule of law and the Fourth Amendment. But give the House leadership points for at least accidental honesty: "Compromise" can also mean "to make a shameful or disreputable concession," which fits the deal brokered by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) to a tee.

And Sarah Posner has the latest on the religious right:

By the 2012 election they will be, says the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the 15 million-member National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. The NHCLC, which Rodriguez describes as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference blended with the National Association of Evangelicals and "a little Taco Bell," represents one of the fastest-growing religious groups in America. Rodriguez says that "in 20 to 30 years, Latino evangelicals will dominate [the political landscape] ... what they believe in socially and politically will influence presidential campaigns." And presidential campaigns, says Rodriguez, "won't be about courting white evangelicals exclusively." "After 2012," he says, "there's no way you can move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue without the Latino vote."

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--The Editors

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced today that the state is buying 187,000 acres of land (an area approximately the size of New York City) near the Everglades from U.S. Sugar. The company, the nation's largest sugar cane manufacturer, is going out of business. This, combined with a land swap with another sugar producer, will restore natural water flows to the Everglades after a century-long disruption.

What's more, U.S. Sugar is so big (it produces a tenth of the nation's cane sugar) that this will deal a big blow to lobbying power of the sugar industry, which has historically been very effective in its attempts to get the government to protect it from competition. What's more, less domestic production means more sugar importation, something domestic producers try to prevent.

That's good 'cause farm subsidies are bad, but also because it could lead to a return of sugar in soda pop (lower tariffs could make sugar cheaper than corn syrup) which, as anyone who has tried a Mexican coke knows, is way better (oh and it's good for the environment too ...).

--Sam Boyd

That's obvious, of course, but I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about a group of pastors, led by George W. Bush's spiritual adviser (and Obama endorser) Kirbyjon Caldwell, who launched a web site by that name to counter James Dobson's attacks on Obama's interpretation of the Bible.

Dobson is lashing out from a low crouch these days. He's marginalized himself by setting up ludicrous litmus tests and stomping about in a childish rage when he's not included in campaign outreach. (Hey, at least he's gotten a few pointers from his years as a child psychologist!) His refusal to back (until too late) the candidate many evangelicals saw as their best option, Mike Huckabee, was seen by many activists as not only a betrayal, but colossally stupid politics.

Many evangelicals still admire his advice on spanking your kids and whatnot, but his days as a player in electoral strategy are over -- because too many voices are rising up to fill a gigantic power vacuum, and because those voices are more politically, racially, and theologically diverse, the grassroots activist has more choices about who to listen to. After all those years of telling millions how to discipline their kids, now Dobson is the one getting the spanking.

--Sarah Posner

Nancy Pelosi proposed an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama's running-mate yesterday -- Texas Rep. Chet Edwards. Edwards represents the 17th district, a heavily Republican area with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+18. He's also notable as the only Democratic congressman targeted by Tom DeLay's 2003 redistricting plan to survive.

While the appeal of picking a Texas Democrat, especially one who has beaten back adversaries like DeLay in past elections, is understandable, Edwards would be a poor choice. Not only did he vote for the Iraq war authorization in 2002, a vote which could undermine the Obama campaign's emphasis on foreign policy judgment, he has an, at best, mixed record when it comes to votes on withdrawal.

While he voted for the House leadership's Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act in 2007, he also voted for a Republican resolution in 2006 rejecting an "arbitrary date for withdrawal or redeployment", and for a 2007 emergency appropriations bill for the war without a timetable for withdrawal (he even voted against an amendment adding such a timetable). The latter two votes, along with his votes in 2007 and this past week for telecom immunity have led to his inclusion on Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers' list of "Bush Dog Democrats".

His conservative record doesn't stop with national security issues; he voted to make permanent the repeal of the estate tax, in favor of the Bankruptcy Reform bill, for drilling in ANWR, and against the 2007 House renewable energy bill. Perhaps most egregiously, he was one of thirty-six House Democrats to vote in favor of the the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004. Is it really too much to expect the Democratic vice presidential nominee to be, at least, not to the right of John McCain on LGBT equality?

For what it's worth, Edwards has said he would not turn down the post if asked, but that he hasn't been contacted by the Obama campaign. I'm pretty sure it will stay that way.

--Dylan Matthews

A lot of people have portrayed Obama's decision to campaign hard in places like Alaska, Texas, and Wyoming as an example of hubris -- comparable to the Bush campaign's last-minute expenditures in California in 2000 or New Jersey in 2004. But as Michael Turk at The Next Right speculated last night and Ben Smith confirms today, Obama is actually concerned about far more than getting those states' electoral votes in November.

In fact, many states that are unlikely to be competitive in November have been chosen for attention from the Obama campaign because they either have Senate or congressional races that are likely to be very competitive or state legislatures that are likely to swap party control. Sure, the campaign hasn't entirely abandoned the idea that it can win say, North Dakota, but even if it doesn't win, it knows there's still a lot to gain by competing there.

And while Obama may be doing this because he can -- his leads in some polls are reaching double digits and his cash advantage is likely to be huge -- he's also showing a remarkable degree of foresight and concern for his party. I mean, I may be wrong (please tell me if I am), but I don't think Clinton did anything like this in 1996 when he was doing as well as Obama is now. Neither did Reagan in 1984. And I certainly doubt that any non-incumbent president has ever tried anything similar.

This should be reassuring news for Democrats, not just because it has the potential to help them across the country, but because it shows that Obama cares about a lot more than being elected. If he's already looking at the size of his congressional majority in 2009 and 2010 (and after, given that he's also targeting state legislatures which will control the next round of redistricting) that reflects a deep desire to push for big changes that require a big majority in Congress (something both LBJ and FDR had when they pushed through big progressive reforms).

--Sam Boyd

After a major fire gutted a large apartment building in my neighborhood in March, leaving several hundred people homeless, it's good to hear that D.C. is planning a crackdown on absentee landlords. The building that burnt down, 3145 Mt. Pleasant Street, had a long history of neglect and safety problems. And because of the rapid pace of gentrification in the District, some landlords have purposefully allowed their buildings to fall into disrepair -- hoping that living without heat, electricity, or enduring a rodent infestation will force low-income tenants out, allowing property owners to refurbish buildings as condominiums.

Mayor Adrian Fenty has announced that the city will inspect rental buildings with three or more units at least once every four years. There are 11,000 such buildings in the city. It's a good first step, but many rentals will be overlooked under this plan. "English basement" apartments on the lowest level of row houses are very common in D.C., and while many of these units are renovated and well-kept, others are in basements of decrepit houses whose upper floors are sometimes unoccupied or in disrepair. Those tenants need support, as do those who rent rooms in former single-family homes. Technically, such "group houses" are classified as one unit, but in actuality, the tenants are often unrelated to one another and have individual leases, which gives disproportionate power to the landlord. So to the extent that staffing allows, D.C. should be inspecting these types of rental units as well -- especially if there have been complaints.

--Dana Goldstein

• John McCain gave a big speech on energy in Santa Barbara, CA, this afternoon. A number of protesters showed up to challenge McCain's calls for lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling. (The Los Angeles Times reports that McCain could have picked a better venue, given that Santa Barbara was the site of a disastrous offshore oil spill in 1969 that is credited with birthing the modern environmental movement.) Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, NV, Barack Obama described McCain as part of the decades of failure in Washington. Gallup has reported that energy/gas prices are the top concern for Americans, and that 47 percent trust Obama on the issue to McCain's 28 percent.
• A front page story in today's New York Times looks at Obama's increasingly shaky relationship with Muslim Americans.
• Last Fall, when McCain's campaign was on the ropes, he opted into the public financing system in order to secure a bank loan and then withdrew from the public system once he secured the nomination. Now the DNC is suing the McCain campaign for violating campaign finance law.
  
• Via Marc Ambinder, a David Plouffe-authored PowerPoint presentation hints at the Obama campaign's general election strategy.
• Apparently, John McCain's "Blog Interact" page at his campaign web site rewards commenters for trolling. McCain might be "aware of the internet," but is clearly ignorant of annoyances therein.
• Polls, polls, polls: Obama opens up a big lead in Michigan, according to Public Policy Polling [PDF], beating John McCain 48-39. (PPP also recently gave Obama a big lead in Ohio). Meanwhile, Survey USA finds Obama beating McCain 48-47 in Indiana. Others have helpfully reminded us that Bush beat Kerry in Indiana in 2004 with 60 percent of the vote. Meanwhile a nation LA Times/Bloomberg poll shows Obama with a 15 point national lead over McCain.
  
• Richard Cohen has really outdone himself today, writing in his syndicated Washington Post column -- I refuse to link to it -- that John McCain's flip flops deserve less scrutiny than Barack Obama's because McCain was tortured by the North Vietnamese. No, seriously. He also lectures us that "A presidential race is only incidentally about issues. It's really about likability and character." Well guess what, Dick, the public thinks otherwise.

--Mori Dinauer

As Abby writes, President Bush has nominated Ann Dunwoody to be the nation's first female four-start general. But it's important to view women's place in the Bush era military within a larger context. As our friend Spencer Ackerman points out today at his new blog home, a disproportionate number of women were the victims of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" last year. While women make up just 14 percent of the armed services, they were 46 percent of those discharged under the rule, which prevents openly gay Americans from serving in the military. A total of 627 people were discharged under DADT in 2007.

The conduct of the Iraq war has also ill-treated many thousands of American servicewomen. Today an American female soldier is more likely to be raped by a fellow-American service member than killed by enemy fire. Veterans hospitals are reporting that as many as 40 percent of their female patients were sexually assaulted during their service. And here at home, more than 100 high school-aged women were sexually assaulted or raped by male military recruiters since Sept. 11, 2001. It's a record of shame.

On a lighter note, do visit Spencer at firedoglake. He's got the best tag line ever: National Security. Iraq. Punk Rock. Real Talk.

--Dana Goldstein

While this will not be the year we get our first female commander-in-chief, one military glass ceiling seems to have shattered nonetheless. President Bush nominated Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody to head the Army Materiel Command, making her the first female four-star general.

--Abby Rapoport

Today on TAP Online we have two pieces about attempts to smear Michelle Obama and, by extension, her husband. Paul Waldman looks at conservative efforts to use her to stoke racist sentiments:

Let's remember why some conservatives were briefly so enamored of Barack Obama: because, in right-wing eminence grise William Bennett's words, "he never brings race into it." But in most of the conservative movement, race was never out of it. While the Jeremiah Wright controversy failed to convince sufficient numbers of Americans that Barack is an Angry Black Man, there was still an option open to stoke the fires of racial resentment. Michelle Obama could become the Angry Black Woman.

And Dave Weigel explains how Larry Johnson went from a netroots darling to a pariah by becoming the most prominent promoter of the Michelle Obama "whitey" rumor:

Johnson's following at places like Daily Kos was always something of a fluke. He followed four years as a CIA analyst with four years at the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. Johnson left intelligence work in 1993, going on to build a dual career as a business consultant and a pundit on intelligence issues. He argued throughout the 1990s, on shows like The News Hour and Larry King Live, that domestic law enforcement was dropping the ball on terrorist threats while the threat of international terror was decreasing. In this age before blogs, Johnson's commentary, whether printed in The New York Times or submitted in congressional hearings, was dry, analytic, and laced with facts.

And, in an article from our last print issue, Paul Starr marvels at just how improbable the primary season would have seemed not so long ago:

Now that Barack Obama has secured his party's presidential nomination, it is a good moment to assess the extraordinary and improbable thing that the Democrats have done. It was not intuitively obvious, particularly to those who saw the party's central task as winning back the Reagan Democrats, that the best way to retake the presidency would be to nominate an African American with an Islamic-sounding name. In the abstract, before Obama emerged, that concept had not suggested itself, and some political insiders may be excused for not immediately grasping its genius.

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--The Editors

The Obama campaign is pushing John McCain's support for off-shore drilling very hard, sending the press corps several emails daily about McCain's flip-flop on the issue. Now Team Obama is highlighting this odd quote from McCain at a town hall meeting in Fresno, California, as reported by MSNBC's First Read: "Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial."

Sure, it would be nice, psychologically, to believe that the U.S. has a homegrown energy supply that would decrease our reliance on foreign oil. But drilling offshore would be environmentally disastrous and yield very little output. Investing in alternative energy and mass transit would have a far greater "psychological impact," don't you think?

In reporting Karl Rove’s attempt to find an analogy that Republicans could relate to to describe Barack Obama -- “You know this guy…he’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by” -- ABC’s Jake Tapper posed the question, at the same country club, who would Rove be?

The easy answer, of course, is “the guy who quit the club when it integrated.” But I think I answered this one last month in my article on the future of the Republican Party and conservatism:

While conservative pundits and some of their politicians are in a state of panic, political strategists like Karl Rove carry themselves with the confident swagger of an investment banker who just lost $2 billion of someone else’s money but still has the Fifth Avenue apartment and the house in Bedford.

--Mark Schmitt

The PDF conference has me thinking a lot about the generational divisions created by how we interact with technology. It started with a conversation I had with two organizers about the potential for organizing via text messages. One woman asked, "So, do either of you have a landline?" I haven't had a landline since 2002, and it occurred to me that I'm probably at the tail-end of the generation that, at some point in the past, had their own landline. Sure, many families still have them, but most people in their twenties, I'd wager, only have a cell phone. When did the cut-off happen? I'd guess it was around 2001 that kids graduating from high school never actually got their own landline; they'd leave their parents' house, and (if they didn't have one already) they'd get a cell phone. I doubt I'll get a landline again, and even if I do, it probably won't be the main way to reach me.

Here's another example--when will the generation hit when a majority of young job applicants will have an online record of their youthful indiscretions? We're all warned to be careful of our Facebook or MySpace profiles, and I've watched friends hit the point where they pull down or (attempt to) scrub the internet of drunken photos and juvenile blogs. But as social networks explode, aren't we going to hit a point where a large number of high school students have lived a very public online life: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc? Will there come a time when employers Googling a prospective hire turn a blind eye to your online record because, hey, everyone was young once? Perhaps this generation hasn't hit yet, but I'd guess this will be the case for the the high school class of 2006 and beyond.

--Phoebe Connelly

New York State Senate majority leader Joseph L. Bruno, the highest-ranking Republican in the state, announced last night that he won't seek reelection to the Senate this year. Bruno has been majority leader for fourteen years now, twelve years of which he served alongside George Pataki and Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver.

This era was the single longest period the same three politicians composed the "three men in a room" who control the New York State political process. That said, the last couple years haven't been kind to Bruno. Since 2006, he has faced a federal investigation into his business dealings, police surveillance against him ordered by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and a whittling of his Senate majority to a single vote.

Bruno's period as majority leader doesn't have much to recommend it. He maintained a consistently conservative record, attempting to reinstitute the death penalty, working with Pataki to slash Medicaid spending, and thwarting Spitzer's attempt to legalize same-sex marriage last year. He descended into bigotry at times, referring to blacks and Hispanics as "people who got their hands out" for welfare and to homosexuality as an "abnormal lifestyle".

Bruno's retirement represents the best opportunity in years for Democrats to retake the Senate, which, with the exception of 1965, has been in Republican hands since 1939. If Senate Democrats succeed in November, Gov. David Paterson will have a completely Democratic legislature to work with, meaning that 2009-2011 could be as productive a time for enacting progressive legislation in New York as it would be federally under an Obama administration. Given that, if it were a country, New York would have the world's sixteenth largest economy, this is no small thing.

--Dylan Matthews

Listening to Lawrence Lessig speak here at PDF. I'd suggest if you haven't read it already that you head over to The Nation and read Chris Hayes' recent profile of Lessig and his new campaign Change Congress.

--Phoebe Connelly

"Obama on wrong side of Elian Gonzalez saga," proclaims a Politico headline today. I thought Politico prided itself on objectivity toward the presidential race. Now they are the arbiter of the right and wrong side of an eight-year old debate?

Apparently so -- and the "right" side is the side of hardliners in the Cuban American community who opposed Elian's return to his Cuban father -- the man who had been his primary caregiver. They're turned off by Obama, David Paul Kuhn reports, because one of the candidate's advisers was a lawyer who represented Gonzalez père, and another was a deputy attorney general at the time who supported the Justice Department's policy of storming Elian's relatives' Florida home to return the child to his dad. Some Cuban Americans also don't like Obama's promise to meet and negotiate with hostile foreign regimes.

But these Cuban American voters are traditional Republicans -- it's no great surprise they are skeptical of Obama, just as they would have been of Hillary Clinton. That doesn't necessarily mean that Obama will lose Florida, as the piece suggests. He will be able to make inroads among younger Cuban Americans, who are more progressive. And Obama's overall poll numbers in the Latino community continue to rise. Just a few weeks after Clinton's departure from the race, Obama's support among Latinos had already climbed to 60 percent, a number John Kerry never met, and that will likely continue to go up. Latinos are trending more and more Democratic; 78 percent of Latino primary voters this year participated in Democratic primaries, and their turn-out at the polls is up nationwide.

--Dana Goldstein

• As Tom mentioned earlier, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will hold their first Unity Rally, appropriately enough, in Unity, NH, where each received 107 votes during the primary.
• The Washington Post has a front pager on Obama's efforts to reintroduce himself for the general campaign and a deeper look at the GOP's apprehension over John McCain's organizational problems. Jonathans Chait and Cohn each agree, however, that last week was good for McCain.
• The DNC came up short in fundraising in May, taking in only $4.8 million to the RNC's $24 million. Meanwhile, Obama's campaign barely edged out McCain in the same month, $21.9 to $21.8 million.
• The first Obama attack book of the season, The Case against Barack Obama, will be available in August, the Politico reports, courtesy of Cornerite David Freddoso.
• The Cincinnati Inquirer has a good story on the presidential campaigns' efforts to strengthen their ground game in Ohio.
• David Paul Kuhn looks at three potential female VP picks for John McCain, while Joe Klein reports that McCain's top three VP picks are each unavailable for different reasons.
• Charlie Black suggests that a terrorist attack would be good for McCain's candidacy, then retracts it with an apology. Sounds like advice one would get from Karl Rove, who today described Obama as "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."
• Correction: In the last edition of the Lightning Round I mistakenly attributed a post at fivethirtyeight.com to the site's founder, Nate Silver, when in fact it was written by Sean Quinn. The real Nate Silver had a compelling post over the weekend arguing that Barack Obama "isn't like Dukakis."
• John McCain wants to offer a cash prize for building a better electric car battery.
• I have to admit, after watching this epic, two-and-a-half minute long re-election ad, I doubt Jesus himself could unseat Sen. John Cornyn down in Texas.

--Mori Dinauer

Editors' Note: Daniel Strauss is a summer 2008 Prospect editorial intern.

Leonard Downie Jr., the longest serving executive editor of The Washington Post, announced today that he will step down Sept. 8. His announcement ends longtime speculation that the recently named Publisher Katharine Weymouth wanted to install her own editor as part of her time as the head of Washington's flagship newspaper. Word on the street (the media gossip street that is) is that Jonathan Landman, digital editor of The New York Times and Marcus Brauchli, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, are in the lead to become the next editor. Whoever the next editor is, he or she will be only the third editor of the Post since the 60s.

Downie's retirement signals Weymouth's interest in having an executive editor more familiar with the panicked digital age of journalism, where newspapers are frantically trying to attract as many readers as they used to to print to the newspaper's websites. Landman sounds like a perfect fit supposedly and the Post's website could be better. Still, under Downie, the Post has added some interesting content like The Fix and PostGlobal.

Under Downie, The Post has earned 25 Pulitzers. Becoming executive editor of the Post after Downie is a tough act to follow for nearly anyone.

--Daniel Strauss

Barack Obama spoke in support of working mothers -- including his own mother and his wife Michelle Obama -- in a speech that he gave today in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Women, said Obama, should have the same opportunities as men, and not have them be stymied by motherhood.

"As the son of a single mother, I also don't accept an America that makes women choose between their kids and their careers. It's not acceptable that women are denied jobs or promotions because they've got kids at home. It's not acceptable that forty percent of working women don't have a single paid sick day. That's wrong for working parents, it's wrong for America's children, and it's not who we are as a country."

Here, and throughout his speech, Obama took a refreshingly novel approach for a male presidential candidate in describing the American working mothers, emphasizing the importance, and rewards, of equality both in the workplace and, for women with significant others, at home. He backed up his idealism with a slew of policy proposals: granting women more paid sick days, hours off to attend their children's school events, and a minimum wage adjusted for inflation.

The speech was a perfectly timed follow-up to Michelle Obama's speech on working mothers last week (which Dana wrote about). While Michelle avoided much mention of Hillary Clinton, though, Barack concludes with praise of her:

"Standing here today, I know that we have drawn closer to making this America a reality because of the extraordinary woman who I shared a stage with so many times throughout this campaign -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. And in the months and years ahead, I look forward to working with her to make progress on the issues that matter to American women and to all American families -- health care and education; support for working parents and an insistence on equality."

--Rachel Stern

The annual Foreign Policy/Prospect list of the "World's Top Public Intellectuals" is out, and the top ten, for the first time, is composed entirely of Muslims. Topping the list is Philadelphia-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, followed by Nobel laureate and microcredit pioneer Muhammed Yunus, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In a development sure to frustrate Paul Berman, Swiss theologian Tariq Ramadan (#8) bests Dutch-Somali anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (#15), and a third Nobelist, Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, rounds out the top ten.

Perhaps even more surprising are the countries of origin of the Muslim intellectuals in the top ten. Only two, al-Qaradawi and televangelist Amr Khaled, come from an Arab country (Egypt). Two (Gülen and Pamuk) are Turkish. Two -- Yunus and Pakistani bar association chairman Aitzaz Ahsan at #5  -- are from the Indian subcontinent.  Two, theologian Abdolkarim Soroush (#7) and Ebadi, are Iranian. Africa and Europe claim one each (Ugandan anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani at #9 and Ramadan respectively).

While the popular perception of the Muslim world conflates it with the Arab world, the Foreign Policy/Prospect list shows that to be as much of a fallacy among thinkers as it is generally.

In any case, given the amount of debate about the Muslim world from Western writers both left (Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy) and right (Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes) it's encouraging that Foreign Policy and Prospect, through the votes of their leadership, are raising awareness of thinkers who actually live in it.

-- Dylan Matthews

Just in case you weren't convinced or needed to prove the point to someone. Via Jessica at Feministing.

--Sam Boyd

Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama announced today that they will hold a "Unite for Change" Rally this Friday in Unity, New Hampshire. Both candidates received exactly 107 votes in the western New Hampshire town in the primary.

That's from a press release the Obama campaign just sent out. If Joe Klein had written this scene in a novel we would all be laughing at him.

--Tom Schaller

At the current panel, "Inside the Presidential Campaigns: What Worked, What Didn't," Tracy Russo, who worked on the Edwards campaign, just went after McCain for lacking hands-on knowledge and understanding of the Internet and social networking tools. Mark Soohoo, from the McCain campaign, jumped to his candidate's defense, saying that the importance of tech wasn't lost on John McCain. (Eve Fairbanks got the exact quote: "You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet."). Russo fired back that understanding in the abstract wasn't enough, that what was needed was a candidate with a world view that accorded with the changing tools.

There's a live question board for the conference, and the second entry from the top reads "The Edwards Woman is OUT OF CONTROL." The next comment? "But she's correct."

--Phoebe Connelly

At The Corner, K.Lo uses this Wall Street Journal story on Planned Parenthood's suburban expansion as an excuse to urge John McCain to make de-funding the organization a plank in his presidential campaign platform. After all, suburban women don't really need Planned Parenthood, right?

As a political strategy, I think targeting Planned Parenthood would backfire among female voters, many of whom have turned to Planned Parenthood at least a few times in their lives, regardless of their socioeconomic class or political take on abortion. Visiting Planned Parenthood was one of the easiest, cheapest, and most confidential ways to obtain emergency contraception before Plan B was available over-the-counter. The organization also provides confidential gynecological care to teenagers, many of whom don't want their parents involved with the process.These teens, by the way, are going to have sex whether or not they can access birth control, so thank goodness there's an organization out there that gives them the option.

All that doesn't take into account the fact that Planned Parenthood remains the primary health care provider for millions of low-income women nationwide. The idea that the group would "suburbanize" into more affluent communities rubs some the wrong way. There's a legitimate debate to be had on whether Planned Parenthood's resources are best spent in under-served rural areas (87 percent of American counties have no abortion provider) or in suburbs where clients are able to pay for services out-of-pocket and are more likely to get involved with the organization's political mission.

But it's important to realize that suburbs aren't homogeneous. In many regions of the country, they are increasingly home to pockets of poverty, and are experiencing an influx of poor immigrants. And girls everywhere are facing a bevy of conflicting messages about sexuality and motherhood -- consider, after all, the suburban Massachusetts high school students who recently made a pregnancy pact.

There's nothing wrong, I think, with building more Planned Parenthood clinics in affluent areas and using funds raised there to expand abortion access via newer, nicer clinics in low-income areas. That's Planned Parenthood's plan. As Ann has written, the real estate of abortion providers is often depressing, drab, and institutional. That should change.

--Dana Goldstein

Today on TAP Online we have not one, not two, but three articles from our latest print issue:

Ann Friedman argues that, historic though her candidacy certainly was, Hillary Clinton isn't enough to change our political culture:

But those who would agree with the statement, "We need more women in positions of political power" -- most of the Democratic Party leadership and most readers of this magazine, I'd guess--need to take a step back in the wake of Clinton's candidacy and, rather than examine what went wrong in the Clinton example, look at how to ensure we don't have to rely on outliers like Clinton in elections for the next 30 years. The real goal should be to identify significant numbers of female candidates as future leaders and promote them through the ranks in a far more conventional manner. In other words, to change our very political culture -- not just have one woman triumph over it.

Harold Meyerson looks at the factors that explain why some states have far more female politicians than others:

Such is the logic of a closed political system, where an outsider becomes an insider only if an insider vouches for hi -- or, even more, for her. And when we look across the nation to ascertain which states have elected the most women to political office and which the least, it turns out that states once (or still) dominated by party machines don't create a political culture in which women can thrive. Where entry into politics depends entirely on who sent you -- on winning the backing of the boy -- women often end up outside the clubhouse, the legislature, and the Congress.

And Ezra Klein explains that, while women win as often as men when they run for office, they're far less likely to be asked to do so:

The problem, it turns out, is less underperformance than underrepresentation. When women run, they perform at least as well as men. But they don't run nearly so often, and our country -- with its weak party system and aversion to quotas—does nothing to specifically redress the resulting disparity. This might be why the percentage of women in Congress puts us in 68th place worldwide, nestled right between Bolivia and El Salvador, and only a couple of spots beneath famously feminist Tajikistan.

Also on TAP online today, Terence Samuel writes about the effect of sweetheart loans received by some Democrats on the chances for mortgage reform:

True enough, but even as they work on providing homeowner relief, Democrats need to very quickly address their little "Countrywide problem," which hurts their credibility and exposes them to great political risk. This is the, so far, mini-scandal in which Dodd and other high-powered Democrats got special treatment on mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corporation, the controversial mortgage lender at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Maureen Dowd, responding to criticism of her disgracefully sexist and content-free attacks on Hillary Clinton:

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Oh, yes, it's "we" who have a consuming obsession with the idea that all Democratic men are women and all Democratic women are men, not you. It's bad enough she's given a forum to write her witless nonsense, but I would appreciate it if she would leave me out of it. (And I'm willing to be perfectly consistent: I wish the Times were publishing columns about politics rather than columns apparently written for eight year-olds about Al Gore "practically lactating" too!)

--Scott Lemieux

You know what's cooler than voting? Voting ... in space!

--Sam Boyd

I'm here at the Personal Democracy Forum, and sad to report that they aren't allowing coffee into the auditorium.

We just heard Zephyr Teachout speak, she asked us to consider whether the innovations we're seeing in political technology were actually creating civic participation. "How many people have within them the knowledge of what it would take to form a local group?" This, she argues, should be the true test of the success or failure of new technologies.

Next, Anthony Hamelle from linkfluence presented a map they have created of the political blogosphere. Pretty fantastic.

--Phoebe Connelly

This guy was pretty damn awesome. Enjoy (somewhat NSFW).

--Dana Goldstein

In a general sense, I agree that sometimes people can get a little sloppy about blaming "the Democrats" for the enactment of policies or nomination confirmations opposed by most Democrats in Congress. Pace Ralph Nader, it's pretty silly to use (for example) the passage of a tax bill that only 12 Dem Sentaors and 28 House Dems supported and that a Democratic president would have vetoed to argue that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

On the FISA bill, though, I can't really object if people want to say the Democrats caved. It's true that plenty of Dems did oppose it, and in this sense the party is better. On the other hand, the House leadership supported it, the party's de facto leader supported it, and its very prominent runner-up hasn't done anything about it either. This wansn't a vote made possible by the malapportionment of and/or lax party disciple in the Senate or the collaboration of a small minority of Blue Dogs. The passage of the awful FISA bill is a failure of the Democratic Party. It was all too "bipartisan."

--Scott Lemieux

All the answers are contained right here in Deborah Solomon's interview with Florida's GOP governor. First of all, Crist is too quick to critique his own party:

Is it fair to describe you as socially progressive? I think it is fair to describe me as a common-sense Republican.

Which implies that some Republicans lack common sense. That’s possible.

Also, the reason Solomon is ribbing Crist about being single is because many people believe he is gay. Or a swinging playboy. Either way, he's not a family values man.

You were married nearly 30 years ago, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Do you prefer living alone? I got married and divorced because it didn’t work out. I haven’t found the right one since. It’s really that simple.

You can’t find one woman in all of Florida? Maybe I have. Stay tuned.

Now, what does that mean? Riveting.

--Dana Goldstein

• Hillary Clinton will officially begin campaigning on behalf of Barack Obama starting next week. In a conference call with her top donors yesterday, Clinton urged them to open their wallets for Obama and took responsibility for the money she loaned her campaign during the primaries while bluntly asking for help with her other debts.
• In light of yesterday's announcement that he will forgo public campaign financing, Obama has taken some heat for going back on an earlier promise to accept public funding if both he and John McCain were the nominees. This doesn't seem to be bothering the campaign, however, with one Democratic strategist suggesting that it would not be impossible for Obama to raise upwards of half a billion dollars.
• Jonathan Martin looks for 527s targeting Obama and doesn't find much.
• New York mayor Michael Bloomberg forcefully denounced the "whisper campaign" against Obama, urging Jewish voters to reject the smear that he is a "shadow Muslim."
• David Leonhardt has three questions about John McCain's economic agenda in the NY Times today.
• The Wonk Room applies McCain and Obama's tax plans to the candidates' families with amusing results.
• Nate Silver tears apart the notion that putting Tim Pawlenty on the Republican ticket will "deliver" Minnesota and Wisconsin to McCain this Fall.
• Sick of wild polling fluctuations? Tough. Rasmussen has Obama up 50-39 in New Hampshire, McCain up 45-42 in Nevada, and Obama down to 43-41 in Colorado. In Georgia, Insider Advantage shows Obama only behind McCain by one point, 44-43, with Bob Barr getting six percent of the vote.
• And finally, Obama unveiled a wicked quasi-presidential seal at a meeting with Democratic governors today.

--Mori Dinauer

Editors' Note: Rachel Stern is a summer 2008 Prospect editorial intern.

About eight high school girls in one blue-collar Massachusetts town
have made--and kept--a pact to become pregnant together, according
to this piece in Time. Author Kathleen Kingsbury
assembles some viable explanations to this startling statistic: lack
of contraception, low self-esteem and even the supposed glam
surrounding fictionalized pregnant teens, i.e. Juno. But the
following? Really?

"The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. 'We're proud to help the mothers stay in school,' says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center."

And you should be, Sue. Not offering baby care support in hopes that
it will prevent teens from becoming pregnant in the first place is
almost as idiotic as high schools who refrain from offering
sex-ed with the same aims in mind. And are there any high
schools that offer sex-ed after freshman year? It seems like the
problem here has deeper roots.

--Rachel Stern

So apparently Ana Marie Cox is moderating a debate on technology and politics between representatives of the Obama and McCain campaigns at next week's Personal Democracy Forum conference. The catch? It will all occur via Twitter.

I'll be attending the conference and blogging about it. The two-day lineup is here and here. Leave a comment if you see a session you'd be particularly interested in hearing about.

--Phoebe Connelly

Robert Kuttner's piece from the last print issue wonders why the media is stuck on a simplicistic and radical view of trade that even many ardent globalizers have abandonded.

The next president can change our trade and labor policies to rebuild the American middle class. An anxiety bordering on panic is unnerving America’s economic elites as political support for "free trade" dwindles, along with declining earnings. While mainstream economists have long contended that trade had minimal effects on wages, prestigious defectors such as Alan Blinder and Paul Samuelson have lately concluded otherwise. It turns out that the popular concerns are rooted in reality.

The elite response has been divided. One the one hand, most of the regime’s defenders continue to treat trade mainly as a problem of voter ignorance and politician posturing. Defenders speak as if the main goal is to preserve the current trade rules, rather than to assure that an open economy delivers broadly shared prosperity. A means has mutated into an end.

Prospect alum Kate Sheppard looks at how New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has balanced progressive goals with a balanced budget:

Jon Corzine was up against a tough crowd this spring when he appeared before the annual New Jersey Conference of Mayors in April. It was just a few weeks after the governor proposed massive cuts to state aid for municipalities, among other drastic reductions to the state budget for 2008, and it was the first time he was in a room surrounded by the local leaders who would have to deal with the impacts of those cuts.

The president of the Conference of Mayors, Colleen Mahr, didn't give him any leeway in her opening remarks. "Our residents will feel the strain if the plan goes forward," Mahr said, turning away from the crowd and directing her comments directly at the governor, seated beside her. "Every mayor here today takes the challenges put forth by you, governor, very seriously, and as you know, we will continue to fight those that we don't agree with."

And Harold Meyerson looks at love and racism in the musical "South Pacific":

What's historically specific about "South Pacific" is its liberal moral pluck on issues of race. It followed by two years Branch Rickey's desegregation of baseball and the first state court decision to legalize interracial marriage (in California). It followed by one year President Harry Truman's order to desegregate the armed forces and, prompted by a Hubert Humphrey speech, the Democratic Party's passage of a strong civil rights plank in its platform. For the boomers in the audience, "South Pacific" offers a tableau of our parents, when very young, behaving very well.

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--The Editors

Editors' Note: Sarah Bayer is a summer 2008 Prospect editorial intern.

Spike Lee announced yesterday that he may work with The Wire creator David Simon on a scripted film about Hurricane Katrina. What would have been an interesting follow-up to Lee's HBO documentary When the Levees Broke now has a downright tantalizing pair of names (at least prospectively) behind it. See TAP Online's former (spoilerific) series WireTAP for more on the show's fifth season.

--Sarah Bayer

There’s been a lot of talk of Michelle Obama toning down her feisty, activist timbre in recent weeks, and indeed, in her speech today at the National Partnership for Women and Families luncheon, she somewhat eschewed the “two for the price of one” model by choosing to downplay talk of specific policies in favor of broad empathizing with overburdened, working class moms:

The mother struggling to make ends meet because her salary isn’t keeping up with the cost of groceries for her children, but if she takes a second job, she can’t afford the babysitter. … Women across this country who earn less than men in similar jobs and believe me, when we’re paid less, we know. … [Military] families who welcome their loved ones home with full hearts but with very little support from their government.

Michelle actually sounded eerily like Hillary Clinton at times, which made sense at an event that was, in part, designed to reintroduce the Obamas to feminist Clinton supporters. But Michelle didn’t speak about pre-k, or education at all, or child care, though she did mention universal health care.

She did get a truly great line in, one that says she’ll continue to poke at conservative sensibilities of what a first lady should be. “I have always been and will probably always be in some way, shape, or form, a working mom,” Michelle affirmed, saying her daughters have always taken for granted two parents who worked both at home and in the outside world. “My kids don’t care where I am,” she joked, “as long as we’re back in time for bed time they could care less where we are.”

--Dana Goldstein

Open up the New York Times op-ed page today, and you'll see that David Brooks is deeply disappointed in Barack Obama:

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This is the same David Brooks who back in January wrote this:

Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by this...This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance...Obama is changing the tone of American liberalism, and maybe American politics, too.

And what do you know - over on the Washington Post op-ed page, Michael Gerson is deeply disappointed in Barack Obama:

Perhaps Obama is just conventionally liberal. Perhaps he has carefully avoided offending Democratic constituencies. Whatever the reason, his lack of a strong, centrist ideological identity raises a concern about his governing approach. Obama has no moderate policy agenda that might tame or modify the extremes of his own party in power. Will every Cabinet department simply be handed over to the most extreme Democratic interest groups? Will Obama provide any centrist check on liberal congressional overreach?

This is the same Michael Gerson who back in January wrote this:

But what is the movement about? It is, above all, the return of idealism...Obama is an impressive carrier of this message for a variety of reasons. First, his personal style evokes the golden age of nonthreatening, high-minded liberalism from the early 1960s...Second, however conventional his current ideological appeal, he has left room for future outreach to middle-ground voters...Third, Obama's race matters greatly, because most of the American story -- from our flawed founding to the civil rights movement -- has been a struggle between the purity of our ideals and the corruption of our laws and souls. The day an African American stands on the steps of the U.S. Capitol -- built with the labor of slaves -- and takes the oath of office will be a moment of blinding, hopeful brightness.

Ah, the idealism of the youthful columnist. But who can blame them? Now that Obama is the Democratic nominee, he's threatening to do things like appoint Democrats to positions in the executive branch, and pursue policies consistent with Democratic ideals! Egad - no wonder they're so disillusioned.

But as I wrote back when many on the right were praising Obama, "As for the conservatives, one can't help but suspect that if Obama becomes his party's nominee, they'll get over their affection for him in short order. The conservative animus toward Democratic candidates is like a scab that they can't wait to pick, to jab with their fingernails until the blood of hatred flows yet again. Don't forget that at this time four years ago, conservatives didn't dislike John Kerry all that much." Indeed they didn't, but they sure learned to. Rest assured, the disappointment of the Brookses and Gersons will turn to a burning fury before you know it.

-- Paul Waldman

Some conservatives are outraged over John McCain's off-the-record meeting with Chicago Latino leaders yesterday, at least a few of whom are further to the right on immigration than the Republican candidate himself. The AP reports:

"He's one John McCain in front of white Republicans. And he's a different John McCain in front of Hispanics," complained Rosanna Pulido, a Hispanic and conservative Republican who attended the meeting.

Pulido, who heads the Illinois Minuteman Project, which advocates for restrictive immigration laws, said she thought McCain was "pandering to the crowd" by emphasizing immigration reform in his 15-minute speech.

"He's having his private meetings to rally Hispanics and to tell them what they want to hear," she said. "I'm outraged that he would reach out to me as a Hispanic but not as a conservative."

On immigration, I don't think either the right or left should trust McCain as far as they can throw him. After initially supporting the DREAM Act, which would give children brought into the United States illegally by their parents the right to qualify for public college loans and in-state tuition, McCain changed course last fall and said he'd oppose DREAM in the future. His new priority, he told the press, was border security. But there's no reason why increasing security at the border can't be implemented alongside a law that would stop penalizing children for their parents' actions. If McCain has any enduring principles on immigration at this juncture, they're impossible to discern.

--Dana Goldstein

Taking on Johnathan Cohn on his own terrain (and I think Cohn's emphasis on presidential ability rather than short-term political tactics is sound), Brad Plumer makes a case for Sebelius as VP pick. This is the bottom line:

Sebelius's biggest strength is the fact that she's the most competent executive of any of the rumored Democratic veep candidates, save for possibly former Virginia governor Mark Warner (whom the Democrats need to win a Senate seat anyway). The fact that, as governor, she erased a $1.1 billion budget deficit in her first year of office without raising taxes, and later steered a large education-funding package through a fractious legislature, would suggest that she's perfectly capable of heading up the executive branch--and doing it well.

There just aren't a lot of people with both executive and foreign policy experience,and the person who best fits that profile (Richardson) has other weaknesses. The other thing to add is that I don't think her less-than-inspiring State of the Union response should be much of an issue. Most people look bad giving them, and if making a dreary entrance on the national stage was a disqualifying factor the Dems would have been stuck with Paul Tsongas in 1992.

--Scott Lemieux

It was announced today that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will campaign together next Friday.

OK, let’s have some fun with this one. What’s going to be the big storyline? And what’s going to be the cute tag name for these events?

I stink at this sort of thing, but I’ll go with Barack-Hill-a-palooza. (They are both iconic people who can be referred to by first names only.) On a more serious note, my bet is that the major storyline will be that Obama will smartly opt to introduce Hillary at the event(s) and let her speech be the focal point, rather than having her open with the standard, rah-rah introduction before yielding the stage to him.

--Tom Schaller

Barring some unforeseen circumstance, I'll be reporting later today from the Washington Hilton, where Michelle Obama will be speaking at the National Partnership for Women and Families annual luncheon. EMILY's List founder and president Ellen Malcolm, a once die-hard Hillary supporter who last week endorsed Barack, will also be there.

The National Partnership is a great organization that originally drafted the Family Leave Act in the 1980s and has been instrumental in defending it ever since. Hillary Clinton spoke often about the FMLA during her run, greatly exaggerating her role in passing the bill, which was the first her husband signed once he was sworn into office in 1993. In fact, the key players were Pat Schroeder, Chris Dodd, and Ted Kennedy. Still, Clinton's focus on the issue, as well as on pay equity for women, were welcome additions to the campaign, and mantles that I expect Michelle Obama will take up in her speech today. It should be an interesting corollary to her husband's speech last week on fatherhood. So stay tuned.

--Dana Goldstein

Whatever you thought of Tim Russert, boy did it take guts for Linda Hirshman at The Nation to write this critique of him.

As for me, I only had one interaction with him in my life, and it was at a Mike Huckabee event in January at the Val Air ballroom in Des Moines. Russert was standing alone in the crowd near the back and I went up to him. I had a press badge on, though I’m not sure he saw that. I asked him what he thought about Huckabee. He just put his hands up in a semi-surrender way; he literally would not say one word.

At first, I took his (non-)response to be rude. But I later realized he probably felt he had a duty not to express an opinion, whatever it was, about people he had or would have to (again) interview some day. On the one hand you could take this as an indication of inflated self-regard, but the more I thought about it the more I concluded he just felt like he had to be as neutral a referee as possible. (But again, read Hirshman’s critique, which makes several compelling arguments.)

A final point: Although I think the whole Buffalo-and-Big-Russ stuff got a bit maudlin at times, the thing I most admired about Russert was that he was a working-class kid from Upstate New York, just as I am, and he let people know it. I’ve interacted with my share of well-connected Ivy League grads in this town who became “senior editors” or whatever not long after they took their first legal drink. For all the talk of how elitist the elected classes are, the chattering classes are more elitist. What Russert proved was that you could make it all the way to the top even if you started near the bottom.

--Tom Schaller

A la Barack Obama, I actually think Ezra is wrong, and it's a great idea to hand kids a symbolic college application at their eighth grade graduation. Ezra's stepsister will likely get plenty of pushing from home to plan for higher ed in the upcoming years. But for those who aren't so lucky, a reminder of bigger, greater goals is in order. Of course, in pressure cooker, relatively homogeneous and affluent suburbs, it's more of a stunt than a real statement, so I can understand Ezra's disgust. But I remember the silliness surrounding my own middle school commencement ceremony -- the girls who got their hair professionally done, the two mean popular kids who were chosen to give speeches -- and I sigh a little.

--Dana Goldstein

In the latest installment of my Baltimore Sun column I discuss the surprising number of policy reversals by John McCain in just the past month. The theme of the column draws heavily from Cliff Schecter’s new book, The Real McCain, in which he writes: "A conditional friend to conservatives, an appealing maverick to independents, and a noxious Bush apologist to Democrats, McCain is a unique blend of allegiances and enmities in American politics. What conservatives misread as disloyalty to the cause isn't that at all; what moderates and independents value of McCain's free thinking isn't that, either."

Though it’s hard to find somebody with as encyclopedic knowledge of McCain as Cliff, the ever-diligent Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report may be the one challenger. Steve, you see, is making a list (and checking it twice) of McCain’s bottomless beach basket of flip flops. So far he has identified—you may need to take a seat here—a whopping four dozen policy position changes and reversals, which he lists here. As I conclude the Sun column: "In 2004, Republicans characterized Democrat John Kerry as somebody who changed positions--a candidate with no policy core, no ideological mooring. This time around, with John McCain at the head of their ticket, it appears that the flip-flop is on the other partisan foot."

--Tom Schaller

• As commented on by Tom and Paul below, Barack Obama has a new general election campaign ad touting his strong American values. Schmaltzy for sure, but aggressive too -- the ad is running in mostly red states, even deep-red states like Alaska, which Nate at 538 argues Obama should make a push for.
• In less encouraging news, Obama cut a different ad for pro-war House Democrat and netroots bete noir John Barrow of Georgia.
• You know who isn't endorsing John McCain? Donald Rumsfeld. (Which isn't surprising given that McCain once called the former defense secretary "one of the worst in history"). Meanwhile, Bill Scher asks, "did Bush just lose Colorado for McCain?" With friends like these...
• The other big story is Obama's decision to opt out of the public financing system. Accepting public financing would have given Obama access to over $80 million for the general election, but considering his donor base of 1.5 million people and counting, it's more than likely that Obama will be able to raise more than that. John McCain wasn't too pleased with the announcement, and his campaign appears to have been put off guard by the timing.
• Straight Talk watch: Steve Benen documents 48 instances of McCain flip-flopping on policy, 17 in the last two months alone.
• Contrary to yesterday's Quinnipac poll, Rasmussen has McCain beating Obama 47-39 in Florida.
• A separate Rasmussen poll finds the American public largely unaware that drilling for new oil doesn't affect price or supply in the short term. Jonathan Stein argues that, because of this lack of knowledge, offshore drilling could become a potent election year issue for Republicans.
• AFSCME, despite a long record of criticizing Obama, endorsed his presidential campaign today.
• First Read notes the surprisingly longevity of the Obama/Carter comparison.
• John McCain finally got his Secret Service code name: Phoenix. Earlier TAPPED codename blogging can be found here.

--Mori Dinauer

So last week the AP decided that it would start threatening to sue people who used as few as 6 words of its news stories without paying (and it sent takedown notices to the drudge report retort on stories which quoted as few as 39 words). This is legally highly dubious, to say the least.

Now the AP is trying to convince bloggers that it's reconsidering by entering into negotiations with the "Media Bloggers Association." Sounds reasonable, right? Well it would be, except that the Media Bloggers Association is actually just some dude:

Who are the Media Bloggers Association? Turns out it's mostly one guy, some right-wing attack-blogger who hangs around on the lecture circuit and ran a blog devoted to pissing on Keith Olbermann.

Some bloggers are boycotting the AP, but I think Kos has the right take on this. Quoting articles at some length is almost certainly legal (and if it isn't, it should be). Let em' sue.

Update: It seems that The New York Times misrepresented the nature of this meeting. It's specifically about the Drudge Retort (not report, as I originally wrote).

--Sam Boyd

Zion Oil and Gas, a company run by people who believe that striking it rich for oil in Israel will usher in the end-times, has announced that it will sponsor the "Night to Honor Israel" at the annual Christians United for Israel summit in Washington next month.

Mariah Blake profiled Zion recently in Mother Jones. Zion's founder, John Brown, "says the Lord spoke to him and told him he was the 'stranger' that the Book of Kings predicts will be sent to fortify Israel in the final days. 'I knew in my heart what to do,' he recalls. 'I knew God was going to put me in the oil business.'"

As it turns out, Zion has yet to strike oil in Israel. Will it be selling more than prophecy at the CUFI summit?

--Sarah Posner

At long last, Barack Obama is on the air with his first ad of the general election. Take a gander:

Like every Obama ad, this one features high production values and a crisply defined message. The script is all about this great land of ours, which you can hardly blame them for, given the sustained attempt by the right to characterize Obama as a flag-hating, terrorist-coddling, Al Qaeda Manchurian candidate. But this isn’t just a reaction to the smear campaign. It’s actually consistent with what Obama has been saying all along.

Let’s remember that Obama has been telling a story about America from the moment he emerged on the national scene at the 2004 Democratic convention. (I wrote about this back in October 2006 here. As a bonus, the article has a link to none other than Ezra Klein arguing that Obama should wait to run for president. Even the best among us can be wrong!) He has always presented himself as the embodiment of what we all want America to be: inclusive, future-oriented, moving beyond our differences to embrace what binds us together. So patriotic talk isn’t something he has recently embraced, it’s actually at the heart of his narrative, which has been consistent from day one. The Obama campaign has always known what their message is, and they have stuck to it (which just happens to be the hallmark of pretty much every winning campaign).

All that being said, the continued evolution of our media universe, not to mention what looks to be an absolutely epic organizing effort on Obama’s part, may make television ads less important in this election than any since they debuted in 1952.

--Paul Waldman

Gershom Gorenberg reports on a new case before the Isreali Supreme Court that could limit settlements:

The photo, taken from the air, shows the red roofs of the houses of Ofrah, one of the best-known Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Between the existing houses one can make out the shells of nine new homes under construction. Computer-overlaid thin green lines show the division of the land on which the settlement sits -- parcels owned by Palestinian residents of the nearby village of Ein Yabrud. The photo is Exhibit A in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by five residents of Ein Yabrud, with the backing of two Israeli human-rights groups. The residents are asking Israel's Supreme Court for an order to demolish the homes being built on their land.

And Dean Baker has the latest on our troubled economy:

The New York Times does the numbers and determines that almost half of the record profits earned by the Wall Street banks in the 2004-2007 boom have already disappeared in debts gone bad . My guess is that we will see a big bite out of the other half in the months ahead.

We know that the top executives at these banks pulled in tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation based on what we now know to be phony profits. In other words, these people got incredibly wealthy, not because they were skilled at finance, but rather because they were skilled at manipulating financial statements.

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--The Editors

Brian Beutler of the Media Consortium reports:

After Democrats stood their ground and refused to pass a series of draconian FISA amendments in February, negotiations over the wiretapping law went behind closed doors. In the months since then, news reports have occasionally suggested that another Democratic party sell-out was imminent, only to be superseded by other reports indicating that negotiations were ongoing. Until today.

A few moments ago, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer released what he refers to as a "bipartisan" "compromise" bill: The FISA Amendment Act of 2008, which he authored along with Jay Rockefeller, Kit Bond, and Roy Blunt (respectively, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence committee, and the House Minority whip). The word "bipartisan" is technically indisputable. The word "compromise", by contrast, is a total farce.

The most controversial elements of the February legislation were provisions that would have allowed the White House to wiretap American citizens without a warrant, and that would have immunized telecommunications companies from participating in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program back in the halcyon days when warrantless wiretapping was unquestionably illegal.

Here's how the new bill deals with the immunity question.

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be promptly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of
the United States in which such action is pending that...the assistance alleged to have been provided by the electronic communication service provider was in connection with an intelligence activity involving communications that was authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007.

That's the game. Non-profit groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation can sue the telecoms if they want, but if Attorney General Michael Mukasey says "presto", the lawsuits must be dismissed.

As for the nitty gritty of surveillance powers the bill authorizes, here's what the ACLU says: "This bill allows for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans’ communications.... The process by which this deal has come about has been as secretive as the warrantless wiretapping program it is seeking to legitimize." And the media blackout over the last few months is testament to that. None of Congress' civil liberties stalwarts partook in these negotiations. Neither John Conyers, nor Patrick Leahy--chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees respectively -- got a say. Nor did Sens. Chris Dodd or Russ Feingold. Nor did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Leahy says "the legislation unveiled today... is not a bill I can support."

Nonetheless, it looks very much as if Pelosi -- who has substantial power to control what does and does not appear on the floor of the House--will allow this to come to a vote.

--Brian Beutler

Wow: Here’s Obama’s first national ad as the nominee. It's "Country I Love" and it reaches directly for the “values” card the Republicans love to play, shreds it into a million little pieces and throws the scraps in their faces.

The not-so-subtle imagery  -- pictures of Obama with his mom and her parents, mentions of supporting “welfare to work” and backing our troops -- quite clearly say to white voters, "Don’t ever dare try to paint me with your 'out-of-touch, unpatriotic elite who doesn’t share our values' brush."

And then there’s the group of states where the 60-second ad will run: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia. I’m not convinced that North Carolina and (especially) Georgia are worth the expenditure, but I like seeing Alaska, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota (!) and, yes, Virginia in the mix.

Shall we consider this the campaign's unofficial, opening list of targeted swing states? Methinks so.

Obama and his team just keep on hitting home runs. It makes me wonder why it was so hard for past Democratic nominees to figure out how to run for president.

Editors' Note: The meaning of the second line of this post was changed accidentally in editing. It should say that the messages of the ad were aimed at white voters, but the ad itself sends a signal to the GOP: "Don't ever dare try to paint me with your 'out-of-touch, unpatriotic elite who doesn't share our values' brush."

--Tom Schaller

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network yesterday, Barack Obama elaborated on the off-the-record meeting he had with thirty Christian leaders last week, and revealed that he channeled Ronald Reagan to win their hearts.

Centrist evangelicals (and even a few conservative ones) are so fed up with Bush and the GOP that they are willing to give Obama a look. The centrists say they are leaving the culture wars behind and focusing on fixing poverty, health care, the environment, and ending the war.

Sounds like a no-brainer for Obama, right? All he needs to do is lay out how his progressive vision for America will accomplish all that.

But that’s not what he’s doing. Instead, he’s pandering to the conservatives by quoting the definitive moment in Ronald Reagan’s courtship of the religious right: when, after clinching the GOP nomination in 1980, he told a group of 15,000 activists assembled by Moral Majority co-founder Ed McAteer, “I know you can’t endorse me. But I want you to know that I endorse you.” Obama did essentially the same thing:

I opened up the meeting by quoting Ronald Reagan which was saying, I know you can't endorse me, but I endorse you. I endorse the good works that are being done, the wonderful ministries that are taking place all across the country and my goal here is just to have a dialogue to listen, to learn, to share my faith journey and I think people came out of it, not necessarily agreeing with me on every issue, but I think that they recognized that I respected them, I respected their faith, I respected what they're trying to achieve.

How does that sound to Obama’s progressive base? The areas of disagreement between progressives and conservative evangelicals are not just policy nuances. They represent the fundamental ideology animating the most divisive and cruel tactics of the religious right. Reagan gave those tactics political legitimacy in the speech Obama cited so approvingly.

Meeting attendee Stephen Strang, the evangelical publisher, serves as a regional director for John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, published Hagee’s book Jerusalem Countdown, and has been drumming up support for CUFI’s summit next month. Does Obama ednorse him? Does Obama endorse how the National Association of Evangelicals’ official position calls for “therapy” so that LGBT people can achieve “complete restoration,” and that God himself has ”provided penalties” for women who have abortions? Does the candidate of transparency and accountability endorse T.D. Jakes (who was also at the meeting) who a Mercedes, BMW, Bentley, and private jet, and lives in a multi-million dollar mansion, but gets an “F” for transparency from the conservative Christian group Ministry Watch because he refuses to make his church’s finances an open book?

Winning over evangelical voters should not be ceded to the Republicans, particularly given shifting evangelical attitudes in the post-Bush era. But if the centrist evangelicals are honestly looking for real policy alternatives and a new kind of leadership, Obama should at least have a shot with them by being himself. By channeling Reagan, Obama betrays and belittles his base, distorts his progressive message, and deceives the people whose trust he is straining too hard to earn.

—Sarah Posner

Obama campaign volunteers -- not staffers, volunteers -- prevented two Muslim women in head scarves from sitting behind the candidate at his Al Gore-endorsement rally in Detroit on Monday. They shouldn't have done that, and I'm glad the campaign has apologized. Both before and since, Obama has posed for photographs with Muslim supporters in traditional dress. As Ezra writes, a sit-down meeting with the two women would be an even stronger gesture of outreach to the Muslim community.

But some commentators on the left remain quite riled up about this incident. At CampusProgress' new blog, Pushback, Masoud Shafaee writes:

What’s most troubling about this incident is the campaign it’s coming from. ...

Obama’s repeated denials of his alleged Islamic faith are accurate but incomplete. Given that the presidential candidate has been praised for his much-heralded speech on race, it’s surprising and somewhat disappointing that he hasn’t come out to say, “No, I am not a Muslim, but what if I were? So what?” It appears that Islam has become the new communism, and “Muslim” the new “commie.” It needn’t be so.

I agree with the ideology here, but unfortunately, I can't agree with Shafaee on the politics. Campaign rallies are highly rehearsed events. The supporters sitting on the dais are often chosen in advance and carefully placed alongside props such as campaign posters and American flags. That these two women got behind the candidate without prior approval suggests some sort of slip-up, though one that's not out of the ordinary when handling a large crowd. Race and ethnicity are a concern at televised rallies because, sadly, they have to be in our contentious political climate.

I remember distinctly that during one of Obama's primary night victory speeches (I can't recall which one specifically, there were so many!), almost every supporter seated behind him was African American. A few minutes into the speech, a very awkward looking young white man in a full suit appeared directly behind Obama, moving a few other faces out of the shot. It would be a pretty safe bet to assume he was sent there to change the visuals.

This stuff is ugly, but it's politics as a smart Democrat will play it against a Republican Party reliant upon identity politics to appeal to Americans' lesser selves.

--Dana Goldstein

Is Daniel Libit's Politico article on the possibilities of Obama's massive, unprecedented email list.

A number of well-positioned Democrats point to health care as a key issue for which Obama’s list could make the difference. But for it to ultimately be effective, the list will have to be organized and managed effectively. And Democrats concede that communicating with supporters in non election years has never been the party’s forte. Neither, for that matter, have its national organizing efforts in general.

Of course, that's partly because in the past, the Democratic Party hasn't actually nominated the candidate with the most innovating, grassroots, media savvy organization. (Think Howard Dean 2004). From its conduct in the caucus states to its fundraising prowess, the Obama team has shown every indication that it will surpass previous Dem nominees in these ways.

--Dana Goldstein

As Dana writes below, Barack Obama has decided to opt out of the public financing system for the general election. Mark Schmitt wrote a great post about this, back when it was first discussed. He's also extensively documented McCain's far more troubling campaign-finance shenanigans here on TAPPED.

--The Editors

Barack Obama made a smart, cagey move today by announcing that he will forgo public financing -- before John McCain made a final decision on the question. The candidates had previously pledged to meet the other on public funding, but that's a plan that would have benefited McCain, due to the RNC's greater fundraising capacity and larger, more aggressive network of 527 groups. By being first out of the gate saying he'll fund his campaign privately, Obama can somewhat avoid being labeled a hypocrite who backed out of a pledge that would have left him disadvantaged. And of course, it's Obama who has the greater capacity to fundraise online among supporters.

--Dana Goldstein

Guess we'd better reconsider this whole universal health-care thing...

--Sam Boyd

It's ironic that a year after our Supreme Court struck a blow against school integration, the Christian Science Monitor reports that Holland is planning on importing American de-segregation programs. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague, about 10 percent of neighborhoods are overwhelmingly made up of ethnic minorities. Nineteen percent of the Dutch population is foreign-born and 6 percent are Muslim.

The challenge of school integration in the Netherlands isn't just a question of mitigating the effects of segregated housing patterns, but also of a longtime emphasis on parental choice when it comes to Dutch schools. The new concept, which is based upon American models, is called "controlled choice":

In the controlled-choice setup, parents visit local schools and rank their top four. The system then tries to give parents their preferences while balancing demographics such as race, class, and parental education level in all the schools. Sometimes it factors in other variables such as gender and proximity, and whether a potential student has siblings in the school.

The potential problem here is the assumption that parents will have the time, knowledge, and inclination to visit many schools in order to rank their top four picks. Some immigrant parents who aren't fluent in Dutch (or, here in the states, English) will likely opt-out or never even hear about the opportunity. That means that when the district sits down to make school assignments, some kids have parents who've registered a choice for a top school, and other don't. That disadvantages already underprivileged kids, but still -- public school choice is one of the best options out there for keeping college-educated, middle class and affluent parents engaged in the public school system, which offers serious benefits to low-income families, who often aren't as active in pushing for school reform.

--Dana Goldstein

• Barack Obama has formed a National Security Advisory Group made up mostly of Clinton-era appointments.
• Michelle Obama appeared on The View this morning, earning mostly positive reviews for a uncontroversial performance. The world of potential First Lady polling tells us that Obama has a 48 percent approval rating compared to Cindy McCain's 39 percent, but more Americans have heard negative coverage of Obama than negative coverage of McCain.
• A new Quinnipac poll has Barack Obama up over John McCain in Florida (47-43), Ohio (48-42) and Pennsylvania (52-40). Similarly, a Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] has Obama ahead 47-45 in Virginia. This "Obama bounce" essentially puts McCain on the defensive in all of his "must-win" states. McCain, however, still predictably trounces Obama amongst white evangelicals.
• The Obama campaign and Democrats hit back hard against Rudy Giuliani's lecture on foreign policy from yesterday. Meanwhile, Greg Sargent reminds us of Giuliani's insistence in wake of the the 1993 WTC bombing that law enforcement was more effective than violence against terrorists, andthat even John McCain questioned Giuliani's foreign policy experience last fall.
• Delicate flowers: former Bush hack Michael Gerson pens a column in the Washington Post describing Al Franken as nothing less than a "vulgar" barbarian at the gates of decent civilization. Fortunately, Jason Zengerle reminds us that Gerson's former boss is just about the most vulgar politician on the planet.
• Christopher Beam has an informal list of rumors the Obama campaign should not try to squash.
• The politics of oil drilling are heating up, but the facts remain pretty clear that little, if any, immediate benefit would flow from such a policy that McCain and president Bush have embraced in order to attack Democrats. Even McCain's economic adviser has admitted as much. This hasn't prevented Larry Kudlow at National Review from remarking that "McCain's drilling flip-flop is a good first step" because "When circumstances change, political leaders should change their policies."
• Jon Chait has a good, short piece in TNR that locates Joe Lieberman not, as he insists, in the tradition of liberal internationalism but rather in the "rollback" policies of the Cold War-era right wing.
• Noam Scheiber claims to have a "slam dunk" case for Tim Pawlenty as McCain's VP. In other veepstakes news, ABC News discovers that McCain and LA Governor Bobby Jindal has conflicting opinions on Katrina funding.

--Mori Dinauer

Some drugstores are starting to refuse to sell contraceptives (including condoms). This, understandably, worries a lot of people who think contraceptives should be available to women everywhere. Slate's ever-contrary Will Saletan isn't worried. Trouble is, his is an argument that's been made time and time again and it's still pretty dumb.

First off, he says that pharmacies that don't stock contraceptives aren't a big deal because "Your burden consists of finding another pharmacy." That's fine if you live in a big city, but in rural areas there often aren't a lot of pharmacies and so if your local one refuses to help you you've got a big problem, especially if you don't drive.

Never fear though, Saletan anticipated that objection! "Whole regions where pharmacies won't stock contraceptives? Come on. Only seven have even signed the "pro-life" pledge." Well, I'm glad you're confident Will, but I'm not (a. In places where it takes hours of driving to get to a pharmacy, several pharmacies making this kind of decision (not improbable in conservative areas) will mean that prescription contraception will become essentially unavailable. It's already hard to find emergency contraception in some places. Even pharmacists who don't much care about contraception may decide not to carry it under public pressure since it can't be a large part of their income. In fact, this is essentially what's happened with abortion in many states. Nor is contraception as uncontroversial as he thinks.

By the way, this is the same logic that people used to justify homeowners who didn't want to rent to minorities. That's just terrible, they clucked, but I wouldn't want to live in a world where the government told people who they could rent to. Well, as it turns out, that world is a lot better than the one it replaced.

Saletan says, "Please, don't tell moralists they have to do or sell whatever's legal. If you do, you won't like what happens to the law." And what, exactly, is that? What terrible consequence will ensue? Your guess is as good as mine. As people like Saletan refuse to acknowledge, we force policemen to enforce laws the disagree with, some states forbid discrimination against gay people over the religious objections of their citizens, and we require teachers to teach evolution (unsuccessfully, in many cases, but legally).

We make these kinds of balancing decisions all the time. In this case, I think it's pretty clear which side we should come down on. Forcing pharmacies to sell contraceptives does deprive people of some freedom, but making contraceptives essentially unavailable to many women seems to be a much worse deprivation of freedom to me.

--Sam Boyd

Brian Beutler of the Media Consortium has an update on his story on torture over on the main site:

Divulged in memos, but largely undiscussed at yesterday's bombshell Senate Armed Services hearing about the origins of American torture was a September 25, 2002 meeting at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba between Major General Michael Dunlavey -- who at the time was overseeing interrogations at the detention facility there--and several of the administrations top lawyers, including Jim Haynes, then general counsel to the Department of Defense, John Rizzo, acting CIA general counsel, David Addington, counsel to the vice president, and Michael Chertoff, then head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice.

The trip report is suspiciously short. It notes for the most part that the group received "briefings on Intel successes, Intel challenges, Intel techniques, Intel problems and future plans for facilities," and that they participated in "private conversations."

But, through interviews with Dunlavey and Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, author Philippe Sands got to the bottom of that trip. In his new book, Torture Team, Sands writes that the Washington gang came down, in part, to learn how the military was treating a suspect named Mohammed al-Qahtani. "They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy," recalled Dunlavey. Beaver said that the message was loud and clear: do "whatever needed to be done." In Sands words, "a green light from the very top--from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

That message was crucial, because just one week later, on October 2, nine people, including Beaver and CIA attorney John Fredman convened at Guantanamo for a "Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting", where they discussed the implications of the green light, asking questions like, What techniques can we use? and, What constitutes torture? The answers--written up in meeting minutes and obtained by the Senate Armed Services committee--are pretty straightforward.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC [the International Committee of the Red Cross] is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Beaver told the group.

One attendee, Dave Becker, who oversaw interrogations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, noted, "We have reports from Bagram [Airfield in Afghanistan] about sleep deprivation being used."

Beaver responded, "True, but officially it is not happening. It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave."

Fredman later chimed in, "Under the Torture Convention, torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely. Severe mental and physical pain is prohibited. The mental part is explained as poorly as the physical.... It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong.... When the CIA has wanted to use more aggressive techniques in the past, the FBI has pulled their personnel from the theatre. In those rare instances, aggressive techniques have proven very helpful.

To which Beaver responded, "We will need documentation to protect us."

Fredman also provided a Constitutional rationale for the aggressive interrogation techniques -- a pre hoc justification for the United States to abuse all enemy combatants, supposedly without falling afoul of the Geneva conventions. "The Torture Convention prohibits torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. The US did not sign up on the second part, because of the 8th amendment. ... This gives us more license to use more controversial techniques."

In response, Beaver asked about the applicability of the "wet towel" technique, known now to most as waterboarding. Fredman responded, "If a well-trained individual is used to perform this technique it can feel like you're drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you're suffocating but your body will not cease to function."

When Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigation Task Force, received the minutes of the meeting from Sam McCahon, his Chief Legal advisor, he wrote, "This looks like the kinds [sic] of stuff Congressional hearings are made of.... Talk of 'wet towel treatment'...would in my opinion; [sic] shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this."

--Brian Beutler

At Politico, Ben Smith writes about Larry Sinclair, the wackaloon who claims he did drugs and had a sexual encounter with Barack Obama. Today Sinclair held a press conference at the National Press Club to remake his case against the Democratic nominee. For those not familiar with D.C., the Press Club is home to many political events, from debates between authors to politicians' speeches to interest groups and think tanks rolling out their new reports. But Larry Sinclair? Seriously? Smith writes:

Public records and court filings reveal that he has a 27-year criminal record, with a specialty in crimes involving deceit. The record includes forgery charges in two states, one of which drew Sinclair a 16-year jail sentence. The Pueblo County, Colorado, Sheriff's Office also has an outstanding warrant for Sinclair's arrest for forging an acquaintance's signature and stealing her tax refunds. ...

In [Colorado] prison, according to state records filed in federal court, Sinclair was disciplined 97 times for infractions including assault, threats, drug possession, intimidation, and verbal abuse, most recently in
1996.

--Dana Goldstein

Ellen Malcolm, founder and president of EMILY's List, met today with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe in Chicago, contributing to the growing peace between Obama and feminist organizations that I described yesterday in my article. According to Marc Ambinder, Malcolm and Plouffe spoke in part about Obama doing more to appeal to working class white women, who some polls now show favoring McCain.

--Dana Goldstein

So some PUMAs -- the acronym stands for "Republican" -- met with John McCain. The PUMAs immediately agreed to purchase an $1,800 vacuum cleaner with a 30-year extended warranty:

Bower said he'd liked McCain's answer on judges, in which he "pointed out that he supported Bill Clinton with both Ginsberg [sic] and Breyer."

To add to the comedy, Mickey Kaus happily buys the Nebraska oceanfront time-share. According to Kaus, this proves that McCain doesn't really believe any of that stuff about "Roberts, Alito, and Scalia" (all of whom he also voted for), because...look, it's Halley's Comet! Perhaps more relevant here are his votes for the actually contested nominations of Bork and Thomas. At any rate, of course I believe that McCain would appoint another Alito or Roberts, since his record on all the relevant issues suggests that he will and he will be constrained by a base that has strong preferences about judicial appointments (see Miers, Harriet).

The best part: the title of Kaus's post is "Suckers! Part XVIII." At least he's honest in describing himself...

--Scott Lemieux

Ezra Klein asks if Max Baucus can fix our health care system:

It started with a rocket ship. Which is something we health care reporters rarely get to write. But Monday morning, in the Mumford Room of the James Madison Memorial Building, Senator Max Baucus grinned broadly as the projector behind him showed the Apollo 11 blasting into space. "I think that video captures the essence of what we're trying to do today," said Baucus proudly, "which is prepare for the launch of health reform."

Whether anyone is actually more prepared today than they were two days ago is debatable. The various sessions of the Senate Finance Committee's "Prepare for Launch" Health Summit were informative enough, but nothing the senators hadn't heard in previous testimony or memos from staff. No legislation was proposed, and no votes were taken. None of the senators set forth their reform plans, or laid out the considerations that would drive their decision.

Brian Beutler reports on new revelations about Donald Rumsfeld's promotion of torture:

It's difficult, therefore, to know precisely what limits governed DOD-approved interrogation for months thereafter. But if the DOD took the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency, there may have been very few. On October 2, 2002, senior CIA attorney Jonathan Fredman met with staff at Guantanamo Bay to discuss harsh interrogation. "It's basically subject to perception," Fredman said, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

And Sarah Posner reports on the Southern Baptists Convention's return to conservative politics, Obama's evangelical outreach, and why Mike Huckabee is a threat to the SBC:

After two years under the leadership of Frank Page, a culturally and theologically conservative South Carolina pastor who tried to steer the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) away from overt politicking, the SBC last week elected Johnny Hunt as president. The move is evidence of the continuing strength of the conservative political insiders who staged a takeover of the SBC in the 1970s.

David Key, Director of the Baptist Studies Program at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, told me that, unlike Page, incoming President Hunt was the favored "inner circle candidate" who "buys into the Falwellian 'we've got to take back America' Puritan model."

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--The Editors

At Higher Ed Watch, Ben Miller has an invaluable post on the University of Phoenix, the for-profit college whose ads for online classes are so ubiquitous (including, occasionally, on this blog). Unsurprisingly, Phoenix's new self-study of its students' performance is far from rigorous: While at first glance the data shows that Phoenix "freshmen" make significant academic gains by their "senior" year, in actuality the university didn't track the same students throughout their experience with the school, but instead compared the performance of beginning students to those already nearing the end of their course of study. A "freshman" might have been a 19-year old with a GED, while a "senior" could have been a middle-aged manager with over a decade of work experience.

The university also downplayed one of the most troubling aspects of for-profit higher ed: Students' high default rate on tuition loans, which far out paces loan defaults at public colleges and private not-for-profits. As Miller writes, "In reality, attending Phoenix is similar to taking out a sub-prime mortgage instead of obtaining a widely available subsidized loan from a local non-profit lender -- in this case a community college."

--Dana Goldstein

A mysterious press release from the Obama campaign this morning announced that the candidate "will host an economic discussion with Democratic governors in Chicago" on Friday, but didn't name who those governors will be. Here's my short list of the folks who should be there, and why:

Montana's Brian Schweitzer: Because Obama should be seen with a guy in cowboy boots.

Arizona's Janet Napolitano: Because she's the Democratic Party's leading pragmatist on immigration. She's also attempting to wean her state off the economic crutch of bad mortgages and rapid-fire exurban growth by focusing on mass transit and greener development.

Kansas' Katheleen Sebelius: Because the oft-floated veep prospect could use a refresher course on how to be an effective surrogate for Obama; three weeks ago at a Teamsters conference in Las Vegas, she got key elements of his biography wrong in a public speech.

New York's David Paterson: A former Hillary Clinton supporter, Paterson got off to a rocky start as Eliot Spitzer's replacement, and is now, for some reason, fighting hard for a cap on property taxes that the teachers unions strongly oppose (property taxes fund public schools, of course). He could use a little lift.

Iowa's Chet Culver: Because the state's flood victims are the kinds of folks Obama's economic policies should appeal to.

New Mexico's Bill Richardson: Because if he can get through events like this without doing or saying anything doofy or embarassing, he just might be a serious veep prospect.

--Dana Goldstein

While he's managed to screw up many aspects of his campaign, John McCain's logo has actually been fairly popular. It had the lone military star, a relatively classy look, and used the same font as the Vietnam War Memorial. So it comes as something of a surprise that he's decided to completely change it and adopt a new, deeply dull and powerfully ugly design. But don't take my word for it, check out the very detailed and devastating takedown by the folks at Brand New, the web's premier re-branding blog.

--Sam Boyd

Today's must-read is the New York Times profile of Michelle Obama, who responds on-the-record to claims that she once made a speech in church using the term "whitey."

“You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she says in an interview. Referring to a character in a 1970s sitcom, she adds: “I mean, ‘whitey’? That’s something that George Jefferson would say. Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived. They don’t know anything about me.”

Along the same lines, at The Root Kim McLaren has a nice essay on how nobody actually says "whitey."

I have spent the afternoon trying—with all the honesty and courage and humble introspection that is called for in this historic moment, with America poised to finally cast off its original sin and move into the full realization of those ringing words in the Declaration of Independence—to think about the terms black folks use when talking among themselves about white people.

I could barely move my pencil tip. Probably because black folks spend a lot less time talking or even thinking about white people than most white, right-wing reactionaries and their black counterparts dream in their hot little dreams. I had trouble, and, after hours and hours, the best I could come up with was this:

White folks. Whites. White people. They.

--Dana Goldstein

• MoveOn and AFSCME have put together a new ad that directly attacks John McCain's militarism. A young mother holding her baby, Alex, asks, "when you said you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him."
• Responding to criticisms from the Obama camp on foreign policy, McCain campaign advisers charge Obama with having a "September 10th mindset." Rudy Giuliani immediately got in on the action, remarking that "Barack Obama appears to believe that terrorists should be treated like criminals -- a belief that underscores his fundamental lack of judgment regarding our national security."
• George Will has a potent column in today's Washington Post defending habeas, and raking John McCain over the coals for calling the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."
• The New York Times takes a look at how close McCain really is to George Bush on policy. The verdict? Pretty close!
• The Wall St. Journal takes a look at Obama's tax plan and wonders why it doesn't include more tax cuts for big business.
• Continuing efforts to shore up the Democratic base, Obama is set to visit with both the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses.
• Buttons have started showing up at the Texas GOP state party convention asking whether "White House" would be an appropriate name during an Obama presidency. Stay classy, GOP. Stay classy.
• McCain has also rolled out a campaign ad arguing his independence from Bush on environmental policy with the slogan "Reform. Prosperity. Peace." Prospect alum Kate Sheppard has noted, however, that McCain is inconsistent on the "mandatory" part of "cap and trade."
• A Public Policy Polling survey has Obama up 50-39 against John McCain in Ohio while Rasmussen has Obama up 45-44 in Virginia. A Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll finds that when voters are given accurate information about Obama and McCain's position on abortion, support for Obama goes up 6 percentage points nationally and by as much as 13 points in battleground states.

--Mori Dinauer

Buried in David Frum's endorsement of 9/11 Giuliani is the kind of claim you hear sometimes:

Since World War II, ten men have received the Republican nomination for vice president. Three of those men continued on to win the presidential nomination for themselves, and two actually became president. Meanwhile, a fourth nominee, Thomas Dewey's running mate Earl Warren, rose to arguably even greater power as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It should be noted as well that in its civil rights opinions, the Warren Court was working with the national governing coalition of the time (the Truman and Eisenhower administrations both supported desegregation in amicus briefs, for example.) Moreover, in areas where they were unpopular, the Court's civil rights, criminal procedure, and school prayer decisions faced very serious enforcement and implementation problems. Without some support from other actors, judicial pronouncements mean little. (To borrow Mark Graber's line about Marbury, it established little except for the power of the Supreme Court to issue a declarative sentence about its powers. That decision came out the way it did, of course, because Marshall didn't want to issue a writ he knew Jefferson and Madison would ignore.)

The Warren Court played an important role in some areas, but it should also be clear that not only was it a partner of the dominant governing coalition of the time, it was a junior partner. And certainly, the president is vastly more powerful than the Chief Justice even if you adjust for the greater tenure of the latter.

--Scott Lemieux

Via fivethirtyeight.com, I've learned that the National Press Club has a blog. Good for them. Unfortunately, I also learned that one of their bloggers is Jeff Gannon. Remember him? The former male escort planted in the White House Press Corps to pitch softball questions to the administration when they were riding high in 2005? Apparently, the NPC believes so strongly in the journalistic norm of balance that they decided to hire a journalist whose entire career in the field is antithetical to those other pesky journalistic norm of integrity and truth-telling. Oops. From Gannon's bio:

Jeff Gannon is a member of the National Press Club, currently serving on the New Media and Newsmaker committees. He is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Online News Association. Jeff Gannon was the first exclusively online reporter to ever cover the White House on a daily basis. His commentary and analysis website is “Jeff Gannon - A Voice of the New Media”.

I assume the cornerstones of this "New Media" are fabrication, dishonesty and partisan deference, right? Glad we cleared that up.

--Mori Dinauer

This is a tribute:

Mr Obama’s candidacy was given an early boost by his opposition to the Iraq war and he has repeatedly said the US needs to rethink its approach to the Middle East.

Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”

That's Richard Danzig one of Barack Obama's to advisers on national security.

Update: To be clear, I think this is a great metaphor, the post is the tribute (for an explanation of the title see here).

--Sam Boyd

Dana Goldstein writes that major feminist groups are preparing to support Obama:

Though some national women's organizations are shifting slowly from primary to general election mode -- or appear not to have shifted at all -- behind the scenes, many of the major players of institutional feminism are preparing to line up behind Obama. The movement's actions, not to mention recent polling of female voters, should put to rest endless rounds of media speculation about whether feminist Clinton voters, particularly older white women, will defect en masse to the Republican Party.

According to NOW President Kim Gandy, the organization's PAC is engaged in "a very extensive internal consultative process" to determine whether to officially endorse Obama after endorsing Clinton in the primary. It is unlikely to be resolved before NOW's national conference, which will take place in Bethesda, Md. July 18-20, but Gandy said the group is already planning media strategies for attacking John McCain.

And Paul Waldman wonders why we think town halls are somehow superior to speeches:

But most of all, the candidates will talk. And though John McCain may prefer talking in a back-and-forth with voters, unless he plans to conscript citizens to participate in a daily White House town hall, his ability (or lack thereof) to give a good speech actually means a great deal to the potential success of a McCain presidency.

Giving speeches isn’t just something presidents do when they’re not doing the real work of running the country, it is one of the core duties of the president. In modern times, presidents give speeches nearly every day. The ability to move, inspire, comfort, and engage the public is one of the most valuable skills a president can have, and their speeches eventually become the touchstones of our historical memory. The Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt and Kennedy’s inaugurals, Reagan demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall -- speeches come to define the president. There is one president, on the other hand, who tried to persuade the public through repeated use of the town hall. His presidency has seven months to go.

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--The Editors

Gosh! It turns out it's actually true that allowing gay people to get married ruins other people's marriages!

That's because conservative local governments are protesting the California Supreme Court's pro-marriage equality decision by refusing to grant any marriage licenses to anybody. Classy!

--Dana Goldstein

Here's a key excerpt from Sen. Carl Levin's opening statement at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today on "Aggressive Interrogation Techniques":

Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They’re recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces their distorted view and increases their resistance to cooperate. The abuse at Abu Ghraib was a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and handed al Qaeda a propaganda weapon they could use to peddle their violent ideology.

So, how did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them. Were these actions the result of “a few bad apples” acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that’s not the case. The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives.

At the Washington Independent, our friend Spencer Ackerman is live-blogging the details of the hearing, including this chilling quote on water-boarding: "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," said CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman. Suffice to say, some of our soldiers were doing it wrong.

--Dana Goldstein

Since we're talking about equally shared parenting, here are some fascinating statistics on how telecommuting can reduce your carbon footprint, via Rebel Dad, a stay-at-home-father. The stats are from Sun Microsystems , which launched an "Open Work Platform" for its employees.

• Employees saved more than $1,700 per year in gasoline and wear and tear on their vehicles by working at home an average of 2.5 days a week.


• By eliminating commuting just 2.5 days per week, an employee reduces energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 Kilowatt hours/year.


• Office equipment energy consumption rate at a Sun office was two times that of home office equipment energy consumption, from approximately 64 watts per hour at home to 130 watts per hour at a Sun office.

Sun is based in Santa Clara, Calif., so these numbers reflect workers commuting in individual cars. Where public transportation is a viable option, the benefits of office face time and supporting mass transit likely outweigh, at least in my mind, the environmental benefits of telecommuting. Of course, that calculus changes if kids are part of the reason why you want to work from home.

--Dana Goldstein

Writing at The American Scene in response to my post about women doing five times more child care than men, Matt Zeitlin suggests that equally shared parenting might, in some way, be a negative for children. "How much autonomy or potential flourishing should women give up for the sake of their kids?" Zeitlin muses.

That's essentially the John Podhoretz line on Lisa Belkin's Times Magazine piece. Podhoretz wrote:

No one claims in the course of this piece that it is better for the children that fathers and mothers share all tasks equally. That would be an interesting piece, with an interesting argument. The sole issue for Belkin is the burden placed on the woman in a marriage, and how it might interfere with her self-actualization. The women in the article all have husbands who have bought into the equal-parenting line. And yet, all they do is whine.

Charming. In any case, what Podhoretz suggests would be an interesting piece, but let me ask Podhoretz and Zeitlin this: Why should it be women, not men, who compromise on "flourishing" in order to raise children? Is there any evidence at all that this system is more beneficial than equally shared parenting for either individual kids or for society? The answer, I think, is that there is no evidence, since we have never truly experimented, on a large scale, with a more egalitarian way of raising children. My hunch, though, is that children gain an awful lot by spending equal amounts of time being cared for by each parent.

--Dana Goldstein

Today's new Washington Post/ABC poll suggests the general election will be decided by independent voters, who are currently evenly split between Barack Obama and John McCain. Interestingly, while 9 out of 10 Republicans are lined up behind McCain, 8 out of 10 Democrats are ready to declare their support for Obama. Those numbers strike me as favorable for Obama, who, after all, had a primary opponent 10 days ago, while McCain has been the presumptive nominee for months.

But back to those evenly split swing voters. NARAL Pro-Choice America is planning a big campaign to reach out to pro-choice Independent women and pro-choice Republican women in October. Polling released by NARAL yesterday found that Obama gains 13 points among pro-choice Independent women and nine points among pro-choice Republican women when they hear about McCain’s opposition to Roe, comprehensive sex-ed, and access to contraception. This could help Obama gain 1.6 points total points against McCain.

Still, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that although swing voters make up their minds late in the election cycle, issues aren't usually the deciding factor. See Karen Tumulty at Swampland for more. She suggests Obama was burnt in New Hampshire by Independents' predilection for breaking late for an underdog -- not Hillary Clinton, but McCain, who they decided to support in the GOP primary because they sensed Obama's momentum from the Iowa caucuses couldn't be stopped.

--Dana Goldstein

• Former Vice President Al Gore is officially endorsing the candidacy of Barack Obama, appearing with the presumptive Democratic Nominee in Detroit, Michigan rally tonight.
• The Obama campaign announced a number of top campaign staff positions today, including former Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle in the role of VP nominee chief of staff and former Edward Kennedy aide Stephanie Cutter as Michelle Obama's senior adviser.
• David Frum floats the idea of Rudy Giuliani for McCain's VP, leading Matt Yglesias to note positively, "At a minimum, I think this choice would be good news for liberal bloggers. Tim Pawlenty seems much less mockable."
• In other veep news, Newt Gingrich keeps the Bobby Jindal flame alive, despite the Louisiana governor's affinity for exorcism and boosting creationism "science."
• Stephen Mansfield, evangelical biographer, has written a forthcoming book, The Faith of Barack Obama, despite having previously written flattering biographies of both Tom DeLay and George W. Bush's faith, Politico reports.
• The NY TImes has a good story today on Obama's executive style.
• John Bicknell writes in CQ Politics that 2008 ought to be a blowout -- the only question is whether it resembles 1956 or 1980. David Paul Kuhn disagrees in the Politico, reporting that a survey of bipartisan historians conclude that McCain doesn't "stand much of a chance, if any."
• Greg Sargent has a lengthy report on the media's often unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton during the primaries.
• The Sunday Times reports on a 1974 thesis written by John McCain at the National War College following his release from imprisonment in Vietnam which sheds some light on the genesis of his foreign policy views.

--Mori Dinauer

Should Obama pick Hillary for veep?

My friend Ed Kilgore and I debate that proposition over at Salon. He says “yes” and I say “no.”

We debate, you decide.

--Tom Schaller

--Ann Friedman

With all due respect to Time's Ana Marie Cox and AP’s Nedra Pickler -- or for that matter, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's strategic plan, as reported by Pickler and blogged by Cox -- I must rudely note that there are a few of us, particularly many western Democrats, who have been saying for years now that there are ways to get to 270 by starting more or less with the John Kerry-won states and building out from there, and yes, even without either Florida or Ohio.

In the afterword to the paperback edition of Whistling Past Dixie, written almost a year ago and published in January before we knew the nominee, I identified five paths to get to 270. Single-shot wins in either Ohio or Florida are just two, but three others without OH or FL include the “southwest passage” of 19 electors from the three, non-Arizona Southwest states, and two variations on what I call the “36th parallel” strategy involving Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia. (Arguably, Hillary Clinton would have had a better shot at KY and WV, Obama could still win either or both of MO and VA.)

So, like, duh. My point is that nobody, including me, is breaking any new ground here, at least by June 2008. Why? As I mention in every presentation I give at home or abroad about the election, the key thing to remember is that the number of states won by 10 percent or more (and the subset of those won by 20 percent or more) doubled between the close 1960 election and the two close elections this decade. That is, the blue states are bluer and the red states are redder and thus the map, though loosening a bit, is still pretty damn tight.

We’re all focusing on the same handful states for a reason -- recent demography makes the map far more rigid, and predictable. I’d be shocked if the 44th president enters office with more than 325 electoral votes. Does anyone want to bet the "over" on that?

--Tom Schaller

There was speculation that Solis Doyle would head Latino outreach for Obama, but in a campaign email announcing new staff roles, that job goes to Temo Figueroa, an Obama loyalist who had been national field director during the primaries. Instead, Solis Doyle, who reportedly has been pissed since her ouster from Team Clinton, is given the odd job of "Chief of Staff to the Vice Presidential Nominee."

Longtime politicos: Is it customary for the presidential nominee, not the V.P. pick, to decide who should fill that role? I also have to assume that this is a way of signaling that Hillary Clinton will not be the V.P. nominee. By all accounts, there's bad blood between the two women, which is sad, since Solis Doyle started out as Clinton's scheduler way back in Arkansas and climbed to become her campaign manager.

--Dana Goldstein

Scott Lemieux looks beyond last week's Boumediene decision to consider how progressives should talk about executive power:

In particular, there is no reason for progressives to accept the argument that there is a zero-sum tradeoff between reasonable protections of civil liberties and national security. Especially when one considers opportunity costs, there is, in fact, little security value in arbitrarily detaining people against whom the government lacks evidence. As Stephen Holmes has argued in his book The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, the Bush administration's aggrandizements of executive power (and Congress' unwillingness to properly exercise its restraining and oversight functions) have undermined national security rather than preserved it. Long-term arbitrary detentions are bad for both civil liberties and the security of the American public, and it's crucial for liberals not to concede the latter half of the equation.

And Terrence Samuel points out that, while President Bush's recent expression of regret is refreshing, he still is regretting the wrong thing:

But what is certain, and what will pain Bush until the end of his days, is that he will always be remembered as the president who dismantled and destroyed his own party after it had dominated American politics for more than a generation. Almost single-handedly.

It is possible that John McCain may overcome the Bush drag on the Republican ticket to win in November, but the GOP is certain to lose even more seats in Congress than it did in 2006. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (PDF) shows Democrats with a 19-point lead in the "generic congressional ballot," meaning that, without regard to specific candidates, 52 percent of Americans would like Democrats to control the Congress while 33 percent would prefer Republicans.

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--The Editors

These are the fields of Monticello, once tilled by Thomas Jefferson's slaves. I visited there last Memorial Day weekend. Today, via Matt Yglesias, I see Ben Smith is reporting that Paula Abeles -- a white Jefferson descendant who's been active in keeping black descendants out of Monticello family reunions -- has become a John McCain volunteer after initially support Hillary Clinton. I've long been fascinated by Jefferson and his family history, and it's worth expanding, I think, upon how deeply racist and out-of-the-mainstream folks like Abeles are.

Conclusive DNA evidence linking Jefferson or one of his brothers to the black Hemings line has existed since 1998. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded it was likely that Jefferson himself fathered all six of his slave Sally Hemings' children. The dates of their births correspond quite neatly to nine months after the rare times Jefferson and Hemings were simultaneously at the estate. And historical documents indicate, the foundation found, that "several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings' children."

If you visit Monticello today, you'll hear chilling, wrenching stories about the lives of the hundreds of enslaved people who lived there. Jefferson, although thought of in his own time and today as a "benevolent" slave-owner, did instruct his overseer to beat his slaves. Jefferson sold husbands away from wives and teenagers away from their parents. Jefferson publicly tortured and humiliated runaways.

Those Jefferson descendants who continue to reject their black brethren are facing off against both science and history, choosing to embrace an outdated and, quite literally, white-washed image of their scion. Hearing that Abeles supports McCain will only push more Clinton supporters -- the vast majority of whom are committed Democrats and fairly progressive -- into Obama's camp.

--Dana Goldstein

Note: Abeles is more than just a typical grassroots McCain volunteer -- she organized an official event for the campaign. See Ben.

Joe Lieberman is really pushing his luck lately. It’s clear he’s still bitter about being defeated by Ned Lamont in the 2006 democratic primary in Connecticut, and that he enjoys rubbing the Democrats’ noses in his victory as an independent in the general election (which he has the luxury of doing in a 51-49 Senate Democratic majority that depends on his vote).

Two recent pieces -- one by Andrew Miga of the Associated Press and another by National Journal’s Matthew Berger -- follow Lieberman-the-apostate on and off the campaign trail. What’s clear is that the only thing more sufferable than Lieberman right now will be Lieberman this November if John McCain wins.

But if Barack Obama wins and Senate majority leader Harry Reid nets three or four Senate seats, the Sanctimonious Sourpuss of the Senate is heading for a world of irrelevancy. And not a moment too soon.

--Tom Schaller

At The Plank, Josh Patashnik catches David Brooks oversimplifying Obama's education record and denying the candidate's willingness to push back against teachers' unions. In fact, as Josh points out, Obama has spoken clearly about teacher accountability, advocating for removing ineffectual teachers from the classroom. It's also important to note that he's defied the unions on merit pay; unlike Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, Obama went on the record in favor of pay tied to the test scores of individual instructors' students.

The union line is that merit pay should be school-wide. In other words, if an entire school improves the academic performance of its students, every teacher and administrator within that school would get a raise, regardless of their individual track record. That plan, of course, has the benefit of avoiding penalizing teachers working with especially challenging or underprivileged groups of students. But it's more complicated to explain.

--Dana Goldstein

Barack Obama gave a great, Father’s Day-themed speech yesterday. Parts of it were politically easy, such as his entreaties about parental responsibility; you could easily imagine some of the words coming from the pen of conservative culture warriors.

But what was impressive is how Obama linked personal responsibility—a theme Bill “end of government as we know it” Clinton used to catapult himself nationally—directly and unapologetically to government responsibility, as in this key section:

[O]ur young boys and girls see…when you are ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself. And so it’s no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools or on our streets. That’s why we pass on the values of empathy and kindness to our children by living them. We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up. That’s our responsibility as fathers.

And by the way – it’s a responsibility that also extends to Washington. Because if fathers are doing their part; if they’re taking our responsibilities seriously to be there for their children, and set high expectations for them, and instill in them a sense of excellence and empathy, then our government should meet them halfway.

Obama then goes on to advocate ending the marriage penalty, extending the Earned Income Tax Credit, and so on. Good stuff.

--Tom Schaller

It's certainly true, as Susan Faludi writes in The New York Times, that Republicans are already using coded language to call Barack Obama effeminate. To his credit, Obama has so far done a good job of refusing to out-swagger McCain on foreign policy. He has also resisted engaging in the other stupid gender role-playing games that are routinely part of American presidential politics (think motorcycle and tank riding, donning flight suits, going duck hunting, and the like). And yes, Obama was raised by a single mom and has a smart, ambitious wife.

But let's not get carried away. All of this doesn't make Obama our "first woman president." Faludi writes:

“In many ways, he really will be the first woman president,” Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined “Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?” came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: “Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel.”

Remember how disturbing it seemed -- once an actual black person was in reach of the presidency -- that Bill Clinton had so internalized the "first black president" moniker that he was shocked African Americans would flock to Obama instead of to his wife? Well, no sooner is Hillary Clinton out of the race then we're hearing that Obama would be the "first woman president." Utterly ridiculous. It's time to retire this trope.

--Dana Goldstein

In his own Bill Cosby moment, Barack Obama yesterday used Father's Day as an opportunity to renew old comments critical of absent black dads. The speech had special relevance, of course, coming from the son of an absent father. And it avoided falling into conservative tropes by admitting that while two-parent households are one solution to the challenges facing poor children, social services are necessary as well:

We should be making it easier for fathers who make responsible choices and harder for those who avoid them. We should get rid of the financial penalties we impose on married couples right now, and start making sure that every dime of child support goes directly to helping children instead of some bureaucrat. We should reward fathers who pay that child support with job training and job opportunities and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit that can help them pay the bills. We should expand programs where registered nurses visit expectant and new mothers and help them learn how to care for themselves before the baby is born and what to do after – programs that have helped increase father involvement, women’s employment, and children’s readiness for school. We should help these new families care for their children by expanding maternity and paternity leave, and we should guarantee every worker more paid sick leave so they can stay home to take care of their child without losing their income.

By the way, to those who were surprised that Obama appointed centrist Brookings Institutions type Jason Furman to his economic policy team, note his "earned income tax credit" solutions -- and this is nothing new. It's been out there on Obama's website since the beginning of the campaign.

--Dana Goldstein

• Meet The Press anchor Tim Russert has died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 58.
• Barack Obama is sending his Iowa organizational guru, Mitch Stewart, to Virginia. It's another sign he intends to make the state competitive this Fall.
• A Diageo/Hotline poll [PDF] shows that while 30 percent of Obama voters would prefer a different candidate, 45 percent of Republicans prefer someone else to John McCain.
• In addition to lining up big Clinton donors to contribute to his campaign, Obama has also dispatched over 3,600 volunteers to 17 states for six weeks of full-time work on the campaign. Marc Ambinder has details on what those volunteers will actually be doing.
• Scandal surrounding Countrywide loans has engulfed several of the political class, including Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Chris Dodd (D-CT), the latter of whom will likely lose his place in the veepstakes as a result.
• John McCain calls yesterday's Boumediene v. Bush Supreme Court decision "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," tries to rally disaffected Clinton supporters to his side, and apparently has over $100,000 in credit card debt.
• Colin Powell hints at supporting Obama in November.
• Senate 2008: Rasmussen has a poll showing the Norm Coleman up by only 3 points against Al Franken in Minnesota and another showing Democratic Challenger Kay Hagan falling 14 points behind incumbent Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina.
• And finally, political divides rock California's first family.

--Mori Dinauer

I don't have a lot to say, except that we were chilled here in the office to learn that the 58-year old Tim Russert passed away so suddenly today. We haven't always been fans of his searching-for-controversy debate moderation style, or his obsessive emphasis on "entitlement reforms" such as raising the Social Security income cap. But I can say that flying to Des Moines to cover the Iowa caucuses last December, I was on Russert's plane, and he was a real gentleman. After we landed, he was surrounded in the airport by well-wishers, whom he treated with interest and respect, even autographing a few copies of one of his books that he had handy. Russert was a journalistic icon in the old-fashioned sense, someone whose mere presence on the television screen reassured viewers. And that will be missed.

--Dana Goldstein

According to his family he died of a heart attack. He was 58.

--Sam Boyd

I just got a press release from the SEIU touting the pro-labor types who are being considered as vice presidential prospects, among them Senators Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Jim Webb, Claire McCaskill and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer. But there was an unexpected name -- SEIU Secretary-Treasurer and Change to Win chair Anna Burger. As a lifelong progressive activist and the first woman to head a major American labor coalition, Burger is a highly accomplished, admirable individual. But she simply isn't a realistic veep choice: She's too lefty, has never held an elected office or served in government, and as a public speaker, I've found her hit or miss. Furthermore, her deep-seeded economic populism, frankly, hasn't been embraced by the Obama campaign to date.

--Dana Goldstein

Mike Huckabee has signed up as a commentator on Fox News. This isn't too surprising -- he's a very fun person to watch on television, even if you disagree with everything he stands for. And while this job certainly pays well (financial details were not released, but it seems safe to assume they were generous), it probably has more to do with keeping his name-ID high among the Republican base in the the expectation of a 2012 or 2016 presidential run.

--Sam Boyd