BENEFITS WITHOUT COSTS. As a follow-up to Tom's point, I think it's critical, when discussing potential outreach to religious voters, to consider the potential negative consequences of such strategies. One thing the journalist Peter Boyer has been guilty of is asserting benefits that would come from running more anti-choice candidates that completely ignore the costs of such potential shifts. It is true, for example, that the sudden politicization of the abortion issue in the 1960s has caused a significant number of Catholic voters to align with the Republicans rather than the Democrats. But supporting abortion criminalization has hurt Republican candidates as well. What keeps presidential elections close in a political context that generally favors Republican is that Democrats have the large, expensive to campaign in, and traditionally Republican states of California and New York in their pockets before spending a dime (and if these states were even competitive, the Democrats would be at a massive disadvantage.) As evidenced by the fact that Republicans can still win statewide office in these states when abortion is off the table, the domination of the Republican Party by the anti-choice lobby is a major reason for the fact that these states are currently uncontested at the presidential level. When you combine that with the fact that the staunchest anti-choice states are states that the current Democratic coalition is highly unlikely to win anyway, it's clear that the abortion issue is a significant net positive for national Democrats, although individual candidates of course have to be allowed some leeway.

Which is all to say that meaningful policy choices in a two-party system inevitably involve tradeoffs, and without knowing what exactly is on the table when we talk about outreach to religious voters, it's impossible to perform this kind of analysis.

--Scott Lemieux

GOP MIDTERM CRAPITUDE WATCH. How to outspend your opponent 24-to-1 and lose ground.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MILITARY DEMOS CONTINUED. Brad Plumer writes in to point me to this Heritage Foundation analysis showing that, due to the post-9/11 enlistment boost, the army is both a bit richer and more educated than the population as a whole. So there you have it. While on the subject, you've really got to check out The Corner's obsession with Kerry's comment. By my count, they've put up 32 posts on the gaffe. Grasping at straws doesn't even begin to cover it.

Update: Nick Beaudrot in comments:

Fuzzy math point #2: The Heritage study covers the US military, not the US Army. The Air Force and Navy are more likely to recruit better educated enlistees than the Army.

This study shows that Army recruits are disproportionately from neighborhoods with incomes between $30K and $60K, with more overrepresentation below median HH income than above median HH income.

HUMAN CAPITAL. Ezra, I think that the lower middle class is more or less the correct answer, although I don't have ready statistics on the socioeconomic backgrounds of military personnel, either. The military still provides a ready avenue for upward mobility, which means that people on lower economic rungs will find it correspondingly more attractive.

On uneducated recruits, the problem is that being a soldier today is a remarkably complex and demanding job, which is why the military tries so hard to determine the aptitude of recruits beforehand and establishes an educational floor. One of the reasons that military officers are so reluctant to back a draft is that they don't really want to take everyone. Interestingly enough, the Bundeswehr draws precisely the opposite conclusions about the usefulness of a draft, believing that conscription allows the selection of the very best potential soldiers, who can then be offered selective incentives to remain in the military after their service requirement is up.

Last observation on the education point; even enlisted personnel tend to be pretty well educated after a couple of years, and officers are among the best educated people in the United States. That all costs a lot of money. One of the reasons that the military has become more casualty conscious (in addition to worrying about the civilian impact of casualty rates) is that the loss of soldiers and Marines represents a very real economic blow.

--Robert Farley

FL-GOV: TWO-WAY CONTEST BECOMES THREE-WAY DEBATE. The suddenly-interesting gubernatorial race in Florida took a surprising turn last night, when self-financed independent Max Linn won a court order 20 minutes before the final gubernatorial debate and joined state Attorney General Charlie Crist (R) and Rep. Jim Davis (D) on the stage. As the Palm Beach Post reported today, the last-minute entry "shook up the night and, possibly, the race itself."

In a rapid-paced hour, Republican front-runner Charlie Crist frequently found himself ganged up on by Reform Party candidate Linn and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Davis. And, thanks to Washington-based moderator Chris Matthews, Crist for the first time in the debates was put in the position of defending an unpopular president and the war in Iraq.

Linn and Davis both gave President Bush a grade of F for his performance in office, mirroring poor approval ratings nationally and in Florida. Crist, the state attorney general, gave him a B.

Davis and Linn criticized Crist's plan to cut property taxes for homeowners by doubling the homestead exemption. Linn used strident language that suggested Crist did not understand the issue.

And when Crist trotted out a favorite line that Davis' record of missed votes in Congress during his campaign for governor showed that he worked from "an empty chair," Linn said he agreed about the chair, but then called Crist "an empty suit."

MSNBC's Chris Matthews didn't appear to do any favors for Crist, either. In one key exchange, Matthews asked Crist, the state's chief law-enforcement official, why he kept claiming that crime was going down when murder was going up. "The only violent crime that's up is murder," Crist conceded. Matthews responded, "[T]hat's what Marion Barry used to say in D.C. when I was there. He'd say, 'Crime is down, but sorry, murder is up, the only exception.' To most people, murder is the big one."

Recent polls show the Crist-Davis race increasingly competitive.

--Steve Benen, (crossposted on Midterm Madness)

WATERBOARDING: AS NEW ENGLAND AS YACHTING AND LOBSTER ROLLS! Jonah should be ashamed himself for posting this "without comment":

I was recently reading Richard Norton Smith's biography of Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. It seems that when McCormick was a student at Groton he was subjected to the school tradition of "pumping." In this quaint ritual the initiate had his head held under a pump and water was forced over him until he felt as if he were drowning. Waterboarding isn't torture, its just part of the New England patrician experience.

--Spencer Ackerman

NANCY. Kevin Drum, Bob Somerby, and Dana Goldstein all offer good comments on this New York Times profile of Nancy Pelosi. Defending Pelosi against petty or mailcious attacks -- mainly from her right, but also from her left -- used to be a priority of mine before I got too busy, but needless to say the task will become only more necessary (to the extent that I think it remains justified, of course) if the Dems take over the House. I should note that I was surprised to see Dick Armey call himself "a big fan" of hers in the Times piece.

At any rate, in the event that she does become Speaker, I certainly hope a right-wing author runs with my Pelosi-related offering in last month's "Spot the Fake Right-Wing Book Title" quiz from the print issue.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO FIGHTS? Man, The Corner's really in damage control mode lately. Depending on the day, you'll have dozens of posts on Santorum's just-around-the-corner comeback, James Webb's novels, Casey's corruption, Kerry incorrect wording the astoundingly banal point that Ivy League grads are underrepresented in Iraq, etc. Thankfully, on Tapped, we're still talking about John Kenneth Galbraith -- none of this relevant, topical, "election" stuff.

On the Kerry comment, my understanding is that this is a lower-middle class war. After Vietnam, the military began requiring a high school diploma, so you cut out really poor or really uneducated recruits (this always struck me, incidentally, as a bad idea: So long as we're going to have an army, it may as well offer upward mobility and discipline to those who can most use it). Nevertheless, the privileged don't serve. So what you get is a bell curve distribution, shifted a bit to the poorer end of the income scale. Data on this stuff is hard to come by, but I assume Spackerman or Rob can speak to this more authoritatively than I can.

--Ezra Klein

TO WREAK HAVOC, KIDNAP. As Spencer notes below, for the past five days, U.S. troops had been encircling Sadr City in order to find a missing soldier they believed was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army, the militia of fiercely anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Sadr denies involvement, but the brother-in-law of the kidnapped soldier says the perpetrators were clearly taking him to Sadr City, the stronghold of, well, Sadr.

The U.S. has now lifted the blockade after pressure from Sadr and Prime Minister Maliki, who depends on the former for support. Spencer may be right that there is some "kabuki theater" going on here, but the more straightforward explanation seems more likely to me: the blockade was becoming counterproductive. There was a huge bombing in Sadr City yesterday, and Sadr partisans were quick to point the finger at the Americans for not allowing the Mahdi Army to provide their own security. And of course, people weren't happy that all of the checkpoints surrounding the neighborhood were apparently all just for one U.S. soldier.

Sadr's movement appears to be splintering, so Sadr doesn't necessarily control everyone who says they are "Mahdi Army" in any case. He may be losing support due to the radicalization of Iraqi Shi'a -- yes, there are Shi'a more radical than Muqtada -- eager to avenge sectarian killings and take a more militant stance against the U.S. The siege of Sadr City plays into the hands of those radicals.

Kidnappings of this sort put the military in a wrenching moral dilemma: do we do everything in our power to get our people back alive, and risk provoking greater anger at the U.S.? Or do we abandon him to certain death in service of (perhaps elusive) broader stability? Does an all-out response show resolve and unwillingness to tolerate kidnappings, or is it a miscalculation? What do readers (and my Tapped colleagues) think?

--Blake Hounshell

PUNITIVE DAMAGES AND LESSONS ABOUT THE COURT. The Supreme Court today will hear oral arguments in Philip Morris USA v. Mayola Williams. The case concerns a $79.5 million punitive damage claim against Phillip Morris that was upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court. (See here and here for more background.) There's a good chance that the Oregon Court's decision will be reversed based on a Kennedy's opinion in State Farm v. Campbell, which discovered a limit against virtually all punitive damages that "awards exceeding a single-digit ratio." Pragmatism is one thing; inventing a right against punitive damage awards that are inconsistent with the Base 10 numbering system (or, in other words, finding a constitutional significance in the number of fingers on the human hand) is quite another. This case should remind us that, despite all of the attention given to hot-button social issues, the courts are also likely to be a major player in the Republican battle to ease restraints against businesses who violate the law by reducing the incentives and efficacy of lawsuits.

The punitive damage cases also have a couple of general lessons about the Court. State Farm was joined by all of the justices usually associated with the Court's "liberal" wing except Ginsburg, but Thomas and Scalia (as they have in all of these case) dissented. "Moderate" apologists for Alito like Stuart Taylor claimed that because Alito is more pragmatic and less interested in grand theory than Thomas or Scalia, he would also be more moderate. But this is completely wrong; the (admittedly very inconsistent) commitment of Thomas and Scalia to broad theories of jurisprudence means that they will sometimes reach "liberal" results that Alito and Roberts will not. If you have left-liberal constitutional commitments, in a death-is-not-an-option game you'd rather have Scalia than Alito on the Court, and I would place a significant wager that Alito and Roberts will vote to strike down the damage judgment here, while Thomas and Scalia certainly won't. Second, it's important to remember that while we think of Justices Stevens and Souter as "liberals" they're really old-school, country club Republicans; they only looking like liberals because of how much the Republican Party has shifted to the right. There's no liberal in the mold of William Brennan or William O. Douglas on the current Court.

--Scott Lemieux

ENJOY YOUR TWENTIES. All right, we all know the stakes in the upcomings. But, Lord above, if this thing doesn't swing the election to the Democratic party, nothing will. Just a note to the people engaged in yesterday's Are Evangelicals Really Worth Saving? discussion -- this kind of idiocy is why the "suckers-or-true believers" debate is nothing more than an academic exercise. No matter how sincerely people adhere to this stuff, handing any part of a secular government over to it is always a bad idea. That strange whirring noise you're hearing is Barry Goldwater going at 78 rpm underground.

The Republican Party -- Hating Sex Since The Last Time We All Got Drunk.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Some book review goodness on the site today. Eric Rauchway reviews two new historical works recounting the eclipse of Reconstruction and the Redemption of white rule in the South -- achieved both through terrorism and northern political capitulation.

Meanwhile, Matt offers his take on Andrew Sullvan's new tome, The Conservative Soul:

...Though billed as "one of today's most provocative social and political commentators" on his book jacket, Sullivan's substantive views are almost frighteningly banal. Far from "bold and provocative," Sullivan offers up an unusually colorful expression of what is, in fact, the bland conventional wisdom of the Anglo-American elite. In foreign affairs he's hawkish, chastened by Iraq but not so chastened as to revisit any of the empirical or theoretical premises that led America into its current quagmire. In economics, he's disdainful of European social democracy, a supporter of balanced budgets and sound money while dismissive of concerns about inequality. On cultural matters, he's generally progressive, but doesn't much care for feminists. He loathes academic postmodernists but doesn't seem to actually know anything about them.

These elite consensus views have, in the way that only an elite consensus can, an enormous amount of political power behind them already. What the elite consensus lacks is what it's always lacked -- a serious electoral constituency -- the very problem that led it to increasingly ally itself with the very forces of more populist right-wingery that Sullivan deplores. This, though, is hardly a new story; from the Red Scare and McCarthyism to Nixon's Southern Strategy, "respectable" conservatism has long found a need to ally itself with base demagoguery to obtain power. As a gay man, Sullivan finds the current configuration of this alliance unusually obnoxious, to an extent he doesn't seem to have minded, say, Ronald Reagan's implicit appeals to segregationist sentiment. So far as that goes, good for him. But the conservatism of doubt -- which is to say the conservatism of elite complacency -- as a mass political movement is an impossible dream, and always will be.

--The Editors

GALBRAITH. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but I'm a little disturbed that neither Robert Rubin, Peter Orszag, or Jon Chait appeared to know where John Kenneth Galbraith's concept of Countervailing Powers comes from. Rubin appears to think it's from a book called Countervailing Powers, which doesn't exist. No one else even heralds a guess. The actual book is American Capitalism, the first in Galbraith's famous trilogy on the American economy (the other two, in order, were The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State.) As I said, not the biggest deal in the world, but here you have two top Democratic economists and a top liberal policy wonk, and none of them seem particularly familiar with (arguably) the greatest Democratic economic thinker of the past century*.

On the bright side, the three do seem to understand -- and this is a particularly wrenching realization for Rubin -- that Galbraith's ideas are absolutely critical in the current moment. I'm often stung by how much everything I write is simply vintage Galbraith, defrosted and mad-libbed for the current era. Take countervailing powers: Galbraith argued that capitalism's natural tendency is towards aggregation. The neoclassical concept of many different competitors all battling it out was, he thought, naive. The realities of mergers, acquisitions, and predatory practices would leave industries with a small number of very large players, most of whom would be tacitly cooperating for reasons of profit or survival.

The only way to restore balance, Galbraith argued, was other behemoths. So massive retailers would compete with massive producers (there's evidence of this happening, as Gillette joins Procter & Gamble, in part to better bargain with Wal-Mart), and both had to handle massive unions and activist government. The tension between producers and retailers would safeguard a good economy, and the power of government and unions would ensure a good society.

The extrapolations aren't hard. Unions are basically dead, the government is currently gripped by a corporatist ideology that leads them not to stay out of the economy but to use their influence to augment corporate power, and no one who reads me will miss the resonance with Wal-Mart's virtual monopsony. I'm not one who goes in much for the conservative adoration of their philosophers and intellectual forebears, but I think the left is deeply impoverished by its essential abandonment of Galbraith's insights. For those who want to do better, you can get a rich and broad overview by reading Richard Parker's recent biography of Galbraith, this compilation of Galbraith's best writings, American Capitalism, or The Affluent Society. And that's just where you should start.

*Not to mention one of The American Prospect's founding sponsors.

--Ezra Klein

RIGHT UP TO YOUR FACE AND DIS YOU. National security adviser Steve Hadley is in Iraq today to deliver a message to the disobedient administration of PM Nouri al-Maliki: He wishes "to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president." That being, in general, "Can't you just do as we say? You know, be a 'leader'? Disband the militias? Secure the country? Let us get some soldiers home, or at least announce something by, say, November 6?"

Maliki opted instead to do the expected thing: Force the U.S. to end its five-day siege of Sadr City, the Baghdad stronghold of Maliki ally and U.S. enemy Moqtada al-Sadr. In times past -- those halcyon days of ex-premiers Iyad Allawi and Ibrahim Jaafari -- there was a temptation to say that the U.S. was ginning up crises in order to have the Iraqi leader demonstrate his independence from America and thereby win some hearts and minds. This, however, is much different: the Bush administration, after investing much desperation-slash-hope in Maliki, is apparently kicking around the idea of a coup.

Coups, as we learned with Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, rarely go in their intended direction. More often than not, they reveal a basic strategic confusion: that a mucked-up situation is really the fault of one unsavory or weak leader. The deterioration of Iraq from Jaafari to Maliki shows this plainly: No Shiite leader is going to dissolve the militias -- even if anyone came up with a way to actually do that -- upon which the Shiites depend for survival; each sect has decided it has a greater interest in war rather than negotiation; etc. Hadley can lean on Maliki all he wants, but Maliki knows one thing: he may not have enough power to rule Iraq, but he has more than enough power to frustrate his would-be American masters.

--Spencer Ackerman

MORE ON RELIGIOUS VOTERS. Amy Sullivan and Addie Stan know more about the religion issue than I do, so I’d like to get their opinions on the risks of going for the evangelical vote -- it strikes me that even the smartest, most heartfelt attempts to lure evangelicals away from the GOP to the Democrats are not without risks. First, it will be hard and rather costly to try to break them away. In 2000, Southern Baptists voted 88 percent against the Southern Baptist candidate, Al Gore. That doesn't strike me as attributable to Gore’s lack of religious identity or facility in talking about his faith. Too many religious conservatives have simply made firm partisan commitments, and any counter-arguments or cross-talk from Democrats and liberals will only alter this at the margins. Sure, stock market fortunes and elections are often won at the margins. But will the cost of trying to make slight gains among evangelicals be worth the losses?

The problem with outreach to any group of unlikely-to-vote-for-you voters is that a party or candidate always risks a loss of authenticity. This is just as true when John Kerry buys a goose hunting license as it is when Democrats kneel uncomfortably in pews: Whatever added votes are squeezed out of such moments are outweighed by the many more votes lost by looking inconsistent, pandering, wishy-washy, and duplicitous to the broader electorate. For this very reason, you don’t see Bush wearing a half-turned red Yankees cap trying to appeal to the P-Diddy vote.

Third, because the South is home to the most and most fervent evangelicals, it would take major gains there to make statewide and many local elections competitive. On the other hand, I do think some of Sullivan’s arguments could make a difference among the more heterogeneous, less strident, more church/state-separation-oriented evangelicals who cast key votes in America’s most purple region, the Midwest.

Finally, in all the national media coverage of religion and politics, we rarely if ever hear that the country is secularizing -- repeat, secularizing. In 1990, the American Religious Survey showed that only 8 percent of Americans were self-identified atheists/agnostics/non-denominationals; by 2001, that number jumped to 14 percent and, by that rate of growth, is probably approaching 16 percent today. That’s a doubling of the share of seculars in just 15 years. And, because younger Americans are more secular than their parents and grandparents -- Gen Y has the same share of seculars as Catholics! -- this trend promises to continue. Does it make sense for the Democratic Party want to become evangelized as America secularizes?

--Tom Schaller

NO REALLY, WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? On the heels of yesterday's discussion of religion and the Democrats comes this fascinating New York Times article on outreach to evangelicals in Ohio by Democratic candidates Ted Strickland (in the gubernatorial race) and Sherrod Brown. After years of longing, I have finally heard from Strickland, an ordained Methodist minister, words of faith I had prayed to hear from a Democratic candidate:

"There are those in Columbus and elsewhere who argue that the biblical mandates to love your neighbor and to work for justice are meant only for individuals and have no application to the political sphere," Mr. Strickland said. "They dismiss the Democrats and those religious leaders who claim that our faith requires us to insist that governments and government leaders -- not just private citizens -- seek justice, love, mercy, and humbly work to help the least, the last and the lost in our society."

Happy Samhain!

--Adele M. Stan

CNN POLLS FIVE KEY SENATE RACES. With just a week to go before the midterm elections, CNN released a new poll this morning on the five states political observers are watching most.

* Missouri -- Sen. Jim Talent (R) and state Auditor Claire McCaskill (D) are right where they've been all along, tied at 49 percent support each. However, the CNN poll showed that expanding the field to registered voters (instead of likely voters) shows McCaskill ahead, 51 percent to 43 percent.

* New Jersey -- Like nearly all recent polling in the Garden State, Sen. Bob Menendez (D) still leads state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R), 51 percent to 44 percent.

* Ohio -- No wonder the GOP establishment bailed on Ohio; it appears increasingly uncompetitive. CNN shows Rep. Sherrod Brown (D) leading incumbent Sen. Mike DeWine (R), 54 percent to 43 percent.

* Tennessee -- In perhaps the biggest setback to Democratic hopes of regaining the Senate, CNN shows former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker with a six eight-point lead over Rep. Harold Ford (D), 52 percent to 44 percent.

* Virginia -- Shortly after Sen. George Allen (R) decided to make Jim Webb's (D) fictional novels the key to his homestretch strategy, voters appear unimpressed. The new poll shows Webb with his biggest lead in an independent poll to date, 50 percent to 46 percent.

With Democrats favored to win Republican seats in Pennsylvania, Montana, and Rhode Island, and with Ohio and New Jersey appearing increasingly favorable for the party, Democrats are still right where they've been for weeks -- they need two out of three in Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia to take back the Senate majority. According to the CNN poll, they just might pull it off.

--Steve Benen (crossposted on Midterm Madness)

LOOKING AHEAD. The battle for control of state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade begins one week from today.

How's that? Well, because incumbent governors are re-elected at high rates; and because any four-year-term governors elected this coming Tuesday who are not term-limited from running for re-election in 2010 will find themselves in the advantaged position four years hence; and because winners that year will be in position to have a major influence over the district mapmaking for both state legislatures and the House, the gubernatorial elections this year will have an indirect bearing on the fates of literally thousands of state and national legislative candidates running in 2012 and beyond. So, too, will battles for control of the state legislatures, in which the parties right now are basically at parity.

And the significance of these under-the-radar races is partly why, as I recently argued in The New York Times, long-term base development and mobilization are more critical than presidential-cycle, centrist party development: These efforts pay out more than every four years (i.e., in midterm and off-year elections as well), and they also pay off well into the future.

--Tom Schaller

ABRACADABRA. Having tracked the religious right's rise over the last two decades, I must say that, unlike Scott and Sam, I find the argument, rendered via Amy Sullivan, over whether or not the religious right is a tool of the man, or poised to become the man himself, largely irrelevant; either way, we wind up with law written by self-appointed religious sages.

The most prescient thing ever said to me about a Republican Party high on religion came from the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzerg, a celebrated scholar whom I interviewed for a 1995 Mother Jones cover story on the religious right. (The cover featured a Photoshopped picture of the White House with a cross on its gable, and the headline, "House of God?" A decade later, the Prospect offered a new riff on the theme):

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Ph.D., of the Interfaith Alliance, a coalition of clergy formed to oppose the religious right, sees something sinister in the language of the right: the exploitation of a religious impulse felt by the economically strapped middle class to further an agenda that will only fill the coffers of the rich. "They are putting on the magic act of family values," says Hertzberg, "while the pickpocket in league with them goes through the crowd and steals their wallets."

--Adele M. Stan

EVANGELICALS FOR AGNOSTICS. To vaguely weigh in on whether Christians are getting used by the right or taking it over, this point of Amy's struck me as interesting:

I, and many Democrats, supported expanding the charitable tax exemption so that more Americans could donate more money to charity. I think you'll agree that it was a supremely conservative idea--increase private giving to private charities so they can do good work without the public sector getting involved. It was the most significant and dramatic part of Bush's original faith-based plan, and it would have resulted in enormous injections of funds into the charitable sector--certainly much more than the faith-based initiative has already dispersed. (One respected estimate projected an increase of $160 billion in charitable giving over ten years.)

Unfortunately--and this gets back to our original question of whether the White House has delivered on its promises to religious conservatives--the Bush administration turned its back on the charitable giving provision. Why? Because it couldn't justify the cost of both that and the elimination of the estate tax. It shouldn't be a surprise that the estate tax won out, but what is most disappointing is that it actually hurts charitable giving even more. One popular way of getting around the estate tax for many wealthy individuals has been to donate money to charities and write off the gift. Eliminating the estate tax cost more than $5 billion per year in charitable giving by those wealthy Americans who can keep their money to themselves now.

As for the larger debate on whether to target evangelicals, such discussions always put me in the mind of a report finding that, if you put together the findings of all those studies saying that X amount of productivity is wiped out by the flu, and Y from smoking in cars, and Z from picking your nose, you're eventually left with a number far larger than the entire global economy. Democrats, it seems, are supposed to be fighting for libertarians, Southerners, Westerners, churchgoers, Indians, blacks, whites, "ideopolises," rural voters, and all the rest. Add them up and I'm sure you'll have a couple electorates stacked atop each other. Seems to me the party would be better off crafting a compelling message that assembles a broad coalition, not adopting the specificity needed to wrest a single group.

--Ezra Klein

SULLIVAN VS. LEMIEUX. Amy responds to Scott here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GOLD IN THEM THAR CREDITS. Last week the investment bank Morgan Stanley announced it was investing almost $3 billion in emissions credits made possible by the much-vilified Kyoto protocol. The announcement happened to coincide with the release of the World Bank's annual "State of the Carbon Market" report, at Carbon Expo Asia, trumpeting the news that the carbon market grew from nearly $11 billion in 2005 to almost $22 billion during the first three quarters of 2006. The Stern report flagged by Kevin Drum, which contains dire warnings about the economic consequences of global warming, is making Morgan Stanley's investment look prescient indeed. News that many European countries won't be able to meet their Kyoto targets means there is ample opportunity to make a killing while doing good for the environment. Businesses are more likely to heed the clarion call of the almighty dollar than earnest newspaper editorials. As for the Bush administration, that's another story.

--Blake Hounshell

POPULISM WITHOUT XENOPHOBIA? Peter Beinart has a smart column this week on the downsides of Democratic populism:

For writers like [Thomas] Frank, the tragedy of that era was that the free-trading, Wall Street-friendly Bill Clinton did not use economic populism to permanently lure these angry white males into the Democratic fold. Now Democrats have another chance. But renouncing future naftas won't be enough. Many liberals would like to pick and choose their anti-globalization politics--arguing for more regulation of international trade and investment, but resisting punitive measures to regulate the flow of international labor. Morally, that's perfectly defensible. But, politically, it is likely to fail. There is a reason that the late nineteenth-century populists Frank admires were nativists: While low-skilled immigration may benefit the United States as a whole, it rarely benefits low-skilled Americans. And, for many blue-collar Americans today, Mexican immigration--whether legal or not--is not just linked to broader anxieties about globalization; it has become the prime symbol of those anxieties. In the coming years, unless Democrats take a hard line on immigration, their hard line on trade is unlikely to do them much electoral good.

--Ezra Klein

IRANIAN NUKES. I was all ready to write a long post on Noah Feldman's article about the Iranian nuclear program, but that determination foundered upon my inability to figure out what Feldman was actually arguing. Feldman included a long, interesting, and rather pointless discussion of the Islamic position on suicide bombing, danced around a realist analysis of the nuclear situation in the Middle East without really committing to it, and soldiered through a discussion of Islamic theology without coming to any conclusions. Marty Peretz liked it, which means that it must have been incoherent. Fortunately, Matt Yglesias is a better man than I, and managed to slog through and produce some observations. Most notable, I think, is Matt's observation that contemporary Western discussions of suicide bombing suffer from some fatal definitional flaws:

And, again, why all the talk of suicide bombers in the context of nuclear deterrence? The West lacks a significant tradition of literal suicide missions, akin to those of kamikaze pilots or Sri Lankan or Muslim suicide bombers. We do, however, have a quite robust tradition of asking soldiers to undertake near-suicidal missions. Infantrymen are asked to charge fixed defensive positions, to go "over the top" of the trench lines, or to be in the first-wave of amphibious assaults. The 1st Infantry Division's official history of the Omaha Beach landing states that "Every officer and sergeant" in the leading company of the assault "had been killed or wounded" within ten minutes. This isn't exactly the same as suicide bombing, but it's a lot more similar to suicide bombing than suicide bombing is to deliberate, utterly foreseeable, national suicide.

--Robert Farley

THEOCRACY HYPE. Scott, I agree with you that Amy Sullivan's prescriptive arguments about Democratic outreach to evangelicals are thin. (And for a small-but-perfect illustration of the limited efficacy of even the rather ostentatious rhetorical gambits that Hillary Clinton has attempted in an effort to reach religious voters, see here.) But I do feel compelled to take Sullivan's side on the broader issue of liberal "theocracy" narratives. You're right that the "religious right taken for suckers" notion is widely understood by plenty of liberals, that it is central to Thomas Frank's argument, and that it renders David Kuo's book more banal confirmation than explosive revelation.

But I think Sullivan's right that there is some real tension and dissonance between that understanding of Republican political dynamics and works such as Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming, Jesus Camp, to a limited extent Garry Wills's latest in The New York Review of Books, and many many more. The reality is always complicated and contradictory, of course, but it seems to me one that of these two narratives -- the religious-right-as-suckers, and the encroaching theocratic takeover of the GOP (and the country) -- has to be more true than the other one. And I really think the empirical evidence -- the substantive policy outcomes under Republican rule -- lends credence to the former rather than the latter notion. Sullivan debated the conservative Joseph Loconte last week ostensibly on this question, though unfortunately the discussion got a bit sidetracked into more talk about the Democrats. I would prefer to see Sullivan debate someone like Goldberg on this, because this issue specifically is one where I think Amy has some real value to add.

--Sam Rosenfeld

AND THEN WHAT? I have a lot of problems with Amy Sullivan's recent piece about the opportunities allegedly presented by David Kuo's new book. First of all, I reject her entire premise that Democratic politicians don't reach out to religious believers, and since she never mentions the names of prominent Democrats who treat believers with contempt it's impossible to evaluate her claims. Second, Sullivan's claim that liberal bloggers have "spent so much time fear-mongering about American theocracy that a book illustrating the opposite simply makes no sense to them" is belied by the fact that what is surely the most-discussed liberal book of the second Bush era makes the well-known case that evangelicals are being played for suckers by the business elite that really holds the power in the GOP. Kuo's revelations aren't so shocking as to be incomprehensible to knowledgeable liberals, but are rather banal.

But my biggest problem with Sullivan's argument continues to be that she's frustratingly vague about how, exactly, Democrats should "reach out to disaffected evangelicals." My understanding is that she's not saying that Democrats should sacrifice core principles such as reproductive freedom. But if that's the case, I don't know what more Democrats can do. Sullivan seems to think that there are large numbers of voters who 1)like Democratic economic policy more, 2)vote Republican because of social issues, but 3)would stop voting Republican on social issues, not because of substantive shifts in Democratic policy but because of shifts in rhetoric. I suspect that these voters could fit in a good-sized walk-in closet. I think most voters who vote on cultural principle care about substantive positions, and with the Roberts and Alito homeruns they're being rational to vote Republican no matter how much Karl Rove disdains them.

Another point to keep in mind is that a concern for social justice doesn't necessarily translate into support for Democratic economic policy. Consider this from the recent New Yorker profile of Michael Gerson, the Bush speechwriter often cited as a true "compassionate conservative":

Gerson defends Bush’s tax cuts, which the President’s critics believe not only favor those with the highest incomes but have also left less money for important domestic programs; Gerson believes that free markets and free trade are the best means of lifting people out of poverty, and that lower taxes stimulate both. "The part of Mike I have the most trouble understanding, perhaps because we simply disagree, is how he can square his support for pretty substantial spending for the very poorest among us with a defense of Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people," Dionne said. "Maybe Mike just buys supply-side economics in a way that I don’t, but most supply-siders don’t think like Mike."

--Scott Lemieux

GRAND OLD PORNO. There are better reasons to vote the Republicans out of office, but it's certainly delicious to see that the GOP has taken money from pornographers, including one who reportedly has expressed a desire to do the Bush twins. Josh Marshall reported this weekend that even as the Republican National Committee tars, in a spectacularly vicious television spot, Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford for allegedly having taken campaign money from "porn movie producers," the party has apparently had its own traffic with the adult video industry. Topping, perhaps, Marshall's revelation of the RNC's lucrative relationship with porn distributor Nicholas T. Boyias, is John Aravosis's post on porn queen Mary Carey's largesse, bestowed last year on the National Republican Congress Committee (NRCC). Writing of Ms. Carey and "her boss," Aravosis asserts, "Their $5k donation got them dinner with the president and a slew of top Republican congressional leaders, and even lunch with Karl Rove.

Later, says Aravosis, Carey expressed her lust for the Bush twins. "I totally want to have sex with them," she reportedly told the blogger.

--Adele M. Stan

A BRIEF LOOK BACK. I'll be writing about this at greater length in a piece for New York Times Select coming out tomorrow, but with Election 2006 just a week away and the narratives already emerging about its significance, I though we ought to pause to first clarify what happened two years ago, in 2004.

First, the basic recap:

HERE WE GO AGAIN. Well, this was a nice little present a week out from the election, wasn't it?

Raise your hand if you've heard Ellen Tauscher's name any time in the past six years.

I thought as much. Why doesn't The New York Times just dig up Carl Albert and ask him what he thinks? He's been about as relevant to the politics of the day as la Tauscher is, and he's a damn sight better Democrat having been dead for six years than she is alive and yapping.

Why, oh Lord, why do Democratic politicians cooperate with stories like this? Mind you, I'm not arguing for freezing out the NYT, or that the story isn't it a legitimate one, but how hard can it be for professional politicians and professional political activists to keep from tossing rocks at each other in public? The correct answer for everyone in this piece goes something like this: "The important thing for all of us is to strike the power from the hands of a corrupt, reckless, and criminally negligent Republican Party, which refuses to police the lunatics in its own ranks because its political success has depended for almost three decades on catering to an extremist agenda and to the worst of our human impulses."

Repeat until reporter's eyes glaze over.

But, no, let's all have a wonderfully productive conversation (again) on what chunk of the privacy rights of 51 percent of the American people we're willing to pitch overboard, and how scary even we find Nancy Pelosi. Or, alternatively, let's line up with the MoveOn guy and talk about why we'd run someone against Heath Shuler, who hasn't even been elected yet.

God, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, what I wouldn't give for a large sock full of manure.

--Charles P. Pierce

NM-1: DOWN TO THE WIRE. Democratic Attorney General Patricia Madrid is going into the last full week before elections in New Mexico's first district with a razor-thin lead over incumbent Republican Heather Wilson. Of course, the poll was run before the televised debate last week. Who won the debate largely depends on who you ask, though most observers found the incumbent to be more polished. Wilson, indeed, has jumped on a verbal stumble of Madrid's during the debate and turned it into an attack ad -- using a bit of creative editing to make it stick:

The ad uses a portion of the debate where Wilson asks Madrid, "Can you cite something that would give the people of New Mexico some kind of reassurance that you will prevent a tax increase?"

Madrid pauses before saying, "Your president and you have -- have voted for a tax relief."

Madrid: "Your president and you have voted for tax relief for the top 1 percent of taxpayers in this country, costing us an immeasurable amount of money. If I go to Congress, I will vote to repeal that tax relief. I do support tax relief for the middle class, even the upper middle class."

--Thurman Hart, (crossposted at Midterm Madness)

THE MAJORITARIAN DIFFICULTY II. Looks like it's Jonah Goldberg Monday here on Tapped. Kevin Drum finds him claiming that the last "100 years" of liberalism has been about "shoving things down people's throats." Drum identifies the most obvious problem: the core elements of the liberal accomplishments of the last century -- most importantly the New Deal/Great Society safety net and civil rights protections -- are very popular, which is why conservatives get power only when they don't oppose them.

But what's particularly remarkable is Goldberg's list of examples: "bussing, racial quotas, gay marriage, Title IX." He can't even cherry pick four without destroying his underlying argument. Busing, I'll give him, was unpopular and in some cases ordered by courts (although I'd love to hear what he would have done as a federal judge facing school boards with long histories of transparent constitutional violations trying to nullify judicial opinions striking down school segregation). But the states in which judicial decisions have legalized gay marriage or civil unions are also states where the practice is hardly unpopular. But, you might say, maybe he's discussing institutional procedures rather than public opinion per se? Then it gets worse for him, because affirmative action is a case where conservatives want judges to ram a policy "down the throats" of publicly accountable officials. (It's also worth noting that the claims of conservative heroes Scalia and Thomas that the Constitution forbids affirmative action in all cases, while a plausible reading of the text, is completely inconsistent with their alleged "originalism." The idea that the 14th Amendment was understood at the time of its ratification to forbid even racial classifications that were intended to ameliorate injustices is frankly absurd, which is presumably why neither Scalia or Thomas has ever bothered to defend their outcomes in "originalist" terms.) And Title IX was dutifully passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President. There's no coherent democratic theory here; just a bald conviction that if reactionaries don't like a policy outcome it must be undemocratic irrespective of what institution is responsible or whether or not the policy is popular.

--Scott Lemieux

JONAH GOLDBERG, WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION? Brad's Battlestar Galactica article reminded me of this gem (discovered by Scott) from Jonah Goldberg, written in response to episode 2-17:

In a society scientifically so much more advanced, it seems to me that the issue would no longer be controversial one way or the other. Either contraceptive technology would have "solved" the problem. Or moral dogma about abortion's acceptable parameters would have been long established.

--Robert Farley

RISK ASSESSMENT: HACKER RESPONDS. Don't miss Jacob Hacker's response to Schmitt, Klein, and Yglesias.

--The Editors

BUT WHAT KIND OF POPULISM? My friend Cliff Schecter has a new article lauding the populist approach of Midwestern and border state Democrats. I'm always happy to see such pieces, mainly because it would be good if part of the post-election narrative for Democrats, assuming they win, is that a resurgent populist appeal pushed them over the finish line. I would, however, be grateful if writers began defining their terms a bit. The fact that these politicians are populist is simply asserted -- what the label means beyond thinking economic hardship is bad is never explained.

There are many different types of populist appeals and many different ways to frame them. Among those which Democrats are assumedly not engaging in are tirades against the Jews and rants deriding intellectuals. Hopefully, they are recognizing the value of some healthy anticorporate sentiment. But it would be good to know who's doing what, and how it's working. Looking at poll numbers, overwhelming majorities of Republicans feel power is too concentrated among corporations and believe government regulation is necessary to protect the public interest. That bespeaks a potential for an anticorporate, pro-government populism we've not seen in awhile. But these articles rarely explain if Democrats are taking that step, or if they're puttering to a close with boilerplate about health care costs and profits.

----Ezra Klein

INCOHERENT LIKE A FOX. OK, do your best with what in the world this means. This is Bush during his roundtable with conservative columnists:

This stuff about "stay the course" -- stay the course means, we're going to win. Stay the course does not mean that we're not going to constantly change.

--Spencer Ackerman

LOOK OUTWARD. I’ve admired Katha Pollitt’s work for years and was thrilled to see she took the time to respond to my essay on the lack of women opinion columnists. Pollitt makes some excellent points; indeed, Gail Collins was hardly the sole decision maker when it came to hiring and promoting New York Times columnists. That’s why I wanted to take the focus off Collins and ask some larger questions about the significance of the debate on women in journalism. I believe it’s important to expand the parameters of this discussion: If we’re going to obsess over the number of women with magazine bylines and on newspaper op-ed pages, we shouldn’t disconnect those discussions from concerns about the lack of women congressional representatives, governors, mayors, and state legislators.

This doesn’t mean, as Pollitt writes, that I issue “an invitation to editorial complacency.” In fact, I argue explicitly in my piece for byline gender quotas, as put forth by Ann Friedman, to force editors to reach out to female writers as well as expand their definition of the topics worthy of emphasis and coverage. What I'd like to see is a broader conversation about why the media favors certain topics within which female thought-leaders are vastly underrepresented. It’s almost too obvious to point out that as long as our government is dominated by men, our public institutions will continue to favor men and our political debates will continue to be limited, giving women and their concerns short shrift.

Committed feminist editors like Katrina vanden Heuvel make a huge difference in the pages of their publications. But committed feminist legislators are just as important when it comes to shifting our political discourse and engaging women in policy debates. It is the same phenomenon keeping women out of electoral politics that keeps them out of opinion journalism and other fields: self-perpetuating institutions built to favor men and advance their interests. So while journalists should certainly look inward to address the inequities in our profession, we must also look outward, and remember the widespread gender disparities that exist across American life. Journalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither should debates about women’s role in it.

--Dana Goldstein

BAD OMEN. There's a great moment near the beginning of the movie Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman and his agent are arguing about a play that Hoffman's roommate has written for him. In the play, Hoffman is to play a man who moves back into the toxin-poisoned neighborhood of Love Canal. The agent (played by director Sidney Pollack) finally explodes, "Nobody will pay to watch people living next to chemical waste. They can see that in New Jersey."

This came to mind earlier this afternoon when, while listening to Al Franken's radio program, he told me to stay tuned to hear from Howard Fineman.

Good god, Al. Howard Fineman?

Is there a broadcast outlet of any kind in America where I can't see Howard Fineman, so reliably banal a fount of conventionality that he makes David Broder look like Thomas Pynchon? I swear, last week, I saw Fineman marching in the Texas band at halftime of the Nebraska game, bidding high on a nut straight on the World Series of Poker, warming up in the Cardinals bullpen, chasing sharks off New Zealand, and being trussed up and stuffed into an oven on the Food Network so as to be served this season as the Christmas goose.

Nobody is rooting harder for Air America to succeed than I am. I like the new morning zoo crew, and Randi Rhodes is a hoot. (In Boston, we get lovable goofball Stephanie Miller at midday and stolid old deerslayer Ed Schultz on evening-drive, instead of the AA shows in those timeslots.) But the network's flagship program can't be giving me Howard Fineman. It just can't. Maybe, instead, it should just run the audio of Bob Corker's new TV ad from Tennessee.

--Charles P. Pierce

SEPERATE AND UNEQUAL. To follow up on my general concerns about federal rules intended to make single-sex education more common, Brad Plumer cites the details of the ACLU's suit against gender-based education in Louisiana, which persuasively cites evidence that this education reinforces gender sterotypes. More concerns expressed here and here. I also agree that it's important to make distinctions between K-12 and higher education here; unless the programs involved are very specialized (like VMI), having single-sex univiersities is much less likely to foreclose opportunities for women than single-sex high schools.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BATTLESTAR GALACTICONS. Sadly, No!'s Brad Reed analyzes the pervasive and frightening phenomenon of sci-fi-influenced conservative foreign policy punditry. Galacticons, dorko-fascists, and jingonauts -- read the whole thing, it's an eye-opening assessment.

--The Editors

TRYING TO STEELE YOUR VOTE. They just love to distort. Michael Steele's got a new ad featuring his sister defending his position on stem cell research. "There’s something you should know about Michael Steele," she says. "He does support stem cell research, and he cares deeply for those who suffer from disease. How do I know? I’m Michael Steele’s little sister. I have MS, and I know he cares about me." Anyone remember this?

Even as [Steele] berated the president, the candidate allowed that he opposes a pullout from Iraq, agrees with Bush's veto of human embryonic stem cell research, and supports constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and flag burning.

--Ezra Klein

AFGHAN WIGS. Rob, I liked your piece defending the worthy invasion of Afghanistan. If I can make one criticism: early in the piece you ask, "If we’ve come to the conclusion now that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, then how do we evaluate the disaster on the other side of Iran?" I don't see how a reevaluation of Afghanistan follows from the disaster in Iraq, except as something of an academic exercise. For the reasons that you ably explain, these are really different wars, with really different objectives and fought for really different reasons. It's an annoying trope of Christopher Hitchens's, among others, to intimate that calls for withdrawal from Iraq are merely one symptom of a general bug-out tendency on the left, rather than a discrete analysis of Iraq qua Iraq. I know that's not what you're up to, but it's worth keeping the distinctions in mind.

Second -- and at the risk of undermining my point -- the question we need to be asking ourselves about Afghanistan is: what now? That is, evaluating Afghanistan qua Afghanistan, we're certainly not seeing much in the way of clarity from the Bush administration on what the objectives are, and if ever there's a recipe for an open-ended military deployment, there it is. Not that that's a bad thing -- with Pakistan opting to give up fighting al-Qaeda, and a resurgent Taliban, there's quite a lot of opportunity for al-Q to reestablish operations in their lost Afghan home, which readers of Peter Bergen's books know has a seriously romantic mystique for them. That's the sort of situation where we should be keeping U.S. forces around -- but we should be, you know, debating this, rather than watching it happen through drift.

--Spencer Ackerman

IF YOU LIKE THE WAR ON (SOME CLASSES OF PEOPLE WHO USE SOME) DRUGS, YOU'LL LOVE ABORTION CRIMINALIZATION. Jill Filipovic, while discussing the incredibly draconian new abortion ban set to be enacted in Nicaragua (which doesn't even have an exemption of the life of the mother), points us to data which reinforces a point that should be central to pro-choice discourse: abortion bans are failures even on their own terms. The Latin American nations which best reflect the combination of draconian bans, miserly social services, moralistic sex "education," and reactionary gender relations favored by most American pro-life groups also have very high abortion rates, much higher than those in most countries where abortion is not only legal but state-funded. Because affluent women have access to abortion even in regimes far more serious about enforcing bans than the United States ever was, and many women without the connections to get safe abortions will seek them on the black market, abortion bans are a remarkably ineffective (and inequitable) means of reducing abortion rates, and have all kinds of negative externalities (starting with the maiming and killing of women). If your primary goal is to punish women who engage in sexual choices you don't like, abortion bans make sense; if your goal is protecting fetal life, not so much. The combination of policies favored by pro-choicers are not only better for women's autonomy, but usually lead to fewer abortions as well.

For those interested in comparative abortion policy, with the caution that the law on the books doesn't always reflect the situation on the ground, Ann Friedman points us to this very valuable resource (which breaks down the current law within the states as well.) It makes a fellow proud to be a Canadian...

--Scott Lemieux

A WEBB OF LIES. A few quick points on the ostensibly grotesque sexual scenes in James Webb's fiction. The first is that it's rather remarkable how few of them there are. The guy's a war novelist -- and somehow, the testosterone pumping through those stories tends to enable no end of pornographic asides. And yet only three of the examples on George Allen's list are actually sexual in nature. One is a scene set in strip club where a stripper mounts a banana. Another has two male prisoners engaging in furtive mutual masturbation. And then there's the the real excerpt:

“A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”

The authoritative Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia covers 87 cultures in which it says there is no incest, just adults playing with, stroking, masturbating and sucking their baby's genitals: "Truk adults play with an infant's genitals...In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son...in Thailand, a Banoi mother habitually strokes her son's genitals."

"It's not a sexual act," Webb told Plotkin regarding the "Lost Soldiers" excerpt. "I actually saw this happen in a slum in Bangkok when I was there as a journalist. The duty of a writer is to illuminate his surroundings."

My guess? This is going to come out. Days one and two of this story will be very bad for Webb. Day three will not be. It's going to come out that these were strange and nightmarish remembrances from when Webb was overseas, fighting for his country. And Allen will look like a fool and a knave for trying to turn evidence of his war record into proof of perversion. This will give Webb the opportunity to speak of all he saw in Vietnam without seeming exploitive or opportunistic about. And Webb's service there, and the lesson it taught him, are not issues Allen wants on the agenda.

The book, by the way, was a terrific seller. And it did so well in no small part because it was endorsed and enthusiastically blurbed by one John McCain. Wonder what he'll say when he's asked about it.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT WE DIDN'T DO. Rob, in your piece defending the Afghanistan war, you imply that the massive support the U.S. enjoyed both in that moment and for that mission could've been used to achieve a variety of other goals: Iran, for instance, approached us in the days following, anxious to follow up on their cooperation with a Grand Bargain that would derail their nuclear program in response for security guarantees, better relations, and possible incentives from America. That about right? And given that our decapitation of the Taliban made us look strong (while our failed occupation in Iraq made us look weak), we could've bargained from a position of power and intimidation. In some ways, it's always seemed to me that the least forgivable aspects of the Iraq war aren't about the war itself, but the extraordinary moment and opportunities we sacrificed to pursue it.

Update: Iran's overtures, I'm reminded, where in the Spring of 2003, so after we'd entered Iraq. The groundwork, as Gareth Porter explains in his definitive article on the subject, was laid by the cooperation during the Afghanistan conflict (which the Bushies declined to use to open negotiations towards Iran), but the actual overture was nevertheless a few months after we invaded Iraq.

--Ezra Klein

GROW, MY MONSTERS, GROW! Yes, yes, economic growth (or possibly total collapse) is important for keeping the country relatively progressive, satisfied, and welcoming. Ben Friedman's book is genius, and we all forget it at our peril. The one thing about that thesis nobody mentions, though: The distribution of that growth matters. If we have a lot of economic growth (as we do now), but it's mostly going to the rich (as it is now), and the middle class is dissatisfied with the economy (as they are now), they're going to, among other thing, hate on the Mexicans (as they're doing now). Much as Friedman would predict. Growth matters, but it's not much without a modicum of just distribution. And right now, we don't have that. It's something the growth-boosters in the audience might want to keep an eye on.

Oh, and our growth is also slowing down. So that's two problems.

--Ezra Klein

TO COMRADE ADELE: Here here!

--Ezra Klein

OUTTA DA MARRIAGE BIZ. As a queer native of the Garden State, I applaud the state Supreme Court decision that orders the legislature of my native land to do the right thing and give us our rights. Like Scott, I'm down with the decision of the best damn state supreme court in the land, but perhaps for less thoughtful and realistic reasons: It gives me hope that the government might, one day, get out of the marriage business altogether.

Really, folks, marriage is a religious institution in which government has no business, except for the enforcement of the contract inherent in that sacred institution. I say, civil unions for everybody -- straights, gays, transgendered, omnisexuals, whomever -- and let the religious institutions determine on which couples they will confer the blessing of marriage.

--Adele M. Stan

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STILL THE RIGHT WAR. As the Iraq debacle has continued to lay bare the pitfalls of occupation, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan and Western forces remain bogged down there, five years after the initial U.S. invasion. Some observers are now starting to reconsider the wisdom of that war as well. Today, Rob takes up the question of Afghanistan and assesses in retrospect the case for invasion.

--The Editors

PROCEDURE MASKING SUBSTANCE. Tom Maguire objects to my suggestion that objections to the Supreme Court of New Jersey 's recent decision from (nominal) supporters of civil unions are, at bottom, substantive rather than procedural:

My personal opinion is that gay marriage or civil unions is fine if enacted by the state legislature but wrong if crammed down by judicial fiat. How would pollsters, or Mr. Lemieux, score that? Surely I am not alone in believing that process counts.

Maguire is, of course, correct that the fact that a majority of New Jersey's citizens support civil unions goes only to the questions of whether the decision is "countermajoritarian," and neither here not there in terms of the merits of the opinion. But he doesn't quote the passage where I actually address his point:

I would be interested in a more robust explanation of why nominal supporters of gay marriage such as Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds oppose these judicial decisions, which are based on a perfectly plausible (although contestable, and opposed by precedent) reading of equal protection clauses. It certainly can't be a general commitment to judicial deference to the legislatures in cases where the constitutional text is ambiguous--when the Supreme Court deferred to state legislatures in Kelo, for example, Reynolds and Volokh strongly disagreed, arguing that the Supreme Court should adopt a plausible (but contestable, and opposed by precedent) reading of the takings clause that would have the federal courts use a broad conception of "public use" to trump the judgments of elected officials.

The problem is that I don't see any evidence that, as a general rule, Reynolds or Volokh believe that exercises of judicial review based on ambiguous constitutional provisions represent cramming policy judgments down the throats of the public. (This may not be applicable to Maguire, although the stray references to Kelo I found on his blog suggest that he believes that the federal courts should, to use his purported vision of the democratic process, "cram" a judicially-determined conception of public use "down the throats" of the public against the will of elected officials.) And it's not just Kelo; Reynolds and Volokh also seem to support more aggressive Supreme Court policing of federal powers, for example. Moreover, given that Reynolds, Volokh and Maguire pre-empitvely oppose any judicial decision expanding marriage benefits irrespective of the text, history and precedents of an individual state's constitutional order, it's implausible that this is simply about the fine points of legal doctrine. "Process" matters here only in the trite sense that of course the courts shouldn't strike down laws without a constitutional basis, but given that there's surely at least a plausible argument that the denial of marriage benefits to same-sex couples is inconsistent with broad guarantees of equal protection, that doesn't do any real work in this case. What's going on here is that Reynolds et al. place a higher substantive value on the rights of property owners than on the rights of gay people. That's their privilege, but they should defend that rather than hiding behind banalties about judicial restraint that are clearly intertwined with substantive judgments about the merits of rights claims.

--Scott Lemieux

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT. Ezra, I really, really don't like disagreeing with Peter Bergen on al-Qaeda. You generally should be extremely wary of telling a guy who interviewed bin Laden that he's off-base. But, dude, you asked. Thanks, Ez, you're a good friend.

Let me start by saying that Peter is 100 percent right that bin Laden & co. want to take over Iraq. But, to expand a bit on a point that Blake made, "want" and "can" are two different things. Peter may be a bit skewed by his deep knowledge of Afghanistan here. It was pretty easy for al-Qaeda to adapt to a post-Soviet Afghanistan. From the evidence so far, that's really not the case in Iraq: not only do the Iraqi Sunnis really dislike al-Q, but Anbar province has even assembled its own anti-Qaeda death squad. There's only one thing that could stop the Sunnis from fighting al-Qaeda: their greater desire to fight us instead.

There's also a Machiavellian aspect here. To be extremely callous (given that we're talking about human life here), it's not exactly against U.S. interests to let Iraqi Sunni (and Shiite, for that matter) fury at al-Qaeda take its course. One of the most valuable, if underappreciated, weapons in our war-on-terrorism arsenal is the recognition among Muslims that no matter how bad they think we are, bin Laden doesn't exactly offer them a bright future. We would definitely reap the blame -- and we should -- for the ravages of the Iraqi civil war, but from the perspective of fighting al-Qaeda, as long as the bodies of the jihadis pile up, that's probably tolerable.

--Spencer Ackerman

RISK ASSESSMENT: SCHMITT CRASHES THE PARTY! Ok, not really. Mark Schmitt has swooped in with a worthy intervention into the Hacker-Klein-Yglesias discussion of The Great Risk Shift. Check it out, and wait for Hacker's response tomorrow.

--The Editors

JUST A GAME. Shakes on Limbaugh:

Limbaugh is just one of many loathsome characters who have made names for themselves by treating politics as a game, a fun and profitable little pastime that has no real-world consequences -- and the richer he gets, the more real a lack of consequences becomes for him. The luxury of staggering wealth means never having to worry about Social Security, or healthcare, or how much gas costs. It’s a game. Who cares.

And in that game, people like Michael J. Fox aren’t real people. They’re images on a screen, they’re pawns to be played. Stem cell research isn’t a real thing. It’s a political football. Safely nestled away from the real world in a radio studio, Limbaugh doesn’t want or need to think about the people he mocks, the people he uses to score a goal.

I like to say that if a neocon is a liberal who got mugged, a progressive is a conservative who got sick. You see it over and over: Andrew Sullivan is a lefty on gay rights, Nancy Reagan came to appreciate the importance of stem cell research, Bob Dole was for intervention in Bosnia (his doc in WWII was a Slav), and so on. A bit of personal experience goes a long way. But it's hard, when you're rich, to experience being poor. And it's hard, if you got rich, to realize you were lucky as well as good. And that paucity of insight impoverishes the discussion. It's not that folks who've had membership in a group will necessarily come to the right conclusions -- see my friend Ben "Badler" Adler for more on that -- but they'll at least know the stakes.

--Ezra Klein

PETER BOYER. Over at Open University, David Greenberg has a good post criticizing Peter Boyer's latest New Yorker piece, which in typical fashion combines plenty of good writing and colorful material with an unseemly internalization of right-wing talking points and caricatures of liberals. This reminds me to plug one of Matt's first web pieces as a young whippersnapper here at TAP -- the definitive (the only?) Peter Boyer hit piece. Give it a look.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SPEECHLESS. In the weirdest, scariest, and most hopeful story you'll read today, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has been functionally mute for the last year-and-a-half. He contracted Spasmodic Dysphonia, a rare, poorly understood affliction where the part of your brain that governs speech simply shuts down. You can still sing, and do public speaking, and talk to yourself, and engage in various other activities related to, but not using the same neural pathways as, normal speech. But you can't speak. No one has ever gotten better. As of today, Scott is the first. He did it by remapping his own brain.

--Ezra Klein

GET OUT OF AL-ANBAR, AND GET OSAMA. I'll take a stab at Ezra's call for reactions to this op-ed by Peter Bergen. Bergen writes:

Instead, we should focus on a minimalist definition of our interests in Iraq, which is to prevent a militant Sunni jihadist mini-state from emerging and allowing al-Qaeda to regroup. While withdrawing a substantial number of American troops from Iraq would probably tamp down the insurgency and should be done as soon as is possible, a significant force must remain in Iraq for many years to destroy al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Fortunately, the emergence of a "militant Sunni jihadist mini-state" is not as likely as Bergen thinks. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is actually fairly unpopular even in Al-Anbar and Diyala provinces, to the extent that the police chief in Baquba has said that they have been "driven out and finished off." What's more, General Casey is now openly admitting that "engagement with the resistance with a view toward decreasing violence and bring [sic] them in the political process" is a key component of its strategy (more speculation on that here from Marc Lynch). I would bet that the U.S. is demanding that insurgent groups show that they are willing to crush al-Qaeda in Iraq, and that they will not export violence once the U.S. leaves. We don't yet know if these negotiations are serious or merely a reprisal of previous failed efforts, but they present an intriguing alternative to Bergen's approach. Staying to fight al-Qaeda ourselves, in contrast, would prevent the broader Sunni Arab insurgency and tribal leaders from isolating and crushing al-Qaeda and entering the political game in earnest.

One more thing: can we get Osama, please?

--Blake Hounshell

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION. Here's Rep. Jean Schmidt, being stupid on the subject of a videotape on which she was, earlier, really stupid.

It is devoutly to be hoped that, if it does nothing else, a Democratic sweep in the upcoming elections might disenthrall the Republicans from the notion that they can collect anyone off the steam-grates of their party's boulevards, dress them up, and throw them out there to plague and pester the rest of us. Among its other effects, the "Gingrich Revolution" created a framework in which an incredible passel of fools, lightweights, mountebanks, kinky libertines, and public omadhauns managed to get themselves elected to Congress. I mean all of that as a compliment, by the way. It takes a formidable political machine to inflict on the rest of us such an unholy combination of The Story of O and Horse Feathers.

--Charles P. Pierce

WHAT ZALMAY FORGOT. While checking in on Steve Clemons' Washington Note, I came across this list from 2005 entitled "Ten Lessons for Nation-Building." I have a lot of respect for its author, Zalmay Khalilzad, as I think he's a pragmatic and able diplomat in a tough job (though he should have stayed in Afghanistan, where he was most effective).

Nevertheless, if you peruse Khalilzad's list you'll note a gaping hole: nowhere does he list the most important job of an occupying power, which is to provide security for the populace. Is it just a coincidence that the U.S. has never, in fact, been able to provide the safe and secure environment that the Army's new counterinsurgency manual (PDF) stresses is essential to winning popular support? Priorities matter.

--Blake Hounshell

MORE TROUBLE FOR SHAYS. Yesterday I doubted whether Rep. Chris Shays' challenger Diane Farrell had the deadlocked race sewn up now by her endorsement in The New York Times. Well, now Garance has a piece in The New Republic that should deliver a death blow to Shays. Apparently Shays has taken to bragging about his first venture into Iraq, leaving out the part about how, stopping en route in Qatar, a small middle-Eastern monarchy, he told an audience: "This nation, like my small state, has always played a large role in advancing participatory democracy, civil discourse, and stable commerce." But the scandal wasn't his royal ass-kissing -- it was how Shays, with his famously holier-than-thou stance on ethics, got there in the first place. According to Garance:

... despite his record of pushing for meticulous record-keeping, Shays's privately sponsored trip to Qatar was notably absent from his own annual federal financial disclosure form, filed in May 2004, in violation of House rules. Nor did he submit an amendment disclosing the sponsor of his Qatar trip until confronted in mid-October 2006 by The New Republic with internal Islamic Institute receipts for his plane tickets, which were provided by an Arab American source upset with Shays's foreign policy positions.

--Ben Adler

WINGER WEEK. Following up Pierce -- the president and vice president have said all sorts of great stuff to conservative journalists and commentators this week.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEPLORABLE. It is deplorable -- deplorable, my friends -- that political parties might use illness or the misfortunes of others to score political points, and it is exploitative -- exploitative, my friends -- that they would use videotaping equipment to bring this deplorable exploitation into our living rooms. And how do we know they're not faking it? It's either one, my friends. Why, if we let something like that happen, then who knows? A president might have to interrupt only the 43rd vacation of his administration to get back to work, and an actual doctor might use his professional credentials like a cheap tin drum, thereby rendering himself personally ridiculous, and his nascent presidential run a sad little circus act.

Deplorable, my friends. Can't have that.

--Charles P. Pierce

WHAT AL-QAEDA WANTS. Peter Bergen, who probably knows more about al-Qaeda than just about anyone else alive, argues in today's New York Times that withdrawal from Iraq would, indeed, be giving the terrorist group what they want. Al-Qaeda's aim, he argues, is to acquire a slice of territory that they can control. The likeliest spot is in the Sunni-dominated areas of central and western Iraq. To pull out would be essentially ceding those spots to al-Qaeda, and would fit the group's master narrative of American weakness.

It's worth noting that this is just one more way in which Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq was manna from heaven for bin Laden. Had Zawahiri mastered Manchurian technology and installed his controllable surrogate in the White House, he could hardly have done a better job. Not to engage in nostalgia for tyrants, but Saddam Hussein, for all his crimes, neither had WMDs nor any interest in ceding portions of his country to jihadists. That said, the situation is what it is, and Peter Bergen is a guy worth taking seriously. But I'd like to hear our own experts weigh in. Spence? Rob? Blake? What say you?

--Ezra Klein

THE MAJORITARIAN DIFFICULTY. Glenn Greenwald makes a very important point about yesterday's judicial decision in New Jersey:

The decision today is entirely consistent with the democratic will of New Jersey residents. The New Jersey legislature already enacted a domestic partnership bill two years ago which recognizes, and grants a whole array of marital rights to, same-sex couples. But the way the laws were written, some rights were still assigned only to "married" couples. The court decision today simply requires that those same-sex partnerships have all of the rights which are given to married couples. But New Jersey voters, through their representatives, already approved of recognition of same-sex relationships two years ago.

Speaking of which, I would be interested in a more robust explanation of why nominal supporters of gay marriage such as Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds oppose these judicial decisions, which are based on a perfectly plausible (although contestable, and opposed by precedent) reading of equal protection clauses. It certainly can't be a general commitment to judicial deference to the legislatures in cases where the constitutional text is ambiguous--when the Supreme Court deferred to state legislatures in Kelo, for example, Reynolds and Volokh strongly disagreed, arguing that the Supreme Court should adopt a plausible (but contestable, and opposed by precedent) reading of the takings clause that would have the federal courts use a broad conception of "public use" to trump the judgments of elected officials. And there's certainly no evidence that this decision will be unpopular among the citizens of New Jersey. Somehow, I suspect that if the marriage rights of heterosexual law professors rather than gay people were being arbitrarily denied, this concern with procedures would suddenly vanish.

--Scott Lemieux

A SLIP? Which of these are actually bad, and which are bad merely for the Republican Party?

Other developments were not encouraging, such as the bombing of the U.N. Headquarters in Baghdad, the fact that we did not find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and the continued loss of some of America's finest sons and daughters.

Then again, it's of course possible that President Bush cannot distinguish between the phrases "good for America" and "good for the Republicans".

--Robert Farley

CONFIRMED. So they gathered them all up from radio studios across this mighty land this week, and they threw them across the White House grounds. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, never has there been such a concentration of worthless bloviation collected in that hallowed place since the last time Warren Harding dined alone. Anyway, you just knew it would be a treasure trove of pure distilled wingnut poteen. And sure enough, courtesy of the invaluable Jonathan Landay, the folks at TPM found a tall glass of the real stuff right here.

Let us be entirely clear here. Vice-President Shoot-'em-In-The-Face doesn't believe that waterboarding is torture. John McCain believes it is. Waterboarding will continue. The "compromise" bill McCain crafted isn't worth the matches they used to set it on fire in the White House. John McCain either doesn't give a damn or he's an utter sap. There is no third alternative.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE COMING COUNTERMOBILIZATION ARGUMENT. In the wake of the decision of the Supreme Court of New Jersey that same-sex couples are entitled to the same benefits as heterosexual married couples (although not necessarily under the rubric of "marriage"), we're bound to hear a lot of speculation about how this will affect the upcoming election (which I'm sure will be forgotten should the Democrats take the House and pick up seats in the Senate.) As I have previously explained here on TAP, I think the effect of these decisions is often overstated, and there's no evidence that it matters whether it's legislation of litigation that leads to the policy change. I also don't think that it matters a lot whether the courts call the equal civil rights required for same-sex couples "marriage." One thing Jack Balkin leaves out of his otherwise fine account is that while the Goodridge decision was an important issue in the 2004 elections in Massachusetts, the pro-gay marriage side won. There's no indication at this point that the policy in Massachusetts will be any less stable than the one in Vermont; both seem like one the voters of the state can live with.

Matt Yglesias also makes an important point. We can argue about whether judicial decisions that advance minority rights are good for the Democratic Party, but claims that they're bad for the interests of minorities themselves are completely implausible. The important question to ask in such circumstances is "compared to what?" Gerald Rosenberg was correct in his landmark book The Hollow Hope to argue that Brown v. Board had almost no impact on school integration in the Deep South prior to the Civil Rights Act. Where I believe he is mistaken is to use this data to conclude that the courts are therefore "flypaper" that attract interest groups against their own interests. I'm sure the NAACP would have preferred a genuine legislative solution, but the option was not on the table -- the hammerlock of segregationists in the Senate meant that it couldn't even pass anti-lynching legislation, let alone desegregate the schools. (And what were they supposed to do, lobby the Alabama legislature?) Litigation wasn't the ideal option, but it was the best option. And the same is true of gay rights litigation. The initial victories in the battle for equal rights are very likely to be won in the courts, and there's no reason to believe that this will stop progress toward equal rights.

--Scott Lemieux

SELF-HATING LIBERTARIAN. Julian Sanchez poses an interesting question, in response to my earlier post on the nasty comments of Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-WY) to her wheelchair-bound Libertarian opponent Thomas Rankin ("If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face.") I asserted that Cubin's obnoxious remark was evidence that Republicans have it in for the disabled, as also demonstrated by various policies they promote. Julian responds:

[W]hile I don't know the details of Rankin's views on these topics -- his platform doesn't directly address them -- he sounds like a pretty straight-up, across-the-board libertarian. Which means, presumably, that he also opposes workplace discrimination laws as interference with private rights of association, opposes Social Security, and opposes government funding for medical research....

So, in the likely event that Rankin does hold these views... are we supposed to infer that he "has it in for" himself?

And my answer is yes, of course, you can be anti-disabled politically while being disabled yourself. Merely belonging to a group does not mean that you get some sort of free pass for taking actions that are hostile to its needs. While based on his views from my interview with him I would say Rankin does not have it for himself, in Julian's hypothetical he certainly would.

--Ben Adler

THE MINIMUM WAGE. Every once in awhile, I like to reengage the minimum wage debate. It's such an article of faith on the right that minimum wage increases lead to widespread unemployment, and such an intuitive argument, that society would have to be a pretty bizarre place not to abandon the wrongheaded policy altogether. Except for the fact that, intuitive as the argument may be, and faithful as its rightwing advocates may prove, there's just not much evidence that minimum wage increases have a measurable effect on unemployment.

The foundational study in this area -- which various economists have sought to confirm or reject, all with varying, and often contradictory, success -- is the Card/Krueger survey of New Jersey restaurants that found a slight positive impact on employment. Lots of controversy on that result, but now there's new data from Arindrajit Dube, Suresh Naidu, and Michael Reich checking out San Francisco's restaurants after they instituted an $8.50 minimum wage. As Kash Mansori points out, the results are best explained in this graph, which also shows neighboring Alameda, which didn't have a minimum wage bill passed:

As Kash explains, "The minimum wage goes up in one place, but doesn't change right next door. Employment in restaurants goes up in both places - if anything, by more in the place where the minimum wage went up...Putting all of these different types of papers together, my conclusion is that the best evidence that labor economists can gather from US data seems to indicate that we need not fear major employment losses if we were to increase the minimum wage. The effects may be slightly negative for teenagers, but overall the effect on jobs may be zero to even slightly positive."

Meanwhile, the invaluable folks at EPI have a briefing paper on the likely impacts of raising the national minimum wage to $7.25. For all the talk of teenagers and so forth, 80% of the 15 million affected workers would be older than 20, $7.3 million children would see their parent's income rise (46% of families with a mniimum wage worker rely mainly on that income), and so forth. Well worth a read.

Update: Relatedly, here's a recent letter signed by over 650 economists, including five nobel prize winners and six past presidents of the American Economic Association calling for an increase in the minimum wage. That's not to say opponents of an increase couldn't furnish a similar letter -- the point here is that there is not, as the right would like you to think, an economic consensus that raising the wage would be a bad thing.

--Ezra Klein

GEORGE WILL, MAKING SENSE. Say what you want about George Will, he's always taken a rational approach to analyzing the business side of sports, and his column today on college football is no exception. Will beats the usual dead horses about what's wrong with Division I-A men's college football and basketball: they're run for business rather than educational purposes, with their high television revenues and coaches salaries, and their low graduation rates. But he comes at it from a fresher angle, asking if universities should lose their tax-exempt status for these commercial rather than educational activities(George Will favors more taxes? This has to be a first.)

The only problem with the piece is that Will seems to buy into the standard approach to this issue, which is to suggest ways of scaling back the business side of college sports and improving the academic experience for college athletes. Clearly, the business is too lucrative, and the fans are too crazed, for this to ever happen. Rather, as I've argued before, college athletics should be spun off from the schools that sponsor them. College athletes who are clearly not academically qualified should be paid an actual salary, commensurate with their monetary value, rather than being given tuition to a school they will never get a degree from. Will is right about the problem, but his hope that "embarassing" the college athletic directors into better behavior will solve the problem is naive. People who see the fundamental problems with college sports must accept that the whole "student-athlete" paradigm is outdated and only a radical solution will make a real change.

--Ben Adler

NOT EVEN SIX DEGREES. While Brother Pierce expounded on the absurdity of the Heaton-Caviezel-Suppan (et al) television spot thrown together in response to Michael J. Fox's latest star turn as an advocate for stem-cell research, my ears pricked up at the mention of the name of Patricia Heaton, whose face graces the misleading Feminists for Life ad that has run on this web site off and on for the last month. As I reported here last week, Feminists for Life is closely allied with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and took funding from the bishops for its first ad campaign.*

Now comes this television spot featuring Heaton that makes a case against a Missouri ballot measure, Amendment 2, that would, according to a pro-amendment editorial in the Kansas City Star, "guarantee Missouri scientists the right to conduct all forms of stem-cell research permitted under federal law." The ad, will air tonight during the World Series, during which Suppan is slated to pitch. The ad, which falsely claims the amendment to be a veiled attempt to constitutionally protect human cloning, is sponsored by a group called Missourians Against Human Cloning, whose spokesperson is Cathy Cleaver Ruse. Ms. Ruse, currently a fellow at the Family Research Council, served until 2004 as the director of planning and information for the Pro-Life Secretariat of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). That post is now held by Deirdre McQuade, who came to the bishops from her position as spokesperson for Feminists for LIfe.

Working in coalition with Missourians Against Human Cloning is the Missouri Catholic Conference, a group that so cherishes the uniqueness of human life that it drafted the 1999 Missouri bill, later struck down in court, that would have categorized the killing of a doctor who performs abortion a justifiable homicide.

* This sentence fixed.

--Adele M. Stan

FALLING OUT OF LOVE. Back when The New York Times endorsed Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary, I wondered whether the Times would break from their tradition of high-minded endorsements for moderate Republicans this fall. It would seem strange, after all, if the same page that opposed Joe Lieberman on the grounds that Congress must be a watchdog rather than an enabler of the Bush presidency run-amok, endorsed, as it always had in the past, the more conservative (and actual Republican) Rep. Chris Shays, also of Connecticut. Well, today the question was answered, very articulately. The Times notes:

[A]s his party has moved to the right, Mr. Shays has taken more and more stands with which we have profound disagreement. His position on immigration reform is far closer to the crabbed, xenophobic stance of the House Republicans than the fairer, bipartisan approach of the Senate. During the campaign, his remarks about the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison -- which he minimized as “something less than torture” -- were disturbing.

I'm not sure about Ryan Lizza's suggestion that the Times endorsement of Shays' opponent, Diane Farrell, will tip the deadlocked race. Yes, the Times is widely read in the upscale district. But the Times is also widely read on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and it still swung for Mike Bloomberg in the 2001 New York City mayoral race (when the Times endorsed Mark Green.) Whatever its impact on the race, though, it's notable to see the Times editorial page go against one of its long-favored sons.

--Ben Adler

MORE ON THE COLLEGE BOARD REPORT. Just to add a bit to Ezra's post: As James Surowiecki recently explained in The New Yorker, the cost of college rises faster than inflation because it is so labor intensive that the technological advances that reduce the costs of production in other industries do not have nearly the same cost-saving effect on higher education. And government subsidies of higher education and tuition, like the Pell Grant, have failed to keep pace, when they should be increasing in response to this problem. There are plenty of common-sense proposals out there, including some that would actually save the government money, like switching to direct student loans (rather than government guaranteed loans from private corporations.) American students have not generally been nearly as active in organizing around these issues as their European counterparts, though the folks I work for are trying to change that.

--Ben Adler

THE ECONOMY ROCKS. According The College Board, tuition costs are far outpacing inflation this year. In fact, "[i]n the report, the board also found that in the past five years, tuition and fees at public institutions rose more than at any other time in the past 30, increasing by 35 percent to $5,836 this academic year." Yikes. The report attributed the cost increases to declining state and federal support. Unsurprisingly, when you cut taxes, you just end up paying more elsewhere. With the tax cuts, however, the rich got far more back than the poor or the middle class. So far as tuition costs go, the prices fall equally (or get transferred to students in the form of loans). Just another reason the Bush economy rocks. If only Senator Bluto were around to make this an issue...

--Ezra Klein

RISK ASSESSMENT. Ezra's first submission in the exchange with Jacob Hacker is now up. Hacker will be responding to him and Matt tomorrow.

--The Editors

GENDER SEGREGATION AND SEXISM. Becks of Unfogged is appalled that the ACLU and a feminist group are threatening to sue over a federal decision to permit more single-sex public education. I think the issue is a little more complex, however. I do agree with Becks that the equation of gender and racial segregation by Nancy Zirkin is excessively simplistic, and probably the former is somewhat more defensible than the latter when education is concerned. Current Supreme Court jurisprudence would seem to agree. In her landmark opinion ruling Virginia's exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute, Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that "[s]ingle sex education affords pedagogical benefits to at least some students, Virginia emphasizes, and that reality is uncontested in this litigation," and implied that if Virginia offered a school for women comparable to VMI, its exclusion of women from VMI itself would be defensible.

However, the VMI case also suggests that there is serious cause for concern. Virginia lost the case because the alternative school offered by the state was not only inferior in terms of credentials, the scope of degrees offered, and other academic credentials, but also didn't provide the "adversative" method used by VMI. In other words, Virginia excluded women from a particular form of education based on gender stereotypes, and offered a watered-down, academically inferior alternative. The women excluded from VMI were right to litigate, and the Court was right uphold their claims. So while I think that the constitutionality of the new federal rules will depend on the facts of their implementation, at the very least I hope that feminist groups will be vigilant: there is significant room within single-sex education for sexist assumptions about what women can accomplish. Given the Bush administration's attitude toward Title IX (also see here), and the kind of people it's appointing to the Supreme Court, I'm rather less sanguine about its motives than Becks.

--Scott Lemieux

BUSINESS FOR SPITZER. Speaking of business, this endorsement of Elliot Spitzer, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, by a former executive vice president of Morgan Stanley, is interesting stuff. The argument, which others have made from the outside but Donald Kempf makes from experience, is that Spitzer's style of anti-corporate populism is a boon, rather than a threat, to capitalism in general and business in particular:

Mr. Spitzer often had a better grasp of the underlying facts, legal implications and policy considerations than many from the federal regulatory agencies. Discussions (sometimes debates) with him on the substance of matters were both focused and fruitful. He was especially constructive when it came to searching for sensible solutions that would facilitate firms resolving problems and getting back to running their businesses for the benefit of customers, employees and shareholders.

Moreover, because he is both smart and self-assured, Mr. Spitzer is willing to engage where others at times seek to hide behind their regulatory status. Ask him, "How can you justify that?" and he will answer you. (Sometimes quite aggressively, to be sure, but he will answer you.) Ask the same of someone from a federal agency involved in the same matter and the reply you're apt to get is often something like, "We don't have to justify (or even explain) our actions to you. We are the ones officially charged with this area of responsibility. We have made our determination and that is the end of it."[...]

Still, the story line runs something like this: Why is this guy Spitzer "meddling" in stuff over which the feds already exercise jurisdiction? The answer, of course, goes all the way back to the founding of the country and the federalist system we adopted back then. At the end of the day, far from being an officious intermeddler, Mr. Spitzer has proven to be a catalyst for constructive change.

--Ezra Klein

BUT HE STARTED IT. I've long been of the opinion, in all seriousness, that Republicans have it in for the disabled. First there is their positioning regarding discrimination against people with disabiilties in the workplace (President Bush, for instance, has repeatedly appointed judges who are extraordinarily hostile to discrimination claims). Then there is their desire to eviscerate social insurance programs that support people with disabilities, like Social Security, and recently there has been their opposition to funding for potentially life-improving stem cell research.

My suspicions have now been confirmed, at least in the case of one Congresswoman, Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-WY). As pointed out yesterday on Midterm Madness, Cubin's Libertarian challenger, Thomas Rankin, says she approached him after a campaign debate on Sunday and said, "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face." What chair she was referring to? The electric wheelchair that Rankin, who has multiple sclerosis, gets around in, when he isn't working from home in a hospital bed. And the Caspar Star Tribune reports, "The Cubin campaign did not deny the remark, but a spokesman for the six-term congresswoman said Rankin started the exchange." Apparently she thinks the "But he started it" is a legitimate defense for her remarks.

--Ben Adler

END OF DENIAL? A curious headline popped up on the New York Times homepage today: "Bush Offers Gloomy Assessment of Iraq." In an Associated Press story on remarks by the president delivered this morning from the East Room of the White House, Bush, against precedent, actually spoke of the number of deaths suffered by American troops this month -- 93 so far. The AP described the occasion of the president's foray into the reality-based community as "a speech and question and answer session at the White House 13 days before midterm elections." A last-gasp attempt, apparently, to close that credibility gap.

The White House likely finds itself stung by yesterday's MSNBC/McClatchy poll, which shows the war in Iraq having a serious impact on the Senate races. Most unnerving, one would think, is the close race between Harold Ford, Jr., and Bob Corker in Tennessee, in which the Democrat advocates a plan for an American pullout after dividing Iraq into three autonomous regions.

--Adele M. Stan

PILING ON KAPLAN. As Spencer notes below, Larry Kaplan apparently fears that Americans will not want to invade other countries in order to install democracy after recoiling in horror from what's happening in Iraq. Kaplan writes as if there isn't a robust democratization literature that, although it hasn't definitively settled every question, has at least achieved consensus on some big-bucket factors that make a country a good candidate for democracy.

Though there are some important scholars (notably Max Weber) who laid the groundwork in different areas, the democracy literature generally started back with Seymour Lipset's seminal 1959 journal article, Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy, which laid out a number of conditions under which democracies develop and thrive. (Lipset is no stranger to neoconservative circles, as for instance it was Nathan Glazer who urged him to develop this article and a number of others into his famous book Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. A writer for Commentary magazine observed in 1961 that the book "once again demonstrated his preeminent position in the fields of both sociology and political science." Given these credentials, Kaplan should have been exposed to Lipset at some point.)

Lipset's criteria -- among them economic wealth, an open class system, an egalitarian value system, a capitalist economy, a high literacy rate, legitimate and efficient institutions, and high participation in voluntary organizations (no, militias don't count!) -- were not meant to be rigid, but by any measure, Iraq was never a good candidate. Throw in the oil, the ethno-sectarian cleavages, Saddam's decimation of society, the intolerance of radical Islamist politics, a historical rejection of colonialism, and you have the current mess on your hands. Any "democracy promotion" doctrine shouldn't simply chuck what we've learned over the last 50 years about democracy in favor of a policy of mere wishful thinking. Otherwise we will just be wasting American lives, dollars, and prestige in a fruitless enterprise.

--Blake Hounshell

THE SPECIAL INTERESTS GO MARCHING ON AND ON, HURRAH, HURRAH... The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article chronicling the desperate attempts of various rapacious and over-indulged industries to spend the Republican majority into safety. The piece starts with the drug industry, whose sweetheart deal preventing Medicare from centrally bargaining drug prices will, according to Nancy Pelosi, be overturned within the first 100 hours of Democrats taking control. Hoping to head that off, the industry has donated almost $14 million, 70% of it to Republicans.

In total, the 2006 midterms are forecast to be the most expensive ever, costing $2.6 billion. Three-quarters of this, or $1.85 billion, will come from business interests. That's a sobering statistic: In this age of people-powered politics and netroots-driven donating, it's easy to forget that business interests still fund the mechanisms of our "democracy." That doesn't change if Democrats take control, and there's a real question if, when business lobbyists begin knocking on their doors and promising the money needed for retention of their fledgling majority, they'll be able to role back some of the grotesque corporate giveaways that Republicans enacted because industry lobbyists knocked on their doors and offering the money needed for majority protection. As the old saying goes, business has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, just permanent interests. And the same can be said for politicians.

--Ezra Klein

THE STEM WEDGE. Apropos of my earlier post, Jim Talent can probably consider himself lucky that Claire McCaskill's only throwing Michael J. Fox at him. If you want to see some real chin music, take a look at this ad on a similar theme, which is being run against Josh Marshall's old pal, Count (Chris) Chocola, and in a number of other races across the country. (Thanks to the redoubtable Mr. TBogg for the original tip). The beauty of stem-cell research as a wedge issue is that it not only forces the Republicans to defend the most radical of their Christianist allies -- note that the star-studded extravaganza from Missouri doesn't even mention religion, but has Jesus Caviezel mumbling Aramaic in front of some graven image -- but it also subtly positions the party as grotesquely anti-science. There are still enough people alive who remember that scientific achievement was one of the ways we were going to defeat the godless Russian Commies. Hell, we put a man on the moon and invented Tang, Vel-Cro, and Teflon along the way.

And the best non-Rapture answer the GOP can come up with is, "Well, there aren't any breakthroughs yet and there never may be any." (This, of course, is not to mention Mrs. Raymond's fear of a Clone Army marching on Jefferson City.) Who hates America now?

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PAST IMPERFECT. Historian Jason Sokol assesses Deval Patrick's historic gubernatorial bid in Massachusetts (a race that gets more brutal by the week) in the context of the Bay State's checkered racial past.

--The Editors

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE, HOLD ON. My buddy Lawrence Kaplan tries to salvage the Bush Doctrine from the Iraq war. His argument is that critics of the war risk learning too much from the failure in Iraq: the antidote to tyranny is democracy, even if it didn't turn out so well in Baghdad, and dangerous dudes will still need to be preempted.

One really, really important -- and revealing -- aspect of this argument is shown by its very absence. A word that doesn't appear in Lawrence's piece is al-Qaeda. You remember them: they killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and they're into killing many, many more. The Bush Doctrine started as a way to stop them. In his January 2002 State of the Union, Bush opted to conflate the threat from al-Qaeda into a threat from Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il and Ayatollah Khameini. It wasn't just cynicism, it reflected a misdguided but deep belief, as Doug Feith later put it, that "Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states." It doesn't take a genius -- much less the "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" -- to see that this is simply wrong: al-Qaeda doesn't have Afghanistan, or even Iraq, and it's plenty dangerous.

The heart of the matter is this: Yes, the Bush Doctrine needs to die an unmourned death in Iraq, along with the thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqis that it's killed. It has obviously failed as a counterterrorism strategy, and doesn't have any successes to speak of. Lawrence may define it on the level of platitude -- democracy good, bad people bad -- but if that's the case, any number of saner strategies can still incorporate the aspects of it he likes. Let's get back to work.

--Spencer Ackerman

EVERYBODY'S A MCCAINIAC. Yglesias relates this little gem:

He has a long time proclivity for suggesting that someone like James Baker or Brent Scowcroft might make a good envoy to try to re-start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Later, McCain qualifies that to say he "would appoint someone to go to the region who was well regarded: Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, George Mitchell, Tony Zinni, Bill Kristol, Randy Scheunemann.

This statement is about as McCain as McCain can get. By suggesting envoys as far apart as George Mitchell and Bill Kristol (!!!?!), he's letting everyone who has an interest in this question know that he's on their side. To liberal hawks he's a careful, reasonable liberal hawk. To conservorealists he's a staunch "Poppy" Bush realist. To sociopathic neocons, he's a raving fellow traveller. Moreover, every reader can dismiss everyone else's favorite choice as electoral posturing. Heck, he might as well toss James Dobson and Noam Chomsky on the list so that he can get full coverage of the political spectrum.

Why can't people see through this guy? He's as transparent as glass.

--Robert Farley

ANSWER RECORD. The moving -- and, it must be said, very tough -- commercial on behalf of Missouri Democratic senatorial candidate Claire McCaskill featuring Michael J. Fox has sent the usual suspects into orbit. But it's done more than give Rush Limbaugh another apparent excuse for a couple hundred more milligrams of high dudgeon. It's required the GOP to muster all of its celebrity star power to put together this ad, which, while not aimed at the senatorial race per se, is pretty clearly a response to the Fox spot.

So, if you're keeping score at home, it is now Alex P. Keaton vs: a) the star of Mel Gibson's Galilean snuff film; b) a guy who was lucky to escape the New England Patriots alive; c) the best player on a worthless baseball franchise; d) Mrs. Raymond, and e) the pitcher who singlehandedly turned the 2004 World Series toward the Boston Red Sox. (Thanks again, Jeff.) The ad raises a number of serious questions. First, what language is Bloody Gobs o'Meat Jesus speaking there at the beginning? Also, why is Kurt Warner apparently talking to us from a juvenile-detention facility? And also, why does everyone sound like they're talking from the bottom of a well? And lastly, in case it escaped the ad wizards who dreamed up this mess -- Michael J. Fox didn't do the McCaskill spot just because he was a famous person. He did it because he is a famous person who has Parkinson's disease, and thus can be reckoned to be more of an expert on the topic than Mrs. Raymond. I was prepared for things to get ugly. Stupid caught me by surprise.

--Charles P. Pierce

HONESTY. Almost all of the state reporting on the Maryland Senate contest has focused on race. Given that Republican Michael Steele is black and Democrat Ben Cardin is white in a state with one of the largest and some of the most affluent African-American populations, a certain degree of focus on the subject is surely warranted. And finally, one of the candidates has uttered something noteworthy on the issue.

Steele was asked earlier this week by The Washington Times if he thought race was a factor in the election. After talking about his chances with black voters, the Republican nominee turned the focus onto his own partisans (which is to say, mostly whites), and said:

Will [race] be a factor in this race? Absolutely it will. You have to go into this race with your eyes wide open. You can't sit back and pretend that everybody is going to love you just because you are a member of their party or you hold their values.

--Tom Schaller

THE GOODS ON BROOKS. JPod is, it must be said, genuinely and intentionally amusing here, mocking Andrew Sullivan's verbose blog responses to David Brooks's review of his new book. But amidst those posts on Sullivan's site is this email from a reader that seems to have the goods on Brooks's ultra-condescending schtick:

Reading David Brooks' review of your new book yesterday, I found myself focusing on the same passage that you highlighted in your response:

"When a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn't know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith."

Something about the passage struck a chord in the memory. It only took about ten minutes of googling to find the following passage from a column he wrote for The Atlantic in December of 2001:

"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We're more sophisticated and cosmopolitan - just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know. We don't know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though the novels they have co-written have sold about 40 million copies over the past few years. We don't know what James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by millions."

How can this passage be seen as anything but an effort, through the citation of Dobson and LaHaye's influence, "to capture the religious and political currents in modern America." Just asking.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WOMEN IN JOURNALISM. I certainly suggest folks read my friend Dana Goldstein's article on why Gail Collins, the retiring editor of The New York Times op-ed page, didn't do more for women in punditry. Dana takes the moment to meditate on the sorry state of women in political journalism. As she knows all too well from hanging out with the DC punditry set, to suggest our profession lacks gender equity is sort of akin to noting the vegetarian entrees at a steakhouse. Dana's argument is, in effect, to push the spotlight away from magazine staffs and towards elections:

Journalism is essentially an observational profession, and it makes sense that many women writers feel detached from a political world that not only showcases very few women, but also relegates “women’s issues” (these days, anything domestic in both senses of the word, whether public education, health care, issues of work-life balance, or student debt) to second-class status.

Indeed, we remind ourselves far too infrequently that the number of women in positions of national power remains miniscule, and that this affects what issues we debate when we write about “politics.” Women comprise just 15.1 percent of Congress and 22.8 percent of state legislatures. Of the 100 largest American cities, only 12 have female mayors. Just four of President Bush’s 15 cabinet members are women. There are only 8 female governors. Only one woman of color has ever served in the U.S. Senate.

As for whether the lack of women in elected office deters women from entering punditry, I fall with the explanations of Amy Sullivan, Maureen Down, and Schoolgirls. The answer comes not in campaigns, but classrooms, and even nursery rooms -- the whole culture of socialization that breeds boys to spout out their opinions and girls to demurely tuck their own away. Sexism accounts for a certain amount of the disparity in both progressive punditry and electoral politics (more in the latter than the former, I'd argue), but having looked at The Prospect's applicant pools, I know the number of female applicants is routinely far, far lower than male applicants. It's not all sexism. There are problems far before our editors get in a room and look over resumes.

One last, more personal anecdote: The people in this town, and particularly in this profession, are argumentative outliers. They are more brash, and loud, and opinionated then just about anyone you've ever met. Having always been the loudest debater in the room, I was stunned to get here and be easily talked over. This profession attracts -- and rewards -- an anomalistic personality type, one who thinks that, at 22, there's no reason they shouldn't critique politicians and argue with learned and famed elders (my understanding is that the gender gap is much smaller is reported news). So if most guys are raised to have X amount of confidence in their opinions, and women are raised to have X-2, that's going to create a huge disparity.

But confidence is taught. When my girlfriend and I met, she wasn't used to folks throwing down the argumentative gauntlet for any disagreement, and taking delight in the resulting heated debate. Now she'll routinely kick my ass. Which is why, in the end, I come down with Ann Friedman: For all the concerned chatter, the only way to change this is to change it, and create byline quotas in the profession. The excuses are too manifold -- and too convincing -- for the problem to be solved, and for editors to reach outside their comfort zone, without a concrete commitment. When they do, they'll find that what hasn't been taught, can be. Complaining about socialization may be correct, but it isn't particularly helpful.

--Ezra Klein

A LIGHT IS FLICKERING. Twelve to eighteen months now, and they can stand up and we can stand down. Maybe. General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad promised that within that timeframe, the Iraqi government will a) disarm the militias, b) quell the insurgency, and c) reach political compromise on the sectarian divisions that have torn the country apart. No word yet, of course, on whether it will also give every Iraqi a pony.

The Bush administration has proven itself very good at meeting its deadlines in Iraq. The June 30, 2004 handover of "sovereignty" took place ahead of schedule; the January 2005 election went off as planned; so too did the October 15, 2005 constitutional referendum and the December 15, 2005 election of a permanent government. What got lost in the mix was the meaning of these dates -- that is, in order to meet every benchmark, and thereby demonstrate "success" in Iraq for a news cycle or two, the administration joyfully overlooked the fact that each of these developments occurred before a lasting political-sectarian compromise was reached, and so they each contributed to ripping Iraq apart instead of putting it back together. Now Iraq is beyond American assistance, which is why Donald Rumsfeld has been saying lately that it's all up to the Iraqis in response to every question he's asked.

And yet, on schedule, after each benchmark simply denotes a new milestone in Iraq's deterioration, General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad emerge to tell us that success is still achievable and that they see light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, they should probably just tell us that, so we know with a wink and a nod that they don't believe this crap themselves. Or will we have to wait until their memoirs to learn that?

--Spencer Ackerman

CENTER OF GRAVITY. The consensus is that Baghdad is the center of gravity for the conflict in Iraq. The military has tried to spin this in a positive way; the battle of Baghdad is where the insurgency can be defeated. But this isn't really what's going on. Baghdad is a center of gravity, but not for the insurgency.

Carl Von Clausewitz introduced the "center of gravity" concept in On War. More or less, it refers to the source of a combatants' strength, which, if captured or destroyed, would deprive an enemy of the means to continue. It can represent anything from a battlefleet to a province to more nebulous concepts like morale and legitimacy. Were the battle of Baghdad successful, the insurgency would be deprived of Baghdad as a base of operations and presumably as a target, but it wouldn't be destroyed. Most insurgencies don't expect to slug it out on the streets of the national capital, preferring to operate in areas where central authority is weak. Baghdad can't be the center of gravity for the insurgency, and no U.S. victory in Baghdad could prove decisive in the sense of bringing about, you know, a decision.

However, Baghdad is the center of gravity for the U.S. and the Iraqi government. If the U.S. can't provide security in the capitol (and it looks like we can't), then the occupation is as done as done. Since Baghdad is the media center of Iraq, chaos there affects the rest of Iraq, the international community, and the U.S. homefront. For the Iraqi state the stakes are higher, since the attacks threaten the central government's tenuous grip on power. Noting that the war is going poorly doesn't exactly represent a brilliant insight, but it's important to understand that the battle going on in Baghdad right now is a defensive one in which the cores of the occupation and of the Iraqi government are under attack. In other words, it's rather more desperate than is being depicted.

--Robert Farley

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IT'S THE POLITICS, STUPID. Dana Goldstein assesses Gail Collins' tenure as New York Times editorial page editor and weighs in on the ongoing debate over women's underrepresentation in political punditry. The lack of female pundits isn't the real problem, she says; it's the lack of female politicians.

--The Editors

EXPERIENCE MATTERS. This warning from John Judis is, I think, an apt one for a Democratic Party that may be willing to trample its own better instincts to recapture power:

I wouldn't say that winning a presidential primary contest, or even the general election, is adequate preparation for being president. I'm skeptical about senators without significant foreign policy experience and governors from small states with little national experience or from large states who had little responsibility in office.

John Kennedy was a two term senator, but he spent much of his two terms campaigning for president, and when he became president, made two very serious errors in foreign policy in his first year--sanctioning the Bay of Pigs invasion and appearing weak to Khrushchev in Vienna. Lyndon Johnson knew how to get domestic policy passed, but had little experience in foreign affairs, and it showed immediately in his decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush made initial missteps in foreign and domestic policy.

The presidents who didn't screw up immediately -- however their presidencies turned out -- were Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush Sr. had extensive foreign policy experience, and Reagan was a two-term governor of the country's most important state, and had been involved in national politics for decades.

--Ezra Klein

THE GREAT RISK SHIFT DEBATE. Sam hasn't done it yet, so allow me to recommend Matt's rejoinder to Jacob Hacker's Great Risk Shift argument. You're already hearing a ton about Hacker's book, but so far, most of the reviews and rundowns I've seen have either been uncritically laudatory or hackishly off-base. Matt's criticism, that Hacker's book marks a perpetuation of the "Third Way" unwillingness to discuss inequality, is the second most perceptive critique I've read of Hacker. The most perceptive critique is mine, but that won't go up until later today. So for now, read Matt.

--Ezra Klein

MOLTO MARIO. God bless you, Mario Loyola of National Review. During these dark times, who will stand up to defend the Iraqi experiment in democracy? You will! To wit:

But as bad as the security situation is, I think Americans would feel differently if they knew the tenor of the political debate in Iraq -- how effectively every major issue is getting debated in the legislature, in the government, and in the press. Amidst all the violence, the democratic debate continues, and it is already sinking deep roots into the Iraqi psyche.

In one sense, of course, Mario is right: this push for raw sectarian advantage, a crucial step in entrenching the Iraqi civil war, was done entirely through the U.S.-sponsored political process. Iraqi democracy, or what passes for it, yielded this result. Mario apparently thinks this is a good thing, and this guy used to be a Pentagon consultant. He says that "the benefit of having a democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East will prove priceless long into the future," which is true, if he's talking about Iran. For us, it's more like a pitiful, bloody nightmare.

--Spencer Ackerman

YOU'VE DONE NOTHING BUT CAUSE HARM. Matt had Clash-blogging; I'll have Avail-blogging. The latest Mason-Dixon poll has George Allen slightly ahead of Jim Webb, albeit still within the margin of error. No one knows how the race will end up, but one group that had Allen's number way, way before Macaca-gate was the brilliant 1990s Richmond-based punk band Avail. Back on their classic 1996 album 4 a.m. Friday, they penned an anthem, "Governor," about then-Gov. Allen:

so don't talk to me
about all you're gonna do
and who you represent
and how you'll see it thru
i'm not buying who you're selling
you're selling you
and it just doesn't seem right
you've done nothing
but cause harm
and you want
praise
and i'm not gonna take it easy

--Spencer Ackerman

SACRE BLEU! Found on a job search board:

Immediate need for project-based native speaking linguists in Afghan Pashto, Farsi, Dari, and in Canadian French. No translation involved. Project involves creating phonetic pronunciations of translated phrases for militiary/intelligence use. Pashto, Dari and Farsi linguists selected must have current, colloquial, Afghan "street language" knowledge of their respective language. Canadian French must be Quebecois. The material is not formal or in a literary form of the language. Must be familiar with basic military/intelligence terminology. Compensation is hourly, to be negotiated. Professional references on linguistic ability requred [sic]. Reply to email listed.

--Blake Hounshell

WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES... The New York Times is picking up on Chris Bowers' brilliant "Use It Or Lose It" campaign, which seeks to force comfortable Democratic incumbents to donate 30% of their useless war chests in order expand the field of competitive seats. The Times leads with Martin Meehan, a safe, Massachusetts Democrat with $4.8 million in the bank. He's donated $355,000 to the DCCC.

Now, Meehan won in 2004 with nearly 70% of the vote. This year is a Democratic dream and he lacks a serious challenger. A 30% donation from him would be $1.44 million, more than enough to fund a couple smaller House races and offer the Democrats a cleaner, less compromised majority. But he has no intention of giving more money. In part, that's because he dreams of eventually running for Senate. In part, it's because he doesn't see why he should have to. Kerry's spokesman, David Wade, sounds similarly entitled:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, came under fire last week when it was pointed out that he had contributed only $15,000 this year to the party’s senatorial committee. Heyjohn.org, whose creator has remained anonymous, highlights the fact that Mr. Kerry has $14 million in his campaign accounts.[...]

“Cowards can hide behind anonymous Web sites,” Mr. Wade said, “but Democrats out in the country, party leaders and real net-roots activists know how hard John Kerry has fought to win these elections.”

As rejoinder to all this, Bowers and the netroots note that the richer Republicans incumbents have donated $2.3 million more to their party's efforts than have their Democratic counterparts. They list the rich, comfortable Democrats alongside how much money they have and whether they even face a challenge. They've gotten articles in The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe. And they've drafted MoveOn.org to deploy the e-mail list and web resources to create an action center where concerned individuals can call their congressman's offices.

It's not all sticks, though. If Democrats donate (as Barney Frank has done), the netroots will pledge fealty to them, talk them up lavishly, fundraise for their next campaign, work against any primary challengers they may have, and generally seek to reward generous behavior with their own continued support. If they don't donate, the netroots promise to remember, and punish. Carrots and sticks. The only way to deal with a donkey.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JAWBONE GEORGE. Matt does not think "diplomacy" means what the president thinks it means. Also in this column, Matt assesses the administration's announced plan to achieve unilateral military hegemony over outer space.

--The Editors

OVERCLASS BIAS. Nothing in the world is more reliable than overclass bias in the elite media. The go-to place for daily tracking of such phenomena is, of course, here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TIP'S WAY. Of all the reasons for Democratic politicians to remain pessimistic about the midterm elections, one of the most telling to me is the fact that Nancy Pelosi is apparently telling everyone she can tackle that impeachment is "off the table" should her party manage a majority in the upcomings. This strikes me as, at best, precipitous and, at worst, cowardly, as though she sees some numbers somewhere that indicate the public needs to be assured that the Democrats won't behave like drunken Ostrogoths if they get some power back.

Impeachment should never be the first club out of the bag, god knows, and it shouldn't be swung around for political purposes. (Ann Coulter, you'll be amazed to learn, is wrong about that.) However, if a new Democratic majority doesn't vigorously revive the oversight function of the Congress, and if it doesn't do so regardless of where the investigations may lead, then it will not deserve to survive the next election cycle. (My choice? Extended televised hearings into war-profiteering.) If it were up to me, I'd put an armed guard around every paper-shredder in the West Wing about 30 seconds after the polls closed on Nov. 7. I don't think impeachment hearings are remotely close to a good idea right now -- but there is absolutely no way anyone can say that in perpetuity, given what we know about this administration's penchant for secrecy and chicanery. And, let us face facts. The president has admitted violating FISA, hanging his reasons on a very dubious interpretation of his constitutional functions.

The template, if there is one, is the way Speaker Tip O'Neill handled his fractious caucus as Watergate gathered steam. (You can read about it either in Jimmy Breslin's How The Good Guys Finally Won, or in Jack Farrell's definitive biography of O'Neill.) He hedged. He temporized. He cut premature resolutions -- like Robert Drinan's attempt to impeach Richard Nixon over the bombing of Cambodia -- off at the pass. He chewed his cud and told people he really didn't know how impeachment should be undertaken. But he never, ever, took any option off the table.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: RISK ASSESSMENT. Per Ezra's post below, Jacob Hacker's new book, The Great Risk Shift, is getting some attention -- in it, Hacker argues that increased risk is the central economic issue for working Americans, one that provides progressives new opportunities for shifting the political tide. This week, Ezra and Matt will be discussing the book with Hacker, who kicks things off today with an explanation of his basic argument.

--The Editors

SO ABOUT ISRAEL. First Ehud Olmert launched an immoral war against Lebanon in response to Hezbollah's aggression against Israel. Then the war embittered nearly the entire country against Olmert, making his hold on power tenuous only months after his massive electoral victory. Now, the once-centrist leader has, in a single blow, decimated his ties to the center by entering into a coalition with the extremist Yisrael Beiteinu party. What Avigdor Lieberman's merry men advocate is, to be blunt, ethnic cleansing: as the creepy name (which translates into "Our Home Is Israel") suggests, Yisrael Beiteinu believes the million-plus Arab citizens of Israel must be expelled.

According to Haaretz, one of Lieberman's right-wing rivals blasted the move, insisting that "Yisrael Beiteinu has abandoned its principles and is joining a left-wing government." But notwithstanding the resistance of the Labor Party to abandoning the Olmert coalition, Lieberman's entry into the government signals the opposite. Since the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon, the Kadima Party has always been a cipher, unclear as to what its true prescriptions -- aside from unilateral withdrawal from the Palestinian territories -- actually are. Now, in a moment of political crisis, Olmert is filling in the blanks, in the most noxious of ways. Lieberman is to be made a Vice Premier, and Haaretz reports that he'll have a portfolio dealing with "strategic threats." But from the perspective of a moral Jewish democracy, Lieberman is a strategic threat.

--Spencer Ackerman

RUNNING MAN. Back in my misspent youth, which was so long ago that track and field still mattered to well over 200 American sports fans, Jim Ryun was a bona fide star. In 1966, when he was 19, he smashed the world-record in both the mile and the half-mile, and he was named Sports Illustrated's "Sportsman Of The Year." In 1967, he ran a 3:51.1 mile, a world record that laster nearly a decade. He was snakebitten in the Olympics, though. In 1968, he got run down by Kip Keino of Kenya and, four years later in Munich, he got tangled up with another runner and fell.

He went on to a career as a Christianist rightwing congresscritter. And now, it seems that, like
many of them, he's in a spot of trouble. I wonder if he feels Kip Keino's breath on his neck.

--Charles P. Pierce

NOTHING INEVITABLE ABOUT IT. Roger Lowenstein's review of Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift in this weekend's NY Times was a surprisingly myopic and -- in the old, populist sense -- elitist piece of writing. His review is hampered, to be sure, by fundamental misreadings of Hacker, but the most glaring deficiency is a blase, even bored attitude towards the woes and worries of those below him on the income ladder.

"To buttress [Hacker's] point," Lowenstein writes, "the author trots out a familiar-seeming list -- of people who burned through their savings to finance a medical expense, or who retired only to see their corporate pension plan go bust, or who lost a job that was once secure. But as predictable and, at times, whiny as his examples seem, Mr. Hacker does make a contribution to our understanding." But how predictable and whiny might such examples seem to the millions of Americans who watch a loved one die from cancer because they couldn't afford to take them to the doctor for early screening, or to Jim Horner, who lost his $900,000 of accumulated pension savings from twenty years of work when Worldcom went bust? Would he be comforted to know that the past few years have been "very good years as measured by the Dow Jones industrial average"?

More substantively, Lowenstein appears to have either not read the book or not understood it. There are legitimate critiques to make of Hacker -- I'll be making one this week in a forum we're doing -- but Lowenstein's charge that Hacker doesn't realize we're in a globalizing age is directly contradicted by the book. And his apparent belief that there's nothing the state can do to counteract those trends is belied by the evidence. Structural though some of the issues may be, nothing about them forces an increase in risk: Western Europe and Canada haven't let globalization deprive their citizens of health coverage, secure retirements, unions, or paid family leave. They've done what governments are supposed to do: surveyed the landscape, and legislated so as to protect their citizens from destabilizing forces.

The remarkable cycle that Hacker is pointing out is that, in an age when structural economic trends are pushing risk and insecurity onto individuals, Republicans have hastened the transfer, trying to push even more risk onto individuals through HSAs and privatization. Hacker, in contrast, is calling for some (so-to-speak) countercyclical policy-making that responds to rising risk with policies designed to combat it. Whiny and predictable, I know, but important nonetheless.

--Ezra Klein

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE NOVEMBER PRINT ISSUE. There remain too many Tapped readers out there who aren't subscribers to The American Prospect. That's a problem. The release of our November print issue might provide a nice occasion to reconsider this unfortunate state of affairs. For one thing, we have a truly must-read report by Spencer Ackerman -- now a Prospect senior correspondent and regular Tappeder (see below) -- that tackles one of the great under-discussed issues surrounding the Iraq debacle: the construction of permanent U.S. bases. Spencer's reporting tells a story of policy drift, official obfuscation, and stark facts on the ground that make it clear that America is planning -- and building -- for the long haul.

For years, the Bush administration has refused to discuss how long the United States will stay in Iraq. More recently, the administration speaks of both a “long war” and just-over-the-horizon troop reductions simultaneously -- although last month General John Abizaid, the U.S. commander for Middle East and Southeast Asia, ruled out a draw down until next year -- with the emphasis shifting depending on the president’s audience and the political moment. On the rare occasions when officials have been pressed, usually in congressional hearings that garner little attention, Bush aides insist there are “no plans” to build permanent bases, a nondenial-denial that focuses attention on unprovable administration intent. But beyond intent is actual construction. That is, the U.S. military has awarded contracts to erect enduring bases at Baghdad, the capital; Balad, in the Sunni center-west; Tallil, in the Shiite center-south; and near Rawah, on the western border with Syria. All this construction is being done not because of any master plan, but in the absence of it. To put it another way, the military has to take steps for a permanent presence in Iraq in order to be responsible -- since no one has instructed commanders about when they will leave.

There is a strategic fog surrounding every aspect of the Iraq War. No one knows, in late 2006, whether the mission is to establish democracy, prevent civil war, or forestall or facilitate Iraq’s disintegration. The duration of an unclear mission is necessarily unclear, which forces commanders to prepare for all contingencies. While the Bush administration publicly denies any plan to occupy Iraq forever, its own strategic confusion is increasingly forcing the military to prepare for precisely such an indefinite, open-ended occupation in very concrete ways. The press, for its part, has treated such development as a paranoid left-wing conspiracy theory rather than documented fact, thereby preventing the public from gaining a fuller understanding of what the United States is actually doing in Iraq. And many in the Army are starting to fear the consequences of what the Pentagon is doing: entrenching a quagmire and facilitating a powerful incentive for Defense Department hawks to launch further wars around the Middle East.

Elsewhere in the issue, Joshua Kurlantzick reports on the global warming profiteers mounting a new-style gold rush to develop the melting polar icecaps. (It's not merely that oil companies contribute to global warming through carbon emissions -- they actually stand to reap a windfall from that warming as the melting Arctic opens up new areas for drilling.) Also, Brian Beutler gives a kiss-off to retiring senator Bill Frist, worst majority leader ever; Jaana Goodrich looks at the dubious data behind the "boys crisis" hype; Richard Byrne digs into The Wire; and Alan Blinder, Joanna Fitzgerald, Robert Kuttner, and Harold Meyerson kick off a new, ongoing series on creating good jobs in America.

It's a great issue. You can read it all if you subscribe. A subscription costs twenty bucks (fifteen for an online sub). Consider signing up.

--The Editors

TALKING TO IRAN AND SYRIA. The momentum is building for the U.S. to start talking to Iran and Syria over the fate of Iraq. The latest: apparently the British Foreign Office backs the Baker-Hamilton Commission (a.k.a. the Iraq Study Group) in talking to the Iranians and Syrians. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is also on board. There is more at play here than just Iraq, however. The Syrians, feeling stronger after the war in Lebanon, are calling for peace talks with Israel over the Golan Heights, while the Iranians, as Christopher de Bellaigue explains, seek acknowledgment that they are a player in the region that can't be ignored.

It's obvious we should talk to Syria. It's much clearer who is in charge there, and the Syrians have repeatedly made clear their willingness to engage. The Iranians are a different case; it's not always clear who is calling the shots, and hardline factions in both countries have a habit of undermining any efforts at rapprochement. So expect the U.S. and Iran to approach each other very gingerly, and don't look for a comprehensive deal like that advocated by Thomas Barnett just yet.

--Blake Hounshell

THE DOUG FEITH WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. From Mike Rubin and Andy McCarthy over at The Corner and Eli Lake of The New York Sun comes word of a truly bizarre NRSC NRCC attack on a Democratic candidate for the PA-10, Chris Carney. Liddy DoleTom Reynolds's forces have sent out a mailing accusing Carney of "having failed our nation" by being part of a Pentagon effort to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda before the war. Now, the substance of the message is, well, true, as I reported in a piece for my former employers, and I suspect that with the exception of the attack on a Democrat, most Tapped readers wouldn't object to the NRCC's characterization. When I hung out with Carney on the stump for an afternoon in Honesdale, Pa., in March, he forthrightly acknowledged that he still believes there's more to the Iraq-al-Qaeda tie than the 9/11 Commission et. al. concluded.

However, Carney also advocates an accelerated let-'em-stand-up-and-let-us-get-the-hell-out-of-Iraq position, which is way, way out of tune with the NRCC. And then there's the small matter of Reynolds's conundrum: what Carney did at the Pentagon in 2002 was what Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush wanted, which was to find any evidence that could support a pretext to invade Iraq. The GOP generally believes this was, you know, a good thing. If they have a problem with Carney, they have a huge problem with the war, and a huge problem with Bush -- which for the GOP is well, a huge problem.

UPDATE: Corrected thanks to sharp-eyed commenters.

--Spencer Ackerman

TO RODHAM OR NOT RODHAM. I've very much bought into the John-McCain-is-unbeatable interpretation of contemporary American politics, so I'm glad to see this poll assuring me that my predictive abilities are absolute shite and that Hillary would pound the guy. CNN's reportage of their own poll, however, must be among the worst analyses I've ever seen:

If presidential elections were held today, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would likely have a comfortable edge over Sen. John McCain, but take away her maiden name and McCain has a better shot of landing in the Oval Office.

So say the results of a CNN poll released Friday by Opinion Research Corp., which asked 506 adult Americans whom they preferred among potential 2008 presidential candidates. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4.5 percent.

Asked if they preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton to McCain, respondents gave the Democratic New York senator and former first lady a 51 percent to 44 percent advantage over the Republican Senator from Arizona.

Remove "Rodham" and McCain had a 1 percentage point advantage, 48 percent to 47 percent.

The results fall within the sample's margin of error, so there is a "good chance, but not a statistical certainty" that Clinton's maiden name would help her in a matchup against McCain, said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director.

--Ezra Klein

ONE LAST BIT ON OBAMA. On the plus side for his national ambitions, I'm fairly certain that, were he to get elected, his eventual presidential memoirs would be the best since Ulysses S. Grant. The man can write.

--Ezra Klein

A MOST CYNICAL APPRAISAL. Nothing if not shameless, rather than letting his appalling behavior in 2000 lie in dignified silence, Antonin Scalia has decided to speak on the issue again:

Georgetown students attending the lecture had questions not only about Scalia’s views on education, but on hot topics such as the sale of medicinal marijuana, campaign finance reform and censorship of high school newspapers.

One student asked whether Scalia believed the 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore was an example of judicial activism. In its 7-2 ruling, the court effectively halted the recount of presidential ballots in Florida, resulting in the nomination of George W. Bush as president.

"My first response to that question always is, it's six years ago. Get over it!" Scalia said. He then explained that "It surely is not activist to apply the text of the Constitution, which is what the court did." [bold added]

As for Scalia's claim that he was merely "applying the text of the Constitution," as a particular Justice once said, this is really more than one should have to bear. It would be implausible enough to claim that the text of the 14th Amendment made the use of different standards in the particular case of Florida 2000 -- but apparently not any of the other equally arbitrary different counting standards used in American elections -- unconstitutional. But it's particularly ridiculous coming from somebody so committed to a claim that the equal protection clause should reflect "those constant and unbroken national traditions that embody the people's understanding of ambiguous constitutional texts" that it shouldn't even make gender discrimination constitutionally suspect. (I must have missed that unbroken American tradition of uniform national election standards.) Nor can the text of the constitution explain why the Court was so unserious about its stated rationale that it wasn't willing to apply a logical remedy within the case itself. And as for the Rehnquist concurrence, the claim that the justices were merely applying Article II of the Constitution is even more specious. Courts construe legislative enactments; that's their job. I am very skeptical that a state court's interpretation of state law can ever be said to not constitute jurisprudence at all merely because a federal court disagrees with it. But I am certain that if there was such a case, it could not be one where the state courts were applying vague legislation that specifically delegated power to the courts to resolve election disputes, and where the court applied its standards consistently enough that Bush -- allegedly the disfavored litigant -- won 3 out of the 5 2000 election disputes. The Supreme Court is far more vulnerable to charges of lawlessness than the Florida courts.

Scalia's public arrogance has always been an annoyance, but as he continues to defend the indefensible it's absolutely intolerable. Nobody who signed Bush v. Gore is ever in a position to lecture anybody about textualism and constitutional traditions. And as long as these justices are on the court, nobody should "get over it."

--Scott Lemieux

WHEN THERE'S NO ONE LEFT TO SWIFTBOAT. Pierce mentioned this last week, but it deserves all the attention it can get. Kevin Tillman, U.S. Army Ranger and brother of fallen American hero Pat Tillman, joins the ranks of the shrill:

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

It should be clear that Kevin Tillman, like his brother, is an American hero. Like many other American heroes, he has grown angry over being asked to sacrifice for a vicious, empty lie. Now he's decided he can't stay silent about it while his brothers and sisters are also asked to die for the void of dishonesty and destruction that claimed Pat's life. Let the right wing come after Kevin, as well as his brothers and sisters in uniform. They've faced much stronger foes than the sniveling cowards who handed out purple band-aids during the 2004 GOP Convention, and they're still standing. They're not afraid. We shouldn't be, either.

--Spencer Ackerman

A MAN, NOT A MOVEMENT. Ok, yet another Tapped post on Obama:

I'm happy to see Bob Herbert putting a pin in the burgeoning "Barackobubble." A couple weeks ago, I thought I detected a swell of presidential posturing from the junior senator from Illinois and wrote an LA Times op-ed pointing out that Obama has never been involved in a high profile, competitive campaign, and he hasn't yet expended his political capital on a politically controversial or dangerous fight. Progressives, before fallin either in line or in live, should demand more evidence of his ability to withstand Republican attack and his commitment to progressive reform.

The next day, I got a call from one of Obama's press people, who merrily berated me for misreading his boss's Iowa visits and national hires as evidence of interest in a national campaign. A few days later, Obama made the interest public and explicit in Joe Klein's cover profile of Time. Bad press management strategy, that.

There's a real danger here for the left who, so long out of power, are ready to jump on whichever train looks likeliest to pull into the White House on time. That may (or may not) be a good strategy for returning to power. But throwing your lot in with the smoothest talker and hoping for the best once he achieves power is a terrible method for building a movement, or popularizing ideas. Liberals need to set up incentives so presidential contenders pledge fealty to their priorities -- their support should be contingent on ideological agreement, and should never precede it. As other have remarked, when David Brooks and Joe Klein both throw their weight behind a putatively "liberal' cause or candidate, smart leftists will look for the catch.

None of this is to deny the possibility that Obama is, in fact, the best or most progressive candidate. I've read a bit of his new book and, thus far, been reassured. It's just to note that no one really knows, and very few seem interested in finding out. I'm profoundly skeptical that the current, constant hagiographies of the senator will last long into a presidential campaign, and there's no history to suggest whether Obama can withstand and respond to the negative barrages the Republican smear machine is capable of unleashing.

And nor is it a sure thing that he will be the progressive movement's Ronald Reagan: He has not resuscitated labor or poverty as causes, like John Edwards has, or (contra Ben) made his opposition to the Iraq war a definitional crusade, a la Russ Feingold, or grown obsessed with climate change, like Al Gore. It's not clear what really animates the guy, save for the pursuit of unity and conciliation (two ideals that don't often make for fantastic legislative agendas). In other words, he remains, for now, a man, not a movement. And this country needs, and the left needs the confidence to work for, a movement.

--Ezra Klein

DON'T TAKE IT FROM ME. My latest piece for New York Times Select (sorry, subscription req’d.) looks at the geography of the coming electoral storm of 2006. Some key graphs on the House side of the equation:

Blizzard is the most applicable term for the brewing cataclysm. Why? Because if Mother Nature sweeps a new Democratic majority -- or two -- into power in Washington, the disproportionate share of Republican defeats will occur in the Rust Belt states of the Northeast-Midwest corridor.
Coupled with isolated twisters in the Plains and a few Western earthquakes, what you have is the formula for a Republican natural disaster north of the Mason-Dixon Line….

Of the 60 House seats most likely to switch to the other party this year, according to the latest rankings by Chuck Todd, editor of the National Journal’s “Hotline” political tipsheet, 53 are held by Republicans and just seven by Democrats. Where are they? Although 39 percent of incumbent House Republicans are Southerners, only seven of their 53 imperiled seats -- a mere 13 percent -- are in the South. Three of those seven are in Florida, the decidedly least Southern of the Southern states.

Conversely, of those seven Democrats Todd lists as potentially in jeopardy (despite their party’s strong tailwinds), three are in Dixie. A smattering of Democrats are positioned to win in places like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. But, as The New York Times’ Jeffrey L. Austin reported last week, Georgia is home to two of the “rarest breed” of candidates this year: the “at-risk Democrat.”

--Tom Schaller

WAPO CONTINUES CAMPAIGN FOR GALLAUDET ADMINISTRATION. I have previously criticized the Washington Post's coverage of the Gallaudet protest movement against the university's new president as being slanted towards the administration and against the protestors. Well, case in point: today at 2pm they are doing a live chat with the new president, Jane K. Fernandes, on their website, with no countervailing voice from the other side of the issue, even though the clear majority of the Gallaudet community opposes Fernandes. This is after they gave Fernandes a space on the op-ed page, and editorialized in her favor, and subtly favored her in (mostly fair) news articles. Before, I simply chalked this up to the fact that the Post has the same establishmentarian bias as most of the elite media. But the favoritism is becoming so clear and inexplicable I'm racking my brain for a conceivable ulterior motive.

--Ben Adler

LANCET AND FACE VALIDITY. In a conversation yesterday, a friend told me that he just couldn't accept the Lancet numbers on Iraqi deaths because they seem too high. The study, he felt, had to have cooked the books in some way, even if the method wasn't immediately apparent. My friend's comments echoed those of Fred Kaplan and Michael O'Hanlon, sensible people who have chosen to reject the study for not terribly compelling reasons. It doesn't really matter, the argument goes, how many people have been killed in Iraq as long as we know that it's a lot and that it's getting worse, but it still can't be that many.

I have a little bit of empathy for my friend's position. My gut tells me that the number is too high, in an eerily similar way to which my gut tells me that Kenny Rogers' post-season ERA is too low. If someone had forced me to make a guess prior to the release of the study, I probably would have picked a number between 150,000 and 200,000, or maybe a little higher. My guess would be a little bit better than just tossing a dart at the board, as the things I know about the history of military conflict and the nature of the state would guide my estimate. And that's it; my expertise would result in my picking of a round number that I kinda felt was right, without having all that much reason for confidence in my estimate.

Herein lies the problem, because despite all estimates, gut feelings, and reasonable expectations, Kenny Rogers really hasn't given up a run in 23 post-season innings. Major League Baseball has a better way of calculating earned run average than my gut, and MLB says that his ERA is 0.00. Similarly, the Lancet study uses considerably more sophisticated statistical and survey methodology than my gut, and is consequently more likely to be accurate. Because methodology is complicated and only professionals really understand it, we have to rely to some extent on arguments between experts to assess the validity of the approach. I'm not an ideal judge, but the defenses of the study seem considerably stronger than the attacks upon it.

Kenny Rogers' success is unlikely, but not implausible. Weird things happen in the post-season, and such events can't be dismissed on their face. Awful things happen in war, and Iraq is currently enduring a truly awful war. 655,000 is high, but it's a plausible number that can't be dismissed on its face. More importantly, it's a number that has resulted from the most sophisticated study of Iraqi casualties available. Consequently, it's really not enough to just kind of feel that the number is too high; the Lancet study has shifted the burden of evidence. If scholars and analysts don't like the number, then they need to either soundly debunk the methodology (which hasn't happened) or do a better study.

--Robert Farley

A NADIR OF LOGICAL ANALYSIS. Here's a strange column ("A Nadir of U.S. Power") by Sebastian Mallaby in which he suggests a connection between domestic absurdities like "the crazy tort system, which consumes more than a dollar in administrative and legal costs for every dollar it transfers to the victims of malpractice" and the inability of the Bush administration to make headway on tough foreign policy problems such as Iran, North Korea, and Darfur.

Mallaby is trying to make a Fergusonian link between America's long-term economic health and its ability to project power abroad, but I must admit that I don't see his logic here. The consequences of the Bush administration's fiscal recklessness have yet to be felt, for instance, and our military spending is actually on the rise (though nowhere near Cold War heights in percentage of GDP). Besides, some of the issues that Mallaby identifies -- Russia kicking out Amnesty International and Sudan correctly believing that the horrible things it does in Darfur are ultimately of marginal interest to the rest of the world -- are basically orthagonal to American power. As for Iran and North Korea, that's another story entirely.

Mallaby appears to view our difficulties in Iraq as the consequence of this broadband loss of power, yet doesn't want to admit the obvious: that the Iraq disaster itself is a major drain on resources, time, and energy that could be better used elsewhere. I know that pundits have to constantly say new things in order to stay fresh, but a lot of times the straightforward explanation's the right one.

--Blake Hounshell

BROOKS'S BOBOS ABANDON GOP. Elsewhere in TimesSelectland, it must be said that David Brooks makes an insightful and valuable argument in his column on Sunday. Brooks, who has earned much-deserved mockery for his red and blue America shtick, in which he typically lambasts the coastal intelligentsia that he writes for and belongs to ("they can't tell wheat from corn in a field, or a soldier's rank by his insignia blah blah blah"), finally turns it on its head. Noting how the Republicans have endangered their majority by trampling their Northeastern moderate wing, he remarks, "it's as if they are purposely trying to antagonize the married moms at the pseudo-New Urbanist outdoor cafes." So, finally Brooks admits what liberals have been saying for years: that cultural/regional alienation cuts both ways in this country, and the proud heartland conservatives who use nouns like "Massachusettes" and "New York" as terms of abuse are the most deliberately responsible for it.

What is really interesting about Brooks's column, though, is that he somewhat eschews the usual explanation for the Bobos' alienation from the GOP (middle-class suburbanites are moderately pro-choice and don't aggressively hate gays so they are turned off by the rise of the religious right.) Rather, Brooks points to the Bush Administration's abandonment of empiricism and accountability in governance. Brooks argues that the professionals and managers who populate suburbs are used to following and enforcing accountablity for one's job performance, and non-ideological fact-gathering in their work. So when they see two of the chief incompetents of the Iraq debacle going unpunished -- Donald Rumsfeld is secure in his job and George Tenet was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- they see a movement that does not know how to govern effectively. And the politicization of the domestic policy process disgusts them as well. Says Brooks:

The people in these offices manage information for a living, and when they see Republicans denying obvious trends, or shutting out relevant data, they say to themselves, "Those people are not like me."

--Ben Adler

THEN AGAIN... Contra my assertion that Barack Obama hasn't been a leader on any contentious issue and Tom's lament this morning, Frank Rich made a solid point in his column yesterday. Says Rich,

[I]t's important to remember that on one true test for his party, Iraq, he was consistent from the start. On the long trail to a hotly competitive senatorial primary in Illinois, he repeatedly questioned the rationale for the war before it began, finally to protest it at a large rally in Chicago on the eve of the invasion. He judged Saddam to pose no immediate threat to America and argued for containment over a war he would soon label "dumb" and politcal-driven." He hasn't changed. In his new book he gives a specific date (the end of this year) for beginning "a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops and doesn't seem to care who calls it "cut and run."

--Ben Adler

KNOCK IT OFF, FELLAS. Senator Barack Obama had better do a little more reading and a little less presidential-positioning before going on Meet the Press again. It's understandably tempting to make a name for oneself by mocking Democrats. It's also a surefire way to gain plaudits from everyone from Tim Russert to Sean Hannity. But yesterday, when Russert read a passage from Obama's new book in which the senator says he's a big believer in free-market capitalism who also worries about the efficiency of government programs, Russert asked him a very specific question Obama couldn't platitude-pander his way out of: So, which programs, Senator? Suddenly the savvy, smooth senator disappeared, replaced by a fumbling dissembler. His answer? He supports Medicare and Medicaid, of course, (of course!), but laments that they use paper billing instead of electronic billing, which would be more efficient.

Is he joking? Is he really so careless as to make sweeping laments about government program but follow that with such a lame answer? Private insurers surely use electronic billing, Senator, but where is your criticism of their inefficiencies? As plenty of folks have pointed out, including Matt and Ezra, the overhead for major federal insurance programs is typically far less than what private insurers take off the top. So which is it, Senator? Are you prepared to venerate the very programs you criticize, given that they're more efficient (not to mention more effective and egalitarian) than the "free-market" solutions you praise in your campaign manifesto/ book?

In a similar case, I ran into a major Colorado Democrat recently who sighed when I asked him about some of Senator Ken Salazar's statements and votes, particularly on torture. "He's angling to be senator for life," he shrugged. Obama and Salazar, the Democratic darlings of the 2004 elections, remain rising stars who will be a big part of the party's future -- and rightly so. But what's next? Salazar finding another Ricky Ray Rector to execute and Obama searching for his Sister Souljah moment?

--Tom Schaller

KIM JONG IL AND DAVID KUO. Unable to match Brother Ezra's heartfelt post about David Kuo and the compassion agenda, I offer readers a rueful laugh in the form of the title of a piece by Jason T. Christy of The Church Report, a right-wing political publication dressed in a cassock: "David Kuo: An Addition to the Axis of Evil."

--Adele M. Stan

A BITE SIZED SOLUTION. I'm not sure how to feel about economist Martin B. Schmidt's New York Times op-ed from yesterday. In it he argues for a 10% tax on food ordered from drive-throughs on the grounds that it will encourage people to get out of their cars, and raise money to off-set the social cost of obesity. In principle I think these are both laudable goals, but in practice this idea is deeply flawed. As long as there are drive-throughs, taxing the people who use them and not people who order the same food at the walk-in counter could reasonably be construed as discriminatory against people with disabilties.

But I'm also troubled by the American state of mind that this suggestion seems to accept. Here is an economist, who clearly understands how our excessive driving culture bloats our wastelines -- and by extension our healthcare spending -- but his solution is almost comically miniscule. Getting people to walk a few steps from the parking lot to the door of a McDonald's will have a tiny effect on public health and the environment (another benefit Schmidt points to.) Getting people to walk to work, or take mass transit there, would have an infinitely larger impact on both. But for that we need to fundamentally alter the American landscape. The tax we need to affect consumer choices and urban planning on that level is on gasoline, not drive-through fast food.

--Ben Adler

FAITH-BASED COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVES. As Michael Crowley points out, David Kuo's anecdotes about the Bush administration's total abandonment of the "compassion" agenda are rather remarkable:

A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. "Well," he yelled through the stairwell, "is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know."

An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent "compassion meeting." In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda....

The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social servoices programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, "still in process of being accounted for."

But then 9/11 happened. The attack obviated the need for a domestic policy, and spurred the administration to expend political capital on foreign policy issues, not economic controversies. Bush, who had no particular interest in domestic policy himself, just went where events took him, and never fought back against the tide to restore his original agenda. The mantle will eventually be taken back up, though: Huckabee, Brownback, and Romney are all compassionate conservatives of a sort, and all offer a certain recognition that folks and their families require outside help to withstand the global economy. McCain and Giuliani are more old-style populists -- where the compassionate cons will work to strengthen institutions that mitigate harm and risk to the individual, McCain and Giuliani will attack the actors they perceive to be doing the harm (McCain is, in many ways, surprisingly anti-corporate). However it shakes out and whoever ends up taking the party's mantle, I expect the GOP to enter a wrenching period of soul-searching and transformation, as they try to marry their current corporatism with the needs of their base.

--Ezra Klein

THE TILLMAN FAMILY IS NOT GOING AWAY. If there's an iconic tale of the betrayal of the national unity and resolve in the wake of the 9/11 atrocities, it's what happened to Pat Tillman when he left the Arizona Cardinals and went off to war. His death occasioned one of the very first grotesque and demonstrable public lies in what has become an almost endless parade of them. Since then, it has been revealed that the original story of hs death was concocted by a military in thrall to a truthless and cowardly civilian political establishment, and it also been revealed that Tillman himself was possessed of a shrewd and interesting mind, with a good eye for how sacrifice gets coined into someone else's gold. Now, his surviving brother, Kevin, has stated his own case. Of course, the real shame is that this didn't appear in a more prominent and influential forum. Of course, if it had, Kevin Tillman would be riding the Cindy Sheehan swiftboat by now. Anybody who doesn;t believe that hasn't watched the way this administration and its asshats in headphones operate. Watch how it works, if Kevin Tillman sticks his head up just a little higher.

Read it anyway.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ELECTROSHOCK. Genevieve Smith explains why worrying about electronic voting machines isn't just for paranoid "conspiracy theorists." Not only is the machines' vulnerability to tampering real, but the potential for simple human error to cause major screw-ups is vast -- and has been demonstrated in practice already. Take a look.

--The Editors

HOW BAD IS CARD-CHECK? A couple days ago, Megan McArdle and I got into a heated argument over the morality of card-check legislation. Card-check is a top union priority that would effectively abolish the current system of employer-controlled union elections and create a situation where, if 50+1% of workers signed a card asking for a union, they've got a union. Megan found this -- and I quote -- "morally abhorrent," mainly because the ballot is not secret, and so unions can intimidate. My concerns fell much more with the current, constant, and far more effective intimidation tactics of employers. Research shows that, when threatened with a union, 30% of employers fire pro-union workers, 49% threaten to close down, 51% use bribery or favoritism to tilt the election, and 82% hire unionbusting consultants. Now that's what I call morally abhorrent.

Today I found some interesting data with strong bearing on the argument. A poll commissioned by American Rights at Work (a pro-union org), Rutgers University, and Jesuit Wheeling University surveyed 430 randomly-selected workers from worksites where employees had sought unions either through the NLRB election process or card-check. The survey included workers who voted both for and against the union, and included campaigns in which the unions both won and lost. The Eagleton Research Center and Rutgers conducted the calls over a couple of weeks in 2005.

The results were telling: 22% of workers surveyed said management "coerced them a great deal.' 6% said the same for unions. During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose (it's worth noting that in card-check elections, 23% of workers complained of management coercion -- more than complained of union coercion). Workers in NLRB elections were more than 53% as likely to report that management threatened to eliminate their jobs.

Even more interesting, fewer workers in card check campaigns said coworkers pressured them to join the union (17% to 22%). Workers in card check elections were more than twice as likely to report the employer took a neutral stance and let the workers decide. So, in fairness to Megan, neither options is perfect. But these results show that one is decidedly less perfect than the other.

--Ezra Klein

POLL BAN. Thirty years ago, when I was doing field organizing for Mo Udall's presidential campaign, I made it a practice about three weeks out from every primary to establish a series of fines in my storefronts. Anyone bringing in a newspaper was assessed a quarter, and any mention at all of poll results cost you a buck. The fines later financed as much Election Night beer as we could afford, so, as you might imagine, there was a lot of obviously fraudulent civil disobedience down the stretch.

Anyway, the point was this: at this point in the campaign, at the grassroots level, all information outside the operation of the storefront is extraneous. It is irrelevant to the grinding, thankless work of GOTV whether or not the candidate is three points up or 30. So, my advice to all the people in the trenches is to ignore stories like this one, even though they make your heart go pitty-pat. Work like you're five points down and you can turn a five-point lead into 10. Of course, the corollary is to tell all those Democratic pols with huge warchests and no opponents -- and this means you, Marty Meehan -- to shoo the moths out of your wallets and help out. I am fond of quoting the old boxing trainer who, when Joe Louis fretted that the referee would steal his victory from him, told the fighter, "Joe, let your right hand be your referee."

So that's it. Any Democratic politician or strategist who mentions these polls before November 7 owes me a quarter. Mention Diebold and, I swear, it'll cost you a ten-spot.

--Charles P. Pierce

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON IS CONCERNED. As I am old, and therefore new to life on the Internets, I haven't had a chance to catalogue personally all the fauna contained therein, but, I must say, that this fellow here strikes me as quite likely the silliest gibbering gibbon in the high forest. This isn't a column. It's something you hear on the radio between Traffic On The Three's and a commercial for hair-replacement nostrums. Let us ignore the rather, ah, flexible definition of the word "recent" as regards the Durbin and Kerry quotes, to say nothing of the fact that a Classicist and Historian can summon up as examples of Republican "ineptness" only George Bush in a flight suit and Mark Foley in heat. I'm neither a Classicist nor a Historian, but I'm fairly sure I can do better than that just by flying to Baton Rouge and driving down I-10 South for a while. I do give the Classicist and Historian big props, though, for managing to get the word "poontang" onto a website staffed by people very likely unfamiliar with the concept.

--Charles P. Pierce

SCAPEGOAT? MORE LIKE A GOOD START. The Washington Post's Sally Quinn seems strangely confident that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will recognize that he is hurting America and step down following the midterm elections. I'm not holding my breath, but I would certainly welcome this long-overdue development -- Rumsfeld holds great responsibility for the disaster in Iraq and for the growing problems in Afghanistan. The ongoing revelations in the press and in Cobra II, Fiasco, and now Bob Woodward's State of Denial have made that clear. Needless to say, I also believe that his bosses George Bush and Dick Cheney are equally if not more culpable. Awful decisions like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army should have been recognized as such and vetoed at the highest levels.

But, alas, you go to war with the president and vice-president you have, not the president and vice-president you wish to have.

--Blake Hounshell

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: UNTRUTH IN ADVERTISING. Folks may have noticed (and plenty of readers have made clear they've noticed) the Feminists for Life ad that's been running, on and off, here on the TAP website the last couple of weeks. As policy TAP Online doesn't apply ideological criteria in accepting or rejecting advertisers, and it should go without saying that advertising doesn't affect the editorial content of the site. Just in case that didn't go without saying, it happens that Tapped's own Addie Stan has offered her take on the outfit today. Take a look.

--The Editors

SELF-HATING FUNDERS. So that Soros post from earlier today? Ignore it. Folks who know better have written in and convinced me that, contrary to what he told me and various blind sources are saying, he's pumping truly significant amounts into very significant things. Among them, according to my source, are the "Center on Budget, EPI, Center for Economic Policy Research, ACLU, a massive fellowship program for several years, the Brennan Center for Justice, Demos, a bunch of state-level progressive think tanks, the Institute for America's Future (c3 arm of Campaign for America's Future), US Action, Center for Community Change, [and] Public Campaign...He does all the things in the world of ideas that Olin did (though not as much in academia), as well as a lot to support on the ground organizing."

Alrighty then. Mea culpa. This is all on my mind today as I went to a lunch on the different funding structures on the left and the right. I need to take some time and organize my thoughts on this, but among the worries I have about big billionaires funding the left, the first and foremost is that it's unlikely billionaires will fund the left. They may fund the Democratic Party, insofar as it's the more managerial, empirical, technocratic, educated, and competent of the two, but to really get into funding progressivism -- what with its skepticism of corporate intentions, its meddling in the market, its willingness to seriously redistribute from the rich to the poor, etc -- would require, for most, a partial rejection of precisely the system that benefitted and benefits them.

In other words, for the right's big funders, channeling their money to the defense of free market capitalism was a natural, even selfish, thing to do. John Olin reportedly said he saw his role as "using my fortune to protect the system that made it possible." For the left, though, it would be quite the opposite: It would mean recognizing the inequities in the system that aided them, and possibly even in the precise elements or industries that enriched them. And psychologically, it's much harder to use your wealth in a way that implicitly disapproves of its existence (or at least size, or relative rarity) rather than to defend, promote, and pretend that this track is open to everyone, if only we make the sort of policy changes that benefit, well, you and people like you.

--Ezra Klein

CIVIL RIGHTS SOLDIERS. Via LGM, Erik Loomis's remembrance of Diane Nash's service to the civil rights movement is an important historical corrective. In retrospect, these things are always made out to be Great Man conflicts. Either Martin Luther King Jr. did it all on his own, or it was his productive tension with Malcolm X, or Lyndon Johnson. That it was, in fact, countless footsoldiers putting themselves in harm's way every day and giving King's rhetoric force and numbers is rarely mentioned. Similarly unexamined is the amount of sexism in the civil rights movement and how it's remembered. In John Lewis's memoir, Walking With The Wind, Nash is often referenced, but mainly for how sexy she was. Which may have well been true, but shouldn't quite be the point.

--Ezra Klein

OUTREACH. Rep J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) thought he might feel just a tad unwelcome at Shul recently after he expressed support for notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford's "americanization" program, and refused to apologize after protests from the Jewish community in his district. So on Tuesday he backed out of a scheduled campaign appearance at a local synagogue and instead sent a surrogate. Some might say that was already a sign of disrespect and not a step in the right direction. But things really got ugly when Jonathan Tratt, a spokesman for the Hayworth campaign, reportedly told the audience that Hayworth "is a more observant Jew" (Hayworth is not Jewish) than those in the audience. That went over real well. Another Hayworth surrogate, Irit Tratt, replied to the audience's unenthusiastic response by saying "No wonder there are anti-Semites." It sounds like Hayworth may need to mend some fences, which at least makes it a good thing he's close with Jack Abramoff.

--Ben Adler

OBAMA BUBBLE. I think Malcolm Gladwell's next book should explain the phenomenon of political speculation bubbles. Iit happens every couple months: a spectrum of the major middle- to high-brow magazines and newspapers run major features on the same topic all at once. There was the June 2005 "how do we deal with the emergence of China?" bandwagon, which featured covers from The Atlantic, The Economist, and Time. Earlier this year there was the "why are boys falling behind in school?" hand-wringing session (Esquire, The New York Times, The New Republic, Newsweek, National Review, and a column in US News claiming the media wasn't covering this urgent issue enough.)

And now it's time for the Barack Obubble. Everyone is using the release of his new book (much to his shock and dismay, I'm sure) as an excuse to play the "Is he running? Should he run?" game. In the cover story in Time, Joe Klein does his meaningless characterological shtick, while pundits across the ideological spectrum, from David Brooks to The Nation's Sam Graham-Felsen laud the potential of an Obama presidential campaign. And something tells me this is only the beginning.

Not to throw cold water on this flame of hope, but the Obama obsession strikes me as a classic media sensation. One awesome convention speech, and all of a sudden he's the next JFK, when he realistically might be more like the next Mario Cuomo. As Ezra points out, all this talk about Obama as a leader seems to miss the point that he hasn't actually led a fight on any major issue. This doesn't mean that Obama shouldn't run or that the Democrats wouldn't be shrewd to nominate him. If a conservative like David Brooks thinks highly of Obama as a leader/thinker and would consider voting for him, it suggests he may be the only Dem with the crossover appeal of John McCain. But even that, in itself, is a product of the media bubble.

--Ben Adler

SOROS SEZ. I previously linked to this Reihan Salam post wondering why megawealthy Democratic donors like Soros are retaining their post-2004 pique and not pumping money into this election cycle, what with its possible 40 or 50 seats in play. Instead, we're getting news stories reporting that "A top official who often speaks with Soros and other major benefactors said they remain upset by the Democratic failure to win the White House and Congress in 2004 and have turned their attention to long-term efforts to build a network of think tanks and advocacy organizations to support liberal causes."

During the 2004 election, I had a conference call with Soros, where I asked him why he was donating such a paltry amount, and whether he'd be sticking around to create a serious infrastructure on the left. He replied that he didn't see that as his role, that he thought this regime was dangerous but it wasn't for him to singlehandedly refashion American politics. That clashed with his "open society" ideals.

Now, it may be that the right's decision to constantly target him over the past few years provoked him out of that defensive crouch. But I doubt it. When the current crop of ideologues is toppled from office and the Karl Popper approach to life is no longer in danger, I'd be surprised to see Soros remain involved in rebuilding the left. Put simply: The guy isn't an ideologue. It's not even clear he's a staunch progressive.

Unlike Scaife, Mellon, Coors or a variety of other rightwing financiers who had a particular ideology they wanted to fund into relevancy, Soros has a particular antipathy to a strain of dominant Republican politics that he wants to fund out of power. Even his fundraising priorities -- basically incrementalist think tanks like CAP, short-lived grassroots efforts like ACT, the thus-far disappointing Democracy Alliance -- belie a sustained commitment to progressive or populist change in the country, as opposed to a temporary commitment to making Democrats more electorally potent in the short-term. Now, people change, and I'd love to be proved wrong. But for now, I've seen little evidence -- and he's directly told me -- that he's not seeking to change the country over the long-term. He doesn't see it as his place.

--Ezra Klein

INFLAMMATORY WRIT: An interesting article by David Savage about the military commissions bill signed by the President this week. I have been highly pessimistic about whether the Supreme Court will rule significant parts of the bill unconstitutional. But at least some scholars believe that the Court will not run (to their undying credit):

Many legal scholars predict the law's partial repeal of habeas corpus will be struck down as unconstitutional.

"This is an outright slap at the Supreme Court, and it is heading for invalidation," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and an expert on habeas corpus. "This is a core principle of law that was established by the prisoners who were tossed into the Tower of London by the king, and it was preserved in the Constitution. Now, Congress is saying it doesn't apply to this disfavored group of prisoners."

Meanwhile, on the substance, Jack Balkin makes the critical point that declaring rights without providing remedies is a remarkably cynical exercise that undermines the rule of law.

--Scott Lemieux

NAFTA. I've always found the NAFTA debate a vastly complicated and hard to navigate discussion, full of competing -- and occasionally contradictory -- evidence that's violently spun by partisans of both ends. So I'm interested to see Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, a neoliberal and once-staunch NAFTA supporter, doing some soul-searching on why the agreement didn't unlock the magical market forces folks expected and catapult the country out of poverty. "Having witnessed Mexico’s slow growth over the past 15 years," he writes, "we can no longer repeat the old mantra that the neo-liberal road of NAFTA and associated reforms is clearly and obviously the right one."

--Ezra Klein

BRAZILIAN ELECTIONS. The elections in Brazil -- where Lula is headed for a run-off on October 29, have received some attention in the U.S. news media, but of course that coverage fails to make much of the context clear. Fortunately, we have a resource in an American academic blogger who goes by the handle Mr. Trend. Currently doing field work in Brazil, he's written on the racial context of the Brazilian electoral process, on the scandal affliciting Lula, on the debates and first round results, and finally on mainstream media coverage and what's at stake in the election.

It's good stuff. I wish that he would write a bit about the foreign policy differences between the candidates, if any are evident. Brazil is a rather important player in South America, and has been pursuing a somewhat more assertive defense stance in the last decade. In particular, Brazil continues to make noises about building a nuclear powered submarine. Nevertheless, we can't have everything we want, and Trend is a good resource.

--Robert Farley

U.S. AND EUROPEAN INEQUALITY. I think Greg Mankiw partially obscures the import of this graph comparing what high income and low income households make across developed countries. "The bottom line:" he writes. "The poor in the United States have about the same real income as the poor in western Europe. The rich in the United States, however, are much richer."

Well, on pure income, that's true. But the poor in these countries have expansive, state-supplied health care, far better public transport options, lusher pensions, paid time off, longer vacations, and all the other luxuries and securities associated with the European welfare state, and not available to Americans till they climb significantly farther up the income ladder. In essence, that's the European trade off: A very high floor, with a significantly lower ceiling. America has quite the opposite: An astonishingly low floor, with a very high ceiling. We have an economy that's terrifically effective at maximizing gains for the rich and very ineffective at sharing them among the poor. Europe isn't terribly good at getting people rich, but they're much better at keeping people not-poor.

It's also interesting that the U.S's tenth percentile is so close in income share to everyone else's. Not so for our 90th. I wonder when the tipping point occurs and the U.S.'s X percentile begins amassing a far greater percentage of the income than the X percentile of our competitors. And I wonder what the breakdown looks like below the 10th percentile.

--Ezra Klein

IRAQI AIR FORCE. Speaking of the air force, it's important to remember that air power, while hardly a panacea, certainly plays an important role in modern military operations. Although air power is less important to counter-insurgency conflicts than high-intensity wars, having control of the air and being able to deliver ordinance to targets never hurts. If the Iraqi government is to fight Iraqi insurgents, it will need an air force. Unfortunately, things aren't going so well on that front:

The squadron's 15 Iraqi pilots and 39 other personnel operate four light aircraft donated by coalition countries -- two bulbous Seekers powered by a single pusher propeller and painted bright yellow, as well as two single-prop CH-2000s sporting a more conventional engine-in-front layout and gray paint. Both types carry infrared and daylight cameras for monitoring power and oil infrastructure and for spotting targets for other branches of the Iraqi military.

Two more observations. First, a modern air force is one of the most critical components of a high-intensity capable military establishment. If the Iraqi experiment were ever to actually "work out" in anything approaching the intended fashion, Iraq would need sophisticated aircraft to defend against Syria and Iran. Of course, such weapons would also be the most direct threat that Iraq could pose to Israel, which is perhaps why this element of military reconstruction has lagged. Second, even if the U.S. withdraws substantial numbers of troops in the future, it looks as if we're still likely to be involved in an aerial capacity. That kind of war will be less destructive for us but potentially even more destructive to the Iraqis.

--Robert Farley

SEDUCTIONS AND PERILS OF AIR POWER. Evidence cannot discredit revolutionary doctrine, as the revolutionaries simply interpret new evidence in whatever way they see fit. Air power enthusiasts have taken rather a hit lately, first with the failure of air power to tame Hezbollah in Lebanon (to the extent that the IDF did damage to Hezbollah, it was almost entirely with ground force), and second with the recent Lancet report suggesting that the use of air power, in spite of increased precision, had led to tremendous Iraqi civilian casualties.

Undeterred, Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. (USAF) insists that air power is best available option for the delivery of U.S. power. Disparaging "boots on the ground zealots," he argued that great recent successes like the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi point to the great capacity that air power still has to deliver victories. Dunlap did not, apparently, give any thought to the fact that the killing of Zarqawi has had no noticeable effect on the insurgency, but nevertheless. Dunlap argues that air war avoids events like Abu Ghraib and Haditha, but mentions nothing of the incident of Qana or the bevy of similar misdirected attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dunlap then insists that air power can win not only conventional conflicts but also counter-insurgency campaigns, and suggests that the Marine Corps should be folded into the Army, since excessive ground forces are unnecessary. That the liberal use of air power in conjunction with extensive use of ground troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq has notably failed to destroy the insurgency doesn't seem to bother General Dunlap, perhaps because he blames "human rights groups, the media, and others" for preventing extermination campaigns against "fanatical" insurgents.

A recent editorial in Warship:International Fleet Review captures the air power zealotry problem in particularly blunt language:

The culprits are the false prophets of air power. An air campaign starts with a target set, which might be informed by adequate intelligence and consists of targets, which are related to the casus belli and susceptible to accurate targeting. The promise of so-called surgical strikes against legitimate targets makes the use of force acceptable to policy-makers and opinion-formers on the left and the right of politics. However, as the air campaign progresses the intelligence becomes poorer and the targeting more challenging, even for precision weapons (which are only 'precision' in terms of means of delivery but are otherwise just as indiscriminate in such circumstances as any other munition). Therefore, inevitably there is 'collateral' damage. At the same time the intelligence becomes less reliable and the targets become more and more remote from the original set. Eventually the campaign ceases altogether to be intelligence-led and becomes capability-led: Rather than search out those targets which contribute to the campaign, the planners seek desperately for the targets which are susceptible to their available technology

A slightly extended version of this post is available here.

--Robert Farley

THE FRAUD CAUCUS FUND. I have to agree with Ari Berman of The Nation that the logical underpinnings of Republicans Who Care are shaky at best. A bunch of decrepit moderate millionaire Republicans are jumping into the breach between their far-right party leadership and moderate districts to save members of the Fraud Caucus like Chris Shays and Deborah Pryce. They are reportedly supporting "Republicans who favor balanced federal budgets and believe government should take a hands-off approach on such issues as abortion." The silliness of this exercise should be self-evident by now: if you want to support a politician who believes in a balanced budget and a woman's right to choose you don't need to look for the proverbial Republican in a haystack, you can just support a Democrat. Indeed, if you really care about a balanced budget and a woman's right to choose, re-electing a Republican who happens to profess those positions is actually counter-productive to those ends, particularly in the House of Representatives, where individuals hold virtually no power. What matters is who controls the committees and leadership positions that bring bills like Bush's tax cuts and the partial birth abortion ban to the floor. Can a bunch of accomplished financiers like David Rockefeller seriously not realize that their efforts, if successful, will do nothing but counteract their supposed goals?

--Ben Adler

FROM THE DECEMBER PRINT ISSUE: A LIBERAL MANIFESTO. Recently, Tony Judt wrote a piece for the London Review of Books entitled "Bush's Useful Idiots," which charged American liberals -- not "some" or "too many" American liberals, simply "American liberals" -- with "acquiesc[ing] in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy." The essay caused a big stir -- and made Todd Gitlin and Bruce Ackerman a bit mad. It inspired them to write this manifesto, a statement of liberal principles for the waning Bush era: "We Answer to the Name of Liberals."

Clearly this is a moment for liberals to define ourselves. The important truth is that most liberals, including the undersigned, have stayed our course throughout these grim five years. We have consistently and publicly repudiated the ruinous policies of the Bush administration, and our diagnosis, alas, has been vindicated by events. The Bush debacle is a direct consequence of its repudiation of liberal principles. And if the country is to recover, we should begin by restating these principles.

...

We refuse to confine our criticisms to personalities. We believe that the abuses of power that have been commonplace under Bush's rule must be laid not only at his door -- and the vice president's -- but at the doors of a conservative movement that has, for decades, undermined government's ability to act reasonably and effectively for the common good.

We love this country. But true patriotism does not consist of bravado or calumny. It resides in faithfulness to our great constitutional ideals. We are a republic, not a monarchy. We believe in the rule of law, not secret prisons. We insist on justice for all, not privilege for the few. In repudiating these American ideals, the Bush administration disgraces America and damages our claim to democratic leadership in the larger world.

--The Editors

THE CENTRIST AESTHETIC. Does David Ignatius remember the 90's? Because I do (indeed, they're about the only decade I can say that for). In his latest Post column, Ignatius warns that "there's a larger, overarching battle this year between two visions of America: testing whether it's a country defined by its political center or one defined by its political extremes." The first is Bill Clinton's "synthesizer" style, which "holds that Americans for the most part, with the exception of irate groups at the edges, are less interested in ideology than in practical solutions to basic problems." The second is the base mobilization strategy Bush and Rove.

But Clinton proves the point: This yearning for polite centrism is a hollow farce. Clinton, as I recall, was the coke-smuggling sexual assault artist who murdered Vince Foster before breakfast and sold off the White House by lunch. Whether his third-way policy ideas were smart approaches, his decidedly bipartisan approach to governance was rewarded with screaming witch hunts and media revilement. Nothing about the 90s was centrist, as you can't have respectful, bipartisan governance if one side won't play. The Republicans didn't. And the media didn't call them on it.

What Ignatius yearns for is the centrist aesthetic. "People from the Old Media, like me, instinctively prefer a centrist style of civilized debate," he writes. Which is fine. Except that "centrism" has a political meaning that connects to various policy positions, which Ignatius, while praising Clinton, Tester, Ford, and Talent, makes no attempt to defend or even distinguish. If Ignatius is just writing unclearly, and doesn't mean to signal a preference for any policy positions at all, that's okay too. But it's time to stop pretending that the death of civilized debate doesn't have suspects.

The media may yearn for civilized debate of another age, but it was Ignatius's employers at The Post who leapt on every blue dress, trumped up land deal, and sexual titillation The American Spectator would "report." If folks want to talk health care, PAYGO, and unipolarity till the cows come home, I'm sure Democrats would happily oblige. But I don't think they're going to enter the knife fight unarmed again anytime soon. If Ignatius is detecting a return of civilization to the political discourse, maybe it's because Republicans have been so silenced by their own failures and scandals that only Democrats are being heard. And when they don't have to shreik to be heard by Mr. Ignatius and his colleagues, it sounds pretty good.

Update: Digby has some characteristically more eloquent, developed, and sophisticated thoughts along the same lines.

--Ezra Klein

RACE MATTERS. Joe Klein's recent mash note to Barack Obama, which Charlie Pierce talks about here, contains some interesting (if banal) reflections on the problems faced by black Democrats. Either they can seek to appeal to other African-Americans, thus jacking up turnout but confining them to majority African-American districts, or they can move towards white voters, which will depress turnout among liberals and blacks. It ain't easy.

But Michael Steele is proving that Republican candidates have it no easier. The Steele path to the Senate relies on heavy white support from Republicans and cutting Ben Cardin's margins among blacks. In the past few days, though, Steele has received some help with the latter that may not be wanted: Mike Tyson, his one-time brother-in-law, happily endorsed him (and then explained to the assembled reporters how he'd like to box women for money) and Don King has hit the campaign trail for Steele (Said King: "I must have an indictment list longer than his awards list."). None of this, I fear, will aid Steele in the white community, where the bulk of his support lies. This sort of thing is on my mind because I received a e-mail today from a reader reminding me that racism has not evacuated electoral preferences:

Ezra: I just voted absentee, straight Democrat. That being said I assure you I will never vote for a woman nor a black for president and I am not alone. If Hillary/Obama ran they probably could not even carry all the blue states and certainly not the South. Perhaps after we are tasken over by the Mexicans voting will change. Evan Bayh of Indiana is the only Democrat with a chance of being elected. Wisdom: He would carry all the blue states plus the red state of Indiana. Hillary/Obama are both from heavy blue states.

--Ezra Klein

CONSPIRACY. Ezra had an interesting post over at his place the other day about the problematic relationship between Serious People and what they dismiss as conspiracy theories. He then thanks someone for passing along the details of the MK-Ultra fiasco. (By the way, according to recent reports, everything old is new again.) It's all a matter of perspective, really, even for those of us who've had a sweet-tooth for American political paranoia most of our lives. We grew up in what was its modern golden age, abetted by the excessive secrecy of the Cold War, and jump-started forever by the botched inquiries into John Kennedy's assassination. That said, we'd believe anything, because LBJ really did lie about the Tonkin Gulf. COINTELPRO was a real program. Ronald Reagan really did sell missiles to the mullahs. Hell, even the original explanation for the Roswell incident turned out to be a grand fib. And, just to play with young Ezra's noggin a little more, here's my personal favorite. Here are the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposing all sorts of crazy stuff regarding Cuba, and nobody turns this lunacy off until it gets to the Secretary of Defense. I've held a copy of the memo in my hand, by the way, at the JFK Library.

--Charles P. Pierce

CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT. Not for nothing, Senator Obama, but you should probably run for cover. Joe Klein may be about to subject you to one of his big old man-crushes. This can't be easy for Joe. After all, the last one of these he had was on that smiling hunk o' red-hot centrism from the Ozarks who ultimately threw him over for Sidney Blumenthal and then a chubby staffer. So it's understandable that Joe would be proceeding cautiously here. Once burned and all.

The most interesting passage scrawled on the cover of Joe's Social Studies notebook of the mind is the one in which he writes down the names of other way-cool African Americans, and reinforces it with a quote from Shelby Steele, which is very often a problem, about how white people love the black people who don't make white people feel too badly about themselves.

We are, according to Steele, grateful for this. Joe certainly is. His list includes Colin Powell, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods. (Holy Pudding Pops, Batman, where's The Cos?) He even refers to something called "the Colin Powell mania of 1995." This was when the general bruited about the possibility that he might run for president until a couple of evangelical pecksniffs called a press conference and beat him up. From this we must conclude that Joe's standards for "mania" are tolerably low.

And, anyway, there's one name missing from this list, and it's a name that Joe Klein would rather drive ten-penny nails into his eyeballs than ever mention. It's a name that would guarantee that Shelby Steele would never speak to Joe after study hall ever again. In March of 1988, as Marshall Frady writes in his essential biography, Jesse Jackson won the Michigan caucuses with 55 percent of the vote, beating the eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, by nearly four touchdowns. He received 22 percent of the white vote, four times more than he'd received in 1984, in that campaign that had cratered over "Hymietown" and Louis Farrakhan. A week earlier, in the 21 primaries held on Super Tuesday, he'd won or finished second in 16 of them.

On the morning after the Michigan vote, Jackson had received more votes than any other candidate, and he probably led in the delegate count as well. It was a brief moment, charged by economic populism, in which Jackson's longtime supporters were joined by unemployed white steelworkers and pipefitters. It didn't last, and Jackson has descended into floundering irrelevance. (Although, to be completely honest, nothing Jackson's done in the past decade comes close to the pathetic spectacle of Colin Powell's bobo act in front of the UN.) But it's certainly more relevant to the discussion of Obama's future than is the relative popularity of a professional golfer.

--Charles P. Pierce

SPOILER. Over on Bolton Watch Michael Roston does an excellent job blogging the race between Venezuela and Guatemala for a seat on the UN Security Council.

So far, there have been more than 22 rounds of voting, with neither country winning the necessary two-thirds support from the 192 UN member states of the General Assembly. The United States is strongly backing Guatemala, (or, more accurately, strongly opposing Venezuela) for one of the Latin American seats on the Council. And in doing so, the United States has shown that its influence at the world body is remarkably limited. As Roston points out, Venezuela has consistently pulled at least 70 countries in the balloting. And for their part, the Guatemalan delegation does not appreciate being branded the “American candidate.” Nevertheless, it looks like Venezuela will be blocked and a compromise candidate will emerge from Latin America.

This is a good thing.

Lots of folks may not think it all that terrible should Hugo Chavez have a seat at the Council. After all, he's expressed what 61 percent of Americans now believe: Bush stinks. But Venezuela is what UN insiders call a “spoiler," a state that often works to disrupt concensus achieved by other member states. Should Venezuela win a seat on the Security Council, it could be a terrible nuisance to some of the important human rights and security work at the UN. For example, when the Security Council passes a resolution authorizing targeted individual sanctions (as it has for Darfur, and recently did on North Korea) all 15 members must agree to the list of targeted individuals. Per Security Council procedure, any member of the Council can place a hold on the name of an individual, and severely disrupt the sanctions process.

There are other instances when unanimity is required, and in the name of blustery anti-Americanism, Venezuela could do some real damage to the Security Council. Progressives who believe in a strong international system should root against its membership.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

GETTING OUT OF IRAQ. Nearly everyone except Billy Kristol and John McCain agrees that the U.S. needs to reduce its presence in Iraq. Even George Bush has made "as the Iraqis stand up, the U.S. will stand down" as the centerpiece of his "strategy." Often, the debate is portrayed as "stay the course" (or the hilarious "adapt to win" spin of RNC hack Ken Mehlman) versus "cut and run" in partisan circles, but the reality is more complex.

The American military has been consolidating its position into fewer, larger bases for well over a year now, while endeavoring to hand over security responsibilities to the Iraqi military and police. As we've seen, this approach has been hijacked by sectarian militias and criminal gangs, who together have rendered the government of Nour al-Maliki largely powerless.

Any large-scale withdrawal will require some form of negotiation with the real centers of power in Iraq, among them some of those we are currently fighting. Since it's better to negotiate with fewer factions, in a way it's good news that various Sunni Arab insurgent factions are forming a united front against both the coalition forces and al-Qaeda. The latter just declared an "Islamic republic" in Anbar province, but is having trouble ralling other Sunni Arabs to its banner. While there are lots of unanswered question about who speaks for al-Qaeda in Iraq nowadays, this ought to present an opportunity for the U.S. to renew serious background discussions (through a third party if necessary) with the insurgency. It may not be time quite yet for a political settlement modeled on the Dayton Accords and with the inclusion of regional powers, but it's certainly time to start thinking along those lines. I don't expect anyone in Congress to call for what will easily be spun as "defeatism" until after the midterm elections are over, but I do anticipate that the Baker-Hamilton commission will propose something similar.

--Blake Hounshell

WHAT WAS THE VOTE COUNT ON THE FEDERAL MARRIAGE AMENDMENT AGAIN? Ed Morrissey claims that attempts to out GOP Senator Larry Craig shows that "Left hates gays." First of all, "a poster at Daily Kos and a gay activist" does not equal "the Left." (I mean, what do Ward Churchill and the immortal Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere have to say?) But more importantly, whether it's right or wrong the idea that outing someone reflects "hatred" for gay people is just silly. The premise is rather that politicians should be as comfortable with homosexual identities as they are with their heterosexual ones (you may have seen a political ad or two with a candidate's family prominently displayed), and that it's particularly odious for gay people to use the depriving of rights of gay people for reasons of political ambition. You may also remember this argument from the ridiculous Kabuki surrounding Mary Cheney, in which various cultural conservatives (and glibertarians), as part of a campaign in which gay-baiting ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments were a central Republican campaign strategy, screamed bloody murder because John Kerry said that Cheney was one of "God's Children." (This remains, as far as I am aware, the first and only gay rights crusade to include Pat Buchanan but no actual gay people.)

Like Ezra, I generally don't support outing. In addition to privacy issues, it's also because I just don't like the politics of personality. What matters is that Craig opposes gay rights, not his motivations for doing so or whether he's a hypocrite. But whatever its ethical status, this kind of outing doesn't reflect anti-gay bigotry, and the Republican bloggers who claim otherwise need to clean up their own house first.

--Scott Lemieux

ISLAMISTS ON THE MARCH? Marc Lynch has a new post up about the 2007 Jordanian parliamentary elections on his excellent new group blog, Qahwa Sada ("black coffee" in Arabic). The fear in the Hashemite Kingdom and in Washington, following the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Palestine, is that Jordanian Islamists will make big gains. They are represented primarily by the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, which is legal in Jordan but not in Egypt. As Lynch explains, however, an Islamist takeover is unlikely if not impossible due to the way the system has been designed.

Morocco will also be holding parliamentary contests in 2007, and these may be more interesting. Morocco has a range of Islamist parties and groups, from the relatively moderate and successful Party of Justice and Development (which currently has 42 seats out of 325) to the banned Justice and Spirituality Association, which is radical insofar as it rejects the legitimacy of the current system entirely (but formally opposes violence). This diversity forces such groups to clear up their "gray zones" or areas of ambiguity in order to differentiate themselves from the others. While the Moroccan government has been more successful than most Arab regimes at integrating Islamists into the political system, it cracked down on the JSA this past spring and summer for allegedly plotting a coup. As for the PJD, they expect to do well, but it's far too early to make any predictions.

How these and similar Islamist parties and movements adapt and behave in the political arena goes to the heart of the bipartisan consensus in the U.S. that Middle East democratization is the best way to marginalize the most extreme groups like al-Qaeda. Any real free and fair elections in the Arab world are going to see Islamists do well, given the current mood in the region, but the devil is in the details.

--Blake Hounshell

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CURT'S NEW HURT. Laura Rozen, who's been on the Curt Weldon beat for a while now, brings us up to date on the current FBI investigation into Weldon and his daughter, and ruminates on possible explanations for the Justice Department's recent interest in the relationship. Guess who comes up?

But a Washington lobbying expert who asked to speak on background has another theory: someone cooperating with the Justice Department on another matter might have tipped them off to Weldon. That person: Jack Abramoff.

“I think that Abramoff told them that his Russian clients told him this Russian company [Itera] had an in with Weldon,” he said. “The info provided by Abramoff would have been sufficient for the FBI to get a warrant for the wiretaps.”

--The Editors

¿Y TU, MEXICO? Over the last few years, Mexico has been rolling out a universal health care system focused on access to preventative care and free enrollment for the bottom income quintile. The results?

The number of cases of malaria have dropped by 60%, six times more people are receiving antiretroviral therapy, TB mortality has fallen by 30%, and Mexico is only one of seven countries on track to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015; the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG4). The reforms have also led to a 17% reduction in the proportion of male teenagers who smoke, a 17% increase in the use of mammography, and a 32% increase in the number of pap sme