JAILBIRD ROCK? Newt Gingrich (who I still believe will be the Republican nominee in 2008, so get used to him) got some attention in New Hampshire this week for giving a speech at "First Amendment" dinner and declaring that the War on Terror called for "a totally different set of rules" on speech.

But what he would take away with one hand, he gives back with another. In the interest of, he said, "expanding First Amendment rights," he called for the elimination of all limits on campaign contributions, in exchange for candidates' and parties' reporting all contributions on the Internet.

This proposal is not new: Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 informs me that when it was introduced in Congress a few years ago, it was known as "DeLay-Doolittle-Ney." Now that the first of those is under indictment, the third has copped a plea, and the middle one is under serious investigation, one has to wonder: What should you call a piece of legislation when all of its cosponsors are in jail?

(By the way, the article linked above makes a terrible and all-too-common error: It says that Gingrich called for repeal of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, passed in 2002. In fact, he called for repeal of the underlying law on campaign contributions, which goes back to 1974.)

--Mark Schmitt

BUT DID ANYONE TELL HIS POLITICAL ADVISORS? I don't know how this process works, but Mitt Romney has named his two primary economic advisors for the 2008 campaign, and, to his credit, they're proponents of, quite arguably, the most politically radioactive ideas in economics. Greg Mankiw's current obsession is a significant gasoline tax, a policy he's so committed to he's created a Facebook group to promote it. Meanwhile, Glenn Hubbard provided crucial backup support when Mankiw admitted that outsourcing was good for the economy -- a position that doesn't play so well in The Rust Belt.

In a weird way, both these moves speak well of Romney. Mankiw's "Pigou tax" obsession is arguable policy, but it's an undoubtedly serious -- and even unpopular -- attempt to deal with a profound threat. And taking a fatalistic view of outsourcing, while again up for debate (which I'll leave to Dean Baker), is at least ideologically honest. Both these guys are serious about policy -- more so, in fact, than they are about politics. And Romney's willingness to embrace them, impolitic statements and all, is evidence that there's a current of such seriousness in him, too.

As further evidence, I did a story on Romney's role in passing health reform awhile back. I concluded that he didn't deserve nearly so much of the credit as he'd been given, but even though the outcome was rather predetermined, everyone involved had honest and lavish praise for Romney's attentiveness to the policy issues and willingness to run an open and honest process -- a welcome change from the current occupant of the White House.

--Ezra Klein

FASCISTS OR HYSTERICAL PUNDITS?: Diane McWhorter has the most bizarre interpretation of this year’s election results to date, in Slate*. It appears to argue that the midterm elections confirm not that Americans are more populist, or even more conservative, but that they are more fascist. Based on a 66 year old musing from Eleanor Roosevelt, McWhorter asserts--without a shred of empirical evidence--that Americans have a long standing tolerance for any political movement that can instill confidence in the public that they will competently carry out their agenda whatever it may be. At the time, Roosevelt fretted that Nazism would appeal to Americans for that reason.

Therefore, she leaps to conclude that Americans only voted Democratic on November 7, because they rejected President Bush’s incompetence, not his policies. While I’m not one to gainsay the importance of the government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina and violence in Iraq as decisive factors, I think her assertion that Americans would have tolerated a war that killed and maimed thousands, even if it had created a more stable and democratic Iraq, is at best unsupported conjecture. Plenty of Americans opposed the war before it even started, and more still opposed it in 2004 when the occupation was not as clearly a disaster.

The rest of her piece seems to be devoted to disabusing the press and politicians of the notion that equating every undemocratic action of the Bush regime with Nazism is actually a good thing, and not a diminishment of the power of the memory of the Holocaust. But she never explains why it’s necessary to make the comparison at all. Isn’t it more effective to simply decry, say torture, as immoral or un-American without reaching for hyperbole as Dick Durbin famously did? And doesn’t McWhorter realize that the first thing most Americans think of when they hear Hitler or Nazi is the Holocaust, so they will invariably make that connection if the press were to, as McWhorter apparently thinks they should, equate Armstrong Williams with Joseph Goebbels propaganda operation? Consequently wouldn’t they dismiss people who use terms like Hitler or Nazism willy-nilly as whiny extremists, regardless of the technical correctness of the specific application? Furthermore, aren’t there other totalitarian regimes that also use propaganda and torture prisoners (Myanmar etc), without those other implications, and wouldn’t comparing the Bush government to them, when such a comparison is actually needed, be more effective?

Most sane observers would argue that the Democrats’ success this year is better explained by their shrewd restraint in not adopting the shrill language that McWhorter urges, and the American people’s fundamental sensibility, not their sheepish obeisance to competence in their public officials.

*Rhyming is for winners.

--Ben Adler

NO SHAME IN HIS GAME. I don't know how to find the audio of it, but David Frum gave a really rocking commentary on NPR today. It argued -- without shame or self consciousness -- that just as Republicans entered office and passed massvie subsidies for the oil industry, Democrats are about to pass massive subsidies for some of their big supporters. And which sinister sector will the Democrats be lavishing funds on?

Public universities.

The degree to which the GOP message machine has fallen apart ("Democrats: They'll expand your Pell Grants!") is really quite remarkable.

Update: Here it is.

--Ezra Klein

FRIST IN FLIGHT. All of us in punditry shed a tear today upon news of Bill Frist's withdrawal from the 2008 presidential contest. His absence will deprive us of a seemingly limitless number of gaffes, craven flip-flops, and opportunistics overreaches, all of which make for excellent copy. Given the sad news, it's worth going back to our November issue and reading Brian Beutler's send-off to Frist. Beutler seems to be operating under the belief that Frist was a bad majority leader. Speaking as a liberal, I believe he's one of the greatest leaders Republicans have ever had, and I hope they keep the mold intact.

--Ezra Klein

THE PROBLEM WITH PICKING A SIDE. Laura Rozen has reported that there's chatter in military circles about picking a side in the burgeoning civil war in Iraq. I have also heard this option described as the "pick a winner" strategy, with the idea being that the U.S. could forge an alliance with whoever appears to be likely to win the conflict and then help them crush the opposition in a short and decisive war, thereby creating a state with enough of a monopoly on the use of force to have internal stability (though not necessarily justice).

Should this strategy be pursued, all signs point to the U.S. allying itself with the Shia in Iraq, since they are the dominant population, and also less involved in the anti-American insurgency. In today's Washington Post, however, Saudi national security advisor Nawaf Obaid throws a wrench into the works and makes clear, once again, the conundrum of our present position. If the U.S. picks a side, he warns, Saudi Arabia will have to pick one, too:

In February 2003, a month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, warned President Bush that he would be "solving one problem and creating five more" if he removed Saddam Hussein by force. Had Bush heeded his advice, Iraq would not now be on the brink of full-blown civil war and disintegration.

One hopes he won't make the same mistake again by ignoring the counsel of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who said in a speech last month that "since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." If it does, one of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis....

remaining on the sidelines would be unacceptable to Saudi Arabia. To turn a blind eye to the massacre of Iraqi Sunnis would be to abandon the principles upon which the kingdom was founded. It would undermine Saudi Arabia's credibility in the Sunni world and would be a capitulation to Iran's militarist actions in the region.

To be sure, Saudi engagement in Iraq carries great risks -- it could spark a regional war. So be it: The consequences of inaction are far worse.

A strategy that serves to further unite the Sunni world -- which birthed and nourishes Al Qaeda -- against the U.S. and which draws Saudi Arabia into a broader regional war cannot be said to have solved the problem of Iraq or helped America in the fight against terrorism. Part of the appeal of the "pick a winner" strategy, as I have heard it described, is that it seems to offer a simple solution to a problem so complex that it has the qualities of a morass. But that is, in fact, the problem with it. It's highly likely that all simple solutions on the table with regard to Iraq will, in time, be revealed to be illusions, and to have complex consequences we can only hope we forsee before we set a course.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MUSICAL CHAIRS. I'll have to disagree with the mighty Atrios on this one. Blogospheric talk about the Harman/Hastings contest wasn't premature or chump-like. Just because "there was never anything coming from Pelosi's office suggesting that he was her designated man for the job," didn't mean there was no reason to believe he was her man for the job. Second in seniority, publicly supported by the Congressional Black Caucus, there was every reason to believe Pelosi would turn to Hastings. And for those who thought it a bad idea, every reason to oppose it publicly and prematurely. Unless I've misremembered my School House Rock, there's no public campaign for Select Committee Chair -- the Speaker simply chooses who her candidate, and then the deed is done. If you want to influence it, you have to do so before the appointment.

As for whether this was really "a big fact-free fake controversy likely set up by Harman supporters," it's resulted in the elimination of both Hastings and Harman, which means the ascension of one of the stronger second-tier candidates. Meanwhile, an obscure controversy over congressional committee selection will be forgotten by daybreak. The Chair of the Committee will be in place for years. A few moments of now-negated bad press seems like a fair trade for confidence in the final occupant.

--Ezra Klein

THE MAIN EVENT. Today's meeting between President Bush and Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki in sunny, safe Amman is not likely to solve Iraq's problems. If the text of Stephen Hadley's leaked memo is any guide, the purpose is to confirm that al-Maliki is still our guy despite his inability to control the sectarian violence that is often perpetrated by factions within his governing coalition. The Post says Bush is likely to press al-Maliki to take on the Mookster, whom Newsweek is now calling "the most dangerous man in Iraq."

Pressure is not going to cut it, I'm afraid. Why does the Mahdi Army exist? Because several million Shi'a are desperate for services and protection from criminals and Sunni insurgents, while the government has proven unable to provide those things. The Hadley memo suggests that al-Maliki's government needs to do a better job providing services in Sunni areas, but it also needs to do a better job in Shi''ite areas in order to obviate the need for Sadr. The danger, though, is that the Sadrists have become so embedded in the government that they're likely to steal resources and take credit for any patronage that results. After all, that's what they did with American aid money. Until you address the underlying security and services problems, you'll get nowhere, undermine al-Maliki, and have a raging two-front insurgency on your hands. As for the suggestion that he can broaden his base to include moderate Sunnis and Kurds, I highly doubt that Iraqis are ready to reverse the current sectarian trend.

--Blake Hounshell

TIMING IS EVERYTHING. I'd dispute Mike Crowley's assertion that Wes Clark's primary problem in 2004 wasn't an excruciatingly late start. According to Crowley, Clark's real problems were "that he seemed unsure of his own position on the Iraq war, recited oddball canned answers about abortion which suggested unfamiliarity with the subject, and generally proved himself to be a terrible politician," all of which sound to me like saying his problem was a late start.

There's no doubt that, right out of the gate, novice politician Wes Clark fumbled. He gave contradictory answers, seemed confused by certain issues, and generally gave the impression of...being a novice politican. Problem is, a couple weeks before the first primaries is neither the time nor the place for novice politicians. And given that he started too late to compete in Iowa, but the race was essentially decided there, he was out before he even began.

Had he started a year out from the first primary, however, he could have made those same slips, and gained crucial campaigning experience, before the cameras were focused and the voters were listening. Additionally, he would have had the time to compete in Iowa, and given how the caucuses shook out (remember: Gephardt was supposed to overwhelmingly win there), could well have occupied either the Kerry or Edwards spot. Indeed, I remain fairly convinced that Clark would have won if he'd entered early enough, and his late start allowed his inexperience and organizational disadvantages to overwhelm what should have been a winning candidacy.

--Ezra Klein

NONE OF THE ABOVE. Nancy Pelosi has, thankfully, chosen to reject both Hastings and Harman, the obviously correct option. The evidence against Hastings is pretty compelling, and taking a bribe as a federal judge isn't the typically vacuous "character" issue; it suggests a lack of ethics and judgment in ways that can affect policy. Moreover, the political hit would have been immense, and it's not as if Hastings was so great on the merits it would be worth paying the price. Meanwhile, Matt is right that Hastings's only virtue was not being Harman: "Hastings shook some dudes down for $150,000 and ruined three FBI investigations. Jane Harman, by contrast, supported an invasion of Iraq based on bogus intelligence that's costs hundreds of billions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Who do I have more doubts about?" Avoiding both of them was clearly the right call, and kudos to Pelosi for bucking the various caucus pressures and doing it.

Alas, it seems as if the oft-touted Rush Holt is out of the running. I don't know much about any of the three viable candidates, but while it's not literally true that they can't be worse than the two who were passed over it seems like a safe assumption.

UPDATE: As Matt Weiner points out in comments, I should note that Yglesias is just stipulating to a worst-case scenario; Hastings is almost certainly innocent of the charges of sabotaging FBI investigations.

-- Scott Lemieux

ENOUGH! WE'RE ALL WRONG SOMETIMES. Nothing more about Tom Edsall, I promise. The ratio of commentary to original text now rivals The Waste Land. However, a meta-point:

In the comments on the various posts here and elsewhere on the Edsall column, and on other sites, the critique jumps without hesitation from "he got it wrong" to a categorical attack on the writer, usually going straight to motive: He's "drunk the Beltway Kool-Aid," he's a "courtier servant...a silly, silly man," one blogger says, and a commenter demands that we "ask what it profits Edsall to lie...He is not a political pundit, commentator, or writer--he is a paid hack and propagandist." About half the comments have a similar tone.

Another example of this popped up this morning on Crooks and Liars: The Washington Post's Dana Priest gave a not-very-good answer to the question of why the Post doesn't call Iraq a "civil war." "We try to avoid the labels, particularly when the elected government itself does not call its situation a civil war." Ok, like I said, not a great answer, although she goes on to say, "absolutely the level of violence equals a civil war." For this, Crooks and Liars declares it "shows how screwed up the Washington Post is. ... Am I missing something here or are they getting an Armstrong Williams check?"

This is Dana Priest, for crying out loud, probably the most effective investigative reporter of the moment! This is the reporter who uncovered the secret prisons, among other stories. Dick Cheney would probably have her poisoned if he could get away with it. She gives one less-than-ideal answer, and all of a sudden we're to assume she and the Post are "getting an Armstrong Williams check?? (That is, bought off by the administration.)

There are lazy reporters and facile commentors out there. And there are, we have come to learn, actual Armstrong Williamses out there, who have no independence or integrity. They deserve a lot of scorn. But Tom Edsall and Dana Priest are not among them. Like everyone, they sometimes get things wrong. They look at facts and interpret them differently, they forget certain facts, they try to construct tight arguments and wind up misstating a case, or they don't have very good answers on the spur of the moment.

And we challenge them on it, as we should. It's a great world we live in that makes such a rapid, thorough discussion of a question possible. But the rush to find a nefarious motive (the "Armstrong Williams check"), or to disqualify a writer entirely as "drinking the Beltway Kool-Aid" doesn't further that discussion or add to our understanding.

I like the philosophy of Wikipedia: Make it easy to make mistakes and easier to correct them. Imagine how Wikipedia would be if every contributor who got something wrong were banned forever. Yet that's often the tone of these blog attacks. We're all on a quest to understand just what's gone on in our public life the last few years and how to fix it. When we see an answer we think is wrong, we can't just declare the writer a "wanker" or a "courtier-servant," or whatever. Just respond to the argument. We're all going to be wrong sometimes.

-- Mark Schmitt

DID SYRIA DO IT? Never loath to leap to conclusions without evidence, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has already decided that Syria killed Pierre Gemayel, Jr. last week. The Journal is pushing back against the expected Baker-Hamilton proposal of talks between the United States and Syria, which seem to meet with widespread approval everywhere but the Bush administration. It's possible that Syria killed Gemayel, but given Lebanon's byzantine complexity, I don't think it's prudent to leap to any conclusions. See Josh Landis for more on that.

I believe that talks with Syria are a good idea -- unless we come to a modus vivendi in the region, they will keep making trouble for us -- but only after Serge Brammertz, the UN investigator looking into the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, assembles more proof of Syrian complicity. His next report is due out in mid-December, around the same time the Iraqi Study Group will release its own findings. Syria is clearly uncomfortable about Brammertz's investigation and enthusiastic about Baker-Hamilton's outreach. They'd want to be let off the hook in Lebanon as part of any deal with the United States, in exchange for help in Iraq and Palestine. Assuming Brammertz has the goods on Syria for the Hariri and other murders (including Gemayel), we'll have more leverage if we wait. I just hope Lebanon doesn't fall apart before then.

--Blake Hounshell

STOP PICKING ON TOM. Of all the folks here, allow me step in to defend Tom Edsall for a moment, and I don't mean merely in the way Mark has done below and more so in private email communication -- i.e., that Edsall is a dexterous mind and a person with a long, impressive career. Rather, let me actually defend Edsall's thesis a bit -- even if I generally agree with Ben, Ezra, and Garance that Edsall's book would have been far more timely in, say, 1999, on the eve of the Bush-led GOP grabbing the full reins of power nationally in 2000, despite a rather thin plurality of popular support, and less than that in the presidential contest.

Having appeared on both a panel and on national radio with Edsall in the past month or so, and having read his book, I think it's fair to say that he has diagnosed the problem correctly but the prescribed antidote (mostly) wrong. On the former, it is true that the Republicans are the "party of the dominant" (even if that dominant class casts too few votes to actually carry much of anything beyond a corporate board of directors' motion); it is true that Republicans have many, many institutional advantages, particularly in terms of infrastructure (including the national media, which is one point with which I'd take issue with him); and it is certainly true that the Republicans have squeezed, cajoled and otherwise maximized every last ounce of power from the support they do enjoy among the broader public (the GOP senate "majority" right now represents a minority of American citizens, e.g.). In the giddiness of the past month, however, I must agree that it would be dangerous for Democrats to ignore the realities of these built-in advantages. A good quarter does not a football victory or annual earnings report make.

Having said that, one might very well cast Edsall's assessment, as I do, as a tipping point-style argument. Such an analysis proceeds as follows: If the GOP in the first half of this decade enjoyed every possible advantage -- controlling the entire apparatus of the federal government and majorities of governors and state legislatures/legislators, plus their various strategic, tactical, financial, institutional, rhetorical, and media advantages -- and still could not effect a realignment despite having the most powerful realigning moment since the 1929 stock market crash (broadcast live on television, no less), then one of two major conclusions are available for our consideration. One, the demographics are an undercurrent pulling against them. Or two, the GOP's ideological disposition and policy agenda is simply unsatisfactory to a significant portion of the public.

I happen to think both are true.

-- Tom Schaller

QUAKE ATTACK. Check out this interesting report on conventional bunker busting munitions at Defense Tech. It's a bit technical, but the upshot is that conventional munitions can do a remarkably good job of destroying underground bunkers, better, in fact, than extant nuclear bunker busters. Drop enough "Deep Diggers" and the result is an earthquake that will collapse just about any bunker or, at the very least, the access tunnels to extremely deep bunkers. Moreover, there's no reason to think that the limits of conventional bunker busting munitions technology have been reached, suggesting that additional research could produce even more impressive results.

This makes me wonder why some in the Pentagon and in associated neoconservative defense circles remain committed to developing new nuclear bunker busting weapons. If conventional munitions can destroy or entomb just about any conceivable bunker, why would anyone ever need new nukes? The answer, it seems to me, is political as much as it is technical. Conservative defense analysts still resent the limitations on nuclear technology created by both international agreements and various permutations of anti-nuclear groups in the 1970s and 1980s. To put it as simply as possible, hippies hate nukes, and hippies are obviously wrong, so therefore nukes must be good, in spite of any practical difficulties that might crop up. Trying to develop new bunker busting nukes is a way of yelling "Screw you!" at the imaginary hippies under the bed ...

-- Robert Farley

IF ONLY I LIVED IN SWEDEN. The World Economic Forum recently released its Global Gender Gap Report for this year. The United States ranked 22 on the list. Although it (barely) ranked above countries like Tanzania, it fell short of South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Croatia.

What really hurt women in the rankings were what the report called "educational attainment" and "political empowerment." Women are becoming the majority of undergraduate students at universities and colleges around the nation, but women still make up only about a quarter of professors nationwide. As for political empowerment, women have long made up the minority in decision-making power structures of government. The representation of women at the highest levels of influence are scarce.

I think this harks back to what Ezra and Dana had to say about the topic of women putting themselves at the forefront of politics. Why women feel restrained in the United States from participating in politics is a topic for futher discussion.

On the upside, women ranked at the top of the list globally for health and survivial.

-- Kay Steiger

YOU'RE WRONG, TOM. See what Matt has to say about Tom Edsall's column in the Saturday Times.

-- The Editors

TRAGICALLY HIP. I'm afraid that this innovative ad campaign, which pokes fun at Lebanese sectarianism through billboards like "Parking for Maronites Only," is bound to be misunderstood. Maybe it's a little too close to Lebanon's reality for comfort?

-- Blake Hounshell

THE CRIME BILL FALLACY.There is yet one more thing to be said about that egregious Tom Edsall column on Saturday: His key example of the destruction of the Democratic Party by it's left-wing interest groups -- the 1994 crime bill -- is entirely false.

Edsall says the bill “sought to burnish the party’s justice credentials by increasing the number of felonies subject to the death penalty,” but instead, “amendments added to win support from the left — most visibly, $40 million for midnight basketball leagues — caught fire on conservative talk radio, spread to the establishment media, and soon became a liability.”

In fact, as the crime bill wound through the Senate and then the House, conservative Republicans as well as Democrats agreed that initiatives to prevent crime – largely by ensuring that adolescents had activities to occupy their time – were at least as central to actually reducing street crime as increasing the number of felonies subject to the federal death penalty. This idea didn't come from the wacky left, but from police officers, who were complaining that they were being put in the position of social workers and that kids with nothing to do and nowhere to go sometimes break the law. ("Let's go get sushi and not pay.")

Midnight basketball -- which had been cited by the first President Bush as one of his “Points of Light” -- was part of a much larger package of prevention initiatives that had bipartisan support. In the Senate we had a murderers row (no pun intended) of Republicans including Domenici, Danforth and Ted Stevens as cosponsors of a crime prevention package that, as it passed in the Senate, included about $1 billion for after-school programs.

As the 1994 election approached, however, Republicans saw a political danger in letting the Democrats claim an achievement on crime, and they saw an opportunity: With whipsaw precision, they turned against the prevention initiatives they had previously supported, singling out midnight basketball for particular mockery. (As Edsall should well know, it was no accident that of all programs in the bill, they chose one that connotes a mostly African-American, urban constituency.)

Edsall portrays these programs as if they were trivial leftist distractions from the main purpose of the bill, which was "to burnish the party’s justice credentials by increasing the number of felonies subject to the death penalty." The bill did add 60 new offenses that are subject to the federal death penalty -- "drug kingpins," etc. But only three people have been put to death under the federal statute since 1963 and 43 people are currently on federal death row. The death penalty provisions were purely symbolic politics designed to make Democrats "seem" tough on crime, and they gave people like John Kerry an opportunity to be for the death penalty after (or at the same time as) they were against it. But they had nothing to do with the main purpose of the bill, which was (or should have been) to reduce crime.

The massive decline in crime that followed has many causes, including raw demographics and an economic boom, but to the extent the crime bill played any role, it is surely in the funding for additional police presence and community policing, and in the prevention programs. Since 1994, there has been a resurgence in after-school programs, which were almost completely gone in the early '90s.

There may be good examples of Democratic deference to far-left interest groups, perhaps even some more recent than 1994. But “midnight basketball” is an example of something very different, the pathological willingness of the Republicans to sacrifice anything, including policies they support, for tactical political advantage. Edsall knows this and he has written about it well in Building Red America.

-- Mark Schmitt

DON'T POP THE CORK JUST YET. Don't mean to step on anyone's birthday cake or anything, but after reading David Paul Kuhn's Washington Post Magazine piece on the evangelist Jim Wallis (who is being touted as the savior of the Democratic Party), I'm not quite ready to declare, as Brothers Tom and Ezra seem poised to do, the triumph of the economic populism narrative. Yes, it's encouraging that Uchitelle is using it, and the Prospect, as demonstrated in Tom's smart piece on the Dems in the North, has got the real story.

That Kuhn's piece should appear, however, just yesterday, replete with references to core Democratic activists who are "hostile to religion," is a bit discomfiting. The narrative evolving here, thanks in part to the anti-choice but pro-safety-net Wallis, is that what kept "religious Christians" (a group Kuhn never really defines) away from the Democratic Party for so long was those pesky feminists and black
people.

Compared with the relative cultural homogeneity of the FDR coalition of labor, Catholics, ethnic whites and Southern whites, the modern Democratic Party began to focus on "a lot more little narrow constituencies under its big tent," such as the civil rights and feminist movements, which were like "little fiefdoms they had to make happy," [said Clemson University Professor Laura] Olson...

"When the Democrats became just the party of rights," Wallis tells Kuhn, "they lost something, a moral appeal."

This is a dangerous story, and one that will no doubt appeal to liberals who believe themselves not to have a prejudiced bone in their bodies. And it's packaged so nicely for easy media consumption.

--Adele M. Stan

WOMEN AND MINORITIES ARE NOT THE PROBLEM; THEY'RE THE '08 LEADERS. Not to pile on, since Thomas Edsall's weekend column has been so ably dissected by Ezra and Ben already, but I do think Edsall's piece also needsto be considered in light of the fact that the two leading Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination in 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are a woman and an African-American.

It seems increasingly bizarre to me that anyone could point to a sensitivity to the concerns of women and African-Americans as the problem with the party, when, in fact, the party is now being led by a diverse group of people whose candidacies have been made possible by the work of such interest groups over the past four and a half decades. Indeed, the real worry ought to be that the party has neglected to adequately study how to help its ever-growing number of female and minority candidates win in a political environment that House candidate Darcy Burner has pointed out may be uniquely unfavorable to them (wartime), and which may require them to pursue different sorts of electoral strategies than the ones that proved so successful for their white male Democratic peers this November.

That said, I've generally found Edsall to be a fantastically astute political analyst whose insights into the differences between Democratic and Republican organizing efforts ought to be heeded, since he does talk extensively with both sides. And in this instance, I don't think it's totally fair to act as if he is expressing only his own views, rather than those he has heard from a broad array of people within the Democratic Party, or that he is somehow uniquely out of touch. The fact of the matter is that a substantial number of leading Democratic and liberal thinkers have made similar critiques of the Democratic Party's interest groups over the past few years, even in the pages of this magazine. For example, Michael Tomasky wrote last May in his acclaimed "common good" article:

the way interest-group politics are done in today's Democratic Party just has to change. I'm not the first to observe this recently -- indeed, momentum is gathering behind this view, although it's still a long way from being a consensus one. In their controversial 2004 paper, "The Death of Environmentalism," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, blasted the environmental movement's tactical narrowness and outdated intellectual frameworks. In their perceptive and passionate new book Crashing the Gate, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong rebuke liberal interest groups for a variety of sins, notably of feeling the need to endorse a few moderate Republicans for Congress even though those Republicans, while they might have acceptable records on issue X, Y, or Z, will go on to make Bill Frist the majority leader and Dennis Hastert the speaker -- and with that single vote, more than cancel out whatever nice things they do when nothing's on the line.

This kind of politics is shallow, it's shortsighted, it's anti-progressive, and it nullifies the idea that there might even be a common good. Interest groups need to start thinking in common-good terms. Much of the work done by these groups, and many of their goals, are laudable. But if they can't justify that work and those goals in more universalist terms rather than particularist ones, then they just shouldn't be taken seriously.

So no, interest groups and their progressive agendas don't need to be kicked to the curb. They need to keep doing what they have started doing, which is gaining new strength as defenders of America's twenty-first century norms against the right-wing radicals who'd like to drag us back half a century.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

KONDRACKE VS. THE FACTS. I'm not exactly going to stun anyone by suggesting that Mort Kondracke doesn't know what he's talking about, but this is rather offensive:

The reason that V.A. prices are lower is, it's basically a socialized medical system. You go to a V.A. doctor, you go to a V.A. hospital, you go to a V.A. pharmacy and the V.A. pharmacies only have 25 percent of the drugs that seniors actually use all the time. So, you know, it doesn't work.

The VA, just like the Medicare presciription drug plans, uses a formulary of drugs on which they negotiate discounts. That formulary contains drugs for every condition, but mostly eschews the copycats and useless medications that clutter up the market. Your pharmacy, remarkably enough, does the same thing. Now, VA users still have coverage for drugs off the formulary, they just don't get the bargained discounts on them. And here's the kicker: The VA has the best outcomes, for the lowest cost.

Those two points are not unrelated. As part of "knowing what I'm talking about," I called Phil Longman, who's done the best work on the system. As he explained, the VA is almost fetishistically rigorous about testing new drugs for efficacy and safety before adding them to the formulary. Vioxx, for instance, was never added to the list, because the VA thought it neither effective nor safe. They were right, and their patients were protected. That didn't -- and doesn't -- mean VA doctors can't approve off-formulary drugs. They just have to explain why doing so is necessary. In that way, the VA incentivizes the proven, well-priced drugs on their formulary rather than the ones in the news, but doesn't eliminate new and necessary treatments.

And how's that worked out? Well, in 2003, The New England Journal of Medicine found the "socialized" VA better on all 11 metrics of care than fee-for-service Medicare. The Annal of Internal Medicine found they surpass the commercial managed-care systems on all seven metrics of care for diabates patients. The National Committee for Quality Assurance, the gold-standard, found the VA the best health system in the country, beating out such star performers as John Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic. And an astounding 81% of Vets approve of their care, higher than Medicare, Medicaid, or the private sector.

But Kondracke doesn't know any of that. Or if he does, he's not telling. And in doing, he's breaking trust with and misinforming his audience. What conservatives literally cannot get around -- and so must ignore -- is that the single best health system in the country today is the socialized one. But inconvenient as it is for their ideology, what's all the more inconvenient is that the pundits Americans entrust to know about and inform them of these things are failing to do so.

--Ezra Klein

CENTER-RIGHT PUNDITS ARE NOT A GOVERNING COALITION. Brothers Ben and Ezra say most of what needs to be said about this atrocious, risibly anachronistic op-ed by Thomas Edsall. An argument this silly contains multitudes, however, and there's one point I'd like to add. My question: if we're throwing "organized labor, minority advocacy organizations [and] reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents" out of the Democratic coalition, who's left? Where are the votes coming from? (The irony here is that DLC types, who see the Democrats building a governing Democratic coalition out of wealthy, complacent white males, are the flipside of Ralph Nader, who seems to think that a governing progressive coalition can be built by white college students.)

There are two moves Edsall makes that are crucial to propping up this nonsense. The first is the egregious double standard in evaluating Democratic and Republican-affiliated factions. Supporters of reproductive freedom are a "special interest" dragging down the Democratic Party, while the cultural conservatives are simply "real Americans" or some such (even on issues, like Roe v. Wade, where the pro-choice position is also the majority position.) The second is that the "public interest" adduced by pundits like Edsall to contrast with "special interests" tends to match up not with the priorities of voters but with what Bob Somerby calls "millionaire pundit values." We're about to see this play out again with respect to Social Security, where Democrats will be urged to be "responsible" and endorse some kind of privatization scheme, although the Democrats' position on Social Security involves backing the majority position against "special interests." Such conceptions of the "public interest" are just empty tautologies used to defend whatever position the pundit happens to hold, and has nothing whatsoever to do with coalition-building.

--Scott Lemieux

SAY "POPULIST" AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF FAIR TRADE. Tom's right, by the way. Democrats should be damn proud of themselves for so rapidly repelling the spin that the 2006 election augured a resurgence of traditional conservatism. Moreover, they were able to actually replace it with a more appealing, appropriate narrative: The rise of the populists. That's the sort of fight liberals used to lose, but this time, in no small part due to the blogs, magazines like this one, and the facts, the Republican message machine was overwhelmed. As the kids say: w00t!

--Ezra Klein

FIGHTING PHARMA. The weekend was dotted with articles detailing Big Pharma's readiness to go to war with the Democrats over Medicare prescription drug bargaining, which is really a way of saying the weekend was dotted by articles fed by Pharma's PR firms into the eager and willing hands of newspaper reporters, who are all too pleased to pass on their doom-and-gloom predictions.

Pharma is arguing Medicare's user base is so massive that government negotiation amounts to de facto price controls, which would decrease innovation. So though Pharma accepts such "price controls" from the VA, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Medicaid -- all of who pay far less than Medicare -- innovation cannot sustain the addition of Medicare's patients.

We should hope not. 2/3rds of Pharmas current R&D budget goes not towards creating new drugs for killer conditions, but towards crafting copycats of other blockbuster drugs, which evade the patent protections placed by competitors. Another massive proportion of the actual research is conducted in the public sector and licensed out at miniscule prices through the Hatch-Waxman Act. Indeed, lower prices and innovation aren't either/or, they're both/and. Were I the Democrats, I'd decree that some proportion of the savings from negotiation go to the NIH to fund the lifesaving research that gets turned into lifesaving drugs, rather than going to subsidize the useless research that goes to create a knockoff version of Lipitor.

Pharma isn't fighting this battle because they're terrified of losing even one dollar that could go towards innovation. They already spend twice as much on advertising as they do on R&D. And most of the R&D doesn't "innovate" at all. They're waging this war because they want to make more money. That's their job. But it's the governments job to advocate for the public interest, and better pharmaceutical prices, particularly coupled with more investment into cutting edge, lifesaving drug research, is the public interest.

--Ezra Klein

AN ENCOURAGING SIGN. Ehud Olmert surprised me today by announcing a new peace initiative following the shaky truce in Gaza:

The Israeli prime minister today said he was prepared to free "many" Palestinian prisoners in return for the release of Cpl Gilad Shalit, the soldier captured by Palestinian militants in June.

Speaking on the second day of a fragile ceasefire, Ehud Olmert said that he was willing to dismantle Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for "real peace".

"I hold out my hand in peace to our Palestinian neighbours in the hope that it won't be returned empty," he said.

"We cannot change the past and we will not be able to bring back the victims on both sides of the borders. All that we can do today is stop additional tragedies."

He also offered to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians and free up frozen funds if violence against Israel ended.

Behind this movement, I think, is the recognition in Washington and Damascus (where Hamas' exile wing is based) that it's in neither party's interest to have the region destroy itself in a frenzy of ethno-sectarian violence. It's a recognition that may have been aided by James Baker's September meeting with the Syrian foreign minister and the steady drip-drip of stories paving the way for U.S. talks with Syria (and Iran). A more cynical view, based on a tea-leaf reading of Philip Zelikow's speech in September at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is that the Bush administration wants some token movement on the Israeli-Palestinian front in order to line up Sunni Arab regimes in favor of strong action against Iran.

--Blake Hounshell

DAMN THOSE LEGISLATIVE ACTIVISTS! You have to hand it to Mitt Romney --like so many opponents of same-sex marriage, he's principled. These decisions should be left to the legislature. Unless, of course, the legislature reaches an outcome you don't like, in which case the executive can veto the legislation and urge that it be resolved by the courts. Or, in Romney's case, when the legislature give you the wrong answer, you return to the courts, claiming another kick at the can because the legislature has used the method it usually uses to defeat enactments rather than the method you'd prefer. Although somehow I doubt that people who (selectively) decry "judicial activism" will object to this attempt to use the courts to "thwart the will of the people." As for the chances of the lawsuit succeeding:

Lawrence M. Friedman, a specialist on Massachusetts constitutional law at the New England School of Law, said the court must decide if the State Constitution requires the legislature to vote. Professor Friedman signed a brief supporting same-sex marriage in 2003 but has not been involved in the issue since then.

“This case is not about same-sex marriage,” he said. “This is a case, first, about what the legislature is required to do, and second, if there is anything the court can do about it.

“It’s not at all clear to me how this is something the court can remedy. It doesn’t seem likely to me the court will order the legislature to take a vote or subvert constitutional procedures and just put it on the ballot.”

-- Scott Lemieux

THANKS, BLAKE. I know I'm supposed to be reflecting on how bad things are in Iraq, but after Blake's post, I'm really just seized by a desire to start pressuring the MSM into henceforth referring to Moqtada al-Sadr as the "The Mookster."

--Ezra Klein

RARELY IS THE QUESTION ASKED: IS OUR CONGRESSMEN LEARNING? It's study hall for the new Democratic Majority, as Nancy Pelosi is running some issue education sessions for her caucus this week. The first class, on Iraq, presents a fair array of thinkers, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Holbrooke, and Major General John Batiste, among others. The second, on the economy, appears to have only one speaker: Robert Rubin.

Now, Rubin's a smart guy, and as his positions on certain issues have changed, he's inching slowly towards the mainstream of progressivism. But this is a guy whose prescriptions, above all, failed to alleviate the precise problems the Democratic Party is now charged with mitigating. NAFTA is widely considered a mediocrity -- if not a failure -- that neither created the (deceptively) promised jobs in America nor stemmed the flow of illegal immigration. And Rubinomics, for all it virtues, enhanced productivity without enduringly ending wage stagnation. Moreover, Rubin is a Wall Street guy, with the centrist, deficit-reducing policies you expect from that crowd.

Undoubtedly, Rubin should be part of any economic education session for incoming Democrats. But that he's slated to play professor all by himself is worrying. What about Jacob Hacker, whose ideas on economic insecurity are legitimately new and important? Jared Bernstein? Elizabeth Warren? Warmed over Clintonomics is not a sufficient response to the problems of the Bush economy. Rubin's points deserve consideration, but his is not the only, or even the most compelling, response to the current moment, and it'll be to the Democratic Party's discredit if they lack the imagination to turn to cutting edge scholars rather than just former officials.

--Ezra Klein

WANKIEST OP-ED COLUMN EVER. "For the Democratic Party to revive, major tenets of American liberalism, economic and sociocultural, will have to be discarded. The party can join Studebaker and the Glass Bottle Blowers union, it can trudge along as No. 2, or it can undergo a painful transformation." Gee, it sure sounds like Tom Edsall, who wrote those words in his Saturday New York Times column, had a whole argument about the death of the Democrats in place before the election and just dutifully trotted it out, the results notwithstanding. Declaring American liberalism dead and the 2006 election a last twitch of life before rigor mortis sets in, Edsall goes on to make all the centrist "friend of the Democrats" attacks on the left that we've been hearing for twenty years.

Only problem: it all proceeds from a factually false premise. The Democrats are not "No. 2." On November 7 they were number one by a wide margin. And the stats from recent years don't suggest a final death twitch: before the midterms the Dems in Congress had actually won more votes than their Republican counterparts, and were only in the minority because of gerrymandering and the over-representation of red states in the Senate. The also won the popular vote in the two presidential elections immediately following the disaster of 1994 that Edsall repeatedly invokes, and their uninspring candidate lost to a wartime incumbent president by a small margin in 2004.

Then there are all the self-contradictions in Edsall's piece. Edsal writes that, "Many Democratic constituencies — organized labor, minority advocacy organizations, reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents — are reliving battles of a decade or more ago, not the more subtle disputes of today." According to Edsall, these hidebound interest groups require Democrats to "plac[e] a disputed cultural or spending agenda above the broader public interest." And voters will abandon Democrats for good if they continue to do so. So what are these issues where Democratic obeissance to narrow interests threatens not only their current majority but their viablity as a major party? "Lethal struggle in the Mideast, nuclear proliferation, mounting skepticism toward free trade, and a rising non-marital birthrate -- now at 37 percent -- that concerns moderate voters."

Call me crazy, but I fail to see how the culprits Edsall fingers have any effect on, say, nuclear proliferation, one way or another. Minority rights groups demanding affirmative action for non-nuclear powers? Unions demanding card check neutrality for reactor employees in Iran? And, in fact, unions have taken the lead in expressing "mounting skepticism toward free trade" and reproductive rights organizations are at the forefront --through expanded access to contraception and the morning after pill, plus protecting the righto choose -- of attempting to combat that high non-marital birthrate.

It seems that Edsall's whole argument is an unfair attack on the left, proceeding from a false premise. I think Chicken Little has spent so long decrying the falling sky that he hasn't bothered to look up -- or at the November 8 headlines -- to notice that it isn't going anywhere.

--Ben Adler

WHILE WE WERE AWAY. Believe it or not, it's possible for Iraq to slip even further into chaos. The Iraqi government -- not that it's really in charge of the country anyway -- is on the brink of collapse after Moqtada al-Sadr & company threatened to withdraw if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki goes ahead with his meeting with Bush in ... Amman (scheduled for Wednesday). As Spencer noted on his blog, this was an astute move by the Mookster, who is the beneficiary of a rising tide of Shi'ite anger provoked by the latest massive bombing attacks in Sadr City. Another round of deadly reprisal attacks on Sunnis may begin if Baghdad's curfew lifts later today.

The rapidly sinking Maliki, put in an impossible position, has said he's going ahead with the meeting with Bush. Maybe he's just trying to flee the country.

--Blake Hounshell

POPULAR POPULISM. The initial media narrative for 2006 -- namely, that Republicans lost because of the war, and to an emergent class of conservative Democrats -- is, I'm happy to report, starting to turn a bit. The New York Times is leading the way, with an appropriately titled piece yesterday by Louis Uchitelle ("Here Come the Economic Populists), followed today by a regional analysis from Pam Belluck about the Republicans' northeastern debacle.

--Tom Schaller

CHEERS, TOM. Our own Tom Schaller is giving a public presentation today on his book, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, at Duke University at 3 p.m. (not 2:30, as originally scheduled), in the Social Science Research Institute. If you can't make it to Durham, you can watch Schaller's appearance on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal"
program archives.

--The Editors

WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE LOST EVERYTHING, YOU FIND OUT YOU CAN ALWAYS LOSE A LITTLE MORE. So it's not just that Bush's new chief of family planning services, Eric Keroack, uses wacky cartoons to teach kids reactionary, anti-scientific nonsense about sexuality. Apparently, he's not even a board-certified ob-gyn. Heckuva job, Bushie! (In fairness, as Bush appointments to crucial family planning posts go, he's still not quite as bad as David Hager.)

--Scott Lemieux

CANCEL THE APPOINTMENT. The Department of Health and Human Services is now defending Eric Keroack as an appointee to lead federal family planning groups based on Keroack's private practice as an OB-GYN, during which he prescribed birth control to patients. Keroack has a record of working for Christian family planning centers that dissuade women from abortions and birth control. Moreover, he "inadvertently" let his OB-GYN certification expire in the last year at the same time that HHS officials have been touting that credential as evidence of his suitability.

--Kay Steiger

FUTURE FORCE. Did you like America's Army, the free first-person shooter designed as a recruitment tool by the US Army? Then you'll love Future Force Combat, a free game that simulates the experience of a Future Combat System equipped Mounted Combat Team. Future Force Combat accomplishes the nifty trick of being not only a recruitment tool but also a sales pitch for the most expensive integrated combat systems that the Army has ever requested. The sinkhole that is Iraq has hit the Army the hardest, and the Pentagon budgeting norms have by and large prevented a reshuffling of defense funding, potentially putting FCS in some jeopardy. J. at Armchair Generalist and Kingdaddy at Arms and Influence have additional commentary on the game and the pitch.

As to FCS more generally, I remain ambivalent. The Army should certainly be planning for future conflict (this is what military organizations do), but I don't know that producing dominance over the entire combat spectrum, from low to high intensity, is something that one system can accomplish, and FCS looks to me much more like a high intensity than a low intensity system. On the other hand, the chances that FCS will see meaningful military employment at some point in the future are much, much higher than those of its Navy and Air Force counterparts, the Zumwalt destroyer and the F-22.

--Robert Farley

SPEAKING OF MCCAIN. Greg has a very, very good question for him.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE NEOCON PARTY. It's tempting to make fun of Marshall Wittmann's newest guise, as Lieberman's communications director, as if it were just another twist in one of the oddest careers in Washington. The New York Times has some fun with that theme today.

However, it's quite obvious where this is going. John McCain will fail to win the Republican nomination, and he and Lieberman will turn up as a third party presidential ticket. They will have a great shtick: "We were each rejected by the ideological extremists in our parties, therefore we represent the true forgotten center of American politics." The Broders of the world will salivate over the possibility.

Except, of course, it will not be a centrist party. It will be the Neoconservative party, with Lieberman having taken that angry turn and McCain already there. And both are rank opportunists, for whom "straight talk" is an empty slogan.

There are many ways this could go wrong, but be aware: someone is certainly thinking about it.

--Mark Schmitt

OVERBLOWN. David A. Bell wishes more people were discussing and debating John Mueller's new book Overblown, which makes the strong case against considering terrorism a genuinely dire, let alone existential, threat to the United States; I share Bell's wish. Mueller's argument is basically off-message for just about everybody, but has always stuck me as a truly useful contribution to debates over terrorism and American policy. Cato Unbound held an in-depth exchange with Mueller back in September that's worth a look, and so is this very strong New York Review of Books essay by Max Rodenbeck, reviewing (sympathetically) Mueller and a few other related books.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SPEAKER PELOSI. Now that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer have gone into overdrive to patch things up and get the caucus unified after last week's fight, we've been reminded that the key challenge of Pelosi's leadership is likely going to be less intra-leadership squabbling with the majority leader than handling the disparate strategic and substantive priorities of the committee chairs. Her batting down of Charlie Rangel's draft push is one early glimmer of the kind of control we're likely going to see her exerting frequently on the chairs in the next two years. That, combined with the strategic sense of theater indicated by the leadership's plan to break up the ethics reform package into constituent parts to prolong the debate and showcase incoming freshmen, offer new reasons for optimism about the strong hand Pelosi will be using as Speaker. (Don't tell the press, of course.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE GENIUS. Sometimes, what with General Nuisance back in the saddle again, and Richard Cohen's apparently mistaking the 101st Airborne for a heating pad. (Note: I'm thinking that the word "therapeutic" is just going to lay there like rotting roadkill on the ol' career path for quite some time), I despair of the world. And then something like this happens, and all is right with the world again. As nice as it was to see Alma Mater take Trust Fund U out for a walk last night, I was somewhat alarmed by the report from ESPN's Doris Burke that, in his effort to broaden his horizons, Marquette coach Tom Crean visited with "the genius, Karl Rove." I think the Jesuit fathers ought to be awfully concerned that their highest profile employee is consorting with godless pirate scum and I think Burke's standards for "genius" are at least two weeks out of date.

--Charles P. Pierce

CONCESSIONS. Two Democratic House challengers that had been holding out with razor-thin electoral deficits finally conceded defeat after further ballot counting yesterday. Patricia Madrid lost to incumbent Heather Wilson in New Mexico, Victoria Wulsin to Mean Jean Schmidt in Ohio. The open-seat race in Katherine Harris's district (FL-13), meanwhile, has the Republican up by 369 but is headed to the courts. As subscription-only CQ reports:

That candidate is Republican Vern Buchanan: The Florida secretary of state’s office yesterday certified the wealthy car dealer as the victor, by a margin of 369 votes, over Democrat Christine Jennings, a former bank president.

Jennings immediately filed a lawsuit in Leon County, which is well north of the 13th District but includes the state capital of Tallahassee. The crux of Jennings’ complaint — which demands that a new election be called — is that there were more than 18,000 “undervotes” in Sarasota County, the district’s largest jurisdiction and the source of Jennings’ greatest electoral strength.

The “undervotes” refer to ballots in which votes were registered for other offices but not for the House race between Buchanan and Jennings.

“The vote totals in the certification are wrong because they do not include thousands of legal votes that were cast in Sarasota County but not counted due to the pervasive malfunctioning of electronic voting machines,” states the complaint…

Some critics are not counting on the audit to iron out their election concerns. A second lawsuit was filed Tuesday by the political action groups Voter Action, People For the American Way Foundation (PFAWF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida on behalf of Sarasota County voters who are demanding a revote.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You go, Garance. That "maidenly vapors" line surely got my back up. Brother Pierce apparently fails to see a connection between expressions of hatred toward women and violence against women. Perhaps an intervention is in order. I do, however, second the sentiments of Brother Pierce on the Seinfeld phenomenon and the fallout from the Michael Richards racist rant. Call me a delicate flower, but I never got into Seinfeld because it was just too mean. (Pierce put his finger on the undercurrent of prejudices flowing through the show, though he neglected to mention the fear of queers that also ran through it.) I just watched the bit posted on TMZ from Richards' satellite appearance last night on Letterman, which, speaking of undercurrents, proves one more time the old adage about de Nile not just being a river in Egypt. Here's Richards:

I push the envelope I do a lot of free association on stage� I don't know. In view of the situation and the act going where it was going, I don't know -- the rage did go all over the place; it went to everybody in the room.

I know people could, blacks could feel -- I'm not a racist, that's what's so insane about this. I don't -- and yet it's said, it comes through, it fires out of me.

--Adele M. Stan

WHAT HE SAID. Josh Marshall is quite right to worry about the Democrats' out-of-the-gate agenda. While the military questions Barney Frank and Charles Rangel want to raise (about gays in the military and whether there ought to be a draft, respectively) are important ones, it is difficult to imagine any two issues more guaranteed to shift the national focus away from Republican mismanagement of the reconstruction of Iraq and how to get America out of a civil war zone and onto what will be framed as Democratic culture war fights. If that is allowed to happen, I am quite certain those moderates and independents who just gave Democrats control of the Congress will start asking themselves what it is that they have done, for neither of these two issues were (I'm pretty certain) what led them to vote Democratic just a few weeks ago.

Further, a decisive national consensus on getting rid of "don't ask, don't tell" may be easier to achieve once the war is clearly on its way to being over. It is extraordinarily difficult to change major national or military policies with regard to specific groups during the middle of a war. However, the examples of the integration of the military and the enfranchisement of women show that change can rapidly follow a conflict's end. Bringing this conflict to an end would thus seem to be the first-order priority.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A NOTABLE ELECTION. Alec alerts us to this very interesting election trivia from subscription-only The Hotline. Some highlights include:

• This is presumably the first cycle since the modern party system began that no party (in this case the Dems) lost not a single House, SEN, or GOV seat.
  
• No House Democrat lost re-election for the first time since '22…
  
• NH is sending its first woman to Congress. Still never having done so are: DE, IA, MS, VT.
  
• First all-Dem NH U.S. House delegation elected since '12. First Dem control of state House since '22. First total Dem control of NH state gov't since 1870's. Dem gain of over 80 state House seats is presumably a record as well…
  
• First ever elected Senate class with only 1 GOP freshman.
  
• Lincoln Chafee is the first RI senator defeated since '36.
  
• PA elected its first Dem in a regular Senate election since '62…
  
• Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the only senator elected to 9 full terms, lost his first county since '88. Already the longest-serving senator in history, Byrd will surpass ex-Sen./ex-Rep. Carl Hayden (D-AZ) as the longest-serving member of Congress ever on 11/18/09.
  
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) is the first CA sen. to win by over 20 points since '74…
  
• NY GOPers lost every statewide race for first time since the '30s…
  
• OK elected its first woman to Congress since 1920
  
• Rep.-elect Albio Sires (D-NJ 13) won 20 years after his first bid for the seat (as a GOPer for then-NJ-14)

--Sam Rosenfeld

UM, EW. I have to say, reading Charlie Pierce's commentary below on a progressive web site is the kind of thing that really makes me wonder about the left today. So Michael Richards's reprehensible and hate-filled rant was the expression of a condemnable authentic Seinfeldian Id, which was hateful in any event because if was a milquetoast alternative to Sam Kinison? I'm sorry, but Sam Kinison -- whom a recent reviewer called the embodiment of a "regressive politics which mainstream America finally got the sense to denounce" -- is the favorable point of comparison here? Seriously? Why is it that misogyny is the only hatred still defended by men of the left? Seinfeld soothed the "maidenly vapors" people had around Kinison? My recollection was that Kinison was a disgusting, hateful, hate-filled boor and those "maidenly vapors" he raised were genuine feminist objections to him, by women who were, for example, trying to create a situation so that girls like myself were not, in the 1980s, subjected to his rants (and those of the equally gross Andrew Dice Clay) by our older brothers and their friends.

Of course, tweaking the feminists is the most common of media sports, an easy way of garnering masculine pats on the back, even among men of the left, for there is nothing so universally approved of as ragging on women for being such sissy little girls about things. The African-American subjects of Richards's foul rant didn't particularly like being targetted -- and yet here, a man who spoke of women as offensively is recalled with fondness as one of those on the side of "all the real stuff," and his critics dismissed as having "maidenly vapors." Richard Goldstein had some useful stuff to say about the political impact of such attitudes in a smart piece of cultural history in The Nation a few years back. People could do worse than read it again.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WINNING BY LOSING. Ezra's fine article in the print edition reminds us that the Republican approach to policy was not just to pass what they thought were good ideas, but to use policy to disembowel their enemies. He does a fine job of identifying some strategies that are not only good policy, but would help break down the right-wing power structure.

As is so often the case when one looks at the recent Republican racket, he could have gone one level deeper in cynicism. Ezra writes that the GOP priorities of "tort reform, unflinching support for Israel, and deunionization [are] policies that would either flip or impoverish lawyers, unions, and Jews, thus eliminating the three primary funding sources for the Democrats."

Taken that way, the strategy would seem like a failure. Jews, unions, or trial lawyers are neither impoverished nor flipped. (Unions are impoverished relative to the past, but still, their financial clout in politics is larger than their membership, and probably is used more effectively today than a dozen years ago. While Republicans flipped part of the Jewish vote -- the Orthodox, in particular -- in 2004, it appears to have flipped back, with exit polls reporting that 87% of Jewish voters supported Democrats. )

But part of the strategy was also how to win even by losing. Part of the strategy of tort reform, and particularly the attack on unions known as "paycheck protection," was simply to divert the resources of those constituencies into the fight over their own interests. As long as the unions were fighting paycheck protection initiatives in various states (requiring unions to allow members to withhold what portion of their dues that goes to political activity), then the unions weren't operating as part of a broad progressive coalition or working to elect good people or working on health insurance. Similarly, if trial lawyers are defending their own turf, they're not working as the base of progressive politics, as they do in so many Southern states where unions don't play that role. And losing is as good as winning, because it means that you can come back year after year with the same fight.

So when you hear people say things like, "the Democratic/progressive coalition is really just a bunch of narrow special interests," remember that there are also policies and policy fights that have the effect of exacerbating the narrowness and self-interest.

So if you want to be that cynical (and it's not easy, if you're not born that way) you want to think about policies that create fights that in themselves help to break up the Republican coalition. Stem cell initiatives probably had that effect, perhaps initiatives on things like banking regulation would take some key parts of the conservative coalition out of the game and focused on self defense.

--Mark Schmitt

MORE ALTMAN. Since I'm having such a good day with pop culture, I figure I'll keep at it. For those of us who went to a lot of movies in the 1970's, the arrival of a new Robert Altman was Christmas morning. Now that he's passed away, there are going to be a lot of justifiable tributes to Nashville and to M*A*S*H, a movie as thoroughly trivialized by its TV version as any movie ever was. But my heart still stays with McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a purely revisionist Western, and everything everyone thought Clint Eastwood had done with Unforgiven, but a lot funnier and a damn sight more quirky. The shootout in the snow with the building aflame is one of my favorite set-pieces ever, and then there's Julie Christie, smoking opium as she passed out of her Carnaby Street phase, and moved into that glorious torrent-of-curls period. Hell, I even liked some of the later, smaller stuff, like Cookie's Fortune, which starred a marvelously batshit Glenn Close. I think I'm going to have me some catfish enchiladas in his memory.

--Charles P. Pierce

ROBERT ALTMAN. I was lucky enough to see a beautiful 35mm restoration of La Regle Du Jeu last week. The most obvious modern inheritor of the "open" filmmaking style invented by Renoir, Robert Altman, has died.

Altman was a risk-taker, and as is well-known this made him uneven. (Pauline Kael, one of his biggest critical supporters, said about the disastrous Quintet that "Altman has reached the point of wearing his failures like medals. He's creating a mystique of heroism out of emptied theaters.") But the upside is that he made a number of pictures that will be seen as long as people watch American movies. For me, the canon starts with the hauntingly lovely McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville--his most successful Renoir-style social panorama--and the superb late-career Raymond Carver adaptation Short Cuts. And since any fan needs one, my favorite of his less-lauded pictures is California Split, his loose, amiable picture about happily degenerate gamblers. He was a giant of American film, and will be sorely missed.

--Scott Lemieux

ROBERT ALTMAN, R.I.P. Truly a giant.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SUPERPOWER SELF-ESTEEM. As Kevin Drum points out, the Iraqi people overwhelmingly want us to leave. They do not believe our presence stabilizes or protects and, as a result, they support attacks on our troops. All the better to get us the hell out.

The question, of course, is why we don't. What's the compelling national interest in occupying a country that deplores our presence? That murders our soldiers? That depletes our treasury? That shows no sign, hint, or hope of molding itself to our desires?

There is none. Instead, we remain in Iraq because the current Administration is afraid to put a loss on the board. We remain in Iraq to avoid a blow to our national self-esteem. So long as we've boots, guns, and grunts in their country, there's always the chance that a stretch of good weather and the tranquil vibes unleashed by the global orgasm for peace will calm the region down, and we'll be able to dart out in a moment of relative optimism and goodwill, reputation intact. To leave now, conversely, would be to admit defeat. And no one making the decisions -- not the elected officials protecting their legacy nor the colonels seeking promotion -- will be the one to codify our humiliation. That's understandable on an individual level, but in the aggregate, it means we're not merely asking men to die for a mistake, we're asking them to perish to protect our ego.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ARAB WINTER. Remember the "Arab Spring"? Matt takes us on a trip down memory lane.

--The Editors

EMINENT DOMAIN. The New York Times has an explosive story on its front page this morning:

JERUSALEM, Nov. 20 — An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.

Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.

If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private.

The new claims regarding Palestinian property are said to come from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, which controls the civilian aspects of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plans to publish the information on Tuesday. An advance copy was made available to The New York Times.

--Blake Hounshell

TAX EVASION. To add a bit to what Ezra argued, the dreadful effects of Republican fiscal irresponsibility extend beyond the question of universal health care. Assisted by the calculated indifference of the administration, the services are hiding an increasing percentage of their day-to-day costs in defense supplementals, allowing them to escape difficult political scrutiny. As J. at Armchair Generalist points out, the combination of corruption, sketchy, politically driven defense accounting practices, and an aversion to taxation of any sort makes it bloody difficult to conduct a war:

The crime here is not just that the Republicans have fostered a disregard for responsible fiscal practices and have encouraged the runaway costs of this military operation. It's that they're actually going to enjoy using this situation for political gain - watching the Democrats try to be responsible by raising money through taxes to pay for the military's needs and then blaming the Dems for being irresponsible "tax and spend" liberals -- rather than trying to face this national challenge in a bipartisan fashion.

--Robert Farley

YADDA-YADDA. I admit it. I never got the whole Seinfeld thing. Part of it was a pre-existing loathing for the star. Back when the late Sam Kinison was prowling the stages and scaring people (Jesus: "Sure, I'll go back, even if I'm the only guy in history who can use his hand for a whistle!") it was Jerry whom the culture warriors brought out to soothe their maidenly vapors. Jerry would talk about how he never worked blue and then yap about breakfast cereals. Different strokes and all, I agree, but I never shook the feeling that Seinfeld was on the other side from all the real stuff.

Anyway, I watched his show long enough to realize that there was an awful lot of overdog bullying going on at the heart of the phenomenon -- vaguely racist and xenophobic, with a mysterious sweet-tooth for Funny Cripple humor. We're losers, but the world is full of bigger losers, and a lot of them look different. Ho, ho. So, when Michael Richards went off the other night (inevitable YouTube footage here), immolating himself and coming damn close to getting his resolutely unfunny ass kicked on stage and on camera, what I saw was the unleashed Id of the authentic television landmark of which Richards was a part. Yadda-yadda, indeed.

--Charles P. Pierce

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE DECEMBER PRINT ISSUE. The latest print issue of the Prospect has dropped; you'll want to check it out. Two of the pieces are available as free previews to non-subscribers: Tom delves further into the data illustrating the northern realignment that these elections consolidated, while Ezra offers up some ideas for how Democrats can pursue smart policies that are also smart politics -- "prioritizing policies that strengthen, expand, and empower their coalition." Elsewhere on the post-election front, Jacob Hacker and Ruy Teixiera suss out the economic politics of these midterms, Drew Westen gets at the subliminal power of effective campaign appeals, and Congressman Barney Frank makes the case for worrying about -- and responding to -- economic inequality.

Spencer has a lengthy report on what the Baker-Hamilton commission will mean for the dynamics of the Iraq debate. Tara McKelvey investigates civil war in the ACLU. Jo-Ann Mort captures the predicament of Israeli Arabs. There's much more. Subscribers, enjoy! Non-subscribers, consider taking advantage of our temporary 6-issues-for-10-bucks deal and joining the happy ranks of Prospect readers.

--The Editors

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PARTIAL-BIRTH'S TROJAN HORSE. Scott tells us why the Supreme Court's upcoming decision regarding the federal partial-birth abortion ban matters more than people think:

If the Court overturns the health exemption, this will deal a body blow to Casey, giving states hostile to abortion much more leeway to legally harass doctors and patients in ways likely to have a chilling effect on abortion providers. (Remember that D&X abortions are not limited to post-viability abortions.) If the Court gives a free pass to legislatures that make bogus medical claims to evade the health exemption requirement, as the drafters of Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act did, this will have the same effect with an extra layer of dishonesty added on top. (It will also send a signal to legislatures that the Court will not scrutinize the motives and consequences of abortion regulations with any seriousness, further diluting the "undue burden" restriction.) If, alternatively, the Court upholds the law pending "as applied" challenges, this will make challenges to abortion laws much more difficult and expensive, exacerbating the class inequities already present in abortion access.

And irrespective of the precise rationale the Court ends up citing, the larger problem is that, because the distinction between D&X abortions and any other procedure is wholly arbitrary, legislatures can invent further distinctions and continue to tie the hands of abortion doctors. As Eve Gartner, the lawyer representing Planned Parenthood, put it during the oral argument, "to allow such an expansion of pre-viability abortions that can be banned would set the stage for continued legislative efforts to ban other iterations of the classic D&E method of abortion, until truly there would be nothing left at all of Casey's holding that it is unconstitutional to ban second-trimester abortions."

--The Editors

A CODA FOR THE BUSH YEARS. He was describing the ongoing gap in test scores between whites and blacks, but he could have been summing up the past six years in many other ways as well:

“Not only have all boats stopped rising, but the boats that are under water are sinking further down,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to the study.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ALZHEIMER'S. This was a terrific catch by Ezra. If I may just add my own particularly nasty-ass dog in the fight -- Alzheimer's Disease, which struck down my father and every one of his four siblings. It is a disease that takes a horrible toll on almost everyone in a patient's family. The estimated cost of caring for an AD patient is $174,000, and average course of the disease is seven years. The Alzheimer's Association estimates that 16 million Americans might have the disease by 2050. Even if a therapy can be found, a lot of the cost of caring for an AD patient is still going to come from things like home nursing and respite-care, which enable the fulltime caregiver, usually an aging spouse, the opportunity to sleep three or four consecutive hours. And we don't have the space to get into the problems inherent in the nursing-home industry. As Ezra said, a malignant system, indeed.

--Charles P. Pierce

A GRAND BARGAIN. Barney Frank, the incoming Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, gave a speech in Massachusetts over the weekend calling for a "grand bargain" between business and Democrats. "What we want to do," he said, "is to look at public policies that'll get some bigger share of the increased wealth into wages, and in return you'll see Democrats as internationalists. . .. I really urge the business community to join us."

In other words, Democrats will lift their opposition to a variety of free trade bills and regulatory changes if business will drop their opposition to legislation increasing wages, guaranteeing health care ("I think employer-paid health care is a mistake, I think it depresses wages"), and reempowering unions. Likely? Not particularly. Business has gotten so much of what it wants over the past few years that the changes Frank can offer are relatively marginal, while the concessions he's demanding are fundamental economic changes.

That said, there could come a moment -- and soon than one might think -- when elements of Frank's agenda, like health care, look good to corporations on their own merits. The automakers are already aching for relief. Wal-Mart has begun to chafe beneath the mountains of bad press their employee relations net them. Small businesses simply can't handle benefit costs. If enough of these companies want to get out of the insurance providing business, Frank's proposed deal could provide them cover for the reversal.

--Ezra Klein

A MALIGNANT SYSTEM. So far as the personal responsibility wars rage in health care, cancer is a usefully clarifying condition. Its causes are manifold and hard to pinpoint: Genetics, poor luck, environment, lifestyle, and a variety of other mechanisms play a large part. Few tend to see the disease as the direct result of poor choices (save smoking), which makes this Kaiser study on affected families all the more poignant.

According to Kaiser's survey, a full quarter of households used up all their savings treating the patient. One in ten had to forego major expenses like food, heat, or housing in order to bear the burden. 13% ended up going into debt and being hounded by collection agencies, 3% declared bankruptcy. 8% of respondents said they delayed or went without treatment due to the expense. 11% were unable to health insurance because of their cancer and 6% lost insurance they already had.

What's there even to say?

--Ezra Klein

WRASSLING WITH DIXIE. Tom's right. His non-Southern Strategy thesis drives people nuts. I know this because I alienated no less than three (3) separate people by mentioning it this weekend, and then finding myself unable to escape the resultant firestorm of offense and anecdote. You can't focus your resources in the Interior West because that person grew up in the South (albeit in a university community), and they know, just know, that the South would greet Democrats as liberators, showering them with chocolate and flowers, if only they'd make a play for their affections.

Tom can ably argue against that impulse, and I'd like to see him go a bit more into the racial politics than he's been doing. It's worth noting that the South, as an aggregate region, disagrees with the Democrats on a variety of issues areas (mainly national security, civil liberties, and cultural issues), and it is not in any way irrational or immoral for southerners to vote based on those preferences.

But as a more general strategic note, the southernization of the GOP will have pretty massive effects on the Republican Party -- effects Democrats will find fairly congenial. As a combination of Californian emigration, Hispanic immigration, and economic fluctuation continue diluting the Interior West's libertarianism, the region will cease exerting its current pull on the Republican Party's ideology. And as the Elephant becomes ever more reliant on the South, the concerns of the region's dominant constituence -- economically insecure whites -- will continue permeating the top levels of the Republican coalition, eventually forcing a leftward shift as their base continues to demand entitlement security and public spending.

None of this obviates the need for Democrats to craft a message that speaks directly to some southern concerns -- if only because Democrats need to force the GOP to respond to a progressive economic appeal (which I argue more fully here). But as someone convinced by Tom's data that the South is Republican for the foreseeable future, I'm surprised by the sparse attention given to the implications of this for the GOP.

--Ezra Klein

TRIAL IN ERROR. Today, Human Rights Watch released a report on the legal and procedural failings of Saddam Hussein's trial. It's not a shocker -- the trial didn't follow standard rules:

regular failure to disclose key evidence, including exculpatory evidence, to the defense in advance;  

violations of the defendants’ basic fair trial right to confront witnesses against them;  

lapses of judicial demeanor that undermined the apparent impartiality of the presiding judge; and

important gaps in evidence that undermine the persuasiveness of the prosecution case, and put in doubt whether all the elements of the crimes charged were established.

--Kay Steiger

HEY ARNOLD! This article on Schwarzenegger's halting, halfhearted attempts to bring universal coverage to California neatly encapsulates the central hurdle facing Republican reformers: Taxes. You simply cannot cover a new segment of the population without the addition of some revenues. And since Schwarzenegger's advisors are already ruling out funding streams as minors as cigarette taxes, you've got just about no place to turn.

The example of Massachusetts has, in some ways, been destructive here, as governors have looked to that state and then done some throat-clearing about replication. Problem is, Massachusetts was a rare case that didn't need new revenues. As I explained in this article, a previous wave of progressive health reform had already created a massive fund to care for the uninsured in the Commonwealth -- which meant the Roney plan only had to redirect revenues, not create new ones. Add in a huge hospital-industrial complex, a very low number of uninsured residents, the threat of an expansive, universal care ballot measure, and the government's withholding of a $750 million health waiver, and you've got an easy path to change.

That said, there is something to the federalist strategy on universal health care, wherein various states give it their best shot and create models for the rest of the nation. Problem is, it's hard for states fund such experiments. That's why I've some affection for Russ Feingold's idea (mp3), which would guarantee a handful of states tens of billions to institute such plans. I'd amp up both the money allocated and the number of states included, but it's an interesting compromise proposal that could, in a Democratic Congress, make it through the legislative process with few enemies and even attract a presidential signature.

--Ezra Klein

GO NOWHERE. Thanks to Tom Ricks, we learn that the Pentagon's Iraq review promises more of the same -- an infusion of an unspecified number of forces for an unspecified period of time to fight the insurgents, and an eventual but unspecific shift in emphasis to the training of Iraqi troops and police. This is called "Go Long," but in reality it's "Go Nowhere." This is exactly what we've been doing for at least a year, plus or minus an Army division.

As a wise man once said: WTF? Well, for one thing, the Pentagon gave the review primarily to three very highly-regarded colonels, all of whom will be generals in the extremely near future. One of them is H. R. McMaster, the hero of Tall Afar. To be high-minded about it, McMaster & co. believe that even at this late hour, the discrete and short-term successes in places like Tall Afar can be applied across Iraq. To be cynical about it, McMaster & co. don't want to be the ones who recommend that the war end with the U.S. -- and particularly the U.S. Army -- in the loss column. That's not the best thing for your career.

For another, this is part and parcel of an interference play run by Bush to marginalize the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which is considering withdrawal. With the new Pentagon study in hand, Bush can claim the best wisdom of the rising stars in the U.S. military, all men with combat experience and some successes under their belts. What's tragic about this -- aside from the fact that, as Fareed Zakariaput it, it's just "willing more American deaths" -- is that McMaster used to know something about the perils of not standing up to civilian maniacs.

--Spencer Ackerman

PARTY OF ONE. May I just say that this Orman character is now my favorite person in all of American politics? We're stuck with Weepin' Joe Lieberman for another six years. In their infinite wisdom, the voters in America's File Cabinet pried their fingers off the handles of the slot-machines in Ledyard long enough to send this human hairshirt back to the Senate, where he will maintain his seniority, assume the chairmanship of a committee, and enable public idiocy for the next six years because the majority's too thin for any other course to have been viable. The only thing left for us is ridicule, loud and unceasing, if only because Weepin' Joe is about as funny as an andiron.

This is a helluva start.

--Charles P. Pierce

AND I THOUGHT DISPLAYING RESOLVE WAS IMPORTANT. Apparently not. Henry Kissinger:

“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” Mr. Kissinger told BBC News.

It should be noted that Kissinger's somewhat incoherent position is still better than John McCain's, whose plan for a "short-term surge" is ably demolished by Yglesias.

--Robert Farley

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT. I�ve learned a lot of lessons from the 2006 elections, including this: The argument for a non-southern strategy simply drives some people batty. They lose any mathematical facilities they once had. Or worse: They blithely cherry-pick election results and poll data. They reach inaccurate conclusions built upon the soft foundation of non-quantifiable statements riddled with terms like "some" or "many" or "a whole lot." Again, I'm not sure what the root causes of this phenomenon are. But I suspect that these behaviors have, um, "a whole lot" to do with the rather inconvenient truths that were revealed on November 7.

--Tom Schaller

STRAIGHT TALK. That new cable fun show, John McCain Will Say Almost Any Damn Thing, rolled into George Stephanopoulos' joint this weekend, where the Straight Talker flipped, flopped, and flew. Gaze in awe. I swear, if I walked up to the man, and whispered that I could deliver a precinct in Manchester, he'd give me his car on the spot. That he plainly doesn't know what he's talking straight about, however, is a more alarming problem. If you throw the privacy rights of 51 percent of the American people back to the states -- and that is what the debate over choice really is, all scriptural filigree aside, an argument about the right to privacy -- you are not a "federalist," the historical antecedents of whom were the advocates of a strong central government empowered to tell the states what the national interest really was. (As best I can recall, Ronald Reagan was the first one to take this particular scam for a spin.) What you are proposing is a return to the doctrine of "states' rights," which fell partly out of favor due to all that unpleasantness at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and in the earthen dams around Philadelphia, Mississippi. It still stands in a bad odor today except within the shrinking Republican base, and in the office of the new Senate Minority Whip, who thinks it got an unfair hearing back in '48.

--Charles P. Pierce

MCCAIN AND ABORTION: THE DANCE OF DISINGENUOUSNESS. John McCain has come out for overturning Roe. Frankly, I'm not sure what this tells us that we didn't already know. McCain has already expressed support for the draconian ban in South Dakota, and voted to confirm Robert Bork and Samuel Alito. And in case McCain apologists once again mention that McCain "said that if his daughter wanted an abortion, he would leave the decision up to her," I note that the fact that McCain wouldn't dream of applying general bans on abortion to people in his social circles doesn't make him a pro-choicer; it makes him a Republican. John McCain's daughter won't have a problem getting an abortion whether Roe is good law or not, but a lot of other women won't be so lucky. Social conservatism for thee-but-not-for-me is pretty much what social conservatism means in this country.

And his justification for supporting the overturning of Roe is also classically dishonest:

MCCAIN: I don’t think a constitutional amendment is probably going to take place, but I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you’d be for that?

MCCAIN: Yes, because I’m a federalist. Just as I believe that the issue of gay marriage should be decided by the states, so do I believe that we would be better off by having Roe v. Wade return to the states. And I don’t believe the Supreme Court should be legislating in the way that they did on Roe v. Wade.

And moreover, Lindsay reminds us that he supports a constitutional amendment banning abortion. I'm not sure if it's the Human Life Amendment in the GOP platform -- which would make abortion first degree murder in all 50 states -- but it certainly renders the "federalism" dodge an even more ridiculous lie.

--Scott Lemieux

BEST EVER. Oh, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew. Allow me to retort.

The 1986 Boston Celtics.

The 1985 Los Angeles Lakers.

The 1972 Los Angeles Lakers.

(Don't worry. We're getting there.)

The 1967 Philadelphia 76'ers.

The 1964 Boston Celtics.

(Almost)

The 1996 Chicago Bulls.

Maybe.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE DEMONS OF THE PAST. Charlie's succeeded in baiting me out of Tapped semi-retirement with this post. I went and looked up Fred Barnes's article "From Bradley to Barkley" and I have to say that it's pretty definitively the worst piece of sports writing ever. It isn't actually an "attempt to re-cast the NBA as a 'conservative' sport based on the fact that one of its stars was Charles Barkley, who then was making silly mouth-noises about being a Republican." Rather, the conservatism of mid-1990s pro hoops is grounded in a larger schematic. Liberal sports are "non-violent ( mostly), collective, and less than triumphal -- in a word, McGovernesque." Sports "where violence is supposed to be kept to a minimum and intricate teamwork matters, are liberal." So far, so good cliché.

Then comes the trouble. Barnes places football in with the rightwing no-teamwork sports. This is, I promise you, a conclusion you could only reach if you'd literally never seen a football game. Meanwhile baseball, a series of one-on-one individual matchups if ever there was one, is lumped in with the collectivist lefty sports. The argument about the NBA, meanwhile, is a bit absurd. The decline of the timid, namby-pamby, college-style "white" game in favor of the above-the-rim athleticism of the contemporary "black" game in the modern NBA is said to herald a rising tide of conservatism because, apparently, there's no teamwork involved in it.

Honestly, the less said about that theory the better, but the fact remains that Barnes happened to have been writing while the best team in NBA history -- the 1996 Chicago Bulls -- were marching their way into the history books. This was, definitively, a team effort, a fact underscored rather than undermined by the presence of the game's greatest individual talent in Michael Jordan. He had a fantastic second-banana in Scottie Pippen, a dominant rebounder in Dennis Rodman, an ace spot-up shooter in Steve Kerr, a fantastic passer in Toni Kukoc -- in short, a wide range of players with complementary skills working together to wipe the floor with the opposition.

--Matthew Yglesias

FRIEDMAN OBIT ROUNDUP. Yesterday I noted that Milton Friedman had just died, joining John Kenneth Galbraith as the second towering figure of 20th-Century economics to die this year. Now the obituaries are out in most major publications (here's the New York Times). Berkeley economist and blogger Brad DeLong submitted his own to Salon. It's a sensitive, nuanced portrait of "an enlightened adversary" with whom left-of-center economists tangled at their "peril."

While Friedman is best known for his ceaseless advocacy of free-market economics and extreme hostility to government (and even to public schools and parks), DeLong highlights his broader "pragmatic" libertarianism: his staunch opposition to the draft during Vietnam, his criticism of the War on Drugs, and his hatred of deficit spending. Love him or hate him, DeLong suggests, Friedman was no hack: he was dogged, articulate, and passionate in his views.

If you're looking instead for a full-throated condemnation of Friedman, his economic philosophy, and his involvement with Chile's military junta, try Counterpunch or this Guardian op-ed. For uncritical hagiography, try NRO Online. Somewhere in the middle, where I am, is this surprisingly-balanced Wall Street Journal obituary.

--Blake Hounshell

INGRAHAM. It's becoming increasingly clear that the new congressional majority is going to take seriously what Donald Segretti used to call "ratfucking" -- low-tech political creepery of a peculiarly scummy variety -- in the context of the last few elections. While a lot of people rightly were concerned about hacked voting machines and organized voter suppression, and other forms of massive fraud, a whole universe of relatively less complicated dirty tricks got organized around the national Republican political apparatus. We got a glimpse of it in 2002, when the Republicans ran a phone-bank-jamming operation in New Hampshire that's subsequently sent a couple of people to the sneezer, a scandal with an actual criminal body-count that very few NH Democrats believe has been plumbed fully to its depths yet. This time around, there was the robo-calling that actually hit the media in real time, and which seems to have caught Harry Reid and Barack Obama's attention. Now there's this.

There's a big old First Amendment rock in the road here, to be sure, but, because Laura was so interested in the sanctity of our national institutions between the years 1992 and 2000, I'm sure she'd want just as much attention paid to this as was paid to, oh, I don't know, Whitewater, maybe.

--Charles P. Pierce

DEM GOVS: AN EMBARASSMENT OF RICHES. As Scott pointed out, Matt worries that there's too little talk about good middle-America governors as presidential candidates, and that "we may be doomed to an endless cycle of Senators (who DC political reporters already cover), governors from Virginia and Maryland (whose exploits are detailed in the Metro section of The Washington Post), and scions of famous families."

That seems unlikely, since not only are senators rarely elected president, they are rarely nominated. There's always talk: Every presidential cycle begins with a long line of senators who want to be president, but usually ends with a governor: between 1976, 1988, and 1992, there are probably two dozen sitting Dem senators who thought they had a shot until Carter, Dukakis or Clinton came along.

Matt's "counterpoint" example of Howard Dean proves the point. The reason Dean jumped out ahead of the pack was not the netroots, but the very fact that he was the only governor in a pack of senators, ex-senators, congressmen, and Al Sharpton. And that in turn was a direct result of the Republicans' absolute domination of the country's governorships in the mid-1990s. By the 2004 primaries, there was hardly one credible Democratic big-state governor with even a single full term of experience. (Vilsack of Iowa and Gary Locke of Washington were the exceptions.) Governors are always more trusted, and they have skills that the Senate strips away, and Dean had the governor slot in the race all too himself. It was only when Dean seemed unelectable that voters turned to the sitting senators.

This year, we'll have Vilsack in the race, and Evan Bayh is a credible candidate largely because he was a successful governor, not because he's now a senator. If Edwards had had one four-year term as governor, with some tangible accomplishment, he would be a more credible than with one six-year term in the Senate.

Yes, Tommy Thompson -- or any of a handful of perceived-successful Republican governors -- would have made a better nominee than Bob Dole in 1996, even though he is a nasty man and a fraud. But of 28 major-party nominees since 1952, only five have been sitting senators: JFK, Goldwater, McGovern, Dole and Kerry. (Good start, then it drops off.)

It's true, though, that the focus on Mark Warner and also on Brian Schweitzer overlooks the embarassment of riches in terms of governors that Democrats have in the next cycle, and they will not only make good presidential candidates, they also make great Senate candidates. Absent a "macaca" moment, only a popular governor can be sure of running a strong challenge to a Senate incumbent, so I'm counting on Sebelius to take out Pat Roberts, Brad Henry to rid us of Inhofe, and Dave Freudenthal to be the first Democratic Senator from Wyoming since Reconstruction.

--Mark Schmitt

OVERSEEING THE OVERSEERS. One thing you may not know about Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tx), now being considered as a compromise candidate to chair the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), is that he joined his friend and colleague, outgoing congressman Curt Weldon at a meeting with infamous Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, against the advice of the Agency, and without informing the U.S. ambassador in Paris, as is proper protocol. The meeting took place at the Sofitel hotel on Rue Boissy D'Anglas around the corner from the US embassy in Paris on a Saturday morning in the spring of 2004 (see update below), according to two sources. (The US government was actually surveilling the hotel lobby that morning out of concern that Iranians might potentially try to harm the congressmen; Weldon apparently loudly asked the concierge for a room for a secret meeting). Ghorbanifar and his business partner were trying to entice the U.S. congressmen to take up the cause of trying to make Ghorbanifar a paid U.S. intelligence asset again on the Middle East, but the CIA would have nothing to do with him, given that he was deemed a fabricator and made the subject of two CIA burn notices in the 1980s, and caused much grief for U.S. policymakers who dealt with him during the Iran Contra affair (think of then-National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane sitting at a Tehran airport with a cake on his lap for Rafsanjani, who wouldn't meet with him, as Ghorbanifar had promised he would, the plane of missile parts from the U.S. sitting in the hangar behind him; Ghorbanifar blamed the mishap on the Americans). What does this say about Reyes' judgment, meeting with a guy like this? Or his knowledge of U.S. operations gone amok?

I put in a call to Reyes' office to ask about that, not for the first time, and am still waiting to hear back. Will post their response if and when it comes. (Also at the meeting, according to my sources, was Congressman Solomon Ortiz [D-TX], who also has not responded to previous inquiries on the matter). One obvious concern is that the House intel committee has, of course, as its chief responsibility oversight of the intelligence community; when the oversight committee potential chairman makes a judgment call like this, what does it mean for the soundness of the vetting that intelligence operations and analysis and personnel decisions can be expected to get?

You can judge the quality of the intelligence Ghorbanifar and his associate were trying to sell the congressmen on by picking up a copy of Weldon's book, Countdown to Terror, which is drawn from it, and read more about the whole affair here and here.

Update: The meeting date was either Friday 29 August 2003 or Saturday, August 30, 2003. Reyes, Ortiz and Weldon were returning from a Congressional delegation that included Russia, and Uzbekistan, on a "technical stopover" in Paris 28/29 August, to give the (US military) crew rest. Weldon had dinner the Friday night before at the ambassador's residence, at which he told the ambassador, when asked, that he had no meetings planned in Paris. He and his group met as planned the next morning with his source Fereidoun Mahdavi who brought his business partner Ghorbanifar to the meeting in a corner of the mostly empty Sofitel lobby in the morning 9am. The US government had spotters on the corner outside and in the lobby out of concern that Ghorbanifar might try to set Weldon up. After Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar showed up, the spotter in the lobby was instructed not to linger.

Reyes' spokeswoman Kira Maas denies Reyes has ever met with Ghorbanifar.

Then CIA station chief in Paris Bill Murray says in response to that: "Weldon, Ortiz and Reyes were part of a Congressional delegation which was in France in late August 2003 for a planned meeting that Weldon planned with his source. I was supposed to go to that meeting but had been given instructions not to after I had learned from my own sources that Ghorbanifar was going to attend the meeting. Therefore I called Weldon, I told him I wouldn't go to the meeting. I also told him his source's information was not very good. He told me that my superiors in Washington would not agree with that and had told him it was first class information. The meeting was held. Ghorbanifar attended."

Update II: For his part, Mahdavi remembers meeting Congressman Solomon Ortiz at that 2003 Sofitel meeting to which he brought Ghorbanifar. About Reyes: "It's possible. At the time, the whole effort of Weldon was to get me in contact with the CIA. I assume no one from the intelligence committee was there." He also tells me outgoing House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra brought a delegation of eight congressmen -- four Democrats and four Republicans - to meet with him last year. Mahdavi says he had dinner with the Congressional delegation led by Hoekstra at the Hotel Opera in Paris in the summer of 2005. He also says he has met with Weldon "several" times.

In sum, the CIA station chief at the time understood that Weldon, Reyes and Ortiz, staying at the Hotel Sofitel in Paris, were scheduled to meet with Weldon's Iranian intelligence source, Fereidoun Mahdavi, on the morning of the 29th or 30th August 2003 at the hotel. When he learned from his sources that Mahdavi planned to bring Ghorbanifar to the meeting, he alerted Weldon that he would not attend, and that meeting with Ghorbanifar was not a good idea. The Congressional Record of November 10, 2003 documents that Weldon, Reyes and Ortiz of the Armed Services committee indeed traveled together on a congressional delegation and were in Paris at that time, and charged the taxpayers the same amount for their Paris stays ($397.00 each for two nights hotel on the 28th and 29th Aug 2003). Indeed, Congressional Travel records indicate that while Reyes joined Ortiz and Weldon on their trip two days late (Ortiz and Weldon went first to Serbia and Ukraine, Reyes joined up with them on the 24 August in Russia), flying commercially, that he departed on the same day with them from France, and they all reported identical charges for their time in France. The embassy sent spotters to scout the hotel lobby and street out of concern that Ghorbanifar, considered a foreign agent for Iran, might try to set the congressmen up. The spotter in the lobby saw a group of congressmen in the lobby of the Sofitel waiting for the 9am meeting, and heard Weldon ask the concierge for a room for a secret meeting, and complain that the CIA was quote chickening out of the meeting again. The spotter saw Mahdavi and Ghorbanifar come in to the lobby, and the group including the congressmen and the Iranians take a seat at a table in a corner of the mostly empty lobby restaurant area. He was instructed not to linger after Ghorbanifar arrived and had made sure no one was around who would harm or set up the congressmen and left. Mahdavi, a participant in the meeting, remembers specifically Weldon, Ortiz and Ghorbanifar there at the table, but isn't sure about Reyes, saying it's possible. I have called Reyes' office previously (as well as Ortiz and Weldon for that matter) to ask about allegations he attended the meeting, and indeed, had his spokeswoman's direct line penned into my US Congress handbook because of the earlier few times I called, but she has never gotten back to me until yesterday, when I included her statement. Perhaps it's time for Congressman Reyes' office to offer an explanation for what he was doing that morning that his colleagues Weldon and Ortiz met with Ghorbanifar and Mahdavi? If he wasn't at the meeting, it would be useful to know what he was doing, since the two colleagues he traveled with were at the meeting with Ghorbanifar and Madhavi. I welcome a fuller explanation, since I had understood from a reliable source that he was there.

--Laura Rozen

THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS. As long as TNR is trying to find the pony in Iraq, it's worth observing that the U.S.-sponsored Maliki government has just escalated the civil war tremendously. Maliki has just issued an arrest warrant for Harith al-Dhari, the leader of the most prominent Sunni organization, the Association of Muslim Scholars. This is exactly analogous to Paul Bremer's disastrous decision to shut down Moqtada al-Sadr's newspaper in March 2004, which unleashed the Sadrist insurgency. Except, since there was no civil war in March 2004, this is much worse. It will be seen as -- and, more importantly, is -- a strike by the government against all Sunnis.

Laura may be more right about a tilt to the Shiites than she realizes. Someone in the U.S. military or the Bush administration must have had known about this latest disaster beforehand.

--Spencer Ackerman

THE QUEST. In my never-ending quest for the worst writing about sports ever published, I have long felt that, a few years back, the Special Sports Issue of The Weekly Standard set, well, the standard. (In it, Fred Barnes made an attempt to re-cast the NBA as a "conservative" sport based on the fact that one of its stars was Charles Barkley, who then was making silly mouth-noises about being a Republican. Hilarity ensued. Please, everyone at TAP Central, make sure NBA beat man Matt never sees this issue. It won't be good for the young man at all.) However, we have something of a contender right here, unless you can convince me that this is somehow parody.

--Charles P. Pierce

UGLY FACE. Noy's review of Iraq in Fragments conveys the power of wartime images -- images that usually aren't pretty. This week, the Post offered an excellent snapshot of the lasting effects of the Vietnam War, depicting vivid images of children who suffer from the remnants of toxic Agent Orange. The images of deformed children have stayed with me since I saw the photographs earlier this week. One somehow doubts that the president is getting much exposure to these human testaments to war's horror on his current visit to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the public consensus has shifted against the Iraq war, and that country will bear the scars for a long time, much as Vietnam still does. Many of the depictions of Iraq on American media have been rightfully criticized for being overly sanitized. To a certain degree, sites like YouTube and other Internet resources have helped to break down those barriers and bring harsher (and more telling) imagery to the surface. But of course the public never wants to believe that war is going to be this ugly. Once again, we'll carry images of our mistakes for years to come.

--Kay Steiger

WHO'S ZOOMIN' WHO? With all due respect to Brothers Rob and Spencer, I think the more operative question is not one of "where al-Qaeda has made its most serious human capital investments," but rather, from where outside its own ranks does al-Qaeda draw expertise and logistical aid? Like its compatriots in the Taliban, it's almost certain that al-Qaeda's bench is deep with advisers from the feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, a Pashtun stronghold that has never truly submitted to the command of the nation's leaders.

Today, on NPR's "Morning Edition," intelligence reporter Mary Louise Kelly reported from Islamabad this account of her meetings with ISI officials, who are currently under suspicion of tipping off Taliban fighters to the movements of U.S. troops. Anyone who has dared to peek under these covers has held such suspicions since the days just after 9/11, when then-ISI Director Mahmood Ahmed was tasked with convincing the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden; instead, it appears, he urged Mullah Omar to resist the coming U.S. assault. (Depending on what details Mahmood knew of that assault, one can't help but wonder if maybe a can of Tora Bora brand beans were spilt.) Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf was then compelled to fire Ahmed (allegations had also surfaced that he had a role in the 9/11 plot), which the general did at some peril, considering that Ahmed was the guy who orchestrated the coup that brought Musharraf to power. Ya following me?

--Adele M. Stan

FOCUS ON THE GOVERNORS: As the unofficial vice-president of Ezra's Gore/Sebelius '08! fan club, I would be remiss not to link to Matt's argument here. The Washington press corps' bias towards politicians already in the Beltway does seem to be the most convincing explanation for the gross overrepresentation of senators, beltway politicians, and scions of political families when discussing presidential candidates. (Would anyone have been touting the hapless George Allen as a presidential frontrunner if he had been governor of Wyoming?) With Sebelius, for example, it seems clear that she has some serious political skills -- for a (pro-choice!) woman to become a two-term Democratic governor of Kansas is considerably more impressive than, say, a Democrat able to become a two-term senator from New York. But with some online exceptions, it's hard to evaluate her fit for a spot on a national ticket because so little is written about her. And what's all the more annoying about this is that Senators generally have such a dismal record as presidential candidates. I'm generally not inclined to ascribe a high degree of political efficacy to blogging, but like Matt I hope that the rise of Dean in 2003 suggests that online activists can broaden the primary electorate's attention beyond the same narrow cadre of hacks prominent media outlets will focus on.

--Scott Lemieux

LEAVE "LEAVE IT TO BEAVER" TO BEAVER. To momentarily take a breath from the election's aftermath and zoom back to the long view, there's some interesting research out of the Brookings-Princeton project "The Future of Children," on the impact of culture on poverty transmission.

In short, conservatives have two ideas on poverty. The first is that people should work. That was achieved in the 1996 welfare reform. The second is that they should get married. Post-welfare reform, that's been their focus. Nothing, they claim, is nearly so critical as marriage. So Charles Murray now preaches the gospel of Leave It To Beaver. The approach is a particularly elegant form of pandering: It denies the need for government action, reifies the Christian obsession with marriage, and insinuates that the poverty of poor blacks can be blamed on their insufficiently virtuous family structures. In other words, it's their fault.

Problem is, the evidence doesn't support the claims. There's plenty of data proving a correlation between marriage rates and better situations for children, but precious little proving that it is an effective bulwark against intergenerational poverty. Poverty isn't actually primarily intergenerational. Generally, poor kids don't grow up into poor adults, and poor adults don't start as poor kids. It's a problem epidemiologists often face: When evaluating a condition's spread, a small group at high risk may not be nearly so important as a large group at small risk. And that's the case here.

According to the National Education Longitudinal Study, eighth-graders living apart from their biological fathers have an expected poverty rate of 16.6 percent. Those in an intact family have an expected pverty rate of 9.9 percent. But that latter group is almost three times as large as the former one. As such, a deeply generous estimate -- one that assumes all fathers are, so to speak, equal and equally desirable, and that single-parent families aren't actually that way for a damn good reason -- suggests that eliminating single-parent families would lower poverty by a mere 16 percent. As such, marriage promotion, while a possible part of an eventual war on poverty, is totally insufficient. It's just not enough. The authors conclude that "to reduce poverty among future generations, there may be no substitute for a system of social insurance and income transfers." No, there probably isn't.

In a future post, I'll go through some of the study's other conclusions, including a troublesome one for liberals -- that economic integration achieved by moving poor families to richer areas does not, in fact, substantially improve outcomes for children. It's all depressing stuff. A behavioral or environmental silver bullet would be nice, but neat and tidy solutions tend to have impacts as limited as the remedies are simple.

--Ezra Klein

THE OTHER BIG LOSER IN LEBANON: AMERICA. The argument about whether Israel or Hezbollah won their summer war goes on, but everyone agrees that the Lebanese people were the big losers. The image of the United States also took a pounding in Lebanon, according to the initial findings of the latest Gallup World Poll (annoyingly not available on their lousy website because it's proprietary). Gallup compared results from August 2005 to late September/early October 2006, about a month after the fighting ended.

Wonder of wonders, most Lebanese aren't too happy that the Bush administration delayed a UN ceasefire in the vain hope that Israel would crush Hezbollah decisively. A year ago, 39 percent of Lebanese had favorable views of the U.S. and 42 percent held unfavorable opinions. In the new poll, the breakdown is 59 percent unfavorable compared to 28 percent favorable. Half of that 59 is in the "very negative" category. 64 percent of those sampled say their attitude toward the U.S. is worse than it was before the war, and 24 percent said our country was mostly to blame for the fighting (a plurality, 40 percent, blamed Israel). Somehow, I don't think touting our progress in picking up the cluster bombs that we manufactured and sold to Israel will make much of a dent in these dismal numbers.

As Daniel Byman and Steven Simon observe in the current issue of The National Interest (sub. req'd), Iraq wasn't the only place the Bush administration failed to fill a power vacuum. The Bush administration wisely joined hands with the dastardly France at the UN in order to pressure the Syrians to withdraw their military after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. After that, we didn't rush in with substantial money and other aid in order to marginalize Syrian influence, nor did we help in resolving border issues like the Sheba'a Farms. Then this past summer, the Bush administration unwisely dawdled on French efforts to broker a ceasefire, while the pro-Western government of Fouad Seniora was exposed as powerless--to the glee of Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. After the war, Hezbollah hit the ground running with piles of Iranian cash for rebuilding, while the West held meetings and struggled to put together a peacekeeping coalition that is more farce than force.

We're now playing catch-up on the aid, but Lebanon is reeling from a government crisis. The Shi'ite ministers resigned from the cabinet when talks on forming a national unity government broke down, and Hezbollah is threatening to hold street demonstrations in protest. So far, Seniora is holding firm and is going ahead with an international tribunal over Hariri's death, but he has to wonder what kind of tangible help he will get from the U.S. in the event that Hezbollah makes good on its increasingly credible threats. Would you trust George Bush with your country?

--Blake Hounshell

"FLOOZY-PATCH." I know he's a brilliant young thinker, but, mother of God, if there's anything worse than Jonah Goldberg's attempting comedy while writing about sex, I can't imagine what it is. Wait a minute. I can imagine something. And it is worse.

--Charles P. Pierce

MORE CASH, PLEASE. What, the security fence along the Mexican border may actually cost many times what was projected? The hell you say!

The Bush administration's proposal to secure the nation's borders with a high-tech "virtual fence" is likely to cost far more than the $2 billion that industry analysts initially estimated, possibly up to $30 billion, a government watchdog agency warned yesterday.

Hat tip to Jason, who has a couple others examples from the extraordinarily rare species, "defense project run amok."

--Robert Farley

JOE'S GAME. I had missed this yesterday, but Greg offers a really sharp take on Joe Lieberman's real prospects for switching parties (they're dim), as compared with the leverage he gains by playing up the threat via a willing press. Check it out (and note the Tom Friedman-style "memo to x" framing for a little bonus Times-bashing).

--Sam Rosenfeld

REYES THE ROOF. Now that the Congressional Black Caucus has endorsed Alcee Hastings to chair the Intelligence Committee and the Blue Dogs have united behind Jane Harman, attention is focusing on Silvestre Reyes as a compromise candidate. Reyes is an interesting guy and, it would seem, a sound choice. A moderate Democrat from El Paso, Texas, Reyes was a Vietnam vet and made his name as a border patrol officer. His district is nearly 80% Hispanic and he pulled down a commensurate share of the vote in 2006. He's chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, opposed the Iraq War from the start, tough on border security, and a member of, in addition to the Intelligence Committee, the Armed Services and Veterans' Affairs committees. In sum, he's precisely the sort of Democrat you'd want, on paper, chairing the Intelligence Committee. Of course, none of this predicts what sort of spokesperson he'll be. But a quick survey of his videos page shows him saying the right things in the right way. Democrats should give him a very serious look -- he's got the ideological credibility Harman doesn't and the personal qualities Hastings lacks.

--Ezra Klein

MCCAIN TRUE COLORS WATCH. In anticipation of a good two years (let's hope not six or ten) of John McCain sucking up to the bigoted base of his party, I'm hereby inaugurating "McCain True Colors Watch" (naming credit goes to Ezra) -- an occasional update on craven McCain's latest disappointment.

First installment: The Hill reported yesterday that McCain provided crucial support to segregationist Sen. Trent Lott in his barely successful bid to return to the Republican leadership (he beat out Sen. Lamar Alexander by one vote Minority Whip.) The Hill characterized McCain as a "strong Lott booster." Who says McCain will have trouble with the base? Maybe Lott will return the favor and get McCain an endorsement from the Council of Conservative Citizens .

--Ben Adler

OPEN OFFICE SPACE. So, Spencer, could we say that the War on Terror has a been a boon for low level managers at Al Qaeda?

More seriously, I wonder where Al Qaeda has made its most serious human capital investments. Every kind of organization, from corporate to military, relies on an expert class that holds the knowledge, training, and connections needed to make the group function. This class is often not the elite leadership; the State Department, for example, relies much more on career professionals than on the political appointees who often occupy the top spots. Similarly, the US Army would have a difficult time doing anything without its expert, professional non-commissioned officer corps. I really haven't the faintest idea how human expertise is distributed in Al Qaeda, but it seems more likely that not that it isn't concentrated in the celebrity leadership that CIA has until recently been tracking. As the disintegration and dispersal of the core Al Qaeda group has been one effect of the War on Terror, I also wonder how much of this expertise is being employed in different groups around the world and potentially spread to new areas. Of course, terrorist training camps exist for a reason (they make it easier to create human capital), so the overall effect of breaking up the Al Qaeda concentration may be a wash or net positive.

--Robert Farley

MORE MORAN. Alec writes in to note some follow-up commentary from arch-Murtha booster Jim Moran, quoted in subscription-only Congress Daily:

Murtha-backer Jim Moran (D-VA), on freshmen who voted for Hoyer: "It remains to be seen if their wished-for committee assignments are fulfilled."

--Sam Rosenfeld

#&*$ THE REDNECKS, THEY DON'T VOTE FOR US ANYWAY. Or so the GOP seems to think. Here's Hotline:

“White rednecks” who “didn’t show up to vote for us” partly cost GOPers their cong. majorities, Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL) told fellow Republicans today. And Putnam, seeking the post of GOP conference chair, chided ex-Chair J.C. Watts (R-OK) for ruining the conference’s ability to serve its members.

Three Republicans in the room independently confirmed to the Hotline the substance and context of Putnam’s remarks. But Putnam’s chief of staff insists that the remarks were taken out of context.

--Ezra Klein

FROM STENOGRAPHY TO TELEPATHY. I'm sorry, but this Michael Crowley thing that got cited earlier simply won't do. It's a perfect example of why Spencer The Apostate won't be attending the annual Stephen Glass Birthday Soiree at Chez Peretz this year. We have mind-reading. We have body-language interpretation. I guess we can count ourselves lucky that Crowley misplaced his Magic 8-Ball. If I turned in a piece of copy that repeatedly used the phases "one imagines," "definitely seemed," or "promise to be" as promicuously as Crowley does here, my editor would chain me to a radiator for a week, especially if my final paragraph, the one containing the actual news, pretty much made the rest of the post look like 10 pounds of nothing in an eight-pound bag. Good Lord, Nancy Pelosi was elected unanimously by her caucus even though most of them knew at the time they were going to vote against her choice for Majority Leader. How can she recover? Well, she can start by not caring how the various Beltway palm-readers and mock-clairvoyants "imagine" things "seem."

And Crowley should inform "Reader A. M." that the Hammer would have understood. In 1995, he ran for Majority Whip and defeated the preferred candidate of that Definer Of The Rules Of Civilization, Newt Gingrich. I don't recall anyone commenting at the time how weak Gingrich "seemed" or that he put on a "game face" after this crushing blow to his new Republican majority.

-- Charles P. Pierce

CURSES! Well, this is certainly alarming, isn't it? Personally, I'd have just settled for rolling back some of the tax cuts.

-- Charles P. Pierce

BUT DO THEY HAVE REFRESHING BOTTLES OF COCA-COLA? On saving the polar bears with floating platforms, Bill comments:

This just illustrates the problem of ignorant political pundits offering opinions about scientific issues. They think the solutions are so simple.

The loss of polar ice has nothing to do with polar bears drowning. The bears are not stupid. They simply won't venture off land into the ocean. Polar ice is necessary to prevent starvation. Polar bears live mainly by killing and eating seals. A polar bear can't just swim around in the ocean like a killer whale trying to catch a seal. They catch seals by patiently wait ing for hours or days next to an air hole in the ice and grabbing a seal when it comes up for air. The sheet ice confines the seals to limited locations and air holes that they have to frequent in order to keep the hole from freezing over. Without sheet ice, polar bears will starve. Floating platforms have nothing to do with the real problem.

--Ezra Klein

ART IMITATES LIFE. A few days back, we had a lengthy disquisition on Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip -- most notably, on creator Aaron Sorkin's apparently incurable tin ear for both political argument and the way actual human beings speak to each other. This was prompted by last Sunday's episode, which featured not only a numbnutted subplot about gay marriage, but also some red-state wisdom from John Goodman as a judge in the town of Pahrump, Nevada, who cautions the Hollyweird liberals not to take him and his town for hayseeds and rubes. Well, I am not prepared to argue that Sorkin understated things greatly.

- Charles P. Pierce

TIME DELAY. Regarding Hoyer's win, it's worth noting that Tom DeLay beat Newt Gingrich's preferred candidate for Majority Whip in 1994. So this isn't the first time a Minority Leader has presided over a historic victory but failed to totally consolidate power.

--Ezra Klein

THE OTHER WAR. There's been lots of coverage about John Abizaid's recent statements to Congress; not so much about the comments of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, Director of the DIA:

In Afghanistan the Taliban-led insurgency, aided by al-Qaida, is incapable of directly threatening the central government and expanding its resilient support networks and areas of influence beyond strongholds in the Pashtun south and east as long as international force levels are sustained at current levels. Nonetheless, DIA judges that, despite having absorbed heavy combat losses in 2006, the insurgency has strengthened its capabilities and influence with its core base of Pashtun communities. Violence this year is likely to be twice as high as the violence level seen in 2005. Insurgents have significantly increased their use of suicide operations. If a sustained international military and Afghan security presence throughout the volatile Pashtun south and east is not established alongside credible civil administrations, central government control over these areas will be substantially restricted. In 2007, insurgents are likely to sustain their use of more visible, aggressive, and lethal tactics in their continued effort to undermine the willingness of the international community to support military and reconstruction operations in Afghanistan and to highlight the weakness of the central government.

The solution is not as simple, however, as just "getting tough" on Pakistan, although it's partly that. As regional expert Barnett Rubin explained to FRONTLINE, the U.S. needs to understand why Pakistan does what it does and help it get out of this trap of fomenting trouble in Afghanistan and Kashmir in order to create "strategic depth." That requires the kind of nimble diplomacy over delicate border and nationalism issues that the Bush administration is manifestly incapable of executing.

--Blake Hounshell

I POUR A 40 FOR MY HOMIES... One thing to note on the death of Milton Friedman: It means that, in the same year, both he and John Kenneth Galbraith have died. They were -- easily -- the two most influential, publicly-accessible, politically-oriented economists of the 20th century. Who takes their place?

--Ezra Klein

MILTON FRIEDMAN, RIP. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and ardent advocate of unfettered markets died today at the ripe old age at 94. I can't say that I agreed with his cold economic philosophy (expressed most succintly in Capitalism and Freedom), but I respected his intellect and influence.

--Blake Hounshell

THE 50 STATE STRATEGY. I'm very committed to the James-Carville-is-a-wanker interpretation of his current assault on Howard Dean. But I think folks need a bit more precision in discussing what's at issue here. The 2006 election, as Matt likes to point out, wasn't a test of the 50 State Strategy. It was nearer to Chris Bower's 435 race concept, where every seat is challenged. The 50 State Strategy relies on funding state parties to put down infrastructure and staff to create long-term change. It simply couldn't have worked yet, not in any meaningful way. That's a feature, not a bug. It's an actual long-term vision, not a next-election gambit. Insofar as Carville is attacking Dean, it's a question of resources: Dean both didn't raise as much as some Democrats thought possible and didn't devote as much to 2006 as some -- like Rahm -- thought necessary. There's an argument to be had there. But it's a different one.

The conversation going on now obscures this. David Sirota, for instance, mocks Carville for thinking "Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy had nothing to do with Democrats winning in places like Kansas and New Hampshire, where groups like the DCCC all but abandoned its own candidates." Carville's right, it didn't. And Dean would agree. Credit for the Kansas win should largely go to Kathleen Sebelius, whose skillful exploitation of a moderate vs. conservative crack-up in the state was the greatest, and most underappreciated, political performance this cycle. As for New Hampshire, the Northeastern conversion was largely a structural occurrence -- as Tom Schaller has repeatedly pointed out, it was a realignment. The three or four staffers Dean may (or may not) have put on the ground there likely had little do with it.

None of this is an attack on Dean nor, for that matter, Rahm. Defend Dean's resource allocation if you want. But this election was not a referendum on the 50 State Strategy. It wouldn't have been had Democrats lost, it isn't now that they've won. The 50 State Strategy is an actual long-term strategy, the success of which won't be measurable for many cycles yet. I think it's an important gambit, and given how ready Carville was with the knife, it's a real blessing Democrats did far too well for Dean to be deposed, as this buys him time to pursue his vision.

--Ezra Klein

HOYER WINS. 149-86. This was all in all a pretty bizarre screw-up on Pelosi's part, but the saving grace of this leadership fight is how quickly it all happened, without dragging on for too many more days or weeks. It's still very early for the incoming majority. Time to kiss, make up, move on. Sidenote: Truly, is there a more bombastic congressman than Jim Moran?

UPDATE: See more from Mike Crowley, who certainly sees no silver lining for Pelosi in this whole thing.

--Sam Rosenfeld

RIM SHOT. Oh, Mitt, Mitt, Mitt. What are we to do with you?

Here we are, nice folks all, who were more than happy to elect you and your hair. If we hadn't, you wouldn't be out there now, running around and eating chicken-based food products with the various racists, kooks, and mountebanks that make up what's left of the national Republican Party. And how do you pay us back? First, you hire this jamoke and nobody points out that there is apparently no boot you wouldn't lick for three points in some Rasmussen poll six months down the line. And how do you pay us back? You start telling jokes like this one here in front of an audience made up of people who have to be watered before they go to work every morning. Come home, Willard, before you hurt yourself.

--Charles P. Pierce

HUG-A-BEAR. Jonah writes:

It seems to me that if A) we believe that man is responsible for the dire plight of polar bears (or even if he's not) and B) we think the polar bears are worth saving and C) we think that doing so won't have outsized negative consequences elsewhere in the ecosystem, Why not intervene to save polar bears? Would building big, free floating docks help? Would moving polar bears and their families to different areas do the trick?

As a more general point, the environmental movement, for completely correct reasons, tends to focus on stopping bad human behaviors. But given that such solutions are often implemented too late -- as looks possible in the case of global warming -- more artifical, interventionistic responses may prove necessary. Global warming is, indeed, a good example. I've minimal confidence that humanity will adapt in time to stop it. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it does mean that, in the end, we may need proactive measures to reverse the impact, having already missed the opportunity to abstain and prevent it. I've come across some wacky ideas for how to do that -- orbiting space mirrors, for instance -- and some less wacky ones. But my best guess is that some serious planetary engineering will become rather necessary as climate change advances.

--Ezra Klein

REDUCING UNWANTED PREGNANCIES AND THE INTERESTS OF WOMEN. Brother Ezra links to a good article by Reason's Julian Sanchez about demands for compromise in the abortion debate. Readers who are familiar with my work on the subject will know that I agree entirely with Sanchez' opposition to trying to find "middle ground" on the abortion debate. Both of the general lines of "compromise" being advanced -- insisting that abortion is icky and women who get abortions are immoral, and passing a series of regulations that end up creating a highly inequitable regime of abortion-on-demand for affluent women and highly restricted abortion for poor and many rural women -- are very bad on the merits, and represent a practical victory for the forced pregnancy lobby rather than true compromises. I'm not willing to claim that fetuses are "persons," not only because I think it's nonsense but because the vast majority of pro-lifers don't seem to believe it, or at least are not willing to advance policies that are even minimally consistent with such a belief. I also agree with Sanchez's general point that sometimes conflicts are incommensurable and we should accept that; you simply can't split the difference over the question of fetal personhood the way you can about tax policy.

However, I do think it's worth noting that it's possible to believe that 1)abortion is a morally arbitrary procedure that should be left to a woman's judgment, and 2)it is good, all things being equal, for there to be fewer abortions. Nobody would dispute that it would be better for people to change habits so that there would be fewer open-heart surgeries, but this hardly constitutes a good case for making them illegal or calling them immoral. I think almost everyone can agree that preventing unwanted pregnancies before the fact is, all things being equal, preferable to women having to go through an expensive and sometimes troubling medical procedure. If pointing out that the bundle of pro-choice policies -- legal, accessible abortion, access to birth control, rational sex ed, good child care politics, etc. -- generally produce lower abortion rates is a way of reaching compromise with the voters Amy Sullivan talks about, I don't have a problem with that. If the "compromise" involves the Saletan-like shaming of women or supporting arbitrary regulations that choke abortion access for (certain classes of) women, that's an entirely different story. (Sullivan does have some pretty harsh criticism of the idiotic "partial-birth" ban currently under Supreme Court review in this BloggingHeads vlog, so we may very well be closer to consensus than is sometimes apparent.)

--Scott Lemieux

JEROME AGAINST HIMSELF. My argument for building a non-southern majority continues to confuse and befuddle some otherwise smart people. Perhaps frustrated by the fact that MyDD’s Chris Bowers pronounced me “utterly vindicated” by the 2006 election results, Jerome Armstrong now argues that Democrats should not single out and criticize “southern conservatives” because when Republicans make hay -- and they have made plenty of hay over the last three decades -- by criticizing “northeastern liberals,” supposedly everyone knows that the GOP adds the “liberal” clarifier just for political cover.

...[I]t's Schaller's first recomendation on "The Path to a National Democratic Majority", that Democrats define the south in the most denigrate ways, to run against the south for an enduring majority, that is morally and strategically wrong.

The obvious correlation here, to which Schaller's himself draws the comparison, is what the Republicans have done to northeastern liberals. And now, Schaller argues, it's time to turn the tables and do to the south for the conservatives, what they have against liberals in the northeast on the national debate...

As Schaller writes, the Republicans make it a point that it's liberals in the northeast, not the northeast, that they are attacking (just as Bush & Rove point out that its not Democrats' patriotism that they are attacking when they make treasonist-like accusations against Democrats). Obviously, that is a Big Lie, and Shaller would acknowlege the distinction is cya rather than substantive.

As I understand him, Jerome believes the GOP is criticizing the entire northeast. That’s funny, because when I was ambushed on a panel at the YearlyKos convention in Vegas by Jerome, Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, and Joe Trippi (“ambush” is how Armstrong later described it to me), Armstrong seemed to agree with Saunders’ and Trippi’s assertion that the Republicans aspire to be a true national party by never conceding any state or region of the country. Apparently, Armstrong believes that Republicans are therefore going after the Northeast by attacking northeasterners -- not just northeastern liberals but, according to him, all northeasterners. This is a truly internally inconsistent argument.

There are three possibilities regarding Republicans and their “northeastern strategy”: 1. They are trying to win there, and their preferred method of doing so is to insult all northeasterners; 2. They are not trying to win there, and they insult all northeasterners as a way to win elsewhere; or 3. They insult “northeastern liberals” as a willful ploy to attract non-liberal northeasterners and non-northeasterners.

Jerome’s argument, #1, is absurd on its face and also means that his criticisms that the non-southern strategy for Democrats is “immoral” must therefore apply to the immoral, Northeast-abandoning GOP. Either way, I wish he’d pick one argument: The GOP is either aspiring to be a national party, or they are aspiring to be a non-northeastern party by picking on the Northeast. It’s a bit unfair to ask me to hit moving targets.

I think #2 is also wrong: The GOP does want to compete in the Northeast, even if their prospects there are dim and growing dimmer. As longtime Armstrong partner Markos Moulitsas rather nicely stated the matter yesterday, just like Democrats don’t need the South to be a majority but want to win there, the GOP doesn’t need to win the Northeast to be a national majority but wants to win there.

That leaves #3, which is precisely what the GOP has chosen to do, and with great success over the past three decades. The “northeastern liberal” attack (particularly the “Taxachusetts” variety) has been masterfully deployed as a way to brand the GOP as a party that stands again a variety of perceived political demons (big government, political correctness, the coddling of minorities, welfare, high taxes, urbanity). But these attacks on “northeastern liberals” have hardly starved the region of Rush-listening, Bush-loving, GOP-voting conservatives. I’m from the Northeast, and I can assure you that there are plenty of folks (disproportionately white, mostly men) who are happy to criticize fellow regionalists of the liberal persuasion. More to the point, it certainly has helped the GOP outside the Northeast. The GOP strategy of selectively criticizing northeastern liberals only began to backfire last week, when Republicans finally lost so much support there and in every other region except the South that their southern base became insufficient to produce a majority.

All of which brings me to this question: Holding aside corporate chieftains, polluters, Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff, is there anyone the Democrats can point to and say, “we think these people are wrong about America”? If not, all the criticisms that Democrats are a gutless, soulless, pandering pack of sissies are spot-on. And if Democrats do have the guts to define themselves by what and whom they oppose, I’ll be happy to set aside “southern conservatives” as my candidate for Group Most Opposed to Democratic Principles if somebody will nominate a better alternative.

--Tom Schaller

MONSTER SUCCESS. Now that O.J. Simpson is publishing his quasi-confession If I Did It, I'm looking for a forthcoming memoir by former Rep. Mark Foley that ought to be called My Back Pages. It's no longer true that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. The last refuge now is the best-seller list.

--Paul Starr

CRYSTAL BALL. It's not often that you get a very clear glimpse of the future so, when you do get it, you should pay attention to it. Now, assuming that the McGyver Solution to the Iraq debacle proves ineffective -- watch Jim Baker make a peace plan out of two paper clips and a flashlight! -- and that, one day, C-Plus Augustus will stop listening to Henry Kissinger talking about the importance of "will" (something I had hoped I would never see again in my lifetime and a concept that the president probably should bounce off his hosts in Vietnam this week just for fun), blame is going to get parceled out pretty thickly. So, in case you folks in the media elite were wondering whether or not all that early cheerleading was going to be enough to immunize y'all, you can stop wondering. It's not.

--Charles P. Pierce

CRUELTY AND SILENCE. The New Republic fired me before it published its Iraq symposium. Oh well -- it had been made clear to me that I wouldn't have been invited to contribute anyway. So now I take up my new role: foul-weather critic of its latest spineless Iraq editorial. (In TNR-speak, a "lede.")

Among the most annoying of TNR tropes is the flight to meta-analysis as soon as the recognition dawns that the magazine can't win an argument. And here, it pains and saddens me to say, TNR embraces it like a security blanket. First, TNR concedes that nothing it can possibly desire is likely to occur: "The U.S. presence in Iraq will not last long. Perhaps this new political reality will serve as shock therapy, scaring Iraq's warring factions into negotiations that can prevent the worst sectarian warfare. But perhaps not." The "perhaps not" is an intellectual prophylactic: it changes the subject before one can ask what in the world the U.S. could tell the Sunnis and the Shiites that could make them believe that that their interests are better served by peace than by war. If TNR has any idea what it means by this, it has an obligation to say so. But -- and, my friends, I can tell you, because I went to those Thursday editorial meetings for years -- these people have no idea what they mean.

No matter. Then the magazine calls for super-duper diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors -- but the kind of diplomacy that rushes blood to TNR's crotch: "It, too, must be brutal: It must include threats and promises, alliances and coalitions -- with the threat of being left out. A new campaign should lay the groundwork for agreements prior to the calling of a peace conference that would include Iraq's parties and its neighbors, as well as the United States, the European Union, and Russia." Hysterically, the magazine concedes in the next sentence that it has no idea what the endgame of that diplomacy ought to be -- or, in TNR-speak, "That's not clear." As long as we bloviate around the negotiating table, apparently, the magazine will be satisfied. (In this sense, TNR's posture is modeled after Bush's approach to North Korea.)

Then, finally, comes the coup de grace. Now that TNR has dispensed with its empty attempt to discuss what ought to be done about Iraq, it comes to the real question:

[A]s we pore over the lessons of this misadventure, we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of "realism." Realism, yes; but not "realism." American power may not be capable of transforming ancient cultures or deep hatreds, but that fact does not absolve us of the duty to conduct a foreign policy that takes its moral obligations seriously. As we attempt to undo the damage from a war that we never should have started, our moral obligations will not vanish, and neither will our strategic needs.

--Spencer Ackerman

CATASTROPHE KEEPS THEM TOGETHER. Never let it be said that CIA Director Michael Hayden isn't shrewd. Knowing that media coverage of yesterday's Senate testimony will focus overwhelmingly on General John Abizaid's call for eternal war in Iraq, he discreetly dropped this bombshell about al-Qaeda:

Hayden said [al-Qaeda] had lost a series of leaders since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the losses have been "mitigated by what is, frankly, a pretty deep bench of low-ranking personnel capable of stepping up to assume leadership positions."

--Spencer Ackerman

A DISAPPOINTING START. Joe Conason is right: The race between Murtha and Hoyer present two astonishingly unappealing options. Murtha is hawkish, corrupt, conservative, and a dear friend to the defense industry -- year after year, he's the top congressional recipient of their donations, and he repays them in full. His brave comments on Iraq were aberrational rather than characteristic, and his emergence as the progressive choice is evidence of some very short Democratic memories. Hoyer, however, is fetishistically centrist, corporatist, and at odds with Pelosi. His elevation is likely to make for a profoundly dysfunctional Democratic majority.

My personal view is that this is basically an early referendum on Pelosi. Murtha is a loyalist, and a vote for him is a vote for her. That said, for those expecting the Democratic majority to last for a little bit, new wars will emerge, new issues will arise, and new progressives will be required. There's always the hope that Murtha has bought into his new anti-war hype and will seek to retain liberal adulation by applying the lessons of Iraq to the next proposed conflict. But given that he supported the war and flipped mainly because we hadn't fought it with sufficient commitment, it's by no means a sure thing that the anti-war authority liberals have invested in him won't be used against them as he decides Syria is ripe for revolution.

Meanwhile, Pelosi's attempts to replace the qualified-but-conservative Jane Harman with the corrupt and unimpressive Alcee Hastings is quite a disappointment. While Pelosi's loathing of Harman appears to spring from California-related rivalries, denying her the top spot on the Intelligence Committee may nevertheless be a smart move. Not, however, if the alternative is Hastings. The Intelligence Committee is an important institution, particularly for Democrats who need to build up some credibility on these issues. A corrupt, disliked, party hack just ain't the way to go there. I'm with Charlie the Pierce on the idiocy of Pelosi's promise to run "the squeakiest-clean Congress there absolutely ever was," but she's proving the impossibility of that pledge a bit quicker than would seem necessary.

--Ezra Klein

HEATH SHULER: ACTUALLY A DEMOCRAT. As the invocations keep coming, I rise to defend Congressman-elect Heath Shuler, who must be getting damned sick and tired of having his marvelous underdog win characterized by the side that got skunked last week as a de facto win for its principles, and even by his own, winning side as a shrewd tactical abandonment of its own. Here's a very good local account of Shuler's win. Shuler didn't win because he was slightly less conservative than Charles Taylor, the Republican he whacked. He won because the party Mr. Taylor represented has so revolted the American public that the "R" next to someone's name was enough. (And God help anyone if the actual Republican president brought his leprous public image by to call.) This was how Taylor lost in Asheville and Lincoln Chaffee lost in Providence, and it's the only thing that those two have in common. Democrats won last week because they were Democrats and also because they were reckoned by most of the country to be Not Insane. Shuler's got enough problems as a rookie legislator without being the Poster Child for everyone's personal political trips.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE POPULIST. Jim Webb's Wall Street Journal op-ed today is a full-throated blast of up-with-the-people populism. He spends four paragraphs fiercely decrying "our society's steady drift toward a class-based system," attacking out-of-control CEO pay and decrying the middle class squeeze. But the really fascinating bit comes when he settles into the fight and picks his targets.

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it's the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism.

Still others have gone so far as to argue that these divisions are the natural results of a competitive society. Furthermore, an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the "right genetics" and thus are natural entrants to the "overclass," while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don't possess the necessary attributes.

I've really no idea who precisely Webb is targeting or what precisely he wants to do. But he's definitely going to be the most interesting new pol we've seen for awhile.

--Ezra Klein

YOO TWO: IN THE NAME OF LOVE. The ACLU is trying to get its hands on something we lowly national-security reporters have tried for years to obtain. That's something known colloquially as Yoo Two -- Yoo as in John Yoo, the torturer from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in the first Bush administration. And Two as in a second memo in or around August of 2002 about torture. The first memo -- and here "first" is a statement about when it was released, not necessarily when it was written -- is the infamous August 1, 2002 memorandum on torture, which radically redefined torture as anything approaching severe organ failure or death, meaning anything short of that standard -- and maybe even that itself, Yoo argued -- was permissible under the president's commander-in-chief powers during a time of war.

But we've long believed there was a second memo, Yoo Two: a piece of paper that specified in detail what the CIA could do to detainees in its custody. And according to Dan Eggen, the intrepid Washington Post reporter, the ACLU might be closing in on it:

The second document is an August 2002 legal memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA general counsel. The ACLU describes it as "specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top al-Qaeda members." (This document is separate from another widely publicized Justice memo, also issued in August 2002, that narrowed the definition of torture. The Justice Department has since rescinded the latter.)

--Spencer Ackerman

SHALL WE DANCE? Well, since the Dems waltzed into the House and did an elaborate tango into the Senate, I confess I find myself a bit shamefaced for having doubted their ability to take the lower chamber. But now, a week later, I'm ready to put all that behind me to focus on the the intramural dramas now gripping both political parties.

A pal at the blog Blue Jersey who goes by the handle JRB points up a charming irony in the choice of Senator Mel Martinez of Florida to chair the Republican National Committee.

Like New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, Martinez is a Cuban-American who recently voted to table an amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act that would have prohibited immigrants convicted of document fraud and identity theft from receiving Social Security benefits -- a vote for which Menendez was villified in a television spot run by his Republican opponent, Tom Kean, Jr.. JRB asks if the righties will take Martinez to task for, as the Kean ad states it, "want[ing] to give your Social Security money to illegal aliens."

--Adele M. Stan

MORE OF THESE PROBLEMS: Trent Lott--your new Republican (in a word I hesitate to use in this context) whip. Red State has to be happy about Jeff Sessions's chances now!

--Scott Lemieux

STALKING. Last month, a Chinese Song class diesel electric submarine approached, apparently undetected, to within 5 nautical miles of the USS Kitty Hawk, well within both missile and torpedo range. The submarine then surfaced, and was reported by a recon aircraft. What's going on here?

Diesel electric submarines are remarkably difficult to detect, but I'm nonetheless kind of surprised that one was able to get so close to a USN supercarrier. Kitty Hawk has an escort group and multiple recon aircraft whose job it is to detect approaching submarines. Indeed, a carrier battle group normally includes a nuclear attack submarine specifically to deal with undersea threats. Even if, as PACOM chief Admiral Fallon has suggested, the group was not conducting anti-submarine exercises, they have to be embarassed by the failure to pickup the Chinese sub. I'm also a bit surprised that the Chinese sub was of the indigenously built Song class rather than of the newer and quieter Russian Kilos.

It's possible, of course, that the sub was detected well before it surfaced, and that the resulting discussion over the exercise has simply been an effort to convince the People's Liberation Army Navy that it has greater capabilities than it really does. I have my doubts, however. As the surfacing of the sub indicates, naval prestige was at stake. I can hardly imagine a US admiral, much less the captains in command of the various escort vessels, admitting that a Chinese submarine had slipped through the protective net of a supercarrier if it hadn't actually happened. In any case, I suspect that ASW exercises will get a bit more attention in the Pacific over the next few months, and that a Chinese sub skipper may get a promotion.

--Robert Farley

MORE MURTHA. Clearly my voice doesn't matter one iota to the final outcome, but I would like to reiterate my concerns about Jack Murtha's bid to be Majority Leader. There is a lot of netroots support for Murtha based on his call to end the Iraq War sooner, and the optics of having a Vietnam vet and staunch defense hawk make that case. Fair enough. I can understand that. But what about this?

In the last year, Democratic and Republican floor watchers say, Mr. Murtha has helped Republicans round up enough Democratic votes to narrowly block a host of Democratic proposals: to investigate federal contracting fraud in Iraq, to reform lobbying laws, to increase financing for flood control, to add $150 million for veterans' health care and job training, and to exempt middle-class families from the alternative minimum tax.

Former congressman Chris Bell (D-Tex.) said yesterday that Murtha helped elevate Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (W.Va.) to the top Democratic spot on the House ethics committee, and that Murtha and Mollohan have worked to slow the ethics process to a crawl for much of the past two years.

If that doesn't sway you, how about the idea that defense contractors are salivating over the prospects of Murtha as Majority Leader? Murtha is "the top recipient of defense industry money in Congress" and "in 2004, he ranked third only to presidential candidates Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and George Bush [in defense industry funding], but in 2002 he was No. 1." Finally, the Abscam tape, which you can watch on Google video, is more damning than you might think. Not the kind of guy Dems should want representing them as Majority Leader, frankly.

--Blake Hounshell

BAD PLEDGE. Forgive me for getting all Massachusetts on you for a moment, but the worst thing done by Nancy Pelosi, both during the campaing and continuing since Tuesday, was her declaration that she was going to run the squeakiest-clean Congress there absolutely ever was. In the first place, it's a promise she is wholly unable to keep. She can no more keep every member of her caucus personally honest than I can. Sooner or later, every caucus has someone overcome by the greedyfingers and, now, there's a perfect frame built in which Pelosi gets a huge portion of the blame when rookie Congressman Grabitall gives his drunk brother-in-law a superhighway for Christmas. (Progressive groups are already starting to fungo Jack Murtha's head all over the Beltway, using Pelosi's vow for the bat.) Lobbying reform? OK. Gift bans? Count me in. But the cleanest Congress ever? A sucker's bet. If men were angels, as my man Jimmy Madison once mused...

Moreover, the goo-goos unnerve me. The greatest crime committed by the late majority was in attempting to establish a permanent monopoly in the market of the exchange of favors. Graft -- both honest and dishonest -- should be at all times democratic. In this way, as in many things, I have to go back to poor Lyndon, who was more than a little crooked, but who rose through the system to fight for the Voting Rights Act and give the greatest speech any president has given in my lifetime. On that evening in March of 1965, only someone without a soul would have wondered how he bought his ranch.

--Charles P. Pierce

DEMS PROVE DOBBS WRONG: A while back I accused Lou Dobbs of misleading readers of his November 1 CNN.com column by asserting that "whether the Democrats or Republicans take control of the House and Senate, corporate America has just bought a license to outsource more middle-class jobs to cheap foreign labor markets, to continue unabated so-called free trade." I argued that, overall, the Democrats are clearly more critical of corporate-friendly free trade arrangements. Well, as The Washington Post reported Tuesday:

As Democrats prepare to take control of Congress, incoming leaders are planning to insert labor and environmental protections into pending trade treaties and to demand that the Bush administration adopt similar measures in future pacts it negotiates, congressional aides and government officials said yesterday.

--Ben Adler

REMEDIAL SESSION. Let me join with Scott in puzzling over the newfound affection for Alabama's Jeff Sessions. It's one thing for conservatives to appreciate a loyal soldier, but to praise his intellect and try to elevate him to a policy job? Every time I've noticed Sessions, it's been for a dazzling display of dimness. During the John Roberts hearings, a thousand liberal blogs, mine included, simultaneously noticed the bizzarely incapable senator from Alabama. As Wonkette explained it, "[Sessions is] treating Roberts like the guy who talks to the class on Career Day." It was really something. On the bright side, he's sorta soft on crack.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SLICE-AND-DICE FOLLIES. Matt takes on the hearty election-analysis tic of identifying some demographic sub-group (angry white men! NASCAR dads! mortgage moms!) and touting it as the key to the political future of the country. The approach isn't just annoying and wrong, he says -- it can be a tool used in the service of pushing dubious substantive points.

--The Editors

CENTRISM. Ah, more pleasant aftershocks from 2006:

People who worked with Mr. Siegel this year say it is not clear how he would perform in a presidential campaign where there are multiple consultants, and where strategic cunning and political moderation tend to be prized. (Mr. Siegel says he has some centrist positions, like supporting welfare reform and the war in Afghanistan.)

--Ezra Klein

IF YOU LIKED TRENT LOTT... I see that right-wing Kos-wannabe site RedState is prominently displaying a "Jeff Sessions for RPC Chair" banner. This is...highly instructive. First of all (as anyone who watched the Roberts hearings knows) there's the fact that in terms of sheer intellectual firepower Sessions makes George W. Bush look like Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Sample question: "And on the Supreme Court, if a case comes up to you, you will probably have briefs from both parties, you will receive the transcript of the trial that the issue arises from and you'll study that. And you have several law clerks who will help you study that. Every one of the nine Supreme Court justices are also studying this same record and all these briefs. Isn't it true that friends of the court can submit briefs?") And second, he would seem to be the candidate for people who think that George Allen lost because he was too progressive on race. Matt reminds us of the terrific New Republic article written by fellow TAPPED alumna Sarah Wildman. Wildman details Sessions' failed legal crusades against civil rights workers, his red-bating of the NAACP, and his "joking" that he thought the Klan were OK until he found out they were "pot smokers." (Ho ho!) And much more.

However, it must be conceded that none of this changes the fact that Robert Byrd was a member of the Klan during the Roosevelt administration.

--Scott Lemieux

READY OR NOT. With the reentry of Democrats into the halls of power, the insurance industry is getting anxious. Aware that the current system is in a slow-motion collapse and Democrats answer to, in part, the very people it's collapsing atop, the industry's trade group is proposing its own plan for universal coverage. The details aren't terribly important (nor terribly good); like socks on your birthday, it's the thought that matters. And the insurers are thinking that something is going to be done in the nearish term, and they'd best start getting out in front. Now that they're arguing for the necessity of universal coverage and the unions have abandoned hope in the employer-based system and Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney is running on his own universal health proposal, this debate is getting kicked rather far to the left. Are the Democrats ready?

--Ezra Klein

PLUS, THE SHOW SUCKS If I may be permitted to add an aesthetic topper to Charlie and Ezra's discussion, it should also be noted that Sorkin is an egregiously overrated writer. Trying to avoid falling into the film trailer method of criticism being practiced by some quarters of the right, I gritted my teeth and watched the two most recent episodes. And, the fact is, Studio 60 is a bad show. The first episode of the two-parter was for the most part merely dull. But last night's was almost as bad as the 9/11 episode of The West Wing, which I believe had the highest pretension-to-achievement ratio of any show in television history. But leaving aside the political merits of the discourse -- which I agree are negligible -- what's worse to my mind is that the show consists pretty much entirely of characters reading B+ high school position papers at each other, as opposed to talking like human beings. Everything is spoonfed the audience; nothing is dramatized. Whether or not the character modeled on Kristin Chenoweth is too sympathetic, what's worse is that you can't believe that she would be having these conversations. And even worse is the judge played by John Goodman. The thing is, most actual rural red-staters don't reassert their purported red-state resentment, in terms that seem to come straight from David Brooks columns, again and again and again. .(And, of course, there's the larger problem of trying to milk a two-parter out of a situation that is both contrived and entirely devoid of interest in the first place.) The show is probably bad politics, but it's certainly bad TV. (And, yeah, this means I agree with Jonah Goldberg. Well, when he's right he's right.)

--Scott Lemieux

IN WHICH I AM DOGMATIC AND UNFRIENDLY. I'll argue that Charlie's digression on the flaws of Aaron Sorkin isn't a digression at all, but an astute take on an essential and damaging tic in contemporary, or at least recent, liberalism. When I wrote my pointedly churlish send-off to The West Wing, this is what I was getting at. Sorkin's desperation to place plausible-sounding arguments in the mouths of his conservative characters -- thus creating a world of well-intentioned philosopher kings engaging in elightened policy debate -- often ends up eviscerating whatever coherence the original conversation possessed. So take Charlie's example: Sorkin's reaching because, frankly, there's not a very good argument against gay marriage. Some people don't like it. It scares them. This isn't an argument, it's a bias.

For quite some time now, liberals have taken a tolerant and politically correct stance to political debate, choosing to believe in the essential worth of all policy ideas and reject dogmatism or excess confidence in their own solutions. In parts, that's an admirable impulse; to believe the best of your opponents and remain open to their insights should rack you up some karmic points. What it doesn't do is win you elections -- indeed, it weakens your ability to respond to bare-knuckle political combat with appropriate rapidity and ruthlessness. And Sorkin's West Wing fantasy world was a prime example of this tic, wherein no liberal argument lacked a worthy rebuttal and so no liberal could truly lament their occasional loss. But, in fact, not every issue has two equally logical sides. Or at least it shouldn't to a liberal. At some point, you have to believe in this stuff because it's right and true, not because progressivism is an attractive political aesthetic. Sorkin has trouble doing that, and it's why West Wing lost its relevance and Studio 60 has struggled to gain traction. The era of feel-good two-siderism has ended, but Sorkin is having trouble evolving past it.

--Ezra Klein

A DIGRESSION. Have I mentioned recently that Aaron Sorkin makes my teeth itch?

In every Sorkin project, there comes a time when an argument seems to be reaching an interesting point, at which point Sorkin invariably accidentally drops coherent thought into the trash compactor and reaches for the violin. It happens in A Few Good Men, when the other lawyer points out that Lieutenant Top Gun seems to be tromping all over the Nuremburg principles, and Lieutenant Risky Business replies, basically, that he's not because his clients are really good guys, badly led, and instead of pointing out that, maybe, that's how Rusty Calleys are produced, the other lawyer goes meeping off into the next room to look for Demi Moore's talent.

And, in that godawful 9/11 episode of The West Wing, when one of the interns trapped in the White House with Rob Lowe confronts Lowe's opinion that terrorism never wins with a question about Ireland, Lowe blows him off with the argument that the Brits are still there, and the kid fails to come back by pointing out that 26 counties exist as the Republic of Ireland at least in part through acts of what even Michael Collins reckoned to be terrorism. I thought we might dodge a similar moment in Sorkin's latest but, alas, no. Last night, there was a subplot about gay marriage and Sarah Paulson, who plays the fundamentalist shiksa Gilda Radner figure, gets all huffy when Matthew Perry compares the civil rights movement of the 1960's with the movement for gay rights. "Black people," Sorkin has her say, shaving at least 100 points off her IQ, "existed openly as black people in this country for 400 years. Gay people have ... for only about 30."

As Sorkin might say, this is stupid on so many levels, the most heinous of which is the fact that, for about 300 of those 400 years, black people didn't exist openly as people at all. They existed as property.

Have I mentioned recently that arguing with fictional TV characters makes me feel like I should get out more?

--Charles P. Pierce

MORE ON THE KONY MEETING. Last night, Sam flagged this Jeffrey Gittlemen piece about the incredible meeting between Jan Egeland, the world’s top humanitarian official, and Joseph Kony, one of the worlds most wanted war criminals. The Times (UK) article about the same meeting makes mention that the Ugandan warlord appeared to be “erratic and rambling during the meeting as if he had taken drugs.” Imagine being an unarmed diplomat meeting a man in the depths of the jungle who is part cult leader, part warlord (and among other things, accused of forcing the children he mutilates to eat their own flesh) -- and then realizing he was on drugs. Scary.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

BARBARIANS AT THE GATES. If Walter Pincus is correct that Defense Secretary-designee Bob Gates will scale back Donald Rumsfeld's expansion of the Pentagon's role in intelligence, we should let out a resounding cheer. Rumsfeld pushed the Pentagon way, way out into the blue yonder of intelligence work -- both with the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, designed to obstruct CIA analysis on Iraq and al-Qaeda, and in the field of human intelligence collection.

The PCEG's failures speak for themselves. The HUMINT stuff is more obscure and wonky, but it has real consequences. DOD intelligence is about tactical matters, not strategic ones -- for instance, learning what bridge to blow up in the field, rather than running spies or informants for years. But the Defense Intelligence Agency has been pushing its resources into duplicating what the CIA already does, and has done for half a century. And consider that if DIA, say, turns a colonel in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the CIA is already looking to recruit from that same pool -- and so CIA's asset inside the Iranian military might unknowingly get fed information from DIA's asset. Experience teaches us that no one will tell anyone who doesn't absolutely need to know who their inside agents are, so this is exactly the sort of duplicative effort that produces unforced intelligence errors. Thanks, Don!

So hopefully Pincus is right. On the other hand, Gates has always been a CIA man, and his opposition to DOD expansions into intelligence might be a vestige of the Pentagon always goring his ox. Will he change his attitude now that he's going to be in a position to do the goring? Let's hope that he gets asked that question during his confirmation hearing.

-- Spencer Ackerman

THE GAME'S STILL THE SAME ... IT JUST GOT MO' FIERCE. I received the same stunning Hill article in my inbox last night that Josh Marshall writes about here. Excerpt:

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will ensure that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) wins his race for majority leader, a key Murtha ally said Monday night.

“She will ensure that they [the Murtha camp] win. This is hard-ball politics,” said Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), a longtime Murtha supporter. “We are entering an era where when the Speaker instructs you what to do, you do it.”...

If Moran’s claims are true, Pelosi is taking an enormous gamble only a week after the election propelled her into the Speakership. If she prevails, she will likely banish her onetime rival Hoyer to the back benches and send a clear signal to her colleagues that she intends to rule with an iron hand. If Hoyer wins, she loses substantial political capital and alerts the caucus that they can successfully oppose her.

Hoyer supporters continue to say he has more than enough votes to prevail, regardless of Pelosi's wishes. Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.) said Pelosi timed her endorsement to come out after the votes were solidified, giving a nod to Murtha for the sake of loyalty but doing little to sway the election.

"This race is already a done deal," agreed Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah).

--Sam Rosenfeld

KLEIN'S LATEST. (THE OTHER KLEIN.) You don't need to be Nostradamus -- which will continue to climb in the polls until it loses to USC in a couple of weeks -- to know that this piece would contain many of the essential elements of a nightmare. However, it's not altogether horrible once you get past the cover, and if you ignore: a) the inevitable man-crush on Jim Webb; b) the fact that the name of Howard Dean one less time than does the name Terri Schiavo; and c) all that unseemly slobbering over the twin Sun Gods, Chuck 'n Rahm. (If you're going to credit them for the win in Ohio because they forced out Paul Hackett in favor of Sherrod Brown, and leaving aside the fact that Hackett likely would have won anyway, since the Ohio GOP was disincorporating before the eyes of the nation, shouldn't you at least feel obligated to point out that they tried the same thing in Montana, but that Jon Tester beat their handpicked candidate on the way to becoming every bit the U.S. senator that Sherrod Brown is?)

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IRAN HAWKS REORGANIZE. Say hello to the Iran Enterprise Institute. Laura Rozen reports.

--The Editors

KONY. To stray off the beaten path for a moment, The New York Times reports on the remarkable meeting between a UN official and the extremely reclusive Joseph Kony, leader of the almost indescribably brutal and horrifying northern Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army. Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity; Fast Leon Goldberg occasionally covered this story for TAP. This 2005 Human Rights Watch report givens some background on this conflict, which has brewed in the country's North for nearly twenty years. (Sidenote: Forest Whitaker, currently earning raves as Idi Amin in the movie The Last King of Scotland, is developing a film about the LRA that he plans to direct.)

At the very least, the Times piece is worth a read.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DON'T FORGET THE GREENS. Rick Perlstein's piece from Friday is right to caution that just because Democrats squeaked out a victory in the midterms, progressives should not ignore or forget the fact that Republican chicanery very nearly turned the tide the other way -- and that it might do so the next time. Along these lines -- of stressing certain points that victory might threaten to obscure -- I think it's worth pointing out that the Independent Green Party candidate for Senate from Virginia, Glenda Parker, received 26,106 votes, 1 percent of those cast. Had George Allen won by the same thin margin that Jim Webb did, Democrats would complain that yet again a marginal, lefty third party cost them control of a branch of government.

And understandably so. The Independent Green Party, while a distinct entity from the Green Party, also clearly belongs in the same spoiler category. The Independent Greens' signature issue is mass transit. As an avid supporter of mass transit and opponent of America's disastrous automobile-centric transportation policies, I sympathize with their feeling that the Democrats have failed to adequately address the issue. But the Democrats have a better track record on the subject than do Republicans, and the way to pull a major party to your position on a pet issue without throwing power to the other major party is to mount primary challenges and movements for platform incorporation on the topic within the party. Progressives should be as vigilant in convincing the pubilc that third parties are simply counterproductive in a winner-take-all system such as ours as they ought to be about fighting back against Republican dirty tricks.

--Ben Adler

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: POOR INITIATIVE. Ben "Badler" Adler notes one dog that didn't bark on Tuesday -- the supposed political potency and spill-off effects of state anti-gay marriage initiatives across the country.

--The Editors

ROB'S QUESTION. Ask and ye shall receive. On the question of Howard Dean, Liberal Hero and Centrist Governor, may I present this, and, of course, this as well.

Personally, I think this guy's got a good bead on things.

--Charles P. Pierce

QUANTIFICATION. Yglesias made a critical point last week:

Anyone who follows the contemporary American military will tell you that it's frustratingly difficult to say how successful it is at minimizing civilian casualties since, after all, the military doesn't count civilian casualties. But there you have it. If Bush really wanted to minimize civilian casualties, wouldn't he order the Pentagon to keep track of civilian casualties? That way you could see how effective the casualty-minimizing tactics employed in this situation or that were. You could, by comparing different efforts, be constantly improving our methods of casualty-minimization. Any serious effort to minimize (or maximize) anything requires an effort to quantify the minimized or maximized quantity. But Bush doesn't do that (and he's not unique among world leaders or US presidents in this regard) because he's not, at the end of the day, trying very seriously to minimize civilian casualties. He's trying to minimize his perceived responsibility for civilian deaths. Part of this is taking steps thought likely to reduce civilian casualties. Another part is to prevent quantification of civilian casualties.

To be sure, badly designed quantitative measures can prove disastrous. Curtis Lemay's obsession with showing progress led him to incinerate civilian neighborhoods of Japanese cities, and the reliance of the U.S. Army on body counts in Vietnam both missed the point of counter-insurgency and created perverse incentives for U.S. officers. Neither of those situations are comparable with Iraq, however. Preventing civilian death is an end unto itself, and counting the number of civilian dead is a uniquely effective method of calculating progress toward that end. As Matt points out, the absence of an effort to produce reliable numbers indicates that the military has no way of knowing how many civilians have died, and more importantly has no way of assessing methods designed to kill fewer civilians.

That the military has abandoned the body count metric of Vietnam is laudable. That it now refuses to do any count whatsoever isn't, because by preventing the assessment of reasonable measures to minimize casualties, it will invariably increase the civilian death toll.

--Robert Farley

PRIMARIES: HELPFUL. The lad is correct here. (Good on you, lad!) And Exhibit A for the plaintiff comes from Massachusetts this year in which rookie Deval Patrick was forced to run against an establishment Democratic candidate (Attorney General Tom Reilly) who'd already won several statewide races, and Chris Gabrieli, a progressive sort with more money than God. On the other hand, Republican incumbent Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey got her party's nomination unopposed and proceeded to embark on what will go down in history as the worst political campaign ever run that wasn't directed by Bob Shrum or Susan Estrich. Her public profile in the state not significantly higher than Patrick's was, Healey proceeded to define herself as Margaret Hamilton crossed with Mary Matalin -- but I repeat myself. If she'd been challenged in a primary, particularly if she'd been challenged from her right and had been forced to rely on her (apparently authentic) credentials as something of a moderate, we might have had a closer race on our hands in November. At the very least. we would have been spared the spectacle of the Hanna-Barbera Healey who ran.

--Charles P. Pierce

MURTHA PUSHBACK. I have some real ambivalence about this leadership race, but I do take issue with Rob and Blake. On Blake's point about John Murtha's personal history of pork-barrelling and helping out family members, I have to confess that I rank such petty corruption issues way, way, way down on my list of things worth caring about. If one were to determine that the outcomes of a Murtha-led caucus would be seriously preferable to a Hoyer-led one to even a small degree, I find such issues vanishingly insignificant. (And I don't buy into the notion that his history is too toxic for Democrats to be able to afford handing him the leadership -- any leader's going to be pilloried by the GOP regardless, and Murtha's offenses aren't that remarkable.)

Rob's point about the limited ability of House party leaders to actually affect Iraq policy is well-taken up to a point (and there's actually little indication that Murtha would be very great shakes on non-Iraq foreign policy issues); moreover, I think too much can sometimes be made of congressional leaders' duties as party spokesmen as compared to their responsibilities as parliamentary leaders, organizers, and tacticians. I genuinely have no sense of Murtha's actual organizational abilites along those lines. Hoyer definitely has such skills -- but, as we all know, puts them in the service, at times, of crappy goals. My second hesitation regarding the Murtha candidacy is admittedly somewhat circular in nature: given the still-strong chance that he goes down to defeat, this race may very well leave the Hoyer-Pelosi working relationship truly broken. Much as one might prefer Pelosi to Hoyer, open warfare on the part of the two party leaders at the outset of the Dems' tenure in the majority would just be very dispiriting.

All that said (am I reaching a conclusion here, you ask?), Ezra's words should be heeded:

In the end, this is less about the Majority Leader than the Speaker. Hoyer represents a more moderate, corporatist stance, and has often whipped in its service. He provided organization and cover for the 73 Democrats -- including him -- who voted for the Bankruptcy Bill. He's got a long-standing personal and political rivalry with Pelosi and will work to establish himself as an independent power center, and will be waiting with a shiv if she slips up. Murtha, who is likely running at Pelosi's request, is her ally first, a centrist second. Given that, this particular contest comes down to how powerful you think Speaker Pelosi should be. In essence, a vote for Murtha is a vote for Pelosi. A vote for Hoyer is a vote against her.

Boy, that was convoluted.

--Sam Rosenfeld

LEFT AND CENTER. Adding to what Matt and Blake have already written, I've long been curious as to precisely how a centrist Vermont governor became the voice of the Left in the United States. Although Dean's non-Iraq policy preferences don't place him as far right in the Democratic spectrum as Jack Murtha, they did leave him comfortably to the right of the establishment candidate of the Democratic Party in 2004. The war's dominance over the distinction between left and center found its way into the blogosphere, where self-identification as a "centrist" almost invariably seemed shorthand for support of the war.

A similar dynamic is happening now. Because Murtha is outspoken in opposition to the war, he's become popular with the left wing of the party in spite of a predominantly conservative record. That's fine, as the Iraq War is the most important single policy question facing us today. However, it's also one of the issues on which the new Congress will have the least control over policy in the next two years. For a Congress that will be dealing with a lot of issues other than the war, it seems to make more sense to stick with the candidate who's a)slightly farther left, and b) more of an established leadership quantity. This in addition, of course, to the yummy bacon problem that Blake mentions.

--Robert Farley

THE "WRONG" CANDIDATES. Michael Tomasky yesterday delivered an eloquent version of the challenge to the conventional wisdom that Democrats won the House by running conservative candidates. He's right, of course, although as I argued, the perception that the Democratic Party has moved a bit toward the center is not harmful, even if it just reaffirms the reality that this is and has long been a center-left party.

My answer to this argument had been simply to point out that there were two kinds of districts Democrats won: moderate-liberal districts formerly represented by so-called moderate Republicans, and won by moderate-to-liberal Democrats, and a smaller number of conservative districts, such as North Carolina-11, where a moderate-conservative Democrat unseated a very conservative Republican. It's true, of course, that few of the newly elected Democrats are quite as far left as, say, John Conyers, but that's simply because the districts that are going to elect a Conyers already do. Districts in play are, by definition, more centrist districts.

But an example Tomasky used to show the liberalism of the new Dems was striking:

Why, there's even a woman who was tossed out of a presidential event for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt (New Hampshire's Carol Shea-Porter), and a fellow who ran an alternative newspaper and who proudly supports affirmative action -- in Kentucky, no less (John Yarmuth).

I didn't follow the New Hampshire race, but it looks the same: Shea-Porter won a four-way primary, defeating a veteran state legislator who had the support of the DCCC, got a campaign visit from Tom Daschle, and out-raised Shea-Porter 10 to 1.

Meanwhile, a good number of the perfect, heavily funded, and aggressively recruited DCCC candidates, such as Patricia Madrid in New Mexico, fell short.

Is there a lesson here? It's not a big sample size, but it suggests that in a district where a Republican was vulnerable to defeat, a plain-spoken progressive could do it at least as easily as a focus-grouped moderate. Perhaps even better.

--Mark Schmitt

NO TO MURTHA. Let me add to Matt Yglesias' doubts about the wisdom of choosing Jack Murtha as House Majority Leader. Forget about left/right: just like Pelosi, the guy is representing his district, where he is wildly popular. He's got two major problems, from my perspective. One: pork. The guy believes his job is to get as much bacon for his district as possible, whether it makes sense or not. That's why Indiana University of Pennsylvania hosts the John P. Murtha Institute for Homeland Security. Two: the Abscam scandal, where he was caught on tape in an FBI sting involving a fake Arab sheikh who offered $50,000 in cash to eight members of Congress. To his credit, Murtha said he was "not interested" in the money, but he did invite the man to invest legally in Johnstown, the largest town in his district and a casualty of the collapse of the steel industry in western Pennsylvania. The taint of the scandal has never left him, and I think Republicans would have a field day with it if he were in the leadership. Murtha is a nice guy, and he has done a lot for a struggling district, but he represents an old-school, local party boss kind of patronage politician that we need to move beyond.

--Blake Hounshell

THE TROUBLE WITH THE SENATE. A few days back, Brad Plumer highlighted this excerpt from a New York Times piece on Iraq oversight; he was focusing on something else in the excerpt, but my attention turned to the mention of Jay Rockefeller:

It is unclear how far chairmen like Mr. Rockefeller may push the administration to obtain more information about secret programs. The committee, like many others, has often degenerated into partisan rancor over the past two years, and Mr. Rockefeller, like other incoming chairmen, has told colleagues that one of his priorities is to restore the committee’s historic bipartisanship.

UPDATE: See Mike Crowley on an early potential dispute between Baucus and the Dem caucus, regarding authorization allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Crowley remarks, "Baucus faces re-election in 2008, making him likely to tack rightward to please conservative Montana voters. (Although it's possible that drug-price negotiation would play well in a Montana that just elected a populist like Jon Tester.)" For what it's worth, I think Crowley's "on the other hand" parenthetical is more on the mark. Blocking Medicare's ability to bargain for cheaper drugs seems like significanly less of an electorally seductive move than backing lavish tax cuts (which Baucus did prior to his 2002 race).

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE KRAUTHAMMER FALLACY. I've been pushing back here quite a bit on the "Democrats won, but as conservatives" meme already, but a few reporters and other people have asked me to explain the riddle of how it can be that both congressional parties, as a result of last week's election, could actually have moved to the right. Here is Charles Krauthammer, for example, from Friday's Washington Post:

Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats, brilliantly recruited by Rep. Rahm Emanuel with classic Clintonian triangulation. Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, antiabortion, pro-gun, anti-tax -- and now a Democratic House member. The result is that both parties have moved to the Republican X = 55right.

This mathematical reality does not, however, imply that the Congress as a whole has shifted to the right. Quite the contrary, in fact. To demonstrate the Krauthammer Fallacy as simply as I know how, let's assume that the
pre-election ideological ratings of a simplified, 5-member Congress (with lower numbers being more liberal) look something like this:

Democrat A = 5

Democrat B = 15

Republican X = 55

Republican Y = 90

Republican Z = 95

Here the Republicans are the majority, their mean position is 80, and their median position is 90. The minority Democrats have a mean and median position of 10.

Next assume that in 2006 Republican X, who is a moderate by his party's standards (Charles Taylor, whom Shuler defeated, was ranked 90th most liberal out of 224 Republicans), is defeated by a Democrat who is a moderate by his party's standards (Shuler). Still, the new Democrat is clearly to the left of the ousted Republican: I do not hear anyone suggesting that a single Democrat won Tuesday by actually running to the right of his/her respective opponent.

Giving Krauthammer the benefit of the doubt, we'll assign this new Democrat an ideological rating of, say, 25 -- i.e., making him the single most conservative member of his caucus. The resulting Congress now looks like this:

Democrat A = 5

Democrat B = 15

Democrat C = 25

Republican Y = 90

Republican X = 95

Notice that the new Democratic majority has moved to the right: Its mean and median position are now 15, not 10. The same is true for the new Republican minority: Its mean and median both jump to 92.5. Still, the overall Congress has moved to the left -- and decidedly so.

The new majority's mean and median position of 15 are much different from the old majority's 80. The median and mean for the Congress as a whole has shifted, too: from 55 and 52 before the election, to 25 and 46 after.

Sorry, Charlie. Nice try.

--Tom Schaller

BUCKLE UP FOR BI-PARTISAN SAFETY. Recognizing fully that internet polls are non-scientific and highly skewed toward (younger, more cynical?) online readers, I thought this question posed by Newsweek was quite interesting in its results.

If the public is right, time to buckle-up for the bumpy ride these next two years.

--Tom Schaller

THE EXECUTIVE QUESTION. I understand completely the political reasons why we won'd have a chance to vote for the guy who helped lead Overseas Democrats For Udall 30 years ago when I was pitching Mo to people on Milwaukee's South Side. However, Russ Feingold's departure pretty much guarantees that the issue of lunatic Executive caesarism is not going to play a big role among the people seeking to be the next ones to run the Executive branch. (Pat Leahy, it should be said, is making very intriguing mouth-noises on the subject, as regards the new Democratic congressional majorities.) I still believe that one reason Michael Dukakis didn't hit Iran-Contra harder in 1988 -- other than the obvious one that his campaign was run by half-bright stoats -- is that he could envision needing to develop an "off the books" capacity himself to respond to some future crisis. Nobody runs for president without feeling deeply in their ambitious little souls that they're going to need a dollop of authoritarian juice to get things done. (Comes from reading all that Neustadt back in the 1960's, I fear, and in our apparently deathless JFK Complex.).

However, for six years, we have been afflicted with an Executive branch run amok, asserting privileges rejected 700 years ago, flaunting its disdain for the Constitution, and ignoring any limits whatsoever. In doing so, it has habituated the country to accept the habits of authoritarian government. Deep in the weeds of this Newsweek poll is this interesting passage:

Another 69 percent said they were concerned that the new Congress would keep the administration "from doing what is necessary to combat terrorism," and two-thirds said they were concerned it would spend too much time investigating the administration and Republican scandals.

--Charles P. Pierce

VETERANS' DAY. Though Laura weighs in below, Tapped is more or less down today in honor of the holiday. But for your TAP Online reading pleasure: Rick Perlstein offers an urgent reminder to Democrats not to let victory lull them into forgetting the dirty tricks operation that the GOP perpetrated on Tuesday -- and will do again in future elections. And Peter Dreier and John Atlas highlight the role that wildly successful minimum wage initiatives in six states played in Tuesday's outcomes.

--The Editors

"T+1": OR HOW A BIPARTISAN IRAQ STRATEGY MIGHT EMERGE. From the proverbial well-informed correspondent:

The story in the NYT today about Gates bringing in old advisors and critics of Rummy/Iraq policy and cleaning out the 'E Ring' seems to be more evidence that the administration is using the [Gates] nomination to signal and provide a down payment on a change in course. It looks like the administrations plans to meet with the [Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG)] next week (then the Dems will meet with them), and that the ISG will be the focal point for a new strategy, which increasingly looks like it may involve (at least informal) talks with Iran. We'll see how much these meetings actually SHAPE the ISG findings that will be released next month. In other words, it looks like the following process is unfolding: at time 't' the ISG meets with Bush/Dems, floats a few ideas, gets feedback, and integrates the feedback into its sense of what kind of bipartisan strategy is possible; then at 't+1' the ISG offers its 'independent' recommendations that become the baseline for a bipartisan change in strategy. We'll see.

--Laura Rozen

A FEW GOOD INTERNS. The Prospect is looking for interns for Winter/Spring 2007. Any Tapped readers out there who are interested in (or who know someone who might be interested in) spending a semester in our DC office, helping out with the magazine and the site, should definitely apply. It's a fun time, and a rewarding experience in every sense of the word except the one that means getting paid money. Check it out.

--The Editors

GUESS WHO’S BACK? So with President Bush begging for a new spirit of bi-partisanship in Washington, he re-nominates the next-most-divisive administration official after Rumsfeld: the recess-appointed ambassador to the UN John Bolton. One has to wonder what the president is thinking -- or what tricks he has up his sleeve.

In the Senate, Republican support for Bolton has always been lukewarm. Indeed, his nomination died this fall because Republican Lincoln Chafee refused to support moving the nomination from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the Senate floor for a vote. And almost as soon as the Bolton re-nomination was announced by the White House, Chafee called a press conference restating his opposition to Bolton. In other words, Bolton’s re-nomination is DOA.

There are only two ways that Bolton could remain on the job -- and both are of dubious legality. Under option A, the president would select Bolton for a post not requiring Senate confirmation, then move him laterally as the “Acting Ambassador." Option B would be to simply give him a second recess appointment, but should this happen, Bolton would not be able to draw a salary. Both options would be akin to declaring war on a Senate with subpoena power.

I think Ian Williams put it best today: the president's got an Alamo complex.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

RAHMBO REDUX. OK, this whole business about who's allowed to spike the ball in the end zone gets to last until midnight tonight and then we all hold hands and sing together. On Rahm-v.-netroots, I'm more on Perlstein's side than Lizza's here -- and I think Sam makes a critical mistake by minimizing the fact that the DCCC's support in many cases came, as he put it, "relatively late." That, it seems to me, is understating what actually happened. As recently as the summer of 2005, when I was working on a piece for The Boston Globe Magazine about Howard Dean's chairmanship of the DNC, it was a ludicrously open secret that Rahm Emanuel and the DCCC believed that a nationwide strategy of the kind Dean was proposing likely would prove not only futile, but catastrophic, and a lot of them were already measuring the space on the wall where they'd hang the Doctor's head. They believed neither in the strategy nor, especially, in the guy pushing it, and any of them who says they did is simply dealing in a barefaced non-fact. There's no shame in admitting that other people saw an opportunity before you did. Nobody denies that the late money was valuable, but Emanuel can best be said to have produced a bumper crop out of ground that somebody else plowed.

In addition, there were and are a number of important issues on which the DCCC and the rest of the party establishment simply are unwilling or unable to address. These certainly include the serious economic dislocations that helped elect Sherrod Brown in Ohio, as well as the ongoing constitutional crisis caused by a rogue Executive branch, a grave problem that nobody in Washington seems to be willing to address head-on, but that energized not only Democratic activists, but also the libertarian slice of the Republican base.

And, it should be noted that a lot of the problem is that an awful lot of people in Washington really don't like Rahm Emanuel, who has a reputation as a supercilious gombeen that is remarkable even by the standards set by employees of the first Clinton Administration, which are considerable.

--Charles P. Pierce

WHEN "CHARACTER" WAS KING: As Donald Rumsfeld is finally thrown under the bus, it seems appropriate to return to Jon Chait's recent account of the Rumsfeld-worship of the early Bush era. (The nadir was probably Midge Decter's book, which seems to have been expanded after Seventeen rejected her initial article because it was too puerile and starry-eyed.) Here's one characteristic example:

To plunge back into the conservative idealization of Rumsfeld, given what we know today, is a bizarre experience. You enter an upside-down world in which the defense secretary is a thoughtful, fair-minded, eminently reasonable man who has been vindicated by history--and his critics utterly repudiated. The pioneering specimen of the genre was a National Review cover story from December 31, 2001, by Jay Nordlinger, cover-lined "The Stud: Don Rumsfeld, America's New Pin-up," with a cartoon portraying the defense secretary as Betty Grable in her iconic World War II image. The central premise of the article was that Rumsfeld epitomized manliness and virility. (This turned out to be a recurring theme in the Rumsfeld iconography.)

Nordlinger's article consisted mostly of the sort of unprovable, impressionistic personal assessments that are the usual grist of the conservative character industry. As one Rumsfeld friend was quoted as saying, "People look for a different kind of person to run Washington--as far away from the Clinton type as you can get." (This was largely a continuation of a conservative theme that President Clinton had surrounded himself with wusses--"pear-shaped" men, as conservative author Gary Aldrich described them, or, as Bob Dole put it in his 1996 presidential nomination acceptance speech, "the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed.")

This kind of silliness makes it doubly appropriate that it was George Allen's defeat which finally put an end to Republican rule in the Senate. You may recall that the National Review ran a similar hagiography of Allen which said little about his substantive merits but a great deal about the character that could be inferred from his football-throwing and tobacco-chewing abilities. I would like to hope that if the spectacular policy and political flameout of Bushism teaches conservatives anything, it's that propping up mediocrities and empty suits based on unfalsifiable attributions of "character" is good in the long run for neither the country nor the Republican Party.

--Scott Lemieux

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE MIDTERMS. Here's an abridged version of an election wrap-up memo I've been sending around:

The prevailing geographic trend for 2006 was a Rust-Belt realignment in which a cohort of Rockefeller-Ford GOP moderates was ousted by progressive Democrats who ran to their left. A major consequence of this mini-realignment is that both parties will be more ideologically and regionally coherent and, perhaps, more polarized as a result.

The irony of this transformation is that conservatives who pushed an agenda that included the Iraq war, deficits, and social issue interference from the beginning of life (stem cell bans) to the end of life (Schiavo), have mostly survived, while their more moderate brethren suffered the casualties. This provides a potential opportunity when the newly-entrenched and embittered minority overreaches, as it did even when the moderates were still around to act, in theory, as a “check.”

About 85 percent of Democratic gains at every level came outside the South:

• Five of six Gubernatorial pickups outside the South (84%)
  
• Five of six Senatorial pickups outside the South (84%)
  
• Twenty-three of twenty-eight House pickups outside the South (82%)
  
• For the first time in more than half a century, the minority party in the South is the majority party in both chambers of Congress -- a truly stunning development.
  
• 256 of 275 net new Democratic state legislators (92%), the vast majority coming from the Northeast and Midwest, yielding nine new chamber majorities (six in the Midwest, one in Oregon, both in New Hampshire)

As for the goofy talk about the election actually being a victory for conservatism, the fact remains that it was disproportionately GOP moderates (particularly from the Northeast and Midwest) who lost Tuesday, and to progressives who ran to their left. Using the most recent National Journal data, 224 House Republicans can be ranked from most liberal (#1) to most conservative (#224).

What do we find from Tuesday?

• The most liberal Republican to lose was ranked #1 -- Jim Leach of Iowa; the most conservative was Texan Tom DeLay, ranked #213.
• Overall, of the 28 flipped GOPers, more than half -- 16 -- were from the most liberal third of the caucus (1-75); 7 were from that middle third (76-150); and just 5 were from the most conservative third (151-224).
• Most striking is the fact that 10 of the 28 most liberal Republicans in the GOP House caucus lost, including five of the dozen most liberal Republicans: #1 Leach; #3 Nancy Johnson; #6 NY’s Sherwood Boehlert’s vacated seat; #7 CT’s Rob Simmons ; and #12 NH’s Charlie Bass.

--Tom Schaller

LITTLE CHANGE IN EVANGELICAL VOTE. I hate to go around puncturing blue balloons, but let's get this hype about a big shift in the white evangelical vote out of the way right now. When the Associated Press reported yesterday that "nearly a third" of white evangelicals voted for Democrats in Tuesday's elections, Dems got all excited, spinning this as something new. In fact, the percentage appears to be about the same as voted Democratic in the 2002 mid-terms (see the link).

The spinners are getting milage out of comparing the evangelical vote in the 2004 presidential election to Tuesday's mid-terms. Apples and oranges, kids -- apples and oranges.

--Adele M. Stan

BEYOND IRAQ. A nice piece by Matthew Stannard in the San Francisco Chronicle lets panda-hugger Thomas Barnett raise a point hitherto overlooked in excitement at Rumsfeld's departure: his leaving heralds a positive change of direction on China policy. Says Barnett:

"The fixation on China, which was strong with this administration when it came in and certainly remained strong with the China hawks under Rumsfeld and with Rumsfeld himself became the excuse for over-feeding the war force and starving the occupation force," he said. "The Air Force and the Navy probably get happier than they need to be ... and the Army and the Marines are left hanging."

--Blake Hounshell

HMM. Hey, Sid. You're happy. I'm happy. All God's children -- well, most of them anyway -- are happy, but what's the deal with this sentence?

Reagan drew his raw material for "morning again in America" from an idealized viw of his boyhood in Dixon, Ill. where his father was the town Catholic drunk, rescued at last only by a federal government job.

Meanwhile, Josh makes a funny.

--Charles P. Pierce

RAHMBO. I think Ryan Lizza more or less has the goods in his rejoinder to Rick Perlstein's piece, which had played down Rahm Emanuel and played up the netroots in assessing who should get the lion's share of credit for the Dems' House gains. Lizza points out that most of the candidates Perlstein cites as examples of netroots-backed and largely DCCC-ignored campaigns actually received plenty of financial and strategic support from the DCCC. Certainly, as in the case of John Hall in New York and many others, the DCCC attention and money came relatively late in the campaign as the races began to tighten and the DCCC expanded its roster of targets, and one can thus argue both that activists are the true source of such eventual victories and that the DCCC should have done more sooner; but each individual candidate always wants more resources from the DCCC and always thinks they're not getting enough fast enough, and weighing counterfactual claims becomes pretty difficult. At any rate, I think Kevin Drum and Zack Roth strike the right note in emphasizing that credit for Tuesday's outcomes is a both-and rather than either-or kind of thing.

Indeed, now that the election's over it's worth disentangling a bit what might be objectionable to liberals and activists about Emanuel. For me it's mainly an objection to some of his substantive positions on policy, to his association with the Hoyer K Street-friendly wing of the caucus, and to a lot of loose talk from folks in town about how it would be better for him to be Speaker rather than Nancy Pelosi.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ROVE, MANDATES, AND POWER. I agree with Matt and Garance (who has a new blog) regarding