Is it really necessary to impune his honor, patriotism, and intelligence? Can't we simply say that he served his nation bravely in a time of war; set an inspirational example as a prisoner; and brought distinction to his uniform. None of that disqualifies him from serving as President - quite the contrary.

But it's also the case that, as an elected official, he's set policy capriciously, allowed himself to be swayed by lobbyists and donors, pursued a series of damaging initiatives, and presently advocates a disasterous course abroad and a continuation of catastrophic policies at home. That, not his wartime service, is why he's unfit to be President.

Posted at May 15, 2008 4:41 PM in response to McCain Blasts Obama As Unfit To Defend America

When President Bush decries "the false comfort of appeasement," and John McCain raises the spectre of Neville Chamberlain, they're deliberately advancing a fallacious line of argument. Appeasement - the acceptance of conditions imposed by an aggressor in lieu of open conflict - is not the result of negotiation, but of capitulation. And the inverse proposition - the rejection of all negotiation even at the price of open conflict - is just as rigidly obtuse. We call it war-mongering.

I don't particularly mind that our President has chosen to air a domestic dispute abroad - that's his perogative. And I've always been miffed by the notion that foreign policy is for the experts, and too delicate a matter to be subject to public debate or the people's will - what the establishment terms 'politicization.' But I'm incensed that the coverage has focused on whether or not Obama's support of negotiations constitutes appeasement, as if this were subject to dispute. It's not. He has never proposed giving in to our enemies. His support of negotiation constitutes, ipso facto, a rejection of appeasement.

There are not two valid sides to this dispute. For the media to accede to this kind of slander, just because it's what the GOP demands, well, it borders on appeasement.

Posted at May 15, 2008 4:37 PM in response to McCain Blasts Obama As Unfit To Defend America

Why is there always a presumption, in posts of this sort, that either Americans must be too stupid to understand how to translate their inclinations into policy, or else the system must be too corrupt to allow them to do so?

It strikes me as a dangerously shallow approach to policy analysis. Bartels presumes that if only Americans understood what their system was doing to them, they'd certainly change it. Because, after all, Bartels' own views on policy issues are correct; answers to vague survey questions bear out that the public agrees with him; and since policies don't reflect these positions, something has clearly gone wrong.

Why not, just once, begin such an analysis with the presumption that public policy generally reflects the views of the public - and then use it to induce what those views must be?

Posted at May 15, 2008 1:45 PM in response to Are Americans Egalitarians?

What I'm doubting is the paragraph's veracity. The reporter doesn't claim to have spoken directly with Davis; doesn't attribute his information; and doesn't offer a quote. In general, that's a sign that he's relying on prior media reports - as a rule, journalists are loath to cite other newspapers when they don't have to. I strongly suspect that the Times got this wrong, and simply conflated Mayor Davis (happy to take Jeff Davis) with the more obscure figure of Mayor Baker (happy to take them both).

I could be off base. I'd be delighted to find evidence that an all-around charming fellow like Greg Davis wanted a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in his city - a scandal like that couldn't find a nicer guy.

At any rate, with a little luck, in a few hours this will be moot.

Posted at May 13, 2008 7:48 PM in response to Contemporary News Accounts Undermine GOP Denials on Confederate Statues

I dunno.

In several contemporary news accounts, Greg Davis was quite clear that he welcomed the statue of Jefferson Davis. He - apparently deliberately - said nothing about Nathan Bedford Forrest. The exclusion is obvious in repeated quotes. The Times piece that you cite doesn't offer a quote or attribute its information. It says that Davis said it "last week," yet none of the local media sources quoted him at the time to the effect that he would "be happy" to take the statue of Forrest.

The Commercial Appeal quote is the closest thing to a smoking gun. But in the context of the story (which you should post) it's equally plausible that the "we" is Davis and Baker, the mayor of an adjoining town who very much wanted the Forrest statue.

I still don't buy it. I'd like to see a quote from Davis saying, in effect, that he wanted the Forrest statue. He wasn't shy about saying the same for the Jeff Davis statute - he even a tentative site in mind and had talked to the Sons of the Confederacy about it. In fact, he was grandstanding to score political points. He deliberately inserted himself into a raging controversy, and made sure reporters heard what he had to say. So why can't anyone find a quote where he makes it clear he wants Nathan Bedford Forrest in his town? Something less ambiguous than using ambiguous plurals.

Again, I'm not defending the guy, who's certainly guilty of racial demagoguery. But it's worth pointing out that the DCCC based their claim on a Commercial Appeal story. And the story they cited doesn't say what they claim it says. It may be that other C/A stories bear out the claim, but I haven't seen them yet.

Posted at May 13, 2008 6:10 PM in response to Contemporary News Accounts Undermine GOP Denials on Confederate Statues

See, now, that's not the point. If they'd slammed him for inserting himself into the controversy and volunteering a home for Jeff Davis - working together with the United Sons of the Confederacy to do so - that would've been fine. But they accused him of wanting Nathan Bedford Forrest, and he didn't. The article they cite quotes him wanting Davis, not Forrest. Three other articles published at the time (AP, Commercial Appeal, and DeSoto Times) bear that out.

Whatever you think of Jeff Davis, he possesses a very different political currency than "the founder of the KKK." The DCCC is way, way out of line here, and frankly, ought to be ashamed of itself. Greg Davis can be attacked on the merits; there's no need to make stuff up.

Posted at May 13, 2008 3:17 PM in response to GOP: Mailer Attacking Our Guy As Confederate-Friendly Is False -- Kind Of

Oh, for an edit function.

Posted at May 13, 2008 9:44 AM in response to Five Reforms for the Democratic Party's Primary Process

An interesting post, and a worthwhile conversation.

5) This one's tough. Having given them a role, it's not so easy to take it away. At the very least, a party that's committed to enfranchising the District of Columbia can't very well exclude DC from a role in its own convention. But it's not entirely clear to me why the principle of enfranchisement ought to be limited to DC. And there's an important addition to your list - I presume you'd also exclude the separate delegates for Democrats Abroad.

4) The main reason for granting members of Congress automatic slots is that we want them at the convention - that ties them more closely to the party, and makes invests them in the process. When they had to run for competitive slots, many demured - they faced either the embarrassment of a loss, or the prospect of winning by trouncing their own constituents. On the other hand, the superdelegate system tends to favor frontrunners and congressional candidates, and in the long-run, that may prove unhealthy for the party. I'd agree with elminating the DNC slots. I think the unpledged add-ons are a terrible idea, at least in their present form. I'm more ambivalent about the other DPLs, including the ex-presidents, but there aren't enough to make that argument important.

3) Amen.

2) I think you're conflating two separate issues. The first is whether delegates ought to be awarded based on results statewide, at the district level, or via some weighted combination. The second is whether the present system tends to artificially level out real differences in the voting. Personally, I like awarding 2/3 of the delegates at the district level. The origins of the system don't bother me; the question isn't where it came from, but rather, what purpose it presently serves. And we've seen that it tends to force the candidates out of the districts where they already enjoy the greatest levels of support, and into those where they don't. That's incredibly healthy for the party and the country. Contrast that with most statewide campaigns, in which each side focuses on turning out its base and driving up its margins where it's strongest. That way, polarization lies. Which is not to say that you don't have a point. But there are any number of other possible solutions to the objections you raise, including (but not limited to) (a) restoring UADs to their original status as PADs, thus awarding a bonus to the statewide winner (b) tilting the district/statewide balance to, say, 50/50 or (c) getting rid of most of the superdelegates, so that the smaller differences in pledged delegate totals produced by the present system constitute larger percentages of the needed number. But your ultimate objection here is off-base. The reason this fight went nine rounds isn't because 56% was as good as 44% - it's because the party was almost evenly divided, and the results of the state level contests reflected that. I don't think artificially stacking the deck so that the race is over after a handful of contests and we can paper over real divisions will prove a good solution to that problem. But we'll test this proposition in the fall. John McCain, after all, won the nomination through just such a system. If he turns out not to have been properly vetted, or is unable to mobilize his base, I think that will speak eloquently to the problems of rigging the nominating system.

1) I loathe the idea of regional primaries. Sure, it would promote a focus on "regional issues" - that's precisely my objection. For better or worse, we don't have a regional system of government. Federal legislation and policy aren't targeted at the regional level. We need a leader who can speak to the problems of the nation as a whole, and to the issues of the basic political units of the union, the states. The regional primary system encourages them, instead, to pander, offering bromides in place of specifics. But more importantly, a rotating regional system is a lottery. If the Southwest and the Rust Belt had gone first this year, Clinton would be the nominee. If it had been the Northeast and Upper Midwest, it would be Obama in March. It creates a shorter process, but also one more determined than ever by the calendar. And since all 50 states vote on the same day in November, it's a terrible way to select a nominee who will have to run nationwide, not regionally.

Let me add, if I may, two more reforms I'd like to see discussed:

A) Quotas: Do we really need to mandate that the delegations be evenly divided between men and women, and that certain racial and ethnic groups be represented (but not others)? Most people haven't focused on the incredibly complex and restrictive rules governing the selection of delegates, because the color of their skin doesn't impact their choice of a nominee. But that's the whole point. Although it creates a pleasing crowd-shot for the cameras, and shows a striking contrast to the quadrennnial GOP gathering - which looks like an NRA convention - the quota system is a relic. It's not that we've erased gender, racial, or ethnic discrimination; if we eliminated the quotas, there's no doubt in my mind that we'd see a striking and regrettable fall-off in the apparent diversity of the convention. It's that we've made some real progress since 1982. The main objective of the Hunt Commission was to fix what it saw as a major problem - the convention floor looked nothing at all like the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party. It was full of the aging hacks and party bosses of an earlier era, even as the party had become a coalition of rights-focused interest groups. Well, the party's changed again. It's still an unwieldy coalition, but that has more to do with geography, education, and occupation. The grassroots plays an increasingly important role, and the era of machine politics is now largely behind us. For all the paeans, the wonderful diversity of our convention is largely skin-deep - they tend to be significantly older, higher-income, better-educated, and more urban than the party as a whole. The party has spent much of the past two decades moving past interest-group politics. It'd be nice to see the nominating process do the same.

B) Too Many Systems: The states have a huge amount of latitude in determining the rules of their initial determining steps - what the rest of us call primaries or caucuses. This is cute, even quaint, until the contests start to matter. And then it rapidly becomes apparent that even many of the experts don't understand the ins-and-outs of their own states' systems, much less those of the other 49. That's a shame; the contest should be about policy and character, not about mastery or manipulation of arcane rules. The DNC should re-write the rules, and offer states a binary choice. They can opt for primaries, to be run under a fairly rigid set of rules, allowing only for legislatively-mandated differences. Or they can opt for caucuses, under a similarly restrictive set of rules. Out with the firehouse caucuses, the primacaucuses, the primaries with and without conventions, and all the rest. In with two choices, that can be explained once and understood by all.

C) Sanctions: We need sanctions that can stick. So long as they're reversible, the party and the nominees will face incredible pressure to back down. Florida and Michigan decided to call the DNC's bluff. So far, they've lost that gamble - but the DNC and the candidates have also lost support. We all like a system with safeguards and appeals. But fairness is sometimes less important than finality. If, when the RBC ruled against Florida and Michigan, they had understood that the decision was absolute and final, they would've buckled under and submitted new, compliant plans. Instead, they assumed that presenting the DNC with a fait accomplit would induce it to back down - or that they'd be seated at the convetion even over the objections of the RBC, because the nominee wouldn't want to anger them. This whole fiasco has been too costly to allow it to happen again.

Posted at May 13, 2008 9:38 AM in response to Five Reforms for the Democratic Party's Primary Process

Actually, we split the difference. I'm not going to explain the formula here, but in essence, states are awarded delegates to the DNC based on an average of their population and the number of Democratic voters.

Posted at May 13, 2008 8:19 AM in response to Five Reforms for the Democratic Party's Primary Process

I thought I knocked this one down last week. If it needs to be said again, the fact that Hillary is winning these districts now doesn't mean that it's to the advantage of the incumbents to have her on the top of the ticket. And that holds true even if she'd run stronger than Obama in these districts in November.

Posted at May 9, 2008 12:25 PM in response to Hillary Campaign Emails Out "Electability" Power-Point To All House Dems