unreelected

Say goodnight, Arlen. The Washington incumbency racket takes one on the chin today. Arlen Specter was the worst kind of centrist, one whose position on any given bill was determined almost exclusively by political expediency, whose every move was calculated to appeal to as many voters as possible. Specter was easily cowed by Bush into voting consistently with the hard right, and cowed by primary voters into voting consistently Democratic (for a time). If his erratic voting patterns had been the product of compromise, I would understand and perhaps even applaud, but I remember all attempts to compromise with Specter during the Bush years, and they always concluded with a quick visit from the president and a sullen looking Specter voting the party line. He was utterly without principle and without backbone, not even a centrist so much as a cipher.

Good riddance.

Stupak retiring

There's a lesson here. It will be misinterpreted by myopic editorials as "the Tea Party is unstoppable!," but I think most people would agree that Stupak came under so much fire because he chose to grandstand and obstruct the president's signature legislation, his own party's electoral hopes, and the dire needs of millions of Americans ... and then back off.

What's funny about his decisions during the healthcare debate is that the bill that passed the Senate never did provide any financial support for abortions. In fact, the pro-Roe crowd was generally angry because it placed extra burdens beyond the Hyde amendment on women seeking abortions. There was a joke circling the internet after Stupak's meeting with the president and his reversal that Stupak couldn't bring himself to believe that the bill didn't fund abortions because it was female senators, women's groups, and nuns telling him so. Finally they all went to the president and told him Stupak won't believe it unless it comes from a man.

In a way, I suspect an element of truth here. My guess is that this had nothing to do with abortion policy. Stupak put his finger to the wind and guessed that this was going to be a major anti-Democratic wave election year, and he needed to get out in front of it. Grandstanding against HCR on behalf of the anti-Roe crowd gets him in the good graces of tea partiers, McCain voters, the US Chamber of Commerce (who will be doing the lion's share of PAC spending this year) and the Christian Right all at once.

Only things didn't work out like he'd hoped. He was probably told by the Speaker that he wouldn't be allowed to join the handful of red state Dems allowed to vote the other way to protect their own asses, so he recruited a bunch of other "pro-life" Democrats to his cause, hoping he could just torpedo the bill and Obama's loss would be his gain. He took a lot of the blame when HCR looked dead, and Democratic groups (and, ahem, voters) were furious.

And then he learned a hard lesson about leading an army of cowards. When it looked like the president was going to lose, they flocked to Stupak. When the conventional wisdom shifted, however, and people started talking about how, during the 1994 elections, centrist Democrats were slaughtered en masse by the GOP whether or not they supported HCR, and that passage of HCR was absolutely essential to the Democrats keeping Congress, knees all around him started shaking.

Then votes in Congress started flipping the Speaker's way, and the Stupakers became the last group left holding up HCR. They caught the angry eye of the Speaker, the White House, and the Democratic electorate at large. Rahm came knocking on their door with the message that the White House "is going to remember who stood in the way of this legislation." Democratic groups and unions start evaluating their support. Support for Stupak et al. among their own Democratic constituents started sinking.

I imagine at some point Stupak and his buddies gathered with their campaign advisors, looked at polls they had commissioned hoping that their gains among tea partiers, Christian conservatives, and Republicans were offsetting Democratic losses, and learned the ugly truth about triangulating your own party in the post-Clinton age: after so many bridges burned and so many allies spurned, Republicans said they supported Stupak et al. in larger numbers ... but still plan to vote for their Republican opponents in November.

Everyone wanted off this sinking ship, they were finished with Stupak's folly (including Stupak himself), but they needed some way to save face, and that's how the president's Executive Order came to be. It won't save them, as Stupak eventually figured out. Stupak made several serious miscalculations:

1. he badly misjudged how important his own party considered HCR


2. he relied on a cadre of cowardly, centrist congressmen to defend against the White House, congressional leadership, every Democratic/liberal interest group in America, and the vast majority of Democratic voters


3. he made a play for Republican and independent votes at the expense of Democratic ones (i.e., gave his own supporters a HUGE reason to stay home), and then tried to renege, effectively antagonizing all three groups

That last one is what gets the "centrists" every time. Research shows that most "independent" voters have amorphous, frequently changing political views, but nobody likes a waffler.

Harold Ford, Jr. running for New York senate seat

What is it about this senate seat that attracts carpetbaggers?

When people of staunch liberal and conservative persuasions talk about the "squishy center," accusing them of spinelessness, double talk, and disloyalty, they're usually talking about guys like Harold Ford. Ford spent the last 5 years on television bashing Democrats for being "extremist," at least when he wasn't burnishing his pro-life credentials or supporting gay marriage bans (now that's "Big Government"!).

Now, however, with a practically open seat in a comfortably blue state, Ford has re-emerged, suddenly socially liberal.

And for the record, ontheissues.org pegs Ford's support percentage from NARAL at 30%, not 80% as he claims. I know that must have been really hard for the lofty New York Post to verify, but there it is.

Joe Lieberman joins McCain campaign

No, I mean he literally joined his campaign. From the Boston Globe:

Sen. Joe Lieberman has been named a chairman of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain's state leadership team.

Lieberman, an Independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, has endorsed the Arizona senator and campaigned for him in Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

He is heading McCain's Connecticut campaign with Republican Rep. Christopher Shays.

George Jepsen, former state Democratic Party chairman who supported Ned Lamont's successful challenge of Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary, said Lieberman's endorsement of McCain is an affront to Democrats who believed Lieberman when he said two years ago that he was committed to helping put a Democrat in the White House in 2008.

Arguing that he would help put a Democrat in the White House was actually used as a primary excuse to justify supporting Lieberman for many Democrats, both voters and elected officials. Once the primary in 2006 was over, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton supported Ned Lamont in the general, which makes one wonder if there's something personal in Lieberman's decision to stab his party in the back.

Of course, we've been heading in this direction for a couple of years now, so we're not exactly in "nobody could have predicted..." territory. Lieberman also co-wrote the war with Iran bill (ya know, "Kyl-Lieberman") that Clinton's been catching so much hell over, he's gone over to the dark side on torture, and most tellingly, endorsed Republican Susan Collins in her upcoming re-election battle in Maine, a prime pickup opportunity for his now former party, and has even raised money for her (partly because she supported his re-election over Ned Lamont and Alan Schlessinger).

I would like to point out, in the interest of gloating accountability, one of my scribblings from 6 months ago:

The transformation of Joe Lieberman from (D-CT) to (R-Military Industrial Complex) is fully underway, and far more advanced than most are willing to acknowledge. He's no longer any more Democrat than Republican, and he's fully admitting to that. It's not a campaign slogan, people.
...
But make no mistake, people: by the time Campaign '08 gets into full swing, Lieberman will be working for the bad guys.

I also predicted that Joe Lieberman will be the keynote speaker at the 2008 Republican National Convention. That may well happen, but it's becoming increasingly likely, if McCain wins, anyway, that he may be making that speech as the VP candidate on the GOP ticket.

culture and politics, a poll

Check out this poll from Zogby and the Norman Lear Center on politics and culture, examining how liberals, conservatives, and "moderates" enjoy TV, the news, movies, music, and video games.

What surprised me most: "Fox, the home of anti-authority satires like The Simpsons, Family Guy and MADtv, draws daily more than three times as many conservatives as liberals." There is such a thing as a liberal who doesn't like the Simpsons? I'd never thought of FOX as particularly ideological, though I do associate it with a certain "trashiness," I guess from the days when it tended to delve further into the risque than other networks.

Nevertheless, rather than "anti-authority satire" being the turn-off for liberals and turn-on for conservatives (since when were "support the troops!" police-state conservatives anti-authority?), I would imagine it's the rest of their programming, nearly half of which consists of reality TV (I counted eight, including COPS and "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?"), that turns off liberals.

What I would really like to know: have we always been this culturally divided? Was it always the case that conservatives and liberals didn't listen to the same music, didn't see the same movies, and didn't watch the same TV (or even the same news, for God's sake!)? Combined with the fact that conservatives are now taking their kids out of public schools, is our society starting to pillarize?

like fishing in an oil spill

The DLC, quite honestly, baffles me. I understand the allure of "centrism," and I get their tactic of tacking right to capture the center (though considering what Americans actually say their views are in polls, I think it's delusional), and I certainly understand that they feel like they're losing the battle for the soul of the Democratic party (if only that were so!). But I think they're stuck in an earlier time. If there was ever a time when the values of the majority of the electorate tracked closer to the Republicans than the Democrats, this ain't it. In fact, judging from the pluralities of most opinion polls, the American people currently oppose the GOP on virtually every issue. It makes no sense, in light of these facts, to emulate the Republicans.

Of course, then again, the head of the DLC, Harold Ford, is a Democrat who did exactly that in a state where the people actually are pretty conservative, and what happened? People chose the actual conservative over the GOP-lite candidate, which is why he's heading the DLC as his day job instead of representing the people of Tennessee in the US Senate. Go figure.

But here's where I'm really stumped. If you're the head of the DLC, which supposedly embraces a blue-dog Democratic ideology to appeal to the middle, why would you go bash Democrats for being too extremist? I mean, if you don't want people to think your party's full of loony leftists, why go on TV and call them a bunch of loony leftists? And more to the point, why would you do it on FOX News? Surely Ford isn't so ill-informed that he never saw the poll that showed that 88% of FOX News viewers voted for George W. Bush in 2004, right? Does Harold Ford, the head of an organization committed to electing Democrats, not know that FOX News viewers vote more reliably Republican than gun owners, white Evangelical Christians, self-identified conservatives, and supporters of the Iraq War? Who does he think he's convincing here? Why not just have the RNC send an email to its supporters about this?