My little politics blog

Elizabeth has stepped back a bit from yesterday's statement that she has more confidence in Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama on the issue of health care, saying instead that she and John Edwards could be best effective at this point as "honest brokers" on issues they care about, rather than endorsing any candidate.

She also denied that a reported conversation with Barack Obama turned them off from his candidacy, but did acknowledge some differences: "And where there are differences, we talked about those differences and why I believed John's was right."

But there was one personnel decision that Weaver didn't control. McCain named Davis the campaign's CEO, or chief money-raiser; rather than cast Davis out, McCain offered him a consolation prize. His Solomonic decision backfired: Weaver and Davis's animosity proved too deep, and the McCain campaign soon reverted to tribalism. One problem was that Davis still wasn't content to be a mere fund-raiser. As Weaver and Nelson worked from the top-down Bush playbook, Davis pushed for a radically decentralized campaign, with regional offices around the country--going so far, at one point, as to line up space in Beverly Hills and Manhattan before Weaver and Nelson quashed the idea. But the bigger problem was that the factionalism created a situation in which the people raising the money (who reported to Davis) didn't communicate with the people spending it (who reported to Weaver), and the campaign soon faced a cash crunch, as inputs didn't keep pace with outputs. "Whoever heard of setting up a system where the strategic and political arms are so separate from the finance arm that they don't know how much money they're raising and can't be told?" asks one Republican strategist. "And that's the system McCain set up, because he didn't want anyone to get their feelings hurt."

Finally, last July, McCain installed Davis as campaign manager. Even then, McCain didn't totally break from his passive management style by taking the logical step of firing Weaver and Nelson. Instead, he left it to them to resign.

Now that Davis is in charge, he's taken his old decentralized strategy--the one Weaver and Nelson killed--off the shelf. As The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder first reported, the campaign will feature ten different regional offices that will be run as ten different campaigns. The offices will be helmed by regional managers who will have enormous autonomy--including the power to hire and fire and build their own field programs.

[...]

Black rightly describes the plan as unprecedented. And it is the extent of its ambition that has provoked grumbling from some McCainiacs, who view the plan as being less about winning the election and more about Davis trying to prove, once and for all, that he's not just a rainmaker--but a master strategist. According to these dissenters, the plan has the cash-strapped campaign footing the bill for nuts-and-bolts functions--like get-out-the-vote operations--that traditionally are the party's province. Some of these critics think Davis's plan is so crazy that it's actually a feint and a bit of misdirection. Others fear that it's all too real--and reflective of a campaign lacking strategic smarts. "The political pros were removed from the campaign and replaced with lobbyists," complains a former McCain aide who left the campaign last summer. "You don't have political pros there. I realize our craft ranks right down there with bail bondsmen and mattress salesmen, but I think we're still slightly above lobbyists."

Laments one prominent McCain supporter: "I think the campaign would be well-served if they had more of them involved. But I wonder if the organization could withstand the personality differences and the insecurities that would come along with that on both sides. The only way it would happen is if McCain brought them together and forced them to work together and took control of it, and that's not necessarily his management style." After all, the hardest thing about being a father figure is having to choose among your children.

Cheney Plays The Jeremiah Wright Card
By Greg Sargent - April 10, 2008, 5:51PM
Dick Cheney, in an interview today, fiddles with his deck of cards and fingers the one with the big "W" on it:

Quote:

"I've watched what's going on on the Democratic side with great interest, and sort of blowing hot and cold in terms of who is going to win -- whether it is going to be Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama,'' Cheney noted in a telephone interview with conservative talk show host, Sean Hannity, today.
"I thought the controversy over Rev. Wright was remarkable," Cheney said. "I thought some of the things he said were absolutely appalling. And, you know, I haven't gotten into the business of trying to judge how Sen. Obama dealt with it, or didn't deal with it, but I really, I think -- like most Americans -- I was stunned at what the Reverend was preaching in his church and then putting up on his website.'"

He was shocked, SHOCKED! I bet it even shocked his conscience.

Their manner of courtship -- one wooing, the other arm-twisting -- seemed to reflect the candidates' different personalities and campaign styles.

Obama preferred the soft sell, calling Richardson every three days or so -- "dialing the phone himself, no operator" -- for long discussions about policy and campaign issues. The two developed a bantering relationship, building on the camaraderie they shared off-camera during debates, when they would roll their eyes at some of their rivals' sillier statements.

Clinton was more persistent and tactical. There were eight or more phone calls a day, Richardson said: "Bill calling. Hillary calling, friends of mine that were in the Clinton administration, Clinton operatives, Clinton Hispanic operatives, New Mexico Clinton Hispanic operatives."

Some callers -- who suggested Richardson had an obligation to back Clinton -- did more harm than good. "I think the Clintons have a feeling of entitlement . . . that the presidency was theirs," Richardson said, and the persistent lobbying from "Washington establishment types" convinced him of a need for some fresher faces inside the Beltway.

He began admiring Obama back when they were rivals, and the sentiment grew the more they talked about foreign affairs, the environment and other issues. "I saw real growth in the guy," Richardson said, "a tremendous growth in policy and expression and experience."

Clinton was more persistent and tactical. There were eight or more phone calls a day, Richardson said: "Bill calling. Hillary calling, friends of mine that were in the Clinton administration, Clinton operatives, Clinton Hispanic operatives, New Mexico Clinton Hispanic operatives."

Some callers -- who suggested Richardson had an obligation to back Clinton -- did more harm than good.

Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008
Two Speeches on Race
By Garry Wills
Of the two speeches discussed here, Senator Barack Obama's speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, is available at www.barackobama.com and Abraham Lincoln's at the Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, is available at showcase.netins.net.

Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an author and historian, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction[1] for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.

Wills is an adjunct professor of history, both American and cultural, at Northwestern University. He graduated from Campion High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951, entered and then left the Jesuit order, and received his PhD in classics from Yale in 1961. William F. Buckley, Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. In 1995 Wills received a L.H.D. from Bates College. He received an honorary doctorate from the College of the Holy Cross.

In 1998, he won the National Medal for the Humanities. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His book Nixon Agonistes landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.

John Leonard said in The New York Times that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[1]

[Tom] Cole is a year into his term as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group charged with managing the party's simultaneous campaigns for 435 seats in Congress, and this role has made him responsible for rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up, and for mounting a defense of the political map. All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.

Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party's representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend. [..]

In 2006, the Democrats won so many elections in what was traditionally Republican territory that Cole, as his party's chief Congressional recruiter, now finds himself in the unlikely position of flying into what used to be considered safe conservative districts and trying to goad Republican businessmen and state senators into running for Congress. His progress, he told me, has been mixed. He mentioned a black Republican prosecutor from Indiana named Curtis Hill, from a district that the party lost in 2006. Cole said he thought the seat was a more natural fit for his party than for the Democrats, and he wanted badly to convince Hill to run. Hill happened to be a founding-fathers buff, and so Cole flew him to Washington to meet with the White House political team and be briefed on how he could win, to look out at the monuments from his window seat and imagine himself as part of history. "Very intoxicating," Hill told me afterward. But he was not convinced. Cole then flew out to Indiana to press Hill to run, telling him that the Democratic congressman, Joe Donnelly, could be depicted as a tool of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and out of touch with the values of the district. Hill thought about it hard. But he had five kids at home, and he also didn't quite buy Cole's description of Donnelly, whom Hill considered "a relatively conservative Democrat. I don't think he's done anything in his record that's irritated anyone." Hill turned the offer down.

His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. Worse still, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently discovered, during an internal audit, accounting fraud so extensive that it had to call in the F.B.I., which is now investigating embezzlement by the committee's former treasurer. Many conservative activists have become so dissatisfied with the party's heresies, particularly on immigration and government spending, that as Cole's staff took over, the committee's fund-raising pleas were being ignored and, on at least one occasion, returned in an envelope stuffed with feces.

Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. "This isn't an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that," he told me in January. "But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that."

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich's insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. "The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992," he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: "I believe there's a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts."

In 2008, when the key Congressional battlegrounds are mostly not in the Northeast but in places like Albuquerque, Huntsville, Ala., and Canton, Ohio, the question is slightly different: Can Democratic candidates retain and expand their advantage in historically conservative parts of the country that have not been accustomed to voting for them?

For operatives like Cole, focused on expanding the party's appeal, the conservative movement had become too demanding: its aggressive rhetoric on some social issues alienated young voters, its swagger on immigration hardened Hispanic voters against Republicans and its emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy made it difficult for the party to appeal to populist voters. [..] "If there are Republicans out there who think that 2006 was a year that could be changed by a few votes in a few districts, they need to wake up," Mehlman told me. "It was a rejection."

Cole says that his task is to help the Republicans move from something that looks roughly like Bush's party to something that looks mostly like John McCain's. The places where Cole must hold the Republican line are largely moderate districts, where the president's conservatism is a divisive thing and where McCain's maverick reputation might permit the party to pull the trick of running against Washington even while controlling the White House. "I don't need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours," Cole said. "I need him to be Gerald Ford."

Throughout the winter, Cole watched the presidential primaries with apprehension. The problem was the gap in intensity between the party's bases; in many states twice as many Democrats were turning out to vote as Republicans. Last month, Obama's campaign passed around a memo listing six states won by Bush in 2004 where Obama's votes in the primary beat the votes of the top two Republicans combined: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota and South Carolina. The map looked as if it were beginning to cave in on itself.

But surprisingly, the ground began to shift after the March 4 primaries, and with it Cole's disposition. [T]he Republicans had a nominee, [..] and the Democrats did not. "Who would've thought two months ago that we'd essentially be over by Super Tuesday, and the Democrats would be in the middle of a death fight between Clinton and Obama?" Cole told me earlier this month.

Cole has been giving that race a lot of thought. "I happen to think Hillary Clinton is a stronger candidate in the end," he told me. "You couldn't raise money against Obama right away like you could with Clinton, that's true, and so maybe by the time you were able to raise money it wouldn't matter. But he's ideologically well to the left of Hillary Clinton, for all his rhetorical gifts, and I also think he's got a national-security deficit. I think she's a plausible commander in chief, and I don't think he is. [T]hose two areas are where we would fight the election, and with McCain, I think we contrast with him very well."

at a moment when Boehner was trying to rebuild the party's reputation on small-government principles (Boehner told me that the matter of the Republican abuse of earmarks, in which congressmen secure funds for favored projects in their districts, is "the most poignant" reason voters rejected Republicans), Cole was openly skeptical of this approach. "Earmarks are not the reason that we lost the election," Cole told me. "I can't find a single seat we lost because of them."

That the presumed neophyte Obama has stood toe-to-toe with the Clintons (for all of Hillary Clinton's complaints about being "ganged up on," Obama has had to face both Clintons every day), has beaten them more often than not, and still might prevail is in itself remarkable. Everybody has got a ten-point plan on everything. You go to Senator Clinton's Web site, my Web site, they look identical.... The problem is not the lack of proposals. The question is, who can bring Democrats, independents, and Republicans into a working majority to bring about change. That's what we're doing in this campaign. This is what a working majority looks like. That's how we're going to move the country forward. That's what I offer that she can't do.Therefore, he's trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the "old bulls," according to a campaign aide, "will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change." Thus, Obama talks about working "from the bottom up" to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it's not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he's building.