Who Listens to Political Blogs?

Why blog?

That's the first thing that came to mind yesterday upon reading John Sides and Eric Lawrence at the Los Angeles Times, "Who Listens to Blogging Heads?":

Daily Kos. Little Green Footballs. Talking Points Memo. Instapundit. Firedoglake. Captain's Quarters. These are among the thousands of political blogs that are increasingly a factor in U.S. politics. Bloggers and their readers are courted by politicians, as occurred when seven Democratic presidential candidates appeared at the August 2007 convention organized by the readers and posters at Daily Kos, a liberal political blog. Bloggers can also shape the news surrounding election campaigns. It was Huffington Post, a liberal political blog, that first reported Barack Obama's comment about small-town Americans clinging to "guns and religion"....

How might political blogs and their readers affect the presidential campaign?

They will not change many voters' minds because the vast majority of their readers are already members of the choir and hold strong opinions about politics. Sodon't expect political blogs to make Democrats vote for John McCain or Republicans embrace Barack Obama. If political blogs change opinions, they will more likely do so indirectly -- by uncovering new information that is then amplified and discussed in media that reach a broader, and less partisan, cross section of the public.

Read the whole thing, as well the additional discussion at The Monky Cage.

A good rebuttal to Sides and Lawrence is at Flopping Aces, "Political Blogs and Influence: Just How Important Are We?"

This tendency to see a minimal influence of blogs is not new.

Last weekend we saw a really interesting exchange of blog posts on the question of "Do Blogs Suck?" The catalyst for the debate was David Appell's total dismissal of political blogging, with special reference to Matthew Yglesias:

Over the last six months or so I have been getting very frustrated with the blogosphere, and I find myself reading less and less of it. There just isn't much meat out there. Amateur bloggers just seem to spread useless gossip. And what's especially bad, "professional bloggers" seem so intent on posting 20 times a day that all of their individual posts are basically useless, conveying nothing whatsoever...

Read the whole post for more, although I'd hazard that Appell's take is extremely narrow.

I'd argue there's more "meat out there" than ever, although one might differ on what kind of meat we're talking about. Blogs and blogging essays rarely rise to the level of hard political research. I see the blogosphere mostly as a world-wide op-ed page in which everyone can contribute.

And all of this is new and growing. Perhaps only a small number of blog posts have a great impact on political debate, but the fact that the political system is deeply sensitive to what's happening across the blogosphere is perhaps a more telling indicator than survey statistics on reader preferences.

As for myself, I'm just having fun, and if I find myself having an impact, then that adds to the thrill of it all. This morning my post on Barack Obama's New Yorker controversy got picked up at RealClearPolitics, which is probably the most important aggregator of political commentary on the web:

BEST OF THE BLOGS - MONDAY

The Truth About ACORN - Betsy Newmark, Cross Tabs
Schumer Owes the Public an Apology - Erick Erickson, Redstate
Are Political Blogs Important? - Mata Harley, Flopping Aces
Obama and 9/11 - Byron York, The Corner
Downplaying Their Differences - Steve Benen, Crooks and Liars
The Elite-Radical Fist Bump from Heaven - Donald Douglas, American Power
KS-Sen: Roberts Gets Worried - Jonathan Singer, MyDD
Jindal and Teaching Creationism in Public Schools - Ron Chusid, Liberal Values
When Memes Collide - Nate, FiveThirtyEight
Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan: A Friendly Critique - Juan Cole, Informed Comment

So, while individual bloggers might not have the same impact as book authors or scientists, blogging certainly invigorates the marketplace of ideas, and folks can have a lot of fun in the meantime!

Obama's Terrorist Cover Story Controversy

I wrote last night on New Yorker's cover satire of Barack and Michelle Obama outfitted as terrorist radicals, "The Elite-Radical Fist Bump from Heaven."

It turns out James Joyner's taken the pulse of the left blogosphere this morning, with his entry, "New Yorker Obama Terrorist Cover."

The liberal blogs are in a tizzy about the cover of the July 21 New Yorker, an illustration by Barry Blitt which shows the Obamas in terrorist outfits, doing a fist bump with a big portrait of Osama bin Laden over their mantle with an American flag burning in the fireplace...

Joyner charts the shifting reactions, from moderate amusement to outright indignation, although, frankly, the reaction among some seems more than a "tizzy." The folks at Daily Kos (there are literally dozens of diaries on this) are looking to retaliate against the New Yorker, and this comment really captures a sense of the outrage on the radical left:

This is an encouragement of every dark, racist, ignorant, and violent impulse that Obama's candidacy has inspired in the hearts of a presumably small number of Americans. Blitt and the New Yorker better pray every day that no act of violence is directed at Obama in this campaign. If it is, they will be culpable.

Where's the cover of Rice or Colin Powell as slaves, or of Lieberman and Haddasah as Hasidic JDL terrorists, or McCain as a Nazi flyer fire-bombing innocent Vietnamese children? Those actually have an element of truth to them. This does not.

The reference to "Blitt" is to Barry Blitt, the cover artist for the New Yorker.

But notice the intense right wing demonization in this comment: Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are "slaves"? Joseph Lieberman and his wife are "JDL terrorists"? And John McCain's a "Nazi fire-bomber"?

I just briefly culled through the comments at Kos last night, and the one cited above is from "Long Tom," who's apparently a regular Kos diarist. One will no doubt find additional outrage in the various entries (at Kos and elsewhere), perhaps including some outright calls for violence against David Remnick or the Republicans.

In that case, would the folks at the Huffington Post demand a Secret Service investigation?

Stay tuned ... things are just getting warmed up, and there's still more than four months of campaigning left!

Related: See Protein Wisdom for a little of what's going on among conservative bloggers.

Lieberman Charts Tricky Path to New Partisan Identity

In a recent essay, I asked, "Do you think [Joseph] Lieberman will have to retire from politics at the end of his current term, since on social policy he may not have a home in the GOP?"

The New York Times, in its profile of Joseph Lieberman this morning, comes closest to providing an answer:

Joseph I. Lieberman, lapsed Democrat of Connecticut, strolled into the weekly lunch of the Senate Democrats last Tuesday, unaccompanied by a food taster.

He greeted his colleagues, including some who felt he should not have been there. He ate his lunch (salad, eschewing the mac and cheese) and sat through a discussion about gasoline prices and Medicare.

Then the conversation veered into the danger zone, the presidential election — specifically, Senator John McCain’s recent votes, or nonvotes, on energy policy.

At which point Mr. Lieberman walked out.

“I just didn’t feel it was appropriate for me to be there,” Mr. Lieberman explained the next day.

“It was the right thing to do,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, who said that a colleague approached him afterward to complain about Mr. Lieberman’s showing up. “This is a delicate situation,” Mr. Durbin summed up.

It has grown increasingly so for Mr. Lieberman, once his party’s vice-presidential candidate and now a self-styled “independent Democrat.” He has zigzagged the country on behalf of Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and, in recent weeks, amplified his criticism of Senator Barack Obama to a point that has infuriated many of his Democratic colleagues.

At least two have asked Mr. Lieberman to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, two colleagues said, and at least three have advised Mr. Lieberman against speaking at the Republican convention, a prospect he has said he would entertain.

Clearly, Mr. Lieberman’s already precarious marriage with the Democrats has reached a new level of discord and could be approaching divorce, if not necessarily a remarriage into the Republican Party. The strain has been rooted largely in Mr. Lieberman’s steadfast support for the Bush administration’s engagement in Iraq and his hawkish views on Iran. He has not ruled out switching parties but has stopped short of saying he has moved so far from the Democratic Party — or, in his view, the other way around — that he is at a point of no return.

“I don’t have any line that I have in my mind,” Mr. Lieberman said in an interview. “If it happened, I’d know it when I saw it.”

Actually, Lieberman has indicated previously that the Democratic Party's been hijacked by the hardline netroots contingents, especially on national security.

In earlier interviews, he's also dismissed suggestions that he'll always be a Democrat.

My own sense is that Lieberman is just slowly walking away from the party, watching the political trends to see how things turn out.

He's promised not to mount his own "Zell Miller moment" at the Republican National Convention, but the content of his message to the GOP is less important than the symbolism of his defection to the other side. He'll never be forgiven by Democratic Party activists, nor by some of his colleagues in Congress.

My advice to Lieberman is to step up his game. He needs to work even harder for John McCain's victory in November. I see Lieberman with a top cabinet post in a McCain administration, such as Secretary of Defense or State.

If McCain loses, the defeat will signal the sundown moment of Joseph Lieberman's life in politics. I simply do not see him finding a long-term place in either party, with the intense political polarization that is no de rigeur in American politics.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Netroots Ninnies Out of Touch With Reality

Kristen Powers notes that radical netroots activists are badly out of touch with reality on the top problems facing the country:

ASK passers-by on any street in America what their top issue is for the upcoming presidential election, and they'll all answer the same thing: the Foreign Service Intelligence Act.

Gas prices, home foreclosures, the Iraq war - all pale in comparison. Single mothers gathered at the laundromat are all talking about one thing: FISA.

And if you get them to stop yammering on about immunity for telecoms, you won't be able to shut them up about their next favorite outrage: Barack Obama's decision to opt out of public financing.

Don't believe it? Then - unlike many left-wing bloggers and activists, known as the "net roots" - you're in touch with reality.

One top liberal blogger opined last week that Obama's drop in a recent Newsweek poll resulted from his vote for a compromise on FISA, the intelligence surveillance law.

Ridiculous: The average American voter can't describe what FISA is.

Meanwhile, a virtual mutiny is taking place on Obama's campaign Web site, which is swamped with angry complaints that Obama has sold out his "base."

Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.

Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they're a loud anomaly in a party that's wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.

And every poll in existence confirms that what the folks in the party's actual base care about is the economy and the Iraq war.

It's high gas prices, not electronic snooping, that have most Americans on edge.

Powers is absolutely right about the core issues of concern to rank and file Americans, although the question of whether or not the netroots constitutes the party's "base" is an analytical and empirical one.

Certainly, in terms of real voting Americans, in cities and towns across the country, the notion of being part of the "netroots" is completely alien or logically preposterous for workaday Democrats.

Yet, officials in the Democratic Party treat the radical online hordes as a significant factor in their electoral coalitions.

If Markos Moulitsas, and others, like Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald, are not genuinely a part to the Democratic Party base, it's incumbent on leaders in the party establishment to formally renounce them for what they are: Online bullies intent to move the country to the far left of the spectrum, drastically out of the mainstream.

I don't think the Democrats will do so, and although Barack Obama continues to throw his far left-wing liabilities under the bus, he's not gone far enough in giving folks like the Kos-kiddes the boot.

The Elite-Radical Fist Bump from Heaven

It's deliciously tasteless, which is the oxymoron that came to me upon seeing the New Yorker's July 21st cover image of Barack and Michelle Obama:

The cover's certainly going to draw fire over the next couple of days, from folks on the same side of the spectrum to which the magazine calls home.

An added bonus is the New Yorker's new feature story, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama," an expose of Obama's politically successful assimilation to the Windy City's leftist political machine.

The piece discusses Obama's run for the State Senate, begining in early 1995, and includes this passage on Obama's campaign associations:

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn ... held an event for Obama. Forty years ago, Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weathermen, the militant antiwar group that bombed the Pentagon and the United States Capitol. By the time Obama met Ayers, the former radical and onetime fugitive had been accepted into polite Chicago society and had been reborn as an education expert, eventually working as an informal adviser to Mayor Daley. (Those ties remain intact in the jumbled culture of Chicago politics. When Obama’s association with Ayers first became a campaign issue, Daley, whose father, in 1968, sent his police force into the streets to combat Ayers’s fellow-radicals, issued a statement praising Ayers as “a valued member of the Chicago community.”)

Here's a bit more discussion, further down in the piece, addressing Obama political style once in office:

Obama began writing a regular column—“Springfield Report”—for the Hyde Park Herald. In the first one, on February 19, 1997, he wrote, “Last year, President Clinton signed a bill that, for the first time in 60 years, eliminates the federal guarantee of support for poor families and their children.” The column was earnest and wonky. It betrayed no hint of liberal piety about the new law, but emphasized that there weren’t enough entry-level jobs in Chicago to absorb all the welfare recipients who would soon be leaving the system.

In effect, while President Clinton and the national Democratic Party were drifting to the right, State Senator Obama pushed in the opposite direction. The new welfare law was one of the first issues that Obama faced as a legislator. “I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare,” he said, choosing his words with care during debate on the Illinois Senate floor. “Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems.

Well, so much for Obama's New Democrat orientation (recall the speech on the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where Obama called for more personal responsibility in the black community)!

Note this section as well, on Obama's optimal machine-style legislative gerrymandering:

One day in the spring of 2001 ... Obama walked into the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, a shabby nineteen-fifties government workspace for state officials next to the regal state capitol. He went upstairs to a room that Democrats in Springfield called “the inner sanctum.” Only about ten Democratic staffers had access; entry required an elaborate ritual—fingerprint scanners and codes punched into a keypad. The room was large, and unremarkable except for an enormous printer and an array of computers with big double monitors. On the screens that spring day were detailed maps of Chicago, and Obama and a Democratic consultant named John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district. Corrigan was the Democrat in charge of drawing all Chicago districts, and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in the campaign against [Congressman Bobby] Rush.

Obama’s former district had been drawn by Republicans after the 1990 census. But, after 2000, Illinois Democrats won the right to redistrict the state. Partisan redistricting remains common in American politics, and, while it outrages a losing party, it has so far survived every legal challenge. In the new century, mapping technology has become so precise and the available demographic data so rich that politicians are able to choose the kinds of voter they want to represent, right down to individual homes.

Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated....

In the end, Obama’s North Side fund-raising base and his South Side political base were united in one district. He now represented Hyde Park operators like Lois Friedberg-Dobry as well as Gold Coast doyennes like Bettylu Saltzman, and his old South Side street operative Al Kindle as well as his future consultant David Axelrod. In an article in the Hyde Park Herald about how “partisan” and “undemocratic” Illinois redistricting had become, Obama was asked for his views. As usual, he was candid. “There is a conflict of interest built into the process,” he said. “Incumbents drawing their own maps will inevitably try to advantage themselves.”

That's an incredibly revealing passage: The concluding sentence is the perfect summation of what I was thinking upon reading these paragraphs: Obama's a classic inner-city pol, an old-school party boss who shamelessly used the perks of the Cook County system to work his way up to power.

What's even more interesting, though less noticeable, is that Obama's new "Hide Park, South Side" ward is essentially America's most unusually postmodern neighborhood.

As Andrew Ferguson wrote recently, in his penetrating essay, "Mr. Obama's Neighborhood":

When Barack Obama was briefly embarrassed earlier this year by his association with the onetime bomb-builder and wannabe bomb-exploder William Ayers, he blamed his neighborhood, sort of. "He's a guy who lives in my neighborhood," Obama said with a shrug, as if to say, "Don't we all have to put up with these cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard?" But of course not every neighborhood has a former Weatherman and his wife, former Weathermoll Bernardine Dohrn, living in it, especially not as twin pillars of the community. Obama's casual dismissal led people all across America, people who live in all kinds of communities without bombers, to look at each other and say: "Wow, what kind of neighborhood does Barack live in?"

Yes, what kind of neighborhood?

Well, as we can see, it's a neighborhood that Obama's utilized perfectly for his political rise. He employed his local party machine connections to tailor a redistricting plan that captured former '60s-era revolutionaries in residence, as well as one of the country's most prestigious college campuses, the University of Chicago, an institution flowing with postmodern intellectualism and home-grown political activism, a "Berkeley with snow."

We might describe such a neighborhood environment as, well, elitist and radical. Elite radicalism perfectly captures the essence of Barack Obama, a man at once comfortable calling white working class voters "bitter" (a notion weighted with Marxist implications), while at the same time one who was indoctrinated to Chicago's black liberationist religious power movement for nearly twenty years.

If Barack Obama's elected in November, we'll see the accession of a machine-style party boss to the Oval Office, one who'll assemble a Democratic administration steeped in a community mobilization and organization tradition, and one prone to capture by some of the most implacable left-wing interest groups ever in American history.

In any case, that cover drawing really is the "elite-radical fist bump from heaven"!

**********

Neocon Express hits the nail on the head, preempting left-wing dismissal or outrage:

With the Reverend Wright, William Ayers, Luis Farrakhan, Khaleed Rashidi and the long list of radicals, tyrants, terrorist-sympathizers and loony-toons supporting Obama ... This image simply hits too close to home. If that were not the case, than the image would be immediately recognized by all as satire. It's not. Which says everything.

Be sure to check out Glenn Reynolds' round up of reactions to both the cover art and the "Making It" article.

See also, "'Scare Tactic' — Obama Slams Muslim Portrayal," and "Yikes! Controversial New Yorker Cover Shows Muslim, Flag-Burning, Osama-Loving, Fist-Bumping Obama."

Moral Difference: Identity Theft or Illegal Immigration?

Well, as we've been debating moral differences here at American Power, what do folks think about this editorial from the New York Times, on illegal immigration?

Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.

The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.

Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.

What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them....

No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored.

I have highlighted the relevant sentence.

For the New York Times, there's a benignity to the lawlessness of aliens who come to the United States, who are breaking various federal statutes to do so, and then who are exploited by unscrupulous employers shaving massive overheads costs with their under-the-table employment practices?

It looks to me that the Times is using this example as a chance, once again, to take pot-shots at the administration. If the Justice Department's at fault, it's for allowing illegal alien employment markets to get this out of hand in the first place.

See also, Christopher Jencks, no bloodthirsty neocon, and his balanced essay, "The Immigration Charade," where he argues that Americans will not truly be serious about immigration reform until there's a crackdown on the demand side.

See also the Camayd-Freixas paper, "Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in U.S. History: A Personal Account."

Human Rights for Animals?

This story at the New York Times, on the push for human rights for non-humans, captures the essence of Europe's postmodern ideological drift:

If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister?

Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the Guantánamo detainee who claims he personally beheaded the reporter Daniel Pearl — deserve the rights he denied Mr. Pearl? Which ones? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions? Habeas corpus?

Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.

What’s intriguing about the committee’s action is that it juxtaposes two sliding scales that are normally not allowed to slide against each other: how much kinship humans feel for which animals, and just which “human rights” each human deserves.

Read the whole thing.

The article notes that while apes would not be according the full range of normally accepted rights and liberties, "their status would be akin to that of children."

Question for Readers: How do you feel about this? Is it appropriate for a chimp to have commensurate rights under the law to that of a child in kindergarten?

I have long considered it a moral responsibility to treat animals humanely. But as animals do not have the capacity for human reason (and hence, objective truth), I do not consider them as entitled to equal protection under the laws to that of people.

To the extent this become a bigger poltiical issue in the Western democracies, the question of animal rights will demonstrate increasingly how matters of social justice have become extremely perverted in postmodern ideology, at the expense of the improvement of human life for the great bulk of humankind around the world today.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Cynthia McKinney is Green Party Candidate

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has been picked as the Green Party presidential nominee for the 2008 election.

Tammy Bruce captures the signifcance of McKinney's entry into the race:

What can I say? Perspective does wonders.

McKinney running for president as Green candidate:

(CNN) -- The liberal environmentalist Green Party nominated former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney as its presidential candidate Saturday...McKinney, 53, held off three rivals to win the party's nomination during its convention in Chicago, Illinois. She picked journalist and activist Rosa Clemente as her running mate....

Just so we're all in agreement, the system is so bad, it's also not serving the lunatic fringe well. So let's get all excited at the prospect of a party that's even crazier than the Dem and Repubs put together, with a nominee who should be running for a psychiatrist's office, not for president.

All humor aside, I've seen a number of newly-alienated Barack Obama supporters mention that they're considering backing McKinney's Green Party bid.

See "Obama's Far Left-Wing Backlash" for more.

Democratic Voter Surge Offset by Personality Issues

The Pew Research organization has new findings on voter engagement this year, and the survey predicts a substantial surge in voter turnout for the general election. Voter enthusiasm is higher among Democrats, but Barack Obama may have diffulties in unifying the Democratic Party, as a number of Hillary Clinton supporters have yet to flock to the Obama banner:

Two unprecedented findings from the new survey support a potential Democratic turnout advantage. For the first time in Center polls conducted since 1992, a greater proportion of Democrats than Republicans are expressing strong interest in the campaign. Nearly eight-in-ten Democratic voters (77%) say they are giving a lot of thought to the election, up 18 points since June 2004. Republican engagement also has increased over this period (from 61% to 72%), but for the first time somewhat fewer GOP voters than Democrats say they are giving a lot of thought to the election.

An even larger gap is seen between the percentages of voters in each party saying they are now more interested in politics than they were during the previous campaign. About seven-in-ten Democratic voters (71%) report they are more interested in politics than they were four years ago, compared with barely half of Republican voters (51%). As with other measures of political engagement, in the past there were no partisan differences or Republicans held the advantage.

A second factor which may also contribute to a Democratic turnout advantage is that supporters of the Republican candidate, uncharacteristically, are less strongly committed to their choice than are supporters of the Democratic candidate. Overall, Obama leads McCain in the presidential horserace by 48% to 40%. Most voters who say they support Obama -- 28% among the 48% -- say they support him strongly. By contrast, only about a third of McCain's backers say they support him strongly (14% of the 40%)....

A positive note for the Republicans is that McCain is now winning the support of 79% of those who supported his former Republican rivals. By contrast, just 69% of former Clinton supporters say they now back Obama. The putative Democratic candidate is attracting more Clinton supporters than earlier in the campaign (59% in May). However, as many as three-in-ten former Clinton supporters now say they will vote for McCain (17%), vote for someone else (2%) or are undecided (12%).

The overall trends are toward the Obama campaign, but in the battle for politically independent swing voters, McCain has an edge among older voters, who historically have averaged twice the rate of turnout than younger cohorts. If voter enthusiasm is fairly constant against all demographics, McCain may come out ahead in the battle for the centrist vote.

The Los Angeles Times reports that McCain and Obama appear attractive to voters looking for pragmatic solutions rather partisan red meat. Although the Times overrates the extent that Barack Obama has moved to the middle, the analysis does substantiate the notion of a battle for the great middle of the electorate.

Much of what may happen this year, then, depends on how well the candidates mount their respective campaigns, not just on policy (as Obama will try to match McCain on centrist appeal), but on personality. It's going to be very hard for Obama to beat McCain on issues of patriotism and service to country, and the matter of defining the candidates may very well decide the race.

Daily Kos and the "False Narrative" of Surge Success

As best as I can tell, this new post at Daily Kos, "Countering the Pro-McCain Media Myth of the Surge," represents just the latest example of hard left-wing denial on Iraq:

The Republican narrative about the current situation in Iraq is that "the Surge has worked." The Surge, we are told, provided the security conditions which have resulted in decreased violence, a move toward relative normalcy for Iraqis, and -- ironically -- a chance for Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi parliament to reject US demands for a sustained occupational force in Iraq.

We are told that the very fact that Maliki is able to demand a timetable, and to reject US demands for among other things, contractor immunity and free military reign in Iraq, is an indication of just how successful General Petraeus and President Bush's "surge" strategy has worked. The very strategy Senator McCain had urged all along. This shows that McCain is wiser than Obama, even if it does have the ironic effect of benefiting Obama in the election.

Nothing about the above narrative is correct...

Notice that last, sweeping dismissal of any American military efficacy in explaining the transformation of the war: "Nothing about this is correct..."

Say what?

I noted sometime back a half-dozen or so revisions among leftists as to why Iraq's supposedly been a failure:

It's clear now that things are going so well in Iraq, that the antiwar left has gotten increasingly creative in its arguments for retreat, in furtherance of the movement's endless project of souring public opinion on the deployment.

Amazingly, the "Bush-lied, people died" slur is still going strong among the surrender hawks, never mind that we're long past that leg of the debate, notwithstanding the New York Times' editorial efforts.

We've also had for the past 18-months the left's self-embarassment in attacking the surge as a failure. More recently, the "crushing" costs of the war became a big draw among surrender mavens, although that meme had hardly any shelf life at all (being easily dispatched, for example, here).

Then, of course, the antiwar meme of relentless sectarian violence, which is hypothesized to forever doom progress toward political reconciliation, has been a handy antiwar slur on the left.

I'm sure we could come up with even more of the war-bashing arguments, for example, the angry recriminations against the Freidman Units, the "genocide," "100 years in Iraq," and who know what else the nihilists have been able to come up with. We've had more attacks on the war than Bush's hated "mutiliple justifications" for the deployment!

Well, now it turns out that the left's big antiwar smear is the permanent-bases, "neo-imperial" project slur, which is debunked by Abe Greenwald at Commentary...

We're still seeing variations of most of these, since the meme that the war's been a "disaster" is so entrenched that war opponents can pull out just about any old slur against the administration, and still get a hearing among those who have no clue as to what's really been happening.

Read the entire Kos post, if you wish, but the gist there is that whatever sectarian cooperation we've seen has emerged completely indigenously, among various Muslim factions in Iraq, facilitated by the good office of the Iranian regime, no less!

Further, the Americans are alleged to have had absolutely nothing to do with Prime Minister Maliki's victory over the renegade Mahdi Army earlier this year.

To the extent that the author acknowledges success on the ground - or any political liabilities for Barack Obama - it's to suggest the futility of attempting to rebut the purported "major media narrative" on the course of the war over the last 18-months (spun, naturally, by the Republican corporate media-masters, and their BushCo allies).

Yes, I guess that explains why Barack Obama has refused to meet John McCain for a nationally-televised town hall meeting at the largest active-duty military complex in the nation, in Fort Hood, Texas.

I'm not sure why these folks fight it any longer: "McCain's Won the Iraq Argument."

At this point I'll simply defer to genuine experts on Iraq to rebut the Kos talking points that "nothing about this narrative is correct."

For example, see Bill Ardolino, "Why the Violence Has Declined in Iraq," at Long War Journal, Peter Feaver, "Anatomy of the Surge," from Commentary, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, "Iraq's Jihad Myths.

See also, Greyhawk, at Mudville Gazette, on the tactical and strategic origins to military succes in Iraq: "Genesis, Parts I and II" (here and here).

Obama's Far Left-Wing Backlash

I've commented a couple of times now on the netroots outrage that's erupted in the wake of Barack Obama's FISA vote for telecom immunity. I seriously doubt that "progressive" contingents would consider abandoning the Illinois Senator for some throwaway vote alternative, or God-forbid, the GOP standard-bearer.

It nevertheless does look like there's some real alienation among young voting idealists, who're now shocked - shocked! - that Obama would tack to the center after wrapping up the nomination. Today's New York Times even has a big story on this, "Obama Supporters on Far Left Cry Foul":

Joe McCraw, 27, a video engineer from San Carlos, Calif., who writes three liberal blogs, said Mr. Obama’s shift on the domestic spying measure was a watershed moment.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen him lie to us, and it makes me feel disappointed,” Mr. McCraw said. “I thought he was going to stand up there, stand by his campaign promises like he said he would, and it turns out he’s another politician.”

Many Obama supporters said the most vocal complaining about various policy positions was largely relegated to liberal bloggers and people who might otherwise support Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, or Dennis J. Kucinich, the liberal Ohio congressman who dropped out of the presidential race earlier this year.

“I think it’s accentuated by the fact that Obama’s appeal is an appeal to idealism,” said Kari Chisholm, who runs a blog, blueoregon.com, and does Internet strategy for Democratic candidates. “They believe their ideology is the only idealism and Obama’s is very mainstream. I’m not surprised they’re getting a little cranky. They’ve always been kind of cranky. A mainstream Democrat has always been too mainstream for them.”

This raises some interesting puzzles:

First, while it's certainly true that far left-wing activists are idealistic, what explains their own sense they are the "mainstream," and hence their resistance to terms like "radical" or "leftist," the types of people the Times is discussing? For example, Markos Moulitsas has long claimed his netroots hordes represent today's political center, which I've characterized as megalomania on a number of occasions. The mainstream press doesn't really see these folks that way.

Things get even more complicated if we consider figures like Senator Joseph Lieberman, who very likely will be driven from the Democratic Party because of the hardline antiwar forces among the party base (he's likely a special case of one who's paid a genuine price for extremist antiwar anger).

Still, it's fun to see the hard-lefties squirm when the press identifies them as "hard left," for example, Digby:

The NY Times has published a story proving that the only Democrats who give a damn about wireless surveillance, or anything else of substance for that matter, are a bunch of crazed, leftwing freaks...

Hey, her words, not mine, but I can dig it, Digby!

(Added bonus: Outrage at Comments From Left Field!).

Second, though, is the deeper, essential issue: Is Obama himself really the "mainstream"?

This is where Obama's political skills have really come in handy!

As we have learned throughout the year, the Illinois Senator attended Trinity Lutheran Church for roughly 20 years, absorbing a black liberation theology that has been identified as a gospel of revolution; he has known ties to ex-revolutionary fugitives William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, activists today who still denounce the United States and stomp on the American flag; he has a personal religious pedigree that raises startling questions about his sectarian fidelity to the nation's Anglo-Protestant heritage; his family ties have deep and troubling foundations in doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist activism and ideology; he espouses a form of patriotism that places him firmly in the minority demographics of public opinion; he's got a record of public policy that's been identified as the most left-wing of any of his contemporaries in government; and he's been beating the drums for an unconditional surrender in Iraq louder than most mainstream political leaders, with the exception of also-rans like Kucinich and Ron Paul, all the while trying to backtrack from his own antiwar retreatism.

But hey, some in the Democratic Party must think this is mainstream!

If Barack Obama wins the presidency the United States will have elected a genuine far-left candidate, which raises another puzzle: Is socialism coming to America?

Maybe those lefties aren't so extremist after all!!

Photo Credit: New York Times

Irish Eyes Look Past Guinness

The Irish love their dark, dry Guinness stout.

But it seems the luck of the Irish has shifted on this classic beverage, as Guinness sales have declined in Ireland, and some pub drinkers are even ordering up a "'Boodweiser' from the barman," the Los Angeles Times reports:

The problem is, Irish traditions are something many Irish simply no longer have time for.

In Dublin, working and commuting now take up much of the time once spent stopping at the pub for a pint after work. And as the Celtic Tiger begins, like everyone else, to feel the effects of the global credit crunch, with home prices declining and unemployment rising, it doesn't help that a pint of Guinness costs $7.20.

"I've got a hundred-mile round-trip commute every day. So you're out of the house for 12, 14 hours a day, and by the time you do get home, all you're fit for is a couple of hours of TV, maybe dinner, and go to bed. It would never, ever cross my mind to go for a pint on the way home," said Cormac Billings, a 33-year-old investment banker who works in Dublin's city center but lives in the suburbs.

"Maybe six, seven times a year, you might meet up with your mates for a few pints, but it's always a hassle to organize," he said. "People are busy. They're married, they're having kids."

Ireland is still the second-biggest beer-drinking market in the world, after the Czech Republic. But beer consumption has declined 15% since 2001. Rural pubs were closing last year at the rate of more than one a day, victims of high taxes, increasing supermarket sales and a nationwide smoking ban that went into effect in 2004.

Add to that an explosion in demand for wine and high-end coffee here, and Guinness now sells more beer in Nigeria -- "there's a drop of greatness in every man," the ads for the extra-robust, 7.5% alcohol foreign extra stout tell Nigeria's receptive males -- than it does on the Emerald Isle.

The company in May announced a $1-billion modernization program that will close two of its most venerable breweries and eliminate more than half its brewery staff, while transferring most Guinness export production, including beer bound for the U.S., to a large, new state-of-the-art brewery in the Dublin suburbs.

Production at Guinness' 249-year-old flagship brewery at St. James's Gate in central Dublin will be shrunk by a third, to focus almost exclusively on beer sold in Ireland and Britain -- for those whose Guinness tastes are so refined they wouldn't accept beer brewed anywhere else. The facility, Ireland's biggest tourist attraction, will get a major face-lift.

"We listened to our consumers, and we listened to ourselves. And something like St. James's Gate is really, really important to people," said Brian Duffy, chairman of the Irish branch of Diageo, the multinational company that owns Guinness and also distributes Tanqueray gin, Smirnoff vodka and Cuervo tequila.

"Not just in terms of its connection with the beer and the connection with the family, but with Ireland. It is almost regarded as part of our heritage."

Pub owners say they still sell more Guinness than anything else, but as Ireland has joined the European Union and become a new center for banking and manufacturing, they face a clientele with more choices and broader interests.

This is interesting.

We're seeing the globalization of refreshments - for example, with the recent controversy stateside over Budweiser's proposed sale to Belgian brewing company InBev. I wonder if what's happening with Guinness is just another indicator of the homogenization of cultures.

Maybe we better call Barack Obama?

Barack Obama's Candidacy: Wake Up America?

My dear blogging friend, Jan, at Vinegar and Honey, forwarded a powerful essay on Barack Obama, by the Reverend Lainie Dowell:

People of every race and hue are finding out daily that Obama is not the promised Messiah his campaign and mesmerized followers have tried to make him out to be. They may point to his charismatic speechifying, magnetic draw of the masses, made-over wife, and overflowing coffers, but, along the way, he is leaving a wide trail of indecision behind him among so many citizens who seek to know what is up ahead for them, as they move closer to the November 2008 general election.

We must keep in mind the seriousness of this political process and how, lest we forget, it must not be viewed as merely some hypothetical game or a test of wills of opponents and their surrogates, as some may suppose. This all-important right is a matter of life and death for too many people; and, therefore, it is imperative that it continues to be guarded against becoming flawed in any way by anyone. It demands from Americans that they choose the very best defender of our constitutional rights and that it is, of necessity, incumbent upon them to find that person to be trustworthy, willing, and competent to keep this sovereign nation strong, free, and proud.

Read the whole thing.

See also, Reverend Lainie Dowell, "America: Hijacked in Plain Sight."

Toward Energy Independence

My good blogging friend, Chris, from Panhandle Perspectives, has been honored with a published essay on energy independence at the homepage of U.S. Senator John Cornyn, "Toward Energy Independence":

The battlefield is one of ideas and it is the equivalent of war. It will require an effort similar to what it took to put a man on the moon. We can overcome our dependence on foreign sources of oil. We can become energy independent if we allow the American spirit of entrepreneurship, innovation and industry to work without the burden of unnecessary government regulation or intervention.

The role of government is to insure that a balance is struck between the competing needs of energy, environmental health and the well-being of its people. It should provide stimulus for the entrepreneurial spirit that has made this nation great. It should create opportunity for new ideas to blossom in an atmosphere of encouragement in the face of uncertainty. It should not penalize those who have paved the way and benefitted from their years of hard work and risk-taking.

We must attack the war for Energy Independence on multiple fronts. Those fronts are 1) expanded safe production of existing known resources, 2) good stewardship of those resources through conservation and efficient use and 3) innovation through the development of new technologies and the implementation of those technologies in a practical manner.

We must develop infrastructure to meet the needs of new and developing technologies while remaining ever vigilant to the possible need to change course when those technologies result in unintended consequences. Without the means to distribute new energy sources to the end-user in an efficient manner, our efforts will be in vain.

Our national security is at stake in the war for Energy Independence. Our purchases of oil from countries that consider us their enemy only increase our vulnerability to their whims. Our inability to control our energy destiny places our economy at risk to blackmail from those countries that control the source of our needs. We must cut the strings that bind us to foreign energy sources or we have only ourselves to blame if they choose to strangle us with those very strings.

Read the whole thing at Senator Cornyn's page.

Senator Cornyn's leading the push for energy independence in Congress. He was quoted in the New York Times on Wednesday, speaking about the need for new domestic drilling initiatives:

“When I was in Texas this last week, this is the No. 1 issue on people’s minds,” Senator John Cornyn said. “When people fill up their trucks or S.U.V.’s in Texas and pay over $100 to fill up their vehicle, it gets their attention, and they are looking to Congress to frankly get out of the way and allow America to develop more of its own natural resources as we take other measures to conserve energy and become more efficient.”

Be sure to visit Panhandle Perspectives for more commentary and analysis. Chris has been a great influence on my development. We are in communication involving matters of faith and goodness, and I thank him for his readership and support.

Tony Snow, 1955-2008

Tony Snow, the former White House press spokesman, has died. He was just 53 years old, and a good man. May he rest peacefully. The New York Times obituary is here.

The news is still breaking across the web, but I'll update with some sample reactions from around the blogosphere.

Sister Toldjah says:

He was the best.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his family. RIP, Tony, and God bless you.

But the commenters at Think Progress are already hard at work demonizing Snow and the evil BushCo:

IF ONLY, it would happen to boooosh and F**K YOU DICK. Only more painful and worse.

I can't imagine the left-wing reaction could get worse than what we saw after the death of Jesse Helms, but who knows.

See also, Fox News, "Tony Snow, Former White House Press Secretary and FOX News Anchor, Dies at 53."

Photo Credit: New York Times

**********

UPDATE: Captain Ed offers the nicest remembrance of Tony Snow:

At the 2004 Republican convention, when I had been blogging for less than a year, I was introduced to Tony almost accidentally. I was shocked when he knew my blog, and maybe even more shocked at how he treated me — as a colleague, an equal in an arena where most of us bloggers felt like Cindarella among ten thousand stepsisters.

He wanted to interview me for his radio show, but he couldn’t work me in. Instead, we chatted off the air for a while, and he impressed me as a man who absolutely loved his work. His joy and his good humor shined through every word, as it did when he worked at the White House, and appeared on television and radio. Viewers and listeners got the authentic Tony Snow; he didn’t build a false persona for public consumption.

When Tony told the world about his illness and took a leave of absence, I sent him an e-mail wishing him well. I was only a little surprised to get a note back from him on his return, thanking me and complimenting me on my work. By that time, I knew what kind of man Tony Snow was...

See also, the wonderful memorial at Gayle's blog.

UPDATE II: The left's campaign of hate is building, for example, in the comments at the Carpetbagger Report. Even those who try to be respectful just get pulled down into the evil of the left's secular demonology.

See also the celebration at Daily Kos, "Tony Snow MORE IMPORTANT than Dead Soldiers":

When a bad guy dies, we should rejoice, not sing his praises of wish him anything by scorn.

UPDATE III: Patterico lays down the line on disrespectful comments at his blog:

Anyone who says anything bad about him in this thread is banned and the comment will be deleted. Anyone who says anything bad about him today anywhere on this blog will be banned and the comment will be deleted. It’s not the time or place.

That's classy.

UPDATE IV: See also Goat's Barnyard, "The Difference in the Leftosphere and the Rightosphere," and Protein Wisdom, "How Some in the Reality-Based Community of Compassion and Caring Honor the Death of Tony Snow."

Obama Polling Bump Collapses in New Survey

Captain Ed's got an interesting essay on the latest results from Newsweek's presidential polling, which finds Barack Obama statistically tied with GOP nominee John McCain (at 44 percent to 41 percent):

Last month, Newsweek’s poll surprised many by showing a huge gap between Barack Obama and John McCain, with the Democratic nominee-apparent enjoying a 15-point lead over the Republican. One month later, Obama has lost all of the momentum and has dropped into a virtual tie with McCain. The latest Newsweek poll shows Obama up 44-41, within the margin of error:

A month after emerging victorious from the bruising Democratic nominating contest, some of Barack Obama’s glow may be fading. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Illinois senator leads Republican nominee John McCain by just 3 percentage points, 44 percent to 41 percent. The statistical dead heat is a marked change from last month’s NEWSWEEK Poll, where Obama led McCain by 15 points, 51 percent to 36 percent.

Obama’s rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. Having vanquished Hillary Clinton in early June, Obama quickly went about repositioning himself for a general-election audience–an unpleasant task for any nominee emerging from the pander-heavy primary contests and particularly for a candidate who’d slogged through a vigorous primary challenge in most every contest from January until June. Obama’s reversal on FISA legislation, his support of faith-based initiatives and his decision to opt out of the campaign public-financing system left him open to charges he was a flip-flopper. In the new poll, 53 percent of voters (and 50 percent of former Hillary Clinton supporters) believe that Obama has changed his position on key issues in order to gain political advantage.

More seriously, some Obama supporters worry that the spectacle of their candidate eagerly embracing his old rival, Hillary Clinton, and traveling the country courting big donors at lavish fund-raisers, may have done lasting damage to his image as an arbiter of a new kind of politics. This is a major concern since Obama’s outsider credentials, have, in the past, played a large part in his appeal to moderate, swing voters.

See the post for additional analysis, especially Newsweek's sampling record as an extreme outlier.

What interests me is the reaction among the netroots base of the Democratic Party. As I noted yesterday, the far-left hordes will turn up their noses at Obama's alleged FISA capitulation, but they'll ultimately be lining up behind the Illinois Senator faster than you can say "regime change."

Far-left blogger Mike Stark, who earned a notorious netroots reputation by stalking Bill O'Reilly at his home, argued today that Obama still deserved "progressive" support after the hard-left's congressional defeat on domestic surveillance:

From the moment George W. Bush took office and ripped this country to the right, Democrats in Congress ran after him like abandoned puppies afraid of being left alone in a dark house. They gave him extreme tax cuts for the wealthy, backed his rush to war, enacted draconian bankruptcy reform legislation and stood by meekly (or actively helped) as he trampled civil liberties and the Bill of Rights.

The Democratic establishment should have learned that we need a Democratic Party that will draw clear distinctions between itself and the Republicans, but it has not. Political cynicism on the left is growing, and with good reason. We won both houses of Congress back in 2006, but we've seen almost nothing change. Most recently, a bipartisan coalition -- which included Barack Obama -- voted to subvert justice by granting the telecom special interests retroactive immunity for lawlessly spying on Americans. (It's worth noting that the capitulating House Democrats received over twice the telecom campaign contributions that their constitutional stalwart colleagues did.) ....

As I write, there are early reports that Obama's June fundraising totals were disappointing. (There is no official confirmation yet.) The Obama campaign is denying a Wall Street Journal report about this, but the Washington Post also reports that his Internet fundraising is off. Much has been made of the small-donor base Obama cultivated so assiduously. Could it be that a drought of progressive enthusiasm based on his FISA flip stunted his crop last month?

Actually, the main reason Obama's fundraising has dried up is that he's having a hard time winning over former Hillary Clinton supporters precisely as his "movement" groupies have maxed themselves out (in fact, 115 deep-pocket Clinton donors made big contributions to John McCain after Obama wrapped-up the nomination, and the intra-party divisions remain deep and lasting).

As Larry Johnson puts it:

What do you do after you have tapped out your own true believers? Who is left? I count at least four categories of potential donors–Hillary supporters, those who wanted other democrats besides Hillary and Obama, uncommitted independents, and disaffected Republicans. It stands to reason then that Obama must reach out to these folks. He needs to make nice. So what is he doing?

Not too good. He fell far short of his fundraising goals for the second quarter. He’s down according to some sources by more than 70%. So who is responsible for this brewing debacle? Hillary of course. Obama and his posse are blaming Hillary for his fundraising woes and–surprise, surprise–scapegoating Hillary for his own failings. The man is a putz.

Obama may be a putz, but the fact is the bloom is off the rose of his post-nomination boost in the polls.

Zogby's now reporting that McCain leads Obama in Florida, and Gallup also saw a tightening this week in the national surveys.

Obama's residual radicalism and his ties to the far-left nihilist base will be his biggest liabilities going forward. Obama needs to tack to the center, of course, but the more he renounces his past positions across a range of traditionally left-wing policies, the more vulnerable he'll become as a run-of-the-mill machine politician eager to pander to the largest voting constituency of the moment.

Photo Credit: "St. Barack of Chicago."