Every Democrat in the United States should know precisely whom we're running against this year. In my opinion, it's really not John McCain and the GOP. It's Karl Rove's and Ari Fleischer's current boss, "Sheldon Adelson III," the wealthiest gambling entrepreneur in the U.S., and the person Forbe's Magazine has listed as the third richest man in America. It is Adelson's deep pockets that are behind Freedom's Watch, the 501(c)4 organization that's pouring upwards of $250 million into issues media in support of Republican congressional candidates and John McCain's candidacy this year. NOTE: the influence of 501(c)4's over our election results this year will probably be as big as, or bigger than, 527 influence on the outcome of our 2000 and 2004 elections--with one major difference: contributions to 501(c)4's have little or no regulatory requirements as far as public disclosure is concerned!

There's an amazing piece about Adelson in the latest edition (June 30th, 2008 edition) of the New Yorker, "The Brass Ring. A multibillionaire's relentless quest for global influence," by Connie Bruck. It's a must read for all progressives serious about victory in November, too.

Bleeding Heartland has been sparring with some Iowa Republican bloggers about the appropriate policy responses to the recent catastrophic flooding (see this post and this follow-up).

Here are some things I have learned.

Convening a special legislative session to address Iowa's flood relief, clean-up and reconstruction needs would be an example of Democrats "politicizing the floods." State officials should wait to see what the federal government does before taking those steps.

But this does not imply that Iowans should "sit on their heinies and wait for the feds to come in and fix everything." We are better than that:

Iowans can fix most things ourselves. It's just a matter of who is going to pay for it all after the fact. This isn't like New Orleans, where (I heard some relief worker on the radio the other day say that) out-of-state volunteers had to wake up residents at 10 a.m. so that the volunteers could get inside the houses where the residents then sat around and watched the volunteers work.

When the legislature does convene, it would be wrong for the state of Iowa to borrow money to invest in reconstruction.

Instead, we should cut fat out of the budget, such as excessive spending on education.

Also, we should cut corporate income taxes to discourage flood-damaged businesses from moving to new communities or out of state.

Any questions?

P.S.--The real lessons I learned were:

1. Conservatives love to trot out their fake fiscal responsibility. In this case, Iowa bloggers make a big deal out of needing to live within our means and not pass on debt to our children and grandchildren. But their response to the floods amounts to, "Let the (deeply-indebted, huge-deficit-running) federal government pay for as much as possible."

2. Republicans will offer corporate tax cuts as a solution to any problem.

3. When the going gets tough, count on right-wing talk radio to make people feel better by reinforcing their racist stereotypes.

I know I'm not the first one to point this out, but I just returned to Daily Kos today for the first time in a long time (and for the last time in a while, that place is still poison) to find some serious cognitive dissonance.  And I know it's not the only place in the blogosphere to suffer from it.

On the one hand, there is a deep and I think sincere belief among most internet progressives in the power Obama campaign's message of unity, post-partisanship, and improved political discourse.  And on the other, some of the prominent people in blogosphere engage in some pretty ugly attacks against political opponents (usually Republicans, but even conservative-to-moderate Democrats).

I actually think the Obama presidency might bring on an blogospheric existential crisis.

If there's one page every Democratic blogger should read this year--perhaps many times over until they have it memorized by heart--it is THIS OVERVIEW!

Please consider this diary a direct request from me--BEGGING YOU--to read this. Know your enemy!

If there's one group that is the focal point of all things evil that Dems are fighting this year, it is Freedom's Watch.

In the wake of hearing from our good friend, Congressman Dan Boren (D-Okla), we have interesting news from The Hill this morning:

At least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Sen. John McCain for president, and more than a dozen others declined to answer whether they back the Arizona senator.

Just wait- it gets better.

I've been meaning to revisit the post I wrote last week entitled "Condescending to Voters, Playing to Perceived Racial Fears Does Not Work" in which I tried to dispel the notion that Republican tactics of trying to make the special congressional elections in Louisiana and Mississippi earlier this month about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright worked, or would work going forward. As I wrote then:

Just because an election is held in a conservative part of the South does not mean that voters think about race like Jim Clark did in 1965 or Orval Faubus did in 1957 or Strom Thurmond did in 1948. Voters do not like being treated like they are racists by anyone, particularly by a party to whom they have given their support in recent elections.

This sentiment came from a couple of places. First, the numbers out of both LA-06 and MS-01 did not bear out the theory that an attempt to appeal to perceived racial fears was successful. In fact, the numbers suggested just the opposite: Voters cared much more about real issues than they did about Obama's former pastor. Moreover, recent political history suggests that while not all White Southerners would call themselves progressive, they are not regressive on the issue of race, either.

Ethan Bronner highlighted this well in his very interesting and informative tome on the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, "Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America." Overall, the book is a great read and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in judicial nomination process or the Supreme Court more broadly (I blazed through it in just a few days in December).

To the point of this post, Bronner writes that one of the keys to the defeat of the Bork nomination was the successful effort to get Southern Democrats in the Senate to vote against Ronald Reagan's choice to replace Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court. In the end, the Bork nomination failed on a 58 to 42 vote, with just two Democrats -- Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and David Boren of Okahoma -- voting for Bork. A total of 16 Southern or border-state Democrats (18 if you count West Virginia) voted against Bork, including conservatives like John Stennis of Mississippi and Richard Shelby of Alabama (who switched his party affiliation to the GOP following the 1994 elections).

One of the key reasons why Southern Democrats voted against Bork rather than for him, as many had expected them to do, was polling showing that Southern White voters did not want to reopen the race battles of the 1950s and 1960s by overturning key civil rights rulings, that they did not want to be portrayed as racist as a result of rehashing these old wounds. Here's the relevant excerpt from the 2007 edition of the book (pp. 259-61), starting with Bronner quoting Pat Caddell, pollster and campaign adviser for Joe Biden, who was running for President and chairing the hearings on Bork as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"When I saw the data, I said, 'We're going to beat the shit out of this guy,'" Caddell remembered. "To see the reaction of white southerners afraid to go back on civil rights was overwhelming. I am a white southerner and I felt this stuff, but I had never seen it so dramatically demonstrated."

Caddell had his assistant, Michael Donilon--younger brother of Tom Donilon, Biden's campaign adviser--write up their conclusions from the poll. in a memo dated September 9 Donilon wrote that the conventional wisdom regarding white southern support for Bork was "just plain wrong." He said the incorrect assumption was based on three misconceptions: firstly, that Bork already enjoyed great support in the South; secondly that white southerners had dramatically different views regarding the Supreme Court from the rest of the country; and thirdly, that as southern whites learned more about Bork, they would become more supportive of his nomination. On the last point, Donilon wrote: "In fact, the potential for the development of intense opposition to Bork is perhaps greater in the South than in any other region.

"The reason for this is threefold: Bork poses the risk of reopening race-relation battles which have been fought and put to rest; Bork flouts the southern tradition of populism; and ... Bork poses a challenge to a very strong pro-privacy sentiment among southern voters."

[...]

The data were striking. Of white southerners polled, 62 percent said they were less inclined to support Bork upon hearing that "he has strongly criticized most of the landmark decisions protecting civil rights and individual liberties." Moreover, 68 percent of white southerners said they were less inclined to support Bork upon hearing that the NAACP opposed him. The same percentage was also less inclined to support him because Bork opposed "a decision striking down a poll tax requirement for voting." Bork's 1963 opposition to the public accommodations law pushed to 77 the percentage of southern whites less inclined to support him. The numbers were similar when constitutional privacy and pro-big business questions were asked.

[...]

Bork's opponents had so successfully framed the issue, had so effectively "turned back the clock" for the debate that the natural wellspring of Bork support--white southerners--was dry. Southerners perceived the nomination as racially divisive and so a threat to their peace and prosperity. No matter what racial resentment many southern whites still harbored, they recoiled at the prospect of reviving tghe period of intense racial tension.

Tom Griscom, White House communications director during the Bork battle, explained why the opposition was so effective in the South, lamenting: "They resurrected the sixties because they knew our people would react back. That's where we got into trouble. There are so many people from the part of the country I'm from--the South--who don't like being tagged racists. We've worn that tag for too long as far as I'm concerned. We don't want to reopen those wounds. We don't want to live that again. We've passed that. please don't make us go through it again. The sensitivity is, more among whites in the South than anywhere else."

Just as Southern Whites 20 years ago -- including conservatives and (especially) moderates -- did not want to come off as racists as a result of a replaying of the civil rights battles of two decades prior, White voters in the South today -- and voters across the country, for that matter -- don't want to be treated as racists by elite Beltway consultants telling their clients to make the 2008 campaign about Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers and other related issues. As I said last week, these tactics undertaken by Republicans and Republican-allied groups were miserable failures, with the Democrats winning in some of the most conservative, GOP-leaning districts in the country, and they're bound to fail in the future as well. America is a better place than that and American voters deserve better.

Here are a dozen, guaranteed, money back reasons why John McCain won't be the next president. (I can only offer a limited-time, money-back guarantee, since unfortunately I can't control world events.)

1. The McBush factor. McCain's support of the Iraq War will make it impossible for him to break from Bush, the most unpopular president in living memory. The photo of McCain hugging and being kissed by Bush will become increasingly embedded in the collective consciousness of the American people as the months roll on.

2. The Republican factor. Yes, McCain is a Republican. He will not be able to deny this fact. Currently, this is not the best party to have behind you in a push to the White House. Witness the recent loss of three traditionally Republican congressional seats and the declining number of Americans willing to identify themselves as Republicans. And then there are the comments of Congressman Tom Davis. "The political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate and is far more toxic than it was in 2006" (NY Times, May 15th, 2008).

3. The Last War Syndrome. McCain and the operatives running his campaign are like generals fighting the last war. They are still convinced that negative advertising will be as successful against Obama as it was against Kerry. However, "The Times They are A-Changin." And this leads to the next factor.

4. The Change Factor: Hillary tried experience, but this race is about change and the future. McCain appears to be operating a time machine that has only a reverse gear.

5. The Money Factor: Obama can raise a lot more, and a lot more quickly.....enough said.

6. The Age Factor: McCain's age will hurt him. (I am not claiming that this is fair, but seems to be a fact. Older voters are especially concerned about McCain's age.)

7. The Not So Straight-talk Factor: McCain has built his reputation on being a man of principle. This has two features: he believes in something and he sticks with what he believes in. McCain has recently begun to backpedal on principles and commitments. He is vulnerable to being viewed as a flip-flopper, if not dishonest, which will undermine his hitherto greatest strength.

8. The Organizational Factor: The evidence thus far suggests that Obama has a far better campaign organization. There will be a volunteer gap, that is, Obama will have a lot more of them and they will be more enthusiastic than McCain's campaign workers.

9. The Skeleton Factor: The Keating Five and lobbyists, need I say more.

10. The Anger Problem: It's real.

11. The Crass and Crude Comment Problem: A corollary to the anger problem. He has made outrageous, crude, sometimes vile remarks, and most Americans don't know about them, yet. For examples, see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/8/1 7456/91972/887/492360

12. And last, but not least, The Lack of Background in Economics Factor. McCain has acknowledged that he needs to read up on economics. Not great for building confidence in a candidate in the midst of a recession.

Okay, that's twelve. But let's make it a baker's dozen.

13. The "My Friends" Factor. I don't believe that Americans will be prepared to live with four or eight years of being addressed by John McCain as, "My Friends," especially when it is followed by that rather strange little grin.

http://msa4.wordpress.com/

This morning I indulged in some schadenfreude surfing the opeds in places like the WSJ,letters to the editor at the WSJ, analysis in the NYT, WAPO etc, rantings on Redstate, etc. The Republicans are starting to come apart at the seams and the most amusing thing about the whole process is that they don't get it. I suppose this is what happens when a political party starts to implode. The blame game being played out is totally surreal. Basically most of conservative opeds blame the three successive Republican disasters in districts that have been gerrymandered for year to make them uber safe for conservatives on the fact that Republicans are not being conservative enough. According to the WSJ it has nothing to do with Bush, the Iraq war, the massive income shifts, the gradual collapse of a market based approach to healthcare and all the other right wing doctrinaire positions dear to their hearts. No it's all because the Republican minority in congress is married to earmarks and hasn't been obstructive enough. Perhaps the biggest laugh in the Journal is Karl Rove pontificating about a state of affairs of which he is personally one of the prime architects. No I take that back. Some of the letters from die hard Republicans which they always publish in large numbers contradicting each other, complaining about the drift to the center, are even more hilarious. On the net their counterparts at Redstate are even more extreme: attacking Boner and the leadership, ranting about socialist policies from Republican appeasers, demanding the start of a new war. Amazing stuff.