Maybe I should devote a new category just to Charlie Crist. This guy cannot be doing very well with his own base at this point. The former arch conservative is taking yet another high profile issue and governing like a moderate Democrat. He reversed the decade long trend of trying to disenfranchise blacks and the poor, restoring my own brother’s voting rights in the process. A week ago, he hosted a two day summit on climate change, saying that the state is compelled to take dramatic action to address it, then signing a bunch of executive orders forcing a bunch of groups to reduce green house gas emissions. He’s working with the Democrats in the legislature to try to overcome majority Republican objections to laws that would really tackle this issue. Unlike the voting rights for felons issue, I can see how this issue might help him politically with general election audiences, but it could make him a pariah among the people whose votes and money he may need in a primary three years from now.

Either this guy has undergone a serious change of heart on some major issues over the last few years or he has some serious, clever long term political strategy in mind.

Many of the nation’s top political analysts and writers have chosen this week to write the obituary for John McCain’s presidential aspirations. Charlie Cook, one of the country’s best non-partisan political analysts (though I’m more of a Stu Rothenberg guy) has written in regard to McCain’s candidacy that “The physicians have left the hospital room and it’s the executors of the estate that are taking over.” That may be a bit premature, but it would take an amazing comeback for McCain to truly be viable again. Time Magazine makes an attempt to explain what went wrong. They fail, but they do list a lot of facts that point to why McCain is unlikely to make the necessary comeback.

John McCain is certainly not the moderate that the demographics behind his support would indicate. By U.S. political standards, he may be a maverick, but all of that perception is about style, not substance. By any comprehensive examination of McCain’s record, he’s one of the most conservative candidates to ever have a legitimate shot at being president. The conservative activist base of the Republican Party isn’t just leery of him, though; they dislike him. People on the center and even the left end of the electoral spectrum who would hate the world created by a McCain presidency like him anyway. Why? It’s all about personal style. McCain has never been afraid to to thumb his nose at the party line. His classic Goldwater conservatism has often left him at odds with the religious right. He’s affable, self-deprecating, and he’s been willing to poke fun at the insufferably self-righteous elements of his party.

In 2000, McCain used a slightly unconventional twist on a conventional campaign tactic: run as the outsider maverick. It’s been done a million times, but rarely have the tactic and the candidate been so well suited to each other. McCain already had a reputation as a maverick. Naming his campaign bus “the straight talk express”, cavorting with the press, and shooting from the hip all played into that well. McCain was the kind of candidate whose handlers were more likely to try to explain and mitigate his statements than plan them for him. He was the kind of candidate who naturally appealed to New Hampshire voters. His opposition to ethanol gave him a built in excuse if he didn’t perform well in Iowa.

McCain took a very different tack this time around. He was the crown prince in a party that always ends up nominating the crown prince. The conventional wisdom is that he had to run as the establishment candidate. In order to do that, he needed to shore up the party base. It’s logical, it’s what any other crown prince would have done and it’s been a disaster for McCain. The reasons for that are pretty obvious and have been discussed by a lot of other commentators. He had to run a campaign that was completely at odds with his own character. He sucked up to the now rotting corpse of Jerry Falwell. He flip flopped on ethanol. He generally stopped just speaking his mind about the nutjobs in his party. In interviews with friendly media outlets, most notably a couple of chats with John Stewart, you could see McCain chafe at his self-imposed straight jacket. In the first of those two Daily Show appearances, he all but admitted to Stewart that he was sucking up to people he couldn’t stand because he wanted to be president.

He could have been president and here’s what he needed to do to achieve it: He just needed to get the GOP nomination even if it was a squeaker. He didn’t need the enthusiastic support of the base. He would draw enough votes from the center to more than make up for whatever right wing activists that choose to stay home on general elelction day. He needed, from the beginning, to be himself and run a campaign that was focused on the general election. The religious conservative activists were never going to wholeheartedly support him. All he needed to do was keep them from activley opposing him. Rather than uncomfortably sucking up to them, he just needed to restrain himself from antagonizing them. I’m sure he could have picked up the support of a few prominent members of that wing of the party through a combination of emphasizing where they do have common ground and appealing to their self interest. Give them the chance to become important members of his administration.

Two of the defining failures of McCain’s campaign have been his stalwart support of the war and his support for the immigration reform bill. I’m sure that some of his support for the war was genuine at first, but I think it was mostly a tactic. Looking and acting like a tough guy and supporting a war that only the die hards of the Republican base support was supposed to give him some traction with them and remind him of his war hero past. Once having gone down that path, McCain seems to have felt like he could not afford to abandon it. I’m equally sure that there was some genuine belief in his decision to support immigration reform. I think there was a lot of tactical consideration here. I think this was supposed to help remind the moderate voters out there of his past reputation and make him look like a statesman. If I had been advising the McCain campaign from a strictly tactical perspective, I’d have told him to go in the opposite direction. The general public isn’t passionate about this immigration reform bill. The far right are extremely passionate in their opposition to it. If he were going to pander to them on one of these issues, this was the one to choose. The right’s support of the war is persistent, but crumbling and not very passionate. The rest of the country’s opposition and/or exhaustion with this war is strongly and deeply felt. His support for it alienates them. It would have continued to hurt him in the general election.

McCain, of course, didn’t do any of that. The only way for him to have stayed viable given the disastrous tactical moves made by his campaign was to become a fundraising juggernaut and then to effectively use that money. The irresponsible spending by his campaign leadership has doomed him. The public may somehow think that the “Dean Scream” was the end of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, but it wasn’t. Dean’s fundraising made him look like the inevitable nominee prior to the Iowa caucuses. A weak finish there certainly would have hurt him no matter what. The real problem, though, was that Joe Trippi didn’t know how to manage the campaign’s finances. Dean spent a ton of money in Iowa and didn’t get anything for it. His vote totals proved that his fundraising advantage didn’t matter because he couldn’t use the money effectively. The fact that he had no real war chest left after Iowa doomed him. He couldn’t afford to mount the campaign he needed to mount to recover from Iowa. Even if he could have afforded it, there’s nothing to indicate that his campaign could have used the money effectively. McCain is now in that boat. His campaign looks mortally wounded. They can’t afford to mount the campaign they need to fix that. Even if they could afford it, there’s no indication they know how to spend the money effectively enough to succeed.

Can anyone out there defend capitalism in this context?

The FTC has ruled against maintaining net neutrality. ISPs will now be able to charge for priority access. For those of us who run independent blogs, websites, or internet based or enhanced businesses, we can now expect our readers, viewers, and customers to have to wait and endure slow access to our sites while those some readers, viewers, and customers, will have zippy access to corporate customers who are willing to pay money to the big ISPs. This is the likely outcome. A possible outcome is that ISPs may choose to just block any website that won’t pony up the fee. So much for “information wants to be free”.

The FTC made this ruling in spite of pretty massive popular outcry against it. The FTC has advised congress against legislating to the contrary under the current Bush doctrine of requiring a demonstrated and documented “market failure” before putting any regulations into effect.

Southern conservatives are racists. The leaders of the movement are straight up, almost unrepetent segregation loving white supremacists. The rank and file vary. You may already know or believe that.

What you don’t know or don’t believe is this: they’re smarter than you.

Southern conservatives have twice had to learn a hard, but incredibly useful lesson about winning, holidng, and using power to support their racist goals. The first time was in the civil war. A lot of leading southern politicans opposed secession. Many, because they saw it as a sure loser rather than on any loyalty to the U.S. State nationalism was alive and well in most of the country. It was dominant in the south. In most states, the vote on secession was close. In some, the regional split within states produced, essentially, mini civil wars within the state. The south lost and learned that armed uprising against the federal government was a losing proposition. In the long run, it was easier to get the yankees out, disenfranchise the blacks, and reap the benefits of generally having a twenty something senator block with a relatively united ideology. The disputed election of 1876 gave southern conservatives the perfect vehicle for achieving this. They gave up the presidency for real power. The one party rule that emerged in the south after the civil war was almost a godsend. It allowed southern congressmen and senators to accrue seniority that vastly increased their already considerable power. The Democratic party’s emergence as the more liberal party, the party that drove real social change through the legislature gave southern conservatives even more power. They could easily use (and twist) the language of populism and be within the ideals that their party supposedly espoused. Southern conservatives were willing to compromise on economic and social policy with northern liberals at the cost that northern liberals would protect white supremacy in the south. It was a bargain that held sway for eighty years, giving the Democratic nominee a reliable block of electoral votes into the 1950s.

Things did really start to change in the 1950s, though. Eisenhower didn’t owe much to conservative southern Democrats. Ultimately, neither did Kennedy really, at least not compared to previous Democratic presidents. Eisenhower and the Kennedys could have given a weak and half-hearted federal response to the various Supreme Court decisions. The Kennedys in particular were vigorous in their push to end segregation and institutionalized, legally sanctioned white supremacy in the south. Consequently, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 run for the presidency is the only one since where a Democrat has carried the whole region. While this realignment was happening, Richard Nixon was a shrewd enough politician to see the writing on the wall and implemented his “Southern Strategy” to try to bring conservative southerners into the Republican party. As an increasingly liberal Democratic party marginalized the southern segregationists. Nixon welcomed them in terms they understood quite clearly without having to be the publicly direct, open racist and anti-semite that we know him to have been. In 1964, Strom Thurmond* was the first of the prominent old segregationist conservatives to switch to the Republican Party. Over the next 25 years, the trickle that started with Thurmond became a flood until the once solidly Democratic segregationist south became the solidly Republican segregationist south.

After the civil war, the southern conservatives learned that they couldn’t have actual slaves, but they could keep blacks in virtual slavery through sharecropping, segregation, and the Klan. They used a long term, calculated political plan to protect that system. After the civil rights era, they learned that they could no longer enshrine inequality into the law, but with another long term, calculated plan, they could keep white supremacy enshrined in the center of our culture. Over the last 25 years, they’ve also learned that blacks aren’t their biggest threat. They dropped out of the Klan. They changed the names of their “white citizen’s councils” to “conservative citizen’s councils”. They learned to package an agenda that pushes white supremacy in the values of our country: freedom, meritocracy, and equality. They’ve made an unholy alliance with big business, radical christians, and pretty much anyone else who thinks the country was better off the way they believe it to have been in 1880 than it is now.

That alliance has had one goal in mind for the last forty years: get control of the Supreme Court. Southern segregationists saw how their way of life could be turned upside down when the court demands equality for all. Religious nuts saw it in 1973 with Roe. Bush v. Gore was a naked power play that was designed more to permanently swing the court to the right than it was even to put Bush in power. Aware of what a dangerous thing they were doing, the decision was handed down, but specified as a one off decision that was not meant to set any precedent. For all the frustrating court decisions we’ve seen in the last five years, those of us concerned with equality and democracy may well look back on this time period as the proverbial “good ol days” before things really went to shit. We’ve already seen 50 years of precedent all but overturned on the question of racial diversity and equality in our schools. That was a judicial precedent we never really even lived up to in our society during those 50 years, but it’s gone. We’re rapidly seeing the erosion of our scant worker protections against harrassment and discrimination. Four of the five justices on our supreme court would probably be happy with the way this country was run in the 1920s. Three of those justices aren’t going anywhere. Clarence Thomas will only be 60 next year. Samuel Alito will be 57. Chief Justice John Roberts won’t even be 52 until later this year. These guys may well be on the court for the rest of my working life. At 71, Antonin Scalia is only in late middle age by supreme court standards. He could easily sit on the court another decade. If they get one more vote, you can forget damn near every good thing that has happened in our courts over the last 50 to 80 years. These guys openly espouse an ideology that would have (and did, prior to FDR’s “court packing” scandal) declared the entire New Deal and Great Society unconstitutional, that would have said the federal government has no right even to limit child labor. No matter what they say today about this or that principle, about “up or down votes’, etc., you can bet that even if we win the next three presidential elections, they won’t let us put similarly liberal people on the court as long as they’ve got 41 votes in the senate.

If you see this as nothing more than partisan cheerleading or fearmongering, as simple “go team go!” on the part of a very partisan Democrat, then you’re not paying attention and you’re part of the reason they’ve been able to get this far. This is a chess game. The electoral left, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined, is planning our moves over the next two to maybe four years and often badly at that. The right is planning theirs over the next two to three decades. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time looking at the position papers that The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, and dozens of other less famous (but equally connected and influential) conservative think tanks started putting out in the 70s and 80s. They’ve had a vision. They’ve been willing to build coalitions, accept short term compromises, and make sacrifices to ensure their long term vision. I often hear liberals and leftists complain about politicians who are willing to accept something less than the full glorious worker’s revolution right here and now as sell outs, as being no different that the Republicans, etc. Tell me, who is more principled: the person who only gets 40% of what they want today, but uses that as a means to get 80% of what they want over the next 20 years or the person who gets all (or more likely none) of what they want today, but watches the social and economic problems they’re working to fix actually worsen over most of their lives? If neither is more principled, then tell me who is more effective at actually serving their principles.

*Thurmond, many years later did moderate his stance on race.

 ”Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world.” - former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

For a moment, I really couldn’t believe it when I saw this flash on CNN at the gym yesterday afternoon. Then the weight of 6+ years of precedent kicked in and the surprise quickly passed. Of course, he did this. I don’t know whether it was just cronyism, the fear the Libby would talk, or some combination of the two, but this kind of thing is precisely what we should expect from Bush. Let’s just make sure that no more prosecutions of his cronies go to judge and jury before January of ‘09.