Like every other one at this time of the year, the new Reuters/Zogby tracking poll might or might not mean anything. But it did include a couple points that struck me as credible given my take on the race. (Two caveats: one, I plan to vote for Obama in my state's primary, and two, anything from bad methodology to unseasonable weather could render this data meaningless, taking my analysis here along with it.)

Since last winter, I've thought that the 2008 Democratic primary campaign essentially would be a sort of referendum on Hillary Clinton, but one that because of other factors would be easier for her to win than most referenda. Her victory didn't require a majority or even a near-majority, just a plurality of first-choice supporters in the early-voting states. Getting that, her institutional advantages of money, establishment support and media willingness/eagerness to stage an early coronation of any plausibly royal family, she rolls to the nomination. In other words, most of the Democrats can be somewhere between unenthusiastically for and doggedly against her, but she still gets to win. (This is true in every race, but for reasons I'll get into below, I believe it's more important when the candidate is as well-known as Clinton is.)

The emerging conventional wisdom has it that the Democrats can't win in 2008 simply by being "reflexively anti-Bush." But I wonder if an equal or greater danger isn't being "reflexively pro-Clinton." I know well that this isn't an issue at Daily Kos, but it pretty clearly remains the case in the party's primary electorate at large.

Consider some findings from the latest LA Times/Bloomberg poll. They show a generic 8-point Democratic advantage in the presidential race next year--but the clear Democratic front-runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, loses to all three leading Republican candidates (40-45 to McCain, 41-43 to Romney, 39-49 to Giuliani). John Edwards outpolls two of them (41-45 McCain, 46-32 Romney, 46-43 Giuliani), and Barack Obama defeats all three (47-35 McCain, 50-34 Romney, 46-41 Giuliani).

At the same time, though, Sen. Clinton leads among all Democratic primary voters with 33 percent to Obama's 22, 15 for Al Gore, and 8 for Edwards. Clinton also commands the support of 40 percent of self-identified "liberal Democrats" (Obama is second with 21 percent), and 47 percent of women (Obama 26). Another poll shows Clinton leading Obama among African-American voters, 41 percent to 35 percent.  

No, it isn't that Barack Obama will prove to be a madrassa-attending Manchurian Candidate, or that Hillary Clinton or John McCain will discard their putative disguises of moderation and theoligarchical conservatism, respectively, once in office. It's that government, now partly under Democratic control after last November's elections, might actually take constructive actions that improves the lives of everyday Americans.

It's pretty much a given by now that the Right is largely defined by what, and who, they hate. And with the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend, the movement types are getting their hate on in a big way. But while anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist isn't quite as viscerally offensive as the Dartmouth crypto-Nazi crowd, he's far more dangerous. He was at CPAC too, and his message was a simple one: don't let anything happen over the next two years.

Probably like many here, I watched Senator Obama's official campaign announcement this morning, and came away very pleased with what I saw. In my opinion, there are essentially two aspects to presidential leadership: managerial skill, and the capacity to inspire the public and gradually move "the center" through use of the bully pulpit and political acumen. Obama has no track record in the first area, which gives me some pause--but on the second, he clearly stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Democratic field as it stands today.

In this diary, I want to make an argument for why the online community of progressive activists should get behind the Senator from Illinois now, without reservation or hesitation--and why we might find ourselves essentially shut out of the national debate if we don't.

Every time David Sirota posts here, I get increasingly nervous about the prospects of Democrats to push positive change in our politics. I don't deny the man's talents as a propagandist and, perhaps, a political strategist--but I have no doubt that his stridency, lack of self-knowledge, and ahistorical perspective is poison to Democrats' chances of both keeping power and using it wisely. His latest diary, Recommended by his adoring followers here, is perhaps the most glaring example: Sirota, great champion of ideological purity and scourge of the compromising Democrats, plaintively asks the question that Democrats have been wondering for almost forty years now: Where is Our Bobby?  

My problem with this is that Sirota misunderstands both Robert F. Kennedy and, more importantly for our purposes today, himself.

One of my very favorite political blogs, the Carpetbagger, has an item today about Bush's latest smears against Democrats on national security during a series of campaign events yesterday. It's the usual bleating: weak-willed, passive, waiting to get hit again, and deedle-deedle-dee.

Carpetbagger has a laugh at Bush's growing irrelevance, but I think he somewhat misses the point that when Bush makes these appearances--always sheltered so he's just speaking to the faithful, with pre-canned and probably pre-queued applause lines--the real point isn't what he says, but what he does. What he did yesterday, in making his dim remarks, was raise $400,000 for Richard Pombo, the thuggish Republican congressman from California. Later, he raised $600,000 for the Dickensian-named (and, of course, corrupt) Congressman John Doolittle, and still later he raised $1.3 million at an RNC event. The Pombo appearance triggered a protest of about 150 administration opponents, which merited a one-line mention in the Yahoo! story from which I drew this information.

The pro-torture right has been squawking for weeks about the need for "clarity" in interpreting the Geneva Conventions--a need that evidently never existed before this war and, for that matter, this election cycle... but never mind that for now).  But two important ideas have been missing from the conversation. To me, this is first and foremost about American values and American claims to moral leadership in a conflicted world. It's sadly clear that the people now in charge of our country don't care a fig about our values and traditions--and that see our values and our moral premises as a shackle, not a strength.

Right now, though, I'm not even thinking about that. I'm thinking about how this is going to work in practice. Not in a movie script scenario where the hardened terrorist knows where the bomb is but won't tell. But how it's going to work with the poor schmuck who's picked up in a sweep of a Baghdad neighborhood one evening right before curfew.

My first reaction to today's news about DeLay permanently stepping down from his leadership post was similar to that scene in GoodFellas where Henry Hill is in the police station and the cops are checking out the evidence confiscated from his mistress's apartment. One cop sticks his finger in the caked white goop on a kitchen scale, brings it to his mouth, tastes it, and smiles wolfishly: it's cocaine. Off-camera, his partner says to Henry, "Buh-bye, dickhead."

But in celebrating DeLay's downfall and the rapidly spreading Abramoff scandal, I have this nagging fear that we're missing the big picture. Abramoff is a compelling story, but he's not really at the core of what's been going on here. The money he controlled and spread around--the massive slush fund that has lubricated Republican politics for the past ten years, and has been especially powerful since they retook the Senate in 2002--was a means to an end.  

The end was permanent one-party rule and, I'd argue, an attack on the core principles of the Constitution.  
 

There's a reason I'll sometimes force myself to listen to a Bush speech. Every time he gets in front of the cameras I figure there's about a 1 percent chance he'll just resign--and not necessarily at the start of the speech, but maybe in the middle. Maybe mid-sentence: "You know what? Fuck this. I quit. I'm going home. It's too fucking hard and I don't feel like it anymore..." But actually watching this one tonight, I think he honestly fails to understand that the two goals he repeatedly states in Iraq--a soverign nation-state with popularly sanctioned government, and a strategic partner and ally for the U.S. in the region--are simply incompatible. Listening to Bush's speech tonight, I think he honestly fails to understand that the two goals he repeatedly states in Iraq--a soverign nation-state with popularly sanctioned government, and a strategic partner and ally for the U.S. in the region--are simply incompatible.  

I've been thinking a lot today about the late Gene McCarthy and the war he tried to stop, and the politics of 1968. I should note at the outset that this was five years before I was born, and so all these thoughts are based on second-hand observations. But my belief is that Senator McCarthy--an honorable man and a very good progressive in both his beliefs and his philosophy of politics--along with his fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, who beat McCarthy for the 1968 presidential nomination, inadvertently helped create problems for the Democrats that we've never completely solved.

I didn't march in Washington, DC yesterday. I don't think I know anybody who did. To be honest, I'm pretty sure I totally forgot about the protest. I didn't see any headlines or TV coverage; not until I came on this site and started looking at diaries did I realize how big a deal it was to people here.

I bring this up not to denigrate those who were there, or even to weigh in on any of the related arguments going on in other threads. But it strikes me again how modern-day progressives are so bound to the past, the glory period of liberalism, and how we so consistently misapply its "lessons." The '60s not only help trigger a right-wing backlash by its excesses; they've also hamstrung our efforts to further liberal ends, or even defend those earlier successes, ever since.

This morning I got an e-mail from the Democratic Party urging me to give money to Fernando Ferrer in the NYC mayoral campaign. Then this afternoon I open up dKos and see Markos referring to "turncoats"... and other users employing much stronger language to describe those Democrats, like me, who are planning to vote for Bloomberg in the November election.

I'm going to try in this diary to set out my thinking, answer some of the criticisms that have been offered, and hopefully de-escalate what I see becoming a rather nasty internal fight here. To this end, I'll offer background on how Bloomberg got into office; his record in four years; and a few thoughts on his opponent.

I didn't watch any national news tonight--or local, for that matter. So I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that in all the remembrances and stories of memorials, analysis of what has and hasn't changed in our country and the world, and sober discussion of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, few if any people focused on the fact that four years after the Towers fell, Osama bin Laden remains at large.

For a group of people so supposedly bound up with honor and martial pride, so praiseful of war and violence, doesn't it seem odd that more right-wingers aren't rabid with fury over the fact that bin Laden wasn't made to answer for his crimes? That the substitute in terms of militaristic self-gratification has gone so badly awry is almost like injury added to insult.

I'll say up front that I'm not sure how to feel about the nomination of John Roberts for Chief Justice. It probably depends upon whom Bush nominates for the newly opened Associate Justice slot, which is what will really determine how far the SCOTUS shifts rightward from its precariously balanced Rehnquist/O'Connor position.

But as another diarist noted here, my strong impulse is to view this move as a striking defeat not just for Scalia and Thomas, but for the whole right-wing push to finish their drive to politicize the courts and the law itself. With a clear (though probably not easy) path to enshrining one of his "model Justices" as the agenda-setter and chief administrator of the high court, Bush instead has punted.

Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? resonated with a lot of us who believe that Democrats can only start winning elections again by differentiating themselves from Republicans on economic issues, rather than by moving closer to their positions on social issues. Frank's contention that Democrats should at least try to stress pocketbook populism, rather than fighting or trying to change the subject on "values," is supported by consistent polling that shows majorities favoring progressive positions on social insurance programs and economic fairness.

While everybody is breathlessly poring over what Matt Cooper has to say in this week's Time, I'm thinking that the other newsweekly has the real story of signicance hitting the newstands Monday--and not for what it says, but for what it is.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek is the very well-known, very mainstream journalist who wrote this piece. He's always been, to my memory, as "straight down the middle" as they come in that business. (A Google search revealed accusations of conservative bias, if anything; no less than Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online praised him to the Columbia Journalism Review.) He's not William Safire; he's not Bob Herbert. And he's certainly not "Jeff Gannon" or Sidney Blumenthal (who was a transparently, at times almost embarrassingly liberal while working as a journalist, and was known as such).

Like many in these parts, I'm a bit nervous that without any crack from the administration, news from Fitzgerald's investigation, or new bombshell revelations, the Rove/Plame story will get bumped off the front burner by the next terror attack, shark attack, or Tom Cruise outburst. This administration has weathered so many storms, outlasted so many egregious scandals, that I'm not sure anything short of Cheney screwing the corpse of a young boy on live TV would really generate the appropriate level of outrage. (And Rush, I'm sure, would even spin that as showing the VP's "fun side".)

There are ways for Democrats (and journalists) to keep this fresh: my favorite is to start aggressively asking the non-hack Republican Senators like Warner, McCain, Hagel and Graham what they think of Ken Mehlman's talking points and the rantings of the Noise Machine. But there's another card yet to be played, and I'd love to know why not.

Today's New York Times features a double-length editorial praising its reporter Judith Miller for her decision to go to prison rather than reveal who from the White House leaked to her the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. In a supreme irony, the paper all but beatifies Miller for "surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government."