[Cross-posted from ProgressiveHistorians.]

My new hero, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, advances one of the most interesting arguments I've seen on why Obama is so equivocal in debates.  Unlike most supporters of Obama, Harris-Lacewell has been following and supporting the Illinois Senator since he was elected to the State Senate nearly twelve years ago.  According to Harris-Lacewell, Obama's rhetoric has changed because of the difficulties Obama faces in attempting to talk across the black-white divide:

Barack has already laid down what will be remembered as some of the most important pieces of American rhetoric in the 21st century: his "Joshua Generation" speech in Selma this summer; his triumphant victory address on the night of the Iowa caucuses; and his inspirational "Yes We Can!" speech on the night of the New Hampshire upset.  While these moments of Barack's scripted voice are both authentic and inspiring; his debate voice is cautious, halting, and decidedly uninspired.  I think it has everything to do with race.

[Cross-posted from ProgressiveHistorians.]

Daily Kos has recently been abuzz with speculation that the coming Presidential election will play out similarly to that of 1932 -- a dramatic realignment election that puts Dems on top for a generation.  DHinMI advanced this argument in a very good three-part series last month.  Today, New Deal democrat provides more evidence of this phenomenon by pointing out that economic conditions were similar in some ways then to how they are now.

It's an interesting, if optimistic, argument, but I disagree with one of its underlying assumptions -- particularly if Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee.  In that eventuality, I think Woodrow Wilson's campaign in 1912, rather than Franklin Roosevelt's in 1932, is more likely to serve as a useful model for the 2008 election.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos and Swing State Project.]

Jim Webb's victory tonight is a victory for Virginia's netroots.  Virginia's progressive blogosphere was not thrilled with the default candidate emerging earlier this year.  So, spearheaded by Lowell and many others, they drafted a Reagan Republican with a stellar resume to run as a Democrat and propelled him to victory in the primary.

--  Raising Kaine

My, how far we in the activist Netroots have fallen.  With Brad Miller's refusal to run in the North Carolina Senate race, it's time to admit that we have a full-fledged blogosphere recruitment disaster on our hands for the 2008 Senate races -- and to ask why it happened, and how we can avoid such an event in the future.

Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Al Gore

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, and My Left Wing.]

Reading Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason has served to reinforce my view that Gore is perhaps the last living Progressive -- that is, the kind from the Progressive Era, not someone who agrees with Dennis Kuninich.  Big-P Progressives, unlike Kucinich, were essentially middle-class moderates who blended reform-minded populism with support for "good" business, environmentalism, moralism, and war hawkishness.  (Okay, Gore obviously doesn't fit that last one.)  In The Assault on Reason, Gore has outdone himself in the Progressivism field; indeed, he has written a bona fide Progressive tract.

The type was pioneered in 1909 by Herbert Croly's masterful The Promise of American Life, the book that inspired former President Theodore Roosevelt's radical 1912 Presidential run on the Bull Moose ticket.  Croly, the founding editor of The New Republic, was trumped in readership five years later by his friend and co-editor, Walter Lippmann, whose volume Drift and Mastery is known today as the outstanding example of the genre.  Both books bear striking similarities to Gore's new work -- in particular that of Lippmann, to whom Gore refers three times in The Assault on Reason (though not in particularly favorable terms).  In fact, all three volumes follow the same general formula:

• 1) Describe American society as in danger, flawed, ill, and otherwise bereft; and



• 2) Propose a universal panacea to renew America and solve all its problems at one stroke.

New Mexico Governor and Democratic Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson is one of America's leading foreign policy experts.  A former Ambassador to the United Nations, Richardson holds an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  Richardson is also perhaps America's leading diplomatic negotiator, having recently brokered successful agreements in both Darfur and North Korea.  Whether or not Richardson is elected President in 2008, he is certain to be one of the most influential foreign policy advisors in any Democratic administration.  Therefore, it is important to ascertain just where Richardson stands on the foreign policy issues most important to progressive activists.

After reading my January diary about Bill Richardson and the need for a visionary foreign policy, a Richardson for President staffer contacted me to arrange a foreign policy interview with the Governor.  I suggested the interview be conducted via e-mail, citing the need for lengthy and substantive answers and my own lack of proper recording equipment, and my contact agreed.  I submitted my questions at the end of January, and received the completed interview over the weekend.  (As a result of the time lapse, some questions are necessarily outdated.)

I drafted the interview questions after soliciting input from readers at each of the eight sites linked above.  The resulting epistolary interview is, I believe, the most in-depth foreign policy interview with Governor Richardson to date.  Many thanks to the Governor and his staff for agreeing to this interview.

Over the flip, the complete text of the interview.

Below, compiled from Politics1, are the terminal degrees of the announced Democratic and Republican candidates for President:

I'm both a supporter and a skeptic of the doctrine of political framing as promulgated by Berkeley linguist George Lakoff in his now famous book, Don't Think of an Elephant.  I'm strongly supportive of the notion of framing insofar as it stresses the craft, once popular but now relegated to arcane debate exercises, of shaping language to convey appropriate and useful connotations along with the strict denotations of words.  I'm skeptical, however, of the doctrinaire methods employed by Lakoff and his disciples in attempting to isolate and typify specific frames, including the use of brackets, categories, and seemingly meaningless keywords.  Such tactics cannot, I feel, be successful in convincing the public that the framer is genuine, a critical factor in winning the long-term support of the populace for a political platform or party.  I believe the public can spot a phony a mile off, and while they may vote for it, they will most certainly never respect it.  Perhaps the most successful framer of the past twenty years was Bill Clinton, who uttered phrases such as "building a bridge to the twenty-first century" only after thoroughly poll-testing them against other similar phrases; perhaps as a result, Clinton may hold the distinction of being the most popular president of the twentieth century who was never actually liked.

Despite their dogmatic shortcomings, the studies of framing published in recent years both on and offline have added much to our understanding of how language intersects with such critical concepts as power, patriotism, and affinity.  It's long past time for the concept to be applied directly to the past as it has to the present.  Jeffrey Feldman gets the ball rolling in his book Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation (and Win Elections) (a steal at $14.95 cover price; you can also read the first chapter online at NYT, though you'll have to have a login to do so).  Feldman, the most prominent of Lakoff's online disciples and the proprietor of Frameshop, borrows Lakoff's rigid linguistic techniques, but he brings his own astute understanding of practical politics to the project, a skill which has been sorely and noticeably lacking in Lakoff's books.  The result is a well-written book that is both readable for a general audience and potentially important to the study of presidential history.

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, My Left Wing, and TalkLeft.]

For some time, there has been a meme in political discourse indicating that Republicans choose their Presidential candidates based on some notion of whose "turn" it is to win the nomination.  I have found evidence of this meme from both the right (William F. Buckley) and the left (a MyDD commenter).  Given the pervasiveness of this meme, I decided to test the historical evidence behind it by examining Republican presidential nominations from 1960 -- a full twelve years before the first election in which primaries played a deciding role in the delegate count -- through 2004.

According to most versions of this theory, there are three ways that one establishes one's "turn" in line: 1) by being a sitting or former Vice President; 2) by running in a previous year, losing but doing better than expected; or 3) by attaining some sort of formal institutional leadership, i.e., serving as Senate Minority Leader or Speaker of the House.  I aim to show that criterion #1 is both natural and common to both parties, and that criteria #2 and #3 are simply not the hard-and-fast rules they have been made out to be.  In fact, in the past twelve election cycles, there has been only one instance where a Republican presidential primary was decided by anything close to the concept of "turn," and even in that instance the outcome was far from certain until well down the stretch.  Essentially, the Republican presidential "turn" is a myth with no predictive value for the 2008 GOP primary.