It just might work. Over at Inside Catholic, I reviewed Amy Sullivan's book. 

Over at Vox Nova,  Jonathan Jones reviewed WTDAB. I appreciated his kind words. Yet I was miffed by his remark that "there is not much new" in the book. To his credit, he posted my response in full.

Quick survey: How many of you had heard of John M. Bailey and David L.Lawrence? (Don't answer all at once.) 

In case you did not hear already, at blogginheads.tv Amy Sullivan and I debated whether Obama will win over religious voters.

Sorry for the lack of posts. For those hungry (desperate!) for some content, you're in luck. Over at Inside Catholic, I wrote a story about the subject above. Here is how the story begins:

"What Goldwater was to Reagan, McGovern was to Obama," New York Times writer Sam Tanenhaus wrote about the 2008 election, in reference to the two fathers of America's modern political movements. The first story, about the conservative ascendancy in the Republican Party, has been told. The second, covering the liberal ascendancy in the Democratic Party, has not. (That is, until my book came out last fall.)

 

In earlier columns, I wrote about the late Fred Dutton's liberal vision for the Democratic Party. Dutton sought to build a Democratic coalition made up of young people, African-Americans, and college-educated suburbanites -- three key constituencies of Obama's campaign.

 

So how did Dutton do it? How did he destroy the old Roosevelt coalition (Catholics, labor, African-Americans, intellectuals, and white Southerners) and create the McGovern coalition?

 

In my book, I show how antiwar liberals overthrew what Lyndon Johnson called "the Catholic bosses" in a coup d'état. Here's how it all began.

Bob Beckel makes the now familiar claim that Obama is the liberal Reagan:

Barack Obama's current political circumstance is eerily similar to that of Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign for president. Both Obama and Reagan, from the beginning of their insurgent campaigns, were viewed as transformative political figures. Both enjoyed passionate grassroots support.

Both men had defeated centrist establishment candidates for their party's nomination. Reagan defeated George H.W. Bush, who was viewed by the growing conservative base of the Republican Party as too moderate. Obama beat Hilary Clinton whose husband had been elected twice by moving away from his party's traditional progressive roots and running as a centrist, a path Clinton herself followed (at least at the beginning of her campaign).

To which, Blake Dvorak counters:

the reason the example gives Obama too much credit is because Reagan, even in 1980, was a known commodity. He was 68 years old, a two-term governor of California and, before that, a Hollywood celebrity very much involved in politics. For all the so-called "risk" Americans were taking with Reagan, it wasn't really a blind risk. Moreover, Reagan was very clear on the kind of change he was offering. Obama? He still disputes being called a liberal.

Dvorak, I think, has the better of the argument: Obama is not the liberal Reagan of 1980. Reagan had a lot more significant experience than Obama has, so he wasn’t as much of a roll of the dice; he had been governor of the nation’s biggest state for eight years, while Obama has been a U.S. Senator for only three years and a state senator for six years.

Yet both Dvorak and Beckel overlook the possibility that Obama is the Reagan not of 1980 but of 1968. Besides the fact that both men were skilled orators and led an ideological movement, both lacked experience when they first ran for president. Reagan had been governor for only a year and a half when he ran for president. And he nearly won the party’s nomination. (Clymer got this right, while Powerline did not. See the best book on the 1968 campaign). If Nixon had not made a deal over Supreme Court nominees and enforcing desegregation with Strom Thurmond, he likely would have lost to Reagan. (“I love that man,” Thurmond said of Reagan. “He’s the best hope we’ve got.”)

To wax counterfactual, imagine Reagan had won the GOP’s nomination in 1968. Would he have beaten poor old Humphrey? Well, he had about as good of a chance as Obama.

(Photo by user Barack Obama used under a Creative Commons license.) 

Over at Inside Catholic, I wrote about Bobby Kennedy's social vision and its demise.

                                                                                             
On this, the 40th anniversary of the day Bobby Kennedy was shot, The Washington Post re-posted three of his campaign ads in the famous Indiana primary. The ads are catnip for my prejudices (and surely others?), but let it be said that some changes in American life have been for the worse.What struck me, besides Kennedy's criticism of high taxes, was his joke before a group of farmers about his ten kids and his quiet reminder to a group of older women about an inconvenient truth of Ameican life. Of no American politician today could the same be said; David Broder offers a similar assessment.  Follow the link.

(Photo by user The Paco used under a Creative Commons license.)

Reader Mark Bowen emailed me last week to write in praise of state caucus elections:

I mentioned in my 1st email that the one part I disagreed with was your proposed solution of getting rid of closed primaries and caucuses in favor of open primaries, mentioning that the more open the primaries have been the more they have favored the candidate that, despite what the polls say now, I truly believe is the embodiment of the feminist/Mcgovernite wing of the party that just is not electable.

As I listened more and more this primary season to how caucuses worked, as opposed to primaries, I became very excited about their possibilities.... what interested me the most was listening to interviews with people saying they were going in not knowing who they were going to vote for. Wow, I thought. Isn't that a thing of the past.... having an open mind and making your decision based on reasoned debate, not on 30 second attack ads and puff pieces on television. I'm thinking about the story you told about Casey losing his first primary to a candidate who spent outrageous amounts of money to buy the election, selling himself as independent from the bosses. I thought the story about Casey's frustration with this, and his preference for the old boss system, illustrated the problem regarding who the new "boss" has become in politics- money.

I think the more open the primary is, the more it people it involves who cast their votes based on what they've seen on tv, and thus the greater the power of money. And given the fact that the biggest problem a pro-life democrat has in winning a primary is that the abortion rights groups can totally shut off their fundraising ability, the greater the power of money in a primary, the greater the power of the secular liberals.

While caucuses can empower the "activist" approach that involves only the most partisan voters, I'm starting to think that, with minor changes, caucuses can become a new third way, that takes the best aspects of the old boss system you identified (picking candidates who win) while getting rid of its worst aspects (undemocratic nature). Couldn't caucuses be set up in such a way that the people who hold the gavels will be local party officials who care about which candidate will help the local ticket, and strongly push the attendees in that direction, with the key distinction being that the caucuses are open to all registered democrats whose will can't be completely ignored? IN other words, the "bosses" could strongly pressure the people (keeping their arguments not about ideology but about electability) but they won't be able to just completely ignore them like they did in the past....

Just wondering what your thoughts were on this....

I think Mark overstates the likelihood of voters changing their voting preference at a caucus. In 2004, John Kerry and John Edwards surged on the final weekend before the caucus ... and each ended up doing well. This year, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards were neck and neck before the caucus began ... and finished neck and neck. I wish that more voters listened to debates and arguments, but the evidence for this is thin.

Mark makes a good point about the power and pro-choice tilt of big money. Every serious presidential candidate has gobs of money; and there are no wealthy pro-life counterparts to Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW, etc; pro-lifers have votes, not dollars. But do both of those factors outweigh demographics (i.e. caucus voters are more likely to be secular and affluent)?

There’s an argument that they did before 1980 when feminists enacted their hard quota proposal and the party endorsed taxpayer-financed abortions. Ed Muskie, a pro-lifer at the time, won the 1972 Iowa caucus and Jimmy Carter, a cultural moderate, got more votes in the Iowa caucus than his opponents.

But I think that today, the make-up of the caucus electorates is determinative. For one thing, today virtually all cultural liberals are Democrats; I don’t see culturally conservative Democrats outvoting them. And for another thing, young mothers and third-shift workers, two groups with more than a smattering of culturally conservative sentiments, are effectively prevented from voting in caucuses.

(Photo by user Momaraman used under a Creative Commons license.) 

Tom Edsall details what I wrote about the other day: like McGovern in 1972, Obama won the nomination on the strength of his showing in the caucus states:

Coming out of the turmoil of the sixties, the 1972 McGovern rules, as they came to be known, radically altered the way Democrats pick their presidential nominees, opening up the political process by mandating proportional inclusion of previously excluded constituencies -- African Americans, voters under 30, and women.

All of the reforms adopted then, and modified over the years, have been in play this year, including the expanded role in party proceedings of blacks, women, and the young; the required use of proportional representation; and superdelegates.

One reform stands out particularly in Obama's march to victory: the much wider use of open caucuses as a key component of the nomination process. Caucuses differ from primaries in that participants must spend many hours in a complex rule-ridden bargaining process that determines how a precinct or ward will allocate its support among the presidential candidates.

Now, some 36 years after the adoption of the McGovern rules, caucuses as a vehicle for the selection of convention delegates have empowered a key Obama constituency: young and relatively well-educated social-cultural liberals -- just the class of political activists that Ickes and the Clintons came out of and made salient.

In the arcane caucus procedures, with turnout ranging from only two to eight percent of the eligible Democratic electorate (compared to voter participation rates in primaries ranging from 20 to 35 percent), smart and strategically savvy party activists make up a disproportionately large share of participants.

"The caucuses made Obama, there is no doubt about it," argues University of Wisconsin political scientist Byron Shafer, the foremost expert on changes since the 1960s in the Democratic nominating process.

"Caucuses were the preferred institution of the reformers. The argument of the reform theorists was not about the gross bulk of participation, but about the character of the participation," Shafer said. In a primary, "you could go and vote, but it was limited: you pull the lever that was it. In a caucus, it wasn't that turnout would be lower, it was the quality of the turnout was higher."

It would be difficult to overestimate the consequences for Obama of Democratic Party reforms promoting caucuses. If the caucus states were eliminated, Obama would not be the one on the verge of declaring victory.

As of June 2, according to RealClearPolitics, Obama had a 157 delegate vote lead over Clinton, 2072 to 1915.

In the 14 states that picked some or all of their delegates through caucus systems this year, Obama won 400 delegates to Clinton's 193, a 207 delegate advantage that more than accounts for his overall delegate lead.