THAT SOUTHERN THING

The 2008 election has messed with the conventional wisdom on race and American politics. The photo above, taken in Martinsville, Indiana, a longtime stronghold of the KKK, is a sign of how the times are a' changing. At least some white voters, who have a distaste for African Americans, who don't live or work near them, and who romanticize the old Confederacy will nonetheless be pulling the lever for the first time for a black candidate.

For at least some voters, interest trumps identity.

H/t to Rustbelt reader Bryant for this one.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Sometimes common sense trumps all. While some voters continue to be attracted to Sarah Palin because of her "aw shucks," if expensively coiffed, persona, Joe Plumber types just aren't buying it. Listen to one western Pennsylvania white voter, quoted in today's New York Times.

“She’s always talking about the ‘Average Joe,’ ” Jeremy Long said. “Average me! I don’t want myself in the Oval Office. I want someone smarter.”

Even though the Times finds a lot of voters out in Pennsylvania steel country who are uncomfortable with Obama because he's black, they also respect that he's smart. And for once, brains seem to be trumping race.

FDR AND LBJ AGAIN?

It's not often that a Wall Street Journal editorial is worth reprinting in its entirety. But this one is. The WSJ editors are convinced that America is about to enter a New New Deal or another Great Society. I will calm the WSJ's fears by noting that there is not a particularly vigorous left flank in the Democratic Party as there was in 1933 or 1964. It will take more than just an Obama presidency and a sizeable Democratic majority in the House and Senate to accomplish real change. The Social Security Act of 1935 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to name two landmark pieces of legislation, resulted from a combination of legislative and bureaucratic innovation and grassroots pressure. If the WSJ is right and we have a Democratic supermajority in place in January, it will up to those of us on the left to do what our predecessors in the Great Depression and in the 1960s did best: to put pressure, pressure, and more pressure on the new administration and congressional majority.

But if half of what the WSJ fears comes to pass, America will be in better shape than we have been in decades.

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
[Review & Outlook]

- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.

Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.

The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.

- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.

The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.

- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.

The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.

- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.

- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.

- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.

Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.

- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar's ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.

It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.

In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.

To the Wall Street Journal editors: Amen!

The Southernization of the White Working Class?

(This essay was originally published the San Diego Union-Tribune on October 1.)

The current battle between the presidential candidates for the votes of the white working-class requires an understanding of the culture of these voters. There are signs of a decline of an old Rust Belt culture, and the adoption of Southern culture – and both campaigns are responding.

The changes first struck me in an unforgettable moment several months ago when I saw what had become of the Rust Belt, white working-class voter. I was standing on the platform of the East Chicago, Ind., station for the local commuter train to Chicago. It was chilly, and the young man near me was wearing a jacket with a union local's name emblazoned on the back and above the left breast. But what he had on his head surprised me: he also wore a black baseball cap with the flag of the Confederacy on it.

Several months later, in a visit to my hometown of hyper-segregated Highland, Ind. – a neighbor of majority-black Gary – I witnessed a large Ford pickup truck cruising through what is left of our old downtown. And there it was again: flying proudly from the rear corners of the truck were a pair of Confederate flags.

These are only two simple observations, but both, I believe, are indicative of major changes taking place in the culture and identities of white working-class voters in the urban north.

The novelist and essayist Dave Eggers – himself a product of the Chicago suburbs – once wrote that the Midwest can be found 25 miles outside of any American city. But I think what is happening, and it is something with important implications for American politics, is that we are finding the American South all over the country. There is a “Southernization” of American politics.

Consider the ways that politicians used to court the white working class in the Rust Belt. The Nixon administration, which pioneered the strand of Republican populism that we see today, sought to appeal to them in three different ways.

First, it sought to “cultivate” (its word) relationships with union leaders. It would not do much for union workers economically, but it would stroke its union identities through words and deeds such as the appointment of Peter J. Brennan, head of the New York Building Trades Council, as secretary of Labor.

Second, it would appeal to working-class voters' identities as Catholics. The way to do this was to laud their institutions, particularly parochial schools.

Third, it celebrated these workers' ethnicity. The Nixon team fanned out across the Rust Belt and made appearances at Polish Pride Parades, Italian American Picnics and Serbfests.

Do we see any of these strategies today? Hardly – and with good reason. The work force in the still-unionized steel mills of Gary is only about a quarter of what it was in its heyday. It just does not make as much sense for the Republicans to tap pride in union membership. Appeals to Catholics are still common, but they come in a very different form. Rather than talking about what is distinctive about Catholics, Republicans appeal to what Catholic conservatives share with evangelicals: opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Religious conservatives of many different faiths, as James Davison Hunter pointed out in “Culture Wars,” share more in common with each other than with the liberal wings of their own faiths. And rather than appeal to these voters'identities as Poles or Italians or Irish, they appeal to the cultural symbols of the American South.

And this strategy makes sense. The sociologist Richard Alba noted years ago that white ethnicity was being severely attenuated by intermarriage and migration to the suburbs. But what may be happening now is that the working-class voters across the country – even in Alaska – are gravitating not toward some bland or empty “whiteness,” but toward the cultural symbols of the South.

Of course, even Nixon used “Southern strategies” to appeal to the Rust Belt. But now these Southern-style appeals are all that are left. In 2008, Republicans appeal to the white working class across the country by stoking and responding to fears of racial change. According to The Washington Post, this year the Republicans' convention reversed its convention trend toward celebrations of diversity and hosted the fewest black delegates (36 out of 2,380) since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began keeping track. And we hear tough talk appealing to nationalism and insecurities about American power, we have a vice presidential candidate who is an avid hunter and gun owner (and who is culturally a snow-bound Southerner), and we hear strong defenses of Christian values.

This is a trend in the wider culture – not just politics. The death-knell for the distinctiveness of the old Rust Belt working class may have sounded when comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a native of Georgia wildly successful for his “you know you're a redneck when – ” comedy theme, appropriated the phrase “blue collar” for a show about the zany antics of himself and some other wacky hillbillies. “Blue Collar TV,” as it is called, is not about unions or white ethnics.

The Southernization of the working class is a perilous trend for Democrats. Obama chose an old-school Catholic, Joe Biden, for his running mate, ignoring the fact that the Democrats have not won the White House without a Southerner on the ticket since FDR. But they at least seem to be cognizant of the trend and are being strategic. For example, Barack Obama ended his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention as Brooks & Dunn's country music smash, “Only in America,” played triumphantly. The Obama campaign can only hope that the Rust Belt voters took note.

***

ADDENDUM

My former classmate, fellow Rustbelt Intellectual, and NPR/PBS reporter Rick Karr sent me the following after reading the above piece:

One small empirical quibble: Since WWII, in particular, the (Northwest Indiana) Region has been heavy with migrants from the Deep South. Your comment on hyper-segregated Highland takes on another meaning in this context: Those southerners tended to live in places like Griffith, Calumet Township, outlying and unincorporated Gary (Black Oak, e.g.), and in South County -- Cedar Lake and so on.

Note the socioeconomic correlation: Highland High "ranked" higher than any of those schools, though not as high as Munster, where, iirc, very few southern migrants lived.

And I recall strong anti-souther bias in my extended family -- the only word used more derisively than "Czarny" ("blacks" in Polish) was "hillbilly". When my family lived in a mixed working-class and lower-middle class neighborhood, many of the neighbors (the Bashums, the Stewarts, the Cartwrights -- note the names) were denigrated as "hillbillies" -- not only by my parents, but also by the Zemkoskys, Suklaks, and so on. Oh, and my family loathed Bill Clinton -- not because of his politics alone, but because, according to my mother, he "looks like a hillbilly".

Seems to me it's a classic migration pattern: We Eastern Europeans got their first, so we disdained those who followed us during and immediately after WWII.

Indiana as a whole has also long had a strong affinity for southern symbolism and politics -- moreso, I think, than the surrounding north-of-the-Ohio states. Neither Illinois nor Ohio ever sent a Grand Dragon of the Klan to the U.S. Senate.

Bottom line: Your conclusion feels sound to me, though citing the Region as evidence seems odd.

Rick is certainly right--and those folks displaying Confederate flags I witnessed could have easily been transplanted Southerners rather than culturally lost ethnic Catholics. I would still maintain, however, that the old political appeals to Rust Belt working class voters emphasizing union membership, Catholic institutions and white ethnicity have mostly disappeared, leaving only Southern-style political appeals in their place.

COURTING DISASTER

The next administration may have the occasion to nominate as many as four Supreme Court justices according to the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network. So as a warning to America, they have put together a bland ad that provides judicial cover for hurling the mud of "God damn America," the Weathermen, and a corrupt developer back into the public sphere. After a few days respite from wingnut slime attacks, we are back to the dubious politics of character assassination and guilt by association.



What is missing from the ad is an evaluation of the sophisticated legal mind that McCain has chosen as his running mate. We now know that he regularly consults her for foreign policy advice, so it's likely that he'll also tap her for her legal acumen, on display in all of its glory here.



Whose Supreme Court justices do you want?

Markets Schmarkets

I write this post over the drone of chainsaws and big chipper machines which have been steadily at work since Monday. As I mentioned previously, Ohio was slammed by the tail-end of Hurricane Ike (how bitterly ironic: here I am 600 miles from an ocean and yet still being slammed by hurricanes!). The result was a major disaster. By anyone's best guess, over 1 million Ohioans lost power. Some were dark for only a day or two; over 100,000 are still without power today. Schools were closed, in some places water emergencies were declared; food was in short supply in others.

And as far as I can tell, most of the country didn't hear about this. And that's fair enough - bigger stories to report. How often do world financial markets meltdown almost completely, after all??!!

So let me put these two things together in a crassly political way: You didn't hear much about our troubles, and at the same time, we didn't hear much about the market meltdown. Some local Ohio papers in small and mid-markets couldn't even publish on Monday or Tues; they didn't get around to putting the market news on the front page until Friday. And that's fair enough too, given all the chaos in Dayton, Columbus and points in between.

But as a result, the biggest crisis of this election cycle happened without Ohio noticing it much. By the time the sawdust settles, so too will this particular phase of our economic crisis. The story will be spun that the Fed intervened, Bush called for a bailout to rescue the market, and all will now be right with the world. Until the next bank needs a bailout, which may or may not happen by November. Even had the story not had to compete with the weather, news of Wall Street's collapse was liable to feel very remote to voters in Ohio. As it is, the worst week in recent American financial history will hardly register I suspect.

In other words, McSame and the Republicans dodged a major bullet in Ohio. Rather than focusing on the failure of Republican economics, and on McSame's staunch resistance to regulating the financial sector, Ohioans had to focus on their spoiling food and their neighbors who needed help. Rather than putting this economic disaster front and center, the Ohio media put local news on center stage.

If this election really is like 1992 when it was the economy, stupid, then the Obama campaign had a real opportunity blown away by Ike's 75mph winds.

SMALL TOWN AMERICA

An oft-repeated theme in this year's election is the virtue of small-town Americans. One of oldest themes in American political and cultural history, the notion that small towns are repositories of all that is good, true, moral, and American continues to resonate. Echoing Richard Nixon's pitch to small-town voters in his "silent majority" campaign (Nixon himself was a product of little Whittier, California), John McCain and Sarah Palin have touted "small town values" on the campaign trail. As Palin stated in her acceptance speech: "'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.' I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America ... who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars." (Note to reader: big cities = lazy, consumers not producers, shirkers not workers, naysayers not patriots).

I thought of Palin's speech this morning as I spent an hour walking the streets of Newark, Ohio, the county seat of Licking County, a town of about 47,000 people that has seen better days. Founded in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Newark's architecture reflects its late nineteenth and early twentieth century prosperity. Among the town's real treasures, The Home Building Association, a jewel box of bank (now vacant) built by the great architect Louis Sullivan in 1914.

The Louis Sullivan building is one reminder of how the Republican tribunes of small-town glory have it wrong. They emphasize the virtues of small rather than the virtues of town. The Home Building Association building reflects the cosmopolitan aspirations of small-town America, the attempt to be something greater than itself. Nearly a century ago, Newarkers were proud to imagine themselves as a city.



But life in small-town America today is less. There is an anomie in many of the small towns I have visited in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. These are places that have lost population and jobs, whose downtowns have been gutted by the expansion of Walmarts and suburban shopping centers, and where politics can be narrow and nasty. (The stories of Palin's reign in Wasilla give the lie to the images of small town politics as uplifting). One of the synomyms for small is petty. And there is a pettiness, a parochial localism, in small towns that gets lost in our romantic evocations of Elm Street.

Newark is one of those towns that has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Like many Rustbelt towns, its economy is dependent on manufacturing, but it has been hit badly in recent years. Licking County is not one of Ohio's worst-off areas: its current unemployment rate is 6.6 percent. But you can see the effects of the downturn in the shabby houses along the once-grand Hudson Street just a short walk from downtown. It's the sort of place where the Democrats should find a ready audience among folks burned by declining incomes, the stagnant housing market, rising gas prices, and insecurity.

But Licking County is a solidly Republican place: its voters pulled the lever by large margins for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. As I walked past the Newark Republican Party headquarters this morning, the McCain/Palin signs dimmed my morning cheer. Their campaign represents the worst of small-town politics: narrowly-defined local interest and the sanctimony of the small. And it doesn't offer much to small-town residents other than a boost of self-esteem that the candidates "know them" and "are one of them." And it doesn't offer much for the Newarks of America, big or small, that are the places left behind in the global economy. It's time to think big.

IDENTITY VERSUS INTEREST

Listening to Barack Obama, John McCain, and Sarah Palin respond to the current economic crisis and make their pitch to working-class voters, I was struck by the fundamental difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Republicans are the party of identity politics. The Democrats are, for the most part, not.

For years, the left and liberals have faced the charges of being mired in a divisive identity politics. Republicans mocked the narratives of oppression offered by advocates of groups that, indeed, were the victims of long histories of oppression, especially racial and ethnic minorities and women (whiners, complainers, dividers). Democrats, beginning with the DLC and Clinton and continuing through the current campaign, have attempted to distance themselves from what observers called "interest group" politics, jettisoning particularism for universalism.

But since the Nixon years, the Republicans have been the party of an identity politics that dare not speak its name, that is white identity politics. And this year's campaign "Country First" is the latest pander to those identity politics, a carefully crafted play to the deep-rooted argument that "they" (Democrats, the party's diverse base, and this year's standard bearer, Barack Obama) are not "us" (or should I be cleverly postmodern and say they are not "U.S."?

Yesterday's stump speeches by Obama in Nevada and McCain/Palin in Ohio make transparent the Republican Party's identity politics. Obama, who is still strangely facing charges that his economic plans lack the specifics needed to attract working people, was very specific in his indictment of the failed philosophy of the Republican Party. McCain and Palin, on the other hand, gestured toward the aggrieved identity of white workers who are the supposed victims of elitist condescension. The telling moment was when Sarah Palin talked about herself and working-class Americans as "us" and then proceeded to trot out the old, tired line about Obama dissing bitter small-town whites for clinging to their guns and religion. For his part, McCain tossed out the lie that Obama will raise "your" taxes (failing to note that in this case, the possessive "your" refers to the 2.5 percent of wealthy Americans whose taxes will be raised, not the other 97.5 percent of ordinary Americans who will receive tax relief under Obama's plan).

The Republicans are playing to voters' identity. The Democrats are campaigning on their economic interests. The outcome of this year's election will ride on whether or not a segment of the working and middle-class electorate in economically-devastated states will support a ticket whose candidates pretend to be the cultural allies of the people or a ticket whose candidates are challenging (at least in part) the failed economic policies that should be the real source of bitterness at the grassroots.

Speaking of economically-devastated swing states, I'm off to Ohio for three days, so sorry for no links this morning and for what might be some thin posting tomorrow and Friday.

INTRODUCING THE NEW, IMPROVED RUSTBELT INTELLECTUAL

Oh, Mom why did you name me Tom? From now on, please call me Beretta Hockey Palin. Why the new moniker? Check out this site for bit of levity in this otherwise grim, grim week of economic news brought to you by the Republican Party and its allies.

SAINT SARAH, MARTYR

For the last forty years, at least, the Republican Party has appealed to its base by making the disingenuous claim that its leaders are outsiders, disrespected, and marginalized in the political process. You see, Republicans are martyrs, sacrificed on the altar of political correctness by the liberals who still dominate our media, our universities, and our political establishment, who still somehow maintain their imperial power despite four decades of withering Republican challenges. Although the GOP has built a formidable infrastructure of lobbyists, think tanks, politicized churches, and grassroots party operations, they are still position themselves as a counterestablishment. The theme has been so oft-repeated that it has become a truth, part of the taken-for-granted of national politics: Republicans are the victims of a biased liberal media, they are the victims of raving leftist professors on campuses and sneering, condescending elitists.

The latest version of Republican martyr comes in the form of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Poor Governor Palin, so poised in face of an onslaught of difficult qustions about her record, so brave and unstinting in the face of criticism that she has serially lied about her position on the "Bridge to Nowhere." Poor Palin who has looked across the Bering Straits to Russia and yet gets lambasted for her lack of foreign policy experience. Poor Palin, the victim of bully Barack who put lipstick on her porcine visage. And above all, holy Saint Sarah, she who opposes reproductive freedom, sex education, equal pay for equal work, increasing the minimum wage, and tough anti-sex discrimination laws, is the victim of sexism.

Here is the latest, by McCain corporate flack Carly Fiorina on the hilarious depiction of Palin by Tina Fey on SNL. "I think that continues the line of argument that is disrespectful in the extreme and yes, I would say, sexist, in the sense that just because Sarah Palin has different views than Hillary Clinton does not mean that she lacks substance." The only people who aren't sexist, it seems, are those who hail Palin's meager executive record as something of substance, who buy her dubious rhetoric of reform, who believe that cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations will solve our country's economic woes, who want to force incest victims to carry their babies to term, and who want teach our children that T-Rex dwelled with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden 4000 years ago.

Saint Sarah joins the litany of Republican martyrs, along with St. Barry (the patron saint of extremists), Sts. Carswell and Haynsworth (patron saints of the South and of mediocrity), St. Phyllis (the patron saint of subservient women), St. Bork (the patron saint of original intent), St. Rumsfeld (the patron saint of waterboarding), and St. Alberto (the patron saint of patronage). Oh ye victims of liberal torture, ye who suffered and died to keep the faith of our wingnut Fathers, welcome into your ranks the exalted St. Sarah who bravely suffers the slings and arrows of the Godless. Pray for us. Amen.

RACE AND THE ELECTION IN MICHIGAN

Nate Silver has a smart piece in TNR about the election in Michigan, where the Democrats are showing a lead within the statistical margin of error. Silver gets the Wolverine State mostly right, not surprising, giving that his blog fivethirtyeight.com offers the smartest analysis of polls and political trends out there. But I might offer an even more pessimistic take on the state's deep, deep racial divisions. Silver, like most commentators on Detroit (who haven't read The Origins of the Urban Crisis) focuses on 1967 as the racial turning point. Metropolitan Detroit's racial tensions are, however, even deeper. He rather modestly suggests that "Michigan is not devoid of racial politics."

I visit Michigan several times a year, I speak there often, I'm a regular commentator in the local press, and I have lots of family in metro Detroit and up North. Silver understates the depth of racial animosity there in his argument that "racial tensions aren't as overt as they once were, but nevertheless, the de facto segregation between Detroit and the suburbs creates little interaction between the state's black and white communities, and the combination of Kilpatrick and the difficult economic situation may evoke some latent prejudice." I am afraid that the prejudice in Michigan is not at all latent. Even minor political battles, like one over Detroit's management of the zoo (a city property located in the suburbs) turned into major brouhahas that can scarcely be imagined in many other metropolitan areas, hinging around overtly racial charges of mismanagement.

Silver states that although he is "generally not a believer in the Bradley Effect, Michigan is one state where it might be worth keeping an eye out for." On this point I agree. Obama needs to pull up his numbers big in Michigan. If he maintains his three percent margin in the polls, it won't be pretty come November.

OBAMA: THE PRICE OF BEING BLACK

Sociologist Andrew Hacker is pessimistic about Obama's chances of election in November. His argument, which he spells out in an article in this week's New York Review of Books, has two parts: the first of which is more compelling than the second. To his credit, Hacker offers a detailed and persuasive analysis of the various electoral mechanisms that result in the disproportionate exclusion of blacks from the voting rolls, among them laws that require voters to show a government-approved photo identification (in most cases a drivers' license or a passport) and laws that forbid felons from voting (which exclude large numbers of black men, who are disproportionately represented in the ranks of those in jail or who have records).

Hacker's forte is statistics. And here, his article is most revealing. He discovers a fatal statistical flaw in the plaintiff's case in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a recent Supreme Court decision that upheld Indiana's photo ID requirement for voters. Indiana has 4.3 million voting age residents. Strangely, the plaintiff's attorney asserted that only 43,000 adults in that state did not have a driver's license. The implication of those data was that Indiana's law would affect only a tiny segment of the state's potential voters--and that there was no evidence that the ID requirement would disadvantage them. Actually the plaintiff's number was wrong. 673,926 Indiana residents don't have a license. That's almost 15 percent of the state's potential electorate. That's a big number--and because of poverty, urban residence, and high insurance rates, a large portion of those carless Indianans are black. Getting a license is, in many states, a hassle: in other words, there are barriers to getting a license that are likely barriers to full political participation. Obama probably won't win Indiana in any case (it's been one of the most solidly Republican states in the Rustbelt), but similar requirements in swing states like Wisconsin could be decisive.

Hacker also notes that the 2002 Help America Vote Act requires that states keep electronic registration records. But this system is plagued with problems. As a number-cruncher, Hacker is on firm ground here, for he knows the difficulties of electronic record keeping and database maintenance. Florida, for example, uses Social Security records to verify addresses on its state voter rolls, a technique that leads to many non-matches--the Social Security Administration is unable to link 28 percent of names because of name changes, marriage and the like.) Another serious problem is simple human error. The mistyping of just one digit or the transposition of one letter in a name can result in someone being dropped from the voter rolls. Interestingly, when it comes to felons, Florida's data management system is rather looser: it looks for 80 percent matches to names, meaning that people with similar or identical names to registered felons can be struck from the rolls and deprived a vote simply because of their parents' naming decisions. Wrongly disenfranchised voters can claw their way back into the electoral rolls, but the process is time-consuming and hassle-filled. The barriers to re-entry are high and it makes sense to surmise that many disenfranchised voters don't have the time or the skills to figure out the system.

The second part of Hacker's article, a consideration of the relationship of race to white voting behavior, walks into more controversial territory. There is a raging debate among political scientists as to whether the vaunted Bradley or Dinkins effect still exists (that white voters are much more likely to choose a white candidate over a black candidate than they indicate in surveys) and if there is a Bradley effect, how big it is. Hacker seems unaware of that debate. He is, without doubt, right that a significant segment of white voters, especially those who make their decisions at the last minute, will instinctively gravitate toward the white candidate. And he is right that whites regularly mislead survey researchers and pollsters about the role of race in their decision-making. The real question here, and it's not one that Hacker can answer is how much white racial voting will matter. I'm a pessimist and lean toward Hacker's argument, drawing from my historical research and from spending time with whites, but neither are quantitatively systematic. In any case, even if I have a hunch that Hacker is right, he does not persuade me here. I'll leave that to what will surely be a growth industry in political science after November 4.

RANDOM POLITICAL NOTES

Just when I begin worrying about Obama's willingness to start pulling the punches against the mendacious McCain/Palin campaign, he has. At last. Someone had to call the duo on their spurious embrace of reform politics. And call them on their lies. For those of you who haven't see the ad yet, it's above. I am still waiting for the campaign to take Steve's advice and launch ads hammering the theme of "old and tired ideas." But this is a starting point.

After nearly two weeks on stage and in her bunker, where she's getting briefed on foreign policy by Joe Lieberman, Palin is finally subjecting herself to an interview. Unfortunately, she's up against the vapid Charlie Gibson. If he pursues questions of the trivial variety that he threw out at the last Obama/Clinton debate, then Palin will come out with even more of that shiny, new glow. I hope, rather than dwelling on her colorful Alaskan heritage, that he tests her knowledge of the politics of Pakistan, Georgia, and Darfur. Will she be able to handle questions about America's troubled relationship with its allies in Western Europe? I don't think so, but I also don't think that Charlie is likely to push the point. I'll be watching anyway. And praying.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a great piece this morning in which Ed Rendell sticks it to Palin by chastising her for selling the surplus Alaska plane on Ebay. Great story Sarah, but as it turns out Pennsylvania made a better financial decision by spending a mere $700 by advertising its surplus plane on two aeronautical web sites, rather than paying Ebay's 2.5% commission. Stick it to 'em, Ed. You need to redeem yourself from your rather lackluster support for the Obama campaign to date.

Many of Rendell's constituents are Catholic (though he is not). Why politicians like Rendell and Hillary Clinton have won the hearts of Pennsylvania Catholics and why Barack Obama has not is the subject of one of the smartest posts that I have read on Catholic politics to date, by Tim Meagher at HNN.

More later, but today is the first day of classes for me and I'm swamped.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: A POLITICAL PITBULL?

Community organizing as a profession got chortles and guffaws at the GOP convention the other night, despite the fact that, in fundamental respects, it represents the sort of grassroots self-help efforts that Republicans have long claimed they support. It's a reminder of the hypocrisy of big-government Republicanism that bottom-up efforts to accomplish social change, which are often threatening to established political power, are the subject of such derision. So much for nostrums about reform and empowering the people.

It may be, however, that community organizing comes back like a lipstick-glossed pitbull to bite John McCain and Sarah Palin. While the Republicans have been prattling about change while essentially proferring up the same, tired policies (just listen to the few specific policy recommendations in McSame's speech last night: cut taxes, reduce the size of government, enact school choice), the energetic supporters of Barack Obama have been burning through their shoe-leather. Yesterday afternoon, as I sweated through the heat of Center City Philadelphia's late summer, I passed several young people who were working up even more of a sweat registering new voters. Such efforts matter in our swing state.

McCain and Palin have a good chance of getting elected this November, given my reading of the polls, the persistence of subtle and less-than-subtle race baiting by the GOP, and the media's gentle treatment of McCain (whose party disingenuously continues to claim it is the victim of left-wing media bias).

But these recent figures on voter registration give me hope:

Colorado: 13,352 Republicans, 66,516 Democrats, 23,437 Independents

Florida: 77,196 Republican, 209,422 Democrat, 26,100 Independents

Iowa: 7,515 Republicans, 69,301 Democrats, -62,922 Independents

Nevada: 1,230 Republicans, 51,457 Democrats, 7,550 Independents

North Carolina: 20,363 Republicans, 171,955 Democrats, 123,605 Unaffiliated

and, of course,
Pennsylvania: 289 Republicans, 98,137 Democrats, 15,907 Independents (no aff.& other)

A lot can happen between now and November, including a mobilization of the right-wing, evangelical base in the GOP, which has finally awakened. But after a grim week of watching the Republican convention, I'm feeling a little better.

ELITE DELITE

I am taking a break from watching the depressing Republican National Convention. As comic relief, here is the funniest take ever on McBush's Obama as elitist meme. From The Onion via PostBourgie. I can't stop laughing.

SCARE TACTICS

Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, once the darling of the DLC and hailed as the mayor of the "hip hop" generation, has been mired in a scandal that is a tragedy for the struggling Motor City but a farce for everyone else. I won't rehearse the whole sordid story of a covered-up affair, "hear no evil, see no evil" police protection, the politically-motivated firing of whistleblowers, $9 million misspent city dollars on a losing court case, blatant perjury, bail skipping, and cop-shoving. Kilpatrick should have stepped aside long ago, for the sake of his constituents and his city.

But Kwame is now the unwitting tool of a group of politicians even slimier than he is. The Tennessee Republican Party is running an ad linking Barack Obama with the troubled mayor. Why should Tennessee residents care about the mayor of a far away city with only a nominal association with the presidential candidate? Call it one small dose of guilt by association and three big doses of "scary black man" race-mongering. This is appalling stuff. Expect worse to come.

SUBURBANITES BEWARE!

Suburbanites beware! The skryrocketing price of oil is part of a liberal conspiracy to destroy your way of life. Of $4 a gallon gas and the Democrats, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota) argues: "I know it is hard to believe, it's hard to fathom -- but this is 'mission accomplished' for them....They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That's their vision for America."

All I can say in response is thank goodness we're in the Last Days. Bachmann and the pious suburbanite rightists who support her will be lifted from their SUVs in the Rapture before President Obama herds them into subways and forces them into tenements.

Some other examples of Bachmann's religious hubris, her far-right views on the environment, and her general wingnuttery.

THE GREEN WEDGE

In the past few weeks the McCain campaign has finally found its Rovian mojo. Confident that the press will not report that the wheels have long ago fallen off the Straight Talk Express – and for the most part it hasn’t – McCain has launched the sorts of sleazy ads that must have Lee Atwater smiling.

So far, the issue that has gotten the most traction has been the question of off-shore drilling. It is pure political posturing, as everyone – including McCain – knows. To suggest that new off-shore drilling will lower gas prices and increase our energy independence is intellectually dishonest and farcical to boot. Even oilman and big-time Republican T. Boone Pickens has said that we can’t drill our way out of this energy crisis. But Americans, according to recent polls, have fallen for the red herring. They favor drilling in big numbers.

Those poll numbers point to a major fault line between two Democratic constituencies, a fault line that has rumbled for almost 40 years. On one side of the fault are those who care about environmental issues; on the other are those working people who feel the pain of rising energy prices most acutely. Both ought to be natural Democratic voters, especially this year. But if the economy continues to stagnate, even while the environmental crisis remains unaddressed, drilling – and all that it represents – may prove to be the great wedge issue of this election.

We’ve been here before, of course. The environmental movement arrived on the national scene in 1970 with the very first Earth Day on April 22. The great promise of the “ecology” movement was that it could unite Americans in a new way. Time Magazine, in a pre-Earth Day issue, wrote that clean air and water know no class or race. Every American had a stake in a cleaner future, so the promise went, and in a nation reeling from the fractious politics of the 1960s that promise was alluring.

But the promise was short lived. Within months of the first Earth Day, we entered the first energy crisis and the economy entered a period of “stagflation.” Quickly, the environment and the economy were cast as enemies in a pitched battle. What was good for the environment was bad for the economy; good environmental policies were too expensive in an age of rising inflation and rising unemployment; environmentalists were egg-headed elitists who didn’t understand the economic pain of working-class life.

It largely worked. The initial energy of the environmental movement faded with the economy, Reagan then rolled back progress on environmental issues, and the nation avoided reckoning with greenhouse gases, peak oil, or alternatives to fossil fuels. Through much of the 1980s and 90s, the environment became a niche issue, not a central part of the national agenda.

Forty years later, however, the environmental crisis is more urgent than ever, and we are reminded of it because oil prices have slowed the entire economy to a crawl. So the McRove campaign is working hard to redirect anger at the state of the economy toward environmentalists. Right-wing shills like Kevin Ferris writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer are already trying to paint Obama as the second coming of Jimmy Carter in a cardigan sweater.

For his part, Obama must aggressively create common cause between the environment and the economy. In the 1970s the environmental movement was driven by a set of moral imperatives, an ethos that scolded that we all ought to do the right thing despite costs and inconveniences. That ethos withered in the face of economic realities. This time around, we need to insist that what is good for the environment will be good for the economy.

Just as importantly, Obama needs to counter the McRove tactics by scaring voters in return, showing them that failure to develop new energy policies will leave this nation at risk. TV commercials showing American consumers in debt to evil-looking Gazprom executives, and parades of soldiers going off to fight yet another war for oil in the Middle East. A litany of jobs lost as America falls further and further behind in the eco-technology race.

We have a much better sense now than we did in the 1970s of what economic damage is being done by our over-reliance on oil. The only way for the Obama campaign to quiet the Republican noise machine over the issue of drilling is to punch back: the nation’s economy and its working people can’t afford an energy future which promises nothing but more of the same.

MCCAIN'S SECRET WEAPON?

Who will John McCain select as his vice presidential nominee? The conventional wisdom is that, in the end, the VP nominee doesn't really make much of a difference. And that's probably true. I mean who voted for Reagan because of Bush, or Bush because of Quayle, or Clinton because of Gore, or Bush II because of Cheney? But in a close race, on the margins, a carefully-selected veep choice could matter.

I'm not worried about the GOP darling du jour, Tim Pawlenty, who is subject to a fawning profile in this morning's NYT. Yes, he's photogenic, he's reputed to be a policy wonk, he's a member of a megachurch, he has an ethnic name, and he's the same age as Barack Obama. But he's not likely to put Minnesota in play for McCain (after all Pawlenty didn't even pick up a majority of voters in his run for the governorship.) Bobby Jindal is a favorite of many Republican insiders, but Louisiana will go Republican regardless and he's a little too novel, probably not quite white enough for the GOP hard core. McCain is probably not going to go for the novelty ticket. Most of the others on the GOP list aren't particularly compelling or have serious liabilities, like the chameleon Mitt Romney, the rabid Lindsay Graham, or the unctuous Charlie Crist. None of them will bring a lot of pizazz to the McCain ticket. Each of them will confirm the view of voters that McCain is really McSame, someone beholden to the GOP orthodoxy.

My guess is that if the people McCain is consulting on the vice presidency have more of a brain that the nitwits who are designing his ad campaign, they will make their vice presidential choice with a detailed electoral map in hand. They need to neutralize the Democrats in one or two key swing states. Two of the biggest prizes are Virginia and Florida. Obama has his eye on Virginia, which has gone cold for the Democrats since Lyndon Johnson, but which has leaned blue in recent years. Two of his frequently named possible veeps, Jim Webb and Tom Kaine, both problematic in my view, are Virginians. And, of course, Obama has his eyes on Florida, home to a volatile mix of Rustbelt-born Snowbirds, I-4 corridor evangelicals, generationally-divided Cuban-Americans, African Americans, small town white Southerners, and coastal cosmopolitans. But there's no compelling Floridian to serve as Obama's number two.

Putting myself in the shoes of McCain's advisors, there is one name which jumps out. And he scares me. The one potential GOP veep who has the potential to bag both Virginia and Florida for McCain is Eric Cantor, a 45-year old GOP representative and chief deputy house whip. Why Cantor? He's popular, he's a fresh face on the national scene, he's photogenic, he has impeccable wing-nut credentials, he represents a Richmond, Virginia district, and he will siphon off enough Florida voters from the Dems, especially older Jews who are uneasy with Barack Obama. A Jewish running mate for McCain, even if he is a rightist like Cantor, would play into McCain's carefully-crafted image as an out-of-the-box "moderate" who is willing to take a "risk."

If he knows what's good for him, Obama will go for a Rustbelter as his veep choice, maybe Ohio's popular Sherrod Brown (he's at the top of my list--listen up Barack). But here's another new, intriguing possibility: Michigan senator Carl Levin. I have a great deal of respect for Levin. (I first met him in high school and, if he's the nominee, I promise to post the photograph of Levin awarding me a scholarship. The first time I voted, I pulled the lever for Levin). He's one of the more liberal members of the Senate, he is smart and conscientious, he has been re-elected by huge margins in a key Rustbelt state, he is attuned to labor and economic issues, and he has strong foreign policy credentials, especially as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. There's something charming about the way that he resists the blow-dried look of most veep wannabees: he has a cheap haircut and rumpled suits. He's not in the least bit flashy. An Obama-Levin ticket would leave McCain-Cantor in the dust and will keep Florida in play. Carl Levin is a dark horse to be sure, but I'll join TNR's Jonathan Cohn and elevate him to the top ranks of my veep list.

MCCAIN'S TRUTH

The Democrats are going for McCain's jugular on economic issues. It's about time. This ad, pitched to Rustbelt voters by the Ohio Democratic Party, is brutally effective because it actually marshals damning facts to link John McCain, his lobbyist cronies, and the economic devastation of the Rustbelt. It's a stark contrast with McCain's fact-free ads about Obama and injured soldiers, Obama as Paris Hilton, and Obama as "the one."

Thanks to Ari (now I know he's a fellow Rustbelt Intellectual) at Edge of the American West.