Is America beginning a new post-Religious Right era—and are religious conservatives, white evangelicals in particular, becoming more “moderate” (or even mirabile dictu, “liberal”)? Those seem to me the two central claims of EJ Dionne’s latest book, Souled Out , which I highly recommend—but with which I’m afraid I disagree.

What’s happening instead, in my view, is the following:
 
First, political conservatives across-the-board are on the defensive--and retrenching--nowadays. The reasons for this have primarily to do with the “big issues” of public life—their mishandling of the war and the economy, as well as corruption (Abramoff, Delay) and incompetence (FEMA, Rumsfeld)—not religion. It has also produced some recent moments that suggest that flying saucers have indeed landed in Roswell: Karl Rove offering his unsolicited advice to Barack Obama on how to win; Newt Gingrich calling for greater bipartisanship; Michael Gerson discovering Catholic social justice teachings.

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I read a lot on religion and politics, but Souled Out gives some of the best historical overviews of contemporary American religious-political life I’ve come across. For example, Dionne sheds needed light on the Evangelical wing of the Religious Right by putting it in a broader context, and he does the same for the Catholic Right and Left too. The result, I think, is that readers from each side in current controversies can better see the rationale of their opponents. In an environment where political and religious disagreement so quickly turns to reductio ad absurdum and ad hominem street-fighting, this kind of respectful attention to “the other” is like opening a window in a stale room.

Simply by modeling a high degree of respect and empathy for both sides – as he does with unusual skill in Chapter 4, E.J. Dionne exemplifies what I believe is the only way out of so many of our current political deadlocks. (One way I’ve said this through the years is to say that almost everybody is against something worth being against; the trick is to avoid becoming so reactive that one finds oneself being for things not worth being for.)

I’ve noticed, though, that no matter how careful a writer like E.J. Dionne is, many secular folks are still nervous to hear religion and politics mentioned in the same sentence. One gets the feeling a good many commenters on “secular” political blogs wish that religious people would keep secret the religious roots of their political views – to put it gently, or that they would just shut up and go away - to put it bluntly. As a Christian myself, I share their distaste for the religious frame of mind that quickly reaches for the rhetorical blow-torch – although I’ve seen the irreligious display the same tendency.

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Bernard Avishai, who is one of Israel’s most provocative writers and thinkers, says that it is “getting harder and harder to find leaders in the Israeli government who are not calling for a massive invasion of Gaza.” He writes about two Israeli brothers in Sderot, 8-year-old Oshri Twito and his 19-year-old bother, Rami. “Imagine,” Avishai writes, “if you can bear it, the affection with which an older brother watches over his little brother on a Saturday evening.” They were walking in the street last week when a Kassam fired from Gaza blew up next to them. The 19-year old was severely injured. The little one lost a leg.

It is easy to see why Israelis are fed up. It is also easy to see why so many favor a full-scale invasion of Gaza to root out the terrorists. After all, what people in their right mind would put up with these attacks, attacks which serve no political goal and whose sole purpose is to terrorize and kill?

These are not attacks designed to end occupation. Even the most extreme Hamas militant knows that Israel is not going to withdraw from . . . Israel. These attacks are simply designed to inflict pain. As such, they are succeeding.

So why not invade?

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I'd like to point our readers to a blog post from last night by member David Headman titled, Cultus, not Cult: Obama and the Rationality of Civic Religion. The assertions we've seen popping up more and more recently that Obama's growing following represents a sort of "cult of personality" raise a number of interesting questions. Headman's argument, boiled down, is that, "What Obama's huge crowds represent is not a cult, but a group of people engaging in the practice of cultus." Take a look.

Relatedly, check out the latest two posts in our ongoing discussion of faith in the public sphere here and here.

What may turn out to be the worst thing to happen to the Obama campaign has been the Intrade Prediction Market's new bullishness on his candidacy. Now up to a 70 percent probability of winning the nomination (compared to 29 percent for Hillary Clinton, 1.2 percent for Al Gore, and 0.2 percent for John Edwards), Obama's stock has never been higher. Unfortunately for Obama, Intrade's indices throughout this campaign cycle have been incredibly reliable indicators of what would not actually happen.

On the Republican side, for example, the markets back in July had Giuliani and Thompson neck and neck for the nomination, with McCain languishing hopelessly below 10 percent -- where he flatlined until November. Giuliani dominated the markets throughout the second half of '07 notwithstanding widely available information about his unfitness for national office. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton's stock remained high throughout '07, plummeted after Iowa, soared after New Hampshire, then basically tanked again over the past week or so. The smart money, this year anyway, ain't so smart.

Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy reminds us that the next president of the United States will be, as much as everything, president of the world.

Consider this:

The separation of powers set out in the US constitution was created explicitly because human beings could not be trusted to act in "good faith." It generated a high legal culture and civic sense of the public interest. But at the same time its low expectations built in permission for Hobbesian "hard-ball" politics and the pursuit of self-interest which are coded into American political expectations. No one can successfully pursue the first who is not also a master of the second's darker arts. Obama seems to have a natural command of the double-game. He pitches himself as above partisan party politics, but in a consummately political fashion. He once said, "I've become a receptacle for a lot of other people's issues that they need to work out. . . . I've been living with this stuff my whole life." But he also attracts this identification with himself deliberately so that he embodies the national unity many Americans long for."

Before I move on to new comments, I want to return to the issue raised by Richard about religious practice and voting. I went back to the book so I could report the actual numbers referred to in my earlier post:

In 2004 . . . the media exit poll found that Americans who attend services more than once a week voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry by a margin of 64 percent to 35 percent. By contrast, those who said they never went to religious services backed Kerry, 62 to 36 percent. Case on religiosity closed?

Not quite. Taken together, these two groups account for only about three voters in ten -- 16 percent of American voters go to religious services more than once a week and 15 percent never go. What of the rest? Again, there is a definite relationship between Republican leanings and church attendance, but it is not as strong as once would assume looking only at the most and least religious. Weekly attenders backed Bush, 58 to 41 percent. Those who attended once a month split evenly, 50 percent for Bush, 49 percent for Kerry. Those who attended religious services a few times a year backed Kerry 54 to 45 percent.

Consolidating the categories among those who participate at least some of the time in organized religion, the four voters in ten who attended religious services once a week or more gave Bush 61 percent of their ballots; the four voters in ten who participated only occasionally gave Bush 47 percent, a difference of 14 percent.

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So Mark Penn implies that if Obama doesn't win "states that count" then even if he has more elected delegates he should not be nominated at the convention.

By "states that count" Penn apparently means mostly states that Clinton won or that have not yet voted.

But either Democratic nominee, or for that matter any of Edwards, Dodd, Richardson or Biden, will win in November in states like California, New York, and New Jersey. These are are not the states that anyone should worry about if the goal if, as it should be, to nominate not only a fine President but someone who is most likely to win this fall and do well nationally so as to bring in a large Congressional majority. Of course they "count" but they aren't where Democrats should look to see who would best lead the party this November.

Those states, of those that have voted so far, include

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While the current economic slump is of unknown depth and duration, there's no doubt that if half of what we have spent on Iraq had been spent on American infrastructure and non-carbon energy generation, we would have much greater job creation, higher wages per job, more economic growth, and a better quality of life in the United States.

I admit we need economists to study this issue and prove the magnitude of the difference between spending our treasure in the desert sands instead of within our national boundaries. But I'm not in doubt that I'm right on this one.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we will be featuring here on the front page selections from the vast and growing world of TPM reader blogs. The idea is to bring to the fore, not just the experts and old-hands who come here regularly to discuss their own areas of expertise, but also the many readers-turned-contributors who also deserve some attention.

For reasons obvious enough, most blogs posted this week have dealt with number crunching, polling data, and, of course, the looming super-delegate question. I actually considered momentarily the idea of featuring only posts having to do with anything but the current state of the primary. Whether or not that would have been a good idea, it turned out to be a de facto impossibility.

On that note, I hope you all will take a few minutes to read over, and engage, with the following posts.

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I am grateful for E.J. raising the important truth that we can never be complacent in the pursuit of justice. It is particularly tempting for people who are privileged to have a seat at important tables to forget that our task is nothing less than making God’s kingdom real.

Now that’s a daunting mission, indeed, and one Christians are mindful of every time we say the “Lord’s Prayer.” But I believe this speaks to an essential point E.J. also makes about how Christians and all people of faith “have the task of calling the world -- and ourselves-- to account in the name of higher standards than any government or economic system typically achieves.”

In its mystery and transcendent power, faith challenges us to see with new eyes, open closed hearts and speak with prophetic clarity. For those of us walking the crossroads of religion and politics, we must not sell our faith short by reducing religion’s role in public life simply to a laundry list of policy positions or talking points with a Biblical quote thrown in for good measure. Faith calls us to something far deeper and more profound about universal human dignity, the hunger for redemption and the need to mend a broken world.

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Dear Clinton Campaign,

Hi! How are you all doing? I’m asking because it seems to me that some of you are getting a little tone-deaf when it comes to things like “elections.” Take this front-page article in the New York Times, for example. Yes, I know it’s the work of Adam Nagourney, and as always, I take it with the recommended daily allowance of salt. But the real problem is that your people are going to the press and talking openly about claiming the nomination regardless of what the final pledged-delegate tally looks like. You’ve got Mark Penn telling NBC that Obama hasn’t won any significant states, and Howard Wolfson telling the Boston Globe that your candidate will lean on the superdelegates, as well as the controversial Florida and Michigan delegations, even if she trails Obama in pledged delegates. This is a problem, people.

Look, I know I’m only a lowly literature professor, and not a high-paid professional consultant. And I know I usually cover the Facetious Commentary Beat here at the Café, because, hell, someone’s gotta do it. There just isn’t enough snark around these parts some days. But do you mind if I get serious for a moment and explain to you all why this new PR strategery of yours is exceptionally ill-considered?

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This superdelegate hullabaloo is completely mistimed and off the subject: what matters is who wins Wisconsin, Texas, and Ohio.

George W. Bush certainly seems like he likes to strangle things. He's been trying to strangle Cuba and Cuban-American families with tightened restrictions on family-related travel to emphasize how much every President of the United States since Eisenhower has tried (and failed) to undermine Fidel Castro's government.

Now, Bush yesterday started to strangle Syria more tightly. Arguing that Syria is not doing enough to stop the movement of terrorists between Iraq and Syria, Bush issued an Executive Order increasing the number of Syrian officials whose financial assets can be held.

So -- someone on the press beat with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, ask these two presidential hopefuls if they agree with the President's action against Syria or not? If so, why? If not, what reasons would they as President use to undo our counter this action.

I'll give you my answer. Bush's move is reckless -- and threatens to add further stress to a region that is wondering whether Bush's initiative to achieve some kind of Israel/Palestine deal is real or contrived.

Syria must be a party to any arrangement with the broader Arab world -- and thus far, Syria has been on the whole reasonably behaved with regard to Israel. When Israel attacked some warehouses that Seymour Hersh argues were not nuclear weapons related, Syria restrained itself from attacking back and did not unleash agents into Israel to create domestic strife.

But beyond that, I have no idea if terrorists are really moving between Iraq and Syria or not -- but I do know that the Syrian government itself sees zero benefit to hosting insurgents or Islamic radicals in its country. The Syrian government is as worried about the impact of anti-government Islamist militancy within its borders as Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states.

What I do know is that Syria is hosting more than 1.2 million refugees from Iraq and that the United Nations and Europe have been applauding and publicly commending Syria and Jordan, which has another million. This refugee problem is a function of the American invasion, and it's simply outrageous that the United States would move to further punish Syria when it is carrying much of the load for our Middle East actions.

I really want to hear what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would do in this case.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Of course you do, because apparently none of your elected officials are arguing against current plans to this effect, or least if they were, the WSJ couldn't find them.

The basic story is very simple. A bunch of greedy and not very bright bankers made hundreds of billions of dollars of predatory loans to low and moderate income people, enabling them to buy homes in bubble inflated markets. Now these people cannot afford to pay their mortgages and the house prices have fallen far below the value of the mortgages. This means that the bankers are looking at huge losses.

But these are not poor people trying to provide child care or health care for their kids, these are rich bankers. So, naturally Congress will cough up the dough.

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As a political movement gathers what seems to be irresistible force, it rides currents of anger as well as affirmation. How it balances and channels those currents determines its fate. A movement can be fired up by outraged decency, but it will come to little -- or worse -- if its participants spend more time and energy venting the outrage than advancing the decency.

Barack Obama understands this unusually well. But how will he help his supporters understand it, when the going gets tough? Answering that question requires knowing a little history, knowing Obama, and knowing ourselves, whether we are his supporters or not.

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Whaddaya know? This morning, as a thought experiment, Maureen Dowd contemplated a woman making a successful run for President. She’d like that, she says. She even hopes the “male reporters” in the media would behave if it ever happened. Presumably she includes herself in that group.

Dowd’s candidate would have an easier time than the real female candidate running, because Dowd’s candidate is not a real person, but one of those women on the internet pornography sites. Maureen’s candidate has no brain, no record, no history, no family, no past statements, no existence except in her overheated imagination.

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Obama has by no means won; the Clintons have many advantages in Ohio and Texas, and if they win both of those states, then she is in front again.

The supertruth about superdelegates is that they should all vote for the person who has the most non-super delegates. That's the purpose of superdelegates: to turn a plurality into a majority so as to avoid a floor fight about Fla or Mich or anything else.

And Obama's infrastructure spending plan is exactly what is needed to create new jobs and a new footing for the economy; it is exactly what should have been done in the 90s instead of cooperating with the Republicans to stint on public good creation.

Once again, Florida and its votes are in question.

Ever since the DNC stripped Florida and Michigan of its delegates for violating party rules and holding their primaries ahead of the nominating contest window (which opened on 5 February), there has been a fight brewing about what to do with the votes cast during those two states’ primaries. Should the votes be translated into delegates seated at the convention? For Senator Clinton, the answer is yes – since she won these two contests. For Senator Obama, the answer is no – the rules are the rules.

Yesterday, Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Bill Nelson of Florida rejected the one remedy that their states can take: hold new nominating contests now before the primary window closes on 11 June. “It would not be practical or fair to hold a caucus,” Levin told Roll Call.

Actually, not only is a new caucus practical and fair, but it also would give these two states the attention that both yearned for (thus their defiance of DNC rules). And for the presidential candidates, there are real political benefits to each of them if they seize on this idea and put their weight behind a re-running of Florida and Michigan.

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Joshua Muravchik and Charles P. Szrom address this vital question directly in their article in the February issue of Commentary. The importance of this question is well summarized in a quote they provide from Daniel Pipes: “radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam the solution.” That is, it is wrong to treat all the followers of the Prophet as if they were terrorists or their supporters (the way Samuel Huntington and Sir Bernard Lewis do); it is equally mistaken to view Islam as a religion of peace, which is sometimes “hijacked” by terrorist to justify their act (as President Bush pronounced). It is an empirical fact of considerable ethical and political import that Muslims—like followers of all other major belief systems, religious and secular—differ greatly from one another. Some could make good allies; some, sadly, are unavoidable enemies. The key question is: who is who?

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Barack Obama has just announced support for a national infrastructure bank -- similar to the one that Senators Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel have been pushing for in Congress.

This is really important for the nation -- and helps to get back to sensible thinking about rebuilding the foundation on which this country's commerce, jobs base, social networks, just about everything that requires connectivity is based. Dems -- particularly budget hawks -- are in a bind because the stress on the discretionary part of the national budget is going to preempt any 'politics of optimism' if we can't distinguish between capital investments in national infrastructure that will help drive forward growth and gains for the economy -- and other kinds of disbursements that have less of an impact on economic growth.

This is great. To be fair, Hillary Clinton has talked a lot about infrastructure in the debates and in her speeches. . .but to my knowledge she had not proposed anything as tangible as this national infrastructure bank concept.

It's about time -- and it makes sense. Good for Senator Obama. I hope that Hillary Clinton joins up to the idea.

Here are Obama's words on the subject delivered today in Janesville, Wisconsin at a GM assembly plant:

For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America. I'm proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years.

This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs -- many of them in the construction industry that's been hard hit by this housing crisis. The repairs will be determined not by politics, but by what will maximize our safety and homeland security; what will keep our environment clean and our economy strong.

And we'll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead.

Truth in advertising. The New America Foundation where I work is working hard to move national infrastructure investment forward as evident in this article by Samuel Sherraden and this piece, "Public Investment Works" by Sherle R. Schwenninger and Bernard L. Schwartz.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

TPMCafé habitués, supporters of Clinton and Obama and Edwards and Gravel, my fellow Americans. I come to you today without prognoses and without predictions. I will leave it to others to deliberate what Barack Obama’s recent primary victories might mean; I will leave to Josh the momentous matters of Texas and Ohio, Michigan and Florida, superdelegates and campaign shakeups, and I will leave to Todd the overwhelming question of whether the good old boys at MSNBC have this poster adorning their studio walls.

For I come to you today with a very simple proposition: if Barack Obama is going to win the Presidency and unite America, he needs to start signalling that he's willing to choose me as his running mate.

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Yesterday’s primary results revealed two important things: Obama is the frontrunner, and we have a pretty good idea how McCain plans to attack him.

On the first point, it ain’t over for the D’s, as the primary moves to some big states where Clinton might have more of an edge. But it’s the second point on which I’d like to focus, because it’s important for progressives to get out in front of this one right away.

Early this AM, I debated Stephan Moore, the anti-tax activist and Wall St. Journal editorial writer. He’s explicitly scared by Obama’s momentum and his line of attack was something like: Sure, he’s inspirational, but “where’s the beef?”

And check out McCain from this morning’s Washington Post: “To encourage a country with only rhetoric, rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people, is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.”

It’s an obvious strategy: try to turn your opponent’s strength into his weakness. But it’s nuts. Both Obama and Clinton are incredibly beefy, with policy agendas that are more robust and carefully thought out than that any presidential bid in recent memory. On health care reform alone, they’re trailblazing.

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Howard Fineman says he's talked to both campaigns and both now believe it's unlikely that Hillary Clinton can end the campaign with more delegates than Barack Obama. The question is whether she can keep the margin close enough to make it credible (not numerically but politically) to make up the difference with super delegates. (You can see the video of Fineman making his argument here.)

Is that true? And what are the implications for the race if it is?

First, let me thank the remarkable group of people who have agreed to participate in this discussion. I admire them all, and appreciate their taking time to offer their insights. I’ll be replying here to the posts I have in hand from Brian McLaren, Richard Parker and Alexia Kelley. I’ll post again on the other contributors.

I found Brian McLaren’s comments deeply moving (and extremely generous). I know a number of evangelicals who were greatly influenced by Francis Schaeffer and had been unaware that he had urged Christians to be “revolutionaries against the status quo.” The heart of my argument with the Christian Right does not concern their assertion that Christianity has a political dimension. Of course it does. But I write in the book: “It is impossible to see Jesus as a tool of the Establishment, It is difficult to imagine this revolutionary figure arguing that cuts in inheritance and capital gains taxes should be the highest goals in politics.”

I do not claim, and I know Brian McLaren doesn’t either, that Jesus is primarily a political figure. Those of us on the left or liberal side need to resist the temptation to turn Jesus into the Eugene Debs or Franklin Roosevelt of antiquity. His mission was primarily spiritual, and Christian salvation claims are more than a promise of a more egalitarian society or a wiser form of government. But I do believe that Christians (and this applies to followers of the Jewish tradition as well) have the task of calling the world -- and ourselves -- to account in the name of higher standards than any government or economic system typically achieves. Religious people should be hard to satisfy. I think Martin Luther King Jr. set the bar very high, and rightly so, when he said: “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream’." We all have a lot of work to do.

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Let me begin by saying how much I’m enjoying EJ’s book. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Souled Out, and I have already learned a tremendous amount. It’s an incredibly thoughtful book, clearly the product of the many years its author has spent carefully considering religion and politics. But I have one critique that I’d like to offer the group.

EJ does an admirable job of showing that, even on the touchiest “values” issues, like abortion and gay marriage, there is more common ground between liberals and conservatives than one might expect: “Cultural liberals are as appalled as anyone else that their children might watch X-rated movies or cruise dangerous Web sites. Cultural conservatives who have gay friends cannot abide prejudice against homosexuals. Opponents of abortion often cannot find it in themselves to condemn a woman they know who has had an abortion for a reason they understand. Some supporters of abortion rights find the issue morally troubling nonetheless and might never choose to have an abortion themselves.” (All of which reminds me of Barack Obama’s 2004 convention speech: “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.”)

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As of today, every Tuesday and Thursday, I will use my bully pulpit as TPM intern to promote some of the outstanding reader blogs that are posted here each week. I hope you'll take the time to check them out, especially since a major reason for building the controversial new TPM site was that, hopefully, it would open the door to a much more robust community experience. So, these twice-weekly posts will help to foreground some of our readers' writing and generate even more discussion at our already thriving Cafe. Here goes. . .

The Grand Panjandrum explains the burgeoning Super-Delegate Transparency Project. Granted, the call for greater super-delegate accountability has largely become the cause of the Obama campaign. Frankly, though, no matter whom you support, some extra clarity in this especially murky domain of party politics can't be bad for democracy.

Billy Glad offers a critical look at Obama's proposal for the First US-Iran Summit, an idea that, if Sen. Obama does win the nomination, should certainly be at the forefront of many coming discussions.

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Ideology and political expediency have trumped the Gospel’s prophetic call to justice and peace for those who have recently dominated the debate over faith and politics in America. But a narrow interpretation of faith in the public square is at odds with our nation’s great religious movements.

The Catholic social tradition in particular offers an unequivocal critique of policies advanced by leading neoconservatives on the religious right who have trumpeted the Iraq war and a holy trinity of tax cuts, unregulated free markets and a Darwinian brand of corporate capitalism that has been devastating to the poor and most vulnerable among us.

Preemptive war and tax cuts for the wealthiest do align with a clear political agenda. But they do not square with the teachings of Christ, who preached “good news” to the poor, kicked the money changers out of the Temple and taught us to love our enemies. The Biblical prophets spoke out against greed and imperial arrogance, reminding kings and the people to serve God humbly and to embrace the widow, the orphan and the stranger in their lands.

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As I began reading E. J. Dionne’s Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right, a memory kept coming to mind, a memory from my college years in the 1970’s.

I should begin by confessing that I am an Evangelical Christian born of Evangelical Christians. Admittedly, my status as an Evangelical these days is questionable: Time Magazine listed me as an influential one, but I get the feeling that some notables at Christianity Today would be less enthusiastic to do so. Whatever my current status, I grew up swimming in the deep end of the Evangelical pool, and like a lot of my Evangelical peers, I was strongly influenced in my college years by the work of the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer.

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EJ is a friend, a great reporter and columnist—and in Souled Out he has again brought his enormous passion and formidable intellect to bear on American politics and religion in ways that benefit us all.

Having said that, let me challenge a key point underpinning the book’s thesis.

“Over the last two decades,” he says, “much of the public discourse was premised on the idea of religion as a right-wing force.” Actually, I think that’s true and false at once, and thus confused—and hence a central reason we are having difficulty thinking clearly about religion’s role in America.

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We'll have responses up to E.J. Dionne's first post in the Book Club later this morning, but I wanted to make sure you all saw his responses to reader at the bottom of his thread. Here he agrees with a reader that religion is neither inherently conservative nor liberal, and here he takes on the New Atheists.

Subtly, continuously, President Clinton invokes identity politics: he tells everyone all the time that Obama is the black candidate, Mrs. Clinton the female candidate.

Bill Clinton grew up with the identity politics of the 60's and 70's. Barack Obama is talking about a politics that does not start and finish with demographics, but instead depends on common ethical principles that don't so much cross, as they ignore lines drawn by race, gender, and religion.

The choice now is between the old identity politics -- the politics that gave the Democratic Party nominees like Walter Mondale and Mike Dukakis, honorable people whose candidacies did not inspire -- and a new kind of politics that might build a large, winning, and effective coalition.

By talking daily about identity, President Clinton is rooting himself and by extension Mrs. Clinton in an old, out-of-date reference scheme. Maybe it will work; maybe in some other big blue state this old language will still resonate. But increasingly I doubt that.

Sen. John McCain has a woman problem. As many people remember, a supporter asked him last November "how are we going to beat that bitch?" His response, after a good old boy's chuckle, was "That's an excellent question." He then went on to discuss his superior poll ratings and ended with a dutiful statement about how much he respected Sen. Hillary Clinton.

McCain's out-of-control sexism is hardly new. In 1998, he made David Shuster seem positively tame. At a Republican fund-raiser, he jokingly asked "Why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly." His answer was that "Janet Reno was the father."

Surely, I need not spell out the implications.

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House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) died today after a battle with cancer.

Lantos was one of the Congress' last real characters of an age mostly gone in which eccentricity, a hybrid of vanity and humility, purpose, passion, and gentility packaged together was a winning path to leadership positions like the one he held for so long.

I enjoyed running into Lantos and his wife at parties around Washington. They loved the good food and wine that they could sample during the evening by jumping from one ritzy gathering to the next -- but although he loved the political scene in Washington and the schmoozing that went with it -- there was always an undercurrent of concern for the global underclass, for those discriminated against, for those with no ladder to get up to a level where decency and humaneness were not anomalies.

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Consider a political story told long ago that reminds us that the words “Jesus” and “religious” were not always reflexively associated with the words “right” or “conservative.” It is the story of Mrs. O’Reilly and her son who was dutifully taking her to the polls on Election Day. Mrs. O’Reilly always voted straight Democratic. Her son, a successful member of the upper middle class, had become an independent and voted for many Republicans.

As was their routine, the son asked the mother how she would vote, and, as always, she answered, “Straight Democratic.” The exasperated son replied, “Mom, if Jesus came back to earth and ran as a Republican, you would vote against him.” And she snapped back, “Aw, hush, why should he change his party after all these years?”

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Via Americablog, this incredible parody take-off of the Obama Yes We Can video.

In an article in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman takes a cheap shot at Barack Obama and his campaign, all in a piece allegedly aimed at expressing concern about the level of unnecessary bitterness being spread in the Democratic presidential primaries. Witness the following passage:

"I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again."

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Subprime mortgages are in the spotlight, but credit card debt has not subsided. Last quarter credit card grew at a rapid 9.3%. For many families, tricks and traps pricing will mean a debt treadmill that will keep these families making payments forever. As struggling families look for a way to get off the debt treadmill without declaring bankruptcy, they run into a new industry: Debt settlement companies.

These businesses promise to negotiate with creditors for some debt forgiveness, but the companies too often take a customer's money and give little in return. Once again, hard-pressed families are thrown into a market that has figured out how to grab the last dollars they have. The industry is growing rapidly, but there are no regulations, no industry standards, and no one to turn to for help if the customer gets cheated. Already struggling and looking for help, these families are naked in a cold world of people who see them as one more profit opportunity.

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"This week's issue of the [New York Times] Book Review ranges over American politics but not, we hope, in a familiar way," its editors write Upfront. They mean not only that their special February. 10 issue, "Politics, Real and Imagined," is devoted almost exclusively to politics but also that it ranges across genres -- books about the politics of race, religion and gender, plus memoirs, and even fiction.

But something besides all that, too, is "not familiar" about this issue, I realized on Friday, when I received a message telling me to "Take a bow." It came from a reader of my excoriations of the Times Book Review last fall here at TPMCafe, The Nation and The Guardian.

"There are sixteen reviews here," my tipster wrote on Friday, "but not a one" by Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, David Brooks, Richard Brookhiser, Christopher Hitchens, Joe Klein, Leon Wieseltier, or the other pumped-up assailants of liberals whom I'd accused of turning the Sunday book section into a "neoconservative damage-control gazette" under editor Sam Tanenhaus. (Mediabistro's Galley Cat called the section a "shadow op ed page" ) So what gives?

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Various delegate count analysts are showing that Obama made some gains in diminishing the gap between himself and delegate leader Hillary Clinton.

Matt Stoller writes that on a net basis, Obama may have added 45 net delegates more than Hillary Clinton did yesterday. Real Clear Politics has Hillary Clinton ahead overall now by just 15 delegates at 1121 over Obama's 1106.

In the upcoming near term races -- Maine (which takes place today), Virgninia, DC, and Maryland -- there are 272 delegates up for grabs.

Ben Smith has published an interesting roster showing the Obama campaign's own predictions on delegate distribution in these upcoming races -- and if the facts on the ground remain similar to the Obama campaign's expectations -- Hillary Clinton will pick up 93 delegates. Obama's crowd expects harvesting 99 in these races, leaving her still a smidgen ahead.

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