In the current New Yorker, George Packer quotes David Frum's new book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, as follows:

If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon... Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well.

Tell it to John "Swift Boat" Kerry. But I digress.

Frum goes on: "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today."

That's high-minded David Frum, thinking positively about how the wonders of "the market" will solve all the problems it's failed to solve for the last, oh, century. Republicans, it follows, need to become the high-road party, zooming away that muddy old low-road ditch where Nixon Way flows into Rove Alley. Not having read Comeback, I'll take George Packer's word for it that Frum's positive ideas represent "a candid change of heart from a writer who, in [his 1994 book Dead Right] called Republican efforts to compete with Clinton's universal-health-coverage plan 'cowardly.'" Perhaps, in Frum's book, it's time to rouse interest in a Republican Party that might improve on George W. Bush, about whom Frum wrote in his previous book, The Right Man: "His vision was large and clear." Clear. Can Frum tear himself away from the large and clear vision of the man he not so long go considered "right"? It would seem he's still a "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists" kind of guy.

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The tiny right-wing Jewish minority is fascinating.

In this article, Dennis Prager, the leader of the suck-up to anti-semitic Christian pack, explains that Pastor Hagee is not anti-Semitic even though he said that the Holocaust was part of God's plan and that Hitler was essentially his messenger. In fact, Prager compares Hagee to Raoul Wallenberg who saved 100,000 Jews from the gas chambers designed by God's messengers.

This is the same Prager who denounces liberals, gays, Democrats, African-Americans, feminists and anybody who dissents from far-right policies on Israel as anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-American.

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According to NBC's Chuck Todd, 57 superdelegates could end the Clinton's delusional hope for the nomination in the next few days. The sad remarks about the Kennedy Assassination should give Supers like James Clyburne and others the opening to get off the fence and end this charade. The former President would have to stop his back room lobbying for the V.P. slot and we could all get on with the important work of creating a Democratic landslide in the fall.

Someone who should know told me the other day that the federal government should sell oil futures short, perhaps thereby driving prices down. The worst that could happen, he explained, is that prices would not fall, but would rise, and the government would have to cover by buying at a higher price than it sold. This the government could afford (unlike individuals or even big trading firms). The best scenario is that if there is a price bubble it would pop, prices would fall, the government would make money by buying oil at a lower price than it had sold, and consumers would be better off.

Is this a good idea?

More generally, what are the ways and means, if any, by which the government should try to pop bubbles, whether dot.com or real estate or commodities? Seems as if we ought to know by now.

I'm holding a contest: in 100 words or less compare two Arizonans nominated for President: Goldwater and (presumably) McCain.

Goldwater, as you can recall or look up, ran on the slogan "In your heart you know he's right." This was supposed to link his rightwingedness to correct positions on issues, and also to signify that the liberal or New Deal consensus, while hard to reject in most circles, was no longer valid.

The common riposte was "In your guts you know he's nuts."

So compare away, please. The winning prize: helping Obama, who is quite obviously sane, temperate, articulate, consistent, and just the sort of person who ought to be commander in chief, get elected President.

Sometimes there is simply nothing one can say. Words simply fail me. Luckily they don't fail Olbermann.

PS. Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told The Post, "She was talking about the length of the race and using the '68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone -- she used her husband's race in the same vein."

Not true. Until 1996, the California primary was always at the end of the process so things kept going until June. All the big California primaries were capstones at the end of the race. That is why Bobby was in California in June. And that is why Bill Clinton was there in June. There were hundreds of delegates still to be won.

But this year California voted in February and as June begins only Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana are still to be heard from. The analogy is ridiculous.

HILLARY RAISES ASSASSINATION ISSUE
DEFENDS LONG RUNNING CAMPAIGN

May 23, 2008 --

Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

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Alternate Universe Washington, DC (AUP)--An influential group of liberal pundits and political commentators has formed a new organization to apologize for their columns on Ned Lamont's 2006 challenge to Joe Lieberman (R - Forallintentsandpurposes) and to call for their own resignations.

The organization, "Repentant Villagers," announced today that it would be issuing formal apologies to hundreds of liberal bloggers, including Duncan Black, Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Glenn Greenwald, and "Digby," acknowledging that the progressive blogosphere was right about Lieberman after all. "No one could have anticipated the breach of the party," said Jonathan Chait, senior editor of the New Republic. "But Lieberman's recent op-ed, calling the Democratic Party insufficiently pro-American, is just sheer barking lunacy. I could never have seen this coming two years ago when I was calling Lieberman's critics 'a pack of crazed, ignorant ideological cannibals,' and I'm deeply sorry. It looks like I turned out to be the truly ignorant one in the end."

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Joe Lieberman may lament what he considers to be the shift of the Democratic Party, but he may also want to reflect on how neoconservatives have so dramatically changed and warped the Republican Party in foreign policy.

Spend some time with these lines from Eisenhower, gathered together by regular TPM Cafe reader Michael Beaver. They remind me of Senator Chuck Hagel's anger about reckless wars of choice in the Middle East, his view that we need a new centrist social contract across our nation, that we need to make America an example that inspires others around the world -- not a nation that tries to force feed democracy down the throats of others. This reminds me of the time Chuck Hagel gave a speech for the New America Foundation in which he said posing questions to the White House about matters of war and peace was not disloyal and was absolutely patriotic.

If I was in Barack Obama's shoes and Hillary Clinton had turned down my offer to run as Vice President, I'd go with Eisenhower in a unity ticket -- and because Eisenhower is not available, I'd go for Chuck Hagel. John McCain couldn't put a ticket together to beat that combo.

From TWN reader Michael Beaver's Eisenhower-isms roster:

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Our pick of the day's best reader posts.

• Phill Hallam-Baker responds to M.J. Rosenberg's claim that the Israel Lobby lost Clinton the nomination.


• San Fernando Curt asks who, exactly, has been telling America's story for the past eight years?


• Big Blue continues profiling Obama's potential veeps. Today: Tim Kaine and Wes Clark


• Project Vote describes a few of the week's key battles for voting rights

Allow me to clarify a little my critique of Eric's analysis. When I
criticize the New Deal-Fair Deal era, I'm not doing so from a purist or
rigidly ideological perspective. My interest isn't in overturning or
scrapping the modern American welfare and regulatory state that was
created then; such a goal is, to my way of thinking, neither possible
nor appropriate. My interest is in reforming and modernizing the welfare
and regulatory state by bringing it more in line with the best of
contemporary social science and the bedrock liberal principles of
individualism and suspicion of concentrated power.

The problem is that America's welfare and regulatory state was created
at a time when social scientists were smitten with hubris about the
possibilities of central planning -- and when, due to the traumas of the
Great Depression and total war, individualism and suspicion of
concentrated power were at their lowest ebb in American history.

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Why are we playing the Republicans game?

Months ago the Republicans and certain Democratic campaigns began pushing the meme that Jews won't vote for Obama. That line was accompanied (what a coincidence) with millions of anonymous e-mails warning Jews that Obama was a Muslim, a Hamas lover, a friend of Israel's enemies.

Obama's Jewish supporters like me had no choice but to respond. And we did.

But enough is enough. Jewish Democrats who still do not intend to vote for Obama are not going to be persuaded. Read the coverage. Listen to what they say. They decided they would not vote for him the first minute they saw him.

They don't trust him. And they won't. And it would take surgery well beyond modern technology to change Obama into someone they can support.

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I have decided that there are only two criteria Barack Obama should consider when he chooses a running mate. The first is: would this person a credible successor? The Vice President cannot be someone who, should he or she become President, would reverse the course the President started on.

Other than that, I say pick the best debater.

Historians say that the only VP choice who carried his home state and thereby won it for the ticket was LBJ. That is probably true. But one VP candidate out of a few dozen hardly establishes a precedent worth following.

Nowadays the only time a VP candidate matters is when he debates his or her counterpart. In 2000, Joe Lieberman's poor performance totally humanized Dick Cheney and contributed to the Bush "victory." John Edwards was also disappointing in his debate with Cheney which hurt Kerry's chances.

We need a VP candidate who will not only destroy his opponent in the debate but also serve as Obama's surrogate in hitting McCain hard. That is how Ike used Nixon, Johnson used Humphrey, Clinton used Gore, and Bush used Cheney. A good VP is the best deputy a Presidential candidate can have,

Obama needs to figure out who that person is and go for it.

John H. McFadden surveys the intersections of psychology and diplomacy, specifically with respect to Iran
Fosberry argues that Clinton and Obama's differing conceptions of public opinion have played a pivotal role in the primary race
• Josh Craft takes a look at the possibilities for a progressive realignment following an Obama victory
• Boyd Reed thoroughly excoriates Joe Lieberman and his wrong-headed foreign policy weltanschauung, as outlined in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed
• Finally, WaldenGirl argues, rightly, that "Women's Political Hopes Do Not Begin and End with Hillary Clinton"

As the community is growing and the threads (especially in the Reader Blogs) are getting long, I've been thinking a lot about how we can encourage a culture of discussion here at TPMCafe. Rules and software tools are good (and I'm sure some folks will have advice on that count), but I'm of the school of thought that you should only go there if you can't solve the problem with community culture. In other words, if we can collectively come to an understanding of what you can and can't do here, and collectively push back when folks violate TPMCafe cultural norms, explicit management moderation or comment ratings may not be necessary.

Then this morning, I found a chart (after the break).

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Two months ago, I posted on payday lending in Ohio. By next week, Governor Ted Strickland will sign into law a bill that would cap interest rates on payday loans at 28 percent in the state.

Notably, some payday lenders defended their practice by saying that banks engage in the same practice: a $35 fee for a bank overdraft amounts to a 913% interest rate. Good point. But that is just another reason for why federal regulators should take a more honest look at the true nature of overdraft fees, and not for Ohio (or any other state) to back down on payday lending. Ohio's economy has taken a beating recently. Kudos to the legislature for acting to make sure that Ohioans don't get hit twice (or, on average, much more) from payday lenders.

John Judis in The New Republic writes that Hillary Clinton might have lost the nomination due to her efforts at "winning the support of the pro-Israel lobby."

Specifically, Hillary's big mistake was backing the Kyl-Lieberman resolution which targeted the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. That resolution was drafted by Dick Cheney's office and Congressional neocons as a part of the run-up to war with Iran.

"Like her refusal to apologize for the October 2002 war resolution, her vote on Kyl-Lieberman may have stemmed from her ignoring the primary and thinking about the general election, or--as Helene Cooper suggested in The New York Times--it might have been an attempt to win support from the pro-Israel lobby,' which strongly backed the resolution. Whatever the case, her vote was a political disaster. It confirmed the worst fears of anti-war Democrats about her foreign policy inclinations. Her rivals denounced her vote, and she had to answer for it in ads, mailings, and debates through early January. It gave Obama an enormous push at a time when he seemed to be floundering and laid the groundwork for his success in fund-raising and in the Iowa caucuses."

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Obama gave a great speech last night in Iowa and continued to hammer McCain.

"I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don't represent is change."

So what was the McCain camp's response?

America needs a commander in chief who is ready from day one. John McCain has the experience, character and courage to move America forward with strength, optimism and resolve."

Hasn't that line already been tried and abandoned by another Obama opponent? Goldman Sachs says we are headed for $6 per gallon gas. Only 18% of the country thinks we are "on the right track." "Ready from day one" is just not going to cut it.

If the tremendous--and deserved--outpouring for Senator Ted Kennedy's well-being shows anything, it shows the power of a savvy legislator who has a clear agenda and keeps at it for decades. As one of his congressional colleagues noted in the NYTimes today, not only has he stuck with his vision and has been one of the most successful-- if not most successful-- legislator in our time, but he's also hired excellent staff who have aided not only his efforts, but the broader progressive cause for decades.

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We're still waiting for a good (not too snarky) name for our new daily Editors' Picks Post. In the meantime, here are today's best reader submissions.

• Big Blue continues profiling Obama's potential VP's. Today: Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius


• Genghis looks at the sobering of the GOP, and its plans to gather voters back into the fold


• Reader ronburgandy reveals John McCain's plans to troll the blogosphere to spread its talking points and TrollCritic 3000 offers a solution


• John H. McFadden rebuts Billy Glad and shows that Obama can rise above the prevailing morality


• DrSteveA considers Israel-Syria peace talks, and how diplomacy really works in the Middle East


• wanderwolf suggests that John McCain may actually be a bigger warmonger than George W. Bush

Well, thanks to Joan, Ed and Brink for their responses. I do very appreciate their thought and care.

Regarding Joan's post, frankly, I don't see its relevance to any of the arguments in my book, (to which it makes no reference). I'm pleased that Joan is a proud liberal and unapologetic for being so. I don't think she should apologize for any of the positions she names. I happen to hold all of them myself, also, unapologetically. It's true, as Joan writes, that "it's crucial to remember that the "divisive politics of identity," and the lack of sensitivity to the "cultural concerns of everyday Americans" are one way of characterizing the liberal fight for civil and abortion rights and income equality." But that's not what I have done and since Joan cites no examples of where I have, again, I'm confused about their relevance to our discussion here. Joan adds, "The last thing liberals should be is apologetic for their efforts to make our society more just, more equitable." Again, agreed. Who would argue differently?

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Watching Obama last night, I had to shake myself. As he said, it's been a long road since Iowa. And he's not President yet.

Nonetheless, it is fitting to think about the amazing victory he has already won. Barring accident (God knows this is a violent country so that caveat is always in order), the Democratic party is going to nominate a black man for President of the United States.

Yes, he is brilliant, eloquent, handsome and all that but he's also black. And despite the media's reluctance to discuss the race issue, it's there. And it's huge.

But not mostly in a negative way. Of course racists are coming out of the woodwork. I know people in Memphis who believe that if Lieberman wasn't on the ticket, Gore would have carried his home state in 2000. But so what.

Racists and haters are always there. The fact is that when Gore put Lieberman on the ticket, he did a great thing (regardless of Lieberman's post-2000 career). And a wall came crashing down.

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Eric has penned a complex book, precisely because it is so comprehensive an analysis of liberalism, its proud past and accomplishments, and its discontents. I agree with Joan that the most controversial of Eric's arguments is that we must rehabilitate and fight for liberalism, while "admitting our mistakes." She calls this a contradiction; I would call it a necessary tension.

Joan's right that some liberal "mistakes" (politically speaking) flow from liberalism's proudest accomplishments. There'd be no backlash without civil rights; no anti-abortion movement without Roe v. Wade; and for that matter, no vast undertow of hostility to government and taxes without liberal policies that helped lift many millions of Americans into the middle (and increasingly upper-middle) class. Some of the recent political weakness of liberalism is largely cyclical, just as the political power of conservatism may not survive an extended period of conservative misgovernment.

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Thanks to TPM for inviting me, the outlier in this group, to join in the discussion. And thanks to Eric Alterman for writing a book that is simultaneously pugnacious and thoughtful. He's provided a great deal to chew on.

Let me start by explaining my own complicated and evolving relationship with liberalism. For all my adult life, I've considered myself a liberal -- a classical liberal, that is. The more common name for people like me is libertarian, but some of us have resisted giving up the older, more elegant, more historically grounded label. The Cato Institute, my employer, tried to float the term "market liberal" a while back. Alas, it sank.

As liberals of a certain type, we libertarians have sided with liberals and against conservatives on many important issues: civil liberties, censorship, drug policy, and separation of church and state, for example. Most libertarians I know are pro-choice, and most favor full legal equality for gays and lesbians. And although I was a Cold War hawk, and by misapplying those old attitudes to the post-9/11 environment I came to support the Iraq war (a decision I now deeply regret), the prevailing tendency among libertarians has been to urge restraint in the exercise of American power -- a position that, over the years, has had more adherents on the left than on the right.

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Most press reports on President Bush's tour of the Middle East note that he kept talking about peace between Israel and the Palestinians but could cite "no concrete steps" aimed at achieving it.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations' Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Subcommittee, I saw first-hand how the Bush administration not only failed to help bring peace to Israel and the occupied territories in 2001-2007, but seemed actively interested in thwarting the Palestinian dream of achieving an independent homeland in the West Bank and Gaza.

Faced with that glaring difference between what the administration says and what it does, I could only conclude that the president is quietly allied with the Jim Inhofes and Tom DeLays of the world, whose fundamentalist interpretation of the Old Testament leads them to believe that the God of the Bible does not want Palestinians governing any part of the Promised Land.

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John McCain is having troubles with both parts of the Republican coalition that elected George Bush. The social conservatives are in a generally rangy mood, as no one seems to be paying attention to their issues.

All told, Gary Bauer, president of the advocacy group American Values and a veteran of Republican cultural debates, points to "a certain fatigue factor" among social conservatives that amounts to "a big problem for the Republican Party overall." The danger for Republicans isn't that they will lose social-conservative votes to either Democrats Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton but that they will fail to generate the kind of energy and turnout that put Mr. Bush over the top in, among other places, Ohio in 2004.

Bauer and Bill Kristol are pinning their hopes on reviving the Gay Marriage issue to excite these fatigued partisans, but I'm not sure that dog will hunt.

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I'm a liberal, and an unapologetic one. I won't apologize for the liberal past of my forbearers. I won't apologize for the fight against poverty. I won't apologize for demanding a rational foreign policy that kept the U.S. a respectable member of the family of nations. I won't apologize for standing up for a woman's right to make her own decisions about her health care. I won't apologize for believing passionately in the right to privacy for all Americans.

I particularly won't apologize for the fight for civil rights. I certainly won't apologize for being appalled and repulsed by the fact that torture has been added to our nation's repertoire of "intelligence gathering tools." And I won't apologize for having full-throatedly opposed George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, a war based on lies.

Granted, those last few points are less pertinent to the assumption Eric lays out in his post introducing his book and this discussion:

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Starting today, TPMCafe's recommended reader blogs will be posted on a daily, rather than twice-weekly, basis. While many good entries get discovered through the recommendation system, even more go unnoticed or unrecognized. We hope this feature will both showcase more great reader content, as well as further integrate our already thriving (and growing) community.

That said, we need your help. We would love to hear any suggestions you might have for a catchy title for this feature. Snarky responses are welcome, but will not be seriously considered.

Today's recommended posts after the jump.

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A warm-up for next week's Book Club.

In the New Yorker, George Packer argues that Rick Perlstein, author of next week's discussion book Nixonland is too pessimistic when argues that the divisions that Nixon exploited and helped sow in the 1960s will exist for another generation. Packer, in essence, argues that the recent failures on the right (three special elections, and the 2006 midterms before that) and the increasingly silly and unsuccessful attempts at Nixonian red-baiting and general name-calling ("elitist," "appeaser," etc. etc.) prove that Nixonland is coming to an end.

My sense is it's too soon to tell. Those tactics may yet work. But for the sake of conversation let's say he's right. If Nixonland is coming to an end, what's replacing it? (And if you say "Obamaland where everyone loves each other," I'm going to assume you're either joking or stoned.)

Last week I wrote a post celebrating the California supreme court's marriage decision, and asking that we defer comment, for just a few minutes, on whether that decision will be Good Or Bad For The Democrats. Some TPMCafe regulars commented on that request, thinking it, variously, disingenuous, a good reminder of the substance of the decision, and . Then I got an email from an editor at TNROnline asking if I could expand. Since there had been some discussion along these lines here after my post, I thought you all might want to check out the article.

Here's how it begins: "I wish I had clocked the minutes between the time that the California marriage decision was announced, and the time that the liberal punditocracy began whining about it. Yikes, those commitment-crazy gay people are going to lose the election for the Democrats yet again! This kneejerk complaint is more than a little annoying, for several reasons." Click here for the rest. I'll check back here irregularly today and this evening to see if any of you want to discuss.

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Doing my job on Capitol Hill, I bumped into Barack Obama at the beginning of 2007 in the Russell building and proceeded to bend his ear with my idea that he just had to run for President.

He was very polite (the man is a great listener). I said that timing is everything in politics and told him that the reason there is no former President named Mario Cuomo is because he should have run in 1984 or 1988, when he was fresh, new, and hot.

Then I said, "Besides someone is going to run against Hillary because of her vote for the war. It might as well be you."

He then said, "that is what everybody tells me. But I'm not running."

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Well, first off, thanks to TPM for doing this. Since publishing my first book sixteen years ago and being spoiled with spots on the Tonight Show, Today Show, Nightline, Larry King, four or five national NPR programs, etc, etc, I've watched the cultural space for non-fiction books in the media all but disappear. The privilege of an opportunity for a discussion like this one is therefore all the more precious and yet another argument for the necessity of the blogosphere in light of the abdication of so much of what was once the responsibility of the MSM.

That out of the way, here's what I'd say about my book to this particular audience. Why We're Liberals is really two different books, both of which are aimed at two different audiences.  The first book tries to explain what liberalism is, what it might look like in power, and how it (and its proponents) ended up in the situation in which we find ourselves. That's about a third of the book. The second, longer, book-inside-a-book is an attempt to subject what I take to be a series of contemporary conservative-driven morsels of conventional political wisdom to scrutiny and demonstrate that most of what our discourse assumes to be true about liberals is actually far truer about conservatives. They, not we, are pro "big government." They, not we are pro "judicial activism." They not we, are disdainful of the military, both as individual soldiers and speaking institutionally, etc, etc. The idea is both to convince the unconverted but no less give the rest of us the detailed information we need to know what we're talking about in our discussions and debates.

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The most depressing aspect of Democratic primary is the fact that for many of us, it still is 1993. We can disregard the Republicans because, Barack's observation aside, these cats ain't really looking like the party of ideas. Should we fall for the same "He's a commie!" strategy they've been running for decades, then like a pro football team falling for twenty straight play-action fakes, we deserve to lose.

The retro thinking that really has me concerned is on our side. A few days back I was doing some last minute blogging before a flight when I came across this gem from Marie Cocco, in which she offers a list of sexist slights endured by Hillary Clinton throughout her campaign. I found almost nothing to disagree with until, I tripped over this fallacious passage:

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

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Los Angeles filmmaker Robert Greenwald (OutFoxed ) is pretty good at mining old newsclips to devastating effect. He just put out a new short on John McCain.