Virginia Postrel comments on a WaPo interview with Howard Dean that gives her the impression that Dean is “the thinking man’s Cruz Bustamante” (which may actually be an oxymoron). It’s fairly clear that Dean’s still tacking left; quoth Virginia:

Dean is running as a guy who wants to control the economy from Washington and who sees business as fundamentally bad. “Any business that offers stock options” covers a lot of companies, including some of the economy’s most promising and dynamic.

Regulation tends to be relatively invisible to the general public, in part because it’s mind-numbingly technical. That makes it much more difficult to reverse, much easier for interest groups to manipulate, and much more dangerous to the general health of the economy than the taxing and spending that attract attention from pundits.

She also has a challenge for the so-called “libertarians for Dean.” Ultimately (assuming Dean gets the nod) they’re going to have to decide whether being pissed off because Bush knocked off Saddam Hussein is sufficient reason to hand the keys of the economy—namely the federal regulatory apparatus—over to a man who barely pays lip service to capitalism.

One of the classic quotes of politics comes from French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Asked, after losing in the first round of a French presidential contest (in 1988, I believe) to Jacques Chirac and François Mitterand, who he would back in the second round, he described the choice as one between “bad or worse”*; in 2004, hardcore libertarians are going to have to decide which is worse, but for now that honor seems squarely to belong to Dean.

Jacob Levy approvingly notes Joe Lieberman’s response to this nonsense. Like Jacob, I’d hate to see the Democrats return to their bad old protectionist ways, but outside a few DLCers like Clinton, Lieberman, and 1990s-Gore I don’t think the party ever really shed its protectionist bent; when Clinton spearheaded expansion of NAFTA to include Mexico in 1994, he did it with mostly Republican backing on the Hill.

Daniel Drezner comments as well, as does Andrew Sullivan; this is my entry in James’ inaugural Beltway Traffic Jam.

Jeff Taylor and Joy have the latest on our friends at the Santa Cruz Operation; Jeff* characterizes SCO’s business model as “consist[ing] of filing suit against Linux users.” I think he’s being charitable; it’s more like “trying to sell for $200/seat technology written two decades ago by a bunch of kids at Berkeley that’s today worth about 10 cents.”

You know, in 1999 or so, that could have been the basis for a decent IPO. Hell, nobody else back then had a viable business model either…

Following today’s Massachusetts Supreme Court decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, there’s been some predictable noise in the libertarian blogosphere in favor of “privatizing marriage“. Normally, I’m pretty sympathetc toward libertarian utopianism, but I’d like to throw a bit of cold water on this idea.

As Michael Kinsley observes in this pro-privatization article, government sanctions of marriage serves as a “bright-line rule” in legal and employment matters. It generates the right answer in the vast majority of cases, while minimizing economically inefficient negotiations.

If I decide to get a new job, I can ask one simple question regarding benefits: Do you offer health insurance for the spouses of employees? If they say no, I can walk out of the interview right then, since this is a benefit I will not negotiate away. And the employer is free to say “yes” without prying into my spouse’s medical history, because it knows that I’m not just trying to get insurance for some relative or casual friend who has a medical problem. (That is, government sanctioned marriage staves off the problem of adverse selection for the health insurance market.)

If I die from an aortic dissection tomorrow, there will be no costly legal wrangling over who inherits my vast fortune. My wife will. This is exactly what I want, as do most married people. And I didn’t have to hire an attorney to draft a will.

In other words, a universally recognized standard for who is “married” is economically efficient.

Now maybe the question of employer-subsidized health benefits could be solved by an oligopoly of private marriage companies. But the legal questions cannot be. The legislature will have to decide which marriage companies to recognize as legitimate, and then we’re right back to government-sanctioned marriage. Homophobic bigots will try to pass laws saying that their state, or the federal government, will not recognize any marriage sanctioned by a company that sanctions marriages between two individuals of the same sex.

In short, privatizing marriage is not going to work unless we privatize the rule of law itself.

And even if I’m wrong here, and privatized marriage might work in theory, it’s never going to happen. What are you going to tell the millions of couples who are already married? “Sorry, you’ve got to go pay $75 to a company to have your marriage recognized by your employer and by courts of law. And since we don’t know how this business is going to pan out, you should register with all three of the major marriage companies, until the natural monopoly kicks in and picks a winner.” Sorry, libertarians, but you’ll have a much easier time abolishing Social Security and Medicare.

So here’s my challenge to the libertarian proponents of privatized marriage. As Will Baude so eloquently put it, you’re in a second-best world. The lines have been drawn in this particular battle of the culture war, and you didn’t get to draw them. But you have to pick a side.

Will you be with the bigots, or against them?

Update: Lower taxes? What are you talking about, Chris? I'm pretty sure that the marriage penalty is one aspect of marriage that gays are not clambering for.

I won’t try to round up all of the posts on Massachussetts’ decision today (a sampler: Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, One Fine Jay, and James Joyner), but I think Brett Cashman’s post is about the most sensible I’ve seen, in terms of the whole “what happens next” question. However, I can’t see conservatives’ innate desire to use the state as a vehicle for social engineering waning as Cashman (rightly) suggests it should.

Instead, realistically I think we could see a draconian form of the Defense of Marriage Act Federal Marriage Amendment sooner rather than later, because the Democrats in Washington are far too spineless to oppose it, and I reckon you could round up 38 state legislatures—bodies full of people looking for ways to avoid giving voters a good reason to vote them out—to ratify the thing in a big hurry. The bottom line is that conservatives aren’t going to let Roe happen twice, because exactly what Matt Stinson predicted here is just around the corner.

Matthew Stinson has a must-read new post on the topic as well. I think many social moderates would share his viewpoint, expressed here:

For what it's worth, I would be more inclined to support gay marriage nationally (rather than locally) if I believed gays desired marriage for more than just its economic and legal benefits. Yes, one's sense of dignity is benefited by having the right to marry, but what's lost on many gay marriage advocates is that marriage is about fidelity as much as it is sharing resources. Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, has argued that the option of marriage will have a civilizing effect on gay men. But gay men aren't children, and they can choose fidelity now if they want. That the vast majority do not do so suggests to me that gay male marriages, but not necessarily lesbian marriages, will be open marriages.

I’m personally not a big fan of outcome-based arguments for (or against) gay marriage, but this is an argument that will resonate with many fence-sitters. The more it sounds like gay people want marriage for the “free stuff,” like lower taxes* and cheaper healthcare, the more people are going to be turned off by it.

(Nor do I really buy the “civilizing effects” argument articulated by Sullivan; I suspect the number of straight men who’ve actually said, “I’d cheat on my wife with Lulu from the temp pool, but I can’t since I’m married” is within ε of zero. They might say “I’d cheat…, but I can’t since I’m in a committed monogomous relationship,” but you can have one of those without being married. It’s a function of character, not institutions.)

Also, you may enjoy this non-work safe post by Mr. Green, which refers to perennial SN foil Ricky Santorum. (Link via the Wizbang! post trackbacked below.)

Steven Taylor throws cold water on the idea that the Democrats will have a so-called “brokered convention”—i.e. that the plurality winner of the primary process won’t be the ultimate nominee. This isn’t the 1960s, and the Democratic base—particularly the Deanites—isn’t going to accept such meddling from party elites, and no amount of wishful thinking from either the media or anti-Dean forces in the party is going to affect that.

To get someone—anyone—other than Howard Dean as the nominee is going to require a lot of anti-Dean Democrats to swallow their pride and put the party ahead of their own interests before the end of the year (maybe even the end of November), so the designated “anti-Dean” candidate—Dick Gephardt seems like the only alternative with enough Old Left street cred, regional ties in the midwest swing states, and establishment support—can gain sufficient traction against both Dean and the novelty candidates. And if you see John Kerry, John Edwards, or Wes Clark stepping aside to back Gephardt, you’re truly kidding yourself.

My current theory on how the nomination battle will play out is explicated here.

James Joyner essentially agrees.

Both Matt Stinson and Robert Garcia Tagorda note George Will’s Sunday WaPo column on the politics of the steel tariffs—and of the European Union response to them. Like Robert, I hope this development gives the administration the final push it needs to abandon the tariffs, before this escalates to a trade war which neither the U.S. nor foreign states can win.

The local Deanies are congregating tonight in Oxford, according to today’s Daily Mississippian. I pass this along in case you want a warning notice to flee across state lines lest you come into contact with any of these individuals.

Incidentally, the fact that one of Dean’s aides is named—and I truly wish I was kidding—“Zephyr Teachout” will explain everything you need to know about this presidential campaign.

Amanda Butler and Will Baude note some idiocy going on in the comments at The Daily Kos. In fairness to Kos, it looks like the message in question is a comment and not an actual post made by a bona fide Kos article poster, so it’s hard for me to get too upset about it (except to repeat my regular complaint about blog comment sections in general).

That being said, both Amanda and Will have excellent rebuttals to this full-fledged display of ignorance. I won’t pretend that Mississippi doesn’t have its quota of bigots—I’ve had the dubious pleasure of teaching at least a couple of them—but I don’t think I’ve been anywhere in America, “southern” or not, that lacked a few unreconstructed racists running around.

Links via Pejmanesque.

Matthew Stinson, a fellow member of the patriarchy who is similarly burdended with false consciousness, has an entertaining and informative post about on-campus politics at FSU. For some odd reason, far-left identity politics hasn’t gained much of a foothold here at Ole Miss, so it’s nice to see that it’s alive and well elsewhere in the South.

It seems that discussion of the proposed “Defense of Marriage” amendment makes Andrew Sullivan take leave of his senses. He spends a lot of time ranting about “celibacy,” a term that appears nowhere in the amendment’s text. Here’s the text, as presented by Sullivan:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities on the existence, recognition, or presumption of sexual conduct or relationships.

Now, let’s deconstruct that paragraph. Sentence one is plain English, so that’s easy. Let’s take a looksee at #2:

Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. [emphasis mine]

Note the “shall” clause. This, in a nutshell, means that anything that doesn’t explicitly say “gay people may marry each other” cannot be construed to mean, well, “gay people may marry each other.” Sounds simple enough. Now onto #3:

Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities on the existence, recognition, or presumption of sexual conduct or relationships.

This is apparently where Sullivan goes off on his bizarro rant about celibacy. To put it crudely, this sentence—in English—means, “you aren’t entitled to anything just because you’re fucking someone else.” How on earth Sullivan makes the leap to this sentence creating the precedent for some sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” police force just boggles the mind; if anything, it would seem to preclude it, because having a sexual relationship cannot have any effect on your “benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities.” This sentence says, whether Sully’s fucking his boyfriend or sleeping down the hall in the spare bedroom, it makes absolutely no difference.

Frankly, I agree that this amendment is fundamentally silly, although, unlike Sullivan, I’d rather have the state out of the business of marriage as completely as possible, leaving it to contract law and civil society—hence why he’s a conservative, while I’m a libertarian. And if Sullivan wants to marry his boyfriend, or the hypothetical lesbian commune down the street wants to organize a group marital arrangement, it’s nothing that’s going to cause the end of the universe; even if God cares, I suspect He has more important things to worry about. But I’d expect someone who, you know, writes for a living might actually be capable of reading what’s in front of his face. And, in this case, I think Sullivan’s dislike for the proposal has blinded him to what the actual text says.

And Sullivan’s still obsessing; apparently, what’s important to him aren’t the benefits of marriage; it’s the societal imprimateur that government recognition of gay marriage would convey. The conservative’s complete, and misguided, faith in government as a qualified social engineer emerges yet again.

I don’t have a hokey website like perennial SN foil Larry Sabato, but I do make slightly better predictions than James Joyner and Stephen Green. Quoth James:

I always thought that the race was going to come down to electable candidates because of the dampening effects of the early Southern primaries. I figured Dean could do well in the “retail” contests in Iowa and New Hampshire—although perhaps losing both of them to favorite sons Gephardt and Kerry—by energizing the base. But I thought, and indeed continue to think, that he’s not going to be very appealing in South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states.

... With so many of the primaries stacked at the beginning of the year, fundraising is even more crucial than ever. Right now, the only candidates I can see able to sustain a serious race against Dean are Gephardt—who pretty much HAS to win Iowa or he moves up three shades on the Toast-O-Meter—and Wes Clark, who has a pretty good team thanks to the Clinton Machine. But I don’t know who Clark’s base is at this point and Lieberman’s presumed base, organized labor, seems to be split between him and Dean. So the key is to survive the early primaries and hope there’s an “anybody but Howard Dean” movement. [emphasis mine]

Fundraising, organization, and exciting the base are going to hand this nomination to Howard Dean, and I’ve been saying that to anyone who’d listen to my drunken political ramblings in bars and on rooftops since mid-July. The key to both Iowa and New Hampshire is getting the base on board the campaign, and that’s something that Dean has mastered.

The problem for the anti-Dean forces isn’t that Iowa and New Hampshire will lock the nomination up; instead, the problem is that the post-New Hampshire winnowing process doesn’t effectively winnow candidates—it’s far too time-compressed. Anyone who has enough money in the bank now to last until Iowa can survive until mid-March, on the basis of the money they’re going to get from today until Iowa alone. Fundraising simply won’t dry up fast enough to stop candidates who lose in South Carolina from persisting through Super Tuesday and beyond.

The other problem for the serious anti-Dean candidates is that the weighted PR system adopted by the party for this round—you qualify for delegates if you get 15% of the vote in any congressional district—benefits candidates who can draw clear distinctions between themselves and the other candidates. There’s no clear substitute for Dean in the field. On the other hand, Kerry is essentially interchangeable with half-a-dozen other white guys in suits in the field; the “I like an establishment Democrat” voter has no clear favorite, so they’ll just spread their votes around four or five different ways. The other likely beneficiary from the allocation rules is Al Sharpton, who will get a lot of his delegates from states that are unwinnable by the Democrats in the general election—particularly since the delegates aren’t allocated equally by congressional district, instead extra delegates are allocated to congressional districts that vote for Democratic presidential candidates.

Unless most of the “establishment Democrats” like Clark, Kerry, Gephardt, and Edwards can come to an agreement—and soon—that essentially has everyone except one of them drop out to maximize the “anybody but Howard Dean” vote, I don’t see any way for anyone but Dean to capture an overwhelming majority of the elected delegates. And even if Dean fails to capture an outright majority (including the superdelegates), I find it exceptionally unlikely that the Democrats would be able to get away with brokering the convention to nominate either a “white knight” candidate or a candidate who lost head-to-head with Dean in the primary process—frankly, I think the Dean base would abandon the party if it came to that. So, for now, it’s essentially Dean’s nomination to lose.

And Matthew Stinson points out the second half of the Dean Catch-22: his complete and utter unelectability.

Daniel Drezner is displeased at the news that the administration may try to evade the WTO ruling against the steel tariffs. The adminstration plans to maintain these protectionist barriers despite evidence that the steel tariffs cost many more American jobs—in many industries that use steel—than they saved.

The open political question is whether the tariffs are causing enough damage to the overall economy, including the economic recovery, that their marginal benefit in states like West Virginia is offset. The trouble here is that the marginal benefit from the tariffs is easy to quantify, because it is concentrated, while the damage is diffuse—thousands of jobs spread across perhaps two dozen states. And that damage could get far worse if it leads to a trade war with the European Union, who—in this case, at least—are clearly in the right.

Like Dan, I hope the administration will come to its senses. But I can’t be optimistic, especially since the dynamics of the Democratic campaign preclude almost any criticism of Bush from that quarter for not being enough of a free trader.

Colby Cosh vents his spleen over the latest blogospheric fad, the “Political Compass” test, while Jacob Levy finds it weird and potentially unreliable.

Matthew Stinson links to a Jonathan Chait TNR piece that takes Howard Dean to task for his vague Southern strategy. As Chait points out, it’s Southern Politics 101 all over again:

So Dean’s plan is to get poor Southern whites to vote their economic interests rather than their cultural predilections. How simple! Why hasn’t somebody else thought of that idea? Oh wait, that’s right: Everybody has thought of that idea.

The notion that the Southern economic elite try to divide the populace along racial rather than economic lines goes back around 400 years. Even though most southern whites didn’t own slaves, a majority of them supported the institution. ...

As it turns out, forging that economic coalition is a good deal more difficult than it sounds. The only success liberals have enjoyed has come when they’ve found candidates like Bill Clinton, who distanced himself from cultural liberalism (on issues like crime and welfare, for instance) to convince Southern whites that he was more conservative than the national Democratic Party.

Actually, before the 1960s maybe-realignment, southern Democrats regularly ran on economic issues—and won. The most infamous example is Huey Long, but national Democrats running for the presidency were winning electoral college votes across the South into the 1960s. What’s changed?

1. Since the Great Society programs of LBJ, and their consolidation under Nixon, there’s a sufficient national “safety net” that Republicans are not going to dismantle—no matter what rhetoric you hear from the far left. This has diminished the economic interest of poor whites in supporting Democratic candidates.
2. The national Democratic party has moved away from the conservative values shared by southern whites, most infamously in its blanket support for Roe v. Wade. This makes Republicans relatively more appealing.

Can national Democrats recapture the South? Unless they can neutralize Republicans’ natural advantage on “race, guns, God and gays,” or can come up with an economic program that is overwhelmingly appealing to both poor whites and blacks (perhaps like Dean’s idea of “affirmitive action” on the basis of economic status, rather than race), that seems exceedingly unlikely.

Is it just me, or are these sorts of editorials only written when Republicans win elections?

Steven Taylor points out yet another idiotic provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act—just in case all of the other idiotic provisions of the Incumbency Protection Act of 2002 were insufficient to raise your ire.

Andrew Sullivan suggests that two decisions by judges in two different states refute the predictions of the “far right” that America will see a “wave of judge-imposed [gay] marriages.” (The states are Arizona and New Jersey.)

Unfortunately, Sullivan doesn’t give us any evidence to decide whether or not this behavior is typical of the judiciary as a whole. Both decisions were apparently made by state, not federal, courts, where most judges are directly elected by the people, or at least face retention elections. Now, if a federal judge sitting in the Northern District of California—or even a state judge sitting in New York City—had made one of these rulings, I’d see it as (perhaps weak) support for his thesis. But counterexamples from states like Arizona and New Jersey that lean moderate-to-conservative on social issues, and where judges are in genuine fear for their jobs if they adopt strongly countermajoritarian positions (at least on issues outside nonpartisan judicial norms like the treatment of criminal suspects), aren’t going to convince anyone that the “wave of judge-imposed marriages” that many conservatives fear hasn’t started.

John Cole of Balloon Juice is, shall we say, rather unimpressed with the latest application of the PATRIOT Act: gathering evidence against the owner of a Las Vegas titty bar in a political corruption probe, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Read their oped too, while you’re at it. There’s more at Rick Henderson’s blog.

Kate isn’t happy either.

I’m not a huge fan these days of the Nolan chart and similar quiz-based ideology measures; however, Tim Lambert has been compiling bloggers’ results on the Political Compass test. As he points out, it’s hardly a scientific sample of bloggers, so take it with a grain of salt.

An interesting outstanding question is whether the Compass is a particularly valid measure of ideology. Their FAQ seems to preclude any independent test of this proposition, as they claim copyright on the items—and I believe that such a copyight is valid, given the widespread use of copyrighted scale questions in psychometry.

I wonder if my committee will accept this Jay Manifold post in lieu of the conclusions chapter of my dissertation. After all, it basically says what I want to say, although far more succinctly and without the obligatory citations to seventeen billion political scientists. Quoth Jay:

The Scrappleface material aside, I rise to the defense of my fellow citizens on this one. Like many other polls, it can be made to look very bad. The lessons we should be drawing, however, are not the usual people-are-stupid, everybody-should-have-to-know-this-stuff sort of thing, but are more related to simple common sense:

1. Suppose the poll had instead taken the form of a true/false test with a list of, say, 40 possible names of Cabinet departments. How different would the results have been? I’m sure that only a small percentage would have gotten them all correct; but I surmise that most respondents would have gotten most of them right, a far different result than the one presented.
2. Also, I like to apply the body-count test. Are we stepping over bodies in the streets every morning as a result of [insert failing of American public here]? No? Then maybe, just maybe, it’s not a big deal.
3. According to the poll, if you can name more than 11 Cabinet departments, you are in a minority of 1%; if you can name them all, you’re probably a solid 3σ away from the statistical mean. In other words, you are a weirdo.
4. In fact, if you’re complaining about public ignorance about almost any political data, while demonstrating your familiarity with such data, you’re not only a weirdo, you’re a control freak whose idea of a healthier polity is one with a whole bunch of weird little copies of you in it.

Needless to say, the above describes almost all current-events bloggers.

Or, as I put it in the current iteration of my draft conclusions chapter:

It is also possible that what matters isn’t what voters know about politics, but rather what they understand about politics. Knowledge may simply be a byproduct of understanding among those citizens most exposed to political information; in other words, knowledge is only important to the extent that higher levels of knowledge about politics—as measured by, for example, answers to the notorious “trivia questions” about politics that are regularly used as evidence that the public has insufficient levels of civic education—generally reflect greater understanding of politics. If that is the case, civic education efforts may improve voters’ reasoning processes even if they don’t lead to greater retention of the minutiae of politics by citizens over the long term.

I resisted the urge, however, to accuse Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter of wanting to build clone armies of themselves.

As Steven Taylor notes, GOP candidate Ernie Fletcher has won Kentucky’s open gubernatorial seat, and Haley Barbour has a fairly robust lead in Mississippi—so robust, in fact, that Barbour made a victory speech just after midnight, despite the slim remaining chance that he will not receive the absolute majority of the vote required to avoid the legislature deciding the election (as they did in Ronnie Musgrove’s victory over Mike Parker in 1999).

John Cole credits the successes of Fletcher and Barbour to DNC head Terry MacAuliffe. However, I’d probably chalk it up to something more fundamental: in the mass media and Internet age, the Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly nationalized, with little scope for state parties to tack too far from the national party’s position. Even in Mississippi, a state where “yellow dog Democrats” have had a lot of sway, that’s slowly fading as Democrats retire or change parties. Take, for example, one political scientist’s observations on the election*:

John Bruce, a political science professor at the University of Mississippi, said though Musgrove and Barbour ran a tough campaign with ads criticizing each other, the two candidates took similar positions on many issues.

Bruce said he took statements about gun ownership, abortion and other issues off campaign Web sites and quizzed his students about which candidate had made the statements. He said many thought the statements came from Barbour — but all the positions came from Musgrove.

“They’re both conservative,” Bruce said. “They’re almost identical on a lot of issues.”

And “almost identical” southern Democrats are increasingly finding that southern voters will choose the real thing—Republicans—over conservative Democrats who increasingly have to rely on the support of groups—like African-Americans, state employees, and transplanted Northern liberals—who aren’t conservative at all.

That isn’t to say that parties can’t field successful candidates in states where their national ideology isn’t competitive—the most obvious case in point would be the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But they’re going to be in an uphill struggle, without the ability to bring in “name” fellow partisans to support them, and they’re going to need to work much harder than they’d have had to in the past to convince local voters that they are truly “independent” of the national party. Ronnie Musgrove couldn’t do either, and ultimately that is what cost him this election.

PhotoDude has more on this theme, tying it into the whole Dean flag flap (via InstaPundit), and Stephen Green notes the GOP surge, but encourages Republicans not to get cocky.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal has an election results page up on its website covering northeast Mississippi, including Oxford and Lafayette County. So far, it’s all zeros; polls closed about 45 minutes ago, so some results should start trickling out soon.

Dan Drezner has been blogging up a storm (also here) on the Center for Public Integrity study and the Iraq reconstruction contracts issue. I’ve added what little I can in his comments, so just go forth and read the posts.

Howie Dean’s latest gaffe has sparked a substantial discussion in the blogosphere about the so-called “Southern Strategy”; Steven Taylor has something close to the post I’d write if I had more time.

From the scholarly perspective, I think most political scientists have attributed the maybe-realignment of the 1960s to racial issues (see, for example, the book-length treatments by Carmines and Stimson and Huckfeldt and Sprague), but Abramowitz (1992 AJPS, I think; might have been JOP) makes a strong case that those issues weren’t driving Republican success in the 1980s—although he leaves the question of the 1960s aside, and I don’t think people in political science were particularly enamoured with his use of exploratory factor analysis to demonstrate his point. However, I think there’s a paper to be written either trying to apply Abramowitz’s methodology to the 1960s-era data or looking at it over the history of the ANES using the Cumulative file; unfortunately, from a publication standpoint, I think realignment is no longer the sexy topic it was in the late 80s and early 90s.

More evidence that Howie Dean is moving right after securing the support of the Atrios fringe: he’s daring to say that just maybe all Southerners who fly the Confederate battle flag aren’t necessarily racists—an article of common sense that nonetheless escapes most national Democrats, who apparently don’t bother talking to their fellow partisans—except the ones who wear the Quixotic “I’m a progressive” label like some sort of pathetic badge of honor—in states like Mississippi and Georgia.

Oh yes, Dean’s now flirting with the DLC wing of the party:

Yesterday, Dean said he wants to create a biracial coalition in the South. “For my fellow Democratic opponents to sink to this level is really tragic,” he said. “The only way we’re going to beat George Bush is if southern white working families and African American working families come together under the Democratic tent.”

I still think the “Dean is a moderate” meme is a load of flaming crap, and his idea of national security policy is worse than a joke. I think he’d roll over for the gun controllers in Congress in a heartbeat (not that I’m hugely invested in that issue). And I generally believe that anyone who can excite large numbers of college undergrads about his campaign is prima facie unsuitable for high office. But if he keeps saying sensible things like this I might actually have to reconsider my overall assessment of the guy.

Mind you, I’m still voting for Sharpton in the primary, because I’d love nothing more than to see the Democratic Party have to deal with the consequences of spending years coddling this race-baiting fool.

Rick Henderson is puzzled by the “Libertarians for Dean” phenomenon, including its backing by some of his former colleagues at Reason.