I've still got to do some last minute lecture prep for tonight's class, so this will have to do for now...
+ Another day, another huge McCain flip flop.
+ Another day, another hideous David Brooks column. He always makes mistakes, but today's is particularly humorous.
+ McCain also announced today that he plans to cede the rhetorical ground to Obama in advance of the campaign. Rather than fight to establish his own narrative, he's going to take Obama's call for change and try to make it his own. Why a 70-something white multi-millionaire thinks he can win that battle against a 40-something african american is totally beyond me.
+ Although there are numerous versions of realignment theory in political science, most aren't particularly well developed. Among the few that are, James Sundquist's version has always been my favorite. Stripped down to its most basic level, the argument is that new issue clusters create new political fault lines, cracking up old coalitions and forming new ones. This post from Andrew Sullivan on the dynamics of the fall campaign is an almost perfect description of that process:
It isn't that one man is much younger than the other. It is that his supporters are skewed younger as well - and that the issues in this campaign resonate differently with the generations.
The culture war means less as the age cohort gets younger; the reflexive assumption that America is required to be everywhere on the planet, with 50 planned permanent military bases in Iraq, for example, is less obvious to a post-Iraq generation than to those with memories of World War II; rising debt will worry the next generation more than those on the brink of retirement; social questions such as same-sex marriage are no longer very salient questions for those under 40.My own sense is that this will be the defining faultline of the contest. Not age as such; but generation. And the key voters will be those in between and whether they decide to ally themselves with their parents or their children.
+ Kos has the map that will matter this fall. I don't buy the idea that all those yellow states will swing - Massachusetts will go Obama without much effort, as just one example. Nevertheless, print it out and put it on the wall, because those are the stets to watch.
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