Check out George Skelton in the L.A. Times today:

SACRAMENTO — California’s system for choosing legislators is badly broken. And only voters can fix it.
The problem: “Closed” primaries combined with districts drawn for party protection. Together, they’re adding up to legislative extremism. Toss in term limits and it’s a formula for producing ambitious amateurs who are radical or reactionary.
…
Legislators of both parties conspired last year to gerrymander legislative and congressional districts in their own interests. They redrew lines to preserve the political status quo for a decade in all but a handful of the 173 districts.
Seats became either safely Republican or safely Democrat — mostly the latter because Democrats control Sacramento. It means practically every election is decided in the primary.
Republican incumbents must guard against a primary challenge from their right. Democrats watch their left. The middle is ignored.
“The fear of being ‘primaried’ is driving decision-making in Sacramento,” South laments.
“They have no idea how you get a budget passed. You’ve got Democrats petrified about cutting spending because it’ll tick off a special interest they’ll need to support them…. You’ve got Republicans sitting there … scared to death they’ll get ‘primaried’ by some anti-taxer.”
The solution: Take the decennial redistricting away from the Legislature and place it in the hands of an independent commission, perhaps appointed by the state Supreme Court. Voters previously have rejected such ballot proposals, buying Democratic demagoguery about “politicizing the courts.”
South supports the independent idea: “Ten years ago I wouldn’t have said that. But this [redistricting] was just a joke and so damaging to the political system, I would favor almost any alternative.”

Well, duuuuh. So would I.

Nathan Lott made a smart comment here which he then expanded into a post on his blog.
Here’s the core:

The strategy of preying upon the economic worries of the working- and middle-classes counts on fear more than hope. Consequently, it does little to improve the Democratic image as dour yet untrustworthy. By that I mean that Bush is viewed as a happy hick on one hand but trusted with protecting the nation on the other. Meanwhile, Gore is a no-fun wonk and a national-security liability in the mind of most Americans. The current Democratic populism not only relies on the American tendency to identify with the working-class but attempts to exploit middle-class fear of a descent into poverty (that really is a retreat to the New Deal). But that fear may not exist. As long as the Republicans can present a hopeful instead of fearful front, they’ll win.
The problem here is not unlike that behind the Democrats unsuccessful objection to Bush’s tax cuts: They mis-define the middle class. Or, more often, they confuse working class with needy. This has two problems: 1) it alienates those middle- and working-class families who no longer identify with the (outdated?) image of honest folks struggling to make ends meet and 2) it forces the party to attempt to buy off the people footing the bill—big government circular spending. Brave Democrats muster the courage to tell voters they’ll increase taxes to spend the receipts wisely. But very few are brave enough to offer middle-class voters only dignity in return, not new government benefits. If Democrat policies targeted only the truly needy, the party couldn’t try to bribe Americans who can afford drugs with free prescriptions, for example. However, they could offer scaled-down solutions to real problems and sell themselves as a party of community.

Here I read three major points:
1) Defending the working class relies on fear rather than hope;
2) That fear is not as prevalent as some would suggest; and
3) These policies are mis-aimed in that they try and speak to secure middle-class Americans about the fears of the (he suggests relatively fewer) who are economically insecure.
I think Nathan’s well-intentioned comments are off the mark. Most indicators show consumer confidence as slowly drifting downward, and the reality of the job mix that we are seeing in this ‘jobless recovery’ is that the classic ‘middle-skills’ ‘mid-career’ jobs can no longer support a middle class family.
(Ironically, this is both masked and caused by the same thing…the explosion in home prices.)
Note that I owe cites on this but can’t get to them today.
If he interpreted my challenge to the party as a ‘create pork jobs’ plan, I apologize for misspeaking. I don’t at this point have a well-cooked plan (if so, I’d be standing at the party doorsteps, nailing it up), and part of what I try and do here is to engage in the dialog which will lead people smarter and better-informed than I to help me come up with one.
That plan should have a few key characteristics:
– Focus on jobs, not just output. Most economic policy uses aggregate employment (unemployment) as an indicator, along with GDP or overall dollars of output.
Since I believe that everyone manages to their metrics, select metrics that involve employment levels and employment quality (stability and income).
– Realize that creating European ‘jobs for life’ is a recipe for disaster, and that we cannot legislate employment. But … legislation in the form of fiscal, economic, and tax policy have huge impacts on employment, and we need to be mindful of those impacts and more specifically, working to have positive, rather than negative impacts.
– Look at the precursors to quality employment, which certainly have some things to do with the workforce. Education, training, culture. Again, not all of these are things the government has been good at doing. So let’s ask how to get them done.
– The reality is that small and medium businesses are the engine of American capitalism and of social stability and mobility. We need to find ways to tilt the playing field back toward the small business; this will have to do with simplifying regulations (not necessarily changing the requirements, but making it easy to understand and comply), tilting the tax laws, and changing the economics which make the government and regulator the ally of the larger company.
Here again we have a bad example – Japan, in which the maze of regulation is designed to protect the small farmer and small businessman to the complete detriment of the consumer.
These are just a few notions of the directions we need to go into. More later.
But dealing with these issues should be a way to offer the average American – the household of 4 making $40K/year – hope for a better future for themselves and their children.
That’s not fear…that how you make fear go away.

Declan McCullagh’s great site Politechbot.com has the transcript of Pentagon briefing on Poindexter’s “TIA” program.
Take a look. Some samples:

My statement goes along the following: The war on terror and the tracking of potential terrorists and terrorist acts require that we search for clues of such activities in a mass of data. It’s kind of a signal-to-noise ratio. What are they doing in all these things that are going on around the world? And we decided that new capabilities and new technologies are required to accomplish that task. Therefore, we established a project within DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that would develop an experimental prototype — underline, experimental prototype, which we call the Total Information Awareness System. The purpose of TIA would be to determine the feasibility of searching vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist activities.
There are three parts to the TIA project to aid in this anti-terrorist effort. The first part is technologies that would permit rapid language translation, such as you — as we have used on the computers now, we can — there’s voice recognition capabilities that exist on existing computers.
The second part was discovery of connections between transactions — such as passports; visas; work permits; driver’s license; credit card; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases — and events — such as arrest or suspicious activities and so forth. So again, it try to discover the connections between these things called transactions.
And the third part was a collaborative reasoning-and-decision-making tools to allow interagency communications and analysis. In other words, what kind of decision tools would permit the analysts to work together in an interagency community?
The experiment will be demonstrated using test data fabricated to resemble real-life events. We’ll not use detailed information that is real. In order to preserve the sanctity of individual privacy, we’re designing this system to ensure complete anonymity of uninvolved citizens, thus focusing the efforts of law enforcement officials on terrorist investigations. The information gathered would then be subject to the same legal projections (sic) currently in place for the other law enforcement activities.

OK, it’s a prototype. On one hand, we want the government to be testing all kinds of things; on the other prototypes have a way of subtly going into production.
Worth digging more deeply, and take a look at the transcript yourself.

In thinking about Iraq, one thing that has nagged at me has been the reversal of position by Scott Ritter, the ‘belligerent inspector’ turned ‘antiwar advocate’. His open opposition to Administration policy was a significant issue for me, until I read Scott Ritter’s Iraq Complex in the NYT (link thanks to OxBlog).
It’s less of an issue for me now; take a look and see for yourself.
(Note that I’m still waffling heavily on the war itself)

Commenter Ray Yang articulates something I’ve been thinking about in his comment below:

You know, the debate, about what types of new powers we allow the government to fight terrorism, is definitely a debate we should be having. However, must we have a sacrificial goat prior to having the conversation?
As far as I can tell, the TIA program itself is guilty of nothing more than poor PR (that seal, putting John Poindexter at the helm, and not being sufficiently obsequious to the insufferable Will Safire). According to the publicly released information, they will experiment with data the government already has, and ‘simulate’ data the government doesn’t have, to test the effectiveness of various data-pooling, data-mining, and analysis techniques. The program collects no data of its own.
That seems like a noble goal, especially when you realize that the biggest customer for this program is likely to be America’s foreign intelligence agencies, which collect their data abroad. At that point, the question isn’t whether you want to give the government the ability to be more intrusive into our lives, it’s whether you’re willing to let the government be aggressive abroad in our defense.

I’ve tried in the past to have it both ways…to support the ‘informed pack’ and to criticize what I see as potentially heavy-handed intrusions into civil liberties. It’s probably time to try and figure out where I stand in this.
First, I’ll try and deflect criticism by pointing out that I’m not alone in wanting to have my cake and eat it too. Talk Left celebrates the demise of TIPS:

We especially liked this from the July 17 Boston Globe editorial, Ashcroft vs. Americans:
“Ashcroft’s informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense or because it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism by overloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about Americans who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPS should be stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would give Stalin and the KGB a delayed triumph in the Cold War – in the name of the Bush administration’s war against terrorism.”
Good riddance to Operation Tips, and may the Total Information Awareness program meet the same fate.

That’s at 9:39 in the morning. But if you look back to 6:10 the same morning, there’s a laudatory post about Gary Hart and his prescient views on terror, with this quote:

What does he say about fighting the terror war?
“Aside from governmental vigilance, Hart stresses the need for an alert citizenry. “The tag line of every speech I’ve given over the last two years on this subject is: ‘You in this audience are now front-line soldiers.’
“This war’s being fought in our streets and cities. Nobody’s going to ride in. The 82d Airborne isn’t coming. The 1st Marine Division isn’t going to be here. It’ll be the Colorado National Guard. The cops on the beat. The fire and emergency management people. We’re all going to have to get into this. Now, why can’t the president say that?”

Now I don’t mean to single Jeralyn (author of Talk Left) out … I’m in pretty much the same boat, here, as are a host of people up to and including much of the Democratic leadership (actually, I’m too generous … the Democratic leadership happily worked with the Clinton administration to cut civil liberties off at the knees).
But we can’t have it both ways. If we empower the citizenry … and I’m not even talking about arming them at his point, just training them on what to look for and who to call when they see something … well, doing that looks a hell of a lot like operation TIPS to me.
And we can’t have hearings on intelligence failures and “why didn’t we know” on one hand and, on the other, criticize efforts to centralize some data and make sure that the arms of the government are working in a coordinated fashion.
So how do we balance these?

I took the Democrats to task for missing the boat on patriotism a while ago; that was my opinion. Josh Marshall talks about the underlying facts:

There are a million things to be said about this batch of polling data which Stan Greenberg assembled for the Campaign for America’s Future. But I need to nurse the illusion that I have something better to do on this Friday night than write about polling data. So just make a point of browsing through the charts and graphs yourself.
The one number that really caught my attention is on page five. In the November 8th poll of actual voters, on the question of which party was better at “keeping America strong,” Republicans beat out Democrats by an astronomical thirty-nine points — Republicans 59; Dems 19. (The specific breakdown of the responses can be found on page 18 of the questionnaire. Yes, it sounds like it should be 40, not 39, but they must be rounding off or something.)
Republicans will crow over those numbers. And it’ll be terribly annoying listen to them do so. (I overheard one of the most annoying of them crowing about it today. And, boy, did I want to slap this dude around …) But Democrats really need to think long and hard about what those numbers mean. That’s just an astonishing number.

Not to me…
(thanks to Ann for the link)

My New Model Democrats are already under attack from the adlai stevenson liberation army, who write:

After their poor electoral showing on Tuesday, the Democrats are getting all sorts of conciliatory pats on the back and advice from people who are, more or less, the sworn enemies of everything they stand for.
Even Peggy Noonan, the Riefenstahl of Reaganism, is dishing out helpful hints.
She, and the rest of them, have as much help to offer as Rufus Griswold had for Edgar Allan Poe. But it’s the response of some purported Dems and libs that’s been most interesting. Their general idea seems to be that liberalism as a creed is finished, and that the Democratic party can only save itself by distancing itself from their base, and by behaving as much like Republicans as possible.

Uh, no, not actually.
I think that the Democrats did two stupid things: they traded the patriotic, passionate, radicalism of a Woodie Guthrie for the detached, academic radicalism of a Noam Chomsky. And before you tell me that the Democrats don’t approve of Noam Chomsky…they may make disapproving noises, but Bonior and Chomsky could sit down and have a latte and find a lot in common.
And then they sold out the greatest mass of the working people in this country for academics, public sector employees, Jesse Jackson, and a bunch of Hollywood executives and stars who are all for progressivism as long as their personal managers can keep their tax liabilities low.
So yeah, I’m unhappy with the Democratic Party. But don’t you dare call me an enemy of liberalism. And ask yourself this: The greatest growth in social spending and social programs in this country happened under LBJ and Nixon. I happen to think that a lot of it was misguided and where not, mismanaged, but we’ve come a long way from ‘The Other America’. It means something when the biggest health problems in the poor are those of obesity…

New Volokh conspirator Philippe de Croy makes sense on how we respond to terrorism in a post critical of the terrible ‘Total Information Awareness’ program.

There is a more general moral here. In the coming years, things are going to get worse in this country in two respects: (a) some of us are going to be killed by Islamic terrorists and (b) we are going to forfeit some things we like about our civilization in order to reduce the number of those killings. We are going to spend a lot of time making trade-offs between these evils over the coming years. Our goal should be to minimize their sum. It therefore is imperative that we recognize measures taken in the name of safety as trade-offs and debate them in those terms, without being cowed by the logic that every measure the government says will help decrease terrorism is therefore a good idea.

William Burton writes:

Now, making economic issues the focus of the Democratic Party won’t be easy, but it’s doable. The Republicans will try to make elections about the social policies that win them votes, not about the economic policies that even most of their supporters don’t agree with (*), but that won’t be the biggest problem. The biggest problem will be untangling Democratic policies from the web of donors who keep the party funded.
Right now, the economic polices that would win the most support for the Democratic Party also happen to be the ones that their donors agree with least. As long as the banks, insurance companies, and drug companies can buy themselves influence from Democratic politicians, they will (even if they’d really prefer Republicans to win). As long as they continue to buy influence, the Democrats will be unable to take the economic positions that will win them electoral majorities. Of course, the Democrats also need money to win elections, and they get this money from their donors. There’s a kinda chicken-and-the-egg dynamic going. That’s why I said this would be tougher than fighting off the Republicans’ efforts to make every election about Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion (with their modern sidekicks Guns, God, and Gays).
The most obvious change would be to the positions Democratic candidates take on economic issues. No longer can they try to be marginally better than Republicans while trying mightily not offend anyone who might write them a check. Playing it safe and refusing to take a stand allows the opponents to pick the issues to do battle with. This is how we’ve allowed the Republicans to position themselves as the Lower Taxes Party when they’re really the Lower Taxes for Corporations and Rich Folks Party. The Democrats haven’t put forth any realistic proposals other than opposition to tax cuts (never a winner electorally). Instead, they should’ve put forth their own proposal that dramatically lowered the tax burden on the middle and working classes while doing next to nothing for the top end. Unfortunately, plans like that don’t get pushed by people trying to keep their donors happy above all else.
I’d also suggest a change in image for the Democrats, but not anything superficial. The Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage out of kicking the so-called “liberal elites” who are supposedly trying to make life hell for white male heterosexuals like myself. Now, a lot of that is pure bullshit and a bunch more is due to the confusion of the academic left (which is virtually powerless in real life, but tends to make itself a good target) and the political left as typified by unions and other power brokers within the Democratic Party. There’s not much that anyone can do about leftist intellectuals pontificating and right-wing talking heads making it seem as if they represent the Democratic Party. We can, however, craft an alternate image for the party that revolves around family and community. That’s the kind of thing that appeals to people regardless of their race or religion (and it’ll make the talking heads look like the idiots they are when they try to say that Democrats are against families).

Now he’s dead-on-target on his analysis here and in the balance of the post that I’ve clipped. The New Deal Democratic alliance was shattered by George Wallace and Jane Fonda, and while the ex-partners eye each other with a mixture of melancholy and anger … kind of like ex-husbands and wives … the reality is that the issues which once held them together don’t any more.
So the Democrats are left looking for a core constituency. But they have three: Rich liberals, who value their self-image as ‘just’, African-Americans who know that many of the programs designed for social redress have become giant patronage machines, and the public unions, as noted here by Rob Lyman.
The Democratic ‘investors’ (donors), invest to secure their own positions. The bigger voter audiences in the middle have interests that often conflict with the Democratic ‘investors’, and sadly, when put to the choice, the Party goes with the ‘investors’ almost every time.
Now I think there’s a big constituency out there…the single moms making $30K and barely getting by, the two-income families who realize that they’ll never make more than $25K together, all the way up to the middle-class families making $100K and happy to own a home, but who realize that they can save for retirement or send the kids to college, but not both.
Social and economic policies aren’t aimed at these people. And yet, they are the ones who the ‘invisible hand’ of globalization is hitting the hardest – by limiting opportunity, by exporting jobs, by capping salaries.
I’m not an isolationist. King Canute’s lesson to his advisors has sunk in. But we have to look at how we will manage the changes in the economy, if in no other way than by cushioning the impacts on those who can least afford it.
The problems of the very poor are equally real, and in many ways, more wrenching. But they don’t have far to fall, and the mere ability to get and hold a job gets them through their worst problems.
And, cynically, they don’t vote.
The working classes do. And they are righteously afraid of falling down a level, with all the reason in the world.
That’s the face of the New Model Democratic Party. When we figure out how to make the lives of working Americans better…by getting out of the way and letting entrepreneurs create jobs, while keeping the scam artists from looting the banks and corporations…by designing tax policy that is simple, fair, and tilted toward those who work rather than those who invest (yeah, this is going to be an issue…)….and by figuring out how to provide the public goods and how to get out of the way and let the market provide the private goods these people need to have decent lives.
A long time ago, I became convinced that what most people want…whether they grew up in Oxaca, Compton, or Brentwood…is a decent house to raise their kids in, a meaningful and reasonable secure job, and some sense that their children’s lives had a shot at being better than theirs.
Deliver that, Democrats, and win.

With the post below, I’m done with the Burk issue (I reserve the right to respond to clever or significantly dumb comments), although not with the issues of men, women, and children.
I did want to take a moment and give an attaboy to Glenn Reynolds (despite the fact that he didn’t link to me and still, dammit, hasn’t put me on the Big Blogroll and Fount of Traffic); he and I had a long email correspondence about all this and while we’re each kind of puzzed about the other’s position, he was gracious, civil, and picked my most coherent email to promote.