Wednesday Quick Reads ...

Trying to shoehorn everything into the day in order to leave early for a special event over at my little church. Here's some good reading for the day ...

» ChiTrib: Dems look to Bean on how to win in GOP-leaning area (Jim Tankersley)
I've seen some of the reasons why Melissa Bean is being used as a model for red-to-purple districts. Hard to imagine anyone doing a better job. She's been a great example of how to make the "Run Everywhere" model a lasting success.

» NY Observer: Dukakis, Once Burned, Refuses to Be Optimistic About 2008 (Steve Kornacki)
A surprisingly good catch-up with Dukakis looking forward to 2008. By no means do I share his pessimism or his simplistic view of what's likely to happen. But his solution, nevertheless, proves to be something worth echoing ...

“We have to organize every damn precinct in the United States of America—all 185,000,” Mr. Dukakis said. “I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. I didn’t do it after the primary [in 1988]. Don’t ask me why, because that’s the way I got myself elected from the time I was running for town meeting in Brookline to the time I ran for governor.”

And when he talks about organizing, he doesn’t mean the legions of eager college students—think the orange-hat-clad “Perfect Storm” that Howard Dean sought to rain down on Iowa in 2004—who are shipped off to key states for crunch-time grunt work. He also doesn’t mean limiting the outreach to “likely” Democratic voters, because—especially after seven years of George W. Bush—“there are huge numbers of disaffected Republicans out there. Who says they won’t vote for us?”

“I’m talking about every precinct,” he said, “with a precinct captain and six block-captains that make personal contact with every single voting household. And I mean starting a year in advance. I’m not talking about parachuting in with two weeks to go. That’s baloney. And these people are people who’ve got to be from the precinct, of the precinct, look like the precinct and talk like the precinct.”

The way he tells it, this was the missing ingredient in his 1988 effort—a powerful and utterly economical tool that, if properly deployed, could have blunted the Bush campaign’s character-assassination-by-paid-media, and one that could spare Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama his ultimate fate.

...

“There’s a chemistry there, which is hard to describe unless you’ve done it,” he said. “Otherwise, it permits your opponent to paint you as something you aren’t. It happened to me. It happened to Kerry. They tried to do it to Clinton. They’ll try to do it to anybody.”

Here’s how Mr. Dukakis broke down the struggle that Mr. Kerry—Mr. Dukakis’ lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1985—faced three years ago.

“You never had a sense that people felt personally connected to the guy, right? Had he had that kind of operation going nationally, there would have been a much stronger feeling of personal connection. Why? Because average folks in the neighborhood are out pushing him.”

That final point, if I may, adds to something that I sense if behind the Hillary Factor - as I see it. Team Clinton, by no means, has the organizational structure that Duke envisions. But there is a rather deep-seeded attachment to the Clintons that isn't there for Obama and Edwards. Whether that's due to exposure, being hardened by battle, or some other combination of factors, I don't know. But I do think there's an element - possibly even a sizable element - of that final point that I clip of Dukakis' that's at work for Clinton this time around.

» Guardian: At stake in Sudan (Václav Havel)
Nothing terribly new here, but just good to see Havel still on the side of angels. TNR has another nice entry on this subject as well.

» TNR: AWAY-FROM-HOME MOVIES, CONT'D (Christopher Orr)
Orr, in this now well-dated review, thinks The Simpsons Movie sucks. So let me say in no uncertain terms that it is, indeed, Chris Orr that sucks. To his credit, he states his "Present at the Creation" bonafides with the show. Fine. But the notion that the movie lacks memorable lines that some of us will be incorporating into our everyday conversations is not the sort of thing you judge with even Orr's delayed sense of immediacy.

» TNR: Death Grip: How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success. (John B. Judis)
Interesting for the read, so I'll recommend it on those grounds. The theory that Bush won in 2004 by pushing everyone's 'fear' button, though, isn't the sort of idea that I share. Maybe it's just one of those eternally debatable concepts, but I think that more of Bush's messaging from '04 was far more optimistic than most of my fellow Dems would like to give the other side credit for. Regardless, Judis goes off at length with the theory. If I find time somewhere, I'll do likewise in response. For now ... just read it and judge for yourself.