The Dish

The latest CBS NBC poll is fascinating. Chuck Todd:

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it’s not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37% positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

The Wright issue is not over for Obama, but he actually seems to have come off less scathed by the process than Clinton, in this poll at least. Most of the damage has been among Republicans; he still is far stronger among Independents than Clinton.

Some perspective on those Gallup numbers, showing a large proportion of Obama and Clinton voters prepared to vote for the GOP in the fall if their candidate loses.

The history of the yellow book:

In 1906, Jews in Trenton threatened to boycott Bell over a resort listing’s promise, "Free From Hebrews and Tuberculosis Patients." Temperance groups in the North agitated to ban brewery ads from directories, while some Southern directories segregated into separate sections for "white" and "colored" numbers. Women’s directory struggles are still within living memory: NYNEX’s first listings for birth-control counseling only appeared in 1967, while Bell fought well into the late 1970s to deny women equal billing alongside their husbands in household listings, claiming it required too much extra paper and ink.

And why they won’t go away:

Ask anyone under 30 about phone books, though, and you might as well inquire about Victrola needles. The Yellow Pages Association claims that even young households use them when the occasion—a wedding, for instance—demands reliable listings. But printed phone books are a maturing industry, with only about six in 10 businesses and individuals still regularly relying on them. Yet even as directories hemorrhage content to the Web and to unlisted cell numbers, enough oldsters—those, say, who still recall physically dialing numbers in a rotary motion—continue using them enough to keep profits rolling in.

A big heart; a gracious piece. Some believe that in the Obama candidacy, there is more at stake than others do. Like Marty, I am still open to supporting McCain this fall, primarily because of character and decency. Hagee and Falwell should not be ignored; but nor should they be dispositive. Iraq is in a terrible, near-impenetrable flux and how McCain and Obama respond to its shifting levels of crisis in the coming months will tell us a lot about the enormous burden of the presidency in the wake of the Bush-Cheney disaster. And how they respond to the economic clouds will be fascinating too.

But like Marty, I find something deeply rotten in the state of the Clintons, and know in advance that they cannot be trusted and will not respond genuinely to events or candidly to democracy. Like Marty also, I am not prepared to dismiss all that Obama is and represents because of the ugly intemperance of a preacher whose context is wide and complex, some of whose statements are simply indefensible, and many have been sincere and prophetic.

This election, I feel, is less and less about ideology. It is more and more about conscience and judgment. Keep examining yours and I will try to keep examining mine. There is a long way to go.

Ali Eteraz on Obama:

I did not start off as an Obama supporter. I was in Hillary’s camp. I thought Obama was a novelty item. Something Democrats paraded around to give the other wooden candidates a bit of glow. Then I slowly began to feel that things Obama said — and the way he handled himself in the campaign — reduced my political nihilism.

It’s clearly working. Her goal is to defeat Obama by destroying him in the next month or two, not by making a positive argument about herself. By ramping up his negatives, she also has an added threat to the superdelegates: nominate him and you’ll elect McCain. And if she cannot destroy him this time, and he gets the nomination, she will have so anathematized him with a segment of voters that McCain will beat him, and she gets to say "told you so" and run again in 2012. The new Gallup finding shows that it is working. It is Rove-Morris politics at its purest; and she and her husband are as skilled at it as anyone.

And that is one key reason why she must be beaten. A great deal is at stake. And the war is just beginning. 

This is simply must-reading for any fair-minded person interested in the full Jeremiah Wright story. There are very, very few people in American religious life as respected as Martin Marty, few scholars as learned, few Christians as sincere. He has been a professor of religious history at the University of Chicago for 35 years, one of the greatest universities in the world. If you do not know of him, here his is Wikipedia page and his own home-page. More here. I have never met the man but I have read a fraction of his over 5,000 articles, was deeply informed by his masterful Fundamentalism Project (co-edited with Scott Appleby) for The Conservative Soul, and know of few more distinguished, principled or decent public figures. Along with Barack Obama, he will not disown Jeremiah Wright, or Trinity United Church of Christ, where he attended services and listened to many Wright sermons.

Read his full defense of Wright in the Chronicle of Higher Education. You will learn this:

In the early 1960s, at a time when many young people were being radicalized by the Vietnam War, Wright left college and volunteered to join the United States Marine Corps. After three years as a marine, he chose to serve three more as a naval medical technician, during which time he received several White House commendations. He came to Chicago to study not long after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969, and the shooting of students at Kent State University in 1970.

This is a man the Fox News right calls an anti-American, a former marine who volunteered to serve his country in a war he opposed. Marty does not excuse some of the indefensible comments of Wright that have now been bludgeoned into our consciousness to the exclusion of all else. And those comments should not be excused. And they have not been excused by Obama. But Marty does say this:

The four S’s charged against Wright — segregation, separatism, sectarianism, and superiority — don’t stand up, as countless visitors can attest. I wish those whose vision has been distorted by sermon clips could have experienced what we and our white guests did when we worshiped there: feeling instantly at home.

Yes, while Trinity is "unapologetically Christian," as the second clause in its motto affirms, it is also, as the other clause announces, "unashamedly black." From its beginning, the church has made strenuous efforts to help black Christians overcome the shame they had so long been conditioned to experience. That its members and pastor are, in their own term, "Africentric" should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be "Judeocentric" or that Chicago’s Irish parishes be "Celtic-centric." Wright and colleagues insist that no hierarchy of races is involved. People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace.

Read the whole thing. It matters. Because the truth matters. Because in these complex, volatile areas, Martin Marty is a far more reliable guide to it than Sean Hannity.

He’s running media for Democratic congressional candidate, Karen Hartley-Nagle, and he’s … 16. Someone in politics has to understand MySpace, I guess.

Juan Cole:

The US military is concerned that if security collapses in Basra, it could cause the center-north to unravel, as well (this calculation is correct).

Matt:

…the details remain murky but the broad outline is that we’re continuing to see conflict between the exile party ISCI, which has been cooperating with the US and Iran in post-war Iraq, and the domestic nationalist Shiite movement associated with Muqtada al-Sadr, which has received some backing from Iran and been mostly hostile to the United States. From the point of view of American interests, this seems to be a fight in which we have no dog. Our main interest in this rivalry ought to be simply that it not turn into a bloody fight that leaves our troops in the crossfire.

James Joyner:

The claim that “AQI is still Iraq’s No. 1 enemy” strikes me as extremely dubious, especially after months of claiming that the Surge has decimated that force and that Iraqis have long since rejected them.

One would think, too, that we’d have used the relative lull in violence of the last few months to secure the border with Iran, since that has always been a pipeline for anti-government forces.

Judah Grunstein:

The story of the Awakening, like that of the Surge and the Iraq War in general, can be boiled down to the way in which tactics got in the way of strategy. More specifically, it’s the story of how tactics meant to reduce our engagement in Iraq ended up having the opposite effect.

Eric Martin:

For the Bush administration, backing ISCI/Dawa is appealing for a few reasons.  First, ISCI/Dawa are amenable to the US presence, whereas the Sadrist current is strongly opposed.  So ensuring that ISCI maintains its political power is essential to the goals of maintaining permanent military bases and gaining preferential access to oil residing in the Shiite-dominated south.  Ensuring the legitimacy of democratic process is, apparently, not quite as important.

Hilzoy:

The surge has never achieved its stated purpose: namely, to enable political progress and reconciliation between Shi’a and Sunnis. Violence has gone down, which is a wonderful thing, but it has never been clear how much of that was due to the surge itself, and how much to the fact that we paid off the Sunnis, and Sadr declared his cease-fire. I hope we’re not about to find out.

My thoughts here and here. If you are trying to catch up on the story, TPM has a synopsis.

(Photo: Iraqi Mahdi Army fighters take position during clashes in the southern city of Bara on March 26, 2008. Fighters loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed again in Basra this morning, a day after running battles in Iraq’s southern oil hub killed seven people, an AFP reporter and witnesses said. Iraqi security forces launched raids on Sadr’s Mahdi Army fighters in their strongholds yesterday, sparking the heavy fighting in which around 50 people were wounded. By Essam Al-Sudani/AFP/Getty Images.)

Boys and their balls: