Kevin Drum

IRAQ UPDATE....Two days ago I was reading stories about how the Iraqis were still flatly opposed to the U.S. version of the security agreement they were being asked to sign. But now everything is different:

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.

"Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011," said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. "If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama."

Translation: we don't trust George Bush to actually observe the terms of the agreement. But Obama will. Apparently Iraqis are pretty shrewd judges of character, aren't they?

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OBAMA'S CONSTITUTION....I don't expect to hear anything about this stuff soon from the Obama team, but I hope they don't put off for too long making some explicit statements about:

• Domestic surveillance/warrantless wiretapping
  

• Guantanamo
  

• Torture policy/adherence to Geneva conventions
  

• Signing statements
  

• Military tribunals
  

Let's call this the "shredding the constitution" file. Or, more hopefully, the "putting the constitution back together" file. The first two items in particular are going to be especially tough for Obama. He's almost certainly going to be told in no uncertain terms by men wearing dark suits and penetrating stares that the wiretapping program has produced reams of actionable intelligence and that cutting it back will endanger American security. And those sentiments won't stay private. They'll be leaked to plenty of friendly reporters if Obama orders the program modified anyway. We can expect some major political firestorms over this.

Guantanamo, if anything, will be even harder. I'm not talking here about Guantanamo the place. The prison itself can be pretty easily moved elsewhere. I'm talking about Guantanamo the problem: namely, what do you do with the remaining detainees there? Battlefield conditions being what they are, it's almost a certainty that the evidence against many of the prisoners — including some of the genuinely dangerous ones — is far too weak to withstand any kind of dispassionate tribunal. But if that means some of them get released, where do they get released to? Kansas City? It's not as if there's another country in the world that will take them, after all.

But we can't keep surveilling American citizens forever and we can't continue to keep prisoners locked up based merely on rumors and hearsay (or confessions extracted by torture). I don't expect Obama to clean this stuff up on his first day in office, but here's hoping that the constitutional law professor doesn't wait too long. It would be nice to have our country back again.

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RAW DATA....Via Steve Benen, Steve Waldman says that Obama has shrunk the God gap:

Obama got 43% of weekly church-goers vs. 55% for McCain. In 2004, Bush got 61% vs. 39% for Kerry. What this means is that Bush beat Kerry by roughly 27 million among weekly churchgoers, and McCain beat Obama by only 15 million — a stunning 12 million person shift.

Hold on a second. I made a pain in the ass of myself over this subject in 2004, and I'm going to do the same thing this year.

First things first. In 2004, Kerry lost to Bush nationwide by 2.4 percentage points. In 2008, Obama beat McCain by 6.3 percentage points. That's a swing of about 9 points nationwide, which means that any group that also swung by 9 points in Obama's favor was doing nothing except following the national trend.

So how about those churchgoers? They went from -22 for Kerry to -12 for Obama. That's a swing of ten points, almost identical to the nationwide swing in Obama's favor. Weekly churchgoers just didn't do anything unusual, which means there's no reason to think that Obama did anything special to appeal to them. More than likely, they voted for him in larger numbers this year for the same reason as everyone else: they were tired of Bush, tired of Republicans, and trusted Obama more in tough economic times. There's really no justification for a special narrative to explain those 12 million extra voters.

But as long as we're on the subject, which groups did Obama do especially well with? That is, which groups did he swing by margins substantially more than 9 points? Based on the 2004 and 2008 exit polls, here are the groups that swung in disproportionate numbers this year:

• Income $200,000 or more (+34)
  

• First-time voters (+33)
  

• No high school (+27)
  

• Latinos (+27)
  

• 18-29 year olds (+25)
  

• Under $15,000 (+21)
  

• Full-time workers (+19)
  

• Urban (+19)
  

• Non-gun owners (+18)
  

• Non-religious (+16)
  

• Parents with children under 18 (+16)
  

The swing in first-time voters (which overlaps heavily with 18-29 year olds) and Latinos was especially stunning. Also worth noting, just because they're such obvious swing groups, are Obama's large gains among moderates (+12) and the unmarried (+14).

And which groups did Obama do substantially worse with than his overall national trend? Here they are:

• Gay/lesbian (-11)
  

• Last minute voters (-8)
  

• Union members (0)
  

• "Other" religions (0)
  

• Gun owners (+2)
  

• White women (+4)
  

• 45-59 year olds (+4)
  

Gays and last-minute deciders are the only groups where Obama performed worse than Kerry. The other five are groups where he did better than Kerry, but not by as much as he did with the country as a whole.

I don't have any special narratives or analysis to offer for any of this. Maybe later. For now, it's just raw data for your noodling pleasure.

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SOCIAL CONSERVATISM....David Frum on the future of the Republican Party:

Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics — and Republicans more conservative on social issues. College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats — but that their values are under threat from Republicans. There are more and more college-educated voters.

So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? This will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. It will involve even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarising on social issues.

Greg Mankiw on why McCain lost the youth vote:

Recent conversations I have had with some Harvard undergrads have led me to a conjecture: It was largely noneconomic issues. These particular students told me they preferred the lower tax, more limited government, freer trade views of McCain, but they were voting for Obama on the basis of foreign policy and especially social issues like abortion. The choice of a social conservative like Palin as veep really turned them off McCain.

Ross Douthat is right to warn that Mankiw's students are hardly a representative sample, but I'll bet he's basically correct anyway. Four years ago the big post-election meme was a warning that Democrats needed to get more socially conservative, but that didn't happen and they won anyway. Social liberalism is actually (surprise!) pretty popular.

On the other hand, there's certainly a place in America for an economically conservative party. Republicans have gone overboard on this during the past decade, but they might be able to get by with only a modest course correction on this score. The financial meltdown won't last forever, after all. On social issues, though, they're doomed if they continue to hitch their future to the hard edged conservatism of their evangelical base. They've mostly won the battle on guns, but on issues like abortion, stem cells, gay rights, immigration, and the environment (which most people view as a lifestyle issue, not an economic issue) I don't see how they survive if they don't moderate their positions fairly dramatically. The GOP is in danger of permanently losing an entire cohort of the electorate if they continue to be perceived as a party in thrall to xenophobes, bluenoses, and tent revival preachers. They created James Dobson; now they need to tame him.

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