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In 2006, driven by a great degree by the immigration debate, Hispanics fled the Republican Party.  From 2004 to 2006 the national Hispanic vote moved close to 20 points, going from 59/40 Kerry/Bush to 70/30 D/R.  And turnout was up 33% from 2002.  This part of the American electorate has become energized, and much more anti-Republican. 

Remember that we've seen this happen before.  In California, Pete Wilson and the GOP took on Hispanics and turned a swing state into a blue and progressive one.  Hispanics responded to the GOP attacks by registering and voting in huge numbers for Democrats.  In the first election after the GOP attacks the effect was modest.  The impact came in the 2nd election, and the ones after. 

The question about the anger Hispanics across the nation now feel towards the GOP was whether or not it would sustain, and if so, what impact it might have.  For it is hard to see a viable electoral college map for the GOP that doesn't contain the heavily Hispanic swing states of AZ, CO, FL, NM and NV.  Take these 5 states away and it starts to become hard how to see the GOP wins in 2008.  A continued big swing of Hispanics in 2008 could deny this states to the GOP, and mark the way the GOP has handled the immigration issue as one of the greatest strategic blunders of modern politics. 

Well, over the weekend, we saw a story that shows this degradation of the Republican brand with Hispanics continues apace.  Peter Wallsten of the LATimes published a remarkable piece showing that those newly eligible citizens registering to vote in South Florida, a place where most Hispanics are Republican, are becoming Democrats:

MIAMI BEACH — As a Cuban who fled Fidel Castro's communist rule for a new life in the U.S., Julio Izquierdo would seem a natural Republican voter — a sure bet to adopt the same political lineage that has long guided most of his countrymen who resettled in South Florida.

But moments after taking his oath this week to become a U.S. citizen and registering to vote, the grocery store employee said he felt no such allegiances.

"I don't know whether Bush is a Democrat or a Republican, but whatever he is, I'm voting the other way," Izquierdo, 20, said Thursday as he waited for a taxi after a mass naturalization ceremony at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Izquierdo said he did not like President Bush's handling of the Iraq war and was miffed at politicians, most of them Republican, who seem to dislike immigrants.

That sentiment, expressed by several of the 6,000 new citizens who took their oaths Thursday in group ceremonies that take place regularly in immigrant-heavy cities nationwide, underscored the troubled environment facing the GOP in the buildup to next year's presidential election.

Surveys show that among Latino voters — a bloc Bush had hoped to woo into the Republican camp — negative views about the party are growing amid a bitter debate over immigration policy.

Republicans in Congress have led the fight against a controversial Senate bill that would provide a pathway for millions of illegal immigrants to eventually become citizens. All but one of the GOP's leading White House hopefuls oppose the measure.

Many Latino leaders, including Republicans, have said the tone of some critics in attacking the bill has been culturally insensitive. They say that has alienated some Latinos from the GOP....

Read on my friends.  This is one of the most important stories in politics today.

Of all the emerging challenges we face in the new post-Iraq Middle East, there is perhaps no more important one than what to do in and with Iraq itself.  In a Sunday Outlook piece, Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon offer thoughts on what to do with the reality of Iraq today, not the fantasy place invoked from time to time by members of the Administration and their allies.  It begins:

Last week's bloodshed in Iraq and the bombing of what remained of the historic Shiite shrine in Samarra and of two Sunni mosques in Basra were more reminders of a terrible truth: The war in Iraq is lost. The only question that remains -- for our gallant troops and our blinkered policymakers -- is how to manage the inevitable. What the United States needs now is a guide to how to lose -- how to start thinking about minimizing the damage done to American interests, saving lives and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco.

No longer can we avoid this bitter conclusion. Iraq's winner-take-all politics are increasingly vicious; there will be no open, pluralistic Iraqi state to take over from the United States. Iraq has no credible central government that U.S. forces can assist and no national army for them to fight alongside. U.S. troops can't beat the insurgency on their own; our forces are too few and too isolated to compete with the insurgents for the public's support. Meanwhile, the country's militias have become a law unto themselves, and ethnic cleansing gallops forward.

To read the whole piece, click here.  For more on this series, click on the Middle East tag above.

Our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, has been arguing that this is the cycle progressives will need to do a great deal of experimentation with mobile telephony and media.  The Times has a worthwhile read today, one that takes an indepth look at ESPN's forays into the mobile arena.  My favorite quote, and one, if it proves to be true, will be very important for the future of advocacy:

“People talk about it being the third screen (mobile phones),” says John Zehr, senior vice president for digital video and mobile products at ESPN. “I talk about it being the first screen because it’s the closest to you.”

Yes, back to our favorite policy theme this morning.  Robin Wright of the Post takes a sweeping look through the results of our foreign policy in the Middle East.   It isn't pretty:

The Middle East is in flames. Over the past week, war erupted among the Palestinians and their government collapsed. A Shiite shrine in Iraq was bombed -- again -- as the new U.S. military strategy showed no sign of diminishing violence. Lebanon battled a new al-Qaeda faction in the north as a leading politician was assassinated in Beirut. And Egyptian elections were marred by irregularities, including police obstructing voters, in a serious setback to democracy efforts.

U.S. policy in the region isn't faring much better, say Middle East and U.S. analysts.

"It's close to a nightmare for the administration," Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview from Dubai. "They can't catch their breath. . . . It makes Condi Rice's last year as secretary of state very daunting. What are the odds she can get virtually anything back on track?"

Each flash point has its own dynamics, but a common denominator is that leaders in each country -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- are each pivotal U.S. allies.

"The people we rely on the most to help are under siege, just as we are," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Council staffer. "Three of the four leaders may either not make it [politically] through the end of the summer or find themselves irrelevant by then."

The broad danger is a breakdown of the traditional states and conflicts that have defined Middle East politics since the 1970s, said Paul Salem of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Beirut office. An increasing number of places -- Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories -- now have rival claimants to power, backed by their own militaries.

Also, once divided by the Arab-Israeli conflict, the region is now the battleground for three other rivalries: the United States and its allies pitted against an Iran-Syria alliance in a proxy war regionwide, secular governments confronted by rising al-Qaeda extremism, and autocratic governments reverting to draconian tactics to quash grass-roots movements vying for democratic change.

Extremists are scoring the most points. "Gaza is the latest evidence that most of the trends are pointed in the wrong direction. It's yet another gain for radical forces. It's another gain for Iran. It's another setback for the U.S., Israel and the Sunni regimes," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and State Department policy planning chief during President Bush's first term. "The United States has not shown that moderation pays or will accomplish more than violence."

A second danger is that conflicts now overlap. "You can't look at Lebanon or Iraq or the Palestinians or Syria or Iran and try to deal with them separately anymore. You could have 10 years ago. Now they are politically and structurally linked," said Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut.

Khouri said the United States deserves a good share of the blame for a confluence of disasters spawning pessimism and anger across the region..

In one of the more interesting stories about the new politics of our day, Jose Vargas of the Post writes about the huge audience Ron Paul is gathering on line.

The Post has a fascinating look at one of our favorite subjects - the very rapid way media and advertising are changing.  This story today looks is provocatively titled: "Gone in 30 Seconds," and tracks the migration of commercial adspend from broadcast tv to the internet.  Two key graphs:

"I believe that search[-based] and other online advertising is taking away from the off-line [or traditional] budgets of marketers, and one reason is it's more accountable," said Karl Siebrecht, president of Atlas Enterprise Solutions, which aQuantive also owns. "You can send your message out there and understand if people click on it downstream, and if they click, do they purchase? If you're selling Toyotas, you can see if they asked for a specific dealer location."

Or:

In April, Nike pulled its running-shoe campaign from longtime ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, which had developed the iconic "Just Do It" tagline and many memorable television commercials. Wieden+Kennedy lost the account because Nike did not believe the agency had the necessary digital expertise to promote Nike shoes online.

Nike caught a whiff of the future from its Nike+ interactive online campaign, dreamed up last year by the leading-edge agency R/GA Associates of New York. The Web site, meant to sell Nike running shoes that interface with an iPod to record a runner's mileage, claims a community of thousands of runners who share workout music available for purchase on Apple's iTunes. The site is more than traditional advertising -- it attempts to be a utility for Nike runners.

"Technologists are pretty foreign to the traditional agency model, but they're an important part of the future," said Bob Greenberg, chairman and chief executive of R/GA, which began life 30 years ago as a Hollywood animation house. "Traditional creative is becoming less and less important."

For more on all this check on any of the tags above or visit our site, www.newpolitics.net.

Yes, we return to our main foreign policy theme again this morning, starting off with a front-page Washington Post piece by Glenn Kessler appropriately titled: "Takeover by Hamas Illustrates Failure of Bush's Mideast Vision."

It begins:

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared.

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas, whose bouts of vacillation have irritated U.S. officials, yesterday dissolved the Palestinian government in response to Hamas's takeover of Gaza. U.S. officials signaled that they will move quickly to persuade an international peace monitoring group -- known as the Quartet -- to lift aid restrictions on the Palestinian government, allowing direct aid to flow to the West Bank-based emergency government that Abbas will lead.

"There is no more Hamas-led government. It is gone," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the administration must still consult with other members of the Quartet. He said that humanitarian aid will continue to Gaza, but that the dissolution of the Palestinian government is a singular moment that will allow the United States and its allies to create a "new model of engagement."

This senior Administration official is correct - we are at a moment, as a nation, that we have to come to terms with the extraordinary failure of our entire Middle East strategy.  Our investment in the region has been immense in terms of lives, money and prestige.  And today our traditional allies are in retreat, and non-Western forces are on the rise.  This "new model of engagement" suggested above is a concept we need for the entire region, not just in Palestine. 

To see previous iterations of this discussion, you can scroll down or click on the Middle East, National Security or Iraq tags above.

Our good friend Jerome Armstrong offers up lots of interesting thoughts about the Democratic Primary in a new post on mydd.  I strongly recommend it without offering any comment on whether I believe it is accurate or not. 

We at NDN and NPI believe we are in the midst of a profound media and technology transformation, one that is ushering in a whole new era of communications that we call "post-broadcast."  Yesterday I wrote about the most important change in this media revolution, the way television is changing.  My piece reflected on how people are swiftly leaving the old 20th century media platforms, and looks at how the Romney campaign is experimenting with a very new 21st century television model.  In his essay Jerome intelligently reflects on the 2nd great change, the arrival of the internet in politics. 

To me what the internet has done more than anything else is lowered the barrier to entry for average people in politics.  A whole new set of cheap and easy to use tools is allowing politics to come to people in more personal, intimate ways.  These new tools allows campaigns and organizations much greater ease in managing relationships with literally millions of people, something not really easy to see or understand until the Dean campaign came along. 

If the broadcast age was about passive consumption, this new age of communications and politics is about participation.  People want to be partners in our fight, not donors to a cause or passive consumers of a candidate's message.  Remember that what is now perhaps the most powerful show on television is one that allows active and sustained and meaningful citizen participation - American Idol.  Success in this new era of politics requires groups or candidates to treat folks as partners and participants, not "couch potatoes."

This is a big change.  It is a cultural change, an operational change, a fundamental change in the way politics and society at large operate.  How one manages this change and this new reality is becoming one of the most important measures of political or advocacy success in this emerging century. 

On the progressive side the organization that has best embodied this "new politics" is Moveon.  Moveon really is only the sum of all the small actions of its individual members, working together towards a common cause and as true and valued partners in the fight.  This model has allowed Moveon to gather more email addresses than the DNC, and to blossom into perhaps the most influential progressive organization in the nation today.  And yes this is an organization without a real office, a dozen or so folks scattered across the country and headed up by a couple brand-new to politics. 

Another way to think of this transformation is to think of a Presidential campaign.  In the 20th century, the age of broadcast, when one thought of a Presidential campaign one thought of a 30 second spot, a tarmac hit and 200 kids in a headquarters.  That was the campaign.  Today, when one thinks of a 21st century Presidential campaign one needs to see millions of people - perhaps in 2008 tens of millions of people - going to work every day as true partners in the fight to elect the candidate.  They can get daily emails or text messages or perhaps even this cycle more complicated intergrated multimedia; they can read blogs and other sites to stay connected; they can share their passion through blogs, their own blog or a variety of social networking sites; they can give money and encourage others to do so; they can email, text, post, link or phone others to take action including giving.  But the key here is that a campaign now has the ability to harness the energy of so many now - as advocates, bloggers, contributors, doorknockers, signholders, etc - as true partners in the fight. 

This is a radically different model, and of course, a much better model than the old. It brings people back into the core of politics in a way they simply haven't been in the broadcast era.  It took Dean 6 months to get 160,000 people signed up on his site in 2003.  My guess is that Obama is close to a million already through his site, facebook, myspace and other means.  We are four years further into this new age of politics, and thankfully, more and more people are asking to become meaningfully involved in the future of their country.

The question that this begs is - what do we want all those people to do other than give money? If folks are true partners does that mean relinquishing control? How much control? What role do they really have in the campaign and how does it stay real?  The answer to all this is the secret sauce now, perhaps the most important key to 21st century politics. 

But figuring this out is worth the struggle, the experimentation, the letting go for the upside is so extraordinary.  Wouldn't you want 10 million people on your team, fighting it out each day, as valued and trusted partners, rather than than relying on the support of a few hundred kids scattered throughout the nation?  I know I would.  And this new age Jerome discusses in his essay allows that.  The question he raises is do the campaigns in this cycle understand all this? We all know Dean and Trippi did.  Do the folks running today's campaigns do too?

So yes this morning we return to one of the main themes we've been discussing over the past year - the need for America to come up with a comprehensive approach to the problems of the post-Iraq Middle East.

Imagine for a moment if we had no troops in Iraq.  Pakistan is weakening.  Lebanon and Palestine are descending into civil wars.  The Taliban have returned to Afghanistan.  Bin Laden is still on the loose.  Iraq of course is on the verge of becoming a failed state, Al Qaeda there is gaining strength (and regional legitimacy), and its chaos is starting to be exported to the rest of the region.  Iran is governed by an extemist, moving towards nuclearization, and is very aggressively establishing itself as perhaps the most important nation in the Middle East today.  Regional Sunni-Shiite tensions are driving a new and more complicated regional dynamic.  Our most important ally in the region, Israel, has a Prime Minister at 3%, and is in an extended political meltdown. 

Taken together it is becoming clear that the West's traditional regional allies are in retreat and new and less pro-Western forces are on the rise.  While there are many reasons to be concerned about the growing instability in the Middle East, the overarching one is oil.  Keeping the region's oil flowing at reasonable prices is of course one of the most important goals of our foreign policy, either Democrat or Republican.  And we have to start talking openly about how growing chaos in the region could spread, and eventually begin to threaten the petroleum lifeblood of the world's economy. 

So, if we had no troops in the region, would we be having a different conversation here in the US and around the world? Would be talking about regional conferences of reconciliation? Special envoys? UN Troops? An American-led peace conference? Would the American Secretary of State be engaged in ongoing shuttle diplomacy, essentially moving to the region for an extended period of time? Would our President be engaged daily in bringing world leaders together to find a better path? Or would we just sit back and let the region fall into greater chaos?  Or do what the Administration has done, which is take the one act most likely to accelerate the regional chaos?  Or have the Treasury Secretary give speeches whining about the lack of cooperation of our allies?  

We need a new conversation about what is happening in the Middle East today.  The stakes are high, and our current government is wedded to a strategy that is without doubt harming the long-term security interests of the United States.  But our answer must become more than a robust discussion about the role of our troops in the region.  We need a new strategy for the Middle East - diplomatic, economic, military - that takes into account the realities of the region today. 

The Times has a fascinating look at how the Romney campaign is modernizing the way advocacy and political campaigns use television, the most important medium in politics today. 

The piece reinforces a basic point we've been making here at NDN and through our affiliate, the New Politics Institute - that given the increasing velocity of change of the media and technology landscape, those looking to succeed in this new battleground of 21st century politics will need to adopt a culture of learning and experimentation.  Doing politics the way one did 4-6-8 years ago is no longer an option, as this "new politics" is literally being invented in front of our eyes.

Consider that in 1985 90% of anyone watching a TV was watching live broadcast television.  In this election cycle, with the rise of cable, satellite and DVRs, only about a third of anyone watching a TV will be watching live broadcast TV.   What a transformation of the most important medium of politics! One would expect a great deal of experimentation in our politics around this tremendous change.  Romney is now leading the way. 

It is only June and Romney has already bought national cable, done Spanish-language ads and executed a variety of more targeted buys - in addition to the traditional broadcast buys in the early states.  There has never been anything like this before in a Presidential, and largely through this strategy Romney now leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire.  Will this lead hold? Not clear, but John Weaver's tortured effort to explain away the significance of what has happened here should make it clear the McCain folks are worried. 

The most interesting part of the piece (including some quotes from me):

It is also unclear just how effective television advertisements continue to be in today’s rapidly changing media environment, with audiences segmented over a kaleidoscopic array of cable channels and with the competing din of the Internet and other information sources.

“There is no model anymore,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, which instructs liberal activists on how to take advantage of media advances. “Everything is made up as we go, because audiences are leaving the old platforms. We are hurtling into a post-broadcast media age.”

Members of Mr. Romney’s media team say they are able to reach those who are already watching the presidential contenders closely by sophisticated microtargeting techniques, pioneered by the Bush campaign in 2004, that crunch through mountains of market research data.

“That’s why early media makes more sense now than it would have even made even four years ago, because we can find our targets in a fragmented media market,” said Will Feltus, another member of Mr. Romney’s media team.

The data helps the campaign’s media buyers, he said, isolate specific programs and schedule their advertisements for times of the day when Republican primary-goers are more likely to be watching. The television show “24,” for example, has been a favorite of the campaign’s.

In another unusual move, Mr. Romney has also been running advertisements on national cable networks, focusing mostly on Fox News, a favorite among conservatives. The goal is to establish him among national party activists, fund-raisers and leaders, as well as among early primary voters.

Lots to think about here.....