Looks like some of Iraq’s major political parties are having some doubts about the security agreement. Basically, nobody in Iraq thinks it’s politically viable to be associated with the United States. It’s almost as if we she do what the overwhelming majority of Iraqis want and make a commitment to get out.

Well, it was about inevitable that this sort of thing start to pop up.

John McCain on Barack Obama’s fundraising success: “I’m saying that history shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.”

I’m a supporter of full public financing of political campaigns. I can only hope that John McCain’s experience of getting pummeled at fundraising will lead him to join that cause. For years, though, McCain’s been opposed to that kind of far-reaching reform, thinking that the only good kind of campaign finance reform is the kind that’s predicted to give the Republican Party an edge.

Meanwhile, I’m a little bit confused about the prospects for corruption here. In September, Barack Obama raised about $150,000,000. His average donor gave him $86 or 0.0000573 percent of the total. The maximum contribution anyone could have given him was $2,300 which comes out to 0.00092 percent of the total September haul. Someone responsible for 0.00092 percent of Obama’s total warchest doesn’t have any meaningful levers of influence over Obama. The nature of a huge haul from a giant pool of donors is that there’s no real prospect for corruption.

I think you could fairly say that issues of corruption aside, the Obama Method is still troubling insofar as it involves a systematic class bias in favor of politicians who appeal to the kind of people likely to make campaign contributions — i.e., relatively prosperous people. Of course this problem also applies to the way McCain is financing his campaign. The only solution would be full public financing of campaigns. Which would be a good idea. But it’s an idea McCain has long opposed.

May I just say that I, for one, am really looking forward to the 2012 GOP primary. Republicans almost always wind up going with the candidate who’s “next in line.” Thus, this year’s GOP race went through some unpredictable twists and turns but ultimately wound up where one would have expected far in advance — with next in line John McCain taking the ring. But if McCain wins, it’s not really clear who’s next in line. Both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have a solid case to make that they finished second in the primaries. And then there’s Sarah Palin.

And in a lot of respects I think Palin’s emergence has helped make Huckabee look really good. Months ago, he was this social conservative darling with undeniable political talent and a seemingly weak grasp of national policy. But compared to Palin, the guy looks like the most knowledgeable candidate on the planet. And while he has a lot of Palin’s small town charm, he’s actually charming enough that a lot of city slickers find him pretty charming too (sign me up). He’ll have a few years, and a Fox News show, to try to improve his command of various issues and then you could see him being a quite formidable contender. If, that is, he can find a fundraising base.

And then there’s Jeb, America’s next Bush waiting in the wings.

The interesting thing about sundry rightwingers branding increasing swathes of the United States as either “unreal” or “un-American” is that I think there’s a real honesty about this. Progressives are prone to becoming upset about things that happen in our country, with people sometimes letting this boil over into hysteria and firm vows to flee to Canada. But to conservatives, it’s actually integral to their conception of the United States that it be governed by conservatives. A period of progressive political power would mean not that America had erred, but that America had somehow ceased to be America.

Mark Steyn wrote the other day that “With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), ‘blue states’ mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California).” But what does this mean? Illinois isn’t a blue state if you don’t count Chicago? New York’s not a blue state if you don’t count New York? But of course Illinois isn’t Illinois without Chicago nor is New York, New York without New York. And mutadis mutandis for the entire United States of America. The country would not be the same country without its great cities and their suburbs. To say that this hypothetical US of Ruralia constitutes the “real” country makes no more sense than to pretend that the country is “really” a small island city-state that happens to be connected to some great wild beyond.

Adam Nossiter’s New York Times article on the Mississippi Senate race features a blunter-than-usual look at the source of Democratic Party troubles in the South:

The numbers in this state, which has perhaps the most racially polarized electorate in the nation, do not favor the Democrat: whites, a majority, overwhelmingly vote Republican, and 85 percent of them voted for President Bush in 2004. Even if there is a record black turnout, Mr. Musgrove would have to receive about 30 percent of the white vote to win.

And of course it’s no coincidence that Mississippi is both racially polarized and one of the states with the largest African-American population. Writing a long time ago about a very different era in the United States, V.O. Key observed in his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation that the so-called “black belt” of heavily African-American counties in Dixie was the stronghold of the white south’s peculiar brand of rightwingery. The advent of the Voting Rights Act has, of course, substantially altered southern political dynamics but the overall pattern in which blacker areas produce white voters ever-more-interested in checking black political power remains the same.

Where you see breakthroughs for Democrats is in places like Virginia and perhaps North Carolina that combine a substantial African-American population with increasing numbers of white educated professionals who don’t exhibit this same pattern and can form viable political coalitions with African-Americans.