Despite the enduring popularity of the “Democrats In Disarray” meme in certain precincts of the chattering classes, the truth is that the enactment of health reform reflected a degree of Democratic unity, resolution, and yes, accomplishment that is becoming a bit hard to ignore. Ron Brownstein’s latest National Journal column gets it straight:

After Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s victory in January’s Senate special election, Democrats appeared shaken to the point of panic. But, from President Obama on down, the party has rapidly regrouped–enacting health care reform, virtually daring Senate Republicans to filibuster tougher regulation of financial institutions, and challenging the GOP with last weekend’s White House announcement of recess appointments for 15 nominees stalled in the Senate. Pundits may be pelting the party with predictions of doom in November, but Democrats have apparently decided that the best defense against a resolute Republican opposition is a good offense.

More importantly, improved Democratic morale has made it easier to get some perspective on the last turbulent year, when Democratic defections in Congress were largely limited to House Members from districts that Barack Obama lost in 2008 (defections that shouldn’t be that surprising).

The governing core of the party’s House majority has been members elected from districts that Obama carried in 2008. House Democrats who represent such districts voted 199-8 for final approval of the Senate health care bill last month. Last year, they voted 201-1 for Obama’s stimulus plan, 194-1 for federal tobacco regulation, 191-8 for financial reform, and 189-15 for climate-change legislation. The Democrats elected in districts that preferred Republican presidential nominee John McCain haven’t supported Obama nearly as reliably, but Pelosi has corralled enough of them each time to pass the president’s priorities.In the Senate, the governing core is the 33 Democratic senators elected from the 18 “blue wall” states that have supported the party’s presidential nominees in at least the past five elections. In 2009, these senators collectively recorded a stunning 97 percent party unity score on the index calculated by Congressional Quarterly. Around that axis, Democratic leaders have assembled shifting coalitions of Democrats from states that are more closely divided. On the most-momentous votes — the stimulus plan and the initial health care reform package — every Senate Democrat from either camp backed Obama.

Brownstein concludes that for all the strom and stress of the last year, Obama and congressional Democrats have put together the most impressive record of accomplishment by any Democratic administration since Lyndon Johnson’s, and a degree of party unity that rivals that of Republicans in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Interestingly enough, a considerable proportion of Democratic criticism of Obama has been from those arguing that he is too committed to bipartisanship in the face of ever-more-radical Republican opposition to his entire agenda. This was not a criticism made very often of George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove.

The problem for Democrats this November is not so much disunity as it is distraction and disinterest among voters who don’t often show up for midterm elections and who in this difficult period of American history understandably have other fish to fry. That’s why upcoming fights like financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination could be especially important: not only adding to this administrations legacy, but providing relatively unmotivated Democratic and swing voters with a graphic illustration of what could happen to the country if the GOP returns to power.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Tuesday’s Moscow attacks may do more to define the path of Russia’s future as a democracy than any single event since 1991. In a worst-case scenario, Vladimir Putin could return to the presidency. A sunnier forecast sees popular sentiment rising against Putin – and the emergence of a wild card that could lead the way to real change in Russia.

Hyperbolic? Sure, but certainly within the realm of possibility. Three things worth noting:

First, after the tragic Beslan school attack in 2004, then-President (and current Prime Minister) Putin used the event as a catalyst to execute a political power-grab in the name of national security. Most glaringly, Putin canceled the election of regional governors and chose to appoint them himself, thus consolidating power in the president’s hands. This was, as I mentioned yesterday, akin to George W. Bush canceling all elections for state governor in the wake of 9/11. That’s downright crazy. So Putin has set the power-grabbing precedent following past acts of terror — might he do so again?

Second, anecdotal evidence suggests the public may be starting to tire of Putin’s act. Ilya Yashin, a self-described youth activist, makes the point that since Putin has concentrated so much power in his own hands, “he is responsible for everything that happens in our country” and should therefore be held accountable for the latest attacks. “Not long ago Putin promised an end to terrorist acts in Russian cities and a military victory over terrorism. For this we gave up our political rights and civil liberties. We gave up the right to elect governors,” Yashin said.

Will this gently percolating anti-Putin sentiment boil over once Russians add concerns over security to concerns over a stagnating economy, as Josh Tucker and I wrote last year?

And then there’s the wild card: President Dmitri Medvedev. Let’s not forget that Putin may have handpicked Medvedev as his presidential successor, but Medvedev has shown an inclination to be open and possibly more pro-Western, having never been involved with the ex-KGB cadre that surrounds Putin. What’s more, Medvedev has distanced himself slightly from Putin’s Caucasus strategy, saying (from NYT) that the government should aggressively hunt down the terrorists, but also focus on the poverty and government malfeasance that he contended nurtured extremism.

Weighing these factors, I can envision two distinct outcomes for Russian democracy.

1. Putin brazenly unmasks himself as Medvedev’s puppet master. He uses the Beslan precedent and Moscow bombings to justify another round of power consolidation, saying that the last round had clearly not been effective enough. He crushes any sort of domestic civil opposition and launches a drive to change the Russian constitution to allow him to run for another term as president. Medvedev proves powerless to object and is slowly moved off to the side.

2. Medvedev realizes he has a potentially strong domestic political constituency as a resolute but smart antiterrorism president. He offers a different strategy to Russians to deal with the threat and successfully distances himself from Putin while effectively holding off Putin’s attempts to grab power.

Much of the outcome rests with Medvedev’s desire and ability to be independent from the man who picked him. I’m hopeful for the second, but my money is on the first.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gloel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Something interesting is going on in Arkansas Democratic politics right now: a serious primary challenge to an incumbent senator, Blanche Lincoln, who is not mired in any sort of personal scandal, and is not, it would seem, mispositioned ideologically for a general election in her conservative state.

As Steve Kornacki notes at Salon today, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s primary challenge to Lincoln is hard to categorize as simply an ideological challenge to a wayward politician who has offended the party base, or as simply an “electability” challenge to a weakened incumbent who looks likely to lose in November:

Generally, it’s easy to categorize these primary challenges. There are two basic varieties: ideological, with an exercised party base seeking retribution for an incumbent’s dissent from the party-line; and pragmatic, with party members responding to the perceived electoral deficiencies of the incumbent. And then there’s the Democratic Senate primary now underway in Arkansas, which seems to be a perfect hybrid of these two types. With the latest poll showing Blanche Lincoln’s challenger, Bill Halter, within 13 points of her, that primary – now just seven weeks away – has become the hottest Democratic contest in the nation.

Lincoln, who’s in the final year of her second term, has managed to pull off a somewhat remarkable feat, infuriating both the left-of-center base of her party and her state’s right-leaning general election audience at the same time. Thus, the challenge she’s receiving from Halter doesn’t neatly fit into either of the above categories.

Kornacki goes on to examine prior examples of ideological primary challenges, and finds little evidence of any that were also based on evidence of superior electibility (absent some non-ideological factor like a personal scandal affecting the incumbent’s political standing).

Now it should be obvious that Kornacki’s premise would not be accepted by a fair assortment of people in both parties. Among both self-identified progressives in the Democratic Party, and most especially self-identified conservatives in the Republican Party, many have argued for decades that “centrists” aren’t really more electable, and that rigorously ideological candidates could actually, if given the chance, exert a superior general-election appeal (via better “frames,” or clearer messages, or by mobilizing non-voters, or simply by providing a “choice”), even in difficult partisan terrain like the one Democrats face in Arkansas. There’s definitely evidence that this proposition is true at times and in places where there are significant numbers of voters who are “mispositioned” by adherence to parties with ideologies alien to their own (e.g., southern conservative Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, and northern moderate-to-liberal Republicans more recently). A subset of the “electability” argument for ideological rigor is that Democratic progressives or conservative Republicans can and will offer messages that have particular appeal to swing voters in a given constituency. That’s also sometimes true, as with antiwar Democrats in times of unpopular wars, or with anti-tax Republicans in places where some state or local tax revolt is underway.

But the Halter challenge to Lincoln is emphatically not in a state where there are liberals outside the Democratic Party ripe for the picking, and there’s not much evidence that Arkansans are generally receptive to any particular progressive arguments, notwithstanding the ancient claim that southerners are especially receptive to anti-corporate “populism” (a complicated topic which I won’t get into here, other than to say that I personally think the claim is vastly overstated since southern conservatives are conservatives on nearly every imaginable topic, including economics).

Lincoln is, however, an incumbent senator at a time when incumbency is not an advantage, and that alone could make Halter as competitive as, if not more competitive than, Lincoln in a general election. And it’s not as though Halter is running as the re-incarnation of Huey Long. His anti-corporate rhetoric, in fact, is pretty much indistinguishable from what we hear from Tea Party folk, opposing bailouts rather than promoting regulation.

It appears Lincoln’s strategy (other than touting endorsements from relatively popular Democrats like Bill Clinton) is to use Halter’s challenge as evidence that she’s not the raging socialist that Republicans make her out to be. If it works, this playing-off-the-left message would presumably boost her general election standing, thus making it easier for her to appeal to Democrats on electability grounds. But she doesn’t have much time to pull this off, and if she doesn’t, she hasn’t instilled enough loyalty in Arkansas Democrats to give her much confidence in a primary win absent an electability argument.

Arkansas will thus be an interesting test of the limits of tolerance for Democratic heterodoxy in tough terrain. And if Halter wins the primary, his performance in the general election will be watched closely for its broader implications as well. The last widely-discussed Democratic primary challenge to an incumbent senator, the Ned Lamont candidacy in Connecticut in 2006, involved a totally different situation: a blue state, a more famous incumbent, a red-hot issue where Joe Lieberman was horribly mispositioned with local opinion, and most of all, a third-party Lieberman general election candidacy that Republicans largely supported. The results of a Halter nomination in Arkansas would be sui generis.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

In mid-February most of the chattering classes, left and right, lost interest in Sarah Palin after an ABC/WaPo poll that showed rank-and-file Republicans souring on her, or at least concluding she wasn’t qualified to be president. (I personally suspect that poll was an outlier, but that’s a subject for another day, when fresh evidence is available).

But now, in the wake of her twin appearances at a Tea Party Express event in Nevada, and on the campaign trail with John McCain in Arizona, Palin has become impossible to ignore again, and there’s now an interesting effort underway among conservative elites to denounce any dissing of St. Joan of the Tundra from their own ranks.

Today neoconservative patriarch Norman Podheretz appeared on that estimable right-wing bulletin board, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to smite unnamed conservative critics of Palin, utilizing the Big Bertha of latter-day Republican rhetoric, the memory of Ronald Reagan:

Now I knew Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Then again, the first time I met Reagan all he talked about was the money he had saved the taxpayers as governor of California by changing the size of the folders used for storing the state’s files. So nonplussed was I by the delight he showed at this great achievement that I came close to thinking that my friends were right and that I had made a mistake in supporting him. Ultimately, of course, we all wound up regarding him as a great man, but in 1979 none of us would have dreamed that this would be how we would feel only a few years later.

Podhoretz goes on to suggest that liberal contempt for Palin is of a piece with liberal contempt for Reagan, and thus should never be echoed on the Right. This is all interesting because it’s the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party — heavily focused on foreign policy, disproportionately led by people who are secular, Jewish, or both, and suspicious of the influence of the Christian Right and of right-wing “populism” generally — where disdain for Palin is most visible. Podhoretz is trying to rein that tendency in.

And it looks like his argument is already getting traction. In its “Arena” feature, Politico asked a bunch of prominent gabbers, most of them conservatives, to react to Podhoretz’s piece, and they generally said he was right (with the occasional condescending reference to Palin’s need for a little more seasoning).

This doesn’t mean that neoconservatives are on the brink of shouting “Run, Sarah, Run!” or emulating the adulation she arouses among Tea Party folk or Right-to-Lifers, but it does represent a disciplinary reminder that the conservative coalition can’t brook any friendly fire. Podhoretz cites William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and implies that the prospect of being governed by Sarah Palin rather than Barack Obama represents an equivalent choice (certainly the most back-handed of compliments to Palin).

But the choice, he says, is clear and must be made:

[A]fter more than a year of seeing how [Obama’s] “prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts” have worked themselves out in action, I remain more convinced than ever of the soundness of Buckley’s quip, in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.

So on behalf of neoconservatives, Podhoretz is taking the coalition oath anew, and inverting the old Popular Front slogan of “Pas d’ennemis a gauche, pas d’amis a droit” (no enemies to the Left, no friends to the Right). That’s not terribly surprising in the current Total War atmosphere of American politics, but it’s amusing that Palin is being treated as the acid test of conservative solidarity, and perhaps alarming that she passes.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

It’s obvious that the Golden State isn’t golden anymore. As a new transplant here, the first state political event I watched up close was a May 2009 special election, featuring six ballot initiatives designed to avert a titanic budget crisis. California’s voters responded with what can best be described as snarling apathy. Turnout was 20 percent, which beat the previous California record for low turnout in a statewide election. The five initiatives that dealt with spending and revenue — which needed to pass in order to implement a major fiscal compromise — all went down, hard. (Most of them lost by two-to-one margins; a sixth initiative, denying legislators pay raises when the budget’s not balanced, passed.) Californians weren’t just experiencing a momentary fit of pique, either: In 2005, a similar package of eight budget deal-related ballot initiatives met the same fate.

As of March 21, the approval rating for Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood at 23 percent, which was where his Democratic predecessor, Gray Davis, was when he was recalled and booted out of office in 2003. But that level of support looks robust compared to that of the state legislature (controlled, if that’s not too strong a word, by Democrats), which stands at nine percent, not far from statistical zero.

California’s bad case of political self-loathing goes beyond a terrible economy, the state’s chronic monstrous state budget deficits, and the endless gridlock over virtually all major decisions in Sacramento. On the structural level, California’s permissive ballot initiative system has inserted voters — or, to be cynical about it, the special interests backing initiatives — into matters normally left to governors and legislators, resulting in constitutional limits on property taxes; excessive reliance on recession-sensitive income taxes; a crippling two-thirds vote requirement for legislative enactment of a state budget or for increasing taxes at any level of government; and a variety of spending mandates. Polls consistently show that a majority of citizens oppose tax increases and most spending cuts (they do favor cutting spending on prisons, which are operating under court rules and stuffed with inmates who have run afoul of the state’s many mandatory sentencing laws, some imposed by initiative). “Waste” is where Californians seem to want lawmakers to look for the massive savings necessary to balance the budget. Too bad California already ranks near the bottom among states in per capita state employees and infrastructure investment, and below average in per-pupil spending on education.

The obvious question is why anyone would want to be the next governor of California. But three viable candidates — two Republicans and one Democrat — are defying logic by offering themselves for this post. One Republican, state insurance commissioner and former tech executive Steve Poizner, is running on a systematic right-wing platform of massive spending cuts, new personal and business tax cuts, and, for dessert, another effort to ban access to public benefits for undocumented workers and their families. The second GOP candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, is running far ahead of Poizner, floating her campaign on an extraordinary sea of early money. Three months before the June primary, and eight months before the general election, Whitman (or eMeg, as local political journalists often call her) has already spent $46 million, mostly from personal funds on her campaign, and has threatened to spend up to $150 million if necessary. She has launched an astoundingly early series of saturation media ads, becoming ubiquitous on the California airwaves, as recently explained by David Crane of the influential political blog Calbuzz:

The campaign’s Gross Rating Point report, measuring total delivery of the current week’s broadcast ad schedule in 11 markets in California, shows that eMeg’s buy is comparable to what a fully-loaded campaign might ordinarily deliver in the closing weeks of a heated race — not three months before a primary that she’s prohibitively leading.“These are some big f****n’ numbers,” said Bill Carrick, the veteran Democratic media consultant after reviewing the report. “She’s buying the whole shebang.”

Whitman’s ads mainly convey, with numbing repetition, her claim to offer a fresh start for the state, delivered by a rock-star business executive committed to cuts in spending, tax cuts, and education reform. But she recently launched another batch aimed at primary opponent Poizner — whom she leads in the most recent Field Poll by 49 points — depicting the hyper-conservative as, believe it or not, a liberal who thinks just like Nancy Pelosi. (Poizner is reportedly planning to fire back using $19 million of his own Silicon Valley fortune, which may force Whitman to tack in a conservative direction on issues that she’d just as soon avoid, such as immigration.)

These assaults have raised some old concerns about her reputation in corporate circles for being ruthless in the pursuit of her goals, and a bit deranged — exhibiting an “evil Meg” alongside the “good Meg” of her press clippings — if denied her wishes. She’s also bought herself grief by refusing, until very recently, to answer press questions or elaborate beyond the happy talk of her biographical ads about her positions on various issues. All in all, she’s in danger of earning the reputation of being something of a robo-pol like her political mentor, Mitt Romney.

Indeed, Whitman’s overall strategy appears to be to clear the primary field by bludgeoning Poizner out of the picture with attack ads, and then to run as a can-do moderate conservative who’s worth a gamble for the relatively few voters who bother to show up at the polls. And she is reportedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a library of negative information to use against her general election opponent, a guy named Jerry Brown.

That’s right, Edmund Gerald “Jerry” Brown Jr., who is, on paper, the least likely person imaginable to become the frontrunner for governor of a state that is so passionately disillusioned with politicians. The son of an old-style liberal Democratic governor who served two terms before being bounced from office by Ronald Reagan, Brown was first elected to statewide office 40 — yes, 40 — years ago. After a term as secretary of state, he was governor for eight years, and later state party chair, mayor of Oakland and, currently, attorney general of California. He also ran unsuccessfully, and somewhat fecklessly, for the U.S. Senate once and for president three times (coming second to Bill Clinton in 1992). Not many Californians can remember a time when Brown or his father wasn’t in office or pursuing office, and most can remember more than one occasion when Brown Jr. did something quirky, embarrassing or controversial. Indeed, Whitman may be wasting her money reminding them.

But that’s the funny thing about Jerry Brown’s candidacy. Instead of being the fattest target in America for a Republican opponent, Brown is even with or slightly trailing Whitman in recent polls, despite her massive unopposed spending on TV ads — and, given California’s Democratic registration advantage, he’s a good bet to win unless the effectiveness of Whitman’s spending significantly outstrips the likely backlash against it.

You see, Jerry Brown is a tough challenger because he is hard to confine to the standard political and ideological boxes. His long political career may be a handicap in some respects, but it has also helped him defy typecasting and create unusual coalitions. Long an ally of Democratic liberals — in the 1990s, he had a show on the lefty Pacifica radio network — Brown governed California as a fiscal hawk in the wake of the property tax-slashing Proposition 13 (which he had opposed) in 1978. Similarly, as mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007, he became known for a strong law-enforcement record, and for his championship of charter public schools, including one controversial military school. He can be broadly characterized as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, which is a good fit for his state. But his leitmotif as a politician has always been unpredictability and a knack for anticipating and sometimes embodying the zeitgeist.

What’s more, his unique form of personal charisma makes him freakishly appropriate for the contemporary madness of California politics. For instance, here’s a characteristic snippet from an interview that Brown conducted with the New York Times, just after he was elected attorney general in 2006:

Over the years, you have moved from being a fabled liberal to a centrist position.

I don’t know. I don’t use that spatial metaphor.

Then how would you describe yourself politically?

I’m very independent. There’s a great line from Friedrich Nietzsche: A thinking man can never be a party man.

Charming. Yet, despite his willingness to name-check Nietzsche, Jerry Brown prefers the idea that politicians should tamp down their own passions, in a way the philosopher might have abhorred. He seriously studied Zen Buddhism in the 1980s, underwent training for the Jesuit priesthood and worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. Not surprisingly, he conveys a certain aura of ironic detachment and self-control.

Indeed, over four decades of engagement in public life, Jerry Brown has developed a remarkable knack for displaying a sense of his own — and government’s — limits. He began his gubernatorial first term in 1975 with an off-the-cuff “address” that ran seven minutes; replaced the traditional inaugural ball with an informal dinner at a Chinese restaurant; traded in his gubernatorial limo for a 1974 Plymouth from the state car pool; rented a small apartment instead of living in the governor’s mansion; and reportedly slept on a mattress on the floor. (As governor, Brown was far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes and spending several times. His austerity, which created vast budget surpluses, prompted one Reagan aide to joke that the Gipper “thinks Jerry Brown has gone too far to the right.”) Appropriately, one of Brown’s publicly identified gurus was Small Is Beautiful author E.F. Schumacher, and he once described his governing style, using a strikingly Zen phrase, as “creative inaction.” That could be very handy if he gets the job he is running for, where limits have been placed on virtually everything a governor can do, and it also provides a strong contrast to Whitman, whose campaign screams hubris.

Short of having their own grossly rich and relentless attack dog in the race, Democrats are probably blessed to have Brown, who can be expected to shrug off Whitman’s certain assault on his record and land a few coolly delivered blows of his own. He’s already reminding voters that California hasn’t had a particularly good recent experience with “outsider” governors promising to come in and clean up Sacramento by sheer force of will. And, without a doubt, Whitman’s campaign will bring back bad memories of another California candidate who boasted of vast executive experience and spent money like water on unconscionable attack ads: Al Checchi, whose over-the-top 1998 campaign eventually elevated the most boring candidate in the field, Gray Davis, to the governorship.

Meanwhile, Brown will have the luxury of leaving the anti-Whitman dirty work to surrogates and supporters who are planning a half-million ad assault on the Republican. And it’s not exactly a bad time to run as something of an anti-corporate populist, as Brown is doing, talking up “the people who work for the people, the firefighters, the nurses, the hospital workers, the janitors.” I don’t have to spell out which billionaire CEO-politician might be caught in that rhetorical net.

And Brown’s other ace in the hole could well be the Latino vote. Dating back to his close association with pioneer farm-labor organizer Cesar Chavez — who backed Brown’s 1974 candidacy in hopes of finding a political solution to the United Farm Workers’ problems — Brown has longstanding ties to California’s Latino community. Even in polls showing Whitman in the lead, he is beating her badly among Latinos. If Poizner gains traction in the primary, she will be under heavy pressure to move closer to his harsh positions on denying state aid to undocumented workers. And it hasn’t escaped notice that one of Whitman’s closest advisors is former governor Pete Wilson, whose sponsorship of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 back in 1994 decisively alienated Latino voters from the GOP and materially contributed to the state’s current Democratic majority.

It’s a long time until November. The Brown-Whitman tilt will have to share media attention and airtime with a Republican challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer and, before that, with a close and entertaining Senate primary battle between Carly Fiorina and Tom Campbell. At the state GOP convention two weeks ago, Fiorina, like Whitman an “outsider” business executive, was the star of the show. Her quirky web ads going after Campbell (the “demon sheep” ad, already a cult classic) and Boxer (a new ad unveiled at the GOP gathering that showed the senator morphing into a hot-air balloon) are as imaginative and attention-grabbing as Whitman’s TV spots are shrill and heavy-handed. The high point of Meg’s appearance was a press conference where she finally answered press questions. Her leaden convention speech and an over-produced Mitt Romney endorsement provided a glimpse of how poorly her act could wear on Californians over the long haul.

And it’s not as though Jerry Brown is likely to present Whitman with an unmoving target. As protean as California itself and as wily as any other 40-year veteran of political wars, Brown nicely defined himself in an interview with Calbuzz just after officially announcing his candidacy: “Adaptation is the essence of evolution,” he explained. “And those who don’t adapt go extinct.”

Indeed, such adaptivity may be the only thing that can serve California’s needs right now. With the state no longer in its political golden age, the harsh reality of running — and governing — in a place with such baleful political realities will require a truly kaleidescopic ability to make the best of a hostile environment. And, in a contest with a Republican who seems determined to prove that she and her checkbook can win it her way or no way, I wouldn’t place any bets against Jerry Brown becoming California’s right-man-in-the-right-place, one last time.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.