Lessons from the GOP Nomination contest

Now that it's over (and it is over), here's what are some lessons learned from the GOP nomination fight in 2012:

1. The Party Decides. The Party Decides. Seriously, The Party Decides. Despite what appeared to be a chaotic race, with no less than 7 different national front-runners, despite the sturm and drang about the "Tea Party", despite the lack of enthusiasm for Romney, the Republican Party coalesced around a compromise candidate with decent campaigning skills who positioned himself so as to not offend any major party interest group.

You couldn't have created a better test for the "Party Decides" framework: Romney's weaknesses, longstanding fractures within the Republican Party, and miserable economic conditions were a perfect storm to upset the system. And yet, as we see party actors from all spectrums of the Republican party turn to destroy Newt after his improbable South Carolina win, the theory seems as safe as ever.

2. The Invisible Primary is the Most Important Primary. By the time people actually started voting the number of possible nominees had dropped to two: Romney and Perry. Romney successfully cajoled, bribed, threatened, or just flat out beat most of his potential competitors before a single delegate was selected. I'm reasonably certain he forced out Barbour and Thune, and I know he beat Pawlenty by drying up his donor base. Huckabee had his own reasons, and I won't even speculate that Palin has a coherent thought process, but they both ran and lost in the invisible primary as well. Others, like Jindal or Christie, might've thought about running and been told not to early on.

3. SuperPACs. SuperPACs have played an outsized role in this nomination contest, and it's not clear why. So far they haven't really done anything that 527s couldn't do in the past. (527s couldn't say "Vote for X" but they could say "X is an evil jerk".) The invisible monsters that don't report donors and savaged Democrats in 2010 haven't been playing in the Republican contest. But it seems like some sort of psychological barrier has been broken.

While it hasn't really ever been illegal for a rogue billionaire to decide to single-handedly prop up a candidate, what has happened between Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson has been remarkable. One of the ways in which the parties retain control of the nomination process is the way political donations are structured. Since people can only give a couple thousand dollars to a candidate, it requires candidates to appeal to a fairly wide swathe of middle class partisans in order to have enough money to seriously compete for the nomination.

Newt was never going to be the nominee. But we may have returned to the era where Joe Kennedy can buy his son a Presidential Nomination. (Hear that, John Huntsman, Sr.?)

4. You Can't Jump In Late. It's a perennial fantasy. Wes Clark, Fred Thompson, and now Rich Perry stand as monumental failures. Your best polling will be on the day you announce. If you're going to run, then run.

The most obvious point of this, as it applies to Perry, is that if you start running earlier, you get to have your big mistakes earlier. If Perry had managed to screw up a few debates before anyone was paying attention, he could have a year to recover and find his game. (Rumor has it that he didn't jump in the race because he was having back surgery, and then his painkillers from recovery were the cause of some of his odd behavior.)

But it goes beyond that: people who jump in late have a harder time raising money, the best staff is taken, some key party elements have already committed, etc. If you're going to run, then run.

5. Don't Get Drafted. Jon Huntsman's campaign to be the Republican for people who don't like Republicans was pretty awful. But that wasn't his fault! He was in China when the campaign started, and could not legally speak to the people trying to get him to run about campaign strategy. By the time he started running, they'd created the McCain 2000 retread. Despite the fact that McCain lost, and that the GOP has gotten more conservative, Huntsman was more-or-less forced to play they hand they dealt him.

5a. Don't hire John Weaver.

6. GOP Voters are Hyper-Informed. I do not mean that they are correct, especially about basic facts about reality. But rather, GOP partisans watch partisan TV, listen to partisan radio, and read partisan newspapers and blogs. The people who vote in the GOP nomination process really follow the race. That is what produced the surges last year, and that's why state-level results have been tracking so well to national results. Things like the ground game and local group participation matter much less when the potential electorate is filled with highly informed voters.

7. The Candidates Don't Get to Pick the Issues. I don't just mean Romney's well-publicized flip-flop on abortion. Anyone not named Rudy Giuliani could tell you that the GOP isn't going to nominate a pro-choice candidate any time soon. What was more interesting was the backlash against Gingrich for his rejection of the Ryan budget, or Perry's cratering in the polls for favoring a more moderate stance against illegal immigration.

As a corollary to #6, the rise of highly polarized national parties with highly informed partisan voters means that candidates have much less leeway to choose their positions than they used to.

8. Ron Paul is The Future. In the alternative future where only people who are under the age of 30 can vote, Ron Paul has won every contest to date. The GOP has been losing younger voters consistently since 2004 (this is a new phenomenon, despite the stereotypes, there historically hasn't been that big of a partisan difference between age cohorts in voting over the past 40 years). And of the young voters who are open to being Republicans, they favor an unconventional candidate with issue positions far outside of the GOP mainstream.

I've been saying for years that if the GOP wants to keep being able to win national elections, they'll need to convince Hispanic people to start voting like White people. Bush (and Perry) seemed to understand this, even if the rest of the party has rejected it this time around. But now it seems that unless the GOP does something about its issue positions — purge the neo-cons, or roll back the drug war — it will become a rump party for a generation.

Origins of Political Order: Mistaken About Evolution

I just finished Part 1 of Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order. First off, I like the book. He’s an evolutionist, and a Hobbesian, which is to say that he understands human nature, and he bases his theory of the state upon that foundation.

Now, a mistake: Fukuyama’s description of human evolution is wrong. It’s only a little bit wrong, but it’s totally wrong. Fukuyama tells the familiar “one tribe out of Africa” story. We now know this is wrong, because we have genetic evidence of interbreeding with Neandertals, not to mention Denisovians, and presumably dozens of biologically modern Homo Sapien tribes that left Africa at different times.

Of course, Fukuyama’s book was published a month before that paper came out, and presumably written a while before.

On the other hand…

For a genetic example of what happens when one people conquers another, we need look no further than the high frequency of European Y chromosomes in the Americas. I would expect most pre-historic genetic exchanges to follow similar models. When an anthropologist says “population displacement,” we should interpret that to mean “they killed all the men and raped and married the women.” This means that conquerors not only take their enemies’ land, they also absorb genetic information, which is then selected for.

Fukuyama is exactly the sort of person who ought to have doubted the old story. Rome claimed to have founded itself upon a crime of mass rape. And the old testament doesn’t shy away from what to do with conquered people. Fukuyama actually quotes Genghis Khan and notes his massive offspring.

So, while one can hardly blame Fukuyama for making this error, since it was the conventional scientific view, if he had been following his own method of science+anthropology+historical analysis more rigorously, he might not have.

The case for Bonapartism

I’ve mentioned this to several people already, so I thought I’d take the time to explain myself online.

Basically, the prevailing “Democratic Peace” theory holds that Democracies tend not to go to war, and don’t ever go to war with each other. This theory may or may not still hold, depending on how “democratic” Serbia was when we bombed them in the 1990s or whether or not Russia and Georgia count as democracies. I tend to think the theory is at least partially true, as democracies at least tend to evaluate their own interests similarly. But even if you don’t think there’s a current example, it’s at least possible to imagine two democracies going at it – most wars have popular support when they’re started, after all.

In contrast to the prevailing theory, these guys argue that young democracies are actually more likely to go to war than other states. If you ignore the mythologizing about democracy, it makes sense. When a country goes democratic the rulers change, and the new government is likely to perceive the interests and global order of the country differently than the previous state. Ideological re-alignment brings instability to stable regions and can therefore easily lead to wars. This probably applies to the shift to any new governing order as well (think of Communist Russia’s survival war after the Russian Civil War, Mao picking a fight with Russia, et cetera, et cetera).

The textbook case for this is, of course, Revolutionary France. Following the extinction of the French monarchy most of Europe declared war on France, which started a spiral of events that eventually led to Emperor Napoleon conquering most of Europe and cheerfully extinguishing monarchies all over the place. Napoleon was able to do this because spreading France’s revolutionary ideals was tremendously popular in France – France was the first nation to be able to fully mobilize for war. Killing kings is fun, apparently.

Egypt is a big country – 80 million people – twice as large as the next largest Arab country. Its politics and culture dominate the Arab world. In short, it occupies the same place in Arab culture as France held in European culture in 1800. Its military is big, modern, American armed, and American trained. Israel is basically the only country in the region that could hope to beat it. It has the capability to be an army of Arab liberation.

Egypt’s culture has been pan-Arabic for as long as it has been independent. They merged with Syria for a couple of years, invaded Libya, and supported a democratic uprising in Yemen. This is not likely to change. What is changing however, is that they are likely to be led by a revolutionary government soon.

Egypt is about to be a big country with a modern army ruled by people who view all Arabs as brothers and democracy as a birthright of humankind. Where is Lt. Bonaparte?

The only thing lacking in this scenario is the triggering event to send Egypt’s army on the march. For Revolutionary France, it was other European countries declaring war on the young republic.

The United Nations just declared Libya a no-fly zone. While it looks like France, Britain, and America will enforce the no-fly zone, they’ve basically ruled out sending in ground troops. Eventually ground troops will, in fact, be necessary (the alternative is portioning Libya). Neither Obama nor Sarkozy nor Cameron have any interest in sending in ground troops, the memory of Iraq is still fresh enough to prevent that – which leaves a “volunteer” “arab” force. Which means next-door Egypt.

And a week later the Arab world finally gets the hero this revolution needs – the great liberator of Benghazi. Where does he stop? Don’t the people of Yemen deserve freedom? Doesn’t the house of Saud pollute the holy land? Aren’t the Sudanese really just “Upper Egyptians”?

Some people think Egypt will become a member of the great democracy club. Other people worry about the Muslim Brotherhood turning it into the next Iran. No one seems to be worrying about an Egyptian Bonaparte, but they should be. I'm not saying it's the most likely possibility, but it's certainly a possibility.

Michael Steele

Seeing Michael Steele out everywhere, vying to be the face of the Republican Party is just plain weird. Before Howard Dean, how many national chairs can people name?

The prominence of the national party chair for the party without the Presidency now looks to be a permanent feature of the American Electoral system, and is a consequence of the nationalization of the two parties. Only a system where the parties are ideologically cohesive could lead to a situation where the national chair mattered. In previous decades regional and ideological differences within the parties prevented this sort of thing from happening.

I also don't think it's an accident that Steele was an elected official before this. It seems likely that party chairs in the future will be minor celebrities who've run for office themselves, as opposed to the party functionaries who held the posts in the past.

Presidential Rankings

This bit of silliness, C-Span's 2009 Presidential Rankings, is making the rounds. Not only is the concept stupid, but they are wrong. FDR belongs at the top of the list. Everyone knows that.

C-Span and all the media reports that I've read have attached some mystical significance to the fact that they asked "Historians", as if someone who specializes in Ancient Rome or Medieval China has any clue who the Presidents were, or what they did. Even if these guys are specialists in American History, they all have their biases.

Two seemingly unanswerable questions keep popping up in the media reports: Why did Grant go up ten spaces, and why did Hayes fall seven? These questions are easily answered if you regard the historians as mere mortals.

Grants reputation has been almost single-handedly rescued by this 2006 blog post by Nathan Newman. It flew across the liberal blogosphere after he posted it. It certainly affected my thinking of Grant, and I've been selling Newman's insights as my own for two and a half years now. Those mystical "Historians" are plugged into this stuff as well, and their opinions are malleable enough to raise Grant's standing by quite a lot.

And Hayes? RutherFRAUD B. Hayes stole the 1876 election. After eight years of Bush, who stole the 2000 election, that facts looks a lot more salient.

Israel's Elections

So, it's a near tie, with Kadima barely winning a plurality, but Likud and the parties to its right winning more seats. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of those guys are assholes. Kadima and Labor started the Gaza war in order to show the Israeli electorate that they were tough enough on the Palestinians that the public didn't need to vote for Likud. This apparently had the result of boosting the right-wing so much that an Israeli Nationalist (ultra right) fringe party, Beiteinu, actually came out ahead of Labor, bumping them back to fourth place.

Nice going, Ehud, you fuck.

Whatever Israeli coalition forms out of this mess will look something like this:

Daschle

It seemed to me that their was a very good case for appointing Tom Daschle to HHS, despite his somewhat scummy history. That argument was a simple one: Daschle, better than anybody else, knows how to move things through the Senate. And since the Senate is the biggest stumbling block to achieving Universal Health Care right now, Daschle was perfect for the job.

But if the guy couldn't even move his own confirmation through the Senate, then all of the positive arguments for him absolutely collapse.

Good to see him go.

Two rigid ideological parties... YES!

Way back in 2005 I had a class on political parties and interest groups. One of the key points the professor tried to drive home was that the United States didn't really have National Parties, but rather 50 state parties and a national fundraising arm for the Presidential race every four years. I pointed out two things: the first is that the parties have becoming increasingly ideologically aligned, and that picking Howard Dean as DNC chief (instead of some fundraising flunky) meant that the Democratic party meant to become a national party. My Prof. allowed for the possibility that I was correct, except that there were still some outliers in congress, and that there wasn't an equivelent "celebrity" leader in charge of the RNC. I argued "wait and see" about the congress, and pointed out that since Bush was President, he was leader of the party, so the RNC didn't need a "leader" leader.

Well, following 2006, the most liberal Republican is more conservative than the most conservative Democrat in congress. Republicans elected from New York are more conservative than Democrats elected from North Carolina. That's an ideologically coherent national party system, my friends.

And now that Obama's won the Presidency, he's replacing Dean with one of his own guys. And it looks like Newt Gingrich wants to be RNC Chairman. Newt being RNC Chair would prove my quasi-Marxist theory of partisan evolution true.

America is a big country, and we've long had a patchwork party system based on regional differences, but fifty years after the advent of mass media, we've finally cohered into a sensible two-party system. This is bad for political reporters, who like interesting stories about Mavericks crossing party lines. And it's bad for wanna-be philosophes who are oh so concerned that the parties don't line up with their particular esoteric political philosophies. But it's great for average voters, who don't need to really know anything about particular candidates before casting their votes.

Now I just need to start a campaign to bring back straight ticket voting...

How Ralph Nader Moves The Democrats Right

Below I pointed out how Naderism siphons voters off from the left and makes Democrats lose, and how this in turn makes progressive policy harder to accomplish. For example, Nader's "Medicare For All", which I and all other progressives agree would have an actual chance if there were 60 votes in the Senate. As it is, we probably won't be able to enact it. This is the fruit of Naderism.

But not only does Naderism hurt progressive policy options, it actually moves the Democratic Party to the right.

This, or something like it, is roughly what the ideological make-up of American voters and congresscritters:

This isn't exact, but let's say the median voter is the red line here. That means in a normal election between two candidates, a candidate must get all the voters up to the red line.:




Now, in an election where progressive voters are convinced to take Naderism seriously the median voter shifts, to the blue line here. Every left-leaning voter that is convinced to abandon the Democratic Party is a vote the Democrats have to make up. Nader's response would be that the Democrats should just move left — but it's much easier to make up the lost votes by moving 1% to the right rather than moving the 10% left needed to win back the Naderites.



If I were a Libertarian, whose policy preferences have been abandoned by both parties to a significant degree, I'd engage in tactical voting to encourage gridlock. I can understand the case for principled Libertarian votes. Naderism isn't like that at all. The Naderite or Green or Socialist critique of the Democratic Party is that the party isn't pure enough. They all fit together on a leftist spectrum, the Democrats are just interested in winning elections, so they have to be more conservative than fringe candidates. The harsh consequence of Naderism, however, is that it has the opposite result of its supposed goals.

If you want better liberals, compete in Democratic Primaries. When it comes to the general election, Naderism is generally a futile gesture, except when it succeeds, because then it's actively destructive to its own goals.

Third Party Suck

It didn't matter on the topline this year, but in the four outstanding Senate races, the third party vote is larger than the difference between the two candidates.

In other words (MARC ERIKSEN THIS MEANS YOU), third parties may have prevented the Democratic party from having the majority it needs for super liberal reform. In other words, the practical consequence of Naderism is to hold the progressive movement back. Or, in still other words, progressives who vote and argue for third parties are just helping the Republicans.

But, if you've been paying attention, that's old news.

What happens when we win?

After the rout.

I agree with all of Chris's predictions to varying degrees. It really is pretty hard to predict what the Democratic Party will do, since their tactic over the past 2 years has been to hunker down and wait out the Bush Presidency, since he'll veto anything fun anyway.

In addition to the normal three axes in American politics (Economic, Foreign, Social), there's a fourth axis that could be described as Partisanship. For example, although Rahmbo is fairly conservative on most things, he's a hyper partisan and will always be first in line to try to fuck the Republicans. On the other hand, you've got a fair number of progressives like Kucinich who seem to enjoy telling Hoyer to get bent. So, once the Democrats have such a huge majority, and a President who will sign their bills, there'll be a wild and wacky period of inter-party alignment. My suspicion is that it'll end up being a fairly liberal working majority that ignores social issues and occasionally throws a piece of meat to corporate America. So: Yes on Universal Health Care, No on repealing DOMA.

Figuring out what the Republicans are going to do is easy. They'll probably fire Boehner, but even if they don't, they'll retreat to "Fuck you, that's why!" mode for the entirety of the Obama presidency. The House Republicans left standing after November will be the ones who are untouchable. If their districts are so conservative that they survive this election, then the only way they'll lose their seats is with a primary challenge from the right. And with such a large Democratic Majority (it's already larger than anything the Republicans managed from 1994-2006), they won't see any feasible way back into the majority. That means they have every incentive to screw with the Democrats, and none to work with them.

Which means the Democrats will be passing legislation by themselves, which is another reason they'll factionalize. Let's say we pick up 25 seats in the election. That'll make it 260 Dems to 175 GOP. That's an 85 seat advantage. But here's where they get bitchy. The GOP just decides that it's going to vote no on everything. Since all of their members are safe, and most of them are assholes, that bloc will hold.

So now you've got 260 Democratic Congressmen, of which 218 are needed to pass anything. Or, to put it the other way, only 43 Democratic congressmen need to be bought off by corporate lobbyists in order to stymie the progressive agenda. That's frighteningly possible, and the main reason why Kos has already made plans to wage a Jyhad against bad Democrats in 2010.

Actually LOL

This, my friends, is the funniest chat log in human history.

Byron York, renowned conservative hack, chatting with Matt Taibbi.

I've been sort of amazed throughout this entire financial crisis — conservatives have literally no idea what's going on, so it's unusually difficult for them to come up with a sensible sounding lies about the situation. Conservative responses aren't wrong, they're just nonsense, literally nonsensical. It's impossible to discuss things with people when they just don't understand something and refuse to admit it.

I suppose this is true about a number of things (most notably global warming and evolution), but in those areas conservatives have had decades to conjure up sophisticated bullshit that at least makes it seem like they know what they're talking about.

Da Sexy Times

Discussing our electoral prospects next month, someone recently asked me if we had any problem spots. I replied that we're probably going to lose a few house seats that we shouldn't have won last time, even though we're going to pick up seats over all.

I used as an example Mark Foley, whose house seat we never would've taken if he hadn't been fucking little boys. Oh, look.

Just Don't Give a Fuck

The Republican party is rightly screwed. They're going to lose the Presidency, and lose enough Senate seats to cripple their ability to do anything.

But in the House, they've been hamstrung since 2006, and there is no hope for any change from that position any time soon. They have no leadership, and no plan for recovery. There is no way for a GOP Rep. to increase his/her power in the house beyond that of an ordinary member. These guys that remain, the majority of 'em, are from such hard right districts that they face almost no chance of losing re-election. Add to this:

1. They hate Bush, for being such a fuck-up.
2. They hate McCain, for being an apostate and an asshole.
3. They're too venal and corrupt to care about the rest of us.

So their default position on the bailout is: FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY! This will, of course, be their default position on anything and everything during the Obama administration.

HELPING OUT PALIN #9

This is the ninth in a twenty part series. Click here for an explanation.

#9 How would you balance concerns over human rights and freedom in China with the United States' growing economic interdependence with that country?

Our economic interdependence with China encourages liberalization in their economy and the spread of political rights.

Any punitive action that we take against another country just tends to increase the support of the people for the rulers, regardless of who or what they are. Bombing Kosovo increased Milosevic's popularity in Serbia. U.S. sanctions against Cuba are the number one reason Castro managed to stay in power for fifty years.

The most oppressive regimes in the world (Burma and North Korea) are also regimes which completely isolate themselves from the broader world — Tyranny can only survive in a vacuum.

If we really want a country to be kinder to its own citizens we ought to encourage it to become more interdependent with the broader world community, and China is on the right path.

Don't fuck with Adlai!

Sort of unbelieveably, in her Wall Street Journal, Lady de Rothschild takes a potshot at Adlai Stevenson:

Democrats Need to Shake The 'Elitist' Tag - WSJ.com: "I must face the uncomfortable truth that liberal elitism has been a weakness of the Democratic Party for more than half a century. In 1952 and 1956, for example, Adlai Stevenson emerged as the presidential candidate of the party's 'new politics' wing. But while Stevenson's stylish, articulate, high-brow manner thrilled the nation's intellectuals, he could never connect with large numbers of working-class Democrats who found him aloof and aristocratic.

The 'new politics' Democrats have found their new, improved Stevenson in Mr. Obama."

He didn't lose because he was elitist and couldn't connect with working americans. He lost because he ran against Dwight "I kicked Hilter's ass" Eisenhower. Harry Truman offered to take a demotion and run for VP again if Ike would run as a Democrat.

Now I really like Adlai (that commercial I posted yesterday was one of his). Hell, here's a commercial from 1952 and one from 1956 endorsing Civil Rights, a decade before Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, what's "elitist" about that?

Brown Voters

I posted the 2004 exit polls yesterday. Remember this part?

VOTE BY INCOME	BUSH			KERRY		NADER
TOTAL	2004	2000	2004		2004
Less Than $50,000 (45%)	44%	n/a	55%		0%
$50,000 or More (55%)	56%	n/a	43%		0%

And among the poorest Americans the result is even starker:

VOTE BY INCOME	BUSH			KERRY		NADER
TOTAL	2004	2000	2004		2004
Under $15,000 (8%)	36%	n/a	63%		0%
$15-30,000 (15%)	42%	n/a	57%		0%
$30-50,000 (22%)	49%	n/a	50%		0%
$50-75,000 (23%)	56%	n/a	43%		0%
$75-100,000 (14%)	55%	n/a	45%		0%
$100-150,000 (11%)	57%	n/a	42%		1%
$150-200,000 (4%)	58%	n/a	42%		*
$200,000 or More (3%)	63%	n/a	35%		1%

Now imagine what the last couple of election cycles would've been like if poorest 5% of Americans weren't allowed to vote.

Well, you don't have to.  Because undocumented Hispanics that live in America, do American jobs, and pay American taxes don't get to vote.

What the American electorate will look like once we offer amnesty and citizenship to them is left as an exercise for the reader.  

*Note also that Nader scores highest amongst the wealthy.  You gotta be pretty rich in order to "vote your conscience"...

White Votes

On what planet does Barack Obama have a chance of winning the white vote?

John Kerry only got 41% of the white vote. If Kerry had won Hispanics with the 66% that Obama is polling, that would've shifted New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada, and probably Colorado.

Given the Hispanic shift to the Democrats over the past 4 years, the natural demographic increase of Hispanic voters, and a potential surge of African American voters, Barack Obama will win the presidency with just 40% of white voters. He ought to be able to pull that in any state outside of the South/Appalachia.

The Democrats will win in 2008 because of the shift of Hispanic voters. Everything else is noise.

HELPING OUT PALIN #6

This is the sixth in a twenty part series. Click here for an explanation.

6. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population lives in China and India. Who are those countries' leaders?

China is an authoritarian (although not totalitarian) oligarchy, broadly Communist in spirit, but pragmatic in practice. The current President is Hu Jintao, who's a fairly boring Technocrat. China's leadership is relative stable and should remain so until the Chinese Miracle wears off. What happens at that point is anybody's guess.

India is the world's largest Democracy, with two large ideological parties, a Hindu Nationalist party and a pragmatic Socialist party. They map fairly easily onto the Republicans and Democrats, if you replace all the crazy Christian BS with crazy Hindu BS. There are also a host of regional parties that make Indian politics fairly impenetrable. The Socialists are currently in charge, as they were for most of the 20th Century. The Nationalists had a brief stint in power during 1999-2004 wherein they almost nuked Pakistan but decided not to at the last minute due to pressure from the business class. As the Socialists appear less likely to nuke Pakistan (or China), I would prefer that they remain in power.

HELPING OUT PALIN #2

This is the second in a twenty part series. Click here for an explanation.

#2 Is Iraq a democracy?

This is a difficult question to answer. Was the United States a Democracy before the voting rights act passed in 1965? According to the criteria that political scientists apply to contemporary nations, no. But most (white) Americans think it was.

I would classify Iraq as an emerging Democracy, with two things that prevent it from being a full Democracy, both relating to the concept of legitimacy, because as procedural concerns go (a constitution, regular elections, civilian control of the military, etc), Iraq certainly qualifies.

1. Domestic Legitimacy - Incomplete Popular Acceptance of the Government.

From time to time the Sadrists or the Sunni or even the Kurds openly defy the central government, often militarily. You can't have Democracy without near-universal popular acceptance of the government's legitimacy even if you disagree with the government.

A good example is the U.S. election of 1800. The Federalists lost the election and actually gave up power without a fight — a peaceful transition of power from one party to each other, which was only possible because both sides regarded the authority of the election above their partisan concerns. Iraq cannot become a Democracy until all sides are stakeholders in the government, win or lose.

2. Foreign Legitimacy - No Monopoly of Force

Whatever else may be the case in Iraq, a government isn't legitimate if it doesn't control its own territory. Currently, Iraq is occupied by the United States, which maintains a monopoly of coercive force in the country.

By definition, Iraq cannot be a Democracy until we leave.