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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: June 2006

Steny’s Doing His Job

Given the lionization of Jack Murtha as a lightning rod for antiwar sentiment in recent months, and the demonization of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer by people like purge-meister David Sirota, I figured Murtha’s announcement that he would challenge Hoyer for Majority Leader if Dems retake the House would ignite a widespread netroots campaign for the doughty Pennsylvanian.So I was pleased to see a post today at MyDD by Jonathan Singer reminding his colleagues of the right measure for this position:

Regardless of Hoyer’s propensity to diverge from progressive talking points — and indeed votes, at times — he has been more effective in this respect than any other Democrat in the position in recent memory. According to a report by CQ in January, House Democrats were more unified in 2005 than at any other point since the periodical has tracked votes. Likewise, House Democrats more strongly opposed President Bush in 2005 than in any other year….So unless Murtha can prove in some way that he would be more effective than Hoyer in wrangling together the disparate factions of the House Democratic Caucus, I just don’t believe the Democrats would be best served by getting rid of Hoyer, whether they’re in the majority or the minority.

Singer’s exactly right. Hoyer has been an extraordinary Whip; his legacy is a far more united House Caucus than anybody had any reason to expect, and that shouldn’t be an afterthought in determining whether he moves up in a Democratic-controlled House.


Zarquawi’s Dead; Now What?

The death of Abu Musab al-Zarquawi, the murderous al Qaeda leader in Iraq, presents a clear example of how killing is sometimes necessary to protect life. This man represented the worst of a bad cause: a jihadist whose rage against the infidels extended to any Muslim who did not embrace his Salafist creed, including all Shi’a. His elimination by an American bomb was clearly the best gift our country has given Iraq since the capture of Saddam Hussein.But the question has to be asked: now what? Will Zarquawi’s death demoralize the Sunni-based insurgency, or al Qaeda itself? Over at the New Republic’s site, Spencer Ackerman suggests this event may actually help al Qaeda by erasing a controversial and counter-productive leader, and may hurt the U.S. by eliminating a scapegoat for all the violence in Iraq. Whether or not Ackerman is right, no one should harbor the illusion that Zarquawi’s death will somehow “moderate” al Qaeda in anything other than a tactical way. It may actually parallel the destruction of the leadership of the Brownshirts in Nazi Germany in the famous “night of the long knives,” which made Nazism ostensibly more respectable even as it solidified the power of the genocidal maniacs of the S.S. Here in the U.S., the snuffing of Zarquawi may give the Bush administration a small and temporary lift, demonstrating that even a blind hog will find an acorn now and then. If, however, the violence in Iraq does not significantly abate, then all the administration’s focus on Zarquawi may ultimately backfire. It’s one thing to acknowledge that Bush got re-elected mainly because millions of Americans bought the idea that by fighting jihadists in Iraq, he was keeping them from perpetrating terrorist acts here; who could prove otherwise? But if things don’t get better in Iraq now that Zarqauwi’s gone, the administration’s whole Iraq-War-Is-The-War-On-Terror argument will quickly unravel.


Illegal Immigration as GOP’s Wedge Issue

David Corn’s “Illegal Immigration: A GOP Issue That Works?” in The Nation merits a thougtful read by Democratic strategists and campaigners. On the heels of the Dems’ narrow loss in CA-50, Corn writes:

If the Ds cannot pick up a seat when an R is nabbed on bribery charges and tossed into prison, that’s a sign that the “culture of corruption” charge (see Jack Abramoff) they are campaigning upon may not do the trick in November…
Without reading too much into the results of one race, there is good reason for Democrats to worry: illegal immigration. Bilbray hyped his support for tough border enforcement, siding with the House Republicans’ keep-’em-out/toss-’em-out approach and attacking the Bush-favored Senate compromise position that blends a (convoluted) path-to-citizenship with steps to beef up the border. And that might have won him the race. During the campaign, Bilbray called for building a fence “from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.” Celebrating his victory, Bilbray said, “The president proposing amnesty was absolutely a big problem. In fact, it wasn’t until I was able to highlight the fact that I did not agree with my friends in the Senate or my friend in the White House on amnesty that you really saw the polls start supporting me strongly.”

However, as Adam Nagourney notes in his New York Times post-mortem on the CA-50 vote:

…Whatever disadvantages the Republicans had here, this is, with some notable exceptions, about as friendly ground as they are likely to find in the months ahead. This was never considered a truly contested district, and most of the districts where both parties are focusing their energy and money are less reliably Republican than this one.
Republicans will be hard-pressed to duplicate that expensive and elaborate campaign they waged for Mr. Bilbray in every district where an incumbent is under assault.
Of the 10 most competitive races for House seats now held by Republicans, as identified by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, only 2 had Republican margins of victory in 2004 greater than the one posted by Mr. Cunningham here that year. Of those two, one is held by Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, who is under federal investigation in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, and the other by Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona, who is retiring.

Corn may be right that immigrant-bashing will trump gay-bashing and flag-burner bashing as the wedgie of choice for Rove & Co in the months ahead. But any gains the Rs make through immigrant-bashing will be at least somewhat offset by losses in Hispanic votes for GOP candidates. Still, Dems in states experiencing high rates of Latino growth should prepare for similar versions of the Bilbray strategy — and get seriously busy registering Hispanic voters.


Elections Message — Voters Want Change

We didn’t win the big one, CA-50, losing by less than 5,000 votes with 90.2 percent of the vote reported at this posting. But, in a way, we did, according to Chris Bowers’ insightful analysis at MyDD:

In 2004, Busby lost the CA-50 by 22.0%. Today, it looks like she will lose by around 4.5%. And that was with the NRCC spending $4.5M on the race. If Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5M of committee money as a good thing, go for it. After all, spin is basically why they spent so much money on this race. By blowing their wad in a solidly Republican district, they wanted to change the media narrative on the election in their favor. It will probably work, given how subservient and generally inaccurate the media tends to be when it comes to Republicans and elections. In reality, for a Republican candidate to pull 49.5% of the vote in a district with 44.5% Republican registration is shocking. Given those numbers, Bilbray probably managed all of 20% of the vote among independents.
No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November. If we receive an 18% shift nationwide, we will win the House easily. If Republican candidates are pulling only 20% of the independent vote, the Indycrat realignment is still on.

Was immigration reform a wedge issue that favored Bilbray or Busby in this north San Diego district? The WaPo wrap-up says Busby probably would have won, if not for a gaffe encouraging illegal immigrants to vote. If so, the Busby vote was all the more impressive. If there are any exit polls, it will be interesting to see how immigration reform played out. In any event, Busby gets another chance to beat Bilbray in November, and 5,000 more votes seems doable.
The other big story is a huge victory for netroots in the Dem Senate primary in Montana, where state Senator Jon Tester, favored by many progressives, beat state Auditor John Morrison by a healthy margin, a victory Bowers describes as “Historic” and “Revolutionary.” Tester’s chances are excellent, but he will need more dough to take this seat for the Democrats, and Bowers’ article has the links for those who want to contribute.
Voter anger about corruption was a common denominator from coast to coast, according to the AP wrap-up:

Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota also held primaries. Corruption and allegations of corruption — in California, Alabama and Montana — crisscrossed the country. Immigration was a campaign issue from the South to the Plains.

Concern about immigration reform cuts both ways and may prove to be a washout, nationwide. But corruption, along with increasing dissatisfaction with the mess in Iraq, will most likely sharpen the Democrats’ edge between now and November.


Here We Go Again

The purpose of this week’s gratuitious “debate” in the U.S. Senate on the so-called Defense of Marriage Amendment doesn’t even qualify as an open secret: it’s more like an open sore. A panicked GOP, under direct threats from self-appointed Christian Right leaders like James Dobson and unable to deal with any real issues, is trying to shore up its hard-line cultural conservative base by pretending to do something about the Awful Specter of Gay Marriage. You might even call it Rove’s Last Stand: with growing majorities of Americans rejecting Bush and GOP policies on almost every conceivable subject, the idea is to repolarize the electorate with cultural wedge issues and reenergize the theocratic element of the God ‘n’ Mammon coalition that’s been so noisily falling apart of late.Tired and transparent as this ploy is, it does fit neatly into GOP plans to make the November elections not a referendum on Republican misgovernment, but a lesser-of-two-evils choice between the incumbent party of power and those crazy Christian-hating, terrorist-appeasing, Bush-impeaching Democrats.Right on cue, the Right’s most promiscuous slanderer, Ann Coulter, is coming out with a new book under the fair-and-balanced title Godless, which “exposes” liberalism as a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to ban Christianity, introduce mandatory Paganism, and reduce the human race to the status of beasts.If you think I’m exaggerating, check out the excerpt from Godless posted at townhall.com, but you might want to keep some hand-sanitizer close by in case you accidentally touch your computer screen. Here’s a characteristic passage:

Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian belief in man’s immortal soul. Their religion holds that there is nothing sacred about human consciousness. It’s just an accident no more significant than our possession of opposable thumbs. They deny what we know about ourselves: that we are moral beings in God’s image. Without this fundamental understanding of man’s place in the world, we risk being lured into misguided pursuits, including bestiality, slavery, and PETA membership.

Those of you who have risked exposure to Coulter’s nasty oeuvre will recognize in this last sentence her signature move of tossing a leaden “jest” into a series of gross calumnies, thus enabling her conservative defenders to excuse her as a practitioner of good, clean, hate-filled fun.Normally I wouldn’t pay any attention to Coulter’s ravings; it’s depressing enough to realize that Godless, like her earlier screeds, will probably wind up on bestseller lists. But a particular passage in the excerpt caught my attention:

If Democrats ever dared speak coherently about what they believe, the American people would lynch them. So they claim to believe in God, much as Paul Begala claims to go “duck hunting” (liberal code for “antiquing”). At the beginning of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Leadership Council held briefings to teach Democratic candidates how to simulate a belief in God. To ease the Druids into it, the DLC recommended using phrases like “God’s green earth.” (The DLC also suggested avoiding the use of phrases such as “goddamned, motherf—ing Republicans!”)

The last paranthetical sentence, of course, is another Coulter bon mot. It does not seem to occur to this self-proclaimed Defensor Fidei that she should eschew violations of the Second Commandment (or, for that matter, that she is exceptionally ill-equipped to accuse Paul Begala of elitism). But the previous two sentences happen to refer to a quote from yours truly, delivered at a conference on cultural issues in Atlanta in the autumn of 2003. Since I was, you know, actually there, and know a lot more about what I was saying that Ann Coulter’s research staff, I can report that the audience was a group primarily composed of southern state legislators, roughly half of them African-Americans. I strongly suspect none of them were tree-worshipping Druids, and moreover, that most of them have forgotten more about the theory and practice of Christianity than Ann Coulter will ever know. And in my remarks to the group, far from teaching anyone to “simulate belief in God,” I was actually suggesting that people of faith who are Democrats shouldn’t hide the fact, and could take a lesson from George W. Bush in how to weave scriptural language into policy discussions, especially insofar as W. seems to ignore half the Law and most of the Gospels.This particular passage of Godless is just a wolf-cub in the snarling pack of Coulter’s lies, but it does give you a sense of her respect for facts. I’ve personally been accused on occasion of indulging in unfunny humor, but to use another “bestial” metaphor, anyone who finds the Clown Princess of right-wing invective hilarious probably likes dead-kitten jokes, especially in the company of those PETA-loving liberal Druids.


Eight Elections Today Hold Clues for Mid-terms

Today is D-Day, for Democrats, as well as historically, with 8 elections to watch for some real-world clues about the Democrats’ (and the GOP’s) prospects coming up in November. These include: Alabama – Primary; California – Primary / Special Election CD 50; Iowa – Primary; Mississippi – Primary; Montana – Primary; New Jersey – Primary / Special Primary CD 13; New Mexico – Primary; South Dakota – Primary. CA 50 is the marquee contest, with the Montana Senate campaign a close second. Look also for an overall “throw the bums out” trend which should bode well for Dems.
Swing State Project is probably the best place to hang out for early results analysis. DavidNYC has asked local Dems to submit tracking sites, and you can most easily check local newspapers through the clickable map at newspapers.com. Sometimes local TV stations are quicker on the draw, especially those with live webcasting, and they can be tapped through Newslink.


Primaries and Purges

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers reacts to the DLC’s recent argument against a nationally-driven purge of Joe Lieberman by shouting “hypocrites!” Where, he asks, are Lieberman’s defenders when it comes to other primary challenges like Ed Case’s against “the arguably more progressive” Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii? Having firmly planted the axiom that the case for Lieberman is all about rejecting the very idea of primary challenges to incumbent Democrats, Chris fulminates for a while about “establishment” types trying to deny Democratic voters their legal right to choose their nominees for office.I respect Chris Bowers, but this time he’s missing a very basic point. The DLC is not arguing against the right to “primary” incumbents; if Connecticut Democrats want to replace Joe Lieberman with Ned Lamont or anybody else, that’s fine by me. It’s the national effort to dump Joe, evidenced by the heavy involvement of national organizations like MoveOn and Democracy for America, that’s objectionable. And as Chris knows, much of the progressive blogosphere is nearly as obsessed with the Lamont candidacy as it is with delivering a Democratic Congress this November, for reasons that have zippo to do with the vindication of the sovereign rights of Connecticut Democrats to choose whomever they want (has anyone other than Ned Lamont himself pledged to support Lieberman if he does win the primary? If so, they’re pretty quiet about it). The level of abuse being aimed at Lieberman is, quite frankly, a close second to the abuse being aimed at George W. Bush.Comparing the national effort to get rid of Lieberman to Ed Case’s primary challenge to Daniel Akaka is just weird. But Chris is determined to follow the line of argument. A few weeks ago, he said this:

If anyone has the gall to claim that progressives are wasting Democratic resources in 2006 by challenging incumbents like Lieberman, just point to Hawaii where conservatives are doing the same thing. How dare the DLC waste Democratic resources like this! Don’t they know the real target should be Republicans?

Upon reading this post at the time, my first thought was “Huh?” Aside from the fact that the DLC doesn’t raise money or endorse candidates or recruit volunteers, I’m quite sure nobody at the DLC was more than dimly aware of the Case challenge to Akaka, which is apparently more about Akaka’s age than anything to do with ideology. This is clearly not a “nationally-driven purge,” just as it’s equally clear the anti-Lieberman campaign is exactly that. And any “so’s your old man” argument to the contrary is a bit like saying that Super Target is identical to Super WallMart because they sell some of the same items.Primaries are fine. Purges are not, and I don’t think there’s much doubt which is which when it comes to the intraparty politics of 2006.


GOP Tries Gay Marriage Again

By Alan Abramowitz
Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the failure of the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress to address the major problems facing the nation including the deteriorating situation in Iraq, our growing dependence on foreign oil, health care, education, and the environment. But Republican leaders have finally come up with a strategy to deal with growing public discontent–bring back gay marriage. On Monday President Bush will again announce his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Despite the fact that the amendment has no chance of being enacted, Republican strategists hopes to use the issue of gay marriage to distract the public from the war and other issues and to energize its conservative base–just like they did in 2004.
The problem with this scenario, however, is that the strategy didn’t even work the first time. There is no credible evidence that the issue of gay marriage actually helped the GOP in 2004. Gay marriage referenda were supposed to increase turnout and support for President Bush among religious white voters. But they didn’t. Turnout increased by the same amount in states with and without gay marriage referenda on the ballot and George Bush’s share of the vote increased by the same amount in states with and without gay marriage referenda on the ballot.
According to national exit poll data, in the 11 states with gay marriage referenda on the ballot, regular churchgoers made up 46 percent of the white electorate in 2000 and an identical 46 percent in 2004. The percentage of regular churchgoers who voted for George Bush was 72 percent in 2000 vs. 74 percent in 2004, an increase of two percentage points. But this was less than the three point increase in support for Bush among all white voters.
The gay marriage ploy didn’t work in 2004 and it is highly unlikely that it work in 2006. Maybe the Republicans should try something different this time–like dealing with the real problems facing the American people.


White Rabbit Day

Yesterday the blogosphere was full of talk about Unity ’08, a nascent third-party effort with a twist: the idea is to build a party online, agree on an agenda, draft candidates to run for president and vice president in 2008, and then get them on the ballot across the country.I found the talk especially interesting because two ol’ pols from my home state of Georgia, Ham Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon (both veterans of the Carter presidential campaigns) are in the forefront of the effort, along with Hotline founder Doug Bailey and former independent governor of Maine, Angus King. My old boss Sam Nunn is being mentioned as a possible candidate (don’t hold your breath, folks; Nunn’s got bigger fish to fry, like saving us all from loose nukes).My colleague The Moose hailed the effort but warned it would have a hard time overcoming the various institutional barriers to a third party. Over at Daily Kos, diarist Redshift notes that Unity ’08’s “crucial issues” list looks a lot like that of Democrats.My reaction was a little different: third-party efforts that begin with the concept of an agenda and the idea of a candidate tend to take its promoters through the looking glass in pursuit of White Rabbits they can never quite catch. Some of you may remember a similar effort back in 1995-96, organized by a group of former elected officials dubbed “the secret seven” (Bill Bradley, Dick Lamm, Tim Penney, Lowell Weicker, Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart and the self-same Angus King). Their deal was to promote “intergenerational equity,” a bit of a code word for entitlement reform, and the press got all excited by the possibility that the group would run one of its number for president as a third-party candidate in 1996.By a pure coincidence, I was moderating a panel at the Minnesota conference where Lamm, Tsongas and Penney showed up with the promise to reveal the “secret seven’s” plans. After much hype, the three did a long presentation on the budget and entitlement spending, admitted they had no plans for a candidacy, and then basically disappeared from view as the horse-race-deprived political media lost interest. My advice to the Unity ’08 crew is that they better get some serious candidate possibilities out there to define their effort and make sure their interactive agenda-building initiative doesn’t become a freak magnet. Otherwise, they’ll be chasing White Rabbits until their potential constituency disappears through the looking glass.


Dems’ Challenge: The How and When of Leaving Iraq

Adam Nagourney’s article in today’s Grey Lady, “War Handicaps Senators in ’08 White House Race” discusses the political fallout facing Senators who voted for President Bush’s Iraq War initiatives as they struggle to navigate their way through the current Iraq quagmire. There may be some drama here and there in the upcomming presidential primaries about different Senators’ votes on Irag. But it’s more likely that American voters will be less interested in votes that helped get us in Iraq, than how and when a candidate is going to get us out. Two years from today, in the heat of the ’08 presidential campaign, no one who doesn’t have “loser” tatooed on his/her forehead will be defending open-ended US military occupation of Iraq, regardless of their earlier Senate votes supporting the war.