Support for U.S. intervention in international conflicts is down, according to a poll conducted 7/21-25 by New York Times/CBS News. As Jim Rutenberg and Megan C. Thee note in their wrap-up story on the survey:

By a wide margin, the poll found, Americans did not believe the United States should take the lead in solving international conflicts in general, with 59 percent saying it should not, and 31 percent saying it should. That is a significant shift from a CBS News poll in September 2002 — one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — when the public was far more evenly split on the issue.

The poll also found that 58 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. “does not have a responsibility” to resolve the conflict between Israel and other Mideast nations, but do support an international peacekeeping force on the Israel-Lebanon border.
Rutenberg and Thee cite “a strong isolationist streak in a nation clearly rattled by more than four years of war” and add that 56 percent of those polled support “a timetable for reduction of United States forces in Iraq.” Further, a majority of respondents support U.S., withdrawall “even if it meant Iraq would fall into the hands of insurgents,” say the authors. And a large majority clearly see U.S. Iraq policy as a fiasco:

More than twice as many respondents — 63 percent versus 30 percent — said the Iraq war had not been worth the American lives and dollars lost. Only a quarter of respondents said they thought the American presence in Iraq had been a stabilizing force in the region, with 41 percent saying it had made the Middle East less stable.

The poll had some good news for Dems, with 53 percent of respondents saying they held a “positive view” of the Democratic Party, compared to 37 percent saying the same for the GOP. Asked who they would vote for “if the election were held today”, 45 percent of RV’s chose the Democratic candidate in their district, compared to 35 percent for the Republican.

by Scott Winship
The thought occurred to me today while pondering my place in the world that perhaps all of you were running out of patience waiting for me to finally reveal what I’m reading. Well, all that waiting has finally paid off, because today I’m going to reveal the answer:

McMahon: The Bare Truth About Chicago’s Brashest Bear
Who Moved My Cheese?
Everyone Poops

Kidding of course – those books are all crap….(rimshot)….is this mike on?….
I’m actually reading a history of the Democratic Leadership Council (Reinventing Democrats, by Kenneth Baer), a netroots manifesto (Crashing the Gate, by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas), and a triumphalist history of Republican strategy (One Party Country, by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten). I’m enjoying all three, but what’s interesting is how they complement each other in a number of ways. I’ll hopefully get to some more examples in future posts, but today I want to focus on one issue the books all examine in their own way: the inability of the Democratic coalition to unify around a common strategy.
Baer’s account describes how the moderate Democrats who would come to form the core of the New Democrats relentlessly try to overcome the power of liberal activists affiliated with the Party’s most powerful interest groups. They first attempt to insert their ideas into the Party platform but are rebuffed. Next they attempt to change Party rules so that elected officials – more moderate than activists, said the New Dems, because they must appeal to diverse constituents and better appreciate electoral realities – are better represented among convention delegates.
Meeting with limited success again, they form the DLC and become involved in efforts to front-load the 1988 primaries with southern contests, which they believe will advantage moderate candidates that appeal to the more conservative South. Instead, Jesse Jackson is the big winner, winning essentially all of the African American southern vote. Dukakis’s loss convinces the New Dems to abandon the Big Tent strategy they had been pursuing, to instead sharply contrast themselves with other Democrats, and to seek out a candidate they can run in the 1992 election. This is as far as I’ve gotten, but I can’t wait to see what happens next. (My understanding is that they recruit a gregarious southern governor…)
Armstrong and Moulitsas also finger interest groups as (one) problem blocking Democratic electoral success, but their diagnosis is rather different from that of the New Democrats. Instead of interest groups being too liberal, they find them too parochial. Environmental groups, minorities, feminists, GLBT organizations, civil rights activists, and even labor (they argue) pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of overall Democratic prospects. In the end, for instance, abortion rights groups do themselves no good by supporting pro-choice Republicans because they are just strengthening an anti-choice majority. Rather than pulling in different directions, Democratic constituencies need to cooperate in multi-issue coalitions to elect more Democrats. This is as far as I’ve gotten, but I can’t wait to see what happens next. (I understand that they recommend new information technology – some system of tubes? – as a way to return power to progressives…)
In contrast to this depressing picture of disunity, Hamburger and Wallsten document the remarkable achievement of Grover Norquist in unifying conservative constituencies around the “Wednesday meeting” at the American Enterprise Institute offices. Norquist drums into his colleagues’ heads the point that their shared goal is to build and maintain a conservative majority, which requires that everyone occasionally sacrifice in the short-term. He also has a canny gift for linking issues across interest groups. Making the case to social conservatives that they ought to oppose Democratic efforts to promote fuel-efficient vehicles, Norquist tells Phyllis Schlafly, “You can’t have a whole lot of kids in a tiny fuel-efficient car.”
Hamburger and Wallsten also recount the history of the early-‘90s congressional redistricting. The re-drawing of district boundaries was driven by an unholy alliance between Republicans and African Americans who wanted to maximize their representation in Congress in the wake of favorable court rulings requiring districts that were fairer to black candidates. As a consequence, blacks experienced gains in the 1992 elections, but so did Republicans, who sliced away right-leaning white voters from formerly Democratic districts in the course of giving African Americans districts that optimized their electoral opportunities. Once again, Democratic division and Republican unity strengthened the power of conservatives – the GOP would win back the House for the first time in 40 years in 1994, in large measure because of the redistricting. This is as far as I’ve gotten, but I can’t wait to see what happens next. (My understanding is that it involves one of the parties winning control of all three branches of government…)
What can we take away from these three books? My conclusion is that there is a critical need to sort through two questions. First, are the Democrats’ electoral problems due more to being out of synch with voters or to being divided? And relatedly, why have Democrats been unable to achieve the unity that Republicans have?
I can’t say that I have the answers to these questions, but I’ll speculate here and hopefully generate some discussion. Taking the second question first, I wonder whether there is something about the Democratic coalition that makes its constituent parts more difficult to bring together. The Republican coalition basically consists of economic conservatives, who want small government and low taxes; social conservatives who want to preserve traditional institutions and promote traditional morality; and neoconservatives who are mainly concerned about how to leverage American military power to promote the nationalist interest abroad.
These groups aren’t usually inherently in conflict. Social conservatives do not advocate heavy government spending or regulation, even if many of them are sympathetic toward the poor and environmental protection. Economic conservatives are willing to tolerate large military budgets, to a point. Neocons have historically been skeptical of government intervention in the economy and in personal lives and concerned with morality. Social conservatives tend to be patriotic and pro-military, if often isolationist. And economic conservatives are (usually) comfortable with the traditionalist agenda of social conservatives, so long as the courts are there to block its more illiberal components. The point is that – until the Iraq fiasco, and now the immigration debate – it was relatively easy for these three groups to live with each other so long as each of them won some of what they wanted some of the time. Sometimes a wedge issue such as stem cell research presents itself, but not often.
Contrast the Republicans with the Democratic coalition. Social liberals include feminists, GLBT groups, environmentalists and civil libertarians who are mainly concerned with higher-order needs such as fulfillment and quality of life. Professionals and the well-educated overlap with this category but add a significant concern about fiscal responsibility. Economic liberals include labor and minority groups who are primarily concerned about their economic wellbeing. Minority groups also have their own concerns around discrimination and civil rights.
This coalition is far more problematic. Professionals who are deficit hawks are in conflict with economic liberals who want more social spending and may oppose excessive redistribution or excessively progressive taxation. Social liberals are often foreign policy doves while economic liberals are often hawks. Environmentalists and labor often have opposing interests. Economic liberals are often social conservatives and reject the modernist agendas of the social liberals, such as gay marriage. To some extent, the perceived interests of whites and nonwhites have conflicted, as busing, neighborhood segregation, and affirmative action battles have demonstrated.
Prior to 1992, the Democratic Party managed these competing constituencies by accommodating those preferences in each group that were liberal – so fiscal moderates, social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and working-class whites competing with minorities for resources had to look elsewhere if those non-liberal preferences trumped their liberal ones (social liberalism in the case of fiscal moderates, economic liberalism in the case of social conservatives, hawks, and working-class whites). The story of Republican realignment is the story of non-liberal values in these groups trumping liberal ones. The Clinton years were a period of moderation, but since 2000 the grassroots of the Party has drifted slowly back toward uniform accomodation of liberal preferences (in a new effort at unity).
To return to the other question raised by the books I’m reading, it may be that attributing Democratic decline to either excessive liberalism or to disunity obscures how these two are related. Toeing the liberal line on all or most policies may necessarily alienate significant numbers of Democratic coalition members, who will then find a home in the Republican coalition. While Norquist needs only to convince Republican constituencies that they cannot always win, achieving unity among Democratic groups may require a Norquist-like figure who can convince each constituency that they must sometimes lose. The rightward tilt of the country might make unity more difficult to achieve among Democrats. What do you think?

by Scott Winship
When it was announced a year ago that Hillary Clinton had accepted the Democratic Leadership Council’s request to lead their agenda-setting efforts for the 2006 and 2008 elections, many critics were, shall we say, angry. David Sirota’s feelings toward the DLC – and toward Senator Clinton by association – summed up the prevailing attitude:

The fact is, the Democratic Party has to make a choice: Is it going to continue to follow the DLC, be a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, and lose elections for the infinite future? Or is it going to go back to its roots of really representing the middle class and standing up for ordinary people’s economic rights?

Well, today the DLC unveiled its agenda, The American Dream Initiative [pdf]. It remains to be seen how DLC critics will react, but to my mind, there is far more here that they should embrace than reject. To begin with, the initiative was undertaken cooperatively not only with the moderate Third Way, but with the Center for American Progress and the Howard Dean- and labor-friendly NDN. What did this coalition recommend in the end?
The report of the initiative begins with a priority that will set off red flags with some DLC critics: fiscal responsibility. The report calls for caps on discretionary spending but it does not propose the repeal of any of the Bush tax cuts. Instead, it would raise over half a trillion dollars over 10 years by eliminating corporate tax subsidies, downsizing the federal consultantocracy, capturing capital gains taxes that are currently evaded, and other measures.
Given the difficulty of closing corporate tax loopholes and the fact that spending caps are likely to be relatively high in order to accommodate the new programs below, it is difficult to see how we can reduce the deficit without at least a partial roll-back of the Bush tax cuts. But strategically, the initiative is clever in that it proposes other ways to fund new spending, so that if deficit reduction remains necessary after these savings measures, a rollback of the Bush tax cuts could be justified on the grounds that the additional revenues will be for fiscal responsibility rather than additional spending. The new programs are “paid for”.
The American Dream Initiative’s revenue-generating measures would allow for substantial additional social spending. The plan calls for boosting the number of college graduates by one million by 2015. It would do so through a $150 billion block grant to states to make public colleges and universities more affordable and raise graduation rates, a $3,000 refundable tuition tax credit (which would replace and expand a number of existing tax credits), secondary education reform, and additional money for non-traditional college students.
In health care policy, the American Dream Initiative would allow small businesses to join together and create a bigger insurance pool (thereby making coverage for their employees more affordable), and it would seek to achieve universal coverage of children. The initiative would invest in health care information technology to reduce costs and the frequency of medical errors. Finally, it proposes an attack on obesity, anti-smoking campaigns directed at children, creation of a National Center for Cures to make health care research more efficient, more liberal stem cell research policy, and allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices with private insurers.
What else? How about a Baby Bonds program that would give interest-bearing $500 bonds to all children at birth and again at age 10? How about making the mortgage interest tax deduction available to taxpayers who don’t itemize? A $5,000 refundable tax credit for down payment costs? Tax incentives for the construction of affordable homes? Expanding FHA loans and creating tax incentives for employer-provided housing assistance? Done and done.
Want more? The initiative proposes employer-mandated retirement accounts for all but the smallest employers, with tax credits to help businesses pay for them. It would also make employees opt out of contributing to these accounts rather than depending on them opting in. And it would make the existing Saver’s Credit refundable, giving lower- and middle-income families a fifty percent match for savings of up to $2,000 a year.
Finally, the American Dream Initiative would expand the economy through fiscal responsibility, increasing international trade, and investing in technology and alternative energy. It would require companies to offer the capital-building benefits they give their executives to all their employees and would make them report to the SEC data on profitability, foreign vs. domestic employment, and CEO and average-worker compensation. And it would impose additional regulations on pension and mutual funds to protect investors.
Presumably, few of us support all of these ideas, but taken together, this agenda strikes me as “progressive” by just about anyone’s definition. Of course, by itself it won’t necessarily be enough to win in 2008. After all, it plays to the Party’s strengths in economic and social policy. The 2008 nominee will also need an equally promising strategy on national security and on values.
To my mind, the best way to frame the entire agenda – from domestic policy to foreign policy to values – is to emphasize a duality that is central to the American Dream Initiative: the linking of opportunity to responsibility. We need to join the American Dream to the social contract, requiring responsibility from parents (for enrolling their children in available health insurance and other programs), non-custodial dads (for paying child support), recipients of means-tested benefits (for becoming self-sufficient), and college students receiving federal aid (for giving back to their communities). Employers must be responsible in their relations with consumers and employees and accountable to them. And the commander-in-chief must be accountable when he or she deceives the citizenry, bungles wars or recovery efforts, and explodes the budget deficit.
Wooing values voters doesn’t require us to become anti-abortion or anti-gay. By embracing the social contract – the idea that in return for providing public aid, society rightly can make requirements of beneficiaries – Democrats can tap into responsibility, a value that is as deeply felt as opportunity in America. And appealing to responsibility can link the American Dream Initiative to our foreign policy critique of Republicans while partly inoculating us against a values-based attack.

One of the great failures of American democracy is our inability to produce even a semblance of gender parity among elected officials in our federal, state and local political institutions. For example, the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) reports that women hold only 14 of 100 U.S. Senate seats (9 Democrats), 67 of 435 House of Reps. Seats (43 Democrats) and 8 of 50 governorships (6 Democrats). The shortfall raises an interesting question: Would women voters be more likely to vote for women candidates, and which party would benefit?
It’s a hugely complicated question and one of the subjects addressed in an interesting scholarly paper presented in April to the Midwest Political Science Association by Kathleen Dolan, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. While the aforementioned statistics suggest Democrats would likely derive the greater benefit from fielding more women candidates, the answer is more complex. As Dr. Dolan explains in her paper, “Women Candidates in American Politics: What We Know, What We Want to Know”:

Analyzing the NES data for congressional races from 1990-2000 indicates that there are some circumstances in which women voters more likely to choose women candidates than men voters do, but the relationship is not overwhelming. Here the effect seems to be conditioned by the office being sought – women voters were significantly more likely to choose women candidates for House races than were men, but there was no sex difference in voting for women candidates in Senate races (Dolan 2004). Too, the effect in House races was not overwhelming. Women’s probability of voting for a
woman candidate in these elections was .59, while for men the probability was .50. Clearly, this doesn’t signal a wholesale embracing or rejection of women candidates by either sex. So, while women may be more likely to vote for women than are men in some cases, this relationship does not hold in all circumstances. Nor does it hold true all of the time. When each election from 1990 to 2004 is analyzed separately, women were more likely to choose women candidates in House elections in only one year, 1992, the so-
called “year of the woman.” And, interestingly, in 1994, men voters were more likely to choose women candidates in Senate races than were women voters. These findings would cause us to conclude that the potential for women voters to favor women candidates is there, but may not be strong enough to determine a person’s vote in specific electoral situations and is rarely strong enough to overwhelm traditional influences like party identification and incumbency.
…But, as my work on vote choice indicates, party identification and incumbency drive voting for women. At the same time, some scholars suggest that some women will cross party lines to support women (Brians 2005; King and Matland 2003). So, it would be interesting to know more about what factors pull people away from their baseline preference and what it takes for that to happen.

Dolan has a lot more to say in her lengthy paper, and students of political strategy should find the entire paper of interest. For more on the gender gap with respect to political parties, see Anna Greenberg’s “Moving Beyond the gender Gap.”
Democrats may well have much to gain by fielding more women candidates, and the November elections offer an opportunity to increase women’s congressional representation substantially. Although filing deadlines for ’06 have passed in at least 46 states, CAWP reports that 13 Democratic women (and 6 Republicans) are running for U.S. Senate and 116 Democratic women are running for U.S. House seats (56 Republicans), with 8 Democratic women running for governorships (and 8 Republicans).
Democrats would do well to make a point of recruiting more women candidates, not only because we want to win more, but because it will make our democracy stronger and our society better. As the late Coretta Scott King said:

The lack of gender parity in government is not only unjust; it goes a long way to explain why children and families are being shortchanged by government policies. For improving the quality of our lives, where we really need some more assertive women is in the halls of congress, our state and local legislatures… Gender alone is no guarantee of effectiveness in leadership. But it is important that women achieve the full measure of opportunities guaranteed by all of the great democracies. Our world will never be in balance until women have a fair share in political decision-making.

The Washington Post today launches a new daily guide to the ’06 elections, “Bellwethers: Key Issues in the Battle for Congress.” The feature focuses on how voting may be affected by eight major “issues,” including: Iraq; immigration; President Bush; corruption; “pocketbook” concerns; GOP chances in the northeast; Democratic chances in the “upper south”; and ballot measures. The feature includes dozens of cross-links to useful data, including candidate bios, district and state demographic profiles, opinion polls, financial information and voting records — much of it nicely illustrated with clickable maps and jazzy graphics. WaPo says ‘Bellwethers’ will be an “organic” feature, which presumably means it will be updated and expanded with new developments. ‘Bellwethers’ offers substantially more easily-accessible content than the New York Times 2006 Election Guide and promises to be the best election tracking gateway offered by a daily newspaper