by Scott Winship
Longtime readers of TDS–by which I mean those of you who read it last fall–remember the, um, spirited debate we hosted over an essay by Third Way, “Missing the Middle“. Authors Anne Kim, Adam Solomon, and Jim Kessler argued that Democrats’ economic message to the middle class failed to resonate with voters because it was unduly pessimistic and focused on security rather than opportunity. Their critics responded that economic insecurity is prevalent–often with good reason. Secondarily, discussants asked, “Where’s the Beef?”, noting the absence of a coherent policy agenda that flowed from their analysis.
Today Third Way rolled out its initial effort to respond to these criticisms–“The New Rules Economy: A Policy Framework for the 21st Century“. The report begins by debunking “myths” of neopopulism and conservatism. It then takes the next step of presenting nine “new rules” of today’s economy, as well as proposals to address the gaps between our old-rules policy framework and the new rules. You could think of it as a “third path”, no, a “middle way”, or….what’s the phrase I’m looking for?…….
Hil-larious kidding aside, progressives will recognize that there is nothing mushily centrist about Third Way’s policy agenda, though because it rejects the neopopulist critique of the new economy it is not as expansive as many progressives would like. Still, there’s no denying the progressivity of an agenda that advocates wealth-promoting and inequality-reducing “worth at birth accounts”, making college more affordable, greater funding for continuing education, training for workers in industries vulnerable to foreign competition to prepare for better employment in high-growth industries, expanded portability of fringe benefits, expanded child care funding, and having the federal government take over responsibility for some of the health care costs that businesses currently bear (among other laundry-list items). To be sure, it’s a framework viewed from 10,000 feet, but Third Way has a permanent project dedicated to fleshing out the details of these and other ideas.
Seems like an agenda even neopopulists could embrace. Give it a look-see. How does it compare with other progressive policy agendas you’ve seen?
Month: February 2007
Dems will be cheered to read Eric Kleefield’s TPM Cafe synopsis of Stuart Rothernberg’s Roll Call article, pointing out that Dems have a good chance to win a fillibuster-proof 60 Senate seats by 2010. Kleefield cites Blumenthal’s argument that Dems only have to defend 27 seats over the next two cycles, while the GOP must defend 40 seats. In addition, in 2008, Blumenthal says the GOP has “tough seats to defend” in CO, NH and ME, along with possible Republican retirements in VA, NM, NE, MS and NC. Further, most Dem seats being defended are in blue states.
All well and good in the longer run. But on Sunday on The Chris Matthews Show, killjoy Joe Klein predicted that, in the shorter run, Senator Lieberman may switch to the GOP “pretty soon,” causing Dems to lose control of the Senate. Here’s hoping Sens. Schumer and Reid are working hard on persuading a GOP Senator to join the Dems.
Props to Ezra Klein at TAPPED for once again posting on the unsavory but important issue of prison rape, which doesn’t appear to have abated despite Congress’ unanimous 2003 legislation (signed by Bush) called the Prison Rape Elimination Act.As Robert Weisberg and David Mills pointed out in Slate shortly after the 2003 legislation was signed:
[D]espite its grand words and its sponsors’ passionate expressions of concern, the main thing the law aims to do is collect data, and that may be, paradoxically, both quixotic and redundant.It is quixotic because the obvious problems of unreliable observations and underreporting inherent in prison assault make highly refined objective data a fantasy. It is redundant because the relevant facts are already clear: A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years.
A look at the web page of the primary product of the 2003 act, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, does not indicate what anyone would call a blizzard of activity. It’s held some hearings, and offers links to studies of prison rape, some of which were conducted prior to 2003. There is a link to an interesting 2006 Urban Institute report on state implementation of the NPREA. Despite lots of examples of new state programs, the report poses several “questions” that still need to be answered through “research.” Here are three of them that tell you everything you need to know:
Do the programs described in this report matter? Are incidents of PSV [Prison Sexual Violence] being eliminated in DOCs [state Departments of Corrections] implementing prevention efforts?…. Are perpetrators of PSV, both staff and inmates, being held accountable, through DOC sanctions and administrative penalties as well as criminally?
So we are definitely not as a society racing towards what the 2003 federal legislation described as a “zero-tolerance” position on prison rape. And thus we continue to accept the cruel irony of making prisons one of the most common arenas for the commission of one of the most violent felony crimes.Simple indifference aside, there are two obvious barriers to eliminating prison rape. The first is that most of the remedies are controversial (incarcerating far fewer non-violent offenders) or very expensive (building less crowded prisons, providing much higher pay and better training and supervision of prison staff, or radically improving monitoring of inmates).And the second barrier to change is the really dirty little non-secret underlying tolerance of prison rape: the idea that it’s an effective deterrent to criminal behavior.This “walk the line or get raped” attitude has undeniably been prevalent on the political Right, where for years politicians have railed against so-called “country-club prisons” and suggested that inmates deserve the most barbarous conditions imaginable. (There has to be a special place in hell for conservatives who want to criminalize loving, consensual gay and lesbian relationships, while smiling upon prison rape.) But it’s also found implicit currency elsewhere, among virtually every advocacy group that wants to deter some anti-social behavior, from drunk driving to white collar crime, by raising the specter of getting sent off to Oz and maybe being raped. As Ezra noted uncomfortably in a post last year:
When we were hoping to put Ken Lay behind bars, Bill Lockyer explained his grand desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, Hi, my name is Spike, honey.”‘
One of the most pervasive indicators of the keep-prisons-barbarous temptation has been the widespread deployment of “scared straight” programs which shuttle school kids through prisons to give them a taste of the consequences of straying into criminal behavior. No one has quite, yet, suggested staging a prison gang-rape for the edification of touring students. But that would in fact represent an act of clarifying honesty for those who continue to tolerate, for whatever reason, sexual violence in prisons.
Dems will be cheered to read Eric Kleefield’s TPM Cafe synopsis of Stuart Rothernberg’s Roll Call article, pointing out that Dems have a good chance to win a fillibuster-proof 60 Senate seats by 2010. Kleefield cites Blumenthal’s argument that Dems only have to defend 27 seats over the next two cycles, while the GOP must defend 40 seats. In addition, in 2008, Blumenthal says the GOP has “tough seats to defend” in CO, NH and ME, along with possible Republican retirements in VA, NM, NE, MS and NC. Further, most Dem seats being defended are in blue states.
All well and good in the longer run. But on Sunday on The Chris Matthews Show, killjoy Joe Klein predicted that, in the shorter run, Senator Lieberman may switch to the GOP “pretty soon,” causing Dems to lose control of the Senate. Here’s hoping Sens. Schumer and Reid are working hard on persuading a GOP Senator to join the Dems.
It appears that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has finally figured out he should distance himself somewhat from Washington, DC. There’s only one problem. He didn’t take a shot at his buddy George W. Bush, who is profoundly unpopular Down Under as well as Up Here. No, Howard went after that real American political hot commodity, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.In a press interview, Howard said of proposals from Obama and other Democrats to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq:
“I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory,” Mr Howard told the Nine Network.”If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.”
Wow. This isn’t Bushism; it’s Cheneyism gone publicly rampant. And in a country whose people (a) like the Iraq War even less than Americans do, if that’s possible, and (b) have a strong interest in maintaining good relations with both political parties in the U.S.The Obama campaign’s quick response was rather direct:
“If Prime Minister Howard truly believes what he says, perhaps his country should find its way to contribute more than just 1,400 troops so some American troops can come home,” [Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs] said. “It’s easy to talk tough when it’s not your country or your troops making the sacrifices.”
Indeed. Gibbs might have gone on to point out that even the very limited Australian troop commitment is deeply controversial in that country. Howard’s naming of Obama was perhaps not as weird as it would first appear to Americans. During my own recent visit to Australia, I was inundated with questions about the junior senator from Illinois; Aussies are extraordinarily well informed about U.S. politics. Moreover, Howard has been trying to make immigration a big wedge issue in the upcoming Australian elections, with the terrorist threat supposedly represented by Muslim immigrants being the public theme, and all sorts of racial fears lying just under the surface. Maybe an African-American politician with an Islamic-sounding name was just too tempting a target. Or maybe Howard’s just watching too much Fox News.
Why is the Democratic presidential nominating contest heating up earlier than ever? There are plenty of explanations, including an impressive field and the sense that this could be an especially momentous election. But the overriding reason is simply that despite widely-held complaints about the “front-loading” of the selection process in 2004, it’s going to be much, much more front-loaded in 2008.Jerome Armstrong of MyDD has a good summary of what he calls “the biggest mess ever,” and focuses on the maneuvering of some states to break into the DNC-dictated four-state (IA, NV, NH, SC) early calendar. And to be sure, all hell could break loose if NH and IA get into a crazy move-things-up-perpetually competition with other states to maintain their traditional first-caucus, first-primary status.But the bigger problem is the number and size of states that have moved up to dates just after SC. As Armstrong points out:
In 2004, seven states held primaries within a couple of weeks of New Hampshire, and already for 2008, sixteen states are in that window. Unlike the 2004, in 2008 there are mega-states like California, New Jersey, Michigan and Florida in that mix.
Some Democrats rationalized front-loading in 2004 on grounds that taking on an incumbent Republican president required an early start for the challenger. That’s obviously not a factor in 2008; yet the front-loading proceeds apace, basically because we don’t really have a national presidential nominating system.There are various theories about how front-loading will affect the 2008 contest. One is that it will actually magnify the importance of Iowa, where all indications are that there will be a close four-way race among Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Vilsack. Another is that the candidates with the most money and national support will “go long” and husband resources for delegate-rich post-SC states like CA and FL. But one thing’s for certain: when a grind-it-out attrition campaign means waiting to throw your real weight into states voting on February 5, roughly nine months before the General Election, it’s a very different nominating process than we’ve ever seen. And that makes me nervous.
by Alan Abramowitz
Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science
Emory University
The South is the most conservative and most Republican region of the country. In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the Democratic presidential candidate failed to carry a single state of the old Confederacy, although Al Gore probably did win a majority of the intended votes of Floridians. And even though Democrats made modest gains in the South in the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans continue to hold the large majority of the region’s Senate and House seats.
Looking at the bleak Democratic landscape in the South, Tom Schaller argues in Whistling Past Dixie that not only should Democratic presidential candidates write off the South, they should actively campaign against southern values in order to maximize their electoral prospects in the rest of the country. What Schaller is advocating is not just a non-southern strategy for Democrats, but an anti-southern strategy.
The assumption underlying Schaller’s argument is that not only is the South more conservative than the rest of the nation, but that southern values are now so antithetical to those of voters outside of the region that trying to appeal to southerners will only reduce a candidate’s appeal outside of the region.
But is it true that a candidate who appeals to voters in the South will reduce his appeal in the rest of the country? Based on an examination of the evidence from the past six presidential elections, the answer to this question is a loud and clear no. In fact, the evidence supports the opposite conclusion: the better a presidential candidate does in the South, the better that candidate will do in the rest of the country and, especially, in the key battleground states that determine the outcomes of presidential elections.
In order to test the viability of Schaller’s anti-southern strategy, I examined the correlations among Democratic presidential candidates’ vote margins (Democratic percentage minus Republican percentage) in five states across the last six presidential elections. The five states that I chose included two southern states, Georgia from the Deep South, and North Carolina from the Rim South, and three battleground states, Pennsylvania from the Northeast, Ohio from the Midwest, and Colorado from the Mountain West. The results are displayed in Table 1.
Not only are all of the correlations positive, all of them are very strongly positive—a correlation of 1.0 indicates a perfect relationship between two variables, and most of these correlations are very close to 1.0. It is clear that over the last six presidential elections, the better the Democratic candidate did in Georgia and North Carolina, the better that candidate did in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.
There is no reason to believe that the positive relationship between a presidential candidate’s appeal in the South and that candidate’s appeal in the rest of the nation, including the key battleground states, will change in the future. The better the Democratic (or Republican) candidate does in the South in 2008, the better that candidate will do in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado that are critical to winning the presidency. That is because southern voters respond in the same way to the candidates and issues as voters in the rest of the country.
No matter whom the Democrats and Republicans nominate for president in 2008, the South will almost certainly be the most difficult region for the Democratic candidate. But is also almost certain that no matter whom the Democrats and Republicans nominate for president in 2008, the better the Democratic candidate does in the South, the better that candidate will do in the rest of the country including the key battleground states and the better that candidate’s chances will be of winning the presidency.
The blogosphere is still smokin’ with screeds covering every conceivable angle of the Edwards campaign bloggers flap (from here it looks like he struck a fairly Solomonic compromise as a presidential candidate who appreciates the importance of free speech, the netroots, reproductive rights and Catholic voters in PA.) Meanwhile, print columnist Jules Witcover reminds us that, ahem, there is a war on, and “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is being upstaged by the “lower” House in dealing with it. As Witcover rolls it out in his syndicated column:
With the Senate dithering over whether or not to debate President Bush’s latest troop buildup in Iraq, the Democratic leadership in the House is going ahead next week with debate of its own, thumbing its nose at tradition and protocol.
As the legislative body responsible for such key matters of foreign relations as approving treaties and confirming ambassadors, the Senate customarily leads the way on issues of international consequence. Its 100 members elected statewide revel in its reputation as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” compared with the House, whose 435 members are often painted as more focused on the needs of their districts.
Witcover goes into considerable detail about the pathos of the spectacle of Senators droning on about procedure to a mostly empty chamber, while the House is about to be set afire with impassioned debate about how to actually disengage from Iraq. He doesn’t give due weight to the narrowness of the Dems’ Senate majority as a causal factor of all this inaction, which underscores the importance of Dems increasing their Senate edge in ’08. Helvidius, over at Taegan Goddard’s Political Insider notes in his post “Kerry’s Cash” that ex-candidate John Kerry has $7.4 mill left over from his ’04 campaign and another $5 mill in his campaign’s legal war chest, and to his credit, Kerry “has pledged to donate a considerable amount” to a new campaign to bring the troops home from Iraq. After reading Witcover’s article, one wonders if maybe the best investment might be the DSCC, so Dems could win a real working majority in the upper chamber in ’08.
There’s a fascinating and important exchange underway on the New Republic site between Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalem Center and Larry Derfner of the Jerusalem Post about Israel’s options towards a potentially nuclear Iran.This debate was spurred by a widely quoted TNR article last week by Halevi along with Michael Oren that suggested Israelis have largely concluded that they cannot live with a nuclear Iran, and will probably soon launch some sort of attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities even if that spurs retaliation or a large-scale Middle Eastern meltdown.You should read the entire exchange (Halevi’s second rejoinder will appear tomorrow), but the central points in the dispute have to do with Halevi’s belief that the Iran regime’s peculiar theological nature will make it intolerably tempted to attack Israel with nuclear weapons regardless of the disastrous consequences to its own people, giving Israel little choice but to preempt that possibility or risk extinction.Derfner’s latest post nails the central problem with Halevi’s argument: it rejects the entire and completely successful history of nuclear deterrence:
You say it’s “facile” of me to use Stalin and Mao to argue that even crazy, bloodthirsty leaders aren’t likely to use nukes, because I’m disregarding the new element of apocalyptic Iranian religion. But, when I’m trying to anticipate what somebody’s going to do in the future, I put a lot more store in his deeds than in his texts. I think Stalin’s and Mao’s purges of tens of millions of innocents augur much more for nuclear insanity than the Shia doctrine of the Hidden Imam. For all its violent repression at home and aid to Islamic terrorism abroad, post-revolutionary Iran has never started a war with another country. It has never used its WMD on anybody, either. It has never trafficked in genocide.The reason, I believe, is the power of deterrence. It has worked on Iran, too. It has worked on everybody–no exceptions. And, while there is, of course, a theoretical possibility that it won’t work on a nuclear Iran, I think Israelis have to weigh the results of nuclear-age deterrence against the predictable and unpredictable results of a war against Iran–and to choose hopeful moderation over its fear-induced opposite.
There are, of course, considerable grounds for Israelis to believe that its nuclear deterrent won’t stop conventional military attacks on their country; after all, during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Egypt and Syria concluded (inaccurately, according to most accounts) that Israel would not launch a nuclear attack to keep Arab armies out of Tel Aviv. But the conventional threat to Israel is only marginally increased by Tehran’s nuclear program, even if it’s far more advanced and successful than most observers think it is. So the question remains: what’s riskier for Israel? Relying on the 100% success rate of nuclear deterrence against nuclear attacks since Hiroshima? Or unleashing a regional war at a time when the furies that would unleash are undoubtedly horrifying, not least for Israel?
If you are a regular reader of political blogs, you are probably aware of the burgeoning kerfuffle over certain remarks about the Catholic Church expressed in the past by two bloggers recently hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign. The story has been percolating for a while, but blew up yesterday when National Review’s Kathyrn Jean Lopez served up some choice quotes from one of the staffers, Amanda Marcotte (formerly of the Pandagon blog), suggesting that women’s rights might be safer if the Virgin Mary had been able to get hold of Plan B contraceptives.As of this writing, it’s not clear whether reports that the Edwards campaign was about to fire the duo are accurate or not. It is clear the campaign is a bit between a rock and a hard place, the rock being fear of association with anti-Catholic opinions, and the hard place being the progressive blogosphere’s increasingly angry demands that Edwards stand up to right-wing intimidation or forfeit his previously strong Left Netroots support.Complicating the story is the fact that the notorious right-wing political operative Bill Donahue of the conservative factional Catholic League (best known for his demands that the Church excommunicate pro-choice politicians like John Kerry) has massively piled onto the dispute, running around the MSM today expressing outrage at the bloggers’ offensive opinions. Thus, any Edwards effort to discipline or dismiss the bloggers is inevitably being interpreted as a cave-in to the Right-Wing Noise Machine on the order of Kerry’s alleged refusal to counter the Swift Boat Veterans’ smear of 2004.The person being most obviously victimized in the furor is the second Edwards staffer in question, Melissa McEwan (a.k.a. Shakespeare’s Sister), who apparently did nothing more than use some profanity in rejecting anti-abortionist efforts to control women’s reproductive systems. Big deal; I feel the same way myself on occasion, and I’m so Anglo-Catholic that I tend to catch a cold when the Pope sneezes.The underlying question, nicely framed by Ezra Klein at TAPPED, is whether we are henceforth going to be treated to endless oppo-research examinations of the published utterances of campaign staffers on topics other than, well, campaign staffing. Ezra thinks this would set a terrible precedent, and I tend to agree, though it’s hardly a novelty; way back in 1972, George McGovern got flack for a pro-Palestinian manifesto that a campaign staffer, Rick Stearns, had signed years earlier as a college student (leading Hunter Thompson to facetiously refer to Stearns as “that devious Arab bastard” in his famous book on the campaign).Since Edwards’ bloggers were not exactly hired to be back-room operators, perhaps the press release on their hiring should have included a disclaimer that read: “All our previously expressed opinions have now been subsumed in the transcendent cause of electing John Edwards president, to which we henceforth slavishly submit.” That might have headed off a world of trouble.The deeper question, when it comes to Marcotte’s more provocative quotes, is whether Catholics specifically, or Christians generally, ought to take offense at this sort of blasphemous nonsense, and play the victim. The simple reality is that the central mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation, is inevitably, to unbelievers, a standing invitation to sophomoric jibes about the Virgin Birth and the whole idea of God Made Human. That’s hardly news, and hardly grounds for believers to get self-righteously huffy, particularly if some of their co-religionists insist on politicizing their faith as hacks like Donohue perpetually do.The whole dispute reminds me of the forgotten incident in 1971, when Patricia Buckley Bozell (yes, that Buckley’s sister, and that Bozell’s wife) assaulted feminist icon Ti-Grace Atkinson at a Catholic University podium after Atkinson made some smarmy remarks about the Virgin Mary “getting knocked up.”Soon after, this letter appeared in Time Magazine:
As a Roman Catholic, as a supporter of the free expression of ideas, and as a believer in the virginity of Mary, I offer Ti-Grace Atkinson my apologies for the outlandish behavior of Patricia Buckley Bozell [March 22]. Never before has the Virgin Mary required the use of arms—or hands—to defend her. Mrs. Bozell was rather presumptuous to think that Mary now needed her intercession.
That’s as true today as it was more than thirty-five years ago.
