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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: March 2007

Rove’s ’08 House Targets Revealed

Eric Kleefield has posted Karl Rove’s House of Reps top 20 “targets” and “Priority Defense” lists at TPM Cafe. We won’t list them all here, other than to offer a regional breakdown. Rove’s vulnerable Republicans include: 3 southerners; 7 northeasterners (Ohio included here); 2 midwesterners; and 5 westerners. Rove’s Dem targets include: 6 southerners; 7 northeasterners; 6 midwesterners; and only 1 westerner. Doesn’t seem to be any striking regional angle here, other than Rove sees the west as pretty shaky. On the other hand, Given Rove’s ’06 W-L record, maybe the best way for Dems to use this list is for fish-wrap.
Rove’s list was reportedly revealed in a Power Point presentation shown at the General Services Administration to promote “team building.” Yet another use of federal government resources to promote GOP political ends, as Paul Kiel notes at TPM Muckraker:

The GSA, remember, is the government’s procurement agency, in charge of almost $60 billion each year. All of this seems like a clear violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using federal resources to aid political parties.

Is there any public trust this Administration won’t violate?


Rove’s ’08 House Targets Revealed

Eric Kleefield has posted Karl Rove’s House of Reps top 20 “targets” and “Priority Defense” lists at TPM Cafe. We won’t list them all here, other than to offer a regional breakdown. Rove’s vulnerable Republicans include: 3 southerners; 7 northeasterners (Ohio included here); 2 midwesterners; and 5 westerners. Rove’s Dem targets include: 6 southerners; 7 northeasterners; 6 midwesterners; and only 1 westerner. Doesn’t seem to be any striking regional angle here, other than Rove sees the west as pretty shaky. On the other hand, Given Rove’s ’06 W-L record, maybe the best way for Dems to use this list is for fish-wrap.
Rove’s list was reportedly revealed in a Power Point presentation shown at the General Services Administration to promote “team building.” Yet another use of federal government resources to promote GOP political ends, as Paul Kiel notes at TPM Muckraker:

The GSA, remember, is the government’s procurement agency, in charge of almost $60 billion each year. All of this seems like a clear violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using federal resources to aid political parties.

Is there any public trust this Administration won’t violate?


Dems’ ’08 Senate Prospects Brighten

Political Wire‘s Taegan Goodard notes an encouraging Washington Times interview with Nevada GOP Senator John Ensign regarding Dems ’08 Senate prospects. As Goddard sums it up,

In a “wide-ranging” interview, Ensign “acknowledged that his party faces a steep, uphill climb in next year’s Senate elections when 21 Republican seats will be up for grabs, compared with 12 for the Democrats.”
Ensign “singled out five Republican seats that are in danger in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and New Hampshire, compared with two vulnerable Democratic incumbents in South Dakota and Louisiana and long-shot possibilities in Iowa and Montana.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times notes the challenge the Iraq war presents to Republican senators seeking re-election in 2008, including Sen. John Sununu (R-NH), Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN).

MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer has more to say about Dems’ Senate propects here.
Also check out DavidNYC’s post at Swing State, noting that fired federal prosecutors tend to be residents of 2004 swing states.


Triumph of Corruption

Today’s news brings a true blast from the past: Ronald Reagan’s legendary budget director and former Congressman, David Stockman, has been indicted on charges of conspiracy, securities fraud and obstruction of justice in connection with his operation of an auto parts firm that went bankrupt in 2005. He faces up to thirty years in the hoosegow, along with fines that could reach over a billion dollars. Many younger readers may have never heard of Stockman, who masterminded the massive budget and tax bills that characterized the core of Reaganomics. But he was virtually a pop culture figure in the early 80s, before losing power and eventually being forced out of office after incautiously admitting to journalist William Greider that the Reagan budgets were creating a fiscal disaster, mainly because Republicans had caved in to special interest demands while lavishing unnecessary hundreds of billions of excess dollars on the Pentagon.Shortly after leaving the administration, Stockman published what still stands as one of the best political “insider” books ever written, The Triumph of Politics, which expanded on his Greider interviews in fascinating detail. As the title indicates, the book chronicled the abandonment of the lofty objectives of Reagan’s initial budget blueprint thanks to an orgy of vote-buying and constituency-tending by GOP pols. Two sections of the book particularly stand out in my own memory: Stockman’s angry account of then-Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger’s exploitation of an accounting error to secure a vast increase in the Pentagon budget above and beyond what Reagan had originally proposed; and his graphic description of the bipartisan special-interest bidding war that made the first Reagan tax bill fiscally and morally ruinous, eventually requiring a big fix in the 1986 tax reform legislation. Aside from its historical value, Stockman’s book remains relevant because he so clearly anticipated and analyzed the political dynamics that ultimately produced the systemic fiscal profligacy and corruption of the Bush/DeLay-era GOP. Indeed, it was Stockman who coined the phrase “starve the beast” for the cynical conservative argument that unfunded tax cuts and huge deficits could restrain big government down the road without the political pain associated with specific budget cuts. The Bush-DeLay era of corruption, which pervaded corporate as well as political circles, led among other things to enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. In a special twist of fate, that’s the law under which Stockman has been indicted. I have no idea whether Stockman is guilty as charged, but it would be highly ironic if the man who offered the first and best analysis (and confession) of the moral rot infecting latter-day conservatism succumbed to corruption himself.


Dems’ ’08 Senate Prospects Brighten

Political Wire‘s Taegan Goodard notes an encouraging Washington Times interview with Nevada GOP Senator John Ensign regarding Dems ’08 Senate prospects. As Goddard sums it up,

In a “wide-ranging” interview, Ensign “acknowledged that his party faces a steep, uphill climb in next year’s Senate elections when 21 Republican seats will be up for grabs, compared with 12 for the Democrats.”
Ensign “singled out five Republican seats that are in danger in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and New Hampshire, compared with two vulnerable Democratic incumbents in South Dakota and Louisiana and long-shot possibilities in Iowa and Montana.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times notes the challenge the Iraq war presents to Republican senators seeking re-election in 2008, including Sen. John Sununu (R-NH), Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN).

MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer has more to say about Dems’ Senate propects here.
Also check out DavidNYC’s post at Swing State, noting that fired federal prosecutors tend to be residents of 2004 swing states.


A Bad Anti-War Litmus Test

Earlier this year I tried, unsuccessfully, to spur some talk in the progressive blogosphere about the provisions made in most Iraq troop withdrawal plans for “residual” forces to fight terrorist cells, deter foreign intervention, and prevent wholesale communal “cleansing.” I did so in the hopes of illustrating a progressive consensus, extending even into the ranks of Republicans, for a formula of eliminating our conventional combat presence in Iraq while acknowledging a continuing obligation to keep the country from going completely to hell in a handbasket–at a time when the obsession with withdrawal timetables and deadlines seemed to obscure this consensus.Well, the subject has finally come up in the blogosphere, but in the context of growing efforts to suggest a bright-line difference between Hillary Clinton and her main rivals. Today at MyDD, Matt Stoller seized on HRC’s discussion of a residual commitment to Iraq to fight terrorists and deter foreign intervention to suggest that she’s beyond the pale for anti-war Democrats:

There is just no way that she can say that she will end the war and that she will continue a military mission in Iraq to contain extremists and ward off Iran. Those are mutually exclusive.

There’s one big problem with Matt’s anathema: it would also apply to Barack Obama, John Edwards, and quite a few other Democrats generally considered to be unimpeachably anti-war.Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan explicity calls for a “residual force” to stay in the country to fight terrorists and deter foreign intervention. John Edwards, who has emphasized the need for immediately withdrawing half the current troop deployment, has also talked about a continuing if limited military commitment. And even such withdrawal hardliners as John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha have supported the same kind of commitment through an “over the horizon” force prepared to re-intervene at a moment’s notice, and even a “minimal” force, presumably special ops counter-terrorism units, operating within Iraq.So if Matt Stoller or anyone else wants to make total withdrawal of every single boot on the ground, and a promise to foreswear any residual “military mission” in Iraq, the new litmus test, HRC is not the only candidate who would flunk. In fact, it would pretty much limit the “true progressive” choice to Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey


VA State Legislature ‘Normandy Beach’ for Dems

Lowell Feld has a MyDD post “Why Turning Virginia ‘Blue’ Matters to All of Us,” which should be of interest to everyone concerned about building a stronger Democratic Party. Feld, who writes the “Raising Kaine” blog, offers a half-dozen reasons why the 2007 Virginia state legislative elections are important, including:

It matters because Virginia, with the election of Tim Kaine and Jim Webb, plus gains in the General Assembly, has moved from “solid red” to “purple,” and because we need to keep moving the state in the “blue” direction politically. Needless to say, the implications of Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes, becoming competitive once again in national politics (Virginia last went for a Democrat in 1964) would be enormous. Don’t think this is possible? Well, I’d refer once again to the fact that the last two governors – Mark Warner and Tim Kaine – have been Democrats, and the last Senate election saw Jim Webb replace George Allen. Also, I would point out that increasingly, Northern Virginia is becoming an extension of the solidly “blue” Northeast corridor. And Northern Virginia is becoming increasingly more politically powerful within Virginia as a whole. Frankly, it’s only a matter of time until the growth in NOVA turns Virginia “blue.” Our job, if we choose to accept it, is to ensure that this change occurs as rapidly as possible.

Republicans currently hold majorities in both houses of the Virginia legislature, but Dems need a net pick-up of only 4 seats in the state Senate to win a majority (Dems lag in the VA House of Delegates 50-47-3). Demographic trends and issues are both breaking the Dems way, and a little extra investment by Dem contributors could go a long way toward securing a beachhead for Dems in the south.
There’s been a lot of ink poured in the debate over whether Dem Presidential candidates should or should not skip the south, but not enough serious discussion about how to begin winning back the South, or at least a significant chunk of it. Virginia is clearly critical to any such effort. One commenter on Feld’s article (Pitin) calls Virginia “the Normandy Beach of taking back the South.”
For Dems, neglecting the state legislatures, which control redistricting, in party-building is like putting crappy retreads on a top-seed in the Indy 500. It’s time for Democratic fund-raisers and Party leaders who want win a working majority to invest in winning more seats in the state legislatures. ActBlue is now accepting contributions for the 2007 VA legislative races here.


VA State Legislature ‘Normandy Beach’ for Dems

Lowell Feld has a MyDD post “Why Turning Virginia ‘Blue’ Matters to All of Us,” which should be of interest to everyone concerned about building a stronger Democratic Party. Feld, who writes the “Raising Kaine” blog, offers a half-dozen reasons why the 2007 Virginia state legislative elections are important, including:

It matters because Virginia, with the election of Tim Kaine and Jim Webb, plus gains in the General Assembly, has moved from “solid red” to “purple,” and because we need to keep moving the state in the “blue” direction politically. Needless to say, the implications of Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes, becoming competitive once again in national politics (Virginia last went for a Democrat in 1964) would be enormous. Don’t think this is possible? Well, I’d refer once again to the fact that the last two governors – Mark Warner and Tim Kaine – have been Democrats, and the last Senate election saw Jim Webb replace George Allen. Also, I would point out that increasingly, Northern Virginia is becoming an extension of the solidly “blue” Northeast corridor. And Northern Virginia is becoming increasingly more politically powerful within Virginia as a whole. Frankly, it’s only a matter of time until the growth in NOVA turns Virginia “blue.” Our job, if we choose to accept it, is to ensure that this change occurs as rapidly as possible.

Republicans currently hold majorities in both houses of the Virginia legislature, but Dems need a net pick-up of only 4 seats in the state Senate to win a majority (Dems lag in the VA House of Delegates 50-47-3). Demographic trends and issues are both breaking the Dems way, and a little extra investment by Dem contributors could go a long way toward securing a beachhead for Dems in the south.
There’s been a lot of ink poured in the debate over whether Dem Presidential candidates should or should not skip the south, but not enough serious discussion about how to begin winning back the South, or at least a significant chunk of it. Virginia is clearly critical to any such effort. One commenter on Feld’s article (Pitin) calls Virginia “the Normandy Beach of taking back the South.”
For Dems, neglecting the state legislatures, which control redistricting, in party-building is like putting crappy retreads on a top-seed in the Indy 500. It’s time for Democratic fund-raisers and Party leaders who want win a working majority to invest in winning more seats in the state legislatures. ActBlue is now accepting contributions for the 2007 VA legislative races here.


Southern Non-Sequitur

South-bashing is definitely in fashion in progressive circles these days, but a recent Matt Stoller post at MyDD takes it to a whole new level. Turns out, according to Matt, that the South is responsible not only for what he considers to be the excesses of Cold War politics, but for the labor movement’s support of same.Here’s Stoller’s tortured logic, at some length:

The roots of this [national security] state are traceable directly to an authoritarian South, a one-party unique region in America that has held the balance of power since the 1930s and that was and is dedicated above all to a race-based hierarchical society. Through shaping even progressive legislation, like the Wagner Act, Dixiecrats ensured that broad-based class movements failed. It’s not widely-understood, but the reason the South flipped to an anti-labor stance in the 1940s is because the CIO had tremendous success in organizing multi-racial unions as World War II labor markets tightened. This was a direct threat to Jim Crow, and so Southern Democrats cooperated with Republicans to pass Taft-Hartley, a piece of legislation which basically made labor organizing impossible and turned unions into groups that can only advocate for their own survival. At the same time, there were massive pre-McCarthy purges of leftists and decertifications of leftists unions, leaving unions open to infiltration by the CIA, FBI, organized crime, and bureaucratic inertia. The biggest movement for social justice in American history – the labor movement of the 1930s – ran up against the South, and the South turned it into a pro-Vietnam reactionary force that rejected the New Left in the 1960s.

Wow. This is some serious logic-jumping. The anti-communist orientation of the U.S. labor movement from the 1950s on was in fact rooted in its own traditions, dating back to the rejection of socialism by the AFL before and after the turn of the twentieth century. And the CIO went to great lengths to disassociate itself from its few pro-Moscow affiliates, before, during and after the failure of its efforts to unionize Dixie. Taft-Hartley did indeed negatively affect the labor movement, but not that much initially: the rapid decline in union representation of the work force really started happening in the 1970s. As for the idea that a southern-dictated “reactionary” union posture led to the rejection of the New Left–well, that’s just not true. Aside from the longstanding and principled anti-communism of the labor movement, there wasn’t much about the New Left that was attractive to organized working folks. The cultural attitudes of most New Leftists were anethema to union members and activists. And the New Left’s characteristic belief that upper- and middle-class students and intellectuals represented a new proletariat was offensive to almost all labor activists, including serious socialists. These are fundamental issues that have nothing much to do with the South. Indeed, if the South had never existed, the U.S. labor movement would have, for its own reasons, still been anti-communist and culturally moderate if not conservative. Attributing the distinctive positions of the labor movement to the region where it had almost no influence is a strange non-sequitur. And wrong.


Bloggers Mull Pros and Cons of Mega-Primary

Political Animal Kevin Drum joins Kos in giving the thumbs up to the ‘Super Tuesday’ (February 5th) monster primary, although Drum stipulates:

I’m pretty much on board with this. I’d rather see the candidates spend a year running a truly national campaign — the kind they’ll need to run in the general election — instead of spending 90% of their time in two small states where they engage in nostalgic but obsolete coffee klatsch campaigning. Like it or not, that just isn’t the way the world works anymore.
However, if a single massive primary day is the way we decide to do things in the future, I hope that by 2012 we can agree to move the whole process forward and hold it in, say, April or May. The first week of February is just too early to commit to a candidate who won’t be elected until November.

A smidge less gung-ho than Kos, who says:

There’s some level of nostalgia over the notion of a long, drawn out primary process in which Iowa and New Hampshire kick things off. This is supposed to help the Jimmy Carter-type underdogs “build momentum” and give voters a chance to “deliberate” over their decisions.
In reality, of course, we had a system in which two non-representative states (IA and NH) decided our nominee last time, and they were gunning for the same “right” this time around.
The rest of the states aren’t morons. They saw what was happening, and so many have moved up to the front of the pack that now we have essentially a national primary on Feb. 5. Is that a bad thing? I’d argue it’s a fantastic thing.

New Donkey Ed Kilgore sees things differently in his recent post, entitled “Nomination Abomination”:

This, folks, is simply crazy. February 5 is nine months before the general election, and roughly six months before the nominating conventions. The heavily front-loaded 2004 schedule was rationalized by some Democrats as necessary to give the nominee time to take on an incumbent; there’s no such excuse for the far more front-loaded 2008 calendar. It virtually guarantees that three factors—money, name ID, and success in the earliest states, especially Iowa—will determine the outcome. And it may well snuff any serious chance for the lower-tier candidates in both parties, who must now somehow simultaneously combine relentless campaigning in Iowa with the massive fundraising necessary to compete in the incredibly expensive February 5 landscape.
Most importantly, the emerging calendar will provide zero opportunity for second thoughts after the early rush has anointed nominees. It could be a very long spring, summer and autumn if a nominee commits some major blunder, or some disabling skeleton jumps out of a closet.

All three of the above make good points. However, their arguments assume that one candidate will emerge on top on Feb. 5th, which may not be the case. Perhaps we can agree that it’s a good thing, assuming two big “ifs” — if one candidate comes out on top, and if that candidate is the best competitor to carry the party standard. It looks like a done deal for ’08, and the outcome will no doubt determine the future of the whole monster primary concept. It’s certainly one of the most important Democratic strategy choices, and readers are encouraged to read all three posts and some of the more than 250 comments on the articles submitted thus far.