It’s become a simple truism that the aftershocks of 9/11 had a lot to do with the Republican electoral victories of 2002 and 2004, supposedly because voters suddenly made national security, a cluster of issues on which the GOP had a natural advantage, an overriding concern, with the absence of additional terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Bush’s watch being the clincher
But something a bit deeper was going on, according to John Judis, who has a fascinating piece up on the New Republic site, drawing on research from a small band of political psychologists.
To make a long story short, these psychologists conducted a variety of experiments showing that voter perceptions of George W. Bush after 9/11 dramatically improved after they had been “cued” to think about their own mortality. Moreoever, and most strikingly, these shifts were not produced by reflection on Bush’s actual record of “keeping America safe,” or even by a preoccupation with terrorism or national security. Instead, it appeared, invoking the fear of death stimulated a general lurch towards conservative sentiments on a whole range of issues, as part of what the psychologists call “worldview defense.”
It’s hardly a novel insight to suggest that an atmosphere of national or cultural crisis tends to promote authoritarian political views. This was the central theme of Fritz Stern’s famous analysis of German fascism, The Politics of Cultural Despair. But it’s another thing altogether to demonstrate that insight empirically, as the political psychologists Judis cites have done.
So what happened in 2006? Aside from the fading proximity of 9/11, Bush’s many palpable failures made him “less of a useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death,” says one of the psychologists. Thus, pre-9/11 priorities and policy preferences re-emereged, to the benefit of Democrats. This, of course, is also the major hypothesis of the recent re-evaluation of their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority published by Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The American Prospect.
But while Judis finishes his TNR essay on a hopeful note for progressives, it leaves the troubling impression that the whole phenomenon of memento mori politics is largely outside the control of Democrats. What if Republicans nominate a more “useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death” in 2008? And what if there is another major terrorist attack on the United States? Will the environment of 9/11 return? And what if anything can progressives do the counter the proported tilt of politics that might produce?
Month: August 2007
Which political action committee gave the most money to congressional campaigns in 2006?
MoveOn.org? EMILY’s List? The National Rifle Association?
Nope, nope and nope.
ActBlue – the web-based bundler – was the single biggest PAC contributor in the last cycle. It delivered some $17 million to candidates in 2006, with about $15.5 million going directly to congressional campaigns. t’s proving to have an even bigger presence in the presidential election, and the organization’s founders are predicting that they will move $100 million dollars during the 2008 cycle.
Matt Bai’s new book, “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics” is not getting the warmest of receptions from blogosphere critics. Bai’s book is reviewed at length by Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh, who explains in Salon‘s lead article today:
Bai’s written a fascinating but ultimately bewildering book that offers occasional insight, since he was smart enough to pay attention to Howard Dean before he was “Howard Dean,” and then to follow the netroots story Dean introduced, in frequent pieces for the New York Times Magazine since 2003. So we get firsthand reporting, exclusive access to early meetings (not all of which, sadly, are that interesting), and some compelling small portraiture — the Democracy Alliance’s Rob Stein, Yearly Kos organizer Gina Cooper, blogfather Jerome Armstrong, plus a damning look at the abortive presidential campaign of former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who in Bai’s telling decided to cut and run rather than fight the lefty blogosphere “mob.”
But for all its love of big bold ideas, “The Argument” is premised on a big, bold idea that’s simply wrong: that Republicans seized and held power in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I generation by selling Americans on a positive platform of new programs for national renewal, while Democrats, by contrast, are now winning merely by not losing, bashing Bush for wrecking the country while never explaining to voters what they’d do instead.
Walsh has a lot more to say about Bai’s take on the netroots, MoveOn, Mark Warner, Joe Lieberman and Bill Clinton, and doesn’t find much agreement. Still, she recommends reading it, but says readers should “draw completely different conclusions” than Bai.
Alternet also leads today with a long review of Bai’s book. Alternet‘s Executive Editor Don Hazen says of Bai and his book:
…he’s spent too much time inside the Beltway to get the story right. …Whether you agree with Bai’s critique or not likely depends on your vantage point. Beltway insiders and the largely elite think tanks that are seeking a “third way” probably agree wholeheartedly. If you are a blogger, a grassroots activist or otherwise outside of the D.C. insiders’ clique, you’re likely to take major umbrage with what Bai has to say.
At its most fundamental level, Bai’s “no new ideas” argument seems flawed. He has organized his book around a false dichotomy; nobody is against smart ideas, but what good are ideas without political power and without the fundamental vision that has been the foundation of progressive values for decades?
…And Bai never fully digests the essential point of the new internet-facilitated democratic revolution. He doesn’t appear to grasp the significance of the transformation that is occurring in politics today — from the hierarchical political machines of yesterday to a grassroots, bottom-up, person-to-person model that involves millions of new people who are fed up with the so-called wisdom from the top…Bai doesn’t get that this aim to democratize the political process is itself a vital and worthy idea.
Hazen credits Bai with an “enjoyable” chapter on Howard Dean and a strong account of Dean’s ascension. He also describes Bai’s book as a “fun read,” however flawed in its overall perpective.
Bai seems to have a unique ability among print journalists to provoke strongly-felt blogosphere critiques, which has been the case long before this book was published. It’s not fair to make him poster-boy for all that’s wrong with the MSM, but understandible, given his influence as a top writer for the New York Times Magazine. Simon Rosenberg has a shorter, more favorable review at his New Democratic Network post here, as does the LA Times‘s Jon Wiener here.
During the brief period of Mike-o-mania last month that broke out over reports that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg might run for president on a third party ticket, some eager pundits went so far as to speculate about Hizzoner’s potential running mate, and the name Sam Nunn came up. Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a story by Jim Galloway based on interviews with Nunn and several close associates, and reported that the former Senator had ruled out being anyone’s running mate, but was exploring a presidential bid of his own, presumably in conjunction with the Unity ’08 third-party project, in which two Georgians, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon, are playing a prominent role.
Before I go any further, I should disclose that I was Nunn’s speechwriter and legislative counsel from 1989-92, and will always respect him tremendously. Indeed, his post-Senate career, focusing largely on dealing with the nuclear proliferation threat (one that the Bush administration has been almost criminally slow to tackle despite its alleged national security obsession), has been especially admirable, given the opportunities he had to instead devote himself to the accumulation of personal wealth or become a super-pundit.
But the Nunn-run talk stimulates a strong sense of deja vu. He gave some thought in 1984 to the possibility that Walter Mondale might tap him as a running mate. He seriously considered a presidential bid going into the 1988 and 1992 cycles. And in 1996, the year Nunn retired from the Senate, Ross Perot tried to get him involved in the Reform Party at some high level, perhaps even as a candidate. In every case, Nunn demurred.
During the 1992 runup, when Nunn was asked about his presidential ambitions, he sometimes cited the “Reagan Rules” as making it possible for him to delay a run until his late sixties. He’s now 68. So it probably is now or never, but which will it be?
In some respects, Nunn is the perfect vehicle for a High Broderist third-party run based on rejection of partisan polarization and a sort of Government of National Salvation designed to end gridlock in Washington. He was always as popular among Republicans as among Democrats in the Senate, and with the exception of a brief period after his successful opposition to John Tower’s confirmation as Defense Secretary and his unsuccessful effort to deny Bush 41 the right to invade Iraq, was also very popular with Republican and independent voters in Georgia (he was re-elected three times with no serious Republican opponent). While he never strayed from fidelity to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, he insisted on calling himself a conservative, and wasn’t very happy when the Democratic Leadership Council, which he chaired for two years just prior to Bill Clinton, decided to name its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute.
Moreover, Nunn’s domestic policy views (which never got much attention) during the latter stages of his Senate career never fit neatly into either party’s agenda. He was (after 1990) pro-choice, but mainly because he considered abortion bans unenforceable. He was the principal architect of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell compromise on gays in the military. Always a fiscal hawk (he spent some time as co-chairman of the Concord Coalition after leaving the Senate), his long-standing belief that “entitlement reform” is a critical national challenge has never sat well with Democrats. And right around the time of his Senate retirement, he became a prominent advocate for a consumption-based income tax scheme–an unpopular idea among Democrats as well as Republicans, who typically want to scrap income taxes altogether.
The overriding rationale of a Nunn run would probably be the argument that Democrats are too allergic to the use of force to be entrusted with national security, while Republicans have proven to be both incompetent and excessively ideological, seriously damaging U.S. credibility. Nunn would be very attractive to neo-realist elites in both parties who think the Bush-style Global War on Terror has been a disaster, but who do not favor a significant retraction in U.S. overseas commitments.
Does Nunn have the political chops to run a serious third-party campaign? That’s hard to say. He’s been in a grand total of one competitive electoral contest in his career (his first election to the Senate way back in 1972). He’s always been highly disdainful of modern media-oriented campaigns (one of his closest friends was the late Lawton Chiles of Florida, famous for his throwback style of campaigning). And while he’s actually a lively and even witty man, his public persona has always been high on gravitas but low on charisma. Most importantly, Nunn is just not that well known anymore, outside Georgia and elite circles in Washington.
On the positive side, if Nunn were to run a serious campaign with Unity ’08 backing, he would presumably have a chance to seriously contest southern states, where neither national party is particularly popular at the moment; it’s sometimes forgotten that Perot’s political achilles heel in 1992, even at the height of his campaign, was his inability to make a mark in the South. And unlike, say, Michael Bloomberg, Nunn would not likely be dismissed as a vanity candidate with no real qualifications for the presidency.
My own hunch is that Nunn probably won’t take the plunge; he’s a notoriously cautious man, and despite his unquestioned passion about issues like nuclear proliferation, it’s hard to imagine him maintaining a fire in his belly throughout the drudgery of a presidential campaign. And Nunn aside, I personally think the whole Unity 08 effort represents a fundamental misreading of the American electorate, which is likely to produce a sizable Democratic majority in 2008 if we let them (i.e., don’t do anything stupid). Today’s third-party enthusiasts are reminiscent of the group of former Labour politicians who launched the British Social Democratic Party even as Tony Blair was beginning to position Labour to win a landslide victory.
Those who want to get more inside skinny on next year’s U.S. Senate races won’t find a better update than Senate2008guru’s link-rich MyDD Sunday post, an article which provides an excellent example of why political bloggers often have better coverage than traditional media. Senate2008guru is struck by the weakness of the GOP Senate field, lacking “a single top-tier challenger to a Democratic Senate incumbent.”
While at MyDD, also read hwc’s “Clinton Strategy: Dual Hurdles for a Woman Candidate,” not because frontrunner Clinton needs more publicity, but because the author identifies a half-dozen key “techniques” being used to “humanize the candidate” — and they make good sense for any candidate.
In his American Prospect article “GOP Candidates Alienate Latino Voters,” Paul Waldman reports that Democrats are benefiting substantially from the Republican leadership’s immigrant-bashing and nativist attitudes, now on vivid display in the GOP presidential horse-race. Waldman notes Romney’s recent sneering reference to New York as “poster child of sanctuary cities” under Guiliani, and adds,
There is no doubt that Romney and the rest of the Republican field will find an audience for anti-immigration rhetoric in the primaries. But by indulging this particular corner of the Republican id, they could be doing monumental, long-term damage to their party….when a party says again and again that you and people like you are the biggest problem facing the country, it’s hard to muster up enthusiasm for its candidates. If the GOP keeps this up, Latino Republicans could become like gay Republicans, a tiny, beleaguered group waging a daily battle against cognitive dissonance, scapegoated by their own party and mocked by their friends for associating with people who despise them.
But Waldman predicts that the Republicans’ nativist rhetoric will suddenly disappear once their presidential candidate is nominated, due to the strength of Hispanic demographic trends in battleground states:
There will be no more talk of building walls, of freeloading immigrants sucking our health system dry, of the vital importance of declaring English our national language. Questions on immigration will be answered with dodges and vagueness, the subject quickly changed to something safer.
But Waldman says it won’t work because “Latinos certainly know which party is against them.” Latinos favored Democratic congressional candidates by a 39 point margin in 2006, and if the GOP field keeps it up, Dems could do even better in ’08.
In the 2003 New Yorker profile of Karl Rove, which Ed linked to on Monday (for obvious reasons), Nicholas Lemann made a point that really stuck out to me. Lehman was suggesting that this might have been Karl Rove’s blueprint for the Democratic party. This is what he wrote:
“The [Democratic] Party has three key funding sources: trial lawyers, Jews, and labor unions. One could systematically disable all three, by passing tort-reform legislation that would cut off the trial lawyers’ incomes, by tilting pro-Israel in Middle East policy and thus changing the loyalties of big Jewish contributors, and by trying to shrink the part of the labor force which belongs to the newer, and more Democratic, public-employee unions. And then there are three fundamental services that the Democratic Party is offering to voters: Social Security, Medicare, and public education. Each of these could be peeled away, too: Social Security and Medicare by giving people benefits in the form of individual accounts that they invested in the stock market, and public education by trumping the Democrats on the issue of standards. The Bush Administration has pursued every item on that list.”
One year later, Democrats broke every presidential fundraising record they had. Two years after that, the DSCC and the DCCC outraised their Republican counterparts in route to retaking both houses of Congress. This year, the trend continues – the presidential candidates are pulling in breathtaking amounts of money, and the DNC, DSCC, and the DCCC are all, once again, beating the GOP.
Despite a lot of GOP effort, nothing on the money front seems likely to change anytime soon. And while the big donors and constituencies that Lemann described four years ago are all still contributing, they aren’t the reason for the Dems’ newfound prowess.
But a lot has changed since 2003. Small donations solicited online changed the game. Thousands and thousands of people are making regular donations to candidates on every level, many of them giving money for the very first time. Together, they’ve carved themselves a wholly new role in Democratic politics. And that’s happened in just four years.
I think it’s important that we remember how far we’ve come in so little time.
Ah, primary season. It’s the wonderful time of year when party activists get to sit down in the intimate setting of a boisterous rally and hear their candidates’ strongest values and desires–you know, the ones they forget immediately after winning the nomination. In a country with wide cultural and social differences, some strategizing on issue positions is necessary in order to win elections. But how much shifting can you get away with and still avoid the devastating label of “flip-flopper”?
This question is addressed by a recent APSR article published by Margit Tavits of Mizzou. In her article, Tavits uses a cross-national dataset of 20 democracies–including the U.S.–to test whether shifting position yields political dividends or losses (in terms of vote totals), and under what conditions. For the purposes of her study, she divides issue positions into two categories: economic or “pragmatic” issues (such as tax policy, regulation, and economic planning), and social or “principled” issues (such as traditional morality, social justice, equality, and environmentalism). A full list of the issues can be found in the original article.
Tavits finds that, on average, shifts on pragmatic issues benefit politicians politically, whereas shifts on social issues are harmful. Since it seems like there is potential for a lot of overlap between issues designated as either “pragmatic” or “principled,” the waters are muddied somewhat. But attempting to moderate or reverse one’s positions on strong, clearly principled issues like abortion, gay marriage, or religion’s place in public life appears to be one ticket to a lost election. If you’re on the record supporting liberal social policies and you’re worried about the South and Midwest, it’s probably a better bet to remain passionate on the stump, while not exactly leading with those issues.
The same could go for moderates in those ideological primary battles. Giuliani gets it on abortion. So does Clinton on the War. If Tavits knows what she’s talking about, we can only hope that the Republicans nominate Mitt Romney.
Drew Westen, current “it guy” of political attitude research, has a provocative HuffPo post about the limits — and untapped potential — of opinion polls. After conceding that current polling techniques can produce useful results, Westen argues:
But polls and focus groups can mislead as often as they inform. They can misinform the public if voters are unaware of the extent to which what you get out of them depends on what you put into them. If you ask people if they are “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” you miss all the nuances that lead two-thirds of voters to believe that we should find some “middle ground” on abortion — if you happen to ask that question. They also mislead voters in an election when the media repeatedly report national numbers, because we don’t elect our presidents in direct elections. If they can’t afford to sample enough voters in a state-by-state or region-by-region basis that can approximate likely Electoral College results, the media shouldn’t report anything, even on a slow news day, because doing so creates false impressions of how candidates would fare in the election (not in a fictitious national referendum) that create bandwagon effects and bias voters’ judgments about electability in early primary states.
It’s not just the missed nuances, Westen believes; it’s also the overreaching:
Polls and focus groups can also mislead — and cost elections — when campaigns don’t understand their limits. They led Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 to avoid talking about the earth we leave our children (notice that I didn’t say “the environment”), even though that was his most enduring passion, because his consultants couldn’t find their way from “the environment” (a term that is, in fact, emotionally and electorally deadening) to the voter. They used the polls, like Democratic pollster-strategists have used them in so many elections, to tell the candidate what issues to talk about, instead of using them the way Luntz used voters’ responses, namely to help candidates refine the words and imagery to talk about what really matters to them. Gore showed how easily he could have turned his passion about the earth into similar feelings among the electorate in “An Inconvenient Truth,” with images of glaciers falling and emotionally powerful words that conveyed — and activated in the rest of us — his passion, as he movingly told his listeners, with an intonation in his voice that transmitted just how important the issue really is, “This is our only home.”
Westen goes on to argue that the “the gut level emotional responses” in voting decisions “are generated outside our awareness.” He discusses how experiments using subliminal flash images of candidates change responses to poll questions and concludes that using such polling techniques would have helped Gore to understand the benefits of making more use of Bill Clinton in the 2000 campaign.
Westen opposes using subliminal images in political campaign ads as manipulative and unethical. But he makes a strong case that applying such technologies in opinion polls can help candidates unveil voters’ deepest feelings about issues and candidates. Pollsters and poll-watchers alike will find his article of considerable interest.
The Republican presidential candidates are all on the Web. Fine. Most of them have even taken the first, halting steps into the brave new world of social media. They have MySpace pages, load video up to YouTube, and control their Facebook profiles. That’s delightful — probably even good for democracy. But as of yet, you haven’t seen one of them (who isn’t named Ron Paul) embrace the change that the Internet has wrought.
Joe Trippi believes that is going to hurt them badly in the general election.
In a video recorded by a blogger for TechPresident (which does a terrific job chronicling the ways in which technology is transforming presidential politics) the current Edwards strategist and former Dean guru sounds off in a segment that strikes me as particularly unguarded, and interesting.
