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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2008

Two Wedge Issues Return

Today’s presidential campaign news includes a couple of items that bring back some bad old memories for Democrats of a certain age: discussions of crime and welfare policy.
Those who came of age in the 1990s or later may have a hard time comprehending the extent to which perpetually rising violent crime rates and the vast unpopularity of high public assistance levels affected politics at every level during the 1970s and 1980s. Crime and welfare served as the hardy perennials of race-tinged conservative “wedge issues” that helped erode white working-class support for the Democratic Party. The decline of crime rates (particularly murder rates) in and after the 90s, and the even more rapid decline in welfare rolls after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation signed by President Clinton, largely took these issues off the table.
Well, crime rates have been recently going back up in many cities, even as the Bush administration slowly starved Clinton-era crime-fighting initiatives. So it’s no big surprise that Hillary Clinton has unveiled a new anti-crime proposal in Philadelphia, a city where spiking homicide rates have become a major local preoccupation.
Much of Clinton’s plan really isn’t new; it focuses on reviving her husband’s signature COPS initiative, which was largely gutted by Bush and pre-2006 Republican-controlled Congresses. And indeed, the fact that it’s a Democratic candidate who has first raised this issue in the presidential contest reflects the extent to which Bill Clinton succeeded not only in blunting conservative “wedge” appeals on crime, but making support for police officers, as opposed to the GOP’s obsessive focus on maximum incarceration of drug offenders, a popular theme for progressives.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama, who in the past has bluntly criticized the failed war-on-drugs as a crime-fighting strategy, begins talking about crime policy more visibly as well. Meanwhile, if the issue continues to emerge, we may find out whether John McCain goes back to the tried-if-not-so-true Republican rhetoric on crime as a reflection of social permissiveness.
The welfare issue hasn’t really “come back” yet, except as a subordinate item of John Edwards’ discussion of poverty. But as a New York Times feature today indicates, it may just be a matter of time, as the struggling economy collides with the rising numbers of public assistance recipients who have reached the time limits established in the 1996 law. Both Clinton and Obama have praised the reforms as successful, and it’s very unlikely Democrats will re-embrace the idea of a national entitlement to cash assistance. But soon enough, the subject may no longer be “off the table,” and it could be of more than passing importance how the partisan dynamics of a new debate on the government’s role in providing a safety net against extreme poverty eventually shape up.


Being Right’s Not Always Enough

My post earlier this week about the important new Democracy Corps survey and analysis on national security as a campaign issue was reinforced and amplified by the invariably clear-eyed Jon Chait yesterday, who warns that the Democratic advantage on Iraq can coexist with a Republican–or at least McCain–advantage on national security generally. Here’s Chait on the broad problem:

Are the Republicans politically suicidal? I don’t think so. The public can oppose you on a specific policy question but still favor you on the issue in general. Richard Nixon was fighting an unpopular war in 1972, but he still crushed George McGovern on foreign policy. Likewise, despite the unpopularity of the Iraq war, John McCain’s general hawkishness might still be an asset for him.

Chait goes on to suggest that the right formula of wrapping opposition to the war with an overall national security posture that allays voter fears of excessive Democratic reluctance to use military force when necessary may have already been signalled by Barack Obama:

Iraq may not be popular, but the general perception (which is not the same thing as reality) that they’re willing to fight the bad guys remains a key positive for the GOP brand. Am I saying the Democrats need to try to mimic Republican positions in order to win? Not at all. A creative approach is needed, and Obama’s combination of dovishness on Iraq and hawkishness on al Qaeda in Pakistan strikes me as probably the best approach.

Whether or not Chait’s right about that assessment of Obama, I certainly share his main argument: you can’t just look at polls about individual issues, domestic or international, and then assume the electorate’s overall candidate preference will mechanically follow who’s right or who’s wrong about the sum of those individual issues. And that’s why Democrats truly do need to start thinking about a “creative” approach to national security that combines being right about Iraq with an overall posture that strikes Americans as being right about the security challenges the country faces going forward.
This can be a highly nuanced exercise. In 2004, John Kerry made hundreds of speeches that made it clear his foreign policy would use America’s full arsenal of military and non-military assets to keep the country safe and improve our strength and prestige. The order of the military and non-military arguments was a subject of constant debate within his campaign, and more often than not, he stressed the value of non-military initiatives before reassuring voters that of course he’d use military force if necessary. His actual platform would not have changed at all had he gone the other way, but the political impact arguably might have been different. The same is true for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The “creative” approach to national security Chait argues for is pretty much what most Democrats, and both Democratic candidates for president, actually support. But sometimes messaging is more about order and emphasis than overall content, and it would be a good idea for Democrats to start thinking about that even now.


Denver Dramatics

As a bit of a Cassandra on the subject of the possibility of an unplanned and hideously divisive Democratic National Convention, I was interested to read a “movie treatment” called “Four Days In Denver” that New York magazine commissioned TV commentator and West Wing scriptwriter Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., to write. The idea is that Democrats arrive in Denver with Barack Obama enjoying a lead in pledged delegates and popular votes, but without enough superdelegates to win the nomination outright. Then the fun starts.
I won’t reveal the plot of O’Donnell’s fantasy, but if you read it, be sure to take it as entertainment, not a semi-serious prediction of what might happen. For one thing, the premise that HRC’s candidacy would survive final Obama leads in pledged delegates and popular votes is dubious in the extreme. Most of the dramatics that O’Donnell conjures up would have certainly played themselves out long before the convention itself, while he omits entirely some events (e.g., credentials, rules and platform fights) that really could happen.
At some point over the next few weeks, if the subject isn’t made moot by primary results, we’re thinking of publishing here at TDS some thoughts from convention veterans of the real issues posed by the possibility of a convention where the nominee is not certain going in. But I’m reasonably sure none of them will begin with a superdelegate sex scene. And that’s one of many reasons I’m toiling away here instead of pulling down big bucks in Hollywood.


McCainiacs

HRC’s campaign is not the only one getting some extra scrutiny this week. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has done a major article analyzing the personnel and strategy of John McCain’s campaign. He unravels the complex John Weaver-Rick Davis rivalry that’s been at the center of the campaign’s various purges and power struggles. And he also explains the odd Davis-driven decision to organize the general election campaign around a “regional autonomy” model that sounds a bit like one of those plans for stabilizing Iraq.
One thought I had after reading Jason’s fine piece is that it’s clear McCain’s back-from-the-grave nomination victory will tend to freeze the current campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message into place even if they aren’t necessarily right for the general election. That, after all, is how John Kerry wound up going into the 2004 general election with a questionable campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message. At about this stage four years ago, I can remember some Kerry supporters muttering to each other things like: “How can you convince a candidate his campaign is making potentially fatal mistakes when he’s just won the nomination after being left for dead?” I wonder if any McCainiacs are muttering similar things to each other today.


Post-Penn Assessments of the Clinton Campaign

Any hopes Hillary Clinton’s campaign had that it could make the demotion of “chief strategist” Mark Penn a neutral or even positive story is rapidly dimming, as political journalists line up to criticize its general competence.
The latest example is a harsh article in The Politico by Jim Vandehei and David Paul Kuhn with the unforgiving title: “Clinton leadership a study in missteps.” A sample:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

Ouch.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a lot of the criticism of Clinton’s campaign is an exercise in 20-20 hindsight. Her third-place finish in the Iowa Caucus disguised an organization in the state that was probably better than that of past winners. Her fundraising, and even her small-dollar fundraising, has vastly outstripped all precedents. And obviously, she’s survived political near-death experiences at least twice in the course of this campaign.
The problem is that in Barack Obama, Clinton has faced a candidate and a campaign that are operating on a whole ‘nother level. As Peter Beinart put it in a Washington Post op-ed piece yesterday, Obama’s [campaign] “has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer.”
And despite his obvious vulnerabilities against Clinton and potentially against John McCain in a general election, Obama has created a political movement that constantly threatens to change the rulebook.
Let’s put it this way: is anyone confident, in retrospect, that Hillary Clinton would not have already locked up the nomination weeks ago if Obama were not in the race? Could, say, John Edwards or Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd have really challenged her financially, or picked up enough votes to have come close to the powerful women/Hispanic/African-American coalition she would have been able to put together if Obama hadn’t run?
I certainly doubt it. So maybe the best assessment of HRC’s candidacy at this point is that she’s run the kind of campaign that should have and probably would have won if so many constellations hadn’t suddenly lined up against her.
That’s how it looks post-Penn, and how it may look post-Pennsylvania as well.


More Long-Form Political Dialogue

In 2002, PBS began to post most of its Frontline documentaries online. Last year, they used a $5 million grant from MacArthur Foundation to expand the capabilities of its video player, which paved the way for last month’s four-and-a-half hour documentary, Bush’s War.
PBS doesn’t know for sure how many people watched the documentary when it aired on television. But it does know that more than 1.5 million people have tuned into some portion of the program online. Many have watched the episode in full.
Keep in mind: this is a television program longer than most feature films. It is undeniably engaging, but it remains a documentary with voiceovers, news clips, and interviews. It is fundamentally a piece of political nonfiction, and we don’t expect PBS documentaries like this to be sensations. But online, that is exactly what “Bush’s War” has become.
Liberated from the television, “Bush’s War” is something more than just a film. The webpage for the documentary is packed with features. There are more than a 20 interactive timelines and maps, which viewers can use to track the rise of terrorism through more than three decades. There are 175 embedded video clips and full transcripts from more than 400 Frontline interviews. There is a live chat with the producer and a forum for discussion. Bush’s War is being watched and talked about and explored in ways not possible in any other format.
All of which suggests a similar point to the one we were trying to make with our comments about Barack Obama’s speech on race — the web is making room for long forms of political dialogue. The speech was less than an hour, and this program runs nearly five times as long, but millions of people are sitting down to watch each of them.
That indicates something healthy about our democracy. The web is just an outlet for this type of content — it still must engage an audience in order to reach a level of popularity. In both of these cases, though, that is exactly what is happening , despite their length and substance.
The sound-bite isn’t dead, and the news as we know it will be with us for awhile. But we are watching the birth of a new type of public discourse.


Zeroing In on the National Security Challenge

There’s been a link up top of the site for a few days about Democracy Corps’ new survey and analysis on how Democrats ought to deal with national security issues in this election cycle.
There’s a lot of valuable stuff in this analysis, but I’d like to zero in on a couple of specific points involving perceptions of a very important voting category, defined by DCorps as follows:

There is a bloc of 12 percent of the likely electorate, “Democratic Wanna-Ds,” who say they would vote for a Democrat in a generic presidential ballot, but then do not pick either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama in the named ballot match-ups. Most of these Wanna-Ds, 57 percent, are moderate-conservative Democrats, while 29 percent are self-described independents; a fall-off in support from the moderate-conservative Democrats is a major reason both Clinton and Obama are now trailing.

In other words, these are the folk who are the most likely targets for a Democratic general election campaign.
Two things about “Democratic Wanna-Ds” jump right off the page in DCorps’ polling on national security issues.
First of all, by a 49-46 plurality, “Democratic Wanna-Ds” think John McCain would “mostly bring a different approach than President Bush” to national security and foreign policy issues. This is highly similar to the perception of Republicans, and sharply divergent with that of most Democrats. Thus, one obvious way to help convert the “Wanna-Ds” to the Democratic presidential candidate is to constantly highlight McCain’s congruence with Bush security policies, instead of letting him use occasional differences like Guantanamo or (some) torture practices to look like a GOP “maverick.”
Second of all, by a startling 33 percentage points, the “Wanna-Ds” say they worry more that Clinton or Obama will be too reluctant to use military force abroad, than McCain being too willing to use military force abroad. Given the wording here, the question is about as clear an indicator of which party’s candidates control the “center” on national security as you are going to find. And the Wanna-Ds are way off the Donkey Reservation here.
These numbers reinforce a simple but critical point about the emerging battle-lines of the general election, in which virtually every issue other than national security will almost certainly help produce a Democratic win: the Democratic nominee must work overtime to expose the extremism and recklessness–in other words, the Bush-like qualities–of John McCain’s national security record and platform, while removing every reasonable doubt that he or she is willing to use military force to protect national interests where necessary and appropriate. This latter objective does not mean “moving to the right” or agreeing with McCain on specifics like Iraq or Iran, but it does mean making it clear that differences on those specifics and others are based on a strong and clear-eyed Democratic commitment to national security.
It would be a tragedy if Democrats succumbed this year to the ancient temptation of changing the subject from national security to economic or other domestic issues, treating the former as “Republican territory” that will be conceded as simply less politically potent. There’s a clear case to be made that Democrats are actually superior in managing the country’s international challenges, but we’re going to have to actually make it.


McCain Back-Peddles on Public Financing

I’ve got a brief piece up today on the DLC’s Ideas Primary site drawing attention to the growing contrast between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s staunch support for public financing of both presidential and congressional campaigns, and John McCain’s back-peddling on this issue, despite his reputation as a champion of campaign finance reform.
Given McCain’s terrible fundraising record, and the emerging Democratic fundraising advantage, this is all kind of ironic, and a token of the ideological hostility of conservatives to campaign finance reform generally.
Check it out, and makes notes for those future moments when McCain’s trying to reclaim the reform mantle.


Open Doors For Democrats

No matter what happens in the presidential elections, Democrats are very optimistic about increasing their margins of control in both the U.S. House and Senate. In the House, one reason for optimism is a continuing wave of Republican incumbent retirements in potentially vulnerable districts.
Stuart Rothenberg of Roll Call maintains a “Dangerous Dozen” list of the twelve open House seats most likely to produce a change in party control. His latest edition, out today, shows ten of the twelve as currently in Republican hands.
As Rothenberg notes: “A significant number of retirements since my last Dangerous Dozen (Oct. 25, 2007) has shuffled the list and shows why the fight for the House is a one-sided battle, with Democrats having most of the targets.”


McCain Meltdown Unlikely

Despite all of the buzz about Senator John McCain’s explosive temper, Democrats would be wise not to bet on a McCain meltdown. Sure, he could lose his cool at some point, but accounts of his intemperate outbursts over the years indicate that he rarely goes ballistic in public forums.
McCain projects a very tightly-controlled persona in media interviews. One of his more impressive communication skills is to lower the volume in his one-on-one television interviews — almost to a whisper — conveying a sense that “this is a reasonable, level-headed man,” in stark contrast to reports of his temper tantrums with aides, congressional peers and his spouse. A lot of voters seem to be impressed by this, and it may be reflected in McCain’s relatively high ‘favorable’ scores in opinion polls — even though the content of what is being said, particularly in McCain’s case, is often disturbing. (Glenn Greenwald has a good post on the topic of McCain’s manipulation of the media here)
McCain is also reportedly adept at schmoozing the press, one reason for the ‘free ride’ many progressives see in the coverage of McCain’s campaign so far. The media interview is McCain’s strongest messaging skill, and his campaign will deploy it lavishly in the months ahead. Don’t be surprised by a series of faux interview, low-content ads showing McCain as a ‘down-to-earth’ guy.
The tightly-controlled persona loosens some in his speech-making, because political speeches require a little passion. Here McCain is good at projecting appealing personal qualities like humility. In his Washington Times article, reporter Stephen Dinan jokingly describes McCain’s current series of speaking engagements, said to be peppered with self-effacing comments meant to endear him to audiences, as the “imperfect public servant tour.”
But the tension is there in the debates. McCain is a white-knuckle debater and appears easily annoyed at times. Both Clinton and Obama have an edge over McCain when it comes to debating skills. But we have seen in recent presidential elections that “who won the debates” doesn’t necessarily decide the election. As Chicago Tribune reporter Jim Tankersly notes via the LA Times,

There’s also a reason Republicans think their party will prevail: In several recent presidential elections, issues took a back seat to personality. Voters want government to do more to fix the economy. They also want U.S. troops out of Iraq. The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, sides with a distinct minority on both counts…But on less tangible questions of leadership, strength and trustworthiness, polls show McCain beating Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democratic candidates.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that FDR had “second-class intellect, but a first class temperament.” Although it’s a bit of a stretch to characterize a President smart enough to win four terms as intellectually lagging, Holmes’ point about the importance of temperament in a politician is instructive. (See Geoffrey Ward’s “A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt” for an interesting book on the topic)
Democrats are in a good position with respect of the temperament of both leading presidential candidates. Clinton’s communication skills have improved significantly as a Senator. Obama seems to have temperamental maturity beyond his years, which should serve him well in face-ups with McCain, should Obama win the nomination. But it would be folly to let reports of McCain’s tantrums make Democrats overconfident. Better for Dems to assume they are dealing with a highly-skilled communicator and respond accordingly.