Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to publish this Strategy Memo by Bruce W. Jentleson, Professor of Public Policy Studies and Political Science at Duke University. Dr. Jentleson is probably best known as the author of American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century.
Print Version
His opposition to the Iraq war helped Barack Obama win the Democratic presidential nomination. Will it help him win the presidency?
It could and should, but isn’t necessarily helping him yet. Polls show Americans very strongly opposed to the Iraq war but not sure whether the anti-war Obama or pro-war John McCain will handle the issue better going forward. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer even issued a “bring it on” dare to “make the election about Iraq.”
Why this seeming paradox? And how can Obama translate opposition to the Iraq war to support for him?
Iraq needs to be addressed as a three-dimensional issue: (1) the war itself and the need to shift emphasis from what Obama is against to what he is for, and not just the calendar for getting out but the alternative strategy for doing so; (2) Iraq as a measure of Obama’s overall foreign policy capability, particularly passing the commander-in-chief test without getting trapped into the “I’ll bomb, too” Democratic wannabe role; and (3) Iraq as a temperature-taker as to whether this is another anti-military Democrat or someone who genuinely respects the institution, its people and its culture.
Initial General Election Poll Data
Four main points should be made about Iraq and public opinion:
First, Iraq remains a crucial issue. The economy is now issue #1, with 33% saying in the June ABC-Washington Post poll that it would be the most important issue in their vote for president. But Iraq is issue #2 at 19%, with the next nearest issue being health care at 8%. While it’s true that Iraq was the top issue a year ago, the fact that it is still as high as it is amidst the worst economic problems in at least a quarter century and despite the surge having reduced the sense of immediate crisis shows real political staying power.
Second, the public remains very opposed to the war. On whether going to war was the right or wrong decision, the numbers are 38% vs. 54%; phrased as “whether it was worth fighting,” 34% yes – 63% no. Some credit is being given to the surge with the percentage saying we are winning up from 29% in January 2007 to 38% in June 2008 (ABC-Washington Post). But the same poll showed only 41% in support of keeping military forces in “until civil order is restored” and 55% opposing. The Newsweek June 18-19 poll giving options for keeping “large numbers of U.S. military personnel in Iraq” had 45% saying bring them home now or in less than one year, 20% saying within 1-2 years, 4% 3-5 years and 26% as long as it takes to achieve U.S. goals.
Third, Democrats are faring well on party preference questions for both Iraq and foreign policy generally. When asked which party would handle Iraq better, Democrats have been pretty consistently getting a 10+ margin, e.g., 50% to 34% in an April CBS-New York Times poll. On who would do a better job generally on foreign policy, the gap in recent polls varies but favors Democrats, 51-31 the largest margin, 45-40 the narrowest. Even the narrowest contrasts quite favorably with the strongly pro-Republican pattern that largely held for many years, including 47-28 in the early Reagan years; 60-26 in October 1991 after the first Gulf War; 51-33 in March 1994 amidst the early Clinton administration failures in Somalia and elsewhere; and 53-36 at the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term. Terrorism is the one issue on which Republicans still hold an advantage. Here the recent range goes from 47-40 to 31-30, although juxtaposed with disapproval of the Bush terrorism policy (57-38).
Fourth, though, is that when personalized to the presidential candidates, the assessments are more mixed. McCain was ahead 50-41 in an April poll on who would do a better job handling the Iraq war. This was down to 46-43 in a May poll, and 47-46 in a June poll (ABC-Washington Post). Obama does better on the differently phrased question on confidence to “make the right decisions about the war in Iraq”. When asked in February their overall confidence levels were comparable (58% McCain, 57% Obama) but within that those very confident in McCain were 27% while only 20% were very confident in Obama. The following month the candidates remained even at 56% in the overall numbers but McCain’s very confident number had fallen to 19% with Obama at 17%. Still, these are quite different from issue-based preferences on which the anti-Iraq margin is much more robust.
In sum, while Iraq is not McCain’s issue, it is much less Obama’s than it could be given the issue preferences.
Month: July 2008
Editor’s Note: The Democratic Strategist welcomes submissions on the activities of “partners” who share similar goals on the political or intellectual battle-fronts. This piece from longtime TDS contributor Matt Compton is about the new online project of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to support Democratic state legislative candidates around the country.
Contributors to the The Democratic Strategist wear a lot of hats. By day, I’m the communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
Today, we are launching a redesign of DLCC.org.
I bring this up on the Strategist because I want to note how our new online presence reflects an evolution in the way we approach political messaging and a reaction to the changing way that voters consume media.
A recent study for the Pew Project for the Internet and American Life found that fully 46 percent of all Americans have used the web to get news about the 2008 campaigns, share their views, and mobilize others.
That point is significant. The Internet has become an important resource for voters because it allows them to access candidates and campaigns directly without the filters of the media or the scripted distance imposed by television.
There are 7,382 legislators across the country, and they represent every conceivable kind of district. Most have been using radio, television, and mail for years, but for many, the Internet remains unfamiliar. They see its potential but have reservations about its complexity and challenges.
This cycle, our committee has partnered with Wired for Change to introduce a resource that reduces the barriers for campaigning online. We call it DLCCWeb.
Our goal is to make the Internet simple and affordable enough that all of our legislative candidates can build and update their own websites. They can choose from a range of templates and color schemes to create the best design for their campaigns. Blog publishing is built right into DLCCWeb, along with advocacy tools, online fundraising, and social network integration.
This cycle, more than 200 Democrats in 30 states (with a whole range of technology comfort levels) are using the Internet in a way that they haven’t before because of this service. To me, that represents a major step forward in participatory democracy and a big advantage for our party at the state level.
For our committee, a new website is the next logical step.
DLCC.org will be a clearinghouse for news about statehouses and legislative elections. The centerpiece will be a blog, hosted right on the front page, which will be updated multiple times a day, at least five days a week. Most posts will be short and quick, though each will include some sort of commentary and context. Most content will be written by our staff, but as we move forward, we plan to encourage contributions from our elected leaders and allies.
We want to start a conversation about our nation’s statehouses. We want to engage readers online to help us identify the next generation of leaders, to set real Democratic agendas in the legislatures, and to build new majorities before the next round Congressional redistricting.
I hope you’ll take a moment to visit the site and let me know what you think. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment here or there or send me an email — compton@dlcc.org.
Update: Check out a little marketing video that Wired for Change put together about DLCCWeb here.
In the games of bridge and chess, as well as in warfare, there is a particular kind of strategy that is called an “endplay”. It is aimed at maneuvering the opponent into a situation where he or she is obligated to make a move and yet every possible move that is available results in a loss.
In a real sense this was the situation in which Wesley Clark found himself yesterday. By now – and with the benefit of hindsight – virtually every Democratic activist in America has thought of some clever response that Clark might have used to avoid the manufactured scandal and outrage over his remarks.
Rather than add to this specific discussion, however, it is worth stepping back a little and noting that an “endplay” situation of this general kind will invariably present itself whenever McCain’s military service is offered as proof of his superior qualifications for the presidency:
1. Any reply that suggests McCain’s military experience – – either as a pilot or prisoner of war – is not clear evidence of his qualifications for high office can easily be spun as denigrating him personally, his service, bravery, fortitude etc. (This can be easier or harder depending on the exact words of the particular response, but an “outrageous denigration of John McCain” can always be concocted. If the actual reply itself is not sufficient, it can be re-edited, words can be taken out of context or simply mischaracterized by partisan commentators).
2. On the other hand, any response that tries to express respect for aspects of McCain’s biography can always be used as a rhetorical stepping stone to launch increasingly more provocatively phrased questions that finally demand some kind of clear dissent from the person being interviewed (this is, in part, what happened to Clark; Obama, on the other hand, handles similar situations with great patience and skill).
There is no iron-clad strategy for evading this trap – litigation lawyers and partisan commentators are both expert in framing no-win, “so tell the jury, when did you stop beating your wife” questions that are extremely difficult to answer well in the high-pressure, unscripted environment of a courtroom or media interview.
One specific approach worth keeping in mind, however, is that it is usually effective to directly quote the opposing candidate himself in order to refute him.
For example, in his 2004 book “Why Courage Matters – The Way to a Braver Life” John McCain said:
“I don’t really need much courage for the challenges most frequently encountered in a political career. Political courage in our consensual political system is seldom all that courageous”.
Today, as Matt Yglesias earlier reminded us amnesiac Americans, is Canada Day–the Canadian parallel, though not exact, to our Independence Day.
I confess that I am an inveterate Canadaphile, and not for such ideological reasons as its health care system or the striking fact that even its current conservative leaders have chosen to mark this Canada Day with apologies to its aboriginal population. No, it’s the basic decency, civility, and sense of humor of most Canadians that has long attracted me. And their highly sophisticated knowledge of our own political system has always put us to shame.
Back in 2000, our then-Ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin (an old friend) arranged for me to speak about Al Gore’s policy views to an Ottawa meeting of deputy ministers–the people who more or less ran the Canadian government. They asked far better questions–and not just on issues affecting Canada–than you’d probably get from anything like a similar audience in the U.S.
It’s been a few years since I’ve had an opportunity to go north of the border, but I miss it, from PEI to BC. I wish all our friends and neighbors there a very happy Canada Day.
Today in Ohio Barack Obama announced that he would promote a much more robust initiative than George W. Bush to involve faith-based organizations in anti-poverty and other worthy public works, while insisting that public funds not be used to proselytize or discriminate.
As Steve Benen explains, there was some initial confusion due to a wire story–quickly corrected by the Obama campaign–that Obama would not insist on non-discrimination in the hiring and firing of staff for publicly-funded services.
And that clarification won’t satisfy those who believe that public dollars should not be extended to any organization, religious or ortherwise, that discriminates in any of its activities, however remote from publicly-funded activities.
It hasn’t drawn as much initial attention as the discrimination issue, but Obama also made it clear that recipients of public dollars under his initiative would be required to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs. That proviso was undoubtedly motivated by the widespread perception that much of Bush’s faith-based dollars were distributed as ill-disguised payoffs to ministers who supported the administration’s broader political and policy goals.
During the DLC event I attended in Chicago over the weekend, I heard a lot of talk (most of it positive) about Barack Obama’s various efforts to “move to the center” in preparation for the general election. In other precincts of the Democratic Party, this alleged phenomenon is being greeted with unhappiness and even panic. A case in point is Arianna Huffington’s post today arguing that pursuing “fickle” swing voters is a disastrous mistake that undermines the enthusiasm and inspiration that has characterized the Obama campaign up until now. Indeed, says Huffington, centrist pandering to swing voters is what ruined the Gore and Kerry campaigns (a highly counter-intuitive take on 2000 and 2004, I’d say).
Since we are likely to hear a lot of this sort of talk in the immediate future, it’s helpful to question some of the assumptions that proponents and antagonists of a “move to the middle” are making.
First of all, a candidate doesn’t really have to “move” at all to create the perception of a different message and strategy once the primary season is over. The general election issue landscape is inevitably going to be different, for the simple reason that the candidate and partisan debate will be different. An example: Barack Obama spent a significant amount of time during the primaries arguing with Hillary Clinton about the relative utility of an individual mandate as part of any plan for universal health coverage. Nobody would expect that issue to matter much in a general election competition with John McCain, who opposes public-sector enabled universal health coverage altogether. Much more broadly, the Democratic nomination contest was in part “about” the various candidates’ applications of progressive principles to policy and political challenges, in detail. The general election is a contest between progressive and conservative agendas, and both candidates will naturally stress those aspects of their agendas that have the widest electoral appeals. That’s not a matter of “moving,” but simply of recontextualizing to a different audience and a different debate.
Second of all, as the TDS Roundtable on swing and base voters earlier this year illustrated, there’s plenty of disagreement about the definition and nature of “swing voters.” They don’t necessarily all reside in the ideological “center” of the electorate on every issue, and moreover, “base” voters don’t necessarily have inconsistent or antagonistic points of view from “swing voters.” The two things that are pretty hard to deny are that (1) undecided “very likely” voters are indeed a disproportionately important electoral prize because winning each of them produces two net votes, and (2) most successful campaigns in a competitive environment manage to energize the partisan base while expanding it into the ranks of independents and even the other party’s base. Huffington’s horror at swing-voter pandering, and her manifest contempt for swing voters themselves, probably reflects the fashionable but very dubious Lackoffian belief that swing voters are cognitively confused, perhaps even stupid or amoral people who can only be appealed to by an even more strongly expressed partisan “frame.”
Third of all, it amazes me that anyone should be surprised by Barack Obama’s willingness on occasion to stray from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship. It has been an important part of his political persona from day one. And those who accuse him of cynicism for expressing heretical thoughts on FISA or gun control or the death penalty now are perhaps the real cynics, who somehow thought he didn’t really mean all his early talk about transpartisan politics or overcoming the stale debates of past decades.
Since 1948 (a complicated, multi-candidate contest), there’s been exactly one successful presidential candidate whose strategy was focused overwhelmingly on base mobilization. That was George W. Bush in 2004, and we’ve seen how well his political capital held up since then. You can make the argument that the partisan landscape this year is positive enough that Barack Obama could run a similar campaign and win. But a lot of what has attracted so much enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy is precisely the belief that he can “break the mold” and win a victory that enables him to achieve things in office that will produce a genuinely overwhelming progressive and Democratic majority in the electorate of the future.
Personally, one of the things I like about Barack Obama as a politician is that he refuses to campaign according to anybody’s playbook but his own. Inevitably, he’s going to disappoint or even anger Democratic activists of every stripe on occasion. Those on the left who fear he’s “blurring the lines” or “moving to the middle” really do need to concentrate on the vast differences between Obama and McCain on a vast number of prominent issues that actual voters as opposed to activists care most about (telecomm immunity or the nuances of gun control not being among them). Those in “the center” who want him to repudiate key elements of his past record to “signal” he’s safe to swing voters are barking up the wrong tree as well.
It’s fine to debate and second-guess Obama’s strategy and message; we do a lot of that here at TDS. But trying to pigeon-hole Barack Obama as a member of one Democratic faction or another, or praising or damning his campaign in terms of our own notions of the strengths and weaknesses of past Democratic efforts, really does run the risk of missing the larger point about this remarkable man.
Let Obama be Obama.
I didn’t choose to “live-blog” the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation this year, partly because I was too busy (moderating three Sunday workshops on election reform, new social media, and “a look ahead to November”), and too ill with a flu-like bug, and partly because internet access in the conference areas of the cavernous Chicago Hyatt was so poor.
But as usual, the focus of the DLC event was on the three-hundred-plus state and local elected officials who attended, and who filled nearly every room in the nineteen Sunday workshops on issues ranging from immigration and poverty to pre-K education and state greenhouse gas initiatives. Attendees were unsurprisingly disappointed that presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama didn’t show up (he didn’t do any public events on Sunday), but there was a strong sense of unity and optimism about the general election.
I had one very unusual experience in Chicago: introducing Markos Moulitsas. The fiery founder of DailyKos, a noted DLC-hater in the past, agreed to speak at the event as part of a agreement he struck with DLC chairman Harold Ford during a joint appearance on Meet the Press last year (Ford will reciprocate by attending the DKos-oriented Netroots Nation event in Austin later this month).
Markos was on a panel I moderated with Jennifer Duffy and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report to discuss the general election outlook (mostly at the congressional level), which all agreed was very rosy for Democrats. You can read Markos’ take on the appearance here, but as I told him after the session, I didn’t share his surprise at the applause he received for referring to Sen. Joe Lieberman as an “asshole.” Whatever residual admiration of Lieberman in DLC circles that existed after 2006 vanished the moment he endorsed John McCain for president. Like them or not, DLCers are committed Democrats, not, as Markos has been in the habit of calling them, “Liebercrats.”
I have to share a small but hilarious moment that occurred after the session. As moderator, I thought it was only right that I buy Markos, Duffy and Wasserman a drink in the hotel bar. At one point, Markos drew our attention to a television monitor over the bar that was displaying one of those blue-and-red-colored maps of the states, and said, in shock, “Where did that map come from?” (It had much of the South colored blue). Turns out it was a map of salmonella outbreaks. We all got a good laugh at our mutual political-junkie inability to look at the states as anything other than bearers of electoral votes.
