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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2008

State Fiscal Disasters

For all the talk about the impact of the financial crisis and the growing recession on the federal government’s balance sheet, the real nightmare is unfolding almost hourly in state capitals around the country.
Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times penned a brisk and depressing summary of state fiscal conditions yesterday. Basically, state revenues, whether based on income or sales taxes, are plunging, as demands for services rise and borrowing costs skyrocket. And most states were in bad shape even before the events of September, having already run through the easier ways to restrain spending, such as hiring freezes and travel bans.
California’s the real trendsetter for fiscal catastrophe. The state went through a protracted budget fight during the summer, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seeking huge layoffs and salary reductions for state employees before finally reaching a deal with legislators that aimed to close a $15 billion budget gap. Now there’s a new $11 billion budget shortfall, and the Golden State is in real danger of defaulting on its obligations.
Up until recently, states with large oil and gas reserves had been largely insulated from the torrent of red ink. Lower oil pricies may have been a “silver lining” in the recent economic disaster for the country as a whole, but they’ve also pushed oil-producing states into the same muck as their less resources-blessed counterparts.
All but one state (Vermont) has some sort of constitutional or statutory requirement to maintain balanced budgets. With credit tight, and resistance to tax increases very high, significant cuts in services are happening very rapidly. And with health care, education and infrastructure investments dominating state budgets, these three big priorities for the incoming Obama administration are being compromised at a dangerous pace. We may soon face the irony of a big brawling debate in Washington over universal health care coverage as the existing health care safety net is being shredded in the fifty states.
That’s why President-elect Obama, and most congressional leaders, have been making it clear that the next economic stimulus package will provide a significant level of state fiscal assistance. The simplest way to do that is through “super-matches” that at least temporarily raise the federal share of expenditures for federal-state programs ranging from Medicaid to bridge repairs. Emergency assistance to shore up unemployment insurance funds–even as eligibility is expanded to help people whose benefits have already run out–may be another “must-do.”
The political implications of the state fiscal crisis are hard to calculate, but could be profound. One of the least-discussed aspects of the “Clinton Boom” of the 1990s was how easy it made life for the host of Republican governors and state legislators elected in the 1994 landslide, who were often in a position to expand services while cutting taxes. It’s possible that the Bush administration’s parting gift to the GOP will be a national economic climate that makes life very difficult for the Democrats who now hold a majority of governorships and state legislative chambers.


Dems Lead Women Gains in Elective Offices

So how did women candidates do on November 4? According to Linda Feldmann’s Christian Science Monitor report “Women make modest gains in Election 2008,” women candidates netted 1 US Senate seat, 3 House of Reps seats, and a .50 percent pick up in all the state legislatures combined. The NH Senate became the first state legislature in U.S. history to become majority female with 13 of 24 seats. According a report by to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, the net gains in state legislatures are “entirely due to an increase in Democratic women.” CAWP reports a net gain of one woman governor and 6 female secretaries of state — all Dems. No data yet on women mayors, who were 16.2 percent of all mayors of cities with more than 30K residents before the election.


Dada Map, White Vote, High Court, GA Run-Off…

Most of us have had our fill of red state/blue state electoral vote maps during the last couple of weeks. But there is just one more that merits a gander, Princeton Election Consortium‘s size-distorted EV map of the U.S. It looks a little dada, but it nonetheless provides a more realistic view of political muscle in presidential races.
Charles Franklin’s “White Vote for Obama in the States, Part II” at Pollster.com concludes his statistical wrap-up on the topic (Part I is here). It will undoubtedly be studied avidly by students of racial attitudes.
Bob Moser, one of the more optimistic analysts of southern politics, writes on “A New, Blue Dixie” in The Nation. Says Moser:

Conventional wisdom advised Democratic presidential candidates to bend over backward to look like “regular” Southern guys–tote a gun, adopt an accent, pretend to be a NASCAR freak, run around with a Holy Bible tucked under each arm and, if all else failed, campaign atop a hay bale (as Michael Dukakis once did in North Carolina). Obama, precisely the kind of Democrat who was supposed to be an impossible sell in the South, eschewed such fakery. He looked South and saw not stereotypes but — wonder of wonders — Americans.

In a related report, Tim Murphy notes at Daily Yonder, via Facing South‘s Chris Kromm, that 32 of the 111 urban counties that shifted Democrat in the presidential vote were based in the South. In another post, Kromm also shows what a powerful force young white voters were in Obama’s NC win.
Poll analyst Nate Silver inks a two book deal with Penguin worth a reported $700K.
David G. Savage’s article, “Who Would Obama Pick for the Supreme Court?” in today’s L.A. Times centers on the probability of a woman appointee and discusses some candidates for Obama’s short list. The article also notes that Obama, more of a legal scholar than perhaps all other U.S, Presidents, has made remarks indicating he may favor moderates over judicial activists.
For a 3-point race that has national implications, the reporting on the GA Senate run-off is embarrassingly weak in today’s daily rags across the state. But The Media Consortium has a “Georgia Run-Off Newsladder” that serves as a good gateway to recent reporting on the race, thanks to the research of Spencer Kent and Robert Harding. See also the Daily Kos postings on ‘GA-Sen’, especially RUKind’s article, “Saxby ‘Sugar’ Shameless” for an informative update on Chambliss’s role in the Imperial Sugar Case. And MyDD‘s demoinesdem has a list of five things you can do to help elect Jim Martin, followed by insightful comments from readers.
Peter Hart and David Gergen have some perceptive comments on “How Obama Won” in their dialogue at Rolling Stone.
Just in case you thought that impressive Democratic victories in ’06 and ’08 would lead to more equitable coverage on the telly, ‘Political Animal’ Steve Benen has a Washington Monthly post showing that the Sunday political yak shows still have a strong conservative bias in their guest lists.


Conservative Truth-Teller

Policy Review editor Tod Lindberg has a habit of telling his fellow conservatives uncomfortable truths at key moments of political history. Back in 1999, he scolded conservatives for refusing to acknowledge that Democrats–and center-left progressives internationally–had reinvigorated their political tradition via a “Third Way” movement that relied equally on effective governance and conservative failure to adjust:

This movement on the part of the world’s center-left parties is the most important political development of the
decade. They have decided to bury large enough swaths of their old ideology to obtain power and govern….
The truth is that Third Way politicians are perfectly happy to have cast conservatives as an anti-government menace whose message for people who fall down is “Get up.” The conservatives are even useful, in their way: Their political salience makes it possible (in fact, necessary) for Third Way politicians to shackle their taste for activist government to market principles, thus reinvigorating governments ossified by old-style liberalism.
If conservatives don’t like the role Third Way politicians have assigned them, they are going to have to articulate a different one. It’s probably going to have to include a sense of what government is for, a question to which conservative parties don’t really have an answer now.

Nine years later, Democrats are on the rise again, and again, conservatives are in denial, claiming that America is still a center-right country that has only turned to progressives reluctantly, due to the non-conservative sins of George W. Bush. One of the first to rebuke them has been Tod Lindberg, in today’s Washington Post:

We are now two elections into something big. This month’s drubbing is just the latest sign that the country’s political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.
Here’s the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, “The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats.” This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.

Lindberg also addresses the one major piece of evidence being repetitively cited for the “center-right country” rationalization:

True, the percentage of voters describing themselves as “liberal” and “conservative” has held relatively constant over many election cycles, with self-described liberals checking in at 22 percent this time around (up one percentage point over 2004) and self-described conservatives at 34 percent (unchanged from 2004). The numbers may not have changed, but the views behind those labels certainly have. Nowadays, it’s a fair bet that most of those calling themselves “liberal” support gay marriage. In 1980, those same liberals were, no doubt, cutting-edge supporters of gay rights, but the notion of same-sex marriage would have occurred only to the most avant-garde. In 1980, having a teenage daughter who was pregnant out of wedlock would have ruled you out for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket. This year, it turned out to be a humanizing addition to the conservative vice presidential nominee’s résumé.

As a Democrat, I’m reasonably happy that so many conservatives want to remain in denial, and comfort themselves that nothing’s really changed over the last two electoral cycles that a return to a more rigorous ideological fidelity can’t fix. But it’s probably not that good for the country to have a major political party living in a parallel universe that’s more and more remote from reality. So we should all probably appreciate Tod Lindberg’s stubborn efforts to provide some reality therapy to his political comrades.


Obama’s Tough Choice: Clinton or Richardson for State

Of all the tough choices President-elect Obama will face between now and the inauguration, none are likely to have more far-reaching political consequences than his pick for Secretary of State. The two front-runners, Senator Clinton and Governor Richardson also happen to be the most prominent female and Hispanic leaders, respectively, in the Democratic Party, and it looks like both may want the post. Jonathan Weisman reports on Obama’s dilemma in the Wall Street Journal

Sen. Clinton, of New York, could be a crowd pleaser in that role, and she has staunch advocates in Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff, and transition director John Podesta, according to Democrats familiar with the transition process…But Mr. Obama risks alienating Latino supporters if he passes over New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, currently the favorite of a lobbying campaign by Hispanic activists, for the State Department job.

It’s hard to imagine either Richardson or Clinton being satisfied with any post south of State as a consolation prize. Richardson’s bio practically screams “future Secretary of State,” and, as a 2-time Clinton administration appointee, he went out on a long limb endorsing Obama. But picking Richardson would almost certainly crank up ire among Clinton’s supporters as a double-diss, since she wasn’t picked for veep. While Richardson’s formidable diplomatic experience may give him an edge, Clinton is clearly one of the most capable leaders in the Democratic Party, and her experience as an actively-involved First Lady for 8 years who traveled the world on diplomatic missions merits consideration.
In picking Richardson, it’s possible Obama could offset criticism from feminists by making sure the “more than 300 cabinet secretaries, deputies and assistant secretaries and more than 2,500 political appointees” cited in Weisman’s article includes a record number of women. Conversely, making sure Latinos get a record number of those appointments might offset negative buzz in the Latino community if he picks Clinton for State. Either way there will be much grumbling in the short run.
WaPo‘s Chris Cillizza weighs the pros and cons of chosing Clinton:

Making Clinton the Secretary of State would ensure buy-in from the former first couple…While the chances of Clinton free-lancing are far less if she is a member of the Obama cabinet, there is absolutely no way of ensuring that her own views on matters of foreign policy would be subsumed in favor of those of the administration…it would be impossible to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

Cillizza may be overstating the likelihood of Clinton being a rogue Secretary of State, and Obama and Clinton do share many foreign policy positions in common. However, Cillizza doesn’t weigh the negative impact that passing over Richardson would have with many Latinos.
Of course, Obama could dodge the dilemma by selecting Senator Kerry for State. In that event, he could tick off both many Hispanics and Clinton supporters. Anyway you slice and dice, it is a very tough choice. The upside is that the country would be well-served with any of these three.


What To Do With Obama’s Army

This often gets lost in the buzz over cabinet appointments and other high-profile issues, but one of the more fateful decisions Team Obama will need to make over the next few months involves the disposition of his remarkable field organization and volunteer/donor network. As noted in an LA Times story today by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, one approach is to fold the Obama organization into the Democratic National Committee and state party affiliates, which is normally what happens after a successful presidential campaign. The other is to keep his organization intact as something of a personal army that will work with, but not under, the national and state parties.
Advocates of the latter approach include key figures in the Obama campaign:

“If it’s in the party,” said Marshall Ganz, a Harvard University lecturer who helped design the training curriculum for Obama’s organizers, “that’s a way to kill it.”
Steve Hildebrand, Obama’s deputy campaign manager and an architect of the grass-roots network, has been warning the president-elect’s team that it risks turning off activists who were inspired by Obama but who never considered themselves a part of the Democratic Party.
These people, Hildebrand said, could be inspired to fight for Obama’s proposals to overhaul healthcare or combat global warming, but would reject appeals that sounded like old-fashioned partisan politics.

Hildebrand’s comments are especially interesting since his name as come up a lot in the last week as a potential quarterback at the DNC (probably under a more visible “figurehead” general chairman).
There are those who say the formal arrangements may not ultimately matter:

“At the end of the day, they own the DNC,” said one party advisor familiar with the internal debate who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing deliberations. “Whether they merge their mailing lists or keep Obama for America as a separate entity doesn’t really matter,” the strategist added, using the campaign’s official name.

Well, that may be true so long as Obama’s agenda and that of Democrats generally remain closely yoked together. But part of the new administration’s strategy may be to try to build grassroots bipartisan and nonpartisan support for his initiatives, redeeming his post-partisan rhetoric through action around the country rather than through deal-cutting or accomodation in Washington.
This is an issue with more complex strategic implications than might at first appear, and bears watching as the transition turns into governing.


Center-Left Country

One of the things we have heard incessantly from conservatives since Election Day is that America is “still a center-right country.” Thiis claim is almost entirely based on exit poll findings that self-identified conservatives still outnumber self-indentified liberals, by the same margin as in 2004.
It’s good to see TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg and Campaign for America’s Future’s Bob Borosage take this claim on directly in an article for The American Prospect:

The conservative claim to a center-right majority comes from addition. More voters say they are conservative than liberal (by a margin of 34 to 22 in this election). Add conservatives to the 44 percent who say they are moderates and you’ve got the majority.
But the addition doesn’t hold up under any analysis. It assumes that moderates are without definition and more likely to swing right than left. This simply ignores reality. In 2008, self-described moderates, about 44 percent of the electorate, voted 60 to 39 for Obama. And, as has been increasingly true in polling going back to 2004, broad majorities have a world view far closer to liberals and Democrats than to conservatives or Republicans.
In this poll, for example, when asked if homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged by society, moderates and liberals agree that it is a way of life that should be accepted by society by 65- and 33-point margins respectively, compared to conservatives who believe it should be discouraged by 32 points. When asked if our security depends on building strong ties with other nations or on our own military strength, both liberals and moderates agree with multilateralism by double-digit margins, while conservatives disagree. On values and on issues, moderates — with one large exception — swing toward liberals.

The “large exception” that Greeberg and Borosage point to is that moderates are significantly more skeptical about the competence of government than liberals. All that means, ultimately, is that Democrats in power need to govern well, particularly after eight years of “big” but inept government under George W. Bush:

[P]rogressives needn’t be defensive about the majority that is dubious about government spending. Making government work effectively is at the heart, not the capillaries of the progressive agenda. This test doesn’t distract; it focuses us on our task. No progressive majority can ever be consolidated for long if it doesn’t demonstrate that government can be an effective ally for everyone.
And that is all moderates are looking for. They aren’t skeptical about the need for government. By large margins, they think regulation does more good than harm. They want investments made in education and training. They favor a concerted government-led drive for energy independence. They far prefer a health-care plan with a choice between their current insurance and a public plan like Medicare, rather than one that would give them a tax credit to negotiate with insurance companies on their own. Their concern is less that government will do too much and more that government will fail to do what it must and waste their money in the process.

The other big reason for the liberal/conservative ratio in exit polls, of course, is that most Democrats stopped using the “liberal” label decades ago, typically preferring “progressive” or “moderate” or even “center-left.” So the self-identification numbers aren’t particularly revealing.
All in all, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have a major window of opportunity to puruse initiatives the majority of Americans, including “moderates,” favor, along with the responsibility of providing, as the Clinton administration did to some extent, that government can get things right and avoid excessive bureaucracy.
The really challenging thing is that at some course over the next two years, the Democratic Party will become the “track” party, in the sense that it will be held responsible for “right track” and “wrong track” sentiments. Maybe Americans will cut Democrats some slack in the understanding that the consequences of Republican misrule cannot be reversed overnight. But we shouldn’t count on too much of a honeymoon if we truly want to solidify a center-left majority before the next elections.


Wanted: Strategic Analysis

Yesterday we published an impressive analysis of the “No on 8” campaign in California by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara. She offered not only a constructive critique of the campaign, but also a strategy going forward for future ballot intiative battles.
I mention all this because Jasmine’s article is precisely the kind of work from “outside writers” that TDS exists to publish. If you have it in you to write something like this that focuses carefully on a particular campaign or other election event, with a strongly strategic bent, please do send it along via the “Contact Us” link at the top right of this page, with all your own contact information.


So You Want To Go to Washington

Whenever there is a change of party control of the executive branch of the federal government, lots of jobs come open, and lots of ambitious and/or dedicated folk start scheming for ways to join the new administration. There’s even a handy-dandy publication–known as the “Plum Book”–put out by the House Committee on Government Reform that lays out available positions.
But in this particular transition, it’s becoming clear that job aspirants, and their family members, better be exceptionally tidy record-keepers, whether or not they’ve got potential conflicts-of-interest or the odd drunk-driving charge in their background. According to a Jackie Calmes article in The New York Times today, the basic questionnaire being distributed by the Obama transition team to those seeking “high-ranking positions” is a 63-point monster of a request for disclosure that goes beyond the usual have-you-been-a-lobbyist-or-felon stuff. Ever sent a potentially embarassing email? (Who hasn’t!). Cough it up. Ever done a blog post or set up a Facebook page? Send that along, please. Some questions clearly relate to issues that came up during the last Democratic transition in 1992. There’s one on “domestic help” that asks about the immigration status and witholding tax arrangements of nannies, housekeepers, and yard workers–a stumbling block, you may recall, for at least two potential Clinton administration Attorneys General. Notes Calmes:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

It’s not clear from the article exactly how far down the food chain this questionnaire is being applied. But those who face it must understand that after they past this test, there’s additional vetting by the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics.
As one of the worst record-keepers you’ll ever meet, I’m sure glad I’m not interested in a high-ranking job with the feds. But for those with that aspiration, perhaps the Obama vetting process will keep the crowds down.


Peach State Showdown Draws McCain

Bit of a donnybrook shaping up in the Peach State today, as John McCain rolls in to campaign for Saxby Chambliss and against Jim Martin in the Senate run-off. Much of the fun will be in seeing how McCain, who will be appearing at a rally at 4:30 with most of the top GA Republicans, renounces his 2002 blast of Chambliss’s shameful attack against Sen. Max Cleland:

“I’d never seen anything like Saxby’s political ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful. It’s reprehensible.”

But that was the straight-talking McCain of yesteryear, before he made his faustian bargain with the knee-jerk reactionaries for his ’08 run. The DSCC has a 50-second web-only ad to welcome McCain and remind internet-active voters of McCain’s earlier views on Chambliss, and a DSCC 5-day TV ad buy is expected to begin in GA today. But, as Atlanta Journal Constitution “political insider” columnist Jim Galloway reminds his readers, McCain owes Chambliss for his endorsement of McCain’s run for President, when polls showed GA Republicans preferred Huckabee.
It’s basically a three point-race that will be determined by turnout in the December 2nd run-off. CNN has an interesting map of the counties that went for Martin and Chambliss, indicating that Martin’s hopes are pegged to GOTV in four GA metro areas, Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus and Augusta. CNN‘s exit poll demographic breakdown of the voters for Martin and Chambliss shows Martin has a huge advantage among Black voters, a 12 point edge with women (and an 11-point shortfall with men), a 10-point edge with younger voters and breaks even with Chambliss among seniors. Chambliss lead among GA’s white voters “with no college” is 70-26 percent.
Issue-wise, it looks like Martin’s biggest weakness is among those who identify the economy as the “most important issue,” who give him only a 2-point lead over Chambliss. He needs to hit harder on Chambliss’s support of Bush economic policies, not just rat-a-tat-tat about taxes. No surprise that the fat cats are digging deep for Chambliss, as the Wall St. Journal reports today. Chambliss has been Bush’s bellhop on economic issues, as well as an errand boy for big oil. Martin needs such punchy memes to generate more heat.
There’s also a stronger case to be made about Chambliss’s awful record on veterans’ issues and low ratings from several vets’ groups. So far, Martin’s ads have been pretty tame on this topic. Instead of the “failed our veterans” rhetoric, the ads of Martin and the DSCC should call it a “betrayal,” for some much-needed water-cooler buzz.
Chambliss’s secret weapon in the run-off may be Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel, who AJC columnist Cynthia Tucker has called “the Katherine Harris of this campaign” and a “partisan martinet.” who “did every thing she could to try to keep as many new voters as possible from casting a ballot.” More on Handel’s games here and GA’s disturbingly large “undervote” here.
Dems should pull out all the stops and mobilize a monster turnout in the four aforementioned GA cities. It would also be good if Sam Nunn and the Carters would make some appearances and/or do an ad for Martin to help take a little bite out of Chambliss’s edge with white voters. Martin could also use some more dough, to match Saxby’s ad avalanche on GA TV. This one is winnable, and you can help right here.