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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: December 2008

The Deep Desire For An “Obamagate”

I’m not as frequent a disparager of MSM political coverage as a lot of progressive bloggers, but I’ve gotta say, the efforts we’ve seen in the chattering classes to make the Blagojevich scandal somehow reflect poorly on Barack Obama doth smelleth to high heaven.
I mean, everything that’s come out on L’Affaire Blago has fully exculpated Team Obama from any complicity. And indeed, what we’ve learned shows the president-elect in a very good light as someone who never came close to wheeling-and-dealing with the guy, and more generally, had an unusually distant non-relationship with Blago considering that he was, after all, the elected and reelected governor of Obama’s home state, representing Obama’s party. On top of everything else, Obama made a rare intervention in state politics in the middle of his presidential campaign by pushing for enactment of an ethics law that appears to have convinced Blago that the window was closing on his pay-for-play games, leading to his latest and fatal bout of reckless knavery. Other than horse-whipping the governor publicly, it’s hard to say what more Obama could have done.
But as BarbinMD shows at DailyKos today, none of this has kept political reporters from darkly suggesting that the Blago scandal is casting some sort of giant shadow on the Obama presidency. As she explains, the basic media dynamic is that reporters find some Republican to say it’s a problem for Obama, and thus they have a “story” manufactured out of thin air and partisan malice.
Maybe all this represents sheer journalistic laziness, or the cynical calculation of reporters who know they can get serious ink by linking two big stories–the juicy Blago scandal, and the Obama transition. Or maybe it’s a sign that some folk in the MSM, still smarting from endless claims that they are “in the tank” for Obama, want to prove otherwise by coming up with an “Obamagate” before the man has even taken office.
But at some point, it really needs to stop, or get derisively hooted off the front page and the evening news.


Michael Steele, the RLC, and GOP “Diversity”

The historian Theodore White once referred to the chairmanship of national party political committees as “fool’s gold” in terms of real power. And there’s no question that the DNC and RNC largely let elected officials and presidential campaigns–not to mention actual presidents–call most of the key shots.
But still, the national parties matter, particularly in periods of rapid political change, and especially at times when the party in question does not control the White House and/or Congress. That’s why Howard Dean’s election as DNC chair right after the 2004 elections mattered, and now why the campaign for the RNC chairmanship is drawing a large field and a lot of attention on the Right.
Over the last week or so, the major public buzz about the chairmanship race has involved two African-American candidates. Entering the field was former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who offers conservatives the psychologically tempting proposition of displaying racial “diversity” while actually intensifying the ideological rigidity of the party. As Sarah Posner explains this week at the FundamentaList, Blackwell has intimate ties to the fringier elements of the Christian Right. And as administrator for elections in Ohio in 2004, Blackwell seemed to go out of his way to legitimize conspiracy theories that he helped Bush steal the state. His disastrous run for the Ohio governorship in 2006, and reports that George W. Bush himself thought of Blackwell as “a nut,” are probably not helpful, but also not disqualifying, to his bid to run the RNC.
But the bigger buzz involved efforts by opponents of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele to make him unacceptable as chairman because of his ties to a “moderate” group called the Republican Leadership Council.


‘Tis the Season

With the holiday season full upon us, it’s time for finishing up gift shopping, negotiating family schedules, stealing some time from work (unless evaluations for layoffs are under way!), and maybe even, from our different traditions, remembering the “reason for the season.”
And oh yeah, it’s time to watch with horror the annual spectacle of Bill O’Reilly and other conservatives whining about the so-called “War on Christmas,” that conspiracy by atheist liberal retailers to persecute Christians by exposing them to non-sectarian seasonal mottoes like the deeply disturbing “Happy Holidays.”
If you’re interested, over at Beliefnet, I’ve done an angry post calling on Christians to wage war on all the “War on Christmas” nonsense, which is an insult to people who have really been persecuted for their faith, and exhibits an appalling ignorance of religious history.
And if you’re really in the mood to think about the intersection of the secular and religious in today’s society, mosey over to the Brookings Institution site and check out the useful study by columnist EJ Dionne and academic Melissa Rogers on how to structure a “faith-based organizations” initiative that doesn’t trample on church-state-separation principles.


Business Loves Stimulus

Even as Republicans whip themselves up into a balanced budget frenzy, one of their most important constitutencies, the business community, isn’t fishing in. In fact, as Kevin Bogardus of The Hill reports, business lobbyists, who perhaps see a collapsing economy as a bigger concern than Fidelity to Conservative Principles, are cheerleading for a big economic stimulus effort:

Big business is lining up to support President-elect Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy with the biggest spending spree on roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects since the Eisenhower administration.
Business groups believe injecting funds into rebuilding America’s roads and highways could put thousands back to work at a time of rising unemployment. As a result, lobbyists from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) are asking lawmakers and Obama’s transition team to funnel federal funds to “shovel-ready” projects as the best way to stimulate the flagging economy.
“Our view is we need significant investments in the nation’s infrastructure to meet the needs of the 21st century,” said Aric Newhouse, NAM’s senior vice president of policy and government relations.
“Most important to us is that President-elect Obama is focused on putting money into real projects that are ready to go,” said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure at the Chamber.
Support from business groups that generally are aligned with Republicans could help move Obama’s stimulus legislation forward. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) last week voiced opposition to public spending projects, arguing that “now is not the time to make matters even worse by asking taxpayers to pay for a slate of new government spending in the name of ‘economic stimulus.’ ” He argued for tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

In assessing Barack Obama’s pledges to govern in a bipartisan or post-partisan way, I’ve always assumed that he intended to appeal to rank-and-file Republicans rather than their supposed representatives in the GOP Caucuses of Congress. But it never occurred to me that business lobbyists would join the subversive effort to neutralize congressional Republicans and the conservative movement. Looks like that could be happening if the GOP continues its bizarre drift into aggressive Hooverism.


Balanced-Budget Fever

Via Mori Dinauer at TAPPED, we learn that MN Governor Tim Pawlenty, supposedly a voice of moderation in the national Republican ranks, has joined House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence in calling support for a constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment critical to the revival of the GOP.
This is just bizarre.
Sure, I understand the powerful psychological necessity for the belief among conservatives that “excessive spending” was responsible for the entire disaster of the Bush Era of Republicanism. And yes, the BBA, now as in the past, is an “idea” with a tiresome and deeply dishonest utility as a way to trumpet one’s lust for fiscal discipline without the difficult and politically perilous task of identifying particular spending cuts.
But still, given the dire fiscal condition of the federal government even before the financial crisis and the onset of a deep recession, this is perhaps the worst time in national history to embrace a constitutional BBA. And that’s why virtually all economists, and such famously fiscal-disciplinary political forces as the Blue Dogs, are urging some serious deficit spending right now to avoid complete economic catastrophe. Yet Pence and Pawlenty seem well on their way to making support for a BBA yet another conservative litmus test for Republican politicians.
Pawlenty’s take on this subject is really deep: a BBA is like “cutting up the credit cards” as a way-station to eliminating debt. Emplanted in this metaphor is the belief that the federal government in seeking to avoid or mitigate the worst recession since the Great Depression, is like a consumer who just can’t stop splurging at Best Buy.
On the positive side, perhaps this sudden outbreak of GOP balanced-budget fever means that conservatives have finally abandoned their previous Big Thought on federal spending: the “Starve the Beast” theory that perpetual tax cuts would, by creating unsustainable deficits, automatically force future spending reductions, thus relieving conservatives of the necessity of identifying them. This is what I’ve called the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe.
But given the zero odds that a BBA would ever be enacted, along with the undiminished ardor of Republicans for new tax cuts as the eternal solution to every economic problem, maybe this is a distinction without a difference. Whether they are “starving the beast” or “cutting up the credit cards,” some of today’s “reviving” Republicans seem to be living in a world where basic arithmetic and logic have been forgotten.


Blag-Uh-Oh

It would be wrong to assume that the Governor of Illinois, arrested today for allegedly seeking to personally profit from the appointment of a successor to the president-elect, is guilty. But there appears to be no doubt about the quotes attributed to him today by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
And so, on the theory that at least this sad saga should produce some humor, check out a Benjamin Sarlin post at The Daily Beast today, which lets readers guess whether Rod Blagojevich or Tony Soprana dished out ten earthy quotes. It’s not a particularly easy quiz.
Who knows: if Blago avoids the hoosegow, he might well be in line for his own television reality show, which should help with the legal bills.


Bypassing Bloggers

For all my skepticism about the conservative “Rebuild the Party” movement, it does appear that its avatar, Patrick Ruffini of NextRight, is offering his party some very good advice. He now has a post up schooling Republicans who are just discovering the internet and the phenomenon of bloggers about the real New Media lessons of the Obama campaign:

The mainstream things people do online are 1) e-mail, 2) connect on Facebook and MySpace, and 3) watch video on YouTube…. [T]he advertising value of all Obama videos watched on YouTube was huge: over $46 million and bigger than the media budget for most primary and general election campaigns.
The difference between the Obama campaign and every other campaign is that they treated the online space as a mass medium, and not just a niche medium for the very interested. They announced online. They did their VP via text message. And they built up an e-mail list that was equal to almost 20% of their voters. They were maniacally focused on building up their e-mail list at every opportunity, requiring e-mail to attend events — and even setting up dummy registration pages late in the campaign for events where an RSVP wasn’t even required.

And as Ruffini points out, Team Obama paid relatively little attention to the blogosphere, and in fact, much of what they did bypassed bloggers and appealed directly not only to self-conscious “netizens” but to a broad swath of the technology-using public. Meanwhile, more traditional campaigns, and the Republican Party generally, still think of blogger-outreach as extremely hip:

I’ve been on numerous campaigns, some more open than others when it comes to technology. But even those campaigns that were more skeptical — and whose bunker mentality caused them to lose — always latched on to blogger relations. Blogger outreach is always the easiest thing to sell to a campaign because it’s like the thing that traditional communications people most understand — namely, pitching to reporters….
While new media is replacing old media, the model is still the same: campaigns passing along information to influential reporters/bloggers/Twitterati, and counting on them to spread the word to the general public. The Obama campaign showed that this model could be superseded. Through its 13 million strong list, the millions of people who would consume content all-digitally on YouTube, and the 2 million tied to the campaign umbilically through MyBO, the campaign built its own in-house messaging engine and didn’t need the netroots, either in the primary or the general. Of the dozens of moving parts to Obama’s online campaign, blogger outreach was probably the only one that got short shrift.

To put it another way, the Obama campaign typically treated bloggers as unnecessary “gatekeepers” that could be bypassed, much as bloggers have treated the would-be opinion-leaders of the MSM. And progressive bloggers were among the first to figure that out, and (to their credit) appreciate it.
I continue to think that Ruffini’s tech-heavy GOP reform effort can only get the party so far if it remains unwilling to reconsider its ideology and policy agenda. But he’s right to worry that too many Republican pols hear the words “new media” and think of it as it existed two or four years ago.


Watch Out Democrats: no matter who the hell is peddling it, the whole “Obama vs. the left” discussion is a big, shiny, flashing red cape – and that sharp pain you can feel in your back is the thrust of the matadors’ sword.

Oh well, it eventually had to happen.
For weeks now the mainstream media has been absolutely desperate to start writing the typical political stories about conflict between a newly elected Democratic president and his liberal-progressive supporters. For mainstream commentators, it’s an absolute zero-effort, no-brainer kind of story – kind of like profiles of Olympic athletes triumphing over early adversity or good Samaritans helping the needy around Christmas. The stories damn-near leap out of the keyboard and write themselves.
But this year liberals and progressive Democrats have refused to play along. Even the people the mainstream media have always trusted to give them combative, fiery quotes – Kos, Chris Bowers, the gang at Campaign for America’s Future – none of them have given reporters’ the red-meat clichés they were looking for.
To be sure, progressives have been critical of some Obama appointments – strongly and passionately so in some cases. But from the pages of The Nation to Daily Kos, Open Left and Huffpo they have consistently and carefully qualified their disagreements – noting that they were not attacking Obama’s motives or rejecting his attempts to put together an administration that could both maintain the support of a stable majority coalition and also confront the unusually difficult economic and military problems the country was confronting.
Don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and check the major writers for The Nation, Kos, Open Left, Talking Points Memo, the Campaign for America’s Future website. Sure, if you go out and cherry-pick the whole bloody internet you can find progressive bloggers and even more people in the comments threads who have thrown verbal hand-grenades, but the strong majority of the major liberal and progressive strategists have been consistently careful and measured in their commentary.
In fact, in recent weeks it has actually been possible to see the outlines of a fundamental and profoundly exciting change in Democratic thinking beginning to emerge. In the past, both centrist and liberal-progressive Democrats frequently saw each other as the chief problem and insisted that the Democratic Party could never succeed until one or the other was subordinated or even purged from the party. Disagreements over policies and strategy were redefined as proof of the other sides’ basic “corruption” or “myopic political stupidity”.
In the last few weeks, in contrast, both centrist and liberal-progressive Democrats have been converging on a new conceptual framework. There is increasing hope and consensus that the Democratic Party actually has the potential to create a broad long-term center-left majority coalition – one that that might be able to maintain a stable majority of 55 or even 60% of the electorate. If you read the recent discussions in the liberal-progressive world carefully, the argument is more and more over what the best strategies are for accomplishing this – For example, how far is it actually necessary to move toward the center on various issues to retain majority support? Is it better to try to move quickly to enact important legislation or should Obama attempt to gradually consolidate support before launching certain initiatives? What does the public really want some specific public policy to be?
These are difficult questions and they will inescapably generate powerful and emotional arguments. But these debates are ultimately arguments over political strategy – arguments that can be successfully conducted inside a broad coalition that is sufficiently in agreement on basic Democratic values and policies to maintain a cohesive political identity.
This is a profound sea-change in Democratic thinking and so it’s not surprising that it has now generated a counter-reaction.
On the one hand, for conservatives and Republicans, Democratic unity along these lines is the ultimate nightmare scenario. So it is not surprising that conservative commentators like Jonah Goldberg, Fred Barnes and a gaggle of others are inventing insults, betrayals and intra-party battles with a flair for fantasy that rivals the best of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (Media Matters has the details here).


Abandoning the Center

In case you need any more evidence that the Republican Party’s reaction to its 2006 and 2008 defeats has been to grasp more firmly than ever the mast of conservative ideological orthodoxy, check out this op-ed today from Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who was unanimously voted to the number three spot in the House Republican leadership recently. Much of it is the usual stuff about America being a center-right nation and the GOP losing because it’s abandoned its conservative principles. But Pence’s definition of a positive GOP agenda for this stricken nation is especially revealing:

We must develop new strategies for strengthening our armed forces and homeland security, and be willing to oppose any effort to use our military for nation-building or progressive social experimentation. We must again be the party of economic growth. The American people know we cannot borrow, spend and bail our way back to a growing economy. Republicans must offer alternatives for restoring growth through tax relief, expanded trade, spending discipline and no more government bailouts. We must detail our alternatives to Democratic plans to raise taxes and expand the federal government in education, health care and entitlements. Ideas like a balanced budget amendment, school-choice vouchers, health savings accounts and welfare reform should take center stage in the Republican agenda. And we must have a vision for defending the cherished values of life and marriage whenever they come under attack from the courts, the new administration or congressional liberals.

It’s hard to imagine measures more out of step with public opinion right now than a balanced-budget amendment, categorical opposition to any sort of “bailouts” (presumably including “bailouts” of middle-class voters in extreme economic distress, and, given all of Pence’s talk about spending discipline, probably any economic stimulus package), the hoary conservative pet rock of health savings accounts (at a time when millions of Americans are losing or will soon lose health insurance), and “welfare reform.” Is there really an outcry right now for private-school vouchers or for expanded trade?
There’s a lot of talk right now about Barack Obama trying to “rebrand” progressive policy goals as “the center.” If so, he’ll be pushing an empty door, because today’s GOP seems determined to avoid any confusion between the two parties by abandoning anything that might look like “the center.”


“Ready-To-Go Projects” Then and Now

I’m sure that some of the Clinton administration veterans now on Barack Obama’s team are having a strong sense of deja vu as the incoming administration and congressional leaders work on an economic stimulus package. This was one of the first priorities of Bill Clinton’s presidency in 1993, and it went down to ignominous defeat in Congress in April of 1993 as Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster against the package.
For those who remember this brouhaha (I was then a federal-state relations director working to gain stimulus funding for projects in Georgia), a particular evocative moment will occur today, when mayors come to Washington ro present a list of 4,600 “ready-to-go” infrastructure projects that merit immediate federal spending. A similar exercise in 1993, aimed at rebutting Republican arguments that infrastructure investments would take too long to materialize to affect the economy, wound up as a public relations disaster. In particular, Republicans seized on a handful of less-than-urgent sounding projects on the state and local project lists, including most famously a swimming pool in Midland, Texas, and described the whole stimulus package as “pork.”
Could the same thing happen this time around? Probably not, for at least three major reasons: (1) The economic situation in 1993 was not remotely as frightening as it is today. (2) the Clinton administration was self-restrained in pursuing a stimulus package because of concerns about the burgeoning federal budget deficit; as President-elect Obama said yesterday on Meet the Press, nobody’s much concerned about deficits right now. (3) The whole scale of things is vastly different, with the 1993 stimulus package amounting to about $15 billion, as opposed to the half-trillion-and-up estimates for the current effort. Individual projects tend to get lost in a package that large.
You’d like to think as well that the Obama team has learned the lesson of 1993, and won’t get sandtrapped by meaningless demagoguery on symbolic issues like the inclusion of a swimming pool in a large and merely illustrative list of “ready-to-go” infrastructure projects. Any stimulus to state and local government will likely be channeled through existing programs with their own existing eligibility rules aimed at separating true needs from “pork.” This should be made clear if fiscal hawks in either party try to made a big deal out of individual projects on somebody’s suggested list.
Still, at this very moment there re probably people in conservative think tanks or on Capitol Hill who are getting ready to go over the mayoral and other lists with yellow highlighters to identify some howlers. But there’s plenty of reason to think that this time around, it just won’t matter.