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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: February 2009

Judd Out–Census Safer

Today’s surprise announcement by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) that he is withdrawing his nomination as Commerce Secretary has a lot of implications, large and small. But one thing is very clear: his withdrawal removes a potential threat to a well-conducted decennial Census in 2010.
Whatever his merits and demerits generally as a senator, Gregg has been a consistent enemy of efforts to let the Census Bureau conduct a count using anything like aggressive efforts to, well, count Americans. As a New York Times editorial observed when Gregg was first nominated:

The Census Bureau is a major agency within the Commerce Department, and the decennial census — the next one is in 2010 — is a mammoth undertaking. After years of mismanagement and underfinancing by the Bush administration, the bureau is so ill prepared to conduct next year’s count that Congressional investigators have warned that it is at high risk of failure unless corrective action is taken immediately.
Mr. Gregg was never a friend of the census. As chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Commerce Department’s budget, he frequently tried to cut the bureau’s financing. In 1999, he opposed emergency funds for the 2000 census requested by President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled House.

An accurate census obviously has a big political impact, given its impact on reapportionment of Congress and the fifty state legislatures. But it also has an enormous effect on all sorts of federal programs that distribute dollars based on census figures concerning the concentration of various population groups in various states and localities. And beyond government, the census is the most critical database for virtually every measurement of American society, in business, in the social sciences, and in journalism.
It’s not totally clear when the Obama administration decided to pair the Gregg nomination with a proposal to make the census director report directly to the White House. But Gregg’s own statement of withdrawal called the census issue one of the two problems–the other being the economic stimulus legislation–that kept him from moving forward with this nomination.
There will be plenty of time later to analyze why Obama made this flawed appointment. It doesn’t really matter, ultimately. But its withdrawal is good news for anyone who wants a fair and complete Census.


“Bipartisanship’s” Outcasts

Via ThinkProgress, we learn today that the office of House GOP poohbah Eric Cantor has issued a statement dismissing President Obama’s commitment to “bipartisanship” as nothing more than a marketing ploy:

“Though the administration’s marketing of its bipartisan hard work has been outstanding, the actual work has been almost nonexistent,” said Brad Dayspring, spokesman for House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

This is because, presumably, Obama and House Democrats did not give a whole lot of thought to accomodating the arguments of Cantor and other House Republicans that the entire thrust of the economic stimulus legislation was a terrible idea, involving “welfare” and “socialism,” that should be rejected in favor Bush-style across-the-board and corporate tax cuts, along with deregulation.
As one of the more consistent defenders of Obama’s brand of “bipartisanship” in the progressive blogosphere, I’d beg leave to make it clear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Eric Cantors of the political world. Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” means reaching out to the millions of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) around the country who may not particularly like or trust Democrats, but who generally accept the idea of direct government action to revive the economy and to deal with long-overdue national challenges like health care reform, climate change, regulation of the financial sector, and ridding Washington of the death-grip of pay-for-play special pleading by corporate interests. Some of them also don’t like a foreign policy that engages in unnecessary wars at the expense of our national interests. These are the people who have been fundamentally misrepresented–literally and figuratively–by congressional Republicans for years, a misrepresentation that looks likely to grow worse as GOPers convince themselves that Bush’s main sin was excessive “moderation.”
So in reaching out to these essentially disenfranchised Americans, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Obama to recognize the GOP pols who have disenfranchised them as their exclusive bargaining agents. I don’t fault him for going throgh the motions of “reaching out” to the Cantors of the world, because their predictable rejection of his overtures helps make his broader point. And in any event, anyone who thinks Eric Cantor gives a damn about “bipartisanship”–short of some sort of corrupt Washington power-sharing arrangement that repudiates the results of the last two national elections and the real-life results of Republican rule–hasn’t been paying much attention to the events of the last eight years.


Build Your Own Israeli Government

In an example of how one person’s political crisis represents another person’s opportunity for grassroots democracy: An email from the National Jewish Democratic Council today offers a link to a site wherein you can go through various scenarios for Israeli party coalitions, and Build Your Own Government.
The site itself is in Hebrew, which could limit its usefulness to many American kibitzers. But the party lines are all color-coded.
Next time Barack Obama has to put together a coalition in the Senate to pass key legislation, a tool like this would be helpful.


A Note on Civility:

Last Sunday, Open Left published a critique of an article we ran here at TDS – an article by Andrew Levison titled Obama the Sociologist. The critique, by Paul Rosenberg, is tough and argues its thesis with commendable energy and seriousness, but, at the same time, it also keeps the debate civil and clearly focused on the issues. In the coming months, as greater problems and tensions arise within the Democratic coalition and community, it is going to become more and more vital that Democrats maintain certain standards of respect and civility, even as they passionately debate policies and political strategies.
Specifically, here are three positive things that Rosenberg’s does in the course of his argument:

1. He assumes the writer he is criticizing is intellectually honest and doesn’t attribute ulterior motives. There are several places where Rosenberg explicitly notes that he has the opportunity to take a cheap shot, but chooses to give the author the benefit of the doubt instead.
2. He treats a debate between Democrats over political strategy as an attempt to identify both good ideas and bad ones and not as a contest whose goal is refute everything an opposing author says. At one point (referring to both Levison’s article and a related analysis by Mark Schmitt) Rosenberg says “I want to stress that both pieces are thoughtful and have useful insights. But I believe both are colored by wishful thinking and have some very flawed analysis as well.” A strong disagreement is very clearly and firmly stated, but it avoids being rude or insulting.
3. He avoids criticizing a publication as a whole for the opinions expressed in a particular article. At one point Rosenberg says: “this is not an attempt to pick a fight, much less to position Open Left in opposition to The Democratic Strategist. Indeed, despite some differences with its initial analysis, I completely agree with the main thrust of another recent piece.”

This is an excellent starting point for a set of rules for how Democrats should debate amongst themselves. TDS supports these standards and hopes that the rest of the Democratic community – progressives, centrists, conservatives, whatever — will all follow Rosenberg’s lead.
(Note: The Author of Obama The Sociologist is developing an amplification of his original analysis that will appear in a few days)


Stimulus Conference Deal: Winners and Losers

A House-Senate conference committee has come up with what will probably be the final version of the economic stimulus package.
From scattered media reports, it looks like the “losers” in the negotiations will be first-time homebuyers and house-flippers who won’t get much of the Senate-passed tax credit for home purchases; and state governments, who will lose most if not all of the flexible federal assistance supplied in the House bill. The AMT “patch” in the Senate bill, that temporarily protects upper-middle-class taxpayers from a big hit on Tax Day, stayed in at a price of $70 billion.
There are garbled reports as to whether conferees did or did not scale back the Obama “Make Work Pay” tax credit, the centerpiece of his campaign’s tax plan.
The one thing that is reasonably clear is that the package will be enacted. The only Republican senator even threatening to leave the reservation after the Senate passed its bill, Arlen Specter, will have a hard time rejecting the conference report unless he’s willing to get deep in the weeds of the differences from the Senate bill. And we will soon see the Obama administration and congressional Democrats thumping the tubs for quick passage of the final bill.
THURSDAY MORNING UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Politically, there’s a lot of grumbling from House Democrats–both progressives unhappy with Senate-passed cuts and Blue Dogs who don’t like unfunded tax cuts–about the AMT “patch,” which survived conference intact (see this Tom Edsall piece for an assessment of the politics of this provision). But it’s unlikely to develop into a revolt on the conference bill itself.


Galston on Obama and Reagan Parallels

Over at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston has published an article pointing to Ronald Reagan’s negotiation of an economic crisis and his subsequent landslide re-election as instructive for Barack Obama today.
In Galston’s take, Reagan overcame plunging approval ratings and a very difficult midterm election by constantly reminding Americans of the opposing party’s responsibility for the economic calamity, and its apparent failure to learn from it, and by sticking to his basic policy guns despite poor short-term results.
In some ways, Obama should find it easier than Reagan did to hold his predecessor responsible for the terrible economy, since a recession was well under way in Bush’s final year as president, and the financial collapse occurred on his watch. On the other hand, Reagan’s party did not have the sort of control of Washington (the House remained Democratic throughout his tenure) that Obama’s does, and even the Republican-controlled Senate rebelled against him on occasion (most notably in forcing a tax increase in 1982).
Generally, though, the parallels between Reagan’s political situation then and Obama’s now are indeed striking. And certainly Democrats hope to be able to say in 2012 that it’s “morning in America again.”


Israeli Elections: Another Problem for Obama

Yesterday’s elections in Israel can and are being spun in two different directions. On the one hand, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, which is committed to the pursuit of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, narrowly (and somewhat surprisingly) outpolled Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud, theoretically giving her the opportunity to form a government. On the other hand, right-wing parties as a whole gained strength, and the big winner was Avigdor Lieberman’s hyper-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which eclipsed Labor, the long-time governing party of the country, to become the third largest electoral bloc.
Today, in fact, Livni and Netanyahu are in hot pursuit of Lieberman’s support, since either leader can obtain the chance to put together a government with a majority of Knesset members on board. Lieberman’s party, among other things, favors the disenfranchisement of “disloyal” Israeli Arabs, and is adamantly opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
At present, there are three possibilities for Israel’s next government: a right-wing coalition led by Netanyahu (the most likely outcome); a Kadima-led coalition that includes Lieberman’s party (which would definitely come with a veto over any possible talks with Palestinians); or some sort of “centrist” coalition (presumably led by Livni) that includes both Kadima and Likud but excludes Yisrael Beiteinu.
Any of these three scenarios would likely paralyze any Israeli movement towards new negotiations with the Palestinians or with Syria, while increasing the odds of unilateral action towards Iran. Livni’s personal victory notwithstanding (and remember that she was until recently a Likudnik herself), the Israeli political center has clearly moved to the right by any meaningful measure. This is obviously not good news for the Obama’s administration and its aspiration to jump-start new land-for-peace negotiations.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


Readers vs. Users

There is something inherently sad about reading a writer with a reputation for greatness and coming to the sudden, jarring realization that time and technology have inescapably passed him by. But that kind of conclusion is hard to avoid after reading Leon Wieseltier’s latest Washington Diary for The New Republic.
The centerpiece of his column is a complaint about an email he received from President Obama after the Inauguration. The crux of Wieseltier’s argument boils down to this: Obama’s rhetoric and the tools he uses to advance it are based on the premise that we are one nation, united with common purpose and goals, but we are in fact a splintered collection of people with divurgent views of reality and all Obama’s techological ‘networks’ only succeed in creating a veneer of actual connectivity.
The argument about our relative level of unification as a country seems silly knowing that close to three quarters of Americans approve of Obama’s rhetoric, and perhaps that’s why Wieseltier saves his real ire for the networks. Toward the end of the piece, he writes:

For one of [Obama’s] innovations in American politics has been the zealous adoption of the ideology of the network. To be sure, there were practical reasons: email and YouTube are cheaper than direct mail, and of course cooler–but direct mail is all they are. The number of people who can be reached in an instant is genuinely astounding–but this is a marketer’s dream, nothing more.

This statement is indicative of a fundmentally-flawed and outdated worldview.
If I were to guess, I’d bet that Wieseltier still pays for a newspaper subscription. Why does that matter? Because people who purchase print newspapers are readers.
People who read newspapers online, however, are users. Using tools built by the media outlets, we email articles to friends. We share op-eds on Twitter, react to news stories on blogs, and we post columns to Facebook.
People read direct mail. People use Internet communication.
We forward the emails that Obama sends to our family. We rate YouTube videos and then we post them to our personal websites. We react to everything, which in turn sparks a ‘national conversation.’
Compare that with offline communication. No one ever puts new postage on a piece of direct mail to send on to a friend.
And the remarkable thing about Obama and his staff is their ability to turn online communication into offline action.
Since the campaign ended, thousands of individuals have signed up to Facebook groups with the expressed intent of lobbying Congress to pass Obama’s recovery bill. This weekend, thousands of people attended ‘Economic Recovery House Meetings’ to discuss the president’s plan. Organizing for America tells that there were 3,587 meetings in 1,579 cities in 429 congressional districts and all 50 states.
Try getting people to do that with a piece of direct mail.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


“Bipartisanship” and Obama’s Approval Ratings

A very interesting discussion has broken out between two titans of the polling-analysis business, Mark Blumenthal of pollster.com and Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. Nate has been exploring the theory (beloved of some Obama critics in the blogosphere) that the President’s rhetoric of bipartisanship on the economic stimulus legislation has blurred his message even as rank-and-file Republicans move decisively against him, producing net losses in his approval ratings without producing any offsetting benefits. Mark responded with alternative explanations of the slight drop in Obama’s approval ratings as entirely predictable, and suggested that a more partisan approach might have worsened them significantly.
Here’s the nut graph of Mark’s argument:

[Is there] evidence of the limits of bipartisanship? Let’s remember that Obama holds an overall approval rating that most polls now peg in the mid-sixty percent range, after winning with 52.9% of the votes cast. Doesn’t the aggregate approval rating, including approval from roughly a third of Republicans, say something about the benefits of the “bipartisan” messaging? And how will those Republican and Republican leaning independents respond to harsher partisan rhetoric from the President?

(It’s worth noting that the most recent Democracy Corps poll also found a third of Republican voters supporting Obama’s “policies and goals”).
Nate’s response adknowledges that there’s no way to definitively answer the question of Obama’s more partisan path-not-taken. But in terms of the path he did take:

[As] Mark points out, most of the decline in Obama’s approval ratings has come from Republicans, among whom he has lost a net of about 24 approval points (approval rating less disapproval rating) in two weeks. This is in spite of the fact that by roughly a 2:1 margin, Republicans think that Obama is in fact working in a bipartisan fashion, according to the latest CBS News poll.
In other words, there are quite a lot of Republicans who believe that (i) Obama is in fact governing in a bipartisan manner but (ii) disapprove of his performance anyway. Republicans can appreciate Obama’s civility — but still disagree with every piece of his agenda.

More pointedly, Nate suggests that Obama really doesn’t need rank-and-file Republican support to keep his approval ratings at a positive level. His conclusion:

[The} value of maintaining the appearance of bipartisanship does not appear to be all that high if it gets in the way of persuasion. For a week or so there during the stimulus debate, we were getting a lot of the former from the White House, but not so much of the latter.

This appears to put Nate at least generally in the camp of those who applauded the President’s speech to the House Democratic Caucus last week, and his press conference last night, as a sign that a chastened Obama has largely gotten over all the bipartisanship claptrap and is finally delivering a clear progressive message that will attract anyone who is genuinely persuadable.
As it happens, I’m among those who also have applauded Obama’s most recent speeches, but for a somewhat different reason than those articulated by most progressive bloggers. He’s distinguishing cooperation with “Republicans” (or perhaps more accurately, non-Democrats) from accomodation of conservative ideological attacks on his agenda, which in turn he’s identifying with the failed Bush policies of the past, and with business-as-usual in Washington. To put it another way, he’s seeking to identify those who are outside of (or shakily committed to) his November 4 coalition who are actually persuadable, and separating them from the GOP, whose obdurate opposition to the stimulus package is actually a good thing in terms of expanding the Democratic Party.
And this is why despite my enormous respect for Nate Silver, I think he’s got one conclusion almost backwards when he says:

While Obama certainly needs the support of a couple of Republican senators to pass his agenda, he doesn’t necessarily need the support of Republican voters.

In terms of his long-range goals, Obama’s ability to influence a significant minority of Republican voters–and even more importantly, of Republican-leaning independents–is of greater value, and comes at a lower cost, than efforts to drag more than one or two Republican senators across the line on specific legislation. Such broad support outside Washington, if it is maintained, will either create great pressure on at least some Republican members of Congress to behave themselves, or if they don’t, will help alienate potentially Republican voters from the GOP. This is what I’ve called “grassroots bipartisanship,” and looking beyond the stimulus bill to future fights over health care and other key issues, and to the next two election cycles, it remains a pretty good strategy for Obama.
That doesn’t mean that Obama has done everything right during the stimulus debate: he often didn’t make the distinction between grassroots Republicans and independents and conservative ideologues in Washington very clear; the Gregg and Daschle cabinet controversies interfered with his message and embroiled him in what looked like conventional Beltway politics; and all the attention being paid to the “centrist coalition” in the Senate also helped make the final legislation look like the produce of High Broderist deal-cutting. You can also make the case that the administration’s handling of the latest phase of the financial industry “rescue” looks dangerously a lot like the handling of the first phase by the Bush administration, which the general public strongly disliked.
But all those missteps were potentially damaging not because they involved “bipartisanship,” but because they imperiled the President’s ability to stand for a large-majority, supra-partisan coalition around the country seeking to force change on Washington.


Senate Vote on Stimulus Shows a Hand Well-Played

After cruising the Rags of Record for insightful reports on the Senate vote on the stimulus, take a couple of minutes to read Dieter Bradbury’s article in the Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel, “Collins gains political capital in vote: Senator won’t back stimulus if bloated spending measures reinstated.” Bradbury’s article provides an interesting home-state perspective on what is involved in piecing together a barely filibuster-proof majority, while focusing on Collin’s pivotal role in sculpting the compromise. Bradbury also does a good job of showing how Collins boosted her own stock, including:

Richard M. Skinner, a government professor at Bowdoin College, said Collins is now in good shape to win administration and Democratic support for bills that would benefit Maine, having played a pivotal role in the economic stimulus debate…”She’s really in a position to get what she wants from the Obama administration,” he said.

While artfully covering her rear flank:

Even if the stimulus fails and the economy continues to decline, it’s unlikely that Collins would pay a price for supporting the measure, said Sandy Maisel, who teaches government at Colby College.”If this is passed and it is seen as a failure, it will reflect on the Obama administration,” he said.
Maisel said the risk for Collins lies just ahead, as a conference committee hashes out differences between the $827 billion Senate bill and the $820 billion House version. Collins has said she will not support the bill if “bloated” spending provisions are reinserted….”If she decides she’s not going to vote for the conference report, then she is in the position of being the person who causes this to go down,” Maisel said.

Hard to see much of an upside in Collins playing a spoiler role. But the option is there if public opinion heads south on the stimulus, an unlikely prospect, if recent polls are any indication.
The 61-36 procedural vote was close to perfect, indicating that the compromise bill is about as progressive as it could have been and still pass. This is not to say that the left critics are wrong about the stimulus being too small and the tax cuts too large to do much good — a separate question. They may be right. But a razor-close margin is exactly what you want to see to get the most progressive possible bill passed.
Collins’ leadership shows the important role liberal Republicans will play during the Obama administration. Sure, we would rather have a filibuster-proof Senate majority. But it helps a lot to have a few Republicans neutralizing the ideologues in their own party. It reminds me of a similar situation back in 1982-83, when Republican Congressman Jack Kemp was instrumental in passing the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday bill. From a pragmatic, reform agenda point of view, the proper care and feeding of liberal Republicans is a worthy Democratic priority.
Give due credit as well to President Obama and his legislative staff for having the smarts to give Collins the room she needed to maneuver the centrists into position and cobble the majority together. Harry Reid also owes her big time. As Bob Herbert put it in his New York Times column today,

It’s early, but there are signs that Mr. Obama may be the kind of president who is incomprehensible to the cynics among us — one who is responsible and mature, who is concerned not just with the short-term political realities but also the long-term policy implications…Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

It will take a little more time to see if the white house is really playing championship chess. For now, however, the poker analogy fits nicely, and Obama and Collins have just played a very shrewd hand.