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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2009

The tea party protesters were not all traditional conservatives. Many combined a small business viewpoint and “populist” distrust of large institutions – including the Republican Party. They are not “in the bag” for the GOP

Now that the “spin war” over the size and authenticity of the “tea parties” is over, Democrats should look at the protests more carefully and consider how best to respond.
To begin, the most important fact to note is that there were actually several quite distinct agendas being pursued during the events.
First, the major “non-grass-roots” promoters of the protests – Fox News, Freedomworks, Americans for Progress — ultimately will want to channel the protests back into the “corporate conservatism” of the Republican Party. The essence of this economic approach has been to provide corporate America and the wealthy with their entire short term wish-list without any coherent philosophy or plan guiding decisions. During the Bush years, corporations and industry lobbyists were quite literally allowed to write their own laws and regulations – which were irresponsibly lax as a result – and then to seek and receive bail-outs with public funds when the companies failed. Tax rates on the wealthy were massively lowered without regard to fiscal prudence (on the grounds that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”) and, as a consequence, major increases in the federal budget deficit and public debt were allowed to develop at the “wrong”, expansionary stage of the business cycle.
The Bush administration’s PR machine described this mixture of economic policies as representing a “free market” or “conservative” approach and, at the time, few congressional Republicans made any serious objection to this characterization. But it was, in reality, not grounded in any coherent social philosophy at all. It simply represented the accommodation of whatever short-term corporate demands various industries and lobbyists could successfully push onto the desks of the Bush policymakers.
There was some significant grumbling about this approach among some “grass roots” conservatives during the Bush years, but it was only with the emergence of the crisis last fall that anger exploded across the political spectrum. In the on-site reports from the Tea Parties there are just too many cases of Republicans being booed, heckled and even discouraged from attending the protests to ignore.
But what were the alternative views? Some protestors were focused on a wide variety of perennial “grass-roots” conservative social issues – evolution, gun control and abortion. Other, more conspiratorially minded protestors focused on Obama’s supposed “non-citizenship”, “hidden” Moslem beliefs or “secret plans” for police round-up’s of true patriots and concentration camps. These participants drew disproportionate attention because their signs, costumes and slogans were particularly flamboyant, but most reports suggested that they were not expressing the typical view of the attendees.
On the contrary, the on-the-scene reports by citizen journalists from Huffington Post and other web publications suggest that probably the largest single group within the tea parties were neither corporate Republicans, single-issue protestors nor conspiracy theorists. Writing in the Washington Examiner, Byron York offered a particularly empathetic view of their attitudes which he portrayed as a mixture of bewildered patriotism, fear of the unknown and nostalgia for traditional, “old-fashioned” economic values and attitudes.
For Democrats, the key to understanding the outlook of this “small-town traditional” group is to recognize that it is not the expression of the standard, “institutional” conservative ideology of the Heritage Foundation and University of Chicago. On the contrary, it is an authentically “grass roots” perspective rooted in a “common sense” understanding of economic affairs that arises from practical experience in the world of small business. The Americans who embrace this view have never read Milton Friedman or attended any formal lectures in their lives. Their philosophy is sustained by the informal exchange of ideas with friends, neighbors and co-workers and is derived from daily life in “the real world” as it appears to many average Americans.
At the core of this view are a cluster of ideas that can best be summed up as “pre-Keynesian.” It is an approach that is unified by the idea that that government should be run according to the same principles that apply to running a small business.


Galston on Torture Investigations

Earlier today J.P. Green did a fine post on the furor over investigation of torture practices in the Bush administration, defending their necessity as a matter of justice, while fearing they might overshadow the Obama agenda if undertaken too quickly.
But we also want to draw attention to an essay at The New Republic by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, whose own “measured approach” promotes a very thorough investigation that explores the moral as well as legal implications of torture, but also suggests a withdrawal of the threat of prosecution as a way to ensure full disclosure of Bush administration practices. Galston offers this especially interesting observation about pleas to simply change interrogation policies without a good clear look at what it being changed:

More broadly, “turning the page and moving forward” on the torture issue simply reflects a too narrow view of moral and political life. We cannot hope to learn from experience unless we reflect on it as systematically as we can. But more than that: part of what makes us human is a sense of justice, and justice has to be backward-looking to some extent. We cannot make sound judgments about what individuals (or nations) deserve unless we reflect on what they have done. By contrast, looking forward involves deliberation on expected results and invites a kind of utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits. President Obama has demonstrated his capacity to engage in such a calculus, coolly and deliberately. But while he has rightly cautioned against governing in anger, he has yet to show that he viscerally understands anger, which is a core moral and political passion, one that can be used for productive purposes.


In Praise of the Chatty Class

Matt Bai is the latest journalist to join the Twitter backlash.
In a short piece for this week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine, he declares:

If Twitter doesn’t turn out to be just the latest political fad (like, say, psychographic polling, or Ron Paul), then it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s.

Bai argues that the politicians on Twitter hark back to an earlier era when “American politics was obsessed with the universality of our experience, typified by the enduring cliché of the president with whom you could quaff a beer.”
That’s a surprising and fundamentally wrong-headed view by a writer who has spent a lot of time trying to understand the influence that the Internet is having on politics.
As with so many other things, the content produced by those on Twitter varies. But the best users of the service — like Sen. Claire McCaskill — produce content that is equal parts fascinating and addictive.
Bai dismisses these efforts as attempts at faux-populism. But in reality, they are anything but. They’re intimate and compelling and wholly authentic.
And on the Internet, of course, authenticity counts for everything.
When, Sen. McCaskill tweets about conversations with her children, the feelings she describes are genuine. When she tweets about policy, the positions she takes are clear. And when she talks smack about sports, it is both hilarious and appealing.
The common thread that connects all of Sen. McCaskill’s Twittering is that it reveals a sometimes-intimate and almost-always-appealing side of her personality. It’s a portrait of who she is that we simply do not get for most of her colleagues.
Couple this with the fact that Twitter is not a one-way-street for communication. Sen. McCaskill reads the @ replies that her followers write. She often replies to them in turn. The best Senate offices encourage their principals to draft the occasional reply to a constituent’s mail, but most of the public will never get to see that kind of communication. When we write to a Senate office, we get a form letter (months after the fact).
Twitter makes those replies part of the public conversation. All of us see the importance that Sen. McCaskill places on keeping in touch with her voters back. And the replies are instant — we know the positions she takes the second she posts them.
With all due respect to Bai, Washington would be a better place if more pols (and journalists) grasped the lessons of Twitter.


GOP Lurches Back to “Checks and Balances”

In a lede that made me look quickly at the date to make sure I hadn’t pulled up something from nine months ago, Poltico’s Josh Kaushaar writes today: “The GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies is offering a solution to Republican candidates as they seek to find a compelling message for the 2010 campaigns: Run to prevent Democrats from having unchecked power in Washington.”
You may recall that “checks and balances” or “divided government” was a theme that was supposed to be the magic formula for victory for John McCain last year, enabling him to run against the terribly unpopular Democratic Congress (which unltimately got a lot bigger) without directly attacking Barack Obama. This, of course, was before the McCain-Palin campaign decided to run against Obama and the Democrats as a gang of socialists determined to redistribute wealth from Joe the Plumber to welfare recipients. So color me as unimpressed as the McCain campaign apparently was with poll data showing that, of course, Americans favor “checks and balances” as opposed to “one-party government.”
But whether it’s an effective message or not, you can certainly see how it would be attractive to today’s Republicans, who are determined to oppose everything Obama wants and to remain united around an increasingly atavistic version of “conservative principles,” even as the public makes it ever clearer that it likes Obama and doesn’t like conservatism. Standing up for “checks and balances” sounds vastly nicer than “obstruction” or “the status quo.” And claiming to be playing this essential constitutional role also evokes a certain aroma of bipartisanship, conveniently expressed through systemic opposition to the other party.
It’s unclear to me that congressional Republicans have either the self-discipline or the external power to tone down conservative attacks on Obama as either a secular or religious version of the Antichrist. But even if they can somehow pain a smiley-face on a policy of total obstruction, and sell it as an effort to maintain “checks and balances,” that’s a terribly bloodless sort of appeal to make to a country that’s worried about concrete things like jobs and health care.
Even the GOP pollster who’s hyping the “checks and balances” message as a nifty panacea for what ails his party, Glen Bolger, allows as how it’s “no substitute for policy alternatives,” which is a bit of a problem for Republicans who are increasingly united around Hoover’s economics, Cheney’s foriegn policy, and Palin’s social views. At least, I supposed, it puts them into a context of relevance to what Obama’s trying to do, and not on the margins, howling at the moon and cheering every downward tick in the stock market.


Pandemic Flu and the Stimulus Bill

If the current pandemic flu threat becomes a nightmare made real, we are going to hear a lot about the elimination of funding for pandemic flu preparedness as part of the effort to get Senate Republicans across the line on the economic stimulus package. Indeed, as Ryan Powers notes in a Think Progress look- back at that controversy, the appearance of the flu funds on the hit lists of stimulus critics seems to have begun with a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the famed compassionate conservative, Karl Rove.
People like Susan Collins and Arlen Spector who successfully demanded the elimination of the funding will doubtless object that they favored more money for pandemic preparedness, but just not as part of a package aimed at immediately helping the economy.
But as John Nichols notes today at The Nation, the original insertion of the preparedness money by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey was explicitly justified in terms of the economic disaster that a pandemic could create–an insight that appears pretty reasonable considering the already-sharp reaction of financial markets to the outbreak in Mexico:

Notably, the second question at the White House press conference on the emergency had to do with the potential impact on the economic recovery.
On Monday, the question began to be answered, as Associated Press reported — under the headline: “World Markets Struck By Swine Flu Fears” — that: “World stock markets fell Monday as investors worried that a deadly outbreak of swine flu in Mexico could go global and derail any global economic recovery.”
Before U.S. markets opened, the Wall Street Journal reported: “U.S. stock futures fell sharply Monday as the outbreak of deadly swine flu stoked fears that a possible recovery in the global economy could be derailed.”

Clearly, preparedness comes in many forms.


Obama’s Measured Strategy on Torture

WaMo‘s Hilzoy has a sharp retort for WaPo‘s David Broder, who has made a sort of blanket generalization that those who want accountability for torture are driven by “an unworthy desire for vengeance.” Broder’s column doesn’t flat out say that all who want accountability for torture are motivated by such darker emotions. But he does swab with a very broad brush — “politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past.” Broder warns further about “endless political warfare,” “vendettas” and “untold bitterness — and injustice.”
Punishment for torturers? Horrors. Hilzoy’s post blasts Broder’s psychologizing:

…Who died and made David Broder Sigmund Freud? How on earth does he presume to know what actually motivates those of us who think that the people who authorized torture should be investigated? Speaking for myself: I have never met David Broder. As far as I know, he has no idea that I exist. So how does he know that underneath my “plausible-sounding rationale” lurks “an unworthy desire for vengeance”? And how, stranger still, does he presume to know this about everyone who thinks this — a group that (as Greg Sargent notes) included 62% of the American public before the latest memos were released?

Hilzoy argues that motives for investigating torture are basically irrelevant and,

…By not investigating torture now, we would be setting ourselves up for future government lawbreaking. Isn’t it obvious that preventing this matters more than anyone’s motives?

The poll Hilzoy cited was conducted 1/30-2/1. In Sunday’s Post, Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta cite a WaPo/ABC News poll, conducted 4/21-24:

About half of all Americans, and 52 percent of independents, said there are circumstances in which the United States should consider employing torture against such suspects…Barely more than half of all poll respondents back Obama’s April 16 decision to release the memos specifying how and when to employ specific interrogation techniques. A third “strongly oppose” that decision, about as many as are solidly behind it. Three-quarters of Democrats said they approve of the action, while 74 percent of Republicans are opposed; independents split 50 to 46 percent in favor of the decision.

On Sunday, during “Meet the Press,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs added this clarification on President Obama’s policy on torture:

The president doesn’t open or close the door on criminal prosecutions of anybody in this country because the legal determination about who knowingly breaks the law in any instance is not one that’s made by the president of the United States…he leaves it to the attorney general to figure out who should be prosecuted for what.

Hilzoy is right to call out Broder for his stereotyping, which is reminiscent of the Gingrich era “the left is driven by hate” meme (and the right is driven by, what, love?). Hilzoy is also correct in saying that we can’t just ignore accountability for torture and let bygones be, not if we want to keep a shred of cred as a justice-respecting democracy.
But there is a valid concern buried in Broder’s reference to “endless political warfare.” It would be bad strategy for the Obama Administration to let the torture investigation get on a fast, loud track, at first investigating the decision-makers, but soon devolving into horrific images, grisly photos and revelations sucking away needed media coverage for reforms in health care, economic and energy policy. Then one day we wake up and read on page A-5 that, once again, health care reform is a dead issue for this session of Congress, which is preoccupied with the media circus re-hashing Abu Ghraib ad nauseum. It would serve the interests of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalists and Republicans seeking distractions from Democratic reforms, but it doesn’t serve Obama’s reform agenda.
In terms of legislative accomplishments, Obama has the strongest political momentum of any Democratic president since LBJ, and he understandably wants the public and media focused on his reforms. He did right in releasing the torture files. Getting bogged down on torture as the dominant media issue at this time, however, could obstruct his agenda until his approval/favorable numbers fall, which is exactly what the Republicans want.
America is honor-bound to address accountability for torture — but later better than sooner. Maybe the best thing, strategy-wise, would be for Holder to initiate a thorough investigation, but save the investigation revelations and recommendations until after we get the economy on solid footing and health care reform safely enacted.


Democrats: Let’s face it: the two terms “the left” and “centrists” have become so vague and imprecise they no longer have any use in serious discussions about Democratic strategy. They degrade the clarity of any argument in which they appear

Note: this item by James Vega was originally published on April 22, 2009.
These two terms have been around for so long that the reality of their present uselessness may not seem immediately obvious. But, in fact, there are actually three very different political groups who are lumped together inside the vague term “the left” and six or seven very distinct meanings of the term “centrist.” For any serious intra-Democratic political discussion to be productive, Democrats have to start making the effort to clearly distinguish between these differences.
In the case of the term “the left,” the problem is obvious to any Democrat who listens to Fox News. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck and their imitators relentlessly hammer away at a succession of straw men called “the loony left”, “the hard left”, “the extreme left” and so on — a powerful group who, they assert, have substantial if not total control of the Democratic Party.
Aside from other political commentators, the only specific examples they offer are — not really surprisingly – such powerful and influential figures as junior professors at small state colleges, eccentric elementary school teachers in communities no one has ever heard of before and a variety of well-known (or just as often barely known) Hollywood actors – individuals whose views or actions are confidently asserted to reflect the absolutely typical or dominant attitude of the entire Democratic community.
The truth, on the other hand — as all serious observers know perfectly well — is that there are actually three profoundly distinct groups that compose “the left” and they are so different that it is essentially useless to make any generalizations about them as a whole.

1. The first group is the traditional social movement organizations dedicated to causes like the environment, civil liberties, labor and so on. The most distinctive characteristic of these groups are their single issue focus and political strategy of bargaining with candidates to win their support.
2. The second group is the multi-issue, internet-based organizations like MoveOn and Daily Kos. Their political stance tends to be militantly partisan and pro-Democratic but not ideologically extreme. Surveys have shown that the political attitudes within this group tend to resemble traditional post-war liberal and progressive views.
3. The third group is the genuine “radicals.” These days they are less often doctrinaire socialists than eclectic ecological/peace/anti-establishment militants. They are concentrated among graying tenured faculty members and young energetic protestors in movements like the anti-globalization coalitions. Although their attitudes are asserted to be the dominant ones in the Democratic coalition, in fact they generally have relatively little interest in standard electoral politics and rarely become involved in the grass-roots organizational activities of the Democratic Party.

The differences between these three groups are generally greater than the similarities, a fact that is relatively obvious when comparing the authentic radicals and the others, but is also evident between the netroots and the traditional organizations (The Daily Kos’s Markos devoted an entire chapter in his book Storming The Gates to outlining the Netroots’ disagreements with traditional single-issue organizations)
Since Obama’s paradigm-breaking campaign, there has mercifully been far less abuse of the general term “the left” within the Democratic Party then in the years preceding. But Democrats nonetheless need to officially retire the phrase and replace it with more specific discussion of issues and questions concerning the positions and actions of the three distinct groups.
Meanwhile, the term “centrist” is, if anything, even more desperately in need of retirement than “the left”. It does not only refer to several different groups, but more confusingly to a cluster of fundamentally different concepts — each of which needs to be clearly distinguished from the others.
When Progressives criticize “centrism” they are generally focusing on three very distinct and specific political behaviors or characteristics (1) an excessive conservatism in ideology, becoming at the extreme nearly indistinguishable from Republicanism (2) a marked timidity or even cowardice in political strategy and (3) corruption in financial and ethical standards.
It is not hard to understand why grass roots Democratic activists who live outside Washington find it relatively easy to feel that these characteristics do all substantially overlap in the group generally known as the “beltway insiders.” From a distance, these people all appear extremely intimate and chummy – appearing on the same think-tank panels and sitting amiably side by side on the Sunday talk shows, referring to each other by first names in the most friendly and collegial way.
But, regardless of how many canapés and podiums the “Beltway insiders” share together, the three characteristics above simply do not necessarily imply each other or overlap. Lumping them all indiscriminately together conceptually in a single term “centrism” is intellectually sloppy thinking and is deeply detrimental to the quality and usefulness of progressive thought.
Let’s untangle the distinctions.


Obama’s “Third Way”

Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on April 21, 2009.
At The New Republic yesterday, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber undertook the latest effort to define “Obamaism,” and concluded that the president represents a sort of hybrid liberalism that reflects the market-friendly attitude of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats tempered by a more traditional commitment to equality:

Like the New Democrats who ultimately shaped the Clinton administration’s agenda, Obama has a deep respect for the market and wants to minimize the state’s footprint on it. He has little interest in fixing prices or rationing goods or reversing free-trade agreements. But, while he basically shares the New Democrats’ instincts, he rejects their conclusions. Reacting against the overweening statism of their liberal ancestors, many New Democrats came to believe that if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity. You only need to view the extent of Obama’s domestic agenda to know he doesn’t agree.

They go on to talk about the Obamaite tendency to “nudge” or “harness” market forces to accomplish progressive means, instead of relying on direct government action, as reflected in both their banking and health care policies.
While I generally agree with their take on “Obamaism,” I do question, as a veteran of the whole New Democratic thing, Foer and Scheiber’s retroactive take on that ideology, which they describe as based on the belief that “if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity.” I don’t think New Democrats were ever as laissez-faire oriented as they describe it.
The closest anyone ever came to an ideological definition for the New Democratic “Third Way” was probably the 1996 Progressive Policy Institute document called “The New Progressive Declaration,” a self-conscious manifesto for the reform movement that was then sweeping through center-left parties all over the world. Here’s that document’s key principle when it comes to the fundamental relationship of markets to government and society:

The first cornerstone–the promise of equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none–has animated generations of American leaders and has attracted millions of immigrants to our shores. It is the ideal of a society in which individuals earn their rewards through their own talents and effort within a system of fair and open rules. It recognizes that there is no invisible hand that creates equal opportunity; it is a conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts: removing discriminatory barriers, providing meaningful arenas for self-improvement, a commitment to public investment, and a rejection of special-interest subsidies that give the influential a leg up.

Equal opportunity as a “conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts” doesn’t quite sound like getting government out of the way to let markets work their magic. And for all the talk about Obama’s agenda transcending that of his Clintonian predecessors, some of his signature progressive agenda items, like a market-based approach to universal health coverage and a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions, have been advocated by serious New Democrat types for years, along with a strong commitment to progressive tax rates.
That’s not to say that Obama is today merely echoing what the Clintonians were saying a decade or so ago. The real difference, I would argue, was not any New Democratic lack of interest in equality or public-sector activism, but rather a hostility to regulation based on a sense of triumphalism about technology and globalization as wholly positive developments, and a conviction that “information age” progressivism needed to rethink the social bargains associated with “industrial age” progressivism. It’s safe to say that New Democrats were irrationally exuberent about the economic trends of the 1990s, though not entirely wrong, either.
In general, I’d say the more we learn about Barack Obama’s domestic ideology, the more it looks like a “third way” progressivism chastened by the economic experiences of the last decade and yoked to a much firmer commitment to the necesssity of maintaining some of the “old” social bargains and regulatory practices of the New Deal and Great Society eras. And in international relations, it’s even more obvious that Obama represents a liberalism chastened by an Iraq War that so many Clintonians embraced, however tentatively or fleetingly.
As Foer and Scheiber conclude, Obama may find the elusive “third way” that Clinton “grasped for a decade ago,” whether or not his political thinking acquires a distinctive label or is articulated in books and manifestos. Right now most progressives would settle for success in sheparding America throught the present crisis, and in giving progressive governance a fresh chance.


The “Movement” Roots of Obama’s Political Strategy — Martin Luther King’s campaigns in Birmingham and Chicago and the congressional campaigns of King’s Top Aide Andrew Young

Print Version
Editor’s Note: this TDS Strategy Memo, written by Andrew Levison, provides a unique historical perspective on President Obama’s much-debated strategy for promoting a progressive agenda in Washington, drawing on the lessons of the civil rights movement. It was originally published on April 15, 2009.
Obama’s ambitious budget has profoundly reassured many Democrats that he is indeed the progressive he appeared to be during the 2008 campaign. But there is still widespread concern about his continued desire to achieve some degree of “bipartisanship.”
For many progressives, Barack Obama’s notion of “bipartisanship” reflects a political strategy rooted in a timid, overly weak and compliant variety of 1990’s centrism — a political strategy that the Democratic Party finally rejected after the 2004 election, leading to the gains in the elections of 2006 and 2008. In this view, Obama’s attempts to negotiate with congressional Republicans over his stimulus and budget programs and his continuing expressions of a desire to win the support of moderate Republican legislators for his health and energy plans represent a serious threat to compromise and dilute the progressive vision reflected in his budget.
The progressive alternative to Obama’s strategy that this critical view suggests seems obvious: a much more consistently combative, fiercely partisan and unyieldingly progressive approach, one that seeks to maximize Democratic victories and reject any unnecessary compromise. As Digby, for example argued: “Only in the beltway bubble is there some expectation that everyone is going to agree. The rest of us would prefer that our politicians stand up for what they believe in and try to do what they promised”.
This approach was developed and championed by the Democratic grassroots and netroots during the Bush years and it is also often suggested that it is also the modern version of the political strategy that underlay the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s.
The Civil Rights Movement was indeed militant and confrontational in many of its tactics such as sit-ins, freedom rides and street demonstrations. But, in the particular approach developed and employed by Martin Luther King and SCLC, the broader, long-term strategy the movement followed was actually a good deal more complex. In fact, Obama’s seemingly unique political strategy did not appear out of thin air in 2008. Its roots actually lie in one particular perspective that emerged out of the civil rights movement and that drew heavily upon the lessons the movement learned during the Birmingham and Chicago campaigns.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to emphasize one key fact. Recognizing that Obama’s political strategy has its roots in strategies developed by King and SCLC does not imply that progressives and the progressive movement today are obliged to support and employ the same approach Obama chooses for his Presidential political strategy. Quite the contrary, Martin Luther King’s strategy in relation to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson suggests precisely the opposite – – that King felt he and the movement had to always maintain a separate and explicitly progressive political role and identity, in contrast to even a relatively liberal President who King understood would often have to make compromises and respond to other political imperatives. But what this interpretation of Obama’s strategy does require is a substantial revision of the notion that Obama’s approach can be dismissed as simply a warmed-over version of 1990’s centrism.


Obama’s Popularity Among the Classes and the Masses

Ron Brownstein’s written an important article on Barack Obama’s base of support, drawing on a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey. It’s worth quoting at some length:

Arguably, the past generation’s most important political trend has been the class inversion in the two parties’ support. Since the 1960s, Republicans have gained enormous ground among blue-collar white voters, many of them conservative on cultural and national security issues, who once anchored the Democratic coalition. Since the 1980s, Democrats have advanced among well-educated and affluent voters who are fiscally moderate but lean left on the same social and foreign-policy issues that have moved blue-collar families toward the GOP.
In the 2008 election, Obama struggled with blue-collar whites but extended the Democratic inroads upscale. This new survey shows him improving his position since then with both camps and further loosening the Republican grip on well-off groups that soured on George W. Bush

He goes on to warn that anti-government attitudes among upscale voters could undermine Obama’s base of support for specific domestic policy iniitiatives, with the proviso that even well-off Americans look to government for solutions on health care. Even there, suggests Brownstein, Obama needs to be careful if he wants to keep the classes as well as the masses on his side:

[G]iven the priority they place on autonomy and their skepticism about Washington, these better-off Obama supporters may be especially sensitive to charges that his initiative will reduce choice by increasing government control over health care. Avoiding the Big Government label that helped sink President Clinton’s universal coverage proposal may be critical not only to Obama’s sustaining approval for his reform plan but also to his solidifying his unusually diverse coalition of support.

Brownstein’s analysis is much more impressive than the usual what-goes-up-must-go-down predictions that Obama’s approval ratings will, any day now, collapse. But even Ron may be overestimating the extent to which the president must rely on discrete approbation of his specific policy initiatives.
If we’ve learned anything from Drew Westen, it’s that political allegiances are not, after all, just a matter of personal calculations of which party is more congruent with one’s preferences on a list of policy issues. If that were the case, Democrats would have won most of the presidential and congressional campaigns of the last three decades.
The political capital that a president can bring to bear in support of his policy agenda is not just the sum of support-levels for his discrete policy initiatives. His personal credibility isn’t just an ephemeral asset that will dwindle away when “real issues” emergge; it matters. And moreover, at a time like this, it also matters that the alternatives are a profoundly unpopular status quo and the policy offerings of a Republican Party that’s lost in some strange time warp where the New Deal failed, Herbert Hoover was dangerously prone to big-government solutions, and Ayn Rand got the fundamentals right.
Brownstein is right that big-picture assessments of his policy agenda among this or that voter category will help determine whether he can maintain his current base of support. But there’s not much appetite right now for “nothing” or “no” as alternatives, and that’s Barack Obama’s ultimate ace in the hole.