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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2009

Can Obama Deploy Some LBJ Strategy?

Robert Dallek has put a must-read post for political strategy junkies up on the New York Times Opinion section, “Can Obama Be a Majority of One?” Dallek, author of acclamed books about Democratic presidencies, discusses which of LBJ’s impressively successful legislative reform tactics might work for President Obama. On Johnson’s sober expectations:

Despite his majorities, Johnson took nothing for granted. He predicted “a hard fight every inch of the way.” He told one adviser: “I’ve watched the Congress from either the inside or the outside … for more than 40 years, and I’ve never seen a Congress that didn’t eventually take the measure of the president it was dealing with.”

LBJ had a toughness of spirit in dealing with congress, but it was tempered with matchless parliamentary know-how and lengthy mental dossiers on hundreds of members of congress that informed his deployment of carrots and sticks:

…He directed aides to treat every member of Congress as if he or she was the center of the political universe. They were instructed to return a representative’s or senator’s call in “10 minutes or else.” Johnson himself devoted countless hours talking to them on the telephone.
Conservative Democrats and Republicans were not neglected. When Representative Silvio Conte, a Republican from Massachusetts, cast a vote for a Johnson initiative, the president called to thank him “on behalf of the nation for your vote.” “It’s the only time since I have been in Congress that a president called me,” Conte said. “I will never forget it”
Every bill Johnson sent to the Hill was presented as a collaboration and was identified with a particular representative or senator. And no cooperative legislator would go un-rewarded…Uncooperative legislators paid a price for their independence. When Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, justified a vote against a Johnson bill by saying that columnist Walter Lippmann shared his view, Johnson scolded him: “Frank, next time you want a dam in Idaho, you call Walter Lippmann and let him put it through.”

On President Obama’s more limited options:

Three months into his presidency, it’s apparent that Mr. Obama is not likely to match the 207 significant pieces of Johnson legislation; but not because he’s unmindful of L.B.J.’s methods. Like Johnson, the current president has been showering considerable attention on members of Congress, courting them by traveling to the Hill and asking their input into his big ticket items — the budget, health insurance, educational, and environmental reforms…
But Mr. Obama faces a more difficult challenge than Johnson’s. Unlike L.B.J., he lacks long-time ties to Congressional leaders, which may be one reason his stimulus plan barely made it out of the Senate and many Democrats, including Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, are balking at the president’s proposed budget. In addition, the sort of mutual back-scratching Johnson relied on is out of vogue. Trading pork-barrel grants for Congressional votes is no longer seen as acceptable politics but as unsavory opportunism. Also, Mr. Obama has far thinner majorities than Johnson had and fewer moderate Republicans to woo. Finally, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and deficits running as far into the future as the eye can see are problems that did not burden Johnson’s reach for a Great Society.

On a more positive note, however:

Yet all is not lost. President Obama has a degree of popular support that rivals the approval F.D.R., Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan enjoyed. And the public’s continuing eagerness for change gives him an advantage over Congress that may yet translate into major economic and social reforms.

Add to this Obama’s email rollodex, the progressive blogosphere support and the edge provided by a highly competent staff, and Obama’s political assets for winning legialtive reforms are formidable.
It would be hard to match LBJ’s mastery of political hardball and softball, and Obama may face a test sooner than later, if congressional Democratic leaders decide to go with the controversial “fast track” budget reconciliation process to pass President Obama’s health care reform and global warming legislation. Resorting to the filibuster-preventing tactic makes some Democrats who still hold fast to fading hopes for a more bipartisan approach a little queasy. But it has been used 19 times in recent years in which both houses of Congress were controlled by one party, according to Majority Leader Harry Reid, who says ” I don’t know why everyone is up in arms about it.”
Indeed. When was the last time an incoming GOP President sincerely reached out to embrace Democrats in genuine bipartisan goodwill? And it’s equally hard to cite an example of Republicans reaching out to help President Obama achieve bipartisan reform. It is early in Obama’s term for protracted trench warfare, but if that’s what it takes to get decent health care coverage for Americans and a sane environmental policy, then we need to bring it on.


House GOP’s Flat-Earth Budget

The black-and-white details are available just yet, but if the outline provided in today’s Wall Street Journal by House Budget Committee ranking Republican Paul Ryan is accurate, the much ballyhooed GOP alternative budget resolution will be a compilation of very tired and very bad ideas.
On the tired side, you have the brilliant breakthrough concept of a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending (exempting veterans affairs). This is, of course, the oldest of budget gimmicks, central to the fiscal strategy of the first President Bush. It treats all federal programs as of identical worth, and achieves savings by counting on inflation to bleed the actual value of federal expenditures.
Equally tired, if not quite as old, is the concept of reducing taxes on corporations and high earners, which the Ryan budget would achieve at an estimated five-year cost of $4 trillion. The gimmickry here is the creation of a two-track income tax system that would allow taxpayers to choose current rates and deductions, or instead, a flat schedule that would have a top marginal rate of 25%. Corporate tax rates would simply be reduced.
Slightly more novel are the “entitlement reform” features of the House GOP budget. Best I can tell from Ryan’s vague description, Medicare would be voucherized for future beneficiaries (those not currently over 55 years of age), which is to say, it would be eliminated as a defined set of benefits and instead turned into cash for the purchase of private insurance, presumably at a fixes rate that would erode purchasing power over time. The federal share of Medicaid would be capped, which simply means that states would be put in the position of either picking up a larger share of the total costs or cutting services or eligibility. Guess which way they will go.
Best of all, the climate change crisis would be address by expanded oil and gas exploration, with a nod to alternative energies through a commitment to deposit lease or sales revenues into a “clean energy” fund.
It’s a pretty amazing package, reflecting the worst ideas from two decades of bad ideas for evading national challenges and shifting resources to the already privileged. And when we have the details, it could get worse.


No Foolin’

It being April 1 and all, some might expect us here at TDS to do an April Fools’ post, oh, I dunno, maybe touting a new study that shows Republicans willing to rethink their ideology and reach out to the political center.
Unfortunately, so many contemporary headlines could be April Fools jokes, like the one reporting yet another tie election yesterday in New York. (Maybe a deal could be worked out to seat the eventual winner of this race at the same time as Al Franken finally gets to occupy the Senate seat he won last year).
In any event, our contribution to the day’s festivities is a link to a HuffPo article with some of the best April 1 hoaxes already launched this year.


Is the Senate a Field of Broken Progressive Dreams?

Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on March 30, 2009
Jonathan Chait has penned a very interesting and important article in the New Republic today about the institutional barriers to Democratic unity, and to achievement of any coherent progressive agenda, posed by the Congress, and especially the U.S. Senate. He covers a lot of ground in this piece, from the floor rules that make 60 votes necessary to pass important legislation, to the “small-state” bias of the Senate’s constitutional structure, which exaggerates conservative power, to the chaotic culture of 100-sun-kings that makes senators resist discipline, to the committee system that gives certain sun kings an outsized ability to shape legislation.
If anything, I think Chait understates the importance of this last factor. Seniority-based committee and subcommittee chairmanships are, after all, the primary magnet for special-interest campaign contributions, and also a powerful reinforcer for legislative parochialism, which enables the committee baron to survive adverse political trends by bringing home and defending the bacon in a way that a replacement senator couldn’t hope to achieve.
Chait’s more controversial theme is that Democrats have a much harder time negotiating senatorial landmines than Republicans. This he attributes to a combination of historical patterns, the influence of business interests, and a tradition of ideological hedge-betting against Democratic presidents.
On history:

Since Democrats controlled the Congress almost continuously for more than 60 years beginning in 1933, the culture of Congress left a deeper imprint on their party. Republicans, shut out from the perks of majority status, finally decided under the opposition leadership of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s that their only path to power lay in partisan discipline.
Democrats, on the other hand, came of age under the old Democratic chieftains, and they have mostly aped that style. They do not fall in line, even under a Democratic president who mostly shares their goals.

On business interests:

[T]he affluent carry disproportionate political weight with elites in both parties. So, while people who earn more than $250,000 per year make up just a tiny slice of the electorate, they make up a huge chunk of any congressman’s friends, acquaintances, and fund-raisers.
What’s more, whatever their disposition toward business in general, Democrats feel it is not just a right but a duty to slavishly attend to the interests of their home-state businesses. That is why Kent Conrad upholds even the most absurd demands of agribusiness, or why even a good-government progressive like Michigan’s Carl Levin parrots the auto industry’s line on regulating carbon dioxide.
Taken as a whole, then, the influence of business and the rich unites Republicans and splits Democrats.

And on bet-hedging:

Democrats have locked themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When their party controls all of Washington, things tend to go south quickly. The president’s popularity plunges, and soon his copartisans in Congress find themselves scrambling to keep from losing their own seats in the political undertow. It happened to Carter in 1978 and 1980, and again to Clinton in 1994.
And, so, they hedge their bets by carving out an independent identity. It doesn’t matter that Obama is popular now, or that a majority of Americans (according to a recent Pew poll) reject the criticism that he’s “trying to do too much.” If Obama defies history and retains his popularity, they’ll retain their seats anyway. They have to worry about the scenario where Obama turns into an albatross.

It’s all a pretty persuasive case, and one that does not, as many accounts do, rely on excessive attributions of treasonous motives to a particular faction of the party. Though party “centrists” are the current top suspects for a revolt against the Obama agenda in the Senate (as opposed to the op-ed pages, where progressives are issuing strong objectives to the Obama-Geithner financial plan), more traditional liberals, sometimes on institutional or parochial-interest grounds, were the main rebels against the last two Democratic presidents.
But Ezra Klein, who agrees strongly with Chait on the importance of institutional factors, challenges Chait’s claim that Republicans managed Congress in a superior fashion during the Bush years.


Obama Af-Pak Strategy Gains Qualified Support

Note: this item by J.P. Green was originally published on March 28, 2009
President Obama’s new strategy regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan is getting cautiously favorable reviews from a broad range of foreign policy experts, most of whom give him credit for narrowing the U.S. mission to defeating Al Queda and their supporters in the Taliban.
The New York Times has an editorial, “The Remembered War,” which does a good job of putting Obama’s new policy in perspective, noting:

…It was greatly encouraging simply to see the president actually focusing on this war and placing it in the broader regional framework that has been missing from American policy. That is a good first step toward fixing the dangerous situation that former President George W. Bush created when he abandoned the necessary war in Afghanistan for the ill-conceived war of choice in Iraq.
Mr. Obama has come back to first principles. Instead of Mr. Bush’s vague talk of representative democracy in Afghanistan, he defined a more specific mission. “We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or dictate its future,” Mr. Obama said, but “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Flashpoints‘ leads the discussion on the pros and cons of Obama’s Af-Pak strategy paper with a package of 7 separate articles from different authors, including “Will the Real Obama Middle East Strategy Please Stand Up?” by Brian Katulis, who credits Obama with,

a much-needed step in the right direction on the Pakistan piece of its policy. Increasing support for the democratically-elected civilian government and massively increasing development assistance to the country are steps that many think tanks have been calling for

Robert Templer, Asia program director at the International Crisis Group adds this in his Flashpoints contribution, “Call in the police (but please help them first)“.

Policing is one of the most effective — and also the most ill-used — tools available to tackle extremism. Yet compared with military and other assistance, international support for policing is miniscule, and much of it is delivered in an uncoordinated and ineffectual manner. Since 2002, the United States has given the Pakistani military more than $10 billion, only the thinnest slice of which has gone to policing…Giving police forces a greater role in counterinsurgency shouldn’t mean sending them heedlessly into harm’s way. What is needed are police to keep everyday peace on the streets. Reducing general criminality and providing security to the public provides the most widely shared and distributed public good. It is much more effective in winning hearts and minds than digging wells or building schools — and indeed encourages and protects such development activities.


“Democrats in Disarray!”

Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on March 26, 2009
There’s no political narrative more beloved in large swaths of media-land than that of “Democrats in Disarray!” Conservatives have obvious motives for promoting tales of indiscipline and factionalism in the Donkey Party. Certain Democrats from Left to Center, with varying degrees of sincerity, also have their own reasons for drawing bright and dreadful fault lines or launching “battles for the soul of the party.” And many MSM gabbers probably talk about the subject out of sheer laziness as a hardy perennial, much as they can always fill a slow news day by pointing to the latest batch of rhetorical craziness from right-wing talk show hosts or very junior GOP House members.
As Congress moves towards action on a new federal budget, however, reports of Democratic factionalism should be examined carefully and taken with more than a grain of salt.
Consider a story today from US News’ Political Bulletin, headlined: “Democrats Split Over Obama Budget.” If you actually read it, evaluations of the extent to which House and Senate Democratic budget committee chairs differ with Obama are all over the place. And if you actually think about it, the main difference so far other than obscure variations in out-year deficit reduction numbers is that the other shoe is dropping on the subject of carbon cap-and-trade legislation, which, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Democratic ideology or Barack Obama, probably would not survive a Byrd Rule challenge that could knock it out of a budget reconciliation bill. Since cap-and-trade auction fees are the financing mechanism in the Obama budget for his Make-Work-Pay tax cut (created for the next two years by the stimulus legislation), that, too, is being left out of the Democratic budget drafts for the time being.
These are important omissions, but are not irretrievable this year or (more likely) next, and don’t represent some sort of Democratic “circular firing squad” or a fullscale congressional Democratic revolt against the administration.
Indeed, after reading the lurid US News headline, check out the headline in this AP assessment of the exact same facts: “Unified Democrats Mirror Obama Budget Priorities.”
The other “Democrats in Disarray” story getting circulation this week involves the announcement by a group of “centrist” Democratic senators led by Evan Bayh that they are creating a 14-member caucus, followed by announcement of an effort by several progressive groups, including MoveOn.org and Americans United for Change, to run ads encouraging said “centrists” to support Obama’s budget and policy priorities (a development that Politico reported under the headline: “Democrats versus Democrats.”).
So far, despite widespread accusations of incipient betrayal, the Bayh group hasn’t issued any demands or offered to broker any deals with Republicans, but the reaction led three of its members to pen a Washington Post op-ed disclaiming treasonous intentions. And the supposed counterweight, the pro-Obama ads, fall pretty fall short of violent chain-yanking or purge-threatening, and could in fact help make it easier for Dems in conservative states to support Obama’s agenda. “There’s zero anger coming from our side,” said Americans United spokesman Jeremy Funk to Politico.
Democratic factionalism may ultimately become a big problem for the Obama administration, but it ain’t happened yet. We all need to understand that such “stories” invariably fall on very fertile soil in Washington, and require little nourishment in the way of objective reality.