Since the Civil War, only two presidents, FDR in 1934 and Bush in 2002, have seen their party gain seats in the House and Senate as a result of their first mid term elections. FDR broke the pattern with bold economic reforms that inspired confidence in his personal competence and his party, and added 9 Senate seats and 9 House seats for Democrats. Bush did it as a saber-rattling cheerleader at a time when swing voters were receptive, adding 8 House members and 2 Senators to the GOP herd.
Interesting, that these two exceptions were achieved by America’s best and worst presidents, the four-termer who lead the world to economic recovery and won two wars; and the other who gave us an economic disaster of historic magnitude and budget-busting military entanglements of dubious purpose.
One common denominator here might be that bold action, rooted in a patriotic appeal early in a first Administration, can sometimes win an upset. Another common denominator is that both made highly-effective use of the bully-pulpit, more specifically the power of the President to make news. FDR shrewdly leveraged the available media of his day (e.g. radio fireside chats, schmoozing journalists) to maximum advantage, making the New Deal a patriotic enterprise in the minds of swing voters. Both FDR and Bush were cheerleaders. Bush quite literally began honing his chops as a cheerleader for his high school’s athletic teams, and he also benefited from the rising power of conservative media – Fox News and wingnut radio in particular.
While some would say that the Iraq war was the pivotal event that gave the GOP it’s win in ’02, to give W fair credit, he worked his tail off for his Party in 2002. By October of that year, for example, he had held 8 large public rallies expressly for Republican candidates, not merely the usual fund-raisers with wealthy contributors – a lesson that might benefit Obama on Nov. 2nd.
Presidential cheer-leading is more complicated now. By 2006, Bush had squandered all of his media capital, and the six-year itch” took hold as voters gave upsets to the Democrats. Plus, the power of the internet took a quantum leap forward as a force in political communication, with Democrats benefiting most. The internet is even more potent today as a political opinion-shaper.
So the question is worth raising, is there any chance the Dems could actually pick-up seats in congress in November?
Most pundits say no, with their poll-based projections of Democratic losses in the range of 20-30 House seats and 3-6 Senate seats. In the past 17 midterm elections, the president’s party has lost an average 28 House seats, and an average loss of 4 Senate seats. Hard to find many who think Dems could flip the reality in the other direction. The DCCC has even created a “Frontline Program” to protect a designated 40 House seats believed to be in endangered by the GOP. On the other hand, the GOP’s RCCC has designated the 25 most vulnerable House seats they hold to be protected by their “Patriot Program” fund-raising initiative.
Political upsets happen, and they are never based on abandoning all hope because of polls. A favorable turn of events can help. More likely, however, they require a critical mass of pro-Democratic activists to embrace the challenge with undaunted determination. Such an activist coalition would include Democratic candidates, their staffs, Democratic party workers, blogosphere and community activists and progressive journalists, ideally working together as much as possible in harmonizing messaging and tapping the power of their formidable echo-chamber. If the GOP’s edge has been Party discipline, as seems a fair assessment, the Dems’ edge could be a more advanced echo-chamber that now reaches nearly all homes in suburban swing districts.
The stakes are enormous. Imagine what Democrats could do with a real majority of progressives in their congressional ranks, which could be a small as 3 Senate pick-ups and a dozen House seats. Unlikely, probably – but not totally out of the range of possibility given a little luck and some hard work.
On the outside chance that ‘creative visualization’ can have some political benefits, let’s entertain event scenarios in which the Democrats actually gain Senate and House seats in the 2010 midterms. In no particular order, here’s a few:

Our military captures/destroys bin Laden and al Qeda’s top leaders at the optimum moment, sometime between the end of summer and the November vote. Barring the apprehension of bin Laden, however, it’s not easy to visualize any great military victories in Afghanistan before November that could benefit the President’s party.
The economy starts to bloom more energetically than expected. This may be our best shot. There are some signs of an upturn in the making.
Democratic memes concerning health care reform take root in swing voter attitudes (Some combination of “Damn, this health reform deal is better than I thought” and “Jeez, those Republicans really have no credible alternatives). This is one of the few ways Democratic activists can have a deliberate impact. And, President Obama’s strategy of letting congress shape health care reform, without much white house involvement, now looks pretty good, in comparison to the Clinton Administration’s more ‘hands on’ strategy.
The progressive blogosphere should develop some new ways to reach out to a broader constituency, instead of preaching to already-converted liberals. Democrats in general need some creative initiatives to reach swing voters with memes and messages in key districts. Outlets like YouTube and streaming video in general open up new realms of message transmission, although they won’t be widely rooted among less than tech-savvy voters until a couple of mid-terms later. The time is ripe, however, for some creative meme propagation.
Another rash of GOP scandals kicks in. Always possible, given the greed-driven basis of many Republican campaigns, though fortuitous timing is unlikely.

In the longer term, it’s clear that Democrats have to develop a program to increase turnout in off-year elections, particularly among friendly constituencies. Some innovative ideas are urgently-needed here. We should also support a program to accelerate naturalization to increase the universe of Dem-favoring registered voters.
No doubt there are other possible events and trends that could flip to Nov 2nd outcome in Democrats’ favor. The biggest mistake would be to say, “Well, the President’s Party always loses seats in the mid-terms,” and cede unnecessary ground to the Republicans. Even given a favorable turn of events, heightened Democratic activism is needed for our optimum performance in the 2010 mid-terms. Our best possible New Year’s resolution would be to sound the knell for mid-term apathy in the Democratic Party.

Like a holiday shopper hitting the mall at the very last moment, the U.S. Senate passed a health reform bill today. Or should we say: Senate Democrats passed the bill on a party-line vote. In retrospect, the GOP contributed nothing to the process other than suggestions that we incorporated at one stage or another, but that didn’t swing a single vote.
There remain three difficult steps in this process: the House-Senate conference committee, and then votes in both Houses on that. And a lot of progressives remain angry or apprehensive about the likely final product. But the Senate action was still a nice holiday gift.

If you will pardon a personal note, we’re celebrating my father’s 80th birthday today. Ed Kilgore, Sr., instilled in me a powerful interest in politics from an early age, during the turbulent civil rights era of the Deep South, when he (and my mother) were atypically liberal. For years, we had a Sunday ritual of eating breakfast, reading what was then a big, fat newspaper, and talking politics for as long as it took.
My father also had an extraordinary knack for seeing all points of view. He often talked conservative, but then voted progressive, being the best critic of his own arguments. He and I were among the very few voters in Tucker, Georgia (where he still lives) who cast a ballot for George McGovern in 1972, and he was a proud Obama voter (along with his wife, my stepmother Patricia) last year.
Aside from the love, support and patience he unfailingly provided over the decades, I also owe him my sense of humor (he more or less became Richard Pryor for a while there), and whatever perspective I bring to world events in my writing.
Happy birthday, Chief. I look forward to many more talks and laughs with you, no matter what happens in the wider world.

The inimitable Mark Schmitt has yet another insightful post at The American Prospect, this one entitled “Machinery of Progress.” But it’s the teaser subtitle, “It’s not just about the president. His successes and failures are tests of the progressive infrastructure” that better illuminates his salient point. As Schmitt explains:

…As the administration’s first year in office comes to an end, the most distinctive thing about it is the degree to which people who should long ago have outgrown Great Man theories of history remain transfixed by a single individual. Every success is interpreted as a measure of Obama’s skills and priorities; every disappointment is read as a revelation of his excess caution, naiveté, or other flaws.
…But even world-historical figures color within lines that they do not draw themselves. What presidents, governors, or even legislators are willing and able to do is defined by forces and efforts outside of themselves. And for progressive politicians, those factors include the condition and power of the progressive coalition and its organizations — its ability to generate and refine ideas, as well as its organizational capacity to bring pressure to bear on the political system. Every success or failure can be seen as a measure of the strength or weakness of that infrastructure.

Schmitt then provides a perceptive account of the long years of hard work that went into the coalition movement that put health care in the forefront of the national agenda as exhibit ‘A’ in the case for the importance of establishing a viable progressive infrastructure. This in stark contrast to the absence of an organized progressive movement for regulatory reform, which made it possible for corporate interests to quickly fill the vacuum. As Schmitt says, “no effort had been made to build a constituency for financial reform.”
Schmitt takes no prisoners in his conclusion:

…The success of his [Obama’s] presidency and this Congress will depend on the strength of the progressive infrastructure. If progressives don’t support these structures for policy development and advocacy, further failure will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the fault will lie not in our star but in ourselves.

Tough medicine to swallow, but a useful antidote to pointless whining by adherents to the ‘great man’ school of history and change.

For southern Democrats, the news that freshman Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama was switching parties brought back bad memories from the 1990s, when a goodly number of elected officials from the region who had been Democrats for no particular reason other than political convenience became Republicans for no particular reason other than political convenience.
But the exodus of party-switchers back then was both natural and healthy, painful as it was. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics seems to think, or hope, that Griffith’s flip-flop could touch off another wave of party-switching. I have two reactions to that: (a) if, as appears entirely possible, Griffith loses his seat anyway, then I doubt he’s going to be a major role model for others; and (b) Griffith is from the rare southern district that is conservative but has never elected a Republican congressman. In other words, it’s like the venues of the party-switchers of the 1990s, when the realignment of the parties was reaching its peak. Most moderate-to-conservative Democrats in the South are from areas where genuine Democrats-In-Name-Only left the party years ago. The remainders are a pretty hardy bunch, even if more progressive Democrats don’t like their voting records.
But whether or not Parker Griffith is the wave of the future or the north end of a south-bound brontosaurus, one thing ought to be clear: his protestations that he had to change parties because of some shocking new ideological development in the Democratic Party is total, absolute, conscious b.s. Griffith’s not some crusty old long-time incumbent whose party changed without him; he was first elected in 2008, when Barack Obama was running on a platform promising climate change and health care reform legislation, and going along with George W. Bush’s decision to rescue the financial industry. Nancy Pelosi, whom Griffith is now attacking, wasn’t any less liberal then that she is today. Sure, he needs to play catch-up with his new party-mates in shrieking about socialism and the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, but nobody should be under any illusion that anything has changed since 2008 other than Parker Griffith’s calculation of his re-election prospects.
So however you assess the meaning of this development, nobody in either party should have any particular respect for Griffith–not because he’s a “turncoat,” but because he’s trying to disguise his opportunism as an act of principle, which it is not.

One of those topics that sharply divides observers is the immediate impact on public opinion of enactment of health care reform legislation. Some reform supporters believe that when the public realizes a lot of the wild, made-up claims about the legislation were, well, made up, approval ratings for the President and congressional Democrats will rise. Some reform opponents think that since few Americans will see any tangible benefit from the legislation (in no small part because of the long phase-in period), buyer’s remorse could set in for those who have supported the bill.
Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com trains his jeweler’s eye on this controversy, and finds there is no obvious answer to the question of “what happens now?” to public opinion. Those who are hoping for a major “bump” in presidential approval ratings will probably be disappointed, says Blumenthal, since those are rare barring “rally ’round the flag” moments of national crisis. Another complicating factor is that Americans don’t really understand many key provisions of the legislation. Will time correct misperceptions, or will the long phase-in period freeze perceptions as they are?
The one definite task for progressives, Blumenthal suggests, is to promote a balanced understanding of the legislation to offset not just conservative mendacity but the heavy focus of the debate on the left on issues like the public option. The provisions that will take effect most immediately, and that are most popular–such as bans on insurance company abuses like exclusions for pre-existing conditions–haven’t gotten nearly the attention they deserve.
All I’d add is that whatever the immediate effect on presidential approval ratings, most progressives are convinced that an outright failure to enact health care reform would be a complete political disaster for Democrats, as a similar failure arguably was for Democrats going into the 1994 fiasco. Assuming the bill is enacted, we’ll never know what would have happened otherwise. And the inability to “prove a negative” is a problem with many aspects of health care reform. Insurance premiums, for example, were due to go up sharply over the next few years in the absence of reform legislation. They will still go up sharply under this legislation (most cost savings will occur down the road), since it costs money to cover 30 or 40 million additional people, but will Americans blame reform itself for this development, which would have happened anyway? Certainly Republicans will make every effort to promote this misperception.
This reflects a broader problem facing the president and congressional Democrats (or anyone assuming power when a previous administration has so thoroughly botched its job): will they get credit for keeping bad times from growing worse, or will they be blamed for the bad times themselves? To cite one obvious example, the best defense for the deeply unpopular TARP initiative is that it was necessary to avoid a complete collapse in the nation’s, and perhaps the world’s, financial system. That is clearly what Barack Obama thought at the time; he certainly did not relish massive subsidies for the least popular people and institutions on the planet. But it’s hard to prove what would have happened in any other scenario. The best solution to this dilemma is to make conditions in the country actually improve. Given the mess Obama inherited, that may be tough to do by next November, or even by 2012. And that’s why progressives need to spend as much time as possible promoting genuine public understanding of the nation’s complex problems, with reminders of our downward trajectory under the previous administration.

The course of events in Congress this year have generated a robust debate over the evolution of the Senate filibuster into a routine 60-vote threshold. I’ve been debating this subject over at ProgressiveFix with former TDS Managing Editor Scott Winship.
In the latest back-and-forth, Scott, who earlier argued that partisan polarization is a bigger obstacle to the enactment of legislation than the filibuster, takes on the proposition that polarization is a phenomenon created primarily by Republicans (hence there’s not a lot Democrats can do about it other than beating Republicans like a drum in elections).
My response focuses on a challenge to the perennial liberal-moderate-conservative typology of voter ideology–which invariably places the political “center” farther to the right than it actually is–and also expresses skepticism about Scott’s preferred remedy to polarization of laws that open up party primaries.
It’s a lot of reading, but well worth the time if you are interested in this perennial topic.

This items is a memo to Democratic senators from noted progressive pollster Mark Mellman. It is cross-posted from Politico.
Voters support the content of healthcare reform, while expressing opposition to a “content-less” plan identified with Congress. The individual elements of the legislation are very popular, as is the bill in total, when it is explained. Moreover, the public continues to trust Democrats and the President over Republicans to deal with the issue.
Public Opinion On Healthcare Reform Is Evenly Split
The news media has recently highlighted polls showing double-digit margins in opposition to the current healthcare plan. But these cursory stories often neglect to mention two salient facts.
First, these poll questions fail to give any content, any specific meaning to the reform proposal. Voters are simply asked whether they favor or oppose “healthcare proposals being discussed in Congress.” Focus group research makes clear that voters know little about the substance of the plan—all they know is that some on both the left and the right don’t like it and that it is the subject of intense controversy. In essence then, these questions ask people whether they favor or oppose “a controversial plan that is in constant flux.” Understood that way, it is surprising we find any support.
Second, public poll analyses often ignore the fact that a chunk of opposition to the current plan comes from those who support reform, but would like to see Congress go further. A late-November AP/Ipsos poll found nearly identical numbers in favor of the bill (34%) and opposed (35%), without describing its content. A crucial 12% initially say they oppose the plan, but told pollsters their opposition was based on their belief that it did not go far enough. So what initially appears to be a 12-point margin against reform is actually an even division.

Read more…

Dick Cheney may have won Human Events‘ “Conservative of the Year” award, but the Right’s more contemporary megastar, Sarah Palin, got her own big end of the year award. She’s the author of PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” via her infamous Facebook post on health reform and “death panels.”
This was indeed an instant classic: completely fabricated, aimed at a particularly important constituency, and applying one of the favorite hallucinations of Palin’s buddies in the Right to Life movement (liberals want to extend their “holocaust” from the unborn to old folks) to the domestic policy issue of the day. And best of all, the lie was distributed not through some clunky and news-cycle-sensitive speech, but through Facebook!
TPM has a nice slide show illustrating how the “death panel” meme pre-developed before Palin invented the term and launched it into the national consciousness.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
I wrote a piece the other day examining the ideological underpinnings of the left/center split in the Democratic Party over the propriety of a universal health care system based on regulated and subsidized private health insurers. I suggested there was a burgeoning, if questionably workable, tactical alliance between “social-democratic” progressives and some conservatives to derail much of the Obama overall agenda. Then I made this observation:

[O]n a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

This statement has drawn considerable comment from people on both the Right and Left, mainly objecting to the argument that Obama’s critics can’t all be right.
Conservative theoretician Reihan Salam, writing for National Review, first argued that there’s not much substantive difference between the “New Democrat” deployment of private-sector entities in public initiatives and that favored by the privatizers of the Right. But then he pirouetted to make common cause with Obama’s critics on the Left:

It is entirely possible for both sets of critics to be correct. The concern from the right isn’t that the Obama approach will literally nationalize for-profit health insurers. Rather, it is that for-profit health insurers will continue evolving into heavily subsidized firms that function as public utilities, and that seek advantage by gaming the political process. Profits, including profits governed by medical loss ratios, can and will then be cycled into political action, which leads to the anxiety concerning a “corporate takeover of the public sector.”

Salam’s friend Ross Douthat of The New York Times added an “amen” to this argument:

The point is that the more intertwined industry and government become, the harder it is to discern who’s “taking over” whom — and the less it matters, because the taxpayer is taking it on the chin either way.

But do conservatives really oppose this intertwining of industry and government? Rhetorically, yes, operationally—not so much. Consider the default-drive Republican approach to health care reform, such as it is. It typically begins with federal preemption of state medical malpractice laws and health insurance regulation, the latter intended to produce a national market for private insurance (while also, not coincidentally, eliminating existing state provisions designed to prevent discriminatory practices). But the centerpiece is invariably large federal tax credits, accompanied by killing off the current tax deduction for employer-provided coverage, all designed to massively subsidize the purchase of private health insurance by individuals (with or without, depending on the proposal, any sort of group purchases for high-risk individuals). Another conservative pet rock is federal support for Health Savings Accounts, which encourage healthy people to pay cash for most medical services, perhaps supplemented by (very profitable) private catastrophic insurance policies. And most conservatives, when they aren’t “Medagoguing” Democratic proposals to rein in Medicare costs, favor “voucherizing” Medicare benefits—another gigantic subsidy for private health insurers.
Now some conservatives will privately tell you that all these subsidy-and-deregulation schemes are just an interim “solution” towards that great gettin’ up morning when tax rates can be massively lowered, all the tax credits, vouchers and other subsidies can be eliminated, and the government gets out of the health insurance business entirely. But don’t expect to see that on any campaign manifestos in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Republicans generally support huge government subsidies to corporations without any public-spirited regulatory concessions in return.
Do anti-“corporatist” progressives really think they can make common cause with conservatives, beyond deep-sixing Obama’s agenda in the short term? Well, sorta kinda. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who rejected my “incompatibility” argument about left and right critics of “corporatism” as strongly as did Salam, is smart and honest enough to acknowledge there’s no real common ground with conventional conservatives or Republican pols. He instead offers a vision of an “outsider” coalition that includes anti-corporatist progressives and Tea Party types. This is, of course, the age-old “populist” dream (most famously articulated by Tom Frank in What’s the Matter With Kansas?) of a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party that attracts millions of current GOP voters (or nonvoters) who don’t share the economic interests of the Republican Party or the conservative movement but have seen little difference between the two parties.
All I can say is: Good luck with that, Glenn. Short of a complete and immediate revolution within one or both parties, complete with blood purges and electoral chaos, it’s hard to see any vehicle for a left-right “populist” alliance other than a Lou Dobbs presidential run. Barring that unlikely convergence, wrecking Obama’s “corporate” agenda would produce little more on the horizon than a return to the kind of governance we enjoyed during the Bush years, or maybe a bit worse given the current savage trajectory of the GOP.
Part of my intention in the original essay was to suggest that pro-Obama Democrats take seriously the views of intra-party rebels on health care and other issues, instead of insulting them as impractical and childish or obsessed with meaningless totems like the “public option” (which in the anti-corporatist context isn’t meaningless at all). But said rebels really do need to think through where they are going, and where they would take Democrats and the progressive coalition.
Meanwhile, conservatives need to be far less pious about their alleged objections to “corporatism.” Cheap rhetoric aside, their own agenda (when it’s not just preserving the status quo) is largely corporatism with any clear and enforceable public purpose cast aside whenever possible.