washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: January 2010

The GOP’s Massachussets Dreamin’

The special election in Massachusetts next week to fill the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate term is rapidly becoming the national Republican Party’s maximum goal. The occasion–a low-turnout-special election in which Republicans are pre-mobilized and many Democrats are indifferent–is highly favorable to the little-known GOP candidate, Scott Brown. The stakes are very large. Aside from the symbolism involved in winning Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat in the home state of Barney Frank and John Kerry, Brown could and would personally derail final passage of a health care reform conference report in the Senate.
The polls on this race show Brown closing on Democrat Martha Coakley, but only if turnout follows a heavily pro-GOP pattern, much like the pattern Republicans hope for all across the country this autumn. As Nate Silver notes today, a Rasmussen poll showing a virtual dead heat also shows likely voters in this race giving Barack Obama a 57% approval rating. So it’s clear: Republicans are nationalizing this contest among Bay State voters; so, too, should Democrats.
If they do, and there’s any sort of decent Democratic GOTV effort, then GOP hopes for winning this race will probably turn out to be no more than Massachusetts Dreamin’.


Revelations

As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid “Negro Dialect” furor, the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.
The people flacking this book have done a brilliant job of trickling out “juicy” insider anecdotes in which major campaign figures do and say deeply embarrassing things. The most notorious example is the Reid quote, but there are others: in particular, an excerpt published by New York Magazine that provides a hellish account of the Reille Hunter saga as seen from within John Edwards’ presidential campaign. The excerpt is getting particularly large play because of its unusually negative portrayal of “St. Elizabeth” Edwards, displayed as an erratic and abusive control-freak whose used her knowledge of her husband’s infidelity as a weapon for leverage in the campaign.
You read this stuff and cringe, but in the end, wonder how much it really adds to our knowledge of the Edwards campaign, much less the 2008 elections generally. If you look very closely at the New York excerpt, buried in all the “juicy” bits, you can discern the real story of the Edwards campaign:

To Edwards, the pathway to the nomination seemed clear: beat Clinton in Iowa, where his surprising second-place finish in 2004 had catapulted him to national prominence; survive New Hampshire; then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he’d carried the last time around. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, “I am going to be the next president of the United States.

To put some flesh on these bare bones, the Edwards campaign was a strategic gamble which heavily influenced everything the candidate did after 2004: his faithful adoption of the “crashing the gates” netroots narrative of the corrupt DC Democratic establishment, epitomized by the Clintons; his hiring of netroots veterans like Joe Trippi; his highly consistent anti-corporate rhetoric; his repeated assertions that only a southerner could win a tough general election; and his slavish devotion to nurturing his organization in Iowa.
It never worked out, of course, in part because he fatally underestimated Barack Obama, and by Caucus Night, the fiery populist was reduced to hoping for a low, senior-dominated turnout.
Now maybe it’s just me, but I find this story, which seems to get little attention in Game Change, to be as interesting and even dramatic as all the internal maneuverings around Reille Hunter. Other accounts have suggested that Elizabeth Edwards played an outsized role in shaping the strategy for her husband’s campaign, and perhaps their weird relationship made that possible. But otherwise, aside from speculation about the explosive impact the Hunter scandal might have had if Edwards had actually won the nomination, it’s not that clear why it much matters to anyone other than the unfortunate immediate participants. And that may be true of other “revelations” in this book.


IMPORTANT UPDATE FOR READERS WHO COMMENT ON TDS

The problem that was preventing registered commenters from logging-on to the system to comment has apparently been resolved. Commenters who registered with Typekey in the past should be able to log-on with the same username and password that they have used previously.
We apologize for the temporary inconvenience. If any readers/commenters continue to have problems logging-in, please contact us and let us know.


Tempest in Tea Party Pots

Up until yesterday, disgruntlement with the National Tea Party Convention set for Nashville next month was largely limited to scattered grumbling about the registration fee, though underneath the surface, there were all sorts of subcurrents involving hopes or fears that the convention was leading the Tea Party Movement in this direction of a third party (hard to understand, given the dominance of the Convention’s speakers’ list by Republican pols).
But then one of the Republican Right’s most influential new figures, RedState’s Erick Erickson, weighed in with a post not only criticizing the Nashville event, but the Tea Party Movement as a whole, and also firing a shot across the bow of Sarah Palin for good measure:

I have asked several of the tea party organizations that, early on, I was supportive of to stop using my name and RedState’s logo. I think the tea party movement has largely descended into ego and quest for purpose for individuals at the expense of what the tea party movement started out to be.
That’s not to say it is in every case. I have much good to say about groups like Tea Party Patriots, but I think this national tea party convention smells scammy….
Sarah Palin is certainly giving the National Tea Party Convention legitimacy. But at what cost? I am fearful this thing will blow up and harm her. I am more fearful that a bunch of well meaning people from across the nation are going to show up, expect more, and then grow disaffected or burn out when the deliverables they expect do not come in.

In all the criticism of the Nashville event, It’s hard from the outside to separate the legitimate concerns about a for-profit group “hijacking” the Tea Party Movement, and the political calculations going on about the relationship of said Movement with the Republican Party. A guy like Erickson is focused like a laser beam on a right-wing conquest of the GOP, and presumably wants Tea Party types to serve as junior coalition partners and shock troops in that effort, not as some independent force. But in any event, political journalists who so enjoy writing “Democrats in disarray!” stories ought to devote more attention to the apparent disarray in the Tea Party Movement.
UPDATE: Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent, who’s been doing the best work on this subject, reports that the Tea Party Convention is closing most of its proceedings from the press–including, it appears, Palin’s keynote address. Notwithstanding conservative paranoia about “the media,” this is a move guaranteed to stimulate even more skepticism about the event’s character.


One Past, Two Futures

In a recent post, I defended the proposition that Democrats should spend a great deal of time on this year’s campaign trail drawing attention to the past failures, present zaniness, and future emptiness of Republican policies. While voters say they don’t like what they perceive to be “negative campaigning,” comparative campaigning is always in order.
Now Ron Brownstein reports that Democrats from the White House on down have every intention of making Republicans an issue in this campaign. Here’s what David Axelrod has to say:

“It’s almost impossible to win a referendum on yourself,” Axelrod insisted. “And the Republicans would like this to be a referendum. It’s not going to be a referendum.”

Naturally, Republicans disagree:

Responding to Axelrod’s arguments, Republican pollster Glen Bolger said he was dubious that Democrats will succeed in shifting the focus toward the GOP. “It’s pretty unlikely,” said Bolger, a partner in Public Opinion Strategies, which polls widely for GOP candidates. “Basically, that is something that the party that is under the gun always says, and it is never the case. [In a midterm election] it is about who is in control and how people feel about how things are going in the country

Now obviously the “out” party in hard times wants every election to be a referendum, and the “in” party wants it to be about the “two futures” the two parties stand for. And when the hard times actually developed under the “out” party’s management, the past is an issue as well.
But Bolger’s idea that his own party’s character, record and agenda don’t matter is a sheer unsupported assertion.
Sometimes people, and particularly Republicans, making the “referendum” argument cite 1980, and Ronald Reagan’s famous formulation during the one presidential debate, that voters should ask themselves if “you are better off than you were four years ago,” as though it represented a magical incantation or reflected an iron law of politics. Nicely framed as it was, Reagan’s “referendum” plea would not have mattered at all if it hadn’t coincided with a political moment when swing voters had concluded he was a credible president with a potentially successful agenda. Until the very end, the 1980 race was actually very close, despite all of Jimmy Carter’s political troubles, which make Barack Obama’s look like child’s play. Moreover, Carter didn’t have an immediate, failed, unpopular Republican administration in the national rear-view mirror to point towards; Nixon had been out of office for six years.
Voters don’t “always” react in a particular way to hard times, and elections aren’t “always” referenda on the party in power at that particular moment: For a hundred years after the Civil War, many millions of Americans still voted for the party that was “right” about that conflict. There’s no reason on earth that Democrats can’t share some responsibility for the current economic situation–not to mention two wars–with the GOP, and insist on asking where each party would lead the country if victorious.


The Founders and the Filibuster

Current defenders of the de facto 60-vote requirement for enactment of legislation by the United States Senate invariably argue that a non-representative and obstructionist upper legislative chamber was crucial to the Founding Fathers’ system of constitutional checks and balances. Without a cranky and institutionally conservative Senate, you see, popular majorities might run roughshod over minority rights, and/or enshrine highly temporary objects of popular enthusiasm into law.
Attorney/activist Tom Geoghegan blows up this line of reasoning very effectively in a New York Times op-ed piece that appeared yesterday. His main argument is that by requiring Senate supermajorities in very select circumstances, the Founders made it clear they did not contemplate a universal, routine supermajority requirement for every circumstance. This is, in fact, a very recent development, accomplished through the abandonment of actual filibusters for threatened filibusters as an obstructionist tactic, and then the routinization of filibuster threats. What used to be an extreme and controversial measure–an actual filibuster–that was very difficult to deploy has now become the normal order of business in the Senate.
Had the Founders wanted the Senate to require supermajorities for all sorts of legislation, they would have placed it right there in the Constitution. But they did no such thing.
Geoghegan offers several avenues for challenging the Supermajority Senate outrage. But his best contribution is an argument that will leave constitutional “originalists” sputtering in confusion.


Reid and Lott

The big toxic political news coming out of the weekend was the revelation, retailed in a new 2008 campaign book, that Harry Reid once speculated that Barack Obama might be electable as president because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “Negro dialect.” Republicans immediately started demanding that Reid resign as Democratic Majority Leader, with many claiming his reported remarks were the equivalent of Trent Lott’s infamous wish-he-had-been-president praise for Strom Thurmond in 2002.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has the most sensible comment about Reid’s remarks and particularly the comparisons to Lott:

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term “Negro dialect” is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument–Barack Obama’s complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the “light skin” part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.
But there’s no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi’s support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman’s efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture–nearly half of Thurmond’s platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was “Segregation Forever!” (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott’s wasn’t forced to resign because he said something “racially insensitive.” He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy–frequently.
Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism.

All I’ll add is a guess that Reid’s use of the word “Negro” probably represented a clumsy effort to find an adjective to modify “dialect,” which isn’t exactly the same as calling African-Americans “Negroes.” Frankly, I haven’t heard a white person use the term in close to three decades; racists don’t bother to clean up their own favorite slur, and everybody else generally follows the rule of adopting whatever a particular racial or ethnic group chooses to call itself.
But in any event, this idea that one race-related gaffe is equal in offensiveness to any other is plain stupid. Lott was expressing continued solidarity with the racist political system he grew up with and didn’t abandon until the last possible moment. Reid used offensive language to make a almost universally-recognized objective point about voter attitudes, in the process of encouraging an African-American to run for president. That’s hardly the same.


Despite MSM Ostrich Reflex, GOP Running Scared

In his Informed Comment blog, Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, makes some interesting points in his post, “Why Republicans are Worried.

The corporate media are in the tank for a Republican comeback in 2010, and the GOP may in fact pick up some seats in the Senate and the House, though if employment ticks up by the fall, not as many as some are implying. The corporate media made a big deal about two Democrats who are stepping down but not about 6 Republicans who are. But the long-term trends look good for the Democratic Party.

Cole then presents a map captioned “This is what the 2008 electoral map would look like if the election were decided by 18-29 year-olds.” The map is a stunner, even considering reader comments about the relatively low voter turnout rates of youth (voters do grow older). There are only 8 red states, and only one of them, Georgia, is one of the ten largest states in electoral votes. There is one split state, Arkansas and two that have no data (Oregon and Colorado). The rest (39 states) are all a beautiful blue. The electoral vote tally of this map would be: Obama 455; McCain 57.
Readers of the demographic and opinion analysis of TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira will not be surprised by this data. Still the map is a jaw-dropper. Cole adds:

Political views are formed in young adulthood and for most people remain stable in later life. Republican wedge issues such as gay-bashing, cutting government services and help to people, and the promise of more wars are increasingly unattractive to the younger generation and that is unlikely to change soon. We could be on the verge of another FDR moment, of a long period of Democratic dominance.
John Judis and Ruy Teixeira were prescient.

It appears that Republicans have good reason to be afraid.
Not to wallow in “the glass is half empty” analysis, of such a beautiful graphic, but the map also indicates that the state and national Democratic parties have some youth outreach work to do in the 8 states (AK, GA, ID, LA, OK, UT, WV, WY). Might not be a bad idea to pump some cash and energy into youth political education and recruitment projects in the three largest of the eight states, and see what happens.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: A Very Different Decade Needed

At TNR, TDS Co-Editor William Galston shifts from the many unhappy assessments of American life in the aughts, and focuses on a formula for better economic times in the decade ahead.

During the next decade, we must save more, invest more, produce more, and export more. That sounds anodyne, but it isn’t, because it implies that personal consumption will have to grow more slowly than the GDP. And because personal consumption includes health care, which will continue to grow faster than GDP, other areas of consumption, such as home furnishing and restaurant-going, may have to flatten or even decline—an abrupt shift from 1995-2007, when consumption soared in nearly every category.
During the next decade, we better not borrow a trillion dollars a year, year after year, much of it from the rest of the world. I say “better not,” because at some point foreign lenders will come to doubt our long-term solvency and demand a higher risk premium, with devastating effects on U.S. interest rates and economic growth. There’s no way we can regain our balance with restraint in discretionary spending alone; everything will have to be on the table.

Galston goes on to argue that an “empowered fiscal commission” along the lines of the proposal recently made by Sens. Conrad and Gregg may be the only way to execute a major change in public borrowing habits. And he calls on the president to support this approach as a signal that he is serious about restoring long-term fiscal discipline.
The stakes, Galston suggests, couldn’t be much bigger:

Serious analysts ponder the possibility of a Japan-style decade of stagnation; others fear an irreversible power-shift to China. But national decline, if it comes, will be our choice, not our fate. The next decade will test our capacity to govern ourselves, to exercise some much needed restraint in the face of dire economic circumstances. As George Bernard Shaw once remarked, “Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”


More On “The Base” and Obama

Mark Blumenthal’s post the other day noting continued strong support for Obama among self-identified “liberal Democrats” attracted a nuanced dissent from OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers.
Bowers notes that there’s evidence liberal non-Democrats have soured on Obama pretty strongly, and that even among liberal Democrats, levels of support as compared to 2008 voting percentages have dropped more than for any other major voting category.
Blumenthal responds today by arguing that the levels of liberal disaffection from Obama are far too small to constitute a “revolt” by the “base,” and also suggests that approval ratings are a misleading barometer when it comes to liberal voters who would never consider pulling the lever for a Republican.
Aside from reporting the substance of this exchange, I would note that its tone represents something of a model for intraprogressive debates. Both Bowers and Blumenthal are respectful of each other’s opinion, try to stick to empirical data, and acknowlege this is a continuing subject for legitimate debate, not something on which one side or the other can claim any definitive “win.”