When political observers start comparing Republican prospects in 2010 to those of 1994, they really ought to spend more time consulting people who were, you know, sort of there in 1994. TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg certainly was, and in a new piece for The New Republic, he provides some important advice on how Democrats can avoid a repeat performance later this year.
Greenberg sees a lot of the same warning signs: a president struggling to get his agenda enacted; Democratic divisions and discouragement; Republican intransigence and excitement. But he also notes there was a lot more going on in 1994 than Clinton’s struggles on the health reform front, the subject of so many 1994-2010 comparisons:

At about this stage in the electoral cycle, in midwinter, we were feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves. The State of the Union address on January 25 hailed the previous year’s passage of the Clinton economic plan, nafta, and the Brady Bill. Health care reform was still supported by half the country. Clinton’s approval rating stood at 58 percent.
Then, it all went tragically and almost comically downhill. The State of the Union glow was blotted out by a media frenzy when a special prosecutor subpoenaed White House officials to testify before a grand jury on the Whitewater land deal–and the president was forced to defend his wife’s honor at a prime time press conference. The president’s job approval plummeted eight points–and support for health care dropped ten. Paula Jones kicked off May with her sexual harassment suit. And, by the June publication of Bob Woodward’s The Agenda–and his characterization of the Clinton White House in a word, “chaos”–the president’s approval had fallen to 45 percent.

Moreover, the health reform debacle was not the abiding reminder of Democratic disarray going into the 1994 elections: it was the omnibus crime bill.

With the Congressional Black Caucus rebelling against the bill’s death-penalty provisions and the conservative Democrats standing against its assault-weapons ban, the popular measure was defeated just before the August recess–only three months before the election. Reporters battled to capture their own astonishment. USA Today called it a “shocking” loss that “plunged” the White House to what could be “its worst political defeat.” In a hoarse voice, the president gathered reporters and upbraided his congressional opponents and vowed to “fight and fight and fight until we win.” After a frantic ten days of campaigning against Congress, followed by high-wire negotiations, he finally won the vote on a Sunday night.
Clinton’s approval fell to 39 percent after this fiasco–which voters interpreted as further evidence of Democratic incompetence and fractiousness. Congress’s approval plunged, and voters warmed to the Republicans, who had moved to about a four-point advantage in party sentiment.

That points up the single largest difference between 1994 and present circumstances, says Greenberg, is that Democratic weakness in the former year led directly to Republican strength. It’s not so clear that’s happening today:

Unlike the party of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, which gained standing with each battle with Bill Clinton, today’s Republican Party looks like a cult. During the 2008 campaign, the Republican Party fell to its lowest level in the history of our thermometers measuring the party’s popularity, and it has not improved its standing since Election Day. The Republicans’ widely held conviction that Obama has a hidden “socialist” agenda, and the ascendancy of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as ideological spokespeople, indelibly defines the party. At the same time, Tea Party candidates are contesting mainstream Republicans in primaries–dividing their base.

This provides a potential opening for Democrats if they get their act together and congressional Democrats behave responsibly. Even in 1994, says Greenberg, he urged the White House to attack the GOP’s Contract With America as promising a return to unpopular Reagan policies. But Clinton, who was by then listening closely to Dick Morris, refused to do so. It doesn’t have to be that way in 2010:

Put aside the rancor and gridlock and show a very different face. Take Paul Krugman’s advice and quickly pass a version of the Senate health care bill. That will raise presidential and congressional approval ratings, just as Clinton bucked up Democrats by passing nafta and tax increases for deficit reduction–neither of which were popular at the time.
They must put the Republicans on the defensive. Make them an offer they can’t refuse on bipartisan legislation they dare not oppose–jobs measures that help small businesses and energy-independence legislation. Then, force Republicans to cast tough and defining votes–on Wall Street bonuses and bailouts and limiting corporate spending on elections….
Most importantly, Democrats must explain this election’s stakes and frame the choice that voters face. This is something we failed to get right in 1994. In the summer before the election, we began to see some power in a populist narrative–“[A] president trying to make a better life for ordinary people against Republicans who favor the wealthy and hurt the middle class.” But we could not define this choice in a way that similarly helped congressional Democrats.

There’s a lot more time in 2010 for Democrats to recover from their troubles, with the important exception that they need at least a little help from economic indicators. Democrats really didn’t know what hit them in 1994. This time around, says Greenberg:

Democrats have already lived through their legislative nightmare. We have already had the benefit of Massachusetts to concentrate the mind. And, just as valuable, we have the lessons of history to guide our course.

One of the frustrating things about contemporary political analysis is the frequency with which key terms get used in a very sloppy manner that reflects highly biased or inaccurate assumptions. A perpetual example is the use of “independent” and “moderate” as interchangeable words for unaffiliated voters. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling explains why this can be so misleading:

One of the media mistakes that drives me the most nuts is when ‘moderates’ are conflated with ‘independents.’ This is most commonly a foible of TV news.
Democrats are in trouble with independents right now. They are not, however, in trouble with moderates.
Independents as a group of voters are somewhat conservative leaning. Our last national poll found that 56% of independents were moderates but that among the rest 33% were conservatives to just 11% liberals. Overall independents were planning to vote Republican for Congress this year by a 40-27 margin. But break that out a little further and while conservative independents are tending toward the GOP by a 68-7 margin moderate independents are tied up at 33. And among all moderates- since moderates continue to identify more as Democrats than Republicans- Democrats lead 46-31 on the generic ballot.
It’s a similar story when it comes to moderates and independents and Barack Obama’s approval rating. Independents are split 48/48 on Obama. But moderates approve of him by a 62/34 margin.

Now there are also inherent problems with conducting political analysis based on self-identification of party or ideology; many “conservative” independents actually favor progressive policy views but call themselves conservatives for some essentially non-political reason; and many “independents” are actually reliable partisans who don’t like to be thought of as such. But if you are going to use such terms, Jensen is right, it’s important to keep them straight. And in terms of current political conditions, people who consider themselves “moderate” don’t seem to think President Obama is some crazy socialist.

Abreen Ali has a post at Congress.org, “‘Mocktivists’ Use Humor to Protest” reporting on recent political skits subjecting the Ku Klux Klan, a wingnut religious group and tea party protesters to measured amounts of ridicule. Here’s how the Klan protest went:

Last summer, activists dressed up as clowns to counter a Klan march in Knoxville, Tenn. For each cry of “white power” from the Klan rally, the clowns had a carefully prepared response.
“White flour?” the clowns shouted at first, throwing fistfuls of flour into the air….Later, they shouted “white flowers?” while waving flowers…Finally they yelled, “wife power” and began jumping around in wedding gowns.
The counter-protest proved popular in Knoxville and online, helping undercut the otherwise ugly imagery projected by the Klan rally.
Wearing black suits and the occasional top hat, members of Billionaires for Bush have held signs like “Wealth care, not health care” at legitimate rallies and Tea Party events…”We want to confuse people long enough that we can engage with them behind party lines,” said Marco Ceglie, a “Billionaire” based in New York.
Ceglie said the problem with traditional protests is that people stop listening once they know you are from the other side. His group, though many of their stances are liberal, aims to be nonpartisan…”We want to tap that populist anger and put it towards the real culprit,” he said.

Ali also reports on a San Francisco group protesting church homophobia, which may not have had as much impact, given the ‘preaching to the choir’ aspect of the location of their protest.
I’ve been wondering for a while why we haven’t seen much counter-protesting at the tea party events. Turns out, however, that there have been some ‘mocktivist’ protests of note, according to Ali:

Billionaires for Bush is a group of demonstrators who pretend to be wealthy bankers and CEOs arguing that people should vote for Republicans…The ruse draws attention to the role money plays in politics, the activists say.

Read more…

This item is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix.
A variety of luminaries representing various “wings” of the conservative movement joined together today near George Washington’s Mount Vernon home to sign—with appropriately atavistic flourishes—a manifesto they are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. The allusion made in the title is to the 50-year-old founding statement of the long-forgotten ‘60s right-wing youth group Young Americans for Freedom, the Sharon Statement (so named because it was worked out at William F. Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut). And that best illustrates the insider nature of the whole exercise, since most rank-and-file conservatives have probably never heard of YAF and don’t much need manifestos to go about their political business.
Three things immediately strike the reader about the document itself: (1) it’s very abstract, with no policy content at all; (2) it’s overtly aimed at reviving the old-time “fusionism” of economic, cultural, and national-security conservatives; and (3) it’s overlaid with Tea Party-esque rhetoric about terrible and longstanding threats to the Constitution. It’s sort of like a 50-year high school reunion at a homecoming game (which fits, because the statement was released on the eve of this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington).
It’s the third aspect of the document that’s most peculiar. Consider this passage:
In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.
Hmmm. This has happened in “recent decades,” not just during the Obama administration. And ‘smatter of fact, that’s true: the landmark Supreme Court cases that paved the way for the expansion of the federal government to its current scope of responsibilities date back at least to the civil rights era, and in some respects, to the New Deal and even earlier.
That’s interesting in no small part because most of the original signatories of this document were powerful and enthusiastic participants in the political and policy enterprises of several Republican administrations that made robust use of expanded federal power—most notably the administration of George W. Bush, which championed virtually unlimited executive powers, aggressive preemption of states laws that were thought to hamper businesses, and extensive limitations on individual liberty. In addition, the choice of the estate of the notorious isolationist George Washington to issue a manifesto that endorses a foreign policy of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” is a mite strange, as Daniel Larison has pointed out.
Still another anomaly is the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins signature on a document that does not mention the rights of the “unborn” or “marriage” or “traditional families.” But you figure he was bought off by the reference to the Declaration of Independence as virtually coequal to the Constitution as a founding document, and presenting “self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God.” This is Christian Right code for suggesting that natural law and biblical principles, which conservatives interpret to mean things like bans on abortion and homosexual behavior, have been incorporated into the Constitution.
All in all, this statement represents an effort by yesterday’s and today’s hard-core conservative establishment to stay together and try to be relevant to the political discourse in an era in which the Republican Party is considered dangerously liberal, and the Constitution is thought to clearly ban everything “liberals” espouse. We’ll see how this works out for them.

Looking for a “wedge issue” that will separate Republican politicians and interest groups from their rank-and-file, and from independents?
Check out this newly released finding from the most recent ABC/WaPo poll:

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Eight in 10 poll respondents say they oppose the high court’s Jan. 21 decision to allow unfettered corporate political spending, with 65 percent “strongly” opposed. Nearly as many backed congressional action to curb the ruling, with 72 percent in favor of reinstating limits.
The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent). …
Nearly three-quarters of self-identified conservative Republicans say they oppose the Supreme Court ruling, with most of them strongly opposed. Some two-thirds of conservative Republicans favor congressional efforts to limit corporate and union spending, though with less enthusiasm than liberal Democrats.

What makes this finding so interesting, of course, is that Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals have fallen over themselves praising the Citizens United decision not just as a Good Thing, but as a heaven-sent vindication of First Amendment free speech rights. This is particularly true of the solon who is supposedly well on his way to becoming Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who said of the decision:

Any proponent of free speech should applaud this decision. Citizens United is and will be a First Amendment triumph of enduring significance.

So I guess Mitch is saying that 80% of Americans don’t care much for free speech. And that may even be true if you think money talks.
The good news in this poll is that it shows a very strong base of bipartisan popular support for the legislative efforts of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to fence off some of the more deplorable implications of Citizens United. But unfortunately, “fencing off” is about all Congress can do in the way of “reinstating limits” on political spending, which is what Americans manifestly want to happen. Unless Citizens United is actually overturned by a future Court (possible if Democrats hang onto the White House for a while) or a constitutional amendment (rarely a real option), the only practical counterweight to massive corporate political spending would be a system of public financing for congressional campaigns. It would have been nice if the ABC/WaPo pollsters had asked about that option. But I strongly suspect this isn’t exactly the best political environment for politicians to ask taxpayers to cover their campaign costs.
Still, the yawning gap between public opinion and the GOP on Citizens United should draw immediate and sustained attention from Democrats. And particularly at a time when the advantages of power in Washington have been so visibly minimized by structural obstacles, Democrats should open up a broader front in supporting political reforms. The status quo isn’t working for anyone other than those who don’t want government to work at all.

The public option for health care reform may be a dead issue for pundits and centrists, but CNN reports that group of Democratic Senators is calling for a vote on it under the budget reconciliation rule that requires 51 votes to pass the upper house. Sens. Michael Bennet (CO), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR) and Sherrod Brown (OH), along with 119 House of Reps members, signed a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to schedule a vote on the proposal under the rule. As the letter explains:

We respectfully ask that you bring for a vote before the full Senate a public health insurance option under budget reconciliation rules…There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach — its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option.

Seems like a reasonable request from four level-headed U.S. Senators, none of whom have ever been associated with political suicide missions, or even unrealistic expectations. And they are on solid political ground, according to polling data. In a Kaiser Family Foundation Kaiser Health Tracking Poll conducted 1/7-12, 2010, 53 percent of respondents said they “would be more likely to support” legislation that creates “a government-administered public health insurance option to compete with private health insurance plans,” with only 31 percent saying they would be less likely to support the public option proposal.
This may be a moment of truth for the beleaguered majority leader, who is starting to look like President Obama’s General McClellan, Lincoln’s union army commander who wouldn’t attack. The comparison may be unfair in this case. If Reid’s head count indicates the votes simply aren’t there, then he would be wrong to schedule the vote. But if the votes are there, Reid should take the initiative, and soon after the Feb 25th health care reform summit. Confidence in Democratic leadership is fast eroding as a result of the perception of excessive hand-wringing and inaction. Further delay could metastasize into unnecessary defeats for Democratic candidates in November. We need a significant win, and soon.
It appears that the political party in power gets about a year to produce reforms that have some credibility, before disapproval takes root. It’s unfair in the sense that this expectation doesn’t take the draconian filibuster threshold into account, but we’re stuck with it — unless we take action via budget reconciliation. Even if the measure is defeated, however, Dems could come back quickly with a modified “plan B” strategy, to give the impression that were are at least trying to pass reforms and moving forward. Otherwise the public perception of do-nothing stagnation will fester on and do deeper damage. What we must convey to voters is the perception that Democrats have the gonads to lead.

Today brings still another bushel-basket of earnest if not angry commentary on the retirement of Sen. Evan Bayh. Sigh. But the best single quote was supplied by Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight, aimed at Bayh’s nostalgia for the good old days:

[T]he notion of a government run based on bi-partisan cooperation among moderates from each party is a fictional fairyland that never existed in the first place, and split-party governance is hardly better. Listening to Bayh wax poetically about the past is like hearing a lecture from your dad (or Bayh’s, since his father was senator, too) about how morally superior America was 50 years ago, and then flipping on an episode of Mad Men to see dad’s generation drunk by lunch and patting their secretaries’ bottoms.

Schaller goes on, however, to offer his own sense of what self-conscious “moderates” can and cannot constructively accomplish, and it’s pretty well-reasoned:

1. They should lay down markers now and again, and occasionally be a holdout when the policy process is insufficiently transparent or the national deliberation insufficiently substantive. Majority-party moderates needn’t rubberstamp every item of their majority’s agenda, nor should minority-party moderates be co-opted tools. However, they shouldn’t expect their ideal policy preference to be the outcome produced by the majority party caucus for which they serve as either an in-party outlier or an out-party critic. This is policy hostage-taking, and it is more dangerous and corrosive to democracy than the ideological, one-party rule moderates so often carp about.
2. Then, after they have negotiated for some concessions or refinements, and precisely because those concessions and refinements were made to accommodate their rhetorical or literal opposition, their role at that point is to wholeheartedly back the compromise. They are fully entitled to clarify their vote for the constituents, saying something like, “Look, this is not the legislation that a chamber full of people like me would produce, but this is a good and good-faith effort by the majority party to solve this national problem.” But what they shouldn’t be allowed to do is hold the process hostage and extract certain policy concessions and still complain about both the process and the outcome. It would be more intellectually honest to just vote against the legislation and criticize it–or even vote for it and criticize it.

My main objection to Tom’s formulation–and for that matter, to how Evan Bayh seems to think–is that being a “moderate” isn’t always must a matter of favoring compromise and bipartisanship, or positioning oneself between wrangling factions or parties. “Moderate” policy positions can reflect matters of principles just as strongly held as those of more conventionally ideological politicians. A good example is the cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions, which used to be a “moderate” position until Republicans abruptly abandoned it and then began denouncing it as the work of Satan. “Moderates” developed and then supported cap-and-trade not just because it had features attractive to both progressives and conservatives, though it did, but because they thought it would work in the real world.
Personally, I’d say that’s the sort of “moderation”–focused on innovative real-life solutions–that both parties need more than they need old-school wheeler-dealers who are good at forging legislative coalitions based on personal relationships and palm-greasing, which seems to be the object of so much of the misplaced nostalgia surrounding Bayh’s retirement.

The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).
Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.
As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.
Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.
Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.
Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.