Almost all the discussions of the “enthusiasm gap” in recent weeks have tended to define the problem as the low level of enthusiasm among Democrats – a perspective that tends to suggest that “disappointment” with Obama is probably the major cause. From this perspective the most direct response would appear to be for Democratic strategists to try to challenge and refute this perception – to argue, in effect, that “Obama is really better than many Democrats seem to think he is”.
But, in fact, Democratic enthusiasm only appears as dramatically low as it does in this non-presidential election year (when turnout is far below election years in any case) because it is being compared with the unusually high level of Republican enthusiasm. This alternate way of viewing the issue leads to a very different set of conclusions about the strategy Democrats should use to combat the problem.
The key fact is that Republicans and conservatives do not see this race as anything like a normal off-year election. Instead, it is for them a decisive battle in a life-or-death existential struggle — a no-holds-barred campaign to bring down Obama and reverse the 2008 election. It is a vision of politics as a bitter ideological and social war and conservatives as an army on the march with a vast overarching objective — to “take back our country” from the forces that have literally stolen it from its rightful owners.
At the heart of the current conservative/Republican coalition is a powerfully energized conservative social movement – one with very strong and widely shared military and paramilitary overtones. This generates a high level of what in military terms is called “morale” – a powerful mixture of passion, commitment, élan, fighting spirit, camaraderie and group cohesion.
Among the core conservative activists themselves this high level of morale has developed in the course of work and collaboration. During the last year and a half friendships were formed, afternoons and weekends were spent working together on projects, successes and failures were shared, all of which built team spirit, optimism and a shared vision of heroic struggle against a uniquely evil, dedicated foe. This energy and enthusiasm was then propagated out into the comment threads of conservative blogs, the discussion groups on Tea Party websites and through e-mail chain letters passed virally among families and social circles. This process has established and disseminated an essentially warlike and combative tone to the 2010 Republican campaign that easily meshes with the similarly combative programming of Fox news and talk radio. The resulting mixture has then been transmitted again and again to a large portion of the Republican electorate.
There is simply nothing comparable to this psychology on the Democratic side. Large numbers of the voters who comprised the Obama coalition in 2008 simply do not see the 2010 elections as a vast do-or-die battle between two contending political armies struggling for control of the country and the future of America. They see it as a conventional off-year election where a patchwork variety of opposing candidates with different philosophies compete for office. As a result they simply do not have the high morale and fighting spirit of conservatives and Republicans. The broad and unifying “yes we can” spirit that was created during the 2008 campaign dissipated soon after the election. The massive Obama for America online organization sharply narrowed its focus to building support for specific elements of Obama’s agenda while other progressives redirected their efforts to promoting specific progressive issues and causes – a focus that frequently brought them into conflict with the administration. Both of these trends substantially diluted and dampened the broad “yes we can” unity and enthusiasm of the 2008 campaign.
The inevitable result was lowered morale, a literal demoralization of the Democratic base that is expressed in three distinct narratives

• That Obama has been a disappointment to his supporters and that not bothering to vote is therefore a logical reaction.
• That the Democratic candidate in a particular district is insufficiently progressive or otherwise unappealing and that not voting for him or her is therefore a reasonable reaction.
• That Washington politics is hopeless and that there is consequently no reason to participate in a useless exercise.

All of these reactions reflect a shared mental model of 2010 as a typical election and not a major and coordinated conservative assault on Democrats in a bitter ideological war. It is this notion of “2010 as just a normal election” that Democratic strategy must first and foremost challenge.

Read more…

The apparent defeat in the Senate of a long-awaited jobs bill (a.k.a., the “second stimulus”) is mainly being discussed in terms of the Republican strategy of steadily eroding the package and then killing it; or in terms of the impact on unemployed people who will lose their jobless benefits.
That’s all very real, but another consequence of this development will play out in state capitals and perhaps in state general election contests, thanks to the demise of assistance to the states that was much needed to avoid health benefit cuts and personnel layoffs.
Originally, the jobs bill was intended to extend the state aid contained in the original stimulus package. But as the bill was racheted down, the version limping onto the Senate floor included only $16 billion for a partial extension of the Medicaid “super-match” designed to prevent major benefit and eligibility reductions for the federal-state safety net health care program.
Unfortunately, 34 states planned on receiving that money, and its failure to materialize is going to create a whole new round of state budget crises. In many states, we can expect Medicaid cuts and/or reductions in other state spending, quite likely including layoffs of teachers and other public employees. That’s why most Republican state officials did not share the happy-talk of their brethren in Washington about opposing “bailouts of the states.”
State budget cuts will have a baleful effect on the economy, and vague conservative talk that “shringing government” will somehow produce private-sector growth is going to be exposed as illusory.
But there could be political consequences as well, as voters begin to realize that there is no big pot of money labeled “waste, fraud and abuse” that can be tapped to balance state budgets, much less to fund the high-end personal and corporate tax cuts that many Republicans continue to call for in the latest incarnation of the discredited theory of supply-side economics.
In other words, the anti-government populism that conservatives are counting on as electoral magic this November may lose some of its appeal when reality sets in. And Democrats should be quick to point out there is no such thing as a free “austerity” lunch.

The presidency of the United States is a very powerful office when it comes to foreign relations and other responsibilities that do not require congressional action. But once Congress–and particularly the filibuster-controlled Senate–gets into the act, the president’s power often fails him. Matt Yglesias uses the inability of the administration to get a relatively noncontroversial tax extension bill through the Senate to make this point:

The administration and Harry Reid’s office tried quite hard to get the votes together, but they just couldn’t. Not because they don’t have any leverage or the offices they inhabit are powerless, but because whatever leverage the White House has doesn’t change the fact that if a Senator really and truly wants to vote against cloture on a bill nobody can force him to do otherwise.
Now of course it’s true that there’s more Obama could have done. He could have gone really nuclear on this topic, but he didn’t. He left some tools in the toolbox, left some arrows in the quiver. And you can say the same about his advocacy for a “level playing field” public option and his advocacy for the Employee Free Choice Act and his advocacy for carbon pricing and his advocacy for a truly independent consumer financial protection agency and his advocacy for the full version of his stimulus bill and his advocacy for DOMA repeal and one or two dozen other things. But that’s actually the point. The White House’s failure to engage in a maximum, 100 percent push for each item on the Obama agenda doesn’t demonstrate that it’s a White House that’s time and again betrayed progressive values. It demonstrates that even though in each case you can always do more, you tend to decide to leave some arrows in the quiver because there are so many legislative fights and you can’t just be going nuclear thirty times a year.

Matt’s argument is aimed at progressives who think that Obama simply doesn’t care enough about their priorities to fight for them. But it’s also food for thought for pundits who are forever acting as though the president’s inability to wave a wand and work magic–say, on an oil spill–represents some terrible sign of personal weakness.

Open Left‘s Mike Lux, always one of the more insightful progressive bloggers on Democratic strategy, has one of his most perceptive posts to date, cross-posted at HuffPo.
Lux. a member of the TDS editorial board, begins by conceding that better polls indicate that the GOP is dominating the framing battle leading up to the November elections, with the meme that “big government,” controlled by Democrats has become “overreaching and ineffective.” He then addresses one oft-proposed remedy, that Dems move to the right, and provides a thorough shredding of the strategy:

This was the path followed by a lot of Democrats in the 1994 and 2002 elections, when the national tide was clearly moving against us. They played defense, started voting with the Republicans a lot, and ran a lot of ads bragging on how much they (a) disagreed with Clinton (in ’94) or (b) agreed with Bush (in ’02). This strategy arguable could have saved a few, but mostly it was a flaming disaster. Of the 52 House members and 8 Senators who lost in 1994, most of them were ones who went with that I’m-a-lot-more-conservative-than-the-national-Dems strategy. And the 2002 candidates who went that direction fared even worse- the only competitive Senate races where Democrats won that year were Landrieu in LA and Tim Johnson in SD. While neither of them ran as flaming liberals, they survived mostly because they put unprecedented amounts of money and effort into turnout out minority communities (Native Americans in SD, African-Americans in LA) in their states.
There are multiple reasons the almost-a-Republican strategy tends not to work. First of all, you tend to depress your base vote even more than it is already depressed. The biggest single factor in 1994, 2002, and the big defeats Democrats have suffered so far this cycle in MA, NJ, and VA was that the electorate has so many fewer of the youth, unmarried women, and minority voters that tend to vote strongly Democrat. They just aren’t coming out to vote. A candidate who moves steadily to the right isn’t likely to motivate those voters to turn out.
Secondly, moving to the right reinforces the negative anti-Democratic dynamic in voters’ minds. If the Democrat sounds like a Republican, and no one is articulating a Democratic frame, it’s a big problem for a Democrat to convince voters- swing or base- why they shouldn’t just go for the real McCoy, a genuine Republican. If no one is making the case why Democratic principles and policies are good, the electorate will keep moving right. Leaving the playing field re the essential framing of the race is never a good idea.
Third, a strategy of walking away from the Democratic Party keeps a Democratic candidate on the defensive for the entire election. The whole narrative of the race becomes “have they walked away enough from Obama/the national party/health care/the stimulus” ad infinitum. I have been volunteering for, working for, or consulting for candidates for about 40 years now, and I have rarely seen a candidate win who was on the defensive for the whole election. I understand how candidates react when they feel besieged and under attack, that you want to pull back the drawbridge and go into a defensive crouch. But if you set up the frame for the entire election in that manner- that even though I’m running on the Democratic line, I’m really not as much of a Democrat as my opponent says I am- you are likely to lose. The candidate, and party, on offense is the one that wins the vast majority of the time.

The better strategy, argues Lux, is to “to go on offense, and to reset the frame in this election” and then he provides this insightful distinction:

…There is genuine anger out there, but it’s not only anger at government or the Democrats; it is anger at the big corporate interests who have messed up our economy and who seem to control our government. The swing voters who are disillusioned with government are in great part disillusioned with the fact that government seems to be in bed with big corporate special interests. And the disappointment with Democrats by both swing and base voters not very interested in showing up to vote is that the Democrats didn’t deliver on the change they promised: the big bankers got bailouts and bonuses while unemployment stayed high; there seemed to be no change in the corruption that allowed BP to drill a faulty well with no decent plan in case of a spill; deficits keep going up while government contractors keep getting rich and regular folks don’t seem to be getting much of the benefit.
I think Democrats should be honest in recognizing those feelings, and not try to pretend the Democratic Party has done everything right in taking on corporate special interests. The frame needs to be about not just taking on big corporations, but taking on corporate corruption of our government…

Lux characterizes the 2010 campaign as “a blame election,” adding,

…Voters are in a foul mood, and they are trying to decide who to blame- or to put it in a somewhat more constructive way, who to hold accountable. Right now, they are leaning heavily toward that being the Democrats, since they control government and government hasn’t delivered jobs or the change that was promised.

It’s a painful truth to accept. But Lux charts a hopeful course:

…To change that inclination in swing voters, and to motivate their own disaffected base, Democrats need to be very aggressive in framing the election about cleaning up the corporate corruption that permeates our government.
It might not work, but it’s got a lot better shot than the I’m-kind-of-a-Republican-even-though-I-am-running-on-the-Democratic-ballot-line strategy that failed so miserably in 1994 and 2002. DC pundits and NYTimes writers like Matt Bai don’t believe a message going after big corporations works in modern America, but I don’t think they talk to enough folks like the ones I grew up with in the working class Midwest. Yes, there is anger at government and the incumbents who people believe have failed them. There is a feeling of bitterness that both parties have failed to deliver, and so we may see a third election in a row where the President’s party gets hammered. But the anger at corporations, and corporation corruption of our government, also runs deep. And if Democrats are brave enough to be aggressive about taking that corruption on, they could reap the benefit.
The Democrats have one chance to get this right. If they stay on defense, or are too tentative in their message, they will get swamped. If they gamble and take on the mantle of cleaning up Washington’s corporate swamp, they have a chance at doing a lot better than anyone thinks.

I think Lux’s prescription is right on time. The BP oil spill is providing vivid, horrific and daily reminders of corporate corruption to an unprecedented extent. Republican office-holders are providing tone-deaf gifts to Democrats in the form of their expressions of sympathy with BP and there is ample documentation of corruption in the Mineral Management Service under President Bush. If Dems don’t make the most of this opportunity to dramatize the connection between Republicans and “Washington’s corporate swamp,” we can expect the worst outcome in November. It’s the difference between riding a wave of discontent and being crushed by it.

The news for Dems is very good in Robert Creamer’s HuffPo post “Evidence Arizona Immigration Law May Be Fatal Mistake for GOP.” Creamer, one of the Democratic Party’s more astute strategists, reviews some recent polling data and finds Democratic candidates now even in the Texas gubernatorial race, pulling ahead in the Colorado Senate race and gaining in the contest for the California governorship — all because Republican immigrant-bashing is backfiring in a huge way. Creamer explains:

The passage of the Arizona “papers, please” anti-immigration law has forced Republican politicians around the country into a political box canyon that does not offer an easy escape. For fear of offending the emergent Tea Party – and other anti-immigrant zealots in their own base — they are precipitating a massive realignment of Latino voters nationwide.

Down in red-state Texas:

According to data released by Public Policy Polling (PPP), Texas Governor Rick Perry has lost his early lead over Democratic challenger Bill White and the race is now tied. The movement from a previous PPP poll in February comes entirely from Hispanic voters. PPP reports that:
“With white voters Perry led 54-36 then and leads 55-35 now. With black voters White led 81-12 then and 70 -7 now. But with Hispanics Perry has gone from leading 53-41 to trailing 55-21….there is no doubt the (Arizona) immigration bill is popular nationally. But if it causes Hispanics to change their voting behavior without a parallel shift among whites then it’s going to end up playing to Democratic advantage this fall.”
…As if to sharpen their anti-immigrant brand, last week the Texas Republican State Convention voted for a platform that included a plank calling on the state government to adopt a state law like the one in Arizona.

Up in Colorado:

PPP reports that its latest polls in Colorado show that incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennett has gone from tying his opponent Republican Jane Norton to a three-point lead largely because his lead among Hispanic voters has soared from 12 to 21 points.

And out in the Golden State:

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman felt compelled to back tough anti-immigrant measures to get the Republican nomination. Now her support among Latinos is hemorrhaging, dropping from 35 to 26 points from March to May. Since the primary, Whitman has begun to waffle on her tough anti-immigrant stand but the damage has been done – what’s more, it’s memorialized in videos that Democrat Jerry Brown is sure to loop over and over on Spanish language TV.

Creamer notes that the AZ “Papers, please” law is viewed by millions of Latinos as a direct insult to their personal dignity and “a litmus test that tells a Hispanic voter whether or not a political candidate is on their side – the critical threshold test of voter decision making.” He describes the GOP as playing with “political fire” and “permanent marginality.” Even more ominously for the Republicans, Creamer adds,

A few months ago, no one would have predicted a massive turnout in November among Hispanic voters. That appears to have changed…If a surge of anti-Republican Hispanic voters destroys the careers of enough politicians who thought that pandering to anti-immigrant fear was good politics, the whole political narrative about immigration reform will change.

Creamer predicts that Republicans will try to repair the damage after the elections, to no avail. “…In all likelihood it will be very difficult to get the anti-immigrant toothpaste back into the tube.”

Probably no one in the United States has a better handle on long-term demographic changes and their impact on politics than TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira. So it’s a major event when Teixeira releases a new study that consolidates most of the recent work he’s done on this subject, along with some new thoughts about the implications of demographic change for the strategies of the two major parties.
Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties, a working paper published by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, contains Teixeira’s most detailed analysis yet of the demographic trends that have long convinced him that we are likely to be entering an era where Democrats hold a significant advantage in national contests.
The big picture Teixeira paints is familar enough: the future electorate is currently being shaped by the growth of relatively pro-Democratic groups–notably minorities, college-educated (and especially post-graduate-educated) white voters, younger voters, and those with no religious affiliation–and the decline of relatively pro-Republican groups, most importantly non-college educated white voters. Geographically, Democratic success in “mature” and “emerging” suburbs is more than offsetting Republican strength in exurban areas, while Republican majorities in high-growth states are being eroded by the very elements of their population that are growing most rapidly.
But what can Republicans do to deal with an electorate that is less sympathetic than today’s? Teixeira suggests that moderation on cultural issues is particularly critical if the GOP is to strenghten its position among college-educated white votes, and particularly “millienials” who have recently entered the electoral picture. But more importantly, he says, Republicans need to offer voters something other than tax-cutting and antigovernment populism. It’s rather obvious that Republicans at the moment are moving in a very different direction than the demographic trends would indicate.
Democrats, on the other hand, are positioned well with their demographic coalition, but must show that their policy agenda can successfully address the country’s problems:

Conversely, if the Democrats fail to produce–whether through ineffective
programs, fiscal meltdown, or both–even an unreformed GOP will remain very
competitive despite the many demographic changes that are disadvantaging the
party. The next few years will tell the tale.

As Teixeira observes, the GOP’s current strategy seems to depend almost entirely on Democratic policy failures, along with turnout advantages that make their minority coalition more powerful than their numbers would suggest.
Now I suspect that most conservatives, if confronted directly with Teixeira’s findings, would object that he’s placing too much emphasis on trends within demographic groups as measured by a single presidential election, 2008, in which Republican policy failures, not the core message of the GOP, was repudiated. In other words, voters rejected the “big government conservatism” of the Bush administration, and are now showing they did not endorse a shift to “big government liberalism” under Obama. That’s an argument that is at least superficially plausible, but the trends Teixeira is talking about have been underway for decades, so writing off 2008 as a temporary reaction to George W. Bush is a dubious proposition, and there’s almost no evidence that fast-growing demographic groups are attracted to the current anti-government populism of the GOP. At the moment, at least, likely Republican gains in 2010 are attributable to very big turnout disparities and to the low-hanging fruit created by big Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008, not to some fundamental shift in the ideology of the electorate.
Some conservatives of a more apocalyptic bent seem to be under the impression that the events of the last two years–the financial sector collapse, double-digit inflation, TARP and other “bailouts”, the stimulus package, ObamaCare–are producing a massive conservative shift in political attachments similar to the pro-Democratic shift generated by the Great Depression. In other words, you can forget all the data and ignore all the long-range trends; we’re in entirely new political territory now.
That sounds a lot like wishful thinking among ideologues who have always been able to divine, beneath the surface and despite the facts, a conservative majority in the electorate which is always on the brink of being manifested once and for all.
So as a Democrat, it’s fine by me if Republicans want to toss all the objective evidence in the nearest trash can and put their faith in the proposition that 2010 likely voter tracking polls, not long-term trends, are the best evidence of where the country is going over the next few decades. But meanwhile, Teixeira’s analysis should remind Democrats that even the most favorable demographic landscape won’t produce electoral majorities if policies fail to improve real-life conditions in the country. Particularly for the party of public-sector activism, governing matters most.

Tunku Varadarajan of The Daily Beast, a conservative analyst, has a nicely succinct take on the President’s dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

Obama has reason to be delighted with himself right now: He has sacked a recalcitrant big-mouth; he has entrusted said big-mouth’s job to a certified hero and military star; and he’s taken that star out of contention for 2012, making his own re-election that much more likely, given the headless turkey that is currently the GOP.

You don’t have to buy into the dubious idea of a 2012 Petraeus presidential candidacy to see the move as a political masterstroke, if only because conservative idolatry of Petraeus means this is one move that the Right cannot attack.

Every once in a while you’ll get a statement of such unvarnished honesty from a politician that it takes your breath away. Check out this excerpt from a Politico interview with Sen. Lindsey Graham about his recent backtracking on climate change, which has unraveled many months of negotiations and placed any and all Senate action in question:

The two-term senator explained that the idea of increasing offshore drilling “resonated with people” back home. Once the BP spill took that possibility off the table, Graham figured he’d be foolish to jump on board with climate change legislation without getting his biggest ask.
“The problem is, the people I did business with, climate change is a religion to them,” Graham said. “This has been a business deal for me. They heaped praise on me when I was advancing their agenda. And now I’m re-evaluating and reassessing what I can and will do, and all of a sudden, I’ve become the bad guy. Well, I’m the same guy.”
“I think people somehow misread that I somehow woke up one morning with a message from God to go save the planet,” he said. “That never motivated me. What motivated me was an opening, a vacuum. You had EPA regulations coming. I’m a big nuclear power advocate. I saw the ability to put together a deal that would be unique and different.”

Now it’s not every day that a U.S. Senator boasts about his own cynicism, proudly identifies himself as an agent for a particular industry, and then mocks people with motives that aren’t so crass. But you have to appreciate that to a guy like Graham, letting anyone back home in South Carolina Republican circles think that he might just have a sincere interest in dealing with global climate change would be potentially fatal. Cutting a deal for the nuclear industry back home is acceptable; caring about the planet is not.

Yesterday’s one statewide primary (not runoff) was in Utah, where two contests of national significance played out pretty much as expected.
Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog who fell just short of the 60% of delegates needed to win the nomination at the State Democratic Convention last month, defeated retired schoolteacher and progressive activist Claudia Wright by a comfortable 68-32 margin. The rumored Republican crossover vote for Wright didn’t appear, and local progressives are probably satisfied they got Matheson’s attention before knuckling down to help him get re-elected.
The Republican Senate primary between entrepreneur Tim Bridgewater and attorney (and former SCOTUS clerk) Mike Lee was, as anticipated, very close, but Lee won 51-49, a margin of just under 4,000 votes. Lee fought Bridgewater pretty much to a draw in the major population centers of the Wasatch Front, and won the runoff with a 60-40 victory in southwest Utah’s Washington County.
The national resonance of Lee’s narrow win derives from its importance to national conservative forces, notably Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund (which became a campaign issue on grounds that DeMint was intervening in the state to secure a dumping ground for SC nuclear waste), FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Express and Erick Erickson of RedState. Indeed, some of Lee’s national supporters insisted on treating Bridgewater as no better than vanquished incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett, who finished third at the state convention and thus didn’t qualify for the primary.
As I noted in the runup to the Utah primary, the Lee-Bridgewater contest showed how rapidly the GOP is moving to the right, because supposed RINO Bridgewater held a variety of policy positions (including abolition of corporate and personal income taxation and the phasing out of several major federal departments) that would until recently have placed him on the far fringes of the conservative movement. And redefining conservatism to require ever-more-extreme positions is precisely what the out-of-state forces supporting Lee want to do.

Brooklynbadboy at Daily Kos flags a new DNC video clip and does a particularly nice job of framing it:

This is the second ad and it is much tougher than the first. The way to capitalize on Barton is not to ask him to step down, it is to make sure everyone knows Barton is what you’re going to get if Republicans win the election.
People talk about how they want to get away from negative ads, but I’m not buying it. The choice is binary. People appreciate knowing who stands for what. This fall, what they need to know is that the Republican Party is nothing more than an extremist group of nutcase fringe. If they get power, they will get back to destroying America just like they did under George W. Bush.
My hat is off, finally, to the administration for getting in gear. Keep it up. Attack Republicans. Every. Single. Day.

Here’s the ad:

That’s the spirit.