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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2010

Nasty As They Wanna Be

Much as I enjoyed romping through the craziness that is the Colorado Republican Party in an earlier post, I have a more somber feeling about the Republican contest in one of the other states holding elections today, my home state of Georgia.
I’ve posted a detailed preview over at FiveThirtyEight, which I wrote in as detached a tone as possible. Here I’ll say that the Republican gubernatorial runoff is one of the most stomach-turning I’ve watched in a while (with the notable exception of the bald-faced-lie extravaganza of the June 8 California GOP gubernatorial primary).
One candidate, “conservative reformer” Karen Handel, has now spent more than a year attacking everyone in her path as a scum-sucking corrupt redneck robbing the taxpayers. The other, former congressman Nathan Deal, has engaged in an extremist attack on Handel that reeks of archaic homophobia and misogyny. Listening to them, you’d never guess Handel is the political protege of the incumbent governor of the state, Sonny Perdue, or that Deal faced voters as a Democratic candidate for office eight times before switching parties the moment it became convenient for him. And that’s just what bugs me about the style of their campaigns; the “substance” is worse. Handel’s main platform plank other than supreme self-righteousness is the demagogic and irresponsible idea of abolishing the state income tax, without any proposal to replace the vast revenues that would involve, even though the state is nearly broke as it is. And to gain interest-group support against Handel, Deal has committed himself to every crazy position on social issues demanded by the Georgia Right-to-Life organization and other elements of the hard-core Christian Right.
It doesn’t help that half the likely 2012 Republican presidential field came running down to Georgia to participate in this abomination.
As a Democrat myself, I ought to be enjoying the spectacle, since it improves my party’s prospects in November. But sometimes shadenfreude‘s not so easy when your own friends and families could be affected, and the familiar landscape of politics is razed by campaigns so cynical that the only thing it’s possible for them to regret is to lose.


Mile-High Meltdown

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The Republican Party is campaigning with a stiff wind at its back this year, thanks to a terrible economy, ripe targets created by two straight heavily Democratic cycles, favorable midterm turnout demographics, and the famous “enthusiasm gap.”
But, in Colorado, it seems as if the Republicans are conducting a meteorological experiment to test the strength of that wind, as they stumble disarrayed into today’s primary. The race for the Republican Senate nomination is ugly: Candidates Jane Norton and Ken Buck are locked in a klutzy and tasteless competition to see who will screw up least. And the gubernatorial race … well, it’s never a good sign when both of your primary candidates are facing widespread demands to resign from politics altogether. What’s more, the candidate who fails to lose that primary will face not only popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the Democratic candidate, but also indignant third-party spoiler Tom Tancredo (who is in an unusually wrathful mood these days, even for him).
What the heck happened? How did the party end up looking so hapless in an election year that began with enormous optimism for a GOP sweep in Colorado?
Originally, former congressman Scott McInnis was cruising toward the gubernatorial nomination, while former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton was the odds-on favorite for the Senate nod. Both were looking good in the occasional general election trial heat. Yes, McInnnis’s November battle with Hickenlooper would’ve been difficult, but he had no particular reason to worry about obscure self-styled Tea Party opponent Don Maes. And Norton, who is very mobbed-up in national GOP circles (her brother-in-law is uber-lobbyist and longtime campaign strategist Charlie Black), held a solid lead over district attorney Ken Buck, another Tea Partier, in Senate primary polls for many months.
Then, things started to unravel for the frontrunners.
By May, Buck, famous for spearheading a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants, developed enough steam among Tea Party loyalists and other conservatives that Norton decided to skip the ritual of seeking ballot access via the Republican State Assembly. Essentially a state party convention, the assembly was an activist stronghold, and Norton’s decision threw the endorsement to Buck by default. Then came a far more painful blow: On the night of that gathering, Sarah Palin cruised into Denver for a big speech and failed to deliver an expected endorsement of Norton (according to some reports, she was warned off by purists in Colorado and elsewhere). Norton’s poll ratings began sliding steadily downward, and Buck picked up national support from Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund and RedState’s Erick Erickson. By late June, he was in the lead.
There was another surprise at the State Assembly. The lightly regarded Maes edged out McInnis for the convention’s endorsement. Yet Maes lost this advantage almost immediately, when he was charged with embarrassing campaign-finance violations, backed up by fines that wiped out most of his very limited funds.
That’s when the real weirdness broke out.


How It’s Done

Kentucky senatorial candidate Jack Conway delivers a great speech, with a tight balance between highlighting his record, articulating his vision and ferociously attacking his opponent. All in all, this one is an excellent instructional video for Dem candidates:

Clearly, Conway could win — with a little support from Dems, which can be provided on Conway’s ActBlue page.


The Movement that Passed HCR

Take a little break from mid term mania and check out Richard Kirsch’s post “What Progressives Did Right to Win Healthcare” at The Nation. While most of the reportage on the struggle to enact health care reform focused on the legislative lobbying, public opinion trends and policy analysis, Hirsch provides an insightful overview of the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition-building effort that was instrumental in passing HCR, and reveals some organizing techniques that should be transferable to other progressive movements. Hirsch’s post covers 10 aspects of the campaign, a few of which are presented here:

A detailed campaign plan: The HCAN Organizing Committee wrote an 865-page campaign plan incorporating: grassroots and netroots organizing; communications through traditional, paid and new media; coalition building including creating a new organization of small businesses; fundraising; and a new round of public opinion research focused on generating anger at the health insurance industry.
Resources to win: If there’s a single hero in this story, it’s Gara LaMarche, the President of Atlantic Philanthropies, which made a $10 million grant to HCAN early in 2008, assuring that we would have enough resources to launch the campaign in the crucial months before the 2008 election. The $51 million amount we raised between 2008 and 2010 from Atlantic and other funders, including our Steering Committee, was sufficient to run a campaign that placed us at the center of reform efforts.
Building on established progressive capacity: Rather than hiring outside organizers, HCAN built local coalitions in forty-four states, through three established networks: USAction, the Campaign for Community Change and ACORN. We funded seventy-five organizers who coordinated the work of paid and volunteer organizers from the local affiliates of our steering committee members and from other organizations that made up our 1,100-member coalition. HCAN’s online staff, working with MoveOn and others, added a huge Internet presence.
Local coalitions held thousands of public meetings and press events with members of Congress and made hundreds of visits to their offices. Regular call-in days generated hundreds of thousands of calls and faxes. When the Tea Party attacks came in early August, members of Congress called on the HCAN coalitions for help. While our response didn’t make as dramatic press coverage as the angry Tea Partiers, the truth is that the HCAN coalition, working with Organizing for America, turned out as many, and sometimes two to three times as many, people as the Tea Partiers, to Democratic Town Halls around the country during the three weeks before Labor Day. Grassroots organizing continued throughout the campaign, with candlelight vigils outside the homes of wavering members of Congress and thank-you events for members of Congress when they returned home after voting for the bill.

Hirsch’s account shows how progressives can overcome disadvantages like a 24-7 attack from right-wing media by taking a long-term view, refusing to get discouraged, thinking big and outworking the opposition. It’s an inspiring story, and one that contains lessons for progressives about the power of vision and commitment.


The Fat-and-Happy Public Employees Canard

One of the most important conservative memes this year has been that public employees (particularly at the state and local levels of government) have fattened themselves on high salaries and rich benefit packages, which means it ought to be easy to dismiss state and local fiscal crises and shrink government generally without any real pain for real (you know, non-public-sector-employed) Americans.
There’s only a grain of truth, and a lot of nonsense, in this claim, and the grain of truth involves highly valued public employees like cops and firefighters–and occasionally teachers–who are fortunate enough to benefit from collective bargaining rights and union representation.
Jon Cohn of The New Republic has a good rundown on the facts on this topic, including this passage:

While raw statistics show that public employees get more compensation than private employees doing comparable work, research that adjusts for variables like education has suggested otherwise. Earlier this year, a study with such adjustments by economists Keith Bender and John Heywood concluded that compensation for local and state workers was, on average, 6.8 to 7.4 percent lower than compensation for comparable private sector workers.
Also, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, many public employees don’t get Social Security. Overall, he says, “most public sector pensions do not provide retirees with an especially high standard of living.” Exceptions to this rule frequently include firefighters and police, particularly in New York. Then again, they risk their lives to protect the rest of us from lethal threats, which is more than you can say for CEOs like the former telecom executive who in 2007 retired with a $159 million benefit package.

The broader point, as Cohn makes clear, is that conservatives are trying to embitter struggling private-sector workers by making them resent struggling public-sector workers. If there is a “gap” between the economic security they enjoy, then it’s only logical to ask if that’s the result of public-sector employee luxury or private-sector employee impoverishment:

To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?
I would suggest it’s more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement–one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market–used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably. You might not be rich, but you wouldn’t be poor, either.
Unions, whatever their flaws, have delivered on that for their members. (In theory, retirement was supposed to rest on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions, and private benefits.) But unions have not been able to secure similar benefits for everybody else.

So let’s not just assume a race-to-the-bottom where all middle-class folk are expected to struggle is the natural state of things, particularly when the very wealthy are obtaining an ever-increasing share of America’s wealth and other blessings.


Argument for 60-Vote Cloture Threshhold Busted

This item by J.P. Green was first published on August 5, 2010.
Chris Bowers’s Open Left post, “Memo to Chris Dodd: We already have a unicameral legislature” provides one of the more succinct, lucid and compelling arguments for cloture reform yet presented. Bowers does a surgical shredding Senator Dodd’s case for keeping the 60 vote threshold for cloture. First up, Bowers shatters Dodd’s argument that the 60 vote requirement is needed to affirm the Senate’s unique role and the principle of our bicameral national legislature:

…You don’t need different vote thresholds to have a bicameral system. Consider:
1. 36 states have bicameral legislatures where no filibuster is allowed. Would Senator Dodd claim those 36 states do not actually have a bicameral system?
2. The 60-vote threshold is not in the Constitution. It just isn’t. That was never a requirement for a bicameral legislature.
3. If anything, the 60-vote threshold has created a unicameral system where the Senate has rendered the House irrelevant. Getting rid of the 60-vote threshold would give the two legislative bodies more equitable power.

I would add that the 60 vote cloture threshold is the foundation of gridlocked government, which is the primary goal of the G.O.P. I say this as an admirer of Senator Dodd, who has been one of the more reliable Democratic leaders on many key issues, but who, along with a handful of other Democratic senators, is simply wrong on cloture reform.
Behind the unicameral legislature nonsense, Dodd’s case is essentially fear-driven, the old ‘we’re gonna miss the 60 vote requirement when we are in the minority’ argument. And yes, that could happen on occasion. But majority rule — the foundation of genuine democracy — is really the more important principle at stake here, and if we can’t have that, a 55 vote threshold is a step toward it. The way it is now, urgently needed reforms that could help millions of people are being held hostage by the 60-vote threshold, and that is unacceptable for a any government that purports to reflect the will of the people.
Bowers notes some related reforms that merit more serious consideration, and which might be achievable in a shorter time horizon that that which would be required for reducing the 60 vote threshold:

…if we do a better job focusing on the wider range of proposed rule changes–such as making unanimous consent non-debatable, requiring the filibuster to be a real talkathon where Senators have to stay on the floor (as Senator Lautenberg has proposed), or switching the burden of the cloture threshold on the opposition (for example, 45 votes to continue a filibuster, rather than 60 to break it, as Senator Bennet has proposed)-then the interest and momentum for reform could increase as people debate a wider range of possible reforms.

Bowers concedes that achieving any reform is an uphill struggle in the current political climate. But he adds, “Senate rules are not going to stay the same forever. The rules have changed in the past, and will change again in the future” — a key point for progressive Democrats to keep in mind in working for cloture reform. Although the obstacles are formidable at this political moment, we have to begin somewhere.


Private Affluence, Public Squalor

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on August 3, 2010.
Just the other day I was wondering if it was a sign of hard times that movies and television shows seem to be featuring obscenely wealthy people, even more than is usually the case. Similarly, it seems like there are an awful lot of people running for office this year who have personal money to burn, having clearly done very well financially even as their fellow-citizens suffered.
I still can’t prove my theory about movies and television, but according to a well-researched Jeanne Cummings article in Politico, this is indeed a very big year for self-funding candidates:

About 11 percent of the combined $657 million raised by all 2010 candidates has come in the way of self-financing — nearly double the 6 percent measured at the same juncture in the 2006 midterm, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.
Of the $134 million raised by all Republican House challengers as of June 30, a whopping 35 percent of the cash came from the candidates’ own bank accounts, the analysis found. Among Democrats, the percentage of self-made donations was just 18 percent.
If such spending stays on course, the Institute’s Executive Director Michael Malbin expects the GOP challengers’ field to eclipse the 38 percent self-financing high-water mark set by Democrats in 2002. “This is or is near a record,” he said.

Much of Cummings’ article focuses on the relatively low success rate of self-funded candidates in prior elections, and explores different reasons for that phenomenon, from lack of self-discipline to specific issues over how the candidate got rich to begin with. Several well-known candidates this year could have some of those issues:

Ohio businessman Jim Renacci, who is challenging freshman Democratic Rep. John Boccieri, for example, is expected to be attacked for going to court to avoid paying taxes on $13.7 million in income.
In the California Senate race, Republican Carly Fiorina, former head of Hewlett-Packard, is being criticized for laying off thousands of workers and taking a $42 million golden parachute.
[Florida Senate candidate Jeff] Greene is coming under fire for the way he made millions off the subprime mortgage meltdown. Those criticisms could be especially powerful in a state hit hard by foreclosures. And his relatively thin connections to Florida and prior celebrity lifestyle in Los Angeles — Mike Tyson was the best man at his wedding — are also expected to be used to paint him as an unsuitable senator for the Sunshine State.
And in Connecticut, [Senate candidate Linda] McMahon is trying to finesse using the wealth from her WWE enterprise while still distancing herself from the scandals — from steroids to sexual harassment — that have plagued the professional wrestling industry.

But as Cummings makes plain, rich candidates invariably claim they’ll be independent because they aren’t spending anybody else’s money, and a lot of voters buy it. It’s another good argument for public financing of campaigns, but until such time as that reform is enacted, there will be plenty of people who look in the mirror one fine morning, see a future governor, congressman, senator or president, and decide to share their resplendence with the rest of us.


Unflattening Taxes on the Rich

As Congress prepares for a big debate on the fate of the Bush tax cuts, there’s an internal debate breaking out in progressive circles on how to deal with tax rates on the very wealthy, not just those currently in the top income tax bracket.
This debate-within-the-debate is being driven by two external data points: First, the fact that income inequality in the United States during the last two (or arguably, the last four) decades has especially manifested itself in the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder; and second, the fact that higher taxes for “millionaires” consistently polls well.
James Suroweicki explains the first point nicely in a recent column in The New Yorker:

Between 2002 and 2007…the bottom ninety-nine per cent of incomes grew 1.3 per cent a year in real terms–while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one per cent accounted for two-thirds of all income growth in those years. People in the ninety-fifth to the ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one per cent has seen its share of national income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three per cent of the nation’s total income. Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very, very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.
The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account.

Thus, framing the tax progressivity question as mainly involving rates for those with incomes well below super-rich levels misses the mark, and, as both Surowiecki and (for months now) Jonathan Chait have pointed out, misses a political opportunity associated with a widespread popular conviction that the very wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
In terms of the stakes involved in proposing something like a “millionaire’s tax” (essentially a new and higher top rate on very high incomes), Nate Silver has shown at FiveThirtyEight that it could indeed raise some pretty serious federal revenues.
But the political bonus of a “millionaire’s tax” proposal goes beyond the numbers: it would help expose the really dramatic gap between the two parties on the whole concept of progressive taxation.
After all, even as Democrats debate making federal income taxes more progressive, a growing and increasingly dominant segment of Republicans favor “flattening” tax rates to eliminate progressivity, exempting capital and corporate income from taxation, and/or shifting taxation away from income altogether and focusing it on consumption. And even for those Republicans who don’t embrace radical tax proposals, the “thinking” behind them is the rationale for the vague support for high-end or business tax cuts that’s almost universal in today’s GOP, in growing contradiction with conservative demands for debt-and-deficit reduction.
Anything that makes this contrast more vivid, on terms supported by big majorities of the American public, is a pretty good idea for Democrats. So I’d strongly recommend that in the debate over extending or eliminating Bush’s tax cuts for the top bracket, proposals to crate a new bracket for the “super-rich” ought to become an essential ingredient.


Democrats: President Obama’s recent speeches provide a coherent Democratic message for the fall. They are clear, serviceable and ready to be put to use.

In the aftermath of the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 Dems widely bewailed the superior “message discipline” of the Republicans. The GOP was credited with successfully guiding its members to focus on a small number of clear slogans and themes while Democrats tied themselves in knots.
In consequence, one key theme of a recent strategy meeting about the coming elections between Senate Democrats and senior staff and the Obama White House was that “there will be intense emphasis on keeping all candidates, offices and parties coordinated on the same message”
To reinforce this, wallet cards with the core Democratic message were distributed:

Democrats are on the side of the middle class. We are fighting to cut taxes for small businesses and middle-class Americans, end tax cuts for CEOs who ship American jobs overseas, and create clean energy jobs that can’t be outsourced.
Republicans are on the side of Wall Street bankers and CEOs. They support tax cuts for corporations who ship jobs overseas. But their economic policies failed under President Bush. Millions of people lost their jobs, the deficit exploded and the middle class got hammered. Now they want to return to the same failed policies of the past. We can’t afford to go back
.

While most democrats would agree with these statements, however, the simple fact is that they do not constitute a message campaign – they are, at best, an executive summary or thumbnail statement of a message campaign. Even when supplemented with bullet point descriptions of key Democratic policies (“end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”, “defend social security”) they still have almost none of the personal engagement or emotional power that a properly designed message campaign is expected to contain.
A serious political message campaign has to have at least four key elements – a narrative, a metaphor, a “case” and a rallying cry.

• The narrative tells a story that defines the “good guys” and “bad guys”
• The metaphor creates a vivid, visual image
• The “case” presents the core argument
• The rallying cry delivers the call to action

Let’s look at this year’s Republican message campaign to see how these four elements are handled:

• The Narrative — Barack Obama is a radical with a mysterious past. He was elected by a fluke and quickly began attacking basic American values and institutions. His actions have generated a vast grass-roots rebellion of ordinary Americans.
• The Metaphor – organized around the metaphor of the “tea party”. This highly visual symbolism pictures conservative Republicans as the modern embodiment of the original colonial patriots and contrasts them with an image of Obama as a would-be dictator like Hitler or Stalin.
• The Case — the struggle over Health Care Reform — both the conservative interpretation of the provisions of the act and their perception of the process by which it was passed — provide the overarching “proof” of the crypto-totalitarian and anti-democratic nature of the Administration’s agenda.
• The rallying cry — “this election will be the epic, decisive battle that stops the liberal/socialist juggernaut in its tracks”.

Most Dems first reaction to this outline will be a sense of frustration that they have been offered nothing comparably compact and organized as an alternative Democratic message campaign. Quite the contrary, in the major pro-Democratic political magazines, websites and forums, the majority of the commentary has revolved around a heated debate over the narrative of progressive “disappointment” or even “betrayal” by the Obama administration.
But, in fact, there is actually a very solid and workable Democratic message campaign, one that is “hiding in plain sight” as it were. It is being presented in the partisan speeches Obama has begun to deliver across the country. Those speeches contain all four of the key elements of a political message campaign that are described above.


Not The Best Night–or Week–for the Right

Tennessee’s primary yesterday featured a bunch of wild Republican primaries in which the accustomed dominance of the hard-core Right wasn’t always confirmed. In the gubernatorial contest, Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam smoked two rivals, congressman Zach Wamp and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who constantly warned he wasn’t conservative enough. Wamp tried to mobilize the Christian Right behind his candidacy, while Ramsey spent much of drive stretch on gun ranges.
In Wamp’s district, the endorsee of both the Club for Growth and the Family Research Council, former state GOP chair Robin Smith, lost narrowly to talk-show host Chuck Fleischmann.
In the open 6th District, perhaps the state’s most hateful contest, conservative activist Lou Ann Zelenik tried to make the race about the awful specter of Sharia Law being imposed on the good Christian folk of Tennessee via a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro. But she would up running a close second to state senator Diane Black in a result largely dictated by geography.
And in Jim Cooper’s 5th district, candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin (CeCe Heil) and Mike Huckabee (Jeff Hartline) lost to businessman David Hall.
To be very clear, it’s not as though moderation is breaking out in TN GOP circles. The 8th district landslide winner, Stephen Fincher, was endorsed by right-to-life and gun rights groups. Black’s campaign web page includes a long paen to constitutional literalism and the 10th amendment. Hall’s talks about his determination to fight “socialistic” government. And Fleischmann benefitted from a Huckabee endorsement and the services of Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, Chip Saltsman.
Haslam’s a big-time right-to-lifer who spent a good part of the campaign denying he had any interest in creating an income tax and trying to prove his gun-nut bona fides (he got into trouble in Knoxville once by supporting a gun buy-back program).
But all in all, it wasn’t the best week for those who think the GOP is a dangerously liberal institution that needs a hard shove to the Right, what with Mike Cox and Pete Hoekstra losing in MI, Todd Tiahrt losing in KS, and now Wamp, Ramsey, Smith, Zelenik, Hartline and Heil all bombing in TN. The Republican Party remains right-bent, but it’s good to know that its primary voters don’t always pull the lever for the shrillest, angriest candidate available.