It’s been clear for a while that Republican congressional candidates this year have basically been divided by those who are screaming for fiscal discipline without being willing to say anything coherent about how to impose it, and those hearty few who are willing to come right out and call for destruction of such highly popular programs as Social Security, Medicare, federal aid to education, and environmental protection.
There’s a fascinating piece in the Washington Independent by Jesse Swick that shines a spotlight on the former group:

Republicans are expected to gain around 50 seats in Congress in next month’s midterm elections, largely running on a platform of deficit reduction. But interviews with a number of Republican candidates who are likely to join the House of Representatives in January reveal that while they have a wealth of creative ideas to cut federal spending, their plans are often lacking in details or far too limited to bring about the level of deficit reduction the candidates are calling for so forcefully on the campaign trail.

I’d say that’s putting it charitably, since “creative” in this context seems to mean “stupid;” “lacking in detail” means “empty;” and “far too limited” means “pretending to slay an elephant with a fly-swatter.”

[S]ome experts say that the areas in which these candidates are advocating cuts — mainly non-defense discretionary spending in the federal agencies — are precisely the places where cuts are the most difficult to find and the least meaningful in terms of deficit reduction.
The problem with the plans that focus on consolidating federal agencies and making them more efficient, said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, is they distract from real debates about the role of government. “The idea that we can simply rearrange things and reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies is engaging a lot of wasted energy.”
In addition, most candidates advocate taking spending back to 2007-8 levels, which, though politically expedient because it conjures up the pre-Obama era, don’t represent as significant a reduction in the deficit as candidates are claiming. “They’re trying to say, ‘Let’s go back to pre-stimulus levels,'” said DeHaven. “Unfortunately, that’s going back to the decade when Congress shot spending though the roof. And they’re only talking about non-defense discretionary spending, which is a very small portion of federal spending.”

But while Republican candidates are vague or just nonsensical on the spending side of the budget, they are very specific about demands to blow up deficits via tax cuts:

For all their worries about spending and deficits, GOP candidates argue for the extension of the Bush tax cuts, even though Congressional Budget Office estimates predict that a permanent tax extension will force the nation to borrow an additional $3.9 trillion over the next decade. The candidates argue that an extension would stimulate the economy, and that higher incomes would help offset the lost government revenues.
“The problem isn’t that we’re under-taxed,” said [Ohio Republican Steve] Chabot. “The problem is that we overspend. When you reduce taxes, most of that revenue will come back through the resulting growth in the economy. It happened under a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, and a Republican, Ronald Reagan.”

When math fails you, it seems, it’s always time to go back to the old supply-side delusion, which no amount of experience seems able to kill.
In college debate, we called a fundamental mismatch between the affirmative team’s indictment of the status quo and its specific plan for doing something about it a “plan-meets-need” problem. That could very well be America’s problem after this election.

If you are interested in reading a thoughtful piece that will distract you from the day-to-day banalities of politics, while providing a fresh reason to vote and volunteer for campaign activities, check out Thomas Edsall’s essay on the politics of austerity, which is in the latest print version of The New Republic.
Edsall begins with the questionable but much-subscribed-to idea that debt-and-deficits will overshadow U.S. politics for years to come, mainly because the economy won’t resume the kind of growth we used to be accustomed to for many years to come.
Once you buy that premise, then much of what he goes on to say does make sense, and it’s a depressing picture:

With resources shrinking, the competition for them will inflame. Each party will find itself in a death struggle to protect the resources that flow to its base–and, since the game will be zero-sum, each will attempt to expropriate the resources that flow to the other side. This resource war will scramble our politics. Each party will be forced to dramatically change its calculus and remake its agenda. And if you thought our politics had grown nasty, you haven’t even begun to consider the ugliness of the politics of scarcity.

In an atmosphere of austerity, says Edsall, Democrats will be forced to defend the less popular government spending programs, and Republicans will more-and-more openly operate as the party of anxious and resentful older white people who don’t so much want government to shrink as to make sure they are the only beneficiaries. This is Edsall’s way of explaining why Republicans this year are simultaneously posing as anti-government libertarians while swearing to protect Medicare; it’s just a matter of playing to their constituencies:

Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war–creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.

There’s not much doubt that’s true, or more generally, that today’s GOP, with our without racial undertones, is battening on the resentment of older white Americans that not only their hard-earned tax dollars, but their hard-earned entitlement benefits, are being threatened by Democrats representing people who are younger and darker than they are.
Edsall has few doubts about the likely winners and losers in a zero-sum politics of austerity:

There’s no doubt which groups will prevail–and which will fall–in these wars. We can already see that the politics of scarcity will inflict the greatest wounds on the poor. The political vulnerability of programs serving impoverished minority constituencies is self-evident. The suffering caused by these cuts is a tragic consequence of this new dynamic. We will not have conceived cuts in a spirit of the common good, or with any eye to creating sound policy, but out of a sense of gamesmanship and the mean-spiritedness that is integral to intense competition over a shrinking pie.

Now if some of this sounds familiar to older readers, it’s probably because the “politics of scarcity” was a standard theme in the stagflation-ridden 1970s. Turns out the United States was not, after all, condemned to an endless future of slow growth and bad choices. Perhaps Edsall’s view of the era ahead of us is off as well. But he’s absolutely right that the nastiness of Great Recession politics, and perhaps the sudden revival of GOP electoral fortunes, has something to do with the rescission of social solidarity and the reemergence of resource fights among highly self-conscious groups of Americans (including the wealthy, who seem as angry and aggrieved as anyone else). With virtually no consensus across party lines about how to conduct government and not just how but whether there is such a thing as “common good,” it’s no time to stand on the sidelines and hope for the best. The stakes, particularly for the most vulnerable Americans, are just too high.

At this late stage of an election cycle, it’s natural to pay attention to the most dynamic contests: those that are close, and where one candidate or another has made recent major gains in the polls. Indeed, you often hear about such candidates having “momentum going into Election Day.”
But as Nate Silver demonstrated rather convincingly yesterday, “momentum” is a term that is misused as often in politics as in sports.

When people say a particular candidate has momentum, what they are implying is that present trends are likely to perpetuate themselves into the future. Say, for instance, that a candidate trailed by 10 points in a poll three weeks ago — and now a new poll comes out showing the candidate down by just 5 points. It will frequently be said that this candidate “has the momentum”, “is gaining ground,” “is closing his deficit,” or something similar.
Each of these phrases are in the present tense. They create the impression that — if the candidate has gone from being 10 points down to 5 points down, then by next week, he’ll have closed his deficit further: perhaps he’ll even be ahead!
There’s just one problem with this. It has no particular tendency toward being true.

Nate then goes on to examine polling of every Senate general election race since 1998, and establishes there’s no clear relationship between gains made in one period of a contest and gains or losses experienced in the next.
As Nate acknowleges, there are sometimes factors which help a candidate improve his or her poll standing one week that could continue to operate later on. Most obviously, a candidate who hoards money until late in the campaign and then spends it is likely to make late gains. A candidate with low name ID who cuts a first TV ad is likely to make gains with a second TV ad as well. And many contests “tighten up” towards the partisan default position as voters begin to pay attention. But that’s not the same as saying that this or that candidate “has momentum” as though polling trends have their own inexorable logic and power.
One scenario where “momentum” does make sense is when gains by a candidate appear to make the contest more or less competitive than was earlier the case, driving financial decisions by party committees or donors. And obviously, there can be external events–whether it’s a change in the political climate or a candidate gaffe–that can drive the numbers in the same direction for an extended period of time. But these factors don’t appear to come into play often enough to make a major mark on the empirical data.
Primary contests (which were outside the scope of Nate’s study) may be different, if only because signs of candidate strength may be interpreted by voters as an indication of “electability,” which some voters value. But the bottom line is that there is no particular reason to believe that candidates who are making gains in the polls released today are going to keep making them between now and Election Day. When a pundit talks about candidate “momentum,” you should probably pay it no more mind than a sportscaster’s assertion that a football team scoring a touchdown has “seized the momentum.” You really can’t know that until the horn sounds.

Mike Lux has a morale-booster for Dems at Open Left:

…The polls coming out over the last 48 hours or so are giving Democratic optimists more numbers to buttress their case…Brown is back up in CA, Sink is back up in FL, Patrick Murphy has pulled ahead in PA, Kagen in WI is back into a dead heat- but they remain all over the map, and it’s harder to spot an overall trend. …
National patterns really stand out in the Senate races. That is why I am encouraged by what I am seeing in the last few days of polling. Democratic candidates in a bunch of different races around the country seem to be gaining ground, in most cases even though they are being dramatically outspent. Check out this pattern:
* WI. Russ Feingold has been down for a while, 8-10 down, and the two latest polls I’ve seen show him in a dead heat.
* AK. The little known and way underfunded Democratic nominee, Scott McAdams, has been stuck in 3rd place behind his two better known and funded Republican rivals, but he has climbed 7.5 points in the latest polling.
* PA. Joe Sestak is in a statistical dead heat in two polls out the last 24 hours. In one of those polls he is ahead by 1 point, the other by 3. He had been trailing Toomey by 6 points or more in most polling done over the last several weeks.
* KY. Rand Paul had built a lead of 6-10 points in most of the polling coming out recently, but Conway has come back to a statistical dead heat.
* MO. Robin Carnahan had slipped to 8-10 down in most recent polls. 2 new polls out the last couple days show her at 5 and 6 points down.
* NC. Badly outspent, Elaine Marshall has had to wait until the end to run TV ads, and had been trailing in the teens. With her up on TV, even though still being badly outspent, she is back within 8.
* CT. Richard Blumenthal has been taking scores of millions of dollars worth of body slam style attack ads from the queen of body slamming herself, Linda McMahon, and McMahon had pulled even in their race, but recent polling shows Blumenthal re-establishing a small but statistically significant 5-6 point lead.
I can’t put this in the same category, because the public polls are contradictory, but after trailing by double digits most of the race, Lee Fisher has pulled within 6 or 9 in his race with Bush’s former trade and budget czar. There’s another (less reliable in my view because they oversample Republicans) that shows the race going in the opposite direction, so in this race the surge is more uncertain, but given that Gov. Strickland and other statewide Democrats seem to be moving up I think it is likely that Lee is moving positively as well.

It’s not yet the rising blue tide that lifts all boats. Lux points out that Boxer and Murray are struggling in the very latest polls. But these two races appear to be exceptions in the larger context. Lux adds that the latest data from DCorps indicates an uptick in voter enthusiasm among Black, Latino, young an unmarried women voters. Good news from coast to coast — but let none of it allow Dems to be lulled into complacency about the urgency of mobilizing a record Democratic turnout in the next two weeks.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
No one really knows what the final numbers will be when the dust settles, but we already know the most important outcome of the November 2 elections: The strategy Democrats used to pass legislation during the 111th Congress will no longer be operative. Even if Democrats retain narrow majorities in both the House and Senate (a bet I wouldn’t take), Republican gains in the Senate will be too large to allow the Democrats to get to 60 votes by uniting their party and picking off two or three Republican moderates.
So the options for the 112th Congress reduce to two: either confrontation and gridlock, or a new discussion across party lines. The majority prediction inside the Beltway is the former, but as frequently happens I find myself in dissent.
To be sure, the majority can draw upon a lot of supporting evidence. An already polarized party system will become even more so; the new Republicans will be even more conservative, and the remaining Democrats will mostly be liberals. Lots of new Republicans in Congress will either represent Tea Party views or be beholden to its supporters, and veterans will be looking over their shoulders to see whether primary challengers are coming up behind them. In the early months of next year, anyway, conservative enthusiasms will find vociferous expression, and confrontation will predominate.
The question is what happens after that. After a fast start in early 1995, Newt Gingrich & Co. found out the hard way that they had been sent to Washington to check Bill Clinton, not to push their own agenda. When they refused to yield on budget proposals that would have imposed large cuts on Medicare and Medicaid, as well as education and environmental programs, and decided instead to shut down the government, the American people sent a loud signal that they had gone too far. It wasn’t long before the Republican leadership came to the table, to the dismay of their more rabid backbenchers, and some genuine accomplishments followed in 1996 and 1997.
Could history repeat itself, or at least rhyme? Well, rumor has it that while John Boehner will face an exquisitely difficult job of managing his coalition, he is determined not to repeat Newt Gingrich’s mistakes. And if his troops do manage to force his hand, the new tranche of conservative insurgents will discover that the people’s appetite for limited government remains … limited.
Once a modicum of sobriety is restored, Democrats and Republicans may discover that areas of agreement do exist. An energy bill that focuses on investments in new as well as traditional sources of power, and on technological innovation, seems within reach. So does agreement on a “mend it, don’t end it” reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which No Child Left Behind is the Bush-era version. It is more than conceivable (if less than probable) that the parties could agree on the modest package of adjustments needed to stabilize Social Security for the long-term without altering the system’s basic structure. (This would be more likely if the president’s fiscal commission is able to agree on a package.) And momentum is quietly building across party lines for a new round of fundamental tax reform to broaden the tax base and lower rates for both individuals and corporations, along the lines of the 1986 act. (Many conservatives and liberals have come to agree that much of what takes place under the heading of “tax expenditures” is in fact spending that dares not speak its name.)
Beyond these measures lie the issues that will require sustained presidential leadership. If President Obama hopes to redeem his pledge of doubling exports within five years, he will have to assemble majority support for a trade package that gets tough on China while moving long-stalled bilateral pacts to the finish line. He will have to persuade reluctant conservatives that many of their own supporters favor increased investment in infrastructure. If he wants to draw down troops in Afghanistan slowly, rather than precipitately, he will have to rely on Republican votes to replace dwindling support within his own party.
And if President Obama is serious about going down in history as a transformative president, he will have to address our country’s long-term fiscal challenges more comprehensively than he has so far. This summer, Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen stunned his audience when he declared that “[o]ur national debt is our biggest national security threat.” Sometime next year, we’ll find out whether Obama agrees, and whether he is prepared to reach across the aisle to do something about it.

David Brooks’s New York Times column “Don’t Follow the Money” provides an excellent example of an op-ed column that does a superb job of marshaling statistics and arguments to make a point. Expect to see it in future anthologies of ‘Persuasive Writing.’
Doesn’t mean he is right, however, as some of the responses to his column in The Times’ letters, indicate. Here’s an excerpt from Common Cause President Bob Edgar’s response:

…It’s clear that money counts in our elections. Since 2000, the average winner in contests for open House seats has outspent the average loser by at least $310,000, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. In races for open Senate seats, winners outspent losers, on average, in every year except 2002.

Mark Green, a former Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and NYC Mayor and author of “Selling Out: How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation and Betrays Our Democracy,” adds:

…But it’s a very big deal when anonymous special interests drop several hundred thousand dollars in targeted competitive House races or several million in swing states, as Representative Peter deFazio, an Oregon Democrat, and Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, have discovered to their consternation.
Mr. Brooks selectively argues that well-financed candidates like Phil Gramm and John Connally did poorly in their presidential races. That’s true, though one wonders whether he also thinks that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s money was irrelevant (only asking).
While independent or candidate spending is not the only or even the most important variable — message, economy, scandal can count for more — only someone who’s never run for office can theorize that money doesn’t matter.
Since Meg Whitman and Linda McMahon have invested a combined $160 million of their own fortunes in their campaigns — and candidates spend half to two-thirds of their time “dialing for dollars” — one wonders why they all waste so much money and time. Mr. Brooks suggests that candidates are foolish to seek and spend such large sums.
Really?

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald does a compelling job of shredding Brooks’s cherry-picked stats, and adds:

Given that all of this funding can be (and is being) directed to close races, and given that the vast bulk of this funding is completely unknown and anonymous (a five-fold increase in anonymous spending since 2006), it requires misleading formulations to depict these amounts as insignificant and trivial in the scheme of things. With his column today, Brooks seems to have relied on exactly that approach to make his point. Brooks purposely concealed from his readers that just these two entities alone were spending $140 million to shape election outcomes — most of which are from unknown sources — because that fact renders Brooks’ dismissal absurd on its face.

Brooks’s argument may apply better to primary contests, before the really big dough shows up. There will be high-profile exceptions, like the ones Brooks has noted. But, overall, the candidates who have less money behind them remain the underdogs.

I’ve been warning for a while that the 2010 midterm election is a political event that is sure to be over-intepreted in most conservative and some progressive quarters. Victor Davis Hanson at National Review has penned an advance spin on November 2 that provides an excellent case in point.
The main burden of Hanson’s column is to argue that since 2008 voters have wised up to Barack Obama’s deceptions, and are poised to do now what they should have done two years ago (talk about elitist contempt for voters!). You wouldn’t know from reading Hanson that among the intervening events was an economic collapse that took hold before and immediately after Obama took office, a development that would have depressed the approval ratings of George Washington. You also wouldn’t know that the stipulated decline in Democratic political standing is exaggerated by failure to note the difference between presidential and midterm turnout patterns, now and always (the electorate that will turn out on November 2 will almost certainly be one that would have, in fact, elected John McCain president in 2008).
No, Hanson’s convinced that Democrats are in trouble because voters are mad that Obama pursued a “radical” agenda after campaigning on a promise of bipartisanship:

Almost all the current style and substance of President Obama were clear enough in the 2008 campaign. But in that long-ago, dreamy summer of mass hypnosis, the excitement about our first African-American president, a biased media, Bush/Iraq, the September 15 meltdown, the lackluster McCain candidacy, and an orphaned election with no incumbent running all conspired to convince voters that what they heard and saw was not so disturbing — or at least that it would end once Obama became president.
So the 2008 campaign, as brilliantly as it was waged in Machiavellian fashion by Obama, will be reinterpreted in the context of the 2010 setback.
The voters are rebelling because they believe they have been had. They now think that they were deceived in 2008 into voting for someone who never had any intention of governing in the bipartisan manner on which he had campaigned.

Now Hanson can plausibly, if not convincingly, argue that many Obama voters were entirely unaware that his platform consistently included precisely the kind of health care reform initiative he pursued in office; precisely the kind of climate change legislation he’s pushed; and precisely the kind of spending initiatives he promoted in the stimulus bill and elsewhere. But he is not entitled to presume, without evidence, that the one thing voters heard was Obama’s promise to reach out to Republicans. It also should be obvious that “bipartisanship” is one of those things that Americans say they like in the abstract, but sometimes interpret differently in concrete cases. Indeed, Hanson is one of those Americans, since he seems to interpret “bipartisanship” as involving abandonment of Obama’s entire platform because Republicans opposed it uniformly. I don’t know where he was when Obama and Senate Democrats were conspicuously sucking up to Republican Senators on the stimulus bill (which wound up being smaller and more oriented to tax cuts as a result) or health care reform, but it’s delusional to think Obama insisted on partisanship as an end in itself (as, say, House Republicans did during the DeLay era, when they typically refused to entertain amendments that might attract Democratic votes and thus dilute partisan credit for legislation).
More to the point, by making bipartisanship the acid test of the Obama presidency, Hanson is certainly setting up Republicans for some embarrassing moments in the near future. Is there any chance a triumphant GOP would “reach out” to Obama in any important way if they make the expected gains on November 2? Will Republicans suddenly forget that the GOP “betrayals of conservative principle” so often demonized by Tea Party activists involved the few genuinely bipartisan initiatives of the Bush administration? Is there any chance whatsoever that a significant number of Republicans would risk destruction by agreeing to consider any kind of tax increase, however construed, in order to obtain a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement?
Now perhaps I’m missing something here and what Hanson is actually saying is that Americans want a conservative government, now and forever, and since John McCain was something of a RINO and Bush turned out to be one, too, then conservatives voted for Obama as the most efficient way to produce a turn to the right, via surrender to conservatives in Congress. If so, it’s just another way of saying that every election, regardless of the outcome, can be intepreted by the same theory of voters desperately begging for conservative governance and only screwing up when they are deceived. It’s certainly no stranger a theory than the conservative conviction that tax cuts for corporations and high earners are always the solution to every economic problem.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With all the talk about nasty or misleading political ads this year, it’s rare to focus on really good, really effective ads. But California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown has come up with one that is very effective without being nasty.
It features a long series of alternating video clips of current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republican nominee Meg Whitman uttering banal outsider-business-executive talking points in identical or near-identical terms.

This approach is effective on three levels. First, the incumbent is very unpopular; the latest Field Poll, in September, gave him a job approval/disapproval rating of 23-68, which is very bad. Republicans don’t like him much more than Democrats, which is one reason why Whitman has largely ignored him.
Second, the ad shows that Whitman’s efforts to display her campaign as a fresh start towards a “New California” (a term also used by the incumbent) represents the same-old, same-old: A wealthy neophyte promising to run the state as a business and touting his/her wealth as a guarantor of independence. Her depiction as echoing Schwarzenegger also reinforces Whitman’s reputation for running a sort of soulless Death Star campaign based on focus-group-tested bromides.
Third, and most importantly, the ad virtually forces viewers to compare the risk they would take in electing the inexperienced Whitman to the realities of the Schwarzenneger years. The first and last clips nicely capture this theme, showing Arnold and eMeg saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting [hoping for] a different result,” and, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Thus, the outsider running against the guy who first won statewide office 40 years ago is tied closely to the political status quo in viewers’ minds.
I don’t know if this ad, entitled “Echo,” will have much impact. But it will be in the back of a lot of minds on October 26, when the incumbent governor and both major candidates to replace him make a joint appearance at a “discussion” sponsored by California First Lady Maria Shriver. Team Whitman will have an interesting challenge prepping their candidate to provide not only a sharp contrast to Brown, but to the Governator.

It’s already election day in much of the country, as early voting begins or intensifies. And it’s useful from here til November 2 to keep an eye on George Mason University’s Michael McDonald, who has been a pioneer in the analysis of early voting.
Here’s a snippet from McDonald’s latest report at pollster.com:
What do the numbers tell us so far?

First, early voting continues along at a strong clip. If early voting continue at this pace, some states and localities appear poised to easily meet or exceed their 2008 levels.
Second, despite stories about an enthusiasm gap, registered Democrats have gotten off to a jack rabbit start in Ohio and Iowa, and are keeping up with registered Republicans elsewhere. The early voting period has become a marathon, so we will have to wait to see if the Democrats can sustain their sprint or if the Republican tortoise will win. This race ain’t over yet.
Third, the early numbers are not smelling so rosy for Democrats in Nevada. True, Democrats have an 9 percentage point registration advantage among early voters in Clarke County — home of Las Vegas — but this is not as the 21 point margin Democrats enjoyed in 2008. And they are currently behind in Washoe by 5 points, a county where they had a 12 point margin in 2008. Anecdotal evidence is that Tea Party supporters were out in force over the weekend for the opening of early voting, but that their efforts were not as organized as the Democrats. We will have to see if Nevada is a state where conservative enthusiasm can beat Democratic GOTV efforts.

According to McDonald’s own site, an estimated 2.3 million votes have already been cast for the midterm elections (and that’s a low estimate based on uneven reporting from the states). Some states report early votes in terms of registered voters by party, which is how McDonald’s reaching his tentative conclusions about Iowa, Ohio and Nevada. States under Voting Rights Act scrutiny typically report a host of demographic data about early voters, most notably minority status, and we’ll be seeing some of that any day now.

One of the most disturbing ideological views of today’s conservatives and the Republican Party is their acceptance of the idea that politics is literally a form of warfare and that liberals and Democrats can literally be viewed as “enemies.” On many occasions The Democratic Strategist has forcefully argued that this view is actually the distinguishing mark of modern political extremism.
But it is simply impossible to understand the “enthusiasm gap” and the frequent low enthusiasm of Democrats without understanding the military concept of morale. The critical fact that needs to be faced is that Democrats have a deeply engrained “culture of de-moralization” rather than of morale-building. Particularly after Democrats suffer setbacks or defeats, this culture of demoralization plays a critical and deeply destructive role.
In the military world, the term “morale” denotes a powerful mixture of passion, commitment, élan, fighting spirit, camaraderie and group cohesion. At the most basic level, it is what, throughout military history, separates a disciplined military unit from an untrained mass of peasants rounded up and dragged to the front by force who then panic and flee in disarray at the first burst of fire.
At first glance, the term “morale” seems essentially a synonym for bravery – the willingness to charge fearlessly into the face of enemy fire. For many whose only knowledge of war is literature, the civil war charges in Stephen Crain’s “The Red Badge of Courage” are the clearest image they can bring to mind.
This conception seems to fit reasonably well with the picture of war that is presented in a standard history book. In a history text, military campaigns generally appear rather straightforward – one side advances and the other retreats. On a typical map showing the German invasion of Russia in 1941, for example, the German drive for Moscow looks like one long and continuous series of forward thrusts. In 1944, in contrast, the map appears to show the Germans in one continuous retreat.
But when one studies military campaigns more closely, it becomes clear that this is not really what is going on. Throughout military history — from the battles of Roman legions to the panzers at the gates of Moscow — most military campaigns follow a more complex pattern.

• A military offensive pushes against a wide defensive line. In some places the advance stalls and cannot move forward, in others, the attack breaks through.
• In the areas of breakthrough, the offensive drives as far as it can but sooner or later encounters much stronger defenses – often a second prepared defensive line – and is forced to come to a stop.
• At this point the attacking army must dig in and prepare for a counterattack because the defender now knows where penetrations have occurred and can redirect its reserves to attack them. The fact that a counterattack is coming does not come as a surprise nor is it considered a setback: it is understood as a normal and expected part of warfare (during Roman military campaigns, for example, a legion would always build an elaborate defensive stockade every single evening to protect itself from attack, even after marching all day long.)
• In some places the new line created by the offensive holds against the counterattack; in others it breaks and is driven back. Once the line stabilizes along the front, the stronger side begins preparing a new offensive all over again.

Thus, seen in detail, a military campaign like the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 does not appear as a single continuous offensive but rather a vast series of small pushes and shoves – often fighting back and forth, over and over, for same town or few yards of terrain. The advances that look as if they were quick and straightforward on a map actually represent months of nightmarish days and nights of agony.
It is, in fact, hard to read the detailed accounts of individual units like platoons and companies in WWII without feeling a overwhelming sense of awe at the morale and dedication that was shown on all sides – the willingness to fight again and again, day after day, without any hope of a near-term victory.
This is the morale of a professional army- it is a deep and unswerving commitment to eventual victory, a willingness to suffer reverses, privation and death and to keep on going as months pass and seasons change with no sight of an end ever on the horizon.
In the particular circumstance of the aftermath of a setback or defeat, there are three basic ideas that military leaders make every effort to impress on their troops because they know these ideas are vital for maintaining a high level of morale:

• That setbacks and retreats are a normal part of warfare – they are a natural and inescapable part of the standard pattern of battle.
• That the failure of a particular attack or an order to retreat are not necessarily proof that the strategy employed was wrong. Taking calculated risks is an inherent and necessary part of warfare, and not all gambles can be successful.
• That casting blame or sinking into demoralization is not the proper response of a soldier to setbacks – in the military world these are considered reflections of weakness and defeatism, not justifiable frustration and anger.

Seen from this perspective, the idea that Democrats have a deeply engrained and profoundly destructive culture of demoralization now starts to come into clearer focus. Consider the beliefs that are implicitly reflected in the typical Democratic response to setbacks:

Read more…