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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: October 2010

There is an important inconsistency in the left critique of Obama’s political strategy – one that needs to be taken seriously because it will prominently figure in the intra-Democratic debate after the elections

Among the unfortunate consequences of the petulant White House sniping against the “professional left” is the fact that it has produced an understandable “circle the wagons” reaction and discouraged greater critical self-examination within the left itself. To a large degree, left assertions of the general form “if Obama had taken a more progressive stance on issue X, he would be more popular today” have tended to be accepted as largely self-evident rather than being subject to careful critical scrutiny.
Yet, even when viewed entirely from within a progressive-left perspective, there is an important inconsistency in this kind of critique of Obama’s political strategy – one which needs to be taken very seriously because this kind of critique will become a central part of the intra-Democratic debate after the November elections.
The inconsistency lies in the following:
On the one hand, left-wing critics of Obama are the most prompt and emphatic to reject the idyllic “civics book” vision of American political life as one big Norman Rockwell town meeting – an egalitarian utopia where every voter is equal and no individual has disproportionate power. On contrary left critics will invariably be the first to agree that the dominant social institutions in America — big business and the military primary among them — have massive, indeed, near-decisive power and influence in American politics and invariably use this power to tilt the playing field in their favor.
Yet when these same left critics turn to evaluate Obama’s political strategy, the constraints that this disproportionate power imposes on Obama’s choices are rarely cited as a critical or even dominant factor in his strategic decisions. On the contrary, it is striking to note how much of the left critique of Obama’s strategic choices is essentially psychological – Obama’s less-than-progressive decisions are most frequently attributed to his being too “timid”, “conservative”, “conciliatory”, “gullible in his choice of advisors” , “trapped in the D.C. beltway culture”, “afraid to stand up to powerful interests” or “unwilling to keep his campaign promises” – a mode of analysis which suggests that he actually has had essentially complete freedom to choose his degree of radicalism.
Rarely is explicit consideration given to possibility that Obama’s caution might be a calculated response to the threat of retaliation from major social institutions. Obviously, any particular concession Obama might make because of such a concern could still be judged to be a strategic mistake, but the left critique generally does not even try to distinguish between a concession motivated by concern about potential retaliation and a concession offered because of actual agreement with a conservative position. There is generally no clear conceptual distinction made between a strategic concession and a “sell-out.” All of the former are automatically defined as also the latter.
This leads to a very specific class of inconsistent arguments. Left critiques of Obama often argue that a more progressive or radical stance on some particular issue would have increased Obama’s political popularity but do not simultaneously evaluate the potential setbacks to his agenda that might have resulted if this same stance also provoked retaliation by the dominant social institutions
As a matter of both basic logic and political strategy, this is simply an inconsistent way of thinking. It is comparable to a military commander arguing for the potential benefits of a particular attack if it succeeds but omitting any mention of the potential risks if it fails.
Let us look specifically at the two major cases – Obama’s strategy with regard to big business and the military


Romney Campaign Disses Iowa

One of the most common insider assumption in American politics right now is that the Republican Party, having richly indulged the tantrums of its radicalized conservative base going into the midterm elections, will revert to its grown-up habits in 2012 and nominate for president someone like that boring but respectable grown-up, Mitt Romney. Never mind that Romney’s long and unrepudiated championship of a health insurance purchasing mandate is going to be a major problem for him next year as congressional Republicans treat the ObamaCare mandate as a devilish product of the slavedrivers of collectivism; the Mittster has earned the right to the nomination by running a decent race in 2008, we are told, and GOPers will not be stupid enough to choose a Palin or a Huckabee or a DeMint.
Maybe that’s how it will all come down, but as John Ellis noted, Team Mitt is not making things any easier for him, as illustrated last week when one of his advisors deliberately dissed the Iowa Caucuses, where Romney’s 2008 campaign came to grief:

After the 2008 debacle, one might have assumed that Romney would clean house and get himself a new team. No dice. Roughly the same team is still in place. And they’re busy making new stupid mistakes which make Romney’s nomination as the GOP standard-bearer in 2012 less likely.
Consider the state of Iowa, home to the nation’s first presidential preference vote (a straw poll attached to precinct caucuses). Iowa has played host to the GOP’s first serious presidential straw poll for as long as anyone can remember. And it will again in 2012.
Not so fast, says Mr. Romney’s legal advisor Ben Ginsburg, who may be the only person in the world who thinks Iowa will not lead off the 2012 presidential campaign voting. Specifically, Mr. Ginsburg is quoted as saying: “Whether Iowa goes first in 2012 is up for grabs in unprecedented fashion….”

This is no small matter. Political activists in Iowa, as in New Hampshire, are acutely defensive about their “first in the nation” status, and do not tolerate even a hint of a challenge to that status from presidential candidates. Indeed, their willingness to puniish candidates for doing so is the real source of their power to maintain the status quo.
So the Romney campaign’s apostasy is not going to go unnoticed:

Iowans will translate Ginsburg’s musings as follows: “Romney really doesn’t like us very much, doesn’t want to campaign here, thinks Iowans are too difficult and prickly, so he’s going to do everything he can to lessen our influence on the nomination process.” ….
[D]issing the first-in-the-nation caucus state is an astonishingly stupid tactical error. That’s what the Romney campaign just did.


Gubernatorial Dynamics

At pollster.com, Thomas Holbrook has a useful piece summarizing current polling averages for 29 of the 31 gubernatorial contests being held this year. According to his calculations, Republicans are favored to pick up no fewer than ten Democratic governorships, but Democratic are favored to flip five Republican governorships, giving the GOP a sizable but not extraordinary net gain of five.
Looking more closely at the data, it’s obvious that some of the turnover involves relatively predictable switches where open gubernatorial slots in strongly red and blue states are returning to type (a trend that Nate Silver noted some time ago). Oklahoma and Wyoming fit this pattern among red states (so, too, do Kansas and Tennessee, which were not included in Holbrook’s analysis since there has been no recent polling in those states). Among blue states, Rhode Island, Connecticut, California and Hawaii have open Republican-controlled governorships.
Another pattern which is hurting Democrats is the backlash against the party in power at the state level in marginal territory. That helps explain current GOP advantages in PA, MI, IA, and OH.
The good news for Democrats other than their ability to offset large GOP gains with some pickoffs of their own is that the closest races could break in their direction. Holbrook has Republicans in the lead in FL, IL and OH; Democrats have made recent gains in the latter two states, and Republican candidate Rick Scott in FL has extraordinarily high negatives that probably set a low ceiling on his support. WI, GA, SC, and TX are definitely within reach for Democrats as well, with unusually strong non-incumbent candidates running in all four states (in GA, the serial ethics and financial problems of Republican Nathan Deal are a real wild card). A third-party candidate could make blue state Maine a sleeper for Democrats as well.
In any event, it should be remembered that gubernatorial contests are more likely to reflect local conditions than congressional races. I’m reminded of 1998, a relatively bad year for Democratic congressional candidates in the South, when nonetheless Democrats won upset wins in gubernatorial contests in AL, GA and SC. The “wrong track vote” in a midterm election isn’t always about national politics.


Siliver Linings?

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on October 8, 2010.
There’s been an interesting exchange over at TNR between Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Bernstein on a subject that’s not discussed much publicly but that’s in the back of most Democrats’ minds: is there some sort of silver lining in the possibility of a Republican-controlled House or Senate? Cohn outlines three such potential silver linings; and Bernstein disputes them.
I tend to agree with Bernstein that Cohn’s supposition of enhanced Democratic unity and an exposed Republican congressional leadership in the wake of a Republican sweep is questionable.
But I think Bernstein is underestimating the extent to which the massive contradictions of Republican policy messaging will blow up on them if they control either House of Congress, for the simple reason that they will be responsible for drafting a budget resolution that cannot possibly accomodate their promises to reduce the defict and cut taxes without touching extremely popular programs or going after the Pentagon. Bernstein suggests they’ll just inflate the deficit as they did under Bush and blithely blame Obama. But the one clear policy implication of the Tea Party Movement’s rise is that deficit reduction, if not (as many Republican candidates are promising this year) an actual balanced budget, is extremely conspicuous in Republican messaging and cannot be discarded as it has been in the past. Nobody with an R next to his or her name is saying “deficits don’t matter” any more. That means a Republican-drafted budget resolution is going to either split the GOP ranks or force them into politically perilous territory on domestic spending cuts, with the 2012 Republican presidential field being forced to take sides on every controversial decision.
In any event, the Cohn-Bernstein discussion is missing a pretty crucial qualifier: a Republican takeover of the House or Senate should be judged as compared to the alternative: Democratic control of Congress by margins that make any effective action absolutely impossible. Yes, it matters who controls Congress in terms of the ability to control floor and committee schedules, investigations, and (in the case of the Senate) confirmations. But the extraordinarily methodical use of obstructionist tactics by Senate Republicans over the last two years really has limited the fruits of majority status. I don’t want to overstate this argument, but you can certainly make a case that the real stakes this November are about which party will preside over congressional gridlock, and be held accountable for it.


Once More, With Feeling: The Enthusiasm Gap In Context

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on October 7, 2010.

I apologize if this site has lately become “enthusiasmgap.com,” but for Democrats, properly understanding the turnout patterns we are likely to see on November 2–what they do and don’t represent–is going to be kind of important to the strategy chosen going forward.
Nate Silver has definitively weighed in on the subject, and reached conclusions that we’ve been offering for a good long while now: much of the “enthusiasm gap” between the two parties is structural, and has to do with the differential turnout patterns of various demographic groups in midterm elections (with Democrats currently more dependent than in the past on low-midterm-voting groups like under-30s and Latinos); and part of it is that a radicalized conservative base is indeed very excited by their conquest of the GOP:

The enthusiasm gap has more to do with abnormally high levels of Republican interest in the election than with despondent Democrats.
Gallup periodically asks a question about whether voters are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the midterms. When they did so in March, shortly after passage of the health care bill, 57 percent of Democrats said they were more excited than usual about voting in the November elections. This was, in fact, the highest figure that Gallup had ever recorded among Democrats in a midterm year (they began tracking the question in 1994). The problem for Democrats? Some 69 percent of Republicans also answered the question affirmatively. As I wrote at the time, “if the Democrats’ total was record-breaking, Republicans just blew the competition away in Usain Bolt-type fashion….”
Also, we should remember that the Democrats usually have some trouble turning out their base at the midterms, since they rely on constituencies, like young voters and racial minorities, who traditionally do not vote in large numbers in these elections. Their 2010 numbers, therefore, mostly reflect a return to normal (in fact, perhaps slightly better than normal). It was 2006, when Democrats were energized by the Iraq War and other perceived excesses of the Bush administration, that was the odd year out.

There are two big takeaways that Democrats must understand from the enthusiasm gap data. The first is that it’s a mistake to primarily assign turnout disparities to an insufficiently progressive agenda from the Obama administration. Maybe a different agenda would have been a good idea on policy grounds, or might have had a different impact on the congressional dynamics. But there’s really little evidence that the discouragement we see among progressive elites is that widely shared among rank-and-file Democratic voters, whose relative likelihood to vote or not to vote is more easily explainable by structural factors.
Second, Republicans may be benefitting today from the hyper-excitement of its radicalized conservative base. But they will pay a price in the long run for the sort of agenda and rhetoric they are being driven to. That will become immediately evident in the 2012 cycle, when GOPers are forced to disclose their extremist hopes and dreams for the country, in the context of an electorate that is automatically less favorable.
For those who simply can’t buy the idea that there hasn’t been a calamitious deterioration of support for the Democratic Party since 2008, it’s important to remember that the electorate we are likely to see on November 2 would have almost certainly vaulted John McCain to the presidency two years ago. The 2008 coalition isn’t dead; it’s quite literally not showing up, by the sort of small margins that only matter on election days.
And those who are engaged in GOTV activities this year should take courage in the fact that they are not only helping offset the impact of an excited conservative base right now; they are also setting the stage for a 2012 battle in which the political winds are very likely to change direction, even before Republicans finish celebrating whatever gains they secure on November 2.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Americans Are Turning Against Trade. How Can We Fix That?

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Every so often a confluence of individual events points toward an emerging reality. Today, that’s true regarding global trade. Consider the following from last week:
*On Monday the Wall Street Journal published a stunning but not surprising piece headlined “Americans Sour on Trade.” As recently as a decade ago, more Americans thought that free-trade agreements helped than hurt the United States. Last month, more than half said that these agreements were harmful, versus fewer than 20 percent who still think they are beneficial. The article noted that support for a policy of getting tough with China on the currency issue now crosses occupational, economic, and political lines: last week’s House vote to that effect gained the support of more than half the Republican caucus as well as nearly all Democrats.
·
*On Tuesday the Financial Times featured an op-ed by the redoubtable and respected economic commentator Martin Wolf. It began this way: “Has the time for a currency war with China arrived? The answer looks increasingly to be yes. The politics and economics of an assault on Chinese exchange rate policy are increasingly convincing. The idea is, of course, deeply disturbing. But I no longer believe there is an alternative.
·
*On Wednesday Stan Greenberg and James Carville published a Democracy Corps survey showing that attacking Republicans for supporting free-trade agreements and tax provisions that (allegedly) promote the outsourcing of American jobs is one of the two strongest arguments Democrats can make.
·
*Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner delivered a talk at Brookings in advance of this weekend’s IMF and World Bank annual meetings. His message was blunt: The necessary rebalancing of the world economy was “at risk of being undermined” by countries trying to prevent their currencies from rising in value. One consequence of this behavior, he said, was to depress consumption growth while “intensifying short-term distortions in favor of exports.”
The meaning of all this is pretty clear: The status quo is neither economically nor politically sustainable. If the United States cannot bring about a negotiated collective solution to imbalances in the world economy, we will be forced to act unilaterally, with incalculable consequences.
Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that “[t]here are, at the present time, two great nations in the world [Russia and America] which seem to tend toward the same end . . . . Their starting points are different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.” Tocqueville would not have been surprised that the conflict between Russia and America defined much of the twentieth century. It requires much less prescience to discern that the relationship between the United States and China will dominate the twenty-first. Much depends on the ability of both nations to keep their inevitable competition within the bounds of peace and mutual benefit. Developing a more sustainable relationship between our two economies is the essential first step.
Amid all the uncertainties of this process, which may require threats as well as more irenic forms of persuasion, one thing is clear: The faster we set our fiscal policy on a better path, the stronger our hand will be. Right now, the Chinese can argue that our savings deficit is at least as responsible for the trade imbalance as is their consumption deficit. Depriving them of that defense will ratchet up the pressure on them to change course.


NDN’s Simon Rosenberg: Midterm Outlook Improving

In yet another indication that Dems are picking up mo against GOP mid term candidates, New Democratic Network President Simon Rosenberg has this to say in an American Prospect interview by Tim Fernholz:

You’ve got trend lines where one party is dropping and one party is gaining — it’s indisputable at this point. If you’re a Republican right now, and you look at this environment, the party that’s dropping a month out usually loses. If you’re a candidate or a political party in a close election and you’re dropping a month out, and the other guy’s rising, you usually lose, because those dynamics are very hard to adjust.
Republican efforts to create an agenda were sloppy and showed the Republicans weren’t ready to govern. The whole effort of [House Minority Leader John] Boehner’s economic speech in Ohio, up through the recent pledge, really defined the Republicans as being a political party not ready for prime time. It gave the Democrats a more appropriate contrast to remind the public about a political party that had not really reconstructed itself. If the Republicans made a fundamentally different offering, the way [Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron] had in Britain, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But they doubled down on a political philosophy and an economic philosophy that did grave damage to the national interest when they were last in power. … If you look at the Gallup poll from two weeks ago, they asked a question: “Who do you blame for what went wrong with the economy?” Seventy percent of the country still blames Bush and the Republicans.
We know the election has shifted. There’s been a four- to six-point shift toward the Democrats. Do those trends continue? Do the Democrats pick up another four to six points this month? The most reasonable scenario now of what happens in the next month is that the Democrats claim another three to six points and end up either even in the generic or slightly ahead, and certainly ahead in the non-Southern parts of the country.

Rosenberg sees the MSM as a tad dumbstruck by the Democratic rally underway:

Now the wave model has to be rejected and something else is happening. … I’m not arguing that the Democrats are going to pick up seats. But this notion that the Democratic Party would have made a six- to seven-point gain in September defies so many historical understandings of what was going to happen in this election that the dramatic nature of what just took place, I think, is being incredibly understated by the media.

He sees major weaknesses revealed in the GOP’s midterm campaign:

…the Republican Party is still not offering solutions for the future, has incredibly unattractive leadership, is ideologically divided, has elected far too many fringe candidates, and is way over-reliant on outside plutocratic money, which I think in the long term is going to become really problematic for them, because if they win the majority, they will have won it based on the contribution of 50 to 100 really rich people, which is unsustainable for them as a political party in this Internet age.
…The Republican Party was psychologically unprepared for what’s going on right now. It’s amazing how silent the national Republicans are right now in the face of it, and the reason why is because every time Boehner or [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell go on television, it hurts them.

Rosenberg also has an interesting explanation for why Dems have seemed a little timid in attacking Republicans this year:

Part of what went wrong with the Democrats in the last two years is that too many Democrats have political Stockholm syndrome. Many Democrats grew up in an era with a conservative politics that was ascendant and center-left politics was in decline. What happened in 2008 was the conservative jailers left, and were defeated, the door to the ideological jail opened up, the sun was shining, the Democrats could leave, and they didn’t leave.

And Rosenberg believes the Great Wingnut Ad Juggernaut made possible by the Citizens United decision is programmed to backfire:

The other thing you’re going to see is that, as the Republican ads go up on the air, it’s going to motivate Democratic voters because it’s going to remind the Democrats how much they hate the Republicans. The ability for the Democrats to label them bad Republicans — just like those Republicans who hurt the country — is not a difficult task in the next month. And I think that’s Obama’s job in the last weeks.

Rosenberg’s take, coming from one of the more astute political analysts, is good news indeed.


Reality Check in Nevada

The Majority Leader of the United States Senate is currently locked in a tight race for re-election against an obscure state legislator once notorious for lonely, extremist positions. But though Sharron Angle has sought to clean up, or at least mute, her act since winning the Republican Senate nomination in Nevada, she can’t seem to stop herself from crazy talk.
Witness this latest example, from an AP wire story:

U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a crowd of supporters that the country needs to address a “militant terrorist situation” that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.
Her comments came at a rally of tea party supporters in the Nevada resort town of Mesquite last week after the candidate was asked about Muslims angling to take over the country, and marked the latest of several controversial remarks by the Nevada Republican.
In a recording of the rally provided to The Associated Press by the Mesquite Local News, a man is heard asking Angle : “I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States … on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan and the residents of the city, they want them out. They want them out. So, I want to hear your thoughts about that.”
Angle responds that “we’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe it isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it.”
“My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States,” she said. “It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.”

The two incidents Angle was talking about are, of course, completely imaginary–just made-up agitprop for Muslim-haters and for Christian theocrats who like to promote the idea that it’s impossible for the state to be neutral towards religion. The mayor of Dearborn quickly set the record straight:

Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly called Angle’s comments “shameful.” He said tea party groups inaccurately spread the word that his Detroit suburb was ruled by Islamic law after members of an anti-Islam group were arrested at an Arab cultural festival in June because a Christian volunteer complained of harassment.
“She took it as face value and maligned the city of Dearborn and I consider that totally irresponsible,” he said. “If she wants to come here, I will take her on a tour. I will show her we follow the Constitution just as well as anyone else.”
Angle, a Southern Baptist, has called herself a faith-based politician. Among her positions, she opposes abortion in all circumstances, including rape and incest and doesn’t believe the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.

If Angle is elected to the Senate, the level of extremism in that chamber will rise significantly, making Jim DeMint look almost like a representative of the mainstream. If Republicans win control of the Senate, Angle could actually chair a subcommittee. Let’s hope it’s not one that requires basic familiarity with objective reality.


Democrats: the issue of “secret money” behind the pro-GOP TV ad blitz can have a huge pro-Democratic “multiplier effect” beyond the obvious populist appeal. Properly communicated, the issue can make voters distrust the ads and ignore their messages.

Democrats have always complained about the effect of corporate cash bankrolling massive ad campaigns and the problem has become vastly worse since the Citizen’s United court decision made secret contributions from unknown sources essentially the most important source of funding for political campaign advertising.
The Center for American Progress dropped an elegant depth charge into this secret world by exposing the facts that the Chamber of Commerce – a major source of this money – does not even keep money from foreign corporations separated from the domestic funds it uses for political ads and insultingly dismisses all calls for openness by essentially saying “it’s none of your F-ing business.”
The details make it even worse, with Chamber employees giving pep talks about the importance of the 2010 elections to foreign members of the organization – even to foreign firms that directly benefit from the export of American jobs overseas.
This provides great ammunition for populist attacks on the tidal wave of secret spending. But Democrats will not be taking advantage of the full power of this issue if they restrict their criticism to this particular line of attack alone.
The emergence of secret corporate cash as a major last-minute issue in the election gives Dems the opportunity to reduce the effectiveness of all Republican advertising — using a fundamental principle derived from social psychology.
In general, Americans know that the advertisements they see on TV are not “real”, even when they feature testimonials by average looking people with a caption below them that says “not a professional actor.” Many years of familiarity with commercials have trained the audience to be able to maintain a basic skepticism– because they know the ad is paid for by the seller — but still entertain the idea that the message being communicated might nonetheless be valid. Generally, viewers do not cognitively categorize commercials as simply either “true” or “false” but rather as either “plausible” or “implausible.” The audience knows, for example, that the square-jawed cowboy praising his Toyota Tundra as a rugged ranch vehicle probably doesn’t drive one, or necessarily even like the machine. But if the commercial is well made, it can still convince the viewer that the Tundra is worth considering as a rough-terrain truck.
Political advertisements work in much the same way. Viewers know that the ads are all one-sided propaganda for the candidates and not “facts,” but they still allow themselves to be influenced by messages that seem sufficiently plausible or convincing.
One basic finding from social psychology, however, is that, if a viewers’ conscious attention can be diverted from the content of an ad to suspicion about the motives of the communicator, the effectiveness of the ad actually does decline tremendously. In effect, if the viewers’ skepticism is consciously activated, the usual “Well, who knows? I know it’s just a commercial but what it says still might be true” reflex is inhibited. The viewer’s attention becomes focused on the commercial itself rather than the message it delivers.
Since Democrats all over the country are now being swamped with a tidal wave of nasty attack ads funded with secret money, every attempt to make voters focus their attention on the secret money behind the ads – rather than on the words of the ad itself – can have a very significant effect. The way to most effectively execute this strategy is with messages that directly and dramatically challenge voters to actively and skeptically think about the commercials they see at the moment when they appear on the TV screen.
Here are several examples of the kinds of messages that can substantially increase voter resistance to secret money anti-Democratic ads.

• That TV ad you are watching right now – guess what? It was paid for by the same people who shipped your job overseas. Are you really going to take advice from people like them?
• If a guy came into your house wearing a mask and tried to tell you who to vote for, would you listen to him? Well, that’s exactly what a commercial paid for with secret money does.
• That TV ad you saw last night – the corporations who paid for it are ashamed to even put their names on it. Do you really think you should believe what the ad says?
• If a corporation won’t even put its name on a TV ad it pays millions of dollars for, shouldn’t you assume that every single thing it says is probably a flat-out lie?
• Honest TV ads at least let you know who paid for them. Ads that don’t aren’t honest. It really is that simple.
• A political ad that hides the identity of who paid for it is no better than a nasty comment about a girl written on a barroom toilet wall.

These are just examples. The general point they illustrate is that, to the extent that Democrats can make viewers focus their conscious attention on the ads themselves rather than the messages they communicate, they can significantly reduce the impact of this years’ secret money advertising.


Silver Linings?

There’s been an interesting exchange over at TNR between Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Bernstein on a subject that’s not discussed much publicly but that’s in the back of most Democrats’ minds: is there some sort of silver lining in the possibility of a Republican-controlled House or Senate? Cohn outlines three such potential silver linings; and Bernstein disputes them.
I tend to agree with Bernstein that Cohn’s supposition of enhanced Democratic unity and an exposed Republican congressional leadership in the wake of a Republican sweep is questionable.
But I think Bernstein is underestimating the extent to which the massive contradictions of Republican policy messaging will blow up on them if they control either House of Congress, for the simple reason that they will be responsible for drafting a budget resolution that cannot possibly accomodate their promises to reduce the defict and cut taxes without touching extremely popular programs or going after the Pentagon. Bernstein suggests they’ll just inflate the deficit as they did under Bush and blithely blame Obama. But the one clear policy implication of the Tea Party Movement’s rise is that deficit reduction, if not (as many Republican candidates are promising this year) an actual balanced budget, is extremely conspicuous in Republican messaging and cannot be discarded as it has been in the past. Nobody with an R next to his or her name is saying “deficits don’t matter” any more. That means a Republican-drafted budget resolution is going to either split the GOP ranks or force them into politically perilous territory on domestic spending cuts, with the 2012 Republican presidential field being forced to take sides on every controversial decision.
In any event, the Cohn-Bernstein discussion is missing a pretty crucial qualifier: a Republican takeover of the House or Senate should be judged as compared to the alternative: Democratic control of Congress by margins that make any effective action absolutely impossible. Yes, it matters who controls Congress in terms of the ability to control floor and committee schedules, investigations, and (in the case of the Senate) confirmations. But the extraordinarily methodical use of obstructionist tactics by Senate Republicans over the last two years really has limited the fruits of majority status. I don’t want to overstate this argument, but you can certainly make a case that the real stakes this November are about which party will preside over congressional gridlock, and be held accountable for it.