An awful lot of the post-election discussion so far has involved insistent demands that President Obama and congressional Democrats “move” in this or that direction–you know, towards “the center,” or away from Wall Street, or towards the GOP, or into violent battle with the GOP. And that’s understandable; given the 2010 results, some sort of dramatic action seems appropriate.
But as E.J. Dionne points out in a column today, all this moving wasn’t exactly what Republicans did after they got beat in 2008:

In 2008, the largest number of voters in American history gave the Democrats their largest share of the presidential vote in 44 years and big majorities in the House and Senate.
How did Republicans react? They held their ideological ground, refused to give an inch to the new president and insisted that persistent opposition would eventually yield them victory. On Nov. 2, it did.
Yet now that Democrats have suffered a setback – in an election, it should be said, involving many fewer voters than the big battle two years ago – they are being counseled to do the opposite of what the Republicans did, especially by Republicans.
Democrats who stand up to say they were right to reform health care and stimulate a staggering economy are told they “don’t get it” and are “in denial”….
Funny that when progressives win, they are told to moderate their hopes, but when conservatives win, progressives are told to retreat.

But E.J.’s case for “standing” instead of “moving” also gets into the very important issue of what happens next, and where Democrats need to be when Republicans start making their own extremist agenda abundantly clear, particularly in the effort to repeal health reform:

The most politically potent attack on the health-care effort was not on the plan itself. It was the argument that Democrats should have spent less time on this bill and more on job creation. Every moment the Republicans devote to destroying this year’s reform opens them up to exactly the same criticism.
Moreover, reopening the health-care debate will allow the law’s supporters to defend its particulars. What, exactly, do the Republicans want to repeal? Tax breaks helping businesses cover their employees? Individual tax credits? (Yes, repealing the health bill would be a big tax increase.) Protections for people with pre-existing conditions or for adult children under age 26

So which posture better positions Democrats to take advantage of this Republican hubris? “Moving to the center” and begging for Republican cooperation in deconstructing the accomplishments of the last two years? Maybe “moving to the left” and joining Republicans in trying to repeal features of health reform (e.g., deals with provider groups or the individual mandate) that many progressives don’t like? Or standing still and letting the opposition fall into the pit it has dug with its ideological obsessions?
The desire to “move” in some direction or other after a political setback is strong and natural But on occasion standing your ground is the best approach. That is particularly true if those of us who have emphasized the structural aspects of the midterm election results are right. If the economy improves by 2012, and the turnout patterns change in a pro-Democratic direction, as they almost certainly will, then it’s the ground that will move, whether or not Democrats move on their own.

Mike Lux’s HuffPo post, “The Re-Positioning Tango,” which makes a good companion piece to Ed Kilgore’s “Matt Bai’s False Choices” at TDS, offers useful insights for Democrats in developing a sound strategy to rebuild our congressional majorities. Rather than cave on progressive principles to appease political moderates/centrists, Lux argues for helping specific groups in the Democratic base whose participation in the midterms declined, as did their support for Democratic candidates, including:

* Voters under 30 were 11% of the electorate in 2010 compared to 18% in 2008, and their margin shrunk from +29 D to +17 D.
* Unmarried women had about the same % of the electorate as in 2008, but their margin slid from +40 to +16. White unmarried women actually voted Republican for the first time since I’ve been reading exit poll data.
* Although their loyalty to Democrats only dropped slightly, African-Americans dropped from 13% of the electorate down to 10%
* Union households’ Democratic margin dropped 8 points, but even more importantly their share of the electorate dropped 6 in comparison to 2006.

Lux adds,

So before you accept the Third Way/Matt Bai argument that the base doesn’t matter much because they voted for us anyway, be extremely careful. The kind of numbers sited in the 4 bullets above, with both smaller shares of the electorate and a smaller % for Democrats in some of the most loyally Democratic demographic groups, is exactly the kind of shift that will cost you elections…this ain’t about positioning, folks, this is about giving all those folks — base and swing voters alike — some solutions on this economy. With the fiscal stimulus being politically dead as a doorknob, that solution is gone. We are going to have to come up with other approaches to help the middle class and those struggling to get into it

Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” goes on to discuss substantive reforms to protect jobs and stabilize the housing market, which is causing so much insecurity. He concludes, “Democrats can win the next election, but it won’t be by engaging the same stale debates about positioning ourselves in the middle, whatever that means. The way we do it is pretty straightforward: deliver real economic benefits to the working and middle class voters hardest hit by this economy. ”

So the co-chairmen of the deficit reduction commission appointed at the insistence of President Obama released their proposals today well in advance of the December 1 deadline for the full commission report. They did this, we are told, in order to preempt leaks, and perhaps in order to put pressure on the commission itself, which at this point is very unlikely to muster the required 14 of 18 votes for a deficit reduction plan that would be sent on to Congress.
If this is the Bowles-Simpson strategy, it probably won’t work. The proposals themselves are heavily skewed towards the Republican approach to deficit reduction, as noted by Jonathan Chait:

About three-quarters of the savings come from spending cuts. And the one-quarter that comes from increased revenue comes through an overhauled tax code with lower marginal rates and corporate income tax rates–that is, something that is a fairly good deal for conservatives on its own terms.

The spending cuts, moreover, include Social Security benefits cuts (via a different basis for cost of living adjustments and a delayed retirement age) that will be about as popular among Democrats as the bubonic plague. Without a Republican commitment to the kind of significant increases in taxes on the wealthy and on corporations that they’ve always rejected, and that are entirely missing in this proposal, there’s no way most Democrats will agree to that.
But preliminary indications are that GOPers will reject the Bowles-Simpson proposal out of hand on a very different ground. Check out this post from James Capretta at National Review’s The Corner:

[T]he most important entitlement decision in the entire package is the explicit endorsement of Obamacare. The Bowles-Simpson proposal would leave in place the entire trillion-dollar monstrosity. Indeed, many of its supposed cost-cutting recommendations would build on Obamacare’s flawed structure of government-driven cost-cutting through price controls. In particular, they would like to create what amounts to a global budget on health care, with the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) given the unilateral authority to hit budget targets with price cutting. This is exactly the opposite of what’s needed, which is cost discipline through consumer choice in a functioning marketplace.

Ah, yes, the ObamaCare obsession. Conservatives won’t even think about supporting the best deal they’d ever get from any entity including any Democrats if it doesn’t go along with their argument that health reform is the greatest threat to the federal budget, and to the country (never mind that independent experts, including the Congressional Budget Office that House Republicans will soon be relying on to estimate the cost of their own proposals, insist health care reform will reduce the budget deficit significantly).
I don’t know what if anything the full deficit commission will be able to agree on, but it’s reasonably clear the Bowles-Simpson trial balloon did not get far off the ground.

Yesterday I wrote that the impending collision between the Republican Party’s newfound interest in fiscal discipline and public support for the government programs from which major savings can be derived might well produce a “great pivot” in the country’s political climate.
The example of this dilemma that is likely to emerge first (aside from symbolic skirmishing over the public debt limit) involves Medicare. For one thing, Republicans are almost certain to go along with action during the lame-duck session to extend the so-called “Medicare doc fix,” a regular overriding by Congress of reduced reimbursement rates for providers, which runs out on December 1. This is the federal spending gusher that Senator-elect Rand Paul notoriously supports.
But even more importantly, Republicans are irreversibly pledged to eliminate the “Medicare cuts” contained in last year’s health reform bill; indeed, it is very likely this will be the first step in the GOP’s campaign to repeal the whole package. This is a very expensive proposition, since the reform bill provided for $400 billion in reduced Medicare spending over the next ten years. Some of those savings reflect an assumed reduction in medical inflation attributable to the entire reform package, but having demagogued about Medicare cuts, Republicans are not in any position to acknowledge that. And they are honor-bound to demand the restoration of the Medicare Advantage program, a privately administerered option insisted upon by the Bush administration which costs a lot more than traditional Medicare, and to scrap the provisions linking reimbursement rates to effective medical practices; these are the real “Medicare cuts” at issue.
Where’s the money going to come from? Nobody seems to know, since Republican spending plans are invariably described in vague terms like restoring federal outlays to 2008 levels, which is a goal, not a plan. It’s very unlikely Republicans can come up with anything like the funds they need for their Medicare promises via nondefense discretionary spending cuts, and as for defense spending, most Republicans want that number to go up (if only for a new missile defense commitment, though many GOPers want more troops in Afghanistan, and more than a few are panting for war with Iran and perhaps North Korea). And then there is the complication that Republicans may well win their fight for a total extension of the Bush tax cuts, which will inflate budget deficits even more.
In all likelihood, Republicans will get through the short-term Medicare dilemma easily enough, counting on President Obama to veto health reform repeal legislation, and issuing more vague promises of offsetting spending cuts (they don’t have to enact a budget resolution in the House until next Spring). Eventually, though, they will have to take one of three paths: (1) backing off their fiscal promises, as they did during the Bush years, which would produce a justifiable revolt from the party’s Tea Party faction; (2) proposing their own Medicare cuts in a form that can be defended as something other than cuts; and (3) just going all out with the proposition that government spending for seniors is privileged, and waging generational and class warfare against similar spending categories like Medicaid.
Option number 2 is already on the table in the form of Rep. Paul Ryan’s “road map” proposal to voucherize Medicare benefits, a massive change in the program that would only produce savings if effective benefits decline. It’s notable that Republican leaders in Washington, and Republican candidates around the country, started backing away from Ryan’s “road map” before its ink was dry; Ryan’s stuff is only useful as a symbolic indicator of GOP seriousness about federal spending, not as an actual plan.
Option number 3 is where I’d put my money right now. Medicare beneficiaries are the very core of the GOP’s political base at present; Medicaid beneficiaries decidedly are not. Moreover, as I argued last year, for all the pundit hilarity about people receiving socialized health insurance via Medicare railing against socialized health insurance, many of these folk think of their coverage as an earned benefit, not as any form of government largesse. So there’s nothing inherently implausible politically about the GOP just flatly defending Medicare (and for that matter, Social Security) while going after the lazy welfare bums under the age of 65. Some of you may have read Tom Edsall’s recent dark vision of an impending era of scarcity wherein politics is dominated by generational and class battles over who gets what from government. Thanks to the central position of older white voters in the GOP, and of Medicare in the federal budget, this nasty scenario could arrive a lot faster than even Edsall has imagined.

In the burgeoning post-election debate among Democrats, there are some very real issues to kick around, from Big Picture considerations like the relationship between the party and various social progressive movements, to strategic and tactical questions involving the newly emboldened and radical GOP and likely turnout patterns in 2012.
To provide oxygen for such debates, it’s helpful to reject efforts to frame the intra-Democratic challenge in ways that present false choices and unnecessarily create pointless fights. I’d like to drop an anvil right now on a New York Times column by Matt Bai that supplies nothing but poison to the common cup of Democratic discourse.
Bai’s main conceit is to suggest that the Blue Dogs are either prime perpetrators or innocent victims of the losses Democrats suffered last Tuesday. In his account, if you accept the former premise, you agree with Ari Berman’s recent NYT assault on the Blue Dogs, favor Nancy Pelosi’s retention as Democratic House Leader, and reject the manifest message of the midterm electorate. If you accept the latter premise, then you agree with Bai that Nancy Pelosi must give way to Steny Hoyer as House Leader and the Democratic Party must bend its knee and renounce its “liberal agenda.”
As it happens, I don’t agree with Berman’s blame-the-Blue-Dogs theory; nor do most Democrats. But the idea that Democrats must now “move to the center” in a way that repudiates much of the Obama agenda of 2009-2010 commands even less support. The Blue Dogs who lost last week were by and large outliers in Republican districts whose electoral demise was inevitable once the long-term trend against ticket-splitting converged with a pro-Republican wave spiced by anti-incumbent sentiment. You can argue all day long about whether the pro-Republican wave was caused by structural factors (including the economy) or Democratic policies, but in the end, it had little or nothing to do with liberal leaders like Nancy Pelosi, who did far more than anyone considered previously possible to accomodate “big tent” dissension in the House Caucus while getting legislation passed. Dumping Pelosi, not that it’s going to happen, would be a purely symbolic measure only satisfying to those whose analysis of the election is as mechanical–you must announce you are moving to the left or moving to the center!–as Matt Bai’s.
Am I being unfair to Matt Bai? You decide, after reading this passage:

[W]hile House Republicans have now managed to cobble together a majority that is more or less ideologically cohesive, history would suggest that the same feat isn’t so easy for Democrats, who have actually never succeeded in pulling it off. Even during the great heyday of Democratic government in the 20th century, when the party enacted Social Security and Medicare and civil rights legislation, its dominance was possible only because Democrats had shaped a majority coalition made up of Northern liberals and Southern conservatives.

You don’t have to be a historian to grasp that the coalitions which enacted Social Security, Medicare, and the major Civil Rights legislation were not the same, and were wildly different from any coalition that is possible today. The New Deal coalition that passed Social Security was mainly composed of northern and southern Democrats who were liberal on economic issues, and who diverged dramatically on racial issues; iconic racists like Theodore Bilbo were rabid supporters of the New Deal. The Great Society coalition that passed Medicare was similar, but included some northern Republicans. The Civil Rights coalition included virtually no southern conservatives in either party.
Today you could get rid of every single member of the Blue Dog Coalition and the Democratic House Caucus would be vastly more diverse ideologically than its Republican counterpart. Conversely, you could make Heath Shuler Speaker of the House, and Democrats would be more united than they were during the New Deal and Great Society eras. Bai’s whole historical analogy is ridiculous. We now have national ideological parties; one is progressive, one is conservative; one is tolerant of dissent, one isn’t. The limits of dissent within the Democratic coalition are debatable; the silly idea that Blue Dogs are being persecuted really isn’t.
Let’s move onto the real debates, please.

Ever since it became apparent that Republicans had a decent chance to win control of the U.S. House, it’s been equally apparent that real political power carried real political risks for this particular incarnation of the GOP. They’ve been incredibly lucky to escape responsibility for the economy and the fiscal situation created by their party from 2001 to 2009; that’s been the real gift of the Tea Party Movement: the claim that today’s Republicans are appalled at the record of the Bush-DeLay GOP, even though they support most of the same policies, and probably don’t have the political will to reverse the ones they claim to despise (who will be the first GOP leader to demand repeal of the Medicare Rx Drug Benefit?).
But going forward, now that they control the House and aspire to gain control of the Senate and the executive branch in the next election, Republicans will be forced to work for an actual agenda. And as Paul Waldman nicely explains today in The American Prospect, this can produce a great pivot in the political climate of the country, very fast:

As a long history of public-opinion research has made clear — and as events continue to remind us — Americans are “symbolic conservatives” but “operational liberals.” In other words, they like the idea of limited government, but they also like just about everything government does. Good things happen to the party that can successfully pander to both impulses, which is why we saw so many ads from Republicans…condemning Democrats for passing a big-government health-care plan because it would … curtail the growth of Medicare.
Perhaps they’re just being cautious as they get used to their new majority, but in the last week, Republicans have steadfastly refused to say what their professed desire to limit government would actually entail. Press them hard on what they want to cut, and they’ll answer “earmarks,” which would be fine were it not for the fact that a) earmarks do not appropriate new money; they merely direct money that has already been appropriated, and b) the value of all earmarks amounts to less than 1 percent of the federal budget….
If there’s one thing Republicans have been clear about, it’s their desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even here, though, they don’t want to get too specific. As you’ve no doubt heard many times, a bare majority of the public opposes “health-care reform” (or “Obamacare”), while substantial majorities favor almost all the major provisions of the law. Once again, Republicans can win the vague, general argument but not the specific one. Faced with the impossibility of repealing the entire act (which Obama would veto), Republicans have said they’ll try to dismantle it piece by piece. Try that, however, and they’re suddenly attacking not “health-care reform” but those particular things people like.
That isn’t to say Republicans will inevitably be punished for attempting to repeal the ACA. Pushing repeal will only be dangerous for them if Democrats make it so. Republicans will suffer if they’re attacked aggressively for wanting to reopen the Medicare prescription-drug “doughnut hole,” for wanting to kick young people off their parents’ insurance, or for wanting to give the insurance companies the ability to deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Those are all provisions of the ACA that have already gone into effect. The Democrats are hardly guaranteed to win the battle of ACA, but they have a shot if they make the right arguments.

Waldman goes on to note that House Republicans will have to write a budget resolution, and moreover, are virtually promising a budget showdown with the president, probably forcing a shutdown of the federal government. There’s no particular reason to assume that tactic will fare any better than it did when Newt Gingrich tried it back in the 90s. But that scenario, too, will force Republicans–and attentive voters generally–to make some sheep-and-goat distinctions between government programs and services that are essential and those that are not. It’s when those two judgments begin to diverge, as they undoubtedly will, that the GOP will begin to pay a high price for consciously promising an austerity budget that somehow won’t upset their own voters. Campaigning on a Big Lie–Big Government is a terrible threat to your liberties and your pocketbook, but Big Government doesn’t involve anything that you care about, dear voter–can cause a real boomerang when the lies have to be turned into an agenda.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira crunches some interesting numbers in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ and in the process shreds the conservatives’ most treasured myths about the November 2nd ‘mandate.’ As Teixeira explains, conservatives are spinning a dubious interpretation, in light of the more telling statistics:

…For them, the 2010 election was all about voters embracing conservative ideas on the economy, health care, and tax cuts. But the 2010 exit polls tell a different story.
Only 23 percent of voters blamed President Barack Obama for today’s economic problems. Instead, they blamed either Wall Street (35 percent) or President George W. Bush (29 percent).
Nor was the election a repudiation of the new health care reform law. Even among a midterm electorate with an abnormally conservative composition, about as many said they wanted to see the law remain as is or be expanded (47 percent) as said they wanted it repealed (48 percent).
Voters weren’t embracing the conservative position on tax cuts, either. A 52 percent majority of voters wanted to either keep only the Bush tax cuts for those with less than $250,000 or let them all expire compared to 39 percent who wanted to keep all the tax cuts.

A rather shaky mandate, indeed. Teixeira attributes GOP gains, more realistically to the economy, the structure of the mid term turnout and the vulnerable seats in conservative areas, factors which are assessed in clarifying detail in Teixeira’s and John Halpin’s new memo for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “Election Results Fueled by Jobs Crisis and Voter Apathy Among Progressives,” recommended for those who prefer sober data-driven analysis to hyperactive GOP spin.