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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: January 2011

“Damage Control” Can Involve a Real Fight

In writing this week about the hole Democrats have dug in terms of their numbers in Congress, and the considerable value of stopping Republicans from disabling the public sector for many years to come, I should probably have made it clear that a mission of “damage control” does not mean surrendering to the opposition, adopting its rhetoric and policies, or even seeking compromise. It does mean scaling back expectations for what Democrats can accomplish on their own in the short term, and adjusting strategy and tactics accordingly.
Indeed, the extremism of the contemporary GOP makes fighting Republicans, and insisting on solidarity in that fight from other Democrats, pretty much unavoidable. And even when the Right is on the offensive, defensive tactics must include positive messaging that makes clear the stark alternatives being offered by the two parties
I guess my attitude on this issue is heavily influenced by being from the South, where Democrats have had a tough time lately, and where Republicans have long been as extremist as the national party has become more recently. Some people look at the supposed “conservatism” of southern Democrats from a distance and conclude they are triangulating compromisers with no fight in their hearts. But up close, partisan politics in the South are typically pretty vicious, primarily because they revolve so often around very basic issues of principle, like the existence of universal public education, the legitimacy of progressive income taxes, the right to vote, the right of workers to unionize, and the most modest forms of separation of church and state. These battles ain’t beanbag, and the stakes are very high for the people Democrats claim to represent.
So let’s don’t confuse realistic objectives with a willingness or unwillingness to “fight.” We all know the most important fights are when you feel you have your back against the wall.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Are Republicans Serious About Fixing the Economy?

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It has been widely reported that economic growth and job creation will be the principal focus of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, and the president’s comments in recent weeks add credibility to those reports. At first blush this sounds promising: Not only would a speech along these lines track public concerns, but it would also invoke a goal that both parties ostensibly share. Most conservatives say they are gung-ho for growth; most liberals understand that without it, not much else is possible. This sounds like a formula for a productive discussion, and maybe even meaningful agreement, across party lines.
But is it? One of the dominant realities of our time is that while the political parties both endorse growth as a goal, they no longer agree on the means to it. I say “no longer” because a rough-and-ready bipartisan consensus once prevailed. After Dwight Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, his “Modern Republicanism” made its peace with the New Deal. During his eight years in office, he launched major public works projects (the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System), created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and expanded Social Security. Although Eisenhower’s economic advisors were not notably Keynesian and his administration systematically practiced frugality, he resorted to increased spending and budget deficits to fight the slumps of 1953-54 and 1957-58.
Shortly after taking the United States off the gold standard in 1971, the next Republican president, Richard Nixon, announced that “I am now a Keynesian in economics.” (The sentence usually attributed to him–“We are all Keynesians now”–was in fact uttered by none other than Milton Friedman.) What happened next is a familiar story: The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed the Keynesian consensus and paved the way for today’s polarized economic debate. The next Republican president, who came to power in no small measure because of that inflation, proclaimed in his First Inaugural that “government is not the solution to our problem.” An iron cord of ideological conviction connects today’s Republican officials to Reagan’s proposition. Most cannot bring themselves to admit that for all its flaws, the much-reviled TARP may well have forestalled a global economic collapse, or that the stimulus package probably prevented output and employment from falling even farther than they did.
The issue extends beyond the effectiveness of government responses to economic emergencies. There is a venerable American tradition–with roots in the thought of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln–that insisted on the link between public investment and economic growth. One wonders whether today’s Republicans agree. Do they believe that there is a zero-sum relationship between government and economic growth–that as government shrinks, the economy expands more rapidly? Or do they distinguish between productive and unproductive public spending?
These are not theoretical questions. The Republicans’ House majority must now translate its pro-growth rhetoric into real economic policy. The new speaker of the House has pledged to reduce domestic discretionary spending by $100 billion–more than 20 percent–in this fiscal year. That potentially places a range of public investments, including education, basic research, and infrastructure, on the chopping-block. And after President Obama submits his FY2012 budget proposal, it will fall to Representative Paul Ryan, author of the spending-cutting “Roadmap,” to craft the Republican alternative.
Republicans may argue that they do believe in government action to promote growth–namely, tax cuts. After all, Keynes himself recommended tax cuts in 1933, and John Kennedy employed them as a growth stimulus in the early 1960s. There are two things to be said about this: First, when households are badly overleveraged, corporations are flush with cash, and a substantial portion of increased consumption leaks out through purchases of foreign imports (all conditions that exist today), tax cutting by itself is likely to be less effective than it was in the early ’60s. And second, it is a basic axiom of public choice theory that simply increasing the amount of privately held purchasing power will do nothing to remedy the market’s propensity to undersupply public goods. So if you believe that public goods exist and contribute to economic growth, you must also believe in government growth-promotion strategies that go beyond tax cuts.
We will soon find out whether this generation of Republicans believes that there is any justification for public investment–or whether they embrace a literal interpretation of the economic revelation announced 30 years ago.


Republicans Boost the Deficit: A Farce in Four Acts

When Republicans brushed aside a couple of years of demagoguery about the transcendent importance of debt and deficits to push for an extension of high-end tax cuts at the end of the 111th Congress, the act of hypocrisy was rationalized by the usual discredited supply-side nostrums about tax cuts for “job creators” paying for themselves through economic growth and higher federal revenues.
Then before the 112th Congress convened, House Republicans took this “logic” to the next stage, exempting all tax cuts from budget offset rules, on the theory that any measures letting Americans “keep more of their own money” couldn’t possibly represent a fiscal problem for the federal government.
Now the entire GOP is dismissing the warning from the Congressional Budget Office that repealing the Affordable Care Act of 2010 would boost deficits even more by scrapping the health care cost containment provisions of that legislation. Why? Because everyone knows a socialist takeover of the health care system will boost federal costs and kill jobs by imposing burdens on employers. Who needs a detailed explanation of that assertion, or a refutation of CBO’s careful accounting?
So tax cuts by definition can’t be on the table in deficit reduction efforts, and neither can spending increases that Republicans happen to want. Act 4 in this farce is right on the horizon, when congressional Republicans announce that defense spending is off the table as well.
Deficits only matter to the GOP, it’s clear, when they can be attributed to particular kinds of spending that they want to slash anyway. At some point, their talk about fiscal responsibility needs to be hooted off the stage as a bad comedy with tragic undertones.


In Praise of Damage Control

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
We’ve all heard that Democrats are in for a very difficult two years. The new GOP majority in the House of Representatives will wage a campaign to disable health reform, financial regulation, and the EPA; stonewall executive and judicial appointments; slash nondefense discretionary spending (thus undermining the economic recovery); gut Social Security and Medicare; and launch investigations into every possible White House indiscretion–potentially leading to a vote for impeachment. Democrats’ only recourse will be to practice what Howard Dean famously derided as “damage control”–to abandon hope for big progressive accomplishments and hunker down until 2012, like the Clinton administration did after the Gingrich Revolution, defending government from the worst excesses of those who would like to eliminate it altogether.
There’s only one problem with this scenario: the time-frame. Politicos and pundits are used to thinking in two-year cycles, and it’s easy to convince oneself that, in 2012, Obama will be able to capitalize on an improved economy, favorable voter-turnout patterns, and a weak GOP presidential field in order to sweep into office with a renewed mandate. But that misses a big part of the picture. Even if Obama wins reelection by a comfortable margin, it’s most likely that the House will remain in Republican hands and Democrats will lose seats in, and perhaps control of, the Senate–and beyond that, Republicans will probably do fairly well in 2014. In other words, we could be looking not at two years of damage control, but six.
Consider the Democrats’ congressional prospects in 2012. Republican successes at the state level during the past two years have given the GOP an extraordinary advantage in the decennial redistricting process. They control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature–known casually as holding the “trifecta”–in 20 states, compared to ten for Democrats. They’ve achieved this trifecta in six of the eight states that will gain representation in the 2012 round of redistricting. (As well as in three of the ten states that will lose seats, compared to two for Democrats.) While Republican gerrymandering will be restrained by rules mandating a “nonpartisan” redistricting process in some states, such as Arizona and Florida, as well as provisions in the Voting Rights Act, this will still provide them with a far-reaching advantage. Control over so many state houses and legislatures puts them in a strong position to shore up the marginal seats they just won in states like Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina–as well as to destabilize Democratic incumbents who succeeded by narrow margins in places like Georgia and North Carolina.
We can’t be precise about how all of this will shake out. But it is reasonably clear that, to take back the House in 2012, Democrats would have to approximate the feat they pulled off in the banner year of 2006 while facing a changed and more hostile political map. Redistricting aside, a number of places where veteran Blue Dog Democrats lost in 2010–including three in Tennessee, two in Mississippi, and one each in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama–are heavily Republican districts that are very unlikely to flip back in the foreseeable future.
The Senate picture for Democrats in 2012 is not much better, for the simple reason that 23 of the 33 seats that will be contested then are currently held by Democrats, reflecting the 2006 landslide. To put it another way, Republicans could lose Senate races by a 19-14 margin and still recapture the chamber (or by a 20-13 margin if they win the White House). Meanwhile several Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch of Utah, Dick Lugar of Indiana, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and Olympia Snowe of Maine, will go into the 2012 re-election cycle more worried about right-wing primary challenges than about general election contests.
It’s far more difficult to predict what will happen in 2014, but we do know that the Senate class up for reelection will be disproportionately Democratic, since it swept into office during the wave election of 2008. Barring any retirements or deaths Democrats will be defending 20 seats and the Republicans just 13. Moreover, in 2014, the same kind of Republican-skewed midterm electorate that appeared in 2010, dominated by older white voters, will likely reemerge, creating another wind at the Republicans’ backs.
So what’s my point, other than to pour cold water on Democratic hopes for a quick revival after a really bad midterm election? It’s that progressives need to begin adjusting their expectations. Up until now, many Democrats have judged Barack Obama according to the hopes he inspired in 2008–that he might not only undo the damage inflicted on the country by George W. Bush, but end more than three decades of conservative ascendancy and usher in a period of progressive reform. We have been judging Obama according to our wish-list: the public option, cap-and-trade, repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And we have been disappointed when he fails to deliver.
That’s not the best way to look at the rest of the Obama presidency. Instead of hoping for a quick return to the box-checking of the 111th Congress, progressives will have to gird themselves for a long, hard struggle with conservatives–one in which avoiding defeat will more often than not have to stand in for victory. Today’s radicalized GOP is not focused on any positive policy agenda, and it does not share with Democrats the fundamental philosophical goals that make principled compromise a likely prospect. The Republicans who just took control of the House of Representatives are playing for keeps. The party’s goal for the next six years will be to wreck the public sector–fundamentally altering the social safety net, de-funding investments in our children and our economic future, and rendering the government’s regulatory apparatus deaf, dumb, and blind–and liberals must realize that preventing or reducing that wreckage is an essential, and even noble, task which we should learn to value if not love.
When the day does come that Democrats again enjoy big majorities in both houses of Congress, a robust economy, and a popular mandate to govern, it would be a matter of fundamental importance that the safety net, a functioning public sector, and an array of progressive commitments are still in place. In addition to what he has already achieved, that may well be Barack Obama’s legacy, and it would be a good one.


Make GOP Sens, Reps Explain Their Hypocrisy on HCR

Brian Beutler has a short post up at Talking Points Memo about House Dems use of the “motion to commit” procedural vote to compell Republicans to publicly announce whether they will be accepting the government health care plan provided to members of congress. Beutler quotes the text of the motion:

“Not later than 15 days after taking the oath of office, a Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner shall notify the Clerk of whether that Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner elects to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.”

As you might imagine, the Republicans voted the motion down in lockstep unity. A tell-it-like-it-is translation of their responses to the motion would be something like “How dare those dastardly Dems require us to divulge whether we accept government-provided health care benefits for ourselves, even as we deny it to the American people.”
There will undoubtedly be more such procedural votes from Dems as the House minority, as Beutler points out. Good. They should seize every opportunity to make the Republican account for their hypocrisy in taking government health care, while calling similar coverage for their constituents ‘socialism.”
Democratic members of congress are doing their part to publicize GOP hypocrisy about their health benfits. Now it’s up to Democratic activists, bloggers and rank and file to hound and badger Republicans wherever they make public appearances, for as long as they try to destroy HCR. Make them explain their double standard, as they hem and haw, stutter, dodge and prevaricate — there is no way for them to look good, no credible response they can make in defending ‘coverage for me, but not for thee.’ Always, always use the word ‘hypocrisy’ in confronting them, until it becomes a boilerplate question, even in the MSM.
But don’t stop there. Republican members of congress can only make so many appearances. Democratic activists should raise the hypocritical double standard on call-in shows, in letters to the editor, flyers in the community, emails to friends, facebook, twitter — all the digital platforms. This should not be a hard meme to propagate, because it’s embarrassingly true and easy to understand. Make their hypocrisy resonate until the last attempt to withhold funding for HCR has failed.
A couple of Republican congressmen have mumbled something about how they are “considering” declining the government health care plan. I think one or two has actually done so. Fine. They make the others look even worse, and themselves look like jailhouse converts.
Nailing the Republicans collectively and individually for their personal hypocrisy on HCR is not a substitute for making them explain their opposition to a bill that has several very popular provisions. Thus far, their explanations about how they would put the good stuff in a brand new bill have also been tortured, unconvincing and raise the dreaded spectre of reopening the whole interminable HCR debate. It’s a tough sell, especially if Dems play a strong hand in making them account for their hypocrisy at every opportunity.


Lessons Learned in 2010, Part 2: Managing a Big Tent Party Against a Small Tent Opponent

If the “fundamentals“–turnout patterns, the political landscape, and a bad economy–made big Democratic losses in 2010 inevitable, what could Democrats have done to minimize the damage?
The answer to that question is obviously one that different observers will answer differently. There are three challenges faced by Democrats in 2010 that I think most progressives would agree represented major problem areas: (1) Intraparty and inter-institutional divisions; (2) an intransigent and unified opposition; and (3) difficulties in formulating and conveying an effective message.
Intraparty divisions extended in two directions, with progressives expressing periodic dissatisfaction with the White House and congressional (especially Senate) leaders on both message and policy, especially with respect to relations with Wall Street, “bipartisanship,” health care reform, civil liberties, Afghanistan, and the late-session tax deal, while deficit hawks and Blue Dogs (categories which overlapped) demanded more bipartisanship, less ambitiously progressive legislation, and “cover” for Democratic candidates in vulnerable seats. Democrats from various parts of the party often expressed frustration with the White House for perceived disorganization, passivity, and insufficient focus on the economy, and there’s little question that House and Senate leaders and the president’s team had trouble coordinating with each other.
The sources of progressive unhappiness with the White House are pretty obvious, and go back to expectations raised during and immediately after the 2008 campaign for an aggressive administration that would reverse the policies of the Bush administration, redeem longstanding progressive goals on a wide range of issues, and reengineer the Obama campaign organization into an ongoing grassroots movement bent on practical achievements. The economic circumstances faced by the new administration in late 2008 made an immediate hash of many of these expectations, and the decision that avoidance of a global depression required major subsidies for, and cooperation with, the battered financial sector tainted Obama’s image among progressives along with other elements of the electorate.
Subsequently the struggle to secure enough Republican (and in the case of health reform, conservative Democratic and industry) support for the administration’s agenda became an ongoing source of friction between the White House and party progressives, particularly when such efforts seemed to secure diminishing returns. Yet conservative Democrats (in office, at any rate; grassroots self-identified conservative Democrats, like their progressive counterparts, remained much more supportive of the president than their putative spokesmen) increasingly shared the Republican charge that the administration had overreached in pursuing health reform and climate change legislation, and in seeking more progressive income tax rates.
It’s entirely unclear that Democratic defections in the electorate had much to do with the midterm results (as noted in the last post, the relatively low turnout of self-identified Democrats was largely attributable to demographic turnout patterns of long standing rather than conscious dissatisfaction), but the disgruntlement of activists and elected officials has an indirect impact on campaigns and a direct impact on messaging and legislative strategy.
One principle all Democrats should be able to agree on is that entirely legitimate efforts to influence Democratic leaders (from the president on down) and seek leverage should not stray over the line into threats, insults, or open opposition. Progressive charges of “betrayal” against the president on this or that issue had no constructive impact other than as an exercise in venting. Blue Dog efforts in Congress or on the campaign trail to distance themselves from the rest of the party and/or to form unilateral coalitions with Republicans were equally destructive. By the same token, occasional outbursts against “the Left” from the president or the White House staff carried the unsavory aroma of triangulation.
While there is no question that Democratic congressional leaders need to exercise party discipline (perhaps more than they have done in the past) on key votes, ultimately Democratic primary voters are the only arbiters of the boundaries of the Big Tent. With respect to self-proclaimed Democratic voices who are not exposed to the discipline of Democratic voters–pundits, former officeholders, and “experts”–the habit of unfriendly criticism and the echoing of Republican talking points (particularly from cozy sinecures in conservative media outlets) should be considered disqualifying, regardless of claims to represent Democratic principles or traditions.
Now I acknowledge there are some progressives who sincerely belief a Big Tent Party is incapable of competing successfully with an ideologically driven and unified Small Tent Party like today’s GOP, largely based on the vague, but to some self-evident, theory that politics is about noise, and the most harmoniously noisy voices win all debates. A parallel theory that focuses more on the content of party messages than on their unanimity and volume holds that political success is based on maximum party differentiation and conflict. These issues invariably lead to the second challenge that faced Democrats in 2010, the consummation of the movement conservative conquest of the GOP.


Pelosi and “Grassroots Bipartisanship”

Admidst continuing progressive angst that the president is addicted to bipartisanship and doesn’t understand he’s being played for a weak fool by an increasingly extremist GOP, an interesting voice emerged in USA Today: none other than former speaker Nancy Pelosi, who commemorated the handover of the House gavel to John Boehner with an op-ed entitled: “Democrats Ready to work with GOP.” The piece is a brief recitation of the accomplishments of the last Congress, and an expression of willingness to cooperate with the new Masters of the House on measures to revive and strengthen the American economy.
There’s nothing in the piece that expresses a willingness to surrender to GOP policies or priorities, not that anyone would particularly suspect Pelosi of such intentions. What she’s attempting is what in the past I’ve called “grassroots bipartisanship,” a combination of conciliatory gestures designed to provide a sharp constrast with Republicans for their obstructionist and extremist tendencies, and to lay down some markers on the broad goals Democrats have on which, theoretically, compromise with the other side might be possible, if they happened to share such goals.
In the current climate, “grassroots bipartisanship” is not designed to produce actual agreement with Republicans (though over time a few heretics might be pulled across the line). It’s instead intended to show that Ds and Rs have different basic principles and goals, not just different “approaches” to achieving those goals.
Pelosi understands that Republicans have a host of priorities much higher than creating jobs–reducing high-end tax rates, eliminating business regulations, decimating entitlements, disabling the public sector and its employees, etc.–and can’t even talk about creating jobs without first running through those very different priorities. So nothing is to be lost, and in the long run much can be gained, by making it clear Democrats share the public’s priorities and Republicans’ heads are somewhere else. This is certainly one way to reduce the impact of the MSM’s chronic tendency to depict every public policy dispute as a food fight in which both sides are equally at fault.


Lessons Learned in 2010, Part 1: Fundamentals Matter

With 2010 now over, and an entirely new and less favorable political climate clouding the skies in Washington and many states, it’s appropriate to take a quick but definitive look back at the political lessons of this last year.
After having mulled over the midterms for a good while, I’m convinced their preeminent lesson to Democrats is to avoid overthinking what happened on November 2.
It’s easy, after we all painstakingly followed every daily twist and turn in the Obama administration’s strategy and tactics during its first two years, to assign a great deal of political freight to mistakes it made or opportunities it did not embrace.
But the best starting point for assessing the impact of things Democrats did or didn’t do is to look at the impact of things beyond their control. And preeminent among those are the condition of the economy (largely inherited from the Bush administration) and the very different turnout patterns in 2010 as compared to 2008.
To boil a lot of data down to a simple conclusion, it appears that about half the swing from Ds to Rs between 2008 and 2010 was attributable to changes in turnout patterns rather than to changes in voter preference, as you might suspect when you see exit polls showing a dead heat in 2008 presidential preferences among 2010 voters (actually, given the well-established tendency of poll respondents to “remember” they voted for the winning candidate, the 2010 electorate would have almost certainly elected John McCain president).
Now it has often been asserted that the 2008-2010 changes in turnout patterns were themselves attributable to the mistakes of the Obama administration or Democratic congressional leaders–i.e., that the “enthusiasm gap” between Republican and Democratic voters (a turn of phrase often used as though “enthusiasm” is interchangeable with “willingness to vote”). But the counter-indication to that diagnosis is the simple fact that 2010 turnout patterns were fairly typical for midterms; what’s changed is that as of 2008, the tendency to vote Republican became positively correlated to age (at least among white voters), a pattern that persisted in 2010. Latino and (to a lesser extent) African-American turnout also tends to drop between presidential and midterm elections.
A less tangible but equally significant structural factor is the nearly universal experience of parties losing congressional seats in midterms two years after taking over the White House, a sort of voter reflex that has occurred in all sorts of circumstances. The only exceptions in living memory to the “midterm swoon” rule happened in 1934, the first New Deal election, and in 2002, the first election after 9/11.
Add into the standard midterm turnout patterns and the “midterm swoon” the “over-exposure” problem–a landscape in which a very large number of traditionally marginal House districts were held by Democrats after the very successful 2006 and 2008 cycles–and it’s reasonably clear in retrospect that major Republican gains in the House in 2010 were inevitable the day after the 2008 elections, regardless of the bad economy and anything in particular Democrats in office did or didn’t do.
But you can’t, obviously, ignore the economy as a factor in the 2010 elections; indeed, many observers, particularly among political scientists, consider it the preeminent factor. A thorough analysis done in 2009 by Sean Trende suggests that very high and persistent unemployment has regularly produced big midterm losses for the party in power (though there really aren’t enough examples to support any particular predictions of particular losses). Another probable indicator of the impact of the bad economy is the sharp break against Democrats in 2010 by independent voters, who typically had very high “wrong track” perceptions of government and low approval ratings of Obama, but didn’t exhibit much support for Republican policies or the GOP itself.
Some progressive Obama critics might well argue that perceptions of responsibility for the bad economy were fatally influenced by the failure of the White House to aggressively blame Wall Street or corporations. But outside the Republican base, most 2010 voters were far more likely to say they blamed George W. Bush or Wall Street than Obama for the bad economy, so it’s not clear much could have been done (other than producing a better economy) to insulate Democrats from a general “wrong track” tendency to express dissatisfaction by voting against the party in power.
So adding it all up–normal midterm turnout patterns, the natural reaction to a new administration, over-exposure of Democratic House seats, and the anti-party-in-power impact of a bad economy (regardless of “blame” for it), you can account for most of the Democrats’ midterm losses before even getting into an evaluation of Democratic policy proposals or messaging. Meanwhile, such ephemera as the relationship between Obama and outspoken elements of the progressive coalition claiming to represent the Democratic “base” are even more dubious as major factors, particularly when you look at the Obama’s consistently high job approval ratings from self-identified liberal Democrats, and the evidence that unhappy Democrats may have been more likely to vote than those pleased with Obama’s performance in office.
None of this is to suggest that policies and messaging, or strategy and tactics, didn’t matter in 2010, or that more mechanical factors like money and the eclipse of Obama’s 2008 mobilization effort didn’t matter, too. But given the vast attention paid to such factors as opposed to the structural issues I’ve emphasized here, any consideration of lessons learned in 2010 should prominently feature a much closer look at the fundamentals, which many Democrats need to understand precisely in order to grasp how they may work in Democrats’ favor in 2012.


Issa’s B.S. Showcased in Walkback

Political bomb-thrower Darrell Issa got his due in a WaPo editorial yesterday, which held him to account for his characteristically over-the-top attack on the President, calling him “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” When his charge fell flat, probably because no one, not even the President’s worst enemies, can cite even one instance of financial impropriety to enrich himself, Issa walked back and refocused his attack on the Administration, which he termed “one of the most corrupt administrations.” As the Post editorial said, “That is hardly more restrained or more responsible. It is in fact patently false.” The editorial continued:

Mr. Issa’s evidence for his assertion is – well, it would be an exaggeration to call it scant. “When you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
There can be disagreement over the wisdom of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the fund proposed by President George W. Bush in 2008 to bail out financial institutions and, eventually, car companies during the financial crisis. But under Mr. Obama’s leadership, TARP has ended up costing the taxpayer far less than originally anticipated; last fall the Congressional Budget Office estimated its eventual total cost at $66 billion. Similarly, it’s fair to argue that the stimulus was misguided or ineffective. But evidence of corruption in its administration is negligible, impressively so given the enormous sums involved.

As the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa’s integrity, or lack of it, will come increasingly into focus. If he chooses to exercise his authority as a hack ideologue, rather than a fair-minded, responsible public servant, he will earn the contempt of his more thoughtful constituents. As the Post editorial concluded:

Mr. Issa is about to be entrusted with one of the most serious jobs in Congress, armed with subpoena power reaching across the federal government. Oversight is a critical congressional function, one that too often has been abandoned. But Mr. Issa’s repeated, inflammatory rhetoric is not commensurate with a responsible exercise of that role. One of the first things over which the congressman needs to exercise better oversight is his own loose talk.

Mr. Issa, who CBS News has called “the richest member of congress,” cut his political chops in a failed 1998 campaign for Senate, in which he reportedly blew $10 mill of his own dough. Apparently he hasn’t yet learned that political bullying, whether with money or authority, often backfires.


Ten Memos to the President Counsel ‘Fresh Thinking’

You don’t have to be a political wonk to agree that President Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address could be the one that truly merits the overworked designation, “the most important speech of his political life.” In addition to tapping the usual sources for guidance and inspiration, the President would be wise to consider the insights of some of the ‘best and brightest’ outside his immediate political orbit.
Toward that end, The Washington Monthly has an excellent round table, which should be of considerable interest to all Democrats, as well as the leader of the Party, “What He Should Say in the State of the Union.” The forum features a broad spectrum of leading Democratic thinkers, including TDS Co-Editors William Galston and Ruy Teixeira; Heather Hurlburt; Will Marshall; Howard Dean; Michael Kazin; Theda Skocpol; Debra J. Dickerson; Jeffrey Leonard; Andres Martinez and Bruce Bartlett.
As Galston sets the stage for the forum in his essay:

The ten “memos to President Obama” that we present in this issue of the Washington Monthly are thus, for me at least, a replay of sorts. They are an attempt to solicit fresh thinking for a White House that needs it now as much as we did back then. Certainly the drubbing Clinton received in 1994 was every bit as bad as the shellacking Obama got in November, and the political road ahead seemed to us no less forbidding than it must to the current administration. The good news is that after listening to outside advice, Bill Clinton reconceived his presidency in the face of the Gingrich Revolution, and that reconception led, two years later, to his reelection. Barack Obama can do the same.

The ten memos are full of nuggets, which the President and his speechwriters could mine and sift for innovative ideas and strategies. In fact, all Dems could benefit from giving the round table a sober reading