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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2011

Beyond Civility: in the 1950’s and 60’s the modern politics of “talking points”, “sound bites” and “message discipline” had different names – “propaganda”, “thought control” and “brainwashing” Our standards of political discourse have been deeply degraded

by James Vega
Democrats who grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s often feel a certain subtle disquiet when talking to politically active Dems who came of age during or after the 1980’s. The latter generally accept the modern world of prepared “talking points”, “sound bites” and “message discipline” as the “new normal” of political activity. To them, the hyper-partisan ideological clash of dueling frames and completely incompatible alternate realities simply “is” what American politics is about.
Read the entire memo.


A “common-sense populist” Democratic Communication Strategy for Re-building Public Trust in Government.

by Andrew Levison
Stan Greenberg provided a particularly cogent description of the profound political problem that the decline in trust of government poses for the Democratic coalition:

There is a new reality that Democrats must deal with if they are to be successful going forward. In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in
government, Republicans have undermined Americans’ confidence in the ability of
government to play a role in solving America’s problems. Democrats will not make
sustainable gains unless they are able to restore the public’s confidence in its capacity
to act through government.

Download the entire memo.


Protest Song Has Echoes for 2011

When it comes to messaging directly to the public, one strong protest song can sometimes do the work of ten good political speeches, which is why The Nation is asking readers to submit the name of “your all-time favorite protest song” on this form. (Nation writer Peter Rothberg has a pretty good list here to joggle the memory). It’s a tough call with so many great protest songs, but I don’t see how you can do much better in terms of relevance to the current political moment than this prescient little ditty, penned by a reluctantly prophetic songwriter, Iris Dement and first recorded by her in 1996:

When Tampa community radio station WMNF played the song back in 1997, Republican state Senator John Grant reportedly got so ticked off that he pulled $104,000 of the station’s public funding. Over the next day and a half Florida listeners raised $122,000 for the station in an emergency appeal.


POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS – APRIL 2011

from PS: Political Science & Politics
The 2010 Elections: Why Did Political Science Forecasts Go Awry?
David W. Brady, Morris P. Fiorina and Arjun S. Wilkins
In President Obama’s words, the Democratic Party experienced a “shellacking” in the 2010 elections. In particular, the net loss of 63 House seats was the biggest midterm loss suffered by a party since 1938–the largest in the lifetimes of approximately 93% of the American population.
Affective Forecasting Errors in the 2008 Election: Underpredicting Happiness
Catherine J. Norris, Amanda G. Dumville and Dean P. Lacy
Individuals tend to be very bad at predicting their emotional responses to future events, often overestimating both the intensity and duration of their responses, particularly to negative events. The authors studied affective forecasting errors in the 2008 election in a large sample of undergraduates at Dartmouth College. Replicating past research, McCain supporters overpredicted their negative affect in response to the (future) election of Barack Obama. Obama supporters, however, underpredicted their happiness in response to his victory. Results are discussed with reference to mechanisms proposed to underlie the impact bias, as well as the unique circumstances surrounding this historic election season.
The Political Relevance of Emotions: “Reassessing” Revisited
Ted Brader
Ladd and Lenz (2008) question a central claim of affective intelligence theory (AIT), namely that anxiety affects political judgments indirectly by reducing the role of predispositions and increasing the role of contemporary information. They claim that alternative hypotheses, especially the notion that emotions are simply rationalizations of political preferences, better explain the role of emotion in politics. Their ultimate conclusions, however, rest on an overly narrow view of both theory and evidence. Even if one accepts Ladd and Lenz’s reanalysis of survey data, there is insufficient evidence to cast aside either AIT or the hypothesis that anxiety affects the mode of political judgment. AIT explains a broad range of political relationships that are unchallenged by the reassessment and which cannot be explained by the offered alternatives. Moreover, numerous experimental studies reject the alternative explanations in favor of an exogenous, often interactive role for anxiety. AIT will surely require amendment, if not abandonment, someday. Competing theories of emotion already exist and, unlike the alternative championed by Ladd and Lenz, these theories too suggest a meaningful role for emotion in political judgment and behavior. For now, given all of the research to date, AIT is a robust competitor, scarcely in need of being “salvaged.” Burgeoning research on the political relevance of emotions will benefit from further debates, replications, and extensions, as long as new claims and evidence are put in proper perspective.
Does Anxiety Improve Voters’ Decision Making?
Jonathan McDonald Ladd and Gabriel S. Lenz
Affective Intelligence (AI) theory proposes to answer a fundamental question about democracy: how it succeeds even though most citizens pay little attention to politics. AI contends that, when circumstances generate sufficient anxiety, citizens make informed and thoughtful political decisions. In Ladd and Lenz (2008), we showed that two simpler depictions of anxiety’s role can explain the vote interactions that apparently support AI. Here, we again replicate Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen’s (2000)’s voting model, which they contend supports AI, and again show that it is vulnerable to these alternative explanations, regardless of how candidate choice is measured. We also briefly review the broader literature and discuss Brader’s (2005, 2006) important experimental results. Although the literature undoubtedly supports other aspects of AI, few studies directly test AI’s voting claims, which were the focus of our reassessment. In our view, the only study that does so while ruling out the two alternatives is our analysis of the 1980 ANES Major Panel (Ladd & Lenz, 2008), which finds no support for AI, but ample support for the alternatives. None of the responses to Ladd and Lenz (2008) addresses these findings. Overall, evidence that anxiety helps solve the problem of voter competence remains sparse and vulnerable to alternative explanations.
The Salience of the Democratic Congress and the 2010 Elections
David R. Jones and Monika L. McDermott
The results of the 2010 congressional elections were indeed historic. The loss of 63 seats by the Democrats was the biggest electoral loss by any party since 1948, making the more recent 1994 and 2006 turnovers pale by comparison. The question that political scientists naturally ask after an event of this magnitude is–why? This article addresses this question by analyzing the role played by the public’s attitudes toward Congress.
Participant Observation and the Political Scientist: Possibilities, Priorities, and Practicalities
Andra Gillespie and Melissa R. Michelson
Surveys, experiments, large-N datasets and formal models are common instruments in the political scientist’s toolkit. In-depth interviews and focus groups play a critical role in helping scholars answer important political questions. In contrast, participant observation techniques are an underused methodological approach. In this article, we argue that participant observation techniques have played and should continue to play a key role in advancing our understanding of political science. After demonstrating the use of these techniques, we offer readers advice for embarking upon participant observation research and explain how this approach should fit into a scholar’s long-term career plans.
The Political Scientist as a Blogger
John Sides
In November 2007, I helped found a blog, The Monkey Cage, with two of my colleagues, David Park and Lee Sigelman. This site joined a nascent political science blogosphere that is now composed of at least 80 blogs (Farrell and Sides 2010). The goals of The Monkey Cage are to publicize political science research and use this research to comment on current events. Although blogging is a promising way for scholars to promote their work to a larger audience, political scientists have been slow to take up this medium. To be sure, blogging is not without its challenges, particularly in terms of the time and energy needed to maintain a site. But blogging can also have its benefits by not only helping political science reach a broader audience, but also aiding individual scholars’ research, teaching, and service goals.
The Political Scientist as Local Campaign Consultant
Robert E. Crew Jr.
During my 45 years as an academic, I have followed the admonition sometimes attributed to the legendary Jedi warrior Obi-Wan Kenobe that political scientists should “use [their] power for good and not for evil.” In this spirit, I have devoted substantial portions of my career to public service by providing strategic advice and campaign management to candidates for small state and local elective offices–state legislature, county commission, city clerk or treasurer, school board, and the like–and supporters of citizen ballot initiatives. These campaigns generally cannot afford the professional campaign assistance that is now virtually a necessity for winning elections at all levels of government.
Expect Confrontation, Not Compromise: The 112th House of Representatives Is Likely to Be the Most Conservative and Polarized House in the Modern Era
Alan I. Abramowitz
An examination of the results of the recent midterm elections indicates that the new House of Representatives will probably be the most conservative and ideologically polarized House since the end of World War II. Republicans will hold 242 seats after a net gain of 63 seats, constituting the largest Republican majority in the House of Representatives since the 80th Congress (1947-49), which also had 242 Republican members.
Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections
Christopher F. Karpowitz, J. Quin Monson, Kelly D. Patterson and Jeremy C. Pope
By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movement’s primary issues.
The 2010 Midterm Elections: Signs and Portents for the Decennial Redistricting
Michael P. McDonald
The 2010 midterm elections are consequential not only in terms of the candidates who were elected to office, but also in terms of the government policies that they will enact. High on the list of important policies is the decennial practice of drawing new redistricting plans for legislative offices. A new census reveals population shifts that will result in a reallocation of congressional seats among the states through apportionment and–following U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s–a re-balancing of congressional and state legislative district populations within states that aims to give fast-growing areas more representation and slow-growing areas less. Of course, much more than an innocuous administrative adjustment occurs during the process of redistricting. The individuals who draw districts are keenly aware that district lines may affect the fortunes of incumbents, political parties, and minority voters’ candidates of choice.
Voter Turnout in the 2010 Congressional Midterm Elections
Costas Panagopoulos
Against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election, a watershed event in terms of electoral participation, many speculated that renewed interest in voting would spill over into the 2010 cycle, resulting in a meaningful uptick in voter turnout in the midterm elections overall. Turnout was expected to be especially robust among Republicans eager to regain their numbers in 2010, capitalizing on Democratic withdrawal fueled by voters’ frustration with President Obama, congressional Democrats, and the struggling economy. In 2008, an electorate energized around an historic contest and unprecedented levels of voter mobilization helped to drive more citizens to the polls on Election Day than ever before (Panagopoulos and Francia 2009). An estimated 131.1 million Americans voted for president, representing 61.6% of the eligible voting population (McDonald 2009). Voter turnout among eligible voters in 2008 was 1.5 percentage points higher than in 2004, when 122.3 million voters participated in the presidential election (Bergan et al. 2005). The 2008 election thus marked the third consecutive presidential election cycle in which voter turnout increased, reversing a trend of declining participation that began in the 1960s (McDonald 2009). In fact, national turnout in recent presidential elections has rivaled modern highs in the level of electoral participation that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
Democrats in Split-Outcome Districts and the 2010 Elections
Jeffrey M. Stonecash
The 2008 congressional elections produced a House in which 84 members came from split-outcome districts. Forty-nine Democrats won in districts that Barack Obama lost, and 35 Republicans won in districts that Obama won. To protect their majority, the Democrats needed to retain these 49 members. Given the party’s 257 seats, these split members constituted the difference between being in the majority and the minority. The 49 Democrats faced the dilemma of whether to vote with their party, given that their district voted for the presidential candidate of the other party. The focus here is on these split Democrats: their electoral situation, their votes, and their fate in 2010.
More than a Dime’s Worth: Using State Party Platforms to Assess the Degree of American Party Polarization
Daniel J. Coffey
How polarized are American political parties? Recently, Kidd used an automated content analysis program to demonstrate that American party platforms reveal only minor policy differences. In contrast to his conclusions, this analysis produces three main findings. First, at the state level, state party platforms reveal considerable ideological differences between the parties. Second, differences in state public opinion do not account for these differences; rather, they are more closely correlated with activist opinions and increases in state party competition. Finally, the conflict is not simply ideological but applies to specific issues in the platforms. As such, American state parties are highly polarized on different measures. Automated content analysis programs clearly represent an important methodological advance in coding political texts, but the results here call attention to the importance of policy and agenda content in party platforms. Moreover, studies of American politics, particularly research focusing on parties and ideological polarization, need to take into account the diversity of agendas that is inherent in a federal party system.
Wikipedia as a Data Source for Political Scientists: Accuracy and Completeness of Coverage
Adam R. Brown
In only 10 years, Wikipedia has risen from obscurity to become the dominant information source for an entire generation. However, any visitor can edit any page on Wikipedia, which hardly fosters confidence in its accuracy. In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia’s coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia’s political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics.
from Political Psychology
Physical Attractiveness and Candidate Evaluation: A Model of Correction
William Hart, Victor C. Ottati and Nathaniel D. Krumdick
Voters typically evaluate an attractive candidate more favorably than an (otherwise equivalent) unattractive candidate. However, some voters “correct” for the biasing influence of physical appearance. This reduces, eliminates, or even reverses the physical attractiveness effect. Correction occurs when political experts evaluate a political candidate under nondistracting conditions. Under these “high cognitive capacity” conditions, voters primarily correct for physical unattractiveness. However, correction fails to occur when voters possess low levels of expertise or are distracted. Thus, in most circumstances, attractive candidates are evaluated more favorably than unattractive candidates. Two experiments provide support for this model of appearance-based candidate evaluation.
An Exploration of the Content of Stereotypes of Black Politicians
Monica C. Schneider and Angela L. Bos
Do voters have the same stereotypes of Black politicians that they have of Black people in general? We argue that common stereotypes of Blacks (e.g., lazy, violent) may not apply to perceptions of Black politicians. Instead, we hypothesize that Black politicians are a unique subtype of the larger group Blacks, different enough to warrant their own stereotypes. We take an inductive approach to understanding the stereotypes of Black politicians. Employing a classic psychology research design (Katz & Braly, 1933) in which respondents list traits for a target group, we find that there is little overlap of stereotype content between Black politicians and Blacks. Our results therefore indicate that Black politicians constitute a separate and unique subtype of Blacks. Our analysis explores similarities and differences between stereotypes of Black politicians and two other groups: Black professionals (another subtype of Blacks) and politicians. We discuss the implications of our findings for the relationship between stereotypes and voter decisions.
from The Forum
The Media Game: New Moves, Old Strategies
Shanto Iyengar
Campaigns are strategic contests between candidates and reporters. While candidates have proven to be adept at gaming news coverage of their campaign advertisements, journalists have maintained their autonomy by curtailing coverage of the candidates’ stump speeches. The advent of online media, however, advantages the candidates by permitting direct communication between candidates and voters.
How Political Science Can Help Journalism (and Still Let Journalists Be Journalists)
Brendan Nyhan and John Sides
Political scientists frequently lament the media’s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in nature. In this article, we propose an approach that would bring more political science to journalism while respecting the professional norms and organizational constraints of news organizations. Although academic research is not always conducive to the demands of the news cycle, political science provides a novel perspective that could improve reporting in five respects: putting episodic developments in a structural context; providing new angles on the news; countering spin about the effects of events by elites; better describing historical trends and comparisons; and identifying known unknowns in politics.
Challenges to Mainstream Journalism in Baseball and Politics
Greg Marx
The increasing acceptance of “sabermetric” perspectives by sports media outlets provides a useful framework to think about the relationship between political science and political journalism. In many ways, the experience in the sports world, in which the conventional journalistic narrative proved flexible enough to accommodate quantitative methods and new analytical frameworks, represents an optimistic model for those who hope to see political reporting become more informed by scholarly research. On the other hand, there are important differences between the two cases. For example, political science poses a much larger challenge to the prevailing approach among journalists to everyday reporting than sabermetrics did. For this reason, it have the field may have less influence on practicing journalists than its supporters hope.
Promoting Policy in a Mediated Democracy: Congress and the News
Christine DeGregorio
Whose interests do major news dailies serve when they report on policy debates in Congress? This study compares what members of the U.S. House of Representatives say about major policy with what is later reported in two news dailies: one liberal (Washington Post) and one conservative (Washington Times). The data include one-minute floor speeches by House members (168) and published stories–news and editorials–in the print media (117). Three high-profile policy initiatives of the 107th Congress (2001-2002) anchor the investigation: No Child Left Behind Act (HR 1), Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (HR 1836), and Airport Security Act (S. 1447). The evidence shows a discrepancy in the perspectives between reporters and officeholders. Where news coverage stresses talk of the president and the process, lawmakers stress the problem and the stakes for the American people. When the debate breaks along party lines, news coverage shows a weak ideological bias that favors Democrats.
Polarized Populism: Masses, Elites, and Partisan Conflict
Paul J. Quirk
Scholars offer differing accounts of the roles played by political elites, on the one hand, and ordinary citizens, on the other, in the highly polarized partisan conflict of contemporary American politics. Some take polarized elite conflict to indicate, in itself, that elected policymakers have escaped the constraints of democratic control and act essentially independently. In sharp contrast to this view, I outline a case for the importance of what I call polarized populism–a condition of politics in which elected officials accord very substantial deference to ordinary citizens, especially those who hold relatively extreme ideological views. I clarify the differences between elite centered and populist accounts of polarized policymaking, and then develop the argument for polarized populism, presenting theoretical considerations in support and assessing several kinds of relevant evidence. I also reply to some claims by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, proponents of the elite-centered view, in an earlier exchange in the Forum. In concluding, I comment briefly about some directions for research to assess the case for polarized populism and discuss some broader implications of this pattern of policymaking.
Advancing a Social Policy Agenda through Economic Policy: Obama’s Stimulus and Education Reform
M. Stephen Weatherford and Lorraine M. McDonnell
In using parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a down payment on an ambitious education reform agenda, Barack Obama has accomplished what few others presidents have. The strategy has given his administration three distinct advantages: a large discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on the president’s agenda; and the ability to shape the national reform discussion for more than a year on the administration’s terms, without being constrained by negotiations over a specific piece of legislation. Now the question is whether the Obama administration’s political dexterity can be matched by skill in fashioning institutional arrangements that ensure the long-term sustainability of these reforms.
The Economic Records of the Presidents: Party Differences and Inherited Economic Conditions
James E. Campbell
Several studies of the post-war American political economy find that Democratic presidents have been more successful than Republicans. Most recently, Bartels (2008) found that economic growth had been greater and that unemployment and income inequality had been lower under Democratic presidents since 1948. If true, these findings combined with the frequent success of Republicans in presidential elections pose a challenge to theories of retrospective voting and responsible party government. This reexamination of these findings indicates that they are an artifact of specification error. Previous estimates did not properly take into account the lagged effects of the economy. Once lagged economic effects are taken into account, party differences in economic performance are shown to be the effects of economic conditions inherited from the previous president and not the consequence of real policy differences. Specifically, the economy was in recession when Republican presidents became responsible for the economy in each of the four post-1948 transitions from Democratic to Republican presidents. This was not the case for the transitions from Republicans to Democrats. When economic conditions leading into a year are taken into account, there are no presidential party differences with respect to growth, unemployment, or income inequality.
from Political Behavior
When Do the Ends Justify the Means? Evaluating Procedural Fairness
David Doherty and Jennifer Wolak
How do people decide whether a political process is fair or unfair? Concerned about principles of justice, people might carefully evaluate procedural fairness based on the facts of the case. Alternately, people could be guided by their prior preferences, endorsing the procedures that produce favored policy outcomes as fair and rating those that generate disliked outcomes as unfair. Using an experimental design, we consider the conditions under which people use accuracy goals versus directional goals in evaluating political processes. We find that when procedures are clearly fair or unfair, people make unbiased assessments of procedural justice. When the fairness of a process is ambiguous, people are more likely to use their prior attitudes as a guide.
Who’s the Party of the People? Economic Populism and the U.S. Public’s Beliefs About Political Parties
Stephen P. Nicholson and Gary M. Segura
Some observers of American politics have argued that Republicans have redrawn the social class basis of the parties by displacing the Democrats as the party of the common person. While others have addressed the argument by implication, we address the phenomenon itself. That is, we examine whether the populist rhetoric used by conservatives has reshaped the American public’s perceptions about the social class basis of American political parties. To this end, we used NES data and created novel survey questions for examining the class-based images of the parties. We examine whether the public holds populist images of the Republican Party and whether the working class and evangelical Christians are especially likely to hold this belief. Contrary to this argument, most Americans view the Democrats as the party of the people. Furthermore, working class and evangelical Christians are no less likely to hold this belief.


Why Budget Line Items Don’t Die

This item by TDS Contributor and Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow and managing editor Lee Drutman is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
In today’s Washington Post, David A. Fahrentold marvels at what he calls the “Line Items That Won’t Die” – federal programs that benefit narrow interests, but somehow manage to keep getting funded: “One spends federal money to store cotton bales. Another offers scholars a chance to study Asian-American relations. Two others pay to market U.S. oranges in Asia and clean up abandoned coal mines.”
Fahrenthold attributes their success to having Congressional champions. The study of Asian-American relations, for example, takes place at a Honolulu nonprofit called the East-West Center, and enjoys the support of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who also happens to be chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
But there’s also a broader story: the simple fact that when a government program benefits a narrow constituency, it’s very easy for that constituency to organize and make demands on legislators about why this program is worth keeping. The larger public, meanwhile is rarely aware, and even if it were aware, is unlikely to do anything.
Take the Market Access Program discussed in the article, which helps promote U.S. agricultural products abroad. A coalition of agricultural interests benefit greatly from this, and they are organized to advocate fiercely for its continuance and threaten to punish any Senator or Congressman who would vote against the program by withdrawing votes and campaign contributions. Nobody in the general public, however, is likely to care about or vote based solely on this single issue.
This is the difference in what congressional scholar R. Douglas Arnold has called “attentive publics” and “inattentive publics.” Attentive publics are the small groups that care deeply about particular policies, and as a result, are likely to be more influential because they care so intensely about that one issue. Inattentive publics are everyone else. The public might be outraged after reading about the Market Access Program, but the likelihood of most people following up are small. Think of it this way: If 1,000 people want money from you, but only one bothers to keep calling you up telling you why he’s so deserving and threatens to punch you in the face if you don’t give him the money, you’re probably going to give that one person money, especially if it’s likely the other 999 will not even notice or if they do, won’t remember.
Another way to think about it (borrowing from James Q. Wilson) is in terms of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. The benefits of a program that pays peanut and cotton farmers to store their bales and bushels in warehouses are solidly concentrated among peanut and cotton farmers. The costs are distributed to everybody else. But the cost per taxpayer is so small that it’s hard to imagine any group getting organized to fight this particular program. Whereas the farmers – well, they’re damn certain to do fight any cuts to the program. What results is what Wilson calls “client politics” – where small narrow interests work with the relevant congressional committee and executive agency staff to build a usually impenetrable consensus around the importance of a single program.
The challenge for governing is that the federal budget and tax code and regulatory apparatus are filled with thousands upon thousands of these programs, each protected by a small consensus, and without any public coverage. One only need to scroll through the Federal Register to see all the small issues that could potentially benefit small attentive publics at the expense of everyone else. Or better yet, look through the tax code to find all the little credits and deductions for very narrow benefits. It’s enough to make your head spin round and round and round. Jonathan Rauch has pessimistically called this condition “Government’s End.”
I don’t really have a solution. In part, this is the nature of our current system of government and the size and complexity of our economy. But the point is, these programs are very difficult to kill, and Fahrenthold’s story is just the tip of the iceberg.


Mike Huckabee and the P-Word

Old-timers probably remember when there was a robust ongoing debate on the Left and Center-Left about the word “progressive” as an ideological identifier. Was it a good replacement for “liberal,” which had been made toxic by billions of dollars worth of conservative demonization? Was it the property of serious Leftists, who had used to define themselves in opposition to conventional liberals (not to mention moderates and conservatives) in the Democratic Party for decades? Or did it connote the historical traditional that went back to the Brandeis-Croley debates of the early twentieth century, when self-described “progressives” could be found in and beyond both major parties?
This all remained inside baseball until Glenn Beck began developing his convoluted conspiracy theories for a rapidly expanding audience a couple of years ago, and made “progressivism” a lurid term for a quasi-satanic and quasi-totalitarian cabal going back to Woodrow Wilson, that was complicit in both communism and fascism and entirely inimical to American constitutional traditions.
Beck’s audience is now rapidly shrinking, but he’s still able to start a fight, and did so this week (as noted by Salon‘s Alex Pareene) on his radio show by applying the “P-Word” to none other than his old Fox buddy Mike Huckabee.

Nearly all of what Beck says about Huckabee is pretty ludicrous (aside from such stupid slurs as calling the Rev. Jim Wallis a “Marxist”). But the interesting thing is that Huck fired back in an unusually uninhibited way on his own blog:

This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a “cancer” and a “Nazi.” What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews? I had the audacity–not of hope–but the audacity to give respect to the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity. I’m no fan of her husband’s policies for sure, but I have appreciated her efforts that Beck misrepresented–either out of ignorance or out of a deliberate attempt to distort them to create yet another “boogey man” hiding in the closet that he and only he can see.

Wow. Them’s fightin’ words. It’s unclear whether they mean that Beck is now marginal enough that even Christian Right pols can take a swing at him, or that Huck’s really not going to run for president in 2012. But you can bet it wouldn’t have happened a year ago.


The Caucus Within the Caucuses

Having first declared that the 2012 Iowa Caucuses had become a “global wingnut magnet” with the arrival on the campaign trail of Judge Roy Moore, I’ve now got a more measured assessment, which I’ve written up for The Atlantic.
You can read it all, but the basic theory is that the Christian Right is holding something of a Caucus-Within-the-Caucuses to determine which of their champions will carry the cross into the main battle with “moderate” infidels like Mitt Romney. It’s sort of what happened in 2008 when Mike Huckabee became the Iowa alternative to Romney among Christian conservatives only after he out-organized Sen. Sam Brownback at the state party straw poll in the summer of 2007.
So Republicans who are hoping that the freak show of far-right candidates crowding Iowa will give more oxygen to “moderates” may be missing the point. Within the context of the Christian Right, Roy Moore is not a madman, but just, well, a rather passionate man of distinctive Dominionist views. He’ll get his audition, along with Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum and maybe T-Paw (if he keeps evolving in the radical direction he seems to have chosen) for the Christian Right nod, but The Faithful will probably go into the Caucuses themselves more or less united.
There’s one other thing that strikes me as fascinating about Moore’s invasion of Iowa. His political act in Alabama has pretty much worn itself out after two very poor showings in GOP gubernatorial primaries. It could very well be that the Judge feels more at “home” in Iowa, one of the few places in the country where conservatives are obsessed with the issue of same-sex marriage. He wouldn’t be the first Alabama demagogue to find a surprisingly receptive audience Up North, would he?


Obama has made strategic mistakes, but waiting until the Republicans revealed their extremist agenda before presenting his own more rational alternative was not one of them.

Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:

On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.

First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.

Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?


The GOP Establishment’s Futile Battle Against Donald Trump

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
During the 2008 election cycle, Mitt Romney was often accused of treating politics more like a consumer-focused business than an exercise in leadership. “My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo,” he said, radiating the sense that if primary voters wanted something, anything, he’d be willing to sell it. His strategists obsessed about creating and selling “Brand Romney.” To many, these efforts made him look like a crass twit, a market researcher’s caricature of the perfect Republican candidate, even as he came in second-place for the GOP nomination. This election, however, Romney may have to compete with Donald Trump.
Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star, has been putting out the types of feelers that usually signal a real candidacy rather than a publicity stunt. He is riding high in the polls on essentially the same customer-service-style political strategy that fellow entrepreneur Mitt Romney pursued, but a la Trump, stronger, bigger, crasser–and in a far more radical political environment, where the demand for an ultra-hard line on terrorism has been eclipsed by the niche demand for Birtherism, along with extreme policy positions that voters weren’t even obsessing about yet like virulent anti-Chinese protectionism and a policy to openly steal the Arab world’s oil. The Republican establishment has perceived this as a threat–believing that Trump will drag the entire Republican field into a world where they cannot be taken seriously by general election voters–and launched an all-out effort to tar him. But the truth is that their effort may be a lost cause, for reasons that are intrinsic to the success of Trump’s consumer-focused approach: This year, GOP voters’ hunger for radicalism is so great that it can be filled by essentially anybody. Kill off Trump’s candidacy and the demand will remain, leaving an opening for yet another demagogic charlatan to take his place.
Trump first raised eyebrows in the Republican establishment by taking steps that a serious candidate would take before running for president–planning trips to Iowa, chatting up potential staff, sitting down for an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody. Then, last Friday, Public Policy Polling released a survey that showed Trump not only running ahead of the entire 2012 field, but registering numbers higher than such prior leaders as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. That caused the Republican Powers That Be to stop dismissing him and launch the kind of sustained attack that is said to have succeeded in fatally damaging Sarah Palin’s credibility as a potential presidential candidate. During the last few days Karl Rove, George Will, and the Club for Growth have all trashed Trump very aggressively.
But a closer look at the PPP findings should reveal the weakness of this elite strategy. What they show is not a desire to support the faux tycoon per se, but a raging right-wing, anti-establishment fever that has only gotten stronger in recent months. Ending or mortally wounding a Trump candidacy would only address its symptoms, rather than curing a condition in which voters will follow whichever candidate is willing to outdo his or her opponents at wingnuttery. According to PPP, fully 23 percent of self-identified Republicans say they could not vote for any candidates who “who firmly stated they believed Barack Obama was born in the United States.” Another 39 percent weren’t sure they could vote for such Birther-defying candidates. The pollster didn’t test some of the other provocative positions associated with Trump, such as his stance on China or desire to despoil the Arab world of its oil, but I have a strong feeling those sentiments would perform pretty well, too. There may be no coherent body of views you could call “Trumpism,” but even without Trump, there would be a hunger for spicier red meat than is being offered by the current crop of Republican candidates.
This screw-the-establishment sentiment must be understood in the context of what looks to be growing dissatisfaction with compromises made by Republicans in the Tea Party Congress and statehouses. The House Republican leadership has been congratulating itself for “winning” the recent appropriations fight without shutting down the government, and without triggering an outright revolt among the House freshmen. But that’s not going over well in activist land. This previous Tax Day weekend saw a slew of protests against the latest establishment sell-out: In a nice act of revenge against her Beltway detractors, Sarah Palin regaled a Wisconsin audience with a fiery attack on Congressional Republican gutlessness, taunting them that they need to learn to “fight like a girl.” And conservative pressure to go to the mats over a debt limit increase is rising rapidly each day, particularly if the alternative is some sort of budget deal with Democrats that leaves tax increases on the table while removing the kind of radical attack on domestic spending advanced by Paul Ryan’s budget.
This dynamic creates an enormous temptation for non-congressional Republicans to join the revolt, as evidenced by the rapid devolution of Tim Pawlenty into an extremist on budget issues and a favorite at Tea Party rallies. (He’s now opposed to raising the debt ceiling, even though that would damage the U.S. economy on a scale similar to a nuclear attack.) And if there is something that GOP voters want which Pawlenty is unwilling to give them because he decides it’s too crazy, then there will always be Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, who are receiving rapturous receptions on the campaign trail, to flay him for his equivocation.
If Trump is pushed out of the limelight or off the campaign trail by the conservative establishment, or by his own erratic record on a host of issues, the atavistic longings of the rank-and-file conservative base will simply affix themselves elsewhere as other candidates try to tap the rich vein of anger he’s helped galvanize. And if he survives the pounding he’s about to get from respectable opinion, then George Will is right: He will make a “shambles” of every Republican presidential debate. But that’s not only because he’s an eccentric demagogue who is willing to say just about anything for attention. It’s also because he’s exactly what conservative voters crave.


Fred Fires Back

To my great surprise, at the National Review site, former Sen. Fred Thompson responded to my TNR piece (cross-posted here) last week making him the symbol of disappointing, half-hearted dark-horse candidates for president.
Like TNR’s Jonathan Chait, I found Thompson’s response interesting, humorous, and even endearing. He did, unfortunately, interpret an entirely metaphorical reference to “abundant stops for rest and ice cream” much too literally. But if I have repeated inaccurate reporting of his actual comings and goings at the 2007 Iowa State Fair, I apologize. As an attendee of that particular fair (though not the same day as Fred), I am quite sure that he was perceived as violating Fair Mores, even if he actually didn’t, and I wish he had gone to more trouble to set the record straight back then.
He didn’t much deal with the broader issues my article raised, but that’s okay. My main point was to upbraid Republican opinion-leaders for their endless faith in late-entering dark-horse candidates. And Fred Thompson provides a warning vastly more credible and vivid than mine:

So Mr. or Ms. Dark Horse, you have not played by the rules, you late-comer, and your belly fire is suspect. And people will go to great lengths to prove their suspicions correct. Therefore, you must be willing to run over your grandmother, mortgage your soul, and behave like an over-caffeinated Elmer Gantry in order to make up for your insolence. Only then will they be comfortable with the idea of your being president.

Thank you, Senator.