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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2011

Phantom Insurgency

I would normally not annoy readers with yet another smackdown of yet another bout of vague talk about Democrats denying Barack Obama renomination in 2012. But the vague talker in this case is an Iowa State University poli sci professor who blogs for the Des Moines Register, has an East Coast megaphone via WNYC, and is reporting that New Hampshire Democrats are begging their ancient rivals the Iowans to launch an effort to draft another candidate, perhaps Hillary Clinton. And all this intel from Steffen Schmidt has been picked up by the influential aggregator RealClearPolitics.
Where to begin? According to Schmidt, New Hampshirites are telling Iowans to create a “write-in candidacy” in the Caucuses for Hillary Clinton. As I am sure the professor understands, you do not really have “write-in” candidates in the Iowa Caucuses. People show up, separate themselves by candidate affinity groups, and recombine once threshold levels are applied to candidates who are deemed viable for the next level in the delegate selection process. There is no secret ballot, and in fact, no real ballot (just raised hands), so it’s the least hospitable environment imaginable for a “write-in” candidate, or really for any development that is not methodically organized by an actual candidate.
Of equal importance, Hillary Clinton has emphatically showed zero interest in running (despite the vast internet chum being tossed onto the waters by PUMAs and conservatives) and even if she was, she’s far from being a suitable vehicle for left-bent critics of Obama.
And finally (sorry for the redundancy there, but it’s apparently essential), there remains no significant evidence of the kind of grassroots Democratic revolt against Obama that would be an absolute minimum threshold qualification for a credible challenge to his renomination.
According to the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll on presidential job approval, Obama is stuck at an all-time low of 40%. But he’s at 79% among self-identified Democrats and 82% among self-identified liberal Democrats. He’s also back up to 88% among African-Americans, who may not matter much in Iowa or New Hampshire, but sure would be crucial later on to any left-bent challenge to Obama.
I know there are a significant number of readers of this site who would love to see a primary challenge to Obama, but in reality, folks, at present there is no candidate and no actual, voting constituency for such an unusual revolt.
As for Dr. Schmidt’s strange, expert certainty, based on conversations over drinks, that New Hampshire and Iowa Democrats are getting ready to dump Obama, I just have to say the analysis is worth the thought he seems to have put into it. And I’d note that Schmidt’s last big pronouncement back in May was that he it was a lead-pipe certainty Sarah Palin was running for president. If and when that transpires, maybe it would be time to take a second look at his predictions of an Iowa-New Hampshire collaboration to replace Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton.


All Shook Up

As you probably know by now, if not from personal experience then from news reports or emails, a relatively large (but not, it appears so far, particularly destructive) earthquake struck the East Coast today, forcing the evacuation of many buildings in DC in particular.
The epicenter was in Louisa County, Virginia, a largely rural area northwest of Richmond and due east of Charlottesville. It’s the site of a nuclear plant, where power was lost (though without, apparently, any consequences), which will bring back all sorts of creepy memories of what happened in Japan. Louisa County is also in the congressional district of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who is currently in Israel.
As it happens, I lived in Louisa County (and am very familiar with the North Anna nuclear plant) a while back, and now live in California near the San Andreas Fault. Who would have thought I was moving to relative seismic safety? Let’s hope the aftershocks are not serious. The population concentrations in areas affected by this event are enormous. If they get through this with no more than a few moments of puzzlement and fear, and stories to tell each other for the next few days, that will be a blessing.


Fairness Doctrine Conspiracy Defeated!

Of all the dumb manufactured “threats” that have circulated via email and talk radio in recent years, one of the dumbest has been the repeated claim that evil bureaucrats or evil socialist politicians were on the very brink of suppressing conservative religious or secular opinions via a hoary regulation called the “Fairness Doctrine.”
For the uninitiated, the Fairness Doctrine is a relic of the 1950s and 1960s–a period when broadcast television and radio dominated American media to an extraordinary degree. The idea was that broadcasters had an obligation to present diverse points of view in their editorial expressions, meaning that in fairly egregious cases of imbalance, free time had to be offered to contrary opinions. It was never much enforced, but was bitterly resented, as you might imagine, by station owners and networks.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repudiated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1987. The occasional politician–usually a Democrat–has talked about bringing it back, generally to rattle the cages of the talk radio industry with its complete domination by conservatives. There has been no serious threat to do so, however. And the lion’s share of the hysteria over the Fairness Doctrine has been since Barack Obama’s election, even though he made it abundantly clear during the 2008 campaign and afterwards that he opposed restoration of the Doctrine. Kevin Drum has helpfully offered up the results of a google image search of the subject, which harvested a large number of conservative cartoons inveighing against the totalitarian designs of godless liberals to use the Doctrine to suppress poor Rush and poor Sean Hannity and poor Glenn Beck, brave and helpless souls that they are. Anyone with an email account and conservative friends (or conservative friends of friends) has probably gotten alarmist messages on this same subject, many of them emanating from religious conservatives claiming the Doctrine is about to be used to ban Christian broadcasting altogether.
Yesterday the FCC expunged every vestige of the Fairness Doctrine from its regulations. Will this finally tamp down the conspiracy theories about the ongoing assault on the rights of conservatives to express their opinions? Probably not.


What You See Is What You Get

So the great Paul-Ryan-for-President boomlet has ended where it began, at the Weekly Standard, which today had to admit their preferred candidate has ruled it out definitively. Too bad.
In all probability, this won’t stop the occasional pleas or rumors. After all, Chris Christie keeps getting mentioned as a late candidate, even though he’s repeatedly planted land mines on the path to any 2012 candidacy by saying he’s not prepared to serve as president. You will also, until the very day someone else nails down the nomination, continue to hear the distant thunder of an alleged 2012 run by another pol who has said “no” a hundred times, Jeb Bush (even though he’s now only about the third most powerful Republican politician in Florida, and continues to bear the dynastic name of the president from whose legacy the GOP has been frantically trying to disassociate itself for at least the last five years).
Since the shadowy “GOP establishment” forces who keep lofting up these flaccid trial balloons are presumably not panting for Sarah Palin to leap into the race, they are about out of helium, and really need to focus on the presidential field they actually have.


Are “Right-Center” or “Insurgent-Establishment” Distinctions Useful For Today’s Republicans?

In analyzing the actual and potential Republican presidential field for 2012, Nate Silver has frequently deployed a chart that plots candidates along axes dividing them by ideology and by perceptions of their relationship to the GOP Establishment. Thus, in his latest installment, he suggests there is more “room” for additional candidates in the “moderate/Establishment” quadrant dominated by Mitt Romney, than in, say, the “conservative/Insurgent” quadrant where Bachmann, Cain, and to a considerable extent Rick Perry are competing.
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein objects that Nate’s typology relies on broad characterizations of candidates at the expense of how specific and tangible GOP constituencies view them:

On the ideological side, it’s not clear how many important individuals and groups within the party are thinking in terms of left/right (or, I suppose, right/very right) rather than about specific policy areas of concern. That is, what really matters isn’t so much whether a candidate is too moderate, but whether the abortion people, the tax people, and so on find the candidate acceptable or not.
I’m also not convinced that an establishment/insurgent vocabulary really captures the relationship of the various groups within the GOP, or the appeal of the candidates. What exactly is an establishment-friendly or insurgent candidacy? If it’s just rhetoric, then we’re probably talking about appeal to larger electorates in next year’s primaries, but no candidate is going to get there without considerable support from organized groups within the party. If it’s appeal to particular groups, I don’t think the groups really exist on an establishment/insurgent spectrum. Indeed, if you’re talking about groups, it’s probably just better to think about groups, specifically and in general, without worrying about whether they are “establishment” or their ideological placement.

This is an interesting dispute, beyond the fact that it involves two of the best analysts of the contemporary political scene. The argument is obscured a bit by Jonathan’s distinct view of “the Establishment” as including right-wing issue-activist groups who are capable of exercising a veto over presidential candidates they don’t like.
I’m also skeptical of Nate’s ideological rating of candidates for a reason Jonathan does not articulate: it distracts attention from the unmistakable overall rightward shift of the GOP since 2008. After all, the “moderate/Establishment” candidate Romney has by any measurement moved to the right since his 2008 campaign as the “true conservative” alternative to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, when he received no significant guff for his Massachusetts health care plan; embraced nothing so radical as the “cut-cap-balance” fiscal plan; was under no particular pressure to support the most extreme measures available to permanently outlaw abortion and gay marriage from sea to shining sea; and was defending his hawkishness on the old war with Iraq rather than agitating for a new war with Iran.
But on the other hand, perceptions within the GOP of the candidates, strange as they may seem to outsiders, really do matter. The main reason the GOP has moved to the right since 2008 is that a revisionist view of the recent history of that party has taken hold with a tremendous degree of unanimity. Lest we forget, George W. Bush won the 2000 Republican presidential nomination as the overwhelming favorite of “movement conservatives.” The congressional Republican leadership of the early Bush years, with Tom DeLay in the driver’s seat, was at the time considered the most conservative in history. Yes, there was some right-wing opposition to No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Rx Drug benefit and Bush’s rhetoric on immigration, and a bit more on overall domestic spending levels. But for the most part conservatives accepted such heresies as strategic measures engineered by Karl Rove to create a “conservative base-centered” long-term conservative majority in the electorate without significant ideological concessions. Stan Greenberg memorably referred to Rove’s novel approach as a “51% strategy” that represented the best conservatives could do given an inherently unpopular policy agenda.
At the time of the 2004 elections, Bush was being widely touted in serious conservative circles as a great world-historical figure. In early 2005, when he began his campaign for partial privatization of Social Security, estimation of W. on the right reached perhaps an all-time high.
Then Bush 43 and the congressional Republican Party committed the unforgivable sin of becoming very, very unpopular, and by 2008, conservatives were mainly absorbed with figuring out how to absolve themselves from any responsibility for that political disaster–a task that became even more urgent when the economic calamity of 2008 hit. And so, with remarkable speed, the idea spread that Bush and Cheney and DeLay and the whole push of ’em were never really conservatives to begin with. This historically unprecedented “move right and win” argument gained enormous impetus from the 2010 midterm election results, which leads us to where we are today.
I’m covering this familiar territory in order to make it clear that even though “movement conservatives” and their various issue and constituency groups have in most important respects become the GOP “Establishment,” their own mythology requires them to keep finding and demonizing “RINOs” and “sell-outs,” and presenting themselves as a party undergoing some sort of populist revolution. Moreover, in this new GOP there are newly powerful factions–the repeal-the-New Deal “constitutional conservatives” and quasi-dominionists in particular–who really are committed to driving their party in directions that would have been considered well outside even the “movement conservative” mainstream just a few years ago. Hence the strength and respectability of Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, whom virtually no one took seriously in the recent past, and the broader popularity of extremist rhetoric throughout the GOP.
From the perspective of these intra-party dynamics, perceptions of ideology and Establishment-status like those Nate illustrates really do matter in the struggle for control of the party. And they are often wielded as weapons by the specific “Establishment” groups Jonathan accurately describes as major players in the nomination battle. To be sure, it’s a dangerous game that Republicans are playing, but to the extent they have bought their own spin about the rightward drift of the electorate, and/or think Barack Obama is doomed to defeat due to objective economic conditions, it’s one a lot of them are willing to play.



GOP Escalates Voter Suppression in Ohio

If any Democrats you know need a reason to raise hell about the GOP-led effort to restrict early voting, please direct them to Ken McCall’s Dayton Daily News article, “Changes to early voting rules could hurt Dems.” The headline is actually an understatement, as McCall’s article makes clear:

A Republican-sponsored state law designed to curb voter fraud by significantly limiting the number of days to vote early has a greater potential to hurt Democrats than Republicans, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of voter patterns from the 2008 presidential election.
The Daily News examined precinct-level voting results in five counties and found that Democratic voters were much more likely than Republicans to come to boards of elections offices and vote early in the 2008 presidential election, especially in urban counties.
The analysis of voting in the 2,830 precincts in Montgomery, Franklin and Hamilton counties found that precincts won by Democrat Barack Obama had significantly more early votes than those that went for his Republican challenger, John McCain.
And the more a precinct went for Obama, the more early, in-office votes were cast….In the top 10 Obama precincts — all from Dayton and all voting 98 percent for the Democrat — early, in-office votes made up almost 29 percent of all votes cast. In the top 10 precincts for McCain — all in rural or suburban areas of the county — only 2.4 percent of the ballots were cast at the board of elections before Election Day….
House Bill 194, now known as the Elections Reform Bill, contains more than 180 changes to election law, including provisions cutting early, in-office voting by about two-thirds — from 35 days to the equivalent of 11.

Even the nonpartisan League of Women Voters has expressed concern about the bill as an instrument of voter suppression. “The League never talks about people’s motivations, but the effect of it will be to depress the vote,” according to the League’s Peg Rosenfeld, quoted in McCall’s article.
Former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has filed petitions to overturn the law. Hopefully there will be mounting protests against the legislation, which targets African American voters as well as Democrats. In any event, the Republican-lead campaign against early voting should underscore the urgency of Dems having stronger GOTV programs in every state where early voting is under assault.
It’s about as naked an attempt to suppress pro-Democratic voters as we are likely to see in the months ahead. For all of the GOP’s flag-waving and blustering about freedom, when you get right down to it, they want to make it harder for people to vote.


Obama’s Personal Favorability Cushion

The basic measurement of a president’s popularity we are all used to examining is the job approval rating. By that yardstick, Barack Obama has hit a very rough patch of late; last week he registered his first sub-40% rating in the daily Gallup tracking poll of presidential job approval.
But as Reid Wilson points out in an important National Journal article, an equally important index is the president’s personal favorability, separated from specific questions of job performance. And so far, Obama has done much better on that scale:

Polling consistently shows that the majority of Americans view Obama favorably, even while they increasingly disagree with his job performance. There is a nuance to voter sentiment, pollsters say, one that provides Obama with a path to reelection. But the disconnect between the two numbers, if it ever shrinks, could also become a leading indicator that the president’s chances for a second term are headed south.

Wilson cites Bill Clinton as a president whose relatively high personal favorability ratings during his first term showed a resilience that was eventually reflected in job approval ratings and then re-election:

[I]n 1994, Clinton’s approval rating dropped to a low of 38 percent, as measured by the Pew Research Center. Clinton endured a period, from March 1994 to October 1995, during which his approval rating hit 50 percent only once. And yet, during that same period, his favorability rating stayed strong, starting around 58 percent and ending, after only a single dip below the 50 percent mark, at 56 percent in January 1996. Beginning with that January poll, Clinton’s approval rating rebounded; by November, when he asked voters for a second term, his job-approval rate stood at 57 percent.

But during his second term, George W. Bush provided an example of a president whose poor job performance assessments eroded his personal favorability, and once that happened, he never really recovered:

A July 2005 Pew survey showed 51 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of the president. By late October, that number had sunk to 46 percent, then stayed in the high 30s for most of the rest of his term. Voters had had enough; Bush’s job-approval rating led the way down, and once the favorable ratings followed, there was no way to recover politically.

So which dynamic is more relevant to Obama’s situation today? It’s hard to say for sure. Pollsters do not measure personal favorability as often as job performance. As you can see from PollingReport, the last national surveys testing Obama’s general favorability were in June, when he came in at 50% or more in polls taken by McClatchey-Marist and AP-GfK. That, however, was after Obama’s job approval rating temporarily shot up in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, so perhaps it’s more relevant that polls in April and May from ABC, NBC and Fox also showed a majority smiling upon Obama personally.
As Wilson notes, the very latest measurement of favorability (though done in slightly different terms from the standard polls) is GQRR/Democracy Corps’ early August survey showing “warm” feelings towards Obama holding up despite a plunge in favorable feelings towards both Democrats and (especially) Republicans in Congress.
This data point indicates that Obama’s efforts to benefit in a bad economic and political context from comparisons to the opposition are still alive and well. And 2012 general election horse-race polling, showing Obama still typically running ahead of all named Republican presidential candidates despite flagging job approval ratings, point in the same direction. It’s worth noting that Bill Clinton’s personal popularity in his first term also benefited by comparison to an unpopular Republican Party and Republican politicians.
So it’s likely Obama still has a personal favorability cushion that could sustain him through tough sledding going into 2012. But it’s a thin cushion that could use some bolstering via improved real-life conditions and/or demonstrations of presidential leadership.


Battle of Ohio: Facing Referendum, Republicans Now Want to Compromise

With the Battle of Wisconsin reaching a temporary lull after the recent recall elections, attention is shifting to another midwestern state, where opponents of recently enacted union-bashing legislation have far exceeded the threshold of petitions needed to get a referendum repealing the measure on a November ballot.
With polls consistently showing Ohio voters favoring the repeal initiative (by 50-39 in a new PPP poll, and by larger margins in earlier polls), Gov. John Kasich and Republican legislative leaders are suddenly asking for meetings to seek a compromise on Senate Bill 5, which was enacted in March on a party-line vote.
Kasich hurried to sign the bill soon after it passed in order to force opponents to seek a referendum this year rather than in the higher-turnout 2012 presidential cycle.
But now Republicans are seeking to head off the referendum, or (since SB 5 opponents have made it clear that total repeal of the bill is a precondition to talks about how it might be replaced with compromise legislation) more likely, trying to strengthen their hand in the referendum fight by appearing reasonable. It’s a little late for that.
So the referendum fight is fully on, and as November approaches, you can expect the kind of national labor/progressive coalition that mobilized for the Wisconsin recalls to focus on Ohio.