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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2011

Try “Colonel,” Dr. Bachmann

Dave Weigel is drawing attention to one of those mini-controversies that sometime blow up into a major brouhaha: the occasional habit of Michele Bachmann and her fans of referring to her as “Dr. Bachmann” because she has a law degree.
Like my own, Bachmann’s law degree is that of J.D. or Juris Doctor, literally Doctor of Law. Back in the day, the same degree was normally granted as LL.B., literally Bachelor of Laws. By universal consent, neither title carries with it the right to be called “Doctor,” and that’s why Bachmann is getting barbecued over the pretension.
My recommendation, at least when she is campaigning in the Deep South, is to adopt the archaic custom [warning: the 1939 newspaper article linked to here includes offensive racial language] of my home state of Georgia whereby lawyers used to call themselves “Colonel.” That has a nice military resonance which will help her compete with Air Force Veteran Rick Perry.


A New Economic Strategy for President Obama

This item is a guest post by Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin, Co-Editors of CenteredPolitics.com. Allan Rivlin is also a Partner with Hart Research Associates/Garin Hart Yang.
Now that the White House has announced that it plans to announce a new set of jobs proposals in September we can see it as a welcome sign–but not if it is just an effort to give President Barack Obama a new economic message heading into the 2012 presidential election. Obama doesn’t need a new economic message for the 2012 campaign; he needs a new economic strategy right now, because America needs strong economic leadership today as much as at any time during Obama’s presidency.
Consider these facts:
The economy, stupid: Obama was elected to do just one thing, fix the economy. He hasn’t. The economy is still stuck in that ditch he was talking about last year and there are real signs beyond stock market gyrations that the economy may even be slipping backward. It is certainly not moving forward at an acceptable pace, and the latest Gallup Poll pegs Obama’s job approval on the economy at just 26%.
Small is not beautiful: The sorts of limited talking point proposals the President and surrogates have been mentioning recently will help create an impression that he is doing something about the economy, but that is not the same as actually doing enough to get the economy moving. The US economy and the world economy need bold action to increase liquidity and increase demand. The vicious cycles must be turned virtuous. People need money to spend to create the demand that will cause businesses to hire workers.
Democrats do not know what they believe. Democrats have lost their identity when it comes to economic philosophy, with doubts and divisions about how to balance the need for job creation with concerns about long-term debt. Congress waited all winter, and then all spring, and now all summer for the White House to take the lead on a job creation agenda – and it seems the White House was waiting for Congress to lead. Right now, only Obama can lead the party back to confidence.
The next deadline is now. Many have been focused on the next act in the debt ceiling showdown, as members were named to the “Super Committee” set up to report in November. But federal government funding runs out at midnight on September 30, and the government will shut down unless Democrats and Republicans agree on a new plan to fund FY 2012 which starts October 1.
The Tea Party has peaked. It is clear Obama feels constrained by House Republicans but their influence peaked with the last deal. Some excellent reporting by the Washington Post lets us appreciate the well-planned and executed Republican maneuver to use the vote to raise the debt limit as an opportunity to exert influence over the federal budget. But it was an ambitious act without an encore. The peak moment of Tea Party influence was timed for that conflict but that moment has passed.
Democrats will have all the leverage this fall. House Republicans had all the leverage in the debt ceiling battle because Republicans knew Democrats could not accept the risk of a government default. An October government shutdown would not be so bad for President Barack Obama or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi but it would be intolerable for House Speaker John Boehner. (More on this below because it is the key strategic point.)
All of this points to the imperative for President Obama to re-take leadership of the global economy by putting forward a new economic plan that sets a goal not of stopping deterioration, but of returning America to what Americans believe is their right: economic growth and prosperity.
A bold but balanced economic vision. What is needed is a clear articulation of what Obama believes and all Democrats can defend. Both of necessity and providence it must balance the economy’s need for job creation in the short term with realistic plans to control the long term deficit. But it cannot be a compromise that fails to do either well. There has to be enough job creating activity to get the economy moving forward in the next 12 to 18 months – even if there is also enough serious deficit reduction to keep America on a sustainable path over the next 20 to 50 years.
The two goals are not contradictory. Rather, they are mutually reinforcing as President Obama said: “The good news here is that by coming together to deal with the long-term debt challenge, we would have more room to implement key proposals that can get the economy to grow faster.” Democrats need to be bold and creative in making the case for billions of dollars in short term economic job creation. And Democrats must be just as bold in addressing the long term debt in order to have credibility and capital to address our needs today and in the future. We must continue to be willing to make reasonable changes in government programs to keep our promises in line with our resources over the long term. We can and must do both.


A Paul Ryan Campaign? Really?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The sub-headline in Stephen Hayes’ latest Weekly Standard post trumpeting the possible emergence of a Paul Ryan presidential campaign lists some big political names who are encouraging the idea: “Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, John Boehner, Jim Jordan, and Bill Bennett encourage Ryan to run for president.” Hayes missed a few more big names who might well be equally excited about a Ryan run: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.
Indeed, Democrats (especially those in Congress) have been plotting for months to make Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, and particularly its radical treatment of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the centerpiece of their 2012 campaign. After all, the proposal drew the support of nearly every Republican in Congress, despite abundant public opinion research (and at least one special election) showing the potential for a strong public backlash against its specific provisions. A Ryan candidacy, in other words, would rigidly align the GOP with its least popular ideas at the very moment that all Democrats, from the president to the lowliest House candidate, are desperate to make this a “comparative” election instead of a temperature reading on life in the Obama era. So why would prominent Republicans be interested in making Democrats so very happy?
One explanation is that Paul Ryan may be simply too emblematic of contemporary Republican thinking to be resisted by his own party. As TNR’s Jonathan Chait (one of the few progressive commentators who have consistently predicted Ryan would run) put it, “He is adored by party activists and elites in equal measure and is the embodiment of the party consensus.” Aside from the laurels he has won by putting together a budget proposal that reflects the long-frustrated conservative goal of demolishing the New Deal/Great Society safety net once and for all, Ryan is also beloved of neoconservatives struggling to rebuff resurgent neo-isolationism in the GOP, and he is a faithful ally of social conservatives as well. And what libertarian can’t help but feel good about a congressman who reportedly has made Atlas Shrugged required reading for his staff?
Another theory, meanwhile, holds that Ryan represents an itch that simply hasn’t been scratched by the current GOP field: the desire for a simon-pure fiscal conservative who doesn’t simply thunder against big government or domestic spending, but actually seems to have more than a clue about how, mechanically and strategically, to go about slaying the beast. The people who were very excited and then very disappointed about Mitch Daniels’ stillborn presidential candidacy seem to be the same people pushing Ryan to run.
But my hunch is that the main motivation behind the growing Ryan boom in elite circles is that Republicans have more or less decided they cannot lose the presidential race in 2012 unless their candidate has big personal flaws or comes off as legitimately crazy. As a result, they are beginning to assess the field in terms of capacity to serve as president rather than mere electability. And they don’t like what they see. Tim Pawlenty would have been fine, but he’s gone. Mitt Romney would be fine, as well, but he may struggle to win the nomination, leaving the field (unless someone like Ryan enters) to less-fine candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. To be sure, the Texas governor supposedly entered the field as a man acceptable to the GOP Establishment as well as the Tea Party and the Christian Right. But his opening act–an announcement speech that was essentially one long feral roar aimed at Obama, liberals, and tax-evading poor people, followed by an egregious exercise of that hardy populist perennial, Fed-bashing–was surely unsettling to elites trying to imagine this caveman-in-a-necktie in the Oval Office.
This we-can’t-lose, so-let’s-win-right point of view was most clearly expressed the other day by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

Romney and Perry will be competing to face possibly the weakest incumbent since Jimmy Carter, with the world in turmoil and the economy adrift. Six months ago, it still seemed as if Republican primary voters might be choosing a sacrificial lamb to run against Barack Obama. Now it looks as if they might be choosing the next president.
This should inspire Republicans to return, yet again, to the question that has dogged their party’s field all year. Is this really the best we can do?

Douthat chose to cast his field-expanding vote for Chris Christie, but more to the point, his comparison of Obama to Carter is a meme that has been steadily spreading like kudzu through the conservative chattering classes for months, and has been given added impetus by the first Gallup tracking poll showing the president’s job approval rating dipping below 40 percent.
The bottom line is that growing Republican optimism about 2012 is leading GOP elites to think seriously about candidates like Ryan, whose popularity among grassroots rank-and-file Republicans makes his nomination at least a realistic, if still a long-shot, scenario. But the same calculation could lead to a general election campaign that gives pessimistic Democrats a seriously renewed hope for victory.


How Do We Actually Know Rick Perry is Electable?

One of the reasons that Rick Perry’s already considered a Big Dog in the Republican presidential field is that it is widely assumed he would be a strong general election candidate who also pleases a very demanding GOP “base” (you know, sort of like a certain other Texas governor back in 2000).
Nate Silver takes a closer look at the evidence about Perry’s electibility, and comes away a bit skeptical.
He notes Perry’s poor performance in general election trial heats against Barack Obama, but suggests that could be just a matter of relatively low national name recognition. He then looks at Perry’s electoral record in Texas, and isn’t that impressed:

Over all, Mr. Perry has won his three elected terms with an average victory margin of 13 percentage points. That’s certainly not a disaster, but it lags the 19-point margin for other Texas Republicans running in those years. In the most recent two elections, Mr. Perry was losing quite a few voters who were voting for Republican for almost every other office.

What I’d add to Nate’s analysis is that Perry’s popularity–or the lack thereof–is germane not just to a measurement of Perry’s political skills, but to his message as a presidential candidate. After all, what makes him attractive to Republican elites is that he can supposedly claim a job-creation record so powerful that it has made Texas the exception to the rule in Obama’s America–a virtual free-market Eden where people are flocking in search of the opportunity they are denied in places that have terrible things like unions, environmental regulations, and publicly-sponsored health care coverage.
If any of that is true, why is Rick Perry consistently less popular than your average Texas Republican? It’s a very good question.


The Ron Paul Pity Party

It is not unusual for politicians who don’t get a lot of headline-style media attention to whine about it–if only to get attention! But the complaints about Ron Paul’s alleged mistreatment by the news media have gone beyond the candidate himself, and beyond the ranks of his intensely loyal supporters, to observers with all sorts of grievances about the media and the political system.
The immediate cause of action was Ron Paul’s failure to be properly feted for his very close second-place finish in the Iowa GOP Straw Poll on August 13. Instead, the actual winner, Michele Bachmann, and someone who was announcing his candidacy halfway across the country, Rick Perry, got all the attention. And that’s because–you can then fill in the blank with your favorite beef, from superficial and small-minded horse-race coverage of campaigns, to a Very Big Conspiracy aimed at thwarting unconventional politicians.
Paul himself and his loyalists seem to be going for the latter explanation, suggesting he is too big a threat to the “Establishment” to receive fair media coverage.
Roger Simon of Politico seems to consider Paul’s meager press clippings as mainly the product of skewed and incompetent political reporting.
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald offered a greatest-hits screed on the subject earlier this week, arguing that the disrespecting of Paul reflects both idiotic political campaign coverage and a conscious effort to marginalize anyone who challenges the status quo on Glenn’s own personal priorities, civil liberties and anti-militarism.
Greenwald’s Salon colleague Steve Kornacki pushed back against this meme pretty effectively, pointing out that Paul’s strong if not-quite-enough performance in Ames didn’t tell us anything about his candidacy that we didn’t already know: the man and his supporters are very good at packing rooms where unrepresentative straw polls are held.
But I’d go a bit further than Kornacki and defend political media shirking of Paul on broader grounds: they are covering the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest, and Paul has something very close to a zero chance of winning it. I’d say he had a zero chance if not for the fact that his party has moved decisively in his direction on fiscal and monetary policy since the last time he ran. But this time around, Paul has chosen (as was made very evident in last Thursday’s Fox News/Washingon Examiner candidates’ debate) to make his foreign policy and national security views front-and-center. And today’s GOP, elites and votes alike, are not about to nominate a man who passionately defends Iran’s right to obtain nuclear weapons. Indeed, if the media were actually giving Paul the kind of attention he and his supporters demand, extended discussion of his riff during the debate about America’s perfidious involvement in the coup to depose leftist Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the 1950s would have more than likely destroyed his appeal to Republicans outside libertarian circles.
The real clincher in this argument involves a simple thought-experiment: suppose Ron Paul was devoting his resources not to a doomed candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, but to a serious third-party bid. If that were the case, you’d better believe he’d be getting a lot more media attention, for the simple reason that his views are attractive to a small but significant minority of voters in both major parties, and outside them. In a hypothetical close 2012 general election, his kind of candidacy backed up with his established name-identification and some serious money could have all sorts of powerful and unpredictable effects on the outcome. He’d be Nader 2000 on steroids, with genuine trans-partisan appeal. He still wouldn’t have a prayer of being elected president, but he’d be taken seriously all right.
Perhaps Paul and the Paulists will move in that direction once his Republican gig predictably crashes and burns. But until such time as that happens, the whining about his lack of media love is unmerited. Nobody made him choose to compete in the presidential nominating contest of a party whose leaders and followers alike strongly favor precisely the kind of truculent foreign policy and pro-military culture that Paul attacks in the most corrosive manner possible. But he did it anyway, and political reporters can be excused for failing to hype his relative success in yet another straw poll as an epochal event.


Dems Win Final Two Wisconsin Recall Elections

So the Wisconsin Recall Saga of 2011 ended last night with two Democratic state senators hanging onto their seats by relatively comfortable margins. The more vulnerable of the two, Jim Holperin, whose district gave Scott Walker 57% of its vote in 2010, won 54% in the recall election.
In the end, Democrats picked up two seats; narrowed the Republican margin in that chamber to 17-16; and threw a pretty significant scare into Walker (who could face a recall of his own in 2012) and his legislative friends.
Given the circumstances, in which state law prohibited recalls of legislators elected in the GOP wave election of 2010, it was an impressive undertaking with results that fell just short of making major history. Indeed, if the tactics and strategies tested in Wisconsin are deployed successfully by progressives in other states in 2012, the effort may yet make history.


81% Approval Rating Is Not A Political Crisis

In a Daily Beast piece provocatively entitled “The Black War Over Obama” that focuses on criticisms of the president by Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, Allison Samuels has this to say:

Never mind the slings and arrows of Tea Partiers. The most politically problematic criticism of Obama these days is coming from his base. And there’s no question that there is a deep reservoir of frustration, confusion, and even rage among many in the African-American community for West to tap into. With unemployment hovering near 17 percent for African-Americans (the national average rate is 9 percent) and 11 percent of black homeowners facing imminent foreclosure, African-Americans have ample reason for anxiety about the coming budget cuts that Obama reluctantly signed into law this month. The Congressional Black Caucus chairman called the recent debt deal “a sugar-coated satan sandwich” that will do little to help communities already struggling.

Samuels is obviously correct about the economic distress of African-Americans (which is almost equally true of Hispanic-Americans). But the idea that African-Americans are abandoning Obama in droves, or represent his biggest political problem, is just not accurate, except in the very limited sense that in a razor-close election any vote lost could be crucial (and by that measurement, of course, losing the small handful of conservative Republicans that might otherwise vote for Obama could be crucial as well).
According to the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll of presidential job approval, which shows Obama dropping to 40% overall, his rating among African-Americans is at 81%. That his lowest Gallup showing among African-Americans since becoming president. It does not, however, translate necessarily into lost votes, given the rightward tilt of the GOP during the last few years, and the likelihood of a highly polarizing 2012 general election in which an exceptionally angry and vengeful conservative Republican base is going to make personal demonization of the first African-American president a 24-7 phenomenon.
This does not mean it would be wise for Team Obama to take African-American voters for granted, much less insist on policies that make their lives even more miserable. But it’s simply not true to say that Obama needs to worry about Cornel West’s increasingly sharp attacks on his presidency more than he needs to worry about any other category of unhappy Americans. Anything he can do to improve the job situation will help the most recession-affected communities the most. And anything he can do to draw attention to the radicalism of the GOP’s prescriptions for America will help him most politically with the minority voters whose wants and needs are so often viewed by today’s conservatives as irrelevant or destructive to the country’s true values and destiny.


The One Tax Increase Conservatives Will Support

The most interesting moment in an otherwise unremarkably cliche-ridden announcement speech by Rick Perry on Saturday was this brief passage:

We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more.

Any doubt in your mind who “we” are in this quote?
It’s all the more interesting because this tangent was nestled into a speech otherwise devoted to the proposition that low taxes are the keys to the economic kingdom.
Steve Benen explains the apparent conundrum:

This is an increasingly popular argument in right-wing circles — Michele Bachmann, one of Perry’s presidential rivals, has pushed the same line — thought it’s entirely counter-intuitive. The argument isn’t even subtle: far-right Republicans are annoyed that many Americans don’t make enough money to be eligible to pay income taxes, so they believe it’s important to get more of these lower- and middle-income Americans paying more to the government.
In case anyone’s forgotten, the relevant details matters here: millions of Americans may be exempt from income taxes, but they still pay sales taxes, state taxes, local taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare/Medicaid taxes, and in many instances, property taxes.
It’s not as if these folks are getting away with something — the existing tax structure leaves them out of the income tax system because they don’t make enough money to qualify.

What much of this is about is actually the Earned Income Tax Credit, the provision in the tax code once much beloved of Republicans (including the sainted Ronald Reagan), and considered central to the Republican-backed welfare reform legislation of 1996, that enables the working poor to reduce or eliminate their income tax liability. It says a lot about the movement of the right of the GOP of late that when Tom DeLay proposed delaying EITC payments back in 1999 in order to help pay for an upper-income tax cut, he was repudiated by both of the front-runner Republican presidential candidates of that cycle, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Now some conservatives confine themselves to attacking not the EITC itself, but its refundable nature: the ability of families whose EITC exceeds its income tax liability to get a check from the IRS (capped, however, by the amount paid in federal payroll taxes). In the common parlance of the Right (ironically echoed by John McCain during the desperate moments of his 2008 presidential campaign when he ran ads attacking Obama’s proposal to increase EITC payments) this refundable feature is “welfare” (albeit “welfare” inherently linked to a work requirement since earned income is necessary to generate it). Indeed, if and when Congress gets around to “tax reform” discussions, you can be certain that conservatives will go after the refundable EITC as a “loophole” that needs to be eliminated along with corporate subsidies.
But Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann don’t seem to be making this sort of distinction; they are talking–in moral terms, no less–about the “injustice” of poor people not paying income taxes in the first place. It’s a faithful echo of the reverse class warfare rhetoric of Rick Santelli’s rant, which launched the Tea Party Movement back in 2009, aimed at the shiftless poor people who had no business trying to own homes and caused the housing and financial crises instead of staying in their place.
At a time when income inequality in this country is reaching previously unimagined levels, and corporate profits are setting records, it’s worth noting that some conservatives are still angry at the less fortunate for their unreasonable demands–to the point they are even tempted to abandon their sacred pledge to never, ever raise taxes on anybody. It’s a part of the seamy underside of today’s politics that bears watching.


Pull Yourself Together, DC! Perrymania Is Overrated

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Like much of his career, Rick Perry’s entry into the presidential campaign was exceptionally well-timed. Announcing the very day that his main rival for the “electable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney” mantle, Tim Pawlenty, was driven from the race by a poor third-place showing at the Iowa Straw Poll, the Texan has a lot of open political space to occupy. As a result, some political observers are already depicting the nomination battle as a one-on-one Romney versus Perry battle, aligning Republican presidential politics along the Boston/Austin axis that has so much resonance in Democratic history. That’s not surprising: Many media (and Republican) elites have long held Bachmann in low regard as a noisy zealot; others are eager to brush aside the cultural and fiscal fanaticism she is thought to represent and get on with a GOP presidential contest centered on the economic issues assumed to be the incumbent’s Achilles heel. But it’s a long way to the next big event of the presidential cycle–the actual Iowa Caucuses, currently scheduled for February–and, barring some self-destructive gaffe or an unlikely plunge to Pawlentyland in the polls, Bachmann is not going away anytime soon.
Following an initial love-fest, Rick Perry is about to undergo the kind of heightened scrutiny that’s already afflicting Bachmann. The centerpiece of his campaign message, the Texas Economic Miracle, is already coming into question in the media, and will be challenged, however indirectly, by his GOP rivals. Eventually, someone will draw attention to the fact that if Perry’s low-tax, low-services, corporate-subsidizing policies really were an economic cure-all, similar conditions should have made states like Alabama and Mississippi world-beating dynamos years ago. He will also have to answer for past actions that have annoyed conservatives mightily, from his long-time advocacy of a state-level version of the DREAM Act, to his 2007 demand for inoculation of every female teenager with a vaccine against the HPV virus, to his 2008 championship of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid, as well as his very recent flip-flops on gay marriage and abortion.
Bachmann, meanwhile, is no Ron Paul. She has none of the heresies to “movement conservative” orthodoxies that Perry has committed. Nor is she simply a close and valued friend to the Christian Right and the Tea Party movement like Perry is: She is “one of us,” to an extraordinary extent. And, as she has so often told Iowans, she is a native of that state. No matter how well past southern-fried candidates with Christian Right backing have done in the Caucuses, if everything else is equal, Iowa conservatives would prefer their champion being someone who understands how to dig a car out of a snow drift and how to follow a hockey game.
Unless Perry decides to concede Iowa to Bachmann (an unlikely scenario), he will have to play some serious catch-up in the state, paying tribute in time-consuming personal attention and consumption of potluck dinners that Iowans demand of every candidate seeking their affection. In that hothouse environment, the risk of gaffes is very high, and it’s too late for Perry to keep expectations low. And if Perry does not set Iowa afire, there’s a good chance that his competition with Bachmann for social conservative activist support will create an opening for Romney to come into the state in search of a knockout blow against the entire field.
Looking beyond the Caucuses, the road ahead looks more daunting for Rick Perry than the hype surrounding his entry might suggest, while the overall state of the race continues to be perilous for Republicans hoping for an early consensus that would provide an extended opportunity for the GOP nominee to unite the party and focus on Barack Obama. Until Perry’s popularity in Iowa can be verified by polls of likely Caucus-goers, the most plausible scenario is a Bachmann win in the Caucuses, followed by Romney victories in Nevada and New Hampshire, and then a Perry breakthrough in South Carolina.
This scenario would take the GOP into uncharted territory, since there’s never been a presidential nominating contest where the first three big states were won by three different candidates, all of them with some level of national support and all of them demonstrably strong fundraisers. It’s the sort of situation where relatively small developments–a gaffe, a strong or poor debate performance, a monomaniacal series of attacks from minor candidates, a failure to meet media expectations–could become very big deals. But barring some major development, an extended nominating contest seems likely; it could have happened in 2008 had John McCain not eked out back-to-back wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and this year the schedule after the early states is significantly more spread out.
To be sure, it’s possible that the Perry hype is justified, and he’ll surge ahead of Bachmann in Iowa and get his one-on-one with Romney. He remains the best-positioned of the three serious contenders as a potential “unity” candidate for a vengeful, conservative-trending party smelling victory and wanting to hide its cultural and fiscal extremism behind a plausible economic success story. But it won’t be a cakewalk, if only because Perry’s not the only candidate feeling a calling to run and win this race.


Beyond the Bully Pulpit: Deploying Other Progressive Assets For a Jobs Effort

This item is a guest post by Ralph Whitehead, Professor of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts and a long-time contributor to discussions of progressive politics.
What James Vega says about the bully pulpit as a medium is certainly correct and worth saying. Much of his memo seems to define the bully pulpit too narrowly, as if it consists merely of a single presidential speech or set of remarks or a brief series of speeches on a single subject. Nevertheless, even if we replace this definition with one that is modestly broader and can include multiple appearances to illustrate a common theme, his case still holds.
Although a President’s words can somewhat alter the level of popular support for some policy objectives, they can’t reliably alter it a great deal for every policy objective. As a medium, the President’s voice is not all-powerful. This holds for President Obama, too, no matter how eloquent he has been in the past or will be in the future. So it isn’t true that the bully pulpit per se, if President Obama would only use it, would be the deciding factor in any of a wide range of policy debates. To the extent that Democratic partisans have called on President Obama to use the bully pulpit because they believe that he will be able to use it to this effect, they are wrong. (Also, as Vega might have said of the Republicans, they don’t control the bully pulpit — but recently they have still been able to accomplish a lot of what they have wanted to accomplish.)
However, three sections of the memo deal not only with the matter of the bully pulpit but also with various aspects of the matter of jobs. These sections appear as a number of Democrats are urging the President in effect to launch an effort to put a large number of Americans back to work by first impelling perhaps 30 House Republicans to take the extreme step of voting for a plan to fund public works projects. I worry that Vega’s cautions against the effectiveness of the bully pulpit will be read as cautions also against the effectiveness of such an effort and thus as cautions against the President and the Democrats embarking on such an effort in the first place. If they are read this way, then I want to make the case that they shouldn’t be.
To move 30 House Republicans is obviously a tall order. Democrats won’t be able to do this by mobilizing merely our partisan base in each of those 30 districts. We will also have to address voters who stand outside of our base. Also, it won’t be enough for us merely to persuade such voters to accept the creation of a jobs initiative that would originate in the unpopular federal government. We will also have to get them to support our plan, and to do it actively enough to be willing to urge their respective House members to vote for it. Given what Vega tells us about the bully pulpit, this order is clearly too tall to be filled by just a series of speeches and appearances by the President. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that attempting such an effort must be a fool’s errand.
Some of the proponents of such an effort know how tall an order it is. Also, though they definitely imagine that a heavy use of the voice and presence of the President would be a necessary part of what it would take for such an effort to be successful, they don’t assume that it would be sufficient. What they have in mind for it certainly includes use of the bully pulpit, But it would have to include other assets as well.
For one thing, apart from the role of the President and many surrogates, this effort would include the elements of any serious grassroots lobbying campaign. Moreover, the role of just the President himself wouldn’t rely only on his own voice. He would also begin to go into each congressional districts and use his stature to help gain attention for the voices of people there who are unemployed or underemployed. Given the nature of those districts, a lot of these people are white. Some hold four-year degrees. A lot of others don’t. Literally and figuratively, he would hand his microphone over to them, so that they can describe their own situations. If they wish, they could then, as the case might be, speak for or against the Democratic plan to create public works jobs. As they did so, they could symbolically address their words to their respective members of the House.
If the President is lucky, opponents of the bill would picket his appearances. If so, their actions would constitute large in-kind contributions to his re-election campaign. They would have to report them to the FEC. So his aides should bring along the proper reporting forms and pass them out. Also, the President’s work at the level of individual congressional districts wouldn’t prevent him from appearing at events of national significance. If a job fair attracts 10,000 job-seekers and national media attention, the President should feel free to attend and see if he can persuade some of the job seekers to devote some of their time to supporting the effort to pass a jobs bill.
In such an effort, the prime source of its appeal to voters, both in the target districts and across the country, wouldn’t have to be the bully pulpit. After all, it isn’t supposed to be. The prime source of its appeal is the appeal that a steady paycheck has for people who need one and, for people who don’t, it is the appeal of the benefits of the ripple effects of the decline in the number of their friends and neighbors who need a job.