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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: October 2011

The Democratic Strategist Interviews Erica Seifert, Lead Analyst, Democracy Corps.

Every serious observer and participant in the formulation of Democratic political strategy is familiar with the work of Democracy Corps – the polling and strategy organization founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville. Democracy Corps is unique in making all its polling research public and providing a perspective that is firmly partisan and progressive but insistently objective in its data collection and interpretation.
Democracy Corps is an independent project run by the polling firm Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research (GQRR). Democracy Corps defines its role as “providing research, strategic advice, and a public voice to the issues important to the American people. It acts as a resource for the unions, public interest organizations, party and congressional leaders who are working for a more responsive government.”
But, while Democracy Corps frequent memos are read by essentially every major political commentator and analyst, there are few if any articles or commentaries that examine the unique aspects of D-Corps methodology and the quite significant methodological advances they have recently introduced.
In order to better understand these topics, The Democratic Strategist interviewed Erica Seifert, the co-author of recent memos with Stan Greenberg and the chief coordinator of D-Corps day to day activities.

Q – What is your background and how did you come to work at Democracy Corps?
I actually have a PhD in political history and was an academic specializing in the recent history of political communication and candidate images before I arrived at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. My academic training included substantial work in oral history and quantitative methods. Also, I like to think that, as an historian, I have a unique perspective–especially in terms of witnessing and analyzing trends in our research.
Q – What did you find when you got to GQRR and Democracy Corps?
What I found was that there was actually a wide range of backgrounds among the people who work here at the firm. There’s really no standard bio, there are social science people and quantitative people working together.
Q. Does GQRR have a formal methodology that it teaches new employees?
No, there is no one particular book or specific formal academic or technical methodology. The core methodology comes from the really vast internal knowledge-base that has been developed over the years and the extensive experience accumulated within the firm. The main training and orientation for new employees is a series of unique workshops that Al Quinlan, Jeremy Rosner, Stan Greenberg, and other in-house experts conduct.
Q – One thing that distinguishes D-Corps’ strategy Memos from other poll-based strategy analyses is the more extensive use of data from focus groups that is closely integrated with standard opinion polling. Many people – particularly Democrats – are often somewhat suspicious of focus groups because of their close connection with advertising rather than political science research. Is this sense of distrust at all valid?
Actually, the need for focus groups in political polling derives from the fact that opinion polls — and specifically the design of questions — is really quite subjective and subject to bias. We’ve all seen extreme examples of questions slanted to produce a particular answer but there’s a more subtle problem as well. We in D-Corps, for example, because we are progressives, could easily write questions that sound right to our ears but which fail to capture the linguistic and psychological framework that ordinary voters employ when they think about a particular political issue.
It’s for this reason that both Stan and Al insist on doing focus groups before writing poll questions. It’s simply too easy to write poll questions that sound right to you but not necessarily right to your audience.
As a result, we do focus groups to learn the language people actually use in normal conversation and how they spontaneously describe things. We use this information to improve our questions as well as to improve the messages we test. Focus groups allow us to hone the grammars and textures we use in our polls and messages.


Political Strategy Notes

Dems, especially, should read The New York Times editorial, “Where’s the Jobs Bill?,” urging Democrats, not Republicans, to work through their issues and get unified behind the jobs bill. “…The sharp contrast with the Republican plan to do nothing can only be made if Democrats are clearly united behind a plan to invigorate the economy.”
Lori Montgomery has a WaPo article on the politics of defining “rich” upward to “millionaires” as a new Democratic tax strategy.
Ryan J. Reilly of Talking Points Memo Muckraker posts on a topic that hasn’t gotten enough coverage, considering the scope of the problem: “What The Justice Department Can Actually Do About Voter ID Laws.” Reilly notes the legal limitations facing Dems in challenging the voter i.d. laws in states not covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: for all the other states that passed voter ID laws that aren’t subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, federal intervention is a long shot. The only other option for opposing a voter ID law is an argument under Section 2 of the VRA, where the burden of proof is pretty high.
We need revenues. We’re too fat. Why cant we do this?
In his Dissent article “Neither Revolution Nor Reform: A New Strategy for the Left“, Gar Alperovitaz has a challenge for progressives: “A non-statist, community-building, institution-changing, democratizing strategy might well capture their imagination and channel their desire to heal the world…Just possibly, it could open the way to an era of true progressive renewal, even one day perhaps step-by-step systemic change or the kind of unexpected, explosive, movement-building power evidenced in the “Arab Spring” and, historically, in our own civil rights, feminist, and other great movements.”
Ralph Nader shows Dems how to shred the GOP meme about “job-killing regulations” at Reader Supported News, and make the point that regulations which promote health and safety create jobs. “Wake up Democrats. Learn the political art of truthful repetition to counter the cruelest Republicans who ever crawled up Capitol Hill. You’ve got massive, documented materials to put the Lie to the Republicans.”
When do campaigns ads matter most? Nate Silver has some answers in the first installment of his two-parter on the topic. A nugget: “…the effects of television advertising appear to last no more than a week — a “rapid decay,” write the eggheads. A study of the 2000 presidential election finds the same decay. Campaigns may be wasting millions of dollars running ads weeks if not months before election day, only to have any effects of those ads dissipate. ”
There may be a good lesson for Dems in one anecdote in Sabrina Tavernise’s The Caucus post, “Democrat Wins West Virginia Governor’s Race” in the New York Times: “Kathy Jackson, a retired janitor, said she would cast her vote for the Democratic candidate because she did not trust Mr. Maloney…”I heard on TV that he wanted to take away Medicare,” she said, sitting in a wheelchair in a McDonald’s restaurant in Charleston.”
Obama campaign making hay vs. GOP early voting suppression in Ohio. TPM has the video ad here.
Jeremy Redmon and Daniel Malloy have an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the labor shortage and economic cost of the new Georgia immigration law. The authors explain: “Georgia’s economy is projected to take a $391 million hit and shed about 3,260 jobs this year because of farm labor shortages, according to a report released Tuesday by the state’s agricultural industry.” Many farmers believe the labor shortage and crop losses are a direct consequence of Georgia’s new immigrant-bashing law — House Bill 87 — passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by GOP Governor Nathan Deal. Latino farm workers fearing legalized harrassment have left the state in droves.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. sees a transformation of the race for 2012 in the events of the last week — to the benefit of President Obama and the Democratic Party. “Obama is a long way from being able to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” But for conservatives, the days of wine and roses are over.”


Needed: Wall St. Protest Focus on Money-in-Politics Reforms

Lawrence Lessig has a HuffPo post, “#OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt,” which merits a thougthful read from everyone who is concerned that the Wall St. protests achieve something substantial. First, Lessig outlines the current predicament:

Writers by the dozen have lamented the influence that Wall Street exercised over Washington throughout the 1990s, leading up to the great collapse of 2008. A multi-billion dollar lobbying campaign, tied to hundreds of millions in campaign contributions, got Washington to erase its regulations and withdraw its regulators. One statistic summarizes it all: in 1980, close to 100 percent of the financial instruments traded in the market were subject to New Deal exchange-based regulations; by 2008, 90 percent were exempted from those regulations, effectively free of any regulatory oversight.
What is surprising — indeed, terrifying, given what it says about this democracy — is what happened after the collapse. That even after the worst financial crises in 80 years, and even after the lions share of responsibility for that crisis had been linked to finance laissez faire, and even after the dean of finance laissez faire, the great Alan Greenspan, expressly confessed that it was wrong, and that he “made a mistake,” nothing changed…We are more at risk of a major financial collapse today than we were a decade ago. And the absolutely obscene bonuses of an industry that pays twice its pretax profits in salaries are even more secure today.

Lessig adds, “The arrest of hundreds of tired and unwashed kids, denied the freedom of a bullhorn, and the right to protest on public streets, may well be the first real green-shoots of this, the American spring. And if nurtured right, it could well begin real change.”
In his WaPo op-ed, “Rescuing America From Wall St.,” Harold Meyerson notes the impressive coalition character of the protests:

Many of these groups have focused on immediate goals — such as stopping particular banks from foreclosing on more homes. They, along with unions, have demonstrated on Wall Street many times since the 2008 financial crisis. But only now, as Occupy Wall Street — an organization that they didn’t create — has grabbed the public imagination the past few weeks, are the myriad mobilizations commanding the media’s attention.
“It’s a confluence of planned and unplanned demonstrations,” says Stephen Lerner, a longtime organizer for the Service Employees International Union who once spearheaded the union’s successful campaign to organize big-city janitors and today helps guide the groups in New Bottom Line. “We build on each other. We go ping-ponging back and forth.”
Planned and unplanned, the groups are coming together. The imminent mixing of largely young and countercultural Wall Street occupiers with more seasoned and hard-nosed unionists and middle-class liberals may produce some clashes of style, but their shared anger at what banks have done to them — to all of us — should be sufficient to cement this nascent coalition. It had better be.

But Lessig, whose post is as hard on Democrats as it is on Republicans, urges that the protests get focused on corruption and campaign finance reform as central priorities for the protests:

…These protesters should see that they are that one striking at the root. They should understand that our system has been corrupted by money — even if the Supreme Court refuses to call it “corruption,” and even if political scientists are unsure about whether their regressions can show it. And they should recognize that until this root is hacked, the weeds of this corruption will continue to destroy this democracy, and this nation.
This corruption is our common enemy. So let this protest first #OccupyWallSt, and then #OccupyKSt. And then let the anger and outrage that it has made clear lead many more Americans to #OccupyMainSt, and reclaim this republic.

Lessig, like Meyerson, is optimistic about the potential of Occupy Wall St., given focus and discipline: “For if done right, this movement just may have that potential. What the protesters are saying is true: Wall Street’s money has corrupted this democracy. What they are demanding is right: An end to that corruption. And as Flickr feeds and tweets awaken a slumbering giant, the People, the justice in this, yet another American revolution, could well become overwhelming, and finally have an effect.”


The Truth About Voter Suppression

This item is cross-posted from Salon.
The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country’s archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.
The outrage generated by the revelations of 2000 soon spent itself or was channeled into other avenues, producing, as a sort of consolation prize, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, an underambitious and underfunded law mainly aimed at preventing partisan mischief in vote counting. The fundamental problem of accepting 50 different systems for election administration, complicated even more in states like Florida where local election officials control most decisions with minimal federal, state or judicial oversight, was barely touched by HAVA. As Judith Browne-Dianis, of the civil rights group the Advancement Project, told me: “The same cracks in the system have persisted.”
But most politicians in both parties paid lip service to the idea that every American citizen had a right to vote, and that higher voting levels of the sort taken for granted in most democracies would be a good thing. “Convenience voting” via mail and early on-site balloting, or simply liberalized “absentee” voting, spread rapidly throughout the last decade, often as a way to minimize Election Day confusion or chicanery. In Florida itself, Republican Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist relaxed and then abolished the state’s practice of disenfranchising nonviolent felons for a period of time after their release.
No more. In the wake of the 2010 elections, Republican governors and legislatures are engaging in a wave of restrictive voting legislation unlike anything this country has seen since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which signaled the defeat of the South’s long effort to prevent universal suffrage. This wave of activism is too universal to be a coincidence, and too broad to reflect anything other than a general determination to restrict the franchise.
Millions of voters are affected. In Florida new Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation reversing Crist’s order automatically restoring the voting rights of nonviolent ex-felons. In one fell swoop, Scott extinguished the right to vote for 97,000 Florida citizens and placed more than a million others in danger of disenfranchisement. In a close contest for the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes, such measures could be as crucial to the outcome as the various vote suppression efforts of 2000.
As Ari Berman explained in an excellent recent summary of these developments for Rolling Stone, restrictive legislation, which has been introduced in 38 states and enacted (so far) in at least 12, can be divided into four main categories: restrictions on voter registration drives by nonpartisan, nonprofit civic and advocacy groups; cutbacks in early voting opportunities; new, burdensome identification requirements for voting; and reinstitution of bans on voting by ex-felons.
While new voter ID laws have clearly been coordinated by the powerful conservative state legislative lobbying network ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), other initiatives have spread almost virally. Virtually all of these restrictions demonstrably target segments of the electorate — the very poor, African-Americans and Hispanics, college students, and organizations trying to register all of the above — that tend to vote for Democrats.
Virtually all have been justified by their sponsors as measures to prevent “voter fraud,” a phenomenon for which there is remarkably little evidence anywhere in the country. As Tovah Andrea Wang, an election law expert at Demos, has concluded: “[L]aw enforcement statistics, reports from elections officials and widespread research have proved that voter fraud at the polling place is virtually nonexistent.” The Bush administration’s Justice Department tried to a scandalous degree to find cases of voter fraud to prosecute, and failed.
But as Marge Baker, executive vice president of People for the American Way, observes:

So-called anti-fraud laws are almost always thinly veiled attempts to prevent large segments of the population from making it to the ballot box … low-income voters, college students, people of color, the elderly. The people behind these laws know that there is no “voter fraud” epidemic. They just want to make it as difficult as possible for certain types of people to vote.


Sour Attitude Toward Congress a Boon for Dems?

The image of congress has hit rock bottom. As Paul Kane and Scott Clement report in “Poll sees a new low in Americans’ approval of Congress” in the Washington Post:

After nine months of contentious battles on Capitol Hill, Americans have reached a new level of disgust toward Congress that has left nearly all voters angry at their leaders and doubtful that they can fix the problems facing the country.
Whether Republican, Democrat or independent, more Americans disapprove of Congress than at any point in more than two decades of Washington Post-ABC News polling.
Just 14 percent of the public approves of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest poll. That is lower than just before the 1994, 2006 and 2010 elections, when the majority party was on the verge of losing power in the House.
For most it’s not just a casual dislike of Congress: Sixty-two percent say they “strongly disapprove” of congressional job performance. An additional 20 percent “somewhat” disapprove.

Interestingly, among those who were dissatisfied with congress, 39 percent blamed the Republicans, while 25 percent blamed President Obama, with 27 percent blaming both and 9 percent having no opinion. Respondents were not asked if they blamed Democrats.
The last time approval dipped under 20 percent, Dems reaped the benefit. As Clement and Kane note, “Congressional approval has been cut in half since March and stands below 20 percent for the first time since October 1994, just before Republicans ended four decades of Democratic rule in the House.”
The data certainly indicates that the Republicans’ responsibility for congressional gridlock could be a potent meme for Democratic candidates in ’12. It appears that Dems have little to lose and much to gain by hammering the “do-nothing Republicans” meme in ads and throughout the Democratic echo chamber.
Apart from Republicans getting most of the blame for dysfunctional government, the really good news in the poll is that it looks like President Obama’s jobs initiative is getting a favorable response. The authors note that the President now “holds a 49 to 34 percent advantage over congressional Republicans when it comes to the public’s trust on creating jobs. That is a change from September, when they were evenly split at 40 percent each.” A majority, 52 percent, said they supported the President’s jobs plan, with 36 percent opposed.


Could This Be Sarah Palin’s Moment?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
We’re at a very strange juncture in the 2012 presidential contest. Rick Perry continues to struggle, as Mitt Romney savagely exploits his offensive-to-conservatives position on immigration and the Texan deals with new, potentially damaging revelations of a racially insensitive name for a hunting camp rented by his family. But Romney’s not benefitting much in the polls, and he remains a persona non grata to many conservatives. And the candidate with the current buzz, Herman Cain, is many miles away from being taken seriously by GOP elites as a potential nominee.
Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Late last week Reuters reported that influential conservative activists upset about Perry’s performance were begging Mike Huckabee to reconsider his decision to give 2012 a pass. (Huck quickly denied he was listening to such pleadings, but not that they were being made.) Chris Christie, meanwhile, is reportedly struggling with demands that he repudiate his own assessment of himself as “not ready” to serve as president and jump into the race. But if Christie doesn’t answer the bell, is there any doubt a certain universally known, beloved-of-the-base politician will hear her name on the restless wind and give fresh consideration to the prospect of “going rogue” and running for president? Yes, this could be Sarah Palin’s moment to confound her critics, to send the GOP establishment types she hates even more than liberals into frantic hysteria, and most of all, to gain the attention she craves.
At this late stage, it’s become impossible not to understand that time has all but run out on potential last-minute candidates–except for those with universal name ID, massive fundraising potential, and a plausible path to the nomination. Florida’s decision to move its presidential primary to January 31, followed by South Carolina’s move to January 21, means that the formal nominating process will almost certainly begin in Iowa on January 2–less than three months from now, if not earlier.
Palin has long been written off as a possible 2012 candidate by pundits who look at her terrible general-election poll ratings and her questionable work ethic and conclude her chronic refusal to rule out a run is no more than a ruse to keep her name in the news. She hasn’t made any effort to put together a skeleton organization or to sustain any sort of continuous presence in national political discourse. But throughout the “invisible primary,” Palin has consistently said that if she wanted to, she could run the kind of wildly unconventional campaign that makes polling, organization, and the attitudes of elites completely irrelevant. It is perhaps worth considering the possibility that she believes what she is saying. If she does, the current situation must look tempting indeed.
Just look at Iowa. The winner of the Ames Straw Poll, Michele Bachmann, whose early success was thought to represent a conclusive preemption of any Palin candidacy, is now, to quote one prominent report, “running on fumes” in her native state, reduced to campaigning in a few major cities and handing out leftover literature asking voters to show up in Ames. Cain never much set up an Iowa campaign to begin with. Romney seems determined to avoid the commitment to Iowa that tripped him up in 2008. And Perry’s immigration heresy is clearly hurting him in a state where nativist champ Steve King is a political icon. Is there any solid reason to believe Palin couldn’t leap into the race in the first-in-the-nation caucus and become a serious competitor? Similarly, there is no way to anticipate how rank-and-file conservatives might react to the kind of mammoth, sustained news-cycle-dominating mockery and vilification Palin would immediately attract were she to finally take the plunge. At least initially, a Palin candidacy would all but blot out the sun.
Might this scenario be irresistible to St. Joan of the Tundra, for whom resentment at mockery by elites has always been the source of her unique bond with the conservative base? That’s hard to say. In a recent interview with her buddy Greta Van Susteren, Palin said her main concern about running for president is that she wasn’t sure the job would give her any more influence than she has today. She also said that over half the electorate was composed of independents who were tired of the existing Republican field’s “bickering” and were mainly concerned about finding a champion to oppose Obama’s “socialist policies.” Clearly, she lives in a world characterized by different facts and different assumptions about politics than most of us. But so, too, do many of the grassroots conservatives who will determine the GOP presidential nomination. A new Washington Post poll shows that 83 percent of self-identified Republicans, and 91 percent of Tea Party supporters, believe that the Republican candidate, whoever it is, will defeat Barack Obama.
In other words, these are not people obsessed with “electability,” or who give much credence to current polls showing Obama actually leading every named GOP candidate other than (occasionally) Romney. They want a conservative champion, and with anti-Washington and anti-politician sentiments at all time highs, maybe even somewhat a bit “mavericky.”
Of course, maybe Chris Christie will jump into the race and become for many Republicans the liberal-baiting champion they crave–at least until, like Perry, he has to undergo a close analysis of his heterodox positions and utterances. But if Christie takes a pass, don’t be too surprised if Palin sees an opening to dominate the political airwaves and internet for weeks and months to come. And don’t be too surprised if a shocking number of Republican voters forget about her allegedly toxic persona and respond to her primitive cry of defiance of everyone who has ever underestimated her–or taken them for granted.


Political Strategy Notes

At HuffPo Pollster, Mark Blumenthal’s post “Obama’s Approval Rating Is Underwater, But Don’t Try To Predict 2012 Yet,” notes that, despite lowered approval ratings, President Obama lead GOP frontrunners Romney and Perry. Although approval ratings are slightly better predictors of election results than trial heats, “none of these polling numbers can predict the winner of the presidency a year or more before the election,” as Blumenthal points out.
Jim Wallis, CEO of Sojourners has a HuffPo post, “Defining ‘Evangelicals’ in an Election Year” reminding progressives not to write off all evangelicals as conservative Republicans. As Wallis notes, “Now in 2011, the Right still gets it wrong when they claim that most evangelicals are firmly in their base; and the Left still doesn’t get it when they tacitly agree with the Right’s claim that all the evangelicals essentially belong to the most conservative candidates….it is precisely because we are Bible-believing and Jesus following evangelical Christians, that we have a fundamental commitment to social, economic, and racial justice, to be a good stewards of God’s creation, to be peacemakers in a world of conflict and war, and to be consistent advocates for human life and dignity wherever they are threatened.”
Lest you thought there was a limit to GOP electoral scams, Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker on “State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012’s top battlegrounds,” a revealing look at Art Pope’s “REDMAP, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures.”
The New York Times has an update on white house strategy, “Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election” by Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler. The authors believe the Obama campaign is focusing on securing states where demographic trends favorable to Dems have taken root — with rapidly increasing numbers of “educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda.”
Some political pundits were shocked when Virginia and North Carolina, as well as Florida cast their electoral votes for Senator Obama in 2008. But demographic trends favoring Democratic candidates are accelerating in the south, as Chris Kromm explains in his Facing South post “Black Belt Power: African-Americans come back South, change political landscape.”
One of the more interesting political history books of the year, “The ‘S’ Word” by John Nichols has a fascinating chapter on Abraham Lincoln’s significant socialist connections and beliefs. That would be Abraham Lincoln, the Republican President, who said “The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of family relations, should be one of uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.” and that “labor is the superior – greatly the superior – of capital.” There’s lots more here to annoy Republicans, when they trot out the sanitized, hagiographic Lincoln of high school history books.
Donna Jablonski has an update at the AFL-CIO Blog, “Working Families Stall Ohio Voter Suppression,” which should encourage citizens groups around the country to get organized and fight Republican schemes to disenfranchise pro-Democratic constituencies.
Lawrence Lessig, author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – – and a Plan to Stop It,” has a post making the case for small-donor reforms at Bloomberg.com. Says Lessig after reviewing several funding pathways: “There are comparisons to make and lessons to learn. But for now my aim is to talk strategy. If you believe that our Congress is corrupted; if you believe that corruption can be solved only by removing its source, if you believe special-interest funded elections are that source, then some version of small-dollar funded elections is the core to a strategy that could restore this republic..”
Michael Cooper reports at The New York Times on the expected impact of laws enacted in a dozen states “requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives.” Cooper cites a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law indicating that the laws “could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.”
Well, this is good news. Kyle Trygstad’s “Senate Math Not So Simple” at roll call.com reports that “The conventional wisdom is that odds favor Republicans winning control of the Senate next year. But an examination of the 2012 landscape at the end of the third quarter shows the chamber’s majority could go either way” owing mostly to uncertainty about the outcomes of a number of GOP primaries.


Can the “Race Card” Save Rick Perry?

The minute the Washington Post ran a big story about a racial epithet gracing (or rather, disgracing) the entrance to a Perry family hunting retreat in Texas at some, debatable point in the not-too-distant past, I heard a number of progressives asking the question: “Is Perry finished?”
I didn’t think so then, and after a day of fervent conservative reaction defending Perry, I sure don’t think so now. So programmed are conservatives to deplore any intimations of racial insensitivity by their ideological fellows as “playing the race card” that the furor may actually be helping the Texan. Here’s a good explanation from Dan Amira at New York magazine:

[Y]ou have to consider that there are two things Republicans hate more than anything. One is being accused of racism, which has happened with increasing frequency since President Obama became president, and, if you ask Republicans, is never, ever justified. Two is unfair treatment by the allegedly biased mainstream media. So among Republicans, the widespread response to the Post story was not, “wow, Rick Perry messed up.” It was, “the liberal media is smearing another Republican as a racist!”

But that’s only half the story of how the Texas revelations might wind up helping Perry: in the richest of ironies, the saga is probably going to hurt, perhaps seriously, the campaign of African-American Herman Cain, who had the temerity to criticize Perry for apparent racial insensitivity. Amira’s piece features a number of tweets from erstwhile Cain fans going ballistic on him for colluding in a “smear” of Perry. Paul Waldman explains how Cain is going to wind up being accused of a racist attack on the Texan:

Cain hasn’t been shy about talking about race, and has offered himself as a living rebuke to the idea that black people should automatically support Democrats. But he apparently didn’t quite get that he’s become Republicans’ New Black Friend. A big part of his job is to show the world, just by his presence, that conservatives aren’t racists. But that means buying into the prevailing conservative narrative on race, which says that anti-black racism is a thing of the past, and the only racism that exists anymore is racism directed at white people. And the critical corollary is that there is no more vile kind of racism than white people being falsely accused of racism.

With Cain palpably taking support away from Perry over the last couple of weeks, this weird dynamic could go a long way toward ending Perry’s free-fall in the polls. If you didn’t know better, you’d almost suspect one of Perry’s Texas buddies planted the whole story in the Post.


Can Progressives Serve Tea?

In his Washington Post column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. asks a question worth pondering “Can the Left Stage a Tea Party?“. Dionne sets the stage:

.A quiet left has…been very bad for political moderates. The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the Tea Party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention. The political center doesn’t stand a chance unless there is a fair fight between the right and the left.
…The absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger. His health-care reform is remarkably conservative — yes, it did build on the ideas implemented in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney once bragged about. It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements.

It was a clever strategy that paid off for the right. Whenever there is a void left by Democratic inaction, the right is always eager to fill it with their custom-tailored memes. In this endeavor they found a willing accomplice, not only in Fox News, but the MSM in general, which they played like a fiddle, as Dionne explains:

Conservative funders realized that pumping up the Tea Party movement was the most efficient way to build opposition to Obama’s initiatives. And the media became infatuated with the Tea Party in the summer of 2009, covering its disruptions of congressional town halls with an enthusiasm not visible this summer when many Republicans faced tough questions from their more progressive constituents.

The press loves conflict, especially when it provides lively video. This week progressives have an opportunity to generate some media interest of their own, as Dionne reports:

…Progressives will highlight a new effort to pursue the road not taken at a conference convened by the Campaign for America’s Future that opens Monday. It is a cooperative venture with a large number of other organizations, notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who wants to show the country what a truly progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment — in a positive sense.” The anti-Wall Street demonstrators seem to have that sense, too.

While no one is betting that these events will attract the same level of soup-to-nuts coverage received by the tea party, at least it’s a start. Dionne relates how an activist left helped two Democratic Presidents who legislated impressive domestic policies:

What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries…A real left could usefully instruct Americans as to just how moderate the president they elected in 2008 is — and how far to the right conservatives have strayed.

Chris Cillizza’s The Fix post “Republicans hold the edge in voter intensity ahead of 2012 elections, poll shows” makes a related point which supports Dionne’s argument. As Cillizza notes:

…If new numbers from Gallup are to be believed, this “intensity gap” is a major problem for President Obama as he looks toward 2012…The data showed that just 45 percent of Democrats say they are more enthusiastic about the 2012 presidential election than they have been in past elections, while 44 percent described themselves as less enthusiastic…Nearly six in 10 Republicans (58 percent), on the other hand, call themselves more enthusiastic about voting in 2012 than in past contests, while just 30 percent say they are less excited.

What apparently hasn’t sunk in yet among Democrats is the grim prospect of a GOP national trifecta — the huge consequences of having the Republicans control both houses of congress and the presidency. The enthusiasm gap indicates that some Democrats — as well as swing voters — need a wake-up call. It may be that more activism from the left can help provide it.


Has the GOP’s Southern Hustle Peaked?

Campbell Robertson’s New York Times article “For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining” scratches the surface of a trend Democrats should try to understand better.
Robertson focuses on Mississippi, the state where African Americans comprise the largest percentage of residents:

At a glance, Democrats may seem to be in better shape here than they are in neighboring states. Republicans won a supermajority in the Alabama Legislature in the 2010 elections and took over the Louisiana Legislature a month later as a result of several party switches, while Mississippi Democrats still control the State House of Representatives. Unlike in Louisiana, Democrats in Mississippi have actually managed to field candidates for a few statewide offices in this year’s elections, and hold the office of attorney general.
But the tale told by demographics is a stark one. Mississippi has, proportionally, the largest black population of any state, at 37 percent. Given the dependably Democratic voting record of African-Americans here, strategists in each party concede that Democrats start out any statewide race with nearly 40 percent of the vote.
…Merle Black, an expert on politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said that point is arguably already here. In 2008 exit polls, he pointed out, 96 percent of self-identified Republicans in Mississippi were white. Nearly 75 percent of self-identified Democrats were black. …Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Democratic support among whites could get any lower when, according to 2008 exit polls, only 6 percent of white males in Mississippi described themselves as Democrats.

The title of Robertson’s article is a little misleading. Robertson is not saying, as the title implies, that white southerners in the polling booth think, “Gee, I better vote Republican because I’m a white person.” Nor are African and Latino Americans voting Democratic at the polls solely because of their skin color. In reality, southerners vote more along the lines of their perceived economic interests.
People of color vote their real economic interests for the most part. The distortion in the south is more about the white working/middle class voters casting ballots against their own economic interests. This happens across the country to some extent, but it is more of a problem for Democrats in the south, where unions are weak and so-called “right-to-work” laws keep them that way.
Robertson notes that there are little pockets of Democratic strength in predominantly white communities throughout the south, with northeast Mississippi being a prime example. However, white progressives in the south are more concentrated in the big cities, closer-in suburbs and college towns.
Outside of the cities, most of the mainstream media targeting the working and middle class are conservative in policy outlook. Too many white voters in rural areas rarely hear or read a well-argued liberal opinion. Hopefully, MSNBC and the growth of the progressive blogospshere are beginning to change that. As income inequality continues to grow unabated, it’s not hard to imagine a tipping point at which southern whites will begin to question the wisdom of ever-increasing tax cuts for the rich and the party that pushes such policies as a panacea for all economic ills.
Robertson quotes Brad Morris, a Democratic strategist, on Democratic prospects, saying “We’ve hit rock bottom,” in the south, and I tend to agree. There’s just not much more room for growth of Republican political influence in the region, given current demographic parameters. And most of the demographic trends going forward favor Democrats.
The Republican echo chamber has been very successful in the south in terms of making demagogic attacks against Democratic candidates and policies stick. State Democratic Party organizations tend to be weaker and underfunded in the south and their messaging suffers as a result, while anti-union corporations in the south make sure Republicans have all the money they need. This is the heart of the GOP’s southern hustle.
President Obama’s victories in North Carolina, Virginia and Florida certainly suggest the Democrats should not write-off any southern states, as some have urged. With stronger candidates, Democrats can win more elections.
Looking to the future, Democrats are going to do better as a result of explosive growth of Latino and African Americans in the southern states. But there must also be more of a conscious effort on the part of state and local Democratic parties to recruit and train stronger candidates. Dems need more candidates of color to turn out these rapidly-growing demographic groups. But they also need more candidates, women in particular, who have white working-class roots and/or know how to reach white working families. With that commitment, a substantially more Democratic south in the not-too-distant future is a good bet.