This article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
For years the NRA has struck terror into the hearts of many Members of Congress. The organization’s officers and lobbyists purported to represent the interests and wishes of millions of American gun owners.
Members of Congress believed that negative NRA ratings — and a flood of NRA money — could sink their political careers faster than you could say “AR-15.”
But the American people, and Members of Congress, are gradually awaking to the fact that — just as with the Wizard of Oz — there isn’t much behind the NRA’s magic curtain but the big booming voice of a special interest bully whose power derives more from perception than reality.
It is of course true that in politics the perception of power translates into the reality of power. The problem is that once it becomes clear that you’re all hat and no cattle, the myth of power rapidly collapses into a pile of dust. That is exactly what is happening to the NRA. Here’s why.
Reason #1. First and foremost, in 2012 the NRA had exactly zero effect on the outcome of the General Election — or to be more precise, it had about .83 percent effect.
One of the big stories of the 2012 election was the failure of some of the big name right-wing PACs to win many races. The Sunlight Foundation calculated the relative effectiveness of a number of right-wing PACs and found that most of their money did not buy success.
The National Republican Congressional Committee had only a 31.8 percent percent success rate.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce only had a 6.9 percent success rate.
Karl Rove’s non-profit, Crossroads GPS, did a little better, spending $70 million with a 14.43 percent success rate. But his American Crossroads Super Pac had only a 1.29 percent success rate after spending over $104 million.
The NRA’s Legislative Institute had only a 10.74 percent success rate.
But the NRA main PAC wasn’t just your run of the mill failure of the 2012 election year. It won the prize for the very worst performance of the entire gang. In fact of the $11.1 million it spent, only .83 percent went to winning candidates.
And to make matters worse, it didn’t just have a dismal batting average; many progressive PACs spent just as much, and were much more effective.
The League of Conservation Voters raised and spent $11 million, but instead of a .83 percent success rate, they had an 83 percent success rate.
Planned Parenthood’s two PACs raised and spent over $11 — and had a 98 percent success rate.
Part of the reason for the NRA’s horrible success rate is the fact that rather than back candidates that support the Second Amendment — a goal endorsed by many of its individual members — it has become for all practical purposes a wing of the Republican Party.
But that isn’t the only disjuncture between the interests of NRA members and those of its officers and lobbyists.
Reason #2. Turns out that the officers and lobbyists of the NRA actually represent weapons manufacturers, not rank and file gun owners. That’s why they refuse to support common sense restrictions on military style assault weapons, magazines that hold a hundred bullets, or background checks for anyone who buys a gun, even though most Americans — and many gun owners — support these measures.
A CBS News poll showed that 57 percent now support stronger laws, an 18-point increase since last April (39 percent). A USA Today/Gallup poll showed a similar trend, with 58 percent supporting stronger laws, 15 points above the level of support in October 2011 (43 percent).
In a CNN/ORC poll, the most pronounced shift was on support for a ban on assault guns like the AK-47, with 62 percent of Americans supporting such a ban, a 5-point increase from last August.
In fact, according to the CNN/ORC poll, 95 percent of all Americans think that everyone who buys a gun should have to undergo a background check. A December Washington Post poll shows this strong support for universal back ground checks extends to gun owners as well. Many people believe background checks are already required for all gun purchases, but the fact is that 40 percent of all gun sales are “private transactions” — at gun shows or from private gun sellers where no background check is currently required. That’s like having two lines in airport security — one that checks for bombs and weapons and one that doesn’t. Which one do you think would be chosen by those who seek to do us harm?
And to make matters worse, databases of many states are not maintained. Bottom line: it easy for dangerous criminals and the mentally ill to buy deadly weapons.
Month: January 2013
At The Plum Line, Greg Sargent’s “Business leaders to GOP: No more debt limit hostage taking!” pinpoints what may be the Democrats most powerful leverage in the negotiations ahead.
Class consciousness seems to be rising quickly in Great Britain, where 60 percent now self i.d. themselves as “working class,” compared to 24 percent in 2011, reports Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian.”…it’s the findings on class that should really give Labour heart. For they suggest serious trouble in the middle – a fear that life is going backwards for many natural Conservative voters in flagrant breach of the age-old Tory promise that hard work will be rewarded.”
As Sen. Jay Rockefeller prepares to retire, at NPR.org Greg Henderson notes an interesting fact about West Virginia, which is a red state in presidential elections: “Both senators, the state’s governor and one of its three members of the House are Democrats. And the state that produced legendary Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd (who brought the state “billions of dollars for highways, federal offices, research institutes and dams,” as The New York Times noted in its 2010 obituary) hasn’t elected a Republican senator since the 1950s.”
The “No Labels” crowd is at it again. This time it’s another WV senator, Sen Joe Manchin and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman singing bipartisan kumbaya in the Washington Post opinion section. In the comments section following the article, DWSouthern adds “Democrats have been willing to negotiate all along. Now all you two dreamers need to do is get about 200 more Republicans (you now have 10) in the House to end gridlock and get the government working again. Lots of luck when the goal of Republicans has been to make the government dysfunction and blame it on Obama. The only solution to the problem is to remove about 100 or so Republican from the House in the next election.”
For an authentic bipartisan act of significance by a Republican U.S. Senator, however, read yesterday’s New York Times editorial, “One Republican Steps Forward,” which gives Sen. Lisa Murkowski well-deserved praise on an important issue: “Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, broke through the partisan wall to propose a badly needed mandate for transparency by the growing army of unrestricted, unidentified donors who underwrite attack ads and other stealth tactics that have so disfigured American politics.” The measure would require every organization that gives more than $500 to disclose its donors.
On the weapons-of-domestic-mass-destruction issue, however, there is only one Republican providing gutsy leadership.
Here we go again with the comprehensive, big-package vs. piecemeal reform debate, this time with respect to gun control, well-reported here by WaPo’s Sean Sullivan. I get the political reasons why big-package always seems to win out as a strategic option, regardless of the issue. But just once, I’d like to see a fast-track, piecemeal reform strategy put into play, nailing the low-hanging fruit and pealing away the bogus arguments against needed reforms that usually get watered down in the comprehensive package.
Also at The Post, John Sides considers “How congressional dysfunction could hurt House Republicans.” As Klein explains: “…The particular problem for House Republicans is this: when Congress is unpopular, voters don’t punish all House incumbents. Instead, they direct their dissatisfaction primarily at majority-party House incumbents. So argue political scientists David Jones and Monika McDermott in their book (see also this article). In the article, Jones finds that a 10-point decrease in approval costs majority-party House incumbents 4 points at the poll. This effect is larger in swing districts and has been getting larger over time, as the parties have polarized…”
See also David Lauter’s L.A. Times article, “Washington stalemates hurting Republicans most, polls indicate,” which provides a good round-up of the latest data on the topic.
At The Daily Beast Bob Shrum ably sums up the nitty-gritty of the GOP’s big problem — and the Democrat’s advantage: “And today, the GOP is the party that won’t compromise; the party that threatens economic chaos; the anti-Medicare, anti-Social Security, anti-women, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay, anti-young party. There’s no future in that.”
This weekend communications guru Frank Luntz offered his messaging advice to Republicans in a Washington Post op-ed. Take this free test and see how close you come to being just as profound a political thinker and strategist as he is.
Part 1.
Do you think Republicans should stop using the following phrases:
• Calling the economy “a hostage you might take a chance at shooting”
• Telling undocumented Latinos to “self-deport.”
If you answered that Republicans should stop using both phrases, congratulations, that’s Luntz’s advice too. You scored 100% on part 1
Part 2
Should Republicans make the following changes in their rhetoric:
• Instead of asking “should the rich pay more,” change the question to “Should Washington take more?”
• Instead of using the phrase “committing fiscal child abuse,” should Republicans use the terms “piling debt on our children” or “mortgaging the American dream.”
• Instead of being the party of “small businesses and job creators”, should House Republicans call themselves the party of “hardworking taxpayers”.
• Instead of “smaller government,” should Republicans talk about “more efficient and effective government”
• Instead of using the term “tax reform,” should Republicans talk about making the IRS code “simpler, flatter and fairer”
• Instead of using the terms “entitlement reform” or “controlling the growth of Medicare and Social Security”, should Republicans talk about “how to save and strengthen these programs so they are there when voters need them.”
If you said Republicans should make all these changes to their rhetoric, congratulations, that’s Luntz’s advice too. You scored a breathtaking 100% on part 2.
Part 3
Should Republicans:
• “Advocate a values-based approach”
• “Talk to Americans about accountability, personal responsibility and freedom.”
• “Be more empathetic”
• “Advocate a “balanced, responsible approach”
• “Listen to voters, rather than lecturing them.”
• “Speak to voters’ aspirations, not just their pocketbooks”
• “SHow how GOP solutions help the want-to-haves, not just the already-haves”
If you said yes to all these recommendations, congratulations, that’s what Luntz said too. You scored 100% on part three.
Now test-takers, hold your breath – here’s how you did:
If you scored between 90 and 100%, congratulations, you too can be a nationally famous Republican messaging strategist just like Frank Luntz.
If you scored around 50%, you can run for congress in any district that doesn’t have a bookstore or Democratic voter within 200 miles.
If you scored 20% or less, you can easily get a job at any talk radio station that advertises gold bullion, survival gear and commemorative DVD’s of “Birth of a Nation”.
If you know anyone who is dithering over the need for filibuster reform, refer them post-haste to Lee Fang’s “Lobbyists Who Profit From Senate Dysfunction Fight Filibuster Reform” at The Nation. Even though Dems have some anxieties about the political environment in the U.S. Senate after the 2014 mid terms, since Republicans have an edge with respect to the disproportionate number of vulnerable Senate seats held by Dems, Fang makes it clear how utterly corrupt is the current system and the need for repair:
I’ve detailed before how lobbyists, even agents for foreign governments, have secured Republican filibusters at a shocking rate….The interesting dynamic for me is, how money in politics has incentivized this contraction of democratic governance. Here are just a few examples of how powerful industries have usurped the normal gears of government, and used Senate obstruction to push policies that punish ordinary Americans and the environment:
• Senator David Vitter (R-LA) placed holds on Obama EPA nominees to delay scientific assessments on the health risks of formaldehyde, which is produced by some of his largest campaign contributors.
• According to a new report from Public Campaign Action Fund, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has collected a hundreds of thousands in funds from the same industries he has protected with filibusters, particularly from oil companies and the finance sector. McConnell has led filibusters to protect oil subsidies, to block efforts to mitigate the mortgage crisis, and against campaign disclosure reforms.
• Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) placed a “blanket hold” on every Obama nominee to force the administration to accept a Northrop Grumman contract to build a $35 billion refueling tanker in Mobile, Alabama. Northrop Grumman is a major Shelby donor.
• Senator John McCain (R-AZ) blocked the nomination of one of Obama’s most important Department of Labor nominees for months, which many believe led the US Chamber of Commerce to aggressively support McCain during a contentious primary with a Tea Party-backed candidate in 2010.
• Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), a close ally of the oil and gas industry, temporarily blocked Obama’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget to extract an administration promise to allow more oil drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.
• Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) filibustered the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill in order to demand a policy that prevents FedEx drivers from unionizing. FedEx is Corker’s third-highest campaign donor.
Fang could probably have gone on and on with many more examples. Such are the fruits of the easy-sleazy filibuster “rules” currently in place. If Dems do nothing about it before the 2013 opportunity expires, the claim that gridlock is entirely the fault of the Republicans will lose credibility.
New poll has 47 percent of Americans self-i.d. as Democrats or leaning Dem, compared to 42 percent for Republicans — “based on an aggregate of all 2012 Gallup and USA Today/Gallup polls, consisting of more than 20,000 interviews.”
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake spotlight “5 senators to watch in gun control debate” explaining why they could have pivotal influence on prospects for assault weapons control.
Charles M. Blow has some cogent thoughts on “Reframing the Gun Debate” in his NYT column, including: “First, let’s fix some of the terminology: stop calling groups like the National Rifle Association a “gun rights” group. These are anti-regulation, pro-proliferation groups. They prey on public fears — of the “bad guys with guns,” of a Second Amendment rollback, of an ever imminent apocalypse — while helping gun makers line their pockets.”
Some stats from Michael Medved’s Daily Beast article on women in the new congress: “In 2012 married women gave a comfortable 7 percent edge to Mitt Romney, and in 2008 they chose John McCain 53-47 percent. In 2004 married females went even more decisively (55-44) for George W. Bush.” But single women, “only 23 percent of the overall electorate …chose Barack Obama in 2012 by a ratio of better than 2 to 1, and assured him the presidency.” In addition, Medved reports that two thirds of women in the House are Democrats, as are three quarters of the women in the U.S. Senate.
Democratic party leaders should read Thomas F. Schaller’s post, “Democrats Dread 2014 Drop-Off” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Schaller quotes experts who say that recruiting quality candidates and mobilizing African American and Latino volunteers offer the best hope for improving turnout in non-presidential elections.
I sometimes worry that a moderate, charismatic Republican presidential candidate might somehow rise from the ashes of the GOP’s current festival of self-immolation (not Christie — his bluster will eventually wear thin and he’s peaking too soon). At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky explores prospects for rebuilding a healthy moderate caucus in the GOP. As for moderate Republican voters, Tomaskys says “I have to believe that there are millions of such people out there. They just have no one to report to, no place to go. If someone builds this, they will come.”
Speaking of Republican moderates, The Monitor’s Liz Marlantes explains why once moderate Lindsay Graham has morphed into the GOP’s lead attack dog.
At AFL-CIO Now Mike Hall’s “10 Reasons All Workers Benefit from Fixing the Immigration System” provides some excellent talking points which could help persuade moderates to support the Democratic plan.
For those who were wondering if FL Gov. Rick Scott could get any sleazier, Sahil Kapur’s “Rick Scott Under Fire For Inflating Cost Of Health Law’s Medicaid Expansion” at Talking Points Memo provides the answer.
Somebody at the white house is doing some good thinking, selecting the bibles of both Lincoln and MLK for swearing in President Obama for his second term, as Michelle Boorstein reports at the Washington Post. You couldn’t ask for better symbols for “binding up the nations wounds” and transforming “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful sympathy of brotherhood” — especially because 2013 should be a big year for anniversaries recalling the legacies of both King and Lincoln.
Given the overwhelming attention paid to the presidential contest, it’s worth a final, panoramic look at downballot races, where Democrats made gains despite a difficult landscape, while Republicans ultimately held onto control of the House and veto power in the Senate, along with continued strong national majorities in statehouses.
The 2012 elections produced relatively few changes in Congress (Democrats gained two Senate seats and 9 House seats, after Republican gains of 5 Senate and 63 House seats in 2010), but a lot was going on beneath the surface.
This cycle was supposed to represent an extraordinary opportunity for Republicans to secure control of the Senate, since 23 of the 33 seats up were controlled by Democrats, who also lost 6 incumbents to retirement (as opposed to three Republicans). Given the steady decline in split-ticket voting, it was notable that two of the Democratic retirees represented profoundly Republican states (Nebraska and North Dakota), and two incumbents were running in other states certain to go Republican in the presidential contest (Missouri and Montana). Only one Republican retiree (and a late one whose decision not to run was a major shock) was from a sure Obama state (Maine), and only one incumbent Republican (Scott Brown of Massachusetts) was running in “enemy territory.” Republicans also anticipated a significant financial advantage in Senate races overall, thanks to heavy commitments of funds by Super-PACs and 501(c)(4)s.
In the end, Democrats won a relatively predictable pickup in Massachusetts, and an independent expected to caucus with Democrats predictably won an open Republican seat in Maine. What no one expected was a Democratic pickup in Indiana, the direct result of a right-wing primary “purge” of long-time Sen. Richard Lugar and then a disastrous gaffe by the GOP nominee late in the campaign. Equally surprising were Democratic “holds” by a left-for-dead incumbent in Missouri (another state where the GOP nominee self-destructed) and in North Dakota’s open seat. The Democratic “hold” in Montana was less surprising, but still impressive since Mitt Romney carried the state by 13 points. Democrats also held vulnerable open seats in Virginia, Wisconsin and New Mexico, and another incumbent thought to be vulnerable in Florida won easily. It wasn’t a sweep, but it defied early expectations for the cycle dramatically.
Republicans held onto a 233-200 majority in the House (with two vacancies) thanks to two interacting factors: the superior efficiency of their vote distribution across districts, and the effect of the post-2010 redistricting, in which Republicans were especially focused on shoring up the freshman members election in the 2010 landslide. All in all, the median congressional district was five points more Republican than the country as a whole. This tilt enabled the GOP to maintain a comfortable House majority despite losing the presidential popular vote by nearly four percent and also losing the the national House popular vote (never precise because some states did not report votes in uncontested races) by just over one percent.
As in Senate races, Democrats had an unfortunate landscape in gubernatorial contests, controlling eight of the twelve governorships at stake despite a 29-20 deficit in governorships overall. Moreover, four of those eight Democratic gubernatorial seats were open, as opposed to one Republican seat. Two Democratic governorships and three of the four Republican governorships were in states certain to be won handily by Romney. Ultimately Democrats won very close races in Montana and Washington, won comfortably in the “red state” of Missouri, and lost a competitive race only in North Carolina, where the Democratic incumbent retired late in the cycle in the midst of ongoing scandals. As in the Senate races, the final results did not fully reflect a strong Democratic performance against expectations. Republicans now control 30 governorships, their highest level since 1996 (and before that, since 1970).
Republicans also effectively used redistricting to protect their historic 2010 surge in control state legislatures. Going into the election, Republicans had a 60-35 margin in control of Senate or House chambers. Democrats posted a net gain of 4 House chambers; a pickup of two net Senate chambers was wiped out by post-election deal-making in New York and Washington. Until those same deals split control of the legislature in those states, the big news coming out of November was a sharp drop in states with divided party control: down to three, the lowest level since 1944. Reinforcing the trend towards polarization in state legislatures is a rapid increase in veto-proof “supermajorities,” now prevailing in 35 of 99 chambers spread across 25 states. Adding in governorships, Republicans have total control of state government in 23 states and Democrats in 13.
Although the gubernatorial and state legislative races didn’t get a lot of national attention, ballot initiatives did: or at least three items–all major progressive accomplishments–did: (1) the first-ever series of ballot initiatives in which supporters of same-sex marriage won (Maryland and Maine); (2) initiatives legalizing marijuana possession (Washington and Colorado); and (3) California voters’ approval of a major tax increase that appears likely to end that state’s endless budget deadlock (particularly given Democratic achievement of super-majorities in the state legislature).
What if anything do these downballot results suggest for 2014 and beyond?
Ed Kilgore’s extremely insightful analysis of Obama’s four-year grand strategy focuses on a key point that is not often noted in the post-mortems of Obama’s victory.
Progressives were quite reasonably frustrated and even outraged by Obama’s conciliatory, “bend over backwards to achieve a compromise” approach at many points during his first term and they can easily point to strong evidence that his apparent meekness was repeatedly perceived as a lack of decisiveness and timidity by the public rather than as sensible or levelheaded moderation.
However, quite paradoxically, these same characteristics actually rebounded quite powerfully to Obama’s advantage during the crucial months of the 2012 campaign. Even as Obama firmly and repeatedly attacked Romney, the GOP could not make the charges that he was “vicious”, “nasty” “negative” or “unfair” stick against him.
The psychological dynamics of how this occurred are worth considering with some care. After all, Americans do not in general admire leaders who seem “weak” or overly willing to compromise their beliefs and ideals. Quite the contrary, progressives are entirely correct when they insist that, in general, Democratic candidates should be consistent, firm and confident in their views and “stand for something” rather than appearing uncertain, shifting with the wind and seeking compromise for its own sake. Voters are also unlikely to accept last-minute redefinitions and “repackaging,” as Romney found out to his chagrin.
So how did Obama seemingly violate this general rule?
One significant psychological insight into the answer comes not from opinion poll data but from the decades of market-based experience of Hollywood scriptwriters – from the formulas that are used in the movies to create the hero or “the good guy” and the villains or the “the bad guys”.
There are, in fact, two distinct Hollywood formulas for creating “good guys” and “bad guys,” two approaches that actually map quite clearly onto the general approaches of the GOP on the one hand and Obama on the other.
The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There is a great deal of angst and worry among progressives about what is going to happen in two months when the Republicans once again will be trying to hostage the entire economy so that they can cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education and everything else in the federal budget that helps low and middle income folks. It is of course a bad situation when you have one branch of the government eager to blow up the economy to get bad things that more than 80 percent of Americans oppose, but I believe we need to spend a lot less time worrying and a lot more time organizing. We can beat these guys, and beat them badly, if we have a focused and aggressive strategy.
There are four things progressives need to be doing right now. The first relates to the president. I understand the disappointment about kicking the can down the road another two months, and the fact that we lost some leverage on the revenue side. And I was very critical of the president’s willingness to swap cuts in Social Security benefits for a deal in this last go-around, and will fight him with every ounce of energy if he proposes any such thing again. But right now is the worst possible time to be raising doubts about this president’s willingness to hang tough in a negotiation as some of my friends on the progressive movement are doing.
The Republicans need to know that the president is deadly serious when he says he won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling, and that the entire progressive movement and Democratic party have his back on this. No negotiation, whatsoever. Period and end of sentence. In the 2011 situation and in the fiscal cliff drama, the president made clear from the first that he was ready, willing and eager to negotiate, and negotiate he did. But Obama knows that we can’t keep running government from one ridiculous self-made crisis to the next, so he has drawn a line in the sand, and progressives need to back him to the hilt. Let’s take him at his word, and expect that he will deliver: no negotiation over whether government will pay the bills it has already incurred. To send the economy into a massive panic, to put the good faith and credit of our country at risk, so that Republicans can cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and education is not acceptable to the American people, and the Republicans will quickly figure that out.
I have been very tough on the president at times over the last four years and I’m sure I will have some choice words for him at some point soon down the line, but I admire the fact that he has essentially put his manhood on the line on this issue. If he backs down and starts negotiating, he will look terrible, be seen as very weak, and he knows it. He knows he can’t afford to blink, and progressives should back him 100 percent: no negotiation whatsoever on the debt ceiling.
Speaking of lines in the sand, the second thing progressives need to be doing is to mount an all-out, serious, no-holds-barred campaign around no more cuts to those things in the budget that help the bottom 98 percent. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits should all be off the table. Education, student loans, Head Start, health care, the SNAP and WIC programs have to be, as well. Low and middle income Americans have lost jobs; had their wages frozen or decline; have had the cost of basic necessities like groceries and health care and gas prices skyrocket; have had their homes drop badly in value; and have taken round after round of devastating cuts in government programs that directly help them. It is neither morally nor economically right that they would be the ones who get hurt by budget cuts. And cuts to these programs are generally quite unpopular, in some cases by percentages of more than 80 percent against. If politicians feel like they need to cut government spending, there are plenty of bloated military contracts and subsidies to agribusiness and oil companies you can cut, but don’t you dare touch the things that help middle and low income folks.
This needs to be a serious campaign, like the campaign against Social Security privatization in 2005, or the campaign HCAN organized on health care reform. We need to build a firestorm that walls off these programs from more cuts, that makes that idea fundamentally unacceptable and politically explosive. And we need to tell the leaders of both parties: we will fight you with everything we’ve got if you don’t keep your hands off the things that matter the most to us.
Third, we need to keep resolutely, in every forum we have, bringing this back to jobs. We should keep asking the questions: how exactly does threatening to stop paying our bills create jobs? How does cutting Social Security create jobs? Why are politicians obsessed with cuts for middle class programs instead of creating new jobs? What we need, as many of my friends in the blogosphere keep saying, are jobs not cuts. In fact, as Bill Clinton proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, the best way to cut the deficit and create a surplus is to create lots of decent paying jobs. So every single time some right wing blowhard is talking about cuts, we should ask them how exactly that cut creates a job, and remind people that 60 percent of the deficit right now is due to the lack of jobs in the economy.
Finally, we need to be very clear: we are not done with needing more tax revenue from big corporations and the top 2 percent. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in big corporate loopholes we need to close; we should have a financial transactions tax on speculative Wall Street trading; we should have a carbon tax to help do something about global warming; and yes, we can still raise more from individual rates and the inheritance tax — after all, the Republicans keep going back and raising the same old bad ideas over and over again, we can certainly revisit the good ideas.
Progressives need to stop worrying about what deals might be cut, and start organizing to make it impossible to cut the bad deals we are afraid of. The president has laid out in the clearest possible way that he won’t negotiate with these economic hostage takers, and we should make clear we have his back. We have to make clear to every politician and every pundit: we need jobs, not cuts to the things the bottom 98 percent most rely on, and we need more tax revenue from big business and the top 2 percent.
Many accounts of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign strategy begin with his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in December of 2011. Then, it is said, after nearly three years of projecting a unilateral commitment to bipartisanship, the president finally went after the Republican Party and its policies with hammer and tong, and began the process of reinvigorating a dispirited Democratic “base,” rebutting GOP efforts to evade responsibility for its extremism and obstructionism, and presenting a clear choice to persuadable voters.
In other words, Obama’s campaign strategy repudiated his political strategy as president–and perhaps the strategy he has resumed in dealing with Republicans now that the election is over, some progressives fear.
That’s an understandable judgment. But from what we know of the internal thinking of the White House, it was long-planned and represented a scheduled “pivot” in messaging rather than any sort of reversal. To put it simply, whatever it meant in terms of his legislative agenda, Obama’s long-suffering “bipartisanship” rhetoric set the stage for his increasingly edgy partisan differentiation later in the cycle by consistently depicting him as a reasonable leader dealing with a Republican Party that refused ever to reciprocate. Given the strong tendency of persuadable (and often “low-information”) voters, reinforced by the false equivalency habits of the mainstream media, to treat both parties in Washington as equally right and wrong in the various conflicts of Obama’s first term, his ever-patient efforts to “reach out” to an unreachable GOP may well have been more effective than direct partisan differentiation in keeping his personal favorability (a key asset moving into 2012, and consistently exceeding his job approval ratings) higher than his opponents,’ including the Republican presidential candidate filed.
Soon after Obama’s “pivot,” as a fractious Republican primary season unfolded, the White House focused on keeping him “presidential,” creating an implicit contrast with the squabbling and pandering GOPers. Once Mitt Romney emerged as the nominee, the Obama campaign skillfully deployed a two-phased attack on his claims to represent a moderate technocrat perfectly equipped to “fix” the economy without association with his party’s past incompetence or present extremism. The first phase constantly reminded voters of Romney’s personal background–at Bain Capital particularly–and many statements (sometimes gaffes) reflecting an exclusive identification with financial elites and the very wealthy generally. And the second phase focused on Romney’s policies as reflecting the same skewed orientation and the same extremist reduplication of the worst of Republican mistakes of the recent past.
The election-year strategy, which also relied on a general improvement in economic conditions and a relatively stable international environment, served the more fundamental missions of convincing swing voters the election was a choice of two very different directions for the country (the constant theme of Obama’s messaging during the stretch run), and convincing “base” voters they could enthusiastically support the President while avoiding the despoilation of cherished progressive priorities by the GOP. It succeed on all counts. It is an open question as to whether “accelerating” the process of sharp partisan differentiation earlier into Obama’s presidency would have worked as well, since it would have become part of the despised Washington background noise long before ballots were cast.
Romney, obviously, had a more restricted landscape on which to deploy his own grand strategy. By the time the general election campaign was fully underway he had spent most of the previous five years trying to establish his conservative bona fides, in ever more glaring contrast to his past record as a candidate and governor in Massachusetts. In the 2012 cycle, his own health care plan as governor became not only a primary-season albatross, but undercut many of his options in the general election. Thus, when he began his “pivot” to the general election, the aspects of his record he couldn’t talk about and the GOP agenda items he had more recently embraced that polled poorly left him with little to tout other than his business experience. And that, of course, left him open to exactly the Obama campaign attack on him that pulled down his favorable ratings and set up the latter assault on his and his party’s policy agenda.
Romney did successfully count on a post-primary consolidation of support from self-identified Republicans, though his choice of Paul Ryan as a running-mate indicated some nervousness about base support. His various efforts to “wedge” Democratic or swing vote constituencies–e.g., the “war on religion” campaign in the late spring, and repeated claims that Obama was insufficiently committed to Israel (which carried the bonus of appealing to conservative evangelical “base” voters)–mostly fell flat or backfired. His audacious stretch-run effort to exploit hazy perceptions of his policy agenda by suddenly posing as a “moderate” were too little and too late, and were obviously undercut by past and present expressions of fidelity to right-wing memes (most famously the “47%” remarks, which did not create but certainly reinforced the Obama campaign’s relentless description of him as an out-of-touch economic royalist).
If there was a distinct moment where the Obama campaign successfully demolished one of the strategic underpinnings of the Romney campaign, it was probably the president’s unveiling of a “Dream Act Lite” initiative in June that he promulgated by executive order. This preempted an apparent Romney plan to reverse some of the damage to his standing among Latino voters that his primary-phase rhetoric on immigration inflicted. Marco Rubio was in the process of developing for Romney a GOP version of “Dream Act Lite,” but the negative conservative reaction to Obama’s gambit left Romney high, dry and more unpopular than ever with this crucial demographic–while considerably boosting Latino enthusiasm for the incumbent, which had been lagging dangerously.
But like many aspects of the Obama Grand Strategy in action, this moment reflected a more general belief by Team Obama that the president’s high personal standing among elements of his 2008 coalition, gradually improving economic conditions, and most of all Romney’s inability to escape the taint of his party’s extremism, would bring that coalition back to life. Add in Obama’s exceptional GOTV operation, and successful efforts (aided by the courts) to blunt Republican voter-suppression tactics, and you have the ingredients of a smart strategy executed very well.
Jonathan Bernstein has a post up at The American Prospect warning of the dangers of the latest Republican ploy to undermine the electoral college by eliminating “winner-take-all” election rules. Bernstein explains how it would work:
The GOP may attempt to rig the Electoral College by changing the electoral vote allocation in GOP-controlled states which voted for Barack Obama. The idea would be to shift from the normal winner-take-all plan to something that would split the votes in those states. Ideally, from the Republican point of view, every Republican state would be winner-take-all while all Democratic states would be split more or less evenly, making it almost impossible for a Democrat to win the White House. All of that, as obviously undemocratic as it is, would be perfectly Constitutional; the Constitution leaves every state in charge of how to choose its electors.
It’s a pretty transparent effort to politicize the rules in favor of Republicans. Instead of supporting direct popular election for all states, a genuinely populist reform, it’s a sleazy effort to leverage proportional allocation of electoral votes, but only in states where the GOP sees an advantage.
Bernstein cites a litany of GOP schemes to toy with rules, just inside the parameters of the law, including abuse of the filibuster, mid-decade redistricting, the Clinton impeachment, all of which were legal, but violated established “norms” that have helped government function in a bipartisan way for decades. Bernstein continues:
Much of the American political system actually runs on norms, not rules. It may seem strange to people–especially after 20 years of Republican-led Constitutional hardball–but that arrangement actually can work very nicely. Both parties, and beyond them most other politically active citizens, simply work within the de facto rules of the game and work for the best results under those rules.
The problem is that once a party in such a system starts looking for areas to exploit in the gap between written law and the way the law is practiced, they may find all sorts of small, temporary edges. And there’s really no particular reason for them to stop once it starts. In each case, the case for moving ahead is the same: why not use the rules to your advantage? For the other party, the incentive to fight fire with fire is overwhelming. Not only is sticking to outdated norms while your opponents don’t a sure recipe for losing, but in fact the very norm of following norms rapidly disappears and should be replaced by loophole-exploiting by everyone.
There’s a classic collective action problem here: everyone is far better off under a system in which the basic rules of the game are agreed to and respected than under a system in which the rules are constantly altered, but at any particular point in time anyone who figures out a gap to take advantage of can be better off.
Bernstein adds, “…Coalition building and complex bargaining–both of which are absolutely essential for large-policy democracy–only do that work when they are necessary. When the rules are up for grabs, those processes can become unnecessary.” He acknowledges that some rules changes are a good idea, when they are measured and fair to both parties. But the latest trend of all-out warfare by finagling the rules is a dangerous way to go.
Bernstein believes that such ‘constitutional hardball’ invites a new kind of trench warfare, which is counter-productive in terms of serving democracy. Republicans will undoubtedly argue that using the ‘nuclear option’ to implement the “talking filibuster” is an example of Democratic party abuse of the ‘rules,’ of course neglecting to mention that their unprecedented abuse of the filibuster makes it one of the few options available to restore balance to the system, given GOP intransigence.
Bernstein concludes that “the best hope is that the present generation of Republicans will maybe be replaced by a group who have a bit more restraint; after all, they do call themselves conservatives. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.” Bernstein doesn’t get into it, but the underlying danger to Democrats is that ‘constitutional hardball’ will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which is now dominated by Republican appointees, most of whom have demonstrated their willingness to make highly politicized rulings.
