With all the vast literature on partisan polarization out there, it’s important to draw attention to those who understand the phenomenon in depth (not a large group), and recognize that something more powerful and ominous is going on. I wrote about one example at WaMo today:

At WaPo’s Monkey Cage subsite today, there’s an important piece by University of Texas political scientist Sean Theriault that gets to a distinction in political attitudes that some of us have been trying to articulate ever since the radicalization of one of our two major parties occurred:

I have been studying party polarization in Congress for more than a decade. The more I study it, the more I question that it is the root cause of what it is that Americans hate about Congress. Pundits and political scientists alike point to party polarization as the culprit for all sorts of congressional ills. I, too, have contributed to this chorus bemoaning party polarization. But increasingly, I’ve come to think that our problem today isn’t just polarization in Congress; it’s the related but more serious problem of political warfare….
Perhaps my home state of Texas unnecessarily reinforces the distinction I want to make between these two dimensions. Little separates my two senators’ voting records – of the 279 votes that senators took in 2013, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn disagreed less than 9 percent of the time (the largest category of their disagreement, incidentally, was on confirmation votes). In terms of ideology, they are both very conservative. Cruz, to no one’s surprise, is the most conservative. Cornyn is the 13th most conservative, which is actually further down the list than he was in 2012, when he ranked second. Cornyn’s voting record is more conservative than conservative stalwarts Tom Coburn and Richard Shelby. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz disagreed on twice as many votes as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
The difference between my senators is that when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.

That’s probably why Cornyn has attracted a right-wing primary challenge from Rep. Steve Stockman.
The rise of “politics as warfare” on the Right, accompanied with militarist rhetoric, is one that my Democratic Strategist colleagues James Vega and J.P. Green and I discussed in a Strategy Memo in 2012. We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.

That clearly has not changed since 2012.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of ‘Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,’ is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Yesterday’s revelation of the Governor’s Office was directly involved shutting down George Washington Bridge access lanes to Fort Lee, N.J., is not just another run-of-the-mill political problem for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
It could be fatal to Christie’s presidential ambitions. There are four reasons to believe that the ham-handed attempt to punish Ft Lee’s mayor by causing traffic gridlock in his city may make his presidential ambitions to sink faster than a rock in the Hudson River.
Reason #1: The episode turns his trademark no-nonsense forcefulness from a refreshing positive into self-serving bullying — a disgusting negative.
In politics, every positive trait has its evil twin. Voters want leaders who are on their side, but they don’t want demagogues that pander to their interests.
It’s a good thing in politics to be passionately committed to strongly-held beliefs. It’s not a good thing to be an uncompromising ideologue.
Voters want their leaders to be self confident and forceful. They don’t want leaders to be arrogant bullies.
That’s why in politics if you’re trying to convince persuadable voters that they shouldn’t support your opponent, it’s often best to take on their strongest positive traits and morph them into their negative first cousins. You attack their strength by turning their into their negative incarnations.
One of the reasons why this approach often works is that people are already predisposed to believe that the politician in question is prone to the qualities and behaviors in question that could have either a positive or a negative side.
Once Christie sold the public on the notion that he is a no-nonsense, straight-talking guy who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, tells it like it is and gets things done — it’s not hard to believe he is also the kind of a guy who will act like a bully to get what he wants.
And of course this episode conjures up all of the worst stereotypes about New Jersey politics that Christie already needed to overcome in places like Iowa and Wisconsin. “Bridgegate” and its colorful cast of characters could be a sequel to the current box office hit, American Hustle.
People in the Midwest and South like straight talk, but they also like “nice” and civil. Christie’s brash “straight-talk” was going to wear thin pretty quickly outside the Northeast even before the “bridgegate.” Now the negative side of his personal style will be the first thing they see.
Reason #2: “Bridgegate” will be the first impression that many ordinary voters get of Chris Christie.
Outside of New Jersey and the New York media market, most of the swing voters who will decide a general election — and many Republican primary voters — have only a vague knowledge of Christie. Normal people, after all, think about politics five minutes a week. The first priority of a political figure is to break through the clutter — to get on the radar scope — to get noticed.
But like your mother told you, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. This is a bad first impression.
Voters cast their ballots based on what they know. For example, if all you know is that you share the candidate’s ethnic name, you are often more likely to support him — since he’s “like you.” But if they learn more, the importance of the name begins to shrink.
“Bridgegate” is a big, interesting, symbolically powerful story that will break through with voters who know very little about Christie. For many voters, it will be their first real impression and he will come to be defined by it. Political communication is all about symbols. This will become a symbol for Christie — a story that describes him for voters who don’t know anything else about him.
“Oh yeah, he’s they guy who caused a three-day traffic jam to punish a mayor that wouldn’t support him, right? What a piece of work.”
Reason #3: So much for the guy who could, as the New York Times said, “transcend partisan rancor and petty politics in the service of the public good.”
You don’t get much more partisan or much more petty than inconveniencing and threatening the public safety of thousands of ordinary citizens in order to punish a Democratic mayor who failed to endorse your re-election for governor. When one unidentified aide said he felt sorry for the children on school buses who were late to school because of the intentional traffic jam, Christi’s friend and Port Authority official David Wildstein replied that they were the kids of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Buono’s supporters. Yuck.
Reason #4: The momentum and inevitability of Christie’s march to the GOP nomination has evaporated.
One of the big things Christie had going for him was the bandwagon. He seemed inevitable, so Republican donors, county chairmen and activists were signing on. No longer.
Of course part of that inevitability was built upon the premise that he could attract lots of persuadable voters and disaffected Democrats with his straight talking, non-partisan image. That is gone too. His attempts to revive that narrative will always be stalked by the specter of the bridge incident that proves it to be a work of fiction.
When he lost re-election many years ago, former Texas Agricultural Commissioner and now progressive radio talk show host and writer Jim Hightower said: “One day you’re a peacock and the next day you’re a feather duster.”
Christie may not be a feather duster quite yet, but the odds have increased that his oversized presence in American politics will appear in history books as little more than a small footnote.

CNN Political Commentator/Democratic strategist Paul Begala isn’t having any of Gov. Christie’s “embarrassed and humiliated” explanation. As Begala explains:

To be fair, Christie faced a dilemma: Either admit to creating a climate of bullying, intimidation and political payback that led to the George Washington Bridge scandal, or claim that his staff and appointees disrupted traffic on the world’s busiest bridge as political punishment without his knowledge. In the business we call it a choice between being a crook or a schnook.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Gov. Schnook.
A schnook, for those who don’t speak Yiddish, is a dupe. A fool. A patsy. A schnook is a victim, and Chris Christie is not convincing playing the victim. He wants us to believe that Gov. Straight-Talk, Mister No-B.S., credulously believed a pack of lies from his close aides.
He wants us to believe that, as a former federal prosecutor, he thought his one-hour “investigation” of this operation, which yielded no confessions, was all that he could have done to unearth the truth. The governor clearly hopes that his press conference, his apology and his firing of one whole person will put this issue to rest.
It won’t.

Begala goes on to argue that Christie’s troubles are not going away, and he cites three reasons why this scandal has a long way to go before it’s over: 1. It feeds a pre-existing narrative. 2. There are ongoing legal and political processes. 3. It happened at the media epicenter. Read more about Begala’s rationale right here.

Gov. Christie’s collapse, soon to be reflected in polls, provides Democrats with an unexpected meme along the lines of “See, even the more moderate Republicans do dirty tricks and don’t care that they create hardships for and endanger their constituents.” Dems can’t be blamed for savoring his meltdown, especially since Christie had topped Hillary in a recent poll.
As one who thought Christie’s act would probably wear thin by 2016 for different reasons (bluster gets tiresome after a while), however, I’m thinking maybe Dems should restrain their jubilation and see how this plays out. Work it, sure. But don’t do the happy dance quite yet.
For one thing Christie’s continued rise would likely have divided his party even more, which is a good thing for Dems, strategically. There are no “moderate” Republicans waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum and exacerbate the divisions, unless Huntsman suddenly grows the chops to score significant primary victories. Rand Paul will make a loud play, but he carries a lot of racist and anti-blue collar worker baggage. Huckabee will try to fill the void, but there’s a reason he got little traction on his last outing. The GOP field now has an opening for a dark horse.
The upside of Christie’s debacle for Democrats is nonetheless substantial. I would be very surprised if the voters of NJ didn’t sour on him and his party. It reminds voters who admired his ‘straight-talking’ style that style can be a facade. He’s now more frequently likened to Nixon than John Wayne. The Christie persona will not be replicated for a while at least. It looks an awful lot like a permanent stain — it may be that the longer he stays in office, the better for Democrats.
Most voters will tell you that both parties have scandals and moral lapses, and Democrats have their share of messes. But can anybody who knows Democratic leaders imagine their staff people being stupid/evil enough to tie up a major city and endanger lives for the sake of political spite? We haven’t seen that level of malevolence since Watergate or maybe Bush II. False equivalence is a very tough sell on this one.

Hard to see how Christie recovers enough from his scandal to run as a national candidate. Recent polls suggest Rep. Paul Ryan may be in position to be the most likely beneficiary in terms of GOP presidential nomination, at least for a while. But watch the other right-wing cheese-head, union-bashing Gov. Scott Walker, who has shades-of-Reagan cred with all GOP factions and better media skills.
And the “Ya think?” award for euphemistic headline-writing goes to…
Christie’s shenanigans notwithstanding, I would have to give Marco Rubio the award for political shamelessness, voting against extending unemployment benefits, and then trashing the War on Poverty, despite mountains of data proving it was a success. At least we’ll always have the deliciousl Youtube video of Rubio‘s eyes darting around like a ridiculous deer-caught-in-the-headlights, as he reaches for water.
NYT columnist Russ Douthat talks frames for “better [conservative] policy ideas” for addressing poverty: “But really, the most important thing is to actually have an agenda, which is why at this point I’m not all that concerned about whether Republicans are talking about fighting poverty or the middle class or both: I just want them to be talking up and trying out policy ideas…” Outside of tax cuts for the wealthy and bashing Obamacare, he will likely have a very long wait.
After giving LBJ due credit for his leadership of the War on Poverty, spare a thought for Sargent Shriver, the “architect” of the idea — as well as the Peace Corps, Job Corps, Upward Bound, Vista and Head Start. He also served as Head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, chairman and president of the Special Olympics. As much as any Democrat of his times, he provided the conscience of his party on helping the disadvantaged.
Some interesting stats from Ariel Edwards-Levy’s HuffPo post “America’s Record Number Of Independents Aren’t As Independent As You Might Think“: “The movement in party identification doesn’t represent a seismic change in Americans’ views, however, so much as an increased unwillingness to be tethered to either party, especially the GOP. When Gallup asked those independents whether they leaned toward one side, just a fraction — about 10 percent of Americans — described themselves as purely independent. The rest leaned equally toward one party or the other, with 16 percent expressing more of an affinity for the Democrats, and 16 percent for the GOP…The difference between partisan-leaning independents and their brethren among the party faithful tends to blur at the ballot box. In 2008, 90 percent of Democratic leaners went to now-President Barack Obama, and about 80 percent of Republican leaners to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), according to exit polls.”
At CNN Opinion Julian Zelizer explores “America’s real problem: Too much bipartisanship. ‘ As Zelizer notes in a teaser graph, “But with all of our discussions of difference and discord, too often we miss some areas where both parties are actually in unspoken agreement. There is a consensus view that encapsulates what’s really wrong in Washington.”
If David Weigel’s Slate post “Obamacare. Obamacare. Obamacare: The Republican strategy for winning the Senate in 2014 is a single word” is right, Dems should expect the GOP ACA refusenik governors to hold the line through the elections — which may prove disastrous for them.
Well, at least we won’t need much paint.

The following article is by Erica Seifert of DCorps:
Earlier this week, the Senate passed a bill to extend long-term unemployment insurance, a measure that would restore assistance to the estimated 1.3 million workers whose benefits expired at the end of December. And while just six Republican senators joined the majority, the bill was pronounced “bipartisan.” Apparently this is what passes for Republican participation these days.
House Speaker John Boehner’s response to the Senate’s action was that the UI extension would need to be paid for with cuts elsewhere, and also include incentives for the unemployed to get back to work. Instead of trying to extend unemployment insurance, Boehner said, the House should “remain focused on growing the economy.” As the Speaker himself might put it: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Economists widely agree that unemployment insurance does not have a deleterious effect on the economy. On the contrary, it is quite beneficial. Our very smart friends at the Economic Policy Institute “find that continuing the extensions through 2014 would generate spending that would support 310,000 jobs. If this program is discontinued, the economy will lose these jobs.” The EPI further reports that “insurance benefit extensions through 2014 would generate a $37.8 billion increase in GDP.”
Given this, one would think that extending unemployment benefits must be politically controversial, because clearly it is not bad for the economy. But according to a December poll conducted by our colleagues at Hart Research Associates, the opposite is true — just a third of Americans oppose extending unemployment insurance. Additionally, maintaining these benefits has a 2-to-1 intensity advantage (those who say they strongly support or do not support extension).

We repeat: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

As we soberly look ahead at 2014, it’s important to remember state elections in addition to competitive congressional races. Alas, the landscape for Democrats is not as good as one might imagine given the radicalism and misgovernment exhibited by the state-level Republicans who benefited from the landslide of 2010. I summed up the lay of the land in a column for TPMCafe today, from which I’ve drawn this excerpt:

In theory, Republicans should be exposed to some serious losses thanks to their 2010 landslide. They will defend 22 of the 36 governorships up this November. Nine are in states carried twice by Barack Obama. Republicans also control 27 legislatures (91 percent of state lower-chamber seats are up this year, along with 55 percent of state senate seats) and partially control five more; five states carried twice by Obama have Republican-controlled legislatures, and three more have split legislatures.
Aside from possible “over-exposure” in places that lean blue, Republican state-level success in 2010 means they could suffer from identification with a wildly unpopular status quo. While approval rating polling of governors has been erratic of late, several notable Republicans (e.g. LePage of Maine, Scott of Florida, Kasich of Ohio, Corbett of PA) have been struggling for many months.
But when you consult the professionals on how gubernatorial races look, there doesn’t appear to be any Democratic counter-landslide in the offing for 2014. The Cook Political Report does not presently show Democrats leading in any race involving a Republican-controlled governorship. Cook does have four Republican incumbents in toss-up races (LePage, Scott, Corbett and Snyder of MI), but that’s balanced in part by two Democratic governorships (Pat Quinn’s Illinois, and Arkansas, where Mike Beebe is retiring) in toss-up status. Overall, Cook shows nine gubernatorial races as competitive (toss-ups plus leaners), and five are Republican, four Democratic. Another rating site, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, presently shows Pennsylvania and Maine favored to flip from Republican to Democratic, but also shows three current Democratic states (Connecticut as well as Arkansas and Illinois) as toss-ups.

Why the lack of opportunities? There are three basic reasons:

The first is the recent alignment of the two parties with elements of the electorate that do (older, whiter voters) and don’t (young people and minorities) tend to vote disproportionately in midterm elections. The “fall-off” in voting for midterms and its variable level in different parts of the electorate is an ancient phenomenon; what’s new is how it affects the major parties, particularly given Democratic dependence on young and minority voters. While a lot of political observers have noted this new situation (and a few, like yours truly, have suggested it will make the elimination of partisan gridlock very difficult), few if any have concluded the “two electorates” with their different leanings are likely to provide Republicans with a significant advantage in gubernatorial elections since four-fifths of them occur in non-presidential years. This advantage may really come in handy for GOPers in 2014.
A parallel factor of equal importance is the sharp decline in ticket-splitting that has occurred since the late 1980s (roughly the time when the ideological sorting-out of the two parties reached its culmination, greatly reducing the number of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who were natural ticket-splitters). In a period of strong national partisan polarization, the likelihood of one trend in congressional elections and a contrary trend in state elections is significantly lower. And that’s why for all the persistent talk of “anti-incumbency elections” or “waves,” it’s actually rare to see elections “turn out the bums” in both parties at different levels of government.
Finally, at the state legislative level, it’s important to remember that the same gerrymandering efforts that solidified Republican control of the U.S. House benefitted the GOP Class of 2010 among state legislators as well.

The good news for Democrats is that Republicans seem to be overconfident about 2014, and just as importantly, determined to continue pushing their luck with radical policies that could help Democrats make major steps in overcoming the midterm turnout “fall-off” problem. I vividly recall one midterm (in 1998) when offensive Republican behavior towards minorities and national revulsion against the effort to impeach Bill Clinton produced a major turnout surge among African-Americans that lifted Democrats to upset gubernatorial victories in three Deep South states (Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina). That sort of scenario is by no means impossible this year in the wide swath of Republican-governed states, but it will take a supreme Democratic effort to make it happen.

The Republican revisionist history machine is cranking up in a big way to address the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty. At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky’s “Marco Rubio Is Wrong: The War on Poverty Worked” provides a well-crafted takedown:

Our problem is when conservatives like Rubio talk gibberish: “Isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” No, it isn’t. It’s high time to say the war on poverty was a success. A wild success, indeed, by nearly every meaningful measure. But no one thinks so, and a big part of the reason is that most Democrats are afraid to say so. They’d damn well better start. If we’re really going to be raising the minimum wage and tackling inequality, someone needs to be willing to say to the American people that these kinds of approaches get results.
You may have seen the big Times piece Sunday that looked back over the half-century war on poverty, kicked off by Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union address. The article noted that in terms of health and nutrition and numerous other factors, the poor in the United States are immeasurably less immiserated today than they were then. But it did lead by saying the overall poverty rate in all that time has dropped only from 19 to 15 percent, suggesting to the casual reader that all these billions for five decades haven’t accomplished much.
What’s wrong with thinking is that we have not, of course, been fighting any kind of serious war on poverty for five decades. We fought it with truly adequate funding for about one decade. Less, even. Then the backlash started, and by 1981, Ronald Reagan’s government was fighting a war on the war on poverty. The fate of many anti-poverty programs has ebbed and flowed ever since.
But at the beginning, in the ’60s, those programs were fully funded, or close. And what happened? According to Joseph Califano, who worked in the Johnson White House, “the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.” That’s a staggering 43 percent reduction. In six years.

Tomasky goes on the explain that the war in Southeast Asia and unrealistic expectations about abolishing poverty combined to unravel much of the progress. Yet, looking back with perspective,

But even for its shortcomings, the Great Society and the war on poverty did absolutely amazing things. I’d like my fellow West Virginia natives to imagine our capital-poor state without the billions the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent since 1965 on roads, local economic development, community health clinics, and numerous other projects. The Great Society brought federal billions to schools, made college possible for millions of kids from modest means, educated innumerable doctors, and so much more.

Yet, conservatives will continue “to point to the existence of poor people and therefore to make the claim that the whole thing has been a failure.” That’s been their time-honored practice of parroting lies until the MSM is suckered into repeating them as “on the other hand” false equivalence scale-balancing.
Democrats can’t give the Republicans and their MSM minions a free ride regarding their myth-mongering about the War on Poverty. As Tomasky concludes, “If we are entering a new phase of fighting a war on inequality, Americans need to know some facts about the last war that firmly support the view that the effort and resources have done far more good than harm. The Democrats just have to be willing–and proud–to say it and say it and say it.”