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Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

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How to Demolish GOP Propaganda 101

Jonathan Chait’s post “Popularity Contest” at The New Republic gives GOP myth-mongers (especially Krauthammer) a proper shredding, and provides progressive bloggers with an excellent template for doing the same in the bargain.
Chait riffs on an ad placed in TNR by conservative American Future Fund (AFF) urging moderate Democrats to ditch health care reform, with the headline “THE LOSERS OF 1994 … THANKS TO HEALTH CARE!” and featuring photos of Dems who lost their seats in that year. Says Chait, who deliciously bites the advertising hand that feeds him:

I hesitate to impugn the intellectual integrity of any of the good folks who purchase space in this magazine in order to share their concerns about public policy. Yet I cannot help but wonder if AFF has truly proffered this advice in good faith…Democrats did not lose their seats in 1994 because they enacted health care reform. They failed to enact, or even vote on, health care reform. So it’s hard to see why…letting health care reform die an ignominious death is an attractive strategy for the majority party.

Chait concedes that “narrow, but stable majorities disapprove” of President Obama’s health care plan, but “The problem with this gauge is that it lumps together Obama’s critics from the right with those from the left” and health care reform in general “actually remains quite popular.” Further, says Chait:

…One recent poll asks whether the Democratic plans create too much government involvement, the right amount, or not enough. Too much gets 42 percent, the right amount 34 percent, and not enough 21 percent. Another question shows that only 28 percent of Americans think the bill goes too far in expanding coverage to the uninsured, 33 percent say it expands coverage the right amount, and 35 percent say it does not go far enough. In both cases, majorities of the public either support Obama’s approach or wish it went further.
Moreover, a clear majority of Americans say that they want the Democrats to pass a health care bill with a public option, even if this means it would get no GOP votes–a striking result, given the misty-eyed sentiment Americans generally display toward bipartisanship in all its forms.

“Vulnerable congressional Democrats may have individual interests in establishing their moderate bona fides by challenging their party leadership,” argues Chait. “But they have a far stronger collective interest in passing a bill.”
Chait quotes a Wall St. Journal editorial, which says “Democrats know this legislation is … possible only because of temporary liberal majorities,” then counters “…Obama out-polled his opponent by eight-and-a-half million votes, a margin that exceeded Bush’s 2000 popular-vote edge by, oh, roughly nine million votes.”
Chait then asks, “Shouldn’t Obama’s actual election count for more than two low-turnout gubernatorial races? Oh no. The off-year elections prove Obama’s presidency is a fluke.” Chait also quotes WaPo columnist Charles Krauthammer:

2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression.,,The return to the norm is happening now.

Chait responds,

Got that? The normal state of affairs is an odd-year, low-turnout election occurring in just two states, which have voted against the incumbent party for the past 20 years, with no national candidates on the ballot, and with double-digit unemployment. That’s a perfectly calibrated measure of public preference on national issues. But Obama’s election was an accident.
…But, if Americans were recoiling at Obama’s liberalism, rather than lashing out at the poor economy, you’d expect to see the Democratic Party losing favor and the GOP regaining it. In fact, the opposite remains true. (A recent poll had the Dems’ favorable rating at 53-41, and the Republicans’ at 36-54.) Given the circumstances, the striking fact about the political landscape is how little has changed since November 2008.
..But 2009 isn’t a debacle, and it won’t be unless Democrats get bluffed into making it one.

All of which adds up to a gratifying example of a conservative organization purchasing space for a propaganda screed in a magazine, which elicits a response in the same magazine that leaves their pitch more discredited than before.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: GQR Poll Shows Huge Support for Prevention Investment

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot at the Center for American Progress web pages,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira cites a new bipartisan poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies, conducted for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Trust for America’s Health, which addresses “the neglected prevention aspect of health care reform…providing people with information and resources and creating policies that help people make healthier decisions.” According to Teixeira:

This poll finds 71 percent of Americans backing more investment in prevention versus just 23 percent who are opposed….Reflecting this strong support, investing in prevention ranked just behind the massively popular prohibition against insurance companies denying coverage for pre-existing conditions in a list of health care reforms given to respondents. Prevention was given an average priority rating of 7.7 on a 10-point scale, compared to 7.9 for the coverage denial prohibition.

Sounds like a focus that Dems can use to win broad support. “Prevention may not get much press,” says Teixeira. “But it is very popular with the public. Maybe it’s time for the press to start paying attention.”


Dionne: Health Reform Progress Historic

The ‘glass is half-empty’ crowd might describe what Democrats accomplished with Saturday’s vote on health care reform as “barely enough U.S. Senators agreed to begin debating a health care reform bill some of them hope to actually pass.” WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. acknowleges all of the complaining about the reform bill, but he emphasizes the more optimistic view in his ‘Post-Partisan’ blog, “Can’t we celebrate a little on health care?“:

Something truly momentous happened in the United States Senate last night…Okay, it’s entirely true that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s success in putting together 60 votes to let debate on a health-care bill go forward is only a first step. ..But can we pause to note that a comprehensive health-reform bill has never been this close to passage?…Is it really so hard to remember that for the 15 years since the failure of President Clinton’s reforms, the conventional take was that health-care reform is impossible?

Dionne recommends Rob Brownstein’s post at The Atlantic on cost-containment in health care reform legislation, and adds,

Brownstein’s point is that while the Senate health care bill is not perfect on this front — has any legislative body ever enacted a perfect law? — the bill is winning praise from very tough-minded health-care analysts for how extensive its cost-containment measures are. There is nothing naïve about Brownstein’s post, and he offers a lot of sensible caveats, but he’s right to suggest that this round of legislating may well be “a milestone in the health care journey.”

The praise the Reid compromise has gotten from cost-containment advocates is an important angle for supporters to promote more energetically. As Dionne concludes, “Let’s celebrate the fact that we are dealing with an issue that we have left unattended for far too long.”


Health Care Reform As Platform for the Future

In Friday’s HuffPo, TDS contributor Mike Lux takes a step back to put the battle for health care reform into the big picture — how it enables momentum in support of the broader struggle for a more progressive agenda. As Lux writes,

Being into the whole history thing enough to have written a book on it, I tend to take a long view on the big policy battles we fight today…At the end of the day you also have to ask yourself two very big questions. The first is whether the passage of this legislation sets the stage on other issues for better or worse things to come. The second is whether the legislation, even with all of its flaws and compromises, creates a platform to build on in the future…These two questions are equally applicable to the other big fights looming immediately in front of us- climate change, financial reform, immigration, maybe (hopefully) a jobs bill, Employee Free Choice Act. In every single case, progressives are going to have to make difficult decisions re the compromises they will be forced to make. On none of these issues will we be able to get what we want, and some of the tradeoffs will really suck. But as we are debating the policy pros and cons, we also need to keep those two big questions in mind.

Lux draws the painful, but instructive lesson from the Clinton Administration’s failure to enact health care reform:

…When we lost on health care in 1994, and then lost Congress in the elections because our base was so discouraged that they didn’t turn out, it made Clinton and Democrats in general hyper-cautious about trying to do anything big or bold the rest of his Presidency. If we had won on health care, we would have kept Congress, and we would have emboldened Democrats to try other big things. It is one of the most basic laws in politics: victory makes you stronger, and defeat makes you weaker. You can fault Obama for some of his specific policy proposals, and for being too ready to compromise on some things, but one thing he has been willing to do is try to do big things, and if health care goes down, the attempt to do big things will probably will stop- climate change probably is given up on as too hard, financial reform gets weaker, efforts to create more jobs probably is given up on, immigration reform very likely gets shelved. If a health care bill is passed…it will create the possibility of doing other big things.

Lux uses the example of Social Security legislation as a foundational reform that paved the way for strengthening amendments:

…When it was first passed, it was far weaker than today, and had many flaws progressives of today would have been rightfully upset about, but that it was a platform future progressives could build on. I think that’s how we have to view this health care bill, the climate change bill, and at least some other legislation coming down the pike.

A salient point. We want the strongest possible legislation, but a bill’s weaknesses can be corrected later. Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, concludes:

…Where there is some early success, momentum can build into something bigger and more progressive over time: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ all achieved most of their big historic changes after more than a year in office. We need to create that platform so we can build big change one step at a time. Every one of those steps will be slow and painful and infuriating. I still have hope, though, if we can get the first step of health care done, we can take another step, and then another one, and that we will be able to look back many years from now with pride because we made big change history when our opportunity for it came.

The opportunity is upon us, and ‘big change history’ now calls Democrats everywhere to action.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston Calls for National Infrastructure Bank

In his post, “One Way to Rebuild America” at The New Republic, TDS-Co-Editor William Galston makes a persuasive case for “a national infrastructure bank,’ to restore America’s deteriorating network of roads, bridges, sewers, mass transit systems and other essentail public facilities needed for healthy economic growth.
The National Infrastructure Bank, which was proposed by a bipartisan commission and in legislation now before both houses of congress, was supported by President Obama during his campaign for president. Here is the basic outline, according to Galston:

The bank would be established with an initial infusion of federal capital–$60 billion is a frequently cited figure–and an independent board of directors. All projects seeking federal support over a fixed amount ($75 million in the 2007 Dodd/Hagel version) would have to be submitted to the bank for approval. The governors would employ an explicit and rigorous template for evaluating projects’ benefits and fundability. Projects surviving this test would be eligible for a range of financing options.
Beyond reducing the influence of local pork-barrel considerations on infrastructure investments, the bank would offer two other advantages. First, it could mobilize additional capital by reselling the loans it makes in the private market. This would enable the bank to make more loans without additional appropriations, multiplying the bank’s impact on the direction and level of investment. Second, it could help smooth over some short-term political problems. Rather than forcing current taxpayers to bear the entire burden of investments from which the next generation will also benefit, revenue bonds would enable all users over a period of decades to pay a fair and affordable share..

Galston acknowledges that the proposal has some powerful foes, including some “congressional appropriators,” who fear the bank’s independent Board fo Directors might “clip their wings” and there are even rumors of some opponents of the proposal on President Obama’s senior staff. But Galston nonetheless sees a near-perfect match of compelling need and available resources that can be best addressed by the proposal:

We have an urgent need–a growing gap in providing public goods that improve economic efficiency as well as the quality of social life. We have massive unused resources, in the form of idle plants and equipment and sky-high unemployment. Infrastructure investment creates high-quality jobs here at home, and it produces tangible results to which politicians can point with pride…It’s a natural centerpiece for any agenda that emerges from the White House’s December “jobs summit.”

Galston puts the challenge to the white house to provide the needed leadership. “Will the president have the courage of his campaign convictions?…Will we become once again the country that created the interstate highway system? Or are we too divided and dispirited even to try?” Good questions, and America’s economic future may well depend on the answer.


Tomasky: Blue Dogs Underestimate Their Latitude

Michael Tomasky’s article, “Who Are the Blue Dogs?” in the December 3rd edition of The New York Review of Books is one of the most revelaing pieces yet written on the topic. Tomasky probes the dimensions of the Blue Dogs’ numerical strength in the House, the demographics of their districts and how the numbers play out in their respective regions. He concludes that,

…The Democratic congressional party has become far more ideologically diverse than the Republican one. In theory, and sometimes in practice, this can be a good thing. But it means that Democrats simply can’t act with the kind of unanimity one sees among Republicans. There is too much disagreement within the caucus…
Certainly, Blue Dogs and other rural Democrats can’t vote like Manhattan’s Jerry Nadler. Everyone understands that. But it’s also not entirely clear that one or two controversial votes would endanger many of these legislators.

A good point. Tomasky also provides some interesting observations about the importance of victory margins:

All but a small number of these Democrats won their own races by a greater margin than McCain’s over Obama in the district. Thirty of them beat their GOP opponents by 10 percentage points more than McCain beat Obama. I calculated these numbers in late July, comparing the Democrats’ victory margins to McCain’s, determining each Democrat’s “margin versus McCain”(MVM).[7] Ross, for example, ran unopposed, scoring an MVM of +67. Melancon also ran unopposed, producing an MVM of +76. Herseth Sandlin’s margin was +28, Shuler’s +21. Only eight of the forty-nine had negative margins. Minnick’s, for example, was –25. He and a handful of others have every right to proceed with caution.
But for the vast majority of members of Congress, once you’ve been elected and reelected once or twice, it takes either a pretty big scandal or a rare historical tidal wave (as in 1994) to produce defeat. Members know this—in fact, they typically know exactly how many percentage points a certain vote might cost them at the polls. One begins to suspect that some Blue Dogs don’t really fear losing as much as they fear facing a semicredible opponent and actually having to campaign hard for a change.

Tomasky offers this insight on the topic of what the Blue Dogs really want:

…It is true that they “campaigned on fiscal responsibility,” as the Pelosi spokesman put it after the stimulus vote. What Blue Dogs typically want out of legislative negotiations, one leadership aide told me, is to be able to go back to their districts and say to their voters that they managed to wrest this or that concession out of the more liberal leadership. This aide spoke of “thousands of hours of meetings” with individual legislators seeking to change health care legislation in large ways and small: “If you can’t go back to your district and say, ‘I’ve changed this bill to reflect you voters,’…you have to be able to point to something that you did that made the bill better.”

An important consideration to keep in mind as congressional leaders craft a final bill that can win the support of a broad cross-section of Democrats.


Three Keys to Dem Success in ’10

TDS contributor Mike Lux’s post “Winning the 2010 Elections” at Open Left offers three challenges he believes Dems will have to meet to do well next November:

…There is a strategy that can turn the 2010 election around. That strategy needs to be built around health care, jobs, and taking on the big banks. None of these things are easy, but I am convinced that they are by far the best hope Democrats have.

First, with respect to health care reform:

On health care, they simply have to pass a strong bill where at least some important and tangible benefits kick in right away. They just have to if there is any hope in the 2010 elections….

Emphasis on ‘right away’ — not a lot of wiggle room here.
To address rising joblessness, Lux has three “don’t”s:

Don’t brag about how the GDP is growing, the recession is over, but jobs are a lagging indicator and the job situation will eventually get better.
Don’t say “well, we know things are bad, but without us it would have been a lot worse”.
Don’t talk about how great it is that the banking sector is healthy again, because soon they will be lending money to businesses, and at some point that will mean some of those businesses will start hiring again.

Making excuses for failure and advocating ‘top-down’ job-creation are “political death” in Lux’s view. On the contrary,

…What Democrats should be doing is …Show that they are moving on this urgent need: get a new jobs bill passed, get a roads/infrastructure bill passed. Show more toughness when the most protectionist country on earth, China, lectures us on being protectionists (they liked us being saps for all those years.) Fight like crazy for new jobs in every venue, every forum, every chance you get- and tell people no matter how many jobs you produce that it is never enough, that you will keep fighting for more…Voters understand the deep hole our economy is in, and that things won’t be solved overnight, but they want to know that their political leaders are as passionate about solving unemployment problems as the people struggling are to find jobs.

Lastly, Lux supports a bill to “break up the big banks,” sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT), adding “about 85% of the American public would agree with Bernie’s statement that if you are too big to fail, you are too big to exist.”
Lux concludes with a warning and a vision for victory:

If Democrats follow the safe conventional wisdom formula in the 2010 elections, they will get their butts handed to them. Voters are not happy with incumbents, base Democratic voters feel like no one is fighting for them, independents feel like nobody cares what they think. But if Democrats shed their caution and become fighters, for jobs and health care and the middle class and against insurers and Wall Street, they can pull off the same kind of surprise in 2010 that we pulled off in 1998.

A formidable challenge indeed, but one which can light the way forward to the best possible outcome in the 2010 elections.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Health Reform Fear-Mongers Lack Traction

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ post at the Center for American Progress web pages brings bad news for fear-mongers who are trying to squash health care reform — the public isn’t buying it, according to the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. While the public “still has many questions and concerns about health care reform,” Teixeira presents encouraging data for reform advocates:

The public was asked whether the president and Congress passing health care reform would make “the country as a whole” worse off or better off. By 53-28, the public thought the country would be better off, rather than worse off.
So much for taking the country down the road to socialism. What about ruining the economy? Over the long term, the public believes, by 49-37, that passing health care reform will actually help the nation’s economy.
And that public option, which conservatives say is the worst of the worst? That still draws 57-39 support from the public, despite the endless talk about how this would mean “a government takeover of the health care system.”

With solid public support for all the key elements of health care reform, the challenge now falls to congress. Says Teixeira, “Let’s hope their elected representatives do the same and complete the historic task before them of finally passing health care reform.”


AP Poll: Fund Health Reform by Taxing Rich

Contrary to much recent reportage, the American people are pretty clear about how they would like health care reform to be financed, according to a new Associated Press poll by GfK-Roper Public Affairs and Media, conducted 10/29-11/8. As Erica Werrner explains in her AP report:

When it comes to paying for a health care overhaul, Americans see just one way to go: Tax the rich.
That finding from a new Associated Press poll will be welcome news for House Democrats, who proposed doing just that in their sweeping remake of the U.S. medical system, which passed earlier this month and would extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
The poll found participants sour on other ways of paying for the health overhaul that is being considered in Congress, including taxing insurers on high-value coverage packages derided by President Barack Obama and Democrats as “Cadillac plans.”

Only 29 percent of adults polled supported the tax on Cadillac plans, with 56 percent opposed. Other measures, including new taxes on insurance, drug and medical device manufacturers also failed to win majority support in the AP poll, reports Werner, with 48 percent opposed to new taxes on insurance companies, and 42 percent in support. A slight majority, 51 percent, opposed higher taxes on drug and medical device makers, while 41 percent supported it.
But the poll found 57 percent of respondents favor financing health care refom by raising taxes on those earning $250,000 per year, with 36 percent opposed. The House bill would impose a 5.4 percent surcharge on those earning more than $500,000 per year, as well as households earning more than $1 million per year.


More Evidence to Support Health Reform

by Matt Compton
When the House voted to pass the health care bill, cable news shows were filled with pundits talking about how many Democrats voted against the legislation to avoid taking a hit in their districts.
But the first poll that I’ve seen which shows a member of Congress losing support at home actually comes as bad news for Rep. Mike Castle — a Delaware Republican who voted against the bill.
A new survey from Susquehanna Polling & Research shows Beau Biden — Delaware’s attorney general and the son of the vice president — beating Castle by five points in a match up for the US Senate. When the same firm polled the race this spring, Castle was up 21 points.
Why is Biden surging? As Dave Weigel points out:

He’s grabbed the lead in vote-rich New Castle County, built up a 41-point lead among Democratic voters, and moved to only 5 points behind Castle among independents. According to the pollster, the shift “may be a result of negative publicity [Castle] received in the state after casting a ‘no’ vote for President Obama’s health care reform bill in the U.S. Congress.” Castle, who has thrived as a moderate Republican in an increasingly Democratic state, has been casting more partisan votes–against the stimulus package, for the Stupak amendment–that have been well-reported in Delaware.

As we noted in a staff post earlier, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that there’s nothing to be gained from voting against health care reform. I think we can safely add this latest bit of data to the top of the stack.