Last week a sequel appeared to one of the great classics of political analysis–Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s 1989 paper, The Politics of Evasion. The previous report was published by the Progressive Policy Institute; the latest, entitled The Politics of Polarization, by the folks over at the congressionally-focused group Third Way (which is friendly with the DLC, but is a completely independent organiztion). This is a 71-page report chock full of findings and recommendations, so my first suggestion is that you read the whole thing, and don’t rely on the Cliffs Notes version reported in the newspapers, or on the generally carping references to it in much of the blogosphere, based largely, I suspect, on the Cliffs Notes version. Yes, Galston and Kamarck argue that the real gold in American politics is in the ideological center, and they will annoy some of you who think counter-polarization is the key for Democrats. And yes, they claim that Democrats haven’t developed a credible consensus on national security issues, and that will annoy others of you who think a position favoring withdrawal from Iraq will do the trick (for the record, Galston and Kamarck both opposed the invasion of Iraq in the first place).But the real value of the paper is that it hammers home three fundamental realities of contemporary partisan politics that cannot much be denied: (1) the GOP-engineered polarization of the two parties along ideological lines has made Democrats much more dependent than Republicans on sizable margins among self-identified moderate and independent voters (and thus more vulnerable to base/swing conflicts) (2) George W. Bush’s 2004 win was produced as much by persuasion of a sizable minority of moderate voters (particularly married women and Catholics) as it was by mobilization of his conservative “base;” and (3) a changing issues landscape has reinforced the importance of Democratic efforts to deal with chronic negative perceptions by voters on national security and cultural issues–efforts which fell short in 2004.If that sounds familiar to regular readers, it’s because it’s pretty much the lesson the DLC took away from the 2004 elections.Galston and Kamarck place special emphasis on “candidate character” as a significant voting factor for “values voters,” and like many other post-election analysts, think John Kerry was fatally wounded by voter perceptions that he was on both sides of not one but two wars (Vietnam and Iraq). But they also make it clear that Kerry’s problem wasn’t simply inconsistency, but the suspicion that his “real” positions were out of line with mainstream sentiments. In other words, it’s not enough to avoid “flip-flopping;” attention must be paid to the political impact of choosing “flip” over “flop,” or vice-versa. This extremely simple point is one that a lot of Democrats, in an understandable mania for clarity and partisan differentiation, sometimes miss.If I have one criticism of The Politics of Polarization, it’s that it fails to say much about the Democratic opportunity to make enormous gains with “values voters” by drawing attention to the incredible and ever-growing pattern of ethical lapses and dissembling by Bush and the GOP.There is little question that Bush’s current dive in support, particularly from independents, is attributable in no small part to buyer’s remorse among voters who thought he was, if nothing else, a man of simple virtues and basic honesty (we tried to tell them otherwise in 2004, to little avail). And there’s little question the only way Democrats can be sure to benefit from this vulnerability is to support a reform agenda designed to help repair the damage the GOP is inflicting on our institutions and our national interests.Still, there’s plenty of great value in the Galston-Kamarck analysis, including a number of fascinating studies of changing perceptions of the two parties over time. One example: as late as 1986, six years into the “Reagan Revolution,” a comfortable plurality of voters considered Democrats rather than Republicans as the party of “traditional family values.”Like I said: read the whole thing.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 14: Democrats Really Were in Disarray Over Spending Bill
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.