Maybe I’ll get around to essaying a full rebuttal of Markos Moulitsas’ gratuitous bashing of Tom Vilsack over the DLC’s alleged “warmongering” during the Iowa Governor’s chairmanship of the organization. But maybe not. I’ve learned over time that netroots folk tend to either share Kos’ belief that the DLC exists to divide the Democratic Party, despite all its endless and interminable and redundant attacks on Bush and the Republican Party, or they don’t, as a matter of political theology rather than empirical evidence.But if you’ve bothered to read Kos’ jeremiad, you ought to read the comment thread it produced, wherein a few brave souls compare the DLC’s occasional statements on how and when to get out of Iraq with those of other non-Satanic Democrats, most notably Wes Clark, who continues to oppose a fixed deadline, much less an immediate fixed deadline, for withdrawal from Iraq. And this doesn’t even get into the inconvenient fact that some of the “out now” proposals (most notably Edwards’ and Obama’s) would probably leave as many troops in Iraq as anything the DLC has suggested.I do want to address one small issue that seems to be big for Kos: that the DLC was being “divisive” last year by disagreeing with John Murtha’s proposal for a short deadline for withdrawal. Those of you who remember this particular debate probably remember that lots of Democrats, far beyond the ambit of the DLC, thought Murtha was being “divisive” in insisting on his position as opposed to one that would embrace nearly all Democrats this side of Lieberman, and even some Republicans. And indeed, the Senate version of the Murtha position, offered by Feingold and Kerry, got a total of seven votes. Retroactively calling this “the Democratic position” and singling out the DLC for dissenting from it is disingenuous.It is obviously true that since last year, the opinions of Democrats and the public as a whole have shifted in the direction of fixed and faster withdrawal timetables (though again, with loopholes for residual troop levels that nobody but me seems to want to talk about). There’s a simple reason for this: Bush has responded to a national and even bipartisan consensus for a fundamental change of course in Iraq by proposing to escalate U.S. military engagement, leading lots of us to conclude that this administration is literally hopeless on this issue. It’s moved everyone, the DLC included, towards a more “antiwar” position, not just because they are following polls or achieving satori on the past errors of their ways, but because the administration and the GOP seem determined to eradicate any middle ground. And it’s obviously pushed Tom Vilsack all the way over to Kos’ position, for which he gets nothing but abuse.Look, I don’t personally mind antiwar Democrats pointing out again and again they were right and others, including the DLC, were wrong on the original decision to go into Iraq. But ever since the war started, Democrats have been in an agonized state over what to do next, mainly because we don’t control the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the State Department, or any of the other levers of executive power. If we are going to go back and examine everyone’s position at every stage of the nightmare in Iraq, it’s not unfair to point out that Howard Dean, during his presidential campaign, said repeatedly that America had a responsibility to stay in Iraq, perhaps for a long time, given our unfortunate decision to go to war.All this endless recrimination over who said what when after the war started, and who moved as fast or faster than Murtha or Kos in the maximum antiwar direction, is IMHO a big waste of time, and far more divisive than anything emanating from the DLC, much less Tom Vilsack.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.