In what will probably be the big Democratic political news of the day, MoveOn.org announced its membership had decided to endorse Barack Obama for president. It appears that Obama narrowly got over the two-thirds-vote hurdle that MoveOn had created for this cycle in terms of an endorsement. In 2000, Howard Dean narrowly missed a lower majority-vote threshold for the endorsement.
What will the impact be? The MoveOn press release linked to above unsubtly notes that 1.7 million members of the organization live in Super Tuesday states. There will also almost certainly be an unsubtle effort in the news media to link Obama to some of MoveOn’s more controversial actions, particularly the famous “General Betrayus” ad last September. But at a time when the Super Tuesday competition was already tightening up, the endorsement will most likely be viewed as another contributor to a late surge by Obama.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 17: A Closer Look at the “Uniparty” Fable
RFK Jr. and MTG are using the same dismissive term for major-party differences. I took at look at this phenomenon at New York:
Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George W. Bush was de rigueur — “Vichy Democrats.”
Today the term “Uniparty” has come to denote the idea that Democrats and Republicans are actually working for the same evil Establishment enterprise, their loudly proclaimed differences being a mere sham. This contention was the culmination of a five-page letter Marjorie Taylor Greene recently sent her Republican colleagues calling for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal, unless he changes his ways instantly. She wrote:
“With so much at stake for our future and the future of our children, I will not tolerate this type of ‘leadership.’ This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority …
“If these actions by the leaders of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican party – we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also leaned heavily into the Uniparty idea in his recent speech introducing running-mate Nicole Shanahan:
“Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.”
The Uniparty claim is ridiculous, of course, as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley demonstrates:
“[O]ur current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn’t see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.”
Kennedy’s subscription to the Uniparty notion is understandable on two points. The first is that his candidacy is vastly more likely to tilt the 2024 presidential campaign in the direction of one of the two major-party candidates (likely Donald Trump, according to most of the polling) than to actually succeed in winning the presidency. Maintaining that it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Biden or Trump running the country is essential to maintaining RFK’s appeal as November approaches and the futility of his bid becomes clearer. Second, Kennedy’s pervasive conspiracy-theory approach to contemporary life lends itself to the argument that the apparent gulf between the two major parties is a ruse disguising a sinister common purpose.
MTG’s Uniparty contention also reflects dual motives. In part she is simply echoing Trump’s weird but useful contention that he’s an “outsider” battling a Deep-State Establishment that secretly controls both parties, which is pretty rich since he dominates the GOP like Genghis Khan dominated the Golden Horde. But there is a marginally more legitimate sense in which key elements of the two parties really are in line with each other on isolated issues that happen to obsess Greene, such as aid to Ukraine. If you are a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.
The same is true of other implicit Uniparty claims, particularly those made by progressive pro-Palestinian protesters who adamantly argue that the need to smite “Genocide Joe” Biden for his pro-Israel policies outweighs all the reasons it might be a bad idea to help Trump return to the White House (including the fact that Trump is palpably indifferent to Palestinian suffering). If the two parties do not appear to differ on your overriding issue, then the fundamental reality of polarization can fade into irrelevance.
So we’re likely to hear more Uniparty talk even as Democrats and Republicans head toward another highly fractious election with very high stakes attributable to their differences.
From Sarah Lai Stirland’s Obama Campaign Used Spanish-Language Phone Banking, Texting to Get Out the Potomac Vote in Wired today:
“Online groups have also helped Obama. MoveOn.org, whose members recently endorsed Obama, raised $500,000 for him. MoveOn also created an online Endorse-O-Thon widget that enabled its members to engage in a peer-to-peer online endorsement campaign by sending out 500,000 e-mails and Facebook messages to their friends recommending the candidate.”
On Facebook over the last day, an order of magnitude more people have added themselves as supporters for Obama than Clinton: 15,000+ to 1,400. Hard to know what percentage are eligible to vote but it’s a pretty impressive ratio.
Also I’ve been tracking the views on the “Yes We Can” video’s on YouTube. It’s up over 2,000,000 views, with the most popular instance having entered the top 10 of videos about Obama.
http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=81#comment-492 has statistics for those who are interested in playing along at home.
Add the endorsement to the fact that Obama has been outperforming the polls in each state primary by 7-8% – when the votes are finally counted. That includes Hillary’s AMAZING NH, NV and FL wins… Hold on to your seats America – it’s Obama time!
There’s a fascinating thread in the Obama discussion groups on Facebook tracking the number of people joining the group. The trend started a couple of days ago, and really accelerated today. Worth checking out.
http://www.facebook.com/board.php?uid=6815841748
One of the things I’m very curious about is the synergies betwee MoveOn’s network-style organization and the Obama campaign’s use of social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. A thread just started in the discussion group on Obama’s Facebook profile … any idea where this is likely to be discussed on MySpace?