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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2008

McCain’s Housing Gaffe

The big buzz in Democratic circles today, even eclipsing veep speculation, is about the precise amount of damage John McCain might have done himself yesterday in admitting he didn’t know how many houses he owned.
At a time when an awful lot of Americans are losing, or afraid of losing, their one home, this wasn’t a terribly felicitous remark, particularly from a candidate whose age and focus have occasionally been questioned. And Barack Obama wasted no time leaping on the gaffe, suggesting it showed that McCain was generally out of touch with the economic woes of middle-class families. It is, in fact, reminiscent of the iconic moment in the 1992 campaign when George H.W. Bush expressed amazement at his discovery of grocery-store scanners.
Team McCain has fired back the only way it knows how, by making an immediate reference to McCain’s POW experience: “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”
The timing of the gaffe is unfortunate for McCain, since the Democratic gathering in Denver will offer lots of opportunities for speakers to mock the Republican candidate’s wealth and self-ignorance. But expect convention message-managers to take care that they don’t overdo it. Just prior to the 1992 convention, Vice President Dan Quayle delighted late-night comics by stubbornly insisting that the starchy tuber from which french fries are made was spelled “potatoe.” On the second day of the Democratic festival in New York, word came down from the high command to the speech and rehearsal staff: “No more potato jokes.” Even the most powerful gaffe sometimes needs to be allowed to sink in naturally.


Post-Convention Bounce Means Little

Larry J. Sabato has an analysis of the size and meaning of the “post-convention bounce” in favor of each of the two parties’ candidates going back to 1960, as measured by the difference between before and after convention Gallup polls. Sabato’s charts show a range of -1 in 1964 to +28 in 1992 for Democratic conventions. ’04 was a zero bounce year for Dems. But Sabato points out,

The size of the bounces can be deceptive in predicting the November winner and loser. Nixon’s big 1960 bounce led to a loss, while his nearly equal 1972 bounce resulted in a landslide. Similarly, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 bounce of 13 percent presaged his triumph, but his 12 percent gain in 1980 couldn’t stop a landslide defeat. Also, George Bush’s miniscule 2004 bounce of 2 percent didn’t prevent his victory.
Bounces can fade quickly. Historically, this has been truer on the Democratic side. Jimmy Carter slid from 63 percent after his convention to 51 percent on Election Day 1976, Michael Dukakis from 54 percent to 46 percent in 1988; and Bill Clinton from 59 percent to 43 percent in 1992.

In other words, despite the abundant media coverage about the post-convention bounce, it won’t mean much — “meaningless in a predictive sense,” as Sabato says.


Whipping Up Unity

It’s not unusual for presidential candidates to have elaborate “whip” operations at conventions, to ensure communications and coordination among widely scattered delegations.
But Hillary Clinton’s convention team is “whipping” its delegates for an unusual purpose: to repress any anti-Obama signs or gestures.
Headed by longtime Clinton operative Craig Smith, the 40-member whip team will work closely with Obama campaign officials to “help foster the image of a unified front during a roll-call process Clinton herself has described as an emotional ‘catharsis’ for her disappointed supporters.” As one Clinton staffer put it:

“If people get down there on the floor and want to start blowing kazoos and making a scene we want to make sure we’ve got people who stand in front of them with Obama signs,” said a person involved in the planning.

Apparently, the lure of convention floor passes helped ensure that plenty of people signed up for the Clinton whip team.


An Early Start on Nominating Process Reforms

Amidst this week’s veep-o-mania, and preparations for the Democratic National Convention, an item of potentially long-term significance slipped into the Washington Post today, in Dan Balz’s report that the Obama campaign will ask the convention to create a Democratic Change Commission to review the presidential nominating process.
According to Obama campaign chief David Plouffe, this commission (to be appointed by DNC Chair Howard Dean) would be instructed to propose ways to reduce the power of superdelegates; to come up with a primary/cacusus calendar that reduces “front-loading” and eliminates Super Tuesday-style megaprimaries; and to set conditions on the power of state parties to hold caucuses rather than primaries.
The first item on this agenda, of course, reflects the sudden rediscovery and potentially awesome power of superdelegates this year. The second and third involves longstanding demands of reformers who think the current state-driven nominating calendar is crazy and capricious, and too distorted by low-turnout caucuses.
Maybe I’m being Machivellian here, but I suspect Team Obama is interested in introducing these reforms on their merits, but is quietly establishing the means for accomplishing them in the guise of accomodations made to Hillary Clinton supporters to keep them quiet and happy in Denver. The forces supporting the current chaotic system (well-positioned state parties generally, and “gatekeepers” like Iowa and New Hampshire in particular) may well have their guards down at this particular moment. If Obama wins in November, he will be in an excellent position to ram through truly significant changes in the nominating process. And now he will have the vehicle for them.


Panic Time for Conservatives?

Speculation continues that John McCain is seriously considering Joe Lieberman and/or Tom Ridge for his running-mate, fueling panic and anger on the Right, particularly among anti-abortion activists.
The Politico has a lengthy story on the possibility of a “Lieberman surprise,” including assessment of possible conservative “blowback,” up to and including a floor challenge to his nomination. The internal campaign argument for risking conservative fury and going with Lieberman is said to be the usefulness of a theoretically “bipartisan” ticket in reinforcing McCain’s “putting country first” message. Ross Douthat (who generally thinks the “McLieberman” ticket’s a terrible idea) suggests that Lieberman should actually be less offensive to right-to-lifers than Ridge, since he’s not a plausible 2012 or 2016 candidate.
All of the talk about Lieberman, of course, could be a head-fake designed to make conservatives more amenable to a Ridge choice, or to stimulate the Right to paroxyms of joy if the Veep is a conventional conservative like Pawlenty.
One thing is for sure: if the McCain-Lieberman ticket somehow does materialize, the happiest camper in the world will be Lieberman Communications Director Marshall Wittmann, the longtime McCain disciple who’s wandered all over the political spectrum over the course of his career, landing with Lieberman as sort of a port of last resort.


Should Caroline ‘Pull A Cheney’?

A little addition to the veepstakes hysteria Ed referenced yesterday: I was roundly ridiculed for floating an idea in conversation with friends a few months ago, probably with good reason. Now, Michael Moore is putting it out there via email and his website post “Caroline: Pull a Cheney! An Open Letter to Caroline Kennedy (head of the Obama VP search team) from Michael Moore.
Yes, I know. An Obama-Kennedy ticket would be doubling down on the perception that the Dem ticket’s experience is limited. But jeez, the idea is appealing on a number of levels. As Moore puts it in a couple of nut graphs:

What Obama needs is a vice presidential candidate who is NOT a professional politician, but someone who is well-known and beloved by people across the political spectrum; someone who, like Obama, spoke out against the war; someone who has a good and generous heart, who will be cheered by the rest of the world; someone whom we’ve known and loved and admired all our lives and who has dedicated her life to public service and to the greater good for all….That person, Caroline, is you.
…And Barack, if you’re reading this, you probably know that she is far too humble and decent to nominate herself. So step up and surprise us again. Step up and be different than every politician we have witnessed in our lifetime. Keep the passion burning amongst the young people and others who have been energized by your unexpected, unpredicted, against-all-odds candidacy that has ignited and inspired a nation. Do it for all those reasons. Make Caroline Kennedy your VP. “Obama-Kennedy.” Wow, does that sound so cool.

Kennedy’s gender is a plus, although you couldn’t blame feminists for complaining that more experienced women were passed over. Yet, Kennedy, more than anyone in her family, evokes the passionate spirit of hope her father, JFK and uncle RFK embodied so elegantly. She has natural dignity and real class (in the positive sense of the term), elements in short supply in American politics. She is extremely bright, intensely patriotic and deeply concerned about civil liberties. Her speech to the 2000 Democratic convention was a smash, as much because of her ability to personify the renewal of lost hope as the content of her speech. Talk about mediagenic. Romney or Pawlenty would look like moral midgets compared to her, and it would be fun to watch exasperated Republicans try to attack her without looking creepy.
When called to serve, the Kennedys have always answered. But no, it ain’t gonna happen, since Ms. Kennedy seems too level-headed to do crazy, even if Obama’s team went for it. It’s too late for a trial balloon to do any good, with Obama’s decision expected any hour now. Yet Moore’s proposal resonates because Kennedy symbolizes a time when all Americans could be rightly proud of their President, however idealilzed were our perceptions back then. She bears that precious memory for the nation with both humility and poise.
It’s not too late, however, to put Ms. Kennedy’s impressive skill set to good use. If Obama decided to embrace the interesting idea put forward by Paul Waldman, to name his cabinet and some key appointees in advance of the election, or even if he does it later in keeping with tradition, Caroline Kennedy would make an excellent U.N Ambassador. Having her represent us at the United Nations would signal that America is determined to earn the respect and admiration of the world, not through militarism and intimidation, but by providing moral leadership and a higher level of humanitarian concern.
It’s often said that America lost some of its spirit when JFK was assassinated, and the sense of loss deepened with the assassinations of MLK and RFK. Obama’s pending nomination has helped reclaim some of that spirit. A leadership role like that of U. N. Ambassador for Ms. Kennedy would be yet another step forward — and it would also be smart politics.


Veepstakes Hysteria, and the Silver Lining

Well, here we are a few days at most before Barack Obama’s running-mate announcement, and exactly ten days before McCain’s, and nobody much knows what’s going to happen.
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire provides an assortment of confident predictions that Obama will choose Kaine, Biden, Reed or Sebelius. Several somebodies are obviously wrong.
And on the Republican side, conservatives went into crisis mode today over reports that the McCain campaign was sounding out GOP officials around the country about the potential repurcussions of a pro-choice Veep (presumably Ridge or Lieberman). Meanwhile, the news that McCain was going to announce his decision in Dayton, Ohio, on August 29, led to speculation that the Bush White House’s favorite, Ohioan Rob Portman, was the choice. But Portman indicated less than a month ago that he hadn’t been vetted.
We’ll all know soon enough, but those who are bored or annoyed with the endless veep speculation should understand that it’s provided a public vetting of potential heartbeat-from-the-presidency prospects to complement the private vetting. And that’s a good thing.
Until quite recently, this potentially momentous decision was often made casually, and with little or no vetting. Nixon picked Spiro Agnew during the 1968 Republican Convention, mainly because he was one of only two “moderate” candidates not vetoed by Strom Thurmond, whose championship of Nixon in the South headed off a lethal delegate stampede to Ronald Reagan. Nobody knew enough about Agnew to figure out that he was taking sacks of cash from highway contractors, and would continue to do so until the revelation of his corruption forced him to resign. The politically disastrous choice of Tom Eagleton by George McGovern in 1972 was a panicky last-minute decision made after more desirable running-mates had turned down the position, and without the benefit of the minimal vetting that might have exposed his serial drunk-driving charges, if not his electro-shock therapy sessions. (As Hunter Thompson later said: “There were any number of political reporters who could have told them that Tom Eagleton was a man who didn’t mind taking thirteen or fourteen tall drinks now and then.”). Another highly significant Veep choice, according to most accounts, was a sheer accident: the Kennedys offered the vice-presidential nomination to Lyndon Johnson in 1960 because they assumed LBJ would turn it down.
Hasty and fortuitous running-mate decisions are now a thing of the past. Given the political and meta-political implications of an unwise choice (aside from the more recent examples, cf. John Tyler and Andrew Johnson in the 18th century), enduring endless Veep speculation is a small price to pay for that.


McCain Just Can’t Help Himself

The fascinating thing about New York Times columnist David Brooks is his ability to faithfully serve the interests of the Republican Party while maintaining a stance of ironic detachment and independence. His column today is a small masterpiece of the genre. Entitled “The Education of McCain,” it is devoted to the story-line that the GOP candidate is deep down the same unconventional and wholly admirable man he’s always been, but who has been forced by contemporary political realities to slavishly follow the party line and personally attack Barack Obama.
Touting McCain’s “long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship,” Brooks says there’s just no question that McCain’s current campaign rubs against his very nature:

In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity. He’s done it through self-mockery, by talking endlessly about his own embarrassing lapses and by keeping up a running patter on the absurdity all around. He’s done it by breaking frequently from his own party to cut serious deals with people like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s done it with his own frantic and freewheeling style, which was unpredictable, untamed and, at some level, unprofessional.

But alas, alackaday, McCain had to abandon the Straight-Talk Express because of “too many 25-year-old reporters and producers seizing on every odd comment to set off little blog scandals.” And he had to run a nasty, negative campaign because “McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama.”
Poor, poor John McCain, forced to behave like a regular politician, even though he’s not.
This story-line is of inestimable value to the McCain campaign, which is engaged in a high-stakes gamble that its candidate can talk out of both sides of his mouth to conservatives, who must be convinced that McCain is if anything a more principled right-winger than Bush, and to swing voters, to whom he is being marketed as a reforming centrist with no loyalty to anyone other than his country. McCain has taken this game to a new level of duplicity in recent weeks. The man who relentlessly channeled the conservative message at Saddleback Church over the weekend is hard to reconcile with the subject of his current network ad, which describes him as the “original maverick” always ready to reach across party lines to battle drug and tobacco companies and Big Oil. (This last assertion must have spawned some head-scratching or cynical belly-laughs among the oil executives who have been showering McCain with campaign contributions after his flip-flop on offshore oil drilling.)
Brooks would have us believe that all the glaring contradictions and vicious tactics characterizing the McCain campaign are just the unfortunate byproduct of our benighted political system–which, presumably, the Real McCain will deal with in office, when he’s not defeating evil somewhere overseas.
One way or another, Democrats need to take on the “Original Maverick” story-line and expose it as a deceptive and hypocritical stunt.


Nunn on the Other Georgia

As Barack Obama prepares to announce his running-mate (insisting, characteristically, on a “no-leaks” policy until the decision is revealed to supporters via text-message, probably tomorrow), one name has dropped out of contention: former Sen. Sam Nunn of GA. Indeed, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway yesterday, Nunn said the Obama campaign had not vetted his finances, which means he’s definitely not on the final short-list.
But in that same interview, Nunn shared some thoughts on the Georgia-Russia crisis that Obama and others should listen to carefully. In the bipartisan rush to identify with beleagured Georgia, support for expanding NATO to include Georgia and other eastern European nations has become reflexive. That’s a bad idea, Nunn suggests:

[C]learly the United States need to pause, look and listen before we rush into making Georgia and Ukraine part of NATO. If we’re going to do that, we have to understand that this is a military commitment. And we have to back it up militarily.
Right now, we’re not doing well in Afghanistan. Our NATO allies seem to be reluctant to put in more forces. NATO’s got a lot of credibility at stake in Afghanistan. And the defense spending by most of our European allies is way down.
And if you look at the map, you can see pretty quickly that defending Georgia will require enormous expenditures unless we’re going to go back to a Berlin sort of situation, where we threaten to use nuclear weapons in response to conventional progression by the Soviet Union….
A wounded bear is going to defend itself. I think Russia’s made a profound mistake, and they’ve got to correct it. [But] we have a real reason to avoid compounding the problem.

With John McCain running around the country demanding immediate NATO expansion in combination with promises to “defeat evil” wherever it arises, consequences be damned, it’s good to know that someone with Nunn’s credibility is willing to talk about those consequences. It was the failure to do so that led to the invasion of Iraq, which McCain continues to champion as a model for U.S. foreign policy in the future.


Crunch Time for Southern Electoral Votes

Bob Moser makes the case about as good as it can be made, so his pre-convention Salon post “How Democrats can take back the South,” along with Thomas Schaller’s response, is a must-read for Dems focused on electoral vote strategy. The debate also has implications for the veepstakes in both major parties.
Moser’s Salon piece is based on his new book, “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority,” which has gotten a “highly recommended” review from Publisher’s Weekly. A couple of nut graphs on southern demographic shifts from his Salon post provide a taste:

Thanks to a historic “re-migration” of millions of African Americans back South, combined with the country’s fastest growing Hispanic population, the political potency of Southern whites has started to shrivel. From 1990 to 2005, the white population percentage dropped in every Southern state — and in many places, the change portended revolutionary political shifts. The state of Texas is now officially “majority minority,” with large chunks of the South following suit. Georgia went from more than 70 percent white to less than 60 percent just between 1990 and 2005. Nashville, of all places, has been dubbed America’s “new Ellis Island” due to its large influx of not only Hispanics, but Kurds and Somalians (among others). These seismic demographic shifts, which the Census Bureau expects to accelerate over the next few decades, mean — among a world of other things — that the Democrats’ “threshold” of white votes needed to win Southern states (in Mississippi, for instance, it’s 31 percent with average black turnout) will keep falling for the foreseeable future.
The Southern swing voters of the future — and of 2008, at least in the closely competitive states of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida — bear scant resemblance to the Bigfoot of yore. That’s not simply because fewer of them are Caucasian: It’s also because white Southerners’ political attitudes are undergoing a profound generational shift. The backlash whites, their anti-liberal politics forged in the ’60s and whipped to a froth by the GOP’s wedge issues in almost every election since, are losing members by natural attrition every day. (Rev. Falwell and Jesse Helms, RIP.) Younger Southerners — and the millions of college-educated Yankees who’ve migrated south for bigger houses and better jobs in recent decades — hold more moderate views on cultural and “moral” issues than their elders did. They support withdrawal from Iraq and strong environmental policies. And on economic issues, they lean populist: Like black Southerners, most whites in Dixie now support government action to reduce income inequities; increased regulation of business; more spending on education, Social Security and healthcare; and higher taxes to help the poor.

Moser is more concerned with long-range strategy here than how the Dems will do in southern states on November 4. Schaller’s response focuses more on Moser’s embrace of “economic populism” as a wedge that can help Dems in the south. Schaller argues,

…Economic populism tends to be more useful politically in the post-globalization Rust Belt, or the new growth economies of the Far West, than in the South. Though the South is the nation’s poorest region and millions of Southerners of all races are hurting financially, the conclusion reached by many demographic analysts, myself included, is that the deep-seated social conservatism and widespread resistance to race-blind redistribution in the South serve as powerful bulwarks against the curative effects of economic populism.
…Unfortunately, the prescriptions Moser offers in “Blue Dixie” are closer to overstated hopes, often based on anecdotal evidence contradicted by broader patterns or wholesale data. If economic populism were an untapped electoral reservoir in the South, Southern state budgets would not be among the lowest per capita in the country, unions would not be weaker than in any other region, and working-class white Southerners would already be joined at the hip with working-class black Southerners as the backbone of the most Democratic region in America. But these are not Southern political realities, and wishing them so will not make them so.

Schaller concedes that the Dems have a shot at winning Virginia and elsewhere he has included Florida as a possibility. But he sees Dem resources poured into winning the electoral votes of other southern states as a waste. On balance, he may be right for this cycle, although Georgia is a possibility if Obama picks Nunn and Bob Barr runs strong.
I think he overstates his case, however, in arguing that the 2006 elections indicate Dems have limited prospects for winning congressional, state and local elections in the south. He argues that “85 percent of all new-seat gains in Senate, House, gubernatorial and state legislative races in 2006 came outside the 11 states of the former Confederacy.” Those 11 southern states are 22 percent of the states. If they account for 15 percent of new gains, that’s a little short, but hardly hopeless. And even if Obama loses all the southern states electoral votes, the increased African American registration should help Dem congressional, state and local candidates. Further, as Ed Kilgore noted of the ’06 elections,

In a quirk of the electoral calendar, only five Senate seats were up in the South (accepting Schaller’s definition of “the South” as the 11 states of the old Confederacy), four held by Republicans. Democrats won two, for a net gain of one senator, which is a perfectly proportional contribution to the conquest of the Senate. Similarly, there were six gubernatorial contests in the South, five in seats held by Republicans. Democrats won two for a net gain of one, again a proportional contribution to the national results. (Democrats also won the single Southern governor’s races held in 2004 and in 2005, which means they now control five of the 11 executive offices.)

At present, Democrats hold majorities of both houses of the state legislatures in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina and West Virginia (and one House in TN and KY), as well as the governorships of Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. Dems hold two U.S. Senate seats in both Arkansas and West Virginia, and one each in Virginia, Florida and Louisiana.
Schaller’s position on southern electoral votes gets some support from the latest poll by The Charlotte Observer/NewsChannel 36, which indicates that 43 percent of North Carolinians believe McCain would be a better president, compared to 38 percent for Obama. McCain’s 5 percent advantage increased when respondents were all registered voters. As Taylor Batten concludes in his Charlotte Observer report on the poll,

By most estimates, John Kerry won no more than a third of the white vote in North Carolina in 2004, according to exit polls. If Obama were to win 30 percent of the white vote and 95 percent of the black vote in North Carolina, blacks would have to make up about 31 percent of the electorate for him to win. They represent less than 21 percent of all registered voters.

Still, Dems are not giving up NC, as Katharine Q. Seelye reports in her New York Times update on Obama’s NC campaign:

Mr. Obama has spent more than $1.9 million on television commercials here since mid-June. He has opened 16 offices in the state since early July…His blueprint calls for deploying 625 teams, of four to six volunteers each, to blanket the state’s 2,762 electoral precincts. So far, more than half the teams are in place, each with captains who are committed to contributing at least 10 hours a week. Almost 6,000 volunteers are actively engaged to some degree…Obama headquarters in Chicago would not confirm the number of paid staff members it had in the various states, but the number in North Carolina is believed to be close to the estimated 150 it has deployed in another battleground state, Missouri, where Mr. McCain is two points ahead.

Regarding NC voter participation demographics, Seelye adds,

In 2000, blacks made up 17.3 percent of the vote, and in 2004 they made up 18.6 percent, according to the state elections board. To win this year, by Mr. Jensen’s calculations, Mr. Obama needs blacks to make up 23 percent of the electorate while also winning at least 35 percent of the white vote. Others say he may need more.
So far, the rate of black registration (up 9.8 percent over 2004) is outpacing white registration (up 4.6 percent), but at the current rate blacks would make up only 20 percent of the electorate.

And, although both Gore and Kerry received no electoral votes in the 11 southern states, Dick Polman notes in the Athens Banner-Herald,

…No Democrat ever has won the presidency without capturing some Southern states. This year, the Old Confederacy holds 153 electoral votes. Nationwide, there are 538 electoral votes on the table. Do the math. If Obama cedes Dixie, he has to win 72 percent of the electoral votes everywhere else. And that’s one reason Howard Dean, the party chairman, has long been touting the importance of a “50-state strategy” to ensure a broader playing field.

Meanwhile the Obama campaign continues to invest heavily in VA, NC, GA and FL at the expense of close campaigns in other swing states. We can be sure only that Obama’s southern strategy is a major gamble that will go down as a colossal blunder or a stroke of genius.