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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: May 2009

The tea party protesters were not all traditional conservatives. Many combined a small business viewpoint and “populist” distrust of large institutions — including the Republican Party. They are not “in the bag” for the GOP. By Andrew Levison

Now that the “spin war” over the size and authenticity of the “tea parties” is over, Democrats should look at the protests more carefully and consider how best to respond.
To begin, the most important fact to note is that there were actually several quite distinct agendas being pursued during the events.
Read the entire memo here.


An Open Letter From Stan Greenberg to Ed Gillespie, head of Resurgent Republic

Note: This item was originally published on May 4, 2009
To: Ed Gillespie Founder, Resurgent Republic
From: Stan Greenberg Greenberg Quinlan Rosner
RE: RESURGENT REPUBLIC
Dear Ed,
Congratulations on forming Resurgent Republic with the goal of replicating “on the right the success Democracy Corps has enjoyed on the left.” Like Democracy Corps, you are promising to become a resource for groups and leaders, enhanced by the public release of credible surveys and focus groups and, indeed, your first survey has been widely discussed and already used by Republican leaders. Well done.
You would probably be surprised if I didn’t have some reactions and advice to offer, as you explicitly state, you are “modeled on Democracy Corps.” Given your goal, I am perplexed that your first poll would be so outside the mainstream on partisanship. Your poll gives the Democrats just a 2-point party identification advantage in the country, but other public polls in this period fell between +7 and +16 points – giving the Democrats an average advantage of 11 points. Virtually all your issue debates in the survey would have tilted quite differently had the poll been 9 points more Democratic.
One thing Democracy Corps has tried to do is be very “conservative” – watching very closely to make sure all our choices in survey design are well grounded or tilted against the Democrats, including the choice of “likely voters” that normally favors the Republicans. You have probably noticed that our job approval ratings for George Bush were almost always higher than the average of polls, just as our job approval ratings for Barack Obama are now somewhat lower.
If the Resurgent Republic poll is to be an outlier on partisanship, then I urge you to explain what about your methodology produces it – or simply to note the difference in your public release.
The problem of partisanship pales before the problem of self-deluding bias in question wording that might well contribute to Republicans digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.
Your most important finding was the strong opposition to Barack Obama’s budget when you describe it for voters. Ed, from your platform on Meet the Press, you told Republican leaders they can confidently oppose this budget and expect independents to side with them.
Your Republican leaders would have been well served had you asked first whether voters favor or oppose the budget, without describing it – as Democracy Corps does routinely. That would have shown a majority or large plurality in favor of the budget, as in all other polls. Instead, your survey begins with this stunningly biased description: “President Obama has proposed a budget for next year that would spend three point six trillion dollars and have a deficit of one point four trillion dollars.” That would be okay if you think that is all voters will learn from the media and Democrats about the budget. I suspect they are already hearing about inherited deficits from Bush, the funding for the jobs recovery plan, health care reform, education and energy independence, and about deficits cut in half – all aspects of the budget. Don’t you think the leaders and groups you are advising deserve to know how this might really play out?
It is a shame because you didn’t need to construct this biased exercise to show that voters are concerned about spending and deficits and that is indeed the strongest critique Republicans can offer. In our own recent polls, we have flagged this concern for progressives and urged them to continue to underscore accountability, long-term deficit reduction, and middle class tax cuts.
For years, James Carville and I pushed Democrats and liberal groups to examine inherited positions in new times, but you are at risk of doing the opposite – urging Republicans to stay the course on key arguments with self-deluding results. In some cases, you prove competitive or you win the argument by presenting the Democratic argument as flat but the Republican, full of emotive terms. In Democracy Corps, we always try to use the language actually used by our opponents.
Nothing is more self-defeating than attributing to the Democratic argument the language and themes Republicans use to attack Democrats rather than the language Democrats use themselves. In effect, your survey has you winning an argument with yourself. Indeed, that is where you start your analysis of the first poll – telling readers in bold and underlined type that you are winning the big ideological debate by two-to-one, which “verifies America remains a center-right country.” In this seminal debate, one side says:
Government policies should promote opportunity by fostering job growth, encouraging entrepreneurs, and allowing people to keep more of what they earn.
The other, pathetically out-of-touch side says:
Government policies should promote fairness by narrowing the gap between rich and poor, spreading the wealth, and making sure that economic outcomes are more equal.
With that demand for equality rejected two-to-one in the survey, Resurgent Republic can tell conservatives to be confident: you are on the winning side of this historic argument about government and the economy.
The problem is that this is the language Republicans use to characterize the Democratic argument, not what Democrats use themselves. Yes, it is true that candidate Obama made the off-hand comment on “spreading the wealth” in an exchange with “Joe the Plumber.” The Republicans tried to use that in the last two and a half weeks of the campaign and Obama’s lead on handling taxes and the economy went up steadily, ending with a double-digit lead on both.
While campaigns may succeed on “gotcha,” you will not win a big argument if you do not respect the other side’s argument and you do not learn from experience. We tested in a different context this philosophic choice, using Obama’s words and ideas – “government policies should rebalance the tax code so the middle class pays less and the wealthiest pay their fair share.” In our work, it is the strongest argument for the budget. (See Democracy Corps national survey of 1,000 2008 voters (830 likely 2010 voters) conducted March 4-8, 2009, Democracy Corps national survey of 1,000 2008 voters (863 likely 2010 voters) conducted March 25-29, 2009 and Democracy Corps survey of 1,500 likely 2010 voters in the congressional battleground conducted April 16-21, 2009.)
The section on energy and cap-and-trade is a parody of the real debate. The implication is that Democrats believe climate change is so serious that it must be addressed, regardless of cost to the economy, with higher taxes. Unmentioned on the Democratic side of the debate is the conviction that investment in energy independence creates new jobs and a new economy and energy costs have to be offset with middle class tax cuts. Failing to construct real debate must leave Republicans puzzled about why the Democrats’ advantage on handling the energy issue has risen to nearly 30 points among likely voters. (See Democracy Corps national survey of 1,000 2008 voters (830 likely 2010 voters) conducted March 4-8, 2009.)
I recognize that in focusing on economic, not cultural issues, Resurgent Republic is making a statement about a new direction for the party and its coalition. But it does not help a party renew itself with survey results so removed from the real debates taking place around it.
I do wish you luck with Resurgent Republic. I’m fully aware that our first public survey a decade ago might well have been critiqued on similar issues and that getting it right under these pressures requires constant vigilance. I look forward to the debate.
All the best,
Stan


Reality Check for Republican “Reformers”

Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on May 5, 2009
It is a good thing that some Republicans, though hardly all, have come to the conclusion that their party’s problems are real, and that simply shrieking at Barack Obama and congressional Democrats while policing each other for any signs of heterodoxy isn’t a very effective strategy for making an electoral comeback.
Yes, many conservatives aren’t there yet and may never arrive, as they frantically look around, via slanted poll questions and vast exaggerations of the importance of “tea parties” that the polls somehow don’t pick up, for evidence that they can’t trust their lyin’ eyes about the trouble they are in. Yes, there’s too much quick-fix talks about social networking and grassroots organization that belie an inability to reconsider conservative ideology. Yes, far too many Republicans seem to believe that they can instantly wash their hands of the legacy of George W. Bush, who was somehow imposed on the party by “moderates” or space aliens (he was in fact the chosen and quasi-universal candidate of the conservative movement in 2000, and was nominated for near-divinity by conservatives in 2004). Some even seem to think that Arlen Specter has been the problem all along, and still others seem to have lost their minds and are yammering about secession and nullification like hormone-addled teenagers.
Nonetheless the “official” GOP has launched a National Council For a New America that at least pays lip service to the recognition that Republicans need “innovative solutions” to the challenges that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are working on, instead of simply denying them.
But I have a bit of advice for these Republican “reformers:” you need to take a fresh look at how you understand and describe what Obama and the Democrats are doing before you can offer credible alternatives.
If you look at the NCNA press release, and its vaporous statement of purpose, you will see a lot of nice rhetoric about using non-big-government mechanisms to solve big national problems. What you won’t find is any acknowledgement that Obama has already occupied much of that high ground.
For all the Republican hysteria about Obama trying to usher in “socialized medicine” or “government-run health care,” the fact remains that most Americans under Obama’s plan would continue to buy health insurance from private firms, and would continue to be treated by private-sector providers. Yes, there may or may not be a “public plan” in the competitive mix, but if that’s “socialism,” then perhaps Republicans want to call for the privatization of Medicare.
The same is true of Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal for reducing carbon emissions: it is precisely not a government regulatory effort to dictate to industry how it operates its business; it’s an effort to let markets determine innovative ways to adjust to an energy economy where carbon is priced according to its true costs. And the same is true of education policy, where Obama and most Democrats champion public school choice and competition. Republicans almost never acknowledge that. And then there’s that instrument called the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, which was one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite policy innovations, and a centerpiece of Republican efforts to find an alternative to welfare and support productive work. It’s now the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s tax proposals, and now Republicans are attacking it as “welfare.”
You can get away with some of this sloppy rhetoric and mischaracterization that Republicans continue to embrace, but after a while, it begins to affect your credibility.
And here’s the grand irony: if Republicans keep this up and offer “alternatives” to some fantasy-vision of the socialist extremist Obama, instead of the actual president, the public will indeed have a tendency to dismiss Republicans as offering “Obama Lite,” the terrible fate-worse-than-death that leads some conservatives to oppose the very idea of “alternatives.”
The point here is that you can’t graft an effective policy agenda onto a delusional understanding of public opinion and the opposition. That’s the lesson learned by Democratic reformers of the 1980s and 1990s who argued against a progressive “politics of evasion” that failed to take a realistic look at why Democrats were losing elections.


What is “right-wing extremism?”

Note: this item by James Vega was first published on April 30, 2009
The recent much-discussed report on “Rightwing Extremism” by the Department of Homeland Security has raised a very important issue of definition: What precisely is right-wing “political extremism” and how does it differ from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism”?
For most Americans, the most critical — and in fact the defining — characteristic of “political extremism” – whether left or right – is the approval of violence as a means to achieve political goals. Opinions on issues, no matter how “extreme” or irrational they may be do not by themselves necessarily make a person a dangerous “extremist.” Whether opinions are crackpot (e.g. abolish all paper money) or repulsive (e.g. non-whites should be treated as sub-humans), extreme political opinions are not in and of themselves incitements to or justifications for violence.
But there is actually one very clear and unambiguous way to define a genuinely “extremist” political ideology — it is any ideology that justifies or incites violence.
Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.
In recent decades we have unfortunately become accustomed to political opponents being defined as “enemies” rather than fellow Americans, but the notion was profoundly shocking when Richard Nixon first used the term in his famous “enemies list.” It marked a tremendous change from generally collegial attitudes of Senators and members of Congress, where a certain basic level of civility was almost always maintained, even among the most bitter political opponents. Unlike many other countries, until the Nixon era American politicians generally saw “politics” as the job of achieving rational compromises among democratically elected representatives and not as the task of crushing, purging or liquidating political enemies, as was often the case in totalitarian countries.
Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter temporarily derailed the trend toward defining politics as warfare, but the notion got a powerful “second wind” in the 1980’s – which came from two main sources.
The first was the culture and doctrines of counter-insurgency and covert operations that blossomed in the Reagan era. In combating insurgent movements, U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine carefully studied Leninist organizations and frequently imitated their strategy and tactics in order to dismantle them. The basic philosophy was frequently to “fight fire with fire” using any available tactics, including even blatantly undemocratic and morally indefensible ones.
During the Reagan years, there was a massive expansion of extremely secret counter-insurgency programs – primarily in Central America and Afghanistan – that were conducted outside the formal structure of traditional civilian-military control. Among the people involved in these programs, an ethos of loyalty developed to the secret military/intelligence hierarchy that was conducting these operations rather than to the formal elected government.
The hero and symbol of this trend was Oliver North. By showing up in his military uniform at congressional hearings called to investigate his role in the illegal funding of counterinsurgencies in Central America and Afghanistan (although he was actually a political appointee of the Reagan white house at the time and not on active military duty) North dramatically embodied the view that his primary loyalty was to the covert military/intelligence command running the secret operations around the world and not to the majority of Congress that had specifically prohibited the actions he had coordinated. He became a symbol of a perspective that viewed the majority of Congress (that had voted against funding the Nicaraguan “contras”) as an internal “enemy” just as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were an external enemy.
By the early 1990’s this general point of view had become deeply entrenched among many right-wing conservatives. As conservative talk radio shows grew in popularity, many hosts like Rush Limbaugh repeated and refined this militarized and combative version of conservative ideology.
These views became even more extreme after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the conservative view, Liberals quickly replaced communism as the principal “enemies” of America. Conservative leader Grover Norquist expressed the view quite clearly when talking to a former college classmate. He said: “For 40 years we fought a two-front war against the Soviet Union and statism in the U.S. Now we can turn all our time and energy into crushing you. With the Soviet Union it was just business. With you, it’s personal.”


Is Gun Control Still “Third Rail” for Dems?

Dorothy Samuels challenges Democrats to rethink a destructive misconception in her New York Times opinion piece, “The Deadly Myth of Gun Control in Electoral Politics.” Samuels argues, in essence, that an election 15 years ago has all but paralyzed today’s Democrats from addressing one of the most important public safety issues.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama tossed cold water a few weeks back on Attorney General Eric Holder’s well-founded enthusiasm for reviving the assault weapons ban that Congress and the Bush White House let expire in 2004. I was struck by a common thread in the responses I heard:Enactment of the original 1994 assault weapons ban cost Democrats control of Congress.
…The notion that gun control was responsible for the Democrats’ debacle 15 years ago was floated by Richard Gephardt, the former Democratic House leader, and other pols and commentators after the ’94 election. But it was Bill Clinton who gave it current credence. “The N.R.A. could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House speaker,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his 2004 autobiography, pumping up the gun lobby and, not incidentally, himself by attributing the body blow to his party to his principled leadership on guns.

Samuels argues that “other major factors in the Democrats’ 1994 loss, starting with perceived Democratic arrogance and corruption” had more to do with the Dems being routed in that year. She points out that Bill Nelson, a strong gun control advocate was elected to the Senate in FL, despite NRA support for his opponent. She also cites,

…voter unhappiness with Mr. Clinton’s budget, his health care fiasco, the Republican Party’s success in recruiting appealing candidates, and that ingenious Republican vehicle for nationalizing the elections known as the “Contract With America.” The contract, by the way, did not mention guns.

Samuels points out that Clinton did well enough in 1996, trumpeting “his role in enacting the assault weapons ban and the ’93 Brady law requiring background checks for gun buyers” and she notes also the prime time speaking slots for James and Sarah Brady at the Democratic Convention in that year She also cites “the stunning defeat four years later, in 2000, of prominent Republican senators running with strong N.R.A. backing” (John Ashcroft in MO, Spencer Abraham in MI, Slade Gorton in WA), noted in Dennis Henigan’s book, “Lethal Logic.” She concludes:

Today, there’s ample reassurance for the Democratic Congress and White House in the N.R.A.’s unsuccessful crusade against Barack Obama in 2008, and the poor showing of its favored House and Senate candidates against hopefuls running with backing from the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign. Yet, the gun lobby’s exaggerated ’94 triumph continues to haunt the nation’s capital, inflating the N.R.A.’s clout and Democratic cowardice on gun violence.

Samuels makes a pretty good case that a 15-year old myth has empowered the gun lobby beyond all reason. Democratic Leadership Council President Bruce Reed has argued in an interesting Slate article that the key to passing meaningful gun control reforms is to link it to crime control:

The political case for not running for cover on guns is equally straightforward. Unlike most politicians, voters are not ideological about crime. They don’t care what it takes, they just want it to go down. The Brady Bill and the clip ban passed because the most influential gun owners in America—police officers and sheriffs—were tired of being outgunned by drug lords, madmen, and thugs.
When Democrats ignore the gun issue, they think about the political bullet they’re dodging but not about the opportunity they’ll miss. In the 1980s, Republicans talked tough on crime and ran ads about Willie Horton but sat on their hands while the crime rate went up. When Bill Clinton promised to try everything to fight crime—with more police officers on the street, and fewer guns—police organizations dropped their support for the GOP and stood behind him instead.

I’m also wondering if the widespread use of the catch-all term “gun control” is a big part of the problem. The American public clearly supports specific measures like a ban on the sale of assault weapons, reasonable waiting periods before gun purchase etc. Polls taken as recently as April indicate that a healthy majority of respondents favor a ban on the sale of assault weapons and tougher restrictions on handgun sales. But the majority shrinks, when the term “stricter gun control laws” is used. Why use the adversary’s terminology in debates, and call it “gun control”? Dems should always challenge the use of such a broad term to obscure specific reforms, and call out the gun lobby for their distortions.
“Gun control” has often been called the “third rail” of American politics in recent years. Certainly, Samuels is right that a 15-year old myth should not be allowed to prevent life-saving reforms — and safer communities for all Americans.


Empty Threats Behind Court Fight

As we await the President’s announcement of a Supreme Court nominee, there’s already lots of anticipatory threats by conservatives absorbed with this sort of thing to make life hell for any red-state Democrats who vote with the President for some godless liberal activist, which of course means anyone Obama names. These threats are in turn the sum and substance of conservative claims that they could actually win a confirmation fight.
But as Terence Samuel points out today in The American Prospect,
the political landscape for the 2010 elections doesn’t offer up too many ripe targets for conservative threats:

Only two Senate Democrats — Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota — will seek re-election in 2010 in states lost by Obama, and both currently have solid re-elect numbers and plenty of money to suppress any serious challenges. Among the 16 Democratic Senate seats up next year, the issue may potentially cause trouble for only two — Harry Reid the majority leader from Nevada and, now, Arlen Specter, whose changeling tendencies can make enemies in surprising places. But both of those guys are people who know how to finesse and fight back.
With so few strategic options available to them, Republicans will have no choice but to make this Court fight as controversial as possible, simply as a way to remind people of their existence.

That sounds about right. The upcoming confirmation fight will be largely an intra-Republican affair aimed at keeping their own senators in line, and in demonstrating the GOP’s continuing fidelity to what has often been called a “marriage” with the Cultural Right, which treats Supreme Court nominations as vastly more important than mere trifles like economic policy.


Rush to the Right in Georgia

I don’t quite know what’s going on among Republicans in my home state of Georgia. First you had Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine conspicuously endorsing a crazy state senate resolution that asserts the right of states to nullify federal laws they don’t like (maybe Oxendine will officially change his name to John C. Calhoun Oxendine). Now Secretary of State Karen Handel has issued a fiery demand for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And these are the two supposed moderates in the GOP gubernatorial race next year.
Handel’s tirade (for the text, see the link above) is confusing, or perhaps reflects some confusion. She seems to be calling for a repeal of the entire Voting Rights Act, although her main ire is aimed at Section 5, which requires “preclearance” of election or districting changes in certain states, mainly in the South. She refers to the VRA as a “vestige of Reconstruction,” which is about a century off.
Most interesting, though, is Handel’s claim that the sole purpose of the VRA these days is to give Democrats an advantage in elections; it is, she says, “pure politics in its worst form.” That insight would have probably come as a surprise to the 192 Republican U.S. House members and 53 Republican Senators who voted for the VRA extension in 2006. The Senate vote, in fact, was unanimous, and boosters of this terrible partisan scam included both of Georgia’s Republican senators.
More relevant, probably, is the fact that as election administrator in Georgia, Handel’s only real avenue for appealing to hard-right conservatives is to tout her championship of the God-given right to rule of the perpetually persecuted white Republicans of the South, who are oppressed by Washington bureaucrats and elitist judges who want to let hordes of shiftless black people and illegal immigrants vote. She’s a big-time stalwart in the battle against the phantom of “voter fraud.” So why not raise the specter of a an African-American Democratic president manipulating the VRA to help his supporters help him? So what if that notorious big-spending liberal George W. Bush, whose sell-out moderate ways righteous Republicans are now struggling to exorcise, supported the VRA extension when he was president!
The bigger picture here is that Georgia Republican candidates are behaving as though the only election that matters is their primary, so there’s no downside to moving to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage. If that attitude persists, Democrats in Georgia will have an opportunity to pull a surprise next year.


Governors: 2010 Could Be Bad Year For Incumbents

In all the talk about the possibility of a good Republican year in 2010 once President Obama and the Democratic Congress start being held accountable for a sluggish economy, it’s often forgotten that there are 50 different incumbents who could be held accountable for the horrid fiscal situation the recession has helped produce in the states.
Nate Silver has taken a comprehensive look at approval rating trends for 14 governors whose popularity has been measured by Survey USA. Only three (Tim Kaine of VA, Jay Nixon of MO, and Bob Riley of AL) currently have approval ratings of 50% or higher. Of the twelve for whom data is available from a year ago, eleven, unsurprisingly, have lower approval ratings now (the exception is Steve Beshear of KY). Sarah Palin isn’t in this batch of surveys, but as Ed Kilgore noted yesterday, her approval ratings have crashed as well.
Of the 36 governorships that will be up in 2010 (19 held by Democrats, and 17 by Republicans), 16 involve term-limited or retiring incumbents (8 for each party), which could mitigate the anti-incumbency factor in some of these states. But in assessing the impact of voters angry at the state of things, remember that they won’t just be voting on the status quo in Washington, but a lot closer to home.


Who Will Cover State and Local Governments?

As some of you may know, Sen. John Kerry held a hearing yesterday about the future of newspapers, and it became something of a debate between traditional print journalists and online news aggregators (Arianne Huffington being there as the big symbol of the latter).
By all accounts, Kerry tried to hold a fair hearing, even though he was clearly motivated by the continuing near-death experiences of his hometown paper, the Boston Globe.
But probably the most interesting moment occurred when David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who is credited as being the creator of HBO’s show “The Wire,” sardonically observed:

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.

Simon’s quip reflects the oft-repeated suggestion that online journalism can’t possibly replicate the essential role played by newspapers in covering and policing state and local governments.
This argument was best expressed in a wonderfully-lucid article by Paul Starr that appeared in The New Republic in March. In Starr’s account, robust coverage of state and local politics and government by major newspapers was a luxury made possible by their monopoly positions and huge profits:

Insofar as newspapers have upheld a public-service vision, they have been engaged in cross-subsidy, using their profitable lines of business, such as the classifieds, to pay for news coverage that probably would have been hard to justify on a narrower view of return on investment. Especially in recent decades, when newspapers were cash cows, their owners could afford to pursue public-service journalism, and some of them did (others just milked their papers for all they were worth).

As profits have declined, so has coverage of state and local governments, and so far, says Starr, the internet has not supplied a substitute in the way that is has for other areas of reduced investment, like national and international news. Thus, the argument goes, we may be in for an era of increased corruption as governors, legislators, mayors and county commissioners evade journalistic scrutiny.
That all makes good sense, but the problem with this “watchdog” idea about traditional big-city regional papers is that many of the dogs have long been asleep. As Starr himself notes, some newspaper barons felt a civic obligation to cover state and local affairs, while others didn’t. Moreover, the corporate media chains that have bought up so many of the regional papers have rarely made good state and local coverage a priority, even as they inculcated a footloose attitude among their best reporters who moved “up the chain.” I’d have to say that in my home town of Atlanta, there have been long stretches of time over the last few decades, and long before the advent of online journalism, when coverage of state and local government by that city’s monopoly newspaper was so bad that it was arguably worse than nothing. Indeed, some regional papers have, ironically, improved their state-local coverage, or at least the quantity of it, in online editions because of their greater flexibility of the format.
None of these ruminations are intended to deny the genuine dilemma of how to finance journalism in the internet age beyond a handful of national newspapers. There may well be, as Starr implies, a built-in demand-side problem in that nobody’s willing to pay what state and local coverage actually costs. It’s a shame we can’t replicate the apparently successful business model of Politico, wherein a vast online readership is subsidized by crazy ads rates charged for access to a tiny but extremely influential print edition, but that’s a unique product of that unique city, Washington, DC.
But in looking clearly at the difficult future for journalism, we shouldn’t nourish too many myths about newspapers, or at least those that have never done a competent job of covering state and local matters. For one thing, the crisis in regional papers hasn’t necessarily afflicted the small suburban newspapers that hit millions of driveways every week, and that often provide strong local government coverage.
And as Matt Compton pointed out in a post here in March, the nonprofit model of financing online journalism is already showing some promise, as in the Center for Independent Media, which is supporting not only the up-and-coming Washington Independent, but online sites in five states. And there are all sorts of freelance folk around the country playing the state-and-local watchdog role, albeit on a shoestring and sometimes without respecting canons of High Journalism. I will assert that online journalists and bloggers (including the AJC’s excellent Jim Galloway) are probably providing better coverage of Georgia politics and government than anything I recall reading in the salad days of the Atlanta papers’ monopoly print edition.
So there’s certainly enough hope out there, and in many cities, enough of a longstanding vacuum, to avoid the conclusion that state and local politicians are going to get any more of a free ride from journalists than they’ve ever had.


Palin Is No Dan Quayle

Right after expressing contempt towards Kellyanne Conway’s pity party for poor, persecuted Sarah Palin, I ran across an article by the Boston Globe‘s Joan Vennochi that comes at the supposed victimization of the Alaska governor from a different angle. Palin’s getting attention, she suggests, because everybody loves to make fun of her, even though they know she has no national political future:

The Alaska governor is everyone’s favorite foil, from the left-wing Huffington Post to the ever-posturing Mitt Romney. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee who cynically chose her as his running mate, now snubs her with relish.
They all act like she has a real chance to win the White House, when they all know the truth. When it comes to be taken seriously by the general electorate as a potential president, it’s as over for her as it was for Dan Quayle.
Quayle was doomed even after he served four years as vice president. He was the proverbial heartbeat away from the first President Bush, but could never overcome the perception that he lacked gravitas.
Palin only ran for vice president; she never made it from Wasilla to Washington. And her political problem is bigger than Quayle’s, because it extends to her family.

I realize that early critics of Palin’s gaffes often made the facile Quayle comparison. But aside from the obvious vast differences in background and bearing (whether you consider Palin’s “class background” a handicap, or, as I do, an asset, it’s nothing like that of the classic Son of Privilege from Indiana), Palin has a real and abiding political base, and Quayle never did. As Vennochi herself acknowledges after treating Quayle as a once-hot political commodity comparable to Palin, the Alaskan remains the darling of the Cultural Right, and had the lead in an early sounding of Republican sentiment about the 2012 presidential nomination.
Quayle had a brief moment of conservative approbation after his famous “Murphy Brown” remarks criticizing single motherhood, but when he ran for president in 2000, he was toast from the very beginning, finishing eighth–eighth!–in the quadrennial Ames Straw Poll of Iowa Republicans that serves as the first test of candidate viability. Long before then, of course, the entire conservative movement, including both its Washington and right-wing-cultural-populist elements, had lined up behind George W. Bush as its champion against the dangerously independent-sounding John McCain.
Maybe Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee or Bobby Jindal or somebody we’re not thinking about can wrest the movement-conservative baton away from Palin between now and 2012, but all of the above-named worthies have their own problems, and Palin’s displacement ain’t happened yet.
At present, Palin’s biggest political problem isn’t media mockery or a Quayle-like deficit in “gravitas,” but the fact that her approval rating among the people she governs in Alaska is dropping like a rock. I don’t think we can blame that on elitist media or Tina Fey.
Meanwhile, the persistent treatment of Palin as some sort of brave and suffering St. Joan of the Tundra by conservative and some mainstream media probably builds a floor under her national appeal to Republicans. So long as they love her, the rest of us have every reason to take her as seriously as she takes herself.