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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2010

Towards A More Upbeat Mid-Term Scenario

For Dems seeking an alternative to the pervasive doom-and gloom mid-term speculation, John Harwood takes an even-handed look iat the upcomming election in his Sunday New York Times edition of ‘The Caucus.’ First Harwood feeds the ‘Dems are doomed’ meme, noting,

As if Republicans did not have enough cause for optimism this year, the pollster Neil Newhouse offers this lesson from history: Since John F. Kennedy occupied the White House, presidents with approval ratings below 50 percent have seen their parties lose an average of 41 House seats in midterm elections.
This year, a gain that large would return the House to Republican control. President Obama’s most recent Gallup Poll rating: 45 percent.

Harwood goes on to add that none of the previous nine Presidents experienced an increase in their approval ratings between January and October in their first midterm election years. But Bush II actually broke the first mid-term jinx in 2002, helped by the World Trade Center bombings, which elevated ‘national security’ to the leading priority of swing voters.
What I like about Harwood’s article is that he gives a fair hearing to the view that, while history is important for predicting political outcomes, it isn’t everything. Harwood cites a litany of busted political rules, including the political realignment of the South, the presidency is for whites only and the Republican “lock” on California. Harwood quotes Alan Abramowitz, who has contributed to TDS, to good effect: “As soon as a political scientist comes up with a sweeping generality about American politics, it will immediately be falsified.” Political rules were made to be broken, and 2010 should be no exception.
Indeed, President Obama’s improbable rise from an obscure state senator/law professor to the most powerful elective office on earth in less than five years ought to give political prognosticators pause in uttering cocksure predictions about electoral outcomes. Perhaps more to the point, Obama’s rise to power was based on a very creative and well-executed outside-the-box strategy, as much as his personal gifts.
This view won’t change the betting on the GOP at Intrade or Vegas, but it does allow a little room for a more encouraging outcome than is currently being parroted by pundits. Further, as Harwood notes,

Though the unemployment rate remains stuck around 10 percent, the economy in March enjoyed its strongest job growth in three years. The stock market has been booming. Democratic candidates hope that continued good news between now and November will begin alleviating the sour mood of voters.
…Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale and a student of the relationship between economic conditions and political outcomes, argued that history shows voters take account of third-quarter performance, too. His model of 2010 economic performance projects that Democrats will draw 51.63 percent of the two-party vote for the House…That translates to roughly 224 seats — enough for Democrats to retain control of the House.

So the Republicans ought to hold the high-fives for a while, particularly if the economy takes a better-than-expected uptick between now and November.


Urgent: A TDS STRATEGY MEMO on the Supreme Court

The Republican right has a deeply disturbing covert extremist agenda for the Supreme Court — end the separation of church and state, undermine the legality of Social Security and Medicare and give individuals the right to ignore any laws they choose.
Does this sound like a wildly hysterical exaggeration?
It certainly does. But unfortunately, it also happens to be true.
Read the entire memo here.


Urgent: A TDS Strategy Memo on the Supreme Court

The Republican right has a deeply disturbing covert extremist agenda for the Supreme Court – end the separation of church and state, undermine the legality of Social Security and Medicare and give individuals the right to ignore any laws they choose.
Does this sound like a wildly hysterical exaggeration?
It certainly does. But unfortunately, it also happens to be true.
The unavoidable fact is that major elements of the Republican coalition – the elements most likely to become deeply engaged in the battle over the next supreme court nominee like the Christian Right, the Tea Party Movement, and the radical Federalist Society legal wing of the Right—do indeed harbor profoundly extreme views on the Constitution. In fact, since Obama’s election these views have veered even more sharply toward extremism.

• Since the 1990’s, the Christian Right has sought to replace the traditional American separation of church and state with the notion that the U.S. was actually created as a “Christian Nation” in which Christianity was intended to receive favored treatment by government policy. The most startling recent expression of this view was last month’s decision by the Texas School Board to remove Thomas Jefferson – the symbol of America’s tradition of religious freedom and tolerance – from the states’ history curriculum
• The opponents of Health Care Reform in the Tea Party Movement and among Republicans around the country have advanced the argument that Congress does not have the constitutional authority to enact health reform legislation and are now filing lawsuits based on this view. The basis for such suits – typically a denial of the power of Congress to legislate economic matters under the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the U.S. Constitution–is automatically and unavoidably a collateral attack on the constitutionality of a vast array of past legislation, including most New Deal/Great Society programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
• The Republican revolt against any cooperation with Democratic legislation and initiatives has carried an extraordinary number of conservatives into a general attitude of defiance towards the rule of law itself and flirtation with constitutional doctrines of state nullification and succession. These doctrines were developed as arguments for state sovereignty by the Confederacy in the civil war era and as 1950’s and 1960’s era segregationist strategies to thwart desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans.

Taken together, these three ideas actually amount to a covert three-pronged agenda to radically transform the American constitution:

1. To redefine America as a Christian Nation and treat Christianity as a state-favored religion
2. To create a legal doctrine that could justify the voiding of all social programs enacted since 1933.
3. To establish the right of individuals or states to ignore and disobey any laws that they happen to interpret as impinging on their freedom or natural rights.

Democrats can – and must — respond firmly and categorically to this extremist philosophy. They must respond by saying that the Democratic Party proudly upholds the traditional American view of the constitution – the view of the founding fathers of this country – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams.

1. That the constitution guarantees religious freedom and tolerance for all Americans of every faith and creed.
2. That the constitution guarantees the right of the freely elected representatives of the people in a democracy to pass laws for the common good. The people have the right to elect new representatives who promise to repeal laws with which they disagree, but not to simply ignore and violate laws of which they do not happen to approve
3. That the constitution protects individual liberty but is not a prescription for anarchy. It provides equal rights for all under a system of laws, but does not provide veto rights for anyone who happens to disagree with a particular law.

The battle between these two views is not a battle from which Democrats should shy away. Most Americans aren’t likely to react well to the spectacle of conservatives demanding a virtual revolution against a popularly elected government, threatening to undermine the legal foundation of the social safety net many Americans depend on for their well-being and seeking to overturn constitutional doctrines that have been in place for many decades and even since the foundation of the Republic.
Republican strategists will desperately try to frame this debate as an argument between the “founding fathers” on the one hand and the “crazy liberal democrats” on the other. They will attempt to blur the distinction between the two fundamentally different visions of America embodied in the two interpretations of the constitution above.
Democrats should not let them get away with this deception. A substantial part of the Republican base deeply and sincerely believes in the three-pronged extremist agenda described above and will consider any attempt by the Republican leadership to shy away from those views as a betrayal tantamount to treason. If Democrats firmly and consistently demand that Republican leaders honestly say where they stand on these issues, the Republican coalition will become deeply fractured.
So if conservatives want to make a battle over Barack Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee, let them bring it on.

• Let them bring it on with all the rhetoric Tea Party folk and other radicalized conservatives have been using about Obama’s “socialism” and the Nazi-like tyranny of universal health coverage.
• Let them bring it on with all the segregation-era legal strategies of succession and nullification.
• Let them bring it on with arguments that programs like social security and medicare are illegal and unconstitutional
• Let them bring it on with all the attempts to write Thomas Jefferson and the separation of church and state out of American history.

The truth is that Democrats don’t want an ugly ideological battle over the next Supreme Court nominee. They would much rather focus on important economic issues like financial reform.
But if the Republicans insist on a fight, let’s stand ready to give them a battle they’ll wish they never started.


Game On

So it’s official: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring, effective at the end of the current Court term, which means a new Justice needs to be confirmed before the October term convenes.
As I noted when Stevens’ retirement became likely, there are two ways Democrats can react to this news.
We can go through the certain Court fight ahead in a half-hearted and distracted way, hoping to get back to “real” issues like financial reform. Or we can take advantage of the opportunity a Court fight presents to expose the extraordinary radicalism of the contemporary conservative movement and its captives in the GOP, best illustrated by its views on the Constitution.
An aggressive and proactive strategy for this fight is in my opinion the right way to go; it will help raise the stakes for the midterm elections for lukewarm Democratic voters, while also casting the choice in November as one between two futures rather than a referendum on a very unpopular status quo in Washington.
So let’s get the game on!


The Revolution in Political Journalism

There’s an interesting feature article by Michael Calderone up at Politico today about the gradual revolution in political journalism going on at some of the mainsteam media’s major institutions. Its point of departure is the success enjoyed by my friend Ezra Klein at the Washington Post:

When Washingtonian magazine recently profiled The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the story contained a tidbit that ricocheted around the Post newsroom: Klein has his own assistant.
An assistant? For that new guy with the blog?
Turns out to be true. Nothing more vividly highlights the changing times at legacy news organizations — or the bilious feelings those times have caused among the assistant-less masses in the depleted ranks of traditional reporters — than the instant status achieved by a newcomer like Klein.
Hired last year at age 24 from The American Prospect, the liberal monthy, Klein was given a prized platform — the invitation to hold forth with commentary and analysis about domestic policy — that not long ago would have gone only to someone with years of experience and achievement.
Klein is hardly alone. Reflecting a mix of desperation and determination to reinvent themselves for a new media era, legacy publications are recruiting and lavishly rewarding a new breed of journalists. They offer an edgy style and expertise in a particular field, but have never spent a day covering cops or courts or county boards — traditionally the rungs of the ladder all reporters had to climb.

Calderone goes on the examine other examples of the New Journalistic Kids on the Block, and the backlash against them among old-school reporters who view them as unprofessional interlopers who mistake bloviating for journalism.
Meanwhile, in his take on the Calderone piece, Jonathan Chait identifies the main weakness in the old-school argument: there are different skills involved in “pure reporting” and the synthesis and interpretation of facts. And that’s not changed by the journalism profession’s tradition of treating success at the former as the precondition for the opportunity to do the latter.
I vividly recall from my days in Georgia politics and government a friend who was a very good statehouse reporter. She was ultimately offered a rare spot on the editorial board of her paper, and given a weekly column. Soon afterwards she called me to complain of the difficulty of finding something to write about once a week. She hated her new gig, and it didn’t last very long.
Not long thereafter, I tried to make a lateral transfer from government and policy work, with a heavy side order of speechwriting, into a job on the editorial board of a Georgia paper. The pay was horrendous; the work-load was brutal; and although I was reasonably sure I was totally qualified, I was told I could forget about it because I didn’t have a journalism degree and hadn’t done any “pure” reporting. A reporter friend explained to me patiently that editorial jobs were the rabbit that kept underpaid reporters running around the track for decades, and that hiring someone like me would represent a disruption of the journalistic career path.
I finally “got it,” and didn’t try journalism any more. Eventually, I got a job with a Washington think tank that ultimately involved writing op-ed length institutional opinion pieces every single day for years. It dawned on me that I had become a “journalist” in all but name. But only the advent of “blogging” made it possible to perform that skill under a byline.
I know it’s fashionable in many journalistic and political circles to think of “bloggers” as ignorant bloviators who have destroyed the ancient standards of opinion journalism and driven politics into a perpetual hate-frenzy. And without a doubt, there’s a lot of crap out there for anyone to read. But as people like Klein and many others have demonstrated, there are also bloggers with much higher standards of research and fact-verification, and much more intelligent levels of reasoned discourse, than their counterparts in the MSM. And that’s why the MSM, forced increasingly to live “online,” is snapping up some of the best of them.
Sure, I have some sympathy for the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate who are embittered by this revolution, which has been driven by the same economic realities that would be threatening their jobs even if the Internet didn’t exist. But they should have some sympathy for the many very talented policy wonks and political analysts who were shut out of their profession for the sin of wanting substantive training or practical experience in politics or government instead of J-School. I’m certainly old enough to remember the days when the very best of what would now be called “blogging” was available only through the extraordinarily narrow window of “Letters to the Editor” that almost no one read. We’re only now as a society beginning to understand that some of the best potential teachers are people who would not have for a moment considered taking many hours of Education classes in college in order to become professionally certified. The journalism profession has benefited from opening up the guild as well.


Help Prevent CNN from Morphing Into FoxNews II

Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, has a post up at the Blog for Our Future urging progressives to raise hell about CNN’s decision to give four hours of free airtime to Pete Peterson’s “I.O.U.S.A.,” regarded by progressive economists as shameless “deficit hysteria,” according to Hickey. As Hickey explains,

Whose voices will be shut out this weekend?
The nation’s leading economists who are urging our government to use deficits today to invest in long-term prosperity – such as Paul Krugman, James Galbraith and Dean Baker.
The fiscal experts who have repeatedly said Social Security is sound and broader health care reform will protect Medicare.
All of you who voted for an active government to invest in our future.
While you are kept silent, who does CNN give the microphone to?
A multimillionaire Wall Street mogul who wants our government to slash investments while millions are losing their jobs. This guy had no problem taking tax cuts for the wealthy that caused our deficit problems – and his Wall St buddies crashed the economy.

Time is short, but Hickey is urging progressives to “demand CNN give equal time to defenders of Social Security, Medicare and public investment,” all of which will be taking a heavy pummeling in Peterson’s flick and the subsequent televised discussion about it. As Hickey says, “We already have a cable news network that does that. We don’t need another unfair, unbalanced channel.” Hickey links to a handy protest form to send to CNN courtesy of The Campaign for America’s Future.


Turnout Rumblings

As we inch closer to the November 2010 elections, some of the early indicia affecting turnout are showing remarkable numbers predictive of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election.
Now it should come as no great surprise that when asked by USA Today/Gallup if they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting in November, 69% of Republicans respond affirmatively. This comports with the general sense that Republicans are getting ready to joyfully snake dance to the polls in November to get rid of the socialist usurpers in Washington and restore the natural order of things. But as Nate Silver has pointed out, the same survey shows 57% of Democrats expressing unusual enthusiasm as well–a higher percentage than ever registered before a midterm by voters in either party, until now.
At pollster.com, turnout guru Michael McDonald of George Mason University stares at the data and suggests we could be seeing a historic turnout rates this November, since overall enthusiasm levels are about where they were two years ago. He’s pretty sure turnout will exceed that of the last midterm election, in 2006, which was considered a very good turnout year by historic standards.
Normally high overall turnout in a midterm election would be good news for Democrats, but turnout predictions based on voter enthusiasm must note the advantage GOPers have on that measurement. We’ll see if conservative excitement about November can be sustained at its current high-pitch chattering whine, and if Democrats can maintain or increase their own level of engagement.


GOPers Go Full Speed Ahead

There’s been a theory running around that Republicans, concerned about the craziness surrounding conservative reactions to health reform, would rein in the extremists and steam towards November in a state of calm and moderation.
The first shots fired from the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans don’t sound very moderate. Here’s what tonight”s speaker Newt Gingrich had to say in a press release about his speech:

“To win in 2010 and 2012, it’s not enough to say no to the radical agenda of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid,” Gingrich said in a released statement. “Tonight’s speech will explain why real leadership requires Republicans to offer a compelling vision of safety, prosperity, and freedom that stands in vivid contrast to Obama’s secular, socialist, machine now running Washington.”

Secular, socialist machine? One can only imagine the reaction if a major Democrat referred to the GOP as a “Christian Right, corporatist machine.” And it would have the added benefit of being largely true.


Senior ‘Persuadables,’ HCR and November 2

Senior voters are getting lots of love from both major parties this year, leading up to the November elections. First, they are a large portion of the mid-term turnout — in the 2006 mid-terms, 29 percent of the electorate in House of Reps races were over 60, according to CNN’s exit polling.
Secondly, many are skeptical about the landmark HCR Act. As Jeffrey Young’s post “AARP, Dems lobby older voters on healthcare law before midterms” at The Hill explains further, “A Gallup poll released two weeks ago found just 36 percent of people 65 or older thought the healthcare law is a “good thing,” compared to 54 percent who said it is a “bad thing.”
The Republicans are focusing on one of the Act’s Medicare-related provisions as a political fulcrum, as Young explains:

Republican criticisms of Democrats using nearly $500 billion in Medicare spending cuts to finance new coverage for the uninsured fueled seniors’ anxiety…The most obvious potential short-term drawback for seniors is the possibility of cutbacks in the Medicare Advantage program…Republican proponents of the private Medicare Advantage plans, as well as the insurance companies that provide them, maintain that slashing the subsidies will result in many plans exiting the market, reducing benefits or raising premiums. The Congressional Budget Office partly backs up this contention, concluding that 1.5 million fewer people will be covered by Medicare Advantage plans by 2019.

Despite the daunting poll figures, defenders of the legislation have some selling points, as Young points out:

To counter the anti-healthcare reform message, Obama and his allies are highlighting the new or improved benefits under the law…“I want seniors to know, despite some of the stuff that’s been said out there, these reforms don’t cut into your guaranteed benefits,” Obama said last week. “What they do is eliminate co-payments and deductibles for preventive care, like checkups and mammograms. You will be getting those for free now.”
Perhaps the biggest selling point for Medicare beneficiaries is the gradual phasing-out of the so-called doughnut hole coverage gap that is currently part of the Medicare Part D drug benefit; this year, beneficiaries who fall into the gap will receive a $250 rebate…In addition, advocates of the law are trumpeting enhanced prevention and wellness benefits such as a free annual physical and expanded access to home-and community-based medical and assisted-living services.

If the aforementioned Gallup poll is right, at least ten percent of over-65 seniors can be described as ‘persuadable,’ which is not a lot to work with. There are no data yet that provide a clear conclusion about the “intensity” of the opposition to the HCR act among the over-60’s, but surely some of those who now disapprove of the legislation could be turned around with persuasive appeals. The white house, Democrats and the AARP are trying to make that happen, and Young’s post provides a good account of the strategy to date.
(Update/Question: Might a strategy that targets ‘younger’ seniors, say 60-65, based on the assumption that some may still have some dormant late 1960’s attitude remaining, produce good results?)
At the same time, however, Dems have to bring their “A” game to the mid-term campaign in mobilizing more sympathetic constituencies. As Ed Kilgore noted in his TDS post, “Seniors, Obama and 2010” back in September, “Democratic success in 2010 will depend on either better performances among seniors than in 2008, or better turnout–or even higher Democratic percentages–elsewhere….Democrats need a 2010 strategy that takes it for granted that disproportionate white senior turnout could be a big problem. Stronger-than-usual turnout among young and minority voters is obviously one way to deal with it, and that will take some serious work.”


Neo-Confederate History Month

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As most readers have probably heard, Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell got himself into hot water by declaring April “Confederate History Month,” in a proclamation that did not mention the rather pertinent fact that the Confederacy was a revolutionary (and by definition, treasonous) effort to maintain slavery against even the possibility of abolition.
After the predictable firestorm of criticism, McDonnell allowed that it must have been a mistake not to mention slavery in his proclamation. And then he repeated his rationale for the whole idea, which was, he claimed, simply a matter of promoting tourism in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s outbreak. Tourism!
I’m sure most conservatives will consider McDonnell’s act of contrition sufficient, while many liberals will cynically conclude the whole thing was a dog whistle to the far Right, much like his earlier and less notorious commemoration of March 7-13 as Christian Heritage Week, in honor of the Christian Right’s revisionist theory that the Founders were theocrats at heart.
But as a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.
It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.
A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the virulent racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.
Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when “Dixie” was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.
Bob McDonnell should be particularly responsible, as a former Attorney General of his state, for reminding us all of the “massive resistance” doctrine preached by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in response to federal judicial rulings and pending civil rights laws, and of the “interposition” theory of nullification spread most notably by Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick.
Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.
Having flirted with such theories himself, Bob McDonnell probably wouldn’t be interested in discussing them in the context of Civil War history. But that’s okay: A greater public understanding of the exceptionally unsavory tradition that conservative Republicans are following in claiming that states can refuse to accept health care reform would be valuable without an explicit discussion of current politics.
So give it up, governor: If you are going to have a Confederate History Month, at least be honest enough to acknowledge that the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t die at Appomattox.