This item is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix.
With all the numbers and hyperbolic rhetoric being thrown around about potential Republican gains this year, it’s sometimes helpful to look more closely at the patterns. We are often told, for example, that this is going to be some sort of day of reckoning for House Democrats generally, or for House Democratic incumbents in particular. But what, exactly, is the nature of those House seats Republicans are poised to win?
For purposes of this analysis, I’ll use Nate Silver’s House ratings, which are more precise than those of most of his competitors. Nate shows 27 districts where Republicans are “likely” (defined as an 80 percent or better probability) to win Democratic seats. Do many of these contests involve longstanding Democratic bastions where incumbents are being ousted by the righteous wrath of an angry voting public? No. Eleven of these seats are open. Another thirteen are seats wrested away from the GOP in the “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. And 22 of the 27 have a pro-Republican PVI (the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index), which means they tilted Republican more than the national average in the last two presidential races.
In other words, these are seats that would inevitably be ripe for the plucking in the first midterm after a Democratic presidential victory, even if you don’t consider the factors (especially age-related turnout patterns and the condition of the economy) that make this an especially promising GOP year.
Looking at Nate’s next category, fifteen “lean takeover” seats where the probability of a switch to the GOP is in the 60-80 percent range, there are far fewer open seats, but plenty of other factors indicating low-hanging fruit for Republicans. Aside from the two open seats, there are twelve that Democrats picked up in 2006-08, and eleven of the fifteen have pro-GOP PVIs.
It’s only in a third category, twenty “even” seats where the probability of a Republican takeover is 40-60 percent, that you start getting into a significant number of contests involving entrenched incumbents. Even there, half the seats were taken over by Democrats in 2006 or later. But 14 of them have pro-Republican PVIs, and many of the Democratic “entrenched incumbents” typically represent strongly pro-Republican districts as measured by PVI: Gene Taylor of Mississippi (R+14); Lincoln Davis of Tennessee (R+13); Jim Marshall of Georgia (R+10); Ben Chandler of Kentucky (R+9); John Spratt of South Carolina (R+7); Baron Hill of Indiana (R+6); John Salazar of Colorado (R+5); and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina (R+5).
Remembering that Democrats will probably win some of these close races, it seems likely that Republican House gains this year will represent more a reversion to the norm than some sort of electoral tsunami–and more of a partisan “correction” than any revolt against Democratic incumbents-particularly if you consider the structural factors that make this particular midterm difficult for Democrats.
Now it’s always possible that Republican gains will be even larger than Nate Silver and most others consider probable, and if so, it will be necessary to reconsider everything I’ve said above. But it’s equally appropriate to demand a reconsideration of all the apocalyptic advanced spin coming from Republican circles if the House results turn out to be relatively predictable. Based on current evidence, the idea that this election is going to usher in some sort of extended era of conservative domination of American politics is no more credible than the belief exhibited by some Democrats two and four years ago that Republicans wouldn’t enjoy power in Washington again for the foreseeable future.

Quite a lot of buzz out there about Jack Conway’s recent video ad attacking Rand Paul for being stupid during his college years, with reactions ranging from righteous indignation to “Hey, personal history is fair game.”
Some progressives were offended by Conway’s ad, which attacked Paul for “mocking Christianity” As Jonathan Chait puts it in the New Republic, “The ugliest, most illiberal political ad of the year may be this one, from Kentucky Democrat Jack Conway.” Morally, Chait is right. In terms of ad strategy, there is a little more room for argument.
Kos disagrees, explaining,

Personally, I see nothing wrong with it. Voters are less concerned with issues than values when casting their ballots, and for many voters, religion speaks to the candidate’s values. I may not like it, but it’s a democracy, and the notion that the source of a candidate’s values are off-limits is patently absurd…In a democracy, you have to sell yourself to the voters. In many places, religion is part of the package.

Kos points out that Paul made religion an issue by prattling on piously. “Remember, it was Rand Paul that tried to gin up the outrage machine when Conway said the word “hell” during his Fancy Farm picnic earlier this year.” Theda Scopkol, quoted here in TPM, agrees that Conway was not out of line:

I have a real problem with all the prissy condemnations coming from liberal commentators about Conway’s ad on Rand Paul’s youthful playing with contempt for Christianity. People are acting as if it is some kind of political sin to point out to ordinary Kentucky voters the kind of stuff about Paul’s extremist libertarian views that everyone in the punditry already knows. This does not amount to saying that Christian belief is a “requirement for public office” as one site huffs. It is a matter of letting regular voters who themselves care deeply about Christian belief know that Paul is basically playing them. No different really than letting folks who care about Social Security and Medicare know that Paul is playing them…

The ad was pretty cheesy. I hate the snarky voice-over thing, which seems to be in fashion this year for ads across the political spectrum. Conway was only down 5 points or so, and the race was most likely going to narrow some. Why bet the whole ranch on a pair of Jacks? I tend to agree with Larry J. Sabato’s take, which is that the ad is probably a net negative for Conway. “Mainly, it’s changing the subject to less helpful issues…I’d be surprised if this brings Paul down,”
But, who knows, the ad may do some good, as well as damage, by implanting the meme that Paul’s is a little too weird for Kentucky. It may be a game-changer, if it encourages the media, which after all, loves personal scandals, to press Paul to explain the pot-kidnapping-bondage-aqua-Buddha thing. My guess is he will dodge the media like he did Meet the Press for the next couple of weeks. It could be a wash.
But Conway should not apologize. Stick with responses that criticize Paul for his extremist ideas. Project certitude and strong conviction that Paul is too crazy for Kentucky. Keep attacking Paul for his idiotic policies, not his college pranks, and do it with sharply-worded soundbites, not rambling critiques.
Regardless of the outcome, the ad will probably be credited with making the difference, even though it may not be the case. Generally, however, I would argue against holding opponents accountable for their college behavior. Not too many of any political party could stand such rigorous scrutiny.

The sudden tightening of the U.S. Senate race in Alaska, as reflected in recent polls and perhaps exacerbated by the bad press that GOP nominee Joe Miller has been richly earning, indicates that Election Night on November 2 could last for quite some time. Aside from the fact that polls in Alaska don’t close until midnight EDT, any close election that revolves around write-in votes (in this case, for incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski) is fraught with uncertainty, big questions about vote-counting, and likely litigation.
But there’s another potentially frustrating situation a bit south of Alaska, where Washington’s all-mail-ballot system allows the counting of votes postmarked by November 2. If the Senate fight between Patty Murray and Dino Rossi hangs fire, it will be days if not weeks before the results are known. And there are also a couple of potentially close House races in WA that might not be decided on November 2.
Finally, there’s Georgia, where general election victories require a majority of votes cast. You may recall that the 2008 U.S. Senate race there went into overtime, though a predictable drop-off of African-American and younger voters gave Republican Saxby Chambliss a relatively easy win in the December contest. Could an extended election happen there again this year, particularly in the heated gubernatorial race between Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes? Maybe, says Insider Advantage’s Matt Towery:

The last IA survey showed Barnes slowly improving his numbers among the critical independent swing vote. The trend was not necessarily reflected in the top line results of that poll once the weightings were done for other demographic groups. I’ll be keeping an eye on the independent numbers in the next poll of the race, and also on how Barnes is faring among whites. If he somehow can creep into the upper 20 percentile of whites, reach parity or take a slight lead among independents, and see the turnout among African-Americans reach at least 25 percent of the turnout on Nov. 2, then the two to three percent that Libertarian John Monds is likely to receive might shove Deal into a runoff.

I’d add that Republican disgruntlement with Deal could push the libertarian vote higher than the numbers Towery’s firm is currently showing. In any event, if it happens, it will be interesting to see if Republicans have the same sort of problems Democrats had in 2008 in motivating satisfied partisans to come back out for a runoff.

Shrinking government is the big priority with Republicans. But they have failed to make it the central priority of voters, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, whose latest public opinion snapshot crunches data from a new poll on Americans’ attitudes toward government conducted by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University. Teixeira explains:

The public was asked if they supported more, less, about the same, or no federal government involvement in dealing with a variety of issues. On five domestic policy issues majorities ranging from 67 to 84 percent wanted to see either the same or more federal government involvement in the issue. (In fact, on four of these issues outright majorities actually wanted to see more federal involvement.) Those wanting to see less or no involvement ranged from only 32 down to 16 percent.

And asked whether they would rather have the federal government provide more services even if it cost more in taxes or have the federal government collect less in taxes while providing fewer services:

A slight plurality (49 percent) preferred the first government-expanding option over the second government-cutting option (47 percent). Even more interestingly, these sentiments are notably less hostile to government’s role than has been the case at a number of points in the past. In 1994 only 28 percent selected the government-expanding option, while 57 percent preferred the government-cutting option.

Asked if they want their representative in Congress to fight for more spending to create jobs in their district or fight to cut government spending even if that means fewer jobs in the district, respondents said:

It turns out that, by 57-39, they want their representative to fight for more spending to create jobs. Again, there is no evidence here of an overriding commitment to cut government. And again we see a less hostile attitude toward government’s role than was seen back in 1994 when, by 53-42, the public came down on the cutting spending side of the choice.

As Teixeira concludes, “…Does the public want to see government performance improved? Yes, and in a big way. But don’t believe the conservative hype about a public thirsty to cut government. It’s just not happening.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Colorado’s election keeps defying expectations. At first, it seemed that Republicans would make a clean sweep: In a rightward-leaning year, the state has an open gubernatorial seat, an appointed Democratic senator who barely survived a primary challenge, and three vulnerable Democratic House seats all in play. Since Colorado was the classic Democratic surge state in 2006 and 2008, it would take relatively little in the way of a rightward swing to return it to deep-purple status.
Then, Democrats seemed to catch a break in the August 10 primaries, when a lightly regarded and financially troubled Tea Party candidate, Dan Maes, won the gubernatorial nomination over ethically challenged frontrunner Scott McInnis; and another Tea Party favorite, District Attorney Ken Buck, won the Senate primary over early frontrunner Jane Norton. Maes was quickly beset with demands from Republican leaders that he withdraw from the race to allow the party to choose a more seemly nominee–and then the nation’s preeminent immigrant-basher, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, jumped into the race on the ticket of the far-right Constitution Party, apparently guaranteeing the Democrat, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a victory.
Now, the playing field seems to be tilting again. With Maes reeling from yet another revelation of his spotty personal finances (a personal bankruptcy in 1989), a new Rasmussen poll has Tancredo zooming up to within four points of Hickenlooper as Maes’s support collapses. At the same time, Rasmussen shows Senator Michael Bennet actually gaining ground against Buck, who’s led most polls the last few weeks, creating a virtual dead heat.
Coloradans–and Americans generally–got a fresh opportunity to compare the two Senate candidates Sunday on “Meet the Press.” There were no real fireworks; host David Gregory spent a good chunk of the “debate” asking the candidates to respond to disparaging comments made about both in a Denver Post editorial (which ultimately endorsed Bennet). Predictably, Bennet spent much of his time on the show denying that he’s a stooge of the Obama administration, while Buck sought to appear as not-crazy as possible, half-conceding Gregory’s assertion that he’s moving to the center during the general election. Still, the most jarring moment was Buck’s blunt agreement with the proposition that being gay is a “choice”: He compared the “influence” of biology on sexual orientation to the predisposition to alcoholism. This is pretty standard stuff in right-wing circles, but isn’t the best positioning in Colorado, at least outside of Colorado Springs.
It’s anybody’s guess what will happen on November 2–or more accurately, what result will be announced that day since most Coloradans vote by mail. With Rasmussen ranking the Senate race as too close to call, it would be unwise to write off Bennet, who’s been battling a vast number of attacks from out-of-state groups including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. But it’s much harder to imagine that Colorado would elect Tom Tancredo as governor; his main concern, it appears, is to wage war on Denver for being an immigrant “sanctuary city.” Tancredo’s election would make the state not only a national laughingstock, but a deadly serious target of boycotts and other tangible forms of opprobrium. Indeed, the most concrete effect of Ol’ Tanc’s candidacy may have been to help Ken Buck, indirectly, in his effort to look less scary during the run-up to Halloween.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With some help from the media, various officials at the National Organization for Women, and her opponent’s clumsiness, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman succeeded in turning an offensive epithet uttered in private by a Jerry Brown staffer into a major campaign brouhaha. Now, Whitman has officially called an end to “Whoregate” by accepting Brown’s apology for his minor role in the saga and saying she wants to get back to “the issues.” And no wonder, since “Whoregate” served her purposes quite well.
For those who somehow missed the whole thing, a month-old phone tape leaked to the L.A. Times–and left because Team Brown failed to hang up the receiver on a call–recorded a staffer wondering aloud if the campaign should attack Whitman as a “whore” for exempting a police union (which subsequently endorsed eMeg) from her high-profile proposal to eliminate defined-benefit pensions for public employees. Jerry Brown did not object to the use of the word, which Whitman, happily promoting the “story,” interpreted as a “personal attack” on her and an insult to the women of California. It was a major point of discussion in the candidates’ final debate last weekend, in which Brown did not handle the controversy terribly well.
Now, a moment’s thought should establish that it was more than a little unlikely Brown intended to “attack” anyone via the unusual means of failing to hang up a phone and hoping eavesdroppers would tape the subsequent discussion and then leak it. As for the insulting nature of the private use of the term “whore,” it’s also reasonably clear that the Brown staffer was not trying to suggest that Whitman was employed in the world’s oldest profession, and instead deployed a gender-neutral meaning of the term (as convincingly argued here at TNR Online by linguist John McWhorter) as short-hand for her alleged sale of a policy position in exchange for an endorsement. That’s certainly the way I interpreted it–and I spent a number of years being occasionally called a “corporate whore” by some of my progressive friends for working at the Democratic Leadership Council.
There’s no evidence so far that Whitman’s efforts to encourage female voters to feel her pain about the alleged insult have worked. But whatever wounds she’s suffered have certainly been ameliorated by the obliterating impact “Whoregate” had on Whitman’s recent problems associated with her hiring and firing an illegal immigrant named Nicky Diaz. Here’s news site Calbuzz describing how one “story” affected the other:

With a major assist from an aggressive Team eMeg, which kept blowing and blowing on the smoldering little story until it finally got lit, and aided by the lackadaisical nonchalance of his own handlers, Brown lost his firm grip on the [“Whoregate”] narrative and momentum of the campaign in the 10 days between the Oct. 2 Fresno debate – when he dominated eMeg with a righteous scolding of her dealings with Nicky Diaz – and the Brokaw [debate] event.
In the end, the bizarre whore story may still not matter much to the outcome of the race. However, it is inarguable that Brown’s mishandling of it not only allowed Whitman to instantly change the subject, but also enabled on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-minded members of the press corps to begin drawing a false equivalence between a person in his orbit blurting a rude word in a closed door campaign klatsch, and the more serious matter of Whitman’s employment of an undocumented worker for years.

In other words, it’s the Diaz dustup, not “Whoregate,” that Whitman is happy to escape in her return to “the issues.” The next time the Republican candidate is likely to make major national news is when she shatters the $150 million cap she originally imposed on the personal funds she was willing to spend in this campaign. Meanwhile, the Brown campaign needs to watch its language and learn how to terminate a phone call.

In our overheated political environment, it was inevitable that someone would come forward with the assertion that one political ideology or another made the celebrated rescue of the Chilean miners possible. So here’s an excerpt from “Capitalism Saved the Miners: The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site” by Daniel Henninger, an editor/columnist at the Wall Street Journal and Fox News contributor (video clip here):

It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.
Amid the boundless human joy of the miners’ liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim. It is churlish. These are churlish times, and the stakes are high.
In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost. The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop:
“The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.”
Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right. Ask the miners.
If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?
Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.
This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.
This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal’s Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

Henninger goes on, extolling the marvels of free trade and innovative capitalism, Samsung cellphones and anti-bacterial socks, adding “…Without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.” He shoehorns in the requisite digs at the Obama administration tax, regulation and trade policies, which he sees as an obstruction to the life-saving miracles of the unfettered market.
Henninger’s bloodless, technocratic interpretation of a richly-human story as “a triumph of market capitalism” is amplified in another WSJ video, featuring additional gush about the leadership of Chile’s right-center President Pinera in the rescue effort.
Nice try, but no sale. After acknowledging that, well, yes, market capitalism does facilitate manufacture of great drill bits, socks and life-saving products (as well as shoddy, wasteful and dangerous products), and OK, President Sebastian Pinera is a charismatic guy who didn’t screw up the rescue, the hard evidence for calling the rescue “a smashing victory for free market capitalism,” thins considerably.
The spirit that kept the miners alive for 69 days has deeper roots in the miners’ faith and remarkable solidarity, strengthened by their families, community and union, CONFEMIN. That was also the source of the strength that drove the unflagging determination of the rescue team.
Indeed, the resurfacing workers pointedly called for stronger safety regulations to protect them and all Chilean miners from further disasters. As the second miner out of the shaft, Mario Sepulveda, put it, “This country has to understand that changes must be made.” Moreover, unions have always lead the drive for mine safety reforms in Chile and all nations, usually against the obstruction of conservative parties.
Some observers believe that Chile’s economy is overly-dependent on extractive industries in general. As Chilean academic Maria Ester Feres, director of the Central University of Chile’s centre on labour relations, research and advice, explains, “The joy over the near-epic rescue that has been the result of the strength and wisdom of the miners of Atacama makes it necessary for us not to forget that situations like this one are absolutely avoidable.”
As for President Pinera’s leadership, what politician wouldn’t be on-site for the duration of the rescue, with the possible exception of Rand “Accidents Happen” Paul, current darling of the libertarian right? Credit President Pinera with projecting a compassionate spirit, as did George Bush in the immediate wake of 9-11. Pinera seems to have found a little pro-regulation religion as a result of the miners rescue and the new national focus on mine safety, according to this report from the IPS-Inter Press Service:

The president also announced the creation of a mining superintendency to regulate and enforce safety standards, a restructuring of the National Geology and Mining Service, increased funds for inspections, and the establishment of another advisory committee, to review mining safety regulations.

Pinera’s proposed reforms have already been criticized by union supporters as inadequate and lacking in substance. Drill bit innovations notwithstanding, meaningful safety reforms to protect miners have always come from two sources: negative publicity following disasters and union advocacy. Mine safety reform is more often obstructed by the legislative champions of unregulated markets.
For a more credible take on the rescue, consider this excerpt from Chris Matthews’ eloquent editorial on the topic on MSNBC’s Hardball (video here):

Down 2,000 feet in the ground a group of 33 men not only survived for 69 days but prevailed. What a story of human faith, hope, charity and community.
I know that last word drives people on the right crazy. Theirs is the popular notion of every man for himself, grab what you can, screw the masses, cash out of the government, go it alone, the whole cowboy catechism.
But how would those miners have survived – the 33 of them – and their loved ones living above – if they’d behaved like that, with the attitude of “every man for himself?”
This is, above all, and deep down there in the mine, about being all in this together. It’s about mutual reliance, and, relying on others not just do their jobs, but come through in the clutch. Somebody had to get food and medicine down to these guys and somebody did. Somebody had to drill that hole down to get them and somebody did. And all the time the guys down there – those 33 human souls – kept the faith.
“I was with God and I was with the devil,” one of the first guys out said. “They both fought for me. God won.”
So, in his way, did man. The group of miners stuck down a half-mile into the earth organized themselves. They had one guy in charge, another the spiritual leader, still another working on health, still another the director of entertainment….

In stark contrast to the spirit on display in Chile, Matthews cites the less inspiring political moment in the U.S.: “This coming election now looks to be a process very different. What it promises to be is a huge number of Americans withdrawing their confidence in the ability to work together, to have faith in each other to build a common community. It’s headed toward being something quite un-American: a statement that we are “not” in this together.”
An interesting point, which may help explain why the Chilean miners rescue made for such riveting television in the U.S. People all over the world prayed for the miners and celebrated their rescue with cheers and tears. But in the U.S., we were particularly inspired by the powerful spirit of concern for the workers throughout Chilean society, so absent in the right-wing movement that threatens to win control of congress. The challenge now is to generate some of that spirit in Democratic GOTV.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.
It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:

I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.

Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.
Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.
But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.
As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):

[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.
The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world.