Anyone who’s been watching the self-inflicted damage that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s undergoing over his sunny comments about his home town’s experience with desegregation has probably felt a sense of deja vu. You might be remembering fellow Mississippian Trent Lott and his fall from the GOP Senate leadership in 2002 after he jovially suggested that life would be better if Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had won the 1948 presidential election.
A lot of the same ingredients are there. Like Lott, Barbour said something objectively outrageous about the segregationist heritage of their common state with a breezy insouciance that belied either deep denial or aggressive mendacity. Like Lott, Barbour (or his handlers) first reacted with wounded innocence and counter-attacks, but quickly retreated to the attempted damage control of a partial apology.
Will Barbout, who doesn’t occupy a national post similar in its vulnerability to Lott’s boss-man role in the Senate, brazen it out?
That’s hard to say, but this is one white southerner of Barbour’s own generation who doesn’t think he should get away with protestations of hazy memories or pretend that nasty old civil rights era was irrelevant to his own career.
The politics of Mississippi in the 1960s was all about race. And the growth of the Mississippi GOP, in which Barbour was a precocious leader making his bones in the early 1970s, was all about the party’s positioning as the inheritor of the Dixiecrat tradition.
Consider this series of numbers: 24%, 87%, 13%, 78%. These are the percentages received by the Republican presidential nominees in Mississippi between 1960 and 1972 (Richard Nixon in three of the four). Why the wildly gyrating support levels? The GOP was he unquestioned White Man’s Party in 1964 and 1972, and wasn’t in 1960 and 1968. This lesson was not lost on young GOPers like Barbour, who labored to make sure the anti-civil-rights bona fides of their party was not questioned thereafter (Barbour’s championship of Ronald Reagan in the contested 1976 nominating process was undoubtedly motivated by the very accurate fear that a moderate nominee like Gerald Ford would be vulnerable to a portion of the old seggie vote drifting to native southernor Jimmy Carter).
Now some of Barbour’s defenders are deploying the old line that criticism of him represents a plenary condemnation of southerners or of southern Republicans. But that’s a non sequitur. In a number of southern states, particularly those with an ancient Appalachian Republican voting base, the Republican Party as a viable political entity predated the en masse defection of segregationists in 1964. To put it another way, being a southern Republican in 1966 or 1970 did not necessarily connote deep hostility to civil rights. But in Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana, it was a rare Republican leader in the late 1960s and early 1970s who wasn’t a former Dixiecrat or Golderwatercrat or closely aligned with them.
All of this is simply to say that amnesia or verbal carelessness on the political events of the 1960s may be permissable for many politicians, but not for someone with Barbour’s (or Lott’s) background. It’s like forgetting your middle name, and I just don’t believe it happens innocently, particularly with someone who has Barbour’s more recent record of allegedly color-blind reactionary policies.

The November shellacking notwithstanding, yesterday’s Census Bureau announcement of initial figures for the decennial population count clearly indicates that major demographic trends strongly favor Democrats, with people of color accounting for more than three-fourths of the U.S. population gain over the last decade.
Republicans will spin the announcement to make it sound like good news for them, along the lines of this excerpt from The New York Times report by Sabrina Tavernise and Jeff Zeleny put it,

The figures will influence the landscape for the 2012 presidential race and the makeup of the Electoral College, with Republican-leaning states from the Sun Belt gaining more political influence at the expense of Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states.
According to the new counts, Texas will gain four seats, Florida will gain two, while New York and Ohio each lose two. Fourteen other states gained or lost one seat. The gainers included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah; the losers included Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

And yes, the redistricting fallout from the shellacking will give the GOP major short term advantage in congress and state legislatures. In the longer run, however, there is every reason to believe that Democratic candidates will continue to receive overwhelming support from African American voters, in the range of 90 percent, as well as upwards of 65 percent of Latino voters.
GOP opposition to the Dream Act was largely based on their concerns about the increase in Hispanic voters — About 40 percent of the population growth came from immigration. Many of the Hispanic immigrants will not be able to vote for a while, until they establish citizenship. But that could change rapidly, with a stronger federal commitment to the naturalization process.
As for Latino citizens, Republican votes against the Dream Act should strengthen the Dems’ edge with this key constituency, as will President Obama’s appointment of Justice Sotomayor. Republicans always point out that many Hispanics are conservative on social issues. But when Republicans go out of their way to make life harder of Latino immigrants, it’s difficult to see how they can expect more than a third of Hispanic voters to support them.
As for African American voters, whatever cred the Republicans hoped to get in the African American community from the appointment of Michael Steele as RNC head and Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as Secretaries of State, will surely be offset by the negative publicity given to the more recent ‘Trent Lott moments’ of Rand Paul and Haley Barbour.
As for the longer range, Ruy Teixeira explained in a 2004 interview:

…Pretty much all the demographic trends are going to continue moving in progressive directions for the next 20 years. Just as one obvious example, we’re going to become an increasingly diverse society over time. By the year 2023, the majority of children will be minorities, people under eighteen. By the year 2042, we’ll be a majority minority nation… We’re going to see continuing increases in the proportion of single women; we’re going to see even the millennial generation, as I mentioned earlier, adding about 4 million eligible voters to the voter pool every year until the year 2018. So I think if you put these things together…the potential is there for a durable and pretty strong progressive majority looking pretty far out into the future.

The red tide will seem to be rising in the months ahead. But demographic trends indicate that the political maps of the not too distant future will morph to purple, and then a lovely shade of blue.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The last few months of 2010 have been illuminating when it comes to the priorities of the Republican Party. By jumping at the Obama-McConnell tax deal, Republicans underscored the fact that protecting the marginal tax rates of high earners–not reducing the federal deficit, and not even denying Obama legislative success–is their party’s primary focus at the federal level. It says something that most conservatives who opposed the tax deal did so on the grounds that it was not permanent, or that it did not completely eliminate the estate tax. As ever, to paraphrase Dick Cheney, Republicans seem to think deficits don’t matter.
Yet that’s not the half of it. For a true litmus test of the lengths Republicans will and will not go to in order defend the incomes of the very rich, you have to look to the states, where budget deficits are generally not allowed. There, a new crop of Republican governors and lawmakers–huge numbers of which rode to power on the Tea Party wave–are focused not just on preserving upper-income tax cuts, but actually cutting taxes for the rich while slashing services and raising taxes on the poor and middle class. All this is happening at a crucial time, since the most dire fiscal conditions in decades are about get vastly worse, as federal stimulus dollars run out.
One of the GOP’s biggest 2010 rock stars, Governor-elect Nikki Haley of South Carolina, is an especially instructive example: During the campaign, Haley came out for abolition of the state corporate-income tax. Facing an enormous and chronic state budget shortfall, she breezily suggested that her tax cut might be paid for by eliminating a recently enacted state sales-tax exemption for food purchases, because the exemption “didn’t create one job.” This statement, which seems to imply that eating is an economically useless activity, takes conservative disdain for consumption as a growth generator to new heights. Instead of trying to keep food on South Carolinians’ tables and consumer demand high, Haley is betting on a tax code tilted to “producers” and “job creators.” As Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey recently explained:

We are a right-to-work state. We keep the unions out. And if we become a no-­corporate-income-tax state as well, we will become a magnet for businesses to come to South Carolina. And that means more jobs for our citizens, more con­tracts for our small busi­nesses, and more growth for our economy.

It’s hard to imagine a more enthusiastic endorsement of the old moonlight-and-magnolias approach of making lower business costs–including taxes, wages, and all those inconvenient regulations aimed at protecting the workforce or the environment–the sole strategy for economic development, at the expense of other public and private goods.
A similar thing is happening next door in Georgia, where outgoing Republican Governor Sonny Perdue created a heavily loaded fiscal commission tasked with addressing the state’s massive budget gap. (Incoming Republican Governor Nathan Deal is expected to embrace the report.) It suggests “redirecting the state’s taxing emphasis to what people buy and the services they use rather than the income they earn,” meaning adoption of a higher sales tax, paired with corporate and upper-income tax cuts and cuts in government services, and speaks somewhat dismissively of “advocates for the poor and elderly [who] stress that those groups spend a higher percentage of their income on goods and services that would be taxed under the Republicans’ scenario.” And Florida’s state budget situation may be even worse than South Carolina’s and Georgia’s–education costs for Haitian refugees are a major new problem–but Governor-elect Rick Scott is committed to both the elimination of corporate taxes and major reductions in property taxes that support local schools.
This trend is by no means confined to the South. Newly elected Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is insistently pushing for reductions in business taxes, which would double the state’s current $1.5 billion budget shortfall. In Pennsylvania, Governor-elect Tom Corbett is determined to cut corporate taxes by nearly one-third while increasing business deductions. Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker, who made headlines by turning down $810 million in federal money for a high-speed rail connection between Milwaukee and Madison, has pledged to cut corporate taxes for smaller employers, and also wants to give a state tax break that will encourage people to snap up those hardy conservative pet rocks, health savings accounts. Walker is facing a two-year, $3 billion budget shortfall. Ohio Governor-elect John Kasich, who, like Walker, turned down federal high-speed rail money, is pushing to restore a previously delayed state income-tax cut, even though his two-year budget shortfall is about $8 billion.
This is what Americans got when they voted for the Tea Party. When the last comparable wave of state-level Republicans took office, in 1994, it happened to coincide with the beginning of the long boom of the ’90s, which allowed GOP officeholders to make popular tax cuts without reducing popular spending. Not this time: Across the country, Republicans are assuring that budget adjustments will be real and painful for everybody but the rich.

On the surface, it can easily appear that there is a single, relatively unified progressive consensus that is critical of President Obama’s handling of the tax cut extension. But, in fact, within this apparent consensus there are actually two profoundly different perspectives being expressed – one by mainstream progressive Democrats critical of Obama recent actions but still basically favoring a “big tent” strategy for 2012 and the other by more radical critics whose arguments logically lead in the direction of a third party.
On the one hand, many leading Democratic strategists have expressed their objections to Obama’s recent strategy. In the last week TDS contributor Mike Lux, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel, among many others, have all clearly and passionately expressed their strong objections.
At the same time, however, all three are in agreement on several basic propositions.

1. Political compromise is often necessary. Their disagreement with Obama does not reflect a rejection of compromise in general.
2. The shared near-term goal of these critics is still to build a center-left coalition for 2012 that can re-elect Obama. The three might have disagreements about the optimal balance to aim for in the composition of this coalition between the center and the left, and also regarding the best strategies for winning both groups, but they are in agreement about the need to win at least some support from both “base” and “swing” voters.
3. They agree that Obama’s particular strategy with regard to the tax cut and his criticisms of his progressive supporters were major mistakes that weakened the struggle to achieve the shared objective. Both as economic policy and as political strategy they concur that Obama’s general approach on this particular issue was simply and profoundly wrong.

The second, quite distinct perspective derives from a broader and substantially more radical critique. It is a perspective that fundamentally rejects Obama’s basic objectives and political philosophy.
The radical critique is expressed in three main propositions – propositions that are now widely repeated in online discussions across the internet:

1. That Obama has proven himself no better than a Republican.
2. That the two major political parties are the same – hopelessly corrupt and completely dominated by Wall Street and large corporations. Any apparent superiority of the Democratic Party over the Republican Party is superficial, not fundamental.
3. that the Democratic Party must be ideologically firm and completely unified around an uncompromising progressive platform and not organized as a “big tent” coalition that contains a range of moderate to progressive supporters and views. From this perspective, regardless of the particular conditions in any given election year it is a matter of core principle that it is preferable to lose an election while running on a solidly radical-progressive program rather than to win an election running on a hopelessly diluted and compromised platform.

From these, two strategic conclusions follow:

1. Unless he radically transforms himself in the next few months, Obama should be dumped and replaced with a more consistently radical candidate for 2012
2. Disappointed Dems should either not vote for Obama (or any other Dems who do not meet core left-progressive criteria) or at least adamantly refuse to contribute or volunteer in such campaigns. Even if less than firmly progressive Dems are the winners in contested primaries, they should still be boycotted in the general election.

It is difficult to find a single discussion thread in the progressive blogosphere right now that does not contain numerous comments reflecting this package of views. Often they are expressed in a very personal way e.g. “I’m completely disgusted with the Democrats. Obama is no better than Bush, I’m staying home in 2012” or “I’ll be damned if I’ll donate a single penny of my money or single second of my time to these spineless, cowardly Dems who cave in on every single issue”
On one level it can be suspected that these statements may in many cases be an emotional outburst that does not reflect the person’s more sober opinion, but at the same time it is also necessary to be realistic and face a basic fact. The moment one substitutes the name Al Gore for that of Barack Obama, the three basic radical propositions above become the exact arguments that were put forth by the Ralph Nader campaign in 2000 and, in previous decades, by third parties like the U.S. Socialist Party (The third proposition, in fact, is actually a paraphrase of early socialist leader Eugene V. Debs famous defense of third parties — that “it is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”)
This does not mean that advocates of a third party are necessarily wrong. There is nothing inherently absurd or dishonorable in believing in the need for a third, left-wing political party or in calling for a takeover of the Democratic Party to convert it into something that would act and behave like a firmly and consistently anti-corporate left-wing third party.
But there has been a profound change in the way radical critics of the Democratic Party have expressed themselves in recent years. Before 2000, advocates of a third party would assert their “plague on both your houses” perspective proudly and openly. Since the 2000 Nader campaign catastrophically discredited the notion of a third party campaign, however, most radicals do not mention a third party directly and have almost completely shifted to arguing for transforming the Democratic Party into a radical party from within. As a result, the three propositions and two recommendations above are now invariably presented as the opinions of “disillusioned Democrats” rather than as challenges to the Democratic Party from the independent left.

Read more…

Republicans are understandibly excited by their upcoming House majority. But if they think their popularity will give them an edge over President Obama, they are headed for disappointment. So concludes TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s analysis of a Washington Post/ABC News poll in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot.’:

In the poll, respondents were asked whether they trusted President Obama or the Republicans in Congress to do a better job with the main problems facing the country. The public trusted President Obama more by a 43-38 plurality.
Obama’s margin on this question is slim, but it’s still quite a contrast to the analogous question asked after the 2006 election by the same pollsters. At that point, President George W. Bush was only trusted by 31 percent of the nation to cope with the country’s problems–far less than the 57 percent who trusted the Democrats in Congress.

And when it comes to helping the middle class in particular, Teixeira notes, President Obama’s edge increases significantly:

Perhaps one reason President Obama has this level of trust is because he is still viewed as being on the side of the middle class. Fifty-three percent in the same survey thought President Obama could be trusted to do a better job of helping the middle class, compared to just 38 percent who trusted Republicans in Congress to do the better job.

Some Republicans may think they can gain traction by attacking the President. But after everything that’s happened so far, they are still spinning their wheels.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama has an opportunity on his hands. Now that he’s cut a grand tax-cut bargain with Republicans, the time is ripe–from both a policy and a political standpoint–to shift toward a comprehensive program of fiscal stabilization and economic growth, integrated into a narrative of American success in the twenty-first century. He should do so during next year’s State of the Union address, which, if used correctly, may well be the pivotal speech of the Obama presidency.
This is how the situation stands: Because of the tax deal, Congress no longer needs to worry about passing additional economic stimulus to boost job creation, since in tandem with the Fed’s $600 billion bond-purchase program, Obama’s agreement offers a substantial short-term injection of cash that could increase growth by 1 percent or more. There is now zero excuse for legislators to ignore the long-term budget problem and put off measures that would repair America’s economic competitiveness. Additionally, Obama has a political window in which to make substantial progress on those goals, because many of the necessary policies have at least some bipartisan support. The following is a point-by-point look at what he should say in January and at the policies he should pursue during the next two years.
Substantively, Obama’s new agenda should focus on two overriding objectives: Stabilizing our long-term budget situation, and laying the groundwork for sustainable economic growth. This is easier said than done, of course, but it’s possible to come up with some immediate proposals that would take us a long way toward success. Let’s start with the budget:
Discretionary Spending: First, as budget veterans predicted, the president’s early pledge to scrub the budget line-by-line has come to naught. There’s only one way to trim discretionary spending: Obama should propose multi-year caps or freezes, defended by rigorous budget procedures. To make this work politically, defense and domestic programs must be treated symmetrically. Starting no later than 2015, all foreign combat commitments should be fully paid for, with a war surtax if necessary.
Tax Reform: The most encouraging surprise of the past year has been the development of an emerging consensus on structural tax reform. Liberals accept the concept of broadening the base and lowering rates, while conservatives acknowledge that many tax preferences represent backdoor spending. Done right, tax reform–corporate as well as individual–can both accelerate growth and increase revenues. Obama should announce the goal of getting reform done before the end of the 112th Congress.
Social Security: While Social Security reform that stabilizes the program for the long-term would have virtually no impact on the budget over the next decade, getting it done would begin to restore confidence–now lacking abroad as well as here at home–that we are capable of governing ourselves. President George W. Bush’s failed 2005 effort made it clear that there is little support for changing the program’s basic structure. A consensus on a package of modest benefit and revenue adjustments is within reach–if Obama commits to it.
Medicare: Many budget-watchers will point out that is not mainly Social Security, but the astonishing explosion of Medicare costs that are at the heart of our long-term fiscal difficulties. They are absolutely right, but nonetheless, this is not a problem that Obama should attempt to solve during the next two years. There’s a reason for this: During that time period, there is no possibility of consensus. The president should frankly acknowledge that disagreement. During the 112th Congress, he could say, Democrats will be trying to promote–and the Republicans to prevent–the implementation of his health reform law. But at some point, the argument must end, and we must work together within some shared framework to foster coverage and quality while lowering costs.

Read more…

TDS is pleased to publish this Strategy Memo by Andrew Sabl, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA and the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics.
The arguments among Democrats and progressives over President Obama’s tax deal have revealed disagreements over many things: strategy, tactics, principles, history. But some of the most bitter criticisms have involved matters of loyalty and political character. The deal–and even more, Obama’s testy criticism of “purist” and “sanctimonious” critics of the deal–were seen as insulting Obama’s most fervent supporters. And the insult was compounded because it came from a President whom many activists had once regarded as one of their own. The transformational speaker and former community organizer seemed to be openly disavowing not only his base but part of himself.
In contrast, many of the President’s defenders have said that Obama was always at heart a legislative deal-maker, and that followers who expected anything different had only themselves to blame.
I favor a third alternative: that Obama was indeed disavowing a part of himself, but that he was right to do so. In my book, Ruling Passions, I extensively examined and compared the roles played by three major kinds of political leaders: activists, organizers and legislators. I argued that all three contribute crucial things to democratic politics–but very different things, normally best performed by very different kinds of people.
One of the book’s central conclusions was that the same person was unlikely to be able to play more than one of these roles well, and that those who did move from one role to another would have to radically shift their ways of acting, and perhaps even their character, in order to succeed. Applied to what’s happening now, this analysis suggests that Obama has very valid reasons for making a change from one role to another, even at the cost of leaving behind some roles that once helped define him, but that he now needs to clearly define and embrace a new role.
Moral Activists
Obama’s remarks, stressing pragmatism and results over “a purist position and no victories for the American people,” took aim at a kind of politics that I called “moral activism.” Moral activists–like Frederick Douglass, Francis Willard, and Martin Luther King–channel the prophetic or jeremiad tradition in American thought and rhetoric. They draw organizational strength and moral authority from communities that are religious or quasi-religious in character, focused on morals as much as politics. That said, activists’ public appeals are not sectarian but appeal to common and perennial American principles. Moral activists demand that we take seriously the true meaning of our ideals: liberty, democracy, equality, the pursuit of happiness.
The preferred political activity of moral activists is speech; their preferred path to political progress not the brokering of deals but the conversion of souls. Accordingly, while not opposed to all compromise, they deeply suspect the rhetoric of compromise, any suggestion that a current half-measure is a final destination rather than a short rest stop on the way to a final goal.
When activists do seek out political allies they demand that those allies’ commitment to the cause approach their own (in steadiness if not intensity); they are fond of pledges and promises and take them very seriously. For all their talk of urgency, they typically think of progress on a scale of generations. Their favorite line is taken from Martin Luther King (though not original with him): “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And uniquely among political types, Moral Activists can and do display a sympathy towards permanent minorities and the politically disenfranchised that politicians who practice majoritarian politics cannot afford to match.

Read more…

Despite all of the grumbling about Obama dissing his progressive base, the more serious mistake is the Administration’s failure to mobilize the Organizing for America (OFA) grassroots network represented by 13 million email addresses, says Obama’s chief campaign blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, in his WaPo article “Why is Obama leaving the grass roots on the sidelines?”

Obama entered the White House with more than a landslide victory over Sen. John McCain. He brought with him a vast network of supporters, instantly reachable through an unprecedented e-mail list of 13 million people. These supporters were not just left-wing activists but a broad coalition that included the young, African Americans, independents and even Republicans – and they were ready to be mobilized.
…Yet at seemingly every turn, Obama has chosen to play an inside game. Instead of actively engaging supporters in major legislative battles, Obama has told them to sit tight as he makes compromises behind closed doors.

Graham-Felsen cites the example of the tax cut battle, in which an OFA spokesman said the network would be mobilized when the time is “ripe.” But it didn’t happen. Then there was the health care battle, in which OFA members were encouraged to push for generalized “reform,” instead of focusing on the public option, and Graham-Felson notes that he was urged to contact his senator, who was already a supporter, rather than target supporters of a centrist in another state, “who was blocking reform.”
OFA’s story is one of missed opportunities made more regrettable by its great potential, as Graham-Felson explains:

Obama has made it clear that, for the most part, his administration isn’t seriously interested in deploying this massive grass-roots list – which was once heralded as a force that could reshape politics as we know it – to fight for sweeping legislative change. It’s a shame. In the few instances that the White House has meaningfully engaged the grass roots, OFA has shown that it has real clout. It’s possible that the health-care bill, limited though it was, would not have passed were it not for decisive action from OFA in the final hours. When OFA members were finally asked to contact other Obama supporters in key legislative districts and after congressional offices were flooded with phone calls, letters and personal visits, several of the final holdouts in Congress were swayed to support the bill. Imagine if that aggressive, bottom-up approach had happened earlier in the process.

OFA’s future can be much brighter, provided the Administration makes a commitment to deploy it more forcefully going forward, and the stakes are high:

If the White House wants to keep its grass-roots supporters at bay during major legislative fights, that’s its choice. But there’s a larger problem looming.
Obama needs this list in 2012 – and he needs its members to dig much deeper than in the last election. The Citizens United ruling has allowed campaigns to become an unprecedented corporate cash free-for-all – and Obama will likely need to raise far more than $500 million from the grass roots to be competitive.
While Obama’s political team intensely focuses on independents, the grass-roots list seems like an afterthought. Every time Obama chooses to compromise behind closed doors, and keeps OFA quiet, he might win over a few independents. But he’s also conveying a message that the grass roots doesn’t really matter, that the bottom-up ethos of his candidacy doesn’t apply to his presidency.
On Thursday, Obama and White House staff met with a group of OFA volunteers who presented survey data and anecdotes on the state of the grass-roots base since the midterm elections. This is a positive sign, but the White House should move beyond gestures. Obama needs a senior adviser whose job is to be a liaison to the movement that elected him. This person needs to be in the room in senior-level strategy meetings, asking: How is this going to impact the list? What message will this send to the grass roots?
Obama needs twice as much grass-roots support in the next election – and he’s not going to get it by sidelining his supporters. If he continues to play politics as usual, Obama risks alienating not just the left but anyone who believed in the promise of bringing change to Washington.

It’s critical, not only for the Administration, but also for Democratic prospects in coming elections that the OFA network list be updated and its members be fully engaged in legislative struggles, as well as election campaigns.