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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: May 2012

Stalking the Elusive “Real Romney”

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on April 24, 2012.

There’s a bit of a dispute going on in Democratic pundit circles about how best to ‘frame’ the ‘real Romney’ in campaign messaging. Would he be most accurately — and effectively — portrayed as a flip-flopping flibbertigibbet or a slickster wingnut?
The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber comes down on the side of characterizing the GOP nominee-in-waiting as “a Goldwater-esque extremist,” tempered by “an added selling point that the coverage has so far ignored.” As Scheiber says,

My only quibble is with Team Obama’s parsing of the allegation. The formulation David Plouffe gave the Times last week went as follows: “Whether it’s tax policy, whether it’s his approach to abortion, gay rights, immigration, he’s the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater.” I’d tweak this slightly (not that anyone asked for my advice) and say, “Whether it’s tax policy … abortion, gay rights, immigration, he’s *running as* the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater.” I don’t think many people look at Mitt Romney and see an authentic, fire-breathing conservative. But I do think they’ll believe he’s been willing to act like one to appease his party. And that the appeasement won’t abruptly end on Election Day…On top of which, phrasing it this way lets you use both the “too conservative” argument and the “soulless” argument in a way that’s perfectly coherent, so you don’t really have to choose.

Describing Romney as a “vulture capitalist who lacks a human core but has embraced a conservative agenda to lead his fellow Republicans and plutocrats to victory in November,” Alec MacGillis’s take, also at TNR, “A False Choice For Obama’s Anti-Romney Message,” offers a melding of the two views:

I also see the two frames as linked and not as inconsistent as some are making them out to be, but in a slightly different way–as fully symbiotic arguments that each would not work all that well entirely on their own, that are stronger if yoked together….Yoking the two frames together works even better when they are combined with the third frame at Obama’s disposal: Romney as the plutocrat who (after a blessed start in life) made his millions slicing and dicing companies, regardless of the human collateral, and who now benefits from a very low tax rate on his fortune. This framing makes each of the other two more persuasive. It buttresses the notion of Romney as one without a core–he’ll do whatever it takes to get on top. And it explains Romney’s current conservatism, making it seem more than just sheer opportunism at least when it comes to taxes and the economy–of course he’s embracing the Ryan plan: It lowers rates for people like himself, even to the point of saving his own sons millions in estate taxes!

Ed Kilgore also envisions a synthesis of the two views at WaMo’s ‘Political Animal,’, albeit angled differently:

I don’t see a problem here. Of course the Obama camp emphasized the “no core” argument during the primaries, since it reinforced conservative doubts about Romney and also painted him as someone so character-less that he’d do or say whatever was necessary to win the nomination. Now that Mitt’s spent months and months pandering to conservative activists and blasting his opponents for ideological heresies real and imagined, it’s perfectly logical to point out how he’s harnessed himself to a political movement that’s partying like it’s 1964. But the “no core” attack line must be recalled now and then to turn on bright flashing lights whenever Romney tries to reposition himself, which he really does need to do lest he come across as Paul Ryan with a lot less personality.
Is it really confusing or risky to depict Romney as an empty suit in the thrall of radicals? Weaver says something I’ve also heard from anxious Democrats who fear that calling Romney is flip-flopper could make him more attractive to swing voters: “Being a flip-flopper might actually help Romney. It shows he’s not an unreasonable person.”
Really? People who don’t like the ideology Romney has been incessantly peddling for the last two presidential cycles are going to vote for him because they believe he’s an incorrigible liar?
I don’t think so. Mitt has built a trap for himself throughout his public career, and Team Obama would be foolish not to bait it and spring it. Persuadable voters don’t much like flip-floppers and don’t much like “severly conservative” ideologues, either. And they really don’t like pols without the character to maintain a reasonably consistent point of view even as they ingratiate themselves to people who are unreasonably enslaved to an extremist ideology against which every decision made by Romney every single day of his presidency would be policed relentlessly and viciously.

Put another way, we are now talking about a flip-flopper who no longer has the wiggle-room to tack back towards sanity, much less moderation. That’s not a problem for the Obama campaign; It’s an embarrassment of messaging riches.


New GOP Meme: ‘Forward’ Means ‘Socialism’

For those who had any doubts that the modern Republican Party has lost its collective mind, Dave Johnson, senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, has an instructive post for you. Johnson’s theme is the unhinged neo-McCarthyism/Obama Derangement Syndrome of the GOP, in which almost every utterance of the President is instantly termed “Socialism.” Johnson begins by citing a Washington Times article, entitled “New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism“:

The Obama campaign apparently didn’t look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, “Forward” — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism…Vladimir Lenin founded the publication “Vpered” (the Russian word for “forward”) in 1905. Soviet propaganda film-maker Dziga Vertov made a documentary whose title is sometimes translated as “Forward, Soviet” (though also and more literally as “Stride, Soviet”).

Johnson explains that “No, this isn’t just some isolated nut, it’s the “national news editor” writing in Washington’s top conservative newspaper,” and he provides 18 hot links to articles from various organs of “the right’s echo chamber” which parroted the Washington Times lunacy, presumably without irony. He cites another wingnut rag which claims that ‘Forward’ is a “Hitler Youth marching tune,” which, come to think of it, may backfire and endear him to some wingnuts.
Johnson adds “Next, go look at the 9.8 million Google hits that come up if you search on Obama and Marxist, or the 29 million hits if you search on Obama and Socialist” and notes also that “This follows Republican Congressman Alan West’s recent claim that 80 Democratic members of Congress are members of the Communist Party.”
Johnson provides even more citations of articles and videos featuring GOP leaders, yes, including Romney, piling on with message du jour red-baiting. All of which will give real socialists a huge chuckle. I can almost hear them now “Oh sure, Geithner, Summers — real Bolsheviks, those guys.”
Andrew Levison warned in a recent TDS strategy memo about the GOP’s descent into all out “propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparallelled in American history” directed against Democrats. Levison suggest some useful messaging to challenge the onslaught of fear-mongering and demonizing GOP attacks and forcing the Republican nominee to own it or disavow it.
Perhaps the most disgusting thing about the modern GOP’s red-baiting is that, thus far, none of them, not Olympia Snowe, John McCain, Richard Lugar, or any of those smart enough to know better, have stepped up and urged their GOP brethren to give the paranoiac delusions a rest. In a way, that’s a good thing for Dems because it lays bare the GOP’s party-wide integrity deficit that won’t be lost on more thoughtful swing voters.


Lux: Accountability for Big Bankers Can Help Dems

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The banking wars are getting more and more interesting. The legal and political implications are bigger than most people understand, and the players involved need to be very careful with the loaded guns they are gesturing with or they might shoot themselves in the foot (or perhaps an even more vulnerable body part.)
Underlying the entire drama is this fundamental subtext: the American people are fundamentally (and correctly) cynical about how the big bankers always seem to get away with whatever they want to get away with. Bailing out the bankers with no strings attached in order to save an economy that didn’t seem to most people to be very well saved, then watching the banks get record profits and bonuses the very next year while the rest of the economy was in the toilet didn’t engender much good cheer about whether justice had been done. Neither have the tons of books, news articles, and blog posts about the things these bankers were able to get away with in the course of the buildup to the crisis and the things that have happened since.
The new financial fraud task force the president announced in his State of the Union address, co-chaired by avowed Wall Street antagonist Eric Schneiderman from New York, was supposed to help staunch the cynicism about whether the masters of the Wall Street universe would ever be held accountable. Many of us who have been working on banking and housing issues had been calling for a deeper investigation of the banks, and when we got it, we were delighted, especially with Schneiderman playing such a leading role. But the success of this task force still hangs in the balance. A lot of questions have been raised by various groups and individuals working on this, including me, about how fast the task force was moving and whether the White House was focused on making sure things were effectively moving. Meanwhile, Republicans like Rep. Patrick McHenry, eager to serve their corporate masters on Wall Street, have started harassing and trying to slow down the task force in its work by forcing them to respond to threatening letters that are pure fishing expeditions.
The good news is that after what felt to a lot of activists like a very slow start, things seem like they are starting to come together in the task force. From everything I hear, the DOJ staffers that were to be assigned to the task force are now working, an executive director is likely to be on the verge of being hired, and other agencies including CFPB and HUD are actively and productively engaged and contributing resources. My sense is that there was some initial foot dragging by DOJ, but things are starting to move. And I think the flurry of questions and email petitions over the last couple of weeks did have the desired effect in getting the White House more involved in encouraging the bureaucracy to keep moving.
It will be very hard to know, of course, what is really going in a legal investigation that has to be confidential in releasing information they are finding in the investigation. It will be a long spring and summer for those of us who care about accountability for the banks, because the wheels of justice take some time to move, and I would guess that the earliest indictments could start flying is several months from now. In the meantime, activists will need to keep the heat on.
Turning from the legal back to the problem of the public’s cynicism about whether the big bankers will ever be held to account, the Obama administration does itself no favors when Treasury Secretary Geithner makes it sound like the administration has already decided not to prosecute anything. From Reuters:

“Most financial crises are caused by a mix of stupidity and greed and recklessness and risk-taking and hope,” said Geithner, who helped tackle the crisis for the Bush administration when he was the head of the New York Federal Reserve and has been urging Europe to act more aggressively to contain its debt problems. “You can’t legislate away stupidity and risk-taking and greed and recklessness. What you can do is make sure when it happens it does not cause too much damage and to do that you have to make sure you have good rules against fraud and abuse, better protections and you force banks to hold more capital against their risk,” he said.

This statement unfortunately echoed Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement after the task force was announced that in his assessment the problems were not mostly related to law-breaking but to greed and stupidity. Whoever is writing the talking points for these guys needs to be fired. The politics and optics of the president announcing a task force to look into Wall Street fraud, and then having his AG and Treasury Secretary announce that there probably weren’t many laws broken in advance of the investigation, is atrocious. If the president loses populist swing voters mad at Wall Street, and therefore the election, I’d recommend looking for a cause first at Geithner for statements like this and policies that have treated Wall Street with kid gloves.
Speaking of those swing voters: one of the biggest unresolved issues in the 2012 election will be whether President Obama can convince the swing voters who are both angry at Wall Street and skeptical of government — in great part because they think it is bought off by wealthy special interests like Wall Street bankers — that he will actually hold Wall Street accountable. Thirty-seven percent of voters in the 2010 exit polls, when asked who was primarily to blame for the economic problems the country was facing, said Wall Street — far more than any other person or institution named. That populist group of voters who blamed Wall Street first ended up breaking 56-42 for Republican candidates (after voting for Obama 2-1 in 2008) because they perceived that Obama was, in the haunting phrase of EJ Dionne, a “Wall Street liberal” — someone who was both too close to Wall Street and pro-big government. These mostly working class voters, many of them hard pressed economically, many of them with underwater mortgages, are under no illusions that Romney is a Wall Street guy through and through, which is why he had so much trouble with working class voters in the Republican primaries. But they don’t trust government or Obama either, and might well vote against the incumbent if they don’t see him taking on Wall Street. If these voters think both presidential candidates will coddle Wall Street, their tendency will be to vote for the one they think will keep taxes down and lower the deficit.
The fraud task force is burdened by three and a half years of virtually no visible action against the Wall Street fraud that helped bring down this economy, and by big expectations coming from the activists on this issue. Cynicism is high, and patience is low. I sympathize with those inside the task force to whom this feels unfair, but the bottom line is that they have to deliver something tangible, and relatively soon, to show that the big boys on Wall Street have to obey the same laws that everyone else does- that when they cheat their clients and cheat on their taxes and fraudulently manipulate markets, that they will be investigated, prosecuted, and spend some time in jail. If the task force can begin to deliver that kind of accountability, people are going to be a lot less cynical about their government.


A Religio-Political Realignment Around Culture As Opposed To–Everything Else

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When Charles Colson died last weekend, he was best known as the Watergate felon turned prison minister. But Colson, a constant presence in Christian Right circles for over two decades, had perhaps his greatest impact in another sphere of American life: expanding evangelical-Catholic cooperation in the fight against legalized abortion into a broader political alliance.
For signs of his success, look at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ latest manifesto, published just last month. Titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the statement embraces the long-standing conservative evangelical campaign against secularism in the courts and in the Obama administration. To protest the alleged threat to religious liberty, the document announced a “fortnight of freedom” series to occur in churches across the country this summer–coinciding with the quickening of the 2012 general election.
The Catholic document, which adopts culture-war memes long associated with the Christian Right, clearly reflects Colson’s long-standing campaign to identify religious freedom with the right of churches and church institutions to defy laws and polices they find repugnant. The statement even included a prominent shout-out to a similar, if more sharply worded, manifesto issued by Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT)–a loose alliance of thinkers and actors founded in 1994 by none other than Colson and his Catholic comrade, Richard John Neuhaus. (Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and former Lutheran minister, is responsible for creating much of the basic vocabulary of the more cerebral elements of the Christian Right in his 1984 book The Naked Public Square.)
When ECT issued its first manifesto, it was a highly controversial exercise that attracted considerable criticism from both evangelicals and Catholics. ECT proclaimed that the moral and political emergency facing conservative Christians trumped their vast theological differences–not to mention centuries of conflict, persecution, and vituperation. And while ECT’s struggle to achieve Catholic-evangelical convergence on doctrinal issues had at best a mixed record, the more fundamental claim that the most urgent matter for today’s Christians is common opposition to “secularist” policies has made astonishing strides, as witnessed by the Bishops’ statement.
But even as conservative Catholics and evangelicals agree to subjugate their continued differences in doctrine, worship, and non-cultural political traditions to a unified front against the enemy of moral relativism, the often-ignored third force in American Christianity–mainline Protestants–have been steadily overcoming precisely those doctrinal barriers that have long divided them from Rome. We may be on the brink of a religious realignment, whereby the issues on which Christians argued, fought, killed, and persecuted each other (and others) since the sixteenth century are giving way to a different source of division: the culture wars.
The signs of this realignment are most visible in politics. A highly traditionalist Catholic, Rick Santorum, who belongs to a parish where the Latin Mass is still celebrated, became the preferred presidential candidate of conservative evangelicals. Over the course of the primary campaign, it became clear that he shares the common conservative evangelical view that mainline Protestants are largely apostates, barely deserving inclusion in Christianity.
Yet the single most notable trend in mainline American Protestantism in recent decades has been the adoption of liturgical practices associated with Catholicism, such as frequent communion and observance of liturgical seasons, particularly since Rome reformed its own liturgy during and after the Second Vatican Council Catholics and most mainline Protestants have long since adopted a common “lectionary” of scripture readings for use during worship services throughout the year. At the same time, the radical theological experiments that were once so fashionable in liberal Protestant circles have been subsiding; mainliners are far more likely to recite the historic Nicene or Apostle’s creeds during worship than are evangelicals. In other words, a growing number of mainline Protestants now worship much like Catholics. And on non-cultural issues, from social justice to anti-war protests, Catholic and mainline Protestant cooperation–particularly at the local level–has become a familiar part of the civic landscape. This tradition, in fact, is continuing currently in the combined criticism of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal by both mainline Protestants and Catholic Bishops.
For anyone familiar with the history of intra-Christian conflict, the mainline-Catholic convergence on doctrine and worship is jarring. I recently attended a Sunday service at a mainline Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregation in Atlanta where the Lord’s Supper was referred to as a “sacrifice.” This would have been startling not only to that denomination’s nineteenth century founders, but to the Protestant Reformers themselves, who abandoned regular communion precisely because of its treatment by the medieval Church as a sacrifice instead of as a testament of faith.
The oddity of the ever-strengthening conservative Catholic-evangelical alliance against the “modernist” mainliners on cultural issues, if nothing else, is most evident in the battles within the mainline denominations over acceptance of homosexuality among lay people and clergy. More often than not, the evangelicals who accuse denominational leaders of abandoning “orthodoxy” in moral teaching are most avid to promote innovation in styles of worship. As an Episcopal priest in Maryland ruefully told me of conservative dissidents in his parish during the 1990s: “These people come to church with a Christian Coalition tract in one hand and a ‘praise hymnal’ in the other.” In the broader fight over ordination of LGBT priests and bishops that has shaken the Anglican communion during the last decade, it’s the evangelicals indifferent or hostile to traditional worship who are leading the battle for “traditional” moral views, while the liturgically conservative Anglo-Catholic wing has generally been indifferent or supportive towards the advent of openly gay clergy.
All these cross-cutting trends and counter-trends in American (and global) Christianity call into question any glib arrangement of denominations, movements, or individuals as conservative or liberal, traditionalist or modernist. Neuhaus and Colson certainly had little doubt that what brought them together as culture-warriors was more important than any of the divergent ways their two Christian traditions have developed doctrinally in two millennia.
And for now, at least, the most powerful leaders among conservative evangelicals seem to agree with Colson. It’s too early to conclude that Neuhaus’s argument has won over the U.S. Catholic hierarchy for good–much less the many millions of Catholic lay people, priests and religious who have not enlisted in the culture wars. But if the recent alarms raised by the Bishops on “religious freedom”–complemented by the Vatican’s crackdown on non-compliant American nuns–are any indication, that’s the direction they seem to be headed. If so, they will stand against the mainline Protestants who increasingly find common ground with them at the altar and in the pews, if not on the cultural and political barricades.


Political Strategy Notes

The Obama campaign has settled on ‘Forward’ as a slogan for the coming weeks/months of the general election campaign, and it is fleshed out in a new, 7-minute video. The elegantly simple slogan has its merits (discussed here), though it’s not as provocative as, say, the “GM is Alive and bin Laden is Dead” bumper sticker (versions here and here).
Nate Silver explains at FiveThirtyEight why Arizona is not a true swing state in his view: “…if he does win Arizona it will probably be superfluous, since in all likelihood he’ll already have won states like Ohio, Colorado and Virginia that are closer to the tipping point.”
Lots of articles on the resurrection of Mayday as an activist holiday, thanks mostly to the Occupy Movement and the GOP war on workers. Peter Dreier has a good overview at The Nation.

The most devastating article for the GOP during the last few days has to be WaPo’s op-ed, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem” by Brookings’ Thomas E. Mann and A.E.I.’s Norman J. Ornstein, who say: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics..ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…Thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington…The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality…Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views.”

An interesting tidbit from David Grant’s lengthy Monitor article “US Senate race in Virginia shaping up as national battleground“: “Of the 10 US Senate races considered to be the most competitive, only one other contest [besides Kaine vs. Allen in Virginia]- Nevada – is in a swing state. Both campaigns and independent analysts believe that is leading, already, to a massive infusion of outside money and attention unmatched in the commonwealth’s recent political history.”

Yay Clooney!

Sarah Jones reports on “Scott Walker Blames Protesters for Wisconsin’s Highest in Nation Job Losses” at PoliticusUSA, noting that “You haven’t truly seen waste and debauchery until you watch a post-Reagan “fiscal conservative” in office…If you want to know what a “businessman” Mitt Romney presidency would look like, just take a look into Wisconsin under Scott Walker. It is the only state with statistically significant job losses…When you hear these words, “I’m a businessman and I’m here to help,” run. Just run. ”

Karl Rove’s state by state polling averages map is surprisingly encouraging — for Democrats.

Michael Tomasky argues that the Obama campaign is right to claim some credit for the raid that killed bin Laden. And it’s OK to remember Romney saying “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” even though he has walked it back. Says Tomasky: “For Republicans, 9/11 politics are supposed to be permanently frozen in mid-2002, with Democrats shivering like Proust under the bedcovers as all the manly Republican men (Five-deferments Cheney and the rest) explained to America that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat and that anyone who didn’t agree with this assertion hated freedom…” Tomasky adds that Republicans will try to “intimidate Democrats into not mentioning it–because they know it hurts them and makes them look like the incompetents they are. Well it’s not 2002, and Democrats should be afraid no longer.”

“Don’t get mad, get elected,” say Debbie Walsh and Kathy Kleeman, director and senior communications officer, respectively of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. They report in the Washington Post that 2012 is shaping up to be a banner year for women in U.S. politics: “By our tally, 225 women — 145 Democrats and 80 Republicans — have filed to run for the House of Representatives this election cycle, although 12 lost their primaries. Seventy more are considered candidates in states where filing is still ahead..That means we’re on track to beat the previous record of 262 female House candidates set in 2010.”

The Wall St. Journal reports that a growing chorus of European economists are making the case that austerity is the wrong way for the EEC to go. Meanwhile in France, anti-austerity challenger Francois Hollande is holding a strong edge in the latest polls over President Nicolas Sarkozy on the eve of Sunday’s presidential elections. Should be a rollicking May Day in Paris.