As the Democratic Party increasingly focuses on social security and the minimum wage as key issues for a more populist approach as the key to future victories, John Russo, long time director of the Center for Working Class Studies in Youngstown Ohio, looks back at two other issues that played an important role in sapping working class support for the Dems in the 90’s.
Here’s his analysis of Ohio:

In January 2014, we celebrate two anniversaries – the beginning of the War on Poverty (1964) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA 1994). So it is a good time to consider how these two programs affected the working class and how they continue to shape working-class political attitudes towards the Democratic Party…
Together, NAFTA and welfare reform give poor and working-class voters, and the community and labor groups that advocate for their interests, good reason to feel betrayed by the Democratic Party. In Ohio in 1992, for example, labor and community groups engaged in massive organizing efforts to get President Clinton elected. Yet within four years, Clinton’s trade and welfare policies had undermined both good paying jobs and social and economic support structures.
Because of this betrayal, it would take more than a decade for Democrats to regain enough support to win statewide offices in Ohio…While support for Democrats reemerged nominally in 2006 and 2008 in Ohio and nationally, that support remains fragile and often relies on voters suspending their disbelief in Democratic Party politics.

You can read the whole analysis HERE

At The PlumLine Greg Sargent reports that “Dems hatch new strategy to pressure GOP on unemployment insurance,” explaining: “Dems who are pushing for an extension have hatched a new…: Once Congress returns, they will refuse to support the reauthorization of the farm bill — which will almost certainly need Dem support to pass the House — unless Republicans agree to restart unemployment benefits with the farm bill’s savings. “Under no circumstances should we support the farm bill unless Republicans agree to use the savings from it to extend unemployment insurance,” Dem Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a top party strategist, told me today. “This is a potential pressure point. We’re going to have to resolve differences in the farm bill because otherwise milk prices will spike. If past is prologue, they are going to need a good chunk of Democrats to pass the farm bill.”…Van Hollen said that a “minimum of $15 billion in savings” was expected from the farm bill, much of it “from the elimination of direct subsidies,” and said it would be unconscionable not to use this money for some form of an extension of unemployment benefits (rather than deficit reduction), which would not only help 1.3 million people, but the economy, too.”
Dan Merica of CNN Politics has a good update, “Democrats’ dream of a blue South: Moon pie in the sky?,” with a focus on Mississippi: “Ask a Southern Democrat if he or she can win statewide, and you will get a wide array of anecdotes and theories. Some point to the last Democratic governor in each state, while others to President Barack Obama winning 43.5% of the vote in Mississippi without spending any money there in 2012…But the most often-cited anecdote — by far — is the success that Southern Democrats had in 2013 municipal elections in Mississippi…For the first time in nearly 30 years, a Democrat was elected mayor of Tupelo, while Meridian elected its first-ever black mayor — a Democrat. After the win, Southern Democrats heralded the day as “Blue Tuesday” and celebrated the victories as a sign of things to come.”
In his post “Are Young Workers the Future of Labor?,” James Cersonsky of In These Times has unearthed a hopeful, though unsourced, statistic: “…Nearly two-thirds of 18-29-year olds have a favorable impression of unions, more than any other age bracket. The time is ripe for labor leaders to bring the next generation into the fold.” If this stat is solid, it is encouraging, given the decline of union membership and the MSM news blackout on union accomplishments.
The Pew Research Center reports a significant decline in the ‘enthusiasm gap’ favoring the GOP between Democratic (and Dem-leaning) vs. Republican (and GOP-leaning) registered voters — about 6 percent today, vs. 14 percent four years ago.
At National Journal’s Hotline on Call, check out Alex Roarty’s “Democrats Divided on How to Recover from Obamacare: Former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg argues Obamacare could be a political winner. Other Democratic strategists are more nervous.” Roaty writes, quoting Greenberg, “On Thursday, senior Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg told reporters that the Republican focus on hitting Democrats over Obamacare was a political “trap.” Citing a new Democracy Corps poll he helped conduct, Greenberg said if Republican dwell on repealing the law while Democrats focus on fixing the economy, Democrats will come out on top….”I know there is an initial opportunity in going after the rollout … I would argue this is a trap,” he said. “The more they’re on this, the more voters say they’re just part of this extreme partisan gridlock [in Congress], and they’re not addressing the economy and jobs.”
Here’s an interesting quote, from a Forbes Magazine article, no less: “During four years of the hapless George W. Bush administration Republicans actually did control all three branches, but the size of government hardly decreased. It grew…You see, the Republicans talk a big game about small government, but they do so with a forked tongue. A major driver of the busted spending caps was Republican aversion to reductions in defense outlays. This is puzzling. Supposedly it’s in our national security interest to force a weaker economy on Americans so that some of the richest countries in the world can be defended by our military for free.”
In the wake of Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle City Council, Bhaskar Sunkara and Micah Uetricht address the question “Can Socialists Win Elections in the U.S.?“, also at ITT.
Required reading for every Democratic candidate preparing to deliver a speech or be interviewed on the topic of education: Blake Fleetwood’s HuffPo post “If You Want the American Dream, Go to Finland,” which includes this nugget: “Not so long ago America had the best school system in the world and the best access to education. Land grant colleges created the largest, most educated middle class in history, which, in turn, led to world supremacy in education, civil liberties, social mobility, science, medicine and a host of other areas…Our education system is static and falling behind other advanced countries — an economic time bomb — whereas Finland is an educational superpower, the best in the west, according to the PISA studies of 470,000 15-year-old students from 65 countries…Our educational progress is merely mediocre compared to the rapid advances being made in other industrialized countries and Asian cities such as Singapore and Shanghai. American students rank 37, behind such countries — in math, the basic sciences and even languages.”
At Wonkblog Dylan Matthews has a discussion with Gawker’s Tom Scocca about the virtues of negativity in politics and the harm done by political ‘smarm,’ which serves to enable conflict-avoidance.

Ezra Klein’s “Inequality isn’t ‘the defining challenge of our time‘” adds some useful perspective to the latest political buzzword. Klein argues that reducing unemployment is a more urgent policy priority than addressing “inequality”:

…Joblessness is still endemic. Growth simply isn’t producing enough jobs. This is a more severe and more urgent problem than inequality. Moreover, fixing it is necessary, though not sufficient, to making real headway against inequality.
It is, however, a harder problem to mobilize a political coalition around. It doesn’t offend our moral intuitions so much as confuse them. Someone making $85,000 annually can look at the incomes of the top one percent and be angry and scared. They can hear that Germany has more social mobility than the does the United States and be offended. The plight of the long-term unemployed and the economy’s stubborn refusal to generate catch-up growth are more abstract concerns to someone with a good job. It’s harder to build a political movement around the intense pain of the few than the more generalized anger of the many.
It’s fair to wonder whether any of this matters. The Obama administration would like to boost demand. But Congress isn’t going to let them. Asking whether inequality or joblessness or growth is the defining economic challenge of our time is like asking how many John Boehners can dance on the head of a pin.
But the same logic applies to inequality: The policies Obama mentioned in his speech — like raising taxes on the rich — also don’t have a shadow of a prayer of passing the House.
The game being played here is a longer one. Of late, inequality become a much more popular research topic — and much more money has been devoted to researching it. Obama consigliere John Podesta founded the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank dedicated to funding research into inequality. The political system’s focus on the issue is leading to more thinking, more concern, more ideas and more pressure for action.
None of that will matter much now. But it will matter eventually. When the left next gets a chance to make economic policy, what will they choose to do? A world in which inequality is the top concern is a world in which raising taxes on the rich is perhaps the most important policy choice the government can make. A world in which growth and unemployment are top concerns are worlds in which very different policies — from stimulus spending to permitting more inflation — might be the top priorities.

Difficult as the challenge is, reducing unemployment is a more politically-coherent policy priority than addressing “inequality.” Yet tax hikes for the rich and pubic service employment or infrastructure investment, for example, may be popular with the public, but neither one is possible with the Republican blockade in the House.
Economic inequality and unemployment are intertwined to a great extent — it’s hard to envision substantial progress in either without some benefit to the other, provided you define employment in terms of “a job at a living wage.” Too many of the jobs created in recent years, however, provide inadequate pay, which enables festering economic inequality. An increase in decent jobs would likely reduce prevailing pay gaps.
What is certain is that neither malady will be addressed until Democrats secure working majorities in both houses of congress. Klein is right that putting jobs first makes more sense than arguing about how to divide a shrinking pie.

Yesterday, TDS Editor Ed Kilgore commented on the recent Wall Street Journal editorial penned by the principals of the group Third Way in both his Political Animal column at the Washington Monthly and in a TDS Strategy Memo. Ed’s comments appear in the post below this one.
Today we are pleased to print a response from Jim Kessler, the Senior Vice President for Policy of Third Way.
Ed – As a fellow centrist, I always appreciate your views, so please allow me to respond to your posting.
First, Senator Warren and Mayor DeBlasio are important voices within the Democratic Party and they are valued for their passion, dedication to the poor and middle class, and for many of their ideas. They each bring energy and ideas to the Democratic Party. We did not write or even suggest that there should be an intra-party purge. In fact, as you know, some have actually called for the party to be purged of moderates/centrists and have funded efforts to push them out of office. We believe the opposite – that Democrats are best as a big tent party that can and must have passionate policy and political debates. So rather than a “purge,” the question we posed in our op-ed is whether their vision of progressivism is right nationally. And on this question, we do not agree.
Second, there is nothing in our op-ed that suggests antagonism toward New Deal programs. But there is a brewing entitlement crisis in this country – in our view. The number of senior citizens will grow by 80% over the next several decades, while the number of working age Americans (those who pay for their programs) grows by 8%. Meanwhile, as entitlement spending increases unabated, other investments suffer. We’ve seen that over and over again. There are various ways to address the entitlement crunch. A few years ago we proposed to expand benefits to those at the bottom and middle and feel strongly that is crucial to do. But we don’t think that every single senior citizen should get a larger Social Security benefit no matter how wealthy they are or whether or not they paid more into the system. We need to take care of senior citizens, for sure. But in 2011, one out of every nine senior households earned more than $100,000. Why should we increase their COLAs?
What we find concerning about economic populism is that, in our view, it adheres to a belief that we can have it all. We can expand entitlement programs, we can invest more in kids, and we can adequately defend the nation all by increasing taxes on the wealthy. Absolutely, we need to increase taxes on the wealthy – let’s be clear. But there just aren’t enough of them to cover the costs of these programs. So what happens is that programs for kids and investments get hit (like sequestration). It’s happening in the federal budget and it’s happening in state budgets.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond.
Jim Kessler.

A big brouhaha broke out last week over a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jon Cowen and Jim Kessler of the Third Way organization. These gents penned an intemperately worded attack on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio, and “economic populism” generally, while advancing deficit-hawky rhetoric about the need for “entitlement reform.”
As a veteran myself of centrist/populist battles over the years and also as long-time editor of The Democratic Strategist which is firmly and emphatically committed to advancing both Democratic unity and intra-democratic civility, I’m reasonably sure the Cowen-Kessler piece was deliberately intended as a provocation to create a fight the authors very much wanted to have. In contrast to the op-ed, Warren and de Blasio have not called for any sort of intra-Democratic Party purge, and both are operating entirely within the zone of acceptable progressive opinion. The op-ed’s wholesale condemnation of populism, and belligerence towards the New Deal programs–published, moreover, in the chief organ of Wall Street finance capital rather than some more neutral venue–was certain to draw blood and then fire, which is exactly what happened.
But I would hope that progressives who are currently beating up on Third Way as the embodiment of Democratic “centrism” will pause for a moment to recognize that there is also a very different kind of centrism that exists within the Democratic coalition–one that is neither reflexively anti-populist nor intentionally divisive. A much better representation of the tone among what I consider genuine centrists is a brief symposium published yesterday by the Brookings Institution in which five wonks who are typically associated with Democratic “moderates” (Thomas Mann, Bill Galston, Elaine Kamarck, Molly Jackman and Michael O’Hanlon) suggest what they think should have been in today’s budget deal. You don’t have to agree with all their suggestions–I certainly don’t–to acknowledge their tone and objective of civil discussion rather than civil war.
So if I may be so bold as to make a very emphatic recommendation to all members of the progressive and Democratic communities, next time you read any “centrist” broadside or manifesto expressed in highly provocative and divisive terms that seeks to foment a highly public battle over the direction of the Democratic Party, pause to consider the motives of the authors and don’t cooperate in defining them as the exclusive spokespeople for entire sectors of the Democratic coalition, when all they may actually represent is a far smaller group with an aching hunger for more media attention and new, well-heeled financial donors.
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor

The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
New Democracy Corps Survey of the Battleground House Districts
The final Democracy Corps battleground survey of 2013 fielded just days after the ACA website fixes were launched–and in the midst of a serious debate in Washington and among pundits about the viability of the President’s signature healthcare law and what it might mean for 2014. However, even as pundits and politicians determined that the ACA website spelled disaster for Democrats in 2014, voters determined that they were unwilling to reward Republicans. Instead, the latest survey of the 50 most competitive Republican house districts and the 30 most competitive Democratic districts should provide a warning to pundits that it is the voters who will ultimately decide the balance of the House next November.
Key Points:
This poll is in the congressional battleground looking at named incumbents and is virtually the only window into what is really happening.
Yes, the health care roll-out and reduced presidential standing has hurt Democrats, but keep it in perspective:

Voters evenly divided on this issue; the big debate ends in a draw. Not a wedge issue.

Majority want to implement in Dem districts and plurality in Republicans

It is hurting the GOP image and re-enforcing that members are part of partisan battle

Keeps Republicans on their weakest case for their role

Setting up strong Democratic attack on Speaker Boehner’s failure to focus on economy and jobs

Gives Democrats opportunity to use to reach affected groups, particularly unmarried women

The big structural forces that leave the Tea Party Republican brand deeply tarnished are undiminished:

All incumbents damaged but Republicans even more so

Republicans at lowest point ever on all key metrics — compared to any prior election

Democrats have continuing brand advantage in these districts

Want members to work with Obama, not to keep stopping agenda

Serious plurality now ready to vote against member because they support Speaker Boehner and the impact on economy and jobs.

Two big demographic dynamics that will determine what happens:

Seniors. Republicans trail their challenger among seniors in the Republican districts.

Unmarried women. If they turn out and vote as in 2012 and in Virginia in 2013, Democrats make major gains. They are underperforming now at 52 percent in Republican districts, but shift 9 points after health care debate and the race overall moves to even. That puts one-half of these 50 seats really at risk.

See the presentation here
__________________________________________
Democracy Corps is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people. It was founded in 1999 by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Democracy Corps provides public opinion research and strategic advice to those dedicated to a more responsive Congress and Presidency. Learn more at www.democracycorps.com.
Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501 (c)(4) organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to increasing the voting participation and issue advocacy of unmarried women. Learn more at www.wvwvaf.org.
Public Campaign Action Fund (PCAF) works to hold politicians who are against comprehensive campaign finance reform accountable for where they get their political donations. Learn more at www.campaignmoney.org.

From E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s column on the Murray-Ryan budget deal: “The bad news is not only that the proposal unconscionably lets unemployment insurance lapse for millions, which will cost the economy some 300,000 jobs next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It also comes very close to enforcing a spending freeze after this year….This is not a good deal. It is, at best, a necessary deal, given the alternatives available in a political system whose priorities have been twisted away from the needs of the struggling majority. It’s this majority that has to make the noise

Dem oppo researchers should check out the Winter 2014 issue of Democracy Journal, which includes insightful articles about the current clout of the tea party. As editor Michael Tomasky explains in his introduction to the issue: “Theda Skocpol tells us why the movement has some staying power. Alan Abramowitz shows why the GOP leadership won’t cut it loose any time soon. Christopher Parker weighs in on whether, and how, the movement might outlast President Obama. Sean Wilentz enters the debate over its historical roots. Leslie Gelb and Michael Kramer consider the Tea Partiers’ impact on Republican internationalism and U.S. foreign policy. And Dave Weigel weighs the chances of a Tea Party candidate winning the 2016 GOP nomination.”

According to a new AP/GfK poll conducted 12/5-9, “Democrats have a slim edge as the party Americans would prefer to control Congress, 39 percent to 33 percent. But a sizable 27 percent say it doesn’t matter who’s in charge.”

A Gallup Poll conducted 12/5-8 found that “The Republican Party’s favorability has improved slightly to 32% from an all-time low of 28% in October during the government shutdown, while 61% now view the GOP unfavorably. The Democratic Party — on the defensive recently for the flawed rollout of the healthcare website — maintains a favorable rating of 42%. But a majority of Americans, 53%, now see the party unfavorably, up from 49% in October.”
David Freedlander’s Daily Beast post “It’s DINO Hunting Season as the Democrats Gird for Their Own Civil War” spotlights and probably overstates the divisive potential of the rift between Dem progressives and conservatives.

But Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future argues at HuffPo that “It’s a fight to determine whether that party will represent the public’s interests unsparingly in the years to come, or will continue to be swayed by corporate interests.”

This Third Way study doesn’t indicate that Dems have a lot to worry about in terms of attrition in voter registration, with a 1 percent overall decline. But it does spotlight some key states where Dems have slipped and must do better, including PA, NH, NC and FL.

The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent provides a couple of perceptive observations: “Here’s a point that keeps getting lost…Inequality is already a disproportionally huge issue among Democratic base voters, and they believe overwhelmingly that government can — and should — do something about it…A new poll captures this nicely. The Bloomberg survey found that huge majorities of Americans say the U.S. no longer offers everyone an equal shot, and that the gap between the rich and the rest is getting bigger….if Dems can keep the focus on actual policies in response to GOP screams of “class warfare” (a war cry that seems to make centrist Dems quake in fear), inequality could prove more favorable political turf for them.”

Chri Cillizza’s post “The best campaign of 2013” offers this interesting observation about mobilizing women voters in the McAuliffe campaign for VA Governor: “…the McAuliffe campaign invested heavily (and early) in efforts to turn out drop-off female voters as well as those in the black community and those aged 18-29.”Our drop-off universe was disproportionately young, disproportionately minority, very heavily disproportionately female. But particularly young people, and particularly younger women, the way you get them is over the Internet,” McAuliffe campaign manager Robby Mook told Reid.”

The following article by TPM editor and publisher Josh Marshall, is cross-posted from Talking Points Memo:
Very interesting discussion here at The Hive of what TPM Readers think of the group ‘Third Way’ (sub req). I think I’ll jump in myself. But just speaking for myself, it’s not so much that I disagree with most of the group’s positions (though I do) as I see them as sort of irrelevant to most current policy discussions.
Obviously, calling a group ‘irrelevant’ can simply be the harshest sort of swipe. And in a sense it is. But I mean it more specifically. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council (which, not coincidentally, went out of business two years ago), definitely had a constituency in right-leaning Democrats from the South and Midwest. It had a policy-political constituency in the widespread belief that the national Democratic party had discredited with the public on issues like national security, welfare, crime, etc.
There’s no point in rehearsing the discussion of whether that was accurate or not: it was the baseline question around which a lot of campaigns and policy debates were argued during that period. The Democrats did lose 5 out of 6 consecutive national elections (1968-1988). And its one-time Southern base appeared to be (and was) in permanent decline.
It is fascinating to remember that one of the high profile ‘victims’ of the 1994 Republican landslide was David McCurdy, then a member of the House trying to make his jump to the Senate and a man very much with national political ambitions. And he was from Oklahoma. It’s hard to imagine any Democrat trying to build a national political career from Oklahoma today.
Things look very different now. Republicans have won the popular vote only once since 1992 and a fairly progressive Democratic President was just reelected during a period of slow growth and high unemployment. It’s just hard to make any credible argument that the Democratic party, either objectively or subjectively, has drifted outside the mainstream of American political life. Nor is it easy to argue that both parties are captive to their extremes and a ‘third way’ is necessary. Certainly, it’s hard to make that case to Democrats, whereas there was a decent constituency of Democrats who very much did believe that twenty and thirty years ago.
The key policy question facing Democrats today is whether there is any credible or viable policy prescription to arrest the trend toward a winner take all society in which the top 10% or 15% do better and better and the rest stagnate or lose ground. In other words, the question of the day is inequality and whether we can act collectively to do anything about it. In that context, cutting taxes for high-income earners and retrenching social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare is a pretty tough sell.
Back during the time he was in the House and angling for promotion to the Senate, Harold Ford used to say, “I didn’t leave my party; my party left me.” Of course, that’s an old line told by countless Democrats in the post-60s era. But it perfectly captured Ford’s ridiculousness in the post-Clinton era since for most people who used to say that, the time when the Democratic party ‘left them’ was in the 60s or early 70s. That is to say, around the time Ford was born.
That captures a lot of what the ‘Third Way’ is about: a sort of fossilized throwback to a period in the late 20th century when there was a market for groups trying to pull the Democrats ‘back to the center and away from the ideological extreme’ in an era when Democrats are the fairly non-ideological party and have a pretty decent record of winning elections in which most people vote.

In his latest New York Times op-ed, Thomas B. Edsall addresses a weighty question at the intersection of policy and conscience, which is likely to be repeatedly raised throughout 2014, “Does Rising Inequality Make Us Hardhearted?” Edsall explains:

…A 2008 study of public attitudes during periods of mounting inequality found that “when inequality in America rises, the public responds with increased conservative sentiment.” This conservative shift applies to all income groups, including the poor, according to the political scientists Nathan Kelly of the University of Tennessee and Peter Enns of Cornell. “Rather than generating opinion shifts that would make redistributive policies more likely,” Kelly and Enns write, “increased economic inequality produces a conservative response in public sentiment.”
The Kelly-Enns study examines poll data and inequality trends between 1952 and 2006. In an email Enns wrote earlier this week, he added that more recent data shows a continuation of the trend: “between 2006 and 2011 (when the most recent data are available) inequality has mostly continued to increase and the public has shifted in a more conservative direction — especially since 2008. This relationship is consistent with our previous findings.”
A key tool Kelly and Enns use for their work is a statistical analysis of the policy mood of the country developed by James Stimson of the University of North Carolina…From 1992 to 2012, according to Stimson’s analysis, overall support for liberal, pro-government initiatives has declined. These results suggest that President Obama’s plan to dedicate the remainder of his term to reducing inequality, to which he devoted a major speech last week, will face significant political opposition inside and outside of Congress.

Edsall adds that a 2011 Pew Research Center survey “found that among all voters capitalism (a rough proxy for deregulated markets) is viewed favorably by a 50-40 margin and socialism (a rough proxy for interventionist government) negatively by 60-31.” Edsall notes the exception of African and Latino American voters, who feel otherwise. Other polls have indicated surprisingly small opposition to an expanded role for government and even “socialistic” policies.
On the question of “whether a voter believes that people are poor because of their own bad choices or thinks that poverty is the result of what pollsters call “circumstances,” Edsall adds:

A Pew survey, conducted in 2012, produced results that demonstrated the nation’s ambivalence on this question. The more voters blame poverty on a lack of effort by the poor themselves, the more inclined they are to say that there are legions of “undeserving” poor for whom taxpayer-funded government programs are not warranted. The more a respondent blames poverty on external circumstances, the more likely he or she is to support government action to remedy those circumstances.
Overall, according to Pew, 46 percent of the public does not fault the poor, agreeing that their plight is the outcome of unfavorable circumstances, while 38 percent are more judgmental, declaring that poverty stems from a lack of individual effort.
This relatively modest 8-point difference among all voters masks very large partisan — and significant racial and ethnic — divisions. A decisive majority of Republicans (see Figure 3), 57-27, say that people are poor because of a lack of effort, while an even larger majority of Democrats, 61-24, say “circumstances” are the cause of poverty. Whites are split, 41-41, while blacks back circumstances 62-28, as do Hispanics, 59-27.

Edsall also notes that “Voters are notoriously conflicted in their ideological outlook — what Stimson, writing with Christopher Ellis of Bucknell, described in a 2009 paper on belief systems as “the contradiction in American ideologies, a contradiction often seen in joint preferences for both conservative symbols and liberal policy action.” It’s as if many voters are more comfortable calling themselves conservatives, even though they support progressive policies when offered the choice.
Citing Gallup data indicating that few voters are comfortable identifying themselves as “economic liberals,” Edsall wonders if “Obama risks activating voters’ “theoretical” conservatism, as opposed to a strategy that stresses specifics in non-ideological terms, a kind of practical liberalism: raising the minimum wage, raising tax rates on unearned income, job training, early education.
Readers won’t have much trouble finding other polls which indicate that substantial majorities support various populist economic proposals, regardless of how respondents describe their individual political beliefs. For now, at least, Edsall’s analysis suggests Dems should give as much thought to how they describe their economic ideology as they do to the policies they advocate.

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:
There has been a long-term intra-Democratic party battle between progressive populists and the more Wall Street-oriented wing of the party for 3 decades now, one that (full disclosure) I will admit to having been a happy warrior in on the side of the progressives for that entire time. This week has been a big moment in that battle, as the Third Way amusingly picked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal as the place to launch an attack on progressives generally but most particularly against Elizabeth Warren. Jonathan Martin did a nice job of summarizing the back and forth in this article, where I am quoted a couple of times on why progressives would choose to defend Warren so strongly, which great leaders like PCCC and Markos Moulitsas at Dailykos did so well.
However this isn’t really mainly a battle between progressives and “centrists” for the soul of the Democratic party, although there is certainly an element of that, and it is certainly understandable for reporters to talk about it in those traditional political battle terms. But what this is more fundamentally about is a battle between the biggest special interest corporations in the world, who tend to have overwhelming sway over everything in Washington, and those of us who want to confront and rein in their power. Those interests know they control the Republicans, because Republicans answer to money first and foremost. But Democrats have DNA and ancient roots from ancestors like Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, Andy Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, FDR, Harry Truman, and the Kennedys — people who distrusted the big financial firms based in New York, distrusted big corporate trusts in general — and that DNA is a continuing problem for these Wall Street conglomerates.
The think tanks and political committees they fund on the Democratic side — in the Clinton era their lead group was the DLC, now it’s Third Way — are asked by the big money guys to come to their defense when the populists start to rise up and upset their apple cart, and they do. Yes, this is undeniably a battle between 2 different wings of the Democratic party, the people wing and the money wing. But it is even more centrally a fight between Wall Street and big business on the one hand, and the politicians who might threaten them like Elizabeth Warren.
I actually feel kind of badly on one level for the leaders of these kinds of DC Centrist groups. Al From and Bruce Reed at the DLC, and Jon Cowan at Third Way, are smart policy wonks who are actually very thoughtful and engaging in the kind of policy discussions they enjoy having, and both groups have come up with some good policy ideas and analysis — the AmeriCorps idea, the Reinventing Government initiative, and the 100,000 cops on the street piece of the 1994 crime bill were all Third Way proposals, and all good ideas. But what happens to these kinds of groups is that because DC centrism has no broad appeal to regular folks who make the activist and small contributor base of the Democratic party (for some reason, it’s hard to raise money through email appeals that call for cutting your grandma’s Social Security benefits), these kinds of groups have to rely on corporate special interest contributions.
And as politicians who take a lot of money from them know, these special interests expect you to come through for them when they come calling for a favor. And boy do they hate the idea of so many people being excited about Elizabeth Warren’s common sense populism, so they really needed their friends at Third Way to try and take her down a couple of notches (and throwing in a shot across the bow at Wall Street’s new mayor was an important political message too.) Just like during last year’s campaign, when Wall Street was desperate to defeat Warren, so they got Third Way to issue a scathing statement against her that the Chamber of Commerce and other Republican hit groups immediately used against her, Wall Street needed Third Way to come through, and they did.

Read more…