Sen. Bernie Sanders, albeit officially (and for a very long time) an Independent, is a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, and votes with Democrats most of the time. Still, his Independent self-ID could create some problems for him on the presidential campaign trail, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

In what I assume is a moment of mischief, former NH Republican congressman Charlie Bass has penned a WaPo op-ed suggesting that Bernie Sanders’ robust poll numbers in NH may not matter because he will not be elgible to run for president in the Granite State as a Democrat. Here’s the logic:

[S]tate law makes clear that candidates must be registered members of the party on whose ballot line they wish to appear.
This is a problem for Sanders, who is not a registered Democrat. One might ask why the good senator can’t simply change his registration in his home state from socialist or independent to Democrat. The answer is that Vermont doesn’t have a party registration system, so he can’t. Similar issues arose with the candidacies of Al Gore and both George H.W. and George W. Bush because, like Vermont, Tennessee and Texas do not register voters by party. But Gore and the Bushes qualified for New Hampshire’s primary ballots because they could show that they had previously appeared on ballots as a Democrat and Republicans, respectively. In his last election, Sanders likewise won the Democratic primary in Vermont, but he declined the nomination and asked that his name not appear on the general election ballot as a Democrat.
In short, Sanders is not a Democrat, has not been elected as a Democrat, has never served as a Democrat and cannot plausibly claim, at least in New Hampshire, to be a Democrat.

According to Bass, a State Ballot Law Commission would rule on any challenge to Sanders’ ballot access, and he thinks it would be compelled to exclude Bernie. Presumably the courts could offer a way around the Commission; I’m not sure what the legal or constitutional rationale would be, but it would be a mite strange to hold that an independent could not contest a primary in which independent voters are allowed to participate. And even if Bernie was to be excluded, he could always run a write-in campaign (which have been known to succeed in NH, viz. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964).
Whether or not Bass is pointing to a real problem in NH, it is a reminder that there could be issues for Sanders elsewhere, particularly in closed primary and caucus states deemed legally to be open only to registered Democrats. It would be a bit ironic if the candidate of people who view themselves as representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” wasn’t Democratic enough to get on the ballot.

In any event, the much-discussed advantages of calling oneself an “Independent” might have some consequences.

I’m not sure I can recall a major Newspaper of Record piece of political analysis that was shot down more quickly and more overwhelmingly than last weekend’s New York Times piece by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman giving vent to red-state Democratic complaints that Hillary Clinton had spurned the family tradition by focusing on Obama Coalition voters. The fact that these complaints were echoed by Ron Fournier and David Brooks undermined them even more.
I added my two cents at the Washington Monthly after a lot of other critiques had appeared:

Unlike some bashers, I didn’t spend the Clinton years arguing that a “middle-out” strategy of the sort Joe Manchin wants HRC to pursue was a treasonous alternative to the “base-in” strategy that Obama more or less adopted in 2012. What Bill Clinton did made perfect sense for 1992 and 1996. It might have even worked for Al Gore in 2000 had he chosen one approach instead of alternating back-and-forth between defending the Clinton-Gore record and championing “the people versus the powerful.”
That was then and this is now, and as Nancy LeTourneau pointed out yesterday, the idea that the “Clinton strategy” puts more electoral votes in play than the “Obama strategy” is dubious to begin with. What do you think is a safer electoral vote strategy: one that concedes Kentucky and West Virginia, or one in which California has to be defended?
As for downballot support, I hate to be cynical about it, but by election day 2016 the only thing surer than red-state Democratic demands for more national money will be red-state demands that HRC keep the hell away from the campaigns of red-state Democrats.
Candidates hunt where the ducks are. The planted axiom of the Times piece is that somehow “America” should be identified with swing voters, no matter how scarce or numerous they are. That’s based in part on the entirely erroneous impression that a candidate who “reaches out” to voters beyond her or his “base” is going to face a more reasonable opposition. The experience of Barack Obama in the first two years of his first term is proof positive against that proposition, for the time being. The only thing that is going to produce a more reasonable opposition is another couple of general election beatings.
Truth is we wouldn’t be having this argument if HRC had a different last name. We’re supposed to believe there is some sort of “Clinton strategy” to which she should be loyal whether it makes any sense or not, 20 years after the last time Bill Clinton appeared on any ballot. I’m tempted to say it would be nice if the Big Dog himself took to the Times op-ed pages and knocked this down for good. But that would just perpetuate the notion HRC’s campaign belongs to her husband, and is best run as a wayback machine.

Even Jeb Bush knows that re-running an old campaign doesn’t work, now that his emulation of his brother’s steamroller Invisible Primary campaign of 1999 has not made him a strong, or even a weak, front-runner.

At TNR Brian Beutler has offered a fascinating interpretation of Hillary Clinton’s recent policy statements–notably her staunch support for the President’s immigration actions and legislation to go beyond it, and her speech this week on voting rights–as representing a presentation of popular and very progressive positions that also trap Republicans into unpopular positions.
But before going into this exposition, Beutler suggests Clinton is having to work against the family reputation for “triangulation.”

[F]or the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clinton’s presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in one’s own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political party’s policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.

As I have done here at TDS before a number of years ago, I took the occasion at Washington Monthly to offer a different take on “triangulation” that among other things suggests HRC is not turning over some new leaf in order to atone for her sins.

Brian’s willingness to concede that “triangulation” has been defined in different ways (some progressives would say it is as simple and evil as sin itself) is refreshing, but I believe he ought to acknowledge that it’s a term used almost exclusively by Clinton critics. So far as I can tell, the only Clinton defender to have used it even briefly is its inventor, the diabolical Dick Morris. But even Morris (who used it narrowly to describe Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election strategy) did not argue for “appropriation of the other party’s policy ideas.” In a 2003 book (perhaps his last major utterance before leaping into permanent conservative punditry), Morris said:

The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other party’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.

That’s not a bad description of what the Clinton administration tried to do between 1992 and 1994 on welfare reform, developing a proposal focused on creating strong incentives for recipients to move from public assistance to work without “hard” time limits or block grants. After 1994, of course, the administration was in no position to dictate the shape of welfare reform, and instead embarked on the long carrot-and-stick process that led to two presidential vetoes and then finally, after agonized deliberations, to the 1996 signature. You can argue that was a bad decision and/or that the compromise went too far, but it’s just not true the whole idea was to adopt conservative positions.
What the Clintonians argued at the time, and I will go to my grave believing they were right, is that it’s both politically and even morally wrong to look at public concerns and divide them into “Democratic issues” and “Republican issues.” The “solutions” can and usually are very, very different, but for the most part if big majorities of the American people are worried about something, you don’t just dismiss it or change the subject to “your” issues. Yet that’s pretty much how Democrats behaved before Clinton took office. And behaving that way again is certainly an option for the future.
Believing that (a) progressives ought to have their own policy solutions for all sorts of problems, and (b) the configuration of partisan forces at any given moment can change exactly how these solutions are deployed and whether they should be bargained over is consistent at the most basic level with what the Clintons did in office and what HRC seems to be doing today. If so, then the planted axiom in Beutler’s essay–that Hillary Clinton is repudiating her past and dealing with a rebuttable presumption that she’s eager to triangulate–is off-base.
The legend of triangulation is so powerful that it’s certainly understandable Beutler would try to confront it on HRC’s behalf–to triangulate against triangulation, in effect. But those who sympathize with her should probably more actively consider the possibility that she’s doing what she believes in the best way she knows how.

The second Washington Monthly/TDS roundtable discussion on the white working class, around Stan Greenberg’s new article, “The Battle for Working People Begins with Government Reform,” was initiated at WaMo this morning with my introduction. The roundtable essays will be published daily there and here.

One of the hardiest of perennials in progressive political discussion is the direction of non-college educated white voters–a.k.a., in the era of mass higher education, the White Working Class. There are a variety of reasons for this preoccupation. For one thing, much of the progressive policy legacy that has been extended and contested in recent decades is rooted in a New Deal Democratic Coalition squarely based on the white working class. That this group of voters is now arguably a component of the Republican “base” is a source of both political frustration and moral self-doubt for progressives.
At the practical level, steady declines in support among white working class voters have diminished Democrats’ geographical reach while increasing the party’s already heavy dependence on young and minority voters who do not participate proportionately in non-presidential elections. More generally, white working class Americans represent a puzzle to Democrats who constantly appeal to their economic self-interest and the positive role of government in their lives, but who nonetheless for hotly debated reasons continue to give a majority of their votes (at least in presidential elections) to a Republican Party deeply committed to trickle-down economics and limited–sometimes disabled–government. In the past many Democrats sought to neutralize alleged cultural conservatism among these voters by muting or even negating their own cultural liberalism, with mixed results and a lot of regrets. More recently, many progressives have come to rationalize the problem as a product of inherently reactionary southerners saturated with racial resentments, or dismiss it as a phenomenon prevailing among a shrinking minority of economic and demographic losers.
No progressive political analyst has devoted more passionate attention to this dilemma over the years than Stan Greenberg, an adviser to presidents and global leaders who first came to national prominence studying the Reagan Democrats of suburban Detroit. Greenberg has returned to this topic again and again in his polling and strategic work, and now is offering fresh data and analysis suggesting a path–though not an easy path–for a Democratic revival in key segments of the white working class, and among the unmarried women who overlap with the white working class by definition and by affinity of views.
Greenberg concedes that certain non-college educated white voters, the “most religiously observant, racially conscious and rural” voters in the South and the Mountain West, are mostly beyond reach of any progressive message at present; most also live in states with formidable Republican majorities. But beyond those limitations, he finds robust support for a progressive agenda and message that includes “policies to protect Medicare and Social Security, investments in infrastructure to modernize the country, a cluster of policies to help working families with child care and paid leave, and new efforts to ensure equal pay and family leave for women.” But among both white working class voters and unmarried women, what undermines support for this agenda is a deeply felt antipathy to government as corrupt, beholden to wealthy special interests, and incompetent to achieve progressive goals.
This is a dynamic that observers like Greenberg have been noting for years. But now, he believes, it has become critical:

We have arrived at a tipping point at the outset of the 2016 election cycle, where the demand to reform government is equal to or stronger than the demand to reform the economy. More accurately, reform can make it possible to use governmental policies to help the middle class. In short, it is reform first.

Greenberg is convinced the conventional wisdom that issues like cleaning up the influence of money over Congress or campaigns are bloodless “process issues” of interest only to “wine-track” voters is dead wrong.

White working-class and downscale voters are open to a bold Democratic agenda and prefer it to a conservative Republican vision for the country. To win their support, however, voters are demanding, with growing ferocity, that Democrats battle against America’s corrupted politics and for a government that really works for the average citizen.

This second part of the “reform” agenda is especially difficult for some progressives: a demand that government be streamlined to become a more efficient instrument for vindicating middle-class interests. This is, interestingly enough, of particular concern to women (both white working-class women and unmarried women generally).
Add together the middle-class economic agenda and a reform agenda and you have, says Greenberg, a potent message that can unite the Obama Coalition with a higher percentage of the white working class, with women from all backgrounds especially supportive.
The “reform first” strategy is sufficiently provocative that we at the Washington Monthly and at The Democratic Strategist (with whom we are collaborating) decided to focus this Second White Working Class Roundtable on this critical subject. The contributors will include John Judis; Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin; Mark Schmitt; Joan Walsh; Richard Kahlenberg; Karen Nussbaum; John Russo; and Jack Metzgar; Andrew Levison; and myself; others may join as well. Here at Political Animal we’ll roll out an essay each day beginning tomorrow, and will collect them at both The Democratic Strategist and at the White Working Class Roundtable website (http://thedemocraticstrategist-roundtables.com/) We may hold follow-up discussions as well.
We hope this will become a watershed discussion that will not only cast light on what progressives can do to appeal to a broader coalition of voters, but dispel some myths as well.

According to Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times:

Hillary Clinton has been telling people — a group of financial backers in Brooklyn, a house party in Iowa — that as president, she would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the Citizens United decision erasing limits on political spending by corporations.
“I will do everything I can to appoint Supreme Court justices who protect the right to vote and do not protect the right of billionaires to buy elections” is the way she puts it.

As I noted at the Washington Monthly, that’s good news indeed.

[T]his is what is known as “setting a litmus test” for judicial appointees, and it’s still frowned upon by Serious People who don’t quite understand that the ideological polarization of American politics has penetrated pretty deeply into the judicial system, professional legal circles, and law schools. That a small handful of legal precedents the Supreme Court can choose to preserve, modify, or reverse have risen to the level of requiring candidates for president to pay attention to them should hardly be surprising. And as Greenhouse explains, Republicans have been openly advocating judicial litmus tests on abortion and other “family values” issues for more than a generation. For nearly that long, it’s been inconceivable that a Democratic president would appoint a Justice who wasn’t committed to abortion rights, whatever they thought about the particular constitutional theories underlying Roe v. Wade.
So it’s a little late for anyone to piously cluck-cluck at HRC for elevating another issue to this level. Perhaps the recent cavalcade of hugely important SCOTUS decisions will change the CW about judicial litmus tests–or, as Greenhouse says, make the composition of the Court something you don’t just talk about at small gatherings:

During the presidential debates in 2012, neither candidate was asked a single question about the Supreme Court. If a Citizens United litmus test serves only to put the court on the campaign screen, where it urgently belongs, it will have done some good before the first vote is cast.

Amen to that.