Sarah Palin’s going through a pretty tough stretch as a national conservative icon. Her daughter didn’t win Dancing With the Stars. Her second book did not rocket to the top of best-seller lists. Her TV reality show isn’t getting renewed for a second year. Polls show her becoming even more unpopular among the national electorate, and showing some weakness among Republicans. And now she’s drawing heat, and not responding very well, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, thanks to her PAC’s adoption of a bullseye-targeting map last year that included Gabby Giffords’ district.
It would be foolish to underestimate Palin’s residual appeal to conservative activists, who may not want her to run for president but may also support her if she does so. But let’s say for the sake of argument she doesn’t run in 2012 (at 46 she is, after all, young enough to make the presidential prospect lists for the next five or six cycles). Does that mean the GOP presidential field for ’12 will be under less pressure to tilt hard right?
Not necessarily. For one thing, there’s a potential candidate out there, another woman as it happens, who makes Palin look like a milquetoast moderate: Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Famous as a provocatively right-wing quote machine, and a particular favorite of religious conservatives, Bachmann has suddenly started making noises about entering the next-door Iowa Caucuses in 2012 (she’s an Iowa native, which never hurts).
Sure, House members almost never gain traction as presidential candidates, and Bachmann barely showed up in a new poll of likely 2012 caucus-goers (though the pollster suggested she had a significant upside if and when she’s taken seriously as a candidate). But as veteran Iowan Republican activist and blogger Craig Robinson pointed out, Bachmann has a couple of potential aces-in-the-hole:

[I]f Bachmann does run, she will have one thing that no other presidential candidate will have when campaigning in Iowa – the support of Iowa’s conservative standard-bearer, Congressman Steve King….
A Bachmann run would create a perfect storm in Iowa. Bachmann is already the darling of the Tea Party. Combine that with King’s statewide network of conservative in a caucus election and its bound to befuddle everyone in the beltway as well as her caucus opponents.
Another point to ponder is, what if Palin backs Bachmann’s campaign? Palin has already headlined a fundraising event for Bachmann last year. The event was a huge success, and Bachmann has proven herself to be an astute fundraiser. She raised $13.2 million in 2010. That’s as much as Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter raised for their 2008 presidential campaigns combined. It’s also almost as much as Huckabee raised for his campaign.

Bachmann’s very close relationship with King is a fact; he was one of the few supporters of her recent unsuccessful bid for a House GOP leadership post, and he’s apparently planning to squire her around Iowa during her upcoming temperature-taking trip to the state. They were also the original cosponsors of the “ObamaCare repeal” legislation.
If nothing else, you have to figure a Bachmann candidacy would be an ongoing nightmare for fellow-Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty, whose vanilla personality would be constantly contrasted, poorly, with Bachmann’s crowd-pleasing fiery appeal.
The bottom line is that there’s a clear political opening in the 2012 campaign for a candidate who gets conservative activists all lathered up and snake-dancing to the Iowa Caucuses. Whether or not that candidate is Palin or Bachmann, someone will audition for the role. You can bet on it.

As J.P. Green noted yesterday, you’d think that some mild and relevant gun control legislation (e.g., Rep. Carolyn McCarthy’s proposed ban on high-capacity ammunition clips, which is a variation on the Clinton-era assault weapon ban) might get fresh attention in the wake of the Tucson shootings. But no, it’s not much happening. As Justin Elliot of Salon explains:

Republicans have, so far, been united in dismissing the need for any new regulation. As Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday: “The weapons don’t kill people; it’s the individual that kills these people.” It’s unclear at this point whether McCarthy’s bill will even get a vote in the GOP-controlled House.
But it would be wrong to blame congressional Republicans alone for the failure to put in place new gun control measures. In the first two years of the Obama administration, with Democratic majorities in Congress, the only significant piece of gun legislation signed by the president was a measure tacked onto the credit card reform bill that allows concealed carry of firearms in national parks.

The truth is, Democrats decided more or less collectively during the last decade that gun control was a loser for them as a party, and that talk about it made life too difficult for candidates in rural areas of the country where it was literally a “bullet vote” issue. The size and wealth of the gun lobby, moreover, made it possible for opponents of even the most timorous kinds of gun safety measures to constantly frame the issue as an all-or-nothing choice between the Second Amendment and immediate confiscation of all firearms (which millions of Americans seemed to believe was somehow going to happen the minute Barack Obama was elected).
So it’s not surprising that Democrats are gun-shy on this issue. But if we ever intend to ask Americans to reconsider the country’s status as a place where virtually anyone can quickly get armed to the teeth, now would be a good time. After all, the assault weapons ban was enacted during the Clinton administration, and the sky did not fall. It can be done again.

The “debate” over the alleged connection between right-wing rhetoric and the shooting spree in Tucson this weekend isn’t turning into much of a debate at all. As evidence mounts about the scrambled thinking of mass murderer Jared Loughner, the few liberal voices willing to draw a direct connection between right-wing demonization of target Gabrielle Giffords and the shootings have grown even more sparse. This hasn’t, of course, kept conservatives from seizing on such talk to play the victim, bitterly complaining about a media/liberal conspiracy to “politicize” the tragedy and create a “blood libel” against the poor, innocent Right.
So no one should expect conservatives to do much soul-searching in the wake of this event, and that’s too bad; this is a particular moment in American history when they could use some. For all their attacks on “arrogant elites,” too many of today’s conservatives consider their views sancrosanct or self-evidently correct. To put it bluntly, it has become common on the Right to treat conservative policy prescriptions as exempt from the normal procedures of democracy because they reflect the preferences of God, the Founding Fathers, or Real Americans. Indeed, the essence of the Tea Party Movement, which dominates the GOP from top to bottom, is the belief that by advancing such quotidian centrist policies as a managed-competition health care system or a market-based cap-and-trade device, Democrats are not simply wrong, but are violating permanent and never-to-be-amended guarantees of low taxes, small government, and laissez-faire capitalism. That point of view helps explain the spluttering rage of people like Glenn Beck and his most devoted fans, who really do seem to believe their “fundamental liberties” include the right to enrich themselves limitlessly and to be exempt from any collective responsibilities, and that mildly redistributive and exceptionally traditional practices like progressive taxation or unemployment insurance represent a totalitarianism that must resisted by any means necessary.
The growing refusal on the Right to accept the legitimacy of political competition does indeed promote a poor climate for civility in politics. But that by no means makes conservatives responsible for acts of violence against the politicians they “target,” so long as they systematically eschew violence.
But there’s one exception that needs to be noted right now: The talk of “Second Amendment remedies,” made famous by 2010 Senate candidate Sharron Angle but a hardy perennial of hardcore conservative rhetoric for years, really does need to stop. It reflects the belief that the Second Amendment is not only a permanent guarantor of unlimited personal firearms possession, and inviolable for all times, but is in fact the most important provision of the Constitution, the “crown jewel” of the Bill of Rights. Why? Well, beneath lots of mealy-mouthed talk about widespread gun ownership being a bulwark against tyranny, the idea is that it may become necessary at some point for right-thinking citizens to undertake the violent overthrow of the government on behalf of some higher law. That’s what “second amendment remedies” refers to, and you can only imagine what kind of reaction this thinking would get if it were being articulated not by middle-class white property-owners but by, say, Islamic jihadis.
The problem is, of course, that crazy people may well take advantage of an ideology that holds we should all stockpile shooting irons in case we decide at some point to stop doffing our hats to those in authority and instead consider them jack-booted thugs who need killing. Perhaps quasi-universal private gun ownership is a good thing on balance, but let’s stop encouraging Americans to think that aiming guns at cops or elected officials or our political opponents is ever a good thing, even in theory.
More generally, everyone in American politics, left or right, needs to guard against use of the language of violence and warfare, however metaphorically. Bad things happen in war zones, including most notably the slaughter of innocents.

In writing this week about the hole Democrats have dug in terms of their numbers in Congress, and the considerable value of stopping Republicans from disabling the public sector for many years to come, I should probably have made it clear that a mission of “damage control” does not mean surrendering to the opposition, adopting its rhetoric and policies, or even seeking compromise. It does mean scaling back expectations for what Democrats can accomplish on their own in the short term, and adjusting strategy and tactics accordingly.
Indeed, the extremism of the contemporary GOP makes fighting Republicans, and insisting on solidarity in that fight from other Democrats, pretty much unavoidable. And even when the Right is on the offensive, defensive tactics must include positive messaging that makes clear the stark alternatives being offered by the two parties
I guess my attitude on this issue is heavily influenced by being from the South, where Democrats have had a tough time lately, and where Republicans have long been as extremist as the national party has become more recently. Some people look at the supposed “conservatism” of southern Democrats from a distance and conclude they are triangulating compromisers with no fight in their hearts. But up close, partisan politics in the South are typically pretty vicious, primarily because they revolve so often around very basic issues of principle, like the existence of universal public education, the legitimacy of progressive income taxes, the right to vote, the right of workers to unionize, and the most modest forms of separation of church and state. These battles ain’t beanbag, and the stakes are very high for the people Democrats claim to represent.
So let’s don’t confuse realistic objectives with a willingness or unwillingness to “fight.” We all know the most important fights are when you feel you have your back against the wall.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It has been widely reported that economic growth and job creation will be the principal focus of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, and the president’s comments in recent weeks add credibility to those reports. At first blush this sounds promising: Not only would a speech along these lines track public concerns, but it would also invoke a goal that both parties ostensibly share. Most conservatives say they are gung-ho for growth; most liberals understand that without it, not much else is possible. This sounds like a formula for a productive discussion, and maybe even meaningful agreement, across party lines.
But is it? One of the dominant realities of our time is that while the political parties both endorse growth as a goal, they no longer agree on the means to it. I say “no longer” because a rough-and-ready bipartisan consensus once prevailed. After Dwight Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, his “Modern Republicanism” made its peace with the New Deal. During his eight years in office, he launched major public works projects (the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System), created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and expanded Social Security. Although Eisenhower’s economic advisors were not notably Keynesian and his administration systematically practiced frugality, he resorted to increased spending and budget deficits to fight the slumps of 1953-54 and 1957-58.
Shortly after taking the United States off the gold standard in 1971, the next Republican president, Richard Nixon, announced that “I am now a Keynesian in economics.” (The sentence usually attributed to him–“We are all Keynesians now”–was in fact uttered by none other than Milton Friedman.) What happened next is a familiar story: The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed the Keynesian consensus and paved the way for today’s polarized economic debate. The next Republican president, who came to power in no small measure because of that inflation, proclaimed in his First Inaugural that “government is not the solution to our problem.” An iron cord of ideological conviction connects today’s Republican officials to Reagan’s proposition. Most cannot bring themselves to admit that for all its flaws, the much-reviled TARP may well have forestalled a global economic collapse, or that the stimulus package probably prevented output and employment from falling even farther than they did.
The issue extends beyond the effectiveness of government responses to economic emergencies. There is a venerable American tradition–with roots in the thought of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln–that insisted on the link between public investment and economic growth. One wonders whether today’s Republicans agree. Do they believe that there is a zero-sum relationship between government and economic growth–that as government shrinks, the economy expands more rapidly? Or do they distinguish between productive and unproductive public spending?
These are not theoretical questions. The Republicans’ House majority must now translate its pro-growth rhetoric into real economic policy. The new speaker of the House has pledged to reduce domestic discretionary spending by $100 billion–more than 20 percent–in this fiscal year. That potentially places a range of public investments, including education, basic research, and infrastructure, on the chopping-block. And after President Obama submits his FY2012 budget proposal, it will fall to Representative Paul Ryan, author of the spending-cutting “Roadmap,” to craft the Republican alternative.
Republicans may argue that they do believe in government action to promote growth–namely, tax cuts. After all, Keynes himself recommended tax cuts in 1933, and John Kennedy employed them as a growth stimulus in the early 1960s. There are two things to be said about this: First, when households are badly overleveraged, corporations are flush with cash, and a substantial portion of increased consumption leaks out through purchases of foreign imports (all conditions that exist today), tax cutting by itself is likely to be less effective than it was in the early ’60s. And second, it is a basic axiom of public choice theory that simply increasing the amount of privately held purchasing power will do nothing to remedy the market’s propensity to undersupply public goods. So if you believe that public goods exist and contribute to economic growth, you must also believe in government growth-promotion strategies that go beyond tax cuts.
We will soon find out whether this generation of Republicans believes that there is any justification for public investment–or whether they embrace a literal interpretation of the economic revelation announced 30 years ago.

When Republicans brushed aside a couple of years of demagoguery about the transcendent importance of debt and deficits to push for an extension of high-end tax cuts at the end of the 111th Congress, the act of hypocrisy was rationalized by the usual discredited supply-side nostrums about tax cuts for “job creators” paying for themselves through economic growth and higher federal revenues.
Then before the 112th Congress convened, House Republicans took this “logic” to the next stage, exempting all tax cuts from budget offset rules, on the theory that any measures letting Americans “keep more of their own money” couldn’t possibly represent a fiscal problem for the federal government.
Now the entire GOP is dismissing the warning from the Congressional Budget Office that repealing the Affordable Care Act of 2010 would boost deficits even more by scrapping the health care cost containment provisions of that legislation. Why? Because everyone knows a socialist takeover of the health care system will boost federal costs and kill jobs by imposing burdens on employers. Who needs a detailed explanation of that assertion, or a refutation of CBO’s careful accounting?
So tax cuts by definition can’t be on the table in deficit reduction efforts, and neither can spending increases that Republicans happen to want. Act 4 in this farce is right on the horizon, when congressional Republicans announce that defense spending is off the table as well.
Deficits only matter to the GOP, it’s clear, when they can be attributed to particular kinds of spending that they want to slash anyway. At some point, their talk about fiscal responsibility needs to be hooted off the stage as a bad comedy with tragic undertones.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
We’ve all heard that Democrats are in for a very difficult two years. The new GOP majority in the House of Representatives will wage a campaign to disable health reform, financial regulation, and the EPA; stonewall executive and judicial appointments; slash nondefense discretionary spending (thus undermining the economic recovery); gut Social Security and Medicare; and launch investigations into every possible White House indiscretion–potentially leading to a vote for impeachment. Democrats’ only recourse will be to practice what Howard Dean famously derided as “damage control”–to abandon hope for big progressive accomplishments and hunker down until 2012, like the Clinton administration did after the Gingrich Revolution, defending government from the worst excesses of those who would like to eliminate it altogether.
There’s only one problem with this scenario: the time-frame. Politicos and pundits are used to thinking in two-year cycles, and it’s easy to convince oneself that, in 2012, Obama will be able to capitalize on an improved economy, favorable voter-turnout patterns, and a weak GOP presidential field in order to sweep into office with a renewed mandate. But that misses a big part of the picture. Even if Obama wins reelection by a comfortable margin, it’s most likely that the House will remain in Republican hands and Democrats will lose seats in, and perhaps control of, the Senate–and beyond that, Republicans will probably do fairly well in 2014. In other words, we could be looking not at two years of damage control, but six.
Consider the Democrats’ congressional prospects in 2012. Republican successes at the state level during the past two years have given the GOP an extraordinary advantage in the decennial redistricting process. They control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature–known casually as holding the “trifecta”–in 20 states, compared to ten for Democrats. They’ve achieved this trifecta in six of the eight states that will gain representation in the 2012 round of redistricting. (As well as in three of the ten states that will lose seats, compared to two for Democrats.) While Republican gerrymandering will be restrained by rules mandating a “nonpartisan” redistricting process in some states, such as Arizona and Florida, as well as provisions in the Voting Rights Act, this will still provide them with a far-reaching advantage. Control over so many state houses and legislatures puts them in a strong position to shore up the marginal seats they just won in states like Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina–as well as to destabilize Democratic incumbents who succeeded by narrow margins in places like Georgia and North Carolina.
We can’t be precise about how all of this will shake out. But it is reasonably clear that, to take back the House in 2012, Democrats would have to approximate the feat they pulled off in the banner year of 2006 while facing a changed and more hostile political map. Redistricting aside, a number of places where veteran Blue Dog Democrats lost in 2010–including three in Tennessee, two in Mississippi, and one each in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama–are heavily Republican districts that are very unlikely to flip back in the foreseeable future.
The Senate picture for Democrats in 2012 is not much better, for the simple reason that 23 of the 33 seats that will be contested then are currently held by Democrats, reflecting the 2006 landslide. To put it another way, Republicans could lose Senate races by a 19-14 margin and still recapture the chamber (or by a 20-13 margin if they win the White House). Meanwhile several Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch of Utah, Dick Lugar of Indiana, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and Olympia Snowe of Maine, will go into the 2012 re-election cycle more worried about right-wing primary challenges than about general election contests.
It’s far more difficult to predict what will happen in 2014, but we do know that the Senate class up for reelection will be disproportionately Democratic, since it swept into office during the wave election of 2008. Barring any retirements or deaths Democrats will be defending 20 seats and the Republicans just 13. Moreover, in 2014, the same kind of Republican-skewed midterm electorate that appeared in 2010, dominated by older white voters, will likely reemerge, creating another wind at the Republicans’ backs.
So what’s my point, other than to pour cold water on Democratic hopes for a quick revival after a really bad midterm election? It’s that progressives need to begin adjusting their expectations. Up until now, many Democrats have judged Barack Obama according to the hopes he inspired in 2008–that he might not only undo the damage inflicted on the country by George W. Bush, but end more than three decades of conservative ascendancy and usher in a period of progressive reform. We have been judging Obama according to our wish-list: the public option, cap-and-trade, repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And we have been disappointed when he fails to deliver.
That’s not the best way to look at the rest of the Obama presidency. Instead of hoping for a quick return to the box-checking of the 111th Congress, progressives will have to gird themselves for a long, hard struggle with conservatives–one in which avoiding defeat will more often than not have to stand in for victory. Today’s radicalized GOP is not focused on any positive policy agenda, and it does not share with Democrats the fundamental philosophical goals that make principled compromise a likely prospect. The Republicans who just took control of the House of Representatives are playing for keeps. The party’s goal for the next six years will be to wreck the public sector–fundamentally altering the social safety net, de-funding investments in our children and our economic future, and rendering the government’s regulatory apparatus deaf, dumb, and blind–and liberals must realize that preventing or reducing that wreckage is an essential, and even noble, task which we should learn to value if not love.
When the day does come that Democrats again enjoy big majorities in both houses of Congress, a robust economy, and a popular mandate to govern, it would be a matter of fundamental importance that the safety net, a functioning public sector, and an array of progressive commitments are still in place. In addition to what he has already achieved, that may well be Barack Obama’s legacy, and it would be a good one.

If the “fundamentals“–turnout patterns, the political landscape, and a bad economy–made big Democratic losses in 2010 inevitable, what could Democrats have done to minimize the damage?
The answer to that question is obviously one that different observers will answer differently. There are three challenges faced by Democrats in 2010 that I think most progressives would agree represented major problem areas: (1) Intraparty and inter-institutional divisions; (2) an intransigent and unified opposition; and (3) difficulties in formulating and conveying an effective message.
Intraparty divisions extended in two directions, with progressives expressing periodic dissatisfaction with the White House and congressional (especially Senate) leaders on both message and policy, especially with respect to relations with Wall Street, “bipartisanship,” health care reform, civil liberties, Afghanistan, and the late-session tax deal, while deficit hawks and Blue Dogs (categories which overlapped) demanded more bipartisanship, less ambitiously progressive legislation, and “cover” for Democratic candidates in vulnerable seats. Democrats from various parts of the party often expressed frustration with the White House for perceived disorganization, passivity, and insufficient focus on the economy, and there’s little question that House and Senate leaders and the president’s team had trouble coordinating with each other.
The sources of progressive unhappiness with the White House are pretty obvious, and go back to expectations raised during and immediately after the 2008 campaign for an aggressive administration that would reverse the policies of the Bush administration, redeem longstanding progressive goals on a wide range of issues, and reengineer the Obama campaign organization into an ongoing grassroots movement bent on practical achievements. The economic circumstances faced by the new administration in late 2008 made an immediate hash of many of these expectations, and the decision that avoidance of a global depression required major subsidies for, and cooperation with, the battered financial sector tainted Obama’s image among progressives along with other elements of the electorate.
Subsequently the struggle to secure enough Republican (and in the case of health reform, conservative Democratic and industry) support for the administration’s agenda became an ongoing source of friction between the White House and party progressives, particularly when such efforts seemed to secure diminishing returns. Yet conservative Democrats (in office, at any rate; grassroots self-identified conservative Democrats, like their progressive counterparts, remained much more supportive of the president than their putative spokesmen) increasingly shared the Republican charge that the administration had overreached in pursuing health reform and climate change legislation, and in seeking more progressive income tax rates.
It’s entirely unclear that Democratic defections in the electorate had much to do with the midterm results (as noted in the last post, the relatively low turnout of self-identified Democrats was largely attributable to demographic turnout patterns of long standing rather than conscious dissatisfaction), but the disgruntlement of activists and elected officials has an indirect impact on campaigns and a direct impact on messaging and legislative strategy.
One principle all Democrats should be able to agree on is that entirely legitimate efforts to influence Democratic leaders (from the president on down) and seek leverage should not stray over the line into threats, insults, or open opposition. Progressive charges of “betrayal” against the president on this or that issue had no constructive impact other than as an exercise in venting. Blue Dog efforts in Congress or on the campaign trail to distance themselves from the rest of the party and/or to form unilateral coalitions with Republicans were equally destructive. By the same token, occasional outbursts against “the Left” from the president or the White House staff carried the unsavory aroma of triangulation.
While there is no question that Democratic congressional leaders need to exercise party discipline (perhaps more than they have done in the past) on key votes, ultimately Democratic primary voters are the only arbiters of the boundaries of the Big Tent. With respect to self-proclaimed Democratic voices who are not exposed to the discipline of Democratic voters–pundits, former officeholders, and “experts”–the habit of unfriendly criticism and the echoing of Republican talking points (particularly from cozy sinecures in conservative media outlets) should be considered disqualifying, regardless of claims to represent Democratic principles or traditions.
Now I acknowledge there are some progressives who sincerely belief a Big Tent Party is incapable of competing successfully with an ideologically driven and unified Small Tent Party like today’s GOP, largely based on the vague, but to some self-evident, theory that politics is about noise, and the most harmoniously noisy voices win all debates. A parallel theory that focuses more on the content of party messages than on their unanimity and volume holds that political success is based on maximum party differentiation and conflict. These issues invariably lead to the second challenge that faced Democrats in 2010, the consummation of the movement conservative conquest of the GOP.

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Admidst continuing progressive angst that the president is addicted to bipartisanship and doesn’t understand he’s being played for a weak fool by an increasingly extremist GOP, an interesting voice emerged in USA Today: none other than former speaker Nancy Pelosi, who commemorated the handover of the House gavel to John Boehner with an op-ed entitled: “Democrats Ready to work with GOP.” The piece is a brief recitation of the accomplishments of the last Congress, and an expression of willingness to cooperate with the new Masters of the House on measures to revive and strengthen the American economy.
There’s nothing in the piece that expresses a willingness to surrender to GOP policies or priorities, not that anyone would particularly suspect Pelosi of such intentions. What she’s attempting is what in the past I’ve called “grassroots bipartisanship,” a combination of conciliatory gestures designed to provide a sharp constrast with Republicans for their obstructionist and extremist tendencies, and to lay down some markers on the broad goals Democrats have on which, theoretically, compromise with the other side might be possible, if they happened to share such goals.
In the current climate, “grassroots bipartisanship” is not designed to produce actual agreement with Republicans (though over time a few heretics might be pulled across the line). It’s instead intended to show that Ds and Rs have different basic principles and goals, not just different “approaches” to achieving those goals.
Pelosi understands that Republicans have a host of priorities much higher than creating jobs–reducing high-end tax rates, eliminating business regulations, decimating entitlements, disabling the public sector and its employees, etc.–and can’t even talk about creating jobs without first running through those very different priorities. So nothing is to be lost, and in the long run much can be gained, by making it clear Democrats share the public’s priorities and Republicans’ heads are somewhere else. This is certainly one way to reduce the impact of the MSM’s chronic tendency to depict every public policy dispute as a food fight in which both sides are equally at fault.

With 2010 now over, and an entirely new and less favorable political climate clouding the skies in Washington and many states, it’s appropriate to take a quick but definitive look back at the political lessons of this last year.
After having mulled over the midterms for a good while, I’m convinced their preeminent lesson to Democrats is to avoid overthinking what happened on November 2.
It’s easy, after we all painstakingly followed every daily twist and turn in the Obama administration’s strategy and tactics during its first two years, to assign a great deal of political freight to mistakes it made or opportunities it did not embrace.
But the best starting point for assessing the impact of things Democrats did or didn’t do is to look at the impact of things beyond their control. And preeminent among those are the condition of the economy (largely inherited from the Bush administration) and the very different turnout patterns in 2010 as compared to 2008.
To boil a lot of data down to a simple conclusion, it appears that about half the swing from Ds to Rs between 2008 and 2010 was attributable to changes in turnout patterns rather than to changes in voter preference, as you might suspect when you see exit polls showing a dead heat in 2008 presidential preferences among 2010 voters (actually, given the well-established tendency of poll respondents to “remember” they voted for the winning candidate, the 2010 electorate would have almost certainly elected John McCain president).
Now it has often been asserted that the 2008-2010 changes in turnout patterns were themselves attributable to the mistakes of the Obama administration or Democratic congressional leaders–i.e., that the “enthusiasm gap” between Republican and Democratic voters (a turn of phrase often used as though “enthusiasm” is interchangeable with “willingness to vote”). But the counter-indication to that diagnosis is the simple fact that 2010 turnout patterns were fairly typical for midterms; what’s changed is that as of 2008, the tendency to vote Republican became positively correlated to age (at least among white voters), a pattern that persisted in 2010. Latino and (to a lesser extent) African-American turnout also tends to drop between presidential and midterm elections.
A less tangible but equally significant structural factor is the nearly universal experience of parties losing congressional seats in midterms two years after taking over the White House, a sort of voter reflex that has occurred in all sorts of circumstances. The only exceptions in living memory to the “midterm swoon” rule happened in 1934, the first New Deal election, and in 2002, the first election after 9/11.
Add into the standard midterm turnout patterns and the “midterm swoon” the “over-exposure” problem–a landscape in which a very large number of traditionally marginal House districts were held by Democrats after the very successful 2006 and 2008 cycles–and it’s reasonably clear in retrospect that major Republican gains in the House in 2010 were inevitable the day after the 2008 elections, regardless of the bad economy and anything in particular Democrats in office did or didn’t do.
But you can’t, obviously, ignore the economy as a factor in the 2010 elections; indeed, many observers, particularly among political scientists, consider it the preeminent factor. A thorough analysis done in 2009 by Sean Trende suggests that very high and persistent unemployment has regularly produced big midterm losses for the party in power (though there really aren’t enough examples to support any particular predictions of particular losses). Another probable indicator of the impact of the bad economy is the sharp break against Democrats in 2010 by independent voters, who typically had very high “wrong track” perceptions of government and low approval ratings of Obama, but didn’t exhibit much support for Republican policies or the GOP itself.
Some progressive Obama critics might well argue that perceptions of responsibility for the bad economy were fatally influenced by the failure of the White House to aggressively blame Wall Street or corporations. But outside the Republican base, most 2010 voters were far more likely to say they blamed George W. Bush or Wall Street than Obama for the bad economy, so it’s not clear much could have been done (other than producing a better economy) to insulate Democrats from a general “wrong track” tendency to express dissatisfaction by voting against the party in power.
So adding it all up–normal midterm turnout patterns, the natural reaction to a new administration, over-exposure of Democratic House seats, and the anti-party-in-power impact of a bad economy (regardless of “blame” for it), you can account for most of the Democrats’ midterm losses before even getting into an evaluation of Democratic policy proposals or messaging. Meanwhile, such ephemera as the relationship between Obama and outspoken elements of the progressive coalition claiming to represent the Democratic “base” are even more dubious as major factors, particularly when you look at the Obama’s consistently high job approval ratings from self-identified liberal Democrats, and the evidence that unhappy Democrats may have been more likely to vote than those pleased with Obama’s performance in office.
None of this is to suggest that policies and messaging, or strategy and tactics, didn’t matter in 2010, or that more mechanical factors like money and the eclipse of Obama’s 2008 mobilization effort didn’t matter, too. But given the vast attention paid to such factors as opposed to the structural issues I’ve emphasized here, any consideration of lessons learned in 2010 should prominently feature a much closer look at the fundamentals, which many Democrats need to understand precisely in order to grasp how they may work in Democrats’ favor in 2012.