With the arrival of Labor Day, and the end of Vacation Time for Americans lucky enough to have jobs with benefits, the options for changing the dynamics of the midterm elections have gradually but steadily narrowed. Significant external events could still happen, but probably won’t; the economy is not going to turn around between now and November 2.
Moreover, the opportunity to engineer a basic sea change in public opinion on the Obama’s administration’s agenda is probably past for the time being. Much as the White House’s earlier efforts to convince people that the economy would be far worse without unpopular market interventions made sense, basic judgments have been made by most persuadable voters. The same is true of health reform; the legislation’s beneficial effects will have to kick in before it gets a fresh trial in the court of public opinion.
What Democrats can — and must — do more of during the shank of the campaign season is to challenge Republicans to disclose their own agenda for the country, and draw greater attention to the extremist logic of where Republican positions of current events would lead. The vast majority of all Democratic messaging in the next two months needs to relentlessly focus on this single topic.
This is obviously easier in the case of Republican nominees such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller, who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. But many other Republicans are demanding elimination of any federal role in education, energy environmental protection or agriculture, and virtually the entire party is reflexively opposing regulations on a wide variety of subjects where corporate misbehavior has had a devastating effect on the national interest and middle-class Americans individually.
Even those GOP elected officials and candidates who have been careful to avoid such specific positions have accepted the party-wide argument that federal budget deficits must be immediately reduced if not eliminated even as new tax cuts for high-earners and corporations are provided and the defense budget is protected (if not expanded via a new war with Iran which many Republicans have been agitating in favor of for years now). By any sort of math, the Republican agenda means massive steps to eliminate regulations and scale back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other basic safety net programs.
Democrats need to hammer away at these general and particular implications of the GOP agenda every day and in every competitive contest across the country.
To those who argue that this sort of “negative” campaigning would represent an effort to change the subject from its own performance in office, Democrats must respond: it’s Republicans who are trying to change the subject from a proper comparison of the agendas of the two parties and of individual candidates.
There’s no secret about the Democratic agenda; the administration and the congressional Democratic leadership have been trying to implement it since January of 2009, against the active obstruction of the GOP, which is using every dilatory tactic, most notably unprecedented threats to use Senate filibusters. The public deserves to know exactly what the Republican Party will propose if it gains control of either House of Congress.
At this late date, such a “negative” campaign by Democrats is the right thing to do, and perhaps the only thing to do that can simultaneously persuade swing voters and motivate a high turnout by Democrats. Waiting until next year to force the hand of Republicans is both irresponsible and politically feckless.
However much conservatives and many elements of the media insist the midterm elections are a “referendum” on the Obama administration or this or that Democratic initiative, they cannot wish away the fact that every contest that will decide control of Congress or of state and local governments involves a choice between a Democrat and a Republican–with the former being held strictly responsible for every discontent with the status quo, and the latter free to demagogue and make vague or wild promises without immediate consequences.
Every Democrat reading these words knows the sort of extremist and very unpopular agenda the GOP will be forced to advance in the very near future by its own loose rhetoric, the logic of its conflicting promises, and the growing radicalism of its cadre of politicians. It’s time to tell the country about it right now.

One of the ironies of this campaign year is the number of free-spending rich Republican candidates who are pouring the golden parachutes they earned when exiting (often nonvoluntarily) the private sector to rant against public spending.
We’re seeing a particularly rich example of this dichotomy in Calfornia, where Meg Whitman, who is promising to squeeze public expenditures and lay off many thousands of state workers, is showing just how lavish a campaign apparatus you can buy with around $150 million.
Here’s is Calbuzz’s summary of a chart of Team Whitman helpfully offered by Jerry Brown’s campaign:

Counting people up, across and over (which sometimes puts people in more than one sector of the Invasion of Normandy graphic) we find eight people in scheduling and advance, 10 staff and consultants in policy, 16 in coalitions, 16 in field operations, 27 in fund-raising and finance and 24 in communications, including eight in the research group.
“In the green box marked ‘Miscellaneous Campaign Staff,’ there are an additional four staffers who have made more than $100,000 from Whitman, and we have no idea what they’re doing,” Brown’s research director told Calbuzz.
Brown campaign manager Steve Glazer likens Whitman’s campaign to a massive aircraft carrier that is stalled in the middle of the ocean, floating listlessly, unable to gain momentum despite spending millions and millions and millions on TV and radio advertising, internet communications, mail, telephone banks, fundraising, event planning and execution – you name it, USS eMeg has paid for it.
Whether that’s an accurate portrayal of a campaign operation with no equal in the history of California is still uncertain. This we know: No governor’s office we’re aware of ever had such a massive org chart, unless you count all the agencies and departments that are part of an administration and the CHP protective detail.
Also, no one in a governor’s office ever made this kind of money: strategist Mike Murphy’s Bonaparte Productions, $861,474; adviser Henry Gomez, $769,216; campaign manager Jilian Hasner, $667,552; adviser Jeff Randle, $572,949; security director John Endert, $261,682; communications director Tucker Bounds, $293,349; press secretary Sarah Pompei, $154,872; yadayadayada. That’s not even all the big-tick items and it’s only up to the most recent financial reporting period.

The grand irony is that anti-government campaigns like Whitman’s are like big dinner bells for the political class, offering lots of jobs at unusually high pay in the pursuit, we are told, of tight-fisted austerity. Even if eMeg loses, Republican political operatives will remember her campaign fondly for many years as a wonderful interval when no political attack was too unconscionable and no expense too high.
If she wins, California public employees could have a hard time. But it’s more than a psychic flash to guess that Whitman’s political operations, whether it’s on the public payroll or supported by what’s left of her vast fortune, won’t suffer from lack of financial support.

In analyses of the current political climate, an awful lot of stock has been placed in the so-called “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats. Sometimes this “gap” is based on polling that actually asks voters about their level of enthusiasm towards voting this year. The problem with such measurements, of course, is that “very enthusiastic” voters don’t get an extra vote; the key variable is willingness to vote, not the degree of passion with which a vote is cast.
More often than not, though, the “enthusiasm gap” has become synonymous with the more meaningful idea that Republicans will have a turnout advantage in November. And while this probability is frequently identified with a relative level of unhappiness among Democrats for the Obama administration and/or congressional Democrats, it cannot be repeated too often that midterm turnout is invariably higher among older and whiter voters. And it just so happens that the Democratic support base as of 2008 was unusually correlated with the youth and diversity of voters.
That’s true today as well. Looking at Gallup’s latest presidential job approval tracking poll, Obama’s positive ratings remain inversely correlated with age, and thus with the proclivity to vote in midterms, ranging from 56% among 18-29 year-olds; to 38% among over-65s. His approval rating among nonwhite voters, another traditionally underperforming demographic group in midterms, is 65% (among African-Americans, it’s 90%).
Meanwhile, 78% of Democrats and 73% of self-identified “liberals” approve of the President’s job performance. These are not optimal numbers, but nor do they suggest a deep malaise. At this point in his presidency, 70% of Democrats approved of Bill Clinton’s job performance, and he went on to win re-election handily. And since it’s de rigour to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter these days, it’s worth noting the 52% job approval rating among Democrats for Jimmy Carter at this point in his presidency (Carter’s Democratic approval rating eventually bottomed out in the autumn of 1979 at 40%).
None of this provides any Democratic comfort for the midterms themselves, but it should be reasonably clear that structural factors account for much of the “enthusiasm gap.” And the minute the 2012 presidential cycle begins, the same factors will create a much more positive environment for Obama, even if you don’t consider the unimpressive Republican presidential field.

President Obama’s announcement last night that all U.S. combat troops have left Iraq, on schedule, didn’t get much positive commentary. Many Republicans complained he didn’t give credit to the man who once promised to “liberate” Iraq and turn it into a model of democracy, George W. Bush. Many Democrats complained that he didn’t reminisce about the original decision to fight the war, or to stay in Iraq for years after formal military operations had largely ended. All sorts of observers wanted him to talk about Afghanistan, and how and when that conflict might finally end.
One center-left pundit, Mike Miller, seized the occasion to apologize for his own support for the Iraq War.
Personally, the only mea culpa I’m interested in, and the only gesture by the president that has any real value, involves a very simple lesson: don’t make the same mistake again by launching a “war of choice” with no clear justification or any feasible strategy for real victory.. That would apply most particularly to the next war on the agenda of many Middle Eastern warkhawks, the war to prevent a nuclear Iran. We don’t need it, can’t afford it, and certainly haven’t shown we can deal with the shattered country and region we’d soon have to deal with if we actually succeeded,
If the president gets that one right, then I really don’t much care if he succeeds in becoming the definitive score-keeper for Iraq.

The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:

Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’

Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.

When President Obama speaks from the Oval Office tonight about the final withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, you’d think most Republicans would remain silent, or if not, focus on Afghanistan or even Iran as the locus for a renewed militant U.S. posture.
But no: the general conservative take is that George W. Bush needs praise as the man who made it possible to withdraw more combat troops to Iraq by sending more of them in the first place.
We’ll soon see whether this bizarre the-more-troops-we-send-the-more-we-can-withdraw narrative works.

It’s now pretty much established that Republicans have a real chance, albeit still a long shot, of winning control of the U.S. Senate in November. This would require a net gain of ten seats, meaning that (to cite the most common scenario) they’d have to hold all their own seats and then win Democratic seats in PA, DE, AR, IN, IL, WI, CO, NV, CA, and WA. A slightly alternative scenario would give the Republicans 49 or 50 seats, plussed-up by a party-switch from Joe Lieberman and/or Ben Nelson (a complicating variable is the possible election of Charlie Crist in FL as an indie, which could theoretically create some sort of centrist “bloc” that would bargain with both parties for control).
But as the primary season continues, it’s increasingly clear that Republican infighting and upsets could change the chessboard significantly, and risk Republican Senate wins long thought to be certain. It’s already happened in KY, where Rand Paul’s primary victory has made the GOP’s hold on Jim Bunning’s seat tenuous, and in NV, where Sharron Angle’s nomination did wonders for Harry Reid’s previously toasty political standing. The Republican mess in FL is also illustrative; either Rubio or Crist would be heavily favored in a two-way race against Kendrick Meek.
And now all sorts of additional havoc in “safe” GOP states seems possible. In Alaska, election officials today are beginning to count absentee and provisional ballots affecting the extremely close Senate primary battle between incumbent Lisa Murkowski and insurgent Joe Miller, amidst an increasingly bitter atmosphere. Suddenly Democratic nominee Scott McAdams is getting a second look as a potentially viable candidate. His prospects did take a blow when the Libertarian Party decided against offering Murkowski a ballot line if she loses the GOP nomination, but still, the intra-GOP hatefest could make this seat vulnerable.
Elsewhere, the main financier of Miller’s campaign, the Tea Party Express, has decided to go all in to support an equally unlikely candidate, Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, who is challenging moderate Mike Castle for the Senate nomination to face Democrat Chris Coons, who’s running an unexpectedly strong race for Joe Biden’s old seat. If, say, Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund decides to back O’Donnell, all bets could be off.
In one of those Republican Senate seats assumed to be in the bag, in NH, Republican establishment candidate Kelly Ayotte may soon be in a dogfight with self-styled “true conservative” Ovide Lamontagne, whose endorsement by the New Hampshire Union-Leader has revived his campaign. Lamontagne is the one Republican candidate in NH who has been trailing Democrat Paul Hodes in general election polls.
Now perhaps Alaska Republicans will more-or-less unite around their ultimate primary winner, and Ayotte and Castle will win their primaries, and Crist will collapse in FL, and then Republicans will sweep all the close Senate races, as occured in “wave” elections like 1980, 1994, 2006 and 2008 (the latter two benefitting Democrats). But the bottom line is that the GOP’s path to control of the Senate is getting more, not less, complicated. Breezy predictions of total victory are colliding with the messy reality that the unprecedented ideological conformity of the Republican Party just isn’t enough for conservatives, and the equally messy reality that actual voters have to choose between actual candidates in individual states.