This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s hardly a secret or an accident that much of politics revolves around the elimination of doubt among voters on public policy issues. Base-mobilization strategies for elections typically involve convincing people with clear preferences but weak civic engagement (or doubts about their own “team”) that any given trip to the ballot box is of epochal importance. Swing-voter persuasion strategies also tend to focus on efforts to convince the undecided that one’s party or candidate will make the country a much happier place. And while doubt’s evil twin, fear, most definitely has a place in both base and swing strategies, it’s still aimed at convincing voters there is a clear and unambiguous, if largely negative, difference between the consequences of voting this way or that.
I mention the dubious political status of doubt in the context of a long and fascinating piece we just published at The Democratic Strategist by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, director of The Progressive Project, entitled “Zero For Thirty-One: Lessons From the Loss in Maine.” A veteran of the struggle for LGBT rights and marriage equality, Beach-Ferrara concludes that ballot measures to stop gay marriage keep winning in no small part because equality advocates don’t talk much to conflicted voters, particularly those for whom religious dogma pulls them away from their own personal sense of fairness–i.e., non-bigots who are lumped in with bigots in most LGBT-rights strategies.
Based on her first-hand interviews with torn voters, Beach-Ferrara contends that marriage equality activists would do well to spend some time convincing such voters to reflect their true convictions by conscientiously passing up the opportunity to make a choice they aren’t prepared to make. In other words, rather than pushing people to come down on one side or the other, activists should have looked at doubt as a political asset.
Beach-Ferrara’s provocative article immediately reminded me of the only politician I’ve ever heard talk about doubt as a religious value: Barack Obama. In his famously controversial but ultimately effective commencement speech at Notre Dame in May, Obama addressed the faithful in terms that Beach-Ferrara (herself a divinity student) would find congenial:

[T]he ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.
This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame..

Given the usual tendency of progressives to deal with conservatively inclined religious people by pandering to them, steering clear of the subject, or offering the faith-based counterdogmas of the Christian Left, Obama was indeed offering something new: pluralism based on conscientious doubt, or as it was once called, the fear of God.
But doubt can obviously become a political asset beyond the ranks of the religious. We normally think of doubt on political or policy questions as an inherently conservative force, leading to a preference for the devil you know. At a time like the present, however, when “wrong-track” sentiments are exceptionally strong and most major public and private institutions are held in low repute, doubt can lead in very different directions depending on how that emotion is deployed.
That’s one important reason why health care reform has been so difficult a topic for progressives. Democrats have been focusing much of their efforts reassuring people with health insurance that reform won’t degrade their coverage. But this message has come at the expense of accurately describing the terrible unfairness and inefficiency and unsustainable trajectory of the current system. Reassured voters have no real stake in reform. Doubters may, but only if they are convinced the status quo represents as much or more of a risk than a new system.
The bottom line is that doubt is going to be an important popular sentiment on complex topics like health care, climate change, globalization, or the long-term fiscal challenge. It can work for progressives, or against them, but the prevailing unhappiness about current conditions in the country ought to make doubt-based decisions—or in the case of gay marriage, decisions not to make decisions—friendlier to real change. So long as we treat certainty as the object of every political communication, and write off the doubtful as stupid, cognitively challenged, or unmotivated, we miss that opportunity.

Like most everyone else who is not in the food or other essential services industries, we’re taking a break from work today. And we’re very thankful for not having lost a job, a loved one, or our minds, during the last year.
A happy Thanksgiving Day to all, and we’ll be back tomorrow.

I haven’t read Sarah Palin’s instabook, Going Rogue, just yet, since I don’t want to pay actual money for it and am just now where I can request a review copy from the publisher. I’m not that impressed by its sales numbers, since Ann Coulter is perpetually on the best-seller lists with her latest phoned-in screed. But I will confine my comments about the latest excrusion of Palinmania to what she has been quoted as saying, and what book reviewers of all ideological stripes seem to agree upon.
It seems pretty clear that one purpose of Palin’s book was to settle some scores with the McCain campaign staff, particularly Steve Schmidt, whom she resented for treating her with something less than respect. With few exceptions, of course, Veep candidates, particularly those with no prior relationship with the Top Dog, are typically treated as props and rally-the-base agitators, not real partners in the campaign enterprise, but that probably doesn’t make it feel any better for the candidate herself. More to the point, Palin’s grudge against Schmidt is a bit ungrateful, since most accounts of her surprise selection indicate that he was her primary advocate within the campaign. Without Schmidt, Palin would almost certainly be an obscure lame-duck governor notable mainly as a B-list speaker at right-to-life fundraisers, instead of someone likely to be a national celebrity for many years. But gratitude is a rare quality in politics, particularly for people who may glimpse the Next President of the United States in their bathroom mirror each morning.
Much has been made by Palin fans of her admission that she made mistakes during the last campaign, particularly in the disastrous Couric interview. But what she really confesses is that she lost her cool when Couric hit her with “gotcha” questions. Let’s think about that: the really bad moments for Palin were her inability to answer the questions about her daily reading habits, and about Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v. Wade that she didn’t agree with. The first question was, by any reasonable standard, a softball, not a “gotcha.” It’s not as though Couric asked her to name the president of some central Asian former Soviet Republic; it was instead about a subject on which Sarah Palin is the primary expert. That doesn’t necessarily make Palin an idiot; Ted Kennedy famously waxed incoherent on an equally anodyne question (“Why do you want to be president?”) in an interview with Roger Mudd back in 1979. But she has no grounds for whining or for implying that her only mistake was not to march out of the studio in protest about this terribly unfair question on where she got her news.
Palin’s flubbing of the second so-called “gotcha” question from Couric is in some respects more surprising. She was, after all, the national poster pol of the right-to-life movement, which generally holds that the U.S. Supreme Court has been engaged in a monstrous conspiracy over many years to enable genocide. You’d think the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which established the current “undue burden” standard for state regulation of abortions, might have come to mind, or maybe the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision (the object of endless mockery by generations of conservatives), which first established a constitutional right to privacy and thus paved the way for Roe. I’m sure some of Palin’s anti-abortion activist fans were shocked at her failure to tick off these cases, which they regard as among the central events of American history.
So Palin’s mea culpa for the Couric interview isn’t all that honest or impressive. And what most stands out about her, from Election Day 2008 to her present book tour, is her penchant for that vice that conservatives used to attribute to liberals: posing as a victim. That’s certainly the quality her most avid supporters identify with. Check out an excerpt of a post from The American Thinker by self-proclaimed “recovering liberal” calling herself Robin of Berkeley, entitled “The Wilding of Sarah Palin,” which treats Palin as a symbolic rape victim. After arguing at inordinate length that “liberal men” are all a pack of vicious misogynists, the writer really goes to town:

Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it’s far worse: many are perpetuators.
The Left’s behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.
They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.
The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat.

Now Robin of Berkeley is a pretty extreme example of the Palin-as-Martyr syndrome, but there’s little doubt that’s the beating heart of her appeal to a large segment of the conservative “base:” the sense that she’s suffering mockery on their behalf from the sneering denizens of Hollywood and the punditocracy, and will (they hope) provide them with their own vengeful vindication. Palin is the ultimate heroine to the kind of conservative who really does believe there’s a “War on Xmas,” that Christians are banned from judicial appointments, that public schools are atheist indoctrination centers, and that pro-choice Americans are consciously, gleefully, genocidal maniacs. It’s interesting that there’s no one remotely like her on the left side of the ideological spectrum, and by that I’m not referring to her casual attitude towards facts and her pretzel logic (there are plenty of inarticulate, semi-educated folk of every persuasion, some in high public office), but rather her constant appeals to the wounded sensibilities of her followers.
It’s become common among Democrats to observe that attacks on Palin simply feed her cult with fresh grievances, and that may be true, but as Robin of Berkeley demonstrates, we’re probably at a point where anything negative that’s left unsaid about Palin will simply be inferred or invented by her fans. This is a fire that will rage on without additional fuel for quite some time, so there’s no real point in ignoring it.
The thing about Palinmaniacs that most amazes me is their conviction that “liberals” are terrified of her, like sinners called to account by a vision of Final Judgment. I’m one “liberal” who wishes her godspeed in her political aspirations and hopes she will run for president in 2012. Her nomination is very unlikely, but if it occurred, it would represent the final descent of the conservative movement into angry and self-pitying delusion, aimed not at capturing political power but simply at smiting its real and imaginary enemies.
As a presidential candidate, she would torment poor, sunny Mike Huckabee, whose political and religious views are as extreme as Palin’s, but who doesn’t offer the requisite spirit of angry vengefulness and almost never engages in collective whines against the terrible mistreatment of upright Americans by their own benighted country. Mitt Romney’s CEO gravitas can’t possibly compete with the multifaceted emotional pull of Palin, the personification of the grassroots conservative activist who views every public policy issue in life or death, us or them, terms. Tim Pawlenty’s plodding and calculated stands for lower taxes or Medical Savings Accounts are thin gruel as opposed to a rival who can display the stigmata of her persecution by the Left. She’s political dynamite within a Republican Party that’s already volatile with anger at the opposition, and at its own leaders’ unwillingness or inability reimpose their traditionalist values and promote via arms their America-only worldview. She’s a threat not so much to Democrats as to Republicans who want political victories more than holy war. And as we are seeing right now, she is not going away.

There’s a well-established rhetorical practice available very often in the op-ed pages of The New York Times that ought to be called the Brooks Maneuver. It involves framing a complicated public policy issue in terms of abstract and conflicting principles that the columnist sympathizes with but deems tragically incompatible, before concluding that any resolution will require a brave new kind of politics that just doesn’t exist. Thus, sadly, no action is advisable until that great day when wise solons take charge, a course of action that happens to coincide, amazingly, with the short-term strategy of the Republican Party.
Mr. Brooks provided a virtuoso performance of his Maneuver yesterday, in a column on health care. Check out this opening gambit:

[L]ike all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally a debate about values. It’s a debate about what kind of country we want America to be.
During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain — poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.
Over the years, Americans decided they wanted a little more safety and security. This is what happens as nations grow wealthier; they use money to buy civilization.

From this lofty perspective, Brooks goes on to stipulate that the health care reform debate represents a choice between “security” and “vitality,” because, he says (on the authority of a Wall Street Journal column), the current legislation is sure to rapidly accelerate health care costs and seriously damage the economy.
And so he concludes:

[Reform] would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.
We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference.

The Brooks Maneuver on health care accomplishes two devious purposes.
First, it identifies the opponents of health care reform with “vitality” and “growth.” In reality, what most reform foes are defending is the status quo in health care, which is hardly “vital” or entrepreneurial in any significant way. Costs are already skyrocketing, most health decision are greatly affected by massive private and public-sector bureaucracies, and the “cruelty” Brooks admits is accompanied by extraordinary inefficiency. Brooks is a past master at “plague on both houses” formulations, but this one, more than most, represents a terribly false moral equivalency.
Second, by lamenting the supposedly long-lost opportunity to control costs, Brooks suggests indirectly that someday, somehow, a health care reform strategy might be devised that transcends the terrible choice between ruthless laissez-fairism and economic collapse. That must, surely, be worth waiting for, right? So without coming right out and saying it, the column leads the reader in the direction of rejecting today’s reforms for those that will someday emerge, when the horrible partisan viccisitudes of the past few years are behind us and America once again finds the “sweet spot” where conflicting values can be reconciled.
Am I overinterpeting Brooks? Maybe, maybe not. But without question, by arguing that the health reform debate poses an impossible choice, he’s avoiding the real choice between a status quo whose few virtues are fading each day, and a chance to head in a different direction. That, too, is a matter of “moral preference.”

When you’ve been away from blogging, and from regular access to political news, for more or less a month, as I have, there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on. But I have to say, the thing I missed that amazes me the most, while confirming some of my own uncharitable fears about conservatives, was last week’s PPP poll showing that a majority of self-identified Republicans think the struggling and marginal grassroots organization ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama.
Matt Compton, Adam Serwer and Eric Kleefield all offered some thoughts on this poll. But I somehow don’t think most progressives are fully grasping the centrality of ACORN to the conservative world-view these days.
I’ve written about this several times over the last thirteen months, but bear with me: ACORN has assumed an all-purpose demonic role for Republicans. They were, in the lurid view of Fox News enthusiasts (embraced on at least one occasion by the McCain-Palin ticket) the cause of the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown, thanks to the alleged help they provided to shiftless people to obtain mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. They then demanded bailouts for their clients. And because a whole lotta socialism was necessary to keep them afloat, they stole the election for their close ally Barack Obama. Coincidentally, of course, and irrelevant to the narrative of ACORN running the country, was the fact that the group is one of the most visibily minority-oriented organizations in national public life.
The fact that there is virtually no empirical evidence for any of these contentions about ACORN (particularly the election-stealing stuff, which is an absolute hallucination by any standard) hasn’t much mattered; the group was far, far too convenient a scapegoat for everything that displeased conservatives since September of 2008.
But in talking about this so many times, it never really occured to me that a majority of Republicans bought into the ACORN Derangement Syndrome, with only a quarter of them rejecting the idea that this group stole the 2008 elections. Analogizing this to the Democratic reaction to Florida 2008 is ludicrous; Gore did win the popular vote, Florida was incredibly disputed, and the Supreme Court did shut down the recount to get Bush across the finish line. There is not a shred of evidence that Obama didn’t legitimately and decisively win the election, and no significant Republican spokesman doubted it at the time. It took a full year conservative shrieking about ACORN to instill this crazy theory into the consciousness of rank-and-file Republican, nicely validating their hatred of Obama, their bizarre claims that he’s some sort of totalitarian revolutionary determined to destroy the Constitution.
It’s a case history in viral demagoguery of the most toxic sort, and reputable Republicans should be even more upset about it than I am.

As has been the case all year, progressives are giving mixed reviews to the latest legislative step health care reform legislation, the 60-40 Senate vote-to-proceed, which is basically a preliminary cloture vote. While everyone’s happy that the vote wasn’t lost, there’s a fair amount of angst over the threats of some Democrats to vote against the final bill, or against cloture on the final bill, unless actions unacceptable to most progressives are taken to change the bill.
And again, as has been the case all year, nearly all the focus among progressive worriers is over the public option, which Senators Lieberman and Nelson seem to be ruling out categorically.
Let’s look at these two issues separately.
If, indeed, wavering Democrats who voted for the motion to proceed nonetheless conclude that they have no obligation to vote for cloture on passage of the bill unless their substantive demands are met, then we might as well start rediscussing the reconciliation strategy, because there is no version of health reform, now or at any point in recent history, that could command 60 votes in the Senate. To get to 60 on cloture (even granting that a Republican or two might still be lured across the line), it will be necessary to convert those who basically said “I hate this bill but I don’t want to prevent the debate” to a position of “I hate this bill but I don’t want to prevent a vote.” And that will require not just moral suasion but pressure and maybe serious threats of reprisals from the Senate leadership, supplemented by a robust public campaign over the next few weeks to demonize the de facto 60-vote requirement, which much of the public knows nothing about. Keep in mind that health reform isn’t the only progressive initiative that’s doomed if it takes 60 Senate votes to enact anything serious on any subject, and also keep in mind that an increase in Democratic votes in the Senate in the immediate future is exceptionally unlikely.
On the second issue, the public option focus, it’s as good a time as any for progressives to finally begin looking at this legislation as a whole, and as compared to what will happen if no legislation is enacted before the 2010 elections. It is entirely possible (particularly if you are a single-payer advocate) to conclude that a reasonably strong public option is more important than covering most of the uninsured, more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable, more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices, and more important than how and when health reform is phased in, just to mention four competing priorities. But it’s equally possible–and more to the point, legitimately progressive–to consider one or more of these factors to be as important as a conventionally constructed public option–again, if you major concern is the practical effects of reform rather than setting the stage for a future single payer system. In any event, an intra-progressive debate on priorities that goes beyond the public option issue needs to happen right away.

Amidst general pleasure over the House´s passage of health reform legislation Saturday night, there´s also progressive angst over two issues: the narrowness of the vote, which leaves little or no margin for error when the conference committee report comes up, and the passage of the Stupak Amendment, which goes much further than previous House or Senate bills in restricting the ability of consumers to purchase abortion coverage in the new exchanges.
The first concern is probably overwrought. Speaker Pelosi clearly whipped her vote, and gave a free pass to vulnerable Democrats to vote “no.” Since the final version is likely to be less subject to conservative attack than the House bill, Pelosi should be able to hold all 219 Democrats and perhaps add a few.
The Stupak Amendment is more problematic, since 64 Democrats voted for it. But given the arcane nature of the differences between Stupak and earlier anti-abortion provisions, it’s unclear that any Democrats who voted for the House bill would vote against the conference report with a slightly less obnixious anti-abortion provision.
In any event, we should take a deep breath right now and appreciate the historic nature of the House vote, which didn’t look that secure until right before it occurred. Aside from its substantive importance, the vote should prove helpful in diverting the news media from ludicrous overinterpretation of the NJ and VA gubernatorial results.

Now that the results from NJ and VA have been masticated for a few days, it´s pretty obvious that the most ominous–but potentially reversible–factor in the dual Democratic defeats was a massive change in the composition of the electorate. According to exit polls, under-30 voters represented 21 percent of the Virginia electorate in 2008, and only 10 percent last Tuesday. And in NJ, the under-30 share of the vote dropped from 17 percent in 2008 to 8 percent in 2009.
African-American turnout didn´t drop so much; in VA, it declined from 20% of the electorate in 2009 to 16 percent this year, and in NJ, it actually went up marginally as a share of the electorate. But since turnout generally dropped, it´s clear that 2008´s massive African-American turnout for the Democratic ticket was not replicated.
With Democratic fears about 2010 already heavily focused on the typically older and whiter composition of midterm electorates, the NJ-VA results simply confirm what we already knew, but at a level of intensity that is surprisiing (though Corzine´s general unpopularity and Deeds´ questionable campaign tactics are responsible for some of the problem).
The question going forward, of course, is why the Obama Coalition turnout was so weak, and what, if anything, Demcrats can do to reverse this trend during the next year.
And that´s where the relative clarity over the numbers breaks down into varying interpretations over the implications.
Unsurprisingly, many self-conscious Democratic progressives think that Obama´s “centrism” has “discouraged the Democratic base,” much as, they believe, Bill Clinton did so in his first two years, leading to the Republican landslide of 1994. In this view, the administration and congressional Democrats need to forget once and for all about “bipartisanship,” congressional compromises, Blue-Dog-coddling, or deficit worries, and plunge ahead with a boldly progressive agenda that revitalizes the 2008 coalition. This interpretation, of course, collides with the counsel of those focused on the disastrous performance of 2009 Democratic gubernatorial candidates among independents, who are (often falsely) assumed to be “centrist” in orientation.
Others focus on the mechanics of voter mobilization, and suggest that what most needs to happen in the next year is a rebuilding of the Obama ¨”machine” that helped boost minority and youth turnout to historic levels in 2008.
And a third theory is simply that conditions in the country, and the enduring unpopularity of both political parties, has eroded the Democratic vote in those segments of the electorate least likely to vote (young voters being most conspicious in that category). According to this theory, a record of forward momentum in Congress (on health care and climate change) and on the economy is most crucial in reducing the fallloff in pro-Obama turnout and the carnage among independents.
The first and third theories point in different directions, since a ¨”bold progressive¨ direction may not be consistent with congressional accomplishments (aiming instead at a Trumanesque placement of blame on Republican obstruction and extremism). And both theories may not sufficiently account for the difficulty in transferring Obama´s relatively strong approval ratings in the potential electorate as a whole to actual voters deciding between actual Democratic and Republican candidates competing across the country in individual races. As Jonathan Singer pointed out this week at MyDD, one scenario going forward is that Barack Obama could become a latter-day Ike, incapable of transferring personal popularity to his party (though split-ticket voting has vastly declined since the 1950s).
Democrats need to debate and sort out these theories of last week´s turnout calamity. But one this is clear: a continuing focus on the dangerous extremism of the GOP is consistent with every theory, particularly if, as is likely, Republicans go into 2010 hoping to reclaim control of the House, and head towards 2012 with a presidential field tilting to the crazy Right. You can argue all day about whether Obama or congressional Democrats have dashed the hopes of many 2008 voters for dramatic change in Washington. But 2008 Obama voters who are made abundantly aware that today´s Republicans want to govern from a position well to the Right of that of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay are a lot more likely to go to the polls next November no matter how sanguine they are about the administration´s record.

At the end of this important week on the health care front, one thing clear is that the differences between what the House and Senate are likely to vote on are not as large as everyone expected a few weeks ago. Harry Reid’s advancing a public option bill with (it appears) a state opt-out, and the House is going with a public option that will negotiate rates instead of pegging payments to Medicare. Had the Senate gone with a weak trigger or something like co-ops, or the House had insisted on the Medicare peg, it could have caused some very serious problems down the road.
However you happen to feel about the substance of these nuances, anything that steadily narrows the gaps between Senate and House Democrats is a step towards enactment of health reform this year. Or at least that’s how it looks to me from an internet cafe a very long way from Washington.