In a recent post, I defended the proposition that Democrats should spend a great deal of time on this year’s campaign trail drawing attention to the past failures, present zaniness, and future emptiness of Republican policies. While voters say they don’t like what they perceive to be “negative campaigning,” comparative campaigning is always in order.
Now Ron Brownstein reports that Democrats from the White House on down have every intention of making Republicans an issue in this campaign. Here’s what David Axelrod has to say:

“It’s almost impossible to win a referendum on yourself,” Axelrod insisted. “And the Republicans would like this to be a referendum. It’s not going to be a referendum.”

Naturally, Republicans disagree:

Responding to Axelrod’s arguments, Republican pollster Glen Bolger said he was dubious that Democrats will succeed in shifting the focus toward the GOP. “It’s pretty unlikely,” said Bolger, a partner in Public Opinion Strategies, which polls widely for GOP candidates. “Basically, that is something that the party that is under the gun always says, and it is never the case. [In a midterm election] it is about who is in control and how people feel about how things are going in the country

Now obviously the “out” party in hard times wants every election to be a referendum, and the “in” party wants it to be about the “two futures” the two parties stand for. And when the hard times actually developed under the “out” party’s management, the past is an issue as well.
But Bolger’s idea that his own party’s character, record and agenda don’t matter is a sheer unsupported assertion.
Sometimes people, and particularly Republicans, making the “referendum” argument cite 1980, and Ronald Reagan’s famous formulation during the one presidential debate, that voters should ask themselves if “you are better off than you were four years ago,” as though it represented a magical incantation or reflected an iron law of politics. Nicely framed as it was, Reagan’s “referendum” plea would not have mattered at all if it hadn’t coincided with a political moment when swing voters had concluded he was a credible president with a potentially successful agenda. Until the very end, the 1980 race was actually very close, despite all of Jimmy Carter’s political troubles, which make Barack Obama’s look like child’s play. Moreover, Carter didn’t have an immediate, failed, unpopular Republican administration in the national rear-view mirror to point towards; Nixon had been out of office for six years.
Voters don’t “always” react in a particular way to hard times, and elections aren’t “always” referenda on the party in power at that particular moment: For a hundred years after the Civil War, many millions of Americans still voted for the party that was “right” about that conflict. There’s no reason on earth that Democrats can’t share some responsibility for the current economic situation–not to mention two wars–with the GOP, and insist on asking where each party would lead the country if victorious.

Current defenders of the de facto 60-vote requirement for enactment of legislation by the United States Senate invariably argue that a non-representative and obstructionist upper legislative chamber was crucial to the Founding Fathers’ system of constitutional checks and balances. Without a cranky and institutionally conservative Senate, you see, popular majorities might run roughshod over minority rights, and/or enshrine highly temporary objects of popular enthusiasm into law.
Attorney/activist Tom Geoghegan blows up this line of reasoning very effectively in a New York Times op-ed piece that appeared yesterday. His main argument is that by requiring Senate supermajorities in very select circumstances, the Founders made it clear they did not contemplate a universal, routine supermajority requirement for every circumstance. This is, in fact, a very recent development, accomplished through the abandonment of actual filibusters for threatened filibusters as an obstructionist tactic, and then the routinization of filibuster threats. What used to be an extreme and controversial measure–an actual filibuster–that was very difficult to deploy has now become the normal order of business in the Senate.
Had the Founders wanted the Senate to require supermajorities for all sorts of legislation, they would have placed it right there in the Constitution. But they did no such thing.
Geoghegan offers several avenues for challenging the Supermajority Senate outrage. But his best contribution is an argument that will leave constitutional “originalists” sputtering in confusion.

The big toxic political news coming out of the weekend was the revelation, retailed in a new 2008 campaign book, that Harry Reid once speculated that Barack Obama might be electable as president because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “Negro dialect.” Republicans immediately started demanding that Reid resign as Democratic Majority Leader, with many claiming his reported remarks were the equivalent of Trent Lott’s infamous wish-he-had-been-president praise for Strom Thurmond in 2002.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has the most sensible comment about Reid’s remarks and particularly the comparisons to Lott:

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term “Negro dialect” is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument–Barack Obama’s complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the “light skin” part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.
But there’s no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi’s support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman’s efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture–nearly half of Thurmond’s platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was “Segregation Forever!” (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott’s wasn’t forced to resign because he said something “racially insensitive.” He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy–frequently.
Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism.

All I’ll add is a guess that Reid’s use of the word “Negro” probably represented a clumsy effort to find an adjective to modify “dialect,” which isn’t exactly the same as calling African-Americans “Negroes.” Frankly, I haven’t heard a white person use the term in close to three decades; racists don’t bother to clean up their own favorite slur, and everybody else generally follows the rule of adopting whatever a particular racial or ethnic group chooses to call itself.
But in any event, this idea that one race-related gaffe is equal in offensiveness to any other is plain stupid. Lott was expressing continued solidarity with the racist political system he grew up with and didn’t abandon until the last possible moment. Reid used offensive language to make a almost universally-recognized objective point about voter attitudes, in the process of encouraging an African-American to run for president. That’s hardly the same.

Mark Blumenthal’s post the other day noting continued strong support for Obama among self-identified “liberal Democrats” attracted a nuanced dissent from OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers.
Bowers notes that there’s evidence liberal non-Democrats have soured on Obama pretty strongly, and that even among liberal Democrats, levels of support as compared to 2008 voting percentages have dropped more than for any other major voting category.
Blumenthal responds today by arguing that the levels of liberal disaffection from Obama are far too small to constitute a “revolt” by the “base,” and also suggests that approval ratings are a misleading barometer when it comes to liberal voters who would never consider pulling the lever for a Republican.
Aside from reporting the substance of this exchange, I would note that its tone represents something of a model for intraprogressive debates. Both Bowers and Blumenthal are respectful of each other’s opinion, try to stick to empirical data, and acknowlege this is a continuing subject for legitimate debate, not something on which one side or the other can claim any definitive “win.”

One of the simmering intraprogressive arguments that’s been going on during the last decade involves the responsibiity, if any, borne by the Clinton administration for the economic conditions of the Bush Era.
The standard Democratic take has been that during the Clinton years the country was putting into place the building blocks for long-term growth, fiscal solvency, and real across-the-board income gains. The Bush administration systematically demolished these building blocks and returned to the ecomomic policies of the 1980s, and produced 1980s-style booms and busts, financial panics, big federal budget deficits, and growing inequality.
But alongside this narrative has been a persistent “minority report” arguing that Clintonomics differed in degree rather than in kind with Republican economic policies, and that the tech stock bust at the end of the 90s exposed the pro-corporate illusions of Clinton’s New Democrats and paved the way for the dangerously laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration. This take was especially popular among netroots activists convinced that both parties, or at least their “D.C. Establishments,” had largely been captured by corporate influences.
The revisionist argument has now gained new momentum among some progressives who are unhappy with the Obama administration’s economic policies, which they blame in no small part on the influence of Clinton administration economic advisors back in power in Washington.
This week the inveterate controversialist Michael Lind has published at Salon the most sweeping restatement yet of the hypothesis that today’s economic troubles were largely created by Clintonomics.
Indeed, Lind takes shots not only at the alleged results of Clintonomics, but at the whole notion beloved of New Democrats that a knowledge-based New Economy had emerged in which technology, education and skills had become prized national assets and the key to erasing income inequality:

Here’s what the New Democrats of the DLC and PPI who chattered enthusiastically about the “creative class” of “knowledge workers” in the “new economy” failed to understand: The main jump in income inequality took place in the 1970s and the 1980s, before the alleged new economy created by the tech revolution.
The relative decline of wages at the bottom had little or nothing to do with technology or the global economy and everything to do with the weakening of the bargaining power of American workers vis-à-vis their employers thanks to declining unionization, an eroding minimum wage and the flooding of the low-end labor market by unskilled immigrants from Latin America, both legal and illegal.
Having misdiagnosed the problem, New Democrats, including Clinton and Obama, have consistently prescribed the wrong medicine: sending more Americans to college. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the occupations with the greatest number of openings in the foreseeable future require only a high school education or an associate’s degree, not a four-year B.A.
The most effective way to raise wages at the bottom would be to increase the bargaining power of workers, by unionizing the service sector and by tightening the labor market through restricting unskilled immigration. That would probably spur genuine productivity growth over time as employers substituted technology for more expensive labor.

Lind goes on to suggest that the Clintonians were blind to the damaging effects of the accumulation of paper wealth by tech entrepreneurs as well as Wall Street tycoons, and continued to promote “neoliberal” policies that ignored the real problems and perpetuated them–and now, as Obama advisors, they are making the same mistakes.
Since the Progressive Policy Institute was singled out by Lind as among the villains of Clintonomics, it’s not surprising that PPI president Will Marshall has responded at some length at Salon:

If you lived through the Clinton years, you might recall them as flush times. Some basic facts: The economy grew briskly, creating 18 million new jobs; rapid innovation, especially in information technology and online commerce, bred new businesses and helped to raise productivity in old ones; unemployment stayed low despite a steady influx of immigrants and women coming off welfare rolls; markets rose as the percentage of Americans owning stock jumped 50 percent; homeownership reached a record high (nearly 70 percent); the poverty rate shrank significantly; and the United States ran budget surpluses for the first time in three decades.
Not bad, right? Well, as reimagined by Lind, the 1990s were another “lost decade,” just like the Bush years, with their successive dot.com and housing bubbles, regressive tax breaks, zooming federal deficits and, of course, the grand finale: the near-meltdown of U.S. financial markets in the fall of 2008 along with the worst recession since 1982. If the comparison seems, well, strained, no matter. Lind’s real target is what he calls the myth of the “New Economy,” an illusion conjured by Clintonites (Progressive Policy Institute comes in for honorable mention here) to justify “neoliberal” policies.

Marshall goes on to cite research indicating that the “tech boom” did indeed increase labor productivity, and that higher education and skills do boost earning potential. And he has this to say about Lind’s alternative agenda for reducing economic inequality:

The causes of inequality are a subject of lively dispute among economists, but Lind is not hobbled by doubts. The reasons, he asserts, are to be found in the decline of unions, an eroding minimum wage, and unskilled immigrants. Yet by his own account, inequality really took off in the 1970s, when unions were relatively strong. (Plus, it’s strange to blame Democratic policies for growing inequality since 1980, since Democrats controlled the White House for only eight of those 28 years). Moreover, it should be obvious that falling union membership is the consequence, not the cause, of a massive shift in the U.S. employment base from manufacturing to services.
Because it affects only a small proportion of workers (including lots of kids working at part-time jobs), the minimum wage is a slender reed on which to hang the revival of good, middle-class wages in America. And there’s scant evidence to support Lind’s claim that immigration, legal or otherwise, has exerted significant downward pressure on native workers’ wages. The tide of unskilled immigration does have an impact on workers who graduate from high school, but not a very large one.

For readers who, like me, are not economists, the political implications of the Lind-Marshall debate are what’s really interesting. Marshall unsurprisingly accuses Lind of whitewashing the Bush administration’s record in his rush to blame Clinton for the economic problems of the aughts. And Lind obviously believes a major change in Obama’s economic policies is demanded by the times, though it’s unlikely that many progressives unhappy with Obama would embrace Lind’s call for radical reductions in immigration to relieve downward pressure on wages. (It’s also not clear, BTW, how Bill Clinton, facing Republican-controlled Congresses, was supposed to have pursued Lind’s other major prescription, the unionization of the service sector).
It’s easy to say that this argument would become largely moot if the economy now begins to turn around under Democratic management. But if and when the damage wrought during the aughts begins to abate, an economic policy consensus in the Democratic Party will become more important than ever, and areas of general agreement–the need for progressive taxes, an activist public sector focused on big national challenges, and careful regulation of big corporations–will be worth stressing, even if we disagree among ourselves about an increasingly distant past.

For all the notoriety of the Tea Party Movement, it’s been difficult to get any reliable fix on its fundamental political objectives. Is it a “third force” in American politics that will either morph into a third party and/or burn itself out through ineffectual if incendiary protests? Or is it essentially a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsesssions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending?
We may get a better understanding of the answer to that question next month, when a group called the Tea Party Nation puts on the first-ever national convention of tea party organizers and activists at Nashville’s Opryland.
TPM’s Christina Bellatoni says the convention’s agenda “sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.” I dunno; the announced speakers list looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin, with Michele Bachman speaking at lunch. Other confirmed speakers include the U.S. House GOP leadership’s resident wingnut, Marsha Blackburn (you do have to admit the Tea Party folks are very good at achieving gender parity in their panelists); Christian Right warhorses Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore; and assorted conservative TV and radio gabbers.
It’s now becoming standard for hard-core conservative candidates in Republican primaries around the country to identify themselves closely with the Tea Party Movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida, where Marco Rubio’s senate candidacy is a cause celebre for Tea Party folk everywhere. There’s a long profile of the Rubio-Crist race by Mark Liebovich in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that gives the distinct impression that Crist is a goner and Rubio’s about to become a maximum national conservative celebrity. And although there will be elements of the Tea Party movement who want to remain independent, the temptation of an opportunity to conquer, or at least intimidate into submission, one of the two major parties may prove irresistable.
UPDATE: The intrepid David Wiegel reports some conservative grumbling about the cost of this event–$549 for registration, and $349 just to attend the Palin speech–and Palin’s own rumored speaking fee of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Sure, big-name pols often command that much or a lot more for speeches, but it’s not what you’d want to charge to a grassroots activist group if you were thinking about running for president with their support. More generally, this kind of money-grubbing could undermine the legitimacy of the event.

There’s an interesting and potentially misleading theme developing in coverage of the 2010 political season: vulnerable Democrats will try to turn attention away from their record in 2009 and, in the words of a Tom Edsall post today, “make the race about the other guy.” The implication many will draw from this theme is that Democrats, having no popular positive agenda, will “go negative” on the GOP.
This is an interpretation that Democrats should fight tooth and nail. Elections are, by definition, a choice between candidates and parties. The framing that Republicans would like to impose, that the election is a “referendum” on the Obama administration or the Democratic Party, is absurd. Without any question, the administration inherited a recession, a financial crisis, a budget crisis, two wars, and a dysfunctional and gridlocked Congress, from a Republican administration. The views of Republicans as well as Democrats about what to do with that inheritence are deeply relevant to the 2010 elections. Yes, Democrats have a specific agenda to defend and explain; to the extent that Republicans have identified their own agenda, that’s on the table, too, and to the extent that they haven’t, that’s of interest to voters as well.
To the extent that Republicans have engaged in extremist rhetoric this last year, and flirted with atavistic nullification theories and race-baiting conspiracy theories concerning ACORN or the president’s credentials as an American, that needs to be pointed out. That’s not “going negative” or “changing the subject;” it’s a matter of presenting the actual choices, which are not “the status quo” and “something better” but one party and the other, and one candidate or the other.
Another relevant issue is what will happen to the country’s interests in the immediate future if a violently obstructionist GOP is strengthened this November. Will Americans welcome two years of partisan conflict and inaction? Are they prepared to resolve the problem by electing any of the currently available Republican leaders their president in 2012?
These questions are all necessary, if not entirely sufficient, to a Democratic message for 2010. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, Democrats.

Over the last 24 hours, word has been leaking out of four separate Democratic candidates for statewide office around the country deciding to retire from office or otherwise fold campaigns. They are Sens. Chris Dodd of CT and Byron Dorgan of ND, along with Gov. Bill Ritter of CO (up for re-election this year) and Lt. Gov. Don Cherry of MI (running for governor this year).
Republicans are naturally spinning these unrelated developments as part of a wave of discouraged Democrats getting out of campaigns in anticipation of a big pro-GOP November. That’s not surprising. But it is annoying that mainstream political media are so avidly buying this spin. Politico‘s banner headline this morning is: “Top Democrats head for the exits.”
The irony is that these changes of heart could actually improve overall Democratic prospects in November. Dodd was in deep political trouble, and his likely replacement as Democratic nominee, CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, will be favored to win. Cherry’s gubernatorial campaign was struggling to raise money, and his withdrawal could open the door to any number of better-positioned Democratic candidates. And in CO, Ritter’s retirement could well draw former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff out of a contentious primary challenge to Sen. Michael Bennet; if that doesn’t happen, highly popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper might run, and there’s even been some talk that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would like to be governor. Any of these candidates would be considered stronger than Ritter.
Dorgan’s retirement is definitely a blow to Democrats. But he, too, was badly trailing Gov. John Hoeven in the polls, and if Rep. Earl Pomeroy decides to take the plunge, his prospects might be as good as Dorgan’s.
In terms of handicapping the overall contest for control of the U.S. Senate, it’s important to remember that not two but six Republicans have already announced retirements (in OH, FL, MO, KY, NH and KS). I don’t recall any “Top Republicans head for the exits” headlines about them.