In a lede that made me look quickly at the date to make sure I hadn’t pulled up something from nine months ago, Poltico’s Josh Kaushaar writes today: “The GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies is offering a solution to Republican candidates as they seek to find a compelling message for the 2010 campaigns: Run to prevent Democrats from having unchecked power in Washington.”
You may recall that “checks and balances” or “divided government” was a theme that was supposed to be the magic formula for victory for John McCain last year, enabling him to run against the terribly unpopular Democratic Congress (which unltimately got a lot bigger) without directly attacking Barack Obama. This, of course, was before the McCain-Palin campaign decided to run against Obama and the Democrats as a gang of socialists determined to redistribute wealth from Joe the Plumber to welfare recipients. So color me as unimpressed as the McCain campaign apparently was with poll data showing that, of course, Americans favor “checks and balances” as opposed to “one-party government.”
But whether it’s an effective message or not, you can certainly see how it would be attractive to today’s Republicans, who are determined to oppose everything Obama wants and to remain united around an increasingly atavistic version of “conservative principles,” even as the public makes it ever clearer that it likes Obama and doesn’t like conservatism. Standing up for “checks and balances” sounds vastly nicer than “obstruction” or “the status quo.” And claiming to be playing this essential constitutional role also evokes a certain aroma of bipartisanship, conveniently expressed through systemic opposition to the other party.
It’s unclear to me that congressional Republicans have either the self-discipline or the external power to tone down conservative attacks on Obama as either a secular or religious version of the Antichrist. But even if they can somehow pain a smiley-face on a policy of total obstruction, and sell it as an effort to maintain “checks and balances,” that’s a terribly bloodless sort of appeal to make to a country that’s worried about concrete things like jobs and health care.
Even the GOP pollster who’s hyping the “checks and balances” message as a nifty panacea for what ails his party, Glen Bolger, allows as how it’s “no substitute for policy alternatives,” which is a bit of a problem for Republicans who are increasingly united around Hoover’s economics, Cheney’s foriegn policy, and Palin’s social views. At least, I supposed, it puts them into a context of relevance to what Obama’s trying to do, and not on the margins, howling at the moon and cheering every downward tick in the stock market.
Ed Kilgore
Note: this item by James Vega was originally published on April 22, 2009.
These two terms have been around for so long that the reality of their present uselessness may not seem immediately obvious. But, in fact, there are actually three very different political groups who are lumped together inside the vague term “the left” and six or seven very distinct meanings of the term “centrist.” For any serious intra-Democratic political discussion to be productive, Democrats have to start making the effort to clearly distinguish between these differences.
In the case of the term “the left,” the problem is obvious to any Democrat who listens to Fox News. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck and their imitators relentlessly hammer away at a succession of straw men called “the loony left”, “the hard left”, “the extreme left” and so on — a powerful group who, they assert, have substantial if not total control of the Democratic Party.
Aside from other political commentators, the only specific examples they offer are — not really surprisingly – such powerful and influential figures as junior professors at small state colleges, eccentric elementary school teachers in communities no one has ever heard of before and a variety of well-known (or just as often barely known) Hollywood actors – individuals whose views or actions are confidently asserted to reflect the absolutely typical or dominant attitude of the entire Democratic community.
The truth, on the other hand — as all serious observers know perfectly well — is that there are actually three profoundly distinct groups that compose “the left” and they are so different that it is essentially useless to make any generalizations about them as a whole.
1. The first group is the traditional social movement organizations dedicated to causes like the environment, civil liberties, labor and so on. The most distinctive characteristic of these groups are their single issue focus and political strategy of bargaining with candidates to win their support.
2. The second group is the multi-issue, internet-based organizations like MoveOn and Daily Kos. Their political stance tends to be militantly partisan and pro-Democratic but not ideologically extreme. Surveys have shown that the political attitudes within this group tend to resemble traditional post-war liberal and progressive views.
3. The third group is the genuine “radicals.” These days they are less often doctrinaire socialists than eclectic ecological/peace/anti-establishment militants. They are concentrated among graying tenured faculty members and young energetic protestors in movements like the anti-globalization coalitions. Although their attitudes are asserted to be the dominant ones in the Democratic coalition, in fact they generally have relatively little interest in standard electoral politics and rarely become involved in the grass-roots organizational activities of the Democratic Party.
The differences between these three groups are generally greater than the similarities, a fact that is relatively obvious when comparing the authentic radicals and the others, but is also evident between the netroots and the traditional organizations (The Daily Kos’s Markos devoted an entire chapter in his book Storming The Gates to outlining the Netroots’ disagreements with traditional single-issue organizations)
Since Obama’s paradigm-breaking campaign, there has mercifully been far less abuse of the general term “the left” within the Democratic Party then in the years preceding. But Democrats nonetheless need to officially retire the phrase and replace it with more specific discussion of issues and questions concerning the positions and actions of the three distinct groups.
Meanwhile, the term “centrist” is, if anything, even more desperately in need of retirement than “the left”. It does not only refer to several different groups, but more confusingly to a cluster of fundamentally different concepts — each of which needs to be clearly distinguished from the others.
When Progressives criticize “centrism” they are generally focusing on three very distinct and specific political behaviors or characteristics (1) an excessive conservatism in ideology, becoming at the extreme nearly indistinguishable from Republicanism (2) a marked timidity or even cowardice in political strategy and (3) corruption in financial and ethical standards.
It is not hard to understand why grass roots Democratic activists who live outside Washington find it relatively easy to feel that these characteristics do all substantially overlap in the group generally known as the “beltway insiders.” From a distance, these people all appear extremely intimate and chummy – appearing on the same think-tank panels and sitting amiably side by side on the Sunday talk shows, referring to each other by first names in the most friendly and collegial way.
But, regardless of how many canapés and podiums the “Beltway insiders” share together, the three characteristics above simply do not necessarily imply each other or overlap. Lumping them all indiscriminately together conceptually in a single term “centrism” is intellectually sloppy thinking and is deeply detrimental to the quality and usefulness of progressive thought.
Let’s untangle the distinctions.
Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on April 21, 2009.
At The New Republic yesterday, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber undertook the latest effort to define “Obamaism,” and concluded that the president represents a sort of hybrid liberalism that reflects the market-friendly attitude of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats tempered by a more traditional commitment to equality:
Like the New Democrats who ultimately shaped the Clinton administration’s agenda, Obama has a deep respect for the market and wants to minimize the state’s footprint on it. He has little interest in fixing prices or rationing goods or reversing free-trade agreements. But, while he basically shares the New Democrats’ instincts, he rejects their conclusions. Reacting against the overweening statism of their liberal ancestors, many New Democrats came to believe that if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity. You only need to view the extent of Obama’s domestic agenda to know he doesn’t agree.
They go on to talk about the Obamaite tendency to “nudge” or “harness” market forces to accomplish progressive means, instead of relying on direct government action, as reflected in both their banking and health care policies.
While I generally agree with their take on “Obamaism,” I do question, as a veteran of the whole New Democratic thing, Foer and Scheiber’s retroactive take on that ideology, which they describe as based on the belief that “if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity.” I don’t think New Democrats were ever as laissez-faire oriented as they describe it.
The closest anyone ever came to an ideological definition for the New Democratic “Third Way” was probably the 1996 Progressive Policy Institute document called “The New Progressive Declaration,” a self-conscious manifesto for the reform movement that was then sweeping through center-left parties all over the world. Here’s that document’s key principle when it comes to the fundamental relationship of markets to government and society:
The first cornerstone–the promise of equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none–has animated generations of American leaders and has attracted millions of immigrants to our shores. It is the ideal of a society in which individuals earn their rewards through their own talents and effort within a system of fair and open rules. It recognizes that there is no invisible hand that creates equal opportunity; it is a conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts: removing discriminatory barriers, providing meaningful arenas for self-improvement, a commitment to public investment, and a rejection of special-interest subsidies that give the influential a leg up.
Equal opportunity as a “conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts” doesn’t quite sound like getting government out of the way to let markets work their magic. And for all the talk about Obama’s agenda transcending that of his Clintonian predecessors, some of his signature progressive agenda items, like a market-based approach to universal health coverage and a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions, have been advocated by serious New Democrat types for years, along with a strong commitment to progressive tax rates.
That’s not to say that Obama is today merely echoing what the Clintonians were saying a decade or so ago. The real difference, I would argue, was not any New Democratic lack of interest in equality or public-sector activism, but rather a hostility to regulation based on a sense of triumphalism about technology and globalization as wholly positive developments, and a conviction that “information age” progressivism needed to rethink the social bargains associated with “industrial age” progressivism. It’s safe to say that New Democrats were irrationally exuberent about the economic trends of the 1990s, though not entirely wrong, either.
In general, I’d say the more we learn about Barack Obama’s domestic ideology, the more it looks like a “third way” progressivism chastened by the economic experiences of the last decade and yoked to a much firmer commitment to the necesssity of maintaining some of the “old” social bargains and regulatory practices of the New Deal and Great Society eras. And in international relations, it’s even more obvious that Obama represents a liberalism chastened by an Iraq War that so many Clintonians embraced, however tentatively or fleetingly.
As Foer and Scheiber conclude, Obama may find the elusive “third way” that Clinton “grasped for a decade ago,” whether or not his political thinking acquires a distinctive label or is articulated in books and manifestos. Right now most progressives would settle for success in sheparding America throught the present crisis, and in giving progressive governance a fresh chance.
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Editor’s Note: this TDS Strategy Memo, written by Andrew Levison, provides a unique historical perspective on President Obama’s much-debated strategy for promoting a progressive agenda in Washington, drawing on the lessons of the civil rights movement. It was originally published on April 15, 2009.
Obama’s ambitious budget has profoundly reassured many Democrats that he is indeed the progressive he appeared to be during the 2008 campaign. But there is still widespread concern about his continued desire to achieve some degree of “bipartisanship.”
For many progressives, Barack Obama’s notion of “bipartisanship” reflects a political strategy rooted in a timid, overly weak and compliant variety of 1990’s centrism — a political strategy that the Democratic Party finally rejected after the 2004 election, leading to the gains in the elections of 2006 and 2008. In this view, Obama’s attempts to negotiate with congressional Republicans over his stimulus and budget programs and his continuing expressions of a desire to win the support of moderate Republican legislators for his health and energy plans represent a serious threat to compromise and dilute the progressive vision reflected in his budget.
The progressive alternative to Obama’s strategy that this critical view suggests seems obvious: a much more consistently combative, fiercely partisan and unyieldingly progressive approach, one that seeks to maximize Democratic victories and reject any unnecessary compromise. As Digby, for example argued: “Only in the beltway bubble is there some expectation that everyone is going to agree. The rest of us would prefer that our politicians stand up for what they believe in and try to do what they promised”.
This approach was developed and championed by the Democratic grassroots and netroots during the Bush years and it is also often suggested that it is also the modern version of the political strategy that underlay the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s.
The Civil Rights Movement was indeed militant and confrontational in many of its tactics such as sit-ins, freedom rides and street demonstrations. But, in the particular approach developed and employed by Martin Luther King and SCLC, the broader, long-term strategy the movement followed was actually a good deal more complex. In fact, Obama’s seemingly unique political strategy did not appear out of thin air in 2008. Its roots actually lie in one particular perspective that emerged out of the civil rights movement and that drew heavily upon the lessons the movement learned during the Birmingham and Chicago campaigns.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to emphasize one key fact. Recognizing that Obama’s political strategy has its roots in strategies developed by King and SCLC does not imply that progressives and the progressive movement today are obliged to support and employ the same approach Obama chooses for his Presidential political strategy. Quite the contrary, Martin Luther King’s strategy in relation to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson suggests precisely the opposite – – that King felt he and the movement had to always maintain a separate and explicitly progressive political role and identity, in contrast to even a relatively liberal President who King understood would often have to make compromises and respond to other political imperatives. But what this interpretation of Obama’s strategy does require is a substantial revision of the notion that Obama’s approach can be dismissed as simply a warmed-over version of 1990’s centrism.
Ron Brownstein’s written an important article on Barack Obama’s base of support, drawing on a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey. It’s worth quoting at some length:
Arguably, the past generation’s most important political trend has been the class inversion in the two parties’ support. Since the 1960s, Republicans have gained enormous ground among blue-collar white voters, many of them conservative on cultural and national security issues, who once anchored the Democratic coalition. Since the 1980s, Democrats have advanced among well-educated and affluent voters who are fiscally moderate but lean left on the same social and foreign-policy issues that have moved blue-collar families toward the GOP.
In the 2008 election, Obama struggled with blue-collar whites but extended the Democratic inroads upscale. This new survey shows him improving his position since then with both camps and further loosening the Republican grip on well-off groups that soured on George W. Bush
He goes on to warn that anti-government attitudes among upscale voters could undermine Obama’s base of support for specific domestic policy iniitiatives, with the proviso that even well-off Americans look to government for solutions on health care. Even there, suggests Brownstein, Obama needs to be careful if he wants to keep the classes as well as the masses on his side:
[G]iven the priority they place on autonomy and their skepticism about Washington, these better-off Obama supporters may be especially sensitive to charges that his initiative will reduce choice by increasing government control over health care. Avoiding the Big Government label that helped sink President Clinton’s universal coverage proposal may be critical not only to Obama’s sustaining approval for his reform plan but also to his solidifying his unusually diverse coalition of support.
Brownstein’s analysis is much more impressive than the usual what-goes-up-must-go-down predictions that Obama’s approval ratings will, any day now, collapse. But even Ron may be overestimating the extent to which the president must rely on discrete approbation of his specific policy initiatives.
If we’ve learned anything from Drew Westen, it’s that political allegiances are not, after all, just a matter of personal calculations of which party is more congruent with one’s preferences on a list of policy issues. If that were the case, Democrats would have won most of the presidential and congressional campaigns of the last three decades.
The political capital that a president can bring to bear in support of his policy agenda is not just the sum of support-levels for his discrete policy initiatives. His personal credibility isn’t just an ephemeral asset that will dwindle away when “real issues” emergge; it matters. And moreover, at a time like this, it also matters that the alternatives are a profoundly unpopular status quo and the policy offerings of a Republican Party that’s lost in some strange time warp where the New Deal failed, Herbert Hoover was dangerously prone to big-government solutions, and Ayn Rand got the fundamentals right.
Brownstein is right that big-picture assessments of his policy agenda among this or that voter category will help determine whether he can maintain his current base of support. But there’s not much appetite right now for “nothing” or “no” as alternatives, and that’s Barack Obama’s ultimate ace in the hole.
There’s an interesting feature up on the American Prospect’s site right now surveying the political landscape in states where Obama cabinet appointees have given up major officies. The premise of the piece, co-written by Dana Goldstein, Adam Serwer and Tim Fernholz is that Obama has “loosened up the politics of several swing states, putting the Democratic Party on shakier footing and creating the space where the next Republican opposition could take root.”
It’s a plausible argument, but not self-evidently right. Janet Napolitano of AZ and Kathleen Sebelius of KS were term-limited, so their early departures didn’t deny Democrats incumbent gubernatorial candidates in 2010. Yes, Napolitano’s resignation turned AZ over to Republican Jan Brewer, which is bad for Democrats in the short run; but given the current fiscal condition of the state, it may turn out to be a good thing that Republicans will go into 2010 controlling both the legislature and the Governor’s Office. The Bennett appointment to Ken Salazar’s Senate seat has caused some internal unhappiness among CO Democrats, but not enough to give Republican any clear advantage. And David Paterson’s political meltdown in NY isn’t primarily attributable to the controversy over his replacement of Hillary Clinton with Kirstin Gillibrand. Finally, it’s suggested that Tom Vilsack’s appointment as Secretary of Agriculture denied Democrats the one candidate who could have beaten (or forced into retirement) Chuck Grassley in 2010. But it’s not at all clear that Vilsack would have run for the Senate if he had remained in Iowa.
All this speculation is fun and has some analytical value, but the reality is that it’s hard to anticipate the national and state political landscape as it may exist in 2010. If you had to guess, you’d figure that incumbency may not be much of an asset this time around, And the notable shrinkage of the GOP’s electoral base nationally has implications in many of the red-to-purple states where the new Obama Cabinet Democrats have done so well. So at this point, whatever they can do to help Barack Obama become an effective president may well be worth the political questions they have left behind.
We’ve all been talking lately about the self-marginalization of conservative Republicans, with one leading indicator being remarks made about states’ rights and even secession by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the 43d president’s hand-picked successor as chief executive of the Lone Star State.
But who knew Texas Republicans as a group were ready to reject America?
A new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of that state indicates that half of Texas Republicans would prefer an independent Texas to a continuation of their affiliation with the United States. Texans as a whole disagree by a two-to-one margin.
This is interesting not just because it provides a particularly graphic example of conservative self-estrangement from the rest of the country: you’d have to figure that Texas Republicans have thought of themselves as super-patriots, certainly willing to support their former governor’s star-spangled crusades against the godless Muslims and French. This super-patriotism apparently doesn’t extend to an America led by an African-American Democrat.
Thus does ideology trump patriotism. It’s sad and scary.
I’ve been saying for a good while that President Obama’s approval ratings and the right-track/wrong-track numbers would eventually begin to converge, and where and when that happened would be politically momentous.
Well, it’s happening more rapidly than I would have guessed, and the point of convergence is quite good for Obama.
The latest AP-GfK poll has the percentage of Americans believing that the country’s headed in the right as opposed to the wrong direction leading by 48% to 44%. I honestly can’t remember the last time a poll showed a right-track plurality, but it was probably just following 9/11; the ratio was at 17 to 78% just prior to the last election. The same poll showed Obama’s approval rating at 64%, pretty much where it’s been since he became president.
Whatever else this ultimately means, Obama has already gotten across the crisis point where people begin to hold him responsible for a status quo that they hate. They still don’t blame him at all for the economic crisis, but his presidency is making them feel better about the future. That’s exactly where he needs to be right now.
Yesterday James Vega made a compelling case for retiring “the left” and “centrists” in intra-party Democratic discourse, since both terms have widely variable meanings and are usually deployed as expressions of contempt.
I’d add a few other terms to the hit list, at least when it comes to the labelling of alleged party factions.
“Populist” is a useful adjective for describing a certain kind of rhetoric and message, and perhaps even a stance on clusters of specific issues (e.g., wealth concentration and progressive taxation, and maybe international trade). But “populism” is notoriously slippery as an ideological marker, since today’s self-styled “populists” aren’t calling for a revival of the platform of the People’s Party of the 1890s, with publicly-owned grain elevators and milleage of silver at a 16-to-1 ratio. There are also obviously left-of-center and right-of-center versions of “populism,” and the promiscuous use of the word suggests affinities between, say, Bernie Sanders and Mike Huckabee that are far less important than their differences.
“Social democratic” has a rich international pedigree, particularly in Europe, where it emerged as a common term for the non-Marxist left. It is often used in this country to denote the strain of public-sector activism introduced by the New Deal to shape post-World-War II liberalism. But like “populist,” the “social democratic” label is most useful in specific contexts, such as the perennial debate between universal and means-tested forms of social safety-net programs; it’s less evocative as a term for any comprehensive ideology or party faction.
Some–if you will temporarily excuse the expression–Democratic “centrists” are still using the term New Democrats, a monikker invented by the DLC around 1990 to underline the claim that it was applying traditional progressive principles to new social and circumstances. The predecessor to the “New Democratic” label was “neoliberalism,” associated with party reformers like Gary Hart in the 1980s who didn’t want to get confused with moderate-to-conservative dissenters from liberal orthodoxy. Like “liberalism” itself, “neoliberalism” suffered from a very different international usage, where it described the Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire ascendancy in modern conservatism. Any “neo” or “new” label, of course, doesn’t have a very long shelf life, and is best consigned to history after a decade or two.
The relatively low utility of intra-party factional terms these days isn’t terribly unique. I’ve recently been doing some reading about American politics in the 1920s; that was a time when the word “progressive” was claimed as a primary self-identifier by elements of both national political parties, including Western isolationist Republicans and the Bryan faction of the Democratic Party, which was culturally conservative and often aligned with the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, in 1920 one potential presidential candidate invariably described as “progressive” had significant support in both major parties: Herbert Hoover.
For all the terminological confusion, then, we should be pleased that “progressive” (or “progressive/liberal”) and “conservative” have found general acceptance as terms applicable to most people in the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, as explained by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira in their recent research for the Center for American Progress.
And ironically, though Vega is right in suggesting that “left” and “center” need to be retired as terms Democrats apply to each other, the term “center-left” remains a pretty good positioning marker for progressives and Democrats generally, denoting “left of center” within the distinctively American context of liberal egalitarianism.
I’m afraid for the time being that we’re all going to have to get by without the big broad factional labels of the recent past, sticking to specific and identifiable groupings of Democrats (e.g., congressional caucuses), specific issue positions, and even specific politicians. If the party continues to grow as it seems to be doing at present, we’ll eventually have enough variation in views and backgrounds that stable factions, and a vocabulary to match them, will re-emerge.
Every now and then a journalist pens a piece which seems to state the obvious, but actually provides a useful summary of what really matters about things we think we all know. That’s true of Politico’s Jonathan Martin today, with an article entitled: “Obama skates while Right fumes.”
Here’s Martin’s basic thesis:
Several times a month in his young presidency, Barack Obama has done things that cause conservatives to bray, using the phrase once invoked by Bob Dole, “Where’s the outrage?!”
The outrage is definitely there, in certain precincts of Republican politics. What’s notable, however, is that it mostly has stayed there — with little or no effect on Obama.
He has been blithely crossing ideological red lines and dancing on cultural third rails — the kinds of gestures that would have scorched an earlier generation of Democrats — with seeming impunity. Obama’s foes, and even some of his allies, are a bit mystified.
Martin goes on to note that Republicans have been going nuts over nearly everything the new president has been doing or saying, but it’s not sticking, particularly when it comes to culturally symbolic matters. And every time the conservative base of the GOP gets lathered up over Obama words and deeds that other Americans don’t find that scandalous, the Right marginalizes itself a bit more, making the next round of unechoed outrage look even stranger.
The piece quotes all sorts of folks in both parties who speculate over this pheonomenon, and some cite generational change, some cite Obama’s solid personality and careful style, some cite the experience Democrats gained during the Clinton years, and still others cite the economic circumstances that make symbolic politics less evocative.
You can read it all yourself, but the question I have is less about the effect of this dynamic on Obama, than its effect on the credibility of the Republican opposition. How many times can they go to the well with wedge-politics attacks that just don’t work anymore? How relevant can they be when perpetually trotting out the rhetoric of the 1990s, particularly when it’s the less-than-credible spokesmen of the 1990s, like Newt Gingrich, who’s hot to trot? And at a time when Republicans have no obvious national leader, who is in a position to police the cumulative party message? Certainly not RNC chairman Michael Steele, who is on permanent probation.
If, of course, Barack Obama’s agenda fails to work in the real world, Republicans will get some traction in criticizing him, and maybe they’ll even grow some new leadership. But right now they are giving the new administration a lot of breathing room by resorting to worn-down wedge issues, offered by worn-out politicians, to the self-destructive excitement of a whipped-up activist base that thinks Glenn Beck makes sense.
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