Even as Americans generally express satisfaction with Barack Obama’s handling of the transition to a new administration, up north across the border, the typically calm and civil Canadians are undergoing a political crisis of an unprecedented intensity.
In case you haven’t heard, three opposition parties (the centrist Liberals, the social-democratic New Democratic Party, and the quasi-separatist Bloc Quebecois) have formed an extremely rare coalition (the first since World War I) that will probably topple a Tory minority government which won a plurality of votes in the October 14 national elections.
The precipitating event was the announcement last month of an economic package by Stephen Harper’s government that did not include significant steps to stimulate the struggling economy, but did include a couple of stick-in-the-eye measures aimed at reducing the financial and political base of the opposition (a reduction in subsidies for political parties–essential to opposition parties–and a temporary ban on public sector strikes).
The opposition coalition, which would give the Liberals the prime minister’s post and the NDP significant cabinet representation, has a spare majority in the House of Commons, and intends to force a no-confidence vote as early as next week (a step the government could delay, but only until January, by adjourning Parliament). At that point, the Governor General of Canada, a Liberal appointee, would probably invite the coalition to form a government, though she could call for new elections (unlikely given the proximity of the October 14 vote). Complicating the situation is the fact that the new PM would be lame-duck Liberal leader Stephane Dion. Liberals have scheduled a leadership selection convention for May, and the winner would duly replace Dion as PM.
Though most Tories appear to concede that Harper has bungled his way into this situation, their rhetoric about these developments is extraordinary by Canadian standards. Aside from predictable talk about “antidemocratic coups” and “banana republic tactics,” there’s lots of shrieking about the perfidy of Liberals forming a coalition with the “socialist” NDP and the “treasonous” BQ.
Over the years I’ve heard a lot of anxious talk from progressives in Canada about the gradual migration of hyper-polarized Rovian political rhetoric from conservatives in the U.S. to their counterparts Up North. I’d say it’s arrived.

As you probably know, there’s been a lot of intra-Republican talk lately about how to recover from the 2008 elections, and more generally, from the disastrous trajectory of the Bush administration.
And as you may also know, most of the participants in this debate begin by asserting that the problems of the GOP are not fundamentally ideological, or if they are, it’s just a matter of insufficient conservatism, or insufficient consistency. Those would-be reformers like Ross Douthat who suggest the old-time religion of small-government conservatism could use a reformation aren’t making a lot of headway. Nobody’s much in the mood to topple any Ronald Reagan statues.
It’s not surprising, then, that the hot item in Republicanland right now is a manifesto entitled: “Rebuild the Party: A Plan for the Future” put together by two young conservative campaign operatives turned bloggers, Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn, along with redstate.org managing editor Erick Erickson. Two candidates for RNC chair have already endorsed the “plan” as their own, and the reaction in the conservative blogosphere has been predictably avid.
What jumps out at any reader of “Rebuild the Party” is the virtual invisibility of any ideological issues, and the extent to which the “plan” is a faithful imitation of the nutsier and boltsier sections of Crashing the Gate, the book-length 2006 netroots manifesto written by Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong. There’s lots about the revolutionary nature of the internet as a vehicle for organizing, fundraising, and communications; lots about the need for a younger and more diverse generation of activists and candidates; lots about rebuilding party infrastructure and competing in all fifty states.
There’s some rich irony in this heavy dose of progressive-envy, since much of the netroots thinking that the Conservative Young Turks are slavishly echoing was itself based on a close reading of the rise of the conservative movement. But more importantly, the “rightroots” movement is missing a key ingredient that helped make the netroots blueprint so successful: a preparatory period of ideological ferment. On the center-left, that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a result of the much-maligned but essential “neo-liberal” and “New Democrat” movements.
For all the Clinton- and New Democrat-bashing amongst the netroots, most honest progressives would admit that what happened in 2006 and 2008 was made possible in the first place by earlier party reform efforts that challenged the self-conception of the Donkey Party as a coalition of shrinking interest and identity groups huddled together to protect “their” pieces of the New Deal/Great Society legacy from the conservative onslaught. There wasn’t much of a positive message or agenda, and not much of a strategy for a progressive majority beyond the hope that the GOP would fatally overreach (as they eventually did under Bush, Rove and DeLay).
It’s reasonable to argue that Clinton’s New Democrats themselves overreached through too many compromises, too much Washington-think, too much adulation of globalization and other market forces, and too little respect for the legitimate needs and interests of traditional constituencies. But as Markos and Armstrong recognized in Crashing the Gate, some crucial work was accomplished in opening the party to new ideas; in neutralizing conservative wedge issues by addressing long-neglected public concerns like crime, welfare dependency, and bureaucratic inertia; and in challenging interest-group tunnel-vision and litmus tests. After all, the “fighting Democrats” of the Dean campaign or the 2006 comeback weren’t just 1970s liberals with better technology, and the Obama campaign wasn’t just a hipper version of the McGovern or Mondale campaigns.
It took a second wave of reform in this decade to complete the picture by reconnecting the Democratic Party to its grassroots and its activists, and to constituencies that may have been maginalized during the Clinton years, while reviving the progressive espirit de corps and extending it beyond the Left’s old redoubts.

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Bringing “change” to Washington isn’t just a matter of introducing new domestic or international policies, or even successfully meeting today’s crises. It also means cleaning out the Augean Stables of federal deparments and agencies that have won reputations for incompetence, particularly during the Bush Era of indifferent management, cronyism, and ideological manipulation.
That’s why I hope the incoming Obama administration takes the time to review the congressionally-mandated Human Capital Survey of the federal bureaucracy, and the associated rankings of federal agencies conducted by the private nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.
Some of the more disturbing findings of these two studies have been summarized for The Washington Monthly by Partnership president and CEO Max Stier and Kennedy School professor John D. Donohue, in an article provocatively entitled “The Next FEMA.” Among the agencies ranking notably low in morale, professionalism, and leadership are the Office of Thrift Supervision (which has a large role in supervising mortgage lenders), the Defense Contract Management Agency (home to vast cost overruns), the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Defense Nuclear Detection Office (paging Sam Nunn!). And oh, yeah, the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA’s now located, ranks second to the bottom among large agencies.
Stier and Donohue offer a variety of sensible reforms that can help bring change to troubled federal agencies, including a heavy emphasis on management expertise in leadership positions, and a focus on measurable results. But the most important factor may well be the ability of the new administration to take the unsexy but essential challenge of government reform seriously even as it juggles crises and pursues big policy priorities. As we all learned in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, bad agencies have a way of creating their own crises and making themselves an unwanted priority.

The major news story right now continues to be the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and I have no particular value to add on that subject, at least until we know more about what happened and why (though you do have to wonder if the initial “Westerners being targeted” reports have distorted understanding of this atrocity, since the vast majority of victims have in fact been Indians).
Scouring the blogosphere for other topics, I ran across an interesting Digby post speculating that conservative paranoia and self-pity owes a lot to the southern cult of “honor” that treats opposing points of view as personal insults. As a southerner and as a fascinated observer of conservatism, the theory is catnip to me. But I don’t quite buy it.
Digby doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but I can see how a careful examination of southern political rhetoric over the years would justify the connection she suggests between today’s “persecuted” conservatives and yesterday’s “persecuted” southerners. During the Civil Rights era, white southern segregationists did indeed view themselves as a brave, beseiged minority under assault from overwhelmingly powerful forces, not as persecutors using every institution of government and civil society to oppress African-Americans and anyone who might sympathize with them. It took a special kind of hallucinatory vision to see Bull Connor as a freedom fighter rather than as the quintessential thug. I don’t know that the Celtic origins (which Digby does mention) of white southern culture was that definitive an influence, though, since precisely the same mentality and rhetoric characterized the very Anglo-Saxon Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Afrikaner apartheid state in South Africa then and later.
Going back further, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy certainly owed a lot to a willful exaggeration of the South’s plight in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860. Some southerners did indeed turn reality inside out by viewing potential restrictions on extension of slavery into the territories as both a provocation to southern sensibilities, and as a direct threat to the Peculiar Institution itself. But much of the secession agitation was focused more generally on the fateful emergence of a northern regional political party that had quickly destroyed the power associated with the South’s implicit veto over the policies of both the Democrats and the Whigs during the Second American Party system. And that was a real, not imaginary threat, even though it wasn’t really imminent.
But my main reason for doubting the distinctively southern roots of contemporary conservative paranoia is that there’s a different and much more proximate antecedent: the midwestern- and western-based isolationist demonization of “Eastern elites” that served as the main fault line in the Republican Party during much of the twentieth century. Dating back at the very least to the regional split in the GOP over intervention in World War I (and arguably to the 1912 presidential campaign), Heartland Republicans constantly complained that shadowy but powerful eastern cultural and economic forces undermined their own “natural” majority in the party and in the country.
This paranoid sentiment probably peaked in 1940, when Eastern financial interests and a shrewd propaganda campaign brewed up by Henry Luce of Time Magazine allegedly stampeded the Republican National Convention into nominating internationalist Wendell Willkie over Robert Taft. But it carried over to 1952, when many of the same forces pushed Eisenhower past Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. And though anticommunism and the Civil Rights movement changed some of the underlying ideological issues in the interim, the same dynamic was evident in the vengeful treatment of “Liberal Republicans” by the Goldwater movement of 1964, and its movement-conservative successors right up through 1994.
When you compare the rhetorical flourishes, it’s pretty evident that the intraparty conspiracy theories and cult of victimization that characterized Heartland Conservatives in the past has been largely projected onto the opposition Democrats in the wake of the conservative conquest of the GOP. The prominence of the South in the GOP today may give this paranoid narrative something of a southern accent, but for my money its roots are more in the prairies than the plantations.

Some people take the occasion of Thanksgiving to pen long lists of things, people and developments for which they are thankful. My own would be too long for publication, and in any event, I hope most regular readers are too busy with Thanksgiving festivities to spend time at this or any other site aside from those with really good recipes for brined turkey or homemade stuffing.
To those who do sneak away from the table or the television to check out political websites in the fear of missing something important or interesting, let me say: thank you! Here at The Democratic Strategist, we have relatively little information about our readership, other than knowing that it seems to have roughly doubled in the last year. But we hope you won’t drift away now that the 2008 election season is (more or less) over. In terms of the strategic issues facing the Democratic Party, this next year may be exceptionally momentous, and we do intend to serve as a meeting-place and one-stop-shop for those engaged in these debates.
Thanks again, and please stay tuned.

As part of the continuing debate here and elsewhere about how to interpret Barack Obama’s pledge to govern in a bipartisan or post-partisan manner, Matt Yglesias offers an important point about the GOP Members of Congress whose votes are really necessary for the Obama administration or Democratic congressional leaders. There aren’t that many:

The House Republicans are, in effect, irrelevant. The House GOP mattered in the 110th Congress because President Bush used his agenda-setting powers to frame a certain number of issues such that Blue Dogs agreed with the Republicans. In the 111th Congress, you’ll have more liberals (making Blue Dog votes less necessary) plus more Blue Dogs (reducing the proportion of the Blue Dog faction you need to get all the Blue Dog votes you need) and a Democratic president who presumably won’t deliberately shift the agenda to terrain that lets the Republicans get the upper hand.
What matters is the Senate. And I would suggest that what matters here is less the number of moderates than the number of people representing states Obama won. Namely — Senators Collins, Snowe, Spectre, Voinovich, Lugar, Grassley, Burr, Martinez, Ensign, and possibly Coleman. Obama will have a strong argument to make that the voters of those states would like to see congress cooperate with the Obama agenda, and he has the organizational tools at his disposal to ensure that voters who feel that way are able to express their feelings to their senators.

I’d go farther and say that one of Obama’s goal is to generate enough public sentiment for his agenda among rank-and-file independents and Republicans that his overall support levels may begin to intimidate congressional Republicans, no matter where they are from. But Matt’s right: it is important to recognize whose votes are significant and whose would represent no more than gravy.

For those who never took or don’t remember Economics 101, two headlines from the front page of today’s Washington Post tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the basic quandry facing economic policymakers in Washington right now:
“US Spending Continued Decline in October.”
“Food Stamp Use Nears Record.”
A contracting economy kills jobs and income and reduces public revenues, even as it boosts demand for public services. A rapidly contracting economy like the one we are facing now does so at a dramatic pace. That’s why virtually no one is talking much about “fiscal discipline” right now. But it’s also why state and local governments, who face this same dynamic without the ability to run large budget deficits, and who actually administer and in some cases help finance the big public-sector programs accessed by people suffering from the recession, need to be a central part of the big stimulus package just ahead.

While Barack Obama’s appointments so far have produced some unhappiness among progressives, and some second-guessing from various quarters, it’s nothing compared to the criticism that will erupt if he, as is rumored, keeps Defense Secretary Robert Gates in place.
This is obviously a pretty momentous decision. As Chris Bowers points out, aside from questions of war and peace and Iraq and Afghanistan, DoD is far and away the largest federal agency, with vast spending powers. The direction of DoD is also at the heart of the case for “change” that attracted many progressives to Obama in the first place.
Obama could, of course, try to reduce the sting by limiting Gates to a short tenure, giving way in six months or so perhaps to a deputy close to the new administration and its thinking (e.g., Richard Danzig). But making the appointment strictly transitional would also reduce its utility as a symbolic gesture of continuity and bipartisanship. And in any event, Gates is reportedly balking at any deal that would deny him the right to retain his own circle of high-level staff, which definitely includes people antagonistic to significant change in the Pentagon.
Moreover, on a broader front, if Obama demurs on a reappointment of Gates, he’ll need to find another way to redeem his frequent campaign pledge to get beyond partisan gridlock in Washington and govern in a bipartisan, or at least post-partisan, manner.
Some Obama supporters never took this talk seriously, and would just as soon see him forget about including any Republicans in his Cabinet.
One option, borrowed from none other than George W. Bush, would be the Mineta Maneuver (in honor of Bush’s first Secretary of Transportation): choosing a member of the opposition party to oversee some lower-priority department that doesn’t carry a lot of ideological freight. Another, even more purely symbolic, approach would be to tap a nominal Republican who’s already on board Team Obama, like former GOP congressman Jim Leach, or a non-political figure with close Republican connections, such as Jim Jones, who’s reportedly slotted for National Security Advisor.
You can certainly make the argument that Obama’s post-partisan rhetoric cannot be, or should not be, discharged primarily through Cabinet appointments. Again, there’s a recent precedent for this dilemma. Lest we forget, George W. Bush took office claiming to be a “uniter, not a divider,” touting his reputation for working with Democrats in Texas, amidst general expectations that the circumstances of his, er, ah, elevation to the presidency might make him interested in reaching across party lines.
As it happens, I wrote a piece back in January 2001 that sought to cut through all the sloppy talk on the subject and analyze ten distinct approaches to “bipartisanship.” I predicted, accurately, that Bush would pursue “bipartisanship on the cheap” through symbolic gestures and efforts to pick off a few Democrats to support exactly what he wanted.
That approach is fully available to Barack Obama as well, who certainly has an electoral mandate far beyond anything the beneficiary of Gore v. Bush enjoyed. There is, however, one form of “bipartisanship” that Bush never took seriously, and that is very consistent with everything Barack Obama has said on the subject. Back in 2001, I described it as an “ouside-in” coalition:

This variety, typically used by incoming Presidents during their “honeymoon” period, involves the aggressive, direct stimulation of public opinion to push members of the opposing party, especially those from states or districts where the President is popular, to come across the line.

This is essentially bipartisanship (or if you wish, post-partisanship) from the ground up, which reaches out to rank-and-file Republicans and independents to mobilize support for big national initiatives. I contrasted this with the “inside-out” coalition–often known later as High Broderism–which involves deal-cutting in Washington across party lines.
I raise this distinction partly because it’s important in and of itself, and also because it provides the essential context for the decisions Obama makes on appointments. It’s one thing to appoint Republicans to positions as a signal that the new administration is interested in a broader agenda of bipartisan deal-cutting in Washington. It’s another thing altogether to appoint a diverse team of officials who are all pledged to implement a clear progressive agenda.
It would be helpful if the President-elect were to address this issue clearly in the days and weeks ahead, if only to avoid confusion about the relationship of his appointments to his plans for governing the country.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The big discussion-point in national politics right now is the effort to ideologically characterize the emerging Obama administration. And the consensus, across ideological and partisan lines, is that this is looking like a Clintonian, “centrist” administration–an opinion very likely to be reinforced by the announcement of Obama’s economic policy team today.
The more self-consciously progressive members of the commentariat are dealing with this apparent reality calmly, if not very happily. Some, like Jerome Armstrong of MyDD and Glenn Greenwald at Salon, are saying “toldja so,” pointing to a variety of signals from Obama dating back to the beginning of his presidential campaign. Others like Chris Bowers of OpenLeft and Chris Hayes at The Nation are a bit antsier, though the “B word”–betrayal–has yet to be unholstered, at least in the mainstream blogosphere.
Aside from noting that it may be a bit early, with Obama’s appointees being only half-announced at most, to make any sweeping generalizations about his “team,” much less his agenda, I have three cautionary notes about the effort to ideologically typecast the Obama administration.
First, I would amplify a point being made implicitly by some of the “toldja so” analysts: Barack Obama never really embraced the critique from the left of Clintonism on policy grounds that, say, John Edwards avidly made. Sure, Obama indicted the Democratic members of the Beltway Establishment for questionable ethics, conventional thinking, detachment from the public, and unproductive partisanship, but never, with the arguable exception of the series of steps that led to the invasion of Iraq, accused Clintonians of pursing policies that proved disastrous under the Bush administration. On the one big domestic policy difference where Obama earlier in his career dissented from Clinton, welfare reform, he largely recanted. On another, trade policy, much of the Democratic Party, including many Clintonians, have had second thoughts. And on the main issue that matters right now, economic policy, Obama, particularly during the general election campaign, made it clear that a return to the broad outlines of Clinton administration policies was what he had in mind.
Second, it’s very important to comprehend the radicalizing effect of the last eight years on those Clinton administration veterans who are entering the Obama administration. Most obviously, the New Democratic confidence that Clinton and his allies had identified a Third Way in both domestic and international policy that would usher in a period of endless peace and prosperity is long gone. Perhaps Hillary Clinton could not bring herself to admit error in supporting the Iraq War resolution, but she was in a definite minority among Democrats who took the same position in 2002. Enthusiasm for deregulation, an aggressive pro-trade agenda, and in general, the proposition that the New Economy had repealed a lot of the old rules, has notably waned. Indeed, some of the “centrist” rethinking in the 2000s has been a mirror image of the “progressive” rethinking in the 1990s of its reflexive hostility to such Clintonian policies as deficit-reduction and welfare reform. Democratic “centrism” just ain’t what it used to be, for better or for worse.
Third, it is impossible to overstate the precedent-obliterating nature of the current economic emergency, which makes a lot of the speculation about the ideological character of Obama and his appointees basically an exercise in predicting that they might have done in a completely different context. “Left” or “center,” we’re all looking for a New Deal now, and while we may hold different, ideologically-driven perspectives on the shape of that New Deal, they are increasingly being subordinated to the common desire for immediate and “reassuring” action. Remember the white-hot anger of some progressives towards the original September “bailout” legislation? Just a few weeks later, there may be some grumbling and muted dissent about additional bailouts, but the general realization that whole economic sectors are in danger of collapse has trumped most arguments, just as many conservative complaints about government intervention in the economy have quickly faded. (Perhaps the dumbest thing about the “center-right country” arguments being made by conservatives seeking to minimize the implications of November 4 is that they don’t take into account the vast swing to the left that was set into motion on September 15).
So wherever you place yourself on the ideological spectrum, counting up Obama’s Clinton administration veterans or typecasting appointees as “centrist” or “progressive” or “liberal” may be misleading. Just as it is apparent that the Democratic Party of the 1990s, and its internal fault lines, has changed, this is a different country than the one Barack Obama sought to lead when he announced his candidacy for president in 2007.

Progressive bloggers are having great sport this week with high-decibal conservative warnings that Democrats are plotting to censor conservative opinion through a restoration of the old “fairness doctrine” that used to theoretically govern broadcast television and radio. That “doctrine” was actually a Federal Communications Commission regulation requiring users of the public broadcast spectrum to provide reasonable access to points of view contrary to their own. It was rarely enforced, and was repealed in 1987, as a vestige of the long-lost days when three television networks completely dominated opinion media.
The unsubstantiated claim that “liberals” want to reimpose the fairness doctrine to destroy conservative opinion media has been a hardy perennial issue for Rush Limbaugh since at least the early 1990s. And during this election year, in association with a variety of other lurid assertions about the radically different way of life Americans would experience in a country governed by Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, the “fairness” meme went viral.
Marin Cogan of The New Republic has penned a fine background piece on this strange furor, and on the highly relevant fact that it’s all a complete hoax.
The Obama campaign explicitly opposed reimposition of the fairness doctrine, and virtually no one in Congress or in progressive “media reform” circles has any interest whatsoever in raising the issue. Notes Matt Yglesias: “Political movements mischaracterize the other side’s general goals all the time. But I’ve never heard of anything like the current conservative mania for blocking a particular legislative provision that nobody is trying to enact.” Some cynics even believe the whole thing is intended to create a phantom menace that conservative gabbers can then take credit for defeating when it doesn’t actually emerge. Cogan chalks it all up to “paranoia and self-pity” among conservatives in the wake of their electoral defeat.
All this may well be true, but I think there’s something deeper going on here: the fruits of conservative demonization of “the Left” over a long period of time.
One of the hallmarks of “movement conservative” opinion in recent years has been the growing tendency to treat itself not simply as a legitimate or “correct” point of view, or one that promotes policies good for the country, but as a cause that is synonymous with American self-interest, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and indeed, Western Civilization. This trend has naturally led to the depiction of its opponents as un-American, immoral and anti-religious, and, well, barbaric. Within the Christian Right, the need to demonize has become even more intense, in justification of the extraordinary step taken by religious leaders to adopt a “prophetic stance” against the wickedness of society and harness their pulpits and their flocks to the secular goals of the Republican Party.
From this point of view, “liberals” can’t simply be wrong or ill-informed or open to persuasion. Those supporting a woman’s right to choose must actually favor infanticide, euthanasia and human cloning. Advocates of a less militaristic foreign policy must be consciously aligned with America’s enemies. “People for the American Way” favoring mild church-state separation rules must really aim at systemic descrimination against Christians. Proponents of marriage equality for gays and lesbians are actually bent on destroying the traditional family.
Ironically, this tendency to attribute sinister and deeply deceptive motives to the opposition grew even more pervasive during the Bush-DeLay era, when conservatives controlled the White House, the federal bureaucracy, and both Houses of Congress. Indeed, Republican electoral success created still another curse to hurl at the hated liberals: they were “elitists” who were undermining democracy through their control of Hollywood, the news media, academia and the judiciary, with complicity from treasonous fifth-columnists in the GOP.
So now, with Democrats actually in a position to wield real power for the first time since 1994, is it really any wonder that some conservatives feel the need to convince their audiences, and perhaps even themselves, that we are on the brink of a totalitarian revolution? Anyone who’s paid attention to the distorted world view of much of the Right over the last decade or two shouldn’t be surprised. When you see devil’s horns on your political opponents, there’s hell to pay when they win.