For those Democrats who were settling down with a bag of popcorn to watch an orgy of ideological strife among Republicans, it’s beginning to become apparent that the war may be over before it began. Sure, there’s plenty of finger-pointing and personal recriminations over tactics and strategy, some of it focused on the McCain-Palin campaign, and some looking back to the errors of the Bush administration. There’s clearly no consensus on who might lead Republicans in 2010 or 2012. But on the ideological front, for all the talk about “movement conservatives” or “traditionalists” at odds with “reformers,” it’s a pretty one-sided fight. And one prominent “reformer,” the columnist David Brooks, pretty much declared defeat yesterday:

The debate between the camps is heating up. Only one thing is for sure: In the near term, the Traditionalists are going to win the fight for supremacy in the G.O.P.
They are going to win, first, because Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists. Republicans from the coasts and the upper Midwest are largely gone. Among the remaining members, the popular view is that Republicans have been losing because they haven’t been conservative enough.
Second, Traditionalists have the institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Conservative Old Guard has built up a movement of activist groups, donor networks, think tanks and publicity arms. The reformists, on the other hand, have no institutions…..
Finally, Traditionalists own the conservative mythology. Members of the conservative Old Guard see themselves as members of a small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite. In this narrative, anybody who deviates toward the center, who departs from established doctrine, is a coward, and a sellout.

Now there’s nothing particularly new about this dynamic. It’s exactly the way conservatives reacted to the 2006 debacle, and in fact, to virtually every Republican defeat since about 1940 (with the exception, of course, of 1964). They’ve never been shy about saying that “moderate” or “liberal” Republicans are not only wrong, immoral and gutless, but are in fact losers. And there’s nothing new as well about their take on George W. Bush; it’s pretty similar to their ex post facto take on Richard M. Nixon: a potentially great leader surrounded by venal hacks who sacrificed principle in an illusory search for short-term political gain and personal riches and power.
There are, however, two aspects of contemporary conservative self-justification that strike me as somewhat new.

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If you own one of those Bush Countdown Calendars that have sold so briskly over the last few years, you know that the presidency of George W. Bush will end in 70 days. Anticipating this event, Paul Waldman of Media Matters has penned for The American Prospect a vast compendium of things to which we will soon say “goodbye and good riddance.” Here’s a brief sample:

Goodbye to stocking government agencies with people who are opposed to the very missions those agencies are charged with carrying out. Goodbye to putting industry lobbyists in charge of the agencies that are supposed to regulate those very industries. Goodbye to madly giving away public lands to private interests. Goodbye to a Food and Drug Administration that acts like a wholly owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry, except when it acts like a wholly owned subsidiary of the fundamentalist puritans who believe that sex is dirty and birth control will turn girls into sluts. Goodbye to the “global gag rule,” which prohibits any entity receiving American funds from even telling women where they can get an abortion if they need it.

There’s a whole lot more, but you get the idea.
But happy as progressives will be to see Bush and his buddies turn in their keys and turn out the lights on their benighted administration, it’s going to be a bit tough adjusting to a post-Bush era, particularly in the blogosphere. W. has represented the still point in a turning world, the Great Galvinizer, the lightning rod, the stimulus to political action, the daily shock to the system, for so very long that many of us will soon struggle for perspective, and even for words. Without a doubt, traffic at progressive political web sites will soon go down, perhaps precipitously, and many bloggers will find themselves trying to decide whether to become policy wonks or cheerleaders or critics of the Obama administration, or simply go dark.
Here at TDS, we are fortunate to have a primary subject matter that is evergreen: the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party, along with the strategic decisions necessary to promote them. But there will be many days when we fire up our computers, stare at the news, and if only for a moment, miss the rich targets served up so regularly by this president and his nightmare of an administration.

Jonathan Cohn has a fascinating article up on the New Republic site about the plans underway in the Senate for early action next year on legislation implementing some version of Barack Obama’s health care proposals. Its main thrust is to reject the beltway conventional wisdom holding that fiscal and political conditions guarantee a go-slow approach on health care for both the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. But nestled in his report is this very important detail:

Of course, drafting a proposal is relatively easy. Passing one–well, that’s another story. But [Senate Finance Committee Chairman] Baucus himself confirms what staffers have been saying for months: Assuming Senate Democrats can find some common ground on reform, they would consider using the budget reconciliation process to enact it.
This is a crucial development. The rules of reconciliation limit debate, restrict amendments, and prohibit filibusters. It’s the one time a simple majority of 50-plus-one votes–rather than the 60 it takes to break a filibuster–can definitively pass legislation. It’s a brass-knuckles way to move legislation and, as such, nobody’s first choice. But, if the Republicans won’t negotiate, Baucus has told me, the Democrats might have to use it.

“Reconciliation” is an arcane but very important congressional budget procedure providing special rules for packaging and voting on legislation necessary to implement congressional budget resolutions. Originally a last-ditch means for forcing rebellious authorizing and appropriations committees to stay within budget, reconciliation was transformed at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency into a vehicle for enacting vast changes in domestic policy on an up-or-down, majority vote. (Indeed, much of Reagan’s domestic agenda was accomplished through a gigantic reconciliation floor substitute in the House–dubbed Gramm-Latta II–that virtually no one had read). It was at the very heart of the Reagan Revolution.
Since Reagan, the use of reconciliation has significantly declined, and has devolved towards its original, stop-gap purpose. But it remains available to a party that controls both Houses of Congress and the White House, and is determined to get big things done quickly.
Republicans will complain, of course, that reconciliation was intended to serve as a way to reduce spending and impose fiscal discipline, not to expand federal benefits for health care or anything else. But the precedent of St. Ronald’s use of reconciliation, which would have shocked the drafters of the Congressional Budget Act, will make such objections seem pretty hypocritical. I’d expect congressional Democrats to emulate their GOP predecessors in another way, by finding a Republican to embrace the “bipartisan” package (for those with short memories, the “Gramm” in “Gramm-Latta,” Phil Gramm of Texas, was at the time a Democrat). But the most important thing is the ability to put together a large and audacious package that can be marketed to the public as what they voted for, and then enacted expeditiously over the objections of the minority party.

A fundamental issue behind the “realignment or reaction” debate over the meaning of the Obama victory is the relative importance of demographic trends as opposed to the persuasion and mobilization activities of parties and candidates (along with real-life events like recessions and wars).
Positions on this issue do tend to become somewhat polarized. Some “demography as destiny” apostles are almost certainly reacting to the tendency of the chattering classes to treat electoral campaigns as sui generis events in which the entire electorate is up for grabs, and the ebb and flow of campaign dynamics and external events control everything. And on the other side of the divide, those who resist “demography as destiny” explanations rightly object that eight years of the Bush administration, culminating in a financial panic and a deepening recession, not to mention the widely varying strategies and resources of the two parties and the two presidential candidates, must have had some significant effect on the results.
The ever-resourceful Chris Bowers of OpenLeft offers a useful demonstration today of both the strengths and weaknesses of the “demography as destiny” approach. Staring at the exit polls and the changing composition of the electorate over time, Chris provocatively suggests that Barack Obama was probably no better a candidate than the much-derided Mike Dukakis. What really changed between 1988 and 2008, he argues, was the relative size of pro-Democratic and pro-Republican elements of the voting-age population. By looking at Obama’s and McCain’s performance in various groups this year, and reconfiguring them to represent their size in 1988, Chris concludes that a candidate as “good” as Obama would have lost decisively that year, while a candidate as “bad” as Dukakis might have swept to victory this year.
Reflecting Chris’s longstanding views on the decline of White Christian America, the optic he chose for this analysis was religious categories of white voters, and unsurprisingly, he concludes that “The Rise of Non-Christian America” and “The Rise of a Non-White America” were two of the three most important moving parts in the slow change from defeat in 1988 to victory in 2008. The third, “Internet Rising,” isn’t directly about demographics, but plausibly represents a “cultural trend” that crucially affected media, fundraising, and organizational opportunities that Obama exploited but did not create:

Internet Rising: Over the past twenty years, the rise of the network neutral Internet has been, by a long way, the biggest change to the national media landscape. Fully 55% Americans are not just online, but have high-speed connections, and the Internet is now the #2 source of news in the country, trailing only television. Twenty years ago, virtually no one was online, and the world wide web wasn’t even created.
The Rise of Non-Christian America. The number of self-identified non-Christians has slightly more than doubled since 1990 and now totals 21.6% of the population.
The Rise of a Non-White America: While the Census does not measure ethnic / racial statistics the same way every ten years, thus making long-term trends somewhat difficult to pin down, twenty years ago non-whites formed 15% of the electorate, much lower than the 26% in the 2008 election. That is an increase of about one-half percent every year for the past twenty years.

Now the immediate problem with Chris’ analysis is that the Democratic-Republican numbers on racial and religious categories bounced around a fair amount prior to and after 1988. Perhaps both the Dukakis and Obama performances can somehow be stipulated as normative, but there’s nothing obvious about that conclusion. The bigger problem emerges when Chris turns to the question of what, exactly, Obama or Democrats can do to build on the demographic trends he views as crucial:

[N]ow that Democrats are the governing party in D.C., we need to actually go one step further and pass legislation that will itself help continue these trends. While there isn’t much we can, or should, do on the religion front (not the sort of business the government should be involved with), this does mean comprehensive, progressive immigration and media reform.

Since the “internet rising” development isn’t really a demographic trend, and since it’s not a slam dunk that nontraditional media will continue to provide a progressive or Democratic advantage, it’s unclear to me that why “media reform” should be a higher priority than, say, a new foreign policy or universal health care. Immigration reform is a good thing in itself, and will in the long run probably contribute to progressive politics, but the short-term costs in terms of a backlash are tangible as well, which is one reason it didn’t happen in the last couple of Congresses despite significant Republican support, which may now vanish.
Truth is, if you really think demography is the main determining factor in politics, with most elements of governing and campaigning being marginal, then there’s not a whole lot to do between election days other than waiting for the next incremental change in the composition of the electorate. I guess you could make the case that an Obama administration would in that circumstance be free to govern as progressively as possible, since voters have predetermined positions that won’t much be affected one way or another. But in the end, I doubt that Chris Bowers, or that many other advocates of “demography as destiny,” really think events in the real world of politics and governing matter so very little.

As we all sort through various theories for what happened on November 4, and what it all means, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect performs a public service by looking back at some of the predictive theories bruited about during the campaign season, and grading their eventual accuracy.
He gives his highest grade to the model advanced back in 2002 by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and The New Republic’s John Judis in their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which, as Schmitt notes, made “predictions [that] were close to an exact map of the Obama demographic.”
He gives somewhat lower but still positive grades to Tom Schaller’s signature efforts to predict a Democratic majority that ultimately did not depend on southern votes; the “economic determinist” models that predicted a Democratic victory based on macroeconomic indicators; and those such as Michael Lind who drew attention to the enduring resistance of Appalachian voters to Obama’s candidacy.
David Sirota’s “Race Chasm” theory, which projected into the general election Obama’s success in states with many or few African-American voters, gets a “C-minus.” A “D” is assigned to the “wine-track” theory that Obama would become just another Democratic candidate attractive to elites but repellant to working-class voters. And “Fs” go to the prophets of a vast “Bradley Effect,” and to those who thought disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters would swing the election to McCain.
Finally, Schmitt gives a big shout-out to Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, whose demographics-and-polls based analysis of the entire campaign from Iowa to November 4, was spot-on, culminating with very accurate predictions of the final popular-vote margin and the state-by-state results. Since Nate’s background is in sabermetrics (the statistics-based analysis of baseball), you’d have to say that he had the kind of year that was the equivalent of winning both the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards.
In any event, Mark’s report card is good clean fun, at least for those who didn’t get assigned failing grades.

As you can see from the “Noteworthy” box at the top of our web page, TDS is cosponsoring a major post-election analysis event at the National Press Club this Friday, in conjunction with the Progressive Policy Institute. It will feature TDS Co-Editors Bill Galston and Ruy Teixeira, PPI president Will Marshall, and to provide a Republican perspective, Ross Douthat of The Atlantic. I’ll be there, too, but will let the above worthies do the talking.
The title, “Rove or Roosevelt? Prospects for a Political Realignment” suggests a look back at the election results and a look forward at how the Obama administration and Democrats generally might decide to create or solidify a realignment. The reference to Karl Rove hints at an approach that some, particularly those convinced that the November 4 victory was fragile or even ephermeral, may urge on Obama: using the levers of power to reward elements of the Democratic base while appealing very selectively to swing voter categories that might push up Democratic percentages in the future to a more comfortable margin, even without the anti-Republican atmosphere of this election year. The reference to FDR, of course, suggests a more systemic approach of governing in order to create a broad attachment to the Democratic Party among Americans grateful for genuine leadership in a time of crisis.
It should be quite a discussion. Please drop by if you are in the DC area on Friday, and we’ll try to quickly get transcripts and make some of the analysis available here next week.

As the Obama administration begins to take shape, inevitably, various interest, identity and advocacy groups are taking credit for his victory, with implicit (probably soon to be explicit) claims on a share of visible appointments, and on the right to influence the President-elect’s agenda.
At Politico, Avi Zenilman has a brisk roundup of victory statements from the National Council of La Raza, the AFL-CIO, the NEA, Rock the Vote, MoveOn.org, Women’s Voices/Women’s Votes, Sojourners, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and even the Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm.
As Zenilman notes, there’s nothing new about post-election “you owe us” statements, other than, perhaps, their sheer scope this year:

Such claims are, of course, an election-year standard. Four years ago, social conservative and anti-tax groups boasted of their role in President Bush’s reelection.
Obama’s wider margin of victory this year makes it seem as though America — and the Democratic Party — may just be big enough for virtually every group to claim credit and jostle elbows as they push for their respective agendas.

That’s exactly right. There’s really not one “bullet vote” that won this election for Barack Obama. On one level, that should mean he doesn’t “owe” any particular group any particular thanks or favors, but on another level, it ensures that many will take credit, and down the road, maybe take umbrage if things don’t work out as they hope.

In a post on Friday, I mentioned the quick-developing debate between those who view Obama’s victory as signaling a realignment, and those who think it was a more fragile accomplishment in reaction to Republican misgovernment and the recent financial crisis.
In the former camp, predictably, the true ultra is the somewhat cranky polymath Michael Lind, who’s published an article for Salon heralding the Obama win as representing a third major turning point in the history of the country.
According to Lind, our history can be broken down into three “Republics” which lasted almost exactly 72 years. It all goes back to the ancient federalist-republican rivalry of Hamilton and Jefferson. In each “Republic,” our politics was dominated by Hamiltonian “nation-building” for about three-and-a-half decades, and then equally dominated by Jeffersonian “backlash” until the next cycle. Thus, in the “First Republic” an activist government built and expanded the country before giving way, under Jackson and his successors, to the centrifugal forces that eventually culiminated in the Civil War. In the “Second Republic,” the Reconstruction Era created a powerful federal government and strong constitutional rights, which were gradually whittled away during and after the Progressive Era. And in the “Third Republic,” the New Deal and Great Society gave way to the conservative movement and the neoliberals, culminating in the disaster of the Bush 43 administration. With Obama begins the “Fourth Republic.”
As always, Lind is both brilliant and annoying. There’s a rough and insightful accuracy to everything he writes. But his quasi-Hegelian obsession with his System causes him to ignore inconvenient nuances (e.g., the difficulty of teaming up agrian populists and urban reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as “Jeffersonians”). And he wastes a lot of space in arguing that the Third Republic actually ended in 2004, presumably so that it can span the prescribed 72 years.
The bigger problem is that Lind gives no real idea what might characterize the Fourth Republic, or its first president, Barack Obama, other than to say that accomodation to new energy sources and new technologies have accompanied previous big shifts, whatever their subjective features. But he assures us that the Fourth Republic is likely to last until, oh, 2076.
Aside from its utility as historical and political analysis, Mike Lind’s theoretical Big Bertha (or outline of same, since you can definitely feel a book coming) illustrates the distinctive American taste for what is called in theology Dispensationalism–the division of history into large and predictable phases. It’s the impulse that has led so very many evangelical Protestants in recent years to engage in the previously esoteric practice (largely limited to adventist sects) of poring over the Book of Revelation to figure out what’s going to happen in the immediate future.
Among its many perils, Dispensationalism in religion or in history tends to produce a sense of fatalism about human control over human destiny. Flattered as Barack Obama might be to see himself depicted as a epochal figure comparable to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR (his fellow Republic-Launchers), let’s hope he doesn’t wait around for large historical forces to shape his administration.

I’ve got a short piece up at the Progessive Policy Institute site that runs through the election results and tries to answer the question: what really “changed” in the “change election?”
At the conclusion of this piece, I discussed the two emerging “big theories” about Obama’s victory: realignment or “reaction.” The first theory suggests that Obama consolidated a new Democratic coalition that’s been in the works, in fits and starts, for a while, along the lines of the hypothesis developed by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and The New Republic’s John Judis, in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. And as it happens, the second theory, which is that Obama’s win was primarily an immediate reaction to Republican misgovernment and the financial crisis, was first and best expressed by former TDS Managing Editor Scott Winship in a TNR piece yesterday.
This debate will surely continue until such time as future events make it moot.