New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement earlier this week that he was changing his voter registration from “Republican” to “Undeclared” has revived simmering speculation that he may run for president in 2008 as an independent. And the New York and Washington media are eating it all up.
The questions about Bloomberg generally revolve around “Will He or Won’t He?” (a subject he seems to be fanning with calculated ambiguity), and “If He Does, Who Gets Hurt?” (Pew says Republicans; the New York Post, quoting anonymous GOP operatives, says Democrats; a batch of SurveyUSA state polls say it depends on the field).
To show how rapidly the Mike-o-Mania is spreading in the Big Apple, there’s actually a New York Observer article out today rating various prominent politicians as potential Bloomberg running-mates (including, to my amusement, my old boss Sam Nunn, who is more likely to enter the 2008 Olympics as a sprinter).
New York media provincialism aside, the legitimate reasons for this buzz include the much-discussed public disdain for Washington partisanship and gridlock; the exceptionally high “wrong track” numbers in every poll; the persistently high percentage of Americans self-identifying as Independents; the likelihood of a close two-party presidential race where a third force could tip the balance; and Bloomberg’s vast personal wealth, which he has certainly used generously in his New York political career (he spent upwards of $160 million of his own money in his two mayoral races, and spent untold millions more in pre- and post-election contributions to a variety of politically significant organizations and causes).
If the Bloomberg speculation continues, it may be a good idea for TDS to dust off and freshen up the existing research on third-party presidential candidacies. Our own co-editor, Stan Greenberg, after all, did the best research on Perot voters back in the early 1990s, in conjunction with the DLC.
But it’s not wise to assume that a Bloomberg candidacy in 2008 would necessarily follow the Perot model. Over at The New Republic’s site today, John Judis suggests the more likely model is John Anderson’s 1980 campaign, which started as a resolutely centrist enterprise and turned sharply left before the end, almost certainly taking more votes from Jimmy Carter than from Ronald Reagan. Judis is concerned about Bloomberg’s potential appeal to independents on whom Democrats increasingly rely for majorities, especially given Mike’s cultural liberalism (see yesterday’s post here about the revised Judis/Teixeira hypothesis on the Democratic coalition). And having done a post myself over at TPMCafe yesterday saying negative things about Bloomberg’s record, unleashing a surprisingly passionate number of comments defending him on that left-bent site, I wonder if some Democrats might be tempted to go third-party under the right circumstances. (Indeed, TPMCafe regular M.J. Rosenberg, whose main preoccupation is criticizing neocons and AIPAC, did a post entitled: “I Could Vote For Bloomberg.”)

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George W. Bush has used his veto pen exactly three times. Once, of course, was to veto the supplemental approrpriations bill that would have imposed a withdrawal timetable for troops in Iraq. And the other two vetoes, one just yesterday, were aimed at legislation relaxing his administration’s restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
On both topics, Bush is swimming against a heavy tide of public opinion. Virtually any way the question is asked, Americans now oppose Bush’s Iraq strategy by a two-to-one margin. Support for stem cell research has risen from 58 percent to 68 percent during the Bush presidency, with half of Republicans supporting it. Fully 60 percent of Americans support federal funding of such research. State stem cell funding initiatives–most famously, California’s–are spreading.
Moreover, on both Iraq and stem cell research, Bush has struggled to articulate a coherent rationale for his position. In the case of Iraq, his “stay the course” rhetoric is jarringly out of synch with media coverage of events on the ground, not to mention Iraqi public opinion and the behavior of Iraqi leaders, as amplified by the vast number of leaks from U.S. military leaders despairing of success. On stem cell research, Bush’s claims that existing stem cell “‘colonies” provide sufficient material for research has been roundly refuted by scientists. On an even more fundamental level, his argument that research “destroys human life” flies in the face of the simple fact that the embyros in question are scheduled for destruction anyway. (I’d love to know if anyone in the administration has considered trying to follow Italy’s lead in restricting embryo generation at IV fertility clinics, which would at least be logical, if politically explosive).
And now, with an override of Bush’s stem cell veto almost certain to fail (in the House, if not in the Senate as well), Congressional Democrats are reportedly toying with the idea of attaching an appropriations rider authorizing research funding, which would make both of the big issues where Bush is defying public opinion subject to the ever-murky appropriations process. And in that legislative swamp, the theorectical power of Congress to impose its will on a president by denying money for objectionable policies contends with the practical ability of the president to force a showdown on his own terms (viz. the 1995 budget standoff between Clinton and Gingrich).
I won’t wade into the fractious debate about the Iraq supplemental, which many Democrats, particularly in the netroots, regard as an example of craven surrender to Bush on an issue where public opinion might support a tougher stance. (That debate, however, is likely to be reignited, at least in the blogosphere, by Sen. Carl Levin’s Washington Post op-ed today defending his vote for the supplemental, citing Abraham Lincoln, no less).
But more broadly, both the Iraq and stem cell issues illustrate that even a weak, lame-duck president has siginificant ability to block change, if not to initiate change, in public policies, even if they are very unpopular, particularly if the opposition party is divided on how to overcome his bull-headedness. The damage inflicted on this country by the Bush presidency is likely to continue right up to the next Inauguration Day.
On the stem cell research issue, the impasse in Congress does potentially make this a significant 2008 campaign issue, and a winning one for Democrats. If anyone other than Rudy Giuliani or John McCain is the GOP presidential nominee (both have opposed Bush’s funding ban), it will be an issue in that campaign.

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As a yellow-dog Democrat from Georgia, I am naturally interested in the ongoing debate about the future of our party in the South, a subject on which a lot of nonsense–ranging from claims that only southern Democrats can win the presidency, to arguments that Democrats should loudly demonize the allegedly atavistic region–often gets said and published.
This week there’s a burgeoning blogospheric debate revolving around the assumption that John Edwards’ southern background and accent uniquely enable him to get a hearing for progressive causes in the South. And that makes some people mad.
It started with a Ben Smith Politico comment on a John Edwards speech in Iowa suggesting that his rivals might have trouble going into certain parts of the country, which Smith interpreted as a citation of Edwards’ status as a southern white male.
At TAPPED, Ezra Klein jumped in with this observation:

Edward’s Southern accent and manners are critical in his ability to project a much more combative, sharp form of liberalism than the others are offering. What would sound like Marxism from the mouth of Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton sounds like good, old-fashioned, American populism from Edwards

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At the same site, Paul Waldman suggested that both southerners themselves and national media elites think of us Crackers as more “authentically American,” giving Edwards a “Dixie Bonus.” And then Political Animal’s Kevin Drum, who says he’s feeling surly today, weighed in with an angry blast at the South’s “victim complex,” and its purported refusal to vote for anybody from “north of the Mason-Dixon line.”
Lord a-mercy. Can a post from Professor Tom “Whistling Past Dixie” Schaller be far behind?
Let’s hold our horses here, fellow bloggers, and at least examine the premise that Edwards has a big southern advantage over other Democratic candidates.

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When Kevin Phillips published his brilliantly prescient book, The Emerging Republican Majority, in 1969, he couldn’t have known that Watergate, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon, and the 1974 Democratic landslide would obscure the fundamental soundness of his analysis.
And in 2002, when John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (a co-editor of TDS) published their own counterpart to Phillips, The Emerging Democratic Majority, they had the misfortune of going to press within months of 9/11, and on the eve of a smashing Republican midterm victory.
Phillips’s long-range view of electoral dynamics, of course, was ultimately vindicated by Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, and down the road, by the Republican breakthrough victory in 1994.
Does the Democratic comeback in 2006 portend a similar vindication for the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis? That’s the question they examine in an important new article just published by The American Prospect, Back to the Future.
Their conclusion after examining the evidence is quite clear:

[T]his election signals the end of a fleeting Republican revival, prompted by the Bush administration’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the return to political and demographic trends that were leading to a Democratic and center-left majority in the United States.

Moreover, say Judis and Teixeira, the demographic categories that were trending Democratic in the 1990s have actually been augmented:

Just as important as these victories is who voted for Democrats in 2006. With few exceptions, the groups were exactly those that had begun trending Democratic in the 1990s and had contributed to Al Gore’s popular-vote victory over George W. Bush in 2000. These groups, which we described in our 2002 book…included women, professionals, and minorities. But in 2006 they also included two groups our book slighted or ignored altogether: younger voters (those born after 1977) and independents. These voters can generally be expected to continue backing Democrats.

It’s become commonplace for Democrats and others to observe that 9/11 (and later, the runup to the Iraq War) made national security a suddenly preeminent public concern, to the benefit of Bush and the GOP. But Judis and Teixeira go further, suggesting a psychological process they call “de-arrangement”:

The focus on the war on terror not only distracted erstwhile Democrats and independents but appeared to transform, or de-arrange, their political worldview. They temporarily became more sympathetic to a whole range of conservative assumptions and approaches. In the past, voters had trusted Democrats to manage the economy, and in 2002 that preference should have been strongly reinforced by a recession that occurred on Bush’s watch. Instead, voters in that election believed by 41 percent to 37 percent that Republicans were “more likely to make sure the country is prosperous.” Recessions could also be expected to reinforce populist perceptions of the economy, but in 2002 the percentage of voters who believed that “the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer” hit its lowest level in 15 years.

This “de-arrangement” began to subside in 2004, and dissipated largely by 2006, as the electoral trends of the mid-to-late 1990s began to reassert themselves, especially among single women, Hispanics, and professionals, all rapidly growing elements of the electorate. And Democrats also made striking gains in the white working class, a shrinking category of the electorate nationally, but one that is still large and crucial in many battleground states of the Midwest. Suddenly voters began to care about economic insecurity again, even though by most measurements the economy was doing better than in 2002 or 2004.

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In today’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne puts his finger on a phenomenon that’s beginning to trouble many Democrats: the significant gap between public perceptions of the Democratic Party, and of actual Democrats, specifically the Democratic-controlled Congress and the leading presidential candidates.
Using a June 8-11 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Dionne notes a 42-35 favorable/unfavorable ratio for the Democratic Party (the GOP weighs in at 28-49), as contrasted with a 23-64 job approval ratio for Congress, roughly equal to Bush’s 29-66 rating. Meanwhile, the same poll shows Democrats with a 52-31 advantage in a “generic” presidential ballot, while head-to-head surveys on actual candidates show a close race, at least when well-known GOP candidates like Giuiliani and McCain are tested against the leading Deomcrats.
Dionne’s basic analysis is that Democrats won in 2006 by putting together a coalition of “base” voters focused on ending the war in Iraq, and swing voters with a broader range of concerns about “getting things done.” Both categories, he suggests, are increasingly disappointed in Congress’ record so far. That doesn’t explain the relative weakness, as compared to the generic numbers, of Democratic presidential candidates, but it does make for an interesting interpretation of the Democratic Party “brand” and its subsidiary “products.”
If you step back for a moment, it’s important to remember that poor approval ratings for Congress are hardly a new thing; the real aberration was the brief moment earlier this year when the positive assessments inched up into the high thirties. Surveys specifically rating Democrats in Congress show a slightly more positive picture; the last ABC/Washington Post poll at the end of May gave them a 44-49 job approval ratio, down from 54-44 in April. Totally aside from specific issues before Congress, it’s reasonable to expect some deterioration as Democratic control of Congress began to sink into the public consciousness, given an environment where the right track/wrong track ratio has plunged to 19-68 (to cite the NBC/WSJ survey).
We’re likely to see a clearer partisan shakedown in terms of assessments of Congress by this fall, if, as anticipated, Bush starts vetoing appropriations bills, and congressional Democrats find new ways to dramatize their efforts to end the Iraq war.
On the presidential front, the gap between “brand” and “product” is partially just a function of the fact that the “well-known” Republicans who are running well in trial heats happen to be those with the strongest appeal to independent voters; that will almost certainly continue to change as the nomination process goes forward, with GOP candidates visibly chewing conservative red meat in every speech and debate. (As my friend Will Marshall has acutely observed, Republicans in their current authoritarian mode seem determined to move from being the “daddy party” to the “abusive daddy party.”) And I personally would bet big money, if I had it, that neither John McCain (whose support is clearly collapsing) nor Rudy Giuliani (who’s been slipping of late) is going to be the Republican nominee. Trial heats involving Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, as they become better known, will be the ones to watch.
In any event, a strong “brand” with relatively weak “products” is preferable to the reverse proposition. A lot was written, and appropriately so, during the long winter of Democratic discontent earlier this decade, about the inability of Democrats to convert “generic” ballot strength into electoral victories. But “generic” advantages mean the door is wide open to gains if you are smart enough to walk through it. And in the long run, that pays off more often than not. Just ask the Coca-Cola people if they’d trade a dip in the warm and fuzzies generated by their treasured brand for a quick upsurge in sales for one of their fruit-flavored Diet Coke offerings.

We’ll be hearing all week about the minutiae of the U.S. Senate’s reconsideration of the so-called “grand bargain” on immigration reform: the amendments, the parliamentary maneuvers, the behind-the-scenes lobbying of Bush, Reid, Kennedy, Lott and others, to drag a couple of Republican votes across the line without losing prior supporters.

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