Like many of you, no doubt, I haven’t exactly been paying a lot of attention to polls (other than exit polls) since November 3, sort of like a guy who can’t stand the thought of red meat after a year on the Atkins diet. But after forcing myself to read tonight’s story on the new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, and then backtracking to read Ruy Teixeira’s post yesterday on the latest Ipsos-AP poll–well, I guess it’s time to get a little protein back on the menu.
CNN’s headline trumpets a rise in Bush’s job approval rating. But the real news (reinforced by the Ipsos poll) is that Bush actually isn’t getting the post-election, pre-inaugural “bump” that winners usually get, and in terms of the two big stories that will likely dominate political discourse in the immediate future, Iraq and Social Security, he’s doing more poorly than ever.
In the Gallup poll, which gives Bush an overall job approval rating of 52 percent, only 42 percent of respondents favor his handling of Iraq, while 56 percent disapprove. Similarly, only 41 percent give a positive evaluation of his handling of Social Security, while 52 percent disapprove. Only 18 percent agree with Bush’s characterization of Social Security as a program “in crisis” (though, as just-say-no Democrats should note, 53 percent believe it “has major problems.”).
As Ruy reports, Bush’s numbers are even weaker in the Ipsos-AP poll, including an anemic 50 to 48 approval/disapproval ratio in his overall handling of “foreign policy issues and the war on terrorism.”
Sure, GOPers will try to use the Inaugural hoopla, and a no-doubt-well-rehearsed Inaugural Address full of Gerson’s finest uplift, to create a sense of momentum going into the Iraqi elections (if they occur) and a highly fractious congressional session. But they don’t simply face a determined Democratic opposition–they face a public that’s not likely to mistake Bush’s narrow election as any kind of mandate for doing the stuff they dislike even more than the stuff he did before.

Kevin Drum of Political Animal beat me to the punch on this today, but I want to echo his suggestion that you read the New Republic’s editorial on the tilting of the National Labor Relations Board during the Bush era.
Labor guys are forever talking about the need for labor law reform, and those of us who don’t follow this issue regularly probably half-assume they are just worried about the general erosion of union membership, and/or want better safeguards against the kind of corporate practices (e.g., offshoring) that didn’t exist when the industrial-age regime of labor laws was created in the 1930s. But as the TNR Editors show, there’s a deliberate GOP effort under way to undermine those laws as they have generally been applied all along.
Organizing to collectively bargain is tough enough these days without the officials responsible for ensuring the rights of employees trying to rig the game. This is an issue on which all Democrats need to show some solidarity with the labor movement.

Many kudos to Amy Sullivan for the public service she performed in her new Washington Monthly piece about why the cast of big-time Democratic political consultants never seems to change, no matter how often their advice is bad and their candidates lose.
She hit all the right notes: the popularity of consultants who pander to their clients by telling them what they want to hear; the huge conflict of interest involved when party committees hire staff who peddle their consulting businesses to the candidates who dare not offend Those Who Write the Checks; the particularly sleazy practice (abandoned by the Bush-Cheney campaign this year, in one step Democrats should emulate) of “strategic consultants” deciding to run ads which they then place for a fat percentage rakeoff; the persistent “Peter Principle” of successful pollsters or speechwriters or direct mail operatives graduating to message and strategy roles they are incompetent to carry out; and of course, the cozy inter-connections between consultants who make sure nobody new gets into The Club.
The only thing I can add to Amy’s tale is one slightly different insight about why candidates keep hiring unsuccessful consultants. Here’s the way it often works, especially for new candidates for the House or Senate. Unless they are already political titans and/or self-funded, the first thing they need to do is to establish themselves as “credible,” and one easy way to do that is to retain a “name consultant.” Then they have to raise the money necessary to pay them, and also to implement their “strategy,” which may well involve additional dollars for the consultants. At that point, the candidate feels extremely stupid not taking that expensive advice, even if he or she suspects it’s the same cookie-cutter crap the consultants are selling to their other clients, or indeed, have been recycling for years. It’s a perfect vicious circle that leads predictably to Palookaville, though the losing consultant will typically shrug and blame the loss on the candidate or on the “mood of the Midwest” or something.
I vividly remember one particular Senate candidate a while back who admitted privately that he went through exactly that vicious circle, accepting his consultant’s bone-headed strategy because he’d be a bone-head to admit he hired the wrong guy in the first place. It made me wonder if Democrats should rethink the standard practice of mentoring prospective candidates by letting them talk to current electeds who’ve won. Maybe we need a Losers School of defeated candidates who can warn their successors of the mistakes they made, and tell them very directly which Loser Consultants they should avoid like the plague.

In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, National Journal political columnist Chuck Todd adds his not-insignificant voice to a bit of emerging Conventional Wisdom about recent political history: the idea that Bill Clinton was responsible for the decline of the Democratic Party over the last decade or so, especically at the non-presidential level. He concludes by suggesting that Democrats begin their recovery by avoiding close association with anybody or any organization contaminated by excessive identification with “Clintonism.”
You can read the thing yourself, but I found Todd’s take sadly typical in that he constructs his argument on the foundation of two highly questionable planted axioms and one big straw man.
First, the planted axioms:
(1) Clintonism was about “triangulation” and “splitting the differences” with conservatives; and
(2) Democrats controlled the House and Senate before Clinton was elected and controlled neither when he left office; thus, he, and his strategy of “triangulation” and “splitting the differences” must have caused this decline.
Now I realize that many Republicans and some lefty Democrats believe that Clinton stood for nothing other than playing off traditional liberalism and “splitting the difference” with conservatives, but that’s sure as hell not what Clinton himself claimed he was doing. The term “triangulation” was invented by the ephemeral 1996 Clinton advisor Dick Morris, and even he never claimed it just meant moving to some position half-way between liberalism and conservatism, but instead devising progressive answers to issues previously dominated by the opposition: “using your tools to solve their problems,” as Morris put it in the last book he wrote before becoming a full-time Rupert Murdoch flack.
And even if you think Todd’s characterization of Morris’ term is accurate, there’s the little problem that the big, unmistakable Year of Decline for down-ballot Democrats was not 1996, but 1994. And it is very hard to make the case that Clinton had done much of any “triangulation” in the two years prior to 1994, while it’s very easy to make the case that Clinton’s own contribution to the ’94 debacle was a pattern (outside the trade arena) of insisting on pursuing the priorities of conventional liberalism, in harness with the conventional politicians of the House Democratic Caucus (There is a revisionist argument that the ’94 results can be explained by disappointment of the “Democratic base” with Clinton’s failure to embrace something like a single-payer health care proposal, but that’s pretty much a joke when you look at the southern districts where Democrats lost the most ground). And lest we forget, the White House political guru going into the ’94 elections was not Dick Morris, but the hyper-conventional Tony Coelho, who consistently told Democrats that early signs of a conservative surge were not worth worrying about, and that Congressional Democrats in particular shouldn’t panic and do anything dangerous like, say, supporting campaign finance reform. This is the same guy, BTW, whose post-1994-election White House political strategy was simply to scream about proposed cuts to the school lunch program.
Beyond that little problem with Todd’s hypothesis, it represents a good example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy, really no different than the assumption that George Bush’s foreign policy has thwarted Jihadist Terrorism because there have been no strikes on the U.S. since 9/11.
That becomes more obvious when you look at the alternative explanations for 1994, which include (a) many years of pent-up popular frustration with a Democratic-dominated Congress, skllfully exploited by the GOP’s dishonest but resolute alliance with the term-limits and balanced-budget movements; (b) a huge number of Democratic retirements; (c) the racial gerrymandering that guaranteed big southern losses in the House; and (d) the first big mobilization of the Christian Right.
And then there’s the Big Bertha of factors, which I’m sure Todd is familiar with: 1994 as the culmination of a gradual but steady trend towards realignment of the two parties on roughly ideological lines, which gave the GOP its big opportunity (in conjunction with the four factors mentioned above) to make huge gains in areas of the country previously represented and governed by relatively conservative (certainly far more conservative than Clinton-style) Democrats. In this context, “Clintonism” can at worst be described as a less-than-successful, last-minute holding action against a Republican Majority, but not as its cause. The gains that Democrats made during the last six years of the Clinton administration–most notably after the Lewinsky scandal–certainly don’t fit into the hypothesis that Clinton himself was the problem.
Now you can make the case that Clinton, like most presidents, was more interested in his own political fate than that of his party, and that he did too little, not too much, to try to change its structure and default-drive ideology–with a big assist from Republicans who relentlessly promoted partisan and ideological polarization almost every day of his presidency. And there is no question the Lewinsky scandal reinforced claims from both the Right and the Left that “Clintonism” was nothing more than poll-driven “triangulation” or “splitting the difference.”
But the idea that the Democratic Party was weaker when Clinton left office–with extremely high job approval ratings and after a record of accomplishment that showed Democrats could be trusted to produce remarkable results–than it would have been under any other plausible approach to strategy or ideology, is questionable in the extreme.
And that leads me to the Big Fat Straw Man in Todd’s argument: the idea that “Clintonism” is responsible for the post-Clinton problems of the party because of the iron grip of his failed political strategy (and strategists) over the last two presidential candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry.
Aside from the fact that Al Gore sorta kinda won, Todd seems to have forgotten that Gore (a) managed to put together a campaign team largely bereft of Clinton ’96 alumni, and (b) made a decisive if counter-intuitive choice not to run on the record of the Clinton-Gore administration.
Kerry’s campaign, meanwhile, was guided by a Democratic strategist involved in every presidential run since 1972 other than Clinton’s two campaigns. And for all the candidate’s virtues, his effort was notably devoid of most of the distinctive hallmarks of “Clintonism,” including a clear overarching message, a determination to look like “a different kind of Democrat,” a willingness to say things uncomfortable to Democratic interest groups, or an ability to connect with culturally traditionalist voters.
Finally, you really have to look at where Democrats lost ground in 2002 and 2004 to see how truly laughable it is to suggest that “centrism” was some kind of fatal curse for our congressional and presidential candidates. Does anybody really think that, say, Max Cleland would have won re-election in 2002 had he been more of a loud-and-proud old-fashioned pre-Clinton Democrat? Or that Brad Carson could have won Oklahoma last year if he had come out for a single-payer health care system? Give me a break.
Todd does say one thing that I agree with, though probably for different reasons than his: that Democrats need to do more on the policy and message front than simply recycle Clinton’s ideas and phrases. But it’s an indictment of Clinton’s Democratic successors–all of us–that the current options or Democrats seem to be limited to asking WWBD? or defining ourselves simply and mindlessly through 100% opposition to whatever it is Bush says he’s for. But see, I would argue that actual “Clintonism” involved a constant effort to come up with new ideas based on the enduring values of our party, focused on actually improving the lives of the American people, as the actual Clinton administration succeeded in doing so well. And that’s one legacy we’d be fools to abandon.

Speaking of books, I mentioned in a Christmas post that I had been given a book entitled Enslaved By Ducks about a pet owner’s gradual loss of autonomy, but didn’t know the author’s name because one of my dogs had already chewed up the cover and title page.
Thanks to the readers who googled the book and gave me the author’s identity, but by then I had received a very nice note from The Enslaved Himself, Bob Tarte. I’ve now started the book (betwixt and between boning up on my knowledge of The Whigs), and so far it is both wise and hysterically funny. And at the point of the book I’ve reached so far, Tarte only has a couple of parrots and a deceased rabbit, far short of the menagerie he ultimately assembles. But he’s already captured the odd psychology of the Pet Owner, while amply illustrating one of my own favorite maxims: a long series of logical decisions can add up to an absurd conclusion.

I finally got around this weekend to using a Borders gift certificate I was given for Christmas, and picked up (or more accurately, hefted) a book I’ve been eyeing for a while: Michael Holt’s massive and magisterial Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, a 1999 study of the antebellum party that died a sudden death in the slavery crisis of the 1850s. I managed to steal enough time from sleep and domestic chores to get through a key section on the runup to the 1840 presidential election, the famous “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign that gave the Whigs their first White House win.
Two things of present relevance really jumped off the page from Holt’s account.
(1) Today’s intraparty tensions are small beer by comparison. The early Whigs were a truly amazing and unstable coalition. It included the most violently nationalist and violently States Rights elements in the politics of the day, and also the most extreme pro-slavery and anti-slavery spokesmen. Despite the general assumption that the Whigs were the successor party to the Federalists and the antecedent to the Republicans, at one point, the tariff-nullifier and slavery-expansion-zealot John C. Calhoun was firmly inside the Whig Tent, while the former Federalist Daniel Webster was trying to create a new coalition with the Whig Nemesis Andrew Jackson. Nor were the Democrats of that day much more united, even under the stewardship of Martin Van Buren, who virtually invented the idea of party discipline.
(2) Conventional wisdom about political history is often wrong. Holt spends many pages skillfully demolishing the standard account that the Whigs gained power by tossing their principles out the window in 1840 and nominating the ideological cipher William Henry Harrison, an act for which they were swiftly punished by Harrison’s death and the elevation of John Tyler, who blew up their fragile and artificial unity. Turns out Ol’ Tip was about as solid a Whig as anybody this side of Henry Clay; that his nomination was less a deliberate act of cynicism than a semi-accident produced by the odd timing of the nominating convention (actually held in 1839), a decision of many pro-Clay southerners to boycott the gathering because they felt it contradicted their attacks on Van Buren’s “convention tyranny,” and a major blunder by potential nominee Winfield Scott. Tyler was an even bigger accident: a man far outside the mainstream of Southern Whiggery who won the Veep nomination basically because none of the obvious alternatives wanted it or could be reached to accept it.
Now: a lot of those who formed the CW about 1840 were present at the time, or were at least a lot closer to the events than Holt, but sometimes participants in political history either can’t see the big picture, or have ulterior motives for promoting a distorted view (in the case of the Tyler disaster, Henry Clay’s supporters had a pretty strong motive for claiming it was deliberately engineered by his enemies). I’ll have more to say about that in a future post about the CW that is emerging in some quarters about the recent decline of Democratic fortunes.

This week’s weirdest story is the revelation that the Bush Administration’s Department of Education paid right-wing TV host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act in the course of his broadcasts.
As Josh Marshall observes, purchased punditry is not a new development, but I haven’t heard of anybody collecting 240 Large for nestling a few references to education reform into a litany of ranting and raving.
If I were running the Education Department, I’d sure as hell think twice about relying on a guy like Armstrong to promote my message. Unless he’s changed recently (I refuse to watch him anymore), Williams is one seriously wacked-out dude. I once made the mistake of going on the show he did years ago for Paul Weyrich’s National Empowerment Network cable outfit, supposedly to talk about crime policy. He introduced me by saying: “My guest today not only thinks like a liberal and talks like a liberal. HE LOOKS LIKE A LIBERAL.” And his first question was: “How can you sleep at night?” Before I could answer, he went off into an insane tirade about Clinton that lasted for a good five minutes. And that was nothing compared to the callers to the show, whom Armstrong revved up into a hate frenzy that made me wonder if I’d wandered into a parallel universe where the Thousand-Year Reich was still underway. We never did talk about crime policy. But I guess no one was paying him to do that.

Don’t know what the rest of you think, but I’m inclined to feel that Democrats should move on from the post-election-analysis phase of our common endeavor. There’s a relatively strong consensus on many important points of that analysis, and I hope this blog has helped formulate them, as suggested by my friend and yours, Ruy Teixeira. The areas where there is a lack of consensus, including national security and cultural issues, have been with us for a long time, and will accordingly require an extended debate that goes beyond a discussion of what happened in 2004.
But there’s one nagging issue that I have not discussed directly that bears at least one mention: the argument that our big problem is not the lack of a compelling message, but simply the lack of a compelling messenger.
This argument often comes up in connection with criticism of John Kerry’s (and four years, ago, Al Gore’s) personal shortcomings in charisma and communications skills. But within moments, the argument always goes back to a paen to Bill Clinton as the prime example of the master messenger we need.
Interestingly enough, this particular variety of Clinton nostalgia is most common not among New Democrat types who view him as an important figure in the modernization of progressive politics, but among those who actually have serious misgivings about Clinton’s distinctive approach to public policy. A good example is in Howard Dean’s recent book, You Have the Power, which devotes a whole chapter to the proposition that Clinton’s unique political gifts made it possible for him to advance an unprincipled, “accomodationist” policy agenda in a way that actually advanced the progressive cause.
A similar argument is being made today among Democrats who say that our real problem as a party is marketing rather than substance, and in the failure to provide a “narrative” rather than our failure to have a message. The “narrative” argument is especially seductive until you think about what it really means. In a recent Washington gabfest where I made a presentation about Democrats and the South, a young journalist whose ability and insight I particularly respect asked me if there was something about southern politicians that made them uniquely able to “tell a story” and provide a “narrative” that helped connect the Democratic message with regular folks. And much as I was tempted to validate the assumption that crackers like me have preternatural political skills, I told her that “narrative” was a supplement, not a substitute, for a political message, which is not “a story,” but an argument for how a candidate intends to organize public resources to advance the interests and vindicate the values and aspirations of the American people.
And that’s how it actually worked with Clinton, folks. Nobody has to explain Clinton’s political gifts to me. I first personally encountered him in 1980 at a National Governors’ Association meeting, when he walked into a room crowded with big egoes and simply lit up the place. The first time I was convinced he was a future president was at a boring economic development conference in Atlanta during his second term as Governor, when he took a boring speech topic and turned it into a compelling presentation about the need to convince southerners that economic opportunity did not demand debasement of public services or abandonment of the higher aspirations of our people.
Then and later, Clinton’s political appeal did not just depend on political skills or “charisma” or the “ability to tell a story,” but on the content of his message, which was consistently unorthodox, provocative and comprehensive–all qualities lacking, in general, from the messages advanced by our last two presidential candidates, and by most Democratic candidates for Congress during recent cycles. Clinton was able to expand the Democratic voting base because he was willing to defy stereotypes about the party and make skeptical voters rethink their assumptions about the ol’ Donkey, which is also why he drove Republicans crazy, who before and after Clinton figured they had our number. And this, not some overweening desire to take credit for everything that happened in 1992, is the source of New Democrats’ special identity with Clinton’s political accomplishments. His message mattered, and without it, he would not have been elected or re-elected as president. Indeed, without his message, he probably would not have survived the Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging allegations that hit his 1992 campaign at the worst possible time, and certainly wouldn’t have survived a presidential impeachment with one of the highest job approval ratings in recent history.
Lord knows I wish we had another messenger of Bill Clinton’s abilities in the wings, but he would be the very first to tell you that what he said was at least as important as how he said it. And right now, two years before we seriously begin to audition candidates for the presidency, we ought to focus on what our party stands for and what we would do in power–on our message–on what we can say to persuadable voters, with or without a charismatic leader or a nifty “narrative”–and then worry about how to add the sizzle to the steak.

Now that the effort to hold up the official ratification of George W. Bush’s re-election has failed, Democrats have three choices about how to deal with the electoral irregularities that characterized this, and the last, presidential election.
(1) They can ignore the issue because there is no immediate payoff for dealing with it, an approach that will make Republicans quite happy.
(2) They can make it a partisan grievance by advancing an essentially conspiracy-theory based argument that Republicans have now stolen two straight presidential elections, which will also make the GOP quite happy.
(3) They can aggressively push for dealing with the problem by enacting a new, and this time effective, election reform law that ensures intrastate uniformity and interstate minimum standards for how federal elections are conducted.
The second approach is a mistake. And the first approach is inevitable unless we agree to pursue the third approach. That’s what the DLC called for in today’s New Dem Daily, and this is one strategy Democrats of every ideological persuasion ought to be able to agree upon.

Well, it’s official now, to my chagrin as a citizen of Virginia who happens to share the surname of the Attorney General of that state. Jerry Kilgore has announced he will run for Governor of Virginia later this year, and he’s the odds-on choice for the GOP nomination.
But just days before his announcement, veteran Hampton Roads Daily Press columnist Gordon Morse penned a piece in the WaPo that not-so-delicately raised the big question about Kilgore’s candidacy. Entitled “Will Being There Be Enough?” Morse’s column aired GOP concerns that the candidate is not considered to be exactly the sharpest tool in the Commonwealth’s shed, as witnessed by his flailing performance in a preliminary debate with his likely general election rival, Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine.
While the title of Morse’s piece ostensibly refers to Kilgore’s unique position as a visible and independent statewide GOP elected official who served his time in the party and conservative cause, you have to assume there’s a sneaky reference here to the unlikely, idiot-savant politician Chauncy Gardiner of the Jerzy Kosinski novel (and Peter Sellers movie), “Being There,” as well. “Kilgore is game,” quoth Morse, “but someone must hand him the right script.”
As we speak, someone in the vast infrastructure of the Virginia or national GOP may be working on that script. “In the fall, we plant the seeds. And in the spring, the flowers bloom,” as Chauncy Gardiner explained the theory of supply-side economics.