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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

J.P. Green

Scratch ‘Entitlement’ from Dem Vocabulary

Political correspondent Bill Boyarsky makes a good point in his Truthdig post “Entitlement Is a Republican Word.”

At his news conference this week, President Barack Obama seized on a misleading Washington word–“entitlements”–to describe the badly needed aid programs that are likely to be cut because of his compromises with the Republicans.
“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are–Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.
It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. And now it’s an Obama word as he moves toward the center and away from the progressives who powered his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination over centrist Hillary Clinton.
“There is, frankly, resistance on my side to do anything on entitlements,” he said before heading into another negotiating session over raising the debt limit and cutting the budget. “There is strong resistance on the Republican side to do anything on revenues. But if each side takes a maximalist position, if each side wants 100 percent of what its ideological predispositions are, then we can’t get anything done.”

Having been guilty of using ‘entitlements’ on many occasions, I now realize Boyarsky is right. It is a convenient catch-all term, but it is freighted with negative overtones and plays right into the Republican scam of making programs working people have paid for sound a little like privileges provided to slackers.
Boyarksky goes on to fault the President for caving on social program cuts and adds “To stop them, Obama has to be honest, forthright and progressive–and stop using “entitlements” to refer to worthwhile government programs. He’s a writer. He must know what negative nuances the word carries.”
I’m not so sure as Boyarksy that President Obama used the term with full awareness of its more nuanced implications. The term has creeped into mainstream reportage and common parlance, even among liberals. But Boyarksy is dead right that the President and all progressives need to stop using it, because every time we use it, we reinforce the GOP meme that needed — and hard-earned — social programs are extravagant give-aways.


A Tax Hike by Any Other Name

So as not to offend the delicate sensitivities of the infantile right, we now begin the search for acceptable euphemisms for taxes. From Carrie Budoff Brown’s Politico post, “Bridging the no-new-taxes divide“:

Increasing airline fees, eliminating ethanol subsidies, boosting Medicare premiums for wealthier seniors — all of these take money from someone’s pocket and send it to the U.S. Treasury. But not all Republicans would call these tax increases. They haven’t been summarily dismissed. And just enough in the GOP might even be able to stomach them, and more.
“I know how many angels can sit on a pin, but I don’t know what a tax increase is,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum and former economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign. “There is a lot of language, and they will choose the language they need to get this done.”
But with so much at stake, Holtz-Eakin predicts that Republicans ultimately will agree to “$100 billion in fees and other stuff that aren’t labeled taxes but raise money for the federal government.”

Brown goes on to list other possible revenue sources, including cutting farm and maybe even – gasp – oil and gas subsidies, along with raising various user fees. There is talk of new billions in fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Another idea being bandied about, reports Brown, is tweaking the inflation calculation for federal benefits, including Social Security. Many Republicans like the idea of selling off “surplus” federal properties and auctioning the wireless spectrum. There’s even a proposal to jack up postage rates, which I imagine might prompt the tea partyers get out their tri-corners and go ballistic one more time.
Call these proposals “revenue enhancement,” or what you will, but these are not taxes, you understand.
I get it that face-saving is a necessary part of politics in a democracy. But looking ahead, Dems have some work to do in demystifying the “T” word to the point that the conservative party need not shrink in horror at the mere mention of it. It may be that demystifying the “G” word comes first, as Andrew Levison has argued — reforming government and figuring out new ways to get people involved in helping to make government policy as stakeholders, not just tax-payers.
So let a hundred euphemisms for ‘taxes” bloom in the short run. But as soon as the present crisis is resolved, it will be time to get serious about changing attitudes toward government and holding obstructionists accountable.


Needed: Apps for Dems

It took me a few minutes to get my head around the recent report that 35 percent of adults, not just 35 percent of cell phone users, now own smartphones, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. More than a third of American adults, not just kids, are using cell phones to check emails, surf the net and noodle with apps.
The app world boasts a few stunning statistics of its own, including the sheer number of available apps — 425K for Iphones and over 200K for Androids, figures soon to be ancient history.
There are a number of apps that provide a broad range of useful political data, such as Walking Edge, a database for canvassers that pinpoints homes of undecided voters and supporters, custom-designed, unfortunately, for Republican-friendly campaigns. Hopefully, a Democratic version is on the way, if not already up and running.
Plenty of political consultants are offering to provide fund-raising apps for individual campaigns. From what I can gather, however, the quantity of useful partisan advocacy apps for Democratic activists could be more impressive. Much abbreviated political dialogue takes place though mobile Twitter and Facebook applications. But apparently, major app providers are struggling with questions of content and taste in deciding which ones to provide. There are a few good pro-Democratic apps, including:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a mobile sign-up widget here.
‘The Democrats,’ the party’s official app, has some useful localized features, along with alerts, events, even some issue analysis
ActBlue Mobile makes cell bill add-on contributions to worthy Dems quick and simple
You can view screen samples for the “Obama 2012” app here.
Some others include ‘Democrat News,’ ‘Democrat Quotes,’ and ‘The Democrat News App

But, more are needed (readers please add good ones not noted above). Some possibilities include a series of daily apps, among them:

Message of the day – The DNC should craft a succinct message on a topic of current interest for rank and file Dems. It could be a rebuttal of the GOP message of the day, which has been part of their echo chamber for years
The Daily Stat – An interesting statistic for bolstering Democratic policy arguments
Political One-liner – sort of ‘snark du jour’ for the water cooler
Republican outrage of the day – A variation on Keith Olbermann’s ‘Worst Person of the Day.’ So much material here that it might be hard to pick just one.
‘The Read’ – Flagging a single must-read daily article or internet post for the time-challenged that explains a policy or issue of concern for Dems unusually well. App developer Handmark has a political digest called ‘Politicaster Left,’ (as well as Politicaster Right) but the offerings seem a little broad.
Candidate of the Day – Mini-bio of a featured Democratic candidate — local, state or federal — who needs some help in the form of contributions, similar to ActBlue, but spotlighting candidates of color and female candidates to improve Democratic candidate diversity. Press a button and your five measly dollars are automatically sent to them and added to your cell bill.

The apps world is expanding exponentially, and smart phone apps have huge potential for helping Dems, more than Republicans, to optimize small contributor fund-raising, educate voters, GOTV and lobby. A commitment to meet this challenge by the pro-Democratic technorati could be a game-changer.


Is GOP Economic Brinksmanship Wearing Thin?

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews wondered aloud on Sunday if perhaps President Obama was starting to look like “the adult in the room” with respect to the struggle over raising the debt ceiling.
It’s a damn good question. The Republicans have been so rigidly infantile in their cut taxes and spending monomania that it seems likely an increasing proportion of swing voters have to be thinking “I don’t like all this talk about default and screwing up the world economy even more to make a point. Boehner, Bachmann and the Republicans seem more like angry children than grown-ups who are serious about compromise and governing sensibly.”
Speaker Boehner is still insisting on a $2.4 trillion deal, linked to a “dollar-to-dollar” ratio of spending cuts to debt ceiling increase. But President Obama wants a bigger, more flexible deal, and is holding out for $4 trillion package with a debt ceiling extension until at least Jan. 1, 2013. Negotiations resume today, with an 11:00 am press conference featuring the President’s update.
Ideologues, left and right want what they want. Middle of the road voters want to see policy compromises that guard against extremes and move the economy forward in a way that doesn’t penalize everyone but the rich. A common sense compromise might include a $3 trillion package with very modest, way-down-the-road entitlement cuts allowing the Republicans to save a little face, but significant tax hikes on the rich to give Dems some buy-in.
Progressive Dems fault President Obama for giving too much away up front. The frequently-heard meme is that he usually starts negotiating with the compromise position. There is merit in this critique. But the upside is that he is being seen as the only one who is willing to compromise with respect to just about all the debates over economic policy. This may help him get re-elected, argue progressives, but at what price?
Opinion data indicates that Dems may have an edge with voters in the debt ceiling debate. Asked in a Pew Research Center poll 6/16-19, “As you may know, unless Congress and the president can agree to raise the federal debt limit soon, the government will not be able to borrow more money to fund its operations and pay its debts. If the limit is not raised, who do you think would mainly be responsible for this: the Obama Administration or the Republicans in Congress?,” 33 percent said the Obama Administration would be responsible, compared with 42 percent who put it on “Republicans in congress.” (12 percent said both).
It’s hard to imagine how Republicans could have gained any advantage in the 3+ weeks since that poll. My guess is that the GOP’s zero-taxes-on-the-rich position has not served them well in recent weeks, and the Dem’s “shared sacrifice” sound-bite is beginning to resonate with crisis-weary voters as a sound principle of any reasonable compromise. A little amplification of it from the MSM, as well as Dems, could help — perhaps a lot.


Silver: Conservative Domination of GOP Verified by Data

Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis, “Why the Republicans Resist Compromise” at his Five Thirty Eight blog at The New York Times affirms the meme that the GOP is pretty much ensnared by its more conservative faction. While this conclusion is no big shocker to most political observers, Silver’s data-driven analysis, as presented in his chart “Ideological Distribution of People Voting Republican for U.S. House,” is impressive and instructive:

The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group. That group, of course, is conservatives. It isn’t a bad thing to be in favor with conservatives: by some definitions they make up about 40 percent of voters. But the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘conservative’ are growing closer and closer to being synonyms; fewer and fewer nonconservatives vote Republican, and fewer and fewer Republican voters are not conservative.
The chart, culled from exit poll data, shows the ideological disposition of those people who voted Republican for the House of Representatives in the elections of 1984 through 2010. Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.

Silver notes the pivotal role of disproportionate conservative turnout in last year’s midterms, and the unfortunate consequences for Dems:

This was fortunate for Republicans, because they lost moderate voters to Democrats by 13 percentage points (and liberals by 82 percentage points). Had the ideological composition of the electorate been the same in 2010 as in 2008 or 2006, the Republicans and Democrats would have split the popular vote for the House about evenly — but as it was, Republicans won the popular vote for the House by about 7 percentage points and gained 63 seats.
Many of the G.O.P. victories last year were extremely close. I calculate that, had the national popular vote been divided evenly, Democrats would have lost just 27 seats instead of 63. Put differently, the majority of Republican gains last year were probably due to changes in relative turnout rather than people changing their minds about which party’s approach they preferred.

Addressing “the enthusiasm gap within the Republican party,” Silver cites a Pew Research poll conducted a few days before the election which indicated that,

Among conservatives who are either registered as Republicans or who lean toward the Republican party, about 3 out of 4 were likely to have voted in 2010, the Pew data indicated. The fraction of likely voters was even higher among those who called themselves “very conservative:” 79 percent.
By contrast, only about half of moderate or liberal Republicans were likely voters, according to Pew’s model. That is about the same as the figure for Democrats generally: — about half of them were likely voters, with little difference among conservative, moderate and liberal Democrats.
So the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010.

Silver cites data indicating that “Republicans are still fairly unpopular,” but adds,

…As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.
Presidential elections are different: they tend to have a more equivocal turnout. The G.O.P. can turn out its base but it has not converted many other voters to its cause, and President Obama’s approval ratings remain passable although not good. The Republicans will need all their voters to turn out — including their moderates — to be an even-money bet to defeat him.

Silver believes that, if Romney is nominated, he would have a clear shot at turning out the GOP moderates, while Bachmann could alienate enough of them to give Obama victory.
At his TPM Editors blog, Josh Marshall applauds Silver’s analysis of conservative domination of the GOP, but adds that it shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook for their failure to take advantage of it:

When I castigate the Democrats for not having a clear message or President Obama for not having an “outside game” in the debt fight, readers will often write in to say that I’m ignoring the fact that the modern GOP is a coherent and highly ideological party while the Democrats simply are not. So Republicans are inherently more able to function as a unified force with a unified message than the Dems. In fact, these folks will argue, it’s not even right to talk about “the Dems” because that buys into the illusion that they’re a party like the GOP as opposed to a coalition of constituencies.
For my money, I don’t find this a sufficient explanation. I do think the Dems are consistently guilty of what amounts to a political failure — the failure to devise and push a consistent message and play on the weaknesses of their foes. I’ve made these points so often that there’s no need (and probably appetite) for me to restate them here. However, it is important to note these structural realities that create a genuine tilt in the playing field of our politics, one that makes it easier for 35% to 40% of the electorate to dominate the country by having virtually total control over one of the two parties.

“Still,” Marshall concludes, “…Politics matters. And on that count the Dems continue to be captive and captured by a weakness it is in their collective power — and for a president to a great degree individual power — to change.”


Is the GOP Bound for ‘Political Jonestown’?

Once upon a time the Republican Party included a few widely-respected leaders who valued reason and flexibility — names like Eisenhower, Javitz, Weicker and a few others come to mind. Hell, Nixon was a paragon of sanity compared to some of the loons running the GOP asylum now. if this sounds overstated, read Richard Cohen’s Sunday WaPo column “A Grand Old Cult,” in which he explains:

To become a Republican, one has to take a pledge. It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan; one has to promise not to give the government another nickel. This is called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” issued by Americans for Tax Reform, an organization headed by the chirpy Grover Norquist. He once labeled the argument that an estate tax would affect only the very rich “the morality of the Holocaust.” Anyone can see how singling out the filthy rich and the immensely powerful and asking them to ante up is pretty much the same as Auschwitz and that sort of thing.
…Almost all the GOP’s presidential candidates have taken this oath, swearing before God and Grover Norquist to cease thinking on their own, never to exercise independent judgment and, if necessary, to destroy the credit of the United States, raise the cost of borrowing and put the government deeper into the hole.

Cohen notes the role of revisionist history and denial in the Republicans’ increasingly unhinged worldview:

…The hallmark of a cult is to replace reason with feverish belief. This the GOP has done when it comes to the government’s ability to stimulate the economy. History proves this works — it’s how the Great Depression ended — but Republicans will not acknowledge it.
The Depression in fact deepened in 1937 when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to balance the budget and was ended entirely by World War II, which, besides being a noble cause, was also a huge stimulus program. Here, though, is Sen. Richard Shelby mouthing GOP dogma: Stimulus programs “did not bring us out of the Depression,” he recently told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, but “the war did.” In other words, a really huge stimulus program hugely worked. Might not a more modest one succeed modestly? Shelby ought to follow his own logic.

‘Logic’ may not be the best word to describe GOP thinking in the second decade of the 21st century. Cohen notes a similar pattern of denial with respect to Republican policies on abortion and global warning, and adds,

…Independent thinkers, stop right here! If you believe in global warming, revenue enhancement, stimulus programs, the occasional need for abortion or even the fabulist theories of the late Charles Darwin, then either stay home — or lie.
This intellectual rigidity has produced a GOP presidential field that’s a virtual political Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult. It is a redoubt of certainty over reason and in itself significantly responsible for the government deficit that matters most: leadership. That we can’t borrow from China.

The problem for Democrats is that, when Republicans become irrational proponents of discredited ideas and failed polices, there is not much incentive for Dems to up their game. Dems are not being challenged to respond to good arguments so much as tantrums by intellectually-constipated ideologues. The public gets cheated out of an enlightening debate and everybody loses.
What puzzles is why all of the Republicans have guzzled the Koolaid. Why hasn’t it dawned on the party’s brighter bulbs, perhaps Senator Lugar or, maybe Scott Brown or Huntsman that “Hmm, I could really separate myself from the pack of idjits by taking things to a more rational level”? All indications are that the public would like to see a little more flexibility from Republicans.
There may well come a point when the Republicans’ impressive party discipline starts to look like pointless obstructionism to swing voters. The public can see that, so far only one party is compromising. If sanity prevails, the Republicans’ unspoken meme that “we’re 100 percent right, and they’re 100 percent wrong, so we won’t give an inch” can’t play much longer without diminishing returns.


Dems Must Dramatize GOP Jobs Blockade

There’s been a lot of discussion in Democratic circles lately about what Dems can do with the fact that Republicans clearly want the economic recovery to fail, at least until the November ’12 elections. Of course, the smarter Republicans deny it, while others like Rush Limbaugh have said it plain.
Wanting the economy to fail is not only unpatriotic; it’s also callously self-serving on a purely human level. it’s a sick political party that will let millions of Americans suffer so it can gain electoral advantage. The question is, how can Democrats turn the GOP’s obstruction of the recovery against them?.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may have come up with an effective way to address Republican obstructionism. In an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley, Pelosi explained, “When the … unemployment rate is high, it’s hard for the incumbent to win. I remind you though, we’re not the incumbent. The Republicans are the incumbent.”
Some might say it’s a tough sell, arguing that Republicans are “the incumbent” because they control the House of Representatives, when Dems are a majority of the Senate and hold the white house. But Republicans are exercising functional veto power by obstructing any bipartisan reforms.
The TDS bumper sticker, GOP=Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis is even more painfully true today than it was when we first made it available.
But Pelosi is right that the Republicans are the “incumbents” in the sense that they are the force that is preventing congressional action on needed legislative reforms. The House Republicans represent the status quo that is obstructing public service employment, infrastructure renewal, restrictions on outsourcing jobs and increased tax revenues from multi-millionaires and corporations that are awash in exorbitant profits. They exercise a knee-jerk veto power on all progressive economic reforms that could put people to work and balance the budget. For a good graphic representation of their strategy, see here.
So maybe dubbing the GOP as “the real incumbents” could be an effective meme that might make some of the more thoughtful swing voters pause before blaming Dems for inaction on needed reforms to expand employment. Dems must have a soundbite-sized meme to capture the GOP’s obstructionist opposition to needed economic reforms, and Pelosi’s point is a good one.


Huntsman’s Scenario More of a Guantlet

Jon Huntsman announced his campaign for the presidency today, which should enliven the campaign for the GOP nomination and possibly set the stage for deepening ideological divisions within his party.
Matt Bai’s portrait of Huntsman in the Sunday New York Times magazine will not cause a lot of concern in the Obama campaign. True, Huntsman won his re-election (Utah governorship) with 78 percent of the vote and Obama ’08 campaign manager David Plouffe said the possibility of a Huntsman campaign back then made him a “wee bit queasy.”
But Bai’s profile of Huntsman reveals an oddly detached and dispassionate candidate with an upper-class pedigree, as heir to his father’s chemical industry fortune. His mother is the daughter of an LDS apostle. Money won’t be a problem for Huntsman, who expects to raise additional dough from wealthy Republicans who have some moderate ‘social issue’ views, place a premium on lowering the capital gains tax, but can’t get their heads around the Romney thing.
Huntsman’s bet for the Republican nomination has to be that the tea party candidates will cancel each other out, and there will be enough Romney-phobes to give him a real shot. This scenario presupposes more charisma than Huntsman may have, although NYT columnist Frank Rich’s description of Romney as “an otherwordly visitor from an Aqua Velva commercial, circa 1985” is not so far off the mark.
It also assumes, not without some evidence, that Pawlenty may be a non-starter. But there’s always the chance that Huntsman’s campaign might boomerang and divide what’s left of the GOP’s moderate conservatives, end Romney’s hopes and make possible the election of one of the more conservative candidates.
Assuming that Huntsman somehow grabs the GOP nod, he will have a tough trek, make that a gauntlet-run, in the general election if the economy improves significantly in the next year. Without an economic axe to grind, Huntsman’s case weakens considerably and he will likely have some ‘splainin’ to do regarding his increasingly sharp attacks against the guy who gave him his most important job. Hard to see how he gets through it without being branded in the minds of many “character voters” as a disloyal opportunist/hypocrite. That baggage isn’t going to magically disappear.
Then there is the flip-flopping, as described by Wayne Holland, chairman of the Utah Democratic party, in Nia-Malika Henderson’s article on Huntsman’s entry in today’s WaPo:

The Jon Huntsman I know supported Barack Obama and President Obama’s recovery act, but said it should have been larger…The Jon Huntsman I know worked with Democrats to pass the cap-and-trade program and said at the time it was the only alternative to a carbon tax. The Jon Huntsman I know signed into law a health insure exchange and proposed an individual mandate for Utah. It now appears that has all changed.

If the economy tanks further, Huntsman would have a decent chance, as would just about any GOP nominee, north of the lowest tier. Even then, however, Huntsman’s lack of any discernible connection to everyday working people could be a formidable obstacle.
JFK proved that brainy rich guys can connect with the pivotal white working-class. But it does require an ability to project warmth, a good sense of humor, compassion and maybe a bit of a track record. I’m not seeing it in Huntsman’s persona, as viewed through Bai’s profile. Huntsman’s working-class cultural creds are pretty thin — apparently his favorite sports are motocross and bungee-jumping. His handlers and ad-makers will have a tough assignment making him seem like a ‘regular guy.’ All in all, it seems fair to say that the GOP field has not been impressively strengthened by Huntsman’s entry.


GOP Immigration ‘Reform’ Rotting Crops, Endangering Farms

On May 29, I commented on an article about the, ahem, fruits of Republican immigration ‘reform,’ which have included labor shortages, rotting crops and pissed-off farmers in Georgia. Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Constitution has an update on the disastrous after-effects of the enactment of the legislation. An excerpt:

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
…Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.
The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

The solution? Gov. Deal now wants to deploy an estimated 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers who live in s.w. Georgia to pick what’s left of the rotting crops. As Bookman says, “Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.” Bookman adds:

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow…We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

Other possible “solutions” to the farm worker crisis being bandied about include raising wages — and consumer prices — to hopefully attract more workers and weakening enforcement of the new law, which is not likely to impress migrant farm workers much. Can prison labor be far behind?
Latinos are 8.8 percent of Georgia residents, but approximately 3 percent of Georgia’s registered voters, so the Republicans undoubtedly figure they won’t pay too much of a political price for the new law. Harassing the undocumented workers of Georgia’s leading industry may score a few points with wingnut ideologues for the Republican Governor and state legislators. But Dems may just have gained an edge with Georgia’s farmers, who live and work in the real world.


Germany’s ‘Secret’ Holds Lesson for Democrats

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a post up at his blog, “Why the Republican War on Workers’ Rights Undermines the American Economy,” which does a good job of pinpointing a critical missing element in the economic recovery effort. Lamenting the passing of the era Reich dubs “The Great Prosperity,” the three decades after WW II when “wages rose in tandem with productivity” and “Americans could afford to buy what they produced,” he holds up the example of Europe’s healthiest economy:

…If you want to see the same basic bargain we had then, take a look at Germany now.
Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).
What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.
How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.
That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.
Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.
The only way back toward sustained growth and prosperity in the United States is to remake the basic bargain linking pay to productivity. This would give the American middle class the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going.

Reich credits strong labor unions as a leading cause of both Germany’s economic health and ‘The Great Prosperity’ era in the U.S. noting “In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.” Reich adds:

With the decline of unions has come the stagnation of American wages. More and more of the total income and wealth of America has gone to the very top. The middle class’s purchasing power has depended on mothers going into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, finally, the middle class going deep into debt, using their homes as collateral. But now all these coping mechanisms are exhausted — and we’re living with the consequence.
…The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

Reich is well-aware of the enormous difficulties of meeting this challenge, particularly the “Republican War on Workers,” which includes eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public workers and “open shop” initiatives to prevent unions from collecting dues, along with attacking the National Labor Relations Board.
Clearly, Reich is not talking about a quick fix in time for next year’s elections. Rather, this is a long haul struggle that will require sustained commitment from both unions and progressives. There are critical reforms, like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which could help strengthen unions. But it these reforms will require restoring strong Democratic majorities in congress.
The outpouring of protests against public worker union busting in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana offer the hope that the public is waking up to the dangers of weakening unions further. Organized labor’s embrace of new organizing tactics, such as those being used to recruit Wal-mart workers into a union-like organization called “OUR Walmart” may open up new directions for union growth.
The image of unions is in need of a make-over, since anti-labor propaganda has been relentless and it looks like its going to get worse. Senator Rand Paul has apparently been appointed the new poster-boy for union bashing. In response, the labor movement could use a major Ken Burns-style prime-time documentary series showing how much unions have done to help American families have a better quality of life. Unions have also got to do a better job of tooting their own horn, not just in the shops they hope to organize, but throughout American society.
Like every Democrat, I’m hoping economic recovery will soon kick in strong enough to do some good for Dems in ’12. But if we want to create a sound foundation for a more enduring recovery benefiting American workers — call it “The Great Prosperity 2.0,” Democrats will have to focus more on supporting unions.