Take a little break from mid term mania and check out Richard Kirsch’s post “What Progressives Did Right to Win Healthcare” at The Nation. While most of the reportage on the struggle to enact health care reform focused on the legislative lobbying, public opinion trends and policy analysis, Hirsch provides an insightful overview of the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition-building effort that was instrumental in passing HCR, and reveals some organizing techniques that should be transferable to other progressive movements. Hirsch’s post covers 10 aspects of the campaign, a few of which are presented here:

A detailed campaign plan: The HCAN Organizing Committee wrote an 865-page campaign plan incorporating: grassroots and netroots organizing; communications through traditional, paid and new media; coalition building including creating a new organization of small businesses; fundraising; and a new round of public opinion research focused on generating anger at the health insurance industry.
Resources to win: If there’s a single hero in this story, it’s Gara LaMarche, the President of Atlantic Philanthropies, which made a $10 million grant to HCAN early in 2008, assuring that we would have enough resources to launch the campaign in the crucial months before the 2008 election. The $51 million amount we raised between 2008 and 2010 from Atlantic and other funders, including our Steering Committee, was sufficient to run a campaign that placed us at the center of reform efforts.
Building on established progressive capacity: Rather than hiring outside organizers, HCAN built local coalitions in forty-four states, through three established networks: USAction, the Campaign for Community Change and ACORN. We funded seventy-five organizers who coordinated the work of paid and volunteer organizers from the local affiliates of our steering committee members and from other organizations that made up our 1,100-member coalition. HCAN’s online staff, working with MoveOn and others, added a huge Internet presence.
Local coalitions held thousands of public meetings and press events with members of Congress and made hundreds of visits to their offices. Regular call-in days generated hundreds of thousands of calls and faxes. When the Tea Party attacks came in early August, members of Congress called on the HCAN coalitions for help. While our response didn’t make as dramatic press coverage as the angry Tea Partiers, the truth is that the HCAN coalition, working with Organizing for America, turned out as many, and sometimes two to three times as many, people as the Tea Partiers, to Democratic Town Halls around the country during the three weeks before Labor Day. Grassroots organizing continued throughout the campaign, with candlelight vigils outside the homes of wavering members of Congress and thank-you events for members of Congress when they returned home after voting for the bill.

Hirsch’s account shows how progressives can overcome disadvantages like a 24-7 attack from right-wing media by taking a long-term view, refusing to get discouraged, thinking big and outworking the opposition. It’s an inspiring story, and one that contains lessons for progressives about the power of vision and commitment.

In the wake of the Missouri referendum drubbing the individual mandate, TNR‘s Jonathan Chait makes a couple of insightful points and provides an interesting suggestion in his post “What the Individual Mandate Vote Means.” First, on the Missouri vote:

…First of all, Missouri is not a “bellwether” state right now. It (narrowly) supported John McCain in 2008 when the country as a whole backed Barack Obama by 7 percentage points. Second, Tuesday’s election was a low-turnout primary with a massively disproportionate Republican electorate, accounting for two-thirds of all voters.

Chait says the assault on the individual mandate of the health care reform act is the thread which conservatives hope can be tugged to “unravel the whole structure of health care reform” and he designates it “the Leninist plan to collapse the system.” But Chait also explains that conservatives and insurers don’t really want to pull the plug on the individual mandate, which is the financial foundation of the act, and leave everything else in place, in which case the reform law would likely morph into a single payer system.
Chait also suggests that reform supporters consider an interesting proposal in a New York Times op-ed by Paul Starr, author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine. As Starr Explains, quoted by Chait:

…Let individuals opt out of the new insurance system, without a penalty, by signing a form on their tax return acknowledging that they would then be ineligible for federal health insurance subsidies for a fixed period — say, five years.
During that time, if they had second thoughts and decided to buy health insurance, they would have no guarantee that they could find a policy or that it would cover pre-existing conditions. In other words, they would face a market much like the one that exists now. And while that’s hardly a desirable position to be in, they would have made the decision themselves, and the option to step outside the system would relieve Republican concerns about government mandates.

As Chait concludes, “Democrats should work on implementing Starr’s idea. It’s better than having endless political fights over the single least popular aspect of the Affordable Care Act.” Looking at an even bigger picture, it’s a great example of the type of thoughtful modification of a progressive reform that does no damage, but minimizes public resistance. Dems need more of this kind of thinking.

Chris Bowers’s Open Left post, “Memo to Chris Dodd: We already have a unicameral legislature” provides one of the more succinct, lucid and compelling arguments for cloture reform yet presented. Bowers does a surgical shredding Senator Dodd’s case for keeping the 60 vote threshold for cloture. First up, Bowers shatters Dodd’s argument that the 60 vote requirement is needed to affirm the Senate’s unique role and the principle of our bicameral national legislature:

…You don’t need different vote thresholds to have a bicameral system. Consider:
1. 36 states have bicameral legislatures where no filibuster is allowed. Would Senator Dodd claim those 36 states do not actually have a bicameral system?
2. The 60-vote threshold is not in the Constitution. It just isn’t. That was never a requirement for a bicameral legislature.
3. If anything, the 60-vote threshold has created a unicameral system where the Senate has rendered the House irrelevant. Getting rid of the 60-vote threshold would give the two legislative bodies more equitable power.

I would add that the 60 vote cloture threshold is the foundation of gridlocked government, which is the primary goal of the G.O.P. I say this as an admirer of Senator Dodd, who has been one of the more reliable Democratic leaders on many key issues, but who, along with a handful of other Democratic senators, is simply wrong on cloture reform.
Behind the unicameral legislature nonsense, Dodd’s case is essentially fear-driven, the old ‘we’re gonna miss the 60 vote requirement when we are in the minority’ argument. And yes, that could happen on occasion. But majority rule — the foundation of genuine democracy — is really the more important principle at stake here, and if we can’t have that, a 55 vote threshold is a step toward it. The way it is now, urgently needed reforms that could help millions of people are being held hostage by the 60-vote threshold, and that is unacceptable for a any government that purports to reflect the will of the people.
Bowers notes some related reforms that merit more serious consideration, and which might be achievable in a shorter time horizon that that which would be required for reducing the 60 vote threshold:

…if we do a better job focusing on the wider range of proposed rule changes–such as making unanimous consent non-debatable, requiring the filibuster to be a real talkathon where Senators have to stay on the floor (as Senator Lautenberg has proposed), or switching the burden of the cloture threshold on the opposition (for example, 45 votes to continue a filibuster, rather than 60 to break it, as Senator Bennet has proposed)-then the interest and momentum for reform could increase as people debate a wider range of possible reforms.

Bowers concedes that achieving any reform is an uphill struggle in the current political climate. But he adds, “Senate rules are not going to stay the same forever. The rules have changed in the past, and will change again in the future” — a key point for progressive Democrats to keep in mind in working for cloture reform. Although the obstacles are formidable at this political moment, we have to begin somewhere.

Greg Sargent’s ‘Plum Line’ post, “GOP blocks small business bill. Who will get the blame?” at the WaPo should be required reading for all Dem elected officials, their staffers and campaign workers. Here’s what Sargent has to say about how important legislative votes are too often reported and received:

…No matter how many times Dems scream about GOP obstructionism, the jury is out on whether Republicans will take any of the blame for its consequences. Dems run the place, and the public may tune out any argument over Senate procedure as so much Beltway white noise.
The latest: In the Senate today, Republicans blocked a bill to create a $30 billion fund to enable community banks to boost lending to small businesses. Republicans decried the move as another bailout, and it’s now unlikely that it will pass before Congress goes home for vacation in August, with little in the way of jobs bills under its belt.
So how will this story play?…

I won’t quote the graph from the AP story Sargent provides as exhibit “A.” You’ve seen it before in many previous incarnations. The general gist is that ‘gee wiz, those ineffectual Democrats failed to pass something again,’ giving the Republicans a largely free ride. The rest of the AP story Sargent didn’t quote prattles on in similar vein, at one point attempting to make Mitch McConnell sound like the voice of reason and humanitarian concern. Yet another classic example of lazy, gullible or GOP-biased reportage. As Sargent asks,

…Is this how the story will be understood by the American people? Very possible…Republicans claimed Dems blocked votes on the amendments they wanted. Dems countered that they agreed to votes on the GOP amendments, only to have the GOP demand more votes. Get what’s happening here? The larger story is all getting subsumed in a bunch of Beltway white noise.

Call it the ‘White Noise Strategy.” The GOP has been deploying it with impressive results for decades. Sargent quotes a statement from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the usual complaint about the Republicans playing politics and how the President will not be distracted — all well and good.
But what’s really needed here is a day of Democratic outrage, making the Republicans eat their numerous statements about small business being ‘the engine of job-creation.’ It should be a day when all Democratic elected officials, from city council members to Obama, get loud on one single message and refuse to talk about anything else. And that message should be fiercely-stated outrage, including displays of raw anger in press conferences, interviews, talk shows and statements, at denying small businesses the help they need to start hiring again. That would be a day that resonates with millions of small business women and men, as well as the unemployed and everyone who has the brains to understand that this is the kind of stimulus that makes sense. Then when October rolls around, remind them again and again about the day of outrage in political ads and a YouTube email campaign.
Small business job-creation is a hugely-important priority for economic recovery. The Republicans have squashed it for now. But there is a choice: Let the white noise prevail again — or get fierce.

We’ve done our share of MSM-bashing hereabouts, and probably not enough shout-outs to the traditional media reporters and columnists who do a good job of covering politics. But MSM groveling at the behest of FoxTV and the wingnuts does seem to be on the upswing, and it requires a lot of effort just to hold them accountable.
For those who think this may be overstating the case, we refer you to Charles Kaiser’s Hillman Foundation article, published in The Nation, which does a solid job of chronicling some of the recent atrocities. Kaiser’s “The Shame of the Fourth Estate.” presents a thorough account of “the perversion of journalism” by “a band of vicious charlatans,” including in his words:

* Time magazine’s decision to ask Glenn Beck to assess Rush Limbaugh’s importance in America for the 2009 Time 100: “His consistency, insight and honesty have earned him a level of trust with his listeners that politicians can only dream of.”
* A decision by the editors of washingtonpost.com to allow Beck to host a chat there to promote one of his books.
* This hard-hitting assessment of Beck by Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, who gurgled on, “Sure, he may be selling a sensationalistic message of paranoia and social breakdown. But politics, or basic responsibility, aside, he has an entertainer’s sense of play with the medium of TV that O’Reilly, or perpetual sourpuss Neil Cavuto, don’t.” And why would anybody care about a basic sense of responsibility, anyway?
* A worshipful 1,943-word profile of Fox News founder and president Roger Ailes by David Carr and Tim Arango on the front page of the New York Times–which included this perfectly amoral quote from David Gergen, a perfectly amoral man:
“Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process.” And what a wonderful conversation it is.
* And finally, the most sickening piece of all in this splendid cohort: David von Drehele’s obscenely sycophantic cover story of Beck for Time magazine, which told us that Beck is a “man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one’s listening all converge;” that he is “tireless, funny, [and]self-deprecating…a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies–if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking.”

Here’s Kaiser on the MSM handling of the Sherrod and ACORN smears and Breitbart’s role.

But far worse than the kid-gloves treatment of Fox and its friends was the inexplicably benign approach the MSM took toward Andrew Brietbart, the original source of the doctored video of Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP that started this whole sorry saga.
In the Washington Post, he was a “conservative activist and blogger”; in Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story in the Times, he was “a blogger” who “similarly…used edited videos to go after ACORN, the community organizing group;” in the Wall Street Journal he was “a conservative Internet activist” who “argued that the Obama administration is insufficiently sensitive to bias against white people”; in the Los Angeles Times, “a conservative media entrepreneur” and to Associated Press television writer David Bauder a “conservative activist” whose website “attracted attention last year for airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.”
But to find out who Breitbart really is, you would have had to read (h/t Joe Stouter) Joe Conason in Salon, who, “recalling Breitbart from his days as eager lackey to Matt Drudge…warned from the beginning that nothing he produced would resemble journalism.”

Regarding Glenn Beck’s splenetic smearing of the President, WaPo‘s Dana Milbank, quoted in Kaiser’s article, has this:

…Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News since Obama’s inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama–as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck’s nightly “report.”

Kaiser has more to say about the Sherrod smear and the press being hustled and intimidated by right-wing ideologues, and it all adds up to a very disturbing picture of one of America’s most important nongovernmental institutions. The time has come for America’s most influential print and electronic reporters and editors to do some soul-searching about their fearful compliance with neo-McCarthyism and reaffirm their commitment to social justice and journalism that serves the people.

In his WaPo op-ed, “Enough right-wing propaganda,”E. J. Dionne, Jr. does a good job of distilling one of the most salient points regarding the Sherrod smear into one sentence:

The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors.

But Dionne points out at some length that it’s not only the wimpy MSM that’s at issue here. He and many progressives rightfully feel that the Obama Administration caved awfully easy on this one:

The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.
The first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle. She could be sacrificed without a thought.
Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god.

After giving the Administration a fair share of the blame for being so easily hustled by prevaricating conservatives, however, it’s hard to overlook the shameless laziness/dishonesty of the MSM’s complicity. The headline for the Post article didn’t really get it. Call it wishful thinking, but I liked Truthdig‘s headline for Dionne’s article better: “The End of the Fox News Era.” Hey, we can dream, can’t we?
Dionne goes on to cite other examples of MSM wimptitude, including the sliming of Al Gore for saying he invented the internet (never mind that he never said it), the GOP’s “death panels” fear-mongering getting huge play, and the trumped up coverage of the “New Black Panthers” voter intimidation case.
The coverage of the Sherrod smear has been so extensive, that whatever fair-minded, persuadable voters were mulling over whether Breitbart and the tea party crowd could be trusted are now leaning toward a healthy skepticism regarding them. Breitbart and his defenders have lost some ground on this one. In that sense, the Sherrod smear did some good in terms of unintended consequences.
Some of the better thinkers have pinpointed a more lofty opportunity in the Sherrod affair that merits consideration. Here’s Charles J. Ogletree Jr., executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and Johanna Wald, the Institute’s director of strategic planning, also writing in The Washington Post:

…In some ways, Sherrod’s tale is a metaphor for this country’s aborted efforts to address race. In its entirety, her deeply moving story was about transformation and reconciliation between blacks and whites. It contained the seeds of progress and healing. She spoke of blacks and whites working together to save farms and to end poverty and suffering. But Sherrod, and those listening to her story, could get to her hopeful conclusion only by first wading through painful admissions of racial bias and struggle.
Racial inequality is perpetuated less by individuals than by structural racism and implicit bias….Implicit bias is a reality we must confront far more openly. A growing mass of compelling research reveals the unconscious racial stereotypes many of us harbor that affect our decisions. Such attitudes do not make us prejudiced; they make us human….
The good news is that structures can be dismantled and replaced and unconscious biases can be transformed, as happened to Shirley Sherrod and the family she helped, the Spooners. First, though, they must be acknowledged. We and others researching race and justice are committed to untangling the web of structures, conditions and policies that lead to unequal opportunities. Our nation has to stop denying the complexity of our racial attitudes, history and progress. Let’s tone down the rhetoric on all sides, slow down and commit to listening with less judgment and more compassion. If Americans did so, we might find that we share more common ground than we could have imagined.

Of course, politicians, as well as the media, can be excruciatingly slow learners. But the Sherrod smear ought to sound the knell for the age of MSM gullibility and general gutlessness. Surely, the time has come to put the childish things away and behave like grown-ups. As Dionne concludes

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting upon the difference between news and propaganda.

The one good thing about embarrassing lessons is that they are usually learned well. If it’s too much to ask of the MSM, it ought to be the only alternative for an Administration that hopes to win a second term.

Here’s hoping the heirs of the late, great Link Wray will allow some YouTube mash-up wizard to use a little piece of Wray’s way-back hit instrumental “Run Chicken, Run” to accompany this video clip of Sharron Angle fleeing reporters:

As Andy Barr of Politico reported:

Sharron Angle walked out of an event to which her campaign invited reporters as soon as they were given the opportunity to ask questions of Nevada’s GOP nominee for Senate.
After giving a three-minute speech on Wednesday on her desire to repeal the estate tax, Angle was asked to make herself available to answer questions from the assembled reporters. Angle turned around without saying a word and left the event, as a video provided by the Nevada Democratic Party shows.

Barr was a little too kind in describing Angle’s exit: She didn’t just walk; Positioned for the quick getaway, she turned tail and hauled ass, as if she didn’t have even two minutes to answer questions. Barr puts Angle’s departure in context.

Angle was followed out of the event by several camera crews and reporters. Without speaking to the media, Angle got into a white Jeep Cherokee with a campaign aide and left the event.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Wednesday’s event was the first to which the press had been invited since she won the June 9 Republican primary.

I particularly enjoyed the inadvertent high comedy of the smarmy m.c. of the press “conference” telling the media “I know Sharron’s got a very tight schedule. But Peter and I and (unintelligible) will make ourselves available for individual questions,” as the bewildered hard-hat guys watch Angle’s sprint, chased by reporters who weren’t into being spoon-fed b.s. by campaign aides. As a stagey political event gone wrong, it couldn’t have been scripted better by Robert Altman.
All of which may help explain why Angle is tanking in the polls. Kudos to NV Dems for capturing Angle in flight. May KY Dems, who also have a media-dodging wingnut to expose, follow suit. It’s not just Angle’s and Rand Paul’s indefensible policy positions; it’s also the fact that both of these candidates for the United States Senate are letting their handlers hide them from open scrutiny by the media. If they refuse to be videotaped answering questions like any candidate with a modicum of personal integrity, then let them be depicted as cowards in flight, which also makes for entertaining television.
Republicans, not just Paul and Angle, but also a slew of tea party House candidates with half-baked policies, have a lot to hide in this election. It will be a sadly-missed opportunity if Dems passively depend on the mainstream media to make them account for it.

Granted, the year is only half done, but if they gave an annual award for the most ridiculous, sour grapes attempt to invalidate an election, it would probably be shared by the Minnesota GOP’s Ex-Senator Norm Coleman and Governor Tim Pawlenty. Perhaps the best account of their sorry attempt to unseat Senator Al Franken comes from Jay Weiner’s Salon.com article, “Get over it, Republicans: Al Franken won.” Nobody’s going to explain it any better than Weiner:

…Minnesota Majority, a very conservative “watchdog” group, released a report (PDF) on June 28 that claims a lot of things. But when you get to the bottom line, the group seems to be saying that according to its research, 341 felons in Hennepin and Ramsey counties who should have been ineligible to vote actually cast votes in the Franken-Coleman election.
The report, flawed in the opinion of most legal analysts, got legs and wings and Internet echo chamber reverberations from — who else? — Fox News last week, and then other news organizations chased it, and right-wing blogs jumped on it, and the Minnesota Republican Party called for a statewide investigation and Coleman called Franken “an accidental senator” and Gov. Tim Pawlenty said there was “credible evidence” that the alleged felons who maybe voted possibly could have flipped the election’s final result. Breathless.

Here’s the math:

Franken, if you remember, won by 312 votes….Now, let’s take one key stat that Minnesota Majority focuses on, that 341 alleged felons from heavily Democratic Hennepin and Ramsey counties voted. For the moment, take that at face value.
That would mean, based on voter turnout numbers, about 70 percent of them (240) would be from Hennepin and 30 percent (101) would be from Ramsey. Taking into account the percentages for Franken, Coleman and others in each of those counties, Franken would net 51 votes.
Remember, he won by 312. Let’s take away those 51 in this silly game. That still isn’t enough to switch the result.

Weiner, author of the forthcoming “This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount,” dissects the twisted logic of the report:

…What makes anyone think felons would vote only for Franken? Indeed, it was Franken’s legal team during the recount’s election contest trial that raised the prospect that felons voted in the election; Franken’s lawyers found one such voter in a northern Minnesota county who voted for Coleman. Dare I ask: If Franken opened the door on such an avenue, why didn’t Coleman’s lawyers pursue this felon-voting issue then? They had their chance. And why does the Minnesota Majority report focus on the core-city counties?

Three guesses on that one. Weiner has more to say, reflecting unfavorably on the integrity of Governor Pawlenty, who is frequently mentioned as a possible GOP Presidential candidate:

As for the governor, he has spoken three times about the recount, and he’s been a bit fast and loose with his facts. First, in the early days of the recount, he spread — on Fox News — the completely untrue story about Minneapolis ballots that were supposedly being driven around in the alleged trunk of an unknown and nonexistent elections official. He spoke of this days after it was reported that the story was a fable.
Later, in a call with reporters, he overstated by thousands of percentage points the increase of absentee voters in 2008, trying to say that Franken won the election because of that…In fact, Franken won the recount by 49 votes before absentee ballots were counted.
Now, there are his comments — on Fox News — about the Minnesota Majority report and how it’s “quite possible” felon voting tipped the election. The facts aren’t there.

Pawlenty’s transparently blundering partisanship is not likely to sit well with mainstream MN voters, who have already endured an excruciating marathon recount process for the Franken-Coleman race. With his latest wallow in the sour grapes, Coleman may be destroying whatever fading chance he had for a re-run against Franken.
Franken, meanwhile, is doing an exceptional job of establishing himself as an able legislator and a happy warrior with a great sense of humor — a worthy heir to Paul Wellstone.

Here we go again with the talking about ‘independents’ as if they had a coherent, unified ideology. Writing at Dailyfinance.com, Pallavi Gogoi describes independents as “an important, influential and powerful voting bloc,” disregarding the fact that Independents have varied political leanings. Some are too liberal for both major parties, some are too conservative, while others see themselves as right in the middle between them. Still others simply dislike both parties, and many others don’t have a clue about what either party stands for.
Golgoi does, however, cite a useful statistic of particular interest to Democrats, the fact that 59 percent of Independent respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll support extending unemployment benefits (compared to 80 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans). She points out that in March, 12 percent of Independents were unemployed, compared with 11 percent of Democrats and 6.5 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll analysis prepared for DailyFinance.
In other words, Republican leaders bad-mouthing and/or opposing the extension of unemployment benefits may be scoring points with the arch-conservative element of their constituencies. But a healthy majority of the politically-amorphous group self-identified as Independents, and even 43 percent of Republicans, think they are wrong. Democrats would be wise to emphasize the extension of jobless benefits as critically important to the economy, as well as to the jobless, in a series of nation-wide ads.

Now that all possible angles comparing the 2010 mid terms to those in 1994 have been explored, Rebecca Kaplan argues at Slate.com that the more relevant comparison is the 1982 elections. According to Kaplan’s post, “The Lessons of 1982: Why Democrats need not fear the ghosts of 1994“:

…Speculation is running rampant, particularly in the media and especially among Republicans (and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs), that 2010 could be a replay of the Democrats’ lowest political moment in the last half-century: the 1994 midterms, when Republicans seized 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. But the similarities between 2010 and 1994 are superficial. The more relevant election–the one that gives a better gauge of the magnitude of losses the Democrats may see–is the 1982 midterms. Although some political scientists were predicting that the Democrats would gain as many as 50 seats, on Election Day they took only 26 seats from the Republicans.
…In many respects, today’s economic conditions are identical to those in 1982. The yearly change in real disposable income per capita is a key factor in predicting midterm outcomes: When their wallets are fuller, people are more likely to send their representatives back to Washington. And right now this number is almost the same as it was at this point in 1982. For the third quarter of 2010, Moody’s Economy.com is predicting a 0.4 percent increase in real disposable income per capita from last year–a fairly stagnant number that does not show much economic growth for the average citizen. In the third quarter of 1982, the change in real disposable income per capita was 0.5 percent–also fairly flat. The unemployment rate is also eerily familiar; it’s now pushing 10 percent, while in 1982 it was 9.7 percent. In 1994, meanwhile, the economy was in better shape than it is now or was in 1982, with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate and 2.3 percent increase in personal disposable income from the third quarter of 1993.

This last point regarding joblessness is not so reassuring. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, if the economy was better in ’94, and we still got creamed, how is that encouraging for Dems?
Kaplan points out that Dem and GOP congressional candidates are spending about equally now, as they did in ’82. While in 94, Republicans outspent Dems by an average of $91,383 in each race — or nearly $5 for every $3 spent by Dem candidates. Clearly, Democratic candidates have got to match their GOP adversaries in 2010, if they want to keep running the House and Senate. Kaplan goes out on a bit of a limb, noting “Without outspending the Democrats, it is unlikely the Republicans will be able to achieve all the pickups they are hoping for.”
As Kaplan explains, Republicans, under Gingrich’s “message mastery” did a particularly good job of working existing media in 94, while Democrats have a significant edge with new media in 2010. She adds that Clinton “lost control of the national conversation” and was distracted by non-economic issues, while Republicans hammered away. That is not the case today.
In a sense, however, all comparisons are not as relevant as some would have us believe. The information revolution that has occurred since ’94, and even more so since ’82, is a huge wild card. Political messaging has been transformed by the internet, Fox-TV and now MSNBC. Not to diminish the importance of economic indicators, but it matters a lot that candidates now have more opportunities to communicate with voters, and progresives seem to have an edge over conservatives in tapping this vein — for now.
Kaplan makes another good point in noting the deepening division in the GOP constituency exemplified by the tea party circus, which has produced some dicey candidates, like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, while Dems have so far eschewed the circular firing squad of earlier years.
Here’s hoping Kaplan’s insights pan out. The key thing for Dems is to learn from electoral history, not to be limited by it. If Kaplan is right, the key challenges for Dems are to keep “control of the national conversation” and invest the bucks needed to fire up the base and win a healthy share of the persuadables.