In his Washington Post column “Obama ditches his illusions about Republicans,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides a perceptive analysis of President Obama’s State of the Union speech and a preview of the Administration’s endgame strategy leading up to 2016. Dionne explains:

“This is good news, people.”
With those five words, President Obama made clear that he thinks it’s far more important to win a long-term argument with his partisan and ideological opponents than to pretend that they are eager to seize opportunities to work with him. He decided to deal with the Republican Party he has, not the Republican Party he wishes he had.
Those ad-libbed words followed what ranks as one of the more polemical passages ever offered in a State of the Union address. “At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious,” he declared, “that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health-care inflation at its lowest rate in 50 years.”
Good news, indeed, and in telling the Republicans that all their predictions turned out to be wrong, he reminded his fellow citizens which side, which policies and which president had brought the country back.
His analysis of the nature of his political opposition, in turn, dictated the approach he took in the rest of the speech. There was no point in hedging on his wishes, constraining his hopes or compromising in advance. Earlier in his administration, he might have begun the negotiations by offering his interlocutors their asking price upfront and then moving backward from there. No more.

Dionne notes the specific reforms the President proposed: redistributive tax proposals, guaranteed sick leave for all, expanded child care, tuition-free community college, equal pay for equal work, “laws that strengthen rather than weaken unions,” as well as a free trade agreement (which unions oppose).
Dionne concludes, “Obama clearly still believes that the country is less divided than our politics allows us to be. But he is no longer drawn to the illusion that his adversaries in the other party will beat their swords into plowshares anytime soon. He is battling not just for a personal legacy but also on behalf of a perspective that he hopes the country will someday embrace.”
Many progressives feel that President Obama took too long to accept that the Republicans had no interest in bipartisan compromises. But Dionne is right that Obama’s SOTU ends the era of extending olive branches to a party more interested in destroying his presidency than helping Americans achieve economic and health security.

The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
Online dial testing with 61 white swing voters across the United States and two follow-up online focus groups – one with white non-college educated men and women and one with unmarried women – show that President Obama’s agenda to bring America closer together as a “tight knit family” scored big. The President’s speech generated strong, positive reactions to policies ranging from investment in infrastructure and college education to a populist agenda that takes on special interests and the wealthy in order to make sure the middle class gets its fair share.

“Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one percent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth. We can use that money to help more families pay for childcare and send their kids to college.”
His proposals resulted not only in major gains on crucial traits and issues, but bolstered the President’s standing as well. President Obama’s personal favorability improved from a neutral rating (44 percent warm, 44 percent cool) to a net +33 (66 percent warm, 33 percent cool), the largest post-State of the Union shift seen for the President in recent years. Tonight’s speech clearly inspired our audience of swing voters.
The President comes away from this address with much to celebrate. In focus groups, voters note that the President was stronger, more confident, and more relaxed than they have seen him recently, and that they liked his positive vision, with one participant concluding that the president was “almost the guy that was elected 6 years ago, that [was] going to do a lot for the country.”
The President was also successful in crafting an agenda that reached across partisan lines. Despite a deep partisan divide in the November elections and in various issue debates, there was little polarization between Democrats and Republicans throughout the speech, with the Republican dials near or above 50 for most of the President’s address.
The President successfully communicated a strong sense of advocacy for middle class Americans, reflected in big gains on impressions of him as a leader, someone who is on voters’ side, and someone who understands the challenges facing Americans. Voters also express greater confidence in the President than in Republicans on key issues Obama highlighted in the speech–including growing American industries, jobs and trade, handling issues facing working women and families, finding new ways to get better jobs that pay more, and having good plans for the economy.
Importantly, the President also appealed to key voters he and Democrats need to win–particularly unmarried women and working class voters. However, there is more work to do to convince these swing voters that the President and Congress can come together on issues and actually make progress on this ambitious agenda.
Read the full memo

From Claire Cain Miller’s Upshot post, “Obama Says Family Leave Is an Economic Necessity, Not Just a Women’s Issue“:

The percentage of women in the labor force in the United States is declining, even as it continues to rise in other high-income countries…The United States is the only high-income country not to require paid leave for workers. Britain gives new mothers 52 weeks; Italy gives 22 weeks; and Japan gives 14 weeks. The president said the government would provide $2.2 billion to reimburse states for paid family leave programs, and called for Congress to pass a bill that would enable workers to earn seven paid sick days. His plan also included creating more child care and giving families a child-care tax cut of up to $3,000 per child per year.

At Demos, Sharon Lerner adds:

…Obama’s spotlight on paid family leave–or, rather, the lack of paid family leave–is incredibly valuable. Having time off to care for new babies is not just the law in the developed world, it’s policy in virtually every other poor country as well. (Yes, Afghanistan, Chad, and Vietnam are ahead of us on this) In the U.S., too, the idea of giving workers time off after having a new baby has wide appeal, though the support is easy to miss–both because proponents have been unsuccessful in getting paid family leave for almost a century, and because opponents tend to frame this as a typical partisan issue, with Democrats on one side and Republicans on another.
Paid family leave isn’t a typical partisan issue, though; it is a beloved policy on both on both sides of the aisle–or at least among voters in both parties. Recent polls show 55 percent of Republican women supporting The FAMILY Act, which would provide workers with up to 12 weeks off paid to care for a new baby or deal with their own or a relative’s serious illness. And 62 percent of Republicans as well as 70 percent of working men polled in 2009 agreed with the statement that “businesses should be “required to provide paid family and medical leave for every worker who needs it.”
Yet, while most Republicans see the value in paid family leave, Republican lawmakers still don’t for the most part, putting them in a politically untenable position that they won’t want to inhabit for long. By bringing the issue to the fore, Obama is garnering the approval of reasonable folks in both parties and drawing attention to the gulf between these Republican officeholders and their constituents. So when the White House highlights the fact that only 11 percent of workers are covered by formal paid family leave policies, for instance, they’re underscoring both the dire need for paid family leave–and the brute insensitivity of those opposing it.

Democrats can expect strong support from women in 2016, not just because of the popularity of our women leaders in recent opinion polls, but also because Republicans oppose nearly every reform that could make life a little easier for working women. What Republicans fear even more about President Obama’s paid family leave initiative is that it could give Democrats a strong edge with a constituency of growing importance — young parents and couples planning to have children.

A brief note from James Vega:
Since 2009 The Democratic Strategist has insisted on the unprecedented character of the extremism that has come to dominate the GOP, an extremism that incorporates not only extreme positions on issues but also extremist political strategies aimed at sabotaging the basic operations of government.
A current, startling example is the “Regulatory Responsibility Act,” passed without fanfare last week by the Republican majority of the House of Representatives and unopposed by any major GOP candidates or leader of the party. Here is a brief description of the legislation:

WASHINGTON — The House passed a measure Tuesday to dramatically restrict the government’s ability to enact any significant new regulations or safety standards, potentially hamstringing the efforts of every federal agency, the entire spectrum of public health and safety, worker health and safety, financial protections and consumer product protections. Opponents dub the measure a “stealth attack” because it targets obscure parts of the regulatory process but has such broad scope that it would affect all agencies, from independent regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission to executive branch agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the mainstream media moves further and further into 2016 campaign coverage and increasingly insists on describing various GOP candidates as representing a “moderate” or “sensible” wing of the party it is important for Democrats to energetically point out “stealth” proposals like this that illustrate the entire GOP’s unopposed hard-line extremist strategy of subtly sabotaging the government.
In this regard, a recent column in Time Magazine deserves close attention. Written by David Kaiser, a military historian who taught for 20 years at the Naval War College (as well as at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and Williams College) it argues the very startling thesis that the extremist strategy of the GOP is actually surprisingly similar to a classical method of guerilla warfare.
As Kaiser notes:

[The Republican success in the 2014 elections is] a new victory for a long-term strategy with a very surprising analog: the strategy that allowed the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to win the Vietnam War.
In one of his many books on the Vietnam War, the late historian Douglas Pike described the overarching Communist strategy, called dau tranh, or struggle, [one in which] the political aspects were always more important.
The Viet Cong always had more political workers than soldiers. They conducted motivational propaganda among their own troops, but also infiltrated and did whatever they could to make it impossible for the South Vietnamese government to function effectively. If they could reduce South Vietnamese society to chaos, they reasoned, the well-organized Communist party could easily take over.
Some years ago, I realized that that the Republican Party has been practicing its own kind of dau tranh for more than twenty years. Recently, the strategy has intensified. It has significantly weakened government at all levels and has a good chance of eliminating the remaining vestiges of the New Deal and the Progressive Era.
…Since winning the House of Representatives and taking away the Democrats’ 60-vote majority in the Senate in 2010, Republicans have made it impossible for large parts of the federal government to function. The genius of the Republican strategy is that it validates itself. Crippling government tends to prove that government does not work, and allows Republicans to argue that the nation would do better with even less government.
Democratic administrations on the other hand depend on the idea that government can help the people. Starving and immobilizing the government makes it look ineffective, which seems to validate Republican propaganda. Franklin Roosevelt created the modern Democratic Party by convincing every section of the country, from the agricultural south and the resource-rich west to the urban areas of the northeast and Midwest, that the government could help them. Now that belief has nearly disappeared in most of the Red states.
…Some months ago Mitch McConnell told a symposium hosted by the Koch brothers that if the Republicans win the Senate, a Republican Congress will use the budget process to defund every part of the federal government that they do not like…That would be the final triumph of several decades of dau tranh.

Republicans will of course respond that it is completely outrageous for anyone–even a professional military historian–to compare their strategy to that of insurrectionary movements whose objective is the deliberate sabotage of government. On this point Democrats can most heartily agree. It is indeed outrageous and the moment the GOP ceases to engage in such behavior Democrats will with great pleasure cease to draw the comparison.

The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps E-blast:
The 2014 election was a devastating defeat for the Democratic Party, with consequences that may be felt for many years to come. Even so, we wrote in the aftermath of the 2014 election, “Despite the deep losses of 2014, the partisan predispositions of the Democratic coalition remain very much intact. There just is not any reason to think the compositional changes will not continue their long-term trends – and the Rising American Electorate will be key.” This prediction certainly holds true in this survey, as the Obama coalition asserts itself in dramatic fashion. But it is also shocking how quickly other changes produce a profoundly different America than the one that showed up last November.[1] On almost all measures, Democratic numbers improve on this survey, beginning with voters’ overall mood. Right direction numbers jump nearly 10 points since the election and are likely to improve further with the growing economy and falling price of gasoline. Numbers also rebound for President and the Democratic Party. Democratic messages and Democratic policies out-muscle Republican messages and Republican policy, suggesting room for further advances. Meanwhile, the honeymoon for Boehner and McConnell barely lasted through the wedding reception as negatives for both, and the Republican Party as a whole, grow sharply. Most striking, the Tea Party Republican is back, defining the Republican brand.
These changes and the emergence of the Obama presidential year electorate leave the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead of Mitt Romney (49 to 43 percent) and well ahead of Jeb Bush (52 to 40 percent). Voters’ hostility to George Bush’s brother is one of the more notable outcomes of this survey.
Given her support among white college educated women and strong support among most RAE voters, Clinton can win a national election without competing among white non-college voters; but this outcome would likely leave most of the Republican 2014 gains intact. Obviously, a lot can change over the next 22 months, but questions at this point are whether the Democratic presidential candidate can grow and protect her lead, and whether 2016 can build a big enough win to recover congressional and down-ballot losses from the 2014 cycle.
The answers to those questions depend in large measure on two overlapping dynamics: Democrats’ ability to build on and consolidate their support among RAE voters and Democrats’ ability to improve on their dismal performance among white working class voters. On the combined measure, Clinton opens strong among RAE voters–unmarried women, people of color, youth–winning 64 percent of RAE voters overall and 62 percent of unmarried women. Obama won 67 percent of unmarried women in 2012, however, and Clinton’s margin among white unmarried women (just 1 percent) is unimpressive. The news here is less edifying for Democrats among white working class voters.
President Obama won 40 percent of these voters in 2008 and 36 percent in 2012,[2] and Democratic Congressional candidates won only 34 percent of the white working class vote last year. Clinton fares no better, winning just 35 percent of white non-college voters and 37 percent of non-college white women on the combined measure.
Critically, the goals of maximizing support among unmarried women and minimizing Republican support among white non-college voters overlap. Nearly a quarter of white non-college voters are unmarried women. The key to both groups is about getting the economy right. Overall, Democrats lead the Republicans on every issue tested in this survey, except the economy, which is the most important one. White non-college voters and white unmarried women are much more pessimistic about the direction of the country (76 percent wrong track among white non-college voters); both believe the road to the middle class is blocked for them. Progressives need to understand what they once understood–rising tides do not lift all boats and gains at the macro-economic level do not necessarily improve the economic prospects of these voters.
Both unmarried white women and white non-college voters prioritize jobs that pay; both focus on protecting Social Security and Medicare and college affordability. Critically, there is no evidence in this survey that the Democratic focus on the “women’s economic agenda” undermines support among white working class voters or white working class men. In fact, some of the gender-specific messages and proposals–equal pay, paid-sick time, help for working mothers–test as well or better among white working class voters as the non-gender-specific proposal. For both groups, this election needs to be about helping working men and women.
It also needs to be about reform. These are people who pay a lot in taxes, but do not believe the government works in the interests of middle families. They see special interests dominating government, often at their expense. They also see waste and inefficiency and are convinced they do not get their money’s worth out of Washington. Reform messages do as well for Democrats as broader economic messages and work particularly well among white working class voters. Reform policies constitute the most popular Republican policy proposal tested, and one of the most popular Democratic policies tested among unmarried women.
In one of the most important and interesting findings in this survey, a reform message opens votes up to a progressive economic narrative. Voters who heard the reform message before hearing the Democratic economic messages were more than 10-points more likely to describe the Democratic framing as “very convincing” as voters who heard the Democratic framing first (43 percent very convincing and 32 percent very convincing, respectively).
For Democrats, this represents an incredibly optimistic study. The road back may not be as long as many in the Party feared. But this road requires some improvement among white working class voters and some consolidation among base voters like white unmarried women. This means speaking directly to the economic experience of these voters, not the experience of Wall Street, focusing on the plight of the middle class and forwarding a set of policy options that directly improve the economic lives of these still-struggling families. And this road will likely be made much easier if Democrats make a serious effort on a government and campaign reform agenda.
Read the Full Memo
[1] The survey of 950 likely 2016 voters was conducted from January 7-11, 2015. Voters who voted in the 2012 election or registered since were selected from the national voter file. Likely voters were determined based on stated intention of voting in 2016. Data shown in this deck is among all 2016 likely voters unless otherwise noted. Unless otherwise noted, margin of error for the full sample= +/-3.2 percentage points at 95% confidence. Margin of error will be higher among subgroups. 50 percent of respondents were reached by cell phone, in order to account for ever-changing demographics and trying to accurately sample the full American electorate.
[2] From Center for American Progress: http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ObamaCoalition-5.pdf
____________________
This research was a joint project of Democracy Corps, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, and the Voter Participation Center. The Voter Participation research related to nonpartisan questions regarding policy topics
Democracy Corps is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people. It was founded in 1999 by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Democracy Corps provides public opinion research and strategic advice to those dedicated to a more responsive Congress and Presidency. Learn more at www.democracycorps.com
Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501 (c)(4) organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to increasing the voting participation and issue advocacy of unmarried women. Learn more at www.wvwvaf.org
The Voter Participation Center (VPC) is a research-driven, results-oriented nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing the participation and amplifying the voices of unmarried women (women who are single, widowed, divorced or separated) and other historically underrepresented groups in our democracy. The mission of the VPC is to boost the civic engagement of unmarried women, people of color and 18-29 year olds–the three demographic groups who comprise the Rising American Electorate (RAE) Learn more at www.voterparticipation.org.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The last couple of days have been a provocative view of the near-term future of American politics. There are four major teams on the scene at the same time, coming from four different corners of the field, and they all have some amount of political juice. How they end up interacting and competing with each other will be the driving political story for quite a while into the future.
On the Republican side, there is the increasingly conservative — but apparently never extreme enough — establishment wing of the party led by Boehner and McConnell and the big business lobby, and there is the Tea Party anti-establishment wing. The establishment guys, pretty much all guys, have the upper hand for now but clearly got a little surprised by the strength of the anti-Boehner rebellion in the Speaker election.
Knowing the strength of the Tea Party gang in primary election fights, they are a force to be reckoned with for the foreseeable future — as evidenced by the fact that the Republican Party’s establishment has moved so far to the right on most issues in the last five years. The establishment team certainly has embraced the Ayn Rand worldview so popular with the tea partiers, as evidenced by how on day one, they passed a rule that will probably result in cutting benefits and stealing from the disabled.
The biggest policy difference between the two wings of the Republicans is that the establishment wing invariably does whatever the big business lobby want them to do, even if it violates small government and free market principles — note how the Wall Street provision snuck into December’s budget bill that caused all the trouble allows more bailouts of the biggest banks’ riskiest bets — which isn’t exactly Adam Smith’s idea of free market economics. Tea Party types have been railing against these kinds of Wall Street bank bailouts since the last round of them in 2008. The biggest political difference is that the establishment will go along with the company line when push comes to shove, while the Tea Party still doesn’t mind-blowing up Congress to get what they want.

Read more…

From TDS founding editor William Galston’s Wall St. Journal column “Common Ground for the New Congress“:

…Many Republicans believe that infrastructure is principally a state and local responsibility. Republicans are committed to tax reform, Democrats to increased infrastructure investment. The highway trust fund will run out of money by midyear, but there is little support in either party for increasing the gas tax, the fund’s traditional revenue source.
Despite support from economists of both parties, a broad-based carbon tax is deeply unpopular as well. It is hard to imagine most Republicans assenting to finance infrastructure with higher general-fund deficits. Neither do they want to be held responsible for infrastructure projects grinding to a halt.
One possible solution is to combine tax reform and infrastructure finance. There is agreement across party lines that corporations should bring home the roughly $2 trillion they have stashed overseas–and that they won’t do so if the tax on repatriated earnings remains high. So why not lower that tax substantially, with the proviso that at least a portion of the resulting revenues would be dedicated to infrastructure finance? Both sides would have to eat some crow, but the dish might still be palatable.

It’s an interesting proposal. Some Republicans are finally waking up to the reality that substantial investment in infrastructure upgrades can’t be avoided much longer if the U.S. is to remain economically-viable. A commitment to shared sacrifice — along with shared credit for forward progress on our infrastructure — could be a win-win for both parties.

In her Time magazine post, “Why Democrats Are Losing the Working Class,” Haley Sweetland Edwards distills some salient points from the new Pew Research Center study on “The Politics of Financial Insecurity.” (In the Pew Center study financial security is evaluated by ten metrics, including savings and checking accounts, retirement assets, health security and other factors). From Edwards’s report:

While 94% of the the most financially secure Americans were registered to vote, only 54% of the least financially secure were, according to the study. Even fewer actually make it to their polling booths. While 2014 voting records are not yet available, in 2010, 69% of the most financially secure cast ballots, while just 30% of the least financially secure did, according to Pew.
The least financially secure Americans also tended to avoid other aspects of the political system as well, the study found. Working class Americans called and wrote to their representatives at much lower rates than their richer neighbors, and paid much less attention to basic facts in national politics. Roughly 60% of the most financially secure Americans could correctly identify the parties in control of the House and Senate when the study was conducted before the 2014 midterm; just 26% of the least financially secure could do the same.

But it would be a mistake to infer that political indifference is the primary driving wheel of low voter participation for the less financially secure. As Edwards notes,

…Working-class folks, who tend to have less flexible hours at work, vote disproportionately more in states that allow early voting and mail-in ballots–measures that are overwhelmingly supported by Democrats. In Colorado, for example, which began allowing mail-in ballots saw much, much higher turnout in 2014 than it’d had in 2010. Oregon and Washington, which also allow for mail-in ballots, had turnout rates that were higher than average in 2014, too. In North Carolina, where early voting measures allowed people to go to the polls over the course of seven days also helped increase voter turnout in that state by 35% from where it was in 2010.

Think about that for a moment. A 35 percent uptick in midterm turnout in a key swing state is highly significant. It would be more interesting to compare the figures for those with different levels of financial security. No doubt the more financially-secure are able to take advantage of early voting opportunities with greater ease. But indications are that expanding early voting is a winner for Dems in terms of increasing turnout of less financially-secure voters.
The Pew Research Center Study also had some interesting data on political preference and turnout of different levels of financial security:

…in 2014, the Democratic Party left far more potential votes “on the table” than did the Republicans. For example, among all of those in the least financially secure category, more than twice as many favored the Democratic candidate over the Republican (42% to 17%). But just 12% of this group favored the Democrat and were likely voters; fully 30% supported Democrats but were unlikely to vote.

After the 2014 midterm election in which the GOP scored major gains in Congress and the statehouses, a particular theme of post-election analyses focused on the relatively low levels of support Democratic candidates received from white working class voters. It is true that Republican candidates were preferred to Democratic candidates among whites in all but the least financially secure group. But the overall relationship between financial situation, partisan choice and political engagement among the general public is evident among whites as well. Republican support declines as financial insecurity increases, while Democratic support is relatively flat. About three-in-ten (31%) of the least financially secure white adults declined to express a candidate preference in 2014, compared with just 6% among the most secure.

There’s a lot more that could be investigated about the interplay of financial security, race and political participation. But the Pew Study certainly suggests that Democrats have a lot to gain by becoming better identified as champions of financial security — and early voting.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Watching the Republicans glory in their new majority in the Senate and expanded majority in the House is hard to take for progressive Democrats. Democrats have dug ourselves a deep hole, and the country will suffer as the most conservative political party in American history controls the Congress. What very few people (especially progressive activists) understand, though, is that it is in moments like this when really important victories can be won.
America’s political history is full of examples. Decisive defeat in an election doesn’t automatically spell doom to the side either in the short run or long run in terms of policy fights. The election of hard pro-slavery President James Buchanan, followed by the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, was the pinnacle of slave power, where it looked like all political power had been stripped from the abolitionist movement, yet less than a decade later, slavery was outlawed for all time. William McKinley’s decisive 1900 defeat of William Jennings Bryan looked like the end of populist hopes and dreams, yet within a few years much of the populist agenda was starting to be enacted. It was a bitter disappointment when Nixon pulled out an incredibly close win against liberal stalwart Humphrey, but in Nixon’s first term OSHA and the EPA were founded, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed, and the first affirmative action programs were put in place.
And here are some questions about more recent times: when were the only two minimum wage increases between 1980 and 2007? 1990, after the devastating win by GHW Bush in 1988, and 1996, after the Republicans swept into power in the 1994 elections. When was the tax reform bill essentially written by the strongest progressive tax group (Citizens for Tax Justice) in the country passed? 1986, after the Reagan landslide in 1984. When was the landmark bill providing health insurance to children passed? 1997, when Gingrich was Speaker. When was the only progressive legislation on corporate corruption (Sarbanes-Oxley) passed since 1980? 2002, after the second Bush won the first time and with Tom DeLay the most powerful man in the House. When did the President’s top priority legislation, Social Security privatization, never even come up for a vote in spite of the Republicans having control of both Houses of Congress in the aftermath of two bad elections for the Democrats? 2005, after both Bush and several new GOP Senators won.
It is time for progressives to stop thinking only defensively (although defensive battles can be great wins as well, like the Social Security fight against Bush), and start thinking about what we can win. While it is true that the Republican party keeps getting further and further to the right, making it hard to pass good legislation, let me give some examples of some of the ways we can fight and win progressive victories over the next two years:

Read more…

While a substantial sector of the Democratic coalition has enthusiastically embraced the rise of Elizabeth Warren and adopted the term “populist” to describe the philosophy she embodies, other Democrats have serious reservations. In a recent column, Brookings Institution fellow William Galston, argued the case for an alternative approach of “nonpopulist liberalism.”
Galston agrees that there are indeed real grievances and issues that lie behind the current regard for populism:

The ills against which populists inveigh are rarely illusory. On the contrary: Populism typically gives voice to genuine grievances, and in so doing gains credibility and energy.
At the heart of the American dream is the promise of opportunity. But in the ABC/Washington Post survey conducted days before the 2014 midterm elections, 71% of Americans said the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy. Only 24% disagreed. The favors-the-wealthy supermajority included 54% of Republicans, 59% of conservatives, 64% of college graduates–and even 57% of those making more than $100,000 per year.
In January, a Pew Research Center survey found that 65% of Americans–including 61% of Republicans–agreed that the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased during the past decade.
The issue is not whether these perceptions are mistaken–they aren’t–but what to do about them.

Galston identifies contemporary populism with the movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century of that same name and argues for the limitations of that perspective:

Populism is the politics of nostalgia. It appeals to a better time in the past–whether that means the mid-19th century, when sturdy yeoman farmers and craftsmen formed the backbone of the economy; or the decades after Congress slammed shut the gates of immigration in 1924; or the mid-20th century, when assembly-line workers enjoyed secure jobs and middle-class incomes.
Populist movements flourish when established leaders and parties fail to solve their countries’ most urgent problems. Throughout the market democracies, one problem dominates all others: the economic squeeze on working- and middle-class families. Neither the center-left nor the center-right has responded in ways that make sense to rank-and-file citizens. So they are looking elsewhere.
Populism offers many satisfactions. Its narrative is clear and easy to understand. It identifies villains–corrupt officials, unresponsive bureaucracies, arrogant elites, large corporations, giant banks, immigrants, even the Jews. It legitimizes outrage, the expression of which is one of the greatest human pleasures. It flatters the people, whose virtue and common sense, it claims, could set the country right if only rich and powerful forces didn’t stand in their way. “The humblest citizen in all the land,” declaimed William Jennings Bryan more than a century ago, “when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they”–the elites–“can bring.”

He then suggests his preferred alternative:

To reject the populist response is not to affirm conservatism. In his controversial postelection speech, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) made the case for a nonpopulist liberalism more interested in diagnosing conditions than in identifying enemies.
“Large forces–technology, automation and globalization–are not inherently malign forces,” he said. The task for Democrats is not to turn back the clock to the fleeting period when the American economy dominated the world. It is rather, Mr. Schumer said, to “figure out ways for the middle class . . . to be able to thrive amidst these forces.”
But how?…The old rules no longer apply, but it is not clear what the new rules are–if any exist….Which forms of public investment are needed to expand opportunity for the middle class and for those struggling to reach it? What kind of tax reform will promote faster economic growth whose fruits are broadly shared? How can productivity gains also mean progress for job creation and wages? What are the responsibilities of employers toward workers and communities, and what incentives do employers need to meet them? Faced with volatile oil prices, how can we sustain the rapid growth of a diverse U.S. energy sector? How can we accelerate the return of manufacturing jobs? How can we turn around an alarming drop in entrepreneurial activity? On what terms should we engage with the global economy?
The answers to these questions will define the future of the Democratic Party. And so will the failure to answer them. Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. The right response to populism is to offer real solutions.

Galston ends by looking at politics:

On the Democratic side, populist economics has found its voice; not so for nonpopulist liberalism. That is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ‘s most important test as she contemplates a presidential run.