This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on January 7, 2009.
One of the simmering intraprogressive arguments that’s been going on during the last decade involves the responsibiity, if any, borne by the Clinton administration for the economic conditions of the Bush Era.
The standard Democratic take has been that during the Clinton years the country was putting into place the building blocks for long-term growth, fiscal solvency, and real across-the-board income gains. The Bush administration systematically demolished these building blocks and returned to the ecomomic policies of the 1980s, and produced 1980s-style booms and busts, financial panics, big federal budget deficits, and growing inequality.
But alongside this narrative has been a persistent “minority report” arguing that Clintonomics differed in degree rather than in kind with Republican economic policies, and that the tech stock bust at the end of the 90s exposed the pro-corporate illusions of Clinton’s New Democrats and paved the way for the dangerously laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration. This take was especially popular among netroots activists convinced that both parties, or at least their “D.C. Establishments,” had largely been captured by corporate influences.
The revisionist argument has now gained new momentum among some progressives who are unhappy with the Obama administration’s economic policies, which they blame in no small part on the influence of Clinton administration economic advisors back in power in Washington.
This week the inveterate controversialist Michael Lind has published at Salon the most sweeping restatement yet of the hypothesis that today’s economic troubles were largely created by Clintonomics.
Indeed, Lind takes shots not only at the alleged results of Clintonomics, but at the whole notion beloved of New Democrats that a knowledge-based New Economy had emerged in which technology, education and skills had become prized national assets and the key to erasing income inequality:

Here’s what the New Democrats of the DLC and PPI who chattered enthusiastically about the “creative class” of “knowledge workers” in the “new economy” failed to understand: The main jump in income inequality took place in the 1970s and the 1980s, before the alleged new economy created by the tech revolution.
The relative decline of wages at the bottom had little or nothing to do with technology or the global economy and everything to do with the weakening of the bargaining power of American workers vis-à-vis their employers thanks to declining unionization, an eroding minimum wage and the flooding of the low-end labor market by unskilled immigrants from Latin America, both legal and illegal.
Having misdiagnosed the problem, New Democrats, including Clinton and Obama, have consistently prescribed the wrong medicine: sending more Americans to college. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the occupations with the greatest number of openings in the foreseeable future require only a high school education or an associate’s degree, not a four-year B.A.
The most effective way to raise wages at the bottom would be to increase the bargaining power of workers, by unionizing the service sector and by tightening the labor market through restricting unskilled immigration. That would probably spur genuine productivity growth over time as employers substituted technology for more expensive labor.

Lind goes on to suggest that the Clintonians were blind to the damaging effects of the accumulation of paper wealth by tech entrepreneurs as well as Wall Street tycoons, and continued to promote “neoliberal” policies that ignored the real problems and perpetuated them–and now, as Obama advisors, they are making the same mistakes.
Since the Progressive Policy Institute was singled out by Lind as among the villains of Clintonomics, it’s not surprising that PPI president Will Marshall has responded at some length at Salon:

If you lived through the Clinton years, you might recall them as flush times. Some basic facts: The economy grew briskly, creating 18 million new jobs; rapid innovation, especially in information technology and online commerce, bred new businesses and helped to raise productivity in old ones; unemployment stayed low despite a steady influx of immigrants and women coming off welfare rolls; markets rose as the percentage of Americans owning stock jumped 50 percent; homeownership reached a record high (nearly 70 percent); the poverty rate shrank significantly; and the United States ran budget surpluses for the first time in three decades.
Not bad, right? Well, as reimagined by Lind, the 1990s were another “lost decade,” just like the Bush years, with their successive dot.com and housing bubbles, regressive tax breaks, zooming federal deficits and, of course, the grand finale: the near-meltdown of U.S. financial markets in the fall of 2008 along with the worst recession since 1982. If the comparison seems, well, strained, no matter. Lind’s real target is what he calls the myth of the “New Economy,” an illusion conjured by Clintonites (Progressive Policy Institute comes in for honorable mention here) to justify “neoliberal” policies.

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This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on January 7, 2009.
At OpenLeft today, Chris Bowers notes that the efforts of Sens. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to hold health reform legislation hostage to their own personal demands have significantly damaged their home-state approval ratings. To put it simply, both supporters and opponents of health reform didn’t like it, and both men have painted big bulls-eyes on their backs when they are up for re-election in 2012.
But Chris goes on to say there’s a lesson in this development for those progressives who favored more aggressive efforts to hold the same legislation hostage:

I think this is a lesson for public option advocates, and our high-profile hostage-taking strategy called The Progressive Block. It seems clear to me now that a strategy like that only works if you build up public support for it (which we most definitely did not do among the Democratic primary electorate), or if the fight is far more low-profile (such as IMF funding in the Afghanistan supplemental). High-profile hostage taking just doesn’t work from the left (or, as polling shows, from the right or the center, either) Voters of all sorts, including those on the left, just don’t like it, and they will punish you given the opportunity. It is indeed small comfort that the mendacious hostage-takers who stopped us are now wildly unpopular both at home and around the country, but it is also a warning that we would have been in the same position if we had become the hostage takers ourselves.

That’s a very interesting, and typically honest, admission from Chris Bowers.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on January 6, 2009.
There’s an interesting and potentially misleading theme developing in coverage of the 2010 political season: vulnerable Democrats will try to turn attention away from their record in 2009 and, in the words of a Tom Edsall post today, “make the race about the other guy.” The implication many will draw from this theme is that Democrats, having no popular positive agenda, will “go negative” on the GOP.
This is an interpretation that Democrats should fight tooth and nail. Elections are, by definition, a choice between candidates and parties. The framing that Republicans would like to impose, that the election is a “referendum” on the Obama administration or the Democratic Party, is absurd. Without any question, the administration inherited a recession, a financial crisis, a budget crisis, two wars, and a dysfunctional and gridlocked Congress, from a Republican administration. The views of Republicans as well as Democrats about what to do with that inheritence are deeply relevant to the 2010 elections. Yes, Democrats have a specific agenda to defend and explain; to the extent that Republicans have identified their own agenda, that’s on the table, too, and to the extent that they haven’t, that’s of interest to voters as well.
To the extent that Republicans have engaged in extremist rhetoric this last year, and flirted with atavistic nullification theories and race-baiting conspiracy theories concerning ACORN or the president’s credentials as an American, that needs to be pointed out. That’s not “going negative” or “changing the subject;” it’s a matter of presenting the actual choices, which are not “the status quo” and “something better” but one party and the other, and one candidate or the other.
Another relevant issue is what will happen to the country’s interests in the immediate future if a violently obstructionist GOP is strengthened this November. Will Americans welcome two years of partisan conflict and inaction? Are they prepared to resolve the problem by electing any of the currently available Republican leaders their president in 2012?
These questions are all necessary, if not entirely sufficient, to a Democratic message for 2010. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, Democrats.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on January 5, 2010.
Anyone paying attention to political discourse during the last two or three months is aware of an acute unhappiness with the Obama administration among a goodly number of self-conscious progressives, sometimes expressed in terms of the president’s “betrayal” of “the Democratic base,” which may not turn out to support the party in November.
But is “the Democratic base” really as upset with Obama as elements of the progressive commentariat?
Mark Blumenthal looks at the numbers over at pollster.com, and concludes there’s not much evidence of displeasure with the president among rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those of a more progressive bent. Using Gallup’s weekly tracking poll of presidential approval ratings as a benchmark, Blumenthal notes:

Obama’s rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent). None of this suggests a full revolt.

Approval ratings, of course, don’t get at intensity of support or disdain, which could have an impact on voting participation, particularly in midterm elections. So Blumenthal goes on to look at more nuanced measurements:

Between late February and mid-December, the ABC/Post survey shows an overall decline in Obama’s strongly favorable rating from 43 percent to 31 percent. Among liberal Democrats, strong approval started out at 77 percent in February and varied between a low of 72 percent and a high of 81 percent through mid-September. It fell in October (65 percent) and November (67 percent) before rebounding in December (76 percent).

So that’s a one point drop in Obama’s high “strong approval” rating from self-identified liberals between February and December.
Now everyone doesn’t mean “self-identified liberal Democrats” when they refer to the “party base.” As Blumenthal notes, Bob Brigham, among others, has suggested that “base” really refers to smaller communities like activists or donors. But it is fair to say that the political relevance of any particular community is somewhat limited if its views are sharply at odds with those of rank-and-file voters who say they share the same ideology.
Remember that next time anyone presumes to speak exclusively for “the base.”

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on December 31, 2009.
I’m surely not alone in thinking today about New Year’s Eve, 1999, when everyone had at least a small nagging fear, and many people were in abject terror, about the possibility of a technological or even economic meltdown associated with the advent of the third millenium.
In a very real way, the Y2K experience was emblematic of the decade that ensued in the United States, characterized by fear, mistrust, disinformation and a growing awareness of the downside of technology-driven globalization. The word “catastrophe” reintered the vocabulary in a big way, whether the subject was the threat of a “dirty bomb,” climate change, or global economic collapse. The upbeat, almost-triumphalist spirit that sometimes accompanied public life in the late 1990s died a slow, noisy death, and pre-existing discontents with the entire Clintonian “New Democrat” mindset on the progressive Left solidified into demands for a very different party structure and message.
Among progressives, at least, the upbeat spirit re-emerged temporarily in 2008, with momentary hopes that a new and enduring political coalition was finally arriving on the scene. While the demographic trends that nourished these hopes were very real, and aren’t going away, the short-term political landscape is obviously more difficult than many expected.
Conservatives, meanwhile, had a very strange and psychologically volatile, decade in almost every respect. They began it with the failed and folly-filled effort to impeach Bill Clinton and got deviously lucky with the sort-of election of George W. Bush. What ensued was a sustained effort to turn back the clock to the economic and social policies of the 1980s (or earlier), accompanied, of course, by a new Cold War frenzy aimed at a new global enemy. The reigning political strategy of the Republican Party in the ‘aughts was Karl Rove’s base-plus gambit that used aggressive polarization to keep his party’s conservative base happy and energized, along with highly targeted swing voter appeals to married white women, Hispanics and seniors. When this strategy failed decisively prior to the 2006 elections, the GOP took a counter-intuitive but very powerful turn to the right, which accelerated notably during and after the 2009 elections, partly as an effort to disassociate conservatism from the record of the Bush administration.
So here we all are, ten years after the night of Y2K, still in fear and uncertainty about the future and even about the facts of our present existence, and still maintaining a deeply ambivalent attitude towards technology and globalization in their many forms. I sincerely hope it’s the end, not a continuation, of an era.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on December 17, 2009.
In a post yesterday, I argued that some intra-progressive fights reflect ideological differences, particularly over the role of private-sector entities in pursuing progressive policy goals, that need to be taken more seriously, in part because failing to acknowledge them often makes such fights nasty exercises in name-calling and character attacks.
There’s another broad area where differences of opinion often originate, and that must be understood as well: differing political strategies.
Two Examples of Strategic Disconnect
Consider two examples: Democratic political operatives and progressive “issue” advocates.
Many full-time political operatives undoubtedly have a personal ideology, or more generally, a reason for being a Democrat. Some have the opportunity to reflect those views in primary campaigns, or in where and on whose behalf they practice their craft. But by and large, when a general election comes along, it’s all about Ds and Rs and Us and Them, and this orientation tends to color how they feel between elections. Anything that promotes the election of a maximum number of Democrats–any kind of Democrat–to public office is more or less the Prime Objective. There are obviously major differences of opinion about how to achieve this result, short-term or long-term, and ideology play a role there as well. But the bottom line is probably best expressed by an old ditty from the presidential campaign of 1892, when Grover Cleveland’s comeback election marked the end of a period of fierce partisan competition and very little ideological differentiation between the parties:
Grover! Grover!
Four more years of Grover!
Out they go, in we go,
Then we’ll be in clover!
Not much deep thinking there, eh?
At the other end of the spectrum, there are “issue” advocates who are involved in politics not out of some broad commitment to a progressive coalition but out of concern for a particular cause, often arising from or rising to the level of personal identity. The relationship of issue advocates to a political party is by definition conditional and instrumental: I support you if you advance my cause, or at least smite the enemies of my cause. Such relationships were much, much weaker in the many decades prior to the Great Ideological Sorting-Out of the two major parties that culminated in the 1990s. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, supporters and opponents of civil rights for African-Americans, women’s rights, antiwar movements, environmentalism, and to some extent even labor rights, were found abundantly in both parties. So progressive issue advocates might be Democrats, Republicans, or independents, but were often functionally independent in their basic relationship to political parties.
Nowadays, when a politician’s position on, say, Union Card Check is a generally reliable predictor of his or her position on abortion or climate change, progressive issue advocates are obviously constrained, and must focus on maximizing influence within the Democratic Party alone. That can be done in noncontroversial ways, such as grassroots organizing, petitions, the cultivation of favored candidates and elected officials, and of course efforts to promote or modify legislation or executive actions. But in the end, issue advocates are largely prisoners of a polarized political system, and must rely in the extreme on threats to sit out elections or even defect from the coalition. That’s where some LGBT activists, some civil libertarians, and some antiwar activists, seem to be right now.
To those whose commitment to the Democratic Party is less conditional, such threats often look selfish, destructive, or even childish. But they are perfectly rational, if sometimes short-sighted: if you are engaged in politics for a cause, that cause’s prospects have to be paramount, and absent the occasional threat to defect, your cause and its advocates can be taken for granted, which is the death-knell of political influence.
But what if a variety of “cause” advocates reach this point of frustration simultanously? Then you can have a genuine “revolt,” which some Democrats fear or hope is in the process of happening out of progressive unhappiness with Barack Obama and the congressional Democratic Party on issues ranging from civil liberties and health care to LGBT rights, Afghanistan, and the financial system.

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This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on December 16, 2009.
The latest intra-progressive dustup over health care reform displays a couple of pretty important potential fault lines within the American center-left. One has to do with political strategy, and the role of the Democratic Party and the presidency in promoting progressive policy goals and social movements. I’ll be writing about that subject extensively in the coming days.
But the other potential fault line is ideological, and is sometimes hard to discern because it extends across a variety of issues. To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, “New Democrat” movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as “the Third Way,” which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It’s also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the “social democratic” tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas).
To be clear, this is not the same as the conservative “privatization” strategy, which simply devolves public responsibilities to private entities without much in the way of regulation. In education policy, to cite one example, New Democrats (and the Obama administration) have championed charter public schools, which are highly regulated but privately operated schools that receive public funds in exchange for successful performance of publicly-defined tasks. Conservatives have typically called for private-school vouchers, which simply shift public funds to private schools more or less unconditionally, on the theory that they know best how to educate children.
Now clear as this distinction seems to “New Democrats,” there are a considerable number of progressives who think it’s largely a distinction without a difference, in education policy and elsewhere. And we are seeing that fundamental divergence on opinion on other, more prominent issues right now. On the financial front, the Obama administration reflexively pursued a strategy of regulation and subsidies for the financial sector, without modifying the fundamental nature of financial institutions, even as critics on the left argued for nationalization (at least temporarily) of key financial functions. At the more popular level, critics of TARP from the left joined critics of TARP from the right in deploring “bailouts” of failed financial institutions, even though the two groups of critics held vastly different views of the right alternative course of action.
Similarly in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to “single-payer” advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health care system. The difference was for a long time papered over by the cleverly devised “public option,” which was acceptable to many New Democrat types as a way of ensuring robust competition among private insurers, and which became crucial to single-payer advocates who viewed it as a way to gradually introduce a superior, publicly-operated form of health insurance to those not covered by existing public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. (That’s why the effort to substitute a Medicare buy-in for the public option, which Joe Lieberman killed this week, received such a strong positive response from many progressives whose ultimate goal is an expansion of Medicare-style coverage to all Americans).
Now that the public option compromise is apparently no longer on the table, and there’s no Medicare buy-in to offer single-payer advocates an alternative path to the kind of system they favor, it’s hardly surprising that some progressives have gone into open opposition, and are using the kind of outraged and categorical language deployed by Marcy Wheeler yesterday. As with the financial issue, there’s now a tactical alliance between conservative critics of “ObamaCare,” who view the regulation and subsidization of private health insurers as “socialism,” and progressive critics of the legislation who view the same features as representing “neo-feudalism.”
To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.
For those of us whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party, it’s very tempting to downplay or even ignore this potential fault-line and the left-right convergence it makes possible. It’s also easy to dismiss critics-from-the-left of Obama as people primarily interested in long-range movement-building rather than short-term political success; that’s true for some of them. But sorting out these differences in ideology and perspective is, in my opinion, essential to the progressive political project. And with a rejuvenated and increasingly radical Right’s hounds baying and sniffing at the doors of the Capitol, we don’t have the time or energy to spare in dialogues of the deaf wherein we call each other names while getting ready for the elections of 2010 and 2012.
UPDATE: In discussing this post with several friends, I recognize I should be very clear about my motives here. I am not trying to promote an ideological fight within the Democratic Party or the progressive coalition, and don’t want to exaggerate ideological differences, either. But ideology, however muddled, is part of what makes most politically active people tick. And if we don’t talk about it–and about differences in strategic thinking as well, which will be the subject of future discussions here–then all we are left with to explain our differences on this issue or that is questions of character. And anyone paying attention must recognize there’s far too much of that going on. “Progressive pragmatists”–the camp with which I most often personally identify, as it happens–often treat “the Left” condescendingly as immature and impractical people who don’t understand how things get done. Meanwhile, people on “the Left” often treat “pragmatists” as either politically gutless or personally corrupt. This is what happens when you don’t take seriously other people’s ideological and strategic underpinnings; whatever you gain in ignoring or minimizing differences in perspective or point of view is lost in mutual respect. Sure, the character attacks on both sides are sometimes accurate, but nobody should assume that in any particular case without further examination of each others’ ideological and strategic views. That examination is what we are trying to promote here.

This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, and originally published here on December 10, 2009, is cross-posted from Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where it first appeared. It is a response to E.J. Dionne’s review of Alan Wolfe’s The Future of Liberalism.
These are perplexing times for American liberals. Last November’s euphoria has given way to frustration and even doubt. This was inevitable, to an extent, because governing is always harder than campaigning. Mario Cuomo’s dictum that we campaign in poetry but govern in prose applies with special force to a president whose eloquence on the campaign trail so effectively aroused enthusiasm and raised expectations.
But some critics have gone farther, charging that liberalism is undermining itself because, as Alan Wolfe puts it, “all too often, liberal politicians lack the courage of liberalism.” This diagnosis leads to a prescription: We must “get liberals to once again believe in liberalism.” This is a version of the 12 Angry Men/Mr. Smith Goes to Washington theory, prominent to this day in Hollywood–a leader willing to confidently deliver an unvarnished liberal message will sweep away all before him. (The remake would star Warren Beatty.)
Reviewing Wolfe’s new book The Future of Liberalism in these pages, E.J. Dionne rejects the author’s shortage-of-courage thesis but focuses on a related phenomenon–namely, liberal ambivalence–about radicalism, populism, social democracy, globalization, individualism, and much else [See “Liberalism Lost and Found,” Issue #14]. While it’s hard to object in principle to Dionne’s suggestion that liberals should “face their own contradictions squarely,” it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi as a bumper-sticker (except perhaps among former Marxists). More to the point, it’s inadequate analytically. Today’s liberals face political difficulties not because they’re gutless or conflicted but because many of the things they believe (rightly, in my view) go against the grain of beliefs that are deeply entrenched in our political culture.
That is not a reason to abandon liberalism. As Wolfe, Dionne, and Paul Starr have shown, the liberal tradition is responsible for much of what is best in modern America, and it charts the most promising path to future reforms. It is, however, a reason to proceed in full awareness of the obstacles in its path and to acknowledge that along the way we will often have to accept much less than we want. This means that liberals in high places may have to be less full-throated than either Wolfe or Dionne might prefer. But as the late Ted Kennedy so shrewdly recognized, a series of modest victories can add up to major changes.
Last year’s electoral sweep, to begin, was a victory for the Democratic Party, but not necessarily for liberalism. Self-described conservatives outnumber liberals by nearly two to one, and the liberal share of the population has risen only marginally, from 19 to 21 percent, during the past decade. And while 72 percent of Republicans consider themselves conservative, only 37 percent of Democrats consider themselves liberal, versus 39 percent moderate and 22 percent conservative. Republicans are ideologically homogeneous; Democrats represent a diverse coalition. If liberals hope to pass major legislation, they must negotiate and compromise with members of their own party whose outlooks differ from their own.
This is a current reality, unlikely to change anytime soon. Other challenges to liberalism have roots deeper in our history. One centers on the role of government. The early American liberalism of the founding era embodied a handful of basic ideas: among them, fear of tyranny and of concentrated power; mistrust of human nature, which needed to be checked and channeled through institutions and rules; and a preference for government that was limited in scope, though not purely laissez-faire by any means.
From this parsimonious beginning, the federal government grew by fits and starts. The Whigs successfully advocated investment in the public goods needed for economic growth, a strategy that arch-Whig Abraham Lincoln continued as president through measures like the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act. The post Civil War expansion of industrial corporations created a thrust toward government as a countervailing power that could limit monopolies and impose regulations in the public interest. Three generations after Andrew Jackson strangled the Bank of the United States, repeated financial crises led to the creation of a much more powerful central bank, empowered to curb dangerous market-based instability. A generation after that, an economic crisis that overwhelmed the capacities of individuals, civil society, and state governments led to new national institutions and policies to provide some measure of security against disaster. In the wake of World War II, the overlapping demands of national defense and global leadership produced a large standing army and a new array of security-oriented institutions. The war also sparked demands to move the historic commitment to equal rights from an abstract norm to concrete practice, which involved the national government in a new system of enforcement. And rising public concern over the externalities of economic growth–especially its impact on the economy–led to new national institutions, laws, and regulations.
Each of these expansions of national power seemed justified, and often compelled, by changing circumstances. In the aggregate, though, the federal government became more expensive and intrusive; it assumed more responsibility that it could easily discharge; and it presumed a level of competence that it often lacked. After the mid-1960s, trust in government declined steadily, reaching an historic low in the month before Barack Obama’s election. It has not improved appreciably since.
This is the central conundrum of modern liberal governance: While state power has grown, America’s anti-statist public culture has persisted. Our national default setting, from which we deviate only under extreme pressure, is suspicion of state power. Half a century ago, this took the benign form so pithily characterized by political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, that Americans were “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Today, after policy failures at home and abroad, many American object to larger government, not (only) on ideological grounds, but also because they doubt its competence and integrity. While the American people accept many liberal aims (including fundamental health reform), they mistrust the means by which liberals typically pursue them. As Obama is discovering, change we can believe in requires a government we can trust, which most Americans don’t think we now have.

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This item by James Vega was originally published on December 9, 2009.
The plan President Obama laid out last week for Afghanistan has confronted anti-war Democrats with a profoundly difficult strategic choice – one that will have far-reaching implications not only for Afghanistan but for America as well.
The first option is to conclude that Obama is either a helpless or a willing captive of the pentagon and to dismiss his entire administration as hopelessly and irrevocably committed to militarism. The second is to view the Obama administration as instead the arena where a strategic debate between the advocates of a political solution and a purely military one is now going on and to attempt to influence that key strategic decision.
For many anti-war Democrats there is a powerful temptation to embrace the first alternative. After all, on the surface there seems little difference between the views of Obama and his generals. Compared with the clear and disciplined agreement among Obama’s cabinet members in favor of sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, any slight disagreements over the details seems trivial.
Disappointed Democrats can point to evidence to support this view. A Dec 7th Washington Post analysis entitled “McChrystal’s Afghanistan plan stays mainly intact” begins by saying that McChrystal “will return to Kabul to implement a war strategy that is largely unchanged after a three month-long white house review of the conflict… the new approach does not order McChrystal to wage the war in a fundamentally different way from what he outlined in an assessment he sent the White House in late August.”
This would seem quite conclusive, but, it is, in fact, not the complete picture. Obama actually did modify McChrystal’s original plan in four significant ways. To see this, it is necessary to clearly describe several key elements of a standard counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.

1. The enemy – called the “insurgents” in COIN – are broadly defined as any people or groups actively opposed to a “host government” that is supported by the U.S. In the case of Afghanistan, the leading COIN strategists define the enemy as any and all of the seven quite distinct groups that comprise the Taliban as well as a variety of other forces influenced by jihadist Islam or who oppose U.S. troops on nationalistic grounds.
2. The mission is defined in purely military terms. The enemy must be defeated and his will to resist broken. The goal is victory, not a political compromise.
3. A counterinsurgency campaign’s basic strategy is not simply to defend static positions or train soldiers but to create stable governments, deliver services, build new institutions and promote pro-western development. A COIN campaign is said to be a failure if it does not win the support and loyalty of the population for the U.S. supported “host government”.
4. The timetable is long-term and open-ended. Historically a few counterinsurgency campaigns have been successfully concluded in 8-14 years while a larger number dragged on for decades. COIN advocates realize that long, indecisive wars are deeply unpopular so they usually define the timetable as simply “as long as it takes” or “until victory” rather than defining any specific number of years or decades.

General McChrystal’s August memo actually incorporated all four of these elements, but none remained in the final plan. With the help of Joe Biden, Obama was able to modify these basic principles in four key ways:

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Editor’s Note: This item, originally published on November 24, 1009, is a special guest post by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project, a national organization that works in communities across the country to elect progressive candidates and promote LGBT civil rights. This article is based upon TPP’s work on the “No on 1” campaign in Maine, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures. Several interviewees quoted in the piece are not identified by name at their own request. Jasmine has written for The Democratic Strategist in the past, and her writing has appeared in The Advocate, Alternet.org, American Short Fiction and other publications.
Back in late September, I traveled with two friends to Biddeford, Maine, to volunteer with the “No on 1” campaign, which was working to defeat Question 1, a proposal to strike down a law legalizing same-sex marriage in that state. It rained all day, the kind of weather that oscillates between mist and downpour and that, on a mild day, makes you laugh at its sheer excess. Our task was straightforward: go door to door, ask people how they planned to vote, rate them on a scale of one to five, and move on. The campaign was in the final stretch of the persuasion stage and this would be one of the last times they had face-to-face contact with swing voters. We were assigned to a middle-class neighborhood in which single-family homes dotted either side of a busy two-lane road. There were no sidewalks, and passing cars gave me a wide berth as I mucked along on the shoulder of the road, as obtrusive as a safety-conscious hunter in my orange raincoat.
Since 2004, the LGBT movement has lost thirty such campaigns across the nation and a lot was at stake in Maine. All of those losses had been explained by factors like inadequate funding, or in the case of the California “No on 8” campaign, an anemic field operation. The “No on 1” campaign was determined to do things better, and by all standard metrics they did.
At that point in the campaign season, the polls were dead even, which in these kind of ballot measures usually means we are actually down by a few points. But the “No on 1” campaign had already raised over $2 million, twice as much as the other side. Volunteers had been canvassing since early summer, and there were paid organizers on the ground across the state. A national network of donors and field volunteers was also bolstering our efforts. Perhaps most significantly, the campaign had already identified the number of supporters they needed to win. Campaign lore holds that if you have these names on paper by early October and run a tight turnout operation, you will win in November.
I was almost done with my shift when I approached a brick ranch house with an open garage. A man in his sixties was wiping off an Allen wrench. Next to him was a motorcycle with long, athletic lines and a gleaming turquoise body. He was friendly as we talked about his bike and the weather. If he raised his eyebrows when I explained why I was there, the conversation didn’t abruptly stop in its tracks, as sometimes happens. “I’ll be voting yes,” he said evenly.
“Can I ask why?”
“The Bible says one man, one woman.”
I nodded. In literal terms, he was right. In moments like this, I’ve often responded by coming right back about what else the Bible says. But this has never led anywhere except a quick dead end. So instead, I asked if I could talk with his wife.
She joined us in the garage, and it was then that I noticed the scooter propped next to the motorcycle, its body a turquoise that perfectly matched the bigger bike’s.
“Do you ride together?” I asked.
They laughed. “I let her get ahead,” the man said, “and then I catch her.”
She explained that she also opposed gay marriage. “As a married gay person, I can tell you that not much changes for anyone but the couple,” I said. “It mostly comes up when you’re talking about things like hospital visits, times when you really need your rights.”
“Our grandson is gay,” the woman said. “We raised him.” She went on to explain that their grandson was having a difficult time. From the time he was a child, she said, she’d known he was gay.
“I never picked up on it. She had to tell me,” her husband chimed in and they laughed again.
“Is it hard for you that he’s gay?” I asked the man.
He seemed surprised by this question and this in itself was telling. It became clear that their grandson was part of their life and much loved, if not fully understood. The conversation continued and then a bit suddenly, the man choked up and wiped his eyes. “I knew a guy growing up who was that way and he got picked on a lot. I used to stand up for him.” His wife put her arm around him. “He can’t stand when people get picked on,” she said.
For a moment, it was silent in the garage.
“Making same-sex marriage illegal sends a message that we’re second class citizens. It opens the doors for people to get picked on, and worse,” I said. They listened, but weren’t terribly persuaded. The conversation circled back to The Bible. I told them I was Christian and brought up an example of scripture that we don’t tend to follow literally – the mandate to give away all your material possessions. We spent a few minutes on this. But again, not terribly persuasive.
“Should I put you both down as planning to vote yes?” I asked.
“You know, I’m still making up my mind,” the woman said. “I just don’t know.”
The conversation ended a few minutes later when their dog – small, blind and adventurous – raced out of the garage and toward the road. The woman went to rescue him. I asked them to keep thinking about the issue and thanked them for the conversation, one of the longest I’ve ever had canvassing. It was also one of the most moving. I have thought of it countless times since then.
Walking away, I rated her as a “three,” or swing voter, and him as a “four,” or likely to vote yes. According to a literal interpretation of the campaign playbook, this conversation had actually been a waste of time in every regard except one: the campaign now knew not to spend time and resources doing further outreach to this couple. At this point in the campaign cycle, an exacting calculus kicks in and attention shifts to turning out identified supporters, “one’s” and “two’s” on the scale. All other voters are lumped together and categorized as unwinnable. For the next five weeks, this couple and voters like them would not hear directly from the campaign, except in TV ads. This is considered smart organizing, and typically it is.
So what went wrong when, five weeks later, the voters of Maine passed Question 1 by a margin of 53 – 47%, making gay marriage illegal? There has been virtual consensus that the “No on 1” campaign was well-run. The leadership of national organizations blamed the loss on the slow tides of history and the bigoted tactics of our opponents. Some grassroots activists said that after thirty-one losses, we should accept that these campaigns are unwinnable and start focusing our efforts elsewhere. Pundits also weighed in, with Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com observing that, “this may not be an issue where the campaign itself matters very much; people have pretty strong feelings about the gay marriage issue and are not typically open to persuasion.”
Here’s where I disagree. This loss confirmed a lesson that the thirty preceding it only suggested: we cannot win the support of swing voters by adhering to the traditional campaign playbook. To do so, we must tear out a few pages and write new plays.

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