Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on February 17, 2009
At pretty much any point during the last four or five years, you could count on two public opinion survey measurements looking really, really bad: approval ratings of Congress, and assessments of the direction of the country.
So it’s interesting to note that both these numbers seem to be gradually moving up.
According to a new Gallup survey, Congress’ job approval rating jumped from 19% a month ago to 31% from February 9-12, or about the time that Congress was finalizing the economic stimulus package. As Gallup notes:

Gallup has been measuring public approval of Congress on a monthly basis since January 2001. During that time, there have been only two month-to-month increases larger than the 12-point jump observed this month.
The largest single-month increase was a 42-point rally in congressional support after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, from 42% in a Sept. 7-10, 2001, poll to 84% in mid-October 2001. Gallup found similar increases in ratings of other government institutions around that time.
The next-largest jump of 14 points occurred after Democrats took party control of both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate in early 2007.

And if the 31% approval rating for Congress sounds pretty low, check this out:

In general, Congress’ approval ratings tend to be low. In fact, the current 31% score is very near the historical average of 35% in Gallup Polls since 1974.

The “direction of the country” (or right track/wrong track) numbers are gradually improving as well, even though most of the economic indicators continue to deteriorate. Look at pollster.com’s chart on these numbers, and you can see “right track” sloping up and “wrong track” sloping down since October at a pretty steady pace.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s job approval rating seems relatively stable in the low 60s, depending on the poll you follow.
At some point, maybe sooner, maybe later, the Obama approval ratings and the “right track” number should begin to converge. When and where they converge will probably tell you everything you need to know about the political direction of the country in 2010 and 2012.

Note: this item by James Vega was first published on February 17, 2009
One major problem Democrats are having in their internal debate regarding Obama’s support for “bipartisanship” as a political strategy results from fact that different political commentators use the word in several distinct senses and at several different levels of analysis. In ordinary Democratic political discourse there is no agreed-upon way to distinguish them.
There is a basic concept from military strategy that may prove helpful in this regard. In military thinking, the term “strategy” itself is usually broken down into three levels – the small scale level of individual battles (often called tactics), the medium-scale level of military campaigns (often called the “operational” level), and the large-scale level (sometimes called strategy proper or “grand strategy”).
This schema is, on the surface, simple. It becomes more complex, however, because the “small-medium-large” distinction repeats itself like a fractal pattern in geometry over and over at many different levels of the military hierarchy, creating a number of overlapping levels of “small-scale”, “medium-scale” and “large-scale” strategies.
This is easier to see in a specific example.

During World War II, from the point of view of the U.S. commander in Bastogne in December, 1944, the holding actions conducted at the junctions on the three main roads leading into the city were small scale battles, the defense of the city proper was the mid-level strategic challenge and the overall struggle in the geographic area around the city (which including managing the airlift of supplies through the blockade, the German outflanking of the city and continuation of their offensive to the West and the eventual relief of the city from the South by Patton’s Third Army) was the large-scale strategic perspective.
On the other hand, from the point of view of General Eisenhower and the allied command, all of Bastogne was a single battle, the entire German winter counter-offensive (The “Battle of the Bulge”) was a mid-level struggle and the entire Western front (including its resupply via the North Atlantic sea routes and the strategic bombing of Germany) represented the large-scale strategic perspective.

It is easier to disentangle these distinct layers of strategy in a military environment because the rigidly hierarchical organization (“squad-platoon-company” etc.) makes the overlapping frameworks more explicit than does politics. But the basic “small-medium-large” way of analyzing strategy can still be of use in political strategy. In the case of the current argument over “bipartisanship” for example, it makes it quickly apparent that different commentators are talking about quite different levels of strategy when they announce that “bipartisanship” has “failed.”

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Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was first published on February 13, 2009
The hot read in the progressive chattering classes today is an article for The New Republic by the always-estimable John Judis arguing that Barack Obama can’t achieve his goals without vibrant and popularly-based pressure from the Left to raise his progressive game.
His argument has predictably unleashed a lot of pent-up progressive angst about Obama’s “centrism” and “bipartisanship.” Some of it is very specific, like Ezra Klein’s suggestion, which galvanizes a very large number of scattered lefty blogospheric views, that Obama should have come into the “stimulus” debate with a much bigger figure, like maybe a trillion-and-a-half, anticipating the “centrist” reductions necessary to get the legislation through Congress and raising the final figure.
Other commentors on Judis’ hypothesis, like Glenn Greenwald, argue for a broader opposition to Obama, because, they think, he has little but contempt for progressive views:

Part of the political shrewdness of Obama has been that he’s been able to actually convince huge numbers of liberals that it’s a good thing when he ignores and even stomps on their political ideals, that it’s something they should celebrate and even be grateful for. Hordes of Obama-loving liberals are still marching around paying homage to the empty mantras of “pragmatism” and “post-partisan harmony” — the terms used to justify and even glorify Obama’s repudiation of their own political values.

To get back to Judis’ own argument, it’s important that he doesn’t seem to value the progressive-gabber allies that have found his article most attractive:

I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry.

Judis goes on to critique the unions and Moveon.org as the progressive forces that need to support a Loyal Opposition From the Left, and to offer the immensely radical and (according to some interpretations) proto-fascist Share the Wealth and Townsend movements of the 1930s as historical precedents for the kind of constructive Left alternative that can keep Obama’s feet on the path of righteousness.
There’s not much doubt that Judis’ hypothesis is closely related to his fear that Obama, particularly on the internatioal finance front, simply isn’t getting the job done. As he said back in early January:

Obama is certainly right to abandon the “anything goes” mentality of the Bush administration and to promote an $800 billion stimulus program. But to reverse to current economic collapse, the new administration may have to go even farther than this in the direction of a fiscal equivalent of war and a new Bretton Woods.

In many respects, Judis is calling for a moblization of progressives to push Obama “to the Left” based on his assumption that Obama, like FDR in his first year, is going to fail in generating a major turnaround in the economy.
And I’d have to say that Judis’ prescription will only make sense if Obama indeed fails. You can’t really mobilize anything like a Huey Long or Francis Townsend “left opposition” to Obama short of a catastrophic economic failure that challenges the basic presumptions of American democracy.
Moreoever, the most viable left-populist opposition to Obama agenda is going to be about the financial bailouts, and the relative ability of Obama-Geithner to distinguish their efforts from those of their Republican predecessors. John Juds may have already decided they simply can’t do that; if they can, then the grassroots pro-Obama campaign that Judis implicitly abhors may actually make sense.
The broadest issue raised by Judis is the idea that Barack Obama needs a Left Opposition to position himself as the new “center.” I will mention without further commentary the rich irony of the idea that the liberals who so resented Bill Clinton’s alleged “triangulation” strategy are now begging Obama to triangulate them.
My own feeling is that Obama should continue to focus on commanding a majority of Americans in support of his presidency and his general agenda, and at the same time seek to lead and represent progressives, even if they don’t like every element of his strategy or policies. His whole political persona up until now has been to depict himself as a progressive who also reprents the “center” in American politics. The “left” can support him or (selectively) oppose him. But the idea that he can’t succeed without an obdurate Left Opposition that forces him, and the debate, to the Left, strikes me as both an extrapoliation of congressional politics into public opinion, and as an underestimation of Obama’s own political abilty to move national policy to “the left” on his own terms.

Note: this Ed Kilgore post was originally published on January 28, 2009
In a post yesterday about the anti-abortion movement, I made passing reference to an article by Peter Beinart arguing that Obama might be presiding over an end to–or at least a pause in–the culture wars of the last couple of decades.
This is actually a proposition that merits its own discussion. Has the Cultural Right begun to run out of steam? Will the economic crisis radically reduce the salience of issues like gay marriage or abortion or church-state separation? Is there something about Barack Obama’s style and substance that tends to calm the cultural waters? And what if any accomodations should Obama or progressives generally make to neutralized culture-based opposition?
The first three questions are rather speculative and also perhaps premature, but I’d answer them “some,” some,” and “a little.” The last question is the real kicker, and the key thing here is to define who, exactly, we are talking about neutralizing or persuading.

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Note: this item by James Vega was originally published on January 6, 2009.
It’s no secret that the groups that compose the Democratic coalition have dramatically different perspectives on many issues. But on one key topic they do agree. Democrats – whether in the Obama administration, Congress or the nation – recognize that they face an unparalleled set of strategic challenges today. As a result, they urgently need to develop more productive ways to debate political strategy within the Democratic coalition.
The challenge is to figure out how to conduct intra-Democratic debates in a way that doesn’t end up in a shouting match but rather clarifies the points of contention and achieves the maximum degree of collaboration and cooperation. Productive debates between Democrats should accomplish three objectives (1) identify the areas of agreement and common action (2) identify the issues that can be clarified or settled with data and (3) agree on ways to work together in a spirit of mutual respect in areas where there are fundamental disagreements on matters of principle.
Today, debates among Dems often accomplish none of these goals. Instead, the participants end up talking across purposes and conclude in frustrated mutual incomprehension.
There is one basic, underlying problem that is often at the root of this failure. Debates among Dems frequently do not distinguish disagreements over political principles from disagreements over political strategy. The result is arguments that do not genuinely engage with each other in a meaningful way.

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Note: this Ed Kilgore article was originally published on December 23, 2008.
If you don’t mind a holiday meditation on a big question that’s been central to widely varying predictions about Barack Obama’s presidency, here goes:
Many of the remaining doubts about his approach to the presidential office can be summed up in one word followed by a question mark: bipartisanship?
From his emergence onto the national political scene in 2004 throughout the long 2008 campaign, Obama has consistently linked a quite progressive agenda and voting record to a rhetoric thoroughly marbled with calls for national unity, “common purpose,” a “different kind of politics,” and scorn for the partisanship, gridlock and polarization of recent decades. Call it “bipartisanship,” “nonpartisanship,” or “post-partisanship,” this strain of Obama’s thinking is impossible to ignore, and has pleased and inspired some listeners while annoying and alarming others.
The weeks since Obama’s electoral victory have not resolved doubts and confusion on this subject. He’s worked closely with the outgoing Bush administration on emergency financial plans, appointed two Republicans to his Cabinet, and called repeatedly for overcoming the divisions of the election campaign—while simultaneously outlining the most ambitious progressive agenda since LBJ’s Great Society. He’s won applause from the Washington punditocracy for his “pragmatism” and “centrism”—even as leading Republicans blamed excessive moderation and complicity in activist government for their defeats in the last two elections.
Among self-conscious progressives and conservatives alike, there’s a prevailing belief that Obama’s “bipartisan” talk is largely a tactical device without real meaning—and a lingering fear that he might really mean it.
But suffusing these hopes and fears is a concept of “bipartisanship” that arguably has little to do with Obama’s: Democrats and Republicans in Washington, with their aligned lobbyists and interest groups looking over their shoulders, getting together behind closed doors and “cutting deals.” It’s the bipartisanship of legendary congressional sausage makers like Bob Dole or John Breaux who “get things done” by compromising principles and allocating influence according to Washington’s peculiar and semi-corrupt power dynamics. At its best, it’s the shabbily genteel Village Elders elitism that progressives call High Broderism. At its worst, it produces legislative abominations like virtually every big tax, energy or farm bill enacted in recent memory.
Is this what the anti-Washington change agent Barack Obama has in mind? And if not, what is he talking about, and shouldn’t he stop?
I’d suggest we suspend the iron belief that bipartisanship and bringing progressive change to Washington are contradictory goals, and take Obama’s own rhetoric a bit more seriously.

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Note: this item was originally published on December 15, 2008
Dear Fellow Democrats;
Greetings from The Democratic Strategist.
We are pleased to present the two TDS Strategy White Papers below. It is our hope that they spark some useful and energetic discussion among Democrats.

1. “Planning Ahead for Democratic Victory in 2010 – Setting Initial Goals and Objectives.”
2. “How Democrats Can Keep and Expand the Support of the Younger White Working-Class Voters who Voted for Obama in 2008.“

For some time we have felt that the Democratic community has needed an additional format for the discussion of political strategy, one that is longer than standard newspaper and magazine political commentary, makes direct use of empirical data and proposes specific strategies to accomplish some defined objective.
We see TDS Strategy White Papers as filling that role.
As a result, we are now making a call for proposals for Strategy White Papers. We are looking for Strategy Papers that address the following subjects:

1) Specific political strategies for 2010 and 2012
2) Strategies for strengthening and building upon the new geographic and demographic patterns of support that have emerged from the 2006 and 2008 earthquakes.
3) Analyses of key strategic choices facing the Dems and how they will impact our success in 2010 and 2012.

More detailed editorial requirements are spelled out in the “Write for us” section of the TDS website. Accepted submissions will receive appropriate compensation and substantial electronic distribution.
Please send letters describing proposed strategy papers to editors@thedemocraticstrategist.org, and be sure to include your full contact information.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Bill Galston, Stan Greenberg, Ruy Teixeira

Note: this item was originally published on December 1, 2008
As you probably know, there’s been a lot of intra-Republican talk lately about how to recover from the 2008 elections, and more generally, from the disastrous trajectory of the Bush administration.
And as you may also know, most of the participants in this debate begin by asserting that the problems of the GOP are not fundamentally ideological, or if they are, it’s just a matter of insufficient conservatism, or insufficient consistency. Those would-be reformers like Ross Douthat who suggest the old-time religion of small-government conservatism could use a reformation aren’t making a lot of headway. Nobody’s much in the mood to topple any Ronald Reagan statues.
It’s not surprising, then, that the hot item in Republicanland right now is a manifesto entitled: “Rebuild the Party: A Plan for the Future” put together by two young conservative campaign operatives turned bloggers, Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn, along with redstate.org managing editor Erick Erickson. Two candidates for RNC chair have already endorsed the “plan” as their own, and the reaction in the conservative blogosphere has been predictably avid.
What jumps out at any reader of “Rebuild the Party” is the virtual invisibility of any ideological issues, and the extent to which the “plan” is a faithful imitation of the nutsier and boltsier sections of Crashing the Gate, the book-length 2006 netroots manifesto written by Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong. There’s lots about the revolutionary nature of the internet as a vehicle for organizing, fundraising, and communications; lots about the need for a younger and more diverse generation of activists and candidates; lots about rebuilding party infrastructure and competing in all fifty states.
There’s some rich irony in this heavy dose of progressive-envy, since much of the netroots thinking that the Conservative Young Turks are slavishly echoing was itself based on a close reading of the rise of the conservative movement. But more importantly, the “rightroots” movement is missing a key ingredient that helped make the netroots blueprint so successful: a preparatory period of ideological ferment. On the center-left, that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a result of the much-maligned but essential “neo-liberal” and “New Democrat” movements.
For all the Clinton- and New Democrat-bashing amongst the netroots, most honest progressives would admit that what happened in 2006 and 2008 was made possible in the first place by earlier party reform efforts that challenged the self-conception of the Donkey Party as a coalition of shrinking interest and identity groups huddled together to protect “their” pieces of the New Deal/Great Society legacy from the conservative onslaught. There wasn’t much of a positive message or agenda, and not much of a strategy for a progressive majority beyond the hope that the GOP would fatally overreach (as they eventually did under Bush, Rove and DeLay).
It’s reasonable to argue that Clinton’s New Democrats themselves overreached through too many compromises, too much Washington-think, too much adulation of globalization and other market forces, and too little respect for the legitimate needs and interests of traditional constituencies. But as Markos and Armstrong recognized in Crashing the Gate, some crucial work was accomplished in opening the party to new ideas; in neutralizing conservative wedge issues by addressing long-neglected public concerns like crime, welfare dependency, and bureaucratic inertia; and in challenging interest-group tunnel-vision and litmus tests. After all, the “fighting Democrats” of the Dean campaign or the 2006 comeback weren’t just 1970s liberals with better technology, and the Obama campaign wasn’t just a hipper version of the McGovern or Mondale campaigns.
It took a second wave of reform in this decade to complete the picture by reconnecting the Democratic Party to its grassroots and its activists, and to constituencies that may have been maginalized during the Clinton years, while reviving the progressive espirit de corps and extending it beyond the Left’s old redoubts.

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Note: this item was originally published on November 25, 2008
The rapidly mushrooming debate about the relationship between the Obama administration and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party suffers from an unnecessary lack of clarity because many of the commentators do not make a clear distinction between two very distinct ways of visualizing the issue.
The first, which might be called “the battle for the President’s soul” perspective, visualizes progressives and centrists or conservatives as engaged in a permanent tug of war to win the President’s support for their agenda. In this perspective, each cabinet appointment and each policy decision the President makes represents one more episode in a perpetual struggle to pull, pressure or cajole the President toward progressive approaches and solutions
For progressive Democrats who entered politics during and after the Clinton administration, this way of thinking about a new administration seems entirely natural and indeed almost completely self-evident. By late 1980’s most progressive movements had become increasingly Washington-focused and political campaign-oriented, in contrast to previous eras of independent progressive grass-roots organizing and mobilization. For many younger progressives, working for political candidates and campaigns was actually their sole form of progressive activity. As such, it made sense for them to feel that a victorious campaign naturally ought to deliver a very clear and explicit ideological “payoff” to progressives after the election, one properly proportionate to the effort they invested during the campaign and the degree of their success.
But during past eras of major progressive social movements – the trade union movement of the 1930’s and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s — there was a very different perspective. It could be called a “natural division of labor” point of view. A Democratic President was basically assumed to be a ruthlessly pragmatic centrist who would make all his moves and choices based on a very cold political calculus of what was necessary for his own success and survival. He might have private sympathy for some progressive point of view but there was generally no expectation among social movement progressives that he would “go out on a limb” for progressives out of a personal moral commitment to some social ideal. As a result, the most fundamental assumption of progressive political strategy was always the need to build a completely independent grass roots social movement, one that was powerful enough to make it politically expedient or simply unavoidable for the political system to accede to the movement’s demands.
In a widely read 1966 essay, “Non-violent Direct Action“, historian and civil-rights activist Howard Zinn clearly expressed this view:

“.What the civil rights movement has revealed is that it is necessary for people concerned with liberty, even if they live in an approximately democratic state, to create a political power which resides outside the regular political establishment. While outside, removed from the enticements of office and close to those sources of human distress which created it, this power can use a thousand different devices to persuade and pressure the official structure into recognizing its needs.”

This same traditional progressive movement view was recently restated in a Nation magazine editorial by Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

…it’s worth remembering another template for governing. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was compelled to become a bolder and, yes, more progressive President (if progressive means ensuring that the actual conditions of peoples’ lives improve through government acts) as a result of the strategically placed mobilization and pressure of organized movements.
That history makes me think that this is the moment for progressives to avoid falling into either of two extremes –reflexively defensive or reflexively critical. We’d be wiser and more effective if we followed the advice of one of The Nation’s valued editorial board members who shared thoughts with the Board at our meeting last Friday, November 21.
It will take large scale, organized movements to win transformative change. There was no civil rights legislation without the [civil rights] movement, no New Deal without the unions and the unemployed councils, no end to slavery without the abolitionists. In our era, this will need to play out at two levels: district-by-district and state-by-state organizing to get us to the 218 and sixty votes necessary to pass any major legislation; and the movement energy that can create public will, a new narrative and move the elites in DC to shift from orthodoxy. The energy in the country needs to be converted into real organization…
We need to be able to play inside and outside politics at the same time. I think this will be challenging for those of us schooled in the habits of pure opposition and protest. We need to make an effort to engage the new Administration and Congress constructively, even as we push without apology for solutions at a scale necessary.

The choice between this “natural division of labor” social movement perspective and the “battle for the President’s soul” perspective is important because the choice of the conceptual framework one uses has a number of very large consequences.

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Note: this item was originally published on November 11, 2008
For those Democrats who were settling down with a bag of popcorn to watch an orgy of ideological strife among Republicans, it’s beginning to become apparent that the war may be over before it began. Sure, there’s plenty of finger-pointing and personal recriminations over tactics and strategy, some of it focused on the McCain-Palin campaign, and some looking back to the errors of the Bush administration. There’s clearly no consensus on who might lead Republicans in 2010 or 2012. But on the ideological front, for all the talk about “movement conservatives” or “traditionalists” at odds with “reformers,” it’s a pretty one-sided fight. And one prominent “reformer,” the columnist David Brooks, pretty much declared defeat yesterday:

The debate between the camps is heating up. Only one thing is for sure: In the near term, the Traditionalists are going to win the fight for supremacy in the G.O.P.
They are going to win, first, because Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists. Republicans from the coasts and the upper Midwest are largely gone. Among the remaining members, the popular view is that Republicans have been losing because they haven’t been conservative enough.
Second, Traditionalists have the institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Conservative Old Guard has built up a movement of activist groups, donor networks, think tanks and publicity arms. The reformists, on the other hand, have no institutions…..
Finally, Traditionalists own the conservative mythology. Members of the conservative Old Guard see themselves as members of a small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite. In this narrative, anybody who deviates toward the center, who departs from established doctrine, is a coward, and a sellout.

Now there’s nothing particularly new about this dynamic. It’s exactly the way conservatives reacted to the 2006 debacle, and in fact, to virtually every Republican defeat since about 1940 (with the exception, of course, of 1964). They’ve never been shy about saying that “moderate” or “liberal” Republicans are not only wrong, immoral and gutless, but are in fact losers. And there’s nothing new as well about their take on George W. Bush; it’s pretty similar to their ex post facto take on Richard M. Nixon: a potentially great leader surrounded by venal hacks who sacrificed principle in an illusory search for short-term political gain and personal riches and power.
There are, however, two aspects of contemporary conservative self-justification that strike me as somewhat new.

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