NOTE: This item by James Vega was originally published at The Daily Strategist on March 13, 2008.
As the eulogies for Bill Buckley give way to more cerebral discussions of modern day conservatism, it is worth stopping for a moment to insist upon a basic fact – one that Democrats should never allow the mainstream media (or themselves) to forget.
Despite the frequent use of the term “movement” by the press, the “conservative movement” that has provided the Republican Party with its basic ideology since the Reagan- Gingrich era is profoundly different from the two major social movements whose viewpoints are deeply embedded in the basic outlook and philosophy of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party’s economic perspective comes not simply from the legislation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, but from the epic struggle of the American trade union movement in the 1930’s. Equally, at the heart of the modern Democratic Party’s social philosophy lies the historical experience of the civil rights movement and the legacy of Martin Luther King.
These two social movements had three things in common. They were struggles of profoundly disadvantaged and oppressed groups for basic social and economic justice, they were grass-roots, bottom-up movements in which leaders emerged from the rank and file, and they were led by dedicated militants who made huge personal and human sacrifices.
Both trade union and civil right organizers lived with the constant fear of death, vicious beatings, or imprisonment and both movements had many famous martyrs killed in the struggle (the Haymarket victims and Joe Hill for the trade unionists; Emmet Till, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Three, (Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner) and the children of the Birmingham bombing for the civil rights movement). Many of the leaders of both movements spent significant time in jail — it was, in fact, a proud badge of honor and a symbol of their commitment to the cause.
Sadly, for many people under the age of 40 these realities — which everybody knew perfectly well at the time — now sound like melodramatic exaggerations. But they are not; they are simple statements of fact.
The modern “official” conservative movement on the other hand – although in some respects indeed a social movement – was and is to a significant degree a movement of the “haves” rather than the “have-nots” and as a result has never had any of the three characteristics above.
The modern conservative movement was heavily subsidized by foundations and wealthy individuals from its beginnings. By the 1980’s there was a substantial network of think-tanks, book publishers, house-organ magazines, scholarships and internships that recruited and financially supported young conservatives. Communication with ordinary people was overwhelmingly conducted by very sanitary, “no getting the hands dirty” methods – largely direct mail and television (particularly televangelist programming) – rather than by any actual door-to-door, grass-roots organizing.
Now to be sure. there have indeed been a number of genuine right-wing, grass roots activist movements since the 1970’s. There have been skinhead/racist/survivalist groups (like “The Order” and “White Power” in 1980’s, the militia movement in 1990s, the Minutemen today), and also broader grass-roots movements to fight local gun control initiatives, to infiltrate local school boards to mandate creationism and to conduct civil (and also very uncivil) disobedience against abortion clinics.
All of these movements shared two characteristics – they were authentically bottom up, grass-roots movements and they were all treated like embarrassing, party-crashing, beer-drinking, trailer park trash phenomena by the official beltway conservative “movement”.
On the other hand when the current generation of “official” conservative spokesmen – the Gingrichs, D’Souzas, Laffers, Murrays, Limbaughs, O’Reillys and Coulters– were in college in the 70’s and 80’s, the worst injustice most of them suffered was having to listen to pompous tenured radicals talk endlessly about Foucault and Germaine Greer rather than Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.
It is important for Democrats to point this out whenever the media casually equate the modern conservative “movement” with the genuine social movements that underlie the Democratic coalition because it creates a false equivalence between the moral authority of the two. It artificially imbues official “inside-the-beltway” conservatism with connotations of a genuine grass-roots social movement – traditions of altruism and self sacrifice, identification with the struggle for justice and solidarity with the underdog.
Let’s face the facts. The conservative movement indeed recognized and capitalized upon a number of genuine and sincere grievances of working-class and other ordinary Americans. But the middle-class and upper-class, white American men who compose the official conservative movement have never in their “custom-tailored-suit- and- tie”, “better-side-of town” lifetimes been the oppressed victims of systematic social injustice.
This is illustrated by an ironic fact. Genuine grass-roots social movements of the oppressed always have songs and anthems that express their deepest social ideals. At the end of every union organizing meeting trade unionists would always sing “Solidarity Forever”. Every civil rights rally concluded with the singing of “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome”.
There is nothing remotely comparable in the well-funded, “inside the beltway” conservative so-called “movement”. In fact, it is hard to even visualize exactly what kind of spiritual anthem could properly express the social philosophy of the audiences who attend meetings of groups like the Conservative Political Action Council, the Heritage Foundation, the College Republicans or the US Chamber of Commerce.
Oh, wait a minute. Come to think of it, there is one. All these groups could kick off their conferences with a few lusty choruses of “Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, A Pirates’ Life for Me”. It would fit them like a glove.

NOTE: This item, by Matt Compton, was originally posted at The Daily Strategist on February 28, 2008.
Before he won the New Hampshire Primary, the political future of John McCain was in serious doubt.
In October, his campaign for president had just $3.4 million cash on hand (with much that money reserved for the general election) and a debt of $1.7 million from overdue credit card payments and unpaid bills.
By November, McCain’s financial worries were so serious that he negotiated a $3 million loan to keep his campaign afloat.
By December, he was broke again, and McCain went back to the banks, asking for another $1 million to keep campaigning. And this time, the lenders told him they needed some collateral.
Knowing that cash would be a problem for the nomination contest, McCain had earlier opted into the national public financing system, and the Federal Election Commission had already certified that he was owed $5.8 million in public matching funds. He also used the FEC certification to get on the ballot in several late-primary states, including Ohio, instead of paying canvassers to collect signatures.
But in the primary process, public financing is a loser’s bargain. If he ultimately chose to accept the federal money, McCain wouldn’t receive any of those funds until March, and even more seriously, he would be limited to a total spending cap of $54 million until he became his party’s nominee at the Republican National Convention in September. Accepting the funds would put him at a major strategic disadvantage in the general election.
Those facts left McCain with a decision to make. Even agreeing to put up the matching funds as collateral for a loan would have forced the campaign to adhere to the spending limits. So, once he started winning primaries, he planned to opt back out of the system and raise private money until he was the Republican nominee. There was a precedent for that — Richard Gephardt had been allowed to do the same thing four years ago.
But to get the new $1 million loan immediately, he and his lawyers tried something clever — they told the bank that if money again became a problem, they would opt back into the public financing system, accept the public funds from the FEC in March, and use that cash to pay back his loans — even if he had suspended his campaign for president.
And there is no precedent for that particular opt-in, opt-out, then maybe opt back in–legal maneuver.
On February 6, with the GOP nomination all but locked up and the money again flowing, McCain formally notified the FEC of his plans to withdraw from the presidential public financing system.
On Thursday, FEC Chairman David M. Mason, a Republican, issued the commission’s response. The letter is available here.
He told the campaign that McCain can’t withdraw from the public financing system for the primaries until the FEC gives him permission to do so. It cannot do that until it has enough members to maintain a quorum.
Right now, there are only two appointees serving on the commission, and the Senate and President Bush continue fight over the nominees. With four vacancies, the FEC isn’t in a place to make any decisions of any kind. It doesn’t have enough members to make any sort of binding decision or impose fines on anyone. The way things stand now, that leaves a lot of grey in the world of campaign finance.
But even with only two active members, the FEC asked McCain to explain his rationale for why using the promise of public funds to secure his loan did not actually commit him to using those funds. If the commission could issue a decision on McCain’s situation tomorrow, there is no guarantee that they would choose to release him from his commitment to public financing.
On Monday, the Democratic National Committee got into the act. Chairman Howard Dean announced that he would be filing a formal complaint with the FEC to demand that John McCain remain committed to the campaign finance rules.
That same day, McCain’s lawyers told the FEC that he did not need their approval to withdraw from the public finance system. Lawyers for his bank reinforced his claim that he never technically promised public money as collateral.
Now we’re at an impasse, again, and one where there is no clear precedent.
McCain has already spent $49 million in the primary, meaning that if he is forced to adhere to the spending limits, his campaign must essentially cease all activity until he becomes the nominee 6 months from now. If he were to continue to operate in clear violation of the spending limit, McCain could be in legal jeopardy — potentially subject to fines and up to five years of jail time.
His lawyers have the option of taking the FEC to court, but as Rick Hasen has pointed out, there’s no way of knowing what authority the judicial system has over an FEC without quorum. We simply don’t know if the courts have the power to order the commission to make a decision as it is currently composed or to somehow make its own decision from the bench.
But this much is clear: If there exists even a hint of a possibility that John McCain might be willfully violating election laws, he has a real image problem. His name is synonymous with the cause of campaign finance reform, and he owes his good press clips to a reputation as a “straight talker.” Deceptive manipulation of the campaign finance system would not go over well. Moreover, the controversy undercuts his frequent attacks on Barack Obama for equivocating on earlier statements that he would accept public financing for the general election. That’s why Howard Dean is working to exploit the issue and make voters aware of it. If this legal process drags on, it has the potential to make him both a hypocrite and, ultimately, a loser.

(NOTE: As explained in an earlier post, this is a guest item from Jonathan Krasno, Associate Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University).
With John McCain the all-but-certain Republican nominee, the obvious question emerges: which Democrat is likeliest to beat him? This, of course, is a purely hypothetical question. John Kerry won the Democratic nomination in 2004 in large part because of the perception that he was the strongest candidate against George Bush. He lost, but we have no way of knowing whether John Edwards or Howard Dean would have done better. The same is true of many of the judgments that people make of candidates. We’ll never know whether Hillary Clinton would be a better president than Barack Obama, whether his foreign policy would work better than hers, and so on. The best we can do make an informed guess. On the question of electability, my guess without question is Obama.
The case for Obama as the strongest candidate comes from simple electoral math. The 30+ primaries and caucuses to date, plus the polls and the pattern of endorsements from red-state Democrats, show that he has more appeal to independents, to a handful of Republicans, and to casual Democrats than does Clinton. Clinton’s support is largely concentrated in core Democrats, the sort most likely to vote in primaries and the reason why she remains in serious contention despite a string of loses. Obama is almost certainly right to claim that he would be more likely to win over Clinton’s voters in the fall than she would be to win over his. Although widely interpreted as a reference to blacks, it is independent and Republican supporters who are most out of her reach. In short, Obama begins with a larger pool of potential supporters, one that encompasses the core Democrats currently on Clinton’s side and extends past them.
The key word in that last sentence is “potential.” The main knock against Obama as a candidate – and the main argument for Clinton – involves his ability to withstand the withering attack to come. Obama has enjoyed a charmed political life, with fawning press and weak Republican opposition. Can he maintain his exalted status a fresh, new voice (for change!) once the campaign really begins? The Clintons, after all, knocked him off his stride for several weeks after Iowa with some hardball tactics, although by South Carolina he managed to turn those tactics against them.
Once the campaign begins, the argument goes, Clinton is better prepared. She has been in the national spotlight since 1992, so she knows what the counterattack will be like and what she has to do to get beyond it. She won’t, like Kerry or Michael Dukakis, be surprised by an attack and lose an early lead. She is not invested in a holier-than-thou image, so she can throw some pretty sharp elbows and do whatever is necessary to win, etc. Furthermore, the strong economy of the Clinton years supposedly gives her a solid claim as the candidate best equipped to deal with recession, especially versus McCain.
All of that would be more convincing if Clinton were a proven vote-getter or a proven campaigner. She ran five points behind Al Gore in New York in 2000, two points behind Elliot Spitzer in 2006. (Her husband, his recent missteps notwithstanding, who is a better politician than she is, never managed to win a majority of votes nationwide.) I live in upstate New York and can confirm that whatever Clinton hatred that remains here is muted, proving that with time Clinton can win over her critics. She does not have the time to lavish attention on the whole country as she has lavished it on New York, to get people who discount her to pay attention. More important, against the toughest political opponent of her career in Obama, she has squandered a huge lead and a dizzying array of advantages. If Obama has run a better campaign for the nomination (aimed at appealing to people who will be swing voters in the general) why should Clinton be seen as the stronger candidate in the fall? It is certainly hard to discount his superior rhetorical skills and the organizational success of his campaign.
Nor does Clinton’s ability to match up against McCain on an array of issues seem like a big deal. One of the things that the exit polls have consistently shown is that Clinton and McCain, arguably the two biggest hawks on each side, have done better than their opponents with voters who favor a quick withdrawal from Iraq. What that suggests, of course, is that voters look at a variety of things besides issues. In Obama’s case it is his uplifting message of hope and change; in McCain’s it is his reputation for honesty. Against either one, Clinton’s mastery of the details of government seems wonkish and uninspired. Given the choice between going into the general election with the master of the economy or the charismatic apostle of change, I would opt for the generic message of changing the friendless status quo.
In other words, the argument for Obama is most electable is based on breadth of his appeal, while Clinton is favored for her supposed mastery of the process of running against Republicans. Of the two, the first seems more tangible and more valuable to me. The potential to bring more Democrats to the polls (especially young ones who could help the party in the future), the potential to win more independents and perhaps more than a sliver of Republicans, the potential to keep the Republicans in disarray rather than healing their divisions for them by nominating an opponent who instantly unites them – all these make Obama the stronger candidate. Obama will be savagely attacked, pulled off his pedestal (along with McCain), and possibly even fatally wounded in the process. But will he end up any more disliked or divisive than is Clinton already? Probably not. The campaign against her is, after all, in the midst of its second decade. It will cost the Republicans tens of millions to try to demonize Obama as effectively as they have demonized Clinton, and there is no certainty they’ll succeed.
One of the common observations about Obama is that he is a high risk, high reward candidate, while Clinton represents a surer thing. The risk is that, with his lack of exposure on the national stage, the bottom could fall out; the reward is that Obama fulfills his potential as a transformational candidate. I do not see him doing any worse than Clinton’s worst. But with the stars aligned for a Democratic victory in November, Democrats can afford to think big. Clinton can win a narrow victory, but only Obama can deliver a landslide.

(NOTE: This item is by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of The Democratic Strategist’s advisory board. It was originally published at The Daily Strategist on February 10, 2008).
Now that Arizona Senator John McCain has all but sewn up the Republican presidential nomination, the first task that faces him is winning over disgruntled conservatives, many of whom were supporting former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries. To that end, McCain gave a conciliatory speech on February 8th at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, pleading with conservative leaders and activists to unite behind his candidacy.
Meanwhile the two remaining Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are locked in a tight battle that could go on for several more weeks and possibly continue all the way to the Democratic convention. This has led to growing concern among Democratic leaders that a protracted battle between Clinton and Obama could make it difficult to unite the party for the general election campaign.
It is clear that unifying their respective parties will be a key task for both John McCain and the eventual Democratic nominee. But for which party’s nominee will this task be more difficult? The answer to this question will depend in part on how deep the ideological divisions are between supporters of the nominee and supporters of the defeated candidates in each party.
In order to compare the difficulty of the task that John McCain faces with the difficulty of the task that will face either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, I compared the ideological preferences of each candidate’s supporters based on data collected in the Democratic and Republican exit polls for California on Super Tuesday. I used exit poll data from California because California was by far the biggest prize in both parties, none of the candidates is from the state, and the primary was hotly contested in both parties.
I calculated the mean score of each candidate’s supporters on a five-point liberal-conservative scale that was included on the exit poll. The scores on this scale were 1 for very liberal, 2 for somewhat liberal, 3 for moderate, 4 for somewhat conservative, and 5 for very conservative. Thus a mean score of 3.0 would indicate that the average supporter of a candidate was right in the middle of the liberal-conservative scale while a mean score of 2.0 would indicate that the average supporter of a candidate was well to the left of center and a mean score of 4.0 would indicate that the average supporter of a candidate was well to the right of center.
The results of my calculations showed that the mean scores for Clinton and Obama supporters were almost identical: 2.5 for Clinton voters vs. 2.4 for Obama voters. In contrast, the mean scores for McCain and Romney supporters were quite distinct: 3.5 for McCain voters vs. 4.1 for Romney voters. The ideological divide between McCain and Romney voters was six times as large as the ideological divide between Clinton and Obama voters. And on this sort of scale with a very limited range, that is a very large difference.
The average Obama and Clinton voter was a moderate liberal. Similarly, the average McCain voter was a moderate conservative. McCain voters were about as far to the right of center as Clinton and Obama voters were to the left of center. But Romney voters were much further to the right of center. Given that Americans generally don’t like to place themselves at the extremes on these sorts of scales, it is striking that 40 percent of Romney voters in California placed themselves at the far right end of the scale. In contrast, only 12 percent of McCain voters placed themselves at the far right end of the scale and only 18 percent of Clinton voters and 22 percent of Obama voters placed themselves at the far left end of the scale.
These results suggest that despite clinching his party’s nomination much earlier than his Democratic opponent, John McCain may face a more difficult challenge in uniting his party’s voters than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Because supporters of Clinton and Obama have almost identical ideological preferences, it should not be difficult for either group to unite behind the other candidate if he or she wins the nomination. The winning candidate will not need to move to the left or right in order to win over supporters of the defeated candidate.
John McCain, however, may be forced to move further to the right in the next few weeks in order to win over disappointed supporters of Mitt Romney. In fact, this is precisely the course of action that is being urged on him by conservative spokesmen and it appears to be what he was attempting to do in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a group that he shunned only a year ago. But this may be a risky strategy for McCain since it will delay if not prevent him from moving back to the center to appeal to independents and swing voters in the general election-a move that will be crucial if he is to have any chance of winning in November.

(Note: This item was originally published at The Daily Strategist on February 4, 2008).
As Democrats prepare to vote on Super Tuesday, there’s a new public opinion survey for NPR conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner in conjunction with Public Opinon Strategies that shows (1) the landscape still favors Democrats in the general election; and (2) that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama bring different strengths to the table in running against probable Republican nominee John McCain. Put simply, HRC currently does better among Democrats, while Obama does better among independents and Republicans.
Here’s the GQR summary of the research:

The race between John McCain and either Democratic candidate produces a very close national race for president — although voters want to be voting Democratic and want the Democrats’ direction on issues and leadership qualities.
Democrats can win with either candidate for president, though the races look totally different. Hillary Clinton has already consolidated Democrats who came away from the primaries even more positive about her. That energy can put her in the race, though gains with independents are key. Barack Obama too gained popularity in the primary among Democrats but also with independents — allowing him to split independents evenly with McCain. But with Obama, a fair number of Democrats support McCain, almost balanced by the proportion of Republicans who split off to support the Democrat. Both races are close but they produce totally different politics and strategies for the general election.
Voters want the Democrats to lead the country, however.
49 percent support a generic Democrat for president, 5 points ahead of the Republican candidate. The support for the Democrat has not changed a point in many months. As the actual Republican nominee has emerged, many dislodged Republicans have moved back to their candidate.
Voters have watched the primaries closely and say they much prefer the Democrats’ issue priorities and their qualities of leadership. The post-primary environment is very favorable for Democrats.
When one takes McCain’s position on Iraq and the economy and contrasts that with the Democrats, voters show a strong aversion to McCain’s direction. Voters want to begin troop withdrawals, not create a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq. Voters favor a stimulus with investments, unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts, not simply making Bush’s tax cuts permanent.

For those Super Tuesday voters who value electability, this survey shows either Democrat should be able to win, but may follow two distinct tracks to a majority.

(NOTE: This item is by Matt Compton, and was originally posted at The Daily Strategist on January 7, 2008).
As predicted by the much-questioned final Des Moines Register poll, Barack Obama won Iowa on the strength of unprecedented support from independent voters and first-time Caucus-goers.
But well before the Caucuses, on blog sites like Talk Left and Firedoglake, questions were being raised about an Obama candidacy based on what sometimes seemed like excessive efforts to reach beyond the Democratic base.
For many bloggers, the problem with Obama was—and is–that he’s been playing into a much-derided “triangulation” meme in appealing to voters without traditional Democratic credentials. As Ezra Klein said last Tuesday, Obama was using “old politics of centrist caution and status quo bias.” Markos Moulitsas walked back from his announced intention to vote for Obama, saying “you have to have your head stuck deep in the sand to deny that Obama is trying to close the deal by running to the Right of his opponents. And call me crazy, but that’s not a trait I generally appreciate in Democrats, no matter how much it might set the punditocracy’s hearts a flutter.” Matt Yglesias tempered his former enthusiasm for the candidate as well, writing “while there’s a lot I like about Barack Obama, if he wins Iowa it won’t have been by running hard on the things I like best about him.”
In truth, Obama hasn’t been afraid to strike back at all his critics with whichever tool best fits the job. Whether criticizing Hillary on health care or questioning John Edwards on the Iraq war, his campaign throws an effective punch. When he announced his intent to seek the presidency, there were real questions about whether Obama had the toughness to win — no longer. But to his online critics, Obama willfully ignored a crucial tenet of blogosphere doctrine — they accuse him of using right-wing talking points to criticize his opponents. And in their eyes, there is no greater sin than validating a GOP frame.
The great irony here is that, ostensibly, the thing that gives so many bloggers pause about Barack Obama is the very thing that they hate about Bill Clinton’s presidency. In fact, the strategy of using “centrist caution” to reach out to swing voters and Independents has been called Clintonism for a long time now. But many of those uncertain about Barack Obama have a lot invested in an alternate strategy of hyper-partisanship, of one-upping the conservatives, of constant confrontation, and when Obama says he does not want to pit Red America against Blue America, you can almost hear them asking, “Why not?” Obama’s real problem in the blogosphere, however, might be about something much bigger than his talking points.

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(NOTE: This item was originally posted at The Daily Strategist on November 27, 2008. Like the item immediately below on national security, it represents another in a series of “Strategy Memos” that deal with large, long-term strategic challenges facing Democrats.)
(Andrew Levison is the author of two books and numerous articles on the social and political attitudes of blue collar workers and other ordinary Americans)
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It is an unfortunate fact that during election years important discussions of long-term political strategy often get oversimplified and distorted in order to squeeze them into conventional campaign narratives.
This is what happened to an important Democracy Corps memo issued several weeks ago. The memo — which offered an analysis of polls and focus group data on a range of domestic economic issues including immigration and open borders — got grabbed and sucked up into the mainstream media debate about the electoral wisdom of the Republican’s “get tough”, anti-illegal immigrant posturing and whether the Democrats should follow their lead or stick to traditional progressive principles.
But this was not the specific issue the D-Corps memo was actually evaluating and its more subtle strategic analysis and conclusions should not be allowed to get lost in the shuffle. The central finding of D-Corps’ polls and focus groups was that a profound and unrecognized degree of frustration exists among average middle-class Americans regarding a wide range of economic issues, feeding an extraordinarily deep contempt and anger at the political establishment, Democratic as well as Republican. The Memo’s key thesis was that, without a proper political strategy, this deep discontent will not necessarily benefit the Democrats next year.
In regard to immigration, the memo noted three critical facts:
1. While Democrats in the survey identified Iraq and health care as the major areas where the country was going in the wrong direction, the top issue identified by independents was immigration and “unprotected borders.” 40% of independents chose this option – no other issue even came close.
2. Immigration and open borders were the top concern for those voters who want to vote Democratic but are holding back – the most attainable swing voters of all.
3. The voters who were most angry about the issue were those with a high school education and rural voters – groups where recent surveys have suggested Democrats might otherwise be able to regain some lost ground.
The first point that should be noted is that these conclusions are focused on how immigration is perceived by a specific group of voters – “ordinary middle-class” swing voters – and not how the issue will play with the electorate as a whole (In fact, when D-Corps studied national opinion as a whole, they found slightly less support for the one- sided “get tough” measures then for alternatives that included some path to citizenship).
More important, the basic problem the D-Corps memo identified is not simply that there is substantial middle-American antagonism to illegal immigration. It is that this sentiment threatens to fuse with three other attitudes among many potential democratic voters: a sense of severe economic distress; a feeling of powerlessness and of being ignored by political leaders; and a simmering sense of class resentment toward the “liberal” educated elite. This was the potent ideological package that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes used to ride to the presidency and which Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ross Perot and scores of their lesser imitators have ridden to national celebrity.

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(NOTE: This item was originally posted at The Daily Strategist on November 12, 2007)
As a Veterans Day meditation, I thought it might be a good idea to take a fresh look at one of the most contentious subjects in intra-party discussions: How Democrats can clearly differentiate themselves from Republicans on national security issues without falling into the “weak on defense” stereotypes conservatives have spent many years and billions of dollars promoting.
To make a very long story short, there have been at least five basic strategic takes on this subject among Democrats in recent years:
1) Ignore national security as “enemy territory” and focus on maximizing Democratic advantages on domestic issues (the default position of Democratic congressional campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s).
2) Agree with Republican positions on national security to “take them off the table” and then seek to make elections turn on domestic issues where Democrats have an advantage (the Dick Gephardt strategy for congressional Dems in 2002 and for his own presidential campaign in 2004; also common among Democrats running for office in conservative areas).
3) Vociferously oppose Republican positions on national security (and particularly the use of military force) in order to convey “strength,” on the theory that “weakness” is the real message of conservative “weak on defense” attacks (a common assumption among bloggers and activists arguing that a single-minded focus on ending the Iraq War is a sufficient national security message).
(4) Oppose Republican positions on national security while focusing on Democratic respect for, and material support for, “the troops” and veterans, on the theory that a lack of solidarity with the armed services is the real message of conservative “undermining our troops” attacks (a common theme in the Kerry 2004 campaign and in post-2004 Democratic messaging).
(5) Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions (e.g., the 2002-2004 Clark/Graham “right idea, wrong target” criticisms of the Iraq invasion as distracting and undermining the legitimate fight against terrorists).

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By Ed Kilgore
(NOTE: This item was originally posted at The Daily Strategist on November 8, 1007).
Over at TAPPED, Dr. Tom Schaller has suggested that Barack Obama and John Edwards should supplement their attacks on Hillary Clinton’s policy positions by making a parallel political argument: that “the Clintons” presided over the destruction of the Democratic Party during the 1990s:
On her health care debacle and war vote, Edwards and Obama are making the case that she used bad policy and/or personal judgment, but they ought to try a new, politically-themed tack: Hillary and (they should be more careful here) Bill Clinton fought the Republicans but the GOP was stronger, not weaker, when they left office in 2001 than the Republicans were when the Clintons arrived in 1993.
Also at TAPPED, Dana Goldstein doubts that actual Democratic voters will be persuaded by a political narrative of the 1990s that doesn’t accord with their own memories. I agree.
But the discussion of the political viability of Schaller’s hypothesis avoids a more fundamental question: Is it true?
This question isn’t just a matter of historical interest. Schaller is faithfully expressing a revisionist take on the 1990s that has become an article of faith in many Left-netroots circles, with an implication that is of immediate importance to Democrats. The idea is the Clinton-style centrism was an electoral as well as an ideological disaster, producing at best two less-than-majority presidential wins at the price of the erosion of Democratic support in congressional and state elections. The 2006 Democratic comeback, according to this theory, proves that a more base-oriented, left-bent Democratic strategy is the key to a long-term Democratic majority.
But what really happened to Democrats in the Clinton years? And why?

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By Will Marshall and Ed Gresser
Populism has a checkered history, but that hasn’t stopped a new crop of American politicians from embracing it in reaction to the supposed scourges of trade and globalization.
Today’s neo-populism has right and left strands. Republican populism is mainly anti-immigration: Think Patrick Buchanan or Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Ariz). Democratic populism, personified by two newly elected Senators, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is vehemently anti-trade. The two strands converge in the person of CNN blowhard Lou Dobbs, who blames immigrants and corporations for either taking American jobs or sending them overseas.
U.S. progressives ought to think twice before adopting the “populist” label, and not just because it’s commonly hung on such noxious demagogues as Jean Le Pen, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The homegrown American populism of the 1880s and 1890s–the horny-handed-sons-of-toil faith identified first with the People’s Party in the 1880s and 1890s and, later, three-time Democratic Presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan–also is a dubious model.
The old populism, after all, was a curious amalgam of cultural reaction and worker-farmer radicalism, mixing calls for important democratic reforms–public regulation of corporations, the progressive income tax, labor union rights, direct election of U.S. Senators–with nutty obsessions like “bimetallism,” and nastier tinges of nativism, racism and religious bigotry.
A better model for today’s Democrats is the Progressives, who came after the populists. They agitated for fundamental reforms in government and society that went with, rather than against, the grain of industrial transformation and urbanization. That is why they succeeded where populists failed–in gaining power and governing.
Neo-populists are right to focus on growing economic insecurity and inequality in America. But they need to offer more realistic diagnoses of their causes as well as remedies.
Americans today face an economic paradox. U.S. industrial output is booming, consumers have their choice of the world’s goods, jobs are reasonably plentiful and unemployment is fairly low. But middle class workers simultaneously see their wages stagnating and old guarantees of security eroding–not only in the sense of stable jobs, but more fundamentally in their families’ security against financial disaster.
The combination is difficult for either party to manage.
On one hand it spells trouble for Republicans. Their tendency to discount well-grounded anxieties appears callous and out of touch. And the Bush administration’s answer to the global competitive challenge is principally tax cuts–‘more money back in your pocket.’ But that is irrelevant to fear of a sudden and sharp fall in income and security, especially when it favors the wealthy more than middle- and lower-income families. It is easy to see why the public gives the White House little credit for economic policy.
On the other hand, a phobic reaction to foreign competitive pressures carries risks for Democrats. Simply railing against the pain and unfairness of economic change didn’t work in Bryan’s time. (The Great Commoner, somewhat inconveniently, was an ardent champion of free trade.) It is likely to fare no better for today’s “Lou Dobbs Democrats,” as the tele-populist modestly calls them. They need only think back to the 1980s, when pessimistic rhetoric about decline and deindustrialization helped ensure Democratic presidential defeats.
Confronting the quandary, the center-left has fragmented into three main schools of thought: neo-populists who blame trade for economic woes; social Democrats who want to import the Nordic model of capitalism from Scandinavia; and progressive modernizers in the Clinton-Blair mold (like us), who want both to raise America’s game in global competition and raise the floor of security beneath ordinary working families.
The neo-populists, allied with industrial unions and a rump group of surviving protection-minded business lobbies, are convinced that foreign trade pressure is unfair and that the U.S. cannot compete against low-wage countries. A typical approach is to demand an indefinite halt to trade liberalization (a “strategic pause,” as Jeff Faux terms it) along with trade protection through tariffs on Chinese goods and strict labor-standards tests on all imports, and to rail against offshoring without offering a policy-based way to block it–because, short of somehow turning off the Internet, none exists.
Whatever its political utility, populism fails as policy. Higher labor standards in developing countries are a worthy goal, but they wouldn’t make countries with vast reserves of low-cost labor less competitive. And the experience of high-tariff U.S. industries like textiles and shoes gives little reason to believe new trade barriers would keep U.S. industries competitive. To the contrary, they would lower living standards and damage our companies’ ability to compete, by raising input costs, depressing the purchasing power of their local customers, and jeopardizing access to foreign markets just as America’s housing boom fades and we need to rely more heavily on exports to generate growth. Rather than offer a new path to the future, populism simply offers complaint.
A more sophisticated critique comes from what might be called the “social democratic” wing of U.S. liberalism. The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, for example, points out that trade is a much bigger part of European economies than our own–yet Europe has managed to avoid the job churning and worsening income disparities that have made globalization so contentious here. The reason? Europe has more lavish social welfare policies, more extensive labor market regulation, and stronger unions. Kuttner advises Americans to look to the Scandinavian model–the Danes are the popular flavor this year–in which solid growth rates and low unemployment coexist with high-wage policies and generous social spending. In this telling, America needs not old-fashioned protectionism but a healthy dollop of European-style social democracy.
Prospect editor Harold Meyerson likewise is no fan of free trade, but he stresses its impact on wages rather than jobs per se. He identifies the real problem as “global convergence of wages,” as U.S. workers lose bargaining power with employers thanks to shrinking unions and the surge of millions of low-wage workers from countries like China and India into the global marketplace; and the solution as a much enlarged form of global governance designed to create social democracy on a world scale.
But–even leaving aside the improbability of Americans voting in European tax burdens and state paternalism, or a global regulatory program–there’s a hitch. The U.S. social democrats seem determined to hold progress on trade liberalization hostage to highly ambitious and sometimes unattainable goals–a dramatic expansion of America’s welfare state; a miraculous revival of militant trade unionism; global governance mechanisms; and full implementation by low-income countries, enforced by trade sanctions, of labor and environmental standards which took Washington decades to develop. This means growth, efficiency, and trade reforms to help the poor must wait for a social-democratic millennium.
Which brings us to the third camp, the progressive modernizers. They reject claims that Americans can be shielded from technological and structural forces affecting the whole world, and hope instead to replace the industrial-era safety net with a new social contract that helps working Americans manage the risks of global competition and share in the rewards of growth. They agree with social democrats on a key point: as U.S. businesses and labor provide less security for workers, government must step into the breach and provide more.
Where they differ is in insisting that robust economic growth and open trade policies are not bargaining chips, but crucial policies for generating the resources and political support for a new social contract with American workers. They backed Bill Clinton’s trade liberalizing initiatives, which played a vital role in the prosperity of the late 1990s, support new trade initiatives that build upon Clinton’s work. But they also recognize that changing terms of global competition pose new risks for working Americans which demand new responses.
In short, they believe America must both fashion a winning strategy for global competition and build a more solid foundation of economic security beneath working families. The strategy can be summed up in four points:

• Trade liberalization remains crucial to growth, economic efficiency, rising living standards, and amicable relationships among great and rising powers.
• The integrated global economy and the technological revolution are the result of structural forces–economic reform in places like India and China, container shipping, the Internet–as well as government-to-government negotiations. Their benefits outweigh their costs, and in any case they will not be repealed.
• For workers, globalization brings risks, as many businesses can no longer provide the health, pension and other quasi-welfare state functions they did in earlier years. And independent of global competition, changing American patterns of work, with quick shifts among companies now far more common than careers at single firms, means neither businesses nor Wagner Act-style unions are as well-suited to providing these protections as they once were.
• Imaginative policies can ease these problems. Government should step in where businesses no longer can, ensuring that job loss does not mean loss of health care, pensions, or hopes for college and home ownership. And social institutions, in particular a reformed and reshaped labor movement, have an essential part to play in finding solutions.

Democrats in Congress can begin to craft an agenda based upon these premises this year. A progressive, optimistic-but-realistic-and-empathetic legislative program for 2007 would open markets, by supporting completion of the Doha Round with a grant of fast-track authority focused on the WTO rather than small-scale free trade agreements. It would simultaneously begin strengthening family security. Recognizing that unions and liberals are right to say the Trade Adjustment Assistance program is wholly inadequate to the modern scale of disruption, it would also draft a broader Economic Adjustment program open to all dislocated workers, including broadened support for health insurance and job placement services. Accompanying both would be a competitiveness package to extend R/D tax credits, bolster investment in basic research, and ensure that visa policy allows American businesses and universities to attract the world’s brightest students and scientists. As we write, Congressman Charles Rangel is leading a courageous effort to develop such a broad policy synthesis, beginning with a formula for approval of several pending trade agreements and revival of the Doha Round.
A modern Progressive presidential candidate, in turn, can use this agenda as a foundation for a much more ambitious social contract, including fundamentally changed domestic policies and modernized civil-society institutions. By 2010, this would include guarantees of universal health insurance, portable pensions, and new forms of insurance to ensure that job loss does not mean inability to pay college tuition and mortgages. It would call upon unions to adopt a new role for the decades ahead, modeled on the approach of their most successful colleagues abroad, such as the Scandinavian unions.¹ Their memberships are the world’s highest and their attraction for young workers uninterested in conflict with employers rests upon through career development, unemployment assistance and job training and placement programs.
In the 19^th century, populism faded and died–unable to preserve a fading agrarian order, and offering more complaints than realistic solutions. Bryan, its great champion, lost three presidential elections. Rather than take this as their model, today’s Democrats would do better to look again at the Progressives who succeeded the populists. They struggled not to preserve a fading agrarian order, but to update old political and social arrangements to meet the new structural challenges emerging from industrialization and urbanization. The Democratic candidate who offers the modern version of this program may well be the one who can win; and will certainly be the one offering the new social contract that anxious workers and a puzzled country need.
Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute and editor of With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.

Ed Gresser has served as Director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Project on Trade and Global Markets since February, 2001. In this capacity, he writes and speaks on the value of open markets, internationalism and social responsibility in the global economy. Gresser joined PPI after ten years of service in the Clinton Administration and as a senior Congressional staffer.

¹For a discussion of alternative models for modern unions, see the recent TDS discussion.