This item by J.P. Green was originally published on April 30, 2013.
Tom Raum’s AP article “Economic gains may not help Democrats much in 2014” really deserves a subtitle like, say, “Unless of Course They’re Really Good.” The nut of Raum’s argument:

–Presidential claims of responsibility for economic gains rarely win plaudits from voters, yet presidents nearly always get blamed when things get worse.
–The historical odds for midterm gains in Congress by the in-power party are slim at best. Since World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 26 seats in midterm elections and gained seats only twice — Democrats in 1998 under President Bill Clinton and Republicans in 2002 with George W. Bush in the Oval Office.
–Presidential elections are often referendums on the economy. That applies less often to midterms.

Raum adds that “there has been a feeling of incremental improvement after Obama’s first term in office. That’s the key word, incremental. Presidents have to make the people believe that things are getting better every month.”
Raum concedes the good news Dems are trumpeting: “Right now, surveys and reports show that the recovery is continuing, although more slowly than most, despite continued high unemployment and an environment of modest economic growth and inflation. Home prices are on the rise, manufacturing is slowly improving.” He cites an uptick in consumer spending and economic growth statistics. He says economists credit Obama’s policies with creating about 3 million jobs, while the Administration claims 6 million jobs added.
But Raum believes sitting presidents have to be very cautious about how much they brag about their economic accomplishments:

Democratic strategists James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Erica Seifert concluded from focus-group sessions with both Democratic and Republican audiences that Obama fares far better in speeches when he highlights economic progress without taking credit.
People “are very much on edge financially … because they live it every day. Every speech needs to start from a place that understands this is not theoretical or ideological,” they wrote in a policy memo. Obama must “thread a very careful needle,” they concluded.

Raum also quotes Rutgers political science professor: “Americans would say, ‘Well, that’s our judgment to make, whether you’re doing a good job or not….Facts speak for themselves,” Baker said. “If things are good, you don’t really need to make any extraordinary claims.”
President Obama is certainly smart enough to avoid crossing the line between skilfully defending his record with facts and bragging immodestly. He’s got articulate surrogates who can amplify his accomplishments in a way that allows him to preserve his dignity. he also has a good sense of just how much he can get away with in terms of explaining his challenges without sounding like a whiner. We will never hear him echoing his predecessor’s mantra in the 2004 debate with Sen Kerry “It’s tough…It’s hard work”
Most voters are smart enough to know that presidents can have undeserved good luck or bad luck. The 2012 vote suggests that a healthy majority apparently gets it that President Obama inherited an unholy mess from his predecessor, and increasingly, that he has done fairly well, especially considering that the Republican party has zero interest in doing anything that might help the country if it also means helping Obama.
Historical patterns suggest that the Republicans will take control of the Senate and hold their majority of the House. For that to happen, however, a majority of the voters who show up at the polls in 2014 will have to think continued gridlock is a good thing or believe, against all evidence, that their Republican incumbent is capable of bipartisan cooperation for economic recovery.
What Democrats have going for them in 2014 is the growing realization among most informed voters that President Obama needs a substantial congressional majority to get anything done. Most swing voters will figure out that electing more Republicans means even more gridlock. Getting rid of a few Republicans on the other hand, just might enable the President to kick-start the economy. If Democrats do indeed have a qualitative edge in ground game mechanics and candidate recruitment for 2014, an upset just may be in the making.

This staff post was originally published on April 17, 2013.

Ed Kilgore’s “The Era of Big Accomplishments Is Over–For Now” at The Washington Monthly provides a much-needed reality check for critics of President Obama: As Kilgore explains:

Look, everybody knows the score: so long as congressional Republicans refuse to work with Democrats on legislation dealing with the major challenges facing the country, there will be no Era of Big Accomplishments for a Democratic president if the GOP has either control of the House or 41 firm votes in the Senate. Right now they have both, and they know it. As the gun issue has shown, big Democratic advantages in public opinion do not significantly inhibit Republican obstructionism. And even on the one big issue where many Republicans feel it is in their long-range interest to bend–immigration–it’s (a) not at all clear comprehensive reform legislation can survive conservative opposition, and even if it does (b) it will likely be a less progressive reform than George W. Bush was proposing six years ago.
Since Democratic presidents have a habit of wanting to govern, of course Obama hasn’t thrown up his hands or thrown in the towel in the face of this situation. He’s laid down second-term markers that reflect what he campaigned for in 2012, and what his supporters expect from him, and has also risked that support by making an offer to congressional Republicans on entitlements that seems designed to further expose their incorrigible obstructionism. He’ll also, I’m sure, try some executive gambits (e.g., on greenhouse gas emissions), though it’s unclear how many he can actually execute without practical control of Congress.
But we’ve known for a good while now that the odds of Obama being able to do much of anything other than protect the accomplishments he achieved before 2011 (and even that will be difficult) were low, and probably won’t improve a great deal after another midterm election cycle where Republicans have all sorts of advantages.
Inveterate Obama critics from the Right, and those on the Left who expect Obama to deploy magical powers to overcome the entrenched power of the GOP, will mock his record for its limited accomplishments. Lord knows he’s made mistakes and isn’t perfect. But at this stage, even if Obama combined the public charisma of FDR with the legislative skills of LBJ, it’s difficult to see how the road gets any easier. An unlikely House takeover in 2014 combined with a continued Senate majority willing to undertake radical filibuster reform might change everything. But anything less won’t change the basic dynamics.

Republicans are going to keep bashing away at the president regardless of what he does. Obama’s Democratic critics will continue to fault him for his mistakes, doomed bipartisan overtures and perceived lack of gumption. That’s OK. Democrats are supposed to press the president toward more progressive policies at every opportunity. But let’s get real about the unprecedented wall of obstruction he faces — and the only hope for breaking it, which is a major upset in the 2014 midterms.

This item by James Vega was originally published on April 14, 2013.
Come on, progressives, let’s be honest. Of course it’s necessary and proper for progressives to criticize Obama’s budget compromises as either bad economics or lousy electoral strategy — or both. Heck, that’s the progressive coalition’s job and progressives would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t firmly oppose the compromise of basic progressive positions and goals.
But there’s no reason to resort to armchair psychiatry or to otherwise impugn Obama’s motives – saying he’s “timid” “gutless” “a DINO (Democrat in name only)” “gullible”, “in wall street’s pocket”, “a corporate tool” “a phony progressive” and all the other personal accusations against him when deep down we all know perfectly well the real reasons why he’s doing what he’s doing.
Let’s face it. Every Democratic president has to walk a very fine line in dealing with the business community and the economic elite of this country. That group is not entirely composed of extreme right wing ideologues like the Koch Brothers (although there is a very disturbingly large group who are). Many are relatively pragmatic individuals who are willing to accept a certain range of progressive policies when the political climate of the country overwhelmingly favors them. The majority of American businessmen are not going to go on a John Galt-style “producers strike” and shut down all their banks, offices and factories to protest a modest tax increase nor will they try to foment a military coup because they don’t like Elizabeth Warren.
But on the other hand, any Democratic president absolutely has to maintain a certain working relationship with the business community or face huge obstacles to almost all of his domestic priorities. Had Obama seriously threatened to prosecute substantial sectors of the business and the financial community for their role in the financial crisis when he first took office in 2008, he would not have gotten the stimulus bill, the modest financial regulation bill that he did get or health care reform. There were only a few major business figures who went overboard with hysterical accusations that Obama was out to destroy the entire free enterprise system in 2009, but if he had really come down hard on business and Wall Street that attack would have been picked up and become so widespread in the business world that plenty of Democratic Congress and Senate members would have melted away from supporting Obama’s first term agenda like snowflakes in forest fire.
Now, sure, its loads of fun to imagine an alternate reality in which a fiery populist president “takes his case to the people” and develops such titanic, fierce, ferocious and powerful grass roots support that American big business has no option except to meekly accept the president’s firmly populist agenda. And yes, we can all cheerfully recite Roosevelt’s stirring line “I welcome their hatred” as the great rhetorical model for how a really tough populist Democrat could deal with the business community.
But, come on, let’s face it, if intense grass roots support for that kind of muscular populism had really existed in recent years, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards would have won the Democratic primaries by a landslide in 2008, blowing away the far more centrist Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In 2004 Howard Dean would have walked away with the Democratic nomination without raising a sweat and in 2000, Ralph Nader would have outpolled Al Gore. Right wing populists like George Wallace and Ross Perot pulled a major slice of the national vote in their campaigns in past decades while no left wing populist in the post-war era has ever even come close. You can’t just go around simply assuming and asserting the existence of some huge, sleeping left-wing populist majority that is just waiting to be mobilized as if it were a given fact of American political life when somehow or other it never seems to be able to drag its butt out of bed and go out to vote for firmly populist candidates on election days.
So let’s stop with the alternate reality stuff for a moment and try to visualize the strategic situation as Obama has to see it when he looks across the table during a meeting with a group like the Business Roundtable or similar organizations of the economic elite. He starts out knowing that a large segment of American business won’t even sit down with him at all – that they are wildly, irrationally and passionately opposed to everything he stands for and are willing to invest huge sums of money to defeat him and every policy he advocates.
So the members of the business and financial elite who are indeed willing to sit across the table from him are the ones he really needs to keep at least reasonably neutral if he doesn’t want an absolutely united front of business opposition to everything he does.
Now the business guys at the table are not completely unreasonable. A recent opinion study “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” by Benjamin I. Page and Jason Seawright of Northwestern and Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt, indicates that the “1 percenters” — those with $8 million in net worth – are at least somewhat open to some relatively liberal economic ideas. Most agreed, for example, with improving public infrastructure such as highways, bridges and airports; scientific research; and aid to education. They also agreed that the Social Security system should ensure a minimum standard of living to all contributors, even if some receive benefits exceeding the value of their contribution and they also agreed that people with high incomes actually should pay a larger share of their incomes in taxes than those with low incomes. And they recognized the need for sensible regulations.
But on the other hand, the study also found the following:

When we asked respondents how important they considered each of eleven possible problems facing the United States, budget deficits headed the list. Fully 87 percent of our wealthy respondents said deficits are a “very important” problem facing the country. Only 10 percent said “somewhat important,” and a bare 4 percent said “not very important at all.” The high priority put on this issue was confirmed by responses to an open-ended question about “the most [emphasis added] important problem facing this country today.” One third (32 percent) of all open-ended responses mentioned budget deficits or excessive government spending, far more than mentioned any other issue. Furthermore, at various points in their interviews many respondents spontaneously mentioned “government over-spending.” Unmistakably, deficits were a major concern for most of our wealthy respondents…. [In contrast, unemployment and education] were mentioned as the most important problem by only 11 percent, indicating that they ranked a distant second and third to budget deficits.

So it’s not just the professional deficit scolds like Pete Peterson or the PR shop called “Fix the Debt” who are pushing the deficit fixation. Nor is it just the columnists and editorial writers at the Washington Post. The belief that dealing with the deficit is the most important national issue is pretty much a consensus opinion of America’s wealthy and business elite.
And now here’s the funny thing. If you ask progressives, most of them would passionately agree that “the one-percent” — the economic elite like those in the survey above — really run the show in America and make the political system dance to their tune. Many progressives will be happy to recite in vast detail how the economic elites in countries like Chile organized the overthrow of democratically elected populist presidents when the latter got the plutocrats really ticked off.
Yet, at the same time, when it comes to evaluating the political strategy and political compromises a Democratic President has to employ in dealing with the economic elite and the business community, the pivotal role and power of the 1% suddenly does not have to be taken into account. It’s like suddenly they don’t have any power at all.
But in reality Obama is faced with a basic choice: he can tell the sector of the business community that is indeed willing to sit across the table from him that he thinks the whole deficit issue is completely overblown – just like Paul Krugman says it is — and accept the fact that they will walk away from the table completely unsatisfied with his answer or he can say that he understands their concern and is willing to make compromises if the GOP will meet him halfway.

Read more…

This item by James Vega was originally published on March 29, 2013.

Paul Krugman’s column today points out an important change:

Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness….
…There has, of course, been no explicit announcement of a change in position. But the signs are everywhere. Pundits who spent years trying to foster a sense of panic over the deficit have begun writing pieces lamenting the likelihood that there won’t be a crisis, after all.
…What happened? Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.

Krugman goes on to discuss the new rationales now being put forward as replacement arguments for why America needs to immediately and radically cut Social Security, Medicare and other social safety net programs. But, from a strategic point of view, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just how much of a setback this change really represents for the forces that were trying to whip up a panic.
There has never been any argument (even from Krugman) that there is indeed a long term need to update and improve the American social safety net – not to dismantle it but to reinforce it for the future. These long-term issues are largely the result of demographic and other gradual societal changes that require carefully structured reforms to current programs.
But the essence of the “debt panic” strategy was to exploit the financial crisis of 2008 in order to demand massive and immediate, ideologically motivated reductions in the funding for those programs or even to achieve their effective elimination. The same groups and individuals that had kept a discrete and diplomatic silence about the ballooning deficits during the Bush era suddenly switched to the “crisis” message the moment Obama was elected. The plan shared by a wide range of conservative and business groups was essentially to “piggyback” the attack on the social safety net on the huge economic dislocations caused by the crisis in order to convince the public that immediate action was required.
It almost worked. Conservatives could have gotten a hugely advantageous deal back in the Spring of 2011 if the congressional GOP hadn’t decided to reject the first “grand bargain” Obama offered and chose instead to bet the farm on defeating him.
You have to put yourself in the debt crisis gang’s shoes to visualize what a huge fiasco this represents for them. Millions of dollars, massive organizational efforts, hundreds of TV appearances and thousands of articles, commentaries and op-ed pieces were all focused on the goal of building support for massive and immediate budget cuts that could be pushed through quickly, before the crisis atmosphere passed. But now, as Krugman says, the moment has slipped by and the debt crisis gang has to start all over again to come up with a basically new rationale.
To put it simply, from their point of view, the 2008 financial crisis offered the opportunity of a lifetime to rip a big gaping hole in the social safety net and because they overreached, they’ve let it slip away. For progressives, a moment of pleasurable schadenfreude is not inappropriate or unwarranted.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on March 23, 2013.
At The Atlantic, Jim Arkedis, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, has a post “Memo to Democrats: Never Mind the GOP, Here’s What *We* Need to Fix: The left is crowing over Republican disarray. But the progressive advantage isn’t as entrenched as many of them seem to believe.” Arkedis describes the upbeat mood of many Democrats in the wake of the RNC’s self-flagellating “Autopsy”:

“After notching a victory last November against weak competition, it’s tempting to be content with our advantages in organizing, data analysis, and candidate quality, and to kick back and enjoy the Republican civil war…While much of the country wishes a pox on both parties these days, President Obama’s major policy positions — on handling the economy, budget negotiations, social issues, or national security — are at least less toxic to voters than the GOP’s.

However, cautions Arkedis, “Not so fast. That attitude guarantees the next defeat will come much sooner than Republican disarray suggests. Now is the time for Democrats to engage in some serious introspection of our own.” He posits “five issues Democrats must consider to ensure the 2012 victory isn’t squandered,” including:

First, progressives need to make serious investments in intellectual firepower…The army of analysts employed by the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Cato Institute. According to the most recent data available at Guidestar.com, these conservative research and advocacy organizations raise over $140 million a year. Their left-leaning and much younger counterparts at the Center for American Progress, Third Way, and the Progressive Policy Institute (where I am a senior fellow) together lag behind with a meager $40 million annual haul combined.
Closing the gap is possible but requires buy-in from on high…concerted efforts to steer donors toward allied think tanks.
Second, the Democratic Party must avoid an impending woman problem — not to mention a Latino problem, a gay problem, and a youth problem…All these groups could waver if Democrats continue to exploit them as coalition building blocks and pocketbooks, rather than integrating them as full partners.
Should immigration reform fail — a high risk in any Congress, let alone this one — many Latino groups will sour on President Obama no matter where fault lies. Witness Hispanics’ disgruntlement with the administration until it backed off on forced deportations. That’s why Democrats must broaden their focus to other issues Latinos care about beyond immigration — such as small-business empowerment, leadership development, and increasing personal wealth.
Third, Democrats need to expand their coalition, particularly among faith voters and lower-income whites. As I’ve written elsewhere, polling shows that religious voters, particularly Catholics, are more open than ever to progressive faith-based messaging. And it’s maddening to watch lower-income whites vote for Republican social positions and against their own economic interests. Targeted messaging to make a distinctly progressive pitch to these two often-overlapping communities on faith and social welfare will fray the conservative coalition even further.
Fourth, the party has to push digital and organizing innovations down-ballot…State legislatures are the key to controlling redistricting, and that’s the key to controlling Congress. National Democrats’ massive digital and organizing edge will be wasted if they are not shared with and adopted by candidates running for state legislatures.
Finally, the party needs to avoid the intramural fistfight brewing over “Organizing for Action,” the president’s campaign apparatus that has morphed into a voter mobilization and advocacy organization — in other words, sort of but not exactly what the Democratic National Committee already does…OFA and the DNC need to come to an understanding of their responsibilities, and share those decisions with party operatives.

Arkedis concludes on a hopeful note, saying Dems are in a “healthier place” than their adversaries, but adds “…Remember who won that race between the tortoise and the hare — and make sure it’s not repeated with the elephant and the donkey.”

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on March 8, 2013.
By most conservative media accounts, this has been a banner week for the Republican Party, snapping it out of the malaise it’s been wallowing in since last November. The week began with Republicans deciding to celebrate the appropriations sequester as a major victory for The Cause. It ended with the conservative movement and the vast majority of Republican elected officials in Washington (not to mention RNC chairman Reince Priebus) deciding to celebrate Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of CIA nominee John Brennan as a great blow against Obama’s tyranny.
As they enjoy themselves this weekend, it’s worth noting the rather significant side-effects of these two ideological benders. By embracing discretionary spending cuts and brushing aside a “grand bargain” with the president, Republicans also kicked to the curb their one realistic opportunity to secure the “entitlement reforms” they’ve spent most of the last three years demanding as the most crucial step towards fiscal responsibility and limited government. It’s hard to see where they go next in the fiscal battle, unless they want to lurch towards a government shutdown or debt default.
As for their mid-week “Stand With Rand,” Republicans managed to produce three significant results: (a) forcing the White House to renounce any legal theory enabling the president to do something there is zero evidence he wants to do: launch drones at American citizens on American soil; (b) making a complete hash of their own positioning on national security and civil liberties; and (c) making the very favorite politician of the John Birch Society a conservative movement hero and a viable presidential candidate for 2016.
This is a good example of how pursuing short-term tactical maneuvers can lead a political party into a long-term strategic trap. It will be interesting to see how quickly their better minds figure that out.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on March 1, 2013.
In his post, “Woodward Does Duty With Phony Outrage Machine,” Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America has an interesting take on the alleged complaint by Bob Woodward that he was somehow threatened by the white house:

Woodward’s hard-to-believe tale about being threatened, based on a single innocuous sounding phrase from an email sent by a senior White House aide, was cheered by Obama’s conservative critics who claimed it proved their long-running theory about the administration’s “thug” culture. But the shaky story of a threat quickly collapsed when the full context of Woodward’s email exchange with the White House aide, Gene Sperling, was revealed. Rather than a threat, the two men had simply engaged in a vigorous, respectful debate.
Yesterday, Woodward summoned two reporters from Politico to his home and told them his tale of woe. According to the Politico article, Sperling had pushed back on Woodward’s assertion that President Obama was “moving the goalposts” on the issue, telling Woodward in an email, “I think you will regret staking out that claim.”
From that, Woodward insisted he’d been threatened, even though “I think you will regret staking out that claim” doesn’t sound like very threatening language. Instead, it sounds like someone trying to tell Woodward he would regret publishing facts that are inaccurate. (Kind of the opposite of a threat, no?)
Indeed, when Politico published the email exchange in its entirety, the whole story fell apart. Sperling had actually written, “I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.” And Woodward’s response certainly did not indicate that he felt threatened; he told Sperling, “I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening.”
Why Woodward decided to stage a media tour based on a false premise of a non-existent threat remains to be seen. But we do know Woodward’s now an honorary practitioner of the far right’s Phony Outrage Machine.
That’s where never-ending allegations of Obama misconduct are churned out on a daily, and even hourly basis. And it’s where there’s always a new claim to replace the last debunked one in an effort to meet readers, listeners and viewers’ insatiable appetite for news about Obama’s supposedly wicked ways…

Boehlert concludes, “But again, the story isn’t true. There was no threat issued. The only question that remains is why Woodward felt the need to concoct such a bizarre and public Beltway drama…By signing up for duty with the Phony Outrage Machine and by parading around on Fox News wringing his hands over a fictitious threat, Woodward does serious damage to his reputation.”
Woodward was on ‘Morning Joe’ this morning, walking everything back as gracefully as he could. To be fair, he did not use the word “threat” in his reporting of the incident, but it does appear that he was trying to imply it, when he had to know better, given the full context of the email exchange. David Axelrod confronted him on the program, pointing out that Woodward’s home paper, the Washington Post used the term “was threatened” in the headline. Give Axelrod credit for being fair and temperate in making his points.
In The Nation, Greg Mitchell’s “From Legend to Laughingstock: Bob Woodward Cites Bogus ‘Threat,’ Calls Obama ‘Nixonian’ gooses some chuckles out of the dust-up, beating up on Politico, as much as Woodward, and observing:

Published at the Politico site, this obsequious report (the writers also backed Woodward’s view on Obama as bad guy in the sequester debate) drew wide mockery on the web last night, even from some on the right. The “threat” appeared no different from someone’s simply warning another that they might be embarrassed if they continue with their current line of action or thinking…The White House quickly pointed out what most readers had already concluded: Woodward was completely hyping the alleged threat–sort of like Bush did with Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons. He had even said much the same thing in a hasty CNN appearance.
Now the White House has released the full text of the e-mails exchanged by the official, IDed as Gene Sperling, and Woodward–and they should bring (but probably won’t) full shame to Woodward, Vandehei and Allen.
Politico has released the full e-mails and they give lie to Woodward’s claim of feeling “threatened,” as you’ll see in Woodward’s reply and Sperling calling him “a friend.” Now we learn that Vandehei and Allen deliberately left out the key “as a friend” lead-in to the alleged “threat.” Sperling also wrote, “my bad,” and closed with: “My apologies again for raising my voice on the call with you. Feel bad about that and truly apologize.” Some threat!
…Dan Froomkin calls the whole affair in a tweet: “Bob Woodward’s Mad Hatter tea party with Allen and Vandehei…. All of them puffed up and delusional.” A writer at The Atlantic Wire observed: “We hope Woodward never gets an e-mail in ALL CAPS.” As Dick Cheney might put it, we are simply hearing the cries of old-line DC journos in the “death throes” of their game…Charles P. Pierce has fun with it all here, but adds, seriously, that Woodward played the pair “like the two-dollar fiddles that they are.” Even The Daily Caller admits they got played by Woodward.

And Ed Kilgore adds that the illustrious Pat Caddell has weighed in on the matter, at the Fox News web page, no less, likening Obama to Nixon and calling out Woodward for not adequately popping off about Benghazi. “C’mon into the fever swamps, Bob! The water’s fine!,” urges Kilgore.
It should be acknowledged that Woodward has given a hard time to Republicans, also, going back to Watergate, though many would agree that he has drifted rightward since then. However, as one of America’s most respected MSM reporters, he shouldn’t be anywhere near the GOP’s phony outrage machine.

This item is an excerpt from an article by TDS Founding Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, cross-posted on February 22 from The New Republic.
There are two keys to achieving real political dominance for the new Obama coalition. First, it must be mobilized beyond presidential elections–in congressional elections, where turnout patterns don’t yet align very closely with presidential elections, and between elections, in the struggle to achieve legislative victories. Second, the Obama coalition must be widened to take in a larger share of the white working class. Otherwise, the hostility of these voters will undercut public support for the president’s agenda, as well as remaining a lurking threat in every election, particularly congressional ones.
The Obama team is not unaware of these necessities. But the strategy they’ve developed to address them isn’t entirely adequate. It seems to consist of emphasizing particular fights like immigration reform, gun control, same sex marriage, and climate change that appeal most strongly to different elements of the Obama coalition. This strategy does have merit. The thought is that even if all these fights don’t yield legislative victories (and they won’t so long as Republicans control part of Congress), they will nevertheless serve to generate more enthusiasm among key parts of the coalition, without imposing much of an electoral cost. Moreover, these fights are all substantively important in policy terms, so any victories attained will be important breakthroughs.
But the strategy has serious limitations. To begin with, even if these issues do little damage to Democrats’ standing among white working class voters, they will also do little to win their support. These voters are primarily looking for material improvements in their lives, improvements that are not possible without strong economic growth and the jobs, tight labor markets, and rising incomes such growth would bring. In a low-growth environment, these voters will remain exceptionally pessimistic and inclined to blame Democrats and government for their lack of upward mobility.
Even more serious, core groups of the Obama coalition will be weakened by continued slow growth. Obama was well-supported by these groups in 2012, but a sluggish economic environment, where unemployment continues pushing 8 percent, will try these voters’ patience. How much enthusiasm will Hispanics, blacks, youth, single women, etc., whose unemployment rates are considerably above the national average, continue to have for a party that cannot do more to improve economic conditions? Attrition in support will be inevitable in such a scenario and the opportunity to consolidate a dominant coalition will be lost.
How likely is it that slow growth will continue? Unfortunately, it appears to be a very serious possibility. The last quarter of 2012 actually saw the economy contract by .1 percent. And CBO’s latest economic projections, just released on February 5, anticipate that the economy will grow by only 1.4 percent this year (halving CBO’s previous projection) with an average unemployment rate of 7.9 percent. They project 2014 to be slightly better–2.6 percent growth and 7.8 percent unemployment–but the economy doesn’t really pick up until 2015. Even then, unemployment remains above 7 percent in 2015, above 6 percent in 2016, and doesn’t approximate full employment until 2017.
The reason for these gloomy projections is fiscal drag–that is, lower spending and higher taxes are subtracting demand from the economy, thereby slowing the still-fragile recovery. The fiscal cliff deal did considerable damage, chiefly due to the expiration of the payroll tax cut, which raised taxes 2 percent for middle and low income earners. The sequester will do more damage if implemented, indiscriminately cutting $85 billion from federal spending this year and every year thereafter for 10 years. And then there is possible further damage from whatever deal might be struck around the next extension of the debt ceiling, due in a few months (damage not included in the CBO projections).
It’s a bleak picture to be sure. What the economy really needs is something like Obama’s initial offer on a fiscal cliff deal. That offer included, besides tax increases on the wealthy and long-term cost reductions for Medicare, extensions of both unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday, as well as a roughly $50 billion jobs plan focused on infrastructure spending. The Republicans rejected the offer out of hand, of course, and the administration quickly yielded on the payroll tax cut and the jobs spending, leaving just the unemployment benefits extension. Rescinding the Bush tax cuts for those with $450,000 in income and higher was the laudable centerpiece of the deal, making the tax code fairer and helping to reduce long-term deficits, but that did nothing to alter the contractionary nature of the deal.
Now Obama has to deal with the extremely contractionary sequestered spending cuts. One of his stated operating principles on dealing with the sequester is to “do no harm” to the economy. However, the only way to really do that would be to avoid short-term spending cuts altogether.
Will he try to do that? It’s possible. But it doesn’t help matters that he has consistently evoked the possibility of a Grand Bargain with the Republicans that would, in a “balanced” way, attain $1.5 trillion in debt reduction over ten years. In all likelihood, that would mean agreeing to hundreds of billions in cuts (Obama would be lucky if only half ($700 billion) of the total savings was from spending cuts; Republicans will demand much more), starting this year and continuing until 2023. Leaving aside the content of the cuts, we know this means one thing that is indisputably bad–subtracting demand from the economy while it is still struggling, thereby making CBO’s gloomy economic projections more and more likely.
It therefore seems that another contractionary deal, despite Obama’s stated commitment to “do no harm,” is a distinct possibility. He would be well-advised to forget about such a Grand Bargain-type deal, which is not necessary in the short run (the deficit is already declining, as the CBO report notes, and will continue to do so for several years) and concentrate on what is necessary: growth. This starts with delaying or ending the sequester. As Paul Krugman points out, “kicking the can down the road,” so derided by Washingon commentators and elites, is in reality the responsible thing to do, given the state of today’s economy.
Then Obama should move to actually getting the economy some help. One obvious way to do this is through infrastructure investment. As Neil Irwin recently noted, low interest rates, millions of unemployed construction workers, and high economic development payoffs make such investment amazingly close to a free lunch. Obama did call for more infrastructure investment in his SOTU, including a new proposal for infrastructure repair called “Fix-It-First”, but this was in the wish list portion of his speech and had no clear urgency or timeline attached to it. These investments need to be moved up to short-term priority number one.
Indeed, if any deal is cut with the Republicans, it should be to put such investments immediately in the pipeline. We need a Grand Bargain for growth far more than we need a Grand Bargain for deficit reduction. Besides as many analysts have noted, the best medicine for deficit reduction is a higher growth rate, so the two goals are intimately and virtuously related. Add a half point to the growth rate and you knock $1.5 trillion off the national debt over ten years, thereby achieving Obama’s current debt reduction target.
And then there is the political payoff. The faster we move into a high growth economy, the better the opportunities for consolidating and expanding the Obama coalition. Conversely, if we stagger along for the next several years, the coalition has an excellent chance of falling apart. A very simple equation captures what’s at stake here:
Demographics + Growth = Dominance
Democrats have the demographics part of the formula already. Now what they need is the growth part to achieve electoral and policy dominance. That is the real challenge for Obama and his party if they wish to see the many worthy ideas in his State of the Union become reality.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on January 23, 2013.
Now that all the pundits have had their say about President Obama’s second inaugural address, Nate Silver brings the data to show what really matters: The public supports the president’s agenda. On climate change:

The PollingReport.com database includes two polls on global warming conducted after the Nov. 6 presidential election. An Associated Press-GfK poll in the field from Nov. 29 to Dec. 3 found that 78 percent of respondents said they believed the planet had warmed over the past 100 years, and 49 percent said they thought global warming would be a “very serious” problem for the United States if left unaddressed (31 percent said they thought it would be “somewhat serious”).
Fifty-seven percent of the 1,002 adults surveyed said the United States government should do “a great deal” or “quite a bit” on global warming…A United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll conducted Nov. 8 to 11 found that 57 percent of adults said they thought global warming was increasing the likelihood of storms like Hurricane Sandy.

On same-sex marriage:

The percentage of adults who favor same-sex marriage has been rising steadily for some time…Five polls on same-sex marriage have been conducted since the election and are included in the PollingReport.com database. Each poll uses slightly different question wording, but an average of 51 percent of respondents favored same-sex marriage and 44 percent opposed it.

On Immigration reform, Silver cites four recent polls, two showing strong majorities favoring a path to citizenship similar to what the president supports and two showing healthy pluralities supporting the president’s proposals.
On gun violence, different polls on various reforms bring a mixed message, but more favorable to Obama’s proposals than not:

…a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 54 percent of respondents favored tighter gun laws, up from 39 percent in a CBS News poll last April…A Jan. 17 Gallup poll found 53 percent of adults said they would want their representative to vote for the package of gun law reforms that Mr. Obama proposed. Forty-one percent said they would want their representative to oppose the laws.
…The most recent Fox News poll found that 51 percent of respondents said that “protecting the constitutional right of citizens to own guns” was more important than “protecting citizens from gun violence.” Forty percent of those surveyed said protecting citizens was more important…In the same Fox News poll, laws requiring criminal background checks and mental health checks on all gun buyers were both favored by more than 80 percent of respondents. (That’s in line with virtually every recent poll on guns. The Times/CBS News poll found that 92 percent of respondents favored background checks on all potential gun buyers.)
…Recent polls have found that support for a ban on assault rifles and semiautomatic weapons as well as a ban on high-capacity magazines usually falls in the low 50s to low 60s.

In his speech the president said, “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.” Silver cites “a solid majority favoring such laws.” Silver did not discuss restrictions on early voting opposed by Democrats in general. But heavy participation rates indicate that it is overwhelmingly popular with voters.
Republican commentators are still parroting their message du jour that the president’s speech was somehow polarizing. Not really. Their knee-jerk response is to oppose everything he proposes. But the public clearly supports the president’s speech agenda in almost every instance — often by overwhelming margins.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on January 8, 2013.
Many accounts of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign strategy begin with his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in December of 2011. Then, it is said, after nearly three years of projecting a unilateral commitment to bipartisanship, the president finally went after the Republican Party and its policies with hammer and tong, and began the process of reinvigorating a dispirited Democratic “base,” rebutting GOP efforts to evade responsibility for its extremism and obstructionism, and presenting a clear choice to persuadable voters.
In other words, Obama’s campaign strategy repudiated his political strategy as president–and perhaps the strategy he has resumed in dealing with Republicans now that the election is over, some progressives fear.
That’s an understandable judgment. But from what we know of the internal thinking of the White House, it was long-planned and represented a scheduled “pivot” in messaging rather than any sort of reversal. To put it simply, whatever it meant in terms of his legislative agenda, Obama’s long-suffering “bipartisanship” rhetoric set the stage for his increasingly edgy partisan differentiation later in the cycle by consistently depicting him as a reasonable leader dealing with a Republican Party that refused ever to reciprocate. Given the strong tendency of persuadable (and often “low-information”) voters, reinforced by the false equivalency habits of the mainstream media, to treat both parties in Washington as equally right and wrong in the various conflicts of Obama’s first term, his ever-patient efforts to “reach out” to an unreachable GOP may well have been more effective than direct partisan differentiation in keeping his personal favorability (a key asset moving into 2012, and consistently exceeding his job approval ratings) higher than his opponents,’ including the Republican presidential candidate filed.
Soon after Obama’s “pivot,” as a fractious Republican primary season unfolded, the White House focused on keeping him “presidential,” creating an implicit contrast with the squabbling and pandering GOPers. Once Mitt Romney emerged as the nominee, the Obama campaign skillfully deployed a two-phased attack on his claims to represent a moderate technocrat perfectly equipped to “fix” the economy without association with his party’s past incompetence or present extremism. The first phase constantly reminded voters of Romney’s personal background–at Bain Capital particularly–and many statements (sometimes gaffes) reflecting an exclusive identification with financial elites and the very wealthy generally. And the second phase focused on Romney’s policies as reflecting the same skewed orientation and the same extremist reduplication of the worst of Republican mistakes of the recent past.
The election-year strategy, which also relied on a general improvement in economic conditions and a relatively stable international environment, served the more fundamental missions of convincing swing voters the election was a choice of two very different directions for the country (the constant theme of Obama’s messaging during the stretch run), and convincing “base” voters they could enthusiastically support the President while avoiding the despoilation of cherished progressive priorities by the GOP. It succeed on all counts. It is an open question as to whether “accelerating” the process of sharp partisan differentiation earlier into Obama’s presidency would have worked as well, since it would have become part of the despised Washington background noise long before ballots were cast.
Romney, obviously, had a more restricted landscape on which to deploy his own grand strategy. By the time the general election campaign was fully underway he had spent most of the previous five years trying to establish his conservative bona fides, in ever more glaring contrast to his past record as a candidate and governor in Massachusetts. In the 2012 cycle, his own health care plan as governor became not only a primary-season albatross, but undercut many of his options in the general election. Thus, when he began his “pivot” to the general election, the aspects of his record he couldn’t talk about and the GOP agenda items he had more recently embraced that polled poorly left him with little to tout other than his business experience. And that, of course, left him open to exactly the Obama campaign attack on him that pulled down his favorable ratings and set up the latter assault on his and his party’s policy agenda.
Romney did successfully count on a post-primary consolidation of support from self-identified Republicans, though his choice of Paul Ryan as a running-mate indicated some nervousness about base support. His various efforts to “wedge” Democratic or swing vote constituencies–e.g., the “war on religion” campaign in the late spring, and repeated claims that Obama was insufficiently committed to Israel (which carried the bonus of appealing to conservative evangelical “base” voters)–mostly fell flat or backfired. His audacious stretch-run effort to exploit hazy perceptions of his policy agenda by suddenly posing as a “moderate” were too little and too late, and were obviously undercut by past and present expressions of fidelity to right-wing memes (most famously the “47%” remarks, which did not create but certainly reinforced the Obama campaign’s relentless description of him as an out-of-touch economic royalist).
If there was a distinct moment where the Obama campaign successfully demolished one of the strategic underpinnings of the Romney campaign, it was probably the president’s unveiling of a “Dream Act Lite” initiative in June that he promulgated by executive order. This preempted an apparent Romney plan to reverse some of the damage to his standing among Latino voters that his primary-phase rhetoric on immigration inflicted. Marco Rubio was in the process of developing for Romney a GOP version of “Dream Act Lite,” but the negative conservative reaction to Obama’s gambit left Romney high, dry and more unpopular than ever with this crucial demographic–while considerably boosting Latino enthusiasm for the incumbent, which had been lagging dangerously.
But like many aspects of the Obama Grand Strategy in action, this moment reflected a more general belief by Team Obama that the president’s high personal standing among elements of his 2008 coalition, gradually improving economic conditions, and most of all Romney’s inability to escape the taint of his party’s extremism, would bring that coalition back to life. Add in Obama’s exceptional GOTV operation, and successful efforts (aided by the courts) to blunt Republican voter-suppression tactics, and you have the ingredients of a smart strategy executed very well.

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