The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

One of the most consequential decisions of Obama’s early administration was to let a small group of, as Simon Johnson puts it in an excellent American Prospect review essay, Status Quo Republicans–Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson–set the overall response to the financial crisis. As Johnson remarks, if you hire Republicans, you will get Republican policy.

Johnson’s review essay covers two books, a jointly written defense of their role in the financial crisis by Bernanke, Geithner and Paulson and Reed Hundt’s new book, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions. (Hundt, FCC chairman under Bill Clinton, was on Obama’s 2008 transition team and, besides knowing all the players, had a close-up view of these decisions being made).

Hundt’s book is primarily concerned with why an alternative approach was not taken, rather than letting the Status Quo Republicans run the show. Hundt’s answer, as summarized by Johnson:

“Obama did not bring with him a large, experienced team, and during the campaign he developed only broad-brush ideas. The experts on the details were almost all people who had worked with the Clintons. They were Small Ball Democrats—smart people with admirable ideas, but hardly in a position to stand up to Status Quo Republicans. New Deal–style Democrats were conspicuous by their absence.

The financial sector was saved, largely intact, by unprecedented government support. If homeowners had received the same level of support in 2008-2009—for example, in the form of cheap refinanced mortgages—what would have happened? The American economy would have recovered, house prices would have risen, and everyone involved would have looked like a genius. Modern central banks control the price level and this has a primary, direct effect on asset prices—including housing. In most of the country, house prices bounced back but millions of homeowners could not finance their way through the trough. Powerful people in the financial sector could obtain cheap loans, even in the darkest days, because their access to credit was the top priority for both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The result, in rough chronological order, was: mass unemployment, greater inequality, collapsed opportunity, confused anger, and President Trump. The efforts put into financial reform—making sure this could not happen again—by Messrs. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson were weak. They lament that next time the central bank will not have the tools to deal with an incipient crisis. If that proves true, it is because their generation undermined the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve through inattention to regulation, consumer protection, and blatant bad behavior before the crisis, and through subsequently allowing the Too Big To Fail banks to become even larger and more dangerous—the total indebtedness of JPMorgan Chase today is in the range of $2.5 trillion.”

This really was the great failure of the Obama administration. Where it really counted, they just had the wrong people in charge and the consequences were immense. There is nothing more important than ensuring this does not happen again.

As Johnson concludes his essay:

“It is unlikely that the next Democratic president will want to be seen as another reincarnation of the Clinton administration. But are the potential home-run policy ideas being debated and honed in sufficient detail? Who will be hired—and with what experience—to be in charge of implementation? What are the plans for regulating the financial sector, which is more powerful than ever? And who exactly will be in charge when anything starts to go wrong in the macroeconomy? On these questions may turn both the election and the future of American democracy.”

I recommend you read this important essay in full and perhaps pick up Hundt’s book to boot. For extra credit, you could try Noam Scheiber’s book, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, which is an excellent, detailed account of exactly what the subtitle says it is.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

EJ Dionne, in his lengthy and generally sympathetic American Prospect review of John Judis’ new book, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization, has coined a new term for my old friend and sometimes co-author. Here’s the end of Dionne’s review, where he applauds Judis’ grouchiness:

“[I]t is vital that progressives come to terms with what both of Judis’s books have to teach [about nationalism and populism]. It is certainly a form of willful blindness to underplay the role of racism and prejudice in Trump’s campaign and to deny that racism and nativism motivated a substantial share of his supporters. But in political terms, the more costly mistake would be to assume that all of Trump’s working-class voters were motivated by race alone and that they can therefore never be persuaded to an alternative politics.

In their vox.com article, “The big divide among 2020 Democrats over trade — and why it matters: Democrats are on the brink of completely reorienting their party on trade,” Tara Golshan and Dylan Scott provide a revealing primer on the recent history of Democratic trade policies and current policies of Democratic presidential candidates, including the following chart, which will likely provoke some arguments:

“Because the most powerful answer to the big lie is the big truth, Democrats should champion a platform of patriotism and Americanism, on issues foreign and domestic, throughout the 2020 elections…Democrats should not “pivot” from talking about the Russian attack against America to talking about the Trump attack against health care for Americans. We should talk about both…A patriot platform for Democrats in 2020 would include a powerful statement about core values of Americanism. Our presidents should be chosen by Americans, not Russians. Government must serve the people by offering them a better life, higher wages and improved health, rather than ripping off the people with a scandal-ridden regime that treats the government of the people as a piggy bank for greed, sweetheart deals, nepotism and insider corruptions.” –from Brent Budoiwsky’s “A patriot platform for 2020 Dems” at The Hill.

Carrie Dann reports that “According to a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing, based on what they have heard about Mueller’s findings, while 40 percent say they do not believe he has been cleared,” Carrie Dann reports at nbcnews.com “But a third of Americans — 31 percent — say they’re not sure if Trump has been cleared. That includes nearly half of independents (45 percent) and about a quarter of both Democrats (27 percent) and Republicans (25 percent.)..The public is still in a wait-and-see view of this investigation and what it means for Trump,” said Jeff Horwitt of the Democratic firm Hart Research, which conducted the poll along with Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.”

FiveThirtyEight’s Dhrumil Mehta notes that “A Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted after special counsel Robert Mueller ended his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election found that 47 percent of registered voters still think that Trump tried to “impede or obstruct the investigation,” even though Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report did not make a determination on whether the president obstructed justice” and that “74 percent of registered voters, including 56 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats, told YouGov in a poll this week that they think the full contents of Mueller’s report should be made public.”

A nifty graphic from Kyle Kondik’s “This Century’s Electoral College Trends: Tracking the strength of the parties in all 50 states ‘ at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

2020 Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings

In “Other Polling Nuggets,” Mehta also notes that “Half of registered voters say that presidential elections should be determined by the national popular vote, while 34 percent say they should be determined by the Electoral College, according to another Morning Consult poll. Seventy-two percent of Democrats thought the national popular vote should decide elections compared to just 30 percent of Republicans, whereas 57 percent of Republicans preferred the Electoral College compared to 16 percent of Democrats.”

At The Daily Beast, Gideon Resnick explains why Democratic presidential candidates are “racing to post large fundraising numbers by the end of the first quarter on March 31” and noters that “A poor showing on the number of donors could be a death blow for some of the top-tier Democrats in the race, signifying that they lack the support and financial viability to make it through. The number of individual contributors, after all, demonstrates not just the extent of a campaign’s grassroots support, but also indicates a strong foundation for future fundraising, since a large pool of small donors can be hit up for cash again and again…the real competition among the field is not so much who can bring in the biggest haul, but which candidate can get the most people to contribute. That’s the number that the top money people on various campaigns say they will be watching when the deadline hits.”

In her article, “The New Politics of the Retirement CrisisAs 18 million Baby Boomers brace for the financial insecurity of old age, Democrats are pushing to expand Social Security and other elderly benefits.” at The New Republic, Rachel Cohen reports that “46 percent of Americans expect to be financially insecure when they retire, anticipating their government and employers will do next to nothing to help them. But these grim fears also open up a political opportunity. In the last election cycle, Democrats campaigned heavily on health care (by mid-October, 55 percent of their television ads centered on the issue). It’s this focus, many suspect, that helped them improve their margins among elderly voters, with seniors casting their ballots almost evenly between the two parties—a marked shift from years past…There are signs that retirement will play a significant role in the 2020 race. In February, Bernie Sanders reintroducedthe Social Security Expansion Act, with sponsorships from three other leading Democratic presidential contenders: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris. They belong to a congressional caucus dedicated to increasing Social Security benefits. Formed last fall, it already has more than 150 Democratic members, and Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, another presidential candidate, are its co-chairs in the Senate.

Sean J. Miller of Campaigns & elections reports that “During winning Senate races last cycle, campaigns on weighted average spent only 4-7 percent of their media budgets on digital, according to a new report by Tech For Campaigns, a non-profit that provides technology services to campaigns on the left…The report puts digital spending last cycle at $623 million, which is below earlier estimates which pegged it around $950 million…The average spend on digital overall for campaigns and PACs in 2018 was 2.7-5.1 percent, with 50 percent of the media budget going to TV and direct mail…Jessica Alter, co-founder of TFC, called the percentage of digital spending “shockingly low.”…The 2019 C&E/PSB Research State of the Campaign Industry Poll found a large majority of political professionals believe digital spending will actually reach parity with TV spend by the 2024 presidential cycle.”

Some sobering insights from Ronald Brownstein’s “Trump’s Opponents Have One Assignment Now: There’s a far better chance of uprooting the president’s influence if he’s beaten at the ballot box” at The Atlantic:

There’s a far better chance of uprooting his influence over the long run if his presidency is ended by the voters, not the courts or Congress…Trump has demonstrated that there is a substantial audience in the evolving Republican electoral coalition for a message that combines open appeals to white racial resentments and unrelenting attacks on “elites” with an undiluted commitment to the traditional goals of economic and social conservatives—from cutting taxes and eliminating environmental regulations, to opposing abortion and installing conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The appeal of that formula for significant elements of the GOP base would not disappear even if Trump were forced from office by one of the many investigations still swirling around him. Perhaps the only way other Republicans might be discouraged from following Trump’s volatile path is if voters show them that it’s an electoral dead end by repudiating it in 2020.

An electoral rather than legal verdict on this presidency is probably a better outcome for the Trump detractors who consider him a threat to both the rule of law and the nation’s social cohesion. If Trump were compelled to leave office before 2020, through either resignation or congressional action, the majority of his supporters would almost certainly view it as an illegitimate coup by the establishment forces in both parties. And that would allow them to claim that his agenda, tone, and electoral strategy—what could be called Trumpism—had been betrayed, but not defeated.

Further, Brownstein adds, “the fusion between the party and its volatile president is steadily growing more complete. And that convergence increases the odds that the 2020 election could harden the existing divisions between what I’ve called the Democratic “coalition of transformation”—diverse, younger, white-collar, metropolitan-based—and the Republican “coalition of restoration,” centered on blue-collar, evangelical, and older whites who mostly live outside major urban areas…such a defining election is exactly what the veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg is expecting. He believes that the president has presented Democrats with the opportunity to cement a majority coalition by identifying the GOP so unequivocally with opposition to demographic and cultural change and with an economic agenda tilted heavily toward the interests of the most affluent.”

Rather than wringing hands in despair over Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, Democrats should seize the opportunity that is being presented by the GOP’s dubious bet on Trump and turn it into an overwhelming repudiation at the polls.

In 2020, Greenberg argues, the electorate could break away from Trump as decisively as it did in 2018. Last year, Democrats captured more than 53 percent of the total House popular vote and benefited from several factors: big margins from minorities and young people, a sharp shift in their direction among well-educated whites, and even modest recovery among working-class whites, especially women distressed by the president’s effort to repeal the ACA.

Where both sides might agree is that the results at the ballot box, rather than in any legal proceeding, now look to be the crucial factor in determining whether Trumpism represents a short-term detour rooted in a single (and singular) individual, or a lasting force in American politics.

“Even in its truncated form,” Brownstein concludes, ” Barr’s summary of the Mueller report signals that no outside force is coming to undermine Trump’s message by disqualifying the messenger. It was probably a false hope to ever assume that some personal vulnerability on Trump’s part would marginalize his agenda. The assignment facing Democrats and Republicans alike who consider Trump’s vision a unique threat is clearer now than ever: Prove at the ballot box in 2020 that a decisive majority of Americans reject it.”

The huge field of Democrats running or considering a 2020 presidential race has a lot of diversity. I discussed one aspect of their differences this week at New York:

In assessing the very large Democratic field assembling to challenge Trump in 2020, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of politicians with résumés that would not normally bespeak presidential timber have taken a look at the 45th president’s rise to the White House and concluded there are no longer any minimum requirements. Yes, there have been presidents with no prior experience in elected office, but before Trump they were all war heroes (Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower) or Cabinet members (Taft and Hoover). A few major-party nominees were closer to Trump in the empty résumé department (notably 1904 Democratic nominee Alton Parker, a state judge, and 1940 Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, a utility executive), but for the most part, especially in more recent times, the major parties have nominated former or current senators and governors.

A recent Morning Consult poll suggests that rank-and-file Democratic voters still value that kind of high-level experience, with 66 percent saying that “decades of political experience” was “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in choosing a 2020 nominee. That could help explain why two candidates (one potential and one actual) who together have 81 years of experience in elected office, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, top every poll. And there’s more where that came from: An astonishing seven former or current U.S. senators are in the race.

It’s possible that while Trump hasn’t totally dispelled an interest in experience among voters in either party, Democrats are less worried than they might normally be about sending up a relative novice to oppose him; it’s not like Trump is going to depict himself as the wise, credentialed, steady hand on the tiller. It’s notable that candidates at both ends of the experience spectrum — Biden and Sanders, and O’Rourke and Buttigieg — are thought to be potentially strong among the white working-class voters so important to Trump’s 2016 election and 2020 reelection prospects. Perhaps all that’s going on is that against the terrifying Trump Democrats are valuing perceived electability above all.

It’s also possible that candidates like O’Rourke and Buttigieg are best compared to recent flash-in-the-pan presidential candidates on the Republican side like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (in 2012) or Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina (in 2016), who got an audition but were eventually cast aside. But one thing’s for sure: Democrats won’t forget about Trump and what happened in 2016 for a moment in selecting their next nominee.

You would think that, by now, Republicans would have come up with some sort of “program” that would provide them at least a fig leaf of cover for their real-world indifference to the health care crisis millions of working people face. Yet, Trump and his fellow Republicans in congress have never offered anything resembling a coherent plan to improve health security for Americans. Even The Editorial Board of the Wall St. Journal agrees that Trump has likely set up a disaster for his party in arguing that “the Administration decided this week to elevate a legal fight over health care that it is almost sure to lose.” When pressed, Republicans have to admit that their only ‘alternative’ boils down to a return to the status quo ante the Affordable Care Act. I can’t remember a time when one of the major political parties had so little of substance to say about the leading issue of the day, a stunning admission of  intellectual bankruptsy and political ineptitude.

“Candidate Donald Trump wanted to make sure you have health insurance. President Donald Trump is committed to taking it away,” Sarah Kliff writes at vox.com. “During his presidential campaign, Trump told 60 Minutes, “I am going to take care of everybody.” On the campaign trail in 2018, he sounded similar. “We will always protect Americans with preexisting conditions,” he said at an event in Philadelphia just before the midterm elections…But in office, Trump has attempted to implement an agenda that does the opposite. He’s backed legislation, regulations, and lawsuits that would make it harder for sick people to get health insurance, allow insurance companies to discriminate against patients with preexisting conditions, and kick millions of Americans off the Medicaid program…This week, his Justice Department filed a legal brief arguing that a judge should find Obamacare unconstitutional — a decision that would turn the insurance markets back into the Wild West and eliminate Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans. By at least one estimate, a full repeal could cost 20 million Americans their health care coverage.”

Dylan Scott elaborates, also at Vox: “President Trump just guaranteed health care will remain a dominant issue through the 2020 presidential campaign, opening up a massive vulnerability in his reelection bid…In a legal brief filed this week, the Trump Justice Department argued to a federal court that the entire Affordable Care Act should be found unconstitutional. That would mean an end to the private markets where 15 million Americans buy their coverage, an end to the expansion of Medicaid that covers 15 millions more, and an end to protections for people with preexisting conditions. According to the Urban Institute, if the entire law were eliminated, as the Trump administration is now advocating for, nearly 20 million fewer Americans would have health insurance…The Justice Department’s move is stunning, considering the price House Republicans paid in the 2018 midterms for attempting to repeal the law in Congress. Health care was the top issue for voters, beating out the economy, immigration, and guns. The voters who named health care as their top issue overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates — helping flip control of the House from Republicans to Democrats…Polling shows Americans strongly disapprove of how Trump has handled health care as president. And now his record on health care heading into his reelection campaign is even more unambiguous: He and his administration have fought to strip health coverage from millions of Americans and to erode protections for people with preexisting conditions — and their new move in the courts shows they are keeping it up.”

At Fortune, Erik Sherman reports that “U.S. Voters Prefer Expanding Medicare Over New Single-Payer Health Care, Says New Poll.” According to the latest national poll from Quinnipiac University, Sherman writes, “People were in favor 55% to 32% of improving the current health care system instead of replacing it with something new. But when asked whether to remove the current system and replace it with single-payer through an expansion of Medicare to cover all citizens, 43% called it a “good idea” while 45% said it was a “bad idea.” By political party, 69% of Democrats and 42% of independents supported it while only 14% of Republicans did…When asked instead whether to keep the current system and then allow any adult who wanted to buy into Medicare, 51% were in favor overall, with 30% opposed. Supporting the concept were 61% of Democrats, 49% of independents, and 43% of Republicans.”

MSNBC’s Katy Tur put it well in her interview of a Trump Administration spokesman: “We are two years into his presidency. We still have not seen a plan from the White House,” she said on “MTP Daily,” repeatedly pressing Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence and former White House legislative director. “When are we going to see this plan?..”If everything that you say is true and if it goes to the Supreme Court and is not upheld again by Chief Justice [John] Roberts … what is the plan you guys have to replace it?” Tur asked Short…”This law has been in place since 2010,” Tur said. “Republicans have campaigned consistently on repealing and replacing it. They tried again to do it 70 times. The president … talked about repealing and replacing ObamaCare. He’d come up with something beautiful and fantastic and everybody would be covered.”…”We will be coming forward with a plan in the next coming months,” Short said, noting that the Department of Health and Human Services would be working on one.” Don’t hold your breath.

Any Democratic candidates looking for fresh health care statistics that reveal the moral bankruptsy of the private health insurance industry could use this excerpt from Roqayah Chamseddine’s article, “A Healthcare Industry Built on Premature Death: On the cruelty of private healthcare corporations” at In These Times: “The industry is an architecture of misery, extracting profits from suffering. According to a report published in 2017 by The Doctor-Patient Rights Project, insurance companies “denied treatment coverage to one-in-four (24 percent) patients with a chronic or persistent illness or condition; 41 percent of the patients denied coverage were denied once, while 59 percent were denied multiple times.” Thirty-four percent of patients who had been denied coverage were forced to put off treatment, despite having a chronic illness. An astounding 70 percent of treatments for a chronic illness denied by insurers were for conditions referred to as “serious.” The grim reaper disguises himself in many forms, in this case that of an insurance agent.”

For some revealing numbers about the cost-effectiveness of Democratic health care, check out Ezekiel J. Emanuel’s “Name the much-criticized federal program that has saved the U.S. $2.3 trillion. Hint: it starts with Affordable” at statnews.com, which notes:  “One month after the ACA had passed, the Office of the Actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services projected its financial impact in a report entitled “Estimated Financial Effects of the ‘Patient Protections and Affordable Care Act’, as Amended.” The government’s official record-keeper estimated that health care costs under the ACA would reach $4.14 trillion per year in 2017 and constitute 20.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)…Fast forward to December 2018, when that same office released the official tabulation of health care spending in 2017. The bottom line: cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion…In 2017 alone, health expenditures were $650 billion lower than projected, and kept health care spending under 18 percent of GDP — basically a tad over where it was in 2010 when the ACA was passed.

“It did all of this while expanding health coverage to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans,” Emanuel continues, “Compared to the 2010 projections, the government’s Medicare bill in 2017 was 10 percent ($70 billion) less, and spending for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program was a whopping $250 billion below expectations (partially — but only partially — due to the failure of some states to expand the program). The actuary had predicted in 2010 that employer-sponsored insurance would cost $1.21 trillion in 2017, but it came in at $1.04 trillion, a difference of $170 billion for that year…Put another way, health care spending in 2017 was $2,000 less per person than it was projected to be. And for the 176 million Americans who have private employer-sponsored insurance, their lower premiums averaged just under $1,000 per person…Barack Obama pledged on the campaign trail and as president that he would sign a health care bill that lowered family health insurance premiums by $2,500. Conservative politicians and pundits roundly mocked him. Yet the ACA has more than delivered on that promise, saving about $4,000 per family. And these lower health care premiums probably contribute to the recent rise in workers’ wages.” It’s a good article for De,ms to cite. Emanuel also suggests some specific improvements to make the ACA even more cost-effective.”

Some closing notes on health insurance industry economics from Bob Herman’s “The latest on health care executive pay” at Axios: “The CEOs of 23 prominent health care companies earned more than $632 million in 2018, based on the actual value of cashed-out stock, according Axios’ most recent tally of federal securities documents…The highest-paid pharmaceutical executive so far for 2018 was Pfizer’s outgoing CEO, Ian Read, who made $47 million…The two CEOs with the highest overall pay were still HCA Healthcare’s R. Milton Johnson($109 million) and Intuitive Surgical’s Gary Guthart ($99 million)…Flying under the radar as one of the highest-paid health care executives was Ari Bousbib, who heads the pharmaceutical data and consulting company IQVIA. He made $77 million in 2018 and has made $137 million since 2016, when Quintiles and IMS Health merged to form IQVIA…When Express Scripts CEO Tim Wentworth joined Cigna last year, he took home $9 million in retention pay and agreed to “perpetual” agreements to never divulge anything about the company.”

The intersection of religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects, and I have a good opportunity to write about it this week at New York:

it’s important now and then to challenge the conservative assertion — often shared in ignorance by secular media — that religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, dictates reactionary positions on culture and politics. So I found it interesting and provocative that 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker goes out of his way to talk about his own religious faith:

“[Booker] bids fair to become the most overtly Christian Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson and perhaps even Jimmy Carter, at a time when his party is trending irreligious and the opposition claims a monopoly on all things biblical. What makes Booker different from many left-of-center figures who are “personally” religious is that he purports to be progressive because of his faith, not despite it or incidentally alongside it (e.g., the way John F. Kennedy referred to his own faith as an ‘accident of birth’). If this becomes central to his identity as a presidential wannabe, it will be provocative to both the Christian right and to secular Democrats. And that could be both a benefit and a handicap for Booker ’20.”

As E.J. Dionne observes, there is another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who’s conspicuously talking about his faith, the fast-rising dark horse Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ last week, the 37-year-old from South Bend, Ind., made a modest plea: ‘I do think it’s important for candidates to at least have the option to talk about our faith,’ he said. He specifically targeted the idea that ‘the only way a religious person could enter politics is through the prism of the religious right.’

“An Episcopalian and a married gay man, Buttigieg pointed to the core Christian concept that ‘the first shall be last; the last shall be first.’

“He added: ‘What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.'”

Dionne notes that Booker and Elizabeth Warren share Buttigieg’s willingness to talk about Christian faith. But what makes Mayor Pete especially interesting is that he challenges the idea that Christianity is inherently homophobic in a direct and personal manner. To him, LGBTQ folk aren’t third parties who are the subject of some argument between Christians and progressives: He’s Christian, progressive, and gay. So conservative Christians who like to imply that their more accepting co-religionists aren’t “real” or “orthodox” because they don’t exclude gay people need to be willing to tell Buttigieg he’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. And that may be — and certainly should be — uncomfortable for them.

The Episcopal Church of America accepts gay parishioners, priests, and bishops in churches that recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday and have as authentic a claim to “orthodoxy” as any other church and more than many. So, too, do such solid elements of the American and global religious landscape as the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. Congregationalists), the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the largest gathering in that faith tradition), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ditto), the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and many congregations and whole regions of the United Methodists and my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that embrace gay people as equals in every way. There are many smaller denominations and nondenominational gatherings that do the same. And that’s aside from the millions of individual Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals who reject, quietly or openly, the homophobia of their own denominations.

Any Democratic presidential nominee who can authentically talk about his or her faith would be well advised to do so if only to confound Christian-right leaders and followers who have cast their own lots with the heathenish warlord in the White House. But Pete Buttigieg offers a particularly interesting contrast with the 45th president. Would anyone be confident in accusing this married, churchgoing, Afghanistan veteran of being ethically inferior to Donald Trump? Not without risking hellfire.

The following article by John Russo, visiting researcher at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, co-author of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown, and co-editor with Sherry Linkon of the blog Working-Class Perspectives, is cross-posted from New Geography:

While Ohio has been trending Republican for more than two decades, electing mostly Republican governors and state legislators, it is not yet fully a red state. If not quite color blind, Ohio remains purple.

In November, Ohio voters overwhelmingly supported Republicans for statewide offices, but they also re-elected Democrat Sherrod Brown. In 2008 and 2012, Ohio’s electoral votes went to Barack Obama, but in 2016, they went to Donald Trump. In 2010, John Kasich won the governor’s race, but a year later, voters “overwhelmingly” supported a public referendum overturning Kasich’s attempt to dismantle public sector bargaining in Ohio.

I’ve been among those noting that Democratic strategists and superpacs should not be too quick to write off the state in 2020. This is especially true given the state’s economic woes. Many Ohio workers are paying the costs of Trump’s “false promises” and the failures of former Governor Kasich’s economic programs.

Trump promised to bring manufacturing back to Ohio, insisting that “companies would not be leaving anymore.” He told his supporters in economically devastated Youngstown not to sell their homes because “all those lost jobs are coming back.” The reality is quite different: last week, one of the community’s major employers, the GM Lordstown plant, closed – a loss of some 4500 jobs. Many of those displaced workers supported Trump. Will they remain loyal? There is growing doubt and Trump knows it.

When Fox News suggested that Trump was losing support in the rustbelt and replayed his past comments about Youngstown, Trump almost immediately began tweeting that Lordstown’s UAW Local president, David Green, was not doing his job and demanded that GM president Mary Barra should either “open the plant or sell it to a company that will open it up fast!”

It’s hard to imagine that Trump’s Northeast Ohio base will be able to keep believing that he is making their region great again. The Center for Economic Development at Cleveland State University estimates that the Lordstown closure cut the region’s economic output by $3 billion, including $270 million in wages and another $600 million in added value. The report also estimates a loss of more than $12 million in state and local tax revenue.

A columnist for the Youngstown Vindicator was quick to remind its readers of the difference between Trump’s rhetoric and his policies. In a commentary headed “Thank you, Prez Obama*,” Bertram DeSouza reminded readers that Trump had advocated that GM should be allowed to go bankrupt during the “Great Recession,” criticizing Democrats and President Obama for bailing out the company – a move that kept the Lordstown plant open for another decade.

Trump’s economic failures are echoed on the state level in Kasich’s so-called “Ohio Miracle.” His supply side economics, tax cuts, and austerity measures since 2010 did not jumpstart the state’s economy. Instead, they led to budget shortfalls and spending cuts to programs that helped working families, contributed to income inequality, defunded public education, and shifted tax burdens to local governments. At the same time, Kasich largely ignored the opioid crisis and the state’s deteriorating infrastructure, which is now so bad that new Governor Michael DeWine has had to ask the Republican dominated legislature to increase the gas tax. DeWine hopes to solve budget shortfalls due to tax cuts to the wealthy with a regressive tax that disproportionately impacts working and rural families. Will that draw continued support for Republicans from working-class and rural voters, or will they rebel?

Even if Ohio residents voted with their pocketbooks, Democrats there face real challenges. In 2018, registered Republicans in Ohio outnumbered Democrats by 600,000. Unlike Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which seem to be returning to the Democratic fold after trending to the right in 2016, Ohio is much whiter, older, less educated, and rural. While urban areas have become increasingly blue, the Republicans dominated elsewhere. So any political transformation will not be easy.

As the 2018 midterms make clear, even without Trump on the ballot, Democrats will need to work hard to regain working-class and moderate Republican voters. They need to mobilize, but they also need to appeal to these voters with something more than Trump-bashing. Democrats have to offer a strong economic message with diverse appeal.

They should not simply rely on instrumental or ideological policy considerations as did the Clinton campaign. As Gene Sperling has suggested, political debates should revolve around principles like economic dignity such as “the capacity to care for family,” the “pursuit of potential and purpose,” “economic participation without domination or humiliation.”

If Ohio Democrats want to win back voters who’ve moved to the right in recent years, they can not only draw attention to Republicans’ false promises and economic failures, they can also offer a strong message of economic justice, one that will appeal to voters across the working class. As Sherrod Brown has suggested, the Democrats cannot make the same mistake that they have in the past by not talking to the “working class Americans of all races.”

John Russo is a visiting researcher at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, co-author of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown, and co-editor with Sherry Linkon of the blog Working-Class Perspectives.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Hey Kids–Independents Are Not Independent!

At least the great majority of them. There are a ton of people who will say they’re independent at first blush–more than admit to identifying with the Democrats or Republicans. But, as political scientists established long ago, this large group of independents in deceptive. Overwhelmingly, independents admit they lean toward one party or another and by and large these “leaners” act a great deal like those who admit they are partisans. The truly independent it turns out are a tiny group (see the graphic).

Pew’s new report on this is detailed and up to date. To the points just made:

“An overwhelming majority of independents (81%) continue to “lean” toward either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Among the public overall, 17% are Democratic-leaning independents, while 13% lean toward the Republican Party. Just 7% of Americans decline to lean toward a party, a share that has changed little in recent years. This is a long-standing dynamic that has been the subject of past analyses, both by Pew Research Center and others….

Those who do not lean toward a party – a group that consistently expresses less interest in politics than partisan leaners – were less likely to say they had registered to vote and much less likely to say they voted. In fact, just a third said they voted in the midterms.”

As the Republicans peddle blaming Democrats for hyping the ‘collusion’ meme about Trump and the Russians, at The Nation, Joshua Holland provides a sobering reminder: “We should also acknowledge that no human being on Earth has done more to keep the Trump-Russia narrative in the news than Donald Trump. Not only does he have a compulsive tendency to randomly blurt out “no collusion, no collusion”–a claim he’s made 231 times since mid-2017, according to The Washington Post—he’s also kept Russia front and center by refusing to implement sanctions that Congress passed against Russian actors, repeatedly meeting with Vladimir Putin with no advisers or note-takers present, and arguing that Russia was within its rights to annex Crimea. When the president of the United States tells reporters that the president of Russia has “probably” ordered assassinations and poisonings, “but I rely on them; it’s not in our country,” that’s objectively newsworthy.”

Sean Illing’s “Does AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller report “exonerate” Trump? I asked 15 legal experts” at vox.com includes this observation from Notrte Dame law proff Jimmy Gurule about whether or not Mueller actually did his job: “The order appointing Mueller to investigate whether Trump or members of his presidential campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 presidential election also authorized Mueller to investigate any crimes arising from the Russia investigation, which includes whether Trump engaged in obstruction of justice…By failing to reach a conclusion on that matter, Mueller failed to fulfill his mandate. Furthermore, referring the obstruction of justice issue to Barr, who had decided that Trumphad not obstructed justice prior to being appointed to serve as attorney general, was a serious mistake and undermines the public’s confidence in the outcome.”

Also at The Nation, John Nichols shares a couple of the better quotes so far about the Mueller report, which could be useful soundbites for Democrats: “Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation into allegations of wrongdoing by the president and those around him was summed up by House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin. “I don’t want to read the Cliff notes version of Macbeth,” observed Raskin. “I want to read Macbeth itself.”…Barr’s assessment is suspect. Indeed, as former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams observed Monday, relying on Barr’s summary is “like having your brother summarize your report card to your parents.”

As for the significant political fallout of Barr’s letter, Nate Silver opines at FiveThirtyEight that, “where this will help Trump the most is not with traditional swing voters but with Trump-skeptical Republicans. Even Republicans who don’t love Trump tend to be critical of the news media, and they’d already thought that the media was devoting too much attention to Russia-related matters. If the investigation now looks to them like a wild goose chase — or a “WITCH HUNT,” to use Trump’s preferred term — it will create greater solidarity between them and the rest of the Republican Party. While this isn’t a huge group of voters, every little bit helps in an election that could shape up as another 50-50 affair.”

Ed Kilgore adds at New York Magazine that “You could also argue that Democrats will now find it easier to stress policy differences with the president and his party. Even if Trump was (to consider a laughable hypothetical) a model of probity, his own policy agenda, his hostility to deeply held national values, his party’s deeply unpopular long-range goals, and his sheer recklessness would all make him vulnerable to a reelection defeat…It should also not be forgotten that all the exultant raging from Trump and his supporters right now will free Democrats of any illusion that 2020 will be a cakewalk. With a Trump reelection now looking significantly more feasible than it did just last week, Democrats may begin considering in painful detail the catastrophic consequences of a second Trump term, and adjust the tone and conduct of their own nomination contest accordingly. The wolf is now most definitely at the door, howling in anticipation of a rich feast that his intended victims can no longer risk serving up via damaging internecine conflict.”

According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), “A few months ago, Republicans effectively stole the elections for 16 seats in Congress and 7 state legislative chambers….That’s the startling conclusion of a brand new analysis by the Associated Press, which found that Republican gerrymandering allowed Republicans to win 16 more congressional seats and 7 more state legislative majorities than they should have based on their vote share…In state House elections…as many as seven chambers otherwise could have flipped to Democrats.” The DLCC urges contributions to help take back the stolen seats via actblue.com.

From an Abstract of “Laboratories of Democracy Reform: State Constitutions and Partisan Gerrymandering” by Samuel Wang, Richad Ober and Ben Williams at The Social Science Research Networ (SSRN): “Here we argue that the Court has successfully laid out several intellectual paths toward effective regulation – but that the best route for applying such reasoning goes not through federal law, but state constitutions…We argue that such a federalist approach offers the most promising route to remedying partisan gerrymandering in America. All fifty state constitutions contain rights and protections which could be used to bring a partisan gerrymandering claim. These include analogues of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, guarantees of pure, free, and fair elections, and redistricting-specific guarantees such as geographic compactness. Because each of these protections involves either individualized or associational harms, the Roberts and Kagan opinions offer state courts persuasive guidance for how to analyze their own constitutional provisions to a partisan gerrymandering claim. Advancing such claims on a state by state basis allows courts to adapt the reasoning to local circumstances. Taken together, our arguments describe a federalist approach for eliminating partisan gerrymandering, a major bug in American democracy.”

In addition to legal battles against gerrymandering, “Another approach that reformers could take is to turn away from the courts altogether and engage with partisan gerrymandering in the system that made it: electoral politics,” writes Amelia Thomson-Deveaux at FiveThirtuyEight. “In the 2018 midterms, voters in four states approved ballot measures creating independent redistricting commissions, which can make elections more competitive…However, not all states permit voters to put initiatives directly on the ballot. And as Tokaji told me, a well-funded opposition can be deadly to a ballot initiative campaign, which means that bipartisan support is key. “If voters are confused about a ballot initiative, they tend to vote no,” he said. “And it’s not hard to confuse people if you have a lot of money.”

Here’s some interesting insights from “The progressive base is more pragmatic than you might think: Door knockers know that on the issues, Democratic voters are far from uniform. They’re working with that” by Lara Putnam at vox.com: “The actual activist base that made these and hundreds of similar campaigns nationwidehappen has little overlap with the metropolitan millennial socialists getting all the press. The people doing the work on the ground are disproportionately middle-aged or older, female, and unlikely to tweet. What they do use their smartphones for is canvassing: individual users of the miniVAN app, which gives campaign field operations access to the shared Democratic voter database, tripled from 150,000 in 2016 to 460,000 in 2018. Field directors’ estimates of the portion of their canvassers who were women range from 60 to 80 percent. (Several noted a surge of younger and more male volunteers in the final days, joining the older women who had been there from the start.)…That’s quite a different perspective than assuming the nation is full of swing voters just waiting for the low-tax, low-ambition centrist of their dreams. But it’s also far distant from the claim that America is full of passionate Leftist non-voters who have waited years for the revolutionary platform that will pull them to the polls…The actually-door-knocking Democratic base knows better. Unlike the political hobbyists burning up the internet with hot takes, they have a hard-won and deeply pragmatic understanding of the regional electorates around them, in all their messy contradictions.”