I’m probably not alone in feeling ambivalent about Senator Jim Webb’s announced retirement from the U.S. Senate. I had already given up on the notion of him as a promising southern Democratic leader. He had made it pretty clear that he just didn’t have the fire in the belly to become a major player in Democratic politics. Webb always seemed a bit stiff in the limelight, more the introverted writer than the exuberant public figure.
A decorated veteran and policy wonk, Webb had the creds and brains to do more. He was progressive on economic issues, and I was hoping at one point that he could help awaken a progressive populist spirit among southern voters. I liked the way he stood up to Bush on Iraq, and his response to Bush’s ’07 SOTU got well-deserved plaudits. He took some heat from women activists for his comments in another statement about women in combat, and Latinos, regarding his hard line on immigration issues. Perhaps he could have healed those wounds, but it’s all moot now.
I think Dems have a good chance of holding Webb’s seat. Polls, schmolls, if the economy improves significantly, Tim Kaine, Terry McAuliffe or Tom Periello could beat George Allen, who faces a bruising primary battle with a tea party candidate. Of the three Dems, Kaine has the stronger track record, cash and VA know-how, but he has made “not interested” noises. McAuliffe has dough, but lacks charisma, though Allen is not exactly flush in that department either.
Whoever Dems nominate, it should be a marquee Senate race. Dems need this seat, especially given the GOP advantage in having to defend far fewer Senate seats in ’12. The “upper south” (Va and NC) is critical for Dem hopes in ’12, and this seat could be the lynchpin.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
After a good quarter-century run, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has announced it will close its doors this month. Its original mission has long been accomplished: This small but famous–or, depending on your orientation, infamous–organization was founded in the wake of the 1984 Walter Mondale debacle by two House Democratic Caucus staffers named Al From and Will Marshall, who enlisted an assortment of elected officials with names like Clinton, Gore, Gephardt, Nunn, Babbitt, and Robb. Its goal was to lay the “message” and policy groundwork for a successful Democratic presidential run, at a time when Republicans were said to have an “Electoral College lock.” With an eight-year Clinton presidency on the books and Obama looking pretty well positioned for reelection, it’s past time to conclude that the lock has been picked.
In fact, there’s a case to be made that the DLC’s immediate raison d’etre was fulfilled in 1992, when Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush. At that point, the council had already evolved from a clubhouse for elected officials disgruntled with the ineptitude of the national party to an idea factory for its prize pupil and tutor (Clinton). Having decided to sojourn on, it became a well-established political fixture that managed a distinctive ideological brand while occasionally engaging in high-profile factional battles with “the Left,” a term it often applied to orthodox liberals, as well as antiwar activists and various interest and identity groups. Sometimes, the DLC even disagreed with Clinton, as it did on HillaryCare (supporting, instead, an approach to health care reform close to what Barack Obama offered upon becoming president).
After Bill Clinton left office, however, they–perhaps I should say “we,” since I served as a policy director there for about a decade before I left in 2006, and I’m still a part-time fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), originally the DLC’s think tank–clearly experienced something of an identity crisis. Beginning in 2000, the DLC determined to rebuild its bench and recapture its original role as a home for non-Washington Democrats left behind by the national party. It engaged in an immensely useful, but not very visible, effort to build a network of state and local elected officials, focused on training and fostering policy cross-pollination among state legislators, mayors, county officials, and sub-gubernatorial statewide officeholders. That network has a pretty impressive alumni list, ranging from Obama cabinet members Tom Vilsack, Kathleen Sebelius, and Janet Napolitano to new Senator Chris Coons and California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. Yet, with “New Democratic” ideas permeating almost the entire Democratic Party, it was clear that the DLC was searching for new ways to be useful, if not a new rationale.
Strangely, just as the DLC was reorienting itself away from Washington, the myth that the DLC served as a shadowy and very powerful link between corporate lobbyists and Beltway Democrats began to grow and grow–fueled by a series of noisy verbal joists between DLC leaders and Howard Dean during the 2004 presidential cycle, followed by extended cold warfare with progressive bloggers in the aftermath of that election. None of this had much to do with what the DLC was doing every day, but it sure got a lot of attention, most of it negative, and preempted any progressive appreciation for the DLC’s policy work or its regular savaging of Bush-era Republicans.
In truth, the DLC was never the ideological or political monolith that its enemies–or even its friends–sometimes imagined. Yes, it was partially financed by corporate money (mainly because corporations wanted to hedge their partisan bets, and because the DLC was at least friendly to them), and it undoubtedly went far over the top in celebrating the “New Economy,” along with the deregulatory demands of the tech industry and its financial allies. But it also pioneered attacks on “corporate welfare” in the federal budget and tax code, opposed state-level tax giveaways as an economic-development tool, and opposed most of corporate America’s legislative priorities (other than on trade policy), most notably the Bush tax cuts and the health care industry’s cherished Medicare prescription drug benefit. Yes, the DLC fought with the labor movement over trade policy, but it also supported the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which could not have pleased corporate donors, and, on one occasion, PPI’s Will Marshall co-authored an economic policy manifesto with American Prospect editor Bob Kuttner. And yes, the DLC often scourged Democrats for appearing to be weak on defense, and it became too closely associated with the Iraq war (though it quickly split with George W. Bush’s policies on Iraq after the invasion). But DLC founder Sam Nunn led the Democratic opposition to Operation Desert Storm, and many elected officials associated with the DLC opposed the 2003 war from the get-go. The DLC’s reputation for “Republican Lite” policy ideas was never that well-merited: At a time when these ideas were outside even the Democratic mainstream, the group came out for public financing of congressional elections and GLBT rights.

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It’s been obvious for a while that whereas Republicans are a bit depressed about their 2012 presidential field, they are very excited about the not-ready-for-presidential-prime-time folk available to fill out the ticket.
Politico’s Alexander Burns wrote about Republican veep-love today:

Even if the class of 2010 is not yet ready to run for president, the range of new officeholders elected in just the past two years assures that the Republican nominee will be able to offset virtually any perceived shortcoming with a running mate who compensates for it.
A candidate light on federal experience could tap Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, perhaps the best-credentialed Republican in the country as a former congressman, budget director and trade representative. A nominee who’s viewed as too conservative could pick a governor from a state Obama won in 2009, like New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell or Michigan’s Rick Snyder.
For a candidate who struggles to connect with women voters, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire or Govs. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Susana Martinez of New Mexico might help broaden the GOP’s reach. Martinez, along with Rubio and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, could help a nominee who’s unappealing to Hispanics.
And if the nominee has trouble firing up conservatives, nearly all the previously mentioned names would likely do the trick, as would a prominent state leader such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Early ticket-making is all good clean fun, and much of it is designed not to strengthen the 2012 drive for the presidency, but to position someone to be the Big Dog in 2016 if Obama wins a second term.
But I hope Republicans take at least a moment to think about their recent history of really bad running-mate selections. Forget about Sarah Palin, if you can, and look at the last five Republicans who were actually elected vice president.
Their names are Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush, Spiro T. Agnew, and Richard Nixon. By my count, that’s two pols who resigned in disgrace, one who became a national laughingstock, one who became a national pariah. Daddy Bush was obviously the respectable exception to the rule.
But one out of five is actually pretty bad. Republicans need to a bit more patriotic in their ticket-making. It can matter.

Yesterday I talked about the more-or-less official beginnng of the 2012 presidential cycle, which will formally get under way in Iowa on February 6, 2012 (if not earlier due to scheduling changes). Interestingly enough, one of Iowa’s better-known political writers, former state GOP political director Craig Robinson, at his The Iowa Republican site, has already gone to the trouble of ranking ten likely candidates in term of their current strength in his state. He refuses to rank Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin on the questionable ground that their refusal to appear at this week’s CPAC conference in Washington indicates they are not planning to run for president. We’ll see about that!
But the candidates Robinson does rank do not necessarily come out in the order you might expect. He has Newt Gingrich topping the list, thanks to his many, many years of speaking in Iowa and his grasp of the full range of issues. His second-place candidate is none other than Michelle Bachmann, thanks to her friendship with Iowa congressman Steve King, her close ties to the religious right, and her fundraising prowess.
Robinson has this to say about Tim Pawlenty, who has probably done the most to create a campaign infrastructure in Iowa:

Some believe that Pawlenty is Mitt Romney without the flip-flops and the albatross known as Romneycare. Pawlenty’s problem is that he’s probably going to be a lot of people’s second choice. For that to benefit him, he needs to see some big-name candidates drop out because, obviously, if people’s first choice is still on the ballot, that’s who they will be voting for.

He ranks Mitt Romney fourth on grounds that his frequent hints of less than full commitment to participation in the Iowa Caucuses will make it very difficult for him to attract and keep local support. That’s no problem for fifth ranking Rick Santorum, who is already spending lots of time in Iowa, and is well positioned to attract hard-core social conservative support if Huckabee and Palin don’t run.
Interestingly, Robinson ranks national pundit heartthrobs Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels and John Thune seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, ahead only of talk-show host Herman Cain.
I have no idea if Craig Robinson’s take is accurate, and he may have his own axes to grind. But to tell the truth, I’d trust his opinion on Iowa more than that of DC speculators who haven’t had shoes ruined by the muck of the Iowa State Fair.

I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.
As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.
But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:
First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.
Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.
Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.
Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.
And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.

So it’s officially no longer too early to speculate about the 2012 presidential election cycle, or wonder about the late-to-develop Republican field. Why? Because the Iowa Caucuses are currently scheduled to take place on February 6, 2012, less than a year from now. It’s always possible, of course, that the date could be moved up, as occurred in 2008, if some states again defy national party rules and try to threaten the privileged status of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the four states authorized to hold nominating contests prior to March 1.
You may have noticed that the red-hot blogospheric talk of just a couple of months ago about a left-bent primary challenge to Barack Obama has almost entirely subsided, as some of us suggested it would.
But why have no Republican candidates formally announced candidacies, or even (with the exception of obscure talk show host Herman Cain) set up exploratory committees?
One of the best of the Beltway Insider pundits, the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, offers an explanation today, based on conversations with alleged GOP movers-and-shakers. I have to say, two factors he cites aren’t really factors at all: the need to raise lots of money (which has little to do with when a candidate begins building an organization in places like Iowa where money is far from the most important issue) and the poor historical track record of early announcers (a double-loaded statistic if ever there was one: strong front-runners, who often tend to win, have no reason to declare candidacies early, but there’s not a strong front-runner this time around).
Cillizza’s other two explanations are more interesting. One is the theory that internet-based fundraising and organizational tools have condensed the amount of time necessary to mount an effective presidential campaign. That may be true, but the fact remains that the pioneer in using these tools, Barack Obama, announced his exploratory committee, and was assumed to be a full-fledged candidate, in January of 2007. Is Haley Barbour (the Great White Hope of GOP insiders at the moment) really going to be a social media sensation later this year? Doesn’t seem likely.
The final factor cited by Cillizza is the overriding shadow of Sarah Palin:

The former Alaska governor is a prime mover in the contest; she acts and everyone else reacts. If she is in the race, it fundamentally alters the winning calculus for everyone from a front-running Romney to a lesser-known candidate such as former senator Rick Santorum. If Palin is out of the race, the contest is even more wide open – a no-go decision could expand the field as more ambitious pols see more of a path to the nomination.

Interesting, isn’t it? The political figure whose national approval ratings have been sinking like a stone, who has been losing to Barack Obama in general election trial heat polls in states like South Carolina, remains the decisive force in shaping the 2012 field. This could not be good sign for the GOP, regardless of what St. Joan of the Tundra decides to do.

Conservatives are about to launch their full-court press on budget cuts. But their problem is, the cuts they want are the diametrical opposites of the cuts the public supports, — and vice versa. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

…Their proposed cuts leave the military largely untouched while taking a meat axe to nonmilitary discretionary spending–that is, spending on areas such as education, energy, the environment, and poverty. As usual, conservative priorities are backward when compared to public opinion.
In a fascinating new survey the Program for Public Consultation conducted, respondents were asked to make their own cuts (or increases) to a projected discretionary budget for the year 2015 with a $625 billion deficit. The top three areas for cuts were defense ($109 billion average cut), intelligence agencies ($13 billion), and Iraq/Afghanistan ($13 billion)–the very areas conservatives are going light on.

As for the budget items the conservatives want to eviscerate,

On the other hand, the public wanted to see spending increases in a number of other areas. The top four areas for increases are exactly the kinds of programs conservatives are ready to cut deeply in their current antispending frenzy: job training ($5 billion average increase), higher education ($5 billion), renewable energy ($3 billion), and elementary and secondary education ($3 billion).

It looks like Democrats who hold the line on social spending while cutting the military budget will be on solid ground with their constituents, while conservatives who stand for the reverse will have some explaining to do.

This post by Democratic strategist and TDS advisory board member and contributor Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from The HuffPo.
The progressive movement is at a challenging but fascinating time in our country’s history. Even when the Democrats had a newly-elected president who ran on a platform of big change, 60 votes in the Senate, a big margin of control in the House and the most progressive Speaker in history, we still had trouble getting big changes passed. We accomplished some important things, but not nearly as much or as progressively as we had hoped. Now, with a Republican House, only 53 Democratic senators, and a president who has signaled he wants to move more to the center, progressives have even less power than before.
There’s one other factor that even this old-school, lefty populist needs to acknowledge at this moment in our political history: While most voters remain very angry at Wall Street, health insurance companies, big businesses that keep outsourcing jobs, and other corporate special interests, they also are very angry with a government that seems pretty dysfunctional. Swing voters in particular are generally tired of traditional political arguments, and just want political leaders who are going to be very pragmatic about actually delivering jobs and other tangible economic benefits. In this environment, progressives should not shy away from making populist arguments, but need to temper that populism with a pragmatic message about helping small businesses and manufacturers create more jobs.

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In this phony-war phase of the 2012 presidential cycle, when all things are theoretically possible, ’tis the season for crackpot theories on how the Republican nomination process can become something different from the unedifying spectacle that is likely to unfold. The venerable David Broder has put in his bid with a column suggesting that GOP governors could conspire to run as favorite sons in their various primaries in order to kill off the ostensible front-runners and produce a dark horse nominee. It’s not entirely clear who the beneficiary of this conspiracy would be, though Broder mentions Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty as possibilities.
Now you have to understand that David Broder has conducted a career-long love affair with governors, and has always looked to the GOP governors as a corrective to the ideological zaniness of their party as a whole. But still, the “favorite-son” scenario is beyond far-fetched, and as both Jonathan Bernstein and Josh Putnam have observed, it seems to reflect nostalgia for the days before voters were given a guaranteed role in the nomination process–sort of like the enthusiasm in some Democratic circles in 2008 for a “brokered convention.”
And that’s the very specific reason Broder’s scenario ain’t happening: Republicans voters would have to go along with it, and there’s no particular reason to think they would spurn the importunings of actual candidates in order to promote some backroom deal. Consider the governor who (as Broder notes) would have to put the conspiracy in motion, Iowa’s Terry Branstad. You think Iowa’s conservative activists, who aren’t crazy about Branstad to begin with, would support an effort by him to neuter their hard-earned right to help pick an actual presidential nominee? Ask Democrat Tom Vilsack how well the “favorite-son” thing worked out for him in 2008, when he was actually making a serious run for president.
If Republican governors want to have a collective impact on the presidential nomination they could all get together and endorse someone, much as they did in 2000 when governors were part of the massive establishment infrastructure for George W. Bush. But there’s the rub: there is no such consensus, which is one reason why the 2012 Republican field is such a mess.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
TO: GENE SPERLING
FROM: BILL GALSTON
SUBJ: INFRASTRUCTURE
It feels like a lifetime ago that you and I shared a windowless broomcloset in the West Wing. I assume your digs are more spacious and better illuminated now. In any event, congratulations on returning to a position you occupied with such distinction in the Clinton administration.
The purpose of this memo is to inform you–in case you don’t already know–that hell has frozen over: Late last week, Tom Donohue and Rich Trumka issued a joint statement applauding the president’s call for increased infrastructure investment and urging both Democrats and Republicans to support it. If there was ever a cause whose time has come, this is it. It has to be done big, and it has to be done right–big because it’s not just another program, but a paradigm change; right because it won’t work if it sinks into the morass of the congressional appropriations process, out-of-date formula allocations, and logrolling project selections. Let me explain–briefly, because I know how busy you are right now.
Despite short-term gains, the consumer-driven model of growth on which we’ve relied for decades has hit a wall. We need to shift from spending to saving, from consumption to production, and from deficit-financed imports to aggressive export promotion. We need to invest in the basic building blocks of productivity. And we need to focus on generating good jobs that can’t be exported.
Infrastructure investment can contribute to all these objectives, and the need is great. Because we’ve neglected our infrastructure for more than three decades, the best estimates suggest that we face an accumulated gap–between what we should have invested and what we actually did–of more than $2 trillion. Anyone who has traveled outside the United States in recent years knows that we no longer have a world-class infrastructure. And time-wasting, productivity-sapping bottlenecks are building up, especially in transportation.
During his 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama advanced an innovative idea to deal with this situation: a national infrastructure bank, which would mobilize private money to finance large, worthy, long-term infrastructure projects that are capable of turning a profit in the free market. In his 2011 State of the Union, President Obama reopened this issue without specifically mentioning the bank. Now is the time to flesh it out and hit it hard.
By this I mean two things. First, get beyond what Hollywood calls the elevator speech, and send Congress a framework for actual legislation. Bills introduced in both the House and Senate within the past few years could serve as a useful baseline. And there are lots of outside experts who would be willing to help out if needed.
Second, specifically include the infrastructure bank in the president’s forthcoming FY2012 budget proposal. You know as well as anyone that if it’s not in the budget, it’s not real. (Remember welfare reform in President Clinton’s first budget proposal?)
Of course, seed money for the bank is going to cost something. And given the rising pressure for fiscal restraint, you’re not in a position to significantly increase spending in order to stand it up. So consider redirecting the necessary amounts from existing infrastructure projects, which neither leverage private capital nor endure the rigors of a market test. As you do, make it clear that the bank would be a public-private partnership, not a government-run enterprise, and would enjoy neither explicit nor implicit public guarantees. If investors aren’t willing to assume market risks, the projects in question shouldn’t be funded: period, full stop.
A final thought. Programmatic changes are sand castles on the beach, easily washed away when the tide changes. All the heavy lifting you did in the 1990s to turn deficits into surpluses went for naught as soon as a new administration took power. As FDR understood, institutional innovations fortify long-term policies against short-term political shifts–and all of the investments President Obama has already made in the economy could easily be defunded. An infrastructure bank, however, would institutionalize the development of public goods in a way that simply passing a budget cannot. And it would be large first step toward the reformed governance that President Obama has so forcefully advocated.