Take a little break from mid term mania and check out Richard Kirsch’s post “What Progressives Did Right to Win Healthcare” at The Nation. While most of the reportage on the struggle to enact health care reform focused on the legislative lobbying, public opinion trends and policy analysis, Hirsch provides an insightful overview of the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition-building effort that was instrumental in passing HCR, and reveals some organizing techniques that should be transferable to other progressive movements. Hirsch’s post covers 10 aspects of the campaign, a few of which are presented here:

A detailed campaign plan: The HCAN Organizing Committee wrote an 865-page campaign plan incorporating: grassroots and netroots organizing; communications through traditional, paid and new media; coalition building including creating a new organization of small businesses; fundraising; and a new round of public opinion research focused on generating anger at the health insurance industry.
Resources to win: If there’s a single hero in this story, it’s Gara LaMarche, the President of Atlantic Philanthropies, which made a $10 million grant to HCAN early in 2008, assuring that we would have enough resources to launch the campaign in the crucial months before the 2008 election. The $51 million amount we raised between 2008 and 2010 from Atlantic and other funders, including our Steering Committee, was sufficient to run a campaign that placed us at the center of reform efforts.
Building on established progressive capacity: Rather than hiring outside organizers, HCAN built local coalitions in forty-four states, through three established networks: USAction, the Campaign for Community Change and ACORN. We funded seventy-five organizers who coordinated the work of paid and volunteer organizers from the local affiliates of our steering committee members and from other organizations that made up our 1,100-member coalition. HCAN’s online staff, working with MoveOn and others, added a huge Internet presence.
Local coalitions held thousands of public meetings and press events with members of Congress and made hundreds of visits to their offices. Regular call-in days generated hundreds of thousands of calls and faxes. When the Tea Party attacks came in early August, members of Congress called on the HCAN coalitions for help. While our response didn’t make as dramatic press coverage as the angry Tea Partiers, the truth is that the HCAN coalition, working with Organizing for America, turned out as many, and sometimes two to three times as many, people as the Tea Partiers, to Democratic Town Halls around the country during the three weeks before Labor Day. Grassroots organizing continued throughout the campaign, with candlelight vigils outside the homes of wavering members of Congress and thank-you events for members of Congress when they returned home after voting for the bill.

Hirsch’s account shows how progressives can overcome disadvantages like a 24-7 attack from right-wing media by taking a long-term view, refusing to get discouraged, thinking big and outworking the opposition. It’s an inspiring story, and one that contains lessons for progressives about the power of vision and commitment.

One of the most important conservative memes this year has been that public employees (particularly at the state and local levels of government) have fattened themselves on high salaries and rich benefit packages, which means it ought to be easy to dismiss state and local fiscal crises and shrink government generally without any real pain for real (you know, non-public-sector-employed) Americans.
There’s only a grain of truth, and a lot of nonsense, in this claim, and the grain of truth involves highly valued public employees like cops and firefighters–and occasionally teachers–who are fortunate enough to benefit from collective bargaining rights and union representation.
Jon Cohn of The New Republic has a good rundown on the facts on this topic, including this passage:

While raw statistics show that public employees get more compensation than private employees doing comparable work, research that adjusts for variables like education has suggested otherwise. Earlier this year, a study with such adjustments by economists Keith Bender and John Heywood concluded that compensation for local and state workers was, on average, 6.8 to 7.4 percent lower than compensation for comparable private sector workers.
Also, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, many public employees don’t get Social Security. Overall, he says, “most public sector pensions do not provide retirees with an especially high standard of living.” Exceptions to this rule frequently include firefighters and police, particularly in New York. Then again, they risk their lives to protect the rest of us from lethal threats, which is more than you can say for CEOs like the former telecom executive who in 2007 retired with a $159 million benefit package.

The broader point, as Cohn makes clear, is that conservatives are trying to embitter struggling private-sector workers by making them resent struggling public-sector workers. If there is a “gap” between the economic security they enjoy, then it’s only logical to ask if that’s the result of public-sector employee luxury or private-sector employee impoverishment:

To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?
I would suggest it’s more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement–one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market–used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably. You might not be rich, but you wouldn’t be poor, either.
Unions, whatever their flaws, have delivered on that for their members. (In theory, retirement was supposed to rest on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions, and private benefits.) But unions have not been able to secure similar benefits for everybody else.

So let’s not just assume a race-to-the-bottom where all middle-class folk are expected to struggle is the natural state of things, particularly when the very wealthy are obtaining an ever-increasing share of America’s wealth and other blessings.

As Congress prepares for a big debate on the fate of the Bush tax cuts, there’s an internal debate breaking out in progressive circles on how to deal with tax rates on the very wealthy, not just those currently in the top income tax bracket.
This debate-within-the-debate is being driven by two external data points: First, the fact that income inequality in the United States during the last two (or arguably, the last four) decades has especially manifested itself in the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder; and second, the fact that higher taxes for “millionaires” consistently polls well.
James Suroweicki explains the first point nicely in a recent column in The New Yorker:

Between 2002 and 2007…the bottom ninety-nine per cent of incomes grew 1.3 per cent a year in real terms–while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one per cent accounted for two-thirds of all income growth in those years. People in the ninety-fifth to the ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one per cent has seen its share of national income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three per cent of the nation’s total income. Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very, very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.
The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account.

Thus, framing the tax progressivity question as mainly involving rates for those with incomes well below super-rich levels misses the mark, and, as both Surowiecki and (for months now) Jonathan Chait have pointed out, misses a political opportunity associated with a widespread popular conviction that the very wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
In terms of the stakes involved in proposing something like a “millionaire’s tax” (essentially a new and higher top rate on very high incomes), Nate Silver has shown at FiveThirtyEight that it could indeed raise some pretty serious federal revenues.
But the political bonus of a “millionaire’s tax” proposal goes beyond the numbers: it would help expose the really dramatic gap between the two parties on the whole concept of progressive taxation.
After all, even as Democrats debate making federal income taxes more progressive, a growing and increasingly dominant segment of Republicans favor “flattening” tax rates to eliminate progressivity, exempting capital and corporate income from taxation, and/or shifting taxation away from income altogether and focusing it on consumption. And even for those Republicans who don’t embrace radical tax proposals, the “thinking” behind them is the rationale for the vague support for high-end or business tax cuts that’s almost universal in today’s GOP, in growing contradiction with conservative demands for debt-and-deficit reduction.
Anything that makes this contrast more vivid, on terms supported by big majorities of the American public, is a pretty good idea for Democrats. So I’d strongly recommend that in the debate over extending or eliminating Bush’s tax cuts for the top bracket, proposals to crate a new bracket for the “super-rich” ought to become an essential ingredient.

In the aftermath of the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 Dems widely bewailed the superior “message discipline” of the Republicans. The GOP was credited with successfully guiding its members to focus on a small number of clear slogans and themes while Democrats tied themselves in knots.
In consequence, one key theme of a recent strategy meeting about the coming elections between Senate Democrats and senior staff and the Obama White House was that “there will be intense emphasis on keeping all candidates, offices and parties coordinated on the same message”
To reinforce this, wallet cards with the core Democratic message were distributed:

Democrats are on the side of the middle class. We are fighting to cut taxes for small businesses and middle-class Americans, end tax cuts for CEOs who ship American jobs overseas, and create clean energy jobs that can’t be outsourced.
Republicans are on the side of Wall Street bankers and CEOs. They support tax cuts for corporations who ship jobs overseas. But their economic policies failed under President Bush. Millions of people lost their jobs, the deficit exploded and the middle class got hammered. Now they want to return to the same failed policies of the past. We can’t afford to go back.

While most democrats would agree with these statements, however, the simple fact is that they do not constitute a message campaign – they are, at best, an executive summary or thumbnail statement of a message campaign. Even when supplemented with bullet point descriptions of key Democratic policies (“end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”, “defend social security”) they still have almost none of the personal engagement or emotional power that a properly designed message campaign is expected to contain.
A serious political message campaign has to have at least four key elements – a narrative, a metaphor, a “case” and a rallying cry.

• The narrative tells a story that defines the “good guys” and “bad guys”
• The metaphor creates a vivid, visual image
• The “case” presents the core argument
• The rallying cry delivers the call to action

Let’s look at this year’s Republican message campaign to see how these four elements are handled:

• The Narrative — Barack Obama is a radical with a mysterious past. He was elected by a fluke and quickly began attacking basic American values and institutions. His actions have generated a vast grass-roots rebellion of ordinary Americans.
• The Metaphor – organized around the metaphor of the “tea party”. This highly visual symbolism pictures conservative Republicans as the modern embodiment of the original colonial patriots and contrasts them with an image of Obama as a would-be dictator like Hitler or Stalin.
• The Case — the struggle over Health Care Reform — both the conservative interpretation of the provisions of the act and their perception of the process by which it was passed — provide the overarching “proof” of the crypto-totalitarian and anti-democratic nature of the Administration’s agenda.
• The rallying cry — “this election will be the epic, decisive battle that stops the liberal/socialist juggernaut in its tracks”.

Most Dems first reaction to this outline will be a sense of frustration that they have been offered nothing comparably compact and organized as an alternative Democratic message campaign. Quite the contrary, in the major pro-Democratic political magazines, websites and forums, the majority of the commentary has revolved around a heated debate over the narrative of progressive “disappointment” or even “betrayal” by the Obama administration.
But, in fact, there is actually a very solid and workable Democratic message campaign, one that is “hiding in plain sight” as it were. It is being presented in the partisan speeches Obama has begun to deliver across the country. Those speeches contain all four of the key elements of a political message campaign that are described above.

Read more…

Tennessee’s primary yesterday featured a bunch of wild Republican primaries in which the accustomed dominance of the hard-core Right wasn’t always confirmed. In the gubernatorial contest, Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam smoked two rivals, congressman Zach Wamp and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who constantly warned he wasn’t conservative enough. Wamp tried to mobilize the Christian Right behind his candidacy, while Ramsey spent much of drive stretch on gun ranges.
In Wamp’s district, the endorsee of both the Club for Growth and the Family Research Council, former state GOP chair Robin Smith, lost narrowly to talk-show host Chuck Fleischmann.
In the open 6th District, perhaps the state’s most hateful contest, conservative activist Lou Ann Zelenik tried to make the race about the awful specter of Sharia Law being imposed on the good Christian folk of Tennessee via a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro. But she would up running a close second to state senator Diane Black in a result largely dictated by geography.
And in Jim Cooper’s 5th district, candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin (CeCe Heil) and Mike Huckabee (Jeff Hartline) lost to businessman David Hall.
To be very clear, it’s not as though moderation is breaking out in TN GOP circles. The 8th district landslide winner, Stephen Fincher, was endorsed by right-to-life and gun rights groups. Black’s campaign web page includes a long paen to constitutional literalism and the 10th amendment. Hall’s talks about his determination to fight “socialistic” government. And Fleischmann benefitted from a Huckabee endorsement and the services of Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, Chip Saltsman.
Haslam’s a big-time right-to-lifer who spent a good part of the campaign denying he had any interest in creating an income tax and trying to prove his gun-nut bona fides (he got into trouble in Knoxville once by supporting a gun buy-back program).
But all in all, it wasn’t the best week for those who think the GOP is a dangerously liberal institution that needs a hard shove to the Right, what with Mike Cox and Pete Hoekstra losing in MI, Todd Tiahrt losing in KS, and now Wamp, Ramsey, Smith, Zelenik, Hartline and Heil all bombing in TN. The Republican Party remains right-bent, but it’s good to know that its primary voters don’t always pull the lever for the shrillest, angriest candidate available.

Yesterday J.P. Green did a post on the Missouri “ObamaCare referendum,” noting its rather tilted character and echoing Jon Chait’s endorsement of a progressive way around the unpopularity of an individual mandate for the purchase of health insurance, as designed by Paul Starr.
But there’s another aspect of the Missouri vote that ought to be mentioned: the individual mandate that was the target of the the state law ratified by Proposition C wasn’t just a feature of “ObamaCare.” It was also a central element in RomneyCare, Massachusetts’ pioneer health reform effort. And amidst all the rationalizations that Romney has offered in an effort to distinguish RomneyCare from ObamaCare, he hasn’t repudiated his support for an individual mandate.
Even if you don’t think the Missouri vote was a fair representation of overall public opinion in the Show-Me State (and it’s dubious on that front, given the low turnout and the 2-1 Republican tilt among priimary voters), it was sure a good measure of how politically active Republicans feel. And a shudder had to shake Romney when he heard about it, since it’s very unlikely the 2012 Caucus-goers in next-door Iowa are going to feel any warmer towards the individual mandate seventeen months from now, when they once again pass judgment on Mitt’s presidential ambitions.

This item, by TDS Contributor Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from The Huffington Post.
To hear some pundits tell it, the outcome of the midterms is preordained disaster for Democrats. Not so fast. Much depends on how Democratic candidates frame their efforts – and how Progressives in general frame the political debate over the next three months.
Here are nine keys to Democratic success:
1) The election narrative — the election must be framed as part of a struggle between everyday Americans and corporate special interests.
Everyday Americans believe the economy is a disaster and the country is on the wrong track. They won’t change that view until the economy actually improves.
The Republicans are doing their best to pin the blame on the leadership of Democrats. Democrats are absolutely correct to frame the election as a choice between moving America forward and going back to the failed Bush economic policies that allowed the recklessness of the Big Wall Street banks to collapse the economy, and cost eight million Americans their jobs.
But we need to make certain that we are not only offering a choice of policies – we are offering a choice of leadership. On the one side, those who will fight for the interests of everyday Americans and on the other, leaders who stand up for the interests of Wall Street, insurance companies and Big Oil.
We need to describe a narrative that is about struggle – not policies and programs.
This is especially important when Democrats talk about Congress’ many accomplishments this term. In fact, this has been the most productive Congress in recent history. But if a candidate tries to talk about “accomplishments,” that will not resonate with the experience of everyday voters.
Instead we should talk about “battles won.” Democrats won the battle with Wall Street and the Republicans to rein in the power of the big Wall Street banks. We won the battle to begin holding insurance companies accountable and prevent them from discriminating against people with “pre-existing conditions.” We won the battle to rescue the economy from the death spiral created by Bush administration policies and the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks.
The language of struggle, and “battles won” has enormous advantages:
•It allows us to talk about what Congress has done in terms that everyday voters can understand. It takes their pain and unhappiness and explains why it happened.
•It places the blame where it belongs and creates a narrative with a clear antagonist and protagonist.
•It allows us to be on the offense – not the defense.
•It positions our candidates as outsider champions for everyday voters and their values – not insider apologists for what Congress has “accomplished.”
•It creates the basis for a powerful mobilization narrative that engages the emotions of anger and inspiration.
2). The antagonist in our narrative should be defined as the corporate special interests – Wall Street, insurance companies, Big Oil – and their Republican enablers.
We are much better off doing battle with these massively unpopular special interests than we are engaging in purely partisan warfare.
It is also much easier to convince voters that the big Wall Street banks, insurance companies and Big Oil are responsible for the economic disaster (which they are) rather than simply Republican policies (which are equally responsible). By tying special interests to Republicans we go to their motivation – to whose side the Republicans are on – not simply the effectiveness of their policies. And, of course, it is true that Republicans and the big corporations are, practically speaking, synonymous.
3). Remind the voters that when the Republicans were in charge, they wrecked the economy and created zero private sector jobs.
George Bush and the Republicans cut taxes for the rich and allowed the big Wall Street Banks free rein to engage in the reckless behavior that collapsed the economy and cost eight million Americans their jobs. They said that their policies would “grow” the economy. Yet, every dime of growth went into the pockets of the wealthiest 2% of Americans and, worse yet, Bush produced zero new private sector jobs.
The New York Times reported last year that, “For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.”
Now compare that to the Clinton administration where the rich paid Clinton-era tax rates. Of the total of 22.5 million new jobs, 20.7 million, or 92 percent, were in the private sector.
Do we really want to give the keys back to the people who completely failed to create jobs and wrecked the economy just two years ago?
4). It’s all about turnout.
We obviously need to do everything we can to move persuadables – but at the end of the day, just as in 1994, this election will be decided by who turns out to vote. That means two things:
•Our campaigns and party committees must make a major priority out of the mechanics of GOTV. No message works better to increase turnout than: “I won’t get off your porch until you vote.”
•The language of struggle must be used to engage base Democrats who have been discouraged or demoralized. Basically, we have to describe the midterm elections as the Empire Strikes Back: “The Wall Street Banks, insurance companies, Big Oil and other wealthy special interests see this election as their best opportunity to reverse the results of the election in 2008. They want to turn back the clock to the failed economic policies of the past so they can undo Democratic victories that will hold them accountable. They want to have free rein once again to siphon off every ounce of economic growth for themselves at the expense if middle-class families. They’re counting on us to sleep through the election. We have to stop them.”

Read more…

In the wake of the Missouri referendum drubbing the individual mandate, TNR‘s Jonathan Chait makes a couple of insightful points and provides an interesting suggestion in his post “What the Individual Mandate Vote Means.” First, on the Missouri vote:

…First of all, Missouri is not a “bellwether” state right now. It (narrowly) supported John McCain in 2008 when the country as a whole backed Barack Obama by 7 percentage points. Second, Tuesday’s election was a low-turnout primary with a massively disproportionate Republican electorate, accounting for two-thirds of all voters.

Chait says the assault on the individual mandate of the health care reform act is the thread which conservatives hope can be tugged to “unravel the whole structure of health care reform” and he designates it “the Leninist plan to collapse the system.” But Chait also explains that conservatives and insurers don’t really want to pull the plug on the individual mandate, which is the financial foundation of the act, and leave everything else in place, in which case the reform law would likely morph into a single payer system.
Chait also suggests that reform supporters consider an interesting proposal in a New York Times op-ed by Paul Starr, author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine. As Starr Explains, quoted by Chait:

…Let individuals opt out of the new insurance system, without a penalty, by signing a form on their tax return acknowledging that they would then be ineligible for federal health insurance subsidies for a fixed period — say, five years.
During that time, if they had second thoughts and decided to buy health insurance, they would have no guarantee that they could find a policy or that it would cover pre-existing conditions. In other words, they would face a market much like the one that exists now. And while that’s hardly a desirable position to be in, they would have made the decision themselves, and the option to step outside the system would relieve Republican concerns about government mandates.

As Chait concludes, “Democrats should work on implementing Starr’s idea. It’s better than having endless political fights over the single least popular aspect of the Affordable Care Act.” Looking at an even bigger picture, it’s a great example of the type of thoughtful modification of a progressive reform that does no damage, but minimizes public resistance. Dems need more of this kind of thinking.

Though most progressives are rightly very pleased with federal district court Judge Vaughan Walker’s ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a challenge to California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriages, it’s going to be a while before we know the ultimate implications.
Yes, Walker’s ruling was sweeping, and in its Emperor-Has-No-Clothes explosion of the case for marriage inequality, it had the ring of a landmark decision that law students will examine for many years.
But it’s important to remember not only that this is a lower-court ruling subject to appeal, but also that it involved fact-finding in a situation where the defendants (supporters of Prop 8) offered an insufficient and incompetent case for their point of view. Indeed, that’s why Walker felt compelled to say the case for Prop 8, as presented in his courtroom, didn’t meet the lower “rationale basis” standard for discriminatory actions, much less the “strict scrutiny” standard that would be employed if gays and lesbians were recognized as a class of citizens requiring constitutional protection.
So unless opponents of marriage equality continue to do sloppy courtroom work, the battle is far from over, and most observers expect the case to wind up on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court, with the outcome probably depending on the unpredictable position of swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy (see Nate Silver’s post at FiveThirtyEight for an optimistic assessment of where Kennedy might land).
But judicial proceedings aside, the vast attention accorded this decision will have a more immediate effect in the political arena, with ripples emanating wide and far and into very different contexts. At Politico today, the early banner article, by Josh Gerstein, was a rumination on how the decision might force the president out of his no-to-gay-marriage, no-to-Prop-8 posture. And beyond the White House, the renewed elevation of this issue will create cross-pressures for Democrats in culturally conservative parts of the country.
All that is fairly obvious, but we should also consider the pressure the decision will create for Republicans who have sought to make economic and fiscal issues, not divisive cultural issues, the focus of their 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
The very day after Judge Walker’s decision, Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal, locked in a nasty cage-match runoff fight with Karen Handel, launched a new ad blasting his rival for alleged friendliness to gays and lesbians. Those unaccustomed to the current tone of Republican politics in the South may be shocked at the unabashed homophobia in the ad, which brings back memories of the late Jesse Helms. In fact, it’s a theme Deal has been hitting for some time, and I’m sure the ad was in the can before word came out of San Francisco about the judge’s ruling. But if he indeed makes this his signature attack line in the final push towards next Tuesday’s runoff, it’s probably because Perry v. Schwarzenegger has again made the specter of “activist judges” supporting the “homosexual agenda” a lively concern among conservative Republicans.
Whatever happens in Georgia–where Sarah Palin is riding into town the day before the runoff to campaign with Handel–a renewed focus on fighting marriage equality will have a long-term effect on the nature and appeal of the GOP. It’s interesting in that connection that Deal’s most prominent backer, Newt Gingrich, has recently become one of the most avid supporters of culture-war politics, athough his focus has been on the alleged un-American nature of Democrats–and more recently on Muslims–not gays and lesbians. Still, many voters who are in no particular sense progressives may not be fond of a double-down return to the Days of Rage when many Republicans spent most of their time attacking the Enemies Within, even in their own party.

Chris Bowers’s Open Left post, “Memo to Chris Dodd: We already have a unicameral legislature” provides one of the more succinct, lucid and compelling arguments for cloture reform yet presented. Bowers does a surgical shredding Senator Dodd’s case for keeping the 60 vote threshold for cloture. First up, Bowers shatters Dodd’s argument that the 60 vote requirement is needed to affirm the Senate’s unique role and the principle of our bicameral national legislature:

…You don’t need different vote thresholds to have a bicameral system. Consider:
1. 36 states have bicameral legislatures where no filibuster is allowed. Would Senator Dodd claim those 36 states do not actually have a bicameral system?
2. The 60-vote threshold is not in the Constitution. It just isn’t. That was never a requirement for a bicameral legislature.
3. If anything, the 60-vote threshold has created a unicameral system where the Senate has rendered the House irrelevant. Getting rid of the 60-vote threshold would give the two legislative bodies more equitable power.

I would add that the 60 vote cloture threshold is the foundation of gridlocked government, which is the primary goal of the G.O.P. I say this as an admirer of Senator Dodd, who has been one of the more reliable Democratic leaders on many key issues, but who, along with a handful of other Democratic senators, is simply wrong on cloture reform.
Behind the unicameral legislature nonsense, Dodd’s case is essentially fear-driven, the old ‘we’re gonna miss the 60 vote requirement when we are in the minority’ argument. And yes, that could happen on occasion. But majority rule — the foundation of genuine democracy — is really the more important principle at stake here, and if we can’t have that, a 55 vote threshold is a step toward it. The way it is now, urgently needed reforms that could help millions of people are being held hostage by the 60-vote threshold, and that is unacceptable for a any government that purports to reflect the will of the people.
Bowers notes some related reforms that merit more serious consideration, and which might be achievable in a shorter time horizon that that which would be required for reducing the 60 vote threshold:

…if we do a better job focusing on the wider range of proposed rule changes–such as making unanimous consent non-debatable, requiring the filibuster to be a real talkathon where Senators have to stay on the floor (as Senator Lautenberg has proposed), or switching the burden of the cloture threshold on the opposition (for example, 45 votes to continue a filibuster, rather than 60 to break it, as Senator Bennet has proposed)-then the interest and momentum for reform could increase as people debate a wider range of possible reforms.

Bowers concedes that achieving any reform is an uphill struggle in the current political climate. But he adds, “Senate rules are not going to stay the same forever. The rules have changed in the past, and will change again in the future” — a key point for progressive Democrats to keep in mind in working for cloture reform. Although the obstacles are formidable at this political moment, we have to begin somewhere.