Back in April we published a Strategy Memo suggesting that any Obama Supreme Court appointment would inevitably expose conservative radicalism on constitutional issues. And despite the ho-hum tone of media coverage of the beginning of confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan, that’s exactly what’s happening.
As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports, the first day of the hearings revealed a strange Republican preoccupation with Kagan’s mentor, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall:

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.
“Justice Marshall’s judicial philosophy,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, “is not what I would consider to be mainstream.” Kyl — the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event — was ready for a scrap. Marshall “might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge,” he said.
It was, to say the least, a curious strategy to go after Marshall, the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education. Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint — literally. Marshall this spring was added to the Episcopal Church’s list of “Holy Women and Holy Men,” which the Episcopal Diocese of New York says “is akin to being granted sainthood.”
With Kagan’s confirmation hearings expected to last most of the week, Republicans may still have time to make cases against Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the panel, branded Marshall a “well-known activist.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Marshall’s legal view “does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) pronounced Marshall “a judicial activist” with a “judicial philosophy that concerns me.”
As the Republicans marshaled their anti-Marshall forces, staffers circulated to reporters details of the late justice’s offenses: “Justice Marshall endorsed ‘judicial activism,’ supported abortion rights, and believed the death penalty was unconstitutional.”
The problem with this line of attack is that Marshall was already confirmed by the Senate — in 1967.

Milbank clearly thinks Republicans are just being goofy here, going after Marshall because they have no ammunition against Kagan.
But it’s likely something else is going on: Republicans are blowing major dog whistles to conservatives whose objections to Elena Kagan are actually objections to much of the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations since the early New Deal. From that radical point of view, the sainted Thurgood Marshall was one of many villains on the generally villainous Warren Court. Kagan’s connection to him is sufficient evidence to reject her if you happen to think the Constitution should be interpreted literally according to an anti-government “originalist” perspective.
Dana Milbank and others should get over their bored amusement with GOP hijinks and consider the possibility that conservatives are deadly serious in deploring the memory of Thurgood Marshall. It may not matter in terms of Kagan’s confirmation, but could matter a lot if Republicans get a lot stronger in the Senate or retake the White House.

Michael Tomasky reiterates a painful, but necessary point in his blog at guardian.co.uk. Tomasky quotes from and references tough statements by Theda Skocpol and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, vigorously blasting the Republicans for obstructing economic reforms, in stark contrast to what Tomasky sees as wimpier Democratic statements concerning the need for economic reforms. Then this:

…Democrats in general still tend to think that you win political fights by having superior arguments. This of course is manifestly not true. You win political arguments by framing the question the media decide to take up. That means being aggressive in your framing, creating conflict (which the media love), and making sure that reporters will go to the other side and ask them well, how do you respond to this?
Some significant number of Americans who don’t hate Barack Obama nevertheless think he wants socialism simply because conservatives have spent 18 months saying that Obama (and the Democrats generally) want socialism. They do that, and quite naturally the media write a bunch of stories in which Republicans allege that Democrats want socialism and Democrats say no we don’t. It doesn’t matter how the article reads. The Republicans have already won in the framing.
And this is the particular political skill the Democrats lack completely. By merely saying the Republicans want to wreck the economy so they can benefit at the polls, if they said it enough, would show them winning in the framing. And as I’ve written a couple of times now, the basic question of this election, still not established, is going to be framed in July and August. Time’s a wastin’.

There’s no denying that, with a few exceptions, the Republicans have generally played the MSM more effectively with well-rooted frames. They don’t do it with magic, smoke & mirrors. They do it with message discipline and repetition, techniques available to Democrats who like the taste of victory.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I visit Israel at least once a year, so I have an opportunity to observe changes in the country’s concerns. Never before have I sensed such a mood of foreboding, which has been triggered by two issues above all–the looming impasse in relations with the United States and a possible military confrontation with Iran.
In response to American pressure that began shortly after President Obama took office, the Netanyahu government agree last November to a temporary and partial freeze on construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which averted an immediate crisis. The freeze expires in September, however, and it will not be renewed. As I write, the central committee of the Likud Party is meeting to consider a resolution supporting renewed construction in all parts of the country. Netanyahu has signaled that he will not oppose the resolution, which its proponents describe as a way of pinning him down and removing all ambiguity about Israel’s future course. The Prime Minister is scheduled to visit the United States in early July and to meet with President Obama. In the face of an Israeli stance that will torpedo the current proximity talks in the fall, what will the president say to him? If Netanyahu leaves Washington without a clear sense of the U.S. stance, he and everyone else will interpret it as a signal that he can stay the course at minimal price.
There are persistent rumors here that the Obama administration hopes to bring down the current Israeli government and replace it with a more tractable coalition. Don’t hold your breath. The potential new coalition member–the Kadima Party headed by Tsipi Livni–will not join unless Netanyahu fundamentally alters his stance in the negotiations with the Palestinian. Headed by Avigdor Lieberman, the hardline forces in the current coalition will not accept Kadima unless it accepts a tough government platform including the transfer of Israeli Arab villages to a new Palestinian state in return for the incorporation of major West Bank settlements into Israel. Netanyahu’s stated position is that he will accept Kadima as an addition to the coalition but not as a replacement for Lieberman and Company. To bring about a new coalition without the hardliners, the Obama administration would have to threaten Israel with measures at least as tough as the ones George H. W. Bush and James Baker implemented two decades ago against the Shamir government, risking a huge domestic political backlash.
Looking farther east, most Israelis–including many who are very dovish vis-a-vis the Palestinians–believe that only military force can prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power in the near future, and they cannot understand why the United States resists this conclusion. According to Ha’aretz, eyewitnesses on the ground support a recent report from the Times of London that Saudi Arabia has agreed to open its airspace to Israeli aircraft “as part of preparations for a possible attack on Iran.” (Israel refused to comment on this report, which the Saudis of course have denied.)
A few months ago I participated in a day-long exercise, organized by the Brookings Institution, simulating the aftermath of a surprise Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. The outcome wasn’t pretty–a forceful Iranian attack on American allies throughout the region and a serious rift in relations between Israel and the United States. The Israeli team hoped that the United States would back them with military measures against Iran that the American team refused to initiate.
In both these areas, the Obama administration has been playing for time. But the sand in the hourglass is running down quickly. Some time this fall, an administration headed toward a midterm election with a faltering economy and negative developments in two war zones may confront a genuine Middle East crisis. We can only hope that its contingency plans are in place and that they’re better than BP’s.

They’re talking class warfare out in the Golden State, or at least Anthony York is, in his ‘PolitiCal’ blog at the L.A. Times. York spotlights a new ad (see below) from California Working Families entitled “Whitman’s World, which portrays the Republican gubernatorial nominee, not without reason, as a fat-cat jet-setter, who stashes her wealth in an off-shore tax haven. Here’s York’s take:

In the third ad released by California Working Families 2010, the group tries to make the connection between Whitman’s personal penchant for private jets and her economic policies for the state. The ad derisively describes “Whitman’s world,” — a place with “tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, but nothing for the middle class.”

Whitman has net worth in the ballpark of $1.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine. She is said the be the 4th richest woman in CA, coming from a background of “multiple lines of great wealth & great connections,” according to Hannah Bell of Democratic Underground. Here’s the ad:

Read more…

As Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings begin in the Senate, Republican lawmakers–and even conservative interest groups–are under a lot of pressure to make this relatively non-controversial appointment a right-wing jihad.
The hook, ironically, has been a ruling by the existing Court striking down Chicago’s handgun restriction ordinances on grounds that they violate the Second Amendment.
Here is Lyle Denniston’s bottom-line analysis of the significance of this decision:

Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in the Court’s main opinion, did make one thing unmistakably clear to lower court judges: the right to have a gun for self-defense in the home is a “fundamental” constitutional right. That one-word label carries enormous import. Ordinarily, if a right is deemed to be fundamental, any law that seeks to limit it will be judged by the stiffest constitutional test there is: it must satisfy “strict scrutiny,” meaning that it will be struck down if the government’s need for it is not “compelling” and if the approach it takes is not the narrowest possible way to get at the problem. Some laws can survive “strict scrutiny,” but not a great many do.

Because the decision makes gun regulation essentially a matter of judicial fiat rather than legislative or executive policy, it has ratcheted up ideological demands that conservatives, and most especially the gun lobby, make judicial appointments, including the Kagan nomination, a litmus test issue. And believe it or not, the NRA is being attacked from the Right for failing to unleash its hounds on Kagan, and earlier, on Sonia Sotomayor. The claim is that the NRA agreed to tame its activists in exchange for an exemption of the organization from the requirements of the proposed “DISCLOSE Act” requiring public information on on campaign finance activities, which conservative firebreathers violently oppose.
What the NRA has to do to rebuild trust with the Right, we are told, is to go medieval on Kagan.
Don’t be surprised if that’s exactly what happens.

It’s been a tough year for the Democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate, with the loss of Edward Kennedy and the solidification of the Almighty Filibuster as the real power in the institution. But the death of Sen. Robert Byrd of WV really does turn a lot of pages, while denying the Senate its unrivalled historian and parliamentarian.
Byrd’s tenure alone makes him one of the titans of Senate history: more than a half-century, spanning the administrations of eleven presidents. He was, however, the junior senator from West Virginia until he was 68, and in another reflection of the Senate’s slow pace of change, his career overlapped with only five Democratic leaders–not counting Byrd himself.
When Byrd was first elected to the Senate in 1958, Democrats from his corner of the world were typically hard-core segregations and equally hard-core New Deal economic progressives. He abandoned and apologized for the former habit, but never the latter. The persistent poverty of West Virginia–for much of his career it included some of the very poorest areas of the country–made it one place where politicians never shrank from the full exercise of power on behalf of the home folks, or from celebration of the seniority system that gave Byrd and so many others the clout to serve as equalizers. Byrd became the embodiment of Senate traditions for good reason: they served his constituents well.
He survived wave after wave of efforts in both parties to change the Senate and make it more responsive to national political trends, and might well have survived one or two more had he been born ten years later. He also survived wave after wave of efforts to bend Congress to the will of presidents of both parties, and in that respect was more consistent than most of his colleagues in both parties.
In this era of political turbulence and simmering resentment of professional politicians, it’s unlikely America will ever see another Senator like him. And so in a very real sense a big part of national history will go to the grave with him. His distinctive and authoritative voice will be missed, and may he rest in peace.

Almost all the discussions of the “enthusiasm gap” in recent weeks have tended to define the problem as the low level of enthusiasm among Democrats – a perspective that tends to suggest that “disappointment” with Obama is probably the major cause. From this perspective the most direct response would appear to be for Democratic strategists to try to challenge and refute this perception – to argue, in effect, that “Obama is really better than many Democrats seem to think he is”.
But, in fact, Democratic enthusiasm only appears as dramatically low as it does in this non-presidential election year (when turnout is far below election years in any case) because it is being compared with the unusually high level of Republican enthusiasm. This alternate way of viewing the issue leads to a very different set of conclusions about the strategy Democrats should use to combat the problem.
The key fact is that Republicans and conservatives do not see this race as anything like a normal off-year election. Instead, it is for them a decisive battle in a life-or-death existential struggle — a no-holds-barred campaign to bring down Obama and reverse the 2008 election. It is a vision of politics as a bitter ideological and social war and conservatives as an army on the march with a vast overarching objective — to “take back our country” from the forces that have literally stolen it from its rightful owners.
At the heart of the current conservative/Republican coalition is a powerfully energized conservative social movement – one with very strong and widely shared military and paramilitary overtones. This generates a high level of what in military terms is called “morale” – a powerful mixture of passion, commitment, élan, fighting spirit, camaraderie and group cohesion.
Among the core conservative activists themselves this high level of morale has developed in the course of work and collaboration. During the last year and a half friendships were formed, afternoons and weekends were spent working together on projects, successes and failures were shared, all of which built team spirit, optimism and a shared vision of heroic struggle against a uniquely evil, dedicated foe. This energy and enthusiasm was then propagated out into the comment threads of conservative blogs, the discussion groups on Tea Party websites and through e-mail chain letters passed virally among families and social circles. This process has established and disseminated an essentially warlike and combative tone to the 2010 Republican campaign that easily meshes with the similarly combative programming of Fox news and talk radio. The resulting mixture has then been transmitted again and again to a large portion of the Republican electorate.
There is simply nothing comparable to this psychology on the Democratic side. Large numbers of the voters who comprised the Obama coalition in 2008 simply do not see the 2010 elections as a vast do-or-die battle between two contending political armies struggling for control of the country and the future of America. They see it as a conventional off-year election where a patchwork variety of opposing candidates with different philosophies compete for office. As a result they simply do not have the high morale and fighting spirit of conservatives and Republicans. The broad and unifying “yes we can” spirit that was created during the 2008 campaign dissipated soon after the election. The massive Obama for America online organization sharply narrowed its focus to building support for specific elements of Obama’s agenda while other progressives redirected their efforts to promoting specific progressive issues and causes – a focus that frequently brought them into conflict with the administration. Both of these trends substantially diluted and dampened the broad “yes we can” unity and enthusiasm of the 2008 campaign.
The inevitable result was lowered morale, a literal demoralization of the Democratic base that is expressed in three distinct narratives

• That Obama has been a disappointment to his supporters and that not bothering to vote is therefore a logical reaction.
• That the Democratic candidate in a particular district is insufficiently progressive or otherwise unappealing and that not voting for him or her is therefore a reasonable reaction.
• That Washington politics is hopeless and that there is consequently no reason to participate in a useless exercise.

All of these reactions reflect a shared mental model of 2010 as a typical election and not a major and coordinated conservative assault on Democrats in a bitter ideological war. It is this notion of “2010 as just a normal election” that Democratic strategy must first and foremost challenge.

Read more…

The apparent defeat in the Senate of a long-awaited jobs bill (a.k.a., the “second stimulus”) is mainly being discussed in terms of the Republican strategy of steadily eroding the package and then killing it; or in terms of the impact on unemployed people who will lose their jobless benefits.
That’s all very real, but another consequence of this development will play out in state capitals and perhaps in state general election contests, thanks to the demise of assistance to the states that was much needed to avoid health benefit cuts and personnel layoffs.
Originally, the jobs bill was intended to extend the state aid contained in the original stimulus package. But as the bill was racheted down, the version limping onto the Senate floor included only $16 billion for a partial extension of the Medicaid “super-match” designed to prevent major benefit and eligibility reductions for the federal-state safety net health care program.
Unfortunately, 34 states planned on receiving that money, and its failure to materialize is going to create a whole new round of state budget crises. In many states, we can expect Medicaid cuts and/or reductions in other state spending, quite likely including layoffs of teachers and other public employees. That’s why most Republican state officials did not share the happy-talk of their brethren in Washington about opposing “bailouts of the states.”
State budget cuts will have a baleful effect on the economy, and vague conservative talk that “shringing government” will somehow produce private-sector growth is going to be exposed as illusory.
But there could be political consequences as well, as voters begin to realize that there is no big pot of money labeled “waste, fraud and abuse” that can be tapped to balance state budgets, much less to fund the high-end personal and corporate tax cuts that many Republicans continue to call for in the latest incarnation of the discredited theory of supply-side economics.
In other words, the anti-government populism that conservatives are counting on as electoral magic this November may lose some of its appeal when reality sets in. And Democrats should be quick to point out there is no such thing as a free “austerity” lunch.

The presidency of the United States is a very powerful office when it comes to foreign relations and other responsibilities that do not require congressional action. But once Congress–and particularly the filibuster-controlled Senate–gets into the act, the president’s power often fails him. Matt Yglesias uses the inability of the administration to get a relatively noncontroversial tax extension bill through the Senate to make this point:

The administration and Harry Reid’s office tried quite hard to get the votes together, but they just couldn’t. Not because they don’t have any leverage or the offices they inhabit are powerless, but because whatever leverage the White House has doesn’t change the fact that if a Senator really and truly wants to vote against cloture on a bill nobody can force him to do otherwise.
Now of course it’s true that there’s more Obama could have done. He could have gone really nuclear on this topic, but he didn’t. He left some tools in the toolbox, left some arrows in the quiver. And you can say the same about his advocacy for a “level playing field” public option and his advocacy for the Employee Free Choice Act and his advocacy for carbon pricing and his advocacy for a truly independent consumer financial protection agency and his advocacy for the full version of his stimulus bill and his advocacy for DOMA repeal and one or two dozen other things. But that’s actually the point. The White House’s failure to engage in a maximum, 100 percent push for each item on the Obama agenda doesn’t demonstrate that it’s a White House that’s time and again betrayed progressive values. It demonstrates that even though in each case you can always do more, you tend to decide to leave some arrows in the quiver because there are so many legislative fights and you can’t just be going nuclear thirty times a year.

Matt’s argument is aimed at progressives who think that Obama simply doesn’t care enough about their priorities to fight for them. But it’s also food for thought for pundits who are forever acting as though the president’s inability to wave a wand and work magic–say, on an oil spill–represents some terrible sign of personal weakness.

Open Left‘s Mike Lux, always one of the more insightful progressive bloggers on Democratic strategy, has one of his most perceptive posts to date, cross-posted at HuffPo.
Lux. a member of the TDS editorial board, begins by conceding that better polls indicate that the GOP is dominating the framing battle leading up to the November elections, with the meme that “big government,” controlled by Democrats has become “overreaching and ineffective.” He then addresses one oft-proposed remedy, that Dems move to the right, and provides a thorough shredding of the strategy:

This was the path followed by a lot of Democrats in the 1994 and 2002 elections, when the national tide was clearly moving against us. They played defense, started voting with the Republicans a lot, and ran a lot of ads bragging on how much they (a) disagreed with Clinton (in ’94) or (b) agreed with Bush (in ’02). This strategy arguable could have saved a few, but mostly it was a flaming disaster. Of the 52 House members and 8 Senators who lost in 1994, most of them were ones who went with that I’m-a-lot-more-conservative-than-the-national-Dems strategy. And the 2002 candidates who went that direction fared even worse- the only competitive Senate races where Democrats won that year were Landrieu in LA and Tim Johnson in SD. While neither of them ran as flaming liberals, they survived mostly because they put unprecedented amounts of money and effort into turnout out minority communities (Native Americans in SD, African-Americans in LA) in their states.
There are multiple reasons the almost-a-Republican strategy tends not to work. First of all, you tend to depress your base vote even more than it is already depressed. The biggest single factor in 1994, 2002, and the big defeats Democrats have suffered so far this cycle in MA, NJ, and VA was that the electorate has so many fewer of the youth, unmarried women, and minority voters that tend to vote strongly Democrat. They just aren’t coming out to vote. A candidate who moves steadily to the right isn’t likely to motivate those voters to turn out.
Secondly, moving to the right reinforces the negative anti-Democratic dynamic in voters’ minds. If the Democrat sounds like a Republican, and no one is articulating a Democratic frame, it’s a big problem for a Democrat to convince voters- swing or base- why they shouldn’t just go for the real McCoy, a genuine Republican. If no one is making the case why Democratic principles and policies are good, the electorate will keep moving right. Leaving the playing field re the essential framing of the race is never a good idea.
Third, a strategy of walking away from the Democratic Party keeps a Democratic candidate on the defensive for the entire election. The whole narrative of the race becomes “have they walked away enough from Obama/the national party/health care/the stimulus” ad infinitum. I have been volunteering for, working for, or consulting for candidates for about 40 years now, and I have rarely seen a candidate win who was on the defensive for the whole election. I understand how candidates react when they feel besieged and under attack, that you want to pull back the drawbridge and go into a defensive crouch. But if you set up the frame for the entire election in that manner- that even though I’m running on the Democratic line, I’m really not as much of a Democrat as my opponent says I am- you are likely to lose. The candidate, and party, on offense is the one that wins the vast majority of the time.

The better strategy, argues Lux, is to “to go on offense, and to reset the frame in this election” and then he provides this insightful distinction:

…There is genuine anger out there, but it’s not only anger at government or the Democrats; it is anger at the big corporate interests who have messed up our economy and who seem to control our government. The swing voters who are disillusioned with government are in great part disillusioned with the fact that government seems to be in bed with big corporate special interests. And the disappointment with Democrats by both swing and base voters not very interested in showing up to vote is that the Democrats didn’t deliver on the change they promised: the big bankers got bailouts and bonuses while unemployment stayed high; there seemed to be no change in the corruption that allowed BP to drill a faulty well with no decent plan in case of a spill; deficits keep going up while government contractors keep getting rich and regular folks don’t seem to be getting much of the benefit.
I think Democrats should be honest in recognizing those feelings, and not try to pretend the Democratic Party has done everything right in taking on corporate special interests. The frame needs to be about not just taking on big corporations, but taking on corporate corruption of our government…

Lux characterizes the 2010 campaign as “a blame election,” adding,

…Voters are in a foul mood, and they are trying to decide who to blame- or to put it in a somewhat more constructive way, who to hold accountable. Right now, they are leaning heavily toward that being the Democrats, since they control government and government hasn’t delivered jobs or the change that was promised.

It’s a painful truth to accept. But Lux charts a hopeful course:

…To change that inclination in swing voters, and to motivate their own disaffected base, Democrats need to be very aggressive in framing the election about cleaning up the corporate corruption that permeates our government.
It might not work, but it’s got a lot better shot than the I’m-kind-of-a-Republican-even-though-I-am-running-on-the-Democratic-ballot-line strategy that failed so miserably in 1994 and 2002. DC pundits and NYTimes writers like Matt Bai don’t believe a message going after big corporations works in modern America, but I don’t think they talk to enough folks like the ones I grew up with in the working class Midwest. Yes, there is anger at government and the incumbents who people believe have failed them. There is a feeling of bitterness that both parties have failed to deliver, and so we may see a third election in a row where the President’s party gets hammered. But the anger at corporations, and corporation corruption of our government, also runs deep. And if Democrats are brave enough to be aggressive about taking that corruption on, they could reap the benefit.
The Democrats have one chance to get this right. If they stay on defense, or are too tentative in their message, they will get swamped. If they gamble and take on the mantle of cleaning up Washington’s corporate swamp, they have a chance at doing a lot better than anyone thinks.

I think Lux’s prescription is right on time. The BP oil spill is providing vivid, horrific and daily reminders of corporate corruption to an unprecedented extent. Republican office-holders are providing tone-deaf gifts to Democrats in the form of their expressions of sympathy with BP and there is ample documentation of corruption in the Mineral Management Service under President Bush. If Dems don’t make the most of this opportunity to dramatize the connection between Republicans and “Washington’s corporate swamp,” we can expect the worst outcome in November. It’s the difference between riding a wave of discontent and being crushed by it.