The following commentary from leading Democratic strategist Robert Creamer is cross-posted from The Huffington Post. Creamer is the author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win.
The political conventional wisdom has already concluded that Democrats will suffer major losses in November midterm elections. Indeed, if the election were held today, that might be true. There have been very few midterms in modern political history where the party that holds the White House has not lost a lot of seats in the first midterm after its President first took office.
But there are six months and a great deal that Democrats can do to succeed this fall.
Rule #1: Keep our eyes on the prize. Democrats have four goals in the coming midterms that should define our allocation of financial and political resources. In descending order of importance they are:

* Maintain control of both houses of Congress. Loss of control of one of the two houses would be a catastrophic blow to achieving a transformative progressive political agenda.
* Assure our ability to actually pass progressive legislation. All Democratic seats are not created equal. We lost 34 Democratic votes on the recently passed health care legislation. Obviously the loss of ten Members who voted yes for the legislation would be a much bigger problem for the health care agenda than the loss of ten “no” votes. That means that all things being equal, our resources should be focused on candidates that support the President’s agenda rather than those who consistently vote no. Let’s face it, from a legislative point of view, nobody noticed when Alabama’s Parker Griffith suddenly became a Republican instead of a Democrat – he always voted like a Republican anyway.
* Use the elections to prove that support for a progressive agenda is good politics. Of course succeeding in the first two goals will go a long way to generate that kind of narrative. But our resources should be focused with special concern to show Members of Congress that the Party as a whole – and Progressives in particular – have the backs of the Members that stood tall for progressive values even though they represented marginal districts.
At the same time, it would be enormously useful if we made examples of several Members who abandoned that agenda – especially those that represent safe Democratic seats. Several come to mind where the filing deadline for the Democratic primary has not yet passed. And as Niccolo Machiavelli noted, you don’t have to punish all of your enemies – just hang one in the public square.
* Take beachheads for Democratic power. As we maximize the goals above, we should remember that it is almost always better to elect any Democrat to any district than to elect a Republican. That’s especially true in areas where we need to build a Democratic presence over the long haul. Two examples come to mind. In Illinois’ 13th Congressional District, Scott Harper is challenging Republican Judy Biggert. The 13th District includes big portions of Illinois’ DuPage County that has a growing Democratic base. Electing a Democratic Congressman there would greatly strengthen the ability of Democrats to win state and local office by strengthening the Party’s infrastructure and presence there.
The other is Florida’s heavily Cuban 25th District that has been dominated by Republicans but is trending more Democratic. Joe Garcia, who did well there last cycle against an incumbent, is considering a run for what is now an open seat. A victory there would help Democrats continue to woo young Cuban Americans away from their traditional Republican roots.

Rule #2: Midterm elections are all about turnout. In 1994 Democrats did not lose control of Congress because of a huge swing among persuadable voters. We lost because Republican voters turned out, and ours stayed at home.
That means two things.

* First, for the next six months we have to be all about inspiring the Democratic base. Of course victory in legislative battles is itself enormously inspiring. The polling shows that the health care reform victory caused the level of “intensity” among Democratic voters to pull even with Republicans. We have to continue winning. And we have to continue to draw clear distinctions between our positions and those of the Republicans – particularly on issues where we have the high political ground, such as holding the big Wall Street Banks accountable. For immigrant voters – and especially Latinos – we have to deliver on fixing the broken immigration system.
* Second, we have to remember that turnout is about execution. Studies show that one knock on the door within 72 hours of the election increases the propensity to turn out by 12.5% — a second knock, almost as much. One of the most powerful messages in the upcoming election is: “I won’t get off your porch until you vote.” Field operations must have a bigger priority this cycle than ever before.

Rule #3: We can’t afford to allow the Republicans to make the midterms a referendum on Democratic performance. It must be framed as a choice between the failed Republican policies of the past and the Democratic program to lay a foundation for sustained, widely-shared economic growth.
Bush and the Republicans created an economic disaster in America. It will take a long time to clean that mess up. We must frame every discussion in terms of the choice between the failed policies that got us here, and our policies for the future.
That means two things:

* First, we have to deliver. Until last week, the Republican hoped their winning narrative would be that Democrats can’t deliver – that Washington is gridlocked. Passage of health care and student loan reform helped closed the book on that story. But we have to continue delivering – not just talking.
* And, of course, by Election Day, people need to see clear evidence — even glimmers — that those policies are working in their own lives and those of their neighbors. Reports and pronouncements from Washington won’t be enough.

Read more…

It’s considered gospel truth in many conservative circles that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the “economic stimulus package,” was just a porkfest aimed at buying votes or rewarding Democratic constitutencies at the expense of good, virtuous taxpayers and their grandchirren. In support of this hypothesis, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and a regular contributor to conservative and libertarian magazines and web sites, recently wrote a “study” designed to show that ARRA dollars went disproportionately to districts represented by Democrats and/or that voted for Obama in 2008, regardless of their actual economic needs. De Rugy helpfully touted her study at National Review’s The Corner yesterday, for the edification of those who look to that blog for talking points.
Looks like she should probably have kept the paper to herself. Nate Silver of 538.com took a look at it, and pretty much demolished it today.
Turns out that de Rugy didn’t notice, or didn’t mention, that most of the “Democratic districts” that show up in her study as the top recipients of ARRA dollars happen to contain state capitals. Thus, ARRA spending designed to benefit states as a whole (the Medicaid super-match, school improvement incentives, state infrastructure grants, the state “flexibility” funds, etc.) are attributed by her to individual districts. She also ignored economic indicators showing poverty and local unemployment, which may or may not be correlated with Democratic voting habits, but which certainly indicate actual need.
I hear through the grapevine that de Rugy plans to respond to Nate’s demolition job at some point. If she manages to climb out of this crater, I’ll certainly be impressed.
The larger point, though, is that without Nate’s intervention (and perhaps even after it), conservatives would be gleefully citing de Rugy’s bottom line “findings” as “proof” that ARRA was what they always said it was. She is, after all, an academic thinker, and her “study” is impressive-looking, with lots of footnotes and scatter plot charts. I’m not saying that conservatives are alone in conducting this sort of skewed and deeply flawed “research,” or in citing it without examination. But that doesn’t excuse it for even a moment, particularly when the “researcher” is out there circulating the stuff as agitprop for the chattering classes before the ink is even dry.

Longtime political reporter Tom Edsall has a long and fascinating piece of analysis up at The Atlantic on the present and future shape of the two major party coalitions. While none of the data he discusses is terribly surprising, he does suggest some real internal problems with the emerging Republican coalition, which is increasingly made of up married white folks, but includes those who are “haves” only because they “have” government benefits that are perceived as vulnerable to budgetary competition from “have-nots”:

It’s entirely possible that, if the deficit forces continued zero-sum calculations, the definition of the center-right coalition of “haves” will be expanded beyond its original boundaries, stretching past the wealthy, the managerial and business class, the gun owners, the anti-taxers, the home schoolers, the property rights-ers, the Western ranchers, Christian evangelicals, and the self-employed to begin to include members of what conservative operative Grover Norquist called the “takings” coalition—men or women who get federal benefits. A Republican Party hungry for victory would welcome as new members Social Security and Medicare recipients—“takers” who simultaneously consider themselves part of the universe of “haves” and of Norquist’s “leave us alone coalition.”

Add in people who are self-consciously dependent on federal defense spending, and you can see how a Republican coalition of public- and private-sector “haves” could be formidable if not terribly stable.
Demographic trends, though, are very dangerous for the GOP, as this Edsall nugget shows:

While there is no doubt that the increase in the number of racial and ethnic minority voters works to the advantage of the liberal coalition, white voters remain a wild card. In 2008, whites made up 74 percent of the electorate, and McCain carried them 55-43. There are precedents for much higher Republican margins: in 1972, Nixon carried 67 percent of the white vote, and in 1984 Reagan won 64 percent. Conversely, Bill Clinton only lost the white vote by one percentage point to George H. W. Bush in 1992. The one clear conclusion to draw from these figures is that if the GOP is unwilling to make major policy shifts, especially on immigration reform, a crucial issue to many Hispanics, the party will have to drive its margins among white voters back up to the Nixon-Reagan levels.

If anything, the current pressure on the GOP from its rank-and-file, including the Tea Party Movement, is in the opposite direction from any position on immigration policy that could attract Hispanics. So there will be a strong temptation on the Right for indulging heavily in what might be called White Identity Politics. In light of Edsall’s insight on the “haves” in the GOP coalition who are dependent on government spending, White Identity Politics could involve racially-tinged distinctions between the “deserved” government benefits received by white middle-class retirees and the “undeserved” government benefits received or sought by poorer or darker folk. That’s a dynamic that’s already been abundantly apparent in the Republican assault on health reform.
Looks like today’s political turbulence will be with us for quite a while, particularly if relatively high unemployment and budget deficits persist, accentuating the zero-sum politics of group competition that Edsall sees in the data.

As we noted on this day last year, we will not indulge in any April Fool jokes today. Any weirdness we happen to write about will be real. It’s a sign of the times that this advisory seems necessary.

A perennial issue that’s been bubbling up a lot since the rise of Barack Obama has been whether and when it’s fair for progressives to suspect racial motives in conservative political appeals. Obama’s race has made the subject pretty much unavoidable, but the special ferocity of conservative reactions to Obama’s candidacy, presidency, and policies has raised the possibility that something a bit unusual is going on. But if the subject ever comes up, conservatives now angrily accuse their accusers of “playing the race card,” as though the issue is by definition illegitimate or demagogic.
Frank Rich of the New York Times stirred up the latest contretemps with a column that suggested the heat behind much of the grassroots anger towards Obama comes at least in part from “fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country”–e.g., white men. At RealClearPolitics, a noted analyst of and sometimes advocate for the political views of white men, David Paul Kuhn, issued a response that accused not only Rich but “liberal elites” of perpetually playing the race card in order to ignore or dismiss legitimate discontent with liberal policies.
I have no interest in adjudicating the Rich/Kuhn dispute, other than to say that Rich is clearly imprecise in his attribution of semi-racist motives to conservatives, and that Kuhn trumps that mistake by pretending that Rich has accused every single white person who doesn’t approve of Obama’s job performance of being a racist.
I am interested in Kuhn’s broader argument, which is pretty characteristic of conservative “race card” rhetoric. His standard on this subject seems to be that if there is any possible non-racial motive for a political posture, then it’s irresponsible to impute any racial motives, not just today, but in the past:

For decades, leading liberals explained white concerns about urban upheaval, crime, welfare, school bussing, affirmative action and more recently, illegal immigration, as rooted in racism. Not safer streets or safer schools. Not concern about taxes for welfare, as working class whites (like all races) struggled in their hardscrabble lives. Not regular men who never knew “white male privilege” but were on the losing end of affirmative action (recall Frank Ricci). Not job competition or economic class. Instead, leading liberals constantly saw the color of the issue as the only issue.

I don’t know which “leading liberals” he’s talking about, but generally speaking, that’s just not true. “Liberals” have typically viewed conservative appeals on issues like crime, welfare, busing, affirmative action, welfare and immigration as designed to play on both racial and non-racial fears and concerns. Kuhn, however, seems to think so long as there is an available non-racial motive for a “concern,” then examining possible racial motives is out of bounds. It’s got to be one thing or another–all race, or all something more noble-sounding or at least less disreputable.
It doesn’t take a lot of deep thinking, or “liberalism,” for that matter, to understand the folly of this approach. Self-conscious, highly-motivated racists do not often proclaim their racism these days, precisely because it is disreputable and does not win friends or influence people. And even back when open racism was more common, racists often denied racism as a primary motive (viz., Confederate and neo-Confederate claims that secession was not “about” slavery, but about states’ rights, constitutional protections for private property, southern “culture,” anti-capitalism, or regional honor–anything other than the ownership of other human beings). And during the more recent period of southern resistance to civil rights, which I experienced personally, and whose constitutional “theories” have been so avidly seized upon by many of today’s conservative activists, you didn’t hear much talk about segregation as a means of subjecting black folk as inferior. It was all about “racial peace,” and “the southern way of life,” and again, state’s rights and constitutional protections for private property. And it didn’t fool a soul.
If David Paul Kuhn really believes that antagonism to busing, affirmative action, welfare, and immigration did not have any racial content, or that conservative appeals on these issues (which, as far back as George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, always avoided overt racial language) did not count on racial resentment as one factor for their success, he’s living in a land innocent of actual experience with human beings.
If he doesn’t believe that, and has at least one foot in the real world where racial motives coincide with others, then the issue is not some sweeping effort to delegitimize the “race card,” but an examination of when political appeals cross the line into deliberate efforts to promote white racial resentment.

Read more…

Via TPM, I learned that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar went on CNBC today and said the administration would no longer be using the term “cap-and-trade” for its climate change proposals.
This decision does not appear to mean any change in the actual proposal, which would still presumably involve placing a “cap” on carbon emissions and then creating a system whereby credits for exceeding carbon goals could be “traded,” thus creating market incentives for pollution control efforts and technology. It’s the label that seems to be the problem, probably because conservatives have taken to calling it “cap-and-tax.”
I can sympathize with the rebranding effort (though it’s not clear what the new monniker will be). I spent years at the Progressive Policy Institute, an early proponent of “cap-and-trade,” trying, without a lot of success, to find simple ways to explain this approach to carbon emissions. It wasn’t as hard as, say, trying to write descriptions of the “revolution in military affairs,” another perennial head-scratcher, but it was never possible to capture it on a bumper sticker.
It probably doesn’t matter, so long as the administration and congressional proponents continue to make it clear that cap-and-whatever is a way to limit potentially catastrophic carbon emissions while employing market mechanisms to create incentives for private-sector innovations in clean energy technology. It is, indeed, the kind of market-friendly alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations that conservatives ought to find attractive, and often have in the past. But it’s the substance, not the politics, of this approach, that really matters, and that will remain regardless of the marketing.

Reid Wilson has a fun post up at Hotline On Call, with a somewhat misleading title “Sports Viewers largely Republican.” Wilson discusses the results of a Nielson/Arbitron survey 0f 218,000 respondents, conducted between 8/8 and 9/9 by National Media Inc., a GOP firm. Among the findings, according to Wilson:

GOPers are most likely to watch the PGA Tour, college football and NASCAR, according to the study. But if GOP ad buyers want to reach more frequent voters, they should focus on the PGA; golf fans told researchers they were much more likely to vote than NASCAR fans say they are. Meanwhile, Dems hold the largest advantages among basketball fans, both those who watch the NBA and the WNBA. And fans of World Wrestling Entertainment are also much more likely to favor Dems — if they vote. Wrestling fans are less likely to cast ballots than any other sports fans…Those who watch Major League Baseball and the NFL are only slightly more conservative than the average voter, while those who watch college basketball are about 5% more likely to vote with the GOP.

No big shockers there, other than presumably intelligent grownups referring to pro wrestling as an actual ‘sport.’ But the following is kind of interesting:

Among the major sports, college football fans say they are most likely to vote, followed closely by MLB aficianados. NFL fans rate with NASCAR fans as less likely voters…The data is fun to peruse, but it has practical implications as well. Ad buyers should focus on sports programming, according to the analysis. That’s because sports fans are most likely to view events live instead of on a DVR machine, meaning they don’t skip the ads.
Dems tend to watch more TV than GOPers, and they dominate most kinds of programming. That means GOP ad buyers have fewer choices, and sports offer the best opportunity to reach their voters…Then again, not every sport has a devoted following. Fans of minor league baseball are high-propensity swing voters, but there aren’t all that many of them.

Almost all sports are covered in the survey analysis, including motocross, bull riding and monster trucks. No doubt the data is useful to political ad-buyers. As Wilson notes, “If you’re a GOP strategist looking for key primary votes, spend your valuable advertising money on PGA Tour events. If you’re a Dem trying to win over your base, focus on advertising during NBA games.”

The craziness surrounding futile efforts to overturn health reform via lawsuits reached a new crescendo in Georgia yesterday, when Republicans in the state House introduced articles of impeachment against Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker. You see, Baker (a Democrat) refused to join Republican Attorneys General who are launching a suit charging that federal health reform is unconstitutional. He argued (very accurately) that the suits have no chance of succeeding, and that pursuing them would be a waste of time and money. Republicans claim he’s required to file suit at the request of Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue.
By threatening impeachment on such transparently partisan grounds, GOPers are probably doing Baker a big favor: he’s running for governor, and has been trailing former Gov. Roy Barnes in the polls. In addition, there’s something a bit attention-grabbing about the spectacle of Republicans demanding that an African-American statewide official embrace neo-Confederate constitutional theories on “state’s rights” grounds.
As Eric Kleefield of TPM has noted, the “massive resistance” approach to health reform has already become a litmus test for conservative Republicans, right up there with criminalizing abortion and defending trust fund babies against “death taxes.” So get used to it; they just can’t help themselves any more.

The white male voter is not an endangered species, as is sometimes suggested. But he is elusive political prey, for Democrats in particular, as Hoyt Hilsman affirms in his HuffPo post, “Democrats, White Men and the Tea Party Revolt.” Hilsman presents interesting demographic and voting data on the politics of race and gender at this political moment:

In his fine book The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, David Paul Kuhn took a hard look at the future of the Democratic party, and it’s not good news. Since 1972, white men have voted by well over 60% for Republican or conservative candidates in every single presidential race. The only exceptions were Jimmy Carter, who got 48% of the white male vote, and Barack Obama, who got 41% of white men.
…With the minority and youth vote expected to be significantly lower in the 2010 midterm elections, white voters will likely cast more than 75% of the ballots. And with Obama’s approval ratings in the mid-30’s among white men, the Democrats’ hold on Congress is in jeopardy and Obama’s re-election in 2012 is questionable.
While some argue that the more progressive blocs of minorities and women voters can overcome the conservative votes of white men, Kuhn points out the fallacy of that argument. The nearly 100 million white men make up almost 40% of the American electorate, more than five times the total of all Hispanic voters, male and female. And the slight improvement that Democrats have registered with white women voters (over half of whom still vote regularly for Republicans) doesn’t begin to match the Republican party’s enormous advantage among white men. Add to that the outsized influence of the white male vote in the South (where more than 75% of white men vote Republican) and in rural areas which carry heavy weight in the electoral college (one Wyoming resident’s vote equals the vote of seventy-two Californians), the electoral future for progressives looks dim.

Looking at the voting data presented by Hilsman from a different angle, if President Obama was able to win 41 percent of white men as an act of faith based on an unproven track record, could he do even better in ’12, riding the crest of an economic uptick, assuming one is well underway by then and he gets much of the credit?
Hilsman’s remedy for the gender gap is credible enough. He notes, “a focus on jobs is paramount, since men have been the major losers in the current employment landscape,” while cautioning that focus won’t mean so much unless the numbers improve over the next few months. Hilsman adds:

…Democrats need to face the gender gap squarely. This does not mean capitulating on progressive causes, nor does it mean competing with Republicans on the macho quotient or reshaping itself as the “daddy” party. What the Democrats – and progressives in general – need to do is revive their conversation with white men, much as they did with African-Americans in the 1950’s and with women in the 1960’s and ’70’s…Democrats now should learn how to connect with the emotions of white male voters.

Hilsman touches on the third dimension of class, missing in the rest of this analysis, “we have been slow to recognize injustices done to white men, who have been viewed as occupying a privileged place in society (even though the vast majority of white men enjoy no such privileges).”
It’s an important distinction, which merits more consideration, since some white male voters support Republicans to defend their upper-class interests, while middle and working class white men who vote Republican are generally voting against their economic interests, arguably more so than any other demographic group. The proportion and ‘why’ of this second group are questions of huge import for the future of the Democratic Party, as well as the nation.
Hilsman suggests that President Obama emulate Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to the political discontent of white males: “FDR opened a dialogue with disenfranchised workers, who had been largely neglected and even scorned by much of American society…he managed to gain the confidence of a large swath of the American work force, and kept them from falling under the spell of political extremism.”
If Hilsman undervalues the role of a class-based appeal to white male voters, he hits the target in his conclusion:

Democrats have a chance to rebuild that progressive movement, but only if they listen to another disaffected group – white men… We should listen carefully to the concerns of white men – urban and rural, North and South – and respond to them within the framework of progressive values. Only then will we be able build a more inclusive future for our country — one that does not include the divisive hatred and venom of the Tea Partiers.

While many progressives remain doubtful about the Democratic Party’s prospects for winning the white working class as a voting bloc, what should not be in doubt is our ability to win a substantial piece of it — with a conscious, substantive and concerted message that speaks to their interests in a very particular way.

Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece suggesting that putative 2012 Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney might have a hard time overcoming his sponsorship of a form of health care reform in Massachusetts that was impressively similar to that great socialist abomination, ObamaCare. This has now become a pretty common refrain in the early 2012 handicapping (viz. this Jonathan Martin-Ben Smith item in Politico yesterday), to the point where the estimable Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic posted a rebuttal to the Mitt-as-Toast hypothesis yesterday.
Ambinder made four reasonable points about Romney’s potential viability regardless of RomneyCare. Let’s consider them in order:
(1) RomneyCare may look more successful by 2012. I don’t think the problem with RomneyCare is that it’s unpopular or unsuccessful in MA; it’s that it bears a lot of resemblence to ObamaCare, which is by definition, regardless of public opinion or objective reality, a horror to the kind of people who participate in Republican presidential primaries.
(2) Health care may not be a transcendent Republican issue by 2012 (just as the Iraq War began to recede once the 2008 Democratic contest reached its climax). Sure, other major issues of importance to Republican primary-goers may emerge, but until such time, if ever, health reform is repealed, there is virtually no chance that it will be forgotten by 2012 (and it can’t be repealed before then unless Republicans win every single Senate race this year and also win two-thirds of the House). If the Iraq War is a suitable analogy, as Ambinder suggests, I think it’s indisputable that Barack Obama would have never emerged as a viable presidential candidate in 2008 if Hillary Clinton hadn’t voted for the war resolution and then refused to say she made a mistake by doing so. Other issues mattered, but that was the big threshold issue. (One of my fellow Mitt-o-skeptics, Jonathan Chait, did a response to Ambinder today that mainly focuses on his own belief that RomneyCare will actually be a bigger issue for Republicans in the future than it is today).
(3) The Republican nominating process is “hierarchical,” and especially favorable to establishment figures like Romney. This is something you hear all the time, and it’s valid in the very limited sense that the rules for awarding delegates in Republican contests don’t demand strict proportionality, and thus help front-runners consolidate early victories. But in 2012, as in 2008, Mitt’s problem could be getting out of the gate, not finishing off the field. Recall that in Iowa in 2008, he couldn’t survive what was basically a one-on-one contest with Mike Huckabee, despite a vast financial advantage and endorsements from most of the local GOP establishment, and even though he was running as the “true conservative” in the race. None of Romney’s problems from 2008 (a wooden speaking style, a history of flip-flops on cultural issues, his religion, his history as a corporate downsizer) have gone away, and it’s very likely the Iowa Caucuses will be even more dominated by cultural conservatives than ever, given the huge importance of the gay marriage issue to conservatives in that state. Add in RomneyCare, and the odds look pretty bad; skipping Iowa like McCain did is a possibility, but would also give another candidate a good chance to become the early front-runner, going into two states (Michigan and New Hampshire) that Romney can’t lose and still have a prayer for the nomination.
(4) Romney is just too reasonable and accomplished a candidate to get knocked out by one issue. Maybe so, but as noted above, he has more than one problem, and as it happens, “one issue”–in fact, one utterance–knocked Mitt’s father, George, out of the 1968 presidential contest, and his resume was if anything stronger than his son’s. If I were a Republican, I’d actually be worried that Mitt’s sitting there soaking up attention, endorsements, and poll numbers that could go to some attractive darkhorse candidate, leaving the GOP with a very weak field if he does go belly-up. And you don’t have to be a total Democratic partisan to observe that Republicans aren’t disposed at the moment to be completely rational about their choice of candidates: a recent PPP survey suggested that nearly as many rank-and-file Republicans think it’s more important to nominate a candidate who is “conservative on every issue” as those who think it’s more important to nominate someone “who can beat Barack Obama.”
In any event, with all due respect to Marc Ambinder (who may simply be playing devil’s advocate), I’d say the burden of persuasion should be on those who think Mitt Romney’s stronger than he was in 2008 than on those who think he’s in very deep trouble thanks to RomneyCare.