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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Like a master stage magician’s best “sleight of hand” trick, Ruffini makes MAGA extremism in the GOP disappear right before our eyes.

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A Democratic Political Strategy for Reaching Working Class Voters That Starts from the Actual “Class Consciousness” of Modern Working Americans.

by Andrew Levison

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The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

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Why Don’t Working People Recognize and Appreciate Democratic Programs and Policies

The mythology of “Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days” and the Modern Debate Over “Deliverism.”

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The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

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Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

And the Democratic Narrative Simply Doesn’t Work. Here’s An Alternative That Does.

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The Daily Strategist

March 29, 2024

Palin, Biden and the Constitution

Last night I did a post expressing astonishment at Sarah Palin’s handling of questions about constitutional law as it relates to abortion in a just-released segment of the Katie Couric interviews. I figured her answers, which among other things, accepted a constitutional right to privacy (the foundation of Roe v. Wade), wouldn’t go over well among her culturally conservative base.
At National Review’s The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru, a conservative whose intelligence and integrity I respect, offered this reaction, which not only defended Palin but went after Joe Biden (who was also interviewed by Couric on the same issues):

Those excerpts from Couric’s interviews give me more concerns about Biden than Palin. He seems to be under the impression that there’s a “liberty clause” in the Fourteenth Amendment (he has talked about it in Supreme Court confirmation hearings too). He misdescribes what Roe held. He seems to believe that Roe has been good for social peace and that this alleged fact justifies it as constitutional law.
Palin, meanwhile, is asked a somewhat oddly phrased question by Couric, and says, reasonably enough, that the Constitution protects a right to privacy. Now it is certainly and obviously true that the Constitution protects privacy: What else do the Third and Fourth Amendments protect, for example? There is nothing incompatible with either a pro-life point of view or originalism with saying that the Constitution protects privacy.

Nice try, Ramesh, but I don’t think either prong of your argument holds much water.
With respect to the Couric-Palin interplay, Palin was not asked if the Constitution protects any privacy rights. She was asked, in the context of her position that Roe should be overturned, if there was an “inherent right to privacy” in the Constitution, which is about as clear a reference to the Griswold holding as any network interviewer could be expected to make. And Couric made that even clearer by referring to the “right to privacy” as the foundation of Roe. While it is theoretically possible to believe that Griswold was a correct decision while Roe was not, I’ve never heard anyone embracing “the pro-life point of view or originalism” take that position, and I’m quite sure Ponnuru doesn’t, either. And he doesn’t address Palin’s weird and immediate descent into Federalist arguments about how to apply that “inherent right to privacy,” which suggests an unfamiliarity with the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that prohibits state abrogation of constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Speaking of the Due Process Clause, which prohibits “any state [from depriving] any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” this is the “liberty clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment that Joe Biden’s talking about. The Court in Roe (following the concurring opinions of Justices Harlan and White in Griswold) made the protection of “liberty” by the Due Process Clause the basis for its decision, launching a debate over “substantive due process” that continues today. While Biden’s use of the term “liberty clause” may be a bit imprecise, there’s nothing remarkable about what he’s actually saying.
As for Biden’s remarks on the reasonableness of Roe, he does not, in fact, claim it has brought the country “social peace” on the abortion issue; he says “it’s as close to a consensus that can exist in a society as heterogeneous as ours.” And I think that’s right, for the simple reason that Roe reflected the popular view (though not the views of activists on both sides of the issue) that the timing of abortions is critically important. And though they all hate to admit it (for perfectly logical reasons), that’s why anti-abortion activists focus so much on late-term abortions, while pro-choice activists focus on early-term abortions, and even the “morning-after pill,” although their underlying positions deny there’s much of a difference in terminating a pregnancy early or late. This is what my former boss Sen. Sam Nunn meant when he used to say that Roe v. Wade “may have been bad constitutional law, but it’s good policy.”
To sum it all up, contra Ramesh Ponnuru, it’s clear to me that Biden made a concise and reasonable argument for a pro-choice position that recognizes possible exceptions, while Palin tried to square circles, presumably in order to appeal to pro-choice voters who wouldn’t like her position if they understood it. That’s made much clearer by the other segment of the Couric interview in which Palin consistently describes her pro-life perspective as all about “making choices,” even though she has in the past supported, and is running on a Republican platform that insists upon, a national prohibition of all abortions, at any stage after conception, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


Bailout Passes Senate Easily

As you undoubtedly know, the financial bailout bill passed the Senate last night by a big margin–74-25, to be exact. And few of the dynamics evident in the House vote appeared there.
For one thing, the partisan splits were a lot closer, with Democrats favoring the bill 39-10, and Republicans by 34-15 (as a matter of principle, Joe Lieberman is not being counted as a Democrat here). For another, election-year pressures weren’t a big factor: Senators up for re-election split 24-9 in favor of the legislation, perhaps in part reflecting the fact that public opinion has shifted noticeably, if not definitively, since the House vote.
The House is due to vote on the revised bill Friday, with the current odds favoring passage thanks to the tax sweeteners added by the Senate, not to mention the buyer’s remorse among Members who voted against the original bill assuming it would pass anyway.


Latino Protestants Shift Towards Democrats

Beliefnet has just done an update of its “Twelve Tribes” survey, a methodology (done through polling by the University of Akron) that slices and dices the electorate along religious (or irreligious) lines. The first Twelves Tribes survey was done at about this same time four years ago, so it provides some pretty interesting comparative data.
There’s a lot of stuff to look at and think about, but the thing that jumps off the page is a big shift in the direction of Democrats among what has long been the Great Brown Hope of the GOP: Latino Protestants.
Here’s a quick summary of this finding by Beliefnet editor Steve Waldman:

In 2004, Bush won 45% of Latinos. According to the new Twelve Tribes analysis, Obama is beating McCain by more than two-to-one — and Latino voters are becoming more numerous.
Significantly, the big shift came not from Latino Catholics but Latino Protestants many of whom are evangelical or Pentecostal and had liked Bush’s faith emphasis. But right now 33% of Latino Protestants are for McCain, 48% for Obama and 18% are undecided. By comparison, at this point in 2004 Bush had 50%, Kerry had 26% and 24% were undecided. And on election day it was 63% Bush, 37% Kerry, according to the Twelve Tribes analysis, which is based on new polling done by the University of Akron’s John Green.

Waldman goes on to say that the main factor in the shift of Latinos generally (he apparently doesn’t have issue breakouts for Protestant and Catholic Latinos) isn’t so much about immigration policy, where John McCain was obviously the best available Republican candidate, but instead because:

[T]hey’ve shifted sharply to the left on economics and foreign policy. Only 37% now say the war was justified (the national average now is 45%). Though the survey doesn’t probe this deeply, it’s notable that many Hispanics have been among the ranks of the American soldiers who have died in Iraq.
On the environment, in 2004, only 46% said they wanted stricter environmental regulation; 65% do now. They’re less likely to want religious involvement in politics (64% say religious institutions should stay out compared to 40% in 2004). In all, 62% identify as Democrats; 54% did in 2004.

In terms of the broader survey, the finding that will probably get the most attention is that the percentage of voters citing “moral issues” as their top concern is half what it was four years ago.


Palin Endorses Constitutional Right to Privacy

Ah, the plot thickens. CBS has just released the segment of the Couric interview where Palin is asked about Supreme Court decisions. Check out this exchange:

Couric: Do you think there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?
Palin: I do. Yeah, I do.
Couric: The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade.
Palin: I do. And I believe that individual states can best handle what the people within the different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see their will ushered in an issue like that.

It sure looks like Palin has no idea what she’s talking about on this issue of greatest concern to her social conservative fans. She may be the first person I’ve ever heard who simultaneously endorses a federal constitutional right to privacy while arguing that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. And if, of course, as Palin said twice, there is a right to privacy embedded in the U.S. Constitution, it’s completely nonsensical to talk about “individual states” handling it as they see fit.
Eyebrows have already been raised over this quote over at The Corner, suggesting that the McCain campaign’s going to be hearing a lot tomorrow from conservative legal scholars.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


Palin’s Abortion Dodge

After writing my last post about Sarah Palin’s odd lack of knowledge about Supreme Court decisions that are considered critically important by anti-abortion activists, I ran across a fascinating analysis by Beliefnet editor Steve Waldman of the segments of the Katie Couric interview that are directly about abortion policy.
I won’t reduplicate the whole thing here, but basically, Couric keeps trying to get Palin to clarify whether her hard-core pro-life position means she actually wants to make nearly all abortions illegal, and Palin keeps retreating into vague language about the “culture of life” and abortion as a “choice.” She finally does say she wouldn’t want to jail women who have abortions, though that’s not really relevant, since the Right to Life movement’s strategy for eliminating abortions has always relied on making them unavailable by cracking down on providers. Palin also at one point suggests that overturning Roe would simply return the issue to the states, which is true, but doesn’t deal with (a) the question of whether, as a governor, she’d support a state prohibition, or (b) the language of the Republican platform, which endorses a federal constitutional amendment to ban abortions, or (c) the fact that Congress could, if Roe is overturned, preempt state laws with a federal statutory abortion ban, much as it’s already done on so-called “partial-birth abortions.”
There’s nothing new about tactical duplicity among anti-abortionist extremists, who’ve always tried to act as though they are motivated only by shock over late-term abortions, even though they support policies that would restrict or ban the vast majority of abortions that occur very early in pregnancy. But Palin’s language in this interview is so incredibly evasive (as pointed out repeatedly by Waldman) that you might be left with the impression that her pro-life self-identification is just some sort of personal preference that has no impact on what she thinks the law should say on this subject. Indeed, what she really sounds like is one of those “personally opposed to” pro-choice Catholic politicians that anti-abortionists have so thoroughly excoriated over the years.
Best I can tell, right-to-lifers are confident enough that Palin’s “one of us” that they’ll let her get away with this sort of talk, as a way to reassure swing voters and help get her into office. But for such a brave maverick, she sure doesn’t seem to have the courage of her convictions.


Sarah and the Supremes

There’s been a lot of talk about the yet-to-be-released segment of the Katie Couric interview of Sarah Palin in which the Veep nominee apparently lapsed into silence when asked to name a single important Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade.
In general, I’m with Atrios in noting that most politicians don’t know a whole lot about Supreme Court decisions, whether they pretend to or not. And clearly, the best response for Palin to have offered was the perennial crowd-pleaser, “I’m not a lawyer.”
But what makes her non-answer startling to me is that Supreme Court decisions are actually the one area of public policy in which Palin’s core constituency, the Christian Right, is extremely well-versed.
Any anti-abortion activist worth his or her salt knows all about Griswold v. Connecticut, the famous “penumbra” decision that first established a constitutional right to privacy, and thus provided the key precedent for Roe. They’d also know about Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe and demonstrated the eternal perfidy of Reagan appointees O’Conner and Kennedy. And more than likely, they’d be familiar with Gonzales v. Carhart, the 2007 decision that validated the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, with Kennedy performing remarkably gymnastic judicial contortions in squaring the decision with Casey. And social conservatives focused on gay rights would be able to remember Lawrence v. Texas, yet another Kennedy decision, which struck down state statutes illegalizing gay sex, and scandalously (to conservatives, at least) citing international law as a relevant factor.
Beyond these recent decisions, every Republican politician knows the importance of ritually denouncing Dred Scott v. Sanford (1856) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the first validating the Fugitive Slave Act, and the second establishing “separate but equal” racial segregation as constitutionally acceptable. This is a time-honored dog-whistle to anti-abortion activists who want to identify their cause with that of civil rights, while reminding people that large Supreme Court precedents have been overturned in the past.
That Palin apparently locked up and didn’t name or even allude to any of these cases is indeed surprising, not because it reflects ignorance, but because it separates her from the base of knowledge characteristic of those most avid to see her elected vice president.


GOP to McCain: Change the Subject!

As the U.S. Senate today seeks to put the Humpty-Dumpty of the financial bailout back together again, John McCain’s getting a lot of advice from “nervous” Republicans, according to a piece by the Politico’s Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin. And that advice is: change the subject! Get away from all this “substantive” stuff and attack Obama!

Several state GOP chairmen in interviews urged the McCain campaign to be more aggressive in hitting Obama’s vulnerabilities, such as his past relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other problematic associations from Chicago….
Among those goading McCain to be more aggressive is Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Robin Smith, who said that “people need to see a gladiator who’s willing to defend what exactly he stands for.”
“We’re not talking, for instance, about the radical associations that Barack Obama has, with Mr. Ayers, Tony Rezko and so on,” Smith said. “More could be done.”
Murray Clark, the chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, said he is eager for Obama’s “troubling relationships” to be aired in his state. “I think those things will come up in Indiana again and they do have an impact on mainstream voters in Indiana. You call it going negative, [but] whoever … is in a position to point out these relationships, I think it’s helpful.”

What’s happened is that the Real World has interrupted the efforts of the McCain campaign to frame the electoral contest as a choice between “mavericks” focused on doubts and fears about his opponent:

McCain’s first signs of life only came after his campaign mocked Obama as a celebrity and sought to make the best of a race that had increasingly been defined by the Illinois Democrat. Then, thanks in part to Palin, McCain pulled even or took a lead in some polls after a convention that savaged Obama and featured only a brief video from President Bush and no appearance at all by Vice President Cheney.
Now, with the financial crisis front and center, Bush has reappeared on the landscape and the race is no longer an Obama referendum.

It’s hard to see how McCain will be able to distract attention from real-world problems with so little time remaining before November 4. But many Republicans clearly think it’s his only hope for victory.


House, Senate Campaigns Intensify

Tim Fernholz has an insightful American Prospect article on Chris Van Hollen’s DCCC strategy and expected Dem gains in the House of Reps.
Chris Bowers’ latest House forecast at OpenLeft predicts a 13-18 seat pick-up for Dems.
Kos considers Dem prospects for winning a filibuster-proof Senate majority and Electoral-vote.com sees a seven seat pick up for Dems in the U.S. Senate for a total of 58 seats, while electionprojection.com sees Dems with 56 seats in the next congress.
Five-Thirty-Eight‘s Nate Silver takes a look at the bailout vote among reps from swing congressional districts
MyDD‘s Todd Beeton has a great quote from Al Franken, on the importance of a Nov. 5 landslide for a working congressional majority.
James L at Swing State Project reports on “the biggest single-day money dump for the DCCC so far this cycle” — and who gets how much.
The Wall St. Journal‘s Easha Anand reports on Senate GOP candidates attack ads in CO, LA and MS.
Freedom Watch is rolling out the big bucks to support conservatives in House and Senate races. Chris Cillizza has a report on their target races at The Fix.
Put your money where your mouth is at Act Blue: The Online Clearinghouse for Democratic Action


House GOP Fiasco: Long Time Coming

I’m often critical of New York Times columnist David Brooks for finding countless ways to reinforce Republican talking points despite beginning almost every column looking at politics from a lofty, independent perspective.
But in yesterday’s column, Brooks threw off the party yoke, and flayed the House Republicans who killed the financial bailout bill as “nihilists” on a “single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party,” and who may “go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century.”
Over at Political Animal, Steve Benen welcomed the Brooks column as a “pleasant surprise,” that occurred “better late than never.”
I usually agree with Steve, and I probably have a more positive overall opinion of David Brooks than he does, but my reaction to the column was: “Why did it take you so long to figure this out, David?”
The path that led to Monday’s vote can be directly traced back to those days just after the 2006 Republican midterm debacle, when conservatives talked themselves into the bizarre conviction that George W. Bush and the GOP had lost their way because of insufficient ideological rigor, and excessive concern for “respectable” mainstream opinion. Ever since, they’ve been determined to place ideology first, and have exerted stronger control over Republican orthodoxy than you’d ever imagine to see in an embattled party.
And that same path was strewn with rose petals by the presidential campaign of John McCain, whose incessant pitch to conservatives was that he and they were fellow “mavericks” against the unpopular GOP establishment, ready to win in Iraq, take on Iran and Russia, slash federal spending, “reform” entitlements, revive the supply-side gospel, and finally win the big cultural fights that Bush and Rove would only use as election-time base-bait.
McCain’s “maverick from the Right” campaign in his own party was clinched once and for all when he looked far down the GOP bench and came up with a running-mate who was without any doubt a “maverick from the Right,” mocked as much by neocon double-domes and mandarin pinstripes in the GOP as by any “liberal elites.”
So when conservatives were presented with an opportunity to simultaneously repudiate George W. Bush and express a neanderthal economic ideology, while annoying elites across the political spectrum, of course they jumped on it with both feet. The only surprising thing about it is that the conservative “maverick” John McCain didn’t follow them.
Folks like David Brooks should pay more attention to, and learn to respect as genuine, what conservative activists in and out of Congress say every day. They really do think that criminalizing abortion and demonizing gay people is a lot more important than bailing out financial institutions. And they really do think that economic catastrophe is a small price to pay for resisting “socialism” They aren’t just feckless foot soldiers for the “responsible” GOP establishment that Brooks adores. They are the Republican Party now, and they aren’t going away. Get used to it.


Is there a psychological explanation for John McCain’s recent behavior?

In the very brief recent period between John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate and his erratic behavior during the last few days, very serious and fundamental questions about McCain’s character, behavior and temperament have become widespread.
But observers have found difficulty in fitting McCain’s various behaviors into any single recognizable pattern. Each critique focuses on a different and apparently unrelated issue – his instability, recklessness, tolerance for mendacity and self-righteousness among others.
There is, however, one very interesting psychological framework that actually does seem to fit the broad pattern of behavior we are now seeing.
Consider the following personality profile:

1. The person is impulsive and does not think about consequences – he or she seems to embrace the philosophy – “just do it”
2, the person is a risk-taker and thrill-seeker. His or her conduct often seems reckless and blind to possible damage or harm. There is a lack of normal prudence and caution.
3. The person exhibits an attitude of “the rules don’t apply to me.” The person clearly understands the difference between right and wrong and even becomes outraged and furious when other people violate the rules. But the person simply cannot apply these rules to his or her own conduct. These individuals’ own violations are always “no big deal” or somehow justified by circumstances.
4. The person exhibits a significant degree of self-centeredness and narcissism – He or she seems to operate according to a philosophy of “it’s all about me”. These individuals have an inability to see events in a larger context than how they affect the person him or herself.

Gee. Seems pretty on the mark, doesn’t it.
Yet, in fact, the description above is actually a profile that is familiar to many people in the juvenile justice system – it is a description of the behavioral syndrome seen in many adolescents – often from stable, good families — who become enmeshed in the criminal justice system because of repeated delinquent behavior like speeding, drunk driving, promiscuity, low-level drug dealing or burglary (not for survival but “just for kicks”) and a whole panoply of other juvenile misbehavior.
Traditional psychological approaches were not very successful in developing a coherent theory to explain this behavioral syndrome. Until the mid-1980’s, in fact, the attempts to understand these different personality characteristics were usually presented in separate chapters of standard textbooks.
The revolutionary advances in cognitive neuroscience in the last 20 years, however – and particularly in CT and fMRI based brain imaging – have provided a dramatically new perspective. It has been found that, although these different personality characteristics are localized in a variety of locations within the brain, they all appear to be mediated (“densely interconnected,” in neurophysical terms) through the prefrontal cortex.
This fact, together with the discovery that the prefrontal cortex often does not completely develop until the early 20’s, has led to a tremendous rethinking of youthful delinquency. An emerging body of legal theory, in fact, considers that neural imaging of the prefrontal cortex may even provide a legal basis for a defense of diminished capacity in young adults.
But what does this possibly have to do with a 72 year old man with a long career in political life? John McCain is clearly not going to hotwire a Mustang and drive off on the beltway at 90 miles an hour.
The answer is that some individuals consistently tend toward the expression of these personality characteristics throughout their entire lifetimes. In McCain’s case simple observation also suggests two additional conclusions:

1. That the above noted, seemingly unrelated personality characteristics which McCain is exhibiting are actually part of a single, coherent behavioral syndrome.
2. That, for whatever reason, the expression of these characteristics in John McCain’s behavior has dramatically increased in recent months.

A number of years ago I observed as a leading expert in delinquent behavior delivered the news to the distraught parents of a young man that there was no easy answer or quick fix for their son’s behavior. The expert concluded:

“You just have to wait and trust that time will help to reduce his problematic conduct. In the meantime, just use common sense – don’t go out of town and leave him alone in the house, and –whatever you do – don’t give him the keys to the car.”

Gee, that sure sounds like good advice to me, doesn’t it.