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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 19, 2024

For Those Who Need a Laugh Today….

The very funny (if not always family-friendly) sports blog Every Day Should Be Saturday has a fake wire story up entitled: “Feds call for 38 point bailout of USC,” suggesting that a retroactive allocation of points to the once-invincible Southern Cal Trojans is necessary to stabilize college football after last night’s shocking loss to Oregon State. There’s lots of hilarious stuff in the comments thread, too, about the costs and moral hazards involved, including a particularly incoherent take from someone posting as “Sarah Palin.”
Given the vast and ancient prevalence of sports metaphors in politics, it’s appropriate to run the metaphors in the other direction now and then.


The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Over at The Nation, Chris Hayes very nicely sums up the perspective of many individual members of Congress, Democratic and Republican, towards the bailout negotiations:

1) The bailout is unpopular: The polling on this is muddled, but the polling is completely dependent on the wording. Every single lawmaker is getting barraged with hundreds of calls a day from constituents, and no one is saying: “Please give lots of money to Wall Street!”
2) The crisis is terrifying to lawmakers: They’re getting insanely heavy pressure from the vulturous Wall St lobbyists buzzing around the Hill (“there’s a gazillion of ’em!” a staffer told me earlier in the week) and also, dire and sober warnings from Bernanke and Paulson behind closed doors. Basically, if you don’t pass this, they’re being told, you’ll have the blood of another Great Depression on your hands.
3) Ergo: The optimal outcome for all lawmkers is to vote against the bill and still have it pass. That way you get to have your cake and eat it, too. But what we’re dealing with is something akin to a massive prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone wants to get into the decision quadrant of voting against the bill and having it pass, but of course if everyone rushes for that quadrant, then the bill doesn’t pass and therefore, no one ends up in that quadrant. If you’re Pelosi and the Democrats you can’t allow the Republican wingnuts off the hook by creating the space for them to crowd into the sweet spot, and then use the bill to run against you. That’s why things are so tenuous and difficult to game out.

This is pretty much what Ed Kilgore was warning about earlier this week. If the bailout passes, the consequences will be bad and very tangible, particularly since nobody’s under the illusion that a bailout will prevent a recession. Nobody knows how much worse things would actually get if the bailout fails. So if it does pass, you definitely want to be recorded as voting against it, particularly if you are vulnerable Republican.
The “prisoner’s dilemma” Chris refers to is a famous game theory conundrum in which it will always be in the selfish interest of one accomplice to a crime to betray the other, even though cooperation would produce a better overall result.


Who Was That Masked Man?

As we continue to await news of the latest round of negotiations on the financial bailout, John McCain has already taken credit for saving the day, and is now unsuspending his campaign and headed to Oxford, MS, for the presidential debate he tried to delay.
The evidence his campaign offers for this astonishing claim is that House Republicans are now represented in the negotiations.
Since said House Republicans object to the basic structure of the agreement reached yesterday by a bipartisan group of House and Senate banking committee members, it’s a little strange to suggest that enabling them to blackmail their way into the negotiations represented some sort of breakthrough. And if they somehow do succeed in driving the “deal” in their favored direction of capital gains cuts and deregulation, and away from Democratic demands that taxpayers secure an equity position in bailed-out companies, along with limits on executive pay, then you can confidently expect a revolt among congressional Democrats that will be larger and more significant than the McCain-assisted hissy fit from the Right yesterday.
Any way you want to slice it, the idea that Washington is closer to a consensus deal than it was the moment John McCain suspended his campaign on Wednesday and went blundering into the bailout negotiations is ridiculous. McCain did indeed get his photo op, and probably got some brownie points from conservatives for implicitly backing their point of view. But it’s quite clear that people in Congress today are not watching him ride off in triumph and gratefully saying to each other: “Who was that masked man?” More likely, they’re happy to see the back of him.


Will Voters Tire of McCain’s Theatrics ?

Will he or won’t he? As I write, John ‘Hamlet on the Potomac’ McCain is still dithering over whether or not to honor his commitment to debate Senator Obama tonight, rudely leaving many McCain supporters as well as his adversaries, in the lurch. Voters are supposed to believe that he can’t take a few hours to fly to Mississippi and proceed with the debate as he agreed because his physical presence in D.C. is so urgently needed.
Hard to say what McCain will do at this point. MS Governor Barbour reportedly expects him to show. GOP strategist Ed Rollins doesn’t think so. Who could blame Obama — and level-headed voters — for saying “Oh, whatever.”
No telling how McCain’s latest stunt will play with voters on Nov. 4. As our staff report indicated yesterday, most voters want the debate to proceed, albeit with some discusssion about the economic crisis. Yet, on election day McCain’s debate vacillations could be old news.
Meanwhile Katie Couric’s interview with Governor Palin yesterday did nothing to dismiss the argument that McCain picked a lightweight or that her selection was “gimmicky,” as GOP strategist Mike Murphy termed it. McCain may survive waffling about the first debate. But my guess is that one more such stunt would be “strike three” with many, if not most undecideds.


More Chaos

Well, it’s basically Close of Business in the eastern time zone, and if anyone has a clear idea of what’s going on in Washington, they’re keeping it to themselves.
Yes, there was an “agreement in principle” involving senior members of the House and Senate banking committees that appears to cover a lot of the demands Democrats have been making for changes in the Paulson Plan, including a “‘phased” approach to distributing bailout money.
But now the crafters of that agreement must go into negotiations with Paulson himself. And in the meantime, House Republicans are threatening a revolt against the basic principle of government purchases of bad securities.
And it’s totally unclear what, if anything, of substance came out of the “summit” that John McCain demanded with Bush, which Obama reluctantly attended. And it’s also unclear whether McCain, having inserted himself into the middle of this delicate process, is planning to help herd Republicans along or blow the whole thing up so he can claim to put it back together again.
Nobody knows, either, whether McCain is going to show up at tomorrow night’s debate, though he is planning all sorts of media appearances.
I’ll write more when there’s more to write about. It’s a day as mysterious as yesterday was weird.


Two Polls: Debate Must Go On

CQPolitics Poll Tracker reports on two new polls, by The Marist Institute and SurveyUSA indicating a strong majority of Americans want tommorrow’s debate to continue on sked. First, from the CQPolitics wrap up of the Marist Poll, conducted 9/22-23, with 5 percent m.o.e:

Voters say by a 53 percent to 42 percent margin that Friday’s presidential debate should go on as planned despite John McCain’s call to cancel it while the nation deals with its financial crisis, according to a Marist Institute poll conducted yesterday…Democrats favor pushing on 80 percent to 15 percent, Republicans side with McCain 76 percent to 21 percent and independents want the debate to proceed by 53 percent to 40 percent.
…Twenty-eight percent of voters say the face-offs will help them make up their minds, while 71 percent said they had already decided their choice. For undecided voters, 87 percent are counting on the debates to help them choose and the same is true for 38 percent of independents.

The SurveyUSA poll, conducted 9/24-25 found:

Three of four Americans say the Friday debate should be held on Friday…Twenty-three percent say the debate should be postponed, up from 10 percent yesterday Wednesday.

The Marist Poll also found that 48 percent of RV’s want the candidates to “talk about economic issues, given the ongoing economic turmoil, as opposed to foreign policy which is the topic of the first debate.” The Poll also indicated that 48 percent expect Obama to win compared to 37 percent for McCain.


What We Learned About John McCain Yesterday

Yesterday was quite a trip through the Twilight Zone, eh? To sum it all up, it was a day when an Address to the Nation by the President of the United States warning of imminent economic collapse was pretty much a minor footnote.
At this point today, there are a lot of important things we don’t know. Will a bipartisan deal on a financial system bailout be announced, as key negotiators have hinted? Will John McCain or Barack Obama be “players” or photo-op-bystanders in any deal? Will investors respond positively to news of massive new subsidies? Will homeowners get any protection? Will banks continue to fail, and will credit continue to shrink?
Will there be a presidential debate tomorrow night, and if so, will Barack Obama debate an empty chair, as so many candidates for offices high and low have done in the past when their opponents refuse to debate? (Though normally, the non-debating candidate is one with a big lead).
While we don’t have answers to any of those questions, we did learn, or re-learn, an important thing about John McCain yesterday. For all his talk of “honor,” the man really is willing to do just about anything for political advantage. He’s a “maverick” against decency.
Consider yesterday’s events. Barack Obama personally and privately called up McCain and proposed a joint “statement of principles” on the financial bailout, to be worked on in secrecy by staff. McCain agreed, and then, without a word of notice to Team Obama, unilaterally announced his campaign suspension, his demand that the debate be postponed, and his challenge to Obama to accompany him to Washington to get into the middle of the negotiations.
Clearly, no one in Washington had asked for McCain’s help in the negotiations; since he’s missed every single roll call vote for five months, his colleagues may have well forgotten that he’s a member of the Senate. There are, in fact, just two possibilities about this stunt: either it was, as Barney Frank suggested, an incredibly reckless act that threatened the negotiations, or if there was any value to McCain’s involvement, it could have all been done in private, away from the cameras.
Meanwhile, McCain refused to sign onto a statement of five principles proposed by the Obama camp, though he did agree to a completely empty statement of concern about the financial crisis. This morning, as Tim Fernholz of TAPPED reports, at the Clinton Global Initiative event (an appearance that somehow did not qualify for cancellation), McCain articulated four of the five proposed principles as his own, in some cases using the exact words of the Obama proposal.
This, my friends (as McCain would say), is a pattern of unmistakably weasely behavior, made no more palatable by the fact that is was all trumpeted as exhibiting the candidate’s selfless commitment to “country first.”
A lot of Democrats yesterday thought the disingenuous nature of McCain’s histrionics would be obvious to voters, and would hurt him badly. I’m not so sure about that, but no one should be surprised at any tactic this campaign descends to from here on out.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


Move and Counter-Move

The political world is afire right now with reaction to John McCain’s announcement that he was “suspending” his campaign in order to return to Washington and participate in negotiations over the Paulson Plan. And oh, by the way, McCain also called for delaying Friday’s first presidential candidates’ debate.
But according to the most accounts, today’s surprises reallly began with Obama contacting McCain this morning to propose a joint “statement of principles” on the bailout.
If I had to guess, McCain’s “dramatic” announcement was intended to steal Obama’s thunder in showing willingness to pursue a joint-candidate approach to the crisis. Since both candidates are senators, and would be leaving the campaign trail to vote on a bailout plan anyway, the practical effect of the McCain announcement would seem to be to inject the candidates directly into the negotiation process. McCain may also be trying to place himself at the head of the parade by taking credit for Republican concessions (e.g., on executive pay) that are already happening. The effort to get the debate delayed, at a time when foreign policy discussions might seem an irritating diversion, was probably just gravy to Team McCain.
The bigger mystery to me is the original Obama gambit. It’s unclear whether it was offered in expectation of a “no” answer, or inversely, to ensure that McCain didn’t find a way to separate himself from a bailout plan that might prove to be very unpopular. And none of us at this moment knows that a joint “statement of principles” might look like.
In any event, McCain seems to be getting the lion’s share of attention for his public counter-move to Obama’s original move. Whether that ultimately helps or hurts hiim remains to be seen.


McCain’s Fishy Debate Postponement Proposal

Much of the speculation about McCain’s debate postponement proposal around the blogs settles on grandstanding as The Noble Bipartisan (Digby and The Fix), putting Obama on the spot and inadequate debate preparation (Tapped) as his real motives, all of which are plausible explanations.
I suspect another motive is that he would like to push the foreign policy debate closer to the election to give it a little more shelf-life in voters’ minds. The tip-off would be if his campaign fights hard to make the last debate about foreign policy. McCain and others believe foreign policy and national security are his strong cards, and that debate affords his best opportunity to shine in comparison to Obama. He may be wrong about that for a number of reasons, but it’s never stopped him before.
I’m not sure it helps him. His postponement proposal may well add to the image of McCain as erratic, mercurial, and distracted, in addition to the obvious grandstanding meme. McCain clearly has an inordinate fondness for the ‘wow factor’ and the ‘Hail Mary.’ He’s the player most likely to bet the ranch on an inside straight as the situation deteriorates. You couldn’t blame voters for thinking ‘I don’t know what this guy is going to do next.’
Here’s hoping Obama doesn’t fall for rescheduling the foreign policy debate. If McCain simply refuses to debate, then nothing happens on Friday. But Obama should hang tough as the solid, steady guy who shows up on time and keeps his agreements. Let McCain, who has missed 412 of 643 Senate votes this session, be viewed as the one who didn’t show for the debate, either.


Debating Foreign Relations–and the Economy

It’s richly ironic that in the midst of a national obsession about the condition of the U.S. economy, we’re about to have a presidential candidates’ debate limited to foreign relations issues.
You’d have to figure that Team Obama is trying to develop ways for their candidate to insert pithy references to the financial meltdown in a discussion otherwise dominated by Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and Georgia, Pakistan and al Qaeda, and so forth. But so long as the moderators cooperate, Obama may have a more direct opportunity to keep economic worries on the front-burner: by talking about the signal failure of Republicans to help Americans manage the transition to a truly global economy.
After all, as Bill Galston pointedly observed in his recent open letter to Obama published here at TDS, the “core issue” on the economy is “a Republican approach to the economy, shared by Bush and McCain, that shafts ordinary Americans and does nothing to help them deal with the challenges of global competition.”
Obama should take every opportunity to argue that the financial meltdown is simply exhibit Z in the long pattern of GOP mismangement of globalization. They’ve given us massive public and private debt, job losses, income losses, and benefits erosion, all supposedly essential to keep the macroeconomic fundamentals sound. And now those fundamentals have been destroyed, giving policymakers the wonderful choice of either risking a Great-Depression-level economic collapse, or providing upwards of a trillion dollar in corporate subsidies.
It’s really not that hard a case to make, and it can be presented in a tone of cold anger at the idea that Republican policies should be given still another chance to work. McCain’s implicit argument that cracking down on budget “earmarks,” or fighting lobbyists (those not already on his campaign payroll), or enacting still more tax cuts, or still more trade agreements, will take care of our economic problems is now obviously and absurdly inadequate to the challenges we now face. His erratic, almost panic-stricken reaction to the financial meltdown itself isn’t very reassuring, either, given his heavy dependence on an aura of principled leadership. Indeed, in a remarkable column yesterday, conservative pundit George Will all but suggested that McCain’s behavior on this issue disqualified him to serve as commander-iin-chief.
So: Obama need not appear to change the subject of the debate on Friday to remind voters of the political implications of the current economic mess. The GOP’s inability or refusal to manage globalization in the national interest is without question one of the preeminent foreign policy issues of the campaign. Let McCain brag that he’s brought us to the brink of “victory” in Iraq, or rattle sabers at the Iranians or the Russians. What’s happened to America’s economy in the last eight years has been a huge strategic disaster for U.S. leadership and security, crystallized in the current reality that we’re probably about to (explicitly or implicitly) raise taxes in no small part to keep our foreign creditors from plunging us into a long depression.
Let’s hope Obama sees this opportunity to present a meta-message on the global economy on Friday, and seizes it.