washington, dc

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

Back to the Fundamentals

When John McCain got his post-Convention “bounce,” many political observers said that Barack Obama’s most urgent challenge was to get public attention refocused on the economy.
Well, external events have taken care of that issue, and it’s not surprising that Obama’s doing better in both national and state polls since the financial meltdown began. But today’s new Washington Post/ABC poll provides at least one data point for the proposition that the presidential race has shifted significantly.
The poll has Obama up over McCain by a 52-43 margin among likely voters. The last Post/ABC poll, conducted on September 5-7, had McCain up 47-45. And the explanation of the shift is pretty simple: the percentage of voters calling the economy the top issue has jumped from 37% to 50% in the last two weeks.
The McCain campaign quickly called the new poll an “outlier,” and that’s entirely possible, at least on the margins. But the Post/ABC polling operation has a pretty good reputation, and if anything, is usually thought to have a slight pro-Republican bias due to its relatively tight “screen” for likely voters. Moreover, as the Post‘s own analysis explains, neither of the last two Democratic nominees ever registered above the 50% mark in a Post poll.
The composition of Obama’s surge in this poll is interesting: he’s regained the lead among independents, and has pared McCain’s lead among white voters to five percent. And it’s primarily college-educated white voters who are moving to Obama: he leads McCain among them by nine percent, while trailing among non-college educated white voters by 17 percent. In other words, Obama’s building a lead based on the strengths he’s long exhibited (he leads among African-Americans by a 96-3 margin).
More ominously for McCain and other Republicans, Democrats have regained a double-digit advantage in party ID.
All in all, the poll’s results seem to reflect a shift in the fundamentals rather than a specific comparative judgment between the two candidates based on campaign activity. And that’s not too surprising, given the recent domination of the news by a heavy confirmation of the public’s long-standing pessimism about the economy, which has been a drag on Republican candidates since well before the 2006 midterm elections.
We’ll see what experts like Mark Blumenthal and Nate Silver have to say about this poll later today, but one thing’s clear: if the economy has indeed retilted the race to favor Obama, it won’t be easy for John McCain to tilt it back, since the odds of the economy looking good before Election Day stand at somewhere between slim and none. Yes, the debates will matter, and yes, external events will continue to have an impact. But right now, the economy is reasserting a powerful negative effect on the campaigns of anyone campaigning with an “R” next to the name on the ballot.


So Where’s the Fiorina Ad ?

Meredith Viera’s deer-in-the -headlights interview with John McCain ought to be a training video for TV reporters who want to see how the hardball political interview is conducted. Viera makes the GOP nominee squirm, sweat and jabber, as he struggles to reconcile Carly Fiorina’s leading role in his campaign, her 45 million dollar golden parachute and his hypocritical put down of “greed on Wall St.” and execs’ “huge severance packages.” Almost a ready-made ad for the Obama campaign.
On the same topic, see Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times article “McCain Stands By Fiorina,” in which McCain blasts two Fannie Mae execs for their golden parachutes, each about half the size of Fiorina’s package.

In a McCain-Palin administration, there will be no seat for these people at the policy-making table…They won’t even get past the front gate at the White House

I guess he would let Fiorina in the back door.


The Ultimate Smackdown

It’s been said a lot lately that Tina Fey was born to do impressions of Sarah Palin. I don’t know about that, but I do know that The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle was born to write the ultimate, definitive smackdown of all the incessant conservative whining about Sarah Palin’s critics being a horde of godless, tofu-eating, Ivy-educated elitists who hate Real Americans.
Cottle’s target was a particularly annoying rant by Ralph Peters about the righteous rage Real Americans (like him, of course) should all feel at any and all criticism of “Our Sister Sarah” by “the leftwing elite.”
Take it away, Michelle!

Oh blah blah blah. In this tiresome piece we see a near perfect distillation of the cheap, shameless culture warfare that conservatives are so fond of employing: An attack on Sarah Palin is an attack on all hard-working, god-fearing, authentic Americans! When Dems and “mediacrats” criticize Palin, they are mocking every red-blooded red-stater in this great nation.
Now I appreciate the effectiveness of insulting stereotyping as much as the next pundit, but I’m getting exceedingly tired of hearing about how much I scorn Sarah Palin because she is a hick chick from a hick state who didn’t go to Harvard. Please. I grew up in freaking Southeast Tennessee, in a smallish suburb of Chattanooga known as Hixson. (That’s right, pronounced hick-son.) I have spent more time at mudbogs, tractor pulls, county fairs, pig-roasts, dirt-bike races, and Wal-Marts than most of the anti-elite conservative whiners flapping their gums and wringing their hands over poor disrespected Sarah. I attended public high school, and the bulk of my classmates had Appalachian accents so thick they make Palin sound like a network anchor. The boys were hunters. The girls–myself included–had absolutely enormous hair. If any of my friends wasn’t a Christian, she had the good sense not to mention it to the rest of us, lest we try to save her soul at the countless revivals, church camps, and youth retreats we all attended….
Just like Ralph Peters, I KNOW Sarah Palin. Hell, in my younger days, I WAS Sarah Palin. (Well, minus being a crack shot.) The difference is I don’t fetishize my regular-gal roots and assume they make me special–much less qualified to run the country. And while I have indeed witnessed my fair share of cultural snobbery from some of my better-credentialed, coastal colleagues over the years, I’m not so defensive about where I come from that I feel the need to champion a wildly unqualified fellow hick whose politics I disagree with as a way to get back at everyone I know who has ever made a sniffy comment about big hair or small towns.
Memo to Ralph & Co.: Get over yourselves and stop lumping everyone who grew up in non-elite circles into some persecuted ball of burning, self-righteous resentment…. Some of us, in fact, don’t give a rat’s ass where [Palin] comes from. We’re too busy worrying about where she and McCain want to take us all next.

As it happens, my own background is pretty similar to Cottle’s. So I am particularly delighted that she spoke so eloquently on behalf of the rest of us birthright rednecks who are extremely tired of the unmitigated gall of people like Ralph Peters, who presumes to speak for us, and then, if we happen to think he’s full of crap, tells us we must have gone to Yale and hate Jesus.


Bailout Backlash

Yesterday I noted that some conservatives are urging Republicans to oppose the Paulson Plan while hoping that Democrats provide the votes to actually enact it. But there’s a Democratic backlash a-building as well.
The blogospheric Left is increasingly committed to full-scale opposition, viz. this post from Atrios:

Look, right now the choice is, Bush’s Plan, or Something Else. Kill Bush’s Plan now, worry about Something Else later.

Markos Moulitsas is arguing for a delay in any bailout plan until after the elections. And here’s how fellow Kossack Meteor Blades assesses the general situation:

Democrats, in general, and Senator Barack Obama, in particular – as the new head of the Democratic Party – should trash this outrageous dictatorial bailout and stop listening to the advice of those who led us into this mess – including some fellow Democrats of prominence. They shouldn’t tinker on the edges of the administration’s proposal. Their substitute plan should put the pain on the pin-striped grifters where it belongs instead of on those Americans who have been repeatedly victimized by them.

There’s also a lot of talk analogizing the political psychology of the bailout plan, and the choices it presents to Democrats, to the Iraq War Resolution and/or FISA.
But heartburn about the Paulson Plan is not limited to the blogospheric Left. Here’s Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute in an op-ed today:

Rather than be stampeded into hasty action, Congress ought to deliberate long enough to make sure that Main Street doesn’t pay for Wall Street’s sins.

Marshall also links to his (and my) former colleague Rob Shapiro’s remarks on Marketplace yesterday, pointing out that the cost of the bailout would have a devastating effect on the policy options available to the next president.
While Democratic resistance to quick approval of the Paulson Plan is growing, there’s considerable confusion in terms of Democratic strategy. Virtually everyone supports Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to secure substantive changes in the legislation; Paulson has already accepted a couple of key changes, including mortgage foreclosure relief and equity acquisition in bailed out institutions (this latter point being critical to potentially reducing the ultimate net cost to taxpayers). But such changes could also undermine Republican support for the plan, pinning Democrats with responsibility for enacting it, and raising the obvious questions as to why Dems don’t just craft a plan to their own liking and present Paulson and Bush with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
In any event, Democrats don’t appear to be just rolling over in a panicked reaction to last week’s market disaster, and letting a Wall Street guy toss three-quarters-of-a-trillion dollars at his old friends, along with foreign investors, with virtually no strings. We’ll soon know just how tough they are willing to be in what will be an extremely momentous series of decisions that could not only affect the November 4 elections, but what happens afterwards for years to come.


Help Wanted: Transformation Manager

Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Dr. Gary Hart (now chairman of the Council for a Livable World) shows why he is regarded as one of the more insightful strategists in Democratic politics in this amusing and interesting dialogue with BloggingheadsTV sounding board Robert Wright. Wright asks him if nowadays “the object of the game in presidential elections is to convince the electorate that your opponent is the type of person they hated in high school?” Hart responds that no, nor is it “who do you want to have a beer with or who reminds you of your first husband.” Hart dismisses the Palin factor as a “distraction and temporary sideshow” and argues that it’s more about helping voters get a “sense” that your candidate can manage the needed transformation better than the adversary. The central question is “who do you down deep think can fundamentally alter the direction of the nation.” Says Hart, “I just wish I could convince Barack Obama to say that.”


End of an Era

When I became Managing Editor and principal blogger at TDS, I resolved to try very hard not to write about college football, which I did often in the autumn at my previous New Donkey haunts. I have to break the self-imposed rule today on the news that the Voice of the Georgia Bulldogs, Larry Munson, is retiring after 42 years on the air. After all, it’s a major story at the International Herald-Tribune.
But I’ll try to give this news some Georgia political context.
When Munson broadcast his first Georgia game in September of 1966, the state had just experienced its first racially integrated high school football game (Carver vs. North Fulton, which I attended as a member of the North Fulton marching band). Jimmy Carter was a lame-duck state senator who had recently lost his first statewide campaign, and who would soon vote in the legislature (charged under an archaic constitution to make the choice) to elect arch-segregationist Lester Maddox to the governorship. Sam Nunn was two years away from his first election to the Georgia legislature. Newt Gingrich was a graduate student at Tulane. Martin Luther King, Jr., was alive and well. John Lewis had been replaced earlier in the year by Stokely Charmichael as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Commitee (SNCC).
It was a very different time.
But the weird thing is that Munson was already a broadcast veteran by then, having been the Voice of the Wyoming Cowboys and of the Vanderbilt Commoderes before arriving in Georgia. He started doing football broadcasts when Harry Truman was a doomed appointed president, and Joe McCarthy was a little-known freshman senator from Wisconsin.
I know nothing about Munson’s politics, if he has any. And he achieved national fame with his hysterical calls of key positive moments in Georgia football history. But those of us who listened to him week-in and week-out know him for his exceptionally paranoid style: every Georgia opponent was a behemoth; no Georgia lead was ever big enough; no trailing margin was ever surmountable; and the clock always moved too slowly when we were ahead and too quickly when we were behind. In other words, Larry Munson sounded just like a generation of Democratic political pundits, right up until the day he retired.
Munson’s initimable voice will be missed. But I’m hoping his inveterate pessimism about Georgia football will prove inappropriate this year, much as I hope Democratic pessimism about the November 4 election is as archaic as the riviting fear Dawg fans once had when a Ray Goff team faced Steve Spurrier.


Obama Must use the “R” Word

The editors of The New Republic have a post scolding Senator Obama for his reluctance to use the word “Republican.” Here’s the gist:

If voters thought McCain was just another Republican, they would run away screaming. That is why McCain is desperate to shed the label–and Barack Obama is desperate to make it stick.
Except, um, that’s not what Obama is doing. On the day before McCain released his ad, Obama gave a major speech on economics. It was a hard-hitting address, in which Obama proclaimed, “It’s time to put an end to a broken system in Washington that is breaking the American economy.” But the word “Republican” never came up. The next day, Obama released a somber ad in which he addressed the camera for two minutes. It included plenty of smart ideas (something he has never lacked, notwithstanding the bogus charge that he’s “all talk”). But its message was all about Obama the non-ideological reformer–that is, the guy positioned to clean up Washington. “Partisan fights and outworn ideas of the left and right won’t solve the problems we face today,” he said. Republicans? They didn’t make cameos here, either. Neither did Bush.

It is a consequential decision, but not necessarilly such an easy call. I tend to agree with the TNR editors that Obama has to use the label to make it stick. Surrogates’ sound bites just don’t get the necessary buzz. Yet Obama is making some inroads with “Obamacons” and seniors (see new CNN poll), many of whom are Republicans. And his campaign’s internal polling may show a potential for many more in light of the deepening financial crisis. Not all conservatives are gung ho in favor of bailing out failed businesses, elective war and nation-building in other countries. He has to be a little careful, not to be perceived as engaging in name-calling that would alienate potential supporters.
That said, the Republicans are directly responsible for the deregulation mania that lead to the financial meltdown, and you can’t hold them responsible without saying so at some point. The challenge is artfully making the distinction between Republican office-holders “who have betrayed their conservative heritage” and fed-up Republican voters who may be considering a Nov.4 cross-over. It’s about simultaneously holding the GOP responsible, while at the same time expressing welcoming respect for potential converts.


Debating While Black

Mine probably weren’t the only eyebrows raised at the news that former Maryland Lieutenant Gov. Michael Steele is playing Barack Obama in John McCain’s preparations for his first presidential debate on Friday. Steele’s preeminent qualification seems to be that he’s African-American.
Now it’s true that MI Gov. Jennifer Granholm is playing a similar sparring-partner role for Joe Biden in his prep for debating Sarah Palin. But this is almost certainly attributable to the need to deal with the Lazio Factor–the famous 2000 precedent whereby Rick Lazio seemed to condescedingly bully Hillary Clinton in a classic gender-inflected dynamic.
It’s not exactly clear what the racial analogy to the Lazio Factor might be, unless Team McCain is concerned their candidate will slip up and address the relatively youthful Obama as “boy” or something.
In any event, if McCain just had to have an African-American stand-in, I’m with Jon Chait: why not Alan Keyes, who has himself debated Obama (not to mention McCain)?


The GOP’s Bottomless Crack Pipe

The general expectation this week is that the Paulson Plan for avoiding a worldwide financial meltdown, with an uncertain number of modifications, is going to pass Congress overwhelmingly, and recede into the background in the presidential campaign.
I don’t know about that.
Every Democrat should read Patrick Ruffini’s post from yesterday at NextRight. He is, I strongly suspect, perfectly reflecting the game that Republicans, including Team McCain, want to play with the Paulson Plan:

Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.
God Himself couldn’t have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That’s why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say “No” and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress….
In an ideal world, McCain opposes this because of all the Democratic add-ons and shows up to vote Nay while Obama punts.
History has shown us that “inevitable” “emergency” legislation like the Patriot Act or Sarbanes-Oxley is never more popular than on the day it is passed — and this isn’t all that popular to begin with. All the upside comes with voting against it.

Ruffini is exactly right about the politics of this issue, especially for Republicans. Think of this as like one of those periodic votes on raising the public debt limit. It has to pass, of course, but there’s zero percentage in supporting it for any one individual. The speculative costs of the legislation actually failing are completely intangible and ultimately irrelevant, while the costs it will impose are tangible and controversial from almost every point of view. For McCain and other Republicans, voting “no” on Paulson without accepting the consequences of that vote is the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: it will please the conservative “base,” distance them from both Bush and “Washington,” and let them indulge in both anti-government and anti-corporate demagoguery, even as Democrats bail out their Wall Street friends and big investors generally. You simply can’t imagine a better way for McCain to decisively reinforce his simultaneous efforts to pander to the “base” while posing as a “maverick.”
Democrats are right to demand significant substantive concessions before offering their support for the Paulson Plan. But just as importantly, they need to demand Republican votes in Congress, including the vote of John McCain. If this is going to be a “bipartisan” relief plan, it has to be fully bipartisan, not an opportunity for McCain to count on Obama and other Democrats to save the economy while exploiting their sense of responsibility to win the election for the party that let this crisis occur in the first place.