Policy Review editor Tod Lindberg has a habit of telling his fellow conservatives uncomfortable truths at key moments of political history. Back in 1999, he scolded conservatives for refusing to acknowledge that Democrats–and center-left progressives internationally–had reinvigorated their political tradition via a “Third Way” movement that relied equally on effective governance and conservative failure to adjust:

This movement on the part of the world’s center-left parties is the most important political development of the
decade. They have decided to bury large enough swaths of their old ideology to obtain power and govern….
The truth is that Third Way politicians are perfectly happy to have cast conservatives as an anti-government menace whose message for people who fall down is “Get up.” The conservatives are even useful, in their way: Their political salience makes it possible (in fact, necessary) for Third Way politicians to shackle their taste for activist government to market principles, thus reinvigorating governments ossified by old-style liberalism.
If conservatives don’t like the role Third Way politicians have assigned them, they are going to have to articulate a different one. It’s probably going to have to include a sense of what government is for, a question to which conservative parties don’t really have an answer now.

Nine years later, Democrats are on the rise again, and again, conservatives are in denial, claiming that America is still a center-right country that has only turned to progressives reluctantly, due to the non-conservative sins of George W. Bush. One of the first to rebuke them has been Tod Lindberg, in today’s Washington Post:

We are now two elections into something big. This month’s drubbing is just the latest sign that the country’s political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.
Here’s the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, “The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats.” This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.

Lindberg also addresses the one major piece of evidence being repetitively cited for the “center-right country” rationalization:

True, the percentage of voters describing themselves as “liberal” and “conservative” has held relatively constant over many election cycles, with self-described liberals checking in at 22 percent this time around (up one percentage point over 2004) and self-described conservatives at 34 percent (unchanged from 2004). The numbers may not have changed, but the views behind those labels certainly have. Nowadays, it’s a fair bet that most of those calling themselves “liberal” support gay marriage. In 1980, those same liberals were, no doubt, cutting-edge supporters of gay rights, but the notion of same-sex marriage would have occurred only to the most avant-garde. In 1980, having a teenage daughter who was pregnant out of wedlock would have ruled you out for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket. This year, it turned out to be a humanizing addition to the conservative vice presidential nominee’s résumé.

As a Democrat, I’m reasonably happy that so many conservatives want to remain in denial, and comfort themselves that nothing’s really changed over the last two electoral cycles that a return to a more rigorous ideological fidelity can’t fix. But it’s probably not that good for the country to have a major political party living in a parallel universe that’s more and more remote from reality. So we should all probably appreciate Tod Lindberg’s stubborn efforts to provide some reality therapy to his political comrades.

Of all the tough choices President-elect Obama will face between now and the inauguration, none are likely to have more far-reaching political consequences than his pick for Secretary of State. The two front-runners, Senator Clinton and Governor Richardson also happen to be the most prominent female and Hispanic leaders, respectively, in the Democratic Party, and it looks like both may want the post. Jonathan Weisman reports on Obama’s dilemma in the Wall Street Journal

Sen. Clinton, of New York, could be a crowd pleaser in that role, and she has staunch advocates in Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff, and transition director John Podesta, according to Democrats familiar with the transition process…But Mr. Obama risks alienating Latino supporters if he passes over New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, currently the favorite of a lobbying campaign by Hispanic activists, for the State Department job.

It’s hard to imagine either Richardson or Clinton being satisfied with any post south of State as a consolation prize. Richardson’s bio practically screams “future Secretary of State,” and, as a 2-time Clinton administration appointee, he went out on a long limb endorsing Obama. But picking Richardson would almost certainly crank up ire among Clinton’s supporters as a double-diss, since she wasn’t picked for veep. While Richardson’s formidable diplomatic experience may give him an edge, Clinton is clearly one of the most capable leaders in the Democratic Party, and her experience as an actively-involved First Lady for 8 years who traveled the world on diplomatic missions merits consideration.
In picking Richardson, it’s possible Obama could offset criticism from feminists by making sure the “more than 300 cabinet secretaries, deputies and assistant secretaries and more than 2,500 political appointees” cited in Weisman’s article includes a record number of women. Conversely, making sure Latinos get a record number of those appointments might offset negative buzz in the Latino community if he picks Clinton for State. Either way there will be much grumbling in the short run.
WaPo‘s Chris Cillizza weighs the pros and cons of chosing Clinton:

Making Clinton the Secretary of State would ensure buy-in from the former first couple…While the chances of Clinton free-lancing are far less if she is a member of the Obama cabinet, there is absolutely no way of ensuring that her own views on matters of foreign policy would be subsumed in favor of those of the administration…it would be impossible to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

Cillizza may be overstating the likelihood of Clinton being a rogue Secretary of State, and Obama and Clinton do share many foreign policy positions in common. However, Cillizza doesn’t weigh the negative impact that passing over Richardson would have with many Latinos.
Of course, Obama could dodge the dilemma by selecting Senator Kerry for State. In that event, he could tick off both many Hispanics and Clinton supporters. Anyway you slice and dice, it is a very tough choice. The upside is that the country would be well-served with any of these three.

This often gets lost in the buzz over cabinet appointments and other high-profile issues, but one of the more fateful decisions Team Obama will need to make over the next few months involves the disposition of his remarkable field organization and volunteer/donor network. As noted in an LA Times story today by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, one approach is to fold the Obama organization into the Democratic National Committee and state party affiliates, which is normally what happens after a successful presidential campaign. The other is to keep his organization intact as something of a personal army that will work with, but not under, the national and state parties.
Advocates of the latter approach include key figures in the Obama campaign:

“If it’s in the party,” said Marshall Ganz, a Harvard University lecturer who helped design the training curriculum for Obama’s organizers, “that’s a way to kill it.”
Steve Hildebrand, Obama’s deputy campaign manager and an architect of the grass-roots network, has been warning the president-elect’s team that it risks turning off activists who were inspired by Obama but who never considered themselves a part of the Democratic Party.
These people, Hildebrand said, could be inspired to fight for Obama’s proposals to overhaul healthcare or combat global warming, but would reject appeals that sounded like old-fashioned partisan politics.

Hildebrand’s comments are especially interesting since his name as come up a lot in the last week as a potential quarterback at the DNC (probably under a more visible “figurehead” general chairman).
There are those who say the formal arrangements may not ultimately matter:

“At the end of the day, they own the DNC,” said one party advisor familiar with the internal debate who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing deliberations. “Whether they merge their mailing lists or keep Obama for America as a separate entity doesn’t really matter,” the strategist added, using the campaign’s official name.

Well, that may be true so long as Obama’s agenda and that of Democrats generally remain closely yoked together. But part of the new administration’s strategy may be to try to build grassroots bipartisan and nonpartisan support for his initiatives, redeeming his post-partisan rhetoric through action around the country rather than through deal-cutting or accomodation in Washington.
This is an issue with more complex strategic implications than might at first appear, and bears watching as the transition turns into governing.

One of the things we have heard incessantly from conservatives since Election Day is that America is “still a center-right country.” Thiis claim is almost entirely based on exit poll findings that self-identified conservatives still outnumber self-indentified liberals, by the same margin as in 2004.
It’s good to see TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg and Campaign for America’s Future’s Bob Borosage take this claim on directly in an article for The American Prospect:

The conservative claim to a center-right majority comes from addition. More voters say they are conservative than liberal (by a margin of 34 to 22 in this election). Add conservatives to the 44 percent who say they are moderates and you’ve got the majority.
But the addition doesn’t hold up under any analysis. It assumes that moderates are without definition and more likely to swing right than left. This simply ignores reality. In 2008, self-described moderates, about 44 percent of the electorate, voted 60 to 39 for Obama. And, as has been increasingly true in polling going back to 2004, broad majorities have a world view far closer to liberals and Democrats than to conservatives or Republicans.
In this poll, for example, when asked if homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged by society, moderates and liberals agree that it is a way of life that should be accepted by society by 65- and 33-point margins respectively, compared to conservatives who believe it should be discouraged by 32 points. When asked if our security depends on building strong ties with other nations or on our own military strength, both liberals and moderates agree with multilateralism by double-digit margins, while conservatives disagree. On values and on issues, moderates — with one large exception — swing toward liberals.

The “large exception” that Greeberg and Borosage point to is that moderates are significantly more skeptical about the competence of government than liberals. All that means, ultimately, is that Democrats in power need to govern well, particularly after eight years of “big” but inept government under George W. Bush:

[P]rogressives needn’t be defensive about the majority that is dubious about government spending. Making government work effectively is at the heart, not the capillaries of the progressive agenda. This test doesn’t distract; it focuses us on our task. No progressive majority can ever be consolidated for long if it doesn’t demonstrate that government can be an effective ally for everyone.
And that is all moderates are looking for. They aren’t skeptical about the need for government. By large margins, they think regulation does more good than harm. They want investments made in education and training. They favor a concerted government-led drive for energy independence. They far prefer a health-care plan with a choice between their current insurance and a public plan like Medicare, rather than one that would give them a tax credit to negotiate with insurance companies on their own. Their concern is less that government will do too much and more that government will fail to do what it must and waste their money in the process.

The other big reason for the liberal/conservative ratio in exit polls, of course, is that most Democrats stopped using the “liberal” label decades ago, typically preferring “progressive” or “moderate” or even “center-left.” So the self-identification numbers aren’t particularly revealing.
All in all, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have a major window of opportunity to puruse initiatives the majority of Americans, including “moderates,” favor, along with the responsibility of providing, as the Clinton administration did to some extent, that government can get things right and avoid excessive bureaucracy.
The really challenging thing is that at some course over the next two years, the Democratic Party will become the “track” party, in the sense that it will be held responsible for “right track” and “wrong track” sentiments. Maybe Americans will cut Democrats some slack in the understanding that the consequences of Republican misrule cannot be reversed overnight. But we shouldn’t count on too much of a honeymoon if we truly want to solidify a center-left majority before the next elections.

Yesterday we published an impressive analysis of the “No on 8” campaign in California by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara. She offered not only a constructive critique of the campaign, but also a strategy going forward for future ballot intiative battles.
I mention all this because Jasmine’s article is precisely the kind of work from “outside writers” that TDS exists to publish. If you have it in you to write something like this that focuses carefully on a particular campaign or other election event, with a strongly strategic bent, please do send it along via the “Contact Us” link at the top right of this page, with all your own contact information.

Whenever there is a change of party control of the executive branch of the federal government, lots of jobs come open, and lots of ambitious and/or dedicated folk start scheming for ways to join the new administration. There’s even a handy-dandy publication–known as the “Plum Book”–put out by the House Committee on Government Reform that lays out available positions.
But in this particular transition, it’s becoming clear that job aspirants, and their family members, better be exceptionally tidy record-keepers, whether or not they’ve got potential conflicts-of-interest or the odd drunk-driving charge in their background. According to a Jackie Calmes article in The New York Times today, the basic questionnaire being distributed by the Obama transition team to those seeking “high-ranking positions” is a 63-point monster of a request for disclosure that goes beyond the usual have-you-been-a-lobbyist-or-felon stuff. Ever sent a potentially embarassing email? (Who hasn’t!). Cough it up. Ever done a blog post or set up a Facebook page? Send that along, please. Some questions clearly relate to issues that came up during the last Democratic transition in 1992. There’s one on “domestic help” that asks about the immigration status and witholding tax arrangements of nannies, housekeepers, and yard workers–a stumbling block, you may recall, for at least two potential Clinton administration Attorneys General. Notes Calmes:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

It’s not clear from the article exactly how far down the food chain this questionnaire is being applied. But those who face it must understand that after they past this test, there’s additional vetting by the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics.
As one of the worst record-keepers you’ll ever meet, I’m sure glad I’m not interested in a high-ranking job with the feds. But for those with that aspiration, perhaps the Obama vetting process will keep the crowds down.

Bit of a donnybrook shaping up in the Peach State today, as John McCain rolls in to campaign for Saxby Chambliss and against Jim Martin in the Senate run-off. Much of the fun will be in seeing how McCain, who will be appearing at a rally at 4:30 with most of the top GA Republicans, renounces his 2002 blast of Chambliss’s shameful attack against Sen. Max Cleland:

“I’d never seen anything like Saxby’s political ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful. It’s reprehensible.”

But that was the straight-talking McCain of yesteryear, before he made his faustian bargain with the knee-jerk reactionaries for his ’08 run. The DSCC has a 50-second web-only ad to welcome McCain and remind internet-active voters of McCain’s earlier views on Chambliss, and a DSCC 5-day TV ad buy is expected to begin in GA today. But, as Atlanta Journal Constitution “political insider” columnist Jim Galloway reminds his readers, McCain owes Chambliss for his endorsement of McCain’s run for President, when polls showed GA Republicans preferred Huckabee.
It’s basically a three point-race that will be determined by turnout in the December 2nd run-off. CNN has an interesting map of the counties that went for Martin and Chambliss, indicating that Martin’s hopes are pegged to GOTV in four GA metro areas, Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus and Augusta. CNN‘s exit poll demographic breakdown of the voters for Martin and Chambliss shows Martin has a huge advantage among Black voters, a 12 point edge with women (and an 11-point shortfall with men), a 10-point edge with younger voters and breaks even with Chambliss among seniors. Chambliss lead among GA’s white voters “with no college” is 70-26 percent.
Issue-wise, it looks like Martin’s biggest weakness is among those who identify the economy as the “most important issue,” who give him only a 2-point lead over Chambliss. He needs to hit harder on Chambliss’s support of Bush economic policies, not just rat-a-tat-tat about taxes. No surprise that the fat cats are digging deep for Chambliss, as the Wall St. Journal reports today. Chambliss has been Bush’s bellhop on economic issues, as well as an errand boy for big oil. Martin needs such punchy memes to generate more heat.
There’s also a stronger case to be made about Chambliss’s awful record on veterans’ issues and low ratings from several vets’ groups. So far, Martin’s ads have been pretty tame on this topic. Instead of the “failed our veterans” rhetoric, the ads of Martin and the DSCC should call it a “betrayal,” for some much-needed water-cooler buzz.
Chambliss’s secret weapon in the run-off may be Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel, who AJC columnist Cynthia Tucker has called “the Katherine Harris of this campaign” and a “partisan martinet.” who “did every thing she could to try to keep as many new voters as possible from casting a ballot.” More on Handel’s games here and GA’s disturbingly large “undervote” here.
Dems should pull out all the stops and mobilize a monster turnout in the four aforementioned GA cities. It would also be good if Sam Nunn and the Carters would make some appearances and/or do an ad for Martin to help take a little bite out of Chambliss’s edge with white voters. Martin could also use some more dough, to match Saxby’s ad avalanche on GA TV. This one is winnable, and you can help right here.

Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to publish this constructive critique of field strategies for the unsuccessful effort to defeat the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 initiative in California. Its author is Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project (TPP). During the 2008 election season, TPP worked in six cities across the nation to engage communities in actions to elect Barack Obama and to defeat Proposition 8 on the California ballot. This article is based upon her work on the No on 8 campaign, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures.
On November 4, Proposition 8 passed in California, enshrining in the state constitution a ban on same sex marriage. Similar amendments also passed in Florida and Arizona. We have now lost campaigns like this in 29 states; we have won only once – in Arizona in 2006. On a human level, these defeats are a blow to people across the nation who care about civil rights and equality. On a strategic level, they are explicable; after all, we continue to rely on the same strategies despite mounting evidence that they do not work.
What is required as the LGBT movement goes forward is a commitment to permanent political engagement and a national grassroots strategy and infrastructure that complement our national legal strategy. We must also finally do what our opponents have long been doing: treating each statewide ballot measure as a national campaign.
The loss in California is a particularly apt case study because it took place in our nation’s largest state and because the opposition made it a national campaign from the start. A full analysis of this loss falls into three overlapping categories:
–An aerial view of the infrastructure, strategies and mindset of the national LGBT movement;
–A “zoom-in” view of the specific field, messaging, and funding strategies used by the No on 8 campaign; and
–a similar “zoom-in” view of the strategies used by two concurrent, successful national campaigns: “Yes on 8” and the Obama campaign.
In this article, I will focus on an analysis of the field strategies used by the “No on 8” campaign
Proposition 8 passed by 510,591 votes. We don’t know if that gap could have been closed. But we do know that the “No on 8” campaign could have run a more visionary, nimble and aggressive field strategy. Ultimately the field strategy came up short in two critical, related areas:
First, the “No on 8” campaign did not become national until October, limiting both the volunteers and donors it could engage.
Second, the campaign’s field strategy failed to effectively reach enough swing voters enough times to turn them out as “no” voters.

Read more…

Over at the Century Foundation’s blog, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has some interesting observations on the November 4 exit polls, particularly with respect to the White Working Class vote:

They lost these voters by 18 points, a significant improvement over 2004 when they lost them by 23 points, but somewhat worse than I thought they’d do based on preelection polls. In my paper with Alan Abramowitz, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, we allowed as how Democrats needed to get the WWC deficit into the 10-12 point range to be assured of a solid victory. As it turned out, they were able to achieve a solid victory even with a higher deficit than 10-12 points. This is because the simulations we were working with made pretty conservate assumptions about white college graduate support for Democrats and about minority turnout and support for Democrats. As it turned out, minority turnout and support were through the roof and white college graduates also exceeded our conservative assumptions. So an 18 point WWC deficit was in the end adequate for a solid victory, rather than a squeaker as I thought. And a 10-12 point deficit would have translated into a true landslide….
The stubbornly high deficit for Dems among WWC is mitigated by the fact that there are now far fewer of them in the voting pool. According to the exits, the proportion of WWC voters is down 15 points since 1988, while the proportion of white college graduate voters is up 4 points and the proportion of minority voters is up 11 points.
The Dems did manage a fairly solid 7 point improvement in their deficit among whites with some college, the more affluent, upwardly mobile and aspirational part of the WWC. But they only managed a 3 point improvement among the less educarted segment, those with only a high school diploma or less. So that held down their overall performance among the WWC.
On the state level, Obama did stunningly well among WWC voters in four of the five highly competitive states they won in 2000 and 2004 (MI, MN, OR and WI). The average WWC deficit for Kerry in these states in 2004 was 8 points. In 2008, Obama had an average advantage in these states of 6 points, a pro-Democratic swing of 14 points. In PA, however, the other highly competitive state the Democrats won in 2000 and 2004, Obama did worse than Kerry, losing the WWC by 15 points as opposed to Kerry’s 10 point deficit. But college educated whites in PA swung Obama’s way by 17 points, turning a 12 point ’04 deficit into a 5 point ’08 advantage.

Among other things, Ruy’s post provides yet another data point for the proposition that Obama really changed the demographic map in states where his presence, his ads, and his field organization, focused their attentions.

Senate Democrats wil soon decide whether Joe Lieberman should be allowed to retain his Senate seniority, including a major committee chairmanship, after not only endorsing the other party’s presidential candidate, but campaigning for him, joining in attacks on Barack Obama, and speaking at the Republican National Convention.
I said my piece back in April, in a post at TPMCafe. An excerpt:

This argument [for tolerating Lieberman’s apostasy out of “bipartisanship”] conflates “bipartisanship” with abandonment of party. It’s one thing to cross party lines to support this or that policy initiative or legislation. It’s another thing altogether to oppose your supposed party in the contest that more than anything else, defines “party” to begin with. And it has ever been thus.
Back when Lieberman first endorsed McCain, Ken Rudin of NPR did a useful analysis of precedents. The last example he could find of a Member of Congress endorsing the opposing party’s presidential candidate without retribution was in 1956, when Adam Clayton Powell, at that point the only African-American Member of Congress, endorsed Eisenhower. You can understand why Democrats might have refrained from punishing him. But since then, three congressional Democrats endorsed other candidates (John Bell Williams of Mississippi and Albert Watson of SC in 1964, and John Rarick in 1968), and all were stripped of their seniority in the House. Unlike Lieberman, all three were, if nothing else, faithfully reflecting the views of their constituents.
Since 1968, there have been, quite literally, hundreds if not thousands of Democratic and Republican officeholders who in one election or the other, privately preferred the other party’s presidential candidate. A huge number of Republicans didn’t endorse or campaign for Barry Goldwater in 1964, but nor did they endorse or campaign for Lyndon Johnson. And despite the incredible weakness of the national Democratic Party in the South and West during the 1984 and 1988 presidential cycles, you didn’t see any public defections from the then-robust ranks of elected Democrats, either.
This is, in sum, the Line You May Not Cross if you choose to identify yourself as a Republican or as a Democrat. John McCain surely understands that; had he followed the entreaties of some of his own staff in 2004 by endorsing–much less joining the ticket of–John Kerry, he would have been stripped of his party prerogatives instantly and eternally.

President-elect Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have suggested that Lieberman shouldn’t be automatically booted from the Democratic Caucus. Reid has reportedly offered Lieberman a different, less influential committee chairmanship. But Lieberman has made it clear it’s “my way or the highway”: he retains his seniority and his Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee chairmanship, or walks across the aisle.
This isn’t about “bipartisanship” or “putting the election behind us.” Barack Obama has promised to reach out across party lines to work with Republicans when possible; he could still reach out to Joe Lieberman if he chooses to join the GOP Caucus. It’s also not about the famous “collegiality” of the Senate. The decision on Lieberman will affect the rights and prerogatives of the 23 current Democratic senators with less seniority, who somehow managed to support their own party’s presidential candidate.
Make no mistake: if Lieberman is allowed to retain his seniority and current committee chairmanship, Senate Democrats will be setting an entirely new and incredibly low standard for party loyalty. This would set a precedent that is offensive not only to “activists” or “the base,” but to those with heterodox views who felt enough moral obligation to the Donkey Party to at least keep their mouths shut and stay away from Republican campaign rallies and the Republican convention. Lieberman made his own choices, and that’s fine; it’s a free country and all. But the idea that it’s Democrats who are offending him by insisting that his choices have consequences, particularly when they are bending over backwards to keep him in the Caucus when they no longer need his vote to control the Senate, is simply bizarre.