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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

Pivotal Week

To call this week a pivotal moment in the presidential campaign, and perhaps even in U.S. history, is probably not much of an exaggeration. High-stakes wrangling in Congress over Treasury Secretary Paulson’s Wall Street stabilization plan will run around the clock, with elements of both parties threatening to kill it. The first presidential candidates’ debate occurs on Friday–planned, inconveniently, to focus on foreign policy. And early voting begins today in Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia, with some estimates suggesting that as much as a third of the national electorate will cast ballots before November 4.
It’s often said that winning campaigns are those who “play chess” while their opponents “play checkers.” But in this general election, in this peculiar climate, the winner may need to play three-dimensional chess.


Election Day Mess

If you don’t have enough to worry about with the financial meltdown, which has panicked Bush Administration figures into the most expensive bailout in U.S. history, you could consider the various warning signs about a potential electoral meltdown in November.
Mary Pat Flaherty has a useful roundup in the Washington Post today of the most obvious problems with rapidly changing voting systems encountering record numbers of new voters.
The bottom line, of course, is that we persist in allowing a highly decentralized, crazy-quilt system of electoral rules, procedures and “safeguards” dictated at the state and sometimes county levels of government. It was in 2000, and remains today, a recipe for disaster.


Chris Cox, Conservative Heart-Throb

The announcement yesterday by John McCain that he favored the firing of SEC Chairman Christoper Cox was interesting, to say the least. Some may not realize that Cox has long been a major conservative hearth-throb, mentioned, in fact, as a potential running-mate for McCain himself not that long ago.
Indeed, Cox–then a California congressman–got some national attention back in 2000 as the consensus “movement conservative” favorite to become George W. Bush’s running-mate.
He was selected to chair the SEC in 2005 precisely because he was certain to be a pro-business deregulator in the post. Here’s an assessment at the time by Stephen Labaton of the New York Times:

In Republican and business circles, William H. Donaldson has been viewed as the David Souter of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a disappointingly independent choice who sided too frequently with the Democrats.
President Bush, hearing complaints about Mr. Donaldson’s record from across the business spectrum, responded on Thursday by nominating Representative Christopher Cox, a conservative Republican from California, as a successor whose loyalties seem clear. And unlike the Supreme Court, where Justice Souter has a lifetime appointment, the S.E.C. provides the White House with an immediate opportunity to tip the balance of the five-person commission in a more favorable direction.
Mr. Cox – a devoted student of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism – has a long record in the House of promoting the agenda of business interests that are a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s political and financial support.
A major recipient of contributions from business groups, the accounting profession and Silicon Valley, he has fought against accounting rules that would give less favorable treatment to corporate mergers and executive stock options. He opposes taxes on dividends and capital gains. And he helped to steer through the House a bill making investor lawsuits more difficult.

Can’t say Cox didn’t come through as promised, eh?
One has to wonder if McCain would have dared call for Cox’s firing if he hadn’t definitively nailed down conservative activist support with his Veep selection of Sarah Palin. As it is, there’s still some grumbling on the Right about McCain’s opportunism in blaming poor ol’ Chris Cox for the financial crisis.


Messaging the Meltdown for Seniors

The meltdown of top financial institutions has left millions of American workers in doubt about the security of their retirement assets, and it’s a particularly urgent concern for those nearing retirement age. The crisis presents an opportunity for the Obama campaign to make significant inroads into a major demographic group that has trended toward McCain thus far and who are now feeling the big hurt — seniors.
Amazingly, the GOP nominee has cooperated in trashing his own credibility on the topic. Here’s John McCain breaking bad on golden parachutes:

Speaking to NBC’s Matt Lauer about the current crisis on Wall Street, the Republican nominee said executives have “treated it like a casino and need to be held accountable and stop walking away with these fat-cat packages.”

Ridiculous as it sounds, coming from one of the Fat Cats’ most reliable Senate bellhops, lots of people will buy it. Why? Because it fills a void. Working people do want more accountability and more fairness in retirement pensions. To those who are not familiar with his track record on social security, pension reform and banking regulation, it sounds plausible, and it fits in well enough with the McCain campaign’s ‘Maverick’ meme, bogus though it is.
But it can only work if Senator Obama and the Democrats let it go unchallenged. Let all Democrats hasten to point out at every opportunity that McCain’s trusted business and economic advisor/sidekick/mouthpiece, Carly Fiorina floated away from her unproductive tenure at the helm of Hewlett-Packard with a golden parachute worth a cool $42 million.
One way to do the the soundbite for speeches, ads, debates and interviews:

John McCain recently called for more accountability for corporate executives with “fat cat packages.” You can bet he didn’t get that idea from his top business advisor Carly Fiorina, who left Hewlett-Packard with a $42 million dollar golden parachute. Now millions of American workers are seeing their retirement saving slashed.

Or, on Social Security reform:

John McCain was one of the champions of putting your social security assets in the private sector. Imagine the shape millions of working families would be in now if he got his way. We need better judgment in the white house.

It appears the Obama is on the right track. Here’s what he said yesterday in New Mexico:

“In the next 47 days, you can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other-way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path,” he thundered. “Don’t just get rid of one guy. Get rid of this administration. Get rid of this philosophy. Get rid of the do-nothing approach to our economic problem and put somebody in there who’s going to fight for you.”

When we say “It’s the economy, stupid,” we’re basically talking about four key concerns — jobs, pay, retirement and health security, and now we can add housing — all of which have been put at risk for millions by GOP-driven deregulation and the current meltdown. Democrats have been given a timely opportunity to demonstrate leadership and the superiority of their track record and policies as champions of genuine economic security. Making the most of it with seniors will serve us well.


Economics Tuneup

Like John McCain, I’d have to admit that I don’t know a whole lot about economics. Sure, I took a couple of pie-chart economics courses in college way back in the day, and have tried to self-educate myself on the subject ever since. During my DLC days, I probably got too enamored with the New Economy hype, though the technological transformation of our country’s economic opportunities remains important, particularly to progressives who are very invested in the idea that the knowledge and skills of American workers generally have become critical capital assets.
But today I’d like to offer a couple of important reads about the economy, The first is a scary explanation of the current financial crisis from Time magazine, by Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan. The second is a short post by an economist calling him- or herself KNZN, which points out that net job loss figures vastly underestimate the number of people who have actually lost jobs, and may well have taken worse jobs.
The first offering is alarming enough to keep you awake, and the second is short and to the point. We all need an economics tuneup in these perilous days.


Rebutting the ‘Divided Government’ Case for McCain

George Will’s column, “McCain’s Closing Argument,” appearing today in WaPo and zillions of other newspapers, urges the GOP nominee to make the old ‘virtues of bipartisan government’ argument as his trump card. It’s a clever strategy, and would be more effective if Will had not gone public with it and instead coached McCain to roll it out in the final presidential debate, catching Senator Obama off guard.
McCain will make the argument. He has to, although not only in the debates. He may roll it out even sooner, hoping to get a meme going. The danger for Democrats is that it is an argument that has some appeal for moderates. Will knows Obama will now have a response ready, which will include a couple of key points.
One counter-argument is that there are not two, but three branches of government, including the judiciary, which was conveniently not mentioned by Will. In fact, the ‘virtues of divided government’ argument is misleading for that reason. The only way we could ever have an evenly divided government is for the Supreme Court to have an even number of members, instead of nine.
After eight years of Republican judicial appointments, the U.S. Supreme Court and federal judgeships are already drifting too far to the right. Four or eight more years of GOP domination of the judiciary could be disastrous for women, unions, working people, consumers, the environment and civil liberties.
But it’s not just the judiciary. Eight years of Republican control has also transformed all of the federal departments and agencies into rubber stamps for the worst policies of corporate management, serving the super-wealthy and privileged at the expense of working people. Senator Obama can respond to good effect “What would America look like after 16 years of Republican control of the executive and judicial branches of government?”, with the current meltdown as exhibit “A.”
As the nation’s most widely-read columnist, Will’s real goal in promoting the ‘virtues of divided government’ argument is to generate buzz among the electorate in living rooms and at water-coolers across the nation. No doubt the buzz is already rolling. Democratic candidates, campaigns and ad-makers should be ready with the rebuttal.


McCain’s Shrinking Media Fan Club

One of John McCain’s real assets going into this election cycle was an unusually positive image among political reporters and pundits, dating back to his careful cultivation of them during his 2000 campaign. Indeed, the role of the media in boosting his political prospects was the subject of a much-discussed (among Democrats, at least) book published earlier this year, by David Brock and Paul Waldman, entitled Free Ride.
Well, McCain’s media fan club has been notably shrinking of late, as nicely summarized by Steve Benen on the occasion of Elizabeth Drew’s disavowal of her past positive feelings about the Arizonan:

McCain is certainly losing friends fast, isn’t he? Drew’s condemnation comes just a couple of days after Richard Cohen’s. Which came a couple of days after Stephen Chapman’s. Which followed Michael Kinsley, Thomas Friedman, Sebastian Mallaby, Joe Klein, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Ruth Marcus, Mark Halperin, and Bob Herbert. Even David Brooks is getting there.
All admired John McCain, all held him in the highest regard, and all have been disgusted as McCain has descended into a Republican hack.

There’s still David Broder, I suppose. But by and large, McCain’s support group is now limited to the conservative advocacy media, most of whose members would be a lot happier if they were thumping the tubs for Mitt Romney.
Will this matter in the real world? Hard to say. At a minimum, the MSM’s growing reluctance to give McCain some sort of personal-honor mulligan could exert a slightly restraining influence over the precise depths of nastiness to which his campaign ultimately descends. During the debates, where media ratings typically have an modest but real effect on how voters perceive the performance of candidates, McCain will not benefit like George W. Bush did in 2000 and 2004 from the personal hostility of reporters and pundits towards his opponent.
Team McCain may, of course, simply incorporate media disdain into its panoply of Evil Forces that their candidate is fighting to vanquish, much as they did during the roll-out of the Palin selection. A full-fledged Nixon-Agnew-style assault on the MSM would definitely please “the base,” along with the Fox News types who want to remake the media world in their own image. But that’s a tricky business, which could backfire by making the MSM, long the validator of McCain’s “maverick” street cred, a real and abiding enemy.
The strange thing about this whole phenomenon is the genuine sense of hurt and betrayal exhibited by McCain’s former media friends. It’s been obvious to a lot of us for quite some time that McCain was going to become very McNasty in this general election, as a strategic necessity. It’s what candidates typically do when their party and ideology are jarringly out of step with public opinion–particularly if they are 72 years old and this is their last shot at the brass ring of the presidency.
It says a lot about the McCain Myth that so many smart people thought he’d do less than whatever it took to put himself into a competitive position out of some sort of invincible sense of decency. But now they know better.


Votes and Consequences

Cross-posted from Beliefnet.com.
There’s been a lot of discussion at Beliefnet and elsewhere about the variable impact of cultural issues like abortion in the current presidential campaign. And it’s safe to say most Democrats have concluded that Barack Obama’s prospects for victory depend in no small part on making the contest turn on economic rather than cultural issues.
But it’s not often explained that this presidential election will in fact have greater consequences than most in the past on cutural issues, preeminently abortion, for the simple reason that the U.S. Supreme Court is on the very brink of a conservative revolution that’s been waxing and waning for decades. To put it very simply, the next president will likely be in a position to shape the Court in profound ways. And if John McCain wins, the conservative revolution will prevail, beginning with the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
During a week of heavy airline travel, I finally got around to reading Jeffrey Toobin’s justly acclaimed account of recent developments on the Supreme Court, The Nine.
While usually described as an insider account of life among the Supremes, Toobin’s narrative really concentrates on the steady development, and chronic frustration of, the activist conservative legal movement that began back in the 1970s, which has always been obsessively focused with the goal of overturning Roe. For these determined conservatives, the great outrage of recent decades has been the accession to the Supreme Court of “liberals” appointed by Republican presidents, ranging from Warren and Brennan by Eisenhower, to Blackmun (author of Roe) and Powell by Nixon, to Ford’s one appointment, Stevens, to Kennedy and O’Conner by Reagan, and to Souter by Bush 41.
As Toobin explains, the real watershed moment for conservative legal activists was their successful effort to force the withdrawal of Bush 43’s nomination of Harriet Miers, and the substitution of Samuel Alito, epitomizing their refusal to trust a conservative president to appoint conservative justices, and their demand for unambiguous proof that a prospective Supreme would be willing to reverse past “liberal” decisions, especially Roe.
In an particularly fascinating chapter of The Nine, Toobin shows how very close the Court came to reversing Roe back in 1992, when the defection of O’Conner and (more surprisingly) Kennedy produced the Casey decision that explicitly reaffirmed Roe on a 5-4 vote. Now O’Conner’s gone, and in two decisions involving legislation banning so-called “partial-birth abortion,” Kennedy’s shown himself willing to accept all sorts of legislative undermining of Roe. Three Justices–Thomas, Scalia and Alito–would definitely support an immediate reversal of Roe, and so would Roberts if the votes were there.
That’s why the antiabortion movement specifically, and the Christian Right generally, have made up their minds that John McCain’s election is transcendently important. He’s gone far out of his way to reassure them on judicial appointments–most notably in a May speech at Wake Forest University that adopted every imaginable conservative “dog whistle” on the subject, but also in his Saddleback Forum remarks. The selection of anti-abortion ultra Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate was the clincher.
As Toobin points out, the three Justices most likely to retire during the next four years are Stevens (who is 88 years old), Ginsburg (who has chronic health problems) and Souter (who’s reportedly been wanting to retire for years). These are three of the four “liberals” currently on the Court, and all of them have pretty evidently been hanging on in hopes that the right kind of president would be elected to appoint their successors.
Add it all up, and it’s as certain as anything in politics that the election of John McCain would produce a Supreme Court that will reverse Roe v. Wade, and also consolidate the conservative judicial revolution on a vast array of other subjects, from privacy and civil liberties to employer-employee relations. Indeed, we’d probably have the most judicially active conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s, when the Court battled to block much of the New Deal.
Conservatives understand this, but I’m not sure progressives really do. In the limited realm of abortion policy, it’s pretty clear that anti-abortionists have made gains in recent years due to a status quo that protected most abortion rights, making it difficult for pro-choicers to mobilize voting decisions in their favor.
That could all change this year, and one of the toughest but most important decisions by the Obama campaign will be about whether to make that clear.


The Money Game Going Forward

So Obama’s haul for August wasn’t $100 million, or even $80 million. I guess they aren’t actually printing money in Chicago.
Too bad.
But Obama did raise $66 million last month, shattering his own record of $55 million from back in February. The campaign added 500,000 new donors, took in contributions from 2.5 million contributors overall, and finished the month with $77 million cash on hand.
All of which is great, but might not be good enough.
Andrew Romano writes this for Newsweek:

The important statistic to look at is the combined amount of cash-on-hand for each candidate and his party (i.e, how much is actually available to spend on getting the nominee elected). Obama may rake in more than McCain, but he also spends more. Plus the RNC, which is handling its nominee’s ground game, vastly outraises the DNC. So here’s the math. In August, the McCain campaign managed to net a record $47 million for its coffers and another $22 million for the party, finishing the month with more than $100 million on-hand–money that it has now turned over to the Republican Party. It has also accepted $84.1 million in public financing from the federal government. Combined with the RNC’s $100 million projected haul over the next two months–all Republican cash now goes to the party, not the campaign–that should leave McCain with about $300 million to spend before Nov. 4. Except for the occasional RNC fundraiser, he barely has to lift a finger to get it. He can spend his time wooing voters instead.

Is this right?
Yes and no.
First, we shouldn’t assume that Obama’s fundraising is going to peak in August — far from it. In fact, we already have some indication of how this new month is going to look for the campaign. The day after Sarah Palin spoke at the Republican National Convention, the Obama camp announced that it had raised $10 million in 24 hours. Today we learned that the campaign raised $11 million at a posh fundraiser in California in the span of a couple of hours last night. A big chunk of that Hollywood money is going into the coffers of the DNC, but at this point, that hardly matters. Even for the Obama campaign $21 million dollars in just two days is astounding. And I’m absolutely positive that the September 26th debate in Oxford, Mississippi will be another jaw-dropping night for fundraising.
Second, part of the reason the McCain camp was able to take the federal money is because the campaign is choosing to outsource its ground operation to the Republican National Committee, which simply doesn’t plan to field a turnout effort as extensive as the one being built by the Obama camp. That choice reflects a definite difference in priorities between the two camps. Republicans are gambling that they can win this election from the top down: controlling news cycles, funding extensive TV advertising, and fielding a 48 hour GOTV program that has been successful in the past. The Obama campaign is waging everything on winning from the ground up: they’re training and organizing volunteers, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters, microtargeting persuadable demographics, and planning to win the election the same way the won the primary — by making sure all their voters show up at the polls. Even still, they’re spending as much as McCain on TV advertising in almost every battleground state (except Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and spending far more than McCain in some states like Virginia.
At this point, I still pretty good about betting money on Obama.


“Stop, Thief!” Cried the Burglar

The financial meltdown on Wall Street is stimulating some very creative messaging from the McCain campaign. Now, all of a sudden, he and Sarah Palin are depicting themselves as chomping at the bit to get into office and crack down on Wall Street, presumably via some government action.
That’s perfectly understandable from a tactical point of view; the only arrow in Team McCain’s quiver that’s remotely relevant to the current crisis is the threadbare but still effective claim that the Arizonan is a cranky “maverick” who wants to change Washington.
But as both the news media and the Obama campaign are quickly pointing out, McCain’s record on regulation of financial institutions couldn’t be much clearer.
The lede in Michael Shear’s front-page WaPo article today gets right to the heart of the matter:

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.
Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation’s largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end “reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed” on Wall Street.

Following the same line of argument, Barack Obama yesterday went right after McCain’s record on financial institutions, and tied it to a general philosophy of reflexive deregulation that has been one of the most consistent features of GOP ideology since the 1980s:

Yesterday, Obama seized on what he called McCain’s “newfound support for regulation” and accused his rival of backing “a broken system in Washington that is breaking the American economy.”
In a speech in Golden, Colo., Obama blamed the economic crisis on an “economic philosophy” that he said McCain and President Bush supported blindly.
“John McCain has spent decades in Washington supporting financial institutions instead of their customers,” he told a crowd of about 2,100 at the Colorado School of Mines. “So let’s be clear: What we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.”

These attack-lines may, of course, get blurred by the he-said she-said dynamics of the presidential campaign, whereby voters tend to accept the credibility of their favored candidate’s claims about underlying facts, actual facts be damned.
But it can’t be good for McCain that the media and the country have forgotten about pigs-and-lipstick and oil drilling and cultural issues for a few days, as the incumbent administration of his own party struggles to avoid a complete financial collapse, at a time when most Americans were already convinced the economy’s in deep trouble.
In a much-discusssed post yesterday, TDS Co-Editor William Galston argued passionately that Obama needs to get out of tactical day-to-day exchanges with McCain and stick to a simple, comparative account of what he would do to address economic concerns versus what we could expect from any Republican president.
I don’t think the financial crisis qualifies as an emphemeral, flavor-of-the-day controversy. It epitomizes the sense of helplessness of Americans whose current and future economic aspirations are being endangered if not squandered by irresponsible behavior enabled by reflexively pro-business, anti-governent, free-market ideology. It’s a subset of the general refusal of conservatives and the GOP to make the interests of middle-class Americans a priority in a rapidly changing, globalizing economy.
Convincing swing voters that John McCain is part of the economic problem rather than its solution, and is so blinded by ideology that he can’t champion “change,” is now crucial for Obama. I think he understands that, and is adjusting his campaign accordingly. But as Galston points out, there’s no longer any margin for error. If McCain is allowed to get to election day perceived as a credible “safe change” option on the economy, instead of a burgler crying “Stop, Thief!” when his own philosophy produces terrible results, then we may be forced to find out whether Obama’s vaunted ground game can make a big difference.