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.

Read the Memo.

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.

Read the Memo.

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.”

Read the Memo.

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.

Read the Memo.

Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

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

Read the Memo.

The Daily Strategist

March 19, 2024

An Open Letter From William Galston

<NOTE: This item is a post from TDS Co-Editor William Galston>
TO: SEN. BARACK OBAMA
FROM: WILLIAM GALSTON
SUBJ: ADJUST OR LOSE
I’ll get right to the point: You are in danger of squandering an election most of us thought was unlosable. The reason is simple: on the electorate’s most important concern – the economy — you have no clear message, and John McCain has filled the void with his own.
This is more than my opinion. The Democracy Corps survey released yesterday proves the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Backed by a wealth of persuasive detail, here is the nub of their conclusion:

In the absence of a coherent change message from Obama, many voters are accepting McCain’s definition, particularly since they want to change Washington and clean up government. As a result, Obama has lost his double-digit advantage over McCain on the right kind of change.

When I say you have no message, here’s what I mean:
First, you are not offering a coherent account of what has gone wrong with the economy – why it is no longer working for average families. People are anxious and bewildered; they want to know why jobs are disappearing, why incomes are stagnating, and why prices are soaring. If you don’t offer an explanation, McCain’s will carry the day by default: the problem is the corrupt, self-interested politicians in Washington; the solution is getting them – and government in general – out of the way.
Second: you are not offering a focused, parsimonious list of remedies for the economic ills you cite. As a result, few if any voters can actually cite a single signature economic proposal you have made. It’s not that you don’t have ideas. If anything, you have too many. At some point, more becomes less, and you are well beyond that point. You need to decide which three or four economic proposals are most important and repeat them relentlessly for the next seven weeks.
Your campaign already contains everything you need to do this. You could offer a focused economic message with four elements: rebuilding the United States, with an infrastructure bank, generating millions of good jobs that can’t be outsourced; creating millions more jobs by leading the world in environmental innovation; significantly reducing the tax burden on average families; and offering health insurance to everyone at a price they can afford. If you say that about your economic plan – and nothing else – from now until November, there’s a good chance your message will get through.
Third: you are not drawing crisp, punchy contrasts between your plans and McCain’s. An example: the centerpiece of his health care plan is the taxation of employer-provided health care benefits. Pound away at that, and let him explain why throwing workers into the individual health insurance market unprotected is such a wonderful idea. And by the way, while your plan would increase coverage, his would do the opposite. Is that the change Americans want?
Fourth: your stump speech is too long and discursive. It shouldn’t last more than fifteen minutes, it should focus on your agenda, not today’s news story, it should feature short, declarative sentences, and it should leave no doubt about what you care about the most. Right now, regrettably, few Americans believe that you feel real passion about their economic plight and are willing to wage a tough fight on their behalf. It’s your job to convince them otherwise, and you don’t have much time to do it.
A message is a thought not only sent, but also received and understood. If your hearers aren’t getting it, it’s not a message. The essence of political speech is functional, not aesthetic. It is a tree judged by its fruit, and the fruit is persuasion. Right now you’re not persuading the people you need to persuade, and nothing else matters.
Fifth: there’s no coordination between an economic message and the rest of your campaign. If you want the focus to be on the economy, that’s what your paid advertising and your surrogates should be doing as well.
Attacking McCain for employing lobbyists is a waste of precious time and resources; it plays on his turf and accepts his definition of the problem. Moreover, It diverts attention from the core issue – 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. So far, while the McCain campaign has gone for the jugular, you’ve gone for the capillaries.
Some Americans won’t support you because they think you’re too young and inexperienced to be president, or that you’re too liberal, or not patriotic enough, or because you might raise taxes, or because you’re African-American. That’s inevitable. The good news is that by themselves, these Americans are not a majority. The bad news is that they might become part of a majority if they are joined by the many Americans who are open to supporting you but are turning away because they don’t hear you speaking to their concerns in a manner that they can understand.
This is not about you alone; it’s a matter of political responsibility. Millions of Americans have invested their hopes and dreams in you, and you owe it to them to campaign effectively, which isn’t happening right now. Yes, the McCain campaign is replete with exaggerations, evasions, and outright fabrications. It’s your responsibility to defeat them, not complain about them. If this means listening to advice you don’t want to hear, and getting out of the “comfort zone,” so be it.
Three months ago, when you were riding high, the McCain campaign was flat on its back. But give McCain credit: when he was told that to win he had to change, he did. He focused, and he accepted a kind of discipline that he had previously resisted. Now it’s your turn.


McCain’s Health Plan: Radically Dangerous

It is to be profoundly hoped that health care becomes a significant issue in the balance of the presidential campaign, and that due attention is paid to John McCain’s health care plan. Here’s the conclusion of an analysis of that plan in the policy journal Health Affairs:

Achieving Senator McCain’s vision would radically transform the U.S. health insurance system. His plan would alter the nature, source, and financing of coverage for the nearly 160 million Americans who now receive health insurance through their employers. We estimate that twenty million Americans–about one in every eight people with job-based coverage–would lose their current coverage as a result of the change in the tax treatment of coverage. Initially, this loss of job-based coverage would be offset by an increase in coverage in the nongroup market (although not necessarily for the same individuals). Within five years, however, the net effect of the plan is expected to be a net reduction in coverage relative to what would have been observed if the tax treatment of employer-sponsored coverage remains as it is now. The decline of job-based coverage would force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system–the nongroup market–where cost sharing is high and covered services are limited. Senator McCain’s proposal to deregulate this market would mean that people in it would lose protections they now have. These changes would diminish the security of coverage for most Americans, especially those who are not–or someday will not be–in perfect health.

Be forewarned.


Meltdowns and Morality

As we all watch anxiously to see what the various maneuvers of the Fed and the Treasury and Wall Street mean for the rest of us, Matt Yglesias has made a simple but profound point that tends to get lost at times like these:

Unlike the guy who runs Lehman Brothers, the guys who clean the bathrooms in the Lehman Brothers office have, as best one can tell, been doing an excellent job. And yet if the company going under results in everyone involved losing their jobs, the guy who runs Lehman will wind up being better off than the guys who clean the bathrooms. This is because in the United States of America, hard work is the way to get ahead.

This probably sounds like Marxist demagoguery to most conservatives, but Matt’s not arguing for a dictatorship of the proletariat; he’s simply drawing attention to the fatuous nature of moral arguments for free-market ideology.
You can make a good argument that capitalism is far and away the best vehicle yet invented by the human race for the creation of wealth, and wealth, up to a point, does typically trickle down enough so that most people can have access to food, shelter and consumer durables. But unregulated capitalism also tends to produce large booms and busts, with the latter wreaking havoc on people without significant capital assets. And this havoc has little or nothing to do with personal merit, hard work, faith, love of family, or other fine bourgeios qualities. To cite the most extreme example, the (roughly) three of ten Americans thrown out of work during the Great Depression didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic, and it’s hard to argue that they were being punished for any collective sins of self-indulgence, either; those generally were found on Wall Street and amongst the free-market ideologues of the Hoover Administration.
Some conservatives today hold a thinly-disguised opinion that the victims of the housing meltdown were pretty much responsible for their own troubles: they accepted mortgages they weren’t sure they could handle, or gambled on ever-higher home prices to keep them ahead through equity borrowing or resale profits. Never mind that real estate speculation is the national pastime, the most prevalent form of asset-building, and the factor that in the early-to-mid 1980s and from the 90s until quite recently, separated the upwardly mobile sheep from the struggling middle-class goats.
But the impact of a broader market meltdown, of the sort we all fear today, is hard to dismiss as a punishment of the morally deficient. Falling stock prices hit the assets of precisely those righteous, organized savers and investors that conservatives laud so consistently. And a credit crunch, not to mention widescale business failures and rising unemployment (compounding the effect of skyrocketing health care premiums and energy costs), devastate all sorts of people living lives that are, according to conservative ideology, the bedrock of western civilization.
It’s hardly a novel observation that government regulations, a social safety net, and the collective will to override markets when they produce perverse economic and social results, have repeatedly saved capitalism from its excesses. But I can’t recall a recent time when there was such a vast and unsustainable gap between the Republican Party’s commitment to the Golden Calf of unregulated capitalism, and its commitment to “traditional morality,” religious and secular, holding that a life lived well should produce a good life.
So we should think about the janitors of Lehman Brothers, and all sorts of good people who will suffer from the financial meltdown without personal fault. And so, particularly, should “values voters.”


Obama Grabs lead in VA Poll

A SurveyUSA poll of 900 adults (including 817 RV’s, 732LV’s) taken today in VA (before the Lehman Bros. meltdown) suggests the McCain-Palin bump may be flattening out. Here’s an excerpt from the wrap up:

…Democrat Barack Obama defeats Republican John McCain 50% to 46%, according to this latest SurveyUSA poll…Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released one week ago, immediately following the Republican National Convention, Obama is up 3 points; McCain is down 3. The movement solidifies Virginia place as America’s 2008 battleground.
One week ago, McCain led among men by 11 points. Today, McCain and Obama tie. One week ago, McCain led among voters age 50+ by 14 points. Today, McCain leads by 1. One week ago, Obama led among lower income voters by 6 points. Today, Obama leads by 20. One week ago, McCain led among Independents by 21 points. Today, McCain leads by 4. 17% of Republicans today crossover to vote Democrat, up from 11% last week and 7% last month. 12% of Democrats cross over to vote Republican, compared with 10% in the two previous polls. Strikingly: week-on-week movement in the DC suburbs was to McCain; movement in the Shenandoah and Central VA was to Obama.
In Virginia, there is still no evidence that Sarah Palin is attracting women to the GOP ticket. McCain polled at 44% before he picked Palin, and at 43% in each of the two polls conducted after Palin was announced.

The poll also lends some cred to Vega’s argument in his Saturday post that “thoughtful middle of the road voters” may hold the key going forward, with Obama leading McCain among VA’s moderate LV’s 58 to 38 percent.


McCainomics Revisited

Given what’s happening on Wall Street today, it’s a good time to take a fresh look at the economic thinking of “maverick” Republican John McCain. And as Jon Cohn reminds us at The New Republic today, virtually the only evidence that McCain’s economic policies would be better than those of George W. Bush is his campaign’s habit of renouncing advisors who are honest about them, the latest example being an economist who suggested there was no reason to worry about Americans without health insurance (they can go to emergency rooms for care!). Generally, McCain’s pattern is to express sympathy for people struggling to make ends meet, while advancing policies that would do absolutely nothing to help them.
Cohn’s piece is useful in no small part because it offers a good, succinct analysis of McCain’s health care plan, which would probably destroy the current system of employer-based health insurance while actually making it easier for insurance companies to deny coverage to people with health problems. Check it all out.


Live-Blogging the Meltdown

So if you’re like most Americans, and are watching with semi-comprehension and growing horror the financial crisis that built up over the weekend, the New York Times is offering a live-blog today that assesses the damage as it unfolds. At this particular moment, stocks have plunged, people on Wall Street are nervous, but the sky’s not falling just yet.
Meanwhile, you can imagine that John McCain’s campaign isn’t terribly happy with the self-parodying investment analyst Donald Luskin, who penned a happy-talk op-ed for the Washington Post yesterday trumpteting the health of the economy while advertising himself as an advisor to McCain. Luskin does note unhappily that McCain himself doesn’t seem to get it that concerns about the economy are fraudulent, but blames that on Barack Obama. Seriously.


In the long run, Democrats must win significant working class support — but in the next six weeks, thoughtful, middle of the road voters may be the most important objective.

The co-editors of The Democratic Strategist are all very strongly associated with the view that, to create an enduring Democratic majority, Dems have to win the support of a substantial minority of working class voters.
In a Brookings Institution study early this spring TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira provided an up to date analysis of the underlying population demographics that support this view and last month TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg led a team from Democracy Corps that conducted a sophisticated survey and focus group analysis of Macomb county, Michigan seeking to understand the attitudes of working class voters in this election and to find the best ways to win their support.
The objective of winning working class support was clearly evident in the Democratic convention. As Ron Brownstein noted yesterday:

Democrats sought to segment the voters by class. They presented Obama (the “son of a single mom”) and running mate Joe Biden (the “scrappy kid from Scranton”) as working-class heroes who would defend the middle-class because they are products of it. The Democrats portrayed McCain as an out-of-touch economic elitist who doesn’t understand the interests of average families.

The Republicans, in contrast “sought to segment the voters along cultural lines”

They presented McCain as the personification of timeless values–honor and duty. Far more importantly (and effectively), they introduced vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as an embodiment of small-town America who champions conservative social values not only in public life but also in her private life. They completed the picture with tough national security messages that usually resonate loudest with the same traditionalist voters most attracted to conservative social positions. Meanwhile, the Republicans portrayed Obama as an out-of-touch cultural elitist who belittles small towns like Palin’s Wasilla as not “cosmopolitan enough.”

On the surface, national economic conditions would seem to favor the Democrats. But, as Brownstein notes, “The first post-convention polls suggested that the Republicans succeeded more than the Democrats in dividing the electorate along the lines they prefer.”

An array of surveys released this week show McCain dominating among economically pressed but culturally conservative (and generally hawkish) white working-class voters, just as President Bush did in 2004.
In the Diageo/Hotline daily tracking survey this week, Obama was winning just 30 percent of white men without a college education, even lower than the meager 35 percent share that exit polls recorded for John Kerry in 2004. Among white no college women, Obama was attracting just 37 percent, down from Kerry’s 40 percent. Among “waitress moms” (married white women without college degrees), Obama was polling just 33 percent in the Diageo/Hotline survey, no improvement on Kerry’s anemic 32 percent.

To be sure, this is very disappointing (and there is reason to think that these numbers may improve somewhat between now and Election Day). But there are, in fact, entirely reasonable explanations for why the Democratic convention did not produce the movement toward Obama that was hoped for – explanations which suggest how Dems can do substantially better in the future.
(In fact, after the election, The Democratic Strategist will launch a major initiative to bring together Democrats from every sector of the party to develop an organized and coherent three-year strategy for peeling off a significant number of the more “middle of the road” members of the Republican working class coalition in time for the 2012 election.)
But right now, Obama and the Democrats face a difficult strategic choice. As Brownstein notes:

…some analysts wonder whether Obama might be better served by shifting his focus toward upscale voters more likely to recoil from a Republican ticket that wants to ban abortion and has praised the teaching of creationism.
Obama recently dipped his toe in that water with a radio ad presenting McCain as a threat to legalized abortion. This week, Biden also lashed the GOP platform’s opposition to stem-cell research. But [the campaign needs] a more concerted effort from Obama to convince socially liberal constituencies (such as single women or infrequent churchgoers) that McCain and Palin don’t share their values.

In fact, there is actually an even an broader group who may be an even more important target in the next six weeks — not just the members of specific, relatively liberal constituencies but the much wider swath of reasonably thoughtful, middle of the road voters who have not voted Democratic in recent years but who deeply desire a higher, more intelligent level and quality of political leadership than the myopically partisan and ideologically driven Bush administration has provided.
McCain has utterly abandoned these voters in this campaign – both with his cynically dishonest advertising that literally insults their intelligence and with his choice of a running mate whose function is to play the role of a Rush Limbaugh attack dog on the campaign trail rather than demonstrate any capacity to be a potential leader of the Republic.
In the long run there is no question that Democrats must develop a strategy for winning a substantial group of working class voters if they wish to create an enduring Democratic majority. But, in the next six weeks, it may be that the heaviest emphasis should be put on winning the growing number of thoughtful middle of the road voters who were initially attracted to John McCain but who are increasingly appalled by the kind campaign he has chosen to run.


Today’s GOP: The Real Bridge to Nowhere

In response to my Wednesday post on messaging decisions, a chap/chapette with the handle ‘cvh1789’ offers an interesting soundbite idea (first suggested by frequent TNR commenter roidubouloi):

An intelligent comment I read at the New Republic website suggests a particular line of attack: describe the Republican Party as “the bridge to nowhere.” That would work for Palin and McCain.

Here’s an excerpt of the riff from roidubouloi:

The Republican party didn’t just try to build the bridge to nowhere at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the Republican party is the bridge to nowhere. It cannot protect us from our enemies. It cannot protect us from falling behind in global competition. It cannot protect us from the storms and natural disasters the result from climate change. It is not just the party of the past, it is the party of no place, no program, no values.”

I like it. Stir in the notion that today’s GOP is “not your father’s Republican Party” and we get a nifty little bumper sticker:

Today’s GOP: The Real ‘Bridge to Nowhere

Or a speech/interview/ad zinger:

The Clinton administration gave us peace, prosperity and a bridge to the future. McCain and Palin are offering us a bridge to nowhere.

It may not be as catchy as ‘where’s the beef?’, but “bridge to nowhere” is a familiar phrase that resonates with voters. And it makes the point that the Republicans have no vision or program, other than wielding power.


Approved Messages

John McCain did two noteworthy things in last night’s aggressively low-key Forum on Service event. First, as Steve Benen at Political Animal points out, McCain rediscovered a national service proposal that he had somehow lost during the last few years. It’s no mystery: most conservative activists (with some honorable exceptions like the late William F. Buckley, Jr.) hate the idea of government-enabled non-military service, either on ideological grounds, or because they identify it (and particularly the AmeriCorps program that McCain’s now praising) with Bill Clinton. Now that conservatives have been definitively propitiated by the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate, it’s apparenly safe for him to indulge in a few of his old heresies, however mildly.
More strikingly, McCain expressed all sorts of admiration for “community organizers”–you know, those useless busy-bodies and agitators that drew so much mockery at the recently-concluded Republican National Convention. McCain deflected his running-mate’s derisive dismissal of community organizers as reflecting an understandably defensive attitude towards criticism of her own experience as mayor of a very small town. This does not, of course, offer much of an excuse for Rudy Giuliani’s nasty, sneering references to community organizers in his “keynote” address the same night as Palin’s speech.
The idea, of course, that McCain can shrug off attacks on Obama and his background made at the RNC as something he had nothing to do with is an insult to anybody who understands how modern party conventions work. His campaign controlled every word said from the podium. And in the extremely unlikely event that Giuliani or Palin somehow ad libbed the remarkalby well-coordinated sneers about community organizers, McCain didn’t have to wait more than a week to make it clear he didn’t agree.
There’s plenty of grounds for suspicion that we’re seeing a pattern here of McCain pretending to take the high road while his surrogates and campaign take the low road. At least with his nasty series of recent attack ads, he’s been forced by law to “approve the message” explicitly. But make no mistake, he’s approved every message, implicitly or explicitly, uttered in his name.


More About St. Joan of the Tundra

Listening to conservatives right now is a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, many of them are convinced that Sarah Palin has revolutionized not only this election, but American politics and even our cultural life. She’s said to have single-handedly reversed the terrible prospects of congressional Republicans, for example. John McCain can barely stand to be out of her presence.
But on the other hand, she’s still a poor, downtrodden victim, “the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history,” as one of the bloggers at PowerLine puts it. And the latest whine, predictably articulated by Michael Gerson in his Washington Post column, is that “liberals” are smearing her religion, making her not just a victim, but a martyr.
Like most of the whining about poor (yet triumphant) Palin, Gerson’s piece does not deign to offer a single example of or source for the alleged attacks on Palin’s faith, beyond a sneer about “reporters” asking Palin’s pastor if she’s ever spoken in tongues. “[L]iberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized — like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper — toward criticizing Sarah Palin’s religion,” he says. And then Gerson is off to the races, with several hundreds words of abuse for the “secularists” who don’t know that charismatic Christianity is a big deal these days. The clincher is Gerson’s identification of these unnamed liberals with those who derided the early Christians.
Who? Where? Can we get a name here? A direct quote? Has Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi, or David Axelrod mocked Palin’s religion?
As for those “reporters” who asked if Palin had spoken in tongues, how, exactly, does this represent persecution? Sarah Palin is the first self-identified Pentecostal Christian to appear on a national party ticket. Simple questions about the nature of her faith are no more unnatural than the questions asked of Jimmy Carter back in 1976 about his “born-again” evangelicalism, or the questions posed to John F. Kennedy in 1960 about his support for church-state separation. And if Gerson’s right, and pentecostalism is far more typical of Americans than the “liberal Episcopalianism” he sneers at, why should she be offended by non-derisive questions, and hide her light under a bushel?
Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running-mate touched off some of the most excited celebrations on the Christian Right that we’ve seen since the election of Ronald Reagan. Fine, but they can’t have it both ways, touting her as a revolutionary, redemptive figure in American politics and then complaining the minute someone notices that her views on the nexus of politics and faith seem to be central to her appeal to conservatives.
As a Christian myself (though one of those “liberals” that Gerson and other conservatives contemptuously dismiss, in what I might choose to construe as a vicious attack on my religion), Gerson’s column and many others like it exemplify one of the most unsavory characteristics of contemporary conservative Christianity: self-pity combined with vengefulness. The best example is the ludicrous annual rite of “War on Christmas” whining, where Christians who have never suffered a moment of real discrimination in their lives complain about department store signs and launch boycotts to force compliance with their tender sensibilities.
Throughout the history of the Christianity, people have actually suffered and actually died for their faith in Jesus Christ. I seriously doubt that many conservative Christians in America share the phony sense of persecution that their “spokesmen” like Michael Gerson encourage them in, or view themselves as martyrs. Nor should they or anyone else buy into this effort to turn Gov. Sarah Palin into St. Joan of the Tundra, even as she is said to vanquish all foes in her colossal path.