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 29, 2024

Palin, Trent Lott, and the Perils of Regional Politics

As the Republican Convention tries to get back on track, and as Sarah Palin and John McCain prepare their crucial acceptance speeches, there’s been an interesting buzz in the background about Palin’s relationship with the Alaska Independence Party.
The AIP (or AKIP, as it likes to style itself) is an exotic but locally significant political party that’s long advocated a reconsideration of Alaska’s 1958 decision to accept statehood, with a return to territorial status, an independent “Republic” position, or secession to Canada (or to some new confederation of Western Canadian provinces) being lively options. AKIP is also a state affiliate of the Constitution Party, a far-right fringe group founded by Howard Phillips “to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.”
Thanks to some investigative work by Mark Kleiman, we know that AKIP claims that Sarah Palin is a former member of its party who attended their 1994 convention. On an inquiry by TalkingPointsMemo, Alaska election officials confirmed that Palin’s husband was a registered AKIP voter up until 2002. There are disputed claims about Governor Palin’s own party registration, but she did send a warm-and-fuzzy video greeting to their latest convention.
Whether or not Sarah Palin was ever a member of AKIP, her easy acceptance of this fringe group is significant. In the odd, neo-colonial poltical culture of Alaska, AKIP is not that far out of the mainstream. But make no mistake: in the politics of the South 48, and particularly Republican politics, the AIP is, well, anti-American. Whatever she represented in Alaska, she is now the putative vice presidential candidate of a super-patriotic GOP and the handpicked running-mate of a presidential candidate whose message is “country first.” “Alaska First” or “Canada First” are not acceptable points of view for John McCain’s GOP, no matter how happy conservative activists may be about Palin’s reactionary views on cultural issues.
In this respect, Palin’s reminiscent of Trent Lott, who casually expressed a time-honored southern regional point of view about the Dixiecrat heritage in 2002, and thanks to Josh Marshall, got nailed for it.
It’s another bit of evidence that Sarah Palin’s a real, authentic, Alaskan wingnut: acceptable in her own political culture, but not so much in the rest of America.


McCain’s “Real Person”

Strange to say, tonight the Republican National Convention will reach its halfway point. And although Republicans, like the city of New Orleans, may have narrowly avoided calamity from Hurricane Gustav, they’ve already lost the opportunity to match the carefully staged and rolled-out show Democrats put on in Denver last week.
Moreover, the drama that the McCain camp introduced into Convention Week with the Sarah Palin announcement last Friday is getting a bit out of control, and “out of control” is not a phrase you want to hear during a national political convention. Yesterday’s revelation that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant, and will carry the pregnancy to term and marry the child’s father, has increased suspicions that Team McCain did not conduct a particularly thorough vetting of their vice presidential candidate. When you are a 72-year-old cancer survivor running for president on your experience and character, an inept vice presidential selection process is not very reassuring.
It’s now clear that Palin will be the central focus of the GOP convention in a way that Joe Biden certainly wasn’t in Denver. And this presents the McCain campaign with an exquisite dilemma. Does it try to puff up her brief record of public service into an edifice of impressive accomplishments, claiming that she’s at least as qualified to become president as Barack Obama? Or does it go in the other direction and tout her lack of gravitas as an emblem of authenticity and populist “maverick” credentials?
I’m sure they’ll try to do both simultaneously, but my money’s on the latter theme as the real emphasis. At the Democratic convention, a lot of podium time was devoted to showcasing “real people” like Barney Smith and Lily Ledbetter with compelling personal stories related to the Obama campaign’s message and agenda. At the Republican convention, the most important “real person” to speak may well be the vice presidential nominee.
At Politico today, Charles Mahtesian nicely channels this approach to marketing Palin:

So far — and it is hard to tell what the future may hold for Palin’s unexpected national candidacy — the travails of the Palin family probably seem awfully familiar to many average Americans. It is this averageness that makes her such a politically promising running mate for John McCain — and such a dangerous opponent for Democrats. Many voters will find it easy to identify with her family’s struggles — a significant advantage in an election where the voting calculus is so unusually and intensely personal….
Even the governor’s own Trooper-gate scandal, in which Palin is alleged to have exerted undue pressure to fire a state trooper, is suffused with an element that many families can identify with: one sister stepping in on behalf of another in an acrimonious dispute with a brother-in-law.

While this approach is obviously risky, it has the additional benefit of representing something of a trap for Democrats, as I argued the other day. In a maneuver as old as the Nixon administration, Republicans can be expected to turn every every sneering reference to Palin’s lack of polish, her family issues, or her backwoods resume, into an elitist assault on the hardy folk virtues of the American people.
Aside from the fact that Palin’s Everywoman appeal could be overplayed–most Americans, after all, don’t consider themselves qualified to run the country–the vulnerability of this approach is that the Governor of Alaska doesn’t have “average” views. Sure, many people, particularly woman, will be able to relate to the painful choices Palin and her daughter faced in dealing with their pregnancies. But the fact remains that Sarah Palin fiercely believes that there was really no choice to be made in either case other than to carry the pregnancy to term, and would deny other women the choice of abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, by force of law.
And this is why the real excitement over the choice of Palin by McCain is most evident among the far fringes of right-wing populism, the kind of people who view politics as a righteous holy war against the “liberal elites” of both parties; the kind of activists who sent checks all those years to Jesse Helms’ Congressional Club and marched in the ranks of the Christian Right. Richard Viguerie, the godfather of right-wing direct mail, a man whose alienation from the Republican Party’s alleged infidelity to conservatism led him to advocate a Democratic victory in 2006, declared Palin “perfect.” Phyllis Schlafly, the slayer of the Equal Right Amendment and tireless agitator of every conservative fever swamp, called Palin the “complete package,” and was planning an event in St. Paul to fete her long before McCain selected her as veep. Christian Right warhorse James Dobson called Friday, the day Palin was announced, as “one of the most exciting days of my life.” Pat Buchanan went so far as to claim Palin as a member of his 1996 Brigades (a claim the McCain campaign quickly denied). At National Review’s The Corner and at Redstate.org, those durable blogospheric sounding posts for “movement conservatives,” her selection touched off all-day celebrations.
The notably cool reaction of GOP neoconservatives to the McCain/Palin ticket (their favorite, Joe Lieberman, was decisively vetoed by social conservatives) simply underscores her symbolism as the apotheosis of right-wing populism.
What all sorts of conservatives see in Sarah Palin is a real, authentic, salt-of-the-earth wingnut–“normal” only to the extent that your nice neighbor with the fading “US Out of the UN!” yard sign can be said to be “normal.” That may or may not be actually true of Palin, but what we know of her views and history so far certainly fits the profile well enough to explain the intense excitement about her among people who think the Republican Party has been dangerously and disappointingly liberal for decades.
And that is why I feel so strongly that Democrats should focus on her nutty views and questionable associations rather than her lack of experience in characterizing this critical decision by John McCain as reckless and irresponsible. Struggling with a choice between satisfying a restless Right and reinforcing his “maverick” street cred, McCain found a running-mate who was a “maverick” from the Right. And the one thing Democrats should not let McCain get away with this week is the contention that Palin has a natural claim on support and affection from moderate swing voters, particularly women who don’t believe in compulsory pregnancy.


A TDS Strategy Memo: Six Highly-Targeted Democratic Messages responding to the V.P. Selection of Sarah Palin

Democratic strategists have been temporarily caught off guard by the surprise selection of Sarah Palin. The Western right-wing populism of which she is an example is an extremely varied and highly idiosyncratic political ideology and strategists both inside and outside the Obama-Biden campaign are requiring additional time to fully understand her particular constellation of views.
No matter what additional information and analysis may appear in the next 5-10 days, however, one likely conclusion will be that no single message or master narrative will be effective as a response. Rather, the Democratic response to Palin will need to be disseminated as a series of highly targeted messages specifically designed for particular audiences.
The four facts below provide the foundation for a series of 6 targeted messages.

1. That McCain rejected Mitt Romney in order to pick Palin
2. That Rush Limbaugh energetically promoted Palin’s candidacy and Ralph Reed, James Dobson and Richard Viguerie all consider her one of their own. A number of articles suggest that the desire to satisfy this group played a very significant role in McCain’s decision to choose her.
3. That Palin has extremely limited experience.
4. That Palin has a history of pressuring and firing political opponents. This is not just in relation to a single case regarding a particular State Trooper, but in other cases as well when she was mayor of her small town.

Using this information, the following targeted messages can be developed.
1. Target Audience: Republican businessmen
Theme: “Palin – An irresponsible choice”
Narrative: Any 79 year old CEO of a major multinational corporation who appointed a successor who lacked any international experience at all would be judged by most businessmen to have acted in a terribly irresponsible way and possibly even be liable to legal action. McCain’s selection of Palin is actually a great deal more irresponsible and represents a profound and deeply disturbing failure of good judgment and thoughtful decision-making.


Strange Labor Day

Traditionally, Labor Day was viewed as the starting-point for presidential general election campaigns. This year the holiday marks a peculiar juncture in the campaign where a vast number of potentially crucial factors are almost impossible to measure.
Even without Hurricane Gustav, the unusually close juxtaposition of the Democratic and Republican conventions, and the announcement of a “surprise” Republican veep selection, have made it difficult to adjudge the impact of the Denver event, with the smartest analysts suggesting that we should wait until after the GOP event to figure out which party got a true “bounce.”
And now Gustav has at least temporarily turned the Republican convention upside-down, all but cancelling its first-day events, and quite possibly altering its tone and message in profound ways. The former effect is a mixed bag for the GOP: mostly what they sacrificed were speeches by the incumbent president and vice president, a mandatory ritual that many Republicans are happy to foreswear. But so long as the atmosphere of national emergency remains, it will be very difficult for the GOP to underake an assault on the Democratic Convention message from St. Paul.
As of this writing, it appears that New Orleans has been spared a Katrina-like calamity. But Republican convention planners can’t immediately return to business-as-usual, since it will be a day or two before we know for sure that the Crescent City and other parts of Louisiana and Texas haven’t been ravaged by flooding or ancillary weather events like tornadoes.
You can only imagine what John McCain’s staff is going through right now in rewriting their presidential and vice presidential candidates’ acceptance speeches to reflect hourly changes in the political interaction between the convention and Gustav (and possibly, later in the week, Hanna).
At a minimum, it’s very unlikely that the Republicans in St. Paul will be able to launch the sort of negative carpet-bombing of their opponent that characterized the 2004 event in New York. And with the fundamentals of the overall campaign still favoring Democrats, that could be good news for the Obama-Biden ticket.
Let’s all hope and pray that we won’t see anything like a reprise of the Katrina nightmare this week. But you can’t take the politics out of politics, and we’ll know a lot more about the dynamics of this most unusual presidential election a week from now.


Avoiding the McCain-Palin Trap

I have to admit some significant disagreement with how most Democrats (including the Obama campaign) are reacting to the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running-mate. Many are simply deriding Palin as a lightweight or someone obviously unqualifed to be commander-in-chief–another Dan Quayle. Others watched the event in Dayton and found the whole thing laughable.
To be sure, I’m a poor judge of the visual side of campaign events. But what I saw in Dayton was (1) the “maverick” GOP presidential candidate introducing his “maverick” running mate, although Palin, even more than McCain, is actually a conservative ideologue whose selection thrilled both cultural and economic factions of the Right; (2) a direct appeal by Palin to HRC supporters to consummate Hillary’s campaign by shattering the splintered “glass ceiling;” (3) a compelling personal story of a woman who (a) has one son with Down’s Syndrome, (b) another who is being deployed to Iraq on September 11; (c) is married to a Native American (at least technically) union worker and athlete; and (d) has bravely defied her party and oil companies in Alaska.
If I’m wrong and other Democrats are right, then Palin’s obvious and laughable lack of gravitas and preparation for the vice presidency under a 72-year-old president will become apparent soon enough. But if I’m right and others are wrong, then focusing criticism of the choice of Palin on her qualifications could be a very large mistake, particularly in terms of women who might otherwise have little reason to support her, but who are sensitive to gender-based double standards. Credentials aside, Palin is very vulnerable because, like McCain, she’s mainly “above party” because she dissents from Republican orthodoxy in Alaska from the Right. Both cultural and economic wingnuts love her passionately. And as I said in my last post, she crucially reinforces McCain’s phony “maverick” image with her own phony maverick image.
Ignoring all that in favor of mocking her for what many Democrats are privately calling her “obvious” lack of credentials for the White House is a big and unnecessary gamble, and quite possibly a trap. We should all take pains to avoid it.


The Logic, and Risk, of Sarah Palin

John McCain’s surprise pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin makes a whole lot of sense in a whole lot of ways. Most of the talk right now is about her supposed appeal to disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, or undecided women voters generally. But the more fundamental reality is this: She is absolutely the only available veep who simultaneously pleases hard-core conservatives while offering reinforcement of McCain’s “maverick” image. And that happens to be, as I’ve said about a million times, the central gamble of the McCain candidacy.
Palin’s a heroine to the Cultural Right for one simple reason: she recently carried a pregnancy to term despite knowing that the child would likely suffer from Down’s Syndrome. In combination with her unambivalent anti-choice (and anti-gay-marriage) views, this makes her the ideal female candidate for the Christian Right (her own religious views are a bit hazy; she’s usually described as a “non-denominational Protestant”).
Economic conservatives like her too, partly because of her advocacy for oil drilling everywhere, especially in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and partly because she’s the bitter enemy of an Alaska GOP establishment long considered (strange as it may seem) dangerously liberal by most conservatives.
And that gets to the other central advantage she offers McCain: already, on Fox News, the spinners are endlessly talking about her as an “above party” reformer. Never mind that she represents the central thrust of an attempted hard-right takeover of the Alaska GOP: all that matters is that she’s criticized other Republicans. (She’s also gone after oil companies, even as she supports policies that would increase their already-bloated profits–much like McCain).
So even aside from the gender issue, Palin represents a veep who reinforces McCain’s message, except in one crucial respect: she has zero national security experience.
And that’s quite a gamble for a 72-year-old (as of today) presidential candidate who’s tried to make national security the central differentiator between himself and Obama.
The one immediate problem for Palin is that she’s been involved in a bit of a scandal involving her efforts to get a state trooper fired for (allegedly) abusing her sister during a brief marriage. That’s probably why at least one Fox spinner said she’s be able to attract attention to the issue of “violence against women” (not coincidentally, Joe Biden was the author of the Violence Against Women Act).
So: for all the gabbing we are going to hear about McCain’s “unconventional” veep choice, she really represents a doubling-down of his duplicitous effort to champion very conservative policies while posing as an independent “maverick.”


The Successful Spectacle

While we don’t know what kind of “bounce” Obama will get from the Democratic Convention, I think it’s safe to say that last night’s Invesco Field spectacle met every reasonable, if very high, expectation.
As I trudged endlessly through well over a mile of lines to get up to the metal detecters barring entry to Invesco Field (turns out it took two hours to traverse the 200 yards from my hotel), and then had to abandon my occupied nosebleed seat for one in the far high corner of the stadium, I feared that the magnitude of the event might be overwhelming its planners. But despite all the carping from Republicans about the “imperial” staging, it worked. The renowned Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales adjudged the massive show as perfect for the little screen:

This was Barack Obama’s big night, and it was the nation’s big night, too — one of those times that watching the screen you may have felt a connection to all the other millions of viewers watching in all the other millions of homes. It seemed that something great was beginning, and to paraphrase the name of an ancient TV news program, we were there.

Obama’s acceptance speech posed a crucial choice for his campaign: would he aim for the history books, or for a more conventional impact on the presidential campaign? He clearly chose the latter, and while the speech wasn’t as mesmerizing or tightly thematic as some of his past efforts, it was a very, very good campaign speech, likely the best delivered in an acceptance speech setting in decades. He systematically addressed every Republican attack line against his candidacy, but without sounding defensive, and obviously created some serious and immediate problems for John McCain. At National Review’s Corner blog, Jay Nordlinger said Obama’s line, “I’ve got news for you, John McCain–we all put our country first,” was “very, very effective–and pretty much sidelined McCain’s slogan.” Neutralizing your opponent’s slogan on the eve of his convention is a pretty big deal.
Yes, there was predictably some grumbling from various quarters about the alleged contradiction between Obama’s line-drawing and McCain-bashing passages, and the speech’s post-partisan coda. But look, folks, this has been Obama’s line of argument from the very beginning of his campaign: a corrupt GOP establishment beholden to narrow corporate and ideological interests is the primary obstacle to the task of addressing big national challenges that most regular people in and beyond the two major parties would like to see addressed. This speech was a pretty faithful, and unusually pointed, presentation of that argument. And it aimed right at the rotten center of McCain’s politically crucial claim that he, not Obama, represents “change” and a decent shot at the end of the long era of partisan gridlock.


Needed: More Testimony from Military Leaders

This was a great convention — the best I’ve ever seen. I was a tad worried about some of the innovative format ideas. But, in the end. they all worked together to create a highly positive overall impression of a candidate, campaign and political party who have their stuff together.
My one quibble about Mile High last night: The 20 or so generals and admirals who lined up for Obama was a jaw-dropper. But It seems a waste to bring them all together like that and have America hear from only one of them. One of McCain’s strong cards is a widely-held perception that he and the GOP are more qualified to protect our national security, and his campaign will hit hard on that meme going forward. These military leaders could do a lot more to increase confidence in our nominee’s national security creds. I do hope somebody has the good sense to videotape a bunch of them saying why they support Obama.
Other than that, boffo!


Too Much Applause!

Well, the rehearsals are finally over, and my main preoccupation now is figuring out how to navigate the 200 yards between my hotel and Invesco Field. It could take an hour or so given the security issues, unless I can pull a white rabbit out of my hat.
You may or may not have noticed that the speaker schedule on previous nights has changed some at the last minute, and/or that the program ran a little long. That’s because convention planners systematically underestimated the amount of applause speakers would receive. In face, speechwriters were frantically cutting speech texts this morning to account for unusually long applause delays.
If you have to have a big problem at a political event, the one you would choose is excessive audience enthusiasm. Let’s hope it’s communicable to a much broader audience.


Big Night

From a less objective vantage point here in Denver, I agree with J.P. Green’s assessment that the convention message operation is now fully on track. Bill Clinton fully addressed all the carping concerns expressed in the media (and by the McCain campaign) about the commitment of the Clinton’s to Obama’s cause, and also did an excellent job connecting the dots among Bush, McCain, and the conservative ideology of the Republican Party. The contextualizing of Biden’s speech–the video, Beau Biden’s intro, the “surprise” appearance of Obama–was perhaps even more effective than the speech itself. And in addition to the speeches Green touted, I thought John Kerry went after McCain quite well, particularly in the line about McCain needing to debate himself before debating Obama.
But it’s all a lead in to the Big Show tonight at Invesco Field. There are obviously some logistical challenges to this kind of event. In the Red Rehearsal Room yesterday, our speech trainer Steve Allen cleverly created a reverb effect to give speakers a taste of the acoustics of a football stadium. But I gather they’re going to have some sort of best-money-can-buy Grateful-Dead-style sound system, so it may not be that big a problem.
The biggest obsession for convention-goers yesterday was securing tickets for Invesco, which are very hard to come by. You can only imagine the hysteria that would have ensued had Obama delivered his acceptance speech in the much smaller Pepsi Center.