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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 29, 2024

Bowers on Nunn

It was just a matter of time before some progressive blogger got alarmed about the possibility of Sam Nunn being Barack Obama’s running-mate. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft filled the vacuum yesterday with a post that calls Nunn a “worse Vice Presidential choice than Joe Lieberman” and half-seriously proposes a “stop Nunn” movement.
I’m a big fan of Chris Bowers, but he goes way over the top with this piece. Yes, Nunn would be an offensive choice to many gay and lesbians, and no, he’s not exactly Mr. Change. But Chris’ suggestion that Nunn has done nothing since leaving the Senate other than serving on corporate boards is a pretty egregious refusal to note the Georgian’s yeoman work towards avoiding the fiery annihilation of the planet. Sam Nunn is to the nuclear proliferation issue what Al Gore is to the global climate change issue, and you could make the argument that these are the two most urgent challenges facing the country and the world. It’s encouraging that both these men have endorsed Obama for president (Nunn back in April, Gore yesterday).
The invidious comparison of Nunn with John McCain’s close friend and supporter Joe Lieberman is more than a bit odd, too, since the Georgian shares none of Joe’s adoration of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy (au contraire), of the Iraq War, or of John McCain’s neo-Cold War posturing towards Russia, China and Iran. Indeed, as a surrogate if nothing else, Nunn could do Barack Obama a lot of good by getting under John McCain’s thin skin on his dangerous approach to national security.
One final thing about Chris’ post: in an effort, I guess, to bring out the Big Berthas on the Nunn Veep idea, he says that “the DLC was originally founded in order to elect Sam Nunn President. I’m not kidding.” Chris’ authority for this assertion is a disputed, agit-proppy Wikipedia entry on the DLC which says the group’s “original focus was to secure the 1988 presidential nomination of a southern conservative Democrat such as Nunn or [Chuck] Robb.”
You know, I somehow don’t think that founding DLC chairman Dick Gephardt (who ran for president in 1988), or founding members Al Gore (ditto) and Bill Clinton (who nearly ran that year) were “focused” on elevating Sam Nunn to the presidency in 1988. But this and other bad and good arguments for and against Nunn will be heard a lot if his apparent short-listing for the vice presidency continues.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


The Only Brokered Convention

Now that Barack Obama’s quietly but steadily taking over the Democratic Party infrastructure, there are probably more than a few Democrats who are publicly heaving sighs of relief but privately feel some regret that they won’t get to witness the exhilirating chaos of a Brokered Convention.
For a vicarious taste of said chaos, they should check out Michael Idov’s ha-larious New Republic article on the Memorial Day weekend convention of the Libertarian Party in Denver.
I watched part of that convention live on CSPAN, but missed all the great backstage stuff Idov caught: Mike Gravel’s Wiccan floor leader; the ginsu-knife-salesman pitch of the eventual Veep nominee, bookie Wayne Allyn Root; and the final sad spectacle of Libertarian “purists” swallowing their defiance and shuffling into Bob Barr’s victory party for the free beer.
It’s quite funny, but I must admit I have some sympathy for Libertarians, having gone through a brief, flu-like infatuation with the works of Ayn Rand (now, Idov reports, Bob Barr’s “favorite thinker”) in high school. And in truth, it’s hard to dislike the breed, who distinguish themselves from other politically impossible folk by a powerful lack of interest in jailing other people or invading their countries.
But the inveterate Libertarian suspicion of authority and collective action makes it an unlikely source of effective political action, as the cat-herding exercise in Denver abundantly illustrated.


AP Versus Bloggers

I did a post this morning linking to and quoting liberally from an AP story on the sad state of the federal Election Assistance Commission, though taking the subject in a different direction in my own remarks. Only later did I discover there was a big brouhaha over the weekend caused by some legal saber-rattling by AP aimed at bloggers quoting content from AP stories. Indeed, AP appeared to be taking the very restrictive line that anything beyond links and “summarizations” were a violation of copyright law. Bloggers, naturally, responded with a call for a boycott of AP altogether: no quotes, no traffic-driving links, either.
AP has subsequently backed down a bit and appears to be reconsidering its policies towards quotes. But until this is all sorted out, I’ll go with my blogger colleagues and ignore AP stories.


A Unity Ticket Debate

I swear, dear readers, that I am by no means obsessed with the less-than-universally-popular idea of an Obama-Clinton Unity Ticket. But the nice folks at Salon asked me and my friend Tom Schaller to write contrasting columns on the subject, and so I obliged. (Tom’s column is here).
Our exchange went up at the top of the Salon site late last night, and as of this moment, my argument has generated 204 comments, most of them hostile to the Unity Ticket concept. I don’t know how much I was able to add to my earlier case for the Unity Ticket, beyond pointing out that it must be weighed against Obama’s actual alternatives, many of which are as controversial as an HRC veepship. Indeed, some folks who are currently fulminating against Clinton as running-mate could find themselves expressing buyer’s remorse if their own suggestions are ultimately rejected, as many of them will have to be.
In the end, it’s obviously Barack Obama’s call, and I have few doubts that the party will rally around whatever ticket he decides to create. But while all the passion brought to the subject by us self-appointed advisers may seem like a waste of time and energy, I do think it helps ensure that Obama makes his choice with a clear understanding of the implications. And we are, happily, light-years away from the relatively recent practice of choosing a running-mate with little thought or vetting, at the very last moment.


Remember Election Reform?

As we look forward to another presidential election in the autumn–one that could be very close–political observers are beginning to wake up to the fact that relatively little has been done to reform the creaking, state-controlled, crazy-quilt system of election administration whose shortcomings were so graphically demonstrated in 2000.
In the wake of the 2000 fiasco, Congress enacted the Help American Vote Act (HAVA), but the reform machinery it put it place, the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, has spent much of its brief existence wandering in the political wilderness. That’s the upshot of a depressing AP story by Deborah Hastings yesterday.
The lede tells you everything you need to know:

It was not an auspicious beginning. The year was 2004 and the newest federal agency had no desks, no computers, and no office to put them in. It had neither an address nor a phone number. Early meetings convened in a Starbucks near a Metro stop in downtown Washington.
Somehow, Congress had neglected to fund the Election Assistance Commission, a small group with a massive task: coordinating one of the most sweeping voter reform packages in decades.

It hasn’t gotten any better of late:

In the run up to November’s presidential election, the commission continues to grapple with hot-button topics such as how to test and certify voting machines. Voting advocates say the lack of such standards contributes to malfunctioning touch-screen equipment and long waits, as evidenced in Ohio in 2004, when presidential results were delayed for days.
The agency remains stalemated on other important issues, including whether states can require people to provide proof of citizenship before they can register to vote — an especially touchy subject exacerbated by a Supreme Court decision this spring upholding Indiana law demanding voters present a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.
Both past and present commissioners complain they were granted little power to force states to implement reforms, and that they often are battered by the brutal nature of partisan politics in the nation’s capital.
“It was the worst experience of my life. It was obvious going in that we weren’t going to accomplish much,” says former chairman DeForest Soaries, a Baptist minister who served as New Jersey’s secretary of state under GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. Soaries, also a Republican, quit the commission 15 months after taking the job in January 2004.
“No one took the agency seriously,” Soaries said. “All of the passion and all of the commitment to ensure that 2000 would never be repeated — that was all Washington theatrics.

A big part of the problem, of course, is that the two parties approach the issue of election reform from vastly different perspectives; Democrats are typically concerned about vote suppression, while Republicans continue to claim, without much evidence, that voting fraud is the bigger issue.
In my own opinion, the obsession of many Democrats with electronic voting systems–how votes are counted–has distracted attention from the more pervasive problem of how voters exercise their right to cast ballots in the first place. Thus, we are heading into another national election in which it will be largely up to private groups to police illegitimate state and local practices, including selective purges of voting rolls, capricious last-minute changes in polling sites, the deliberate underdeployment and understaffing of precincts, and minority voter intimidation.
We’d better get ready for all that, without any help from Washington.


‘Sotto Voce’ Strategy Aims at Purple Seats

Bart Jansen’s CQPolitics post “Softer-Touch Marketing Woos Cross-Party Voter” reports on Democratic consultants’ soft-sell approaches to win GOP-held House districts trending purple. As Jansen explains:

This new breed of campaign consultants typically hews to sotto voce campaign themes: guarded, post-ideological messages that are calculated to reassure cross-party and independent voters…Democrats have to campaign in purple districts ever so softly. A key element of the strategy to hang on to these “majority maker” districts is to downplay any suggestion that the incumbents — mostly members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition — might rub their constituents the wrong way, ideologically speaking, and to highlight the ways they’ll be fighting on behalf of their districts in more crucial everyday struggles.

Jansen cites the recent victories of Travis W. Childers in N.E. Mississippi and Bart Cazayoux in Baton Rouge as emblematic wins by Blue Dog Dems using soft sell strategies. He quotes retiring Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, former head of the NRCC:

The Democrats have cracked the code, and we still have an admissions test to get into the party and be a candidate…Democrats are smart. They want to win. Our guys still want to be right.

Jansen reports that many of the new Blue Dog candidates are quite conservative, particularly on social issues, though usually more progressive than their Republican opponents on key economic issues. While some liberal Dems have concerns about over-stretching their party’s “Big Tent,’ fortunately the Republican establishment remains hell-bent on pursuing their incredible shrinking tent strategy.


Tim Russert RIP

It certainly came as a shock to everyone involved in politics or journalism to learn that Tim Russert suddenly died today. He was 58, relatively young, and professionally, in the prime of life.
I didn’t know him personally, but know lots of folks who did, and you never really heard an unkind word said about him. Sure, people had issues with his interviewing style (particularly politicians terrified that he would skewer them), but in an industry overpopulated with, well, self-centered and half-educated jackasses, Russert was by all accounts remarkably decent and knowledgeable, despite an iconic position that would have led many others to get puffed up or lazy.
Having watched MSNBC for a while today, I have to say that it’s a tribute to the genuine affection his colleagues had for him that they have managed to talk lovingly about him without a single false note, though none of them could have possibly had more than a few moments to prepare.
But much as the tributes to Russert’s professional qualities are warranted, the real tragedy is that a wife, a son, and a father, have so suddenly lost him, without (it appears) even a chance to say good-bye. May they be comforted, and may he rest in peace.


Case in Point

Yesterday we published a post by James Vega predicting that conservatives are beginning a “stab in the back” propaganda effort aimed at arguing that Democrats threaten to squander an ongoing military victory in Iraq, partly by using lots of action verbs attributing every positive development in the country to the force of arms.
As commenter Joe Corso pointed out, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer abundantly confirmed Vega’s prediction this very morning, with a piece that described a long series of events in Iraq as part of an invincible surge-related campaign.
Interestingly enough, Krauthammer’s heroic spin was ostensibly aimed at convincing John McCain to make the victory-or-disgrace argument on Iraq the very centerpiece of his entire general-election campaign.
Let’s hope McCain is listening.


Top Down, Bottom Up

One of the fascinating aspects of the upcoming presidential general election is that it will offer highly contrasting organizational models. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft nicely describes the Obama campaign’s M.O.:

The Obama campaign is clearly obsessed with maintaining a tight, top-down organizational and message structure. So far, as TPM Election central notes, the Obama campaign has been “famously devoid of (publicly visible) infighting and/or leaking.” Last month, they put the clamps on progressive 527’s, and now they are taking over the DNC. Virtually the entire general election messaging will run through the senior leadership of the Obama campaign, and no one else. This makes the Obama campaign something of a living paradox, as it sports the largest grassroots corps in electoral history, combined with the tightest top-down message structure in recent Democratic presidential election history.

Meanwhile, John McCain’s campaign has yet to show any signs of grassroots energy, and its own organizational structure is regional, not national. Furthermore, McCain will have to rely on the RNC and 527s for a significant portion of its message-delivery function.
It’s part of the CW of the 2004 campaign that Bush’s ability to centrally control his message, and distribute it via a sophisticated grassroots network, gave him a big advantage over John Kerry. This may also represent a largely hidden but important advantage for Obama.


Here Comes the Republican “Stab in the Back” Campaign – How the Democrats Should Respond:

In the last few days editorials in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have started laying the foundations for a new two-pronged propaganda campaign – one that will serve to support McCain’s candidacy during the campaign season and then seamlessly convert into a “the perfidious Democrats stabbed our troops in the back” campaign in the event Obama wins the election and troops begin to be withdrawn.
The key to this new campaign is the assertion that the Sunni and Sadrist “insurgents” in Iraq are actually now on the very verge of collapse – shattered, demoralized and reeling from recent setbacks in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul. It is therefore only if the weak-kneed Democrats start withdrawing troops that the insurgents can possibly win.
Now anyone who has carefully read the articles about events in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul in the New York Times, Washington Post and major wire services is well aware of three facts:
1. The insurgent pullbacks in all three of these cities were carefully negotiated withdrawals with the entering government troops obeying mutually agreed-upon conditions (in Sadr City, for example, one element of the agreement was that US troops would not be part of the entering forces) In Mosul, the Times reported that “the Iraqi military appears to have allowed many insurgents to slip out after scores of negotiations with militias and their leaders.”
2. While preceded by periods of serious combat, the actual withdrawals or negotiated surrender/amnesties did not involve significant casualties for the insurgents or the unplanned abandonment of weapons, ammunition, supplies or materials.
3. The press reports gave no indication that the withdrawals were accompanied by any widespread demoralization, panic or breakdown of discipline among the insurgent forces.
(This last item may seem surprising to Americans because our military culture almost automatically identifies retreat or withdrawal with humiliation and failure while heroism is identified with standing fast (e.g. “not one step backward,” “fight to the last man” etc.). Arab-Persian martial culture is different, however, with withdrawal often envisioned as a specific kind of military operation that includes feigned retreats and false surrenders. The most famous historical example of this style of battle was the Parthian archers who would feign retreat and then decimate the pursuing cavalry by twisting around and firing arrows while their horses still raced ahead. Similar tactics of feigned retreat and false surrender were also a significant element in the reputation Arab and Persian generals gained during the Middle Ages of being uniquely “cunning” and “devious” compared to their more “upright” and “chivalrous” European opponents)
In short, while the insurgents’ loss of their bases in the three cities represented a significant setback, there is absolutely no reason to take seriously the idea that the events in Basra, Sadr City or Mosul have pushed them to the literal verge of collapse.
Now let us look at the exact words the Wall Street Journal and New York Post editorials used to characterize the events:
The New York Post, “Eat Crow, Iraq War Skeptics,” June 9, 2008
The Iraqi army “forcefully reoccupied” the three cities.
The Iraqi army “compelled insurgent militias to lay down their arms.”
The Wall Street Journal, “Iraq and the Election,” June 6, 2008
The Iraqi army “routed insurgents in three of their most important urban strongholds.”
Basra was “liberated from Sadrist goon squads.”
The Sadr City truce “had all the hallmarks of de-facto surrender.”
In Mosul, “the remaining terrorists were forced to scatter to the countryside or flee for Syria”
All these phrases – “forcefully reoccupied,” “routed,” “forced to lay down their arms,” “surrender,” “scatter,” and “flee” are extremely misleading as descriptions of what actually occurred during the negotiated withdrawals from the three cities and give ordinary Americans an utterly false visual image – an image of broken, panic-stricken and demoralized insurgents dropping their weapons and fleeing in terror.
This exaggerated image is of course vital for the Stab in the Back narrative to seem plausible. The enemy has to be on its “last legs” and “certain to fall if we can just stay firm a tiny little bit longer.” If, on the other hand, the Sadrists and Sunni insurgents are more accurately described as “playing possum,” “keeping their power dry,” “biding their time,” or “waiting for the right moment,” then the events of this spring appear more like a positive but not decisive trend in a long war of attrition with no end necessarily in sight. In this case, the Stab in the Back narrative falls apart.
What should the Dems do?
First, they should directly challenge the distorted view of events which underlies the “stab in the back” narrative whenever it is presented so that it does not become unconsciously accepted on the basis that “I’ve heard it so often that I guess it must be true.” Independent media watchdog groups as well as specifically Democratic sources should consistently quote articles from the major papers and wire services showing that the picture of “insurgents on the verge of total and complete collapse” is simply not supported by the facts to date.
Second, when the Republicans do roll out the “stab in the back” argument – as they inevitably will – the Democrats answer should be categorical.
Neither the Sadrist nor Sunni insurgencies were decisively shattered or broken by the events in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul and it is a genuinely shameful betrayal of the incredible sacrifice of our brave and dedicated men and women in uniform – and their families back home — for writers and commentators – for whatever partisan political motive — to deliberately sugarcoat that reality and distort the facts about how difficult the real conditions are that our soldiers are facing in Iraq and what it will actually take to pacify the county . Our men and women in uniform deserve better.
Before writers and commentators make vile assertions about Democrats stabbing our troops – our brave and dedicated troops and their families — in the back on the basis of misleading characterizations of the actual military situation in Iraq, they should look at themselves in the mirror.
And they should be ashamed.
James Vega is a strategic marketing consultant whose clients include leading nonprofit institutions and high-tech firms.