Every now and then, all of us political types need to be reminded that we’re not exactly experiencing current events in the same way as most Americans.
A couple of weeks ago, I made a big deal out of three posts on John Edwards by Markos Moulitsas that drew a total of 2400 comments.
Well, earlier this week, Ellen Degeneris’ web site posted a note and a video about her now-famous confrontation with a local animal rescue league over the fate of a small dog named Iggy. Virtually overnight, it attracted 14,971 comments, most of them, naturally, taking Ellen’s side in the dispute.
I guess you could say that Ellen really energized her base, eh?

In the course of a series of posts about the alleged lack of appeal among Democrats of Barack Obama’s frequent calls for bipartisanship at the new TNR campaign blog “The Stump,” Noam Scheiber poses an interesting question: “Can You Be a Partisan Moderate?”
He answers the question affirmatively, citing Hillary Clinton as an example, but that the question even needs to be asked reflects a common assumption that partisanship is essentially, or at least primarily, a function of sharp ideological differentiation between the parties. And that, historically and empirically, is not necessarily borne out by the evidence.
By most standards, the most viciously partisan presidential elections in our history were during the period between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Populist uprising (1880-1892). By and large, the main issue dividing the parties in those elections was tariff policy. And lest anyone suggest these largely non-ideological contests failed to energize voters, it should be noted that they set a high plateau of eligible voter turnout–ranging from 74% to 79%–far above twentieth-century levels.
A more recent, if general, example of the divisibility of ideology from partisanship is in the contemporary politics of the South. Anyone paying real attention to southern elections these days would have to concede that despite the relative conservatism of many Democrats in the region, campaigns are generally as combative and sometimes down-and-dirty as anywhere else in the country.
And to be much more specific, despite all of Bill Clinton’s supposed “triangulating” and the deals he cut with Republicans on trade, welfare reform, and the budget, anyone who lived through the Clinton administration would have a hard time accepting that this period represented a low point in partisanship, on either side.
One of the sources of this disconnect between theory and practice in terms of the correlation between ideology and partisanship is simply disagreement over the degree of differentiation that is needed to produce partisan energy. For decades prior to 1980, conservatives argued that Republican acceptance of the main tenets of the New Deal drained elections of any real reason to vote for one party over another. And today, some Democrats sincerely believe that their party’s acceptance of, say, a private-sector role in health care or a legitimate U.S. national security role in the Middle East, leaves voters with no real choice and no real excitement over the outcome. Yet voters have less trouble finding significant differences between Ds and Rs.
This is not to say, I must emphasize, that ideologues don’t have legitimate grounds for decrying “moderation” in either party. Agreement between the two parties to fight elections on some issues but not others, even if it doesn’t reduce partisanship, could in theory and sometimes does in practice take important issues off the table. The extreme example was during the period prior to the founding of the Republican Party, when Democrats and Whigs fought violently partisan elections on a foundation of a system that avoided disputes over slavery whenever possible.
But that’s precisely why those on the Left of the Democratic Party today should simply make their case that party “moderates” are wrong on real-life policy grounds, instead of arguing that they aren’t partisan enough, or are cowards when it comes to opposing Republicans. Indeed, when John Edwards suggests (as Barack Obama has come close to suggesting) that the Clintons are part of the same corrupt system that produced George W. Bush, he’s really saying there are some things more important than partisanship, which is undoubtedly true. Confusing this argument, as many netroots activists have done, by asserting that any Democrat who fails to oppose the GOP on every conceivable issue is actually, secretly, indifferent to partisan control of government, requires conspiracy-theory reasoning about the D.C. Democratic Establishment that loses whatever power it has when you start looking at those many Democratic centrists who work and live outside Washington and have no stake in the Beltway status quo.
For that reason, the partisanship-versus-ideology debate in the blogosphere that sites like OpenLeft is promoting is very healthy, even for “centrists.” You can definitely be a highly partisan centrist, and if you take seriously claims that there’s not a sufficient difference between the two parties right now, you can be a bipartisan, nonpartisan, third-partisan, or post-partisan ideologue (that, in fact, is a position that could theoretically justify Barack Obama’s appeals to a new kind of bipartisanship based on a complete overturning of the current system, if he were clearer about the ideological underpinnings of his “new politics”). But the idea that all “centrists” or “moderates” or whatever you choose to call them don’t want to win elections and don’t viscerally dislike the other side, just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Also on the intraparty unity front, there’s a fascinating discussion going on over at OpenLeft (a site devoted to making the netroots more of an ideological force in the Democratic Party) spurred by Mike Lux, who suggests that any of the likely Democratic nominees are going to be more “Center” than “Left.” The question he then poses is whether those on the Left are willing to accept a coalition “deal” for limited but real influence over the next Democratic administration, similar in some respects to the “deal” their ideological predecessors struck during the Clinton administration.
So far, the comment thread on Lux’s post seems to indicate general acceptance of “The Deal,” with discussion centering on those issues deemed non-negotiable (typically action on climate change, movement towards universal health coverage, rejection of war with Iran, and refusal to retreat on social issues).
While you are at OpenLeft, you should also check out Chris Bowers’ post, which reviews the lack of any post-Nobel public demand for a Gore candidacy, and concludes Gore is more useful outside the presidential campaign. As it happens, Gore has already made a post-Nobel comment which, though it falls short of full Sherman Statement, indicates a continuing lack of interest in a presidential run.

In a small but significant sign of progress on the intraparty unity front, Markos Moulitsas hands a brief attaboy to DLC chairman Harold Ford for a recent pattern of combative, pro-Democratic appearances on Hannity and Colmes. So, too, at greater length, does the Fox monitoring site News Hounds.

As you may have heard, Barack Obama continued his recent pattern of coded criticisms of Hillary Clinton by denouncing “triangulation and poll-driven politics,” which is being generally interpreted (not least by HRC’s camp) as an attack on her husband’s political tactics and alleged infidelity to progressive principles.
John Edwards has also attacked “triangulation” as part of a broader, yet still heavily-coded, criticism of the Clintons as representing an unprincipled Washington Establishment.
So with HRC’s top rivals both definining themselves in opposition to “triangulation,” it might be a good time to ask: what, exactly, does “triangulation” mean?
Outside politics, “triangulation” is used in geometry, electronics, and gunnery as a general term for locating an object through reference to two fixed points.
In politics, “triangulation” is identified with the 1990s-era international Third Way movement generally, and with Bill Clinton specifically. And it’s pretty much agreed that the term was invented by Clinton advisor Dick Morris to describe the approach used by the Clinton-Gore campaign in its successful 1996 re-election campaign. Indeed, beyond Morris, no one associated with either Clinton has ever, so far as I am aware, used the term; it’s become entirely pejorative.
But what does it mean?
The AP story on Obama’s speech offered this definition: “His reference to triangulation, however, refers to Bill Clinton’s eight years as president when some advisers urged him to make policy decisions by splitting the difference on opposing views.”
Aside from the questionable suggestion that “triangulation” preceded and succeeded Dick Morris’ brief tenure as a Clinton strategist, I’m reasonably sure that anyone connected with Bill Clinton would angrily reject the idea that “splitting the differences” between the two parties was the essence of Clintonism. But the same argument has raged with respect to the related concept of “The Third Way,” which critics from both the Left and Rightviewed as an effort to appropriate conservative policy ideas and political messages, but whose advocates always maintained was an effort to refresh the Left with new policy ideas while refusing to concede whole issue-areas to the Right.
Going to the source himself, Dick Morris did an entire chapter on triangulation in his 2003 book, Power Plays. Here’s how he defined the term he made famous, as explained in a review of the book that I wrote at the time:

“The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.” Clinton, Morris shows, adopted the longstanding conservative goal of welfare reform as a top item on the Democratic agenda, but developed progressive policies, including higher funding for child care and stronger financial support for working families, to pursue that goal.

So according to Morris himself, triangulation isn’t about compromising on principles or policies, but about preempting conservative wedge issues by addressing them through progressive policies.
It’s no accident that Morris uses welfare reform as an example of triangulation. And so would many Democrats who prefer the pejorative definition of triangulation. Clinton’s 1996 decision to sign welfare reform legislation that a majority of House Democrats had voted against was at the time interpreted by some as a surrender to Republican principles and priorities, and by others as a redemption of his 1992 promise to “end welfare as we know it,” after a reshaping of the legislation (he vetoed two previous versions) to reflect much of his own approach to the issue. The real argument isn’t about Clinton’s subjective intentions, but about whether you think accepting a time limit for public assistance represented an unacceptable betrayal of progressive values, as some of Clinton’s own friends and advisors said at the time (though many have since recanted given the success of the initiative, and Clinton’s efforts after 1996 to eliminate some of the original bill’s restrictive provisions).
Another example of Clintonian “triangulation” you often hear of was his famous statement in the 1996 State of the Union Address that “the era of big government is over,” which a lot of conservatives treated as an ideological victory. But was it? Is “big government” essential to progressive governance? Or was Clinton’s argument that smaller but more efficient government was actually progressive defensible?
And a third example often cited was his advocacy for trade expansion, and particularly NAFTA (another issue where he was opposed by a majority of House Democrats, and by the labor movement). But whether NAFTA was right or wrong (and if anything, Democratic unhappiness with the agreement has increased since 1994), it’s hard to describe Clinton’s position as a “triangulating” surrender to the Right, since he was continuing a pro-trade Democratic tradition that dated back to Martin Van Buren, and included virtually every progressive luminary of the past.
What I’m driving at here is that differences of opinion about “triangulation”–its definition and its propriety–often come down to differences of principle, not differences between principled and unprincipled people. All of Clinton’s supporters and critics would agree that the conditions under which he governed–facing, for six of his eight years as president, a ruthless congressional Republican majority that eventually sought to remove him from office—excused some tactical flexibility. But is that all he represented?
In the end, maybe it no longer matters. Even if Obama and Edwards are attacking a disputable definition of triangulation that may not be historically accurate, I think we’d all agree that we don’t want a Democratic nominee for president who is unprincipled and entirely poll-driven. That’s why I agree with those who encourage HRC’s critics to get more specific, drop the code words, and take on her actual policies as evidence of her actual philosophy. And that’s particularly true of a candidate who has previously defined himself as representing a new generation of progressives who want to get over the tired arguments of the 1990s.

Mark Green, one of the Dems’ staunchest progressives, has an encouraging post up at the HuffPo “Why 2008 will be a Perfect Storm for Republicans,” with this happy prediction:

Adding it all up: look for Democrats to end up with a near filibuster-proof 58 Senate seats (up from 51) and 260 House seats (up from 213 in 2005 and 233 in 2007). The 2006 and 2008 elections would then be the equivalent of a rolling realignment, comparable to the 51, 49 and 53 House seats that switched hands in 1958, 1974 and 1994 respectively. For when there’s a tidal wave of sentiment, it doesn’t tip some close contests but nearly all close contests.

Green’s perfect storm has four elements, encapsulated in the GOP’s disastrous policies in the following areas: Iraq; the economy; intolerance; and children. Green adds:

Beyond these four problems, a variety of other realities combine to dig Republicans into an even deeper hole. Recent polls show Democrats are more trusted on every domestic and foreign policy issue: education, health care, environment, economic growth, fiscal discipline, even terrorism. The number of Americans who self-identify as Republican is at a seven year low. While Americans believing the country is on the wrong tack was 50 percent in 2002 and 2004, it’s now 67 percent. National Democratic committees and presidential candidates are outraising their Republican counterparts better than 2 to 1. And then there’s the fact that Republicans are defending 22 Senate seats in 2008 compared to 12 for the Democrats. Nine Republican Senate seats are now considered vulnerable (Alaska, Colorado, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and Virginia).

In other words a thorough housecleaning is in the making. Another Green, David Michael, a Hofstra poly sci professor, thinks the “perfect storm” analogy may fall short in describing the political weather taking shape for Republicans. As he writes in his Common Dreams post, “The Coming Progressive Era“:

Calling this a perfect storm may not do justice to the tsunami headed the GOP’s way. They’ll be lucky if they wind up as well off as the Tories in Britain after Thatcher, exiled for a dozen or more years…Democrats are likely to get one more chance in 2008, and they’re likely – with one exception – to sew up total control of the government, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and little need for overriding vetoes.

Lest we get too optimistic, Professor Green points out that we’ll still have a reactionary Supreme Court. But even that could change with a lucky break or two. And yes, I know, a million things can go wrong between now and November ’08. For now, however, we can be cheered that political observers are beginning to envision a very different political climate for the opposition. ‘Perfect Storm’ or tsunami — either one will do nicely.

I’m sure Matt Compton will do a more definitive post on the subject here directly, but I wanted to draw your attention to the Washington Post story today about the Ron Paul Phenomenon: the eccentric presidential campaign that’s almost entirely internet based (70 percent of his impressive money haul was raised online).
While the piece (by Jose Antonio Vargas) provides a useful summary of the Paul campaign, it does include one real howler that I’m surprised got by the editors:

There are shades of Howard Dean here, the way the insurgent Democratic candidate embraced the Web in 2003. And shades of McCain, too. The Arizona senator raised $1 million in two days online in 2000 after beating Bush in the New Hampshire primary.
But the most fitting analogy, political analysts here say, might be Patrick Buchanan. Though Paul has not been a general in the culture wars like Buchanan, both men come from the old right of the GOP, pols who champion limited government and fiscal conservatism. Buchanan was barely registering in the New Hampshire polls months before his surprise defeat of Bob Dole in 1996.

In his blind-men-describing-the-elephant approach to Paul, Vargas does not appear to realize that Ron Paul, far from representing the “old right,” is a libertarian. He was the Libertarian Party nominee for president in 1988, and spoke at that party’s national convention as recently as 2004. (The Libertarian nominee in 2004, Michael Badnarik, has endorsed Paul this year). His obsessive support for a return to the gold standard, for repudiation of international institutions and agreements, for wholesale abolition of federal agencies, for junking the “war on drugs,” and for elimination of overseas military commitments, are all libertarian boilerplate positions. Maybe Vargas was thrown by Paul’s extremist anti-abortion views, which are not characteristic of most libertarians (though as Grover Norquist once shrewdly observed, while all anti-statists believe abortion should be a matter of individual choice, they disagree about how many individuals are involved in the decision).
But confusing Paul with Buchanan, a man whose ideological lodestars are early-nineteenth-century Whiggery and early-twentieth-century Catholic Corporatism, just because both have opposed wars in Iraq, is a bit like identifying John Edwards with Tom Tancredo because both favor repeal of No Child Left Behind.
Once Paul’s libertarian identity is understood, his Net Power isn’t that mysterious. From the beginning, libertarians have always had a wildly disproportionate presence on the Internet. I learned this personally way back in the late 1990s, as I reported more recently in a New Donkey post:

I used to do a regular column for an e-zine called IntellectualCapital that posted comments after every article. It didn’t matter what I wrote about; within two comments the threads invariably degenerated into an intra-libertarian food fight over slavery-as-a-contract or privatizing the sidewalks or Ayn Rand’s Epistle to the Californians, or whatever.

The Post story sparked a fun exchange between Kate Sheppard and Ezra Klein over at TAPPED, wherein Kate wonders if Paul’s inability to turn all this cyber-juice into votes is a function of the Net-deadening Iowa Factor, and Ezra responds that crazy people are far better at creating blogospheric buzz than in attracting actual voters.
Just my point. The Internet is a tool that can be used by anybody, but is best used by people who actually represent a mainstream point of view.

A lot of Democrats were probably amused late last week when Mitt Romney, in a speech in Nevada, said he was speaking for “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He was obviously adapting Howard Dean’s famous slogan (which actually originated with the late Paul Wellstone) of representing “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
Aside from illustrating a certain lack of originality in Mitt’s speechwriting shop, the line has been broadly interpreted as being a shot at Rudy Giuliani’s heterodoxy on cultural issues, and (viz. John McCain’s derisive response) probably a mistake, given Romney’s own history of recently repudiated moderation and bipartisanship.
But I suspect this is a theme that Romney will continue to use, because it has an anti-Washington subtext that goes beyond its utility in savaging Rudy.
Let’s remember that Dean’s campaign was less an ideological crusade (aside from his opposition to the Iraq War) than a vehicle for the steadily growing belief of many Democrats that their representatives in Washington had lost touch with both progressive principles and the sentiments of rank-and-file party members. And Dean’s own credibility as the leader of a “people-powered movement” owed relatively little to his own record as a centrist, bipartisan governor of Vermont (as Dick Gephardt’s campaign was quick to point out on the campaign trail in Iowa). But the fact that he was a governor untainted by the alleged culture of cowardly compromise in DC was the only credential he really needed.
Anti-Washington appeals have an ancient provenance in Republican politics. It was an important part of George W. Bush’s message in 2000 and of Ronald Reagan’s message in 1980 and 1976. And going back much further, the idea that there was an evil and corrupt “Eastern Establishment” in the GOP that consistently betrayed rank-and-file conservatives was central to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 insurgency, and to Robert Taft’s 1940, 1948 and 1952 campaigns.
While most Democrats (myself included) think of the current, Washington-based GOP as faithfully reflecting the natural consequences of conservative ideology in power, there’s a powerful psychological need among conservatives to believe otherwise. The overwhelming consensus intepretation of the 2006 debacle on the Right was that Bush and his congressional allies “went native” in Washington and betrayed their conservative principles, refusing to rein in spending, embracing an immigration amnesty and a Medicare expansion in the pursuit of swing voters, and (pre-surge, at least) failing to go all out for victory in Iraq.
As it happens, there’s no 2008 Republican candidate (with the possible exception of the severely underfunded Mike Huckabee) who is the natural vehicle for this revisionist take on the GOP’s past, present and future. So Romney’s exploiting the void, and can be expected to continue this effort.
I wouldn’t want to push any Dean-Romney parallelism very far. Unlike Dean, Romney does not “own” any key galvanzing issue. Unlike Dean, Romney does not possess any new movement-building tool for creating an army of supporters to lead (unless you think his campaign’s alleged mastery of “microtargeting” qualifies as a pale reflection of Dean’s internet-based juggernaut). And unlike Dean, Romney’s running a slick and highly professional campaign that does not exactly ooze rough-edged authenticity.
But unless and until some other candidate can seize the anti-Washington, anti-centrist mantle, don’t be surprised if Mitt keeps calling himself the leader of the “Republican Wing of the Republican Party.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Paul Rosenberg’s Open Left post “Class Still Matters Among Southern Whites” provides some interesting trend data showing party self-identification by income percentile in the south over the last half-century. Rosenberg provides tables for each decade from the 1950’s through the 2000’s (based on the American National Election Studies (ANES) Cumulative Datafile) showing a precipitous decline in middle-upper income white southerners identifying themselves as Democrats. As you might expect, the largest shift was from the 1950’s to the 1960s, with a more modest drift toward the GOP after that. There’s really no good news for Dems in the data, other than an increase benefitting Dems at the lowest (0-16) and highest (96-100) income percentiles from the 1990’s to the 2000’s.
Rosenberg’s earlier Open Left post on the topic, “(Southern) White Men Can’t Vote–For All Of Us,” offers more detail on southerners’ party preferences. As late As 2004, 50.7 percent of southerners chose Democratic for party i.d., compared with 41.5 percent choosing the GOP. Comparable ’06 southerner party i.d. statistics are not yet available.
Also, actual voting patterns provide a more complex — and relevant — view than we get from party i.d. statistics. Paul Krugman has reported that 62 percent of southern whites voted Republican in ’06 House races. However, in a later NYT blog post, Krugman cites studies and concludes “… if you look at voting behavior, low-income whites in the South are not very different from low-income whites in the rest of the country…It’s relatively high-income Southern whites who are very, very Republican.”
Moreover, the GOP advantage on issues of concern to southerners is not so overwhelming, as Bob Moser explained in his Nation article “The Way Down South“:

The chasm supposedly yawning between Southern ideology and national norms is wildly, though routinely, overstated. In a 2003 comprehensive study of Southern political attitudes, pollster Scott Keeter found folks still tilting to the right on many issues of race, immigration and the use of military force. But Southerners are just as likely as other Americans to support government regulation, strong environmental protection and social welfare. They’re prochoice, too (though less than the rest of the country), and on another contentious “cultural” issue, gay civil unions, are just slightly less supportive than other Americans. Polls show that young Southern voters, along with the region’s booming Hispanic population, lean Democratic

Before writing off the Democats’ future in the south, take note also of demographic trends indicating strong growth in African American and Latino population in the region. In addition, Despite party i.d. data and congressional votes in ’06, Democrats manage to hold majorities of both houses of the LA, MS, AL, AR, NC and WV state legislatures, and one House in both TN and KY.
Democrats clearly have a future in the South, but you have to look at a broad array of data to see it.

Daniel Gross has a post up today at Slate “CEOs for Clinton: Even the ultra-rich are abandoning the Republicans,” which affirms the trend noted by J. P. Green’s post below, American Prospect’s Paul Waldman and Christopher Hayes at Washington Monthly back in June, among others. Says Gross:

Back in 2000, George W. Bush called his base “the haves, and the have-mores.” But the have-mores are clearly more receptive to Democrats than they were seven years ago. “It’s a much easier pitch drumming up support this cycle from business people, there’s no question,” says Steve Rattner, founder of the private-equity firm Quadrangle Group, who is a longtime Clinton backer. His take: Fed-Up CEOs are reacting to the bungled war in Iraq, poor fiscal and disaster management, and conscious outreach efforts by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

It’s not all CEO’s of course, Gross hastens to add, and he likens the rash of CEO contributions to Democratic candidates to a hedge bet. But the momentum does seem to spell trouble for the GOP — especially when it comes from one of their most reliable constituencies.