The "Tea Party" and the Republican Party and the November 2010 elections

Just after the 2010 elections, the New York Review of Books published The Historic Election: Four Views: Ronald Dworkin, Mark Lilla, David Bromwich, and Jonathan Raban (12/09/2010 issue). Each writer did a piece on their analysis of the election outcome. Raban's is focused on analyzing the politics of Washington State.

The other three look at the implications for national politics. And all of them have some surprisingly questionable observations. Dworkin writes, for instance:

The people who voted against his policies—or simply stayed away from the polls—many of whom voted for him two years ago, must have had a reason for not listening to him now.

We must take seriously what so many of them actually say: that they feel they are losing their country, that they are desperate to take it back. What could they mean? There are two plausible answers, both of them frightening. They might mean, first, that their new government is not theirs because it is not remotely of their kind or culture; it is not representative of them. Most who think that would have in mind, of course, their president; they think him not one of them because he is so different. It seems likely that the most evident difference, for them, is his race—a race a great many Americans continue to think alien. They feel, viscerally, that a black man cannot speak for them.

This is the kind of broad generalization that is a plague of so much of our political commentary in the US. Yes, there is considerable experience these last two years showing that hardcore Republican voters displaying white racism. But hardcore Republicans are not going to be voting for Obama or Democrats anyway. Other than the fact that they didn't vote for Democrats, it doesn't really tell us much to lump in independents open to voting for Democrats with hardline Republicans. How many independents have told pollsters they share the Glenn Beck/Tea Party complaint "that they feel they are losing their country, that they are desperate to take it back"?

I also question whether his description of the declining relative power of the US in foreign affairs is so widely perceived in the way he describes it:

They read every day of our declining power and influence. Our dollar is weak, our deficit frightening, our trade balance alarming. The Chinese own more and more of our currency and our debt; they, not we, have built the world’s fastest computer; and they show no inclination whatever to heed our demands about revaluing their currency or helping to protect human rights in Africa or prevent nuclear weapons in Iran. Our requests and demands are more and more ignored in foreign capitals: in Jerusalem, for example, and in congresses on climate change. Our vaunted military power suddenly seems inept: we are unable to win any war anywhere. Iraq was a multiple disaster: we could not win peace in spite of a vast expenditure of blood and treasure. Afghanistan seems even worse: we are unable to win and morally unable to quit. The democracies of the world, who once thought us the model of the rule of law, now point to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and call us human rights criminals.

Mark Lilla is stuck on the Richard Hofstadter model of the Radical Right crashing the Republican Party in the 1964 Presidential election. A lot has changed since 1964. And in this silly passage, he echoes the Republican standard complaint that Democrats are snooty elitists:

Republicans take seriously the Tea Party and the quarter or more of the electorate that is sympathetic to it because they see it as a fundamentally right-wing phenomenon. They are wrong. Democrats don’t take it seriously — by which I mean, don’t try to understand and engage the passions behind it — for the very same reason. They, too, are wrong. The Democratic doxa for the past few years has been a mix of contempt (look at the misspelled signs Glenn Beck's puppets are holding!) and economic determinism (these sorts of things happen when people lose their jobs and homes).

President Obama is no snob but he is susceptible to the latter delusion ...

To complete the stock whine about alleged Democratic elitism, he writes at the end of his piece, "As for progressive pundits and Democratic Party leaders, they need to get out of their limousines and talk to some of those people with the misspelled signs. They'll discover some potential allies among them."

Lilla also careless lumps in independent voters with Tea Partiers, who are conservative Republicans. He even claims, with no evidence to base it on as far as I know, that "vast numbers of independents" sympathize with the Tea Party "and have loated back to the Republican Party because of it."

David Bromwich says something I think is accurate: "Obama's long-drawn-out attempt to settle himself in a place above politics has injured his party and found no takers on the other side." But the immediate continuation suggests that the problem on which he is focusing is Obama's devotion to the neoliberal/globalization/Washington Consensus view on economic policies:

Only in the last three months did he begin to blame his predecessor for anything. Yet to blame George W. Bush for the economic collapse was a half-truth. The fault goes back at least to Lawrence Summers’s deregulation policies under President Clinton; and it was Obama himself who brought Summers back into government. Such improbable shifts of tactics are one reason why many people who voted for Obama in 2008 no longer think he is someone on whom they can rely.

He also offers us a modified version of the Hofstadter (neo-Hofstadter?) model, in which Tea Partiers are part of annoying Radical Right that bubbles up to the top in the Republican Party now and then:

The Tea Party movement stands as the latest embodiment of a far-right strain in our politics that has passed episodically from partial control to a dominant grip on the Republican Party. It ascended in 1964, in 1980, in 1994, and has returned with a vengeance in 2010. The continuity has been concealed by the legend of Ronald Reagan as a moderate conservative. Reagan gave the nominating speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and his central issues in 1980 were Jimmy Carter's want of manly resolve in failing to attack Iran and his lack of patriotism in letting Panama take charge of the Canal.

That description is fine so far as it goes. But the story is more the increasing radicalization of the Republican Party, not necessarily from 1964 on but certainly from 1968 on with the dawn of Nixon's Southern Strategy.

This comment of his is also true so far as it goes: "Capitalist utopianism and unqualified loathing for all that remains of the welfare state are the dispositions that now unite the Republican Party from the bottom up." I would add that while the billionaires with their hands out for tax cuts aren't all Christian Right sort, the Christian dominionism identified with the Christian Right is at least as an important ideological unifier for today's Republican Party.

Tags: 2010 elections, radical right, republican party

Elizabeth Drew on Obama's problems with the voters (and the Villagers)

Elizabeth Drew rarely steps far outside the bounds of Beltway Village consensus. But her political analyses are definitely better than the average for the Village.

In her essay In the Bitter New Washington New York Review of Books 11/22/2010 (12/23/2010 issue), she looks cautiously at the political trends and what they portend for the political movement that brought Obama to the Presidency in 2008 and how the Obama Administration itself contributed to the 2010 electoral outcome.

Drew warns against overinterpretation of the 2010 elections, or, better, against careless interpretations. One worrisome factor she mentions is the number of older voters who turned to the Republicans believing they would defend Medicare, a result of their demagoguery during the health care reform debate. Her article has several journalistic observations that caught my eye, like the fact that Joe Biden "was virtually shut out of the dealings with people in Congress in the first two years." She doesn't come to any firm conclusions, though the picture of a President too seriously isolated from his base as well as the larger public comes through. But her essay is also flawed by annoying lapses into Village trivia and the occasional stock Republican-friendly canards, such as the supposedly "common complaint about the Obama White House in the first two years has been that there were no 'grown-ups' around." Remember back in 2000-1 when the Cheney-Bush Administration were "putting the grown-ups back in charge"? Still, it is a well-informed and informative piece by an analyst who actually can read polls and relate policies to politics, and does both in this article.

Sadly, the Village touch shows up in Drew's piece. She says of Republican leaders declining a meeting in the White House - as Jerry Brown also did just last week - "this just isn't done". You can almost here the gasp in her voice. Here we see her indulging the Villagers' pathetic social obsessions about parties:

Last year, a friend of mine was invited to a Hanukkah party that the Obamas gave for prominent Jews (a group with whom there had been tensions), and after the Obamas descended the grand stairway, they stood in the foyer briefly, the President made a few remarks and shook a few hands, and back up the stairs they went. No mingling.

And this could have come from Maureen Dowd or Gail Collins:

In their first two years, the Obamas have seemed a bit tone-deaf: there were too many vacations while people were hurting, especially Michelle's extravagant trip to Spain. (I'm as interested in Michelle’s clothes as the next woman but at the same time think she and her staff are too focused on her looking smashing, which she does. Her wardrobe seems quite extensive for these troubled times.) [my emphasis]

I don't recall seeing even a single poll saying that for either women or men, their opinion of Michelle Obama's wardrobe played even the tiniest role in their vote in 2010. But for the Villagers, these things are very important.

But even though she puts it in the context of manners, I actually think she has a point in the following. And it's been a real problem, by no means limited to Village social events:

Barack Obama's personality has been much mulled over in the past two years, but it seems inescapable that his high self-esteem often slides over the thin line to arrogance, which trickles down (with some exceptions) to much of his staff, some of whom are downright rude to all but a chosen few. Obama has seemed uninterested in anyone but his immediate group, and three of the four members of his immediate circle — Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod — had had no experience in governing. The fourth, Rahm Emanuel, expressed himself with such flippancy, arrogance, and overuse of the F-word that he offended not just members of Congress but also would-be allies of the President.

Tags: est2010 elections, barack obama, obama administration

Why I find Noam Chomsky annoying and not particularly helpful

Annoying but insightful is one thing. Just annoying is another. This interview with Noam Chomsky is a good illustration of why I find his analyses not very helpful.



I can understand why Chomsky is appealing to some people with a left-leaning viewpoint. He avoids crackpot conspiracy theories. And he generally relies on factual material reported in the mainstream press in constructing his arguments. And he offers a more analytical look at current events than news consumers typically get, especially from our TV Pod Pundits.

But Chomsky's arguments, even in print, almost always wind up sounding mind-numbingly cynical to me. In this video, his tone even adds to the effect. As a political analyst, he's kind of a one-trick pony. His message invariably is that there are powerful economic forces that always dominant any administration and prevent anything from ever getting better. The message that comes across is not so much, "You should really care about this stuff and figure out what you can do to change it for the better" than it is, "You're a fool if you think you can ever do anything to change the political and economic system for the better". That's not what he literally says, of course. But it might as well be.

In the early part of this interview, he also hauls out a lazy, superficial argument of the type that advocates of a left third party are sometimes inclined to use. He says that when you look at what "people who call themselves conservative" support, "most of them have more-or-less social-democratic attitudes! That's just cracked. As a way to look at American voters' political behavior, it's virtually useless. Essentially, he's looking at logically inconsistencies among whatever group he's talking about (he doesn't specify whether he's talking about registered voters, the general public, likely voters, etc.) and assuming that what he calls the "social-democratic" side of their attitudes are more important to them than the hardcore conservative Republican side.

So not only do overwhelmingly powerful interests control the whole show, but most conservatives are actually social democrats who are waiting for someone to organize them into a social-democratic movement. That is, if the people who might be inclined to organize them aren't so discouraged and depressed from listening to Chomsky that the decide to give up on political and concentrate on personal research into medical marijuana for the rest of their lives.

Tags: 2010 elections, chomsky

My suggestions for post-election reading for Democrats

John Amato and David Neiwert, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane (2010) Dave Neiwert’s journalistic speciality for the last two decades or so has been following the Radical Right in the US. In this book, he and John Amato look at the flourishing of Radical Right activity and the continued mainstreaming of such ideas into the Republican Party. At present, there seems to be every prospect that this process of radicalization will continue, at least as long as Obama remains President. John Amato is the creator and manager of the blog Crooks and Liars, Dave is the editor, and they both post there regularly.

Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010) Bacevich is an historian and former career military officer who has been writing for years about the military overreach of the United States. In this book, he analyzes a development that happened without a lot of people noticing that something remarkable had taken place. During the Cold War, we had a permanent war economy and something very much like a permanent state of psychological war mobilization. But with the Afghanistan War now in its tenth year with no end in sight, the Iraq War still going on also with no end yet in sight, with war in everything but name in Pakistan and now expanding combat operations in Yemen, war (in Bacevich's words) "not a cold war; but engagement in actual hostilities - [is] establishing itself as the new normalcy".


Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (2009) The Christian Right – essentially white conservative Protestants – are the main voting base of today’s Republican Party. But long after that became a reality, most of the traditional media still does a pitiful job reporting on that movement and the organizations and individuals who lead it. Max is a good example of how a journalist can be both partisan and an excellent reporter. This recent study of the Christian Right focuses on Republican Party politicians closest to that movement but he also looks at the rank-and-file, coming up with a provocative observation about the role that the "politics of personal crisis". plays with Christian Right voters.


Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000) Investigate, slander, pimp pseudoscandals: the Republicans pursued these methods throughout the Clinton Presidency. From their point of view, they were successful and justified. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently explained that the problem was that they didn't focus single-mindedly enough on wrecking the Democratic Presidency. We’ll see more of the same, much magnified by the Republican Noise Machine including FOX News, but also by a mainstream media happy to play along. Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is the way it explains how the traditional media outlets took a serious dive in quality circa 1992. And they haven’t hit bottom yet, e.g., ABC News inviting white racist propagandist Andrew Breitbart to be an election commentator. Joe's work appears in Salon and the New York Observer. Gene's column normally appears on Thursday in the Cagle Post.


John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (1992) This book by the late Kenneth Galbraith is nearly two decades old. A lot has changed in American politics since then, not least of which is the appalling drop in quality of the traditional news media, especially TV news. But a lot remains the same, including the central framing concept of this book: in a political system where only about half the eligible voters actually go vote even in Presidential election years, and those voters are demographically considerably more affluent on average than non-voters, American politics revolves largely around comforting the comfortable. The main difference in that regard is that the Republicans focus on comforting the already very comfortable. This results in considerable neglect of consequential problems of both the short-and long-range kinds. Galbraith’s rather pessimistic conclusion on the immediate prospect of breaking out of that framework are even more sobering now with the experience of two disastrous wars and an economic collapse that looks like the beginning a depression having occurred, our politics appear to be even more locked in the comfort-the-comfortable mode - even though the teapartiers theatrically claim to be more than uncomfortable. In fact, the outrage of affluent older whites at the policies of the Obama Administration is exactly the sort of attitude he discusses in this perceptive work.


James Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008) The subtitle provides a short summary of the theme. Conventional wisdom – a phrase popularized by his father J.K. Galbraith – insists that in the early years of what looks a lot like an economic depression, we should be applying Herbert Hoover remedies: slashing government outlays, balancing the federal budget, phasing out Social Security, etc. Galbraith the Younger explains why those are terrible ideas. His discussion of the relation of the federal budget deficit, private savings and the trade deficit is especially interesting.


Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006) A clear-headed journalistic account of the Christian Right based on extensive interviews and field work. As the subtitle suggests, she focuses heavily on the nationalism and militarism of the Christianists, but also on their theocatic ambitions. The degree to which forms of Christian dominionism influence the Christian Right and the Republican Party today are not generally well understood. Michelle writes, "The things so many Islamic fundamentalists hate about the West ... are what the Christian nationalists hate as well. And so, in a final grotesque irony, we come full circle and see defenders of American chauvinism speaking the language of anti-American radicals."


Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (2007) The late astronomer Carl Sagan used to worry that as American society became more and more dependent on science and technology, that we might wind up with a huge portion of the population walking around clutching their crystals and trying to read their auras while lacking even a basic understanding of the science on which our civilization increasingly depends. Al Gore has a similar worry. But his focus in this book is how pseudoscience, bad information, irrationality and the manipulation of religious fundamentalism affect important areas of public policy and represent a real threat to American democracy.


Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) After the First World War, there was a famous exchange of letters between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein that was published under the title, "Why War?" Chris Hedges looks at that question in this thoughtful and provocative book. Chris has the unusual combination of experiences of having been a war correspondent and also a trained theologian. His book is a reminder that war is a chronically seductive weakness of the human race.


Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., War and The American Presidency (2004) A collection of essays from the late historian's last years. In one of them he quotes Hegel, "People and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." Schlesinger himself doesn't go that far. But he does argue that people need to keep both a sense of skepticism and hope for the future, based on a realistic understand of what we know about ourselves. A large part of the book deals with the issues of war and Presidential power and the danger they represented to American democracy. "The American president as the world's self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner? - the road that lead straight to Abu Ghraib." Sadly, Obama has claimed Executive power in foreign and military affairs that in some cases exceed those of his immediate predecessor.


Tags: 2010 elections, democracy

Taylor Marsh: "Truth isn't subjective"

Taylor Marsh makes some very good points on false political equivalencies in Rally to Restore Sanity an Ode to Independents 10/31/2010. While she sees a real need to mobilize indepedent voters and win them to the Democratic side, she points out the problem with pretending for the sake of an image of "moderation" that "both sides do it" when, in reality, it's mainly one side "doing it." It, in this case, being promoting violence, racism and hatred. She writes:

Truth isn’t subjective, however, which I’m reminded of every day. Sometimes one side is absolutely wrong, like when Sarah Palin talked about "death panels," or when Rand Paul talked about private business owners being exempt from the Civil Rights Act. That would have been worth Stewart or Colbert pointing out. Pres. Obama and the Democrats were wrong not to fight for the public option, but also a stronger finreg bill, should have stood strong for women instead of selling us out. But that's a hell of a lot different than Sharron Angle’s charge that Second Amendment remedies should be used, which is not a way to solve differences. There is no one on the left suggesting such dangerous notions, which should have been said. No one on the left had a reporter handcuffed, like Joe Miller did in Alaska, or threatened to take a reporter out as Carl Paladino did in New York. These things matter, all of which Stewart and Colbert ignored for drawing false equivalents to the right and left. ...

Unfortunately, by amplifying left and right equally Stewart and Colbert did a disservice to the truth, which is not subjective.

If Jon Stewart truly believes that the left talking softly while the right wields a big rhetorical stick can get the job done he’s not been paying attention to his own show this year and should review the tapes, starting with the ones featuring Fox. [my emphasis]

And, as we've seen this last two years, the Republican version comes not just in the form of a metaphorical big stick, but in head-stomping (Kentucky), arresting a reporter for asking questions (Alaska) and variety of "Tea Party" nastiness. Oh, and various kinds of lethal far-right terrorism here and there, to which the Republican Party has largely responded by ignoring it and complaining that people who notice it are trying to unfairly connect Republicans with them.

Tags: 2010 elections, democratic party, radical right

Extremist rhetoric - being generated by "both sides"? Ted Nugent edition (Updated)

Juan Cole points out in Ted Nugent vs. Jon Stewart: Fumigating the Democrat Rats vs. Can’t we all Get Along? Informed Comment 11/01/2010, one side's rhetoric is sounding considerably nastier than the other's.

He passes on the news from CNN about one-time rock star Ted Nugent used explicitly eliminationist language against Democrats at a rally for the Republican Senate nominee in West Viriginia, John Raese, in a closely-contested race. Republicans love to whine that the mean libruls are trying to take away their freedom of speech. But anyone who wants to imitate Nugent's rant might want to check on the law first. As a general rule, a call for civil violence is protected under the 1st Amendment if it's not an immediate and specific call for violence, as in "Kill that guy in the blue hat right there!" Nugent actually mentioned specific names of Democrats who needed to be exterminated. I'm sure that if he mentioned the name of someone like the President currently under Secret Service protection in that context, he would get a not-very-friendly visit from them. People do go to prison for threats to kill individual politicians. Update: After listening to the full CNN tape, he mentions Nancy Pelosi by name, and it's hard to see how anyone could hear what he says here and not think he's referring to Obama as one of the "rats"; he talks about the White House and then about how we the public let the rats move in. I actually would be surprised if the Secret Service didn't at least take a close look at that.

Our star pundits seem to agree that "both sides" in American politics are contributing equally to extremism. If our Pod Pundits agree, I suppose it must be true. Still, things like this have to make you wonder. Ted Nugent is within the mainstream of today's Republican Party. Where he gave this speech was at a rally for the Republican Senate candidate in West Virginia, in a tightly contested race. Nugent is also a favorite speaker at NRA conventions - the NRA that Tea Partiers think is dangerously *moderate* on gun issues.

Tags: 2010 elections, radical right

Obama's pre-election weekly address: say what?

I just don't get it. This is the President's last regular weekly address before Tuesday's election. And he makes a pitch for an impossible bipartisanship on domestic issues? Other than setting the stage for him to embrace Social Security Phaseout when the Catfood Commission makes its recommendations Dec. 1, what is the point of this?

Whatever the outcome on Tuesday, we need to come together to help put people who are still looking for jobs back to work. And there are some practical steps we can take right away to promote growth and encourage businesses to hire and expand. These are steps we all should be able to agree on – not Democratic or Republican ideas, but proposals that have traditionally been supported by both parties. ...

On these issues – issues that will determine our success or failure in this new century – I believe it’s the fundamental responsibility of all who hold elective office to seek out common ground. It may not always be easy to find agreement; at times we’ll have legitimate philosophical differences. And it may not always be the best politics. But it is the right thing to do for our country.

He does take a timid shot at the Republicans:

That’s why I found the recent comments by the top two Republican in Congress so troubling. The Republican leader of the House actually said that "this is not the time for compromise." And the Republican leader of the Senate said his main goal after this election is simply to win the next one.

Then he goes on to say, "But when the ballots are cast and the voting is done, we need to put this kind of partisanship aside – win, lose, or draw."

I just don't get it. After what we've seen this last two years with the Republicans, I really don't get it.

Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama

A weird suggestion for Obama's relations to his voter base

Yes, a lot of the Republican base really sees him this way

I was channel-flipping Sunday evening and I heard Republican "strategist" (aka, hack commentator) Alex Castellanos on some infotainment show saying that President Obama needs to dump his base. How does a politician go about dumping his base voters? Wouldn't that mean, you know, switching to the Republican Party? Obama may be sold on the neoliberal gospel of deregulation and "free trade." But I really don't see him switching to the Republican Party. Since a large part of their base think he is the Antichrist.

Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama

Tom Tomorrow grumps about Jon Stewart's simplistic call for moderation on the proverbial both sides

I'm glad to see that Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's rally drew a good crowd in Washington yesterday: Bigger than Beck? Huge crowd attends Restore Sanity rally McClatchy Newspapers 10/30/2010.

But I'm not thrilled about the increased blurring of politics and show business this kind of thing represents. And this was political satire on a grand scale. But it wasn't free from the taint of High Broderism, with Stewart encouraging the proverbial both sides to cool it.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow wasn't impressed with Jon Stewart's speech Saturday drawing false equivalencies between Democratic progressives and the screaming mimmies of the Tea Party right. He tweeted on it several times, including:

Seriously all, no one consistently makes me laugh as hard as Stewart (except maybe colbert.) Just don't entirely agree w/him today.

Shall we take it down a notch, work with our right wing friends on defunding science, outlawing abortion, eliminating social security?

Rt @KeithOlbermann I wish it were otherwise. But you can tone down all you want ... the Right will only get LOUDER. // <--this. [for non-tweeters, the "rt" means re-tweet, meaning that comment was a tweet by Keith Olberman]

I should note for the record that I generally love Jon Stewart to death, but really hate the false equivalency flag he likes to fly.

Jon Stewart 1861: the North and the South both make some pretty good points.

Jon Stewart 1964: let's just agree to disagree on this whole "civil rights" issue.

The trouble with "reaching across the aisle to get things done" is that ppl disagree on "things" -- abortion, gay rights, etc.

Aggressive moderates: please unfollow. Not interested in calls for pre-emptive surrender to the crazies.

Like Digby says, right wing isn't going to listen to any of this. So basically DFH's just got told to STFU.

This is sounding like a college freshman stoner session. Dude if we just all remember we're like human beings you know?

Please Jon Stewart explain to me the difference between racists and Tea Partiers carrying racist signs.

And yeah to the extent this is perceived as a "liberal" event, can't help but take wind out of Beck's sails, which is a good thing.

That latter comment was meant to be kind of a compliment.

Tags: 2010 elections, democratic party

Mystery of the Blue Dog Dem mystique

Cameron Joseph's report A Blue Dog Bloodbath? National Journal 10/29/2010 raises the major problem with the standard conventional wisdom about the Blue Dog Democrats. He reports:

The Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally moderate to conservative House Democrats from mostly rural areas, has grown in the last four years from 34 to 54 members. Those gains may soon be reversed. According to the Cook Political Report, 34 of them are in races rated as toss-ups or than lean Republican heading into next week’s elections. ...

Obama's average share of the vote in Blue Dog-held districts was 48.5 percent. Of the 54 Blue Dogs, 33 hail from districts that backed John McCain. While 3 in 5 Blue Dogs are at particular risk, just 1 in 5 in the rest of the Democratic coalition are as vulnerable. [my emphasis]

On what do the Blue Dogs tend to blame their predicament?

Blue Dog members past and present blame Democratic leaders and the difficult districts they hold for their likely losses.

"The Blue Dogs got to 54 because they won in marginal districts," said former Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, a Blue Dog co-founder. "When the majority got as large as it did, [party leaders] pushed the agenda in Congress further to the left, further than a person in a swing district could vote for and get reelected."

Retiring Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., another Blue Dog co-founder, agreed. "The Democrats followed an agenda that was out of step with what people wanted," he said. "They wanted us concentrating on the economy, ending the war, and the debt, and the first thing out of the box was climate change. That started a disconnect between the Democratic Congress and the American people." [my emphasis]

If we unpack that a bit, the first thing that occurs to me is that Tanner complains that for the White House, "the first thing out of the box was climate change." What the [Cheney]? Yeah, I guess it was. Unless you count all the other stuff that took priority, like the stimulus package, health care reform, and escalating the war in Afghanistan. That sounds like some FOX News propaganda line.

And to me, it's just a bad joke when some conservative talks about how much people are worried about the national debt and deficits. Most people don't give a flying flip about either, as polls consistently confirm. Since both parties officially claim deficits are a bad thing, it's not surprising that general polls show people considering that a problem, but a very low-priority problem. In reality, Republicans ignore the debt altogether except when they're opposing a Democratic bill or trying to phase out Social Security and Medicare. When they are in power, giving big tax cuts to the wealthiest is their top domestic priority, the deficit be damned.

Dick Cheney voiced the actual Republican position when he said, "deficits don't matter." Sadly, about the only politicians and voters that actually seem to care about the deficit are Democrats. And this is a big problem. Not the deficit, the fact that Democrats worry about it.

The Blue Dog narrative is a firmly embedded piece of conventional wisdom: politics works on a horizontal scale from left to right. To win an election in American winner-take-all districts (which essentially force a two-party system to operate), a candidate has to win enough of "the middle" to get a majority. If they slide too much to the right or (especially!) to the left, they lose that sacred middle.

This belief is a key piece of the High Broderist faith.

Congressman Jim Matheson (D-Utah) offers another piece of conventional wisdom about the Blue Dogs:

Matheson says that despite electoral dynamics, the Blue Dogs think and vote the way much of America wants them to. "We've always been a bridge away from the polarizing dynamics of Congress," he said. "The Blue Dogs represent most of America in terms of being the more pragmatic people in terms of trying to get things done."

Tanner held out some hope that in a more closely divided Congress, whichever party is in power will have to work with moderates to get anything passed, even if there are fewer moderates than in the past. "If anybody is going to be successful with the gavel," he said, "they will have to forge some sort of consensus that will naturally include the handful of moderate Republicans left and the Blue Dogs." [my emphasis]

But wait. If the Blue Dogs "think and vote the way much of America wants them to", why are they in such trouble at the polls this year? If the voters on the average have become more conservative, shouldn't the Blue Dogs be getting some benefit from this? After all, they've been showing their independence from the Marxist Kenyan revolutionary President, haven't they?

This is part of the problem of the whole conventional wisdom on Blue Dogs. One answer to those questions is simply that they are in Congressional districts that were apportioned by the state legislatures in such a way that they have a close match between regular Democratic voters and regular Republican voters. Pretty much by definition, any election in those districts is likely to be competitive.

But given the figures cited above, it's hard to see how the Blue Dog Dems have benefited very much from their strategy of showing how often they oppose their own Party and distancing themselves from the Democratic President, even facilitating and contributing to the Republican criticisms against him. An example is the silly remark by Congressman John Tanner that in Obama's Administration "the first thing out of the box was climate change."

I'll suggest a different way to understand the position of the Blue Dogs. I'll ignore for the moment the commercial and business opportunities that can come from being a Blue Dog Democratic Member of Congress.

Linguist George Lakoff is right in a key part of his argument about Democratic messaging. Most voters don't vote primarily on the basis of analyzing individual policies in detail. They identify instead with parties and candidates based on how they perceive the candidates to line up with their values, whether or not the candidates and their actual parties genuinely represent those values. In Lakoff's description, there is no middle political position in the ideological way our Pod Pundits understand it. There are voters who line up consistently with Democratic values, other who line up consistently with Democratic values, and others who are "independents" in their voting because they have values that are enough in conflict that they don't have a longer-term tribal adherence to one Party or the other.

Those voters aren't going to be measuring the candidates on the basis of their rankings in the rating schemes of liberal and conservative groups. They are going to be swayed by candidates who convince them that he or she better represents their values. The two parties set the broad framework for what voters understand are the competing sets of values at play. If Blue Dog Democrats promote narratives that reinforce the Republican message against the Democrats, their only making the electoral hill they have to climb that much steeper. "I don't like the side I'm on" doesn't strike me as nearly as strong as message as, say, "My Republican opponent wants to keep sick children from going to the doctor!"

It seems to me that Democrats elected in highly competitive districts would be better advised to work to build the Democratic Party brand in their districts, and their own personal brands along with it. As Joseph says, "Obama's average share of the vote in Blue Dog-held districts was 48.5 percent. Of the 54 Blue Dogs, 33 hail from districts that backed John McCain." If I can still handle basic arithmetic, that means 22 of the Blue Dogs in question come from districts in which Obama won a majority in 2008. Those numbers suggest something pretty obvious: that even the Kenyan Marxist Muslim (by Limbaugh and Beck standards) at the head of the Democratic Party was competitive in most of those districts.

The Democratic Party nationally also has to worry about its own brand image. Obama paid far, far more deference to the Blue Dog obstructionists aligning themselves with Republicans than he did to House and Senate progressives these last two years. As a result, he restricted his own accomplishments significantly and left many of his base voters frustrated (the default condition for loyal Democrats in any case) and disappointed, even angry.

Yet the official Democratic Party campaign organizations give more attention and financial resources to these Blue Dogs who help to delegitimize their own Party than to progressive like Raúl Grijalva in Arizona who are hardliners in supporting the official Party agenda.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Tags: 2010 elections, blue dog democrats

Bipartisan harmony after the elections?

From Andy Barr, John Boehner: 'We will not compromise' Politico 10/28/2010

Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” ...

“There will be no compromise on stopping runaway spending, deficits and debt. There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) in an interview last week on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.

“There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes," added Pence, who may leave the House GOP leadership to prepare for a presidential run.

And many of the potential incoming Republicans have stated that they wouldn't budge in trying to meet Democrats halfway.

“When it comes to spending, I'm not compromising. I don't care who, what, when or where, I'm not compromising,” Ken Buck, the Republican Senate nominee in Colorado, told The Washington Post. [my emphasis]

President Obama, from Full Transcript Of President Obama's Meeting With Progressive Bloggers Oliver Willis 10/27/2010:

Q Mr. President, you’ve said that you want to work with Republicans after the election, but there’s probably a pretty good chance that they’re not going to advance with you. Is there sort of a breaking point you have of where you try to work with them and they just refuse to budge, which they’ve indicated so far? Is there a breaking point for you just like you’re going to have to go off on your own and find a way around them?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, the — I'm a pretty stubborn guy when it comes to, on the one hand, trying to get cooperation. I don’t give up just because I didn’t get cooperation on this issue; I’ll try the next issue. If the Republicans don’t agree with me on fiscal policy, maybe they’ll agree with me on infrastructure. If they don’t agree with me on infrastructure, I’ll try to see if they agree with me on education.

So I’m just going to keep on trying to see where they want to move the country forward.

In that sense, there’s not a breaking point for me. There are some core principles that I think are important for not just me to stick with but for the country to stick with. So if the Republicans say we need to cut our investments in education, at a time when we know that our success as a nation is largely going to depend on how well trained our workforce is, I’m going to say no. And there are going to be areas where, after working very hard, we just can’t find compromise and I’m going to be standing my ground, then essentially we debate it before the American people.

But I don’t go into the next two years assuming that there’s just going to be gridlock. We’re going to keep on working to make sure that we can get as much done as possible because folks are hurting out there. What they’re looking for is help on jobs, help on keeping their homes, help on sending their kids to college. And if I can find ways for us to work with Republicans to advance those issues, then that’s going to be my priority. [my emphasis]

From Michael Moore, A Boot to the Head Huffington Post 10/28/2010:

Yes, one big boot is poised to stomp out whatever hopey-changey thing we might have had two years ago and secure this country in the hands of the oligarchs and the culture police.

And if they win on Tuesday, they plan to show no mercy. They will not speak of bipartisanship or olive branches or tolerate any filibuster threats. They will come in and do the job with a mandate they'll perceive the electorate will have given them. They will not fart around for two years like the Democrats did. They will not "search for compromise" or "find middle ground." They will not meet you halfway on the playing field. They know that touchdowns aren't scored at the 50-yard line. ... [my emphasis]

Tags: 2010 elections, bipartisanship

A cheatsheet for the horserace in next Tuesday's House elections

David N. Wasserman of The Cook Political Report points to Five House Races To Watch On Election Night 10/27/2010 for an early read on what Republican gains in the House may be:

In Indiana and Kentucky, the first two states to report in results, there are five Democratic seats worth watching. From highest to lowest likelihood of switching to the GOP, they are the seats of Reps. Brad Ellsworth (Ind.) (who is running for the Senate), Baron Hill (Ind.), Ben Chandler (Ky.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), and John Yarmuth (Ky.). ...

If Republicans win either or both of Chandler and Donnelly's seats, they are almost assuredly on their way to taking control of the House. Even if they do not carry either, but win the Ellsworth and Hill seats, they could still be on a trajectory for a net gain in the mid-40s. If Rep. John Yarmuth falls to Tea Party-backed GOP nominee Todd Lally in Democratic-leaning Louisville, however, then all bets are off and Republicans could be on their way to picking up in excess of 60 seats. The situation in the House is much more fluid than it is in the Senate, so thank Indiana and Kentucky for giving us a neat early measuring stick when polls close on Tuesday.

It's not over until it's over. But Democrats are expecting a sobering experience next Tuesday, especially in the House races.

Tags: 2010 elections

The horserace for next Tuesday

Regular readers know that I don't like to spend a lot of time on "horserace" issues in election contests. Our star pundits don't like to spend their time on political reporting on much else, unless of course there's a sex angle to be squeezed out of story.

But elections are horseraces, after all. I'm trying to be optimistic for the Democrats, even though the national Party's message to the base has been mostly, "We can't stand you, now go vote for us." (David Dayen's formulation)

There are clearly bright spots. Early voting trends give some hope for strong Democratic turnout. In California, Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer are running against corporate Republican zombies, and that's strong motivation for the Democrats. Brown, unlike the national Party, has also been willing to come down hard in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, which gives Latino voters incentive to turn out in the state.

But political horserace guru Charlie Cook isn't offering cheery news for Dems nationally. The title of this article of his indicates shows what I mean: Dems' House Losses Likely Enormous, but Senate Hard to Read National Journal 10/25/2010. His House predictions are suitable for Halloween fright:

It's easy to look at what appears to be a gigantic Republican 2010 midterm election wave in the House and feel a little slack-jawed, but not so much surprised. There were plenty signs well over a year ago that Democrats were facing grave danger, but even when expecting an onslaught, one can still be shocked at its size and unrelenting force. It would be a surprise if this wave doesn't match the 52-seat gain on Election Night in 1994, and it could be substantially more.

Yo! That's bad.

In the Senate races, here are some of his key calls as of Monday. It would take a pickup of 10 seats by the Republicans to give them control in the Upper House.

Democratic leads:
CA: Barbara Boxer (D) over Carly Fiorina
WA: Patty Murray (D) over Dino Rossi
W VA: Joe Manchin (D) over John Raese
CN: Richard Blumenthal (D) over Linda McMahon (she's the wrestling exec)

Very close:
NV: Harry Reid (D) over Sharon Angle
CO: Michael Bennett (D) over Ken Buck

Republican leads:

AR: Blanche Lincoln (D; anti-labor Blue Dog) vs. John Boozman
WI: Russ Feingold (D) vs. Ron Johnson
IN: Brad Ellworth (D) vs. Dan Coats
ND: Tracy Potter (D) vs. John Hoeven
PA: Joe Sestak (D) vs. Pat Toomey

It's not over until it's over. Democrats: go vote. Republicans: hey, don't worry about it, you're Party's got it made; stay home, watch FOX News, don't put yourself out.

Tags: 2010 elections

Base turnout, Blue Dog Southern Democrats, and the masochism strategy

William Douglas highlights an important point about Blue Dog Democrats in the South in To avoid GOP romp, Democrats must get out black vote McClatchy Newspapers 10/14/2010. Their failure to energize their base can make a decisive difference to their chances for reelection. The stock linear formula that our star pundits are so fond of using, in which the most important challenge for a general election candidate is wooing the ideological "center" can be especially misleading in looking at this year's elections.

Douglas cites a study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies looking at the prospects for African-American turnout in 20 House races and 14 Senate contests in which the African-American vote is considered a decisive factor. Of the 20 House races:

Seven of those 20 seats are held by fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, and some political analysts think that could pose a problem in generating African-American enthusiasm at the polls.

Several Blue Dogs voted against the health care bill, a measure that had strong support among African-Americans. Locked in tough re-election battles, some are touting their differences with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in order to woo conservative votes.

At least two incumbent Democrats — Reps. Bobby Bright of Alabama and Jim Marshall of Georgia — have signaled that they won't vote for Pelosi to be speaker again if Democrats keep the House.

In fact, the Alabama Democratic Conference, a black political organization, recently endorsed Bright in spite of his voting record largely to help Democrats retain the House.

"That was the only reason," said Jerome Gray, a former field director for the group.

"Well, he sucks, but at least he's nominally a Democrat" really isn't a great slogan to motivate your base to turn out.

This year's election highlights the risk for the Democrats of having even a realtively small number of its Congressional delegation being effectively only nominal Democrats. The Blue Dogs in the current Congressional session contributed mightily to critical concessions that angered the national Democratic base - especially the elimination of the public option in health care reform - and they are the ones most vulnerable to losing their seats if the base voters don't turn out to support them.

Put a slightly different way, the Democrats undercut their voting support nationally in order to cater to encumbents who are likely to lose their seats anyway.

The current Blue Dog formula is really still a remnant of the Democratic Party of the segregated South. In those days, the Democratic Party nationally was far more dramatically divided ideologically than today, because the segregated South was almost as much of a loyal voting bloc for Dems as it is for Republicans today. And a majority of white voters living under segregation - and part of the segregation system was incredibly crooked election practices - tended to lean conservative on a whole range of policies, not just those overtly related to race.

But today, the Deep South is deep red. (I love the irony that in American politics since 2000 it has finally become common to talk about Party colors and that the Republicans are the Reds in the American convention.) In the 1950s and early 1960s, it made rational electoral sense for Southern Democrats to campaign as Democrats while voting against - often bitterly opposing - key positions of the national Democratic Party and a Democratic President. But today the Republicans have a lock on the anti-National-Democratic brand. If Blue Dogs can't carve out an identity for themselves that identifies them solidly as anti-Republican and supportive of the national Democratic Party on key policies, they will not only be chronically vulnerable themselves but act as a major obstacle to defining the national Democratic brand.

Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee established a "50-State Strategy" to address just this problem. The Democratic Party in many Southern Congressional districts has had a weak organization and a thin bench of talented candidates. Dean saw the value in building up the Party presence and brand identity everywhere. In the shorter run, that would allow the Democrats to take advantage of situations where the Republican candidate turned out to be unexpectedly weak. And at a minimum, it would force the Republican national campaign organizations to devote more time, effort and money to defend their seats even in "safe" Republican districts.

Current DNC Chairman Tim Kaine unwisely abandoned that approach. Even worse, far worse, the national Democratic campaign organizations neglect loyal progressive Democrats while backing Blue Dogs, as Digby ably explains in The Masochism Party Hullabaloo 10/13/2010:

The Democrats have candidates in trouble all over the country. [Ala] Grayson [in Florida] and [Raul] Grijalva [in Arizona] are just two of any number of incumbents who are in races that are going to be nail biters on election night. And yet the Party is standing behind people who are basically running against them and undermining everything the Democratic party allegedly stands for while ignoring those who are taking their fight to the Republicans.

This isn't a strategy, it's masochism.

Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama, democratic party

Shields and Brooks 10/15/2010

Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks did their regular Friday Political Wrap segment - which I've been known in less charitable moments to call the Shields and Brooks Clown Show - on Friday's PBS Newshour on the Citizens United era of corporate money gushing freely into political races and President Obama's bizarre interview with the New York Times' Peter Baker. Bobo thinks that there's nothing new or especially disturbing about the Citizens United environment, and anyway he says that the Democrats did it first (of course!). He is disappointed in the lack of substantial self-reflection in Obama's interview, i.e., Obama hasn't decided he fully embrace every aspect of the Republican Party's program that he was elected running against in 2008. He later starts rambling about how Obama seems to be one of our most self-reflective Presidents, and then realizes as he says it that he's stepping on his previous comment and backpedals. Mark rouses himself from his afternoon stupor to express justifiable astonishment that Obama just before the mid-terms elections would give an interview saying essentially, oh, well, we're gonna lose big-time but it's not our fault. Transcript at Shields and Brooks on the Tea Party's Message, Obama's 'Shovel Ready' Jab. Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama, democratic party

Are progressives intending to "teach the Democrats a lesson"?

Robert Parry thinks so. And he argues against the notion in The 'Teach-the-Dems-a-Lesson' Myth Consortium News 10/15/2010 by recounting at some length Republican skulduggery back to 1968.

He cites real examples of something like this occurring, notably Ralph Nader's Green Party in 1980:

To this day, very few Nader supporters will admit that they contributed to Bush’s tainted victory, although it should be obvious that Nader’s votes in Florida – if most would have gone to Gore – would have put the election too far out of reach for Bush to steal.

A Gore presidency also would have taken the country in a far different direction. Most significantly, he might have made significant progress in getting the United States to face up to the crisis of global warming, an existential threat to mankind that Bush studiously ignored.

His column is a good explanation of the dilemma of groups, especially on "the left", who dissent in significant ways from the policies of both Democratic and Republican Parties. It's the blessing and the curse of a two-party system that an alternative party can only succeed on a national scale by destroying one of the two major parties and replacing it in the two-party system.

The only time that occurred in US history was with the Republican Party in the 1850s, which displaced the Whig Party. Despite all the changes and controversies and ideological fluctuations since then, the US today still has the same two major parties it had in 1856. (The earlier Federalist Party wasn't displaced by a different party; rather, it just blew away into the dustbin of history.)

Parry's historical sketch is useful. But, in an uncharacteristic moment for him, he builds his premise for 2010 on what seems to be quicksand. The only people he mentions from "the Left" actually wanting to "teach the Democrats a lesson" in 2010 by seeing the Republicans gain Congressional seats are these: "If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to 'teach the Democrats a lesson' by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties ..."

Third parties always get a certain number of votes. I've haven't seen any polls indicating an upsurge of voter support for any third parties this year, "left" or any other kind. And among even the Democrats most critical of the Obama Administration's shortcomings on health care reform, financial regulation and the Afghanistan War - criticisms which I share - I don't know of anyone pushing for an election boycott or third party protest voting. No labor unions that I've heard of. None of the major progressive bloggers, like Digby or the folks at Daily Kos or even those at Firedoglake, whose Jane Hamsher is often mentioned as one of Obama's harshest critics on "the left." Not The Nation magazine, or The American Prospect, or Salon, or In These Times. Not Howard Dean or Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich or Barbara Lee or Michael Moore.

In other words, if these is some large sentiment among progressives for "teaching the Democrats a lesson" at the polls in two weeks, it's remaining remarkably well-concealed. On the contrary, labor is pushing to get out the vote. All the other progressives outside the usual third-party political ghetto are worried sick that discouragement among Democratic-leaning voters will give the Republicans control of the House of Representatives. And have been begging the national Party to get aggressive with something - jobs programs, a foreclosure moratorium, anything plausible - to energize the Democratic base to go to the polls.

Those concerns are far from imaginary. Charlie Cook reports in House Flips. Senate Doesn't. The National Journal Magazine for 10/16/2010 (accessed 10/15/2010):

Democrats who were trailing by more than a few percentage points remain behind, but by smaller margins. Although Republican strategists are hardly panicking, they are noticing the tightening. As one Republican strategist put it, Democratic voters were so demoralized that their intensity had only one way to go, and that was up. Democrats still have a formidable challenge in getting their sympathizers to the polls, but their task may not be as difficult as it appeared a few weeks ago, when Democratic voters were even more despondent. [my emphasis]

Jesse Zwick reports in With Voting Rights Groups Reeling, New Registrations Decline Washington Independent 10/15/10 on the lag in registering new voters this year. He writes:

A four-year wave of attacks on voter registration drives, both in terms of state laws that either shut down voter registration drives or made it too onerous to do it, and other public attacks have certainly had an effect,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Project. ...

The most obvious cause for the decline in voter registration is the shuttering of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. At its height, ACORN had a budget of close to $35 million and was credited with registering approximately half a million voters in 2008 alone. Amid allegations from conservative activists that the group engaged in widespread voter fraud, Congress voted last fall to defund ACORN, which received approximately a third of its budget in the form of government grants. The rest of the group’s funding soon dried up, and ACORN was forced to cease operations at its approximately 75 field offices soon thereafter.

And the fact is that the Congressional Democrats facilitated the sleazebag smear of ACORN by running from the organization like scared rabbits when that bizarre punk James O'Keefe made his fraudulent video "sting" of the group. The Democrats are just rolled too easily on things like that. And that can't blame that one on "the left."

The Republicans' voter-suppression efforts that Zwick's article describes are right out of the old segregationist playbook. And they have become standard operating procedure for the Reps. The Democrats have got to start showing more fight in protecting voter rights. If it hurts their feelings to hear anyone say that, I would hope losing to Republicans hurts their feelings even more.

Tags: 2010 elections, democratic party, robert perry

What is the White House's "Oh, well, only so much we can do" position about?

I'll start this post with a suggestion for Democrats cringing at the continuing fecklessness of the Democratic national leadership in this year's election: listen to some of Jerry Brown's debates with eMeg Whitman. Jerry is a reminder that there still is such a thing as a high-profile Democrat who is willing to straightforwardly defend the rights of labor and immigrants, to attack malfeasant banks and greedy rich people, and to defend public services as vital to society and the economy. Who talks like a real Democrat, in other words. And, at this point, he's leading in the polls despite eMeg's outspending him with $120 million-plus of her own money. Trust me, it will cheer you up.

The Obama Administration, on the other hand, continues to make the Democratic base wonder what the [Cheney] they are doing.

There is the Administration's unwillingness to aggressively take the side of homeowners being foreclosed on in a situation of mass fraud by the banksters. (Eric Dash and Nelson Schwartz, Bankers Ignored Signs of Trouble on Foreclosures New York Times 10/13/2010; Susie Madrak, As Mountain Of Foreclosure Fraud Evidence Grows, National Media Has Decided It's Really More Of An "Oops!" Crooks and Liars 10/14/2010)

There is their decision to drop the deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico over a month early, announced three weeks before the fall elections. That in the face of evidence that the damage of the BP spill is far greater than BP and their partners in the Energy Department are willing to acknowledge. (Kate Shepard, Obama Admin. Drops Drilling Moratorium Mother Jones 10/12/2010; Julia Whitty, BP's Deep Secrets Mother Jones Sept-Oct 2010)

Then there is the jaw-dropping Peter Baker article, Education of a President New York Times Magazine 10/12/2010, based on interviewing Obama and White House officials, in which Obama comes off as resigned to a huge Democratic setback in the November elections and still talking the Pollyanna hope that he can work constructively with the Republicans the next two years. To put it mildly, he's not exactly sounding the charge to beat back the Republicans in the elections less than three weeks away now.

With most of the country reeling from unemployment and foreclosures, with the last year and a half having given dramatic evidence that economists like Paul Krugman who urged Obama to go for a much bigger stimulus more focused on job-creating efforts (aid to states and localities, more emphasis on direct spending and less on tax cuts), here is what Obama regrets about the stimulus, according to Baker's article:

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called "tactical lessons." He let himself look too much like "the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat." He realized too late that "there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead "let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts" so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise. [my emphasis]

If it had just looked more bipartisan... Wow! Just, wow!

For a reality check on this big spending binge, see Krugman himself, Hey, Small Spender New York Times 10/10/2010.

How can the following not sound like throwing in the towel before the November election?

These days, Obama has been seeking guidance in presidential biographies. He is reading, among others, "The Clinton Tapes," Taylor Branch’s account of his secret interviews with Bill Clinton during the eight years of his presidency. "I was looking over some chronicles of the Clinton years," Obama told me, "and was reminded that in ’94 — when President Clinton’s poll numbers were lower than mine, and obviously the election ended up being bad for Democrats — unemployment was only 6.6 percent. And I don’t think anybody would suggest that Bill Clinton wasn’t a good communicator or was somebody who couldn’t connect with the American people or didn’t show empathy."

In the fall of 1994, things were even better than Obama recalls: unemployment was in fact 5.6 percent. If the feel-your-pain president had trouble when the economy was not nearly as bad as it is now, with 9.6 percent unemployment, then maybe the issue for Obama is not that he is too cool or detached, as some pundits say. When the economy is bad, even the most talented of presidents suffer at the polls. “There is an anti-establishment mood,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton aide who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff, told me before he stepped down this month. “We just happen to be here when the music is stopping.”

And this kind of talk can't do anything more than feed the shallow minds of star pundits like David Broder, Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd:

In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard.

That sounds like whining even to me. Just imagine where Maureen Dowd will go with that. She'll be making snotty comments about it for the next 10 years.

The Baker article is full of stuff like that. It's headache-inducing to even try to imagine what the White House thought they were doing with this. My worry is that this is a prelude to the December report of the Catfood Commission which is almost certain to recommend Social Security Phaseout. If the White House is looking to lay the groundwork for embracing Social Security Phaseout - to show fiscal responsibility, bipartisan goodwill, yadda yadda - this article helps do that.

But that would not only be the triumph of neoliberal ideology and Beltway Village conventional wisdom at their worst producing a really bad policy. It would also be politically disastrous for the Democrats. As Joan McCarter points out, "an awful lot of Dems are staking their races on protecting Social Security. If they manage to eke out their majorities in 2010 after making the promise to protect it, the surest way to destruction of the party in 2012 is cutting Social Security." (What the Fiscal Commission is supposed to be doing Daily Kos 10/11/2010; see also her post, Pre-catfood commission, Seniors preparing to cut back on food 10/12/2010.)

But in the strange atmosphere in which our star pundits live, Obama looks like a rabid partisan and a flaming class warrior on those occasions when he sounds like a real Democrat: David "Bobo" Brooks and Gail Collins, Obama, the Attack Dog New York Times 10/13/2010. Of all the remarkably clueless things Bobo has written and said over the years, this has to be near the top in terms of cosmic cluelessness: "The second reason Obama’s behavior is depressing is that it shows that the administration is getting mentally captured by the lefty blogosphere." What, is Joe Lieberman posting now at something called Lefty Blog? Lady Collins chimes in that Democrats are weenies, a perennial favorite charge for Beltway Pod Pundits.

For Peter Baker, following the sacred script of High Broderism in which if things are between the alleged extremes of the left and the right, it must be juu-uust right, says:

The policy criticism of Obama can be confusing and deeply contradictory — he is a liberal zealot, in the view of the right; a weak accommodationist, in the view of the left. He is an anticapitalist socialist who is too cozy with Wall Street, a weak-on-defense apologist for America who adopted Bush's unrelenting antiterror tactics at the expense of civil liberties.

Or, maybe one of those side's is talking like stark raving Birchers and crackpots and taking what comes out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth as reality, and the other is, uh, not doing that. The Republicans have become experts at exploiting this shallow-minded weakness of the mainstream press of creating false equivalencies to set up the High Broderist balance they fell is compulsory. Our star reporters and pundits, though, despite imagining themselves as salt-of-the-earth types in touch with the Real Americans, they also love to strike the pose of standing above such petty policy judgments as, say, whether the health care reform can actually work reliably in the absence of a public option.

David Corn comments on the article in Obama's Inconvenient Interview Mother Jones 10/14/2010. I quoted in a previous post from Digby's Inclusion Hullabaloo 10/13/2010 which deals with Obama's quotes in the interview about the happy prospects of bipartisan cooperation with the Republicans after the November elections.

Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama, democratic party

Managing expectations? Or undercutting Democratic Congressional prospects in November?

This is a puzzling and troubling report by Peter Nicholas and Christi Parsons, Obama reshapes administration for a fresh strategy Los Angeles Times 10/06/2010. It reads like stenography, and David Axelrod was on the record in supporting the basic message:

As President Obama remakes his senior staff, he is also shaping a new approach for the second half of his term: to advance his agenda through executive actions he can take on his own, rather than pushing plans through an increasingly hostile Congress.

A flurry of staff departures and promotions is playing out as the White House ends a nearly two-year period of intense legislative activity. Where the original staff was built to give Obama maximum clout in Congress, the new White House team won't need the same leverage with lawmakers.

"It's fair to say that the next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it is about managing the change that we've brought," White House senior advisor David Axelrod said in an interview.

This sounds like: forget about the Employee Free Choice Act. And comprehensive immigration reform. And tougher financial regulations. And don't even think about adding that public option to health care reform.

It's also probably not a good wager to bet that Obama and the Senate Democrats will push to abolish the filibuster rule.

Is the White House consciously trying to cut the Congressional wing of the Democratic Party loose in hopes that will increase Obama's re-election chances? Are are they just blundering along with this stuff?

Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama, democratic party

Democrats: don't they even want to win?

I'm sure most of them do. It's just that, like I heard Michael Moore say on Larry King Live a few minutes ago, that the Democrats seem to get up every morning and say, hey, it's not looking sure enough that we're going to lose, so what can we do today to screw things up?

Dropping the deepwater drilling ban a month early, and three weeks before the election? After the BP oil gusher created one of the biggest corporate disasters in history? As though it weren't bad enough that the Dems seem to be trying to forget the BP disaster as quickly as possible, the Obama Administration takes this action to remind everyone that they just want to forget it as quickly as possible and let the oil giants get on with creating the next Gulf-killing disaster.

Forty-nine states investigating the foreclosure crisis - and the Administration assures us that their priority is to protect the banks. That would be the banks that the public bailed out last year, the banks that crashed the world economy the year before that, and the banks that the Administration supposed "stress-tested" last year to let them go back to their bad practices as quickly as possible make sure they were sound.
The phrase "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" comes to mind.(But hope springs eternal; maybe this is a good sign: David Dayen, Elizabeth Warren Heads to Ohio, Hotbed for the Foreclosure Fraud Crisis FDL News Desk 10/13/2010)

Digby just picked up on this stunner of Obama talking about how he was sure he would be able to get along with those nice Republicans after the election no matter what happens and they would be able to find common ground, etc. (Inclusion Hullabaloo 10/13/2010)

Digby is understandably gobsmacked:

He's going to need Christine O'Donnell to cast a spell on the Teabag Republicans because that's the only way they are going to do anything remotely bipartisan. Even if he agreed to reduce millionaires' tax to zero and barnstorm against gay marriage and abortion, they would not help him. They want to beat him, not govern.

If Obama goes too far in trying to appease these people, he'd better hope to hell the Republicans run the Palin/Paladino ticket because that will be his only hope for reelection.

I don't think he's a dumb person so I'm hopeful that this is pre-election spin designed for political purposes. I'm not sure what those are, but I simply can't believe that he's serious after what we've seen.

Tags: 2010 elections, barack obama, democratic party

Money, politics and policy: health care edition

Matthew DoBias, Health Groups Do Balancing Act With Donations National Journal 10/09/2010

Overall, contributions from trade associations representing doctors, hospitals, and drug manufacturers are all leaning heavily toward Democrats. Yet, while avoiding direct confrontations with their Democratic allies in the health care fight, the groups are tilting toward Republicans in open-seat Senate contests -- signaling that they might be preparing for a post-midterm world in which Republicans will control more of the agenda.

The clear tilt of donations toward incumbent Democrats represents an extension of the handshake deal that the hospital, physician, and pharmaceutical lobbies made with Obama to support his approach to health care reform.

In July 2009, three of the nation's most influential hospital groups, including the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals, trumpeted a deal to accept more than $155 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts to help finance the reform effort. In return, they agreed to back the Democratic-led effort to reshape the health care industry. That commitment remains apparent -- to a point -- in the way they are distributing their campaign dollars this year.

The wording isn't clear there. It sounds like the industry made a concession, and then out of gratitude for being allowed to make the concession, made another one. It doesn't explain the role of the individual mandate and the public option.

But for each of these groups, this cycle's pattern marks a shift from their traditional approach. [The pharmaceutical lobby] PhRMA has been closely identified with Republicans over the past decade; until earlier this year, it was led by former Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. From 2000 through 2006, while Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House, PhRMA directed about three-fourths of its congressional contributions toward Republicans. The Federation of American Hospitals also had leaned strongly to the right, directing nearly two-thirds of its giving toward the GOP. So did the AMA: In each election from 2002 through 2006, it directed at least three-fifths of its contributions to Republicans.

Almost without exception, the groups this year have avoided contributions to Republicans challenging incumbent Democrats who voted for reform. The AMA PAC, for instance, hasn't contributed to any such challenger except Eric Wargotz, a Republican physician who hasn't displayed a pulse in his race against Sen. Barbara Mikulsk of Maryland. And AMA has contributed to her campaign as well.

AHA and PhRMA have also shied away from contributing to Republicans challenging incumbents who voted for the legislation. The four PACs have contributed to a long list of embattled Democratic supporters of the bill, from Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Harry Reid of Nevada to Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who held up her vote until the 11th hour before ultimately supporting the package. [my emphasis]

But now that the industry has the individual mandate and the public option is out, it seems pretty clear what the answer to the question posed at the end of the following passage will be:

The broadest measure of health industry support sends a similar message of qualified allegiance. Individual contributors who identify themselves as part of the health care sector have donated close to $321 million to congressional campaigns, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. And they have split their donations almost exactly in half between Democrats and Republicans.

For Democrats, this bifurcated pattern of support for incumbents and a tilt to open-seat Republican challengers leaves the largest question unanswered: If a new GOP majority tries to repeal or block the law in 2011, will the industry defend the law or join in the campaign to raze it?

Tags: 2010 elections, health care reform