On Macho, Macho Men And Manly, Unshaven Girls

[litbrit speaking]

I really liked Glen Greenwald's take on the (latest) Ann Coulter bit of blather.  He discusses a conversation  on Fox last night between Kirsten Powers, Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin; Malkin makes the observation that Coulter is "very popular among conservatives", and Greenwald makes the following point:

This is why -- the only reason -- Coulter's remarks are so significant. And the significance lies not just in this specific outburst on Friday but in the whole array of hate-mongering, violence-inciting remarks over all these years. Its significance lies in the critical fact that Malkin expressly acknowledged: "She's very popular among conservatives." The focus of these stories should not be Coulter, but instead, should be the conservative movement in which Ann Coulter -- precisely because of (not "despite") her history of making such comments -- is "very popular." (Note, too, that Malkin urges that Coulter be shunned not because her conduct is so reprehesensible, but because her presence "is not going to be a help" win the 2008 election).

Coulter's use of a gay epithet to try to insult John Edwards was wrongheaded on many levels, not the least of which is the fact that persons who are gay are rightly offended that the state of being who they are--and the language used to describe this state--was, and is, being used to engender slurs with which to attack another person who clearly isn't gay (in this case, Edwards). They object to people using "gay" and "faggot" and worse as slurs because so doing implies that the word, and the state of being, is somehow negative. Surely thoughtful persons of all political persuasions would agree that it's time to denounce, and put a stop to, this nasty habit. Coulter didn't literally mean that Edwards was gay; rather, she used the word to imply that John Edwards was a sissy, a girly-man, a person who isn't macho. And to a large sector of her conservative audience, machismo--or, more pointedly, the appearance or outright illusion of machismo--is the be-all and end-all of electability.  Greenwald notes:

As critical as it is to them to feminize Democratic and liberal males (and to masculinize the women), even more important is to create false images of masculine power and strength around their authority figures. The reality of this masculine power is almost always non-existent. The imagery is what counts. [.....] Just as what matters is that their leaders prance around as moral leaders (even while deviating as far as they want from those standards), what matters to them also is that their leaders play-act as strong and masculine figures, even when there is no basis, no reality, to the play-acting. 

  Ronald Reagan never got anywhere near the military war (claiming eyesight difficulties to avoid deployment in World War II), and he spent his life as a Hollywood actor, not a rancher, yet to this day, conservatives swoon over his masculine role-playing as though he is some sort of super-brave military hero. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, who actually graduated the Naval Academy and was assigned to real live nuclear submarines, is mocked as a weak and snivelling coward who should not have a ship named after him.

  And the ultimate expression of faux, empty, masculine courage and power is, of course, the Commander-in-Chief himself -- the Glorious Leader whom John Podhoretz hailed in the title of his worshippful cult book as The First Great Leader of the 21st Century -- with the ranch hats and brush-clearing pants and flight-suit outfits that would make the Village People seethe with jealousy over his costume choices.

Exactly.  As a progressive, feminist woman who writes online, I'm often the target of such comments as "You're just another grubby man-hating liberal chick who should consider shaving her legs and looking in the mirror once in a while, "  or worse.  And this from  people who have never met me, who know nothing about me.  Based on my limited experience thus far with this relatively new medium (blogging), I second Greenwald's observation: there are an awful lot of conservatives out there wishing to masculinize progressive women while feminizing progressive men.  One has to wonder what sort of confusion they must face every day, going out into a world in which female pilots, male nurses, gay football players, and straight male ballet dancers are now so commonplace as to be unremarkable.  To my mind, this persistent need to pigeonhole people according to a narrow set of gender-based attributes signifies a troubling lack of awareness, not to mention a profoundly starved imagination.  When all else fails (and all else is failing rather spectacularly, I'd say), call your male opponent a sissy or suggest that your female one is ugly or hairy and "can't get a man".  It's beginning to look a bit desperate, don't you think?

And just for the record, this progressive woman--one who not only managed to "get herself a man" but also gestate and birth three smaller versions thereof--does wear makeup.   And I do shave my legs.  But I also climb trees, swear like a longshoreman, drive really fast, and loathe doing the laundry.  Perhaps I'm a centrist after all!

If You Can't Find a Donkey, Ride the DINO

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Whenever I read posts like this by Jedmunds, I feel a need to say something about what a Senate majority means.  Jedmunds is rooting against Sen. Maria Cantwell in her re-election race because she has dumb views on the Iraq War and voted against the Alito filibuster.  I think Cantwell's views are dumb too, but it's important to keep the big picture in mind here.  In some cases, a Senator contributes more to progressive causes as a mere matter of party affiliation than by her actual votes. 

Control of the Senate, whether by one vote or a dozen, means a Democratic majority on every Senate committee, Democratic chairmanship of all committees, power to subpoena witnesses when investigating the executive branch, and a number of other procedural powers that must not be left in Republican hands.  Winning either chamber of Congress in 2006 would allow us to conduct real investigations of the Bush Administration.  The betting markets give us only a 19% chance of retaking the Senate this year, but I think we stand a pretty good chance of getting it in 2008, when many more Republicans than Democrats are up for re-election. 

And can you imagine what it'll look like if January 2009 rolls around and we control both chambers of Congress, and John Edwards is president?  It's time for universal health care and fixing poverty and taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage (which Cantwell supports) and appointing judges who respect women's rights.  Even if Cantwell votes against us sometimes (or hell, even if she votes against us all the time), she'll help simply by allowing for Democratic chairmen and a Democratic majority on all the committees that we need to pass our proposals through.  And no matter who's president, I'm a lot happier with subpoena power  in Democratic hands than in Republican ones. 

If you don't want to vote for Cantwell for Cantwell's sake, that's okay.  Then vote for her for the sake of Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama and Chris Dodd and (let's hope) Sherrod Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse and Ned Lamont, all of whom will be more powerful under a Democratic majority, because they'll rise in power on their committees, get to serve on more powerful committees, and get subpoena power for any investigations they want to conduct.  And vote for her to smooth the passage of so many wonderful things if we get President Edwards or another good Democrat in 2009. 

Governors: WTF?

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

I've seen people remark on this phenomenon in a couple of places, but nobody seems to have a good explanation for it, so I'll just bring it to your attention and see if anybody has any hypotheses.  When you look at the net approval ratings of our nation's governors, the most popular Democrats are almost all from red states.  Of the top 12 Democratic governors, 10 are from red states and 2 are from blue states.  The effect spans all regions of red America -- the West, Midwest, and South all have their popular Democrats.  Then there's a big gap, and you get the bottom nine Democrats, only one of whom is from a red state.  With Republicans, the correlations are much weaker, but it looks like the general direction is similar.  I wonder how long-standing this phenomenon is -- back in '94, Democrats Jim Hunt of NC and Evan Bayh of IN were the nation's top governors just after the GOP landslide.

It makes sense that governors would be somewhat insulated from national sentiment, since they don't have to obey the party leadership and they can focus on more local issues.  But this inverse effect is just weird.  What's going on? 

Laws are for Lawyers, Politics is for Politicians

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Despite my anti-Feingold broadside below, I think that there is a reasonably good political case to be made for censure.  It's important that we see how this case goes. 

First let me explain how it doesn't go.  There is no great mass of voters out there who will learn the law, look at what Bush did, determine that Bush broke the law, and come to support the Democrats because they support censuring Bush for his illegal acts.  For this to happen, Americans would have to learn the law.  Any plan that involves the American people applying laws that they did not know at the end of junior high school will fail.  If we try to educate them on the law, they will not learn.  Republicans will advance bullshit interpretations of the Constitution on which Bush can invent eight new laws each day, the media will go he said/she said on everything, and the only people who will be convinced by us will be the ones who were disposed to agree with us from the start. 

So what is the political case for censure?  It depends on the American people not liking Bush very much, and being spurred to vote against candidates who protect him.  As SUSA shows us, no competitive state likes Bush very much -- Ben Nelson has no strong opponent in 49-48 Nebraska, while Montana has turned against Bush 44-49.  For Bush, it goes downhill from there.  One problem I noted with Lizza's TNR piece was that he used Bush's performance in 2004 to determine whether a state likes him -- essentially using polling data that is 16 months old.  I don't think that this is anywhere near the best issue on which to attack -- polls show that we're doing better on lots of other things than on censure, but it's one that can be tied to Bush himself an especially direct way.  Using this issue to link DeWine and Burns and Chafee to Bush is basically what we're trying to do. 

As Ezra points out in the post immediately below this one, censure isn't a big deal.  And even if we actually moved heaven, earth, and moderate Republicans to pass a censure resolution, Bush would just shrug it off and keep doing the illegal stuff that he is doing.  The idea that Feingold is actually doing something to harm Bush by pushing this resolution has no basis.  (His Patriot Act battle was, obviously, different -- there was actual policy embedded in there.)

Don't Feed the Regionalism Monster

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Atrios is talking about boycotting South Dakota in light of their near-total ban on abortions. Roxanne and Amanda don't think that's a good idea. I'm with the ladies on this one -- as they point out, a boycott would harm lots of poor hard-working women, and it's very unlikely that it would accomplish anything.

The point I'd like to add here is that one of the least-understood forces causing trouble for progressives everywhere is red-state regionalism. Making the abortion issue look like some kind of battle between left-wing coastal elitists and ordinary Americans from the flyover states will make it even harder for us to fix things in the Dakotas and elsewhere. Here I want to quote one of the best comments from my personal blog, which my Nebraska ex-roommate posted shortly after the 2004 elections:

Red-staters (myself included) have a serious inferiority complex with respect to people on the coasts. Whether easterners consider themselves elite or not is really besides the point. The fact is people in the Midwest (I don't know the South) suspect that easterners think we're just a bunch of ass backwards hicks, and we worry and worry about showing that (i) we're not, and (ii) we don't care what they think anyway. Part of the reason Bush goes over so well in the Midwest is that he's one of "us" -- yeah, yeah, he's privilleged, but he speaks naturally in religious terms, which counts for a lot. Voting for Bush is actually a sort of populist move for many red-staters: it's a way of saying fuck you to the elite easterners who think they know everything and put us down. I actually think the gay marriage results are partly (though certainly not entirely) a reflection of this sentiment.

People in the Mountains, the Midwest, and especially the South are deeper into their regionalism than people on the coasts are, so having a particular position coded as the Midwestern/Southern view makes it politically stronger than having it coded as the NY/DC/California position. (By the way, if you haven't read John Rogers' brilliant post on regionalism and what Democrats can learn from standup comedy, please do. I'm probably going to vote for it as post of the year when the Koufax voting gets on.)

I'd guess that the greater appeal of regionalism in the interior of the country is part of why the predominantly coastal punditocracy tends to underestimate its significance. David Brooks is one of the few pundits who really understand regionalism. Of course, he expresses his understanding not by describing it, but by doing whatever he can to intensify and increase it. Part of his job in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is to feed the media caricature machine with pictures of Democrats as sophisticated elitists who sneer at the salt-of-the-earth working folk from the plains, and he does his job well. Elsewhere, you see Bush clearing brush on his Crawford ranch, making sure that years in Washington don't dilute perceptions of him as an ordinary fella from Texas. After eight years and more in DC, Al Gore stopped looking like an ordinary fella from Tennesee, and that was the end of him.

Making the abortion ban into another gay-marriage kind of issue with which red-staters can say "fuck you" to blue state elitists, then, is a very bad idea. So what do we do? I like Amanda's suggestion of using this issue to rally support among unmarried women everywhere, though I don't know the numbers on how many extra votes we can pick up that way. (As she points out, they're already a reliable Democratic bloc.) The other big thing is to defend our values without inciting regionalism by running a pro-choice red-state Democrat with common-man appeal in the next presidential election. You know who I'm thinking of.

Brown/Hackett

With much of the blogosphere all aflutter about Sherrod Brown's decision to redirect his ads towards ActBlue's fund for whoever wins the primary, it's worth calling his move what it is: savvy. Not charity, not kind, but a spot of smart political jujitsu. Brown's got an impressive war chest, a large fundraising base, and a huge financial head start. By giving the undecideds online the option to simply contribute to whomever wins, Brown is drying up funds that Hackett was hoping to have.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that, it's brilliant and speaks very well of his political abilities. But we in the blogosphere shouldn't get so snookered by it. It's not a classy move and it's not an act of selflessness. The couple tens of thousands the netroots would've given don't matter to Brown, but they're Hackett's financial lifeblood. I should say, here, that so far as I have a dog in this fight, it's Brown, who I think would be a far superior senator, should still call a spade a spade. Further, that spade is advertising on my site, and since I want Brown and think he'll win, I encourage you to donate. Ads on your left.

Put Down The Race Card

This is absurd. Hillary Clinton's lack of support for Fernando Ferrer's mayoral campaign can be construed as a lot of things, from a conviction that Ferrer isn't a good candidate to an a cravenly opportunistic decision to avoid a sinking ship. But you know what it isn't?

Racist.

For Armando to label Clinton's tepid backing for Ferrer as a lack of commitment to minorities is beyond nonsensical, it's wrong. Contemporary politics includes a number of pitched battles that have real, resonant effects on underprivileged ethnic groups, and if Clinton is fighting against Section 8 housing, Medicaid funding, or financial aid, you've got your case. But she's not. After hosting Ferrer's largest fundraiser and having Bill Clinton record robocalls for him, her support for an underwhelming candidate is being called lackluster. And, compared to her support for other, better, candidates, the description's apt. But she's in good company, since, so far as I can tell, New York's response to Ferrer is substantially less enthusiastic than even Clinton's.

So if you want to tag Clinton for her lack of party fealty, go do your thing. But unless you're willing to criticize her bigoted decision not to raise money for Maryland's Michael Steele -- a black man! -- leave race out of this. Ferrer's a poor candidate and politicians have the right to offer lukewarm support to mediocre, clearly losing campaigns. Call it bad strategy if you want, but it's not race-related.

Yes, But Is It Working?

By Ezra

Over at The Washington Monthly's place, Jacob Hacker and and Paul Pierson are doing the guest-blogger thing, explaining and working through ideas from Off Center. Should be fun. But while they're around, I'd like to see them reexamine their premise a bit. While the continued electoral success of ideological extremists is a bit of a head scratcher, the furtherance of their agenda has not, so far as I can tell, been going according to plan:

In this first entry, however, we want to focus on what we consider the biggest and most important puzzle. If the GOP has moved so far off center, why hasn’t it provoked a backlash, or, at a minimum, found its agenda completely stalemated?

But haven't they? I mean, sure, they've passed some candy-and-ice-cream proposals like tax cuts, they've been bright about under-the-radar regulatory changes that can have far-reaching impacts, and they've engaged in some fairly impressive foreign policy adventurism, but their agenda, such as it goes, can't count much to its name. Slashing taxes without cutting spending -- and both Bush and Newt have tried and failed to cut entitlement spending, notable on Medicare and Medicaid -- is no great feat, it's just kicking the reckoning down the road. Social Security privatization failed, the expanded drug benefit passed; abolishing the Department of Education failed, expanding federal funding and regulatory control through No Child Left Behind passed; the federal marriage amendment failed, stem cells passed; and so on.

The question of how extremists get elected is a good one. At the national level, Bush ran as a moderate in 2000 (and lost the vote) and then campaigned as a warrior in 2004, so that may be part of it. So too does the traditional GOP lead on national security appear to be paying dividends now -- while Republicans may wave buh-bye to the center domestically, they tend to represent large swaths of it in their attitude abroad (though that may now be changing). But the fact remains that while the moderate middle hasn't kept the crazies out of office, neither Gingrich's Revolution nor DeLay's Parliament has been able entrench the conservative agenda. The easy sells, like tax cuts, are sunsetted and, without spending slashes, heading for certain reversal. The tough sells, like privatization, have failed outright. And the cost of continued power has been the institution of a raft of liberal-sounding policies, from an expanded Medicare program to NCLB.

Mystery of the Missing Voter

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

The key statistic from the post below is a striking one indeed. Shakespeare's Sister points out that in 2004, the national median income was $35,100, while the median income of the electorate was $55,300. In other words, poor people are voting at a much lower rate than rich people. Then she cites Cernig's view that "they don't vote simply because neither Republicans nor Republican-Lites have policies that address their concerns!" There's some truth in this claim, but a lot more error.

Democrats support a bunch of policies that directly benefit poor people -- in particular, raising the minimum wage and expanding the EITC. Republicans, by contrast, push for cuts in all sorts of antipoverty spending, from Social Security to Section 8 housing vouchers to Medicaid to home heating assistance. When you add superior Democratic economic management, this all makes a difference -- the poverty rate fell from 15.1% to 11.3% over Clinton's two terms, and rose each year in Bush's time. We certainly could offer a lot more than we're offering, and I think we absolutely ought to. But the fact that poor people aren't coming out at the same rate as the rich and voting for Democratic policies that are clearly better for them makes me suspicious of claims that larding on more genuinely helpful initiatives will be enough to turn out more poor voters. I wish I could regard increases in antipoverty spending as a means to win elections, but barring some really special stuff (which I'll describe further down) I'll have to regard them merely as an end in themselves.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Democrats don't control the government, and have controlled it for only 2 years of the last 24. If we actually could pass some ambitious antipoverty policies like free health care for kids, we could make it immediately obvious to poor people that the Democrats are their friends. (Make no mistake, we tried real hard in our two years, with a plan for universal health care. And at midterm elections, we were completely crushed. O poor huddled masses, where were you?) When you're not in power, you just have to argue that your policies will be better. And then you're subject to the difficulties Nick points out:

They look at Kerry talking about his health care plan, they look at Bush talking about his health care plan, and in the rush of a few 90 minute debates, it can be very hard to tell the difference. So, they look at the personal qualities of the candidates, with the idea that those personal qualities will somehow reflect the behavior of the candidate once he's in office. Some voters are in fact looking at the candidate's views on abortion and gay marriage in that way.

I see two things we can do about this. First, we can offer antipoverty measures so bold and exciting that Republicans won't be able to offer an obfuscatory proposal with a similar name that can be confused with our awesome proposal. Given the awesome ability of Republicans to obfuscate and the total inability of the media to cut through their obfuscation, this is going to be a tall order. I really don't know how the obfuscation games will play out -- if we offer a plan that funds health care for all children, and the Republicans offer tax deductions for childrens' health care, will poor people know that our plan helps them a lot while the Republican plan does nothing for them? I hope so, because otherwise it's hard to see what we can do.

The second thing is to make sure we absolutely blow away the Republicans in the "personal qualities of the candidates" game. If we want to show that we are the party that will help poor people, it'd be great to have a candidate whose public persona and media profile are fundamentally associated with helping the poor. We need to nominate someone whose background and mannerisms don't set him apart from the voters we're trying to attract. The ability to give powerful speeches about income inequality would help too. Of course, the candidate should actually have a good set of policy proposals to deal with the issues -- some of which have a shot at overcoming obfuscatory Republican counterproposals. Where, o where, can we find such a candidate?

The Mostly Unfuzzy Math of William Galston & Elaine Kamarck

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, authors of the seminal work "The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency", a post-game analysis of the 1988 election that heavily influenced the DLC's (and therefore Bill Clinton's) electoral strategy, have updated their ideas for the modern electoral environment in  "The Politics of Polarization". In a noticeable shift from the the 1988 elections, the paper does not claim that Democrats have to "move to the center" in order to win the next Presidential election. Instead, it presents a muddled view of the electorate that suggests Democrats have some "hard decisions" that they must make before they will be able to win the Presidency, as long as foreign policy remains the key strength of Republicans. It recommends several possible changes, and thus has become something of a Rorschach test for various center-left members of the commentariat.

In reality, despite Galston & Kamarck's concerns, the long term demographic picture for Dems is not terribly gloomy, and small changes on the margins may be enough to solve our current electoral puzzle.

First, let's debunk the notion that long term demographic trends are stacked against Democrats. Looking at the issue poll on page 33, we see that Kerry lost the most ground among married women and white Catholics. All that talk about "security moms" turned out to be right -- like most Bush voters, they placed more emphasis on Iraq and terrorism than Kerry voters. But, the "security moms" deserted Bush immediately, as they were one of the first groups of Bush voters to oppose his Social Security schemes. Likewise, the continued bungling of Iraq and Katrina has damaged their confidence in conservative governing style. Security moms want a government that works for them and protects us from the hard edges of terrorism, natural disaster, and financial uncertainty. Taking a wrecking ball to our economic safety net and staffing FEMA with political hacks won't earn their support.

But we shouldn't rely on external events to return Democrats to power; after all, the facts on the ground in Iraq may change very quickly. So it behooves Dems to find ways of attracting voters in other ways. In addition to placing higher priority on fighting "terrorism" than the general public, married women were more concerned with Terrorism and Moral Values than their single counterparts. Likewise, white Catholic voters also placed a larger-than-average emphasis on "Moral Values". But before you roll your eyes and whine about anti-choice, anti-gay working class whites "voting against their own interests", let's look at what poll respondents said "moral values" meant to them. Half of the Values Voters gave the standard GOP reponses of abortion and gay marriage. But a quarter chose "candidate qualities" and a sixth chose "religious preferences". What, on earth, do these muddled responses mean?

The truth is, most voters think politics is too complicated for them. That's not a knock on voters -- they have better, more interesting things to do with their time, like sitting down with their kids to read, watching playoff baseball, or going fishing. They look at Kerry talking about his health care plan, they look at Bush talking about his health care plan, and in the rush of a few 90 minute debates, it can be very hard to tell the difference. So, they look at the personal qualities of the candidates, with the idea that those personal qualities will somehow reflect the behavior of the candidate once he's in office. Some voters are in fact looking at the candidate's views on abortion and gay marriage in that way. Some are looking at how "churched" he is (despite being a weekly churchgoer, Kerry's patrician Catholic language on Christianity sounds very foriegn to many Baptists, Presbyterians, and other assorted conservative Christians). But others are looking for the presence of conviction, a sign that they have personal beliefs and not just policy positions, and can withstand the Republican onslaught of being a Serial Exaggerator or Flip-Flopper. And you don't need to rebut the charge directly; Slick Willy accomplished this not by trying to be more honest than George HW Bush -- though "read my lips" helped on that front -- but by out-empathizing the incumbent President. Technocratish Dems -- the New Yale, as Matthew Yglesias puts it -- forget that these personal qualities serve as important indicators of a candidate's decision making process for many people.

"The Politics of Evasion" had a very clear message: working class white voters see Democrats as soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend liberals who can't be trusted to manage the economy. If you nominate a pro-death penalty, budget-balancing governor of a state that's moving in the right direction, moderate your image on welfare and crime, you'll have solved most of your problems.

The conclusions of "The Politics of Polarizaton" are much less clear. There many paths to victory at the national level for Democrats. Go "Sistah Souljah" on Michael Moore. Rachet up the rhetoric on Pakistan. Find some pro-life convention speakers and focus on the common ground goal of reducing the number of abortions. Pick a candidate who uses "I believe that ..." to mean "I know in my heart that..." rather than "Having looked at the available data, my opinion is ...". Use the phrase "this is not rocket science" when trashing the prescription drug's lack of bulk bargaining and reimportation. Get their hands dirty and start disparaging the personal qualities of Republican candidates (I hear Bill Frist killed cats when he was in Med School. Can we work up personal opposition to Brownback, McCain, Huckabee, Giuliani ... any of these other guys?). But none of these are terribly large changes in substance, and none of them are radical changes in style, either; the Democratic machine needs a tune-up, not an overhaul.

The Politics of Mobilization

This bit from William Galston and Elaine Kamarck's Third Way report strikes me as fairly important:

Jimmy Carter captured only 72 percent of the liberal vote in 1976 and won the presidency. John Kerry captured 85 percent of the liberal vote and lost. Carter captured 77 percent of registered Democrats and won; Kerry
captured 89 percent and lost. In fact, no Democrat in modern history captured a greater percentage of both self-identified liberals and registered Democrats than Kerry, yet he lost.

So, for Democrats who think that we just need to follow a strategy of base mobilization, the numbers just don't bear you out. Kerry also won 54% of moderates, but lost because a slight majority among Independents and huge base mobilization still turned out a smaller number than the Republican base. Now, I think Kamarck and Galston get something wrong when they assume that these numbers and, more importantly, the ideological values that underpin them, are fixed, and I'll be saying more about that soon. But they are quite right that mere Democratic/liberal turnout, if it doesn't also mobilize across the rest of the political spectrum, will not win us any elections.

Framing Katrina

Over at my employer's fine website, George Lakoff and John Halpin have penned an interesting piece examining the framing around Hurricane Katrina. I'm going to let you read that, as I found it a bit generalized to really take issue with or find inspiration in. But I will say this -- the fact that Katrina punctured the myth of Bush's decisiveness and competence without harming the American desire for government involvement says quite a bit. Because, on surface, Katrina was a federal failure -- the government's, both national and local, did not respond effectively. And while some of that can be blamed on funding decisions, crony appointment, and misplaced priorities, much of it was long-standing, most of it was bipartisan, and the majority seemed endemic. Bush's presidential leadership was particularly bad, but it certainly wasn't the only factor.

Which is why Katrina, I think, shouldn't be seen as a values issue. This really wasn't about the values of society -- as the aftermath showed, Americans actually did believe in caring for the poor, evacuating the meek, and helping the helpless. This was about efficiency, about action, it was about government's ability to translate long-standing but rarely-needed values into federal policy long before the issue ever evolved into a crisis. We had to stop Katrina before it happened, but instead, we determinedly degraded our ability to do anything of the sort. Bush wrecked FEMA, the tax cuts and the war shredded state budgets, and with hurricane prevention low on the list of policies that win elections, more immediate funding gaps forced the redirection of funds that'd otherwise have helped here.

All of which is to say that the framing, so to speak, on Katrina is really the general argument for government -- we have one, it can do things, it should do them well. And then you reach a very simplistic choice: do you trust the party that believes in government's ability to function effectively, or do you trust the party that denies its basic utility and seeks to defund and dismantle it? Katrina was about conceptions of government. If it's really just a partisan war, than filling crucial spots with political allies makes perfect sense. But if the parties are vying to see who runs government best, than do anything save appointing qualified and able candidates is quite insane. The hurricane convinced Americans of the latter, now all Democrats need to do is remind voters which camp each party is in. At that point, it's really not a framing war, it's just a straight recital of what happened, what didn't happen, and why.

Webster's Political Dictionary

Quick question for Hunter. When he says:

A passing comment by Republican pollster Frank Luntz on the Mclaughlin Group (yes, I know; I'm a glutton for punishment) and this excellent diary by Torta converged to ring the same bell in my ears: what do Democrats stand for? It seems a common refrain, or assumption, that Democrats do not have an overall theme or narrative, and I will certainly agree that the party as a whole does a rather bad job of articulating the message. But it lodged in my brain, and after a half hour of thought I realized that I, at least, know what I stand for. And it's not complicated. And I think, in reality, it encapsulates the Democratic Party rather well:

Strong Families.  Strong Communities.  Strong Nation.

What does he think that means? I don't mean how can you explain it, I mean how does it read on a bumper sticker? How does it sound in a debate? How does it work on a talkshow? Does he think the Republican will turn around and say, "Why, I must disagree with my opponent here, what this country needs a weaker families, more dilapidated communities, and a wimpier nation."?

Of course not. The reason "family values, low taxes, strong national defense, and smaller government" work as the prototypical Republican definition is because they actually define something. They are things that, for the most part, Republicans believe and Democrats do not. Sure, we'd argue over strong national defense (doesn't just mean big) and family values, but we're not for smaller government, not for lower taxes, not for endless military spending, and so forth. It defines the Republican party because it couldn't define us. Hunter's definition does define us as well as them. And while we can argue endlessly over who it really defines, on first read, it's so vague that anybody can lay claim to its embrace.

I'm all for defining the party, but we need to do it right. And that means nothing that requires five paragraphs of explanation on why it actually characterizes us rather than our opponents. Definitions should speak of actions, they should be, in a real and basic sense, little policy platforms that signal what we believe by explaining what we'll enact. Think "national health care, governmental reform, regulated corporations, a living wage, and a revived American image abroad". I'm not saying I have the perfect set of proposals, but at the least, they need to be policies, places the Republican party can't follow. That's how you define yourself, by saying what you are that they're not. And if the definition is going to work, you have to be able to simply say it, not need to explain it.

On Senators

By Ezra

As addendum to my Don't Draft Krugman argument below, it's worth saying that, contrary to the energy we put into senate races, individual senators can really do remarkably little. Think of last cycle's great hopes -- Ken Salazar and Barack Obama. Heard from either lately? The most waves Obama's made have been in the form of a recent rebuke to the blogosphere! And as for the powerhouses? Kennedy, Clinton, and so forth? The closest you get to a recent accomplishment there is Kennedy's cosponsorship of No Child Left Behind.

The US Senate is a numbers game. If you have more guys than the other team, you can do a fair amount. If not, it really doesn't matter how many brilliant minds populate your side, they're going to be powerless. And then, when you regain control, those brilliant minds still find their awesome intellects subordinate to the leadership team's agenda and the President's priorities. Indeed, the only place where individual senators make a difference is in election cycles and, potentially, as future presidential candidates, although we well know that they've tallied up a rather lackluster record there during the past 50 years.

The real fight is in establishing the conditions for majority control, which is to say working the media, disseminating your ideas, pushing better flacks on the shows, expanding your base, building coalitions, funding good candidates, choosing races wisely, and generally creating an atmosphere where voters elect Democrats rather than Republicans. A guy like Krugman is better utilized as part of that operation than as another well-known, little-seen, and wholly impotent senator.

Talkin' Strategy

Man, I usually agree with Oliver, but his latest post is just a 12-car smashup of wrongness. Top to bottom, it's just got less sense than a Heritage intern after a three day bender with David Horowitz. Oliver thinks that Democrats should be out there talking up the DeLay scandal, adding their voices to the chorus, making sure the media pays attention and the American people get the message?

Is he insane?

Democrats have a tried and true protocol for these sorts of situations. Give the media a couple days to peck at the not-yet-dead corpse, and then, when their coverage slows, let the Republicans pop to their feet with an overwhelming counterstrike that sucks up so much televised oxygen that Chris Matthews ends up in the hospital. Meanwhile -- and here's the beauty part -- Democrats get to take a vacation! You see, our caucus is overworked, our congressmen underpaid, our senators jonesing for some time on the links. Now that DeLay has been indicted by a soon-to-be-smeared prosecutor who does yoga and talks about "holistic justice", this election is as good as won. Nancy Pelosi should start buying furniture for that bigger office. It's off to Fiji for the Dems! See ya in 2006, suckas!

As it is, some folks misunderstand the lesson of Newt Gingrich. It wasn't his relentless efforts to publicize and push scandal that helped him torpedo the Democratic majority. Nah, that's but a misconception. His promise to never let a speech go by without mentioning a Clinton infraction? Sheer folly. But even such folly couldn't triumph over such a glorious white mane and funny, reptilian title. Newt! How sweet is that!? And how could you've expected the American people not to elect such a memorable name?

But "Nancy's" kinda dull. So the thing to do is completely disappear from the scene while the Republicans mount their counterattack. We did it with the SwiftVets and we'll do it now. Folks like Oliver should settle back and watch some pros -- we're Democrats, we know how it's done.

When Pro-Choice Republicans Go Bad

Not to reopen the old NARAL debate or anything, but after endorsing Lincoln Chafee to prove they'd stand by Republicans who support choice, watching him gladly shout "aye!" for John Roberts must be a real kick in the pants.

I've said it before, but the basic reason not to endorse Republicans is that, right now, given party discipline and the agenda set by the Republican leadership, there is no such thing as a pro-choice Republican. What they believe is almost as meaningless as what they say. The Republican party is best viewed not as a collection of individuals but as a coherent, unified organism that quiets offending sections and moves in the direction that important constituencies demand. Republican moderates, chimerical creatures that they are, talk a good game and vote right when it doesn't count, but when the chips are down, the only way to distinguish them from Santorum is a Bush/Putin-style soul gaze. Chafee's behavior here should be example #1: In the area that most matters on choice, Chafee just voted for a Chief Justice who will, in all likelihood, work to overturn or radically constrain Roe. As Scott puts it:

It's the same lesson as Pataki vetoing over-the-counter Plan B as the opening salvo in one of the most pathetically futile presidential campaigns in living memory--in the current context, there is functionally no such thing as a pro-choice Republican. There's always some reason for them to roll over for the party leadership, and the pressure required seems to get less and less. This was not always true historically, but it's the case now. I'm not saying pro-choice groups should be mere appendages of the Democratic Party either, but they really need to adapt to this reality.

NARAL should pull their endorsement. Actually, take that one step farther: NARAL should pull their endorsement and work like like hell to defeat Chafee. If it was important for them to prove they'd reward friends, it's orders of magnitude more crucial to show they'll steamroll those who betray them.

Roberts was going to pass with or without Chafee's support. The senator could've taken the moment to make a public, if futile, stand on behalf of choice. He didn't. And if he failed when the stakes were low, how quickly will he cave when the stales are high?

NARAL screwed up. Time to fix it.

As Goes My Party, So Goes Yours

In his Prospect column this week, Matt wrote:

The other possibility is that Republicans are so convinced that government is inefficient and full of people who don't know what they're doing that it just doesn't occur to them to do it any other way.

In response, Wil Wilkinson said:

Naturally, Matt is implying that there is some other way to do it. But, no. The Republicans are right; that's just how government works. The problem with the Republicans is that they, being invested with power, are insufferably opportunistic hypocrites. They're not uniquely prone to cronyism. They're just prone to being in power, which is the enabling condition for the cronyism to which all political types aspire.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Clinton's nomination of the incredibly qualified James Lee Witt totally blow Wil's theory to shreds? Because considering the decidedly non-constant nature of the dynamic Wil describes, this strikes me as but another chapter of "Republicans who ideologically dislike government can't run it effectively and thus it stands to reason that no nobody else can either."

Help Me Help You!

Nobody really noticed this yesterday, but The Washington Post had an article about a major lobbyist experiencing a Jerry McGuire-style epiphany after Katrina and embarking on a crusade against his profession:

Frederick L. Webber, a longtime denizen of Washington's lobbying corridor, showed up at work one day last week and found on his desk a dozen fundraising requests from members of Congress.

He threw them all in the trash.

In a self-described epiphany, Webber, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, drafted a large check to help families displaced by Hurricane Katrina and decided that an imperative of his vocation -- political giving -- had finally gone too far.
[...]
Webber told K Street colleagues that radical change is needed in election laws: Donations should be further limited, campaign seasons should be shortened and lawmakers, somehow, should be freed up to do more legislating and less soliciting.
[...]
"Members of Congress are trapped. They have to continue to raise money if they're going to survive, and I sympathize with them," Webber added. "But I've seen a lot of people -- very good people -- leave Congress because they're tired of fundraising. This thing has gotten away from us."

Hair Like That Cannot Lose

By Ezra

For those interested in events beyond our own borders, the Washington Post has an interesting article on Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's Prime Minister, who recently dissolved his own party to eject the hardliners and has embarked on an ambitious -- to say the least -- program of privatizing most everything in Japan, starting with the Postal Service, which, through some mechanism I don't understand, seems to act as the nation's largest bank.

And then he had breakfast.

No, not really. Koizumi doesn't eat breakfast. He's too sweet for breakfast.

In any case, the clash is hurtling towards a vote this weekend, which'll either send Koizumi to the unemployment line or leave him leader of a wholly reworked party. Impressive stuff. In addition, he's been sending "assassin" candidates against his enemies -- female celebrities, corporate raiders, and other attention-getting asskickers. It's political theatre on a pretty grand scale, albeit political theatre that I don't quite understand. So if any of you are following the Japanese elections, I'd love to hear your impressions.

Carter V. Bush

Mark Schmitt writes up a rousing cry to replace Jimmy Carter with George W. Bush in the pantheon of hapless, incompetent, Presidents. As he notes, what happened under Jimmy ain't nothing compared to what's gone down under George -- the numbers alone should consign Bush to political pariah status. And Mark, as he so often does, gets it right. If the world were rational, Bush would join the pantheon of the disgraced. But it isn't. And what we disdain Carter for isn't rational either.

Carter isn't maligned because of the economic indicators and foreign policy misadventures he presided over; his failures were communicative, narrative. Bush stays afloat on Iraq -- though he's rapidly sinking -- by making it a heroic battle, wherein withdrawal and recognition of our casualties equals defeat. So long as he staves off the "D" word and uses it to tar Democrats, he can keep portraying this as a respectable, if costly, fight, not a misguided and losing act of hubris.

Carter, conversely, presided over a loss. We lost in Iran. Our helicopters went down and America was humbled. And after they went down, Carter, because he's responsible, didn't try to mount an invasion or carpetbomb Tehran, he just swallowed the humiliation and returned to diplomacy. In the end, the hostages survived. I doubt they'd have been so lucky under Bush.

American Presidents cannot admit defeat. Pain or failure must be incorporated into a larger narrative of triumph or resiliency. The current deficit is the fault of 9/11, the result of a brave country reemerging into the world to hunt down evildoers and spread Good Things. Carter's deficit was, well, partially our fault, and in any case up to us to change. The Bush deficit requires no sacrifice whatsoever -- it even comes with tax cuts. It's a paper deficit, his wars are TV wars. With Carter, our failures abroad came home in oil prices and our budgetary problems caused stagflation. Americans got hurt, and they don't like to be hurt. Right now, they're just bystanders in a surprisingly fastpaced play -- even though the plot is rapidly becoming a downer, they've no reason to call for the curtain. That won't last forever, but its' proved surprisingly resilient right now.

Carter lost because he was responsible, honest, realistic. He didn't tell the American people what wasn't true, and he didn't protect them from psychic and economic pain. Bush, if nothing else, has spent his presidency insulating Americans from his decisions. His bill, of course, will eventually come due. The only question is, does reality hit in the next three years, or does the country implode under his successor?

No Party For Lincoln

According to The Carpetbagger, Lincoln Chafee will be facing a primary challenge from Cranston's lunatic mayor, Stephen Laffey. Democrats, of course, are pleased as punch. Chafee survives election season by being a Democrat too independent to make his party registration match his political beliefs. Daddy was a Republican, and so Chafee will be one too. And so, though he votes Frist in as majority leader, he sends off write-in votes for President (Dubbya being beyond the pale for this Republican) and gets early endorsements from NARAL -- it's the best of both worlds.

But those worlds are readyin' to collide, as Laffey's mounting a Club-for-Growth backed insurgency that'll force Chafee to swing hard right during the primaries to survive. That'll mean allying himself with the Bush administration, a none-too-popular group of folks in Rhode Island. And then, assuming Chafee survives that fight, he'll have to dart left again for the general. That's a lot of running around -- he'll probably pull something. And, come November, we'll probably have a Democrat in that seat.

What Do We Do Now?

By Ezra

The aftermath of Katrina will be expensive. We're talking huge funds to house, to feed, to clothe, to rebuild, to refit, to paint, to restore, to recreate a city and protect its inhabitants. This is a humanitarian disaster on a massive scale, and bringing New Orleans back into the light is going to require an almost unimaginable amount of cash.

But where are we going to get it?

Iraq isn't proving cheap, health costs are exploding, the deficit is soaring, and the administration's fiscal management philosophy has, up till now, been from the Crackhead School of Accounting. So how're we going to pay? Tony Blankley, speaking of Left Right and Center yesterday, said doing so would force some very serious tradeoffs in America life. Health care, he noted, might have to be cut. Urban spending can't coexist with entitlements if we're going to rebuild the drenched areas.

Tony Blankley, you should all know, is a douche. Because what he didn't mention is that taxes can, and should, be raised. Government revenues aren't fixed things, they change in response to tax structures, to fees, to economic cycles, and to phases in the moon. But we can, by and large, control them, raise them, lower them, through tax revenues. Obviously, if we have much to spend on but no money to spend, we should be raising. But with the Senate promising immediate consideration of Estate Tax Repeal or Reform (Reform being the difference between murdering the tax and simply paralyzing it for life), that's looking rather unlikely.

This is where presidential leadership is supposed to come in. This is where responsible statesmen step in front of the cameras, heave a big sigh, and tell their fellow countrymen that American citizens need help, that disaster has struck, and that we're all going to have to tighten our belts a bit. Just like in a family, where the misfortune of one necessitates the involvement of all, so too is America a sort of extended family, and all of us are going to have to aid our siblings in Louisiana. Pursuant to that, the next two years are going to see tax increases of 2% per bracket. That'll go towards rebuilding the flooded territories and making sure our soldiers have body armor. It sucks, but Bush, Cheney, and all participating cabinet members are going to lead the way by sacrificing their salaries for the next three years.

His poll numbers would go through the roof. Grover Norquist would break out in hives, as would certain knuckle-draggers in the House, but they'd quickly be marginalized, ejected from the American consensus. This country is packed with good people who believe in charity and community -- most of them would love to aid in this disaster, and the knowledge that their taxes would go towards something so concrete would make for an easy sell. It's a political no-brainer.

So why won't he do it?

Legitimizing government's role, I guess, is anathema to the Republican consensus. And raising taxes and calling for sacrifice are the acts of statesmen, but that breed was long ago poached out of existence in this Executive Branch. So what we're left with is a disaster we can't pay for, a disaster that prominent Republicans are demanding we fund with cuts in entitlements that keep the poor barely afloat. In other words, a reconstruction effort funded by worsening the sort of poverty that led to this situation.

Those who ignore make the poor repeat it.

At the end of The Candidate, Redford, having won without substance and taking an office for which he's unprepared, turns to his campaign manager and, overwhelmed, asks, "What do we do now?" At the end of this flood, with a President lacking substance and a government that's totally unprepared, there's no statesman to turn to. But it's still the same question.

What do we do now? And how will we pay for it?

No More Northerners

Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Nobody sees the 1976 presidential election as a great moment in American history, and maybe that's why it hasn't gotten much pundit love. But the map is something to behold -- Jimmy Carter won every Southern state except for Virginia, and it wouldn't be until 1992 and Bill Clinton that Democrats would win a sizable number of Southern states again.

Importantly, Carter managed this immediately after all the events usually regarded as devastating to Democratic fortunes in the South -- the Civil Rights movement, the countercultural 1960s, the peacenikdom of 1972. A look at the preceding elections makes this even more impressive -- in 1964, Goldwater's only pocket of strength outside his Arizona home is the Deep South. 1968 has Wallace's independent candidacy shutting the Democrats out of the South. When Nixon wipes the floor with McGovern in 1972, he wins by a 47% margin in Alabama and by 38% in Arkansas. Carter carries those states by 13% and 30%.

Regionalism in America is mostly a one-way affair. New Yorkers aren't going to interpret someone's words uncharitably just because he happens to be from Georgia. But a Northerner trying to win in the South faces deep-seated regional prejudices that prevent people from interpreting his views in charitable ways. While they're willing to believe that a fellow Southerner shares their views on issues, they assume that a Northerner is going to have different values and policy priorities, and from the beginning they'll interpret his statements in accordance with those perceptions. Here's a demonstration of the kind of psychological phenomenon I'm talking about:

Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush's international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues--the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)--and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.

Now, these results are from the entire nation, not just the South, and the article interpreted them as the result of public identification with Bush after 9/11, not with anything regional. But it's the issue of identification that's essential here, and a lot of people in the South identify themselves strongly by their regional affiliation. They attribute their own values to people who were born in their part of the country and share their accents. Even when a Northerner agrees with them, it won't be hard to convince them that he's just pandering in order to get elected. This doesn't come out so strongly in primaries, since primary voters comprise a relatively well-informed sector of the population that will actively seek out a candidate's views on their favorite issues, without being distracted by regional affiliation. But in a general election where many voters are driven by regional stereotypes, Southerners have a huge advantage.

"Nominate a Southerner" is in no way whatsoever a code word for "concede ground on cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage." In fact, it's a way to absorb the cultural-identification advantages of the conservative position on those issues without actually conceding anything. Put Jimmy Carter's liberalism and support for desegregation into the mouth of a Connecticut Yankee, and Ford wins in 1976. But a Georgia peanut farmer can ride these positions to victory.

Even if a brilliant, articulate Northerner who shares all my political views seeks the Democratic nomination, I'm going to stuff Circe's wax in my ears and vote against him in the primaries. Making substantive policy changes means far more to me than seeing my views expressed boldly by a candidate, and if politics is anything more than a sport to you you'll feel the same way. You can only make substantive policy changes if you win, and it's Southern Democrats who win the presidency.

States Matter

The last year has not been a good one for choice:

This year's state legislative season draws to a close having produced a near-record number of laws imposing new restrictions on a woman's access to abortion or contraception.

Since January, governors have signed several dozen antiabortion measures ranging from parental consent requirements to an outright ban looming in South Dakota. Not since 1999, when a wave of laws banning late-term abortions swept the legislatures, have states imposed so many and so varied a menu of regulations on reproductive health care.

Three states have passed bills requiring that women seeking an abortion be warned that the fetus will feel pain, despite inconclusive scientific data on the question. West Virginia and Florida approved legislation recognizing a pre-viable fetus, or embryo, as an independent victim of homicide. And in Missouri, Gov. Matt Blunt (R) has summoned lawmakers into special session Sept. 6 to consider three antiabortion proposals.

A special session for antiabortion proposals. Wow. Articles like this make me thankful for Sirota's PLAN and Nathan Newman's Agenda for Justice, our two newest organizations dedicated to pushing progressivism at the local and state level. Liberals, recently, have lost so much ground on the national level that most all the movement's energy has been channeled into macro-resurgence and ideological counterattack. We need to get the House, the Senate, the Presidency -- something! And while that effort has largely failed, it's still sucked attention from the state level, where the Christian Right's decades of conscientious effort have really flowered in a multifaceted, springtime display of antichoice legislation and backlash politics. May a thousand theocrats bloom!

Democrats need to reestablish themselves at the State level to succeed nationally. As the Christian Right used local successes to slowly, methodically build up to national dominance, we can and should do the same. Less politically, state policy making is as important, and maybe more so, than national legislation. If we're losing legislative battles at the local level, it's hurting people. And if we could get some big wins, they'd help people, in addition to serving as an example for national change. One place to start is California, where SB840, a bill that'd institute single-payer health care in the state, has passed the Senate, attracted the support of the state Democratic party and could, if we got a progressive, visionary governor, become law. And if it worked, it could serve as example for the nation and show the way to a Democratic resurgence. This should be as much or more of a priority for progressives than most of the doomed fights we're picking nationally.

Fight Smart

Greg's admonishment on Michelle Malkin is exactly correct. And, before the usual suspects rear up to accuse me of softness and appeasement and DC-ness and weakness and giving aid to Republicans and whatever else, remember: it's not attacks that are the problem, it's stupid attacks that backfire on us and do us damage that are the problem.

There should be full court press against Michelle Malkin's repulsive smearing of Cindy Sheehan, her little foray into Sheehan's marital status should be plastered over the talkshows as proof of conservative cravenness. This is the time for JuJitsu, letting their poorly aimed, grossly inappropriate attempts at character assassination become the story, destroying the characters of those responsible and making Cindy look even more sympathetic. Instead, we call Malkin a whore, start making fun of her surname, leave threatening messages on her answering machine, and do a thousand things that, if put on O'Reilly, would make us look just as bad as her.

You don't win by being aggressive, you win by being disciplined. The right gets it. When Ed Klein's book came out, they backed off. When the SwiftVets were firing fusillades, the President talked about Campaign FInance Reform, not John Kerry's marriage to Theresa. With Sheehan, we're ahead. We're hurting them. That's why they're going so batshit crazy. But what does the right do when a story is slapping them around? They refocus the news cycle on something else. Bush loses the debates, but the three days following are endless stories about John Kerry's craven outing of a self-identified lesbian. Right now, Cindy Sheehan is winning the debate, let's be disciplined enough that the right can't refocus the story.

It Won't Happen Outside Here

CNtodd, in a post hoping for the rise of a new labor party to challenge the Democrats, writes:

Unless labor unions drop their support of the Democratic Party, workers will continue to lose the rights they fought for so long ago. The Democrats need a wake-up call in 2008.

Sorta like the wake-up call Nader gave them (and the country) in 2000, right? And do you think things would be quite so bad for workers if, say, that wake-up call hadn't happened and Gore had won? If Kerry had won?

I don't.

In any case, new parties really aren't the way to go. Lipset and Marks wrote a great book called It Didn't Happen Here, explaining why socialism never grabbed hold in the States. They argue, basically, that the essential impenetrability of the two-party system killed its chances; there was no electoral space in which it could breathe. Convincing stuff, and worth a read if you're interested in that sort of thing.

A good example of why these initiatives fail can be seen on the right. Howard Jarvis, a tax-cutting zealot whose wingnut ballot propositions screwed up California for a generation, tried to parlay a failed Senate insurgency into a Conservative Party. This was in 1962, a time of remarkable conservative mobilization in California, and the new party got 60,000 members. And then, when Barry Goldwater announced his candidacy for President, it lost most all of them (as did the CA organizations in other states).

Goldwater, of course, got stomped in the general, but the activists he recruited rebuilt the Republican party into a powerhouse organization able to advocate for business as effectively as Todd wants Democrats to push for labor. But they couldn't do that from outside the traditional structure, they had to come back in to the Republican party make a difference.

We've been seeing, in the Democratic party, signs that liberal mobilization is changing things. Dean as chair of the DNC, the vote against CAFTA, the real backlash to those who betrayed consumers on the Bankruptcy Bill, the broad backing populist tracts from Thomas Frank and Rick Perlstein are receiving, and so on. This is not the time to pick up your marbles and go home. This is the time to take a lesson from the Goldwaterites and change the one institution that might actually achieve your goals. The Democrats don't need a wake-up call, they need to be shown that populism can win an election. And for those who agree with the Sirotas, Franks, Todds, and Perlsteins of the world, the next step should be finding and recruiting a presidential candidate who can prove that.

Speaking of which, what's Byron Dorgan doing these days?

Update: Todd has a response which, naturally enough, disagrees with me. We see the system in fundamentally different ways so we have fundamentally different strategies for moving forward within it. Also, David Sirota writes in to remind me of "fusion voting", a system where third parties can nominate main party candidates, thus controlling a block of votes which, in the end, can be funneled to friendly Democrats (or Republicans). New York's Working Families party has been quite successful with this; here's an explanation as to how.

Fight to Win

The post-Hackett argument for funding challengers in every race is a well-intentioned, but not really convincing, bit of political strategy. Democrats have X dollars, to fund a challenger everywhere in the country will, unless we have some sort of federal finance reform, bankrupt the party and suck much-needed cash from close districts in order to fund longshot challenges in preordained races. Hackett was a hell of a test, but a candidate like him contesting an open seat during a special election simply creates a different dynamic than a local DA attacking a popular incumbent in an on-year. Most seats are not open. Most candidates are not Hackett. And most races don't get a news vacuum to fill.

Nevertheless, we should be fighting on more fronts. And that's where Kos and Bob and Jerome and Chris and all the other netroots generals can come into play. The dispersed intelligence of the blogs, which can gather information on hundreds of races, get reports from those districts, interview potential candidates, and prejudge matchups, allows for a lot of early reconnoitering. And, when they find a candidate in an unfriendly district whom they judge to have an unexpected chance, the netroots can be the canary in the coalmine, raising seed money and seeing what happens to it. If a cash infusion increases excitement, scares the other side, moves numbers, changes the media, or otherwise points to a winnable race that nobody saw on the radar, the netroots can join with the more traditional institutions to fund these candidates.

But we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. Ginny Schrader and Paul Hackett, though they came close, both lost unexpectedly well-funded races to fill open seats (though we shouldn't forget that Stephanie Herseth won one). So while our races have been exciting, they've not resulted in a particularly impressive seat gain, a truth I think this cartoon expressed well. And, not to be a Cassandra, but battles against incumbents are much harder than open-seat elections. We don't need to throw money away on principle, but we do need to spend more in places we wouldn't otherwise think of. That's where the netroots come in, and it shouldn't engender a tension with the DCCC. It can be our job and they can do theirs, and hopefully the twain shall often meet.

NARAL Redux

As coda to last night's post on NARAL, a few things:

Brad, who should know he can never outstay his welcome at chez Klein, so long as he promises to call it chez Klein, has a fuller rundown of his argument at his place. Read it. I think the basic disagreement comes over how well you think Democrats stand up for choice. Kos and I think pretty well, Brad and DaDa Head are less impressed. Fair enough. Brad in particular points out that, in 1976, a Democratic Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which restricted federal funding for abortion, and in 1993, 98 Democrats crossed the aisle to help pass a weakened Hyde amendment.

This seems one of those perfect v. good arguments. Democrats aren't perfect, but compared to Republicans they are very, very good. And the playing field in 1976 was different than the playing field now. NARAL, back then a small group, had only been around for seven years, and choice wasn't as important an issue within the Democratic constituencies because it wasn't as loud an issue in the culture generally. In 1993, Clinton was dragging, Democrats were unpopular, and the 1994 realignment hadn't happened, so we still had scores of Southern Democrats who were, particularly on culture, Republicans. They crossed over on other things too.

But 1993, in some ways, proves the point. NARAL isn't in a place to play this kind of hardball. Remember, this isn't a moral argument, but a tactical one. In 1994, Democrats who voted against NRA priorities were eviscerated in the elections. The NRA, through grassroots mobilization and targeted spending, remade the political environment on guns. Whatever the country's opinion may have been, the reality was Democrats were now and forevermore going to be very, very careful around firearms legislation. Who did NARAL beat?

In some senses, actually in many, NARAL has failed. An interest group's mandate is not to get legislators to vote their conscience, it's to create a political environment where legislators have to vote their way. But despite a fairly solid majority for some kind of choice, NARAL's been completely outplayed by the Christian Right. They've let abortion rights become quasi-radioactive for Democrats. Is it all their fault? No, of course not. But they have failed at their mission, which was to do for choice what the NRA has done for guns. For that reason, the NRA can play hardball with the Republican party, the right knows they need the NRA. NARAL doesn't quite have the same leeway. Democrats don't need NARAL.

As I said yesterday, the real political gold is in denouncing them, separating, proving we chart our own path on choice. Now, we won't and shouldn't do that, but the difference is, the Republicans can't do it to the NRA. So when NARAL comes out and begins endorsing Republicans who vote with a majority that takes the destruction of choice as a sacred quest, they deserve to be blamed. They're acting as if they're in a position of strength, as if the Democratic party is sticking with them because it's the politically expedient thing to do, not the right one. But that's not the case, and we all know it. Democrats are taking real hits by standing with NARAL, by not publicly backpedaling dramatically on choice. And it's that very loyalty, that respect for an ideological ally and commitment to their program, that explains why NARAL should be trying to get Reid made majority leader, not hedging bets with Chafee.

You get Reid on top and Langevin in, and much of what Brad's talking about won't come to the floor, votes that'd upset NARAL will get help up in committee, judicial nominees will be rejected. Not all, certainly, but there's no doubt that the Republicans pass much more that's chips at choice than Democrats do. When NARAL and its allies remake the playing field so choice is sacrosanct, no Democrat will cross lines to oppose it. But NARAL is weak right now and they need to make their principal ally strong. Trying to drive out the one challenger who led Chafee in the polls deserves all the criticism it can get, because NARAL's primary mission should be electing a Democratic party that is indebted to them, and that they can then control.

Update: These comments concerning NARAL's position on Roberts and Chafee's likely actions are worth reading.

Looking For Two of Three

Scott Lemieux has a good time mocking Michael Lind's request that all Democrats stop being social liberals and focus solely on the butter, please:

So let's get this straight. Democrats can't win because "populists" don't like Democratic positions on abortion (odd, since the Democratic position on abortion is far more popular than the Republican one. Lind also has an interesting definition of "banned," which apparently means that "you can only be the most powerful Democrat in Congress if you oppose abortion rights.) Populists were burned by Clinton. The electorate was so upset about it that in 1996 Clinton won by 8 points, and in 2000 they voted for Al Gore by a margin of a half million votes.

Scott is, as usual, right. And Lind is fairly unprincipled for suggesting we give up on equality, choice, and everything else in order to win some votes. But there is a deeper, more interesting point lurking around his analysis: Democrats, as a party, are defined as much by our social stands (pro-gay, pro-civil rights, pro-abortion, pro-feminism) as we are by our economic stances. In large part, that's fine. What's peculiar is that we're not at all defined by our national security accomplishments. We're credited for the New Deal and the Great Society, blamed for abortion and gay rights, but never noticed for World War I or World War II. It's weird.

More, it's dangerous. The electorate swings on three issue areas: foreign, domestic, and cultural. Democrats continually win on domestic issues, and when foreign policy is absent from the election, as it was in 1992 and 2000, we win the elections. But mostly, we lose. And we lose because Republicans dominate two of the three areas, while we only control one. Cultural issues are less important than either domestic or foreign policy matters, but added to the Republican advantage on national security, they basically consign us to minority status. That needs to chage.

So while Scott's right in his factual fisking, Lind's right on perception. Democrats are losing on cultural values, even if the electorate broadly agrees with our stance on choice. Clinton indeed ran as a cultural conservative, and he won in 1996 because 1) foreign policy was largely absent, 2) president enjoy an authority advantage on national security, and 3) Dole was a very weak candidate. Nevertheless, voters do think we're dogmatic on abortion (though we're not), in favor of gay marriage (though we say we're not), and too permissive on culture (though it makes no difference). Those are perception issues and, aside from the glimmer of potential shown by Hillary's recent rhetorical approaches to choice, there's not a whole lot to be done that wouldn't result in bad policy consequences or a betrayal of what we know to be right.

That leaves national security, and the two connect. As Matt notices, the Democracy Corps focus groups show that it's not necessarily cultural issues that people don't trust Democrats on, their quotes show questions about character, values, conviction. National security works the same way. Character traits, speech cadence, "toughness"...those make up a candidate's national security numbers. Nobody knows what George Bush is doing on terrorism. But his numbers on it stayed high long after voters had turned on him in every other area.

That's because George W. Bush looked like he'd punch bin Laden in the face, Kerry didn't. For that matter, George W. Bush looked like he could have been a war hero, Kerry looked sadly out of place in his Vietnam tapes. A Schweitzer-esque candidate who stepped up to the podium and was willing to fight for his beliefs, even unpopular cultural ones, would make gains on national security simply by proving himself the kind of guy willing to fight. Kerry's equivocations and careful language made him seem like someone who'd hesitate long enough to get nailed in the face.

And so that's where much of this should end. Democrats are losing in two of three areas that elections are decided on. We can't simply wait for election years that favor domestic policies. But we can't, a la Lind, betray our beliefs, and we shouldn't sell constituencies down the river because it's electorally useful. So given our narrow space for action there, national security is where we should focus. And that means becoming the party that, if nothing else, you can imagine fought and won World Wars I and II. As a party, we're defined by economic issues and cultural conflicts. If we could get a strong, competent national security image to coexist in there, our problems would be largely solved. Voters who don't like the Republican economic agenda vote for their national security and cultural plans anyway. Voters who don't like the Democrats cultural beliefs would still hand us elections if we swayed them on foreign policy and economic issues.

Never Enough

By Ezra

In comments, Iron Lungfish writes:

If the bar's fallen so low that Huckabee is now the standard for what makes a grownup Republican, this is a hideous portent that there are no potentially tol