Hoisting The Sail

by digby

There is no more reliable arbiter of beltway conventional wisdom than Cokie Roberts. Her entire career has been built on the idea that she knows what the establishment is thinking (which the establishment then inexplicably twists into what “the people” are thinking.) She has spent her life in Washington DC and is as much a part of the firmament as the Arlington cemetary. When she speaks, the poobahs have issued an verdict. This morning on NPR she said this:

Democrats are enjoying their miseries. Jack Reed of Rhode Island said to me this week-end “we have a strong wind at our back and all we have to do is get a sail up, any sail, some sail” but they haven’t managed to do that yet.

They were interested to see how Senator Russ Feingold’s call for censure worked with the blogosphere, mainly, and also in polls. Because Democrats backed away from his call just dramatically, even Democrats like Nancy Pelosi of California didn’t want anything to do with it. But a Newsweek poll out today shows 42% of the people supporting censure including 20% of Republicans. So Democrats are feeling pretty good about where they are in all this.

Apparently the establishment needed some numbers in order to know what to think. OK. As I wrote earlier, I think some of our leaders’ natural political instincts have been hobbled by an over-reliance on strategists and pundits. But I would remind the courtier class who are advising the Democrats of what Bill Kristol said this week-end: politics is not just about running on issues people already agree with, it is trying to change public opinion. Somebody had to jump start the debate about the president’s theory of presidential infallibility and abuse of power. It’s a huge issue to millions of Americans and it’s vital that politicians of both parties recognize this.

The Newsweek poll says that 53% of the people believe it is a political ploy, but I suspect that there are more than a few Democrats within that number who are vastly relieved to see a Democrat with enough imagination to try to seize the debate and change public opinion. One can call it a political ploy (although Fiengold is one of the few guys in the congress with a real reputation for integrity) but to the base it’s a political ploy in service of bedrock principle. Democrats cannot pass legislation. They cannot force the president to change his Iraq policy. They don’t have the power to call hearings or subpeona witnesses. Even when they have hearings, the Republican chairmen refuse to put the witnesses under oath.

Political ploys are the only way the minority can make its voice heard. I have the cable blathering on in the backround most days, much of the time tuned to C-Span. There are dozens of press conferences held each week on both sides of the aisle. It’s is a very rare one that anybody sees or hears. This is no way to get your message out.

I have no idea how many people might have favored censure before Feingold put it out there. But it’s amazing that without any prior discussion at all, this large minority, including a large chunk of Republicans, were ready to agree with his motion. Or perhaps it isn’t so amazing. Kos reminds us this morning:

The Alito filibuster was supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Somehow, their numbers didn’t suffer. Murtha was going to kill Dems by making them “look weak on defense”. But somehow, people seem to agree with him. Now, Feingold’s censure resolution is supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Yet if that was the case, why are Republicans reacting so virulently against it? Bill Kristol admits the censure motion is hurting Bush. Meanwhile, Brit Hume’s head exploded at the resolution. Not the action of a man confident that Feingold is hurting the Democratic Party.

That’s because they know that these things aren’t hurting the Democratic party. The only party hurting right now is the Republican party.

People want to know what Democratic base really stands for? The same thing that the majority of the country stands for. We believe in the rule of law, civil liberties, civil rights and supporting the troops — all of those things are embodied in the Alito filibuster motion, the Feingold NSA wiretapping resolution and the Murtha plan. None of them were done out of an expectation that they would win passage in the congress or force the president to change course. These actions, regardless of motive, have laid down the stakes in the next election, which is why Brit Hume had an aneurysm about the proposition that the NSA wiretapping issue might actually play to the benefit of Democrats.

If that’s so, then it’s true that Republicans are going to be in for a tough time under a Democratic congress. People need to prepare for the fact that accountability is going to be on the menu. Nobody is going to be impeached over silly blow-jobs but there are some very serious matters that the Republican congress has refused to deal with. If that stirs up the GOP base, then fine. It stirs up the Democratic base too.

In any case, the Republicans are going to move their base anyway, so there’s no margin in worrying about it. (Via Joe Gandelman) I see that Fred Barnes reports that aside from the usual labeling of Democrats as traitors and cowards, the Republicans are planning to begin another assault on civil liberties in order to turn out their conservative Christian voters.

There’s another part of the 2006 Republican strategy. This spring and summer, Republican leaders in the Senate and House plan to bring up a series of issues that are popular with the Republican base of voters. The aim is to stir conservative voters and spur turnout in the November election. Just last week, House Majority Leader John Boehner and Whip Roy Blunt met with leaders of conservative groups to talk about these issues.

House Republicans, for their part, intend to seek votes on measures such as the Bush-backed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a bill allowing more public expression of religion, another requiring parental consent for women under 18 to get an abortion, legislation to bar all federal courts except the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, a bill to outlaw human cloning, and another that would require doctors to consider fetal pain before performing an abortion.

I assume that it will be successful with those voters, too. They tend to be very supportive of the party that articulates their views, and everyone agrees that they form an important component of the Republican base. The Republicans know what they are doing with this. They have a very sophisticated GOTV effort that significantly outperformed the Democrats in 2004:

It is … particularly disturbing that while both Republican and Independent turnout increased sizably from 2000 to 2004, Democratic turnout remained flat. We may have helped move a lot of unlikely voters, but we did not mobilize our base nearly as well as Republicans did.

Mid-terms are turn-out elections. It’s always lower than the presidential years. The Alito filibuster motion, the Murtha withdrawal plan and the Feingold resolution all serve to shake up the establishment and public opinion. But they also send a message to the base of the Democratic party that the party hears their concerns. The establishment at large can take them for granted if they choose. The Republicans won’t take their base for granted. They never do.

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