Sunday Must Read
Kevin Hayden has written an awesome analysis of Iowa and the possible ramifications of what is looking like a possible serious upset, over at The American Street. If what he thinks is true, this race is going to be very, very exciting.
Through The Looking Glass
Maybe this has been covered before and I missed it, but the following comment about the space initiative from Scarborough Country just blew me away:
REP. TOM FEENEY ®, FLORIDA: Well, in the first place, Joe, I actually am very excited about the president‘s proposal, even though I‘m one of the leading fiscal conservatives, voted against the recent Medicare proposal, partly because it does bust our budget, in my view.
But let me say this. Bottom line, Joe, exploration is important. Research is important. But somebody on the face of the Earth is going to control and dominate space in the next several decades and centuries. If it‘s not the United States, it may be a hostile nation, a hostile set of nations, or even a hostile or rogue terrorist group.
This is a matter in part of national security and homeland defense. If we lose our dominance of low Earth and high Earth orbit, bottom line is, we‘re going to risk our very security in the United States of America.
[…]
Ultimately, somebody will dominate space. If it is not the United States, it‘s going to be somebody very hostile to our interests. We can‘t permit that to happen. And NASA, while it needs to work closer with the Defense Department, NASA is part of America‘s leadership and dominance in the future of space exploration and in protecting our security and homeland.
The PNAC paranoids have long believed that we should weaponize space. This reasoning isn’t really that far out for that crowd.
Via: Civic Dialogs
Reinventing The Wheel
John “uncool when uncoolness is necessary” Emerson wrote me and others an e-mail in which he argues that we can’t keep running to the center because it takes us ever rightward.
I agree that any more policy shifts to the right are a mistake, but “running” to the center is a different thing altogether. The party moved to the center for two reasons during the late 80’s and early 90’s. The first and most important reason was purely because we were losing ground across the board and the future looked grim. We were about to lose our congressional majority as soon as the remaining southern Democrats retired; they had only stayed with the party because they would have lost their powerful committee positions if they had jumped. (That process was finished in 1994.) And, presidential politics had been a disaster since LBJ. The Democrats decided they needed a different, more pragmatic approach in order to win.
But, there was another reason they moved to the center. People like Mickey Kaus and others advocated it as a way to force the Republicans to tack leftward or be left looking like extremists. This was a serious miscalculation as we now know because the old bipartisan consensus was disappearing with the emergence of the new breed of GOP gangster like DeLay and Gingrich. The more we shifted to the right on policy, the more rightward they went in response.
So, to the extent that John is talking about the latter, I am in complete agreement. We simply cannot compromise on policy anymore. No more “pilot programs” on privatization, no quarter on “faith based” initiatives, no bipartisan cover on anything. It only hurts us. Any experimental ideas can be tested in the states. As a national party, and particularly as congressional delegation, we have moved as far to the right as we can go and it is time to hold the line.
Just as important, we must counter their obfuscatory rhetoric and never, ever adopt it as our own. Any Democrat who uses terms such as “tax relief,” “tort reform” or “partial birth” abortion should be fined 1000 dollars per instance. (And, might I add that constantly calling the leadership of the Democratic Party “cowards” only reinforces Rush Limbaugh’s daily rants, as well.) Changing the language, re-framing the terms of the debate and developing an idea/media infrastructure has been the most brilliant Republican achievement of all and we have to stop enabling it. It is, in my view, the primary reason why they are in power today.
But, I don’t think any of those things have much to do with winning presidential elections and winning this next one is mandatory. This GOP lock on institutional power is so dangerous and has such huge long term ramifications that we must be ruthlessly pragmatic and intensely focused. We must take control of one branch of government and the executive branch is the only option in 2004. We have to assume responsibility for foreign policy because if Bush gets elected legitimately they will take it as a further mandate to expand the Bush Doctrine of unilateralism and military confrontation. This is too dangerous to allow.
Likewise, while I know that we are all tired of damage control and we want desperately to enact a progressive agenda, the fact is as long as the GOP has control of the congress, damage control is our singular duty. The checks and balances aren’t working. The modern GOP is a rogue Party that has proven it cannot be entrusted with the reins of power. Taking back the executive branch is job one. It’s more immediately important than “taking our party back” or building for the future or purging the Clintons or “letting it rip.”
I hate to be too dramatic here, but it is our responsibility to save the country and the world from another four years of a power mad, reckless group of ideologues who are acting more and more crazy with each passing day. (Can we talk about Mars?)
This is not the time to reinvent the wheel or ignore the things that we know. We won the last 3 presidential elections. Until 2 years ago the Republicans had been losing seats in every election subsequent to 1994. There is data and experience to be culled from that. We just had a census, information from which when combined with sophisticated new marketing tools and detailed demographics can help us figure out how to target voters and formulate a winning message. Dean and Clark and all the others to a certain extent have opened up a new way of communicating and fundraising (and potentially organizing) via the internet. The base is unified on policy.
We don’t have to blow this thing but from what I see, there is an increasingly good chance that we are going to if we decide that this election, of all elections, is the one where we must simultaneously attract 8 to 10 million disaffected voters, try out a untried theoretical idea for winning swing voters, experiment with an electoral strategy that openly writes off the south, and ignore all of the empirical data we have about how people vote in this country. (I’m not, by the way, accusing Emerson of advocating these things.)
I don’t mean that we can’t be innovative or that this election doesn’t present unique opportunities, but we don’t have to behave as if we’ve been in the wilderness forever. We know that the economic message alone does not work with people who are culturally conservative. We know that we are weak with white males and stronger with white females. We know that Bush’s highest ratings are on leadership and national security. We know that polls consistently show that 40 percent of voters consider themselves conservative, 40 percent moderate, and just 20 percent liberal. We know that incumbent presidents have a built in advantage. We know that Bush is going to run as The Bold Man Of Vision Who Saved The World and anybody who disagrees with that is going to be labeled an unpatriotic, irreligious, cowardly, decadent, unhinged traitor. We know many things.
I realize it has become fashionable to say that we needn’t worry about our candidates’ perceived weaknesses because the Republicans just make stuff up anyway but that’s like saying that you might as well send a fighter with a glass jaw into the ring because the other guy has a reputation for hitting below the belt. (I am guilty of saying that same thing some months ago, right on this blog, but I am here to say that I was completely full of shit.) The Republicans aren’t omnipotent, but they are good at what they do and they have years of practice tearing down Democrats for being godless, elitist, sissified libertines. Of course they’ll make stuff up but that doesn’t mean that we should play into their hands by making ourselves even more vulnerable in areas that play into people’s by now hard wired negative perceptions about Democrats. It’s insane to think we can win this election without taking into account what the opposition is planning to do and trying to counter it. We know how to do that, too.
If we don’t use our heads and focus intently on the goal of beating George W. Bush, I fear that the worst result will be a Bush landslide and at best, this, most depressing scenario:
David Berthiaume a Manchester taxi driver, has not been to any candidate’s events. He hasn’t paid much attention to the race — he said he turns off the television when political ads come on — and he says that most of his friends aren’t particularly focused on the race either.
On the afternoon of Nov. 21, on a ride to Manchester Airport, here’s what he told a nosy reporter in the back seat: “I’ll tell you where my vote’s going: to our president. I’m not a Republican, I’m an Independent. And I’m pro-choice. But I think he’s done a good job, and so does at least 51 percent of the country. Fine, he might have been misled about Iraq, but it needed to happen anyway. We kicked Saddam in the teeth, and now he’s gone. We should all be happy about that.”
In the end it doesn’t matter if it’s a landslide or a squeaker. The kind of destruction that the Republicans are going to wreak if they get four more years of unfettered power is truly frightening. It simply cannot happen.
Right Wing Freak Show
The weekend after September 11, George Bush’s former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, sat in a leather armchair at Camp David, the presidential retreat, devouring a pile of intelligence documents on al-Qaeda handed out by the CIA boss, George Tenet.
A two-day crisis meeting of Mr Bush’s senior advisers had finally wound up. The President had gone to bed.
Across the room, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was singing hymns, accompanied on the piano by the Christian fundamentalist Attorney-General, John Ashcroft.
Leafing through the CIA documents, Mr O’Neill was astonished to read plans for covert assassinations around the globe designed to remove opponents of the US Government. The plans had virtually no civilian checks and balances.
“What I was thinking is, ‘I hope the President really reads this carefully’, Mr O’Neill said. “It’s kind of his job. You can’t forfeit this much responsibility to unelected individuals. But I knew he wouldn’t.”
It makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, doesn’t it?
Inappropriate Triumphalism
I’ve been greatly concerned these last couple of days about the reports of Wes Clark’s hawkish triumphalism as expressed in that London Times article from last April as Baghdad fell. Even though he had spent 34 years in the Army and was predictably proud of the military victory, there was really no reason for him to be so effusive in his congratulations. It is unseemly, particularly if one wasn’t a strong supporter of the war, to say things like this:
The first order of business is to congratulate the United States military, to congratulate the Iraqi people and to say that this is a great day, both for (the) American military and American people and for the Iraqi people. I think President Bush deserves a day of celebration. Everybody in America is elated. We congratulate the troops. They’ve done an extraordinary job. We’re blessed to have the best military we’ve ever had. We are all so proud of their efforts not just today, but every day as they work tirelessly to bring democracy to Iraq.
Oops. I made a mistake. The above comments were made by Howard Dean, John Kerry, and John Edwards after the capture of Saddam just last month. It’s so hard to keep straight when you are allowed to effusively congratulate the troops and President Bush for successful military operations and when you’re not. My bad. Never mind.
Swingers
While I’m on the subject, SKBubba turned me on to this article in the Atlantic about the sophisticated new methods being used to find and understand these wacky swing voters. There is much of interest in the article, but I was particularly struck by this:
The New Democrat Network, a centrist political organization, was among the first in this election cycle to use polling to sketch out a profile of the latest generation of swing voters. Data shared with each of the Democratic candidates (and provided to The Atlantic) describes them as mainly white and also younger, less likely to vote, and more likely than self-identified Democrats or Republicans to characterize themselves as “workaholics.” They are most heavily concentrated in suburbs and small cities, and though they disapprove of many Bush Administration policies, they tend to be more religious and to admire military service more than most Democrats do. “On many issues their attitudes correspond strongly with the Democratic Party even though demographically they are closer to Republican voters,” says Peter Brodnitz, of the firm Penn, Schoen and Berland, which conducted the poll.
The New Democrat Network identified civil liberties and the environment as the two issues on which independents and Republicans most strongly disagree—and, indeed, many of the Democratic candidates have sounded precisely these themes. (Buried in the report’s “tactical recommendations” is information that both sides in the next campaign may find useful: independents listen to a disproportionate amount of country radio, and they watch SportsCenter more often than other Americans—a taste, the poll reveals, that corresponds more closely with Democrats’ than Republicans’.)
Other organizations, including Emily’s List, have conducted broader studies to sort independents into smaller “lifestyle clusters,” the better to target them in the fall. Emily’s List has identified four basic groups: disengaged “Bystanders,” who when motivated to vote lean Democratic; “Senior Health Care” voters, whose gender (predominantly female) suggests an inclination to support Democrats; “Education First” voters, 64 percent female and 66 percent pro-choice but currently more supportive of Bush and the Iraq War than the typical Democrat; and the “Young Economically Pressured,” many of whom work more than forty hours a week and may care for an elderly parent. Though this last group tends to support the Democratic position on funding public schools and other issues, its members live predominantly in small towns or rural areas and are culturally conservative.
The challenge for the next Democratic candidate will be reaching all these independents, many of whom live in small cities and suburbs that are gradually abandoning the Democratic Party. The suburban vote, which Bush won narrowly in 2000, continues to grow. Suburban women already tend to vote Democratic, so the nominee must make a special effort to appeal to men, whose vote fluctuates more than women’s in presidential elections and who have lately deserted the party in large numbers: men now prefer Republicans over Democrats by 19 percentage points.
Read the whole article. It’s got a lot of food for thought.
The Base Part II
Nick Confessore at TAPPED discusses the “bringing in new voters” meme and highlights some interesting information from an article (subscriber only) by John Harwood in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Granted, Dean laid out his swing voter strategy in the article I linked in my earlier post, but according to this article he is also saying in Iowa this week:
“We can’t beat George Bush with the same people who voted in 2000.The only way we can beat George Bush is by attracting people who have given up on politics.”
Now, I don’t have any beef with Dean saying this. It’s a big part of his appeal and his strategy. But, I confess that I’m always skeptical of any politicians ability to deliver on the claim because I went through those years in the 70’s and 80’s when Democrats often said it and it never turned out to be true. (In fact, just last fall, everyone including the candidate himself said that Schwarzenegger was going to pull a Jesse Ventura and bring in a bunch of new voters and that didn’t turn out to be true either. He won with an average turn-out of the usual suspects including the support of 20% self-professed liberal Democrats.)
However, that does not mean it isn’t true this time, so I’m keeping an open mind. As always, I’d like to believe it because … well, I’m a loyal Democrat and I’d genuinely like to see an influx of voters who have been turned off by politics in the past. Confessore doesn’t seem to think it’s likely and I have to admit that this excerpt from the WSJ piece doesn’t soothe my worries about this strategy:
There’s no doubt that rousing new enthusiasm in the country as a whole will prove more difficult for Mr. Dean than it has been in the nomination contest. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows greater Democratic sympathies for Mr. Dean among those who aren’t registered to vote than among those who are. But among all unregistered voters, there isn’t a greater propensity to vote for Mr. Dean — either in the Democratic race or in the general election.
In fact, those not registered are slightly more supportive of the Iraq war than Americans as a whole. So are younger voters, whom Mr. Dean has been counting on but who have rarely turned out in large numbers. An exception was Mr. Ventura’s third-party win. So far, “Dean is no Jesse Ventura” when it comes to drawing young voters, observes Robert Teeter, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with his Democratic counterpart Peter Hart.
Confessore adds:
Let’s recap. Democrats not registered to vote are slightly more pro-Dean, but the non-voting masses are not — in part, it would seem, because they are actually more pro-war than registered voters. So that doesn’t exactly net out to Dean’s benefit. And although you see a lot of media coverage about Dean’s capacity to excite young voters, that group isn’t exactly coming out in droves for the guy — again, probably in part because they are relatively pro-war.
Quick Answer
If anyone tries to claim, as the Wall Street Journal does today, that Wes Clark and Richard Perle were in agreement during their testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on September 26, 2002, just point them to this statement:
PERLE: “So I think General Clark simply doesn’t want to see us use military force and he has thrown out as many reasons as he can develop to that but the bottom line is he just doesn’t want to take action. He wants to wait.”
Update: The above comment is from the very same transcript.
The Base
I know I’m going to get royally flamed for posting this, and I’m sure I’ll regret ever thinking of it, but I was waiting for it to get circulated and it never did, so I guess it’s up to me.
By Susan Page
USA TodayFormer Vermont governor Howard Dean is leading in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, but a demographic portrait of the voters he’s drawing nationwide shows he’ll face major challenges when the opening contests are over and the Democratic field narrows.
An analysis of the Democratic electorate indicates that Dean’s major rivals are likely to be in a better position than he is to appeal to voters whose candidates drop out of the race.
And many of the contests next on the calendar are in states dominated by the sort of voters Dean has had relatively little success drawing, at least so far.
USA TODAY combined responses from 3,238 Democrats surveyed in the USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll since September, when retired general Wesley Clark got in the race. They were sorted into the 14 demographic groups devised by the marketing firm Claritas, which uses Census data to characterize Americans.
The contrast between Dean and Clark, who lead the field, is stark:
Dean’s support is disproportionately drawn from affluent, college-educated voters who live in big cities and their suburbs. His largest single group of supporters is called “Urban Uptown.”
He is weakest in a group called “Rustic Living,” a mix of young and old people who live in rural areas and small towns.
Clark’s support is the most balanced among the six major contenders, generally tracking the distribution of Democratic voters among cities, suburbs and rural areas. He draws strong support from a group called “Second City Society,” affluent, college-educated voters who live in medium-size cities. His single largest group of supporters is in “Rustic Living.”
The “Rustic Living” group looms large in the Democratic contests. It makes up the biggest bloc of Democratic voters, comprising one in 10 U.S. households but one in six Democrats. It is the greatest single source of support for Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
This is the first I’ve seen of any serious demographic analysis of the various candidates’ support. I’ve not seen the underlying data but assuming it is basically correct it validates the questions many of us have with Dean’s “turn out the base” strategy, since he doesn’t seem to be clicking quite yet even with Democrats outside of big cities. Maybe these “Rustic Living” Democrats who make up six in ten members of the party will vote ABB no matter what, but I don’t think that’s clear. More importantly, it’s not a very good way to deal with the electoral college challenge. Big turn out in blue state big cities simply isn’t going to get it done.
Dave over at Seeing the Forest linked to this comment by Dean in
US News and World Report about his “crank the base” strategy:
Though Dean did not enter the race with the expectations of winning, he did see a way to win. “Karl Rove [President Bush’s political guru] discovered it, too, but I discovered it independently,” Dean says and adds that the theory is embodied in the writings of George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley. “What you do is crank the heck out of your base, get them really excited and crank up the base turnout and you’ll win the middle-of-the-roaders,” Dean says. The reason, according to the theory, is that swing voters share the characteristics of both parties and eventually go with whatever party excites them the most. “Democrats appeal to them on their softer side–the safety net–but the Republicans appeal to them on the harder side–the discipline, the responsibility, and so forth,” Dean says. “So the question is which side appears to be energetic, deeply believing in its message, deeply committed to bringing a vision of hope to America. That side is the side that gets the swing voters and wins.”
I have expressed my doubts about the usefulness of Lakoff’s framing of the two parties for any kind of electoral strategy or message. It is simply a descriptive frame, and I think Dean aptly uses it here. However, I have absolutely no idea, and frankly neither does he, if this theory about swing voters is true. Certainly, it has not been true in the past.
In 1992, the Republican convention showcased a party of energy, one that deeply believed in its message and portrayed a strong vision of hope for America. Pat Buchanan made a case for taking the country back from the moral relativists who were ruining the country. It was much too strident and ended up sending swing voters running. I am not comparing Buchanan to Dean, so save your fury for someone else. I am merely pointing out that there is some evidence that Dean’s theory, at least sometimes, does not work.
Indeed, contrary to what Dean asserts in his comment, after the overt partisanship of that convention and the divisive leadership of Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove went in the opposite direction and ran George W. Bush as if he were a card carrying member of the NAACP and the ACLU. Apparently, they thought that being too “deeply believing in its message” was turning off voters. (Of course, he lost by half a million votes, so perhaps that theory doesn’t work either.)
So, maybe it is the message that counts with swing voters, after all. Or perhaps it’s a matter of cultural affinity or a “good feeling” for the candidate. I’m not sure anyone really knows what moves swing voters. Whatever the case, Dean’s theory cannnot be tested if he cannot stir the base beyond the big cities. The next two months will tell that tale.
I know that I will get some comments about Dean’s bringing in new voters and his organizational prowess. I am not dismissing that. However, as with the demographic data I referenced above, I have been waiting to see whether Dean is, in fact, bringing in new voters and whether his organization is, in fact, powerful. I’ve only heard campaign boasts and anecdotal evidence from his supporters that this is true. The press repeats it as if it were gospel, but I haven’t seen any actual evidence from them either. The proof is in the pudding and I presume that actual real life voters will confirm whether his campaign has broken new ground beyond its obvious success with fundraising and internet communication.
I hope that it has because gawd knows we Democrats need all the help we can get.
Bad Politics
Chris Suellentrop gives a rather tortured defense of his incomprehensible screed from the other day to which I won’t even bother to respond in detail.
I do take issue with his characterization of both Clark and Dean engaging in “bad politics” by making what he calls “impolitic” statements. Clearly, what Suellentrop knows about politics, bad or otherwise, could fit on the head of a pin.
Yes, both men have made impolitic statements, as have Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt and even(Gawd help me) George W. Bush. I would bet that every single candidate for office in the history of the world has made “impolitic” statements, and many of them won because of them. They give several speeches every single day and answer huge numbers of questions which are then poured over by smug, superior reporters who search for small niggling inconsistencies with which to Gore them. Fine. We all know that.
Suellentrop, from his perch atop Mt Olympus also apparently believes that each of the candidates are perceived in exactly the same way by the voters (as clowns, evidently, since that is how he sees them) so when they make these “impolitic” statements they are also received by the public in exactly the same way. This is ridiculous.
It is bad politics for Wesley Clark to make an “impolitic” statement about abortion because it reinforces the perception that he doesn’t know anything about women’s issues or the minefield of abortion politics in America. In the Democratic Party that is a BIG mistake. That comment plays to his weakness and is therefore, bad politics. On the other hand, when he makes an “impolitic” statement about national security it reinforces the idea that he is prepared to take on the conventional wisdom about George W. Bush on national defense. That plays to his strength.
When Howard Dean makes an “impolitic” statement about national security it reinforces the perception that he is inexperienced in an area that makes him vulnerable to George W. Bush. This is a big issue for Democrats. That comment plays to his weakness. On the other hand, when he makes an “impolitic” statement about his supporters being unwilling to back another candidate it reinforces his independence from the Democratic power structure. It plays to his strength.
These alleged impolitic statements aren’t made in a vaccuum. The candidates are a package of image, talents, experience, strengths and personality. The fact that they each may be making similar claims that sound “impolitic” to the ears of Chris Suellentrop does not mean that any of the the claims are wrong or that it is equally bad politics for all candidates to say them.
Frankly, I’m not really sure that journalists such as Suellentrop are in a position to guage what bad politics are in the first place. To completely butcher a great quote by Rebecca West, they seem to believe that Democrats practice bad politics whenever “they express sentiments that differentiate them from a doormat.”