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MEMO TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: How to Win On Foreign Policy in 2012

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Obama as Commander in Chief

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MEMO TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: How to Win On Foreign Policy in 2012

To: President Barack Obama
From: Jim Arkedis, Director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s National Security Project
RE: How to Win on Foreign Policy in 2012

Mr. President:

I hope and trust that you had better things to do than watch the GOP’s last two debates on foreign policy. I took care of that for you, and reread the transcripts just because I am a masochist.

It’s clear the Republican field is offering nothing new on foreign policy this election cycle, and that creates a real political opening. This memo serves as a guideline for how you can use the issue to your advantage on the campaign trail in 2012. In a nutshell, the public must see you as a stronger leader: Your numbers are hurting there right now, and you should trumpet your national security record to help them rebound. The trick is that if voters view you as a strong leader generally speaking, it will create a spill-over effect, bolstering their confidence in your leadership on domestic issues (read: the economy).

No matter who ends up as the Republican nominee for president, they’re not going to beat you on foreign policy substance. Most of the GOP candidates offer vague criticism that you’ve handled Iran badly, but can do no better than propose “crippling sanctions” as a solution, which are somehow better than the comprehensive ones you’ve enacted.

On areas where they actually differ with you, there still isn’t that much daylight: Michelle Bachmann tried to ding you for sending thirty, rather than forty, thousand troops to Afghanistan, and Rick Perry thinks that any withdrawal timeline from that country is a bad idea (even though Mitt Romney, in the second debate, basically agrees with your timeline for withdrawal). But you know that those are hardly winning arguments with the American public, 53 percent of whom would prefer to wash our collective hands of the whole mess. The GOP field (minus perennial laggard Rick Santorum) might get closer to broad (but confused) public sentiment to slash foreign aid, but on policy alone, this is probably their only opportunity to score political points.

The main conservative line of attack is stale, but potentially effective: They’re going to out-muscle you. I was absolutely shocked that no one critiqued you on “leading from behind” in the debate, but that phrase is sure to appear–on repeat–in ads before next November. But heck, you’ve even got Jon Huntsman — the guy you appointed to be our emissary to China — saying you “can’t lead”! It could erode the public’s confidence in your leadership abilities.

For now, the GOP seemed mostly content to insinuate this alleged weakness: Mitt Romney claimed that your re-election guarantees Iran will get a nuclear bomb; both he and Newt refuse to negotiate with terrorists (you do, in case you weren’t sure); and Herman Cain doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, which is why he’d use it. Most bizarre was Bachmann’s assertion in the first debate that America has lost the War On Terrorism under your watch. I wonder how Usama Bin Laden feels about that.

You’re no slouch when it comes to politicking, and you know that this election will be won and lost on each candidate’s ability to make a case for economic growth. It’s understandable that you might want to minimize foreign policy on the stump this year.

That’s a mistake, because your ability to make an economic case should be buoyed by your solid record on foreign and security policy. This might not be intuitive, so hear me out:

You killed Bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, helped oust Mohamar Qaddafi, have ended the Iraq war, and protected the country from a massive domestic attack. Voters have noticed: a November Gallup poll has your general foreign policy approval rating up five percent over disapproval, an astounding 63 percent support you on terrorism, and the numbers are good on handling Iraq and even Afghanistan.

More importantly, if you sell your foreign policy achievements in the right way, it will paint you as a strong leader. That’s critical: Americans want their president to project an image of strength, and you’re hurting there right now. Between May (when Usama Bin Laden was killed) and August, the percentage of Americans who viewed you as a strong leader slipped from 55 to 44 percent. Here’s the kicker: If you’re seen as a credible, effective Commander-in-Chief, voters are more likely to believe that your leadership can pull them out of the economic slump.

I realize that you’re not the type of guy who wants to pound the podium and out-flex your opponent. That’s okay. However, you still have to keep in mind that foreign policy is an emotional issue for voters, and that you have to connect with their gut subconscious before you can lead them elsewhere. Below, I offer four ways you can use foreign policy to increase your leadership credentials in 2012.

1. Explain your vision and your values. Having a good track record isn’t worth a damn if you don’t connect with voters. They’ve got to feel you on these issues. Even assuming the GOP nominee is the shape-shifting Mitt Romney, he’ll sell a consistent, militaristic vision of American exceptionalism that might resonate with America’s gut.

Don’t cede that ground, just tell your own version. You might not make a major foreign policy campaign address, but your stump speech absolutely must include your vision of America’s leading place in the world in the 21st century. It doesn’t have to be “rah-rah”. It does have to be convey some emotion using two frames: “strong and smart.”

Explain that you know that the threats facing America have changed since the end of the Cold War, and we must rise to meet the challenge. That requires strong American leadership, complemented by strong alliances and backed the world’s strongest military.

But it also requires a laser-focus on the long term: American strength in the 21st century means being smart, too. Safety at home is enhanced by spreading American values abroad, and that requires more robust diplomacy to expand economic and political opportunity for all. That’s a great way to connect on the economy, too: Economic strength is what drives American power, and that means we need to out-innovate, out-produce, and out-think our challenges.

2. Tell a us a story (often). Specifically, tell us the story of how you decided to send SEAL Team Six to kill Bin Laden. Voters remember stories, not policies. So give them the best you got, because it will reinforce your image as a substantive Commander-in-Chief. You could recount the version you gave CBS’ 60 Minutes in May. It doesn’t have to be overly dramatic: just calmly recount the facts and remember that details are good. The story sells itself, and shows America that you made a bold, gutsy, strong decision. Most importantly, the country, not your administration, was successful.

3. Use military veterans as surrogates: Your campaign should have the most robust veterans surrogate network in the history of American politics. In an age when Congressional approval languishes in the single digits (and yours are in the 40s), guess who the public believes? The military. A September 2011 poll reinforces a standing trend: 92 percent of Americans are confident in the military and hence, its veterans.

Remember the Swiftboat Veterans who sunk John Kerry’s campaign? They tipped the balance because they were credible messengers. This year, you’ve got to get out ahead of the game. A few days ago, I received a campaign-sponsored email from Rob Diamond, who runs “Veterans and Military Families for Obama” (full disclosure: Rob is a friend). You need to give him every resource he asks for because he needs to pack cable news, campaign rallies, and small-town newspapers in military-heavy swing-states like Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado with veterans supporting you as the Commander-in-Chief they were proud to serve.

4. Attack Republicans as reckless. You have to make the public’s decision on national security a binary choice. If you’re to be a strong leader and a tough, competent Commander-in-Chief, you need to define (presumptively) Mitt Romney is reckless and out-of-touch. A poll from back in 2008 found this to be an effective attack against Republicans on foreign policy, and I sense that it would continue to work in 2012.

Why? Well, Romney’s rhetoric isn’t that different from George W. Bush’s. In an October speech at the Citadel, Romney promised to reverse proposed defense cuts, resurrect the neocon missile-defense shield, and build six more navy ships per year, even though America’s wars are coming to a close and the country faces a massive debt issue. Does that sound smart, efficient and strong in the 21st century, or does it echo the reckless George Bush, a playground bully who fights but doesn’t think and remains stuck in the Cold War?

Mr. President, it’s going to be a tough election. But used correctly, you can turn a solid record on matters of foreign policy and national security into a real asset this year, and just maybe tip the balance in a few key states. And how’s this for a bonus? The GOP isn’t expecting that you’d dare try.

If you’ve read this far, you might follow me on Twitter @JimArkedis

Photo credit here.

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Wingnut Watch: The Tea Party Celebrates Tax Day

Monday, April 18th, 2011
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

The Tax Day (or more accurately, Tax Weekend) observances of the Tea Party movement weren’t as large or well-publicized as in the past, but they did reflect the hardening consensus of conservative activists against both the appropriations deal just agreed to by congressional Republicans, and the coming legislation increasing the public debt limit. This consensus is being reinforced by potential presidential candidates and other opinion leaders who are encouraging the perception that the Beltway GOP is once again “selling out” the conservative movement and its latest Tea Party incarnation.

This snapshot of the mood at New Hampshire Tea Party events by Michael Crowley is illustrative:

The overall picture is one of a restless Republican base that sees defeating Obama as a matter of national survival. Angry conservatives believe Washington is spending the country into oblivion, and that lazy freeloaders are leeching federal money at the expense of ever more squeezed middle-class taxpayers. They also feel that the Washington game is rigged against them: “We’re constantly being lied to,” fumed Dan Dwyer of Nashua at a local GOP confab on Thursday night, still angry that Republicans had “caved” in their budget negotiations with Democrats earlier this month.

At a Wisconsin Tea Party rally, anger at congressional Republicans was fed by none other than Sarah Palin, who “unleashed a withering critique of congressional Republicans Saturday, lambasting them for not cutting spending deeper and faster, and saying the party needs to ‘fight like a girl.’”  Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, who spoke at a number of Tea Party events, has been urging Republicans to oppose a debt limit increase on the questionable grounds that arrangements could be made to avoid a federal credit default until the autumn.

The superficially confusing aspect of this rhetoric is that the conservatives who are being most vocal about the dire nature of the deficit-and-debt emergency are precisely the same people who are fearful that congressional Republicans might cut some long-term budget deal with Senate Democrats and the administration that leaves increased taxes on the wealthy on the table.  That’s why they are linking any approval of a debt limit increase not just to some deficit agreement, but to acceptance of the kind of deep spending cuts and “entitlement reforms” laid out in Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.

Accordingly, we will soon see Tea Party fire concentrate on those Senate Republicans said to be negotiating a deal that would include some tax increases.  The Republican point man in the so-called “Gang of Six” of bipartisan senators engaged in these negotiations, Saxby Chambliss of GA, is already drawing unfriendly home-state fire from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who had this to say today:

Senate Republicans are going to support raising the debt ceiling and raising taxes all while refusing to demand passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment. House Republican Leaders will no doubt decide that . . . well . . . Republicans only control one house of one branch of government so . . . .

Bend over America.

This conflict will soon make it more obvious than ever that most conservative activists, including those identified with the Tea Party Movement, are less concerned with deficit reduction than with permanently shrinking the size and reach of the federal government and pushing both radical spending cuts and continued tax cuts.

On another front, there are growing signs that Republican elites have decided to give Donald Trump the same dismissive treatment that was said to have led to Sarah Palin’s steady decline in credibility as a potential presidential candidate.  Over the weekend, Karl Rove called Trump a “joke candidate.” Playing his snooty Tory role, George Will called The Donald a “blatherskite,” and warned he could seriously screw up Republican presidential candidate debates.  Slate’s Dave Weigel went to the trouble of reading Trump’s 2000 proto-campaign book, and noticed that Trump expressed a fondness for the Canadian single-payer health care system.  Surfing off that disclosure, the Club for Growth put out a release calling Trump a “liberal.”

It’s almost certain that this offensive was stimulated by the Public Policy Polling survey of Republicans that was released on Friday showing Trump jumping out into a sizable national lead over the rest of the potential presidential field.  Trump’s 26 percent is higher than any proto-candidate has registered in early national polls.  And the internals, showing 23 percent of Republicans saying that could not vote for a candidate who believes Barack Obama was born in the United States (and another 39 percent saying they weren’t sure if they could or not), were probably terrifying to beltway GOPers.

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No Trump

Monday, April 18th, 2011
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Eventually, even billionaires grow bored with making money and look for more meaningful pursuits. For Bill Gates, it’s fighting disease in Africa; for George Soros, it’s kindling civic freedom in closed societies. To find Donald Trump, you have to slide considerably further down the social utility scale, to reality TV and, now, tea party demagoguery.

Is Trump a serious candidate? That’s an easy one: No. If he runs it will be to provide comic relief, which may be superfluous given the Republican Party’s already motley collection of odd, extreme and improbable presidential aspirants.

A tougher question: are Republicans a serious political party? That America’s vulgarian-in-chief can so easily vault to the top of early polling suggests a fatal GOP weakness for noisy celebrity over political substance.

Continue reading at Politico

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Extremism In the Name of Liberty

Monday, December 6th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Those who think it’s some sort of partisan exaggeration to say that today’s Republican Party has moved into some pretty extreme ideological territory should pay some attention to the latest conservative craze in state capitols and even in Washington: the so-called Repeal Amendment.

The bright idea here is to amend the U.S. Constitution–if necessary by a state-called Constitutional Convention–to allow two-thirds of state legislatures to nullify federal legislation whenever it pleases them.

Here’s how Dahlia Lithwick and Jeff Sesol of Slate characterize the Repeal Amendment:

There is so much wrong with the Repeal Amendment that it’s difficult to know how to begin to respond. The Constitution is–by design–a nationalist document. It is also–again by design–an anti-democratic document. American history reveals precisely what happens when state or regional interests are allowed to trump national ones, and the Constitution has been at its best (for example, the Reconstruction Amendments) when it has addressed (and, better yet, resolved) that tension.

They don’t even get into the potential issues with a constitutional convention, which according to some scholars, cannot be limited to any one issue and could fundamentally rewrite the Constitution.

But crazy as it is, the Repeal Amendment is getting some real momentum, not least because it’s been embraced by the number two Republican in the U.S. House, Eric Cantor:

[J]ust two months after the proposal was a twinkle in a Virginia legislator’s eye, the leadership of nine states is showing interest, and the popularity of the amendment’s Web site (they have them nowadays) has “mushroomed.” And this week, completing the proposal’s rapid march from the margins to the mainstream, Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah introduced the amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, pledging to put “an arrow in the quiver of states.” The soon-to-be House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, said this week that “the Repeal Amendment would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach, and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around.” Fawning editorials in the Wall Street Journal and chest-heaving Fox News interviews quickly followed.

This is just nuts, and defenders of the sweet reasonableness of the GOP need to acknowledge it.

This article is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Kim Davies

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A Deficit of Common Sense

Thursday, November 18th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

‘Tis the season for deficit commissions. The past week has brought not one, not two, but three stabs at solving America’s looming fiscal crisis. And just yesterday, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion on “The Politics of Entitlement Reform and the Budget Deficit,” featuring a murderers’ row of budget experts across the ideological spectrum. All the activity underscores just how much concerns about the deficit have taken over the Washington conversation.

But will all that hand-wringing lead to anything concrete and enduring? I have my doubts. The substantive merits and faults of the plans aside, what’s striking is, frankly, how unlikely any action seems to be.

Too pessimistic? Perhaps. But at the Brookings event, there was a subterranean motif that tempered any enthusiasm one might have for any ideas put forward. Isabel Sawhill, director of Brookings’ Budgeting and National Priorities project, at one point said, “The public is in denial about the scope of the problem.” Meanwhile, Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute sounded another note of consternation: “Both political parties are afraid to ask the middle class to do anything.”

There, neatly stated, are two fundamental problems that stand in the way of fiscal balance: a public in denial, a politics in retreat. Simply put, the American public simply has no idea how much the government that they like to have around costs. They may profess to hate big government, but ask about cuts to the entitlement programs – by far the largest contributors to our long-term deficit – and what do they say? Hands off! Even 62 percent of Tea Partiers say that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost of the programs; the general public is even more supportive, at 76 percent.

Recent research by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler underscores the disconnect between the kind of government Americans say they want and the government they actually use. In a recent paper that takes a look at Americans’ relationship with the “submerged state” – federal policies that incentivize and subsidize behavior by individuals – Mettler found that most Americans have little awareness of how the state affects their lives. Most alarming were the results of a survey of program beneficiaries who were asked if they had ever used a government program. Forty-four percent of those collecting Social Security retirement and survival benefits said no; 43 percent who had benefited from unemployment insurance said no; nearly 40 percent of Medicare said no. There’s more: 47 percent who took home earned income tax credit said no; 53 percent of those who took Pell Grants said no; and 60 percent who benefited from the home mortgage interest deduction said no.

So the governed don’t know. What about those who govern? Alas, our political elite seems to have lost all sense of responsibility at steering the ship of state to calmer waters. The fault lies mainly with the right. Yes, Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that Social Security and Medicare cuts are off-limits is easily caricatured as liberalism at its worst, but let’s face it – Pelosi faces a lot of opposition on her side on that front. There is a genuine debate going on under the big progressive tent about just how much entitlements should be touched, if at all, and it’s testimony to the vibrancy – and fractiousness – of progressivism.

Contrast that with the right, which has become an all-tax-cut, all-the-time movement. Grover Norquist, in whose image today’s Republican Party has been modeled, dismissed the Bowles-Simpson report, with his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, calling it “a plan to raise taxes cloaked in the veil of bipartisanship” – this in response to a plan that, by any objective measure, by far does more on the spending side than the revenue side. If their starting point is no revenue increases at all, then the right has all but written the obituary on any attempt to narrow the budget gap.

So there you have: a failure of government, a failure of the governed. Until the American public begins to accept responsibility for the current fiscal straits – and it begins by asking serious questions about what they’d like to see from government and how much they’re willing to pay for it – there really is little hope that we’ll see movement on the issue. Meanwhile, the only institution that can give them that nudge, our political class, isn’t up to the task.

When asked about the worst-case scenario that would finally force policy-makers’ hand to do something, Brookings’ Henry Aaron had a one-word response: “Greece.” Americans may profess to hate European-style states, but the disconnect between their hatred of taxes and love of benefits may well hasten the day of a European-style collapse.

Photo credit: nflravens

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The Tea Party is the GOP’s Problem

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Among the many midterm imponderables is this: will the Tea Party have as big an impact on the election as it’s had on the chattering class?

The media obsession with the Tea Party has made it the big political story of the year.  Fox News helped to midwife and validate it, and liberal commentators seem equally fixated on the phenomena, which they view with a mixture of dread and envy. They are forever dreaming of populist uprisings, and when it actually happens, it’s on the wrong end of the ideological spectrum!

But is the Tea Party really a new and genuinely independent expression of conservative populism, or is it something more familiar – the right wing of the Republican Party? A study released yesterday sheds some interesting light on the question.

It’s called Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election, by Robert Jones and Daniel Cox of the Public Religion Research Institute. The study confirms much of what is already known about the Tea Party – its members are generally white, older, more affluent and more male than the population at large. They are very conservative, and as we all know, they have a gimlet-eyed view of government.

But the report also purports to correct some common misconceptions about the movement. Some key findings:

  • One in 11 voters describe themselves as a Tea Party member. That’s a lot, but hardly an irresistible force in America politics. As Jones and Cox note, it’s only half the percentage of voters who identify themselves as Christian conservatives.
  • Despite Dick Armey’s opportunistic attempts to get to the head of the Tea Party parade, the movement is more socially conservative than libertarian, at least on social issues. Its members, for example, are strongly opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
  • Nearly half (47 percent) say they are also part of the religious right, a key GOP constituency that supposedly has gone to ground in recent years.
  • Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly partisan Republicans. Most (76) say they lean Republican and over 80 percent say they plan to vote for GOP candidates in their districts.

This last point is offered as upending conventional wisdom, but it shouldn’t be. Many commentators, including PPI’s own Ed Kilgore, have pointed to the basic compatibility of Tea Party attitudes with those of hard-core GOP conservatives. In backing challenges to GOP moderates, in fact, the Tea Party looks like a looking glass version of the “netroots” progressives who backed Howard Dean in 2004 and Ned Lamont’s primary challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman.

There are some distinctly new flavors in the Tea Party brew, of course. One is an antic Constitutional fundamentalism that yearns to roll back amendments providing for the direct election of Senators and the progressive income tax. And the Tea Party’s decentralized, headless nature means its members really don’t take orders from the GOP hierarchy.

But in general, Tea Partiers look like GOP conservatives, only more so. Not surprisingly, they are disproportionally from the South, the GOP’s geographical and ideological bastion.

So maybe progressives shouldn’t worry too much about the movement. Ultimately, the Tea Party is a Republican, not Democratic, problem. Yes, its members are energized to vote and will turn out in droves in November. But they are also divisive, polarizing and, often, downright weird (Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell) or borderline psychotic (New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino).

If Democrats do as badly as everyone seems to expect in the midterm, it won’t be because of the Tea Party. It will be because independent voters, who put Barak Obama solidly over the top in 2008, have defected to Republican candidates to protest joblessness and the sluggish recovery. Meanwhile, Tea Party passions are pushing Republicans to the nether fringe of conservativism, leaving an abandoned center for progressives to recapture after the election.

Photo credit:  bvcphoto

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The West: Bellwether for the Mid-Term Elections?

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

With five weeks to go until Election Day, the national political environment seems to have stabilized enough to conduct some regional analysis of what’s likely to happen on November 2.  Let’s start today with the West, where highly competitive gubernatorial and Senate contests are occurring in at least seven states.

Much of the Pacific Coast seems relatively impervious to the Tea Party movement.  In California, hard-core conservative activist Chuck DeVore finished a relatively poor third in the Republican Senate primary, and gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, who tried to run to the right of Meg Whitman, was beaten badly.  Conservatives could not even mount a strong challenge to the much-derided RINO, Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado.  In Washington state, another TP favorite, former pro football player Clint Didier, barely broke double figure percentages in a Senate Republican primary challenge to Dino Rossi.  And in the same state, one of the more moderate new House candidates in the country, Jaime Herrera, won her primary easily.  Alaska, of course, is the exception on the coast, since its long-powerful conservative movement knocked off Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate in the general election.

In any event, Republicans have at best mixed prospects for major gains on the Pacific coast.  In CA, recent polls have given Barbara Boxer a significant lead over Carly Fiorina for the Senate seat, and despite Meg Whitman’s unprecedented spending, Jerry Brown is at worst tied with her as he begins his own media campaign in the governor’s race.  Republicans have a realistic shot at just one Democratic House seat in California, and Democrats are sure to hang onto control of both chambers in the state legislature.

In Washington state, Patty Murray appears to be opening up a modest but consistent lead over Rossi, who led her in some early polls.  While Herrera has a good shot at picking up an open Democratic House seat, only one incumbent Democrat, Rick Hansen, seems to be in jeopardy.  In Oregon, former Gov. John Kitzhaber is in a close race with Republican Chris Dudley for the governorship.

In Hawaii, Democrats have a better than even chance of flipping control of the governorship, with former congressman Neil Abercrombie a solid favorite over Lt. Gov. Duke Aoina, and of retaking Abercrombie’s House seat, which was lost in a special election earlier this year thanks to multiple Democratic candidates.

In Alaska, Democratic Senate candidate Scott McAdams remains underfunded and little-known; his fate almost certainly depends on the viability of Murkowski’s write-in campaign down the stretch.

Moving eastward from the Pacific, Colorado is another hotly disputed state.  Tea Party favorite Ken Buck has been leading Sen. Michael Bennet in early general election polls, but this race is likely to tighten up.  John Hickenlooper is almost certain to hold the governorship for Democrats thanks to the conservative split between Republican nominee Don Maes and former congressman Tom Tancredo, who is running on the Constitution Party ballot.   Republicans think they have a shot at taking two Democratic House seats, though their best chance is against freshman congresswoman Betsy Markey.   Turning south to New Mexico, Republican gubernatorial candidate Susana Martinez has recently taken a steady lead in the polls against Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, who once looked invincible, and two Democratic House members, Harry Teague and Martin Heinrich, in some peril.  In Arizona, Sen. John McCain and Gov. Jan Brewer look safe to hold onto their seats for the GOP, and though Republicans have visions of picking up as many as three House seats, all three Democrats—Gabby Giffords, Anne Kirkpatrick and Harry Mitchell, are in reasonably strong condition.

Finally, in Nevada, one of the top national races looks almost certain to go right down to the wire, with Sen. Harry Reid and Tea Party champion Sharron Angle running neck and neck in virtually every post-primary poll.  Reid would probably be doomed against any other Republican opponent, but Angle’s long history of eccentric issue positions has given him a new lease on life.

All in all, the West could prove to be a national bellwether. A true Republican tsunami in the region could produce a net gain of four Senate seats (Washington, California, Colorado and Nevada), two governorships (Oregon and New Mexico), and nine House seats.  On the other hand, a stronger-than-expected Democratic performance could keep Republicans from gaining any net Senate seats, and could actually give Democrats a net gain of one gubernatorial seat (Wyoming looks to be a certain Republican gubernatorial pickup, but that could be offset by a Jerry Brown win in California and an Abercrombie win in Hawaii). None of the Western House races in which Republicans now look strong is a slam-dunk.

One regional factor that use to bedevil strategists is now of declining importance: the hope or fear that early returns from the eastern and central times zones could influence final turnout in very close races.  That’s because voting by mail is increasingly important in the West, with all ballots in OR and WA; most in Colorado; and over half in California, now being cast by mail.  The dominance of voting by mail will also significantly limit the impact of very late campaign activity in many states.  If Meg Whitman’s going to hit her target of spending $150 million in personal funds in the CA gubernatorial race, she’ll probably hit it well before November 2.

Photo credit: Michael R. Swigart

Arizona

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Will the Republican Pledge Backfire?

Friday, September 24th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

As the battle for November continued to unfold this week, House Republicans unveiled their long-awaited, long-debated version of the 1994 classic Contract With America.  This one was called the Pledge to America.

In figuring out where to fall between cautious national GOP figures who basically would like to overturn the 2006 and 2008 elections and bring back the splendors of the Bush administration, and the elements of the conservative base, radicalized into the Tea Party Movement, who would like to turn back the clock quite a few decades further, the authors of the Pledge struck an interesting balance.  The Preamble and Forward of the document are full of fiery Tea Party rhetoric suggesting the illegitimacy of the Obama administration and the need for a radical restructuring of the federal government and the immediate abolition of deficits and debt.

But when the Pledge gets into is specifics, it immediately retreats into limited demands for total repeal of the Obama administration’s initiatives, along with a return to Bush tax and economic policies, and notably abandons the fiscal radicalism that so many Republican candidates this year are campaigning on.  There’s no balanced budget promise; no endorsement, even, of a constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment (now, as once before, boilerplate for GOP candidates); and certainly no mention of plans to take on major structural reforms, much less phase-outs, of Social Security and Medicare.

Indeed, the Pledge gives the impression that if the clock could be turned back to August of 2008, before the enactment of TARP, everything would be fine.  It will be most interesting to see how that approach squares with candidates and activists who think a return to 1933 is the only possible solution.

The Pledge does create a sort of whack-a-mole problem for Democrats seeking to exploit it.  Do they focus on the radical rhetoric that suggests a willingness to go after the basic New Deal/Great Society safety net?  Or do they focus on the details that suggest a more modest but equally vulnerable determination to bring back the policies that voters repudiated in 2006 and 2008?

In any event, the very existence of the Pledge offers some hope for Democrats struggling to make the midterm elections something other than a straight-up referendum on the status quo.  Under Republican governance, they will be able to argue, things could get worse, unless you really do pine for the salad days of 2006 or 1933.

The other big political development this week, which is still unfolding, is the decision by Senate Democrats against taking the lead on extending middle-class tax cuts and forcing Republicans to champion the extension of upper-class tax cuts, at least until after November.  There is still a chance the House will move first, but it’s unlikely given vocal Blue Dog opposition, and the decision is being widely derided as evidence of Democratic over-cautiousness, if not surrender, going into the midterms.  It’s an issue that will likely come up, however, in a lame duck congressional session after the elections, though with Republicans, who want to make all the Bush tax cuts permanent, holding a stronger hand.

There’s been some craziness in the polls this week, most notably a Quinnipiac survey showing the very off-the-wall Republican nominee for governor of New York, Carl Paladino, suddenly closing to double-digits against prohibitive Democratic front-runner Andrew Cuomo.   The Q-poll did not exactly reinforce its credibility by then releasing a survey showing another lowly-regarded Republican, Joe DioGuardi, trailing Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, by just six percent (Siena, meanwhile, had Cuomo up by 33percent and Gillibrand up by 26percent).

Most survey results this week were more conventional.  Mason-Dixon showed Democrat Alex Sink with a 47-40 lead over Republican Rick Scott among likely voters in Florida.  The respected Field Poll, also moving to a likely voter model, showed a dead heat between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman in the California gubernatorial race.  And a new national Pew poll showed an unusually large 10-point swing in the GOP’s favor between registered voters and likely voters—though interpretations of such results as reflecting an “enthusiasm gap” often ignore the structural reasons for a Republican advantage in midterm elections.

Finally, Google has come up with a very useful series of maps comparing some of the most credible handicappers’ projections of Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections.

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Lashed to the Mast

Monday, September 20th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Weeks before the November elections, leaders of the Republican Party’s increasingly dominant right wing are spending nearly as much time fretting over the potential squeamishness of their own party about implementing a radical agenda as they are ensuring they get the opportunity to enact one.

In a CNN interview yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint, the one-time kooky loner who’s now a Very Big Dog in the GOP, said the GOP would be “dead” if it didn’t keep its promises to repeal health care reform, balance the federal budget and radically reduce spending. Remember he’s the guy who thinks Social Security and Medicare have ensnared Americans in socialism, and likes to call public schools “government schools.”

Another fringe figure who’s suddenly become very relevant, congressman Steve King of Iowa, is frantic in his fears that a Republican House would fail to shut down the government as part of a strategy to repeal health reform. Indeed, he’s asking would-be Speaker John Boehner to sign a “blood oath” to include a health reform repeal in every single appropriations bill, which would have the effect of shutting down the government, just as Republicans tried to do, unsuccessfully, in 1995, in order to impose a budget on Bill Clinton.

This is a sideshow well worth watching. People like DeMint and King are trying to lash their fellow Republicans to the mast of their ship and make them immune to the siren song of the massive popularity of the public programs and commitments they aim to attack: Medicare, Social Security, federal support for educational opportunity, environmental protection, and on and on. It’s an interesting approach on the brink of what many expect to be a big Republican electoral victory, and says a lot about the gap between what Republicans are campaigning on and how they actually intend to govern when in office.

This piece is cross-posted at the Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Mark Hyre

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

It’s Time To Unmask the Republican Agenda

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

With the arrival of Labor Day, and the end of Vacation Time for Americans lucky enough to have jobs with benefits, the options for changing the dynamics of the midterm elections have gradually but steadily narrowed. Significant external events could still happen, but probably won’t; the economy is not going to turn around between now and November 2.

Moreover, the opportunity to engineer a basic sea change in public opinion on the Obama’s administration’s agenda is probably past for the time being. Much as the White House’s earlier efforts to convince people that the economy would be far worse without unpopular market interventions made sense, basic judgments have been made by most persuadable voters. The same is true of health reform; the legislation’s beneficial effects will have to kick in before it gets a fresh trial in the court of public opinion.

What Democrats can — and must — do more of during the shank of the campaign season is to challenge Republicans to disclose their own agenda for the country, and draw greater attention to the extremist logic of where Republican positions of current events would lead. The vast majority of all Democratic messaging in the next two months needs to relentlessly focus on this single topic.

This is obviously easier in the case of Republican nominees such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller, who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. But many other Republicans are demanding elimination of any federal role in education, energy environmental protection or agriculture, and virtually the entire party is reflexively opposing regulations on a wide variety of subjects where corporate misbehavior has had a devastating effect on the national interest and middle-class Americans individually.

Even those GOP elected officials and candidates who have been careful to avoid such specific positions have accepted the party-wide argument that federal budget deficits must be immediately reduced if not eliminated even as new tax cuts for high-earners and corporations are provided and the defense budget is protected (if not expanded via a new war with Iran which many Republicans have been agitating in favor of for years now). By any sort of math, the Republican agenda means massive steps to eliminate regulations and scale back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other basic safety net programs.

Democrats need to hammer away at these general and particular implications of the GOP agenda every day and in every competitive contest across the country.

To those who argue that this sort of “negative” campaigning would represent an effort to change the subject from its own performance in office, Democrats must respond: it’s Republicans who are trying to change the subject from a proper comparison of the agendas of the two parties and of individual candidates.

There’s no secret about the Democratic agenda; the administration and the congressional Democratic leadership have been trying to implement it since January of 2009, against the active obstruction of the GOP, which is using every dilatory tactic, most notably unprecedented threats to use Senate filibusters. The public deserves to know exactly what the Republican Party will propose if it gains control of either House of Congress.

At this late date, such a “negative” campaign by Democrats is the right thing to do, and perhaps the only thing to do that can simultaneously persuade swing voters and motivate a high turnout by Democrats. Waiting until next year to force the hand of Republicans is both irresponsible and politically feckless.

However much conservatives and many elements of the media insist the midterm elections are a “referendum” on the Obama administration or this or that Democratic initiative, they cannot wish away the fact that every contest that will decide control of Congress or of state and local governments involves a choice between a Democrat and a Republican–with the former being held strictly responsible for every discontent with the status quo, and the latter free to demagogue and make vague or wild promises without immediate consequences.

Every Democrat reading these words knows the sort of extremist and very unpopular agenda the GOP will be forced to advance in the very near future by its own loose rhetoric, the logic of its conflicting promises, and the growing radicalism of its cadre of politicians. It’s time to tell the country about it right now.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Tim Bradshaw’s photostream

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics, Issues | 1 Comment »

Tea Bags, Wind Bags and Moneybags

Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

So let’s say you’re a Republican politician who’s been working the far right side of the political highway for years, getting little national attention other than the occasional shout-out in Human Events. Or let’s say you’re a sketchy business buccaneer with a few million smackers burning a hole in your pocket, and you’ve decided that you’d like to live in the governor’s mansion for a while, but you can’t get the local GOP to see you as anything more than a walking checkbook who funds other people’s dreams.

What do you do? That’s easy: Get yourself in front of the loudest parade in town by becoming a Tea Party Activist!

There has been incessant discussion over the last year about the size, character, and intentions of the Tea Party rank-and-file. But, by and large, the political discussion has passed over another defining phenomenon: The beatific capacity of Tea Party membership, which enables virtually anyone with ambition to whitewash his hackishness—and transform from a has-been or huckster into an idealist on a crusade.

After all, to become a “Tea Party favorite” or a “Tea Party loyalist,” all a politician has to do is say that he or she is one—and maybe grab an endorsement from one of many hundreds of local groups around the country. It’s even possible to become indentified as the “Tea Party” candidate simply by entering a primary against a Republican who voted for TARP, the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, or No Child Left Behind. It’s not like there’s much upside to distancing oneself from the movement. Most Republican pols are as friendly as can be to the Tea Party; and it’s a rare, self-destructive elephant who would emulate Lindsey Graham’s dismissal of it all as a passing fad (in public at least).

Here, we’ll take a look at two specific types of politicians who have been especially eager to embrace the Tea Party movement: the fringier of conservative ideologues, for one, and also the self-funded ego freaks who can easily pose as “outsiders,” because no “insiders” would take them seriously. Let’s call these, respectively, the windbags and the moneybags.

By “fringier” conservative ideologues, I mean those who have argued, year in and year out, sometimes for decades, that even the conservative Republican Party simply is not conservative enough. Many of these politicians would be considered washed-up and isolated, or at least eccentric, in an era when “Party Wrecking” was still treated as a cardinal GOP sin. But now it’s as if they’ve been granted a license to kill. One classic example of this type is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who was considered such a crank in the Senate that he was often stuck eating lunch alone as recently as 2008. His views, for example that Social Security and public schools are symbols of the seduction of Americans by socialism, were not long ago considered far outside the GOP mainstream. Now, in no small part because of his identification with the Tea Party Movement, DeMint has become an avenging angel roaming across the country to smite RINOs in Republican primaries, his imprimatur sought by candidates far from the Palmetto State.

Then there’s the new House Tea Party Caucus, chaired by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, best known for suggesting that House Democrats be investigated for treason. Its members include a rich assortment of long-time conservative cranks, including Steve (“Racial profiling is an important part of law enforcement”) King, Joe (“You lie!”) Wilson, Paul (“We’ve elected a Marxist to be President of the United States”) Broun, Dan (Vince Foster Was Murdered!) Burton, and Phil (National Journal’s Most Conservative House Member in 2007) Gingrey. The key here is that these are not freshly minted “outsiders”: Burton has been in Congress for 28 years, Wilson for ten, King and Gingrey for eight. The oldest member of the House, Ralph Hall of Texas, who has been around for 30 years, is also a member of the caucus.

Even some of the younger Tea Party firebrands didn’t exactly emerge from their living rooms on April 15, 2009, to battle the stimulus legislation and Obamacare. Marco Rubio of Florida, after all, was first elected to the state legislature ten years ago and served as House Speaker under the protective wing of his political godfather, Jeb Bush. Sharron Angle first ran for office 20 years ago, and was elected to the Nevada legislature twelve years back. And of course the Pauls, father and son, are hardly political neophytes—they have just begun to look relevant again because the Tea Party movement has shifted the GOP in their direction.

And, in addition to the hard-right pols who’ve emerged into the sunshine of GOP respectability, the “outsider” meme surrounding the Tea Party movement has also created running room for well-funded opportunists—the “moneybags.”

These are epitomized by Rick Scott of Florida, who probably would not have passed the most rudimentary smell test in a “normal” election year. While there are always self-funding egomaniacs running for office—California’s Meg Whitman comes to mind along with Connecticut’s Linda McMahon—the former hospital executive presents a unique test case for the whitewashing power of Tea Party identification. He has managed to overcome a deeply embarrassing embroilment in the largest Medicare fraud case in history by taking his golden parachute from Columbia-HCA and becoming a right-wing crusader against health care reform, helping to make that a central cause for the Tea Party movement. (Scott was forced out of his position as head of the for-profit hospital chain, which he tried to build into the “McDonald’s of health care,” and the organization was fined $1.7 billion for overcharging the federal government.)

Pushed out of his job after the fraud decision, Scott decided to found the Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR) group that exploded onto the national scene early in 2009 with a series of inflammatory TV ads attacking health reform, employing the same firm that crafted the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth spots against John Kerry in 2004. CPR also played a major role in organizing the town hall meeting protests in the summer of 2009, which marked the Tea Party movement’s transition from a focus on TARP and the economic stimulus bill to a broader conservative agenda.

So when Scott (a Missouri native who moved to Florida in 2003) suddenly jumped into the Florda governor’s race early in 2010, the cleansing power of tea had already transformed his image among conservatives, making his improbable campaign possible.

On the wrong side of this dynamic was Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, a former congressman and sturdy, if conventional, conservative who had paid his dues by twice running unsuccessfully for the Senate. McCollum had apparently all but locked up the nomination when Scott, in mid-April, leapt into the ring with ads calling himself a “conservative outsider” who would “run our state like a business,” while tarring McCollum as the candidate of “Tallahassee insiders” responsible for “the failed policies of the past.” Then came a torrent of advertising from Scott ($22 million by mid-July, more than anyone’s ever spent in Florida in an entire primary/general-election cycle) blasting McCollum for alleged corruption, for insufficient hostility toward illegal immigration, for being soft on abortion providers. The assault voided a lifetime of McCollum’s toil in the party vineyards, vaulting the previously unknown Scott into the lead in polls by early June. Worse yet, from a Republican point of view, Scott drove up McCollum’s negatives, and increasingly his own, to toxic levels, handing Democrat Alex Sink the lead in a July general election poll. And now McCollum, fighting for his life, is striking back, drawing as much publicity as he can to Scott’s questionable past, especially the Medicare fraud case against Columbia-HCA.

So the question is: Would Rick Scott have been in a position to carry out what is beginning to look like a murder-suicide pact on the GOP’s gubernatorial prospects if he hadn’t been able to identify himself as an “outsider conservative” with close ties to the Tea Party? That’s not likely, but it’s no less likely than the remarkable epiphanies that have made career pols of marginal relevance such as Jim DeMint and Sharron Angle into apostles of an exciting new citizens’ movement. So the next time you hear a candidate posturing on behalf of the Tea Party, squint and try to imagine what they were like in their former lives. Many of them have only found respectability through the healing power of tea.

This item is cross-posted at The New Republic.

Photo Credit: Hatters!’s Photostream

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

Primary Day in Oklahoma

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

If it’s Tuesday, there must be another primary election, and today’s is in Oklahoma, where both parties are holding gubernatorial primaries, and there are a couple of congressional contests of interest.

I’ve got a preview up at FiveThirtyEight for those who want a serious run-down. The bottom line is that Attorney General Drew Edmondson is favored to defeat Lt. Gov. Jari Askins for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, in what’s been a very civil contest; while Rep. Mary Fallin is almost certain to defeat Tea Party advocate Randy Brogdon for the GOP nod. Meanwhile, Blue Dog Dan Boren will turn back an underfunded progressive primary challenge, and Republicans will go to runoffs in his district and in Fallin’s.

Oklahoma’s one of those states with a pretty hardy Democratic tradition (registered Dems still outnumber registered Republicans) that’s been trending Red for some time. Hanging onto the governor’s office and a congressional seat, particularly in this kind of year, would be quite an accomplishment. Today’s primary will help determine whether that happens.

Photo Credit: Wright914′s Photostream

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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