“Dems, It’s Time To Dump Dixie”: A Lost Cause, A Different Country
I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.
And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)
With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.
Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).
So Democrats still need to care about those two states, at least in presidential terms. And maybe you can throw in North Carolina under the right circumstances. And at some point in the near future, you’ll be able to talk about Georgia as a state a Democrat can capture. And eventually, Texas, too.
But that’s presidential politics. At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there. This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going to win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.
My friend the political scientist Tom Schaller said all this back in 2008, in his book Whistling Past Dixie. I didn’t want to agree with Schaller then, but now I throw in the towel. He was a man ahead of his time. Look west, Schaller advised the Democrats. And he was right. Now it’s true that many states in the nation’s heartland aren’t winnable for Democrats, either. Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah will never come anywhere close to being purple. But Colorado already is. Arizona can be. Missouri, it’s not crazy to think so. And Montana and South Dakota are basically red, of course, but are both elect Democrats sometimes. (Did you know that both of Montana’s senators right now are Democrats?!) In sum, between the solid-blue states in the North and on the West Coast, and the pockets of opportunity that exist in the states just mentioned (and tossing in the black Southern seats), the Democrats can cobble together congressional majorities in both houses, under the right circumstances.
But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”
Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.
It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 8, 2014
“In Politics, Does Evidence Matter?”: We’ll Be Having A Lot Of Disagreements Over The Next Few Years
One of the lovely formulations in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address expressed his hope that “a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion.” Kennedy was talking about the Cold War, but we could use a little of this in the partisan and ideological warfare that engulfs our nation’s capital.
And so let us pause at the beachhead established after the midterm elections by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). They have co-sponsored a bill that’s unlikely to get a lot of attention but deserves some — not because it will revolutionize politics but because it could, and should, encourage both sides to begin their arguments by asking the right questions.
The Murray-Ryan bill would create a 15-member commission to study, as they put it in a joint announcement, “how best to expand the use of data to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs and tax expenditures.” The commission would also look into “how best to protect the privacy rights of people who interact with federal agencies and ensure confidentiality.”
Before you sigh, dismiss this as “just another commission,” and turn or click elsewhere, consider what Murray and Ryan are trying to do. Whatever your views, they’re saying, you should want government programs to achieve what they set out to do. And in this age of Big Data, there are more metrics than ever to allow you to have a clear sense of how well they are working.
Also, credit Murray and Ryan for this: They are looking not only at whether programs live up to their billing but also at whether the various tax breaks Congress has enacted — they are worth about $1 trillion a year — bring about the results their sponsors claim they will. If we are ever to reform the tax system, it would be useful to know which deductions, exemptions and credits are worth keeping.
The bipartisan duo — they worked together amicably on budget issues despite large disagreements — is not asking the commission to invent something out of whole cloth. On the contrary, evidence-based social policy is a hot idea at the moment.
Ron Haskins, my Brookings Institution colleague, has just co-authored a new book with Greg Margolis, Show Me the Evidence
Haskins, by the way, is a Republican with whom I’ve engaged in a long-standing (though friendly) argument over welfare reform. His interest here is not partisan but in having both sides pay more attention to what it takes to create “high-quality programs.”
“In politics, evidence is typically used as a weapon — mangled and used selectively in order to claim that it supports a politician’s predetermined position,” Haskins and Margolis write. “That is policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy.”
The Haskins-Margolis effort comes in the wake of Moneyball for Government
No one, of course, should pretend that by marinating ourselves in data, we’ll render our philosophical and partisan differences obsolete. The major divide over how much government should do and which problems it should take on will persist. So will disagreements over the extent to which government should push back against rising inequality and the degree of regulation a capitalist economy requires.
But conservatives who care about more than just scoring points against government inefficiencies (both real and invented) should want taxpayer money spent in a sensible way. And progressives have more of an interest than anyone in proving that government can work effectively to solve the problems it sets out to deal with. It’s on those two propositions that Murray and Ryan have found common ground.
Argument is at the heart of democracy, so we shouldn’t fear that we’ll be having a lot of disagreements over the next few years. But dumb arguments are not good for anyone. Insisting that politicians base their claims on facts and evidence ought to be the least we expect of them.
By: E.J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post; The National Memo, December 8, 2014
“Buying And Selling Political Campaigns”: McConnell’s Eyes On The Prize–Repealing All Campaign Finance Laws
The big unfolding story of the post-election period is the ever-rising clamor of Republicans for appropriations riders “defunding” Obama’s executive action on immigration, or this or that feature of Obamacare. I am sure others will get into line holding up additional conservative ideological totems.
But what does it appear Mitch McConnell is focused on? Further deregulating campaign money, of course (per a report from Paul Blumenthal at Huffpost):
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to use a massive appropriations bill to loosen campaign finance rules.
The Republican leader’s office is attempting to attach a policy rider to the omnibus bill that would effectively end limits imposed on coordinated spending by federal candidates and political party committees.
Currently, coordinated spending by candidates and political parties is limited based on a series of formulas for different offices. For example, the total amount presidential candidates may coordinate with political parties is calculated as the national voting-age population multiplied by two cents — a figure that is adjusted for the cost of living each election cycle.
The McConnell rider would allow parties to consult with candidate campaigns on advertising or other electoral advocacy without having the resulting spending count towards their coordinated limit, so long as the spending is not “controlled by, or made at the direction of” the candidate. The change would create a loophole essentially making the coordinated limits moot…..
In practice, discarding the current limits would give candidates significant input into the spending of party committees that can accept much larger direct contributions than the candidates are allowed to receive for their own campaigns.
This is pretty typical of McConnell’s priorities. This supremely cynical man may or may not actually believe in the various tenets of conservative orthodoxy. But he believes in buying and selling political campaigns with vast and unlimited appeals for cash from special interests with the tenacity of a mystic in direct communication with God Almighty.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 2, 2014
“Is Obama Bold Enough For You Now?”: Conservatives Derided Him For Timidity, Appalled At What A Tyrant They Now Think He’s Being
Remember when the problem everyone had with Barack Obama was how passive he was? In late October, Charles Krauthammer lamented Obama’s “observer presidency with its bewildered-bystander pose.” Dana Milbank agreed that “The real problem with Obama is not overreach but his tendency to be hands-off.” Milbank quoted Mitt Romney approvingly for his criticism of Obama for not being sufficiently “focused” on the Ebola threat (I guess a more focused president would have managed to avert the thousands of American Ebola deaths—oh wait). Anonymous Hillary Clinton aides tell reporters that unlike the “passive” Obama, their boss is going to be “aggressive” and “decisive” when it comes to foreign crises. Leon Panetta writes a memoir criticizing Obama for being passive, but the specific criticisms look a lot like, “I told the President to do something, and he didn’t follow my advice!”
This isn’t a new complaint. For years, pundits who are supposed to have some sense of how politics actually works have looked at the institutional and political limits surrounding policymaking and whined, “Why won’t Obama lead?” as though he could do things like make Republicans agree with him if only he were to exert his will more manfully. A close cousin of this inane belief is the idea that Obama could solve some complicated problem by giving a really good speech about it, an idea that has had disturbing currency among Obama’s liberal critics.
Perhaps some of this comes from the contrast between Obama and his predecessor, who called himself “the decider,” so decisive was he. During his time in office, reporters and headline writers were forever referring to George W. Bush’s proposals and actions as “bold,” almost regardless of what they entailed. And some of them actually were. Invading Iraq? Now that was bold. Had Obama decided to invade Syria, that would have been bold, too. But we probably wouldn’t be too pleased with the results.
Even when Obama has done bold things, he’s seldom described that way. Perhaps it’s because of his generally calm countenance; I’m really not sure. But his career has been characterized by periods of patience interrupted by calculated risks taken when the timing seemed right. So maybe it’s because many of the “bold” things Obama has done, like running for president after only a couple of years in the Senate or proposing ambitious health care reform, actually worked out. In retrospect, everyone thinks an electoral or legislative success was pre-ordained, and the sage observer saw it coming all along. Perhaps if Obama crashed and burned in dramatic ways more often, he’d get more credit for boldness.
But now, with two years remaining in his presidency and faced with a Congress unified under Republican control, Obama doesn’t look so passive. He’s using executive authority to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, he’s making agreements with China on carbon reductions, he’s issuing regulations on ozone. Of course, the same conservatives who derided him for timidity are appalled at what a tyrant they now think he’s being. Could it be that nobody really cares whether he’s being too bold or too passive, and those complaints are just a cover for their substantive disagreements with whatever he’s doing (or not doing) at a particular moment?
If there’s an area where you think Obama hasn’t done what he should have, go ahead and make that criticism. You might be right. There may be issues on which he’s allowed the status quo to continue when you think more aggressive moves were called for, and you could be right about that too. But presidents constantly make choices to pursue some paths and not others, to allow some policies to remain in place while trying to change others, to start some political fights that they think look winnable while avoiding others that don’t. If you think some issue ought to be higher on his agenda, the fact that it isn’t is probably just because he doesn’t agree with you on that particular point, not because of some broader orientation toward passivity that is holding him back.
And if you’re pleased that he’s moving on immigration and climate change, is it because you think the things he’s doing are worthwhile, or because you just favor boldness in the abstract? I’ll bet it’s the former.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 1, 2014
“The Tough Reality Of Politics For Women”: Learning From My 2014 Mistakes; A Year Of Reckoning For Democrats
Thanksgiving is a great time for writers to reckon with whatever we got wrong over the year – and to be grateful that in this day and age we get to write every day, and put mistakes behind us quickly. So with the 2014 midterm election rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror, I thought I’d reckon with my one big political mistake this past election cycle, as well as one big thing I got, sadly, right.
In July 2013, long before the midterm, I wrote this piece: “Red state women will transform America.” I was pretty darn excited about the prospect of Wendy Davis, Alison Lundergan Grimes and Michelle Nunn stepping up and running in Texas, Kentucky and Georgia. In hindsight – or maybe even at the time – I showed some irrational exuberance. So did a lot of Democrats.
Maybe more significantly, I participated in wishful thinking shared by many more Democrats – believing that the women’s vote is the party’s ace in the hole and that, in addition to solid support from non-white voters, it will give them a lock on the White House, and will even turn red states blue over time. I’m less optimistic about that now. The Democrats’ continuing troubles with white women, and white married women, doomed all three once-promising white female Democratic candidates.
Of course, none of them were perfect candidates. I will always be grateful for Davis’s brave filibuster of horrible Texas anti-abortion legislation. But I overestimated her political skills. Reams have been written about her poor campaign; I don’t need to kick her here. In the days before the election, silly #tcot folks tried to pretend I’d written my Davis praise recently, not more than a year before the race. But I did get overexcited.
Likewise, Grimes wasn’t quite the pro I thought she was, although she had admirable political skills. Michelle Nunn, who actually came closest to being elected of the three, had little to recommend her besides her father’s famous name and her detachment from partisan bickering thanks to a career in business, not politics.
Even at the time, I overlooked what is still the tough reality of politics for women: Frequently, they get their big political breaks only when more experienced men size up a race and find it too dangerous. I still believe Texas will turn blue again, but state and national Democrats knew it wouldn’t happen in 2014. In Kentucky, experienced pols like Rep. John Yarmuth and Gov. Steve Beshear didn’t take on Mitch McConnell. And in Georgia, ambitious Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed knew he was at least a cycle too early for Georgia to turn blue.
I’m not blaming any of these men, by the way, for making the women in question sacrificial lambs or scapegoats. But the truth is, women often get their big “chances” when they run as sacrificial lambs. I should have reined in my optimism about their political potential much sooner.
My faith that white Democratic women could win over red state white women voters was particularly misplaced. CNN exit polls showed that Michelle Nunn lost white women to David Perdue 69-27; Wendy Davis lost them 66-31; Alison Grimes lost them 55-41. For now, the Democrats’ oft-touted advantages with “women” – which should always be described as “all women except for white women” — are outweighed by their difficulties with whites.
Right now, for complicated historical, cultural and racial reasons, white women vote more like “whites” – mostly Republican, though less than white men – and less like other women. Single white women and college-educated white women defy that trend more than others, but any 2016 prognosticating that relies on white women as Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon shouldn’t be trusted unless there’s data behind it. And I haven’t seen any.
What did I get right? Well, lots of things, if I do say so myself, but the most obvious late-cycle story was that Republicans and Fox News were ginning up a minimal Ebola threat as a powerful political weapon – and too many mainstream media outlets, and even Democratic politicians, participated. In the post-election mayhem, this seemed like too small a point to raise, but as we start bidding goodbye to 2014, I couldn’t resist it. I’d like to say Democrats learned from this one, too, but again, I’m not sure.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes looked at media overkill on Ebola, especially at Fox and CNN (and also at the fact that it did nothing for ratings, which is heartening). Of course the right was disgusting, with Michael Savage dubbing Obama “President Obola” (the genteel Daily Caller settled for “President Ebola,” trusting their readers to get the African association with the Kenyan Muslim president’s unusual name).
Mainstream media skipped the name-calling, but went along with the hysteria: ABC News dubbed Ebola “the official October surprise,” and on CNN Don Lemon asked if it was “Obama’s Katrina.” Within a few weeks, though, Ebola was gone from our shores (though not from West Africa), the few American cases successfully contained by competent public health officials – but the story of its disappearance (let alone the media’s malpractice) went virtually uncovered.
In the end, CNN exit polls showed that while the public, early on, thought the federal government was doing an adequate job handling the threat, by election night that had shifted – 50 percent of voters polled disapproved of the federal government’s handling of Ebola, while 44 percent approved. Democrats lost so badly it’s unlikely that Ebola made the difference in any race. Still, it’s worth remembering how conservative and even supposedly moderate Republicans used Ebola politically – and how the media let them get away with it.
Sure, Senators-elect Tom Cotton and Thom Tillis were particularly insane on the topic, suggesting terrorists with Ebola might cross the Mexican border and combining the GOP’s three primal fears: terror, disease and swarthy illegal immigrants. But let’s take a moment to remember 2016 contender Gov. Chris Christie’s craven posturing, quarantining “Ebola nurse” Kaci Hickox when she came back from a trip treating Ebola patients. Christie dared Hickox to sue him: “Whatever. Get in line. I’ve been sued lots of times before. Get in line. I’m happy to take it on.”
The dignified humanitarian health worker won the round, getting released to her home in Maine and declaring Christie’s move not the “abundance of caution” he said it was, but “an abundance of politics.” Democrats could learn from Hickox; too many cowered in the face of GOP (and media) demagoguery on the small threat posed to Americans by the disease. Vulnerable Democrats Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Udall of Colorado and Mark Pryor of Arkansas all defied Obama and came out in favor of travel restrictions on people coming from Ebola-plagued nations; all lost their races anyway.
Even in real time it was obvious what Ebola panic was designed to do, but voices who said exactly that were drowned out by hysterics. And when hysteria prevails, the GOP wins. That dynamic trumps the Democrats’ demographic advantages and will for a while. Democrats lose when they’re overconfident about demography and underestimate the power of fear. I was one for two on those issues last cycle; I’ll try to do better next time around.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 28, 2014
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