“The Magical President Doesn’t Exist”: What The Left Must Really Do To Defeat The Wingnuts
Labor Day marks the traditional kickoff to election season, and all Democrats can say for themselves about the coming midterms is: Things look bad, but they could be worse. Republicans will almost certainly gain Senate seats, and could very well take it over, though their chances diminish every time we hear new audio of Mitch McConnell and his GOP cronies sucking up to the Koch brothers at their last retreat. But traditional low midterm Democratic turnout could make McConnell the Senate majority leader in January nonetheless.
This political season opens against a backdrop of profound pessimism, captured in an August Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that found that 71 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The president’s approval rating is at an all-time low, but so is that of congressional Republicans. Even worse, the two big stories dominating the end-of-summer headlines – the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. and the rise of ISIL – only deepen the political gloom, because they reflect two enormous American problems that are coming to seem almost unsolvable: profound and persistent racial injustice, and the shape-shifting chaos that is Iraq.
These problems are particularly vexing for people who subscribe to the Magical President theory of politics — which includes too many of us, including me sometimes – because those are two issues Americans thought we’d “solved,” or at least responsibly addressed, by electing our first black president, who’d famously opposed the “dumb” Iraq war and promised to end it. Now race relations are arguably worse than when Obama took office, and so is Iraq, and this is a rare case where you can fairly say people on “both sides” blame the president — mostly wrongly.
Cornel West is now slipping deep into Maureen Dowd territory: a formerly incisive, moderately influential social critic (a genuinely important one, in West’s case) driven to cruelty and irrelevance by Obama hatred. The National Journal’s Ron Fournier is a consistent proponent of what some deride as the “Green Lantern” approach to the presidency: If only Obama would just lead, our problems would solve themselves, though Fournier doesn’t stoop to channeling Abraham Lincoln or Aaron Sorkin when he criticizes Obama. But even fair and sober observers are frustrated with some of Obama’s moves.
You can certainly criticize the president on the margins – I have, and I’m sure I will again. Personally, if I worked for him, I’d probably have suggested not golfing after his moving statement on journalist James Foley’s execution, and not equivocating as much in his Ferguson remarks, which Michael Eric Dyson fairly laments. But those are issues more of stage management than statecraft.
Still, even for people who respect Obama, it’s hard to see us mired in what feels like ancient, intractable conflict in both Ferguson and Iraq. It hurts. Yet I would argue (after having been demoralized about both issues) that the unrest in Ferguson is in fact a kind of social progress: Within hours of Mike Brown’s awful shooting a network of new and seasoned activists came together to demand justice, pushing both Gov. Jay Nixon and the president to take action to rein in abusive local cops and drive the investigation into what happened.
Even the ugly situation in Iraq represents political progress, because as painful and outrageous as Foley’s execution was, and as disturbing as it is to see ISIL gain power in Iraq and Syria, the vital debate over what the U.S. can and should do there has actually been strengthened by the existence of intervention skeptics on the left and the right. Obama has repudiated the neocon approach, but he’s still wrestling with Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn doctrine: If you break it, have you really bought it? Certainly, we’ve already paid for it, many times over.
Let’s be clear: There is neither a Democratic nor a progressive consensus on what is to be done there. All we have is a profound skepticism, and I’ll take that over a cynical Cheneyesque certainty, built on lies to the American people. Disagreement, even deadlock, is preferable.
The belief that somehow Obama can lead us out of our summer of misery reflects Magical President thinking. Which leads me back to the rapidly approaching and dispiriting midterms. When I reviewed Rick Perlstein’s “Invisible Bridge,” I noted that the major political difference between the right and left seems to be that when defeated and disillusioned, the right gets back to the nuts and bolts work of electoral politics. The left, or some of it, disintegrates, a flank here promoting direct action over electoral politics (a debate that’s understandably renewed by events in Ferguson); a flank there preaching about a third party; and one over there fantasizing about the perfect left-wing challenge to the mainstream Democratic candidate, like that dreamy African-American senator who opposed the war in Iraq who looked so magical eight years ago. Meanwhile, Republicans count on division on the left, and low turnout by the Democratic base of younger, poorer non-white voters, to help them take back the Senate.
And when they do, Mitch McConnell has promised only more obstruction and gridlock. I should point out, this isn’t just a byproduct of Republican victories, but one of the goals. It’s become obvious in the GOP’s approach to Obama that obstruction is at least partly intended to demoralize the reluctant, occasional voters in the Democratic base. For if there’s no action on those “gosh darn” issues, in McConnell’s words, like a minimum wage hike, student loan relief or extended unemployment insurance, let alone immigration reform or climate change, even after Obama became the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to win more than 50 percent of the vote twice, those of us who say that voting is the most reliable path to social change sound either foolish or dishonest. People say, why bother?
The cause isn’t helped by spineless Democrats who try to blur their differences with Republicans instead of heighten them. Right now Karl Rove is attacking Democratic senators like North Carolina’s Kay Hagan and Arkansas’s Mark Pryor for endorsing Obama’s Simpson-Bowles commission report, which recommended cuts to Medicare and Social Security. But nobody could have predicted anyone would use entitlement cuts as weapons, right? Except many of us did. Again and again.
On the other hand, Hagan, Pryor and also-vulnerable Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana are doing better than expected, either leading their GOP opponents or tied, at least partly because during this election year, they’ve been feistier and more progressive, particularly when it comes to defending the Affordable Care Act. And Kentucky voters may yet make Mitch McConnell pay for sucking up to the Kochs. He shouldn’t be redecorating the Senate majority leader’s office, at any rate.
Democrats have two months to make sure this election doesn’t turn out like 2010 did. It’s not about the president right now, and we shouldn’t wait until 2016 for a new magical president. The kind of thoroughgoing change we need won’t happen in eight years, or even 80. It’s an eternal battle, the constant effort to expand the realm of human freedom to everyone, against the constant crusade by the wealthy to ensure that the trappings of human dignity – education, leisure, family life, childhood itself – are reserved for those who can afford to pay for them. The Kochs and their allies are trying to repeal the 20th century. Progressives can’t just suit up for that battle every four years.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, September 1, 2014
“The Promise Of So Much Money”: For 2016 GOP Candidates, Does Courting The Kochs Bring More Risk Than Reward?
While most Americans were settling in for a long weekend, many of the potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates — Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Mike Pence — went to Dallas for a convention of Americans for Prosperity, the group through which Charles and David Koch channel much of their political money. If any of the politicians were wary about how it looks to have so many people who want to be the leader of the free world kissing the Kochs’ rings, you couldn’t tell. They’re making a strategic calculation that whatever PR risks are inherent in getting too close to the Kochs, they’re outweighed by the money the brothers bring to the GOP’s table. And if the Kochs plan to intervene in the 2016 primaries — something no one seems sure they’ll do — then every Republican candidate wants to be the one on the receiving end of that fire hose of cash.
At the moment, Republicans couldn’t be happier about the Kochs’ support, because the sums they mobilize are staggering. The Koch network (which includes other like-minded benefactors) spent at least $400 million in 2012 and are expect to drop another $300 million in this year’s midterms. The law of ever-increasing campaign spending suggests that in 2016 they’ll spend even more. It would be a surprise if the total didn’t top a half billion dollars.
So far, the Democrats’ efforts to make voters see the Kochs as a pair of villains have met with only limited success. One poll taken in March found 37 percent of people with an opinion about the Kochs (25 percent negative, 12 percent positive). On the other hand, it might be enough if many voters had only the vaguest sense of who the Kochs are and what they stand for. If people hear the name and say, “Aren’t they those billionaire Republican guys? I don’t quite remember,” then that would make Democrats happy. As Greg has explained before, while Democrats certainly want voters to think of their opponents as heartless robber barons, the strategy is more complex than that; it’s also about establishing a context for attacks on Republican positions on economic issues. When you go after Republicans for not supporting an increase in the minimum wage, an association with billionaire oil magnates tells voters why Republicans believe what they do and why their interests are opposed to those of ordinary people.
Republicans will tell you that it’s foolhardy of Democrats to try to make an issue out of the Kochs’ sway over the GOP, mostly because voters don’t particularly care about the influence of money in politics. But even if the attacks had some effect, it would have to be clear and unambiguous before Republican contenders started shying away from the Kochs and all that money.
I’d be extremely surprised if the Kochs actually chose to back a single candidate in the 2016 primary; not only does that risk alienating whoever wins if it’s not the one they picked, it could also turn them into just one faction in a factional conflict. Even if the brothers aren’t toeing the GOP line on some issues (such as immigration or foreign interventionism), they benefit from having everyone on the right view them as a friend to all Republicans. At the same time, it’s in the Kochs’ interest to have all the candidates believe they might back a primary candidate. That way, those candidates will continue to cater to their concerns and maybe even make some promises about actions that could be taken once a Republican is in the White House.
But the closer we get to the 2016 general election, the more problematic it will be for the eventual nominee to be seen as too close to the Kochs. Democrats aren’t going to stop going after them, and if the Republican candidate himself isn’t a plutocrat (none of the contenders this time around approach Mitt Romney’s level of wealth), the next best thing is to say that he’s in a plutocrat’s pocket. So there will be many more Democratic ads with the brothers’ pictures, and many more Democratic speeches tying that eventual nominee to the oil barons from Kansas.
The longer that goes on, the higher the chances that being seen as too close to the Kochs poses a political risk for Republican presidential candidates. But for the moment, they don’t seem too concerned, especially when gaining the Kochs’ favor comes with the promise of so much money.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, September 1, 2014
“Something Out Of Nothing”: Obama’s ‘No Strategy’ Moment Is A Non-Story
It’s all so predictable. As expected, media pundits are having a field day dissecting President Barack Obama’s statement yesterday that, when it comes to dealing with the Islamic State (the militant group also known as ISIS), “we don’t have a strategy yet.” That sentence came in response to a journalist’s question regarding whether Obama needed Congress’ approval to go into Syria militarily, and came after an extended analysis by Obama regarding the Islamic State and the situation in Iraq and Syria.
As I suggested in this previous post prior to Obama’s press conference, the president’s caution regarding how to deal with the Islamic State is warranted, given the fluid nature of the situation in Iraq and Syria, and because there remains a great deal of uncertainty among his foreign policy experts regarding the extent to which the Islamic State presents a security threat to U.S. national interests.
For most Americans who saw Obama’s press conference in full, his candid statement explaining why his administration has not yet settled on a military strategy for dealing with the militants is likely to hardly raise an eyebrow. But for media pundits determined to extract a digestible sound byte or headline from Obama’s rather nuanced and lengthy discourse, the specific statement regarding the lack of a strategy was manna from heaven. Not surprisingly, the twitterverse exploded in consternation that the president would make such an admission, and many news outlets used Obama’s statement to lead their press conference coverage. As a result, Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest went on the news shows to clarify that by lack of strategy, the president referred specifically to military tactics for dealing with the Islamic State, and that he in fact did have a plan for addressing broader regional concerns.
Earnest’s explanation notwithstanding, pundits were quick to assess the damage Obama’s statement would have on a) his political standing, b) the nation’s foreign policy, c) the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming midterms and d) all three. The most common media theme was that Obama’s statement reinforces the impression conveyed by recent polls that Obama is not tough enough when it comes to foreign policy, and that – as Hillary Clinton implicitly suggested in her recent Atlantic interview – Obama’s foreign policy approach lacks any underlying guiding principles. And, not least, it allowed the pundits to recycle all the previous stories about the damage done by presidential gaffes.
Here’s the problem with these instant analyses. They are wrong. Obama’s statement, by itself, will almost surely have no substantive impact on either his political standing or the effectiveness of his foreign policy. Nor will it change the outcome of the 2014 midterms. This despite the best efforts by pundits to fit this statement into a larger media narrative that will surely dominate the next few news cycles.
How do I know this? Consider some other celebrated gaffes that are even now being recycled in light of Obama’s latest statement. For example, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake likens the “we don’t have a strategy yet” to Mitt Romney infamous 47 percent statement during the 2012 presidential campaign, in which the Republican presidential candidate claimed that “47 percent of the people ….are dependent on government” and thus would never vote for him. Blake writes, “As with all gaffes, the worst ones are the ones that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions or fit into an easy narrative. That’s why ‘47 percent’ stung Mitt Romney so much, and it’s why ‘don’t have a strategy’ hurts Obama today.”
The problem with Blake’s analogy, however, is that despite wide-spread media coverage of Romney’s 47 percent statement, including pundits’ claims that he had essentially killed his chances to win the election, it actually had almost no impact on the outcome of the presidential race, a finding documented by political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in their careful study of the 2012 presidential race. They conclude that, “In terms of the most important decision – who to vote for – there was no consistent evidence that much had changed” as a result of the video. Indeed, they argue that whatever its immediate impact, the video’s effect largely dissipated by the time of the first presidential debate a few weeks later and that it had no lingering influence on Romney’s support. They conclude, “Whatever the explanation, it was striking that this video, a supposed bombshell, detonated with so little apparent force in the minds of voters.”
Despite the media fixation, this will almost certainly be the case with Obama’s latest “gaffe” as well. The reason is that voters are not blank slates whose opinions toward politicians and policies are largely determined by the latest media meme of the day, no matter how pervasive the coverage. Instead, history suggests that voters’ assessment of Obama’s handling of foreign policy will be driven much more by their perceptions of events, including the Islamic State’s progress in Syria and Iraq, as mediated through voters’ own ideological predispositions, than they will by pundits’ single-minded focus on one sentence in a presidential press conference. Nor will it overshadow the more fundamental factors – the state of the economy, incumbency status and the typical seat loss experienced by the president’s party – that primarily determine midterm election outcomes.
Nonetheless, the fact that Obama’s statement will matter little to most of the public won’t stop pundits from endlessly replaying and analyzing it for the next few news cycles in the fervent, albeit misguided, belief that it may turn out to be the equivalent of “‘read my lips’ signature of a failed presidency”. That is, unless another non-story comes along in the next few days to push this one from the headlines.
By: Mathew Dickinson, Professor, Middlebury College; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, August 29, 2014
“2014 And The Limits Of Rage”: Voters May Decide That Rage Has Its Limits And Government Has Work To Do
The short-term future of politics in the nation’s capital will be determined in large part by which party ends up in control of the Senate. But for a sense of the long-term future of politics in the country as a whole, watch the governors’ races.
The question to ask: Do voters begin to push back against the tea party tide that swept governorships and legislatures into Republican hands four years ago and produced the most radical changes in policy at the state level in at least a generation?
On the Senate races, two things are true. Simply because so many Democratic seats are at stake, the GOP has an edge. Republicans have probably already secured three of the six pickups they need to take control next year. But in the rest of the races, they have yet to close the deal. This year, late-breaking news and how well campaigns are run will really matter.
But something else is true about the fight for the Senate that is much less relevant in the struggle for governorships. Most of the key Senate contests are in Republican-leaning states where President Obama is not popular. GOP candidates are thus making him a big issue against Democrats. The 36 governors’ races, by contrast, span red and blue states, and many are in battlegrounds that decide presidential elections.
The Senate elections are backward-looking referendums. The governors’ races are forward-looking.
The one exception to the Obama rule may be Florida, where the former governor — and former Republican — Charlie Crist swept to a 3-to-1 victory in the Democratic primary Tuesday over former state senator Nan Rich. The primary was taken as a measure of how well-accepted Crist is in his new party, and the result was heartening for the Democrats’ marquee convert.
Unusually for Democrats this year, Crist has hugged Obama close and has hired many of the president’s key operatives to run his campaign. The former governor is essentially deadlocked in the polls with incumbent Rick Scott, a Republican, and much will depend on the willingness of Democrats to go to the polls in November. Four years ago, turnout was lopsided in favor of the Republicans, as Adam Smith, the Tampa Bay Times political editor, has noted. Crist is one of the handful of Democrats whom Obama may really be able to help this year.
Tuesday’s other major gubernatorial primary was in Arizona, which offered exactly the opposite lesson. Republicans chose the tea party’s favorite, state Treasurer Doug Ducey, a former partner and chief executive of Cold Stone Creamery. Ducey got 37 percent in a six-way race and vastly outspent second-place finisher Scott Smith, the former mayor of Mesa and the moderate in the race. Smith supported Gov. Jan Brewer’s expansion of Medicaid (she endorsed him over Ducey) and also the Common Core education standards.
It was striking on Tuesday night that Smith’s concession speech sounded a lot like the victory speech of Democrat Fred DuVal, who won his party’s nomination unopposed.
“We had a vision about bringing people together,” Smith said. “We gave them a message maybe that wasn’t red meat. Maybe it didn’t fit the primary campaign mode. But it was the truth.”
DuVal, who badly needs votes from independents and crossover Republicans, played down party altogether in his primary-night address. “What’s missing are leaders who care less about party politics and more about building a future together and growing our economy,” DuVal said. “We’re going to stop fighting and start fixing Arizona for Arizona families.” Ducey, who was endorsed by Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin, will be pressed to occupy some of the center ground that DuVal hopes to make his own.
The tea party has opened opportunities for Democrats elsewhere to frame this year’s choice as being between right-wing ideology and problem-solving. In Kansas, a poll released this week showed Democrat Paul Davis with an eight-point lead over Gov. Sam Brownback (R). A Brownback loss would be a devastating blow to the tea party’s approach to policy. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, another hero to the right, is in a dead heat with Democratic businesswoman Mary Burke.
Democrats also have a very good chance of ousting Republican governors in Pennsylvania and Maine, although they face tough challenges to their incumbents in Illinois and Connecticut.
In 2010, an electorate heavily populated with tea party supporters expressed rage against government at all levels. In 2014, voters may decide that rage has its limits and that government has work to do.
BY: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 27, 2014
What Failure Would Cost the Democrats-A Cold Analysis of This Weeks Vote
Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party. Caddell and Schoen close their Washington Post article with the following warning: “Unless the Democrats fundamentally change their approach, they will produce not just a march of folly but also run the risk of unmitigated disaster in November.”
The case Caddell and Schoen make parallels the one made the previous day by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, and that is made daily by a parade of Republican pollsters and lawmakers: The Democrats’ health reform plan is wildly and deeply unpopular, mirroring the unpopularity of Washington and big government. If it passes, it will result in a huge political backlash, especially if Democrats use reconciliation, which Caddell and Schoen call manipulation and liken to the “nuclear option” that Senate Republicans threatened during the Bush administration. For Rove, the use of reconciliation will open the way for Republicans to use the same technique to repeal health plan when they recapture the majority.
We fundamentally disagree; the surest path to political debacle for Democrats is to fail to enact health reform, and the best way to avoid a rout in November is to show that the party in charge can actually govern. The reconciliation process is entirely appropriate for amending the Senate-passed bill; in any case, the public will judge the Democrats on the basis of the results, not the inside-baseball process. In fact, the Democrats most reluctant to support health reform–those from more conservative, Republican-leaning districts and states–are the ones most likely to lose in November if health reform is defeated.
The obvious first antecedent to examine is 1994. Democrats went into the midterm elections after a presidential contest in which they grasped the full reins of power in Washington for the first time in a dozen years. Early momentum disappeared when first President Bill Clinton’s modest stimulus proposal went down in the Senate and then his deficit-reduction package staggered to the finish line after eight long months and without a single Republican vote in either house. It looked more like a setback than a victory. This was followed the next year by a lengthy struggle to enact sweeping health care reform that ended in a complete collapse, without even a vote on the Clinton plan. A shocking loss in the House on a crime bill, though ultimately reversed, reinforced the image of a president and party that could not govern competently.
What followed was a disastrous midterm for Democrats—losses of 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Heading into that election season, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, described the Democrats’ condition bluntly: “Imagine it’s October, and the Democrats are going to get up and make the following case: ‘We’ve run the House for 40 years, we’ve run the Senate for eight years, we have the White House, and the Republicans are so much more clever than we are that they’ve obstructed us. We need you to elect more dumb Democrats so we can overcome those clever Republicans.’” Conservative Democratic Senator John Breaux, of Louisiana, echoed that point on health policy, saying, “We can blame the Republicans for filibustering, but we have the responsibility to govern.”
To be sure, there were many reasons for Democrats’ massive losses in 1994, including scandals and angry gun owners. But the failure to fulfill their responsibility for governing contributed mightily to the debacle. That was the conclusion of pollsters from both parties in the aftermath of the November contests. Two weeks after the election, Republican pollster Bill McInturff found that “one of the most important predicates for Republican success was not having health care pass.” He noted that the collapse of the plan reinforced voters’ belief that Washington was in a dysfunctional state of gridlock. At the same time, Democratic pollster Mike Donilon, who worked on the losing campaign of Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford, said he believed that Wofford would have won had health reform passed.
It is undeniably true that a Washington plan to reform health care is not overwhelmingly popular. But that’s mostly because Washington is unpopular these days. When the component parts of the Democrats’ plan are parsed out, surveys show high approval for nearly all of them, including removing preexisting conditions, ending lifetime benefit caps, providing tax credits to small business to get them to cover employees, subsidizing low- and middle-income families to enable them to buy insurance, and creating a health-insurance exchange to shop for policies.
We also know that voters are warming somewhat to the idea of a reform plan, in part because the president has ramped up his efforts on its behalf beginning with the State of the Union and the health-reform summit—letting voters know what is actually in the bills. The actions of insurance companies like Anthem and Wellpoint, raising premiums sharply before enactment of reform, has also contributed to a public receptiveness to change. And we know that there was a noticeable bump in public approval when bills passed the House and the Senate—voters like action, and like success. Even where we are skeptical about the benefits of government programs, we want government to work.
It is also true that the health-reform plan, contrary to conventional wisdom, will not simply frontload the costs and backload the benefits. The plan will move quickly to erase the unpopular “doughnut hole” that results in a costly jolt for many seniors buying prescription drugs, to end discrimination based on preexisting conditions for children, to ease the insurance burden on those losing or leaving their jobs, and to enable parents to carry children up to the age of 26 on their family policies. Many House and Senate Democrats are understandably nervous about voting to enact health reform. We are convinced that the political damage will be far, far worse if they fail to do so.
By: Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. They are co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back On Track. March 15, 2010-The New Republic
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