Category: Democrats

The Consequences of Franken

Dave Weigel makes a very solid and under-made observation that the consequences of Al Franken not being seated in January 2009 were dramatic on the ability of Democrats to pass their agenda in a timely and effective fashion.

If Franken had eked out another 1000 votes in Minnesota, or if Republicans simply decided not to keep suing to overturn the recount he won, the Democratic agenda would have been radically different. In January and February, the 59 — not 58 — Democrats in the Senate would have only needed to grab one Republican to pass the stimulus. That probably would have resulted in a larger stimulus bill, with extra billions of dollars (maybe $110 billion) going to tax cuts or spending. Democrats would have had the votes for card check, and gotten that out of the way quickly, while Ted Kennedy was still healthy. Just having that extra vote to play with when Obama’s popularity was peaking might have shaken up the whole schedule, gotten nominees like Dawn Johnson into their jobs, and led to more action in the Senate that pleased the Democratic base and — possibly — had a marginal impact on the economy. As it was, Democrats only had a functioning “supermajority” from September 2009 (Franken in the Senate, Paul Kirk in Ted Kennedy’s seat) to January 2010, and all they did with it was pass health care.

I think Weigel is glossing over the impact Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy’s illnesses had on the composition of the US Senate in 2009. For most of the year, 59 or 60 seats on paper meant 56 or 57 seats in reality. Franken would have made a huge difference had a been seated earlier. But it’s not as if Kennedy and Byrd were being rushed to the Senate floor from their hospital beds with any regularity as it was – it was never quite clear under what conditions men who were struggling to survive another day or week would risk their health to come cast a vote. That is, even with Franken being seated promptly, I don’t know that all the things Weigel says could have gotten done would have gotten done. Yes, I’d expect a bigger stimulus and more confirmations, but I still doubt Employee Free Choice would have happened or healthcare would have happened any quicker.

This actually all gets at a point that I’d like to see more commentators make. While Democrats had a 59 seat Senate in early 2009 and a 60 seat Senate after Specter switched parties at the end of April. But throughout that time Franken was not seated and Kennedy and Byrd were not there to vote with regularity.  The historic moment America was promised from a Democratic super majority in the Senate simply did not exist, at least not as advertised. There is certainly more that could have been done had all of the caucus been in place and healthy. Even in the reality which we experienced where those votes were not present, there could have been more done to pressure conservative Democrats to vote with the caucus – through incentives and threats and public campaigning. This isn’t an apologia of Reid or Obama for more not getting done due to structural hurdles. Rather, I see this as a valuable effort to remind people that part of the disappointment came from being sold what amounted to a bill of goods about what we could reasonably expect the US Senate to accomplish with the Democrats’ historic majority.

I don’t know why Democrats let Republicans obstruct Franken’s seating and have their be any political consequence for it. But it had real consequences, especially as two other Democratic senators were deathly sick. The inability for Democrats to do more substantial legislating in 2009 was directly, though not wholly, attributable to the absence of Franken. It’s going to cost Democrats electorally in November. There should have been a price to pay for it.

Lost Optimism

Back in April, I predicted that Democrats would actually shape up to be in a good position heading into the November election:

It feels really weird to write this, but as of today, April 22nd, 2010, I’m not that concerned about the fate of Democrats in midterms. Granted, they haven’t done much to make me care too deeply about the size of the Democratic majority in either chamber or even holding on to both. If I had to guess based on where we are in late April, Democrats will lose a couple seats in the Senate and a low two-digit number in the House, but maintain legitimate majorities in both chamber.

In addition to healthcare, I expect Wall Street reform and immigration reform to pass in some state. There’ll probably be a number of smaller jobs bills that are passed before the fall too. Take into account that Republicans continue to abide by a doomed-to-fail strategy of mistaking their base’s disappointment with Obama with independents’ disappointment with Obama and this doesn’t look like it will be a catastrophic election for Democrats. I don’t expect gains, but given where we were six to nine months ago, I think it’s a pretty good place to be, if you care about the electoral fate of Democrats.

From where we are today in early September, this prediction was massively off-base. The economy has stayed south and there has not been a lot of good legislation moving forward from Democrats. We don’t really know today what the administration’s plan for fixing the economy is, nor do we see any urgency about solving the unemployment crisis. This has lead to a truly awful environment for Democrats. While people aren’t really in love with the Republican brand, “Anyone Else” is winning out over “The Guys We’re Not Happy With.”

We are about to come off another brutal August where Republican messaging dominated the media. Congress will come back soon and that will change, but from where we are today, I’d predict that Democrats lose the House. If they hold the Senate, it will only be by 2 votes. Things still have ample opportunity to get better for Democrats, but more importantly, there is still opportunity for them to get worse. And right now, I’d bet the Under.

Westen on Populism

Drew Westen has a big piece in Alternet about the current political climate and the anger fueling populist backlash. First, I think this is spot-on:

The “Obama Doctrine” should have been that Americans who want to work and have the ability to contribute to our productivity as a nation should have the right to work, and that if the private sector can’t meet the demand for jobs, we have plenty of roads and bridges to fix, new energy sources to develop and manufacture, and schools to build and renovate so our kids and workers returning for training can compete in the 21st century global economy.

And Westen’s natural follow-up is right on too (and useful for determining why so many progressive activists are feeling dissatisfied with the administration’s course of action):

But it’s too late for that. The administration opted for an alternative doctrine, which Larry Summers enunciated on This Week several months ago: that unemployment is going to remain high for the foreseeable future and eventually come down — as if there’s nothing we can do about it — and that they will push here and there for small symbolic measures whose symbolism tends to escape people who are out of work. It’s hard to be excited by symbolism when your children are hungry or the bank is repossessing your home — although you didn’t do anything to deserve it — while the people who did are once again making out like bandits.

Westen describes the current mood in America as populist anger, something that I agree with. I disagree that this anger from the left is because of missed opportunities – sure, that may be part of it with activist Democrats. No, I think the populist anger from the left stems from the fact that the economy remains broken, people don’t have jobs and are suffering because of it.

There’s a lot in Westen’s analysis of the timeline of the Obama administration and choices made. In many ways, Westen provides a comprehensive narrative of that is tossed around in progressive circles of missed opportunities and the progressive critique of what it means, particularly in terms of depressing the base and diminishing electoral prospects in 2010. I do think one paragraph is particularly worthy of quotation:

The underlying psychological assumption of these moves is that if you mix policies from the right and left in equal parts, you win the center. In fact, no one has ever won the center that way. It appears weak, opportunistic, and incoherent to the average swing voter, which is particularly problematic at a time when people in the center desperately want to know that their leaders have a vision and a coherent plan for what to do (which is why both FDR and Ronald Reagan were so effective in moving voters in the center). It doesn’t win any votes on the right. But it does have one predictable effect: It sucks the motivation out of your base, who feel demoralized and betrayed (if they’re part of the “professional left”) or less likely to vote (if they’re average voters who don’t follow politics carefully but just don’t feel very enthusiastic anymore, even if they don’t really know why).

There are a lot of relatively fundamental critiques of this administration, but this strikes me as one of the core ones – the penchant to be post-partisan and find agreement in the ideological lacuna that is the American center. Sure, it makes David Broder happy to see the White House try and strike an incoherent balance, but it just isn’t a political method which understands what voters want, which policies work, and how actions akin to ideology present themselves to the country. Strength wins, not alchemy.

Westen provides a serious playbook for the administration and Democratic leaders to use to describe how we got to where we are economically and who is to blame for it. Not enough of this is being done currently and as a result, Democrats are missing an opportunity to harness populist anger against Republicans and for better governance. There are still massive economic needs – job creation, state funding, green energy development, infrastructure repair, etc – and ample opportunity for Democrats to do things to address these problems, blame Republicans for opposing the success of the American economy, and actually get things on track. All it takes is building a narrative about who is to blame for today’s problems and who doesn’t want them to be fixed, while establishing Democrats in contrast to this. It’s time to do something.

It’s easy to read Westen’s account of the first year and a half of the Obama administration and be depressed. But this is prescriptive analysis. He provides a clear path forward for the administration to both achieve great things and have continued electoral success. Whether or not the administration is interested in pursuing Westen’s recommendations is obviously another question. But being where we are now is not determinative of future failures, but for the extent that the administration is unwilling to change course. Looking at the economy and at the political peril Democrats are facing electorally, it’s hard to imagine a situation where the President doesn’t start acting like his shoes were on fire.

Nonetheless, that unimaginable situation is the one we continue to find ourselves in. The time for change is now. Westen provides a good playbook. I hope the administration uses it.

Scott McAdams

Steve Aufrecht of What Do I Know? shot this video of Alaska’s Democratic Senate nominee Scott McAdams in Anchorage on Wednesday. McAdams is the mayor of Sitka, Alaska, and though he isn’t widely known across the state like a couple other Alaskan mayors, he is the real deal.

Dave Weigel at Slate asks a good question:

Do you reach a point where $250,000 in Alaska is worth more than $250,000 to bail out Blanche Lincoln? I think you’re already there.

I hope the party is ready to get behind Scott McAdams. If he ends up facing Joe Miller there is no doubt that he can win. I met him briefly at Netroots Nation and was very impressed with him. All of the Alaskan bloggers I talk to think McAdams is a great candidate and a great Democrat. He would be a great representative for Alaska and a great addition to the Democratic caucus (especially when you think about what Joe Miller might do if he’s given a vote in the Senate).

I’ll be watching this race closely.

Daou: Why the Right Wing Dominates Debate

Peter Daou has an uncharacteristically short, yet characteristically good post  on why he thinks the rightwing dominates our national debate. The short version: because “Democrats run away from the left.” Daou writes:

Forget the thousand explanations pundits have offered for the administration’s beef with the left; this is the single biggest reason the left is furious with Obama: that one by one, he has willingly and unnecessarily bargained away the progressive positions that would move the national debate back to the center. After all, the counterweight to the right is not the mushy middle, it’s the principled left. Did progressive bloggers really think Obama was going to establish a single payer health care system, bring all Bush warmongers to justice, stop the looting of the poor by the ultra-rich, revitalize the environmental movement, undo Bush-Cheney’s executive power excesses, bring about true social justice and stop needless wars? No. They’re far more jaded and pragmatic than anyone admits. But at least make those the debate points rather than ditch them unilaterally.

As I’ve argued, it matters not one iota if Obama is a progressive at heart. What matters is that Democrats run away from the left like it’s the plague while Republican run to the right like it’s nirvana. The net effect is that the media end up reporting far right positions as though they were mainstream and reporting liberal positions as thought they were heinous aberrations. And you wonder why America is veering off the rails? [Emphasis added]

I find any sort of efforts to describe disappointment or anger progressives feel in unitary terms tend to fail. The reasons progressives are disappointed are manifold. But Daou does find a common thread that certainly is a large contributing factor to progressive discontent. Of course the key here, and Daou is right to make it, is that the problem does extend beyond the administration and is common to Democrats around the country (see all the cowardice around Park51 for a recent example). What’s most frustrating, as Daou notes, is that the result of systemic unwillingness to embrace the left by Democrats is that it sets up the Overton Window in a heavily rightward frame, so the public is not hearing liberal positions from Democrats nor from the press. It’s a dynamic that leads to long-term failure for Democrats politically and from a policy standpoint.

Masking Differences

In an otherwise awful column, Maureen Dowd makes a relevant point:

There are deep schisms within the Democratic Party that were masked for a time, first by Bush and then by Obama’s election. Now that the Democrats have the presidency and the power and can enact legislation, it’s apparent that the word progressive is kind of meaningless.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the word progressive is meaningless, but Dowd is right that we huge schisms are being exposed between the grassroots of the Democratic Party and centrist, Beltway types. These aren’t new differences. There has been a long-running war between the online progressive movement (and more largely, progressive movementarians) and the timid wing of Democrats who think running as DLC, Third Way, Republican Lite politicians is a winning movement. Basically it’s the difference between people who think good policy leads to good politics and we should be proud of our ideas and those who think that while the American public can handle crazy Republican ideas, we can only shade slightly to the left if we want to be electorally viable. Again, these aren’t new distinctions and anyone who paid attention to what liberal bloggers have been saying for the last eight years would know that these differences exist.

But a mask is definitely coming off. Maybe it’s that the press is finally noticing these differences. Maybe it’s that leaders of the Democratic Party pretended that these differences didn’t exist and that tribal opposition and fear of Republicans would force liberals  to remain together, regardless of the policy content at hand. And certainly, when groups like the Third Way and politicians like Harold Ford Jr. call themselves progressive, the word is losing meaning. But this isn’t news.

It’s not that the word progressive is meaningless. It’s that it is meaningless to people who adopted it because it provided shelter from attacks from the right on the word liberal. Maybe the cover this word provided is disappearing, but that doesn’t mean long-standing differences are new differences and in that, Dowd is right.

Primaries Are Good, But…

I think primaries are really good, healthy things for both democracy broadly and the Democratic Party specifically. In my home state of Connecticut, there’s a heated primary going on between grassroots hero Ned Lamont and Stamford mayor Dan Malloy. It’s not that it’s a close race – Ned is well ahead of Malloy and is likely going to win the primary by double digits. But Malloy has been spinning some of nastiest, negative attacks I’ve seen in a Democratic primary since, well, Joe Lieberman was attacking Ned Lamont in 2006. CT Bob has a post up today that covers the recent mud Malloy is throwing and puts Dan in his place for doing it. What’s so shocking and depressing about Malloy’s attacks is that they are verbatim the same ones Lieberman used against Ned in 2006 and every single one was refuted by facts then. That is, despite the fact that he has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, Malloy is repeating Lieberman’s attacks and he has to know that they’ve been proven false already. As Bob writes, “Malloy is running the most cynical and dishonest campaign I’ve ever seen.” This is scorched earth stuff and it’s not good for Connecticut nor is it good for the Democratic Party.

Build A Larger Case

Greg Sargent is right:

All I’m saying is that raging against successful Republican efforts to block individual Dem initiatives isn’t enough. Raging about GOP obstructionism in general isn’t enough, either. The point is that Dems need to build an effective larger case that transcends individual issues and reckons more directly with the strategy underlying all the GOP obstructionism. That’s all I’m saying.

Blaming the GOP and obstructionism for failure to achieve your agenda is not effective. Passion, as demonstrated by Rep. Weiner, is refreshing. But beyond wonks in the blogosphere, I don’t see it as being adopted as part of the larger assessment of who each party is and what they do.

Chuckles the Sensible Woodchuck

ChucklesTheSensibleWoodchuckLast month I mentioned a brilliant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow that effectively lampooned how the American right as bizarrely warped perceptions of the positions held by President Obama. In it, Tom pointed out the irony of the right portraying Obama as a crazed liberal, when in fact most of his actions show he is a centrist with some strongly rightwing views on executive power. At the time, Tom and I got into a back-and-forth on Twitter, as I viewed his toon as showing pretty clearly the same sort of dynamic from the left, wherein the President has taken positions that are similar or even more extreme than Bush on many issues, yet some Democratic supporters gloss over what this means. I tried to highlight the behavior on the left as similar laughable to what Tom described on the right.

I missed it at the time (I was on vacation), but a couple weeks ago, Tom did a new cartoon describing the similar phenomenon of liberal attitudes on Obama. Part of the point that Tom makes so well in this strip (and people like Glenn Greenwald have made repeatedly since early 2009) is that liberals cannot and should not change their assessments of a President’s actions dependent on what party that person belongs to and whether or not you voted for them. If you’re changing your views or apologizing for a politician who has not met your expectations, something is wrong.

The strip definitely worth a read and I hope/imagine the new character, “Chuckles” the Sensible Woodchuck, will be a recurring one in this strip.