Category: Elections

Matt Bai Is Nuts

Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times today, titled “‘Blame the Blue Dogs’ Theory for Democratic Losses Doesn’t Add Up.” It’s just plain nuts. Actually, it’s worse than that. Bai primarily seems to be laundering the Conventional Wisdom that Blue Dogs and the Third Way want to take hold – namely, don’t pay attention to the fact that our preferred policies and tactics were enacted over the last two years when trying to figure out why we were decimated at the polls.

The reality is that the size and cohesion of the Blue Dog caucus made them a key voting bloc during the last two years. As a result, they had major input on the content of legislation passed by the House. Their threat to walk was always hanging over negotiations and often they ended up not voting for legislation that they’d worked hard to get modified to be satisfactory for them (See: the Stupak Amendment). But to suggest that the Blue Dogs didn’t have a major hand in the nature of legislation that the House passed is to be in pure denial of the facts. The problem the Blue Dogs faced is that their efforts prevented Congress from doing more to help people. The stimulus was smaller than necessary because Blue Dogs prevented the “political will” from existing, to use the phrase that was repeated to justify an insignificantly large stimulus. They shrunk jobs creating bills. They limited the scope and efficacy of healthcare reform.  They pursued pork for themselves as bargaining chips. In short, Blue Dogs were critical agents in making sure what efforts the Congress made towards righting the economy and helping voters were too small to be effective.

Policy is not like porridge. The middle point between liberal ideas and conservative ones is not just right. As we saw, when Blue Dogs go their way, America’s porridge stayed too cold to be palatable.

I doubt many voters went into their voting booth last week and said, “Congress was insufficiently liberal, so I will vote my Blue Dog rep out of office.” But they likely did say, “Congress bailed out the Wall Street banks, didn’t create a job for me or my wife with the stimulus, and haven’t punished the people who caused the economic collapse. All of these were things my Blue Dog rep made happen – I’m going to vote him out.”

Clearly Matt Bai, the few remaining Blue Dogs, and the Third Way do not get that Democrats lost because the policies that were enacted were too timid to be effective. They failed to make peoples’ lives better. It’s not about liberal or conservative for voters – it’s about efficacy. But when we political operatives look at last week, we have to ask ourselves, “Why weren’t the laws of the 111th Congress enough to fix the economy, create jobs, and keep voters happy?” Any sober answer to that question would lead one to find the obstructionism by Blue Dogs and conservative Democrats which was removed by watering-down every major piece of economic legislation (at the behest of Blue Dogs). That is, not enough was done because of conservatives in Congress. Voters punished them for this. The lesson is clear to me, but obviously the conservatives who have a vested interest in convincing the rest of the party that their political malfeasance wasn’t the cause of electoral defeat will refuse to learn this lesson, while sending their lackeys like Matt Bai out to talk down to anyone contradicting them.

Thinking About the Election

Earlier this week, Ryan Grim of Huffington Post wrote:

Over the past decade and a half, the party of FDR, JFK and LBJ drifted away from its foundation and found refuge in a transactional politics that is being forcefully rejected by voters. Presented with the chance to make history, Democrats made deals — with pill makers, with device makers, with hospital executives, with hedge fund managers, with swaps dealers, with auto dealers, with “non-bank financial institutions.” As the tide turned, Democrats found those corporate interests scurrying back to the GOP. When the party turned back to its people, they were nowhere to be found. Compromise in pursuit of a broadly popular, unifying agenda is a forgivable sin. Compromise just to put points on the board leads to a blowout.

Last night, HuffPost Hill included this snippet on the election results:

ARMAGEDDON – This is a very, very, very bad night for the progressive movement — a blow that calls into question whether there is such a thing. The idea that running as a passionate progressive-populist, working hard, raising a ton of money and doing bang-up constituent work is a legitimate path to reelection in a conservative district, even in a wave year, was thoroughly demolished. Tom Perriello is a thoughtful, charming, hard-working freshman whose progressive values are deeply held. He worked as hard as anyone in Congress, passionately articulated and defended his controversial votes, raised a ton of money and held endless townhalls while running a flawless campaign in his rural House district. Yet he lost to an empty-headed, country-club Republican who refused to take a position on anything other than the need to cut taxes and spending. He was swamped with corporate money. Carol Shea-Porter and Mary Jo Kilroy, also tough progressives in swing districts, met similar fates — the former to a guy who was part of a bar fight this year and skipped out before the cops came and somehow came up with hundreds of thousands of dollars to lend his campaign after telling voters he was personally broke and the latter to A BANK LOBBYIST. And Alan Grayson went down. And Pat Toomey won in Pennsylvania. Pat Toomey. The Club for Growth derivatives trader. HuffPost Hill is out of answers.

I think the value of the online progressive community, including reporters like Ryan at HuffPost, is that while the right (of both parties) and the Beltway press will try to explain away losses of Grayson, Carol Shea-Porter, Kilroy and a couple others as the result of them being too liberal, we can rebut that simplistic view while learning from what happened to make sure the next crop of progressive elected officialss don’t suffer the same fate.

At base level, not enough was done by elected officials to make peoples’ lives better. But questions about who their opponents were, what sort of outside spending they face, what sort of Democratic Party support they received, what sort of labor support they received, what sort of other progressive group support they received, what specific votes they took that may or may not have been tough for their district, how they communicated with their constituents about these votes, what their opponents said about these votes, and what vision of change they presented to their constituents to befit their reelection are all very important to answer. We can look at them and provide a more robust answer than “progressives can’t stay in office.”

Today might feel like failure, especially with the loss of folks like Grayson and Perriello. But if the Conventional Wisdom coalesces around the Third Way line, then we’ve really failed, as it brings us back to a pre-2004 attitude within the Democratic Party and almost certainly ensures prolonged pain for the American people.

What Markos Said

Markos has a post up at Daily Kos in which he thoroughly takes down the DLC clone organization, Third Way. The whole post critiquing the Third Way’s efforts to become a major player after Democratic losses is worth a read. But this is a brilliant summary of what the Third Way and their campaign to move Democrats to the right stands for:

Their agenda can be summarized as follows:

(1.) Foreclose on Democratic voters, by opposing principle paydown or a foreclosure moritorium.

(2.) Fire Democratic voters, by slashing public sector jobs

(3.) Make the Democratic voters who still have jobs take a pay cut

(4.) Liquidate the pensions of remaining Democratic voters.

You know, the kind of things that get Wall Street all excited.

He goes on:

So I look forward to them coming out of the shadows, where we can more directly engage. If there’s going to be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, let’s have it out in the open. Where people can see that the people trying to buy our democracy post-Citizens United, are also trying to buy our Democratic Party.

I can think of few things more dangerous to the country in a situation where Republicans control one or more chambers of Congress than a concerted effort by corporatists to co-opt the Democratic Party and the Democratic agenda. One thing that I know for sure is that the netroots will fight against this tooth and nail. And that’s a good thing.

Krugman’s Pre-Mortem

Paul Krugman’s Pre-Mortem to today’s election is pretty brutal. The short version is his closing sentence:

So again: it was mainly the economy, with the effects of a bad economy reinforced by Obama’s consistent policy of undercutting both messages and movements that might have helped Democrats weather the economic storm.

We’ll find out tonight, though Krugman is certainly offering some hardcore pessimism early. Except it isn’t pessimism. It’s designed to offer a rebuttal to the inevitable talking points uttered by GOP talking heads and repeated by cable news hosts that Obama and the Democrats suffered losses because they were too liberal and overreached. That’s just not what happened. I do agree with Krugman that the economy was and is the main driving problem and the administration’s failure to aggressively tackle this with strong Democratic policy ideas and clear messaging about them is a major problem. That is, I don’t substantively disagree with Krugman’s assessment, I just shudder to read it on election morning.

It’s In My Raccoon Wounds

Paul Krugman clearly left his optimism behind when writing this column. I imagine the bolded part being read by Peter Griffin:

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Sadly, I think Krugman is right. This is going to be terrible, especially for the economy.

The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I continue to hold out some hopes that Democrats hold the House, but I’m not too optimistic. I think it’s a near certainty that we hold the Senate.

Momentum in Alaska

Over at Daily Kos Joan McCarter has a really exciting post about the momentum Scott McAdams is showing in the Alaska Senate race against Tea Partier Joe Miller and Lisa Murkowski, who is displaying a Lieberman-like surge for personal power. McCarter publishes these internal numbers from the McAdams campaign:

Scott will be close. The numbers in the last week for the two target areas have decreased on Lisa and increased on Scott. Our target was Anchorage/women. Anchorage is now 30/28/26 Miller/Murkowski/McAdams. Last week it was 31/36/23 Miller/Murkowski/McAdams. Undecideds in Anchorage are now 13%, up from 6%. 53% of remaining of the total undecided universe is in Anchorage. A week ago women were 65/29 Positive to Negative for Lisa; in the last week this has changed to 51/41. Clearly our targeting is working. We are pouring everything on at this point.

McCarter goes on:

Miller’s ethics problems have consumed all the oxygen in his campaign for two weeks, and he’s using that to remind Alaskans that Murkowski has been somewhat less than squeaky clean in her own tenure. That’ll serve to remind Alaskans, particularly Democrats, that they don’t really like Murkowski that much either. McAdams has emerged as serious candidate and valid contender.

Miller can’t go 48 hours without sparking a new scandal. In the last day, records from his tenure in Fairbanks North Star Borough show that he admitted to lies about his actions of using Borough computers for personal, political activities. This has been an ongoing scandal for the last week or two and is getting major play in Alaska. And last night, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was told by Joe Miller that being gay was an individual’s decision. Oh and to get this interview, Maddow basically had to walk through a building at breakneck speed to get Miller to talk. Classy!

Nightmare Scenario

New York Magazine has a truly horrific thought experiment about the 2012 presidential election and how Michael Bloomberg’s entry as a third party candidate could throw the election to the Republican nominee, presumably Sarah Palin.

The magazine supposes that were Palin to get the Republican nomination, Bloomberg would run as an independent. The problem I have with this supposition is that while it’s clearly likely that Bloomberg would not support the idea of Palin as the Republican alternative, there’s no real basis to suggest he is equally disgusted by the chances of Obama winning reelection. As the article notes, the administration has done a lot to keep Bloomberg in the fold, including lots of face time with the President, Vice President and Treasury Secretary. The administration clearly values his perspective. I find it hard to believe that he’d reward that with a course of action that is likely to throw the White House to Palin. A candidate doesn’t get into a race because he hates one outcome when getting into the race assures that outcome will come true. That is, while I do think gaming out the consequences of Bloomberg entering the 2012 race (throwing it to the GOP candidate) is interesting, it’s hard to believe that Bloomberg would enter the race out of a desire to stop Sarah Palin from being elected.

What’s really remarkable about the thought of Sarah Palin getting the Republican nomination is how important it makes the 2012 election. 2004 was the most important election of my lifetime, until 2008 was. And now, with the prospect of Palin as his opponent, 2012 might become the most important election. The stakes keep getting raised by the Republican Party through the militarism, demagoguery, and fundamentalism of their candidates.  Nothing would close any perceived Democratic enthusiasm gap in 2012 fast than a Palin nomination.