Everything Has to be on the Table....Except National Defense

A direct quote from Judd Gregg yesterday on the PBS News Hour yesterday (speaking about the debt commission) : "Everything has to be on the table: entitlements, taxes..."

Two things:

One, it's amazing how conventional this idea has become. Judy Woodruff just listens to what he says and moves on. Kent Conrad, who is also on the program, doesn't say anything either.

Letting Republicans frame the debt issue this way is--in no uncertain terms--fucking stupid. The public's desire for increased military spending is very low. True, there are very powerful constituencies in Washington who would scream over reducing our deficits with cuts in military spending. But they do not have broad popular support. This is another reason why the President's proposed spending freeze which specifically exempts national defense spending cannot really be taken seriously.

When in Doubt, Go to the Graphs

John Judis makes a convincing argument that the declines of Democratic candidates in recent months is intimately linked to Obama's approval rating in the state that candidate is running in. Except that he doesn't say much. He just lets polling graphs do the talking.

I don't know enough about the history of Senatorial candidates in these states to make an argument as to Obama's declining numbers have, in fact, dragged down democratic candidates in these states. What I think seems clear is that numbers really start getting bad for both Obama and Democrats around November. Missouri seems like a pretty conservative state. Obama is under 50% before August. But Robin Carnahan is very popular in the state and she is leading Blount until right around the middle of November. Colorado has a similar story: Obama's below 50% by September, but Senator Michael Bennett still has a lead until right around Thanksgiving (notice for Bennett how his numbers are flatlined, not declining, but the Republican's are rising). It should be extremely disturbing to Democrats that Obama's numbers are below 50% in Ohio and, particularly, in Philadelphia. Here is where you can really see the national trend emerge. Obama is still above 50% in both states at the beginning of November. The Dem Senate candidate, Fisher, and Ohio's (perhaps formerly) popular governer, Ted Strickland, both have leads all year that they lose right at the end of October. The one outlier to all of this is Arlen Specter, whose numbers have been a on a serious decline since he switched parties (remember how he was going to save his seat that way?).

One other point that should be made, however, is that none of these races--with the exception of Specter's seat (surprisingly)--seem even close to being lost. With the exception of Carnahan's race, which is still very close, all of these races have high numbers of undecided voters and the elections are 10 months off. That's a world of time away. However, what does seem clear is that over this past year Democrats let themselves be defined by Republicans, without Republicans offering any alternative for governing, and it worked. In every poll you can see Republican numbers rising, in some cases faster than Democrats' are falling. As of today, that trend is still going strong.

To Defend or not to Defend

Jonathan has long post arguing, in detail, for what is a fairly standard position among the Netroots:

Democrats can be assured that Republicans will attack them, regardless of what they do. Democrats could eliminate the estate tax permanently, slash the capital gains tax, repeal the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, invade Iran, and pass a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion, and Republicans would still attack them -- with exactly the same vehemence and vigor that Republicans have now. That's politics. It's how partisan politics is played. It is absolutely impossible to avoid attacks from one's opponents; nothing you do gives them license to attack, because they will attack whatever you do.

Bernstein's basic point can be summed up as follows: ignore the attacks because they will attack you no matter what.

Now, if we're referring to the current political situation in Washington today, I can't really find a simple example of Republican attacks that would refute Bernstein's argument. But that's more because Republican attacks have been largely fabricated media operas (death panels, Harry Reid's "negro dialect" comment, and bad-bad stimulus "pork" like creating jobs to clean up historical monuments). There is no excuse for Democrats failing to destroy these attacks right where they stand and I think makes a largely-correct-on-the-merits argument like Bernstein's very tempting.

But in absolute terms I think it's wrong. Republicans larger attack against Democrats--that they are both for Big Government and Big Business--is an argument that has resonance with the American public. And I would argue that it does because 1) it rings true given how the administration chose to handle the banking crisis, and 2) because, as Rauch himself argues, it is bad policy on the merits. If the Republicans had more of a coherent governing platform of their own I think this would be more clear. As it currently stands, Bernstein can simply dismiss every Republican attack as hypocritical because they don't have a real governing platform. But just because they aren't any better, doesn't mean that what they're saying doesn't have some truth. I wouldn't frame it the way Republicans frame it. But over this past year it's become very hard for me, as a Democrat, defend it against the charge that it is not just halfway beholden to corporate interests (which I always knew), but that it is ENTIRELY beholden to them when all is said and done. And, yes, it's bad policy. But it's also terrible politics and the Democrats have not paid nearly enough attention to their image as a party in bed with corporate interests. They assume that since the Republicans aren't any less beholden to corporations that voters will dismiss Republican attacks as hypocritical, or at the very least, view Democrats as the lesser of two evils. Both visions display a fundamental poverty of imagination.

Rick Perlstein put it well back in 2004:

For a party whose major competitive advantage over the opposition is its credibility in protecting ordinary people from economic insecurity, anything that compromises that credibility is disastrous.

If Democrats can't embrace being the party of the little man at the expense of their corporate support I don't really know what reason their party has for existing. All of this is to say that, in terms of Bernstein's argument, I think that some attacks really SHOULD be paid attention to. For example, if Democrats had listened more to criticism from their progressive members about their complicity with Wall Street, it's unlikely any of would ever know who Scott Brown was.

Pissing off Conservatives

So far, this is definitely the best argument I've seen for why Democrats should pass the healthcare bill.

Remarks of a Heretic

If I currently get happy whenever I see the Dow fall, does that make me a bad person? (I think if it dipped under 9,000 I'd probably stop feeling that way).

What David Plouffe Has to Say

Plouffe is out with an Op-Ed in the Post about how Democrats can still win in November. Seems like a pretty good plan to me. This passage in particular caught my eye:

Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy. Rarely does a congressional vote or issue lend itself to this kind of powerful localization. If GOP challengers want to run ads criticizing the recovery act as wasteful, Democratic candidates should lift up the police officers, teachers and construction workers in their state or district, those who are protecting our communities, teaching our children and repairing our roads thanks to the Democrats' leadership. Highlight the small-business owners who have kept their doors open through projects funded by the act.

While it's easy to paint ARRA as ineffective on the macro-level (the unemployment rate is still at 10%, right?) I think it's going to be a lot harder for Republicans to stigmatize individual democratic congressman on their vote for ARRA come November. If Democrats are smart they will only briefly focus on hard-to-picture abstractions ("the stimulus pulled our economy back from the brink") and instead localize the results of ARRA. Every time they mention it should be simultaneously linked in voter's minds with faces of people from their communities whose jobs were saved. I think this will be very effective.

One final thought: a lot of the things that Plouffe mentions aren't that hard to figure out. Doing them is really a question of putting in the time and energy. For example, the way to run a strong p.r. campaign behind ARRA is fairly obvious, but if you think about the logistics it's actually pretty complex. You'd need deep roots into local communities to find out specifically how they were helped, and you'd need to local communities to organize and get constituents who were helped to come forward and lend their voices to your campaign. All of this is simple as a solution. Putting it into practice, however, requires a great deal more patience and energy. If Democrats don't believe in what they are doing come November, it doesn't matter how obvious the solution is. There won't be the drive to get the necessary work done.

Why Obama Fears Telling a Story.

In a recent blog post for the New Yorker, Junot Diaz writes:

A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation—but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story. It is hard to feel invested in a terrible story or a confused story or, in the case of the current Administration, no story at all. Obama needs to craft a strong story, and fast, if he expects to be able to accomplish anything in the three years that remain. His opponents are hard at work smithing their stories, and Obama soon might find himself surrounded on all sides by crude powerful tales that no amount of ratiocination will be able to dispel. The President needs to remember his post’s true vocation: that of the Storyteller-in-Chief.

The whole post is worth reading in full. However, Junot seems baffled as to why Obama has not told a story. Indeed, I think many American writers were ecstatic at the possibility of an Obama presidency precisely because he was a real writer, a real storyteller. And in the case of the last eight years leading up to the financial collapse, the narrative for Obama to tell is so unbelievably obvious that for him to be unaware of it is simply impossible. So why hasn't he told one? Because any good story--by it's very nature, is ideological. Any good story uses its characters and their actions to tell us something about human nature, and by extension, about morality. It involves framing a character's actions so that the reader perceives the consequences as either good or bad, productive or destructive, right or wrong. By extension this involves casting particular characters as heroes and villains. Clearly, we of the so-called literary class value stories that blur these binaries, which reveal things that we like to refer to as "the grey area," "paradox," "ambiguity," and so on. But such stories have little value in a political context. Stories that move massive numbers of people to action have traditionally been rather black and white. Their brilliance comes not from burrowing into a small slice of the world and revealing its complexity, but by taking the sprawling series of events over a period of years and streamlining them into a simple, emotionally charged narrative. For Obama to tell convincing story would require him to cast various political actors as heroes and villains. And this is conflicts with something fundamental (and I believe, detrimental) to his presidency: his sincere desire for bipartisanship. He genuinely wants to work with Republicans even as he moves the country left. The problem is that in order to move the country left he needs to cast Republicans in the role of the villain. He needs to state unequivocally that Republican's vision for America has, for the last 25 years, caused median incomes to stagnate while the wealth at the top has exploded. Such rhetoric is, quite rightly, viewed as partisan. One could not blame Republicans--many of whom sincerely believe in their conservative vision for society--to view Obama as an existential threat, a man who enters their land to proclaim that conservatives believe in a false God. You don't negotiate with a man who publicly pronounces your ideology morally bankrupt and fundamentally dysfunctional. None of us would negotiate with a man like that, unless--perhaps--our very survival depended on it. Obama--being the gifted empathizer that he is--certainly knows this. And so what does he do? He presents policies which do move the country in a more progressive direction, but fails to defend them with a narrative that explains why such a direction is necessary. Because the other thing he definitely wants to do--however naive many of us think it--is to bring opposing sides together around a common cause. In other words, he wants to mediate the partisan divide. Well, any mediator will tell you that not villainizing either side is a pre-requisite to successful mediation. If you cast someone as a villain they will behave as a villain. But this is already happening. Republicans already perceive Obama as a threat to their existential survival. They already have no problem dissembling and obstructing. And this--I believe is where Obama may actually be naive: he doesn't want to believe that moving the country leftward will inescapably terrify the conservative movement, that they will perceive HIM as a villain no matter what and will tell a story to the public in which he and the democratic majority are taking the country down a radical path. Obama hasn't done the same thing because he knows the destructiveness of such a narrative, that once you cast your opposition in that light it cements the conflict and destroys any chance of compromise. But the problem is that Obama is also telling a story about his presidency bringing transformational change to the country, and the basic goals of this change are liberal ones: a more equal society, stronger labor laws, higher wages for lower income folks, and a larger role for government to enact these changes. This is an existential threat to conservatism and if Obama wants to make these changes he needs to tell a story with heroes and villains, with good and evil, a story that strikes the majority of Americans at their own existential core and gives them a story they can tell themselves about why Obama is doing what he is doing, why certain people hate it, and why those people who hate it are fundamentally wrong.