Category Archives: Democratic Party

Thoughts on Last Night

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It struck me that the GOP convention featured speaker after speaker talking about the hardships their grandparents had overcome. Last night we heard speaker after speaker talk about the hardships they had overcome themselves.

To be fair, several Dem speakers spoke of parents and grandparents also. But the hardship stories were different in another way — the Dems connected the hardship stories to real policies in a way that the GOP did not. John Dickerson noticed this, too.

If the speech is effective beyond the power of well delivered rhetoric, it will be because the first lady took this description of Obama’s core self and linked it to policy. This is what Ann Romney and Mitt Romney never did. The message of the GOP convention was “Trust Mitt.” That was Michelle Obama’s message too: Her husband could be trusted because he came from a background and has lived a middle class life. But then she started connecting the biography to the policy. This was always Bill Clinton’s great gift. If this connection is successfully made, then that’s what will make this pitch more politically [word missing?] than just a pretty speech by a loving wife who thinks her husband deserves an A for effort.

“We were so young, so in love, and so in debt,” she joked about their early student loan debt, which was higher than their mortgage. “That’s why Barack has fought so hard to increase student aid.” She made the same connection between Obama’s grandmother and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help women get equal pay for equal work. Tax cuts, the auto bailout, and every other policy, she argued, grew out of his biography.

You got that from most of the Dem speakers; a personal connection, a story of how their own experiences shaped their views and inspired them to enter public life. With Republicans there’s a huge disconnect; their experiences of real hardship are second and third hand. We ended up listening to Ann Romney — who is having an elevator installed in the garage of one of her homes to manage her several cars — pretend to care about the price of gasoline.

Another difference between GOP and Dem “hardship” narratives is that Republicans like to tell these stories to show how Grandpa succeeded without anyone’s help, whereas Dems talk about coming together to achieve success. Mayor Julian Castro, for example, talked about “investing in opportunity.” I liked this part of his speech —

Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead. We all understand that freedom isn’t free. What Romney and Ryan don’t understand is that neither is opportunity. We have to invest in it.

Another thing that struck me is that the Dems talked a lot about veterans, a group absent from last week’s GOP rhetoric. And when Iraq veteran Tammy Duckworth said,

President Obama pushed for fairness in the military, listening to commanders as we ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on how to allow women to officially serve in more combat jobs—because America’s daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.

— I saw a roaring ovation from the women in the hall. (Duckworth also reinforced the “working together” theme by talking about how her Blackhawk helicopter crew didn’t abandon her after a rocket-propelled grenade tore her legs off.)

In Tampa, the GOP seemed to have entirely dropped its long-standing conceit of being the pro-military and pro-national security party. Maybe somebody said this, but I didn’t hear them talking about supporting the troops or getting tough on terrorists. It was like they forgot. Why was that?

After Osama bin Laden was killed, I wrote,

The larger point is that, while the death of bin Laden might not be a front-burner issue in 2012, it certainly has changed the trajectory of U.S. politics in President Obama’s favor.

Some commenters argued that the polling bump the President got from bin Laden’s death would be short-lived, and I didn’t disagree, but my point was that the killing of bin Laden would force the GOP to make narrative adjustments it didn’t want to make. And I think the lack of talk about security and terrorists in Tampa was the result of that adjustment.

Righties still can, and do, reassure each other that Obama is soft on terrorists. They still like to compare President Obama to President Carter, who in rightie mythology plays the role of the Specter of Wimpiness. But it must have sunk in to at least some of them that they can no longer credibly claim to be the party of Tough Guys Who Will Protect You From Scary Things versus the wimpy Dems. That part of their sales pitch was kneecapped when Bin Laden was killed.

And given the rolling embarrassment that was Mitt’s “world tour,” I suspect Mitt himself may have banned talk of foreign policy from the convention.

Here is Deval Patrick’s speech, if you missed it.

Dem Convention Day One

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I’m going to do a little live blogging. Is it me, or are the Dems a lot more fired up than the Republicans were?

Deval Patrick — Wow. Great speech. It’s a shame he was on before 10 o’clock eastern when the networks begin broadcasting. I’ll have to post a video as soon as there is one. I’m sorry I missed Ted Strickland. I’ll find a video of that, too.

Wait — here it is —

Update: Mayor Julian Castro is doing pretty well, I think.

Update: Michelle Obama’s speech was, as always, very real.

Tomorrow — the Big Dog.

Taxing Issues

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The Hill reports that Democrats in Washington may go after the “carried interest” tax loophole that gives preferential tax treatment to private equity executives. Some of them are even planning to push for a “Buffett rule” that anyone making seven figures a year pay at least 30 percent in taxes.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll says 55 percent of Americans think the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes, and 52 percent think capital gains and investment income ought to be taxed at the same rate as wages. This is fruit ripe for plucking, one might say.

For years, the dominant argument on tax reform involved lowering marginal rates and closing loopholes. But the “loopholes” most likely to be targeted, Dems realized, are credits and deductions that benefit the middle class. (Oddly, after decades of alleged loophole cutting, GM still didn’t pay taxes last year. Funny how that works.)

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year, so you know this is going to become a big campaign issue. For too long Republicans have gotten away with demagoguing the tax issue. But now recent events and public opinion favor Democrats. They’re coming to bat with the bases loaded, so to speak.

From the far reaches of the Crazy Land Fringe, Grover Norquist says that if the Bush tax cuts expire, President Obama could be impeached.

NORQUIST We’re focused on the fact that there is this Damocles sword hanging over people’s head. What you don’t know is who will be in charge when all of this will happen. I think when we get through this election cycle, we’ll have a Republican majority, [though] not necessarily a strong majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House. The majority in the House will continue to be a Reagan majority, a conservative majority. Boehner never has to talk his delegation going further to the right.

If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and the presidency, I’m told that they could do an early budget vote—a reconciliation vote where you extend the Bush tax cuts out for a decade or five years. You take all of those issues off the table, and then say, “What do you want to do for tax reform?”

Then, the question is: “OK, what do we do about repatriation and all of the interesting stuff?” And, if you have a Republican president to go with a Republican House and Senate, then they pass the [Paul] Ryan plan [on Medicare].

NJ What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Overlooking the technicality that the House impeaches, not the Senate — the time has come to round up all of Grover Norquist’s whackjob ideas and drown them in a bathtub. He wants to make 2012 about tax cuts? Bring it on.

Majority Minority Democrats

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Sorta kinda related to the last post — Thomas Edsall wrote in the New York Times —

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

Now, if you watched the video in the last post, you saw that most of the children featured in the video are white. These are families that lost jobs and homes because of the financial crisis and prolonged unemployment and haven’t been able to get back on their feet. And while you can certainly find bad actors in both parties who contributed to the mess, ultimately our deteriorating economy is the inevitable result of 30 years of Reagonomics and the “no taxes, no regulations” hysteria promoted by Grover Norquist, “free market” conservatives, et al.

And, as we all know, the politicians that brought us this mess get elected mostly because they hoodwink white working-class Americans to vote for them.

I posted something a few days about about some New Hampshire voters who had either crashed or were hanging on to middle-class status by their fingernails, and who were planning to vote Republican next year. And you can go bang your head against a wall all day long over this stuff, but unless one has some understanding of why the economy is failing, and why Washington isn’t responding, I could see why it wouldn’t seem to make much difference which party one votes for.

And you’re not going to get that information unless you’re willing to do some reading, because it’s rarely properly explained on radio or television. And if they’re watching Faux News, they’re just plain being lied to about it.

As I said in the earlier post, for years at progressive conferences the question of how to reach these voters to explain reality to them comes up again and again, and no one has an answer. I think step one is to somehow gain their trust or sympathy so they are willing to listen, but that won’t happen overnight.

Howard Dean’s “50 state” strategy allowed the Dems to take back the House and Senate, but it also saddled us with a bunch of right-wing Blue Dogs who voted with Republicans on critical legislation (and, children, that’s what killed the public option). And in 2010, the white working class voted for Republicans in record numbers, Edsall says.

So, instead, the Obama campaign team wants to put together a center-left coalition of college-educated whites and racial minorities.

There are plenty of critics of the tactical idea of dispensing with low-income whites, both among elected officials and party strategists. But Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science at Rutgers, puts the situation plainly. “My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there, it is because there are no fish.”

Demographic projections suggest that the Dems could be a “majority minority” party as early as 2020. Being cynical, I’d say eventually the Dems could dominate elections simply by making sure people living in their cars and trucks can’t register to vote.

Is Health Care Reform Dead?

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The short answer is, I don’t know, but probably. There are a couple of possible scenarios under which some kind of hcr legislation might still be passed, although it seems one is being ruled out already — to hustle and get a vote on a bill before Brown is sworn in. That’s not going to happen.

The other possibility is that the House would pass a bill identical to the Senate version, which I understand would allow the Senate to go through the procedural nonsense that requires 60 votes. They could then pass the bill with 51 votes. This is probably our only real hope, but the more progressive members of the House say they won’t vote for that bill.

Then there’s the reconciliation option, but I understand that only bits and pieces of the hcr bill could be passed that way, not the whole bill.

We’re already hearing from DINOs like Evan Bayh that the reason Coakley lost is that the Dems moved too far to the left, and they’d better hustle their butts back to the right. That’s going to be conventional wisdom, folks. Count on it.

Peter Daou has a more measured analysis of why the Dems are coming apart at Huffington Post. The whole piece is interesting, but this is worthy of special note:

The single biggest reason Obama’s hope bubble burst is because of the unintended convergence of left and right opinion-making. The cauldron of opinion that churns incessantly on blogs, Twitter, social networks, and in the elite media generates the storylines that filter across the national and local press, providing the fodder for public opinion. Stalwarts of the left, dedicated to principles not personalities, hammered the administration; couple that with the partisan criticisms from conservatives and libertarians, and the net effect was to alter conventional wisdom and undercut Obama’s image and message.

I would say this message isn’t just for President Obama, but all Democrats in Washington. The Democratic Party needs to realize that the foot-dragging of people like Max Baucus (who held hcr up in his finance committee for many long weeks, thereby delaying its passage), Ben Nelson, and Evan Bayh is devastaging to the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party. These guys may be doing what they need to do to win re-election in very conservative states, but in doing so they are killing the Dems’ chance to re-brand itself as a party that can actually do something useful.

The Dems had a small window of opportunity to prove that it really does matter which party one votes for, and that most folks are better off with them, and they blew it.

Hanging by a Hair

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Nate Silver is saying Coakley has only a 25 percent chance of winning the Massachusetts senate election today, which, he reminds us, is not the same as zero. But I’m telling myself not to hope.

Meanwhile, the Peking Duck writes the post I had planned to write today, which saves me a lot of time. See also Bob Cesca and John Cole.

Update: See also Kevin Drum:

The striking thing to me, though, is how fast the left has turned on [Obama]. Conservatives gave Bush five or six years before they really turned on him, and even then they revolted more against the Republican establishment than against Bush himself. But the left? It took about ten months. And the depth of the revolt against Obama has been striking too. As near as I can tell, there’s a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they’d be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It’s extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

That last sentence is a point I keep trying to make. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s better than others, but the rage from the left against Obama and the Dems is so much like the rage from the left against LBJ and then the Dems and then party politics generally that went on back then, and the eventual result — beyond electing Richard Nixon twice — was to give the nation over to Ronald Reagan and lock progressivism into a dungeon, from which it has not yet entirely emerged.

Some Things Are Certain

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After any Democratic Party legislative accomplishment, even an accomplishment that’s not really an accomplishment yet, such as last night’s Senate vote, there are some reactions you can count on.

Someone on the Right will explain why the accomplishment was not, in fact, an accomplishment, but a failure. Or a sign of weakness. Or a portent of failures to come.

Someone on the Left will explain that Harry Reid (or Rahm Emanuel, or Chuck Schumer, or Barack Obama, etc.) isn’t really one of us and has been planning to sell us out all along.

I’m still waiting for the third reaction, although it will no doubt be all over the Sunday talk shows — A majority of “pundits” will solemnly declare that whatever the Dems want to do will have no chance of success unless progressives adopt the wiser, more temperate positions of “moderates.”