Losing the North: Republican Realignment

People have been asking if we're seeing a realignment of American electoral politics, with Donald Trump  scrambling the campaign map. There are no real signs of that yet: polls show the presidential electoral map unchanged so far, with the Democrats and Republican leading in the same states they carried last time and the time before that. The real story is the realignment that has already happened, without fanfare, over the past quarter-century. This Fourth of July weekend I'd like to talk about Maine and Vermont.

The largest political realignment of the last half century has been the movement of the Dixiecrats, the traditional Southern bloc of segregationist whites, out of their traditional home in the Democratic Party and into the GOP. That realignment took decades, and made uneven progress; some key Dixiecrats, such as Robert Byrd, remain Democrats for their entire lives while other figures, such as Strom Thurmond, literally switch party affiliation over the course of their careers. LBJ famously remarked after he'd signed the Civil Rights Bills that he'd likely signed away the South for a generation, and the results of his re-election campaign a few months later bear him out. (Here I'm going to use 270toWin's collection of historical electoral maps as the perfect digital visual aids.) Although LBJ absolutely destroyed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 landslide, Goldwater carried the five states of the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina), all traditional Democratic strongholds. That switch in party allegiance is all the more striking because those were the only states Goldwater carried except for his home state, Arizona.

But the realignment LBJ had been worrying about had already been solidly underway for at least sixteen years, since Thurmond's rebellion against Harry Truman and run for President on the third-party Dixiecrat ticket in 1948:

As you can see here,  four of those five deep-South states that defected to Goldwater in 1964 had already made an attempt to secede from the Democrats well before the Civil Rights Act. (Thurmond and his followers left the Democratic Party in a righteous rage over Harry Truman's allegedly radical civil rights agenda. That included things like desegregating federal housing projects and integrating the military. Some white Southerners were not only ready to walk but actually in process of walking before Brown v. Board of Education, the Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, and the rest of the classic Civil Rights Movement as we remember it.)

In 1968, there is yet another third-party run by another Southern Democrat, George Wallace, still angry about the Democratic position on civil rights but not entirely ready to turn Republican. In this map you can see some division and indecision: Texas voting Democratic, Arkansas and four of the five Deep South states voting for Wallace, and the rest of the South (including South Carolina) voting for Nixon. But from 1972 on, those states trend solidly Republican, part of Nixon's "Solid South." The South does vote for southern-boy Jimmy Carter in 1976, but abandons him for Reagan in 1980 (with Carter only carrying his native Georgia in the South). And in 1992 another Southerner, Bill Clinton, manages to take roughly half of the Southern States, and holds on to a little less than half in 1996.

But by 2000, even a Democratic nominee from the South can't get any purchase. Al Gore doesn't get a single electoral vote in the South, not even in his home state of Tennessee. From 1976 to 200 we go from the South willing to vote for a Democratic President, but only if he's a southerner, to the South willing to split its vote for a Democratic nominee from the South, to the South voting as a solid Republican wall no matter where the Democrat is from.

That's a striking and extremely important realignment. And it leaves us, by 2000, with our familiar red-state/blue-state battle lines. Each party has its own fairly stable electoral base, with a handful of swing states (Ohio, Florida, Colorado, etc.) in active play.

But I want to talk about a smaller development that we've overlooked. While the Southern tier was migrating to the Republican column, some long-time Republican strongholds have turned reliably blue. That includes what had been the two most reliably Republican states in the nation: Vermont and Maine.

Vermont and Maine have voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate in every single one of the last six elections, from 1992 to 2012. (Current polling, which could change, suggests that it will be seven in a row.) This in itself is not a huge deal, because those states are so small. They have only seven electoral votes between them, the equivalent of Oregon or Oklahoma. (Of course, in a polarized election, every little bit counts.) I'm more interested in Vermont and Maine as bellwethers of changing political coalitions. Since 1992 those two northern New England states have always voted Democratic in Presidential elections. Previously, they almost never did.

Vermont voted Republican in 33 of the previous 34 presidential elections, from 1856 to 1988. That's every presidential election from the founding of the Republican Party until the election of Bill Clinton. The single exception is the 1964 landslide in which LBJ blows out Goldwater. Maine voted Republican in 31 of those 34 presidential elections. The three exceptions are the Goldwater election of 1964, the second Dixiecrat uprising in 1968, and the 1912 "Bull Moose" election in which Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the Republican vote. (Vermont was one of only two states to stick by Republican incumbent Taft when his home state abandoned him.) For 132 years, Maine and Vermont were the two most reliably Republican states in the nation. This map shows how reliable they were: the only holdouts in FDR's 1936 re-election landslide.

One of the striking things about this is that Maine's turn against the Republicans in the Electoral College begins with a repudiation of George H. W. Bush, who is nominally a Texan but actually a prized resident of Maine. (GHWB voted from a hotel address in Houston but owned a home in Kennebunkport.) And then Maine went on to vote against another Bush twice, despite his local Down East ties.

What happened? How did Vermont and Maine go, over the last 80 years, from the most Republican of Republican strongholds to solid membership in the Democrats' national base?

Most of the stories we hear about changing party allegiances focus on urbanization and changing ethnic demographics. States become more Democratic as they become more urban, and as minority populations, especially African-American and Latino populations, grow. All of that is true enough, but none of it explains Maine or Vermont. Those states are still extremely rural. (I have been to Burlington, Portland, and Bangor, and they are all wonderful towns, but none of them will be mistaken for a major metropolis.Neither state has any city with even 100,000 inhabitants.) Furthermore, Vermont and Maine are the two whitest states in the union: Vermont is 94.3% non-Hispanic white, while Maine is a resplendently snowy 94.4% non-Hispanic white. (The two states' shared neighbor, New Hampshire, is 92.3% non-Hispanic white; Vermont and Maine are actually whiter than the White Mountains.) This is not about racial politics, or at least not in the terms we usually discuss it.

One possible explanation is Democratic voters moving to Vermont and Maine from other, more urban Northeastern states, bringing a more general Northeastern liberalism, and Democratic party loyalties from places like Hartford, Boston, and New York. There's at least some truth to this theory; Brooklyn-born Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is only the most obvious example.

But that is not the whole story. People have also been migrating to the Sun Belt without changing its social conservatism. And rural New England's social liberalism is not simply an urban import. The Vermont and Maine Republicans were traditionally socially liberal: not merely moderate Republicans but progressive and liberal Republicans. Remember, the Republicans were originally the civil-rights party, and the Northeast was originally one of their heartlands. It was Maine who sent Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, to the US Senate for four terms.

Those voters don't fit terribly well with the Dixiecrats. And part of what we're seeing is that adding one of these groups to a party means that, over time, the other group will leave. It is basically a counter-realignment, a smaller response to the large movement of the Dixiecrats from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Look at that Goldwater map from 1964 again: Vermont and Maine flip blue when the Deep South flips red. Vermont, which had stuck by every single Republican candidate including Taft. abandons the Republican nominee that the South crosses party lines to vote for.

It's not that anyone articulates this. No one in Vermont or Maine announces, "I won't stay in the party with those Southerners!"  Nobody complains when a national election swings a party's way because a region that usually goes for the other side suddenly goes for yours. Northern Republicans like having majorities in Congress. But northern Yankee Republicans and Southern converts to Republicanism make strange bedfellows, who disagree strongly about the temperature of the bedroom. They have different cultures and different priorities. Their religious histories are different. As the old Dixiecrat bloc has become ascendant in the party, they have come to set an agenda that often leaves the old-school New England Yankees indifferent and sometimes actively upsets them. You can't keep both groups happy, and pleasing the (relative) newcomers means gradually driving the old guard into the other party.

This doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of Republicans left in Vermont, Maine, and the rest of New England. Of course there are. (Maine currently has a Tea Party governor who squeaked through in a four-way race and is currently antagonizing everyone in the state including the lobsters.)  Regions change political allegiance slowly, by fits and starts.  State and local Republicans can still win in Vermont and Maine even if Republican presidential nominees can't, just as conservative Democrats could keep winning state and local races in the South for years after it had switched its Presidential loyalties. (See: Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).) In fact, you can see a surprisingly large number of independents winning statewide office in Vermont and Maine, and to some degree in other New England states like Connecticut. For a while there, Vermont's three-person Congressional delegation included a Republican, a Democrat, and a Socialist Independent.

But I would suggest that all those independent officeholders are part of the region's piecemeal migration from the R to the D column. It's fairly rare for voters, much less career politicians, to switch parties after a certain age; party identity is an identity, too, and it's hard to switch sides. You have some official party-swapping in Northern New England, including some pretty high-profile examples, but you have many more examples where former Republicans simply become independents: disaffected from their original (and in some sense natural) party, but not willing to sign on with the Democrats yet. So you see former Republicans running as Independents, but also former Democrats running as Independents in order to appeal to that body of swing voters who've migrated away from the Republicans but aren't ready to call themselves Democrats. Senator Angus King (I-ME), who became an Independent in the 1990s, won both the governorship and a Senate seat with this strategy.

But you also can see dramatic switches happening in real time: back in 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords, (R-VT), a traditional Yankee Republican, left the party to become (I-VT), caucusing with the Democrats and handing the Senate majority over to the Democrats from the Republicans. Jeffords blamed George W. Bush. (That Bush did not know how to handle New England Republican Senators, despite the fact that his own grandfather had been a New England Republican Senator, tells you how much the party has changed.) But that's part of a larger story, in which the original, foundational base of the Republican Party, the heirs of the Lincoln Republicans, leave (or are driven off) because they can't co-exist with the party's new, post-Confederate base.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Clinton: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Eight years ago, in what was really my first few months as a blogger, I opened a post like this:

The most important question to ask tonight is:

Can a woman be elected President of the United States?

I think the answer, at the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign, has to be a resounding "Yes."

No, she didn't win. No, she is not going to be the next President. But it's no longer possible to say that a woman couldn't do it. It is now undeniable that a woman can be a powerful contender for the White House, and that if a few things had gone differently (her campaign strategy; her vote on Iraq) Senator Clinton would have had the nomination.

That was the night Hillary Clinton's first campaign for President ended, with the close of the 2008 California primary.
Last night she proved me wrong and right. I was right that she had paved the way for a woman to gain the nomination and to win the White House. But I did not foresee that the next woman candidate, the first to be nominated by a major party, would be Clinton herself. She has become her own successor, her own political descendant. I wish my mother had lived to see this day.
She didn't go easily eight years ago, and I was in the opposing camp. But I was moved by what she had achieved then, and moved more deeply by her accomplishments today.
In 2008 there were also mutterings that the fix was in, that she had had the race stolen from her by sexism. And then, as now, I thought those mutterings diminished then-Senator Clinton's place in history:

Least of all should her achievement be diminished by claims that the nomination was wrongly denied her, or that it was stolen. It wrongs Senator Clinton, and ill serves the women who will come after her, to imagine her not as the pioneer, the power broker, the master politician that she has become but instead as a victim.

[snip]

Don't tell your daughters that the nomination was taken from Hillary Clinton. Don't tell them that the door to the Oval Office will always be closed, that no matter how well they do they will never get a fair accounting. Don't tell them that even the best candidate, with the best message and best campaign, will always be cheated by sexism, that a woman's best will never be good enough, or that even great women end up as victims. Tell them the truth: that there is a chance for them no matter what they do, that sexism will always have to be confronted and defeated but that it can be, and that while they will have to work harder and fight longer that in the end they will have the chance both to fail and to succeed, to take upon themselves the responsibility for their own defeats and their victories. Do Senator Clinton justice as a woman who made her own decisions, as a historic figure who held much of her political destiny in her own hands.

Tell your daughters that Hillary Clinton ran a great campaign, but not a perfect campaign. Tell them that she was a great woman, but not the last great woman. There was a better campaign to run, and there will be another woman, on another day, to run it.

The next day has come, and the next campaign, and the next great woman in American politics is Hillary Clinton herself. As long as I have thought I have known her, she never ceases to amaze.

History, here she comes.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at Dagblog

Dear Republicans: You Did This. You Fix It.

Dear Republicans: I know that many of you are upset by Donald Trump's rise. I know that many of you are horrified. But let's be frank. This is your party. You did this. I won't walk through the details. But the thing speaks for itself: the Republican Party planted the seeds for this, cultivated those seeds through campaign season after campaign season, and now they have borne strange fruit.

You did this. You have to fix it.

I've heard some talk from various pundits about what Democrats or liberals should do to stop Trump. Some pundits talk about how we should vote in the Republican primary to shore up this or that anti-Trump. Some people have already begun muttering about how the Democratic nominee will need to use restraint against Trump in the general, about not stooping to his level, all of which is simply an attempt to impose rules to limit how the Democratic nominee campaigns. To all of that I say: no.

The Republicans did this, and the Republicans need to fix it. If you cannot keep Trump from becoming your nominee, we will take things into our own hands by beating him in the general. And don't you dare tell us how to campaign. We will beat Trump by any means required, because the health of our Republic demands it. You don't get to build the monster, lose to the monster, and then tell us all the ways we're not allowed to fight the monster. You beat him yourself, or you let us do it and don't complain about how.

If you can't stop Trump in the primaries, you need to stop giving us advice. If Trump gets to the general election, it's your turn to listen to us. You need to do your duty to America and vote for Hillary Clinton.

You don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, or for Bernie Sanders? I get it; I understand that you're Republicans. In your shoes, I wouldn't want to vote for your party's nominee. But I'm not in your shoes, because my party isn't about to nominate a dangerous and shamefully unqualified demagogue to the highest office in the land. We're deciding between a competent pragmatist and a seasoned idealist. You're about to nominate a race-baiting realtor with florid psychiatric symptoms. Our party doesn't do that. Yours does. There is a price to pay for that.

And don't tell me that Hillary Clinton is just as bad as Donald Trump. You know that is a lie. And lies like that are how your party got so far adrift in the first place. It's time to stop lying to yourselves and to face the real world. There's no place left to hide.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

I'm With Her

In 2008, I supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. I would have backed Hillary in the general, happily. But I saw Obama as somewhat to Hillary's left, and I saw him as a superior campaigner who would make a stronger candidate.

This year, I am voting for Hillary Clinton. She is strongest general election candidate the Democrats have this year, she will make a more effective president than any other Democrat in the field, and she is far better qualified than any other candidate in either party. My decision could not be simpler.

I am to Hillary Clinton's left myself, just as I was and am to Barack Obama's left. (Nor have I ever been surprised to find myself on Obama's left. I knew who I was voting for in 2008, and Obama has proved to be pretty much who I thought he was.) I accept that I am much more liberal than the median American voter. If I want to see a president of the United States as liberal as I am, the whole country has to move left first. That movement will never happen during a presidential election; the presidential election will ratify a movement that has already happened.

Do Hillary's centrist instincts sometimes frustrate me? Yup. Absolutely. But the way to move her left is to shift the terms of debate left. And Hillary's long political track record demonstrates, without question, that she moves to the left as the progressive policy consensus moves left. She has done it repeatedly, on issues across the spectrum. Some of Hillary's critics point to positions she once took, often twenty years ago, that contradict her positions today. But that is one of the reasons I'm voting for her. She has moved left. And she does not cling to her former positions out of any rigidity or misguided pride. She will continue to move left as our policy debates evolve. America has real problems that need solving, and almost all the best solutions lie in the left side of the spectrum (simply because almost every workable conservative idea, and more than one unworkable conservative idea, has already been tried). The center is going to move to the left because of reality's liberal bias. Hillary Clinton's realism will move her further to the left over time.

Bernie Sanders is much closer to me ideologically. I agree with him about where we ought to go as a country, and where we should end up. But he is not great about explaining the details off how we get there, and I am not persuaded that Bernie would get us there. He is no Barack Obama. He has virtues that Obama doesn't, and Obama has strengths that Bernie doesn't. Bernie is not nearly the same campaigner. And Bernie's policy proposals are not built around what he can actually achieve in the near or intermediate future. Bernie's campaign is great about what we ought to do, but much fuzzier about the means. I have more faith in Hillary to get me as much progress as the next four years allow.
What about the scandals? What about them? I'm old enough at this point to remember twenty-four years of persistent talk about Hillary scandals, scandals that never quite turn into anything solid.

Some people say that Hillary isn't trustworthy, that where there is so much smoke there must be some fire. But it's been a quarter century of smoke without fire, so it's fair to ask if the endless smoke isn't something else entirely. It's not that "people" don't trust Hillary. It's that people, specific individuals, work very hard to paint Hillary as untrustworthy. That isn't a reason for me not to trust her. It's a reason for me to rally around her. I'm tired of her being attacked. And after years of all-out, scorched-earth political warfare, I am not about to abandon a seasoned warrior. We're going to fight for everything we get, no matter how big we win in November. And Hillary is the best fighter. She's the best choice, and I'm with her.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Praying for Nino, and Planning for What's Next

This morning in church I prayed for the soul of Antonin Scalia, and asked for him to receive God's mercy. I disagreed with him sharply during his lifetime, and sometimes judged him harshly, which made prayer all the more incumbent on me. Some of my friends have argued with me about this on social media, taking it as some sign of approval or absolution. Let me be very clear: I believe that Scalia is very much in need of mercy. (I have a beloved aunt, a former Sister of St. Joseph, who passed away a few years ago, and I almost never pray for her, because I strongly doubt God needs me to vouch for her.) I believe, I fear, that Scalia has done things that require God's forgiveness.

But on the other hand, Scalia was a human being with a moral self, capable of both good and evil, and I need to recognize his humanity. Nor is it for me to judge his soul. Scalia was subject to some of the temptations -- a sharp tongue, a weakness for partisan conflict, pride in his intellectual abilities -- that I have wrestled with for many years. And my chief grievance against Justice Scalia in the exercise of his office was that he sometimes failed to respect others' humanity as fully as he ought, that he did not render the compassion or mercy that others were owed. But if those were his failings, they will not be mended by aping him. Dehumanizing Nino Scalia and hardening our hearts against him would mean taking on the worst of his failings and perpetuating them.

I was appalled to see people cheering Scalia's death on the internet. I was never going to be sorry the day he left the Court, but I can't rejoice in the way he left it. I was ashamed of many of my fellow liberals. But I was just as appalled to see conservatives playing partisan games within an hour of the sad news.

I can't imagine a sorrier monument to Scalia's "originalist" approach than to openly defy the plain reading of the Constitution. A President of the United States with 11 months left in his term is President of the United States. Apparently, even those basic facts are unacceptable to the current Republican Party, so we're going to spend the rest of the election year in the Thunderdome.

But I think the Republicans, in their current disarray, just Thunderdomed themselves. One result of McConnell and Cruz's open obstructionism is that the Senate elections just got nationalized. Every Republican senator running for election in a swing state can now be painted as an obstructionist for not giving the President's nominee an up-or-down vote. Just choosing to find fault with a particular nominee, the safe and obvious strategy, has been taken off the table because McConnell gave the game away by announcing that Obama had no right to nominate anyone.

(There's a special circle of political hell for Republican senators who are running for re-election in swing states but who haven't had their primary yet, which is to say all of the swing-state Republicans but Kelly Ayotte. Those senators can be attacked on the right unless they commit to NOT approving ANY nominee, and then attacked in the general for being partisan hacks. Mitch McConnell, political genius, just threw his own senators into that circle of hell.)

Meanwhile, Obama is free to nominate a potential justice he genuinely wants to see on the court. If his pick gets nominated, he wins. If the Republicans block his nominee (or a series of his nominees; he has time to nominate at least three), he can make the Republicans look like the hacks they are. Meanwhile, the stalemated Court won't be able to make any precedent without at least one of the liberal judges agreeing. (The sole exception is the odious Fisher v. Texas case, where the conservatives might overturn affirmative action in college admissions of a 4-3 vote because Justice Kagan has recused herself. Chief Justice Roberts has to ask himself if he's willing to do that, and possibly damage the Court's reputation, with only four votes.)

The biggest surprise in this political chaos is that we're surprised. It's been a long time since a Supreme Court Justice passed away in office. And in many ways, our political elite has begun to presume upon modern medicine and extreme longevity. Antonin Scalia was clearly planning to hang on into his eighties. We now expect Supreme Court Justices to hang on into their eighties if they choose, as if it were simply a matter of choice. When the death of a 79-year-old comes as such a drastic surprise, we all need to recalibrate our response to mortality.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

New Hampshire Primaries: Slouching Toward the Brokered Convention

It's still early, with only two-fifths of the returns in from New Hampshire tonight. But Sanders is comfortably ahead of Clinton and, on the Republican side, chaos is comfortably ahead of consensus.
Recently, on one of Mike W's threads, I argued that:

The most chaos-inducing result for the Republicans in New Hampshire probably goes 1. Trump 2. Kasich 3. Bush 4. Rubio 5. Cruz. In that situation, and in a few other permutations close to that, all five of them have enough reason not to drop out of the race.

Currently, with 40% of the vote in, it's: 1. Trump 2. Kasich 3. Cruz 4. Bush 5. Rubio. (Cruz and Bush are less than half a percentage point apart, and have already flipped places once; they may flip again. Pretty close to the nightmare result, if you're looking for closure, or the dream result, if you're a civics geek/media nerd yearning for a brokered convention.

Basically, what this means for the GOP is that only Chris Christie is dropping out tomorrow. (Maybe Carson and Fiorina, maybe not; they're so far behind it doesn't matter.)

Rubio is very unlikely to drop out before South Carolina. Bush, with his deep warchest and stubborn pride, is going to call a third- or nearly-third place showing good enough to stay in. Kasich's second place is exactly what he hoped for to keep him in the race. So all three of the Bush/Kasich/Rubio troika are staying in; even if one dropped out, the party would not immediately coalesce behind one of the other two.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side it's simpler: Hillary will fight a pitched battle to defeat Bernie in Nevada and South Carolina, and hope to finish him off on Super Tuesday.

The day to look for is the Ides of March, March 15th, when Florida, Ohio, and Illinois vote. Any primary that isn't essentially wrapped up by that point is probably going the whole distance.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

After Iowa: Republicans Still in Trouble

The day after the Iowa Caucus, the conventional pundit wisdom is that the Republican position improved and that the Democrats are somehow (and here things get a little cloudy and ill-defined) in trouble. This is because the conventional wisdom is 1) relative, 2) obsessed with direction, and 3) amnesiac. So the Republican result gets spun as positive, because things are relatively better for the GOP and moving in the right direction, so that's "good." We forget all about the fact that last week -- just last week! -- various Republican heavyweights were actively trying to prevent the very result that is now being hailed as Good News for the GOP. And we measure everything by expectations, rather than by objective standards.

But even if the Republicans have taken a step toward climbing out of their hole, they are still in a deep hole, with a lot of climbing yet to do. They don't have a front-runner. They don't have a clear primary field. The Republican presidential campaign has gone from Completely Doomed to merely Basically Doomed. It could be even worse for them, and sometimes has been, but don't be fooled. "Could be worse" does not mean "good."

The big success story is that Trump came in second, so the Republicans can start the parade. Maybe this is better than Trump coming in first, unless of course you remember that last week the Grand Old Party was trying to throw Ted Cruz under the bus and openly rooting for Trump to beat him in Iowa. So Cruz beating Trump is a victory condition, and Trump beating Cruz is a victory condition, which must be convenient. Unless, of course, we remember that both Trump and Cruz are horrible general-election candidates and more than half of the Iowa Republicans voted for one of them.

Part of today's thinking is that Trump, having had a setback and badly underperformed his polls, will now collapse like a cheap tent. To this I say, maybe. It's certainly true that Der Trump has not behaved like a traditional candidate, proving immune to things that would end most campaigns. On the other hand, this scenario counts on Trump behaving unlike a traditional candidate. The conventional wisdom has never been that someone who comes in second in Iowa by a few percentage points and holds a hefty in lead in New Hampshire is no longer anyone to worry about. The idea that Trump is done because he came in second in Iowa, where several polls were showing him in second place over the last month, strikes me as wishful thinking.

The Republicans can be pleased and relieved that Trump didn't roll up 35% of the vote. On the other hand, when you step way from the endlessly-adjusted expectations, you find yourself facing the fact that a psychologically troubled amateur with no ground game still got 24% of the vote. That is not good at all. And that psychologically troubled amateur, who is still leading in New Hampshire, has enough money to stay in the race all the way until the convention if he's feeling stubborn, especially because he doesn't have to pay for a ground game or even much advertising, and still take a significant slice of the vote. Trump can certainly keep someone else from building a majority. And if he actually starts paying for commercials, who knows.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio's 23% of the vote is allegedly cause for triumphant rejoicing, because he did better than expected and because one of the "electable" candidates got into the top three. So now the whole party can coalesce around Marco, right? Well, slow down. He managed to come in third. And he only got 23% of the vote. So his ability to expand to 50+% percent is still, ah, untested. So is Rubio's alleged ability to consolidate the "mainstream" or establishment vote, since most of his mainstream-y rivals basically abandoned Iowa and are waiting in New Hampshire, where three of them are polling at 10% or better. You can't say Rubio took the crown from Bush, Christie, or Kasich, since Bush, Christie, and Kasich conceded the round and are positioning themselves for the next one. Is Rubio the mainstream boy to beat? Maybe. But he still has to do it.

And then if Rubio emerged as the Sanest Remaining GOP Candidate, there's no evidence that he could beat Trump or Cruz. Rubio got 23% of the Iowa vote. Bush, Christie, and Kasich split less than 7% between them. That's barely 30% of the Iowa Republican electorate voting for sanity or electability. Meanwhile, if you add up the vote shares for Cruz, Trump, Carson, Rand Paul, Huckabee, and Santorum, you're seeing a very solid two-thirds preference, a supermajority, for a candidate who is bananapants crazy. Even if everybody gets behind Rubio, it's not clear that "everybody" is a majority of the party any more. The Bananapants Caucus is large and it's energized and it wants what it wants.

And while we're talking about the 30% threshold, how is it that none of the Republican candidates got to 30% of their own party's vote? Even the "winner," Cruz, did not get to 28%. You can say that this is because the vote is split so many ways. But actually, the vote is split so many ways because none of the candidates are very popular. None of them can even get one third of the vote. By contrast, in 2008 all three of the leading Democrats got a larger vote share than Cruz did this time. Part of that is because the Iowa Democrats shunt caucusers to second choices, but the third-place Democratic finisher in 2008, one Senator Hillary Clinton, got 29% of her party's vote, while 2016's glorious victor Ted Cruz doesn't quite have 28% of his party backing him.

(Oh, yes and because of expectations, Hillary's whisper-thin victory, or statistical tie, is supposed to be a huge comedown. On the other hand, she got nearly 50% of the vote in a state where last time she got 29%. Disaster!)

And while we're comparing Democratic and Republican vote tallies, we can ask ourselves how many people voted for the top two Democrats. We can't say in detail, because the Democratic Caucus only releases state-delegate counts, but we can use registration data, turnout history, and the published results to estimate a ballpark figure. If it were a close comparison we wouldn't have enough data, but in this case the ballpark estimate will do because Ted Cruz is not actually in Sanders's or Clinton's ballpark. Even using the most conservative estimates, both Sanders and Clinton each collected at least 10,000 more individual votes last night than Ted Cruz did.

Just under 187,000 Iowa Republicans caucused last night, out of 650,000 registered Republicans: better GOP turnout than the last two presidential cycles, where Iowa turnout was around 20%. (Here I'm using Dennis J. Goldford's turnout date from The Iowa Caucus Project, which is very much worth a look.) Of those 187,000, Cruz garnered just over 51,000 votes.

Now, there are 700,000 registered Democrats in Iowa (and 750,000 registered independents). Goldford's data shows that the last two contested Democratic caucuses, 2004 and 2008, had a turnout of more than 23% in 2004 and just under 40%, a whopping amount by caucus standards, during the Obama/Clinton/Edwards showdown of 2008. We don't know this year's turnout, except for meaningless media anecdotes, so lets err on the small-c conservative side and say that the minimum Democratic turnout is 20%, lower than in 2004. (We could get super-conservative and set it to 18% and it wouldn't matter much.) That would mean 140,000 Democratic caucusgoers, with much lower turnout than the Republicans this year, and that sounds very low, but let's stick with it.

If 140,000 people caucused for the Democrats and split nearly in half, that's just shy of 70,000 votes for the winner AND 70,000 for the runner-up. That means the second-place Democrat had to pull at least 18,000 or 19,000 votes more than the Republican winner.

(Don't like that number? Let's set Democratic turnout to a bottom-falling-out 18%, much worse than 2004. Now we have a mere 126,000 Dem voters, giving Clinton and Sanders a mere 62,000 votes and change. Still a five-figure advantage over Cruz.)

And of course, if the Democratic turnout was actually higher than that 20% (or 18%) minimum, the difference between Sanders's vote and Cruz's vote only expands. If we find that 25% of Democrats turned out, a fairly middling number by recent standards, that would mean that Sanders and Clinton each had around 35,000 more supporters than Cruz did last night. And if the Democratic turnout was even 30% (on the high side, but far below 2008's high water mark of 39-40%), then both Clinton and Sanders collected one hundred thousand votes apiece, basically doubling Ted Cruz's total.

These aren't exact figures, because we don't have the exact figures. They are only estimates of general scale. But the difference between Cruz's support (or Trump's or Rubio's) on one hand and Sanders's or Clinton's on the other, is not a matter of exact figures. You don't need most of the decimal places. It is a comparison of scale. Even if you low-ball Clinton and Sanders, they had to swamp Cruz in the raw vote count.

So obviously, as everyone on TV concludes, things are looking pretty tough for the Democrats.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

I Was Wrong About Hillary

Back in 2000, when Hillary Clinton was still First Lady and running for the US Senate, I thought she would be a bad fit for the job. Clinton was clearly very smart and talented, but I believed that her particular gifts made her a natural Cabinet Secretary: the very job that she couldn't hold as the sitting President's spouse.

I thought Hillary would be better running a department, which would allow her to draw upon her deep mastery of policy detail, than she would be as a legislator and campaigner. She wasn't the natural stump politician that Bill was, and I didn't think she would do well in the deal-making, back-slapping world of the Senate. I was wrong.

Clinton was an extremely effective Senator, and got re-elected without breaking a sweat. She not only adapted to the Senate, but she mastered it, becoming a powerful and influential member. So I was wrong, because I had underestimated Hillary Clinton.

Then, when she had lost her closely-fought nomination contest with Barack Obama and President-Elect Obama asked her to be Secretary of State, I thought that it was a mistake. Yes, of course, I thought she would make a great Cabinet Secretary, that it was a natural position for her gifts. But now that she was being offered state, I thought that she would be great leading any department but State.

I thought Clinton would be undermined by being the emissary for another powerful male politician, especially by one who had beaten her. She had been Bill's surrogate, and now she would be Barack's. The Secretary of State needs to a solid relationship with the President, or (more accurately) needs other foreign leaders to see her relationship with the President as solid. I disliked seeing Clinton in a job which made her so visibly dependent upon a male patron.

I was wrong. Again. Because I had underestimated Hillary. Again.

Clinton was a powerful and effective Secretary of State, who obviously had Barack Obama's ear and who was clearly respected by foreign governments as a heavyweight in her own right. Being Obama's deputy did not diminish Clinton; it elevated Obama. Clinton's gravitas underscored Obama's seriousness, and sending Clinton always signaled that Obama was taking someone seriously.

I was proud of Clinton's service. My favorite moment was during a meeting with various Arab leaders shortly before the Arab Spring, in which Clinton tried to persuade them to loosen up and reform their systems before they had problems. (Yes, she told them this before the Arab Spring. When you're right, you're right.) They threw back their reflexive deflection, "Why don't you get Israel to reform its behavior?" to which Clinton answered, without missing a beat, "We can't get a lot of our allies to do what we'd like them to do." Boom! There it is.

So I've been wrong about Hillary Clinton, on a consistent and semi-regular basis, for a decade and a half. I've given her my mealy-mouthed doubts, always saying that of course she's very qualified, but not for whatever particular job she was up for. I didn't think of it as a sexist objection, but let's be frank: I discounted her qualifications in every actual case, so that I would speak of her as gifted in the abstract but unqualified whenever she was up for an actual job.

Well, I'm done making that mistake. I've been wrong about Hillary Clinton a number of times. But I'm not going to underestimate her again. She has always surprised me, always exceeded my expectations, and I am never going to discount her again.

I'm ready for Hillary. But even if I weren't, Hillary is ready.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Larry Summers Is Not the Main Problem

I'm as pleased as anyone that Larry Summers has withdrawn from consideration as the next Chair of the Fed. I thought he would do a terrible job. But Summers himself was never the real problem. His candidacy was only a symptom. The real problem is that we have a President who wanted to nominate Summers in the first place. Obama does not understand what's wrong with the American economy, and five years into his term, he persists in some basic misunderstandings.

There are two basic Democratic narratives to explain the 2008 financial meltdown, and they contradict each other. When Obama took office, he had to choose which story to believe. The first story is that the economy thrived under Clinton, and Bush's people screwed it up. I'll call that the Democrat vs. Republican story. It's partisan, but not ideological.

The other story is that Clinton's economic policies led to a short-term boom, but set us up for the long-term bust that started in 2008. The toxic securities that crashed the system in 2008 were deregulated under Clinton. Deregulation of banks started under Clinton. Clinton thought Alan Greenspan was a genius. The list goes on. The Bush people, at worst, only exaggerated what Clinton's people had already been doing. Their basic emphases (favoring investors over workers, worrying more about inflation than unemployment, etc.) were the same. Call this the Left-vs.-Right story. It's ideological, but not partisan.

You can't believe both of these stories if you're going to actually come up with a plan to improve the economy. You have to pick one. If the Democrat-vs.-Republican story is the right one, the best thing to do is to put Clinton's old academic advisers back in charge. But if the Left-vs.-Right story is true, then putting the old Clinton guys back in charge is the LAST thing you should do. Clinton's economic policies, devised by Robert Rubin and the so-called "Rubinites" associated with him, are either the way out of our country's economic mess or a way further into that mess. It can't be both.

Obama clearly chose the "Clinton knew how to run the economy" story at the outset of his first term. That makes sense. Obama had never had a strong personal vision for economic policy. (Read the economy chapter in The Audacity of Hope and you'll see what I mean.) He was immediately forced to take responsibility for a national economic crisis that had hit late in his election campaign, giving him almost no time to think our economic problems through or develop new policy ideas. And he had to stop the bleeding somehow. Going with the Democrat-vs.-Republican story gave Obama a ready-made team to put in charge and a set of basic policies to follow. (Larry Summers, Clinton's old Treasury Secretary, is one of the main Rubinites.) Going with the Left-vs.-Right narrative would have meant coming up with a completely new team and a completely new set of ideas. But who would he have picked? How would he distinguish good policy advice from bad? Accepting the Left-vs.-Right narrative meant moving into uncharted territory during a national emergency. Throwing out the old playbook and starting over is a much riskier move, and Obama hates unnecessary risks. Electing Hillary Clinton instead of Obama would not have avoided this problem. Hillary would have relied on Bill's old economic advisers, too.

While Obama's original choice might have been reasonable at the time, it has also turned out to be wrong. Five years later, growth is still sluggish, unemployment still high, and income inequality more rampant than ever. We've had five years of the Rich Man's Recovery, where the tiny fraction at the top have started growing even richer than they were in the Bush II years, but the rest of the country is still nowhere close to getting back to economic health. Not only is that not success, it's potentially a recipe for much bigger failure. The high levels of inequality make the whole system less stable and more prone to catastrophe.

Sure, we are almost certainly better off than we would have been if McCain, rather than Obama, had been calling the shots, and better off than we would be under President Romney. A move to the kind of Austrian economics that people like Rand Paul favor would have been a disaster. Obama understandably wants credit for keeping the economy from going off the rails completely and for whatever recovery has taken place over the last five years. He's committed on some level to defending his earlier decisions, and doesn't feel he has any room to maneuver on his left. He's right as far as that goes: his centrist policies are surely healthier than hard-right economic ideology would be. But "better than crazy" is not good enough. And while Obama's policies fit reality better than the right wing's do, the actual economic reality is still far to Obama's left.

Centrism is almost never the long-range solution to a fundamental crisis. A major crisis is usually a sign that a set of policies have major underlying problems. Sticking to the middle of the road makes sense in the good times, but disasters as big as 2008 are reality's way of telling you that you are on the wrong road. Proceeding cautiously down the wrong road and obeying a reasonable speed limit only changes how fast you get lost. To actually get out of trouble, you have to turn around and go in a different direction. That Obama wanted to put Larry Summers, the chief advocate of deregulating the exotic securities that caused the 2008 crisis, in charge of the Federal Reserve, shows that Obama still thinks that he can keep going down the Clinton/Bush economic road and it will all be okay if he just drives carefully enough. That he wanted to have Larry Summers riding shotgun with him is bad. But even if Summers isn't officially navigating, Obama is still following the wrong directions.

cross-posted from Dagblog

"Meh" Is for Mitt

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary last night with 39% of the vote. The media is counting it as a big win, which is fair enough. 39% is a perfectly good win in New Hampshire, and very much in line with what many past winners have received. But there are two things that should worry the Mittster.

1) Voter turnout was basically flat from 2008, even though there wasn't a contested Deomcratic primary this time.

That's significant because in New Hampshire, Independents can vote in either primary. In 2008, the Democrats had a barn-burner of a contest with a record voter turnout. This year they had a perfunctory vote for an unopposed incumbent President, which dropped their turnout by about two hundred thousand. That should have freed up many tens of thousands of Independent voters to participate in this year's Republican race, but participation on the Republican side didn't really budge. That suggests either a problem with Republican enthusiasm, a lack of appeal to swing voters, or both.

2) 39% in New Hampshire isn't really that good for a politician from Massachusetts. I'm not saying that it shouldn't count as a win. But it does suggest that Romney's not really breaking through to the voters.

For someone who's held statewide office in Massachusetts, New Hampshire in basically a home game. Almost everyone in New Hampshire gets their TV, and their TV news, from Boston. Most of the state's population lives near the Massachusetts border, many voters are originally from Massachusetts, and a large number go to Massachusetts every day for work. (I used to wake up in New Hampshire and go to high school in Massachusetts. This isn't unusual.) So anyone who's held major office in Massachusetts is someone that New Hampshire voters already know pretty well.

Let me put this in perspective:

- Massachusetts candidates have now won New Hampshire in four of the last seven primaries (1988, 1992, 2004 and now 2012).

-Only two Massachusetts candidates have ever lost New Hampshire: Ted Kennedy in 1980, who was challenging an incumbent President of his own party, and, well, Mitt Romney last time around.

-Every one of those Massachusetts candidates over the last thirty years, winners and losers, have polled somewhere in the 30s on election night. Mitt Romney now has the distinction of having the highest and lowest vote percentage from that group, 39% last night and 31% four years ago. But he's not much ahead of previous high-score holder John Kerry at 38%. Even Ted Kennedy got 37% when he lost.

Last night's win puts Mitt in the august company of John Kerry, Mike Dukakis, and Paul Tsongas. You'll notice something about these men: none of them became President of the United States. They were perfectly plausible nominees. On the other hand, they were not great campaigners. Dukakis and Kerry, who actually won the nomination in years when they had a very legitimate shot, managed to fall short in part because they were not terribly effective on the trail. You couldn't call either of them electrifying.

By contrast, the last Massachusetts politician to win the Presidency, John F. Kennedy, won New Hampshire with an eye-popping 85% of the vote. That win isn't directly comparable to results from the last thirty years. The primary system as we know it was still evolving in 1960, and New Hampshire was not contested in anything like the way it is now. Still, 85% is a long way from 39%.

Romney should feel pleased by his victory. But he was Governor of Massachusetts for four years, he has quite literally moved to New Hampshire, and even with that state's voters knowing him as well as they know their own elected officials, he couldn't break 40% of the vote in his own party. That isn't exactly an overwhelming rush of love. 39% is great, but John Kerry could get 38% and Mike Dukakis could get between 36 and 37%. Paul Tsongas, who was like Dukakis's more sedate cousin, could break 33%. Ted Kennedy could get 37% of the vote in that state after Chappaquiddick. 39% is nobody's landslide.

Mitt Romney has an increasingly secure hold on the nomination. Mitt Romney also has a problem on the campaign trail. And it's probably him.

Dear Barack

cross-posted at Dagblog

Dear Mr. President-

I'm a big fan of pragmatism. And I've been a big fan of yours, defending you in the intramural arguments of Left Blogistan. I'm not even especially angry about this particular compromise with the Republicans, which was better than I'd feared it would be. But apparently you're angry. Your press conference yesterday made that very clear. And instead of being angry at the conservatives who've hobbled you, you're angry at the liberals and progressives who've phone banked for you, knocked on doors for you, and written you campaign checks. And that's not okay. So let me break some hard news to you:

You are not a pragmatist.

Don't kid yourself. If you want to put results ahead of abstract principle, that's great. I'm all for it. And most of your critics on the left would be pleased with that. We're not angry because you don't quote Howard Zinn enough. We're angry because you do not get results.

Pragmatism is about facing reality and dealing with it. Ten percent unemployment is a reality, and it needs to be dealt with. (I know, it's "only" 9.8%, up from "only" 9.6%, and next it will officially be 9.92% and then 9.9871% and then 9.999661%. Save it. Everyone who buys groceries understands what $2.98 on a price tag means.) Your economic strategy, trusting the big-money players to fix the economy from the top down, has been a colossal bust. The massive corporations you counted on to get things moving are enjoying record profits while letting the rest of the economy go to hell. This is reality. You have to deal with it.

I know, I know, you have to deal with the reality of what's practical in Washington, given the Senate rules and the Republican opposition and Ben Nelson's mood swings. You think of yourself as a pragmatist because you're dealing with the way the game is played. You're wrong. Dealing with the "realities" inside a Beltway that refuses to cope with what's actually happening to our country doesn't make you a realist, or even a political realist. Didn't that midterm election get through to you? You can't win by the old Beltway rules. You shouldn't play by them. You had a tax proposal that the voters like, and the Republicans had one the voters don't like. But they could defeat your plan in the Senate with only 36 votes. The game in Washington no longer reflects what the voters want or what our national economic crisis requires. If you play the game by the existing rules, you will not be able to fix the real problems. If you are not able to fix the real problems, you will be punished, no matter how principled your efforts were. You need to change the game.

I know this is not the presidency you wanted. Radical change was never on your agenda. But the Presidency of the United States has never been the job that the President wanted it to be. It has always been the job that history demands at that moment. John F. Kennedy had no intention of taking on civil rights, let alone becoming a civil rights president. Abraham Lincoln did not want to be a war president, let alone a civil-war president. Thomas Jefferson wanted to be a limited-government constitutionalist, until Napoleon offered him a very large piece of real estate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was talking like a traditional laissez-faire capitalist in 1928; it took the Depression to turn him into someone else, and World War II to transform his presidency yet again. You will not be measured by the success of the agenda that you originally planned. That agenda is already out of date. You will be measured by your response to a changing world.

For you, that means taking on a major structural overhaul of our economy and a structural transformation of our politics. If that sounds like idealistic hype, it usually would be. The things that you need to do now would be folly in ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. A surgeon who operates on patients who could be treated with aspirin commits malpractice. But so does the surgeon who prescribes aspirin to a patient who needs a triple bypass. Necessity is the heart of pragmatism, and you can not call yourself a pragmatist if you do less than is necessary.

I know you don't view yourself as the messianic figure that some voters wanted and needed you to be. I know that image strikes you as a fantasy. But the voters really wanted and needed that savior figure. They had reasons for voting for him. Those reasons aren't fantasies, but responses to the hard realities around us. We're not talking about the voters' psychological needs. We're talking about their everyday practical material needs. I know you are not that guy. I know you don't really want to be that guy, or feel equipped to be him. But the country voted for that guy because the country needs him. If it hadn't been you, it would have been somebody else. But our country really does need that guy, and you're all we've got.

Wake up, Barack. Reality is calling.

The Short Lesson of the 2010 Elections

cross-posted at Dagblog

So almost every op-ed page agrees that the lessons of the 2010 midterms are as follows:

1) The Democrats should compromise more with the Republicans, because the Republicans now have about a 50-vote majority in the House.

2) The Republicans should get to decide what counts as "compromise," because the voters are on their side.

3) Obama should apologize to everyone, all the time, for everything he did in his first two years as President. He has been Rebuked by the People and should atone for his Sin of Pride.

That's certainly one way to look at it. Here's another:

The Republicans just made serious gains by not compromising. They turned Not Compromising into 60+ House seats. If last Tuesday night was a shellacking for Democrats, the last election (and truth be told, the one before) can only be described as a shellackety-ackety-acking for the GOP. Even their big angry red wave in 2010 couldn't put the Democrats in a hole as deep as Boehner and Cantor were standing in two years ago, with their sorry 180 seats to Pelosi's 255. Never mind the big Presidential loss they'd taken, and their lopsided weakness in the Senate. But they decided that they had not been Rebuked by the People, no matter what the vote count looked like. They decided they were the True Voice of the People and acted accordingly.

I freely admit that being in opposition and being in the White House require different strategies. But even so, the post-election consensus among opinion journalists flunks the Listening to Themselves Test, badly. The Republicans just followed a political stragegy to major Election-Night gains, and the conventional wisdom is that the Democrats should not follow that strategy.

This advice is either counter-intuitive or just plain stupid. If it comes with a reasonable explanation and an alternative strategy, it's counter-intuitive. If it's just announced as plain common sense, it's plainly stupid.

Democrats should never pay attention to what the Republicans say (or vice versa). The Republicans have absolutely no interest in giving their opponents useful advice. Democrats should pay attention to what their opponents do. That's the lesson. If the other side beats you by playing aggressively and working the refs as hard as they can, you don't counter that by playing less aggressively yourself. Either you figure out a way to make their strategy work against them, or you hit 'em hard and cry foul as loudly as you can. That's what they would do.

You Can't Sell Your Soul If the Devil Ain't Buying

cross-posted at Dagblog

The election is the day after tomorrow, and I'm basically done looking at predictions of the results. Foreknowledge is the beginning of folly, and no matter how the day goes I'm going to do the same thing on Tuesday and after Tuesday. Win or lose, you keep your eyes on the prize.

But there's one thing just about every prognosticator agrees on: Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) is toast.

Lincoln, of course, is a "moderate" Blue Dog. She has clearly felt that the Obama Administration's agenda would hurt her back home in Arkansas, so she's gone out of her way to water down key bills, especially financial reform, and essentially run against her own party:

She takes strenuous pains to distance herself from the White House, trumpet her centrist credentials and assert her independence from her Democratic colleagues.

Her reward for watering down those votes that she was afraid would cost her re-election? She's an incumbent who can't even get to 40 percent in the most recent polls.

And that brings me to the political lesson of the day, this October 31: You can't sell your soul if the Devil ain't buying. Every voter that Blanche Lincoln was trying to appease is voting against her anyway. Why shouldn't they? She signaled over and over again that their political philosophy was right, and that she herself was uncomfortable with Democatic policies. Maybe the votes that Lincoln would pick up by making a strong case for Democratic principles and the good that Democratic policies did for the average Arkansas voter wouldn't have been enough to re-elect her. But clearly she couldn't win without those votes.

Sometimes the Devil won't pay for your soul. He'll just take it for free. You might as well do the right thing instead.

The post-election pressure to be more compromising and more moderate and more "Clintonian" already started ramping up last week. The next six hundred times you hear that talking point, remember Blanche Lincoln: a classic Clinton Democrat, with Bill Clinton himself stumping for her personally, getting stomped 2-1 in Arkansas. If that's what winning looks like, let's look at some losing strategies, please.

And before you say it's impossible for a Democrat to win in a state like Arkansas, let me point out that Lincoln's seat has been Democratic since Reconstruction and that the state's other Democratic Senator, Mark Pryor, was re-elected two years ago by an 80-20 margin. Lincoln hasn't lost a tough hold. She's given away a stronghold.

Moving to the "middle" by meeting the hardest right-wing candidates in living memory halfway isn't going to help Democrats survive. Conceding the basic principles of the "conservative" argument simply means conceding to them. You can't say, "Big government is a problem, but we need to do some practical things out of necessity," anymore. And you can't make so many concessions to your policies that the policies don't work, because the opposition will just hang the failed policies around your neck. If the Republicans decide next week to oppose all childhood vaccinations and claim that they cause autism, you don't try to appease them by weakening the MMR vaccine until it stops protecting kids against measles, mumps and rubella. Doing that would destroy the case for vaccinating kids in the first place, and look like an admission that the crazy fact-free case against vaccinations was true.

Plenty of Democrats are going to take that "centrist" advice. Lots of them already believe it in their souls. And most of those centrists, frankly, are going to end their own careers. Do you seriously think that Ben Nelson is going to be re-elected in 2012 for being the least Democratic of the Democrats? He's going to be run out of Omaha on a red-state rail, and a real Republican will replace him. If your political purpose is to pull Obama to the right, a Republican is always, always going to do it better. The question is whether more progressive Democrats are going to follow Ben Nelson on the same cliff.

I'm all for pragmatism. But pragmatism isn't pragmatism if it doesn't get results. And I understand why any working politician is going to think about his or her own political safety. That's the nature of the beast. But at a certain point, cowardice won't keep you safe. If you want to survive, you have to push forward and fight for every step. There's no guarantee of winning that way. But you're guaranteed to lose doing anything else.

History Never Repeats Itself

cross-posted at Dagblog

Election day is next Tuesday. Papers like the New York Times and Washington Post began publishing their post-mortem analyses of the election results last week. What should Obama do now that next Tuesday's results are in? Highly paid opinion writers have opinions.

The current conventional wisdom has two basic pillars:

1) It is currently 1994.

2) Since it's 1994, Bill Clinton should be President.

I'm going to leave the actual electoral predictions to my colleague Articleman and to folks like Nate Silver. But even if Tuesday night were to turn into an exact replay of 1994, district by district, the political situation on Wednesday morning would still be something completely new. History echoes itself, but it never repeats exactly. If this really were 1994, of course, being more like Bill Clinton would be a stupid idea, like telling someone fighting Muhammad Ali to be more like Sonny Liston. As Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall both remind us, the Big Dog was soundly beaten in 1994. And his post-1994 playbook, no matter how successful it was fifteen years ago, is just not going to work in 2011. Things have changed.

The point of all the "1994 all over again" spin is that it allows reporters and "expert" sources to come off like experts and make confident pronouncements about how things are going to go. "It's tough to make predictions," as Yogi Berra said, "especially about the future." That's why most pundits and sources try to predict the past instead. The point is not to be useful or even to be right, but to sound knowledgeable, and if pundits just predict a replay of what happened last time they can stick to repeating what they know instead of thinking about the unknowns. And if things play out differently, well, the pundits bet with the smart money and that's what really matters, if you're a pundit.

Planning a strategy on the assumption that things will go exactly the way they went last time is inviting one's own defeat, especially in adversarial contests. If something worked on your adversary last time, and they're coming back, do you really think they're going to make precisely the same mistakes this time? France in 1940 is not France in 1918, and you can't expect the Germans to cooperate by sticking to the strategies that lost them World War I. It's still very important not to repeat major strategic mistakes, like allowing unemployment to hit 10% in an election year, trying to march an army from Western Europe all the way to Moscow, or attempting to reduce the deficit during a massive recession. Those will always lose. But you can't count on winning the way you did last time, because the circumstances change and the opposition adapts. When Very Serious People talk about how Obama can win by using Clinton's playbook, they might as well be talking about defending France with the Maginot Line. Marshal Joffre was a Very Serious Person, too.

There are a bunch of reasons why the political situation in Washington, even if Tuesday night looks like deja vu, will actually be terra incognita, requiring a brand new map.

1) We're in much worse shape. In 1994, we were going through a moderate cyclical recession. We were also at peace, with a secure feeling of military near-omnipotence. We are now mired in a much deeper and longer recession, with troops in two ongoing wars. The economy has been seriously, structurally damaged, and there's the potential for plenty more bad news around the corner. The moderate and centrist small-bore fixes that worked well enough in the 1990s will not fix the problems we have now. Neither will just waiting for things to get better. And inaction, let alone wrong-headed action, could make things even worse.

The Republicans have been campaigning for two solid years on a hot-potato strategy, trying to keep the Democrats from fixing things, on the principle that if things were still a mess in 2010 they would get power back. They have no lucid proposals for fixing the economy; they want a mix of useless but expensive tax breaks for folks who are already hoarding their capital and foolishly pro-cyclical spending cuts that will make the depression even worse. If, as they and the media establishment expect, they get the hot potato back next week, they have to figure out what to do about it. And they have no plans that will work. The only predictable result is a lot of trouble.


2. The Republicans are counting on winning this time. 1994 was a big surprise. People weren't predicting it. The Republicans themselves weren't seriously predicting it. They've been predicting big wins in 2010 for well over a year. They have promised their base a victory, and more to the point they have promised that base the spoils of victory. Anything but a major rightward policy shift is going to disappoint and antagonize that base. Indeed, as Daniel Larison points out, disappointment and anger from the right wing is almost certain. There's going to be rage if (as Larison believes), the GOP comes up a few House seats short of a majority, but there's also going to be rage if the majority is smaller than the months of what Larison calls "overhyping" have led conservatives to expect and, most of all there will be rage when the GOP can't give their base everything their base has been counting on. Any new Republicans elected next week will have been elected to run Obama out of town, not to compromise with him. The voters who will carry any such Republicans to victory are hellbent against compromise.


3. Obama has passed more legislation in his first two years than Clinton did. For all the disappointment and anger among the left-wing base, Obama has gotten more done than Clinton did in the first two years. He didn't pass the health care bill I would have designed, but he passed a health care bill. He didn't make financial reform as strict or thorough as I think we need, but he passed a financial reform bill. And if he blew the size of the stimulus, he passed a much larger stimulus than the other side of the aisle wanted. In the same period, Clinton passed the Family Medical Leave Act and the Brady Bill (which requires background checks for gun purchases except when it doesn't), created Don't Ask Don't Tell (which was treated as progressive at the time), and got stuffed on health care. I don't mean any disrespect to the Big Dog; those are just the facts. And while the Family Medical Leave Act is a great thing, it isn't a thing that the Republicans were hell-bent against or wanted to repeal. Obama, on the other hand, has passed major legislation that the Republicans hate, have campaigned against, and will claim they have a mandate to repeal. Compromising with the other party is much easier when you're talking about what to do next. "Compromising," for Obama, would mean giving some of his major legislative accomplishments back. And that is neither a recipe for success nor compromise.

It isn't so much Barack Obama isn't Bill Clinton as that he can't be Bill Clinton. And he'll pay badly if he tries.

There Are No Moderate Republicans in the Senate

(cross-posted at Dagblog)

The Senate Republicans folded on their filibuster today. This morning The Hill ran an article with this headline:

Republican centrists warn Reid’s tough tactics on reform bill could backfire

Now, at first glance, that article's writer, Alexander Bolton, looks like a fool. But his headline is absolutely accurate. A bunch of Senate "centrists" did tell him that. And Bolton obediently published their claims, twelve or so hours before his sources proved how utterly hollow those claims were. If Bolton is a fool for swallowing transparent spin, without examining its basic plausibility, then there are a lot of fools writing about Congressional politics these days. And the biggest lie he swallows has been swallowed by nearly the entire political press: the lie that there are any GOP centrists left.

There are no moderate Republicans in the Senate any more. There are Republican Senators who were once moderates. There are Republican Senators who might depend upon moderate voters in, say, Maine. There are even Republican Senators who might vote moderately if they weren't actually, you know, in the Senate. But it in actual world, every Republican Senator votes the same way, which means that they are all indistinguishable from Sam Brownback.

When the votes actually matter, Olympia Snowe votes like a hard-line conservative. So does Susan Collins. They're only moderates when nothing real is at stake. If you talk like a moderate but vote like a conservative, that means you actually are a conservative in the only way that matters. Because the votes get counted.

Believing in the mythical "moderate Senate Republicans" requires that the "moderates" not be held accountable for how they actually vote. They are allowed to obstruct legislation through relentless parliamentary maneuvers while complaining that the majority isn't "collegial" enough. Blocking debate on banking reform is acceptably "centrist" and "reasonable," but holding a vote during the dinner hour is unreasonably punitive. (No, seriously.) Lindsey Graham gets treated like a Profile In Courage by people who should know better because he's claimed that he would not filibuster one key piece of legislation, and thereby feels entitled to set the Democrat's legislative agenda, events in Arizona be damned. That Lindsey Graham votes to obstruct Senate business every other time is apparently not relevant to the question who's been cooperative enough.

Key to the myth of the Moderate Senate Republican is the idea that if the Democrats simply compromised with these imaginary people, everything would work out. Also, if the Democrats befriended some leprechauns, we could balance the budget with magical gold. But there are no compromises that would actually lead the non-existent moderates to break with their party whips. They will pretend that there are: they were spinning the "we'd-cooperate-if-we-were-indulged-more" story for Bolton the day before they publicly embarrassed him. But while they would be happy to receive further indulgences, they won't give anything back for them. They will only break with their party leadership when they're afraid of getting hurt at the polls. They are not susceptible to persuasion. They are only susceptible to pressure.

Of course, part of the myth of the Centrist Republican is that compromise is always just around the corner, like the gold at the end of the rainbow. They are always promising that it's just a little way off, if you'll keep following them through the woods, and always expressing disappointment that the Democrats gave up when they were almost there! Of course, the "moderates"will tell you that. They can only gain by telling you that. But there's no reason to trust them. Just ask Alexander Bolton.