I started reading Nathan Newman recently because he's one of the few bloggers to cover organized labor, but I've become consistently impressed with his other work -- a unique mix of solidly left politics and clear thinking. Exempli gratia:
So here's the approach we need. We know that House Republicans won't agree to elminating the payroll tax cap, so there is no danger that proposing it as a reform will be met with any real negotiation on the issue. But we can slam the conservatives for supporting such a regressive policy.
And since progressives don't believe there is a crisis, we don't think there needs to be any new revenue raised TODAY, so any rise in revenue from eliminating the payroll tax cap should be matched with an overall cut in payroll tax rates paid by average workers-- probably equivalent to saving them 2-3% of their income.
Yes, Dems should be proposing a TAX CUT! You want wedge politics, you've got it.
Brilliant. Bold. Srangely obvious. And yet I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Congressional leadership to push for it.
Caution for those with weak stomachs: the follow includes stated agreement with Thomas Friedman, who is generally a pompous "free market" ideologue and apologist for the Israeli occupation, among other vices. Proceed at your own risk.
For the first time in a long time, we have an administration articulating a bold and forceful foreign policy objective: spreading liberal democracy around the globe, at gunpoint if necessary. Bush's inauguration address was a brilliantly written, if flatly delivered, declaration of a new role for America in the world.
It's easy to tear the speech apart as hypocritical and impractical. The anti-war left does a decent job attacking the administration on the first front and the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment does a marginal job attacking it on the second.
What's not so easy is to articulate an appealing alternative. Let's try a thought experiment: if John Kerry, or even Howard Dean, had decided to turn his inauguration speech into a foreign policy vision, what would he have said? What themes would he or she emphasize? Undoubtedly, two themes would figure prominently:
(There is also a third theme which neither major party wants to touch: disentanglement, perhaps even to the point of isolationism. I'm having trouble finding a suitable quotation, but the basic line here would be something like: "Today, many of the national security threats we face are of our own making: terrorism breeds on resentment towards continued American support for despotic governments. We must return to our roots as a modest republic and stop meddling in the affairs of other nations across the globe." This would be a more fundamental break with the administration, but it ain't gonna happen.)
Both themes expresses a certain degree of wisdom. But neither is the stuff that dreams, or even doctrines, are made of. They have a "yes, but..." quality to them (as in "yes, let's invade Iraq, but let's get France on board first and make sure we've got a plan for the occupation"), which makes for ineffective political communcation. But more importantly, they're both missing the "vision thing." Bush wants use the military and economic might of the United States to bring democracy to the world, and we want to? Err... um... do so more politely?
Moreover, they reflect, as Dick Cheney would say, a pre-9/11 mindset towards public opinion. We no longer live in a country where most people could care less what goes on outside our borders. (Note that this does mean most people have a reasonable understanding of what goes on outside our borders.) As a result, the bar is raised for Democrats when it comes to national security. Simply appearing credible isn't enough anymore.
What the left, broadly constituted, needs is a foreign policy vision which builds on the obvious criticisms of the administration's policy while also demonstrating our ability to lead. Like the Bush vision, it must be presented, first and foremost, as a strategy for combatting anti-American terrorism, even if -- again, like the Bush vision -- it has other important goals which the public cares little about.
I'm hardly the best person to come up with such a vision, but I'm arrogant enough to try:
"While continuing to use the best intelligence and law enforcment tools available to combat terrorism, the United States must embark on a massive campaign to eliminate the causes of terrorism around the world. The forces of anti-Americanism in the Middle East are strengthened by corrupt governments fed by the outrageous prices we pay for their oil. Terrorists finds recruits among the poor and the desperate, in societies where young men and women have no opportunity to get ahead in life. We must free our nation from the dangerous shackles of dependence on foreign oil, undermining terrorists overseas and creating jobs at home. And we must show the world our generosity by leading a global effort to fund education and economic development in countries with devastating levels of unemployment."
The idea here is to integrate tough, bold, and patriotic language with the Democrats' core appeal on domestic policy: economic fairness. Moreover, it can be tied into a cohesive attack on the Bush administration policy as hypocritical, self-serving, and inconsistent for playing nice with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia while talking about freedom and democracy.
Lest I sound like a starry-eyed leftist, consider Thomas Friedman's column in this Sunday's New York Times:
Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neocons, and it is the "geo-greens." I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple (and I'm not with him on nuclear energy), but it's a damned good start.
The American Prospect is soliciting one for the left:
Well, we all know the basic outline of conservatism's elevator pitch: "We believe in freedom and liberty, and we're for low taxes, less government, traditional values, and a strong national defense." But what is liberalism's?
My entry:
We believe in democracy and equality, and we're for a fair economy, a just society, an honest government, a clean environment, and a safer world to leave for our children.
(Via Kos, where everyone and their friend is chiming in.)
There's a lot of people talking right now about a new article in the Washington Monthly, "Fire the Consultants", which does a very good job dissecting the national Democratic Party's reliance on a small number of insider consultants who aren't particularly good at, say, winning elections.
It's important to remember, though, that just because Bob Shrum shouldn't run the party doesn't mean that you or I or Kos should. We're at the cusp of some important changes in how campaigns are conducted, particularly on the Democratic side. But for the moment, two facts remain very much central:
1) The overwhelming majority of persuadable voters decide how to vote based on television and direct mail.
2) Most grassroots progressive activists, a category in which I include myself, have no experience or ability in communicating to said voters, no matter how many blogs they comment on or how much George Lakoff they've read.
Yes, we need to recognize that the way the D.C.-based Democrats are operating is losing elections. But we also need to take a clear-eyed look around and figure out who's winning them, and why.
I was thinking of writing this last night (for the record, before I heard Dean's announcement, which I knew was coming), but Joe Trippi's endorsement just clinched it.
I'm throwing my considerable (read: nonexistent) weight behind Simon Rosenberg to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. Not because I share his politics -- his background is as a centrist New Democrat -- but because he fundamentally gets it when it comes to the future of political organization and communication, in a way that I'm not convinced Howard Dean really does.
I have enormous admiration for Dean, and for many of the bloggers and activists who are gunning strongly for him as DNC chair. But I think it'd be good to consider what the job entails before deciding that Dean's the man for it. Though the chair does get to do a fair bit of press interviews, his primary responsibility is not to be the public face of the party -- it's to be the chief strategist and fundraiser, providing institutional support to candidates around the country. Republicans understand this, which is why they choose lobbyists and other political pros for the role.
Which gets me back to Rosenberg, who has this to say about the GOP's' institutional advantages:
The Republican/conservative alliance has built a superior information-age political machine. By investing billions of dollars over 40 years in a vast array of powerful institutions and capacities, the Republicans have changed the national political playing field. Their combination of mature and modern intellectual, political and media capacities is simply bigger, better, more coordinated and more strategic than the arrayed set of institutions on the progressive side. We like to think of it as an information-age Tammany Hall.Even at the campaign level they have a much more modern model for reaching voters. They began investing heavily in databases and direct one-to-one marketing in the 1970s, and have built a campaign communications system that has much greater ability for “smart” narrowcasting – personalizing messages to specific groups and individual voters and reaching them through specialized communication. Though we made great strides in the last two years, our campaigns are still built around an aging “dumb” broadcast model that blasts a more generalized message to a larger and much less differentiated audience ...
As an intellectually-based movement born when the Republicans were a true minority Party, their infrastructure is built on a foundation on the need to persuade. At the very core of their collective institutional ethic is that they must persuade, persuade, persuade. The institutions and leaders were born and grew when few listened to them, let alone agreed.
A look around his website, and the fantastic New York Times Magazine cover story from last Summer, shows that Rosenberg has a lot of very innovative ideas on how the Democrats can begin building their own "information-age Tammany Hall", many of which involve working more directly with the grassroots (including bloggers). I want him in a position where can implement them.
Which is not to say that there doesn't continue to be a fundamental ideological problem with much of the Democratic Party -- i.e., acting like Republicans without the (faux) populism. But that's fundamentally a problem with elected officials (especially the congresscritters) and policy leaders, who the DNC chair has little sway over. Fixing it is a whole different ballgame (involving better politicians, think tanks, and labor unions), and it's a moot point if we don't have the organizational infrastructure to win elections in the first place.
Oh, and let's find a way for Howard Dean to be on TV a lot more often. If for no other reason than to make the editors of The New Republic cringe.
UPDATE:
Just stumbled into this very cogent endorsement of Rosenberg at the Gadflyer. In particular:
It is not the role of the party chair to develop the Party's core themes and policy agendas; that job falls to the party's top leadership, even if that leadership presently consists of congressional minority leaders and two dozen governors. It's also why blaming Terry McAuliffe for failures of theme or message during the past four years is misguided; that ire should have been directed at Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, among others.
Meanwhile, Zephyr Teachout has a beautifully written piece on MyDD endorsing Dean without saying anything about the DNC. This is exactly what I'm talking about...
Wise words on how to build a powerful religious left:
Religious progressives must now learn the lesson evangelicals learned long ago: the key to organizing people of faith is not through celebrity clergy but through congregations. Congregations are where the rubber hits the road. This is where the faithful meet, greet, eat and mobilize. E-mail lists are great and an important tool, but congregations are the long established historical and spiritual bases of operation. Congregations are the very definition of grassroots. The right knows this and the left does not. ...
One problem for religious progressives today is a lack of trained organizers in their midst. The religious right has been training organizers for years. Religious progressives, with some heroic exceptions, have not. Progressives need to enlist the help of professional organizers from the likes of the labor movement and community organizations to fill in the gaps and train a new generation of activists. Otherwise there will be lots of message, lots of talk, lots of spin, but it will not filter down to the congregations with sufficient force to mobilize significant numbers.
I would add that mainline Protestants are too often conflict-averse, fearful of losing members to political controversy or otherwise upsetting the apple cart. While evangelicals are busy making sure everyone has a Christian Coalition voter guide, the rest of us are forming task forces to gather input on whether at some point we might issue a vague statement about faith and politics. In addition to being politically useless and reflective of organizational ostrich-headedness, that's also bad theology: "Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers" (Matthew 21:12).
Sadly, the title for this post is not sarcastic. Marc Cooper brings the unfortunate, if not all that surprising, news -- originally reported by Al Jazeera -- that Ramsey Clark is joining Saddam Hussein's legal defense team. Clark was an attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, but he's long since gone off the deep end into the authoritarian loony left.
I share Cooper's extreme distaste for Clark and his various protest outfits. (As an impetuous first-year, I even wrote a letter to the local alternative paper blasting the outfit, which immediately accused me of red-baiting). But I don't agree with his conclusion that ANSWER's sponsorship of several of the larger protests did serious damage to the anti-war movement's effectiveness, if for no other reason than the organization's sinister political agenda went mostly unnoticed in mainstream press coverage. There may be a way for massive street protests to be an effective tool for political persuasion, but the anti-war ones mostly weren't, regardless of whether Clark was associated with them.
In another sign of his all-but-announced candidacy for DNC chair, Howard Dean gave a big speech this morning giving his vision for the future of the Democratic Party. Mostly pretty good, though very little new. However, his overriding theme was a bit absurd:
Now we need to build on our successes while transforming the Democratic Party into a grassroots organization that can win in 50 states.
I have seen all the doomsday predictions that the Democratic Party could shrink to become a regional Party. A Party of the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest.
We cannot be a Party that seeks the presidency by running an 18-state campaign. We cannot be a party that cedes a single state, a single District, a single precinct, nor should we cede a single voter.
I couldn't quite put my finger on why I found this irritating, nor could I understand why Dean put so much emphasis on this 50-state business, until I read Paul Waldman's take on the DLC's latest broadside:
Al From and Bruce Reed write in the Wall Street Journal that Democrats need to reach out to the heartland, because they can't survive without being a "national party." ...
But here's the thing: The GOP isn't a national party either.
Let's look at the facts. In the last four elections, the Republican nominee has won a grand total of one state in the Northeast or West Coast, when Bush squeezed out New Hampshire by 7000 votes in 2000. From and Reed, like many others, express shock that Democrats "write off" the South - but Republicans write off the Northeast and West Coast. They lament that Bush "won 202 electoral votes without lifting a finger" in states Kerry didn't bother to contest. But Kerry won 190 electoral votes without lifting a finger.
What we have is two non-national parties, one based in the South, lower midwest, and mountain states, and one based in the Northeast and West.
In fact, I'd go step a step farther and say that there's basically no such thing as a "national party" in American politics. The two party system has almost always pitted regions against one another -- often to a far greater degree than it does currently (see 1860).
I'm not sure how much of this 50-state talk is bluster, and how much if it is concrete strategy. I am sure that deploying limiting resources in unwinnable races so that Democrats can vainly call themselves a national party is not a good way to take back Congress.
Finally, why the hell is Howard Dean, a viable candidate to lead his party, taking bait offered by Al From, who is quickly descending into irrelevance?
As I've written previously, I think there's really no good empirical basis (as opposed to a poorly-worded question in an inaccurate exit poll) for the notion that this election turned on "moral values" more than any other (especially 2000). Nevertheless, the buzz on that front hasn't subsided much since election night. And while my initial inclination has been to chalk it up to lazy journalists and the right-wing noise machine, it's been picked up on to a far greater degree by a far wider audience for that to be an adequate explanation. From the blogosphere to the editorial pages, everyone and his brother is offering some variation on "the left needs to (re-)claim the language of religion and morality."
What if this meme is sticking in part because it speaks to something deeper than exit polls and message strategy? There's an obvious kernel of truth in the religious right's diagnosis -- that our nation really is on the wrong moral path, suffering from a degraded culture and an eroded value system, particularly in the way we treat the most vulnerable members of society.
I'd like to humbly suggest that some of what's going on here is a case of projection. Perhaps it's not just that lefties know the religious right is hurting our side on Election Day (hell, they've been doing that for a quarter-century), but that we sense that America really does need an authentic, radical religious renewal and the hope and prophecy that comes with it. That we need to reach to something beyond ourselves to fully articulate a political vision that will not only lead us to victory, but speak to the times in which we live.
I went to a DFA Meetup in Seattle last night, and was stunned by the attendance and energy, so I posted some thoughts at Progressive Majority Washington.
One of the many things that struck me about it was how people seem to be ready to talk about "The Left" again. In the Dean campaign, I was also stunned by how many obviously-progressive folks insisted on painting themselves and the candidate as "common-sense centrists," even while railing against the centrism of the party. Could it be that we're prepared to be proud of who we are again? Perhaps even proud of our radical heritage?
I was going to write an entry, but Paul Waldman has already said what I was about to. It's short, so go read it -- and then do it.
UPDATE: This piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel is in a similar vein and also pretty good.
E.J. Dionne is becoming one of my favorite commentators. He hits the nail on the head in discussing what was so innovative and effective about the convention last week.
Some choice grafs:
But at this year's convention, the Democrats -- including, interestingly, Clinton himself -- scrapped the defensive approach and went on offense.Thus emerged a major theme of this fall's campaign: that Republicans are a party of dividers who can win only by setting one group of Americans against another.
...
Attacking divisiveness could yield multiple dividends in the fall. Having laid down their argument, Democrats can respond to Republican attacks with a breezy, Reaganesque "there they go again."
...
It's commonly said that this convention was designed to "move the Democrats to the center." Actually, it was a convention designed to move the center toward the Democrats.
Too many political analysts confuse left and right, which are fundamentally about ideology and policy, with rhetoric. Speaking in ways that will appeal to those who don't already share your views isn't moving to the center -- it's simply effective political communication. And there's a double standard at play: Bush regularly makes very conservative policy -- particularly on social issues -- but rarely promotes it through right-wing tirades, and no talking head ever remarks that he's moving to the center or selling out his base.
And though Dionne doesn't say it, this sort of political message actually creates an opportunity for the Democrats to move to the left on policy, by opening a space for bold new proposals offered in terms of national purpose and unity, which we got a taste of in Kerry's call for energy independence:
We value an America that controls its own destiny because it's finally and forever independent of Mideast oil. What does it mean for our economy and our national security when we only have three percent of the world's oil reserves, yet we rely on foreign countries for fifty-three percent of what we consume?
I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation – not the Saudi royal family.
And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future -- so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Hopefully there's more where that came from.
Addendum:
I should point out, in typically spiteful form, that Howard Dean should get much of the credit for this rhetorical shift. To wit:
I am tired of being divided in this country. I am tired of being divided by race. I am tired of being divided by gender, when the president thinks he knows better than an American woman what kind of reproductive health care that she ought to have.I'm tired of being divided by income. I'm tired of being divided by sexual orientation. I'm tired of being divided by religion.
When we say we want our country back, what we mean is that we want the country that all of us were promised when we were 21 years old, the country where we were all in this together, where we could believe, where we could hope again that America would be a better place as we grew older.
Amen.
Addendum II:
Over at The Gadflyer, Paul Waldman is making the same point (about unity, that is, not Dean).
Figured I should probably blog something about the Take Back America Conference while it's still vaguely topical.
Bottom line is that it was incredible. I have rarely seen a more passionate and excited gathering -- thousands and thousands of progressives from all over the country. Little more than a year ago, I thought moving the Democratic Party to the left was an impossible pipe dream. What a difference a year makes.
Some recurring themes