Category Archives: Democrats

Democrats, Donald Trump, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

The Speaker announces that the House is launching an impeachment inquiry

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution, especially when the President says Article II says I can do whatever I want. For the past several months, we have been investigating in our committees and litigating in the courts so the House can gather all of the relevant facts and consider whether to exercise its full Article I powers, including a constitutional power of the utmost gravity, approval of Articles of Impeachment. And this week, the president has admitted to asking the President of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him politically. The action of the Trump – the actions of the Trump presidency revealed a dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.
Therefore today, I’m announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. I am directing our six committees to proceed with their investigations under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.” — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

(Image: screen grab from video.)

2020 General Election, Democrats

Trump has spooked Democrats, who fear nominating a women for president

Quote of the day:

“Trump has so thoroughly demoralized Democrats that they are exhibiting sexism in their own political judgments in the guise of ‘electability.'” — Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

Kilgore links to Li Zhou’s attempt (in Vox) to knock down fears (based on Trump’s 2016 election) that voters are not ready to elect a woman president.

Women powered the 2018 midterm victories to take back the House. And, as Zhou observes, most of the seats flipped from Red to Blue were won by women.

Zhou also notes that Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, as well as Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand, have never lost an election. In contrast, Joe Biden — Mr. Electability, a safe white male — (when not on a ticket with Barack Obama) suffered two not-even-close defeats in previous bids for the White House.

Zhou notes the added enthusiasm generated by women and people of color; cites the lack of empirical evidence that a woman can’t win in the Midwest (or elsewhere); and rejects electability as a squishy, untrustworthy guide.

Kilgore concludes:

So if you happen to have two women, one “progressive” and one “moderate,” who can credibly promise a greater 2020 payoff than just ejecting Trump from office, why keep preferring men who appear to live in a different era (Biden) or country (Sanders)? Yes, Trump has gotten deeply into the donkey’s head, and has convinced Democrats that his dark misogynistic soul is America’s. That’s some serious damage.

(Image from Wikipedia, which offers this description: A satirical photo from 1901, with the caption “New Woman—Wash Day”. Shown is a woman wearing knickerbockers and knee socks (traditional male attire) and smoking a cigarette, supervising as a man (who appears to be wearing a dress and an apron) does the laundry with a tub and washboard.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Just how many liberals are there in this center-right nation?

“In 2018, for the first time, a majority of Democrats said they considered themselves to be “liberal,” according to Gallup. At 51 percent, the 2018 share is only 1 point greater than the share of Democrats who identified as liberal in 2017, but it’s very different from how Democrats’ political ideologies broke down in the 1990s and early 2000s.” — Janie Velencia, FiveThirtyEight

The same poll revealed that among all Americans, not just Democrats, 26% identified as liberal. (That’s the chart on the left in the image above.) The same poll revealed that 35% of Americans identified as conservative and 35% embraced the moderate label, which is why the U.S. is often referred to as ‘center-right.’

Meanwhile, James Stimson, a political scientist who has been measuring the public policy preferences of Americans since 1952, has found that Americans are more liberal than at any time in the 68 years since he has been doing the survey.  (That’s the chart on the right.) The 2018 result: support among Americans for government action — that is, for liberal public policies — stands at 69%.

That’s quite a difference. Why? Because the first survey asks Americans to self-identify; in other words, to choose the label that best describes their political ideology.

The second survey, on the other hand, doesn’t ask Americans to label themselves; instead it asks their opinions on a range of issues (background checks for gun purchases [which weighs in with 89% support], Medicare for all who want it [70%], government regulation of prescription drug prices [67%], a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. illegally [64%], and so on). The Public Policy Mood survey crunches the numbers to get a result based on actual policy preferences of Americans.

That 69% is just a shade above the previous high, recorded in 1962, in an era when faith in government to right wrongs and to offer protection to Americans (with the passage of Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights and voting rights legislation, and so on).

In other words, as the authors of Asymmetric Politics noted, Americans are ideologically conservative (they think of themselves as conservative) and operationally liberal (they endorse the liberal policies that benefit them and their neighbors). So, Democrats campaign on specific issues: healthcare coverage for preexisting conditions, lowering prescription drug prices, offering a public option …; while Republicans campaign on ideology: linking Democrats with the Democratic Socialists of America and labeling them as “far to the left” and of course as “socialists.”

Yesterday, Gregory Koger highlighted the Public Policy Mood results to explain several strategic choices that Democrats and Republicans have made as we head into the 2020 elections, including the decision by Republicans to hit hard on socialism (“an extreme ideological label”), even though that didn’t work for them in 2018.

(Image composed of two charts: left, from FiveThirtyEight, and right, from Mischiefs of Faction.)

Democracy, Democrats, Republicans

A primer on the asymmetric political parties in the United States

(Or: ‘How the Republican Party became an insurgent outlier – Part 1’)

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” — Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

In It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the Politics of Extremism, Mann and Ornstein credit political scientist Stephen Skowronek with attaching the term ‘insurgent outlier’ to the GOP, while absolving him of the details of their analysis. By now, the increasing extremism of the Republican Party—long before Donald Trump’s ride down the escalator—has been widely (if not universally) acknowledged. As has a second element of Mann and Ornstein’s critique: that this GOP transformation is the first place to look to explain the highly dysfunctional state of the American political system.

While it’s easy to identify villains in this story—I’ve written multiple posts featuring Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, and William Barr, for instance—I’d like to sketch a structural explanation of how we got here. So, in today’s installment, I’ll begin with a look at the asymmetrical nature of the two political parties, inspired by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins’ book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, and their account contrasting the Democratic Party, a coalition of social groups, and the GOP, the vehicle of an ideological movement.

The Democratic Party

‘President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s smashing victory in the 1936 presidential election revealed that the American political landscape had shifted. With FDR at its head, the Democratic Party put together a formidable coalition whose main components were lower-income groups in the great cities—African Americans, union members, and ethnic and religious minorities, many from recent immigrant groups—and the traditional source of Democratic strength, “the Solid South.”‘ — William E. Leuchtenburg  

The New Deal coalition, which dominated American politics from 1936 until the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, fractured with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. But while the composition of Democratic constituencies changed (most prominently with the loss of the Solid South), the fundamental structure of the Democratic Party did not.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of social groups. Because the groups, and their public policy agendas, are separate and distinct, what they bring to the table may generate conflict within the coalition. Indeed, Democrats have a reputation—going back to the 1930s—for dissension and discord. Unifying many groups with their own interests and ideas is challenge. The process of coming to agreement may be chaotic—and, over many decades, the picture hasn’t always been pretty.

  • “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat,” Will Rogers remarked in an era when the New Deal Coalition prevailed.
  • The 1968 Democratic Convention, when the New Deal Coalition was near its end, stands as the prime exemplar of Democratic disunity in my lifetime. (Both 1948 and 1972 were fractious years for Democrats, but neither are remembered for violent street clashes, while the first one, in any case, was before my birth.)
  • A half century after 1968, “Democrats in Disarray,” remains a hoary meme (and click-bait), because disagreements are inevitable when many different interests are crowding under a single tent (and journalists need a hook). The Washington Monthly explored this topic in March, while Crooked / Pod Save America offered fifteen links on the topic last week. A simple Google search will virtually always find current examples of this genre.)

The perennial challenge for Democrats is crafting a coherent policy from the disparate views and interests of the various groups coalescing under the party banner.

Democrats pledge to represent ‘everyday Americans’ (‘the forgotten middle class,’ ‘the people,’ ‘the common man’) with a contrast (often explicit, sometimes implicit) to Republican commitments. The Democratic electoral base is comprised of groups that regard themselves as disadvantaged, and look to specific government policies and programs to provide a measure of social equity.

These constituencies have this in common: they believe that government can help people like themselves.  They believe that public policy is capable of solving problems, of offering benefits, of providing redress for injustices. That notion had little traction in Washington in the decades before FDR came into office. President Roosevelt, and the Democratic Party that he led, empowered government, expanding its role and responsibilities, to ensure that the economy benefited a majority of Americans.

Government can help make people’s lives better, Democrats agree. But because they’re a diverse bunch, their experiences of disadvantage—and specific public policy preferences—are different. How do we unify these groups and their program and policy preferences?

The Democratic Party’s solution is to wrap its arms around these groups, to acknowledge the disadvantages (problems, injustices) of each—and to embrace specific public policies to change things for the better.

The Democratic agenda—as represented in the party platform, political campaigning, legislative priorities, policymaking, and regulatory enforcement—is formed from the collective demands and appeals of the disparate social groups that comprise the coalition. 

Grossmann and Hopkins, who cite Dean Acheson (1955) and a trio of studies from political scientists (1966, 1976, and 1983) making similar observations, put it this way:

The coalitional composition of the Democratic Party has long encouraged party leaders to assemble a policy agenda from the aggregated preferences of the party’s numerous constituencies, courting the mass electorate with a large assortment of concrete benefits favoring targeted groups. Although the particular groups inside the Democratic “big tent”—as well as their specific programmatic demands—have evolved over time, the party’s foundational partisan character has remained constant for decades of electoral history.

This model has the great virtue of matching our familiar experience. A list of Democratic constituencies circa 2019 would include: women, African Americans, organized labor, voters under age 35, … and so on. Consider women, who are far and away the largest social group in the Democratic coalition. Clear majorities of women consistently vote Democratic and have done so for decades. (Discussion of the political gender gap began in the Reagan era. The gap has grown considerably since then, especially in our most recent electoral cycles.)

The Democratic Party is responsive to this voting constituency, as reflected in Democrats’ advocacy of specific policies and priorities to benefit women. Health care—salvaging the Affordable Care Act in response to efforts by Congressional Republicans, egged on by Donald Trump, to repeal it—was at the heart of Democratic campaigns in 2018. Women voters played the starring role in the Democratic victory to take back the House.

Accessibility to health care is high on the list of concerns of most women who vote (or may be tempted to vote) Democratic. Access to reproductive health coverage—and the right to choose to end a pregnancy—is a crucial element of health care. While abortion is fraught politically (particularly late-term abortions) in some quarters, the great majority of women—and especially those who identify as or lean Democratic—do not want to be denied the right to make this choice on their own. Ensuring this right is a Democratic priority.

Democrats embrace many other issues that resonate with women: the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay for equal work, gender discrimination in employment, family budget concerns more generally, and  sexual harassment and violence toward women are all issues that appeal to the largest group in the Democratic coalition.

The contrast with Donald Trump’s Republican Party couldn’t be clearer. Trump has boasted of sexual assault of women, repeatedly assessed women’s worth based on appearance and sexual attractiveness, and insulted women in misogynistic terms. This hostility has increased Democratic support among women, but that’s only part of the story with the contemporary GOP.

In swing districts and, in many instances, in previously stable Red districts that flipped in 2018, Democratic candidates often presented a clear contrast with Trump and Congressional Republicans vis-a-vis respectful discourse; regard for the rule of law, for democratic institutions, and for coming together—to compromise with the other side, as needed—to enact meaningful legislation to benefit the people that Congress and the President were elected to serve; and concern with the welfare of the nation as a whole, not only of the GOP base. These are hardly ‘women’s issues,’ but they resonated with the largest social group in the Democratic coalition. Women who feel threatened by Trump and the GOP have every reason to regard these issues as critical to their interests and well-being.

Wage Gap

Elizabeth Warren’s pledge last week to women of color at the Essence Festival illustrates how an injustice toward a social group prompts a policy response among Democrats. Begin with these facts: white women earn 77 cents for every dollar that white men earn, while black women earn 61 cents and Latinas, 53 cents. That, for Democrats, counts as a prima facie injustice.

In Warren’s words:

Black women are more likely to be breadwinners for their families and work more than almost any other set of women workers in America, including white women. Yet, Black women are paid less and they are less likely to be able to afford basic human rights like healthcare, childcare and housing.

And her response:

On day one of the Warren Administration I will take a set of executive actions to boost wages for women of color and open up new pathways to the leadership positions they deserve. I’ll start by putting tough new rules on companies that contract with the government — who collectively employ a quarter of the American workforce. Companies with a bad track record on equal pay and diversity in management won’t get new contracts — which gives them a big financial incentive to shape up. I will prohibit companies that want to get government contracts from forcing employees to sign away their rights with forced arbitration clauses and non-compete agreements — restrictions that are particularly hurtful to women of color. I will also take executive action to make the senior ranks of the federal government look like America and strengthen enforcement against systemic discrimination. We need to demand that companies and the government properly value the work of Black women — and hold them accountable if they don’t.

These executive actions are just a first step. . . .

We could inventory every social group/voting bloc that coalesces within the big tent of the Democratic Party and match emblematic concerns and priorities among group members, on the one hand, with commitments and programs that Democrats embrace, on the other, to show piece by piece how the Democratic agenda emerges.

Inevitably, there will be disagreements among the groups. Negotiation, forming alliances, and generating consensus—a give and take, the stuff of politics and practical compromise—will come into play. In this way, the party advances the interests of the groups in its coalition in a process that mostly plays out in the open.

Getting it right can be tricky. In addition to balancing the interests and preferences of multiple groups, the party must look ahead to competitive elections against the Republicans. In such an environment, not every group will be a winner (at least in equal measure with others in the coalition). Similarly, once in office, Democrats are unlikely to enact every item on their agenda; some programs and policies will win out, while others will not. (Barack Obama, the most recent Democratic president, put the expansion of health care at the top of his agenda, while choosing not to elevate criminal indictments of the financial sector executives who crashed the economy.)

While some preferences must be deferred, however, generally everyone with standing in the party is heard. Inclusion is a Democratic priority. There is an expectation that every group’s preferences will be reflected in some measure in the party’s agenda. As Jo Freeman put it (in an article surveying the cultural differences between the Democratic and Republican parties), “The word that would most aptly characterize what Democrats want is ‘fairness.’”

This picture of the Democratic Party (going back roughly eight decades) is more or less the traditional view of how politics works in the United States. It is not, however, the way things work in the contemporary Republican Party.

The Republican Party

The Republican Party is an altogether different beast than the Democratic Party. Ideology reigns supreme in the GOP, which serves as the vanguard of movement conservatism.  Republicans, and organizations within the party, self-identify as conservative. Fidelity to conservative ideology is the organizing principle of the Republican Party. This ideology motivates activists, generates campaign themes and pledges, sustains the demands of the base, and provides a rationale for the party’s governing agenda.

In contrast to Democrats—who, as we have seen, look to government for practical remedies on behalf of social groups experiencing disadvantage—Republicans view proposals in relation to abstract ideological doctrine. The question is not whether a proposal would be efficacious or cost-effective or fair, but instead: Would implementing the proposal be consistent with conservative ideology? As the Republican Party has moved further right in recent decades (and ideological hostility toward government has grown), the possibilities of getting to ‘Yes’ have diminished considerably, especially regarding any proposal offered by Democrats.

In governing, Democrats accept that group interests will conflict, that negotiation and compromise will take place, and that trade-offs and even half measures may result. And that’s okay much of the time: half a loaf is better than none.  Democrats reward leaders who get things done, often even when victories are only partial. Not so with Republicans. Their preference is often all or nothing. They are looking to leaders who will not stray from a rigid party line. The touchstone is conformity to the party’s ruling ideology.

The primacy of conservative doctrine has become increasingly more entrenched in recent years, as illustrated by an observation by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy):

As conservative activism has shifted toward national politics, it has also focused increasingly on the recruitment and certification of aspirants to elected office and the monitoring and punishment of politicians once they are elected. Ideological “box scores” are a revealing indicator of the trend. A few decades ago, only a handful of prominent conservative groups (notably, the American Conservative Union, or ACU) assembled ideological issue scores based on members of Congress’s recorded votes on hot-button topics. Today, the ACU’s scores compete with those of such conservative watchdogs as the National Tax Limitation Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Republican Liberty Caucus, the Christian Coalition, the Eagle Forum, the Campaign for Working Families, the Family Research Council, and the subtly named Center for Reclaiming America. These groups range in size and clout. But even the smallest can often exert considerable power when it can credibly claim to be the arbiter of whether a candidate or elected official is a true believer in a central conservative cause.

Being “a true believer in a central conservative cause” often precludes getting anything done. Republican voters reward elected officials who uphold doctrinal purity, shunning compromise altogether. These voters carry out “punishment of politicians” who fail in this regard. Increasingly, these collaborators get primaried because Republican voters won’t stand for any ideological deviation or accommodation with Democrats. Moreover, often a symbolic ideological embrace, the conspicuous expression of fidelity to conservatism, matters more than the actual substantive outcome of their stance.

House Speaker John Boehner’s tenure was an extended case study of this dysfunctional dance as members of the Freedom Caucus repeatedly chose to one-up their conservative colleagues with expressive displays of ideological purity, even as they sabotaged Republican policy preferences. This self-defeating gamesmanship continued with the elevation of Paul Ryan to the Speakership, as Jonathan Bernstein related during one of the skirmishes:

Democrats only have leverage to negotiate a fairly good deal because Ryan’s Republican conference was split, with Ryan knowing he would never have the radicals’ votes on anything that could even get a simple majority in the Senate. That meant Ryan would eventually need Democratic votes, which meant everyone knew from the start that some Democratic priorities would wind up being fulfilled despite the large Republican majority in the House.

What the Freedom Caucus gets out of it is the chance to win in the Real Conservative game … at the cost of actual conservative policy preferences.

It wasn’t always this way in the GOP.

The Republican Party of the 1950s and 1960s was ideologically diverse in this sense: there were moderate Republicans and even liberal Republicans in the party. They were, like their conservative brethren, Republicans in good standing. No longer. The conservative movement, which seized the nominating apparatus of the Republican Party in 1964, by the Reagan era not only dominated debate and decision making within the party, it had begun to make the party inhospitable to moderate and liberal Republicans. In more recent decades, ritualistic purges through primary elections came to dominate Republican Party politics, but the seed was planted long before.

When William Buckley declared that his foe was “the Liberal Establishment,” Republicans were as much in his sights as Democrats. This included Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower, whose views on both domestic and foreign policies have no place in today’s Republican Party. In 2019, self-identification as conservative is required of all Republicans in good standing — elected officials, candidates, and nominees (at least on the national level).

Conservative Revolution

In the 1950s, Buckley and other intellectuals fused three strands of ideology into a central, overarching conception of conservatism (the ‘three-legged stool’). These beliefs included commitment to (i) free markets, (ii) traditional morality, and (iii) a combative foreign policy. The conservative movement embraced the fusion of this trinity, which came to represent Republicans’ reigning ideology.

I didn’t mention the word ‘liberal’ in my description of the Democratic Party. While liberal intellectuals are among the party’s constituencies, and many party activists and voters identify as liberal, most Democrats self-identify as moderate or conservative (though the number of self-identified liberals in the Democratic Party has grown in recent years). People regard themselves as Democrats because of social identity, group empathy, and specific issues embraced by the party. Regarding oneself as liberal is not a defining characteristic of Democrats.  

Republicans, in contrast, view politics through an ideological lens: political conflicts reveal a fundamental divide between conservatism and liberalism. And a visceral opposition to liberalism is embedded within conservative ideology.

While it’s possible to describe contemporary conservatism (and the three-legged stool) without appeal to liberalism, doing so would leave something out. Grossmann and Hopkins quote George Nash’s observation (in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945), regarding the fusion of three strands of ideology into one, that the free-market, foreign policy, and traditional morality conservatives were united by their opposition to liberalism:

To the libertarians, modern liberalism was the ideology of the ever-aggrandizing bureaucratic, welfare state. If unchecked, it would become a totalitarian state, destroying individual liberty and private property—the wellsprings of a prosperous society. To the traditionalists, liberalism was a disintegrative philosophy which, like an acid, was eating away at the ethical and institutional foundations of Western civilization, creating a vast spiritual void into which totalitarian false gods would enter. To the Cold War anti-Communists, modern liberalism—rationalistic, relativistic, secular, anti-traditional, quasi-socialist—was by its very nature incapable of vigorously resisting an enemy on its left.

The authors also quote Nicol Rae (The Decline and Fall of Liberal Republicans), who crisply characterizes conservative ideology in these words:

In a crude form, their ideology can be stated as follows: Something is rotten in the American body politic; that rottenness is due to liberalism; and only by returning to the economic, moral, and foreign policy precepts of America’s past can the promise of America be redeemed.

Conservative ideology at its heart begins with an unequivocal aversion to liberalism. This aversion is baked into the conservative movement. Although most Democrats have not embraced liberal ideology, Republicans view the Democrats as liberal standard-bearers. Republicans see political conflict as thoroughly ideological and their critique of Democrats is consistent with that stance.

Democrats have a practical, instrumental view of politics. The focus is not ideological, but pragmatic. But whether or not Democratic voters (and officials) identify as liberal, the Democratic Party looks to government to right wrongs and to offer a helping hand. The Republican view of Democrats as their ideological opponents is accurate insofar as Democrats seek public policy solutions to social problems, while Republicans harbor mistrust of government and oppose expanding its reach.

Having it both ways

Grossmann and Hopkins point to the contradictory views of voters as a reason the United States has settled into a dynamic with a fundamental asymmetry (which they characterize as a “foundational imbalance” and “mismatched nature”) between the two political parties. A majority of Americans can be found to affirm an ideological commitment to traditional American values (and suspicion of government) in agreement with conservative Republicans, while at the same time more than half support an array of specific domestic programs (aka left of center Democratic policies) that offer practical benefits. In other words, most Americans are at once ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. (One version of this inconsistency is to cling to cherished benefits, while casting shade on government, the source of the benefits: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”).

Both parties play to their strengths in political battles: Republicans sound abstract conservative themes, such as the virtue of limited government, while Democrats affirm the social identity of their coalition partners and tout an array of specific programs that benefit them.

Because most domestic policy programs are highly popular (especially big, expensive programs), while most voters also embrace conservative rhetorical sentiments (such as demanding limited government), the governing majority can shift back and forth, depending on how voters with these contradictory attitudes lean from one election to the next.  

The asymmetry between the Democratic and Republican parties results in a cascade of practical implications. I’ll explore various consequences in future posts.

(Image: Thomas Nast, Stranger things have happened.)

Democrats, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Nancy Pelosi scolds tweeting caucus contingent & updates sausage metaphor

Wisdom of the day (from a San Francisco liberal who should know a thing or two about pâté and unquestionably understands how things work in Washington):

“I’m here to help the children when it’s easy and when it’s hard. Some of you are here to make a beautiful pâté but we’re making sausage most of the time.”

By the way, regarding that political folklore often attributed to Otto von Bismarck – “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made” – apparently (at least according to Quote Investigator) he didn’t say this (or anything resembling this when rendered into English from German).

(Image from wikipedia.)

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Donald Trump ran and won as a moderate – more moderate than Clinton (in voters’ eyes)

Quote of the day (Editor’s emphasis added):

” Many progressives have what they believe to be a knock-down answer to nervous Nellies who fret that talking about desegregation busing, decriminalizing illegal entry into the United States, banning assault weapons, and replacing private health insurance will kill them at the polls in 2020: Donald Trump is president.
If Trump is president, the thinking goes, it’s the ultimate proof of “lol nothing matters” politics. And if anything does matter, it’s riling up your base to go to war, not trimming and tucking to persuade precious swing voters. The old rules no longer apply, or perhaps they were never true at all.
Activists are pressing candidates to take aggressively progressive stands on broad issues like Medicare-for-all but also narrower ones like including undocumented immigrants in health care plans and providing relief from graduate school debt.
This is, however, precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Trump era.
It’s true that Trump is president, but it’s not true that Trump ran and won as an ideological extremist. He paired extremely offensive rhetoric on racial issues with positioning on key economic policy topics that led him to be perceived by the electorate as a whole as the most moderate GOP nominee in generations. His campaign was almost paint-by-numbers pragmatic moderation. He ditched a couple of unpopular GOP positions that were much cherished by party elites, like cutting Medicare benefits, delivered victory, and is beloved by the rank and file for it. ” – Matthew Yglesias

Yglesias provides documentation justifying my headline and the selected quotation, which begins his piece. I’ll add that Democrats flipped the House in 2018 by presenting a clear contrast with Donald Trump’s Republican Party, not by reaching to the left edge of the Democratic Party.*

Fearless editor’s fretting: Elizabeth Warren is far and away my favorite United States Senator. I’d like to vote for her for president. Warren’s stance on Medicare for All (rather than Pete Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It) and the elimination of private insurance strikes me as a huge political miscalculation – and, independently, as bad public policy** – for someone who wishes to turn Trump out of office in November 2020.

I’ve voted for Kamala Harris in several statewide elections. She is high on my list of prospective Democratic nominees. Harris has twice endorsed the elimination of private insurance and twice walked it back the next day. This, much more than her past hedging (“We should have that conversation“), sows doubts about whether her tool chest of political skills – while impressive – is stocked with everything she needs to run a high stakes national campaign against Trump. She’s very good when she’s well scripted (though perhaps the script isn’t always reliable). And I’m not yet convinced that she’s “quick on her feet.”

* Taxing the rich is popular. I’m ready to take that stride to the left. Taking away someone’s health insurance is highly unpopular, for reasons – I’d argue – that are sound. See the note below.

** In my view, this policy shift is a heavy lift, which cries out for an incremental approach as we figure out in stages how to do it right and how to ameliorate the unwanted consequences. Furthermore, without a Democratic lock on the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, the risk of Republicans sabotaging things during the transition (as they’ve done with ACA and Warren’s CFPB) are far too high. If the shift to Medicare for All Who Want It is done well, this will serve to reassure the public on the wisdom of a more radical change.

Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump

Tick tock, tick tock – Why hasn’t the House staged televised hearings with live witnesses?

Well, finally: “In their attempt to move forward with impeachment, the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee is reaching way back, calling Watergate star John Dean to testify on June 10.”

It’s a beginning and long overdue.

Never mind what you think about impeachment, or Nancy Pelosi’s resistance to it, or optimal timing for it, or initiating impeachment proceedings, or any other permutations. Why haven’t we had televised hearings with live witnesses in the House of Representatives every week since Bill Barr released his redacted version of Robert Mueller’s report? There are scads of people whose testimony the Trump White House can’t possibly block – including many B-List folks who aren’t household names, but (as in the Watergate hearings of another era) can advance the narrative of presidential wrongdoing. (John Dean is fine, as a warm-up, though the Mueller Report mentions a cavalcade of others who have a closer connection to Donald Trump.)

The absence of hearings up till now represents Congressional malpractice. Numerous commentators have highlighted the importance of telling a story through House hearings:

June 6 – Jonathan Bernstein (“Stop Obsessing About Impeachment Poll Numbers“):

What the House can do is relentlessly dramatize and amplify the story that the Mueller report tells, along with other Trump impeachable malfeasance and scandals. So far, they haven’t really done that effectively.

June 4 – Josh Marshall (“Thoughts on Impeachment“):

The most effective action the House can take is to investigate the President’s wrongdoing and bring it before the public and hold the possibility of impeachment in the offing as they bring new evidence to the public about the President’s misrule.
But here’s the thing. . . .
If the most aggressive stance toward President Trump isn’t impeachment but aggressive investigation – which I firmly believe – then you actually have to be aggressive and show you’re being aggressive.

June 2 – Francis Wilkinson (“Before Impeachment, Democrats Must Win the War for Truth“):

Democrats . . . should methodically highlight the truth of Trump’s ethical and policy failures, day after day, in hearings, reports, news conferences and events in Washington and around the country. And then they must get up each succeeding day and do it all over again.

May 30 – Donna Edwards (“Democrats need to repackage the Mueller report for TV“):

It’s time for Democratic leaders to repackage Mueller’s findings in a form that will be more readily digested by the American people. Unfortunately, the current approach of investigations in no fewer than six committees, multiple subpoenas, innumerable court proceedings and White House delay tactics just creates more confusion. How can the United States focus on the findings if a Democratic House will not singularly focus its investigations? From the cheap seats, it appears that there may be too many balls in the air.
It is no surprise that few Americans are talking about the report over the water cooler. The only voice that breaks through with a consistent (if mostly untrue) message is President Trump’s, especially absent an alternative narrative. Democrats should look at this differently. Mueller has given Democrats cover to present that narrative and proceed with impeachment as the appropriate process under the Constitution.

May 29 – Benjamin Wittes (“Mueller Bows Out: What Does Congress Do Now?“)

Congress’s current strategy is an incoherent muddle. . . .
The better approach, in my view, is to focus on live testimony from witnesses who supplied the material about President Trump’s conduct that Mueller made public in the report—mostly but not exclusively in Volume II. There are a lot of these witnesses. Congress could easily hold weekly hearings that would be riveting television. Who knows? They might even get what the president most values in the world: good ratings. The goal would be to focus public attention on the president’s abuse of the intelligence and law enforcement communities and his individual conduct with respect to Russia. Such hearings could develop new information. They could also enrich our understanding of the existing factual record. They would serve to publicly validate and elucidate Mueller’s findings and, critically, to shift those findings from the voice of Mueller himself to the voice of the president’s closest aides. Perhaps most importantly, they would create a sustained vehicle for focusing on Trump’s conduct—which is, and needs to be, the central issue.
If I were in charge of the House judiciary committee, a wide array of witnesses named in the report would receive an invitation for public testimony—and any of them who did not immediately agree to appear would receive a subpoena in short order. The idea would be to bring the Mueller report to life and, along the way, to establish clearly in case law the ability of Congress to conduct such oversight hearings against a recalcitrant executive.

May 22 – David Corn (“Have the Democrats Blown the Trump-Russia Scandal?“):

For five months now, the Democrats have held power within the House. While passing legislation to address voters’ needs and while battling to enforce subpoenas, they could also be telling the story—with hearings featuring witnesses who could present compelling accounts that have a chance of grabbing the nation’s attention for at least a few minutes.
Three percent of Americans say they have read the Mueller report. That number is probably high. Yes, many have seen the headlines and the news accounts summarizing the report’s findings and allegations. But there is something visceral about a well-run hearing. It is a different way of presenting information to the citizenry. (John Dean’s testimony during the Watergate hearings continued for days and captivated the nation.) Congressional hearings could be used to convey the basics of the Trump-Russia scandal that have disappeared in the ceaseless shuffle—and been shoved aside by the debates over collusion and obstruction.

May 5 – Jonathan Bernstein, who has been at it a while (“Impeaching Trump Would Constrain Democrats Too Much“):

The “before” question is whether to continue investigations and hearings as part of regular House oversight, or as part of an explicit impeachment inquiry.
Are there advantages with the latter? Not really, I don’t think. Whether it’s called impeachment or not, what matters at this stage is whether Democrats can find ways to publicize Trump’s malfeasance, in hopes of both hurting Trump’s popularity and of finding new allies among any weak Trump supporters among congressional Republicans.

April 22 – Norman Ornstein (“Impeachment Is Not the Answer. At Least Not Yet“):

What we need is for the Judiciary, Intelligence, and Homeland Security Committees to conduct a series of deep dives into the areas of communication and coordination between Trump and his campaign with Russians and their surrogates, such as WikiLeaks; the multiple categories and areas of obstruction of justice that Robert Mueller outlined; the threats to our intelligence operations and our justice system from Trump and his operatives; and the moves by Russia to interfere in and influence our elections used by Trump and unchecked by Republicans. Other committees, such as Ways and Means and Banking, need to be ready to do the same thing as more information emerges from the SDNY and the New York attorney general, among others, about Trump’s financial dealings, including with the Russians, and about Russian money laundering. The witnesses need to include Mueller and Rosenstein, of course, but also the range of figures mentioned in the report, and also a range of experts in areas such as ethics, constitutional violations, intelligence operations, and election administration and security.
Democrats need to stage and coordinate hearings across committees and subcommittees, to make sure they do not overload Americans’ ability to pay attention. Most important, they need to structure the public hearings in a dramatically different way than usual. Each committee needs to use experienced counsel—a good example might be former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara—and limit, if not abandon, opening statements, except from the chairs. No five-minute rounds of questions going down the line of every committee member, leading to utterly disjointed discourse, making it easy for hostile witnesses to evade, filibuster, or otherwise avoid follow-ups and get through a five minute period, which is then followed by a five-minute breather with an ally on the Republican side, and then another five minutes from the next member of the panel that may have nothing to do with the previous round of questions.

(Photo of John Dean: screengrab.)

2020 Democratic Primary, 2020 General Election, Democrats, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

Democrats disagree about political strategy: Is Trump the problem or the GOP?

“I feel like the party went through this and the 2016 election showed that Trumpism isn’t just Donald Trump — it’s the entire Republican Congress, too. Until there is someone in the Republican Party who can stand up to Trump, then none of them are better than Trump.” — Rebecca Katz, Democratic strategist

(“Biden Thinks Trump is the Problem, Not All Republicans. Other Democrats Disagree,” Shane Goldmacher, New York Times, May 4, 2019)

Joe Biden is running on the conceit that Donald Trump is an aberration. And that he, Biden, can reach across the aisle to work with a cooperative Republican Party.

The former Vice President is either making a clever (if not quite factual) electoral pitch (which, while it may sound reassuring, is hardly something we can bank on), or he has a very short memory — because Joe Biden was there when Barack Obama was greeted with absolute, across-the-board opposition from the Republican Party.

Let’s recall:

Michael Grunwald, speaking of his book, “The New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era,” recounts a now familiar plot line for Time magazine (when the United States was poised to plunge into a depression):

It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”

Grunwald goes on to relate that Biden was aware of this scorched earth strategy:

Vice President Biden told me that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said. The Vice President said he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along those lines.

“So I promise you — and the President agreed with me — I never thought we were going to get Republican support,” Biden said.

Robert Draper’s book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” describes the Republican strategizing at the January 20, 2009 meeting:

“The only way we’ll succeed is if we’re united,” Ryan told the others. “If we tear ourselves apart, we’re finished.” But, he added, he liked what he was hearing now. Everyone at the table sounded like a genuine conservative. It was a place to start.

“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” said Kevin McCarthy. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

…

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward: Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: “Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it — please?”)

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

“You will remember this day,” Newt Gingrich proclaimed to the others as they said goodbye. “You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”

Here is how Mitch McConnell summed up the strategy on everything Obama proposed:

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Why?

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Want another example? There was Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi: the Republican never-ending cycle of hearings to politicize the deaths in 2012 of Americans at the Libyan embassy. Why? For political advantage, of course, as Kevin McCarthy (then House Majority Leader; now House Minority Leader) explained in an interview with Sean Hannity:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy asked. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

“I give you credit for that,” said Hannity. “I’ll give you credit where credit is due.”

The obstructionist strategy played out in the bipartisan negotiations leading to passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act in 2010, Obama’s major legislative accomplishment, without a solitary Republican vote in favor. Democrats made numerous compromises with Republicans (this is why we don’t have a public option*) before Republicans revealed their unanimous, remorseless opposition to ACA:

… [W]ith Obama’s blessing, the Senate …became the fulcrum for a potential grand bargain on health reform. Chairman Max Baucus, in the spring of 2009, signaled his desire to find a bipartisan compromise, working especially closely with Grassley, his dear friend and Republican counterpart, who had been deeply involved in crafting the Republican alternative to Clintoncare. Baucus and Grassley convened an informal group of three Democrats and three Republicans on the committee, which became known as the “Gang of Six.” They covered the parties’ ideological bases; the other GOPers were conservative Mike Enzi of Wyoming and moderate Olympia Snowe of Maine, and the Democrats were liberal Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and moderate Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

Baucus very deliberately started the talks with a template that was the core of the 1993-4 Republican plan, built around an individual mandate and exchanges with private insurers—much to the chagrin of many Democrats and liberals who wanted, if not a single-payer system, at least one with a public insurance option. Through the summer, the Gang of Six engaged in detailed discussions and negotiations to turn a template into a plan. But as the summer wore along, it became clear that something had changed; both Grassley and Enzi began to signal that participation in the talks—and their demands for changes in the evolving plan—would not translate into a bipartisan agreement.

What became clear before September, when the talks fell apart, is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had warned both Grassley and Enzi that their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation to be signed by Barack Obama. They both listened to their leader. An early embrace by both of the framework turned to shrill anti-reform rhetoric by Grassley—talking, for example, about death panels that would kill grandma—and statements by Enzi that he was not going to sign on to a deal.

And, let’s not forget the Senate’s refusal to hold hearings for Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Mitch McConnell is especially pleased with himself for putting President Obama in his place: “One of my proudest moments was when I told Obama, ‘You will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.'”

When I asked McConnell how he felt about his legacy and Trump’s being so closely linked, he rejected the premise. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think the most consequential call I made was before President Trump came to office.” I asked what he meant. “The decision not to fill the Scalia vacancy,” he said. “I think that’s the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.”

Remember: not a single Republican Senator moved a finger to ensure hearings for Obama’s choice (though there were ineffectual murmurs of complaint — I recall Senator Susan Collins murmuring — just like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker’s mild criticism of Trump, while voting consistently in support of Trump and the Republican leadership).

This, the Garland blockade, McConnell believes, will be his lasting legacy as Senate Majority Leader:

When I asked McConnell how he felt about his legacy and Trump’s being so closely linked, he rejected the premise. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think the most consequential call I made was before President Trump came to office.” I asked what he meant. “The decision not to fill the Scalia vacancy,” he said. “I think that’s the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.”

Count me in the Democratic camp that thinks that Trump is only a symptom of an off-the-rails Republican Party.

*After posting this, I recalled Joe Lieberman’s threat to kill the public option. I don’t wish to let him off the hook for his misdeeds, but if Republicans hadn’t played Max Baucus for months on end with meaningless negotiations and compromises, the ACA would have passed with Ted Kennedy’s vote.

(Image: McConnell, Ryan, Trump, and Pence celebrating the Republican tax bill.)

Democrats, Income Inequality

Blue collar wages (inflation adjusted) finally recovered after Reagan era slide

Graph courtesy of Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Blue collar wages hit a peak in the early ‘seventies. That was followed by a long slide downward, especially during the Reagan years and into the mid-nineties.

Sarah Jones at New York magazine reports that 40 Senate Democrats have introduced the PRO Act – Protecting the Right to Organize – to boost workers’ rights to organize, strike, and sue employers who violate those rights.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why Bill Clinton and Barack Obama weren’t all over legislation along these lines.


2020 General Election, Democrats, Income Inequality, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

“Democrats should court the economically anxious Trump voters who don’t exist”

While the headline, from an Eric Levitz post at New York magazine, expresses the point ironically, I am in complete agreement with the argument. Politics – and winning elections – is a pragmatic endeavor. Taking back the White House in 2020 is a crucial goal; disparaging voters who opted for Trump 2016 is not. A couple of key quotes:

“The politician and the public intellectual have two very different jobs. The latter is tasked with telling the best approximation of the truth they can muster — especially when said truth is uncomfortable or unpopular. We need political scientists willing to overturn our most cherished presumptions about actually existing democracy, historians eager to recover our republic’s most violently suppressed memories, and commentators who illuminate our collective complicity in contemporary injustice.
In certain contexts, on certain subjects, we need elected officials to do the same. But the politician’s primary vocation isn’t to speak truth to power — it is to win power, and then exercise it in a manner that advances the greater good. In a representative democracy, that typically means rallying the largest possible coalition behind you, your party, and its governing priorities. Depending on one’s definition of the greater good, that task may well involve a great deal of uncomfortable truth telling. But any politician who cares more about expressing (what she perceives in a given moment to be) the unvarnished truth than about using state power to improve people’s lives has chosen the wrong line of work.”

And:

“Many progressive policies and value propositions enjoy majoritarian support. But the percentage of Americans who hold the liberal position on each and every political question is tiny (as is the percentage that espouses uniformly conservative views). For progressives, there is no alternative to finding ways to make common cause with the unenlightened.”

(Image: Wage Inequality, Economic Policy Institute, from inequality.org)