Quote of the day:
‘But anyone that paints 2020 as a “my candidate or bust” situation really has no perspective or understanding of the myriad great choices we have. If I ranked the current field by order of preference, I’m at candidate 9 or 10 before I think “ugh.” We Democrats are in a good place.’ – Markos Moulitsas
Agreed. And I don’t expect an ‘ugh’ to win.
(Image from the 11th Hour during the last half of March.)
Last week I posted a ‘quote of the day’ by Rebecca Traister. I thought the most significant point she made was that Joe Biden has hardly changed at all since, after Anita Hill’s appearance, he blocked corroborating witnesses from testifying at the Clarence Thomas hearings. In my view, Joe Biden is a throwback to a U.S. Senate when Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch co-sponsored legislation; when Joe Lieberman and John McCain were best buds; when the filibuster was rare and blue slips were respected by both parties; and when 100% of Senate Republicans would not have given Mitch McConnell a pass when he blocked a hearing for Merrick Garland.
I cross posted the Traister quote of the day on another website, which generated a number of comments, virtually all of which focused on Biden’s well-known habit of hugging, touching, and kissing women whom he doesn’t know. So I’m revisiting this issue.
Biden’s handling of the Thomas hearings is more significant, especially since he has never acknowledged a mistake. Plus, he continues to act – to this day – as though somehow, someway we can bring back the good old days of comity and bipartisanship to American politics.
First, let’s look back at the hearings, which Anita Hill, and 4 women in the House and 1 in the Senate (circa 1991) spoke about with the Washington Post in 2017. The Post describes then-Members of Congress and the Senate as “all allies of Hill during her historic appearance at the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.”
Pat Schroeder: “As I recall, a group of us walked in, and you know how you can do the one-minute speeches on the floor? So we each got up and we’re doing them. And that then inspired us to go over to see the wonderful Senate, because they were having lunch as they always do on Tuesday. So we marched over there to go see them, because we were dumbfounded.” . . .
Barbara Mikulski: “I’m the only Democratic woman in the Senate. I didn’t know they were marching over. There’s George Mitchell, our Democratic leader, and somebody hands him a note and he says there are congresswomen outside. They want to speak. I said let them in. Others were saying okay.” . . .
Later Schroeder and Louise Slaughter called on Joe Biden. Slaughter: “We went to see Biden, because we were so frustrated by it. And he literally kind of pointed his finger and said, you don’t understand how important one’s word was in the Senate, that he had given his word to [Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.), Thomas’s chief sponsor] in the men’s gym that this would be a very quick hearing, and he had to get it out before Columbus Day.”
Biden was a man of his word. He respected Republican Senators as colleagues. He hasn’t changed much, as far as we can tell. Whether it is complimenting a Republican Congressman (when a Democrat was running to flip the seat in 2016) or praising Donald Trump’s Vice President as “a decent guy,” (though, yes, he walked it back, but) Biden apparently isn’t onboard with a more aggressive approach toward Republicans that many Democrats in 2019 are ready to embrace. He comes out of a kinder, gentler era, when Senatorial courtesies and bipartisan deference were ascendant.
None of this is disqualifying. It’s an intra-party disagreement. Maybe the right Democrat in the White House could get Mitch McConnell to be more reasonable. Maybe he (or she) could persuade a handful of Republicans to object to McConnell’s obstructionism. Recall the suggestions by serious people that Obama should have played more golf with Republicans. Or perhaps invited GOP opponents to the White House more frequently for bourbon and cigars (or whatever). Maybe then a few of them would have supported the ACA.
Or not.
Joe Biden is a prospective Democratic candidate for the nomination of his party; based on polling, he would be a front-runner (though I’m skeptical, having watched him seek the nomination twice before, that he is a likely winner). If he runs, this history (which isn’t dead, and may not be past), is something for Democratic voters to consider when deciding on their nominee.
(Image of Kumbaya moment at South Park from the web.)
Quote of the day:
“Here’s the truth: If Joe Biden had ever done two minutes of actual thinking about the harm he’d helped to inflict on Hill, on women, and on the nation in handling of those hearings, he wouldn’t still be doing this kind of thing. ” – Rebecca Traister, NYMag, “Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer.“
My view: I was angry in 1991 about Biden’s handling of the Clarence Thomas hearings. I am angry still, especially because as Traister describes, “Biden was reluctant even to let Anita Hill testify as to how Thomas had repeatedly sexually harassed her, since — as he would explain afterward — he had given his word to a Republican colleague, in the Senate gym, that he’d make sure Thomas’s confirmation was speedy.” And he still says of his decision (and of his refusal to call three women, who were willing to testify as corroborating witnesses), “I wish I could have done something.” He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
(Image: screen grab of the Thomas hearings from YouTube.)
Quote of the day:
“All in all, Democrats should approach 2020 with the mind-set that this is an election with such high substantive and political stakes that history will never forgive them for blowing it. “
– Ed Kilgore,”Hellscape 2021: Why a Second Loss to Trump Could Produce an Existential Crisis for Democrats,” March 24, 2019
(Image: Hell – detail from a fresco in the medieval church of St Nicholas in Raduil, Bulgaria, wikipedia)
“After this week’s CNN town hall, it’s more and more clear that any money Howard Schultz might spend on an independent presidential bid would function as an in-kind campaign contribution to Donald Trump.” – Ronald Brownstein
“To win a majority of electoral college votes, which Schultz says would be his goal, he would have to ultimately replace the Democratic nominee as the favored choice of voters who do not want Trump to win a second term.” – Michael Scherer
Schultz has praised the “thoughtful analysis” of a conservative commentator who fears the Democrats will nominate a “hard-left” candidate and – in the course of the column – demeans Kamala Harris (“shrill … quasi-socialist promising pie in the sky”), Elizabeth Warren (“Fauxcahontas … playing a game of socialist one-upmanship”), and “supposedly centrist” Joe Biden. The critic also name-checks Bernie Sanders and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Schultz, who claims to be a “lifelong Democrat” – but not a very attentive one (“Schultz voted in just 11 of 38 elections dating back to 2005”), took back the praise he had offered after folks actually read the “thoughtful analysis” he was promoting; he deleted the tweet when he was asked about it by the Washington Post, and blamed someone else for posting the link on his personal Twitter account.
Nonetheless, he embraces the conservative views expressed in the deleted column. It’s the “hard-left,” “quasi-socialist” Democrats that Schultz fears and, most scary and objectionable of all, the proposal (broached by conservatives’ favorite new Democratic Member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez) to raise the marginal tax rate for incomes over $10 million to 70% (the level in the United States in 1980).
When asked at his CNN Town Hall what he thinks his personal income tax rate – as a billionaire – should be, Schutz concedes that he “should pay more taxes,” but tap dances for more than a minute (with platitudes about corporate taxes, the Republican tax bill, comprehensive tax reform, as well as personal income tax rates for millionaires) without giving an answer, at which point the moderator Poppy Harlow reminds him of the question and asks, “Give me a sense. Are you talking about you should pay 2% higher? Ten percent higher, twenty percent higher federal income tax?”
He stammers and says, “I don’t – Poppy, I don’t know what the number is….”
“Ballpark it for people,” she asks.
He won’t. He finally gets to the heart of his concern, “I think that what’s being proposed at 70% is a punitive number. And I think there are better ways to do this.”
Better ways. In other words, instead of significant increases in the personal tax rates of billionaires, we should seek revenue increases somewhere else.
“To obscure his tilt toward the Democrats on almost all issues, Schultz has quickly settled on a strategy of loudly criticizing ideas popular on the party’s far-left flank.”
Brownstein perceives in Schultz’s strategy echoes of the (now defunct) centrist group, the Democratic Leadership Council, which Bill Clinton embraced in his trek to the White House. But there’s a huge difference in the two strategies. The DLC and Clinton worked for years “inside the Democratic Party.” Regardless of what you think of Clinton or his policies, he sought to “rebuild a political majority that would allow Democrats to regain control of the national agenda from the increasingly militant conservatism within the GOP.”
Schultz seeks to do the opposite: to split the Democrats and peel off Democratic voters to his independent campaign.
‘Exaggerating the power of the left in the Democratic coalition, he’s portraying the party as beyond redemption for anyone holding centrist views. To make that case, Schultz is echoing claims from Trump and other Republicans that Democrats have become radical. At times, Schultz has even called some of the Democratic ideas he opposes “un-American” or “not American,” not to mention “punitive” and “ridiculous.”
By validating the Republican efforts to portray Democrats as outside the mainstream, Schultz is helping Trump already.’
1. “No one has benefitted more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the new jobs created in the last year. ”
[Cue celebration by Democratic women in the House]
“You were not supposed to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before. Don’t sit yet. You are going to like this.
That’s great. Very great. And congratulations.” – Donald Trump, SOTU 2019
Let’s give credit where credit is due. Trump’s campaign, election, and tenure in the White House inspired those women to run – and fueled their victories.
2. “An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”
A threat? Wishful thinking? Bargaining by the reality-television dealmaker?
Nixon’s proclamation in his 1974 SOTU, “One year of Watergate is enough,” didn’t get him off the hook. I don’t expect Congress – or Mueller – to turn tail and run this time either. Those newly elected women (and men) in the new majority in Congress, as well as returning Democrats, didn’t come to town to ignore, excuse, lie, and cover up like Paul Ryan’s crew did.
3. “But we must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution – and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good.”
4. Stacey Abrams provided the Democratic response to Trump’s SOTU address. Here’s hoping we’ll see her in the U.S. Senate before long.
The media’s favorite democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – sorry, Bernie Sanders – has proposed raising the marginal tax rate on income above $10 million to 70%. (That’s where it was when Ronald Reagan was elected; it was 28% when Reagan left office.)
It turns out that most voters agree with the Congresswoman from the Bronx:
In the latest The Hill-HarrisX survey, which was conducted Jan. 12 and 13 after the newly elected congresswoman called for the U.S. to raise its highest tax rate to 70 percent, found that a sizable majority of registered voters, 59 percent, supports the idea.
…
Women support the idea by a 62-38 percent margin. A majority of men back it as well, 55 percent to 45 percent. The proposal is popular in all regions of the country with a majority of Southerners backing it by a 57 to 43 percent margin. Rural voters back it as well, 56 percent to 44 percent.
Republicans oppose the idea by 55% to 45%.
(Wikipedia photo of Reagan at home in California in 1976, four years before his election as president.)
After the overwhelming Democratic victory for the control of the House of Representatives – Democrats won by nearly 10 million votes nationally, which was the greatest popular vote margin in U.S. history – a highly diverse Congress convened yesterday. It doesn’t look quite like America – but it’s closer than ever before.
A woman became Speaker of the House for only the second time; Nancy Pelosi, who made history the first time, made history again. More women – 102 – will serve in the 116th Congress than in any previous House. (And consider this contrast: in 1989 there were 16 Democratic women and 13 Republican women in Congress. In 2019, there are 89 Democratic women and 13 Republican women in Congress.)
Two Native American women will serve in this Congress. And, heralding greater religious diversity, two Muslim women (a Somali-American and a Palestinian) will serve.
A PEW survey notes that even with the new members, Congress still doesn’t accurately represent Americans’ religious preferences and ‘by far the largest difference between the U.S. public and Congress is in the share who are unaffiliated with a religious group. In the general public, 23% say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” In Congress, just one person – Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who was recently elected to the Senate after three terms in the House – says she is religiously unaffiliated, making the share of “nones” in Congress 0.2%.’
Ed Kilgore notes that the two parties present a stark contrast regarding religious diversity: “With the exception of the two Jewish Republicans in the House, all of Congress’s non-Christians and religiously unspecified members are Democrats. Professed Christians are over-represented in both parties’ congressional ranks…”
Meanwhile, evangelical Christians continue to be the most devoted, unwavering supporters of one Donald J. Trump, a man (in Michael Gerson’s words) “prone to cruelty, bigotry, vanity, adultery and serial deception.” Gerson, who embraces a never-Trump conservatism, notes in an op-ed in this morning’s newspaper – borrowing a phrase from Ronald Brownstein – the “hardening loyalty” of evangelicals to Trump.
Gerson suggests that something other than fidelity to the Gospel lies behind this support:
Trump has understood something about evangelical Christians that many are unable to articulate themselves. White, theologically conservative Protestants were once — not that long ago — a culturally predominant force. Many of their convictions — on matters such as sexuality and public religiosity — were also the default settings of the broader society. But that changed in a series of cultural tidal waves — the Darwinist account of human origins, the application of higher criticism to the text of the Bible, the sexual revolution — which swept away old certainties.
Americans, in an increasingly diverse country, have reason to celebrate more diverse representation at the national level. Democrats are at the forefront of the changes taking place. Make no mistake: Trump and Republicans, 89% of whom approve of the job he is doing in the latest Gallup Poll (December 17-22), view diversity as a threat. Identity politics, tribalism, and cultural anxiety have swamped faith, hope, and charity in this group.
(Photograph is MSNBC screengrab of Kyrsten Sinema, a departing member of the House just elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona, taking the oath of office with her hand on a law book, which contained the Constitution of the United States, rather than a religious text.)
I am not in sync with much of what Joan C. Williams has to say in her December 2018 piece in the Atlantic, “The Democrats’ White-People Problem,” but we agree that it would be a mistake for the Democrats to write off the white working class as a bunch of racists:
As of this writing, the results of the midterm elections are unknown, but one thing is clear: Democrats have banked a lot on the prospect that their voters’ anger can outmatch the anger of the voters who propelled Trump to office. Whether or not this strategy wins a given election, writing off an ocean of rural and Rust Belt red is a terrible strategy in the long term.
First (though I held my breath as I waited for the outcome on election night), I thought the Democrats’ midterm strategy was smart and sound. It gave voters in districts across the country plenty of reasons – including a robust defense of affordable, accessible healthcare and an embrace of civility – to vote Democratic. I’d hardly characterize the message as fueled primarily by anger. (Of course activists were angry. But – as one of those activists – I was motivated to make calls, send texts, and canvas neighborhoods to flip one of those now-blue Orange Country Congressional districts more by fear, than by anger; more because my conscience moved me to do something to set things right, than because I was mad at Trump.)
Second, while I agree that writing off rural and Rust Belt regions would be “a terrible strategy,” that’s not the half of it. It would represent a colossal failure of vision and principle. Williams observes that increasing income inequality, chronic economic insecurity, and a middle-class (including blue-collar white folks) that’s falling further and further behind, has convinced many Americans that we have a rigged economy:
Broader measures of income inequality show why many Americans feel so insecure. The economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Harvard have documented a sharp decrease in social mobility in recent decades: Virtually all Americans born in the 1940s outearned their parents; only about half of those born in the 1980s will. Simultaneously, the share of national income earned by Americans in the middle of the income distribution is declining.
This dismal picture represents a glaring problem and it cries out for a public policy response. That makes it political. So Williams’ focus on campaign strategy is understandable. And a new report from the Brookings Institution – “Countering the geography of discontent: Strategies for left-behind places” – begins with a nod toward the midterm results: “The 2016 election revealed a dramatic gap between two Americas—one based in large, diverse, thriving metropolitan regions; the other found in more homogeneous small towns and rural areas struggling under the weight of economic stagnation and social decline.” The report outlines this “epidemic of divergence”:
Big, techy metros like San Francisco, Boston, and New York with populations over 1 million have flourished, accounting for 72 percent of the nation’s employment growth since the financial crisis. By contrast, many of the nation’s smaller cities, small towns, and rural areas have languished. Smaller metropolitan areas (those with populations between 50,000 and 250,000) have contributed less than 6 percent of the nation’s employment growth since 2010 while employment remains below pre-recession levels in many ‘micro’ towns and rural communities (those with populations less than 50,000).
As a result, few can now deny that the geography of America’s current economic order has brought economic and social cleavages that have spawned frightening externalities: entrenched poverty, “deaths of despair,” and deepening small-town resentment of coastal cosmopolitan elites. It is baleful realities like these that caught many politicians, academics, and journalists off guard in 2016 as they poured through post-election red-blue maps. In a very real way, the 2016 election of Donald Trump represented the revenge of the places left behind in a changing economy.
Greg Sargent and John Harwood each highlight the Brookings’ findings as an explanation of why Donald Trump’s campaign of fear-mongering and immigrant-bashing fell short. Harwood quotes Brookings researcher Mark Muro, “The Democratic Party and Republican Party, at this point, really do occupy different economic worlds and represent different economic worlds.” The Trump message doesn’t resonate in the blue world, where a diverse population contributes to a thriving economy. Trump’s words directly contradict Americans’ experience in the most prosperous areas of the country.
Sargent pivots from an explanation of why Democrats did well in the midterms to the reality of an expanding economic divergence: “The broader point here is that big Democratic gains in areas dominated by the new economy also showcase the need to address the problems in areas outside of them.” He then quotes a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute:
“The economic dislocation outside growing metropolitan areas creates legitimate economic grievance,” Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute, which has studied the impact of economic concentration on these left-behind areas, tells me. “Rising regional inequality bespeaks the need for a broader policy agenda,” one that will “ensure broadly shared prosperity.”
We’re all in this together. It’s a big country. Trump has governed as a factional president, not a national leader. We can’t let that stand.
The 2018 midterm elections ended one-party rule in Washington. A Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will restore Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch and the checks and balances the Founders envisioned.
Democrats and activists opposed to Trump have been energized since before his 2017 inauguration. By election day – following the battle over Kavanaugh’s nomination and the president’s deceitful campaign of fear-mongering and violent political rhetoric – the Trump base was also revved up. The result: 49.2 percent turnout (as of November 11), the highest rate in a midterm election in the past 100 years.
As of today (as votes are still being counted in undecided races) Democrats have picked up 31 seats in the House, which will welcome record numbers of women, including the first Native American and Muslim women. With a highly unfavorable Senate map – 10 Democrats were running in states Trump won – the Republican majority will increase by no more than two (Florida is still counting ballots and Mississippi will have a December runoff). Democrats flipped more than 300 legislative seats, made a net gain of 7 governorships, and will have 27 (of 51) attorneys general in place in January 2019.
In their book, How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat write:
Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents.
Flipping Congress from red to blue was not a certainty. Trump’s election generated intense grassroots push-back from left-of-center groups and aroused citizens. The Women’s March protests across the country (and the world) on January 21, 2017 set the stage. The outpouring of volunteers and huge number of campaign contributions lead the way to the November 6, 2018 general election.
Electoral rules and practices in a number of states tilted the playing field through stratagems reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. The proceedings in some cases did not constitute free and fair elections: too many institutional norms were shattered to suppress the vote. But the elections were free and fair enough to bring about change. That’s worth celebrating.
November 21, 2018 update:
Dems' national lead in raw House votes – now 8.8 million – just broke the record for largest for either party in the history of midterm elections (previous record was 8.7 million set by Dems in 1974). https://t.co/0pm7oW1pFE
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 21, 2018
