Prohibitive
This is the kind of thing I’m referring to when I say that it’s absurd to deny that Romney is a mortal lock, whether he narrowly wins or loses South Carolina. There are serious campaigns for the Republican nomination, and there are campaigns that fail to get on the ballot in major states, and there’s certainly no overlap in these categories.
In related news, Hunstmentum! Further comedy gold:
A new group that hopes to tap into a rising appetite for a third-party presidential challenger has discovered that $30 million in secret cash can buy ballot access and attention, but not necessarily a dream candidate.
The group, Americans Elect, failed to generate interest in possible campaigns from Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lamar [! -- ed.] Alexander, and its intensive outreach to a host of other prospective candidates, including former Nebraska Sens. Chuck Hagel and Bob Kerrey, hasn’t yielded much public enthusiasm for its efforts.
We know Huntsman’s place in the political universe now: to be mentioned every four years among other conservative hacks with no constituency by whatever Broderite or PUMA is trying to start up a Pain Caucus third party candidacy.
Members of the national political press corps needs something to do with their lives for the next 8 months until the conventions are over and the general election begins in earnest. I suspect this is the overriding reason we will see endless speculation about Christie, Jeb, Daniels, et al jumping into the race in May or June to force a brokered convention, or social conservatives revolting en masse against Romney (which they won’t), or Ron Paul running under a third party banner (remotely possible).
Could we compromise and get them to start speculating about Wiillard’s veep choice instead?
Sure VPs never matter electorally and only matter politically when one is following the (now hopefully retired) Fourth Branch model, but unlike the GOP nomination, the GOP veepstakes are still very much up in the air. And they may even be marginally affected by the results in upcoming primaries and caucuses, so that’ll give the boys ‘n’ girls on various Mittless campign buses something to write about.
(A final note to the Fourth Estate: while Romney’s VP choice remains undecided, Obama’s is Joe Biden. Writing about how an Obama-Clinton ticket is the key to Democratic success is both factually wrong and of waste of time. No you can’t recycle those stories from June 2008.)
I really need to get to that Bill Keller “Hillary for Veep!” piece, which contains pretty much every pundit fallacy about how politics works in one handy column.
For the ultimate combination of tokenism, appeal to the lunatic base, and offbeat enough to be interesting without being entirely implausible, Mitt can’t beat Janice Rogers Brown as a running mate.
I actually think Nikki Haley fulfills that role better. Mitt probably needs a Southerner and an evangelical (Judge Janice is the latter, but barely the former…she was born in Alabama, but practiced law in California). And Haley is a much safer sort of person of color for the GOP base. The only strike against Haley from the Republican perspective would be a new, generic concern about nominatind first-term female governors.
Ummm….
A Mormon and a Person of Hue (not to mention vagina-equipped) on the same GOBP ticket? I think not.
I agree, insofar as I think a white, male, Southern Evangelical is far and away the most likely bottom half of a Romney ticket (Haley Barbour…come on down!).
But if he feels he needs a Hail Mary–as McCain apparently did in the summer of 2008–Haley is a lot more likely than Rogers Brown.
Haley pretty much eliminated himself this week with the “bye y’all Ahm goin’ out the door now” pardons of something like 200 felons, including rapists and murderers. The bad pub got the story o ABC (at least) for two or three nights. The MS AG is trying to find a way to rescind them.
I’m pretty sure that was intended as Nikki Haley, not Haley Barbour.
I mentioned both, in fact. And efg is correct: there are now safer white, Southern Evangelical choices than Barbour. DeMint, perhaps?
After the Sarah Palin debacle there’s no way that an inexperienced not-very-bright not-ready-for-television female governor who barely managed to beat a Democrat in South Carolina makes the ticket.
I don’t really think that Rogers Brown is a likely choice, but she would be an interesting one and if I were a nominee Romney who’d decided that a Hail Mary was in order she’d be near the top of my list. She’s got wingnut credentials up the wazoo; can give the I’m-not-a-career-politician speech and mean it; can probably string sentences together better than the more prototypical potential wingnut V.P.s; and given the broad overlap in Republicans who’ll never vote for a Mormon, woman, and person of color she probably gains more enthusiasm by ideologically exciting the base than she loses by virtue of genitalia and pigmentation. Being a federal appellate judge with degrees from very good schools also immunizes her against charges of stupidity if it turns out that she has more trouble putting those sentences together than I expect she would.
I’m guessing though that Romney goes with a white male protestant wingnut who ends up looking just as stupid as Palin once the cameras are rolling, i.e. Thune.
Am I wrong for thinking that maybe this is a mistake?
Not electorally, Biden doesn’t bring any plusses or minuses this year for Obama I don’t think. But I sort of think that it’s the responsibility of President’s running for a second term to bring someone on board who can be properly groomed to leverage their incumbent Vice-Presidency into a successful Presidential bid later on. It’s a ‘good of the party’ thing, and I think that its especially important in Obama’s case, as he stripped the Democrats of a lot of their up-and-comers to staff his administration.
I’m willing to be talked around on this if I’m just crazily wrong, tho.
Number of sitting Vice Presidents who have been elected President since 1840: One
Apparent value of Scott’s rejoinder to Bill Keller: Priceless
You’re skipping Truman and Johnson because they ran as presidents for re-election?
I’m not skipping them. They didn’t run as sitting VPs.
Sitting VPs are at an enormous disadvantage. They’ve spent the previous eight (usually) years systematically burying their own political views and personality in the interest of their President’s policy and career. Then, while still doing this, they need to establish themselves as independent, “presidential” political actors.
Truman and Johnson simply didn’t have to do this (at least not before facing the voters…and in Truman’s case, he was only VP for a matter of months). Both ran as Presidents for reelection.
And I count two since 1840 who’ve lost (Nixon and Humphrey, one of whom won it later). Beware of small sample sizes.
I think that parsing the numbers down a tad further is useful.
Popular vote difference in 1960, 1968, 1988, and 2000:
1960: VP (Nixon) down ~100,000 votes (0.1%)
1968: VP (Humphrey) down ~500,000 votes (0.7%)
1988: VP (Bush) up ~7,000,000 votes (7.7%)
2000: VP (Gore) up ~500,000 votes (0.5%)
So, the total record of sitting VPs is +7.4% in four elections, an average of a solid 2% election win. Sitting VPs have a very good record.
I guess the next step would be to look at how these VPs did against expectations – there’s certainly a case to be made that Nixon (’60) and Gore underperformed expectations even if they ran even with their challengers.
Please remember that Murc’s claim is very strong:
Let’s put aside the posited ethical responsibility for a moment (which, in this case, would need to be weighed against, e.g., the cost of replacing an apparently successful Secretary of State).
Murc’s argument assumes that being a sitting VP actually improves one’s chances of becoming President of the U.S.
I’ll grant that, experience in the modern era suggests, if the sitting VP seeks his (and it’s always been “his,” in fact) party’s presidential nomination, he will get it.
But in the case that the VP doesn’t want or is too old for the Presidency (the apparent case with Biden), that’s not an issue for the incumbent party.
I see no evidence whatsoever that running as a VP increases one’s chances of victory and some evidence that it decreases them.
Annointed successors also strike me as a rather undemocratic way of selecting presidential nominess, but since our system almost always awards the nomination to whichever candidate raises the most money in the year before the primaries begin, the alternative, quasi-open method of candidate selection isn’t much of an improvement.
There is a pretty strong case to be made that Gore’s–and especially Humphrey’s–campaigns were hurt by their association with the incumbent President. And given the closeness of these elections, even slightly stronger performances by either would have won the White House.
On the other hand, the chances of either Humphrey or especially Gore securing the nomination in the first place would have likely been much lower had they not been VP.
The Nixon (in ’60) case is also interesting. Ike didn’t exactly drag down Nixon, but the sense that that Nixon had accomplished little as VP (which is pretty typical of VPs) certainly didn’t help his campaign (Ike’s famously responded to a press conference question about what Nixon had done “give me a week and I’ll think of something”), nor did the icy relations between Ike and his VP (which went way back to Nixon’s showing up Ike in the wake of his successful Checkers Speech defense of his place on the ticket). Did any of this cost Nixon votes? Hard to say. But again, this was an extraordinarily close election.
Just a clarification….
Unquestionably, Clinton’s odds of getting the nomination would be higher if she were VP than if she were one candidate in a Democratic primary in which no VP was running.
But it’s not clear to me why that should be of great interest to anyone but Hillary Clinton (and certainly not to people who’d like to see an at least somewhat more progressive Democratic nominee). And even Clinton might want to think about whether she’d be in a better position in the general election running as a (presumably recently retired) Secretary of State. Her odds of getting the nomination would still be very high, I think.
No. No, it wouldn’t. I absolutely don’t want Obama to replace Biden with Hillary in this specific instance. That’s why I didn’t mention her name.
Now, this is something I really do worry about, especially since I don’t have a ton of faith in party institutions in general.
But… I dunno. It’s like this; I feel like a President has a responsibility to do party-building and to try and think about what happens after he is gone, and to make an effort to hand off the reins to a qualified successor. Yes, his first priority should be to govern well, absolutely. But given the fact that being a Vice-President at the end of a two-term Presidency basically guarantees that 1) you’ve had a chance to prove yourself out on the national stage, and 2) you have an enormous advantage when it comes to getting the nomination, it seems to me that a President heading into his second term has a responsibility to seek out and find someone who would make a good successor, and to give them time in the spotlight and a role in policymaking that would let them prove (or disprove, if it turns out they’re colossal failures) that.
However, the flip side of that is that is the responsibility of the party to say “fuck NO” if the President makes a bad call. It works both ways.
Hmmm…
This seems to assume that VPs make better candidates in November (which is far from clear) and/or that open primary processes do a less good job of identifying “good successors” than future lame-duck President’s do (and this is a point worth stressing: the President, in this scenario, is choosing a Presidential nominee for four years in the future).
I also question your sense that being VP is “time in the spotlight and a role in policymaking.” Historically, it’s been neither. In recent decades, it’s quietly become the latter in most cases, but it’s never become the former. Hillary Clinton has much more “time in the spotlight” and a clearer, more visible role as a policy maker as Secretary of State than she would as VP, even if she were given an unusually significant portfolio, as Al Gore was. She’s certainly more visible than Biden.
Finally, it needs to be said that major American political parties are complicated mixtures of ideologies and constituencies. First term presidents often have much more say in their parties than lame duck presidents, simply because lame duck presidents have fewer political favors to bestow.
Open presidential primary processes are, in part, a struggle over what a party stands for.
Obviously to the extent that a sitting president cares that his or her party continue in his or her ideological footsteps, choosing a VP that will govern as he or she did is an especially significant way of doing so (though it involves foreswearing ticket-balancing approaches to VP selection). There’s a good case to be made that picking a VP to assure one’s legacy in this way makes sense from the point of the view of the president.
There’s a less good case to be made that it makes sense from the point of view of the party, let alone from that of members of the party in factions other than the president’s.
I don’t have much of a substantive response to that, IB, aside from saying that you make a strong case that I’m just totally wrong.
I hadn’t fully considered the implications of the tension between ‘this is what I would do to consider myself a responsible President and steward of the republic’ and ‘this is whats best in terms of establishing healthy procedures in general.’
Four years ago that was supposed to be Obama, I think. Both Obama and HRC were more liberal than any other likely choices for the national ticket. I don’t see her being offered the spot but if it was offered and she said no it’s unlikely the spot would be offered to anyone more liberal than she.
Obama and Clinton ran on nearly identical platforms. In fact, the most liberal likely choice at the start of the process was Edwards, though he obviously proved to have serious problems of other sorts.
Furthermore, since Obama is governing to the right of his own beliefs based on what he can wring out of Congress, there’s no reason to believe a more liberal president (if one could get elected in the first place) wouldn’t be at least equally constrained.
I have a number of social friends who are still PUMAs, and they like Huntsman and Romney. It was hard enough to deal with four years ago, but I could understand that Clinton’s loss and the primary campaign were still fresh pains. I’m not sure how much patience I’ll have for it this year.
The most frustrating are two of my gay friends (I’m gay too). They talk about how Obama isn’t good enough on gay rights (particularly on marriage), and it drives me crazy. He’s been the best president on this issue we’ve ever had. The worst is that they both voted for McCain and I point out that McCain fought the repeal of DADT and Obama signed it. It just doesn’t seem to matter to them. Both of these friends were always moderate, third-way Clinton Democrats, so their transition to Republicans hasn’t been SO shocking (whereas I would consider myself a liberal Democrat), but it’s been strange.
Does anyone have any insight into how this happens to people? What motivates them? At this point, I simply avoid talking about it with them to preserve our friendship, but I literally just cannot understand this mindset.
It seems that at some point, certain people become prone to the “Chickens for Col. Sanders” disease.
What causes this is still unknown.
But I suspect there’s a certain point where there’s a confluence of self-loathing with a sense of superiority, which then creates a tsunami of stupidity.
Stockholm Syndrome.
The reality has always been that a lot (not all by any means) of Clinton’s supporters were actually moderate Republicans alienated by the increasing radicalization of the GOP.
The relity has always been that a lot (not all by any means) of Obama’s supporters were actually moderate Republicans alienated by the increasing radicalization of the GOP.
On the issues there was never any significant difference between Obama and Clinton. She supported an individual healthcare mandate; he didn’t ( which if anything put her to his left)….then he signed one into law. That’s pretty much it.
Yes, she supported the dumbest war in US history while he opposed it. But looking forward this goes to judgment more than policy. There foreign policy positions in 2008 were also hearly identical.
In short any moderate Republican who supported Clinton woul have had no trouble supporting Obama (and I know a number who did).
The Clinton supporters I knew who were angry about Obama’s were driven not by disagreements over policy but by a sense that: 1) it was Clinton’s time, both because she had paid her dues (unlike Obama) and she was a woman and it was time for a female President and 2) she was more electable because she was a “fighter” (unlike Obama), she had already received the worst that the right could sling at her (and she was thus impervious or something), and that America was not ready to elect a Black man president.
All of these Clinton “advantages” already looked dubious in the fall of 2008 (nobody paying any attention to the primary race could seriously prefer HRC’s campaign team to Obama’s). That’s one reason why actual PUMAs, who refused to vote for Obama, were as rare then as the vaunted Progressive Paulbots today. About all that remains from the 2008 Clintonista mantra is the “fighter” meme…which is about partisanship and could hardly be particularly appealing to moderate Republicans, many of whom do, indeed end up voting for moderate Democrats like Obama and Clinton these days.
I thought poli-sci boffins had long since concluded that people figure out how they’re going to vote first, and then figure out why.
Romney, because he makes president-noises, is a dude, wears suits, and has an R after his name, has a floor of 65 million popular votes under him(1). ‘Why’ can wait.
1. assumes no second 1929-style market collapse, or Alaskan-governor VP pick.
Perhaps your friends placed too much Hope in Obama and now are disillusioned like so many of us.
Equality for gays is a civil liberties issue; not an area where expectations were met.
To be clear, they never liked Obama. They supported Clinton to the hilt in the primaries, and they then campaigned against Obama and in favor of McCain. So disappointment can’t be the reason.
Moreover, I could understand why a person might be upset about Obama’s record from the left and thus not support his reelection,* but I don’t think it can possibly justify supporting the Republicans in a general election because they’re all WORSE on these issues than Obama. There’s really no question that a Romney presidency would have as bad or worse results on civil liberties issues than Obama’s administration. Arguments from the left might be a reason to support a primary challenge or to support Paul or maybe even Huntsman (though I think that’s wrong), but it’s not a reason to support Republicans. One can make many arguments from the right against Obama, but my friends mostly don’t make those.
* Though I don’t feel that way; I always had relatively realistic expectations about him and he has largely lived up to them (better on some, worse on others).
First, I don’t think any President has had a great record on civil liberties (as opposed to civil rights), and Obama’s actually been better than most on them. Moreover, his attempts to be good on them (such as shutting down Guantanamo) have been thwarted by conservatives in Congress, and many of his worst policies (such as signing the detention bill) have been pushed on him by conservatives in Congress.
Second, I personally like to distinguish civil liberties (limited government power, particularly in the area of police/military action, intrusion into privacy and medical decisions (particularly abortion), and criminal rights) from civil rights (mostly focused on eliminating impermissible discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, disability, etc.). Obama’s record on the second has actually been really good: he’s done a lot for gay rights, Perez has resuscitated the civil rights division and is pursuing very good suits to ensure voting rights, and Obama’s appointment record shows a good record of ensuring equal representation in government positions of power. Moreover, his appointments have mostly been better on both issues than any recent republican appointments: in particular on abortion and equal treatment of women in medicine. I would note that the rights to privacy and abortion are the rights where I see the most overlap between civil liberties and civil rights (and I personally prefer the civil rights arguments), and Obama’s been very good on it compared to any Republican candidate. Most of the lefties who are upset at Obama (e.g., Greenwald) are people who are particularly concerned about civil liberties and are relatively unconcerned with civil rights, and that makes sense because Obama’s record is worse on the former than the latter.
There’s really no question that a Romney presidency would have as bad or worse results on civil liberties issues than Obama’s administration.
It would hasten the day when we finally get the progressive government we deserve, ushered in by the votes of the 60 million or so Americans who don’t vote because no sufficiently-left candidate is ever offered by the two major parties.
Nach Romney, wir!
Gay folks voting Republican: I find it to be usually an economic/other privileges phenomenon. In my experience, economically comfortable white men (who happen to be gay) vote as economically comfortable white men, then cast about for something to mitigate the damage done to their sexual equality. I’ve dealt with Log Cabin Republicans, and most of the ones I spoke to would resume the closet if it kept their taxes low.
I guess this is probably a major factor, though they won’t cop to it. Murc has probably accurately identified another major factor below.
Ah, well, dumb friends are still friends.
Yeah. I’m friends with a number of people who are Paul-curious.
Although I’ve also severed ties with a number of former friends whose political beliefs got way to egregious. I can remain friends with people who, say, voted for McCain. But I don’t care how much trouble we got into together in High School, if you go full Birther and start talking about how we should outlaw the “God of Terror” in this country, I will drop you like the sack of shit you are.
Now I need a midafternoon drink.
Talking about how Obama isn’t good enough in an absolute sense is fair game. They might be wrong, but there are legitimate critiques.
Ending those critiques with “… and that’s why I’m voting Republican.” means that your friends are dumb. No offense. They just are.
This.
+1
Or racist? Or really truly Republican trying to make it seem less than bizarrely stupid? (Which is, itself, stupid.)
After a slow start and a fair number of prods, complaints, and threats from activists, yes.
Yes and no. He was awfully fond of GOP talking points on Social Security, and Clinton was able to score off him for that. I’m not sure how much if any difference it would have made in the long run, but she was noticeably more solicitous, at least rhetorically, of the social safety net and domestic issues generally. Her hawkishness was always deplorable. It is possible, even likely, that Obama would have voted against the Iraq war if he’d been in the US Senate, but we’ll never know.
Many people were disturbed by the misogyny that raised its head in some unexpected quarters, of course. Joan Walsh’s pieces from the time summarized these concerns fairly effectively as I remember.
I honestly think that one reason he’s been successful on gay rights is that he doesn’t seem TOO passionate about it. The republicans want to destroy him on everything, but they’ve let things like the Hate-crimes bill and the repeal of DADT through, and that is partly because Obama is not so passionately behind them. I suspect that if Obama was really in favor of gay rights, the Republicans would filibuster forever to stop it.
Of course, I still helped organize the equality march in Washington to help give him incentive to pass the bill repealing DADT. So, your point is well taken.
Maybe the other candidates heard that Gov. McDonnell was going to secede from The Union by then?
At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
Followed closely by AL, AK, AR, AZ, FL, GA, KS, KY, LA, MO, MS, SC, TN, TX, and a few others, which frankly, at least speaking for myself, I wouldn’t miss.
Some 19th century opponents of slavery also saw secession as a “solution” to the problem of slavery in the US, as it would rid the country of the evil slave power and the moral problem of slavery. Doubtless, enslaved African Americans disagreed.
Similarly, I think your proposed alliance with the desires of right-wing Southern governors would be opposed by the 30-45% of our states who vote Democratic, as well as Blacks, latinos, gays, the poor, and other groups who would stand to lose.
But I’m always surprised how little concern that Blue Staters sometimes show to the most direct victims of Red State governance. This is, incidentally, precisely why we need a vigorous federal government, rather than bitter federalism, however ironically offered.
Couldn’t we do some sort of a citizen-prisoner exchange program?
I know plenty of Upstate NYers who would fit right in down South – but they’d might bitch about the heat in the summer.
And they can have a few of my relatives in NY City, too.
We can take their’n and make ‘em our’n – and they can take our’n and make ‘em their’n!
:-)
Speaking as a Blue Stater, I am often bewildered by how many Red Staters actively bring on their own oppression and immiseration. They are not slaves: they vote, they make choices in how their money is spent; some even participate in the political process. A number of those who have fallen on particularly hard times due to the fouling of their nests then emigrate to blue states (especially, it seems, California), where they often try to re-create the circumstances of their lives in the red state they just fled. Why would my failure to embrace the people who have worked so hard to spoil their own states be surprising?
Bear in mind also that a vigorous federal government may well protect the citizens of the red states against the whims of their political and law enforcement and corporate calsses, but that same federal government also frequently protects blue state citizens against their own laws–think ICE raids and the DEA overriding local sheriffs on pot enforcement. It is necessary to have enough federal power to block excesses of local power, but we must also have enough local power to block federal overreach. It’s a balancing act.
They are not slaves; they vote.
While you’re generally correct about this, massive felon disenfranchisement really is a problem in many red states.
They do vote. Their votes, especially in the deep south, are terrifyingly determined by race.
In Mississippi, in 2008, these were the breakdowns by race in the Presidential election:
Whites:
88% McCain, 11% Obama
Blacks:
98% Obama, 2% McCain
I think it’s non-crazy to start talking about racialized false consciousness as an explanation for working-class white voting patterns in the deep south. And as for non-whites, “they vote” Democratic.
Yes. My thoughts exactly. If you believe in fighting for the poor, the working class, minorities, women, glbtqiaa, etc, you have to fight for them wherever they are, especially when the federal government is the only government willing to help.
Except in the blue states, the federal government is the government actively harming people; again, I would point you toward ICE raids (which have increased in number), that take place even in “sanctuary cities” wherein the police are directed to make immigration enforcement low-priority, and DEA raids on marijuana dispensaries, keeping barfing chemo patients from accessing their weed.
The people of the red states are not without agency. They bear some responsibility for the conditions present in their states, and many of them appear to want things the way they are. I’m all for correcting the obvious problems–stopping vote suppression, keeping law enforcement on a tighter leash–but let’s not bring down the blue states while we are bringing up the red ones. That’s merely counterproductive.
Social Security, Medicare, the NLRB, and the Civil Rights Division operate in the blue states as well. Picking two cases isn’t very rigorous analysis.
And what agency have they not shown? They vote Democratic, they protest things like AZ1070, they use the courts (the Federal courts, btw) – they’re just outnumbered.
I would hope the progressive movement is capable of chewing bubblegum and walking at the same time.
I don’t worry about the progressive movement. I worry about the institutional Democratic Party. Progressives can indeed walk and chew gum simultaneously, but Dem politicians keep calling out law enforcemnet on them when their bubbles get too large or their stride too jaunty.
That’s why I’m not a giant fan of too much federal government. Some is necessary, by all means, but not at the expense of FBI and DHS spying (to pick two more agencies). It is, as I said before, a balancing act.
I always chime in here to channel Lincoln and point out that it’s all our country–they don’t get to take any part of it.
Americans Elect Motto:
A moderate Republican is running against a moderate Democrat. Shouldn’t we elect some random weirdo centerist instead?
They do have a point. Actually competitive Presidential candidates will never be as vocal about causing average Americans pain as the austerity crowd would like them to be. Since making the middle class suffer–and promoting this goal–is the very mark of political seriousness for these folks, no Democrat or Republican is likely to give them what they want.
Romney is a crazy elitist Republican right down to his fuzzy Mormon longjohns. Obama is the moderate Republican. Looking forward to Cuomo/Durbin vs. Petraeus/Rubio in 2016. Good stuff. Long live the senate filibuster and the comity that rules our country. Now there’s a group that really wants to avoid a Pain Caucus.
If Andrew Cuomo gets the nod in 2016 I just don’t know what I’ll do. The man is significantly to the right of Obama on just about every issue but marriage equality and is economically innumerate and a union-buster to boot.
Yesterday he was cheering on Bloomberg’s attacks on teacher unions.
Well, if you start advocating for a third party, you’ll be derided as a crazy masochist. There is no way to turn the party left, the status quo is the best we can hope for, living under moderate Republican rule is not really that bad once you adjust to it. (The OWS movement is composed of a bunch of whiners.)
Maybe if Greenwald yanks Lemieux’s chain again, he’ll denounce US soldiers pissing on Afghan corpses or perhaps even work himself up into a scathing analysis of US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But then again, I doubt it. Too much criticism of Obama blurs the distinction between the president and the Right and our tactics in that part of the world are, while not remotely successful or liberal, probably the most reasonable accommodation for a Democratic C-in-C. We should all breathe easier that he is not being threatened from the left.
If you can explain how I can vote third party without throwing elections to Republicans, I am prepared to listen.
There isn’t? Political parties have executed tons of leftward turns in the history of the republic. Why can’t that work again?
I’d be perfectly happy to live under moderate Republican rule. Pity that there hasn’t been a moderate Republican operating at the national level since Eisenhower.
Wha? I’m pretty sure that Scott and his co-bloggers resolutely disapprove of US policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that they do so completely independently of what Greenwald thinks about the issue himself, or of them.
I also question how this comment is germane to the discussion at hand.
You are wrong.
We should? Credible intraparty challenges are a vital part of moving political parties left and right along the spectrum.
Political parties have executed tons of leftward turns in the history of the republic. Why can’t that work again?
But it won’t work tomorrow, so what’s the point? Blogwhining is all we have left to us.
I have to say that I have no idea where the “no way to turn the party left” meme came from, because that’s not the line that anyone from the pro-party politics side has actually used.
If anything, I think our argument has been that you can move the party left through a number of ways – taking over party organizations at the local and state level, ballot fusion in states where that’s legal (the Working Families model), and supporting the mot left-wing viable candidate in primaries (including challenging incumbents where we’ve got a chance to win). Our point has rather been that it would be a lot easier to win this strategy if the self-identified progressives who’ve decamped to the greens or just left electoral politics would join in, giving us more votes, manpower, and resources to use in this effort, given the real challenges of defeating conservative democrats.
It’s not really a meme, its a strawman. There are a fair few people who propose tactical and strategic plans for turning the party leftward that others think are dumb and wrong. When those others say “Your plans are dumb and wrong” they respond with “So you’re saying there’s no way to turn the party left.”
I suspect you’d get more participation from those self-identified progressives if there was some indication that the Democratic Party didn’t simply write us off as fucking retarded, in need of drug testing, and easily ignored until we could be guilt-tripped into doing all the GOTV work for their candidates while they flooded out our own with corporate money.
The Democratic Party has been very active in bringing about the current state of affairs. Pointing fingers at “self-identified progressives” for failing to be sufficiently enthusiastic doesn’t change that. You want the Left to join in, maybe you need to get the national party to quit fucking over the Left.
jeer should take lessons from you, Doc.
(I mean that completely honestly. You make the points he seems to want to make without deploying strawmen or misrepresenting the views of your gainsayers.)
Absolutely true and a hundred percent accurate characterization of many leading Democratic party members and elected officials.
Speaking for myself, I will never point a finger at fellow progressives for failing to be enthusiastic. I’m not enthusiastic myself. Not being enthusiastic about the Democratic nominee for a public office is a long and proud tradition that I firmly embrace.
But.
I will point fingers at people who go from “not enthusiastic” to “completely disengaged” or “actively abetting Republicans.” And by the latter I don’t mean “criticizing Democrats from the left” I mean the sort of shit some of the PUMAs got into.
Doc. You’re really missing the point. There is no “the Democratic Party” as a single actor; there is no “the Left” as a single actor. There are leftists inside the Party and leftists outside the Party, and the Party is made up of many different ideological groups, and leftists do not predominate therein.
It’s not about feelings, it’s about math. There are so many of us inside, and so many of us outside, and there’s so many of them inside.
The national party will stop fucking over the left when it’s made up of leftists – what you are asking for is preemptive victory without participation in the struggle to win.
Of course it’s not about feelings. I hear that a lot from people missing the point.
Democrats often point to the successes of the far right, and take the lesson that people on the right have spent years doing unglamorous things like running for school board, thus laying the foundation for their victories. True, as far as it goes, but there are plenty of people on the left who have done the same.
What, then, is the difference? The Republicans don’t fuck over their far-right; they support them and bring them into the process. They fund them. They don’t give them everything they want, but they do make common cause with them. The Right understands coalition politics.
The Democrats, by contrast, shut out their left wing. They make no secret of their corporate ties and their disdain for input from anyone they deem outside acceptable discourse.
The Democrats lose more often than they should, given the popularity of their programs. The Republicans win more often than they should, given the popularity of their programs. That does not have to be the case.
Pity that there hasn’t been a moderate Republican operating at the national level since Eisenhower.
Sure there has.
Bill Clinton.
That joke never gets old. :)
More seriously, yeah, Clinton was a moderate conservative, and you kind of prove my point. Living under him, despite all his wrongheadness and a number of deeply flawed policies, was in fact not really that bad.
It’s amazing what a President who has an actual INTEREST in governance will do for the efficacy of the executive branch.
Murc,
Please address the senate filibuster situation in which the Dem party chiefs and DNC are complicit in blocking progressive legislation from ever reaching the floor. If they were genuinely interested in governing from the left, they would be doing everything possible to elect senators who support ending the filibuster (not unelectable lefties from Red States but ones who want a more democratically run senate) and punishing those who hinder reform (instead of funding their re-election chances in primaries).
Instead, we have fake filibusters for a fake democracy. Though as a thought experiment, try to imagine 63 Dem senators passing progressive legislation without 4 of them (different each time of course on the various issues) abandoning the cause at the appropriate moment. The oligarchy has its real bottleneck and the apologists have their strawman.
Credible intraparty challenges are a vital part of moving political parties left and right along the spectrum.
And that’s why last year when speculation about a primary challenge to Obama arose it was met with loud applause from the centrist status quo. Ohhh, wait, they derided it as undermining his position and weakening his re-election chances. And why third parties do the same.
I appreciate that you condescend to address the poor issues that trouble the deranged (“as there but for the grace of God go I”), though I find your responses less than substantive. They’re sort of along the lines of Attewell’s reply (I have to say that I have no idea where the “no way to turn the party left” meme came from, because that’s not the line that anyone from the pro-party politics side has actually used.) Well, duh? Some people still think Lucy will let Charlie Brown kick that football. I’ve stopped hoping. Maybe in another twenty years you’ll lose your patience and realize that the Dem party underwent a sea change after Carter and threw in their lot with the corporations and bankers.
DNC has nothing to do with the Senate; the DSCC does. If you’re going to blame somebody, jeer9, blame the right organization.
Now, it’s true that the DSCC could push for more left-wing candidates. But the DSCC is run by the Senate Caucus, who aren’t about to rock their own boat. Change in the Senate will come when activists organize through the State Democratic Parties, not the DSCC.
As for primarying Obama, the key word in that sentence is “credible.” Primarying Obama isn’t a credible challenge. Primarying Lieberman was.
And if we’re going to start talking history, let’s acknowledge that the Democratic Party used to be the party of white supremacy, and became the party of civil rights; it used to be the party of rural fundamentalism and became the party of urban immigrants; it used to be the party of states rights and the gold standard, it became the party of the New Deal.
The Democratic Party has shifted right and left and back in its history. Just because we shifted right after Carter does not mean that the party cannot shift again.
First of all, the DNC is only tangentially involved in what actually happens inside the Senate.
Second… address it in what way? You have made an accurate statement. Not sure where to go from there.
The Senate Democratic leadership is not interested in governing from as far left as they should be, and to the extent that they’re interested in governing further to the left than the Republicans are (and they ARE interested in governing further to the left than the Republicans are) they lack the caucus support to end the filibuster and have very different (and wrong) notions about what it takes to get elected as a Democrat than we do.
Those are all bad things. They hurt the party, they hurt progressivism, they hurt the country. I don’t know why you think I disagree with you about this.
Also, if you think the DNC funds primary races, I think you are actually factually wrong about this. I don’t even know that the DNC funds actual races; I think that’s the province of the DSCC/DCCC. And those two organizations do not fund primaries either, I don’t think.
Uh… yes. Supporters of the centrist status quo derided taking action that would have shifted the party away from the centrist status quo. People who didn’t want the boat rocked shit on an idea that would have rocked the boat! Imagine that.
Speaking for myself, I’d have loved it if someone like Russ Feingold had run at Obama from the left, and I’d have voted for him. It didn’t happen but it would have been a good idea.
I did not mean to condescend to you. To elaborate on my opinions regarding your own, I find the stances you take how people should be politically engaged to be simultaneously 1) ones I have a lot of native sympathy to, but 2) to go to nihilistic extremes, and 3) to go to those extremes I could easily see myself going to if the situation were right.
Now, I could be wrong about this, I suppose. But it’s where I was coming from.
No, I realize this right now. I think I’ll outsource my response to this to Steve, who said it more eloquently than I could:
This.
Steven,
Thanks for organizational correction. It is duly noted.
Change in the Senate will come when activists organize through the State Democratic Parties, not the DSCC.
Aren’t the State Democratic Parties significantly influenced by the national party which seems much more interested in sponsoring Third Way types? While many activists are admirably motivated by principle, where does the financial backing come from to counteract the corporate trend?
If a moderate Republican like Obama (who has been an abject failure) represents the Democratic Party and is not challenged, I fail to see the party as credible. The lesser evil, for sure.
I look forward to watching those strange, unpredictable historical forces that will move the Dems left.
Just so everyone understands how the Democratic Party functions as an institution (because this is actually a rather esoteric thing):
- The DNC is responsible for electing Presidents. Period. It doesn’t have authority even over the DCCC or DSCC. It has authority over how state parties nominate presidential delegates, and it gives some money to state parties to help them organize, but outside of presidential election years, it’s a minor factor (with the brief exception of the 50 State Project, which is why that was so controversial, but even then only for red states).
- The DSCC and DCCC chairs are chosen by their respective Caucuses in Congress. The DSCC and DCCC do intervene in primaries, but almost never in a primary involving an incumbent unless the incumbent is mired in such a scandal that everyone but them knows they’re about to lose. There is a strong argument that these committees tend to intervene in open primaries to promote more “moderate” candidates.
- The State Parties are organizationally independent of the national party except where it comes to how delegates for the presidential nomination work.
Now, as someone who did oppose primarying Obama but who supported previous efforts to primary incumbents who had betrayed the party (Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln), let me set out my rationale. Primaries need to be considered strategically – what red lines has the incumbent crossed? do they do more harm than good? have they alienated sufficient constituencies within the party such that assembling a winning coalition is possible? Will winning the primary result in a general election victory or the election of someone further to the right?
In the case of Obama, I feel that a lot of those criteria haven’t been met – Obama has significantly advanced the progressive agenda in a number of areas, and he retains the allegiance of virtually all constituencies within the party as well as among the rank and file.
However, I would definitely support a ballot fusion effort whereby as many of Obama’s votes as possible come from Working Families Party equivalents so that it’s clear that the left is a necessary precondition for victory. I’m very much in favor of progressives getting their act together early for 2016 and beyond so that we can head off faux-progressives on the Cuomo model.
In the end, it’s not historical forces as deus ex machina, but political work over the long term. FDR happened because Al Smith happened, etc.
The DSCC and DCCC chairs are chosen by their respective Caucuses in Congress. The DSCC and DCCC do intervene in primaries, but almost never in a primary involving an incumbent unless the incumbent is mired in such a scandal that everyone but them knows they’re about to lose. There is a strong argument that these committees tend to intervene in open primaries to promote more “moderate” candidates.
Wouldn’t you agree this method should be altered if progressive legislation keeps being stymied by the filibuster? And if it isn’t, aren’t the Dems engaged in some disingenuous chicanery?
The State Parties are organizationally independent of the national party except where it comes to how delegates for the presidential nomination work.
Are we to believe the decertification of the California Progressive Caucus (when it supported a primary of Obama) occurred without any influence from the national party? That seems to be pushing the bounds of naivete.
FDR happened because Al Smith happened, etc.
Obama happened because Bush and then McCain happened. Et cetera’s doing a lot of work there.
More people ought to pay attention to their state committeepeople. In Pennsylvania, and I suppose everywhere, they’re elected by county in off-year elections by voters enrolled in the party. Sometimes they’re highly competitive, and sometimes a few write-ins will win the seat (as Chris Bowers learned).
Learn how your committeepeople vote at state committee and who they support. If you don’t like the choices and inclinations, complain. They may listen; mine did. If they won’t listen, find someone else to run or run yourself.
When the state committee endorses a candidate, that candidate is very likely to win the nomination. If you don’t like the choices the party is giving you, you can be one of those in the state committee who’s picking candidates and endorsing them.
Wow! It’s amazing Americans Elect could round up so many dicks without even getting to Evan Bayh.
Bayh isn’t even sixty yet, so clearly he’s too young. The four they mention were all born in or before 1946. Only a president who’s already safely drawing SS and Medicare can be trusted to gut those entitlements for the sake of future generations.
No love for Erskine Bowles either, now there’s a man who can win over the electorate.