Mark Schmitt: All Publications, Events and Press

The Obstacles to Real Health-Care Reform

Erin Drankoski — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:17:00 -0400

American presidents have tried seven times to bring us into the community of nations that provide health care to all citizens. Seven times the effort failed. More accurately, it was blocked. In the 1940s, the anti-reform movement was led by doctors, through the American Medical Association. In the 1990s, it was led by the insurance and small-business lobbies.

My Model City

Erin Drankoski — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:05:00 -0400

New Haven, Connecticut, at the tail end of the 1970s was a pretty good place for a precocious kid to get a political education. The city contains all the ethnic and social dynamics of New York City or Philadelphia in microcosm. But it's small enough that a 15-year-old with a ten-speed could get to any neighborhood to knock on strangers' doors before an election or a primary, of which there were dozens. The city loved politics and was then embroiled in a fierce battle between "the reformers" and "the machine."

Opposite Day

Erin Drankoski — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:36:00 -0400

Every Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson's (that is, both of them) has followed a pattern: A fresh face enters the White House bringing new hope and big ideas, delivers his agenda to Congress, and quickly gets the back of the hand from the contemptuous grandees of his own party. With little accomplished, congressional Democrats suffer major losses in the midterm elections. Over the next two years, even less progress is made.

A New Agenda for Tough Times

Erin Drankoski — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:26:00 -0400

It has been 13 years since a Democratic president's signature on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 eliminated a flawed program that also provided the only protection against destitution. Yet that act also brought an end to the welfare wars, a long and debilitating period in which poor people were the focus of political conflict and racially loaded demagoguery, exemplified by former Sen. Phil Gramm's image of a society divided between those "pulling the wagon" and those "riding in the wagon." Even

Left Without Labor

Erin Drankoski — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:15:00 -0400

Several years ago, I spoke on a panel where an audience member posed the rhetorical question, "Can any of you envision a robust progressive movement that doesn't have organized labor at the center of it?"

Master of Opportunity

Erin Drankoski — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:22:00 -0400

There are two battling story lines about the career of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy: Here at the Prospect, we recall the Lion of Liberalism, treating his 1980 convention speech as the hinge of his long career. Meanwhile, on cable news, or in the hands of Dan Balz at The Washington Post, he is the icon of bipartisan compromise, whose close working partnership with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah among others was legendary. Earlier this week, a number of Republicans including Hatch invoked a disingenuous, "if only Teddy

The Optimist

Erin Drankoski — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:19:00 -0400

The occasions on which President Barack Obama says something simply preposterous are rare enough that they ought to attract some attention. Yet it passed almost without notice when, in his May 21 speech on national security, Obama explained that he is opposed to creating a commission to explore the abuses of the Bush years "because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability." He continued, "The Congress can review abuses of our values, and ... the Department of Justice and our courts can work

Political Money as a Force for Good

adminn — Wed, 13 May 2009 05:45:00 -0400

Early in 2007, campaign finance experts and editorial writers, looking toward the looming presidential campaign, began to talk of a "billion dollar election." In a February 2007 editorial, the New York Times invoked Watergate to warn that such a sum spent on an election would represent a breakdown of campaign finance regulation and mark a return to the corruption of the Nixon era. If Sen. Hillary Clinton was looking for a clever

Expert Advice

Erin Drankoski — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:14:00 -0400

On June 11, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at Yale. After some Harvard-Yale jocularity, he put forward the most memorable definition of that triumphal moment in what historians now call the era of liberal consensus: "What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies ... but the practical management of a modern economy." Economic problems of the 1960s, Kennedy said, are "subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided."

It's Time to Rethink the Problem

Erin Drankoski — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:00:00 -0400

If there's one thing the financial crisis has taught us, its' that we grossly misjudged the risk we were taking on. We offer five perspectives on rethinking risk -- on everything from finance to housing to social policy--in the hopes of stopping the next major meltdown before it starts.

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The Mystery of the Right

Erin Drankoski — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:52:00 -0400

One of the greatest accomplishments of the first several months of Barack Obama's presidency has been the near-total marginalization of the Republican right. Rather than developing a coherent alternative to the president's agenda, the right has descended to frantic, tone-deaf cries of "socialism," has allowed some of the least popular figures in public life--Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich--to be their spokespeople, and most recently, seems to have staked everything on a defense of the previous administration's most disgraceful (and, incidentally, unpopular) conduct.

On Our Own

Ron Tang — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:29:00 -0400

Interviewing Rick Perlstein, author of the mega-book Nixonland, Mark Hemingway of National Review lamented recently that "liberal or popular historians don't seem to be very interested in conservative history and ideology."

Perlstein answered politely, but the correct response would have been, "What planet are you living on?" Indeed, the legend of the rise of the right -- as told by and to the left -- has become the defining narrative of our political experience. I shouldn't admit this, but I probably own and have read more books about conservative history and ideology than about the civil-rights movement (and I'm pretty interested in the civil-rights movement). From the intellectual roots in Albert J. Nock's idea of "the remnant" (an enlightened few doomed to irrelevance in a liberal age) through the spooky-sounding Mont Pelerin Society, William F. Buckley's "fusionism" of libertarians and traditionalists, then to Barry Goldwater, the movement's emergence into political power under Ronald Reagan, and then the late, decadent phase, it is a fascinating, absorbing story.

For liberals living in the conservative era, conservative history has been more than a story. It has been a template, the closest one available, for what it means to translate ideas into political change. How often have I heard, "We need our Grover Norquist" -- someone who would organize the weekly meeting where everyone would get their marching orders? (There is such a meeting now; I'm told it's more chaotic than Norquist's.) Or, "We need a Heritage Foundation for our side"? The Democracy Alliance, a forum for liberal donors, had its origins in a PowerPoint version of the conservative story that urged donors to model their funding on the collaborative structures of the right. Call it the "I'll have what she's having" theory of change, after the famous deli scene in When Harry Met Sally -- assuming that if you do the same things, you'll get comparable results.

Even arguments among liberals often focused on differing interpretations of the right's success. Those who thought we needed think tanks, journals, and ideas told the story of the conservative intellectuals and their institutions; others who wanted to see more invested in grass-roots organizing told the story of Goldwater's legions and the Christian Coalition. Those involved in the Democratic Party told the story of the right in terms of the tight coordination between the party and the party line; those who favored a more daring liberalism noted that conservative institutions kept their distance from the Republican establishment. Those who wanted to revive the legal liberalism of the 1970s pointed to the Federalist Society, and those who began to think that conservative forces in the states were at least as important as what happened in Washington, D.C., tried to build analogues to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a network for conservative state legislators and those who lobby them.

Fortunately, the imitative institutions are now far surpassing their role models. If the founders of the Center for American Progress once looked in awe at Heritage, the quick-moving, high-tech, imaginative progressive think tank now makes its conservative analogue look like a once-mighty, now threadbare brand name from the 1970s. (Heritage's daily blast-fax was once an innovation.) The American Constitution Society is now a full-fledged presence at over 160 law schools. And ALEC is reportedly crumbling, while the Progressive States Network has begun to take off.

And so, we're on our own now. There may be more left to the political power of the right, but its narrative arc is complete. With that, we can look at the great political narrative of the latter half of the 20th century with fresh eyes, with the distance of an actual historian, rather than try to plunder it for useful weaponry. More importantly, we can turn back to the history that really matters to liberals, which is not the history of reaction but the history of aspiration to greater levels of equality and justice. My own vow this summer is to stop reading all those books about conservatism and get back to the civil-rights movement. Maybe I'll finish Taylor Branch's trilogy about Martin Luther King Jr. I promise -- just as soon as I finish Nixonland.

Did Hillary Crack the Working-Class Code?

Ron Tang — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:29:00 -0400

The tragedy of Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency is that only after she had effectively lost the Democratic nomination did she find a language and message that gave people a reason to vote for her beyond the claim that her nomination was inevitable. By that point, though, the day-to-day proxy war with Barack Obama was so relentless that even her supporters may have missed the subtle argument and language that could be her lasting contribution to progressive politics.

While Clinton was winning primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, much attention was paid to the reasons that white working-class voters in those states were not voting for Sen. Obama. Yet in every one of those primaries, turnout was two to three times higher than in previous presidential primaries, and in several cases exceeded the total votes for the Democrat in the general election of 2004. Voters don't turn out in such numbers to vote against someone. Support for Sen. Clinton among these voters, male and female, old and not-so-old, was overwhelmingly positive and affirmative. Even those of us who didn't find her candidacy inspiring have to acknowledge that Clinton gave her voters hope, every bit as much as Obama inspired younger voters, African Americans, and voters in other regions.

The magnitude of her accomplishment deserves more respect and analysis than it has received. It is far from obvious that any Clinton, especially Hillary, should have become the vessel in which working-class voters placed their aspirations. That the more credible critic of NAFTA should have been the candidate whose husband signed the deal into law (and whose soft-populist "Putting People First" promises of public investment were traded away for fiscal stringency and narrow appeals to affluent swing voters) is nothing short of miraculous. And in the Bill/ Hillary partnership, it was always he who took the role of earthy populist, while she played the suburban technocratic do-gooder -- a role akin to Obama’s today.

Moreover, few national Democrats in the last several decades were able to reach these particular white working-class voters. West Virginia and Kentucky were the states that swung most sharply to the right in the last eight years, and their brethren in southern Ohio were responsible for the inability of either Al Gore or John Kerry to capture that state. So while Clinton's success with white working-class voters was a distinctly regional one, it is a region of some importance, and her success there is an achievement unmatched by any recent national Democrat.

There are several possible explanations for Clinton's success and the massive turnout. Perhaps voters were mobilized in these states as elsewhere by hatred of Bush, the war and the economy, and once mobilized, Clinton was just a more comfortable, familiar choice. Another possibility is that it was all demographics -- that, even if she had changed nothing about her campaign, the older, whiter, and less educated populations of the later states would have delivered predictable victories. But the passionate commitment of her supporters suggests that there was more to it than that -- something in her words or policies that cemented their allegiance.

I doubt that it was her policy proposals, particularly not the narrow differences between her proposals and Obama's. In a few states, she tried to leverage her specific policy differences with Obama -- running ads on the individual mandate in health insurance in Wisconsin and on the gasoline tax holiday in Indiana -- but that tactic didn't lead to big victories. Where she won with a wide margin, her speeches and ads positioned mostly unsurprising policy proposals in the context of an argument about economic opportunity and fairness.

If Clinton's advantage did not come from what she said, it must have come from how she said it. To understand how she talked about these issues, I went through about a dozen of Clinton's speeches and television ads from after Super Tuesday. I ignored the tendentious remainders of the inevitability argument that had failed her in the first half of the campaign and instead asked, "What was distinctive about her economic message?"

I found two salient features: balance and modest aspirations. "I still have faith in [the American] dream. It's just been neglected a bit," Clinton said in a Pennsylvania TV ad. "They're not asking for anything special," she said of working-class voters in Zanesville, Ohio. "They're just asking for a fair shake. They're asking for a president who cares about them."

Her language created a sense of order in the world, which she described in terms of mutual responsibility, symmetry, and a return to a better past: "We're going to say, 'Wait a minute Wall Street; you've had your president. Now we need a president for Main Street,'" she said on April 14 in Pittsburgh. Here's a complicated version of the same argument, from a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, in February:

For seven long years we've had a government of, by and for the corporate special interests. They have been heard first, they have been heard loudest, and they have drowned out everyone else. And while you pinch pennies to stay within your budget, the president blew the bank on tax breaks for his friend and no-bid contracts for his cronies, borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China to pay for it all. He has signed a sub-prime mortgage on America's economic future and that's your future. And so when people ask me "why can't we get tough on China?" well, when was the last time you got tough on your banker? And so we have to get back to fiscal responsibility in order to get tough on China because we shouldn't be borrowing so much money from them.

There's a lot packed into the oscillations of that paragraph: Corruption, taxes, the idea of middle-class responsibility ("pinch pennies") contrasted with government irresponsibility, China, sub-prime mortgages, leading to a final, overarching call for "fiscal responsibility" -- the most modest and essentially conservative of goals. The passage reminded me of a famously decisive exchange in the 1992 presidential debates, when Bill Clinton alone understood that when an audience member asked "how has the national debt affected you personally," she was not asking literally about long-term fiscal policy, but instead using the term as a proxy for economic hardship generally. Hillary Clinton likewise seems to understand that "fiscal responsibility" means not only keeping the budget balanced but also taking an orderly, fair approach to the economy.

Note how different this language is, not just from Obama's, but from the hard populism of John Edwards. Edwards depicted a permanent struggle against a relentless enemy: the corporate special interests themselves, who "will never give up power without a fight." For Obama, there is a similar permanent challenge but also the hopeful idea that a lasting grand breakthrough might be possible.

For Clinton, the hurdles are lower -- there's a fight but no enemy. She argues that government has had its finger on the special interests' side of the scale for seven years, so change is merely a matter of moving the weight over to the other side. Hence her constant theme, used in almost every ad and speech since March 4, of returning to balance -- seven years of this, now seven years of that. Fairness for Clinton is not about resentment, equality, or even equality of opportunity. It's about a return to an imagined normal order, where individuals' thrift is matched by a comparable sense of responsibility on the part of their government. At other times, she uses the metaphor of a recent "detour," arguing that we need to get back onto the "main road" of economic policy.

This is an appropriate message for the candidate of restoration, but the way Clinton talks about the years of her husband's presidency is surprisingly modest. In her telling, he is no FDR or LBJ -- just a capable steward of the normal order. "The 90s were good for Pennsylvania" (or Ohio), she said often, linking the decade with the 1940s and 1950s, when, as she describes it, a man like her grandfather could support a family and build a good life on a single blue-collar income. Of course, the industrial base of Ohio and Pennsylvania has been declining steadily since the late 1970s.

Clinton also embraced the "work" part of "working class," aligning her own image as hard-working and relentless with the pride of her voters: "I was thinking... looking at the sheet-metal workers today. How many mistakes were made before that perfection was reached? How much work had to be done before you felt confident in trusting that new assignment or that young sheet-metal worker? We could go through any kind of work any of you do and say the same thing. Well, it’s true about our government too."

Her ads and speeches of the latter campaign remind me of the poet William Carlos Williams or the artist Charles Sheeler in their evocation of order and purpose in even the dreariest corners of the mid-20th century industrial economy: "This is me in Scranton," she said, narrating her most memorable ad, "where my father was raised, and my grandfather worked in the lace mill. Every August, we’d pile into the car and head to our cottage on Lake Winola. There was no heat, or indoor shower, just the joy of family. I was raised on pinochle and the American dream."

This is in sharp contrast to the original "son of a millworker," John Edwards, who used his father's early years in the mill (in a very different place) as a story of economic hardship. It was only when his father became a manager, Edwards said, effectively making the leap from the working class to the middle class, that their lives improved, and it was this upward mobility that Edwards sought to restore. But upward mobility is unnecessary in Clinton's vision -- the dignity of work, "pinochle and the American Dream," can be as available to the line worker as the foreman.

Clinton's language navigates successfully around three related rhetorical problems that have been tormenting progressives over the last several years. The first, which Edwards tripped over, is the question of whether we're talking about the actual middle class, or the poor who aspire to be part of the middle class. Edwards' "Two Americas" was at first linked to his focus on poverty, but later he declared that the two Americas were really the very rich and everyone else. Clinton avoids this framework entirely.

The second dilemma is the question of whether to take an optimistic or pessimistic tone about economic opportunity. A quiet battle of ideas has been brewing in Washington. On one side, analysts at Third Way, a "strategy center for progressives" and home of the "Middle Class Project," argue that the median household has it pretty good and won't react well to gloomy rhetoric. The other side, led by the Economic Policy Institute, argues that the Middle Class is very far from all right and notes stagnating wages, increasing household insecurity, and high inequality. Neither is wrong, and yet finding a message that speaks to the optimism of those who are doing well, while hearing the frustration of those who aren't and the confusion of many others, is a challenge. Clinton's nostalgia pitch balances the two well.

Finally, Clinton's approach recognizes that "economic issues" are not a well-defined box that excludes the nonmaterial interests and conditions of life. Her speeches and ads make clear that rewarding work and a rich family life are as central to her economic vision as rising median wages. The normal order of life that she invokes has a moral dimension as well as an economic one.

It is tempting to describe this modest, nostalgic, moral language as conservative, and in many ways it is. Certainly it establishes a tone that has no trace of ideology and would not put off more conservative voters. Yet it contains within it policy proposals that are as progressive as any others that emerged in the presidential campaign: universal health coverage, investment in green technologies and public jobs, access to higher education, and a reversal of some of the Bush tax cuts.

The electoral success of Clinton's message -- even if limited to one region -- is a reminder that many working-class voters are uncomfortable with big promises or the permanent struggle. Yet both the idea that we need "balance" in the economy, and the notion that work itself has a value beyond its wage, are vital but easily forgotten liberal concepts. Clinton's economic language in the second half of the campaign worked particularly well for her because it said as much about the kind of person she is as the policies she would pursue. Still, to the extent that the language succeeded, it contains some useful clues about what white working-class voters in one critical region are comfortable hearing, and a way to talk about ambitious, liberal policies without scaring people off.

Mark Schmitt in Financial Times | 'Obama Must Win Hearts of Rival's Supporters'

Communications — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:17:00 -0400

...[N]ot everyone agrees Mr Obama needs to rely on Mrs Clinton for victory. Mark Schmitt, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said it was not clear her political endorsement would sway voters.

"Obviously those are voters he needs to reach, but it is an open question whether they are reached by her vouching for him, or by him reaching them [with his own message]," Mr Schmitt said...LINK

Mark Schmitt in the New Republic | 'McCain's cynicism'

Communications — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:17:00 -0400

...Apropos my question about McCain's cynicism, Mark Schmitt has an interesting piece in The American Prospect arguing that conservatism has been so discredited that McCain's only hope of winning will be a kind of right-wing identity politics that pits "Americans" versus "others," with Obama playing the role of chief "other..." LINK

Battle Of the Budget Slide Shows

Ron Tang — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:14:00 -0400

"Saving our future requires tough choices today" may be a banal sentiment, but it's not an easy one to challenge. That is the headline on the "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour," a slide show created by David M. Walker, formerly head of the Government Accountability Office. In hopes that it will be to the long-term budget deficit what Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" slide show has been to climate change, Pete Peterson has set aside a billion dollars out of his recent windfall from the Blackstone Group to fund Walker's national tour and like endeavors.

Walker, Peterson, and groups like the Concord Coalition solemnly inform audiences that the tough choices are as follows: Taxes raised to unimaginable levels. Economic crisis. Or, reduced spending on "entitlements," also known as "SocialSecurity-MedicareMedicaid."

Entitlements are "blank checks," Walker tells audiences, "unfunded promises" to seniors, made unaffordable by the demographic certainties of an aging population. Will Marshall of the Democratic Leadership Council likens entitlements to a "doomsday machine."

Who would vote for blank checks and doomsday? Presenting the options in this way writes its own answer: Create a separate budget for entitlements, as recently proposed by a consortium of think tanks from the center to the far right. The fault is in "the budget decision process," they argue, because "it does not require that Congress and the president conduct a periodic review of how we are committing our limited resources across all of our competing priorities."

John McCain similarly calls for "entitlement reform" (which sounds more palatable than "slash Social Security"). And the idea that aging and demographics force decisions that should not be postponed is the common wisdom of every Tim Russert-wannabe and "sensible" editorial writer in the country.

In a quiet battle of PowerPoints, however, an alternative view has begun to emerge. It doesn't challenge the fact that on current projections the three big entitlement programs, plus interest on the federal debt, will within a few decades consume all federal revenues. But the alternative view argues that the problem is not "entitlements" but one program, Medicare, and to a lesser extent Medicaid. As Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution asked in the title of a 2007 presentation: "Chronic Deficit: Entitlement Crisis? Or Health Financing Problem?"

"There is no entitlement crisis other than health care," Aaron answered. "There is no practical way to deal with public healthcare spending other than by general health-care financing reform." The solution is not "entitlement reform" but health-care reform.

Aaron's conclusion rests on two points: First, while Medicare spending is affected by an aging population, most of the growth in Medicare costs arises from the increase in healthcare costs per patient, which is many times more important than the increasing number of Medicare recipients. And second, rising health-care costs are not just a Medicare/Medicaid problem but involve the whole health-care system.

Aaron's argument demolishes the "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour's" obsession with blank checks and doomsday machines, but it doesn't offer a clear solution, either. One answer might be a global budget for health care, with certain services rationed or spending in the last year of life limited. McCain argues for "market-based solutions," claiming that putting people "in charge of their health-care dollars" will empower them to reduce costs, ignoring all evidence that it won't.

But in a third PowerPoint presentation that has been making the rounds in Washington, Peter Orszag of the Congressional Budget Office adds a new dimension to Aaron's argument: "Embedded in the nation's central long-term fiscal challenge," he argues, "appears to be a substantial opportunity: Can we reduce health-care costs without impairing health outcomes?"

Orszag has embraced the research from Dartmouth Medical School, popularized in Shannon Brownlee's recent book Over-treated, which shows that health-care spending, both public and private, varies wildly across the country and is unrelated to outcomes. Geographic variation in health-care spending has more to do with the habits and assumptions of doctors and hospitals in a particular region: In some areas, patients are more likely to be hospitalized or recommended for surgery, with no difference in outcomes. The opportunity Orszag sees is to reduce health-care spending, improve health outcomes, and resolve the long-term fiscal problem.

Of course, one person's wasteful spending is another person's income, so change will hardly be easy. Excess health spending is often the only thing creating jobs in certain regions or cities. But the combination of Aaron's and Orszag's insights is potentially revolutionary. By adding a new variable to the dreary old zero-sum game of the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, it makes real choices possible.

Can Identity Politics Save the Right?

Ron Tang — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:03:00 -0400

There are two points at which a political party or an ideological faction can find its voice and begin to claim power. One, of course, is when it is at the height of confidence and electoral success, like Ronald Reagan's conservatives in 1981. The other is when it has hit bottom, when there's nothing more to lose, no constituencies to feed, no illusion that anything in the current strategy is working, no excuse for caution.

The Republican Party today is certainly not in the first position. But, with party identification favoring Democrats by the widest margin in 16 years, and Republicans losing even the battle for campaign money, the party may be close to the second. Parties in nonparliamentary, winner-take-all systems don't disappear. The recent resurgence of the British Conservative Party is a reminder that even after a decade of futility, a new leader, a vision, and impatience with the incumbent party can turn things around quickly. But for now, with Republican state parties in shambles, with no chance of reclaiming a congressional majority any time soon, and suffering, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned, "a catastrophic collapse of trust," the GOP could be hitting that bottom, and grabbing desperately onto a frayed lifeline -- the identity politics of American-ness -- in a last bid for survival.

To appreciate the value of hitting bottom, consider what happened to the Democratic Party and liberalism. All through the Reagan and first Bush eras, and again in the Clinton years, Democrats always had something. The institutional heart of the party was in the House of Representatives, and during the Reagan era, the complacent assumption that "we'll always have the House" meant that many important Democratic figures didn't feel they had much stake in whether Michael Dukakis won the presidency or President Clinton succeeded. After the Gingrich takeover of Congress in 1994, the Democratic Party's purpose became identified with the personal survival and renewal of the Clinton presidency. Only after 2002, when the Democrats finally lost everything, when they reached the political equivalent of living in their car, did the path to renewal begin. Accelerated by the disaster of the war and awareness of their own complicity in it, enraged by the media and energized by new voices such as the "netroots" bloggers and the stellar candidates of 2006 and 2008, the Democrats proved that a party, and even its liberal wing, can turn things around almost completely in just four or six years.

The Republican Party, though, has always had a different attitude about risk, almost courting disaster while the Democrats postponed it. In Building Red America, his slightly belated 2006 opus on the Republican plan for permanent power, Thomas B. Edsall points to studies showing that core Republicans are "confident risk-takers" -- white men with a very high tolerance for hazard. But as Edsall notes, they are so confident because they have been generally insulated from the consequences of their risk-taking -- think of George W. Bush's career as an oil man, or of Bear Stearns, or of the quasi-celebrities whose messes are discreetly taken care of. And while conservative pundits and some of their politicians are in a state of panic, political strategists like Karl Rove carry themselves with the confident swagger of an investment banker who just lost $2 billion of someone else's money but still has the Fifth Avenue apartment and the house in Bedford. Rove's scheme to establish a 30-year reign of absolute Republican power increasingly looks like yet another gamble of the bubble economy, like a hedge-fund scheme that couldn't fail until it failed.

Whether it has a secret Swiss bank account of political capital or not, the Republican Party is not going away, and conservative ideas, despite their failure in practice, probably still have a hold on the American instinct. A fully ruined Republican Party could be as dangerous and consequential as one holding on to some scraps of power. But even if it retains the presidency, the party, and the conservative movement with which it became conjoined, faces deep structural problems -- and the next moves are far from clear.

The Downfall

To understand the depth of the hole that the Republican Party finds itself in this year, set aside the presidential race for a moment and zoom out the map. The real secret of Republican success starting in 1994 and into this decade was not Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove -- it was big-state Republican governors who were seen as successful in implementing actual conservative policies, from welfare reform to standards-based education reform to tax-cutting economics. In the late 1990s, you could start in Boston and drive out I-90 to Chicago, back up and down through the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest, and with the idiosyncratic exception of Indiana, the governor's name on every "Welcome to... " sign you passed would be that of a Republican, most likely popular and considered successful. Although much of that success was built on accounting fraud (Christine Todd Whitman, that means you), it was these Republican governors who made voters comfortable with the idea that conservative governance could work. Republican governors of the 1990s produced the senators (George Voinovich, Lamar Alexander), cabinet secretaries (Tom Ridge, Tommy Thompson, John Ashcroft), and the president of the current decade.

Today all this is gone. There are still 23 Republican governors, but of the big states in the Northeast and Midwest, only Minnesota is governed by a Republican. A handful of the 23 are considered successful, mostly because they have moderated their predecessors' conservatism -- notably Charlie Crist of Florida, who reversed many of the barriers to voting set up by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut, and Jim Douglas of Vermont succeed by accommodating liberal Democratic legislatures to such a degree that it could be argued that they give Democratic legislators a little more courage, because the governors will share political responsibility for tax increases or other policies that might bring a backlash. (I grew up in Connecticut, and it's unquestionably a more reliably progressive state now than when it had Democratic governors in my youth, passing domestic-partnership and real campaign-finance reform legislation, raising the estate tax, and moving toward a universal health program.) A few other GOP governors, including Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Jon Huntsman of Utah, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Sarah Palin of Alaska, are considered successful conservatives but run states that are so solidly red that for purposes of the presidency and the Senate, their success has little external effect.

Future governors, members of Congress, and policy initiatives will emerge from state legislatures, but those, too, have been flipping to the Democrats. Of the 99 state legislative bodies, Democrats control 58 and Republicans 40 (Nebraska's single house is nonpartisan), and only seven states are fully controlled by Republicans. In several cases, the new Democratic majorities have been bolstered by waves of party-switching. These are numbers last seen in the 1980s, when Democratic legislative majorities included very conservative Democrats in the South.

At the national level, Democrats in the House of Representatives have a robust margin of 37, which is likely to grow. (Only four Democratic seats are currently considered toss-ups.) The Democratic majority in the next Senate is almost certain to be big enough that it will not have to depend on Joe Lieberman continuing to call himself a Democrat, and it could reach 56 or 57. Most notably, unlike the last Democratic majorities in the early 1990s, this one will not depend on the party's ultraconservatives. The most conservative Democrats today -- Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas -- are vastly more liberal than their predecessors and, not being from the Deep South, don't have one foot out of the party.

Significantly, these Democratic majorities at every level are unshakeable in November. There are only 11 gubernatorial elections this year, and only three of those are considered competitive. Only one Democratic Senate seat is in play, and even that incumbent, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, has been strong in polls. Retirements, scandals, and strong recruiting give Democrats an advantage in Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, and several other states. While a few House Democrats who beat scandal-plagued Republicans in 2006 will have to struggle to hold on to those heavily Republican districts, a far larger number of Democrats are seeking to take the seats of retiring or weakened Republicans in districts trending Democratic. On April 22, a Democrat won the plurality of the vote in a special election for a Mississippi House seat in a district designated "R+10" -- as Republican as it gets. On the same day George W. Bush set a new record for the highest disapproval rating ever recorded for a president. As blogger Matt Stoller wrote that evening, "The public hates Republicans."

John McCain may well win the presidency. If he does, though, it will not be because Stoller is wrong but because McCain is able to retain a reputation as somehow separate from the public's perception of the Republican Party -- that he is honorable where the Party is corrupt, moderate where it is far right. A McCain victory will not in itself restore the Republican brand, although it may lay the foundation for a certain kind of comeback. While McCain's instincts are conservative, it's quite likely that a President McCain would look a lot like Gov. Schwarzenegger or Gov. Rell, with McCain having no alternative but to collaborate with a heavily Democratic legislative branch, perhaps being warmly received as a result. So while McCain might well win, and might even be deemed a moderately successful president, he will not do so by solving the deep structural problems of the post-Bush Republican Party and conservatism's decadent phase, but by divorcing himself from them.

McCain may be able to leave the Republican Party and the conservative movement behind, but it remains to be seen whether the Republican Party can divorce itself from the failures of conservatism. In theory, of course, conservatives and Republicans are not the same, and one can succeed while the other fails. After all, it's only been a few decades that the Republican Party has been distinctly conservative. But much of the success of both in the last decades has been in their mutual embrace. Republican moderates like former Rep. Nancy Johnson of Connecticut chose to throw in their lot with conservatives like Gingrich not for reasons of ideology but because they saw the conservatives' passion as the means to a reinvigorated, aggressive party. And the conservatives -- who had at first succeeded by building institutions outside of the party -- then threw themselves into it completely. As a result, conservatism and the Republican Party now rise and fall together and cannot easily be disentangled. The Northeastern Republican moderates are now nearly extinct (Johnson was unseated in 2006), and conservatism has no other home. Bush, his administration, the Republican brand, and all but a few Republican officeholders are deeply unpopular and so is almost every aspect of conservative policy.

Conservatives like to construct an elaborate tale of betrayal in which the true faith can be restored by wresting it away from the unseemly ambitions of Republican politicians. But that story denies the reality that the downfall of both the party and the movement began on the very moment that Bush shed all the hedges and compromises -- such as "compassionate conservatism" and the Medicare prescription drug benefit -- and began to try to govern like a conservative. The Bush era ended two days after the 2004 re-election when Bush declared, "I earned... political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Starting with the effort to privatize Social Security, everything went straight downhill. The rejection of the Republican Party came not because it failed conservatism but because conservatism failed.

The Paths Back to Power

Whether after a total defeat, losing both houses of Congress and the presidency for the first time in 16 years, or under the circumstances of a compromised, drifting McCain presidency, Republicans and conservatives will face the same question: How do they rebuild political power?

As Republican Party officials fade into insignificance (how many people would recognize the chairman of the Republican National Committee or even House Minority Leader John Boehner in an airport?), the face of the party becomes its pundits, bloggers, and former grandees like Gingrich, former Rep. Mickey Edwards, and Jack Abramoff -accomplice Grover Norquist. These Republicans are filling the bookstores with soon-to-be-remaindered titles like Comeback, Grand New Party, Reclaiming Conservatism, and Heroic Conservatism, all premised on one variation or another of the "we lost our way" theory.

Animating all these books is the idea of ideas or as they like to say, in a motto attributed to the agrarian conservative Richard Weaver, that "ideas have consequences." We have an intellectual history, conservatives often condescendingly tell liberals, while you just have feelings. "Conservatives won by out-researching, out-thinking, out-arguing, and out-smarting their opponents," former Bush speechwriter David Frum writes in Comeback, and lost their way when "conservatives began to argue that intellect no longer mattered to conservative politics."

The more specific ideas proposed in some of these books are mostly smart and palatable. If the intellectual commissars of the opposition party were Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who in Grand New Party propose supplementing a mild social conservatism with actual economic supports for fragile families, our political system would be nicely balanced. If former Rep. Mickey Edwards' call in Reclaiming Conservatism for a respectful constitutional libertarianism and a restoration of the balance of powers were the Republican ideology, I would think of the party as a sometimes useful check on the ambitions of liberalism. But most of these ideas are not what they claim to be: plans for renewing the party by anchoring it in a rediscovery of the moral absolutes of conservatism. Rather, they are purely improvisational, tactical positioning -- attempts to meet the public demand for action on health care and climate change without accepting liberal solutions, much like the Bush Republicans' attempt to meet the demand for prescription-drug coverage under Medicare. These are elegant, short-term compromises disguised as ideology. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Dozens of similar prescriptions were written for the Democrats during the wilderness years and formed the basis for the Democratic Leadership Council, for Clinton's second-term triangulation, and for the cautious posturing of Vice President Gore and Democrats in the 2000-2002 period. The difference is that all those proposals at least had parallels in the actual practice of Democratic politics. The Republican prescriptions exist in a hypothetical world, rather like the alternative historical fiction novels that Gingrich cranks out in between his visions of the future. "What if the Republicans had commonsense ideas?" is the new "What if the South had won the Civil War?"

If Republican politicians were testing these ideas on the campaign trail or in Congress, they might be of more than academic interest. Debates among the 11 initial Republican presidential candidates would have been expected to provide a forum for a range of ideas about the party's future. But it was not to be. A momentary glimmer of the Douthat/Salam theory was visible when Mike Huckabee talked about health care as a moral obligation, but he was so tied down by the most extreme version of the tax-cut agenda that he couldn't do anything with it. Mitt Romney briefly abandoned the laissez-faire economic dogma to speak of Republican investment in key fields, like green jobs and the auto industry, but those talking points expired as soon as they served their purpose of helping Romney win the Michigan primary, after which it was back to cutting taxes and doubling the size of Guantanamo Bay.

The eventual nominee, John McCain, brings nothing new to the table of political ideas, except for a uniquely militaristic view of American supremacy in the world. There is no philosophy of "McCainism" around which the election will revolve. Nor are there any up-and-coming Republican officials, with the possible exception of Gov. Crist of Florida, who take any of this reformist thinking seriously. Even Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, whose phrase, "Sam's Club Republicans" inspired Douthat and Salam, is a conventional tax-cutter and social conservative. Rather than reconstructing a coherent philosophy out of their compromises, Republican politicians fall back on a mode of argument (modeled on Gingrich, its original master) that involves making occasional grand and ridiculous gestures toward supportive government -- "a laptop for every child" or more recently, advocating legislation to ensure "more energy at lower cost with less environmental damage and greater national security" -- followed by a quick return to the traditional bromides about tax cuts and entitlements. One admires the conservative writers for their resilient commitment to the idea that ideas matter, in the face of all evidence that in actual Republican politics, they've never mattered less.

The second path for Republican renewal is to use the opportunistic power of pure opposition, free from the responsibility to participate in governing the country. The Republican structure was always a machine better designed for opposition than for governance, and the unity-in-opposition of the early Clinton years is surely the moment for which conservatives are most nostalgic. They are geared up to destroy the next Democratic administration as soon as it comes forward with any kind of tax increase, a health-care proposal, an initiative on climate change, a plan to end the Iraq War, or anything related to guns or gays.

In the 16 months since the Democrats took over Congress, Bush has been able to hold the initiative in part by operating as the opposition party from within the White House, vetoing and threatening vetoes, casting every Democratic effort to end the war or limit warrantless surveillance as surrender. But whether McCain is president or not, by the natural rhythm of politics, it will be almost impossible to sustain the kind of disciplined, crafty opposition that allowed the Republicans to set the agenda from below as they did in 1993 or 2007. For one thing, there are far fewer Democrats who will play along or be as easily spooked as they were in 1993. For another, holding together absolute party unity will not be as easy this time. What's in it for Sens. Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, or Gordon Smith to join a vicious attack on a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton health proposal, especially if it reflects some of their ideas? It doesn't help them in their states, it won't help them get any closer to a congressional majority, and it won't exactly brighten their legacy. Pure opposition politics would be further complicated by the fact that the politics of taxes can no longer be cast in absolute terms. There is no possibility of extending all of the Bush tax cuts when they expire starting in 2010. There will be pressure immediately to work out a deal on the estate tax in particular, and permanent repeal is no longer a possibility. So even though Republicans will yell about the "biggest tax increase in history," it will be a debate about the structure of that large tax increase, not about whether to increase taxes. If Democrats can master the congressional agenda, they can construct a package that continues tax cuts for the middle class while restoring fair treatment of capital gains and dividend income. Ever since George H.W. Bush's 1990 budget deal, which raised some taxes, Norquist and other conservatives have insisted on an absolute choice between raising taxes and cutting them. But when it becomes impossible to cast tax choices in such pure terms, the most powerful weapon in the Republican arsenal of opposition will be lifted from Republicans' hands.

The Identity Pander

That leaves Republicans with a single alternative, one that's embodied in the slogan of McCain's first general-election advertisement: "The American President Americans Are Waiting For." It's the politics of identity -- not necessarily racial or ethnic identity but identity as an American. The blog FiveThirtyEight.com, which has been gathering all sorts of data relevant to the Electoral College vote, recently noted a fascinating demographic fact: About 7 percent of people refuse to answer the Census questions about ethnic origin and instead write in "American." Those defiant Americans are overwhelmingly found in the states and counties that turned away from the Democratic Party in 2000 and 2004 -- the Appalachian belt running from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio -- which are also the counties where Barack Obama has done worst in the primaries.

David Frum calls explicitly for this brand of identity politics, declaring that while the Republican Party's issue positions have evolved over the years, "there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood," whereas Democrats "attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: ... intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays -- people who identify with the ‘pluribus' in the nation's motto, ‘e pluribus unum.'" In case it's not clear, in Frum's Latin, "pluribus" means "parasites," and he tells us helpfully, "As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger."

In Frum's book, this ugly bit of identity politics is carefully nestled within thousands of words about policy. And this is how the code is supposed to work. The GOP's attack on "liberals" was always an attack on people not quite like "Americans" -- secular, cosmopolitan, educated, egalitarian. When Republicans went after Michael Dukakis for his policies on crime, they weren't just saying his policies were bad. They were saying, he's not like us; he's a cold-blooded, academic mush-brain who wouldn't give his kids a whupping if they needed it.

The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it's unpalatable otherwise. Without the helpful crutches of symbolic issues like welfare, crime, and immigration, the raw edges of the politics of people-not-like-us would be a little too uncomfortable, and not just for those of us who fall into one or more of the "pluribus" categories. But thanks to the unlikely trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain, the usual game is impossible. Clinton took welfare and crime off the political agenda. Bush made global belligerence and eternal tax cuts unpalatable. And McCain's inconvenient position on immigration takes away what Republicans last fall were dreaming would be their silver bullet. As a result, with Americans saying they are willing to pay more taxes for health care and better schools, with Republicans at a disadvantage in the polls on every single issue, there is no respectable costume in which to dress up identity politics.

Traditionally, the phrase "identity politics" has referred to the Democratic coalition's caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted. Identity politics on the left, according to this very conventional wisdom, opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right. And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close. Obama is not Jesse Jackson; Hillary Clinton is not former Rep. Pat Schroeder. He chose to campaign on national reconciliation, she on bread-and-butter economics and her expertise on military affairs. Whereas McCain -- a man whose known positions on the war and on the economy are deeply unpopular, whose other positions are endlessly shifting, whose party and ideology are rejected -- is recast entirely in terms of his biography, his honor, his character, his American-ness.

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus "pluribus," unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain's slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn't salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else -- ideas, competence, governance -- is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, "The American President Americans Are Waiting For."

If it works, it will be in part because we -- by which I mean the media and many Democrats -- believe it will. We are easily spooked by the confident swagger of the Republicans, who not so long ago were plotting permanent world domination. But then, so was Bear Stearns.

If it fails, the Republican Party will be left with nothing. It will be a regional party, with no hold on government, no up-and-coming generation of politicians, no noble ideas which might have their day again. For Republicans, that may be the better result. It might take a decade, but like the British Conservatives, one day a new leader will emerge, read the books about reforming conservatism, embrace a new vision, and rebuild a party that can compete for power without trying to monopolize it.

What Does Not Change

Ron Tang — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:50:00 -0400

The presidential primary process, over the years since Eugene McCarthy "won" New Hampshire by losing it in 1968, has evolved into such an elaborate analysis of expectations and sequence that, this year, it has finally imploded on itself. Every other Tuesday brings a new analysis of whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has done better or worse than expected, is closing the gap or widening it. New measures are invented weekly -- this week, a version of the popular vote that excludes four states, but includes the invalid primaries in Michigan and Florida seems to have taken hold in the media, although it has no actual relevance to the nomination.

At a certain point, the constants of the underlying political alignment reassert themselves over the micro-trends of the artificial narrative. Consider the things that do not change from primary to primary:

Once again, almost as many people voted in a Democratic primary as voted for John Kerry in the 2004 general election (670,000 in the Kentucky primary, and 712,000 for Kerry). Three times as many people voted in Kentucky yesterday as in the 2004 primary, and for all the focus on those who seem to resist voting for Obama, 70,000 more Kentucky Democrats voted for the loser of the primary than voted for the winner in 2004. Together with the enormous sums of money raised by both Democratic candidates -- $22 million for Clinton and $31 million for Obama -- this increase indicates that the process is overwhelmingly additive, adding contributors, adding volunteers, and, in colossal numbers, adding voters.

Another thing that did not change, and that became evident on Super Tuesday, is that Obama has difficulty winning some working-class white voters -- not all, Oregon is as white and working-class as the country gets -- but a particular subset, those in the Appalachian belt from West Virginia through Tennessee. Even Tim Russert and Chris Matthews stopped talked about the "white working-class problem" and started talking about Obama's "Appalachian problem." Of course, white Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry had an Appalachian problem as well, and it seems likely that West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee will be the three states that have switched away from the Democrats at the presidential level more or less for good, although all will continue to send Democrats to Congress and the statehouse.

In the fall, the "Appalachian problem" matters most in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Obama will likely lose the southern and western counties of Pennsylvania, as would Clinton. But good turnout in Philadelphia, the rapid Democraticization of the suburbs, and growth in the Allentown area (all described in great detail in a new report on Pennsylvania by Ruy Teixeira and William Frey) will enable any Democrat to win the state.

The same is not true in Ohio, though. There, in 2004, massive turnout in the cities and a Democratic trend in the suburbs were not enough to offset the Republican trend in the Kentucky-bordering part of the state. But that was four years ago, before the national revulsion at the Republicans, before Democrats took control of the machinery of government in Ohio, including the secretary of state's office, and before Ted Strickland, born in rural Lucasville, became governor. It's a different political situation in Ohio. If that's true, then Obama's "Appalachian problem" might be of little consequence in the general election.

But Democrats need to be able to speak to those voters, if not in order to win, then because the aspirations of those families, who have benefited least from the recent economic booms, are what the Democratic Party is about. That brings us to the third thing that hasn't changed: Since Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses, his candidacy has been on a steady trajectory from "a lot of hype and a little too much hope" as he put it last night, back down to Earth, to a substantive, practical politics of difference. Without the hype and hope, he never would have been able to overtake Clinton so readily, but a campaign can't go all the way on air and enthusiasm.

Clinton's greatest success has been in pigeonholing Obama as the candidate of "just a speech." Obama had plenty of policy substance, but not enough to differentiate himself from Clinton. Thus what differences did exist -- as on the individual mandate in health reform or the gasoline tax holiday -- seemed petty and nitpicky, as did the candidate.

David Moberg argued recently in In These Times that, to reach working-class voters, Obama needed to give "a speech on class" comparable to his Philadelphia speech about race. That's terrible advice; giving such a speech would reinforce the image of Obama as a speechmaker and analyst of problems rather than an actor. I can't speak for the working-class whites of America, but I suspect they're less interested in a national conversation about class and more interested in having some small hope that they'll have greater economic security and opportunity next year, and that government can play a role in that. In that sense, Obama's speech last night -- because, and not in spite, of its brevity and ordinariness -- was pitch-perfect. It was a reminder that once out from under the suffocating policy blanket of Clinton, in an open-field general election fight, Obama's economic vision stands in stark contrast to McCain's.

But there's a lot more work to be done. It's not just a matter of denouncing the malefactors of great wealth, Obama must put the pieces together into something that's persuasive and real and positive. That Obama is not there yet is not a knock on Obama -- no one's quite there yet, no candidate, no think tank, no one. No one has quite figured out how to wrestle together the pieces of the next social contract and deal with the government's role in minimizing the disruptive force of trade and globalization while maximizing its benefits.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking about Sen. Kennedy and in the evening went to hear Rick Perlstein talk about his new book, Nixonland, in which he argues we continue to live with the corrosive politics of Nixon. It is worth remembering that what does not change is the robust, aspirational liberal tradition of Kennedy into which Obama fits far better than we have perhaps understood. He is not quite the candidate of the fierce, combative, anti-Nixon left that some argue is the only plausible counter to the right, but rather, the renewal of the unifying liberal consensus of the early '60s, chastened and educated, as Kennedy himself has been, by Nixon, Reagan and Bush, by Vietnam and Iraq. At the event last night, Christopher Hayes of The Nation argued that the nomination of Sen. Obama would be evidence that "Nixonland is over." The politics of resentment and American identity have run their course.

As the poet Charles Olson wrote, "What does not change/Is the will to change." Every primary, every special election, every poll reminds us that this is a moment when the country is ready to throw out not just some elected officials but 30 years of assumptions. The story of these primaries will one day be told quite simply: Barack Obama got that, and Hillary Clinton didn't.

Mark Schmitt in Financial Times | "Obama Focuses on Battle with McCain"

Communications — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:25:00 -0400

Full article

. . . "Because of Florida's higher age profile, the state will be difficult for Obama in a general election," says Mark Schmitt, a political analyst at the New America Foundation. "But Obama will also open up other states, such as Colorado, that have a younger age profile, which would probably be beyond Senator Clinton's reach." . . .

Mark Schmitt on Bloggingheads.tv | "The Future with Obama"

Communications — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:30:00 -0400

Bloggingheads.tv / New York Times

Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation, left, and Noam Scheiber of The New Republic discuss whether Barack Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate.