Hoping Obama Fails

It is clear at this point that the Republican strategy is to hope for the failure of barack obama. If your doubting that i can point you to this. The general idea is that the republicans are going to obstruct as much as possible, declare everything is a horrendous mistake, hope it fails, and then run against it in 2010 and 2012. This they believe is the best way back into power without actually coming up with anything new that might actually solve the problem. Is this strategy correct or is there another way?

The obstruction strategy seems to be the easiest. Of course it has the drawback that it will fail spectacularly if obama is successful at turning things around. I believe their is a much better option for the republicans that has the added benefit of not endangering the future of the country. The Republicans should try to actually fix the situation along side Obama.

Ridiculous though it sounds there is actually a path back into power by helping obama. It requires that the republicans elevate the idea of bipartisanship to a level that makes them seem like coequal in any policy discussion, take visible credit when things that are popular pass, hope everything actually succeeds and the country returns to the point of "normalcy". At that point they can take credit for the return to better times and ague that they are the better stewards of prosperity than the democrats. Essentially they try and pull a second 2000 style election. Obama comes in fixes everything up and the american people decide at that point they can afford to go in another direction.

I mentioned the importance to the republicans of keeping the idea of bipartisanship as one of the most sought after policy hurdles. This allows for policy proposals to be framed in a gop centric manner. everything will be defined as how the republicans will respond or approve and this makes them seem like the final arbiters of policy, giving them more legitimate credit claiming in the future. The democrats think that by gaining republican support for bills they gain cover if the plan fails because they can say republicans voted for it too. However, republicans will simply charge that as the party in power the Dems crafted the failure and that they tried to improve it and were stopped etc. being bipartisan simply robs democrats of the credit while keeping them responsible for the failure.

this is not a short term plan. The key to this plan is the short attention span of the american people and the press. It might seem unimaginable that the american people would forget what happened the last time they turned a surplus and peace over to the republicans but this will be eight years down the road. By assisting in the recovery the republicans can argue they were just as responsible for the turn around and that the Bush years are long gone. The media of course would be more than happy to carry that "counter intuitive" type of story.

Kos has made the argument that if the democrats pass health care and the other aspects of their agenda that they will have a lock on the power structure for a generation. I think that this fundamentally misreads the long term appreciation for a universal health care system the american people will feel. If its done early enough in the new term it has eight years to become simply another part of the american landscape. If it becomes thought of as unremarkable the democrats running on the "but we brought you health care" platform could easily find themselves out of power. Elections are generally prospective rather than retrospective and counting on legislative achievements to carry us for a generation seems incorrect.

Several bloggers, which i cant recall off the top of my head, have made the point that voting for the stimulus and working with obama would mean acknowledging that their world view was incorrect. I dont think this is quite right. they could easily claim that they were trying to work within the system to minimize the damage done by the government and that a yes vote was simply the price for that minimization.

i think the odds of republicans adopting something like this are remote to say the least. this would require much more subtlety and long term planning than republicans seem interested in. also it requires a rather meek congress that allows the republicans to continue to dictate terms of the debate without asserting dem control. There is also the problem of facing whoever comes after obama and making the case against that person as the steward of prosperity. just something to think about.

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John McCain is Not Winning and it is becoming about Him.

John McCain is not winning the election at this point in time. There has been a great deal of handwringing over the fact that Obama is not currently projected to win every state in the union. The expectations for him are a little on the high side because there are so many factors working against the Republicans and John McCain. The argument is based on the idea that things are so positive for Democrats that Obama should be up by 15 or more points across the board. I think people should calm down a little take a deep breath and realize that if the vote were held today Obama would win.

Normally I love Rachel Maddow. I listen to her as often as I can and I think she might be one of the best analysts around. I harbor a conspiracy theory that the only reason msnbc does not give Rachel her own show is because she is a lesbian… or maybe its just internal politics working against her. She has one argument that I just thing is wrong. On “Race for the Whitehouse” Friday she said this

“John McCain is winning this election right now. It may not look like it in the national polls, but this isn’t a national election, and John McCain is moving up in the states.”

She is a devotee of the argument that because the election is about Obama the Dems are in trouble. She cites the evidence that McCain is improving in some state polls. I will simply refer everyone to Kos’ State of the Race story from the same day. He clearly and succinctly illustrates that Obama is winning. If I had to point to one state that shows the effectiveness of Obama’s current strategy it would be Florida. The illustration of how well Obama has closed in Florida is available in Kos’ Presidential Polls diary of July 31.

The real debate here is about how Obama should be placed in the meta-narrative of the election. One school of thought is that after the last eight years everything should be about how awful Bush has been and how McCain is just like Bush. It is a theory based around retrospective voting. This school wants the electorate to punish the ruling party by rejecting its policies and choosing the other guy. I think it is a strategy formed on desperation. It is a strategy from a party out of power that is so scared of losing that any way back into power is ok. Do not get me wrong winning is the goal but to govern with a progressive majority and to gain a mandate Obama needs to do more.

There is a very good reason Obama would want the election to be about him. If it is a referendum on him and his Ideas, the win becomes more powerful. It is not merely a rejection of the other but an embracing of Obama. An Obama win when the election is about him shows that the American people want his ideas and policies and that Congress should get in line and pass them. If there is any hope for a transformative election I think that the election needs to be more about the prospective. Prospective voting would be an acknowledgment that Obama is the right direction.

When it comes down to it I think that people vote on the future not the past making the current Obama strategy more sound. It will not leave questions about what Obama plans to do. No lingering, “Yeah Bush Sucks, but what do you plan to do?” Building a strategy around the future is better than building one around the past. It may be a little more risky if only because there is so much to punish the GOP over but the reward is greater. Obama also seems like the type of person who wants to win on his own merits and gain the confirmation that he is being chosen because of who he is and his policies.

Ultimately, the election might become about Bush-McCain anyway. It has been a little subtle but the wild and erroneous attacks launched by the McCain campaign have been effective in getting him the media attention and oxygen that he was so desperate for. Along with that though has come some more intense scrutiny and criticism because the attacks were so negative and so false. They have drawn attention to McCain and started to generate a new narrative about how he has either changed from - or never was - the “maverick warrior with a heart of gold”. It is becoming about McCain in a way he would not like.

Obama is currently solidifying his identity as a prelude to attacking McCain. Obama is going to wait till after the GOP convention and VP picks are done so that any damage that he does are not mitigated by the convention bump. Then with his solid identity established he will hammer on McCain reminding people right before the election all about the negative aspects to McCain. Going into the voting booths voters will have both the positive aspect about what Obama wants to do in the future and the negatives about McCain and Bush’s past.

Attacks are not without risk as McCain is finding out now. We need to be patient and wait for the right time to level McCain. Obama has run a nearly flawless campaign so far and I think he knows what he is doing. We cannot let the desire to see the GOP decimated eclipse the ultimate goal, electing a President Barack Obama.

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The 50 State Strategy is Good for Democracy and the Poor

I have to confess that I have not read Kos’ book. I actually went to buy it once but it was not in stock. All of this may be in his book but I have no idea. What I am going to write about is the effect of the 50 state strategy not on the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party but on the effect on the American Democracy as a whole. When politicos talk about electoral strategy and where to commit resources they take into consideration where they can make the best use of them to get their candidates and future candidates elected. What people do not seem to realize is that the expansion of the electoral map in a presidential campaign makes for a better democracy.

Kos has actually touched on this when he talks about the benefits of the primary. The benefits he cites are increased registration and the building of party infrastructure. What those two things represent is involvement. Those two things are about people becoming involved and engaged in the political process. The long and contested primary built up excitement and involvement in every state and territory it touched. The side effect of this increase in involvement is better knowledge and the increased likelihood of future participation. Once the initial barrier to involvement is breached the resistance becomes less each cycle until participation becomes the habit and not the exception.

One benefit that goes unremarked upon is an increase in voting among the lower income demographics.

“As acknowledged by political scientists and pundits alike, American voters comprise an unrepresentative sample of the nation; they are older, more affluent, better educated, and more likely to be white than they would be if everyone were to participate at equal rates”. (Gimpel et al 2007 787)

The problem with having this group make the decisions for everyone is that more often than not they make the decisions out of their own self interest. For people who do not fit this narrow cross section of America they are being left out of the process. These people are people who need the most help as they are typically at the bottom of the food chain, the poor, the minorities the young. These voices and interests were being neither herd nor represented. Having large segments of a countries population go unrepresented is not good for Democracy and does not contribute to a healthy polity. There are fewer people interested in keeping the government honest and holding it accountable.


More and more people were being left behind in the 90's because the prevailing electoral strategy and tactics were reinforcing the negative habits instead of correcting them. There are three basic reasons why people do not participate in politics. The reasons are that they can’t because they

lack necessary resources, they don’t want to because they lack sufficient interest or knowledge, and nobody asked them to because they fall outside of the traditional networks that rally voters (Gimpel et al 2007 787). The failure of the 90's affected all three of these reasons. The 90's saw the rise of large media ad buys and the atrophication of local and state party infrastructure. There was a focus on appealing to those voters with a solid reputation for turn out ignoring any idea of growing the base or targeting less traditionally vocal groups. The 50 state strategy is changing this.

Modern campaign tactics use technology to great effectiveness. Computerized voter lists, demographic patterns, the internet and email allow savy campaigns the ability to contact and organize more voters more efficiently than ever before. Combine these with grass root efforts to get everyone, lower income voters included, involved allows for increased political participation and thus a better democracy.

The premise is simple enough. The more people are involved with political campaigns and the political process the better citizens they become. Presidential campaigns are the biggest, most interesting, and best equipped to get people involved. Thus the more states the Presidential campaign is heavily active in the more people will become better citizens. This is why the 50 state strategy is better than the typical DLC Ohio-Florida-Penn strategy. Limiting the Presidential campaign to a very few states greatly reduces the contact voters out side of these traditional battleground states will have with the campaigns. Over the period of a few cycles these effects will accumulate and reduce the breadth of the voting demographic.

The recent research bears this difference between low income voters in battle ground vs non-battleground states out. 2004 might be considered the early development of the internet and computer campaigning combined with grass roots effort.

The conditional effects indicate that poor voters who live in battleground states report significantly
higher political interest levels than their low income brethren in safe states, particularly so in 2004. (Gimpel et al 2007 791)

On a 100 point scale they found a 9 point difference between the low income voters in bg vs nbg states when it comes to political interest. They also found that the contact levels for the low income voters in 2004 was different between those with traditional voter profiles and those without. The difference in contact between bg and nbg states for low income voters was a spectacular 36% in 2004. In competitive states the poor are being brought into the voting public but not in states considered safe. This obviously reduces their over all voice and representation weakening our Democracy.

There are other findings that reveal the importance of the campaigns presence in the state. Campaign involvement is 7 to 8 percentage points higher among low-income voters in the most competitive states in 2004 than it is in the safe states. An eight percentage point increase in turn out or participation in a group could have a major impact on an election. A consistent increase would more than likely lead politicians to consider the wants and needs of this group in a very serious way.

The divide between the bg and nbg states cannot be stressed enough. In the states where resources are committed people become more interested and participate more. In those bg states we get closer the classical picture of the citizen as an informed and enthusiastic participant in Democracy. In nbg states we see the apathy among the lower income citizens continue unchecked. The 50 state strategy will go some way towards changing this. What has started out as a means to get more and better democrats will bring with a better democracy simply by including and engaging a wider segment of the populace.

It all seemed very intuitive and yet the effect of the 50 state strategy on our Democracy was not something i had thought about. Sure if it gets the Republicans out of office then it is good for our country but it also increases the type of people the democrats will represent. It will give us a progressive majority. Corporate Dems will have a harder time getting elected if the poor actually become a political force. Our Democracy will be better of when it truly represents all of us and not just the rich old white Americans.

Ok, so this really is my last diary before my vacation.

Cite
James G. Gimpel, Karen M. Kaufmann, Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz (2007) Battleground States versus Blackout States: The Behavioral Implications of Modern Presidential Campaigns
The Journal of Politics 69 (3) , 786–797

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