When Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties and became a Democrat, he immediately got the support of his new party's leadership, including President Obama, for his upcoming re-election fight. But now another party leader has given Congressional liberals room to back the man challenging Specter in the Democratic primary next year, Rep. Joe Sestak.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., will be endorsing Sestak during an event in Philadelphia on Monday. It's an important get for Sestak; an endorsement from your average House liberal is nice, but Frank's nod means more.
Because he's one of the most influential men in the House, Frank can bring other members of Congress along with him. At the very least, he gives those among his colleagues who might otherwise worry about angering the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid some cover.
"No one calls it like they see it quite like Barney Frank," Sestak said in a statement provided to Salon. "He's not willing to let Senator Specter get away with running from his record as a loyal Bush Republican. Just like Barney and I, Pennsylvanians won't be fooled by election year conversions."
You might assume that Texas politics would still be a wild and woolly business, full of eccentric candidates who’d pull all kinds of crazy stunts to squeak by each other. Like how Lyndon Johnson lost one stolen election for the Senate and, having learned his lesson, probably stole the next one himself. Or like Gov. Lee "Pass the biscuits, Pappy" O’Daniel, the flour-peddling model and namesake for the politician character in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" But modern Texas has settled into a situation of relatively quiet Republican dominance. Despite the best efforts of novelty-singer and 2006 independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman, there hasn’t been a genuinely close general election for a Senate seat or the governorship since the mid-1990s.
But this year, Texas looks like it’s getting back to its old self. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is going through with a long-anticipated run for governor, which sets her up for a major run-in with incumbent Gov. Rick Perry in the Republican primary. Hutchison has amassed a lot of support from the GOP establishment, but Perry is burnishing his right-wing credentials to a fine gleam. (In case you were wondering, he landed Sarah Palin’s coveted endorsement back in February.)
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine will run a piece by Robert Draper on the race. Frankly, Draper leaves Perry looking like something of a buffoon. This is the governor, after all, who started talking about Texas’ right to secede from the union earlier this year. Perry suggested that Lino Graglia, a conservative legal scholar, would back up his view, so Draper called Graglia. Said the law professor, "No, I don’t think there’s any basis to that claim." In the article, Perry also expresses a fantasy about Sam Houston running for president in 1860 and beating Abraham Lincoln. This would, Perry claims, have prevented the outbreak of Civil War. No word, of course, on slavery.
This guy has actual bizarre policy ideas, though, not just Confederate reenactment fantasies. Perry claims that last year’s economic panic was overblown, and the only necessary response to the financial meltdown was to "cut the spending, cut the taxes," instead of passing any emergency bailout. Judiciously, Draper comments, "Most economists might take issue with the governor’s sentiment. Then again, economists are unlikely to decide the outcome of the Texas primary."
Perry’s flirtation with the far right is the basic rationale for the candidacy of the comparatively moderate Hutchison. As she puts it, "I’m in it to save our party."
And that’s just the issue. Perry, with his talk of states’ 10th Amendment rights and his accusation that the president is “hell-bent on socialism,” is as prime a specimen as you can find of tea party influence on the GOP. He’s a politician who’s trying to go as far as possible into right-wing fantasy world while still actually running a state.
Of course, there are some repercussions for acting like that. Assuming that he survives Hutchison’s challenge, Perry will have to put in a real fight in the general election. His approval numbers are relatively weak, and he’s dragging the GOP one way while Texas’ demographics run the other. As Draper points out, Texas has recently become of the few so-called majority-minority -- that is, majority non-white -- states in the country.
On top of all that, on Friday the Democrats landed their ideal challenger. In Houston Mayor Bill White, who confirmed that he will enter the race, Democrats have easily their strongest gubernatorial candidate since Ann Richards. Hutchison might be the voice of relative sanity in the Republican Party, but it's hard not to wonder what a Perry-White contest would be like.
The African American vote is vital to the Democratic Party. That's a truism of American politics, has been for some time now, but it was especially true in 2008, though not just in the way people usually think. The black voters who came out in droves in order to elect Barack Obama president didn't just vote for him; they gave Democrats in down-ticket races a major boost as well.
In 2008, Democrats picked up a net of 21 seats in the House of Representatives. Of those, 10 were in districts with a disproportionately high African American population, where the increased black turnout almost certainly played a role in flipping the seat. Those 10 were also all on a list I compiled for an October 2008 article I wrote previewing the role black voters could play in down-ticket races shortly thereafter; only three of the districts that were on my list didn't switch from Republican to Democrat. The effect didn't end with the House, either --in one key race, for example, black voters helped Democrat Kay Hagan knock off now-former North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole.
But next year, Obama's name won't be on the ballot. That will almost certainly mean a drop in black voter turnout back to more normal levels, at the very least. And Democrats are expecting that, or at least they should be. A new poll seems to indicate that things could be much worse than that, however.
Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver noticed a number in a recent DailyKos/Research 2000 poll that should give Congressional Democrats some sleepless nights: While 68 percent of whites said they definitely or probably will vote in 2010, only 33 percent of blacks said the same thing.
There's always a racial gap in turnout rates, but it's never been that big, or even close to it -- in fact, Silver says, the biggest in the past 30 years was 13 percentage points. That was in 1994, and Democrats remember very well what happened then.
There's reason to be skeptical about the result, if only because it's so wildly different from the norm, and there's plenty of time left before Election Day. But if those numbers hold, it could be a very bad year for Democrats. That would be true not just in the House but in the Senate as well -- low black turnout could doom vulnerable Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, and it could hurt other Democrats who are facing legitimate races like Sens. Chris Dodd, Kirsten Gillibrand and Arlen Specter.
Nearly six months ago, Al Franken was sworn in as the junior senator from Minnesota. For his defeated opponent, former Sen. Norm Coleman, it was the end of a long, hard road -- a road full of legal challenges, ballot challenges, financial challenges and, one can only assume, profound personal challenges.
That’s not enough to stop Coleman, though. The current rumor, reported by Politico, is that he’s thinking of making a run for governor. This is an office he’s always wanted: Dick Cheney had to talk him into running for Senate instead in 2002. And with incumbent Gov. Tim Pawlenty leaving, apparently to run for president, it’s Coleman’s chance.
So the former senator is giving it some thought. However, one of his top operatives, Jeff Larson, is throwing some cold water on the rumor, saying, "I don’t think it’s something he really needs to do or really wants to do. I think he’d make a spectacular governor. I really do. I just don’t think he’s going to run." Another advisor, though, says that Coleman sees a gubernatorial race as a chance to "to put aside some of the partisan rancor."
And the almost-two-term senator himself? "It’s really nice waking up in the morning and reading the paper and realizing that nobody is trying to kill you politically today. I’m a public servant at heart, but I haven’t made a final decision on whether being the governor is the best way to do that,” he said.
CEDAR CREEK, Texas -- Rick Perry strode across the stage last Wednesday night and leaned over into the microphone. This was his moment to shine; two dozen of his fellow Republican governors, and a couple of hundred big GOP corporate donors, were gathered at a barbecue to celebrate Republican victories and look ahead to more to come in 2010. And Perry, the governor of Texas, wants very much to make sure he's celebrating next year, despite what could be a nasty primary challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to secure the Republican nomination.
Which made his remarks a bit of a mystery. "Virginia is for lovers," he drawled, in an apparent tribute to Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell, who had just finished talking. "Texas is for jobs." He called up his wife, and some of the other governors' wives, to the stage. "Hey, back in the back," Perry called out. "Y'all hold it down just a minute -- we're fixing to introduce the ladies. Yeah, I want them all up here." Then he rambled through another five minutes about the weather, the trials and tribulations of being a rookie governor and an introduction of the night's musical entertainment, before kicking back to party with the rest of the crowd. At least he didn't talk about Texas seceding from the union, like he did back in April. Meanwhile, his opponent missed the whole thing; Hutchison was stuck back in Washington debating healthcare reform, where she insisted the new mammogram guidelines were merely the first step in a sinister government plot to ration medical treatments.
Welcome to the Lone Star State, where the politics next year are shaping up to be as bizarre as anything else in Texas. Perry, who's been governor since George W. Bush ambled off from Austin to the White House in 2000, is seeking his third full term in office next year, extending a tenure that's already broken all of the state's records. Hutchison, the first woman to represent the state in the U.S. Senate, has been in Washington since 1993. She says she's so committed to the race that she'll resign her Senate seat to run -- but not until after the March primary. (Democrats are likely to coalesce behind Houston Mayor Bill White as their candidate, though he hasn't yet officially declared he'll run.)
In the process, the campaign could wind up going a long way toward helping the Republican Party determine whether it wants to try to appeal to swing voters, or double down on the tea party-loving, Glenn Beck-watching, Sarah Palin book-buying crowd that helped the GOP lose New York's 23rd Congressional District for the first time in over a century earlier this month. Facing a starkly conservative primary electorate, Perry has, well, gone rogue. Besides threatening to dissolve the United States over the Obama administration's policies while addressing a roaring tea party crowd in April, Perry also refused to take $556 million in unemployment aid as part of the economic stimulus package. He talks about the 10th Amendment with the kind of fervor most Republicans reserve for the gun-toting Second; at the GOP governors conference, he urged his colleagues to "stand up and push back against Washington, D.C."
Hutchison, meanwhile, hasn't exactly racked up a liberal record in 16 years in the Senate. But she's more of a country club Republican, firmly conservative on economic issues but not a full-on culture warrior. She voted for the first federal bank bailout last fall and has supported keeping abortion legal, though she also frequently votes to restrict access. If she can wrest the nomination from Perry, that could be a sign the GOP will resist the urges of its conservative id. If she can't, though, it could mean other Republicans will take Perry's pandering to the tea party crowd to heart, and turn the party even harder to the right than it's already heading.
Judging by the early indicators, at least, the conservatives may prevail. Hutchison's poll numbers have dropped steadily since she got into the race over the summer. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, tells anyone who will listen that he wants Hutchison to quit the race so Perry can win the nomination. Perry's first TV ad made it clear he plans to run against Washington as much as against Hutchison -- which could be the right strategy in Texas. "She's claiming, 'I'm from Washington, and I'm here to help you,'" says Austin-based GOP pollster Mike Bonaslice, who's advising Perry. "Good luck with that spin right now. Republican primary voters aren't too keen on what's coming out of Washington the last year or so."
Hutchison's campaign isn't exactly sitting back and taking the abuse. Her own first TV ad promises, "I'm going to do everything I can to stop the government takeover of healthcare." Her campaign comes down to vociferously opposing the White House on issues that matter to Texas conservatives, and bashing Perry for talking tough but not delivering. "Perry is all talk, that's all he's ever been," says Terry Sullivan, Hutchison's campaign manager. "He says what he thinks folks want to hear at any time in his political career."
But that hasn't been enough to endear her to the true believers. "Texas is really -- as I like to say -- a beacon of sanity, fiscal sanity, particularly compared to Washington," says Peggy Venable, Texas state director of Americans for Prosperity, the group that put together the April tea parties. "Most Texans support pushing back on Washington; we certainly don't want to see Washington's policies carried out on Texas." She's backing Perry personally, though AFP is barred from endorsing any candidate. "It'll be tough for Kay Bailey Hutchison to run against Gov. Perry without talking about what's wrong in Texas," Venable says. "And many of us feel like what's wrong is primarily in Washington, not in Texas, and so I think a lot of people aren't going to appreciate a negative campaign in that respect."
Meanwhile, the most hardcore conservatives may not support either Perry or Hutchison. The chairwoman of the Wharton County Republican Party, Debra Medina, is running a grass-roots campaign for the nomination well to the right of both of the major candidates. Her platform includes eliminating property taxes, nullifying federal laws that interfere with Texas sovereignty, banning all abortions and encouraging Texans to buy even more guns than they already have. (Except for the property tax bit, though, that's not all that different from what Perry is running on.)
What Republicans are dealing with in Texas -- and in Florida, where conservative darling Marco Rubio is challenging Gov. Charlie Crist for the GOP nomination for Senate, and in a handful of other races around the country -- is just more fallout from the last few years in politics. When Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, some Republicans figured it was because the GOP had lost touch with voters; other Republicans, ideological kin to the ones who would wind up hurling tea bags at the White House last spring, figured it was because the GOP had lost touch with itself. The elections in Virginia and New Jersey this fall offered one way forward for the party -- present candidates who stick to economic issues, keep whatever radical social agendas they might have in mind tucked firmly away, and don't let Sarah Palin come to town and alienate the moderates. Between now and March, Texas may offer another path, the same one the party's activists are increasingly insisting on following. It could be a bumpy ride for them -- but it should be fun to watch for the rest of us.
Is a Jackson revival under way? I'm referring not to the late King of Pop but to the 19th century populist president whom his opponents called "King Andrew." According to Michael Barone, in the 2010 elections Republicans have a chance to knock Democrats out of as many as three dozen insecure congressional seats in "Jacksonian districts."
By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the Scots-Irish enclaves of the Appalachians and Ozarks. Witness the calls from Democrats as well as Republicans for President Obama to oust Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and pay more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street.
In itself, American populism is neither left nor right. Translated into economics, Jacksonian populism spells producerism. For generations, Jacksonian populists have believed that the hardworking majority of small producers is threatened from above and below by two classes of drones: unproductive capitalists and unproductive paupers. While government promotion of public goods like defense, infrastructure and utilities that benefit all citizens is acceptable, Jacksonomics is suspicious of crony capitalists who owe their fortunes to political connections (can you spell B-A-I-L-O-U-T?). And Jacksonian producerism naturally is haunted by the nightmare of a class of the idle poor, who are capable of working but instead live off the labors of others and lack an ownership stake in the community.
Reform movements have succeeded in the United States only when their programs resonated with populist and producerist values. Lincoln's antislavery Republicans succeeded where the earlier Whigs had failed because the Republicans persuaded Jacksonian farmers that snobbish, parasitic Southern Democratic slave owners were a greater threat to white farmers and white workers in the Midwest than rich Republican bankers and industrialists in the Northeast. Lincoln's Hamiltonian program of aid to railroads and national banking had to be sweetened with the offer of Western homesteads for yeoman farmers before former Jacksonian Democrats would join his coalition.
In the 20th century, the most popular and enduring legacies of the New Deal have been the programs compatible with small-d Jacksonian democracy -- public spending on infrastructure like dams and electric grids and highways, the promotion of single-family home ownership, federal aid to education and Social Security and Medicare, two entitlements tied to individual work by means of the payroll tax. In contrast, welfare for the nonworking poor was always unpopular with most New Deal Democratic voters, who preferred public works programs like the WPA, CCC and CETA to relief payments for the poor and unemployed. Although he broke with the New Deal tradition in other ways, President Bill Clinton was true to its spirit when he collaborated with the Republicans in converting "welfare" from an unpopular federal entitlement to state-based workfare programs.
All too often in American politics the populist distinction between producers and parasites has been mapped onto the racial division between whites and nonwhites. But the Jacksonian republican concern about freeloaders is not, in itself, racist. And it has frequently manifested itself in anger at the freeloading rich as well as the freeloading poor. At the moment, populist anxieties about the nonworking poor or illegal immigrants receiving medical coverage are eclipsed by populist anger at federal bailouts for well-connected Wall Street bankers who pay themselves titanic bonuses for unproductive gambling with other people's money.
Here, one might think, would be an opening for the center-left. And yet the Obama Democrats, unlike the Roosevelt Democrats, cannot take advantage of the popular backlash against Wall Street. Why?
One reason is that the attempt of the "New Democrats" like Clinton, Al Gore and Obama to win Wall Street campaign donations has been all too successful. As Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin helped complete the conversion of the Democrats from a party of unions and populists into a party of financial elites and college-educated professionals. Subsequently Obama raised more money from Wall Street than his Democratic primary rivals and John McCain. On becoming president, he turned over economic policymaking to Rubin's protégé Larry Summers and others like Timothy Geithner from the Wall Street Democratic network.
The financial industry is now to the Obama Democrats what the AFL-CIO was to the Roosevelt-to-Johnson Democrats. It is touching to watch progressives lament that "their" president has the wrong advisors. "We trust the czar, we simply dislike his ministers." Obama owed his meteoric rise from obscurity to the presidency not to any bold progressive ideas -- he didn't have any -- but rather to a combination of his appealing life story with the big money that allowed him to abandon campaign finance limits. According to one Obama supporter I know, the Obama campaign pressured its Wall Street donors to make their contributions in the form of many small checks, in order to create the illusion that the campaign was more dependent on small contributors than it was in fact. Even now President Obama continues to raise money on Wall Street, while his administration says no to every progressive proposal for significant structural reform of the financial industry.
There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama's White House -- and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires' club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.
To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately "densified" cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.
Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election -- universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.
It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don't need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal's emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today's progressives seem to have internalized the right's caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.
This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.
At a recent event in Washington, I was surprised when a Democratic senator said, "The major threat facing America today is the class divide." The speaker was Jim Webb of Virginia, the self-conscious heir to Scots-Irish Jacksonian populism. He went on to attack the inhumane treatment of prisoners in American jails and the avoidance of military service by the American elite.
Populists like Webb are rare in today's Democratic Party, while the Republicans, for all their folksy rhetoric, offer nothing but the economic program of their Wall Street Journal/Club for Growth wing. If mass unemployment and slow growth persist for years, some sort of third-party, "Middle American" populist movement in 2012 seems possible. (Lou Dobbs: tanned, rested and ready?)
Could a new wave of populist independents be steered into the Democratic Party? Alas, that seems unlikely, if Democrats are viewed as the compromised, establishmentarian governing party. Moreover, the Republican Party benefited from the last two populist upheavals. Richard Nixon built the generation-long hegemony of the Republicans on the anger of George Wallace voters, and, following the campaign of Ross Perot in 1992, Newt Gingrich captured anti-system reformism to build a Republican congressional majority for most of the period between 1994 and 2006.
In each case, liberals and progressives indiscriminately rejected the populist voters. The Wallace voters, most of whom were New Deal Democrats, were dismissed by most liberals as though they were motivated by nothing but opposition to racial integration. In 1992 the New Republic published an idiotic cover with Perot dressed as Mussolini, implying that he and his supporters were crypto-fascists. Today ridicule of the bombastic Sarah Palin shades all too easily into loathing for the lower middle class.
It would be much easier for the Republicans to rebuild the conservative-populist coalition that dominated American politics from 1968 to 2006 than it would be for the Democrats to rebuild the kind of liberal-populist coalition of the New Deal era from 1932 to 1968. Will the Democrats be marginalized a third time rather than empowered by anti-system populism? In the next few election cycles we may find out.
The Republican comeback of 2010
The midterm elections are only two years away. Can the Democrats defend their gains?
By Thomas Schaller, Salon
Five things the Virginia election results don't mean
Tuesday's Democratic gubernatorial primary might seem like a first glimpse at the 2010 election. But it's not.
By Mike Madden, Salon
The Specter of a shrinking GOP
Arlen Specter's defection likely means a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority. Choose your metaphor -- rats, ships, small tents -- but will the last Republican to leave please turn out the light?
By Mike Madden, Salon
Michael Steele is here to stay
Plenty of conservatives want to eighty-six him. But the P. Diddy-loving RNC chair isn't going anywhere.
By Mike Madden, Salon
The Reintroduction of Kirsten Gillibrand
After a shaky first hundred days, the junior senator from New York is trying to start over.
By Stephen Rodrick, New York Magazine
Patrick picks Obama aide for his 2010 campaign
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is tapping David Plouffe, the architect of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, to help run his bid for reelection next year.
By Matt Viser, The Boston Globe
Who can possible govern California?
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s latest ambition is to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California.
By Mark Leibovich, The New York Times
Giuliani out, and maybe in, in 2010.
The Honeymoon's over.... But not the Marriage
What a Difference a Year Makes