The argument continues. Washington Post reports on a new study (.pdf) issued by a group called the Third Way.
:::flip:::
The Third Way group is sponsored by six Democratic Senators:
Blanche Lincoln U.S. Senator, Arkansas
Evan Bayh U.S. Senator, Indiana
Tom Carper U.S. Senator, Delaware
Our Honorary Vice Chairs:
Mary Landrieu U.S. Senator, Louisiana
Mark Pryor U.S. Senator, Arkansas
Ken Salazar U.S. Senator, Colorado
According to the study, Democrats cannot win national elections anymore.
Let’s talk about Jimmy Carter. Carter barely won. He ran for President as a southern Christian at the end of a period of national trauma. Vietnam was lost, Nixon had resigned, the country was learning about abuses of power by the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS. Gerald Ford was a third-string President who barely fought off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. And Ford had pardoned Nixon, to the outrage of much of the country. In spite of all this, Carter won by a nose and then was solidly thumped in 1980. In hindsight, Carter’s victory looks like an aberration. In hindsight, after the Democratic Party split over the Vietnam war, the country took a turn to the right and never looked back. That conclusion leads to analysis like this:
Now let’s look at George W. Bush. Bush won election after a long period of national prosperity and relative peace. The most pressing issues seemed to be how to spend an enormous budgetary surplus, and how to restore moral values to a White House besmirched by the l’affair Lewinsky. Bush lost the popular vote; he only won the electoral vote through a combination of luck, fraud, voter suppression, and the intervention of the Supreme Court. He had no mandate at all. And then 9/11 happened:
Simply put, the above is not altogether true. We know that the liberals’ position on abortion (that it remain legal) is the majority position. The liberals’ position on gay-marriage is the minority view. The liberals’ position on Iraq is now the majority view, but the liberals’ position on the defense budget and global posture is probably a minority view. It’s a mixed bag.
· They warn against overreliance on a strategy of solving political problems by “reframing” the language by which they present their ideas, as advocated by linguist George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley: “The best rhetoric will fail if the public rejects the substance of a candidate’s agenda or entertains doubts about his integrity.”
· They say liberals who count on rising numbers of Hispanic voters fail to recognize the growing strength of the GOP among Hispanics, as well as the growing weakness of Democrats with white Catholics and married women.
· They contend that Democrats who hope the party’s relative advantages on health care and education can vault them back to power “fail the test of political reality in the post-9/11 world.” Security issues have become “threshold” questions for many voters, and cultural issues have become “a prism of candidates’ individual character and family life,” Galston and Kamarck argue.
Their basic thesis is that the number of solidly conservative Republican voters is substantially larger that (sic) the reliably Democratic liberal voter base.
I agree completely about overreliance on ‘framing’. I even considered banning the use of the term on this site before I thought better of it. Yet, the importance of framing cannot be denied completely. I don’t see any fall-out for Republicans for naming their programs ‘Iraqi Freedom’, ‘Healthy Forests’, or the ‘Patriot Act’. I don’t see the public concluding that such abuse of usage indicates a lack of integrity. Framing is important, but it should not be relied upon.
On Hispanics, Catholics, and married women: the question arises, ‘are these voters voting for the GOP for rigid ideological reasons?’ Or are they picking and choosing in each election cycle? It seems to me that the GOP has made inroads into these groups by wedging abortion and gay marriage. But they haven’t put them firmly in their camp. Hispanics still vote Democratic, and their numbers are growing. Liberals shouldn’t rely on mere demographics to take them over the top, but neither should they despair of creating a new electoral majority by utilizing a southwest strategy.
On the post-9/11 world: the aftereffect of 9/11 is starting to wear off. Gas prices, rebuilding the Gulf Coast, health care, good-paying jobs…these issues are slowly reemerging as the primary concerns of the American electorate. Still, having said that, the liberals need to articulate a defense strategy that the electorate can accept. There is probably no bigger gulf between liberals and mainstream America than over our military posture in the world.
Are we to be an empire, with troops stationed in over a hundred nations around the globe? Should we sacrifice some of our sovereignty to join with multilateral organizations to tackle the world’s pressing problems? The American public is still very much infatuated with our post-World War Two myths about ourselves. Despite humbling experiences in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, and Iraq, we still have an abiding can-do belief in our ability to exercise power without consequences. Even 9/11 did not make us question the costs of empire, but rather led us to demand more (or at least to go along with more). Attempting to articulate a more humble foreign policy, a smaller defense budget, and more multilateral cooperation is difficult and easily demagogued in an environment rife with terrorism.
So, there are difficulties that liberals face, but we should take a lesson from George W. Bush. Bush’s policies are far out of the mainstream, and his budgetary policy doesn’t have any relationship to his party’s ideology. Despite coming into office with less than a plurality of the vote, he was able to move the country dramatically to the right and still win reelection.
Likewise, a Democrat could win an election by a tiny majority and then govern much further to the left than they had led people to believe. The Republicans rely on stealth (look at the SCOTUS nominees) to push through many radical policies. They are willing to push a forceful agenda without any popular mandate. And they have been successful, so far, in enacting much of their agenda without paying any price on election day. There is little reason to believe that a Democratic President and Congress could not do the same.
The public has not backlashed (until recently) at the Bush administration for several reasons. Primary among them, is the extreme self-confidence with which the Republicans pursue their aims and exercise their power. To be sure, the GOP soft-pedals some of their more controversial policies, and they distort the nature of their policies (what they do, what they cost, who benefits).
To me, the lesson of the past two elections is that the country is equally divided, but it can tolerate being ruled from the far right or the far left. We have failed to win the Presidency not for any systemic reasons, but through a combination of factors. If the Palm Beach County election board had not used a butterfly ballot George W. Bush never would have been President and we would not be talking about the inability of Democrats to win national elections. If John Kerry was just a tiny bit more charismatic he would have won in 2004. We should not overanalyze our recent failures. Neither should we conclude that we must make significant changes on social issues (like abortion or gay marriage) in response to tiny electoral defeats.
The Democrats are positioned to win elections in 2006 and 2008 utilizing either a progressive strategy of mobilizing the base and projecting strength and confidence in our beliefs, or in muddying the waters and playing to the middle. However, as long as we are out of the mainstream on defense issues (empire, huge budgets) we would do better to run to the left and project our strength and confidence in the validity and correctness of our beliefs.
I’m a moderate and I’m sick of this stuff where the Dems become Repubican-lite. No Democrats (including here) are talking about kitchen table issues like minimum wage, healthcare, rotting infrastructure and all the other issues that are to the interests of the working and middle classes. The Dems in the Washbag think tanks and their wannabe succesors ain’t doing squat to put food on the table or help the kids. They aren’t even talking about it. Women? Hispanics? African-Americans? What the hell do the blow-hards know about them? They don’t know what a quinsenera is or what Juneteenth is, they’ve never watched a single mother decide which bill not to pay that month.
If Democrats can’t manage to draw a sharp ideological contrast between themselves and the bunch of crazy, corrupt, and power-hungry idiots currently in charge, why the fuck should I care whether the Dems return to power or not? Anyone that I’d want in power would be easy to distinguish from most current Repub leaders.
Here’s one vote our new DLC overlords aren’t getting.
If Democrats can’t manage to draw a sharp ideological contrast between themselves and the bunch of crazy, corrupt, and power-hungry idiots currently in charge, why the fuck should I care whether the Dems return to power or not?
Exactly.
Wish I could have said it that well.
The current foreign adventure is the first prolonged war we’ve been in since Vietnam – it took that long for the public to get the bad taste out of its mouth. I suspect we’ll have another decade or more of only short interventions (like Grenada) once this war is over. The public will be very ready for the idea that our security is best improved by weaning ourselves from Middle Eastern oil as quickly as possible, and then leave the region to itself (a policy of benign neglect that actually will probably be better for the people of the region than our propping up corrupt regimes). Carter was seen as a breath of fresh air and good government after Nixon-Ford, and I suspect a plain-speaking governor like Brian Schweitzer, with a VP like Bill Richardson who lends a little gravitas (especially since energy security will be a key issue), could do very well as a ticket…
And they probably would be an easier sell to folks like those here than a pro-strong-defense, “moderate Democrat” like Joementum.
I suspect these consultants told their clients exactly what they wanted to hear. They haven’t convinced me they have the surest route to victory, however.
Last time I checked we were supposed to be fighting terrorism. That does not involved waging war on any nation I can think of (today), but does involve increasing troop strength in certain key areas. Kerry was right about that one.
Dems have also failed to call for “de-privatizing” the military, which is necessary for alot of reasons. Not the least of which is the pay disparity (cost to us), and rampant cronyism (even more cost to us).
This isn’t about energizing the base. The base was energized in 2004 and it wasn’t enough. It’s about standing for things that most Americans are for, like universal health care. I remember reading a few months back that most Americans when asked policy questions actually line up with the Greens more than Dems or Repubs. Here’s a link:
http://prorev.com/2005/04/biggest-media-sin.htm
It’s not about the base, but having a vision that people can get behind. With these Washington policy wankers calling the shots, I doubt either party will ever have “that vision thing.”
Moderate right winger wanabees will be the death of the Dem party.
The Third Way; ideological “Rs” in “Ds” clothing. Whay good are they to core Democratic principles if they don’t stand up for any of them?
They can all go shit in their hats as far as I’m concerned.
It would be great if they’d break out and go their own “Third Way” and leave the real Democratic party to realign itself to the fundamental beliefs that once made the party great. The sooner these imposters, these faux Dems, are gone from the Dem tent the sooner the party can rebuild it’s strength.
I posted a diary a month or so ago about the fact I thought they misrepresenting views on choice for women. I posted polls here from Media Matters which show much more support than the Third Way indicates.
Is the Third Way misrepresenting support for women’s rights
This was the most annoying paragraph.
Here is a link to the Media Matters polls.
Support for Roe v Wade misstated
Similarly, a Gallup poll conducted July 7-10 asked the same question to half
of its respondents; 68 percent said, “No, not overturn,” while 29 percent responded, “Yes, overturn.” Gallup asked the other half of respondents a different version of the question: “Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe versus Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?“Sixty-three percent responded, “No, not overturn,” and 28 percent responded, “Yes, overturn.”
A Gallup poll conducted June 24-26 found that nearly two-thirds of respondents want a new Supreme Court justice who would vote to uphold Roe. Gallup asked: “If one of the U.S. Supreme Court justices retired, would you want the new Supreme Court justice to be someone who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade — the decision that legalized abortion — or vote to uphold it?” Sixty-five percent responded, “Vote to keep it,” while 29 percent responded, “Vote to overturn.”
In addition, a CBS News poll conducted July 13-14 asked: “More than thirty years ago, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe versus Wade established a constitutional right for women to obtain legal abortions in this country. In general, do you think the Court’s decision (to uphold Roe) was a good thing or a bad thing?” Of the 632 adult respondents, 59 percent called the decision a “good thing,” and 32 percent called it a “bad thing.”
“It should be noted that “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are vague terms, and different respondents surely understand them differently. A May 12-16 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked a more specific question: “Which of the following best represents your views about abortion — the choice on abortion should be left up to the woman and her doctor, abortion should be legal only in cases in which pregnancy results from rape or incest or when the life of the woman is at risk, or abortion should be illegal in all circumstances?” A majority, 55 percent, said the choice should be left up to a “woman and her doctor”; 29 percent said abortion should be legal only in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother; and 14 percent said it should always be illegal.“
Sounds to me like they are deciding what issues they want for the party, and then telling us to believe in it. They make me nervous. I don’t like seeing Hillary and Lieberman so tied to them.
These are conservatives who are doing what conservative Democrats have been doing for decades: instead of trying to sell their ideas on the merits, they try to argue that Democrats have to adopt them to get elected.
Fun Bill Galston fact: he’s a Straussian, though he’s usually cited as a “liberal” (or even “left”) Straussian. Everything is relative, I guess.
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I appreciate and respect your analysis BooMan, it makes a lot of sense and is coherent. Covers many bases, not all though in sufficient clarity.
I believe Democrats should analyze European elections to see voter shift and social movements. Recent years show a growing number of swing voters, people making a last minute choice in the voter booth. No poll manages to capture these decisions, therefore the election result is more often a surprise. German election is another excellent example.
Most fitting for U.S. Democrats, Green Party and Leftist movements is to observe the U.K. and Tony Blair’s Labor Party of Socialists. Blair has managed to neutralize the centrists and even right faction of the Conservatives. In the electoral system, the third party of Liberals do gain popular votes but is not translated into parliamentary seats. Thus Blair’s Labor party can lie and deceive, while retaining the majority. Of essence is to grab power by winning the election.
Therefore, an election campagne should be handled to win elections, as Bill Clinton demonstrated in 1992 with new campagne tactics. The issues – party platform – offers much debate, arguments, fights, party-splits, etc. In the end, the goal is to win the election and move into a position of democratic power in the White House and Congress. One needs to focus and establish your goal :: WIN.
Democrats more often know the issues in debates, offer more factual knowledge on foreign policy, social and cultural aspects during a campagne. The polls prove them right on the reasons and wisdom whether to invade Iraq. Yet, the Republicans control the WH and both Senate and House on the Hill. The majority in the Supreme Court has just been achieved, Democrats are checkmate.
I do see an advantage in establishing a shadow cabinet – UK model – which will unite potential candidates, offer quick response to WH moves and speak with a single voice whenever it’s possible. It would create an image to voters of a united Democratic party, offering a stance on major issues. It’s a form of bankruptcy in the party, not having a clear position on Iraq policy. Many senators are resting comfortably in the plush of their Senate seat. Democrats need to be heard and go on the offensive in a coordinated manner.
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With all due respect — which is very little — why can’t these right-wing Third Way assholes go form a third party instead of sabotaging the Democratic Party from within?
like “liberal’ and “conservative” to proclaim totally baseless statements like “liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole” makes this whole report stink of paid propaganda. This is not an “analysis” but a political spinjob.
Boo, if you want to ban words (which would be a bad idea), “liberal” and “conservative” would be excellent candidates. The GOP is in no way conservative, unless there’s such a strange frankenmonster as a radical conservative. And “liberal” means nothing either. The most commonly perceived “liberal” positions — on healthcare, the environment, international cooperation, and a level playing field are all overwhelmingly favored by Americans according to every poll I’ve seen in the last decade.
More basically, the authors seem to think attitudes just grow from nothing like the mice that people once thought were generated by wedges of cheese. The Dems are losers in a game they should be winning precisely because while the GOP hammers away at its so-called principles, the Dems just try to seem “nice” and by never having a thought or a vision of their own. It isn’t enough to just say we’re for healthcare or the environment or peace. That was Nader’s mistake. We have to put it all into a context that everybody can relate to. We have to educate, not just whore after the latest polling numbers.
We have to be for fairness for everybody, not just for blacks or hispanics or gays or women. We have to be for justice for all, not just some pressure groups. We have to be for freedom as an unbreakable bottom line, and we have to define it as freedom from government intrusion as well as from corporate coopting of the common good and the public space. We have to fight for the right of every American to have a vote and to have that vote count as much as every other vote.
There hasn’t been a swing to the right. There has been a failure of nerve and conviction by Dems who listen to “consultants” exactly like the marketing whores who wrote this report. If the Dems are incapable of working for the people instead of their corporate sponsors, then it’s time for a massive purge of Dem leadership. The faction these ‘consultants” represent has nothing to offer but permanent minority status. If they are allowed to swing the party bosses to their view, there is no longer any choice but to abandon the Dem Party for something new, no matter what it costs.
is a truly stupid idea.
He’s lost so much of his support at home- the kind of support that canvasses and gets voters to the polls.
Salazar didn’t care what I say when I call- that he claims to have run as an independent Dem. He’s a true Vichy.
I read the whole thing and I ummmm think that it’s pretty good and that there are a lot of accuracies to be found in it. Look, they laid it out there clearly, it is right there in the numbers and it says that if we would just grow a pair of balls they already want to like us more and vote for us more than the Repubs! Military Defense has got to matter now too, not just busting up the corruption found in the military contractors! That is one thing that 9/11 did change folks and no longer can we clean up after the hawks bloodbaths any longer and COME OUT LOOKING GOOD AND ON TOP! We are good fixers, we are fantastic fixers……we tear down the problems and do our best to figure out how to get people what they need to work at their best and be productive to the whole system and as soon as we are done with that we lose our vision! I agree with these people when they say that as a rule we Liberal Dems don’t know what to do with power once we have it and we most definitely evade the issues right now HUGE. We are as bad at not listening to the needs of the people as the Republicans are too usually. I still can’t believe that we picked Kerry last year, I still just can’t believe it…….we wanted to pick the least controversial semi intelligent one up there and by God didn’t we do that for damn sure?! We wanted to be reassuring to all the “other” voters out there and the only thing we completely assured them of was that “ability to kick a little ass when needed” would once again be missing from our side of the ticket!
It’s probably going to take two or three more big Democratic losses before things settle down. Then probably the left will split, with progressives moving to the Green party or starting a new one. That new party will then have to gradually build up a new majority consensus, which might take a pretty big disaster–like the collapse of social security for the baby boomers, or a really big energy crisis, or an economic disaster.
In the meantime, the Democrats’ electoral hopes over the next decade seem pretty dubious. Even Carville is preaching the DLC argument.
http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/10/07/434637e79a469
Booman says:
But this is not what framing is about at all. At best, it’s just the perverted tip of the iceberg. And framing itself isn’t just the iceberg, it’s not even the polar icecap that the iceberg comes from. It’s the whole friggen global hydrological cycle.
Let me explain. Or not. Let me just show why it matters to destroy the thesis of the “Third Way” report.
(1) The authors note, correctly, that the number of liberals is less than the number of conservatives.
(2) Therefore, they conclude that political polarization must benefit the GOP.
This seems perfectly reasonable. But it overlooks two things:
(3) The majority of self-identified “conservatives” support a good deal of liberal policies.
(4) Framing by conservatives is one of the chief ways of making (3) politically irrelevant. Framing by liberals can help make (3) very politically relevant. But this can only be done by making drawing sharp distinctions, not by trying to “move to the center” on issues, since people are actually left-of-center on the issues.
To illustrate (3), consider, for example, social spending. The conservative agenda, ala Grover Norquist, is to shrink government so that it can be drowned in a bathtub. But your average conservative voter is much closer to FDR and LBJ than to Grover Noquist:
The Variable Codes from the table above correspond with the spending codes as follows:
Sidenote: The 21-point difference between support for “Improving The Conditions Of Blacks” and “Assistance To Blacks” is a tip-of-the-iceberg framing effect. You’d best believe it’s important.
But even more important is the fact that the above chart is for people who self-identify as extreme conservatives, “7” on a scale of 1-7. And three-quarters of the items above have three-quarters support of this group or better. That’s an awful lot of support for government spending coming from self-described “extreme conservatives.”
And this isn’t an isolated phenomena. Consider, for example, the poll from PIPA (the Project on International Policy Alternatives) that found that most Bush voters preferred a multi-national foreign policy, and falsely believed that Bush felt the same way–including support for the Kyoto Protocols and the International Criminal Court.
The fact is, conservatism is more of an identity than a true ideological position. We need to reconnect people with their actual values, and what they want done in their names. To make the facts matter, we have to create narratives that explain the world to people, we have to create frames that make things salient and compelling to them.
The “Third Way” people are absolutely right about one thing: We cannot win by simply asking people to vote for a political identity. But it’s not because the identity stands for the wrong thing. It’s because people identify both labels with the wrong things. And changing that situation is very intimately (though certainly not exclusively) involved with framing.
If you click on the link for more information on the Third Way’s homepage, you end up here.
The page prominently features this map:
Here’s what the Third Way has to say about it:
Of course, it does no such thing. Perhaps if our electoral system was by square mile, this map would indicate that the country wildly skewed red. But of course, what this map fails to show is relative population density.
Neither Kamarck nor Galston (nor their Senate sponsors) are idiots. They know that this strategic pseudo-argument is nonsense. What they are is relative secular, moderate conservatives who’ve cast their lot in with a party whose grassroots completely disagrees with them on the issues. So they have little choice but to pass off slightly reworked Republican talking points as uncomfortable electoral truths. Pathetic, and truly worthy of contempt.
Yes, George Bush is a miserable, abject failure and the Republicans have nothing to offer the country but further flagellation, but so what? The people want the Democrats to offer them something more…something positive.
The Democrats should be advocating their own programme of change. Let’s start with redistribution of income (tax the rich to end poverty or at least reduce it), universal health care, greater investment in schools, roads, and bridges, and negotiating a phased withdrawal of forces from Iraq.
Why aren’t they doing these things? It’s not because they won’t work, it’s because the corporate financial backers of the Democratic Party won’t allow it. There’s money to be made in the occupation of Iraq, the insurance companies don’t want universal health care, and building roads and bridges and investing in schools is just not as profitable as no-bid contracts to “gentrify” hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
We are left with four alternatives: