Two former Hillary Clinton campaign pollsters disagree about whether President Obama’s call for higher taxes on the most affluent will help or hurt him among upper middle class white voters. Geoff Carin isn’t worried:
“This label of populism ignores the reality of the conversation that’s going on and the positions that President Obama represents in the debate,” Garin said. “You know, it’s only about 75 percent of the public that supports a millionaire’s tax. The Republicans can have the other 25 percent. We’ll take the 75.”
Mark Penn has the opposite opinion.
But Penn, along with some other skeptics, remains convinced that such poll numbers are transitory – and that when Republicans push back, Obama’s drive for higher taxes on the rich will eventually bite him in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia, Northern Virginia and the suburban counties ringing Denver – all places he can’t afford to lose. “The people who vote on taxes,” Penn bluntly insists, “are the people who pay them.”
It’s true that polls can be highly misleading when they ask about subjects in a vacuum. What might poll well in the abstract can become quite unpopular once it faces a well-financed and highly-coordinated opposition campaign. Yet, it’s hard to argue that taxing millionaires isn’t more popular than slashing Medicare and Social Security. Mark Penn is fulfilling his professional role as a concern troll for the Democratic Party.
I’m not even sure that Mark Penn has correctly identified the pivot-point of the electorate. John McCain got a higher percentage of the white vote in 2008 than George W, Bush got in 2000, but Bush’s election ended in a tie and McCain was crushed. Did McCain lose because white suburbanites turned against him? What is the evidence to support that contention? It seems like he probably got at least as big a percentage of affluent white suburban voters as Bush. What McCain didn’t get was other groups.
Latino Vote
Bush 2000: 35%
Bush 2004: 44%
McCain 2008:31%
Black Vote
Bush 2000: 10%
Bush 2004: 11%
McCain 2008:4%
Age 18-29
Bush 2000: 46%
Bush 2004: 45%
McCain 2008:32%
It seems to me that the Republicans have two choices. They can try to get a bigger percentage of the white vote or they can work on reversing their downward trend with Latinos and young voters. Or, they can try to do both, to the degree they are not mutually exclusive. As for Obama, if he gets the same percentages of voters that he got last time, his win will be even larger because the country is becoming less white (pdf). For example, between 2000 and 2010, both the Latino and Asian populations grew by 43%, while the white population grew by 1.2%.
There also is a likely fallacy in Mark Penn’s thinking. If Obama loses a few liberal-minded but tax-averse suburban white voters, he’ll probably gain a near-equal or even greater number of middle to low income white voters who respond to his economic populism. Anyone who is taking on the rich people who crashed our economy and now refuse to pay any taxes to fix the problem is going to be more popular than Mitt Freaking Romney.
Mark Penn wants to ignore two things, that doom his case. That something polls at 75% means it is very popular. Two, with all the Faux Noise and other bullshit floating around, and it still polls at 75% is even more proof that Douglas Feith isn’t the stupidest MF’er alive, it’s Mark Penn. Penn is a trojan horse inside the party. Does he even believe in any of the party’s platform?
Penn, like a Ferengi, appears only to believe in profit.
I agree with all of this. There is no surer bet on the planet than Obama winning the 2012 nationwide popular vote. It’s 100% guaranteed. It’s a million percent guaranteed.
Of course, as 2000 showed, the electoral college can have other plans. And if there’s another global recession emerging in 2012 and voters are feeling shitty again, then some combination of squeaker wins in Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Virginia can be back in play for the GOP. And then we will have a dual track election: complete landslide in the metric that doesn’t matter, and a nailbiter in the one that does. And that would suck.
What would doom Obama is a charismatic Republican candidate that is not completely nuts. Huckabee would fit this, but he is keeping his lucrative TV gig, proof that he is not completely nuts.
The Republicans may still pull some General out of the woodwork. Petraeus?
Firebagger, please.
And Petraeus is the fucking CIA director…
Yeah, Patraeus is a non-starter.
But I wouldn’t rule out the Republicans throwing some celebrity up there late the game as their nominee. Norman Swartzkopf. Mike Ditka. Some Hail Mary candidate.
Huntsman was in the administration but is now running against Obama. Anyway, Petraeus was just a guess. Colin Powell would have been ideal (from their point of view), but Cheney destroyed him.
What is less certain is the rest of the ticket. In the Senate, many more Democratic seats are at risk and if they keep playing footsie with the rich, ignoring the 99%, they will lose.
A populist backlash could take over the House, but Republicans are portraying themselves as the populists! Meanwhile, DINO Democrats are playing right into their hands.
I foresee Obama winning but having a Republican Senate and House. Finally, the bi-partisanship government that he craves.
Voice, any evidence for the assertion that Obama “craves” a bipartisan government?
I think Obama is what he’s always been, and that this moment with the Keene NH newspaper is closer to the truth of how Obama thinks of bipartisanship: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC8C_JH2eQc
It has been the hallmark of his administration.
I don’t think it is anymore; just my opinion.
Opinion noted and respected.
Then why was the entirety of his legislative agenda passed with a Democratic Congress, and he’s gotten absolutely nothing done – unlike Bill Clinton, by way of comparison – with a Republican House?
Because of how much he wants a Republican Congress to work with?
Voice, thanks for the response. However, I was hoping for evidence, not mere assertion (i.e., “It has been the hallmark of his administration”).
Stressing one’s own bipartisanship, and willingness to work with anyone who has a “good idea” on an issue, is a strategy straight out of Organizing 101.
Obama learned it as a young organizer with Gamaliel. Senior organizers there learned it from Saul Alinsky. Alinsky learned it from CIO/United Front organizers in Chicago in the 1930s.
Why use this strategy?
1 – Because if you want to advance a progressive agenda, your opponents will try to weaken you by painting you as an extremist (e.g., a leftist, a pinko, a Commie, a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, etc.). By loudly and persistently stating the opposite, you perform a political jujitsu maneuver that, if executed properly, weakens your opponents by making them seem like the extremists who are out of touch with reality.
2 – Because by demonstrating your openness to your opponents’ concerns, you can sometimes persuade some of them to become your allies. Take, for example, Obama’s record in the Illinois state senate on public safety issues:
“His most public accomplishment was a bill requiring police to videotape interrogations and confessions in potential death penalty cases. Obama was willing to listen to Republicans and police organizations and negotiate compromises to get the law passed. That helped him develop a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with various sides of an issue. Obama also led the passage of a law to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they stopped.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_career_of_Barack_Obama
There are other reasons too—some of which I might agree with, some of which I might disagree with.
It may well be that Obama’s willingness to “reach across the aisle” is a hallmark of his administration. (I’m not sure how it could be any different for any other African-American politician in his position. Let alone that it’s a hallmark of many presidencies—e.g., Ronald Reagan.)
However, it’s a giant leap from there to the assumption that Obama prefers more Republicans in Congress. It’s that latter assumption for which I see no evidence.
That’s a very reasoned argument and deserves a reasoned response.
First, as to your points for bi-partisanship as a strategy.
Point 1: They are doing that anyway. They will do it no matter what he does. That should be obvious. I’ll address this anomaly later.
Point 2: They are allies only so long as he is going “90%” of their way, to quote Speaker Boehner.
From the first, Obama seemed to disdain Democrats. Such as urging Reid to keep Lieberman in the caucus and with all his seniority. He spent more time searching for a Presidential dog than he did on selecting a Secretary of Defense. Obama cut the legs out from the public option, publicly saying he didn’t care if it was scrapped while Liberals were trying to get a vote on it. Obama’s Attorney-General is trying to get the state Attorneys-General to sign on to blanket immunity for the banksters. Likewise with refusal to investigate crimes of Bush and Cheney even with the public admission by Powell of torture. Pushing for renewal of Patriot II. TARP part 2. Renewal of the Bush tax cuts. Dropping support of EFCA. The seemingly endless stream of insults to Liberals coming out of the White House.
There seems to be three theories about this inexplicable behavior on Obama’s part.
That’s it in a nutshell. I really think that branding him as a conservative closet Republican is less insulting than thinking him a coward or idiot.
Finally, we’ve digressed a lot on a peripheral issue. The main thrust of my original post was to not assume Democratic gains in Congress. Judging from what I see at street level, Republicans are fired up and enthusiastic. They smell blood. Democrats are confused, demoralized, hurt and bewildered. Not enthusiastic at all. I know three workers for Melissa Bean and Obama who are not going to work for anyone. They do say they are going to vote, but remember these are diehard activists.
Thanks for your courteous and well-reasoned reply. I think we agree on the main point: any victories for national Democrats next year (Congress and the White House) will be hard-earned and not pretty.
Some more thoughts on bi-partisanship:
I agree Republicans are “doing that anyway” and that “they will do it no matter what he does”. It is obvious. However, just because an opponent’s tactic is obvious and expected doesn’t mean you don’t have to respond to it. In any case, the primary audience for the bi-partisan rhetoric Obama uses (or that many community organizations use), isn’t the opponent (in this case, congressional Republicans). It’s the undecideds. The goal (part of it, anyway) is to persuade undecideds to lean towards your side…and maybe even join your side.
As for Obama disdaining Democrats and insulting liberals—there is, in my view, somewhat more of a case to be made for the latter than the former. I don’t think it’s a great case, however. Take some of your examples:
1 – Keeping Lieberman in the Democratic caucus helped secure his vote for the Recovery Act, and for the Affordable Care Act (arguably the two most important Senate votes in the past three years).
2 – Keeping Gates as Defense Secretary helped Obama withdraw from Iraq, change strategy in Afghanistan (and begin to withdraw from there), and win the repeal of DADT. As with the Lieberman decision, I’m not entirely happy with it, but it’s a decision that contributed to some significant progressive victories.
3 – Renewal of the Bush tax cuts fall in the same category, I think. Obama cut a deal to get about $400 billion in economic stimulus (and the New START treaty) out of the lameduck session of Congress last December. This was the price of that deal.
The president’s actions in these cases all lend support to a 4th theory about Obama and his approach to politics:
He’s a “pragmatic progressive”, center-left politician. He aims to have about 30% of the body politic to his left, and another 30% to his right. He then attempts to get that 60% to agree enough with each other in order to advance a progressive agenda.
With the 111th Congress, that meant passing lots of legislation that was acceptable to the Ben Nelsons and Joe Liebermans of the Democratic caucus—because they were the 60th votes in our (profoundly undemocratic) Senate.
With the 112th Congress, that has meant having to deal with Speaker Boehner. The result, so far, is very little legislation and endless skirmishes—many of them on terrain traditionally favorable to Republicans.
Finally, as I’ve mentioned before (and no doubt, will again), Obama’s a political counterpuncher. Think Ali-Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle”. See the great documentary, “When We Were Kings”, for a sense of the costs and benefits of that strategy. For better or worse, Obama’s our fighter.
Bazooka Joe, I’m not as confident as you are of the election, simply because running for re-election with 9% unemployment and slow economic growth is very, very tough.
That said, yes, Mark Penn is once again demonstrating his dunderheadedness.
“The people who vote on taxes,” Penn bluntly insists, “are the people who pay them.”
As awful as a sentiment this is, I don’t think its entirely wrong. And its certainly true during mid-terms. Until the unemployed and the uninsured vote in mass numbers, the political system won’t do a particularly good job at responding to their needs. The GOP is doing everything in their power to make sure that those people can’t vote, even if they want to. But nonetheless, as long the median swing voter in America is a suburban white Mom, we’ve got uphill battles moving things in a progressive direction.
I always get the feeling Penn thinks he’s advising the Bush Sr. campaign.
There has been a lot of talk to the effect that a substantial percentage of the “1%” actually does not have a problem with the tax increase they would get. The famous example is Warren Buffett, but he is certainly not alone. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of the “1%” are reliable Democratic voters, I’m sure it is not negligible. We all know that most of the rabid republican voters are NOT among the 1% — we should also bear in mind that not all of the 1% are going to vote against Obama.
The numbers are by no means clear, but this bears watching:
http://capitalistvoters.com/news/99-recuits-other-1-maybe