If you show up in court without a lawyer visibly by your side, the judge will probably ask you if you have “representation.” That’s what lawyers do for their clients. They represent them. It’s also what political parties do for their clients. And we hope that their clients are at least sometimes the people in the states and districts the party’s politicians hope to represent. Too often, it seems, they consider their real clients to be big donors.
Nonetheless, we call the lower chamber of Congress the House of Representatives (or, alternatively, “the People’s house”) for a reason. Political parties aspire to place members in Congress where they can represent the interests of the people who are members of their party.
Mark Penn appears to have a loose grasp on this concept. He says “The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.”
It’s doubtful that it’s a good idea to pursue a strategy with the explicit aim of rejecting the values and interests of your clients. A lawyer who did this would lose the trust of the community he served. He might even be disbarred.
The better way to look at things is that the Democratic Party needs to be able to serve more clients than they are presently serving. There are too many communities right now who feel like the Democrats aren’t offering the kind of representation they want. They can find ways to meet these clients’ demands without, as a price, suddenly failing to do the one thing that they’re really fairly good at.
In fact, when you present this a zero-sum game, it becomes something you can’t accomplish. If the only way to add new clients is to lose the clients you already have, then you can’t grow. If you figure that your clients are loyal and, in any case, don’t have anywhere else to go for representation, you’ll discover that you’ve overestimated the strength of your position. There will be negative consequences if you keep going into court and doing a lousy job.
The way to look at this is not that the party has lost the support of white working class voters by doing too good of a job representing the people in their urban strongholds. The party has lost support from the white working class by doing a lousy job of representing the white working class. And there are a whole host of areas where the interests of the white working class and the Democrats’ urban base are not in conflict.
For Penn, the Democrats’ problem is that they’ve criticized the police and gone too far in pushing LGBT rights. They’re too soft on illegal immigration, and they’re proposing too many “socialist” solutions. But that’s how the Democrats represent their clients. Their problem isn’t that they do this too well. They’re problem is that these issues aren’t addressing what is foremost on the minds of people living outside of the large population centers of the country.
If these people want someone to outlaw abortion, they’re going to hire the other firm. If they want someone to help them with the opioid epidemic then they might well hire the Democratic firm. If the Democrats would develop a plan for revitalizing small-town entrepreneurship and regional equality, they could take that plan to these communities and make a case that they’re best prepared to revitalize them economically.
If the Democrats have a problem it’s their impulse to impose a uniformity on the party that just won’t work if the goal is to compete everywhere. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy when he rolled it out as chairman of the DNC. Progressives want the party to compete everywhere. What they don’t want is to have the party speak with two voices on key issues. That’s understandable, but it’s easy to make the perfect the enemy of having any political power on the state or national level.
Too often, progressives operate from the reverse side of the same basic paradigm that Penn is using, which is that any emphasis on attracting white working class voters must of necessity involve a zero-sum calculation where they come out on the short end of the stick.
Admittedly, things can get uncomfortably fuzzy at the juncture where contentious issues meet. But progressives need to be mindful that civil rights, the environment and social justice are best served and protected when the broad left has majorities. If a little fuzz is the price for obtaining those majorities, the tradeoff is well worth it.
Living at all times at that intersection where divisions are emphasized and hashed out is not a productive way of going about our business. The productive course is figuring out how the party can serve the interests of potential clients in more communities without at the same time failing to represent the left.
Mark Penn doesn’t attempt this. At all.
This is why he is a legendary failure as a political strategist. But, to be honest, he’s only a mirror image of the same problem a lot of people on the left are having figuring out how to regain power. It’s one part of lack of imagination and two parts lack of effort. Progressives are always giving me reasons why white working class voters won’t support the Democrats even though the whole point is that their support elected Barack Obama and not Hillary Clinton. Their support gave the Democrats control of most state legislatures in the 1990’s and their lack of support is locking the Democrats out of power in a large majority of states in the present.
Mark Penn is right about only one thing, and that is that the Democrats are suffering terribly due to their loss of support from white working class people. The solution is not to try to become a party that serves white working class people at the expense of the still-loyal members of the party. That suggestion is idiotic on its face. The solution is to find a way to represent working people regardless of their race, and if that means that the party isn’t as coherent as some people would like, that’s just too bad.
We are really up shit’s creek when calls for infrastructure and economic justice become “socialist solutions” that are beyond the pale (out in a foreign country) of American politics.
The best thing that could happen for Democrats is for Mark Penn, Robbie Mook, and company to start representing candidates in the Ted Cruz wing of the Republican Party. Or for them to find jobs where they actually contribute to society.
That referenced article could have been written by and for Trump. It was co authored by Andrew Stein, aka Finkelstein, a democrat who rallied around Trump. If memory serves my sister worked for his father Jerry Finklestein. She always thought Andrew was a shit head ( my words, not hers, but it works).
Got your both siderism right here:
“But, to be honest, he’s only a mirror image of the same problem a lot of people on the left are having figuring out how to regain power.”
The effort from Silicon Valley, WTF, is yet another attempt to keep the damn hippies out of the party.
I recently saw a poll of rural Americans that said they thought the number one need in their area was infrastructure.
Rural whites don’t want “government assistance” they want to do things themselves. What if something like infrastructure threads a needle: fulfilling a basic government purpose that allows (at least in their minds) them to pull themselves up?
They say that because they know they are supposed to. As them, though, to name 1 or 2 infrastructure projects in their city or county that need to be completed and they’ll draw blanks.
Hmm, good point.
That sounds like something local democrats (all 10% of them) could raise awareness of in the community and have the advantage of it appearing non-political to lessen personal risk.
Infrastructure hires local people as construction workers. That is why FDR’s construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway was popular with the mountain Republicans who weren’t giving up the family land for the right-of-way.
Why interstate highways were extremely popular (as well as the ability of politicians to spot some interchange land for development flipping).
Why most counties in the 1950s had county hospitals and why the rural county hospitals were both the largest employers and were very popular.
That gets counted as doing for yourself.
It’s the various means-tested programs that people hate. They see their relatives figuring how to just make it inside the means and act like they are retired for life.
Social Security and Medicare (even with the age restriction) they like. Medicaid they hate because they have had affluent relatives tell how they shed assets as gifts and spent down just to get in the nursing home.
That is seen as ripping off other people.
The politicians take that an spin it all sorts of ways, salting it with terms like “self-reliance” (Emerson), “freedom” (Founding Fathers), and “personal responsibility” and pointing to the boondoggle “liberals” that accomplished fancy or failed grandiose schemes. For much of the 1970s, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was the poster child of liberal boondoggles. No matter that it was a form of “negro removal” gone awry; it was useful propaganda.
The government as employer of last resort, or the job guarantee will do exactly that. It is a big idea whose time has come. It can help solve or solve poverty and unemployment and healthcare and provide basic services we all need.
There, FTFY.
(Surely it cannot be necessary to marshal the reams of evidence that “rural whites” in general are plenty happy to accept the forms of “government assistance” that they routinely do accept, e.g., “welfare ranching”, farm subsidies, just for starters. It’s those “other” people getting government assistance that sets them off.)
cf. idiot actor (“Coach”) Craig T. Nelson (perhaps paraphrasing, but very close): “I got through college using student loans. Nobody helped me!”
If the Democratic Party is brain dead enough to take advice from Mark Penn, it gets what it deserves. Leave it to Penn to set out to build the Democratic coalition of 1950 by piecing together the strategy of 1990.
My view is we should all post the Washington Monthly recently referenced by Booman to our facebook pages with an entreaty that people should read and share it. In this way, we can each do our small part to prepare the ground to rebuild both our party and our country.
Here’s a link to the article:
http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/januaryfebruary-2017/democrats-must-become-the-party-of-freedo
m/
We’ve discussed anti-monopoly here and my position is the same.
If you run on breaking up Wal-Mart you’re going to lose because like it or not, Wal-Mart uses its monopoly power to bring low prices to consumers. Yes the collateral damage is great, but as we’ve seen with airlines and manufacturing over and over again when its time to put their money where their mouth is the huge majority of Americans care only about price.
My suggestion would be to take on monopolies everyone hates like the telcos that use their monopoly power to make things actively worse for everyone.
But even assuming this is done I think we need more. I’d like to see democrats run on an end to government by kluge. Increasingly complex systems that just get built on and built on. Instead of specific fixes you simply run on big ideas of overhauling the entire system with an end goal. Yes in practice these might get watered down but the purpose of the slogans is to establish in people’s minds your aspirations.
Walmart may be a monopoly in rural areas but not in suburban areas. I can shop at Walmart or Costco or Target or Sears (yuck) or Kmart (double yuck) or Kohl’s or Carson Pirie Scott or JC Penney. There are others like Macy’s that I wouldn’t even think of going to.
For food I can shop at Mariano’s(Kroger subsidiary) or Jewel or Tony’s Finer Foods or Aldi or yuppie places like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Building materials plus more – Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menard’s. It’s true I usually buy gas at Sam’s Club, but there is also Shell, BP, Mobil and various “Gas for Less” stations.
Tell a suburbanite that Walmart is a monopoly and they will think you’re nuts.
There are problems with Walmart, like worker abuse but strengthened labor laws and EFCA (hear that you Democratic Wall street shills?) would fix them.
As an aside, I think when Eastern Liberals think “rural”, they are thinking “Green Acres” or “Beverley Hillbillies”. The reality is different. I know because I used to spend August in rural Michigan to escape the polio season in Chicago. Luckily my mother’s older sister had a small dairy farm there and took us in (and worked us!) Life is different but not medieval or primitive. I could hardly believe it when we all went to church on Sunday and didn’t lock the doors! You don’t do that in Chicago. All my cousins went to college, mostly at Ann Arbor. Two have Ph.D’s (Chemistry and Biology). I suppose that gets a giggle from people who think the only colleges are Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
I read a lot of true crime. It’s astounding how many murders occur in places where people don’t lock their doors. I can’t even conceive of purposefully not locking them.
I read somewhere that city mothers fear their children going into the country and country mothers fear their children visiting the city.
Every August I had to get used to the scary hoots and other strange sounds at night. I could sleep well at home with the familiar sirens, brake screeches and horn honking. Dark. Very dark. A magnificent sky at night but pitch black in the bedroom. The city is never that dark unless you lock yourself into a closet.
And cows! Man, they were huge! My cousins laughed and slapped the cows on the nose. At least the barn cats were familiar.
Fascinating that murder rates are so high in cities where everybody locks their doors. Until about 1970 and in the suburbs on the west coast, locking front doors wasn’t done except when away on vacation.
“I can shop at… Sears (yuck) or Kmart (double yuck)”
You may not have to suppress your gag reflex much longer. They’re in danger of going bankrupt.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bon-ton-stores-sears-j-crew-lead-list-of-retailers-with-high-risk-o
f-default-2017-07-06
I’m not sure who’s saying that anti-monopoly laws would result in breaking up Wal-Mart.
What would deal with Wal-Mart to some extent is a strong minimum wage and a return to strict wage and hour enforcement. In addition, there needs to be regulation of the limitation of hours purely to prevent people from claiming fringe benefits, such as health care.
What Wal-Mart effectively did was turn independent shopkeepers into employees — of Wal-Mart or of someone else — effectively reducing their wages by eliminating the competition.
It is not efficiency that creates those low prices; it is monopsony purchasing, using large size market power against smaller vendors.
Anti-monopsony legislation would reempower the vendors through some mechanism that reestablished market prices instead of monopsony prices. Allowing vendor co-operatives as the exclusive negotiator with Wal-Mart would be one way of restoring market prices.
That wouldn’t necessarily mean that Wal-Mart prices would go up but it would put pressure on Wal-Mart profits and limits on legal restrictions on vendors.
Retail is a complicated sector to start rearranging laws; the obvious attack on retail monopsony is with market pricing of labor.
In another post, I had a link to Chicago’s North Avenue Beach. I note that it was built by the WPA.
http://thechicagolifestyle.com/guide-to-chicago-beaches-north-avenue-beach/
>> I note that it was built by the WPA.
we recently discussed San Francisco beaches: one of the best-remembered WPA projects around here is the murals at the Beach Chalet building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Chalet
all over the Western U.S., in National Parks and other scenic areas, there are facilities built by the CCC in the ’30s.
In New England, too, wonderful rustic facilities that in at least some cases I know of still survive.
The WPA had a bad rap. Was that because it was successful? Surely Republicans ridicule a successful program more than an unsuccessful program. An unsuccessful program’s faults are fairly obvious. It’s a Democratic success that the (R)’s can’t stand.
The WPA bad rap had nothing to do with its success or failure. The average American has little respect for the arts and lacks the requisite vision to embrace a future. Thus, during the planning and construction phase of every large public project, the naysayers never stop griping until it’s completed and operational. Then they begin scheming on how it can be privatized. Or in the case of WPA artwork, how to steal it.
A short story about the wpa.
And it employed 8.5 million people. Of course it can work.
link
Walmart’s goods are mostly Asian. US laws won’t affect their prices much.
And will voters applaud Democrats fighting for higher prices?
And how much will restraining Walmart expand Amazon?
I’m not in favor of a vendetta, just restraint. IMHO, a union would do more for Walmart employees than anti-Walmart legislation. Decent inheritance laws would have wrested control from Sam Walton’s drone grandchildren as well.
I am not personally sure that Wal mart or Amazon are in violation of any anti trust laws. Maybe but lower prices won’t prove the point. We need an attorney to weight in here. Lower prices are what we all want, I thought? But before the democrats go live with this, this issue will have to be sorted out. Who exactly are we targeting?
Here’s an idea whose time has come. Forget a Higher Minimum Wage–Here’s a Better Way to Help American Workers
Sounds a bit like back to FDR. Andrew Finkelstein may just jump on board?
To most workers a job guarantee sounds like an invitation to loaf and goof off.
Sure, until a few get fired.
The fine print in that is the base wage of the job guarantee. That is where those wanting to sabotage the program will make sure that the wage is too low to live on or will insist that no one have a basic guarantee job longer than some period of time irrespective of the state of the economy.
The government is an excellent employer of last resort as long as the government job jar is filled with real contributions to the society that require actual work and command dignity for the results.
FDR’s job programs had mixed results on the dignity part. WPA was maligned. CCC and PWA were considered to have produced some great results. After 80 years, WPA’s contributions in humanities and arts seem more significant than they did at the time.
It could be used for anything. Infrastructure is most talked about and heavens knows we need lots of that. Trillions of dollars and that comes with administrative work and professional. Elder care is another area likely to be used. Etc. The program would be like any other democratic progressive program and the republicans will do all they can to hinder and end it.
We can debate what FDRs programs accomplished but their work is still with us today. Of course the base wage is the minimum wage, since it sets the standard for all business. If Mickey D wants people, they have to pay at least that wage. So people on this program will increase or decrease with the business cycle – that’s the idea. It is a price support for labor. And the government buys up any labor business doesn’t want and hires back when a recession sets in. The program would go a long way to end poverty and could simulateously set up universal, health care as a benefit. Employers would have to match the health care and the wage. But most do that much today.
I should add that GDP which has been stagnant for a long while should increase dramatically. There’s your four percent. And it can be rural or city work. There’s your WWC.
The Internet toobz are full of confidently placed policy and political advice like this these days.
Any advice which claims to be part of a comprehensive strategy to help working people which does not include providing workers better access to labor unions and collective bargaining is doomed to failure.
A Federal job guarantee would not guarantee that the jobs would sustain workers and their families. In fact, such a subsidy program would strain public budgets and there would be a major incentive for elected officials to provide “jobs” which have poor compensation and working conditions.
We don’t have an employment crisis in the United States. We have a middle class compensation job crisis in the United States. Service jobs are middle-class jobs where the workers are provided an opportunity to engage in a fair fight with their employers over pay and benefits.
The key problem with people like Penn is that the NYTimes gives him space. He has been a miserable failure for at least 10 years. Accountability please!
Opinion by Owen Jones in The Guardian recently …
>>But there are others who remain ideologically and emotionally wedded to centrism and balk at the idea of a leftwing ascendancy in the … party.
Exactly as BooMan says above; that’s Mark Penn.
Mark Penn has some advice. And it’s the same bad advice Mark Penn has always had.
that’s the Cliff’s notes for everything Penn has ever had to say. But he’s a Serious Person, because all the other Serious People say he is, so the NYT will print this awful spew.
Related:
To answer Sirota, no difference between selling Obama and Clinton in the US and Cameron and May in the UK. Had the 2016 general election been Sanders vs Bush or Kasich, Messina would have taken the contract with the GOP.
If Penn’s formula had ever been true, it should have worked better in 2016 than in all the elections from 1992 through 2014. Like the anti-vaxxers, Penn rejects all the evidence that he’s wrong.
If his formula worked, he had the perfect candidate- and she lost.
A little less perfect as of April 2015 when she formally entered the race than she was in her 2008 campaign when she believed that marriage is a “sacred bond between a man and a woman.” And she became less perfect in 2015-2016 when publicly she backed away from the TPP. Plus she had her long public reputation of being “liberal.” OTOH, her running mate was a bit closer to perfect and her GOP opponent was a nincompoop; so, it was a good test of his formula for a winning Democratic strategy.
Expect to see them going with “perfect” in 2020. Assuming they don’t have the stomach for a rematch, there’s a full bench of “perfect” ready and waiting: Cuomo, Warner, Kaine …
from the vocabulary of every liberal/progressive/Democrat.
The specifically white subset of the working class has no legitimate grievances, aspirations, or expectations that are distinct and separate from those of the (simply) working class.
Proposing “outreach” or “appeals” to or “understanding of” or programs to benefit the, specifically, white working class is inherently, definitionally racist and racist-pandering. Liberals/progressives/Dems should run at maximum speed from any such suggestion for practical, but more so for moral reasons.
That said, booman, you seem surprisingly tone-deaf regarding this point (this is not the first time I’ve made it . . . and I’m not the first to do so!).
For example, your actual policy proposals (e.g., anti-trust enforcement) do not, in fact, target any benefits only to the white subset of the working class. (The flaw I continue to see with them is the unlikelihood of them resonating as a message with your target audience. But perhaps that’s fixable.)
So why couch them in racist-pandering terms???
I just don’t get that!
If the white subset of the working class can only be reached through pandering to their whiteness, then fuck ’em (i.e., those for whom that is true).
I’ll propose that this distinction I’m insisting on here is, in fact, the key to winning over (enough of) the “white working class” without alienating the rest of the Dem core constituency, as you rightly declare is required. Proposals must appeal to and be targeted to benefit all the natural Dem constituency, not single out one privileged (still!) racial group for special favorable treatment (which even mere deployment of the phrase “white working class” does) — and especially not the one racial group that has consistently been, and still is, the advantaged group in this country (despite the counter-factual resentment of the white racists.)
But then it’s in Glenn Greenwald’s blog, so best ignore it right?
Clinton Strategist Mark Penn Pushes Democrats to Move to Center — And Quietly Profits From GOP Victories
I knew that the consultant and lobbyist world in DC had gotten corrupt, but I did not know that it had gotten that corrupt.
What other “Democratic” strategists are playing both sides of the street to line their pockets.
Robbie Mook?
Jim Messina?
Those are the ones that come most quickly to mind.
No doubt the lifestyle has its copycats in state capitals.
Tell me why voting makes sense with these denizens of the swamp around giving tainted advice.
iirc, many of the DC lobbying firms are bipartisan with a Republican and a Democrat in the name of the firm. Reflects the law firm roots of many of the lobbyists.
Reflects a marketing strategy. Republicans listen to Republicans; Democrats listen to Democrats. And more importantly, the post-political career new hires come with and existing network of contacts.
Maintaining that network requires the appearance of partisan loyalty, but not necessarily to principles but to the persons in the organizations.
That’s why corporations hire them; they’re twofers for those clients. And as the largest of lobbying firms, they have the sort of cache political parties like.
I totally agree with this, Boo.
It’s a great sign for the strides the Democratic Party has made over the last decade or so that Sitting Senators are mocking Penn on Twitter.