About 6 months ago, I started warning about the potential for a really bad electoral cycle for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms. I feared that by not taking the big banks on more aggressively, not doing more to create jobs in a really bad economic period for job creation, and letting the health care bill drag on and get too compromised in terms of taking on the insurance industry, that Democrats would be badly hurting ourselves with both our base voter turnout and with swing working class voters getting hammered in this economy. A lot of the Democratic establishment said folks like me were over-hyping, that while it wouldn't be an easy year, there were all kinds of reasons to think it wouldn't be so bad. To my great chagrin, my predictions were proved right with a vengeance in the first three big elections of this cycle in NJ, VA, and MA: base vote turnout was terrible, and working class swing voters turned dramatically against us. Now, the conventional wisdom has turned and just about everybody in the Democratic party is in full scale doomsday mode.
That's why I was so heartened to see David Plouffe's well reasoned analysis piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, laying out a strategy on how the Democrats can survive 2010 without getting slaughtered. Because what is needed now in the Democratic party is that kind of calm, steady thinking. As worried as I have been now for these last 6 months, I am equally convinced that if we do the right things politically and policy-wise (the two are in sync), we can surprise people in the 2010 elections and do a lot better than the pundits and the panickers think.
The reason I believe this is that I have been involved in several elections where good things happened against all the predictions of the conventional wisdom. Let me take you back to some elections in the past where Democrats came back when things looked really dark for them:
1992. I had endorsed Harkin in the 1992 Presidential primary, and that didn't work out so well, but after the smoke cleared from the primary I went down to Little Rock in May to talk with the Clinton campaign about helping out and ended up signing on. The day I agreed to come on Clinton was at 25% in the polls, a very weak third place to the first George Bush and Ross Perot. Every pundit in America had declared Clinton to be dead and a disaster for the Democratic party, and there were senior Democrats who were desperately trying to talk Clinton into giving up the race. I was convinced in my visit, though, that the team in Little Rock- Carville, Stephanopoulos, Eli Segal, David Wilhelm, and all the rest- had come up with a brilliant strategy and focus for the campaign that would surprise the hell out of people. And they had, and we did. By running a campaign with a populist message intensely focused on "the economy, stupid" and "change vs. more of the same", we took out a well liked incumbent President, and delivered a victory for a Democratic candidate for the first time in 16 years.
1996. After the 1994 debacle, conventional wisdom again had Bill Clinton dead, and Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole ascendant. There was a lot of talk of a Democratic primary, people were once again trying to talk Clinton out of running, and reporters were asking the President whether he was still relevant. But when Clinton had the guts to stand up to Gingrich and Dole twice on the government shut down in the middle of 1995, the tide turned. Clinton came back from the 1994 disaster by standing up for Democratic values and ideas, and ended up winning re-election easily.
1998. With the Monica Lewinsky scandal dominating the news, everyone in Washington assumed there would be a full scale rout of Democrats in the 1998 elections. But a few of us starting noticing in the focus groups that people were sick of the scandal talk, tired of Republicans obsessing about it, and thought it was about time to move on. The organization I was with at the time (People for the American Way) launched a national ad campaign with the time to move on theme, and at the same time online activists Wes Boyd and Joan Blades independently launched their grassroots petition drive that ultimately became Moveon.org. At first, Democratic establishment figures were horrified that we were doing this strategy- they were desperately trying to change the subject. But sometimes in politics (most of the time in fact) the best thing to do when you have problems is to face them head on, and our strategy worked. Instead of losing the 30 seats in the House and five in the Senate pundits had been predicting, we ended up even in the Senate (beating the two people who had been most aggressive in going after Clinton on the Lewinsky thing, Faircloth and D'Amato) and picking up five House seats- the fist time since 1822 that a President's party in the sixth year of their time as President picked up seats in Congress.
2006. After dehabilitating defeats in 2002 and 2004, Karl Rove was bragging about a permanent Republican majority and Democrats were too discouraged to even dream of trying to win back the House or Senate. I wrote a memo to friends early in 2005 saying I thought the conventional wisdom was wrong, and that we had a legitimate shot at taking back the House and maybe even the Senate. When a top official at the DCCC saw the memo he called and told me that I should not be saying this stuff, it got people's hopes up too much. The DCCC was targeting only a few races in those days (about 15), and had no projections that they could win the House back. But starting with Bush's ill-fated campaign to privatize Social Security, and then the Terri Schiavo incident, and then the terrible response to Hurricane Katrina, the case against Republicans began to mount. Add in one of the most scandal prone congresses since the robber baron era and a steadily weakening economy, the problems just kept building for the Republicans, and Democrats took back both the House and Senate.
The conventional wisdom about elections this far out from Election Day is quite frequently dead wrong. The important thing for Democrats right now is to stay calm and devise an aggressive strategy that will move Democrats from defense to offense. I thought Dave's points were all good ones, especially his first one (passing a good health care reform bill ASAP), and his last one- no bed-wetting. As I have written before, it is time for Democrats to calm down and toughen up.
One final thing that I would add that is as important as anything else: at the heart of a Democratic strategy for victory in 2010 is going straight at the big banks. They are the symbol for everything that happened to our economy and everything wrong with our politics. The President's biggest mistake so far has been to let Tim Geithner and Larry Summers convince him to go soft on Wall Street. I am as happy as I can be that this finally appears to be changing, that the President now seems to be realizing that the big bankers need to have their economic and political power directly confronted, in policy and in rhetoric. Let the Republicans defend the big bankers, and explain to voters why they shouldn't be broken up or held accountable. If they want to filibuster on behalf of Wall Street, let them. This one issue can turn around our fortunes as a party if we focus on it and don't let ourselves get scared of taking the big boys on.
The Democratic party might and could get swept away in a tide of voters unhappy with the economy and the status quo. But if we stay calm and focused, if we have a stand-up strategy for fighting back against the Republicans and their big banker, big insurance allies, we can once again shock the pundits and have a pretty good election year.
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