And state Senator Regina Thomas loses badly by a little over 50 points, 76.3% to 23.7%. Thomas, like Fallon, just didn't believe in running a modern campaign with polling, mail, and paid media. Thomas was well-known in Savannah, her district, but she was outspent by $800k to $20k or so, a factor of 40. And Barrow was endorsed by Obama.
The key is to make sure that candidates run modern campaigns and use all tools at their disposal. Neither Fallon nor Thomas did that. They both had the attitude that the public was with them, because they were reactive to the activists backing them and did not reach out beyond that circle. This is a fairly common myopic view from community activists or state politicians who launch into expensive Federal races.
Organizing and politics is very hard. It is useful to understand how tough it is to communicate well with a primary universe, even in a strong year for change.
Today is primary day in Georgia. I expect progressive state Senator and Better Democrat candidate Regina Thomas to be blown out by John Barrow for two reasons. One, Obama endorsed Barrow, a very significant setback for Thomas's chances. She was banking on a change message, and the primary messenger of change has endorsed her opponent. Two, she did not raise money and is not running a professionalized campaign. Her bet is that she and her family can work their personal networks and the churches to drive turnout in a low energy primary against John Barrow. While she has some reach, in any district there's a reason that mail firms exist and radio and TV are important. Barrow is sitting on more than a million dollars in cash, and has been running ads and doing voter contact. This was similar to Leonard Boswell and Ed Fallon; the campaign did not use a credible voter file, and so their numbers were way off.
That's not a statement on Fallon or Thomas; it is brave to run a primary campaign, and very people will help you. Donna Edwards couldn't get good consultants her first race in 2006. But it is something that needs to be fixed.
Even though she is unlikely to win, I'm a contributor to Thomas, just as I gave to Ed Fallon before her. One of my biggest regrets in 2006 was not supporting Marcy Winograd, who really gave Jane Harman a run for her money and changed the voting patterns in the district. There's almost no support for primary challengers anywhere in the country; we on the internet have the ability to change that equation, but we have a lot of learning to do. I remember three years, from 2004-2006, when the we had to put up with the argument that we couldn't win, until we defeated Lieberman in the primary. And then Lieberman won the general, and Al Wynn narrowly beat Donna Edwards, and I had to hear about how the Congress was composed of conservative Democrats.
And then Donna Edwards crushed Al Wynn, and FISA happened. That fight will be turned into an attempt to revise the Patriot Act in 2009. It's going to take a long time to turn this ship around, but we're doing it. The losses are as important, more important perhaps, than the wins, because that is how we learn. Next cycle, Obama's infrastructure is going to leave a lot of fresh campaign operatives unemployed, and a lot of new talent looking to run for office. There will be people who know how to run a voter file, know how to micro-target, understand field campaigns, and mail, and radio, and TV, and paid media online, and integration with the blogging world. They will have learned this on the Obama campaign, and will be able to deploy these skills elsewhere.
In fact, the energy is clearly there. This cycle, there were primary challenges against John Lewis, Ed Towns, Leonard Boswell, Carolyn Kilpatrick and Dennis Kucinich. Not all those challenges were from the left, but the jostling loose of the incumbent protection racket will in general help progressives. And so it's important to have test runs with people like Regina Thomas and Ed Fallon. Tonight, we'll learn a lot more about how far we have to go.
Ezra Klein notes that Obama's team of national security experts is fairly conservative. This isn't a shocker. And then there's this.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has taped a radio commercial on behalf of U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Savannah, who faces a July 15 primary challenge.
It's the first case of Obama involving himself in a local race in Georgia.
Details of when the ad will start airing and where it will be broadcast - the 12th District covers much of east Georgia, including portions of Augusta and Savannah - were not immediately available Wednesday.
But the Obama campaign made clear to my colleague Aaron Sheinin that it sees Barrow, a two-term Democrat, as an important ally. We've got calls into the Barrow campaign, but haven't heard from them yet.
Barrow is one of the most reactionary members of Congress, and he's facing a progressive primary challenger in Regina Thomas. I could go into Barrow's voting record, but you can just watch this ad he ran for his campaign.
70% of the primary voters in GA-12 are African-American. Barrow is white and has $1.3 million, Thomas is a progressive African-American and a state legislator, and has very little money. I don't know what kind of game Obama is playing, but using his remarkable brand to protect conservative Democrats is a move reminiscent of Nancy Pelosi endorsing Al Wynn. If Barrow loses, Obama has a progressive ally in Thomas. If Barrow wins, a conservative House Democrat owes Obama a big favor. It's a no-lose proposition for him.
As Obama consolidates his power within the party, note who he is bringing with him in terms of economic policy and foreign policy, and note who he is protecting politically.
It is up to us to create a progressive check on Obama, and we might just have our first opportunity.
Bush Dog John Barrow in Georgia is facing a primary challenge from state Senator Regina Thomas. Tondee's Tavern has more on the race, quoting Insider Advantage.
Two-term Democrat John Barrow who represents the 12th District (Augusta and Savannah) has drawn a primary challenge from African-American state Senator Regina Thomas. This district's population is 44.5% African American. In this year's Democratic presidential primary African Americans constituted 69.4% of the turnout. In the 2006 summer primary, 66.8 % of the Democratic voters were black. If two-thirds of the voters in this summer's Democratic primary are African American then if Thomas gets three-fourths of that vote, she wins. If she polls 80% of the black vote, she can win if blacks constitute 62.5% of the turnout.
Barrow will have money, Thomas will have grassroots support. He's an archreactionary, as you can see from this ad.
For a few days now, I've been getting google alerts on all 41 Bush Dogs, which means that I've been reading a lot of articles on awards ceremonies, immigrant-bashing by Democrats, and occasionally random attacks from Republicans (like this one on Zack Space) or announcements that Republicans are running for office against them.
What's missing is not only any progressive critique of any of these public officials, but any explanation of what they do in office. There's no press on PAC donations, letters they send on behalf of one party or another, or even votes on major pieces of legislation and what they mean. Now, Google alerts tends to miss smaller publications, and it also fails to include the talk radio circuit. Talk radio is an organized partisan media source, and smaller community papers tend not to have tremendous reach or the resources to cover politics systematically. Alternative papers with some reach exist, but only in major metro areas.
In fact, the only Bush Dog that consistently receives coverage that offers information about his record, as well as a progressive critique, is Dan Lipinski, the man running in a primary in a major Metropolitan area with a dense media ecosystem.
This creates an incredibly perverse incentive system. Bush Dog Democrats, in fact most Democrats, and in fact most politicians, simply cannot get credit for doing anything progressive because the press won't explain what they are up to. The only time they are noticed is if they bring pork back to the district, if they are attacked by the right, or if they are praised by the right. That's it. Is it any wonder that politicians are responsive only to the right in their decision-making, and have organized their institutional affiliations around conservative networks?
For the voters, this also presents a huge challenge. Being told that your Congressman, after 10 years of thinking he's a good Democrat, is suddenly a reactionary that votes for corporate interests and endless war, is incredibly jarring. The antiwar Lieberman voters, who were about 10-15% of the total voting universe and have flipped against Lieberman, just couldn't believe he was as right-wing as he turned out to be. And this is because the press simply wasn't reporting on his record until challenged by Lamont, and third party validators would not come in for Lamont. In essence, voters were choosing between a candidate they had voted for three times before and were told repeatedly over 18 years was a good Democrat by the press and other Democratic elites, and someone they didn't know making the first case against Lieberman they had ever heard.
I don't have any immediate solutions to this problem. We need a lot more primaries, if only because it looks like they are the only way to educate Democrats as to what their representatives are actually doing. But we also need to begin thinking about how to break stories into local media and move information over the internet to local constituents.
On the flip, I put a few samples of the press these Congressmen regularly get.
I've been kicking around the idea with Chris that we should raise the costs of bad decision-making on things like FISA, or when they fold to Republicans on the supplemental or (insert fight here).
It's not much to put up some google ads criticizing these members for their position on FISA. The way Google adwords works is that the ad will only show up for the search terms we select. That means that if we select 'Chris Carney', then people searching for Chris Carney (PA-04) will see an ad criticizing Chris Carney for his vote on FISA. And the people who are searching for Chris Carney are people who want to know more about Carney, like reporters, activists, and constituents. We can even geotarget his state, so only people in Pennsylvania see the ad.
It'll probably run around $100-150 per member for a six month period, which is the amount of time until the law must be reauthorized.
Would you put a bit of money and effort to go after these wayward Democrats? We can't replace all of them with progressive Democrats, but we can certainly annoy at least a few of them and raise the costs for voting against the Constitution.
Aside from money, this will take some work, since we'll have to get posts written about each member that did this. It's not worth doing unless you'd support it. So if you think this is a good idea, put it in the comments or send me an email at stoller at gmail.com. We need support in one of two ways. One, you could throw in a few bucks for this. Two, you could write up a problem Democrat, on this blog or on your own site, and we'd use that as the Google ad advertised link. Let me know if you'd be willing to do either.
Yesterday, I tested out the idea that what we are dealing with in Congress is a nominally Democratic majority but an effective Republican working majority. I mostly pinned this on the Blue Dog swing bloc and a conservative Senate, but there are other important factors at work. The conversation was really amazing, and punctured some holes in my piece.
The fact is, things have changed quite a bit. I'm friendly with a lawyer in a major executive branch agency, and she told me that the investigations going on by Congress are allowing her to do her job. Steve Novick, candidate for Senate in Oregon (who is really quite terrific), told me the same thing about friends he has in the Federal bureaucracy. Governance itself is getting better, or at least has stopped getting worse. So Blue Dogs are not Republicans.
There are other weaknesses in what I wrote, and the commenters pointed them out. In particular, this comment by Paul Rosenberg is I think accurate, as he argues that we are facing a conservative but not right-wing Blue Dog/DLC bloc combined with an anti-progressive elite consensus in the form of a hostile media establishment, a hostile think tank and academic structure, a hostile regulatory structure, a hostile set of cultural leaders and a set of old world economic incentives for elites.
I'm going to revise my earlier title, and argue that while we don't have a Republican working majority, we do have a conservative working majority to contend with. Most of the strategic problems I highlighted in the original piece remain, with the additional need to attack and/or subvert elite structures. The irony, or perhaps the not entirely-coincidental pattern of the Open Left, is that we're all at once going after the right-wing, their Blue Dog enablers, and the elite structures that love them.
I'm beginning to explore an idea that I'm not entirely sold on, which is that in the House, while Democrats are in control, there is effectively a Republican working majority. If true, this has a number of implications, both electoral and political. But first, I'll illustrate my thinking, which basically boils down to the fact that politically speaking, Bush is effectively using the surge model to govern in all policy arenas. Take tax policy.
President Bush said yesterday that he is considering a fresh plan to cut tax rates for U.S. corporations to make them more competitive around the world, an initiative that could further inflame a battle with the Democratic Congress over spending and taxes and help define the remainder of his tenure.
Advisers presented Bush with a series of ideas to restructure corporate taxes, possibly eliminating narrowly targeted breaks to pay for a broader, across-the-board rate cut. In an interview with a small group of journalists afterward, Bush said he was "inclined" to send a corporate tax package to Congress, although he expressed uncertainty about its political viability.
It's a simple pattern. When Bush loses ground politically, he simply changes his ask. It's the equivalent of negotiating with someone to sell them a bike for $50, and when they find a problem with the bike, changing the price to $75 and negotiating the final price to $65. It's bad faith negotiating, but it's working, because Democratic leaders aren't able to walk away from the table out of a mixture of fear, incompetence, and insufficient liberal voting strength. They always stupidly buy the bike at the higher price.
The FISA bill debacle is a good example. I've been in email contact with a variety of sources inside the House, and there's certainly tremendous bitterness at what happened with FISA, as well as a recognition that the 'stand up and cave' rhetoric strategy is now a clear pattern for this Congress. Steny Hoyer is the weak link in the House leadership, and though I can't read tea leaves that well, I think that Blue Dogs are essentially threatening a revolt against Pelosi if she tries to impose real discipline. In addition, the Senate is making it nearly impossible for her to stand up for liberalism. With a reactionary Senate that has about 10 neoconservative Democrats and a neoconservative President, liberals cannot govern except on the most clear-cut and non-controversial issues, like poor children's health care (which itself might be vetoed).
So while we may have thought we gained a check on Bush in 2006, we actually didn't. What we gained was a more progressive Democratic Party, but we started from such a low base that the Republicans essentially can still govern. Now, holding the majority is nice for subpoena power, and that matters. But when you combine a conservative Senate, a Blue Dog swing block, and an extreme White House, you may have a situation similar to the Boll Weevil Democrats in the early 1980s and their working relationship with Reagan. I'm not sure how well the analogy holds up since I've never studied that period in history, but regardless, Bush has realized that his conservative governing mandate is still intact.
In 2006, the midterms registered a clear antiwar message, but instead of listening, Bush surged troops, and politically speaking, it worked. No one stopped him. Bush, weaker than he's ever been as President in terms of popular approval and credibility, is governing this country through a mix of veto threats, bad faith negotiating tactics via surrogates like Mike McConnell and David Patraeus, and Blue Dogs. This is true with Bush's rampant lawbreaking and authoritarian criminal impulses. No one stops him. I'm no longer content to think that Blue Dogs are acting out of fear of being criticized, at this point I am going to take the Heath Shuler's at their word and recognize them as right-wingers.
To be clear, there's reason for optimism, as this is a temporary situation and we've made enormous progress since 2002. There are more self-identified liberals today than there have been since 1972, independents are swinging far to the left, and the base Democratic vote is making the difference in elections. The Democratic Party of 2007 is much more progressive than that of 2002, and at the rate we're gaining reliable liberal votes (10/year), there will be an unbreakable progressive House majority by 2012. The overall intellectual environment, the shattering of the right-wing careerist foreign policy community, the increasing efficiency of liberal advocacy groups, the increased participation of progressive economy sectors in the political sector, and the liberalization of the White House and Senate, can also have significant effects. Our politicians are obviously behind the curve, with Clinton quasi-supporting the surge and Obama in his most recent Iowa ad doesn't call himself a Democrat. But this is temporary.
I don't have a good strategy on how to 'fix' the Senate, but to get to a progressive working majority in the House, we need to pick up 41 more reliable votes, either by beating Republicans or by converting or beating Blue Dog Democrats. If we can get to an uncompromising progressive majority in the House, then the Senate will be dragged along through conference committees and a Democratic White House. In the Senate, we'll need 16 for a clear progressive majority, but because of institutional dynamics we'll probably need less to have a working majority.
There are several paths to making this happen in the House.
Pick Up Safe Seats Progressives: This is what we are trying to do in Massachusetts 5th, where a reactionary Niki Tsongas is facing four other candidates, including progressive Jamie Eldridge. There's also a primary in TN-09, Harold Ford's old haunt.
Convert Reactionary Democrats: Both Al Wynn and Ellen Tauscher are good examples of how this can be done, and this is continuing against Daniel Lipinski, Al Wynn, and Henry Cuellar.
Beat Republicans: In 2006, Democrats picked up 30 seats in the House. Out of those pickups, 11 voted for the FISA expansion, and 19 didn't.
Convert Republicans: I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq is trying to crack Republicans, but this is very very difficult. Republicans have run right-wing primary challenges against dissidents for 30 years, since 1978. Countering that is extremely tough, though recent moves by the Mainstream Partnership could have effects.
If there is a Republican working majority, with the Blue Dogs as the swing group, that should have one very significant effect on our strategy. In a House with a minority role for Democrats, electing a Blue Dog Democrat is far superior than electing a Republican. But in a majority Democratic House where conservatives have a governing working majority, electing a Blue Dog Democrat is little different than electing a Republican when it comes to public policy choices. Electing a Blue Dog is not going to help us restore out Constitutional fabric, hold these people accountable, deal with global warming, energy, health care, or restore a progressive tax code. More significantly, more Blue Dogs aren't going to give someone like Pelosi the leverage she needs to do any of these things.
What this means is clear. No longer should we as progressives particularly care whether a Democrat is in a swing district or Republican district when considering how to evaluate them. It is more important to elect progressives and destroy the power of Blue Dogs than to increase our partisan advantage in the House, though these goals are complements and not substitutes. The Colorado example, of turning a libertarian-esque red state into a Blue Dog state at the behest of wealthy billionaires, is not something to emulate. Rather, we should look at the New Hampshire example, which has turned a libertarian-esque red state into a deep blue progressive libertarian area.
There's one other important rhetorical consequence here. When Blue Dogs vote with Bush, they are not 'betraying' us any more than Republicans are when they vote with Bush. Blue Dogs just don't agree with us. And when they vote to expand wiretapping or to cut taxes for the wealthy or to support endless war, they are acting like Blue Dogs, and Blue Dogs support President Bush and the conservative movement.
