I had an interesting discussion with Kirsten Gillibrand at the fundraiser where I confronted Pelosi. I said to Gillibrand that Congress is corrupt, and pointed out that the PAC donations to Democrats are obscene. She then denied that campaign contributions necessarily influence political choices, that there's no quid pro quo. Later on, we were chatting about retroactive immunity, and Gillibrand mentioned that the votes might not be there to stop it. My reply was that she should speak out publicly against the Bush Dogs if retroactive immunity were passed, since she acknowledged that there's a tremendous amount of internal frustration. Her response is that they live in districts that are conservative, and that's where our conversation ended as she rushed to another event. Gillibrand is a wonderful, warm, and kind person, and I found it hard not to be charmed by her. And yet, the logic is just inescapably wrong.
As David Sirota shows, it is in rural conservative districts where the subprime mortgage issue is hurting people the most. Markos noted this as well, pointing to this LA Times story.
The shift is not confined to one county in the mid-Atlantic region. Similar rumblings of discontent can be heard among GOP voters in fast-growing areas across the country that are being hit by the housing crunch, including parts of Florida and Nevada.
The obvious political upside, and the obvious moral case, is what makes the petty and legalistic argument to wait until we know more about the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill before dealing with the mortgage crisis from the Bush Dogs so galling. Many people are being crushed by the economic forces unleashed by our problematic legal structures that created these mortgage problems, even as the wealthy and powerful are bailed out.
If these members want to justify their behavior by the conservative nature of their district, then they should show us the popular movement in their districts for big banks. Otherwise, this list is their real rationale. The number is in bold that means that the Finance/Insurance/Real Estate industry was/is the biggest contributor to the member for that cycle:
I just got back from a fancy NYC fundraiser headlined by Nancy Pelosi for Kirsten Gillibrand to which I snagged a ticket. I wanted to ask Pelosi about Al Wynn, and I managed to get a response, though not a nice one.
The fundraiser was set on the 36th floor of a high rise in midtown overlooking a beautiful cityscape, and there were speeches by a number of Democrats thanking other Democrats and their various hosts. The gathering was full of New York finance and media types, people that are vaguely aware something is wrong but recognize the constraints of Congress, and want to make sure that Democrats stay in control. I sat next to a tall and regal older retired investment banker who says he gives money sometimes but 'isn't very political', is frustrated at the war, and thinks Bernanke's rate cut was smart. Before that conversation, I had talked to a beautiful and intelligent woman who works for the Oxygen network. An avid Obama supporter, she described herself as a moderate Democrat and hinted at some mild frustration that online quizzes told her she was actually liberal because she doesn't like liberal elites. It was that kind of scene.
Pelosi spoke in her usual nice but vaguely incoherent style, and she listed a litany of accomplishments of the new Democratic Congress, as well as promises to do things she can't possibly get done, like passing a good energy bill. She capped her talk with a strange apology/non-apology for not being able to do anything on the war, and promised to impose a timeline. Ironically, during the standing ovation, I got an email on my blackberry saying that $200B was going to be appropriated to Bush to continue the war in Iraq.
I got the sense that it was a well-heeled New York community of fundraising circuit people who likw Democrats and like these fundraisers, and there were lots of 'thank you's and standing ovations and appreciation. Pelosi was there, as was Carol Shea-Porter, Betty Sutton, Charlie Rangel, Richard Holbrooke, Geraldine Ferraro, Allyson Schwartz, and Kirsten Gillibrand, who was the host of the event.
I went up to Pelosi after her odd speech to ask her in person about her support for Al Wynn. I said 'I helped organize a fundraiser for Donna Edwards', and I was about to talk about retroactive immunity and ask her to take this as a sign of frustration, as well as to tell her how proud she makes me as the first female Speaker of the House. But the moment I mentioned Al Wynn, Pelosi's whole face abruptly changed, her smile melted away, and she got hostile and said in an icy voice 'I know about that.' She then turned away to talk to someone else. That's happened to me only one other time in politics, when I said to Jerry McNerney that I was a blogger.
I also managed to chat with Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand's a very smart and very lovely person, and she's aware that activists in her district are frustrated. And she's frustrated too in her own way, and explained that change is much slower than she'd like. And yet, I get the sense that there's very little that she can do about it, and that even if there were something she could do it's not clear that she would.
And I think I realized then that there seem to be two types of frustration, insider frustration and activist frustration. Many of the Democrats in Congress, Pelosi for instance, are insider frustrated. They know something is vaguely wrong somewhere, they know their activists supporters are unhappy, they are still raising lots of money, they know they are in power and feted at fancy breakfasts, and they are unwilling to consider new strategies that actually challenge the constraints they see as permanent.
And when someone else does, they get mean, their face turns cold, and they walk away.
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.
The nub of Rosenberg's comment is as follows:
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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.
