Democratic Party missing: Feared dead

Greed · Nov 6, 2010

Obama Weekly Address: Priorities on Taxes

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Greed · Nov 10, 2010

Jim Webb: Why Reagan Dems Still Matter

Jim Webb: Why Reagan Dems Still Matter
By David Paul Kuhn
November 8, 2010

Jim Webb went to the White House last September. The Virginia senator was meeting with the president to discuss Guantanamo detainees. The conversation soon shifted to healthcare. "I told him this was going to be a disaster," Webb recalls. "The president believed it was all going to work out."

Democratic leaders broadly believed it was all going to work out. The stimulus, healthcare, cap and trade. Americans were to come around to the left side.

We're talking about why voters didn't come around. Webb is weighing my report the morning after the election: Democrats won the smallest share of white voters in any congressional election since World War II.

"I've been warning them," Webb says, sighing, resting his chin on his hand. "I've been having discussions with our leadership ever since I've been up here. I decided to run as a Democrat because I happen to strongly believe in Jacksonian democracy. There needs to be one party that very clearly represents the interests of working people ... I'm very concerned about the transactional nature of the Democratic Party. Its evolved too strongly into interest groups rather than representing working people, including small business people."

This is a decades-old rebuke, one uttered today by moderate Democrats like Webb. The balkanized coalition never came to recognize the vice of its virtues. Diverse interests sometimes severed it from the majority's interests. That fissure moved political tectonics by the 1980s. And we came to know these migrating voters by the president who won their favor.

Webb is a Reagan Democrat who returned home. He was Ronald Reagan's Navy secretary. Almost two decades later, he was the Democrat who scrapped out a win in Virginia.

Webb seems less at home today. He identifies himself as a Democrat. But he has few Democratic leaders to identify with. He won't say this. His criticism is discernibly girdled. He begins to tell a story about a conversation with a Democratic leader and pulls back. "I don't want to talk about that," he mutters. "I have had my discussions. I've kept them inside the house. I did not want to have them affect this election, quite frankly. I didn't want to position myself in the media as a critic of the administration."

But criticism is in order. Democrats' suffered historical losses from Congress to the state houses last week. It's an apt moment for Webb to step in. He is an atypical politician. Politics is not his alpha or omega. He's authored more than half a dozen books, succeeded as a screenwriter and won an Emmy for his coverage of the U.S. Marines in Beirut. This success outside politics empowers him to be less political. Yet what suits Webb to criticism is not that. It's the political sociology he embodies.

Webb represents an endangered species. It's more than his red state Democratic stature, although that would be reason enough. The moderate House Democratic coalition lost more than half its lawmakers last week. But that Blue Dog set is still more common than Webb.

Webb's one of the last FDR Democrats. An economic populist. A national security hawk. His Democratic politics are less concerned with social groups than social equality (of opportunity, not outcome). His values were predominant in the Democrat Party from FDR to JFK, the period in the twentieth century when Democrats were also dominant.

Webb walks to this older Democratic beat. Today's Democrats' are more McGovern than JFK. (Could a John Kennedy win the Democratic nomination today?)

Democrats looked like McGovern on Tuesday. It was that bad historically, for congressional elections. The election's passage has liberated Webb (a little). He's privately raised issues throughout Barack Obama's tenure. Some frustration is tactical. He told Rahm Emanuel last June that the president should provide a "very specific format" for his vision of healthcare reform. It would have offset the, in Webb's words, "complex amorphous leviathan that bubbled up out of five committees."

"A lot of people in this country, when they look up here, they want to see leadership. They want to see credibility. And they are not always the same thing," Webb says. "The healthcare issue really took away a lot of the credibility of the new leadership--Obama particularly--the Reid-Pelosi-Obama trio."

Webb swallowed the bitter pill in the end. He voted for the final healthcare package. He quickly notes that he's open to improving the legislation. These issues will dog Webb two years from now, when his term ends.

But is Webb running again?

"Still sorting that out," he replies. "I'm not saying I'm not."

That is not a rousing assurance that he is, however. And it would be a shame for Democrats if he does not.

"In his [Webb's] book "Born Fighting" you see that he understands what a lot of Democrats don't," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "That is the white working class, long time Americans who never made it, who lost jobs. It's really a problem that has existed since the 1960s. Webb is also exactly the kind of Democrat who ought to be showcased and given more visibility and authority."

There are aspects of Webb that liberals' embrace. Many relished his critique of George W. Bush over the war in Iraq. But that critique could never have succeeded without the fight in this man. It takes a hawk to politically challenge a hawk.

Webb is a hawk in the traditionally conservative sense. He is adverse to "adventurism." And that evokes the wider rub for Webb. The antiwar bloc championed Webb's Iraq fight. But that same bloc, more broadly, has driven hawks like Webb from this dovish, post-Vietnam, Democratic Party. Webb was pushed away himself, after his decorated Vietnam service.

Liberals also admire the populist Webb. The same cannot be said for the Democratic establishment. Webb has pushed for a onetime windfall profits tax on Wall Street's record bonuses. He talks about the "unusual circumstances of the bailout," that the bonuses wouldn't be there without the bailout.

"I couldn't even get a vote," Webb says. "And it wasn't because of the Republicans. I mean they obviously weren't going to vote for it. But I got so much froth from Democrats saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fundraising.

"People look up say, what's the difference between these two parties? Neither of them is really going to take on Wall Street. If they don't have the guts to take them on, and they've got all these other programs that exclude me, well to hell with them. I'm going to vote for the other people who can at least satisfy me on other issues, like abortion. Screw you guys. I understand that mindset."

Liberals don't always favor his tendency to represent that mindset. Earlier this year, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Webb argued that diversity programs are wrongly discriminating against working class whites. He supported abolishing the programs or narrowly limiting them to their historic original intent, to mend the "badges of slavery" forced on blacks.

"In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations," Webb wrote.

"I needed to write that just so people were sure I still believed it," he says today.

Many Democrats were displeased he wrote that. "Things are tough enough without having people you thought were friends do things like this," said Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia's first black governor, at the time.

But who will raise the hard issues other than friends? This is the same Webb who takes on prison reform, questioning why this country has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's an issue important to minority groups. It's also not politically expedient.

Yet liberals often seem to view Webb's breed of Democrat more like frenemies. There was Glenn Greenwald, typical among many liberal writers the morning after the election, explaining why he viewed "last night's Blue Dog losses with happiness." This is par for partisan flanks. We saw it on the right this year, when tea party activists savored the defeat of Delaware moderate Republican Mike Castle, though it cost Republicans a critical Senate seat.

But Democrats' problem remains their proximity to their flank. Last week, independents continued their turn against Democrats since 2008. The results were foreseeable. Independents skepticism of big government has long placed them nearer to Republicans than Democrats. These matters led the majority of independents to tell Gallup pollsters last summer that Democrats are "too liberal."

This independent problem returns Democrats to their white problem. Most non-aligned voters are white. White males constitute the plurality of independents. These are the Reagan Democrats. Webb does not see himself as their spokesman. But he is one of the few Democrats able to speak as one of them.

David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma. He can be reached at david@realclearpolitics.com and his writing followed via RSS.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar...webb_why_reagan_dems_still_matter_107875.html

Greed · Nov 26, 2013

Democrats Fear Obamacare Will Cost Them The Senate

Democrats Fear Obamacare Will Cost Them The Senate
By Josh Kraushaar | National Journal
8 hrs ago

Last week, President Obama's pollster Joel Benenson sent a memo to congressional Democrats encouraging them to refocus attention on the economy and ignore the health care chaos that has consumed the administration for the last two months. The three-page set of talking points argued that the media's relentless focus on the Obamacare website is a "distraction" from more important work on the minds of voters.

But for Senate Democrats who backed the unpopular legislation, avoiding the subject isn't so easy. Republicans are armed with reams of polling data showing how the health care law could overturn the Democrats' majority, and are already hitting vulnerable Democrats on the subject. Indeed, Democrats who voted for the law face a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't crisis: flip-flop on legislation they actively embraced or tie themselves to an increasingly unpopular law that could doom their reelection prospects.

For now, as the White House keeps hope alive that the health care website will be mostly functional by the end of the week, Democrats are holding out hope their political fortunes will improve. Democratic operatives argue that voters are looking for constructive solutions over repealing the law—a proposition backed up by polling that shows repeal still hasn't reached majority support, even with voter frustrations growing. Some of the most vulnerable senators, like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska, have proposed their own fixes to the legislation designed to inoculate them from blowback with their conservative constituencies back home. Even Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, a loyal ally of the president's on health care, suggested he could support a delay in the individual mandate if the website still isn't working in short order by the end of November.

They're all echoing the line Democratic campaign officials are privately urging their members to take: stress the promised benefits, offer constructive criticism, and hope their constituents are patient enough to sustain them through the rocky rollout. Some may even call for more aggressive oversight of the law's implementation. But it's an open question whether that political line will be sustainable if the health care exchange website is still dysfunctional heading into next year, and an older, sicker insurance pool could mean a "death spiral" of ballooning premiums for 2015. In a telling sign of the White House's longer-term political fears, the administration delayed the second round of open enrollment for one month—to occur right after the 2014 midterms.

"There's only so much muddying up you can do on an issue as important as this," said Tom Bowen, former political adviser to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "People elected politicians who disagree with them as long as they know where they stand. You have to have some flexibility, but trying to sort of shade who you are—that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence."

For Democrats, the politics of the health care law are creating a death spiral of their own. For the White House to protect its signature initiative, it needs to maintain a Democratic Senate majority past 2015. But to do so, Majority Leader Harry Reid needs to insulate vulnerable battleground-state Democrats, who are all too eager to propose their own fixes to the law that may be politically satisfying, but could undermine the fundamentals of the law.
Race-by-race polling conducted over the last month has painted a grim picture of the difficult environment Senate Democrats are facing next year. In Louisiana, a new state survey showed Landrieu's approval rating is now underwater; she tallied only 41 percent of the vote against her GOP opposition. In Arkansas, where advertising on the health care law began early, Sen. Mark Pryor's approval sank to 33 percent, a drop of 18 points since last year. A new Quinnipiac survey showed Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, who looked like a lock for reelection last month, in a dead heat against little-known GOP opponents. Even a Democratic automated poll from Public Policy Polling showed Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina running neck-and-neck against Republican opposition, with her job disapproval spiking over the last two months. These are the types of numbers that wave elections are made of.

The big picture isn't any better: The president's approval rating, which historically correlates with his party's midterm performance, has dipped below 40 percent in several national surveys. Democrats saw their nine-point lead on the generic ballot in the Quinnipiac survey evaporate in a month, and a CNN/ORC poll released today shows Republicans now holding a two-point lead.

"You want to prevent your race from being about Obamacare. If you enable your race to be about Obamacare, you're making a mistake," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who's working for Landrieu. "You need to explain what you're trying to fix, and you better be trying to fix something. If there's nothing you want to fix, there's something wrong with you. At this point, it's hard to defend the benefits, but you can say we're not going back to the evils of the old system."

As consolation, Democratic operatives point to the high African-American population in several Republican-friendly battleground states, like Louisiana and North Carolina, as critical to their reelection prospects. Just as the Obama campaign micro-targeted a pro-Obamacare message to Hispanic supporters to narrowly win Florida in 2012, some Democratic strategists are encouraging members to tailor their messages on health care to African-Americans, the most reliable pro-Obama constituency.

"Each of the senators [up in 2014] has a decision to make about where Obamacare could potentially energize their voters and communicate to them something that's important," said Bowen. "So for Hagan, getting out there, needing the African-American community to show up at the polls, you need to let these voters know you're on their side."

But despite the Democrats' proven mastery of campaign logistics, they face limitations if public opinion remains against them. For one, minority turnout is usually low in midterm elections, and would have to be near presidential-year levels to compensate for the party's historically low standing with white Southern voters. Landrieu is likely to face a runoff election, against a single Republican challenger in December—a month in which turnout is usually anemic among minorities. Hagan faces the challenge of winning loyal support from Democrats as an obscure freshman senator without a high profile in Washington.

Indeed, there's a growing sense of fatalism among Democrats. Even as strategists are advising their clients on how to best talk about health care, they badly want to change the subject and hope that the problems go away. On that point, the White House and congressional Democrats are on the same page.

"If the election were held today, Republicans would probably win back the majority," said one longtime Democratic operative tracking internal Senate polling. "But we know for sure the election would not be held today."

http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-fear-obamacare-cost-them-senate-061334117--politics.html

thoughtone · Nov 26, 2013

Re: Democrats Fear Obamacare Will Cost Them The Senate

Greed said:
Democrats Fear Obamacare Will Cost Them The Senate
By Josh Kraushaar | National Journal
8 hrs ago

http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-fear-obamacare-cost-them-senate-061334117--politics.html

I like how you take a repost originally from a right wing nut source, the National Journal and post it as some sort of mass Obamacare fear mongering consensus.

Better you post comments from Sarah Palin on Faux Snooze.

Greed · Jun 24, 2014

Rich Democrats go from challenging the status quo to embracing it

Rich Democrats go from challenging the status quo to embracing it
By Matt Bai
June 19, 2014 6:01 AM

So you're a liberal member of the 1 percent, and you've decided to wrest control of the Democratic agenda from change-averse insiders. You want to free the capital from the grip of powerful interest groups. You want to inspire a new set of policies to help America meet the challenges of a fast-transforming economy. Where do you turn for leadership and innovation?

To the teachers union, of course!

At least that's how it seems to have played out at the Democracy Alliance, the group of superrich Democrats who have funneled more than half a billion dollars into liberal groups over the past decade. Earlier this month, the alliance announced that John Stocks, executive director of the National Education Association, would become the chairman of its board.

The move went largely unnoticed by the Washington media and even most Democrats, who could think of nothing at that moment other than the Memoir That Ate Everything in Its Path. But it tells you something — more than Hillary Clinton's book does, certainly — about the direction of Democratic politics right now.

To understand why this decision is such a stunner, you have to understand the vision that guided the formation of the Democracy Alliance a decade ago. I was present at the creation, at least figuratively; I wrote the first magazine piece about the origins of the group and later devoted much of a book to following it.

The alliance grew out of a PowerPoint slideshow assembled by Rob Stein, a longtime Democratic operative, who diagramed what Clinton had famously called the "vast right-wing conspiracy." He argued that a handful of rich, conservative families had funded a network of vibrant think tanks and a "message machine" to spread their ideas.

The thinking behind the Democracy Alliance was to create a venture capital fund for new progressive groups. (The Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America were two of the charter recipients.) A central tenet of the alliance in those days was that it wanted nothing to do with the Democratic Party or elections, per se. The alliance was about creating a bolder alternative to the status quo.

It didn't take long, though, for the alliance to deviate from that course. The Silicon Valley and Wall Street contributors who were most focused on modernization started to drift away, exhausted by the endless conference calls and the knee-jerk resistance to any rethinking of the liberal agenda. The remaining "partners," as the alliance calls them, were overwhelmingly aging boomers who clung to 1960s orthodoxies.

Eventually, the alliance became, essentially, a convener and funder of the party establishment. It welcomed several big unions to the table and took up side collections for candidates. And now it's formalized that role by electing Stocks as its chairman, replacing Rob McKay, heir to the Taco Bell fortune.

To be clear, the problem here has nothing to do with Stocks personally, whom I've never met, and who has been described to me as a thoughtful and open-minded guy. It also has nothing to do with teachers generally, many of whom are nothing short of heroic, and who are struggling to adapt to the turmoil in their industry, same as the rest of us.

But if you were going to sit down and make a list of political powerhouses that have been intransigent and blindly doctrinaire in the face of change, you'd have a hard time finding a better example than the country's largest teachers union. (I guess you could point to the National Rifle Association, if that's really the kind of company you want to keep.) Just last week, a California judge, in ruling against the union, condemned its age-old protections of incompetent teachers, saying the union's position not only was unconstitutional but also "shocks the conscience."

Don't just listen to the judge on this, though. Heed the words of Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based venture capitalist and school reform advocate, who wrote in a 2012 email that subsequently became public: "It is impossible to escape the painful reality that we Democrats are now on the wrong side of every education reform issue. … There can be no doubt in any reasonable person's mind that the leadership of our party and most of its elected members are stooges for the teachers union, the ring leaders in all this nonsense."

As it happens, Hanauer is now a board member of the Democracy Alliance. When I called him last week, Hanauer told me Stocks is a good friend of his, even if they disagree on some issues, and that he's just fine with Stocks as chairman. "In the end, the only thing that matters for the Democracy Alliance is how the partners feel about its direction and its leadership," Hanauer said. "It doesn't matter what you think, with all due respect."

But of course that's where Hanauer is wrong; the Democracy Alliance does not exist in a vacuum. It's viewed by groups in Washington as the main bank for big money on the left, and the signal it sends has a profound effect now on what those groups are willing to say and do.

What kind of signal is the alliance sending by handing leadership to the teachers union? There is no area of policy more important to our economic success than public education, period. And in no area has the Obama administration shown more courage or more willingness to lead. Its Race to the Top program sped momentum toward charter schools and rewarding strong teachers.

What liberal group in Washington that relies on alliance funding is going to champion those kinds of reforms now? What Democratic candidate in the 2016 primaries — just humor me for the moment and assume that there will be primaries and multiple candidates running in them — will vow to carry on Obama's legacy if the party's organized millionaires are standing squarely behind the union that opposes it?

What does Stocks' elevation say to the left, more broadly, about any reform movement in Democratic politics? If you're a group or a national candidate who supports free trade agreements, or who wants to restructure entitlement programs as the boomers retire, are you really going to say any of that and then try to raise money from the Democracy Alliance?

The message is: There is no distance between the party's biggest funders and its 20th-century labor movement. If you don't get that, don't come through the door.

Maybe that's how it always was and was always going to be. But that's not how the Democracy Alliance started, and it doesn't bode well for a party whose last generation still refuses to step aside.

"I do think the D.A. is obviously evolving in a way that is not in the spirit of what we intended," says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the think tank NDN (formerly the New Democrat Network), who helped start the alliance. Like the centrist think tank Third Way, NDN was later cut off from funding. "I envisioned an organization that was interested not just in the big actors in the party or in playing it safe," he says, "but in taking some risks."

The only thing the Democracy Alliance risks, as it stands now, is becoming just another bulwark of the status quo.

http://news.yahoo.com/rich-democrat...the-status-quo-to-embracing-it-005034373.html

QueEx · Jul 1, 2014

Re: Rich Democrats go from challenging the status quo to embracing it

thoughtone · Nov 6, 2014

source: The Daily Banter

Democrats Ran Away From Obama and It Cost Them Dearly On Election Day

The 2014 midterm election was never going to be kind to Democrats, with a map that favored Republicans to pick up at least some seats in the Senate, and a 2010 redistricting spree that practically guarantees a GOP majority in the House for, well, ever. But with an avalanche of good news about health care and the economy, and a Death Star-sized advantage on the issue of immigration reform, Democrats rolled up their sleeves and ran as hard away from that as they could. So, how’d that work out for them?

Of the many high-and-lowlights of Election Day 2014, I think this special Democrat’s Cut of Joni Ernst’s victory speech in Iowa sums it up best. In a six-minute televised speech, Ernst spent a good, solid minute laughing a weird, Fire Marshall Bill laugh at fuck-knows-what, but I like to think it was at the Democrats’ genius strategy:

<iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VH8AObAFfMc" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe>

Things really could not possibly have gone worse for the Democrats. When the dust settles, Republicans will probably hold 54 Senate seats, if Democrat Mark Warner (D-Va.) can hold off a surprise challenge by Ed Gillespie, and may also flip Angus King (I-Maine). If Warner falls, then there could be a 56-44 Republican majority. In the House, Republicans look to pick up 25 seats, and in the states, Democrats lost in solidly blue states like Maryland and Illinois.

It doesn’t look like walking around saying “Barack who?“ and convincing President Obama to break his promise on immigration did Democrats any good at all. But the exit polls from Tuesday’s election strongly suggest that those moves did manage to hurt Democrats in states they desperately needed to carry (well, all of them). While Republicans gained with there bread-and-butter, white voters, Democrats lost support from 2012 among black voters (-4%), Hispanic voters (-7%), unmarried women (-7%), and unmarried men (-6%). As CNN’s last pre-election poll indicted, Obama was not a factor for 45% of voters, while another 19% said their vote was cast in support of the president. Only 33% said they cast their vote in opposition to the president. That number is consistent with every poll ever of Republican opposition to Obama.

So, while Democrats lost ground in their share of every group that Obama carried, preliminary exit polling indicates that turnout among these groups, as a share of the electorate, was mostly flat. That means not only did Democrats lose decent chunks of their voters, they also failed to turn out significantly greater numbers of them. On the Republican side, however, President Obama’s decision to delay immigration action until after the midterms doesn’t seem to have quelled nti-immigration turnout at all. The most important issue to voters was the economy, where Democrats were basically tied with Republicans, but to the 14% of voters to whom immigration was most important, 73% of them voted Republican.

Despite all of this, the conventional wisdom now is that this election was a repudiation of President Obama and his policies, neither of which any of these losers ran on. Policies like health care, which, according to the exit polls, Democrats carried a 59%-39% advantage over Republicans on among voters who thought it was the most important issues. Issues like the minimum wage, which passed in all five states where it was on the ballot, including 69%-31% in Alaska. Personhood lost by a mile in Colorado, while a measure requiring coverage for birth control passed by 32 points in Illinois. Democrats ran candidates who insulted farmers in Iowa and called a U.S. combat veteran “entitled,” but it was Obama who screwed them.

Unfortunately, Democrats have a habit of listening to consultants and pundits, rather than facts, so we can look forward to significant numbers of them drawing the lesson that they didn’t run away from Obama hard enough. Joni Ernst may not have laughed best last night, but she and her party surely haven’t laughed their last.

thoughtone · Nov 6, 2014

source: Mediaite

MSNBC Guest: Black Voters Were ‘Offended’ by Dems Running from Obama

One reason being thrown out today for crushing Democratic losses in the midterms was the fact that so many candidates ran from Obama. And on Al Sharpton‘s MSNBC show today, guest Tara Dowdell said that black voters in particular were “offended” by Democrats running away from the president.

This particular argument was thrown out on MSNBC earlier today, when Joy Reid said that not standing with Obama looks bad to the Democratic base. But Dowdell took it one step further, telling Sharpton, “If you talk to anyone on the street… they will tell you they were offended, and particularly black Americans were offended by the fact that these candidates ran from the president.”

She admitted that Democrats really fell short when it came to a unified message about economic successes. Meanwhile, some Democrats are actually blaming Obama himself for being a poor messenger for those successes.

Watch the video below, via MSNBC:

<iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CVpE3ZVUM2M" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe>

Greed · Nov 28, 2014

Southern Democrats urge a return to party basics

Southern Democrats urge a return to party basics
Associated Press
By BILL BARROW 5 hours ago

ATLANTA (AP) — Southern Democrats are joining others in the party who say that a return to advocating to lift people out of economic hardship and emphasizing spending on education and public works will re-energize black voters and attract whites as well.

"It's time to draw a line in the sand and not surrender our brand," Rickey Cole, the party chairman in Mississippi, said. He believes candidates have distanced themselves from the past half-century of Democratic principles.

"We don't need a New Coke formula," Cole said. "The problem is we've been out there trying to peddle Tab and RC Cola."

Cole and other Southern Democrats acknowledge divisions with prominent populists such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Yet they see merit in pushing stronger voting rights laws, tighter bank regulation, labor-friendly policies such as a higher minimum wage and other familiar party themes.

Democratic politics have become a tough sell in the conservative South. A major challenge in the region is finding candidates who can win high-profile races now that Republicans, who scored well in midterm elections earlier this month, dominate the leadership in state legislatures and across statewide offices.

Georgia Democrats thought legacy candidates were the answer. But Senate hopeful Michelle Nunn, former Sen. Sam Nunn's daughter, and gubernatorial challenger Jason Carter, former President Jimmy Carter's grandson, each fell short by about 8 percentage points despite well-funded campaigns and ambitious voter-registration drives.

Arkansas Democrats lost an open governor's seat and two-term Sen. Mark Pryor. Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu led an eight-candidate primary but faces steep odds in a Dec. 6 runoff. Democrats' closest statewide loss in the South was North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan's 1.7 percentage point margin of defeat.

Exit polling suggests Democrats did not get the black turnout they needed and lost badly among whites. Nunn and Carter got fewer than 1 in 4 white votes, while Pryor took 31 percent and Landrieu 18 percent.

Should Landrieu lose, Democrats will be left without a single governor, U.S. senator or legislative chamber under their control from the Carolinas westward to Texas.

J.P. Morrell, a state senator from New Orleans, faulted a muddled message that began with candidates avoiding President Barack Obama. "You have to articulate why the economic policies we advocate as Democrats actually benefit people on the ground," Morrell said.

In Georgia, Nunn supported a minimum-wage increase and gender-pay equity, but her television ads focused on ending partisan rancor. Carter mostly accused Republican Gov. Nathan Deal of shortchanging public education. Nunn and Carter supported Medicaid expansion under Obama's health overhaul, but neither emphasized that argument in television advertising.

"No real economic message got through," said Vincent Fort, a state senator from Atlanta.

Georgia's Democratic chairman, DuBose Porter, defended Carter and Nunn as "world-class candidates" who can run again. He said Democrats "proved Georgia can be competitive in 2016," but he cautioned against looking for a nominee other than Clinton. "She puts us in play," he said.

In an interview, Carter focused more on tactics than on broad messaging, saying the party must register minority voters and continue outreach to whites. "If 120,000 people change their mind in this election, it comes out differently," he said. "But it takes a lot of time to build those relationships. ... You can't expect it to happen in one year."

Gary Pearce, a Democratic strategist and commentator in North Carolina, said Hagan's margin in a GOP wave offers hope for 2016, when statewide executive offices will be on the ballot. Fresh arguments, he said, "will have to come from younger Democrats in the cities." He pointed to several young Democratic candidates who won county commission seats in Wake County, home to Raleigh.

Cole, the Mississippi chairman, acknowledged that any new approach won't close the party's gap in the South on abortion, same-sex marriage and guns, and said Democrats intensify that cultural disconnect with "identity politics."

While the party's positions on gay rights, minority voting access, women's rights and immigration are not wrong, Cole said, "those people who don't see themselves in those groups say, 'What have the Democrats got for me?'"

Unapologetic populism, he said, would "explain better that the Democratic Party is for justice and opportunity — with no qualifiers — for everyone."

http://news.yahoo.com/southern-democrats-urge-return-party-basics-080153748--election.html

Greed · Dec 10, 2014

Liberals punch back at Dem criticism of ObamaCare

Liberals punch back at Dem criticism of ObamaCare
By Mike Lillis
12/07/14 10:00 AM EST

Liberals on and off Capitol Hill are defending President Obama's healthcare law from the friendly fire of fellow Democrats.

The liberals say the criticisms from Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are not only flat wrong, but also pointless coming four years after the law’s passage.

"I disagree with both of them," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who helped usher the bill into law as then-chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "I disagree with what they said, and I can't quite see a lot of value in it."

Schumer and Harkin – both of whom played an outsized role in crafting the legislation in 2009 and 2010 – have raised eyebrows in recent weeks by second-guessing the wisdom of their work.

Schumer said the Democrats' timing was poor, arguing that party leaders should have used the momentum coming out of the Democrats' 2008 election sweep to focus on bread-and-butter economic issues.

“After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus,” Schumer, the Senate's third-ranking Democrat, said in a Nov. 25 speech at the National Press Club. “Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs – not for changes in their healthcare."

Harkin took those jabs a step further this week, arguing that the policy itself is flawed because Democrats didn't fight hard enough for a public insurance option or a single-payer system, like that underlying Medicare.

“We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly, and we didn’t do it,” Harkin, the chairman of the Senate health committee, told The Hill. “So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.

“What we did is we muddled through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively,” he added.

Waxman fired back, saying the ObamaCare law was the best the Democrats could do given the resistance from centrist Senate Democrats and outright opposition from Republicans.

"What Sen. Harkin would have liked might have been better, but it couldn't have passed," Waxman said. "[And] I disagree with Sen. Schumer [in] that this was a very important accomplishment by this administration, and I think the Democrats and Sen. Schumer ought to be proud of it."

Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, delivered a similar message, arguing that, while there are plenty of improvements that could be made to the law, the critics should focus their attention on getting those things done instead of questioning the value of the law as it stands.

"There are things that can make the bill better, more accessible and certainly more affordable," Grijalva said. "But in terms of saying we should have done something else, I think it's kind of late in the process."

Grijalva said he agreed that Democrats should have pushed harder to lower the Medicare eligibility age and promote a public option "that would make the competitive situation on the exchanges much more to the benefit of taxpayers and individuals."

"[But] the only second-guessing that we can do now is to try to provide some fixes to those areas," he said.

Top House Democratic leaders also took steps to defend the Affordable Care Act this week. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, while not specifically mentioning the Democratic criticisms from across the Capitol, used her weekly press conference to trumpet what she said are the successes of the law.

Citing recently released administration figures, the California Democrat noted that the number of hospital-acquired conditions dropped by 1.3 million cases in 2013 – "an important part of the legislation," she said – while national healthcare spending grew by 3.6 percent in the same year, "the lowest annual increase since the statistics began to be collected in 1960."

"So in terms of quality of care, in terms of cost to the individual and to the federal government, the news is very good," she said.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the minority whip, piled on, with his office releasing a statement Friday arguing that "millions of Americans" have been helped by the law.

"They are benefitting from the elimination of lifetime limits on coverage, protections for those with pre-existing conditions, measures that ban discrimination against women, and other critical patient protections," the statement said.

Paul Krugman, the liberal economist and New York Times columnist, dedicated Friday's op-ed to dissecting Schumer's critique, characterizing it as "deeply wrongheaded."

"[E]conomic management is about substance, not theater. Having the president walk around muttering 'I’m focused on the economy' wouldn’t have accomplished anything," Krugman wrote. "And I’ve never seen any plausible explanation of how abandoning health reform would have made any difference at all to the political possibilities for economic policy."

Republicans, who voted unanimously against the healthcare law in 2010 and have tried repeatedly to undo it since then, have pounced on the criticisms from Schumer and Harkin. They see the comments from some of the law's chief architects as further evidence that ObamaCare is unworkable and needs to be repealed.

"Obamacare has been a disaster for the Democrats," Jennifer Rubin, the conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wrote of Schumer's remarks. "Indeed it might have worsened the middle-class squeeze, impeded growth and made labor too expensive and jobs therefore scarce."

Liberal Democrats have rejected those assaults, saying the Republicans would have continued to attack Obama's signature domestic achievement with or without Schumer and Harkin entering the fray.

"It's not going to affect the Republicans one way or the other," Waxman said. "They're crazed over the idea that millions of Americans are going to get insurance and not be denied because of pre-existing conditions and get help to buy insurance if they couldn't afford it."

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/226207-liberals-punch-back-at-dem-criticism-of-obamacare

Greed · Jan 19, 2015

Bernie Sanders opens a new front in the battle for the future of the Democratic Party

Bernie Sanders opens a new front in the battle for the future of the Democratic Party
Updated by Dylan Matthews
on January 10, 2015, 11:00 a.m. ET

President Obama's biggest problem in the Senate is obviously its new Republican majority, but opposition from the left wing of the Democratic caucus appears to be growing too. Most prominently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has clashed with the White House on a key Treasury Department position and the CRomnibus spending package. But new budget committee ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is poised to break dramatically from traditional Democratic views on budgeting, from Obama to Clinton to Walter Mondale and beyond.

His big move: naming University of Missouri - Kansas City professor Stephanie Kelton as his chief economist. Kelton is not exactly a household name, but to those who follow economic policy debates closely, tapping her is a dramatic sign.

For years, the main disagreement between Democratic and Republican budget negotiators was about how to balance the budget — what to cut, what to tax, how fast to implement it — but not whether to balance it. Even most liberal economists agree that, in the medium-run, it's better to have less government debt rather than more. Kelton denies that premise. She thinks that, in many cases, government surpluses are actively destructive and balancing the budget is very dangerous. For example, Kelton thinks the Clinton surpluses are nothing to brag about and they actually inflicted economic damage lasting over a decade.

A drastic theoretical break

Usually, when Democrats hire economists, they hire nice, respectable Keynesians, who use mainstream economic models and often agree with conservative economists on a lot of theoretical matters while drawing different policy conclusions from them. For example, Greg Mankiw, who served as George W. Bush's top economic advisor, and Christina Romer, who served as Obama's, were both influential in developing New Keynesianism, a macroeconomic theory that emerged in the 1980s and arguably dominates the field today. What really set Romer and Mankiw apart was policy, not economic theory.

Kelton disagrees with Romer and Mankiw on economic theory. In fact, she disagrees with just about every economist Bush or Obama ever hired about economic theory. Kelton is among the most influential advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a heterodox left-leaning movement within economics that rejects New Keynesianism and other mainstream macroeconomic theories.

MMT emphasizes the fact that countries that print their own money can never really "run out of money." They can just print more. The reason we have taxes, then, is not to pay for stuff, but to keep people using the government's preferred currency rather than, say, Bitcoin. In some rare cases, consumer demand gets too high, so sellers raise prices and inflation ensues. Then, you need to raise taxes to cool the economy down. But the theory holds that this eventuality is pretty rare. James Galbraith, another MMT-influenced economist, once told me that the last time it happened was in World War I.

The main takeaway from this is that you really don't need to balance the budget over any time horizon, and attempts to do so will hurt the economy. That's what Kelton argues happened after the Clinton surpluses of the late 1990s / early 2000s. Any dollar of government surplus must show up as private debt, she reasons. And the private sectors just can't run up debt like that indefinitely. "Eventually, something will give," Kelton once wrote to Business Insider. "And when it does, the private sector will retrench, the economy will contract, and the government's budget will move back into deficit."

A minority view

Plenty of people criticize Obama's economic policies (or Clinton's) from the left, but this is very much a minority view in economics — even among liberals. Paul Krugman, for example, has argued that MMT gets this all wrong. You still need people to buy government bonds, and if the interest rates on those get too high, then paying for it all might be hard to do without triggering runaway inflation. "Once we’re no longer in a liquidity trap, running large deficits without access to bond markets is a recipe for very high inflation, perhaps even hyperinflation," Krugman writes. Joe Gagnon, an economist at the Peterson Institute, also notes that Australia and Canada ran surpluses for years without suffering economically as a consequence. (You can see MMT responses to these points here and here.)

Before recently, mainstream economists and policymakers could comfortably ignore MMT. Galbraith told me that when, on a panel for an April 2000 event at the White House, he argued that the US's new budget surplus would harm the economy, the hundreds of economists in attendance laughed in his face. That's all changed. The financial crisis created a huge appetite for new economic thinking, and MMT helped meet it. Now, people like Krugman are expected to at least grapple with its claims. Kelton's elevation to the budget committee is another important step in mainstreaming the theory, and making it safe for left-wing Democrats to embrace.

If you want to learn more about MMT, I wrote a long profile of the movement back in 2012 that explains the basics. But theory aside, in concrete political terms this is a sign that Sanders is likely to reject the consensus-oriented approach of his predecessor, Patty Murray, and produce big spending budget frameworks that many members of his own caucus — as well as the White House economic team — would reject. That's going to be a headache for an administration that would like to count on a unified group of Democrats as it heads into inevitable battles with the Republicans.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/10/7521819/sanders-mmt-kelton

thoughtone · Feb 6, 2015

Greed · Mar 2, 2015

Centrist Dems ready strike against Warren wing

Centrist Dems ready strike against Warren wing
By Kevin Cirilli
03/02/15 06:00 AM EST

Centrist Democrats are gathering their forces to fight back against the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of their party, fearing a sharp turn to the left could prove disastrous in the 2016 elections.

For months, moderate Democrats have kept silent, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) barbed attacks against Wall Street, income inequality and the “rigged economy” thrilled the base and stirred desire for a more populist approach.

But with the race for the White House set to begin, centrists are moving to seize back the agenda.

The New Democrat Coalition (NDC), a caucus of moderate Democrats in the House, plans to unveil an economic policy platform as soon as this week in an attempt to chart a different course.

"I have great respect for Sen. Warren — she's a tremendous leader,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), one of the members working on the policy proposal. “My own preference is to create a message without bashing businesses or workers, [the latter of which] happens on the other side."

Peters said that, if Democrats are going to win back the House and Senate, "it's going to be through the work of the New Democrat Coalition."

"To the extent that Republicans beat up on workers and Democrats beat up on employers — I'm not sure that offers voters much of a vision," Peters said.

Warren’s rapid ascent has highlighted growing tensions in the Democratic Party about its identity in the post-Obama era.

Caught in the crossfire is the party’s likely nominee in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband took the party in a decisively centrist direction during his eight years in office.

Former President Bill Clinton’s rise within the party had been aided by groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council, which believed that previous presidential nominees including Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis had run on platforms that were too far to the left, resulting in crushing defeats.

But the tensions from those long-ago fights are now tangible again. Progressives distrust Hillary Clinton and are pushing Warren to challenge her from the left in the presidential election, though Warren has repeatedly rebuffed their pleas.

Warren spokeswoman Lacey Rose said in a statement to The Hill that “Warren is a relentless fighter for priorities that will help level the playing field for middle-class families.”

Publicly, Democratic lawmakers are hesitant to discuss a growing rift.

When asked about disagreements between centrists and the Warren wing, one Democratic member of Congress demurred.

"There's no need to get me in trouble," the lawmaker said, laughing. "I don't need an angry phone call from Bill Clinton."

Privately, moderate Democrats in the Clinton tradition say they have been working behind the scenes to change the party's message.

Leaders at three centrist groups — the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the New Democrat Network (NDN) and Third Way — arranged a series of meetings with moderates after the disastrous midterm elections to "discuss the future of the party," according to a source close to the NDC.

“Democrats ought to avoid the danger of talking about only redistribution and not enough about economic growth,” said PPI President and founder Will Marshall, who addressed House Democrats during their Philadelphia retreat in January. “Economic growth is a precondition to reducing inequality. You can't redistribute wealth that you're not generating.

“There's a lot of sympathy for that view in the pragmatic-wing of the party,” he added.

Gabe Horwitz, director of Third Way’s economic program, said moderates have been arguing the case for rebranding the Democratic Party around “the middle class and middle-class prosperity.”

“In the last election, Democrats, as a party, offered a message of fairness. Voters responded, and they responded really negatively,” Horwitz said. “Democrats offered fairness, and voters wanted prosperity and growth.”

The policy proposal from The New Democrat Coalition will serve as a rejoinder to the progressive agenda unveiled last week by Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). A Facebook video of Warren discussing the plan has already generated more than 1 million views.

Cummings said progressive Democrats have “got to do a better job of informing not only our own members, but the people who sent them" about disparities in the economy. He said Warren plays a "major role" in shaping that message.

"She acts as a person who has earned the trust of the American people, and I think that more and more, you're going to hear people listening to her," Cummings said.

Even before Warren’s election to the Senate in 2012, the Democratic Party appeared to be moving in a more liberal direction.

President Obama’s victory over Clinton in the 2008 race was the harbinger of a broader shift, with the Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate now further to the left than in at least a generation.

One sign of the shift is the decline of the Blue Dog Coalition, a once-sizable bloc of conservative Democrats that is nearly extinct. More than two-dozen of its members were ousted from office in 2010.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who is viewed as a centrist, said the centrist strain of politician is declining and estimated that "there's fewer than 100" left in Congress.

"We need more moderates and centrists in both parties," Carper said. "Part of politics is the art of compromise."

The fight over the future of the Democratic Party poses a real test for Clinton, who will need to keep the factions from breaking apart should she mount her expected run for the White House.

Democracy For America founder Howard Dean, who has backed Clinton for president, said Warren is “right on policy, but the rhetoric needs to be toned down.”

“Our program cannot be soak the rich — that's a mistake and alienates middle class people. But on substance, the Warren wing is correct,” said Dean.

“The rhetoric about wealth creation needs to be scaled back because Americans like wealth creation,” he added. “The level playing field argument wins it for us. The reason you do not want to talk about ‘tax the rich’ is because when middle class people hear it, they hear ‘they're going to raise our taxes.’ Democrats can't do that.”

Warren has insisted she's not running in 2016, and sources close to the senator strongly dispute that she’s left the door open to a run.

But she has done little to silence her supporters' criticism of moderate Democrats.

During a public appearance in Springfield, Mass., in February, she said her supporters were trying to draft her for president because they're "ready to fight back."

In an appearance on MSNBC's "Politics Nation" less than a week later, Warren said voters would have to "wait and see" whether Clinton is a progressive warrior.

“I want to hear what she wants to run on and what she says she wants to do — that's what campaigns are supposed to be about,” she said.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/234224-centrist-dems-ready-strike-against-warren-wing

Greed · Aug 17, 2015

O'Malley on Lack of Dem Debates: "What Have We Come To As A Party? It's Ridiculous"

O'Malley on Lack of Dem Debates: "What Have We Come To As A Party? It's Ridiculous"
Posted on August 13, 2015

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MORNING JOE: We were in Cleveland. We had Debbie Wasserman Schultz on talking about the Democratic debate. She said they're fair, they're not a coronation. I also see these debates as a way for guys like you to shine. Do you think the way it's planned is fair?

FMR. GOV. MARTIN O'MALLEY (D-MD): I don't think it's fair. I think that the people of New Hampshire deserve more than one debate before they make their decision. I think the people of Iowa deserve more than one debate, and I think for the DNC is trying to insert itself into this process. To try to shut off debate is a terrible disservice to the process and most importantly to the American people.

I mean, we face a lot of big challenges as a country, and our party actually has solutions to these challenges and we need to have robust debates. We should stop delaying the debate schedule. We should get our candidates on the stage and let the people see what each of us has to offer by way of ideas that will move our country forward and get incomes to go up again instead of down.

BRZEZINSKI: How many debates would you like to see?

O'MALLEY: Certainly, there must be a happy medium between the 20 debates we had last time and the one that the DNC would like to restrict Iowa to, the one they would like to restrict New Hampshire to. So, I would think three debates in both of those early states would be a lot preferable than limiting it to just one debate. What have we come to as a party, Mika, where we can only afford one debate in New Hampshire before this decision? It's ridiculous.

I'm going to go to as many debates as I can. I'm here in Iowa today. We're rolling out 15 goals for our country that will rebuild the American dream; get incomes to go up again; increase average families' median income in the United States, over the next -- by 25%, over $25,000, over the next ten years. These are the things like debt-free college, clean energy future. These are the actions and proposals that will actually move our country forward and help American families. That's what the debates should be about: the ideas that serve our national interests.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...to_dnc_stop_delaying_the_debate_schedule.html

thoughtone · Aug 17, 2015