Political handicappers are so intent on trying to quantify Democratic losses in the midterm elections that they are missing the bigger picture: America’s radical center seems to be in a permanent state of revolt.

Democrats are going to get thrashed tomorrow, just as Republicans incurred huge losses in 2006 and 2008.  The 2010 midterm will likely be the third successive election in which voters – or, more precisely, independent voters – rejected the ruling party. Grasping the significance of this meta-trend is more important that toting up the partisan body count.

Volatility across the broad center of the U.S. electorate has made this the age of the fleeting governing majority. Bill Clinton and the Democrats had one briefly from 1992-1994. Then George W. Bush and the Republicans held undivided power for six years before losing it in 2006.

“That’s never happened before in back-to-back administrations,” notes pollster Scott Rasmussen. The likely return to divided government signals, as Sarah Palin might put it, public “refudiation” of both political parties.

It’s no accident that this trend coincides with the “great sorting out,” the tendency of both parties to gravitate toward their respective ideological poles. This has left a large, discontented body of voters that increasingly feels disenfranchised by the two-party system. More Americans (37 percent) now identify as independents than as Democrats or Republicans.

Of course, independents are a diverse lot. The Pew Research Center, for example, breaks them down into categories (“shadow Republicans” and “doubting Democrats”) that suggest that a significant portion of them have residual partisan leanings. They’ve also grown more conservative since 2006, perhaps owing to GOP defections, and more skeptical of government’s ability to solve big problems.

Compared to core conservatives and liberals, however, independents are generally pragmatic and moderate in outlook, and almost by definition are alienated from the hyper-partisan, zero-sum game of politics as played in Washington.  Above all, says Andy Kohut of the Pew Center, they put performance before ideology. They will vote against incumbents not out of a basic philosophical affinity with the Republicans, but because they believe Democratic policies have failed to spur jobs and economic growth.

In 2006, independents gave Democrats a 17-point margin, and control of Congress. Obama carried independents by 8 points in 2008, enough to give him the biggest majority won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. Their defection from the progressive coalition over the past two years is the main reason  Democrats are facing a beat-down tomorrow.

The silver lining for progressives in the midterm is that these swing voters could swing back their way over the next two years.  According to a recent National Journal poll, independents still harbor reasonably warm feelings about President Obama. The key to winning them back is not to be more liberal or more moderate, it’s to govern effectively from the pragmatic center. That means building bipartisan support for tackling the nation’s most urgent problems: stalled job growth, eroding competitiveness, a massive overhang of debt, not to mention a careful winding down our overseas military engagements.

But if Obama and House Republicans can’t find a way to make forward progress on these fronts, the radical center will only become more disenchanted with the two-party duopoly. In that case, watch for a serious push to weld non-aligned and moderate voters into a “third force” in U.S. politics.

Photo credit: Chris

Imagine you are taking a shower. The water is too cold, so you turn it a little to the hot side. But hot turns out to be too hot, so you turn it a little to the cold side. But then cold turns out to be too cold.  So you turn it back a little to the hot side, only for it to be too hot again. But no matter how you adjust, you can’t seem to find that nice comfortable middle temperature.

That seems to be about the dilemma a majority American people face with regard to their representatives in Congress. According to a new analysis of voters and their members of Congress, an estimated 90 percent of voters are less extreme than their elected representatives. Or put another way, only one in ten voters are more extreme then the folks representing them in Washington, DC.

But the problem is these 90 percent voters don’t have centrist candidates to choose from. Instead, they go from electing representatives who are too conservative for them, to electing representatives who are too liberal for them, to too conservative for them, every now and then trying to adjust, but always quite unsucessfully.

The authors of this analysis, Dartmouth political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron, call this process “leapfrog representation” – since the median voter keeps getting leapfrogged when seats change parties. And what’s more compelling is that according to their analysis, even the median voter within each party is more moderate than the representatives.  (If you want to know more about how they got these results, you can read a more detailed article I wrote about the study, or for the technically inclined, the authors’ academic version.)

One of the other neat things about this study was that the researchers were able to show that voters who also contribute to campaigns tend to be more extreme than those who don’t. Though they don’t have the data to prove this for sure, it does suggest that money may be doing some of the work of driving extremism. If you assume that money is important (a pretty safe assumption), it makes sense that candidates who appeal to extremes can raise more money, which helps them greatly at the early stages of a campaign when money is probably most important.

All of this, of course, makes for pretty depressing reading. It suggests that we are in a period of “leapfrog politics,” in which the moderate, middle-of-the-road voters who make up the majority of the electorate are going to keep switching from too liberal to too conservative, never quite able to find that happy medium ground (like the poor shower-taker switching from too hot to too cold).  But it is a helpful way of understanding what’s going on, and a quite powerful analysis.

Photo credit: Davide Repucci

All the screaming (and some stomping) is coming to an end. Pundit upon pundit has beaten the drum of defeat for the Democratic Party.  John Boehner can measure the drapes, the Tea Party’s here to stay, blah blah blah.

Don’t go sulking just yet, and you heard it here first: Democrats will hold the House.  Let’s take a step back and look at the facts and races that tell the hidden story of this election.

1. Ideas Matter

To state the obvious, the Republicans haven’t offered a single concrete idea, asking voters to forget years of ill-gotten tax cuts and an ill-advised war.  Do they really believe voters are ready to turn over trust to them again so quickly? They have played it safe and will take the anger vote and hope it gives them a majority. The public isn’t buying it—the Republican brand stands at just 23 percent approval

Many swing voters focus on the election over the weekend and realize that Democrats told the country what they would do two years ago and then did it—healthcare, stimulus, and financial regulation reform.

Some of these ideas might be more long-ball (e.g., healthcare) but Democrats will get more credit than you’d think for ideas and leadership.  That’s why I’m betting that late-deciding voters will either break slightly to the Democrats or just stay home.

2. Campaigns matter

 

It might seem like every Democrat in the country is down 50 percent in the polls. The truth is that most all of these races will come down to one-to-four percent and that in the end, the actual hard work of grassroots fighting for the last vote is very much in favor of Democrats.

When I was at the DCCC in 1994, I was all too aware that Democrats lost 52 House seats by a grand total of 18,000 votes (not the overall vote but the difference in seats lost).  Those votes are turned by a campaign ground game, and the Republicans don’t have a good one, thanks to the incredibly poor leadership of Michael Steele at the RNC.  The DNC is pouring its all into GOTV efforts of this final stretch.  When you look at the latest polls and see 10-to-12 percent undecided vote, it is most likely those voters will never show up at this point.

3. Seat by Seat

The “Pundit Consensus” is a 55-seat gain by Republicans, which would give them a 16-seat majority in the House.  But if we examine those races on a case-by-case basis, the details indicate Republicans only stand to gain 35 seats, or four shy of a majority.

The top list of Democratic holds that all show up as losses currently.

Let’s start with 55 seats and work our way backwards:

New York

Three candidates on top of the ticket running 20-30 percent ahead of flawed Republican Senate candidates.  Are we going to see vote splitting at the 25 percent level? That just doesn’t add up.  The Republican Party in New York is in complete disarray and that will affect turnout in the closing days.

Take away at least the following pickups:

Owens  -3^rd party candidate getting between 5-15 percent of the vote

Murphy

Hall

Pickup now stands at 52.

Pennsylvania

Democratic well-oiled turnout machine will be prepared to do battle and hold:

Murphy

Kanjorski

Carney

Pickups now stand at 49.

New Hampshire

It’s doubtful that voters will return Charlie Bass to Congress, and marginal plus to have Paul Hodes on top of the ticket in this seat, who will bring that 1-to-2 percent extra vote out for Annie Kuster.

Pickups now stand at 48.

Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina

Marshall –  he has been written off before, likely to hold with the tightening of the Governors race doing nothing but help.

Kissel won his seat by imploring serious grassroots organizing, and that still holds true for him this year. He ticked off many with his no votes on health care, but they are coming home to help him.

Nye is a strong candidate that votes his district and attracts strong crossover support.

Perriello  — a strong case for getting credit for doing what’s right and standing up for your votes.  Obama is coming to rally for him tonight.

Pickups now stand at 44.

Texas

Rodriguez—the demographics strongly favor a win by Ciro.

Pickups now stand at 43.

The Dakotas

Pomerory—unemployment is only at 4 percent in North Dakota, and Pomerory has a strong record of constituent service—the independent minded democrat holds on again.

Hurseth-Sandlin has voted her state and is running against a republican with flaws.

Pickups now stand at 41.

Idaho

Minnick – the Democrat-endorsed by the Tea Party, voted his district…he will hold on.

Pickups now stand at 40.

Illinois

Phil Hare, conservative district that continues to vote 55-60 percent for the democrat candidate for the House, spending is even and outside groups are almost spending more to badger the Republican.

Pickups now stand at 39.

Nevada

Dina Titus, another Dem who will get credit for standing up for her votes and showing leadership—and she does not have the negatives of Harry Reid. In the end she will hold this swing seat.

Pickups now stand at 38.

Colorado

John Salazar is strong candidate against weak Republican who received 37 percent of the vote last time he ran.

Pickups now stand at 37.

Those are the seats that the Democrats won’t lose. Now for the few they’ll actually flip:

Minnesota

Michele Bachman—she has the money and the media attention, but her actions and personality don’t fit the Midwest common sense approach of Minnesota…first upset of the night.   Tarryl Clark with the big upset.

Pickups now stand at 36.

Florida

Joe Garcia has run a strong campaign against a very weak flawed-almost off the ballot- republican.  Second somewhat surprise of Tuesday.

Pickups now stand at 35.

I could include other possible upsets (WA-8, CA, FL etc)

From leading on ideas, being prepared for the fight and the other side not offering any new ideas, lacking a true grassroots campaign and the voter being a lot smarter then pundits and the chatting inside the beltway give them credit for, the Democrats hold the House with a five-to-nine seat majority. You heard it here first.

Dear Jon:

I’m looking forward to attending your rally this Saturday, but like many, I’m not sure whether you are intending to simply produce a Daily Show-esque send-up of the whole rally-on-the-Mall concept, or whether this is the moment when you give the genuine rallying cry of “moderate!”

I know a lot of your fans are hoping you don’t undermine your hip satire with the mawkishness of actually caring.  But I, for one, sincerely hope that you are actually serious here, and that you have every intention of giving voice to “the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat,” as you call them.

We need you Jon. You may be our last best hope.

As you know and well understand, political debate in this country is actually nothing at all like debate. The two parties and their loyal acolytes keep yelling right past each other. They effectively inhabit two separate unbridgeable worlds, drifting further and further apart.

The activist bases of both parties have been spending the last 30 or so years trying create a black-and-white world where you are either with us or against us. Increasingly, they hold the key to elected offices, especially on the Republican side, by being the source of campaign resources and energy. Meanwhile, a media culture drawn to sharp conflicts always zooms in on angry yelling over possible consensus for a simple reason: the schoolyard knife fight makes better TV than the debating society, and every attention-seeking pundit and politico now knows this.

And yes, this has excited and energized the most extreme elements on both sides, who by dint of personality are attracted to moral clarity these Manichean struggles offer. But it has turned off those who are prefer compromise and open-mindedness, who don’t see the world in such stark terms, who, as you put it: “who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard.”  Fewer and fewer Americans choose to identify themselves with either of the two major parties, and the plurality of Americans now think that neither party has “a clear plan for solving the country’s problems.”

The problem for political moderates is that there are so few leaders to turn to for inspiration.

But Jon, you know all this. It’s the basis for your satire. It’s why millions of viewers, especially those supposed disaffected young people who vote at significantly lower rates than their forebears, watch your show. You are the one who they trust.

I suspect that you are slightly uncomfortable with this power. You are, after all, a comedian at heart, the funny man who sits on the sidelines and says: you silly politicians, how you contradict and contort yourselves and say ridiculous things. Let us find the laughter in tragedy and thusly ease our sorrow over the sad fact that while we endlessly debate Christine O’Donnell’s latest gaffe, China is building a new city every sixteen seconds.

But sitting on the sidelines must also be frustrating. How can you curate the modern tragedy of American politics, day after day, and not think: why, the more I call attention to the idiocy, the more it metastasizes?

You have at your disposal the goodwill of millions of Americans. If you throw yourself into the political fray (as you may be about to, if this rally is indeed serious), you have the potential to make a major and I think quite positive impact on American political discourse. You are poised to be the leader of new moderate movement, one that rests on the premise of civil discourse, openness to reason, and an eagerness to actually solve problems.

I say, go for it. Make the most full-throated, heart-felt, call-to-reasonableness you can. Set up the moderate majority, or whatever you want to call it. Use your show and your brand to mobilize the millions of citizens who would pledge to support candidates who will adhere a platform of civility and open-mindedness and a spirit of pragmatic problem-solving – and who might even make it cool once more to solve problems instead of simply firing up the base. Be an explicit force for counter-polarization.

I know it’s a big task. But look around you. Glenn Beck and his merry band of truth-benders at Fox News are mobilizing the armies of cranky crazies to the right, and the loudest voices on the left are those complaining that Obama is a sell-out.  This country faces major, generational challenges of transitioning to a 21st-century economy and solving a looming deficit and entitlement crisis. We’re not going to solve them by shouting slogans past each other.

One hears a lot about the “enthusiasm gap” this election. But maybe the better term is “enthusiasm lack.” The vast majority of the American electorate is not at all jazzed up about their choices, and even if Republicans take back the House next Tuesday, it will hardly be because they inspired the American electorate. This is good news for Democrats in 2012, if they are smart enough to take advantage.

Consider the latest Associated Press-GfK Poll. With just a week until the election, one third of all likely voters say that they either haven’t yet made up their minds, or they are leaning in favor of one candidate but could still change their minds, though these undecideds are leaning slightly towards Republicans. This is hardly the sign of a passionate electorate.

Of course, midterm elections almost always have lower turnout than presidential elections anyway – typically about 40 percent of registered voters turnout in mid-term years, as opposed to 60 percent in presidential years. That missing 20 percent (or a third of those who vote in presidential elections) are often younger people and poorer people, but also those who tend to pay minimal attention to politics either because none of the candidates inspire them or they can’t see the difference.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math: If 40 percent of the electorate winds up voting next week, but of that 40 percent only two-thirds feels strongly one way or another, we’re now down to roughly 27 percent of the electorate that has a strong feeling about the outcome. Since Republicans are doing better than Democrats among likely voters, let’s say that 15 percent of the electorate consists of Republican voters who currently feel strongly about how the election turns out. These are your hard-core, Tea Party-type Republicans who a Republican House majority would be representing.

Probably the only way this is a sustainable governing strategy is if the rest of the electorate remains so alienated and cynical that it continues to stay home while hard-core Republicans try to dismantle the idea of the modern state. Maybe this is the Republicans’ plan: make Washington so dysfunctional that nobody sees the point in voting anymore.

But here’s the more likely scenario: The presidential election of 2012 will bring out many of the voters who stayed home in 2010. Democrats will win back seats because turnout among registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent moderates will increase. (When Obama tells crowds ““If everybody who voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election,” he is probably right.)

But in order for this to happen, Democrats have a challenge: they need to stay sane. They need to let the Republicans say and even try to do some of the ridiculous things that only 15 percent of the total electorate supports, all the while reinforcing how moderate and reasonable they are being, and not getting dragged into the gutter.

When the economy recovers (as it is already starting to), and the existential angst and fears of economic uncertainty dissipates, the Democrats (if they can refrain from counter-ranting and be the adults in the room) will come out looking much better, and will have a real mandate to proactively solve the major problems facing our country, like modernizing to meet the energy and infrastructure needs of the 21^st century.

There will be, of course, many recriminations next Wednesday within the Democratic faithful that Obama didn’t do this, or didn’t do that. But the past is the past.

The hand that Democrats are being dealt is this: Republicans are likely to win the House on a platform that appeals to maybe 15 percent of the total electorate (though 30-40 percent of the active electorate). But as long as Democrats can be savvy, remaining moderate and letting hard-core Republicans fulminate hysterically as only they know how about absurdities like repealing the 17^th Amendment, 2012 will be a very good year to be a Democrat.

Photo credit: Rakka

Yesterday, former Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson picked on Obama for publicly complaining that fear gets in the way of rational thinking, and that the electorate isn’t thinking straight because people are scared.

Gerson accuses Obama of intellectual snobbery, of falling prey to pseudo-science (“Human beings under stress are not hard-wired for stupidity, which would be a distinct evolutionary disadvantage,” insists Gerson – more about that in a moment), and most of all, that Obama is not a very good politician because a good politician would connect with fear, rather than rationalize it away.

Of course, anyone who has read one of the many recent behavioral psychology books explaining why we humans do many stupid things not in our best interest would get what Obama is talking about. As Professor Obama correctly notes, when we get frightened, we tend to not be as good at stepping back and thinking things through rationally.

And this makes sense, from an evolutionary psychology perspective. There is no time for planning when you are being attacked by a predator. In moments of real emergency, one needs to act on instinct. Moreover, if you’re in a fight-or-flight moment, you need to focus all your energy on survival. No sense being rational about the future when the future might not even exist.

Though we are no longer on the predator-infested savannah, in modern society, we still experience extensive stress that produces much of the same fight-or-flight feeling, like, say, if we are worried about losing our jobs and providing for our families.

Moreover, human beings are also hard-wired for instant gratification because for most of our existence as a species and a proto-species, we never know if we were going to be alive tomorrow. We are also hard-wired to get mad and throw temper tantrums to demonstrate that we mean business when we don’t get what we want.  That’s why it feels so good to act out and demand justice.

But a society of instant gratification and lashing out does not hold together well. Instead, much of the history of civilization can be seen as an attempt to find ways to sublimate our more destructive desires (those of the evolutionary old, reptilian brain) by using our ability to plan into the future (using our evolutionary new neocortex – the human brain) by enacting laws and teaching morality.

Obama, like many in the liberal tradition, believes in the collective ability of humans to reason and think past the immediate needs of what Freud called the id, and to achieve something bigger than our base desires.

But it’s a delicate balance. And Gerson is at least partially right: Obama hasn’t done as much to connect with the emotional concerns of everyday citizens (Clinton and Bush were much better at this)

Still, there’s also an important difference (that Gerson ignores) between honoring the fear and acting on the fear. Gerson writes: “There is fear out there in America – not because of the lizard brain but because of objective economic conditions.”  His mistake is separating the two. Yes, economic distress makes people afraid. But the “lizard brain” is the part of the brain that amplifies this fear and leads people to lash out in ways and demand things that may feel good in the moment but defy long-run logic.

Fear and anxiety may be natural human conditions, and we have probably evolved to be quite prone to them (being happy and calm was presumably not a great strategy for avoiding predators and stockpiling food once upon a time).

But we can also overcome our fears. There is, in fact, a long tradition of mindfulness meditation that teaches inherently anxious humans to accept their emotions without acting out on them. Obama seems to be much more able to allow intellect to triumph over emotion than most, but perhaps too much so that he doesn’t understand intuitively how might have a hard time. Gerson seems to assume that fear is always valid and shouldn’t be overcome through the intellect. Somewhere in the middle is a successful approach to coping with our emotions and making productive, rational choices about our collective future.

photo credit: JJ Judes

How much anti-government feeling is really out there?  Perhaps less than you might think.

Consider a fascinating new poll in which Gallup listed 11 functions of government and asked respondents how much responsibility they think government have for each, one a scale of one to five. For five of the 11 functions, at least 48 percent of Republicans said the government should have more responsibility (giving these functions a four or five on the five-point scale).

“Protecting Americans from foreign threats” not surprisingly got strong support from 96 percent of Republicans. But “Protecting consumers from unsafe products” (66 percent), “Preventing discrimination” (54 percent), “Developing and maintaining the nation’s transportation systems” (52 percent),  and “Protecting the environment from human actions that can harm it” (48 percent) also did better than you might expect from all the government-bashing rhetoric dominating the airwaves.

Even 37 percent of Republicans think the government should have more responsibility for “making sure all those who want jobs have them.” And perhaps shockingly, a third (32 percent) think government should have more responsibility for “making sure that all Americans have adequate healthcare.” As one would expect, Democrats rate the responsibility of government 20 to 30 percentage points higher on all of these issues.

The lessons from this poll are simple, but important. While Republicans keep bashing “big government” as a general concept, it’s different when it they are asked about specific government functions.  Even as trust in government is at all-time lows, it’s not the case that this means that most voters – even supposed government-hating Republicans – don’t want government to do anything.

Rather, it’s more likely that the anti-government feeling is more about voters not trusting the current leaders in Washington to do what’s right.

To understand this better, consider another recent Gallup poll asking respondents “Do you think the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens?” Fully 66 percent of Republicans say it does pose a threat, while only 21 percent of Democrats do. But four years ago, when Republicans controlled Washington, the numbers were nearly reversed: 57 percent of Democrats were afraid of the federal government, compared to just 21 percent of Republicans. In other words, this has more to do with who is in power than about the federal government per se.

What this means is that all this anti-government rhetoric needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Most voters (even Republicans) still want the federal government to take responsibility for major things like protecting consumers, the environment, maintaining transit, preventing discrimination, and even ensuring adequate healthcare and making jobs available.

It’s easy for Republicans as the party out of power to bash big government in the abstract and to demonize Democrats for running government poorly.  But in the end, the supposed anti-government frame is probably more about personally frustrated voters looking for something and someone to blame. The vast majority voters don’t want government to go away anytime soon – they just want it to operate better and solve public problems intelligently. Though it’s easy to confuse the two, this is an important distinction. Elected leaders, especially extremist government-bashing Republicans, ignore this at their peril.

Photo credit: Scott Ableman

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.

It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:

I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.

Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.

Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.

But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives, have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.

As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):

[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.

The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world

This piece is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Ian Mansfield

I was struck by an item in the recent Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard Survey on The Role of Government: The fact that in 2000, 28 percent of Republicans said they would give the overall performance of the federal government a grade of “A” or “B”.  (And that was with Bill Clinton as President.)

That number today is 8 percent, which is about what you would expect, given the ubiquitous anti-government rhetoric. It’s a remarkable loss of any faith in government by one of the two major political parties.  (By contrast, 42 of Democrats now rate government “A” or “B” – slightly less than the 47 percent in 2000, but not as significant a decline.)

But here’s the question that sticks with me: What happens if the Republicans take back the House or at least make significant enough gains to have ownership over the government again? Will the anti-government rhetoric explode in their face?

Having spent so much energy disparaging Washington, can Republicans maintain popular support if they take back some share of the federal government and are forced to make hard choices of actually governing? It’s easy for Republican voters to have no faith in Washington when it’s controlled by Democrats, but what happens if Republicans again have a share of governing responsibility?

Consider another telling item in the same poll highlights a problem that Republicans are going to face: Half of the country thinks that the budget can be balanced with only cuts to “wasteful spending.” But as Jon Cohen and Dan Balz note: “Eliminating waste in the budget would do very little to bring down the size of the deficit.” Republicans have, as many opposition parties are wont to do, peddled excessively simple solutions to excessively difficult problems.

In today’s Times, Kate Zernicke notes that “33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats” – In other words, a there will be a sizeable caucus of firethrowers who will continue to amp up the anti-government rhetoric within the party.

But how long before the Tea Party faithful loses faith in the Republicans who they’ve elected on the bold revolutionary promises to tear down government when those promises go unfulfilled – as they inevitably must, given the dramatic mismatch between their platforms and what is actually possible to accomplish in Washington?

Republicans are essentially saying: Elect us to do things that we are incapable of doing. Elect us to run an institution that we have encouraged you to be thoroughly frustrated with, so that we can ultimately be in charge and be accountable for your frustration.

Of course, that’s not to say that Republicans can’t continue the Janus-like pose of both being responsible for governing and bashing the very idea of government. Reagan did it successfully. And even if Republicans take back the House, they will still have Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate to bash.

But ultimately, it’s a self-negating electoral strategy. Republicans are never going to succeed in drastically shrinking the size of government or even repealing healthcare reform for the simple reason that when it comes down to it, there’s much less fat to trim than most people think, and certainly no fat to trim painlessly.

So I do not envy the new crop of Republicans who will be picking up seats this November. They’ll have been elected as part of an anti-incumbency, anti-government mood that they’ve done much to foment.  But that mood takes on a life of its own. It may not be so useful when they become the incumbents and are part of the government.

Photo credit:  babasteve

The night that President Obama won the presidency, I was distracted by a looming deadline for New Republic piece I was already writing warning the left not to misinterpret the election results.  Democratic Congressional victories were primarily the result of voters continuing to grow sour on the way Republicans ran the House and Senate.  Obama’s victory owed its magnitude to the financial crisis and McCain’s response to it.  Essentially, I warned that the 50-50 Nation was alive and well and that moving too aggressively could backfire.

The piece was largely ignored at the time, but it is looking pretty good today.  Democrats successfully enacted landmark health care legislation, shepherded the financial system through a harrowing period when fears of another depression were widespread, passed an enormous stimulus package, and pushed through financial reform.  In the process, the deficit soared to worrying levels, unemployment continued to rise, the government became the owner of FannieMae and FreddieMac and part owners of the automobile companies, the economy limped along, and public opinion turned against them.

In a sure sign that in its own way, the left is as out of touch as the conservative tea party activists, liberals lamented the supposed timidity and corporate-coziness of the Administration, and the base grew depressed.  This despite the unprecedented scale of federal spending and intervention into the workings of the economy, the near death of health care reform (the biggest progressive victory since Medicare’s enactment), and loss of support among independents and moderates.  Progressives thought they had a mandate for aggressive change.  Apparently they still don’t realize that they didn’t.

Ironically, one of the left’s leading pundits, E. J. Dionne, argued in a sharp book in the 1990s called They Only Look Dead that the way to understand the 1992, 1994, and 1996 elections was to view the first two years as a period of liberal overreach and the second two years as a mirror image on the right.  Despite all the evidence that the country is even more closely divided today, liberals such as Dionne cannot see the same dynamic of partisan overreach playing out over the past decade.  But it was there during the Bush years on the right, and it has been there over the past two momentous years on the left.

Yes, the economy is surely the driving force behind voter dissatisfaction with Democrats, and Obama was damned if he did (spend hundreds of billions to avoid a depression) and damned if he didn’t.  But health care was supposed to be a game changer—if voters were so keen on a massive disruption of the health care sector, as progressives have argued for twenty years now, why hasn’t this trumped the economy?  The electorate is fundamentally moderate and as poorly served by liberals who want to circumvent that moderation as by tea-party conservatives who are convinced Obama is a socialist Muslim foreigner.  It will be interesting to see which party—if either—gets it between now and 2012.

This article is cross-posted at No Labels.

Photo credit: Hyokano