Peter Beinart has a must-read in Time on the rise of what he calls “vicious-circle politics”: the Republican strategy of using government gridlock and failure to win control of government. Beinart points out that GOP obstructionism in the Obama era has its roots in the Gingrich Congress, when congressional Republicans turned into an art form the use of polarization to stymie government and make the case to a frustrated public that they needed to evict the party in power.

He tracks its origins to the “great sorting-out,” the post-’60s alignment of party, region, and ideology that purified both parties, with conservative Democrats from the South and moderate Republicans from the North gradually switching sides.

But it wasn’t until the Republicans were knocked out of power in the 1990s that vicious-circle politics became an active GOP strategy. Beinart writes:

In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. “Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort,” scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, “now filibusters are a part of daily life.” For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of “stabbing us in the back.” Their pictures were taken off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. “What do these so-called moderates have in common?” conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. “They’re 70 years old. They’re not running again. They’re gonna be dead soon. So while they’re annoying, within the Republican Party our problems are dying.”

In Clinton’s first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works. While filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton’s agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.

With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people: they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge. So when the Gingrich Republicans carried out a virtual sit-down strike during Clinton’s first two years, the public mood turned nasty. By 1994, trust in government was at an all-time low, which suited the Republicans fine, since their major line of attack against Clinton’s health care plan was that it would empower government. Clintoncare collapsed, Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans learned the secrets of vicious-circle politics: When the parties are polarized, it’s easy to keep anything from getting done. When nothing gets done, people turn against government. When you’re the party out of power and the party that reviles government, you win.

In the Obama era, with the congressional Republican caucus smaller and purer than it has been in a long time, the GOP has pursued vicious-circle politics on steroids. It’s a depressing — and depressingly familiar — picture that Beinart paints.

While Beinart acknowledges that Democrats might one day use the same strategy to stonewall a Republican administration, he notes correctly that the tactic fits better in the GOP playbook: “Winning elections by making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party.” That observation raises another frightening prospect: absent filibuster-proof majorities, can major legislation only pass now with a Republican administration and Congress? Because all the moderates are now on the Democratic side, and because progressives — moderate or liberal — are less likely to see gumming up the works as a desirable end in itself, is it possible that only Republican-driven initiatives that could get moderate support will be the only way major legislation gets passed?

Beinart offers some solutions to break the vicious circle: opening more primaries to independents (like in New Hampshire); more Crossfire-style programs to counteract the ideological ghettoization on cable news; more Ross Perots who can light a fire under both parties to break the gridlock.

Whether you think them effective or not, those proposals will take years to enact. The Democrats need to govern now. And here’s the thing: they can. There are 18 more of them in the Senate, over 70 more of them in the House — not filibuster-proof, but certainly enough to get some things passed through reconciliation. Here’s what it all boils down to: In the face of a unified opposition bent on making sure they don’t get anything done, will Democrats band together, fight back, and govern proudly? Or will they shrink from the challenge and, in fact, get nothing done?

One of the frustrating things about contemporary political analysis is the frequency with which key terms get used in a very sloppy manner that reflects highly biased or inaccurate assumptions. A perpetual example is the use of “independent” and “moderate” as interchangeable words for unaffiliated voters. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling explains why this can be so misleading:

One of the media mistakes that drives me the most nuts is when ‘moderates’ are conflated with ‘independents.’ This is most commonly a foible of TV news.Democrats are in trouble with independents right now. They are not, however, in trouble with moderates.

Independents as a group of voters are somewhat conservative leaning. Our last national poll found that 56% of independents were moderates but that among the rest 33% were conservatives to just 11% liberals. Overall independents were planning to vote Republican for Congress this year by a 40-27 margin. But break that out a little further and while conservative independents are tending toward the GOP by a 68-7 margin moderate independents are tied up at 33. And among all moderates — since moderates continue to identify more as Democrats than Republicans — Democrats lead 46-31 on the generic ballot.

It’s a similar story when it comes to moderates and independents and Barack Obama’s approval rating. Independents are split 48/48 on Obama. But moderates approve of him by a 62/34 margin.

Now there are also inherent problems with conducting political analysis based on self-identification of party or ideology; many “conservative” independents actually favor progressive policy views but call themselves conservatives for some essentially non-political reason; and many “independents” are actually reliable partisans who don’t like to be thought of as such. But if you are going to use such terms, Jensen is right, it’s important to keep them straight. And in terms of current political conditions, people who consider themselves “moderate” don’t seem to think President Obama is some crazy socialist.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A variety of luminaries representing various “wings” of the conservative movement joined together today near George Washington’s Mount Vernon home to sign—with appropriately atavistic flourishes—a manifesto they are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. The allusion made in the title is to the 50-year-old founding statement of the long-forgotten ‘60s right-wing youth group Young Americans for Freedom, the Sharon Statement (so named because it was worked out at William F. Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut). And that best illustrates the insider nature of the whole exercise, since most rank-and-file conservatives have probably never heard of YAF and don’t much need manifestos to go about their political business.

Three things immediately strike the reader about the document itself: (1) it’s very abstract, with no policy content at all; (2) it’s overtly aimed at reviving the old-time “fusionism” of economic, cultural, and national-security conservatives; and (3) it’s overlaid with Tea Party-esque rhetoric about terrible and longstanding threats to the Constitution. It’s sort of like a 50-year high school reunion at a homecoming game (which fits, because the statement was released on the eve of this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington).

It’s the third aspect of the document that’s most peculiar. Consider this passage:

In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

Hmmm. This has happened in “recent decades,” not just during the Obama administration. And ‘smatter of fact, that’s true: the landmark Supreme Court cases that paved the way for the expansion of the federal government to its current scope of responsibilities date back at least to the civil rights era, and in some respects, to the New Deal and even earlier.

That’s interesting in no small part because most of the original signatories of this document were powerful and enthusiastic participants in the political and policy enterprises of several Republican administrations that made robust use of expanded federal power—most notably the administration of George W. Bush, which championed virtually unlimited executive powers, aggressive preemption of states laws that were thought to hamper businesses, and extensive limitations on individual liberty. In addition, the choice of the estate of the notorious isolationist George Washington to issue a manifesto that endorses a foreign policy of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” is a mite strange, as Daniel Larison has pointed out.

Still another anomaly is the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins signature on a document that does not mention the rights of the “unborn” or “marriage” or “traditional families.” But you figure he was bought off by the reference to the Declaration of Independence as virtually coequal to the Constitution as a founding document, and presenting “self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God.” This is Christian Right code for suggesting that natural law and biblical principles, which conservatives interpret to mean things like bans on abortion and homosexual behavior, have been incorporated into the Constitution.

All in all, this statement represents an effort by yesterday’s and today’s hard-core conservative establishment to stay together and try to be relevant to the political discourse in an era in which the Republican Party is considered dangerously liberal, and the Constitution is thought to clearly ban everything “liberals” espouse. We’ll see how this works out for them.

It is to Evan Bayh’s enormous credit that he never settled comfortably into the Washington political scene. His decision to pack it in, after 12 years, is a loss to his party, and even more to his country. Most of all, it’s a withering rebuke to Congress, which seems to have lost the knack for governing.

If anyone could have been expected to make a seamless transition to the national political stage, it was Bayh, the handsome, dutiful son of former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh. But from his arrival here in 1998, Bayh seemed frustrated with the ideological and partisan hothouse that is contemporary Washington.

Maybe that’s because Bayh was a popular, two-term governor of Indiana who built a solid record of progressive reform in a fairly conservative state. He isn’t the first ex-governor to bring an executive temperament to Congress, only to feel stymied in an institution where partisan power struggles and the evasion of hard choices often trump public problem-solving.

Bayh nonetheless has distinguished himself as a leader of his party’s pragmatic wing, as a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and key organizer of an influential group of centrist Senate Democrats. In the Senate, he has championed the economic prospects of working Americans, like the many who have lost jobs in Indiana’s troubled manufacturing sector. He has been a stalwart for fiscal discipline, echoing the Jeffersonian view (best articulated by John Randolph of Virginia) that elected officials should spend every public dollar as if it were their own. And Bayh has filled a critical vacuum in the Democratic Party for credible, tough-minded voices on national security and foreign policy.

Bayh’s earnest centrism and refusal to put partisanship over considerations of national interest have not endeared him to the Democratic left. Some self-appointed commissars of ideological correctness are even saying “good riddance” to the Indiana Democrat. This is monumentally dumb.

If Democrats want to become the nation’s majority party again, it can only be as a broad coalition of pragmatic centrists and liberals, including a large dollop of the independent voters who have been drifting away from the party since the 2008 election. However overrepresented they may be in the chattering class, liberal purists constitute less than a quarter of the national electorate.

In fact, Democrats should worry plenty about Bayh’s decision. With the midterm election looming, the last thing they want to do is give the impression of a party hostile to pragmatic centrists and independents who have similar views. And the departure of a serious, public-spirited leader of Bayh’s caliber can only deepen the public’s jaundiced view of Congress.

“There is too much partisanship and…too much narrow ideology in Washington,“ Bayh said in explaining his decision not to seek reelection. “Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.”

That’s right, and it’s a big problem for the governing party.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/ / CC BY 2.0

The big political news from the President’s Day weekend was the surprise retirement announcement of Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. According to reports, the decision was so sudden that even some staff members were taken by surprise.

The peerless Nate Silver has come up with an analysis of what this means for Democrats:

Of the 59 Senate Democrats in the current Congress, he was the 2nd most conservative after Ben Nelson, according to the DW-NOMINATE database. Nevertheless, because he comes from a fairly red state, Bayh was reasonably valuable to his party, ranking about in the middle of the pack among all Democratic Senators based on his roll call votes.

Throughout his career, Bayh has come under fire from the left for his resolutely centrist positions. But such criticisms almost always leave out the political context in which moderates like him operate. As Silver points out, Bayh was representing a generally conservative state (it’s R+5 according to the Partisan Voting Index) in which the chances of a Democrat being elected are about 40 percent. And yet, according to Silver’s analysis, Bayh’s voting record was actually more liberal than the Indiana norm.

Complain all you want about his unreliability as a Democratic vote, but the fact is that Bayh was to the left of the median voter in his state. Considering the constituency that he had to represent, Bayh was actually a relatively valuable member of the Democratic caucus. Of course, it’s not impossible for Democrats to run a more liberal, populist candidate in Bayh’s place who could win. But the likelier possibility, especially in this environment, is that a Republican far more conservative than the incumbent will take the seat, and an iffy vote for Democrats now becomes a reliable “party of no” vote.

“[T]he fact is that over time, the median voter theorem tends to prevail, and that electing someone slightly to the left of center is usually a win for the liberal party in a slightly-to-the-right-of-center jurisdiction,” Silver concludes. That seems obvious, but it’s a lesson that progressives tend to forget. Indeed, Bayh’s departure has been met by cheers of “Good riddance!” from some progressives. If the objective is to make the progressive tent a little smaller and the conservative one a little bigger, then yes, good riddance indeed.

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.

The poll shows 18 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43 percent saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55 percent of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62 percent of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only nine percent have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. Eighty percent have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.

Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).

There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.

But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hadesigns/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Some of you may remember that the very day after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, Republicans began fantasizing about actually taking over the Senate this November, in no small part because former senator Dan Coats had announced he was coming out of retirement to take on the previously unassailable Democrat Evan Bayh in Indiana. Yeah, it was noted at the time that Coats had been living and voting in Virginia for the last decade, while working as a DC lobbyist, but GOPers figured Coats’ long political record in the Hoosier State would enable him to brush that off as a less-than-youthful indiscretion.

But since then, Indiana Democrats, accessing public records, have found out and loudly let it be known that Coats wasn’t just a lobbyist for banks and equity firms, but for foreign governments. He personally lobbied for India, but much more interestingly, his firm lobbied for Yemen. You know, Yemen, that al Qaeda stomping ground where “Christmas Day Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab got his training.

Suffice it to say that Democrats have not kept this information to themselves. According to a piece in Politico today about the “nuking” of Coats:

“We just hit him with a freight train,” one Democratic official familiar with the anti-Coats effort said Monday. “It’s Politics 101: Frame the guy early.”

The effectiveness of the Democratic attack on Coats is probably best reflected by the fact that none of the Republicans previously in the race to challenge Bayh (including former U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, a fiery conservative) have pulled out. Coats’ proto-campaign has largely confined itself to whining about “mud” being thrown at their hero.

So maybe Republicans shouldn’t be quite so quick to mark Indiana down in the column of likely Senate wins this year.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.