Tag Archive for 'Democrats'

Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat lost: The politics of anti-politics

News is just coming in that Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has been lost by the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to the Republicans’ Scott Brown. FiveThirtyEight.Com has the margin at 52-47 and that blog will be well worth watching for analysis and breakdown of the result.

Writing for Crikey today, David Hirst observes:

Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck — a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park.

It wasn’t a huge issue but it played well — the message presumably was that sophisticated people from places such as Boston were not represented by folks who drove trucks. Kennedy sure didn’t drive a truck.

The shell-shocked mainstream media better get used to it, for there are many shocks to come. That the Republicans had the sense to see “truck” and “Wall Street” and bring the two to one was clever indeed.

His analysis suggests that the result is born of the sentiment of a plague on the US political classes, bailing out banks with abandon, but doing nothing perceptible for ‘Main Street’, and the straightened economic circumstances many Americans face after the GFC. He also suggests the Republicans will be emboldened to escalate their anti-Obama rhetoric, but that they themselves have nothing effective to offer; short of pandering to anti-government sentiments deeply embedded in American political culture.

In truth, the US party system is incapable of doing anything other than slightly tacking in the direction of popular sentiment; something confounded by the hyperbolic checks and balances, whose frustration of a majority in the Senate is precisely what made this special election so important.

Previous discussion on LP: Here.

Update: Nate Silver on the swing.

Obama, healthcare and social democracy

Reports that Barack Obama is prepared to concede the public option in the health care bill (with some perhaps vague hope that it might be reinserted in a conference between the House and Senate on reconciling inconsistent provisions) expose the difficulty any President faces in securing even an approximation to what are basic and threshold social democratic reforms in the United States.

Leaving aside the obvious attempt to articulate the health care plan with ‘right to life’ scaremongering through all the nonsense about ‘death panels’, we still have a textbook example of how culture and ideology can cause blindness to collective interests (and indeed self interest). No amount of rhetoric about the possibilities of self actualisation and choice over life goals has any meaning if there is sustained structural inequality in health outcomes (and therefore life chances), and if there is no real attempt to ameliorate this inequality through collective action by the state.

At The Global Sociology Blog, SocProf hones in on the reasons for the absence of any discussion of, or even awareness of, class inequality in American culture and politics.

Obama now faces the familiar dilemma of attempting to save political face through the passage of some watered down bill which will do nothing, and may even be harmful, given the capture of representatives and Senators by the private interests of health insurers. Progressives also face a painful dilemma – an oft repeated one: whether to be complicit in the passage of a measure whose momentum is now driven almost solely by political calculation or whether to take a stand on principle. John Odum poses this well. But it seems unlikely that conditions – under the current political arrangements – for the passage of genuine health care reform will ever be more favourable.

The spectre of Specter

Game changing. Displays the irrelevance of the GOP. Tea bag parties inspired by Fox News and all that crew coincide with a drop in partisan identification to 25% of the electorate. Etc.

Certainly, the party swap of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a fillip for the Democrats.

Although, those with a long memory for the ‘Clarence Thomas hearings’ might question the elderly gentleman’s progressivism when it comes to issues of concern to women. Anita Hill, wherever she is now, probably isn’t over the moon:

Continue reading ‘The spectre of Specter’

What comes after the Democrats? (And “new” Labor?)

In an earlier post riffing off the Katherine Wilson hoax on Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant, I made some comments about the absence of any real political force representing small l Liberalism, to the consternation of some commenters on the ensuing thread. It would seem that I’m not alone in holding this view, judging by Norman Abjorensen’s article in Inside Story today. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with Abjorensen’s dichotomy of romantics and realists, but I think he’s close to the mark here:

And herein lies a lesson for the modern day romantics on the centre-right who dream of an impending epiphany in the Liberal Party: there is simply no constituency for it. Sure, there are the disgruntled social liberals still in or close to the Liberal Party, the former Democrats without a home and fragments of an uncommitted middle class. But this is a small and probably shrinking constituency, as the Australian Democrats discovered to their peril.

Abjorensen is sceptical about the claims sometimes made about an enduring Deakinite liberal tradition, pointing out that Deakin himself succumbed to the “ruthless game of hard-headed pragmatism” a century ago.

Continue reading ‘What comes after the Democrats? (And “new” Labor?)’

The Obama inauguration: some interesting links

There’s probably literally millions of reactions to Barack Obama’s inauguration on the intertubes today, so I wanted to try to highlight some more specific articles and posts which raise some interesting issues which might otherwise get lost in the crowd. [The text is here.]

Two of the more pressing questions since the election in November have been how Obama will respond to the global financial crisis and from what political position he will seek to govern. Both, in a way, have been answered, but hardly definitively. It’s worth observing in passing – and the point is a crucial one for us here in Australia – that the selective invocation of the mantra “there’s only one President at a time” means that we know very little about what the new administration’s stance on global financial regulatory issues and the governance architecture of the world economy will be. Such decisions as are taken – and paths not taken – will probably be of more lasting moment than how effectively and quickly his fiscal stimulus works to turn around America’s domestic economy. But, in that regard, the addition of tax cuts to the infrastructure investment proposed in his domestic package (to corral in some congressional Republican support, or so it’s being framed) reflects a debate about the composition of any stimulus which is important, and to some degree being played out, in our own context as well. Here, I was intrigued to see Andrew Leonard at Salon’s How The World Works blog suggest that a passage in the Inaugural address shows Obama has come down on the Keynesian side of the argument. (And to see Leonard compare Obama’s eloquence with Keynes’, to the former’s detriment.)

Continue reading ‘The Obama inauguration: some interesting links’

Truthiness versus Truth II: Now with graphs!

More on the instant revisionism from the Republican Noise Machine in the wake of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ victory – this time scatterplot and red state blue state rich state poor state make a graphic point about the claims that the Republicans’ loss was somehow artefactual. It’s worth adding that the problem of the under-representation of Democratic votes in terms of seats adduced also goes to the horrendous architecture of the American political system – entrenched and partisan gerrymandering in many states, the two party monopoly, disenfranchisement and appallingly conducted elections, and all the other factors which distort popular will and poorly represent it.

Continue reading ‘Truthiness versus Truth II: Now with graphs!’

Truthiness versus Truth

The fiercely independent thinking RWDBs of the Australian media and blogosphere have been out and about reciting talking points from the discredited Republican Noise machine ever since Barack Obama won the Presidency last week. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Antipodean wingnuts take their wingnutty duties so seriously, but I’m sure that many are still firmly in the faith-based alternative universe, and thus allergic to facts. But for anyone who’s been wondering about some of the most egregious memes around the joint, here are some links to set the record straight.

Myth #1: The Obama turnout meant that Prop 8 won in California.

But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters — the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) — voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin

- Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com

Myth #2: The Democrats’ victory wasn’t comprehensive.

What happened? Overall, the Democrats gained a bit in 2004, a lot in 2006, and some in 2008. But we knew that (see the time series plot in the blog entry linked above). We also see a bit of scatter. Beyond this, yes, there are some patterns. In 2006, the Democrats particularly gained in Republican areas–see how those dots in the lower left of the second graph are way above the 45-degree line? In 2008, the swing is more uniform… Returning to the “How well did the Democrats actually do in 2008″ question, I think that one problem is that people are comparing Obama’s vote to Kerry’s vote but then comparing the congressional Democrats in 2008 to the congressional Democrats in 2006. I think it’s more appropriate to compare 2008 to 2004 in both cases. As Paul Krugman put it, “Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections.”

- Andrew Gelman.

Myth #3: Obama would be politically sensible to govern as a moderate gradualist.

So a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn’t listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself.

- Paul Krugman.

US election: the demographics

The big note of caution should be that this data is drawn from exit polls which don’t take into account the very large early vote, and that exit polls have certain problems of validity and reliability.

However, there’s some interesting reading at both RedBlueRichPoor and FiveThirtyEight. I suspect the absence of the early vote in the sample diminishes the increases in youth and African-American turnout. And it’s just as well to remember that the election was actually reasonably close in the popular vote, and that the electoral vote map has been tweaked rather than transformed. Trends which were operating this year need reinforcing through the upcoming electoral cycles, and much will depend on Obama’s performance in government. You can never claim that there’s a realigning election on the basis of one cycle (06-08), though my bet would be that this will turn out in retrospect to have been one, for a whole host of more qualitative and interpretive factors.

I haven’t seen any comprehensive data as yet on Hispanic and youth votes’ partisan composition, but some evidence presented during the CNN coverage suggested very strong 60+% Obama votes in both populations. It’s worthwhile noting that the demographics of many states which are swinging to the Democrats strongly – or showing signs of such swings (ie in Texas, Arizona and South Carolina) – are fast changing to a much more heterogenous composition. And that generally, the younger cohort is more socially liberal and less hung up on racial barriers and all the baggage of the culture wars – including among younger Evangelicals.

There’s a lot here for Obama and the Democrats to make hay with in terms of partisan and geographic realignment, if they play their cards well.

Continue reading ‘US election: the demographics’

Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?

Director of the Centre for Policy Development Miriam Lyons writes:

Barack Obama’s victory represents a watershed in American history, but it will also have ramifications around the world. Before I head out to celebrate I thought I’d just bash out a few quick notes on some of the policy implications for Australia of this momentous turnaround in the state of US politics:

Climate change

Today’s election result heralds the rise of Green Keynesianism. The US economy is in the toilet and smart economists are advocating direct investment over a more consumer-based fiscal stimulus. Democrats in Congress got a head start last year with the Green Jobs Act, and elements of the President-elect’s energy and environment policies look a lot like a ‘Green New Deal’. This from Time Magazine:

He wants to launch an “Apollo project” to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: “The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit.” But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, “because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt.” A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and “there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy … That’s going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.”

Calls for a Green New Deal are also starting to gain traction in the UK – and the UN. This can only help the chances of Australia’s version of the Apollo alliance, which released the ‘Green Gold Rush’ report last week calling for investment in green-collar jobs growth.

The Obama campaign’s target for emissions cuts was 80% by 2050 – a fair way ahead of Oz Labor’s as-yet-unaltered election promise of 60% by 2050. With the Arctic ice-sheet melting rapidly even an 80% target is too low for a developed country like the US, but it should certainly give Professor Ross Garnaut reason to revise his pessimism about the likely outcome of the Copenhagen round of climate negotiations. It’s worth noting that the Obama campaign’s climate and energy platform specifically called for 100% auctioning of permits.

Continue reading ‘Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?’

US election: Obama wins – The audacity of hope…

It’s all over, red rover, and Barack Obama, with 200 electoral votes in the bag and enough in the bag to come from the West Coast and Midwest to come, has won the presidential election. Lots of interesting stuff still to come, including the all important Senate races and the ballot iniatives, and the size of the victory both in the electoral college and in the popular vote. And the turnout, which is looking huge.

What’s intriguing about this win is that Obama will exercise influence immediately. George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks, and arrangements have already been made for the next president to participate in shaping economic policy, and former Times Economics Editor Anatole Kaletsky thinks that influence will make a difference quickly:

If tomorrow’s election delivers a clear economic mandate to a competent new Administration, the financial markets will soon stabilise — and the US economy could recover surprisingly quickly from the blundering incompetence of Henry Paulson and George W. Bush.

Obama will be naming cabinet members and other key administration figures very quickly, and we won’t have the traditional waiting game for policy and names to trickle out before mid January.

How will he govern? One of the most interesting comments he’s made is when he told Jon Stewart that difficult times enable a President to achieve big things. There’s a bit of an FDR game in play, perhaps, with the modest promises of the campaign potentially being eclipsed by the pressure of events. We’ll see – expectations will certainly be high.

Related posts: The archive of all US election 2008 posts at LP can be accessed here.

Update [by Mark]: The text of Obama’s speech is here.

US election: The Senate – race towards 60 Democratic seats?

A sign of a campaign in trouble is normally the plea to make sure the winner doesn’t win too big. In the Australian context, we’ve often had the “send a message” ploy from Oppositions in state elections – Premier X and Party Y is bound to win big, so vote your grumbles and make them more responsive. When the incumbent’s support is soft, it can win you the election – two examples that come to mind are Wayne Goss in Queensland in 1995 (though strictly speaking it took a contested election and a subsequent by-election, etc, etc) and Jeff Kennett in Victoria in 1999. There was a twist on this tactic last year from the Liberals federally – with the “Labor coast to coast” scare, though that was despair from the incumbent rather than an insurgent Opposition. In America, where the legislative and executive branches are elected separately, it’s easy to run this sort of thing – hence the ploy from the McCain/Palin campaign to start a furore over “leftest government ever” if Obama is added to big Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

Mind you, I can’t see personally how anyone would be scared of Harry Reid, or why he’s some ultra-liberal commie pinko. And Nancy Pelosi and “San Francisco values”? Well, look what happened in ‘06. In the House, the Democrats are hunting deep in red state territory and in the Republican suburbs and exurbs, actively campaigning in over 60 GOP held districts, while the Republicans play defence. Gains of 20-30 seats are expected.

But there’s probably more interest in the Senate contest. The Senators up for election this time around were elected in 2002 – a good year for Republicans. There’s some hope that the Democrats will increase their current majority from 51, perhaps reaching 60 – a point at which the minority can no longer hold legislation hostage through filibuster threats. (Note, though, that party discipline is nowhere near as tight as it is in parliamentary systems, though it’s much tighter among the Republicans than it used to be since they became more ideologically unified.) The Dems now include among their wafer thin majority two independents – Socialist (more like European style social democrat) Bernie Sanders of Vermont and “Independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Lieberman may well lose his committee chair after the election, but in terms of his re-election prospects, he’s still got some incentive to caucus with the majority.

Nate Silver has all the good oil on which races to watch. Stirling Newberry also has a worthwhile analysis of the contests in the South – Virginia, where former Governor Mark Warner (D) (and former 08 presidential hopeful) should easily take Richard Lugar’s seat after retirement, Georgia, where Jim Martin (D) looks good against Saxy Chambliss (R) (and where there might be a runoff under state law if the Libertarian candidate can prevent either the Dem or Repub from getting 50%), and North Carolina where Elizabeth Dole (R) looks to be in trouble. Longer shots are one of the two races in Mississippi (to fill the unexpired part of Trent Lott’s term), and Kentucky where GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is vulnerable. John Cormyn’s seat in Texas is a really long shot, but turnout – if it’s big and big for Obama – may well be a factor in making a lot of the races tighter than they appear to be.

Continue reading ‘US election: The Senate – race towards 60 Democratic seats?’

US election: What to expect and what to watch

I’ll be updating this post as we get closer to Wednesday, but it’s worth making a few points at the outset:

Exit Polls: Take these with a grain of salt. In the states which allow early voting, almost 30 million have already turned out – with big advantages in many states in terms of the proportion of registered Democrats and independents voting over registered Republicans. Obama has “banked”, if you like, a lot of the support he had at the top of the range of his poll results. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t get a lot of support on election day – the number of genuine undecideds would be very low at this point. The race is basically frozen – there hasn’t been much “tightening” and McCain has run out of time. The early voting advantage also means a smoother turnout the vote operation on the day itself, and all the evidence is that the Republicans’ much touted turnout advantage has been completely reversed. In fact, if you put together a lot of what we know about the lack of volunteers and enthusiasm in the GOP camp, this could be quite important.

In addition, the chance of dirty dealing on the results is lessened because a lot of the African-American vote has deliberately turned out early to minimise shenanigans and maximise the chance of votes being counted. So… that takes us to…

Why people are still saying the race could go either way… It’s partly the meejah trying to maintain interest, and partly both campaigns have an interest in making sure their voters think it’s important to turn out. And then there’s Republican denialism and their well known habit of assuming that you can create your own reality. And Democratic nerves.

States in play: Here’s the Kerry/Bush map from 2004 (courtesy of Wikipedia):

The latest polls have Obama ahead in all the Kerry states, and leading in the following Bush states – New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada and Iowa. Outside chances are Georgia, North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and McCain’s home state of Arizona. McCain appears to have a lot of eggs in the Pennsylvania basket, but it doesn’t look likely. The invaluable Nate Silver discusses possible McCain electoral math scenarios here, and the key states to watch here.

Update: Nate Silver sums up where the latest polling leaves the race:

Far more important, of course, is the race for 270 electors. It appears almost certain that Obama will capture all of the states won by John Kerry in 2008. Pennsylvania, while certainly having tightened somewhat over the course of the past two weeks, appears to be holding at a margin of about +8 for Obama, with very few remaining undecideds. Obama also appears almost certain to capture Iowa and New Mexico, which were won by Al Gore in 2000. Collectively, these states total 264 electoral votes, leaving Obama just 5 votes shy of a tie and 6 of a win.

Obama has any number of states to collect those 5 or 6 votes. In inverse order of difficulty, these include Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana. Obama is the signficant favorite in several of these states; winning any one of them may be fairly difficult for John McCain, but winning all of them at once, as John McCain probably must do, is nearly impossible.

Robert Corr has tweaked a map of poll closing times in the various states, adding Australian times to it as a guide for tomorrow, and Nate Silver has prepared an hour by hour guide of what to look for as the results come in.

Update: Related post: Election eve links.

Update: Howard Dean’s pollster at Salon on how to read the numbers.

Update: Related post: What to watch for in the Senate races.

Update: Nate Silver on ten reasons why you should ignore exit polls.

The Reds are coming!

I’m not sure if I’m the only one who found the juxtaposition on the news last night of discussion of global regulation at a meeting between Chinese and EU leaders and George W. Bush’s “free markets are great!” remarks rather odd. I suspect two things are at work here – first, the defensive reaction to loudly proclaim your ideological purity even at a time when your actions belie your words, and secondly, the related posturing of the Republicans doing their level best to damn Obama as a socialist (which is also rather strange as John McCain wants to spend $300 billion buying up mortgages). For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like the red smear is working – unsurprisingly polls are finding that a large majority of US voters don’t mind the idea of higher taxes on those earning more than $250000 a year to fund a healthcare plan. Conjuring up these atavistic spectres (“communism!”, “socialised medicine!”) isn’t spooking too many people.

The GOP might also be a tad influenced by Alan Greenspan’s concession that his ideological predispositions led him into errors which contributed to the global financial crisis, which John Quiggin argues illustrates the bankruptcy of the “efficient markets hypothesis” and demonstrates that financial markets have a tendency towards creating instability, rather than the other way around.

So, I think there’s a bit of projection going on – amidst the ruins of their ideological landscape, the GOP are trying to cast the Democrats in the role of the enemies of market freedoms, whose benefits (in the form in which they existed) are looking quite illusory. Continue reading ‘The Reds are coming!’

Bring back Bill Clinton (the last dog isn’t dead yet)

I’m going to go out on a limb here.

Bill Clinton is the only genuine political talent that creaking heap of donkeys, the beloved Democratic Party, has produced in an age. Damn that Twenty-Second Amendment.

Obama plays it safe yet again, basically following the line of least resistance by endorsing the Paulson bailout plan with some meaningless caveats. There were calls in the States for Obama to actually return to the Senate and get involved in the legislative process over the “plan”, which would be a useful contrast with what firedoglake correctly characterises as McCain’s “empty babbling on the economy”. That might be a smart move particularly given his very thin legislative record.

But, nope.

What we get is propaganda about “post-partisan solutions”. The Democratic candidate who won’t even speak the D Word, let alone the L Word. Continue reading ‘Bring back Bill Clinton (the last dog isn’t dead yet)’

McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere

Although aspects of his critique are tentatively sketched by his own admission, Jay Rosen has hit more nails than he’s missed with his analysis of the significance of the Sarah Palin veep selection by the McCain campaign. Rosen’s article is rightly getting a lot of attention. It’s “personalities, not issues” as McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said, and the dark divisive arts of Karl Rove are being revived for the umpteenth time, and to date, are apparently working. Though in an somewhat problematic article in Salon, problematic because of the gender stereotypes it re-enacts while purportedly criticising them, Gary Kamiya provides some hope for thinking the Democrats might turn things around. But the controversy over Palin’s claims to have opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” illustrates the double bind the GOP have the Democrats in.

At least the turf this issue – the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain – is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.

But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands – because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want – and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works – because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters – who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv – and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks – are seeing what McCain wants them to see – a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.

Continue reading ‘McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere’