Our new Chief of Staff, everybody

Rahm Emanuel:

spent most of the [2006] campaign furious with Dean, whose Fifty State Strategy to build up party infrastructure nationwide he saw as little more than a way to throw money to the wind. In May 2006, Emanuel and Senator Charles Schumer, his counterpart in the Senate, met with Dean to ask for more money for their respective campaigns. Banging his hand on the table, Emanuel chided Dean's grassroots plan, "No disrespect, but some of us are arrogant enough, we come from Chicago, we think we know what it means to knock on a door. You're nowhere Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan. That's fucking bullshit." The two wouldn't speak again until election time.

That being the same 50 State Strategy which laid the groundwork for this:

...Chris Bowers does a great job running down the objections to Rahm -- basically, pugnacity and hilarious stories notwithstanding, he represents a whole lot that that we thought the Democratic Party was leaving behind. He is basically a Clintonian, in that he sees everything through a prism of short-term political success and distrusts the appeal of liberalism; "We have no base," he apparently believes, and his work at the DCCC was hence always aimed at eking out narrow victories with conswervative candidates. Rahm Emanuel plays the political game very well, but he is not a game-changer, which is what we should be expecting from a supposedly transformative Obama administration.

Now. Is this a bad sign? Not necessarily. Obama could well be envisioning Emanuel as his enforcer, someone who takes the progressive legislative priorities he's given and then gets them done, dammit. (Rahm's close connections to the Congress will be invaluable in that regard.) Hopefully, on ideological issues he takes direction well. But I urge caution: we should get used now to questioning President (-elect) Obama's decisions, not just lauding them uncritically. We are not, after all, Republicans.

BONUS QUESTIONABLE OBAMA STAFF CHOICES: Larry Summers is in the running for Treasury. Yes, this Larry Summers. The controversies of Harvard aside, he's certainly no liberal lion...

Hillary Clinton, Outsider?

AT THE RISK of inflaming the very same argument that I tried to kill in yesterday's thread (using the best weapon I know how -- children's television), I have to point out that Hillary Clinton has shown a new and surprising strength in online fundraising, if not to the extent that Obama has. Matt Stoller gives an intriguing take on why (emphasis mine):

What happened now, though, is that the Clinton campaign just tapped out of its McAuliffe big dollar donors, and Clinton was forced to rely on her real base - the women who love her. (I question the "women" bit, but it's not key to the argument --Markus) And unwittingly, with her showing in the Super Tuesday states and her $5 million donation to her own campaign, she asked them for support in a way she never had. And they responded.

It's remarkable, because it is converting voters and supporters into activists and donors, only it's probably not the creative class anymore. Clinton, like Dean, became an underdog, a real underdog, with more public support than Village support, and her public directly responded over the internet to close this gap.

In other words, the Obama campaign has had a strategy of cultivating online donors and activists, they know how to do it, and they are very good at it. The Clinton campaign has not done any of this particularly well because it hasn't been their strategy. And somehow, they are at rough parity over the last 48 hours.

Well, shit. This race has just completely scrambled the insider-outsider dynamic, hasn't it? We all thought that Hillary Clinton was the consummate moneyed insider, and Barack Obama the upstart people-powered outsider. Whether this was ever true is arguable -- but it's certainly not anymore.

Obama's establishment support at this point is on par with Hillary's; all kinds of party apparatchiks have lined up behind him, bringing donors along for the ride. You cannot credibly call him an outsider anymore, just like you cannot credibly call him the underdog. Meanwhile Hillary -- whose campaign tried very hard, stupidly, to paint her as the inevitable Übercandidate -- is now forced by pure financial necessity into more of an outsider role.

It's not an unnatural fit for her, believe it or not; the Clintons' arrival in Washington predates memory for most of us, but the fact is they were (and are) viewed with a definite elitist skepticism by many of the Village doyennes. They and their people were seen as a bunch of Arkansas good ol' boys, hicks who talked funny and hung out in some very unfashionable parts of Washington; it was an affront to many of the older D.C. socialites (Democratic and Republican). Consequently the Clinton administration had a lot of trouble gaining traction (both in the media and legislatively). Think of the way David Broder, king of Old Washington, famously said it in 1998:

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

Bill and Hillary Clinton were always awkward heads of the establishment, and I think they'd both be much more comfortable running from outside it -- much like, we are beginning to see, their supporters. The question ss whether her campaign is capable, institutionally, of making such a switch. (Certainly Mark Penn is not the man to do it, that worthless union-busting choadbag -- if this once-inevitable candidate actually winds up losing, it will be almost completely his fault -- but other folks in the Clinton organization show more promise.) It's quite possible that they're not, or that the circumstances will dictate a different course, or that the idea will just be too utterly ridiculous to stick.

But if Hillary really can recast herself as the outsider candidate, expect to see a subsequent popular (and populist) Clinton surge -- one that will give both the old-line media who've hated her from the beginning, AND the elite bloggers who are convinced of her pervasive establishmentarianism, a new and altogether confusing kind of heartburn...

The IOP likes to reinforce its own stereotypes

Seriously? Among the IOP's spring study groups:

Drawing from her experience in American politics, Morella will head a study group on the past, present, and future of political moderates in Congress.

[...] Morella, who was also an IOP fellow in 2003, said she is pleased to return to Cambridge to discuss issues such as redistricting, special interest groups, and globalization with students.

Why not just cut out the middleman and rename it the Lieberman Institute?

...I remember the outcry when Garrett wrote about "neutered mandarins" and the "catechism of centrism" last month... everyone was so very upset...

...In fairness, the other newly-announced spring fellows seem inoffensive (two reporters, a former Indianapolis mayor, an Irish parliamentarian, and some environmentalist guy), but this just absolutely takes the cake. Are they trying to be walking caricatures of themselves?

Above: "OMG OMG OMG! I HAVE TO TIVO THIS!"

(Also, I'm having a bit of trouble with "redistricting, special interest groups, and globalization." Do those three issues have anything in common at all? Other than that they're all unbelievably boring crap that nobody other than junkies and D.C. insiders cares about? I guess I just answered my own question there...)

Re: Huckabee (and Huckaphobia)

Will and Rob have a zeitgeist going this morning about Mike Huckabee (seven minutes apart! damn dudes!) and how "scary" he is. It's true that Huckabee is quite radical on social/religious issues, but that's not the whole story; I want to present an alternate perspective in which Huckabee's rise is a very good thing for both the Republican Party and the nation.

First of all, I should point out that Huckabee's not going to get the nomination. Rob's point about organizational strength is quite true (not to mention, Huckabee lags significantly in financial support), and historically, the late-rising Republican underdog never actually wins anyway (see McCain 2000): unlike Democratic races, where momentum is usually king, Republican races inevitably wind up nominating the choice of the party establishment. In this case, that's fairly obviously Romney, and I'm confident in predicting -- famous last words -- that his cash and overwhelming organizational strength will pull out a stronger-than-expected second or first in Iowa, a big win in NH, and roll from there to the nomination. (For the record, I think Giuliani's national-primary strategy is horseshit. It has been tried before and it never works. Besides, his numbers are sinking like we knew they would anyway, so I woudln't worry about it.) Even if Romney were to somehow weaken: considering his lack of cash, Huckabee can't campaign everywhere, so he has to hope for a McCain spoiler win in NH, Giuliani strength on Feb. 5, and consequently a delegate split that leads to a brokered convention (about which David Freddoso has written a must-read article for National Review). And a brokered convention, which means that party insiders will be the ones pulling the strings, certainly doesn't favor an outsider populist like Huckabee. So I just don't see how he wins.

(On the other hand, I put no stock in these general-election matchup polls that say Huck would lose badly to Dems; Huckabee's name recognition is way too low for those numbers to signify anything. Same with those polls that say Romney's an easy target -- it's just low-information voters picking the candidate they've heard of. Huckabee could easily put up a serious fight.)

But his meteoric rise in the GOP polls is important in and of itself. And that tells an encouraging story about the state of the GOP electorate: it's pissed with its leadership. Huckabee, remember, is the one candidate who emphatically is not part of the Republican elite; he's not a rich CEO, he's not a city slicker, he's not a Hollywood actor, and he's not a Washington swamp-thing. The Club for Growth despises him, Robert Novak has vetoed him, even the leadership of the religious right is uncomfortable with him; Huckabee's a total outsider. And I think that is what's powering his rise: Republican base voters are fed up with what they've got (understandably), and are looking for a conservative insurgent. It's a mirror image of the dynamic that gave us Howard Dean '04, who rose just as quickly, and who looked just as wacky to conservatives as Huckabee does to us.

There are two good things about this:

• First, it's the harbinger of an all-out Republican civil war (since, unlike the easily-cowed DLC types, I don't think the economic hard-right will go quietly) that would consequently guarantee Democratic control of everything for decades.
• Second, it's a sign that grassroots Republicans (who are still, after all, Americans) are not as tied to low-tax free-market lunacy as their leadership would suggest, and are perfectly willing to support a candidate who talks sense on the economy. Though he's weak on the particulars of issues -- FairTax? Come the fuck on -- he's at least demonstrated a commitment to fair trade, fighting poverty, supporting health care and the social safety net, etc. That's tied right up with his religious identity and sits at the core of his candidacy; they are unquestionably good things to believe.

So I have absolutely no problem with a continuing Huckabee surge; I encourage it, in fact. (And not to toot my own horn, but I should point out that I called this four months ago. Shoulda put money on it!) Christianist nutbar or not, general election threat or not, Huckabee's continuing presence can only be good for our politics.

Garrett Smacks the IOP in Today's Crimson

Read read read read read:

On its face, the IOP purports to support exactly what the misty-eyed memoirists of the activist Sixties want Harvard students to be doing. In the style of the civic-minded academy, it implores Harvard students to “examine critically and think creatively about politics and public issues.” The entire circus operates under the spiritual aegis of President John F. Kennedy ’40, who, one imagines, looks down with rolled-up sleeves and a winning smile upon the IOP’s noble young activists.

Marketing, however, can’t gloss over the truth forever. What transpires down at the end of JFK Street is not the catalysis of idealism but rather a sort of cotillion for political nerds. It absorbs every freshman looking to exercise their obligations as a citizen and churns out a mixture of political technicians, professional hand-shakers, and disillusioned burnouts.

[...] the IOP inculcates a worrisome catechism of centrism in its followers. The maxim of political involvement IOP-style is to mold yourself into just the right mixture of sensible sentiments and professional suavity. Of the nineteen members of the IOP’s Student Advisory Council, for example, only four choose to identify as “liberal” or “conservative” on their Facebook profiles. Nine, apparently, have no political views whatsoever.

And having a corral for the political set on JFK street means Harvard mirrors a problem endemic to the nation: the consigning of civic duties to a self-contained class of “political people.” This flies in the face of the very notion of democratic society: that we are all political people. Political mobility is a sentiment which needs to boil through everyone who comes to Harvard College, a trade school of citizenship.

Absolutely right. Plus Garrett is much more intellectual and pragmatic about it than I can ever bring myself to be -- my solution to this problem has never grown much past "burn the motherfucker down", which for the record is also how I feel about the Crimson, the final clubs, and the GODDAMN NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS -- so you should really just go read his piece.

Though I would add that the IOP is ultimately not a cause of our political inertia so much as a symptom; there is a whole social and economic order that demands just those centrist sycophants the IOP churns out. (Let's not pretend the Dems are innocent on that front either.) After all, the all-inclusive "democratic society" Garrett proposes does not coexist well with a capitalistic one...

...For a palate cleanser, make sure also to read Jarret's fun column comparing the GOP presidential race to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- though I do think Jarret seriously underestimates the impact of Ron Paul. He has a blimp, people! A BLIMP! HOW CAN HE LOSE??!?

Watching Out for the Business Lobby

RedState's Erick Erickson -- one of that august institution's only readable writers -- makes an interesting point on the dynamics of the GOP presidential race. Writing from the Family Research Council summit in Washington, (a.k.a. Religious-Right-O-Rama), he proposes a theory as to why Mike Huckabee is struggling to gain any traction among Republican elites:

The social conservatives do not want to rally around Huckabee because he is as distasteful to fiscalcons as Rudy is to socons. Even Tony Perkins, the head of FRC, said he hoped the social conservative candidate would be palatable to the fiscal conservatives out there. Huckabee is not.

That's putting it mildly. Mike Huckabee stands in direct opposition to the tenets of fiscal conservatism; he's a red-blooded Middle American populist, complete with a record of tax hikes and a healthy distate for Wall Street in his rhetoric. Additionally, he's a batshit-crazy religious fanatic who thinks the Declaration of Independence was written by ministers and abortions cause immigration. Neither of these two characterists are particularly appealing to your average CEO, who simply wants someone who'll balance the budget and won't make waves.

Thus the hesitance among religious-right leaders to throw their weight behind Huckabee, even though he's perfect for their constituency (see his remarkable strength at that FRC summit). After all, these people aren't stupid; the last thing they want to do is incite a GOP civil war with the Club for Growth types and all their party's money. Marc Ambinder, adding some thoughts of his own that I don't entirely agree with, nevertheless sums it up very well:

Huckabee has an independent streak. The establishment is threatened. Their interests are at stake and they want candidates who are beholden to them. Huckabee doesn't fit the bill.

At this point the reaction of the Democratic reader is probably some kind of schadenfreude -- but not so fast, this dynamic has consequences for us, too. Here's the scary part of Erick's analysis (emphasis added):

And here we arrive at the conundrum for the GOP and the Press. While the media has been filled with stories about the socons ready to bolt from the GOP if Rudy is the nominee, the real story and the untold story is that the business community is even more ready to bolt from the GOP. For the last eight years they've watched as the socons have scored every significant win on the right — stem cells, judges, etc. Only against Labor have the fiscal guys scored wins. But there have been no budget cuts, no culling of pork, steel subsidies, etc.

The fiscal guys see the writing on the wall. They see Hillary's position. And they are just about ready to cut a deal.

It's not by coincidence that corporate donations to Democrats have soared lately -- access to power is, after all, their driving motivation, and we look increasingly good since the '06 Republican implosion. As a recent example, look how the telecom companies put the otherwise decent Jay Rockefeller in their pockets; and I imagine that's the tip of the iceberg. Of course, business involvement in politics is nothing new, but it has unarguably ramped up on our side since 2006.

The risk here is that business interests will coopt the Democratic Party. Don't think they couldn't do it -- we are agreeable folk by nature, and in purely financial terms we come at a much lower price than Republicans. My God, look how close we are to nominating Hillary Clinton, a first-rate machine politician who fits neatly with their idea of "responsible" (read: malleable) leadership. (It could only be easier for them if we went with Bill Richardson, a Third Way stooge who actually believes the stuff; but thankfully his throwback campaign seems to have disappeared. Has anyone heard from Bill Richardson lately? Is he OK?) I give no credit to the rest of the field, either, save the fringe candidates and of course John Edwards (whose increasingly fiery populism has prompted what looks like a contract on his head among the media, not to mention serious trouble raising funds; whether grassroots support can propel him over these hurdles remains to be seen). The temptation to form such a coalition, with its promises of untold organizing resources and at least a few cycles of total electoral supremacy (until Republicans or a third party got their act together) would be difficult for most Democratic leaders to resist.

But there would be nothing more perverse and dangerous, of course, than an intrusion of the business lobby into our policymaking. For starters, you can kiss off any serious progress on energy and the environment, not to mention the minimum wage and workers' rights or any sort of progressive tax. In the long term, assuming the planet had not yet been fried to a crisp and the disenfranchised poor had not yet risen up in revolt, we'd face a return to the toothless Democratic Party of the pre-radical 1960s when placid status-quo liberalism ruled the day. Nobody, except Exxon and Wal-Mart, wins in this scenario.

I have no concrete proposals as to what we can do about this, except to humbly suggest a vote for John Edwards and a serious look at his government reform proposals; mostly we just need to watch out for the threat of co-optation, and keep our first principles in mind. And of course, keep an eye on the Republican race, specifically on how successful the business lobby is in keeping Mike Huckabee down. It may be an instructive test case for us.