A changing coalition
February 29, 2008
Ron Brownstein has an article in the National Journal on the changing demographics of the Democratic Party, namely that we are “growing younger, more affluent, more liberal, and more heavily tilted toward women, Latinos, and African-Americans”.
Brownstein notes that:
this year’s changes have accelerated a clear movement away from key elements of the historic New Deal coalition on which Hillary Clinton has based her candidacy.
… just before the Wisconsin primary in mid-February, ABC News polling director Gary Langer calculated that a cumulative majority of white Democratic primary voters in all of this year’s contests had college or postgraduate degrees — a remarkable tipping point for a party that since its 19th-century inception has viewed itself as the tribune of the working class.
“The Democrats are replacing a union working-class voter with a nonunion upscale voter,” says [Matthew] Dowd, who advised Texas Democrats before enlisting with Bush in 1998.
The thing to note, though, is that Dowd is wrong. The Democrats aren’t replacing working-class voters with more affluent ones. They’re building a center-left majority by adding to the old coalition. Brownstein observes that “even groups whose relative role is declining are voting in larger absolute numbers: Their share of the vote is shrinking only because they are not growing as fast as other components of the party’s coalition”.
Moreover, this change isn’t happening because Democrats have adjusted their policy agenda in favor of more affluent voters. It’s happening because moderately well-off Americans increasingly see themselves as in need of the same economic security which the New Deal provided to those with less money.
Both the Democratic House, and the Clinton and Obama campaigns are putting out credible legislative proposals that are substantially more progressive than were either Gore’s or Kerry’s. Universal health care instead of prescription drugs. Tax reform instead of an endless parade of petty deductions. Liberal internationalism instead of me-too warmongering. Substantive ideas to rein in carbon emissions instead of in addition to platitudes about foreign oil.
It’s almost like growing a backbone when it comes to progressive issues that enjoy majority to super-majority support can help you win more elections.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
You are wrong Ben. The working class is waking up. Most of us are fed up with the corporate Democratic Party. Just because Obama speaks change he still is a DLC loving Neo Liberal. Fromm loves the guy and so does his mentor Harold Ford. The DLC Neo Liberal wing has taken full control.
February 29th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
That kind of scares me. To think that many people believe the government needs to be bigger and that it is here to solve your problems. and to think that many people have bought into the global warming/climate change hoax.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 am
Jason: Think this thru…
It is the mindset that you espouse that got us where we are today. We bought into the conservative concept that all government is bad and government always screws up. So we elected a bunch of government-haters to run our government.
The now-the-government conservatives had a Hobson’s choice. Either they screw up badly and prove that government always does things badly or actually govern and prove their whole political reason for being was wrong.
Unfortunately they chose to go the route of screwing up to prove their point and we are all going to pay for that neo-con fantasy for the next generation.
It was pretty easy for Newt, Rush, Sean and the gang to throw rocks when they were not responsible for our country. Now that they have botched things so spectacularly, they are about to be pitched out of power for a long time. It could be a New-Deal sort of realignment this year, and the Conservatives have only themselves to blame for being incredibly stupid, corrupt and cruel.
You all followed Rush’s siren call and forgot that he is an entertainer, essentially an insult comic with a Hillary obsession, and not a creator of any sort of workable policy. All the proof you need of that statement is to look at the astounding mess that implementing his espoused polices has made. You can’t blame it on the “Libruls”. This is a born-and-bred conservative disaster.
RE: Climate change
It is good to remember that the earth is not flat, even though it may appear so to the uninitiated observer. The overwhelming consensus of scientists studying global warming is that we are the problem. Rush, the WSJ editorial page and Rupert Murdoch’s various bile ducts don’t believe it, but I don’t see them actually doing the science. The issue here, of course, is the deniers are attempting to force science to match their pet economic theories.
That is bogus by definition. First you take the data, then you draw the conclusions. Not the other way around….
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:25 pm
You are right the Republicans did screw up by not governing as Conservatives. That is why the Dems won in 06. There are many reasons I don’t buy into the who Global Warming/ Climate Change thing and it’s not because Rush or Sean says it’s falce it has to do with the starting premise that the climate right now is perfect. The earth is billions of years old and the Climate has chaged many times before we got here so I think yeah the earth is changing and there is nothing we can do about it I mean if we can make it hotter why can’t we also make it colder? I just think it is arrogant to think that we can destroy the planet by making our own lives better.
Hey sorry If I belive people are what make this country great and alot of the policies that Obama espouses will get in the way of people making their lives better and our great country better. I just can see punishing Exellance as a way to improve the economy, all that is going to do is make people not want to improve themselves and make a slight downturn we are having worse.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:42 am
It is sad to see how the principled conservative movement has been hijacked by a collection of wild-eyed radicals at least as crazy as the hard left ever was, and with a lot more power to do mischief.
Conservative didn’t used to mean electing the stupidest and most bull-headed president ever, starting voluntary wars of aggression, bankrupting the country, turning the good ‘ole USA into essentially a police state where the government can spy on your every move and communication without a warrant and whisk you off to another country and torture you with no legal recourse.
I t isn’t very difficult to understand why the “Conservative” brand is a little tarnished right now. The modern version of conservatism is more closely aligned with fascism than classic conservatism. The Republican party enabled this conversion and will pay dearly for embracing raw power over the traditional concern for individual liberties. Go back to your roots, conservatives! We will be a better country for it.
And please…Don’t trot out how 9-11 changed everything. It allowed the most blatant governmental power grab in our countries history, mostly. We are not safer now. We have made an entire region of the planet into our sworn enemies. That was both predictable and astoundingly stoooopid. It has cost trillions and accomplished nothing at all to help the average American.
What says it all about our “surging” and “success” in Iraq is that the President of Iran, a charter member of the “Axis of Evil” can now visit Baghdad with three days public notice and be greeted with rose petals, kisses from the Iraqi President and state dinners.
George Bush has to sneak into the airport unannounced in the cover of night for a couple of hours while being guarded by the entire 82nd airborne. A lot of progress there, neo-cons. Good job, eh?
March 4th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
I just have one question for you. What liberties have you lost? How can we make a Region that for the most part already hated us for our liberty and our culture our enemies uh I believe alot of them already were our enemy. they did attack us many times before 9-11 after all. If you didnt’ know you can trace there attacks all the way back to the 1790’s but I digress. I’m not really a Bush fan he has done alot of things I don’t agree with but really don’t see all the things most people hate about him except that he’s not the best speaker in the world.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:44 am
1. Habeas corpus.
2. The right not to be tortured by my government.
3. The right to make a phone call without being spied on.
4. The right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
That’s not what I meant. What I was asking is what Liberties have YOU personally lost? Have you lost Habeas Corpus Ben? are you Being Tortured by the US Government? are you being Spied on Ben? Have you lost the right to a speedy and public trial by and impartial jury? Has any of this happend to you or any of your friends or family?
March 5th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Amen Ben!
The concept that the middle east hates us for our liberty and culture is gospel among the right wing. It is a concept put forward by Bush and endlessly and mindlessly repeated by dittoheads everywhere. It is nice, gauzy, piece of completely content-free rhetoric and makes a nice bumper-sticker sort of mantra. Problem is…It isn’t true.
Ponder some more plausible reasons why we may not be the Iraqi’s favorite folks:
1. We invaded their country for demonstrably bogus reasons. No WMD. Hans Blix couldn’t find them. Scott Ritter couldn’t either. Nor could the 1200 member “Mobile Exploitation Team”. Nor has 160,000 member of the US armed forces and 100000 contracted mercenaries found any in 5 years of looking.
2. We have killed 600,000 of their neighbors, family members and countrymen.
3. We have attempted to force a representative democracy on them, so they could be just like us.
4. We have denigrated their religion by lumping all Muslims under the heading of “Islamic Fascists”.
5. We enabled a 3-way civil war on their territory.
6. We continue, under presidential command, to torture and indefinitely detain their countrymen.
7. We have been bombing them since 1992 and have had them under punishing embargo now for 16 years. We have rained more bombs on them that we dropped in WW2, completely destroying the countries infrastructure. We continue to bomb them, surgically, of course.
8. Our servicemen and contractors engage in murder, rape and torture of their countrymen, children and women. Things the the USA executed Germans for doing at Nuremburg.
9. We hunted down and killed their leader and as much of his family as we could find.
So, where do you rank “Hate us for our Liberty and Culture” in that list?
My beef with Bush is not his incoherence. I find that sort of amusing. His major problem is having the most underdeveloped set of reasoning skills that any modern country has had to endure in a leader.
He’s the decider, so he likes to remid us. He blasts off a ill-considered (or more to the point, unconsidered) hip-shot decision and then absolutely refuses to entertain any evidence that he might not be doing it quite right. His minions like to think this is “steely resolve”. No, it is old-fashioned pig-headed substitution of consistency for critical thought. A dangerous characteristic for a guy with this much firepower behind him, as we have sadly discovered.
George Will, ordinarily a devoted Bush boot licker” opined on 5-4-04: ”This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts.”
And that is the problem….
March 5th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Liberty isn’t defined by what’s happening to me at this moment in time.
If the government claims the right to spy on American citizens without warrants, abduct American citizens off the streets of American cities, hold them without charges in a military prison, fly them off to third-world countries to be tortured, and execute them in military tribunals (George Bush has claimed the authority to do all of these things), then the government is asserting its right to do any of that to you and me, too, even if we don’t have dark skin and funny Muslim names.
If a country of laws is turned into a country of “for reasons of national security”, then yes, our liberties are being weakened. Maybe we don’t need to avail ourselves of those constitutional protections right now, but it’s good to know that they’re there if you need them. Which, thanks to Bush and the Republican Party, they may not be.
March 5th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
His major problem is having the most underdeveloped set of reasoning skills that any modern country has had to endure in a leader.
I think this is exactly right. I’m convinced that Bush sees himself as a grimly determined world-historical leader (”I could have been like Churchill, if only I had the chance”!). Overwhelmed by the complexity of his job, he latched onto a “good vs. evil” theme through which he could filter everything else. Having done so, an inability to respond to events or have second thoughts becomes a virtue. (”They didn’t believe Churchill in 1936, either. I’ll show ‘em!”).
It would be pathetic, if it wasn’t costing us $3 trillion ($10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country) and thousands of lives.
March 5th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
OK where did you get that # that we indiscriminatly killed 600,000 Iraqis?
Where is the proof that we are going around and Murdering /Rapeing/tortureing men women and chidren just because we can?
Uh we might of hunted down Saddam but Iraqis killed him not us.
and last but not least We found over 5000 WMD’s a year or so ago I just wasn’t widely reported.
once again no Service member is out there tortureing it is against The UCMJ/LOAC
March 5th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
OH and we are not SPying on American’s unless they are talking to suspected Terrorists. I don’t think They are that interested on what you are saying to your friends and family unless they are planning to blow up some buildings that arn’t scheduled for demolition.
March 5th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
unless they are talking to suspected Terrorists
Do you really not understand the difference between (A) some guy at the NSA just wants to spy on you, for whatever reason, so he calls you a terrorist; and (B) there’s evidence that you’re talking to terrorists, so some guy at the NSA goes to a FISA court judge, who grants a warrant that allows the government to wiretap your phone?
March 5th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Abu Ghriab? Rendition to third countries for “Enhanced Interrogation”? Lyndie England? Robert Granier?Are you really not aware of this?
The 600,000 deaths number came fro0m a study that the British Medical Journal “The Lancet” commissioned. Bush disputes the number and says it is only 30,000-50,000. That still likely ranks it higher than hating our freedoms and culture on the list, ya think?
RE: Rape/murder http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5545121
Don’t take my word for it. the US Government arrested them.
5000 WMD in the last year. Want to cite a credible source?
Uday, Qusay? And we did not facilitate Saddam’s hanging?
March 5th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
once again no Service member is out there tortureing it is against The UCMJ/LOAC
The thing is, shit happens during war, even when every soldier behaves with the utmost chivalry. And not all of them do. Obviously, the Lyndie Englands and Robert Graniers of the world are to blame, as individuals.
But equally obvious, it seems to me, is the fact that the government which put them there bears responsibility for its actions as well.
If you use war as a routine instrument of policy, then you’re responsible for the inevitable and universal results of those wars. Namely that it really, really sucks to live in a country where there’s a war going on, and all the pious cant about freedom being God’s gift to the world doesn’t change that one bit.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I might of gotten the Number wrong but here is a link to the story
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213
March 6th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Credible sources is what I was looking for. Not WorldNetDaily or Rick Santorum. WorldNetDaily is essentially the National Enquirer featuring off-the-wall right wing conspiracy theories instead of alien abductions. Rick touted this theory and got laughed out out of the Senate for his trouble. (Well maybe not this alone. There was the issue of Teri Schaivo and the bringing home of the miscarried fetus to show his kids, too.)
Do you not think that if any of this was real Bush would not have been shouting from the rooftops? Even he doesn’t believe it.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:35 am
ok here are is another version of it
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
Kinda show’s contrasting views of the world
March 7th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Leaving aside the fact that the news sources you’re linking to are not credible: degraded artillery shells that used to hold mustard gas two decades ago during the Iran-Iraq War (when, you know, we were providing them with military aid to use the mustard gas on the Iranians) is neither a legitimate cause for war with Iraq, nor the missing “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam was going to use against Cleveland on 45 minutes notice if we didn’t invade.
More to the point, the idea that mustard gas is comparable to a nuclear arsenal, and that they should be categorized together as WMD, is mendacious bullshit (for crying out loud, the Belgians had mustard gas in 1914). When the government keeps pretending that the two things are equivalent, it makes me wonder what they’re trying to accomplish. Good policy doesn’t need to be sold to the public with a bunch of lies and distortions. It’s almost like there was a group of people in the Republican Party who wanted to invade Iraq for a bunch of not particularly convincing reasons, and they decided to gin up support for their war by pretending that Iraq was a grave threat to the United States.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Ok now tell me how Fox News isn’t as Credible as CNN or MSNBC ?
UH what about the VX that is some pretty nasty stuff?
March 7th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Ok now tell me how Fox News isn’t as Credible as CNN or MSNBC ?
UH what about the VX that is some pretty nasty stuff?
March 7th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Ok now tell me how Fox News isn’t as Credible as CNN or MSNBC ?
UH what about the VX and sarin gas that is some pretty nasty stuff?
March 8th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I don’t give CNN a pass. Lou Dobbs is at least as loathsome as Hannity.
But what you see at Fox is is a “news” organization” performing as the propaganda arm of the Republican party and the white house. When Tony Snow became press secretary to Bush it was not a promotion…It was a lateral transfer in the same organization. Same job, new title. Now he’s back in the old job again. Round and round they go…
Fox is run by Roger Ailes, who first sharpened his partisan chops as Nixon’s hatchet man. They employ Karl Rove, for Gods sake! Do you not think “Bush’s Brain”, who bailed out of the white house just ahead of the hounds, might be perceived as partisan? How about O’Reilly? Some raving lefty there, eh? Rupert Murdoch, the owner, is the darling of right-wing whackos everywhere because he serves up a steady diet of war-mongering and Clinton-bashing. What FOX has tapped into is the patriotism-trumps- thinking mindset of way too much of the American right. It is way easier to shout “Love it or Leave it” or You’re a Dirty Fucking Hippie” slogans than it is to actually analyze what is being fed you by the war-cheerleaders.
FOX gives prominent billing to Billy Kristol, who has been relentlessly wrong on every point about his war, yet he still draws his check from Roger.
Fair/Balanced? Nah. Fox exists essentially to inject Republican talking points into the “mainstream” discussion. They do that with an efficiency and single-minded obsession that makes me proud of the American work ethic. They have every right to do that, but there ought to be some truth-in-labeling enforced.
RE: “WMD”
Ben is right. Remember the 38000 Liters of Botulinum Toxin and the 500 tons of Sarin that the Administration hyped endlessly? Remember Colin Powell destroying his reputation and credibility at the UN with the “Mobile Weapons Labs”? How about Condi and the “Mushroom Cloud” and the “Hi-Strength Aluminum Tubes? Seems like a few 1980’s vintage non-functioning artillery shells are not in the same league as the hype. I can see where the war-monger crowd would seize on them as “any port in a storm”, but nobody seriously put them in WMD category. Not even Bush…
But FOX did…There they go, being Fair and Balanced again.
I do share Ben’s bemusement about what this war really is about. Nothing logical make any sense. Maybe the problem is that there is no logic. I don’t think Bush reads Boole all that much…
March 8th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
He He you know what’s funny you dislike Fox for the same reason I dislike CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NYTIMES, NBC, CBS, ABC, shall I go on? Why don’t they put out some truth in Advertising?
March 9th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
You know my whole problem with this Global Warming oh I’m sorry it’s Climate Change now since it’s actually cooling. My problem with it is that it is still a Theory it has not been proven to be a scientific FACT. There are plenty of well respected Scientists out there who have run tests and such that show THe changes in the climate are natural and not man made. like the fact that the global temp dropped 1degree C in the last year due to a drop in Solar flare activity.