You're gonna have to serve somebody...

Today's lesson: respecting your base. Or, as Molly Ivins put it, dancing with them what brung ya. This is the evidently complicated political tactic of listening to the desires of the people who voted for you, then carrying out said desires. I know, it's a radical idea. But stay with me here.

Every political party has a natural base; that is, an amalgamation of individuals and interest groups who stand to benefit most when the government is run by that party, and will therefore vote for that party. In the US, the party/base split is as follows:

Republican Party: Large corporations, wealthy individuals.
Democratic Party: Everybody else.

So in a representative democracy, how is it possible that a party whose governing philosophy would benefit everyone with fewer than two houses (a slight majority, last I checked) loses any elections at all?
Partly it's cultural. There's a very deep-rooted piece of the American mindset that likes the idea of government stepping in to help people, but thinks they're doing way too much for the darker-skinned folk, or the gays, or the (fill in minority/special-interest group here). Tribalist stupidity? Oh yeah. But it's there. And as long as you're a party that really wants a better shake for everyone, regardless of gender, race, orientation, religion, etc., you're probably going to lose a few people who don't want to share their toys with the weird kid.

A bigger part, though, at least with the post-DLC Third Way-horseshit Dems, is that they took a look at that calculus, and decided that rather than follow their basic philosophical instincts and cater to the needs of every American who doesn't have a trust fund and a winter home in the Caymans, they would try to out-corporate the GOP. There's a funny thing about that, though. The big corporations already have a party, and don't need another one. And when everyone else looks around for a party, they don't have one. Come Election Day, they either don't show up, or they vote for the good-looking guy with the truck who at least seems like he listens occasionally.
Too theoretical? OK, cool. 3 out of 5 MA Obama voters who voted for Brown said that they support a public option in healthcare. And of Obama voters who stayed home, 80% support a public option. This is what we call in political science "a pissed-off base." Might be time to fix that.

But if you try sometime, you just might find...

I (along with a few million other folks) got an email tonight from Organizing for America, the Obama administration's grassroots/fundraising arm. It's basically a "calm down, Dude, nothing is fucked" missive. Par for the course politically, especially after a loss as humiliating and preventable as Tuesday's. There's one gem of a line in it, though, which will bring me into the first post on the "now what?" following Coakley's loss.

"We could have simply sought to do things that were easy, that wouldn't stir up controversy. But changes that aren't controversial rarely solve the problem." There's a civil response to such a statement. I choose to forgo said response.

Are you guys fucking kidding? Seriously, please tell me you're joking. I'll grant you, nothing about this year has been easy politically. And there has certainly been more than a bit of controversy. But to imply that this is because the Dems have been boldly striking a new path and the squares just can't handle it? That's just... that is an Augean level of bullshit. Yeah, that's right. I'm so pissed about this that I've gone to the classics nerd place.
The Democratic Party has spent the entirety of the last year (hell, of the last decade or two) bending over backwards in an effort to be non-controversial. Everything they do shows a desire to find the mushy, inoffensive middle and snuggle up there forever. One imagines caucus meetings on the Hill: "Does this bill do anything?" "No, but David Broder wrote a glowing column about it, then called me and said I reminded him of a young Sam Nunn!" There's a little-known saying, which I can understand that the Dems may not have encountered, about what happens when you try to please everyone. (Hint: it's not pleasing everyone.) Take healthcare. The Democrats have begged, compromised, and bludgeoned their way to a sensible, incrementalist baby step of a bill which doesn't open the floodgates to single-payer and, AND! cuts the deficit. And what has it gotten them? Senator Scott Brown, for one. (Hey, I got through typing that without puking! The scotch must have worked.)

Understand the following, O wise leaders of the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. There is no comfort to be found in the middle, marshmallowy soft though it may be. I'm going to highlight the next sentence, because it's the most important one in this post.

Compromise is a means, not an end.

This is what people always get wrong when they make the "ah, Ted Kennedy would have helped here, 'cause he was a real horse trader. He'd have found the middle ground, and the bill would have passed." Horse traders don't look for the middle ground. Any horse trader who wants the middle ground goes out of business. You know why a horse trader trades his horse? To get a better fucking horse!
If tomorrow morning, Red Sox fans read that Theo Epstein's traded Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz, Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis, and a handful of prospects to Toronto for Adam Lind and Vernon Wells's salary, and justified it by saying "This was as far as the other side wanted to go, and leading a baseball team means making compromises," I somehow doubt we'd be erecting a statue. In fact (and this is important) some of us would start calling John Henry and urging him to hire Toronto's GM. Because that dude got shit done.

When everything's gone wrong somehow...

I've had a little while now to process that the guy with the truck is about to be the junior senator from Massachusetts, but I've been preparing myself for it for about two weeks. Mostly with scotch. So let's start where we must, and then go on to the "what now?"

Martha Coakley, her campaign staff, the Massachusetts Dems, the national party... they're all to blame for basically the worst campaign I have ever seen in my life. And I voted for Shannon O'Brien in 2002, which should give you a good idea of my threshold there. To decide (as one friend put it) "Hmmm... we're running an establishment Democrat in an era of economic turmoil. I know! Let's run as though the election were merely a formality! After all, it worked for President Hillary Clinton..." is bad enough. To then double down upon that stupidity by delaying debates, mocking the very idea of old-style hustings, and (GODDAMN it I can't believe this matters but it does) implying that one of the most beloved sports figures in the state roots for the Yankees? The English language fails me in attempting to describe the awfulness. If ever a candidate deserved to lose, and lose humiliatingly, it was our otherwise competent AG.
Of course, here's where we come to one of the best phrases Molly Ivins (and man, oh man, could we use her around these days) ever used. There's an old leftist concept of heightening contradictions. The idea, basically, is to let the center-left parties swing, and let the rightists run things for a while, and everyone will see how awful it is and come running to the left. Political problems aside, Ivins's response was always to imagine the mother of a soldier, or an uninsured cancer victim, saying "not with my child's life." Because the problem with giving up on the "left-wing" of the two legit parties is that the right-wing one gets to be in charge, and they will get people killed. Martha Coakley deserved to lose. But that does not mean that we all deserved to suffer the consequences of her failure.

So what will those consequences be? Well, that seems as good a series as any to actually get this blog on a roll. I'll cover a bunch of aspects of the fallout over the next week or two, and with any luck it'll be enough of an impetus to really make me a blogger.

The Telling Anecdote

A big thing in political reporting is what's known as the "telling anecdote." This is basically a form of politics-as-fractals, the idea of a single moment or story that perfectly encapsulates a given candidate or issue. Mike Dukakis in the tank, George Allen's "macaca" slip, these are both decent examples. John Kerry's "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" is even a better one. The best one I can think of is the Bush Administration's (man, I'm glad they're gone...) response to Katrina. Incompetence, arrogance, willful unpreparedness, and callous disregard for the damage caused to real people by bad policy, all wrapped up in a flooded American city? The perfect shorthand for 8 years of Dubya. (I'll cover McCain's in tomorrow's election remembrance.)

Anyway, there was a lovely one today from Orrin Hatch, longtime holder of the coveted "Most Hypocritical Member of the Senate" crown. He was giving an interview to a conservative news service, and in talking about healthcare, he voiced his fears that the passage of a reform bill could destroy the two-party system. Since the Dems are pushing for socialized medicine (I pause here for a wistful "oh, if only..."), then once we've got it, "...almost everybody's going to say all we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party." This, he implied, was the major rationale behind healthcare reform.
Now, a couple things. Firstly, even if the Dems were inclined to go for the "if you don't vote for us, your children will die of easily curable diseases" route, the moment they got healthcare reform passed, they'd promptly start tripping over their own feet, because such are the Democrats. Secondly (this deserves a line break)...

...I'm not sure it's ever occurred to Orrin Hatch that there might be non-electoral reasons to support healthcare reform. Are there political points to be scored by giving people cheap healthcare? Sure, of course. I'm not sure the Democratic Party is smart enough to capitalize upon such a thing, but it's foolish to suggest that there's no possible political motive involved. However, the US spends a sixth(!) of its GDP on healthcare, and we have 50 million people uninsured or underinsured. Americans who do have insurance regularly lose it for such horrifying offenses as changing jobs or going to a dermatologist five years prior to developing cancer. The status quo is horrifying, and one of the basic tasks of government is to solve problems such as this.
But I don't think Orrin knows that. I'm not sure he can wrap his head around the idea of doing something because it's a necessary and worthwhile policy decision, rather than an electoral winner. The only reason that Democrats and progressives could possibly want to provide cheaper health insurance is to bribe low-income voters, thus gaining their votes in a sinister plot to win legislative majorities that will pass mandatory gay-marriage laws.

So why is this a telling anecdote? Because it reveals a party in its basic philosophy. The Republican Party, when it looks at legislation or policymaking, doesn't see the forging of a social contract and the building of a commonwealth. It sees patronage and electioneering.

Have the Democrats Learned Branding?

While granting credit to the GOP in anything grates a bit, one area in which they've always handed the Dems their asses has been bumper-sticker sloganeering. It's not exactly an important skill in governance, but when it comes to campaigning, it's a hell of an advantage. It's better for advertising (bumper stickers and pins, of course, but also 30-second TV spots), it's better for getting media coverage (anything more than five words, and reporters' eyes start to glaze over), and it plays into one of their key lines of attack against the Democrats. The overly wordy, wonkish egghead liberal is one of the old standbys of Republican campaigns, and we don't exactly do a wonderful job of ducking it. And, America being what it is, in a contest between the nerd and the regular dude, the nerd's not going to win too many rounds.

So how do we deal? Well, we could go the Republican route, and base our entire platform on a small set of reactionary concepts which run no more than three syllables apiece ("guns good," "taxes bad," "gays icky," etc.) Or, we could just sell our actual ideas more simply. Not that this is easy. There's only so much to be done as far as explaining the intricacies of healthcare reform. But finding a way to sum up shouldn't be hard. I think this is one realm in which Obama's years as a professor come in handy. Summing up complex ideas and helping others understand them is pretty basic to the teaching profession, and the best teachers do this amazingly well.
It seems like the Dems may be getting the memo on this one. There's evidently talk in the House of rebranding the public option as "Medicare Part E" ("E for Everyone," puke, but cheesy can occasionally work out). This is exactly the sort of simplification that can work. It's not dumbing anything down, it's not assuming the electorate is too busy or too stupid to listen to a three-minute explanation, it's just a shorthand. Everyone has some idea of what Medicare is, they know it's government-run (well, most of them do, anyway), they know it's cheap, and they know it's reliable. Most of us know at least one person who's on Medicare, and can ask them what they think of it. And most importantly, it's exactly like the ideal public option, a government-provided, easily-accessed form of health insurance. Toss in the fact that Medicare is overwhelmingly popular, so much so in fact that defending it has been cited by Republicans as a rationale for opposing the reform effort, and you've got a hell of a way to sell a public option.

As for broader campaign slogans, the President brought one out over the weekend that I'm hoping shows up on a million bumpers and lapels all through 2010. Giving a speech at a Dem fundraiser, he praised the concept of a strong, loyal opposition, but pointed out that we don't really have that, we just have a heckling section. Or, as he put it: "...when, you know, I'm busy and Nancy [Pelosi]'s busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else's mess, we don't want somebody sitting back saying, 'You're not holding the mop the right way.' Why don't you grab a mop?" "Grab a mop" is a hell of a slogan. Three words (ah!) and it's quietly devastating. It doesn't say to anyone, "Hey, you're idiots for voting GOP," it doesn't start a long debate, and it only hints at the fact that the mess is their fault. It just thumps them for being useless.
The GOP's been branding itself as the "party of ideas" for a few decades now, but it's spent a good half-century or more as the party of hard work and good old American can-do pull-yourself-up spirit. Even more importantly, they've gotten a great deal of mileage out of portraying Democrats and their social welfare programs as just being designed to help people who are lazy, drugged-up, or otherwise undeserving. If the Dems can turn this around a bit, make themselves over as the party that's working hard to fix the country while the GOP just sits in Washington flinging mud, they can do score some serious points. Here's hoping we see a lot more mops at rallies and campaign stops over the coming year.