Shadow Campaign

Put Some Chicken on That Chest--A Note to David Axelrod

David--

When a girl I once knew (and liked quite a bit) first saw my bare white torso, she giggled and told me to "put some chicken on that chest."  That admonition has stuck with me and served me well over the years.  When something I'm given feels, well, a little too ethereal or theoretical, I ask for a little more chicken on the chest.  When you're running a national campaign, the advice is free and plentiful.  Here's mine:  put some chicken on that chest. 

Let's do this:

Reverse the race-based spiral we are in with a blockbuster speech on affirmative action and class mobility, as only your guy can deliver it.  Here's how I would play it--go to Wheeling and remind America of multi-generational rural white poverty and how the stories from Harrington's "The Other America" are now 45 years old and yet conditions in many of the places he documents are virtually unchanged a half-century later.  We are now a nation of strivers and strugglers, and this may better define us and serve your man's needs than the racial, ethnic, and linguistic tags once easily assigned us.  The difference, he should note, is that outcomes today are often not a matter of race and ethnicity but of simple geography and access to those ladders of upward mobility.  He should once again establish his own bona fides in this regard--BHO's own forebears were strugglers, who chased opportunity across the continent, etc.; he and MRO are strivers who have gained the credentials and tools to ensure better lives for their children. 

Policy prescriptions--

1)  Class-Based Affirmative Action Pilot Projects  Begin with three regional US Dep't of Education pilot grants to road-test state university admissions based on household income--under $50k would be my recommendation--and parental attainment (dedicated slots set aside for first generation college students of any race who meet the income requirement).  This is a small first step, not significant enough to cause great consternation among civil rights leadership but fraught with great symbolism for those vulnerable to HRC's class-based appeals. 

2)  Establish universal broadband access as a tool of upward mobility and a matter of rural/regional empowerment.  Small towns are dying and it's not just Walmart and deindustrialization that's squeezing the life out of them.  It is access to knowledge, technology, and creative capital that keys to economic survival for small towns. Universal broadband is an equity issue for small towns and rural areas.  It is the 21st century equivalent of rural electrification and the TVA--without it, small towns can't attract and retain talent, rural hospitals lack real-time access to expertise and health information, schools can't prepare fully prepare students to function in a global economy, and professionals and small businesses can't flourish.   

3)  Propose a DOE grant program to establish Green Tech incubators at decommissioned industrial sites.   Don't just talk in broad terms about 5 million "green jobs" the campaign is touting, go to Goshen, Indiana to the StarTrans plant where hybrid shuttle buses are being assembled for the North American market and talk batteries and drive trains.  Talk about the transformative promise of these technologies, as the race's only true 21st century candidate can.  What BHO has and neither of his competitors can touch is a firm grasp of the future.  Plug-in hybrid vehicles for the mass market will be available in the 2009 model year.  Heavy duty all-electric delivery trucks with a 120 mile cruising range will be rolling off an assembly line in Long Beach by the end of the year.  The future is here.  BHO should embody it.

What he must do is talk about how government can till the soil and help create favorable conditions on the ground for targeted investment by green manufacturers.  This includes grants for cleaning up brownfields, assembling land, and improving transportation to idled industrial sites. Changing government procurement policies to encourage purchase of domestically-made hybrid, electric, and clean fuel vehicles; re-incentivizing domestic production in key industries through changes in tax policy; and supporting community college training programs in clean energy and green technology all support this vision.

Go to it.  And put some chicken on that chest.

DW's Post: How Paul Krugman Broke My Heart

Paul Krugman has really disappointed in recent weeks.  No, more, he broke my heart when he wrote that Obama supporters = cultists.  I've been a Krugman fan for years now, through thick and thin.  I have had no problems with his scathing policy editorials on Obama's health care plan; as concerned citizens, we should be able to take criticism from fair-minded people, if anything, it ought to make our candidates stronger.                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                  

His blasts of Obama's heath care policy were fine, that's his very reasoned opinion I thought. 

But unlike the many many many editorials on Obama's health care proposal which Krugman wrote from his own inspiration, this most recent cultist article is a squarely Clintonian slander deeply tied to the their spin camp. 

Krugman was one of the first to blast Obama's health care proposal; the talking points he wrote were later adopted and disseminated by the Clinton team (and, most recently, even used as source material in negative mailers in Wisconsin). Fine, I reasoned, academics often advise politicians on complex matters.  No problem. 

But then Krugman does two things in recent weeks I find objectionable: 1) he argues that people who saw political motivation on behalf of the Clinton Machine to paint Obama as the "the black candidate" were being played like a fiddle by the media, and 2) calls Obama's supporters a cult following. 

How are these related?  Krugman maintains that people who saw an effort to "darken" Obama before South Carolina have been, essentially, sheep in the media's favorite game of Clinton-bashing.  But then, with sheep on the brain, Krugman himself sheepishly recants and legitimizes a story that the Clinton team has been trying to push (with disappointing success), that Obama's supporters are strange, deluded, celebrity obsessed, purely emotional ....in a word, cultish.

One one level, the claim is laughable.  All day long we hear people on TV and in the media tell us that Obama's base is: black people...black people...affluent, educated, white wine sippers...and lately, men.  Leave aside the inaccuracy of this statement, and definitely leave aside the African American component here -- a decidedly Clintonian tactic as of late -- can the pushers of the cultist theory really have it both ways?  Can the Obama supporters be simultaneously mindless, rabidly emotional AND the more affluent, best educated members of the Democratic party?  Does that even make sense? 

Krugman tells us that we should overlook the repeated and questionable efforts by Team Clinton to start up a conversation about race before South Carolina because the whole thing was a media invention.  We've been had, he says.  But he has no problem pushing an explicit Clinton talking point, one that follows in the vein of their attempts to de-legitimize Obama's gains in this campaign at every turn. 

Has Krugman been had, or is he just carrying the Clinton's water nowadays?

Restoration

Teddy Kennedy is hoarse, but you get the sense that the Kennedys are hoarse people. Any family that has been running for office for as long as they have, advocating, cajoling, speechifying, empathizing, defending, and politicking in shirt sleeves when it's 12 degrees outside has earned the right to sound a little hoarse. But why is Teddy, at an age when his peers are writing memoirs and sipping Dewars, running so hard for Obama? Why the fierce urgency of now now? East LA, New Mexico, Boston, Teddy's been running like his the family business is at stake. Running like this is the Kennedys' last shot to make things right.

If is true, and the Kennedys (at least the credible ones) see in Obama Bobby's final avatar, then Teddy is running not so much for Barack Obama as he is for his own family's legacy. That legacy has always been intertwined with the fortunes of the Democratic party and if JFK, Jr. had survived his own reckless youth, perhaps there would today be another Kennedy vying to lead the party out of the wilderness. So permit me some rank speculation: Teddy, though he embraced them, saw the Clintons as usurpers, accommodationists, inauthentic bearers of the party's (and the family's) historic mission. Sure, he tolerated them like boorish in-laws, but ultimately they always disappointed. The Kennedys poured the cement for the Great Society; the Clintons took a jackhammer to important parts of it, some would argue, in the name of triangulation.

I always thought Kennedy really lost his heart when he staged his improbable and costly insurgency against Carter in 1980, but what was ultimately abrogated in that run was the Kennedy claim on the party. Kennedy's bloody run was blamed, unfairly I feel, for the ascendancy of Reagan, so I have to believe that he was deeply invested in the success of Bill Clinton and the party's return to the White House. When the Clintons' timid centrism revealed itself, it was clear that the Kennedy legacy would remain in cold storage for another eight years. One more leap--the family saw JFK, Jr. as their next and perhaps last chance to burnish the brand and recapture its relevance on the national stage. And there is ample evidence that John was weighing a run when he perished in the waters off Martha's Vineyard during the last year of Clinton's second term. The seat he might have sought? Pat Moynihan's--which HRC ultimately captured. So who is Obama to Teddy? Not Bobby at all. He is JFK, Jr., in the race that was never run against the pretenders who had never measured up. It is not just Bill and Hillary who are seeking a restoration.

Edwards' Graceful Exit

Timing is everything, but location counts, too.  JE will end his campaign at 1 PM today where it began--in New Orleans' Ninth ward.  He will undoubtedly keep the focus on poverty and inequity in America and will almost certainly not make any endorsements that might detract from that message.  At least not today.  If it is true and Teddy Kennedy prevailed upon him to drop out before Thursday's debate and the super Tuesday contests, then that would certainly presage an Obama endorsement some time in the near future.  But what is more intriguing to me is what will happen to Edwards' congressional endorsements--yesterday, Arizona Dem Raul Grijalva came over, perhaps because he was tipped off--and there are still some key Texans (Charlie Gonzalez and Eddie Bernice Johnson), most members of the NC delegation, and possibly Bart Stupak who could be enormously helpful to Obama.

Even short of an official endorsement, there is the matter of resources, consultants, and donor lists, and of course ground troops, who might be expected to gravitate to the remaining insurgent in the race.  And then there is Trippi and his loyalists.  You gotta believe Trippi was an Obama guy from Day One and was just running out clock with Edwards until he coudl make his move.  I have only watched him from afar, but I know that he is one of the most principled guys in a generally unprincipled field.  He is also a scrappy and unabashed idealist used to long odds and improbable candidacies.  Unlike Edwards, this a guy made for this fight and I suppose that the conversation with Axelrod is already underway.  How Edwards' brain trust--egos and ids and all-- can be coolly integrated into the Obama operation will be a huge test for the candidate and one measure of his ability to manage a sprawling bureaucracy and ease the inevitable friction between big personalities that always dogs national campaigns.  Much more to come on this... 

I Was Against the Florida Primary Before I Was For It

Pope Theodore

Now that he has issued his encyclical on the Democratic race, will he take an active role in the campaign?  More to the point, will he go to California?  Imagine Kennedy headlining an Obama town hall in downtown LA on immigration reform.  Could the stars be aligned any more perfectly for this "anchor baby", this son of a foreign-born father whose quintessentially American story may land him in the White House?  Obama's narrative is itself an eloquent response to those who would hound immigrants back to their native lands and close the gates behind them.  What's needed is a sure-footed and graceful pivot--this part of his story needs to be told and re-told, but especially in Spanish, so that Obama's campaign is not misinterpreted as another extension of zero-sum tribal politics so prevalent in LA. "I understand what is to be a stranger in a strange land.  My father was a stranger here.  As a boy, I lived in an unfamiliar place with customs that were new to me.  And I have always carried that with me--to be from a place but not entirely of a place..."

So Teddy and Obama...the venerable Kennedy brand wedded to a start-up with a great upside potential.  If Maria Shriver also could speak her mind and lend more of her family's DNA to the movement, that would be the trifecta.  In any case, how could cousin Teddy come to town without at least a visit or a joint appearance?  A tantalizing possibility for Obama, who needs Schwarzenegger independents and crossover votes to overcome HRC's built-in advantages in the state.  More to come on this.

The Fire this Time

"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign.  And Obama ran a good campaign here."

--Bill Clinton in Columbia, SC today in response to a question about Obama's statement that it "took two people to beat him." Jackson had not been mentioned.

This much I know--Bill Clinton is all id and vicarious ambition, and even his most innocuous comments are today laced with broken glass and razor blades.  Clinton is referring to Jackson's two historic victories back when the state held caucuses, not a primary.  And Clinton's objective was not to commemorate Jackson's success but to belittle Obama's and marginalize his campaign.  In fact, in 1988, in his best showing in the state, Jackson only won between 5 - 10% of the white vote, far short of the kind of numbers he needed to call his base a "rainbow coalition".  That improbable mosaic of progressives, African-Americans, and blue collar whites that he sought to assemble never emerged.  As it turns out, Jackson was twenty years too early.   

Exit polling from today's SC primary reveals that Jackson's unlikely coalition of two decades ago may be crystallizing around the candidacy of Barack Obama, with some important differences.  For Obama's campaign, the single most significant cleavage today's primary demonstrated wasn't racial nor class or gender-based, but generational. An astounding 52% of "non-black" (largely white) voters ages 18 - 29 who pulled a lever in today's primary supported Obama--more than twice the percentage (21%) who voted for the only white male still in the race.  Obama lost to Edwards in ever other "non-black" age category, but still ended up with about 25% of the total white vote--2.5 to 5 times the level of Jackson's percentage from '88.  Overall, an average of 66% of voters 18 - 39 of all races chose Obama over his two rivals.  And this in a primary which brought out tens of thousands of new voters and in which over a half million went to the polls.  Obama won women, won men, and, in an encouraging sign for the general, won churchgoers--overhwhelmingly.   

The fears of white backlash over the outpouring of black support for Obama were simply unfounded.  Many whites also found Obama a sympathetic figure in light of Clinton's (Bill's) attacks on him, so the exit polling suggests.  A party elder I know and admire who is neither black nor white once told me that a putative "race traitor" is more threatening to a southern white voter than even a black candidate with a shot at winning.  This is why he believed that Bill and Hillary might hit a wall once the primaries moved south. 

Now I don't think Bill's a "race traitor" or a "race partisan" and I'm even a little embarassed to dignify such a freighted and archaic term with this much attention.  My friend may be giving the Clinton's too much undeserved credit for loyalty to what I have always presumed was their base.  If anything, the last two weeks have demonstrated the transcience and purely utilitarian nature of the coalitions the Clinton's have assembled in the past.  They jettison old friends whose votes they are unlikely to secure this time around and speak in code to groups once thought of as hostile to their interests.  Perhaps the last two weeks in SC have been one extended "Sista Souljah moment" for Bill and Hil.  Like Obama, they may have in fact succeeded in bringing new voices into their coalition--a far lower percentage of Clinton's SC primary voters thought America "is ready for a black president", than Obama's primary voters. 

But what should be most worrisome for the Clinton's is not the shifting sand beneath their coalitions nor the new embrace from some voters who are presumably hostile to black aspirations; what should put the fear of Jesus in Bill and Hil is their near irrelevance to so many young people of all backgrounds.  And what should embolden the rest of us to believe again is the utter indifference to race with which these 20 and 30 somethings seem to exercise their franchise--something Jesse Jackson could only dream of in 1988.  Twenty years later, that's bad news for Mr. and Mrs. Clinton and any other Dems who want to replicate their "Southern strategy" in the future, but a most heartening development for our nation.

 

A Message for DW

Trust the man, trust the message, and trust the voters to shovel through the BS.  The news cycle had already shifted its focus back to Bill Clinton by mid-afternoon and the Rezko story had once again petered out.  WJC is becoming a huge distraction for HRC and he is always one inflammatory remark away from overshadowing her.  And more importantly, voters in key states are getting a taste of what four more years of the Clinton Travelling Circus would feel like if HRC is elected--he always vying for attention, voters (and perhaps foreign leaders) never quite knowing who is really pulling the strings, and his appetites and sense of grievance always pulling him off message.  If he has been abandoned by her and left to get out the vote in SC--a fool's errand, since she has no chance--and even his base is tuning him out, then we can surmise that HRC left him there to limit the damage he can do in the more important Feb. 5th states.  It might be that HRC has seen the writing on the wall and it clearly says, "It's the change, stupid."  You can't be a change candidate when your principal surrogate is a tired and petulant former President, with neither the grace to stay above the fray nor the sense to see that his approach will fragment the party and hand the White House to the GOP for another term.

Daschle, Kerry, and the other Democratic Party

Maybe it's a guy thing.  Maybe it's a white guy thing.  But some of the adults in the Democratic Party are beginning to find their own voices and confront the Clintons over their demonstrably false attacks on BHO.  Kerry's e-mail this afternoon to the several million names on his list and Daschle's announcement earlier today of a "Truth Squad" to debunk false allegations about Obama reveals some deep fault lines in the party that are at once surprising and refreshing.  We always knew Kerry and the Clinton's had their issues, but when a grey lion like Pat Leahy goes public with his endorsement, you've really got to assume that 8 years of Clintonism took its toll on the party and the fear of a replay of 1994's GOP revolution still resonates.  Claire McCaskill has raised the spectre of vast down-ticket erosion in red states if HRC is the nominee, erasing any gains we have made since the mid-terms.  Others clearly have been sharpening this axe since the health care debacle when even Dem legislators were shut out of discussions with the administration.  What BHO really needs is a Barbara Boxer to speak up, bringing an outspoken woman and an indisputable progressive to condemn these attacks and blunt the implict message that the interests of women and those of African-Americans cannot and do not coincide or intersect.  This kind of messaging from Mark Penn & Co. will destroy the party's chances of regaining the White House for a generation. 

Night of the Long Knives

"Oh, No She Di-Int!", my wife shouted when HRC pelted BHO with the "slum landlord" Tony Rezko slur (what ever happened to more regal and summary "slumlord"?  Is that term of art so passe or does HRC in fact have contributors whose business cards actually read "Slumlord"?  And besides, it wasn't clear if she was knocking slums or landlords in that thrust).  But none of attacks tonight were more startling than her assertion that "You (BHO) never take responsibility for any vote..."  So here we are in SC, where close to 60% of primary voters will in all likelihood be African-American, and HRC's telling a black man he never takes responsibility for something.  That's code for white voters--another black man who won't take responsibility.  That's HRC's dog whistle.  It's only overheard by the intended recipients in Missouri, Colorado, New Jersey, and rarefied suburbs in Tsunami Tuesday states.  So I think she conceded SC tonight to Obama but at the same time was speaking to white voters (and some Latinos), and more particularly, white women voters, in the Feb. 5th contests.  What woman at the end of her rope hasn't at some point wanted to tell off their boyfriend, son, lover, Commander-in-Chief husband with same line?  "You never take responsibility, Bill..."  She is right, this is intensely personal. 

Let that simmer a minute and then stir in the element of race and you get a truly combustible accusation.  "You never take responsibility..."  For the babies you make.  For the jobs you've been fired from.  For your addictions.  For the hurt you have caused your family/community/co-workers.  Check the box.  And the irony is that Obama, alone among the Dem candidates, speaks candidly and often about the essential role that personal responsibilty plays in strengthening communities and ensuring that well-meaning policies have the desired effect.  Mark Penn's hidden hand undoubtedly at work here.  I bet he even focus-grouped that line before she used it.  So it sounds to me like HRC didn't leave her all race cards in Vegas, but palmed a few on the way out of town.  She's just laid one down again, and as the Super Tuesday stakes continue to rise, you can expect more of the same in the days ahead.