The "electability" discussion on the Democratic Presidential candidates

Alexandra Petri recently had a provoctive column that raised some actual "electability" issues in a humorous manner, You have to think about electability Washington Post 04/25/2019.

I've been following some of the current "electability" arguments in the Democratic 2020 Presidential contest. One line of argument goes like this:

• If Sanders wins the nomination, enough Democratic voters will vote for a 3rd party so Trump will win and it will all be Bernie's fault.
• If Sanders loses the nomination and Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar get easily rolled by Trump, that will be Bernie's fault, too. Somehow.
• But if the Dems nominate someone who can appeal to the center and whose positions are more popular than Trump's - like, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016 - the Dems will win for sure! Unless Bernie finds some way to sabotage them.

Actually, electability games are always good clean fun. But "electability" at this stage is basically a way of saying, my candidate is electabile and yours is a LOSER. I think the fact that Trump could win the Presidency (even while losing the popular vote) brings into question every "electability" argument made for at least the previous half century.

Unfortunately, Democrats all too often hear "electability" and think that means we should pick people like Joe Manchin. Or candidates who are either opposed to abortion, or apologetic and embarassed to defend "choice" and would never let the phrase "abortion rights" enter their vocabulary. Obviously, conventional wisdom and the "church of the savvy" were convinced that Donald Trump was anything but electable in 2016. Unitl he got elected. That's another twist on electability. With the Electoral College, it depends on which particular states you can win.

Petri's column is a reminder that the actual swing voters are mostly not ideologues and are not making their choices based only on some kind of measurement of which candidate is closer to the center on a left-to-right ideological specturm. If they did, President Hillary Clinton would now be looking good for re-election in 2020.

Also, what happened to those polls we used to see that showed people think that they are more liberal than other, even though their outlook and the positions they support are popular?

This report by Lydia Saad (U.S. Still Leans Conservative, but Liberals Keep Recent Gains 01/08/2019) reports this finding from a recent Gallup poll:

Since 1992, the percentage of Americans identifying as liberal has risen from 17% then to 26% today. This has been mostly offset by a shrinking percentage of moderates, from 43% to 35%. ...

The percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal averaged 51% in 2018, up from 50% in 2017, marking the first time a majority of Democrats have adopted this term, following gradual increases since the 1990s.

In 1994, nearly half of Democrats described their views as moderate while equal percentages, at 25%, identified themselves as liberal and conservative. That fundamental pattern held until about 2002, during the first half of President George W. Bush's first term in office. From 2002 through 2014 -- spanning the Iraq War under Bush and the Barack Obama presidency -- the liberal share increased approximately one percentage point a year, while the percentages moderate and conservative fell. Since 2014, the percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal has increased at an even faster rate of two points per year on average. [my emphasis]

The 1990s was the period when the Clinton Administration was following a Democratic Leadership Council script that emphasized presenting policies on business, crime, and the social safety net that echoed conservative Republican positions and tried to avoid presenting themselves as "liberal." So some of that two-decade shift in Democrats' self-descriptions may be more that "liberal" became a more comfortable/respectful label and not necessarily a shift to the left in the political perspectives.

I think in some ways this Democratic inclination to look for supposedly "safe" moderates like Manchin or Diane Feinstein is an admittedly strange hangover from the days when liberal Republicans were not nearly-unimaginable fantasy creatures. And when Democratic Presidential candidates had to win some Southern states to win the Electoral College.

Today's Republicans would be ready to burn characters like Jacob Javits or Mark Hatfield at the stake. And while Florida is still an important Electoral College goal, that game of needing Southern states to get Presidenta elected changed drastically in 1992 when Clinton won California. Then Pete Wilson came along with the xenophobic Proposition 187 in 1994, which passed, but also energized Latino voters like never before and made California a "safe" Democratic state even in the conventional wisdom. Thank God for that instance of Unintended Consequences!

Nancy Pelosi, Trump scandals, and progressive Democrats

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress posted a Twitter thread on Nancy Pelosi as the House opposition leader under Shrub Bush's Presidency. Unitil I got to Tweet 9 of 10, I thought he was contrasting Pelosi's previous willingness to actually fight for progressive goals.

Here's Tweet #1:

1) As an Old, I want to tell a story to the Youths about a great hero-- Nancy of the West, Once and Future Speaker, Savior of Social Security. This is our history, O Ye Progressives. Gather and listen.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) November 8, 2018

Here are Tweets #9 and #10:

10) For once we were weak, not because we had to be, but because we chose to be. And it was Nancy Fucking Pelosi who showed us how to be progressives.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) November 8, 2018

I first thought in reading the first one that he was doing some kind of Game of Thrones mock rhetoric to drmatize the change in Pelosi's posture.

By the end, it just sounded like a typical condescending corporate Democratic sneer at progressives, dripping with contempt.

Pelosi has some other admirers, too:

In all fairness, Nancy Pelosi deserves to be chosen Speaker of the House by the Democrats. If they give her a hard time, perhaps we will add some Republican votes. She has earned this great honor!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018

Once again, here is what Nancy Pelosi herself is saying, as reported by Mike Lillis, Pelosi seeks bipartisan tone day after divisive midterms The Hill 11/07/18:

“We will strive for bipartisanship in the belief that we have a responsibility to seek common ground where we can,” Pelosi said during a packed press briefing just outside her office in the Capitol.

“Where we cannot, we must stand our ground,” she continued. “But we must try.” ...

Pelosi said she spoke Wednesday morning with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who will lead the GOP-controlled Senate in the next Congress, “as to how we could work together — especially on infrastructure.”

“That issue has not been a partisan issue in the Congress,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve been able to work together — regionally, across the aisle, across the Capitol and down Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I hope that we can do that, because we want to create jobs from sea to shining sea.”

Lillis' article reads like it could have been dictated by a corporate Democratic spokesperson. But that perspective seems obviously sensible to the Establishment press, so they don't need a lot of encouragement to write it up that way.

Lillis also writes:

Pelosi vowed strong oversight of the administration — before and after the midterm results were in — citing the constitutional “responsibility” of Congress as a check on the executive branch.

But she’s rejected calls from some liberal members to pursue impeachment hearings into the president — a message echoed by her top lieutenants.

Not for nothing, Trump is reinforcing Pelosi's pitch:

At a press briefing at the White House moments before, Trump offered a similar message of potential bipartisan cooperation.

“We have a lot of things in common on infrastructure. We want to do something on health care, they want to do something on health care,” Trump said. “There are a lot of great things that we can do together and now we'll send it up.”

This is a bad joke. The election was Tuesday, today is Thursday, and Trump has fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as Attorney General to obstruct justice in the Mueller investigation, a motivation that Trump has repeatedly described openly, though without using the legal phrase "obstruction of justice." And he staged an authoritarian scene worthy of Hungary's strongman Viktor Orbán by bullying CNN reporter Jim Acosta at a press conference, including declaring CNN an "enemy of the people," then banning him from the White House press pool.

The corporate Democratic advocates are saying they want to defer to Mueller on investigating corruption and other criminal conduct by Trump and his Administration. In bipartisan fashion (?!?), Trump escalates obstruction of justice by firing Sessions and is saying explicitly he could fire the whole Mueller team.

Politically, Pelosi saying she wants to defer any Congressional investigation of Trump Administration crime and corruption, is just a declaration of preemptive surrender. Trump is surely taking it that way. Every Republican in Congress understands it that way. And I hope every Democratelected to Congress understands it that way, including Pelosi herself. Because if they really don't think that's what it means, they must really be clueless.

But there's also a serious Constitutional duty at stake. The Congress, both House and Senate, have the responsibility to hold the Executive accountable before the law. Given the real scandals that we know about in the public record at this point, it really is their duty to do serious investigations. The fact that the Republicans don't take that seriously when the President is a Republican doesn't mean the Democrats should follow their example. In fact, it makes it more urgent for them to exercise that power and meet that responsibility.

I won't try to recount Pelosi's whole history as Democratic leader here. She did have a liberal voting record when she became Democratic Minority Leader in 2002. This looked like a step in the right directions. The Democratic habit for House and Senate leadership had been to pick Democrats from "purple" districts, the theory presumably being that Democrats from very competitive districts would present a more consensus face of the party than a more straight-line liberal. The downside was that they would potentially be made more politically vulnerable in their own districts if they acted as a strong party-line advocate.

During the campaign around California Republican Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Diane Feinstein felt the need to stress her opposition to immigration. Pelosi, on the other hand, more assertively called it out as a bad thing. (Jerry Brown, then a private citizen, opposed 187 as racist demagoguery.)

But let's go back to Millhiser's example of Pelosi's willingness to fight Bush on Social Security privatization. She was defending Social Security. A core New Deal program that is extremely popular, widely and rightly regarded as an essential part of America's retirement system. Defending Social Security shows that she was willing to defend a program that is popular even among conservatives. It's a good thing. But it doesn't constitute evidence that Pelosi is distinctly progressive in the sense we use the label in 2018.

The fact that some of her fellow Democrats wanted to help Bush cut Social Security benefits is a sign of how deeply conservative economic and social ideology had made inroads into the Democratic Party.

And, of course, Barack Obama as President tried repeatedly to strike a "Grand Bargain" with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare. An extremely bad idea, and one for which progressive Democrats criticized him. I don't recall Pelosi being aggressive in calling Obama out on that particular neoliberal dogma that he embraced.

I'll refer again to Ryan Grim's important report, We’ve Got People: Resistance and Rebellion, From Jim Crow to Donald Trump. He provides a preview in this article, Life After Trump: How Donald Trump Saved the Democratic Party From Itself The Intercept 11/06/2018. In the face of Trumpism - I think it's legitimate to call it a "fascist moment", though obviously not (yet) an overthrown of Constitutional institutions - what we've seen in 2016-2018 has been an upsurge in small-d democratic activism. And much of it has been channeled into the Democratic Party, which produced the House win this week and gains at the state level.

The Democrats can't just coast to 2020 and assume everything will be all right. They need to treat Trumpism and the Trumpified Republican Party as the threat to democracy they are will require more than recycling the ads and talking points of the last 20 years. Citizens United (2010) qualitatively increased the clout of billionaires in US politics. A grassroots based effort, like we've seen in 2018 and like Obama used in his 2008 campaign (but abaondoned as soon as he became President), including relying on grassroots fundraising rather than big donors, is not compatible with the kind of preemptive surrender Pelosi was announcing already on Tuesday.

I'll close by quoting tweets by David Sirota and Marcy Wheeler.>

It’s the morning after Election Day and my question is: how is Chuck Schumer still the Senate Democratic leader?

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 7, 2018

I don't think Dems in Congress understand that the constitutional crisis is already here.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 7, 2018

Here's the perspective of a currently very popular American politician on these issues (Bernie Sanders responds to midterm elections CNN 11/07/2018):