10 lessons Democrats can learn from the midterms – Part 2
From Joy Reid, who is carrying me today:
Welcome to the permanent campaign, Mr. President.
Yesterday, I brought you five lessons Democrats can learn from today’s elections, no matter what the outcome. I realize that the two dominant emotions today are irrational triumphalism (on the right) and equally irrational demoralization (on the left). But in fact, Democrats aren’t facing anything that isn’t in perfect historic proportion today. The party in power almost always loses seats — typically north of 25 — in the first midterm after taking the White House. And Democrats have, I think, done a decent job of mitigating the losses they’ve been bracing for since Charlie Cook all but called off the midterm elections back in January. Still, win or lose (or lose big) there are lessons the Dems can take away from today. You can peep the first five here, and here are five more…
Lesson #6: the media is not your friend. It’s become axiomatic that the media is hopelessly liberal, and biased in favor of Democrats. Not only is that not the case, in some ways, the opposite is true. Sure, most East Coast reporters are socially liberal; it’s just the nature of the beast when most people in the media business were educated in Eastern (or Western) private colleges where there’s much more social diversity than you’d find, say, at a Midwestern college or in a rural town. But many of these reporters actually hail originally from those midwestern towns (think Tom Brokaw) or from families with decidedly mixed ideological backgrounds (think Chris Matthews’ cloth coat Republican Philly roots.) I myself was born in Brooklyn and educated in the “elite” east. But I spent most of my formative years in Denver, Colorado. One parent was a Dem, but the other (though not a citizen) is a staunch Republican. I know lots of reporters with the same familial dichotomy. And in my experience, members of the MSM will often pull in the opposite direction of the conventional wisdom about them, in part as a reaction to the “liberal media” meme; which means in the opposite direction of you. Besides, the media doesn’t root for Democrats, they root for great stories. Barack Obama was the great story of 2008, but Sarah Palin is the great story of 2008 through 2012. The tea party movement is endlessly fascinating to the media, which is going to keep showering them with negative and positive attention until the next shiny, ratings-producing object comes along. Democrats have not mastered the art of marketing great stories. Dems are policy wonks. And policy wonks are boring. What’s exciting is conflict and controversy, which is why George “Macaca” Allen is back as a talking head on the increasingly desperate CNN, along with Client #9 Elliot Spitzer and RedState bomb thrower Eric Erickson; and its why Andrew Breitbart is getting his star turn on rather rightish ABC News tonight.
PLEASE VISIT THE REID REPORT.
Lesson #7: the campaign is never over. This one’s for my friends (figuratively, not literally) in the White House. It’s become painfully obvious that President Obama, who is about as decent a human being as I’ve seen in office for a long time, hates campaigning and “politics” writ large. Somehow, he believed that after the landmark 2008 election, he could get to governing, and put aside the permanent campaign. Whoever allowed him to believe that should be fired. Today. The permanent campaign is just that, and the White House should have never dialed it down. This president has accomplished more, and this Congress has pushed through more progressive legislation than any White House-Congressional combo since LBJ moved the Great Society forward. They should have been campaigning on those accomplishments, and against the obstructionist Republicans every single day for the last two years. They’re now paying the price both for those accomplishments (as Rachel Maddow eloquently described last night) and for their failure to campaign on them like every tomorrow was November 4, 2012. As a very smart media person said to me yesterday, the difference between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton is that Clinton actually loved the permanent campaign. He enjoyed every minute of it. And that’s why he was such a successful president. He communicated his joy of governing to the public, even during the hardest times for the country, and his presidency. Obama may not be able to emulate that, but he’s got to start embracing the ceremonial aspects of the presidency, and get used to the fact that he’ll have to constantly sell his program and plans to the American people, along with his vision for the country. It doesn’t have to be used car salesman — he can do it in his own style. But the president has to deal with the fact that the campaign only ends when he becomes a lame duck, sometime around late 2014.
Lesson #8: constant polling and prognostication is the functional equivalent of voter suppression. Don’t give in to it, counter it. I’ve been saying for a minute that the constant barrage of polling and narrative building against Barack Obama and Democrats has had the unintended but very real effect of putting a thumb on the scale for the midterm elections. When Republicans have been hearing for a year that they are on the rise, that they are ascendant, and that they’re going to win, how can they help but be enthusiastic? Conversely, how can the “Charlie Cook effect,” and the constant Sabato-Rothenberg pounding on Democrats’ impending doom not depress the Democratic base by making the electoral process look futile? I’m sure Republicans would say much the same about what seemed to be the polling momentum for Barack Obama in 2008, except that the above mentioned media tendency to pull to the right upended that in September, when Palin fascination kicked into overdrive (it hasn’t cooled down since.) Democrats should alter their response to the poll driven narrative by getting out early with internal polling and other data that can counter the Rasmussen and other conservative-tilting poll data that’s skewing the narrative against them. At both the statewide and national level, Democrats have got to continuously engage their base to keep them focused on the next election. That includes not assuming that those college kids who came out for Obama in 2008 are paying attention now. Get back on those campuses, and push for more civic engagement among both younger voters and minority voters — don’t wait until the last minute. That’s what the right does with their angry geezers, and they do so very effectively via Fox News, talk radio and the wingersphere. As a result, even though there’s zero data to support the idea that a majority of Americans favor Republicans, Republicans are convinced that there is. That’s a matter of communication, coordination, and discipline among GOP communicators.
Lesson #9: call off the circular firing squad. It’s fine to criticize the president, and the failure to march in lockstep is what separates progressives from the authoritarians on the other side. But there’s a part of the left that over the last two years invested so heavily in nitpicking everything Barack Obama did or didn’t do, or didn’t do quickly enough, it essentially stripped the White House of its front flank. At the same time, the White House political team has done a piss-poor job of relating to the Democratic base, in part because it spent so much time chasing conservatives who are never going to be its friends, and the Rahm Emanuel crowd clearly showed too little respect for the liberal wing of the party. Both sides need to find a way to work together, and to support each other, if this presidency is to be successful. The president can’t snap his fingers and bring about fundamental change in every institution in government, from the military to the financial regulatory systems that failed us during the previous administration. Change takes time. It’s much more complicated to close Gitmo or end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell without a vote in Congress, or to reign in Wall Street or bring about universal healthcare than it looks to those of us outside the West Wing. Give the guy a chance. And the White House should probably scrap its political team and start over.
Lesson #10: Despair is not an option. The country hasn’t done a 180 from 2008. Three-quarters of voters in the new NBC/WSJ poll who say they’re voting Republican this cycle call it a temporary change, not a permanent realignment in their ideological thinking. Democrats still win just about every generic ballot test among registered voters. The losses Dems will face in this election are a result of a lack of motivation among the majority of Americans who believe in Democratic, rather than Republican solutions to the country’s problems. If most of the people who bother to vote this cycle choose to give Republicans a chance at doing a better job than they think you’ve done, let them get a gander at what that means. If and when Republicans gain more responsibility for governing the country after tonight, what they’ll do with that power will be the real predictor of whether Democrats will regain strength in the coming years or head off into the wilderness that I swear the same pundits were banishing the GOP to like a year and a half ago.
My guess is that the war for the Republican Party starts tomorrow, as the forces of status quo and Wall Street prepare to fight both the tea party wing and the Palinites, not to mention the prospect of a Palin White House run, which would be like a giant, national version of the Christine O’Donnell debacle in Delaware. I’m looking for the House Republicans to overreach — to go after the president personally, perhaps to even try impeaching him; to propose massive, unpopular tax breaks for the rich, and to clear the way for outsourcing in a way that will alarm the rust belt back into contention — if Democrats react to it quickly and don’t capitulate to these disastrous ideas out of fear for 2012. If Democrats absorb the real lesson of this election — that the American people are fearful for their economic future and that most people don’t wake up every morning with an all-consuming hatred for the president; they wake up worried about their jobs — we’ll be fine, we’ll come back, and we will win the future.
In the end, in America, the good guys eventually win. To quote Joe Scarborough — and yes, I know, I know, he’s that conservative guy you love to hate — keep calm, carry on.
Another great article Joy.
You forgot the greatest lesson Joy.(Ask not what your country can do for you.Ask what you can do for your country)