archived: 9 - 15 Oct, 2005         Back                 Next

UPDATED:  October 12, 2005 

                        FRAMING THE ECONOMY 

Republicans have been cutting taxes and spending America into debt.  It is not an overly complex concept for Americans to understand.  Like every American family knows, one cannot long keep spending more than their income. 

James Cramer, a well known Wall Street guru, frames this issue best for Democrats:  

What if our fiscally clueless president really does keep spending at a rate that far exceeds what our government can take in at these low tax rates? What happens if the president’s acolytes and the Pollyannas in Treasury keep believing that we can grow our way, fairy-tale-like, out of this jam? You can bet that when you cash out your nest egg of nice U.S.-based mutual funds and solid common stocks, your dollars will fit nicely into a wheelbarrow designed specifically to cart worthless currency to the bank.  – New Yorker 

Cramer’s article describes well what may be coming and that the financial community is becoming nervous with good reason.  The article is a must read.

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                        ADVICE FOR THE FORLORN DEMOCRAT 

As Bush’s poll number fall, Democrats are getting advice on recapturing majority status.  It is a fascinating array of views.  

James Carville offered this rapier edged advice: 

The problem with Democrat campaign speeches is “litany,” and they need more narrative like Winnie the Pooh stories, political consultant and pundit James Carville said.

At a speech sponsored by the Northwestern College Democrats Thursday evening, Carville told the audience that Democratic candidates can’t succeed by shouting out to every group in a crowd. Instead candidates should tell stories with the three elements of any good story — setup, conflict and resolution.

“No Kumbayah crap,” Carville said.  . . .

In addition to breaking away from a laundry list of special interests, Carville said, Democrats need to learn that a candidate who can’t campaign can’t succeed.

“If you’re not competent in campaigns, you don’t have a chance to be competent in government,” he said.

Using Al Gore as an example, Carville said being a smart candidate is not enough.

“It’s actually possible to be wise, right and strong,” he said.

But Carville added that no one in Washington likes anyone who is right too often. Howard Dean’s accurate assessment about the failure of the war in Iraq helped kick him out of the running for president despite his passion, Carville said.

In the same way that intelligence and accuracy can’t stand alone, strength without accuracy is a catastrophe, he said. His example: the Republican administration. – The Daily Northwestern 

William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, of the Clinton administration, beckon Democrats to a return of the “good old days:”   

The liberals' hope that Democrats can win back the presidency by drawing sharp ideological contrasts and energizing the partisan base is a fantasy that could cripple the party's efforts to return to power, according to a new study by two prominent Democratic analysts. . . .

Democrats must "admit that they cannot simply grow themselves out of their electoral dilemmas," wrote William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, in a report released yesterday. "The groups that were supposed to constitute the new Democratic majority in 2004 simply failed to materialize in sufficient number to overcome the right-center coalition of the Republican Party."  . . .

But Galston and Kamarck, both of whom served in the Clinton White House, said there are simply not enough left-leaning voters to make this a workable strategy. In one of their more potentially controversial findings, the authors argue that the rising numbers and influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic Party are pulling the party further from most Americans.

On defense and social issues, "liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill."

Galston and Kamarck -- whose work was sponsored by Third Way, a group working with Senate Democrats on centrist policy ideas -- are critical of three other core liberal arguments:

They warn against over reliance on a strategy of solving political problems by "reframing" the language by which they present their ideas, as advocated by linguist George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley: "The best rhetoric will fail if the public rejects the substance of a candidate's agenda or entertains doubts about his integrity."

They say liberals who count on rising numbers of Hispanic voters fail to recognize the growing strength of the GOP among Hispanics, as well as the growing weakness of Democrats with white Catholics and married women.

They contend that Democrats who hope the party's relative advantages on health care and education can vault them back to power "fail the test of political reality in the post-9/11 world." Security issues have become "threshold" questions for many voters, and cultural issues have become "a prism of candidates' individual character and family life," Galston and Kamarck argue.

Their basic thesis is that the number of solidly conservative Republican voters is substantially larger that the reliably Democratic liberal voter base. To win, the argument goes, Democrats must make much larger inroads among moderates than the GOP.  . . .

Their recommendations are much less specific than their detailed analysis of the difficulties facing the Democratic Party.

They suggest that Democratic presidential candidates replicate Clinton's tactics in 1992, when he broke with the party's liberal base by approving the execution of a semi-retarded prisoner, by challenging liberal icon Jesse L. Jackson and by calling for an end to welfare "as we know it." – Washington Post 

TPJ “frames” the collective advice as follows: 

Democrats need to reject its failed progressive heritage and adopt centrist doctrines in order to attract sufficient voters to win elections.  Democrats can exemplify their new centrist policies by approving executions of a few semi-retarded prisoners, challenging Black liberal leaders in the Party and openly renouncing progressive doctrines.  In order to sell the centrist doctrines, Democrats only need field candidates that are smart, but not too smart, and strong, but not too strong.  Democrats need candidates who can convince Americans to adopt the new centrist doctrine by communicating to citizens as if telling a Winnie The Pooh story. 

Now, that is a Democratic Party every American would want to join.   

May heaven help us! 

                        DON’T READ THE HEADLINES 

CBS’s most recent poll finds Bush’s approval rating at 37%, the lowest approval rating in CBS polls.  Predictably, one exuberant Democrat website runs a headline, “37%: Bush's biggest poll wipe-out ever.” 

“Wipe-out” is hyperbole.  CBS is not the only polling service.  Three polls have been released in the last few days that TPJ follows:

The few October polls certainly suggest that Bush’s approval rating remains in a rather steady decline.  TPJ has noted for some months that Bush’s approval rating is falling between 1% and 2% a month.  October starts out on the same pattern. 

TPJ warns again that Bush’s falling poll numbers do not mean that the Republican Party is in a state of collapse.  TPJ covered this proposition last week – TPJ, IT’S THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY STUPID . . . .  The latest CBS poll also supports TPJ’s warning. 

The first question is WHAT groups no longer approve of Bush’s handling of the Presidency.  CBS’ party breakdown suggests that Republicans accounts for some of the drop in Bush’s poll numbers.   

                                                               Approve     Disapprove No Opinion

Bush’s approval among Republicans had ranged toward 90% prior to 2005.  It is highly unlikely that these Republicans are abandoning the Republican Party even if they no longer approve of Bush’s handling of the Presidency.  TPJ suspects the Republican “shift” represents radical Republicans who are furious with Bush’s selection of Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, federal deficit spending and the war in Iraq that marches inexorably to civil war.  TPJ’s assumptions are supported by a new AP-Ipsos poll: 

Evangelicals, Republican women, Southerners and other critical groups in President Bush's political coalition are worried about the direction the nation is headed and disappointed with his performance, an AP-Ipsos poll found.  . . .

Only 28 percent say the country is headed in the right direction while two-thirds, 66 percent, say it is on the wrong track, the poll found.

"There is a growing, deep-seated discontentment and pessimism about the direction of the country," said Republican strategist Tony Fabrizio, who believes the reasons for their pessimism differ for those in one political party or another.

Among those most likely to have lost confidence about the nation's direction over the past year are white evangelicals, down 30 percentage points since November, Republican women, down 28 points, Southerners, down 26 points, and suburban men, down 20 points.

Bush's supporters are uneasy about issues such as federal deficits, immigration and his latest nomination for the Supreme Court. Social conservatives are concerned about his choice of Miers, a relatively unknown lawyer who has most recently served as White House counsel.

"Bush is trying to get more support generally from the American public by seeming more moderate and showing he's a strong leader at the same time he has a rebellion within his own party," Thurber said. "The far right is starting to be very open about their claim that he's not a real conservative." -- AP 

The second question is WHERE Bush’s support is dropping.  Viewing the overall approval/disapproval ratings tends to leave the impression that Bush is declining across the nation.  That impression is deceiving.  Bush’s biggest drops in approval are coming from “blue states.”  This comparison of Survey USA poll from June and September, ranked by change of Bush’s approval ratings, demonstrates the point graphically: