Features » December 22, 2010
A Three-Point Plan to Save Democrats
The party must reconnect to its populist roots.
By Roger Bybee
On November 24, Iris Martinez, 6, whose family is facing eviction, protests outside a home that is being foreclosed on in Long Beach, Calif.
President Obama and his advisors should notice that free trade policies have become such a huge liability to nearly all Americans that they virtually foreclose his re-election prospects.
If the Democrats are to regain power, they must first wage an elemental battle over their party’s fundamental identity and strategy.
To briefly recap: The long-predicted Republican tidal wave arrived with the mid-term electorate—whiter, wealthier, older and more conservative than the mass of voters who elected Obama in 2008—evicting some 63 House Democrats and handing the Republicans six Senate seats.
Progressives hoping to move Democrats toward policies promoting shared prosperity must understand the reasons for this “shellacking” and the transformation necessary to get the party back on course.
The punditocracy almost universally pronounced that November 2 proved the nation wants to fundamentally change course. But this superficial analysis both overstates the Republicans’ non-existent mandate and understates the magnitude of the Democrats’ loss of connection to their base. Polling data clearly suggest that the majority of 2010 voters may have pulled the Republican lever, but they nonetheless decisively reject the pro-wealthy Republican program.
The divergence between the vote for Republican candidates and support for their policies was dramatized in polling by Peter D. Hart in the 100 congressional races that swung the election. By a margin of 77 to 21 percent, the voting public as a whole favored job creation through investment in public roads, schools and other facilities. (Continuing the tax cuts for those earning $250,000 or more—which the Republicans depict as a central route to economic rejuvenation—was opposed by 63 percent of all voters.)
In a very different way, the Democrats also experienced their own gulf between the approach of their leadership and the sentiments of key portions of the 2008 pro-Obama coalition. Youth, people of color, and blue-collar workers all have suffered especially sharp losses in pay and jobs during the recession.
In Wisconsin, for example, the blue-collar vote for Democrats sank from 52 percent in 2008 to 40 percent, which more than accounts for the loss of outspoken progressive Sen. Russ Feingold and the northwoods House seats held by staunch liberal Rep. Steve Kagen and the seat vacated by longtime progressive Rep. David Obey.
The main achievements touted by the Democrats—enacting a healthcare plan whose main features do not kick in until 2014 and halting the huge cascade of job losses that marked late 2008 and early 2009—failed to dent the day-to-day misery and anxieties about jobs, pay and security still being experienced by tens of millions of Americans.
The Great Recession continues to persist in large part because, as Carl Rosen of the United Electrical (UE) workers union puts it, “Workers can’t afford to buy what they make.” With earnings and savings falling for average families, the richest 1 percent of Americans command 23.5 percent of all annual income, up from 9 percent in the 1970s.
The remarkable plummet in public enthusiasm for the Democrats over the past two years indicates that the party of Roosevelt desperately needs a progressive transformation. It needs to re-connect with the people most victimized by the increasing inequality that is coming to define our country. But this will only happen if three things occur:
In 2006, pollsters and political analysts John Halpin and Ruy Texeira analyzed Democracy Corps polling data and concluded: “A majority of Americans do not believe progressives or Democrats stand for anything.” In other words, it is unclear which values the Democratic Party would find worthy of fighting for.
They must become clear. The Democratic Party must become the party of the people shut out from the record profits and share of income enjoyed by Corporate America and the richest 1 percent. Just as the Republicans incessantly define themselves in simple, memorable terms like “smaller government and lower taxes,” the Democrats must become known as “the party of decent jobs, a fair shot for all, and dignity for everyone.”
Obama’s rightward slide and unwillingness to act decisively has been the result of unwavering pressure from the Right—from his coterie of Wall Street advisors to CEOs to the Right’s massive media apparatus.
Even the most atrocious displays of corporate greed have little visible or audible mobilization on the Left. BP’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the death of 11 workers offered a clear lesson on what happens when corporate power becomes too big to regulate. No left-wing version of the Tea Party emerged during the last two years—and we need one badly.
There are endless problems facing working families, but none more critical than a daily volume of foreclosures 10 times higher than during the Great Depression, according to It Takes a Pillage author Nomi Prins. Why don’t the country’s two large labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, picket the giant banks foreclosing on homes across the country?
Since 1994, deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the admission of China into the World Trade Organization have contributed to the loss of 4.9 million U.S. jobs and the closing of 43,000 U.S. factories.
A September poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC revealed that 86 percent of the public opposed the export of jobs. On October 2, the Journal observed: “In the recent WSJ/NBC poll, 83 percent of blue-collar workers agreed that outsourcing of manufacturing to foreign countries with lower wages was a reason the U.S. economy was struggling and more people weren’t being hired; no other factor was so often cited for current economic ills.”
CNBC cited a finding that suggested a possible political alliance: “While 65 percent of union members say free trade has hurt the U.S., so do 61 percent of Tea Party sympathizers.”
These latest figures should remind President Obama and his advisors that free trade policies have become such a huge liability to nearly 90 percent of Americans that they virtually foreclose his re-election prospects. An analysis by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch of the impact that “free trade” had on 182 competitive election indicated that opposition to “free trade” and the offshoring of jobs served as a firewall for Democratic congressional candidates, with opponents of these policies three times more likely to win compared to Democrats who supported them.
Lori Wallach, the group’s director, warned in a November 3 Common Dreams interview: “In 2008, Obama only won the election because he won the critical states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by differentiating himself from McCain on trade. It is pretty obvious with Dems and GOP nationwide running against the trade status quo and its job offshoring damage, that if Obama flip-flops now in favor of more job-killing NAFTA agreements, he will lose those states and end up a one-term president.”
A different future could be charted by the Democrats, however. But it will depend on them adopting a clearly defined identity, embracing grassroots activism and abandoning the “free trade” track to job destruction and community devastation.
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Reader Comments
I, for one, was very disappointed in the results of the 2010 Congressional elections. But not for the same reasons. My disgust involved the actions of the fickle, immature, and easily-swayed American voter. It’s unbelievable to me how many of those people have forgotten the first eight years of this decade. Our great country was brought to the brink of destruction by a simple-minded and inept administration.
If we were somehow able to take the race factor out of the equation of the 2008 presidential race, Obama’s victory would have been an absolute landslide. The GOP would have been much further exposed as the one-dimensional, unimaginative party that it is. Unfortunately, what I call the ‘prejudicial poison’ is still prevalent in our country, well into this twenty-first century.
Every constructive idea proposed by the Obama administration in its first two years was either argued or delayed or blocked by the Republicans in Congress. They acted as a childish group, with no individuality. They wasted our time and our tax dollars, and we rewarded them for it. We were told that our president did not live up to his promises, but in most cases that is not true. And remember, he still has half of his term to make good on the others. But only if we let him. I believe that the only major mistake Obama has made is underestimating the bull sludge in Washington. He thought he’d only need galoshes to wade through it. He didn’t realize he’d need an entire wetsuit.
We failed to see how we’ve been manipulated by the conservative press and media. When a lie, or a strong innuendo is spoken, it is ‘out there.’ It floats around cyber space until most people take it as the truth. No one bothers to do a little research and check out something that seems odd. They’d rather believe it, and turn their attention back to their favorite reality show. And they don’t realize that the political commentators on FOX whom they idolize, are no more than carnival barkers with multi-million dollar contracts. Didn’t they ever wonder why FOX saw it necessary to misrepresent the number of people at the conservative rallies they covered? Why would they want to deceive their own viewers?
I very much agree with Roger Bybee’s three point plan. The ideas he stated would bring all Americans back to our roots. With the influence of big banks and big business and foreign governments, we’ve strayed so far away from them it’s not funny anymore. It’s a tragedy.
There are three additional points I’d like to include. But these are aimed at the American voters.
1) Grow up. I don’t know what a Kardashian is or what a Goslin is, but people seem more interested in them than their own future.
2) Think for yourself. It doesn’t matter what political party you’re affiliated with. Never let a ranting commentator influence you. There is a reason they’re ranting. They want to get an unreasonable or an untrue point across.
3) Be patient. It took eight years and a thousand bad decisions to get us into this situation. It’s going to take time to get out of it. Obama himself said that it’s not going to easy. And we all heard him.Posted by Eugene Connolly on Dec 23, 2010 at 9:45 PM
Eugene –
I had a ringside seat for “the first eight years of this decade”. The first year was a disaster when the Bubba Bubble collapsed, the NASDAQ fell $2.5 trillion, the DOW peaked and started down, and government revenues from tax receipts fell like a rock, all BEFORE Clinton left office. The Clinton “surplus” did not peak at the end of Clinton’s term as Hillary and Axelrod would have you believe, it peaked at the end of FY 1999, sixteen months before Clinton left office. From the peak in FY 1999, government revenues went almost straight down until the deficit bottomed out in FY 2003. The Clinton “surplus” fell rapidly from +$236 billion in FY 1999 to -$413 billion in FY 2003. Clinton not only allowed the dot.com Bubble to develop and collapse, he was still in office for sixteen month during the crash.
Fortunately, W applied the proper corrective actions and the recovery was quite swift: growth, jobs, and the DQW all hit record highs by 2007. Unfortunately, the Democrats’ Unaffordable Housing Bubble collapsed right after the Democrats took control of the Congress in 2006, and the Housing Bubble was a much bigger disaster than even the crash of the Bubba Bubble.
The Democrats are keen to blame both the Bubba Bubble and the Housing Bubble on Republicans so they can continue their larcenous and corrupt misgovernment.
Posted by scorp on Dec 25, 2010 at 11:56 PM
Scorp,
I’m usually not into statistics. I’m not smart enough. My opinions are based on a number of things. One of them is the condition of my family and friends. When they’re happy, I’m happy. But during George W’s time in office, nobody I knew was content. As we went upon our daily lives, there seemed to be something in the back of our minds that caused us to worry.
It was the wars, I finally reasoned. Part of us, part of our country was fighting in the Middle East. And later, when we all discovered that the war in Iraq was ‘illegitimate’ and that an all-out war in Afghanistan was probably unnecessary , I looked for someone to blame. I looked to the man in charge. And I knew there was something terribly wrong.
The reason I said that the war in Afghanistan may not have been necessary is because we aren’t fighting the Afghan army or the Afghan government. Our objective is to eliminate Al Qeida, the terrorist group we believe is responsible for 911. This group doesn’t have a country, no real base, no international support. Shouldn’t the intelligence networks of democracies from all over the world be able to pinpoint this group’s locations? Shouldn’t our special ops personnel, the best in the world, be able to take them out? Wouldn’t this approach have avoided the chaos and lives lost in this war?
It seems like I’m getting way off track, but my point is this: if George W. Bush was responsible for this mess we’re in, and I believe he is, how could he possibly have done something right, something constructive?
So I looked to different sources to determine if your claim that he ‘applied the proper corrective actions and the recovery was quite swift: growth, jobs, and the DQW all hit record highs by 2007” was correct. I checked out some websites to see if it was.
I searched Job Growth Under Bush. I found many articles that contradicted your claims. One of the best and most thorough was entitled: ‘Job Growth Under Bush and Prior Presidents: 1941 to Present’. It refers to an editorial in the New York Times entitled ‘Through Bush-Colored Glasses’. In it, in a very detailed way, it supports the editorial‘s conclusion that “Mr. Bush boasted of 52 months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is magnitude, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush-which it is safe to conclude is now over- produced job growth of 4.2 percent. That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945.”
Posted by Eugene Connolly on Dec 26, 2010 at 2:21 PM
Eugene –
Bush “applied the proper corrective actions and the recovery was quite swift: growth, jobs, and the DQW all hit record highs by 2007” to quote myself.
Well, yes. We were just coming off the crash of the Bubba Bubble, the third largest economic bubble in history, and Bush minimized the damage, holding the unemployment rate to 6.1% with a swift recovery. I presume you enjoy Obama’s results better? The other big economic bubbles/crashes lasted over a decade (Roaring Twenties/Great Depression) and the 1991 Japanese Bubble that has had no recovery after two decades and counting. Then there is Old Europe that has blundered around for over twenty years. Under Bush, growth was restored by 2003, unemployment hit near record lows, the DOW went to new heights, and the New York Times criticized and complained incessantly.
There are good economic policies and bad economic policies. The problem is that economic policies unfold over a period of years, during which time the political party in charge may change, creating opportunity to mislead the public on who-did-what-to-whom. The Democrats favor policies that take money from productive individuals and give it to unproductive individuals, after taking a sizeable cut for themselves. This serves to deprive the economy of investment capital, resulting in less growth, fewer jobs, and less goods available for the poor since most of us can afford available goods even if they do cost a little more. When the tax bill comes due, Democrats then blame Republicans for the high taxes and national debt.
The very best example of this was LBJ’s War on Poverty which became law in 1965. The WoP cost hundreds of billions of dollars each year for thirty years ($6.6 trillion total) and never created a positive effect nor reduced poverty for the poor who were supposed to benefit.
After WWII the American economy rose steadily for the most part until LBJ’s War on Poverty, but starting in 1966 the markets went sideways for seventeen years. GDP growth and employment was minimal during this period with three recessions including the Carter Catastrophe in the late 1970s. Money that was wasted on the War on Poverty was not available to invest in jobs. President Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 and installed regulatory reform and tax cuts that caused the economy, growth, and jobs to take off like a rocket.
You can see this graphically on the DOW graph:
http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/djia1900.html
[Note the absence of growth in the markets from 1966 to 1983 and the sharp growth after Reagan’s policies kicked in. Unemployment during Carter’s recession was even higher than it is now.]
(Continued.)
Posted by scorp on Dec 28, 2010 at 7:55 PM
(Continued.)
The worst rap that Democrats have on Reagan is that he increased the national debt. But if you do the math, the growth of the national debt during the Reagan years was almost exactly the same as the amount of money wasted on LBJ’s War on Poverty during those same years, average $220 billion per year. Besides wasting $6.6 trillion, the WoP substantially destroyed Black family life in the USA and created major problems with fraud and corruption. The cost of the wasteful, ineffective WoP was equivalent to the entire national debt in 1995, citizens were up in arms about the waste and cost, and the state governors were complaining bitterly about the mandated costs that were required of them under WoP. Republicans led an initiative to end of the War on Poverty and Clinton signed off on it in 1995 taking credit for the savings which contributed to the Clinton “surplus”. Democrats promptly blamed Reagan for the rise in the national debt during his term, but the whole wasteful, corrupt program should have ended a dozen years or more before when Reagan first tried to end it.
The waste and corruption of the War on Poverty continued thirty years during Democratic and Republican administrations. It is wrong to blame Republicans for laws passed years before by Democrats, when the Democratic Congress blocked reform of the War on Poverty..
The same is true of the current economic crisis. Obama loudly proclaims that he inherited the bad economy, even though every single law and policy that created the Housing Bubble was the product of a Democratic Administration:
* Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that required lending institutions to make loans to qualified borrowers. No problem.
* Clinton adopted the policy that all mortgages borrowers were qualified, even if they had little or no income. Problem.
* Democrat bureaucrats in Fan and Fred started faking ratings on mortgages, declaring that sub-prime mortgages were actually investment grade. Very big problem. All of a sudden investors worldwide could not determine the value of their investments, creating a worldwide panic. This was the trigger event for the current crisis. Democrats created this crisis and Obama is clueless on how it might be corrected. Democrat Senator Dodd and Democrat Representative Frank prevented reform of Fan and Fred even after the system was recognized to be in trouble.
(Continued.)
Posted by scorp on Dec 28, 2010 at 7:58 PM
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