By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Oct 1, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET I’ve always prided myself on both keeping an open mind and having strong opinions – sure, it’s a tough balance, but as a former high school debater I still remember the skills we developed having to argue on both sides of any issue. And while I believe I’m in the right about most things, I have always tried to consider the opposite point of view.
Until now . . . the GOP antics about the debt ceiling and government funding have left me unable to comprehend how they can simultaneously argue that it’s already destroyed the economy and killed people while also insisting we have to stop it now before people get addicted to it. And don’t get me started on the congresspeople who have compared it to Naziism, the Fugitive Slave Act or a mass outbreak of cellulite in Hollywood. (Yes, I made up that last one but it makes just as much sense as the others!)
When I contemplated writing a song about the latest from the GOP, I started to worry that I might offend people. And yes, some of my best friends actually ARE Republicans. Of course, I’m in the San Francisco area, so Republicans here tend to be pretty moderate, particularly about social issues like marriage equality, medical marijuana, and reproductive choice. (One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows a woman telling her friend about her last date: “He says he’s a fiscal conservative and a social liberal – that means he’s cheap and he sleeps around!” – but I do believe my friends who describe themself the same way . . . )
However, when the subject of politics came up, a friend of mine said, “I’m a registered Republican, and I’m thoroughly disgusted with my party these days!,” and I don’t think she’s alone. So if you look at it that way, making fun of the GOP actually IS bi-partisan . . . .
“The GOP Says No!”
By Artur Davis, on Tue Oct 1, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET Given that not a single Democratic voice has surfaced in favor of bending on the House GOP’s demand of a moratorium on the health care law, and since it is unlikely that the House would accept the one remotely plausible counter-offer of a one year delay of the individual mandate, the government shutdown is about to commence.
Whether that eventuality proves to be a blunder that thwarts the recovery and casts Republicans as intransigent extremists is a gamble I would rather Republicans not run. I’m in the camp that fears that shutdown politics will be costly for the party, from Virginia’s November races to the Senate fight in 2014. But even when the crisis eventually resolves, likely through some Senate procedural device that bypasses or outwits the House, the more meaningful dilemma is that the right’s path to brinksmanship has not really been countered by any articulate, influential conservative voice.
The case against the Ted Cruz putsch has been advanced in Republican circles, to be sure, but largely in the context of either the Wall Street fallout or disdain for Cruz’s leveraging of the defund Obamacare strategy to elevate his presidential ambitions. Missing is an alternative, conservative anchored vision of what the political right might more constructively be doing to advance its agenda.
 What would such a message sound like? It might, for example, point out that Republicans are sacrificing one of the most principled critiques of the Democratic maneuvers on Obamacare: that the process of passing the law circumvented congressional rules and fed the public’s cynicism about congressional responsiveness to public sentiment. The defund movement’s tactics—risking a government stoppage that every poll suggests is deeply unpopular and seeking to effect a dramatic policy shift without anything resembling the normal process for repealing legislation—resembles too closely the Democrats’ insistence on driving through a healthcare overhaul in the face of broad opposition, through a parliamentary slight-of hand that effectively imposed one congressional chamber’s prerogatives on the other.
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Artur Davis: Where Is the Right’s Answer to Ted Cruz?
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Sep 27, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
By Artur Davis, on Tue Sep 24, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Molly Redden’s essay in the New Republic about the waning of Democratic centrists may be off-base in its examples—Christine Quinn’s deficiencies as a candidate competed with her ideological positioning as a source of her troubles, and Bill Daley’s withdrawal from the Illinois Governors’ race can hardly be attributed to a leftist backlash when he was running ahead in the polls—but her premise is certainly not one an expatriate former Democrat like myself would argue. In fact, I will use her observations to go one step further: the declining appeal of centrism in Democratic politics is not only tactically relevant to candidates, it is about to become just as culpable from a policy shaping standpoint as the much more heralded implosion of the old governing “establishment” wing of the Republican Party.
To be sure, Redden and her like-minded colleague Noam Scheiber aren’t spending much anxiety on the erosion of Democratic social conservatism, but they are highlighting that essentially one economic world view is tenable within internal Democratic fights. The tenets are that the inequitable distribution of wealth is the dominant economic threat; an aggressively regulated marketplace promotes fairness in a manner that overshadows any costs to innovation or growth; and the only adequate response to more systemic conditions like high unemployment and poverty is an assertive infusion of public dollars. In practical campaign terms, this means a candidate with a record of alliances with corporate institutions will need to spend time disgorging any rhetoric that helped forge those ties (for example, the Cory Booker who 16 months ago was defending private equity’s capacity to invest in underserved neighborhoods has morphed into the soon to be senator whose stump speech laments the failure to hand down prison sentences to Lehman executives); and a Bill de Blasio will have a built-in advantage over a more pro growth oriented message even without the special circumstances of identity politics around his mayoral nomination in New York City.
 But the demise of the corporatist sensibility in Democratic politics has arguably spilled into an aversion to the reform minded brand of politics that was until recently an underpinning of both the party’s strategic and policy framework. This plays out most decisively in the context of entitlements. There is a near universal consensus among Democratic politicians and elites that the current entitlement structure is morally and fiscally sound enough that a genuine overhaul is neither desirable nor necessary: a sharp movement from the Simpson Bowles approach a notable number of Democratic thought leaders praised in 2011 and a lifetime of difference from some of the thought experiments of the late Clinton era.
The same antipathy to reform surfaces in the disappearance of the old Robert Kennedy critique of bureaucratic anti-poverty institutions, and in the field of education reform, where accountability and strengthened teacher standards are about as unpopular among today’s Democrats as vouchers or parental choice; that is to say, almost toxic. And, as fellow right-leaning reformers like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat might point out, there is no meaningful discussion in contemporary liberalism of the kind of pro family tax reform that would advantage major portions of the Democratic Party’s low wage base; and it is conservative pundits who are churning out proposals to make the earned income tax credit more flexible or to permanently reduce FICA taxation on the working poor.
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Artur Davis: Those Fading Democratic Centrists
By Artur Davis, on Tue Sep 17, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET A few takeaways from Bill de Blasio’s apparent victory in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary:
(1) If the New York Times’ insider account of his strategy is accurate (and not just post victory spin by consultants) de Blasio deserves a substantial amount of strategic credit for running against the grain of initial polling as well as conventional wisdom. Six months ago, the best empirical and anecdotal evidence was that New Yorkers were generally contented with the city’s direction, and preferred a successor that offered a continuation of Michael Bloomberg’s policy tilt, albeit in a less autocratic, more compassionate style. It turns out that had de Blasio heeded that mindset rather than challenging it, his candidacy would likely have suffered from the thematic muddle that damaged Christine Quinn’s and Bill Thompson’s efforts.
That is no small nod to de Blasio, given that most campaigns become prisoners of their own data and the temptation to craft a message broad enough to leave virtually every sector of the electorate (and the universe of endorsers) in play. And in making a bold play for a silent, but disgruntled majority, de Blasio enabled himself to benefit from an emergent shallowness in Bloomberg’s popularity: once the voice of opposition to Bloomberg became an unabashed liberal (and the ad featuring that candidate’s polished, appealing son) as opposed to Fox-loving critics of soda bans and the National Rifle Association, the mayor’s approval ratings bled, and his putative heir, Quinn, collapsed. (for a similarly adept Republican example of tossing conventional wisdom aside, see Bobby Jindal’s 2003 race for Governor of Louisiana, when an obscure, thirty-something Indian policy wonk opted to run on a comprehensive ethics platform when polls described the state’s tepid economy and the wounded petroleum industry as the major voter concerns. Jindal lost in 03, but his 48 percent showing tagged him as a fresh figure who became the presumptive favorite four years later.
(2) Bill Thompson’s inability to mobilize the African American vote, which had he dominated it, would have put him and de Blasio in a dead heat, is even more surprising than it seems on first glance. Unlike, say, my own 2010 race as a right of center Democrat, Thompson’s campaign was a conventionally liberal affair that, post primary rationalizations aside, actually spent considerable energy and advertising on assailing New York’s stop and frisk laws. To be sure, there was a lawyerly, nuanced bent to the substance of Thompson’s arguments—more thorough supervision versus an outright repeal—but it is unlikely that Thompson’s increasingly personal and forceful denunciations of the controversial tactic did not register on the city’s African American electorate. Nor did Thompson, by the way, reap much benefit from his support from one of New York’s influential and minority dominated teacher unions.
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Artur Davis: The Tale of New York
By Artur Davis, on Tue Sep 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET While the political world is consumed with Syria—and the close question of whether Barack Obama’s muddled case for intervention is bolstered by worries about the institutional damage to the presidency that would come from a “no” vote on his Syrian resolution—a perceptive piece by two Democrats, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, on the travails of the Republican Party, deserves a serious read. In their essay “How to Save the Republican Party, Courtesy of Two Democrats”, Galston and Kamarck outline Republican misconceptions about the electoral environment that as they point out, almost identically mirror what pre-Clintonian Democrats surmised about their party on the heels of successive presidential losses: (1) faith that there is a non-voting segment of the electorate that would be energized by a move toward an undiluted, ideologically pure version of the party’s ideological message and (2) that a solid majority in the House of Representatives and a majority of governorships are proof of an underlying electoral strength that will eventually reassert itself at the presidential level.
Anyone who has perused this site can guess that I am aligned with much of the Galston/Kamarck critique, and that I view what they call the “hyper-individualistic libertarianism” that is dominant in conservative grassroots circles as a liability for Republican aspirations to raise their vote shares with minorities, under 35 professional women, and white working class voters: in fact it is a liability about equal to the constraints interest group liberalism posed to eighties era Democrats trying to resurrect their appeal to southern moderates, white ethnics, and suburban professionals in the aftermath of Reagan.
But while Galston and Kamarck are singing off the right hymnal, I’ll advance one huge cautionary note that partly explains why conservative reform still struggles to resonate with GOP activists and primary voters. Any advocate of the kind of conservative evolution I would favor has to come to grips with an intrinsic contrast between the respective policy successes of Reagan Republicans (more muted than memory usually serves) and Obama Democrats (more sweeping than either camp prefers to acknowledge).
A generation ago, the Reagan era managed to rewrite one dramatic element of the domestic policy framework—namely, a sizable reduction in marginal tax rates—but to an extent that was downplayed then and obscured now, that framework was undisturbed in most other aspects. Discretionary spending was not sharply diminished; the entitlement structure was solidified; legal policy was turned rightward at the edges, but not in a manner that criminalized abortions or undermined affirmative action; and the regulatory footprint was mostly indistinguishable in 1989 from what it was in 1981.
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Artur Davis: One More Threat to Conservative Reform
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Sep 2, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET John Y. Brown, Sr. and Ed Pritchard
In 1984, Vic Hellard, longtime director of the Legislative Research Commission and Kentucky historian, conducted a much anticipated oral history with the “Sage of Kentucky Politics,” Edward F Pritchard. Pritchard, came onto the Kentucky political scene like a meteorite—a wunderkind from Paris, Kentucky who went to Princeton and then Harvard Law and later became part of FDR’s “Brain Trust” before falling from grace, in Shakespearian-like manner, for stuffing the ballot boxes and going to federal prison.
The boy wonder who many thought early in his career could have been a Kentucky governor, US Senator or even Supreme Court Justice, slowly re-emerged as a behind the scenes force in Kentucky politics as an advisor to governors, trusted commentator, and a singular force as an advocate for improving education that culminated in the creation of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, which helped usher in Kentucky’s landmark education reform. He ended his life on almost as high a note as he had begun in his early career.
“Pritch” as he was affectionately called by those who knew him well, had paid his dues for his earlier excesses and political peccadillos. In his later years the rehabilitated and wiser Pritch was subdued by the humility that escaped him in his youth and hardened by the realities of the limitations of a world he once believed he was destined to leave an even greater mark on—but still managed to leave a profoundly important legacy on nonetheless. And to stand out as one of last century’s most fascinating and important political characters. Just not in the way he had originally desired or planned….but, in retrospect, perhaps the best and most fitting legacy for his personality and capabilities. Life seems often to work out that way. For all of us. Even those of us bestowed with the rarified talents of an Edward F Prichard.
 When I first heard about the oral history in the mid 1980s, I called UK to try to get my hands on them. I wanted to hear the history of our state and nation from the lips of the pedagogical and pugnacious pundit who I marveled at as a young man. Pritch was a sort of intellectual hero to me. And, secretly, I also wanted to see what, if anything, he had to say about my grandfather, John Young Brown Sr, who was Pritch’s contemporary. How did this fabled hero assess my own flesh and blood?
Unfortunately, the tapes were embargoed until Pritch’s death for reasons that had been worked out with the University of Kentucky. Later the interviews came out in a Digital Collection and I found them fascinating. And found a brief description of Pritch’s take on my grandfather (see below).
Pritch’s comments about my granddad were, more or less, about what I expected. The praise wasn’t as glorious as I had hoped; and the criticisms weren’t as disappointing as I had feared. It was good enough….and in the scheme of things, put in its proper perspective, something to be proud of and grateful for. Life seems often to work out that way.
“Vic Hellard: And what were your— what’s your opinion of John Y. Brown Sr.? Has that changed over the years or—
Edward F Prichard: No. I’ll never forget the first time, did I tell you the first time I ever met him, when he came to our school and gave a chapel speech, and I was just dazzled by him, eloquent, full of force, and I— I just thought he was marvelous. And I’ve followed him ever since with interest. I’ve sometimes been for him, sometimes not. We’ve been good personal friends, always.
Vic Hellard: Is there— how about—
Edward F Prichard: He’s even been a benefactor, but I think that he has some tendencies to be a demagogue. He is not a profound intellect. He has a good command of language, a good command— good presence as a speaker.
As he’s got older, he’s tended to be a bit garrulous. He has a big ego. But I think he’s, in his way, he’s always been for the common man and the little man. Naturally, he has a weakness for his own son. Who wouldn’t?
There’s a certain element of casuistry in his makeup, rationalization.
But by and large he’s been for more good things in Kentucky than he has bad things. He’s sponsored a lot of progressive legislation. He has been a strong defender of the working man, of the people that needed help.
As I say, there’s some foolishness about him, some, a lot of ego. But on the whole, this is a better state than would have been if we hadn’t had him.”
A final footnote: Several months before my grandfather died, we had dinner together at the Cracker Barrel in Lexington. I was 21 and he was 84. I asked him specifically “What was Ed Prichard like?” I honestly can’t remember the details of what he told me. Maybe it will come back to me. It was a kind and warm and respectful comment from my grandfather about Pritch…. but also somewhat lackluster and not reverential, as I had expected.
The heroes we have when we are young are almost always seen in more pedestrian terms than we hoped and expected by those who knew them as their contemporaries and who worked alongside them. Maybe the only thing that distinguishes heroes from mere mortals is time spent in their presence. But heroes are still, in the scheme of things and put in their proper perspective, something to be proud of and grateful for. And sometimes as we seek them out we find out that our real heroes are those much closer to us in proximity. Like our own flesh and blood grandfather. Life seems often to work out that way, too. As it did here, for me.
By Michael Steele, on Thu Aug 29, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET From 92Y at the Jefferson:
 Former Chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele recently sat down with 92Y Producer Jordan Chariton at The Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to revive the Republican Party.
In part two of our extended interview, Steele touched on everything from the Tea Party movement to the Trayvon Martin case.
Steele doesn’t see Tea Party lawmakers as obstructionists:
“They had a charge from the people who elected them…you go to Washington and you draw a line in the sand, you put a hold on the amount of spending, and you say no to more spending without some level of contraction.”
Where Steele does acknowledges issues Republicans are having is with communication, specifically with minority groups, joking:
“I think there’s a huge gap between our brain and our mouth,” Steele said, adding, “You don’t always express what you’re thinking without thinking it through.”
Steele also shared his views on the murder of Trayvon Martin.
“A 17-year-old African American with a bottle of tea and a bag of Skittles was killed for no reason other than being black, young, wearing a hoodie.”
He also spoke about President Obama’s election, pointing out that it has not ended racism in America.
“Obama’s election was not a panacea for race relations. All these folks running around talking about, ‘Oh, we’re in a postracial America’ … BS, as the Trayvon Martin case readily proves.”
Do you agree with Steele’s take on the Trayvon Martin murder? Comment below.
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 29, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Click here to review and purchase The modern South is waiting for its epic; or failing that, for a book that captures how one region can be so distinctive and still emblematic of every national psychosis at the same time. Peter Applebome’s excellent 1997 work “Dixie Rising” (facts out of date, conclusions still dead on) comes the closest in a pretty sparse field to hitting that zone, but there is no southern themed version of what George Packer just did so skillfully in excavating the Great Recession in “The Unwinding”. Tracy Thompson’s sometimes very good but nowhere near great effort, “The New Mind of the South” doesn’t threaten “Dixie Rising’s” standing. It might have, if the author had done a little less translation and a little more interpretation.
Some of Thompson’s flaws are relatively lower case blunders: identifying William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential nominee who reconfigured his party as a populist vehicle, as a third party candidate is not unforgivable, although it is the kind of gaffe that calls every other obscure detail into some degree of doubt. Some of her faults are the price of an approach that prefers the anecdote and the cherry-picked stat to heavy duty research. This is a book that devotes a chapter to Hispanic immigration while tossing off two sentences about Alabama’s controversial law; that reaches conclusions about the racialization of southern politics without acknowledging that at the time she went to print, the nation’s only black senator happened to be a South Carolina Republican who defeated Strom Thurmond’s son in a congressional primary.
But Thompson did not set out to write a tome or a textbook. And her intuition that the best impressionistic essays can be deep without being a fact dump is surely right. But where she falls short is that a stylishly rendered, graceful account still constantly feels one step away from the depth she was striving toward. This is well done description of a road trip laced with a little data, not so much analysis, and likely would have fared better with critics if it had been packaged that way.
Exhibit One: The sketch of teenaged Latinos in Asheboro, North Carolina is a smart, interesting read on their space between absorption into and alienation from their surroundings, and that duality does add a tricky side note to the rising Hispanic southern population. But that same half-in, half-out condition also applies equally well to, oh, inner city black teenagers in the Ivy League, or imported northern professionals filling downtown condos from Richmond to Nashville. Thompson dwells on whether that ordinary enough ambiguity in place identity will change the nature of southerness, as if it were something profound, but skims the surface of more immediately relevant questions: are Hispanics really the key to a Democratic revival in a Georgia or North Carolina or will the social conservatism of the region’s Latinos (which she pauses to address for only about a sentence) turn them into a bloc that Republicans may woo when the immigrant bashing drains out of the right’s system? Is their rightward lean on faith and family different than or tantamount to the one that black southerners possess but don’t take into the voting booth? And if those details are too tediously political, how about this big question: how is that Alabamians and Georgians who so conspicuously pride themselves on racial progress had no compunction passing some of the nation’s harshest immigration laws at obvious cost to their reputation? Thompson’s take on whether there is rationalizing or back sliding at the source of this tension would have been worth hearing.
There is more of this pattern of reporting up to but not including the point of real insight. She is laser like in capturing Atlanta’s rising tide that didn’t lift enough boats, and is appropriately critical of Atlanta’s run of political mediocrity and its lapsed civil rights generation succession. All true, but interesting for this book’s purposes only if it traces a path that surfaces in the rest of the New South. Thompson never lets us know if a Birmingham, Memphis and Little Rock tell the same story, even if just by way of an aside. Moreover, by subscribing so predictably to the lament over right wing Republicans and self serving civil rights cut-offs, she brushes aside another thorny issue: why have southern progressives had so little to offer lately beyond a bought and paid for defense of plaintiffs lawyers and casinos? The absence of a reform culture in 21st century liberal southern politicians is the kind of thing a southern liberal like Thompson should have appreciated. But she opts for the cliché instead.
For every spot-on instinct about southern ways—give her credit for placing the southerner’s casual interrogations as to who raised you and who you married as anxiety to find a zone of connection rather than snobbery or nosiness—there seems to be a spot where her antenna goes dead. One would like to know what Thompson makes of a more consequential oddity most northerners don’t know: the fact that the South’s politics are arguably the most classless in the country—downscale whites vote roughly the same as white southern economic elites, and not just when a certain black president is on the ballot. The phenomenon of upper income voters forming the newest element of the Democratic electoral base is altogether missing down South. Also, what does Thompson take from the perverse reality that the irrelevance of class, rather than birthing some new fangled populism, has instead produced an electorate disengaged from class oriented problems in one of the sections of American where they are festering?
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Artur Davis: The New Mind of the South: A Native Southerner’s Miss
By Jeff Smith, on Wed Aug 28, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET The conventional wisdom in the political class is that Tea Party-inspired primary challenges of recent years have had decidedly mixed success. Sure, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee have beaten sitting senators and establishment-anointed candidates, changing the issue terrain and nature of debate in the Senate. But most Tea Party candidates imploded.
That view largely misses the point. Interest groups seeking more influence within their party should think more like class-action trial lawyers: While it would be great to beat the company, the real reason to fight is not to win a 43-cent check for every plaintiff but to change corporate behavior in a lasting way.
Seen this way, even widely mocked far-right challengers have had lasting impact. Although Senate nominees Christine O’Donnell (Delaware), Sharron Angle (Nevada), and Richard Mourdock (Indiana) lost, their primary wins over establishment candidates terrified some other senators, causing them to move right. Witness the pandering of Senate Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn since 2010 to their home-state counterparts Paul and Cruz. Even very marginal primary losers like Arizona’s J.D. Hayworth had an impact, temporarily moving John McCain to the right on key issues like immigration. (McCain, who appears unlikely to seek reelection in 2016, has since shifted back.)
 When tough votes arise, many Republican senators can’t help but consider ex-Senators Dick Lugar of Indiana and Robert Bennett of Utah — both unceremoniously booted in primaries — which usually leads to appeasement of the Tea Party. That’s the nature of politics. As congressional scholar Gary Jacobson has documented, politicians run scared, altering their behavior in anticipation of future challenges. That’s why it is helpful, but not necessary, for interest groups seeking power within a party to get a scalp.
Economic progressives are now clamoring for a Federal Reserve chair more progressive than Larry Summers. But they should’ve thought of that last year and, for instance, challenged incumbent Delaware Senator Tom Carper, who consistently votes with Republicans on banking and finance issues. They could have attempted to nationalize the race as conservative interests groups such as the Club for Growth did for Lee, Mourdock, Cruz, and others. They could have tried to capitalize on the residual energy of the Occupy movement to energize liberals angry at the Clinton-ushered takeover of the Democratic Party by Wall Street which has proven relatively durable even in the wake of the finance-induced Great Collapse.
There are many reasons Carper should have been a progressive target — from the obvious policy ones (Carper is the Senate Democrat who votes furthest to the right of his constituency) to logistical (a tiny state where grassroots activism can trump money) and media (close to the Beltway and so easily covered) advantages. And again, winning isn’t necessary: Primary challenges to incumbents can help change policy before the fact — despite ultimately losing, Netroots darling Bill Halter’s Arkansas primary in 2010 made Senator Blanche Lincoln stronger on Dodd-Frank.
And if progressives had found a credible candidate, it likely would not have been a fool’s errand — Elizabeth Warren demonstrated the national grassroots thirst for a populist Democrat last cycle, and locally, a political nobody fresh out of law school named Bryan Townsend ran a longshot primary in Delaware last year and upset the entrenched state Senate president, suggesting at least some Delaware Democrats are willing to buck party orthodoxy.
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Jeff Smith: Do Liberals Deserve Larry Summers as Fed Chair?
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