By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Nov 15, 2012 at 6:00 PM ET
Yep, you read that right.
Tonight at 11:00 PM EST, I will be appearing on one of my all-time favorite television programs:The Daily Show, starring Jon Stewart, on Comedy Central.
Daily Show correspondent Al Madrigal interviewed me this summer at the No Labels headquarters in Washington, DC for a segment on hyper-partisanship. I had planned to make a passionate case for Make Congress Work, our 12-point plan to help transform Washington from hyper-partisanship to problem solving.
Of course, this is Comedy Central. And we spent about three hours in an “interview” that can only be characterized as a comedy improv session.
I had to comply with 2 rules: No jokes. No laughing.
And that was a lot more difficult than it sounds — Madrigal and his crew are really, really funny.
The scariest part about tonight’s airing is that I have no idea what parts of the interview survived the editing floor. And if you have ever seen the pretaped segments on The Daily Show, you can anticipate a whole lot of making fun of… yours truly.
If you’d like to experience the show with me — virtually speaking — I will be running a live feed of my spontaneous tweets here at this site as the show runs tonight at 11. You can join me with your comments, critiques, and put downs (keep it civil!) by using the hashtag #RecoveringPol from your personal Twitter account. Your comments will appear live aside mine here at The Recovering Politician home page.
If you are fast asleep at 11 — don’t worry, there will be many other chances to watch me implode on national television.
The show will re-run again tomorrow (Friday, November 16) at 1:00 AM, 10:00 AM and 7:30 PM (all EST). And, of course, I will have the clip up here at The Recovering Politician as soon as technology permits.
So join me tonight (or tomorrow) on The Daily Show. It could be the last time you will ever see me in public…
In his semi-regular gig as American politics expert for Canada’s CTV News — the CNN plus MSNBC plus Fox News of the Great White North — The RP spoke yesterday to the residents of his wife’s homeland about how the grassroots movement he co-founded, No Labels, is working to transform Washington from hyper-partisanship to problem-solving.
To sign onto the No Labels’ plan to Make Congress Work, click here and add your energy to the growing movement which now includes nearly 600,000 Democrats., Republicans and Independents, all who believe we must occasionally put aside our labels to do what is right for our nation.
And for The RP on CTV News, let’s go to the videotape:
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Nov 15, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
In my latest column for The Huffington Post, I explore how average citizens — you and me — can influence policymakers to promote problem-solving, instead of hyper-partisan paralysis.
Although we’ve re-elected President Barack Obama, much of the president’s success depends on what happens in Congress. If we want our country to move forward over the next four years, we need Congress and the president to put political point-scoring aside and work to solve our country’s most pressing problems.
The most immediate challenge is the fiscal cliff, which threatens to push America back into recession, unless Democrats and Republicans in Congress — working with the White House — can cast aside partisan interests in favor of a balanced solution. Each side will have no choice but to support some things it doesn’t like and take political risks. But with the fiscal cliff looming at the end of the year, time is running out and tough choices are necessary.
It has become clear that fundamental change is needed to make Congress work more efficiently and effectively to address this cliff and more of America’s most pressing problems. Given how little time our representatives spend actually working together, it’s no surprise that breakthroughs are few and far between. House members spend almost as much time in their home district or traveling as they do legislating. Instead of working at problem solving in Congress, they are focused on partisan infighting and planning the next campaign.
In order to truly solve problems, lawmakers need to come out from behind their bunkers and start talking with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. It’s happened before. President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill put partisan interests aside to shore up Social Security’s finances. A Democratic Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower agreed to build the interstate highway system. More recently, President Bill Clinton worked with Republicans in Congress to reform welfare programs.
We can’t wait for Washington to get to work. That’s why No Labels — a growing grassroots movement of about 600,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents who favor a new politics of problem solving — has put together two common-sense action plans — Make Congress Work! and Make the Presidency Work!These plans would improve communications across partisan lines, modify or eliminate rules that promote gridlock, and establish new timetables for taking action. Most importantly, they would foster a new environment of leadership in Washington.
By John Y. Brown IV, on Wed Nov 14, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
I was as disappointed as any other Republican with last Tuesday’s election results. President Obama defeated Governor Romney soundly in the Electoral College while also defeating him, albeit by a lesser margin, in the national popular vote. Republicans also lost seats in both chambers of Congress.
This was a pivotal election. On Tuesday, we learned that the large expansion of the federal government that took place in President Obama’s first term will likely continue without a Republican president or more conservative House or Senate to intervene. Whether Republicans like it or not, Obamacare is here to stay. The same is true of Dodd-Frank Act and many other expansions of federal power that took place under this President.
Likewise, whoever was elected president in 2012 was destined to play a major role in the budgetary reforms that are needed to bring our country to long term financial solvency and short term fiscal sanity. With President Obama, we can expect to see heavier tax hikes and military cuts and much smaller domestic spending cuts than we would have under a President Romney. Entitlement reform will be hard to achieve in any meaningful way with a President who is already on the record as opposing raising the retirement age, cutting benefits (even for the wealthy), or having any sort of market based changes within the various systems.
The point here is that with so much on the line, my party lost big last Tuesday in an election that had huge implications for the future of public policy.
The easy impulse is to find blame (the devastating storms, the power of incumbency, an Obama friendly media, etc.) that will relieve us from the harder (but also more rewarding) task of asking ourselves honestly where our party came up short.
What was it that made swing voters break towards President Obama instead of Governor Romney in the final days of the campaign?
Most commentators tell us that it was because Republicans came off as too extreme on social policy like immigration, abortion and other hot button social issues. These extreme positions, the argument goes, caused republicans to lose critical support from minorities, women and youth. I believe there is more than a grain of truth to what those commentators are telling us.
Most minorities don’t support Republicans because of issues like immigration but more because they are drawn to the populist economic message that Democratic Presidents typically promote. These segments of voters generally support higher taxes (on the “rich”) and more public services.
Read the rest of… John Y. Brown, IV: Why We Lost — Republicans Need to Connect to Middle America
The RP sent the following message to the 600,000 person army of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who comprise the No Labels movement. Please read, and if you agree, sign on to this important cause:
The election is over, and our leaders are talking about working across the aisle — but will they follow through?
The stakes have rarely been higher. Neither side has the numbers to push through an agenda without compromise, and the price of failure would be severe. Once again, they have no choice but to work together.
Speaker John Boehner said, “If there was one mandate that came out of the election, it was find a way to work together to address our problems.” President Barack Obama agreed, inviting congressional leaders tothe White House to work on a solution to the fiscal cliff.
More than a half-million Democrats, Republicans and independents have coalesced behind this cause. Washington can and will work, but only if the people demand it. That’s what we’re doing.
1) Return to your fiscal conservative roots. Adhere to your rhetoric about not crippling the next generation with debt by supporting policies that would actually balance budgets, as opposed to Ryan-esque chimera and other supply-side delusions.
You may recall how the economy fared in the 1990s after every Republican legislator voted against Clinton’s ’93 tax hike and asserted it would kill the economy. Did a Republican Congress that limited spending help satisfy bond traders, keeping interest rates low and powering growth? Sure. But the public associates that growth with Clinton. Your doomsday rhetoric about Clintonomics cost you credibility, and a decade of feeble growth following the Bush tax cuts didn’t restore it.
2) As true budget hawks, take the lead in two areas where the nation could save billions: military spending and prison reform. Want to win the votes of young people and minorities? Bingo. Young people have overwhelmingly opposed recent overseas conflicts, and in a time of fiscal austerity when college grads are moving back in with their parents, the fact that that we spend more than the next 10 highest spending nations combined should be sobering.
Prison reform could be two-fold. First, train offenders in prison in entrepreneurship. Pilot programs in this area have reduced recidivism by as much as 80% – and 60% recidivism rates drive corrections spending. Second, focus on sentencing reform so that we don’t continue locking up non-violent offenders for decades as part of misguided “three-strikes” and “truth-in-sentencing” laws. Since minorities are disproportionately affected by the prison-industrial complex, they would appreciate a focus on sentencing reform.
3) Stop opposing the DREAM Act. The writing is on the wall. These approximately 15 million folks aren’t going anywhere; they’re not self-deporting and government lacks the will and the money to deport them, other than criminals who are apprehended. These 15 million mostly consider themselves Americans. Almost all work hard and play by the rules. Quit appeasing your eroding base of old white people and get with the program.
4) Stop talking about gay people. As has been obvious from the generational divide in polling on the issue for the past decade that ship is sailing away from you, fast.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: 7 Things Republicans Must Do
By Michael Steele, on Mon Nov 12, 2012 at 8:20 AM ET
I am certain at some point during the past 18 months you found yourself feeling like that kid riding in the backseat of the family car on what is supposed to be the “great adventure” to “someplace special.” But the only thing you can muster after about 15 minutes is, “Are we there yet?” Well, kiddies, Tuesday night we arrived, and the trip that was Election 2012 was finally over.
When this journey started many of us had high hopes for an engaging battle of ideas, but what we got instead was more a battle of super PACs and their negative campaign ads. By the time of the first debate in early October, many voters were fed up and tuned out.
But a funny thing happened that night: President Obama finally got to meet Mitt Romney — not the caricature of the “rich white guy” or the plutocrat from, well, Pluto, but the husband and father, and the former governor of Massachusetts. It was this night, on the biggest stage of his political career, that Romney found his voice. He didn’t talk process or sound indifferent to the concerns of 47 percent of Americans, nor did he concern himself with the misdirection and bright shiny objects offered up by Democrats (e.g. campaign ads) but instead, looked every voter in the eye and talked to us with specifics and reminded us that we are not better off just because “it could be worse.”
Read the rest of… Michael Steele: Are We There Yet, GOP?
We welcome our newest contributing recovering politician to the RP: Steve Levy, who served as a Suffolk County Executive from 2004-2011, a New York State Assemblyman and was a Republican candidate for Governor of New York in 2010. Steve currently is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political, governmental and business consulting firm.
1. Occupy Wall Street
This movement, which started as a grassroots, diverse consortium of the disaffected and ultimately morphed into a cabal of old time anarchists and communists, is what gave Obama his sense of direction. Obama handlers knew there were few accomplishments to harp on, given the stagnant economy, but by focusing public anger on the 1%, they could help galvanize their base while also pointing the finger at the greedy rich folks they could claim were the cause of the mess they inherited.
2. The Greatest Convention Ever?
History will show the 2012 Democratic Convention as being the best of this century and possibly any convention over the last fifty years. It played to every constituency in the base, motivating them in difficult times and used President Clinton to lay the blame for today’s woes on the Bush administration. Romney could easily have accentuate the hypocrisy of Democrats blaming the current problems on the Bush administration. Economists agree that Bush policies had little to do with the crash of 2008. The culprit was the deregulation of Wall Street by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, ironically signed by Democratic President Clinton. The Romney campaign allowed the Democrats to establish traction on the term “Don’t Go Back.”
3. Define Your Opponent Early
Politics 101 is to seek to define your opponent in a negative way as early as possible. Politics 101A is for the affected candidate to respond quickly and forcefully. The Democrats wisely adhered to the former strategy, while the Republicans ignored the latter to their detriment. In the lull after the Republican primary, the Democrats spent a good share of their money pummeling Romney, defining him through his association with Bain Capital. He became the out-sourcing, job cutting, detached Daddy Warbucks who could not identify with the average worker, It took away Romney’s narrative that he was the sharp businessman who knew how to fix the economy. Romney could easily have defended himself as being the saver of jobs. Staples, Sports Authority and other companies survived because of his intervention. The initial jobs that were lost after Bain’s acquisitions would have been lost anyway. By the time Romney finally sought to aggressively erase this caricature at the debate, it was too late.
Read the rest of… Steve Levy: Top Ten Game Changes of the 2012 Election
Well before Bill Clinton mastered the skill of political survival, and became the most consequential ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt, he pulled off a more pivotal achievement. Clinton essentially restored the Democratic Party as an electoral force by shoring up its credibility on fiscal policy, social policy, and race, and in so doing, he drew two crucial blocs firmly back into his party: blue collar whites and suburban professionals. The modern electoral map, which allots most of the industrial north and Midwest to Democrats and in which suburb-heavy states like California and New Jersey have not been contested in a generation, is the legacy of Clinton’s restoration project.
Republicans face a comparable predicament to the one pre-Clinton Democrats faced in the late eighties, and to compound the analogy, it is a challenge along roughly the same fronts with a very similar alignment of voter blocs. If Walter Mondale’s Democrats seemed wedded at the hip to their union benefactors, today’s Republicans seem just as tied to corporate lobbies or billionaires. If the party that nominated George McGovern seemed mired in the grip of left-leaning activists bent on a radical redesign of social policy, Republicans appear to be under the sway of one network and a bevy of factions who are just as bent on a counter-cultural revolution from the right. The combination of money and noise exerted veto power on late eighties Democrats, much as contemporary Republicans are constrained by their own base.
And the blue collars and suburbanites whom Clinton strategized over are the very same slices of the electorate that allowed Barack Obama to run the battleground table with the exception of North Carolina (whose unpopular Democratic governor and nine percent plus unemployment should have made a 2.5 point margin much more comfortable).
The particulars of the Clinton project are worth recalling. The adoption of welfare reform served as an antidote to voters who associated Democrats with the transfer of tax dollars to the irresponsible. The denunciation of a rapper for loose lyrics about police violence seemed to erase the pandering, excuse making side of the party’s DNA. The now forgotten middle class tax cut proposal may not have survived Clinton’s first budget cycle, but it did its job by linking his party to the economic fortunes of a group that hadn’t seemed needy enough to be a liberal priority.
My strong hope is that Republicans, my new party, are about to discover their Clinton instincts. Had those sensibilities surfaced in the last ninety days, Mitt Romney would likely be planning a transition now. It is not hard to imagine the impact of a well-timed denunciation of the Todd Akin/Richard Murdock mythologies on rape not as gaffes, but as wrong-headed efforts to have government substitute for the conscience and moral judgment of a victimized woman. A fleshed out plan to rescue homeowners underwater on ill-conceived mortgages would have reflected some of the smarter instincts in the conservative intelligentsia in the last several years, while paying dividends with voters who associated the GOP with the blocking of initiatives and little else. Grabbing and running with Senator Marco Rubio’s version of the Dream Act before Obama absconded with it would have made a difference in Florida and Colorado.
But the tactical missed chances by Romney’s operation are history. The current challenge is finding a GOP pathway to do on the right what Clinton did in the salvation of the left 20 years ago: first, restoring the party’s bona fides as an institution capable of thinking and governing and not just pawing under the commands of its base. Second, overcoming a resistance to smart, fiscally disciplined innovation and reform.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The New Republicans
By Nick Paleologos, on Fri Nov 9, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
In their quest for the presidency, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each spent a billion dollars. They debated each other three times in front of an average audience of 60 million Americans. In the process, they aired sharp differences on several major issues facing the country.
The people listened carefully.
On Tuesday November 6, 2012, Americans delivered their verdict.
They gave President Obama three million more popular votes–and 126 more electoral votes–than Governor Romney. By their votes, the American people settled the following questions:
1) National health care? YES. (Obamacare is here to stay.) 2) Tax cuts for the rich? NO. (Ryan Budget rejected.) 3) Roe v. Wade? YES. (Rape is never “legitimate.”) 4) Citizens United? NO. (Most expensive election ever.) 5)Balanced approach to deficit reduction? YES. (Grover Norquist sent packing.) 6) Privatize social security & medicare? NO. (Fix, don’t nix.) 7) More women in US Senate? YES. (Number climbs to 20–the highest ever.) 8) More Republicans in congress? NO. (GOP loses 2 seats in Senate, 5 in House.) 9) Bi-partisanship? YES.(Voters applaud Obama-Christie cooperation.) 10) Deregulation? NO. (Voters to top 1%: Greed is NOT good.) 11) Equal pay for equal work? YES. (Voters punish GOP for “war on women.”) 12) Self-deportation? NO. (Voters support sensible immigration reform instead.) Significantly, the proportion of young people voting in 2012 was up from 2008—as was the proportion of African-Americans and Latinos.
President Barack Obama–by virtue of 2 consecutive majority victories in the popular vote–is now the most successful Democratic presidential candidate since Franklin Roosevelt.
For a rare look into the man’s soul, I offer you this:
The scariest part about tonight’s airing is that I have no idea what parts of the interview survived the editing floor. And if you have ever seen the pretaped segments on The Daily Show, you can anticipate a whole lot of making fun of… yours truly.
