First of all, I'd like to say Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there including my grandmother, mom and sisters.
Second, I'd like to give a shout out to all the folks who volunteered yesterday for Vote for Change all over the nation. Here in Hayward, California, we registered over 350 new voters yesterday and over 100 of us, young and old, learned the ins and outs of registering voters in Alameda County one of the largest Democratic counties in the nation.
Finally, I'd like to salute Barack Obama's newest Super Delegate, Crystal Strait of the Young Democrats. Crystal, who works for the California Democratic Party and was instrumental in getting local bloggers credentialed to attend the convention in San Jose last month. Her advocacy for youth voters and their core issues is a welcome addition to Obama's team.
This diary is about taking a look at the road ahead in 2008 as Democrats and Progressives...
One of the things I'd like to do with this diary is give a quick snapshot of what we can expect to see as the Democratic nomination process, one way or another, winds to a close.
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advancing our agenda
The first thing we can expect to see, right off the bat, is that Barack Obama will forge, with every move he makes, not simply a path to secure victory in the Presidential Election in November, but a path to victory for a wide slate of Democratic candidates intent on advancing a Democratic agenda with a Democratic Congress and Executive Branch in 2009. Not only that, but Barack Obama's single-minded attention to voter registration, a signature of his entire career in public service, will have a carry-over effect in advancing local Democrats running for office in every state and locality in the nation. That's huge.
2008 will be a Democratic year. Everything we do will be coordinated to advance our legislative goals in 2009 and forward.
While this may seem to be on a par with previous elections, 2008 is truly different from previous election years. The Democratic Party has a chance to reinforce healthy majorities in the House and the Senate and secure the Presidency. Further, in state after state, local Democratic Parties with the help of Chairman Dean have rebuilt and retooled their approach. With the 2010 Census approaching, and State Legislatures swinging Democratic, the Democratic Party has a chance to undo years of Republican-slanted redistricting that created huge Republican advantages in critical states.
What this means in policy terms is that our Presidential nominee will be in a position to tell the public he or she will do something and that will mean something. There is a promise in 2008 of breaking legislative deadlocks that have gripped our political process one way or another for decades. When Barack Obama says he will pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform in his first year in office, as he has, that's exactly what he and the Democratic Congress will set out to do. John McCain will be able to make no such promises on the campaign trail; he can't.
This is one of those political observations that is so obvious that few bother to make it. It is, however, a very big deal and will impact the Presidential race. The Democratic Party is looking to solidify its gains from 2006 with big wins in 2008. That means, in practical terms that the election of 2008 is about what we will do together as a nation in 2009 under Democratic leadership. John McCain, in all ways, can only equal more of the same.
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building our coalition: regional gains and Latino voters
Much has been made through the primary process about the various factions and demographics that make up the Democratic coalition. While it will naturally take time for wounds to heal, it is important to set aside the resentments of the moment and look at the bigger picture. The Democratic coalition is expanding geographically, with huge gains in the Mountain West and Great Plains in states like Colorado and Montana and Kansas and Nebraska. The Democratic Party continues to reinforce its hold on the Northeast and Upper Midwest. And the Southern United States, the base for George Bush's entire popular vote margin in 2004 (Kerry won the popular vote in every other region), is showing Democratic strength in the mid-Atlantic states of Virginia and North Carolina and even in the deep South as we've seen in recent Congressional races in Mississippi and Louisiana. Barack Obama's campaign, it's no coincidence, understands this to the core. The 50 State Strategy was essential to his success in battle for pledged delegates.
2008 is also the year that the Democratic Party will begin to break out of the constraints of ethnically-identified districts and candidates. As the United States becomes, more and more, a national quilt of ethnicities none of whom, in twenty or thirty years will be a majority, we can see that the Democratic party has become home to a vibrant coalition of Latino and black and white and Asian and American Indian candidates and voices. 2008 is the year that the nation will begin to understand what will be more and more apparent in decades to come: the emerging power of Latino voters, the fastest growing demographic in the United States.
Since California is solid blue and Texas is still, for now, solid red and since John McCain hails from Arizona (and Florida, for now, plays by its own rules)...it would be easy for Democrats to ignore the significant emergence of Latino voters and candidates in the last decades. That would be a huge and costly error. Latino voters are proud and essential members of the Democratic coalition and in states as varied as Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Illinois, and New York (and in non-Presidential contests in CA, AZ, TX and FL) Latino voters will play a significant and decisive role in the strength of the Democratic Party in 2008 and whether we succeed in advancing our legislative agenda in 2009.
I expect that the first thing that Barack Obama will do when he secures the nomination is reach out to Latino voters and embrace them and include Latino leaders in the process of strategizing 2008 and 2009. That will be an essential part of bringing out party together. And, as current events have shown, while Latino citizens have many issues that affect their communities uniquely and disproportionately, there is a fundamental unity of concerns that all Democratic voters share: educational opportunity for our children, health care for all, investment in our communities, our security as a unified nation and building a vibrant and energy independent United States ready to lead the world to a healthier environment.
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liberal and economic populism
Another thing I expect Barack Obama and the Democratic Party to do in 2008 will be to reemphasize a message that got lost after Al Gore's 'loss' in 2000, the message of Liberal Populism and how core economic concerns unite our coalition across regional and racial lines.
As Jonathan Chait writes, the Clinton campaign veered towards a conservative populism in these last months. Expect Barack Obama to reverse that with a return to traditional Democratic economic appeals:
Historically, the conservative populist's social divide ran along racial and ethnic lines. In recent years, overt racism has all but disappeared from mainstream political life, and even racial hot button appeals like the 1988 Willie Horton ad have grown rare. What remains is a residue of nostalgia about small towns--whose residents are said to have stronger values and work harder than other Americans, and who also happen to be overwhelmingly white. In 2004, after John Kerry declared that some entertainers supporting him represented "the heart and soul of America," George W. Bush embarked upon a national tour of small- and mid-sized cities, where he would say, "I believe the heart and soul of America is found in places like Duluth, Minnesota," or other such places.
Likewise, Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated. Hillary Clinton's statement about "hard-working Americans, white Americans" simply made explicit a theme that conservative populists usually keep implicit.
Liberal populism is mostly harnessed to a concrete legislative program aimed at broadening prosperity. Al Gore's "people versus the powerful" campaign focused on his differences with Bush over issues like regulation of HMOs and progressive taxation. Conservative populism, by contrast, is a way of exploiting the grievances it identifies without redressing them. It has an ever-shifting array of targets--Michael Dukakis's veto of a law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or the rantings of Jeremiah Wright--but no way to knock them down.
What Barack Obama and the Democratic Party must do in 2008 will be to emphasize the core economic themes that unite Americans across all regions and racial lines and counter the divisive trend the Clintons established towards the end of their campaign by running towards Republican themes that John McCain will use to divide us. Jim Webb has paved the path for the success of that unifying economic populist appeal even in the Republican-leaning Commonwealth of Virginia. I expect that Barack Obama will take Jim Webb's economic populism up and run with it.
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forging a new center
Barack Obama is not running a 50%+1 campaign. Liberals in traditional Democratic strongholds like NYC, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Boston and Philadelphia can expect that our sensibilities will be tweaked by Obama's push for a 60% campaign in the general. All I can say is get used to it. There is no way around it.
Barack Obama will make appeals that transcend traditional Democratic identity lines in both style and substance. The recent surge in support for Obama from evangelical Christians is one indicator of this trend. His popularity in rural areas west of the Mississippi is another. Democrats who expect that in a "Democratic resurgence year" that liberal orthodoxy will be triumphant are in for a rude shock. The tide turned for Barack Obama when politicians like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy AND politicians like Janet Napolitano and Claire McCaskill and Kathleen Sebelius came out in support of him. The campaign in 2008 will reflect that fact.
The founding reality of Barack Obama's campaign for President was his striking win against two formidable opponents in Iowa, a state George Bush won in 2004. Expect Obama to return to those roots: a mix of idealism and an emphasis on personal responsibility and engagement in our civic life. There is a square deal for every last citizen in the coalition that Barack Obama is forging; not having to go outside of one's immediate political comfort level, however, is not one Obama's promises.
The 2008 coalition will be forged on the premise that if we all give up something stylistically, we can gain a heck of a lot more substantively from the power we gain by coming together on issues we care about. That's the unity message. That was the entire premise of Obama's pathbreaking speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. Obama will not abandon that fundamental vision in 2008; it is his pole star. Obama is for a fair deal, a hand up, but never a simple hand out. We all have to do our part. Equitable solutions and coalitions that fight hard to win them will be the order of the day. There will be Republicans in Barack Obama's cabinet. Their participation, however, will be founded on an entirely different premise than Joe Lieberman's journey to the dark side; Barack Obama's politics is founded on the idea that one's political opponents will give up a great deal for a chance to do the right thing and move our nation's agenda foward.
And, at the end of the day, that is not simply what the campaign of Barack Obama in 2008 will be about...looking forward at the challenges we face as a nation in 2009, we have no other choice.
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what about progressives?
I wrote a comment on Open Left a couple months ago that I never followed up on. Here it is:
What most Open Left critics of Obama don't see is how his campaign represents a methodological approach to progressivism that is his best hope of building a winning coalition open to progressive ideas that could elect him in the general. The 50 State Strategy. Grassroots activist empowerment. Team building.
Walk into an Obama office and you are treated differently than previous campaigns. You are not a "rote" automaton to be trained and used. In all likelihood if you've volunteered for Obama you've learned, built and implemented a set of skills and level of teamwork on your own on some level. The people you worked with have all come out of that experience too. You've been linked into a social network. That is all progressive...but methodologically so.
This methodology has resulted in youth empowerment and new voter engagement in unprecendened levels. The turnout, the driving energy of the primary season has been driven by Barack Obama. This translates into politics. Obama has clear positions on open government and transparency. He would be, head and shoulders, above either of the two remaining candidates and if elected the most powerful reformer we've had yet at the head of our Federal Government in this regard.
If the progressive blogosphere were willing to rally behind Senator Obama on this core issue, we could have, and might still yet see, a kind of functioning issues based progressive political alliance born.
Transparency and open government provisions, are, believe it or not, pretty much the only "progressive values" that every single progressive believes in. Progressivism is strongest when it makes an appeal to government reform. This is the least ideological of our positions. But it's also where we share huge common ground with Senator Obama and, frankly, where astute left activists know, the most powerful possibilities for regulatory and legislative reforms reside. Open government IS the key to progressive reform. Barack Obama will go there with us. [snip]
My advice to progressive bloggers would be to understand the methodological innovations that Obama's campaign embodies, embrace the open government reforms where we have our broadest policy overlap with Senator Obama, and, finally, work with the "new coalition" that Obama has assembled to build a true multi-racial, multi-class, anti-racist coalition within the Democratic Party that is ready to fight back against the forces that divide us white from black from Asian from Latino.
That coalition is worth its weight in gold and the key to advancing progressive ideals.
I understand that to a lot of readers here the above paragraphs could read like so much theoretical gobbledygook. They are not. Registering new voters and building a nation-wide truly multi-racial, multi-class coalition, and as part of that, pushing for open government reforms (including core issues like net neutrality, copyright reform, sunshine provisions, ethics and campaign finance reform...ie. good government reforms) are the key and central components of the progressive policy agenda. This is what, at the end of the day, we all agree on; it's what makes us progressives.
It is only when we do that, that we begin to advance the budget and policy priorities that we agree on to differing degrees but all of us find important: reinvesting in the infrastructure of America and moving from a national budget beholden disproportionately to the military industrial complex first among them with health care and the environment as our highest priorities.
We do this one step at a time. I am convinced that the most progressive aspects of Barack Obama's campaign are inherent in his commitment to good government reforms. If we can link this to a massive effort to register new voters around these ideals, we will have truly moved the ball forward in regards to progressive politics in this nation.
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a final note: registering voters
There is no greater and more effective call to change than a political party committed to registering new voters and bringing them to the polls on election day. The Republican Party kicked our ass in this regard in 2004. It's not that we did not register new voters; non-affiliated groups registered tons of voters in 2004, it's who those voters eventually went to the polls and voted for that was the problem. George Bush increased his vote totals in every major city in the United States in 2004, except San Francisco and Minneapolis. That statement is the most significant fact in this diary. You may not have read it before...but it's true.
When we register and track new Democratic voters we kick Republican butt. When we register new voters and get them to the polls we inherently move the Democratic Party in a progressive direction. I saw this first hand this last month. A local candidate we just elected in Oakland in 2006 just now pushed through his first reform: bus passes for all community college students. Education + Mass Transportation...that's progressive reform...and that only happens when MORE and especially younger voters get to the polls like we did in Oakland on election day 2006.
Barack Obama, a methodological and ideological progressive committed to good government reform and building a 60% majority for the Democratic Party nationally will register millions of new voters in 2008.
That's our job. That's our task. It's that simple. Register, outreach, build coalition and talk about economic populism and the real issues that affect every last American's life.
In 2008 the answer is simple: Vote for Change.