This next year and a half is likely to see the Democrats moving to take advantage of the currently displayed Republican weakness in ethics and poorly accepted domestic issues. The Republicans may find it necessary to retreat to security issues, military adventurism and trying to get the Christian Right to maintain its current high-level of activism. Let me explain.
The Election in 2004
Bush won a narrow but still convincing reelection in November 2004 based primarily on security issues and the turnout of the Christian right. Neither would have worked without the other. The administration had sufficient coattails to maintain the House majority (DeLay’s redistricting accounted for the increase) and to pick off the weaker Democratic Senators.
After he won reelection in November 2004, George W. Bush had this to say:
"When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view," he said, "and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let's work together."
Republicans currently down
Now five months later the impression is different. ”...the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president's poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment. […]
“With comparatively little furor -- and the support of a significant minority of Democrats -- Bush in his first 100 days has enacted far-reaching proposals to restructure the nation's laws on bankruptcy and class-action lawsuits.
“Judged by conventional standards, such legislative victories would signal a second-term president performing at full throttle. But Bush signaled from the moment of his reelection that he was not contemplating a conventional second term.
“Instead, on the advice of White House strategists such as Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and White House director of strategic initiatives Peter Wehner, he settled on a bolder-is-better strategy. The rationale, according to White House aides, is that most second-term presidents tend to lose their policymaking leverage quickly. This dictated moving quickly and decisively -- to ensure that Bush remained the dominant figure setting Washington's agenda and to take full advantage of a narrow window.
“By this reckoning, White House aides say, Social Security is a natural issue, because it shows Bush taking on a problem that most politicians had timidly avoided, and it could turn retirement security -- political turf owned for decades by Democrats -- into a Republican issue. Even among many influential conservatives, there has been a growing consensus that the Bush governing theory, at least on Social Security, has been proved wrong.
[Underlining is mine – RB]
I had really wondered why, with all the real problems the US is facing, Bush took on such an unpromising and relatively unnecessary one as Social Security privatization. This explanation makes sense.
Ed Kilgore of New donkey dot com describes the difficulty the Bush administration is now facing:
”There's a blizzard of public opinion research making its way into publication that consistently makes one big point: growing majorities of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. [...] George W. Bush's approval ratings have dropped to their pre-9/11 level, while his main priorities, especially Social Security privatization, are more unpopular every day. And the Republican Party and the Republican Congress are getting down there into the dangerous territory of being perceived as a menace to the country.”
Democrats not correspondingly up
Recognizing this James Carville and Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps (requires Adobe reader) have reported from a recent survey that ”The faltering electoral position of the Republicans is not yet crystallized. In this survey, Bush’s job approval dropped to 48 percent. That is low, but not yet a repudiation of his presidency.
“Positive and warm feelings for the president have fallen to 47 percent – the lowest point of his presidency – but not nearly to the point of our scandalized presidents. Nor have voters fully concentrated their ire on the Republicans and the Republican Congress. Both have witnessed noticeable drops in public affection, but they are not yet scorned.
Warm reactions to the Republicans have fallen from 47 to 42 percent; for the Republican Congress, they have fallen 3 points to 41 percent. The big changes in the image and character of the party, reported later, have not yet been generalized into a fuller judgment.
And the doubts have not crystallized into a political choice because Democrats are not yet integral to the narrative. Later in this report, we write about the dramatic changes in the image of the Republicans, but that is not accompanied by image gains for the Democrats. Indeed, they have dropped along with the Republicans on some specific indicators, including trust and change and reform.”
So at the moment the Republican Party is down in public estimation, but the Democrats are not correspondingly ‘up.’ And the Bush administration knew they were taking a big risk with Social Security. Largely because of that risk, they did it as early as possible in the election cycle. The risk of alienating the voters was taken so early to permit a recovery from its failure. The Republicans know they still have a year and a half until the election in 2006.
Where now for Democrats?
Ed Kilgore recommends: ”we need a Reform message and agenda that (a) meshes with our negative critique of GOP misrule; (b) reminds voters who's in charge in Washington; and (c) reassures voters we aren't just itching to get back into power and substitute our form of special-interest pandering and fiscal indiscipline for theirs.”
Carville and Greenville suggest several possible reforms (page 14 of the PDF document.) ”The strongest reforms [as tested by the survey] are ones that link congressional benefits to protecting the Social Security trust fund, comprehensive lobby reform, and tax reform that simplifies the tax system, closes loopholes and cuts middle class taxes.”
1) Require Congress to forego a pay raise in any year the government runs a deficit or raids the Social Security trust fund, and require that any future benefit cuts to Social Security should apply to congressional pensions as well.
2) Enact comprehensive lobbying reform, including strict requirements on lobbyists to report all discussions with members of congress within two weeks, and make it a federal crime to offer campaign contributions on the basis of a vote.
3) Enact a comprehensive tax reform plan that simplifies the tax code to three brackets, eliminates virtually all loopholes, treats capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, and provides a tax cut for the middle class while reducing the deficit.
4) Enact a comprehensive tax reform plan that closes corporate loopholes and consolidates existing tax breaks in order to give the middle class four types of tax relief: doubling the college tax credit to three thousand dollars, giving workers a universal savings account, providing a simplified child tax credit, and letting middle-class taxpayers take the home mortgage deduction even if they don't itemize their taxes.
5) Enact a lobbying ban of ten years on former Members of Congress and senior government officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign entities in order to reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington.
6) Create an independent ethics committee for Congress, made up of retired members of Congress, retired federal judges, and ordinary citizens in order to curb ethics violations in Congress.
[I modified the verbs from those used in the table by Carville and Greenberg, but I do not think I have changed the meaning at all.]
I like this, but it is all domestic and does not address the doubts that voters have about the Democratic ability to deal with military and security issues. Nor do I have any strong suggestions on this set of issues.
Where now for Republicans
In 2002 the Republicans gained House seats because of 9/11 and the pending invasion of Iraq. In 2004 they gained seats in the House because of DeLay’s redistricting in Texas, while Bush was reelected primarily because of security fears in a number of voters. The Republicans since the 2004 election are now in trouble because of severe overreach in ideologically-motivated domestic policy issues and a series of ethical problems in Congress. There is also the problem that Bush cannot run for reelection and there is no obvious candidate. It is possible that the nomination process will axcerbate the split between fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives in the Republican Party.
he Democrats were weak on security issues in both 2002 and 2004, and that weakness continues. The war in Iraq was, and remains, a severe problem for Democrats. Because of 9/11 domestic issues were not a decisive factor in either 2002 or 2004. That has changed because Bush tried to expand his political clout to phasing out Social Security. Essentially he used his agenda-setting power to create Social Security as an issue for the Democrats. But the Economy is becoming a more obvious problem, and after four years of tax cuts it should be obvious by now to voters that tax cuts will not improve the economy. Uncertain employment and the rapidly increasing cost of college education both are growing problems, as are increasing numbers of people without adequate health insurance. The uncontrolled federal deficit is leading the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates. If they do so soon enough, the Fed may be able to punch the economy up by lowering interest rates in the Spring of 2006, taking this issue away from the Democrats for the time of the election.
The logical direction for then Republicans is to move towards military adventurism. Any terrorist activity in the US between now and November 2006 will be greatly to the advantage of the Republicans and to the detriment of the Democrats as it sits right now. Security issues trump domestic and economic issues for most elections, and will not be devisive within the Republican Party.
Conclusion
We Democrats need to keep the pressure on the ethics failures of the Republicans, demonstrate their domestic policy failures and propose some better policies, move towards fiscal sanity and at the same time we need to build a solid consensus on security and military issues. We also need to head off the Republican tendency towards military adventurism.
I'd really like to see a Proposal for America's Future based on something like these lines. Have the PR guys write it and keep the policy wonks and the lawyers far away from it. It's a PR document, not a policy document.
Then we need to run credible candidates for every state-wide and federal elected office including Judges in the red states.
This next year and a half will be very interesting.
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