OFA, Campaigning, and Governing

A Washington Post article quotes a perceptive comment by my student Abe Shimm about the difference betweeen campaigning and governing.

[E-mail] now comes from Organizing for America, the campaign's online network, renamed, that helped deliver Obama to victory and was supposed to smoothly pivot toward pushing his agenda through Congress. It hasn't worked out that way. Election Day was black-and-white; it declared a winner. Inauguration Day was the beginning of gray; it brought the grind of governance, with its weird parliamentary maneuvers and bizarre negotiations.

The members of "the movement," in their loose confederation online, are still paying attention, says Abe Shimm, 22, a Claremont-McKenna College senior who took two summers and a semester off to organize for Obama in Iowa and Indiana. "When there is an actual campaign presence, to be told by an organizer, 'If you knock on these doors, you'll get these votes' offers you a tangible result. . . . It's far more difficult to express what a phone call is going to accomplish" if made to a member of Congress wobbly on the health-care overhaul plan.

Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 35

From Katie Couric's interview:

KATIE COURIC: A lot of people, including Democrats, wrote to me saying, "You campaigned on a slogan of change you can believe in. But their lives and the ways of Washington," they wrote, "haven't changed at all. What would you say to them?"

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it's not true that they haven't changed at all. Let's just take, we're sitting in the White House here. Every single person who comes into the White House now is posted on a website, so you know every visitor to the White House. That's never happened in the history of the Republic. We are eliminating lobbyists from boards and commissions that have significant power throughout Washington. That hasn't happened in a previous Administration.

There's more transparency on something like the Recovery Act and how taxpayer dollars are being spent than there's ever been on a project of this size and scale. So, here in the White House, actually, we have instituted a whole range of changes that give people a lot more confidence in what we're doing. We haven't done as much as needs to be done. So, for example, on earmarks -- what people consider to be pork projects.

What we've said is, "Member of Congress, if you're gonna introduce a project that benefits your district, you should post it on the internet so people can see it, before you vote on it. And we'll put it on a centralized website." But all these things take time. I mean, you know, you're not gonna transform a culture in Washington or anywhere else over the course of a year. You just gotta keep on chipping away at it, and that's what we've tried to do

No transcript of the interview is available on the White House website.

Palin in Nashville

An earlier post here quoted David Plouffe's observation that YouTube and other new media have changed message production and consumption. The latest example is SarahPalin at the Tea Party (below). Ann Althouse has a savvy blog post about the earlier perception that Palin's resignation had turned her into political toast:

I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It's innovative the way she's staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she's working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That's so not toast.

As for the tea party movement, more thoughts here:


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Obama Approval in the States

The 2008 election continues to provide a useful baseline for understanding the political map. Gallup reports:

How the residents of each state view Obama continues to be strongly related to 2008 voting patterns. Approval toward him was particularly high in the states that gave him the most support in the 2008 election -- led by Hawaii and Washington, D.C. His lowest support as president came from states that voted strongly for John McCain -- particularly Wyoming and a number of other Western as well as Southern states.

But Obama approval does not translate into electoral success. The home state of Senator Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) ranked sixth (with DC counting as number one).

West Virginia is the only state where Obama approval lags behind Democratic identification. The state thus continues its journey into the solid-R column in presidential politics. Before 2000, it was solid-D, going Republican only in landslide years. In that year, Karl Rove saw that cultural and environmental issues were pushing it away from the Democrats, so he poured resources into what seemed a quixotic effort to win its electoral votes. Had he not done so, Gore would have won.

Demographics, Economics, and House Elections

There is an important new National Journal article on the demographics of the 2008 vote for the House. See excerpt below. For full text, click here.

Generally, the greater the district's nonwhite population and the higher the education level of its white residents, the more likely it is to be represented in the House by a Democrat. In contrast, the analysis found, the whiter the district and the lower its number of white college graduates, the more likely it is to elect a Republican...

In the struggle for House control, the two parties thus face tests with contrasting timeframes. As racial minorities and better-educated whites, or both, become a larger share of the population in more districts, the long-run challenge for Republicans is to compete across a demographically broader range of districts than they do now. Democrats face a more immediate trial: Avoiding a repeat of the huge wave, particularly among working-class whites, that carried Republicans to control of the House in 1994. The increase in the number of high-minority and well-educated districts provides House Democrats defenses that they lacked back then. But if the tide of white working-class discontent reaches high enough or spills over to include enough upscale white voters, even those levees may not protect the House majority that Democrats labored so long to recapture.

Why have Democrats not made greater inroads among working-class whites? Why have these voters responding to Scott Brown populism? Michael Barone suggests an answer:

One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no. Moreover, like Andrew Jackson, most Americans suspect that some of the income that is redistributed will end up in the hands not of the worthy but of the well-connected.

The GOP Civil War That Isn't

When the Republicans nominated John McCain over more conservative candidates, some pundits saw a mere fluke. The GOP, they opined, was destined for a civil war in which conservatives would wipe out moderates. But in The Politico, Jonathan Martin reports that these forecasts are proving wrong:

GOP leaders easily swatted down a proposed “purity test” for candidates at last week’s Republican National Committee meeting — an indication that party officials are no more willing to turn over the keys to right-wing activists now than they were during the Bush years.

In Illinois, Rep. Mark Kirk is hardly a conservative heartthrob — and some activists are openly contemptuous of what they perceive as his moderation — but he easily won the Republican Senate primary there Tuesday night, against a more conservative, underfunded opponent, in part because he is seen as having the best chance to capture President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat.

Recent elections also suggest a second trend: It may not be all that hard in a favorable political environment for skilled Republicans to bridge or blur the ideological divide between the conservative activists who dominate the party and the more moderate swing voters whom candidates need to win office.

Scott Brown has become the toast of Republicans nationally by winning Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts even though he supports abortion rights. Conversely, Republican Bob McDonnell defied predictions that he was too far to the right to attract moderate voters to win a landslide in the Virginia governor’s race.

And there is more. Here in California, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for the Senate is Tom Campbell, who is pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage. Rival Carly Fiorina has tried to run to Campbell's right, but conservatives have reacted to her latest web ad with derisive laughter instead of support:

What Happens in Vegas

Hotline reports:

In remarks yesterday at a town hall meeting in NH, Obama touted fiscal responsibility, pleding to rein in government spending. "You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don't blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you're trying to save for college," Obama said.

Under pressure from Harry Reid, the president took it back:

"I hope you know that during my Town Hall today, I wasn't saying anything negative about Las Vegas. I was making the simple point that families use vacation dollars, not college tuition money, to have fun," Obama wrote. "There is no place better to have fun than Vegas, one of our country's great destinations. I have always enjoyed my visits, look forward to visiting in a few weeks, and hope folks will visit in record numbers this year."

Obama had made similar comment about Las Vegas a year ago. This time, Mayor Oscar Goodman was not in a forgiving mood:

He has a real psychological hangup about the entertainment capital of the world. An apology won't be acceptable this time, I don't know where his vendetta comes from but we're not going to let him make his bones by lambasting Las Vegas, that's why (the press) is here today.

He didn't learn his lesson the first time, but when he hurt our economy by his ill conceived rhetoric, we didn't think it would happen again, but now that it has I want to assure you, when he comes I'll do everything I can to give him the boot back to Washington and to visit his failures back there.

I gotta tell you this, everybody says I shouldn't say it, but I gotta tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner.

The gaffe is not helpful to Obama's hopes of winning the state in 2012. Obama carried Nevada in 2008 -- but only because of Clark County, home of Las Vegas. Outside of Clark County, McCain carried the state by 2,778 votes.