Clinton, Obama, and Change

Andrew Kohut writes at Politico:

Here’s the potential problem: Demographics notwithstanding, views of Clinton among Democrats correlate strongly with views of Obama. No fewer than 71 percent of Democrats who hold a highly favorable view of Obama feel the same way about Clinton. And the converse is true: Democrats who are unenthusiastic about the president are also unenthusiastic about Clinton—just 29 percent rate her very favorably.

And Clinton faces another potential challenge: the desire for change that divides the Democratic base between populists and centrists, given that she was married to one centrist Democratic president and worked for another [Obama -- a centrist?] The appeal of populism among Democrats in 2016 cannot be discounted. Sixty percent of Democrats continue to say their finances are not in good shape, even as many of them see the stock market and real estate values having recovered. Little wonder that a September Pew survey found 62 percent of Democrats saying that regulation of financial organizations has not gone far enough, compared with just 32 percent of Republicans who hold that view.

In 2008, Obama was the "change" candidate while Clinton was the "experience" candidate.  In Epic Journey, we explained:

A 2007 survey asked Democrats which was more important to their candidate choice: experience or the ability to bring about change. Only 26 percent chose experience while 73 percent wanted change.47 If Democrats valued freshness over familiarity, Obama was the one.

So in 2008, Obama beat her by being the outsider.  In 2016, Obama could drag her down by reinforcing her image as an insider.

Democrats and Wall Street

Previous posts have discussed insiderism and outsiderism.  At The Daily Beast, Lloyd Green writes:

Just weeks before de Blasio’s New Year’s Day inaugural address, Hillary Clinton pocketed at least $400,000 at two Wall Street events by saying, “Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy—it needs to stop.” In 2008, Wall Street accounted for nearly 20 cents of every dollar raised by Barack Obama. The securities industry was the No. 2 donor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, trailing behind law firms but ahead of lobbyists in donations.

Reid even took in more than $112,000 in contributions from Weitz & Luxenberg, law firm of Sheldon Silver, the ethically challenged speaker of the New York State Assembly and even better, de Blasio’s newest friend.

...

During Clinton’s 2000 run for the U.S. Senate, New York Democrats were all doing their damnedest to stroke the bankers who commuted to Wall Street from New York’s tony suburbs, such as Chappaqua, which Clinton calls home, and which Clinton bought with a handout, er hand, from Terry McAuliffe, crony capitalist par excellence and Virginia’s new governor.

Clinton didn’t comment on the repeal of the .45 percent commuter tax in 1999, as she was mulling her Senate run. And Silver was instrumental in its repeal. The tax repeal costs New York City $500 million annually.

Early in the aughts, Wall Street whistled, and neither Clinton nor de Blasio barked. No, instead they brought Wall Street its slippers, coffee, and newspaper.

Rubio on Poverty

Marco Rubio joins Mike Lee, John Kasich, and other Republicans talking about poverty and inequality. Mike Allen reports at Politico:

Sen. Marco Rubio, who plans to spend much of this year pushing ideas for reducing poverty and improving income mobility in America, is releasing a two-minute video in conjunction with Wednesday’s 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty: “[I]sn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure? Instead of continuing to borrow and spend trillions of dollars on government programs that don’t work, what our nation needs is a real agenda that helps people acquire the skills they need to lift themselves out of poverty and to pursue the American dream. This agenda would create an economy with more good-paying middle class jobs and a government with less debt. It would repeal ObamaCare and it would replace it with more affordable health care options. It would save and strengthen our retirement programs for future generations."

 

Rubio speaks of "an agenda to create a new opportunity society in America."  The phrase "opportunity society," along with the overall tone of the speech, comes straight from Newt Gingrich.  In To Renew America (1996), he wrote:

The greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society. For every day that we allow the current conditions to continue, we are condemning the poor--and particularly poor children--to being deprived of their basic rights as Americans. The welfare state reduces the poor from citizens to clients. It breaks up families, minimizes work incentives, blocks people from saving and acquiring property, and overshadows dreams of a promised future with a present despair born of poverty, violence, and hopelessness.

Third Parties: Lessons from Rusher

Previous posts have discussed barriers to new parties. At Politico, Jonathan Riehl and David Frisk reflect on William Rusher's abortive efforts to found a conservative third party:

By the 1980s, when Reagan was ultimately elected president as a Republican, Rusher had changed his tone years later, calling for a united GOP as the most effective way to advance conservative values. “Above all else in politics,” he told one of us three decades after the third-party flop, “remember that it isn’t enough just to have a set of principles. You have to have people out there representing them, getting elected on the basis of them.”

Tea Party and libertarian insurgents should think hard about that. If conservatism is truly the legacy they want to represent, they can’t just focus on their own frustrations and political reputations, bandying about loose rhetoric claiming their own particular brand of conservatism as the only real one. The GOP might lack an intellectual leader as prominent as Buckley and a preeminent political leader like Reagan, but it’s clear that the current factionalized, twitterized shouting match will get us nowhere.

Take it from Rusher: It is “dangerous,” he wrote a few years ago, for the right to “engage in maneuvers that try to narrow the GOP’s appeal to militant conservatives only.” Buckley and a chastened Rusher would try to shepherd those wayward conservatives back into more orderly discourse—and a single Republican party.

The Unimpressed Uninsured

Gallup reports:

Uninsured Americans who have visited a health insurance exchange website mostly say their experience was negative rather than positive, by 59% to 39%. That reading, from Gallup Daily tracking throughout December, is only a slight improvement from Gallup's combined October and November polling, when 63% reported a negative experience and 33% a positive one.

The latest figures are based on Dec. 1-29 Gallup Daily tracking interviews with more than 1,500 uninsured Americans, including roughly 450 who have visited a health insurance exchange website. Since the exchanges opened on Oct. 1, the federally run websites have been plagued by technical problems, while the state-run exchanges have reportedly performed better. Among uninsured Americans who have visited an exchange, 24% say they went to a federal exchange, 20% to a state exchange, 17% to both, and 37% are unsure.

The Obama administration set a goal of having the major technical problems with the federal exchanges fixed by Nov. 30. Thus, all of the recent interviews followed that date. However, some of the respondents interviewed in December may have visited exchanges prior to Nov. 30. Still, the update suggests the website fixes have not dramatically improved the customer experience for uninsured Americans seeking health insurance to comply with requirements of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare."

Social Conservative Fundraising

At Politico, Kenneth P. Vogel writes of a recent summit of religious conservatives:

The recent backlash against the tea party in Congress and the public could provide an opening for religious conservative leaders. They believe that, with a few tactical adjustments, they can capitalize on donor dissatisfaction with establishment outfits like Rove’s Crossroads and fiscally conservative operations like the one connected to the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers. Between them, the Rove and Koch networks combined to raise an unprecedented $750 million for their 2012 efforts.

Socially conservative groups, meanwhile, mostly missed the boat on the explosion in unlimited outside group spending in the post-Citizens United world.

The roughly 25 socially conservative groups represented at the Ritz — including [Frank] Cannon’s, as well as Gary Bauer’s American Values outfit, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Americans United for Life, the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage — combined to pull in at least $280 million in 2011 and 2012, according to publicly available tax and campaign filings. While that’s hardly chump change, a majority of it went to groups focused on providing services and “issue education” to like-minded conservatives — including Dobson’s group, which raised $166 million — rather than to more overtly political activities.

“There are enough people out there that are pro-life and pro-family that have the resources to fund political efforts on those issues, and for a variety of reasons they just haven’t stepped up and so we have to do a better job of getting them to step up,” said Bauer, who’s been working with Cannon and others to increase coordination among socially conservative groups. Their leaders, according to Bauer, are increasingly concluding “that we’ve been behind the curve and that we need to do a better job of strategic fundraising and working together in order to get more traction on these issues.”

The question is whether they can find many billionaires willing to bankroll an emphasis on issues such as abortion and gay marriage instead of economic concerns.

Economic Data and Outsiderism

At The New York Times, Steven Rattner offers a chart that explains why outsiderism may have appeal in 2016. Improvements in the stock market do help people with defined-contribution pensions, but much of the benefit  goes to affluent people who own stock directly.  Inequality could be an issue.