Recently in National politics Category

We've run across some worthwhile pieces recently. See below for the links:

Everybody wants a more efficient government, it seems, and everybody's got their own public policy version of the killer app to make it happen. Now along comes former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw with what is a pretty radical op-ed piece in The New York Times titled, "Small-Town Big Spending."

The PBS Newshour snagged a very interesting breakdown of presidential approval ratings by various kinds of places where people live. President Obama is most popular in what is labeled the "Industrial Metropolis" and least popular in "Mormon Outposts" and "Evangelical Epicenters." Interestingly, his popularity has risen the most since the election in "Tractor Country" and dropped the most in "Immigrations Nation." Swivel has the entire breakdown right here.

Public Policy Polling points out that if the 2008 voting turnout had matched the expected voter composition of the 2010 elections, John McCain might well have defeated Barack Obama (instead Obama's raw-vote margin of victory was the largest in history by a non-incumbent) -- McCain would've won Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida if those voters saying they plan to vote (or not vote) in 2010 had  comprised the 2008 electorate.

But Democrats are trying to find reasons to muster optimism, as evidenced by this Washington Post op-ed written by the man who in 1994 was among the first Democrats to predict the Republicans would take the house for the first time in 40 years. Brief summation -- at least this time the Democrats see the tsunami coming and still have time to rally the troops and limit damages.

And that rallying of troops, it more and more appears certain, will involve reminding voters how much they did not -- and still do not -- much approve of President George W. Bush's handling of economic matters. This USA Today/Gallup poll shows that 71 percent of Americans believe Bush deserves blame for the bad economy. The bad news for President Obama and the Democrats -- those who believe President Obama deserves blame for the bad economy is at 48 percent, up from 32 percent last year. Predictably, the poll showed a gulf in partisanship. "Republicans by 4-1, 44%-10%, were more likely to give Obama a great deal of the blame than Bush. Democrats by more than 20-1 targeted Bush: They said the former president bore a great deal of the blame; just 3% said that of the current one."

 NASHVILLE - Tennessee Republicans are downright giddy over the prospect of being in charge of legislative and congressional redistricting next year for the first time - apparently few more so than Tim Skow, head of a downtown Nashville GOP luncheon club called First Tuesday.

 

First Tuesday's guest speaker today was Memphis lawyer John Ryder, Tennessee's Republican National Committeeman and chairman of the RNC's redistricting committee. Skow's e-mailed invitation to First Tuesday members for today's meeting gave a glimpse of what Democrats might expect from Republicans in the redistricting process next year if the GOP retains its majorities in the state legislature, as expected.

 

"You want to know what we can do 'legally' to make the DEMS scream as a result of redistricting?" Skow wrote in the e-mail. "For years our cry has been 'Win the Pen in 2010' - then we can redraw  the line for Congress, the State House, and State Senate WITHOUT any input from the dreaded DEMs! - Well, John Ryder is our party's legal expert on this critical issue - and it will be John who leads our fight in court if (or WHEN) the DEMs sue because they don't like the way WE draw the lines. (don't know about you but I can't wait to hear the whining coming from the DEMS when the new lines become public should we 'Win the Pen in 2010' and redraw the lines!)" (sic)

 

We should note here that these are Skow's words, not Ryder's. 

 

That kind of buildup naturally drew the attention of the press. But when five reporters -- including me -- arrived to chronicle the revelation of the grand strategy, Skow barred entrance, declaring it a closed event. The club is private and, of course, has every right to close its meetings. First Tuesday's monthly meetings attract a mixture of grassroots Republican activists and Capitol Hill officials. For example, Nashville lawyer Linda Knight, a member of the state's Ethics Commission, attends frequently.

 

Before Skow was elected its chairman, the group's meetings were routinely open to reporters who occasionally dropped by to hear what officials, candidates and insiders had to say.

 

Skow alternates where he places the blame for the current sometimes-open, sometimes-closed policy. Occasionally, he says the law firm that hosts the meeting in its expansive conference room, Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, must clear the presence of reporters lest they spy some client  who prefers privacy. Other times, he's said that particular month's speaker doesn't want the coverage. And other times, he's just simply noted First Tuesday's status as a private club that can admit whomever it wishes. Sometimes, reporters are allowed in.

 

Today though, Skow declared: "It's a members meeting....  If a candidate wanted you here, we'd be glad to do it. All the people who are attending the meeting were well aware that it's a Republican Party meeting, okay? A dues-paying members meeting, okay?"

 

Skow later said reporters need only let him know in advance so he can clear their presence with Waller Lansden.

UPDATE: Ryder -- a cross between an expert attorney and a college political science professor -- walked across the street to the Legislative Plaza pressroom to give the ink-stained wretches there our own briefing on the status of the reapportionment process. (A report on that appears separately in our print and online editions.) 

Ryder said he did not ask Skow to keep the press out and said he basically told the First Tuesday members the same thing he told us -- that the redistricting will have to be "fair and legal" in order to pass constitutional muster and the courts. Because Tennessee has "tilted Republican" -- as evidenced, he said, by the general trend of statewide elections in recent years -- a majority of legislative districts will reflect that.

The filibustering on the filibuster brought the reminder of a maneuver attributed to former Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver back when senators really did have to go to great lengths to extend debate to obstruct, delay or otherwise kill legislation that otherwise had 50-plus votes. A Wall Street Journal article earlier this year on the filibuster mentioned how former South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond once dehydrated himself prior to taking the floor, so that he would not need to leave to use the facilities.

According to the article:

To avoid the same problem, Sen. Estes Kefauver (D., Tenn.) once rigged up a bag so he wouldn't have to leave the Senate floor.

One quarrel with that article, however -- the author unfairly lumped Kefauver and Thurmond together as southern senators who used the filibuster to stop civil rights legislation from going to a vote (the legislation had majority support but could not get past the filibuster). Kefauver and fellow Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Sr. were among those rare southern senators most often opposed to filibustering civil-rights legislation; both deserve credit for taking courageous political stands, along with President Lyndon Johnson (a former southern senator himself), in favor of civil rights legislation.

This archived piece from TIME spells it out:

The entertainment was a filibuster, staged not by Deep Southerners−the most frequent filibusterers of recent years−but by liberal Democrats, notably Oregon's Wayne Morse and Maurine Neuberger, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, Texas' Ralph Yarborough. Some of them, over the years, had conspicuously denounced Southern filibusters against civil rights measures. Ex-Republican Morse (he quit the G.O.P. in the midst of the 1952 campaign) once called filibustering a "disgraceful and contemptible procedure," and has been one of the Senate's most vociferous advocates of rule changes to shut off filibusters, even though in 1953 he set a senatorial wind record with a speech lasting 22 hours and 26 minutes.

One of the interesting things about the current debate over whether the filibuster is unconstitutional, necessary to prevent majority overreach or whatever your viewpoint, is that views can flip depending on which party controls the Senate. In 2005, it was Democrats who extolled the virtues of the filibuster, because they were using it to block some of President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. Back then, there were calls by Republicans to trigger what some called the "nuclear option," which would have meant eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominees and likely would have led to the elimination of it altogether.

In 2005, at least a few liberal bloggers (here and here) were advocating that Democrats allow the filibuster to meet its demise, on the theory that political movements run in cycles and Democrats would have the majority at some point. And in 2005, many conservatives were saying use of the filibuster at that time by Democrats was wrong, unconstitutional, obstructionist, etc.

See excerpts below from the liberal bloggers in 2005 begging the then-minority Democrats to cut a deal with Republicans to break the filibuster:

Matthew Yglesias:

As conservative activist Jim Boulet Jr. has wisely argued in a memo to his comrades, the filibuster is crucial to conservatism. By his account, without it, majorities would exist to raise the minimum wage; reform labor law to make new union organizing easier; ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment; reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; and close the "gun-show loophole." . . . In the past, of course, the filibuster is most famous for its role in delaying the dawn of civil rights. Less well known is that it was integral to the defeat of Bill Clinton's health care plan in 1993. If liberals ever get another chance to go for comprehensible health-care reform, the filibuster will once again rear its ugly head.

Nathan Newman

So the filibuster allows conservatives to block any decent policy proposed by progressive leaders, then when those conservatives are in office, they pass watered down versions of policies they know are inevitable, then take political credit for them. This is the broader political problem of the filibuster, which is that it creates continually divided and thus unaccountable government. And unaccountable government is used by conservatives to block policy under Democratic-dominated governments, grab credit for (halfway) measures when they are in office, then play faux populist games to run against a government conservatives may ultimately control.

And then there was this in 2005 from the conservative Weekly Standard:

Suddenly Democrats are wrapping themselves in the Constitution. Emphasizing his commitment to maintaining the filibuster as a way to stop President Bush's judicial nominees, Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin said last week, "We believe it's a constitutional issue. . . . It's a matter of having faith in the Constitution." The trouble is, the filibuster is nowhere mentioned, or even implied, in the text of the Constitution.

There is no Senate campaign in Tennessee this year, which is sort of a shame, given the implications in Senate races for President Obama and also because there has been a recent spate of articles on the transformation of the Senate from one of the world's great "deliberative" institutions to one of the world's great "dysfunctional" political chambers.

An op-ed this week in The New York Times calls for various things, including going back to the future with filibuster rules that require the minority party to actually, you know, filibuster by reading from the phone book and bringing out the cots keeping those marginally in favor of obstruction motivated to continue. The column, by Norman Ornstein, does a nice job of explaining the filibuster and calls for modest reforms:

True, the filibuster has its benefits: it gives the minority party the power to block hasty legislation and force a debate on what it considers matters of national significance. So how can the Senate reform the filibuster to preserve its usefulness but prevent its abuse?

For starters, the Senate could replace the majority's responsibility to end debate with the minority's responsibility to keep it going. It would work like this: for the first four weeks of debate, the Senate would operate under the old rules, in which the majority has to find enough senators to vote for cloture. Once that time has elapsed, the debate would automatically end unless the minority could assemble 40 senators to continue it.

The New Yorker published a long narrative piece on the Senate which featured many passages focused on Tennessee's two senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander. Here's one excerpt on Corker and the role he tried to play in fostering bi-partisan teamwork on a financial reform bill:

Finally, on February 10th, Dodd called Corker, who, though he was one of the committee's junior members, agreed to be the chairman's Republican negotiating partner. When Corker informed McConnell and Shelby, they expressed surprise. "It was an odd place to be," Corker recalled. "And yet that night we began meeting." The junior Republican savored the rare experience of creating, rather than opposing, legislation. In response, Shelby's conservative staff tried to undermine Corker, spreading rumors among Republicans and their lobbyists that he was giving too much away.

Alexander was featured as a kind of "institutionalist" who decried the polarization of the Senate but came out against changing rules to make it harder for the minority party to obstruct.

"They'll get over it," Alexander said of the Democrats' enthusiasm for rules reform. "And they'll get over it quicker if they're in the minority next January. Because they'll instantly see the value of slowing the Senate down to consider whatever they have to say." He added that the Senate "may be getting done about as much as the American people want done." The President's ambitious agenda, after all, has upset a lot of voters, across the political spectrum. None of the Republicans I spoke to agreed with the contention that the Senate is "broken." Alexander claimed that he and other Republicans were exercising the moderating, thoughtful influence on legislation that the founders wanted in the Senate. "The Senate wasn't created to be efficient," he argued. "It was created to be inefficient."

WASHINGTON - Harold Ford Jr., who considered a run for the U.S. Senate from New York earlier this year, is still registered to vote in Shelby County, elections commission administrator Richard L. Holden confirmed this morning.

Unless and until New York state voting authorities, or the voter himself, inform Shelby County that he is registered elsewhere, the local registration is appropriate, Holden explained.

Ford, a vice chairman at Merrill Lynch and a regular television commentator, added best-selling author to his list of credentials when his More Davids Than Goliaths reached the No. 4 spot on The Washington Post's best-seller list last week.

Holden Ford Jr. last voted in Shelby County in the November 2008 presidential race. His father, Harold Ford Sr., is also a registered voted in Shelby County, although he lives in Florida, and last voted in Tennessee in 2007.

This DNC project, called the "Accountability Project,"  could be interesting. Essentially, Democrats have created a program that encourages its partisans to attend Republican events and get audio and/or video that they then upload to a central website. Will the Republicans create a similar program? I would be interested to hear if any Democrats in the area a) have heard about this b) plan to participate and/or c) really believe a local Republican would be unwise enough to say something to an audience that might embarrass the party.

Whichever way you lean, of course, it takes a special kind of temperament to attend events where the opposing party is confidently proclaiming how awesome is its political philosophy (and how abhorrent is your side's political philosophy). In launching the project, Democrats are citing the infamous 2006 moment when Virginia senatorial candidate George Allen used a slur aimed at the Democratic partisan actually holding the video camera hoping for such an incident. It's easy to forget now, but when Allen was in Memphis earlier that year for the 2006 Southern Republican Leadership Conference, he was considered a serious contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. That video and his subsequent upset loss to Jim Webb set back his national ambitions considerably.

After you finish watching Argentina-Mexico in Sunday afternoon's World Cup quarterfinal, head on over to the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library to get a dose of public policy. The Public Issues Forum is hosting a forum 3 p.m. Sunday on campaign finance titled, "THE INFLUENCE OF MONEY ON OUR DEMOCRACY -- Facts and Implications of the recent Supreme Court Decision allowing unlimited Corporate Contributions to Campaign Finance."

Dr. Heather Larsen-Price, an assistant professor in the University of Memphis's political science department, will be one of the panelists, along with U of M law professor Steve Mulroy, a county commissioner with expertise in election law.

According to a press release, "The Public Issues Forum is a Memphis voluntary association, which sponsors programs to inform and educate the public on current issues and seeks to reinforce the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States."

We'll be going over to Herenton Campaign HQ for the 11 a.m. "free-for-all" as the campaign is advertising the press conference. Though the campaign would never admit it, that is exactly the sort of attention-seeking event you are much more likely to see from a candidate trying to play catch up. Candidates who believe they are ahead or who feel they have momentum rarely take such risks. Willie Herenton, of course, has never been accused of going by any conventional political script. So it should be fun; whether it turns out to be insightful remains to be seen.

If Herenton is indeed far behind incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen in the 9th Congressional District Democratic primary -- as one recent poll strongly indicated (though with a high margin-of-error) -- it will be yet another piece of evidence that black voters are NOT as influenced by race as some want to believe. As many political scientists and black political experts so often point out, white politicians have received much more support from black voters over the years than black politicians have from white voters (that's true even if you start the timeline in, say, 1980 or 1990).

The argument can be made, more and more, that black voters care deeply about substance -- public policy matters. I was away with my family last week in Alabama when U.S. Rep. Artur Davis -- a young black Harvard-trained lawyer -- was "stunned" in the Democratic gubernatorial primary by Ron Sparks, the state's 56-year-old white Agricultural Commissioner. Davis got only 38 percent of the vote, and analysis of election results show that he lost in large part because black voters in his base of Birmingham and his congressional district abandoned him. Here is Chuck Dean of The Birmingham News:

In predominantly black counties such as Wilcox and Perry, Sparks got 70-plus percent of the vote. In Greene, Marengo, Lowndes and Hale counties, Sparks picked up 60-plus percent of the vote. In Pickens, Dallas and Macon counties, Sparks got 50-plus percent of the vote. Davis lost his home county, Jefferson, where Sparks racked up 58 percent of the vote. Davis won only a single majority black polling place in all of Jefferson County. He even lost his own polling place -- Southtown Housing Community Center -- by a handful of votes to Sparks.

And why did Davis lose? Many who follow politics closely in Alabama say that those black voters punished Davis for voting against policies they supported, most notably the way in which he opposed national health-insurance reform. He was the only African-American congressman to oppose health-care reform, and it was one of many stances he took that positioned him as a moderate. But that move away from the left cost him in the primary. This is what Birmingham-Southern College political science professor Natalie Davis told the News:

"It's stunning. It's absolutely amazing. You can't thumb your nose at your base, and that is what Artur did when he voted no on health care. Still, when you look at how Davis lost a race that was so much his to win, it's just staggering."

Spotted this morning on Walnut Grove -- the first pure "PALIN" bumper sticker I've seen in Memphis. During and after the 2008 presidential election, there were several cars spotted with "PALIN" stickers, but upon closer inspection these were examples of people cutting off the "McCAIN" portion. The one you see here is exclusively Palin -- and note the American flag decal on the, um, Acura. Are those built in the U.S. now?


Anybody else out there seen "PALIN" stickers? And the question at this point, I think, is what statement is being made? It seems apparent that if the Republican presidential primary were held this November, Palin would be hard to beat, but perhaps these stickers are expressions of a certain worldview more than an endorsement of the half-term former Alaska governor as candidate?