josephcollins's blog

Local or national in PA-12?

Unfortunately, the debate around PA-12 seems to center around the failure of “nationalizing” the election.  This failure occurred in part because Mark Critz was able to portray himself as a moderate on issues like guns, life, and health care, and in part because Critz was able to convince voters that he would model his economic plan after the late John Murtha’s porky earmarks.  

In light of the seeming failure of a 1994-esque nationalization strategy, the advice from some corners seems to be to focus on local issues.  This addresses the problem too narrowly.  The problem is that this is a federal office, and for the most part the only “local” issues revolve around earmark spending for “jobs”.  A Republican candidate can not run in a district like PA-12 without selling the message that Congress is hurting job creation, and by challenging the premise that pork spending leads to sustainable jobs.  

As if it needed reiteration, the issue is jobs.  Given the failure of the Obama economic message in key districts, and voter focus on national issues, the question is less about whether to nationalize districts like PA-12, but how.   Why does it matter that Mark Critz won’t vote to repeal Obamacare?  Because it hurts job creation.  Why does it matter that Nancy Pelosi controls the legislative agenda?  Because everything she passes is detrimental to jobs.  Why are earmarks bad?  Because $2 million per earmark-job is too much money and hurts private sector job creation.

This is in contrast to the bad sort of nationalization.  Bad nationalization leads to fighting for the soul of the Republican party in a swing district general election.  Bad nationalization is running as a Tea Partier with a flawed Tea Party message rather than adapting the Tea Party issues to a broader language and focus.

For years, underdog candidates campaigned against John Murtha on ethical issues, his closeness to unpopular national Democratic figures like Pelosi, and idiotic remarks Murtha made about the US Marines involved in the Haditha incident.  None of it ever worked.  Murtha had Federal money for “jobs”.  Murtha even called his constituents a bunch of rednecks to no ill effect.  (How’s that for a local issue?)

Why should these tactics start working all of a sudden, now that Murtha has shuffled off this mortal coil.  Even the flawed PPP poll taken shortly before the special election showed that the Pelosi negatives were not rubbing off on Critz.  

I’ve heard political consultants say “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”.  Well, we’re not doing any explaining, and we’re losing, so best we figure out how to explain things in simple language and well chosen narratives.

The Republican messages and policies on jobs are national.  There’s no escaping this essential fact.  They need to be translated into local language.  Doing so requires challenging the premise that pork spending is a long term winner, and if there’s any cycle in which to promote that message, it’s this one.

(Cross-posted to my personal blog.)

Who was in charge of messaging against Obamacare?

More than just mere fodder for political horse-race commentary, polls show us where our blind spots and biases are. A recently released Winston Group survey reveals important areas where opponents of Obamacare dropped the ball. Now, we're used to hearing from conservatives that the opposition did its job, and that voters disapprove of Obamacare. And that's basically true. How could we have stopped the Democrats from defying the will of the electorate? By making Obamacare a 70-30 issue rather than a 55-45 issue, or even a 60-40 issue, that's how.

The Winston survey pits the Tea Party perspective against the perspective of the electorate at large, and some fairly big differences stand out. Despite confirmations of their demographic normalcy, bottom line is that the Tea Partiers aren't on the same wavelength as everybody else, and I think that hinders their persuasive abilities. Anti-Obamacare messages were insufficiently effective or non-existent when it came to specific measures in the plan that mattered most to average voters, and Tea Partiers spend a lot of time stressing issues of diminished importance to average voters. Opponents were banging their heads against the walls talking about deficits and tax hikes, when average voters were much more concerned with pre-existing conditions and quality of care.

Let's get to some figures.

Here are some draft scripts for a two-part series advert I think would work.  We’re following our middle-tier cube dweller, Mike.  Mike and his team represent office-working middle America, who are being told by the Democrats that they’ll “be allowed to keep their private insurance”.

#1 - "The Meeting"

[Cube-farm setting] 

SECRETARY - [leans over Mike’s cubical] - They want you in Meeting Room B to discuss the Johnson account. 

[Mike nervously opens door on meeting in progress.  Executives line a conference table.  Big-shot executive with salt & pepper hair and power suit is giving a PowerPoint presentation.]

BIG-SHOT - Mike! Thanks for coming in.  Have a seat I’m just finishing up something. [Continues presenting] So to summarize, when the government health insurance plan goes through, we’ll be able to pawn off the lower level employees to the government plan and save big-time on the bottom line. 

MIKE - [Interrupting as executives nod gently and agree.] Excuse me, ... uh, my team will still be on the private plan, right? 

BIG-SHOT - [Brief pause] Yeah, sure, Mike!  You guys have nothing to worry about. 

[Executives glance at each other cautiously.] 

MIKE - [Forced smile] Great. [Look of concern] 

--[Cut to voice over]

#2 - "Break Room" 

[Mike walks into the break room, complete with table, water cooler, coffee maker, etc.  A woman is seated, reading a newspaper.  A man is eating a doughnut.  Another man is pouring himself a cup of coffee.] 

COFFEE GUY - Hey, Mike! How did the meeting with the big-shots go?  

MIKE - Uh, fine.  Hey - what do you guys think about the government health insurance plan they’re taking about ?  

DOUGHNUT GUY - Well, they say we’ll be able to keep our existing health insurance, so I guess I’m fine with it. 

MIKE - Yeah, but you don’t think the company would drop our coverage and make us go on the government plan, do you? 

WOMAN - [Looking over newspaper, sarcastically] To save a buck?  So they can take their executive retreat in Tahiti next year?  Nah.

--[Cut to voice over] 

One Democratic talking point about offshore oil is that it won't be brought to market for many years even if we start now. Eric Bolling, a trader writing for thestreet.com, gives us this interesting bit of information (emphasis added):
 

A Congressman followed my segment and suggested that drilling wouldn't help for 10 years or more. I know this is absolutely untrue, so I called Transocean, the biggest driller in the world. An officer of the company told me that depending on the location of the drilling, oil could be realized in as little as a year.

Ultra-deepwater fields might produce in 3-5 years. For the most remote locations, without any prior infrastructure support, that barrel may require a 4-6 year window. I suggested 8 years and he said that he could not envision a situation where it would require more than 6 years to bring a barrel out of the ocean floor.

This is a complete deal-breaker for one of the Democrats' favorite talking points.

This is huge.

Democrats are almost uniformly lockstep in their opposition to increased domestic oil and gas production. "We can’t drill our way out of this," they say. "Those projects won’t bring any oil to the market for years," they say. But if all the complaints about rampant speculation are true, then approving increased production will help prices now even if the oil takes years to come to market.

How? The price of oil now has increased in response not only to current supply and demand, but to the idea of peak oil theory - that we are nearing the maximum amount of daily oil production. Prices are responding to the idea that there isn’t much, if any, incremental supply to add to the market, and that oil will get increasingly scarce starting right now.

A recent column by Kevin Hassett on Bloomberg described how Milton Friedman saw speculation as a good thing. Price speculators are smoothing the price curve and giving the market a signal about future supply. Consumers should conserve and producers should increase supply. Hassett writes, "Friedman's logic is irrefutable. If speculators are, as is popularly believed, brilliant tacticians who are making a killing, then their activities are stabilizing. Speculation is good."

If Congress approves increased domestic production, then the fears about peak oil will be delayed as the expectation of future supply works its way into the futures markets, and the parabolic price moves in energy will retreat.  It isn't a permanent solution, but it does help right now.

Dr. K. has pointed out what a lot of Republicans believe, that we are winning in Iraq and that Republicans can benefit from this progress.

The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Democrats won an exhilarating electoral victory in 2006 pledging withdrawal at a time when conditions in Iraq were dire and we were indeed losing the war. Two years later, when everything is changed, they continue to reflexively repeat their “narrative of defeat and retreat” (as Joe Lieberman so memorably called it) as if nothing has changed.

It is a position so utterly untenable that John McCain must seize the opportunity and, contrary to conventional wisdom, make the Iraq War the central winning plank of his campaign.

He goes on to implore action from McCain:

Give the speech, senator. Give it now.

First, this issue has the potential to let the proverbial air out of the tires in Obama's campaign.  The vehemently anti-war crowd put Obama on the map and comprise the original cornerstone of his base. 

Second, as much as I would love McCain to give Krauthammer's speech, we have seen signs that we can not trust the McCain campaign to actually implement a solid mesage.  Telling the story of success in Iraq is now a must-do action item for 527s, YouTube video-meisters, and independent activists.

Many of the problems facing America are complicated.  We want oil and gasoline to cost less, but we also want to “get off oil”.  We want food prices to come down, but we also want to preserve family farms without handing out truckloads corporate welfare to agribusiness.  We would like to see Iraq stabilize, but we want to bring our troops out of harm’s way.  We want to secure our border without sending a message that America is not welcoming of immigrants.

If we adopt a “walk and chew gum at the same time” campaign, we can offer paired policy choices that address these issues on the short term and the long term.  The “walk and chew gum” message also carries the connotation that a McCain administration would be more competent that the Bush administration without explicitly bringing it up.

Lower Energy Costs while Planing for the Future
Conservatives want to increase domestic production of oil and natural gas to bring down the costs of these fuels.  This, however, does not address the fundamental problem of our dependence on oil, particularly since so much of the world’s oil production comes from unsavory regimes.  Fuel prices will stabilize in the short to medium term, but this will only delay the consequences of “peak oil” theory.

McCain can link increased domestic production to the elimination of subsidies for oil companies and dramatic government investments in setting the stage for alternatives, notably electric capacity and cellulosic ethanol.   We must build nuclear infrastructure including the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in order to minimize waste, we must vastly expand our research into nuclear fission technology, and we must increase research into cellulosic ethanol technology that will ease the tension between biofuels and food costs.  Funding research may not be the preferred policy of some economic conservatives, but funding research can potentially change the fundamental structure of energy markets, whereas our current tax-and-subsidize policies only mask underlying problems and create inefficiencies.

Lower Food Costs while Helping Small Farmers
Ethanol mandates must be phased out.  Any subsidies we decide to keep must be capped such that family farms qualify but large corporate producers do not benefit beyond the cap.  Tariffs on sugar and ethanol imports must be eliminated.

Win in Iraq while Bringing the Troops Home
This is the classic “return on victory” plan.  With any luck, this will be an easier sell going into the fall if Gen. Petraeus recommends further troop reductions.

Secure the Border while Normalizing Illegal Immigrants
The GOP faces a serious problem with illegal immigration.  If we reject anything that might be construed as “amnesty” and focus on completing the border fence not only will we fail to enact those policies but we will be irritating an enormous voting block.  “Comprehensive immigration reform” has been a poorly disguised push for a Reagan style amnesty.  Control the border, fund additional English language classes to aid assimilation, and create some way to normalize those already in the country.  It’s not ideal, but it may be the best we can do.  “Comprehensive” must mean actually being serious about being comprehensive.

The one-two-punch approach strikes a balance between having a concise and complex message.  Selling it as being able to walk and chew gum at the same time shows confidence in the competence of a McCain administration.  Having two messages in one policy proposal may also allow targeted language to appeal to more than one demographic group at the same time.  This approach should be replicated for healthcare, job creation, and other issues that arise as the campaign progresses.

It has been pointed out that left wing blogs are more action oriented than right wing blogs, which are largely editorial.  Many comments on this site seem to be groping at some sort of solution to this discrepancy.  It should be unsurprising that many of these comments are themselves ironically editorial in nature, urging any number of solutions to the GOP’s woes.

Of course there’s a place for editorializing, and I do my fair share too.  I’ll try not to editorialize here, but rather ask some questions I think need answering with the hope that somebody out there has better answers than I do.  Please feel free to chime in with either solutions or more problems in need of solutions.

The right lacks a decision making mechanism to focus our collective idle brainpower on specific campaigns or issues unless we’re smacked over the head with something like Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  How does any community of “online activists” decide what issues to focus on, what (down ticket) races to follow, what represents the acceptable/orthodox, and what is unacceptable/unorthodox?  (I’ve seen much more diversity of thought on this site than I had anticipated, so this is no small task.)

I’ve seen more than one suggestion of a new Contract With America, each accompanied by a unique set of more or less specific policies.  What is the mechanism for whittling those policies down to a “sellable” slate of ideas that candidates might latch on to?  Simple online polls are not scientific, particularly without identification or exclusion mechanisms.  (Otherwise Ron Paul would be the Republican nominee.)

The congressional race in my own district is likely to be unexciting.  But other races in Pennsylvania (in my case) are interesting.  A focused outside effort could perhaps swing a given race, but a diffuse effort is unlikely to move the needle.  I’m at least an hour’s drive from a population center in any given adjacent district, so I’m reluctant to dive head first into a race with which I have no natural connection.  What infrastructure exists (or could exist) to help an online community “adopt” a particular race?  How do we deal with the existing campaign infrastructure?  Campaign managers are not the type of folks to hand over a big chunk of their organization to a bunch of cyberpunks.

Do we face a problem of too wide a geographic disbursement?  Democratic areas tend to have high population density while Conservative areas tend to have lower population density.  Does this prevent us from utilizing Meet-up style technologies as effectively as Democrats?  How much does this inhibit spontaneous real-world participation?

How does a community promote follow-up on good ideas?  I’ve seen a few good ideas floated here, but so far it seems like most of the online right is a suggestion box waiting impatiently for the powers-that-be to spontaneously get with the program.

This is a bit out of step with the rest of this post, but I’ll throw in a suggestion for this site that’s been used on other sites like Slashdot.  A moderator should arrange for an interview with some well-known or important individual, and the community can suggest (and debate) questions to be asked of the interviewee.  It won’t work quite as well without a social moderation system to weed out the stinker questions, but I think you guys are bright enough to pick out about ten good questions for such an exercise.

So in summation, I’ve suggested a few problems to get us started... sadly no solutions.  What are some other problems we face to which technology might be a solution, and what might those solutions look like?

I'm not a Grover Norquist clone, though I do agree with the vast majority of what he says, and even on what I disagree with he makes interesting points.  He's been doing events promoting his book "Leave Us Alone", in which he divides the political world into two main coalitions, the "takings" coaltion and, of course, the "leave us alone" coalition.

I'd highly recommend watching this video of Norquist in semi-hostile territory at the New America Foundation if you haven't seen him speak recently.  (The video clocks in at an hour and ten minutes, with four minutes of introduction, and the main spiel ending around the 30 min mark, followed by an interesting Q&A.)

"Leave us Alone" is, unfortunately, not a catchy slogan.  What caught my attention was the discussion of what ultimately motivates the leave-us-aloners is a direct threat to their particular voting issue.  Right off the top, Mr. Norquist asserts that it wasn't school prayer or Roe-v-Wade that catalyzed the religious right, but the idea that the Carter administration might take away the tax status of Christians schools and sic the FCC on Christian radio stations under the fairness doctrine.

Obama's "bitter" comments strike this same social nerve.  Of course people felt that their identities had been besmirched, but implicit in Obama's remarks was an actual threat to the religious and the gun owners.  They want those issues left alone.

Duplicating this outrage is the challenge.  We need to find "voting issues" on which activists and voters alike are righteously outraged.

Norquist cites the anti-earmark good-government movement as a potential voting issue.  I'm undecided as to whether this can be a voting issue, but at least McCain has the upper hand over Obama on that, particularly if Maverick will allow us to talk about the money Obama got for Father Pfleger's programs or for the hospital that happened to be his wife's employer.

Norquist also suggested that since the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends apparently caused the value of the stock market to increase, that Obama's proposed tax hikes could take a $5.5 trillion chunk out of people's 401k's and stock portfolios.  I think Norquist is wrong to imply a perfect correlation between the tax cuts and subsequent equity performance, but the basic idea is right - increasing these taxes will put a major hurting on (baby boomer) retirement accounts.

He is somewhat dismissive of the so-called 80/20 issue slates proposed by Newt Gingrich and others because they aren't framed as "voting issues", though he allows that some of them might be altered to fit such a mold.

So there's some food for thought.  Not too far off the beaten path, conveying a sense that coalitional calculus must still be performed, but steering us in the direction of finding the visceral connection with those areas where people's voting issues may be endangered.

In the debate about whether Republican candidates need to distance themselves from George W. Bush in order to get elected, often overlooked is what exactly the popular media means by this distancing.

McCain and others can certainly point to a number of issues on which they have broken with Bush, but those are issues that matter mostly to conservatives.  On issues that matter to the left and the media (but I repeat myself), Bush's positions are largely the positions of his fellow partisans.

The big stories the media and the Democrats are pushing are the Iraq war (which is unpopular), the economy (which is in a down cycle), healthcare, and energy prices.  On all of these issues, McCain and most Republicans share President Bush's basic position.  Yes, McCain and some others were calling for Rumsfeld's head long before he was finally removed, but on the question of whether we should have gone at all, most Republicans are on the "wrong" side of the Iraq issue.

Republicans, including McCain, want to continue Bush's "failed" economic policies including free trade.  Republicans were against the expansion of S-CHIP beyond needy children.  These are unpopular positions on which the left will relentlessly bombard the electorate.

Where some Republicans might differ from Bush they are also "wrong".  Much of the conservative base is against "comprehensive immigration reform" and in favor of enforcement first, but Democrats flog us with this issue as racists and nativists.  Much of the base thinks Medicare Part-D was a fiscal abomination, but the program is popular among voters.

The biggest "winning" issue on which Republicans can break with Bush is the issue of earmark reform and governemnt waste.  McCain has wisely chosen to do this, but incumbent Republicans are often reluctant to give up their bridges to nowhere.

There are many topics on which Republicans can distance themselves from Bush, but they are too often the wrong issues.  To rightly criticize the competence of the Bush administration on issues such as Iraq and Katrina will only feed into the Democrats' arguments.  This is the conundrum facing Republicans this year.  Distancing one's self from President Bush is an extremely complicated exercise, and the calls to do so are often unfocused and cavalier.