change

As college students, people always assume we're Democrats. You’ve probably heard the old political saw (often misattributed to Winston Churchill), “”If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” There are numerous theories as to why. Democrats have a more optimistic, open-hearted vision for America. Young adults tend to be socially liberal. They saw a lot of themselves in Barack Obama. Liberal indoctrination by college professors. The list could stretch for miles. But today’s young adults may not be pigeonholed the same way. This year Democrats’ cannot take their votes for granted.

That doesn’t mean Democrats aren’t trying. President Obama is kicking off a series of rallies on college campuses, designed to reinvigorate the young adults who carried him into the White House two years earlier.

But the message has drastically changed. Rather than ignite young adults with his hopeful brand of politics, the President is reduced to groveling. As the Washington Post reported today,

When Obama steps onto a grass quad at the University of Wisconsin on Tuesday, he will deliver a newly tailored, more personalized campaign appeal aimed at ginning up enthusiasm, according to White House and senior Democratic officials. Plouffe said Obama will remind students of the work they put into his 2008 campaign and warn them that if they don’t reengage now, “all that could be jeopardized.”

In 2008 he advocated for change. In 2010 he’s advocating for things to stay the same? Not exactly a winning message.

But it is made even more unpalatable given the general lack of change we have actually seen from Obama. It is easy to promise change, it is much more difficult to actually deliver it. And this has been Obama’s failing. As one previous Obama supporter said in a town hall recently,

“I’m one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for. And deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people and I’m waiting sir.

Substitute “middle class” for “young adults” and you’ll understand the frustration that is being seen on many college campuses. We wanted something different. We were promised something different. We got more of the same.

More politics. More backdoor dealings. More big government. More spending. More wars. For young adults there really wasn’t much difference between the Obama administration and the Bush administration from which they were so disenchanted.

All told, Democrats have a much tougher sell this time around if they want to recapture magic with young people. Meanwhile, Republicans are beginning to find traction on college campuses. Take college sophomore Edward Dooley, who told ABC News that just two years ago he was a “Kennedy-worshipping, stereotypical Massachusetts liberal.” But now Dooley, like so many other young adults, finds that his political ideology has shifted to the right after being turned off by Obama’s “glossy ideals” and “lack of concrete policies.”

Beyond a failure to live up to promises, Obama’s support among the youth vote has been eroded by his failed attempts to jump start the economy. The recession has been especially hard on young people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics youth unemployment was at 19.1 percent in July – the highest July rate since statistics were first kept in 1948.

Unfortunately for the unemployed the Democrats’ stimulus policies have done little to budge the unemployment needle. In fact, the only thing they have really accomplished is trillions of dollars of additional government debt, money that younger generations will be responsible for paying back.

As College Republican Chair Bob Kosek told ABC News for their story Republicans Rising on College Campuses,

“Hope and change doesn’t put money in your bank account to buy textbooks or pay off your student loans. It doesn’t help you get a job after you graduate either, and I think a lot of students are realizing that now.”

The rampant unemployment and dismal economy that is the Democrats’ legacy of the past two years is perhaps no clearer than on the University of Wisconsin campus where Obama is beginning his college tour. As the Washington Post reports,

The students on this leafy, generally liberal campus once constituted one of the strongest battalions in Obama’s grass-roots army. Two years later, the political dynamic has changed. Across campus, stickers, signs or chalkings for any politician are scarce. The laundromat where Obama’s young volunteers once staged late-night phone banks and planned bus trips to neighboring Iowa has gone out of business.”

A one-time hub for pro-Obama students now out of business. What a fitting, if sad metaphor for this administration.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/09/27/obamas-campus-tour-finding-college-conservatism-on-the-rise/

Yes we can or yes we will? It is about time Obama stepped out of the hypothetical and into reality. After all, he was elected because he promised a fundamental change in Washington. It is little wonder then that after an underwhelming first year in office, conservatives and liberals alike are wondering when he will finally take ownership of this presidency. If recent news is any indication, Obama may be forced to do so soon, if for no other reason than blaming Bush, rather than coming up with working policies, is falling flat.

The Bush attacks are coming from all over:

• A campaign advertisement for Jon Corzine closed with “Chris Christie: Bush’s friend. Bush’s policies. Bad for New Jersey.
• A radio ad from Creigh Deeds in the Virginia gubernatorial race featured dialogue like, “George Bush – what a disaster for our economy,” “What I can’t figure out is why this Bob McDonnell wants to do it just like Bush” and “Creigh Deeds: a little more Mark Warner and a LOT less George Bush”
• Or the Massachusetts Democratic Party which ran a mailer for the Coakley campaign that said, “What can Brown do to you? He can reward corporations that ship your job overseas just like George W. Bush.”

So what do all of these have in common (beyond a backhanded shout-out to George Bush)? They all lost; with two of the races representing upsets in key Democratic states.

But not all liberal pundits have learned from the mistakes. In his recent article “Democrats Need to Learn the Blame Game” James Carville argues that,

“Democrats would not be playing the blame game with one another for the loss for the healthcare debacle if they had only pointed fingers at those (or in this case, the one) who put Americans (and most of the world) in the predicament we’re in: George W. Bush.”

If this is the best strategy Democrats can come up with to try and regain the momentum they have lost over the past year, consider me ecstatic. After all, as Steve Hidebrand, a top aide on Obama’s presidential campaign told Politico,

“Voters are pretty tired of the blame game. . . What a stupid strategy that was.”

But more importantly, it sends a signal that the Democrats are out of ideas. The public, fearful of a the words “trillion” and “debt” being used so often in the same sentence had long abandoned many of the Democrat’s plans. The stimulus was a waste. The bailouts were a bust. The only arrow left in the Democrat’s quiver was supposed to be the one that would win the war – health care. But with Scott Brown’s upset bid signaling that the public didn’t want the Democratic health care plan, the party has been left searching for answers. Thus far the only thing they have been able to come up with is a freeze on discretionary spending that Obama previously called “a hatchet” when we really need, and “a scalpel.”

With their fragile house of cards, constructed in back room deals and glued together with the mortar of Barack Obama’s personality, now in ruins, Democrats are resurrecting their favorite villain…George Bush. But going negative won’t work. Not for the party whose slogan in 2006 was “A New Direction for America.” And it especially won’t work with the young adults who carried him into office.

Young adults engaged in campaigns and showed up at the polls in record numbers based on the promise of “change.” They wanted change from the passing the buck blame game that had become politics as usual in Washington. A grassroots campaign which mobilized and organized enormous numbers of young adults convinced people that Barack Obama was that change. As Patrick Ruffini explained on the NextRight,

[W]hat happens when the campaign goes away? What happens when the enthusiasm inevitably ebbs and the hard work of governing begins? The immediate benefits of a bottom-up strategy become less clear. You revert to traditional instincts, where powerful obstacles stand in the way of getting things done — even amongst your base, and the wielding of massive political machinery cannot be left to amateurs.

More than simply reverting to top-down governing, it appears that the Democratic leadership has relapsed ever further – to playing the blame game.

As 2008 made clear, we are tired of leaders passing the buck, we want results. It is time for the President to take ownership of the mistakes he has made on the economy, on health care, and on the stimulus. Young adults are smarter than to have their attention diverted from the recent causes of our lack of progress. It’s time to put the Bush-blaming to bed. But do Democrats have any ideas left to take its place?

- Brandon Greife, Political Director, College Republican National Committee (www.crnc.org)

President Obama has issued a signing statement, contradicting some things he said during the campaign.  But signing statements are just a procedural shortcut past a very serious problem of legislative collusion.  There is a better solution.

President Obama's signing statement...

[A]fter Democrats criticized former President George W. Bush's signing statements, Mr. Obama issued one of his own, declaring five provisions in the spending bill to be unconstitutional and nonbinding...

...would seem to contradict his previous arguments. 

• In a 2007 letter to a constituent, Senator Obama said, "The President can veto a bill or sign it into law, but the Constitution does not grant him authority to determine when he can ignore those he signs." 
• In a 2007 interview, Senator Obama said, "it is a clear abuse of power to use such statements as a license to evade laws that the president does not like", and "I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law.
• In a 2008 campaign event, when asked, "Do you promise not to use Presidential signage to get your way?", candidate Obama said "Yeah" and added that "We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end-run around Congress."  That was captured on video... 

The issue of signing statements is complicated, and I don't intend to make a blanket pronouncement on the matter here. It comes down to a tension between speed and quality of legislative action: "Congress sometimes includes minor constitutional flaws in important bills that are impractical to veto."

But signing statements do not resolve the important questions of Constitutionality; they simply kick the can down the road.  Signing statements are a procedural shortcut that allow politicians to maintain the omnibus approach to legislation. 

The legislative bundling process sacrifices quality, oversight and accountability in exchange for speed.  This is a very bad collective decision making process.  It is unaccountable and collusive. 

The solution would be an unbundling of legislation.  That is, the legislature should consider and vote on each legislative item separately - each earmark, each rule, each amendment.  While this might seem prohibitively complicated for a massive bill, it need not be.  Line item voting could be accomplished with a simple box-check form submitted at the time of the formal vote, with the final bill composed of the individual items that recieved a majority vote.  This could also simplify the legislative reconciliation process. (NOTE: We should also ask ourselves why we would tolerate a legislative process so complicated that legislators cannot consider each element of a bill)

President Obama has pledged to change the Bush administration's approach to signing statements, but only in degree, not in principle.  That will not improve the government's perverse collective decision making process.   Legislative unbundling could resolve that problem, but that would require accountability and responsibility.  Neither Republicans nor Democrats appear interested in that. 

Rasmussen Reports, one of the two most accurate polling firms in predicting the outcome of the 2008 Presidential Race, has come out with a series of new polling numbers the last couple of days that should come as welcome news for the Republican Party. It all has to do with one thing: the opposition to Barack Obama’s so-called “stimulus” package that has been described as a “piñata” and a “rotting corpse”.

In other words, the American people, who were once for the Obama stimulus plan, are now suddenly against it. For the first time, the support for the Obama plan has fallen below the number of those who oppose it (37% support it versus 43% opposing it). Why? There are 50% of Americans who believe that the plan will make the economy worse.

The end result is that this is becoming a huge shot in the arm for the Republicans who are in opposition to the Obama stimulus plan. For the first time since early December of last year, the Generic Congressional Ballot shows the Republicans within four points of the Democrats (42% to 38%) and more than half of all Americans (54%) think Congress is doing a “poor” job while only 12% think Congress is doing an “excellent” or “good” job (that’s beginning to rival Rod Blagojevich territory when Blago had a 7% approval rating back in December). 

If the Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy “Margaret Hamilton” Pelosi want to become a minority party again by 2010 and 2012, all they need to do is to keep doing what they are currently doing. 

In the House vote, every Republican and 11 Democrats voted against the plan, but it was not enough to stop the plan from passing the House. In the Senate, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) has tried to reassemble the “Gang of 14” to get any stimulus plan passed. It’s more a sign of desperation instead of bipartisanship. 

Before our eyes, the plan’s details, namely the pork-barrel projects, are being decried. There was money for contraception which has now been removed. There is money for a discus golf course in Austin, Texas. There is money for Shreveport, Louisiana to purchase eight Harley-Davidson motorcycles for the police department. There is money for a dog park in Chula Vista, California. And, of all places, Las Vegas is asking for $2 million for more neon signs. 

As the days go by, the American people are waking up to what is really going on in Washington and it flies in the face of the “change” that President Obama’s campaign was all about. Instead, Obama should have just cut out the Barbara Streisand (B.S.) and just campaigned on “Politics as usual”. 

Karl Rove reports in the WSJ:

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama criticized Washington for being "obsessed with the perpetual campaign." As president he is the first occupant of the Oval Office to give his director of political affairs -- who coordinates the president's involvement with his party and other campaign related activities -- an office in the West Wing. [...]  That's a sign of the importance of politics for Team Obama.

@anamariecox on Twitter

I think Obama is *perfecting* the Bush model of media relations...

David Cay Johnston in the Columbia Journalism Review:

While it is too early to judge just how this will work out, the early signs are troubling. And interviews with a dozen Washington reporters indicate that the Obama press operation tends to embrace friendly questions, while treating skeptical questions as not worth their time or, worse, as coming from an enemy.

Brendan Nyhan (formerly of Spinsanity) co-authored a book ("All the President's Spin") about the slippery, overtly political way the Bush White House communicated.  I've had a couple exchanges with him and others since then over the substance of the book (which I found generally solid), and the implications of it.  While many on the Left and in the media seem to regard the Bush White House as an anomaly - unusually deceptive, untrustworthy - I think they are giving insufficient weight to two factors:

1. The Trend: The permanent campaign is further entrenching itself in government, becoming more sophisticated, and evolving outside of its traditional home in the communications department.  It is not an anomaly; it is an arms race.  Politicians may be outraged that their opponents do it, but they will rationalize their own need to do the outrageous.  Absent a structural change in the way government operates, this will continue.
2. The Internet: Comparisons between recent years and earlier periods are virtually impossible. The internet gives us access to exponentially more information than we have ever had before. It gives people exponentially more opportunities to research, expose and communicate problems, flaws, hypocrisy and deception.  Before, we were drinking from a glass; today, we are drinking from a firehose.  It should be no surprise that today's poiticians seem somehow...wetter.  Even if the Bush administration was exactly equivalent to previous administration's, we would still be aware of vastly more problems. 

 Whatever the intentions of the Obama administration, the fact is that only major structural changes to the incentives (e.g., mandated transparency, accountability mechanisms, etc) can create actual change.  Intentions and promises are not a useful metric.  

Good intentions will always lose to perverse incentives. The Obama administration may find itself surprisingly similar to the Bush administration they thought they despised.

From a recent Newsweek story....

With Democrats in control on Capitol Hill, the incoming Obama team shouldn't have to worry much about hostile probes. Last week's confirmation hearings for top Obama nominees were largely congenial (though there are still a few ongoing flaps, including Treasury nominee Tim Geithner's tax and "nanny" issues). Legislative insiders say a reshuffling of key committee posts in the new Congress will ensure that investigations of Obama's actions will proceed with caution.

It's increasingly apparent that "Change" was more about swapping out the pigs than cleaning up the mud.

“Which comes first,” asks Michael Turk, “ideas or the message?” That’s an easy one. Of course it’s ideas. But to understand why, let’s think about politics in the context of the production cycle.

This concept is not my original thinking. It was explained to me a couple weeks ago during a presentation on the future of conservatism as a way to grasp our shortcomings and understand the gaps of our movement.

Let’s start with the basic manufacturing production cycle, which I’ve boiled down to three essential steps: 1) obtain raw materials, 2) turn them into a product, and 3) sell that product to consumers.

Now let’s apply those three steps in the context of producing change in politics:

1. Coming up with ideas. Academia plays an important role, albeit less significant today due the shortage of right-leaning academics. For example, think about the work of the powerhouse team of political economists at the University of Chicago (Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, George Stigler) and how their ideas on free-market economics began to take shape after World War II.
2. Turning ideas into public policies. This is role of think tanks -- and on the right there is no shortage of them. Think tanks existed prior to the 1970s, but mostly in the form of academic institutions without students (AEI, Brookings, CSIS). The Heritage Foundation (my employer) helped usher in a new approach. These new institutions (Cato, ATR, NTU) began working directly with policymakers to have an impact.
3. Implementing policies. Here is where activist groups, media and politicians fit. The left has a superior network of implementers who are effective at shaping a coherent message (MoveOn.org) and using communications channels (full-time bloggers) to sell it. We're about to see how a politician, Barack Obama, achieves this through governing. On the right, groups like Club for Growth and online communities such as RedState fit into this portion of the cycle. Rebuild the Party is an example of an implementer.

The point of this exercise is to understand the imbalance we face on the right. There is a serious deficiency of academics and implementers. We have an abundance of think tanks. Because we lack balance, the production cycle is thrown out of whack and we’re unable to produce change.

You see, ideas alone don’t produce change. And activist groups and bloggers savvy at marketing can’t produce change if they don’t have principled public policies to back up their message. We need a more integrated structure and balanced production cycle.

Earlier this evening, a group of under-40 operatives pulled back the curtain on RebuildTheParty.com, a 10-point action plan for the next RNC Chairman.

The premise behind the plan is simple: every Republican has a stake in the outcome of the RNC election, so every Republican must have a voice in the process. Collectively, we intend to bring pressure to bear, not for a specific candidate, but for a set of principles that will force our new leadership to deal head on with the GOP's structural failures -- a yawning online gap, a failure to mobilize our grassroots, and an inability to recruit either strong candidates in every district  or encourage sophisticated activism at the local level.

A number of us have been talking about these problems for months now. Well, the time for talk is over and the time for action is now. That's why the plan outlines a number of specific proposals and success metrics: 5 million new online activists, a minimum of $100,000 raised online by target Congressional candidates, candidates in all 435 districts, 25,000 new people who can work on campaigns and run their neighborhoods. It's time to start holding people in the party accountable for online success the same we hold people accountable for the number of voter contacts.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be fleshing out individual pieces of the plan and likely be getting more specific in our recommendations. We also know that we can't micromanage the process and that the next Chair is going to have to chart his or her own path. Having worked on campaigns, however, we know that necessity is the mother of invention. The primary purpose of the Rebuild the Party plan is to create this sense of urgency and necessity. We challenge the idea that the Internet is more than a fun little add-on or that it's enough to prove you "get it" by setting up a Twitter account. The Obama campaign proved that the Internet is so much more than that: it is a serious platform for transforming literally everything about how your campaign is run, from media to fundraising to field.

And the best part? You can vote on key tenets of the plan, submit your own, and vote them up in a Digg-like process. The best user generated ideas may be included in future releases of the plan. Participate in this platform by visiting Ideas.RebuildTheParty.com and registering.

Beyond disappointment at all the opportunities we missed this election, I felt something else on Tuesday night: liberation. I felt like a huge burden had been lifted off our shoulders, that we could finally get to work building the Republican Party we really want not just defending the one that we had. Our mission will no longer be subsumed in the immediate work of winning an election. The time to build the next right has come.