Coalition Building

Gary Andres makes a very important point about the Left's new infrastructure in a recent Washington Times article.  The whole thing is very worth reading, but I want to focus on the infrastructure.

Democrats regularly benefit from well-organized, well-financed and effective outside liberal advocacy groups who relentlessly investigate, attack and criticize Republicans. The GOP lacks this kind of advocacy infrastructure.

Glenn Reynolds calls this sort of thing "battlespace preparation".  It's an appropriate term.

These outside groups have long existed, but the rise of the new media has accelerated the Left's political machine.  The organic elements, such as Moveon.org, Daily Kos, MyDD, Atrios, Talking Points Memo, etc, arose between 1998-2003, and they have been reinforced since then by very savvy, cultivated elements, such as the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, the Center for Independent Media and many more. 

The Left has taken their existing coalition and grassroots-based infrastructure, and combined it with this new internet-based Progressive Infrastructure to move messaging, mobilization and money into more effective channels.  They have seen three benefits from this.

• Better information and strategy coordination among coalition groups and the broader movement
• New channels for signaling and mobilizing the activist base
• Better targeting and influence of the media

Gary Andres continues...

Liberal activists have grown increasingly restive and well-organized over the past 15 years. Their grievances mounted when Republican political power grew in Washington between 1995 and 2006. Impeachment, the disputed 2000 election and the Iraq war all have helped focus liberal anger like a laser. [...]

[The Right has] also suffered over the past decade because they lacked a coherent narrative about what they would do with government once they controlled it - or at least a vision that could sustain a majority of American public opinion support. They needed new ideas and communications channels for these policies. Liberals are working on such a comprehensive model. [...]

[The Right] will never possess liberals' passion for the prize. But they need to build new advocacy institutions simply to fight back against the increasingly sophisticated and effective liberal infrastructure. If they don't, the "just leave me alone" conservatives will get some unwelcome company, overrun by the insurgent liberals at the gate.

This cannot be emphasized enough.  The Right is not just being beat at the polls.  That pendulum will swing back and forth.  The Right is being beat at the communications game.   You cannot lose the communications game and expect the pendulum to swing back in your direction.  It may swing away from the Left again, but it will not swing back to a "limited government, leave-us-alone" Right unless the Right can identify its unifying grievance, and communicate a clear, coherent, consistent and compelling narrative - an alternative vision of government to the one currently being sold.  

New distribution channels do not simply allow us to communicate "more"; they will allow us to move messaging, money and mobilization outside of the traditional establishment channels - from the entrenched bureaucracy of the Right, to a new, more vigorous and relevant "leave us alone" movement.

What!?  Yesterday the McCain Blog published this article titled Sen. McCain Offers $300 Million Prize for New Auto Battery:

The presumed Republican nominee on Monday proposed a $300 million government prize to whoever can develop an automobile battery that far surpasses existing technology. The bounty would equate to $1 for every man, woman and child in the country, "a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency," McCain said at Fresno State University.

McCain said such a device should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs and have "the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars."

The Arizona senator also proposed stiffer fines for automakers who skirt existing fuel-efficiency standards, as well as incentives to increase use of domestic and foreign alcohol-based fuels such as ethanol.

In addition, a so-called Clean Car Challenge would provide U.S. automakers with a $5,000 tax credit for every zero-carbon emissions car they develop and sell.

"In the quest for alternatives to oil, our government has thrown around enough money subsidizing special interests and excusing failure," said McCain. "From now on, we will encourage heroic efforts in engineering, and we will reward the greatest success."

Interestingly, today's Daily Kos responded as follows:

...it's not all bad news from the right -- no matter what you may think of McCain generally or his energy policy specifically, his proposal suggesting a large cash prize for renewable energy technology is at least a step in the right direction.

Could this be the coalition issue that will lure Democrats who-are-just-not-quite-sure-that-Obama's-their-guy over to McCain?  I hope so.  I like it!  It works for me.

Suppose that you are playing a game in a hilly landscape, and the object of the game is reach a higher altitude than any other player, and all you've got is your own feet & eyes (no GPS, etc.)  What do you do?  Well, presumably you try to find the highest hill you can spot, and head straight for the top.  But what if you're playing in a thick fog, and can only see a few dozen feet in any direction?  In such conditions, you can determine what your local slope looks like, and climb up it.  And you can reach the top of whatever hill you're on that way, just by always climbing higher and higher until you run out of up.  But... what if that hill is not, in fact, the highest hill?  You'll be at a top, but not the tallest top.  What then?

If you're on top of a hill, but it isn't the highest hill, then you are at what AI researchers (among many others) call a local maximum.  Many problem-solving tasks can be modeled as playing this sort of foggy hill-climbing game.  And one always runs into this basic dilemma: make your problem-solver too risk-seeking, and it'll trade away a perfectly good hilltop for bupkis; but make your problem-solver too risk-averse, and it'll trap itself in a local maximum, unwilling to climb a little bit down in order to have a chance at finding an even higher hill to reach the top of. 

From the conversations that have been going on on this site, it seems to me that the right today is in a real danger of being caught in a local maximum.  We know that the coalition that has worked at least since Reagan is no longer working.  After Bush and Rove and Iraq and Katrina and... well, the independents just don't seem to trust the right anymore.  To the extent that they are interested in McCain, it's because they accept that he's not really a right-winger (as many around here are happy to agree.)  And the demographics are against the right, too, in terms of the youth vote, Latinos, etc.  Trying to just keep pushing forward with this coalition -- staying put on top of this particular hill -- is a recipe for short-term electoral suicide.  Maybe the left will burn itself out in a few cycles, but I wouldn't count on it; they've learned from their losses in the mid-90s, and from watching the GOP meltdown in this century.

And it's worse than that, even, because the current coalition is fraying.  There are too many tensions that have become too clear in the last decade.  We can't have both lower taxes and an invasion of Iran.  We can't have a smaller, less intrusive government and unlimited domestic security powers.  We can't have a laissez-faire government and a government that continually helps out agribusiness, or the airline industry, or the banking industry.  Yet all of these are elements that have been crucial to GOP electoral success thus far.

The right needs to climb down a little, before it can climb higher.  And what that means, in cashing out the metaphor, is that some elements of the current coalition are probably going to get jettisoned in order to better pursue new voters that haven't been reached before, or who have recently been lost.  Some might think that "just return to our conservative roots!" is a solution that avoids this difficulty, but that's an illusion -- much of the reason that GOP legislators vote for government- and deficit-expanding measures is that there are some voters that these actions keep in the GOP fold.  Ditto with, e.g., Medicare D.  To propose more small-government conservatism is to propose to lose those voters.  Maybe the true-blood conservatives whose votes will be gained will more than compensate for the kitchen-counter voters who will be lost.  But it's a hard answer to determine one way or another, in the current fog.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating here any particular rejiggering of the conservative coalition, nor am I making any suggestions as to which groups of voters are those that are not currently in the coalition but which should be pursued.  But I think it's important to face up, as clearly as possible, to the difficulties being faced standing here at the top of this no-longer-dominant hilltop. 

The meltdown of the lefty blogs on FISA allows us to point out something: there were two significant online communities that were tracking the FISA bill: lefty blogs and tech blogs. The tech blogs were more wrapped up in other things, like the fight between AP and TechCrunch. (kind of astonishing that more political blogs didn't track this), the release of Firefox 3, etc. But there was real attention at Ars Technica, Wired, CNet, etc.

Similarly with another issue that is far more obscure: net neutrality. TechCrunch's Mike Arrington was interviewed by the LA Times about his politics. The response is quite stunning:

Arrington said he had a harder time endorsing a Republican candidate because he felt each of their positions on technology was flawed. Even though Paul won the TechCrunch reader primary, Arrington said Paul's opposition to net neutrality, for example, disqualified him.

Eventually, he settled on McCain:

Though McCain is "standoffish" on net neutrality, mobile spectrum rules and the digital divide, and has voted against some bills to fund renewable energy research, Arrington blogged that he was swayed by McCain's willingness to address "inequities that arise from his hands-off policies on net neutrality and mobile allocations, which other Republican candidates refuse to do. And his positions on Internet taxes, H1-B visas, China/human rights violations and other issues are strongly pro-technology."

Is net neutrality really a voting issue for anyone? Looking at the tech blogs, you get a sense that for some people it might be. Maybe not an insignificant number of people. MyDD even hosted a debate on spectrum allocation, one of the other issues that Arrington mentions. And OpenLeft has a front-page tag and video about net neutality. (my understanding is that Matt Stoller does some work for one of the groups in this space, but still)

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.