John Kerry's fighting talk

According to media reports, Senator John Kerry has thrown a potentially big spanner into the Democrats' steady progress towards victory in the mid-term elections next Tuesday. The party's presidential nominee two years ago told an audience of college students in California on Monday that if they didn't study hard they could end up 'stuck in Iraq'.

The Republicans have responded with a lovely line in mock outrage, epitomised by President Bush:

Even in the midst of a heated campaign season, there are still some things we should be able to agree on; and one of the most important is that every one of our troops deserves our gratitude and respect. The senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful.

This from a party which has spent the last week engaged in one of the filthiest smear campaigns against its opponents in recent US political history.

But while the Republicans' response was predictable, Kerry's counter-attack will come as a bit of a shock to those who remember the slightly lame way the senator responded in 2004 to the attacks on his Vietnam war record by the Bush-backing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Describing those who had attacked him as 'right-wing nut jobs', Kerry went on:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticise the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did. I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J Fox's Parkinson's disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have

If Kerry had shown a little more of that kind of fighting talk two years ago, it may well have been him, and not Bush, sat in the Oval Office today.

Blogging the midterms: 3 Questions Answered

This  is the second post from Washington in an occasional series on the current US midterms next Tuesday. In the first i asked readers to leave in the comments the things they wanted answered, and so i thought it only polite to actually provide an answer to some of them. The same thing goes this time - if you see something in the news you don't buy or get, just mention it in the comments to this post, and I'll try to have a look at it. Go on. There must be something you want to know about?

I'll take 3 this time, on turn out, the senate, and the role of business in the election.

1. Why does Turnout matter so much?
David Brede gets straight to it: "You say that the Republicans are one cycle ahead in their turnout operations. As this will be a key issue in 2009 if not before in the UK, is this a sheer hard work issue or something other than that." Its something else. There was a long, very interesting piece in the Times over the weekend which everyone interested in this should read. Here Charles Schumer, who heads up the Dems senate campaign, claims the Dems have caught up. If you want to see the likelihood of this being true, read this very, very funny profile of his optimistic tendency in the Post recently, in which the journalist writes: "Some see the glass as half empty, others as half full. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) sees it as overflowing." Basically the GOP are better across the board on GOTV. They have better existing databases, or "voter files" as they are called over here. They have close-to-perfected the art of the 72-hour Prue-election day push. They are better at "micro-targetting", the new buzz in American politics. (It basically means that they can figure out from precinct level data the extent to which consumer and socio-demographic data reliably predict your voting preferences. If you drink latte and drive a volvo etc etc.) And they are a united GOTV group. The Dems still rely on a motley bunch of unions and campaigning groups - gathered under the umbrella of America Votes - to back up their official effort. My hunch is that all of this isn't going to be enough to save them this time. But the implications of their improved ability to turnout voters are strategically, and i use this word advisedly, profound. It completely overturns the Blair / Clinton pragmatic rationale for centrism if you can inflate your base. And that is the biggest takeaway from American politics at present for Progress people. I'll write more about this later.

2. Where matters in the Senate? Can the Dems win? 
Richard Phillips asked "can you give us a quick summary of the party's chances in the key battleground senatorial races?" Right you are. The long list of key races are, in order of importance, Virginia, Tennesse, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Montana, Rhodes Island, and Pennsyvania. The best way to keep in touch is the Real Clear Politics poll page. As it stands the Democrats need 6 of this 8 to win. And my hunch is they will win, at most, 5. Virginia and Tennessee have been unbelievable races. In Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford Jnr has run a brilliant campaign, but is currently being slimed by his opponent. Jim Webb in Virginia has not run a brilliant campaign, but his opponent George Allen has had a nightmare, as this excellent recent article in the Nation explains. But both VA and TN are very conservative states - most people still expect the GOP to win. This is especially true because the Republicans are very, very good at shifting the message when they need to. There was a tawdry brouhaha going on over the weekend around about whether Jim Webb and / or Lynn Cheney wrote sexually explicit passages in respective books. As Webb said  its "smear after smear - a desperate but politically extremely clever attempt to make the last weeks of this election about anything other than Iraq and the economy. Be it Penthouse models in Tennessee, gay marriage in Virginia or immigration rows in New Jersey - it all smacks of a coordinated campaign to pivot critical campaign messages away from the Democratic ground. Anyway, thats a longwinded way of saying that Democrats will definitely win in Pennsylvania (excellent news, as the incumbant Santorum is a weapons grade idiot.), Rhodes Island, and Ohio. They will probably win in Ohio and Montana. Conventional wisdom says, however, that without VA or TN, they will fall 1 or 2 seats short of a win.

3. What is happening with business? Are the corporations taking a pasting?
Mike Bennett asked how "what's happening with the Corporations and the Democrats." Very interesting. As i mentioned in a recent OpenDemocracy piece there is a very clear anti-corporate theme in the mid-terms. Across America politicians are slamming "big business," attacking their opponents for cravenly taking money from "big pharmaceuticals," and generally being in the pocket of corrupt corporations. Especially popular are attacks on "big oil," big oil profits, big gas prices, and big subsidies to oil giants. This is a different phenomneon from the 2002 / 2004 Enron bashing, where corrupt corruption was the issue. This time my hunch is there is more a feeling that companies are, as the Amercians would say, making out like bandits, while ordinary americans are not doing well. Median income under Bush is stagnant, while wages have declined. For more on the economic debate see these two memos on wages and the economy i drafted for my current employer.  All of this, in turn, is wrapped up in the fractious relationship America is currently having with economic globalisation, which is much, much more controversial than in the UK. The upshot is that in certain Senate races - especially Ohio - there is a strong  business-bashing theme.  This in turn is a function of where this election is being fought. If you find a map of America - like this one - most of the competitive races are in an an u-shape stretching from New York down through Virginia and up to Illinois. No surprise that these rust-belt races tend to be where the manufacturing economy is in the tank; decline breeds discontent.

Right. I have to go to work. Put more questions in the comments and I'll try to answer them best i can. Feel free to debate and challenge these points too, especially the first. As I say, the GOTV issue has big implications for Labour - strategically, and electorally - if we can master it. More anon. James

Blogging the midterms: Is the conservative era over?

This is the first in an occasional series of posts I'll be doing on the Progress blog looking at the next few weeks in the US congressional elections. Before diving in, I'd like to make a plea. If anyone reading has something they would like to know about the contests, put them in the comments. I'd really like to know what Progress people are interested in, and am happy to give a view on whatever people reading the Progress Blog would like to know about.

Right! How to begin? Three things. First I'd like to give a quick update on where we are. Second, a brief word on the possible reasons for an upset. Third, I want to point you towards today's must read article in the Times by David Brooks.

Where are we at. It goes something like this. The democrats are significantly ahead in the generic ballot, meaning when Americans are asked "do you like Republicans or Democrats" people say Democrats by a 10-25% margin. Pace gerrymandering this would mean a big gain in both the House and Senate. As it is it means the Democrats are likely to take the 15 seats they need to take back the House of Representatives, and come 1-2 seats shorts of the 6 they need to take back the Senate. The important thing to realise is that under the British election system this would be a landslide - that is how unpopular the Republicans have become. The list of reasons why is long, but can be boiled down to (in order of importance) Iraq, the economy and Mark Foley. In a sense the Foley scandal was the most important because it produced the biggest swing the polls. But the deteriorating situation in Iraq is now, unbelievably, a winning issue for Democrats. The economy always was - despite strong growth the American public is seeing median declining wages and incomes, and is unhappy about its lot.

The only thing which can stop the Democrats taking back the House, as of now, is turnout. The Republicans are about 1 electoral cycle ahead of the Democrats in their turnout operation. We saw this in 2004 where the GOP matched the Democrats, and possibly bettered them, in getting their voters out. This time round everyone i speak to expects them to do so again. The scariest paragraph i read this week came tucked in the end of a Poll in Tuesday's Washington Post:

Both parties are making extraordinary efforts to turn out their voters in November. Twenty-nine percent of registered voters said they had been contacted by one party or the other for their votes, and three in 10 of those said they had been contacted by advocates for both parties. Republicans appear to be doing a better job of contacting independents. In the poll, 45 percent of those independents who said they had been contacted said they were urged to vote for Republicans, while 17 percent said they were urged to vote for Democrats. The rest said they were contacted by both sides.

With numbers like this suggesting a 3:1 advantage on GOTV, more in key states, this thing isn't over yet. If the Republicans come back Karl Rove and RNC Chair Ken Melman will officially become deities of the conservative movement.

Finally, if you can get a copy, you should really try to read David Brooks in today's New York Times. He put his finger on something very significant about these elections - namely that a generational shift is occurring in American politics. Since the late 1970s there has been one story in American politics - the rise of conservatism. It went like this:

Reagan won. Bush 41 adapted Reagan. Clinton reacted to Reagan/Bush, and won. Gingrich beat Clinton. Clinton reacted back. Americans rejected Gingrich. Bush 43 adapted to Gingrich, and won again.

That whole process is now over. These elections are historic because the American people are rejecting Republican governance in the same way that the British people did in 1997. The big difference is that in 1997 in the UK we had a Labour party ready to govern, with a formidable leadership team. The Democrats, as yet, have no such agenda or vision. Time will tell if they can use the next two years to come up with one. That's it for this time - let me know if there is anything I can tell you about the elections, the candidates, or anything else in the comments.

 

Cameron throws down foreign policy challenge

Both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have delivered speeches heavy in foreign policy significance in recent weeks. The Prime Minister’s speech to the Labour Party Conference went beyond terrorism and the need to maintain support for the United States to highlight energy security and mass migration as new issues on the national security agenda. David Cameron, speaking ten days earlier to the British America Project, talked of the need for a new multilateralism and of the need to re-balance our relationship with the United States. Of the two speeches, it is Cameron’s that points the way ahead for progressives.

This is true for two distinct but related reasons. First, Cameron is right to say that the foreign and security problems we face today can only be met through multilateral solutions. No state acting unilaterally, not even the United States, can manage the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of climate change, or of transnational terrorism and organised crime. The international community’s response to the North Korean nuclear test will be informative in this regard, since there is little the US itself can do in response. Meaningful sanctions, if they come at all, will come from China and South Korea. Cameron’s speech may have been motivated by political opportunism, and he himself may be politically incapable of seeing the EU as a pivotal part of the multilateralism now needed, but this should not distract us from the wider truth his speech identified: Security requires multilateralism.   

Second, the Labour government’s claim that there is no inconsistency between full public support for the current US administration on the one hand, and our stated desire to build effective multilateral institutions and regimes on the other, is no longer tenable. The neo-conservative view that the national security mission should determine the necessary coalition, rather than the coalition of states determining the mission, is fundamentally at odds with the approach required to foster the multilateralism we now need. It is one thing, against this backdrop, to say that effective multilateralism cannot exist without US participation and that we should seek to influence US policy in our direction. It is another thing entirely too publicly support US policies that undermine the more effective multilateralism needed to keep us safe. 

Given this, and given the domestic political price already paid by progressives for the government’s support for President Bush, a change in our approach to relations with the United States is now urgent. To be successful, this needs to include not only a subtle shift in policy but also some fresh analysis and a more mature understanding of how our relationship with the United States works.

First, we need to assert politically that it is possible to be serious minded on security without agreeing with everything the American administration does. In this regard, Cameron’s speech was extremely helpful.  It exposed as flawed the Prime Minister’s view that only two security policy choices are on offer, namely close support for the Bush administration on the one hand or the hopeless idealism of the far left on the other. There is a viable policy space in between these extremes and Cameron’s speech has made it politically easy for us to occupy it without being seen as soft on security.

Second, and to reinforce the credibility of this shift in policy, we need to conduct a strategic threat assessment to ensure our policy frameworks, alliances, and institutional architectures are designed to meet the challenges of the early twenty-first century rather than those of the last century. This threat assessment must consider issues such as the worrying amount of WMD related material and know-how going missing from sites in the former Soviet Union and Pakistan. It must consider the security implications of growing international pressure on natural resources such as oil and water and the possible re-emergence of multipolar competition among the US, China and a resurgent Russia. Finally, it must consider the long-term security implications of climate change, and the degraded power of formal state authorities to keep control of transnational terrorist and organised crime networks. Strategic assessment of these threats should underpin development and publication of a national security strategy for the United Kingdom, spelling out our interests and vulnerabilities, as well as the rationale for any policies intended to keep us secure.   

Third and last, we should develop some much needed maturity in our domestic debate on the relationship with the United States. It simply lacks credibility, for example, to claim that any public disagreement with a US administration on a national or international security issue would destroy the relationship. This has not been the experience of history, nor the experience of other European allies when they have failed to agree with US foreign policy positions. And if the claim were true, this would be a stunning assertion that our entire national security strategy is based upon the most fickle and unreliable of relationships.

It is equally unhelpful to claim that all disagreements with the US are motivated by anti-Americanism. As Andrew Gamble, the leading academic and author of Between Europe and America has pointed out, there is an identifiable Anglo-American presence in world politics. Ideological debates take place between Anglo-America and other entities internationally but also within the Anglo-American sphere itself. These latter debates are transnational in nature, dividing opinion within the US and UK in more important ways than they divide opinion between the US and UK. The neo-conservative view currently prevalent in Washington, therefore, is not the sum total of American opinion. Many credible foreign and security policy analysts in Washington disagree profoundly with the policies of the Bush administration. And when disagreement is allowed to be branded as disloyalty, either within the United States, or between allies across the Atlantic, we concede important ground to those who seek political advantage in constructing the debate in this way.

Moreover, if we treat, the views of the current US administration as a permanent feature of the landscape, we fail to acknowledge the obvious point that American politics is dynamic and cyclical. Neo-conservative foreign policies often struggle to show results abroad, and can suffer serious loss of popular political support at home. American administrations, in this context, use the support of allies abroad as important sources of political capital in the ongoing noise of domestic disagreement and debate. We will never know how a British government refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq would have played on the American political scene but we should not underestimate how valuable our support can be to any American president about to undertake serious and risky military action overseas. 

There is then, more room for disagreement and influence in this relationship than many would have us believe. We share core values with the United States, including a commitment to an open international economy, good governance and universal human rights. More often than not, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with the US in promoting a global order based on these values. But in a mature relationship there will sometimes be open disagreement. The challenge, of course, is to limit the disagreements and to know when to disagree, and why. The decision should be based on the contents of a well thought through national security strategy, not fear or unconditional loyalty.   

Is America ready for a female president?

‘Progressive’ may not be the first word that springs to mind when thinking about American society. However, a fascinating poll out from USAToday shows that some things are changing. Most adults in the US believe that the country is ready for a female president – although only by 61% to 38%. In addition, and perhaps more surprisingly, a smaller majority (58%) believe that Americans are prepared to elect a black or African American to the White House.

This will be cautiously welcomed by the Democrats, whose best candidates for 2008 are looking to be either the most well known Senator, Hilary Clinton or the talented, up and coming Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. A woman or black person has never received the nomination of either Republicans or Democrats for President.

The shift in perspectives of ordinary Americans is good news, but hardly a triumph for equality – the majorities in favour are relatively small, and doubtless much narrower than if the same poll was done in EU countries. What is depressing is the attitude to other social groups – there are clear majorities against the idea of a Hispanic President (perhaps bad news for Jeb Bush whose wife is of Mexican origin) an Asian, atheist or gay person in the White House. A shocking 91% of Americans think the country is not ready for a gay or lesbian President.