The Progressive

Blogging the Midterms: Best TV ads this election

It’s polling day in America. Frankly, there isn’t much left to say. $2.6bn dollars have been spent. No one really knows who is going to win. And there isn’t much anyone can do to affect the outcome. So while we wait for the results I thought I’d post a little election day fun, and link to the best adverts I’ve seen this season. (I said in a previous post that i'd also make a brief argument that such ads should be allowed on UK TV. That argument should be appearing on Comment is Free sometime soon. But I figured political obsessives at Progress might just prefer to see the ads themselves.)

That said, here is a selection of the most amusing, outlandish and controversial ads from this years American elections. I've avoided the vast majority, most of which are of the "i'm a good guy who believes in families" or "my opponent voted to support the terrorists" variety.  Some are downright scurrilous. Some stretch the truth. Others break it entirely. And some are quite brilliant. I’m not sure that critics of American ads will be entirely persuaded by this selection. Nonetheless, they are the most interesting and memorable i've seen. And, as i argue at the guardian, i see no especially good reason why we should not allow (with appropriate restrictions) similar ads in the UK.

The prize for the single funniest ad goes to Massachusetts independent candidate Christy Mihos, for his perfectly convincing explanation of why Boston’s Big Dig construction project cost $12bn. Its laugh out loud funny, and frankly not far off the mark.

My vote for the best ads overall go to Republican Michael Steele. Steele has run a great campaign for the Maryland Senate race. He is still likely to lose, but then there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans in the state. Nonetheless his ads showed that a fresh, relaxed and funny approach could  connected with voters. And his “Puppy spot was especially good, and earned a sharp response from Democrats.

The nastiest spot was a toss up between Vernon Robinson and Kerry Healey. Robinson is an extreme right wing African American republican from North Carolina, known for poisonous commercials. Perhaps we should expect no better from a man known to boast “Jesse Helms is back, but this time he's black.” This ad shows just how low you can go. Healey, on the other hand, ran both a highly negative and notably unsuccessful campaign to become Massachusetts Governor. Her ad is no less reprehensible, and plays clearly off racial fears.

The weirdest? Step forward outgoing - and yes, that is a sweet thing to say - Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. His WWF-style wrestling Ad is very odd indeed. Watch what happens when he mentions Hillary Clinton. It sort of works. I think.

The gong for most controversial, and also perhaps the most effective judging by the polls, goes to the “Harold, Call Me” spot, run by the Republican National Committee in support of Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. So slimy was the ad seen to be that Corker himself asked for it to be taken down. Nonetheless, is he wins tonight he can credit it with saving his campaign. Before it went up Corker was slipping fast. After it he rebounded. Why? Frankly, i'm not persuaded that ad is playing on racial fears - and it's actually very funny. Judge for yourself. Mind you, Ford himself also ran effective adverts, including his "church" spot in which he successfully promoted his stance on faith and morals.   

Democrats weren't shy about putting up fighting ads either. In particular they went balls out this cycle to fight back on security and terror. Harold Ford, again, took the lead. Good examples would include his ads on "terrorist amnesty" and the "UK terror plot.

But i was most struck by the pro-demcorat VoteVets series. Both their widely used "Body Armour" spot, and the latest "because of Iraq" spot featuring Wesley Clark, are extremely effective. These show a concerted effort not to allow the Republicans to paint the Dems as weak on defence, something the GOP would surely otherwise have done.

And last, but not least, the advert that most effectively brought an issue to national attention was without doubt Michael J Fox's powerful series on Stem Cells. This should be a classic wedge issue for  Democrats.  Almost all Democrats agree on this issue, but Republicans are deeply divided. Yet before Fox's ad, the issue was nowhere. Then the combination of the power of the ads combined with Rush Limbaugh's callous idiocy, and this vital issue was being discussed by millions of Americans.

All in all, a bumper crop. Some good, some bad. Some nasty, some funny. But ultimately part of the richness of American campaigns. And something we should look seriously at allowing in the UK.

Kerry on fighting

Kevin Drum is one of the US bloggers that I most admire. His Political Animal is intensely readable, he carries readers with him on his hobby horses and also remains open to new ideas and subjects.

And yet he is entirely wrong about John Kerry’s recent misspeak. I am sure the Democrats wish for nothing more right now than some amateur, transatlantic advice, so here goes. Don’t get angry at Kerry, he’s a combat veteran who misspoke. Get angry in private at the Democratic candidates and anonymous political consultants who are backing away from Kerry. Get mad in public at Bush and Cheney. Kerry has apologised. Now demand that Cheney apologise for saying that ‘he had other priorities’than serving during Vietnam. Get Bush to apologise for saying ‘bring it on’ or ‘mission accomplished’. These guys didn’t misspeak. They meant it.

Howard Dean got pilloried by the press and by fellow Democrats for saying that the capture of Saddam Hussein didn’t make America. Bush got away with saying the capture of Bin Laden was not a top priority.

The lesson for Democrats is simple: stand the hell together and hit back on the facts. The Democrats have become, like the Tories used to be, a post-modern, almost open-source party, eternally ready to doubt its direction and leadership in public. Get over yourselves and get fighting.

Blogging the Midterms: One Era Ends, Another Begins

At the risk of overposting - do people really care about the midterms? - I was going to break up the coverage with a few fun links to the best of the 30 second spot ads this cycle. But i'm going to hold fire on that until i can actually figure out why it is that we in the UK don't allow TV ads. I feel an article coming on. Anyway - instead i thought i'd just post on one more interesting thing about this election, namely how it sits in the grand sweep of American politics. This thought prompted by an article in yesterday's Washington Post by the new editor of the American Prospect Harold Meyerson. (I posted on this over at NDN, so apologies for cross posting a little.) It is worth reading, especially for this frankly jaw slackening quote from Republican Susan Collins.

Most of the House seats that the Democrats are expected to take from Republicans are in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, heartland of the old Republican Party of Lincoln, McKinley and Eisenhower. Many of the Republicans holding these seats are a distinct minority in a party now dominated by Southerners who are more supportive of executive branch authoritarianism and yet also more government-phobic. And the Republican moderates, judging by their own comments, are boiling mad that the Democrats are going after them. "There is no one who has voted more often with the Democrats than Linc Chafee," Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, told the New York Times of her Rhode Island colleague, who is trailing Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the polls. "Yet that didn't stop them from going after him with everything they had."

Right. Riiiiiiiight. Of course she is correct. Sensible democrats do prefer Chafee republicans to, say, Brownback republicans. That said, reflect on the cheek of it. After 8 years of being divided, wedged, spun, polarized, split up, pilloried and pounded by a Republican attack machine that asks and receives no quarter - hell, not even a nickle - Collins has the gall to criticize Democrats for going on the attack? Its enough to leave one stammering in amazement.

My boss here in DC is a guy called Simon Rosenberg. He is a what people tend to call a Democratic strategist; someone with the "vision thing". Over the last two days i've heard him in meetings telling friends of NDN that this is the "last election of the 20th century." In this sense he is quite on. There is a different sort of America politics coming. You can see the case for it being made, for instance, in this piece from scarily smart political scientist Thomas Schaller on why the Dems no longer need the South. And you can see it, as this WSJ piece from yesterday notes, in the battle for the Mountain West:

Despite a Republican edge in registration, Democrats are discovering the Mountain West — and Colorado in particular — to be a new political frontier as the party benefits from a potent mix of changing demographics, anger over the war in Iraq, resentment toward conservative social initiatives and millions of dollars’ worth of advocacy advertising.

But in addition to these signs of the future we also have signs of the past. This election is about a cosolidation, a closign of business, of an older sort of American politics. We have GOP further wiped out in the north. We have Democrats winning in the rust-belt. We have conservatives holding firm in the south. We even have Bush and Kerry attacking eachother. Its all a bit old fashioned. And at the same time this election has seen an intriguing glimpses of how this could all change quickly - the importance of hispanic voters being just one factor, the battle over colorado and the west being another. And we've also seen a glimpse of some of the future stars of the Democratic party. This will be a party run not by Pelosi, Clinton, and Kerry, but a party lead by bright stars of the future with names you might know less well: Spitzer, O'Mally, Brown, Obama, Fenty, Patrick, Schweittzer and Emmanuel. Nonetheless, in the end, if that means this election that this election the Democrats have to take out the last of the Rockerfeller Republicans, the Republican party only have themselves to blame.

Blogging the midterms: Kerry 2008, RIP.

Post number 3, and the same caveat as the first two - do feel free to write about anything you want to know from the election in the comments. And with that out of the way, onto the news. You know the bad guy you thought was dead, who comes back at the end of the movie for one final scene-stealing jumpy moment, before being quickly dispatched by our hero? That's John Kerry. The bad guy, not the hero. And it's been Kerry's 24 hours in DC. The post put up earlier gets the most important bits of it. I wrote a Guardian piece also, trying to give a positive spin on event:

Yesterday was, in fact, a tremendous day for the Democratic Party. John Forbes Kerry, uniquely among his fellow Americans, genuinely appeared to believe that the next President of the United States could be John Forbes Kerry. Much in the same way as Nixon ran against Kennedy, was defeated, and came back, Kerry thought his phoenix could rise again. That is now not going to happen. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. John Kerry 2008. RIP.

This is the major takeaway. John Kerry yesterday became the second Presidential candidate to fall in this election, the first being Virgian Senator and Bush-lite impersonator George Allen. (The big winners are Mitt Romney and Barak Obama. More of that another time.) It now feels as if the news cycle has moved on. Kerry showed some rare smarts by going into hiding, while the Dems tried to counterpunch (not very succesfully) by attacking the President on Iraq. There has been some amusing comeback - this from radioshow host Don Imus and this picture, supposedly from Iraq - have been among the Kerry related stuff pinging around DC today. But in the end, there wasn't much of a story beyond an old Kerry-in-a-dunce-hat line. We move on.

Yet, in moving on, we still lost a day in the cycle. And that day hid two important stories squashed by Kerry and his mouth. First, and this is a big loss, we have the extraordinary fact that the American army just abandonned a soldier kidnapped by Shiite Cleric Moktada al-Sadr's militia. I'm not qualified to judge the military wisdom of this. But I am qualified to say that the Democrats should be all over this like a rash. This is (was?) a stop-the-press, storm-the-studios open goal chance to get the news back onto Iraq. Because if the news stays on Iraq, we win. As this morning's Note put it: Democrats must be about "making the end-game wide and narrow messages Bush, Iraq, Bush, Iraq, change, Bush, Iraq." (BTW - if you are a yank political junkie, the Note is as close to crack as it gets. Sign up here.)

The second story is, for me, even more exciting. Without anyone noticing it, the Senate is now in play. I repeat: since the weekend, the Senate is in play. I've just finished Progress Director Robert Phillpot's measured and reasonable intro to the campaign. It's good stuff, but it (perhaps wisely) undersells the possibilities of Democratic victory. There is almost no chance of 1994-style landslide for various reasons I can go into if people want. But in the last 3 days there have been 3 separate polls showing Jim Webb ahead in Virginia. This is tremendous news for the Democrats. It's also  exciting news for those of us who live close to Virginia, and have been watching this race more closely than any other. Jim Webb is a good man who has run an unfussy campaign. He has given his idiot opponent enough rope to hang himself one malapropism at a time, while never sticking in the knife. And his policy background would be an asset for the Democrats for a generation. I can't vote for obvious reasons, but I really, really want to vote from Jim Webb.

Anyway, if I read the polls correctly, it is now just possible that the Democrats could win all of their competitive Senate races bar Tennessee. Doing this would take back the Senate. Is it likely? No, I think probably not. We have the turnout issue. We have the GOP's kick-ass GOTV issue. We have the Republican financial advantage issue. And we have the possibility of some other big news event coming Kerry-style and ruining another few days of the news cycle. But we must remember that if these races go into election roughly even, theory and history expect late-breaking and independent voters to go 2:1 for change. And that means voting for the Democrats. So don't hold your breath, but next Tuesday might be a good night all round. James.

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.