The job nobody wants...but should!

Senator Mike Bennet has become the most recent Democrat to turn down the job of running the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, i.e. the committee designed to elect Democrats to the U.S. Senate. Evidently quite a few other Democratic Senators--including Chuck Schumer and Al Franken--have also turned down the gig, ostensibly because the Democrats will have over twice as many seats to defend as Republicans will in this election cycle. It certainly seems like the sort of thankless job that nobody wants, but I wonder why it's so difficult to find someone when one considers the following factors:

1. Since everybody expects the Democrats to lose seats, the bar for success will be low.
2. Since nobody wants the job, the person who takes it will earn some serious points from the party for being a good sport.
3. The 2012 electorate will not be the same as the 2010 electorate, and there are a number of signs that the economy, including the employment numbers, are starting to improve. It will be a much more favorable environment to run a campaign than 2010 was for Democrats, which should make recruiting easier.
4. Obama's 2012 re-election effort will undoubtedly feature an extremely robust GOTV effort that would help Democrats running for lower offices.
   

And looking at the 2012 Senate battlefield, it seems far from likely that a second bloodbath is even plausible. The Democrats will be defending a very large number of seats, but many of those are among the safest the Democrats have. There's just no way the Republicans are going to knock off someone like Daniel Akaka. The Republicans had an outside chance of beating Boxer this year (that they helpfully squandered, thankfully) but they have no chance of unseating the less-polarizing Dianne Feinstein, or her most obvious replacement if she retires. Ditto someone like Tom Carper or Ben Cardin. In fact, by my count, there are only seven Democratic Senators that ought to be in significant trouble, all red- or purple-state Democrats who could be vulnerable with the right challenger:

• Bill Nelson of Florida
• Claire McCaskill of Missouri
• Jon Tester of Montana
• Ben Nelson of Nebraska
• Kent Conrad of North Dakota
• Sherrod Brown of Ohio
• Jim Webb of Virginia

There are others that are more of a stretch--Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, for example, is an extremely good fit for a socially conservative/fiscally moderate-to-liberal state and should be safe, but you never know--however, these are the obvious takeover ideas for Republicans. I would have figured Nelson would be in trouble over health care reform but evidently his polling against two established commodities--outgoing Senator George LeMieux and Jeb Bush--looks pretty good. McCaskill's approval looks tepid, but the Republicans are looking to field two-time loser Jim Talent against her, which could help her get another term. The other Nelson's problems are obvious, but he's got a pretty longstanding relationship with his state's voters that could help him stick around. Conrad might squeak by because the ND GOP doesn't seem to have another giant-killer around like they did in 2010 with against eleventy-term Senator Byron Dorgan, and Sherrod Brown is quite progressive but a deft populist who won big last time. Webb might or might not get another term, but there's always Tim Kaine if he doesn't. I'm not saying that all these folks are going to win even if the economy improves greatly, but none of them are sure losers if they run again, and in most of their cases the boost of a national campaign along with some points in their favor should prevent really any of them from being doomed. If a bunch of them retire, of course, things get a lot tougher.

On the other hand, Lieberman's seat seems all but assured to fall to an actual Democrat, Scott Brown isn't likely to stick around when Obama wins 60% of the vote in Massachusetts, and John Ensign is a sure loser in Nevada, especially since he's running again and appears to have substantial Republican support. That should be a gimme in the general election. Throw in Olympia Snowe's inevitable primary loss (another probable Democratic pickup), and maybe one or two other outside possibilities (Janet Napolitano stepping down from the Cabinet to challenge Jon Kyl?), and there's a good chance the Democrats can keep the Senate in 2012. The real challenge will be keeping it in 2014, when you have some real tough ones like Alaska and Louisiana coming up in the traditional "six-year itch" elections. If I were a young Democratic Senator trying to make my name, I'd step up to the DSCC in 2012 and stay the hell away in 2014.

Obama knows what he's doing today

Two examples:

1. Middle-East diplomacy: Like most everyone, I've grown not to expect too much from the current round of peace talks. But they're not dead, and this can only be seen as promising. During Bush's last year, he tried to accomplish Middle-East peace with the Annapolis process and suffered a high-profile failure, as his White House hyped the effort and increased expectations. Obama's team seems not to have pushed back on a lot of the defeatist rhetoric but kept things going, so any progress actually made will be a much bigger deal. I'm not going to get too optimistic, but as a J Street supporter I remain hopeful for a two-state solution. And if it were to happen, it would be huge.
   
   
2. Obama takes the blame: I can only imagine what Krugman and the Kossacks are saying about this:
   

   “I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so: maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington,” he told reporters in a brief question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One as he returned from a 10-day trip to Asia. “I’m going to redouble my efforts to go back to some of those first principles,” he promised.

   Democratic partisans must be livid over this sort of stuff, but I think there are basically two ways Obama could have responded to this most recent election. He could have continued with the fierce (and usually correct) attacks on the Republicans that he lobbed around during the 2010 campaign, or he could have offered the Beltway opinionmakers a bit of a bone. Most of what I read suggests the Administration has about as dim a view of the news media as the partisans do, but one cannot get around the fact that these idiots do have a lot of power. Throwing down a marker at this point would probably not have gained Obama anything, but statements like this make sense if Obama wants to set the tone for the next two years, with himself as the reasonable adult in the room and the GOP as hyperpartisan crazies. And it's not like he's giving up anything of substance yet. Meanwhile, after having used the drawn-out process of passing health-care reform to hurt the favorability of Obama and the Democratic Congress and witnessed the damage done firsthand, their evident response is to get themselves some of that too. Time will tell how serious they are, since repeal right now would mean bringing back recissions, benefit caps, the "donut hole" and so forth, and the government shutdown card would be quite a radical one to play.
   

Why won't capital punishment go away?

I'm glad Ta-Nehisi follows this stuff. I think there are by now a number of examples where it seems clear that an innocent person was executed (David Grann's lovely, heartbreaking piece on Cameron Todd Willingham and the circumstances of his execution is something that everyone should read), and yet public opinion still overwhelmingly backs the death penalty, even though almost everyone surveyed admits that it's likely that someone innocent has been lost due to the practice. Capital punishment was one of the first areas where I rebelled from my evangelical conservative upbringing, and one of the causes that I am personally passionate about (though it's probably fallen into my second tier at this point). Capital punishment is an excellent example of man's hubris, the notion that people can somehow determine for sure that someone can never be rehabilitated, that we can really see into another person's soul (or, for my materialist friends, whatever term you wish to substitute in for the soul). There is, in my opinion, not really any satisfying argument in favor of the practice, though John Stuart Mill's comes close. But capital punishment has almost completely dropped out of sight as an issue in American life, and nobody even bothers to defend it on its own terms anymore.

There are a lot of reasons for this state of affairs. Crime has gone down dramatically since the early 1990s, but I don't think people have adjusted to the new reality in their minds. My personal experience growing up in suburbia is that it involves highly distorted (and self-glorifying) views of the realities of urban living, since why else did they move to the suburbs? And it cannot be denied that there is a sort of caveman justice to capital punishment that intuitively makes sense to people with certain assumptions. One of the key problems to anti-death penalty argumentation that I've come across as a death penalty opponent is that opponents tend to emphasize the poverty of the "deterrence" argument in favor of capital punishment. There is a major point to be made here, since the Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty for nearly two years with the Furman v. Georgia decision in the mid-1970s, and crime did not shoot up. Not only that, but the common sense rebuttal is compelling as well--one of the earliest episodes of The West Wing noticed that drug kingpins live every day under the threat of execution, so why would a more sanitary and drawn-out one threaten them at all? All of this is solid reasoning, but the problem is that it proves the wrong point. Nobody believes in capital punishment as a deterrent, as that's just the reasonable facade to make it seem a lot less like something intolerably dark. Fighting this point won't change any minds in and of itself, but most death penalty opponents (in my experience) tend to be rational types more swayed by evidence and reason than by emotion. Which is to say that they're basically the opposite of how most people process something like the death penalty. Which is part of the reason why things are the way they are. After all, if 2/3 support capital punishment and almost 9/10 admit that innocent people have been executed, there's clearly something other than dispassionate logical analysis going on here.

At some point, we death penalty opponents are going to have to realize that the reason we're getting our asses kicked is because we have never been able to rebut the Dukakis question. It's not terribly likely that one's wife or daughter will randomly be raped by a stranger and murdered, since most rape is date rape to begin with, but that is such a vivid and emotional example that virtually everyone can project themselves into, and all the reasonable arguments in the world aren't going to overtake emotionalism of that magnitude (Incidentally, the weakest rebuttal to the question, "If your daughter were raped and murdered, wouldn't you want to see the killer executed?" is "No."). I suppose the equivalent for the anti-capital punishment side is "What if your son happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got falsely accused of a murder and was sentenced to death?" which is simply a lot weaker than the other argument since accepting the premise requires someone to assume their child is associated somehow with undesirables, and if your strategy involves overcoming parental denial it's probably not a good strategy. It might work well among minorities with whom the police have a less friendly relationship overall, but that's going to reach only a limited amount of people, necessarily. How to make this argument to your average suburban household, then? I admit that I really don't know, and the lack of institutional support for ending capital punishment makes outreach all the more difficult. At best, the pro-life movement pays lip service to capital punishment. And that's at best. Then again, considering their track record, I don't think anyone is really crying out for their help.

When you get down to it, though, capital punishment functions as a microcosm of the American public's relationships with our civic institutions. In most cases, Americans are skeptical of pretty much all authority, rightly or not, and I can think of plenty of examples of both types. But when anything related to public safety comes up, people seem to become practically inured to any argumentation arguing for healthy skepticism. I'm always the optimist, and I do believe that America will eventually mature into a nation where emotionalism does not guide public policy with such a heavy hand. But that day has not come yet.

And we liked it!

Zack Handlen's write-up of the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Best of Both Worlds" (part one here, part two here) has some interesting insights into how television viewing has changed over the past 20 years:

I don't think I watched "Worlds" when it originally aired, so I have no idea if people actually believed Picard was lost. I kind of doubt they did, given Beverly's comments, and seeing as how we never actually see Worf firing the Magic Bullet that will supposedly take out the Borg cube; most cliffhangers don't resolve by just giving us the most obvious next step. But this was back before everyone knew about actor's contracts, before every casting development hit the Internet before the ink was dry. Plus, the episode is structured in such a way as to strongly indicate that Picard is on his way out.

Yes, secrecy and mystery are important to make any sort of creative endeavor more interesting. But there is also the possibility of picking up on different perspectives and missed details, which is a plus with one considers how much more sophisticated television has gotten since the 90s. I find it interesting that the cliffhanger seems to be out of favor these days--DVDs have encouraged people to see the season and not the episode as the fundamental indivisible unit of television, making the season-ending cliffhanger feel lazy instead of thrilling. Plus, after 24 ended every episode with a cliffhanger, and sometimes even put multiple cliffhangers in a single episode, it just seems like a tired device by now. But there is something to be said for the shock value of something like "Worlds", coupled with having to wait three months before seeing the conclusion.

Is Webb done?

Rumor has it that Jim Webb might not run for re-election. It is just a rumor. At this point, though, nothing would surprise me. It's amazing how quickly the Democrats seem to have just given up and accepted the "center-right nation" notion. Webb certainly seems to be one--he started out outspoken, economically populist and proud, and slowly he's morphed into a Bush tax cuts-supporting, DADT-anxious Southern Dem. It's been kind of sad to watch, actually.

I've mentioned this a few times, but I think Greg Sargent captured the struggle within the Democratic Party:

Three dozen moderate Dems have signed a letter to Dem leaders demanding a vote on extending all the tax cuts. And behind the scenes, they are telling House Dem leaders in no uncertain terms that they don't want a vote focused on just the middle class ones, the sources say. The leadership aide says moderates are complaining that if they take the vote, "they'll be subject to a 30 second ad saying they raised taxes."

When you have overwhelming public support for many of your agenda items, and you can't convert that into political victories, there are big, big problems. Not all of those are of the Democrats' making: Fox News, the corporatist Pravda; its enablers in the mainstream media, who are content to let lies stand as truth; Citizens United and its consequences; intense polarization based on cultural factors; and a thoroughly busted structure of government are all things that it's difficult to see how the Democrats can really address alone. So, I've been willing to cut them some slack, since in spite of all this they have accomplished a lot. More than any Congress/Administration pair since the Lyndon Johnson days, as a matter of fact, with a considerable handicap. That's worth a lot, in my opinion.

But the quote Sargent gets here tells a lot about how Democrats in Congress think. I get that there are tough obstacles, but in order to actually succeed, you have to actually believe you can succeed. That's not all you need to succeed, but it's an important precondition. I've met quite a few successful people in my day, and approximately none of them got that way because they were afraid people would say nasty things about them--if anything, they thrive on that stuff, as it gives them more of an incentive to succeed to prove the naysayers wrong. If you're in a place where you're afraid to vote for a tax cut for the middle class because it will be portrayed as a vote to increase taxes, then you've lost. You've been psyched out. All those obstacles don't even matter if you can't even get over the obstacles inside your own mind. And it's nuts, because while spin can accomplish a lot (like retconning Operation Iraqi Freedom into a mission to install liberal democracy in the Middle East), the spin suggested here is simply unintuitive. There's logic here, but the counterargument is so simple I don't see how it could be outspun. There's no desire to fight back against the smears, and there's not even a desire to fight the good fight, even if they lose. The implications are pretty shocking, if you draw them all out.

This just makes me think of the Iraq War Resolution, voted on a bit over eight years ago. Since then, we've had three wave elections that have produced major turnaround in the ranks of Congress. The Democratic Party's demographic makeup is way different now than it was back then, but when I think of the Democrats' performance in the immediate post-9/11 era, there are some striking similarities with how it still operates today. I keep thinking about the Jerry Seinfeld bit about how old people don't buy new clothes, they somehow keep finding new old clothes, which makes me wonder how the Democrats keep finding defeatist seat-fillers to take the place of the departed ones. Every once in a while, they get someone like Tom Perriello in there for a while, but it's hard not to see that as an exception. After the classes of 2006 and 2008 turned out to largely be busts, politically speaking, 2012 will present the Dems with a chance to get it right at last. Let's hope they don't screw it up.

Reality Check: One-term Obama Edition

Larry Sabato has a funny, tongue-in-cheek argument as to why Obama is absolutely a one-term president:

Nonetheless, we are quite confident in our assertions. President Clinton’s easy reelection to a second term in 1996 should imply nothing about 2012. The pendulum of American politics cannot swing so quickly in just two years, except maybe in 1994-1996.

Despite his upset victory over heavily favored Hillary Clinton in the ’08 Democratic contest and his easy win over a much more seasoned John McCain in November two years ago, Barack Obama lacks the political skills necessary to adjust to the new realities of divided government. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama is an inflexible liberal who couldn’t find the center with both hands, even if his career depended on it. And there is no chance at all the new Republican leadership in Congress could over-reach and repeat the errors of Newt Gingrich and his allies. The GOP legislative caucus contains no core of rigid ideologues that might go too far and create an opening for Obama.

Historically, incumbent presidents who have sought another term have won them by a two-to-one margin. Those aren’t impressive odds. How many of us would bet on a horse with minimal chances like that? Since 1900 only one incumbent president whose party captured the White House from the other party four years earlier (Jimmy Carter) has been beaten. The other incumbent losers—Taft, Hoover, Ford, and the senior Bush—were from a party that had held the White House for two or more consecutive terms. But the key is that Carter and Obama are practically twins; both won the Nobel Peace Prize. Enough said. Moreover, the present moment is unprecedentedly perilous for an incumbent president. There’s really no comparison in the existence of the American Republic, save for about a dozen crises like the Civil War, economic panics, the Great Depression, world wars, and 9/11.

I hadn't thought about the fact I bolded, but it's a good point. It's true that the economy will be a major determining factor here. But you have to have somebody to beat somebody. The president has a pretty unique hold on the public's attention and imagination in our system, for better or worse, and due to the personality-centric model of contemporary politics, for the Republicans to beat Obama they are fundamentally going to have to find somebody that the public actually likes more than Obama. None of their top-tier guys come close, with the possible exception of Huckabee, who has serious problems himself.

Of course, as the Republican blogs would say, there's always Marco Rubio. But will he Jindalize after inevitably being asked to respond to Obama's next SOTU, or will he be smart and decline the offer?

Quote of the Day

I'm a little too busy today to blog, but I just wanted to point you to this post, which breaks down the idiocy of Jim DeMint's following quote:

"Well, you can't be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative. A large part of the expansive government is to make up for a dysfunctional society because our culture's falling apart. The family's falling apart."

It's really not, of course. But did you expect anything else from DeMint?

DADT

I have been reading that it's likely to be stripped out of the Defense appropriations bill. Some liberals are wailing about it. Am I the only one who remembers that the law has already been overturned in the courts, which made the government ask for a stay pending appeal, and the law can come down at any time if Obama orders Eric Holder to drop the suit? Which is probably the most likely outcome at this point, though I wish that Democrats would actually try to land a few blows on the "moderate" Republicans who are keeping this from happening. And abolish the filibuster, since if Snowe/Collins/Brown/Kirk are too afraid to stand up to their leadership on this, where else are they going to provide bipartisanship?

The problem with Christian media

Sully links to a great article about why Christian-themed media is so awful. It's worth a read in full. As a Christian who avoids that stuff like the plague unless the purpose is to mock it (Fireproof: A laugh and a half for believers and heathens alike. It really is!), I think there need to be a few distinctions made here. I don't have anything against people who just don't care to watch movies with profanity, sex or violence in them. Personal preferences are what they are, and since there are plenty of movies that I won't watch due to my understanding of their content--the synopsis of the film Antichrist intrigued me, but after reading about the genital mutilation I skipped it--and if I were to say that people should watch a bunch of stuff that is just unpleasant to them, I'd pretty much be a hypocrite.

I don't really think this is the problem, though. I remember that my parents for a time received the Focus on the Family critical mag, which was titled "Plugged In", which is a great ironic title. I always found it to be a pretty good gauge of the evangelical/fundamentalist attitude toward art and culture because it was incapable of understanding several things. It was incapable of understanding that portraying something is not the same thing as endorsing it. I suppose this is an arguable point, and maybe in some specifics that is true (Truffaut's argument about the impossibility of making an anti-war film applies). But we're talking about a magazine that would do things like pan both Half-Baked and Requiem for a Dream because they were both about drug culture. Which is true--they are both about drug culture. But other than that, they are essentially opposite films, in terms of tone, approach, and their fundamental attitudes toward drug culture (and the drugs they portray, it should be noted). I get that critics miss the point sometimes, but there is a real disservice done here. I mean, both Philip Roth and Eyes Wide Shut are about sex, but Roth's books are all about how having sex is great, a part of vitality, and not really anything that should be suppressed, while Eyes Wide Shut tries to show a few reasons why sexual repression is necessary on some level, and how we couldn't function without it. Roth's work and Kubrick's film have flaws--I'd say Eyes is a severely flawed film that has some serious lapses in direction that go to show that Kubrick wasn't at full power near the end--but you almost have to be willfully obfuscating not to recognize the differences between different visions like that.

What this reflects is, as the author argues, basically an inability to think about art in any manner other than at face value. It's part and parcel of a movement in Christianity to reduce literally every aspect of the Christian experience to feelings (and, particularly, upbeat feelings), with learning being a tertiary (or even nonexistent) influence. It's unbalanced, obviously, and it's been pretty damaging to Christianity over the past decade on a number of levels--note the soaring number of people who don't claim a particular faith, for example. I can't imagine Kirk Cameron's performance in Fireproof, inspires anyone to take Christianity more seriously. Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation of Christ? Admittedly not a fully canonical Christian film, but who knows?

Democrats after defeat

Benen and Drum are disgusted:

Honest to God, stuff like this just makes me want to scream. Why do Democrats panic so badly whenever they lose an election? Why run to the nearest reporter to spout idiocies about Obama not feeling middle class pain or not being an extrovert like Bill Clinton? Bill Clinton! For chrissake, I like and defend the guy, but he was an extrovert who felt people's pain and he lost 54 seats in the 1994 midterm. No one cared if he felt their pain. Likewise, no one cares if Obama feels their pain. They want jobs, not pursed lips and moist eyes.

Drum is right: the talking point about Clinton is really stupid. But my take on this is pretty different: I was just thinking that the circular firing squad isn't nearly as intense this time around as it has been in the past. I mean, the despair after 2004--in which Democrats lost a national election by all of three percentage points--was quite dispiriting and just unnecessary. But so far, all I've heard are the complaints of an outgoing conservative Democratic governor from Tennessee, a TNR columnist who always thinks the Democrats are too far to the left, and Alex Sink, who is most likely just looking for someone to blame after losing a high-profile election to an ex-con in Florida. If that's as bad as it gets, then I'm not that worried.

Also, on a tangentially related note, Yglesias is right about this:

It looks like Nancy Pelosi is going to stick around as Top Democrat in the House. This has led to a dumb media meme about her continued presence being a political millstone for the party moving forward. That’s dumb. People pushing that narrative should recall that when Pelosi first took over as minority leader the CW was that her ascension doomed the party to perpetual minority status. The fact of the matter is that congressional leaders just don’t play that kind of role. House leadership is very important to what actually happens in the House of Representatives and their political importance is strictly secondary to that.

Pelosi was never the problem. Every poll shows her as more personally popular than Boehner, but nobody ever suggested that Boehner's presence as leader would consign the Republicans to a minority status. People generally seem to have a vague dislike for congressional leaders because they have a dislike for Congress, largely because the economy is so poor. But outside of the far right, is there really an intense animosity to Pelosi? My impression is that few really know or care too much about her. And if that's the case, her legislative talents recommend her to stay at the top spot. On the other hand, there might be good reason for Senate Democrats to ask Harry Reid to step down and let Chuck Schumer have a shot at the leadership, on the basis that Schumer is more tenacious, has a more aggressive style that could rile up the base a bit more, and can communicate a lot better than Reid. But I've come to the conclusion that Reid has done about as well as can be expected under the circumstances, and I suspect that his come-from-behind victory for re-election has boosted his personal stock considerably. I bet he doesn't even draw a leadership challenge.