Losing Faith in the Democratic Majority Materializing

Back in January, I made predictions for this fall's Senate, House, and gubernatorial races, predicting some very impressive gains for Democrats. Three months later, the Bush administration has endured an unending barrage of negative publicity, the corruption scandals related to Jack Abramoff have tainted the entire Republican and led to the resignation of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and a string of policy failures have made Congress look even weaker now that it did at the end of 2005. Yet even with all this negative mojo plaguing majority Republicans, I can state without reservation that the Democrats are in a weaker position to pull off the kind of electoral wide that is necessary to return to the majority.

So what's going wrong?

For starters, the outlook for individual races has not improved for Democrats as the campaign season has proceeded. In the Senate races, pressure by party leaders prompted a disillusioned Paul Hackett out of the race in Ohio. Hackett was the kind of charismatic straight-shooter who would have been able to win over voters who didn't personally agree with him on all or even most issues. He was a loose cannon prone to bombastic statements that could have easily been his Achille's heel, but he was nonetheless the candidate better positioned to take out Republican incumbent Mike DeWine. Sherrod Brown, the northeast Ohio Congressman who Democratic party leaders preferred, has a nice progressive voting record, but is short on charisma and long on arrogance all too often. In the southern region of the state where Hackett would have been able to still thousands of Republican votes, Brown most likely will get skunked.....and lose the race. The odds for picking up the Ohio Senate seat got a lot longer with the withdrawal of Hackett from the race.....and Brown's lackluster campaign is pulling it further out of reach with each passing day.

Little has significantly changed in the other battleground Senate races since January, but all kinds of things have changed in the House. Unfortunately, I don't believe any of these changes have produced a net gain for Democrats. On the positive side, senior Republicans Jim Kolbe and Sherwood Boehlert are retiring, turning their swing districts into top-tier battlegrounds; former Democratic Congressman Ken Lucas is coming out of retirement to try to take back his conservative northern Kentucky district; and Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth won her hotly-contested primary in the open IL-06 district, upping Democratic chances of swiping Henry Hyde's vacated seat.

On the other hand, "Fighting Dem" Tim Dunn, the only Democrat who could win North Carolina's conservative 8th district, has changed his mind about running; easy target Tom DeLay is resigning, decreasing the chances of Nick Lampson to turn that district blue (and robbing Dems of a key bogeyman for their "culture of corruption" theme); and Democrat Charlie Wilson of OH-06 screwed up his ballot petition and will now have to see if he squeak by in next month's primary as a write-in candidate against two token contenders who apparently were smart enough to turn in a sufficient ballot petition.

But the most disheartening event of recent months was last week's special election for California's 50th district, where the open seat vacated by prison-bound Randy "Crook" Cunningham. Here was a case where an exposed Republican crook had just left his Republican-leaning seat in an ultimate act of disgrace. The Democrats had a candidate in Francine Busby with strong name recognition (she ran against Cunningham in 2004), a generous bank account, and a divided field of Republican candidates. Few suspected Busby would pull in the necessary 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff in June, but the existing situation in the country left Democrats optimistic for a 47% or 48% showing that would position her well for the runoff. But when the time came, Busby could only muster 44%, barely overperforming John Kerry's performance in 2004. Her eventual Republican challenger, Brian Bilbray, only pulled in 15% in the crowded GOP field, but it's now an extreme longshot for Busby to improve her performance by 6% in the runoff considering nearly all of the 56% of voters who didn't cast a ballot for her last Tuesday voted for a Republican of some stripe.

The post-mortem in this race is troubling for a number of reasons. Busby couldn't seal the deal even in the current political environment where we're told Republicans are in such deep trouble. In fact, she barely did better in this district than Kerry did, indicating the partisan needle may not have moved as far as many Dems have thought. Even worse is that turnout was an abysmal 36%. While turnout is always low in special elections, lackluster turnout here is indicative of an electorate that is not yet outraged to the point of "needing change"....and the Democrats need voters, particularly independents, at that point come November 7. If Busby had consolidated the independent vote and Democrats in the district, she would have won....but if she can't even motivate the independents to come to the polls, it's a moot point.

The lack of motivation of independent voters is a troubling sign heading into this fall's midterms. Current conventional wisdom suggests that it's disillusioned Republican voters who will be too angry or disappointed with the President to head to the polls this November, but I'm not buying it. This is the post-Karl Rove era, where one stray comment by Nancy Pelosi or one well-timed exploitation of a mindless wedge issue will compel the GOP true believers to the polls in one fell swoop. And Republicans know they're in trouble, as opposed to Democrats at this time in 1994 when they thought the upcoming November midterms would essentially be business as usual. That will give them ample opportunity to formulate a Rovian strategy to minimize losses and fuel Republican turnout. Assuming Republican turnout is comparable to what it was in 2002 and 2004, the Dems will be completely dependent upon a near-sweep of independent voters, and the preliminary CA-50 results indicate the Dems have a long way to go in making that sale.

Alot can happen in the next 6 1/2 months, but the Democrats had better have a strategy that rises above "we're not them" if they plan to be taken seriously. I'm torn over whether a Democratic alternative of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America is the right strategy or not, but they need some sort of affirmative message to bring to this campaign beyond the "culture of corruption" tagline for Republicans. If they do, they can still win the 15 seats they need to take back the House of Representatives. If they don't, they'll almost assuredly have two more years to drift further into the political wilderness.

One More Year in Iraq....And Not a Day More

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the biggest foreign policy mistake in the nation's history. Sensible and informed voices on both sides of the political aisle warned the Bush administration not to open up this can of worms, to no avail. Now, we are stuck in a brutal and senseless quagmire that is likely to go on for many years if somebody doesn't put their foot down.

There are obviously no easy answers here. There is certainly merit to the neo-conservative claims that leaving Iraq prematurely could make a bad situation considerably worse. Unfortunately, things are getting considerably worse even with U.S. troops operating at full capacity in Iraq. A total absence of U.S. troops would likely accelerate the descent to all-out civil war that could spread throughout the Middle East, but at this point that shouldn't be America's problem. I have long resisted the idea of troop withdrawal out of a sense of duty to the Iraqis whose government we toppled. But multiple democratic elections later, we have to allow this new government to proceed the same as any other democratically-elected government proceeds...through the good and the bad.

It's also become abundantly clear that the Iraqi Security Forces need a serious motivational kick in the ass. After 2 1/2 years, very few ISF battallions are combat-ready, in comparison to American military battallions ready for combat in six months. Clearly there were plenty of logistical and cultural t's to cross and i's to dot with Iraqi's ISF, but it's become abundantly clear that the Iraqis have little incentive to be self-sufficient as long as they have the coalition force's "welfare army" to lean on. It's mind-blowing that the same domestic conservative voices preaching "self-sufficiency" when it comes to poor people at home refuse to apply the same premise to an Iraqi population that refuses to takes it own security seriously.

Setting a rigid timeline for withdrawal sends a much-needed "get your shit together" message to the government and security forces of Iraq. I'm not optimistic that they'll be able to avoid a bloody and long-term civil war, but there's little reason for the U.S. troops and taxpayers to finance a continued American presence in a sovereign state's internal conflict. This may sound ethically self-serving considering the U.S. is responsible for fueling Iraq's internal conflict, and it probably is. But the needless loss of thousands more American lives in the name of nationalism and dumb American pride is even more ethically self-serving.

Even if the bottom falls out in the next year in Iraq, we should hold firm to our pullout deadline of Easter 2007. When you're in a hole, you cannot keep digging......a common sense philosophy that was too difficult for America to accept during Vietnam, but one we have to accept more than 30 years later.

Both Sides Get It Wrong on Immigration

Much has been made of the bitter divisions that the recent immigration debate has exposed in the Republican Party. Far less ink has been dedicated to the divisions among Democrats on the issue, even though the chasmic disparity among Dems is just as if not more pronounced (and emotional) as the split among Republicans.

With Republicans, the great divide pits the cultural conservatives ("no amnesty for lawbreaking invaders!") against the Chamber of Commerce hacks ("we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won't do!") With Democrats, the limousine liberals ("we're a nation of immigrants!") are much more quietly facing off against labor defenders ("immigration suppresses wage levels for working people!"). Personally, I'm firmly aligned with the labor wing of the Democratic Party, and have personally witnessed the saturation of the low-skill/semi-skill labor pool via immigration cut wage levels by half in what were some of the best-paying industries in the country. And while the media obsesses about the split among Republicans over immigration, it's the Democratic Party that probably stands to lose the most if the immigration agenda they appear to be endorsing comes to fruition.

It is truly sickening to see Ted Kennedy and the vast majority of Senate Democrats align themselves with cheap-labor conservatives, particularly in the push for a noxious "guest worker program" (hats off to North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan for being the first Senate Dem to balk about what a sellout such a program would be to working people). The Democratic sellout of their traditional voter base can be understood based on two different phenomena. The first and most obvious of the two is that they are whoring themselves for "the Hispanic vote", which most Dems believe will solidify a long-term Democratic majority because of demographic shifts. Secondly, "the working man" matters less to the Democratic Party with each passing day. The recent high-profile crackup of the AFL-CIO will further marginalize the influence of labor, and the amount of money they'll be able to produce for Democratic candidates in future election cycles.

Yet despite the labor vacuum, Democrats have actually done very well in fundraising in recent years. Where is the money coming from? "The new left", specifically latte-sipping elitists from Manhattan's Upper West Side and the posh mansions of Beverly Hills, along with professors from college towns all over America. For the most part, the "new left" is isolated from the everyday struggles of working people, making it easier to ignore the consequences of unbridled immigration beyond their romanticized visions of a multicultural utopia. Even revered liberal economists/columnists Bob Samuelson of The Washington Post and Paul Krugman of The New York Times, who both wrote columns warning us what a bad bargain current immigration reform proposals are, don't seem to have succeeded in exposing the "jobs Americans won't do" canard for the heap of bourgeoise bullshit that it is.

Clearly, we have a huge immigration problem and we have to do something. What should it be? First, swallow our pride and grant amnesty and a track to citizenship for the 12 million illegals currently living in America. Deporting all of these illegals is not a realistic option, nor is the current "compromise" being debated in the Senate where amnesty will only be granted to those who have been here illegally the longest, sending the Jose-come-latelys back across the Rio Grande. And it doesn't do us any good to have a segment of our population the size of Ohio living beneath the radar and disengaged from the political process of the nation in which they work, live and raise a family. It would be particularly pointless to deny emergency health care and education to illegal immigrants and their children, assuring that the problems of current immigrants will extend to the next generation. Some of the Republican immigration proposals are sound, but they have to realize we need to bite the bullet and legalize the current batch of illegals amongst us.

Secondly, however, we have to secure our borders to stem the ruinous influx. Limousine liberals gasp in horror at the prospect of building a huge, ugly fence along our border, but most Republicans (and a growing number of Democrats) are right to keep this on the table as a viable option. Post-9/11 security concerns being what they are, it's almost shocking that we don't already have a fence on the border. And guess which country has a fortress on its southern border? That'd be Mexico. They'll be damned if they're gonna let all that cheap labor from Central America suppress their wages! They have no moral authority here. If we don't follow Mexico's lead and take whatever steps necessary to seal our borders, we'll find ourselves granting "amnesty" to tens of millions more illegal immigrants 20 years from now. That's unacceptable.....and even the most clueless open borders ideologues should recognize that.

Third, we should customize our legal immigration channels to carefully manage labor demand rather than saturate labor supply. Nursing is a professional employment field where we already have a labor shortage, and are expected to have a much larger labor shortage in the future. Letting in a sufficient number of nurses (and nursing students) would be a win-win for everybody. And low-skill/semi-skill immigrants should by no means be excluded from continued acceptance in our country. A controlled influx blue-collar immigrants inject needed growth in the domestic labor market and the competition fuels and helpful productivity motivation for native-born workers. The problem comes when entire industries become so monopolized by immigrant workers that they suppress wage and benefit levels and drive down industry working conditions, such has been the case with meatpacking and increasingly commonplace in drywalling and construction. A smarter approach to who we legally let in, combined with a fiercer gauntlet to keep others out, would produce countless dividends for the country and the economy.

Lastly, as I opined about in a previous thread, we must avoid at all costs the institutionalized apartheid of a "guest worker program", which would disenfranchise and dehumanize generation upon generation of immigrant workers...and create an incentive for as many American industries as possible to slash wages and benefits, then throw their hands in the air and declare themselves in possession of "jobs Americans won't do", enabling them to qualify for a pipeline of "guest workers". Of all the proposals floated around regarding immigration, the "guest worker program" is the hands-down worst....which of course means it's the most politically popular and most likely to be passed into law this year.

The ultimate irony is that the Democrats' calculated alliance with cheap labor barons over immigration will most likely result in their LOSING rather than gaining political momentum. I diarized on the Daily Kos last month that most counties that have seen an influx of cheap labor-related immigration in the past 20 years have gotten MORE REPUBLICAN over that same period of time, and I provided an arm's length of examples to validate the theory. The calculus of this enigma is quite simple. Most Hispanics are non-citizens and don't vote. Since Republicans are most likely to talk tough about immigration, communities teeming with foreign-born newcomers end up producing a white working class that's more Republican, a black working class that's less Democratic, and an invisible non-citizen Hispanic working class that never has and never will vote. With a "guest worker program", Hispanic disenfranchisement will rise as a percentage of their overall population.....not exactly a fast-track for a minority political party to become a majority.

In the short-term, George Bush will be the public face of the "guest worker program", and will likely alienate plenty of voters because of it. However, most elected Republicans are not in sync with Bush over this issue, while most elected Democrats support it. At least under the formula being set up today, the Democratic Party is permanently cementing its political tomb by putting the interests of illegal immigrants over the interests of their own working-class base.

Doylie, You're Doing a Heckuva Job!

In Chapter 326 of the same old novel, another member of the Bush administration is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. This time, it was Homeland Security Department Press Secretary Brian Doyle, who solicited a 14-year-old girl for sex online, flaunting his Homeland Security credentials to try to weasel her into his bed (I couldn't make this stuff up). The plan backfired when the "girl" turned out to be an undercover cop who entrapped him. And here I thought entrapment laws were only waived when it came to fining minimum-wage store clerks who sell a pack of cigarettes to 17-year-old narcs.

What a relief that the Republicans fought so hard to install that Department of Homeland Security. Those wizards have been coming through for us time and time again since the department's inception. And I fully expect Brian Doyle to follow George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld in receiving the coveted Medal of Freedom.