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The 'mushy middle' hard to reach for Obama, McCain
By LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press Writer
12:15 PM EDT, July 3, 2008
WASHINGTON
They're the most fickle voters, and potentially the most powerful. Thus, with party nominations secure, John McCain and Barack Obama now are pushing toward the center to win them over.Meet the "mushy middle," a complex chunk of people likely to decide the presidential election but difficult to reach and hard to please.
"Yes, we can!" isn't floating their boat. Nothing much is, from either candidate.
They aren't uniformly conservative or liberal, and they don't fit strict Republican or Democratic orthodoxy. They aren't typically engaged in politics, and they don't much care about the campaign. And like so many others, they are extraordinarily pessimistic.
"To me, it's not about the party, it's about who is the best person for the job," says Pam Robinett, 47, from Wellington, Kan., who always votes. Then again, "they'll all lie, cheat and steal to get what they want."
Talk about a tough sell.
"The country's going to go to hell in a handbasket with this election," seethes James Nauman, 55, from Lutz, Fla. "I don't think Obama's qualified and McCain's another Bush. Neither of them really have impressed me."
Both will try.
A recent AP-Yahoo News poll finds that 15 percent call themselves moderates and aren't solidly supporting a candidate. More than half of this still-persuadable middle is made up of independents.
"The center always matters," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "It matters more this year. Both candidates were nominated because they appealed to independents and moderates, so how these voters make a choice between Obama and McCain will be even more decisive."
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For now, at least, the race is competitive and the rivals' bases are mostly intact.
The survey, conducted by Knowledge Networks, found that three in four Republicans and three in four conservatives are backing McCain, while Obama has nearly identical support among Democrats and liberals.
So, both are tacking away from their party's ideological ends to appeal to this unpredictable swath in between.
McCain is moving away from the unpopular President Bush if not from the Republican Party itself. He emphasizes bipartisanship while pressing two issues that resonate strongly with voters of all stripes.
He "stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming," one McCain commercial says. Another promotes a "bipartisan plan to lower prices at the pump, reduce dependence on foreign oil through domestic drilling and champion energy alternatives."
Obama, for his part, broke from the left by backing new rules for the government's terrorist eavesdropping program, straddling a Supreme Court ruling striking down a gun ban and objecting to the justices' decision outlawing executions of child rapists. He even quoted conservative hero Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" line in reacting to North Korea's latest agreement on nuclear weapons.
His leadoff campaign commercial cast him as the embodiment of the center and pitched family values, patriotism, "welfare to work" and lower taxes. It stressed "love of country" and "working hard without making excuses" -- echoes of Bill Clinton.
McCain naturally may be better positioned to capture more of the middle; he came out of the GOP's center to dispatch liberal Rudy Giuliani on his left and conservative Mitt Romney and Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee on his right. Obama emerged from the party's left to topple the more centrist Hillary Rodham Clinton.
However, Obama and McCain both won their nominations with the support of independents, moderates and crossovers from the opposite party.
Some 39 percent of voters called themselves Democratic, 29 percent Republican, and 32 percent independent in the June 13-23 survey, part of an ongoing study tracking opinions of the same group of people over the election cycle. The overall margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
That Democratic edge suggests Obama may be less dependent on votes in the middle than McCain.
Still, the likeliest path to the White House cuts through the center of the electorate.
"They're the kingmakers in American politics," said Matt Bennett, a Democratic operative at the centrist Third Way policy group. "They're the people who decide elections."
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Who exactly are these power-wielding voters?
They look much like the general population. They reflect the same frustration with the status quo. A significant majority has a low opinion of Bush and Congress. They have more favorable impressions of Democrats than Republicans. Many are feeling the economic pinch. They want troops to return from Iraq as soon as possible.
Like the broad electorate, they rank gas prices and the economy as their top concerns, followed by health care, Social Security, taxes and education. Terrorism and Iraq are lower.
But there are important differences.
Compared with far-right and far-left voters, this group tends to be more Hispanic, more Catholic than the left and more secular than the right. They are more likely to be married with children and live in far-flung suburbs or rural areas. They also tend to be less educated.
They are not nearly as motivated as those who identify with political parties or ideologies. Fewer are registered to vote.
"These are the most disengaged voters," said Ron Shaiko, a public policy specialist at Dartmouth College. "There's a point at which they're going to engage, and it's not clear who will win when they do."
Nearly half view McCain favorably, while slightly more than a third see Obama positively. Still, the candidates are little-known to a quarter, and many have little enthusiasm for either.
"I like McCain more because I'm concerned about Obama. I question his judgments," says Tony Miller, 39 and a left-leaning moderate from Springfield, Ill. Conversely, Susan Carroll, 43, a moderate Democrat from Garrettsville, Ohio, says Obama's "the better choice" because "I honestly think that McCain is anti-woman."
This voting group's views cross some of the usual lines.
For instance, they overwhelmingly favor abortion rights and legal rights for same-sex couples, typically Democratic and liberal positions. But they also overwhelmingly say cutting taxes should be a high priority, typically a Republican and conservative refrain.
These voters say they are far less interested in cultural issues and far more interested in bread-and-butter subjects like health care and Social Security.
"The center of the American electorate -- moderates, independents and ticket splitters -- is an amalgam of disparate interests with the following commonality: all are a few points from the ideological center of the country, and they tend to be fiscally conservative and socially tolerant," said Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster in New York.
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Take Jan Thomas.
"I'm liberal in some areas and I'm conservative in others," says the undecided moderate from Stevensville, Mont., who is 69 and shuns party labels.
Unlike the GOP, she supports abortion rights and declares "to each his own" on gay marriage. Splitting from the Democrats, she objects to "big government," costly entitlement programs that "lead to dependency" and universal health care proposals "that mean higher taxes."
She's unsettled about both candidates.
Obama's "inexperience and his voting record on gun control" bug her; she owns two handguns, a shotgun and a rifle and is still "a pretty good shot." She doesn't like McCain's "vacillating" or stances on the environment and comprehensive immigration reform. "I do not believe in global warming," she says. And "we've got to secure our borders."
David Donovan, 31, a GOP-leaning independent from Crystal River, Fla., also is "not exactly thrilled with either of them."
McCain on foreign policy "just doesn't make a lot of sense," but Obama's "abundance of gun control" irks this gun owner, as does the Democrats' education platform. And, he says, "I think taxes suck."
Not that he has time to follow the campaign closely; Donovan travels 150 miles roundtrip to build bridges for 14 hours a day. The commute costs his one-income household $50 in tolls and $220 in fuel each week. He and his wife haven't had health care coverage for two years. She's on disability after seven mild strokes. Her student loan debt is growing.
"There are some days where I'd vote for Mickey Mouse for president," Donovan said. "It's got to be better than this."
March 22, 2007
Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007
Political Landscape More Favorable To Democrats
Summary of Findings
View the complete report in pdf format
Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.
At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew's longitudinal measures of the public's basic political, social and economic values. The proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.
Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.
Yet the Democrats' growing advantage in party identification is tempered by the fact that the Democratic Party's overall standing with the public is no better than it was when President Bush was first inaugurated in 2001. Instead, it is the Republican Party that has rapidly lost public support, particularly among political independents. Faced with an unpopular president who is waging an increasingly unpopular war, the proportion of Americans who hold a favorable view of the Republican Party stands at 41%, down 15 points since January 2001. But during that same period, the proportion expressing a positive view of Democrats has declined by six points, to 54%.
The study of the public's political values and attitudes by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press – the most recent in a series of such reports dating back to 1987 – finds a pattern of rising support since the mid-1990s for government action to help disadvantaged Americans. More Americans believe that the government has a responsibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, and that it should help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt.
These attitudes have undergone a major change since 1994, when the Republicans won control of Congress. In particular, 54% say the government should help more needy people, even if it adds to the nation's debt, up from just 41% in 1994. All party groups are now more supportive of government aid to the poor, though Republicans remain much less supportive than Democrats or independents if it means adding to the deficit.
Despite these favorable shifts in support for more government help for the poor, 69% agree that "poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs." Still, the number in agreement has been declining over the past decade.
More broadly, the poll finds that money worries are rising. More than four-in-ten (44%) say they "don't have enough money to make ends meet," up from 35% in 2002. While a majority continues to say they are "pretty well satisfied" with their personal financial situation, that number is lower than it has been in more than a decade.
In addition, an increasing number of Americans subscribe to the sentiment "today it's really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer." Currently, 73% concur with that sentiment, up from 65% five years ago. Growing concerns about income inequality are most apparent among affluent Americans; large percentages of lower-income people have long held this opinion.
The new survey also shows that the deep partisan fissure in values and core attitudes revealed in Pew's previous survey in 2003 has narrowed slightly. But Republicans and Democrats remain far apart in their fundamental attitudes toward government, national security, social values, and even in evaluations of personal finances. Three-in-four (74%) Republicans with annual incomes of less than $50,000 say they are "pretty well satisfied" with their financial conditions compared with 40% of Democrats and 39% of independents with similar incomes.
Even as Americans express greater commitment to solving domestic problems, they voice more hesitancy about global engagement. They also are less disposed than five years ago to favor a strong military as the best way to ensure peace.
In 2002, less than a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, more than six-in-ten agreed with the statement, "The best way to ensure peace is through military strength." Today, about half express similar confidence in military power.
The latest values survey, conducted Dec. 12, 2006-Jan. 9, 2007, finds a reversal of increased religiosity observed in the mid-1990s. While most Americans remain religious in both belief and practice, the percentage expressing strong religious beliefs has edged down since the 1990s. And the survey finds an increase in the relatively small percentage of the public that can be categorized as secular.
In Pew surveys since the beginning of 2006, 12% identified themselves as unaffiliated with a religious tradition. That compares with 8% in the Pew values survey in 1987. This change appears to be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one.
In addition, political differences in levels of religious commitment are larger now than in years past. Republicans are at least as religious as they were 10 or 20 years ago, based on the numbers expressing belief in God, citing prayer as important, and other measures. By contrast, Democrats express lower levels of commitment than in the late 1980s and 1990s.
At the same time, the survey records further declines in traditional social attitudes. The poll finds greater public acceptance of homosexuality and less desire for women to play traditional roles in society. Both represent a continuation of trends that have been apparent over the past 20 years, and have occurred mostly among older people. The younger generations have changed the least, as they have consistently expressed more accepting points of view over the past 20 years.
Divides on some once-contentious issues also appear to be closing. In 1995, 58% said they favored affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better jobs. That percentage has risen steadily since, and stands at 70% in the current poll. Gains in support for affirmative action have occurred to almost the same extent among Republicans (+8), Democrats (+10), and Independents (+14).
Changes nationally in the beliefs of Americans on social, political and religious values tell a revealing but incomplete story. The proportion of voters who hold certain politically relevant core beliefs varies widely from state to state, further complicating an already complicated 2008 election campaign. For example, politically conservative, white evangelical Christians make up 10% of all Republicans and Republican leaners in New Hampshire – currently the first state to hold its presidential primaries in 2008 – but 39% of all GOP partisans in South Carolina where primary voters go to the polls several days later. On the Democratic side, the proportion of Democrats who say they are politically liberal ranges from 38% in California to 25% in South Carolina. (See pages 10-11 for a fuller ideological profiling of key primary states)
Among other key findings from the wide-ranging survey:
- The public expresses highly favorable views of many leading corporations. Johnson & Johnson and Google have the most positive images of 23 corporations tested. At the bottom of the list: Halliburton, which is viewed favorably by fewer than half of those familiar enough with the company to give it a rating.
- Views of many corporations vary significantly among Democrats along class lines. Two-thirds of working-class Democrats have a favorable view of Wal-Mart compared with 45% of professional-class Democrats.
- Americans are worried more that businesses rather than government are snooping into their lives. About three-in-four (74%) say they are concerned that business corporations are collecting too much personal information while 58% express the same concern about the government.
- The public is losing confidence in itself. A dwindling majority (57%) say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions. Similarly, the proportion who agrees that Americans "can always find a way to solve our problems" has dropped 16 points in the past five years.
- Americans feel increasingly estranged from their government. Barely a third (34%) agree with the statement, "most elected officials care what people like me think," nearly matching the 20-year low of 33% recorded in 1994 and a 10-point drop since 2002.
- Young people continue to hold a more favorable view of government than do other Americans. At the same time, young adults express the least interest in voting and other forms of political participation.
- Interpersonal racial attitudes continue to moderate. More than eight-in-ten (83%) agree that "it's all right for blacks and whites to date," up six percentage points since 2003 and 13 points from a Pew survey conducted 10 years ago.
- Republicans are increasingly divided over the cultural impact of immigrants. Nearly seven-in-ten (68%) conservative Republicans say immigrants threaten American customs, compared with 43% of GOP moderates and liberals. Democrats have long been divided along ideological lines, but the GOP previously had not been.
Roadmap to the Report
Section 1, which begins on p. 7, describes the striking shift in party identification over the past five years, the public's views of both parties, and the ideological profile of the early presidential primary states. Section 2, which details the public's views of the government safety net, success and empowerment, and personal finances, begins on p. 12. Section 3 (p. 19) covers public attitudes toward foreign policy and national security. Section 4 (p. 30) covers opinions about religion and social issues. Section 5 (p. 39) describes changing attitudes toward race and race relations. Section 6 (p. 45) discusses the public's complex views about government and political participation. Opinions about business, and ratings for individual corporations, are covered in Section 7, which begins on p. 52. Section 8 covers public views about civil liberties, the environment, and science.
October/November 2005No Right TurnIf Americans haven't gotten more conservativewhy is the GOP in charge? |
Yet, as political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue convincingly in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, there are scant public opinion data to suggest that is so. They cite political scientist James Stimson, who's been recording the "national mood" through a survey of over 200 questions for over two decades and finds Americans no more conservative today than they were in 1972. National Election Survey data reveals that Americans are less likely than they were in the '70s to say that the government is "too powerful," and the percentages of the electorate that identify as liberal and conservative respectively have remained unchanged for nearly three decades. "It is striking," they write, "that across all of the major left-right issues, one is hard pressed to find any evidence that Americans are markedly more conservative today than they were in the recent (and even relatively distant) past."
So what gives? That, of course, is the big question occupying progressive writers, academics, and public intellectuals of all stripes, and if Off Center's answers aren't entirely novel, the book's detail, specificity, and comprehensiveness make it a vital contribution. Two key trends are at work according to Hacker and Pierson: the growing numerical and financial strength of the Republican base and the GOP's refinement of a variety of tactical gambits--unified mostly by their reliance on subterfuge--to subvert the normal mechanisms that prevent majority coalitions from pushing through a radical agenda. All of this combines to produce "a systematic weakening of the institutional bonds that connect ordinary voters with elected politicians to ensure that American politics remains on center."
One standard view of the American constitutional system is that its checks, balances, diffuse power, and obstacles at every turn invest the most power in those closest to the center of the political spectrum: the independent voters and centrist legislators who can tip the scales in favor of a candidate or piece of legislation. According to this view, when the "the public and the base conflict," Hacker and Pierson write, "the public wins." But in the last several decades, the economic base of the GOP--the top fifth of income earners (which vote for and contribute overwhelmingly to the GOP)--has become far wealthier and far more politically involved than it once was. At the same time, the migration of the South into the Republican column has removed what was once a kind of centrist anchor. Southern politicians were generally extreme, even viciously conservative on social issues, but often downright liberal on economics; when Barry Goldwater floated the idea of privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, Southern supporters rushed to denounce the idea. The conversion of Southern conservative Democrats into free-market crusaders and Republican partisans has created such a large conservative base that Karl Rove and Tom DeLay need to poach only a relatively small number of independents and moderates in order to win elections or pass legislation.
If there's a wicked genius in the GOP strategy, it's in understanding that they can get enough of these moderate votes without actually moderating the content of their policies. Take the first set of tax cuts pushed through by the GOP in 2001--even before, the authors note, the president gained the political capital of a wartime leader. At the time, dozens of polls showed that tax cuts were simply not a priority of the American public. As Bush was sworn in, just 5 percent of voters polled said that taxes were the nation's "most important problem," and when given a choice between spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare or tax cuts, tax cuts garnered support from barely a quarter of those polled. The administration knew all this full well. Treasury official Michele Davis wrote in a memo to then-secretary Paul O'Neill (reprinted in the book): "The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes."
Here, then, was the first time the administration was faced with the fundamental obstacle to implementing the Gilded Age governing vision of its benefactors and leaders: The policies that would enrich its wealthy base were not those the general public wanted. But the Bush administration understood something profound about public opinion, something Hacker and Pierson only implicitly allude to but don't quite seem to grasp. Polls might be the best way of figuring out the public's stance on a wide variety of issues, but insofar as they carve the world into issue categories, they build in a way of thinking about politics that isn't necessarily reflective of what motivates people when they actually cast their ballots. If you ask the public if the growing deficit is a problem, they say "yes" overwhelmingly, but in the words of one Bush aide "Name me one person who has lost an election because of the deficit." In other words: It doesn't matter what people think about issues, it only matters what they vote on. In this respect, Bush is telling the truth when he says he doesn't listen to the polls. He realizes that on a whole host of issues, he doesn't have to.
And the tax cuts are another perfect example. Tax cuts are a kind of political junk food. If you ask Americans if they want them, they may say no, but when they're actually right there in front of the voter on the plate, they're hard to resist. Instead of choosing between its wealthy paymasters and the public at large, the GOP figured out a way to have their tax cuts and eat them, too. They just had to muddy the waters long enough to get them passed. So they lied about both the intentions and the effects of the policy--Davis told O'Neill it was "crucial that your remarks make clear that there is no trade-off" between the tax cuts and spending on other programs. And more insidiously, they structured the cuts themselves in such a way as to hide their intent and effect. Republicans front-loaded the few benefits there were for the middle class while slowly phasing in the porcine pay-offs for the uber wealthy. And they inserted sunset provisions to reduce the putative cost of the tax cuts despite the fact they knew they'd be able to browbeat enough legislators into making the cuts permanent. Once it was all done, despite the outcries from progressive critics, the public simply shrugged it off.
The process that produced the 2001 tax cuts has been repeated ad nauseum in the years that have followed, resulting in--just to name a few--three additional successive tax cuts, the Patriot Act rammed through under the cover of night, and the Medicare boondoggle. In all these cases, the problem, Hacker and Pierson argue, is not that policies are complex but rather that the policy features "are designed to hide what policies are really doing while deliberately restricting the scope for future democratic choice." To those who have been following politics for the last several years, this is nothing new. But the authors do a fine job of documenting the extent to which the GOP, rather than using its political power to create policies, uses its policies to advance its political agenda.
It would be naïve to assert that this is entirely novel: All effective politicians use policies for political purposes. But Hacker and Pierson point out just how totally the aims of governance have been subsumed in the aims of furthering GOP hegemony. John DiIulio, who directed the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and whose critiques are heavily cited in the book, pointed out in a 2002 letter to journalist Ron Suskind that the total domination of politics over policy in the Bush White House is completely unprecedented: "In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions…the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking."
What DiIulio describes is the inner workings of a classic political machine, the guiding ethos of which, in the legendary phrasing of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, makes no distinction between politics and policy. "Good politics is good government," Hizzoner used to say, "and good government is good politics." The Rove/DeLay/ Norquist machine, in this respect, is no different than its predecessors. It seeks what all machines seek: to discredit, manipulate, intimidate, or marginalize any source of power outside the machine itself.
The second half of Off Center describes in detail how the "Republican Machine" works, how it rewards friends and punishes enemies, and how it has neutered or annihilated the moderates in its midst. Broken up into clear subsections with apt coinages like "backlash insurance"--the ways party leaders protect legislators from constituent disgust with the party's radical direction--Hacker and Pierson lay out in sober detail the various ruses the "New Power Brokers" employ: robbing committee chairs of their independence by instituting term limits, using the House Rules Committee (which has nine Republicans and four Democrats) to quietly kill threatening amendments, utilizing obscure administrative rules to institute broad policy changes, holding floor votes open while arms are twisted to pass legislation, shutting Democrats out of conference committees where corporate pork can be larded onto already-passed legislation away from the minority party's prying eyes, tightly coordinating different factions of the right, and-- as Nicholas Confessore first reported in these pages--bullying lobbying firms into hiring only Republicans.
Most pernicious are the "time-bombs" GOP lawmakers insert into legislation, whereby they intentionally ignore or exacerbate emerging policy problems, such as the Alternative Minimum Tax, with the hope of creating future crises that can serve as cover for further radical measures.
As lurid as the details are, one can't help but ask: Why didn't previous majorities do this sort of thing? Tip O'Neill was a smart guy. Why didn't he provide his members with "backlash insurance," or change the Ethics Committee rules so that the majority party could single-handedly stop an investigation? While Off Center never explicitly addresses this question, the implicit answer is a simple as it is disturbing. Much of what kept prior governing coalitions in check were informal, generally agreed-upon norms rather than black-letter law or immutable rules. Consider that for years state legislatures have, as a matter of custom, redistricted congressional districts only every 10 years, following new census data. There was nothing stopping a majority party from engineering a mid-decade redistricting for its own partisan advantage other than a generalized sense it would be cheating to do so. Such considerations mean little to Tom DeLay and Karl Rove.
The picture of the GOP's leadership that emerges from Off Center resembles nothing so much as Louis XIV, who was able to consolidate power in the French monarchy by recognizing that much of what limited the king's political power were ultimately social and cultural norms, norms which Louis ingeniously undermined. He was, in short, an innovator, a power entrepreneur who recognized that the "rules" that kept the king in check could be subverted and altered, and that the fractured nature of the aristocracy could be leveraged and manipulated to his advantage.
But there's a structural aspect to the GOP's dominance as well. Machines thrive on a dearth of information, which is why they are so effective in electing "downticket" candidates. You may be able to make up your mind about who you want to vote for mayor, but when it comes to the 12 names on the ballot for Water Reclamation District or circuit judge, you're likely to pull the lever for whomever's on the palm card your precinct captain slipped you because that's simply the only thing you have to go on. In Washington today, it is the information "haves"--most notably corporate America and interest groups on both sides--who hold policy makers to account, while the information "have nots"--the majority of the American populace--have literally no idea what the hell is even going on. The GOP's repeated and brazen give-aways to the powerful, the connected, and the super-rich are like crimes committed in broad daylight in front of a blindfolded crowd.
The blame for this can't all be laid at Tom DeLay's feet. If there's a gap in Hacker and Pierson's account it is the glancing treatment they give to the parallel stories of how oppositional forces such as labor unions, the press, and most obviously the Democratic Party have either withered or failed to hold the machine accountable. The GOP didn't rise to power in a vacuum, and despite the body blows the party has landed to the mechanism of self-governance, the nation remains a democracy in which citizens choose between alternatives by means of elections. If people are voting for a party with which they fundamentally disagree on a whole host of issues, then the opposition party has more than a little bit to do with that.
While some of the reforms Hacker and Pierson propose in the book's final chapter are no doubt warranted, the first step in any structural reform is to pry the machine's fingers off the steering wheel of power. In this case, the destruction of the GOP monopoly and the restoration of accountable governance fall to progressives, liberals, moderates, and a whole host of other coalition members in the big dysfunctional tent that is the Democratic Party. We had better get our act together soon because as Off Center suggests, the longer a machine stays in power, the harder it is to beat.
Christopher Hayes is a senior editor of In These Times.
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