End of the Conservative Ascendency

David Frum has a great blog post on his National Review diary discussing some of the indications revealed by Stan Greenberg's new poll. Greenberg's research, conducted for the Democracy Project, shows that the legacy that will damage President Bush's party is not the Iraq war but its handling of the immigration issue. Frum explains:

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) - and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 - and especially since 2000 - the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP. If Republicans face an inhospitable future after 2008, we will hear much of the dreadful legacy of George W. Bush on social issues, the war, the environment, etc. But Greenberg's own work makes clear that these issues matter relatively little.

(Only 28% of young voters would respond positively to an anti-religious-right message, for example: see page 11.)

No, the legacy that will damage his party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement. This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals). It is these voters who will sway elections in future. And thanks to this president's immigration policies, there are going to be a lot more of them than there might otherwise have been.

The Presidential debate jointly sponsored by YouTube and CNN this evening represents a remarkable moment where new media finally takes its rightful place right alongside the old media. The symbolism of the moment will be as important as the practical outcome of this experiment in melding the best of the traditional political journalism world with the powerful new capabilities of the highly democratized and participatory world of web video.

I will be in South Carolina tonight to witness this coming of age in new media, represented by YouTube, the web video website owned by Google, which is the most prominent of a whole range of new media sites that are now making a big impact on American Politics. The New Politics Institute has been heralding this transition and the importance of these new tools since its inception more than two years ago. We have been helping progressives understand the magnitude of the changes happening in media and new digital technologies, as well as master the new strategies on how to successfully integrate these tools into politics.

For those who want a refresher before the debate on how these new tools play in politics, take a look at the report, videos of our public meetings, and other forms of content at our website at www.newpolitics.net or the various links to the side. Web Video itself has been the subject of quite a bit of recent content, including "The Exploding World of Web Video", a video from a recent event of ours that shows how web video is being used in politics. Then there's “Political Web Video World", an innovative video itself that gives an overview of more than a dozen categories of political activities where web video already is making its mark. Check out the written report by NPI Fellow Julie Bergman Sender on her approach to creating compelling web video, such as her famous “White House West” Will Ferrell impersonation of George W. Bush on a ranch in the lead-up to the 2004 election. Or check out our NPI blog, or the NDN blog, where Tuesday I will post my analysis on the debate and what made it different.

The week may start with the historic YouTube/CNN debate in South Carolina, but it will end Friday with an NPI event in Washington on the launch of Stage II of our New Tools Campaign. We will showcase eight new tools that are ready for widespread adoption by progressives at all levels of politics. We will build off last year’s tools - Buy Cable, Engage the Blogs, Speak in Spanish, and Advertise Online - by adding Re-imagine Video, Go Mobile, Leverage Social Networks, and Target Your Marketing. We will have experts speaking in DC, with video of the whole event, as well as practical memos about how to get started using these tools.

As the name of the debate indicates, the new politics will not be about the new media completely superseding the old, or the old media beating back incursions of the new. The new politics coming in this cycle and the decade to come will be about both old and new working together in unprecedented ways. The New Politics Institute will be there every step of the way, and we hope you will be there with us. Thanks.

Conservative author and commentator Byron York weighs in today with a true must read.  It starts:

Let's say you're a Republican president, a bit more than midway through your second term. You're scrambling to salvage what you can of a deeply unpopular war, you're facing a line of subpoenas from Democrats in Congress and your poll ratings are in the basement. What do you do?

You estrange the very Republicans whose backing you need the most.

That's precisely what President Bush has managed to accomplish during the two big political developments of recent weeks: the commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence and the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform. But the president's problems with the GOP base go beyond those awkward headlines. Republicans aren't mad at Bush for the same reasons that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the devotees of MoveOn.org are; there's no new anti-Bush consensus among left and right. No, conservatives are unhappy because the president allied himself with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over an immigration deal that leaned too far toward amnesty for illegal immigrants. They're unhappy because Bush has shown little interest in fiscal responsibility and limited government. And they're unhappy, above all, because he hasn't won the war in Iraq.

All of this has left Republicans saying, at least among themselves, something blunt and devastating: It's over.

"Bush fatigue has set in," declares one plugged-in GOP activist.

"We're ready for a new president," says a former state Republican Party official in the South.

"There was affection," opines a conservative strategist based well beyond the Beltway, "but now they're in divorce court."

Read the rest here in today's Post. 

The Bush era has done great damage to Washington's ability to meet important challenges.  We know the story - big mistakes, challenges not met, extraordinary betrayal of the public trust.  In 2006 voters asked for a new chapter in the American story.  What we now know well into 2007 that this new chapter will not come quickly.  It will take years and a great deal of work to move past this disapointing and damaging era of politics. 

There are many examples of how Bushism will be with us for years to come.  The right-leaning Roberts court.  The continued erosion of American support for globalization and trade liberalization.  A Middle East more difficult than before.  But to me the most graphic example of our hard it is going to be bring the parties and the American people together to solve our common problems is what happened with the immigration bill last week. 

We have written about this often so I wont repeat other than to say that if anything was to pass in this Congress it was the immigration bill.  It had broad and deep bi-partisan support.  It passed the Republican controlled Senate last year.  It had a remarkable coalition behind it, including leaders of labor, the Catholic Church, business and immigrant rights groups.  It was supported by the most powerful leaders in Washington including the President, John McCain, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  And yet it still didnt pass. 

For progressives, we have several tasks ahead.  First to stay focused on solving problems not playing politics.  We need to get things done that improve the lives of average Americans.  Second, and perhaps most importantly, is that we cannot let these disapointing years cause us to doubt the power and goodness of the American experiment itself.  We have overcome much greater challenges before.  And though the array of challenges in front of us are great, and urgent, at our very core we must believe that they can met and tackled with the same sense of can-do optimism as this remarkable nation has met similar times of trial and trouble in our past.  This is no time for retreat, for withdrawal, for accepting the limited and cramped vision of the Bush era.   Our task now must be to re-imagine the goodness, and greatness, of America, and apply our creed and values to the newly emergent challenges of this new century. 

It is not the day that it is dark.  It has been our response to it.  And that we have the power to change.  But it is not going to be quick, easy, inexpensive and clean.  We have years of hard work ahead of us to move America beyond the broken politics of the Bush era.

In the last several weeks NDN's arguments about American politics have been breaking through in powerful ways:

Immigration and its implications for the GOP - We are all deeply disappointed with the results of the immigration battle this year. However, the political aftermath of the debate has created a unique opportunity, one that may enhance our chances of reviving the bill, or even passing better immigration legislation, in the near future. NDN led an effort, capped by a joint press conference with NCLR last week, which demonstrated how the harsh tone of the immigration debate was pushing Hispanics away from the GOP, threatening their capacity to become a majority party in the 21st century. Our advice to the GOP throughout was "to sue for peace:" work with the Democrats to pass comprehensive immigration reform and minimize the damage to their brand in the Hispanic community, the fastest growing part of the American electorate. While we didn't win that battle, our efforts in the media had a significant impact on the interpretation of what happened as the bill collapsed last week.

The best example of our message success was a highly influential Wall Street Journal editorial last Wednesday, a day before the vote. But you can also find our presence and influence in articles in Newsweek, USNews, Congressional Quarterly and The New York Times, the LA Times (here and here), The St. Petersburg Times, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Salon (here and here), DailyKos, and The Hill. A national AP piece ran in dozens of papers across the country, and several of the stories above got picked up in major outlets like CBS News. This narrative also appeared in a front page story in USA Today last Thursday, and the New York Times on Sunday.

Reviewing these stories, it is clear the NDN team created and shaped the national narrative in these last few weeks around this very consequential immigration battle.

The emergence of a New Politics - Our large argument about how the big changes in three areas - governing agenda, media/tech/advertising and demography - are reinventing politics continued to drive media coverage of politics. Most prominently, a major NPR story by Mara Liasson highlighted NDN's extraordinary efforts to create a culture of investment to help create a 21st century infrastructure for progressive politics. Ron Brownstein's recent LA Times column featured our thinking about the emergence of a people powered politics. A recent New York Times article featured our commentary on the changing face of political advertising. A front page Washington Post story this week featured the thinking of NPI Fellow Tim Chambers, and referred to his excellent NPI paper on mobile media. And NPI Director Peter Leyden is featured in the current issue of Mother Jones where he discusses the potential of open-source politics.

NPI recently released an important new report, The Progressive Politics of the Millenial Generation, which Future Majority urges progressives to "make your bible for talking about young people in politics." A survey of young Americans by the New York Times/CBS News/MTV, released several days later, shows very similar statistics and comes to many of the same conclusions as our NPI report. If you haven't already read this important report, it certainly is worth a look.

All of this press has come in just the last few weeks. This year, NDN and its team has appeared in literally hundreds of stories in news outlets across the nation, in all types of media, in both Spanish and English. We have been quoted in front page stories of most major publications, including the New York Times Magazine, on topics ranging from globalization to the rise of Millennials to the emergence of viral video on the internet. Our Hispanic Strategy Director, Joe Garcia, was also part of the panel on Telemundo the night of the State of the Union.

The reason all this matters is that our work together is breaking through. NDN is not just imagining a better future for progressives, our point of view is being heard, driving the debate, having an impact. I am very proud of this powerful community we've built, together, and promise that we are working hard each and every day to usher in a better future for our politics and our nation.

Don Siegelman, the former Governor of Arkansas whose politically-motivated prosecution we've discussed here, was thrown in jail this week. This is the shameful conclusion of an investigation that Scott Horton of Harpers calls "a political vendetta, conceived, developed and pursued for a corrupt purpose." And he has the evidence to back that up, in spades; the web of deceit and corruption surrounding this case is much too intricate and tangled to delineate here, but Horton has been doing an excellent job of unearthing and explaining the myriad dirty secrets surrounding the prosecution.

The operation to ruin Siegelman and seize power in Alabama, masterminded by Karl Rove, was so outrageous and underhanded that Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who had previously run a campaign against Siegelman, decided she had to speak out about it. When it became known that she was going to blow the whistle, "Simpson’s house was burned to the ground, and her car was driven off the road and totaled."

A powerful editorial in the New York Times a few days ago calls on Congress to immediately investigate Siegelman's case, since Bush's Justice Department is not at all interested in promoting Justice. From the editorial:

"The idea of federal prosecutors putting someone in jail for partisan gain is shocking. But the United States attorneys scandal has made clear that the Bush Justice Department acts in shocking ways."

Can we really be shocked anymore, though? The Greek philosophers believed justice to be the highest and most important political virtue. Yet though words like "freedom" and "liberty" are used profusely (and loosely) by this Administration, the word "justice" almost never enters their rhetoric, unless in the context of bringing the evil-doers to it. And it is easy to see why; they are simply uninterested in the concept. The Administration and its friends have persistently tried (and largely succeeded) to turn every level of the Judicial branch into an arm of the White House.

From Cheney's constant efforts to make the executive branch above the law, to the regressive right-wing activist rulings of the Roberts Supreme Court, to a a study of the "Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of cases involving political figures [that] showed seven prosecutions of Democrats for every one Republican," it is exceedingly clear that these people, who share a strong disdain for justice and the rule of law, have no interest in playing by the rules, and that is a truth which is ultimately bad for Americans of all political pursuasions. In the end, the great damage done to the Judicial branch may be the most harmful and long-lasting legacy of the Bush era.

An encouraging new poll released today by the New York Times/CBS News/MTV found that younger Americans are more liberal than the general public. The Times poll closely echoes most of the main points of the report NDN's New Politics Institute released last week, entitled The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation (which Future Majority encourages readers to make "your Bible for talking about young people in politics.")

Some of the new poll's findings about young people include:

• 28% describe themselves as liberal, while only 20% of the whole American public does
• 44% support same-sex marriage, compared to 28% of the general public
• 62% support government-sponsored universal healthcare coverage, compared to 47% of the public
• They are more likely to favor a common-sense drug policy, being more inclined than the general public to legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana.
• They are more open to immigration than the general public, with 30% saying America should always welcome new immigrants, compared to 24% of the general public.

The most striking part of the report, however, was this:

"By a 52 to 36 majority, young Americans say that Democrats, rather than Republicans, come closer to sharing their moral values, while 58 percent said they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and 38 percent said they had a favorable view of Republicans.

Asked if they were enthusiastic about any of the candidates running for president, 18 percent named Mr. Obama, of Illinois, and 17 percent named Mrs. Clinton, of New York. Those two were followed by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, who was named by just 4 percent of the respondents."

Contrary to popular opinion, the Millennial generation is not politically cynical or apathetic: again reinforcing the findings of our NPI report, the Times found that 77% of Millennials believe their generation will have an important effect in the next presidential election, and 58% already say they are paying attention to the 2008 election (compared to 35% of 17-to-29 year olds at the same point in the last election).

Their lack of cynicism is frankly surprising, given that they have come of age in a political climate defined by unprecedented corruption and corporate influence, headed by perhaps the worst president and most hubristic vice-president in the history of our nation. But their optimism is very good news for America, because a full "70 percent said the country was on the wrong track." And to paraphrase Socrates, realizing there is a problem is half the solution.

We will be talking about this new Post series on Cheney for a long time.  The 2nd installment runs today.  There is so much in here that it defies a quick am blog post, and is both informative and tragic at the same time.

In 2006, driven by a great degree by the immigration debate, Hispanics fled the Republican Party.  From 2004 to 2006 the national Hispanic vote moved close to 20 points, going from 59/40 Kerry/Bush to 70/30 D/R.  And turnout was up 33% from 2002.  This part of the American electorate has become energized, and much more anti-Republican. 

Remember that we've seen this happen before.  In California, Pete Wilson and the GOP took on Hispanics and turned a swing state into a blue and progressive one.  Hispanics responded to the GOP attacks by registering and voting in huge numbers for Democrats.  In the first election after the GOP attacks the effect was modest.  The impact came in the 2nd election, and the ones after. 

The question about the anger Hispanics across the nation now feel towards the GOP was whether or not it would sustain, and if so, what impact it might have.  For it is hard to see a viable electoral college map for the GOP that doesn't contain the heavily Hispanic swing states of AZ, CO, FL, NM and NV.  Take these 5 states away and it starts to become hard how to see the GOP wins in 2008.  A continued big swing of Hispanics in 2008 could deny this states to the GOP, and mark the way the GOP has handled the immigration issue as one of the greatest strategic blunders of modern politics. 

Well, over the weekend, we saw a story that shows this degradation of the Republican brand with Hispanics continues apace.  Peter Wallsten of the LATimes published a remarkable piece showing that those newly eligible citizens registering to vote in South Florida, a place where most Hispanics are Republican, are becoming Democrats:

MIAMI BEACH — As a Cuban who fled Fidel Castro's communist rule for a new life in the U.S., Julio Izquierdo would seem a natural Republican voter — a sure bet to adopt the same political lineage that has long guided most of his countrymen who resettled in South Florida.

But moments after taking his oath this week to become a U.S. citizen and registering to vote, the grocery store employee said he felt no such allegiances.

"I don't know whether Bush is a Democrat or a Republican, but whatever he is, I'm voting the other way," Izquierdo, 20, said Thursday as he waited for a taxi after a mass naturalization ceremony at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Izquierdo said he did not like President Bush's handling of the Iraq war and was miffed at politicians, most of them Republican, who seem to dislike immigrants.

That sentiment, expressed by several of the 6,000 new citizens who took their oaths Thursday in group ceremonies that take place regularly in immigrant-heavy cities nationwide, underscored the troubled environment facing the GOP in the buildup to next year's presidential election.

Surveys show that among Latino voters — a bloc Bush had hoped to woo into the Republican camp — negative views about the party are growing amid a bitter debate over immigration policy.

Republicans in Congress have led the fight against a controversial Senate bill that would provide a pathway for millions of illegal immigrants to eventually become citizens. All but one of the GOP's leading White House hopefuls oppose the measure.

Many Latino leaders, including Republicans, have said the tone of some critics in attacking the bill has been culturally insensitive. They say that has alienated some Latinos from the GOP....

Read on my friends.  This is one of the most important stories in politics today.

As ThinkProgress reported today, a House Oversight investigation found that White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts for a much greater volume of official federal business than had been previously disclosed.

Use of RNC and Bush-Cheney '04 campaign email accounts for official White House correspondences constitutes a violation of the Presidential Records Act. The investigation found over 140,000 emails sent or received by Karl Rove alone (!) from RNC email accounts, and found that at least 88 White House employees had used RNC email accounts for official business.

The most striking finding of the investigation, however, is that the RNC oversaw “extensive destruction” of these emails, including the deletion of all email records for a whopping 51 White House employees. The report found that "given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."

These actions would be entirely consistent with this administration's notorious neo-Nixonian penchant for secrecy and willingness to obstruct justice. Still, the new report seems particularly damning; such raw exposure of this Administration's frantic efforts to cover their tracks is a strong indictment of their culture of corruption, obstruction, and disinformation.