Key 2008

As President-elect Barack Obama turns to the enormous challenges facing the nation, his first priority will be to set his priorities. Already, there are more urgent problems than any president could tackle successfully in a single term, and even more will almost certainly emerge. Moreover, he now will have to lead in ways he did not have to as candidate, by taking real and contentious actions. His historic, landslide election will give him greater, initial political capital than any president since Ronald Reagan. Even so, capital gets spent, and a president’s power and influence are finite, so he will have to choose precisely where he intends to focus all that capital, power and influence.

The lead items on his domestic agenda must be the nation’s financial and economic crisis. That will require, first, steps to slow housing foreclosures. He has pledged to initiate a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures, but that would be only a first, modest step. He also could also create a new fund to lend tide-over funds to homeowners facing foreclosure after the 90 days are up, and while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work out a responsible plan for them to renegotiate the terms and interest rates on the mortgages of homeowners in distress. He also can help banks get credit flowing again with a temporary, reduced tax rate on an estimated $700 billion in profits now held abroad by the foreign subsidiaries of American companies.

That step also could provide a measure of stimulus for an economy currently entering what is likely to be a long, nasty recession, and addressing the recession also must be one of President Obama’s first priorities. Tax rebates won’t work, since most Americans would most likely save any new checks rather than spend them. So Washington will have to jumpstart the nation’s additional spending, with a new spending package of $200 billion to $250 billion. And President Obama should focus most of it on the long-term investments he called for during the campaign, including grants to digitize health care records and provide access to computer training for current workers, and new supports to modernize the electricity grid and accelerate the development and spread of alternative energy. On top of that – and grants to cash-strapped states so they can avoid large cuts in their Medicaid programs and their workforces – the new president should focus the infrastructure piece of his stimulus on creating a national infrastructure financing bank and initiating new commitments for low-polluting light rail systems in major metropolitan areas.

The president will also hear demands and pleas for a new regulatory framework for the financial sector. That task is clearly a necessary and urgent one, but getting it right will be a long, complex process. His best move would be to create a national, expert commission with a mandate to figure it out over the next six months and report back to the nation.

The president’s serious priority-setting can only really begin once he addresses those emergencies – and it won’t be easy. The stimulus measures can be the first steps toward meeting his pledge to help build a more energy-efficient and climate-friendly economy. And since he will have to choose, the rest of that agenda should probably take lower priority than health care reform. One reason is that while the recession will cut energy prices and energy use with no help from Washington, for at least a time, it will only worsen out health care problems. The recession will further increase the numbers of people without coverage, perhaps by millions, without making a dent in the steady, sharp increases in health care costs that will continue to cut into jobs and wages. And any further delay will only make it all worse. It’s time to carry out his plans to make coverage much more nearly universal, and tie those extensions to a hard-nosed program of cost controls that will require hospitals and clinics to adopt the best practices of the country’s most cost efficient medical centers.

This will leave President Obama with plenty to tackle in the second half of his term. That can be the time to take further steps to help make America more climate friendly and energy efficient. It also has to be the time to build on the cost-control lessons from health care reform and finally address the serious and treacherous business of reforming Medicare and other entitlement spending for tens of millions of Baby Boomers.

And if President Obama can make real progress in these priority areas over his first term, it will almost certainly earn him an even bigger national landslide for a second term. 

Last January, on the morning after the Iowa caucuses, I published the essay you see below: "On Obama, Race and the End of the Southern Strategy." Moved by Senator Obama's incredible speech the night of the caucuses, I spent a great deal of time that morning thinking about what his rise meant for our politics and our nation. I came away believing then, as I do now, that his powerful voice that emerged that night had the potential to have a profound impact on America.

On Obama, Race and the End of the Southern Strategy

For the past several years NDN has been making an argument that for progressives to succeed in the coming century they would have to build a new majority coalition very different from the one FDR built in the 20th century. The nation has changed a great deal since the mid-20th century, as we’ve become more Southern and Western, suburban and exurban, Hispanic and Asian, immigrant and Spanish-speaking, more millennial and aging boomer and more digital age in our life and work habits than industrial age. 21st century progressive success would require building our politics around these new demographic realities.

Looking at the leadership of the Democratic Party today, there is cause for optimism on this score. The four leading Presidential candidates includes a mixed race Senator of African descent, an accomplished and powerful woman, a border state governor of Mexican descent and a populist from the new South. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi represent areas west of the Rockies. Taken together these leaders represent a very different kind of politics, a 21st century politics, for the Democrats.

But of all these great changes the one that may be most important today is the growth of what we call the “minority” population. When I was born in 1963 the country was almost 89 percent white, 10.5 percent African-American and less than 1 percent other. The racial construct of America was, and had been for over hundreds of years, a white-black, majority-minority construct, and for most of our history had been a pernicious and exploitive one. Of course the Civil Rights Movement (particularly the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act) began to change our understanding of race around the time of my birth, but it was the Immigration Act of 1965 that changed the face of America. That act changed who would enter America, reorienting our new immigrant pool from Europe, as it had been for over 300 years, to Latin America and Asia. And America changed.

As the chart below shows, today America is 66 percent white and 33 percent "minority". While the African-American population has grown a bit, most of that increase has come from the recent historic wave of Asian and Hispanic immigrants. In my half a lifetime the “minority” population in the United States has tripled. When I was born one of out ten people walking around America were non-white. Today it is one out of three.

I think it is safe to say that America is going through the most profound demographic transformation in its long history. If current trends continue, America will be majority minority in my lifetime or soon thereafter. In a single lifetime we will have gone from a country made up largely of white Europeans to one that looks much more like the rest of the world.

If Senator Obama becomes the Democratic nominee this profound change will become something we all begin to discuss openly. Today the nation is having a big conversation about this change - whether it understands it or not - through our ongoing debate over immigration. While this debate has seen some of the most awful racist rhetoric and imagery since the days of Willie Horton, what should leave us all optimistic is that only 15 percent of the country is truly alarmed about the new wave of immigrants arriving in America. Consistently about 60 percent of the country says we need to leave all the undocumenteds here, indicating a pragmatic acceptance of the changes happening around our people and their families. Once again the uncommon wisdom of the common people appears to be prevailing here, and it is my hope, perhaps my prayer, that if Obama is the nominee American can begin to have a healthy and constructive discussion of our new population rather than what we have seen to date.

My final observation this morning is a point we focus on in our recent magazine article, The 50-Year Strategy. This election is the first post-Southern Strategy election since 1964. The Southern Strategy was the strategy used by Conservatives and the GOP to use race and other means to cleave the South from the Democrats. This strategy – welfare queens, Willie Horton, Reagan Democrats, tough on crime, an aggressive redistricting approach in 1990 – of course worked. It flipped the South (a base Democratic region since Thomas Jefferson’s day) to the GOP, giving them majorities in Congress and the Presidency. 20th century math and demography and politics dictated that without the South one could not have a majority in the US. But the arrival of a “new politics” of the 21st century – driven to a great degree by the new demographic realities of America - has changed this calculation, and has thankfully rendered the Southern Strategy and all its tools a relic of the 20th century. As Tom Schaller has noted, today the Democrats control both Houses of Congress without having a majority of southern Congressional seats, something never before achieved by the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Lyndon Johnson.

In our article we lay out what might become the next great majority strategy, one yet unnamed, that we believe may be used by the Democrats to build a durable 21st century majority. It will be built upon an America described above, and will embrace the new diversity of 21st century America at its core. At a strategic level, resistance to the new demographic reality is futile, which is why GOP leaders like George Bush, Ken Mehlman and even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page (here and here) have railed against the GOP’s approach to immigration. They rightly understand that positioning their party against this new demography of America may render them as much a 20th century relic as the Southern Strategy itself.

Liberating American politics from the pernicious era of the Southern Strategy should be one the highest strategic priorities for left-of-center politics. Last night a powerful and thoughtful man emerged on the national stage who deeply understands - and is himself the embodiment of - the moral and political imperative of moving beyond this disappointing age. He appears to be summoning the courage, the vision, and the conviction to usher in a whole new – and better – era of politics for America. At its core this new politics will embrace diversity and difference rather than exploit it; at its core this new politics will be defined by hope and tolerance not fear and Tancredoism; at its core this new politics of tolerance is not just a requirement for a more just America here at home, but is a requirement if America is to reassert itself abroad in the much more globalized, multi-polar, interconnected, and open world of the 21st century.

And of course the arrival of this new post-Southern Strategy age of American politics will be accelerated by the extraordinary level of political participation of Millennials, the largest generation in American history, whose life experiences and values are much more Obama than Nixon.

Whatever happens in this campaign, the arrival of Barack Obama and his politics is a welcome development for our nation struggling to find its way in a new and challenging day.

- January 5, 2008

The world was definitely watching as the results of the U.S. elections came in. In Latin America - the news of Obama's victory, and even Congressional races, were all over the press. Looks like NDN's view of the Hispanic electorate has gone global: Spain's major publication, El Pais says: "Latinos Were a Key Force In Obama's Victory," and Mexico's La Jornada reports: "Obama Blows McCain Away Among Latino Voters." Overall, it seems that the U.S. once again (in the words of Bill Clinton) moved the world by the power of its example rather than by an example of its power, and has revived the sentiment of hope and endless possibility in others, for which it is known.

In Mexico, the story of Obama's victory sadly was relegated to the interior of printed press because as Obama's victories were coming in, tragedy hit Mexico - Mexico's Secretary of the Interior, who led the fight against drug cartels, Juan Camilo Mouriño and anti-drug czar José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos were killed in a plan crash, which is under investigation (latest news confirms that U.S. authorities are assisting in this case). In spite of this tragedy, Mexican press did comment a great deal on the election: El Universal reported on Obama celebrations abroad, in Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, etc. where the general sentiment was:

[Translation] Observers, many of them from countries where the idea of a member of a minority group being elected President is unthinkable, expressed surprise and satisfaction at seeing the United States overcome centuries of racial conflict as it elected an African-American as their president. "This shows that the U.S. is a truly diverse and multicultural society, where skin color doesn't matter," said Jason Ge, a student of the University of Pekin in China.

The substance of this statement might be up for debate, but the irrefutable point is that the world looks at the U.S. in a new light today. The Latin American news reports even have some interesting tid bits that had never been reported in U.S., for example, Chile's La Nacion reported on election day celebrations in Kenya, and I learned that Barack Obama's "grandmother" in Kenya is not a blood relative - she is not the mother of Barack's father, but rather the third wife of Barack's grandfather, with whom he had other children.

Argentina's La Nacion showed off its new tools capability, publishing a word cloud of Obama's victory speech (in Spanish) seen below - "Hope,""Moment," "United," and "Country" have the most hits. Also in La Nacion, Congressmen and women outlined their hopes:"We have to observe the composition of the new Congress and strengthen relationships there...we will insist on greater market access in agriculture," and, "We have an opportunity to set aside our prior differences, Obama seems to be predisposed to dialogue and a higher degree of understanding...so I see a world with greater peace and security." The Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs has this press release on their homepage:

[Translation]
U.S. Elections: [Minister]Taiana affirms that "Obama's victory is a message of hope..."
"Undoubtedly, the victory of a candidate like Barack Obama in the U.S. is a message of hope and proof that a cycle is coming to a close in the world...a cycle dominated by...a politics of unilateralism and the imposition of decisions."

In Peru, El Comercio printed President Alan Garcia's congratulatory letter to Barack, in which he's already inviting Barack to go visit: "We have followed this campaign with interest and admiration, it has demonstrated the vigor of democracy in the United States and the people's decision to support your message of change and hope....We are also assured that during your term our bilateral relationship will continue to become strengthened...Peru, as a country committed to peace, stability and security in our continent, would be honored to greet you. I extend my most cordial invitation for you to visit Peru."

El Comercio also wrote about the excitement of First Minister Yehude Simon in view of Obama's victory, the headline reads: "Simon on Obama's election: ‘It is wonderful what's happened in the United States," and Simon added, "I hope he does not fail us," while he also praised the "lesson on democracy" taught by John McCain through his acceptance speech.

Even in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez sent Obama a congratulatory note, calling suddenly for "a constructive bilateral agenda," because, "From the homeland of Simón Bolívar, we are convinced the time has come to establish new relations between our countries and in our region...," as reported by El Nacional.

Colombia's El Tiempo reports that this historic election brings great expectations for Barack Obama within and without the U.S., and also discusses McCain's moving concession speech. In the face of such challenges some degree of skepticism remains, as reported by Mexico's La Jornada: "Mexico shouldn't get its hopes up too high with Obama: says expert of the Center of Economic Research." While the Universal's headline read a bit differently, "Obama represents hope for immigrants...Obama as president could mean pride for the foreign-born and hope for a change in their living conditions." So the world writes of hope, making history, transcending race, challenges, opportunity...most importantly, it is in everyone's best interest for the next administration to look more to all these neighbors to the south and work to develop a fundamental change in the U.S.'s view of what constitutes a positive working relationship with Latin America.

One more nail in the coffin of the GOP's southern strategy: Virginia goes blue in 2008. NDN has long discussed the impending downfall of the Southern Strategy as the demography of traditionally "red" states changes to reflect the 21st century composition of the country.  Before last night, Virginia had voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1952, except in 1964. This year Virginia's Latino voters and immigrant voters played a critical role in winning the state for Democrats. There are about 150,000 registered Latino voters in Virginia (almost twice the number from 2004), and let's not forget that Jim Webb defeated Sen. Allen in 2006 by 10,000 votes. Hispanics comprise 3% of total eligible voters, but last night they accounted for 5% of total voters in Virginia - a state that Obama won by 5% (or close to 155,000 votes). This is another example of Hispanics voting at a higher rate than the general electorate. Could Virginia,with its growing Hispanic and immigrant population, be the next Nevada?

In the past 24 hours, NDN has helped to shape the post-election narrative. Here are some of the highlights from the recent election analysis:

Simon was featured in a fantastic piece by Thomas Edsall in the Huffington Post:

There is a substantial body of thought among Democrats, however, that Obama's victory accurately reflects transformations in the demographic and attitudinal characteristics of voters. Because these transformations are rooted in the voters themselves, and not in political strategies, they are likely, from this perspective, to be enduring. One of the strongest proponents of this approach is Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democrat Network.

"When I was born in 1963 the country was almost 89 percent white, 10.5 percent African-American and less than 1 percent other. The racial construct of America was, and had been for over hundreds of years, a white-black, majority-minority construct, and for most of our history had been a pernicious and exploitive one," Rosenberg writes. "Today America is 66 percent white and 33 percent 'minority'.'' According to Rosenberg's assessment, Republican wedge issues will no longer work. "This strategy - welfare queens, Willie Horton, Reagan Democrats, tough on crime, an aggressive redistricting approach in 1990" will prove ineffective in "the new demographic realities of America."

Simon also had a great quote in McClatchy, which appeared in a plethora of papers across the country, that touched on similar themes:

"The Republican playbook that worked for them for a generation, that's become an anachronism," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network. "There's a new voting population, new coalitions, new issues, new media. The Republicans have been fighting the future. That is one of the reasons why they are in trouble. They've gotten on the wrong side of history."

He also weighed in in Wired about Obama's thoroughly modern candidacy:

"He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think-tank NDN, and a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. "Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."

Simon's analysis was also featured in USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle (twice, here and here), the Boston Globe (twice, here and here), the Houston Chronicle (twice, here and here), the Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

Simon wasn't the only member of the the NDN team in the mix. New NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais had an excellent quote in this MSNBC article about the importance of the youth vote:

Through a steady stream of texts and Twitters, experts agree Obama has managed to excite young voters by meeting them where they live — online.

“This is a group of people who are constantly checking in with everybody else in their circle to make a decision,” says Morley Winograd, the co-author of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics” and a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore. He defines Millennials as ages 18 to 26.

“This is a generation that doesn't tend to think about asking experts for opinion," Winograd says. "They tend to ask each other, and then that becomes the truth.”

Winograd says that means no decision is made without dozens of e-mails, texts or Facebook messages to check whether an idea works for the whole group — anything from “Where should we hang out tonight?” to “Who should we vote for?” — which could explain why Millennials so firmly latched onto Obama’s message of unity, he says.

“They are naturally inclined to be unified,” explains Michael D. Hais, who co-wrote “Millennial Makeover” with Winograd. “It’s the way they were reared; they were reared to believe that everyone has a role to play, everybody is the same and everybody should look for group-oriented solutions.”

They also had a featured post on the front page of the Huffington Post, and appeared in the Examiner and NewGeography. Additionally, Michael was quoted in the Herald Tribune.

Finally, Rob was quoted on the election in two Irish newspapers, the Independent and FinFacts.

While much will be made today on political blogs and cable news channels of long lines at urban polling places, some of the most important battles in this presidential election have been fought in the nation’s exurbs. Exurbs, typically the areas painted red beyond the purple of the suburbs, are places the Obama campaign is fighting in hard, sometimes to win, but much of the time to lose by less than Kerry lost to Bush in 2004. (The New Politics Institute, and NDN affiliate, studied the exurbs extensively in 2006.)

Yesterday, Alec MacGillis wrote about these efforts in Ohio on the front page of the Washington Post, saying:

Obama has mounted an ambitious effort to correct the mistakes of Kerry's campaign, which boosted turnout in cities but lost the state by ceding exurban counties and rural areas. Obama has scattered dozens of offices and scores of paid organizers across central, southern and western Ohio, hoping to find enough pockets of support to put him over the top.

Indeed, should Obama win Ohio today, these efforts will have been crucial to that victory. But, these exurbs, which were recently some of the fastest growing areas of the country, have been hard hit by both the troubled economy and high energy prices. Over the summer, as gas flew past $4 per gallon, it was no coincidence that John McCain campaigned for a gas tax holiday, a move targeted at the Republican exurban and rural base that he needed (and perhaps still needs) to consolidate. The housing market cave-in has also not been kind to the exurbs, and this array of factors means politics of these regions could likely decay in coming elections.

Tonight, as early returns come in, savvy election watchers will be sure to look not just at urban centers for high turnout, but also crucial exurban and rural areas for the size of McCain’s margins. If Obama outperforms Kerry in these regions, look for a big night.