Month: August 2017

Back when I was a pollster, I would explain that following the daily polls was like watching a heavy rain fall on the surface of a river. There’s a lot of action and noise and splashing around but nothing that gives you a real sense of where the river is going. For that, you must look beneath the surface where the current keeps moving steadily onward and the storm is barely noticed.

The same logic applies to the state of American politics today. It’s easy to get caught up in the sound and fury of the daily news cycle, but that tells us more about our dysfunctional political system than it does about the future of our nation. When you look a little deeper and explore the currents of American society, you quickly discover that most people are moving steadily onward with their daily lives and barely notice the political storms.

Sure, most have an opinion about Donald Trump or Barack Obama or the latest political obsession, but it’s not the driving force in their lives. Instead, they are focused on family, jobs, faith, community and doing what they can to make their world a little bit better. To the degree most think about politics at all, the vast majority start with a belief that they have the freedom to live their own life on their own terms and that everybody else has the equal right to do the same. When politics is needed at all, most Americans believe in the self-governing ideal that the people are supposed to be in charge.

These are America’s founding values and they are deeply embedded in American society and culture. It’s true, of course, that our nation has never perfectly lived up to these ideals. But the deep currents of American society have been consistently flowing in the direction of freedom, equality, and self-governance since before the nation was even founded.

And, from the very beginning, there have been political elites who rejected those ideals. At the Constitutional Convention, Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman thought the people should have “as little to do as may be about the government.” Alexander Hamilton proposed that the United States should have an elected monarch who would rule until death or impeachment and have extensive powers. Fortunately, that idea didn’t sit too well with other delegates who had just finished a war against a king with too much power.

In the early days of our nation, the biggest challenges came from slave-holders who were so outraged byour national commitment to equality that they fought a Civil War to try and leave the nation. Today, the great challenge comes from a political elite who believe that they are smarter and more fit to govern than everyday Americans.

Rather than freedom, they believe in a Regulatory State where bureaucrats write the rules for the rest of us to live by. Rather than equality, they want government officials to pick winners and losers. And, rather than self-governance, they dream of a world where bureaucrats are protected from the desires of voters.

In other words, the political elites are actively trying to divert the currents of American society away from our founding ideals. Our challenge is to make sure the river keeps flowing and wears away whatever obstacles they put in place.

The America portrayed on the evening news is unrecognizable to most Americans.

Rather than reflecting the realities of a complex and dynamic nation, the national news media seems to treat real events as little more than a Rorschach test for measuring what the political activists think is going on. Then, in solemn tones, the television presenters pass on the absurd interpretations that become a national narrative.

In TV-Newsland, America is presented as a hopelessly divided nation where hate-filled people battle over how they can get the government to give them what they want. Extremists of all political persuasions are presented as reflecting the real views of everyday Americans. It’s a scary world in which every symbolic event can be used to demonstrate that most Americans are stupid, racist, socialist or whatever other condescending view the elites wish to project.

I recognize, of course, that there’s an audience for this sort of thing. Conflict sells and that’s true whether it’s Survivor, the Bachelorette, or national politics. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment executives putting on shows that draw good ratings. But it is a great disservice to the nation to equate what happens on the nightly news to what is happening in America.

More than 90% of Americans don’t watch the evening news and experience an entirely different America. It’s an America where most people want to work hard, play hard, take care of their families, help their neighbors, and do what they can to make their corner of the world a little bit better. When someone falls on hard times, others look for ways to help out.

In this real version of America, there are 63 million community volunteers, 27 million entrepreneurs, and tens of millions of others who serve their community in different ways. Rather than begging for a dysfunctional political system to bail them out, the vast majority of Americans recognize that these community servants are the people who can actually get things done and solve the problems before us.

These Americans are more pragmatic than ideological and Instinctively committed to our founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance. They are united by a belief that all of us have the right to live our lives as we see fit so long as we don’t interfere with the rights of others to do the same. Because they see it working all around them, they celebrate the fact that we create a better world by using our freedom to work together in community.

This America is not obsessed with extremists and their battles. They are also not obsessed with the petty partisan political battles than consume official Washington. Many might see those phrases as redundant, since politics in DC often seems like little more than a platform for extremists to fight their battles.

In pointing out the differences between America and the TV-Newsland version of America, I am not suggesting that the national evening news programs need to change their ways. They have found a formula that serves their niche audience and that’s what entertainment companies do. What I am suggesting, however, is that we need to look elsewhere if we want to understand what’s going on in America.

In the decade leading up to America’s War for Independence, much of the drama took place in and around Boston. Sam Adams was the ring-leader on the colonial side and public enemy number one to the British. He had been thinking about liberty and independence since he attended Harvard decades before. He was motivated partly because what we would now call the Regulatory State targeted his family because of their political views.

Eventually, British troops were sent to occupy Boston and keep things from getting out of hand. Naturally, the occupying force was hated and the tension between colonists and Redcoats grew. Recognizing how angry the Bostonians were, Adams worked hard to keep them from erupting into an angry mob.

On March 5, 1770, that challenge became more difficult when British soldiers fired into a mob and killed five colonists. In the colonies, the event became known as the Boston Massacre and the British were clearly at fault. As is usually the case, the truth was a bit more complex. On top of the already heightened level of tension, colonists knew that the soldiers had orders not to fire. So, they taunted the young British men, threw things at them, and dared them to shoot.

Eventually a shot was fired, people died, and the facts didn’t seem to matter. There was a definite desire in Boston for revenge rather than justice. Rather than riling them up further, Sam Adams recognized the importance of ensuring a fair trial for the soldiers. He wanted the colonists to show the world that they were the civilized party in this dispute. So, Sam and others encouraged his younger cousin to defend the British.

Out of respect for the rule of law, John Adams agreed. It was not a popular move for someone thinking of a political career. It became even more unpopular when he successfully defended the soldiers arguing that “facts are stubborn things.” His law practice suffered and he lost perhaps half his clients. But, later in life, John Adams considered taking this case at this time to be one of his finest moments.

It was actions like this that developed America’s founding ideals and defined our national commitment to freedom, equality, and self-governance. The words were nice, but the actions mattered more.

Unfortunately, a commitment to our nation’s founding ideals is lacking in our political leadership today. Some on the political left are uncomfortable with giving people freedom to decide for themselves; some on the right struggle with equality. And, politicians all across the spectrum would prefer to centralize power in their own hands rather than embrace self-governance.

As a result, our political system is badly broken. In fact, it may be broken beyond repair. It has been more than 45 years since a majority of Americans trusted the federal government. Simply put, our government does not have the consent of the governed, a reality that’s not likely to change any time soon.

To move our nation forward, we need to look away from the failed political system that divides us and focus on the noble values that unite us. It’s time to celebrate the core values of freedom, equality, and self-governance with more than words. Like Sam and John Adams, we must stand up for them even when it hurts.

The White Supremacists who marched in Charlottesville seemed to think that their movement is committed to taking America back. They are mistaken. They cannot take America back because it was never theirs in the first place.

It’s true that the legacies of slavery and centuries of legalized racism have long tarnished our nation’s history. That reality has always stood in conflict with our nation’s founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance. For too many years, white Americans simply ignored the contradiction that they didn’t want to see.

That failure to confront evil did allow racists and White Supremacists to continue their hateful traditions in America. But, from the very beginning, it has been our noble ideals that defined the nation and its aspirations. Both yesterday and today, being an American means believing that all of us are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The real shame, perhaps our greatest national shame, is that so many who believed in those high ideals never did anything about the grossly unfair and unequal treatment of African-Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. called out such so-called “moderates” in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” How can you claim to believe in freedom and equality without standing up for those who are denied such basic rights?

Long before that, Frederick Douglas correctly noted that tolerating slavery while celebrating the Declaration of Independence made the celebration a “sham” filled with “fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy.”

Tragically, many who believed the best about America turned a blind eye to this problem. On the other hand, those who advocated white supremacy never lost sight of the fact that their abhorrent views were threatened by America’s noble traditions. John Calhoun, a leading defender of slavery, was frustrated that admiration for the Declaration had “spread far and wide, and fixed itself deeply in the public mind.”

Calhoun rejected the ideal of equality and believed that black people did not deserve freedom. Such despicable views made Calhoun a traitor to America’s founding ideals just as surely as Benedict Arnold was a traitor to the young nation in the War of Independence. The treasonous behavior continued when southern states explicitly rejected America’s founding ideals and chose to fight a Civil War in defense of slavery.

Make no mistake about it, those who march under a banner of racism and white supremacy today are also traitors who reject America’s founding ideals. They are not taking America back, they are trying to undo everything that makes America great.

Those of us who believe in freedom, equality, and self-governance must not be silent.

In Politics Has Failed: America Will Not, I argue that it is well past time for the shameful strand of our history to die so that the noble strand can flourish. We must not only clearly denounce and reject the hateful voices that reject our founding ideals, we must also work together to create an inclusive society worthy of those ideals. We must accept nothing less than a free and self-governing society where, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

The Democratic Party has, for the moment, become a regional party.

Only 449 counties across the nation are reliably Democratic. Five times that many—2,226—are reliably Republican. The Democratic counties are generally found along the coasts and in large urban areas.

Nowhere is the party’s abandonment of rural America more apparent than in West Virginia. For most of the twentieth century, this was a solidly Democratic state. In the first presidential election of the 21st century, however, George W. Bush carried the state and it’s voted Republican at the presidential level ever since. Last year, Donald Trump won the state with a crushing 42 percentage point victory over Hillary Clinton (68% to 26%).

Still, at the state level, West Virginia remained a Democratic stronghold until 2014. In that year, the Mountain State gave Republicans control of the state legislature and elected a Republican U.S. Senator for the first time in more than half a century. Last week, Democratic Governor Jim Justice switched parties to join the GOP.

These trends help explain why the midterm election outlook is fairly bleak for Democrats. U.S. Senator Joe Manchin is up for re-election as a Democrat. There’s no doubt voters in the state like Manchin, but there’s also no doubt they don’t like the crowd he hangs out with in Washington. As a result, Manchin is currently considered only a very slight favorite for reelection. Still, it’s far from certain.

Beyond West Virginia, the regionalization of the Democratic Party means that eight Democratic Senators are vulnerable because they are running for reelection in unfriendly territory. Three probably have a 50/50 chance to be reelected: Joe Donnelly in Indiana; Claire McCaskill in Missouri; and Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. Manchin and four others are just narrow favorites: Jon Tester in Montana, Bill Nelson in Florida, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin; and, Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

On the other side of the coin, just two Republican Senators are considered potentially vulnerable: Dean Heller in Nevada and Jeff Flake in Arizona. Both have angered the Trump wing of the GOP and will face primary challenges before getting the chance to compete in a general election.

Put it all together and the regionalization of the Democratic Party limits the party’s upside potential in 2018.

On a good night for the Democrats, they would pick up the GOP seats in Arizona and Nevada while not losing any of their own seats. But, even in that scenario, the result would be a 50-50 split in the Senate. With Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote as Vice President, Republicans would still be charge.

In contrast, on a good night for Republicans, they might hold on to their two seats and pick up the three toss-ups in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. That would give them a 55-45 majority in the Senate and a greater ability to advance their agenda. It’s even possible to envision the GOP having a better night if they can pick up some of the seats where Democratic incumbents are only slight favorites.

It’s impossible, of course, to know which way the political winds will be blowing on Election Day in 2018. However, it seems clear that the shrinking of the Democratic Party to a regional base will keep Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate.