Author: Jim Eltringham

Political consultant specializing in grassroots mobilization, online media, and public relations.

Terrorism. Racism. Unions.

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

We have heard plenty of criticism of political activists in the past week.  Their methods were likened to terrorists and their tone, we were told, had echoes of the racism.

Surely those critics will be just as vocal in denouncing the California labor unions who have been trying to scare voters away from signing referendum petitions, right?

The Golden State’s finances are anything but, and unions are likely worried about the types of reform movements that gripped other states with budget woes (like New Jersey and Wisconsin).  There are real possibilities that those reforms could be enacted by ballot referenda.  And so, there are not one but two campaigns working to squash ballot measures before they even get on the ballot.

The California chapter of the SEIU’s Think Before You Ink laughably blames ballot initiatives for “silencing the voices of working Californians” through ballot initiatives.  You read that correctly: the SEIU says that allowing voters to vote on referenda silences voters.

More insidious is Californians Against Identity Theft, which tells voters to stay away from petitions on the flimsy premise that signing risks identity theft.  Petitions, of course, require voters to share their name and address – in other words, most (but not all) of the information that can be found in a phone book, if anyone uses those anymore.

CAIT gets more unhinged the more you dig.  Check out this image from the website masthead:

It looks like someone found LSD, Red Bull, and Photoshop in the same weekend and had a bad trip.  And if that’s not enough, listen to their radio commercial, which suggests that felons straight out of San Quentin are patrolling the Ralph’s parking lot, preying on your phone book information.  And they might even send your information to (gasp!) India.  Who knows what those Indians will do with it? the ad intones ominously.

CAIT is comically over the top; it is also a deceitful effort that plays on identity theft concerns and racial tensions to suppress voters from participating in democracy.  The SEIU “Think Before You Ink” campaign is less egregious, but just as dishonest.  Both are founded on the basic premise of sabotaging democracy.

Common Cause certainly knows it’s wrong, though Vice President Joe Biden has yet to liken the organized labor goons behind it to terrorist.

Crossposted at Punditleague.us.

Windows of Opportunity

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Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a great call to arms for anyone – left or right – who is dissatisfied with the debt deal:

Public opinion is everything. Ronald Reagan was successful because public opinion supported him: he wanted to cut taxes and raise defense spending and so did big chunks of the public. He was leading in a direction that they already wanted to go.

But no matter how many times we try to kid ourselves with one poll result or another, liberals just don’t have that advantage. The public is mostly in favor of raising taxes on the rich — though I suspect its support is pretty soft — but on the bigger issues they mostly aren’t on our side. They think deficits are bad, they don’t trust Keynesian economics, they don’t want a higher IRS bill (who does, after all?), and they believe the federal government is spending too much on stuff they don’t really understand. Conservatives have just flat out won this debate in recent decades, and until that changes we’re not going to be able to make much progress.

Drum has a sizable audience: plenty of conservatives are upset with the way the deal shook out and wouldn’t chalk it up as a wind, just as many liberals and leftists would probably share Drum’s dour assessment.

The problem for either side is indeed public opinion.  There are certain policy positions you can and can’t “sell” to the public at large.  The Mackinac Center, a Michigan-based free market think tank, calls it the Overton Policy Window: for every range of possible outcomes for public policy issues, there are a subset which the public is willing to accept at a given time (or, more accurately, what politicians feel the public is willing to accept).

Drum is really talking about the need to move the Overton window in order to win political battles.  That’s a good way to keep activists motivated after a legislative battle that ends with so much dissatisfaction and compromise.

It’s also something good to keep in mind to those addressing Tea Party activists in the coming months.  For example, I spoke to a conservative columnist the other day who bemoaned the fact that while there are plenty of inside-the-beltway organizations eager to use the grassroots muscle of the tea partiers to advance an agenda, there are few telling them that a compromise might be, politically, the best thing that gets passed.  He was technically right about the need for real leaders to provide more a constructive focus for passionate advocates.  That type of communications will always be doomed, though, unless it’s accompanied by a roadmap to better outcomes in the future.  People don’t want their leaders to tell them what can’t be done; they want leaders ready to change the world – if not today, then tomorrow.

As both Republican and Democrat leaders look to keep their respective bases motivated, it will be important to keep this in mind when discussing the recent debt deal.  Instead of portraying the compromise as a victory, each side must discuss the debt issue in terms of reframing the policy window.

Governing Is Campaigning by Other Means

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Earlier this week, I pointed out in The Daily Caller how much the new website for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau looks and operates like an advocacy campaign site.  The Obama Administration can use the recently launched ConsumerFinance.gov to identify potential grassroots, third-party supporters.  Since the agency will undoubtedly be targeted for being both a regulatory behemoth and a waste of already-scarce money, there’s a good chance it will need such supporters.

It’s actually quite a smart move – and the left side of the aisle isn’t the only place you can see it in action. ClickZ points out that a new video from the New Jersey’s Governor’s office looks an awful lot like the type of video a political candidate might use:

And they’re right.  The ad wizards who came up with this one – just like the ones who built the CFPB website – understand that winning public opinion while in office is just as important as winning public opinion on the first Tuesday in November.

Now’s a good time for minority outreach

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President Obama is winning the majority of the American people with his rhetoric on the debt ceiling crisis.  But polls also show that he’s losing some support among key demographics – namely liberal and black voters, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll reported by Politico.

If you’re looking for clues, stop right here Sherlock: the unemployment rate for black men is twice that of white men.  Economic policies intended to elevate the less fortunate are failing, leaving certain demographics behind more than others.

The case for smaller government and personal empowerment has never been more clear.  And the polls that show minority voters increasingly distrustful of the President demonstrate that, at least on some level, voters are also in a position to reject the big-government promises they have been sold for generations.

But only if the case is made to those voters, directly and on a person-to-person basis.

With the 2012 elections over a year away, it’s a good time for campaign organizations, party committees, and non-profits on the right to begin trying to make inroads into communities where they haven’t had much success.  It may take the form of voter registration or straight party recruitment efforts.

Imagine if a candidate like Michelle Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, or Mitt Romney took the initiative to sat down with community leaders of black and/or Hispanic groups the way Herman Cain is doing with Muslim groups. It would likely be even more productive, since Cain is reaching out only after he seriously frayed his relations with that community.   The same outreach by key leaders of the conservative movement would be equally valuable.

It will still be low-yield; the cost per registrant will be high in the early going.  That’s the price of ignoring those communities for so long.  This wouldn’t be about volumes of new party voters, though.  Unlike many of the failing government programs that have been used to buy these communities’ votes in the past decades, this would be a legitimate investment in the future.

Cross-posted at PunditLeague.

Savior du Jour

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The word on the street is that Rick Perry is going to save the Republican Party.

With a primary field that doesn’t seem to satisfy the electorate and/or the media covering the race, the GOP is primed for Perry to ride in on a white horse and seize the nomination.  The Texan inherits his position from a long line of GOP saviors, joining the ranks of Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Fred Thompson.  Barbour and Daniels opted out of the 2012 race.  Despite plenty of anticipation for a consensus conservative to jump in and provide Republicans a choice who wasn’t John McCain in 2008, Thompson proved to be what was feared: an entirely unserious candidate.

Why would Rick Perry be any less disappointing?

Like Thompson, Perry could be underestimating the existing primary field – a field which has been doing plenty of behind-the-scenes work to build campaign organizations.  Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Newt Gingrich have been unofficially running their 2012 campaigns since 2008.  Like Barbour and Daniels, he could simply be the empty suit of the week – a fresh face many party leaders hope will have enough appeal to unite various factions of the Republican party and win critical middle-of-the-road votes to make 2012 closer.

Perry’s deliberations suggest he understands just what he would be getting into if he throws his hat into the ring – and that, like fellow governors Daniels and Barbour, he would rather not declare his candidacy unless he’s prepared to do what it takes to go all the way.  If that is the case, then Perry could be formidable in the primary, even with the ground he has to make up.  Still, there are plenty of areas where Perry is behind, such as establishing field offices, raising money, and building other elements of a successful campaign.

The problem isn’t with Perry or his nascent campaign but with the “savior mentality.”  It creates expectations which are very difficult to live up to – and with expectations so important during primaries, Perry and his campaign would be wise to keep that mentality in check.

Debt runs deep, too

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This commercial ran during the MLB All-Star game this evening:

So a car company which is only in existence now right now due to a massive government bailout funded by taxpayers, feels their product is so amazing that it deserves a blank check for any repairs.

That sounds about right.

 

 

Flake or B… uh, Witch?

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Cross-posted on PunditLeague.us.

The top two Republican women who have made the most news recently have been Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann – the latter for a recent rise in several Iowa polls, the former because… well, because Sarah Palin seems like she will be a political headline fixture for the next few months at least.  But there have also been a few rumblings about South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley playing hardball in her state government – rumblings which are becoming more relevant as Haley becomes a short-lister for the 2012 Vice Presidential spot and a potential 2016 candidate.

The stories about Bachmann and Palin are familiar; both are treated like intellectual lightweights.  Bachmann’s campaign was picking up some steam when she derailed her own momentum with an unfortunate accidental reference to a serial killer in her announcement speech (though, to be fair, she may just be a fan of creepy clown paintings).  It’s familiar territory for Palin, who has been mocked for being vacuous since she failed to make fun of Katie Couric for thinking newspapers still matter.

A completely different story is unfolding about Haley.  Republicans and Democrats are both painting her as a shrewd and deft politician wearing ambition on her sleeve, a sort of center-right Hillary Clinton with clear goals, an idea of how to get there, and the willingness to carry out an aggressive (or even ruthless) plan to do it. The derogatory term for a woman like those qualities rhymes with “witch,” and it looks like her opponents are ready to hang the scarlet B around Haley’s neck.

The Bachmann/Haley stories lead to a disheartening observation: women in politics tend to be portrayed as either airheaded or hardheaded, with very little middle ground.  It isn’t a case of anti-conservative media bias, either.  When George W. Bush tripped over his words, the mistakes were evidence of the former President’s folksy charm.  Barack Obama’s admonitions to his political opponents to “get serious” by acquiescing to his demands receives praise for taking charge.  Each has their detractors, but neither has received the same level of caricature  as Palin or Clinton.

So if one has to choose, which is better?  Palin and Bachmann are discovering the pitfall of being a populist woman.  Their ability to boil down issues to sound bites has seemingly backfired; their less-than-favorable coverage playing on their supposed intellectual shortcomings has made them almost impossible to envision as winning national candidates.

Maybe, for the sake her political future, it’s not such a bad thing for Nikki Haley to channel her inner Meredith Brooks.

Holding higher education accountable (but some schools more than others)

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Two stories that have been floating around in the last week haven’t really been connected in most media coverage, but they should have been.

The first is the US Department of Education’s website designed to “increase transparency” by providing prospective students with information on college costs – including tuition and fees and rates of increases over the past few years.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the hope is to keep students from being “saddled with unmanageable debt.”

Another story is the ongoing effort to exterminate for-profit colleges – the Strayers and Phoenixes of the world.  Last month the Obama Administration promised new rules on for-profits; earlier this week several Democrat Senators pounded their chests and released a statement condemning schools that exploited GI Bill benefits after they saw a story it on PBS.  (Of course, now that a statement has been released, the problem is sure to be cleared up.)

As a sidebar: When did seeing something on TV become a reason to make a statement?  Shouldn’t there be more study and consideration that goes into an official statement?

The Senators’ statement comes a few weeks after the Obama Administration promised to regulate for-profit colleges.  These so-called educational institutions, it seems, receive large amounts of federal funding through student aid programs and other grants but often leave students with student loan payments and questionable career prospects.

If that sounds familiar, it should, because that’s how just about every other institution of higher learning operates.

Tuitions and fees at saintly non-profit colleges have skyrocketed in the past several decades precisely because the cost of education has been so subsidized – from easy student loan programs to Pell grants to federal work study programs that pay two thirds of a student worker’s wage.  (Another sidebar: It just dawned on me that, due to the Federal Work Study program I once ran a snack bar with federal aid.  That means federal tax dollars went toward making sure people in Coolidge Hall at UMass got exceptional grilled cheese sandwiches served to them.  Suddenly, the existence crippling deficit makes a little bit more sense.)

How much have tuition rates risen?  Enough to motivate the Department of Education to launch a website so that students could keep score and avoid overpriced schools.  It’s a good thing those schools aren’t making money, too, or they’d be facing new regulations, too.