Progressive Book Club [PBC]: The Democrats' Da Vinci Code

[The Progressive Book Club (PBC) offers in-depth discussions on some of articles and books that we have found especially influential in our efforts to build the progressive netroots in Virginia.]

David Sirota is my favorite blogger (present company excluded, of course).  Not only is he articulate and fiercely principled, he does something that few other bloggers seem capable of:  he organizes in the real world.  Sirota is a former spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, and served as a Senior Fellow for the Center for American Progress.  He is the founder of the Progressive States Network which focuses attention on progressive measures that can be taken at the State and Local level.  Most recently, Sirota and Progressive States coordinated an effort which resulted in the passage of anti-war legislation by 20 state legislatures, nationwide. Yeah, Sirota doesn't mess around.

Newsweek did a writeup on him [here]. Mother Jones has a fantastic interview [here], his interview on the Colbert report is embedded above.

David Sirota is also the author of one of the most important articles in progressive, populist politics, his renouned American Prospect piece "The Democrats' Da Vinci Code", which is the subject of today's Progressive Book Club (PBC)...
Writing from the aftermath of the disastrous 2004 election, Sirota saw straight through the wreckage of the Democratic party to a clear pathway of heart, soul, and enduring triumph.

As the Democratic Party goes through its quadrennial self-flagellation process, the same tired old consultants and insiders are once again complaining that Democratic elected officials have no national agenda and no message.

Yet encrypted within the 2004 election map is a clear national economic platform to build a lasting majority. You don't need Fibonacci's sequence, a decoder ring, or 3-D glasses to see it. You just need to start asking the right questions.

Where, for instance, does a Democrat get off using a progressive message to become governor of Montana? How does an economic populist Democrat keep winning a congressional seat in what is arguably America's most Republican district? Why do culturally conservative rural Wisconsin voters keep sending a Vietnam-era anti-war Democrat back to Congress? What does a self-described socialist do to win support from conservative working-class voters in northern New England?

The answers to these and other questions are the Democrats' very own Da Vinci Code -- a road map to political divinity. It is the path Karl Rove fears. He knows his GOP is vulnerable to Democrats who finally follow leaders who have translated a populist economic agenda into powerful cultural and values messages. It also threatens groups like the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which has pushed the Democratic Party to give up on its working-class roots and embrace big business' agenda.

Heady stuff.  A democratic pathway that is "political divinity"?  It's "the path that Karl Rove fears"?  It threatens the DLC?  Huzzah!  Where do I sign up?  What is this magic formula?  Essentially the formula is simple:  stand up for progressive principles.  But he doesn't stop at generalizations.  He itemizes specifics. 

Without further ado, the Democrats' Da Vinci Code:

1.  Fight the Class War
2.  Champion Small Business Over Big Business
3.  Protect Tom Joad
4.  Turn the Hunters and the Exurbs Green
5.  Become a Teddy Roosevelt Clone
6.  Clean Up Government
7.  Use the Values Prism

I'll quote key parts and give my thoughts, but there's just no alternative to reading the full article.

Fight the Class War
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, crying "class warfare" is the last refuge of wealthy elitists. Yet, inexplicably, this red herring emasculates Democrats in Washington. Every time pro-middle-class legislation is offered, Republicans berate it as class warfare. Worse, they get help from corporate factions within the Democratic Party itself.

But as countless examples show, progressives are making inroads into culturally conservative areas by talking about economic class. This is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans.

In North Carolina, instead of following John Edwards' class-based formula, Democrats anointed investment banker Erskine Bowles as the nominee to replace Edwards in 2004. At the time, party insiders brushed off concerns that, as a Clinton White House chief of staff, Bowles was an architect of the free-trade policy that helped eliminate North Carolina's manufacturing jobs. But Bowles' opponent, Representative Richard Burr, made the Democrat pay for his free-trade sellout. "You negotiated the China trade agreement for President Clinton, which is the largest exporter of jobs not just in North Carolina but in this country," Burr said at one debate, robbing Bowles of an economic issue that might have offset North Carolinians' inherent cultural suspicions of a Democrat. On election night, Bowles went down in flames.

In 2006, Webb, Tester, Sanders and a dozen others triumphed on a message of economic fairness.  Meanwhile, guys like Harold Ford spun like the American Enterprise institute, made no real connection with working-class, rural voters, and finally tanked hard.

Champion Small Business Over Big Business
The small-business lobby in Washington is a de facto wing of the Republican Party. But Democrats are finding that, at the grass-roots level, small-business people are far less uniformly conservative, especially as the GOP increasingly helps huge corporations eat up local economies. While entrepreneurs don't like high taxes and regulations, they also don't like government encouraging multinationals to monopolize the market and destroy Main Street.

As a small-business man himself, Montana's 2004 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Brian Schweitzer, figured out how to use these frustrations in one of America's reddest states. He lamented how out-of-state corporations were using loopholes to avoid paying taxes, thus driving up the tax burden on small in-state companies. He discussed taxing big-box companies like Wal-Mart that have undercut local business. In the process, he became the state's first Democratic governor in 16 years.

Protect Tom Joad
Northern Wisconsin and the plains of North Dakota are not naturally friendly territories for progressives. Both areas are culturally conservative, yet their voters keep sending progressive Democrats like Representative David Obey and Senator Byron Dorgan, respectively, back to Congress.

No issue is closer to these two leaders' hearts -- or more important to their electoral prospects -- than the family farm. In Wisconsin, corporate dairy processors have tried to depress prices for farmers' dairy products. In North Dakota, agribusiness has squeezed the average farmer with lower prices for commodities. But unlike other lawmakers who simply pocket agribusiness cash and look the other way, Obey and Dorgan have been voices of dissent. They have pushed legislation to freeze agribusiness mergers, a proposal originally developed by populist Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. As Dorgan once wrote, "When Cargill, the nation's number one grain exporter, can buy the grain operations of Continental, which is number two, the cops aren't exactly walking tall on the antitrust beat."

Dorgan and Obey also opposed the Republican-backed "Freedom to Farm Act," which President Clinton signed into law. Instead of pretending the subsidies in the bill were good for the little guy, Obey told the truth and called it the "freedom-to-lose-your-shirt" bill. He noted that the new subsidies would primarily go to large corporations, encourage overproduction that depresses prices, and reward big farms over small ones.

And the opportunities for progressives are growing. Instead of neutralizing Democrats' advances on agricultural issues, the GOP is digging in, already planning to repeal country-of-origin labeling laws that help small farms differentiate their products from larger corporate producers. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, who has pocketed more than $360,000 from agribusiness, wants to kill the measure, claiming, "I can't find any real opposition to doing exactly what we want to do here." Clearly the GOP hasn't talked to any family farmers lately.

The truth is that Republicans and conservatives are locked at the hip to these moneyed interests that believe they own the governement and believe that they owe regular people absolutely nothing.  The corporate socialist elites of the far right, will continue to drive small businesses and small farms out of existence as long as they are allowed to win the worldwide race to the bottom of the wage pool.

Turn the Hunters and the Exurbs Green
For years, conventional wisdom has said that culturally conservative hunters and exurbanites will always vote Republican. But the GOP's willingness to side with private landowners and developers is now putting the party at odds with these constituencies. And that could create a whole new class of Democratic-voting conservationists.

In Montana, Schweitzer criticized his opponents for trying to restrict the state's Stream Access Law, which protects anglers' rights to fish waterways that cross through private land. He also promised to prevent the state from selling off public land. It was one of the ways he outperformed previous Democrats in rural areas and won his race.

In Colorado, when the Bush administration tried to allow development in wildlife areas, John Salazar pounced. He noted that many of the Bush administration's plans went "against what nearly every local elected official on both sides of the aisle has asked for." Salazar's opponent, who was a former lobbyist and industry-friendly state environmental official, was unable to effectively respond.

Red + Green = Blue

Become a Teddy Roosevelt Clone
"Tough on crime" has always been a reliable Republican mantra. Now, though, progressives are claiming that law-and-order mantle for themselves. Led by state attorneys general, Democrats are realizing the political benefits of fighting white-collar crime, big-business rip-offs, and corporate misbehavior.

In Republican Arizona, former Attorney General Janet Napolitano became known as a tough prosecutor of corporate crime. She charged Qwest with fraud and negotiated a $217 million settlement with scandal-plagued accounting firm Arthur Andersen on behalf of investors. The record helped her become the state's first Democratic governor in more than a decade.

In New York, Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who had never held elective office, eked out a victory against a Republican incumbent in 1998 to become the state's Attorney General. He then did something that seemed like political suicide: He took on Wall Street. Specifically, Spitzer used state law to charge investment firms with bilking stockholders. Though opponents labeled him anti-business, he countered that he was pro-business because he was protecting the integrity of the market. Four years later, he won re-election in a landslide, improving his performance in many parts of the conservative upstate.

Clean Up Government
In the early 1990s, Newt Gingrich attacked Democrats as corrupt, wasteful, and incompetent, eventually leading the Republicans to reclaim Congress. Now, though, progressives are using the tactic for themselves.

In Montana, voters grew tired of state policy being manipulated by corporate lobbyists while the economy was sputtering. In Gingrichian fashion, Schweitzer criticized his GOP opponent for becoming a corporate lobbyist after a stint in the Legislature. He also asked why his opponent had spent $40,000 of taxpayer money to redecorate the secretary of state's office during a state budget crisis.

Schweitzer was following Arizona's Napolitano, who was making headlines by cutting out almost $1 billion of government waste at a time the state budget was in the red. Her crusade was reminiscent of how deficits have been used by South Carolina Representative John Spratt to symbolize government mismanagement and win his Republican-leaning district. It also echoed Colorado Democrats, who used deficits to win the state Legislature for the first time in 40 years. "The Republicans' obsession with narrow cultural issues while the state's looming fiscal crisis was ignored drove a deep wedge between fiscally conservative live-and-let-live Republicans and the neo-conservative extremists with an agenda," wrote one Denver Post columnist.

Responsible government may not be sexy, but there's nothing like twisting the knife in when Republicans and conservatives prove themselves incompetent or corrupt.  The quintessence of this is, of course, the drowning of New Orleans.  Cronyism kills.  Heckuva Job, right-wing conservatism.

Use the Values Prism
In 2004, pundits seem to agree that the national election was decided by "moral values." And though many believe the term is a euphemism for religious, anti-abortion, and anti-gay sentiments, it is likely a more general phrase describing whether a candidate is perceived to be "one of us."

It is this sense of cultural solidarity that often trumps other issues. For example, many battleground-state voters may have agreed with John Kerry's economic policies. But the caricature of Kerry as a multimillionaire playboy windsurfing on Nantucket Sound was a more visceral image of elitism. By contrast, successful red-region progressives are using economic populism to define their cultural solidarity with voters. True, many of these Democrats are pro-gun, and some are anti-abortion. But to credit their success exclusively to social conservatism is to ignore how populism culturally connects these leaders to their constituents.

In Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, Sanders' free-trade criticism not only speaks to conservatives' pocketbook concerns but also to a deeper admiration of a congressman willing to take stands corporate politicians refuse to take.

In Montana, Schweitzer's plans to protect hunting access not only attract votes from outdoorsmen but also project a broader willingness to fight for Joe Six-Pack and the state's way of life. As focus groups showed, this stance garnered strong support from Montana's women, who saw it as a values issue.

As we'll see in the next Progressive Book Club (PBC), (George Lakoff's "Thinking Points")the great political discovery of the Reagan era was that people don't make voting decisions based on issues, but on connection, trust, and values.  Meanwhile, Democrats and Progressive interest groups are still in the dark ages.  Our people still believe that we can win, because we're right on the issues.  Until we wake up and stand up because we're right in our VALUES, an enduring Democratic majoirty will continue to escape us.

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After this intro, if you still just can't get enough David Sirota, here's an interview he did on the Mark Gorgon radio show.  Enjoy, and thank you for everything that you do.

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