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Posts by Matt Stoller
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Sleazy Lobbyists and Drunk Bribocrats: Why am I at the DNC?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on August 27, 2008 at 4:07 AM.
Last night I happened upon a DLC Chairman dinner with Harold Ford, and it was just another reminder that this convention is not really built for people like us. Sleazy lobbyists coming out of the event were sloppy drunk and the slender blonde running the event slurred her words to me that those sponsors are the ones paying her salary. Harold Ford then came out, and I ended up standing in front of his SUV and taking flash picture after flash picture just to make it a little less pleasant for these kinds of conservative bribocrats to attend this convention.
There are a lot of meetings going on, and that's one reason to be here. The media is here because it's their prom. But in terms of raw power dynamics, progressives are not particularly relevant. Hilariously, bloggers have actually been demoted; in 2004, we could actually see the stage at the Fleet Center, this time, online communications director Aaron Myers has secured us a room in the Pepsi Center with televisions in it.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Guess Who Pays for Mainstream Media Political News?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on August 14, 2008 at 5:03 AM.
Sometimes a picture tells the story quite nicely.
DC Democrats Campaigning Against Progressive Dem Annette Taddeo
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on July 24, 2008 at 5:40 AM.
Here's something to note.
Anxious Miami Beach officials huddled Tuesday with Florida Department of Transportation representatives, summoned by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who met with the group, along with representatives of Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
So that's three Republicans and a top Democratic leader meeting, and that Democratic leader has pretty much endorsed these three Republicans. Odd, but on local issues, there's a logic to it we can accept. When you combine it with a whisper campaign against Ros-Lehtinen's opponent, though, this begins to really smell.
So let's look closer at a subtle campaign against Ros-Lehtinen's progressive Democratic opponent, Annette Taddeo. This campaign is designed to get two memes out there, that Taddeo can't win and that Ros-Lehtinen is 'moderate'. The first meme is designed to lock out institutional support from Taddeo, the second to help Ros-Lehtinen portray herself as moderate to voters. The notable thing about this campaign against a progressive Democrat is that it's coming from Democrats in the local establishment and parts of the DC establishment. The rumors of Ros-Lehtinen's strength are allowing groups like EMILY's List to not come in to the race, citing viability questions. To his credit Chris Van Hollen at the DCCC has reserved airtime in FL-18, so there is recognition she can pull this off. And I will have stats soon on EMILY's List support of candidates of color to show why the group should come in for Taddeo.
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So Much for Clean Politics: McCain's Latest Attack Ad Ignores Facts
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on July 21, 2008 at 11:57 AM.
Here's the script:
ANNCR: Gas prices - $4, $5, no end in sight, because some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America.
No to independence from foreign oil.
Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?
CHANT: Obama, Obama
ANNCR: One man knows we must now drill more in America and rescue our family budgets.
Don't hope for more energy, vote for it. McCain.
JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.
I spent Netroots Nation obsessed with gas prices, chatting with various operatives and politicians about polling on the subject. The best framing came from Van Jones, who said that we can't 'drill and burn' our way out of this problem. The public is there with us; they don't believe that gas prices are coming down, even if we open everything to oil company leases. Yet the most of the public -- even some liberals -- supports drilling anyway for three reasons:
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The Money-Laundering Operation at the Heart of the Democratic Party
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on June 25, 2008 at 6:23 PM.
Every week or two I read another article in Roll Call, the Hill or the Politico on the increasing clout of the Blue Dog caucus. Today's came out in Roll Call, titled 'Blue Dogs' Bite Gets Stronger'. Anna Palmer's article opens with the sentence, "Blue Dogs get ready: The ranks of obsequious lobbyists looking to curry favor - and contribute to your war chest - is set to explode." The article also dubs Blue Dogs 'pro-business' and 'fiscally conservative'.
Since the 2006 elections, the Blue Dog political action committee has become one of the fastest growing, and is among the largest in Democratic leadership. Already it has nearly doubled its fundraising this cycle from the $1.2 million raised in 2006. This cycle, through the end of May, it had raised more than $2.2 million, according to CQ MoneyLine.
That puts it nearly on a par with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's (D-Md.)AMERIPAC, which as of the end of April had raised more than $2.2 million.
"We've always been fairly successful with fundraising, even when we were in the minority," said Vickie Walling, chief of staff to Tennessee Rep. John Tanner, a founding member of the group.
Going on to the FEC site lets you see the truth about the Blue Dog PAC - 85% of its money - $1.95M - comes from conservative corporate interests. The list is pretty standard. Walmart, Verizon, AT&T, Charter, Comcast, US Chamber of Commerce, Raytheon, Boeing, etc. And Steny Hoyer's PAC - AmeriPAC - isn't much better. Roughly 65% of his money comes from PACs, most of them similar to the ones flooding the coffers of Blue Dogs - Raytheon, AT&T, Boeing,etc.
From Hoyer and the Blue Dog PAC the money spreads outward. Just check out the list of candidates and committees Hoyer supports, from the Congressional Black Caucus to conservatives like John Barrow, Al Wynn, Don Cazayoux, Larry Kissell, Brad Ellsworth, and the Blue Dogs to progressives like John Hall, Dennis Schulman, Jim Himes, and Darcy Burner.
Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the people that Hoyer gives to, which is the point. We've endorsed some of them on our Better Democrats page. It's just important to note that much of the capital funding the Democratic Party is corporate PAC money, sluiced through figures such as Steny Hoyer and the Blue Dog caucus.
This has real consequences, for the business community. Check out the roll call for the net neutrality amendment that went down to defeat in 2006, 269-152. Blue Dogs voted against it, by and large, which is not so much pro-business as it is pro-telecom and cable industry and anti-technology and innovation. Or if you look at the people protecting the large tax credits for oil and gas, just check out the Blue Dog caucus and you'll find a good number in there. And telecom immunity matters deeply to businesses that don't break the law.
The sluicing funds within the Democratic Party represent relationships that make it really easy to go along with the status quo. They are at their heart network systems, dense thickets built to withstand change. I'm really quite excited about some new mapping tools I saw at Personal Democracy Forum which will help us understand just how dense the networks are, on all sides.
Comcast Censoring Political Ads Critical of Its Actions
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on June 10, 2008 at 4:59 AM.
Glenn Greenwald is reporting that Comcast is refusing to run an ad critical of Representative Chris Carney, an ad which features Comcast itself as a major donor to and beneficiary of Carney's policy choices. The network told him that they would "face potential liability for any defamation contained in the spot."
Comcast in this case concocted a factual inaccuracy and is refusing to run the ad. While there's no excuse for this blatant conflict of interest, the company created an artifice of legal barriers that most stations simply do not. Censoring advertisements from network and cable TV is a common practice in our political discourse, one that often goes unremarked. Here are some recent examples:
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Centrist Climate Bill Deserves Defeat
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on June 3, 2008 at 11:26 AM.
Today in Roll Call, I'm reading a funny little exchange about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act which subsidizes businesses and sort of imposes an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions. The bill is strongly backed by Barbara Boxer and most of the major green groups, with the prominent exception of Friends of the Earth (and a weaker opposition from LCV and the Sierra Club).
"We are about to take up the most important fight of our generation, and we have no strategy, no message and no plan to get out of this," one senior Senate Democratic aide said...."Boxer is walking us off a cliff," another senior Senate Democratic aide said.
The only group to do paid media against this bill was the Friends of the Earth, who realized early on (as did most liberal bloggers discussing this issue) that the politics didn't make sense. You can't cut the baby in half with regards to climate. Either you tax carbon in some form and use it to build a socially just society, or you tax it and give the money to business elites, leveling the rest of the middle class in the process. The result of the latter scenario is 'nuclear feudalism', with a superrich class and the rest of us steeped in poverty.
Lieberman-Warner was the bill that taxed carbon (through a confusing cap and trade mechanism) and gave the money to businesses. Business elites realized a few years ago that funding the deniers was only useful as a wedge to solicit subsidies around carbon. In other words, they were saying something along the lines of "Don't side with the crazy environmentalists, don't side with the crazy deniers, side with moderate pro-business reasonable people who agree that climate change is a problem but don't want to cost the economy money." If that sounds like the immigration or Energy bill or war funding fiascos, you wouldn't be far off, as the architecture of those conversations is the same as the architecture of this one.
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White Boomer Women Dropping Support for Obama
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 30, 2008 at 8:22 AM.
Obama's numbers have come down, but Josh Orton is missing the picture. It's women, specifically, white women, who are unhappy and switching over to, mostly, undecided.
Recent declines in Obama's image have been pronounced among whites - especially white women. Currently, just 43% of white women express a positive opinion of Obama, down from 56% in late February.
This is confirmation of what Gallup noted earlier.
The only major demographic group still supporting Clinton to the tune of 51% or more is women aged 50 and older. This group's preferences have changed little during May, at the same time that Clinton's support among younger men (those 18 to 49) has declined by nearly 10 points.
And not only is it white women, according to Pew, it's white women between the ages of 30-64, with a specific heavy loss among women between the ages of 50-64. In other words, this is Clinton's bread and butter.
The survey finds that as many 39% of Clinton's female supporters believe that her gender has hurt her candidacy. In turn, favorable opinions of Obama have tumbled among women who support Clinton - from 58% in March to 43% currently. By contrast, there has been a slight increase in positive views of Obama over this period among men who support Clinton (from 42% in March to 47% currently).
Women, in particular boomer women, are really really mad. Digby says 'don't put baby (boomer) in the corner', and she's right. Women of working age who grew up on choice and first wave feminism and strong glass ceilings and saw, up close, sexual harrassment and the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, don't like a new form of politics that comes complete with a besmirching of one of their icons. I'm seeing women attacked for sexism all over the country, and it is making white boomer women extremely angry. And it's showing up in the numbers.
And here's a video that drives home the point:
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Needed: A Kickass Woman Political Archetype
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 29, 2008 at 6:00 AM.
I just read a new paper out by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox titled 'Why Are Women Still Not Running for Public Office?'. Right now, America is 84th in the world in terms of percentage women in our legislature, with a whopping 16.3% of our seats in the House and Senate held by women. That is not only below Uganda, Burundi, and Cuba, it is lower than the international average itself.
Why is this? It's not, as Lawless and Fox note, because it is harder for women to win than men. And it's not because qualified women don't exist The problem is just that women don't seem to think they should or can run compared to men of similar demographic status and accomplishment. Part of this is cultural, and part of it is infrastructure, as women just aren't recruited as often as men (organizations like EMILY's List and She Should Run are set up to deal with this problem).
One of the consequences of this cultural problem is that progressive citizens run less than their share of the population, and conservatives run disproportionately higher than their share of the population.
Women in the sample, on average, are three years younger than men, a probable result of the fact that women's entry into the fields of law and business is a relatively recent phenomenon. Further, women are more likely to be Democrats and liberal-leaning, while men are more likely to be Republicans and conservative, a finding consistent with recent polls showing a partisan gender gap among the general U.S. population.
This pattern of who runs drives how progressive our politics is quite directly. If you look at the caucus, and Chris and I did last week, you'll see the pattern instantly.
The more women in office, the more progressives in office. There's good news in the report - since 2001, there has been an uptick in women doing the things that precede running for office, such as building a fundraising network and being recruited for office. And women are inspired across parties by women in positions of power such as Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleeza Rice. In the Republican Party, 17 percent of women, compared to 4 percent of men find Hillary Clinton 'inspirational'.
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Clarifying Obama's Position on Net Neutrality
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 23, 2008 at 3:05 PM.
In telecom circles, there's been a little dust-up about Obama's position on net neutrality, sparked by Carlyle Group telecom expert and former FCC Commissioner Bill Kennard's statements.
"Where that has typically led us is to supporting tier pricing systems as long as they're not discriminatory," said Kennard, an outside communications policy adviser to Obama.
Susan Ness, the likely FCC Chair under a Clinton administration, echoed Kennard's comments, going slightly further to the right and suggesting that Clinton is quite wary of regulation even though she supports network neutrality.
Now, 'tiered access' is a loaded term. It could mean charging consumers different amounts for different types of service, like DSL, Cable modems, T1 lines, dial-up, and broadband cards. That's fine. Or it could mean charging youtube and Google and bloggers more money depending on what type of content they put on the web and what their content says. That's not fine. In other words, Kennard either means that ISPs can charge different amounts to consumers who use different amounts of bandwidth, or he means that ISPs can charge content providers different amounts based on the type of content they serve. We already know that without proactive action from the next administration, cable and telecom companies will inspect, block and censor content, as Cox and Comcast are already doing.
The political pressure for an open internet is increasing; the Senate just held a hearing on equipment makers that help the Chinese government censor content. The Senate Judiciary Human Rights Subcommittee raked Cisco Systems over the coals for "having a role in the Chinese government's construction of a system for monitoring, censoring and prosecuting online dissidents who speak in favor of democratic values." The basic system architecture of packet sniffing and monitoring in China is no different than the one American companies will use to tier access to different types of content. And even McCain is having to concede that an open internet is important.
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Is $8 Per Gallon on the Way?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 22, 2008 at 3:28 PM.
Atrios makes the point: "$4 gas is annoying. $8 gas, if it happens, will be... different."
The Wall Street Journal has a piece out on the International Energy Agency substantially dropping its forecasts of global oil reserves. Joe Romm, an energy expert at the Center for American Progress, points to this study by the Bush Department of Energy on peak oil, in 2005, which says the following.
The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.
The public sort of gets the problem, without any explanation from elites or the press. Survey USA did a poll on gas prices, and found that 80% of respondents think that gas will rise to $5 a gallon before it drops to $3 a gallon. The good news is that only 34% of Americans say they have no mass transit options, while 15% say that mass transit is a convenient option. So there's lots of substituting away from driving with current infrastructure in place, and that's not even considering carpools and auto-centered ways to save energy. But the problem is not simply energy-related, and much of the peak oil doomsday pronouncers are allowing the real villains to get off scot-free. Here's the Cunning Realist, who has been pointing out the least-notices aspect of the story.
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Obama Ratchets-Up His Attacks on Big Media
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 20, 2008 at 6:01 AM.
On Friday, I wrote about how Obama is subtly sending out signals that he is going to reform media by emphasizing a more diverse ownership structure. Currently, radio station ownership is mostly held by white men. Latinos own 2.9% of all radio stations and African-Americans own 3.4% of them. TV is even worse. According to Free Press, "people of color own just 3.15 percent of commercial television stations in the United States... while women own just 5.87 percent of television stations."
Pledging a more diverse ownership structure is a serious challenge to the current media environment. Today, Obama pledged to use antitrust tools to work on media consolidation.
"I will assure that we will have an antitrust division that is serious about pursuing cases," the Illinois senator told an audience of mostly senior citizens in Oregon.
"There are going to be areas, in the media for example where we're seeing more and more consolidation, that I think (it) is legitimate to ask...is the consumer being served?"
I wrote about this in November, 2007, when Obama came out with his media and tech proposals. He's got a strong open source, almost libertarian attitude, as evidenced by his technocratic advisors and slightly more conservative stances on economic stimulus and health care. While cautious instincts are part of his DNA, when it comes to media, they serve the public extremely well. Unlike health care and the green economy, elites in technology are extremely powerful and progressive, so they counterbalance the more corrupt and conservative telecom and cable interests. The Obama camp is close with Silicon Valley, which is both libertarian in general matters and progressive when it comes to technology; venture capitalists were some of Obama's first Presidential backers, and you can get a really good sense of who he is by reading this blog post endorsing Obama by Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape (and a Mitt Romney donor). Google itself is willing to get into the fray, pushing back against Joe Lieberman's demands to censor Youtube.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Obama Stands Up to Bush, the FCC, and Big Media
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 16, 2008 at 9:58 AM.
John Eggerton at Broadcasting and Cable has the story.
The fight over the Federal Communications Commission's Dec. 18 media-ownership vote set up a potential battle between the current president and a senator who wants to be the next one.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) Thursday urged the House to follow the Senate's lead and pass a resolution of disapproval, an unusual legislative maneuver that would invalidate the FCC's decision to allow TV and radio stations and newspapers to be co-owned in the top 20 markets, subject to some conditions.
After the Senate approved the measure, Obama, a co-sponsor of the bill, released a statement saying, "I urge my colleagues in the House of Representatives to expeditiously pass the legislation."
He framed the vote, as he has before, as standing up to "Washington special interests," a campaign theme. "Our nation's media market must reflect the diverse voices of our population, and it is essential that the FCC promotes the public interest and diversity in ownership," he said.
The FCC decision to consolidate yet more media was opposed by 99% of public comments. As Paul Rosenberg noted in this comments, this might be the single least popular decision by the Bush administration ever. But Obama, as he did with his media and tech plan, took this further, and called for diversity and representation for the public interest in media ownership.
With ownership levels for minorities and women in media in the low single digits, Obama is really saying that it's time to reshape our media system. In discussing Reagan, one of the great conservative media reformers, remember he made the following comment.
"I didn't' say I liked Ronald Reagan's policies," Obama explained. "What I said was that was the kind of working majority we need to form in order to move a progressive agenda forward."
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Disruptive Party Building: From a Straw to a Funnel
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 15, 2008 at 11:29 AM.
The evolution in field and the reimagining of politics continues apace. Back in May, 2007, I pointed to this quote from David Plouffe.
"Don't get me wrong," said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager and Rospars's boss, "the Internet is a powerful organizing and fundraising tool, and it's getting more and more important every day, but it's still not the persuasion and message tool that TV is."
Though I criticized him at the time, I believe Plouffe was correct. Obama's speech on Wright was perhaps a singular messaging moment for the internet, and the pushback on the gas tax came from the internet. But by and large, the messaging from Obama has been TV messaging, and it has worked. Plouffe was correct about the internet's impact on field, as I noted at the time.
Social networks will be combined with voter files, which have seen dramatic improvements since 2000. And fundraising, field, and media will have converged. Candidates will be putting out youtube clips early to raise money, identify supporters, and win primaries. All of this has been tested already, and it works.
Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992...
The number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer app.
Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.
If Rock the Vote experiences the type of growth of regular Web 2.0 startups like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc, there's no reason that 18-29 year old voting block can't expand its share of the electorate by 3 or 4 points. This would swing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. And it would put North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas into the swing category, while pulling New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania out of swing state territory.
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Obama's Consolidation of the Party
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 8, 2008 at 7:47 AM.
Brownsox blogs.
Over 1.25 million Indianans voted yesterday for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary.Over 1.1 million Indianans voted for Jill Long Thompson or Jim Schellinger in the Democratic primary for Governor of Indiana.
In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry received 969,000 votes in the state of Indiana...in the general election.
That is stunning. The primary has been exceptionally good for party building. Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
Voter Registration: Obama has launched a 50 state registration drive.
"That's why I'm so proud that today our campaign announced a massive volunteer-led voter registration drive in all 50 states to help ensure every single eligible voter takes part in this election so we can take back Washington for the American people."
I have heard from several sources that the Obama campaign is sending out signals to donors, specifically at last weekend's Democracy Alliance convention, to stop giving to outside groups, including America Votes. The campaign also circulated negative press reports about Women's Voices Women's Vote, implying voter suppression.
Obama Organizing Fellows: Here's Obama describing them:
Basically what we've done is we've been attracting so much volunteer talent, so many young people who have gotten involved in the campaign, that we wanted to give a handful of them an opportunity to have some more intensive training. So we've asked them to apply for fellowships. I think they're called Obama Fellows. They will get intensive training, and they will be put on staff and will have an experience, starting in June.
These are unpaid positions, and they will be used to do field organizing, message, and helping to "continue to build the movement". This is pure leadership development, though it continues the class-based diminution of talent by refusing to pay, a problem outlined in Crashing the Gates.
Money: MyBarackObama.com: With 1.5 million donors, this campaign has blown away anything we've ever seen in terms of grassroots fundraising. The technology is all centralized, so Obama knows the name, address, giving patterns, and occupation of every donor out there, as well as social networking information, like who the best raisers are. He has bypassed Actblue, and will probably end up building in a Congressional slate feature to further party build while keeping control of the data.
One email from Moveon to their full list can bring in between $100k to $1M for a candidate, with $1M being the very top end of the range. With one good email to his list, in a few months, Obama will probably be able to bring in $1-3M for a Senate candidate under attack or split that among several. 10-20% of the money going to Senate candidates this cycle might come from Barack Obama's internet operation. Stunning.
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