Good post-election demographic and political analysis from Judis, Teixeira and Katz.

Bill Clinton as Chairman of the DNC? So says this LA Times editorial. To me it sounds like a great idea. And I say that as someone who believes Hillary Clinton never should and probably (hopefully) never will run for president.

Surveying the scene today, one thing that occurs to me is that President Bush is remaking the government into something that is looking more and more like a parliamentary democracy. I don't mean in every specific, of course; the key feature of the Bush presidency is an extremely powerful executive that to a great degree coopts and controls his own congressional majorities.

But the similarities are important and worth understanding. The key elements are extremely tight party discipline (something political scientists have lamented the absence of for years) and a sharp diminishment of rivalries between the branches of government which used to cut against unified party control.

Party discipline is simple enough. President Bush's first term was replete with examples. And an instructive comparison is how much President Bush was able to accomplish with thin majorities in 2001-02 compared to what President Clinton was able to do with much more substantial majorities in 1993-94.

Today I'm struck by this most recent example with Arlen Specter.

Fresh from his successful senate reelection campaign, Specter (heir apparent to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee) suggested he'd hold the line against anti-Roe v. Wade judges President Bush might appoint.

Then no more than a day later he beat a hasty and shamefaced retreat.

“Contrary to press accounts, I did not warn the President about anything and was very respectful of his Constitutional authority on the appointment of federal judges.

“As the record shows, I have supported every one of President Bush’s nominees in the Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor. I have never and would never apply any litmus test on the abortion issue and, as the record shows, I have voted to confirm Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor, and Justice Kennedy and led the fight to confirm Justice Thomas.

“I have already sponsored a protocol calling for a Judiciary Committee hearing within thirty days of a nomination, a vote out of Committee thirty days later, and floor action thirty days after that. I am committed to such prompt action by the Committee on all of President Bush’s nominees.

“In light of the repeated filibusters by the Democrats in the last Senate session, I am concerned about a potential repetition of such filibusters. I expect to work well with President Bush in the judicial confirmation process in the years ahead.”

I assume the word came down from the White House to Sen. Specter that he simply wouldn't be Chairman if that were his attitude.

Then we have the incident we noted yesterday in which Sen. Frist may, at the president's say-so, change the cloture rules which require 60 votes to push through legislation.

Past presidents have usually had to deal with Majority Leaders who were much more solicitous of their chamber's independence and institutional prerogatives. But then again, President Bush all but appointed Frist to his post. So this should not surprise us.

There's even an element of parliamentarism in President Bush's post-election comments about his mandate and his right to expect others to fall in line behind views because he won a majority, even if a small one, at the ballot box.

It's fine to bemoan this. And there's much to bemoan. But Democrats also need to learn how to live with it, at least for the next four years. And that means realizing that for at least the next two years, the President can get passed almost anything he wants to. His congressional majorities are now sufficiently padded that he can even afford a few Republican defections. He simply doesn't need Democrats for anything.

And that means approaching most legislative battles not with an eye toward preventing passage or significantly altering legislation, but placing alternatives on the table that the party will be able use as contrasts to frame the next two elections. In other words, their only remaining viable alternative is to be an actual party of opposition.

The dollar ...

The dollar continued its decline in global currency <$NoAd$> markets yesterday, intensifying worries among some economists that mounting U.S. budget and trade deficits could send the U.S. currency into a tailspin.

But John B. Taylor, the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, defended the Bush administration view that the deficits pose no danger of a dollar collapse. He issued a detailed rebuttal of what he called "scare stories."

The dollar fell yesterday to within a fraction of a cent of its all-time low against the euro of $1.2930 , trading as low as $1.2898 before rallying slightly to close at $1.2867. It fell modestly against the Japanese yen, and continued a sharp slide against the Canadian dollar, which rose to 83 U.S. cents yesterday for the first time in 12 years.

It was the second straight day that the dollar has fallen despite a surge in the stock market, continuing a trend that began in early October when it started slipping against the currencies of major U.S. trading partners. The decline rekindled the fears of some analysts that the dollar could be headed for a severe sell-off unless the White House and Congress make a major effort to shrink the budget gap.

The rest from the Post ...

This is reprinted from a post from last February ...

It all reminds me of a line from a famous, or rather infamous, memo Pat Buchanan, then a White House staffer, wrote for Richard Nixon in, I believe, 1972 when their idea of the moment was what they called 'positive polarization'.

At the end of this confidential strategy memo laying out various ideas about how to create social unrest over racial issues and confrontations with the judiciary, Buchanan wrote (and you can find this passage on p. 185 of Jonathan Schell's wonderful Time of Illusion): "In conclusion, this is a potential throw of the dice that could bring the media on our heads, and cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

And there you have it. Tear the country apart. And once it's broken, our chunk will be bigger.

Apropos of the <$NoAd$>moment.

In an article at Foxnews.com on possible Supreme Court nominations, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to the first President Bush said the following about the filibuster rules in the Senate ...

As it stands today [Democrats] can block [a nominee] ... But I also believe that the president and majority leader may well decide to change the rules given the elections ... The president has a very strong political support, potential support, for asking for and getting this change.

What does this mean exactly?

Certainly, a reelected president with an expanded senate majority has a lot more <$NoAd$> leverage to get his judicial nominees confirmed. There's no getting around that. And it will be very difficult for Democrats to hold their whole caucus together to stymie a judicial appointment with a filibuster. Moreover, the 60 vote rule, on the merits, is subject to a lot of very valid criticism.

But what is it about the president's victory on Tuesday that provides a moral authority or logic to changing the rules under which nominations are now approved?

This is a critical difference.

Democrats have to deal with the fact that President Bush is now no longer a minority president, however slim his majority may have been. They also need to contend with his expanded senate majorities.

But this is what I fear will be a growing pattern in this second term: an effort to use a narrowly secured majority not only to govern, even govern aggressively, but to make institutional changes that strip away the existing powers and rights of large minorities. These formal and informal checks and balances constitute the governmental soft-tissue that allows our political system to function.

An earlier example of this was the DeLay double-dip redistricting from last year. I believe we'll see much more. And it's a pattern that everyone should be watching closely.

Take a look at Ed Kilgore's take on the post-election intra-Democratic party issues at his NewDonkey website. For those of you who don't know, Ed is the Policy Director of the DLC.

"I think a large part of the public likes the conservatives' theme music. Now they will be tested on whether they like the lyrics."

After the Massachusetts court decision in favor of gay marriage, I remember writing that though this was good for civil rights, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it's anything but bad for the Democratic party. I thought I'd written that in TPM. But when I used the TPM search engine yesterday I couldn't find it using the obvious keywords. So it's possible that I wrote it somewhere else or even in a private letter. Who knows ...

In any case, over the last 7 or 8 months I think I managed to convince myself that this wasn't the case, which was obviously wrong.

Let me start by making an important distinction. Recognizing that a certain position cost a lot at the polls is not the same as saying the position should be discarded for political reasons. I know that on the surface it may seem that way. But they're not the same thing. And it's foolish to ignore these realities if you're going to make any headway at coping with them.

As many other have already noted, Rove and Co. cleverly managed to get anti-gay marriage initiatives and referenda on the ballot in a number of key swing states. And that seems to have played an key role in mobilizing 'peripheral' evangelical and culturally conservative voters.

Once they were at the polls, of course, they voted for George W. Bush.

Looking back over the week before the campaign I realize that I should have been more attentive to the reports I was picking up from readers about a wave of push-polls or robo-calls on the gay marriage issue -- some hitting the issue itself while others dug deeper and insisted that the issue was really whether homosexuality would be 'taught in schools' and so forth.

This issue clearly had potency without a phone-call campaign. But that added to it. The decision to get the initiatives on the ballot, followed by a carefully orchestrated campaign of push-polls and the like amounted to a effective campaign pincer movement. And it was one that, to be honest, I think fairly few on the Democratic side even saw coming. Gay marriage -- and the whole cluster of issues that surround it -- became the sub rosa issue of the campaign.

It may have provided Bush with the crucial turnout boost on the right that allowed him to remain in office.

Memory hole watch: the LA Times has the first interviews with soldiers who watched as looted dragged away those high-grade explosives from the al Qaqaa munitions complex.

President Bush says Social Security privatization starts now.

See this earlier post for more on the linguistic funny-business over the term 'privatization'.

As an oft-times critic of her, let me highly recommend Maureen Dowd's column in this morning's Times. And we'll be saying more about 'reaching out' to Red State voters.

In his commentary today, Marshall Wittman says: "Organization is fine - ideas and message are far superior."

Lest there be any doubt, I entirely agree. It is simply that I think the two work in tandem and each galvanizes and augments the other.

There's a lot of talking to done about this, haggling, gnashing of teeth, some shouting too. The point of my earlier discussion wasn't stand-pat-ism. Improvement is always possible and necessary. And Democrats are still recovering from various social and political developments stretching from the 1960s straight through to the 1990s. It is, simply, also important to distinguish between the present moment and 1984 or 1972, though many would like to portray this in those terms.

Needless to say, we'll talk much more about this.

Quite right -- particularly on second-guessing. See Atrios.

Yesterday, in an overnight post, Andrew Sullivan wrote, President Bush "deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again, and the constructive criticism of those of us who decided to back his opponent. He needs our prayers and our support for the enormous tasks still ahead of him."

I thought about this when I read it. And, to put it simply, I didn't agree. What I considered writing was that given the track record he's compiled and the way he ran this campaign, he's really owed no fresh start. That would be graciousness at war with reality.

It would be up to the president, I thought of writing, to show concrete signs of a willingness not to govern in the divisive and factional spirit from which he's governed in the last four years.

And then there's this from his comments today: "We've worked hard and gained many new friends, and the result is now clear -- a record voter turnout and a broad, nationwide victory."

This is the touchstone and the sign. A 'broad, nationwide victory'? He must be kidding. Our system is majority rule. And 51% is a win. But he's claiming a mandate.

"A broad, nationwide victory"?

It would almost be comical if it weren't for the seriousness of what it portends. This election cut the nation in two. A single percentage point over 50% is not broad. A victory that carried no states in the Northeast, close to none in the Industrial midwest is not nationwide, and none on the west coast is not nationwide.

And yet he plans to use this narrow victory as though it were a broad mandate, starting right back with the same strategy that has already come near to tearing this country apart.

If you have any doubt what may be coming, look at this.

Well, what to say? Two years ago, after some surprisingly disappointing election results I quipped something like, "Well, that could have gone better."

But somehow, that sort of irreverent, grim humor doesn't seem appropriate. This isn't just a disappointing election result. The consequences of what happened last night are too great.

Setting aside my general political leanings, my personal views and feelings of partisanship, I think the result portends very bad things for America's role in the world and the well-being on all levels of this country. Changes in domestic politics, in theory at least, can be shifted back at a following election. The world, though, is different. There we are just a ship -- though the largest one -- on waters we can never truly control. And I fear that this result will set in motion dangerous dynamics that even the relatively young among us will be wrestling with and contending with for the rest of our lives.

I've referred to this in the past, and hopefully will have a chance to return to it, but here's the essence of the matter, as I see it. Before today, the course that America had charted in the world over the last three years could be seen as the result of a traumatic event (9/11) and the choice of a president who was actually put in office by a minority of the electorate. This was a referendum on what's happened in the last three years. And it's been validated.

Let me run through a few other points rapidly.

The situation in Ohio. I gave myself the benefit of sleeping in a bit this morning. So I have not gotten my head around all the details of the provisional ballots and how many votes, in theory, remain. I can see that President Bush is trying to force the process and wring some de facto concession out of Sen. Kerry -- a typical Bush/Rove maneuver on many levels.

I don't want to see Kerry supporters (or the country as a whole for that matter) remain in an emotional limbo any longer than necessary. But for my part, I see no reason that Kerry should concede anything so long as uncounted votes remain outstanding that could conceivably decide the contest in his favor.

That's not something that means a lot to this president; I know that. But this whole contest has been too dirty, too marred with voter suppression, dirty tricks and other unspeakable antics not to press every last possibility. So, not that my views matter in this, but I would say do nothing premature. Make sure every last vote is counted. The fact that the president is "convinced" that he won, is not only meaningless but offensive. We have a system of rules for counting votes. That's how we decide.

(As I was writing this, word just went over the wires that Sen. Kerry called President Bush to concede the election. I don't second-guess the decision. They have a better handle on the numbers than anyone. And I'm sure they can see that they are simply not there.)

Finally, to Democrats and Kerry supporters.

Yesterday evening I heard various commentators say that Kerry's defeat would usher in a civil war among Democrats. Tucker Carlson said it would or should lead to a 'Goldwater moment' for the Democrats.

As I've noted above, I don't want to diminish the scope of what's happened. But a civil war over what exactly? Yes, some consultants will get a hard shake. And I'm certain there will be backbiting against Kerry (which I for one will very much disagree with.) But a civil war over what? The right and the left of the party were remarkably united in this cycle and managed to find points of compromise on key issues.

In some ways this would all be conceptually easier for Democrats to deal with if President Bush had managed a realignment of our politics in the post-9/11 world. But when I look at the results from last night what I see is that they are virtually identical to four years ago. Pretty much the same states going each way and a very close to even race -- though of course the president's 51% makes all the difference in the world.

As I said, if the Dems had been crushed, that would be one thing. If the American people were coalescing away from them, etc. But that's not what has happened here. In 2000 the country was divided into two (increasingly hostile) camps. And it's still exactly the same way. If anything it seems only more entrenched -- perhaps symbolically and geographically captured by the flip between New Hampshire and New Mexico from 2000.

The country is bitterly divided. And as much as anyone President Bush has divided it. But president Bush got 51% and if there's anything I've learned from watching him for the last four years-plus, it is that his team will take this as a popular mandate for an aggressive push for their agenda -- notwithstanding the profound division in the country or what has happened over the previous four years.

For the Democrats, what I fear most (and what I've privately worried about for months) is this: Energy cools after an election. That's inevitable. But organization and institutions can survive. And it is within institutions and organizational infrastructure that energy and power exist and persist.

Certainly it would have been more pleasant (and perhaps better) to nurture all the organization and infrastructure that has been built up over the last two years under a President Kerry. But my concern over the last few months has been that if Bush won, all of these groups and organizations and incipient infrastructure would simply be allowed to wither, as though it had been tried and found not to have worked.

That, as a factual judgment, I think is just plain wrong. And if that were allowed to happen it would truly be tragic. The truth is that what Democrats have begun to build over the last two years is tremendously important. It just wasn't enough, not yet.

I remember talking to Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Dem Network, at the Democratic convention last summer. You'll remember, he and his group were profiled in the Times magazine around that time. The article, in brief, was about plans to create a Democratic-leaning counter-establishment along the lines of what Republicans did two generations ago -- with an alternative media, activist groups, organized political giving, in short a political infrastructure.

He told me he thought it would take ten years to accomplish. And I told him my one worry was that it could all be strangled in its crib if Kerry didn't win.

Well, here we are. And this is the test for people who care about this kind of politics and these sorts of values -- making sure that what has been started is not allowed to falter. This isn't 1964 or 1972 or 1980. This wans't a blow-out or a repudiation. It was close to a tie -- unfortunately, on the other guy's side. Let's not put our heads in the sand but let's also not get knocked of our game. Democrats need to think critically and seriously about why this didn't turn out 51% for Kerry or 55% for Kerry (and we'll get to those points in the future). But it would be a terrible mistake to stop thinking in terms of those ten years Simon described.

Take time to feel the desolation and disappointment. But I remain confident that time is not on the side of the kind of values and politics that President Bush represents. It took conservatives two decades to build up the institutional muscle they have today. Though I was always nervous about the result, I thought we could win this election. But it was always naive to believe that that sort of institutional heft could be put together in 24 or 36 months.

President Bush and the Republicans now control the entire national government, even more surely now than they have over the last four years. They do so on the basis of garnering the votes of 51% or 52% of the population. But they will use that power as though there were no opposition at all. That needs to be countered.

Leave today for disappointment. Tomorrow, think over which of these various groups and organizations you think has made the best start toward what I've described above, go to their website, and give money or volunteer. After that, okay sure, take a few more days for disappointment, maybe a few more weeks. But this takes time. And you shouldn't lose heart. The same division in the country remains, the same stalemate. The other side just got the the ball a yard or two into our side of the field rather than the reverse. And we have to deal with the serious consequences of that. Tomorrow's the day to start.

Before getting to comments on last night's election, I want to make a correction about last evening's comments about the youth vote, comments which were incomplete and partly misleading. Young voters showed up at a far higher level than they did four years ago. But everyone else did too. And so the proportion of the electorate made up by the youth vote did not increase. At least not dramatically -- look at the specific numbers for details. For the Democrats, this was clearly not a good thing. But that doesn't mean that young voters didn't turn out in record proportions.

Some beginning comments on last night, momentarily.