Katrina and Progressives' Revival

[MsTryska]

got this report in email.

Mods - i'm posting in entirety as it is not on the web anywhere and the author has given permission to forward along.

reports like this are available from www.stratfor.com

Katrina and the Progressives' Revival
By Bart Mongoven

With dramatic footage and tragic human-interest stories from the Gulf Coast continuing to fill the airwaves, the media will spend this week focused on the devastation in New Orleans and on placing blame for the slow government reaction to Hurricane Katrina. President Bush is likely to bear the brunt of the blame -- and, as many have pointed out, the timing could not be worse for him.

Bush already had been politically weakened by the continuing insurgency in Iraq and by perceptions that he was not taking action to address high gasoline prices. Now, it can be expected that Bush's popularity will plummet to new depths, giving the Democratic Party significant room to maneuver on issues ranging from estate taxes to regulatory reforms. Most important, we could see a realignment of American politics stemming from the rejuvenation of the progressive -- or "liberal" -- wing of the Democratic Party.

As we pointed out last week, Katrina will affect public debates over energy policy, particularly oil and the country's use of it, but the long-term political impacts of Katrina will be much broader. The images most likely to endure from flooded New Orleans -- poor Americans stranded in a Hobbesian chaos against which the federal government appeared powerless -- will help to rejuvenate the most "liberal" wing of the Democratic Party. This faction has railed against the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) -- an organization of moderate Democratic Party leaders formed in the early 1990s -- and its perceived accommodation of corporate interests. They will argue that by spending a decade shrinking the federal government, the leadership of both political parties sowed the wind -- and that with Katrina, average Americans reaped the whirlwind.

Having been politically impotent for more than a decade, American progressives --liberals who traditionally have been closely aligned with environmental, labor, peace, race and similar broad-issue concerns -- began to band together after the 2004 presidential election. Viewing their position in the Democratic Party as analogous to that of religious conservatives in the Republican Party 20 years ago, many progressive leaders began to study how those conservatives gained power within the Republican Party. They drew lessons about strategy, messaging tactics and fundraising. Significantly, they also concluded that for any of these new approaches to work in their favor, the various interests that call themselves "progressive" had to work together toward some long-term political objectives.

In the wake of Katrina, progressives will find new opportunities to gain power and exert influence over public policy. The challenge before them now is to find a way to capitalize in a specific, coherent way on the populist emotions now surging into a political wave. Clearly, they require more than mere criticism and finger-pointing, and they must unite the many-pronged anti-Bush concerns: opposition to the war in Iraq; environmental, economic and political worries about the United States' sources of energy; the needs of the poor; fiscal responsibility and calls for the United States to show greater respect for world opinion.

A New York Times editorial, published Sept. 4, partly foreshadows how the progressives will use Hurricane Katrina for their own ends. The piece asserted that the Republican Party's tax-cutting, federal government-shrinking mantra will have to be put aside for the time being, while recovery efforts are under way. Progressives will take this argument one step further: They will argue that the federal reaction to the disaster challenges the notion that a smaller federal government is good under any circumstances, let alone in the face of an extreme national challenge. Progressive leaders and activists will ask the public whether what happened in New Orleans reflects the image America has of itself, and -- if not -- whether some of the fundamental assumptions currently underpinning national policymaking need to be re-examined.

Before Katrina, the public appeared to be divided fairly equally between the ideological positions represented by the two parties. During the last presidential campaign, both Bush and Sen. John Kerry expressed support for streamlining government. Both political parties' leaders generally support lower taxes, at least in theory. During the past nine years, Democrats have carved out a new space for themselves in the political spectrum that departed from both their own enthusiastic support for large government in the past and from the Republicans, by advocating less drastic tax cut programs and the devolution of power from the federal government to state governments wherever possible. The centrist DLC in particular has developed arguments accepting the premise that, all things being equal, the government that governs least governs best. The DLC and its adherents essentially embrace the economic arguments that the GOP developed in the late 1980s, but they criticize the extremes to which the Bush administration and Republican-led Congress have taken these concepts.

Since the ascendance of the DLC, which was consolidated by President Bill Clinton's election in 1992, the center and left of the Democratic Party have sat waiting, frustrated by the emergence of a political middle that seems, in their view, to espouse premises with which they disagree. This middle and left edge of the Democratic Party were mobilized in the 2004 election around the candidacy of Howard Dean, who declared himself "the candidate of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

As a result of his surprising showing in the 2004 campaign, Dean was placed in charge of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) -- the central strategic organization of the Democratic Party -- particularly because of his ability to reach out to and mobilize grassroots Democrats. The party's leadership had recognized that under Chairman Terry McAuliff, the Democratic Party raised money well but was listless at the grassroots level, lacking the strong organizing capabilities upon which GOP leaders rely. The Democrats bet that Dean's followers, like conservative Republicans, might not necessarily agree with many of the moderate positions that leading politicians took, but that they would remain loyal if the party reached out to them.

In the public's view, Dean has spent his first year in charge of the DNC drawing media attention for provocative comments, which is one part of the larger strategy for quietly building grassroots party activists. The next six weeks will tell how well Dean has done in his first year at his real job -- reviving the party apparatus -- as the Democrats move to recapture the American middle by emphasizing the key longstanding differences between them and the GOP.

For now, the DNC will try to use the situation in New Orleans to weaken Bush politically and to assert that the values expressed by the Republican Party are not core values held by mainstream America. This argument will include more than just a defense of taxes, as the recent Times editorial implies, but also will address the very question of the role of the state in private life.

Amid fears of price-gouging by gasoline retailers and descriptions of "toxic soups" leaking from industrial facilities in the flood-hit area, the Democrats will raise the issue of government's role in regulating corporations to ensure that, in their pursuit of profit, they do not trample on the well-being of American citizens. The DNC will attack the Republican view of the government's appropriate role by focusing on two GOP tenets that Katrina seems to have called into question: first, the belief that smaller government is better, and second, that state and local governments -- which are closer to the citizens -- are better equipped and more efficient than the federal government in dealing with local problems. These are fundamental positions that the progressives have opposed for years, but which the Democratic Party as a whole has hesitantly supported during the past decade.

The strategy the DNC pursues will hinge on how effectively it can use its resources and allies to ensure that the media, in coverage of Katrina's aftermath, continues to portray the Bush administration's actions in a negative light. The strategy itself will be predicated on anecdotes from the flood zone: the heroism of those who helped strangers and the misery of those, some of whom died, who waited for government action. The strategy will rely heavily on the ability of activist groups -- particularly liberal 527 groups such as the Center for American Progress, the Democracy Alliance and MoveOn.org -- to insert these stories and messages into mainstream media coverage. In the end, the stories and arguments that emerge will pull from progressive, rather than centrist Democratic, themes: race and poverty, the need for dramatic changes in environmental protection, the need for a strong central government, anti-war positions and many other issues.

The DNC's approach to issues has not changed markedly under Dean's leadership, but the party is now in a position to benefit from a swing back toward issues that will give progressives a voice in national affairs. Even without Katrina's devastation, the party was due to re-evaluate its support for small government and devolution. But amid the debris from Katrina, this re-examination will become a virtual recanting. Progressive party activists will argue that a decade spent whittling the size of the federal government has resulted in a state incapable of responding to a major natural disaster which, not incidentally, resembles the hypothetical, catastrophic terrorist attacks to which the Bush administration has devoted so much attention.

The argument that Bush failed is an easy one to make, and it will provide the DNC and progressives particularly with an opening to press the advantage already created by high energy prices and comparisons between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. The DNC now must determine how it will leverage this temporary opportunity into a long-term movement, advancing the argument that a larger and more activist government is a positive thing -- and that the Democratic Party can deliver it.


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[MsTryska]

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