Monday, November 26, 2012

A Decisive Win for Liberalism, But Not a Permanent One | Mother Jones

A Decisive Win for Liberalism, But Not a Permanent One | Mother Jones:

A Decisive Win for Liberalism, But Not a Permanent One

| Wed Nov. 7, 2012 11:41 AM PST

President Barack Obama greets the crowd at his election-night headquarters with his family.Brian Cassella/MCT/Zuma

On Tuesday night, a country that once sold black people as property elected a black man to its highest office for a second time. Twice now, Virginia, the seat of the old Confederacy, has given its electoral votes to America's first black president. Although Barack Obama's presidency has often departed from the best moral instincts of American liberalism, from his dismal record on clemency to his stewardship of an unaccountable national security state, the fact of his presidency represents a triumph of American liberalism's ability to push the boundaries of what is possible.

Liberalism's triumph in the 2012 election goes far beyond the reelection of the first black president of the United States:

When the next Senate is sworn in, it will include Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay member of America's upper house.
Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use, setting up an inevitable conflict between the federal government's immoral war on drugs and an American electorate that is growing increasingly weary of it.
California voters declined to reject the death penalty, but they voted to raise taxes and limit the state's draconian "three strikes" law, which mandated automatic life imprisonment for individuals convicted of three felonies.
Marriage equality supporters notched wins in four states, for the first time winning at the ballot box instead of in the courts or state legislatures.
Maryland voters approved in-state tuition discounts for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children.
Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, the most regressive symbols of the Republican agenda on women's rights, were defeated.

The emerging Democratic majority, as Ruy Teixera once put it, seems to have emerged. But Obama owes that coalition, to an incredible degree, to the decision of Republicans to alienate every significant minority in the country.

Blind to their own identity politics, Republicans dismissed the concerns of gays and lesbians, and women and minorities, as wish lists from "special interests." The right killed George W. Bush's effort at immigration reform in 2006, and was then captured wholesale by immigration restrictionists whose naked hostility to Latinos meant that Obama could preside over more than a million deportations and still win the Hispanic vote in a landslide. American Muslims, whoonce overwhelmingly voted for Bush, became a toxic fixation for Republicans who began to regard them as a potential fifth column. Granted a majority in Congress with a mandate to heal a bleak American economy, Republicans chose to focus on restricting women's access to abortion and birth control. Eager to deny Obama any legislative accomplishments whatsoever, the GOP attempted to filibuster the repeal of the military's policy banning gays and lesbians from open service. Republicans shouldn't blame Romney for his defeat, not after they paved such a narrow, winding road to victory.

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The big question now is whether and to what degree 2012 heralds the emergence of a new liberal consensus, a tacit agreement that government has a responsibility to provide for certain basic needs but to stay out of people's business when it comes to other matters. Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, has described the Obama coalition of women, minorities, and young voters as a "realignment," writing that "the age of Reagan is officially over, and the Obama majority is the only majority we have."

To the extent that we are looking at a new Democratic governing majority, Obama didn't build that—not by himself. He had a great deal of help from Republicans whose refusal to acknowledge a changing American electorate narrowed their political coalition. Because Republican intolerance played such a decisive role in the electorate that emerged Tuesday, it's hard to draw a broad conclusion about a long-term ideological shift in the United States, or to see Obama's coalition as a lasting one.

Absent a successful Democratic-led effort at immigration reform, for example, the Latino vote likely remains up for grabs. Young voters could grow disillusioned by an Obama administration that continues its aggressive prosecution of the war on drugs. Someday, religious conservatives may realize that observant American Muslims are natural allies rather than domestic enemies. The success and permanence of Obama's new coalition, and of American liberalism, depends on what happens now—particularly whether the American economy recovers enough in the next four years for Obama and the Democratic Party to be able to claim credit for restoring prosperity, not just bringing the country back from the brink.

Douthat is right when he says that the Obama coalition, which seems likely to grow even stronger as the country grows more diverse, might "not last forever; it may not even last more than another four years." Remember: The Democrats were once the party of the Deep South, and the Republicans were once the party of civil rights. In politics, no coalition is permanent.

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The Tea Party Is Dead. Long Live the Tea Party. | Mother Jones

The Tea Party Is Dead. Long Live the Tea Party. | Mother Jones:

The Tea Party Is Dead. Long Live the Tea Party.

Odds are Republicans won't get back from crazytown for a while. Will Dems take advantage?

—By Kevin Drum

| Fri Nov. 9, 2012 3:03 AM PST

581

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Its birth certificate says that the tea party was born one month after Barack Obama's inauguration, on the day that CNBC's Rick Santelli delivered a blistering on-air tirade against Obama's mortgage bailout plan. But that's only the official story. In reality, we've seen the tea party before. When FDR was president, it was called the American Liberty League. When JFK was president, it was the John Birch Society. When Bill Clinton was president, it was the Vince Foster conspiracy theorists. America's far right fluoresces like this whenever a Democrat is in the White House, and Obama's first term was no exception.

But the tea party burned bright and fell fast. Sure, it galvanized opposition to Obama in a media-friendly kind of way, and helped power the Republican Party to a big majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms. But given the state of the economy this was a victory they probably would have won anyway. And on the other side of the Capitol building, the tea party was almost certainly responsible for the loss of three winnable Senate seats that year. By 2012, after tea party forces nominated several more "wackadoodles" (in Republican strategist Steve Schmidt's phrasing) and helped the GOP lose two more winnable Senate seats, its name was officially mud.

But none of that matters. The tea party has done its job, and for all practical purposes its hard-nosed, no-compromise ideology now controls the Republican Party in a way that neither the Birchers nor the Clinton conspiracy theorists ever did. It's no longer a wing of the Republican Party, it is the Republican Party.

So what's next? Having now lost two presidential elections in a row, conventional wisdom says Republicans have two choices. The first is to admit that tea partyism has failed. 2012 was its best chance for victory, and evolving demographics will only make hardcore conservatism less and less popular. As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has put it, "We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term." So the party will need to moderate or die.

The second option is to double down. Party activists will tell themselves that Mitt Romney was never a true conservative, and that's what voters sensed. But Republicans can win again in 2016 if they stay true to their principles, moving farther right and amping up the obstruction of all things Obama even more. In Congress, Paul Ryan will be their pied piper and Eric Cantor will be their enforcer.

To most liberals, it seems obvious that if the GOP's leaders are smart, they'll choose the first option. But the truth is that this isn't as obvious as we'd like to believe. After all, moving to the right has worked out pretty well for the party. In 1980, the Reagan revolution gave them control of the Senate for the first time in decades. In 1994, the Gingrich revolution gave them control of the House. In 1998 they impeached Bill Clinton, and two years later won the presidency. In 2009 the tea party took over, and in 2010 they won a landslide midterm victory. The truth is that an ever more radicalized GOP seems to have done at least as well as a more normal GOP probably would have done. Maybe better.

So for now, at least, it seems probable that we're stuck with Option 2. Republican Party elders will probably try to be a little more careful about vetting candidates for political Tourette syndrome (no more "legitimate rape," please), but otherwise the tea party strain will remain ascendant even if the name itself is relegated to the ash heap of history. Republicans will continue to deny climate change, continue to insist that tax cuts pay for themselves, and continue to believe that Barack Obama is a socialist revolutionary. They will once again hold America's economy hostage over the debt ceiling and tax cuts for the rich, and they will continue to filibuster every single bill that Democrats introduce in the Senate.

That much is, frankly, so predictable as to be uninteresting. What is interesting is this: Why doesn't the American electorate punish this behavior? After all, polls don't suggest that the public has moved much to the right over the past few decades, and yet it continues to give an ever more right-wing Republican Party about 50 percent of the vote. What's going on?

At this point we enter the realm of guesswork. One guess is that the public treats unhinged behavior from Republicans these days as merely a kind of brand marker, not something to be taken seriously. Based on past experience, they figure that once Republicans are actually in office they'll talk crazy but mostly act like a fairly normal conservative party.

For liberals, a more unnerving guess is that we simply haven't made ourselves into a consistently appealing alternative for persuadable centrists. We're too eager to raise taxes. We display too much public contempt for things like religion and gun ownership. We don't offer the middle class enough in the way of concrete benefits, and when we do (as with Obamacare) we sell it so poorly that people barely even realize what they're getting.

If either—or both—of these things are true, it's easy to see why Republican extremism hasn't hurt them very much. The next few years, however, could finally be different. If Republicans hold the American economy hostage over the debt ceiling again, their crazy talk might start to sound a little more worrisome. If voters start taking climate change more seriously in the wake of Sandy, concerned independents might abandon a denialist GOP. If the growth of the black and Hispanic electorate causes Republicans to double down on efforts to suppress the nonwhite vote, they could provoke a serious backlash. And if Obamacare gets implemented competently and Democrats make serious progress on reining in the deficit, centrists might not have much reason left to vote against them.

In any case, there's a simple message here for lefties: Don't worry so much about Republicans. Worry about getting the public on our side. If we do that, the GOP will either back away from crazytown or else it will die a natural death. To borrow James Carville's famous epigram, It's Public Opinion, Stupid.

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Sunday, November 25, 2012

Egypt's President Removes Military Chiefs In a Surprise Move | Care2 Causes

Egypt's President Removes Military Chiefs In a Surprise Move | Care2 Causes:

Egypt’s President Removes Military Chiefs In a Surprise Move

by Kristina Chew
August 13, 2012
8:24 am

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On Sunday, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi ordered the retirement of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who had served in the post for twenty years and was a key ally of deposed leader Hosni Mubarak. Tantawi had been the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the military council that had served as Egypt’s interim leader before Morsi’s election, and had just been reappointed as defense minister. Also ordered to retired was Army Chief of Staff Sami Hafez Anan, who had been thought to be Tantawi’s successor, and the chiefs of the navy, the air force and the air defense branch.

Morsi also annulled a constitutional declaration issued by the SCAF on June 30– the day before he took office — that had granted the generals legislative powers and budgetary controls, as well as oversight in drawing up a new constitution.

Egypt’s military has so far shown no sign of opposing Morsi’s decision, which reportedly surprised the country and “transformed [Morsi's] image overnight from a weak leader to a savvy politician who carefully timed his move against generals.” Egypt’s state media announced that the shake-up was “done in cooperation and after consultations with the armed forces.”

Morsi chose younger officers from the military council to replace the 76-year-old Tantawi and Anan, which may suggest that he had made some sort of deal with them. Selected to head military intelligence is Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, whose name surfaced last year when he admitted to Amnesty International that the military had performed “virginity tests” on female protesters. El-Sisi’s defense for the policy was that it was intended to “protect” soldiers from allegations of rape and that the tests would be stopped.

The removal of Tantawi is especially noteworthy as he was seen as a symbol of the military’s continued attempt to hold onto power after the ousting of Mubarak. Morsi’s announcement followed an attack on the Sinai last week by militants that left sixteen Egyptian solders dead, says the BBC’s Yolande Knell.

Writer and journalist Wael Eskander suggested that, with demonstrations against Morsi’s party, the Muslim Brotherhood, planned for August 24, the “military shakeup prompted speculation that Morsi was fearful of the possibility of a coup.”

Another BBC correspondent, Kevin Connolly, noted that the “dismissal of senior military officers will be seen by Egyptians as a decisive move in a struggle for real power” between newly elected politicians and the generals who have been in command for years.

Questions remain about Morsi’s constitutional powers to act. On Sunday, he also appointed Mahmoud Mekki, a senior judge who fought for judicial independence under Mubarak, as vice president. But Gaber Nassar, a professor of constitutional law at Cairo University, told the New York Times that Morsi had the right to abolish the SCAF’s declaration; a retired brigadier general, Ayman Salama, also told the the BBC that Morsi had acted correctly.

Crowds gathered in Tahrir Square to express support for Morsi’s moves with people chanting “the people support the president’s decision” and “Marshal, tell the truth, did Morsi fire you?”.

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Saturday, November 24, 2012

How President Obama Won a Second Term | Politics News | Rolling Stone

How President Obama Won a Second Term | Politics News | Rolling Stone:

How President Obama Won a Second Term

Political strategist James Carville breaks down where the Republicans went wrong – and what it means for the future

Comment

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

By TIM DICKINSON

November 23, 2012 7:00 AM ET

Two weeks after Barack Obama won a second term, political analysts are just beginning to assess the surprising scope of his victory. By routing Mitt Romney by 332 to 206 in the Electoral College, Obama joins FDR, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan as the only presidents of the past century to twice win more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

To unpack the significance of Obama's big win, Rolling Stone turned to one of the shrewdest observers of American politics: James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton's election in 1992. Over the course of an hourlong interview, Carville traced the roots of Romney's collapse to the reactionary posturing required by the GOP primaries, and underscored the strategic blunders that sealed Romney's fate – including the Clint Eastwood debacle. "You can't control what happens in a debate," Carville says. "But you do get to control your convention – and they didn't control that."

Carville marvels that Romney, a businessman whose core sales pitch was competent management, entrusted his campaign to second-rate crony consultants who were so divorced from reality that they had him convinced to the bitter end that victory was all but assured. And looking to the future, Carville predicts that America could face a surprising role reversal in 2016: Democratic voters are likely to behave like the GOP base and fall into line behind a pre-anointed candidate, while Republicans will be forced to embrace a centrist agent of change – a Republican version of Carville's former boss.

In the primaries, Republican voters did their best to avoid picking Romney. Why were they so reluctant to gravitate toward him?
They didn't gravitate to him in 2008, so why would they now?

Republicans tried going with everyone from Michele Bachmann to Rick Santorum. Have we ever seen someone like Herman Cain storm out of nowhere and lead the polls for weeks?
Not in my memory. I think we came up with eight different front-runners.

Is that unprecedented?
This was like the most meandering river ever. But every time since 1948, it has always wound up going to the obvious person. Even the sainted Reagan didn't get it in '76. If you are making a model of mathematical certainty based on past results, there was no doubt that Romney was going to get it. It was never not to be.

For Democrats, the good news is, we won the election. And for people who like to be entertained, the really good news is that Marcus Bachmann is coming back as a congressional spouse. He was my favorite character ever. He and Cain's adviser, Mark Block, who is the only person I've ever known in history who was banned by court order from the profession of political consulting. Even Dick Morris couldn't get banned! If you're banned from frickin' political consulting, that's it: You're a dude!

Was there anybody else in the field, a Gingrich or a Santorum, who could have done a better job against Obama in this race?
I really don't think so. It's the Republican brand more than it's Mitt Romney. And the Republican brand made him jump through a lot of hoops that he wouldn't have wanted to or wouldn't have had to.

So Romney's goose was already cooked by the time the primaries were over?
From 1968 to 1988, not counting the freak election after Watergate, the Democrats lost the popular vote. Then Clinton came along and said, "We're going to change things a bit." They moved to shed some of the Sixties without changing the basic function of the party. So from 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote only one time. We went one for six, and now they've gone one for six. You have to ask yourself: Can we declare a trend here?

There's a reason that Jeb Bush or Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels didn't run: They just couldn't do it. They knew what they had to do, and deep down inside, they didn't have it in them.

You mean to take all those crazy positions demanded by the GOP base?
You had to be against any kind of immigration reform. You had to be not just skeptical of global warming, you had to deny it even exists. You almost weren't even allowed to be for evolution. When you were asked if you'd accept $1 in tax increases for $10 in spending cuts, you couldn't raise your hand. They couldn't do anything.

In 2016, they're going to change, because they have to. It might only be cosmetic, but they're going to want to win. There's going to be a different dynamic – it will be the first time since '48 that there's not an obvious front-runner.

Romney's perfectly adaptable to be whatever the voters wanted him to be. Why didn't he just run as a moderate truth teller, a successful businessman?
He couldn't win the primary if he did that. And he couldn't raise the money he needed to if he did that.

His shift to the right was linked to raising money?
The people the Republicans have to raise money from are as crazy as the people that vote in the primaries. Their contributors are as wacky as their base.

Like who?
Well, Foster Friess, just to name one. Put an aspirin between your knees for birth control?

Friess was the patron of Santorum, just like Sheldon Adelson was the patron of Gingrich. Did all that Super PAC money hurt Romney in a big way?
The way that it hurt him is this: He raised a lot of primary money, but he couldn't save it to spend on the general election. So once he got out of the primary, when he was exhausted and his hands were down, the Obama people just cold-cocked him – the same thing the Bush people did to Kerry in 2004. They got a good definition out on him, and he wasn't able to deal with that until the first debate.

The speculation now is, "Why didn't he just write himself a check after the primaries until his fundraising got up to steam?" He could have just written himself a check on whatever he was short. The man is worth at least $250 million – $50 million ain't going to break him.

So all that Super PAC money helped Obama more than it helped Romney?
Never have so few spent so much to accomplish so little. We all freak out that the money in politics is going to change everything. As it turned out, it really didn't change much.

What was Romney's strategy during the general election? How'd he plan to win?
His plan was to come across as a little more moderate in the first debate. After that, they concluded – and you could just see it – that their base would stay energized against Obama, and the economy would cause enough people to say, "Oh, we just can't give him a second term." In debates two and three, they looked like they were trying not to mess up what they had – just to come across as not too conservative.

Why was the first debate so damaging for Obama? There were no key gaffes, nothing jumped out as terrible.
It's not that it was damaging to Obama, it's that it was helpful to Romney. People looked at him and he was more aggressive and more moderate than people thought. Obama just didn't look like he wanted to be there.

Or be president. Right. I'm dying to read the inside book as to what happened. I do know, almost for certain, that he prepped and he prepped well, and there was some meeting right before he went in. Who knows if they changed the strategy at the last minute, but it was not a good change.

After that debate, Romney started lying flamboyantly. Can you recall a candidate more at ease with twisting the truth?
No – and by the way, neither did the fact-checkers. Of all the Pinocchios given in the campaign to both candidates, Romney got something like 60 percent of them. I don't doubt that he's honest in his dealings with his family, but I don't think the lying even affects him – I don't think he thinks about it. He said, "I'll just say it – who cares?"

Where does that come from? Is it marketing – just going where the market is?
It's all about "We're doing the country a favor – we know how to lead the country. And in politics, everybody's got to say things, so we'll just say whatever we've got to say, and that's the way it is." Deep down in Romney's heart, some inner recesses of whatever, he just doesn't think that truth-telling is a big part of the whole thing.

Does that come from his dad's experience? George got into trouble for telling the truth.
I don't know – that's a different skill set than I have. That's for a psychiatrist somewhere. What I do know is that people would just keep pointing it out, and he'd just keep on going.

Remember, for Obama, there was a great strategic dilemma as to whether to present Romney as a flip-flopper or as someone who is for the rich guy. You had to pick one, and they picked "for the rich guy." If you're going to be successful in politics, you have to pick one. One of the great statements of the Kerry campaign was when they said, "We have a nuanced and layered message." It can't be nuanced and layered and be a message – it just can't.

The best thing Romney did was flip-flop in the first debate. If you flop to where people are, then they like you. Let's say that somebody runs against gay marriage all their life, and you're for gay marriage, and then they come out for it. You don't say, "I don't trust him, he flipped his position." You say, "I like that, he changed his mind." In the research – and I know this because we did a lot of it – if you'd say that Romney was for all these crazy right-wing things, people would say, "He's more moderate than that, he doesn't believe that." They liked the fact that they couldn't trust him.

That's why the Obama campaign decided to focus on his history at Bain.
Yeah. At the end, the message of the Bain stuff was: When he has to choose between you and his friends, he's going to choose his friends. I think that stuck with him pretty good.

Is that why the "47 percent" video was so damaging? The Republicans have been talking about makers and takers for a generation. Why was that moment so pivotal?
Because it sounded like who people thought he was. In politics, the worst thing that can happen is to confirm an existing belief. People who saw the video believed he looked down on them, and they said, "That's the guy I knew he was." That's why the rape comments by Mourdock and Akin hurt him – because they reminded people of who the Republicans are.

Romney had a chance to change the narrative with his vice-presidential pick.
He couldn't do that, because of the donors.

So he picked Ryan for the money?
The same thing – they had to get their money lined up and get the base all happy. Ryan accomplished all that. But in the end, I don't think Ryan got him a vote or cost him a vote. I really don't. If I look at how Obama performed in Wisconsin, it was as expected. I don't know if it would have made a difference if he would have picked Chris Christie or anybody else.

Let's talk about the Obama campaign. How did they manage to sustain their turnout in key states, despite not having people jazzed up like they were in 2008?
They connected people in a way that had never been done before with Facebook. If they knew I was an undecided voter, they also knew I was in the Marine Corps, and they'd have a retired gunnery sergeant call me to get me to vote. It was way far above anything that's ever been tried in politics before. Political scientists will mine this data forever.

The other thing is that the Republican brand tends to get Democrats out, too. The Republicans are not the only people who can be enthusiastic. African-Americans, they were 13 percent of the vote. No one really thought that was going to happen.

How did the Republicans get so outclassed in terms of technology? In 2004, Rove dominated on that front.
The most amazing story of the whole election was how personally shellshocked Romney was that he lost. They completely thought he was going to win. How can a man with a reputation of being data-driven, who does spreadsheets better than anybody in the world, be shocked that he lost? I can't wait to read the book as to what happened to Romney. It's stunning.

Part of it is how inefficiently they spent all the money they had. Conservatives have a point here: You give somebody too many resources, and they don't allocate them very well. The top people in the Romney campaign were paid $134 million in this election. The top consultants in the Obama campaign were paid $6 million. Democrats just spent their money smarter, better and with less nepotism or favoritism. It's stunning that a community organizer would be so much more efficient than a head of one of the largest private equity funds. As the rabbis have been saying for 5,000 years, "Go figure."

Did Hurricane Sandy seal the deal for Obama?
In every election the Republicans lose, the excuses pile up. In '92, it was Perot. In '96, it was the GOP Congress. In 2008, it was McCain botching his reaction to Lehman Brothers. In 2012, it was Sandy. It's a convenient narrative. If you believe that, then you don't have to change anything – it allows you a kind of fantasy.

Even Democrats thought the Republicans would have more success in turning out people who hate Obama. But according to the numbers, Romney's vote may not even match McCain's. Why weren't people fired up and ready to go on the right-wing side?
It looks like the turnout was a little down. What was surprising to me is the model they used for the white vote. The white vote in '08 was 74 percent of the vote, and that's what they were counting on this time. But according to population trends, the white vote should be 72 percent – and it actually came in at 72. And it will be under 70 in 2016. What the Republicans have is some form of a progressive disease, like diabetes – it's just going to keep getting worse until they address it.

The demographics are a creeping cancer for them, in other words.
Yes. Every four years, the white vote goes to minus two – and it's picking up steam. From 1948 to 1992, it went from 91 to 87 percent. From '92 to 2016, it's going to go from 87 to 70.

Combine that with the youth vote. It was 54 percent for Kerry, and it was 66 for Obama in '08. This year it was 60 for Obama. Remember, the greatest predictor of how you're going to vote when you're 54 is how you voted when you're 24.

The Republicans don't have any choice but to deal with this. The question is how they deal with it. Older whites are like bloody marys when you have a hangover – you just have to go back to them, but eventually they're going to catch up with you. You go down to the hotel lobby and say, "I'm shaking – I have to have a bloody mary." The Republicans keep drinking them, and they're very productive in off years, like 2010.

But isn't that what we said when they lost in 2008? I was writing the obituary of the Republican Party after Obama won on the basis of those same demographic trends.
The obituary was correct – but they're going to come back. At some point, there's going to be something like the Democratic Leadership Council that figures out how to obtain conservatism's aims through different language.

If you were giving them advice on how to reform, what would you tell them?
The first thing is that they've got to cut a deal on immigration. They have to find a way to put the issue behind them. They don't have a lot of maneuvering room on things like gay marriage or abortion. The way these congressional districts have been drawn, a lot of Republicans can't make a deal and move forward, because they'll get beat in the primary. That's got them in a box. If you're a Democrat and Obama gives you permission, you can do anything you want. But nobody can give them permission – there's no person there.

I want to get your read on 2016. Who are the top five candidates on either side?
The number-one issue for Republicans in 2016 will be, "Who can win the general election?" Not who is the most conservative, not who is the best they've got, but who can win the general. From a Democratic standpoint, the obsessive question is going to be, "Does Hillary run or not?" If she does, a lot of people are going to say, "We should act like Republicans."

There's going to be a lot of falling in line?
Falling in line, yeah. Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, but we might be the people who fall in line this time. Someone will run against her, of course, but it will be a tough case to make.

On their side, they need a Republican version of Bill Clinton in 1992, someone who can shed the old image of the party. If Jeb Bush had been named Jeb Smith, he would have changed that brand and been the nominee, and he probably would have won. That's the person I'd be most afraid of – Jeb Smith. Maybe somebody with that kind of skill will emerge.

Somebody like a Chris Christie?
They hate Chris Christie. We have no idea how much they hate Chris Christie right now because of the Sandy stuff.

Do you think that will blow over for him?
Who knows? I've seen my man, President Clinton, leave office, and now there's not a more popular person in the world.

What will be the deciding factor in 2016?
Our party's fate, in a larger sense, is going to be tied up in what happens with the economy. The dominant issue in American politics is how you get the middle class back in the game. If recovery takes hold, the Democrats will be in a pretty commanding position.

Looking forward to the next few years, how does Obama spend his political capital now so he can build on this victory?
The danger is whatever deal he makes to reduce the deficit. Since he doesn't have to run for re-election, he may want to seal his legacy with some sort of grand bargain. The problem is, deficit reduction is popular with the elites, but it's not that popular with the country. If he does this, he's going to have to work hard at telling people why this is good for them.

This story is from the December 6th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

Presidential Debates

Monday, November 26, 2012