Mark Schmitt

Timeless Truths

What part of these memorable three paragraphs would not be true if someone gave this speech today?

Remarks by Governor Bill Clinton & Senator Al Gore Madison, WI October 1, 1992

SENATOR ALBERT GORE, JR.

...
Ladies and gentlemen, what Bush and Quayle have given this country is the worst economic performance since the Great Depression. Unemployment is up. Housing starts are
down. The trade deficit is up. Real incomes are down. Bankruptcies are up. Consumer confidence is down. Everything that should be down is up. Everything that should be up is down. They've got it upside down, and we're going to turn it right side up.

Under Bush and Quayle there are fewer jobs in the private sector today than there were four years ago when they took over. In other words, if George Bush went out to Hollywood and made a movie, he would have to call it, ``Honey, I Shrunk the Economy.''

And you know what? The sequel would have to be, ''Honey, I Blew Up the Deficit,'' because they've doubled it only four years time.

Just one word: "Quayle".

two days in DC

An interesting couple of days in DC this week. I attended part of the annual "Funding State Services" conference put on by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. This meeting brings in state-level researchers and advocates who are trying to understand their state's tax system, budget process, health programs, etc., basically with the goal of getting good things funded. It's always a huge conference, but this year's was bigger than ever, and gave one a sense that there are an incredible number of very talented people all across the country working hard to turn the policy debate around, and learning from one another.

John Podesta of the Center for American Progress gave a very good, substantive speech which showed how valuable that institution is becoming. He made one interesting point that had not occurred to me, and I hope I can explain it as succinctly. Basically, his point, or my interpretation of it, was that the Republicans have more in mind in their plan to shift taxes from work onto investment than just to make the investor class richer. Their motive is very similar to their ideology of the "Lucky Duckies," which holds that the many innovations of the past decades that effectively eliminated taxes for working poor families were in fact a bad thing, because they created a class of people who do not "feel" taxes and therefore don't rebel against the size or cost of government.

Podesta's point was that shifting taxes off investment, through reducing dividend taxes or creating more tax-exempt accounts, actually has the effect of making the working middle class, which gets its income from work, more tax-sensitive since any tax increase will fall exclusively on them. Put another way (this is my own interpretation of what Podesta was getting at), suppose that the latest package of tax-exempt accounts being planned by Secretary Snow pass next year. And then four years from now, there is finally a Congress willing -- or, more likely, forced -- to deal with the huge deficit. With so much income taken off the table by having been moved into these accounts, the only way to increase revenues will be to increase marginal tax rates, which will then fall exclusively on income from labor, and therefore have to be higher than it would be if the taxes were falling on the broad base of income. The tax revolt is all the more likely. And once income has been moved into these accounts, it will be impossible to go back and make them taxable, although it would be possible to end new investment in them.

Interesting. it just goes to show, which the crowd that's in power, you have to follow every conspiracy out to its end. And all the more reason to stop fussing about which tax cut to repeal and make the case for a complete overhaul.

Otherwise, a beautiful couple of days in Washington. Especially if you stay consistently within a half-mile radius of DuPont Circe. One of the things that always bothered me about Washington, compared to New York, is that it is such a segregated city. Certainly by race, although that's finally changing, especially in the Shaw neighborhood around U Street. But in every respect -- the gay neighborhoods always seem to be 80% gay and the other neighborhoods seem to have very few gay residents; the families-with-kids neighborhoods are totally families with kids. (These are totally impressionistic, by the way, and not based on census block analysis.) I find that kind of dividing-up a little stifling after a while. But DC is also hilariously segregated by ideology. Sometimes I'll spend a day in Washington, downtown or around Capitol Hill, and really feel like I'm immersed in Bush country. The short-sleeved dress shirts, the interns from SMU, etc. But you can also spend the day in a completely like-minded liberal world. I visited someone at the New America Foundation, another colleague who works on campaign finance reform, had a spontaneous meeting at the Alliance for Justice, met Ruy Teixera for a cup of coffee, and had a meeting at the Tabard Inn. Everyone around looks like someone you know, or someone you'd like to know, or vaguely remember because they used to work for Senator Paul Simon. It's like living in a zone of a partitioned city. Strange, but very comfortable.

A Medicare Bill?

It's hard to know whether there is really a Medicare bill, or not:

Deal "In Principle" for Medicare Plan to Cover Drug Costs

When Frist says, "We have come to an agreement on principles that set a glide path" for passage of the legislation. "We feel very optimistic that we are going to be able to send a bipartisan bill to the president in the next few days," that sounds a lot like more song and dance to me. But let's assume there is an agreement here, and it does seem like Frist, DeLay, the White House and the drug lobbies are ready to give it a push, with help from Senators Baucus and Breaux. The biggest risk now is that the budget score probably comes in much higher than they are expecting.

Two comments:

First, the Times reports that "the bill would provide more than $70 billion over the next 10 years to discourage employers from eliminating retiree benefits." The Post reports that the amount hasn't been determined yet, and earlier reported that it was Democrats who wanted a larger amount. Whatever the amount, that's billions more in new corporate tax breaks, just to "incentivize" companies to keep doing what they're already doing. The costs of these benefits are already fully tax deductible. How hard would it be to say to these companies, if you eliminate benefits, you can no longer get the tax break for your executive health benefits. (There's a law called ERISA that provides the framework for doing this.) If we think it's a bad thing for companies to drop their retirees' benefits, why can't we penalize it, rather than begging and rewarding the companies that don't? (And have no illusions, as I wrote before, they will eliminate the benefits anyway.)

The other interesting question is related to Ruy Teixera's question about whether the Medicare drug benefit is really "political gold for the GOP." I think he's right -- this is not going to be a popular bill. It doesn't go into effect for years, it costs seniors too much and provides far too little, and it undermines Medicare as they know it. I'm not alone in imagining a backlash comparable to the reaction against Catastrophic Health Care in 1989. But it won't happen immediately.

So the calculus for Democrats is deadly. If they block the bill, they're blamed for it's failure (which was the set-up all along), and there can't be a backlash against a bill that never passes. All seniors will hear is that they might have had prescription benefits but for those bad Democrats. On the other hand, if Democrats help pass the bill, they are collaborators and can't stand apart when the backlash hits. The third option, which seems to be Daschle's approach, is to stand aside, criticize the bill sharply, let the Republicans pass it with a few Democratic votes, and be able to say "we told you so" when it's an unpopular disaster.

Assuming the Republicans can reach a deal among themselves, the third option is probably the only politically sound choice. But it's a $400 billion choice (at least), and the backlash may mean that it is another dozen years or more before anyone will be willing to pick up the cause of real change in Medicare.

This administration is good at one thing: Creating ugly choices between bad policies.

David Brooks gets it right: It's about governing

I wrote a long post a while back about Times op-ed columnist David Brooks's critique of Bush-hating, which I thought was mostly, but not completely, wrong-headed. I accidentally lost the post, and Krugman said most of what needed to be said anyway. When I saw today's column, which takes the form (a tired columnist's trick, but effective) of a hypothetical speech by a Democratic candidate other than Howard Dean, I expected more of the same. Actually, Brooks gets it exactly right.

This is an evenly divided country. That is the political fact of our time. It is about time we had a president who understands that, who has a strategy for governing in such circumstances. Howard Dean and George Bush do not. They just want to pound away and pound away and ram things through. More artillery, more troops, more screaming and more hatred.

As for me, I say no more war. I'm for movement. I'm for progress, and if you are, too, come along with me.

Brooks also has his imaginary candidate say a few things about Bush that, it seems to me, are exactly what most of the "Bush-haters" he derides are trying to say: "Remember when George Bush used to say he was going to change the tone in Washington? He lied about that. He couldn't even reach out to Jim Jeffords, a moderate in his own party. He was never going to reach out to Democrats. He is too intellectually insecure. He can't handle people who disagree with him, so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded." I don't see any indication that Brooks doesn't share that view. And I also don't think it's impossible for Dean to give the speech Brooks has in mind, though it's not the track he's on right now.

The key to this column is that Brooks is, almost alone, thinking ahead to after the elction. A potential leader needs to be able to do three different things in order to get this country back on the right track (as the pollsters like to put it): First, win the Democratic nomination for president. Second, win the general election. Third, the newly elected president needs to be able to govern the country. These tasks each require different skills, different language. And, for the moment, both the pro-Dean and the anti-Dean Democrats are thinking only about the first two. While fierce Bush-hating may win the nomination, in the general election, the nominee will have to reach independents and some Democrats who, as I've written before, may have turned against Bush or may turn against him in the future, but who -- unlike most of the people I know -- didn't always dislike him and at some points even expected much better things from Bush. Still, the election will be at least in part a referendum on Bush, and unless a candidate can make the best case for the "miserable failure" of the administration, he will not overcome the general assumption that Bush is a strong leader.

But if the first two steps succeed, on January 20, 2005, Bush will be gone, probably haunting the bars of Crawford, Texas like a preppie-punk version of Nixon's exile in San Clemente. And the new president will head into the fiercest headwind any president since FDR has ever faced. A long-term deficit that will have to be dealt with before anything else. Tax cuts scheduled to go into effect that will have to be stopped, in addition to the absolute duty to repeal most of the other cuts, even if it's called a tax increase. A situation in Iraq that we will have to deal with, and the fact that the new president would never in a hundred lifetimes have made the choices that created the situation is irrelevant. And a Congress that will still be at least partially controlled by Republicans, the angry and vicious Republicans bred in what Brooks calls "the cocoon of the like-minded." It will make the situation Bill Clinton inherited -- a deficit, and a Republican minority in Congress that was unusually blatant about it's intent to deny Clinton any advantages -- look like paradise.

The Republicans have this thing set up nicely. If Bush wins, they win. If Bush loses, they're poised to savage his successor, cripple his ability to govern and send him home four empty years later.

Brooks is right that only a dramatic change in the culture of politics, one laid out early in the campaign and bred deep in the bones of the nominee, can turn this around. I wrote yesterday about the potential for the next president to claim deep loyalty in Congress simply by restoring to the members of Congress some sense that they have a role to play in governing the country, rather than just executing their "responsibilities" as delegated to them by management. There are many other pieces that will go into governing successfully. One is to have a clear, principled affirmative vision that can carry the new administration forward with a sense of a mandate. Another is find ways to redefine the terms of the debate, so that we can stop talking about tax cuts unconnected from the services people demand from government, for example.

It's far too early to expect the candidates to be thinking about the third phase. But it is possible to see who has a sense of how it might be done. And, as Brooks suggests, thinking about it now is one to frame a strong message for both the primaries and the general election. It's the difference between the candidate who charges headlong into the controversies in exactly the terms that Bush has defined them -- repeal the tax cuts or not, back down in Iraq or not -- and the candidate who can craft a forward-looking and persuasive vision of an equitable tax system and a strong, responsible foreign policy.

I haven't seen Dean do that yet. Which is not to say he can't. But I think when Joe Klein commented that Dean has not offered much substance beyond his opposition to the war -- an article which the commentor known as "lerxst" called my attention to, this is what he meant, not a lack of details in his policy proposals. Opposition to the war is important as a symbol of Dean's leadership, but it is not enough unless we can get a better sense of what comes next, of what Dean's leadership would mean in a world in which the war and the occupation, the tax cuts and the deficits, are facts on the ground.

It is not caving to Bush to acknowledge that Brooks has a point here. We are not electing a president to take on Bush; we're electing a president to succeed him.

An interesting campaign finance question

I really want to get back to some policy issues, but the complex choice of whether presidential candidates should or should not participate in the campaign finance system continues to intrigue me.

Today's news is that Clark will participate. That makes sense for him. Since he got a late start, he wasn't spending money this year, so the aggregate limit won't be a problem for him, and unless he wants to go "all in" in New Hampshire, the state limits won't be either. So, like any candidate, if he opted out he would get the big advantage of having some room to keep raising and spending money after the nomination is decided, but he really wouldn't gnot the ancillary benefits.

And now that Dean has made his choice, it makes more sense for Clark to adopt the role of sanctimonious reformer. My advice: Be McCain. Every day. Think about McCain independents, McCain Democrats. Four years ago, E.J. Dionne wrote of McCain's success something to the effect that, "the winning ticket is reform, not liberalism." That's less true this year, but to the extent that it is, Clark is in a position to embrace that message, the message of self-sacrifice in the interest of a more honest system, in addition to his straight talk and competence about the international situation.

But that wasn't my point. How'd I get off on that? Here's what I was thinking about this morning: It's obvious that a candidate who's not participating can keep raising and spending money after he's cinched the nomination, even if it's plainly targetted to voters in the general election. That's what Bush is doing, and has done before. But what if the nominee is someone who's participating in the system, and is limited, but they choose to announce their running mate early, and the running mate is someone who's not participating. For example, suppose John Edwards is the nominee, and picks Dean early as his running mate (I know it's unlikely, but it's just an example, and anyway, if Dean doesn't get the nomination, it will be very hard to deny him that spot on the ticket): Could Dean continue to raise and spend money on behalf of the Edwards/Dean ticket? Or on behalf of his own vice-presidential candidacy? It's an interesting question. I can't imagine anything like it's ever come before the Federal Elections Commission.

How does Bush get away with treating Congress the way he does?

Since 1994, being a Democratic member of Congress has been a pretty miserable existence. No staff, no supboena power, not even the power to offer an amendment, much less get it voted on. And even the stoic rationale -- "We treated the Republicans pretty poorly ourselves, so they're entitled to some revenge" -- is now many years past its statute of limitations. Some congressional Democrats operate in a frenzy, looking for every opportunity inside or outside the institution to make a point or find an angle, while others float half-dead through the halls, like that co-worker whose job was effectively eliminated years ago but no one ever fired. They can't even quit and get hired as lobbyists any more, thanks to Tom DeLay's "K Street Project" to cut off access to lobbying firms that hire Democrats.

But how can it be any more fun, or seem meaningful, to be a Republican in Congress? Bush treats them exactly as he treated the United Nations: You're either with us or against us. You have to step up to your responsibilities, which we will determine for you. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist might be having a good time, but even he's been cast into the role of Chief Operating Officer in a corporation run by CEO Cheney and Chairman Bush. (With Karl Rove in the Andrew Fastow role of slick CFO.) For all the rest, they might as well not even be there. When they offer major amendments and even win big, such as Rep. Jo-Ann Emerson's proposal on drug importation, or the amendment to lift the Cuba travel ban, or the amendment to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's deregulation plan, management treats it like an entry in the suggestion box, letting it pass but not even disguising their intent to take it out in conference. When it's time for the conference, the circle of people involved gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Now it's two people on the Medicare bill, and two on the energy bill.

The melodrama on the Senate floor, in which the Republicans are staging a made-for-TV counter-fillibuster, complete with "let's go to the mattresses" bravado and cots laid out in the Strom Thurmond room in honor of his brave stand against civil rights, is perhaps a distraction. It is drawing attention away from the fact that the Senate is doing nothing at all, and the House has cancelled all votes this week, while a handful of people and the White House try to work out Medicare, energy, a tax bill, and several appropriations bills. All of them will be presented as faits accompli, to be voted up or down in a day or two before Congress intends to leave for Thanksgiving, not to return until the presidential race is in full swing.

Next week, Bush will either take his U.N. tone from yesterday: "The House and Senate must resolve their differences and get a bill to me. For the sake of America's seniors, I call on the United States Congress to get the job done," or he'll try to set up a situation in which it's the Democrats who seem to be blocking the Medicare bill. On the other legislations, they'll do more or less the the same thing. And those Republicans who wanted something different and thought they had won it fair and square in a democratic process will have only one choice: to vote for or against the bill, to be with the president or against him. And, like Senator Voinovich on the tax cut, they will probably decide to be with him.

How can these Republicans feel it's worth going to work every day? Do they even have an interest in the process they are participating in? Are they just content that behind all the bluster about cutting discretionary spending, Bush has let it rise by 12%, which means plenty of pork for their districts? Are they just marking time and gaining seniority until they can cash out as lobbyists under DeLay's "K Street Project"? Why would anyone put up with this treatment? What are they getting for it?

Congress used to take a certain, excessive, pride in its own prerogatives. Jimmy Carter got off to a bad start in 1977 because he didn't understand or respect those prerogatives. (I think his main offense was that he tried to cut some water projects; the full story is in the wonderful book Cadillac Desert.) Reagan mastered Congress in 1981, but not by bullying them, rather by carefully cultivating different factions among the Democrats and Republicans to fashion majorities.

If a Democrat is elected president next year, he will face an enormous challenge in figuring out how to govern effectively, without the backlash that crippled Clinton after the first year. One secret might be to make these members of Congress both Democrats and Republicans, the ones not named DeLay and Frist, feel like they have a role to play in government. After the way they've been treated for the last three years, and the way the Democrats have been treated for a decade now, it might earn the president their undying loyalty.

What if John Kerry had voted against the war?

One of the few e-mail lists I'm on that's always got something interesting to offer is political analyst Charlie Cook's weekly newsletter. It's free -- sign up here:
NationalJournal.com -- Get Charlie Cook's 'Off To The Races' (You can also pay many thousands of dollars and get Cook's incredibly detailed analysis of every congressional race, but this weekly dose is enough for most mortals.)

This week, Cook raises a very provocative counter-factual: are John Kerry's problems the fault of his campaign staff, now being gutted, or is it just that he voted for the Iraq war resolution?

In voting for the Iraq resolution, Kerry voted against everything he had ever represented and effectively cut himself off from his own base. This has become a particular problem for Kerry because he and Dean share a constituency -- younger, well-educated, more affluent liberals, especially in New
England.
These Democrats saw many of their party's leaders "abandon them" and sought out the most visible opponent of the war they could find, and they had to look hard before they found Dean. Until the war issue came along, Dean had been using Vermont's civil unions law as a way to show that he wasn't just another politician who just licked a finger and put it up in the air. The irony, of course, is that Kerry took what he and many other Democrats thought was the politically safest course of action rather than what almost everyone believes his conscience told him to do. This is certainly not to suggest that every Democrat in Congress who supported the war was violating their conscience. Does anyone really believe that Lieberman's position is anything but his own? But for some, their behavior on the Iraq vote was completely inconsistent from everything they have ever been and done.

While polls show that a majority of Democrats prefer a candidate that voted for the war but don't like how President Bush has conducted the war, these are not the voters that Kerry was going for and that Dean
got. Those Democrats are the ones driven to vote because they are against the war.

This is very perceptive. How painful it must be to wish you had done what you believed was right, rather than taken the path that seemed politically safer, but wasn't. I'm not convinced, though, that Kerry would have escaped all the problems in his campaign if he did not have that one vote holding him back. When you look at the level of chaos, backstabbing, and what seems like mutual hatred between candidate and his staff revealed in today's papers, it's hard to believe that this campaign would not have collapsed anyway. It's not the fact of firing the campaign manager, or people quitting. No one outside can know whether those are good or bad moves. Rather, it's the fact that every single conversation, including the candidate's private conversation with the fired Jim Jordan, was revealed in detail in both the New York Times and the AP, with multiple sources. Both the Times and the AP report that staffers were furious that Kerry was obviously eating dinner while he talked to them over a speakerphone; the AP adds that he mispronounced the name of his communications director, who quit today. (That's a bit of a puzzle: the guy's name is "Robert Gibbs." How do you mispronounce "Robert Gibbs"?)

Anyway, this is one of the most extraordinary meltdowns in the history of campaigns. One gets the sense from the level of leaking and backstabbing that, while some campaigns are weakened by the staff's deep love for the candidate, which can blind them to his limitations or problems, this may be the rare campaign that seems to be crippled by the staff's deepening dislike of their own candidate. There are other problems as well. In yesterday's ABC News/The Note, which was filled with even more insider-joke nonsense than usual, a parody memo from the ousted Kerry campaign manager to his successor included the following: "You will probably be tempted to ask the research department to give you a memo on The Candidate's accomplishments in the Senate. Don't bother." That's vicious, but true. There may be other senators who have spent 20 years in office and left less evidence of their ideas or passions, but you've probably never heard of them.

Which got me thinking about whether Cook's counter-factual might better apply to some of the other candidates. What if Gephardt had voted against the war? He'd be in a much stronger position in Iowa, certainly, perhaps the only state that has a significant voting base that might describe itself as "pacificist." And his denunciation of the "miserable failure" might have more sting.

But that raises another point. Gephardt didn't just vote for the war. He notably undercut Senate then-majority leader Daschle by appearing at the White House and agreeing to blank-check language at just the moment that Daschle was building some bipartisan support -- notably Republicans Lugar and Hagel -- for the Biden-Lugar alternative that would have been much more limited, and which Dean also supported. After Gephardt's move ensured that the president could get whatever he wanted in the House, this promising alternative in the Senate disappeared, and was not even voted on. And this is what made the situation particularly difficult for Kerry and others: They wanted to vote for something. Rightly or wrongly, they didn't want to just vote against giving Bush the authority to use force against Saddam Hussein without an alternative. Had Gephardt not gone to the White House, and had Lugar and Hagel stuck with the alternative despite being battered by the White House, the end result would have been that all the Democratic presidential candidates, except probably Lieberman, would have had exactly the same position on the war. And it's even possible that Bush would not have had the freedom to launch the war.

I've always had a lot of respect and admiration for Gephardt. I think he knows the rules of the game of politics, has a good heart, and could make a strong general-election candidate. But there's no getting around the fact that he made a major error in judgment last fall that has hurt not just him, but several other Democratic candidates.

When candidates opt out, where does the extra money come from?

With Dean now out of the public matching system for the presidential primaries, it's more likely that Kerry will opt out as well, and perhaps Clark as well. I talked about this in probably unnecessary detail a week ago, but now that it's real, there's an interesting question: Where does the extra money come from? That is, what makes a candidate come to the conclusion that he is better off trying to raise amounts well above and beyond $45-$50 million, at the price of leaving $10 million or so in public money on the table? Even Dean, has only raised half that so far -- how can he be confident that he can keep going past the $50 million?

The answer, of course, is that it comes from other candidates' donors. Once the nomination is decided, contributors who have already "maxed out" to the nominee (that is, they've given a total of $2,000) can't give more, and there will be plenty of contributors, especially the small givers that Dean has cultivated, who may not have maxed out in the legal sense but will have given all their able to give.

But there's no problem with a big Gephardt donor or Kerry donor coming back in to give another $2,000 to Dean, if he's the nominee, or vice versa. A lot of those big donors are largely motivated by the desire to beat Bush; if they gave $2,000 once most can give it again. That's where a lot of the extra money between the time the nomination is decided in March or so, and the convention in August, is going to come from. It will be interesting to see whether the fact that the nominee will have to cultivate not just his opponents' voters, but also his funders, will change the tone of the debate. Not sure -- it's never happened before.

Do Governors Matter?

A belated point about last week's gubernatorial elections in Mississippi and Kentucky, and the Nov. 15 runoff in Louisiana:

As disturbing as it is that Haley Barbour is in the statehouse and not on a chain gang, elections for governor quite plainly have nothing to do with presidential elections. This is easily provable: Of the seven states that voted 55% or more for Vice President Gore in 2000, six currently have Republican governors. And of the seventeen mostly smaller states that gave Bush more than 55% of their vote, five, including some incredibly solid Bush states like Oklahoma and Wyoming, currently have Democratic governors. (I'm not counting Mississippi and Kentucky which are both among Bush's best state's, and had Democratic governors then, but not now.)

But the Democrats' failure to elect governors, especially in their own states, does matter. Not next year, but in the long term. That's because governors go places. Governors run for president, for one thing, and seem to have an advantage over Senators and members of Congress. (Peter Beinart, the editor of the New Republic, had a brilliant op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago pointing out that one source of Dean's strength was that he was the only governor in the race, and noting that, had Democrats not lost so many governorships in the 1990s backlash against Clinton, a governor from a larger state might have eclipsed Dean. But the only possibility was Gray Davis.)

The other place governors go is to the U.S. Senate. Eleven current senators are former governors of their states, and governors are usually unbeatable. (Except in the Northeast, where popular governors Weld of Massachusetts and Shaheen of New Hampshire both lost.) It will be hard for Democrats to be in a position to take back the Senate if they cannot start to put some governors into that advantaged position, in their own strongest states.

The Times Goes to Piggy Park

A couple of items following up on my remarks about Governor Dean's comments on reaching people "in pickup trucks with the confederate flag." First, no doubt I took this too far, reading a series of meanings into a remark that, although it probably used the wrong metaphor, was really a perfectly sensible statement, and put somewhat better by Dean, I notice, back in February.

White folks in the South who drive pick-up trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us because their kids don't have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.

(Am I sucking up to Dean now that he seems more likely to win the nomination?? Hey, I want to be deputy assistant secretary of HHS as much as the next guy. As long as I don't have to move back to Washington.)

Second, in an exchange with the erudite commentor "R Wells," we agreed that as northerners, there was just a lot about the attitudes that people in various parts of the South have about the confederate flag that we can't really grasp, including whether the flag-waving was driven by elites. One of us commented that we weren't likely to get this understanding from the New York Times sending a reporter to spend an afternoon in a coffee shop.

It's actually even worse than that. The Times goes to South Carolina today to see how people feel about Dean and the flag, and here's what they come back with:

Maurice Bessinger may not have been the kind of voter Dr. Dean was trying to reach - but reach him Dr. Dean has.

Mr. Bessinger, who is 73 and white, flies the Confederate flag all over Piggy Park, his barbecue joint a few minutes west of the capital, where he also gives away booklets calling Lincoln a traitor. His reputation is such that many grocery stores will not sell his barbecue sauce.

And he was just thrilled by Dr. Dean's remark, calling it proof that the South is rising again, at least politically. "They've got to get our vote to win," he said.

"If I was voting in the Democratic primary, I'd vote for Dean."

The Times archive reveals that this is the seventh mention of Mr. Bessinger and his Piggy Park outside Columbia in the Times in the last four years. One story, by R.W. Apple, was actually about barbecue sauce. The rest were about the confederate flag. If Dean's "pickup trucks with Confederate flags" image is considered a stereotype, what about the Times' attitude: "Let's find out what real Southerners think. Go hit the Piggy Park. It's only fifteen minutes from the airport, the food's good, and you can always get a quote from that old crank."

Third, a couple of people took me to task for criticizing the word "ought" in Dean's statement that low-income white southerners "ought to be" voting Democratic. I wrote that "People believe what they believe, support who they support," which "Don Pedro" called "a very silly thing to say...either Panglossian or defeatist." I don't think that, in context, it needs clarification, but in case it does, let me be clear that I certainly think there's a place for persuasion in politics. Of course there is. The only alternative is the madness of Dick Morris. But I don't think persuasion can begin from the position that people "ought to" vote a certain way, that they would vote a certain way if they really understood their own best interests, or that they should put a certain priority on economic interests over other values.

We can wish that poor whites would vote on the basis of their economic interests rather than social issues, but those other issues are part of people's core beliefs as well. Sometimes -- as I think Dean understands well -- we do have to hear and respond to people's non-economic values even if we don't share them. (Dean's moderate position on gun control, which many supporters who don't share that view think will help make him electable, is a good example.) In other cases, we have to recognize that we're not going to get beyond those values. That is, there's a certain group of people whose non-economic beliefs -- confederate flag, anti-choice, homophobic, racist -- make it impossible for the Democratic party to reach them, or if we reach them it will be at a very high cost in clarity and ideological coherence. My point was that Southerners like Edwards seem to understand that choice; I'm not sure Dean does yet.

But to the extent that "ought to" really means, as one commentor suggested, something like "we ought to be able to find a way to persuade some of these whites to vote Democratic...." it's totally true. And then the challenge is actually persuading them, which means giving people some real reason to believe that they will have health care and that their schools will be better and above all that they will have JOBS. Anger at George Bush does not alone provide that hope. I agree with ABC's The Note, which yesterday listed 18 mostly positive things about Dean, but also, "Howard Dean has not developed a general-election winning message on the economy — yet."

Next week is economy week at the Decembrist. I've got a few different things to say about what a general-election winning message on the economy might look like.