Month: January 2016

When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders shared a stage—separately—at Monday night’s Iowa Democratic Forum on CNN, the most noticeable thing was the difference in volume. By reputation, Sanders is a shouter, but on this occasion he came across as much quieter than Clinton, who gave forceful, directed, and impassioned answers to some difficult questions from Iowa Democrats. Both candidates were fighting against stereotypes that voters have formed of them, using a new tone to win over those still wavering before the Iowa caucuses next Monday. And both of them gave, in their different ways, remarkably convincing performances. [...] [O]n the whole, the kinder, gentler Sanders showed that he has a much wider tonal range as a politician than the Larry David stereotype—or some of his rallies—would suggest. It’s likely that this softer Sanders was crafted in no small part to appeal to the rural populations of Iowa and New Hampshire. Rural voters are especially important in Iowa, because of the weight their votes have in the caucus system. Sanders has already won over a considerable number of college students and urbanites, who form his core fan base, so he needs those rural voters to diversify his support. Clinton’s new, fightin’ tone is also aimed at skeptical voters. She’s been accused of being a complacent front-runner and pillar of the establishment. Whether this image is fair or not, Clinton needed to counter it. And so she’s re-cast herself as Hillary Clinton the fighter, the counter-puncher who has had to fight the Republicans her whole life. The theme of a combative Hillary is quite visible in her recent campaign ads, and her performance in the Democratic Forum was designed to reenforce this idea.

By most accounts, cities like Flint are victims of structural forces. The common-sense canard that globalization and technological change have made rust-belt cities unviable has been a convenient narrative for restructuring industrial cities through fiscal austerity programs. But while deindustrialization is an important part of Flint’s story, it obscures broader political forces that have decimated budgets and battered working class populations across the Midwest. According to the Michigan Municipal League, between 2003-2013, Flint lost close to 60 million dollars in revenue sharing from the state, tied to the sales tax, which increased over the same decade. During this period, the city cut its police force in half while violent crime doubled, from 12.2 per 1000 people in 2003, to 23.4 in 2011. Such a loss of revenue is larger than the entire 2015 Flint general fund budget. In fact, cuts to Michigan cities like Flint and Detroit have occurred as state authorities raided so-called statutory revenue sharing funds to balance their own budgets and pay for cuts in business taxes. Unlike “constitutional” revenue sharing in Michigan, state authorities could divert these resources at their discretion. It is estimated that between 2003-2013 the state withheld over $6 billion dollars from Michigan cities.

As Democrats mull how change works, consider Obama. Bernie Sanders' light sketch of single-payer healthcare Utopia has got Democrats debating their theory of change. Generate mass support for fundamental restructurings -- of healthcare, banking, wage law --or take any step you can, by legislative compromise or executive order, to make current institutions more progressive? Obama is often held up these days as a proto-Bernie who stoked the thirst for swift transformation in 2007-8 and then disappointed. But if Hope and Change was the Obama trumpet call, his bass note was always slow, hard, pragmatic step-by-step progress. Even at his most apparently messianic, Obama has always stressed the incremental nature of change for the better… The biggest flaw in Obama's theory of change was born of arrogance rooted in past personal success. He plainly thought he could win Republicans over by moving toward them. I don't think he fully corrected on that until the sequester took its first bite and he realized that Republicans wouldn't compromise to shut it off. That quirk aside, though, I don't think that Democrats ruminating over how change works can find a more nuanced or effective perspective than Obama's.