Within the Margin

On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram alerted me to the two-year anniversary of the launch of Ready for Hillary – Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC for the 2016 election. It’s exciting because she’s a giant on the American political landscape, and I have found droves of people who have been inspired by her and anticipate great things from a Hillary Clinton presidency.

But since its launch, Ready for Hillary has also felt like a march toward inevitable nomination. When a leading voice of the grassroots left weighs in over a year before the first caucus and primary votes are cast – as Howard Dean did last month in Politico – there is clearly interest from unexpected places in accelerating a candidate selection process that needs some time and thought, and we need to step back and make sure we’re thinking this through. I want the right kind of Hillary Clinton candidacy. I think we can get it, but I’m not taking it for granted.

Let’s quickly dispense with the obvious: no one can question the strength of her resume: from playing an active role in White House policy in the ’90s to eight years in the Senate to four years as Secretary of State, she is incredibly versed in policy foreign and domestic and in both the legislative and executive branches of government. Preparation is not in doubt here. But Hillary Clinton still needs to make the case for why she should be the Democratic nominee for president. It has to be more than her historic significance as potentially the first woman to become a major-party presidential nominee, because there are plenty of women who would make fantastic nominees. If we’re into the idea of Hillary as trailblazer – and I am into that: I am ashamed of the lack of women in Congress, in state legislatures, in the White House, and I’ve long wondered if we need to institute gender quotas like in various countries around the world – then why not Kirsten Gillibrand, with a few hard-fought legislative victories already under her belt and major initiatives in progress despite an era of do-nothingism in Congress? She was rewarded with a state-record 72% of New York’s vote in her last race. Or Amy Klobuchar, whose comprehensive efforts on energy policy resonate in both economic and environmental terms and are decidedly 21st-century in their focus – and who in 2012 won 85 out of 87 counties in a state that we still often count as swingy? Or despite her brief time in public office, Elizabeth Warren, with a coherent message about the things that created a financial crisis and the risky steps we’re taking toward repeating them? That’s just to name Democratic candidates; the lengthy list of expected Republican candidates currently lacks any women, but that could yet change and hopefully will (he said, without holding his breath for the slightest length of time).

And if it’s a matter of checking off the philosophical boxes, well…we’re not really sure, are we? We don’t have any reason to believe Hillary would be more aggressive in prosecuting Wall Street for its ongoing offenses against the less-moneyed citizens of this country. Suspicion of Wall Street types has never been a hallmark of the Clinton family. The Iraq invasion in 2003 was a major mistake: as a rule we probably shouldn’t launch wars on false pretenses, or that curtail our military readiness to complete an existing and more pressing mission in Afghanistan, or that exhaust our country’s patience and send us spiraling toward isolationist sentiments now shared by large swaths of right and left – hence our uncertain responses to more recent conflicts in Libya and Syria. The first two were obvious at the time of her vote, and the third was frankly predictable to those of us with any awareness of our nation’s history when it comes to supporting ongoing involvement in wars. It was a three-part mistake that Hillary has never acknowledged. And did she acknowledge this mistake? The one where she seemed, intentionally or not, to imply that hard-working Americans are white Americans, and that maybe non-white Americans are not? Not a pleasant moment in her 2008 candidacy.

I readily concede that asking any major party nominee to mount a populist war on banks is unrealistic – though I’d happily take a pass on the rhetoric and settle for a quiet sequence of legal prosecutions and major reforms. The Iceland model is just fine with me, and I would welcome a Hillary Clinton candidacy that talks about these kinds of measures, as opposed to the derivative regulation rollback we just saw from our lame-duck Congress. As for foreign policy, her hawkishness has not changed since the Bush administration and I have no reason from her statements to believe it will, so I have to worry that her presidency would likewise focus on the wrong enemy at the wrong time, leaving us unable to respond nimbly to other crises.

There are positives on policy, beyond the resume: she started talking about student debt in her fall speeches. This is encouraging, because I’m of the mindset that people in their 20s and 30s are severely hamstrung by student debt, rendering many of us unable to fully participate in the economy. I’ll feel better if this becomes a key facet of her platform. The next step toward policy relevance for my crowd: start talking about the transit investments that will make more of our cities livable for those of us who wouldn’t mind commuting sans car. The better the transit in any given city, the more places we can afford to live in said city (or even outside cities). Yes, transit tends to drive up rents and property prices: but inexpensive housing is meaningless if it’s nowhere near where we want to work and play. We’re hearing any number of people talk about road and bridge improvements as necessary investments and (temporary) job creators, but transit has to be part of the mix or infrastructure benefits will miss younger people. And as is well-documented, any Democratic presidential campaign in 2016 is going to rely on younger votes, so how about the policies start to match the need? Steve Singiser is the latest to write about the first part (the politics); I’m trying to get the discussion moving on the second part (the policies).

None of the questions or criticisms above are meant to preclude my support for her candidacy! Not in a primary election, or especially in a general election where it’s easy to imagine the totality of her positions adding up to something much stronger than a Republican nominee in thrall with his (let’s face it, it’ll be his, not her) party’s various foibles like a resistance to financial regulation and infrastructure investment, an inclination toward climate denial, toward rejection of reproductive rights, toward mockery of the notion that ours is still an unequal society whether we’re talking about gender or sexual identity or race or class, toward cluelessness about net neutrality, and so forth. As a New Yorker, I’ve already voted for her twice (for U.S. Senate in 2000 and 2006). But in the meantime, I think she should earn it in the present: we need a dialogue and we need to see what kind of platform she begins laying out.

The whole “ready for” concept has always annoyed me a little bit anyway, because what I’m really ready for is to concentrate on the rest of the Obama presidency – you know, the one that Paul Krugman, writing in Rolling Stone, correctly termed one of the greatest in history. I usually don’t go in for Krugman’s more agitated writings, but he does have his strong suits, from the esoteric (such as connecting American readers to the ongoing demise of democracy in Hungary) to the commonplace (like assessing a presidency). And I think that part of having a historic presidency is defending it against a newly-empowered Congressional majority that seeks to destroy it, and that requires some vigilance. The president himself has sometimes fallen short in mounting his own defense, but last week’s State of the Union was the latest in a series of post-midterm actions and statements that recognize progress made and outline aggressive goals for building upon those successes. Oh, and it included this. You know, I had watched this a bunch of times already, and only now did I notice he winked afterward. He winked! I love it all over again.

So sure – I’m ready for Hillary, but I’m not Ready For Hillary™. I’m just as ready for Elizabeth or Kirsten or Amy. I’m probably ready for Deval or ‘Loop or Martin, too, though I think it would be hella good for this country to have a female president. And I’m quite ready for someone coming from outside the elected realm, though the Obama presidency has demonstrated that a degree of political nuance is important to the job, or at least to beltway perceptions of one’s skill set for the role. There’s plenty of time for the nomination campaign to get started, but in the meantime Democrats need to figure out how to operate in a world where Republicans hold some very important cards at the legislative table and where last month’s split budget vote indicates that we have a competition between pragmatism and populism pulling at our Congressional delegation. How that unfolds in the coming months is surely as important as how the next few steps of Hillary’s campaign-in-waiting play out.

Every now and again, the “old” John McCain comes back.

I wasn’t politically-engaged enough in 2000 to have much of a sense at the time of what his primary campaign for the Republican presidential nomination focused upon, but the first George W. Bush presidential term that followed provided occasional glimpses into what might have been. McCain’s hawkishness provided useful (or damaging, from my perspective) cover to assuage moderates that the administration’s prosecution of the war on terror was appropriate, but on domestic policy he offered support for significant and successful campaign finance reform (since eviscerated by the Supreme Court’s de facto conservative majority) as well as legislation to combat climate change. In those days, he also tended to be a reasonable voice on immigration reform, as was President Bush. McCain was a lot of Democrats’ favorite Republican: by no means right on all the issues, but good on a few of them and with enough charisma and credibility to be a useful bridge to bipartisanship from time to time.

By 2008, that was fading. Lessons having been learned from eight years before, he had to run a bit more to his right in order to secure the nomination against the challenges posed by Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The general election campaign against Barack Obama was not stridently ideological until he made the astounding decision to place future Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin on the ticket. But his tone was decidedly changed from the earlier McCain. Vexed that his experience was being trumped by Obama’s reformist sensibilities and frankly modern message, McCain struggled to conceal his affront as the race slipped away. It took him a while to recover: Obama’s first term was marked by a snarling, partisan McCain who now struggled to find common cause across the aisle, and who focused his 2010 Senate primary campaign on immigration in the face of a challenger who attempted to out-conservative him on the issue. The “complete the dang fence” ad is not exactly the McCain-as-statesman image pushed by the mainstream media from 2000 onward.

But one common thread throughout McCain’s tenure is his opposition to torture (or its charming euphemism, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) and his willingness to note both the ineffectiveness and immorality of such approaches. Americans raised on “24” have been led to believe that bad guys will crack under pressure and tell you where the other bad guys or what they’re up to, and our American heroes then use that information to save the day. As McCain and various scientific researchers point out, the information gleaned from these techniques is often worthless: the things people say under extreme physical and psychological duress are often junk, uttered only to make the torture stop. Beyond that, one would rather have the moral high ground in fighting a war, and treating

This was something McCain had to do continually during the 2008 Republican primary debates, as he shared the stage with seven, eight, nine candidates who all proudly asserted they would continue the Bush administration’s torture regime. One of my more surreal experiences of that campaign was watching a war hero explain to a bunch of people with no military or intelligence experience that he knew a little something about this issue and could tell them how a torture victim actually responds.

Now, in the aftermath of the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of torture, McCain is again in the position of bucking most of his party and offering an impassioned defense of the report’s release – as well as decrying the moral and indeed strategic cost of American use of torture. These are ultra-partisan times, and I don’t want to give a senator too much credit for just doing what’s right. But there’s always room for the statesman version of John McCain to challenge past practices and hopefully ensure that America lives up to its values going forward.

p.s. – in the interest of recognizing when my local Congressman gets something right, U.S. Representative Chris Gibson offered similar thoughts to McCain on Wednesday: “I’m talking as a guy who has front line experience. You’re never going to get any reliable information through any other means than through persuasion,” said Gibson, who served in the Army for more than two decades. “If you put somebody under torture, they’re going to tell you anything you want to hear to have it stop. It’s not reliable. I’m telling you from both a values perspective and a pragmatic perspective, what you want to do with a prisoner or a detainee is to have them be in the space where they see it’s in their best interest to share information.”

In the wake of the Newtown shooting in December, my WTM collaborator Matt Clausen published this piece to reflect upon where the national discussion might go. I intended to respond promptly, but I couldn’t find my intellectual and emotional footing. More than six months later, I still don’t have a game-changing set of answers to the questions raised since then about safety and freedoms. But I have thought a lot, which is all we can do sometimes. Here’s what came from that process. 

When Matt first published his piece about gun politics, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to engage the question he was asking – can we get everyone involved in the far-reaching gun discussion to the table for a fair and open-minded examination of how to prevent gun deaths in America? And what does “gun discussion” even mean anymore? I had spent years steeped in the belief that gun ownership and the wider gun culture was an innate and valuable part of our national heritage. For all that I appreciate most iconoclastic attempts to break down the mythologies that fuel American identity, this was one that the historian in me wanted to believe was abstract but valuable: a link to a frontier that played such a role in our past, an opportunity to connect the past and present through pastimes that had an inherently rustic association. Plus, I believed, and still believe, that rural America is right to occasionally feel misunderstood by urban dwellers. I’m a very geographic person; “place” is always a very salient concept for me. I saw no reason to upset a balance on gun policy that seemed in so many ways to be defined by place and how we as Americans related to it. The national Democratic party mostly saw things the same way, leaving behind gun control as a major policy position rather than fighting elections over an issue so mystically entwined with national identity.

I thought that my position was bringing us together via a sort of detente. It was allowing us to leave behind one piece of the culture wars that so often defined modern American politics, that divided us along stark lines that obscured our overarching commonalities.

I think was wrong. It turns out that no trust had been banked during that time. Those years of apparent consensus bought absolutely nothing from gun rights advocates. Instead, long before Newtown – and with great intensity in the months after – they armed themselves to the teeth. We watched gun sales skyrocket in the months leading up to President Obama’s re-election, lest victory at the ballot box embolden him to enact the long-held gun control schemes he had so long been plotting. Newtown itself was met with absurdities from gun advocates: raving fantasies about how violence in schools would be reduced if only we armed teachers and security guards, and ultimately, the defeat of bipartisan background check legislation in the U.S. Senate.

But in the months since Newtown, we also saw an imperfect but far more helpful contribution to the discussion, and it has come from many places: gun rights advocates, mental health advocates and those concerned more generally about society’s well-being completely separate from gun violence. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle: the idea that  mental health is the root issue in these killing sprees and in plenty of other violence acts, and there’s a reasonable case to be made with respect to the post-Newtown discussion. It sets aside the one-on-one gun violence that is still pervasive in many American neighborhoods, but I’m always happy to see people discussing mental health as a real issue in any context. Yet sadly, many of these dialogues – certainly including those occurring at the Congressional level – have overwhelmingly missed the point: they focus on the need to lock people up, on “crazy people” and sentencing and institutionalization and court-ordered treatment. There’s a place for that, in many cases. But that rhetorical linkage between crime and psychological well-being does two unhelpful things: one, it stigmatizes those with mental illness, turning them – I’m sorry, us – into criminals waiting to happen, and two, it pretends that access to treatment only starts to matter as a facet of public policy when someone has gone over the edge. In reality, we need to de-stigmatize mental illness so that individuals seek treatment long before he or she is damaged enough to hurt another person.

That’s a cultural shift that we need to take, and as much progress has been made in terms of accepting the fact that a large percentage of our population struggles with mental illness, we still have a ways to go. I’d like you to to pause for a minute to think about how many people in your life you can openly discuss your emotional troubles with when they go beyond the mundane and into the clinical. Not just the lousy day you had at work, or the slippage in a romantic relationship, but the lingering sadness that comes from loss, from being unsure of your purpose or goals in life, or a lack of close friendships, or the kids you miss now that they’ve grown up and are not scurrying around your house. Maybe it’s the anxiety that leaves you on edge for days at a time, snapping at minor trivialities. Maybe it’s the panic attacks you sometimes get crossing a bridge. Or at social events. Or the ones that come for seemingly no reason at all in the middle of the night when insomnia opens the flood gates, and you sit in the anxiously in the dark, afraid, confused and worried, wondering if things will be back to “normal” by the time you have to get up and go to work in the morning. How many people do you have for whom it’s okay to talk about those things – those seemingly irrational vulnerabilities – in detail? And how often does it feel like it’s okay to burden those people with any discussion of what’s happening? They’re so sympathetic, but you just know they have other things to worry about, too…now imagine it’s worse. Imagine the scope of your troubles involves horrific swings in mood and functioning, or bends in reality that divorce you from what “everyone else” is seeing, hearing, experiencing. Imagine the isolation is deeper – you really have no one.

That brings us to the second facet of the guns-and-health discussion, which is access. Remember that in many states, it’s pretty easy to get a gun and a carry permit. Gun shows and private sales make it a veritable free-for-all. It should be as easy, or easier, to seek the mental heath treatment you need. And guess what? That might mean that government has to spend money to expand access to care – to create new, affordable clinics, or to increase staffing at existing agencies, or to improve education and awareness of what’s out there and available. It also might mean that we have to impose new regulations on the insurance industry – it was only a few years ago that my home state of New York finally passed permanent parity legislation, requiring heath plans to provide comparable coverage for mental health treatment relative to treatment for physical ailments.

In this lingering era of  Tea Party politics, it’s not too fashionable to note that sometimes we have to invest or regulate. And there’s a great deal of overlap between reactionary, Tea Party conservatives and gun rights advocates. I find that I can’t count on most gun rights advocates serving in our state and federal governments to legislate these improvements in health care services – they’re too busy they’re too busy claiming that we’re coming to take their guns, that Barack Obama or Andrew Cuomo are fascist dictators, that they need to be armed to the teeth for that hypothetical day when they need to defend their homes against tyrannical oppressors.

That’s the state of affairs as I see it on the health care side. In terms of actual gun policy, I’m content for now to keep it simple. Background checks, folks. Ensure that we know who we’re selling to – every sale. Registration, folks. Ensure that we have a last known owner in association with any firearm, so that we can get to the root of illegal transfers and appropriately punish people who sell recklessly. These don’t need to be scary initiatives. These are common sense means of continuing to permit widespread ownership while ensuring that we decrease sales to dangerous people. And we have to understand that some of the people who go on to commit violent acts obtained their firearms through perfectly legal means, and then become criminals. And that means that some states are going to attempt to reduce the total number of firearms in circulation, and to restrict sales entirely of some kinds of firearms and accessories deemed to be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person – who may well have been the “right” person when (s)he initially acquired the gun, passing background checks and so forth. Categorizing and restricting various firearms as assault weapons is a much thornier matter, from how you do it in a technical sense all the way to whether it is even effective on a state-by-state (rather than federal) level.

Both my home state of New York and neighboring Connecticut passed comprehensive and bipartisan gun legislation in the aftermath of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I think that Connecticut basically got their new law right, both in terms of what it actually does and the painstaking time taken to craft it. Inclusiveness and openness were the hallmarks of their process. If I were sitting in their state legislature, I would have voted for it. New York’s law, passed months before Connecticut, includes a few more bizarre features than our neighbors to the east, and was passed through an absurd process: in the middle of the night, with a message of necessity from the governor to waive the three-day waiting period before voting. Look, under those circumstances, I would have voted against it. Process matters. But let’s look at the fallout in New York, because as I said at the start of this piece, I think I was wrong about where the nation was in terms of trusting each other to be respectful in the gun debate.

As a staffer in the state legislature, passage of a gun control bill meant that I would not just experience the ensuing discussion up close, I would be part of the dialogue. And that discussion was one of the most frustrating that I have experienced. Given my reservations about the law and the way it was passed, I had as open a mind as one could hope for. I watched as people who knew better offered comments like “I became a felon overnight.” Well, no, you didn’t, for a few reasons – the simplest of which is that if you had a firearm that fell under the expanded assault weapons ban, you had until 2014 to register it.

“But registration leads to confiscation!” Oh? By whom? When is this confiscation taking place? And why? What is the government’s motivation? To gain greater control over society? To do what? I have had that conversation with dozens of NYS residents in the last six months. It always peters out when I try to get the other person to explain what the end-game is: Ok, Obama and Cuomo want to take all your guns…and then do what? What’s the big plan at the end of all of this? Conspiracy theories aren’t much fun if you don’t provide us with some hint as to the dramatic climax your antagonists are conspiring toward.

“High-capacity magazines can’t be restricted – they’re fun, plus if I’m repelling a home invasion, I need all the shots I can get!” Come on, guys. When your argument is that you’re not very good at hitting your target, you shouldn’t be angry at legislators. You should find something to play with besides guns. Or become a better shot.

***

We need to get better at dialogue in this country. Matt’s original post was skeptical that we were ready to do that, and he was all too correct, at least with respect to our national lawmaking body. The results in our state legislatures are more mixed – to stick with the local examples, New York and Connecticut passed laws, but only the latter engaged in a dialogue along the way. With respect to the people themselves, there is overwhelming consensus in support the gun control measures Washington actually did try to pass – but as we all know too well from watching it dabble in twenty-week abortion bans and sloppy farm bills in the months since the background checks vote, Congress is not a representative body in any actual sense.

We need to get better at trusting each other. Those living in more rural areas need to stop assuming that city folk don’t understand them and are out to change their way of life, and people in cities can’t assume that rural people are remnants of a different civilization. We also need to get better at dealing with realities as they exist on the ground: No one’s confiscating guns. No one’s discarding the Constitution (but try reading ALL of District of Columbia v. Heller – not just the parts gun advocates love – so that you can better understand the leeway granted states in regulating firearms). And there are lots of people who don’t know the first place to start when they feel their emotional grip becoming tenuous, so we can’t pretend that we’ve done enough to make those services available.

When we start to do those things, we might begin to tear down the ideological and political barriers to passing benign legislation like Manchin/Toomey. We might begin to operate in good faith, so that we get outcomes like Connecticut’s gun bill rather than New York’s. And we might start to repair the broken democratic process that allows people to kill background check legislation in the first place. Newtown is about the death of wonderful people, including many who, bless their tiny hearts, lived too short a time to ever lose their precious innocence. It should also be about a nation turning a corner in its approach to politics and governance.

In our third show, we look back at the SC-1 special election and ahead to the Massachusetts senate special. Then we dive into the “how” of being campaign and election junkies – our history in campaigns, favorite resources, jargon and so on. We hope you enjoy.

Episode 3: 

Second podcast. An Empire State-themed show includes discussion of the NYC mayoral race, other pundits’ speculation on state senate retirements, Andrew Cuomo’s current standing and future prospects and the absurdity of New York’s electoral processes. We hope you enjoy, but we also hope you give us feedback either way.

Episode 2: 

We recorded a podcast. It’s a little over a week old, because I was  dallying over where wanted to host the download. Ultimately it made the most sense to put it right here with the rest of the blog. Topics covered include the special election in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional district (or as most would identify it: the one with Stephen Colbert’s sister and the governor with the Argentinean mistress); politicians talking about guns and torture with respect to the Boston Marathon bombing; and early recruiting and fundraising efforts for the 2014 midterm elections. We enjoyed recording, and we hope you enjoy listening.

Episode 1:

Everyone likes Chris Christie. Oh, except for some Republican donors who have probably never actually had to govern a state. Or anything. And who might not listen to enough Springsteen.

Last week, the Times ran a piece detailing Chris Christie’s rocky relationship with Republican insiders amid the fallout from having a warm relationship with President Obama in Sandy’s aftermath. That piece was worth a read to understand the depths to which out-of-state donors sunk as they begged Christie to focus on helping Romney rather than the devastation that had come to his state from Sandy.  Look, it should be noted that Chris Christie was hardly the Romney campaign’s biggest problem. If the Republicans really wanted to win that election, they could have offered a budget whose numbers added up, rather than Paul Ryan’s sleight-of-hand (the Paul Ryan “MATH” Obamicon was one of the more ironic images from the 2012 campaign). They could have offered something besides condescension for the rising demographic groups with whom they performed so poorly. They could have offered a set of values that would not be so easily caricatured as coming from the 1920s (economic policy) or 1950s (social policy. Oh, and foreign policy, with that bit about Russia.)

But they didn’t, and Romney lost, and Chris Christie has little to do with that. It’s probably not the first time in the annals of history that the GOP donor class is out of touch with normal people. It seemed pretty obvious to most, I think, that the man’s commitment to duty and deep love for his state was fueling a desire to work hand-in-hand with the federal government to get through a crisis. But don’t take my word for it. Quinnipiac has been polling the Garden State, and they found that 84% of New Jerseyans approved of Christie’s praise for Obama – including 69% of Jersey Republicans. When it comes to Christie handling his job, particularly inter-governmental relations, I care what people in his state think – not what donors think, and now what insiders desperately looking for their next consulting gig might think.

Now, as Democratic insiders go, I’ve always been pretty tolerant of this guy. There’s a reason for this. When it comes to Christie, the first thing I think of is not union-busting or physical girth or New Jersey bluster – which are the things media people and pundits and political combatants usually cling to. For me, the first thing that comes to mind when I ponder Christie…is Springsteen. That goes beyond Christie and I simply being fans of a man and his music, because the music represents something hard to define, but which is about an attachment to place and time and personal struggle that I feel in an acute way, and which I think Christie does as well. I can disagree with Christie on some – not nearly all – of his policies, but I might consider him something of a kindred spirit in how he goes through his life. So when I see donors lamenting that Christie’s too tight with Obama, or Iowa Republican operatives saying they “don’t forget things like this, I think, “Oh, another bunch of donors and hacks who could use a little more Bruce in their lives.” If you can’t empathize with Christie and understand the importance of place and people before politics in the days and weeks following Sandy, then it seems to me there’s a catalog of music that’s missing from your life. Come back to me when you’ve found your soul.

Sometimes it’s just about geography. My favorite district in my second state is a good example. 

I understand that Republicans are looking for bright spots from this month’s elections, and that’s fair. I’d be doing the same. But to hear Brock McCleary tell it, Keith Rothfus’ victory in southwest Pennsylvania’s 12th district is a triumph of smart campaigning and of prevailing against great odds. McCleary is the NRCC’s  (National Republican Congressonal Committee) Deputy Political Director, and he has a history with this district. He’s forthcoming about how personal this race was for him. I think that attachment is preventing him from seeing this simply as a triumph of partisan mapmaking.

Redistricting took the district that Critz won in 2010 (twice) and  made the Obama ’08 percentage about four points lower than it had been. Then, in 2012, Obama cratered in much of western Pennsylvania, and most profoundly in the areas contained in the 12th district. Critz’ Cambria County base voted narrowly for Obama in 2008. This time, he received only 40% of the vote – a nine-point drop. The same goes for Somerset County. Other counties in the Fightin’ 12th saw anywhere from a 1-4 point Obama percentage drop over 2008 . This collapse didn’t happen in most parts of the county, where Obama’s drop relative to 2008 was around two points. But it happened throughout Appalachia, and southwest Pennsylvania was no different. Winning in a 50-50 district would have been tough enough for Critz. Winning in the redrawn 54-45 McCain-Obama district was going to be tougher, and this turned out to be more like a 57% Romney district. We’re moving back toward straight-ticket voting in this country, and we’ll find that few Democrats held on in districts where Romney’s percentage was so high.

Where did we at WTM see this race going? We had it at Tilt Dem, with Critz’ political chops being just enough to survive the continued reddening of the district. So yeah, we got it wrong – barely – and maybe that validates McCleary’s excitement a bit. But the credit should go to the Republican legislators in Harrisburg who concocted a map where Rothfus could squeak out a three-point win while Romney was romping in the district. They made it more Republican. They removed IUP, where Critz is an alum (as am I). They shifted it north, removing the sections of Greene and Fayette that Critz had previously carried.

Look, partisan gerrymandering kept Republican losses lower than the might have been this year. It also helped Democrats in two of the only places where they got to draw the map – Illinois and Maryland. It’s ok to acknowledge that fact rather than paint Keith Rothfus and his team as a group of political geniuses.

From time to time we like to take things local here at WTM, and on Election Night I promised to elaborate further on the scope of just what had happened in my home county. I don’t toss around words like “historic” without thought; I have a graduate degree in the field and a deep awareness of the transient nature of electoral success. But as election results came in, it became clear that Democrats in Dutchess County were experiencing something akin to their best-case scenario for the evening. In doing so, the party surpassed all of its previous high-water marks, which are ranked below. But first, let’s examine what happened, starting at the top.

President. Barack Obama carried Dutchess County again. His margin was slightly reduced from 2008, but the erosion was not as much as he experienced nationally (-1.24% versus -2.14%, both numbers being subject to minor revision pending final tallies) and was still enough for a comfortable 6.6% margin of victory in the county As much as Democrats struggled here in 2009 and 2010, causing doubts as to whether Obama could again carry Dutchess, he ended up performing pretty decently here. This is the fourth time that a Democratic presidential candidate won this county – the others being Johnson ’64, Clinton ’96, and Obama ’08.

Senate. As expected, Kirsten Gillibrand obliterated her woeful, extremist opponent statewide and carried Dutchess by a 2:1 margin.

House of Representatives. Dutchess is divided between two Congressional districts. Republican freshman Chris Gibson represents northern and eastern Dutchess and carried the county en route to reelection. Fellow GOP first-termer Nan Hayworth represents southwestern Dutchess and was not so successful: she was defeated decisively by Democratic Sean Maloney in Dutchess and more narrowly district-wide. Maloney becomes the third Democrat to represent Southern Dutchess in Congress, following John Dow in the ’60s and John Hall, who won in 2006 and 2008.

State Assembly. The new Assembly map divides Dutchess into four Assembly districts. The 103rd includes only Rhinebeck and Red Hook and is otherwise an Ulster County district; here, incumbent Democrat Kevin Cahill was unopposed for reelection.

The 104th district includes Poughkeepsie, Beacon and sections of Orange and Ulster. This was won narrowly by Frank Skartados in 2008 over 14-year incumbent Tom Kirwan. The latter would be back to win an even closer rematch in 2010, but he passed away before completing his final term, prompting a March 2012 special election. Skartados won that easily, and crushed his opponent in the general. This seat, safely Republican for so long and marginal recently, has officially become a safely Democratic seat.

The 105 and 106th districts are effectively new entities, drawn out of the old 102nd and 103rd. Democrat Didi Barrett’s special election victory in the old 103rd in March made her the first Democrat ever to hold that seat, now effectively the 106th. In her quest for a full term, Barrett faced new territory and a legitimate challenger in West Point graduate and Milan councilman David Byrne. The Republican had won an Opportunity to Ballot campaign to snag the Independence Line from Barrett in September and the Barrett campaign was taking nothing for granted, even in a district slightly more Democratic than the one in which she triumphed in March. She ended up winning by the almost-comfortable margin of 55%-45% – a remarkable feat in territory so unaccustomed to sending Dems to Albany.

The 105th includes all of Dutchess County’s most Republican towns; it did what southern Dutchess does and elected Republican Kieran Lalor to an open seat by a 56-44 margin. That loss for Dems should not detract from the totality of what they did. In 2010, Dutchess was divided between five districts; only one (featuring exactly one Dutchess town) elected a Democratic Assemblyman. In 2012, three of the county’s four districts elected Dems, and did so by healthy margins.

State Senate. This might have been the biggest win of them all. No Democrat had been elected to the State Senate from Dutchess County since young legislator Franklin Delano Roosevelt won a pair of elections in 1912 and 1914. Roosevelt would fade into obscurity, and Democrats rarely even came close to winning the seat again. Even in the great years of 2006 and 2008, the mighty Steve Saland was just too powerful. But his vote for marriage equality invited a Republican primary challenger who nearly defeated him in September; the same man fought on via the Conservative line in the general election. And ready to twist the knife was Terry Gipson, the Rhinebeck village trustee who spent two full years campaigning for this seat, starting as an underfunded longshot and ultimately ending as the 41st district’s next state senator. In dethroning one of the giants of Dutchess Republicanism, Gipson demonstrated the importance of starting early and sticking with it.

Two Dutchess towns (Beekman and Pawling) remain in the 40th district; they voted heavily for Republican incumbent Greg Ball, who won a second term as his Putnam and Dutchess victories outweighed a narrow Westchester defeat.

State Supreme Court. Dutchess forms part of the 9th Judicial District along with Orange, Putnam, Rockland and Westchester. It’s friendly enough turf for Dems, but Dutchess rarely gets represented in the Democratic nominations since Westchester has the highest population, is the most Democratic, and likes to call the shots. But his year, Maria Rosa of Millbrook was one of the Democrats running for three seats on the court, and emerged victorious to become the first Dutchess Democrat elected to the 9th since 1964.

County Legislature. County elections occur in odd-numbered years, but the appointment of incumbent Republican Gary Cooper to a county administrative post necessitated a special election in the 19th district of northeastern Dutchess. Milan’s Debra Blalock mounted a spirited campaign against appointed replacement David Sherman of North East; she was the underdog but fought to a 17-vote lead on Election Night. That’s close enough that it theoretically could have flipped via absentees, but it has not: Blalock’s lead has increased to 71 votes during the counting of absentee ballots. Blalock thus becomes the first Democratic county legislator in history from her district.

Town Races. Several special elections were held to fill unexpired terms for supervisor, justice and town board in different towns. These were all in places Republicans historically win with ease. But in one of them, young Democrat Tim Tuttle bounced back from a 2011 loss to become the first Democrat on the Fishkill town board in half a century.

So let’s summarize. Dutchess Democrats carried the county for the president and U.S. Senate, picked up long-held GOP seats on the Fishkill Town Board, Dutchess County Legislature, and New York State Senate, retook a Congressional seat, held two Assembly seats that had GOP incumbents this time last year, and elected a fresh, local face to the State Supreme Court. It was more than anyone could have realistically hoped for coming in, and it’s an indication that the party’s relatively new (and smallish) registration advantage is starting to translate into victories up and down the ballot. There will still be challenges: this year was partially enabled by Obama’s presence atop the ticket. Republicans around the country are vastly better than Democrats at turning out their voters in local years, and Dutchess is no different in this respect. But with each win, candidate recruitment gets a little bit easier. And as recruiting improves, more wins occur and the cycle begins anew. The candidates and party leaders who made these wins possible should congratulate themselves not only for what they did this year, but for what this year potentially means going forward in making Dutchess a truly competitive two-party county.

The rest of the top five Democratic years in Dutchess County history? We can debate the order, but here’s how I’d rank ’em:

2. 2008
This was the year Democrats passed Republicans in the number of voters registered in Dutchess County, auguring a strong year for the party. Barack Obama was the first Democrat to carry Dutchess in the presidential race since Clinton in ’96 and he blew past Clinton’s 45.6% to win just under 54% in Dutchess. That aided easy wins for each of the county’s incumbent members of Congress, plus several local pickups. In the 100th Assembly district (Poughkeepsie/Beacon/Newburgh and suburbs in Orange and Ulster), Frank Skartados eked out a win over longtime incumbent Tom Kirwan. Joan Posner won a historic victory to take a seat on the county’s Family Court, the first Democratic female to do so in the county’s history. Robert McKeon won a special election to give Democrats the majority on the Red Hook town board. Joanna Shafer won a special town board race in Stanford.

Legitimate disappointments were few. Jonathan Smith’s Assembly campaign against Joel Miller gained traction but didn’t end up quite as close as I thought it would. Anne Rubin’s guerilla campaign against Marc Molinaro will always hold a special place in many of our hearts, though. And…Lumies Huff, anybody? Go Crimson.

3. 1964

In ’64, Lyndon Johnson became the first Democratic presidential candidate in the 20th century to carry Dutchess County – he would be the last to do so until Bill Clinton did so in 1996 with an assist from Ross Perot. As many locals have no doubt heard, even Franklin Delano Roosevelt never carried his home county even while winning nationwide with ease on four occasions. Johnson’s 63%-37% victory was similar to his national margin of victory; he obliterated Republican nominee Barry Goldwater everywhere but the Deep South. That created a coattail affect across the country, and in Dutchess County it was enough to secure victories in Congressional seats that Democrats had not won for a century. The then-27th district, including southern Dutchess, southern Sullivan, Orange, Putnam and part of Rockland, elected John Dow. He would be a liberal’s liberal in Congress, one of the first members to oppose the Vietnam War. Where many of those elected in the Johnson landslide were swept out two years later in a very strong year for Republicans, Dow survived the ’66 election but lost to Martin McKneally, a Nixon law-and-order man, in 1968. McKneally turned out to be a words-not-deeds law n’ order guy, however, and lost a rematch in 1970 amidst revelations that he was a tax evader. Dow’s tenure in Congress finally ended in 1972 when moderate Republican Ben Gilman defeated him and installed a deathgrip on the seat, which eventually became a Rockland/Orange/Westchester seat. The northern Dutchess seat stretched north to Columbia County and west through and beyond the Catskills; it elected Joseph Resnick in 1964. Unlike Dow, Resnick was a strong defender of Johnson’s war policy and cut a more moderate figure on Capitol Hill. He too was reelected in 1966 despite the Republican tide, but gave up his seat in ’68 to run for the Senate (he lost the primay). Resnick was replaced by Hamilton Fish III, who held the seat as it becamse a southern Dutchess/Putnam/Westchester seat.

The other local Democratic wins in 1964 included a Dutchess judge’s election to the state Supreme Court as well as Victor Waryas, who captured an Assembly seat he would hold until 1968 (safe to say ’68 was not a banner year for Dutchess Dems). Locals will recognize the Waryas name from the park on the Poughkeepsie waterfront from which Joe Bertolozzi’s Bridge Music is broadcast in perpetuity.

The Johnson landslide created many wins in terms of quantity, but these proved relatively fleeting. While Obama’s coattails certainly helped this year, Johnson in ’64 was winning by such a large margin that he couldn’t help but bring others into office with him. The test of 2012 will be whether those folks last longer than the local class of ’64.

4. 2007

After four consecutive blowout wins, Republican County Executive Bill Steinhaus finally had a real fight on his hands. Democrats nominated Wappinger Town Supervisor Joe Ruggiero, who amassed a significant warchest previously unseen in local Democratic circles. He fell short by just 2,064 votes, or 3.3%. But with a viable top of the ticket, Democrats won control of the Dutchess County legislature for the first time since 1979. They also won control of the Dover town board, the Beacon mayoralty, and netted gains on the Poughkeepsie city council and East Fishkill, Pawling and Red Hook town boards.

It wasn’t a flawless year for Democrats, however. In addition to Ruggiero falling just short, the incoming legislative majority could have been larger had two Democratic incumbents not lost their seats. Republicans gained control of the Milan and Rhinebeck town boards and captured the mayoralty in Poughkeepsie. They would strike back with a vengeance in 2009 to retake the legislature.

 5. 1977

Yeah, the history of good Democratic years in Dutchess County starts to thin out pretty quickly. 1977 is probably the best contender because it’s the other year – besides 2007 – that Democrats won a county legislature majority, in addition to a decent year at the town and city level. ’77 is particularly important to the county’s political history because of what would transpire in the following months: Republican County Executive Ed Schuler would be indicted and convicted of bribery, leading to his resignation in early 1978. The legislature was empowered to appoint a new executive to serve out Schuler’s term; with the legislature now under Democratic control, it chose Majority Leader Lucille Pattison of Hyde Park to step into the executive’s role. She thus became the only Democratic and only female county exec in Dutchess history and was elected to full terms in 1979, 1983 and 1987.

Honorable Mention: 2005

Dems picked up four seats in the county legislature and were a hair’s breadth from capturing the majority, positioning them to do so in 2007. Diane Jablonski was elected county comptroller – the first Democrat in decades to win that office.  In the Town of Wappinger, Democrats won the supervisor and clerk races as well as maintaining a town board majority.  In Hyde Park, Democrats captured the supervisor seat and the town board majority. Bill Dahncke became the first Democrat elected to the East Fishkill town board since former Town Supervisor Dominick Cannizzaro left office. Dems also held a rare town board seat in Beekman; few incumbent Democrats were defeated anywhere in the county.

We can quibble over details like what constitutes a “legitimate” safety net beyond food or the fact that “some” bridges and roads does not begin to address our national infrastructure woes. But I’ll give Representative Adam Kinzinger a bit of credit for thinking slightly out of the box on the matter of tax rates:

“…I don’t care what tax rates are, they are random number derived from haggling and negotiations. What I want is a small government with a strong and fierce military that can kill our enemies and break their toys, legitimate safety nets that provide food and not a way of life, and some roads and bridges. Put that vision into action and set the tax rates at a percent that covers those costs. And once you have our payment, leave us the hell alone. That my friend, is conservatism.”

However – there’s always a however – that doesn’t explain, Mr. Kinzinger, why you and virtually every other “conservative” in Congress have signed Grover Norquist’s pledge not to raise any tax rates by any amount. If you now believe in honest budgeting, fantastic! I’m glad you feel elections matter. I agree – they do! But it means it’s time for you to renounce Norquist. We can’t budget around the priorities you describe if we have an artificial box around how we balance our numbers. That’s not to say rates absolutely must go up – it’s to say that our approach to budgeting cannot be constrained by external political pressures like a tax pledge that never made sense in the first place.