Sam Hall, Ashley Parker and Jay Barth are our guests this week.
Show hosted by Jeff Smith, New School professor and former Missouri State Senator
Show produced by Katherine Caperton.
Original Air Date: June 28, 2014 on SiriusXM “POTUS” Channel 124.
PoliOptics airs on POTUS on Saturdays at 8 am & 6 pm, Sundays at 4 am & 5 pm and Mondays at 2 am.
Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics.
Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above.
Show also available for download on Apple iTunes and other streaming services.

I’m Jeff Smith, urban policy professor at The New School and former Missouri state senator, sitting in for Josh King. This week, we dissect Mississippi politics, which stood at the epicenter of American politics last week as Senator Thad Cochran came back from a political near-death experience and clung to his seat.

We dig deep into what happened on the ground – and why it all matters for the rest of the nation. I’d like to thank my fantastic guests, all three of whom spent election day in Jackson, the state capital: Sam Hall of the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, Ashley Parker of the New York Times, and Professor Jay Barth, chairman of the Hendrix College political science department, and member of the Arkansas State Board of Education.

***

In his 1949 landmark book “Southern Politics,” the famed political scientist V.O. Key concluded that the politics of the South “revolves around the position of the Negro … Whatever phase of the Southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro.”

Since the Civil War, wealthy and struggling whites clashed over wages, the right to organize unions, and the role of government. About the only thing they agreed upon was the myth of black inferiority that helped unify the South in national political battles to lock in iron-clad segregation and ban black voting.

Throughout the 20th century, the Mississippi Democratic Party housed these two factions. Mississippi politics was a battle between the Delta planters and the poor white “peckerwoods,” as Key called them. The planters wanted low taxes and limited public services; the peckerwoods favored the New Deal and the electricity and jobs it brought to the rural South. The affluent Delta produced politicians such as Sen. James Eastland, while the poorer piney woods region produced pols like KKK member Sen. Theodore Bilbo, a fire-breathing race baiter whose vile rhetoric embarrassed the genteel Delta planters.

These divisions persist in Mississippi politics – except now they exist within the Republican Party. As the Mississippi Republican Party’s elder statesman, Thad Cochran is a modern-day Eastland, embodying the measured tone of the planter class. Conversely, the fiery McDaniel was born and raised in an impoverished rural county, and McDaniel’s retrograde rhetoric on race and sex bore uncomfortable resemblances to the hateful Bilbo speeches of yesteryear.

***

But after much strife and bloodshed, civil rights finally came to Mississippi, giving politicians a new voting bloc with which to contend. And yet even after black residents began registering in droves, it was often considered taboo for politicians to actually court their votes.

But that all changed three weeks ago. After McDaniel’s near-upset in the primary, Cochran tried an unusual strategy during the runoff election: he tried to persuade black Democrats to cross over and vote in the Republican primary. And instead of doing this via under-the-table vote buying, as had once been typical in the Delta, Cochran strategists even boasted about their strategy.

***

Though the rise of Southern Republicanism in the 1950s did not begin because of race – indeed, Nixon was seen as more
progressive than Kennedy on civil rights until word spread about Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta Scott King while her husband sat in a Birmingham jail – Southern Republican success mushroomed in the 1960s and 1970s due to the Republican Party’s increasingly conservative positioning on civil rights and other issues linked to race.

For 150 years, Mississippi politicians of both parties succeeded by vehemently oppose policies that benefited black residents. Indeed, it was only last year that Mississippi finally ratified the 13th Amendment freeing slaves. And yet Cochran’s very prominent African-American outreach – even as he courted a Republican primary electorate that has been bred on decades of racially-laden appeals – somehow succeeded.

Native Mississippian Sam Hall describes the political undercurrents of the election barely, if at all, visible to the national media who swarmed the state in the closing weeks. Ashley Parker analyzes the national political and policy implications of Cochran’s stunning come-from-behind win. And Jay Barth goes deep twice – first, offering an historical lens through which to understand the politics of the Deep South, and second, describing the tactics and techniques of the Cochran ground war that eluded most of the media. It’s a show no political junkie will want to miss.

Ken Vogel and Nick Confessore are our guests this week.
Guest host this week: Jeff Smith, New School professor and former Missouri State Senator
Show produced by Katherine Caperton.
Original Air Date: February 15, 2014 on SiriusXM “POTUS” Channel 124.
PoliOptics airs on POTUS on Saturdays at 8 am, 4 pm and midnight and on Sundays at noon and midnight.
Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics
Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above.
Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here

The first campaign manager of the modern era was Mark Hanna, who ran McKinley’s famous “front-porch campaign” in 1900. In many ways it was quite unlike from today’s presidential campaigns: McKinley made no pilgrimages to meet and greet voters in Iowa or New Hampshire, but rather greeted millions of voters from his front porch thanks to the free passes given by railroad companies looking for goodwill from a McKinley administration.

There was, however, one important similarity between that campaign of a century ago and today’s campaigns, one embodied by Hanna’s response when asked to explain McKinley’s win. “There were two keys to victory,” he said. “The first one was money. I can’t remember what the second was.” Indeed, Hanna had persuaded several of the so-called “robber barons” to donate millions of dollars towards a marketing campaign which produced millions of pamphlets and handbills promoting McKinley and trashing opponent William Jennings Bryan.

For decades after that, there were scant regulations on the financing of campaigns, and many of our presidents and aspiring presidents took advantage of this. For instance, as a young congressman seeking to revitalize the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Lyndon Johnson literally received sacks of cash from Brown and Root CEO Herman Brown that he distributed to colleagues as a way to gather chits and build his own power base.

In the wake of Watergate, reformers passed some of the nation’s first campaign finance laws, limiting contributions to $1,000 each and requiring full disclosure. But soon, enterprising politicians found loopholes, including “soft money,” the unregulated contributions to political parties that led to accusations of President Clinton “renting the Lincoln bedroom” of the White House out in exchange for $50,000 soft money contributions during his 1996 re-election.

These revelations became one impetus for reformers to propose more stringent regulation, which culminated in the 2002 signing of McCain-Feingold, which banned both soft money and any coordination between independent groups and candidate campaigns.

Again, though, the law of unintended consequences went to work: soon, there was more money flowing into the system than ever, from ever more shadowy places. And many doubted campaign operatives’ claims that so-called independent expenditures were actually independent.

Although many pundits grappled with this new Wild West environment, no one was able to distill it quite as well as comedian Stephen Colbert. Colbert satirized the concept of independently operating Super PACs by plotting on air with Trevor Potter, former Federal Election Commission chairman, to transfer the reins of his amply-funded Super PAC so that it could support his looming presidential candidacy. Potter informed Colbert that anyone other than Colbert could run such a PAC, provided they did not coordinate on strategy:

“Well, I wouldn’t want to even create the appearance of skullduggery,” said Colbert, “but I think I know just the guy.”

Suddenly, Jon Stewart appeared on stage, and asked Potter if the fact that he and Colbert were business partners would prohibit him from running the PAC.

“Being business partners does not count as coordination, legally,” Potter replied, handing Stewart a single sheet of paper christening the new entity, “Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC.”

“Now that I have the Super PAC,” asked Stewart, “may I legally hire his current staff to produce these ads that will be in no way coordinated with Stephen?”

“Yes,” said Potter, “as long as they have no knowledge of Colbert’s plans.”

Colbert thought for a moment and concluded, “OK, from now on I’ll have to talk about my plans on my show and just take the risk that you might watch it.”

Colbert likely he had no idea that real-world events would quickly seem more surreal than his satire. For instance, just before his breakthrough victory in the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich met privately with benefactor Sheldon Adelson at Adelson’ s Las Vegas resort. Adelson and his wife had recently donated $11 million to a Gingrich-affiliated Super PAC. Gingrich and Adelson emerged from their meeting and insisted that they did not discuss campaign strategy. Days later, Adelson contributed another $5 million. Adelson actually donated more to the SuperPAC than Gingrich’s official presidential campaign committee raised during Newt’s entire candidacy.

Gingrich was not alone in relying on a single donor to keep his presidential campaign afloat –   or in stretching the bounds of credulity regarding coordination. When Rick Santorum’s campaign could not afford a single television ad in the run-up to February 7 contests in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado, billionaire donor Foster Freiss stepped up to the plate with a seven-figure donation to Santorum-aligned Red, White, and Blue Super PAC, which ran ads that helped power Santorum to victory over Mitt Romney in all three states. And Freiss seemed even less concerned than Adelson about potential accusations of illicit coordination: while underwriting Red, White, and Blue’s ad campaign, Freiss traveled with Santorum on his campaign bus for 3 weeks.

Of course, these campaigns may well have avoided actual coordination. Savvy operatives  –  with the aid of election-law attorneys  –  argue that it is relatively easy to comply with the law even while achieving the ultimate goal of coordinating attacks on opponents. One method pioneered by the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2010 was to release advertising plans publicly, allowing independent groups to run their own advertisements in a way that would complement the NRCC’s ads. Although Democrats essentially ceded the Super PAC terrain to Republicans during the 2010 cycle, President Obama’ s  wink and nod brought them onto the field in February 2011. Democrats quickly learned to “coordinate without coordinating”  in many of the same ways Republicans did, even taking it to a new level: while John Lapp ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s traditional campaign arm (a PAC bound by limited contributions), his wife Ali ran House Majority PAC (the Super PAC charged with an identical mission but able to accept unlimited contributions).  In one striking product, the DCCC operation aired an ad attacking the Republican candidate for a New York congressional seat, followed almost immediately by a similar House Majority PAC spot. Though the ads cited the identical line from a Wall Street Journal article, Ali Lapp assured a reporter that she and her husband never discussed campaign strategy. “ John and I were much more excited about the serious progress our 2 ½  year old made in potty training that day,” she said, unconvincingly.

Unfortunately, it was a violation of this very law against coordination – to the tune of a somewhat less princely sum, estimated at $10,000-$25,000 – that ultimately led to a federal prison sentence of a year and a day for yours truly.

In any case, mega-donors like Adelson have made the days of $50,000 soft money donations seem positively quaint. This week we’ll be talking with reporters who wrote this week about two men who each committed to spend $100 million bucks on elections this year!

First, we’re joined by Ken Vogel, senior political reporter for Politico and the author of the only book with a title longer than Leibo’s recent best seller; it’s called Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics, and it chronicles the wild spending of the 2012 election. After the break, we talk with New York Times national political reporter Nick Confessore, who wrote a fantastic piece last week about Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist who may be the left’s David Koch.

Ben White, Matt Zeitlin and Tim Carney are our guests this week.
With guest host: New School Professor and former Missouri Senator Jeff Smith
Show produced by Katherine Caperton.
Original Air Date: October 5, 2013 on SiriusXM “POTUS” Channel 124.
PoliOptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6 am, 12 noon and 6 pm.
Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics
Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above.
Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here

Hi – I’m Jeff Smith, public policy professor at The New School in New York City, sitting in for Josh this week – a week full of political intrigue. Between Senator Ted Cruz’s theatrics, the government shutdown, the Obamacare rollout, and the looming debt ceiling, there’s a lot to talk about – and the standoff also raises intriguing questions about party alignment. This week we hosted three reporters who’ve been in the thick of it, Politico’s Ben White, Buzzfeed’s Matt Zeitlin, and the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney.

* * *

Few political science concepts have been as heatedly debated in academia (and in journalism, to a lesser degree) as the term “realignment.” Some scholars argue that party realignments happen in a single election; others say they take decades. Some define realignment as a durable shift in the voting behavior of certain groups, while others stress elite-level policy shifts. During realignments, a “rare, massive, and enduring shift of the electoral equilibrium” occurs, and while some suggest that realignment occurs through mobilization of new groups or generational replacement, others stress actual partisan conversion in the electorate. Whatever the cause, the shift profoundly alters party coalitions and the relative strength of various factions within them.

ealignments typically occur when the dominant issue cleavage in a political system is disturbed by a new set of issues leading to widespread public demand for action. Given a two-dimensional issue space – imagine economic issues on one axis and cultural issues on the other – the minority party will naturally attempt to shift the focus of political debate to issues which will help it divide the other party’s coalition and attract more voters – which is what Republicans are attempting to do by focusing on Obamacare, which unites Republicans but splits Democrats from Democratic-leaning independents. Repeated iterations of such attempts by political parties may gradually produce a rotational movement of party realignment over time in a two-dimensional space. Such rotation helps explain why the 2000 electoral map was almost the mirror image of the 1896 map: it wasn’t that electorates in Nebraska and Manhattan traded their world-views and economic interests over decades; it was that in many respects, the two parties traded places. A realignment, then, comprises two elements: 1) a newly dominant issue cleavage and 2) a transformation not of political preferences generally but of the way that people holding those preferences align by party.

And so, although this week’s show mostly focuses on the shutdown and debt limit default, we also raise broader questions about how these battles may affect party alignment. For instance, does Wall Street’s alignment with the president against the Tea Party portend a broader switch of allegiances to a pro-business Democratic party under the banner of Wall Street-backed Hillary Clinton versus a populist Ted Cruz or Fed-auditing Rand Paul? Or might the emergence of a Clinton candidacy buoyed by Wall Street bundlers inspire a Warren-esque anti-financier insurgency that attracts elements sympathetic to both Occupy and anti-bailout libertarians – particularly if Wall Street-backed Chris Christie is the Republican standard-bearer?

This week, Polioptics fans get to hear three whip-smart young journalists – Politico’s Ben White, Buzzfeed’s Matt Zeitlin, and the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney – delve into all of this and more. Matt and Ben explain the shutdown’s economic impact and the financial implications of default – globally, and locally – with an eye towards possible shifts in party alignment that might result from Washington’s current battles.  And Tim takes a deep dive into the future of the Republican Party – and the conservative movement more broadly. Three unique perspectives not just on today’s news, but on tomorrow’s…and perhaps next year’s as well.

Chris Grew, Peter Hamby and Dave Catanese are our guests this week.
With guest host: New School Professor and former Missouri Senator Jeff Smith
Show produced by Katherine Caperton.
Original Air Date: June 29, 2013 on SiriusXM “POTUS” Channel 124.
PoliOptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6 am, 12 noon and 6 pm.
Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics
Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above.
Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here

This is Jeff Smith filling in for Josh this week.

We’ll be talking about two disparate topics with one big thing in common: optics are critical in both areas.

First, we talk prison reform with Chris Grewe, founder and CEO of American Prison Data Systems (APDS), which leverages digital technology to help prepare inmates for the outside world. After the break, we welcome Peter Hamby of CNN and Dave Catanese of The Run 2016 to discuss how recent events – from SCOTUS decisions and national security controversies to immigration reform – affect the strategic calculus of 2016 presidential wannabes.

* * *

Back in 2007, as a new Missouri senator learning about the state budget, I was shocked to learn that the state spent nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars on corrections. When I asked our state’s Department of Corrections about their budget, I learned that sky-high recidivism rates –2 of every 3 inmates released re-offended within three years – were the primary cost driver. Why were rates so high? I asked. Once people got a taste of prison, why did so many come back? I spent the next few years focusing my legislative efforts on both the front end (60% of kids in my hometown failed to graduate high school) and back end (ways to ease prisoner re-entry and reduce recidivism) of this problem.

By the end of 2010 – most of which I spent in federal prison on obstruction of justice charges – I was, unfortunately, far better equipped to answer these questions.

Due to the runaway growth in the nation’s prison population, over 650,000 inmates are now released each year. They return to communities where they have failed before – now with the added complication of prison records. The idea of applying for legitimate work can seem laughable when selling drugs – something most have experience doing – pays far more than flipping burgers.

Research has shown that GED completion can cut recidivism rates in half, while high-quality vocational and business training can reduce rates even more severely, potentially generating vast savings. Although many states (and the federal government) advertise specialized educational and vocational programs, prison administrators and correctional officers’ commitment to programmatic success varies widely, leading to uneven implementation. For instance, the sole vocational opportunity offered during my time at Manchester FCI was a three-week hydroponics course in which inmates learned to grow tomatoes in water.

Fortunately, social entrepreneurs are working to fill this void. One of them is Chris Grewe of APDS, which provides tablet computers equipped with a suite of educational and vocational software to inmates. Given the dearth of technology to which inmates have access, prisons have never had a safe and affordable way to provide this type of material and instruction. Now, tablet computing offers a scalable way to deliver it – while also helping prisons eliminate cost centers such as law libraries through digitization. (New York alone has saved $2.3 million annually by moving this material online.) Moreover, tablets could increase prison security by significantly reducing the items sent in to prison, and thus cutting opportunities to introduce contraband.

As Chris explains on this week’s show, if policymakers don’t rethink prison, inmates won’t learn any new practical skills to help them get back on their feet post-release. They’ll just learn new hustles – and they’ll probably return within a few years.

* * *

After the break, we talk with two of political journalism’s rising stars, CNN’s Peter Hamby and The Run 2016’s Dave Catanese about the way recent events – from landmark Supreme Court decisions and NSA surveillance controversies to comprehensive immigration reform – are already scrambling the next presidential race.

Hamby, who recently completed the spring term as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has recently focused on dramatic changes to the media landscape during the 2012 presidential cycle. Hamby points out that – notwithstanding the Texts From Hillary meme created by two people unaffiliated with Clinton – neither Clinton nor anyone in her orbit has demonstrated a strong facility with the new media terrain. Hamby also observed that the public seems to be gravitating towards less packaged, more “authentic” – or at least, packaged to seem more authentic – candidates, and opines that Clinton hyper-cautious 2008 campaign of may not be suited to the current environment. Fresh off a trip to the progressive Netroots Nation conference, Hamby notes that while most attendees mentioned Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean received a bigger applause than President Obama, and ignited a firestorm of speculation when declined to rule out a second White House bid.

Catanese, whose new inside-baseball blog is dominating coverage of the 2016 race, agrees that Dean has some running room to Clinton’s left and that Clinton has likely already peaked, noting that the same “inevitability” which plagued her last bid could hinder a future one as well. Looking over the Republican contenders, Catanese and Hamby suggest that Rand Paul is trying to be too many things to too many different groups, indicating that he may not be quite ready for prime time. They agree that, despite Washington politicians and pundits generally overlooking him, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is the Republican field’s dark horse to watch.

They also agree that – despite landmark court decisions on gay and civil rights that have roiled Republican waters and an immigration bill that splits party elites from the activist base – it’s too soon to tell which direction the party will go on the very hot-button cultural issues they wielded so deftly to divide Democrats just a decade ago. And that’s just one reason that the looming clash of philosophies – through the prism of the presidential primary process – will be so fascinating to watch.