The Dish

Who’s Afraid Of The Internet Of Things?

Sue Halpern is, a little:

[A]s human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the Internet of Things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state. In the world of the Internet of Things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine—to say nothing of your phone—generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it. That is the point: the Internet of Things is about the “dataization” of our bodies, ourselves, and our environment. As a post on the tech website Gigaom put it, “The Internet of Things isn’t about things. It’s about cheap data.” Lots and lots of it. “

What Might Congress Get Done?

Neil Irwin considers legislation that the GOP and Obama might agree on. A big first test:

One way or another, the debt ceiling will need to be raised sometime in the first part of 2015 to prevent a government default, and deals will need to be made to continue funding the federal government without the high drama of standoffs like that over the debt ceiling in 2011, the “fiscal cliff” of late 2012 and the shutdown in 2013.

It will pit two sides of the G.O.P. against each other. One team of Republican leadership seeks to bolster the party’s brand in the run-up to 2016 elections and is responsive to business interests who prefer stability. The other is the harder-right contingent of the caucus that wants to try to shut down Obamacare at any cost. Presidential politics may come into play as well, as potential candidates like Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky push for a harder-edged approach than that preferred by the majority leader Mitch McConnell. (“Let me be clear: There will be no shutdowns and no default on the national debt,” Mr. McConnell said Wednesday in his appearance in Louisville).

Howard Gleckman isn’t betting on tax reform:

Everyone says they want tax reform but once past that rhetoric, they agree on very little. President Obama says he supports corporate reform. Cruz wants a flat tax. Paul Ryan, who wants to be the new chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, favors broad-based overhaul rather than corporate reform alone. House Speaker John Boehner says he favors tax reform but when presented with a plan by Ways and Means Chair Dave Camp earlier this year, Boehner ran for the hills. On top of that, Democrats and Republicans are completely at loggerheads over whether reform should cut taxes, raise them, or leave them roughly the same. Other than that, a deal is imminent.

Republicans may have better luck on Keystone XL:

The new Senate Republican majority creates an opportunity for likely Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to force a vote on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline he’s been waiting years to hold. By The Huffington Post’s count, the new Senate will have at least 61 votes in favor of a measure forcing the pipeline’s approval — a filibuster-proof majority.

Plumer sizes up the Keystone fight:

[O]ne big question is whether President Obama would veto. Some onlookers are skeptical he could hold out forever. “People are fed up on Keystone,” an aide to a moderate Democratic senator told my colleague Ezra Klein. “I don’t know how Keystone isn’t just approved if Republicans take over.”

A lot may depend on the form that the bill takes. If Republicans sent a standalone pro-Keystone bill to the White House, Obama could veto rather easily. But if it was attached to a larger budget bill? If a government shutdown was potentially at stake? That’s tougher.

Trade is another area where bipartisan agreement is possible. Heather Timmons thinks the GOP victory is “good news for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free-trade agreement between a dozen countries that excludes China”:

Republicans are big fans of the TPP, which would drop trade tariffs and regulatory barriers among the participating countries. Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, promoted the TPP last week at a speech in New York, saying: “Instead of just talking about a so-called ‘pivot to Asia,’ the Obama administration should prioritize negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership by year’s end.” TPP member nations are using the APEC summit this week in Beijing as a chance to meet on the sidelines, and plan to discuss the pact Nov. 8.

Actually, Obama already supports the TPP, but key Democrats have blocked the pact, opposing fast-tracked trade agreements over concerns they would send more manufacturing jobs overseas, and in particular hurt the auto industry. Now, Obama may be able to “ride the Republican wave” to get trade deals passed, as Foreign Policy puts it.

Regardless of the issues under debate, Jacob Weisberg is hopeful that the gridlock will ease:

Until this year, the biggest hazard to Republican incumbents came from more extreme Tea Party conservatives. But in this year’s primaries the Tea Party’s power began to wane, as money from wealthy donors flowed to old stalwarts such as Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Pat Roberts of Kansas who were better positioned to keep their strongholds out of Democratic hands. This will be even more true in 2016, since turnout is far larger, and the electorate much more Democratic, in presidential election cycles.

If you are a Republican incumbent who feels that the greatest threat to your job comes from your right, then you take a big risk when you side with Obama about anything.

If, on the other hand, your principal worry is losing to a Democrat, you have an increased incentive to strike deals with the opposition on issues where Democratic positions are more popular than Republican ones.

Obama’s Next Legacy: Detente With Iran

https://twitter.com/thekarami/statuses/530400160715931648

Amid all the drama of the last few days – in which the inevitably triumphant Democratic coalition scenario segued seamlessly into the Republican lock on the Congress for decades – it’s worth taking a deep breath to see what’s really changed under Obama. On domestic policy, we had a huge shift toward universal health insurance – a shift that looks very likely to stay in place. On foreign policy, Obama has bet a huge amount on a long-game engagement with Iran. So far, the strategy has worked far better than most predicted. The sanctions have been effective in both getting rid of Ahmadinejad, and getting Iran to the negotiating table; the international coalition has stayed rock solid; Rouhani’s election made detente feasible; lower oil prices have given Iran an incentive to deal to save its economy; and slowly, Iran itself has changed in a way that makes an opening to the West much more feasible. For a sample of that, I recommend the Economist’s latest survey on the country. Money quote:

While the world has been cut off from Iran, it has failed to notice how much Iranians have changed. No longer is the country seething with hatred and bent on destruction. Instead, the revolution has sunk into the disillusion and distractions of middle age. This is not always a nice place, perhaps, but not a Satanic one, either.

As if on cue, this week saw a potential breakthrough in the nuclear negotiations, three weeks before the looming deadline for a deal:

Iran has tentatively agreed to ship much of its huge stockpile of uranium to Russia if it reaches a broader nuclear deal with the West, according to officials and diplomats involved in the negotiations, potentially a major breakthrough in talks that have until now been deadlocked. Under the proposed agreement, the Russians would convert the uranium into specialized fuel rods for the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran’s only commercial reactor. Once the uranium is converted into fuel rods, it is extremely difficult to use them to make a nuclear weapon. That could go a long way toward alleviating Western concerns about Iran’s stockpile, though the agreement would not cut off every pathway that Tehran could take to obtain a nuclear weapon. … For the United States, the fuel agreement would give negotiators more flexibility.

Perhaps the most striking thing is the role of the Russians. Despite a dramatic worsening of the relationship with the US, Russia has twice now cooperated in key WMD restrictions in the Middle East – first by brokering the deal that destroyed Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons, and now in helping nudge the negotiations past a stumbling block. At some point, those dismissing the reset may have to rethink when it comes to broader international problems. I’d argue that the next deadline can be breached, as long as serious progress is still being made and as long as Iran’s ongoing suspension of its nuclear program continues. But the deal is easily the most substantive foreign policy achievement in a generation. It should not be lost over an arbitrary deadline.

The incoming Republican Congressional leadership, of course, has other ideas :

Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican likely to replace Rep. Mike Rogers as the next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast Wednesday that he would like to begin digging into the administration’s Iran talks—in particular, the role played in those talks by the U.S. intelligence community. … Nunes said he thinks the deal being contemplated could lead to disaster. “Shouldn’t the Congress be concerned about the Iranians getting a nuclear weapon,” he said. “They are going to be close to getting a nuclear weapon because of this deal, this should matter to the American people.”

McCain said he, Corker, and Burr are also interested in pursuing more vigorous oversight of the Iran deal as well. “The Iranians are helping [Syrian dictator] Bashar Assad,” McCain added. “They are the ones that got the 5,000 Hezbollah guys into the fight [against Syria’s rebels], they are gaining more and more influence in Baghdad. And we somehow believe we make a nuclear deal with them and that will lead to other areas of cooperation.”

John Hudson wonders how presumptive Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will approach the Iran file:

One thing McConnell did not mention that will surely loom large in the coming months is congressional action on Iran’s nuclear program. This year, Reid single-handedly prevented a bipartisan bill leveling new sanctions on Tehran from reaching the Senate floor because the White House feared it would upend the fragile nuclear negotiations the United States is conducting with Tehran in Vienna. Republicans have shown no such concern about disrupting the talks with punishing sanctions. “The pressure is now on President Obama to bear down and negotiate a good Iran deal or face a resounding political defeat when the Senate votes ‘no’ on the deal,” Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Foreign Policy.

But more opposition from the right and the Greater Israel lobby might actually help get the deal off the ground – especially as the administration does not need the Congress to relieve some financial sanctions as part of an ongoing confidence-building deal. In this vein, Golnaz Esfandiari listens to what Iranian officials had to say about Tuesday’s Republican rout and what it portends for the nuclear talks:

Iranian Communications and Information Technology Minister Mahmud Vaezi said the victory of the Republicans in the November 4 elections will not have “any effect” on the nuclear negotiations. … But former diplomat Ali Khorram, who reportedly advises Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, said that the Obama administration could be forced into taking a harder line in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, if both sides fail to reach a final agreement by November 24. “Obama has to use the remaining time to reach a deal with Iran,” Khoram said.

Apparently addressing domestic critics, he said those who oppose the talks “out of ignorance” should “wake up” because he said Iran’s national interests could be jeopardized if there was no deal. “We should not allow Republicans to unite with Israel and witness the tensions we saw under [former President] Mahmud Ahmadinejad and George W. Bush because it is not in the interests of Iran and the region,” Khorram said in an interview with the official IRNA news agency.

Arash Karami rounds up some more Iranian reactions:

Outspoken University of Tehran professor Sadegh Zibakalam, who is politically aligned with moderates, told Khabar Online, “Republicans do not believe in decreasing conflict and creating friendly relations with Iran.” He said the Republican victory is “not to our benefit,” as “Within the Republicans, there are more who are opposed to Iran, and they think the way our own conservatives do.” … Fars News Agency interviewed analyst for US affairs Fouad Izadi, who said that he believes the chances of new sanctions being passed is much higher now, given the Republican victory. He criticized domestic analysts and officials who have focused entirely on Obama while “The problem is in the Senate.”

Izadi said that this victory should be a “wake-up call” for some in Iran and predicted that Iran’s problems with Congress in the last 30 years “will become more clear in the coming days and months.”

The Bloomberg View editors weigh in, warning DC not to spike the talks:

The alternatives to Obama’s sanctions-plus-diplomacy approach are two: sanctions alone, or airstrikes. Neither of these would end Iran’s nuclear-weapons program for good. On the contrary, they would probably accelerate Iran’s bid for the bomb and undermine critical support for sanctions in Europe. So long as Iran sticks to the restrictions on its enrichment program, and the current sanctions remain in place, there is no hurry to end this negotiating process. What matters is getting the right deal. Iran’s nuclear program is largely frozen. At the same time, Iranian society is gradually becoming among the least religious and least anti-American in the Middle East. Yes, the conservative regime remains hostile and committed to creating a nuclear weapons capability. Yet it also needs a deal to keep its growing consumer society happy.

Comparing Obama’s effort to seal the Iran deal with FDR’s struggle to get Congress on board with entering World War II, Scott McConnell urges the president to fight like hell for it, because his legacy may well depend on it:

There is little doubt that if Obama reaches a deal, Israel and its advocates will be able to generate a seemingly massive Congressional uproar to undermine the President’s diplomacy. But larger forces, both inside and beyond the Beltway, line up on Obama’s side. The Pentagon, it was reported recently, has been seeking to make deals with Iranian companies in order to stabilize Afghanistan. Will the U.S. military brass, having expended large amounts of blood and treasure to wrest Afghanistan from the Taliban, wish to see it revert to Islamic extremism because Israel doesn’t want Iran involved in stabilizing the country?

Maneuvering for an Iran deal will take all the political acumen Obama can muster, and more than he has demonstrated in previous dealings with Congress. And in terms of political skill and appeal, Obama is no Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the president has powerful cards to play, and will have the support of much of the world if he plays them well. One day peace with Iran may seem as inevitable as did war with Germany. Even though he was drubbed in the midterms, Obama’s chance to forge an historic and positive legacy still lies very much before him.

He should seize it with both hands.

Obama Takes The War To Congress

Literally. Laying out his agenda for Congress’s lame duck session yesterday, Obama announced that he would finally ask for a new AUMF to cover the ongoing war against ISIS:

He said the goal was to update an authorization narrowly tailored to the fight against al-Qaida to be more applicable to the current mission against IS extremists in Iraq and Syria. “It makes sense to make sure the authorization from Congress reflects what we perceive to be not just our strategy over the next two or three months, but our strategy going forward,” Obama said. The conversation was to start Friday, when Obama said he’d update congressional leaders about the fight against IS during an Oval Office meeting. Obama said he wanted the process of crafting the new authorization to start now, but that finalizing it could carry over into next year, when a new Congress will usher in GOP control of the Senate.

This is something that should clearly have been done long before now. The decision to go to war should never be punted until after national elections. Such a decision should precisely be made before elections so that voters have a better sense of what they’re voting for. But there I go again – insufficiently cynical to understand how Washington works these days.

Nonetheless, now it is going to the Congress, let’s have a debate. On this question particularly, the GOP needs to put up or shut up. They need to make an argument as to what their foreign policy would be. Let newly-elected Senator Tom Cotton make the explicit case for a renewed invasion of Iraq and a new war against Iran. Let them show us what further domestic programs will be cut to release the Pentagon from the sequester’s constrictions. Alternatively, let’s hear from those Republicans more leery of more war, and disdainful of further attempts to retain hegemony in the Middle East. Let’s see the divisions of the GOP on these questions laid bare – between fiscal hawks and defense aggressors, between neocons and libertarians and realists.

Again: why Obama didn’t force them to make this positive case before now is beyond me. It would have clarified a lot.

Juan Cole lists more pragmatic reasons why he thinks Obama is making this move now:

1. Obama may be trying to mollify Republicans so that they’ll cooperate with an extension of the aid program to train Syrian rebels, which runs out in December.

2. Obama is taking ISIL off the table as an issue during his last two years (and into the next presidential campaign) by this step. If the GOP Congress gives him the authorization, they will bear the blame if anything goes wrong. If they refuse, then everything that goes wrong will be their fault.

3. If they vote for an authorization for the use of military force, the GOP Congress won’t easily be able to blackmail Obama by threatening to withhold funding for the military effort against ISIL unless he gives in on some issue.

But, like me, Jens David Ohlin has no idea why he waited until after the elections:

If he had sought authorization before the election and received it, this would have strengthened his image as a foreign policy president dealing with the most pressing and emerging threats. Furthermore, thinking of this as a “new” war helps his image. If it is viewed as an “old” war, he is open to criticism that the situation was caused by his failure to deal with the Iraq War appropriately. On the other hand, if Congress had denied him the authorization, he could have used that denial as a sword against the Republicans going into the mid-term elections.

I guess the Democrats believed that the “war on women” and never mentioning the economy’s success and the ACA was going to do all their work for them. For his part, Larison wishes Congress would vote it down, even though he knows they won’t:

At the very least, the debate over authorization should subject the administration’s policy to the kind of close scrutiny that it has so far escaped. Obama embarked on this open-ended intervention without debate or real consultation with our representatives. Meanwhile, gutless members of Congress from both parties have been more concerned to jump on the pro-war bandwagon or to demagogue the threat from ISIS than they have been to question the wisdom of the intervention and the likelihood of its success. Now is the time for Congress to debate whether the ostensible goal of the intervention is even possible at an acceptable cost, and if it isn’t the president and Congressional leaders should be prepared to acknowledge that the intervention can’t succeed on its own terms.

But if there’s one thing we know about Washington’s debate about these questions: no one ever wants to ask whether what we want to do is even doable. No one wants to concede that the Iraq intervention was a catastrophe from which we have still not recovered. No one wants to point out that Pentagon spending is not compatible with a saner fiscal future. No one wants to point out that American power is on the wane, that intervention is becoming progressively less legitimate, and that the sensible response is to retrench. In fact, in a Clintons vs Republicans death match, both will be angling for the crown of intervener-in-chief – and the cost and feasibility of intervention will scarcely be on the table.

Walker 2016? Seriously?

In John Dickerson’s interpretation, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s victory last night – his third in four years – “isn’t just a win for Walker, it’s a win for a theory of governing”:

After Walker became the first governor to defeat a recall attempt, he argued that he had found a way to appeal to Obama voters by governing as a conservative. He said that almost 10 percent of the electorate voted to re-elect President Obama and keep him in office, too. In the Wall Street Journal, he argued he was a model for the Republican Party—someone who could govern as a conservative and still win in a purple state. The midterm electorate is much different than in a presidential year, but Walker won some new ammunition for his argument. Walker won 11 percent of the “liberal” vote and, while he lost those who self-identified as “moderates” by six points, that’s a small margin for someone who has been considered as enemy number one for liberals. Walker will now return to the top of the presidential speculation, arguing that he knows how to win and govern as a true conservative in a purple state. Oh, and 34 percent of union households voted for Walker.

On the presidential front, I can only say he seems to me utterly unprepossessing. He has the same problem some other GOP hopefuls have: he just doesn’t seem presidential. He looks like a product of a college debating club, his appeal is very tied to the governor’s role and to the fight with organized labor – which are not federal issues. Foreign policy? No idea. You need something more – either the charisma of an Obama candidacy or broader national exposure or a distinct image. Maybe this will come, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test to me at this point in the cycle. Philip Klein differs:

Although Walker polls in the single digits in most surveys, the 2016 field has no clear front-runner and a number of attributes put him in a unique position. There is well-publicized split within the Republican Party between its conservative and pragmatic wings, and of all the potential candidates out there, Walker is the one who is most likely to unite the two.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner in March, Walker rejected the idea that there was a tradeoff between conservatism and pragmatism. “You don’t have to compromise one for the other, meaning you can stand up for your principles, you can push your core beliefs, and you can still govern effectively,” Walker said. The fact that he demonstrated this in Wisconsin is what makes him such a potentially strong candidate. His fight for limited government reforms in the face of a ferocious assault from national liberals endeared him to activists on the right. At the same time, his ability to successfully govern and get re-elected in a blue state is comforting to Establishment Republicans.

But Ana Marie Cox damps the enthusiasm over Walker’s victory:

Nothing about the exit-poll results besides Walker’s win itself suggests that Wisconsin voters are especially enamored of conservative ideals. They were evenly divided over how Walker handled the Affordable Care Act (or didn’t handle it, really); they were almost evenly divided in their view of government unions (slightly more with an unfavorable view); they were almost evenly divided over whether “government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals.” About half of voters had a negative view of the Democratic Party. About half had a negative view of the Republican Party. The only policy issue that rallied a significant majority of Wisconsin voters was the minimum wage—two-thirds favored raising it.

None of this sounds like proof that Walker has succeeded in making conservative arguments more appealing to more voters, or that he’s gained more voters because he’s made conservative arguments. (The same rich, white, married, male church-going coalition pushed him over the top this time as last.) Rather, Scott Walker may have succeeded because he’s been able to make all of his races about Scott Walker.

Update from a reader:

Here’s a factoid: If Walker were elected, he would be the first president since Harry Truman not to have graduated from college. It would be curious to look back at contenders over recent decades, and leaders of other foreign countries, to see if there is any other example of this. Certainly not the UK or France. Italy or Australia? Russia, China certainly possible.

Another:

UK? Surely not. Two of the last six UK Prime Ministers did not go to college: Jim Callaghan and John Major. That is two since 1976.

Another:

Funny that UK and Australia had Prime Ministers in the 1990s without tertiary educations – John Major and Paul Keating. The last Russian/ Soviet example was Chernenko.

(Photo by Darren Hauck/Getty Images)

The GOP’s Plan To Do Nothing

As I pointed out yesterday, National Review’s response to GOP majorities in both Houses was to tell Republicans not to bother with governing. Friedersdorf pushes back:

If you’ve ever wondered why the Founders were so wary of political parties and factionalism, consider how dysfunctional American government would be if both major parties agreed to govern only when they controlled all of Congress and the White House. It’s impossible to say with certainty that National Review’s long game will fail. It’s conceivable that the GOP could retain Congress and win the White House in 2016, and that all the politicians now setting aside substance to focus on future electoral gains will suddenly become principled conservative legislators eager to improve America once a member of their party retakes the White House.

But come on.

Most politicians are inclined to delay or forgo the tough business of governing to preserve their electability. When encouraged to postpone governing until a later date by the very intellectuals who are supposed to be urging substantive results, the most likely result is that the long-anticipated time for actually governing will never arrive.

My own view is that this complete nihilism in terms of governing is actually quite emblematic of the most powerful forces in the GOP today. Fox News and the entire conservative media-industrial complex have no real interest in Republican governance. They thrive on conflict and on opposition. How many ratings-rich shows are they going to produce on tax reform? They have created an alternate cultural universe for the right where the craziest tub-thumpers get the most attention and where the boring, necessary act of governing is anathema. Ponnuru defends his magazine’s editorial:

It’s worth recalling that the Democrats, after taking Congress in 2006, did not announce en masse that they now needed “to prove they could govern.”

They cut a few deals with President Bush, but certainly did not base their political strategy on earning public support thereby. (They didn’t engage in a lot of veto showdowns, either, or base their strategy on that.) They did, more or less, what the editorial recommends: lay out their own approach on the main issues of the day and try to build support for a governing majority that could implement that approach.

Danny Vinik, for once, agrees with National Review:

Liberals are mocking the piece on Twitter, but the reasoning makes a lot of sense. If Republicans set high expectations for themselves, they are bound to fail. After all, Democrats can block legislation at will by using the filibuster. As we’ve seen from the past few years, the media will not report that Democrats blocked legislation that had support of more than 50 senators. They’ll report that Congress failed—and the blame will fall squarely on the GOP. Democrats learned this the hard way over the past few years.

So neither party should attempt anything until they control both House, Senate and White House? I’d say that if there is one categorical sentiment from Tuesday it is that voters want an end to that gamesmanship. I’m sorry but even though I can see the brutal logic of this politically, I refuse to acquiesce to the cynicism behind it. Drum’s take:

Republicans probably are better off doing nothing for the next two years except mocking President Obama and throwing out occasional symbolic bits of red meat to keep the rubes at bay. Usually, though, this is the kind of thing you talk about quietly behind closed doors. It’s a little surprising that we’ve gotten to the point where apparently this level of cynicism is so routine that no one thinks twice about spelling it out in public in explicit detail. Welcome to modern politics.

It’s a politics in which voters are denied the chance to compare varying responses to particular challenges and expect their representatives to reach an agreement. It’s a politics designed to make deliberative self-government close to impossible. It’s factionalism gone mad. Waldman sees no political incentives, in our current climate, for the GOP to govern:

The incentives for them to continue fighting Obama on anything and everything are everywhere. The strategy of maximal obstruction got them where they are today. Twenty-four Republican senators will be up for re-election in 2016, and every last one will be looking over their right shoulder, worrying about a primary challenge and knowing that the only way to avoid it is to be as venomous as possible in their opposition to Obama. And next year’s House will also become even more conservative than it is now, with the addition of a group of new Tea Partiers.

A Republican party in the flush of a sweeping victory isn’t exactly going to be looking for areas where it can dial back its demands. If someone would like to explain how a GOP caucus in Congress even farther to the right than the one whose antics we currently enjoy would be more inclined to compromise with Barack Obama than it is now, I’m all ears.

And the beat goes on.

“The Country’s Most Competitive State”

Thomas Mills nominates North Carolina:

Tillis won the most expensive U.S. Senate race in history; the campaigns and outside groups spent more than $100 million on the contest. More than 100,000 political ads ran in North Carolina this election cycle, the most of any Senate race. And the state is relatively evenly split among Democrats, Republicans and independent voters.

In other words, North Carolina is the country’s most competitive state. But 2014 might have been just a preview of what’s to come. In 2016, besides GOP Senator Richard Burr’s reelection bid, the state will have competitive gubernatorial and presidential contests.

How the might 2016 play out?

North Carolina had the second-closest presidential race in both 2008 and 2012—Democrats won the former, Republicans the latter. 2016 will be a tie-breaker of sorts, a test of the Democratic coalition’s strength. Republicans believe that Democrats stayed competitive because of an African-American turnout that might not return without Obama on the ticket. Democrats believe that changing demographics in the state are turning it bluer each election cycle.

Jason Zengerle analyzes Thom Tillis’s defeat of Kay Hagan:

Tillis’s most important move might have been in the race’s final days, when he went positive. After months of both candidates (and the outside groups supporting them) demonizing each other in 30-second TV spots—over 100,000 of which aired in the state—Tillis’s final ad of the race was this one which, while still tying Hagan to Obama, did so in a less slashing fashion and actually put forward an affirmative case for Tillis. …

For a long time, it looked like the North Carolina Senate race would hinge on whether voters were more angry at Raleigh or Washington when they finally went to the polls. If it was the former, Hagan would win; if it was the latter, Tillis. Obviously, the national climate was such that it may have been impossible for any Democrat to win in North Carolina this year. But anger wasn’t the whole story, and, in the end, Tillis gave North Carolina voters just enough of a reason to vote for—rather than against—someone that it made a difference.

(Screenshot from the Upshot’s detailed Senate maps.)

Another Reason For The Democrats’ Rout

Alec MacGillis blames the Dems’ gubernatorial defeats on bad candidates, not the Republican wave:

[W]hy would [Massachusetts’s Martha] Coakley and [Maryland’s Anthony] Brown go down, while [Colorado’s John] Hickenlooper and [Connecticut’s Dannel] Malloy survived? Here one has to consider the ultimate local context, the quality of the candidates. Hickenlooper and Malloy provoked plenty opposition in their states, not least with their signing of sweeping gun control legislation after the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre. But voters also had a clear sense of where these men stood. The same could not be said for the lackluster Coakley and, especially, for Brown, who ran one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever observed up close.

The son of a Jamaican father and Swiss mother, a colonel in the Army Reserve and former JAG officer whom [former Maryland governor Martin] O’Malley plucked out of relative obscurity in the Maryland House of Delegates to be his running mate in 2006, Brown is an amiable enough fellow but gives off the distinct vibe of a second-stringer. His big chance to show his stuff, the launch of the Maryland insurance exchange under Obamacare, was a total fiasco.

Tim Murphy creates excuses for Coakley:

Massachusetts is overwhelmingly Democratic, but in many ways the state government has moved on from the policy fights facing the rest of the country. Although Baker, who lost to Gov. Deval Patrick in 2010, has been critical of the Affordable Care Act, the issue lacks the resonance it has in a place like Louisiana, because Massachusetts already had a law mandating health insurance. It was even written by a Republican. Baker is also pro-choice and supportive of same-sex marriage (his gay brother starred in a campaign ad). He’s hardly a cookie-cutter national Republican. …

Massachusetts is the kind of place that periodically elects moderate Republican white dudes to positions of power—Republicans had held the governor’s mansion for 16 years before Deval Patrick won in 2006.

But he admits, “She probably shoulda won, though.” One piece of Dougherty’s advice to Democrats:

[J]ust like the GOP in 2012, a big part of your problem was candidate selection. GOP victories in the statehouses do have a way of thinning the bench. But Democrats should be able to do better than Martha Coakley in 2016. That’s solvable.

Obama Promises To Act On Immigration

What he said at his press conference last night:

Zeke J Miller summarizes Obama’s remarks:

On immigration reform, Obama vowed to plow ahead with unilateral action. On minimum wage, he pledged to keep up the fight despite GOP opposition. Shaking up his White House staff? “Probably premature,” he said. He called, for the umpteenth time, for Congress to take up the banner of additional transportation infrastructure spending, which has fallen on deaf ears in each previous iteration.

Dickerson imagines how Obama taking executive action on immigration will play out:

If the president goes forward, he weakens House Speaker John Boehner and McConnell’s leverage with their members. House and Senate leaders are never going to get their members to agree to any future deals on immigration (or any other issues that require trusting the president) if he takes unilateral action on immigration. That’s because their voters are going to think individual Republicans are turncoats for working with a president who would act like that.

Maybe the president wants to exacerbate existing tensions within the GOP by playing hardball on the executive orders. But that’s a pretty aggressive bet. And since Republicans are most irritated by the president’s unilateralism, it’s safe to say that action in advance of legislation would swamp any more happy talk.

Jonathan Alter somehow still believes that the GOP and Obama can hammer out a deal on immigration:

Of course the odds against achieving anything more than bills on Ebola, ISIS, and maybe infrastructure are steep. Lots of Republicans feel they were sent to Washington to beat up on immigrants. That’s where old-fashioned backroom deal-making comes in. During the 1940s and 1950s, House Speaker Sam Rayburn hosted an informal gathering in a Capitol hideaway office that was dubbed “The Board of Education.” No panderers or demagogues allowed. Many of the great bills of the post-war era emerged from those sessions.

David Corn isn’t counting on such bipartisanship:

The fundamental political dynamic of the Republican Party has not shifted; it’s advance has been fueled by its Obama-hating tea party wing. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Cory Gardner of Colorado will be two new GOP stars in the Senate, and they both hail from the far-right region of their party. Their model senator will likely be Ted Cruz of Texas, who on election night refused to endorse the newly reelected Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as Senate majority leader, signaling his intention to lead what might be called the Monkey Wrench Caucus. And in the House, the tea party club—which blocked House Speaker John Boehner’s deal-making with the White House and pushed for government shutdowns and a debt ceiling crisis—will likely have a few more members when the new Congress convenes in January. The lesson the House tea partiers will probably draw: Obstruction pays off, big-time.

Eleanor Clift highlights other parts of Obama’s presser:

Now that the Republicans are in charge, Obama said he’s looking for them to put forward a very specific governing agenda, so they can find areas of agreement. He singled out the rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure, an area where in the past Republicans and Democrats have found easy agreement. And he listed three specific items he wants from the lame-duck Congress: more resources for U.S. troops and the medical community to combat the spread of Ebola; a new authorization to use military force against ISIL; and a budget. Congress passed short term legislation in September to keep the government open. they’ve got five weeks to pass a budget, he said, adding that he hopes they will do it in a “bipartisan no drama” way. “We don’t want to inject any new uncertainty” into the economy, he said.

“What Do The Democrats Stand For?”

Frank Rich is asking:

If the GOP’s only overriding strategy was to run against Obama, the Democrats’ only coherent national message was to run away from Obama, including his signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. It’s only on social issues that the Democratic party has a clear profile, and as was seen last night most spectacularly in Mark Udall’s defeat in Colorado, running a narrowcasting campaign focused on the GOP “war on women” is not a blueprint for victory.

Yuval Levin calls the election “a warning about [the Dems’] overwhelming intellectual exhaustion”:

They have very nearly nothing to say to or offer the country at this point, and their approach to politics has been reduced to little more than a series of tired rote gestures and slogans disconnected from the present and the future. The cupboard is bare and the energy is depleted. That is President Obama’s fault in part, but it is also the fault of the Left’s broader failure (shared in common with the Right to some extent of course) to think seriously about some basic realities of 21st-century America.

This exhaustion is powerfully evident in the Democrats’ preparations for 2016, which at this point are astonishingly lacking in energy and intensity. The Democrats appear to have just one reasonably plausible presidential contender and may be embarking on an essentially uncontested and content-free primary in a non-incumbent year. This kind of extended yet empty process — no excitement and no tussle, just the long, grim coronation march of an uninspiring leader whose followers dearly hope is in fact “likable enough” — could seriously exacerbate their problems.

Scott Shackford argues along the same lines:

Up until this point in Obama’s presidential career the party has rallied around him and served him. Whatever Obama stood for is what the party stood for. Without Obama, the party is left with a bunch of progressive platitudes and outcomes that they find desirable (raise the minimum wage, reduce college debt) and no strategy on how to get there, especially now. When identity politics play much less of a role in an election outcome—note the lack of gay marriage issues on the ballot—they’re struggling. Illinois Democrats manufactured some progressive-friendly “advisory” votes in order to try lure out voters, and yet their incumbent governor still lost.