Posts by Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a political activist/blogger in DC, and was an editor at MyDD from November 2005 until June 2007. He also consults for the Sunlight Foundation, FreePress.net, and Working Assets as well as proactively networking other progressive bloggers/internet activists and progressive professionals.

Caroline Kennedy's Voting Record
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on December 19, 2008 at 9:45 AM.

Oops.

City Board of Elections records show Kennedy has failed to vote in many elections since she registered in the city in 1988 - including votes for the Senate seat she hopes to fill and numerous Democratic faceoffs for mayor.

"It doesn't speak to a deep-felt commitment to the electoral process," Baruch College political scientist Doug Muzzio said when told of Kennedy's ballot breakdowns.

Records show Kennedy did not pull the lever for any of her fellow Democrats in city primary races for mayor in 1989, 1993 and 1997 and 2005, which Republicans went on to win three out of four times in the general election.

She was also AWOL for the primary and general elections in 1994, when Sen. Daniel Moynihan was running for reelection to the seat Kennedy hopes to hold.

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A Good Pick: Obama Taps Hilda Solis to Be His Labor Secretary
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on December 18, 2008 at 4:04 PM.

I did some interviews with the Labor Secretary to be, Hilda Solis, in August of 2007.  The video above is a discussion of the Progressive Caucus (forgive the shitty editing, I was experimenting).  Here's the other video I took, on on global warming and race.

I'm impressed with this pick.

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Evan Bayh Forming Blue Dog Caucus in the Senate
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on December 15, 2008 at 5:39 AM.

I suppose they should formalize it yet.

Bayh, who has spoken with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) about his initiative, said he is trying to create a faction of moderate Senators who will gather on a weekly basis ahead of the usual Tuesday Democratic Caucus meetings.

Additionally, Bayh envisions inviting outside speakers to address the group, which would also work in concert with third parties that have similar viewpoints, like the Third Way, a nonpartisan progressive think tank.

A Reid spokesman said the Majority Leader was similarly upbeat about the idea.

"Nearly a decade of Republican fiscal irresponsibility has contributed to our current economic crisis," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said in an e-mail statement. "That is why Sen. Reid welcomes Sen. Bayh's decision to form this group. For we know that Sen. Bayh, like all Democrats, is committed to restoring our nation's fiscal and economic health."

Over the past three weeks, Bayh and his staff have reached out to Senators to judge the appetite for such a group.

"I've had some expressions of interest," Bayh said. "I'm going to continue to meet and talk to my colleagues."

Likely targets for Bayh would include moderate Democrats like Sens. Mark Pryor (Ark.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Jim Webb (Va.), and Sen.-elect Mark Warner (Va.).

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Why the Right Will Oppose Getting Us Out of Recession
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on December 4, 2008 at 8:12 AM.

In a post about Depression Economics, Paul Krugman discusses deflation, or dropping price levels.  I'm seeing deflation in the local real estate market, as buyers are holding back because they think prices will keep dropping.  One theory is that deflation raises the value of money, which is true.  If one dollar buys more real estate tomorrow than today, the value of money goes up.  Presumably, this is expansionary since it is increasing the total monetary base in the economy, and has what's known as a 'real balance effect'.

But here's the rub.

Then add in the debt deflation issue: deflation redistributes wealth from debtors to creditors. If the debtors have a higher marginal propensity to spend out of wealth than the creditors, which is what Irving Fisher thought, then this could easily swamp the tiny real balance effect.

Deflation transfers wealth from debtors to creditors, which is another way of saying from people who have cash (the risk-averse rich) to people who don't (the poor, the middle class, entrepreneurs, risk-takers).  Unfortunately, the risk-averse rich don't spend very much of their wealth relative to everyone else, which is why they are risk-averse.  There also aren't that many of them, and they have probably become more risk-averse in this environment because of expected deflation and financial losses from substantial asset value declines.  

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So ... There's An Election in Georgia Today
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on December 2, 2008 at 10:17 AM.

"The truth is . . . we will be fine on most major issues. We will almost always have some moderate Republican support."

Senator Amy Klobuchar

Better Democrat Jim Martin is up against Saxby Chambliss in Georgia today, and it's pretty clear, sitting in DC, that there just is not that much enthusiasm for this race on the Democrati side.  The last nine polls are showing Chambliss ahead.  The dynamic here is set by Republicans throwing everything they have into the race, including surrogates like John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney in there, whereas Democrats have put Al Gore and Bill Clinton to surrogate for Martin, but not Obama.  Obama has cut a radio ad and some robocalls, but the high voltage press and field jolt that would be possible - especially among African-Americans - in a low turn out run off is missing.  That choice seems to have contributed to a corresponding enthusiasm drop across the party for Martin, as it should.  Obama has put his organizers in the battle, but not his own prestige.  I have seen the number of mentions of '60 votes in the Senate' drop substantially, ironically even as that goal is quite possible should Franken win and Martin take the seat.  If nothing else, this should suggest that the 60 vote goal was always something of a chimera.

From what I understand, Chambliss is a weak candidate, failing to do good constituent services or really endear himself to Georgians on a local basis.  This will come down to turnout, but it seems unlikely that Chambliss has been framed well enough to lose him that slender margin he's always carried.  People just aren't that interested in the race.  Sean Quinn down in Georgia suggests that Obama field organizers are finally seeing GOTV numbers they are happy with.  That's a hopeful sign.

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Minnesota Recount Going Well for Franken
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on November 21, 2008 at 9:02 AM.

Update (From Steve Benen): In Minnesota, Norm Coleman's lead over Al Franken is down to just 136 votes. As of last night, about 46% of the 2.9 million ballots had been counted as part of the statewide recount.

Looks like Norm Coleman is feeling the heat.  Here's Minnesota Monitor reporter Chris Steller being thrown out of a Coleman press conference.

I made it as far as the inside of a small press conference room at a drab office park in St. Paul where I was just about to settle into the chair that seemed least conveniently located to the exit when a staffer asked who I was with. When I said the Minnesota Independent, he said I'd have to leave. To my protest that MnIndy is a news outlet like others represented there, the staffer replied, "Right, and it's funded by George Soros," and he escorted me out.

Franken is picking up votes in GOP areas and doing a bit better than he needs to in order to take the seat.  It's still early but there is a reason Coleman is sweating.

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Republican Soul-Searching in Five Minutes
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on November 18, 2008 at 4:02 AM.

After the election, I was half-interested in the discussions around the Republican party.  Should they become moderate?  Will they become more conservative?  How will they use the internet?  Blah blah blah.  There's a lot to learn about politics from the Republicans and the details of how they reform, but the general gist of the matter seems pretty clear.

The GOP is going to do is futz around for awhile with the fake moderate versus conservative argument and then eventually find a way to tap into the newly emergent overt racism.  It may happen in 2010, and it's impossible to predict whether the issues will be framed around 'law and order' as the millions of unemployed young people inevitably do what young people do when they are bored and disempowered in a recession, or some sort of stabbed in the back narrative around Iraq or Afghanistan, or some new set of issues focused on the fallout from this very scary financial crisis.  Whatever happens the party will reorganize on the internet and that's going to seem really cool and innovative and counter-intuitive except that it will be perfectly normal for a political party to reorganize using a culture's mainstream medium for organizing, which is the internet.  The right already did it once, with Drudge and the Free Republic in the 1990s.

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On Putting a President's Democratic Address on Youtube
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on November 16, 2008 at 12:53 PM.

Obama is now putting his weekly Democratic address on youtube.  That is pretty neat, but I want to inject a slight note of skepticism as to how important it really is.

What's innovative and interesting about political technology is not that the President-elect can use it, but that it allows for different social arrangements and ways of using power.  What's interesting about youtube is that it lets anyone have access to a TV channel.  The President-elect already has access to a real TV channel.  The essence of a social change via technology is that it will allow citizens to group with each other to speak to elected leadership in interesting ways, not that it allows yet another mechanism for a powerful President to address citizens.  I mean, many of Bush's addresses were put on youtube without him having an account, but that's not innovative, it's just what happens when the internet is mainstream.

What Obama is doing by putting various speeches on youtube has been done before with more interesting twists.  Foreign leaders put their addresses on youtube; Tony Blair congratulated his French colleague Nicolas Sarkozy upon his election over youtube, in both French an English.  It would be interesting if other foreign leaders responded to Obama on youtube, and that could potentially be exciting depending on what results. 

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Larry Summers Out as Obama's Treasury Pick?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on November 14, 2008 at 9:45 AM.

Victoria McGrane and Lisa Lerer from the Politico are reporting that Larry Summers is on the outs with the transition team.

The incident would likely make Summers' Senate confirmation a rocky proposition, especially since women's groups and liberal bloggers have already unleashed fierce opposition to him.

So far, our petition has around 6000 names on it, and several Facebook groups have emerged to protest his possible selection.  Women's groups have released a list of names for good candidates.

For Treasury secretary, Gandy said she suggested Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairwoman Shelia Bair; Alice Rivlin, the first director of the Congressional Budget Office and expert on urban issues as well as fiscal, monetary and social policy; former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairwoman Brooksley Born, who tried to regulate credit default swaps but was blocked by Summers, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

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Are BushCo Using the Economic Meltdown to Rob Us Blind?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on September 22, 2008 at 9:51 AM.

Obviously conservatives and Republicans in Congress are throwing tantrums about how any additional provisions to the $700 billion blank check are partisan maneuvers to take advantage of a crisis.  They say this as if Hank Paulson isn't a conservative Republican asking for $700 billion for his conservative friends on Wall Street.  This is an ideological war and they are assaulting America.  I'd call it treason but it's legal.

On the flip side, this crisis is our chance to thrash the conservative movement and it's one Democrats should jump on.  I've had anti-corruption fighter David Donnolly note that this is a good moment to get public financing through, since it's obvious that our political system is totally corrupt and needs systemic reform.  This is a good moment to reform the Bankruptcy code.  And it's also a good moment to really shift the rules and help labor (where the hell is labor, by the way); here's a note from Joshua Zeitz, candidate for Congress in NJ-04.

No one is even broaching the topic of unions.  Ironicaly, given my trouble with labor, this is the point I'm going to hammer home this week.  Thanks to the Bush visit, I'll have a microphone.

During WWII, the U.S. government offered industry a deal: cost-plus war production contracts and expansion capital in return for closed shops.  Ford, GM, &c. refused to switch to war production until they were offered these cost-plus contracts, and ultimately, Congress and the Roosevelt administration were able to use both the carrot (massive investment of pulic funds in the construction of privately held plants) and stick (the threat of nationalization) to force the unionization of heretofore non-union shops.

The $700 billion bailout plan is comparable insomuch as it will create a massive infusion of public funds into private firms. Unions are dying, and this is a chance to extend them a life saver. There should be a mandate that any firm accepting the federal funds/buyout of securities unionize its support and clerical staff, sign agreements to use only unionized workers when building new facilities, use unionized (domestic) call centers , &c.  This is a once-in-a-generation chance to use government leverage to open the door for unions. Democrats need to hammer that point home.  It's how we began raising the prevailing wage and benefits in service industries.  This is important.

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Is John McCain Dying of Cancer?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on September 16, 2008 at 2:32 PM.

I just got back from a dermatologist for a check-up (growing up in Miami with outdoor summers requires this), and I asked her about McCain and skin cancer.  He's had various types of the disease and I wanted to get a sense of whether he's really in danger or if this is one of those treatable forms of cancer.  And she told me that basically, some skin cancers are not that bad, but malignant melanoma - the kind McCain has had in two separate places - is not one of those.  It's bad.  Real bad.  And unlike most cancers, it doesn't really go away, even after years in remission.  Sam Donaldson had it on his ankle, and thirteen years later it returned in the same spot.  McCain has had it on two separate 'primaries' (not recurrences, which aren't as bad), and you can clearly see the post-surgical scars of having his lymph nodes checked (and partially removed).  This is not a healthy guy, this is a 72 year old man with a fairly high likelihood of serious illness and death within the next few years.

I asked Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, about John McCain's cancer, and he said that McCain is in remission.  The video is above.  You can see above that Kyl is taken aback, but he says that he trusts what John McCain told him.  But why?  That might be good enough for a Republican Senator, but why should that be the test for the voters?  Why should we trust McCain on his medical past?  It's not just that McCain has stretched the truth in this campaign, as even Karl Rove noted, or that he's acted as desperately as you'd expect a dying man to act when stretching for his lifelong dream of the Presidency, it's that McCain has simply refused to release his medical records to the public and confined select members of the press to a three hour window with no electronic equipment to examine his records.  Brave New Films is on this question, and more than a thousand doctors have signed up to ask him to release his medical records.  You should sign this petition and watch the video, it is downright scary.  While this race is between Obama and McCain, President Palin is not an unlikely outcome (as Matt Damon noted).

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Mitt Romney on McCain: "Huge Mistake"
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on September 16, 2008 at 12:59 AM.

That's Mitt Romney calling McCain out on lying, following on Karl Rove's assertions that McCain has "gone too far."  This is starting to look coordinated, and Rove doesn't speak out of turn for no reason.  Either there are some very angry conservative insiders knifing McCain or this is part of some dramatic PR ploy in which McCain will somehow be portrayed as a hero.

I don't know, it's a little spooky.

Update: My mistake. This video is from the primaries.

Sleazy Lobbyists and Drunk Bribocrats: Why am I at the DNC?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on August 27, 2008 at 4:07 AM.

Last night I happened upon a DLC Chairman dinner with Harold Ford, and it was just another reminder that this convention is not really built for people like us. Sleazy lobbyists coming out of the event were sloppy drunk and the slender blonde running the event slurred her words to me that those sponsors are the ones paying her salary. Harold Ford then came out, and I ended up standing in front of his SUV and taking flash picture after flash picture just to make it a little less pleasant for these kinds of conservative bribocrats to attend this convention.

There are a lot of meetings going on, and that's one reason to be here. The media is here because it's their prom. But in terms of raw power dynamics, progressives are not particularly relevant. Hilariously, bloggers have actually been demoted; in 2004, we could actually see the stage at the Fleet Center, this time, online communications director Aaron Myers has secured us a room in the Pepsi Center with televisions in it.

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Guess Who Pays for Mainstream Media Political News?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on August 14, 2008 at 5:03 AM.

Sometimes a picture tells the story quite nicely.

DC Democrats Campaigning Against Progressive Dem Annette Taddeo
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on July 24, 2008 at 5:40 AM.

Here's something to note.

Anxious Miami Beach officials huddled Tuesday with Florida Department of Transportation representatives, summoned by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who met with the group, along with representatives of Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

So that's three Republicans and a top Democratic leader meeting, and that Democratic leader has pretty much endorsed these three Republicans. Odd, but on local issues, there's a logic to it we can accept. When you combine it with a whisper campaign against Ros-Lehtinen's opponent, though, this begins to really smell.

So let's look closer at a subtle campaign against Ros-Lehtinen's progressive Democratic opponent, Annette Taddeo. This campaign is designed to get two memes out there, that Taddeo can't win and that Ros-Lehtinen is 'moderate'. The first meme is designed to lock out institutional support from Taddeo, the second to help Ros-Lehtinen portray herself as moderate to voters. The notable thing about this campaign against a progressive Democrat is that it's coming from Democrats in the local establishment and parts of the DC establishment. The rumors of Ros-Lehtinen's strength are allowing groups like EMILY's List to not come in to the race, citing viability questions. To his credit Chris Van Hollen at the DCCC has reserved airtime in FL-18, so there is recognition she can pull this off. And I will have stats soon on EMILY's List support of candidates of color to show why the group should come in for Taddeo.

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