Congratulations to Obama and his team.

Bill Richardson obviously should be Secretary of State.

I have no idea whether building online buzz could possibly help the chances of this happening, but it seems worth trying.

Sage advice from a comedian, activist and libertarian leaner on learning how to speak to more conservative voters:

As a Canadian, and one of libertarian bent, I hope I have a better perspective on the two parties in the USA. What I see does not bode well for the Democrats. I think they understand the Republican side poorly, worse than the Republicans understand them. And, over the last two elections, they have shown little willingness to learn about it.

...

Election-winning comedy must be able to stick in the minds of all voters, and it must not be bitter to do that. For example, when Guliani over-used 9/11 in speeches, and comedians satirized this, it played a large part in sinking him, which he didn’t understand. But it’s a joke his people can get and not find vicious.

Democrats need to do two things if they want to win:

* Keep the attacks civil and less extreme. Consult with good comedians to stay on the right side of the line. Encourage the troops not to be bitter no matter how tempting.
* Hire wise former (or mercenary) republicans and learn from them how to sell the message to conservatives and independents. Listen to them.

As I said, we’re coming off a Republican administration that the public knows was horrible for the country. Even the conservatives know that. Changing power in the White House should have been a true slam dunk. Making the conservatives close ranks by insulting them rather than talking to them in their own language is the way to undo the slam dunk.

Read the whole piece.

Cato's Tim Lee on his personal blog:

It’s becoming increasingly true that the “free-market movement” is a polite fiction that continues to be observed because we have built institutions whose continued viability depends on its perpetuation. The cleavage is somewhat less obvious at the state level because state think tanks don’t grapple with the questions of war and executive power that divide conservatives and libertarians at the federal level. But even here, we have politicians signing ridiculous legislation to setting up state-wide databases to track meth consumption and punishing landlords that fail to pry into the personal lives of their Hispanic tenants. A movement that cared about individual liberty and limited government would be speaking out about these questions, but the “free market” movement is frustratingly silent on such questions.

Here. Thanks to ka1igula's blog entry for finally motivating me to do so.

Via Tim Lee at the American Scene, who notes that Obama was the last Democrat candidate to so declare.

Of the remaining Republicans, it seems that only Paul and probably (based on previous votes, but not an affirmative statement) Tancredo oppose such raids.

I've only glanced at this, but it seems apropos -- Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy?:

Under our model, it turns out to be optimal for the Democrats to move slightly to the right but staying clearly to the left of the Republicans' current position on economic issues.

Of course I'm sure many here will think "the Democrats can move plenty in the direction of less economic interventionism without moving to the 'right'."

Link to Kos' post on being a libertarian Democrat, via Reason. I've only skimmed the post and not looked at the comments at all yet, but it looks pretty good and needs to be noted here. Excerpt:

Of course, this also means that government isn't always the solution to the nation's problems. There are times when business-government partnerships can be extremely effective (such as job retraining efforts for displaced workers). There are times when government really should butt out (like a great deal of small-business regulation). Our first proposed solution to a problem facing our nation shouldn't be more regulation, more government programs, more bureaucracy.

I am very much a Libertarian Dem, and this is exactly what my next book will be about. It's progressivism for a new century. And that's what this new breed of Democrat is building in the Mountain West and Virginia and Ohio.

Looking forward to the book!

Arnold Kling:

If I look back over the last thirty years or so, I think that professional economists, like Mankiw, have given good advice. On average, I think that Democratic Presidents have come closer to taking advice, especially advice that might otherwise have been unwelcome.

I am not saying that Carter and Clinton were grade-A economic policymakers, but they left the country with somewhat better policies than they inherited. I think that they differed more on luck than on skill, and if you average the economic statistics of their two Presidencies you get a good indicator of their performance.

Johnathan Rauch's Stoking The Beast in the current Atlantic magazine is attracting attention in the blogosphere, including from me (unsurprisingly the original paper is more interesting).

Any special implcations for libertarian Democrats? Don't rule out Democrats who want to increase taxes, for they are unwittingly making government seem more costly, leading to less spending? Get Barney Frank to give more speeches about spending? :-)

Arnold Kling's most important economic story of the year:

The average productivity growth rate in the last five years is the highest over the past half century.

This is really important, as increasing productivity is the driver for long term economic growth, and really interesting. One (perhaps facile) interesting angle is that the 2000q4-2005q3 rate is nearly fifty percent higher than the previous five years' rate, and the latter almost perfectly maps to the .com boom.

Of course the impact of events on productivity can be delayed--the investments made during the boom may have enabled post-bust growth. The same goes for the impact of policy, even moreso. As Kling points out, Bush can't properly claim credit, nor can Clinton, nor anyone else.

But given the importance of these numbers (and I think the importance of productivity can be appreciated by average voters, if set in the right context), Bush will claim credit. Democrats need to be ready with a productivity story of their own, and not just "great, productivity growth will take care of social security and medicare!"

One thing to note is that the previous peak was 1960-1965, followed by decades of mediocre growth. Please, let's avoid another Johnson-Nixon era. Unfortunately Bush II feels like the wrong start.