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The Grand Bargain’s Best Last Chance

by Elias Isquith on April 13, 2013

Obama talking Medicare Social Security cuts

I’ll be honest: when it comes to President Obama’s willingness to use Social Security as a bargaining chip, my outrage reserves are tapped. I understand why people are upset over the New York Times report that Obama’s budget will include cuts to Social Security; and I wouldn’t ask folks to be quiet since causing a ruckus is the essence of activism. I’m also on-record (a.k.a. the internet) in my belief that progressives should go total Tea Party-level obstructionist in the face of such a cut.

All the same, I related to Jonathan Chait’s response to the news, which was to call Barack Obama’s willingness to trade Social Security for higher taxes no news at all. Obama’s said as much for years. Examples are easy to find, and Digby has been tracking them since at least 2009. What they all show is that this news is not news. And it’s certainly not a reversal; or at least it’s not a reversal from the position taken at the beginning of the first term. As long as he’s been president, he’s been this way.

My take on the partisan politics is similar to Chait’s, too. There’s a flailing characteristic to the leak. For one thing, the proposal is a textbook case of lipstick on a pig politics; Republicans already turned this framework down during the fiscal cliff negotiations. As Chait puts it:

Mainly this appears to be a message strategy aimed at advocates of BipartisanThink, who have been blaming Obama for failing to offer the plan he has in fact been offering. The strategy is that, by converting their offer to Boehner from an “offer” to a “budget,” it will prove that Obama is Serious…

[T]his strikes me as completely ridiculous.

It is completely ridiculous. But if Republicans were to actually realize what’s within their reach — getting a Democratic president not only agree to cut but offer to cut Social Security — and took yes for an answer, the ridiculous would become the real all too quickly.

But a Grand Bargain can’t become law unless it gets through the House. And no bill that conservative Republicans regard as a sell-out to Obama would get out of the House without significant Democratic support. Without the Party’s Progressive Caucus’s support, the numbers even on the Democratic side don’t add up.

What it all means is that if third time’s the charm when it comes to Obama’s Grand Bargain, there will be an empire’s worth of pressure on Congressional liberals to get with the program — even if the program is cutting a sacred Democratic-created program. The logic will somewhat approximate that described so memorably by Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight and his monologue about “the plan”:

On that score, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports progressive leader Raul Grijalva laying down a line in the sand, refusing to vote for a cut, full stop. But it unfortunately sounds like Grijalva is speaking very much for himself:

Asked if he would vote against any deal containing Chained CPI, Grijalva said: “I’ve made the commitment that if this is part of it, I will not vote for it. I can’t support it.”

However, asked if he thought a sizable bloc of liberals would vote No, Grijalva demurred, and — in something that will bring back bad memories for the left — cited the health care debate as an example. “At this point, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve been through this before with the public option. The motivation will be there to close ranks and support the president.”

Oh, Tea Party Republicans, don’t fail us now…

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The Last Of The Republicans

by Elias Isquith on February 28, 2012

Tpow

Jonathan Chait’s latest piece for New York stands as not only his best effort thus far under their masthead but, more importantly, as my new go-to link to give to those who genuinely want to know what’s really going on in American politics but have neither the time nor inclination to wade knee-deep into the wonky minutiae (sorry, Messrs Sides and Silver). It’s a bit like a Malcolm Gladwell piece in a way, with Chait skillfully translating and synthesizing recent, influential, and Big Picture-y ideas from the polisci world. But instead of explaining just why it is that rich people are so awesome*, Chait’s attempting to provide answers to that most-vexing question — WTF has happened to the Republican Party?

The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams… the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

A key thing to understand is that we’re not talking about the end of the GOP in and of itself. There won’t be a “TBA” on the other side of the ballot, across from “Scarlett Johansson (D)” in 2028. America’s two-party duopoly — already the longest-serving in the democratic world — will continue to reign supreme. As it has before and as the Democrats have, too, the Republican Party will eventually change enough, ideologically and demographically, to ensure its continued existence**. But the GOP that we know, “the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes,” that’ll die the same way that the Democratic Party of Thurmond, Byrd, and Long — or the Republican Party of Dewey, Eisenhower, and Chaffee — died.

It’s not the economy but rather the demographics, stupid:

Campaign reporters cast the [2008] election as a triumph of Obama’s inspirational message and cutting-edge organization, but above all his sweeping win reflected simple demography. Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country. One measure of how thoroughly the electorate had changed by the time of Obama’s election was that, if college-­educated whites, working-class whites, and minorities had cast the same proportion of the votes in 1988 as they did in 2008, Michael Dukakis would have, just barely, won. By 2020—just eight years away—nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third. In 30 years, nonwhites will outnumber whites.

And as Chait persuasively argues, the Tea Party-type GOPers know this, either literally or somewhere in their bones. Hence the controversial “anti-illegal immigration” laws in Arizona, South Carolina, George, and elsewhere; hence the many attempts nationwide to make voting more difficult for the poor, the young, the uneducated (and, incidentally, the non-white); hence the constant talk amongst the more roused of the Republican rabble — or those interested in doing the most rousing — of a kind of final confrontation, a battle to forestall 1,000 years of darkness.

A reasonable person could learn the above and conclude 2012 to be so much Sturm und Drang over what is in some ways an irrelevant election. Demographics are destiny. Whether Obama wins or loses in 2012, we’ll never see another Newt Gingrich come so close to the White House. It’s rather hard to win elections, after all, when your primary supporters are crashing that big town hall meeting in the sky. But I’d recommend wariness against this kind of complacency. The United States may be Barack Country in the long run, but remember what Keynes said: in the long run, we are all dead.

I’d take Washington Monthly‘s Paul Glastris seriously when he argues that this time really is different:

[I]t’s natural for veterans of Washington to be a little dismissive of the idea that any big changes will happen if the Republicans win big this November. The presumption is that the desire to get reelected, the resistance of K Street, the power of the minority party to create gridlock, or the sense of responsibility that comes with governing will rein in the extremism we’re hearing from GOP candidates in the primaries….

I think this is a profound misreading of where the Republican Party is right now. The failure of the GOP to shrink government the last three times it had power is precisely what motivates the anger of the Tea Party base—a force that still exhibits an amazing ability to lead the Republican Party by the nose….

The attitude of official Washington is that politicians will behave like politicians and avoid extreme actions that will lose them the next election—and if they do overreach, the other party will win and take corrective action. But what the Beltway elite doesn’t understand is that the Tea Party only needs two years in power to make the changes they have in mind—changes that would be destructive, far reaching, and in many ways tamper-proof. Even if they then lose, their antigovernment agenda will live on.

Remember: nothing fights quite as fiercely and desperately as an animal cornered.

[click to continue…]

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Will The Tea Party Revolution Eat Its Children?

by Elias Isquith on January 29, 2012

Mitt

Doug J plays a little What If with the 2012 election and the Republican Party:

Let’s say Romney wins the nomination, then loses a fairly close (but not crazy recount close) election this November.

My guess is that we see less ACORN-blaming and more “Romney sucks” from the teahadists. I wonder how much longer the Republican establishment can keep the teahadists from gaining total control of the party.

It’s got to be at least even money that in either this presidential election or the next, the Republican nominee will be raving about Saul Alinsky well into the general election. Will establishment media continue to treat the Republican party as the serious daddy party if this happens or will the clamor for an Americans Elect Bayh-Bloomberg type get even louder?

Even if Romney were to lose in a rout, I think the chances of this happening are vanishingly small. Not because the Republican base will reorient its intellectual architecture in the face of defeat; and not because the Party is as crazy as the American system will allow it to be (the behavior of most State legislatures should offer definitive proof that there’s plenty more crazy where that came from).

The reason, I think, that the “teahadists” won’t be able to assume full control over the part is because, simply put: in American politics, money decides. You see no better example of this truism than the Florida primary, where Romney has regained a commanding lead over Gingrich due in no small part to an avalanche of campaign ads:

Newt Gingrich is not just getting outspent by Mitt Romney and his allies on the Florida airwaves, he’s getting creamed.

The Romney campaign and a super PAC supporting him is spending nearly quadruple the amount that Gingrich and the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, has spent to air television and radio ads ahead of the state’s Jan. 31 primary.

So far, Romney has bought $5.6 million worth of airtime and the pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, has shelled out a whopping $8.2 million, according to a Republican media buyer who is tracking ad spending in the state.

Compare that to $837,000 spent by the Gingrich campaign and the nearly $3 million of airtime bought by Winning Our Future, a super PAC supporting the former House speaker, and it’s easy to understand one reason why Gingrich has slipped in the most recent polls in the Sunshine State.

The historical parallel most would have in mind when speaking of a complete Tea Party take-over is Goldwater’s ill-fated but seminal 1964 candidacy. The thing is, though, that the Goldwater of 1964 is less crazy than the kind of Tea Party types whose control over the GOP would move the party dramatically further right; and, moreover, while Goldwater never had the kind of money that his liberal challenger for the nomination, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, commanded, he nevertheless was able to secure the nomination through relying on a mix of a innovative grassroots funding apparatus alongside the backing of some seriously wealthy far-right capitalists.

I suppose we could imagine a scenario in which, following a Romney loss, the Koch Brothers and the Schaife family decide to just drench the Jim DeMint bloc with funds to be used for the explicit purpose of ousting squish RINOs like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. But it seems to me these men are, however crazy, still primarily interested in their own bottom-line. And that’s something that there’s much reason to believe they can protect quite adequately not only during a time of a Mitt-led Republican Party, but, for that matter, under a second Obama Administration, too.

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Win Or Lose In 2012, Obama’s Got No Class

by Elias Isquith on January 24, 2012

Obamaclass

Noting that, for the first time in a generation, inequality will be a major theme of a US Presidential election, Michael Cohen writes how the result in November may establish a new conventional wisdom about electoral politics in America:

With recent polls suggesting that Obama has used the inequality discussion to reclaim the mantle of protector of the middle class, the most immediate outcome of this shift is that he will wage his re-election battle on far friendlier political turf.

But the more important question is whether the sudden willingness of Democrats to tackle the issue of income inequality has the potential to live on far past the next election. For decades, Republicans have successfully portrayed the bogeyman of big government as the enemy of America’s middle class. The emerging focus on America’s glaring economic disparity – and its direct and deleterious impact on the middle class – suggests that Democrats are willing to use their own bogeyman of Wall Street greed in response.

Indeed, it’s quite likely that the election will be a struggle between these two conflicting views. If Democrats are successful in such an endeavour, it has the potential to make 2012 more than just another election, but one that could shift the very narrative of American politics.

I’m feeling too lazy to rut around in my archives for the proof, but back when Obama first started inching his way towards embracing a milquetoast version of the 99% rhetoric — when he was more or less at his popularity’s nadir; when it looked quite likely that he’d stand as the Most Reasonable One-Term President in the Room — I worried that his haphazard glomming-onto Occupy, and subsequent electoral loss, would further cement among media élite the article of faith that Class is monster that cannot be named in US politics. He’d lose for wasting so much precious time reaching out to Tea Party types in 2011 and rhetorically bear-hugging austerity (and also because of various things outside of his control); but the media would end up saying he lost because he turned to the Left.

I’ve no doubt that, if he loses, this is going to happen. Hell, he hasn’t lost yet — he’s looking increasingly decent shape, in fact — and some are already spinning that yarn. But the flip-side, which was always there but didn’t seem very likely to mean much circa August 2011, is that if Obama wins, the same dynamic comes to play but in reverse. Suddenly it’s a stroke of pure genius that caused Plouffe & co. to realize that America was no longer a center-right country, that class politics were back with a vengeance, yadda-yadda-yadda. (I should note that I don’t think in this scenario that the two versions of this spin-job are proposed with equal force — i.e., I doubt that there wouldn’t still be a bunch saying how dangerous for a candidate class politics are, even if Obama wins in a route; it’s what they get paid for.)

What’s worth mentioning, though, is that it’s almost certain that, in either scenario, the narrative is at most only partially true. If you’re left-of-center, it’s a nice story that Obama’s poll numbers are on the rise because of his rhetorical focus on iniquity. But most political scientists — and that part of you that can at least try to see things outside the prism of Meaning — are likely to tell you a different tale: the economy is, as of late, progressing from atrocious to merely bad. And with things looking tentatively on the up-and-up — and with a profound distaste for the GOP still prevalent — Americans are starting to think that maybe the President ain’t so bad after all.

Not quite as gripping as a pronouncement on the very ideological essence of the American voter, true. But facts, however prosaic, can be stubborn things.

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The Universal: Social Security, Medicare, And Tea Party Hypocrisy

by Elias Isquith on January 23, 2012

Socsec

At Jacobin‘s blog (a must-read for people who enjoy this blog) Seth Ackerman argues that the conventional wisdom about Tea Partiers’ rather selective antipathy for Big Government — documented in this example by the peerless Theda Skocpol alongside Vanessa Williamson — is causing liberals to miss the forest for the tea:

[Skocpol and Williamson] make abundant use of polling data to argue that when it comes to slashing government spending, Tea Partiers draw the line at those two programs [Social Security and Medicare]. But their empirical case is a bit one-sided. For example, they cite a Public Policy Polling survey in which Tea Partiers, like the rest of the population, overwhelmingly preferred raising the Social Security tax to having “benefits cut and the retirement age increased to age 69.” But just a few months later, at the height of the debate over Paul Ryan’s plan to slash and privatize Medicare, the same polling firm found that when asked to choose between “raising taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans or privatizing Medicare” to close the deficit, the general population favored the former (64% to 22%) while the Tea Partiers favored the latter (52% to 36%). Skocpol and Williamson note a New York Times poll in which 62% of Tea Partiers say Social Security and Medicare are “worth the cost” to taxpayers. (Not hugely different from the 76% of the general population who said so.) But in the same poll, self-described supporters of “smaller government” were asked whether they would favor it if it “required cuts in spending on domestic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, education, or defense.” Only 29% of the general population were willing to go that far. Among Tea Partiers the number was 67%.

Now… it’s indisputable that Tea Partiers make some kind of conceptual distinction between universal programs like Social Security and Medicare and other government programs. But this says less about the Tea Party than it does about universal social programs. It is easy for liberals to point to the Tea Partiers and call them bigots because they make a distinction between “people on welfare” and “normal people.” But in fact it’s the state that has made that distinction. When the state operates a means-tested or other conditional program, it inspects each citizen and stamps him or her as belonging to one category or the other, either as part of a “food stamp class” or a “normal American” class. By contrast, no one is perceived as being part of the “Social Security class” — or, rather, everyone is perceived as belonging to it together.

To me, this critique of what Mike Konczal calls “pity-charity liberalism” is really, really important. But, frustratingly — though understandably — it’s not a conversation that left-of-center political actors in the United States often have. One explanation might be that it’s because the division-point in question is in some ways esoteric when the other side isn’t advocating tweaks to the welfare state but its very annihilation. Logic goes, we’ll talk about this stuff later — after we’ve beat back the oncoming army. (When that happens? Not so clear.)

Another explanation for why we don’t have this conversation is because the means-testing side has decisively won — indeed, they did so a while ago (see: Clinton, Bill) — and thus their position is so entrenched that a lot of people don’t even realize it’s a position at all rather than “common sense.” Ideological hegemony, in a phrase. I’ve got some personal evidence of this, just anecdotally, in that when I’ve talked to some liberal friends who are informed but not exactly in-the-weeds when it comes to politics, I’ve often heard them say that they’re in favor of a reasonable check on entitlement growth. They speak Obama, basically.

And when I say in response, OK, one way to do that is to implement means-testing for Medicare and Social Security (reader: please put aside whether or not this is actually enough; I’m aware that many think it won’t be) they invariably say they support the idea. But — when I flag and briefly explain the Ackerman critique, they almost always walk back their earlier support of means-testing and end up at the “Hmm… damn” juncture; the point where you realize the solution you’d like is about as palatable to the contemporary political scene as renaming the country The People’s Republic of Ho Chi Minh is Awesome.

In any event, I’m always happy to see this distinction — between universal welfare and “pity-charity liberalism” — highlighted. And you can probably guess which side I’d claim as my own.

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Power in (Small) Numbers

by Elias Isquith on December 23, 2011

Tea Party

Responding to the recent decision by House Republicans to agree to a two-month extension of the payroll tax cuts — after an unseemly and unnecessary game of chicken during which, achieving the seeming impossible, Congressional GOPers even managed to enrage the Wall Street Journal op-ed page with their obstinacy — Jonathan Chait snarks about a Tea Party death wish:

The payroll tax debacle is now the third suicidal episode undertaken by the House Republicans since they took control of it at the beginning of the year. The first was when they voted almost unanimously for Paul Ryan’s budget, which was filled with grist for attack ads – huge cuts to Medicare, big tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulating Wall Street – despite it having no chance of passing this term. The second was when they played chicken with the debt ceiling and turned a once-routine procedure into a white-knuckle game of chicken with the world economy. And then this week, when they attempted to extract concessions in return for extending the payroll tax holiday, an anti-recessionary measure with strong support from economists, businesses, and voters. These are not just gestures. The right-wingers are really trying to off themselves.

There very well be some kind of latent suicidal impulses motivating the Tea Party caucus. I’m sure there’s an essay or five, collecting dust in some corner of the liberal blogosphere, explaining how Michele Bachmann’s fundamentalism is the outgrowth of a messianic desire for self-immolation. But if we could table that line of inquiry for just a minute, I’d like to highlight a new paper from some Georgetown political scientists on the Tea Party and their motivations.

Titled “Tea Party Politics: a Story of Activists and Elites,” [PDF] the paper, by Michael Bailey, Jonathan Mummolo, and Hans Noel of Georgetown University, attempts to determine what’s the strongest influence on Tea Party Congresspersons’ behavior: activists, elite self-ID, constituent opinion, or group endorsements. Their answer is one that should make any dedicated group of radicals — not matter how small — shine bright with optimism. Behold the return of the revolutionary vanguard:

Our analysis points to activism as the most important way in which the movement might have influence. Republican candidates in districts with more Tea Party activists performed better in the 2010 general election relative to other Republicans… This ground-level enthusiasm also was associated with legislative changes. On speci c votes of interest to the Tea Party, members from districts with high levels of Tea Party activism repeatedly took stands consistent with the movement. The broader implications are clear: organization matters and non-median influences on Congress are alive and well

The story of a small group of dedicated people making a huge impact on the comparably unengaged masses is hardly new. But it’s interesting nevertheless to see just how insignificant the opinions of the people, broadly conceived and superficially measured, really are when it comes to determining politicians’ behavior:

Sympathy toward the Tea Party among ordinary citizens showed no inuence on electoral outcomes and virtually no sign of influencing congressional votes. This may be due inpart to survey respondents not really understanding the Tea Party or due to their lack of mobilization. The contrast of the consistent evidence that activists matter is striking.

So, basically, this paper would stand as evidence in favor of those who say that the Tea Party is moving the GOP rightwards, and in a way that may cause severe blowback from the electorate-at-large in 2012. But, simultaneously, I’d say these results, if true, shouldn’t lead you to relax and assume that, no matter how many inmates gain hold over the prison’s master key, the sensible middle always wins out in the end. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, the Tea Party types have managed to get more than a few things done during their short time in office.

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Rick Perry Inches Ever-Closer to Rock Bottom

by Elias Isquith on November 17, 2011

Sadperry

Patrick Caldwell of Mother Jones is all but ready to call the Perry campaign effectively over. The reason? Reports that Perry’s one last bastion of strength, his fundraising apparatus, has finally suffered the same fate as every other element of his disastrous campaign:

Perry’s only hope for a comeback was his massive fundraising apparatus, which was expected to easily dwarf any of the other candidates, save possibly Mitt Romney. He began using those funds to full effect after his “oops” hiccup at the debate last week, purchasingnearly $1 million in ads to run on Fox News nationally, and flooding the key early states with ads and mailers.

But that advantage has now disappeared alongside his drop in the poll numbers. The Houston Chronicle reports that Perry is set to raise only $3 million to $5 million in the fourth quarter. That’s a precipitous drop from his $17 million haul in the third quarter, the first finance disclosure of his campaign. Since Perry entered the field after the start of the quarter, that $17 million was raised in just six weeks, while the next figures will cover three months of fundraisers. If that $3 million to $5 million pans out, Perry would draw less than his fellow Texan Representative Ron Paul, who raised $8 million in the third quarter, as well as Michele Bachmann’s $4 million and Herman Cain’s $3 million.

To go from leading in the primary by somewhere near 20 points to getting out-fundraised by Ron Paul in the span of only a few months — what a remarkable accomplishment that would be!

But even if Perry doesn’t ultimately reach such deep, dark, depths of defeat, his campaign for President will still be a sterling example of how voters in the United States — a people that reelected George W. Bush — nevertheless will not select a candidate whose second biggest problem is his sounding like a hopelessly incompetent illiterate (the first: Sounds like George W. Bush). Perry may very well be an intelligent man whose skills don’t translate to the medium of a televised debate.

Who’s to say he’s not simply an intelligent man who, worn out from yet another day pounding the Iowa pavement and wearing the orthopedic shoes he had to since his major back surgery, earlier in the year; such a man who, simply put, had neither the time nor the inclination to study hard, practice frequently, or in any way otherwise express anticipation for the next GOP debate. He’s exhausted, his back hurts — and suddenly he’s rattling off barely memorized, thoroughly unregistered talking points on federal agencies he’d place on the chopping block, provided he become President and, crucially, remember their names…

Tough luck for the President, though! Romney and Perry in essence advocate the same policies and represent the same people, a two-party system being what it is; but Perry was so less talented than Romney at obscuring the Confederate id that undergirds so much of the Republican far-right today. In some measure, that’s why voters and Party elites have rejected him so thoroughly. They (especially the Tea Party set) may be frequently near-fanatical in their conservative conviction, but they’re not quite pure ideologues yet. They’re still capable of imagining, at least to same degree, what it’s like to see through the eyes of a nonbeliever.

One lingering question is whether or not Perry is stubborn and spiteful enough to run a series of his (in)famously vicious and ruthless attack ads against Romney, even when the latter’s victory is all but assured. Perry reportedly hates Romney just about as much as everyone else who campaigns against him — I wonder if he’d go so far as to drench the bridge in gasoline and flick a match.

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Will Mitt Romney be the first Tea Party President?

by Elias Isquith on November 9, 2011

Romz

E.D. thinks that, contrary to what many fear, a President Romney would not be a puppet on so many Tea Party Congressman’s strings:

Why would Romney, unlike virtually every other president in recent history, govern for the base rather than the center? Obama moved to the center when he took office. Aside from his foreign policy, so did George W. Bush. Clinton was a centrist democrat, and Reagan and George H.W. Bush were both centrist Republicans.

Everyone campaigns to the right or left of where they actually end up governing. And why shouldn’t they? All the incentives that exist in a primary disappear in the general election, and disappear further once a candidate takes office.

Romney would have to work with Democrats, appease independents, and he’d have plenty of centrists from both parties to assist him. There is this myth in American politics that because the rhetoric is extreme, the governing must also be extreme. But actual legislation is determined by the center, not the fringes – at least most of the time. And the center is exactly where Romney is most at home.

I’m not sure Erik’s history is top-notch here (specifically, I don’t think Reagan could be considered centrist in any context other than our current one), but his overall point is fundamentally sound. The supposedly irresistible pull of the center is what one learns in any Intro to US Government 101. Where Erik may go wrong, though, is a bit wrapped-up with the error of calling Reagan a centrist; if one assumes a President Romney will govern to the center — and that this should be cause for relief for those among us less than smitten with American for Prosperity — one is implicitly also assuming that the center is stationary, at least in the short-term.

I don’t think that’s true, at least not right now. Instead of the relative calm and placidity that’s been a hallmark of American politics in general, and especially in the post-War period, I believe we’re now ensconced in a much more volatile status quo. Largely born from economic distress and a yawning gap in equality, the US electorate is right now in a very feisty mood, more than capable of swinging from one presumed extreme to the other. Look at 2008, for example, and then look at 2010. It was almost as if two different countries existed on the same plot of land, agreeing to hold their elections at different intervals so as to keep everyone from getting too confused. And, indeed, to a significant degree, two — at least! — different countries do exist on this same vast piece of land: here’s just one representative example.

What I’m proposing here isn’t the Overton Window theory — it’s not that the center shifts from one side to the other, depending on who has the better talking points or whatever. I’m loath to roll out a cutesy pundit-speak, so I’ll simply emphasize that it’s more like we switch between different windows entirely rather than move from one side to the other. The risk, therefore, is that Romney is elected on a Tea Party wave that further bolsters their numbers in the Congress. If that’s the case, we’ve ample evidence to show not only that the Tea Party types care not too much at all about public opinion (see: debt limit fiasco), but that Mitt Romney cares just about as much about what anyone not holding the reins of power wants.

I don’t think that scenario is very likely at all, which means I don’t imagine President Romney will be our new RedState overlord. But that’s not to say it couldn’t happen! Things that never happen never happen — until they do.

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The Las Vegas GOP debate: Perry swings, Romney misses

by Elias Isquith on October 19, 2011

Last night’s Republican debate was the first one actually worth watching—but that doesn’t mean it was in any sense a pleasant viewing experience.

Let’s get the also-rans out of the way: Bachmann is Bachmann, which means that she says things like “[Obama] put us in Libya, and now he’s putting us in Africa.” Santorum came off like a real smug, mean-spirited, and obnoxious SOB; nothing new there. Ron Paul had one of those nights that make me glad he’s still running, offering a useful antidote to the braindead militarism and—shockingly—daring to criticize the holy memory of St. Reagan by bringing up the Iran-Contra unpleasantness. Gingrich seems to be finding his niche in these things as the pompous, Emperor-with-no-clothes-styled house intellect that mostly stands on the sidelines, slightly amused with it all, and occasionally enters the fray if only to enlighten the rest of us with his pearls of insight.

Cain, meanwhile, proved to be in this race for the book sales, rousing himself to deliver a meager and—even for him—especially incoherent defense of his 9-9-9 advertising slogan by rambling some or other about apples, oranges, and various other kinds of fruit (all of which, by the by, will be taxed under President Cain’s new tax regime). I hope he’s enjoyed these past couple of weeks and has secured himself enough future sources of revenue to make it all worthwhile, because I’m relatively confident that his bubble—like Bachmann’s and Perry’s before him—was just punctured.

Now for the real story: Perry, for the first time, actually came out in this debate looking like he intended to win. He took some huge shots at Romney, and either failed miserably (or didn’t try) to conceal his deep contempt for the GOP front-runner. Perry obviously has at least decent pollsters working for him, so he no doubt understands that the only reason, really, that his prospects have utterly cratered in this contest is because of the serious hits Romney’s delivered regarding the Texas Governor’s record on immigration. As we could all have guessed, and as recent studies seem to prove, the Tea Party contingent is deeply, profoundly, irrationally concerned with the scourge of illegal immigrants facing this nation. You may think they’re animated by low taxes or federalism or what have you; and to a certain degree, they are. But it’s those damned porous borders—and the horde of freeloaders that traipses across ‘em—that really gets their blood going.

So Perry went with a time-honored shot to the liver, one that’s felled many a campaign before: he accused Mitt of employing illegal immigrants himself. This clearly rattled Mitt, and the two soon descended into a bickering match. From my perspective, two things of note then ensued. One, Mitt, while defending himself, paraphrased what he told the contractors working on his house as, “You can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for office, for pete’s sake, we can’t have illegals.” A lot of people’s eyebrows went up at that point, and the conventional wisdom is fast-coalescing that this was a gaffe. I think it was. Perhaps the biggest knock on Romney is that he’s an empty-suit phony willing to do and say anything to win. Saying anything that makes it appear as if his problem with the hiring of undocumented immigrants isn’t one of principle, but one of expediency, is not going to help him on this score.

The second thing that the Romney-Perry squabble did is make Romney look like a total jerk. Many pundits are saying that they felt Perry came off more poorly, as petulant and personally antagonistic towards Romney. I think that’s probably true, but I don’t think it’ll matter that much. The position Perry is in right now is one in which he’s drowning; he needs to do whatever he can to bring Romney down a notch, to make the story about Romney’s electoral troubles rather than his own. People won’t remember how Perry came off in the altercation so long as Mitt doesn’t clearly get the better of him. And, in this instance, I’m quite certain that he didn’t. Unless you think condescending, whiny, preppy, and huffy beats petulant and aggressive.

As Romney condescendingly placed his hands on Perry and repeated, over and over again, “I’m speaking; I’m speaking; I’m speaking; I’m speaking,” he appeared, to my eyes, as a caricature of a pampered, privileged, entitled nancy-boy who can dish it out but can’t take it. It was as if the class know-it-all had suddenly been bested in a back-and-forth with the kid who is usually the slacker and, rather than keeping his composure, seemed overcome with unction at the very idea of his being challenged. Romney is a Harvard guy, and he came off like the broadest, meanest caricature of North Eastern elitism. I think the clip above, and others like it, will be run a lot on cable TV—they live for this kind of petty theater, after all—and I don’t think people who didn’t watch the debate closely (along with plenty who did) are going to come away liking Romney.

Now, I know that the crowd was quite clearly on Romney’s side on this one; but I wonder how much that had to do with location. Although Las Vegas itself is not exactly known as the Mormon community’s favorite haunt, Nevada has a significant Mormon population. I’m just guessing here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the audience was of the same religious and cultural milieu as Romney, and thus—like the Paulbots who follow the Congressman’s campaign as if he were the Grateful Dead—left viewers with an impression of the GOP electorate that is not an entirely accurate. In the immediate aftermath of the debate, not just Mormons, but highly educated pundits and media elites, have come away calling Romney, once again, the victor. But their focus has been on his facility with policy; and considering that Republican voters, on the whole, have clearly shown themselves to be less than thrilled with the prospect of voting for the man, I’m not so sure that his coming off like the kind of sneering country club Republican they always hated won’t seriously reduce the presumptive front-runner’s stature among the Tea Party set.

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A new Fairness Doctrine

by Elias Isquith on October 10, 2011

Fairdeal

I’m one of the many who think mainstream political analysis in America is overly obsessed with armchair psychoanalysis of power-holders. The often far more important roles that institutions and externalities, chiefly the economy, play are frequently woefully under-emphasized. We didn’t “win” the Cold War because American leaders stuck out their chests and pounded on tables; FDR didn’t win four elections because his speeches were structured like fairy tales; Adlai Stevenson didn’t lose back-to-back elections to Eisenhower because he liked to read too much, etc.

Having said that, I do think there’s utility in attempting to place yourself in the heads of voters—however you’re defining the term—in order to understand why it is that politics in America works the way it does. This can often get messy and reveal more about you than voters (see: the pundit class’s obsession with Daddy) but sometimes it’s elucidating. A fundamental, if unstated, assumption behind representative democracy is, after all, that people can share the same or very similar world views and communicate with one another—even make decisions for one another—without asking the opinion of each person, one-by-one.

So here are some examples, good and bad.

Let’s start with the bad, because I’m just that kind of guy. The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza has been very enthusiastic over the past few days about a new article from his colleague, Scott Wilson. In brief, the Wilson piece argues that President Obama is just not an especially outgoing, friendly, personable, or emotionally available guy, and that this explains to a significant degree his current political difficulties and continued strained relations with Congressional Democrats. In praise of the piece, Cizzilla writes this morning:

[Obama's] go-it-alone approach to politics paid huge dividends during the 2008 campaign as it allowed him to paint himself as the consummate outsider in an election where people were craving just that.

But, Obama’s loner tendencies have served him far less well as president and now, as he turns to his bid for a second term, threaten to leave him isolated with little political cover from his own side.

Obama is doing what he can to remedy that problem with a base-intensive strategy of late designed to remind Democratic voters — and elected officials — why they like him.

The question for Obama is whether the problem is fixable. The level of distrust is significant and long-held. And the timing couldn’t be worse.

I read about half of the Wilson piece, and immediately thought it was total bunk—and the kind of bunk that the DC press produced, almost like clockwork, whenever a President is experiencing especially hard times. It’s not so surprising, I guess, that reporters and political players in Washington immediately interpret the President’s flagging popularity in terms of his personality; they do so often reveal their conception of themselves (and Washington in general) as nothing so much as a big, army-having, war-making, bomb-deploying high school. But it’s still a brand of analysis that leaves something to be desired.

If Brad was the coolest dude in the 12th grade as of a few months ago, but now everyone kind of hates him—then, yeah, it would make sense to bring up all the times he told Mary-Sue he was too busy to hang out with her when he was so totally not; and it would make sense to point to that time during Christmas break when he told back-up QB Jason that he’d never be half the player he is. But as an explanation for why the President’s popularity is sagging and why he isn’t finding Congressional democrats, with an election of their own to look forward to in little more than a year, desperate to hitch their wagon to his earth-bound name?

I get it; gossip is more fun to write than another repetition of the same-old story of partisan gridlock and a bad economy. People don’t tend to talk about public policy around the water-cooler. But not only is politics not bean-bag—it’s not “The Real World: DC,” either.

That’s the bad. Now let’s turn to the good.

Responding to an unfortunately deterministic and rather water-carrying article from (again) The Washington Post, this time Ezra Klein, in which the horrible state of the economy, post-financial crash, is portrayed as nigh-on inevitable—while the Obama Administration is mostly absolved of guilt because, after all, they’re only human—Steve Waldman chides the White House for still living too much in the DC bubble. They remain seemingly incapable not only of imagining the channels of power as malleable, but also conceiving of public policy’s impact upon voters on an emotional, symbolic—not technocratic—level:

[Klein's] account is far too sympathetic. The Obama administration’s response to the crisis was visibly poor in real time. Klein shrugs off the error as though it were inevitable, predestined. It was not. The administration screwed up, and they screwed up in a deeply toxic way. They defined “politically possible” to mean acceptable to powerful incumbents, and then restricted their policy advocacy to the realm of that possible. […]

[H]uman affairs are not about dollars and cents. Santelli’s rant and the tea party it kind-of inspired were not borne of a financial calculation — “Oh my God! My tax bill is going to be $600 higher if we refinance underwater mortgages!” Santelli’s rant, quite legitimately, reflected a fairness concern. The core political issue has never been the quantity of debt the government would incur to mitigate the crisis. It was and remains the fairness of the transfers all that debt would finance. A fact of human affairs that proved unfortunately consequential during the crisis is that people perceive injustice more powerfully on a personal scale than at an institutional level. Bailing out the dude next door who cashed out home equity to build a Jacuzzi is a crime. Bailing out the “financial system” is just a statistic.

I think Waldman’s correct, though it should be appreciated that big numbers scare people, and that means that even the most ethically iron-clad bail-out plan is going to start at a disadvantage in the arena of public opinion. Still, the overriding sentiment today, on the left and the right, is anger flowing from a wounded idealism. For all their superficial, savvy, jaded cynicism, people thought that the American contract was, more or less, legitimate—and that meant they’d be given a fair shake. Millions of foreclosures, lay-offs, and banker bonuses later, this rather romantic conception of the American political system has been revealed to be far from the truth.

The sentiment is easy enough to recognize in the Occupy Wall Street movement, of course, with its dozens of signs relating to Banker greed and elite corruption. But a fascinating new report by Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol (and two graduate students) shows how this shattered dream animates those on the right—often conceived of as the country’s self-styled thick-skinned, hard-scrabble, suck-it-up realists—just as much as those on the left, albeit with a very different focus. Instead of greedy bankers and corporate-shill lobbyists and politicians, the Tea Party set are angry at, primarily, immigrants for being, in a word, unfair:

The Harvard scholars found immigration to be a core, and highly emotive, Tea Party issue, even in Massachusetts, which has relatively low levels of illegal immigration and no foreign borders.

This impassioned opposition to illegal immigrants is often equated with racism, but Ms. Skocpol and her colleagues take great pains to point out that the Massachusetts Tea Partiers, whom they studied most closely, are vocally and actively opposed to overt racism. A racist poster to their Web site was publicly reprimanded and a plan was made to take down racist signs at a rally (though, in the event, the researchers didn’t spot any that needed removing). For the Tea Partiers, the major intellectual distinction isn’t between black and white — although that is the color of most of them — it is between deserving, hard-working citizen and unauthorized, foreign freeloader.

The political implications may surprise you—and, if we take Waldman’s criticism of the White House policy apparatus seriously, concern Obama supporters:

The Harvard scholars’ careful parsing of the thinking of the Tea Party has some important political implications. The first is that there is a latent but potentially vast divide between the grass roots and the conservative elite on the United States’ most important fiscal issue — the twin entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Cutting these programs is a core tenet of faith for the party’s funders and its intellectuals. But the Tea Party’s rank and file views them as earned benefits that belong to hard-working Americans as surely as do their homes and private savings. […]

The second take-away is for the Democrats, particularly the technocrats among them. It has become conventional wisdom, including on the left, that the way to make social welfare programs affordable is to direct them at the people who really need them. If politics were a math exercise, that view would make a lot of sense.

But Ms. Skocpol and her colleagues’ study of the Tea Party suggests that the government spending programs that earn widespread, long-term public support, including among people with strongly conservative views, are those that are perceived to be both universal and deserved. Helping the poor is well and good, but when times get tough the institutions we are willing to pay for are those that assist virtuous, hard-working people — in other words, ourselves.

Keep this in mind next time you hear a Reasonable Democrat extolling the virtues of means-testing for Medicare or Social Security. On paper, yes, it makes abundant sense—in fact, it seems to be the height of fairness. But if Skocpol’s findings are correct, left-leaning wonks looking to shore-up the welfare state would do well to keep in mind that old saying about policy for the poor making for poor policy. In the abstract, it may be smart. But maybe the more important question isn’t whether it’s smart—it’s whether it’s “fair.”

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