“Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.”
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein is stunned by the radicalism of the GOP presidential candidates:
If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be:
Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.
It’s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on — health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.
These folks are actually talking about repealing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970s.
They’re talking about abolishing Medicare and Medicaid, which passed in the 1960s, and Social Security, created in the 1930s.
They reject as thoroughly discredited all of Keynesian economics, including the efficacy of fiscal stimulus, preferring the budget-balancing economic policies that turned the 1929 stock market crash into the Great Depression.
They also reject the efficacy of monetary stimulus to fight recession, and give the strong impression they wouldn’t mind abolishing the Federal Reserve and putting the country back on the gold standard.
They refuse to embrace Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has been widely accepted since the Scopes Trial of the 1920s.
One of them is even talking about repealing the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution, allowing for a federal income tax and the direct election of senators — landmarks of the Progressive Era.
What’s next — repeal of quantum physics?
Full editorial here.
The Problem of ‘Low Information Voters’ in a Fragile Democracy
Another former Congressional staffer weighs in on Mike Lofgren’s must-read essay “Goodbye To All That,” which I posted earlier this week:
Like Mike Lofgren, I am a retired Congressional staffer who worked for a House Member from 1985 until January of this year. Unlike Lofgren, I did not retire voluntarily; my boss, a moderate Democrat, lost his race for re-election last November. I found myself agreeing with virtually everything in Mike’s article and immediately forwarded it to a bunch of my friends, some of whom remain working on the Hill.
Privately, many of us who have worked in Congress since before the Clinton Administration have been complaining about the loss of the respect for the institution by the Members who were elected to serve their constituents through the institution. I don’t think people realize how fragile democracy really is. The 2012 campaign is currently looking to be the final nail in the coffin unless people start to understand what is going on.
One thing that especially resonated with me about Mike’s piece is the importance of “low information” voters. The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters’ minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.
The media likes to call this group “independents,” which implies that they think so long and deeply about issues that they refuse to be constrained by the philosophy of either party. There may be a couple of people out there who fit that definition, but those are not the persuadable voters campaigns are trying to capture. Every campaign is trying to develop its candidate into an easy-to-remember slogan that makes him or her more appealing than the other guy. Actually, because negative campaigning is so effective, they are more often trying to portray the opponent as more objectionable (“I guess I’ll vote for the crook because at least he won’t slash my Medicare”).
You can read more on James Fallows’ page at The Atlantic; he has been following this crucial debate in earnest since the Truth-Out article first made waves. This is a conversation we all need to be having.
Recommended Reading: “Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”
“Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult” is a must-read feature by Mike Lofgren, a former Congressional staffer who spent 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
[…]
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”
[…]
This constant drizzle of “there the two parties go again!” stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote?
Full article here.
What Can We Expect from Obama’s Jobs Speech?
At this point, it seems unlikely that Obama will be able to deliver more than empty rhetoric at his upcoming jobs speech, absent a bold plan on mortgage refinancing (as I discussed in a recent post). This kind of politics, unfortunately, is relevant for few outside of the punditocracy — and, as Yglesias notes, won’t accomplish anything meaningful in the real world. You know, the one that real, unemployed people still live in.
The fact that President Obama is requesting a joint session of congress to hear his jobs speech certainly reflects an effort to raise the political stakes around it, despite the considerable evidence that presidential speeches don’t move the needle on politics. Still, let’s assume for the sake of argument that a presidential speech can be a big deal. What do progressives want to hear? Paul Krugman, for example, says “let’s see what the jobs plan looks like — and more important, since the GOP will block everything, how (and if) he makes a political issue of that obstruction.”
As I said yesterday, the problem here is that the kind of robust jobs plan Krugman or I would like to see is probably quite different from the kind of jobs plan that makes for optimal politics. If you’re talking about a purely political speech then dwelling on the fact that negative real interest rates are crazy or how the Federal Reserve should be more tolerant of higher prices and especially higher prices for food and gasoline is a bad strategy. The public doesn’t have a deep understanding of the deficit or passionate views about it, but they know that they’re “bad.” The public has less understanding of monetary policy, but they know that inflation is “bad.” You can revive the economy with higher deficits and more tolerance for inflation, but you don’t inspire the public with it. If the speech is just about politics, you have to judge it purely as political messaging and not for agreement with wonky accounts of the truth.
Things may still go south, and if they do, the war’s lack of necessary congressional approval will remain precisely what it always was. Of course, one hopes it all pans out for the best. But should the Libyans be so lucky, those Democrats who do not share the neoconservative and liberal internationalist agenda of benevolent American hegemony must carefully consider whether they really want to be so helpful teeing up America’s next euphemised and dubiously legal war.
Democracy in America, The Economist
Full editorial here.
You Know the Libyan War is Over When…
“Tell me how you got Qaddafi’s hat?”
“It wasn’t really hard. I just went inside his room.”
Another powerful example of the Daily Show’s complete mastery of its format. Always good to see Jon Stewart and the DS writers using the medium to speak truth to power.
My own take on the Warren Buffett backlash here.
The stories, photographs, and video coming out of Libya today are indeed spectacular, and cause for celebration. But it is still unsettling how quickly we forget the illegality of the United States’ involvement in the NATO campaign, and accept the triumphalist media narrative of the rebel victory. Glenn Greenwald highlights the irrational exuberance of both the left and the right as Gaddafi’s regime falls:
The towering irrationality of this taunt is manifest. Of course the U.S. participation in that war is still illegal. It’s illegal because it was waged for months not merely without Congressional approval, but even in the face of a Congressional vote against its authorization. That NATO succeeded in defeating the Mighty Libyan Army does not have the slightest effect on that question, just as Saddam’s capture told us nothing about the legality or wisdom of that war. What comments like this one are designed to accomplish is to exploit and manipulate the emotions surrounding Gaddafi’s fall to shame and demonize war critics and dare them to question the War President now in light of his glorious triumph.
Just as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s deaths were used to vindicate our campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and to silence criticism, so to will the capture and likely execution of Muammar Gaddafi be used to distract from the illegality of our military involvement in Libya.
In Defense of Warren Buffett
By Benjamin Landy
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett became a controversial figure last week, when his provocative op-ed, Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” landed prominently on the New York Times editorial page. “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” Buffett wrote. “ It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.” His suggestion, that the government immediately raise taxes on Americans making more than $1 million — and even more so on those making in excess of $10 million — set off a firestorm of criticism from conservatives.
Among the more misguided attacks was a CNN.com opinion piece by Jeffrey Miron, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, who outright dismissed the significance of increased government revenues. “The first problem with Buffett’s view,” Miron writes, “is that the number of super-rich is too small for higher rates to make much difference to our budget problems. […] Imposing a 10% surcharge on this income would generate at most $73 billion in new revenue – only about 2% of federal spending.”
Miron is right that $73 billion won’t solve our “budget problems,” which I take to mean our $14.4 trillion national debt. Nobody is arguing that. But that hardly means $73 billion is inconsequential. In order to illustrate just how much money $73 billion is, I did some research to discover some of the things you could buy with that kind of money. The graphic below shows just a few examples.
If you were more militarily inclined, $73 billion could also buy you 16 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — the largest and most powerful capital ship in the world — or 1,327 brand new F/A-18 Super Hornets from Boeing. And $73 billion could quintuple NASA’s operating budget, providing enough funds to develop and maintain an international lunar base for the next five years, according to CSIS cost analysis. Less than half that amount would provide safe drinking water for the entire planet, helping save the nearly 6,000 children who die every day from diseases associated with contaminated water supplies.
No matter how you choose to look at it, $73 billion is a lot of money. With all of the problems our country is facing today, can we afford to turn it down?
A Summer at War in Libya. Photos via the New York Times.
And there is this:
Ambassador Ali Aujali, representative of the Libyan Transitional National Council to the U.S., is surrounded by other Libyans as he announces the reopening the new Embassy of Libya under the control of the TNC in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
Via MSNBC. Photo: Jewel Samad / AFP - Getty Images
Podhoretz’s John Birch Society Republicanism
Originally “They’re Soaking In It”
By Paul Waldman, The American Prospect
Here’s the problem with our politics. Conservative eminence grise Norman Podhoretz writes the following in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend:
Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we [conservatives] interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama’s goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”…He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.
Among the characteristics of the paranoid imagination is the ability to take a pile of evidence countering your thesis — say, the experience of two years of a presidency comprising hundreds of policy moves demonstrating Barack Obama to be a center-left politician — and say, “None of that matters. What matters is this thing he said once, which when you interpret it in the right way, provides the key that unlocks the sinister hidden plan at work.” Another feature of the paranoid imagination is the insistence that your enemies are possessed of extraordinary, even superhuman competence. They never make mistakes. If Obama’s economic policies had succeeded, it would have shown how clever he is in laying the groundwork for the coming socialist revolution. The fact that those policies haven’t succeeded shows how he’s intentionally subverting our economy to lay the groundwork for the coming socialist revolution.
I give this to you not just to say, “Look what these crazy conservatives are saying!” Podhoretz is a buffoon whose “ideas,” such as they are, ought not be taken seriously by anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex, regardless of their ideology. But the point is: This piece of rancid tripe appeared not on some nobody’s blog but in The Wall Street Journal, the highest-circulation newspaper in America.
Emphasis mine. No surprise here that the Paranoid Style is still alive and well in American Republicanism. Robert Welch would be so proud.
Interesting clip from Jon Stewart on Ron Paul’s striking absence from the current media narrative of the Iowa straw poll. I would like to believe that the news media tend to ignore Paul because they understand he has no chance of winning the Republican Primary, not because of his radical (although remarkably ideologically consistent) stances on issues like drug legalization or anti-interventionism. But if radicalism makes a candidate unelectable, why give lip service to Michelle Bachmann, who wanted the United States to default, or Ricky Perry, who yesterday threatened Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke with physical violence if he were to “print more money” (which is essentially the entire point of the Federal Reserve).
You would think Roger Ailes would be pleased: the mainstream media has so internalized Fox News’ constant accusations of liberal bias that they have allowed this level of looniness, and indeed the whole Tea Party narrative, to become normalized. But the Serious People within the GOP know better: Ailes, Rove, Brooks and Frum must be terrified of the conservative id that has been unleashed in this country. They know this upcoming election cycle could see the self-immolation of the current Republican party.
Ron Paul is lucky to be a sideshow to this GOP circus. At least he won’t be around when the tent collapses.
