Tag Archives: Republicans

Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide

August 27, 2012 – 10:39 am

A week after Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment, we should be long past the “OMG — I can’t believe he said that!” stage. It’s time to take a longer view and ask ourselves what the Akin incident says about the larger picture.

You can find takeaways at many levels. First, contrary to Akin’s personal damage control, he didn’t “misspeak“. He really believes that many pregnant women — like maybe this one — make up their rape stories.

At a slightly more general level, and contrary to Republican damage control, you can observe that Akin is typical of the party. Not only is his no-rape-pregnancy lie common, but Paul Ryan agrees with him about redefining rape, and the official party platform calls for banning abortion with no rape exception. (Mitt Romney claims to support such an exception, but as usual, he’s speaking out of both sides of this mouth. Whose delegates are writing this platform? And if he won’t actively oppose a no-exceptions party platform, what makes you think he’ll veto a no-exceptions bill when Congress sends it to him?)

But here’s what I think is the most important Akin takeaway. When confronted with an ugly consequence of his policies — women forced by law to bear their rapists’ babies — Akin papered it over by telling a pretty lie: It doesn’t happen; the female body doesn’t work that way.

Isn’t that pretty? Wouldn’t the world be nicer if no woman who “really” got raped had to worry about pregnancy? Of course it would.

Akin may not have intended to lie; maybe he believes what he said. But does he believe this bogus biology because it makes sense? Of course not. Because an expert told him? The “expert” is someone he sought out precisely for that purpose; real experts would have told him the opposite.

I have a simpler explanation: Akin believes the lie because it’s pretty. The lie tells him that he’s not a monster. It helps him avoid the ugliness of his beliefs.

That thought pattern makes him absolutely typical of the conservative movement today. When implemented, conservative policies cause a lot of ugliness. And when confronted with these ugly consequences, conservatives rarely adopt a more compassionate position. A few brave ones talk about necessary sacrifices and breaking eggs to make omelets, but most just paper over the ugliness with a pretty lie.

“Raped women don’t get pregnant” is just the first lie on my list. Here are four others:

2. The uninsured can get the medical care they need in the ER.

The lie. As he prepared to veto a 2007 bill providing health insurance to children, President Bush said it very clearly:

People have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

That’s what Governor Rick Perry meant during his presidential campaign when he said:

Everyone in the state of Texas has access to health care, everyone in America has access to health care.

Mississippi Governor Halley Barbour agreed: “there’s nobody in Mississippi who does not have access to health care”

Why it’s pretty. It’s so distressing to hear statistics like 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. (Texas and Mississippi rank #1 and #2 in percentage of the population uninsured.) But wouldn’t it be nice if that number didn’t really mean anything? if insurance was just a bookkeeping device, and nobody really went without care?

Why you shouldn’t believe it. It’s true that the uninsured can get emergency care. If you’re in a car accident, if you’re having a heart attack, if you’re not breathing when they fish you out of the lake — EMTs and the ER will do their best to save your life even if you can’t pay. But as the Houston Chronicle points out, emergency care can’t replace regular care:

About half of uninsured adults have a chronic disease like cancer, heart disease or diabetes. The lack of regular care for the uninsured is why they have death rates 25 percent higher than those with insurance; more than half of uninsured diabetics go without needed medical care; those with breast and colon cancer have a 35 percent to 50 percent higher chance of dying from their disease; and they are three times more likely to postpone needed care for pregnancy. Clearly, the uninsured don’t get the care they need

What it hides. Lack of health insurance kills people. It kills lots of people — more than car accidents or our recent wars. The technical public-health term is amenable mortality — the number of people who die unnecessarily from treatable conditions. An article in the journal Health Policy says:

If the U.S. had achieved levels of amenable mortality seen in the three best-performing countries—France, Australia, and Italy—84,300 fewer people under age 75 would have died in 2006–2007.

France, Australia, and Italy don’t have smarter doctors or better medical technology, but they do have something conservatives are determined to see that Americans never get: universal health insurance. When a questioner confronted Rick Santorum with these facts, he replied:

I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.

Of course he does. If he accepted what the public health statistics say, he’d have to admit that his policies condemn tens of thousands of people to death every year. “Pro-life” indeed.

3. Tax cuts pay for themselves.

The lie. The most recent vintage is from the Wall Street Journal’s defense of the Romney tax plan:

Every major marginal rate income tax cut of the last 50 years — 1964, 1981, 1986 and 2003 — was followed by an unexpectedly large increase in tax revenues

Or you could hear it from Mitch McConnell:

That there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.

The claim is pretty widespread on the Right: Cutting taxes stimulates the economy so much that the government ends up collecting more revenue even at the lower rates.

Why it’s pretty. Everybody likes a tax cut, but deep down we all know that taxes pay for important things: roads, schools, defending the country, keeping the poor from dying in the streets, and so on. But wouldn’t it be great if we could pay less tax and pretend that money for all those things will appear by magic?

Why you shouldn’t believe it. This has been tried over and over again. It never works. Pointing out that it didn’t work for Bush is shooting fish in a barrel — nothing worked for Bush — but this didn’t even work when Reagan tried it. The Economist’s “Democracy in America” column looked up the numbers:

The federal government’s receipts for 1981-86, in billions of 2005 dollars:

1981    1,251.1
1982    1,202.6
1983    1,113.4
1984    1,173.9
1985    1,250.5
1986    1,277.2

Do you see the “unexpectedly large increase in tax revenues” resulting from the 1981 marginal rate income tax cut? Me neither! It took five years just to get back to par.

What it hides. A huge transfer of wealth to the rich. This lie is the first move in a cruel shell game: First, cut taxes with the promise that it won’t cause a deficit. Then, when it causes a deficit (as it always does), don’t respond “Oh, we were wrong. Let’s raise taxes back to where they were.” Say: “Government spending is out of control! We have to cut food stamps, education, Medicare …”

Stir the two steps together, and you get a cocktail voters would never have swallowed in one gulp: We’re going to cut programs people rely on so that the rich can have more money.

4. Gays can be cured

The lie. Homosexuality is a choice that results in an addiction, but (like alcoholics and drug addicts) gays can learn to choose differently and become ex-gay.

Why it’s pretty. Suppose you think gays are going to Hell, and then your son turns out to be gay. Or suppose you’ve been brought up to believe gays are evil, and then in junior high you start feeling same-sex attractions yourself. Of course you’re going to want to believe that this situation is fixable.

Why you shouldn’t believe it. It’s almost impossible to 100% prove a negative like “Gays can’t be cured”. But if a well-funded movement to teach people to fly had been running for years, and yet no one actually flew, reasonable people would develop a strong conviction that this wasn’t going to work.

That’s the situation with the ex-gay movement. The extreme lack of success has reached the point where the movement itself has started to splinter. The original ex-gay group, Exodus International, now rejects attempts to “cure” gays and instead focuses on “helping Christians who want to reconcile their own particular religious beliefs with sexual feelings they consider an affront to scripture.” This has caused a schism, with the new group, Restored Hope Network, continuing to promote therapies to cure gays.

What it hides. Pure bigotry is the only reason to discriminate against gays.

As discrimination wanes, it becomes obvious that unrepentant gays can find love, form long-term relationships, raise children who are a credit to the community, and (in short) do all the things that are usually thought of as part of a good life. They can also serve in the military, be good teachers, have productive careers in the private sector, pay taxes, do volunteer work — everything that constitutes good citizenship.

To prop up anti-gay discrimination (and even to try to reinstate it in places where it has been torn down), and to do so even though the people discriminated against didn’t choose to be gay and can’t change it — that’s pretty ugly.

5. Obama’s election proves racism is over.

The lie. John Hawkins put it like this:

So, the moment Obama was elected, people started asking the obvious question, “How serious of a problem can racism still be in the United States if a black man can be elected President?” The honest answer to that question is, “Not very.”

Just this summer, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby reacted the same way to a black man becoming head of the Southern Baptist Convention:

The pervasive racism [Martin Luther King] confronted is primarily a historical memory now, while King himself is in the American pantheon. … America’s racist past is dead and gone.

Why it’s pretty. Pat yourself on the back, white America! You used to have a problem, but you kicked it.

So if any blacks or liberals are still complaining, feel free to ignore them. They just want the government to give them “more free stuff” by taking what you earned, or to use the charge of racism as “their sledgehammer … to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us”. If anybody’s really oppressed these days, it’s whites.

Why you shouldn’t believe it. Barack Obama’s election was definitely a sign of racial progress, just like Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers in 1947, Jesse Owens’ Olympic gold medal in 1936, or Jack Johnson becoming heavyweight champion in 1908. But racism didn’t end in 2008 any more than it ended in 1908.

Let’s start by debunking the logic: In 2008, a year when everything broke wrong for the Republicans, Obama got 53% of the vote. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s more-or-less what a white Democrat would have polled. Does that prove racism is over? No, it just proves that Republicans already had the racist vote.

Then we get to evidence that points the other way: Trayvon Martin. (Nobody jumps to the defense of black men who shoot unarmed white teen-agers.) Birtherism. (No white president has faced this kind of persistent, baseless accusation.) The racial dog-whistles in the Romney campaign. The racist anti-Obama pictures and cartoons that circulate in viral emails. (But don’t you get it? These are jokes. Like the “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012” bumper sticker. Clever, huh?) The attempt to legalize anti-Hispanic racial profiling in Arizona and other states. I could go on.

It’s not just that 1 in 3 black men will spend time in jail, it’s that this fact isn’t seen as an emergency that requires outside-the-box solutions. If white men were imprisoned at the same rate (no matter what they were imprisoned for), the number of possible explanations and solutions would skyrocket. But black men … that’s just how they are; what can you do?

(For a longer discussion of racism in the Obama era, see Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in the current Atlantic.)

What it hides. Indifference to human suffering. At a time when poverty is at a level we haven’t seen in decades, the House has passed bills to gut safety-net programs like Medicaid and food stamps.

That can only happen if the white middle class is convinced that the poor are different and deserve their fate. And the best way to accomplish this is through racial stereotyping: The poor are black, and blacks are lazy. Both statements are false, but they work.

How to respond. This is far from an exhaustive list; I just picked the pretty lies I could document and refute fairly quickly, and I didn’t even touch well-covered lies like “Global warming is a hoax.” or “Abstinence-only sex education works.” But I hope the five I’ve listed are varied enough to establish the pattern.

If you have any conservatives friends, relatives, or co-workers, you probably hear pretty lies all the time. (“The poor have it good in America. They’re the lucky duckies who don’t have to work, because the rest of us are paying for their X-boxes and cable TV.”) Probably you’ve already tried to respond by googling up facts and presenting them, so you understand that this never works.

I sympathize with your frustration.

But it’s important take the next step and ask why presenting the facts doesn’t work. It’s simple: Facts are not the source of the belief. Conservatives aren’t mistaken, they’re hiding something.

What they’re usually hiding is cruelty. Conservative policies are cruel, but individual conservatives usually aren’t, or at least they don’t want to see themselves like that. The only way to square that circle is with a lie.

Once the lie is in place, “facts” will be found to support it. A whole industry is devoted to supplying fake facts. And since fake facts are easier to manufacture than to refute, you will never fight your way through the swarm.

I don’t have a foolproof method for converting conservatives, but I can tell you this much: You don’t understand a pretty lie until you’ve seen all the way through to the ugly truth it’s hiding.

That’s where you should be focusing your energy. Don’t just refute the lie. Expose the truth.

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I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To

August 13, 2012 – 9:00 am

Much ink was spilled this weekend about Paul Ryan. Here are the ten best observations I found:

1. This was Plan B for Romney.

Steve Kornacki:

The most important thing to know about Mitt Romney’s running-mate choice is this: It’s not the move he would have made if the campaign was going the way he hoped it would.

Plan A was to frame the election as Barack Obama vs. Somebody Else, and Mitt all but changed his name to Somebody Else. Beyond a few believe-in-America platitudes, the Romney campaign has been the anti-Obama campaign.

That strategy led to what Ezra Klein called a “policy gap” — not a gap between Obama’s policies and Romney’s policies, but

Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t. … Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals.

Klein gives many examples, including:

On financial regulation, Romney would ‘repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.’ That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something.

Romney’s plan to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare is equally light on the “replace” part. The Romney website lists a lot of virtues his plan will have, but only hints at how it will achieve those virtues.

Until Saturday, everything about the Romney candidacy was fuzzy, even whether or not he supports RomneyCare. He bowed to all the conservative icons during the primary campaign, but his Massachusetts record pointed the other way, and Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom indicated that Romney’s primary commitments might be null and void after the convention:

I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

In hindsight, the hole in that strategy is obvious: Not only did this looming betrayal make the base edgy, but Romney’s refusal to define himself let Obama define him as the slash-and-burn financier who destroyed American industry and walked away with all the money.

All summer, Romney has been helpless against the assault. Does he want to make women bear their rapists’ children? Does he want to raise taxes on the middle class? Did he pay any taxes himself? All possible responses would force Mitt to be Somebody, when he really wanted to be Somebody Else.

The results showed up immediately in Romney’s unfavorable rating.

Romney’s overall favorable/unfavorable score remains a net negative – a trait no other modern presumptive GOP presidential nominee (whether Bob Dole, George W. Bush or John McCain) has shared.

And eventually Obama started to pull away in the head-to-head polls.

Time for Plan B.

2. Ryan’s voting record is very, very conservative.

Nate Silver notes that Ryan’s Congressional voting record gives him a DW-Nominate rating “roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann”. Ryan may not be as physically wild-eyed as Bachmann, but ideologically they’re very similar. That makes him the most ideologically extreme VP candidate from Congress since at least 1900. (See chart below.)

Given Mitt’s fuzziness and Ryan’s high-contrast definition, Ryan’s positions are now the Romney-Ryan positions. The Etch-a-Sketch option is gone.

Those Romney-Ryan policies include privatizing Social Security, turning Medicare into a voucher program, and drastically cutting Medicaid. (Ryan hopes that some magic wand at the state level will create efficiencies, but the Urban Institute estimates some 14 million poor people would lose coverage.)

3. Ryan is both a Catholic and a follower of atheist author Ayn Rand.

He’s very anti-abortion but completely ignores the long series of socio-economic encyclicals that started with Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum in 1891.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote letters criticizing the Ryan budget, which Ryan falsely rejected as not representing “all the Catholic bishops”.

Catholics have a real decision to make in this election. Are they single-issue anti-abortion voters? Or does the Sermon on the Mount still count for something?

4.The Ryan pick focuses the election on the deficit.

Matt Yglesias complains:

focusing attention on the big-picture disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about long-term fiscal policy means we won’t be focusing attention on what ought to be the most pressing economic policy issue of our time—mass unemployment and the tragic waste of human and economic potential it represents.

This cuts both ways. On the one hand, it plays into the popular misconception that lowering the deficit would create jobs. (Both Econ 101 and the experience of Britain say that cutting the deficit will destroy jobs.) That favors Romney.

On the other hand, Obama’s balanced plan for dealing with the long-term deficit is much more credible than the Ryan/Romney plan to cut rich people’s taxes even more, increase defense spending, and make up the difference by closing unspecified loopholes and cutting unspecified spending.

Ezra Klein explains how steep those cuts would have to be:

Ryan says that under his budget, everything the federal government does that is not Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will be cut to less than 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, energy research, national parks, civil service, the FBI — all of it. Right now, that category of spending is 12.5 percent of GDP.

Another way to put 3.75% in context: Romney has already promised to put “a floor of 4 percent of GDP” under the defense budget alone.

5. Ryan’s reputation as a deficit hawk is undeserved.

Ezra Klein:

the real north star of Ryan’s policy record isn’t deficits or spending, though he often uses those concerns in service of his agenda. It’s radically reforming the way the federal government provides public services, usually by privatizing or devolving those public services away from the federal government.

More bluntly: The deficit is just an excuse to shrink government. If the deficit went away, Ryan would rebuild it by cutting rich people’s taxes and letting corporations skim a bigger profit out of public services.

Paul Krugman says Ryan’s budget-sausage contains $4.6 trillion in “mystery meat”: Like Romney, he claims his tax cuts for the rich will be balanced by closing loopholes, but he doesn’t identify any of those loopholes.

We’ve heard this song before: Republicans always claim their tax cuts won’t increase the deficit, but they always do. Reagan’s did, Bush’s did, and Romney’s will too.

They will try to claim that Ryan’s cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and every other non-defense program are necessary to save our children from the deficit. (MoveOn points out the ways in which the cuts harm our children — like making it harder for them to get an education if their parents aren’t rich.) The election probably hangs on making the public realize that those cuts have nothing to do with the deficit and will instead go straight into the pockets of the rich.

Early focus groups indicate that sale won’t be hard for Obama to make.

6. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. 

Ryan has benefitted from what President Bush (in another context) called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The prevailing media prejudice is for “balance”. But the reality of the last few years has been a reasonable administration facing an opposition that abandoned anything resembling facts or logic in favor of pure obstructionism and open hatred.

How to balance that? Paul Krugman explains:

What these people need is reasonable Republicans. And if such creatures don’t exist, they have to invent them. Hence the elevation of Ryan — who is, in fact, a garden-variety GOP extremist, but with a mild-mannered style — to icon of fiscal responsibility and honest argument, despite the reality that his proposals are both fiscally irresponsible and quite dishonest.

I don’t think Ryan understands this process, so I expect him to be totally floored when the media starts covering him more rigorously and asking reasonable questions.

The Republican rank-and-file also don’t understand. They believe Ryan is really, really smart and expect him to wipe the floor with that doofus Joe Biden.

I think they’ll be surprised.

7. Ryan is a creature of Washington.

Wisconsin reporter John Nichols describes him as “Dick Cheney with nice hair”.

he is a guy who went to Washington as soon as he could, rooted himself in the establishment, got himself elected as soon as he could and became a major player

Joan Walsh offers him as an example of “the fakery at the heart of the Republican project today”.

The man who wants to make the world safe for swashbuckling, risk-taking capitalists hasn’t spent a day at economic risk in his entire life.

If you want to make an Ayn Rand character out of him, Wesley Mouch is a closer match than John Galt. Walsh continues:

guys like Ryan … somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life. Their only tether to it is their remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of “other” people – the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand’s famous “parasites.”

8. He voted for all the budget-busting policies of the Bush administration.

According to the LA Times, Ryan voted for TARP, the unfunded Bush prescription drug benefit, the Iraq War, and (of course) all the Bush tax cuts.

Deficits only became a problem after Obama was elected

9. Obama owns foreign policy now.

Romney and Ryan look good posing in front of a mothballed battleship, but that’s the only qualification either brings to the job of Leader of the Free World. Meanwhile, Obama is the guy who finally got Bin Laden and ended the unpopular Iraq War.

Thomas Schaller observes that until now

at least one candidate on every GOP presidential ticket during the past half-century could boast at least some foreign policy, diplomatic or defense chops.

Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating comments:

Romney seems to be wagering that foreign policy will not be a major issue in the campaign.

10. Ryan would be the real power in a Romney administration. And if Romney loses, Ryan is already the front-runner for 2016.

When Romney introduced Ryan as “the next president of the United States” Steve Kornacki heard a Freudian slip:

while it will be the former Massachusetts governor who is sworn-in as the 45thpresident if the GOP ticket prevails this November, it will be Ryan who sets the new administration’s policy direction.

The New Republic’s Michael Kazin predicts Ryan would be more powerful than Dick Cheney.

Republicans have never before nominated someone for V.P. in hopes that he, and not the would-be President, would define the critical domestic policies of the entire federal government.

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner agrees:

Republicans envision an administration in which Romney has relegated
himself to a kind of head of state role … with Ryan as the actual head of government

Why? Well, Ryan has a philosophy and a real constituency in the Party and in Congress. He also carries the standard of the Koch brothers. Romney has none of that.

Already on Saturday, Nate Silver tweeted:

If Obama wins, most likely 2016 match-up is: Paul Ryan vs. Hillary Clinton. That would be pretty epic.

Kornacki describes Ryan 2016 as “the Right’s long game”.

But even if Ryan’s budget proves an albatross for Romney and the GOP ticket goes down, it’s not hard to see conservatives rationalizing away the defeat: The problem was Romney couldn’t sell the message – that’s why the next time we need Ryan at the top of the ticket!

After all, right-wingers still haven’t admitted that Palin was a liability to McCain. As Digby put it years ago: “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.”

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Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes

April 16, 2012 – 11:25 am

In case you were having trouble figuring it out, Herman Cain explained the Obama/Romney gender gap to the Fox News audience:

Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies — which is what most people disagree with — it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.

Which leads Digby to ask: “Who are those ‘other people’ (besides men) you speak of?”

You know, Digby: Girls. Those darling little ladies who swoon at pictures of Obama’s cute kids and don’t worry their pretty little heads about manly subjects like health care or the trade deficit. They say all kinds of silly things to pollsters, but come November their menfolk will set them straight and they’ll vote for Romney. (They’ll probably pout about it for a week or two afterwards — and their heads-of-household might want to be careful about eating the meatloaf on Inauguration Day — but they’ll do what they’re told.)

I’m glad Cain explained it so clearly. Otherwise, I’d have no idea why girls might not like Republicans. Well, there’s the whole we-want-you-to-carry-a-dead-fetus-to-term thing. But that’s yucky. I’m sure girls don’t think about stuff like that.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is another Republican girls ought to love. He dismissed the whole war-on-women theme by pointing to female Republican senators who agree with him:

There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’

Except … well, they actually say the exact opposite. ThinkProgress observes:

Three of the four women McConnell names have already come out against the GOP’s war on women — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In fact, Murkowski specifically pushed back on claims like McConnell’s, saying, “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Doesn’t that make you want to elect some more Republican senators so that McConnell can be majority leader?

You might think that a Republican woman who gets herself elected senator (like Murkowski or Snowe or Hutchison) might finally get some respect, that the men might listen to her (on women’s issues, at the very least) and not just use her as cover in a some-of-my-best-friends-are-dames way.

Think again.

A new study links conservatism to “low-effort thought”.

when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In situations where you don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you default to stereotypes and justifying the status quo.

If I’m stressed or tired, it’s much harder to think compassionately or generously. Much easier to think like this: Is there a problem? Somebody ought to find out whose fault it is and kick their butts.

As ego-boosting as this study is for liberals, there might be more to learn than that: When somebody who ordinarily seems to be a good person repeats some ridiculous conservative talking point, maybe the right response is just to say: “Seriously?” Don’t slap them down, just encourage them to think a little harder.

Jim Robinson, founder of the conservative community blog Free Republic, announces an anti-Romney revolt.

I’ve stated many times since Romney started running for the presidency way back when that I’d never vote for him and I will not. … There will be no campaign for this Massachusetts liberal liar on FR!!

Uh, Jim, why?

Romney is a pathological compulsive liar. Lie after lie papered over with more lies. Doesn’t even flinch when caught in bald faced lies, simply tells another big whopper to cover up or dodge the issue. Funny thing, the man actually seems to believe his own latest lies and simply ignores the glaring record of his past actions/lies.

Check out the comments Robinson gets: overwhelmingly positive, with only the occasional “Are you nuts?” thrown in.

That “liar” meme is catching on. Steve Benen is up to #13 in his ongoing series Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. Most of it isn’t spin or shading; it’s real that-never-happened stuff.

Crazy Congresspeople #1: Missouri’s Todd Akin explains to a constituent why his fellow Republicans in Congress hasn’t impeached President Obama yet:

I can’t speak for the other 400 and some congressmen, but I believe when they take a look at impeachment the question is do you have the votes to do it?

You don’t need, like, grounds to impeach a Democratic president, just (as Hunter at Daily Kos summarizes): “You know, stuff.”

Crazy Congresspeople #2: Florida’s Rep. Alan West knows how many “card-carrying Marxists” are in Congress: 78 to 81. He later clarified that he was referring to every member of the Progressive Caucus.

Hey, Alan: They did away with cards years ago. It’s all biometrics now. And sub-dermal computer chips. Have you checked for those? Communists have their alien allies insert them into your body while you’re asleep.

Crazy Congresspeople #3: North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who has

very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.

She knows there’s no reason for it because she and her husband graduated with almost no debt back in the 60s, when states gave more support to schools like her alma mater UNC and tuition was much lower. (I’ve already told you what I think about student debt.)

Let’s add a crazy state legislator to the list: Iowa’s Mark Chelgren proposed that child-support-paying Dads should be able to demand that their ex-wives take a drug test. (No War on Women here.)

You know who’s not conservative enough now? Orrin Hatch. Not so long ago he held down the far-right end of the Senate, but the Tea Party has moved past him. “I despise these people,” he says.

Teen pregnancy is down, but it’s still highest in the states that encourage abstinence-only sex education.

A 72-year-old grandmother tells the story of her abortion in 1978 in No One Called Me a Slut. It was a difficult decision, but she was treated with respect and she hasn’t regretted what she did.

I have five grandsons and three granddaughters, and I passionately want each one of them to be responsible and have the same legal right to choose that I had.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Republicans Have Gone Crazy Before

February 20, 2012 – 10:30 am

The most comforting thing about reading history is that you know the story comes out at least sort of OK. After all, if the world had really ended back then, you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this book.

This week I’ve been reading Rule and Ruin: the downfall of moderation and the destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. You might imagine that story would be depressing, but I’m finding it strangely hopeful, for this reason: Republicans have gone crazy before, and they more-or-less recovered from it.

So they might recover again.

Regular readers of the Weekly Sift know that I think the current Republican Party is insane. I agree with David Frum that conservatives have created an alternate reality “with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. As a result, the main Republican “accomplishments” of recent years have been to prevent the country from dealing with real-world problems like global warming or growing inequality, and they’re fighting a last-ditch effort to stop Democrats from doing anything to help the 50 million Americans who lack health insurance.

Delusional thinking is understandable when the fantasy is at least pleasant. But in the conservative Bizarro World, our country is ruled by foreign-born usurper who is trying to destroy the Christian religion and replace the Constitution with either Communist dictatorship or Sharia or (somehow) both. We are beset by all manner of bizarre conspiracies, mapped out from beyond the grave by Saul Alinsky and orchestrated by Marxist multi-billionaire George Soros.

The real world has many problems, but at least it’s not that bad. If somehow we could shake our Republican countrymen awake from their nightmare, we’d be doing them a favor.

So anyway, I’m down on Republicans these days. But what you might not realize — because I have assumed it goes without saying — is that I fully support the idea of a Republican Party. I agree with a recent Thomas Friedman column: America doesn’t need a third party,

What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

On all sorts of issues — education, pollution, housing, poverty — we need a vigorous two-party debate on national standards vs. local control. Neither side should win that debate once and for all, because both represent American values that go all the way back to Hamilton vs. Jefferson.

Similarly, all the way back to the construction of postal roads and the Erie Canal, American economic development has balanced the public and private sectors. We need one reality-based party championing public-sector development and another championing private-sector development.

Isolationism vs. internationalism, workers’ rights vs. owners’ rights, preserving traditional mores vs. correcting past injustices — what’s called for in each case is not a final victory of one side over the other, but a continuing tension between conflicting values. That’s why we need two parties.

Two sane parties, that is.

Consider the budget. Just about everybody understands that it’s a bad idea to borrow another trillion dollars every year from now on. So there’s room for reasonable people to debate whether to close that deficit primarily with spending cuts or with tax increases; how that pain should be spread among the rich, the poor, and the middle class; whether to start tightening the screws immediately or wait until the economy is stronger; how to split the spending cuts among safety-net programs, investments in education or infrastructure, and defense; and many other questions.

Instead, last summer we debated whether or not the United States should pay its bills. That was not a sane discussion. And in a Republican presidential debate in August, none of the candidates would accept a hypothetical deal in which spending cuts outweighed tax increases 10-to-1. Instead, all Republican candidates have proposed tax reforms that would substantially decrease revenue. They focus tax cuts on the rich, while sometimes actually increasing the taxes of the working poor. Vague or completely unspecified spending cuts make up the difference.

On social issues, Republican presidential candidates (eventually including Romney and Paul) have endorsed an anti-abortion “personhood” position so radical that it was decisively voted down in Mississippi. Got that? Mississippi is too liberal for the current crop of Republican presidential candidates.

It’s crazy over there.

So here’s the comforting lesson from Rule and Ruin: Republicans were at least this crazy in 1964, and they got over it.

Those of us old enough to remember Barry Goldwater at all have had our memories sepia-tinted by the mellower Goldwater of the 80s, and 90s, who warned against the dangers of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. But the Goldwater of 1964 was every bit the full-blown loon that Michelle Bachmann is today.

Just like present-day crazies, the 1964 extremists imagined a previously invisible conservative majority that Richard Nixon had failed to inspire in 1960, but which would turn out in droves if Republicans nominated a “real” conservative this time. In the defining pro-Goldwater tract A Choice Not an Echo Phyllis Schlafly explained:

it looks as though there is no way Republicans can possibly lose so long as we have a presidential candidate who campaigns on the issues. But … how did it happen that, in four major presidential campaigns*, Republicans were maneuvered into nominating candidates who did not campaign on the major issues?

It wasn’t any accident. It was planned that way. In each of their losing presidential years, a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues.

Top that, Sarah Palin.

[*the four treacherous candidates were Wendell Wilkie in 1940, Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, and Richard Nixon in 1960]

The Tea Party of 1964 was the John Birch Society, whose founder believed Dwight Eisenhower had been a communist sympathizer. “It is difficult,” he wrote of the five-star general and two-term Republican president, “to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.”

But within a few years all that had been swept away. Just as Goldwater’s elderly mellowness brightens our memories of him, Kent State and Watergate have darkened our picture of Nixon, who presided over a very moderate administration overall. From the Nixon years we get the Clean Air Act, OSHA, the EPA, and the first SALT treaty with the USSR. Nixon opened relations with China, appointed more blacks than Johnson had, and increased the minority role in federal contracts both on the small-business level and in labor unions.

Nixon’s Republican Party is what I wish we had back: a party of diverse views, leaning conservative and sometimes pandering (as any party does) to the electorate’s baser instincts, but by-and-large facing the nation’s real problems and trying to solve them. Even the party’s right wing was purging itself, as Bill Buckley succeeded in marginalizing the Birchers.

So how does an insane party get its mind back? First, it has to nominate a true extremist like Goldwater. (Rick Santorum would fill the bill nicely.) Until it does, the delusional system will explain every defeat as it did McCain’s in 2008 or Nixon’s in 1960: He wasn’t extreme enough.

Second, the extremist has to go down to a historic defeat (like Goldwater’s 61-39 shellacking by LBJ) that proves for a generation that the invisible majority does not exist. Again, I’m confident Santorum could handle this part of the script.

And finally, the sane-but-cynical conservatives who thought they could harness the crazies have to become targets of insanity themselves. This is already happening. Fox News and the Drudge Report, for example, are already under fire for having “turned left”. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have been assailed as “liberal” and even “socialist“. Newt Gingrich is “not a real conservative” either.

This will keep getting worse, because when reality becomes optional, no one is safe. At some point, even conservatives with impeccable credentials will realize that the beast is eating its own and has to be put down.

And then they will put it down. It happened before. It can happen again.

By weeklysift | Posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Also tagged , | Comments (13)

Barack X, the Fictional President

January 30, 2012 – 1:01 pm

One of the most surprising things The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza learned from the Obama administration’s unreleased memos was this: President Obama really believed he could get Republican support if he based his programs on Republican programs, like Romney’s healthcare plan or Bush Sr.’s cap-and-trade.

Obama did not anticipate how effectively his political opponents would cast him as a polarizing figure.

So how did they do it? Bill Mahr explains:

Republicans have created this completely fictional president. His name is Barack X, and he’s an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who’s coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe, or worse yet Saul Alinsky.

And this is how politics has changed. You used to have to run against an actual candidate. But now you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate.

In the end, Obama couldn’t even get Mitt Romney’s support for Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan, or John McCain’s support for the cap-and-trade system resembling the one in the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003.

Jay Rosen explains why not:

the [Republican] party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. …

When I say “reality-based Republicans” I mean those who recognize the danger in trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes. … [T]he tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don’t understand very well. …

Mitt Romney, the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012, is a reality-based Republican who cannot run as a reality-based Republican because he thinks he cannot win that way. Jon Huntsman’s campaign is the proof of that calculation. All the candidates, including Romney, have to make gestures toward the alternative knowledge system, with its own facts.

If those “facts” include that the Romney-inspired healthcare plan is an unconstitutional government takeover of the entire system and a step towards socialism, then Romney has to go along if he wants to win. He also has to pretend global warming is dubious, austerity will create jobs, and that we need to get our troops back into Iraq.

If I could raise one off-the-record issue with Mitt and count on getting honest answers, this is what it would be: What’s your Bizarro-world exit strategy? Do you picture bringing your campaign back to reality at some point, say, after the convention? Or if you run a fantasy-based fall campaign and win, do you plan to govern realistically? If so, how do you plan to get your base to put up with it?

Or if not, how do you plan to get Reality to put up with it?

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The Frontrunner Turns Into a Newt and other horserace notes

January 23, 2012 – 1:08 pm

I don’t want to make a habit of focusing the Sift on the horserace for the Republican nomination. I often criticize the corporate media for indulging in the horserace’s drama and conflict (as if democracy were really all about personalities) and ignoring the serious business of governing the world’s most powerful nation (as if public issues were just bludgeons for candidates to swing at each other). I don’t want to fall into the same trap.

But then a week like this past one blows away all my virtuous intentions.

After New Hampshire, Mitt Romney’s nomination was supposed to be inevitable, and South Carolina was about to give him the final stamp of approval. But by Saturday, Carolina’s landslide winner had turned into a Newt. And by this morning the witchcraft is nearly complete and Gingrich is leading the first post-SC poll of Florida as well.

InTrade still gives Romney a 62% chance of being the nominee, but that’s crashing from over 90%. If that first poll holds up and Gingrich really does win Florida, he’ll be the frontrunner.

A number of things came together to cast this spell: Gingrich turned a devastating personal story into a counter-attack against the media. He also effectively dog-whistled to racists, taking advantage of an almost all-white SC primary electorate. Plus, Romney fumbled the tax-return issue (Ruth Marcus said he was “choosing to pull off the Band-Aid with excruciating slowness”) and did a poor job of parrying attacks related to health care and abortion.

In the short run, Sarah Palin was right about ABC’s interview with Gingrich’s ex-wife on Thursday. Mrs. Gingrich II claimed that Newt asked for an “open marriage” so that he could continue his affair with the future Mrs. Gingrich III. Palin said the interview would

incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction, because it’s played so selectively by the media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more.

Gingrich played it that way in Thursday evening’s debate, launching a crowd-pleasing counter-attack against CNN’s John King. Gingrich already had momentum, but that debate performance locked up South Carolina for him. His anti-media tirade was the lead on all the news shows (even though I thought Rick Santorum had a much stronger debate overall).

Remember, though, that the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain also gave Cain a short-term boost. In the long run, I think the “open marriage” phrase will stick in the public mind and be a slow-but-steady drag on Gingrich. At a minimum, his rivals have a new rhetorical hook to use. Expect to hear metaphors about Newt’s open relationship with the truth, with conservative principles, and with anything else opponents want to raise doubts about.

Rush Limbaugh may think “everybody has an angry ex-spouse“, but it’s equally true that every woman has a man who done her wrong. (For at least three women, that man is Rush Limbaugh.) If they start identifying Newt with that guy, it’ll cost him.

The NYT’s Charles Blow:

Gingrich seems to understand the historical weight of the view among some southern whites, many of whom have migrated to the Republican party, that blacks are lazy and addicted to handouts. He is able to give voice to those feelings without using those words. He is able to make people believe that a fundamentally flawed and prejudicial argument that demeans minorities is actually for their uplift.

In short, Gingrich has been dog whistling. He doesn’t openly say: “Lazy blacks expect you hard-working white taxpayers to support them.” But if you believe that already, you listen to Gingrich and think, “That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about!”

Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Gingrich by quoting Jane Austen:

when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

Hence the sense of injury when politicians like Gingrich are accused of pandering to racists, when in fact they are and know that they are.

A few facts about Gingrich’s “food-stamp president” rhetoric and the way he tries to make the issue food stamps vs. paychecks:

  • White food-stamp recipients outnumber blacks almost 2-to-1. Percentage-wise, blacks are more likely to be on food stamps than whites, but it’s not a black issue.
  • About half of food-stamp households with children already have jobs.
  • Nationwide, the average per-person food stamp benefit is $134 a month. That might keep you from starving, but it’s not going to replace a job.

In short, there’s no reason to believe that cutting food stamps would motivate people to get jobs. And looking at the causality the other way, liberals also hope for a job-rich economy that makes food stamps unnecessary. The question is how to get there. If conservative policies created jobs, we wouldn’t have been on the brink of a depression at the end of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, open marriage (or polyamory) is topical again. Salon explores the ups and downs, and the NYT has a free-for-all.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is freaking out. Josh Marshall explains why with Gingrich’s national favorable/unfavorable graph (which doesn’t reproduce here).

As he galvanizes the most extreme elements in the Republican electorate, Gingrich’s unfavorability with the general electorate is spiking. Nate Silver referenced the same graph while saying Gingrich “would be one of the most unpopular candidates ever to be nominated by a major party.” (Gingrich’s favorability numbers have only gotten worse since Nate dismissed his chances last March.)

Real Clear Politics’ average of national polls has Obama narrowly ahead of Romney (47%-45%), while crushing Gingrich (50%-40%). But in the CNN exit polls, the South Carolina primary voters mainly looking for an Obama-defeating candidate picked Gingrich over Romney by a wider margin. He got 51% of those votes compared with 41% overall.

This is what happens when people believe their own propaganda. Tea Party Republicans claim they’re not a far-right fringe, they’re mainstream America. Believing that, they think mainstream America hates President Obama like they do. Gingrich does the best job of inspiring and channelling their hatred, so they think he must be the best candidate to send into the general election.

They’re kidding themselves. In the real world, even people who doubt Obama’s competence tend to like him personally. So going after Obama (or his wife or his kids or his dog) with nasty and racially polarizing rhetoric will backfire on the national stage. And while Republicans love to make fun of Obama’s teleprompter— another dog-whistle about the intelligence of blacks — Obama actually thinks on his feet quite well. In a debate, he won’t be the punching bag Gingrich supporters imagine.

Despite his disappointing showing in South Carolina and low national poll numbers, Rick Santorum is right to stay in the race. Here’s his scenario: Gingrich will crash again, Romney will be damaged goods — and then it’s Santorum or a brokered convention, which hasn’t happened in half a century.

Through the magic of video editing, Mitt Romney debates Martin Luther King.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Truth Vigilantes and other short notes

January 16, 2012 – 11:50 am

The most clueless post of the week came from the NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante? Brisbane was

looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

So if a “newsmaker” says the sky is green, should the Times let that stand? or explain to its readers that the sky is actually blue?

That post drew 327 comments and countless responses from bloggers and other pundits, almost unanimously (except for National Review) saying: If you have to ask that question, the Times is in worse trouble than we thought.

Brisbane wrote a follow-up claiming that we had all misunderstood the question, which prompted another avalanche of responses saying that we understood it perfectly.

Greg Sargent sums up current practice, which is to print a fact-check column once (maybe), but not reference it when a false claim gets repeated again and again. Result: “any Times customer reading [the false claims] comes away misled.”

Glenn Greenwald translates newsmaker to mean “those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems” and points out that critics of the newsmaking elite get a different treatment: “their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.”

Jay Rosen gives a long-term perspective:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years … the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false.

Salon’s Marcus Cederstrom asks the question I’ve been wondering about for weeks: What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?

In all the uproar about American Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, one point hasn’t gotten much attention: All the way back to George Washington, America has tried to maintain a code of honor for its troops. (We didn’t always succeed, but we always tried.) Why?

Here’s why: The American ideal is the citizen soldier who eventually rejoins civilized society. America’s fighting men and women are not supposed to be packs of jackals that we unleash on our enemies and then forget about. They are us, and when they’re done with the disagreeable job of war, we intend to welcome them home.

So when Dana Loesch says, “Come on, people, this is a war“, she may think she’s supporting our troops, but she isn’t. By implying that barbaric behavior is normal in our military, she’s undermining our soldiers’ eventual re-integration into civilian life.

If this is how Loesch pictures Marines, how will she feel when an ex-Marine moves in next door or wants to marry her little sister? Or has the distance between Marines and media stars grown so great that such possibilities are unthinkable now?

While I enjoy Jon Stewart’s pokes at our political system from the outside, nothing tops the way Stephen Colbert demonstrates its abusrdity from within.

When it became clear that unaccountable Super-PACs were going to dominate the 2012 election cycle, Colbert started one: Americans United for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow. It’s a stunt, but it’s not just a stunt. He really raised money and put ads on TV in Iowa.

This week, Colbert demonstrated the absurdity of Super-PACs that are devoted to one candidate (but allegedly don’t co-ordinate with that candidate’s campaign) by transferring his Super-PAC to Jon Stewart and then announcing his own candidacy for president. Colbert and Stewart worked out their “non-cooperation” agreement on national TV.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And now, the Super-PAC has the absurd anti-Romney attack ad Mitt the Ripper on the air in South Carolina: If Romney really believes corporations are people, then he was a serial killer during his time at Bain Capital.

It was amazing to watch how quickly and effectively the Republican establishment moved to shut down criticism of Romney’s “vulture capitalism“. TPM’s 100-seconds series captured it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The point here seems to be that capitalism transcends good and evil. To make any moral comment on Romney’s business practices is beyond the pale, and puts you on the road to Soviet Communism. Such a nihilistic argument is pretty weird for a party that claims to be the natural home of American Christians.

Dahlia Lithwick: “If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era.” We wouldn’t just see a loss of abortion rights, but “a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state.”

If you haven’t checked out Vi Hart’s YouTube channel, you’re missing the Internet’s best example of charming geekiness.

It’s always important on MLK Day, to remember just how radical King was. He didn’t promote a vague be-nice message, but took outside-the-current-mainstream stands on major issues.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged , , | Comments (1)

The Four Flavors of Republican

January 9, 2012 – 12:57 pm

As I’ve explained elsewhere, the news media does a good job at telling us what is new today, but a bad job of explaining the context-providing frames that the insiders have known all along.

That is showing up big-time in the coverage of the Republican presidential campaign. Let a new poll come out or one candidate launch a new sound bite at another, and CNN is all over it, whether it actually makes any difference or not. That’s how we wind up with so much coverage of manufactured events like August’s Iowa Straw Poll, which in retrospect did not even say much about last Tuesday’s Iowa Caucus, which in itself was a bit of a manufactured event.

On the other hand, the background truths that insiders take for granted are never “new”, so they don’t make headlines.

I thought I’d fill in one of those gaps by asking: What is this thing called “the Republican Party”? What are its components? How do they fit together? And how do the various candidates relate to them?

The four components. Republicans come in one of four basic flavors: NeoCons, Corporatists, Libertarians, and Theocrats. I don’t call them factions because the boundaries between them aren’t clear-cut. You can pitch many of the same pitch ideas to all four, but each requires its own spin.

Take global warming. All four flavors are potential climate-change deniers, but each requires its own argument: Tell Corporatists that regulating or taxing carbon will cut profits. Tell Libertarians that global warming is a conspiracy to impose world government. Theocrats will also buy the conspiracy angle, if you emphasize that the plot was concocted by the same evil scientists behind the evolution conspiracy. Tell NeoCons that any carbon restrictions we accept will work to the advantage of the Chinese.

But they aren’t just tribes speaking different languages. Their substantive differences show up most clearly on drugs. Libertarians want to legalize drugs, because what business is it of the government’s anyway? This position is anathema to the Theocrats, who see the government as the guardian of public morality. NeoCons fundamentally don’t care, while Corporatists would happily make money selling either heroin in elementary schools or helicopters to the DEA or both.

Get the idea? Now let’s go through them one by one.

  • NeoCons are the people who gave us the Iraq War. Their highest priority is that the United States remain the top military power in the world, and that we use our power to prevent the rise of any rival powers. Their #1 issue in this election is Iran. When a candidate says we have to do “whatever it takes” to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon, he (now that Bachmann has dropped out I’ll refer to candidates as he) is appealing for NeoCon support. Of all the remaining candidates, Newt Gingrich is the clearest NeoCon choice.
  • Corporatists champion the interests of corporations and want to weaken government, unions, or any other power that might resist corporate dominance. Often they borrow the individualistic rhetoric of the Libertarians, but their motivation is different: They want decisions made by individuals because individuals are no match for corporations. Mitt Romney was the corporatist candidate even before he said, “Corporations are people, my friend.“
  • Libertarians want government restricted to defending people and property against crime, defending the borders against invasion, and enforcing contracts. If you don’t want the government to restrict your neighbor’s right to build a nuclear power plant in his back yard, you’re a Libertarian and your candidate is Ron Paul.
  • Theocrats (a.k.a. Social Conservatives or the Religious Right) believe that morality is eternal and established by God, and that society will collapse if it diverges from this God-given script. Therefore the government should promote true morality and punish deviance. They are especially obsessed with anything that changes gender roles: abortion, gay rights, and even contraception.

It’s possible to organize them on two axes, as in the diagram: Corporatists and Libertarians want weak government, while Theocrats and NeoCons want government strong enough to control your bedroom and tap your phone. Libertarians and Theocrats have a populist/outsider mentality that is suspicious of experts and prone to conspiracy theories. Corporatists and NeoCons have an elitest/insider mentality, believing that people are stupid and need to be manipulated into doing what’s best. Insiders see outsiders as useful idiots; outsiders sense this attitude and resent it.

Trust and volatility. This coalition goes back to Reagan, who virtually invented the useful-idiot theory, using social issues as bright, shiny objects to get Theocrats’ attention, but not actually doing anything about them once in office. As Thomas Frank put it in What’s the Matter With Kansas?:

Values may “matter most” to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. … Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists, receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

The outsider groups have been catching on lately, which is how they turned the tables in the 2010 elections: The Tea Party was supposedly all about economic issues, but once in office the first priority was restricting abortion.

That’s why the Republican electorate has been so jittery in the 2012 cycle, jumping from candidate to candidate and asking who the “real” conservative is. Everybody is afraid of getting played — except for the Corporatists, who have complete confidence in Romney.

Agree/Disagree. Four groups means six relationships.

  • Corporatist/NeoCon. Agree: Control the world’s oil. Install pro-capitalist, pro-globalization governments. Disagree: Iran (Corporatists want to make money trading with them) and immigration (NeoCons worry about the border, Corporatists want cheap labor).
  • Corporatist/Libertarian. Agree: Cut taxes and regulations, including regulations on campaign contributions. Disagree: convergence of Wall Street and Washington (Libertarians want to abolish the Fed, Corporatists want cheap loans from it).
  • Corporatist/Theocrat. A diagonal relationship; mostly they can co-operate because their issues have so little to do with each other. Agree: oppose anti-poverty programs, see wealth as a sign of God’s blessing. Disagree: globalization.
  • NeoCon/Libertarian. Another diagonal relationship, but more fraught. Agree: on substance, not much. Disagree: foreign wars, civil liberties.
  • NeoCon/Theocrat. Onward Christian soldiers. Agree: American exceptionalism, Pro-Israel, anti-Muslim, no gays in the military. Disagree: NeoCon indifference to social issues.
  • Libertarian/Theocrat. Agree: against liberal judges. Disagree: government as a moral watchdog.

Unifying rhetoric. Talking out of four sides of your mouth is a good trick, even for a professional politician. So spinmeisters have developed variety of rhetorical tropes so that the same words are heard differently by different people.

To give just one example, Theocrats and Libertarians share attitudes, but not policies. Both are nostalgic: Libertarians for the Robber Baron era of the late 1800s, Theocrats for the Great Awakening of the 1700s.

Worshipful rhetoric about the Founders is designed to appeal to both. Theocrats believe the Founders established a Christian Republic, while Libertarians identify the Founders with limited government — too limited to get into your bedroom or your medicine cabinet. So a candidate need only say “the Founders” and each group will fill in the picture it likes.

Fault lines. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush unified the four flavors, but this year no candidate does. NeoCons can’t support Ron Paul, Libertarians can’t support Rick Santorum, and Theocrats can’t support Mitt Romney. That’s why Republican insiders keep having fantasies about some new candidate — it’s basically the same fantasy they had about Rick Perry before he turned out to be an idiot: a tough-talking, pro-business, Christian Reconstructionist who wants to abolish the EPA.

Each non-fantasy candidate exposes a different fault line, so expect Obama to run differently depending on who the Republican nominee is. His increasing economic populism of late is evidence that he expects to run against Romney.

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Iowa Preview

January 2, 2012 – 12:59 pm

Given how accurate Nate Silver was in predicting the primaries in 2008, my basic rule of thumb says: Whatever polls can tell you, Nate has already figured out. His Iowa model is here. Last I looked it had Mitt Romney as the favorite, narrowly ahead of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

So I start with Nate’s projections and then ask, “What can’t polls tell you?” In caucuses, a lot of factors are impossible to poll, like: Who’s going to show up? A caucus is a bigger time commitment than just voting — it’s an actual business meeting of the local party and takes all evening. So Republicans who are busy Tuesday night or aren’t that interested in politics aren’t going to turn out. On the other hand, all voters willing to change their registrations to Republican are eligible to vote at a Republican caucus, so a certain number of Independents and even Democrats (who nobody has been polling) are going to be there.

Since a caucus is a face-to-face event, a candidate’s supporters get one more chance to convince the undecided. Lots of people (41% in the final Des Moines Register poll) say they could still be convinced to change their minds — how do you poll for that?

So if you want to go beyond what’s in the polls, you need to ask: Who are these mercurial voters? What’s going to make them enthusiastic enough to give up an evening of their lives? And why might they change their minds at the last minute?

For weeks, reporters have been combing the plains of Iowa looking for the typical Republican caucus voter. To me, the one that sounds most authentic comes by way of TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro: Curtis Jacob is a religious-right social conservative who voted for Huckabee last time around and thought a few weeks ago that he would vote for Herman Cain.

Jacob describes a three-step process of deciding who to support. First comes the ideological hurdle — the candidate’s got to say the right things. This is a non-factor in this election, because (other than Ron Paul’s isolationism) it’s hard to tell the difference between the candidates’ positions.

Then there’s the authenticity hurdle: “ok, is this person real? — are they the same in person as opposed to the speeches they give?” Jacob eliminates Romney and Huntsman, apparently because he believes their hearts really aren’t in all the social conservative positions they’re taking (and maybe — he doesn’t say this — because they’re Mormons).

Finally he asks who can win.

And that’s why the yo-yo in the polls, because, ok, we think this is what we want, is electable then they get beat up and we think, ‘oh, maybe not.’ So then we go for the next one.

The candidates who have been yo-yoing are the ones he’s choosing among. (Romney has steadily polled around 25% while Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich have each had a boom/bust cycle.)

Of the candidates in Jacob’s acceptable pool, Paul and Santorum are having the final surges. Each has an additional advantage: Santorum’s surge has come so late that nobody is running negative ads against him, and Paul is going to pick up votes from unpolled Democrats who want to end the wars and repeal the Patriot Act.

If Jacob is really typical of undecided Iowa Republicans, you’d expect to see support bleed away from Bachmann, Perry, and Gingrich at the last minute and flow to Santorum or Paul. The final polls (showing Romney narrowly leading) probably accelerate that process. The most persuasive caucus-day message is going to say: If you’re not voting for Santorum or Paul, you’re handing the victory to Romney.

Any of the three could win, but if I had to bet, I’d say Santorum.

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Your 2012 Deep Background Briefing

December 12, 2011 – 1:48 pm

2012 is an unusual election year. Some elections revolve around a single issue: 1860 was about slavery, 1932 about the Depression. 2002 (and to a lesser extent 2004) was about terrorism. 2006 was about the Iraq War. 2010 was about rising government spending and debt.

Some elections, particularly re-elections of incumbent presidents, are ratifications of a general direction, like Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign from 1984 or the Democratic landslides of 1964 and 1936.

There’s always a chance that an emergency will take over an election.  No matter what anybody had planned in 2008, everything changed when the economy started collapsing in late September. Obama probably would have won anyway, but the election turned into a landslide because the country wanted a calm voice and a steady hand. McCain’s “maverick” image was suddenly exactly wrong.

Barring an emergency, 2012 is about a mood: anxiety.

Obviously, President Obama can’t run a ratification campaign in a year when there is a large and growing sense that the country is on the wrong track. But at the same time, this isn’t an issue election. Unemployment, inequality, debt, corruption, national security, health care, climate change, moral decay, and so on are all serious concerns for many voters, but in 2012 they are mainly screens onto which to project a much more diffuse fear that our country is broken — that whatever the issue, we are no longer capable even of grappling with it, much less solving it.

By its nature, anxiety is full of contradictory impulses: Any program that isn’t radical seems like re-arranging the Titanic’s deck chairs, but any particular radical change seems like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. We want a hero to ride in and save us, and yet we are cynical about heroes on horseback. We look back fondly to a brighter, more confident era, and yet we resonate with Jack Burden’s cynical challenge to a nostalgic Anne Stanton in the classic political novel All the King’s Men:

What you mean is that it was a fine, beautiful time back then, but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time, why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and beautiful if there wasn’t something in that time which wasn’t fine and beautiful? Answer that one.

Parties. An anxiety election is an opportunity for the party out of power, but which party is that?

A Democrat is president, but Republicans control the House and have the Senate blocked up with filibusters. An activist Republican majority on the Supreme Court keeps inventing new rights for corporations. Several swing states went Republican in 2010, and the radical programs of the new governors are wildly unpopular.

What makes Americans most anxious is that no one seems to have power. We spent the summer agonizing about the debt ceiling and how to lower the deficit, but in the end that issue got punted to the so-called supercommittee, which deadlocked. Neither party can force its view on the other, yet attempts to compromise also fail.

The Republican presidential opportunity. The challenger has an advantage in an anxiety election, but seizing that advantage requires threading a needle. You have to be on both sides of several contradictions: You are an outsider, but you are experienced; you’re a scrapper who will do whatever it takes to win, but you don’t fight dirty; you’re uncompromising but not rigid; principled but pragmatic; radical but not dangerous; able to get something done in Washington, but not willing to play the old game.

A Republican wins the presidency in November if he (we’ll ignore Michele Bachmann) represents Do Something Different and makes Obama represent Keep Doing What We’re Doing. That vague referendum would be a landslide for Do Something Different.

So the ideal Republican message would create the illusion of specificity without actually being specific. It could embrace a subtly self-contradictory slogan (like Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” from 2000) and embody vague themes (like the Hope and Change of Obama’s 2008 campaign). The perfect message would resemble Nixon’s in 1968: He confidently claimed to have a plan to get us out of Vietnam, but had reasons for not revealing its details.

That’s basically what worked in 2010: Republicans promised to “cut spending” without saying which spending. They implied that the federal budget was full of bridges-to-nowhere that could be eliminated without hurting anybody, but didn’t have to identify them.

Unfortunately for Republican candidates, that perfect November message flops completely in the primaries. The party is firmly in the hands of its radical base, to whom even the Republican establishment represents Keep Doing What We’re Doing.

The base is afraid of compromise and wants to nail candidates down on specifics. So it’s not enough to endorse a theme like traditional American values; a candidate has to oppose same-sex marriage and gays in the military. He can’t just be religious, he has to be a strong Christian who wants kids in the public schools to pray and learn creationism. Environmental pragmatism and balancing short-term economic interests against long-term environmental harm — that’s not good enough. The candidate must promise to abolish the EPA and agree that climate change is a scam.

Social Security and Medicare are so complicated that they are perfect for a Nixonian I-have-a-plan claim, but even Mitt Romney has been driven to endorse Paul Ryan’s voucher system for Medicare.

The Republican base is showing its own symptoms of anxiety. Again and again they have jumped at the vague idea of a hero on horseback, but then been disappointed when they tore into the details of the person and the plan. As long as Rick Perry was “the Jobs Governor” or Herman Cain was an inspirational biography plus a 9-9-9 plan, they rode high. Closer inspection has been fatal to both.

How Obama Can Win. Obama’s calm manner is well suited to an anxiety election, but it won’t be enough, even if his opponent looks scary. Even a radical challenger (like Reagan) could win in a year with a big wrong-path majority (like 1980).

Usually, though, an incumbent president facing a big wrong-path majority also faces a damaging primary campaign, like Carter’s against Ted Kennedy in 1980 or Johnson’s against Gene McCarthy in 1968. But not this year. The Left hasn’t been happy with Obama (see my own Barack, Can We Talk?), but after seeing the Tea Party governors like Scott Walker, few liberals are willing to risk helping the Republicans win the presidency.

Ditto for liberal third-party challengers like Nader in 2000 or Henry Wallace in 1948. Even those of us who lament the corrupting influence of Goldman Sachs or how many War-on-Terror abuses Obama has ratified — we can’t claim that it makes no difference which party wins.

So even if the Left is not happy, it will be united and even motivated in the fall.

Assuming a less-than-perfect Republican challenger, Obama’s winning message has these pieces.

1. I’ve done more than you think. The model here is an op-ed in Tuesday’s LA Times, in which a woman apologizes to President Obama for turning against him.

I’m sorry I didn’t do enough of my own research to find out what promises the president has made good on. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that he really has stood up for me and my family, and for so many others like us.

The reason? She was diagnosed with breast cancer and discovered that the Affordable Care Act makes it possible for her to get health insurance. Pre-ACA, she would have been uninsurable and might well have lost everything.

For decades, health care has been like the weather — everybody talked about it, but nobody succeeded in doing anything. You could wish for more or better than the ACA, but against the alternative of continuing to do nothing (and all the Republican proposals amount to doing nothing), ObamaCare looks pretty good. Voters may have hated the horse-trading process of passing the ACA, but they will love the personal stories of the people it is already helping.

In foreign policy, Obama ended our combat mission in Iraq and finally nailed Osama bin Laden. He helped the Libyans overthrow Gaddafi on their own and didn’t involve us in another Iraq-style mess. The trump card of Bush defenders was always to say, “He kept us safe” after 9-11. Well, we’ve been equally safe under Obama.

Obama gets his lowest marks on the economy, but even there he looks good if you remember just how bad things were when he took office. Expect to see more of this graph:

2. I’m on your side. Preventing big cuts in Social Security and Medicare, wanting to raise taxes on millionaires — people support that stuff. It’s going to help a lot that swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida have seen how Republican governors grind down the working class and favor the wealthy.

3. You like me. Even surveys that show a low job-approval rating show that people like Obama personally. The Republican base — the folks who forward emails about his Kenyan birth and his Muslim faith — want to see red-meat attacks against him. But swing voters don’t.

4. I’m running against Congress. This was the Truman strategy in 1948. Obama’s approval ratings hover in the 40s, but Congress’ are in the teens. And if voters blame Congressional Republicans for the gridlock in Washington, then Obama becomes the do-something-different candidate.

5. My plans are better than their plans. This is where the Republican’s nomination battle is going to work against them. If Obama can make the Republican candidate stand for the specific policies he endorsed to get nominated, rather than Do Something Different, he’ll win.

A lot of moderates who aren’t usually single-issue voters will discover that certain Republican positions are deal-breakers. Can you really vote for a candidate who wants to do nothing about global warming? Or roll back gay rights that already exist and don’t seem to be hurting anybody? Or take away collective bargaining rights? Undo child labor laws? Automatically treat Hispanics or Muslims like suspects? Define a fertilized ovum as a person, which turns a doctor-patient discussion of abortion into a murder conspiracy? Or privatize Social Security and replace Medicare with a voucher program?

How far do they go? A lot hinges on how long the Republican nomination stays in doubt, and how far right the nominee has to go. Their ideal winning scenario — that an early consensus would form around a candidate with an ambiguous record like Romney’s — is already not happening.  If candidates are still competing for Tea Party votes in April and May, they’ll have a hard time coming back to get moderate votes in November.

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