Tag Archives: Republicans

Where Occupy Goes Next and other short notes

November 28, 2011 – 1:18 pm

With winter coming and mayors prepared to unleash the police as ruthlessly as they can get away with, debate has turned to where the Occupy movement goes next.

Partly this is about constructing an agenda. (Michael Moore’s seems fairly typical.) But Glenn Greenwald writes:

I disagree with the prevailing wisdom that OWS should begin formulating specific legislative demands and working to elect specific candidates. I have no doubt that many OWS protesters will ultimately vote and even work for certain candidates — and that makes sense — but the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it.

while Julian Sanchez disagrees:

protest, however vital as a consciousness raising tool, can only be a preparation for the more humdrum enterprise of convincing your neighbors with sustained arguments (or being convinced yourself), electing candidates, and all the rest. To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like.

Some Democratic politicians would like Occupy to raise enthusiasm for them the way that the Tea Party has for the Republicans, but movement activists are wary of being co-opted. Van Jones is recruiting (presumably Democratic) candidates “to run under this 99% banner“, provoking Occupy DC’s Kevin Zeese to write “Van Jones Can’t Occupy Us“.

Cenk Uygur has announced Wolf-PAC as a vehicle for pushing not candidates but issues like a constitutional amendment against corporate involvement in politics.

Mitt Romney’s first ad of this cycle quotes President Obama as saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

The problem: Obama was quoting a John McCain aide in 2008, not talking about his own 2012 campaign.

A Rick Perry ad quotes Obama as saying, “We’ve been a little bit lazy I think over the last couple of decades.” Perry replies: “That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans have gotten lazy?”

And Romney piles on: “[Obama] said that Americans are lazy. I don’t think that describes Americans.”

The problem: Again, context. The fuller Obama quote makes it clear what he means: Previous administrations have been lazy about trying to attract overseas investment in the U.S., and he’s trying to correct that in his administration.

Well, if that’s how the game is played now, let’s play it. ThinkProgress assembles a collection of Mitt Romney “quotes”.

This speaks for itself:

And this (the world’s lightest material) is just cool:

Does it seem to you that conservatives have the advantage in the scurrilous-viral-email department? They do.

The U.C. Davis pepper-spraying cop has become an iconic image. A whole tumblr is devoted to photo-shopping him into all the other iconic images.

I’m becoming a fan of Noah Smith’s economic blog Noahpinion. This article raises an interesting thought: What if the values conservatives claim to love (hard work, individual responsibility, etc.) are promoted better by a liberal welfare state than by a conservative dog-eat-dog utopia?

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It’s Mitt Romney’s Economy

October 31, 2011 – 12:14 pm

One of the major debates of the 2010 election was about whose bad economy this was: Did the mess belong to Barack Obama now, or was he still just mopping up after the disaster that was George W. Bush? Despite the merits of their case, the Democrats lost that argument, and most of Congress along with it.

As we move towards 2012, the cover article in the current New York Magazine (doesn’t young Mitt look like Mad Men‘s Don Draper?) raises an intriguing third explanation: Maybe it’s been Mitt Romney’s economy all along.

That claim seems like a stretch the first time you hear it, but it makes sense. Our 1% economy didn’t just come from government, it’s also the result of a revolution in the way corporations behave. And one of the most decorated veterans of that revolution is Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with efficiency. Whether or not you think a corporation is “efficient” depends on what you think corporations are supposed to do. Romney’s revolutionary cadre of young management consultants believed that the sole purpose of a corporation was to make money for its owners — a view that is orthodox in American business today, but wasn’t in the 1970s. (It still isn’t in many other capitalist countries, like Germany.)

Whenever you change the definition of efficiency, you’re going to look around and discover lots of inefficiency, because nobody has even been trying to be efficient by your new definition. That’s what Romney saw when he came on the scene in 1975. Corporations were inefficient in all sorts of ways: Too many were unfocused conglomerates, assembled more to gratify egos than to make money. They tried to do too many things and failed to make the most productive use of their resources.

But above all, they had too many employees and paid them too much. Efficiency demanded that this be fixed, and vast profits awaited whoever would fix it.

As the Economist points out, Romney can’t claim all the credit for this transformation — otherwise he’d be Buffett/Gates rich — but nonetheless he is typical of the class of people who can. Romney worked for the consulting group Bain & Company and in 1983 led their spin-off Bain Capital.

Every business story begins with a proposition, and the one that launched Bain Capital was the notion that the partners might do better if they stopped simply advising companies and starting buying and running the firms themselves.

One obstacle to efficiency at the taken-over companies was the loyalty that some managers felt towards their workers and middle managers, but Romney had a solution for that.

In 1986, Bain Capital bought a struggling division of Firestone that made truck wheels and rims and renamed it ­Accuride. Bain took a group of managers whose previous average income had been below $100,000 and gave them performance incentives. This type and degree of management compensation was also unusual, but here it led to startling results: ­According to an account written by a Bain & Company fellow, the managers quickly helped to reorganize two plants, consolidating operations—which meant, inevitably, the shedding of unproductive labor—and when the company grew in efficiency, these managers made $18 million in shared earnings. The equation was simple: The men who increased the worth of the corporation deserved a bigger and bigger percentage of its spoils. In less than two years, when Bain Capital sold the company, it had turned an initial $5 million investment into a $121 million return.

The poster child here is the paper company AmPad. Romney bought it, took it private, re-organized, and then took it public again.

By 2001, five years after the company had been taken public, it had filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets. But Bain Capital made more than $100 million from AmPad for itself and its investors.

In just about every way, Romney and Bain Capital were among the trailblazers of the new economy: They destroyed both blue and white-collar jobs, cut pay at the bottom and raised it at the top, and made money even on companies that failed.

How much further ahead of his time could Romney have been?

In 2002, he became governor of Massachusetts, where he turned his attention to health care. In a rational world, RomneyCare would be his political claim to fame. Working with a Democratic legislature, Romney crafted a program that has resulted in only 4.6% of residents under 65 lacking health insurance (compared to 26.5% in Texas). But RomneyCare was the model for ObamaCare, so now Republicans hate it and Romney can’t take credit for it.

But the choice of health care as Romney’s original issue gives a lot of insight:

But what separates Romney’s plan from Obama’s—and gives some clues about his potential presidency—is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve.

The picture that emerges is a little different from the one his Republican rivals paint: It isn’t that Romney changes his principles when the wind changes. It’s that principles are not fundamental to his thinking. He exhibits

the clinical separation of decision-making from ideology, the detachment of those decisions from moral consequence, a persistent blind spot for people as people.

That makes him an odd choice for a Republican Party that is more ideological and moralistic than it has ever been. And yet (though he is persistently mired in second place in the polls — seemingly behind a different leader each month), the InTrade predictive market is giving him a 70% chance to win the nomination, compared to 5.4% for current poll leader Herman Cain.

The Republican electorate longs for an authentic conservative (Bachmann) who has both charisma (Cain) and gravitas (Gingrich). But given that there isn’t one, they may have to settle for an efficient problem-solver who will say whatever they want to hear.

Next summer and fall, there will be a battle of narratives about the economy. Both parties will say that the economy is bad, but they will disagree about why. Is it bad because it is the Obama economy, hobbled by deficits, taxes, and regulations? Or is it bad because it is the Romney economy — the economy of paper profits and no jobs, the economy of the 1%?

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Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes

September 26, 2011 – 11:17 am

Whenever human rights advance, bigots feel victimized because they are no longer entitled to treat people badly. Case in point: This editorial is “concerned” about the rights of anti-gay military chaplains now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history.

Glenden Brown wrote a full takedown on One Utah, so I’ll just sum up: At the root of the chaplains’ complaint is a fundamental misunderstanding of their role. Their paychecks are not issued by God or by their denominations. They work for the U.S. military and their duty is to serve our troops. If you bear that mission in mind, all their issues evaporate.

Chaplains who aren’t right-wing Christians have always felt a tension between serving the soldiers and pushing their own beliefs or the dogma of their particular sect. (Examples: this Quaker chaplain and this Unitarian Universalist.) If right-wing Christian chaplains are feeling a tension now too, that isn’t discrimination.

This weekend I attended (via the Web) Lawrence Lessig’s Conference on the Constitutional Convention, which was interesting both for outside-the-box thinking about political change and because it raised the possibility of a left/right alliance for basic reforms. (Lessig’s co-host was Mark Meckler from Tea Party Patriots.) Details next week.

Surprise! Some of the things said by the Republican candidates in Thursday’s debate were not true.

In fact, the moment that “won the debate” for Herman Cain was also the most outrageous lie of the evening: He claimed that if ObamaCare had been in force in 2006, he would have died from colon cancer because “government bureaucrats” would have delayed his treatment.

Reality: Cain is a multi-millionaire businessman with private health insurance. He will continue to have the same insurance under the Affordable Care Act. And even if insurance-company (not government) bureaucrats get in his way, nothing in the ACA prevents Cain himself from paying for whatever treatment he wants.

Kate Conway elaborates:

It’s kind of twisted that Cain uses his against-the-odds recovery to condemn a policy that could help others less fortunate than him beat similar obstacles.

And Kevin Drum draws the conclusion:

[T]his is a real problem for liberals. Sure, we cherry-pick evidence, we spin world events, and we impose our worldview when we talk about policy. Everyone does that. But generally speaking, our opinion leaders don’t go on national TV, look straight into the camera, and just outright lie about stuff. Theirs do. … It’s awfully hard to fight stuff this brazen … especially when the mainstream press no longer seriously polices this stuff, and isn’t much believed even when it does.

I used to worry that the Republican primary campaign would dominate the airwaves the way Obama/Clinton did after McCain locked up the nomination in 2008. But so far that’s working in the Democrats’ favor. Each debate offers new evidence that the GOP has left mainstream America far behind: cheering for executions, calling to let the uninsured die, and (Thursday) booing an American soldier in Iraq because he has come out as gay now that the law allows him to do so.

William Kristol reported getting an email from “a bright young conservative” saying “We sound like crazy people.” Noticed that, did you?

Crazies can infiltrate any crowd, but here’s the real problem: At none of these moments did a candidate stand up to the mob and defend basic decency. How hard would it have been to tell the gay soldier: “Although we disagree on some issues, I honor your service to our country”?

Rick Santorum’s actual answer to the gay soldier was incoherent, and raised the “special rights” canard. David Tharp refutes:

[DADT repeal] doesn’t give gay and lesbian soldiers any “special privileges;” it only allows those soldiers to be honest about who they are. Straight soldiers are allowed to wear wedding rings, talk about their spouses and acknowledge their sexuality. Now, finally, gay and lesbian soldiers have the same rights.

Conservative commentators were ready to bury Rick Perry after three bad debates, and his nationwide standing against President Obama is slipping. There was some question whether rank-and-file Republicans agreed with their commentariat, but after Perry lost a Florida straw poll to Herman Cain and a Michigan poll to Romney, maybe they do.

I ran across a lot of amusing political images this week, like this Rick Perry poster (“because George W. Bush didn’t do enough damage”). Or this pie chart explaining the consequences of gay marriage. The most amusing same-sex marriage signs are collected here.

This looks cool as a poster: “I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one.” And I loved: “They only call it class warfare when we fight back.“

You should never read too much into the phase-one trials of any treatment, but this NYT story of a miraculous leukemia remission via an immune-system treatment is pretty amazing.

Pro Publica looked at the question of whether regulations kill jobs. Conclusion: Not really.

Add this to my continuing series on Libertarianism: SF author David Brin uses conservative/libertarian principles to argue against “the idolatry of property”.

For Brin, markets are a means, not an end. The Soviet failure taught him that an economy is too complicated for central control; markets allocate resources better through distributed processing. But when a handful of corporations come to dominate an economy and their CEOs all play golf together, you’re back to central control.

Jon Stewart covers the plight of “this nation’s most vulnerable wealthy”. If only a Subway mogul could find some inexpensive way to feed his family …

If you’re feeling excessively cheerful today and want fix that problem, look at Doom by TNR’s John Judis. The governments of the world are repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, and the only policies that might turn things around are politically impossible.

Surely everybody on FaceBook has seen this by now, since it went viral sometime last week. But new Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has captured the liberal-populist message better than anybody so far.

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A Primary Issues Guide

August 29, 2011 – 9:50 am

The old conventional wisdom was that competitive primaries are bad for the party. The best strategy was to unite early around a single candidate, so that a long negative campaign wouldn’t turn your nominee into damaged goods before the other party even took a shot.

2008 blew that up. The Obama/Clinton battle went on forever, but it did a lot of good things: registered voters, held the spotlight, and got John McCain out of the headlines from February to June. Any idea Obama and Clinton shared started to sound obvious.

There’s still a chance that the Republican 2012 candidates will tear each other to shreds, but it could also play out the other way: A long primary campaign could make their shared misinformation sound like common sense.

So here are some issues that are already coming up and being distorted. The Republican candidates are unlikely to vet each other on this stuff, so it’s important that Democrats not lose sight of the real story.

The South Carolina Boeing plant. South Carolina is an early primary state, so we’re going to hear a lot about his issue. The National Labor Relations Board is blocking Boeing from opening a 3,800-worker plant in SC. This Rick Perry quote is the standard Republican-candidate spin:

[President Obama] stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-business cronies who want to dictate to a private company, Boeing, where they can build a plant. No president, no president should kill jobs in South Carolina

Two facts are in danger of getting lost: First, this isn’t about creating jobs, it’s about moving jobs from one state to another, as states race to the bottom in worker protection. The Boeing jobs would otherwise be at their existing plant in Puget Sound, Washington.

Second, this is a rule-of-law issue. It’s illegal to move jobs purely to punish your current workers for unionizing or striking. Normally this is a hard rule to enforce, because businesses can fabricate hundreds of reasons why they want to manufacture here rather than there.

Unfortunately for Boeing, though, it is managed by idiots who admitted what they were doing in public. The NLRB’s complaint says Boeing CEO Jim McNerney:

made an extended statement regarding … moving the 787 Dreamliner work to South Carolina due to “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”

and another Boeing official told a Seattle Times reporter:

The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.

A lawyer for the International Association of Machinists writes:

In a case where, as here, the employer has admitted its unlawful motive, the failure of the NLRB to issue a complaint would raise serious questions about the continued right of America’s workers to engage in collective activity.

Regulation moratorium. Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” is one of those ideas that sounds unobjectionable, but is actually a disaster. Why? Start at the beginning: Fundamentally, the government regulates business to prevent it from doing bad things — killings its workers or customers, poisoning waterways, adulterating the food supply, and so on.

Naturally — or at least it seems natural if you’re a sociopath — business resists this narrowing of its options. So it takes advantage of any loophole it can find (or its lobbyists can create) to keep doing profitable damage. The government then tries to plug those loopholes, business finds new ones, and they go round and round. That’s why regulations get so complicated.

A moratorium on regulations means that government surrenders this fight. Any loopholes business finds, it keeps. Good news for them. Bad news for workers, customers, the people downstream, and anybody who eats.

RomneyCare. The model for the Affordable Care Act (i.e., ObamaCare) was RomneyCare in Massachusetts. The basic structure — private health insurance that the government subsidizes and mandates — is a Republican idea that goes back the Heritage Foundation in the 90s.

Romney tries not to talk about his own greatest accomplishment, but all the other Republican candidates insist that RomneyCare has been a disaster. In fact, a recent poll showed 63% in Massachusetts support the law. When Scott Brown won his surprise Senate victory in 2009, he supported the law. You can’t get anywhere in Massachusetts by telling people you’re going to repeal RomneyCare.

Global warming. Mitt Romney used to take the side of science in this issue (even if he dragged his heels about doing anything), but even he is backing down, leaving Jon Huntsman as the only pro-science Republican candidate.

The rest compete to be the most vigorous climate-change denier. So far Rick Perry is winning with his McCarthy-like charge that “a substantial number of scientists” have “manipulated data”. (Name one, Rick.)

Fortunately, fact-checkers are showing some backbone here. (The Washington Post awarded Perry its lowest truth-rating of four pinocchios.) Even Fox News’ Clayon Morris admitted that Fox fact-checkers had found “Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water” before going on to say “but it doesn’t matter.”

The stimulus. Republican candidates unite around the idea that the stimulus failed. But check out this chart of private-sector employment.

Bush-Obama-Jobs-Chart

What’s killing job growth is that we’ve lost government jobs: The federal stimulus was never big enough to counter-act job cuts by the states.

I’m sure I left a few issues out. If you think of them, add a comment.

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Horse Race 2012

August 22, 2011 – 12:13 pm

I’m usually reluctant to write about the presidential horserace, because it already gets over-covered in the corporate media, at the expense of covering who the candidates are and what they propose to do.

On the other hand, the media also tends to get the horse race wrong, which tempts me to comment. Recently, for example, pundits have been analyzing “what went wrong” with Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy, never admitting that it was a mistake to give him so much coverage in the first place. In truth, they could just as fruitfully analyze what went wrong with your candidacy or mine, since neither of us is going to be president either.

(I wrote about Pawlenty because his campaign videos illustrated an important propaganda technique.)

So (with proper apologies and promises of future restraint) I’m going to plunge into some horserace coverage about the 2012 election.

President Obama. President Obama’s job approval rating hit an all-time low of 40% this week. Still, he is polling well — or at least not badly — against his potential 2012 opponents: In three states a Republican challenger needs to win — North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado — Obama is “edging Mitt Romney and keeping clear leads on the rest of the field”.

So Obama’s approval-rating slump seems less of a personal rejection than a symptom of a general wave of pessimism with the economy and disgust with American politics following the debt-ceiling debacle. Things are bad and the President seems to have no solution, but neither does anybody else.

Nate Silver (who I consider the best poll interpreter in the country) is struck more by the breadth of Obama’s slump than its size. During 2011 his approval rating has fallen among all income groups and in all regions of the country; among whites, blacks, and Hispanics; among conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats.

The drop among liberal Democrats is fairly small — about 3% — something you would never guess from progressive blogs like Hullabaloo. Nate sums up like this:

Although many leading liberal voices were unhappy with the debt ceiling deal that Mr. Obama struck with Republicans this month (justifiably, in my view), this just isn’t showing up in a big way among the liberal rank-and-file.

One thing to keep in mind is that if most liberal Democrats had strongly approved of Mr. Obama’s performance before, then a “downgrade” in their views of him might be toward less enthusiastic approval, rather than to outright disapproval. Although these liberal Democrats might not vote against Mr. Obama, less enthusiastic support could translate into reduced turnout, volunteerism and fund-raising for the president’s re-election campaign.

Count me among that number. I’ve gone from an enthusiastic Obama supporter to someone who says “at least he’s not batshit crazy”.

The Republican Savior Search. Republicans are currently going through what Democrats suffered in 2004, when Bush seemed beatable, but we lurched from one “savior” to the next because we just couldn’t find the right person to run against him. Howard Dean was going to save us, and then he wasn’t. Wesley Clark was popular until the exact moment he entered the race, and then we started longing for Hillary Clinton or Al Gore.

This year, Rick Perry is playing the Wesley Clark role. He was supposed to be the answer for Republicans who think that Michele Bachmann is unelectable (like Howard Dean), Mitt Romney is too establishment and too phony (like John Kerry), and (in spite of previous boomlets for Donald Trump and Herman Cain) everybody else just seems too small or too boring.

Then Rick ruined it all by announcing his candidacy. Suddenly he was every bit as crazy as Bachmann, a corrupt crony capitalist, a Shariah sympathizer, a porno investor, “an idiot“, a proponent of “big government overreach” and somehow simultaneously “the second coming of George Bush” and at war with the former Bushies. [In fairness: Think Progress explains why the porno charge is overblown.]

So now Republicans daydream of new saviors: Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan.

The Republican problem in a nutshell is that no actual candidate polls as well against Obama as the generic Republican. This is similar to the phenomenon that generic spending cuts are popular, while specific cuts aren’t. The generic Republican candidate runs on a generic platform that cuts spending without cutting anything important. Actual candidates have to be more specific.

The path to beating Obama is clear: He’s vulnerable on the economy, which everybody is disappointed in. The Republican candidate needs to talk about creating jobs while obscuring the fact that none of the Republican ideas created jobs when President Bush tried them. That’s why I was briefly worried when Perry cast himself as “the jobs governor”. The we-did-it-in-Texas message is deceptive, but it could fly.

The Republican problem is to get a candidate nominated without taking far-outside-the-mainstream positions, particularly on social issues. You can’t run against the gays any more. Prayer is good, but urging the public to pray for rain is wacky (especially if God turns you down). And abortions are strangely like guns: Most Americans think there are too many of them, but they still want their family to be able to get one as a last resort.

Other red-meat conservative issues fail nationally, too. People may not want to make big sacrifices to avoid global warming, but Perry’s scientists-are-frauds claim or Bachmann’s promise to “lock the doors” and “turn off the lights” at the EPA are going to scare more people than they attract. Illegal immigration worries many whites, but Republicans can’t win without at least 1/3 of the Hispanic vote.

So a winning Republican needs to wink-and-nod to the extremists while not scaring everybody else. Only Romney (OK, Huntsman also, for all his chances are worth) is trying to walk that line, and I think he could beat Obama if things continue to look bad economically. But the only way he wins the nomination is if Perry, Bachmann and maybe Palin split the wacko vote in the primaries.

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The Dog Whistle Defined

July 25, 2011 – 11:02 am

I’ve been ignoring Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy because the voters are. But this campaign video is worth watching purely for educational purposes. If you’ve ever wondered what the term dog whistle means, this is it:

According to Wikipedia, a dog whistle is “coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.”

The targeted subgroup here are evangelical Christians. The general public will find the intro (where Pawlenty and his wife testify to their faith) dull but unobjectionable. The Pawlenties believe in something; good for them. Most will get bored and stop watching. But this lengthy testimony tells Evangelicals to get out their codebooks to decrypt phrases that will follow, like:

  • people of faith. If you’re a Muslim, Jew, liberal Christian, or even a Catholic, you may think you’re a person of faith. You aren’t. Evangelicals do not use people of faith in this ecumenical way. To them, the phrase is a synonym for evangelical Christian.
  • God. Similarly, you may think that the Pawlenties are talking about your God. They aren’t. If you worship somebody other than the Lord Jesus Christ (as He is envisioned by conservative Protestants), you don’t believe in God.
  • nation under God. Not the ecumenical meaning (that America is united under a larger truth rather than divided among warring sects). Instead, this means that only a government dominated by right-wing Christians is legitimate.
  • the Founders. Not the historical politicians who wrote the Constitution. The Founders are latter-day prophets who were inspired by God to create a Christian nation. They wielded a divine authority similar to Moses or St. Paul.
  • faith in the public square. Rather than every American’s right to profess his or her beliefs in public, this phrase refers to the special right of Christians to commandeer public resources to promote their religion.

So later, when Pawlenty says:

The separation of church and state was intended to protect people of faith from government, not government from people of faith. … I think the Founders of this country made it very clear: We were founded as a nation under God. … So it’s very clear what roadmap they put out for us as it relates to faith in the public square.

codebook-holders hear him agreeing that Evangelicals have inherited the prophetic authority of the Founders. America is their country, the power and resources of the government are theirs to use, and the rest of us should be grateful for their tolerance, such as it is.

Evangelicals want to hear that message from a candidate, but Pawlenty knows he’ll offend the general public if he says it in so many words. Hence the dog whistle: They hear it; you don’t.

Another dog-whistle to the Religious Right is Rick Perry’s 1-minute invitation to “The Response“, a “call to prayer for a nation in crisis”.

This event will sail under most voters’ radar, because it sounds just like the prayer breakfasts and days-of-prayer that politicians are always associating themselves with.

But true believers will hear something different. Perry has modeled the Response after what “God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel”. If you haven’t read Joel lately, you probably don’t realize how apocalyptic it is. Invoking Joel implies not just that America is having hard times, but that God is smiting us for our sin.

Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

Given that the Response is hosted by the American Family Association, we can guess what that sin is: tolerance of homosexuality.

A little of that apocalyptic flavor comes through in the official Response promo video, which most voters won’t bother to watch.

And then there’s the Response’s page of “endorsers”. (The Endorser link from the home page was dropped after it started getting attention, and then the page disappeared altogether.) Chances are you’ve never heard of them, but they include some of the most dangerous religious nuts in the country.

Here Mike Bickle, for example, warns his flock about “the Harlot Babylon movement”, which is “preparing the nations to receive the Antichrist”.

I believe that one of the main pastors, as a forerunner to the Harlot movement — it’s not the Harlot movement yet — is Oprah.

Oprah is the forerunner to the forerunner to the Antichrist. Who knew?

Another official Response-endorser, C. Peter Wagner, believes that the Japanese Emperor has had sex with a Sun Goddess/Demon, and that this event had real consequences for the Japanese economy.

Since the night that the present emperor slept with the Sun Goddess, the stock market in Japan has gone down. It’s never come up since.

And of course there’s John Hagee, whose endorsement John McCain had to renounce in 2008 because of Hagee’s anti-Catholic bigotry. His picture was also up there on the Endorsers’ page.

Rachel Maddow collects more of this kind of insanity from Perry’s endorsers/allies.

It’s not clear yet how many of these people will appear on stage with Perry at the Response. But their followers know that Perry’s event is their event. You should know it too.

The Response-hosting AFA is not just ideologically conservative, it is partisan for Perry. Tuesday, the AFA’s Bryan Fischer wrote that Michele Bachmann’s migraines “make a Rick Perry candidacy both inevitable and necessary.”

Liberals, interestingly enough, are not the ones piling on this issue. “I thought Hell would freeze over before I defended Michele Bachmann,” Dana Goldstein writes.

The Texas Observer describes Perry’s connections with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement founded by the same C. Peter Wagner. The movement’s leaders talk about “infiltrating” government because “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.”

Contrast Pawlenty’s and Perry’s dog whistles with Herman Cain, who just lays it out there for everyone to see, as during this interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to [can] ban a mosque?

CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.

And draws this response from Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison:

It’s reprehensible that [Cain] just will not relent with this bigotry and that he actually thinks it’s going to enhance his chances to get the Republican nomination. If I were a Republican, I would be outraged.

But by talking in code, Pawlenty and Perry make no headlines and leave their opponents nothing to quote.

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Meet ALEC

July 18, 2011 – 11:28 am

The Republican landslide of 2010 swept into office governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and John Kasich of Ohio. All replaced Democrats except for Scott, who replaced moderate Republican Charlie Crist.

All five of these governors ran fairly vague campaigns about cutting waste and shrinking government, but after the election each hit the ground running with a detailed and radically conservative agenda — coincidentally, the same agenda.

Some of that agenda was predictable from campaign rhetoric: budget cuts in education and medical care, tax cuts for corporations, and loosening regulations that protect consumers and workers from corporations. Voters may not have guessed the specific cuts from the ads they saw, but anybody who has been paying attention knows that when Republicans say “waste” they mean schools and medical care. And when they say “growth” or “jobs” they mean give-aways to corporations.

Strangely, though, much of the one-size-fits-every-state agenda wasn’t even hinted in the campaigns: breaking the state employee unions, for example. It is predictable that governors who want to cut education will drive a hard bargain with teachers. But in November nobody was talking about taking away collective bargaining rights or de-certifying unions. And then suddenly in February they all were.

Just as suddenly, the new governors were talking about making it harder to vote. And harder to sue. And easier to carry concealed weapons. Similar plans to start or expand private-school voucher programs appeared.

Hardly anybody ran on those issues. But on Day 1, Republicans were ready to move on them.

Even the predictable parts of the unified agenda were being pursued in suspiciously similar ways. All over the country, conservative governors decided to go big, hit hard, and push their opposition to the wall. At one point Illinois was hosting refugee legislators from both Wisconsin and Indiana.

This level of similarity would make sense if there had been some public Contract With America II that they had all signed. But there wasn’t.

Clearly, governors (or leaders of Republican legislatures in states with Democratic governors) were not calling in their local advisors and having independent conversations that all happened to reach the same conclusions.

The hidden common thread was the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC). ALEC is an organization where corporate representatives and conservative politicians meet together in secret to draft legislation that the politicians can then take back to their home states. American Radioworks claimed in 2002 that about 1/3 of state legislators are ALEC members.

ALEC has existed since conservative activist Paul Weyrich founded it in 1979, and it has been written about for years. The American Radioworks piece described how the private prison industry works through ALEC to build their market by increasing prison sentences.

But [Corrections Corporation of America] does more than chat up lawmakers at ALEC meetings. On top of its membership dues and contributions to help pay the bills for ALEC meetings, the prison company pays two thousand dollars a year for a seat on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. That panel writes the group’s “model” bills on crime and punishment. Until recently, a CCA official even co-chaired the task force.

… Among ALEC’s model bills: mandatory minimum sentences; Three Strikes laws, giving repeat offenders 25 years to life in prison; and “truth-in-sentencing,” which requires inmates to serve most or all of their time without a chance for parole. ALEC didn’t invent any of these ideas but has played a pivotal role in making them law in the states, says [Edwin] Bender of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

The piece ended with a quote from William Dickey, the former head of Wisconsin’s prison system:

I’ve always understood political people as having differences of opinion — tough on crime, soft on crime. But I’ve usually thought that whatever views were being held in that debate, they were sincerely arrived at. And to discover that there’s a group pushing criminal justice policy not because it’s in the public interest, but because it’s a way to make money, is disappointing to me.

But that’s just one industry. Recently we got our first look at the full scope of ALEC’s activities when the Center for Media and Democracy got its hands on 800 pieces of model legislation ALEC has written. You can find them on the web site ALEC Exposed.

The major pieces of the Walker/Scott/Snyder/Corbett/Kasich agenda are all there. (For example, the model “Public Employee Freedom Act” contains the union-busting provisions, and the “Voter ID Act” the vote-suppression provisions — including the ones that make no sense, like saying that an expired driver’s license does not establish your identity.)

There is, I rush to point out, nothing illegal about this. Any one can write model legislation and try to get a legislator to propose it. Liberal groups do it too. What is sinister, though, is the secrecy. Corporations have managed to remove their fingerprints from the laws they have written.

Whether an environmental group is pushing higher pollution standards or an polluting industry seeks lower ones, the public has a right to know where its laws are coming from, and what interests are being served.

You get an idea of the founding philosophy of ALEC from this 1980 clip of founder Paul Weyrich: “I don’t want everybody to vote. … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

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The Hard Line

July 11, 2011 – 1:28 pm

Two articles this week explained why Republicans are (depending on your point of view) either (1) able to hold together on hardline positions, or (2) unable to compromise. Turns out, it’s not just the party leadership or elected officials that are different, it’s the rank-and-file:

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NYT blogger Nate Silver looks more deeply at the polling data and concludes that while polarization is hitting both parties, it has a more profound effect on the Republicans. Republican is becoming identical with conservative, while the Democrats remain a coalition of diverse philosophies. So Democrats worry about alienating their moderates, while Republicans focus on energizing their base.

In The three fundamentalisms of the American right, Salon’s Michael Lind notes a long-term philosophical shift in conservatism. William F. Buckley modeled the mid-20th-century conservative movement after 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who argued that people underestimate the values embedded in traditional practices, so change should be measured and thoughtful rather than sweeping and giddy.

But increasingly, 21st-century conservatism is built around fundamentalist reaction rather than thoughtful prudence. Christian fundamentalism (the Bible), constitutional fundamentalism (the Constitution and carefully selected quotes from the Founders), and market fundamentalism (Atlas Shrugged) each have a holy scripture that teaches unquestionable Truth. And that creates a problem for democracy.

Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

A Burke-Buckley conservative respects the status quo, but to a fundamentalist the status quo already represents a fall from a lost Golden Age — often an imaginary one.

It’s tempting to respond to all three types of right-wing fundamentalist with scorn, especially when they make up facts about their respective Golden Ages. But in the long run scorn may be counterproductive. Fundamentalism is a reaction to a loss of identity and community. (No one who feels at home here and now pledges loyalty to a lost era or an ancient text.) Ultimately, fundamentalists need to be healed, not beaten down further. The candidate-Obama message of Hope and Yes We Can seems exactly right to me, if we can see it through.

This move conflicts with my healing strategy, but I’ll be interested to see if it works tactically: The American Values Network points out that two of the right-wing fundamentalisms contradict each other. Jesus and Ayn Rand are not at all on the same page.

Less-extreme Republicans have finally started protesting against the hard line: David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Robert Samuelson.

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