Posted: November 3, 2010
by Jacob Hacker from The Huffington Post
Democrats will search for the hidden message of the election. But the message isn't hidden: The decisive blocs of voters that switched from Democrats in 2008 to Republicans in 2010 were angry and disillusioned -- with the economy, with a political system they see as helping banks and CEOs, not ordinary working families, and with both parties, Republicans (exit-poll favorability rating: 41 percent) as well as Democrats (43 percent). They want action to rebalance the economy so it produces jobs and gains for the middle class, not just Wall Street. Unfortunately, they're not going to get it.
That's because these voters have just handed Congress back to a party least likely to heed their call: the party that spent the last two years saying no to Wall Street reform, to an economic recovery package that included major tax cuts, to expanded health insurance and medical cost control, and to extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the middle class; the party that shamelessly courted lobbyists and corporate donors while claiming they were only against reform because it represented a "bailout" of these very same interests.
In exit polls, voters were asked who they blamed for the state of the economy. In order, they blamed banks, then the Bush administration, and only then the current administration. Yet those who blamed banks gave their votes by a wide margin to the GOP. Their votes have made Speaker-to-be John Boehner the second most powerful person in Washington only months after he staged an open rally for bank lobbyists, urging them to block Democrats and their "punk staffers." The rally worked: Wall Street swung toward the Republicans, joining health insurers, big business groups, energy companies, and the rest of the GOP's new money trust.
Midterm election losses are a virtual inevitability for the party of the president. A terrible economy makes them more certain -- and larger. The only thing that would have saved Democrats from big losses this time around was a huge organizational and fundraising edge. Thanks to the Tea Party and billions in outside campaign spending that favored the GOP, the edge was Republicans'.
If there is a hidden message in the election, it's one that we, in our recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics, call the "dirty little secret" of political science: most voters pay little attention to what happens in Washington and have only the vaguest sense of what is happening there. Most are completely unaware of how the filibuster has been used relentlessly to block action on the economy, and a majority mistakenly believes that the astonishingly unpopular TARP legislation passed under Obama, when in fact in was signed by George W. Bush.
We are taught to believe that voters call the shots. And they often do. Yet the vote is a blunt, heavy weapon -- one that voters barraged with negative ads and misleading messages, without strong guidance from grassroots organizations, often wield with little awareness of or regard for the collateral damage that will result. In this case, the damage is likely to be the crippling of goals and policies that most Americans continue to support.
One salient example sums up the whole: Republicans' big gains came with older voters -- in part because they were frightened by GOP attacks on the health care bill. Yet Republican budget blueprints -- from Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" to the GOP "Pledge to America" -- mean even bigger cuts in Medicare and the revival of the GOP's mothballed plans for partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Ask older Americans whether they would like to trash their cherished programs in return for massive new tax cuts for the richest of the rich, and the answer will be a resounding no. Only on election day, a strong majority of older Americans, in effect, said yes.
In John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, perhaps the most memorable line was uttered by an angry farmer about to lose his home (sound familiar?). Enraged and despairing but unable to pinpoint blame for his terrible loss, he asks, "Who can we shoot?" That's what voters were asking in 2010, and most had no clearer idea than the farmer of where responsibility for their plight lay.
The 2010 election was the political equivalent of the perfect crime: The GOP vigorously took on all reforms designed to rebalance the economy for the long term, tying Washington up in contorted knots, then were rewarded at the polls by voters dissatisfied with an ugly D.C. culture unable to produce economic renewal.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The Whiny Center
by Paul Krugman
November 3, 2010, 8:14 am
Blame The Whiny Center
So, we’re already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of … well, there weren’t any, but he should stop them anyway.
What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street. And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck.
But he did have help in getting it wrong: at every stage there was a faction of Democrats standing in the way of strong action, demanding that Obama do less, avoid spending money, and so on. In so doing, they shot themselves in the face: half of the Blue Dogs lost their seats.
And what are those who are left demanding? Why, that Obama move to the center.
November 3, 2010, 8:14 am
Blame The Whiny Center
So, we’re already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of … well, there weren’t any, but he should stop them anyway.
What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street. And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck.
But he did have help in getting it wrong: at every stage there was a faction of Democrats standing in the way of strong action, demanding that Obama do less, avoid spending money, and so on. In so doing, they shot themselves in the face: half of the Blue Dogs lost their seats.
And what are those who are left demanding? Why, that Obama move to the center.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Move to the Center?
Paul BegalaCNN political commentator
Posted: November 2, 2010 09:03 PM
A Centrist Democratic Agenda: More Jobs, Less Corruption
Dear Democrats: I feel your pain. I've been there. I was one of President Clinton's chief political advisers when we lost 52 House seats and eight Senate seats -- and then we lost a ninth when Dick Shelby of Alabama switched parties.
So many commentators have compared the present situation to the 1994 debacle that I thought I'd put my recollections, thoughts and counsel on paper (or, rather, on pixels.)
First, losing the Congress was not good for President Clinton. The Republican Congress impeached him, for Pete's sake. They harassed him. They refused to confirm many of his judges. They shut down the government. They refused to listen to him on climate change. They did not heed his warning to "save Social Security first" and lock away the Clinton surplus so it would not be squandered. They even accused him of playing "Wag the Dog" when he tried to kill Osama bin Laden.
The only ways in which having a GOP Congress was good for Clinton is that it gave him some Grade-A villains to push off against, and allowed his centrist instincts to be seen in sharper relief. On balance, I would rather have had a root canal.
I expect the new Republican House to be even more partisan; even more extreme; even more mean-spirited. In the beginning of this year -- long before the corporate-funded deluge of attack ads -- 39 percent of Republicans supported impeaching President Obama. In the same Harris Poll, 24 percent of Republicans thought Obama might be the Antichrist. When the base of your party so despises the President that they are delusional, impeachment not only seems feasible, it seems downright reasonable.
It is true that having a Republican Congress forced Clinton to move to the center. He signed a welfare reform bill that was far more ruthless than he would have liked. He signed a cut in the capital gains tax -- hardly a Democratic priority.
Look for President Obama to do the same. I think he should very publicly say, "I get it," making clear he heard what the electorate was saying. Then define what they were saying not in the GOP's terms ("Cut spending! Shrink government! Privatize everything!") but rather in more realistic terms:
Job creation and reducing the influence of special interests are as mainstream as you get. President Obama and Congressional Democrats should challenge Republicans to enact a payroll tax holiday. The payroll tax is regressive and it's a job-killer. Working people hate it. Small businesses hate it. Republicans ought to hate it. Let the GOP explain why they prefer an elitist tax cut -- say, on the income taxes paid by millionaires and billionaires. If the tea party-backed newcomers are real populists they will want to create jobs on Main Street, not give another tax break to Paris Hilton.
The Democrats should push the rest of their now-stalled pro-growth tax cuts: reducing taxes on investments businesses make in research & experimentation, tax cuts for creating green-collar jobs and generating clean energy.
Then President Obama and the Democrats should challenge the Republicans to support real investment in the real America: our roads and bridges and airports and mass transit. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our drinking water system a D- (think of that when your child wakes you up in the middle of the night for a glass of water). The engineers say one in four rural bridges is deficient -- and it's worse in the cities, where one in three is deficient. A bridge is built to last 50 years. The average age of a bridge in America: 43.
President Obama does not have a communication problem; he has an economic problem. He has a jobs problem. He needs a jobs plan. That, by the way, is the one communications wrinkle I would iron out. Stop calling it "stimulus" or "infrastructure" or "R&E." Call it jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs, dammit. Then challenge the GOP to join you in creating jobs by cutting taxes and rebuilding America.
Democrats should be just as bold on corruption. Rather than whine about the money spent in this election cycle, Democrats should propose new ideas to limit the power of lobbyists and require greater disclosure of campaign money. In 2006 John Boehner famously said, "Yes, I am cozy with lobbyists." I didn't see any Tea Party activists carrying signs calling for electing leaders who are cozy with lobbyists. Pushing reform is not only good for our government, it's good politics. It splits the GOP's corporate wing from its populist grassroots.
Yes, President Obama and the Democrats need to move to the center. Fortunately, that does not mean slow-walking gay rights or repealing the 14th Amendment. Rather, it means a strong, centrist jobs program and a clear, centrist commitment to limiting the power of corporate special interests. If they have the skill and adaptability to reclaim the center, the Democratic comeback won't be far behind.
Posted: November 2, 2010 09:03 PM
A Centrist Democratic Agenda: More Jobs, Less Corruption
Dear Democrats: I feel your pain. I've been there. I was one of President Clinton's chief political advisers when we lost 52 House seats and eight Senate seats -- and then we lost a ninth when Dick Shelby of Alabama switched parties.
So many commentators have compared the present situation to the 1994 debacle that I thought I'd put my recollections, thoughts and counsel on paper (or, rather, on pixels.)
First, losing the Congress was not good for President Clinton. The Republican Congress impeached him, for Pete's sake. They harassed him. They refused to confirm many of his judges. They shut down the government. They refused to listen to him on climate change. They did not heed his warning to "save Social Security first" and lock away the Clinton surplus so it would not be squandered. They even accused him of playing "Wag the Dog" when he tried to kill Osama bin Laden.
The only ways in which having a GOP Congress was good for Clinton is that it gave him some Grade-A villains to push off against, and allowed his centrist instincts to be seen in sharper relief. On balance, I would rather have had a root canal.
I expect the new Republican House to be even more partisan; even more extreme; even more mean-spirited. In the beginning of this year -- long before the corporate-funded deluge of attack ads -- 39 percent of Republicans supported impeaching President Obama. In the same Harris Poll, 24 percent of Republicans thought Obama might be the Antichrist. When the base of your party so despises the President that they are delusional, impeachment not only seems feasible, it seems downright reasonable.
It is true that having a Republican Congress forced Clinton to move to the center. He signed a welfare reform bill that was far more ruthless than he would have liked. He signed a cut in the capital gains tax -- hardly a Democratic priority.
Look for President Obama to do the same. I think he should very publicly say, "I get it," making clear he heard what the electorate was saying. Then define what they were saying not in the GOP's terms ("Cut spending! Shrink government! Privatize everything!") but rather in more realistic terms:
Job creation and reducing the influence of special interests are as mainstream as you get. President Obama and Congressional Democrats should challenge Republicans to enact a payroll tax holiday. The payroll tax is regressive and it's a job-killer. Working people hate it. Small businesses hate it. Republicans ought to hate it. Let the GOP explain why they prefer an elitist tax cut -- say, on the income taxes paid by millionaires and billionaires. If the tea party-backed newcomers are real populists they will want to create jobs on Main Street, not give another tax break to Paris Hilton.
The Democrats should push the rest of their now-stalled pro-growth tax cuts: reducing taxes on investments businesses make in research & experimentation, tax cuts for creating green-collar jobs and generating clean energy.
Then President Obama and the Democrats should challenge the Republicans to support real investment in the real America: our roads and bridges and airports and mass transit. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our drinking water system a D- (think of that when your child wakes you up in the middle of the night for a glass of water). The engineers say one in four rural bridges is deficient -- and it's worse in the cities, where one in three is deficient. A bridge is built to last 50 years. The average age of a bridge in America: 43.
President Obama does not have a communication problem; he has an economic problem. He has a jobs problem. He needs a jobs plan. That, by the way, is the one communications wrinkle I would iron out. Stop calling it "stimulus" or "infrastructure" or "R&E." Call it jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs, dammit. Then challenge the GOP to join you in creating jobs by cutting taxes and rebuilding America.
Democrats should be just as bold on corruption. Rather than whine about the money spent in this election cycle, Democrats should propose new ideas to limit the power of lobbyists and require greater disclosure of campaign money. In 2006 John Boehner famously said, "Yes, I am cozy with lobbyists." I didn't see any Tea Party activists carrying signs calling for electing leaders who are cozy with lobbyists. Pushing reform is not only good for our government, it's good politics. It splits the GOP's corporate wing from its populist grassroots.
Yes, President Obama and the Democrats need to move to the center. Fortunately, that does not mean slow-walking gay rights or repealing the 14th Amendment. Rather, it means a strong, centrist jobs program and a clear, centrist commitment to limiting the power of corporate special interests. If they have the skill and adaptability to reclaim the center, the Democratic comeback won't be far behind.
1936 NOT 1996
by
Robert Reich Former Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley
Posted: November 2, 2010
Why Obama Should Learn the Lesson of 1936, not 1996
Which lesson will the president learn from the midterm election -- that of Clinton in 1996, or FDR in 1936? The choice will determine his strategy over the next two years. Hopefully, he'll find 1936 more relevant.
Obama shouldn't be fooled into thinking Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996 because he moved to the center. I was there. Clinton was reelected because by then the economy had come roaring back to life.
The 1996 election was about little else. Dick Morris, Clinton's pollster and chief political advisor (who effectively took over the White House policymaking apparatus shortly after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress in 1995), instructed the president to say only "the economy's booming and you ain't seen anything yet."
President Obama won't have that luxury in 2012. In all likelihood, the economy will still be anemic. It's now growing at the rate of no more than 2 percent a year -- far too slow to bring down the jobless rate. Even now, sales are slowing. Business revenues are slowing. Home sales are down. Home prices are down. Foreclosures are increasing.
For the next two years Republicans will try to paint Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with America, who's responsible for the continuing bad economy.
Obama won't be able to win this argument by moving to the center -- seeking to paint himself as a smaller-government moderate. This only confirms the Republican's views that the central issue is size of government, that it's been too large, and the economy can improve only if it's smaller.
On the Republican playing field, Republicans always win.
Obama's best hope of reelection will be to re-frame the debate, making the central issue the power of big businesses and Wall Street to gain economic advantage at the expense of the rest of us. This is the Democratic playing field, and it's more relevant today than at any time since the 1930s.
The top 1 percent of Americans, by income, is now taking home almost a quarter of all income, and accounting for almost 40 percent of all wealth. Meanwhile, large numbers of Americans are losing their homes because banks won't let them reorganize their mortgages under bankruptcy. And corporations continue to lay off (and not rehire) even larger numbers.
With Republicans controlling more of Congress, their pending votes against extended unemployment benefits, jobs bills, and work programs will more sharply reveal whose side they're on. Their attempt to extort extended tax cuts for the wealthy by threatening tax increases on the middle class will offer even more evidence. As will their refusal to disclose their sources of campaign funding.
The relevant political lesson isn't Bill Clinton in 1996. It's Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.
By the election of 1936 the Great Depression was entering its eighth year. Roosevelt had already been President for four of them. Yet he won the biggest electoral victory since the start of the two-party system in the 1850s. How?
FDR shifted the debate from what he failed to accomplish to the irresponsibility of his opponents. Again and again he let the public know whose side he was on, and whose side they were on. Republicans stood for "business and financial monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking," he said over and over.
And he made it clear they wanted to prevent him from helping ordinary Americans. "Never before have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today," he thundered. "They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."
The 2012 economy won't be as bad as the 1936 economy, hopefully. But it won't be nearly as good as the 1996 economy. For a president running in 2012, 1936 is the more relevant.
Robert Reich Former Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley
Posted: November 2, 2010
Why Obama Should Learn the Lesson of 1936, not 1996
Which lesson will the president learn from the midterm election -- that of Clinton in 1996, or FDR in 1936? The choice will determine his strategy over the next two years. Hopefully, he'll find 1936 more relevant.
Obama shouldn't be fooled into thinking Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996 because he moved to the center. I was there. Clinton was reelected because by then the economy had come roaring back to life.
The 1996 election was about little else. Dick Morris, Clinton's pollster and chief political advisor (who effectively took over the White House policymaking apparatus shortly after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress in 1995), instructed the president to say only "the economy's booming and you ain't seen anything yet."
President Obama won't have that luxury in 2012. In all likelihood, the economy will still be anemic. It's now growing at the rate of no more than 2 percent a year -- far too slow to bring down the jobless rate. Even now, sales are slowing. Business revenues are slowing. Home sales are down. Home prices are down. Foreclosures are increasing.
For the next two years Republicans will try to paint Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with America, who's responsible for the continuing bad economy.
Obama won't be able to win this argument by moving to the center -- seeking to paint himself as a smaller-government moderate. This only confirms the Republican's views that the central issue is size of government, that it's been too large, and the economy can improve only if it's smaller.
On the Republican playing field, Republicans always win.
Obama's best hope of reelection will be to re-frame the debate, making the central issue the power of big businesses and Wall Street to gain economic advantage at the expense of the rest of us. This is the Democratic playing field, and it's more relevant today than at any time since the 1930s.
The top 1 percent of Americans, by income, is now taking home almost a quarter of all income, and accounting for almost 40 percent of all wealth. Meanwhile, large numbers of Americans are losing their homes because banks won't let them reorganize their mortgages under bankruptcy. And corporations continue to lay off (and not rehire) even larger numbers.
With Republicans controlling more of Congress, their pending votes against extended unemployment benefits, jobs bills, and work programs will more sharply reveal whose side they're on. Their attempt to extort extended tax cuts for the wealthy by threatening tax increases on the middle class will offer even more evidence. As will their refusal to disclose their sources of campaign funding.
The relevant political lesson isn't Bill Clinton in 1996. It's Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.
By the election of 1936 the Great Depression was entering its eighth year. Roosevelt had already been President for four of them. Yet he won the biggest electoral victory since the start of the two-party system in the 1850s. How?
FDR shifted the debate from what he failed to accomplish to the irresponsibility of his opponents. Again and again he let the public know whose side he was on, and whose side they were on. Republicans stood for "business and financial monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking," he said over and over.
And he made it clear they wanted to prevent him from helping ordinary Americans. "Never before have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today," he thundered. "They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."
The 2012 economy won't be as bad as the 1936 economy, hopefully. But it won't be nearly as good as the 1996 economy. For a president running in 2012, 1936 is the more relevant.
Pat Conroy's Memoir 'My Reading Life'
KIM CURTIS | 11/ 2/10 02:25 PM |
"My Reading Life" (Doubleday, $25), by Pat Conroy: Best-selling novelist Pat Conroy doesn't just love books, he devours them. He doesn't just visit libraries and bookstores, he inhabits them. He doesn't enjoy language, he revels in it. He says he learned early on that "great words arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers."
Conroy's new memoir, "My Reading Life," isn't simply a filler book presented by his publisher to take up space between novels. Instead, it's a rich, unabashedly self-critical and moving tribute to a writer's passion.
The book contains 15 essays highlighting a different aspect of Conroy's adoration of literature – from "Gone With the Wind" and "War and Peace" to Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey and librarians and sales reps. He takes readers along well-trodden themes of his life: abusive father, much put-upon mother, the American South, military boarding school. But he has the imagination and skill to make it all new again. Like Stephen King did in his remarkable "On Writing," Conroy reminds us of his considerable talents for telling a story and arranging words.
He's also quick to acknowledge what he perceives as his own shortcomings, both as a writer and as a man, and we cannot help but relate to the author – a once lonely and hurt young boy who hasn't yet fully abandoned the grown-up and much-adored man.
When Conroy says, "Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself," we believe him.
___
KIM CURTIS | 11/ 2/10 02:25 PM |
"My Reading Life" (Doubleday, $25), by Pat Conroy: Best-selling novelist Pat Conroy doesn't just love books, he devours them. He doesn't just visit libraries and bookstores, he inhabits them. He doesn't enjoy language, he revels in it. He says he learned early on that "great words arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers."
Conroy's new memoir, "My Reading Life," isn't simply a filler book presented by his publisher to take up space between novels. Instead, it's a rich, unabashedly self-critical and moving tribute to a writer's passion.
The book contains 15 essays highlighting a different aspect of Conroy's adoration of literature – from "Gone With the Wind" and "War and Peace" to Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey and librarians and sales reps. He takes readers along well-trodden themes of his life: abusive father, much put-upon mother, the American South, military boarding school. But he has the imagination and skill to make it all new again. Like Stephen King did in his remarkable "On Writing," Conroy reminds us of his considerable talents for telling a story and arranging words.
He's also quick to acknowledge what he perceives as his own shortcomings, both as a writer and as a man, and we cannot help but relate to the author – a once lonely and hurt young boy who hasn't yet fully abandoned the grown-up and much-adored man.
When Conroy says, "Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself," we believe him.
___
Monday, November 1, 2010
Just a Pawn in Their Game
As Bob Dylan might say, the Tea Baggers are just a pawn in the hands of the real Republicans with their historical economic and political agenda. One can say the same of the social conservatives.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 30, 2010
ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.
The New York Times
Frank Rich
What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.
But whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually effecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.
Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.
Karl Rove outed the Republican elites’ contempt for Tea Partiers in the campaign’s final stretch. Much as Barack Obama thought he was safe soliloquizing about angry white Middle Americans clinging to “guns or religion” at a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008, so Rove now parades his disdain for the same constituency when speaking to the European press. This month he told Der Spiegel that Tea Partiers are “not sophisticated,” and then scoffed, “It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.” Given that Glenn Beck has made a cause of putting Hayek’s dense 1944 antigovernment treatise “The Road to Serfdom” on the best-seller list and Tea Partiers widely claim to have read it, Rove could hardly have been more condescending to “these people.” Last week, for added insult, he mocked Sarah Palin’s imminent Discovery Channel reality show to London’s Daily Telegraph.
This animus has not gone unnoticed among those supposedly less sophisticated conservatives back home. Mike Huckabee, still steamed about Rove’s previous put-down of Christine O’Donnell, publicly lamented the Republican establishment’s “elitism” and “country club attitude.” This country club elite, he said, is happy for Tea Partiers to put up signs, work the phones and make “those pesky little trips” door-to-door that it finds a frightful inconvenience. But the members won’t let the hoi polloi dine with them in the club’s “main dining room” — any more than David H. Koch, the billionaire sugar daddy of the Republican right, will invite O’Donnell into his box at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to take in “The Nutcracker.”
The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP.
His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, will be certain to stop any Tea Party hillbillies from disrupting his chapter of the club (as he tried to stop Rand Paul in his own state’s G.O.P. primary). McConnell’s pets in his chamber’s freshman G.O.P. class will instead be old-school conservatives like Dan Coats (of Indiana), Rob Portman (of Ohio) and, if he squeaks in, Pat Toomey (of Pennsylvania). The first two are former lobbyists; Toomey ran the corporate interest group, the Club for Growth. They can be counted on to execute an efficient distribution of corporate favors and pork after they make their latest swing through Capitol Hill’s revolving door.
What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.
Perhaps the campaign’s most telling exchange took place on Fox News two weeks ago, when the Tea Party-embracing Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, was asked seven times by Chris Wallace to name “one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” in order “to extend all the Bush tax cuts, which would add 4 trillion to the deficit.” She never did. At least Angle and Paul have been honest about what they’d slash if in power — respectively Social Security and defense, where the big government spending actually resides.
That’s not happening either. McConnell has explained his only real priority for the new Congress with admirable candor. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Any assault on Social Security would defeat that goal, and a serious shake-up of the Pentagon budget would alienate the neoconservative ideologues and military contractors who are far more important to the G.O.P. establishment than the “don’t tread on me” crowd.
For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal have been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end. The more the Tea Party looks as if it’s calling the shots in the G.O.P., the easier it is to distract attention from those who are actually calling them — namely, those who’ve cashed in and cashed out as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s. Typical of this smokescreen is a new book titled “Mad as Hell,” published this fall by a Murdoch imprint. In it, the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen make the case, as they recently put it in Politico, that the Tea Party is “the most powerful and potent force in America.”
They are expert at producing poll numbers to bear that out. By counting those with friends and family in the movement, Rasmussen has calculated that 29 percent of Americans are “tied to” the Tea Party. (If you factor in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the number would surely double.) But cooler empirical data reveal the truth known by the G.O.P. establishment: An August CNN poll found that 2 percent of Americans consider themselves active members of the Tea Party.
That result was confirmed last weekend by The Washington Post, which published the fruits of its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country. To this end, it enlisted the help of Tea Party Patriots, the only Tea Party umbrella group that actually can claim to be a spontaneous, bottom-up, grass roots organization rather than a front for the same old fat cats of the Republican right, from the Koch brothers to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Tea Party Patriots has claimed anywhere from 2,300 to nearly 3,000 local affiliates, but even with its assistance, The Post could verify a total of only 647 Tea Party groups nationwide. Most had fewer than 50 members. The median amount of money each group had raised in 2010 was $800, nowhere near the entry fee for the country club.
But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 30, 2010
ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.
The New York Times
Frank Rich
What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.
But whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually effecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.
Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.
Karl Rove outed the Republican elites’ contempt for Tea Partiers in the campaign’s final stretch. Much as Barack Obama thought he was safe soliloquizing about angry white Middle Americans clinging to “guns or religion” at a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008, so Rove now parades his disdain for the same constituency when speaking to the European press. This month he told Der Spiegel that Tea Partiers are “not sophisticated,” and then scoffed, “It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.” Given that Glenn Beck has made a cause of putting Hayek’s dense 1944 antigovernment treatise “The Road to Serfdom” on the best-seller list and Tea Partiers widely claim to have read it, Rove could hardly have been more condescending to “these people.” Last week, for added insult, he mocked Sarah Palin’s imminent Discovery Channel reality show to London’s Daily Telegraph.
This animus has not gone unnoticed among those supposedly less sophisticated conservatives back home. Mike Huckabee, still steamed about Rove’s previous put-down of Christine O’Donnell, publicly lamented the Republican establishment’s “elitism” and “country club attitude.” This country club elite, he said, is happy for Tea Partiers to put up signs, work the phones and make “those pesky little trips” door-to-door that it finds a frightful inconvenience. But the members won’t let the hoi polloi dine with them in the club’s “main dining room” — any more than David H. Koch, the billionaire sugar daddy of the Republican right, will invite O’Donnell into his box at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to take in “The Nutcracker.”
The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP.
His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, will be certain to stop any Tea Party hillbillies from disrupting his chapter of the club (as he tried to stop Rand Paul in his own state’s G.O.P. primary). McConnell’s pets in his chamber’s freshman G.O.P. class will instead be old-school conservatives like Dan Coats (of Indiana), Rob Portman (of Ohio) and, if he squeaks in, Pat Toomey (of Pennsylvania). The first two are former lobbyists; Toomey ran the corporate interest group, the Club for Growth. They can be counted on to execute an efficient distribution of corporate favors and pork after they make their latest swing through Capitol Hill’s revolving door.
What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.
Perhaps the campaign’s most telling exchange took place on Fox News two weeks ago, when the Tea Party-embracing Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, was asked seven times by Chris Wallace to name “one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” in order “to extend all the Bush tax cuts, which would add 4 trillion to the deficit.” She never did. At least Angle and Paul have been honest about what they’d slash if in power — respectively Social Security and defense, where the big government spending actually resides.
That’s not happening either. McConnell has explained his only real priority for the new Congress with admirable candor. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Any assault on Social Security would defeat that goal, and a serious shake-up of the Pentagon budget would alienate the neoconservative ideologues and military contractors who are far more important to the G.O.P. establishment than the “don’t tread on me” crowd.
For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal have been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end. The more the Tea Party looks as if it’s calling the shots in the G.O.P., the easier it is to distract attention from those who are actually calling them — namely, those who’ve cashed in and cashed out as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s. Typical of this smokescreen is a new book titled “Mad as Hell,” published this fall by a Murdoch imprint. In it, the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen make the case, as they recently put it in Politico, that the Tea Party is “the most powerful and potent force in America.”
They are expert at producing poll numbers to bear that out. By counting those with friends and family in the movement, Rasmussen has calculated that 29 percent of Americans are “tied to” the Tea Party. (If you factor in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the number would surely double.) But cooler empirical data reveal the truth known by the G.O.P. establishment: An August CNN poll found that 2 percent of Americans consider themselves active members of the Tea Party.
That result was confirmed last weekend by The Washington Post, which published the fruits of its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country. To this end, it enlisted the help of Tea Party Patriots, the only Tea Party umbrella group that actually can claim to be a spontaneous, bottom-up, grass roots organization rather than a front for the same old fat cats of the Republican right, from the Koch brothers to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Tea Party Patriots has claimed anywhere from 2,300 to nearly 3,000 local affiliates, but even with its assistance, The Post could verify a total of only 647 Tea Party groups nationwide. Most had fewer than 50 members. The median amount of money each group had raised in 2010 was $800, nowhere near the entry fee for the country club.
But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.
Twitter vs Facebook: Smackdown FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN
31 Oct 2010 08:28 pm
Jonah Lehrer writes that Twitter encourages users to follow someone because they "share a set of common interests and beliefs," whereas Facebook "allows us to keep track of people we know in real life." He then applies to both sites the findings of a new paper:
What’s interesting is that the differences between Twitter and Facebook mirror a longstanding debate about how the human brain processes other people. Do we assess others based on similarity, on their devotion to the same political beliefs, TV shows and sports teams? Or do we focus instead on their closeness to us, on whether or not they’re a sibling or a third cousin or a distant friend? This might seem like a minor mystery, but it has some major implications for social cognition. Are we clannish creatures, obsessed with bloodlines and kinship? Or are we more interested in finding a group that shares our peculiar passions and opinions?
Facebook wins:
While similarity is nice – it makes cocktail conversation a little bit easier – it’s ultimately less important than mere familiarity. Of course, social cognition is an incredibly complex process, and can’t be neatly reduced to the blood flow of a single brain area. But this study helps us better understand why closeness matters, and why Facebook has more than 500 million active users, 50 percent of whom check their Facebook page every single day. We care about people we know, even if they vote for the other party.
31 Oct 2010 08:28 pm
Jonah Lehrer writes that Twitter encourages users to follow someone because they "share a set of common interests and beliefs," whereas Facebook "allows us to keep track of people we know in real life." He then applies to both sites the findings of a new paper:
What’s interesting is that the differences between Twitter and Facebook mirror a longstanding debate about how the human brain processes other people. Do we assess others based on similarity, on their devotion to the same political beliefs, TV shows and sports teams? Or do we focus instead on their closeness to us, on whether or not they’re a sibling or a third cousin or a distant friend? This might seem like a minor mystery, but it has some major implications for social cognition. Are we clannish creatures, obsessed with bloodlines and kinship? Or are we more interested in finding a group that shares our peculiar passions and opinions?
Facebook wins:
While similarity is nice – it makes cocktail conversation a little bit easier – it’s ultimately less important than mere familiarity. Of course, social cognition is an incredibly complex process, and can’t be neatly reduced to the blood flow of a single brain area. But this study helps us better understand why closeness matters, and why Facebook has more than 500 million active users, 50 percent of whom check their Facebook page every single day. We care about people we know, even if they vote for the other party.
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