The broadly exhibited public anger about the AIG bonus scandal, and equally broad if less intense hostility to federal “bailouts” of financial institutions, has spurred a lot of worthy ruminations about populism in its various manifestations. Most of them quote Bob Borosage (though without a link; I can’t seem to find the source online, either) as reminding us of this historical lesson:

If the Roosevelt era is any parallel, you’ll get both a left-wing populism and a right-wing populism. It was not just Huey Long, it was also Father Coughlin. There is an anger out there that is populist and will take right-wing and left-wing forms. And politicians on each end of the political parties–aided by populist rabble-rousers–will start to stoke this anger and move it.

Today at TNR Walter Shapiro talks at some length about the risk of a major populist backlash against Obama’s financial policies, and even suggests the White House fears such a backlash more than any conventional Republican opposition. But he goes on to note that there’s no obvious political vehicle for this backlash. To the extent that Republicans oppose corporate subsidies, it’s primarily from a laissez-faire point of view that’s not shared, and never really has been shared, by that much of the public. A party that excoriates bailouts while demanding lower corporate and upper-income taxes, and in some cases applauding deflation and unemployment as healthy, isn’t going to go much farther than a default-drive anti-incumbent electoral option, particularly since the GOP continues to hold generally unpopular positions and manias on cultural issues. And as Shapiro notes, for all the unhappiness evident in some precincts of the Left about the policies and backgrounds of administration officials like Geithner and Summers, there are no signs so far of a revolt against Obama:

[U]nlike Democratic predecessors like Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter, Obama does not have to brood about a political threat from his left flank. Even Vermont’s independent socialist Senator Bernie Sanders offers praise for the new president: “I think, in general, Barack Obama is doing a very good job.” For Capitol Hill left-wingers like Sanders, the emphasis is less on pressuring Obama and more on shining a spotlight on Wall Street for its rule of ruin. “We need a real investigation–not a sham investigation–about how this crisis did occur and who were the people pushing subprime loans and who were the people who fought for deregulation,” Sanders says. “We need a real investigation and we need to hold people accountable.”

Still, Shapiro notes, the anger out there is real and palpable, and could produce “ideologically incoherent rage.” He specifically suggests that bipartisan coalitions in Congress could emerge to block future Obama measures that appear aimed at propping up financial or even industrial firms. That certainly makes sense, if you remember how hard it was to secure congressional approval of the very first bailout package last year, despite support from the president, congressional leaders of both parties, and the presidential candidates of both parties.
Tactical coalitions aside, though, the ideological and institutional barriers to some left-right populist convergenge that overturns not only the Obama administration but politics-as-we-know-it are formidable. It’s worth remembering that the terrifying alliance of Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Francis Townsend that Borosage alludes to, united in hostility to both the New Deal and Corporate America, ultimately produced little more than the anemic Union Party ticket of 1936, which registered less than 2% of the popular vote as FDR cruised to a crushing re-election victory.
Strange times produce strange politics, so Team Obama is wise to worry about the kind of rage spurred by the AIG mess. In the end, though, the administration’s ability to turn the economy around will determine whether populist outrage can be assuaged or even harnessed by Barack Obama, or instead becomes a phenomenon as “postpartisan” as anything he proposes.

The most amusing story out there today is provided by Politico‘s Manu Raju, who’s been trying to push Republican Member of Congress to take a position on a proposed surtax for those receiving bonuses from AIG. Here’s the money quote:

They wouldn’t mind letting the bonus issue linger for a while, and they’re wary of either signing on to the plan — and with it, a tax increase — or resisting it, and thereby risking being seen as insufficiently tough on AIG and its employees

Could be that GOP Congressmen are waiting for Grover Norquist to make up his mind how he feels about an AIG bonus tax:

Thirty-four senators and 172 House members signed a pledge with the Americans for Tax Reform saying they would not vote to raise taxes. The group is still evaluating the legislation and has not determined yet whether a vote for the plan would violate the pledge.

Republicans hope Grover’s staff gets a move on. The House is likely to vote on an AIG bonus surtax this very day, and while GOPers would prefer to be watching NCAA tournament basketball, they’re going to have to go on the record as to whether their fear of voter wrath or their hatred of government is greater.

Nate Silver has a fascinating post up today at 538.com, based on his gleanings from the news aggregator Memeorandum, analyzing the spread of the AIG bonus story.
It all started with a Washington Post article posted online last Saturday night, and, after a very brief lull, it steadily emerged as a mega-story:

On Sunday, the story gained significant steam throughout the liberal blogosphere. By 3 PM, according to Memeorandum, 20 independent (e.g. not related to a major media outlet) blogs had picked up some variant of the AIG story, of which 16 (by my count) have a definitive liberal orientation. There was then an additional round of attention later in the day, this time mostly coming from the mainstream media, after AIG’s counterparty list was released, and as the papers began to release content online from their Monday editions.
AIG-related affairs continued to dominate the discussion on Monday after Barack Obama said he wanted to block the bonuses and amidst speculation about the political fallout. Over the course of the day, the discussion tended to shift from liberal blogs to mainstream media channels.
Then yesterday (Tuesday), the story got bigger rather than smaller, becoming the subject of about twice as much discussion as it had been 24 hours earlier. Noteworthy about yesterday is that conservative blogs, which had been slow on the trigger initially, finally started to cover the story en masse, perhaps sensing the potential for embarrassment to the Administration.

This pattern isn’t that surprising when you think about it for a bit. The “liberal blogosphere” is divided between people who strongly oppose financial industry bailouts, and those who don’t, or who at least have some sympathy for the reasons for them. Both camps have every reason to get angry about the AIG bonuses, so both gave the story attention. MSM coverage followed news hooks (though by now, of course, it’s migrated on to coverage of the public reaction as a news item in itself). And while fairly big majorities of conservative bloggers claim to deplore financial industry bailouts, they don’t generally like to “demagogue” about high corporate pay (after all, it’s the low-income mortgage-holders who are really to blame, right?), so they ignored the story until it became about an apparent mistep by Obama and Geithner.
But what Nate’s talking about is significant: the stories that tend to build and build and become mega-stories feeding on themselves are those which attract heated commentary from different directions. When the story quickly morphs from one of corporate greed to one of “liberal” incompetence, it becomes a pinata that gets whacked hither and yon.
If you think of the AIG bonus story in terms of the amount of time that is necessary for a blogger to read and digest a news item, and then a news reporter to read a blog post, it actually developed pretty slowly. But from the perspective of a White House trying to deal with the substance of a very complex issue while monitoring and influencing the reaction, it must have seemed viral. And there’s only so much you can do via “damage control” once the story is whizzing around. It’s all the more reason to realize that careful strategic analysis of the negative news almost certain to emerge from a complex mess like the AIG meltdown and bailout is a very wise investment of time, if only to limit the number of people who leap on a breaking story from all sides of the political spectrum.

One of the most consistently advanced arguments in the conservative effort to oppose the Obama administration’s policy agenda is that it is exhibiting “arrogance” or “hubris,” and is also making a mockery of all of the president’s previous rhetoric about reaching across the partisan aisle and respecting other points of view. Almost invariably, the stimulus legislation, and the administration’s health care and climate change proposals, are cited as exhibits A, B and C. There’s a classic version of this argument being offered in the current issue of National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the smartest and least hackish of contemporary conservative political writers. And the same argument has been offered by self-styled “centrists” like David Brooks, and even to some extent by those “centrist” Democrats who want to take legislative vehicles for majority rule like budget reconciliation procedures off the table.
This whole approach, of course, is intimately connected with the conservative claim that Obama is, as they of course warned during the presidential campaign, a “radical” who is turning a 7 percentage point popular vote magin on November 4 into an illegitimate mandate for all sorts of crazy socialist intentions that he craftily hid from public view on the campaign trail.
At the risk of redundancy (not that this seems to be a concern of Obama critics), it’s helpful once again to examine this argument and expose its very shaky underpinnings.
Of course Obama didn’t outline the stimulus legislation in detail on the campaign trail, because the financial and economic meltdown largely occurred at the very tail end of the contest, and worsened significantly later on.
The size and structure of the stimulus legislation reflected decades of progressive, “centrist,” and even some conservative opinion on what government should do in the case of a collapse in demand and credit. And in the intra-progressive debate about exactly what Obama should propose, he hardly sided with “radicals,” or even old-fashioned liberals, who typically feared the stimulus package was too small to work and too open to “centrist” or conservative influence.
On health care reform and climate change, Obama is proposing relatively modest versions of what Democrats have largely agreed on in these areas for quite some time, and of what he specifically and consistently pledged to do throughout his presidential campaign. He has also specifically and consistently argued that dealing with these two topics would be expensive in the short run but extraordinarily cost-effective in the long run–an approach that also happens to nicely coincide with a fiscal strategy of short-term stimulus and long-term fiscal sanity.
As for “bipartisanship,” Obama has specifically and consistently offered Republicans a seat at the table if they were willing to agree with him on major policy goals and key principles–the “what” rather than the “how.” Since most Republicans have loudly and fundamentally disagreed with his major policy goals and key principles in terms of the stimulus package (they either want to do nothing or rely strictly on tax cuts), health care reform (they continue to pursue such truly radical ideas as forcing all Americans into individually purchased health insurance or paying for health care with cash via tax-preferred savings), and climate change (they either deny the problem, want to use all carrots and no sticks to bribe companies into alternative energy usages, or simply say the problem’s too expensive to address), Obama’s moved on without them.
A lot of the conservatives (though not Brooks or Ponnuru) who are attacking Obama for abandoning bipartisanship violently deplore the very idea themselves, so it’s not an objection to be taken very seriously in any event.
The one area where Obama critics have some sort of case for pig-in-a-poke charges is on the subject of financial industry “bailout” or “repair” or “damage mitigation” policies (there’s no real term for this policy area that’s not loaded, unfortunately). Whatever else they represented, the last two national elections that produced Democratic control of Congress and the White House weren’t referenda on what to do if a housing market collapse produced a financial system collapse that produced a credit collapse and then a consumer demand collapse. To the extent that the last few weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign revolved around this scenario, there certainly wasn’t any clear-cut D versus R split of opinion on what to do immediately, and Obama had zero input into the Bush administration’s structuring of the first big round of bailouts. If anyone in politics “flip-flopped,” it was the large segment of the GOP, including its presidential candidate, who conspicuously backed the Bush bail-out but now talks as if anything vaguely similar as pursued by Obama is insane.
An even more mendacious aspect of the criticism of Obama’s financial industry policies from the Right is the ventilating about “corporate welfare.” If Obama abandoned the current approach in favor of a temporary government takeover of imploded financial institutions–the most visible option other than doing nothing–they’d be the first to scream that he had succumbed to Red Russian Socialism.
The main point is that Obama’s done pretty much what he promised to do, and has departed from his campaign pledges mainly in areas outside the orbit of campaign discussion, and mainly in the direction of accomodation of “centrist” views. It’s entirely legitimate for conservatives or anyone else to argue that his policies are wrong or won’t work, but the idea that ideological rigidity or “arrogance” characterizes his young presidency is tiresomely threadbare. And by and large, the notion that fidelity to ideology represents “hubris” sounds more than a bit strange from conservatives who are competing with each other to see who can most loudly denounce George W. Bush and latter-day GOP “reformers” for failing to hew to the True Faith.

The hypocrisy that underlays the GOP’s ‘big government’-bashing has been noted before, but seldom so well explained, as by Dr. Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. Zelizer, author of forthcoming “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism” and other political science texts, puts it this way in his commentary “GOP’s ‘small government’ talk is hollow” at CNN Politics.com:

After the past eight years in American politics, it is impossible to reconcile current promises by conservatives for small government with the historical record of President Bush’s administration. Most experts on the left and right can find one issue upon which to agree: The federal government expanded significantly after 2001 when George W. Bush was in the White House.
The growth did not just take place with national security spending but with domestic programs as well. Even as the administration fought to reduce the cost of certain programs by preventing cost-of-living increases in benefits, in many other areas of policy — such as Medicare prescription drug benefits, federal education standards and agricultural subsidies — the federal government expanded by leaps and bounds. And then there are the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Zelizer points out that govenrment spending reached $1.9 trillion when President Clinton left office, while President Bush proposed spending $3.1 trillion this year. Republicans controlled both houses of congress betwen 2002 and 2006 when much of the increase occurred. The conservative Cato Institute reported in 2005 that total government spending increased by a third during Bush’s first term — “the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Zelizer’s article also notes the expansion of executive power under Republican rule, hardly commensurate with their advocacy of smaller government.

Fifty years of American history have shown that even the party that traditionally advocates small government on the campaign trail opts for big government when it gets into power. The rhetoric of small government has helped Republicans attract some support in the past, but it is hard to take such rhetoric seriously given the historical record — and it is a now a question whether this rhetoric is even appealing since many Americans want government to help them cope with the current crisis.

Government-bashing is an ever-present staple of GOP propaganda. Dems should not hesitate to hold them accountable for their record, as well as their rhetoric, and Zelizer’s article provides one of the best responses thus far.

As Washington gears up for an apocalyptic battle over President Obama’s budget proposals, the issue that most looms over that battle is the administration’s decision to fold two large policy initiatives into the process–health care reform and climate change.
When it comes to health care, we now are in a position to know a lot more about how that decision was made, thanks to Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic. He has an article out today that explains the internal debate in the transition team and then in the White House over the timing of health care reform and its connection with the president’s first budget. Most interesting in this story is Obama’s own crucial role, particularly during the key juncture when would-be HHS Secretary Tom Daschle was first distracted and then sidelines by controversy over unpaid taxes:

[H]ealth care, in the end, might have gotten pushed aside–except that one very senior official in the administration kept insisting that it stay on the agenda. That official was Obama himself.

Another fateful decision–the extent to which the administration would offer a highly prescriptive and comprehensive reform plan, or leave significant wiggle-room for Congress–was also made personally by the president, who had to choose between larger and smaller budget proposals for health care:

Rejecting the $1 trillion proposal, because the offsets it required seemed too severe, Obama went with the $600 billion option–$634 billion, to be precise. The sum wasn’t enough to finance universal coverage; an actual package could cost $1 trillion, if not more, according to many estimates. But Obama decided simply to note that fact and promise to work with Congress on finding the extra money–in a nod to the fiscal concerns of Orszag and Summers. Strategically speaking, this approach was consistent with the widely accepted lesson of the health care battle of 1994–that the Clinton White House should have let Congress take more ownership over the process.

It’s obviously too early to judge how well these decisions play out. But Cohn’s account helps illustrate how thoroughly they were discussed, and makes it clear that Obama :can bring his advisers to him–rather than the other way around.”

If there is one topic that Democrats come back to over and over in electoral analysis, it’s the party’s persistantly weak performance in recene years among non-college-educated white voters, a.k.a., the White Working Class. And there are some obvious reasons for this debate. As Ruy Teixeira’s new study for CAP (“New Progressive America“), Democratic weakness among WWC voters persisted in 2008, although the impact was mitigated by the steady decline in that demographic’s share of the electorate. And that bugs Democrats a lot, since these are voters who should be (and in opinion if not sometimes in voting behavior actually are) responsive to the progressive economic message. There’s even a moral argument that a progressive party which struggles to connect with working-class voters isn’t adequately representing a core constituency.
But as this debate continues, a parallel debate is developing on the other side of the partisan divide, as some Republicans are beginning to argue against the targeting of WWC voters, urging instead a refocus on the upscale voters who have been sharply trending towards Democrats over the last 20 years. In some respects, this point-of-view is the direct corollary of conservative attacks on Obama’s tax policies; they sense that many upscale voters are ready to vote Republican, and perhaps even join the Tea Party “movement,” in reaction to Obama’s outrageous advocacy of top marginal rates on high-earners that resemble those of the bad old 1990s.
But there are some interesting generational arguments as well. Michael Barone suggests, mainly from inferences rather than hard data, that younger WWC voters are pretty much checking out and can’t be relied upon in the future to support the GOP in the numbers represented by their parents. (In fact, there is tantalizing evidence that Obama may have done surprisingly well among under-30 WWC voters in 2008, which Andrew Levison wrote about in a TDS White Paper in December).
Barone cites and at least tentatively endorses another theory, one advanced by David Frum in reaction to the news that single mom Bristol Palin ain’t getting hitched any time soon. Frum contends that young WWC voters don’t exhibit the sturdy folk virtues of their parents, and thus won’t be attracted to the cultural conservatism of the GOP:

Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.
The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.
Take a look at Table A17 in this report by the Educational Testing Service. Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.

Thus, as Barone puts it in his gloss on Frum’s argument, young WWC Americans are embracing “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles that aren’t conducive to GOP voting behavior.
This”forget about the white trash” dismissal of future WWC voters has pretty significant strategic implications for those GOPers who adopt it. And it exposes a dilemma in conservative message development that became obvious during the 2008 campaign, and is becoming even clearer today. In retrospect, as some of us pointed out at the time, the whole Joe the Plumber phenomenon in the McCain-Palin campaign was an effort to put a WWC face on an argument over tax policy that really affected only high-income voters.
The same conflict is even more evident in the current disagreement among conservatives about whether to go after Obama for his “socialist” and “redistributist” economic policies that threaten to destroy the “productive” upper class, or instead to go populist with an attack on bailouts of Wall Street firms, while stressing Obama’s alleged cultural radicalism. And even those who attack bailouts on laissez-faire grounds, like Joe the Plumber’s replacement, CNBC “reporter” Rick Santelli, don’t much like “demagoguery” about the AIG bonuses (which, after all, benefit the very people he has defended as victims of lower-class perfidy).
This conflict is complicated, of course, by the fact that upper-income voters do not proportionately embrace the cultural conservatism that’s been a big factor in WWC Republican voting, and that Frum and Barone suspect the WWC is beginning to abandon, as evidenced in the marital data and symbolized by the devolution of the Palin family.
It’s all pretty fascinating as a sign of fault lines in the GOP and the conservative movement that will probably become more apparent in days to come. And these fault lines have obvious implications for the putative front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Bristol Palin’s mother.
We Democrats, of course, would like nothing better than a GOP abandonment of non-college-educated voters as a target. Whatever well-heeled conservatives think of their “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles, we’ll take ’em.

After a barrage of big business advertising, and some criticism of the legislation from a couple of Blue Dog Democrats, one might expect that prospects for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. “card-check”) any time soon would be dim. But it’s not quite so simple as that.
As Jeanne Cummings explains at Politico today, the business community may have overplayed its hand on EFCA, particularly by focusing its campaign on provisions of EFCA that could change in a labor-backed compromise proposal. Anticipating this change of dynamics, business lobbyists are already beginning to shift their arguments against EFCA from the “don’t abolish the secret ballot!” line to one that simply suggests that the economy can’t tolerate an increase in unionization.
Meanwhile, Gallup has a new poll out showing that EFCA is favored by 53% of Americans, with 39% opposing it. Follow-up questions indicate that the respondents who are most closely following the “debate” over EFCA tend to tilt in a negative direction, but since much of the public “debate” has consisted of anti-EFCA ads focusing on the “secret ballot” issue, that’s not suprising. And more importantly, if the anti-EFCA talking points continue to shift towards generic “unions are bad” rhetoric, opinion on EFCA is likely to begin polarizing on that much more general topic.

Good news for the President and Dems from a new bipartisan survey of 800 LV’s conducted 3/12 and 14 by Public Opinion Strategies in conjunction with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for National Public Radio. According to GQR’s executive summary (audio here):

The first bipartisan survey conducted for NPR by Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner since the 2008 election shows Barack Obama with high overall approval ratings and strong marks on handling the economy, but much more important, Democrats winning the big debates surrounding Obama’s first budget on taxes, energy, health care, and the deficit by significant margins.

Further,

On both energy and health care the Democratic message wins by 53 to 42 percent, a margin nearly twice the Democrats’ 6-point partisan advantage. A majority of voters also side with the Democratic argument on taxes (52 to 43 percent) and the deficit (51 to 45 percent).

And,

President Obama’s approval rating remains strong. Nearly six-in-ten voters (59 percent) approve of the job President Obama is doing while just 35 percent disapprove…Indeed, by a near two-to-one margin, voters think that Obama’s economic recovery package will help rather than hurt the economy (40 to 21 percent with 34 percent believing it will have little impact on the economy) and a strong majority favor the recovery package passed by Congress and signed into law by the President (55 percent favor to 42 percent oppose).

The poll findings indicate that retirement and job security are now the top priorities for LV’s. The survey found that “worries about the declining stock market and investment losses” matches “the number who mention loss of work, pay cuts or the inability to get a job” as the two leading concerns of respondents. For more, detail, see the PDF here.

The growing frenzy over AIG’s insistence on providing $165 million in employee bonuses, mainly to securities traders in the company’s catastrophically disastrous financial products group, reflects an entirely legitimate belief that this scandal will serve as a popular tipping point between widespread unhappiness and marching-in-the-streets popular outrage over government bailouts of the financial sector. The President and Treasury Secretary spent much of the day trying to get in front of this fast-moving train, not only expressing their own outrage but discussing the possibility of ways to block the bonuses without creating a whole new financial crisis.
It’s an example of the visibility of this issue that it completely overshadowed Obama’s rollout of initiatives to help small business secure access to credit, itself an important symbol of the administration’s efforts to help worthy victims of the financial meltdown rather than its perpetrators.
It’s obvious that many people from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum are perpetually angry about corporate bailouts. And as for the general public, similar sentiment is definitely growing, as Mark Blumenthal reports today at Pollster.com:

In the survey released just today by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of Americans say they are “angry” about the government “bailing out banks and financial institutions that made poor financial decisions” (39% say they are bothered but not angry, only 12% are not bothered). Not surprisingly, this anger translates into considerable skepticism about bailouts of banks and financial institutions:
62% say the federal government has spent too much on “large banks and other financial institutions in danger of failing,” 8% say it is spending too little and 21% say the amount is about right (Newsweek [pdf]).
59% oppose “giving aid to U.S. banks and financial companies in danger of failing,” while 39% favor it (USA Today/Gallup).
50% disapprove of “the federal government providing money to banks and other financial institutions to try to help fix the country’s economic problems,” 39% approve (CBS/New York Times [pdf]).
Note that the expression of disapproval is slightly lower on the last question, which justifies assistance as way “to help fix” the economy. Nonetheless, the opposition as measured over the last month is still considerable, even before the latest AIG bonus story.

As this last poll finding cited by Blumenthal illustrates, it’s critically important that the Obama administration be viewed as only being willing to help “banks and other financial institutions” when it’s absolutely necessary to “fix the economy,” while fighting like hell against any further abuses or misuses of taxpayer dollars. And that’s why the administration’s response to the AIG bonus issue, even as it prepares to make another $30 billion infusion of cash into the company, is so dicey but so important.
One theory among progressives, well articulated today by TNR’s Noam Scheiber, is that the administration needs to shift to a more radical strategy of temporary takeovers of troubled banks and financial firms, whether or not it’s billed as “nationalization.”
This approach, of course, will immediately be labeled as “socialism” by conservatives, and that may be why the administration has avoided it. But as the AIG furor has documented, there’s some serious risk now that the President will be viewed as both enabling and deploring financial sector abuses, drawing attention to the waste of taxpayer funds even as he’s promoting more bailout money in the very near future. Even as gifted and popular a communicator as Barack Obama will struggle to maintain that balancing act, given the crossfire he will get with each new revelation of the causes and consequences of Wall Street misconduct.