One of the most effective talking-points of the unions and Democratic legislators battling Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin was: “It’s Not About the Money!” This battle-cry drew attention to the fact that Walker’s union-busting agenda had little or nothing to do with the state’s fiscal crisis, which Walker himself had helped engineer by pushing corporate tax cuts.
It’s time to make the same point in terms of the Republican agenda in Congress. Much of the battle between Ds and Rs over non-defense discretionary spending isn’t about the deficit numbers, but about GOP efforts to grind various ideological axes, from defunding EPA and bank regulators and NPR, to crippling abortion and contraceptive services, to repealing last year’s health reform legislation. Indeed, appropriations “riders” that have nothing to do with spending levels are what conservative House members are most adamently demanding in return for supporting any appropriations bill, temporary or permanent. In effect, alarms about debts and deficits are being used as an excuse to go after government functions that Republicans would object to even if the budget was in surplus.
Now on one level this isn’t surprising or even wrong-minded; the two parties can and should reflect their own sense of priorities in every budget decision, not just those driven by concerns or negotiations over spending reductions. But these priorities need to be acknowledged and discussed openly and directly, and not in the disguise of making “painful but necessary cuts.”
The truth is that most Republican these days would prefer to live in a country with little or no regulation of corporations (environmental or any other sort) or banks, a far more regressive tax code than has been the case historically, workplaces with no collective bargaining rights or even minimum wages, a status quo ante health care system in which private insurers are free to discriminate and rising costs are borne by the sickest and poorer Americans, the social safety net is weaker and not subject to any national minimum norms, and abortion (plus many forms of contraception) are illegal. They’d also prefer to get rid of legal protections against discrimination generally, and a federal government limited to the kind of functions typical of the eighteenth century in which the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
It’s their right to favor this kind of society, but given the abundant evidence that a large majority of Americans would be very unhappy with it, it’s the responsibility of non-Republicans and of the news media to make this agenda as clear as possible, and not just mindlessly accept that conservatives are only worried about the debt burden on future generations.
I made a small effort to do this on a nationally syndicated public radio show today, and am resolved to keep it up at the risk of redundancy. So should you.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the possibility of an intra-conservative fight over defense spending, as sparked by Haley Barbour’s vague but forceful talk about refusing to exempt the Pentagon from scrutiny, and Tim Pawlenty’s hostile response to this idea.
It’s still too early to tell if this argument will become a serious issue on the Right, but it’s sure sparking some serious initial exchanges of fire. Barbour’s act of heresy earned him a contemptuous slap from neocon poohbah Bill Kristol, framed in about as insulting a manner as he could find. In a piece entitled “T-Paw Versus Hee-Haw,” Kristol said this about Barbour’s central contention on defense spending:

This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon–apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.

Ouchy.
Ol’ Haley’s son, Sterling Barbour, responded with an email accusing Kristol of “assassinating the character of a great conservative,” and concluding with this whiny anathema:

My dad would tell me to leave this alone. And for the record, I have never heard him say an ill word against you. And he never will. He is the consummate team player. Maybe we should rename him the anti-you?

Now I don’t know what sort of personal issues are behind the Kristol/Barbour flareup. But aside from the healthy impact of any discussion of defense spending as a big part of the country’s fiscal problems, any topic that gets conservatives going after each other with claw hammers so quickly elicits a two-word comment from this Donkey: Hee Haw!

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We expect to receive some responses to the six essays already published in the Demos-TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government.
But as co-moderator of the forum, I’d like to offer a few preliminary observations on the discussion so far, and what it means for progressives.
Significantly, none of our six essayists doubted there was a serious erosion of American’s trust and confidence in our government, or that this condition is threatening to progressive politics and to the ability of the country to address its immediate and long-range challenges. William Galston probably most accentuated the immediacy of the problem, arguing that President Obama must tailor his agenda to reflect the loss of public trust in government, and to mitigate it. And while none of our contributors were the least bit naive about the severity and duration of the problem, Thomas Edsall was perhaps most pessimistic in projecting that an extended period of “austerity” could completely erode any sense that government can or should work for the benefit of all citizens, rather than favored political constituencies.
But perhaps the best way to summarize the forum participation so far is to look at the questions we orginally proposed:
1. Has the collapse of public trust in government been a cumulative process over a long time, or primarily the result of recent events?
Our essayists generally agree that trust in government has been declining for decades. Galston suggests the drop in trust occurred most dramatically during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, and has sharpened periodically since then. Patrick Besette notes that the phenomenon is international in scope. David Callahan emphasizes the impact of highly publicized political scandals since the 1970s.
2. Is the source of distrust in government its perceived incompetence to achieve generally supported public goals, or its failure to engage effectively with citizens in setting priorities and pursuing them?
This is a subject of great concern to our forum contributors. Galston argues that competence, responsiveness, and a third factor, integrity, are all in play. Based on their polling data, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira focus on competence to achieve tangible results as the key to resolving the disconnect between public support for specific government responsibilities and lack of confidence in government to discharge them. Bresette offers an extensive critique of faith in “knowledge-based” approaches to rebuilding trust in government, based on the mixed results of various ‘reinvention” efforts, and insists that a more fundamental public cynicism about the efficacy of collective action needs much greater attention. Edsall focuses on who benefits from goverment action in a period of austerity, in the belief that both competence and engagement can fail to engender trust in government among those who perceive its beneficiaries as someone else. And Peter Levine argues that relational accountability–the direct experience of citizens in self-government–is more important that the informational accountability that is typically the object of both government reinvention efforts and pro-government “education” initiatives.
3. Are we experiencing class, generational or racial/ethnic divides over the role of government in which Americans are being pitted against each other in a zero-sum competition for public resources?
This is the main focus of Edsall’s essay, which extensively discusses the current alignment of the electorate on generational and racial/ethnic lines, fostering an atmosphere of fierce and sometimes bitter competition for scare public resources. Both Levine and Bresette suggest that restoring a sense of government as collective self-government can overcome corrosive divisions. And both Galston and Halpin/Teixeira urge leaders to identify with the broad interests of middle-class voters to build a durable base of support for public-sector activism.
4. Should progressives focus on the perception or reality of special-interest control of government, incidents of public corruption, and the ongoing scandal of campaign financing, to improve public trust in government and the political process?
This is the main focus of Callahan’s essay, which calls on progressives to take corruption seriously, to revive interest in campaign finance reform, and to avoid excessive identification with interests (e.g., public-sector unions) perceived as having a stake in large and inefficient goverment. Halpin and Teixeira place special emphasis on the current perception of government as serving corporate interests at the expense of the public interest.
Beyond addressing these questions, the essayists offer varying degrees of specific recommendations for immediate action. Both Galston and Halpin-Teixeira present a detailed agenda for reducing or counteracting the loss of trust in government. Bresette identifies specific models for “common undertakings,” and also suggests national leadership, beginning with the president, to reduce public cynicism. Callahan’s prescriptions for the appropriate reaction to incidents of corruption, and to perceptions of excessive coziness with interest groups, are highly relevant to current events. Edsall is less optimistic about options for avoiding conflicts over public resources, but is instructively specific in analyzing the emerging fault lines. Like Bresette, Levine points to outstanding examples of citizen participation in public functions and agencies, and encourages their expansion throughout government.
Once reactions (either here or elsewhere) to this forum have been digested, we’ll have another summary to weigh findings and examine outstanding questions for future debate.

Via Greg Sargent:

Liberal groups are going up with a new version of their much-discussed ad featuring ordinary Wisconsinites making the case for public employee barganing rights — and this time, the new spot focuses on four Wisconsin state senators who are top targets for the Dem recall drives
“Republican Senators like Alberta Darling should enjoy their last several weeks in office,” says Charles Chamberlain, the director of Democracy for America, which is airing the ad along with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “The local energy around recalling Republicans is unlike anything DFA, the PCCC, or most other political organizers have seen in a long time.”

Sweet

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As the 2012 Republican presidential field finally takes shape over the next few months, one thing is fairly certain: An intensely ideological female politician closely identified with the Christian Right and with the Tea Party movement, someone liberals love to hate, will define the race. But surprisingly, it’s increasingly likely that person will be Michele Bachmann rather than Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor has been deliberately opaque about her plans, but she looks ever less interested in running for president–and even if she is quietly hankering for a White House bid, her approval ratings have been sliding steadily among Republicans as well as the public at large (worse, a vast majority of Americans think she is unqualified to be president). That leaves an opening for Congresswoman Bachmann, the Tea Party firebrand from Minnesota, who is almost an improved version of Sarah Palin: even more right-wing, which appeals to the base, but also lacking many of Palin’s fatal political flaws.
The parallels between Bachmann and Palin are hard to ignore, up to and including their backgrounds as minor beauty pageant contestants. Both women are politically rooted in the anti-abortion movement, having earned the loyalty of anti-choicers by “walking the walk”–Palin by carrying to term a child with a severe disability, and Bachmann by serving as a foster parent to 23 children (in addition to her own five), plus walking a few abortion clinic picket lines over the years. Both candidates are heroes of the Tea Party movement (Bachmann is the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus). And both have regularly played fast and loose with facts and history, constantly treading the boundary between ideologically loaded viewpoint and sheer ignorance.
But when you put Palin and Bachmann side by side, it is striking how much broader and deeper–in a word, more seriously committed–the Minnesotan’s involvement with right-wing causes has actually been. Her signature issue as a Minnesota state senator was fighting same-sex marriage, while Palin made her name as a maverick who fought corruption. Bachmann is the one who organized the borderline-violent demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol just before last year’s final vote on health reform, and suggested that Democratic members of Congress be investigated to determine if they were “pro-American” or “anti-American.” And Bachmann isn’t a casual churchgoer like Palin: She got her law degree from Oral Roberts University (a law school that eventually migrated to Pat Robertson’s Regent University); her husband has long run a “Christian family counseling” center; and both Bachmanns once operated a charter school that was accused of seriously violation of the principle of church-state separation.
Moreover, Bachmann doesn’t give the impression her public persona is just an ego-gratifying act. She hasn’t starred in a reality TV show (or sent her daughter to dance with the stars), appeared on Saturday Night Live, or quit her job. And she is relatively free of Palin’s whiny martyr complex, which conservatives have begun to criticize quite loudly. For all her defiance of the “lamestream media” and the hated “elites,” Palin concedes the power of her critics’ sneers by being so conspicuously wounded by them. Bachmann seems tougher, as reflected in her handling of a recent gaffe in which she said that the battles of Lexington and Concord happened in New Hampshire. Bachmann responded to the mockery with a barbed admission: “So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!” Likewise, she refused to wallow in the media backlash over her poorly received State of the Union rebuttal, in which a camera placement error caused her to stare off-screen like a zombie. Instead of making her critics the story, as Palin so often does, Bachmann just moved on.
Moreover, Bachmann is in excellent political position. She could certainly do well in the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucus, particularly if Mike Huckabee also stays on the sidelines as expected, creating a hunger for a new Christian Right champion in a state where the Christian Right still walks tall. It also helps that she is actually an Iowa native living in next door Minnesota–and it’s hugely important that her very closest associate in Congress is influential Iowa Congressman Steve King. As Craig Robinson, an Iowa GOP insider, says about the Bachmann-King combo:

A Bachmann run would create a perfect storm in Iowa. Bachmann is already the darling of the Tea Party. Combine that with King’s statewide network of conservatives in a caucus election and its bound to befuddle everyone in the beltway as well as her caucus opponents.

Even if Bachmann doesn’t win a state outright, she could wreak havoc on the field. Given her fanaticism about root-and-branch repeal of ObamaCare, is there any doubt she would make sure every Caucus-goer knows about RomneyCare? Plus, she represents a deadly threat to the ambitions of her fellow Minnesota Republican, Tim Pawlenty, who has been quietly consolidating a position as likely Republican frontrunner: When she was a state legislator, Bachmann once assaulted a Pawlenty proposal for an enterprise zone, saying it represented Marxist principles. She won’t need an oppo research firm to dig up other alleged Pawlenty violations of conservative dogma. And it’s unlikely Pawlenty could survive running behind a fellow Minnesotan in a state so close to his own.
That said, it’s doubtful Bachmann would wear very well on primary voters in later states, and it’s hard to imagine someone as radical as her actually winning the nomination. Some observers think she will eventually back off and perhaps run for the Senate instead. But I wouldn’t be so sure. Bachmann need look no further than Palin’s example to see that making a big splash in a national election can secure success more quickly than crawling up the career ladder in Washington. And also like her doppelganger, Bachmann has never been shy about her ambitions–or the conviction that her career is being guided by none other than the Lord himself. Why wouldn’t she take a leap of faith?

This TDS Strategy Memo by Andrew Levison, author of two books and numerous articles about working-class Americans, was written in response to the Demos-TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government.

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In a 2007 article in The American Prospect, pollster Stan Greenberg provided a particularly cogent description of the profound political problem that the decline in trust of government poses for the Democratic coalition:

There is a new reality that Democrats must deal with if they are to be successful going forward. In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans’ confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America’s problems. Democrats will not make sustainable gains unless they are able to restore the public’s confidence in its capacity to act through government.
…”the scale of damage done to people’s belief in government is enormous… 62% in a Pew study said they believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. By 57% to 29% Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life rather than helping people. 85% say that if the government had more money it would waste it rather than spend it well.
Although people may favor government action on critical issues like health care, education and energy their lack of trust in governments capacity to spend money properly means that their first priority is to cut wasteful spending and make government more accountable. People are desperate to see accountability from Washington, not just in the spending of tax dollars with no discernible results but also in politicians’ behavior… To have any chance of getting heard on their agenda, Democrats need to stand up and take on the government–not its size or scope, but its failure to be accountable–and deliver the results that people expect for the taxes they pay.

A more recent strategy memo by Greenberg’s Democracy Corps focuses on the overwhelming distrust and contempt with which Congress in particular is viewed:

Voters are disgusted with ‘business as usual’ in Washington. There is a deep and pervasive belief, particularly among independents, that special interests are running things and Members of Congress listen more to those that fund their campaigns than the voters that they are supposed to be representing. Three quarters believe that special interests hold too much influence over Washington today while fewer than a quarter believe that ordinary citizens can still influence what happens in politics. Similarly, nearly 80 percent say that Members of Congress are trolled by the groups that help fund their political campaigns while fewer than a fifth believe that Members listen more to the voters.

For Democrats the fundamental “take-away” from Greenberg’s analysis is simple. Until this profound distrust is overcome Democrats will be unable to pass any major new social legislation or political reform. Democrats have no alternative. They must reduce the enormous cynicism Americans now feel about government.
In political terms the most important demographic group whose opinions of government Democrats must seek to change is the white working class–people who have less than a college degree and are generally employed in “working class” rather than “middle class” jobs. Their support for Democrats plummeted by 12 percent between 2008 and 2010 in large part because of this issue. Without regaining a substantial part of this lost support in 2012, a Democratic victory will be close to impossible.
What Democrats need is a coherent strategy for addressing the complex mixture of attitudes that lies behind hostility and distrust of government–a strategy that not only addresses the problem in a meaningful way but which can also be presented in a consistent and convincing communications campaign.

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One of those shoes you just knew would eventually have to drop was some exposure of the massive contradiction between conservative Republican militancy about federal spending and that party’s tradition of support for open-ended defense spending and aggressive military interventions around the world.
But while it would have been predictable if this latent conflict had been brought to light by someone like Rand Paul, who has never made a secret of his neo-isolationist foreign policy views, it now appears that Haley Barbour, of all people, is making it a calling card for his own likely presidential campaign.
In a speech in Iowa guaranteed to attract maximum attention, this most conventional of GOP pols went out of his way to attack the idea that defense spending should be off the table in deficit reduction efforts, and specifically suggested the U.S. consider winding down its troop levels in Afghanistan.
Dramatizing Barbour’s heresy, Tim Pawlenty promptly went out of his way in South Carolina to oppose significant defense cuts or any reconsideration of the Afghanistan commitment. At least two other probable 2012 presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have long been on record calling for higher defense spending and a more confrontational foreign policy towards states like Iran and North Korea. And another right-wing luminary, Sarah Palin, once offered to take up the mission of convincing her admirers in the Tea Party Movement to exempt the Pentagon from any budget-cutting exercise.
Now it’s entirely possible Barbour’s gambit and the reaction to it will turn out to be smoke and mirrors, reflecting a desire to dominate a news cycle or two rather than any serious interest in defying the neocon wing of the Republican Establishment or the long-settled Republican habit of encouraging a foreign policy based on threats of military intervention and little else. But even a token gesture in that direction could be politically significant, much like Mike Huckabee’s 2008 effort to distinguish himself from other Republicans by refusing to celebrate the Bush Economy as a total success, or hail Wall Street as an unambiguous source of economic and moral virtue. Like Huckabee on the economy, Barbour may fail to follow through with any truly heterodox thoughts on foreign policy and defense.
But the next few days of reaction to Barbour’s speech will be interesting. If nothing else, it shows he’s not planning on running for president purely on the basis of his fundraising power, his lobbying skills, or his claims of having turned Mississippi into an economic dynamo.

Here we have an emblematic example of the bogus overpaid-public-employee-horror-story brought to you by, who else, a Republican state Senator. Here’s how Greg Sargent rolls it out in his Plum Line column:

…Wisconsin GOP state senator Randy Hopper — a top target of the Dems’ recall drive — is running a new ad that slams public employees by decrying a “union bus driver in Madison making $160,000 a year.” The driver has been widely presented as the archetypal overpaid and overstuffed public employee — and a number of you seemed very interested in his case — so I thought I’d look into it a bit more.
Turns out that a little digging proves beyond doubt that pointing to this as evidence that public employees are overpaid is entirely bogus.

Sargent goes on to point out that the guy made his dough by working lots of o.t. at time-and-a-half above his hourly base ($26 per hour) — which he earned as a result of his nearly 40 years on the job. And when employees rack up large amounts of overtime, that often results from a manpower shortage caused by ill-considered r.i.f.s and layoffs.

Most Americans remember the date April 4 as the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a day of commemorating the courage, vision and contributions of one of America’s greatest leaders. It is a measure of King’s legacy that he is honored in observance programs across the nation, not only on his birthday, a national holiday, but also on the anniversary of his death.
The 2011 anniversary of MLK’s death, however, will have added poignancy, since it will be observed in the context of the historic protest demonstrations in Madison resisting the attack on public workers’ collective bargaining rights. King was martyred in 1968 while leading a protest campaign supporting the rights of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. When the new monument honoring Dr. King is unveiled at the Great Mall in Washington, D.C. this summer, America will have our first major memorial honoring a leader of the struggle for worker rights, as well as for racial equality.
Organized labor will mark the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King with a mass mobilization, including rallies, marches and other activities to defend workers’ rights in cities and towns across the nation. For a partial listing of events (more being added continually) check here, and for assistance with event ideas and resources, click here. (Facebook page here)
In addition to labor unions, the ‘We Are One’ MLK commemorations are expected to draw a significant turnout of African Americans and students, because both have been targeted by GOP disenfranchisement campaigns. April 4 could well mark a rekindling of King’s ‘Coalition of Conscience,’ a new 21st century movement for social and economic justice.
For an inspiring and informative read on the topic of MLK and worker rights leading up to April 4, you can’t do much better than “All Labor Has Dignity,” a new collection of King’s writings, edited by Michael Honey.
Mark it on your calendar, Monday, April 4th — We Are One.

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This item, the sixth essay in the Demos-TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Peter Levine, Director of Research and Director of CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.
Americans’ distrust of government is deep and poses a fundamental obstacle to progressive reform. According to the CBS/New York Times poll conducted in Feb. 2010, just six percent of Americans believed that the stimulus bill that had been enacted almost one year before had created any jobs so far. And according to a 2009 Gallup poll, Americans believed that 50 cents of each dollar of federal spending was wasted.
Distrust of government has old roots in American history, but attitudes toward government were much more favorable in the mid-twentieth century, when progressive politics were ascendant. The reasons for today’s profound distrust probably include deliberate anti-government propaganda that echoes around the conservative chambers of an increasingly polarized news and entertainment media–plus lame responses from liberal leaders.
But when only six percent of Americans trust the government to have created any jobs by spending almost one trillion of their dollars, the problem is much deeper than Fox News or the communications strategy of the White House. The underlying relationship between people and their government is fundamentally broken.
I don’t believe that communicating the virtues of government or educating citizens about the public sector can raise trust much, because the pro-government case is too difficult to make in a crowded media environment, and the message is too vulnerable to scandals. Also, if the government actually fails to address our most serious problems–which I fear is the case–people will not be convinced that it works.
I am equally skeptical about improving accountability in the way that the Clinton and Obama administrations have tried. They hope that by disclosing information about the government’s performance, they will expose and remedy actual failures and thereby increase people’s confidence in public institutions.
The evidence that transparency improves performance and trust is mixed, at best. Besides, most people do not want informational accountability; they want relational accountability. For example, they do not want to know the test scores, teacher salaries, and graduation rates at their local high school; they want to know the principal and have confidence in her values.
In focus groups that Doble Research Associates conducted for the Kettering Foundation in 2001, parents were highly resistant to the idea that tests would be useful ways to hold school accountable. For one thing, they wanted to hold other parties accountable for education, starting with themselves. A Baltimore woman explained, “When I think about accountability, I think about parents taking responsibility for supervising their children’s learning and staying in touch with teachers.” This respondent not only wanted to broaden responsibility but also saw it in terms of two-way communication.
Many participants wanted to know whether schools, parents, and students had the right values. They doubted that data would answer that question. One Atlanta woman summed it up: “What we’ve got to do is develop a stronger sense of community between the schools and families in the community.”
I believe that schools and other public institutions would work better if they enlisted more of the energies, ideas, and values of ordinary citizens and trusted them to make consequential collective decisions. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for a career of work showing that laypeople can do an excellent job of managing public institutions. She has also found that decentralized, participatory bodies can produce better outcomes than either centralized, expert-led bureaucracies or markets, even though participatory bodies often overlap, duplicate efforts, and reinvent one another’s wheels.
Ostrom argues that we have moved in the opposite direction, consolidating school districts, replacing elected boards with appointed experts, relying on standardized tests and measures, and otherwise reducing opportunities for laypeople to work together in public–all in a foolish quest for efficiency.
Decentralized, participatory efforts work well because the problems that really concern us–such the dropout rate of about one third, rampant crime, deindustrialization, and the profligate waste of natural resources–are “wicked problems.” They involve complex, rapidly changing, interconnected systems that are virtually impossible to predict or to shape from the outside. They also involve conflicting values and interests, so that the very definition of success is contested, and people’s motives are part of the problem.
In general, “wicked problems” are best addressed by decentralizing control and empowering mixed groups of people, including those most affected. There are no expert solutions. Markets decentralize decision-making, but they cannot address genuine public problems such as deep inequality and environmental degradation. Governments can redistribute resources and regulate behavior but cannot solve “wicked problems” without the local knowledge and energies that citizens provide.

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