This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
George Will and I have something in common: We were both trained in the close reading of political texts. Will recently applied his interpretive skills to a statement by Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Massachusetts. Here is what Warren said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there–good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea–God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is [that] you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

After applying to Warren’s words William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith–a pyromaniac in a field of straw men, refuting propositions no one asserts–Will moves to the gravamen of his argument: Warren’s vision entails a collectivist political agenda. He tartly and uncharitably described that agenda as follows:

[Its] premise is that individual is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so that the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize–i.e., conscript–whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

I have never met Warren. For all I know she may privately embrace the premise Will sketches. But even a cursory inspection of her public words reveals that she is saying nothing of the sort. Rather, she is making a straightforward argument. Without the enabling framework that only government can create, individuals cannot securely enjoy the fruits of their endeavors. Every return on investment, then, is actually a return on two sources of investment, one reflecting individual choice, the other public decisions. Taxation is not theft; nor is it, as the late philosopher Robert Nozick once put it, “on a par with forced labor.” Rather, it reflects the return on the public investment to which nearly everyone contributes. It does not rest on the claim that all resources are collective and that individuals receive what is theirs as an act of grace, but rather on the more modest claim that we all owe something in return for the collective goods without which our individual striving cannot succeed.
And Warren is saying something else as well–that (to quote a thinker with whom Will has more than a passing acquaintance), “Society is indeed a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Warren’s homely phrase, “pay forward,” captures the moral bond that connects this generation with the next. If we don’t adequately provide for their future, we are breaking that bond. A decent political community has the right–indeed the obligation–to honor that bond–if necessary, by compelling individuals who refuse to look beyond their own immediate concerns to contribute their share to the common future.
To be sure, these general arguments don’t come close to settling the question of who should pay how much in taxes. That’s what elections and political contestation are about. But they do establish a sturdy foundation for the idea that individual choice does not create all our obligations and there is nothing in principle objectionable when society presents its bill to each of us. I hope that is one of the straw men that Will (unlike some of his less tutored conservative brethren) never intended to deny.
Not content to accuse Warren of collectivism, he proceeds to accuse her of determinism, or at least to tar her of that sin by guilty association. Warren’s statement, he contends, is a “footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government–of the ability to govern oneself.” This premise–public incompetence–is said to warrant a “tutelary government” that owes “minimal deference to people’s preferences.”
As Will might say, Well. Let us set aside Galbraith, John Rawls, and the bedraggled remnant band of Marxists clinging to the doctrine of false consciousness, none of whose views can be fairly be imputed to Elizabeth Warren. As I understand it, her case for reasonable regulation does not ignore, but rather reflects, people’s preferences. We don’t want to be misled or cheated, but the complexity of modern contractual arrangements can baffle even the most educated among us. So we collectively opt for a framework that protects us against those who have more time and expertise to devise deceptions than we do to ferret them out. No, government shouldn’t make our choices for us, and we shouldn’t ask it to. But it does have a legitimate role in ensuring that the information relevant to those choices is accurate and intelligible.
Again, we can argue about the details. No doubt the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren conceived and hoped to lead is imperfect in some respects, as is every human creation. If so, experience will expose its flaws, and the political process can improve it. But the claim that it rests on a necessary presupposition of individual incompetence–and worse, the denial of individual autonomy–is unfounded. And so is Will’s root-and-branch dismissal of modern liberalism.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web page, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports strong support for President Obama’s jobs bill and takes hikes on the rich to pay for it. On the jobs bill, Teixeira explains:

In the most recent Washington Post/ABC poll, 52 percent say they support his plan, even though the $450 billion price tag is prominently mentioned, and just 36 percent are opposed.
And in the same poll, respondents were asked whether President Obama’s jobs package, if it passed Congress, would improve the jobs situation. By a 58-40 margin, the public said it would.

President Obama also has strong support for his proposals for financing the jobs bill, as the WaPo/ABC poll indicates:

As for taxing the rich, that idea is wildly popular. By an astounding 52-point margin (75-23) the public supports the idea of raising taxes on those making over $1 million a year.

As Teixeira concludes: “Conservatives said the American people would reject President Obama’s proposals because they were “big government, tax and spend.” And many pundits predicted President Obama’s aggressive approach would alienate centrist voters who wanted a continued focus on deficit reduction and bipartisanship at all costs. Wrong on both counts.”

There were three main story-lines that came out of this weekend’s Value Voters Summit, an annual gathering of cultural conservative (and mainly conservative evangelical) folk sponsored by the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and the American Family Association that has also become an obligatory stop for Republican presidential candidates.
The first, and perhaps least interesting, is that Ron Paul’s supporters again packed the room and won a straw poll. Paul is by all accounts running a more formidable campaign than he did in 2008, but these straw poll showings have little or nothing to do with it (notably, in the two major straw polls this year where Paulites couldn’t just show up at the last minute and dominate the balloting, the Ames Iowa GOP event in August and the Florida “P5” event in September, Paul did not win).
The second story-line is that a prominent Texas preacher known for his anti-Mormon sentiments introduced Rick Perry and then gleefully gave interviews repeating his belief that the LDS faith is a “cult,” getting Mitt’s religion back into the immediate consciousness of the conservative evangelical voters and opinion-leaders most likely to pay attention to the event, while also probably scandalizing Republican elites who don’t like religion-talk generally.
The third story-line is that Herman Cain again gave a rapturously received speech, another version of the same speech he’s been giving for months.
It’s debatable at this point whether the second (the nasty Romney-Perry rivalry) or the third (the Cain surge) story matters most. But the underlying story is that three candidates who had an early advantage in Christian Right support–Gingrich, Bachmann, and Santorum–have become semi-invisible, while a fourth–Tim Pawlenty–has withdrawn altogether.

In the comments section following J.P. Green’s Friday post, “Limitations of the ‘Do Nothing Congress Meme” a commenter with the handle ‘massappeal’ flagged “Obama’s Chances Could Turn on One Key Indicator” by Alexis Simendinger at RealClear Politics. Here’s the crux argument from Simendinger’s post:

What if the incumbent president’s fate hinges on one basic economic question in 2012: Are the incomes of voters growing in the six months before Election Day? Barack Obama is likely to win a second term if real disposable incomes are stable or climbing in the two quarters leading into next year’s election, according to respected political science research…There is also a body of scholarship examining presidential elections over time that has uncovered predictive statistical conclusions. And here’s what that research shows: If we could gaze into a crystal ball and know whether personal incomes are climbing, flat, or falling — especially in key electoral states — between June and November 2012, we could place informed bets on the incumbent president’s fate….Real disposable income growth (that is, income growth adjusted for price changes), can produce predictive correlations that suggest outcomes a year from now.

Simendinger explains that the argument comes from Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels, author of “Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.” (Bartels and Princeton political scientist Christopher H. Achen crunch and analyze some key numbers in their 2004 paper “Musical Chairs: Pocketbook Voting and the Limits of Democratic Accountability.”)
Simendinger quotes Bartels: “Obama’s expected popular vote margin would be 5.17+3.49 x (2012 income growth). This implies that he is likely to be re-elected even if real incomes are stagnant in 2012, and even more likely to win if there is some real income growth in the next 12 months.” Further,

What is particularly intriguing about Bartels’ research is that Obama may be re-elected, based on the calculations, even if personal incomes are stagnant in 2012 — as they have been in the last year. But a late-breaking surge in income growth in the summer and autumn next year would clinch the election for the president, the research suggests…If Bartels and other political scientists are right about the benefits to incumbents of election-year economic upswings — and the voters’ decisive and “myopic considerations” about their own well-being — even a slight improvement in personal incomes in 2012 could be enough to deliver a victory to the president.
…If there are notable green shoots during the months prior to November 2012, Obama may be both lucky and victorious. The theoretical expectation is that voters next year will mentally drag their income evaluations into the voting booth and support the incumbent if they feel even marginally cheered about their perch in prosperity.

DCorps lead analyst Erica Seifert’s observation, made the October 6 TDS interview with her, that “pervasive underemployment” is more destructive for Democratic hopes than even unemployment may also reflect the importance of changes in real disposable income.
Yet, it’s hard to accept that this one statistic would trump all others, particularly in a worst case scenario. What will happen, for example, if unemployment, poverty, debt and gas prices are all rising, and somehow, owing to a statistical anomaly of some kind, real disposable income is improving?
Whether or not disposable real income growth is the ‘holy grail’ statistic for predicting presidential election outcomes is debatable. In terms of formulating political strategy, and messaging in particular, however, it does appear that real disposable income growth is a trend worth monitoring.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
While all of Washington fastened its gaze on Chris Christie, the most important issue of the week–maybe of the year–was playing out on the floor of the Senate. By a margin of 79 to 19, senators agreed to consider a measure that would allow the United States to impose tariffs on another country if the Treasury found its currency to be “misaligned.” As the Wall Street Journal points out, this is a less demanding standard than current law, which “requires a finding of intentional manipulation.” If this newfound bipartisan comity in Congress over the issue of confronting China culminates in a bill that passes both houses, it will put Obama in a serious bind: either adopt a similarly hawkish stance and risk a trade war, or issue a veto that would expose him to attack from the Republican nominee and provoke a populist backlash from workers and communities throughout America’s hard-pressed manufacturing sector.
The huge bipartisan majority on the procedural question this week virtually guarantees that the bill will make it through the Senate, and it illuminates the changing contours of the China trade issue. Nearly every Democrat voted to proceed; Washington’s Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray and (intriguingly) Claire McCaskill of Missouri were the only dissidents. And fully 31 of the 47 Senate Republicans supported the motion as well, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander, Policy Committee Chairman John Thune, and John Cornyn, who heads the committee responsible for electing more Republicans to the Senate in 2012. Among the party’s leadership, John Kyl stood alone in opposition.
This Republican split should have come as no surprise. Last year, just a month before the midterm elections, a similar bill won the support of 99 Republicans, with only 74 opposed. If anything, the balance inside the new House Republican majority has shifted even further toward confronting the Chinese: Compared to traditional business-oriented conservatives, Tea Party populist conservatives are significantly more hawkish on Sino-U.S. trade relations. In a nomination contest in which Tea Party sympathizers will enjoy disproportionate influence, it is not hard to understand why even a quintessential business candidate like Mitt Romney has chosen to embrace a hard line on Chinese currency and trade practices.
Republicans are hardly out of step with the country, either. In a Pew survey conducted earlier this year, 54 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that it was very important to get tougher with China on economic and trade issues; so did 52 percent of Democrats and their independent leaners. Among Republican identifiers and leaners, 60 percent of Tea Party sympathizers agreed, compared with only 49 percent of non-Tea Party sympathizers.
This is not to say that Americans see China as an adversary, a position endorsed by barely one-fifth of the population. And nearly three in five Americans believe that it is very important for the United States to build a stronger relationship with the People’s Republic. The question is whether we can have it both ways.
It’s easy for business-oriented leaders and publications to dismiss these sentiments as raw politics. But there’s more to them. In a recent NBER paper, “The China Syndrome,” economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, who cannot be accused of shilling for anyone, examine the effects of Chinese import competition on the U.S. economy. Their conclusion: The more exposed a local labor market is to that competition, the larger its negative effects. They summarize matters this way:

Rising exposure increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Transfer benefits payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in exposed labor markets. The deadweight loss of financing these transfers is one to two-thirds as large as U.S. gains from trade with China.

I hope that other economists will examine and assess these findings, which seem solidly grounded. If Autor, Dorn, and Hanson are right, the United States has a problem that goes well beyond the vagaries of populist politics.
And speaking of politics, what about the House and the White House? John Boehner characterizes the Senate’s action as “dangerous” and believes that forcing another country to revalue its currency goes “well beyond what the Congress ought to be doing.” If he has his way, the bill will never come to the House floor. But it’s not clear that he will, because he probably doesn’t speak for a majority of his own party, let alone of the House. If a bipartisan coalition feels strongly about the matter, it can probably get enough signatures on a discharge petition to override the Speaker’s wishes.
As for the president, he has declined to take a position on the matter. Trapped between the imperatives of global diplomacy and pressure from the Democratic base, no doubt he is hoping that the Republican leadership can keep the bill bottled up indefinitely. If not, he’ll have to declare himself. And if legislation reaches his desk, he’ll be forced to make what could turn out to be a fateful choice: Sign the bill and risk a trade war, or veto it and face an onslaught from Mitt Romney throughout the Midwest. No wonder many Democrats are urging him to get engaged and negotiate with the Hill before he is faced with only these unpalatable options.
In a lead editorial, the Wall Street Journal argues that “a major benefit of free trade is its stabilizing effect on rising powers like China.” There’s something to this, as the history of the 1930s suggests. But American workers are entitled to ask why they are always the ones paying the price for our global diplomacy. If the U.S. business community wants to sustain an open global trade regime, it should start investing in job-creating enterprises here at home. And if the Obama administration wants to maintain a good working relationship with the world’s second-largest economy, it should use the leverage created by the pending currency legislation to wring significant economic concessions from China’s leaders. The alternative is a trade war that will benefit no one, and the collapse of the modest cooperation that now exists on issues such as North Korea and Iran. The clock is ticking, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The latest big phenomenon in the Republican presidential nominating contest is the sudden collapse of Rick Perry, who looked to be consolidating a formidable lead just a month ago. The consensus opinion is that Perry lost his way in back-to-back candidate debates where he came across as an inarticulate yahoo that Republicans could not trust to hold his own against Barack Obama–an impression deepened by the most recent controversy over the name of his family’s leased hunting retreat.
If that is indeed the case, it would be highly premature to write Perry off, since there’s nothing about his image that could not be cured by a strong performance in future debates and judicious use of the $17 million the Texan has raised since entering the race in August. But there is an alternative theory about Perry’s decline that creates a less optimistic scenario for the governor, while raising some hard-to-answer questions about the direction of the GOP. There is abundant evidence that Perry’s problem is less a matter of style than of substance, and more a matter of ideology than of electability. To put it simply, the man who announced his candidacy with a fiery right-wing speech at a gathering of the fiery right-wing RedState community is rapidly alienating his hyper-conservative base, and may have real trouble getting back his wingnut mojo.
Recent polls illustrate the problem clearly. The percentage of GOP voters supporting Perry in the ABC-WaPo survey dropped from 29 percent to 17 percent between early September and the end of the month. But look at the internals:

The falloff for Perry against other announced candidates has been particularly steep among those aligned with the tea party movement. In early September, Perry had a 3-to-1 advantage over any other candidate among those “strongly” backing the tea party, but his support has plummeted from 45 percent to 10 percent in this group.

Similarly, a new CBS poll that shows Perry dropping from 23 percent to 12 percent among all Republicans during the last two weeks has him dropping from 30 percent to 12 percent among Tea Party supporters, a 60 percent plunge. He now ranks not only behind Cain and Romney with the Tea Folk, but behind Newt Gingrich as well.
In other words, Perry’s plunge has been disproportionately strong among conservatives, and according to ABC/WaPo, catastrophic among hard-core conservatives. At a time when the same survey says Republicans care more about a candidate’s agreement with them on the issues than about their relative electability by a 73-20 margin, it appears unlikely that Perry’s alienation of his erstwhile fans is primarily a function of his debating style or his appeal to swing voters.
It is generally understood that Perry’s positioning on immigration, and specifically his continued championship of a program that offered in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants, has proven problematic to conservatives (the new CBS poll showed 86 percent of Republicans disapproving of Perry’s program). But the extent of the offense has been underplayed by political observers for whom it is gospel that issues other than the economy don’t matter to voters this cycle. Evidence to the contrary, however, is right there in the ABC/WaPo survey. Offered a list of issue positions which might make Republican voters more or less likely to support a candidate, “supports in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants” elicited far and away the most powerful negative response, with 53 percent saying it made them “much less likely” to support the candidate promoting that heresy (the same percentage, it so happens, as those saying “wants to repeal new health care law” made them “much more likely” to support the candidate). The poll didn’t ask what voters would think of a candidate who called them “heartless” for feeling that way, but presumably the numbers would be even more emphatically negative.
The really bad news for Perry is that the worst may be yet to come, once his positions and record on issues other than immigration come fully to light and are exploited by rivals. Michele Bachmann tried to turn his handling of the HPV vaccination controversy into an example of Perry’s “crony capitalism,” but her attacks backfired thanks to her foolish embrace of the idea that the vaccine might cause mental retardation. Other Perry initiatives in Texas, though, show more obvious vulnerabilities, particularly his fondness for using state funds to subsidize private companies–some with links to him personally and others whose executives have turned up as Perry campaign donors–in the name of economic development. This was the topic of an early Wall Street Journal op-ed blasting Perry for “crony capitalism.” And you can bet rival campaigns are digging into the ground already turned by TNR’s Alec MacGillis in his examination of the state’s Enterprise Fund, the Emerging Technology Fund, and the OneTexas Foundation, along with private contracts awarded by the Perry administration for major public services like Medicaid. At a time when Republicans are in full cry about the Obama administration’s alleged habit of picking “winners and losers” in the private sector in areas ranging from the auto industry to clean energy, there is an obvious opening for tarring Perry with similar practices.
MacGillis has suggested that Republicans don’t really want to “go there” when it comes to Perry because their corporate allies won’t like it. But in the heat of a competitive presidential campaign, Perry’s rivals will be strongly tempted to pick up any rock they can find to hurl at him, particularly if it can be used to undermine the “constitutional conservative” credentials that bind him to the Tea Party. And anyone who thinks Perry will get a pass on all these ideological questions should note the challenge, just issued by RedState’s Erick Erickson, for all the candidates to submit to an individual “conversation” based on the concerns of “conservative activists.” Wildfires in Texas gave Perry an excuse to skip the last such ideological inquisition, sponsored by Jim DeMint on Labor Day. But that one lasted about twenty minutes per candidate. Erickson wants two hours. No stone will be left unturned. And unlike the occasion of Perry’s announcement speech to Erickson’s group in August, he won’t be able to spend his time ranting and strutting and whipping the crowd up into a frenzy against Barack Obama. He’ll have his own right flank to cover.

I was hoping it wasn’t true. But Brendan Nyhan, always with the “it’s the economy stupid” arguments, now has me convinced he is probably right about the limitations of the “do nothing congress” meme as a Democratic battle axe. Here’s Nyhan, writing as a guest columnist for Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, on Dems’ embrace of the meme:

Can President Obama overcome a weak economy and win in 2012 by campaigning against the Republican Congress? The historical evidence for this claim is weaker than his allies would like to admit.
Obama’s strategy seems to be Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign against a “Do-Nothing” Republican Congress. Last week, for instance, David Goldstein of McClatchy Newspapers asked, “Has President Barack Obama been channeling Harry Truman?”
Like most journalists who have written on the subject, Goldstein repeated the conventional wisdom that Truman’s campaign against the “do-nothing Congress” was responsible for his victory: “Facing long odds in the 1948 election, Truman put Republicans in his campaign bull’s-eye and unloaded on the “do-nothing Congress.” He won, and conventional wisdom took a beating.”
This idea, which has been echoed by opinion makers ranging from former New York Times columnist Frank Rich to Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, has given hope to Obama supporters demoralized by the current state of the economy.
Obama himself has paid homage to Truman’s strategy. During a Sept. 15 speech, for instance, he said: “[T]his Congress, they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they’re comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing.”

Nyhan then quotes from an academic article by University at Buffalo, SUNY political scientist James Campbell:

Until recently, for instance, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) figured that GDP in the first half of 1948 (leading into the Truman-Dewey contest) was growing at a healthy 4.1% rate. The BEA’s latest series indicates that this greatly understated growth at the outset of the 1948 campaign. The BEA now figures that the economy was growing at a sizzling 6.8%, a revision that helps explain Truman’s miraculous comeback…

Not content to leave it at that, Nyhan adds,

This well-timed surge in economic growth is likely to have played an important role in the success of Truman’s campaign. By contrast, the International Monetary Fund just downgraded its forecast for US economic growth in 2011 and 2012 to 1.5% and 1.8%, respectively.

Killjoy.
Nyhan then presents some depressing charts comparing the very different economic situations facing Truman and Obama to make his point. He concedes that the predictions could be wrong and an unexpected upsurge could help Obama and Dems.
But there’s really no denying Nyhan’s larger point — that it would be folly for Dems to think they can reheat Truman’s “Do Nothing Congress” strategy without the favorable economic trends that gave HST the needed cred.
That doesn’t mean Obama can’t get some leverage from the meme, because, after all, the Republicans really are all about gridlock, and it needs to be said. But let’s not bet the ranch on it.
I do have one admittedly less substantial quibble with Nyhan’s excellent post — the title “Obama 2012: Not Exactly the Truman Show.” Having just returned from a couple of days r&r not far from Seaside, FL, the otherworldly village where “The Truman Show” was filmed, I can report that the town feels much more like a Republican creation, with it’s pricey neo-victorian houses, manicured landscaping and upscale boutiques, by all appearances a not entirely welcome colony of hedge fund prosperity that developers have superimposed on the Redneck Riviera.

Recent events ranging from the massive recall and repeal campaigns in Wisconsin and Ohio, the protests in the streets of downtown New York and the broad progressive coalition meeting in Washington to jump-start the “American Dream” movement have all dramatically raised progressives’ hopes that a new independent progressive movement might be emerging – one that will be able to successfully challenge the hold of Fox News and the Tea Party on ordinary Americans.
The hard and inescapable reality, however, is that any progressive organizing effort will quickly find itself grinding to a halt if it does not honestly and immediately confront a critical problem – the existence of two profoundly condescending and deeply destructive assumptions about ordinary working Americans that are widespread in the progressive world.
The assumptions are these:

1. That progressives naturally understand the “real” issues that face ordinary Americans without having the need to do any serious “field” research to find out how ordinary people themselves define, understand and think about the issues.
2. That ordinary working Americans are basically gullible and can be easily manipulated by the messages they get from the media.

In combination, these two assumptions repeatedly sabotage all progressive attempts to build an independent social movement that gains the support of ordinary working Americans.
Stated this bluntly, most progressives would quite indignantly deny that they actually hold these two views. But these opinions are rarely expressed this directly. Instead, they operate as unstated and often unrecognized underlying assumptions behind other kinds of assertions that are far more widespread.
An example
A recent Huffington Post article presented a typical example of how these views are expressed in progressive commentary.
Here is how the article expresses the first assumption – that progressives already know what ordinary Americans consider the “real issues” without needing any data:

[Democrats] have become convinced by the new conventional wisdom in Washington, that Americans aren’t really concerned as much about jobs as they are about the deficit. If you stop and think about it for a moment, that notion is absurd on the face of it. Is it really possible that Americans who have lost their jobs or fear losing them are more worried about an abstraction — the budget deficit in Washington — than about the realities of their lives — that they face a budget deficit around their own kitchen table at the end of every month when they’re trying to pay their rent or make their mortgage payment on their rapidly depreciating home?

Set aside for a moment the verbal sleight of hand by which “Americans” in one sentence becomes “Americans who have lost their jobs or fear losing them” in the next. The article’s implicit argument is that “common sense” alone is sufficient to prove that the American people can never genuinely view deficits to be of equal importance to unemployment. The alternative can be summarily dismissed as “absurd”
Polls or other empirical data, on the other hand, can simply be “rigged” to provide any answer the pollster wants.

Can a pollster who believes or wants to show that Americans are as or more concerned about the national debt than jobs or the economic insecurity they face every day write questions in such a way as to get what he or she is looking for? Sure. Does this reflect what working and middle class Americans feel as they watch their economic security disappear? Not in a million years.

Many progressives will be deeply attracted to this point of view on an emotional level. But when one steps back to view it more dispassionately it becomes clear that the basic assumption underlying this line of argument is that progressives can know what ordinary Americans consider the “real issues” they face by a process of simple introspection and logic. Data is unnecessary because any alternative hypothesis can be summarily dismissed as “absurd on the face of it” and could not be true “in a million years”
This view has its roots in the post-World War II conviction among both progressives and Democrats that, as the advocates and representatives of the “ordinary guys” and “Average Joe’s” of the 50’s, they were naturally able to understand the “real” — essentially “kitchen table” economic — interests of working people and reliably distinguish between the “real” issues working people faced and the social and cultural issues that conservatives continually exploited to manipulate them. A recent and particularly lyrical version of this “real issues” versus “false consciousness” notion was expressed in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas”
The problem with this perspective is that it too easily leads to the rather arrogant notion that progressives can “know” what working people really want and care about by a process of deduction from what are defined as their “real interests” rather than through open-minded field research and investigation.

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