washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Like a master stage magician’s best “sleight of hand” trick, Ruffini makes MAGA extremism in the GOP disappear right before our eyes.

Read the Memo.

A Democratic Political Strategy for Reaching Working Class Voters That Starts from the Actual “Class Consciousness” of Modern Working Americans.

by Andrew Levison

Read the Memo

The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

Read the Memo.

Why Don’t Working People Recognize and Appreciate Democratic Programs and Policies

The mythology of “Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days” and the Modern Debate Over “Deliverism.”

Read the Memo.

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

Read the Memo.

Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

And the Democratic Narrative Simply Doesn’t Work. Here’s An Alternative That Does.

Read the Memo.

The Daily Strategist

March 28, 2024

TDS Co-Editor William Galston: I Read the CEA Report So You Don’t Have To (But You Should Look At It Anyway)

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
One of the few benefits of being snowed in is the chance to read long documents more carefully than the normal pace of work allows. The 462-page economic report that the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released today is worth the time it takes.
On one level, it paints a clear and cogent picture of the path that economic recovery and growth over the next decade will have to take. The principal drivers of growth in the decade prior to 2007—construction and personal consumption—will both lag between now and 2020. Savings and investment will rise, as will net exports. This is more than national accounting arithmetic: Savings had fallen to unsustainably low levels in response to misleading economic cues (more on this a bit later), and investment sagged below trendline for much of the past decade. For their part, exports tend to decline more rapidly than GDP during recessions and to grow more rapidly during recoveries. So the story makes sense, at least qualitatively.
The CEA report offers an illuminating account of the savings rate. It turns out that three factors—the wealth/income ratio, credit availability, and the unemployment rate—explain most of the variation. Much of the decline in the savings rate since the early 1980s is attributable to the proliferation of credit; the near-collapse of saving during 2005 and 2006 is correlated with what turned out to be illusory increases in household wealth. Looking forward, it seems likely that the wealth/income ratio will stabilize below its peak, that credit will remain tight for quite some time, and that unemployment will decline only slowly.
Indeed, the labor market outlook over the next decade is not especially bright. The CEA is projecting above-trendline growth in GDP over the next eight years. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate will decline only slowly. It is projected to average 10.0 percent this year, 9.2 percent in 2011, 8.2 percent in the year President Obama will run for reelection, and 6.5 percent during the midterm election year of 2014. This is not the formula for a contented electorate.
The underlying math shows why it will take the job market so long to climb out of its hole. Recent estimates revealed that the economy has lost a staggering 8.4 million jobs since the Great Recession started in December 2007. In addition, the economy needs to generate about 100,000 jobs per month just to stay even with the natural growth of the labor force. In short, we are nearly 11 million jobs short of where we need to be. But the CEA estimates job growth for 2010 at 95,000 per month—just about enough to keep the hole from getting even deeper, but not enough to begin digging out. My calculations based on the CEA projections show that we will not recover the missing 8.4 million jobs until the spring of 2013, more than five years after the recession began. And we won’t reach full employment (defined as 5 percent unemployment) until nearly the end of the decade.
Suppose you have only five minutes to spend on this report. What are the five most illuminating pages? Here are my nominees, back to front:

•Figure 8-7, p. 225, which dramatically illustrates how we have lost our leadership in post-secondary education attainment. We still have the greatest research universities in the world, but our workforce is treading water while the rest of the developed world is moving ahead. We won’t be the world’s economic leader in 30 years if we don’t do something to end our stagnation.
•Figure 8-4, p. 219, which charts the unbelievable rise, over the past four decades, in the share of pretax income going to the wealthiest 10 percent of all families. Bottom line: Welcome to the 1920s.
•Figure 7-4, p. 192: From 2000 until 2008, the percentage of non-elderly adults with private insurance coverage fell from 75.5 percent to 69.5 percent. What are the chances that this trend will halt if the Democrats let health reform die.
•Figure 7-2, p. 184: During the past decade, health insurance has consumed all the growth in total compensation … and then some. If we do nothing over the next 30 years, health care will constitute fully half of total compensation, and workers’ income net of health care costs—i.e., the amount remaining for everything else—will barely budge.
•Figure 5-3, p. 141: The previous administration’s refusal to pay for two tax cuts, two wars, and prescription drug coverage has increased the budget deficit by more than 4 percent of GDP. How long will it take the Republicans to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for the fiscal mess we’re in?

The late lamented Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked to the effect that, while every man is entitled to his own opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts. How quaint that sounds today. But we can’t have a serious discussion of our problems—especially across party lines—if we don’t jointly acknowledge a common base of evidence. I’m not holding my breath.


A Better Glimpse At the Tea Party Movement

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party Movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the Movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.
The poll shows 18% of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43% saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55% of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62% of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only 9% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. 80% have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.
Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).
There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.
But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.


Liberals and Libertarians Finally Break Up

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration’s agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.
This cooperation reached its height during the 2006 election, in which, according to a new study by David Kirby and David Boaz, nearly half of libertarian voters supported Democratic congressional candidates—more than doubling the support levels from the previous midterm election in 2002. (As Jonathan Chait noted after the first Kirby/Boaz study of libertarian voting, their definition is overly broad, encompassing 14 percent of the electorate.) At the time, left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas hailed the influx of “libertarian democrats” into the Democratic coalition. Soon, even the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey was proposing a permanent alliance of what he called “liberaltarians.”
Well, you can say goodbye to all that. The new Kirby/Boaz study reports that libertarian support for Democrats collapsed in 2008, despite many early favorable assessments of Barack Obama by libertarian commentators. Meanwhile, the economic crisis has raised the salience of issues on which libertarians and Dems most disagree. And there’s no question that during Obama’s first year—with the rise of the Tea Party movement and national debate over bailouts, deficits, and health care—libertarian hostility to the new administration has grown adamant and virtually universal. But what progressives need to understand is that the end of this affair is actually a good thing.
The progressive-libertarian alliance may have provided tactical benefits in 2006, augmenting the Democratic “wave” election of that year. But 2008 showed that libertarian support is hardly crucial: Obama still won “libertarian” states such as Colorado and New Hampshire handily, even without their backing, and he generally performed better in the “libertarian West” than any Democratic nominee since LBJ.
In terms of a deeper bond based on philosophical congruence, it’s true that modern liberals and libertarians share common ideological roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-American liberalism. Both believe in a world of rational actors, and both consider the promotion of individual autonomy to be a positive good. With the emergence of the “neo-liberal” and “New Democrat” movements of the 1980s and 1990s—which lauded capitalism, technological progress, and free trade—the potential for overlap only increased.
What’s more, these groups have a sociocultural affinity. Secularism, prevalent in both liberal and libertarian circles, makes them more comfortable with each other in an era of culture wars. (In my own Washington think tank years, the two camps often coexisted on panels and over lunch or drinks—the sort of professional and social interaction that rarely if ever occurred with the Christian warrior wonks of the Family Research Council.) Plus, people on both sides of the “alliance” undoubtedly enjoyed the psychic rush of breaking bread with someone from “the enemy camp” who could quote Thomas Jefferson and rage against the Iraq war and corporate welfare.
Yet this liberal-libertarian lovefest was doomed. As Jonathan Chait argued in his 2006 essay, true “liberaltarianism” would require progressives to give up their core goals of smoothing capitalism’s rough edges and delivering economic security. Amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, that ain’t happening.
Moreover, with the arrival of the Tea Party movement, libertarians have acquired a kind of mass political cachet that they’ve never before enjoyed. As Nate Silver estimated last year, the early tea parties were “two parts Ron Paul/libertarian conservative–with its strength out West and in New Hampshire–and one part Sarah Palin/red-meat conservative–with its strength in rural areas, particularly in the South.” This phenomenon has pulled libertarianism rightward: Despite some expressed concerns about the crudeness and cultural conservatism of many Tea Party activists, it has become clear that most self-conscious libertarians are willing to participate in, and cheerlead for, the Tea Party movement as though their political futures depend on it.
That, in turn, has torn open cultural rifts between libertarians and liberals. Progressives who previously fawned over the libertarians’ Jeffersonian modesty are now exposed to the unattractive aspect of libertarianism that is familiar to readers of Ayn Rand: a Nietzschean disdain for the poor and minorities that tends to dovetail with the atavistic and semi-racist habits of reactionary cultural traditionalists. After all, it is only a few steps from the Tea Party movement’s founding “rant”—in which self-described Randian business commentator Rick Santelli blasted “losers” who couldn’t pay their mortgages—to populist backlash against all transfer payments of any type, complaints about people “voting for a living” instead of “working for a living,” and paranoid conspiracy theories about groups like ACORN.
Certainly, few self-conscious libertarians have much tolerance for racism, but they are encouraging a point of view about “welfare” that has long been catnip to racists. And that’s a problem for liberals. How can an alliance last in a climate where a progressive think tanker has to look down the rostrum at that nice Cato Institute colleague and wonder if he or she privately thinks the poor are “looter scum”; or if he’s willing to get behind the Sarah Palin presidential candidacy that’s so wildly popular in Tea Party circles?
The gap is wide enough that even liberals who are frustrated with the president have trouble mustering any sympathy for the Obama-bashing of contemporary libertarians—a sign that the earlier alliance really was an ephemeral product of the Bush administration’s many sins. For example, most progressives reacted angrily to the very latest proposal for a left-libertarian convergence, in which activist and blogger Jane Hamsher touted a coalition between Tea Party activists and the left against health care reform and corporate bailouts.
So could “liberaltarianism” make a comeback in a not-too-distant future, when today’s passions have abated? You never know for sure, but the next major obstacle to cooperation may well be the Supreme Court’s decision on corporate political spending in Citizens United v. FEC, which libertarians celebrated as a victory for free speech, and most liberals denounced as a travesty if not a national disaster.
Cancel the Valentine’s Day hearts and flowers; this romance is dead.


G.O.P. = Gridlock, Obstruction & Paralysis

Thanks to the recent Supremes Citizens United decision, Dems can expect record-level spending on attack ads targeting Democratic policy from GOP supporters. The worst response would be to crouch down in a defensive posture and not initiate an aggressive counter-offensive.
For a hint of how nasty GOP attacks on Dems are going to be, read the recent editorial, “The Politics of Fear” in The New York Times supporting the Obama Administration’s adherence to the principle of civilian trials for most accused terrorists. The editorial notes that “Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, suggested — without any evidence — that vital intelligence was lost by that approach.” The objective here is to ‘slime’ Democrats as soft on national security — and Collins is one of the least conservative Republicans. Of course Collins and other Republicans said not a peep when the Bush Administration prosecuted over 300 accused terrorists in federal courts. This is just a preview of slimes to come.
Dems should fight back more aggressively on all fronts, with an emphasis on soundbite-sized attack memes that call out Republican candidates where they are vulnerable, and their party as a whole when the critique fits.
The headline for this post is one example. It fits nicely on a bumper sticker, picket sign or in a 10-second TV ad, and it does accurately describe GOP’ “leadership,” particularly during the last year. It’s a good political argument-starter because it puts the adversary on the defensive immediately. The Republicans have no bite-size slogan that so accurately describes what some voters may believe to be the worst impulses of the Democrats. It is not an ad hominem attack in that it criticizes organizational policy, not personalities, so no demerits for being mean-spirited.
The “GOP = Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis” meme is just one of many possible hard-hitting attacks Dems could launch in the months ahead. The Republicans have formidable advantages in attack messaging, including discipline, FoxTV, right-wing radio and money. But they also have a serious vulnerability — weak policy. Thus far they have been able to steer media coverage away from policy.
Dems need a strategy to better educate undecided voters about policy differences. But it’s more important to take the offensive and stop allowing them to monopolize media coverage of policy debates with fear-mongering cliches about Democratic policy being ‘socialistic’ or leading America to economic armageddon. Through sheer repetition in the media, Republican cliche-memes have taken root, even with some voters who, when asked, say they support the Democratic policies being slimed.
Democrats have to attack and hit a lot harder in the months ahead to correct the imbalance. One excellent example of how it’s done in the media can be found in Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC report last night on the utterly shameless Republican hypocrites who trashed the Obama stimulus package and voted against it, but who now are so eager to pose for pictures with “big goofy fake stimulus checks,” as Maddow terms them — checks that are now being spent in their districts. If Democratic opponents of these Republicans don’t use these images and nail them with ‘windmill’ ads and the like, they will be guilty of political negligence. Maddow’s interview with The Nation‘s Washington editor Chris Hayes in the segment also features an interesting discussion of requirements for hard-hitting political attacks.
At TPM, Christina Bellantoni reports on another example of an effective hard-hitting Democratic attack strategy, in this instance the DSCC compelling four Republican Senate candidates to take a stand on Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security and slash Medicare benefits to create a voucher system. The DSCC publicity cites the jobs and economic impact of the Ryan scheme in each of the four states. Another good example of fierce attack strategy. Force them to diss long-standing wingnut policy or alienate senior voters in their state. Dems need more of the same.


53 Cents

I’m normally not one of those commentators who wants to blame the ignorance or selfishness of the American people for our political problems. To put it simply, if ignorance is an issue, the blame lies with government, educational, and political officials who apparently haven’t spent enough time educating the public on basic facts. And when it comes to selfishness, there’s no question both major political parties have often competed to convince voters that they should conduct a personal cost-benefit analyisis on their ROI from what they pay in taxes, and cast ballots appropriately.
Still, it’s a bit startling to read the latest ABC/WaPo poll and find that Americans on average think that 53 cents out of every dollar of federal expenditures are “wasted.”
In a very perceptive post for 538.com, Tom Schaller notes that this finding is actually consistent with polls taken for the last twenty years. He goes on to separate the three very different perceptions this consistent opinion might reflect:

The possibilities for what makes government “wasteful” are many, but it seems to me waste can be reduced to three non-exclusive types:
1. Ineffective spending: Spending on programs that do not work;
2. Inefficient spending: Excessive spending or overhead/overpayment on programs that do work; and/or
3. Inappropriate spending: Efficient and effective spending on programs that the respondents normatively view as something the government shouldn’t be involved with in the first place.

Schaller concludes that types 1 and 3 are what most Americans are complaining about, but acknowledges that there’s not much of a national consensus about spending that’s ineffective or inappropriate. If that’s true, then the best progressive response to widespread public convictions about government “waste” would involve constant assessments of the effectiveness of government programs, and a clear sense of priorities that don’t add up to “more of the same.” But this should be undertaken with a clear-eyed understanding that Democrats aren’t much trusted to “cut out waste” in some categories of federal spending, such as defense, just as Republicans aren’t trusted to pare back highly popular New Deal/Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare.
That means Democrats must articulate a clear and comprehensive strategy for balancing fiscal discipline and government reform with popular public activism on big national challenges that aren’t considered impractical or inappropriate. It’s not that hard to fight what Schaller calls “type 2” waste: bureaucratic inefficiency and so forth. Showing that progressives combine a good set of priorities with a jeweler’s eye for “what works” could be the keys to the poltiical kingdom.


A Practical Response to Citizens United

Like it or not, and I certainly don’t like it, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has revolutionized the landscape of campaign financing. Corporate political spending, at least on efforts that are separate from specific campaign operations, is now going to be legal. You can rage against the decision, and you can conclude, as I have, that some form of public financing of campaigns is the only way out of this mess. But given the current high levels of hostility to government, this isn’t exactly the best time to ask Americans to support use of taxpayer dollars for political campaigns.
That’s why it’s important that Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen have come up with a more practical response to the new reality in campaign finance rules: a bill that would limit the damage wrought by Citizens United without uselessly attacking its core holdings.
As Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent explains, this legislation would fence in the consequences of the Supremes’ dirty work by banning campaign spending by foreign interests or domestic federal contractors; enhancing discloure requirements; tightening restrictions on coordination of corporate political efforts and actual campaigns; and requiring affordable access to media for responses to corporate-backed political ads.
Given the configuration of forces in the U.S. Senate, it’s unlikely this legislation can become law. But it does usefully offer Democrats and campaign finance reformers from every background a line of attack that doesn’t simply rely on calls for public financing.


Has Palin’s GOP Support Collapsed?

New findings released from a recent ABC/WaPo poll provide some pretty bad news for the future political prospects of Sarah Palin.
The poll shows her general standing with the public deteriorating significantly since the last ABC/WaPo survey last November, with 71% now saying she’s unqualified to be president, and only 37% thinking of her favorably (as opposed to 55% holding unfavorable views).
But what’s far worse in the poll is that 52% of Republicans think she’s unqualified to be president, and among conservative Republicans, only 45% believe she is qualified. (Sorry, the Post analysis doesn’t provide parallel numbers on all these categories, and the crosstabs haven’t been released yet). These represent large changes from the previous poll, where, for example, 66% of conservative Republicans thought she was qualified to be president.
According to ABC’s analysis of the poll, Palin’s favorable rating among Republicans has dropped from 76% in November to 66% today.
I’m not sure what developments would explain this phenomenon, unless you buy the idea that any increased exposure to Palin, even among conservatives and among Republicans, makes her less attractive. Certainly conservative opinion-leaders mostly raved about her memoir, Going Rogue, and loved her recent televised speech at the National Tea Party Convention.
Personally, I’d await a little more data before concluding that Palin has worn out her welcome with conservatives, given her exceptionally strong personal bond with so many of them. Maybe the ABC/WaPo poll has captured a sudden trend before others did. But maybe it’s an outlier. We’ll soon see.


Scott Brown For President? No Way.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
A lot of dumb things get said in American political commentary, and I’ve undoubtedly said a few myself over the years. But one dumb thing that ought to be quickly exploded is the persistent talk that newly minted Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts might run a viable campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.
Yes, Brown is a godlike figure to Republicans right now. Yes, various domain names connected with a Brown presidential run got snatched up the moment he won his Senate race. And yes, he’s the symbol of the “fresh faces” Republicans long for every time they look at the rather unexciting (or in the case of Sarah Palin, too exciting) field they will likely choose from in 2012.
But it ain’t happening. And that’s not because of his rather signal lack of experience since, as his fans love to point out, Barack Obama only had a year more of elected experience beyond the state senate when he was elected in 2008.
To mention the most important reason it ain’t happening: Brown is pro-choice. He explicitly opposes overturning Roe v. Wade, and in fact, his rhetoric on abortion is remarkably similar to that of the president. And this, boys and girls, has become an absolute disqualifier for Republican presidential prospects these days; just ask Rudy Guiliani. Or better yet, ask John McCain or Joe Lieberman, since McCain’s decision to put Lieberman on his ticket in 2008 was only abandoned when his advisors told him he’d face a potentially successful convention revolt if a pro-choice running-mate were chosen.
Sure, pro-lifers supported Brown’s Senate run, but there’s all the difference in the world between being a candidate in a blue state who can help disrupt Democratic control of the upper chamber, and being a candidate for national leader of the GOP and the person who makes Supreme Court appointments. Past Republican presidential candidates have gotten into trouble for failing to support a constitutional amendment recognizing fetuses from the moment of conception as “persons” endowed with full constitutional rights. Supporting Roe is an abomination to today’s GOPers; in a recent poll, self-identified Republican voters said they considered abortion “murder” by a margin of 76 percent to eight percent (nearly a third of them, in fact, want to outlaw contraceptives). This is not a negotiable issue.
If that’s not enough to convince you that Brown 2012 is a mirage, consider another problem: Brown was and remains an avid supporter of Massachusetts’ universal health plan, which is extremely similar to the national plan passed without a single Republican vote by the U.S. Senate. That wasn’t a problem for Brown in the Senate race; indeed, his main argument for his pledge that he would vote against any such bill in the Senate was that Massachusetts didn’t need help from the feds because they had already enacted the same reforms. But he’s still on record favoring a “socialist” scheme for health care, and specific items like an individual mandate for health insurance coverage, which most Republicans nationally consider unconstitutional, or perhaps even a form of slavery.
To be sure, this is a problem that Brown shares with Mitt Romney, who signed his state’s version of ObamaCare into law. But Romney has been inching away from the health plan since his 2008 presidential campaign, and will probably repudiate it entirely before long, while Brown’s hugs for the plan are very fresh.
Speaking of Romney: his own presidential ambitions are still another bar to a Brown candidacy. The Brown campaign kept the Mittster under wraps until Election Night, which was smart since Romney is not very popular in Massachusetts. But Brown’s political advisors are all Romney people, who presumably have some residual loyalty to their old boss. Will Romney, who probably first saw a future President of the United States in the mirror before entering kindergarten, step aside for this whippersnapper? Unlikely, and there’s definitely no room in a Republican presidential field for two socialized-medicine supporters from Massachusetts.
So you can forget about Brown for President in 2012, which will become apparent once he starts casting heretical votes in the Senate in order to position himself for a re-election run that same year. He clearly seems smart enough to understand that in 2012, he’ll be dealing with far less favorable turnout patterns, and can’t expect his opponent to run as feckless a campaign as Martha Coakley’s. Odds are, Democrats will run a candidate against Brown who has heard of Curt Schilling and doesn’t wait until the final week to run ads.


MSM’s Free Ride for Tea Party Unhinged

Since I read Jonathan Kay’s Newsweek web-exclusive article, “Black Helicopters Over Nashville,” I can’t help but chuckle a bit when I see the ubiquitous ads for Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” (teaser-trailer here, Superbowl ad here).
Subtitled “Never mind Sarah Palin and the tricornered hats. The tea-party movement is dominated by conspiracist kooks,” Kay’s article is one of the gutsier MSM reports on the tea party gathering. Kay writes,

I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, not one of the bemused New York Times types with a media pass. But I also happen to be writing a book for HarperCollins that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I have a pretty good idea where the various screws and nuts can be found in the great toolbox of American political life.
Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn’t just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.

Kay then presents a gallery of tea party characters, including:

This world view’s modern-day prophets include Texas radio host Alex Jones, whose documentary, The Obama Deception, claims Obama’s candidacy was a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to “con the Amercan people into accepting global slavery”; Christian evangelist Pat Robertson; and the rightward strain of the aforementioned “9/11 Truth” movement. According to this dark vision, America’s 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, one-world socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan.
Sure enough, in Nashville, Judge Roy Moore warned, among other things, of “a U.N. guard stationed in every house.” On the conference floor, it was taken for granted that Obama was seeking to destroy America’s place in the world and sell Israel out to the Arabs for some undefined nefarious purpose…
A software engineer from Clearwater, Fla., told me that Washington, D.C., liberals had engineered the financial crash so they could destroy the value of the U.S. dollar, pay off America’s debts with worthless paper, and then create a new currency called the Amero that would be used in a newly created “North American Currency Union” with Canada and Mexico. I rolled my eyes at this one-off kook. But then, hours later, the conference organizers showed a movie to the meeting hall, Generation Zero, whose thesis was only slightly less bizarre: that the financial meltdown was the handiwork of superannuated flower children seeking to destroy capitalism.
And then, of course, there is the double-whopper of all anti-Obama conspiracy theories, the “birther” claim that America’s president might actually be an illegal alien who’s constitutionally ineligible to occupy the White House. This point was made by birther extraordinaire and Christian warrior Joseph Farah, who told the crowd the circumstances of Obama’s birth were more mysterious than those of Jesus Christ…

Having watched some of the tea party doings on C-SPAN and elsewhere, I commend Kay for his candor. But I think he only scratched the surface of the lunacy represented at the confab. However, Kay’s conclusion hits the bulls-eye:

Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin’s Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room…That doesn’t say much for the state of the right in America. The tea partiers’ tricornered hat is supposed to be a symbol of patriotism and constitutional first principles. But when you take a closer look, all you find is a helmet made of tin foil.

The teasers for ‘Alice in Wonderland’ suggest Tim Burton may have inadvertantly provided an excellent cinematic analog for the tea party movement, sort of like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and McCarthyism during an earlier era. As the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) says in the ‘Wonderland’ teaser trailer “Some say to survive it you need to be as mad as a hatter, which luckily…I am.”


Turning Coats

Some of you may remember that the very day after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, Republicans began fantasizing about actually taking over the Senate this November, in no small part because former senator Dan Coats had announced he was coming out of retirement to take on the previously unassailable Democrat Evan Bayh in Indiana. Yeah, it was noted at the time that Coats had been living and voting in Virginia for the last decade, while working as a DC lobbyist, but GOPers figured Coats’ long political record in the Hoosier State would enable him to brush that off as a less-than-youthful indiscretion.
But since then, Indiana Democrats, accessing public records, have found out and loudly let it be known that Coats wasn’t just a lobbyist for banks and equity firms, but for foreign governments. He personally lobbied for India, but much more interestingly, his firm lobbied for Yemen. You know, Yemen, that al Qaeda stomping ground where “Christmas Day Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab got his training.
Suffice it to say that Democrats have not kept this information to themselves. According to a piece in Politico today about the “nuking” of Coats:

“We just hit him with a freight train,” one Democratic official familiar with the anti-Coats effort said Monday. “It’s Politics 101: Frame the guy early.”

The effectiveness of the Democratic attack on Coats is probably best reflected by the fact that none of the Republicans previously in the race to challenge Bayh (including former U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, a fiery conservative) have pulled out. Coats’ proto-campaign has largely confined itself to whining about “mud” being thrown at their hero.
So maybe Republicans shouldn’t be quite so quick to mark Indiana down in the column of likely Senate wins this year.