I was a bit startled yesterday to read a Nathan Newman post at TPMCafe suggesting that bloggers had pulled off a coup in helping elect one Frank Page as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. I did a little research, and found that indeed there was a grassroots effort, spread in part by bloggers, to promote Page against the conservative establishment candidate Ronnie Floyd of Arkansas.But it would be a bit too much to assume that Page’s election represents some sort of sea-change in Baptist political theology. He’s a supporter of “biblical inerrancy,” and by his own account has supported the conservative theocratic takeover of the SBC. The big argument for his candidacy has mainly revolved around the need for congregational support for Baptist mission work, which has been lagging of late. And if you actually google around and read some of the blogs about the contest for the SBC presidency, there’s an underlying tension among Baptists that Page exploited: a neo-Calvinist movement in the Baptist seminaries that threatened the denomination’s commitment to evangelizing the world.This is a very old conflict among Baptists; in the nineteenth century, it produced two denominational spinoffs: the Primitive Baptists (two of my great-grandfathers were ministers for this group) who rejected missionary activity as a waste of time given the doctrine of predestination of souls; and the Free Will Baptists who rejected predestination altogether.The neo-Calvinists, who often overlap with the politicized right-wing leadership of the SBC, have exposed a lot of underlying Baptist angst about the drift of the denomination away from its roots. Page’s outspoken resistence to neo-Calvinism, and his advocacy of a more open and inclusive Baptist attitude towards unbelievers, may have been crucial to the success of his candidacy.So there’s more going on here than some grassroots rejection of “fundamentalism.” But Page’s election does in fact indicate that internet-based organizing is particularly relevant to a denomination with a strong tradition of local, congregational autonomy (vitiated so much by the conservative takeover of the SBC). Moreover, the upset probably indicates an understanding among Baptist clergy that the denomination’s massive growth in recent decades has slowed, and that Southern Baptists have lost the initiative to pentecostal churches, and to the nondenominational megachurches where right-wing politics are not the central message from the pulpit.I was raised as a Southern Baptist, and know a lot about the denomination and its membership. And althought rank-and-file Baptists have not vocally dissented from their Christian Right leadership, there’s a lot of snickering going on behind those Broadman Hymnals every Sunday on which the preacher suggests that divorce, feminism, extramarital sex, or homosexuality are unknown among the Godly. Maybe Page’s election will ultimately help energize the sensible if silent majority of Baptists. I certainly hope so.
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TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 29: Here Comes the Tea Party Strategy on Retirement Programs Again
If you are feeling a sense of deja vu about where the current budget debate in Congress is headed, you aren’t alone, and I offered an explanation at New York:
In the partisan messaging battle over the federal budget, Joe Biden seems to have Republicans right where he wants them. Beginning with his State of the Union Address in early February, the president has hammered away at GOP lawmakers for plotting to gut wildly popular Social Security and Medicare benefits. This has driven Republicans into a defensive crouch; they can either pretend their proposed cuts aren’t really cuts or forswear them altogether. It’s a message that Democrats would love to highlight every day until the next election, or at least until Republicans figure out a better response than lies, evasions, and blustery denials.
But as Ron Brownstein points out in The Atlantic, there is a logical path Republicans could take to counter Democrats’ claims that GOP policies threaten popular retirement programs. It’s based on pitting every other form of federal domestic spending against Social Security and Medicare, and on making Democratic support for Big Government and its beneficiaries a political problem among seniors:
“Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare [from cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit] will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs … potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.
“Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. ‘We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,’ Blendon said. ‘The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.’”
And so Republicans will very likely return to the messaging they embraced during the Obama administration. Back then, self-identified Tea Party conservatives constantly tried to convince elderly voters that the real threat to their retirement programs stemmed not from GOP budget cutting, but from Democratic-backed Big Government spending on younger people and minorities, with whom many conservative voters did not identify. Then as now, a partisan budget fight — and the threat of a debt default of government shutdown — let Republicans frame funding decisions as a competition between groups of beneficiaries, rather than a debate over abstract levels of taxing or spending.
The big opening shot in the anti-Obama campaign was Sarah Palin’s wildly mendacious but highly effective September 2009 Facebook post claiming that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels” that would eliminate Medicare coverage for seniors or disabled children deemed socially superfluous (the barely legitimate basis for the attack was an Affordable Care Act provision to allow Medicare payments to physicians discussing end-of-life treatments with patients).
Soon Republicans would come up with slightly more substantive claims that Obamacare threatened Medicare. In 2011, House GOP budget maven Paul Ryan, whom Democrats hammered for his proposals to partially privatize both Social Security and Medicare, claimed that Obama administration projections of health cost savings in Medicare represented a shift of resources from Medicare to Obamacare. By 2012, when Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, Ryan was campaigning with his mother in tow, claiming that Republicans wanted to protect her from raids on her retirement benefits by the redistributionist Democrats.
Romney and Ryan didn’t win, of course, but they did win the over-65 vote by a robust 56-44 margin, a better performance in that demographic than Trump registered in 2016 or 2020. As Thomas Edsall explained in The New Republic in 2010, the Tea Party–era Republicans understood they had to mobilize their federal spending constituents against alleged competitors:
“Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war—creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.”
In a 2024 campaign in which Democrats are going for the jugular with seniors, a reprise of the GOP’s 2012 Medicare counterattack, dishonest as it was, might make sense.
During this year’s budget skirmish in Congress, House Republicans are expected to take a claw hammer to domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports:
“This spring, House Republicans are expected to release an annual budget resolution that calls for large health care cuts, and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) marketplace coverage are likely to be prime targets. House Republican leaders are calling for cutting the deficit and making the Trump tax cuts permanent, while saying they will shield certain areas of the budget (Medicare, Social Security, and military spending) from cuts. To do all these things at once, it is highly likely they will propose cuts in health programs that provide coverage to millions of people.”
The House GOP has also already called for deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending, including food stamp and nutrition programs. It’s likely the GOP’s state-based crusade against “woke” public education will lead to a renewal of ancient conservative demands to deeply cut or kill the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe those representing energy-producing areas will go hard after EPA or the Department of the Interior’s programs. Almost certainly, the GOP as a whole will embrace across-the-board cuts in federal employment or federal employee benefits under the guise of “draining the swamp.” Any and all such cuts can also be rationalized as necessary to avoid reductions in spending for Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, not to mention tax increases.
Whatever formula they adopt, there’s little doubt Republicans will find ways to present themselves the true defenders of Social Security and Medicare, just as many of them will always keep scheming for ways to damage or destroy these vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Biden seems committed to his effort to make seniors fear the GOP, and this is the only way Republicans can counter-punch.