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.
This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on February 9, 2010.
President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.
On one, very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.
Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.
Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.
This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.
But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.
It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less his terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.
The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on February 5, 2010.
Sara Robinson’s post, “State of the Union: A Status Report on the Far Right ” at the Blog for Our Future helps to put the big Tea Party confab in interesting perspective. After collecting and crunching all of the data, Robinson called up Chip Berlet, one of the leading authorities on America’s hard right, and asked the money question, “…How many far-right wingers are there in the United States?” Berlet responded:
Ten percent of the population….It’s been the same number for most of our history, and it doesn’t change much.
Robinson adds, “How many really hardcore conservatives are we dealing with here?” It’s thirty million people, give or take.”
Many progressives might find the ten percent figure encouragingly low, although it’s scant comfort that thirty million paranoid, sometimes violence-prone reactionaries are out there. Robinson paraphrases Berlet, however, in cautioning that there is another group on the far right, “who are conservative by temperament, but don’t live full-time in that same overwrought, hyper-vigilant, paranoid space that the ultra-right wing authoritarian 10 percent do.” This group is capable of a hard right turn in times of economic and /or social stress, like, well now.
This group is a key base element of the Tea Party movement, according to Robinson and Berlet, and is is “actively decoupling itself from the center-right position of the GOP’s mainstream, and forming stronger alliances with the ultra-right 10-percenters—creating a super-right-wing faction that includes upwards of 25-30 percent of the country.”
It’s a scary prospect, almost a third of the electorate hardening their political views in a rightward direction, including flirtations with racism and anti-semitism, according to Robinson. She continues:
And it’s the combination of the two that’s worrisome. On their own, the far-right wingnuts can’t elect a dogcatcher (and even trying to do that much would no doubt cause a schism that would wind out for years in court. It’s just how they are.) But controlling 25 to 30 percent of the American electorate — while not enough to take over the country in straight numeric terms — is enough for the combined group to win limited but serious victories here and there. And, of course, their power is further magnified by the vagaries of the electoral college and the way we choose senators. In real terms, the system is set up so that this 30 percent can wield the political clout of 50 percent. That’s where we are now — and it’s one reason we’re running into so much gridlock in trying to govern the country.
Robinson notes that Fox News feeds this toxic mix at a time when independent daily newspapers are shrinking and disappearing. She has some harsh words for Democratic leadership:
Another driver is the Democrats’ continued fecklessness in clearly communicating the coherent moral values at the heart of the progressive worldview; and their extreme reluctance to support any kind of progressive populist agenda. Everybody knows now that there’s a rising populist tide in America. Average Americans, left and right, are uniting behind an implacable fury at the big banks — and at Congress and Obama, who seem determined to enable criminal behavior rather than make any serious attempt to control it.
You don’t need me to tell you that the tide is rising. We’re seeing the signs of political climate change all around us. But most of the Village still regards any kind of populism as a dangerous (and avoidable) impulse. “Responsible” consultants are cautioning Democrats not to get out front of that wave and ride it. In 20 years, historians will record this as a mistake on the same magnitude as the one they made in 1972 when they started backing away from the unions…
Robinson sees a remedy, but one that requires new focus and commitment from progressive Democrats:
Any progressive strategy to weaken the right should begin by finding a way to peel the second slice back off from the ultra-right, and bring it back toward the center. That alliance is the keystone on which the entire strength of the conservative movement is resting right now; pull that stone, and the rest of it crumbles. Reviving a vital progressive populism is the best wedge and sledge we’ve got right now…
I’m sure Robinson is right that such a wedge strategy could be efffective. Theresa Poulos has a post, “Five Ways It Could Fail” at the National Journal Online, which could help flesh out the specifics of an effective wedge strategy. Poulos’s post is less an article than a collection of five interesting video clips highlighting weaknesses in the Tea Party movement. The videos address: political infighting in the Tea Party Movement; exploiting the political inexperience of Tea Party participants; the difficulty of GOP attempts to absorb the movement, which includes a Independents; social issue schisms; and the possibility of an improving economy.
The Republicans hope to mimimize the internal disagreements within the Tea Party Movement and portray it as a monolithic anti-Obama/Democrat juggernaut. If we fail to challenge this meme, the blame will be ours.
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 Independentexplains, 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.
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic, where it was published on February 4, 2010. Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought –John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962 We deliberate, not about ends, but about means. –Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii
Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.
Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last” as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama’s worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”
Where to begin? Mansfield offers an elaborate argument in defense of the proposition that Obamacare represents a government takeover. I disagree and could offer an equally elaborate rebuttal. I could argue, as well, that Obama’s appeal to transcend the division between red and blue America reflects not a desire to end partisan argument, but rather most Americans’ disgust with the contemporary hyper-partisanship that thwarts effective governance and allows problems to fester indefinitely. These are hardly trivial matters. But because they would divert us from the questions Mansfield raises, I shall pursue them no farther.
As Mansfield knows very well, he does Democrats no favor by framing current disputes as conflicts between progress and liberty. In American politics, the defenders of liberty always occupy the rhetorical high ground. If there really were a contradiction between progress and liberty, progress would surely lose—and so would the party of progress. So there are two questions. First, is there such a contradiction? And second, if there isn’t—if what we really have is a dispute between two competing understandings of liberty—which should we prefer?
I can dispose of the first question quickly: There is no inherent contradiction between progress and liberty. Simply put, removing issues from the political agenda—placing them beyond dispute—often promotes liberty. After political contestation and a bloody war, we decided that slavery was impermissible, and we reordered our laws and institutions accordingly. A century later, we made a parallel decision about racial discrimination, with similar consequences.
I suppose we could view these questions as permanently open to debate. But we don’t, and rightly so. In that sense, there is a “progressive” component to our political history: While some questions remain open, others don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Settling questions neither ends politics nor denies liberty.
Mansfield might reply that, while some disputes raise such fundamental issues, most don’t, and it disserves political liberty to place the latter beyond the bounds of ordinary political contestation. Fair enough. So what is Obama actually saying—about health care, for example?
As I understand the president’s argument, it goes something like this: Our current health care system’s costs are rising at an unsustainable rate, threatening businesses, households, and our public finances. At the same time, nearly 50 million people go without health insurance—some by choice, to be sure, but most out of necessity. The only way to deal with all these problems effectively is to get nearly everyone into the insurance system, with a mix of subsidies and mandates, while creating a more competitive market among insurance plans. He may be right about this, or he may be wrong. But the key point for my purposes is that he is putting forth his plan as the means to an ensemble of ends—universal insurance coverage in a system that reduces the rate of cost increases—that he takes to be both desirable and essential to the long-term common good.
This is a political argument, pure and simple. The president never intended to side-step politics, and he certainly did not succeed in doing so. He hoped that his articulation of the good to be achieved through his plan would outweigh the objections—such as cost and complexity—that he knew would be arrayed against it.
There are several ways to disagree with the president’s proposal. One is to say that while his ends are defensible, his means are defective. This is the line that Representative Paul Ryan takes, as the president has acknowledged. But note that this debate lies squarely within the arena of deliberation as Aristotle defines it. Nothing apolitical or liberty-denying about that–unless deliberation itself suffers from these defects, which would be an odd contention.
Another way of disagreeing with the president is to say that his ends are less important than he thinks—otherwise put, that we can better serve the public interest by giving priority to competing ends. In this vein, many Republicans contend that because even people without insurance get care when they need it, through emergency rooms or charitable organizations, it is unnecessary to use either legal coercion or public funds to universalize insurance coverage. And many fiscal hawks argue that the mechanisms the president uses to fund his proposal—tax increases and Medicare cuts—should be used instead to reduce the long-term federal budget deficit, which is projected to soar unsustainably. Again, a classic political debate, of the sort Aristotle analyzed in the Rhetoric, and the president has done nothing to short-circuit it.
Mansfield gives short shrift to both these sorts of disagreements, focusing instead on a third, which is (to repeat) whether government or the private sphere should take the lead. He describes this as a question of “principle.” Is it? No doubt this question frames a major disagreement between the two political parties, and among Americans. And, as I’ve argued repeatedly, public mistrust of government has done more than anything else to weaken the president’s health reform effort.
The deeper question concerns not public sentiment, but, rather, the basis on which government may legitimately act under the Constitution. In 1933, FDR argued that that only the powers of government could be adequate to the exigencies of the moment. If so, he said, it could not be the case that our Constitution had disabled us from meeting a grave threat to the general welfare, and potentially to constitutional government itself. He won that argument: We live today in the legacy of his victory, and (I say this at the risk of sounding “progressive”), we’re not going back.
The alternative formulation of the dispute–Mansfield’s, I think–is that the issue isn’t the relation of means and ends, but rather the right of government to act in certain ways. If government doesn’t have the right, then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)
This brings me to the second question: If the issue is liberty, what is the nature of liberty, rightly understood? And does the Obama health care plan invade liberty, so understood?
To begin, experience gives us no reason to conclude that government is the only, or always the gravest, threat to freedom; clerical institutions and concentrations of unchecked economic power have often vied for that dubious honor. The unchecked market, moreover, regularly produces social outcomes at odds with the moral conditions of a free society. Capitalism does not reliably produce, or reward, the good character a free society needs: Perceptive observers from Charles Dickens to Tom Wolfe have given us ample evidence to the contrary. And, while it may be that long-term dependence on government saps the spirit of self-reliance that liberty requires, there are other forms of dependence—economic, social, and even familial—that often damage character in much the same way.
At the heart of the conservative misunderstanding of liberty is the presumption that government and individual freedom are fundamentally at odds. At the heart of any liberal understanding of freedom is the proposition that public power can advance freedom as well as undermine it.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Sometimes significant political news stories involve dogs that don’t bark. That’s just happened in Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have failed to force a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn the state Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Under Iowa’s constitution, amendments have to be enacted by two consecutive legislatures (which meet for two years), and then face ratification by voters. So barring some unforeseen development late in the current session, the earliest an amendment could be sent to voters would be in 2014.
Aside from the fact that this gives same-sex marriage a new lease on life, this non-barking dog also preserves the issue as a source of political controversy in Iowa for two more election cycles. But it also means that it won’t be directly on the ballot during the 2012 presidential contest.
Same-sex marriage has become a heavily partisan issue in Iowa, with virtually all Democratic officeholders supporting the Supreme Court decision and virtually all Republicans opposing it. But it’s also a bit of an intraparty issue for Republicans, since elected officials and candidates deemed insufficiently obsessed with efforts to overturn the court decision (e.g., former Gov. Terry Branstad, the favorite in this year’s GOP gubernatorial primary) have faced angry criticism from the Cultural Right. And the issue could spill over into the 2012 Republican presidential caucuses, where Iowa, as always, will have the first say, and where the Cultural Right (viz. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 victory) has always been very strong.
A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:
When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.
Gaza isn’t Vietnam.
Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).
Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
Political conventions are different today.
One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.
By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.
Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.
Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.
Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.
The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
