Query: is it possible for a political candidate to spend too much money on too many television ads? California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman seems determined to find out.
Those who read my recent piece on the California governor’s race may recall the amazement with which Golden State cognoscenti are viewing eMeg’s barrage of early ads. It’s not just the size of her ad buys that’s impressive–you can’t, after all, exceed saturation levels–but it’s the timing. Her “introductory bio” ad started running night and day all across California during the Winter Olympics, long before the June primary, and very long before the November general election. If possible, her attack ads on primary opponent Steve Poizner have been even more ubiquitous, and she’s just put up a new “positive” ad that’s very hard to miss.
As political reporting site Calbuzz noted this week, no one really knows if Whitman’s strategy will work:

Two months before the primary election for governor, Meg Whitman’s unprecedented campaign spending — including another cool $20 million tossed in late Monday — has hit the standard quantum limit of politics: its effect on the governor’s race has moved into unknowable territory.
To any would-be prognosticator, seer or soothsayer Calbuzz offers this verbum sapienti: Like scientists mulling data from the Large Hadron Collider, we have no idea what the effect of $100-150 million in campaign spending will do in a California statewide election, because we’ve never seen anything like it.

That’s saying a lot, since California was the scene of the 1998 campaign of former airline executive Al Checchi, which broke all the previous spending records. In the end, the Checchi campaign’s torrent of attack ads on Democratic rival Jane Harman appear to have backfired, becoming the main issue in a campaign eventually won by a third candidate, Gray Davis (Davis strategist Gary South memorably described Checchi’s attacks on Harman as a “murder-suicide”).
It’s unclear whether a similar fate could befall Whitman, since she has the luxury of just one significant opponent in each cycle: Poizner in the primary, and Jerry Brown in the general. But if she keeps up her current pace of appearances on the tube, her name ID will soon approach 100%, and at that point an undefined but real set of otherwise persuadable voters may get tired of her act, and perhaps wonder if someone so excessive in the spending of campaign dollars is really a good bet to cut state spending, which is her main campaign promise.
You don’t have to have a stake in this campaign to watch Whitman’s experiment in sheer dollar power with a sort of fascinated horror.

At 538.com, Tom Schaller has taken on the task (using some of Jonah Goldberg’s loose utterances on “Tax Freedom Day” as a foil) of explaining that the total tax burden of Americans is relatively low as compared to residents European countries, and that U.S. tax and spending policies do very little to redistribute income from the top to the bottom.
I don’t know if Tom’s analysis will cut much ice with conservatives who typically think of Europe as a decadent socialist backwater, but his posts do raise some pretty important distinctions about conservative anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric and the popular attitudes they are designed to exploit.
Conservatives often make economic arguments for smaller government and lower taxes, based largely on the notion that government programs, taxes and regulations are essentially parasitical and thus drain resources and vitality from the wealth-generating private sector. These arguments, of course, are readily debatable through the use of empirical data on macroeconomic performance, and conservatives frequently struggle with the fact that some of the most explosive economic booms in U.S. history have occurred under “liberal” national management and in periods of high marginal tax rates (not to mention the economic success of more “socialist” countries).
But the kind of anti-governement, anti-tax arguments that are becoming especially prevelant today (particularly with the rise of the Tea Party Movement and its strong influence on the Republican Party) are essentially moral: government activity illegitimately redistributes income from virtuous people to less virtuous people, and its size and weight are eroding basic liberties. These arguments, obviously enough, aren’t immediately subject to empirical verification or repudiation. And being moral arguments, they tend to be invested with an emotional intensity that you don’t generally see in discussions of GDP growth rates.
I’m personally convinced that at the emotional heart of today’s most passionate anti-government sentiment is the belief that a coalition of rich elitists and shiftless underclassers–perfectly represented by the community-organizing Ivy Leaguer Barack Obama–are looting the virtuous middle class to bail out bankers and welfare-moochers alike. There’s unavoidably a racial subtext to this belief, but it’s certainly possible to hold it without any conscious racial sentiment at all; after all, most people who think of themselves as “virtuous” don’t find racism virtuous at all.
This belief has been fed by decades of conservative rhetoric about the “New Class” of unproductive elitists who hold bourgeois values in contempt, and who seek power via manipulation of favor-seeking poor and minority people. And now this anti-middle-class alliance seems to be running the country. Having wrecked the economy via profitable but fradulent mortgages given to uncreditworthy people, they’ve bailed themselves out and are now trying to hold on by bribing voters with still more goodies at taxpayer expense, from stimulus dollars aimed at maintaining public employment rolls to universal health coverage.
Many progressives view this belief system as too ridiculous to take seriously. After all, isn’t the demographic category most hostile to Obama in general, and to health reform in particular–white seniors–disqualified from anti-government feelings because of its dependence on (and fierce support for) Social Security and Medicare? Not necessarily. As I argued at the beginning of the health reform battle, most seniors view Social Security and Medicare as earned benefits, not as “welfare” or “redistribution” in any real sense. This, in fact, is the reality that progressive single-payer fans don’t quite grasp when they advocate “Medicare for all” as a can’t-miss political proposition. Many seniors would violently oppose making “their” Medicare benefits available to people who haven’t been paying payroll taxes for forty to fifty years, and who haven’t, more generally, proved their virtue by a lifetime of rules-observing and often unrewarding work.
So what can progressives do about this moral argument against government and taxes? It obviously would help to dissociate liberalism from corporate welfare in any form: to treat TARP and the auto industry bailouts as essential emergency measures rather than a permanent industrial policy, and to stress the public accountability via regulation that comes with government “aid.” More fundamentally, some educational efforts are clearly in order laying out the basic facts about the actual size of government and taxes, its actual beneficiaries, and the actual impact of conservative policies–the sort of educational efforts at which unions have excelled for so many years. It is helpful to explain to seniors that Social Security and (particularly) Medicare aren’t really self-financing forced savings programs or “earned benefits.” And the loonier conspiracy-theory arguments, such as the very popular but completely hallucinatory idea that “liberals” are conspiring to take away gun ownership rights, should simply be mocked as the fabrications they are.
But the broader effort must be to tear down the alienation of middle-class folk from government and liberalism, and build up a sense of solidarity with the national community as a whole, and with the people who need an active public sector to cope with the universal risks and pitfalls of contemporary life. Plenty of “virtuous” people are not treated very well by our economic system, and they look a lot more like middle-class Tea Party activists than like the well-heeled people (viz. the Young Eagles) richly rewarded by the Invisible Hand of the marketplace regardless of merit, whose economic ideology the Tea Party Movement has adopted.
Ultimately, progressives must convince as many Americans as possible that an active but accountable public sector is not antithetical, but is actually essential, to basic traditional values like “freedom,” and to a society in which individual “virtue” is understood as something to be enabled and expanded, not angrily defended as a fixed and endangered commodity. How we talk about “middle-class values,” not just on “cultural issues” but on core economic issues, will go a long way towards determining whether we can maintain the Democratic Party’s longstanding position as the party of the masses, not the classes.

As we await word from Justice John Paul Stevens about his retirement plans, conservatives (and particularly the conservative legal activists who live for Court nomination battles) have decided to engage in a sort of warm-up act, or perhaps a show of force, by picking a fight over UC-Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a summary of the mobilization over Liu that’s already far along among conservatives, Politico‘s Kasie Hunt suggests the professor’s views (or more specifically, the long paper trail that professors tend to leave) make him symbolically important to his and the president’s enemies:

Why all the fuss over just one among hundreds of federal judicial nominees? Conservatives see Liu as the tip of the spear for the next generation of jurists — if he makes it to the court they fear he could become a leading liberal jurist on property rights, the death penalty, affirmative action, guns and even interpretations of the health care law.

Now it’s fundamental to disputes over the Supreme Court and the Constitution that each side–sometimes fairly, sometimes not–tends to depict the other as aggressors against the status quo ante; I’d personally rephrase Hunt’s characterization of conservative opinion to say that they view a rising legal star like Liu as a conveniently “radical” foil for their own radical constitutional arguments, aimed at rolling back “liberal” Supreme Court decisions dating back at least to the New Deal.
Accordingly, progressives need to go into the fight over Liu not in a defensive crouch over his “controversial” utterances carefully taken out of context from law review articles and interviews, but determined to expose the radicalism of his tormentors. Among the conservative legal beagles who will be leading the charge against Liu are people who are determined to erode the separation of church and state; to undermine the constitutional basis of New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare; and to strip away significant civil liberties and civil rights protections.
Whatever happens to Liu’s judicial ambitions (and it’s worth noting that it’s a lot easier to defeat a circuit court nomination than a Supreme Court nomination), the fight over his nomination should be a warm-up act for progressives as well. As I wrote when word of Stevens’ likely retirement came out, the Supreme Court battle offers progressives a good opportunity to show that the Republican Party is increasingly the captive of people and opinions that won’t much stand the light of day, and whose radicalism is most evident when they begin trying to tamper with the Constitution. I suspect Goodwin Liu’s “controversial” liberalism will embolden them to go hog-wild.

Eric Boehlert’s post “Post-Hutaree: How Glenn Beck and Fox News spread the militia message” at Media Matters for America merits a read, not only by progressives, but also by moderates, and even conservatives, who draw the line at supporting violence. Boehlert reports:

Not only have the number of radical-right extremist groups exploded in the wake of President Obama’s election (more than 500 today, as compared to just 200 during the 1990s), but these militia members now have a proud sponsor in the person of Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who has done more than any other person to amplify and mainstream the movement’s hateful and foreboding anti-government message. Beck continues to give a voice, and national platform, to the same deranged, hard-core militia haters and self-style “patriots” who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco.
On TV and the radio, Beck rarely bothers to mention the militia movement by name. Instead, he’s simply co-opted their rhetoric as his own. He’s acted as a crucial transmitter, warning about Obama fronting his own private “army,” and urging followers to “start food storage.”
Not to mention these previous militia moments:
Beck asserts: “The second American revolution is being playing out right now”
Beck says “what is ahead may loosen the bonds of society,” may end with “a French Revolution”
Beck: “There is a coup going on … it has been done through the guise of an election”
Beck: “You can’t convince me that the founding fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede”
Beck: “[I]f we don’t have some common sense, we’re facing the destruction of our country… it’s coming”
The truth is that the daylight separating the radical, anti-government militia movement from self-styled mainstream conservatives is growing dimmer by the day. Like the fact-free Obama birthers, the militia remains a radical subset that today’s right wing refuses to part ways with. That sad fact was highlighted when scores of far-right media voices initially downplayed the Hutaree arrests last week, or even defended the militia members and — disturbingly reminiscent of Waco — cast the FBI and the federal government as the over-reaching bad guys.
And at Fox News, it’s not just Beck. The cable “news” channel’s militia-flavored message (beware gun-toting IRS agents!) has been as simple as it’s been relentless: Obama is destroying this country and he’s doing it intentionally. It’s not that people disagree with Obama and don’t like what they call his “liberal” policies as applied to the economy and health care reform, etc. Instead, the conflict is much more dire. Obama is not just misguided in this political and legislative agenda. Instead, Obama is the incarnation of evil (the Antichrist?), and his driving hatred for America, as well as for democracy, runs so deep that he ran for president in order to destroy the United States from within.

I’m old enough to remember a time when leading conservatives were champions of the police and law enforcement. Those days appear to be over, as Boehlert explains:

Blogger Pamela Geller complained that the FBI raids were “nuts.” Glenn Beck’s radio guest host Chris Baker decried the Hutaree arrests as “nothing more than attack on faith and free speech.” And Washington Times columnist and frequent Fox News talker Monica Crowley likened Hutaree members to proud patriots, as she squarely placed the blame on the government for squelching the militia’s right to dissent…Keep in mind that both Geller and Crowley conveniently forgot to inform readers that the militia members had been arraigned on charges of plotting to kill cops. Apparently that fact no longer moves the needle in today’s right-wing media, which has severed its traditional ties with the law-and-order movement and instead today pledges its allegiance to whoever hates the government — and Democrats — the most.

Boehlert also provides a graphic of the “Tea Party Patriots” website, “the official home of the American tea party movement,” which claims the Hutaree militia with the headline “FBI Raids Tea party Compound.”
Somewhere there must be some conservatives who are repulsed by the glorification of allegedly would-be cop-killers. Even Elizabeth Hasslebeck, house conservative of the popular daytime chat show “The View,” condemned Sarah Palin’s Facebook graphic putting the districts of progressive members of congress in a gunsight crosshairs. If you don’t think this sort of thing encourages violence, consider this report from today’s New York Times about the arrest of Charles A. Wilson, who allegedly threatened to kill Senator Patty Murray for her support of HCR:

“I hope you realize, there’s a target on your back now,” Mr. Wilson said in a recorded voice mail message on March 22, according to the criminal complaint. “There are many people out there that want you dead.” He added, “It takes only one piece of lead. Kill the [expletive] senator! Kill the [expletive] senator! I’ll donate the lead…Not only do I say ‘kill the bill.’ I say, kill the [expletive] senator too, ’” Mr. Wilson said in another message, according to the complaint. “Kill the bill. Kill the senator, too.”

Media Matters for America reports that 80 or more sponsors have dropped Glen Beck, after he called President Obama a “racist” who harbors “deep-seated hatred for white people.” According to MMA‘s “So who’s still advertising on Beck? April 6 edition..,” the list of Beck’s current sponsors includes:

American Petroleum Institute
Wholesale Direct Metals
Pajama Jeans
NoMask.com
Citizens 4 Healthcare
Rosland Capital
Easy Water
Quietus
Hydroxatone
Tax Masters
Weekly Standard
Dish Network
Lear Capital
IAmNotAshamed.org
Foundation For A Better Life
Merit Financial
IRSTaxAgreements.com
Wall Street Journal
Goldline International
Lifelock
Nutrisystem

One would think that companies like the Wall St. Journal and Dish Network could lose a lot of customers by supporting inflammatory hate TV. Perhaps they assume progressives don’t watch Beck/Fox, so they probably wouldn’t think to take their business elsewhere.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin have unearthed an interesting statistic about the relative popularity of two ideas much in the news these days:

The numbers don’t lie.
The percentage of Americans viewing “The Tea Party movement” favorably: 37 percent. The percentage of Americans with a positive image of “socialism”: 36 percent. (Both sources, Gallup).

The term “Socialism” has apparently lost much of its ‘boogeyman’ stigma, while the tea partyers are not as popular as the right-wing echo chamber says. As Halpin and Teixeira point out, “Although the question wording is not exactly the same, the point is obvious. You can find roughly 4 in 10 Americans who will give a positive rating to just about anything in politics that they know little about.”

Over at OpenLeft, the ever-vigilant Chris Bowers has a useful rundown of primary elections in May and June. There are a lot of them, involving 22 states.
Among Chris’ many insights are that NC Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s robust lead in the polls over three Democratic rivals is basically a matter of name ID, nothing else; and that Joe Sestak has the money for a late ad push that should give him a decent chance against party-switching PA Sen. Arlen Specter.
If you are really into primaries, you can also take a look back at Ed Kilgore’s analysis of 2010 GOP primary fights, entitled the “Republican Civil War,” that was published about a month ago.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has an op-ed, “Turning Our Backs on Heroes,” which Democratic leaders should read and take to heart. Herbert tells the story of an American vet who has lost both his legs in Afghanistan and expresses concern about “a strong tendency” to “give short shrift to the many thousands of Americans who are suffering grievously as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Herbert adds:

The wars have become like white noise in our culture. They hit the front pages from time to time, and there are evenings when some aspect of the wars are featured on the national news telecasts. But we have no real sense of the extraordinary sacrifices that have been made by the young men and women who are fighting these wars in our name.
The agony for many of the wounded has been all but unbearable — those who have lost limbs or been paralyzed or horribly burned, or who lost their hearing or eyesight…The suffering extends to the families and loved ones of the wounded, and in all too many cases will last throughout their lives. These are peculiar wars in that the impact on the warriors inevitably is profound, while the effect of the wars on most other Americans is minimal.
There is something shameful — dishonorable — about relegating these warriors to the background. We sent them into hell and we owe them, at the very least, our grateful acknowledgement of their tremendous efforts and boundless sacrifices. There is no way to do that without paying serious attention to them.

Herbert cites a mounting toll:

Nearly 1,000 service members have lost limbs as a result of the two wars, and nearly 200 have lost more than one limb. More than 17,000 G.I.’s serving in Iraq or Afghanistan have suffered wounds so serious that they could not be returned to duty.

Says Herbert, “These wounded service members, many of them quite young, deserve much more of our awareness and support than they are getting.” Herbert’s appeal is rightly anchored in moral grounds. But the lesson should not be lost on Dems that the party that gets credit for doing something substantive for our combat vets will likely gain an edge with vets at the polls.

As noted yesterday, the 2012 presidential election cycle is already informally underway, and will get very real the day after the midterm elections on November 2.
By comparison, check out our older cousins in the United Kingdom. Today Prime Minister Gordon Brown set the date for his country’s next general election: 30 days from now.
Now obviously, electioneering in Britain is not totally confined to the formal period of the campaign, but much of it actually does take place in the sprint to election day, and that’s the case in most other democracies as well. It helps illustrate one of the major drawbacks of our own system, in which constitutionally fixed general election dates allow campaigning for major offices to creep back through the calendar relentlessly.
As for the likely outcome of the UK elections, the Conservatives have long led in the polls, which is unsurprising given the long tenure of Labour control (13 years), and the condition of the economy. But the Tory gap over Labour has been shrinking lately, and if it continues to shrink, what looked like an almost certain Tory victory a year ago could turn into a narrow advantage producing a “hung parliament”–i.e., where no party has a majority in the House of Commons. That scenario could create a minority government in which either the Tories or Labour form a coalition with the third-party Liberal Democrats, or if negotiations with the LibDems fail, another quick election.
American Republicans looking to the British elections as a possible harbinger of good things to come here at home should take note of Tory leader David Cameron’s repeated pledged that protecting the National Health Service–a.k.a., “socialized medicine” in the real, not (as with ObamaCare) imaginary sense–will be his “top priority.” Tories have also been blasting Brown for exceesively austere fiscal policies. So a Tory victory, if it happens, wouldn’t exactly be transferable to the U.S.

Democrats sometimes disagree with each other over the extent to which class-based “populist” appeals are appropriate or effective.
But on occasion, Republicans just make it all too easy for us. That’s definitely true with the revelations that are beginning to seep out about the RNC’s Young Eagles donor program aimed at budding plutocrats with time and money on their hands. We still don’t quite know how the YE’s wound up footing a bill at a bondage-themed club in LaLaLand (though it seems it was an after-party following an RNC event in Beverly Hills). But a scintillating story by Politico‘s Kenneth Vogel gives us a glimpse into the Richie Rich psychology of the program:

“We do events that a specific demographic will like, so it will love us and give us money and vote for us,” said David Norcross, a former RNC general counsel and current committeeman who was briefed by Steele on the RNC’s plan to revamp its reimbursement and expense-approval process for all programs in the wake of the controversy.
“And, when you’re dealing with young people, it’s probably a good idea to go off the beaten track a little bit and do things you think they might like.” Norcross said. “Just because a couple of mistakes have been made, doesn’t mean you don’t want to continue being progressively forward looking. Why should we of all parties do old stodgy stuff?”
A former Young Eagle who did not want to be quoted by name seconded that opinion.
“Everything that’s cool from a pop culture perspective is Democratic — whether it’s Kanye West or Bruce Springsteen — and with younger conservatives, a good event is often a big way to help sell,” said the former Young Eagle, who left the program in 2008. Traditional fundraising events such as golf and tennis outings don’t quite cut it with young donors, he said. “How many times can you go to the U.S. Open?”
The Young Eagles are “a fun group,” the former member said. “If you’ve got a little insecurity complex, but you’ve got money — what a cool group to hang out with.”

Pity the poor little rich boys: all that money to burn (at least for those whose inheritance hasn’t been ravaged by the “death tax”), and nowhere to burn it except by associating with those damned socialists, who have a corner on “cool.” With the Young Eagles at least temporarily grounded, it seems they’ll have to resign themselves to just another boring trip to the U.S. Open.