This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
The 2012 “invisible primary” is looking likely to end just how and where it began: with Republican ideologues anxiously looking to Iowa for signs of an electable “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney. Depending on whom you ask, they have found no such candidate, or have found too many of them. In either case, despite their fevered hopes the First-in-the-Nation Caucus is not likely to play its intended role as an all-important arbiter where ideological squishes are disciplined or destroyed and the faithful find their champion. Indeed, from the perspective of a conservative movement hoping to consolidate its control over the GOP once and for all and make 2012 the beginning of the end for the New Deal, Iowa has been a big failure.
The sad spectacle of the FAMiLY Leader organization–whose board, after administering a controversial pledge document and then holding a candidate forum, could not reach agreement on an endorsement–is something of a microcosm of the Right’s failure to separate the sheep from the goats throughout the invisible primary. While FAMiLY Leader chieftains Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley eventually supplied “personal” endorsements for Rick Santorum, Vander Plaats has been subsequently begging Santorum supporters to contribute money to enable him to actually campaign for his candidate–a sign of the gesture’s probable futility. Given the fact that they are appealing to largely the same constituencies and are hardly flush with cash, neither Santorum nor Michele Bachmann seem very likely to win a big “ticket out of Iowa.” And Rick Perry, once the favorite of the Christian Right, is still holding onto an impressive war chest that will likely sustain him, but he’s got precious little else going for him other than the hope that he, rather than Gingrich, will survive through New Hampshire to make a late appeal to southerners. For his part, Newt has not been haunting the highways and byways of Iowa all that obsessively either; the big news for his campaign this week has been its opening of an all-volunteer headquarters in Sioux City, just his second outpost in the entire state.
Meanwhile, neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul seems likely to be influenced by the results in Iowa at all. While it’s true that Romney has moved decisively to the right in order to make himself minimally acceptable to today’s conservatives, he’s done so out of deference to the primary process as a whole–not the glare of publicity and pressure on the Iowa campaign trail, which he has largely ignored until very, very recently. Indeed, the main Romney footprint in the state has been via the nasty attack ads on Newt Gingrich launched by the “Restore the Future” super-PAC backing Romney. And while Ron Paul has done well in the target-rich Iowa environment of a low-turnout caucus (lots of home-schoolers and lots of eager college students), it’s not as though he’s doing much of anything he hasn’t been doing for many years. Moreover, it is certain that Paul’s campaign will continue right up until the convention no matter how he does in Iowa.
So the caucuses themselves will probably only cull one candidate from the field, no more than the Iowa Straw Poll back in August that ended Tim Pawlenty’s campaign. As Jonathan Bernstein has recently explained, barring a real upset Iowa’s influence over the nominating contest may well be reduced to spin: Did this or that candidate beat expectations, or set the table for success down the road? That is not a meaningless role to play, but after absorbing so many months of candidate and media attention, it’s hardly ideal from the point of view of Iowa triumphalists who consider their strange contest the epitome of deliberative democracy.
And for the high-riding right wing of the Republican Party–be they denoted as Tea Partiers, the Christian Right, or “constitutional conservatives,”–it’s been a long and arguably pointless trip. Unable to use the unique leverage of Iowa to elevate Tim or Michele or Rick or Herman or Newt or the other Rick, they are now looking at genuinely long odds for denying the nomination to the man they do not want, Mitt Romney, who is more and more looking like the Richard Nixon of the early twenty-first century: The lowest common denominator of a political party in which leadership is in painfully short supply.

In a recent Huffpo piece, Bob Kuttner delivered a sharp and well-deserved back of the hand to the latest and biggest fad in pseudo-populist “Don’t Vote for Obama” politics (dressed up, like most of these things are, as grass-roots citizen participation). As he said:

A well-funded, faux-reformist group known as Americans Elect is promoting a third party presidential candidacy and anticipates qualifying its candidate to be on the ballot in nearly all states. It is doing this by collecting millions of petition signatures, over 2.2 million so far, taking advantage of voter frustration with political blockage in Washington. The actual candidate will be decided later, by Internet Convention.
Despite the superficial populism, just about everything about this exercise is misguided…

Kuttner explains:

The quest for a centrist third party alternative misstates why Washington is blocked. The storyline is one of symmetrical extremism and refusal to compromise on the part of Republicans and Democrats alike. Says Americans Elect’s website, “you have the power to help break gridlock and change politics as usual. No special interest. No agendas. Country before party.”
But as anyone who hasn’t spent the last three decades on Jupiter must know, Democrats have spent the era since Jimmy Carter moving to the middle of the spectrum on a broad range of pocketbook and national security issues. Only on tolerance issues has the presidential party remained progressive.
So we already have a centrist party. It’s called the presidential Democratic Party….
…Republicans during this period have both moved further to the right ideologically, and have become more obstructionist tactically. They have refused to pass routine legislation such as extension of national debt authority. Ordinary bills are now subjected to Senate filibusters. If they don’t like a federal agency like the consumer financial protection bureau or the National Labor Relations Board, they won’t confirm its nominees. If they don’t like duly enacted legislation like the Affordable Care Act, they vow to destroy it. The Supreme Court has become a partisan organ.
This pattern of extremist obstruction by a major party is something unknown in American politics since the pre-Civil War battles over slavery…

O.K., so Americans Elect is clearly peddling the anti-Democratic “false equivalency” snake-oil. Kuttner then asks the obvious question: who’s behind it?

…The thing is funded mostly by hedge fund gazillionaires. In fact, the chief operating officer of Americans Elect, Elliot L. Ackerman, got a $30 million dollar gift from his father, Wall Streeter Peter Ackerman, to finance this exercise in Internet populism. Thanks, Dad.
Note that this hedge-fund-spawned third party is most likely to attract self-financing billionaires. This is one hell of an exercise in the people taking back their politics.

Now as everyone in the Washington beltway village knows, the effort is widely suspected to be a tool of Michael Blumberg’s and the likelihood that any other candidate who might harm the Republicans instead of Obama will get the nod is totally undermined by the fact that the hedge-fund insiders running this scam have given themselves the explicit right to override the votes of the masses of “citizen-voters” who participate if the voting doesn’t go the way they want and to anoint someone else they consider a more “acceptable” centrist.
As Richard Hassen noted in a recent Politico investigative report:

the [nomination] process can, in fact, be overruled by the small board of directors who organized the group. This board is to have unfettered discretion in picking a committee that can boot the presidential ticket chosen by voters if it is not sufficiently “centrist” and even dump the committee if it doesn’t like the direction it’s heading.

Hassen provides the details:

Under the group’s bylaws, the committee, along with the three other standing committees, serves at the pleasure of the board — and committee members can be removed without cause by the board. The board members were not elected by delegates; they chose themselves in the organization’s articles of incorporation.
The bottom line: If Americans Elect is successful, millions of people will have united to provide ballot access not for a candidate they necessarily believe in – like a Ross Perot or Ralph Nader — but for a candidate whose choice could be shaped largely by a handful of self-appointed leaders.
Despite the veneer of democracy created by having “delegates” choose a presidential candidate through a series of Internet votes, the unelected, unaccountable board of Americans Elect, funded by secret money, will control the process for choosing a presidential and vice presidential candidate — who could well appear on the ballot in all 50 states.

Kuttner nicely sums up the whole noxious package as follows:

So we have wrongheaded ideology, married to a misguided diagnosis of what ails America, yoked to a perverse politics. Just about what you’d expect of hedge-fund billionaires meddling in electoral reform.

That pretty much says it all. But, just for the heck of it let’s make absolutely sure we have all the details completely straight in our minds. An unelected cabal of plutocrats has invested millions of dollars (collected from a handful of carefully concealed secret donors) into a completely unaudited private balloting process whose results they have explicitly given themselves the right to casually throw in the garbage if they don’t like them in order to handpick the candidate they prefer.
Wow. Where did these electoral Einsteins ever manage to find the inspiration for this absolutely awesome and breathtaking innovation in “grass roots democracy”? Albania, maybe? A Central American Banana Republic in the 1930’s? An unpublished novel of George Orwell?
Damned if I know. But just for fun TDS readers can go ahead vote for their choice between these three alternatives. But just remember, if I don’t like your choice, I can always just crumple it up and throw it in the trash. That’ll give you a head start in understanding how your vote can get treated by Americans Elect.

The Wall St. Journal Editorial “The GOP’s Payroll Tax Fiasco: How did Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?” is getting huge buzz. When the WSJ joins the Weekly Standard and National Review in piling on Boehner, a consensus that knee-jerk obstructionism is getting old is emerging across the political spectum. Even Newt is urging Boehner to cave, sayeth the WSJ.
At Daily Kos DemfromCT has a good round-up on the payroll tax banjax.
Peter Grier’s Monitor post “Are GOP voters fooling themselves about Newt Gingrich’s electability?” discusses what polls show about the disconnect between Republicans and the population at large on the topic of Newt’s chances against Obama.
George Will has a characteristically droll graph in his WaPo column on why Newt is not a real conservative: “Gingrich’s unsurprising descent into sinister radicalism — intimidation of courts — is redundant evidence that he is not merely the least conservative candidate, he is thoroughly anti-conservative. He disdains the central conservative virtue, prudence, and exemplifies progressivism’s defining attribute — impatience with impediments to the political branches’ wielding of untrammeled power. He exalts the will of the majority of the moment, at least as he, tribune of the vox populi, interprets it.”
Tomasky makes the case that it could be Santorum time.
Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer at The Atlantic has a long article on “Grappling With Ron Paul’s Racist Newsletters,” agonizing really, over how to deal with Paul’s publishing ugly racial diatribes. Friedersdorf glosses over the report in Ramesh Ponnuru’s Bloomberg post, which I flagged on Tuesday, noting that in 2004 Paul was the sole vote (414-1) in congress against a resolution celebrating the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Worse, he gave a speech defending his vote, arguing that “employers who wish to discriminate against blacks, in his view, should be free to do so,” according to Ponnuru. Judging by the tortured rationalizations, Libertarians seem to be having a tough time letting go of Paul.
CNN’s Gloria Borger does a good job trying to make Paul explain his newsletters on camera. Watch Paul respond here. Meanwhile Jackie Kucinich of USA Today reports in “Paul’s story changes on racial comments” that in an interview with the Dallas Morning News he “admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996.”
Lauren Fox argues at US News that “Ron Paul Victory Could Hurt Legitimacy of Iowa Caucuses,” not for the aforementioned reasons, but because “If Paul wins and then fades really quickly afterward [in national campaigning]…then you have two caucuses in a row where the Iowa winner doesn’t go on to be the GOP nominee,” says Christopher Larimer, a professor at Northern Iowa University, quoted in Fox’s article.
Iowa, Schmiowa, I say. It’s past time for reforming the primary process so the states take turns going first or draw the privilege by lots. Other reform proposals here.
Alex Altman asks an important question at Time Swampland : “Americans Elect: Can a Well-Heeled Group of Insiders Create a Populist Third-Party Sensation?” Altman’s article provides an interesting look at an ostensibly moderate group, which may function more as a stealth GOP effort to drain moderate support from Dems. See also Michael Finnegan’s L.A. Times report on Americans Elect.

You know that widely-accepted meme that the public strongly opposes The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that nearly all Americans purchase health insurance, the one that has been used to help drive the effort to repeal or overturn the law? Turns out that it’s not true when polls put the question to the public with a critical missing piece of information. As Sarah Kiff reports at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in “Messaging the Individual Mandate,” her post on the new Kaiser Family Foundation poll, conducted 12/8-13 and released today:

Kaiser found, as a baseline, 65 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the health reform law’s mandated purchase of health insurance. But among those, they found the majority would flip to a positive opinion when they were told that Americans with employer-sponsored insurance really wouldn’t have to deal with the mandate.

In other words, when the public is properly informed about how the “mandate” actually works, you get a strong majority, 61 percent supporting it, with only 34 percent still opposed. Other pieces of information also significantly reduced unfavorable attitudes toward the legislation. Reminding the public that without the mandate, people could “wait until they are seriously ill before buying health insurance, which will drive up costs for everyone” gets support for the law up to 47 percent, with 45 percent still opposed. Telling respondents that no one would be held to the mandate “if the cost of new coverage would consume too large a share of their income” gets the favorable support up to 49 percent, with 45 percent still opposed.
It may seem a little late to be thinking about re-messaging the individual mandate, with the Supreme Court set to rule on it mid-2012. But it is important for Dems to learn the lesson and pay more attention to different ways of messaging reforms, and specifically how to counter-punch when a reform is oversimplified in the opposition’s attacks.
Moreover, it seems to me that very little effort was put into explaining the law to the public after it was passed. The attitude seemed to be, “well, we got that one passed. Now let’s move on to the next fight.” Even though many people were weary of the whole debate, we didn’t really finish the job of explaining the new law in a way that would elicit strong majority support. A simple FAQs mailer to every home could have helped. Let’s not make that mistake again.

If the GOP wingnuts thought they were going to get any traction with their various proposals to gut Medicare and Social Security, they are living in political fantasyland. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in this week’s edition of his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

Start with this finding from a recent Pew poll: 58 percent thought it was more important to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are rather than take steps to reduce the budget deficit (35 percent).
In the same poll, 59 percent thought it was more important to avoid any future cuts in Social Security benefits, compared to 32 percent who thought it was more important to avoid any future Social Security tax increases for workers and employers.

The public also has a very low tolerance for wingnut schemes to screw around with eligibility requirements for the two programs, particularly the age of recipients:

Nor does the public like the idea of raising the age you can receive benefits for either Social Security or Medicare. By 59-39, the public opposes raising the age you can receive Social Security benefits and, by an almost identical 58-38, they oppose raising the age at which you can receive Medicare benefits.

Teixeira concludes that conservatives who “confuse the views of their base with the views of the broader public…could pay a significant price come next election.”

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In an invisible primary where it seems everyone other than Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum is fated to have his or her brief day in the sun, two new polls from Iowa show the indefatigable Ron Paul now leading the field among likely caucus-goers, with just two weeks left before actual voting occurs. The media, much to the consternation of fanatical Paulists, is already writing him off as another flash-in-the pan, his libertarianism too extreme to gain the support of moderate conservatives and too at odds with social conservatives to win over their vital support. This is the right instinct–Paul will not win the nomination–but then how to explain his growing popularity? The truth is that, with the singular exception of his Chomskyesque views on foreign policy, Paul is not nearly as divorced from mainstream conservative thought as was the case four years ago.
As it has been for past candidates with a small but intense and highly organized following (most famously Pat Robertson in 1988), Iowa is indeed a promising environment for a Paul upset. That’s partly because it is a caucus state where the number of supporters it takes to win is limited, and partly because Paul has made important inroads with key groups like home-schoolers and college students. Moreover, the steadiness of Paul’s support has given him staying power even as other campaigns have undergone feast-and-famine swings. What’s perhaps most remarkable about the new Public Policy Polling survey that gave Paul his first Iowa lead is how similar the numbers look compared to results published back in April, which showed Romney in the twenties and Gingrich, Paul and Bachmann in the teens. Paul’s poll “surge” is actually a matter of adding seven points over the last eight months.
The reason Paul has been able to slowly build his base of support in the state is that, on most issues, his views no longer lie outside the mainstream of the party orthodoxy. It’s become one of the great clichés of 2012 that the GOP as a whole has moved significantly in Ron Paul’s direction since his last campaign in 2008, and on domestic issues, it’s largely true. Paul’s endless fulminations about profligate monetary policy and the evil Fed, as well as his draconian prescriptions for a radically smaller federal government, now all sound completely within the conservative mainstream.
This development is due, in part, to the fact that there is now a Democratic administration that all Republicans are happy to demonize. More subtly, Paul’s narrative of a long disastrous national slide into socialism, which sounded very weird to many Republicans when their party controlled the White House and Congress, has become commonplace, as have hints and (for some) outright arguments that the entire New Deal and Great Society legacies need to be dismantled.
A Democratic administration has also made it possible for Republicans to disparage, with some degree of impunity, current military engagements in Afghanistan and Libya, while concerns over the economy have generally placed foreign policy issues on the back burner. But in a conservative-movement-dominated GOP, ideological purity is more important than ever, and by any standard Ron Paul flunks every foreign policy and national defense litmus test imaginable. Paul’s views on the projection of American power abroad are sure to get a thorough airing if he does win in Iowa, sending him right back to the fringe status he occupied in 2008.
While there remain different “schools” of foreign policy thinking on the right, the two words that best define conservative orthodoxy at the moment are “American exceptionalism,” the belief that the United States is uniquely endowed (some would say directly by God) with the resources and moral authority to defend the world against totalitarian evil, generally, and what most perceive as an Islamist threat, in particular. A corollary to “American exceptionalism” might be termed “Israeli exceptionalism,” the belief (buttressed by conservative evangelicals with various theological axes to grind) that Israel is America’s best and most important ally, with its own unique role to play in the struggle against Islamists, tyrants, and Islamist tyrants.
Paul emphatically repudiates both forms of exceptionalism, as illustrated most notably by his consistent view that America’s problems with the Islamic world are mainly a product of “blowback” from past U.S. meddling in the region. At a time when other candidates are arguing about exactly how much military power will be needed to prevent an intolerable achievement of nuclear weapons capability by Iran, Paul has actually defended Iran’s right to become a nuclear power and points to the CIA’s role in overthrowing Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 as creating a permanent and justified Iranian grievance against the U.S. As Michele Bachmann charged during the most recent candidate debate (in words we will hear over and over if Paul does well in Iowa), Paul’s foreign policy views place him well “to the left of Obama.” And at a time when conservatives are avid to attack Obama as an enemy of Israel, Paul’s hostility to the U.S.-Israeli military alliance is so notorious that the Republican Jewish Coalition has twice banned him from candidate forums, labeling him a “virulent and harsh critic of Israel.”
To be sure, today’s wild and wooly GOP is a much friendlier venue for the Ron Paul Revolution than it’s ever been, and a low turnout caucus in Iowa may showcase its strengths. But Paul’s residual weaknesses, rooted in a refusal to match domestic with global belligerence, will be enough to give him a one-way ticket back to political oblivion.

A crack in the obstructionist front? Felicia Sonmez’s “Payroll tax cut compromise further divides GOP” at the Post has a good report on the underlying politics behind the Reid-McConnell bipartisan compromise. Sonmez quotes House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD): “We are witnessing the concluding convulsion of confrontation and obstruction in the most unproductive, tea-party-dominated, partisan session of the Congresses in which I have participated.”
Brendan Nyhan takes some reporters to the woodshed in his Columbia Journalism Review post “When Newt Isn’t Newsworthy:The problems with news pegs in campaign coverage.” Says Nyhan: “Unfortunately, reporters’ dependence on news pegs means that they end up substituting opposing campaigns’ judgments about what issues are important for their own, particularly when it comes to a well-known political figure like Gingrich…Reporters: John H. Sununu should not be your assignment editor!”
Barbara A. Perry, Senior Fellow in Presidential Oral History at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, addresses the possible political fallout of major decision facing the High Court’s upcoming session, in “The Supremes v. Obamacare: Will the Court Decide the 2012 Presidential Election?” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “If the court upholds the entire act, Obama will emerge bruised but victorious from the judicial battle. On the campaign trail, he could then emphasize his efficacy in implementing a key pledge from 2008. The court’s complete invalidation of the law, on the other hand, would deal the president a severe blow…A loss on health care could also prompt Obama to make Supreme Court appointments a campaign issue…”
The polls are all over the place about Newt and Romney, but it’s good to see the President’s approval ratings have reached a high since summer, according to a new ABC/WaPo poll conducted 12/15-18 reported by By Peter Wallsten and Jon Cohen in the Washington Post. Speculation, some of it supported by data, credits his new populist message, a lackluster GOP presidential field, congressional Republicans’ obstructionism and a slight improvement in economic trends. It’s just a hunch, but I’m thinking general likability — in stark contrast to his adversaries — may be worth a few points.
Of the 11 Governorships up next year (not yet including the Wisconsin recall effort) “in a decidedly light gubernatorial year”, Crystal Ball wizards Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley rate 5 safe, likely or lean Republican, 2 as toss-ups and 4 as safe, likely or lean Democratic. The authors provide one-paragraph analyses for each race.
Paul Begala has a fun post up at the Daily Beast, “The GOP Candidates Read Wacky Books.” Mitch likes such enlightening tomes as Bush, Jr.’s “Decision Points” and L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth,’ while Newt cozies up with “military texts like Sun Tzu to Buzz Lightyear-style future-babble from Alvin Toffler.” Then there is Michelle Bachman who “cited J. Steven Wilkins’s Call of Duty: The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee…Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker tells us that “Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North.” Perry digs the Glenn Beck-recommended “The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World” by W. Cleon Skousen, a John Bircher who has reportedly been called “an All-around nutjob” by Mark Hemingway of the National Review.
At last, a decent MSM report focusing on Ron Paul’s racist newsletter, “New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters” by Jim Rutenberg and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. in the New York Times. Still we wait for an interviewer to ask Paul point blank, “Mr. Paul, are you opposed to racial discrimination against African Americans?”
Looks like the GOP establishment is getting nervous about Ron Paul, as well as Newt. National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru reports at Bloomberg on another worrisome indicator of Paul’s racial views: “In 2004, the House voted 414-1 for a resolution celebrating the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paul not only voted no but gave a speech arguing that the act should never have been enacted. Employers who wish to discriminate against blacks, in his view, should be free to do so. A federal government that claims the power to override their decisions, he said, could also impose racial quotas. “Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
We don’t expect our politicians to be saints. But Carl Gershman’s moving WaPo tribute, “Vaclav Havel’s legacy to humanity” raises a question: Why can’t we have politicians like this?
Charles Babington has an AP article focused on Romney’s considerable vulnerabilities on the issue of jobs, spotlighting his profiteering from mass layoffs when he was at Bain capital, as well as his weak jobs record as Mass Governor. “Romney’s record is a target-rich environment, since he threw people out of jobs to make a lot of money,” said Doug Hattaway, a Democratic strategist. “Gingrich is harder to paint as a job-destroyer.”…When Romney was endorsed by Delaware tea party activist Christine O’Donnell — she once declared “I’m not a witch” in a Senate race ad — Obama strategist David Axelrod jumped in. “If Christine O’Donnell really wants to help Mitt, maybe she can cast a spell and make his MA and Bain records disappear,” Axelrod said via Twitter.”

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama’s much-heralded speech in Osawatomie, Kansas focused on inequality, which, he argued, is undermining our prosperity, weakening our democracy, and shrinking our middle class. While there’s a serious data-based argument to be made in favor of that view, recent surveys suggest that most Americans don’t share it. If the speech becomes the thematic template for his reelection campaign, it may well reduce his chances of prevailing in a close race.
Let me start with a Gallup survey released on December 15, which showed that the number of Americans who see American society as divided into haves and have-nots has decreased significantly since the 2008 election. Back then, 49 percent saw the country as divided along those lines, and 49 percent didn’t. As of this week, only 41 percent see the country as divided between haves and have-nots, while 58 percent do not. (The share of Americans who consider themselves to be “haves” hasn’t budged: 59 percent in 2008, 58 percent today.)
Significantly, most of the reduction in those seeing the country as economically divided has occurred in the middle of the political spectrum. In 2008, 48 percent of independents saw an economic divide; today it’s 37 percent. In 2008, 51 percent of moderates saw a divide, versus only 38 percent now. Liberals are the only group that has become more likely to see a divided society–63 percent in 2008, 66 percent today. While invoking sharpening divisions will thrill them, it may have the opposite effect on the moderates and independents without whose support national Democratic candidates will fail.
Now consider another Gallup survey, this one released on the 16th. Respondents were asked to categorize three economic objectives as extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not important. “Grow and expand the economy” was rated as extremely or very important by a 82/18 margin, with “Increase equality of opportunity of people to get ahead” rating nearly as strongly (70% called that extremely or very important). But only 46% called “Reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor” extremely or very important, while 54% rated it “somewhat or not important.”
Regardless of partisanship, substantial majorities of Americans saw expanding the economy and increasing equality of opportunity as extremely or very important. Not so for reducing income and wealth gaps–21 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of independents. Only Democrats gave this goal a high priority, by a margin of 72 to 27.
When Gallup asked a sample of Americans in 1998 whether the gap between the rich and the poor was a problem that needed to be fixed, 52 percent said yes, while 45 percent regarded it as an acceptable part of the economic system. Today, those numbers are reversed: Only 45 percent see the gap as in need of fixing, while 52 percent don’t. Again, Democrats are the outliers: 62 percent of them want it fixed, versus 24 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of independents.
A third Gallup survey asked Americans to state whether they saw big business, big government, or big labor as the biggest threat to the country in the future. In March of 2009, 55 percent felt most threatened by big government, and 32 percent by big business. As of December 2011, a near-record 64 percent saw big government as the greatest threat, versus on 26 percent for big business. As Obama nears the end of his third year in office, the people are more likely to fear government, and less likely to fear business, than they were at the beginning of his administration.
The source of the change is surprising. Republican fear of government, already sky-high in 2009, hasn’t budged, while fear of government among independents has risen only modestly. The big change has occurred among Democrats. In 2009, only 32 percent feared big government the most, compared to 52 percent who feared big business. Today, fully 48 percent of Democrats (up 16 percentage points) cite government as their principal fear, while only 44 percent give business pride of place. In short, a 2008 election widely regarded as heralding a shift toward the more government-friendly public sentiment of the New Deal and Great Society eras seems to have yielded just the reverse.
None of this is to say that Obama can’t win next year. Indeed, if the economy grows a bit more quickly and unemployment falls farther than the standard forecasts predict, he may well prevail. It is to say that a campaign emphasizing growth and opportunity is more likely to yield a Democratic victory than is a campaign focused on inequality. While the latter will thrill the party’s base, only the former can forge a majority.