This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
During the last few weeks, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is said to be on the very brink of launching a presidential bid, has said and done some things that would have been big trouble, and perhaps mortally damaging, to most politicians. On two separate hot-button issues (gay marriage and abortion), he first identified with hard-line Tea Party “10th Amendment” interpretations that states should be responsible for sorting out such matters, only to then obsequiously flip-flop to hard-line Christian Right positions favoring the passage of a federal constitutional amendment. And in an encomium to theocracy far beyond anything Michele Bachmann has conjured, he presided over a “prayer assembly” in Houston that embraced the radical “dominionist” viewpoint that only the subjection of America to conservative evangelical prescriptions could heal the country’s economic, as well as moral, problems.
Indeed, looking back over Perry’s career, these most recent examples are fairly typical of times he’s risked turning off influential factions within the Republican Party. Not that long ago, Perry flirted with the profound alienation of social conservatives by becoming the country’s most visible supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid. In addition, Perry has maintained his support for a law he signed as governor offering in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children; he’s championed a fishy-sounding and very expensive statewide transportation corridor; and he once proposed that every female teenager in Texas be required to receive vaccination for the HPV virus. So why is it virtually certain that Perry will be instantly launched into the very top tier of the 2012 presidential nominating contest the moment he announces his candidacy?
To be sure, Perry has access to a lot of money, and he is renowned as a tough retail politician who loves to give conservative audiences the kind of bloody red meat rhetoric they seem to crave more than ever this year. But it’s also clear that something else is going on: In keeping with the extraordinary timing that has charmed his entire political career, Rick Perry seems to perfectly embody the Republican zeitgeist of the moment, appealing equally to the GOP’s Tea Party, Christian Right, and establishment factions while exemplifying the militant anti-Obama attitude that holds it all together. He offers the Republican Party an opportunity for unity at a time when his only rival in this respect is the underwhelming Tim Pawlenty, whose once-promising campaign could quite possibly expire this next weekend in the heat and noise of the GOP straw poll in Ames, Iowa. And unlike T-Paw, Perry has the ability to forcefully project the talking-points of various GOP factions in a way that seems authentic, no matter how often he contradicts himself. It’s a rare gift, possessed by his one-time boss George W. Bush, and even more famously by–though the comparison may seem blasphemous–Ronald Reagan himself.
When it comes to wooing the far right, Perry has managed to identify himself with both the Tea Party and the Christian Right as thoroughly as Michele Bachmann, but without giving the impression, as the fiery Minnesotan often does, of being a disciple to obscure extremist thinkers, or being especially interested in pointy-headed systematic thinking. You can’t quite imagine Perry claiming, as Bachmann did recently, that he takes books by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises with him to browse on the beach. Nor is Perry in the habit of complicating his association with zealous evangelical pastors by excitedly telling crowds how deeply he was influenced by Francis Schaeffer. Instead, he keeps his relationships simple and at a distance, which also has the advantage of letting non-Tea Party, non-Christian Right factions in the party believe it’s all a shuck that he won’t take seriously if he’s elected.
On the other side of the Republican spectrum, Perry’s most important ace-in-the-hole is his appeal to Republicans who strongly believe the GOP should avoid divisive social issues and exotic constitutional theories and run in 2012 on a straight-forward pledge to create jobs and limit federal spending. On this score, Texas’ fiscal and economic record (on the surface, at least) during Perry’s long tenure as governor makes it easy for him to claim superiority to other Republican candidates, and to Barack Obama, without advancing any messy, controversial proposals for solving the country’s economic problems. This credential represents a direct challenge to the uncharismatic Mitt Romney, whose own reputation as a potential economic savior is mainly attributable to a career in corporate consulting and to the executive abilities he displayed in what conservatives view as his less-than-ideal tenure as governor of Massachusetts.
Such comparisons to other candidates help explain why Perry is already running in double-digits in recent national and state polls, without even forming an exploratory committee or spending his every weekend in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. He’s already much more successful than Pawlenty in positioning himself as a candidate who is more electable and less controversial than likely Iowa-winner Bachmann, and more acceptable to movement conservatives than likely New Hampshire-winner Romney. And, at this late point in the process, support for Perry as a unity candidate should no longer be undermined by the longing for a dark-horse savior like Chris Christie, or an old favorite like Jeb Bush, who will come out of nowhere to save the party from its current presidential field.
No wonder a lot of Republicans are willing to turn a blind eye to Rick Perry’s frequent flip-flops and over-the-top utterances, his occasional heresies to conservatism, his chronic inability to convince the citizens of his home state that they are living in an economic paradise, and his less-than-impressive intellectual credentials. Whatever he lacks on the supply-side of being an ideal GOP candidate, the demand-side of those seeking a viable conservative alternative to Bachmann and Romney will inevitably give his candidacy a big push.
Ed Kilgore
As you probably know, the recall election involving six Republican state senators fell one seat short of the three needed to flip control of the Wisconsin State State to Democrats, and only a bit over 2,000 votes separated the candidates in the decisive contest. All six districts were carried by Barack Obama in 2008, but also by Scott Walker in 2010, and as Nate Silver has characterized them, they are clearly a bit more Republican than the state as a whole.
Both sides in the particularly harsh political/economic struggle in Wisconsin, which is rapidly becoming a microcosm of the national struggle, will be examining not just the results, but their strategies, tactics, GOTV methods, and paid media investments, for weeks and months to come. Labor/Progressive efforts to boost turnout appeared to have succeeded; turnout across the six districts came very close to that of the 2010 general election, a pretty remarkable development for a late-summer special election. After-action reports will seek to determine whether pro-recall GOTV investments were effectively countered by tea party groups and the local GOP, or created a polarizing atmosphere that boosted turnout across-the-board.
Sheer money was obviously a factor; an estimated $8 million was spent in one district alone (the 8th, won by Republican Alberta Darling in what turned out to be the crucial contest in terms of control of the Senate). It will be a while before the spending numbers can be sorted out, but the CW going into election day was that conservative groups had outgunned progressives financially down the stretch, much as they did in the narrow Supreme Court election in April.
For Wisconsin Democrats, the key question is whether the results justify an expensive and difficult effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker next year. If you extrapolate yesterday’s numbers, a similar result in a statewide race would probably be enough to topple Walker, but it would be very close. In terms of national politics, however, the 2011 recall elections should be viewed as a laboratory for the 2012 presidential election–sort of a Spanish Civil War prior to the big event. Wisconsin is by any definition a state Democrats will have to win in a successful presidential campaign, but more importantly, the resource allocations and messages being tested in Wisconsin must be measured against the many decisions Democrats and their progressive allies must make in a complex national landscape.
We’re only a couple of hours away from poll closing time in Wisconsin, where six Republican state senators are facing a recall election today. If Democrats win three of these elections, they take control of the Wisconsin Senate, which would represent a major blow to Gov. Scott Walker and a large boost to progressive morale not just in Wisconsin but nationally
A large labor-driven voter mobilization effort (counted only in part by Tea Party activists) is behind the recall drive, and near-saturation-levels of paid media have been reached in some of these contests. Accordingly, turnout is expected to be somewhere between the 35% level of the recent statewide Supreme Court election, and the much higher levels achieved in general elections.
Here’s Politico‘s description of the forces arrayed on both sides:
The state parties are boasting more than 3 million voter contacts between them. Democrats claim they’ve enlisted 10,000 volunteers — creeping close to the 15,000 they were able to draw for the 2010 statewide gubernatorial contest.
“I have never seen the type of volunteers across the state as I’ve seen in this election,” said Baldwin, who has spoken with elections clerks forecasting presidential-like turnout.
“The intensity is off the charts in these races,” said Republican National Committee political director Rick Wiley.
Then there are the third party groups, which are far outspending the candidates. They’ve poured in more than $30 million , according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks political spending. That’s just shy of the $37 million total spent on last year’s governor’s race.
From the left, it’s the Progressive Change Campaign Committee; Howard Dean’s Democracy for America; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union. On the right, it’s Tea Party Express, Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth.
It should be an interesting, and will be an important, night.
Anyone familiar with the presidential nominating process in either party knows that the “early states” are extremely sensitive about their status and influence. That’s particularly true of “first in the nation caucus” Iowa and “first primary state” New Hampshire. These states have gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain their position, to the point of threatening to move their contests into the year prior to the general election if necessary, and generally thundering against candidates who think they can win by skipping ahead to other states.
On the Republican side, Iowa’s status is enhanced by the ritual of the GOP Straw Poll, traditionally held in the college town of Ames (a quick drive from Des Moines) the summer before the elections (on August 13 this year), which has become the first reportable contest of the cycle and an event that often purges weak candidates from the field.
Iowa Republicans are anxious about the credibility of the Straw Poll, not just because it draws unique attention to the state, but because it is their major fundraiser for the cycle (attending the Straw Poll costs $30, with most of the tickets paid for and distributed by presidential campaigns; other money is raised by auctioning off sites for candidate HQs, typically huge air-conditioned tents). And so they have taken the risky strategy of publicly warning candidates that they might as well skip the Caucuses if they skip the Straw Poll. And some do: Mitt Romney, who typically runs first or second in early polls of likely Republican Caucus-goers, decided to skip the Straw Poll this time after spending a ton of money to win it in 2007, succeeding only in boosting expectations that he would win the Caucuses. When he ultimately lost to Mike Huckabee in the Caucuses, it probably damaged his candidacy more than the alternative path of forgetting about Iowa altogether.
So with Romney already giving Ames a pass, the Iowa GOP’s self-esteem depends on the Straw Poll producing a viable challenger or two to Romney. There are two main threats to that happening: the possibility that a non-viable candidate will win in Ames, and the possibility that another candidate skipping the Straw Poll will emerge as a Big Dog.
As Craig Robinson, proprietor of the influential web page The Iowa Republican is demonstrating today, both these threats could soon become very real. Robinson’s own handicapping of the Straw Poll predicts a narrow win for Ron Paul, a candidate nobody much takes seriously as an eventual nominee (you can read Robinson’s take yourself, but the bottom line is that he thinks Michele Bachmann’s organizational shortcomings in Iowa will keep her from taking full advantage of her popularity in the state, and also thinks Tim Pawlenty, who does have a strong organization, just hasn’t excited local Republicans enough to get them to make the trip to Ames to support him).
Meanwhile, Rick Perry’s staff has put out the word that he will say something definitive–and presumably positive–about his own presidential plans the very day of the Straw Poll–in South Carolina, at the annual gathering of right-wing activists held by the Red State web site.
This has Craig Robinson very upset:
Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to announce his candidacy in South Carolina at the same time the Iowa Straw Poll is taking place in Ames is not only a slap in the face to Republican voters in Iowa, but it also is disrespectful to the Iowa GOP and the other candidates seeking the nomination.
The move makes it obvious that Governor Perry either doesn’t understand the Iowa caucuses or doesn’t respect the role that Iowa plays in the nominating process. We shouldn’t be surprised. The candidate he endorsed for president in 2008, Rudy Giuliani, never could figure out Iowa either….
Stealing some of the media attention away from the Straw Poll and the candidates that are participating on Saturday may seem like a savvy thing to do, but it comes at a high price. Perry now risks alienating the very people he needs to support him in order to win the nomination.
In other words: we’ll punish you in the Caucuses, Rick Perry, if you rain on our parade this Saturday, and don’t think you’re going to win the nomination by skipping Iowa altogether!
But if Ron Paul wins the Straw Poll, Pawlenty does poorly, and Bachmann falls well short of expectations, then the buzz after Ames will probably be that Romney and Perry are the front-runners for the nomination. This perception could obviously change if a nationally viable candidate wins the Caucuses and charges into New Hampshire and South Carolina with some momentum. But the scenario Iowa Republicans fear could make for a very anxious few months in the First-in-the-Nation-Caucus state–and bring joy to the hearts of political observers who think the influence of the Straw Poll is ridiculous.
This item by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on August 2, 2011.
The debt ceiling deal has been struck and the score looks to be in the neighborhood of Republicans: a zillion, Democrats: zero. It is perhaps the inevitable outcome of a process in which Obama treated GOP default-threatening tactics as legitimate and accepted the GOP framework that cutting debt, not creating jobs, was the country’s central problem. As a result, we have a deal that severely undercuts Democratic policy priorities and cuts government spending just as the economic recovery is showing signs of tanking. Just how, exactly, did it come to this? The most plausible explanation is that Obama and his political advisors are convinced that striking a bipartisan compromise on debt reduction is the way to the hearts of America’s political independents, who famously abandoned the Democrats in 2010.
Following this logic, Obama’s actions–treating the Republicans’ extraordinary threat not as an illegitimate bargaining tactic but as an opportunity–begin to make a measure of sense. Since independents are supposedly fixated on a bipartisan compromise to reduce spending and cut the debt, Obama would use the leverage provided by the Republicans’ threat, in a judo-like fashion, to enlist both parties in a grand bargain to restore long-run fiscal health. As a result, independents would reward Obama for being, in that tired phrase, “the adult in the room” who stood up for their fiscal priorities.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. As Obama has talked endlessly about a “balanced” approach to getting the country’s fiscal house in order, the economy has continued to stagger and that support from independents is nowhere in sight. Pew data show his approval rating among independents down 16 points in the last few months to an abysmal 36 percent. As for Obama’s re-elect numbers, they have also tumbled, with just 31 percent of independents now saying they would vote to re-elect him, compared to 39 percent for a generic Republican.
To understand how very unlikely it is that Obama’s long sought-after deal is going to magically turn around his numbers, we must visit one of the most robust but amazingly underappreciated findings in American political science: independents are not independent. That is, the overwhelming majority of Americans who say there are “independent” lean toward one party or the other. Call them IINOs (Independents In Name Only). IINOs who say they lean toward the Republicans think and vote just like regular Republicans. IINOs who say they lean toward the Democrats think and vote just like regular Democrats.
Right now, according to Pew data, IINOs are 68 percent of independents, split 36/32 between Republican-leaners and Democratic-leaners, respectively. That leaves less than a third of independents who might really qualify as independent. This figure, in turn, translates into just 13 to 14 percent of adults, and inevitably a lower percentage of actual voters, since pure independents have notoriously low turnout. In 2008, according to the University of Michigan National Election Study, pure independents were only 7 percent of voters.
So how’s the debt deal going to go over with these different flavors of independents? Well, Democratic IINOs and pure independents both are concerned about the job situation over the deficit by a margin of two to one, according to Pew data. In fact, the only part of the “independent” pool that actually thinks the deficit is more important than the job situation are Republican IINOs, who right now give Obama a 15 percent approval rating, the same as regular Republicans. Good luck winning that group over.
But maybe pure independents only say they’re concerned with the economy when their real passion is bipartisan compromises on the debt, and so they’ll ignore the bad jobs situation and turn out in droves for Obama. That’s not likely to happen either. As John Sides has pointed out, voting preferences among pure independents are more influenced, not less, by the state of the economy.
These are the facts, but politicians, and Obama especially, seem to have a hard time grasping them. Perhaps that’s because independents are the Rorschach test of U.S. politics–you see in them what your beliefs and preferences incline you to see. Obama and his team want to see teeming hordes of voters who are above the partisan allure of party, untroubled by the bad economy (or, at least, not planning to vote on that basis), and pining for a Washington where the parties, darn it, just work together. So that’s what they see.
The administration’s chimerical search for the independents of their dreams has not served the country, nor the president, well. Obama has stumbled ever further into a political heart of darkness, hemmed in on all sides by radical GOP views on government and governance. And he can’t expect independents to bail him out.
This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on August 1, 2011.
So there is finally a “deal” to increase the public debt limit, agreed to, at least, by the president, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner (Nancy Pelosi is assumed to be selling it to unhappy House Democrats behind the scenes). There is no guarantee it will be approved by the House, where both progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans would like to vote “no” for very different reasons. The pressure to approve it, though, was underscored by the positive response to news of a “deal” by financial markets, first overseas and then on Wall Street. Defeat of a deal now, on the eve of the supposed August 2 deadline, and at the hands of House Members with diametrically opposed reasons for killing it, would probably produce a pretty bad, interest-rate-boosting, 401(k)-melting, reaction, and leave no obvious course open (assuming the president continues to categorically reject the “14th Amendment option”).
Signatories to the deal are unsurprisingly spinning it their own way, but Ezra Klein’s assessment seems pretty sensible:
[Here is] the truth of this deal, and perhaps of Washington in this age: it’s all about lowest-common denominator lawmaking. There are no taxes. No entitlement cuts. No stimulus. No infrastructure. Less in actual, specific deficit reduction than there was in the Simpson-Bowles, Ryan, or Obama plans, and even than there was in the Biden/Cantor or Obama/Boehner talks. The two sides didn’t concede more in order to get more. They conceded almost nothing in order to get a trigger and a process, not to mention avoid a financial catastrophe.
There’s reason to be skeptical that a trigger and a process will do much to change these basic dynamics. We’ve now attempted to get a deficit-reducing grand bargain by yoking it to both a near-shutdown and a near-default, not to mention a series of negotiations, commissions, and senatorial gangs. None of it has been enough. And that’s because bipartisan commissions and terrible consequences have not been enough to convince Republicans to agree to revenues, and revenues are fundamental to large deficit-reduction compromise.
Aside from this “trigger and a process,” the deal includes pretty much the same immediate domestic discretionary spending cuts (half from domestic programs, half from “security spending”) negotiated by Biden and McConnell weeks ago, that were assumed to be baked into any agreement. The main last-minute wrinkles, which the White House is treating as significant wins, are that defense spending joins non-defense discretionary spending in the new “hostage room” of the automatic cuts that would be triggered by the failure to reach a second deficit reduction agreement by December, while Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits (as opposed to provider reimbursements) would be exempted from such automatic cuts. Lingering in the background, of course, is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012, which will keep revenues on the table in broader budget discussions even if they are not part of the current deal itself.
I think it’s safe to say that progressive hostility to this deal (which is pervasive, and varies mainly only in temperature) is more about the process that led up to it than the specific details worked out at the final minute. Some think the president fatally erred by even getting into a discussion of deficit reduction ( way back when he appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission) so long as the economy was struggling. Many think he should have negotiated a debt limit increase as part of the deal at the end of last year that temporarily extended the Bush tax cuts. Still others think he should have threatened from the very beginning to use the “14th amendment option” if Republicans didn’t agree to a “balanced approach” (e.g, one including new revenues) to long-term deficit reduction. If you read what is likely to be the most influential progressive condemnation of Obama, Paul Krugman’s column today, it’s notable that virtually every false step he excoriates happened weeks or months ago, not during the end-game.
Some progressives obviously still believe, and will put votes behind the proposition in the House, that the potential consequences of a debt default are exaggerated, or in any event cannot justify the sort of damage an all-cuts, no-taxes deficit reduction agreement will inflict on the economy (via virtually certain big cuts in “investment” programs that most affect growth, and additional, perhaps massive, reductions in federal employment levels) and on diverse beneficiaries of federal programs, from K-12 school children to people who prefer to drink safe water and breathe clean air.
Any way you look at it, the aftermath of this depressing series of events will require some pretty serious rethinking of Democratic strategy, tactics and messaging for 2012. If the deal is defeated in the House, all bets are off and we’ll just have to see what happens both economically and politically. If it is approved, we’ll be looking at a Democratic Party that is not much in the mood to celebrate any theoretical improvement in the president’s approval ratings or 2012 prospects, and is forced to reconsider how it talks about its plans for a federal government that will be operating under new constraints beyond anything conservatives were proposing as recently as last year’s election campaigns.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 27, 2011.
Katrina vanden Heuval’s recent WaPo op-ed sketches a disturbing picture of Republican voter suppression in a number of state legislatures, an important story that has been bounced to the back pages of the MSM by the debt ceiling controversy. From her op-ed:
In states across the country, Republican legislatures are pushing through laws that make it more difficult for Americans to vote. The most popular include new laws requiring voters to bring official identification to the polls. Estimates suggest that more than 1 in 10 Americans lack an eligible form of ID, and thus would be turned away at their polling location. Most are minorities and young people, the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party.
The i.d. campaigns are based on a particularly flimsy excuse, the myth of “voter fraud” as a significant problem in the U.S. As vanden Heuval explains,
…Voter fraud, in truth, is essentially nonexistent. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud at rates such as 0.0003 percent in Missouri and 0.000009 percent in New York. “Voter impersonation is an illusion,” said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center. “It almost never happens, and when it does, it is in numbers far too small to effect the outcome of even a close election.”
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) disagrees. He argues that voter fraud is a serious problem that requires serious action. But as proof, Kobach cites just “221 incidents of voter fraud” in Kansas since 1997, for an average of just 17 a year. As a Bloomberg editorial points out, “During that same period, Kansans cast more than 10 million votes in 16 statewide elections. Even if the fraud allegation were legitimate . . . the rate of fraud would be miniscule.”
The suppression initiatives appear tweaked to fit demographics of different states. As vanden Heuval notes,
In Ohio, for example, a recently signed law to curb early voting won’t prevent voter impersonation; it will only make it more difficult for citizens to cast their ballot. Or take Florida’s new voter registration law, which is so burdensome that the non-partisan League of Women Voters is pulling out of Florida entirely, convinced that it cannot possibly register voters without facing legal liability. Volunteers would need to have “a secretary on one hand and a lawyer on the other hand as they registered voters,” said Deirdre MacNabb, president of the Florida League of Women Voters…This year Texas passed a voter ID law, but wrote in a provision that explicitly exempts the elderly from complying with the law. The law also considers a concealed handgun license as an acceptable form of ID, but a university ID as insufficient.
At the annual NAACP convention in Los Angeles, President Benjamin Jealous underscored concerns about the deliberate disenfranchisement of people of color leading up to the 2012 elections, reports Alexandra Zavis in the Los Angeles Times:
He cited new laws in 30 states that require voters to present approved photo identification at the polls. “Simply put, people who are too poor to own a car tend not to have a driver’s license,” he said…In Wisconsin alone, he said, half of black adults and half of Latino adults are now ineligible to vote because of this requirement.
Jealous also took issue with laws in Georgia and Arizona that require voters to attach a copy of their driver’s license, birth certificate or passport to their registration forms. And in Florida, he said, the establishment of a five-to-seven-year waiting period before felons can vote would disqualify more than 500,000 voters, including 250,000 blacks.
In addition to the i.d. requirements, shrinking of early voting periods and felon disenfranchisement expansion, the GOP is also suppressing voting power of people of color through redistricting. In North Carolina, for example, the Republicans are twisting the intent of the Voting Rights Act to dilute minority voting, as WRAL’s Laura Leslie explains:
According to Republicans, the VRA and resulting case law require lawmakers to create districts with majority populations of minority voters that can elect the candidate of their choice. They argue the creation of such districts will protect the state from potentially costly civil-rights lawsuits.
But Democrats disagree. They say the VRA does not require lawmakers to create such districts, except in truly exceptional cases. They’re accusing the GOP of using the VRA to justify “packing” minority voters into a handful of districts to reduce their influence elsewhere.
In the Senate, where the Senate and congressional map votes were strictly partisan, Democrats accused Republican mapmakers of drilling down to precinct-level caucus data to separate black voters from white ones…Senator Josh Stein, D-Wake, asked why the GOP Senate map splits 40 voting precincts in Wake County alone. “The only possible explanation is that you want to reach out and grab every black person you can find and put them in Dan Blue’s district. And for what purpose?”
The Republican voter suppression initiatives are not unconnected in purpose or timing, as vanden Heuval points out:
What’s worse is that these aren’t a series of independent actions being coincidentally taken throughout the country. This is very much a coordinated effort. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-funded organization that works with state legislators to draft model legislation. According to The Nation’s John Nichols, “Enacting burdensome photo ID or proof of citizenship requirements has long been an ALEC priority.” It’s not surprise then, that the Wisconsin state legislator who pushed for one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation is also ALEC’s Wisconsin chair.
Vanden Heuval quotes Alexander Keyssar, a top voting rights scholar and author of “The Right to Vote”:
…”What is so striking about the wave of legislation for ID laws is that we are witnessing for the first time in more than a century, a concerted, multi-state effort to make it more difficult for people to exercise their democratic rights…It is very reminiscent of what occurred in the North between 1875 and 1910 — the era of Jim Crow in the South — when a host of procedural obstacles were put in the way of immigrants trying to vote.”
This is the first part of what will almost certainly be a three-stage voter suppression program. Call it the pre-election suppression campaign, likely to be followed by election-day shenanigans at the polls and then ballot-counting “irregularities” in Florida and Ohio, among other states.
It’s tough to challenge voter suppression campaigns in Republican-controlled state legislatures and state and federal courts. But Democrats should keep demanding that the Justice Department review these laws for compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and have legal teams in place to monitor election-day suppression and ballot counting.
In the midst of a angry post about Drew Westen’s Sunday New York Times op-ed excoriating Barack Obama’s failure to use the bully pulpit to school Americans on the necessity of Keynsian fiscal stimulus, Jon Chait offers a useful comment about the need for precision in recounting past political events. Westen contrasted Obama’s passivity in resisting deficit hawkery with FDR’s aggressive advocacy of fiscal stimulus. Chait notes that (1) FDR was luckier than Obama in taking office at a much later stage in the economic downturn that defined his election; and (2) Roosevelt took quite a while to embrace Keynsian pump-priming, and never succeed during his first term in convincing Americans that was the right course.
On this last point, Chait quotes none other than Paul Krugman, who unearthed Gallup polls showing that Americans favored a balanced budget and debt reduction by a 70-30 margin at the end of 1935, and still favored a balanced budget by a 65-28 margin in November of 1936, just as they were re-electing FDR by a historic landslide.
None of this data suggests that Obama’s fiscal policies have been right, but it does undermine the assumption that the president of the United States can easily act as Economics-Professor-In-Chief, brushing away simplistic “family-budget” analogies of what a nation should do in a recession or depression with big doses of Keynes. Progressives in general have failed over a long period of time to promote a decent level of public understanding about what to do in a recession, and however much Obama has contributed to that failure, he’s hardly alone.
The definition of a political “dog whistle” is a communication (or series of communications) that convey to key members of an interest or constituency group gratifying but potentially controversial affirmations of their views without the mainstream media or the broader electorate catching on. By that standard, Rick Perry’s big “day or prayer and fasting” in Houston over the weekend was a very successful dog whistle.
Mainstream and secular-conservative media coverage of the event (dubbed “The Response,” itself a dog whistle reference to an ongoing series of dominionist events operating under the brand of “The Call” aimed at mobilizing conservative evangelicals to assume leadership of secular society) generally concluded that it was a largely “non-political” gathering–just some Christians upset about the bad economy and their own moral failings who got together to pray over it.
A few reporters who watched and listened more carefully, and had a Christian Right decoder ring on hand, had a very different take. Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner, who knows the ins and outs of dominionist thinking exceptionally well, and who attended the Houston event, explained its intent as an act of political mobilization:
“[C]ommand” and “obedience” were the day’s chief buzzwords for many speakers, as repentance was required on behalf of yourself, your church, and your country for having failed to commit yourself to Jesus, for having permitted abortion and “sexual immorality,” for failing to cleanse yourself of “filthiness,” and to repent for having “touched what is unclean….”
The people who gathered at Reliant Stadium are not just Rick Perry’s spiritual army, raised up, as Perry and others imagine it, in the spirit of Joel 2, to sound an alarm and prepare the people for Judgment Day. They are the ground troops the religious right set out four decades ago to create, and duplicate over generations, for the ongoing culture wars. One part of that army is people like Perry himself, supported by religious right political elites who aimed to cultivate candidates, advocates, and political strategists committed to putting God before government.
That a sitting governor would laugh off charges that his “instigation” of an exclusively Christian–and, more specifically, a certain kind of Christian–event is proof of the success of the cultural and spiritual warriors, who believe they are commanded to “take dominion” over government and other spheres of influence. Perry is their man in a high place, in this case an especially courageous one, willing to rebuff charges from the “radical secularists” that he’s crossed the line between church and state. That makes him something much more than just a political or spiritual hero; he is an exemplar.
Slate‘s Dave Weigel was also in Houston, and his report debunks the talk of the event being “nonpolitical” by understanding, like Posner, the political freight of the particular strain of evangelical Christianity mostly represented there:
[According to] Pete Ortega, one of dozens of people who’s come up from San Antonio on buses from John Hagee’s church…there is nothing political about the event, he says. He just wants to praise Perry.
“If this is successful here,” he says, “I think other governors, or other politicians, will come out of the closet. Christianity is under attack, and we don’t speak out about it.”
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That’s the brilliance of what Perry has done here: These ideas don’t contradict each other at all. He doesn’t need to talk about politics, or do anything besides be here and understand this event. The religion is the politics. These worshippers understand that if they can bring “the kingdom of God” to Earth, economic problems, even macroeconomic problems, will sort themselves out….
The soon-to-be Republican presidential frontrunner, who is best known among liberal voters for raising the prospect of secession and for presiding over hundreds of executions, has just presented himself as a humble messenger of obvious biblical truth. “Our heart breaks for America,” he says. “We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government.” It’s one day since S&P downgraded America’s bond rating, in part because the agency worried that conservative Republicans had proved that they would never agree to a debt-reducing bargain that included tax increases. Perry was pulling off an impressive act of transference.
Observers who don’t get any of what Posner and Weigel are talking about are in effect assisting him in the effort to execute his dog whistle appeal to activists whose world-view is entirely alien to nearly all secular Americans and most mainstream Christians. But just because much of the country can’t hear it doesn’t mean it cannot serve as a powerful inducement to political activity in a presidential nominating process where small determined groups of people can have a big impact.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Just days after Congress averted a much-discussed debt limit crisis that some feared would produce a market crash and an economic catastrophe, older fears of a “double-dip” recession have quickly reemerged. So what, if anything, can our gridlocked political system, already ensnared in the complex deficit-reduction doomsday machine created by the August 1 deal, do to head off or mitigate another crisis?
Some observers are predicting that an aroused public or chastened politicians will suddenly rediscover the merits of good old-fashioned Keynesian fiscal stimulus measures. Here’s what business writer John Cassidy predicted in Fortune even before the debt limit deal was enacted:
With the economic picture darkening daily, the burden of preventing another slump is falling on the White House and Congress. The Fed, which has just finished its second dose of quantitative easing, seems determined to sit on its hands. Before long, incumbents in both parties will start to panic about next year’s election. Debates about the size of the federal government will take a back seat to getting reelected, and the result will be more tax cuts and spending increases.
But that suggestion seems to assume Republicans have any vested interest in changing their minds on the efficacy of fiscal stimulus and, moreover, can escape the logic of their recent collective decision to simultaneously demand lower taxes and reduced debts and deficits. Meanwhile, with Democrats huddled around their own sacred cow of protecting entitlement programs at all costs, don’t expect them to make an impassioned case for immediate increases in discretionary spending either.
In the short-term, the Obama administration is already dusting off mildly stimulative initiatives that didn’t make the cut in the debt limit negotiations, notably an extension of the payroll tax relief and unemployment insurance extensions enacted as part of the deal to extend the Bush tax cuts last December. The president is also showing signs he will return to the small-bore “winning the future” investment agenda he talked about in his State of the Union Address.
When it comes to gaining Republican support, is the apparent popular rejection of Keynesianism enough to make conspicuous Hooverism acceptable? Don’t even non-Keynesians accept that drastic domestic spending cuts tend to directly boost unemployment, even if you deny claims of its other economic effects? Maybe so, but conservatives are so entrenched in the conviction that public-sector jobs aren’t “real,” and so focused on destroying public-sector unionism as a critical political asset for Democrats, that they’re likely willing to run the risk of boosting short-term unemployment. As recently as Tuesday, the GOP was getting lathered up to go after deeper cuts in FY 2012 domestic appropriations. And while progressive claims that Republicans are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy are perhaps unfair, there’s no question they realize the president and his party will get the bulk of the blame in 2012 for perpetually bad economic conditions.
Indeed, a better bet is that conservatives will double down on their own conviction that the only way to bring back economic growth is through deregulation and tax cuts, accompanied by spending cuts. And Democrats, who for their part still believe in Keynes even though they’ve concluded most of the public doesn’t, will resist new austerity measures, but they will also resist new high-end tax cuts in order to accommodate the remorseless demands of the deficit reduction process. Moreover, as the contents of the debt limit deal illustrated, Democrats have decided to make their chief partisan fiscal stand on the politically strong ground of opposing major long-term changes in Medicare and Social Security, even though entitlement reform is probably the only avenue to big-time deficit reduction measures that do not savage discretionary spending. So instead of coming together to deal with what could quickly become a genuine economic emergency, the two parties may soon be farther apart than ever.
When the “super-committee” convenes to accept or come up with an alternative to automatic spending cuts, mostly of the discretionary variety, an extended economic slump will only further reinforce the fact that there is no obvious “solution” that will be acceptable across party lines. That’s one reason analysts like Cassidy think both parties will figure out a way to junk the entire process. But with the spending-cut-obsessed Tea Party faction howling on the sidelines, it seems inconceivable that Republican congressional leaders will be in a position to suddenly announce that it’s decided Dick Cheney was right back in 2002 when he famously said, “Deficits don’t matter.” Indeed, it would take a truly monumental economic crisis to call off the deficit reduction doomsday machine and bring John Maynard Keynes back from the dead.
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