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.
Ed Kilgore
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.
This item by J.P. Green was first published on April 2, 2010.
I’ve been a little wary of Drew Westen’s argument that the failures of Democrats in politics derive from over-reliance on reason-based appeals, while the Republicans win their victories by connecting with voters’ emotions. I felt he may have over-stated his case, since I know lots of people who make elegant rational arguments for or against politicians based on positions on the issues.
But Westen makes a very strong case for the persuasive power of emotion over reason in politics in his CNN commentary “Why Obama won the health care battle.” This time, Westen, author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” applies his theory to explain the course of the HCR struggle, and it fits impressively.
Politicians tend to think about how the minds and brains of voters work in one of two ways.
The first is to assume that voters come to decisions on issues like health care reform by carefully examining the data and the arguments and then calculating whether one plan or another better fits their rational self-interest. In this view, a campaign is a debate on the issues.
When you hear (or heard) Democratic strategists dismiss polls showing that the majority of Americans opposed the president’s health care plan but support its component parts, this is the model of the mind of the voter they are assuming.
That’s why Democrats tend to lose ground even on issues with strong popular support, like health care reform, which was extremely popular during the 2008 election but steadily lost backing over the course of the first year of the Obama administration until regaining some momentum over the past few weeks.
Westen argues that HCR got serious traction when President Obama and the Democrats embraced the alternative view of “voters is as people who have to be sold on a policy or candidate. They are consumers, not debaters, and they’ll walk out of a store that doesn’t have attentive salespeople.” The winning strategy, according to Westen:
How do you sell reform? You tell a consistent story about what’s wrong with the system, who broke it and how we can fix it. You evoke not only people’s concerns about their interests but their values: fairness, the ability to choose what’s best for themselves and their family, security.
You try to get people as passionate as you are, concerned about the security of their care, angry at insurance companies that have been calling all the shots and hopeful that you know what to do about it. And you choose your words carefully, because words carry emotional connotations, and people may not know exactly what’s in a bill, but they have a general sense of whether they like it.
This is how Republicans tend to think about politics. And it’s how they managed to leave Americans with a bitter taste in their mouths about efforts to reform a health care system that had left virtually all of us one pre-existing condition — or one cancer requiring treatment that exceeded our annual or lifetime “cap” — away from medical bankruptcy, no matter how good we thought our insurance was.
For too long, argues Westen, Dems were over-using emotionally-constipated phrases such as “universal health care” and “health insurance reform” that “don’t exactly make your spine tingle.” Meanwhile Republicans were tapping the power of emotional appeals, like calling HCR “Obamacare” and “a government takeover” of our health care system that would “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Further,
For a year, while the Republicans were telling a great story about “death panels” and the president’s “socialist” agenda (though the president wouldn’t even support the “socialist” option of giving Americans the option of buying into Medicare if they preferred it over private insurance), the White House wasn’t offering a coherent story.
Precisely what problem the plan was intended to fix seemed to shift from week to week (Was it cost? Or the 46 million people without insurance? Or middle-class people losing their coverage?). And as for the plot, we didn’t know until a few weeks ago what the president’s plan even was.
Making matters worse, Obama seemed to lack passion about his signature issue. Everything seemed negotiable, as if what mattered was that the bill passed, not what was in it. And the White House used every word in the book you wouldn’t use if you wanted to “sell” reform.
Instead of emphasizing that people who work for a living ought to be able to take their kids to the doctor when they’re sick — a value statement that makes clear who the bill was designed to help (people who work for a living and still can’t get or afford decent health care, or could lose their insurance if they lost or changed jobs or started a small business) — the White House talked about “bending the cost curve,” another linguistic heart-stopper.
But the tide changed, Westen says, when President Obama began “telling a compelling story”:
….This story actually included the villains: Health insurance companies denying life-saving care to people for profits. In speeches journalists described as his most “passionate” since becoming president, he told the story of a woman who lost her life after she lost her health insurance and of a little boy who lost his mother because she couldn’t pay for her illness. He seized on an insurance rate hike of nearly 40 percent in California to mobilize populist anger.
And for the first time, the president decided to answer the attacks of his opponents, not just with well-reasoned arguments (which he did) but with attitude. When John McCain started posturing at the president’s “bipartisan” summit, the president reminded him that the election was over and who had won. When House Minority Leader John Boehner started rattling off talking points, the president responded with the verbal equivalent of eye rolling and asked whether there was someone who actually wanted to get something done…The president looked strong, resolute and passionate.
Looking ahead, Westen sees a critical choice for the white house:
…He can return to the “why can’t we all just get along?” unilateral bipartisanship that tied him up in knots in his first year, as if Republicans are just Democrats in need of rational arguments.
Or, better,
…Obama can damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead, dare the Republicans to vote no on every effort to fix every problem the country faces and pursue the pragmatic (sometimes partisan, sometimes nonpartisan) leadership the American people want.
And if the President can bring some of the passion he displays so well in his speeches into his press conferences, interviews and televised appeals, he can brighten prospects for the mid-terms, his re-election and the future of his party.
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.
The 2012 presidential cycle doesn’t officially begin until November 3, but the Republican field will start being seriously shaped this week down in New Orleans, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Confirmed speakers include no fewer than nine people who have been “mentioned” as possible presidential candidates: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal. Tim Pawlenty will address the event by videotape. Mitt Romney, who may be playing the traditional front-runner’s game of avoiding appearances with his lilliputian rivals, will be missing; he’s off hawking copies of his book in–two guesses where!–New Hampshire.
Other than the usual straw poll of attendees (with the main question being whether Ron Paul’s young supporters will flood the event like they did at the CPAC conference in February), and the usual informal assessments of the speeches, here are some other sources of intrigue: (1) Will any or all of Mitt’s rivals blast him for prevarication on similaries between RomneyCare and ObamaCare? (2) How many of the presidentials will claim close kinship with the Tea Party Movement? (3) Will any of them formally disclaim candidacy? (4) How bloody will the rhetorical red meat get? (5) Who if any of them will try to get media plaudits for a calm, substantive approach? and (6) Will any new “true conservative” limus tests be laid down?
The New Orleans event could represent quite a presidential field hockey match. And in case you think it’s crazy to be talking about the 2012 presidential race, remember this: it’s just twenty-one months til the Iowa Caucuses!
It’s certainly taken a while, but as we head towards the Tea Party Movement’s holy day of April 15, it seems to finally be sinking in among the commentariat that these people did not come out of nowhere or arise spontaneously from an aroused populace, but are instead simply the same old conservative Republicans who used to be so boring back in the day. A new poll of the Tea Folk by Gallup seems to have spurred this realization along, though some gabbers may persist in being baffled by the high number of Tea Partiers who self-identify as independents. The Atlantic‘s Mark Ambinder explains it to them:
[I]t’s true that just half of those Tea Partiers surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion’s share of the other half say they’re independent. But they’re not: they’re Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don’t want to identify with the party’s brand. That’s not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.
This is a very old story, one that arguably goes all the way back to the 1940s. At any given moment, a significant number of conservative Republicans don’t want to call themselves Republicans because their leadership is not, in their view, conservative enough. This is one reason why Republican self-identification numbers have chronically undershot Republican votes in actual elections. At particularly difficult moments, conservative Republicans have even threatened to form a third party–as in the mid-1970s, when National Review publisher William Rusher argued that conservatives should leave the GOP to it’s “elitist” establishment and make common cause with Wallacites and other social conservatives in a “producer’s party.” Such threats today are no more unusual, or credible, but do help encourage Republican office-holders to follow their own inclination to hew to the Right.
As the (apparent) novelty of the Tea Party wears off, its familiar outlines should become apparent, except to those with a strong bias in favor of misunderstanding the phenomenon. In an interesting column today, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect discusses those left-progressives who persist in helplessly hoping for a “populist” alliance with the Tea Folk. Part of the allure, he suspects, involves some progressive self-loathing:
[F]inding allies among Tea Partiers is the equivalent of what finding a black friend was to liberals in the 1960s. It’s a way to get in touch with the real America, to feel a little superior, a little less elitist or isolated, less wimpy, less conformist.
But the real America is at least as likely to be found in the 205 million voting age adults who aren’t Tea Partiers as the few hundred thousand who are. And the rest of that real America, with its own passions and anger and economic pain, is probably a more fruitful area to look for allies on real liberal goals that include inclusion and fairness.
In any event, I’m with Ambinder: If pollsters want to keep examining the Tea Folk, it’s time for them to drill a little deeper:
Next time, I’d love for Gallup, or any other pollster, really, to ask self-identified Tea Partiers for their vote histories, for their views on immigration and race, for their views on questions about Obama attributes (is he a socialist?), for their specific views on policy matters (do they support a “fair tax?”).
Moreover, instead of asking Republicans and independents over and over if they might be tempted to vote for a hypothetical Tea Third Party candidate, pollsters might want to focus on the actual major-party preferences of Tea Partiers, since in all but a few scattered contests, that’s what they are going to face at the polls. I say that mainly because of all the delusions surrounding the Tea Party Movement, the one that suggests Democrats will be saved by a mass of third-party candidates associated with said Movement is among the most fanciful. The Tea Folk are systematically dragging the GOP to the Right, and that’s the development that Democrats need to think about exploiting in November and beyond.
Despite the enduring popularity of the “Democrats In Disarray” meme in certain precincts of the chattering classes, the truth is that the enactment of health reform reflected a degree of Democratic unity, resolution, and yes, accomplishment that is becoming a bit hard to ignore. Ron Brownstein’s latest National Journal column gets it straight:
After Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s victory in January’s Senate special election, Democrats appeared shaken to the point of panic. But, from President Obama on down, the party has rapidly regrouped–enacting health care reform, virtually daring Senate Republicans to filibuster tougher regulation of financial institutions, and challenging the GOP with last weekend’s White House announcement of recess appointments for 15 nominees stalled in the Senate. Pundits may be pelting the party with predictions of doom in November, but Democrats have apparently decided that the best defense against a resolute Republican opposition is a good offense.
More importantly, improved Democratic morale has made it easier to get some perspective on the last turbulent year, when Democratic defections in Congress were largely limited to House Members from districts that Barack Obama lost in 2008 (defections that shouldn’t be that surprising).
The governing core of the party’s House majority has been members elected from districts that Obama carried in 2008. House Democrats who represent such districts voted 199-8 for final approval of the Senate health care bill last month. Last year, they voted 201-1 for Obama’s stimulus plan, 194-1 for federal tobacco regulation, 191-8 for financial reform, and 189-15 for climate-change legislation. The Democrats elected in districts that preferred Republican presidential nominee John McCain haven’t supported Obama nearly as reliably, but Pelosi has corralled enough of them each time to pass the president’s priorities.
In the Senate, the governing core is the 33 Democratic senators elected from the 18 “blue wall” states that have supported the party’s presidential nominees in at least the past five elections. In 2009, these senators collectively recorded a stunning 97 percent party unity score on the index calculated by Congressional Quarterly. Around that axis, Democratic leaders have assembled shifting coalitions of Democrats from states that are more closely divided. On the most-momentous votes — the stimulus plan and the initial health care reform package — every Senate Democrat from either camp backed Obama.
Brownstein concludes that for all the strom and stress of the last year, Obama and congressional Democrats have put together the most impressive record of accomplishment by any Democratic administration since Lyndon Johnson’s, and a degree of party unity that rivals that of Republicans in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Interestingly enough, a considerable proportion of Democratic criticism of Obama has been from those arguing that he is too committed to bipartisanship in the face of ever-more-radical Republican opposition to his entire agenda. This was not a criticism made very often of George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove.
The problem for Democrats this November is not so much disunity as it is distraction and disinterest among voters who don’t often show up for midterm elections and who in this difficult period of American history understandably have other fish to fry. That’s why upcoming fights like financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination could be especially important: not only adding to this administrations legacy, but providing relatively unmotivated Democratic and swing voters with a graphic illustration of what could happen to the country if the GOP returns to power.
I was very happy yesterday to be able to cross-post Robert Creamer’s HuffPo piece laying out ten “rules” for Democrats in maximizing their performance in the 2010 midterm elections. Creamer is always a good read, and his take on 2010 was both succinct and comprehensive, which is rare.
But he indirectly raises an age-old issue that is important to get right, and that I’d like to comment on: the choice, in strategy, message and resource allocation, between base turnout “mobilization” and undecided
voter “persuasion.” Creamer says, in terms of this particular cycle, that “midterm elections are all about turnout.”
What he’s talking about here is the simple fact that the shape of the electorate is almost always different in midterm and presidential election cycles, with the smaller midterm electorate skewing towards Republicans. That’s a particular problem for Democrats in 2010, because of the especially large difference in midterm turnout between the oldest voters, who tend to make up a much larger percentage of the electorate, and the youngest voters, who tend to disappear in midterms. Obama’s unusually strong 2008 performance among the latter and weak performance among the former means that Democrats probably began the midterm cycle in the hole even when the president’s approval ratings were a whole lot better. Add in the excitement that atavistic conservative tactics have instilled in Republican voters, and the lukewarm attitude many Democrats have towards the White House and Democratic Members of Congress, and you can see why Creamer and other strategists are obsessed with turnout to the virtual exclusion of any other factor.
But in the end, a vote is a vote, and votes obtained by convincing Democrats to turn out count the same as votes obtained by convincing undecideds or even Republicans to flip in your direction. The resources devoted to these tasks depend on a lot of variables, including the votes available through different techniques; you can certainly argue today that partisan polarization has reduced the number of “persaudable” swing voters to a bare minimum, particularly in a low-turnout midterm election. On the other hand, capturing a “persuadable” voter who’s very likely to turn out produces a bonus by denying your opponent a vote. And if your base-mobilization efforts happen to help your opponent turn out his or her own base (as can happen if you deploy particularly abrasive or ideological public appeals), the net value of each “turnout” vote can be relatively small or even in rare cases negative.
All these factors have to be weighed in the mix, and applied in a carefully developed strategy. Ideally, one’s mobilization and persuasion efforts would be complementary, but more often, choices have to be made based on assessments of both opportunities and costs. Creamer is emphatically correct that old-school under-the-radar GOTV efforts to get “your” voters to the polls can be very effective if executed properly, and because they are conducted late in the game and behind the scenes, they rarely help opponents get out their own vote. But the recent massive upsurge in early voting in many parts of the country has complicated GOTV campaigns considerably by stretching out the “end-game.”
In other words, winning elections is rarely “about” any one thing, though if you had to pick one factor this year, maximizing Democratic turnout would be far and away the most important thing. For those interested in this topic, The Democratic Strategist published a roundtable discussion of the whole base-versus-swing, and mobilization-versus-persuasion debate back in early 2008 (Robert Creamer, in fact, was one of the participants) and most of it remains entirely relevant.
It’s considered gospel truth in many conservative circles that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the “economic stimulus package,” was just a porkfest aimed at buying votes or rewarding Democratic constitutencies at the expense of good, virtuous taxpayers and their grandchirren. In support of this hypothesis, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and a regular contributor to conservative and libertarian magazines and web sites, recently wrote a “study” designed to show that ARRA dollars went disproportionately to districts represented by Democrats and/or that voted for Obama in 2008, regardless of their actual economic needs. De Rugy helpfully touted her study at National Review’s The Corner yesterday, for the edification of those who look to that blog for talking points.
Looks like she should probably have kept the paper to herself. Nate Silver of 538.com took a look at it, and pretty much demolished it today.
Turns out that de Rugy didn’t notice, or didn’t mention, that most of the “Democratic districts” that show up in her study as the top recipients of ARRA dollars happen to contain state capitals. Thus, ARRA spending designed to benefit states as a whole (the Medicaid super-match, school improvement incentives, state infrastructure grants, the state “flexibility” funds, etc.) are attributed by her to individual districts. She also ignored economic indicators showing poverty and local unemployment, which may or may not be correlated with Democratic voting habits, but which certainly indicate actual need.
I hear through the grapevine that de Rugy plans to respond to Nate’s demolition job at some point. If she manages to climb out of this crater, I’ll certainly be impressed.
The larger point, though, is that without Nate’s intervention (and perhaps even after it), conservatives would be gleefully citing de Rugy’s bottom line “findings” as “proof” that ARRA was what they always said it was. She is, after all, an academic thinker, and her “study” is impressive-looking, with lots of footnotes and scatter plot charts. I’m not saying that conservatives are alone in conducting this sort of skewed and deeply flawed “research,” or in citing it without examination. But that doesn’t excuse it for even a moment, particularly when the “researcher” is out there circulating the stuff as agitprop for the chattering classes before the ink is even dry.
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