This item by J.P. Green was originally published on February 5, 2010.
Sara Robinson’s post, “State of the Union: A Status Report on the Far Right ” at the Blog for Our Future helps to put the big Tea Party confab in interesting perspective. After collecting and crunching all of the data, Robinson called up Chip Berlet, one of the leading authorities on America’s hard right, and asked the money question, “…How many far-right wingers are there in the United States?” Berlet responded:
Ten percent of the population….It’s been the same number for most of our history, and it doesn’t change much.
Robinson adds, “How many really hardcore conservatives are we dealing with here?” It’s thirty million people, give or take.”
Many progressives might find the ten percent figure encouragingly low, although it’s scant comfort that thirty million paranoid, sometimes violence-prone reactionaries are out there. Robinson paraphrases Berlet, however, in cautioning that there is another group on the far right, “who are conservative by temperament, but don’t live full-time in that same overwrought, hyper-vigilant, paranoid space that the ultra-right wing authoritarian 10 percent do.” This group is capable of a hard right turn in times of economic and /or social stress, like, well now.
This group is a key base element of the Tea Party movement, according to Robinson and Berlet, and is is “actively decoupling itself from the center-right position of the GOP’s mainstream, and forming stronger alliances with the ultra-right 10-percenters—creating a super-right-wing faction that includes upwards of 25-30 percent of the country.”
It’s a scary prospect, almost a third of the electorate hardening their political views in a rightward direction, including flirtations with racism and anti-semitism, according to Robinson. She continues:
And it’s the combination of the two that’s worrisome. On their own, the far-right wingnuts can’t elect a dogcatcher (and even trying to do that much would no doubt cause a schism that would wind out for years in court. It’s just how they are.) But controlling 25 to 30 percent of the American electorate — while not enough to take over the country in straight numeric terms — is enough for the combined group to win limited but serious victories here and there. And, of course, their power is further magnified by the vagaries of the electoral college and the way we choose senators. In real terms, the system is set up so that this 30 percent can wield the political clout of 50 percent. That’s where we are now — and it’s one reason we’re running into so much gridlock in trying to govern the country.
Robinson notes that Fox News feeds this toxic mix at a time when independent daily newspapers are shrinking and disappearing. She has some harsh words for Democratic leadership:
Another driver is the Democrats’ continued fecklessness in clearly communicating the coherent moral values at the heart of the progressive worldview; and their extreme reluctance to support any kind of progressive populist agenda. Everybody knows now that there’s a rising populist tide in America. Average Americans, left and right, are uniting behind an implacable fury at the big banks — and at Congress and Obama, who seem determined to enable criminal behavior rather than make any serious attempt to control it.
You don’t need me to tell you that the tide is rising. We’re seeing the signs of political climate change all around us. But most of the Village still regards any kind of populism as a dangerous (and avoidable) impulse. “Responsible” consultants are cautioning Democrats not to get out front of that wave and ride it. In 20 years, historians will record this as a mistake on the same magnitude as the one they made in 1972 when they started backing away from the unions…
Robinson sees a remedy, but one that requires new focus and commitment from progressive Democrats:
Any progressive strategy to weaken the right should begin by finding a way to peel the second slice back off from the ultra-right, and bring it back toward the center. That alliance is the keystone on which the entire strength of the conservative movement is resting right now; pull that stone, and the rest of it crumbles. Reviving a vital progressive populism is the best wedge and sledge we’ve got right now…
I’m sure Robinson is right that such a wedge strategy could be efffective. Theresa Poulos has a post, “Five Ways It Could Fail” at the National Journal Online, which could help flesh out the specifics of an effective wedge strategy. Poulos’s post is less an article than a collection of five interesting video clips highlighting weaknesses in the Tea Party movement. The videos address: political infighting in the Tea Party Movement; exploiting the political inexperience of Tea Party participants; the difficulty of GOP attempts to absorb the movement, which includes a Independents; social issue schisms; and the possibility of an improving economy.
The Republicans hope to mimimize the internal disagreements within the Tea Party Movement and portray it as a monolithic anti-Obama/Democrat juggernaut. If we fail to challenge this meme, the blame will be ours.
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic, where it was published on February 4, 2010. Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought –John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962 We deliberate, not about ends, but about means. –Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii
Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.
Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last” as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama’s worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”
Where to begin? Mansfield offers an elaborate argument in defense of the proposition that Obamacare represents a government takeover. I disagree and could offer an equally elaborate rebuttal. I could argue, as well, that Obama’s appeal to transcend the division between red and blue America reflects not a desire to end partisan argument, but rather most Americans’ disgust with the contemporary hyper-partisanship that thwarts effective governance and allows problems to fester indefinitely. These are hardly trivial matters. But because they would divert us from the questions Mansfield raises, I shall pursue them no farther.
As Mansfield knows very well, he does Democrats no favor by framing current disputes as conflicts between progress and liberty. In American politics, the defenders of liberty always occupy the rhetorical high ground. If there really were a contradiction between progress and liberty, progress would surely lose—and so would the party of progress. So there are two questions. First, is there such a contradiction? And second, if there isn’t—if what we really have is a dispute between two competing understandings of liberty—which should we prefer?
I can dispose of the first question quickly: There is no inherent contradiction between progress and liberty. Simply put, removing issues from the political agenda—placing them beyond dispute—often promotes liberty. After political contestation and a bloody war, we decided that slavery was impermissible, and we reordered our laws and institutions accordingly. A century later, we made a parallel decision about racial discrimination, with similar consequences.
I suppose we could view these questions as permanently open to debate. But we don’t, and rightly so. In that sense, there is a “progressive” component to our political history: While some questions remain open, others don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Settling questions neither ends politics nor denies liberty.
Mansfield might reply that, while some disputes raise such fundamental issues, most don’t, and it disserves political liberty to place the latter beyond the bounds of ordinary political contestation. Fair enough. So what is Obama actually saying—about health care, for example?
As I understand the president’s argument, it goes something like this: Our current health care system’s costs are rising at an unsustainable rate, threatening businesses, households, and our public finances. At the same time, nearly 50 million people go without health insurance—some by choice, to be sure, but most out of necessity. The only way to deal with all these problems effectively is to get nearly everyone into the insurance system, with a mix of subsidies and mandates, while creating a more competitive market among insurance plans. He may be right about this, or he may be wrong. But the key point for my purposes is that he is putting forth his plan as the means to an ensemble of ends—universal insurance coverage in a system that reduces the rate of cost increases—that he takes to be both desirable and essential to the long-term common good.
This is a political argument, pure and simple. The president never intended to side-step politics, and he certainly did not succeed in doing so. He hoped that his articulation of the good to be achieved through his plan would outweigh the objections—such as cost and complexity—that he knew would be arrayed against it.
There are several ways to disagree with the president’s proposal. One is to say that while his ends are defensible, his means are defective. This is the line that Representative Paul Ryan takes, as the president has acknowledged. But note that this debate lies squarely within the arena of deliberation as Aristotle defines it. Nothing apolitical or liberty-denying about that–unless deliberation itself suffers from these defects, which would be an odd contention.
Another way of disagreeing with the president is to say that his ends are less important than he thinks—otherwise put, that we can better serve the public interest by giving priority to competing ends. In this vein, many Republicans contend that because even people without insurance get care when they need it, through emergency rooms or charitable organizations, it is unnecessary to use either legal coercion or public funds to universalize insurance coverage. And many fiscal hawks argue that the mechanisms the president uses to fund his proposal—tax increases and Medicare cuts—should be used instead to reduce the long-term federal budget deficit, which is projected to soar unsustainably. Again, a classic political debate, of the sort Aristotle analyzed in the Rhetoric, and the president has done nothing to short-circuit it.
Mansfield gives short shrift to both these sorts of disagreements, focusing instead on a third, which is (to repeat) whether government or the private sphere should take the lead. He describes this as a question of “principle.” Is it? No doubt this question frames a major disagreement between the two political parties, and among Americans. And, as I’ve argued repeatedly, public mistrust of government has done more than anything else to weaken the president’s health reform effort.
The deeper question concerns not public sentiment, but, rather, the basis on which government may legitimately act under the Constitution. In 1933, FDR argued that that only the powers of government could be adequate to the exigencies of the moment. If so, he said, it could not be the case that our Constitution had disabled us from meeting a grave threat to the general welfare, and potentially to constitutional government itself. He won that argument: We live today in the legacy of his victory, and (I say this at the risk of sounding “progressive”), we’re not going back.
The alternative formulation of the dispute–Mansfield’s, I think–is that the issue isn’t the relation of means and ends, but rather the right of government to act in certain ways. If government doesn’t have the right, then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)
This brings me to the second question: If the issue is liberty, what is the nature of liberty, rightly understood? And does the Obama health care plan invade liberty, so understood?
To begin, experience gives us no reason to conclude that government is the only, or always the gravest, threat to freedom; clerical institutions and concentrations of unchecked economic power have often vied for that dubious honor. The unchecked market, moreover, regularly produces social outcomes at odds with the moral conditions of a free society. Capitalism does not reliably produce, or reward, the good character a free society needs: Perceptive observers from Charles Dickens to Tom Wolfe have given us ample evidence to the contrary. And, while it may be that long-term dependence on government saps the spirit of self-reliance that liberty requires, there are other forms of dependence—economic, social, and even familial—that often damage character in much the same way.
At the heart of the conservative misunderstanding of liberty is the presumption that government and individual freedom are fundamentally at odds. At the heart of any liberal understanding of freedom is the proposition that public power can advance freedom as well as undermine it.
New findings released from a recent ABC/WaPo poll provide some pretty bad news for the future political prospects of Sarah Palin.
The poll shows her general standing with the public deteriorating significantly since the last ABC/WaPo survey last November, with 71% now saying she’s unqualified to be president, and only 37% thinking of her favorably (as opposed to 55% holding unfavorable views).
But what’s far worse in the poll is that 52% of Republicans think she’s unqualified to be president, and among conservative Republicans, only 45% believe she is qualified. (Sorry, the Post analysis doesn’t provide parallel numbers on all these categories, and the crosstabs haven’t been released yet). These represent large changes from the previous poll, where, for example, 66% of conservative Republicans thought she was qualified to be president.
According to ABC’s analysis of the poll, Palin’s favorable rating among Republicans has dropped from 76% in November to 66% today.
I’m not sure what developments would explain this phenomenon, unless you buy the idea that any increased exposure to Palin, even among conservatives and among Republicans, makes her less attractive. Certainly conservative opinion-leaders mostly raved about her memoir, Going Rogue, and loved her recent televised speech at the National Tea Party Convention.
Personally, I’d await a little more data before concluding that Palin has worn out her welcome with conservatives, given her exceptionally strong personal bond with so many of them. Maybe the ABC/WaPo poll has captured a sudden trend before others did. But maybe it’s an outlier. We’ll soon see.
This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
A lot of dumb things get said in American political commentary, and I’ve undoubtedly said a few myself over the years. But one dumb thing that ought to be quickly exploded is the persistent talk that newly minted Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts might run a viable campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.
Yes, Brown is a godlike figure to Republicans right now. Yes, various domain names connected with a Brown presidential run got snatched up the moment he won his Senate race. And yes, he’s the symbol of the “fresh faces” Republicans long for every time they look at the rather unexciting (or in the case of Sarah Palin, too exciting) field they will likely choose from in 2012.
But it ain’t happening. And that’s not because of his rather signal lack of experience since, as his fans love to point out, Barack Obama only had a year more of elected experience beyond the state senate when he was elected in 2008.
To mention the most important reason it ain’t happening: Brown is pro-choice. He explicitly opposes overturning Roe v. Wade, and in fact, his rhetoric on abortion is remarkably similar to that of the president. And this, boys and girls, has become an absolute disqualifier for Republican presidential prospects these days; just ask Rudy Guiliani. Or better yet, ask John McCain or Joe Lieberman, since McCain’s decision to put Lieberman on his ticket in 2008 was only abandoned when his advisors told him he’d face a potentially successful convention revolt if a pro-choice running-mate were chosen.
Sure, pro-lifers supported Brown’s Senate run, but there’s all the difference in the world between being a candidate in a blue state who can help disrupt Democratic control of the upper chamber, and being a candidate for national leader of the GOP and the person who makes Supreme Court appointments. Past Republican presidential candidates have gotten into trouble for failing to support a constitutional amendment recognizing fetuses from the moment of conception as “persons” endowed with full constitutional rights. Supporting Roe is an abomination to today’s GOPers; in a recent poll, self-identified Republican voters said they considered abortion “murder” by a margin of 76 percent to eight percent (nearly a third of them, in fact, want to outlaw contraceptives). This is not a negotiable issue.
If that’s not enough to convince you that Brown 2012 is a mirage, consider another problem: Brown was and remains an avid supporter of Massachusetts’ universal health plan, which is extremely similar to the national plan passed without a single Republican vote by the U.S. Senate. That wasn’t a problem for Brown in the Senate race; indeed, his main argument for his pledge that he would vote against any such bill in the Senate was that Massachusetts didn’t need help from the feds because they had already enacted the same reforms. But he’s still on record favoring a “socialist” scheme for health care, and specific items like an individual mandate for health insurance coverage, which most Republicans nationally consider unconstitutional, or perhaps even a form of slavery.
To be sure, this is a problem that Brown shares with Mitt Romney, who signed his state’s version of ObamaCare into law. But Romney has been inching away from the health plan since his 2008 presidential campaign, and will probably repudiate it entirely before long, while Brown’s hugs for the plan are very fresh.
Speaking of Romney: his own presidential ambitions are still another bar to a Brown candidacy. The Brown campaign kept the Mittster under wraps until Election Night, which was smart since Romney is not very popular in Massachusetts. But Brown’s political advisors are all Romney people, who presumably have some residual loyalty to their old boss. Will Romney, who probably first saw a future President of the United States in the mirror before entering kindergarten, step aside for this whippersnapper? Unlikely, and there’s definitely no room in a Republican presidential field for two socialized-medicine supporters from Massachusetts.
So you can forget about Brown for President in 2012, which will become apparent once he starts casting heretical votes in the Senate in order to position himself for a re-election run that same year. He clearly seems smart enough to understand that in 2012, he’ll be dealing with far less favorable turnout patterns, and can’t expect his opponent to run as feckless a campaign as Martha Coakley’s. Odds are, Democrats will run a candidate against Brown who has heard of Curt Schilling and doesn’t wait until the final week to run ads.
Some of you may remember that the very day after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, Republicans began fantasizing about actually taking over the Senate this November, in no small part because former senator Dan Coats had announced he was coming out of retirement to take on the previously unassailable Democrat Evan Bayh in Indiana. Yeah, it was noted at the time that Coats had been living and voting in Virginia for the last decade, while working as a DC lobbyist, but GOPers figured Coats’ long political record in the Hoosier State would enable him to brush that off as a less-than-youthful indiscretion.
But since then, Indiana Democrats, accessing public records, have found out and loudly let it be known that Coats wasn’t just a lobbyist for banks and equity firms, but for foreign governments. He personally lobbied for India, but much more interestingly, his firm lobbied for Yemen. You know, Yemen, that al Qaeda stomping ground where “Christmas Day Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab got his training.
Suffice it to say that Democrats have not kept this information to themselves. According to a piece in Politico today about the “nuking” of Coats:
“We just hit him with a freight train,” one Democratic official familiar with the anti-Coats effort said Monday. “It’s Politics 101: Frame the guy early.”
The effectiveness of the Democratic attack on Coats is probably best reflected by the fact that none of the Republicans previously in the race to challenge Bayh (including former U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, a fiery conservative) have pulled out. Coats’ proto-campaign has largely confined itself to whining about “mud” being thrown at their hero.
So maybe Republicans shouldn’t be quite so quick to mark Indiana down in the column of likely Senate wins this year.
Sometimes significant political news stories involve dogs that don’t bark. That’s just happened in Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have failed to force a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn the state Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Under Iowa’s constitution, amendments have to be enacted by two consecutive legislatures (which meet for two years), and then face ratification by voters. So barring some unforeseen development late in the current session, the earliest an amendment could be sent to voters would be in 2014.
Aside from the fact that this gives same-sex marriage a new lease on life, this non-barking dog also preserves the issue as a source of political controversy in Iowa for two more election cycles. But it also means that it won’t be directly on the ballot during the 2012 presidential contest.
Same-sex marriage has become a heavily partisan issue in Iowa, with virtually all Democratic officeholders supporting the Supreme Court decision and virtually all Republicans opposing it. But it’s also a bit of an intraparty issue for Republicans, since elected officials and candidates deemed insufficiently obsessed with efforts to overturn the court decision (e.g., former Gov. Terry Branstad, the favorite in this year’s GOP gubernatorial primary) have faced angry criticism from the Cultural Right. And the issue could spill over into the 2012 Republican presidential caucuses, where Iowa, as always, will have the first say, and where the Cultural Right (viz. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 victory) has always been very strong.
President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.
On one, very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.
Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.
Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.
This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.
But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.
It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less his terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.
The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.
If you didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.
She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d’horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama adminstration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.
Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.
Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the of lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.
But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by “elites,” and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.
And that’s why having watched Palin’s act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can’t possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don’t think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it’s possible she could win the Republican nomination.
To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a “hidden majority” of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, “moderate” policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition’s vulnerability by any means necessary–all mistakes imposed by Republican “elites” who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin’s public frustration about the campaign’s unwillingness to “take the gloves off” (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).
I don’t think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now “socialist” anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; “moral relativism,” including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering “real American” population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as “hate-America” semi-treason.
And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can’t do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but in the ongoing purge of RINOs and “moderate” squishes.
This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin’s immediate political future needs to be conducted. It’s a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don’t stand out. It’s a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.
So why wouldn’t this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a newDes Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?
That’s all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin’ up morning that conservatives expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin’s maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn’t want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).
But it’s far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process–and it was–then she’s got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, “you betchas” and all.
If you get bored with pre-Super Bowl hype today or tomorrow, you should check out media reports from the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. The controversial (but still sold-out) event did not get off to a very smooth start, according to the Washington Post:
The convention’s first day lacked the orchestrated staging of most modern political events. The convention host delivered a meandering welcome speech without notes, saying he misplaced them. Former congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) offered a fiery defense of Judeo-Christian faith and traditional American values, but there was no prayer or Pledge of Allegiance to open the convention — nor was there an American flag in the convention hall. ([Tea Party Nation spokesman] Skoda blamed the oversight on the hotel staff.
With earlier big names Michele Bachman and Marsha Blackburn pulling out of the event, citing congressional ethics concerns over its sponsorship by the for-profit group Tea Party Nation, delegates were instead treated to opening remarks by one of the loonier tunes on the national political scene, former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, the apostle of twenty-first century nativism. Tancerdo fired up the crowd with a peroration lashing the American people for their ignorance in electing the “committed socialist ideologue…Barack Hussein Obama,” suggesting it wouldn’t have happened if the country had civics and literacy tests for voting. He also blasted John McCain, who is of course a Tancredo bete noir thanks to his one-time support for immigration reform legislation.
Though it’s well-known that anti-immigrant sentiment is very strong in Tea Party circles, it’s still debatable whether the convention did itself any favors by featuring Tancredo, a man whose 2008 presidential campaign disappeared without a trace, and whose political sense was perhaps best illustrated by his attack on Pope Benedict XVI for favoring good treatment of U.S. immigrants in order to boost Catholic church attendence.
The best news is that the Washington Independent‘s Dave Weigel is now on the scene in Nashville, and should have some interesting dispatches over the weekend. And then Saturday night comes the long-awaited televised speech by Sarah Palin, during a dinner where those who paid the pricey registration fee will reportedly dine on that hearty populist fare, steak and lobster.
Speaking of those fees, Tea Party Nation spokesman Mark Skoka had the best line so far in response to perpetual complaints from Tea Party activists about the for-profit nature of the event:
Convention spokesman Mark Skoda acknowledged Wednesday that [Judson] Phillips and his wife, Sherry Phillips, founders of the for-profit Tea Party Nation Inc., will “make a few bucks” on the event. But Skoda questioned why that should be anyone’s concern.
“Have we gone so far in the Obama-socialist view of the nation that ‘profit’ is a bad word — in particular, if we’re using it to advance the conservative cause?” Skoda asked.
While virtually all national attention has been focused on the difficult straits of the higher-visibility items of the Obama administration’s legislative agenda (and even there, according to the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann, his record has been vastly underappreciated), on the domestic matters that a president actually has some control over, the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, the administration has quietly un-done many years of Republican mischief.
That’s the message of an important piece by John Judis that appeared in The New Republic earlier this week.
Judis places Obama’s accomplishments on the regulatory front into three main categories. First he’s appointed (where Republicans in the Senate have allowed him) officials who actually believe in the missions of the agencies they work for, and are qualified for their jobs.
Given the habits of Republican administrations, that’s no small thing:
Reagan chose Thorne Auchter, the vice president of a construction firm, to head OSHA. Bush appointed a mining company executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration and a trucking company executive to head the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. To lead OSHA, he named Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a longtime foe of the agency who had advised companies on how to block union organization.
Some of the Republican appointees weren’t business types, but ideologues or hacks who were utterly unqualified for their positions. Anne Gorsuch, whom Reagan nominated to head the EPA, was a rising member of the Colorado House of Representatives, where she was part of a conservative group known as the “House crazies.” Michael Brown, whom Bush appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), had previously been commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
Obama’s approach, says Judis, couldn’t be more different:
[T]he flow of expertise into the federal bureaucracy over the past year has been reminiscent of what took place at the start of the New Deal.
For instance, as a replacement for Foulke at OSHA, Obama chose David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University. In 2008, Michaels published a book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, detailing how businesses had delayed regulations by “manufacturing uncertainty” about scientific findings.
To manage the EPA, Obama appointed a slew of highly experienced state environmental officials. (As Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies explains, state officials are ideally suited for the EPA because they have firsthand experience in how regulations are enforced and how they work.) Obama’s choice to run the agency was Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer who led the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Her deputies include the former secretary of the environment in Maryland, as well as the former heads of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, the Massachusetts Bureau of Resource Protection, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.
Meanwhile, Obama chose as his Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Margaret Hamburg, who achieved renown during the 1990s as health commissioner of New York City, where she developed a program for controlling tuberculosis that led to a sharp decline in the disease. Her number two is a former Baltimore health commissioner who, in 2008, was named a public official of the year by Governing magazine.
Second, says Judis, Obama has decisively reversed the Reagan-Bush 43 habit of undermining regulatory agencies by starving them of administrative funds and personnel:
Even in the face of the recession, he proposed and got funding increases for numerous regulatory agencies–some of them dramatic. He asked for $10.5 billion for the EPA for 2010–a 34 percent jump over 2009, and the first time in eight years that the budget had increased. He also requested a 19 percent increase in the FDA’s budget, the largest in its history; a 10 percent increase for OSHA, which will allow it to hire 130 new inspectors; and increases of 5 percent, 7 percent, and 9 percent for the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Finally, Obama has ended the application by Republican administrations of a skewed approach to cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulations that makes short-term costs to businesses an overriding consideration. His most important step was probably appointing progressive law professor Cass Sunstein to head up the White House “super-agency” that reviews federal regulations, which under Bush became a major obstacle to the ability of regulatory agencies to do their work.
Judis warns that continued progress on this front is one of the little-appreciated stakes involved in this November’s elections:
In 1993, Clinton, too, attempted to revive the regulatory agencies by appointing well-qualified personnel and increasing funding. But, after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they managed to cut Clinton’s budget proposals and delay or block the implementation of regulations. If Democrats lose Congress this November, the same thing could happen again.
That’s something for progressives “de-energized” by the events of the last year, and inclined to sit on their hands this election cycle, to keep in mind.
These aren’t the happiest days for Democrats, but the impact of so much wild lawlessness by Trump 2.0 should be offset a bit by indications the 47th president and his minions may be a bit over their skis, as I discussed at New York:
During the first month of his second term, Donald Trump’s popularity started out mildly positive but has slowly eroded, according to the FiveThirtyEight averages. As of January 24, his job-approval ratio was 49.7 percent positive and 41.5 percent negative. As of Thursday, it’s 48.7 percent positive and 46.2 percent negative, which means his net approval has slipped from 8.2 percent to 2.5 percent. The very latest surveys show a negative trend, as the Washington Postnoted:
“Trump’s approval ratings this week in polls — including the Post-Ipsos poll and others from Reuters, Quinnipiac University, CNN and Gallup — have ranged from 44 to 47 percent. In all of them, more disapprove than approve of him.
“That’s a reversal from the vast majority of previous polls, which showed Trump in net-positive territory.”
Given all the controversy his actions have aroused, that may not be surprising. But he has some vulnerabilities behind the top-line numbers, mostly involving ideas he hasn’t fully implemented yet.
His proposals tend to be popular at a high level of generality but much less popular in some key specifics. For example, a February 9 CBS survey found 54 percent supporting his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but only 14 percent favoring his idea of a U.S. takeover of Gaza. Similarly, a February 18 Washington Post–Ipsos poll found 50 percent of respondents approving of his handling of immigration, but only 41 percent supporting the deployment of local law enforcement for mass deportations, and only 39 percent supporting his push to end to birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.
But by far Trump’s greatest vulnerability is over his management of an economy where renewed signs of inflation are evident, and where his policies, once implemented, could make conditions worse. Already, his job-approval ratings on managing the economy are slipping a bit, as a February 19 Reuters-Ipsos poll indicated:
“[T]he share of Americans who think the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53% in the latest poll from 43% in the January 24–26 poll. Public approval of Trump’s economic stewardship fell to 39% from 43% in the prior poll …
“Trump’s rating for the economy is well below the 53% he had in Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted in February 2017, the first full month of his first term as U.S. president.”
And a mid-February Gallup survey found 54 percent of Americans disapproving Trump’s handling of the economy and 53 percent disapproving his handling of foreign trade. More ominous for Trump if the sentiment persists is that negative feelings about current economic conditions are as prominent as they were when they helped lift Trump to the presidency. The WaPo-Ipsos poll noted above found that 73 percent of Americans consider the economy “not so good” or “poor,” with that percentage rising to 76 percent with respect to gasoline and energy prices and 92 percent with respect to food prices.
Republicans and independents will for a time share Trump’s claims that the current economy is still the product of Joe Biden’s policies, but not for more than a few months. A particular controversy to watch is Trump’s tariff wars and their potential impact on consumer prices. As the CBS survey showed, sizable majorities of Americans already oppose new tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and Europe, with tariffs on China being an exception to low levels of support for that key element of Trump’s economic-policy agenda. And the same poll showed 66 percent of respondents agreeing that Trump’s “focus on lowering prices” is “not enough.” He may have forgotten already how he won the 2024 election.
