One of the most consistently advanced arguments in the conservative effort to oppose the Obama administration’s policy agenda is that it is exhibiting “arrogance” or “hubris,” and is also making a mockery of all of the president’s previous rhetoric about reaching across the partisan aisle and respecting other points of view. Almost invariably, the stimulus legislation, and the administration’s health care and climate change proposals, are cited as exhibits A, B and C. There’s a classic version of this argument being offered in the current issue of National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the smartest and least hackish of contemporary conservative political writers. And the same argument has been offered by self-styled “centrists” like David Brooks, and even to some extent by those “centrist” Democrats who want to take legislative vehicles for majority rule like budget reconciliation procedures off the table.
This whole approach, of course, is intimately connected with the conservative claim that Obama is, as they of course warned during the presidential campaign, a “radical” who is turning a 7 percentage point popular vote magin on November 4 into an illegitimate mandate for all sorts of crazy socialist intentions that he craftily hid from public view on the campaign trail.
At the risk of redundancy (not that this seems to be a concern of Obama critics), it’s helpful once again to examine this argument and expose its very shaky underpinnings.
Of course Obama didn’t outline the stimulus legislation in detail on the campaign trail, because the financial and economic meltdown largely occurred at the very tail end of the contest, and worsened significantly later on.
The size and structure of the stimulus legislation reflected decades of progressive, “centrist,” and even some conservative opinion on what government should do in the case of a collapse in demand and credit. And in the intra-progressive debate about exactly what Obama should propose, he hardly sided with “radicals,” or even old-fashioned liberals, who typically feared the stimulus package was too small to work and too open to “centrist” or conservative influence.
On health care reform and climate change, Obama is proposing relatively modest versions of what Democrats have largely agreed on in these areas for quite some time, and of what he specifically and consistently pledged to do throughout his presidential campaign. He has also specifically and consistently argued that dealing with these two topics would be expensive in the short run but extraordinarily cost-effective in the long run–an approach that also happens to nicely coincide with a fiscal strategy of short-term stimulus and long-term fiscal sanity.
As for “bipartisanship,” Obama has specifically and consistently offered Republicans a seat at the table if they were willing to agree with him on major policy goals and key principles–the “what” rather than the “how.” Since most Republicans have loudly and fundamentally disagreed with his major policy goals and key principles in terms of the stimulus package (they either want to do nothing or rely strictly on tax cuts), health care reform (they continue to pursue such truly radical ideas as forcing all Americans into individually purchased health insurance or paying for health care with cash via tax-preferred savings), and climate change (they either deny the problem, want to use all carrots and no sticks to bribe companies into alternative energy usages, or simply say the problem’s too expensive to address), Obama’s moved on without them.
A lot of the conservatives (though not Brooks or Ponnuru) who are attacking Obama for abandoning bipartisanship violently deplore the very idea themselves, so it’s not an objection to be taken very seriously in any event.
The one area where Obama critics have some sort of case for pig-in-a-poke charges is on the subject of financial industry “bailout” or “repair” or “damage mitigation” policies (there’s no real term for this policy area that’s not loaded, unfortunately). Whatever else they represented, the last two national elections that produced Democratic control of Congress and the White House weren’t referenda on what to do if a housing market collapse produced a financial system collapse that produced a credit collapse and then a consumer demand collapse. To the extent that the last few weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign revolved around this scenario, there certainly wasn’t any clear-cut D versus R split of opinion on what to do immediately, and Obama had zero input into the Bush administration’s structuring of the first big round of bailouts. If anyone in politics “flip-flopped,” it was the large segment of the GOP, including its presidential candidate, who conspicuously backed the Bush bail-out but now talks as if anything vaguely similar as pursued by Obama is insane.
An even more mendacious aspect of the criticism of Obama’s financial industry policies from the Right is the ventilating about “corporate welfare.” If Obama abandoned the current approach in favor of a temporary government takeover of imploded financial institutions–the most visible option other than doing nothing–they’d be the first to scream that he had succumbed to Red Russian Socialism.
The main point is that Obama’s done pretty much what he promised to do, and has departed from his campaign pledges mainly in areas outside the orbit of campaign discussion, and mainly in the direction of accomodation of “centrist” views. It’s entirely legitimate for conservatives or anyone else to argue that his policies are wrong or won’t work, but the idea that ideological rigidity or “arrogance” characterizes his young presidency is tiresomely threadbare. And by and large, the notion that fidelity to ideology represents “hubris” sounds more than a bit strange from conservatives who are competing with each other to see who can most loudly denounce George W. Bush and latter-day GOP “reformers” for failing to hew to the True Faith.

If there is one topic that Democrats come back to over and over in electoral analysis, it’s the party’s persistantly weak performance in recene years among non-college-educated white voters, a.k.a., the White Working Class. And there are some obvious reasons for this debate. As Ruy Teixeira’s new study for CAP (“New Progressive America“), Democratic weakness among WWC voters persisted in 2008, although the impact was mitigated by the steady decline in that demographic’s share of the electorate. And that bugs Democrats a lot, since these are voters who should be (and in opinion if not sometimes in voting behavior actually are) responsive to the progressive economic message. There’s even a moral argument that a progressive party which struggles to connect with working-class voters isn’t adequately representing a core constituency.
But as this debate continues, a parallel debate is developing on the other side of the partisan divide, as some Republicans are beginning to argue against the targeting of WWC voters, urging instead a refocus on the upscale voters who have been sharply trending towards Democrats over the last 20 years. In some respects, this point-of-view is the direct corollary of conservative attacks on Obama’s tax policies; they sense that many upscale voters are ready to vote Republican, and perhaps even join the Tea Party “movement,” in reaction to Obama’s outrageous advocacy of top marginal rates on high-earners that resemble those of the bad old 1990s.
But there are some interesting generational arguments as well. Michael Barone suggests, mainly from inferences rather than hard data, that younger WWC voters are pretty much checking out and can’t be relied upon in the future to support the GOP in the numbers represented by their parents. (In fact, there is tantalizing evidence that Obama may have done surprisingly well among under-30 WWC voters in 2008, which Andrew Levison wrote about in a TDS White Paper in December).
Barone cites and at least tentatively endorses another theory, one advanced by David Frum in reaction to the news that single mom Bristol Palin ain’t getting hitched any time soon. Frum contends that young WWC voters don’t exhibit the sturdy folk virtues of their parents, and thus won’t be attracted to the cultural conservatism of the GOP:

Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.
The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.
Take a look at Table A17 in this report by the Educational Testing Service. Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.

Thus, as Barone puts it in his gloss on Frum’s argument, young WWC Americans are embracing “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles that aren’t conducive to GOP voting behavior.
This”forget about the white trash” dismissal of future WWC voters has pretty significant strategic implications for those GOPers who adopt it. And it exposes a dilemma in conservative message development that became obvious during the 2008 campaign, and is becoming even clearer today. In retrospect, as some of us pointed out at the time, the whole Joe the Plumber phenomenon in the McCain-Palin campaign was an effort to put a WWC face on an argument over tax policy that really affected only high-income voters.
The same conflict is even more evident in the current disagreement among conservatives about whether to go after Obama for his “socialist” and “redistributist” economic policies that threaten to destroy the “productive” upper class, or instead to go populist with an attack on bailouts of Wall Street firms, while stressing Obama’s alleged cultural radicalism. And even those who attack bailouts on laissez-faire grounds, like Joe the Plumber’s replacement, CNBC “reporter” Rick Santelli, don’t much like “demagoguery” about the AIG bonuses (which, after all, benefit the very people he has defended as victims of lower-class perfidy).
This conflict is complicated, of course, by the fact that upper-income voters do not proportionately embrace the cultural conservatism that’s been a big factor in WWC Republican voting, and that Frum and Barone suspect the WWC is beginning to abandon, as evidenced in the marital data and symbolized by the devolution of the Palin family.
It’s all pretty fascinating as a sign of fault lines in the GOP and the conservative movement that will probably become more apparent in days to come. And these fault lines have obvious implications for the putative front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Bristol Palin’s mother.
We Democrats, of course, would like nothing better than a GOP abandonment of non-college-educated voters as a target. Whatever well-heeled conservatives think of their “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles, we’ll take ’em.

The growing frenzy over AIG’s insistence on providing $165 million in employee bonuses, mainly to securities traders in the company’s catastrophically disastrous financial products group, reflects an entirely legitimate belief that this scandal will serve as a popular tipping point between widespread unhappiness and marching-in-the-streets popular outrage over government bailouts of the financial sector. The President and Treasury Secretary spent much of the day trying to get in front of this fast-moving train, not only expressing their own outrage but discussing the possibility of ways to block the bonuses without creating a whole new financial crisis.
It’s an example of the visibility of this issue that it completely overshadowed Obama’s rollout of initiatives to help small business secure access to credit, itself an important symbol of the administration’s efforts to help worthy victims of the financial meltdown rather than its perpetrators.
It’s obvious that many people from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum are perpetually angry about corporate bailouts. And as for the general public, similar sentiment is definitely growing, as Mark Blumenthal reports today at Pollster.com:

In the survey released just today by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of Americans say they are “angry” about the government “bailing out banks and financial institutions that made poor financial decisions” (39% say they are bothered but not angry, only 12% are not bothered). Not surprisingly, this anger translates into considerable skepticism about bailouts of banks and financial institutions:
62% say the federal government has spent too much on “large banks and other financial institutions in danger of failing,” 8% say it is spending too little and 21% say the amount is about right (Newsweek [pdf]).
59% oppose “giving aid to U.S. banks and financial companies in danger of failing,” while 39% favor it (USA Today/Gallup).
50% disapprove of “the federal government providing money to banks and other financial institutions to try to help fix the country’s economic problems,” 39% approve (CBS/New York Times [pdf]).
Note that the expression of disapproval is slightly lower on the last question, which justifies assistance as way “to help fix” the economy. Nonetheless, the opposition as measured over the last month is still considerable, even before the latest AIG bonus story.

As this last poll finding cited by Blumenthal illustrates, it’s critically important that the Obama administration be viewed as only being willing to help “banks and other financial institutions” when it’s absolutely necessary to “fix the economy,” while fighting like hell against any further abuses or misuses of taxpayer dollars. And that’s why the administration’s response to the AIG bonus issue, even as it prepares to make another $30 billion infusion of cash into the company, is so dicey but so important.
One theory among progressives, well articulated today by TNR’s Noam Scheiber, is that the administration needs to shift to a more radical strategy of temporary takeovers of troubled banks and financial firms, whether or not it’s billed as “nationalization.”
This approach, of course, will immediately be labeled as “socialism” by conservatives, and that may be why the administration has avoided it. But as the AIG furor has documented, there’s some serious risk now that the President will be viewed as both enabling and deploring financial sector abuses, drawing attention to the waste of taxpayer funds even as he’s promoting more bailout money in the very near future. Even as gifted and popular a communicator as Barack Obama will struggle to maintain that balancing act, given the crossfire he will get with each new revelation of the causes and consequences of Wall Street misconduct.

It’s not exactly news that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has decided to stake out the most extreme Hooverite position available on the federal government’s efforts to stop the downward spiral of the economy via fiscal stimulus. He’s been ranting about this on every available national platform for months, and scolding his fellow governors, and his fellows Republicans, for wanting “bailouts.” And it’s also no secret that Sanford would like to run for president in 2012.
But it’s interesting to see the lengths to which Sanford is willing to take his crusade for deflation. His latest stunt was to demand that President Obama give him some sort of super-waiver to devote $700 million in federal stimulus dollars (about a fourth of the state’s total allocation) slated for SC not to their intended purposes, but to a pre-financing of future state debts. Gee, that’s just want you want to do in the middle of a recession, particularly in a state whose unemployment rate just jumped to 10.4%.
Sanford made this completely symbolic demand secure in the knowledge that the people of SC wouldn’t actually have to suffer, since SC congressman Jim Clyburn, knowing his governor, inserted into the federal legislation language allowing state legislatures to apply for the stimulus funds if any governor failed to do so by April 3. And after some hemming and hawing, the SC legislature’s Republican leadership is moving to do just that.
Just to make sure, however, that the whole political world understands there ain’t nobody getting to the Right of Mark Sanford, the governor has chosen to analogize people who want to spend the stimulus money for stimulus to the Zimbabwean supporters of Robert Mugabe, as reported by Politico’s Glenn Thrush:

Sanford told reporters in South Carolina that he still intends to turn down millions in stimulus cash, despite the likelihood of his state legislature accepting the cash — and criticism by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) that rejecting any payments would disproportionately harm African American residents.
“What you’re doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more money that we don’t have, send it to different states – we’ll create jobs… If that’s the case why isn’t Zimbabwe a rich place?”…”why isn’t Zimbabwe just an incredibly prosperous place. Cause they’re printing money they don’t have and sending it around to their different – I don’t know the towns in Zimbabwe but that same logic is being applied there with little effect.”

As Oliver Willis observed: I’m sure him being from South Carolina had nothing to do with this.” And among the things that Mark Sanford is willing to sacrifice to his “principles”–or more likely, to his ambitions to run for president as the King of the Right–you’d have to list not only his own state’s economic conditions, but its longstanding efforts to rid itself of the legacy of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.
As a native of the Palmetto State, let me say: Nice work, governor.

One of the odder phenomena of contemporary public life is the enthusiasm of conservative gabbers and even elected officials for the idea of “Going Galt:” the suggestion that the oppressed wealthy of America withdraw their vast contributions to the commonweal in protest against the supposedly confiscatory taxes and redistribution of income to the morally depraved underway at the behest of the Obama administration. The allusion is to John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, that massive tome that represented the Summa of her rigorously capitalist, atheist, and anti-altruist philosophy of “Objectivism,” which has captured a vast number of adolescents and an impressive number of adults over the last several decades.
I’ve written about this in the context of U.S. Rep. John Campbell’s (R-CA) claim that “we’re living through the scenario” laid out in Atlas Shrugged, wherein the industrial leaders of the West, sick of subsidizing “parasites” and “looters,” drop out, take to the Rockies, and finally, through Galt’s voice–a radio address that took up 90 solid pages in the novel–chastise an economically helpless nation.
But Campbell was just surfing the right-wing zeitgeist, where excited talk about “going Galt” has spread like kudzu. It’s merged, in fact, with the Rick-Santelli-spawned Tea Party “movement” of “productive” people fed up with the poor-and-minority scum who cause the financial collapse by living beyond their means, and who now refuse to shuffle off into the ranks of the homeless and instead are instituting a socialist tyranny.
I don’t need to summarize the “going Galt” literature; that’s already been done quite well by David Weigel of the Washington Independent and Roy Edroso of the Village Voice (the more Galt-sympathetic Stephen Gordon of The Liberty Papers also has a long list of relevant links from various points of view). I also don’t need to analyze the absurdity of well-heeled, not-going-anywhere conservative bloggers and pundits like Michelle Malkin or Helen Smith to encourage others to “go Galt,” or of the self-congratulatory people who think it’s a license to cheat on their taxes, lay off a few underlings, or stop tipping (no, seriously!). Hilzoy has succinctly demolished the clownish and entirely un-Randian nature of these latter-day Galtists.
What I’d like to do as a public service is simply to remind folks tempted to “go Gault” or to gush ignorantly about the subject in blogs or on Fox that they are flirting with a philosophy that is profoundly and expressly hostile to anything that could remotely be described as “conservative.” And before anyone even thinks of offering the “you-don’t-have-to-be-a-fascist-to-love-Ezra-Pound’s-poetry” defense, it’s important to understand that John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, and their creator Ayn Rand represent a remorselessly unified and logical world-view that can’t be sliced and diced into bite-sized portions you can take or leave. Galt’s speech, in particular, which is the supposed inspiration for all this excited Tea Party chatter, was a painstakingly wrought distillation of Rand’s all-encompassing philosophy of Objectivism, which few “conservatives” could stomach, much less endorse. And Rand, if she were alive, would be the first to object to promiscuous use of her words and character, especially by political “conservatives,” whom she largely despised as life-hating slaves to an imaginary God, or as unprincipled demagogues little better in practice than all the other “collectivists.”
The following are a sprinkling of quotes from Rand’s work that ought to make any self-conscious conservative think twice about scribbing “Who is John Galt?” on the nearest whiteboard.

Read more…

I’ve done a couple of posts (here and here) on Stan Greenberg’s fascinating new book, Dispatches From the War Room–enough, I hope, to interest folks in reading Stan’s unique memoir in its entirety.
But I’d be remiss in failing to write a few notes about the central issue of Dispatches: the relationship between public opinion and political strategy, and beyond that, with political leadership.
Throughout the book, Stan challenges the common stereotype that public opinion research ruins political leaders by making them tactical, reactive, and basically gutless. That may be true with some leaders relying on some strategists and pollsters, he acknowledges, but in the right hands knowing public opinion is essential to principled leadership, and to actual change. As he puts it in a post at Pollster.com:

I come out of this believing that strong political leaders build a special bond with people, rather than flying in the face of it. Strong leadership is not defying the public, but engaging with it — using support to get things done; mobilizing the public, educating the public on challenges and goals and working to shift opinion. I look at the example of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt who were both intensely solicitous of public opinion. Engaging with the public was a precondition for boldness. That contrasts with Bush and Cheney who thought they were strong because they pursued bold policies, never guided by polls and focus groups, but I think we can look now at the consequences. President Obama’s special bond with people is part of his leadership but he will struggle like these leaders to keep people with him and enhance his chances of success. That makes for stronger and more democratic leadership and produce greater civic engagement.

This crucial distinction between the proper and improper role of public opinion research by political leaders comes out most clearly in the chapter of Dispatches about Ehud Barak. In one of the most emotional passages in the entire book, Stan defends himself against charges that he led Barak to abandon negotiations with Syria based on adverse poll results. But he then goes on to explain how in the midst of the famously intense negotiations with the Palestinians over a proposed “final status” settlement, Barak used constant polling not to determine his negotiating stance, but to measure his relative success in bringing Israelis along with him in his astoundingly bold course of action. And to Stan’s own surprise, public opinion in Israel moved significantly on issues long thought to be carved in stone. In the end, Stan suggests, it was the inability of Palestinian leaders even to attempt a similar feat of leadership and public education in their own community that doomed the whole enterprise.
To put it another way, political leaders who do what they are so often urged to do, and eschew public opinion research in order to avoid the temptation of following rather than leading, are actually denying themselves an essential tool for leadership: the ability to intelligently engage the public. To cite a prosaic parallel, those who tell politicians not to use polls are much like the baseball “traditionalists” who have spent much of the last three decades fighting the use of sophisticated statistical methods in evaluating the game and its players. As the baseball pioneer Bill James once observed, people who don’t want more information are almost certainly relying on assumptions and stereotypes that are no less imprisoning than “statistics.” It’s the same with public opinion research. Those who don’t want to know what the public thinks probably assume they already know without asking, or, worse yet, like Bush and Cheney, don’t really care. Wilfull Ignorance or arrogant indifference isn’t really a better option than knowledge when it comes to political leadership in a democracy.
I should also mention a corollary of this approach to public opinion that helps explain the title of Stan’s book: the War Room. The whole idea of a campaign War Room, which originated in the 1992 Clinton campaign, was to foster a highly integrated message and field operation with (literally) no walls. From the point of view of the campaign pollster, that meant sharing all the public opinion research, good or bad, conclusive or inconclusive, with everyone else, as part of an ongoing and highly collaborative effort. Stan doesn’t come right out and say it, but the War Room approach also helped insure that no one, and certainly not the pollster, was given an opportunity to become a backstairs Mephistopheles tempting the candidate to trim his or her sails and abandon the broader strategy and the broader “mission” in search of short-term advantage.
Thus this “pollster’s memoir” actually serves as a very rich and entertaining meditation on the nature of leadership in a democracy–particularly progressive leadership at a time when the public is demanding change. That’s why Dispatches, for all its value as recent history, is especially relevant for progressives right now.

More and more, the Republican Party seems to be chasing its own tail under the direction of its new national chairman, Michael Steele. And this week, the putative revolt against Steele transcended the grumbling about slow staff appointments and his clumsy dance with Rush Limbaugh, and became openly ideological, at a time when the GOP’s ideological rigidity seems to have reached an all-time high. As Ben Smith explained yesterday at Politico:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s series of gaffes turned into something more serious Thursday, as leaders of a pillar of the GOP—the anti-abortion movement—shifted into open revolt over comments in an interview with the men’s magazine GQ.
Steele called abortion an “individual choice” and opposed a constitutional ban on abortion in the Feb. 24 interview, which appeared online Wednesday night. He echoed the language of the abortion rights movement and appeared to contradict his own heated assertions during his campaign for chairman that he is a committed soldier in the anti-abortion movement.
While he issued a statement Thursday affirming his opposition to abortion and his support for a constitutional amendment banning it, the damage appeared to be done as leading social conservatives publicly attacked the embattled chairman.

Some of the criticism came pretty close to the line that separates more-in-sorrow-than-anger rebukes from get-thee-behind-me-Satan anathemas. Mike Huckabee, for example, isn’t satisfied with Steele’s apologies for his heretical comments on abortion:

For Chairman Steele to even infer that taking a life is totally left up to the individual is not only a reversal of Republican policy and principle, but it’s a violation of the most basic of human rights–the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His statement today helps, but doesn’t explain why he would ever say what he did in the first place.

And Smith quotes several other social conservative activists who clearly would like to drop Steele from the nearest cliff:

“Michael Steele has just walked away from the Reaganesque position of strong moral clarity on abortion to personify why the Republican Party continues to be in a ‘free fall’,” said another activist, Jenn Giroux, the executive director of the conservative group Women Influencing the Nation. “It is amazing that he cannot see and learn from the fact that Sarah Palin’s position on abortion and her unapologetic defense of every conceived child drew crowds by the thousands on that issue alone.”

Trouble is, of course, that dumping Steele as RNC chairman isn’t a very easy or appetizing prospect, either. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today offers “Five Reasons Why Steele Stays.” To boil them down: (1) The last thing the GOP needs now is more chaos at the top; (2) Dumping the first African-American RNC chairman so quickly would constitute “symbolic suicide;” (3) There’s no obvious successor; (4) Removing an RNC chairman is procedurally tricky; and (5) Steele is finally getting things moving again at the RNC.
That all makes sense, though Republicans could dragoon some generally acceptable elected official into chairing the RNC, at least as a figurehead, to minimize the damage if they want to show Steele the door. My guess is that Steele stays, but with a muzzle firmly attached to his face. And while that might keep him out of the newspapers and out of trouble, someone who never gets noticed is not exactly what you want these days in a national party chairman.

You’d sort of think that Citigroup, perhaps the biggest public assistance recipient in history ($50 billion or so and counting), would be a little careful about meddling in politics right now. Logical, but apparently wrong.
First came the news that Citi was downgrading its rating of Wal-Mart’s stock on grounds that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)–which was just reintroduced in Congress this week–might pass and damage the retail giant’s profits. Then it transpired that the same analyst who pulled that bizarre scare-tactic stunt, one Deborah Weinswig, actively participated in a conference call among EFCA opponents to strategerize about defeating the infamous socialist legislation that would let a majority of employees in a workplace form union bargaining units without formal NLRB elections.
As explained by Sam Stein at HuffPo, the conference call was organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represented by Gordon Spencer, who explained its highly nuanced position on EFCA as follows:

“From the Chamber’s perspective, and I would say probably from the whole business community’s perspective, there are really no amendments you could make to this bill that would make it acceptable.”

So much for the spirit of compromise and bipartisanship.
In any event, the hysteria level among business lobbyists about EFCA is very high, strange as that may seem at a time when you would think they have a lot of bigger fish to fry.
As for Ms. Weinswig and Citi’s involvement in the anti-EFCA cabal, they aren’t the only corporate welfare loafers who think it’s okay to beg the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress for money while lobbying against legislation they support. According to Stein in an earlier article, Bank of America hosted its own anti-EFCA conference call three days after receiving a $25 billion subsidy from the feds.
It’s unclear at this point if EFCA has the votes to get through the Senate. But even if it does, and without the sort of amendments that the Chamber is already ruling out, the only way it would affect the business community is if it made it a bit easier for workers to organize unions. If the position of the anti-EFCA crowd is that unions are so intolerable that they ought to be outlawed, then they should come right out and say so without all the crocodile tears about preserving the sacred right of workers to vote against unionization via secret ballots after long, employer-dominated campaigns. But those who are accepting vast public subsidies to stay in business ought to have the decency to stay out of lobbying efforts based on the idea that corporate America should be allowed to do whatever it damn pleases, or they’ll plunge us all into penury.

The Center for American Progress has released two very meaty new studies on progressive trends in the American electorate.
The first, by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, is entitled “New Progressive America,” and documents “twenty years of demographic, geographic, and attitudinal changes across the country” that “herald a new progressive majority.” Texeira’s basic conclusion is:

At this point in our history, progressive arguments combined with the continuing demographic and geographic changes are tilting our country in a progressive direction–trends that should take America down a very different path than has been traveled in the last eight years.

The fundamental question Teixeira asks in this study is how the country moved from a 53-46 Republican victory in the 1988 presidential election to a 53-46 Democratic victory in 2008.
In terms of demographics, the study focuses on pro-Democratic shifts in the population, especially an 11 point increase in the minority percentage share of voters in presidential electionsa 4 point increase in the percentage of voters who are white college graduates, and a 15 point drop in the percentage of voters who are non-college-educated whites. The first two groups have become solidly pro-Democratic, and while Democrats made small gains in the “white working class vote” between 2004 and 2008, this remains the most conservative major voting demographic.
Other pro-Democratic demographic trends include the impressively progressive outlook of Milennials (those born after 1978), which are adding 4.5 million adults to the voting pool every year, and the growing tilt of professionals, who are “now the most progressive occupational group.” Religious diversity, or more specifically “rapid increases among the unaffiliated”–is another pro-Democratic factor.
In terms of geography, Democrats have become dominant in most major metropolitan areas, primarily because they have made vast improvements since 1988 in fast-growing suburbs.
Texeira also offers detailed analysis of trends in nine states usually thought of as “swing states”: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. All these states were carried by George H.W. Bush in 1988 and by Barack Obama in 2008.
The second big CAP study, by John Halpin and Karl Agne, is entitled “State of American Political Ideology, 2009.” Using new definitional categories and a detailed examination of voters’ actual views, this study challenges the static impression of ideological positioning in the electorate that has been produced by the many surveys that simply ask voters whether they consider themselves “liberals, moderates or conservatives” (the basis of all that “center-right nation” talk after the last elections).
Its basic conclusion is:

After nearly three decades of public acceptance of the Reagan-Bush model of conservatism–limited government, tax cuts, traditional values, and military strength–a broad and deep cross-section of the American public now holds markedly progressive attitudes about government and society.

In terms of ideological self-identification, the study deployed a five-part scale that adds “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual three-part menu. This approach showed 34% of voters self-identifying as conservatives, 29% as moderates, 15 percent as liberals, 16 percent as progressives, and 2% as libertarians. Follow-up questions designed to identify the leanings of moderates divided the electorate into 47% who were or who leaned liberal or progressive, and 48% who were or who leaned conservative or libertarian.
But when Halpin and Agne used 40 specific ideological statements to probe beneath self-identification, a different picture emerged:

On the domestic front, after years of supply-side tax cuts, support for corporations (especially extractive oil and mining companies), and deregulation of the economy, large percentages of Americans increasingly favor progressive ideas centered on: sustainable lifestyles and green energy; public investment in education, infrastructure, and science; financial support for the poor, elderly, and sick; regulation of business to protect workers and consumers; and guaranteed affordable health coverage for every American. On the international front, the legacy of the Bush years has yielded to an American public far more interested in restoring the country’s image abroad, fighting climate change, and pursuing security through diplomacy, alliances, and international institutions than in the continued pursuit of national objectives through the sole projection of military might.
Approximately two-thirds of Americans—reaching to 70 percent to 80 percent on some measures—agree with progressive ideas in each of these domestic and global areas.

Both these studies supply extensive details supporting the top-line findings. But the big news is that the trends–both demographic and ideological, and ultimately partisan–so evident in November of 2008 are truly trends, not emphemeral events. And while the success of President Obama’s and the Democratic Congress’ agenda will obviously have a major impact on what happens in 2010 or 2012, we Democrats do, finally, appear to have the wind at our backs.

As you probably know if you spend any time paying attention to conservative agitprop, Depression Revisionism is all the rage on the Right, where it’s now settled wisdom that the New Deal failed and that Herbert Hoover, like Franklin Roosevelt, was a big-spending market interventionist who helped create the Great Depression in the first place by excessive meddling with the economy. This revisionist point-of-view is obviously aimed at reinforcing GOP arguments that Obama’s economic activism is doomed to fail–you know, just like FDR’s.
More importantly, this rather counter-intuitive if loudly and confidently announced historical axiom seems to have infected MSM coverage of the current economic debate. An anecdote: I was recently awaiting a flight in an airport that featured monitors blaring out CNN, and could not help but be aware of an “Anderson Cooper 360” segment on the economic stimulus package. Nestled in the midst of turgid analysis of the jobs impact of this bridge and that road was an interview with some midwestern economics professor, who was given the opportunity to say, without contradiction, that it was the “consensus” of economists that the New Deal had failed to make a dent in the Great Depression. This is the sort of assertion that has a strong subliminal effect on those of us–a pretty big majority of Americans–who don’t spend a lot of time keeping up with the Dismal Science.
The would-be Copernicus of this Calvin-Coolidge-Was-Right revolution in understanding of the 1930s is undoubtedly Amity Shlaes, a conservative columnist whose best-selling book on the New Deal and the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, is one of those tomes that is constantly cited as definitive by people who haven’t read it at all.
While the temptation to say we should all actually read Shlaes is offset by my lack of interest in further enriching her, I’m glad to report that Jonathan Chait has laid out the basic issues for us in an important review in The New Republic.
I know that like many bloggers I often link to an article or post and beg you to “read the whole thing,” but with respect to Chait’s review of Shlaes, I really do mean it. That’s because Shlaes’ take on the Great Depression has become very central not only to the GOP case against President Obama’s agenda, but to the “positive” antediluvian economc policies most Republicans are urging upon us as an alternative.
To boil it all down, Chait shows that Shlaes’ account of the Depression is highly anecdotal and doesn’t always support the “lessons” we are supposed to learn from her; that she uses economic statistics in a dubious and very selective way to make her points; and that her interpretation of both FDR’s and Hoover’s reponses to the Depression is one that virtually no reputable historian would support. He also establishes that most economists, regardless of ideology–and contra the assertion of that economist speaking on “Anderson Cooper 360”–would disagree with Shlaes’ basic understanding of the Depression and its causes and remedies.
We should all understand by now that interpretations of large historical events often have a profound influence on contemporary public discourse. “Revisionist” takes on developments ranging from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the execution of Jesus Christ, to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Tours, the French Revolution, and the Treaty of Versailles, all fed powerful political and intellectual movements many decades and even centuries later. While the Great Depression of the 1930s probably doesn’t match most of those events in its significance, it was undoubtedly an experience that molded political opinions in America for a very long time, mostly in a way that benefitted the Democratic Party. It’s thus not surprising that Republicans want to overturn the popular understanding of those difficult years. And thus it’s important for progressives to challenge them when they are so dangerously wrong. Thanks to Jonathan Chait for firing back with facts, logic, and a compelling narrative of what really happened in America so long ago.