Joe the Plumber has been a particularly soft punching bag for progressives who want to mock the contemporary conservative movement and its pop culture aspirations. Aside from the various holes in the “story” that made him a media celebrity and McCain-Palin campaign fixture, the guy has always skirted SNL parody territory via his Nixon-Agnewish epitomization of a “silent majority” being encouraged to get loud-and-proud about cultural (if not racial) bigotry and economic selfishness.
So it’s interesting that Patrick Ruffini of Next Right, whose Republican “rebuilding” project has generally eschewed anything that would discomfit the “conservative base,” has done a number on Joe as a party symbol:

If you want to get a sense of how unserious and ungrounded most Americans think the Republican Party is, look no further than how conservatives elevate Joe the Plumber as a spokesman. The movement has become so gimmick-driven that Wurzelbacher will be a conservative hero long after people have forgotten what his legitimate policy beef with Obama was.

It would be nice if Ruffini would give the same treatment to Rick Santelli, who has become sort of an upper-class counterpart to Joe the Plumber in attacking the supposed poor-and-minority looters who are benefitting from Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. I’m afraid that Ruffini considers Santelli, unlike Joe, as “serious.” If so, dumping Joe misses the point, and won’t help Republicans recover from stupidity at all.

You don’t have to be a media conspriacy buff to note the very different headlines that MSM outlets have assigned to the release of the Obama administration’s first budget. Indeed, some of them contradict media bias stereotypes.
For example, who do you think is headlining its coverage of the budget with the headline: “Deficits Soar in Obama Budget”? Turns out it’s the supposedly liberal MSNBC. This is slightly more inflammatory than the Fox News headline: “Obama: We Must Add to Our Deficits in the Short-Term.”
The Washington Post, which distinguishes itself by being considered liberal by conservatives and conservative by liberals, leads with: “Obama’s Budget Proposal Would Push Deficit To $1.75 Trillion.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times has a different spin, headlining the budget as: “Obama Plans Major Shifts in Spending.” That’s consistent with CNN’s: “Obama Outlines Big Changes in Spending.”
Maybe these initial headlines don’t matter that much, because the debate over the Obama budget will rage on for months, but it’s interesting to see how this very complicated blueprint for spending and taxes is initially presented to the American people.

While we are on the subject of Louisiana Republican politicians, Politico’s Daniel Libit has an update today on what could be the strangest primary contest of 2010: David Vitter’s effort to get himself re-elected to the U.S. Senate after admitting he’d frequented prostitutes in Washington.
He could face a rather unusual field, to say the least. While nobody really thinks porn star Stormy Daniels would have a chance to win either party’s nomination for the Senate (she hasn’t indicated which primary she would enter, if any), her presence in the campaign would ensure that Louisiana voters don’t forget about Vitter’s hypocritical extracurricular activities for even a moment. And if conservative Republicans do get antsy about Vitter’s problems, another potential candidate, the nationally renowned Christian Right figure, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, could well be there to harvest the backlash.
Vitter’s sought to shore up his support not by choosing the more tolerant horn of the dilemma in which he has placed himself, but by becoming a conservative’s conservative–becoming, for example, one of two Senators casting dissenting votes against Hillary Clinton’s confirmation as Secretary of State, and ranting about supposed ACORN subsidies in the economic stimulus legislation.
One wild card in the 2010 Senate race will involve an upcoming decision by the Louisiana Republican central committee about whether to open up its primary to independent voters (in case you missed it, Louisiana abandoned its famous “jungle primary” for federal–but not state and local–races prior to 2008). A more open GOP primary could tempt other Republicans into the contest, and also force Vitter to do more than simply voting to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage in the Senate to win his nomination.
In any event, it doesn’t look like Vitter will be allowed to put his “personal problem” behind him any time soon. And in a state that loves its politics down and dirty, the 2010 Senate contest could ultimately rival the “race from Hell”–the infamous 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff between Ed Edwards and David Duke–for sheer weirdness.

As J.P. Green noted below, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was picked to do the official Republican response to Barack Obama’s address to Congress last night, and the reviews are not very good. His delivery–which managed to sound both sing-songy and uncoordinated–was that of someone not terribly comfortable with prepared texts (you’d be surprised how many politicians share that problem), and his hand gestures were mechanical and distracting. The speech itself had a dumbed-down quality, or at least seemed that way to anyone who knows how bright Bobby Jindal is in real life. Even at National Review’s The Corner, where Jindal has been a folk hero for years, the reaction was one of disappointment bordering on dismay.
Style aside, the most striking feature of Jindal’s response was the sheer weirdness of the official Republican critique of Obama’s first big speech beginning with a reminder of the federal government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. That’s what left the normally very articulate Rachel Maddow of MSNBC speechless.
But when you really think about it, Jindal’s citation of Katrina made sense (aside from the fact that he’s from Louisiana) in the context of the central theme of his speech, which is that government can’t do anything right other than to tear itself down and thus “empower” citizens. To me, the most remarkable thing in Jindal’s response was his official (if oblique) apology, on behalf of the Republican Party, for George W. Bush’s big-spending liberal ways, which rightly forfeited the trust of the American people. We’ve been hearing that from conservatives regularly since 2006, but it was still sounded odd on national TV in such a formal setting, at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans who aren’t conservative “base” voters are demanding federal activism.
Most Americans probably think of Katrina as an example of the catastrophic consequences of a federal government that has placed responsibility for emergency response in the hands of incompetent political hacks who didn’t believe in their own mission and didn’t much care about victims who weren’t Republicans and refused to take care of themselves. But it’s clear a lot of conservatives really did think government’s main failure during Katrina was to involve itself–with the bureaucratic rules and regulations that Jindal cited in his lengthy and uncompelling anecdote about himself and Harry Lee–instead of getting out of the way and letting churches and citizens handle it all.
In other words, Bobby Jindal did offer a pretty faithful expression of the Republican Party’s contemporary governing philosophy, such as it is. Instead of complaining about his delivery, Republicans should reflect a bit on Jindal’s core message.
And that’s why the general feeling across the board that Jindal really hurt his national political aspirations last night is a bit ironic. He satisfied the first requirement for any Republican who wants to run for president these days: he echoed the views of the conservative base, just as he did when he joined the small group of Republican governors who pledged to reject some of the stimulus money. But he didn’t do so with a “Reaganesque” ability to perform the sort of rhetorical enchantment that makes core conservative views attractive to the rest of the country. That may prove to be an impossible standard for any potential candidate for president.

Eve Fairbanks at TNR makes a pretty good observation about the anti-Obama tactics that Republicans have embraced since he officially became president: they are eerily similar to the anti-Obama tactics that the McCain-Palion campaign used unsuccessfully to try to keep him out of the White House in the first place.
Eve mentions the earmark-“pork” attack on the stimulus legislation, various “dramatic” gestures, and hilariously failed efforts to get cool with rock-laden videos intended to go “viral.”
But I think there are some other examples as well: the blame-the-poor reaction to Obama’s housing proposal; cries of “welfare” over Obama’s tax proposals, of “socialized medicine” over his health care proposals; and of “socialism” over his banking proposals. And you can’t help but think of McCain’s adoption of Joe the Plumber when viewing the current conservative mania for Rick Santelli
Moreover, it’s not so much that Republicans are imitating the McCain campaign as that the McCain campaign itself out of desperation embraced some of the longest-playing themes of the hard-core Right. Anyone who’s spent much time listening to conservative talk radio over the last couple of decades would find the rhetoric of both the McCain campaign and of today’s congressional Republicans depressingly familiar. They’re replaying some very old tapes here, and it’s clear they think they are timeless classics.

Matt Miller has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal which adds to the minority of us progressive gabbers who think that Barack Obama’s “bipartisanship” is aimed at a political realignment rather than short-term compromises with Republicans in Washington.

The president has his eye on a bigger prize than winning a few Republican votes for his stimulus package or having a conservative in his cabinet. He aims to move the political center in America to the left, much as Ronald Reagan moved it to the right. The only way he can achieve this goal is to harness the energies and values of both parties.

Matt doesn’t quite put it this way, but the more concrete Obama objective is to expand the Democratic electoral base by consolidating high levels of support among independents and exploiting the growing divide between Republican politicians and a significant minority of GOP voters.
It’s obviously too early to judge whether this approach is working, but a new Washington Post-ABC poll out today certainly shows how it might work in terms of voter categories.
The Post‘s write-up of the poll dwells on the sharp reduction in Republican support for Obama’s job performance: it’s down to 37% from 62% on Inaugural Day. Well, of course it is; Inaugural Day was and always has been a “peak moment” for any new president, and a month of relentless pounding of Obama by GOP elected officials was bound to resonate with the conservative “base” who heard him described as an elitist socialist baby-killer throughout the presidential campaign.
But Obama’s job approval rating among independents is 67%. Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who think Obama’s trying to compromise with Republicans in Congress is 74%, while the percentage who think Republicans in Congress are trying to compromise with him is 34%. Unsurprisingly, while Obama’s overall job approval rating is 68%, and that of Democrats in Congress is 50%, Republicans in Congress earn a job approval rating of only 38%.
All this could change, but the trajectory in public opinion is towards an isolation of congressional Republicans, who are helping this dynamic along by their behavior towards Obama and the economic crisis itself. You can call it “redefining the center” or simply “realignment,” but if it continues, Obama and the Democratic Party could be well-positioned for the future.

Careful readers of my last post just below may have deduced that I don’t have a real high opinion of Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who treated viewers yesterday to a lengthy tirade on the outrage of Barack Obama trying to help “losers” who can’t pay their mortgages. It’s fine by me if anyone wants to disagree with Obama on housing policy, though I’m not sure why CNBC thinks it’s okay for a “reporter” to indulge himself with a hyper-ideological tirade from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. But what I find despicable about Santelli is his puffed-up sense of moral superiority towards millions of people he knows nothing about, and who are already suffering from personal economic misfortunes that I rather doubt he could imagine.
In any event, I regret to report that Santelli’s receiving not only approbation, but instant folk-hero status on the political Right. At National Review, aside from Larry Kudlow’s “moral hazard” lecture playing off Santelli’s rant, you’ve got an interview with Santelli himself, wherein he modestly appraises himself as just a red-blooded American saying something that everybody he knows agrees with, and then a mocked-up “Palin-Santelli 2012” campaign poster published at The Corner by Kathryn Lopez. Joe the Plumber must be green with envy.
I don’t know what’s more disturbiing about this festive treatment of Santelli’s expression of the Rage of the Trading Floor: that so many conservatives seem to identify with him, or that they seem to think his is a point of view that could soon sweep America, where the main feeling about the economy is that people who aren’t doing well deserve it.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

There was a lot of self-delusional and semi-fascistic talk among conservatives during the late stages of the presidential campaign blaming the entire economic calamity on poor people and minorities who supposedly blew up the Boom Times by taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay. As an exercise in right-wing populist “wedge politics,” it didn’t work. But it didn’t go away, as witnessed by yesterday’s now-infamous on-air tirade by CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.
You should watch the video itself, but the main thrust of Santelli’s jeremiad was aimed at Obama’s new foreclosure relief proposal, which rewarded “losers,” and will place the United States on a trajectory to become just like Cuba. The sheer self-righteousness of Santelli’s rant–inflated by attaboy cries (genuine or facetious) from the prosperous white men on the trading floor around him–was what was remakable about it. As Ezra Klein brilliantly observed:

[W]atching the traders bray and cheer as Santelli calls for the streets to run green with the equity of the working class is an astonishing insight in the psychology of the crisis. These guys feel betrayed. America let them down! After all, they didn’t buy the mortgages and default. They just bought the packages that then defaulted. They trusted Americans to be responsible and they were burned for it. And so you know what? Screw ’em. This is their problem. Let them default. They should lose their houses. Wall Street is tired of being ground under the thumb of the lower middle class. This country has coddled those losers long enough, and see where it’s gotten us.

But I think something a bit deeper is going on here as well. Santelli’s argument is not much more than a crude and boorish version of a lot of the sober “moral hazard” criticism of Obama’s housing plan. You probably know the idea: when government helps people who have suffered from bad behavior in the past, it encourages bad behavior in the future. Better to make them object lessons of the consequences of bad behavior. What are a few million ruined lives as compared to the advantages of a country with improved moral muscle tone?
The problem with this “analysis,” of course, is that there really weren’t a whole lot of people who sat down one fine day and decided: “I think I’ll buy a house I really can’t afford and then default on the mortgage!” Put aside the blandishments of lenders, the national ideology of homeownership as a sign of middle-class status (and as a rare source of working-class capital), and the widespread expectation that housing values would continue to more-or-less improve for the foreseeable future. More fundamentally, it’s difficult to wax angry at homebuyers who somehow did not anticipate losing jobs, health insurance, savings, home equity, and most of all the ability to sell homes at a break-even price. And you also have to wonder how many people who are upset at government help for housing “losers” were the completely accidental beneficiaries of more fortunate trends in the housing market in the past (e.g., those millions who bought at a price slough, built up equity without lifting a finger, and then used government-subisidized home equity credit to retire debt, boost savings, and acquire many nice things).
What may be at the bottom of some of the angrier “moral hazard” talk is even deeper than the habit of blaming victims, with the oft-accompanying strains of self-righteousness and sometimes racism. Big economic downturns challenge one of the most abiding myths that well-off Americans venerate: that economic success is a sign of personal virtue. The corrollary, of course, is that economic failures tend to deserve it. That obviously wasn’t true in the depths of the Great Depression, when a fourth of the population couldn’t get jobs. But the myth lived on, and precisely at times when it seems to be endangered by empirical evidence, it sometimes emerges in a nasty and vengeful manner, as when Rick Santelli indulged himself yesterday in sneering at Barack Obama for caring about “losers.”

Even as we await the effects of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration’s first federal budget is due to be released next week. And according to some rich hints dropped by Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszsag to Politico‘s Ben Smith, that budget is likely to focus to a surprising extent on creating a foundation for universal health care:

Though the budget’s details have been closely held, Orszag revealed, in broad terms, two: a continued focus on health care policy and a plan “to restore the nation to a sustainable fiscal trajectory over the five-to-10- year window.”
The next step on health care, he said, is a set of “changes to Medicare and Medicaid to make them more efficient, and to start using those programs more intelligently to lead the whole health care system.”
With a growing body of research finding some practices more cost-effective than others, the program’s reimbursement rules can be used to force changes at those hospitals — a sort of back door to health care reform.
“Medicare and Medicaid are big enough to change the way medicine is practiced,” he said.

This suggests steps to link health care cost containment to a major shift towards adoption of medical best practices, including outcome-based medicine, chronic disease management, and prevention, all big preoccupations of Orszag when he ran the Congressional Budget Office.
So: a move towards universal health care in a budget that will reflect widespread fears over the fiscal implications of the stimulus package? Yes, because of the vast implications of medical cost containment for the federal budget.
The Obama administration’s focus on convincing Americans that universal health care will actually save money over the long run is likely to be a central feature of next week’s “fiscal responsibility summit,” which has been advertised as a first step towards “entitlement reform.” As Jonathan Cohn explained at The Treatment blog yesterday, progressives fearing some sort of change-Social-Security agenda should calm down; the “summit” will largely be about Medicare and health care costs.
As Ben Smith notes, next week will be a really big week for Peter Orszag. Comprehensive health care reform foundered in the 1990s in part because Americans weren’t convinced that the status quo would wind up being far more expensive and less reliable. Making that case again, and more effectively, will be very important for the administration and the country.

At OpenLeft today, Chris Bowers asks a good question: is it more attractive, on balance, for a politician like, say, Kathleen Sebelius or Janet Napolitano, to accept a position in the Cabinet as opposed to continuing as governor or running for the U.S. Senate?
Chris, who admits he was disappointed by Napolitano’s decision to become Secretary of DHS and is ready to be disappointed if Sebelius becomes Secretary of HHS, mainly because he views both women as the best available Senate candidates in their states, nonetheless comes up with a list of reasons for instead getting Lost in the Cabinet.
It’s a perfectly good list that mainly focuses on what a risky and difficult chore it is to run for statewide office, but I do think he misses a couple of pertinent points.
For one thing, 2009 is a historically bad time to be a governor, particularly in states like Arizona and Kansas with Republican-controlled legislatures. The pressure to cut services or raise taxes (the latter very difficult in a conservative state) is enormous, even with the help now on the way via the economic stimulus package. And both Napolitano and Sebelius are term-limited after next year, so neither could run for another term in the hopes of better economic times.
For another thing, you shouldn’t conflate gubernatorial and senatorial gigs as “statewide offices.” Governors, even in bad times, typically wield a lot of power. They have thousands of state employees ultimately reporting to them; don’t really have to answer to anyone other than the law and the public; and can make news pretty much whenever they want. They also get a free place to live, usually a very nice one with state-paid help.
A Senator is one of a hundred preening narcissists. A freshman has little real influence. Staffs are tiny by state government standards, and turnover is heavy. The solons are invariably subordinate to the party leadership and various committee and subcomittee chairs. And you have to maintain not one but two homes at your own expense, and live a bifurcated existence of shuttling between Washington and your home state (otherwise you are “losing touch”). There’s a good reason most Senators are independently wealthy before running for office. And I’m always surprised when political observers are surprised that this or that sitting or former governor doesn’t choose to “move up” to the Senate. It’s clearly a demotion.
Finally, being a Democrat running for Senate in a red state like Arizona or Kansas isn’t the same as running for governor. Senatorial campaigns are almost invariably nationalized and polarized, unlike gubernatorial campaigns where manifest executive abilities and state/local issue configurations can give Democrats in conservative areas a fighting chance.
So nobody should really be that astonished that even a screwed-up agency like DHS looked like an attractive challenge to the very competent Janet Napolitano, or that Kathleen Sebelius might prefer to play a role in an administration that could revolutionize the American system of health care. The alternatives really weren’t that seductive.