This article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Often, economic crises are caused by real physical problems – like draught, war, demography, or technological innovation that robs one economy of a competitive advantage over another.
Other times, economic crises result when asset bubbles burst, or financial markets collapse. That was the case of the Great Depression – and more recently the Great Recession.
The economic crisis of the moment – the “fiscal cliff” – does not result from any of these factors. In fact it is not a real “economic crisis” at all, except that it could inflict serious economic hardship on many Americans and could drive the economy back into recession.
The “fiscal cliff” is a politically manufactured crisis. It was original concocted by the Republican Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell as a way to get past the last crisis manufactured by the Republicans – the 2011 standoff over increasing the Federal Debt Ceiling.
Theoretically, “the cliff” – composed of increased taxes and huge, indiscriminant cuts in Federal programs – would be so frightening to policy makers that no one would ever consider allowing the nation to jump.
Now, America is on the brink of diving off the cliff for one and only one reason: many House Republicans are terrified of primary challenges from the Tea Party right.
That’s right, if your tax bill goes up $2,200 a year, or you’re one of the millions who would stop receiving unemployment benefits, the cause of your economic pain is not some a natural disaster, or a major structural flaw in the economy. The cause is Republican fear of being beaten in a primary by people like Sarah Palin, Sharon Angel or Richard Mourdock – funded by far Right Wing oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers. It’s that simple.
Most normal Americans will have very little patience with Republicans as they begin to realize that GOP Members of Congress are willing to risk throwing the country back into a recession because they are worried about being beaten in low turn out primaries by people who do a better job than they do appealing to the extreme right fringe of the American electorate – and to the far Right plutocrats that are all too willing to stoke right wing passion and anger.
Nate Silver, of the New York Time’s 538.com, argues in a recent column that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is the increasing polarization of the American electorate. That polarization translates in to fewer truly “swing” Congressional seats and an increasing number where Members are more concerned with primary challenges than they are with losing in a general election. He concludes that at this moment the number of solidly Republican seats is larger the number of solidly Democratic seats.
This, he argues is partially a result of redistricting by Republican legislatures that packed Democrats into a limited number of districts in many states. But he also contends it results from increasing polarization of the electorate in general. And it is due to the fact that solidly Democratic urban areas have very high concentrations of Democrats, where Republican performing areas tend to have relatively lower concentrations of Republicans. These reasons help explain why, even though Democrats got more votes in House races this cycle than Republicans, Republicans still have more seats in the House.
Increased political polarization in the United States is not a result of some accident or act of God. In 2006, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Kevin T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal published a study of political polarization called Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Their study found that there is a direct relationship between economic inequality and polarization in American politics.
They measured political polarization in congressional votes over the last century, and found a direct correlation with the percentage of income received by the top 1% of the electorate. It is no accident that the years following the second World War, a period of low political polarization, was also a period that economist Paul Krugman refers to as the “great compression” — with robust economic growth for most Americans and reducing levels of economic inequality. In other words, it turns out that if you want less political polarization, the best medicine is reducing income inequality.
Of course, one of the other major factors feeding the GOP fear of primaries is that, because of the Citizens United decision, far right plutocrats can now inject virtually unlimited amounts of money into primary races. Unlimited independent expenditures have so far been much more successful in unseating incumbent Republican Members of Congress than it has been winning General Elections.
In the end, of course the relatively more diluted presence of Republicans in Republican districts – and the country’s changing demographics — may allow Democrats to win many currently Republican seats. What’s more, Republican near term concern about primary challenges – and the stridency it breeds — may alienate increasing numbers of moderate Republican leading independents. We’ve already seen this effect in the Presidential and Senate races and it would not be surprising that by 2014 many of the primary obsessed Republican incumbents are hoisted on their own petard in the General Election. Just ask Tea Party Members of Congress who were defeated in 2012, like Alan West and Joe Walsh. But in the near term, at least, there is also no question that many occupants of Republican seats appear far more concerned with primary challenges than they are with general elections.
If House Speaker Boehner is to be successful passing any form of compromise to avoid the “fiscal cliff” – either before the end of the year or after – he will need to convince Republican Members of the House that he is doing them a favor by bringing a bill the floor that can pass even with many Republicans voting no. That, of course requires that the deal is good enough to allow many Democrats to vote yes.

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At The Guardian UK, Harry J Enten illuminates “How polarisation in Washington affects a growing feeling of partisanship” with some interesting data analysis. Enten begins by commenting on a recent Nate Silver blogpost:

The basic premise of Silver’s article is that House districts have been more polarized of late. That is to say, there are fewer swing districts. In addition, fewer districts are voting for one party for House and another for president…The conclusion one might draw is that many legislators have little reason to play to the middle, and that’s why Washington seems more partisan than it used to be.

Enten then cites presidential election figures from a New York Times article by Adam Liptak, which indicated that “…in 1976, there were near 25 states that came within three points of the nationwide margin and well over 30 that were within five points of the nationwide vote. In 2012, it was eight states within three points of the nationwide margin and 10 within five points.” Enten adds, that in November 2012, however, “there were only 14 states out of 50 where the statewide margin came within 10 points of the nationwide margin!”
In terms of the U.S. Senate, the consequences have been more than substantial:

This increased polarization has translated to the Senate makeup. After the 1992 elections, when Republicans won 43 seats, 49% of the Democratic caucus came from states that voted more Republican than the country as a whole, while about 28% of the Republican caucus came from states where Bill Clinton won by a greater margin than he did nationwide. After the 2012 elections, in which Republicans won a slightly higher 45 seats than 1992, only 25% of the Democratic caucus comes from states where Obama underperformed his national margin, and only 16% of the Republican caucus comes from states Obama won by a greater margin than he did nationally.
…You would think that House Democrats may have become more liberal over the past 20 years, given that they are increasingly safe districts. In 1992, only 51% of the Democratic caucus came from seats that were five points or more Democratic than the nationwide presidential vote. In 2012, 88% of Democrats came from districts won by Obama by five points or more – a 37-point increase.

Using data crunched by Christopher Hare, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in their Voteview Blog paper, “Polarization is Real (and Asymmetric),” Enten tracks roll call votes to see how these numbers are reflected in partisanship in congress, using the “DW nominate score method,” which puts legislators on a scale from -1 for most liberal to 1 for most conservative. The chart and numbers he presents indicate that,

Interestingly, the scores don’t indicate that House Democrats have really become any more liberal….There has, however, been an increase in partisanship in the house, and it truly is “asymmetrical”. The Republican House caucus has been becoming more conservative every year since 1977, whether or not House Republicans are winning or losing elections. Republicans have climbed from 0.4 on the DW nominate scales after the 1992 elections to near 0.7 in the last congress. That type of charge towards polarization is historically unusual over data that stretches back 130 years.
The fact that it is House Republicans who have become more partisan is somewhat surprising given that the party caucus is representing only slightly more Republican territory than it did 20 years ago. The percentage of Republicans representing seats that went for the Republican presidential candidate by five or more points than nationwide only increased from 74% to 90% – a 16-point increase. That is far less than the 37-point increase that House Democrats, who aren’t much more partisan than used to be, experienced during the same timeframe.

Enten goes on to note a parallel effect with respect to the U.S. Senate — not much change among Democrats, but,

Republicans, on the other hand, have slowly and become more conservative in their roll call votes by moving from about 0.3 to 0.5 on the scale. You might expect this trend given Republicans are representing more Republican leaning states, but the magnitude is quite noticeable given that the average Democratic ideology during the same period didn’t move under polarization.

In addition to roll call votes, Enten explains:

The number of cloture motions since the Democrats took over the Senate in 2007 is 391, an average of 130 per Senate. It would take the last six Senates combined before 2007, that is to say those from 1995 through 2007) to match this total. In the final Senate before the Republicans took over in 1995, there were 80 cloture motions…It’s not just that Republicans aren’t allowing bills to be voted upon in an up-or-down vote, it’s that they are blocking bills in far greater numbers than they did 20 years ago.
When Democrats were in the minority for of the 1995 to 2007 time period, the most cloture motions that were filed in a Senate was 82. Since 2007, the fewest number of clotures in a Senate has been 115. The average number per Senate when Democrats were in the minority was 70 – some 50 less than when Republicans were in the minority the past six years.

The data is just overwhelming. As Enten concludes, “Yes, Democrats block bills, but Republicans block many more. This is gridlock at its finest (or worst)…the feeling that Democrats and Republicans are further apart than they used to be is upon inspection of the evidence more because of Republicans than Democrats.”
The challenge for Democrats is to distill these findings into memorable message points that connect with average voters.

Ari Berman, Sam Stein and Steve Kornacki conduct an informative discussion with Sen. Jeff Merkley at MSNBC’s ‘NOW with Alex Wagner.’ Dems don’t yet seem to have the 51 votes needed for filibuster reform, or at least the “talking filibuster” Merkley is proposing in the clip below. Even some liberal Democratic Senators have reservations about changing the current filibuster rule, no doubt because they may wish they had it back, if the Republicans take control again — and Dems have an unusually-large number of seats they now hold up in 2014, compared to Republicans (20 vs 13). Still, as Majority Leader Harry Reid says in the clip below, he has faced 386 filibusters compared to 1 for Lyndon Johnson, when he was Majority Leader. Something needs to be done.

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You probably knew that Speaker John Boehner faces a tricky math problem in assembling a House coalition of Democrats and reasonable Republicans in passing a bill that would avert a fiscal crisis. For a peek at how difficult is this challlenge for the incoming congress, check out Nate Silver’s FiveThirty Eight.com post, “In House of Representatives, an Arithmetic Problem,” which explains:

… The new House of Representatives will have 233 Republicans and 200 Democrats. Two seats remain vacant, which means that 217 of 433 votes will be required to pass a bill. Of the 233 Republicans, 51 will be members of the Tea Party Caucus, give or take a few depending on which first-term members of Congress join the coalition. The other 182 are what I will call Establishment Republicans….It seems clear that Mr. Boehner lacks the confidence of roughly three dozen Republican members of the House, and possibly more.
Say that Mr. Boehner cannot count on the support of 34 of his Republicans when it comes to passing major fiscal policy legislation. That means he would need to identify 18 Democrats who would vote along with the Republicans who remained with him.
Here’s the problem: it might be hard to round up those 18 Democrats…The reason is that most of the Democrats who remain in the House are quite liberal.
…What that means is that if Mr. Boehner has a significant number of Republican defections, as he did on Thursday night, he will need to win the support of at least some liberal Democrats. And a bill that wins the support of some liberal Democrats will be an even harder sell to Mr. Boehner’s Republicans. For each vote that he picks up from the left, he could risk losing another from his right flank.

Given Boehner’s ‘Plan B’ fiasco, argues Silver, “this arithmetic problem could turn out to be intractable at some point.”
None of which should engender much sympathy for Boehner, whose militant lack of bipartisanship thus far has been a huge part of the problem all along. Silver doesn’t discuss the option alluded to by TNR’s Noam Sheiber and J.P. Green, of a coalition of House Dems joined by a small handful of Republicans, perhaps with good reason, since it is a long shot. If any coalition is forged which prevents going off the cliff, it will more likely be in spite of Boehner’s ‘leadership,’ rather than because of it.

Writing in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ in the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira reveals the clarity of the public’s opinions about the issues being negotiated in the “fiscal showdown.” As Teixeira explains, “As an extensive, just-released Pew Research Center poll makes clear, the key priorities for the public can be summed up as:”

Raise tax rates on those who can afford it.
Don’t raise the Medicare or Social Security eligibility ages.
Don’t cut spending in critical areas such as education, transportation, and aid to the poor.

And the data couldn’t be more clear, as Teixeira continues:

In the Pew poll, an overwhelming majority (69 percent to 28 percent) said we should raise the income tax rate on those making $250,000 or more to help close the deficit. The public also endorsed raising the tax rate on investment income by 52 percent to 43 percent.
The same poll showed the public opposed raising the Medicare eligibility age (56 percent to 41 percent) or the Social Security eligibility age (56 percent to 42 percent).
Finally, the public massively opposed reducing federal funding for education to reduce the deficit by a margin of 77 percent to 21 percent. They also opposed reducing federal funding for roads and transportation (67 percent to 30 percent) and opposed reducing federal funding for low-income assistance programs (58 percent to 38 percent)

In light of the dramatic disconnect between congress and the citizens they represent thus far, adds Teixeira, “The solution to the fiscal showdown is not yet clear. But the public’s priorities on that solution are. Let’s hope policymakers are paying attention.”

President Obama and Democrats should be encouraged by a new CNN/ORC International poll, which underscores how little leverage the Republicans have at this political moment. Here are a couple of the results, which spell trouble ahead for the GOP:
Asked “Do you have more confidence in President Obama or in the Republicans in Congress to deal with the major issues facing the country today?,” 49 percent said President Obama, compared to just 31 percent for ‘Republicans in congress.’
Responding to the question, “If the two parties can develop bipartisan solutions to the country’s problems, which party do you think should give up more of the proposals it supports — the Democratic party or the Republican party?,” 53 percent said the Republican party, compared to 41 percent for Democrats. And 53 percent also said that the Republican Party was “too extreme,” with 43 percent saying the GOP was “generally mainstream.”
In addition 52 percent said they disapproved of “the way John Boehner is handling his job as Speaker of the House?,” with only 34 percent expressing approval. The speaker and his fellow Republicans haven’t yet shown much regard for how the public feels about their extremist politics. But the tide of public resentment seems to be rising, and their obstructionist strategy may not be able to survive much longer.

Jamelle Bouie’s post, “Why the next four years might be more of the same” at Greg Sargent’s ‘Plumline’ sketches a fairly discouraging scenario for the remainder of President Obama’s term. As Bouie explains:

…None of the incentives have changed for Republicans, meaning they still have no reason to cooperate with the President. In other words: The next four years may be largely the same as the last four.
The GOP’s current behavior is out of sync with the public’s priorities, as expressed in the election, where solid majorities reelected President Obama and sent more Democrats to the Senate. But that likely won’t matter to Republicans, because the odds are good that in the end they won’t incur public discontent for failing to cooperate. As the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey shows, there’s a strong disconnect between how Americans view the president, and how they view the question of whether he has a mandate to carry out his agenda.

And despite President Obama’s otherwise impressive poll numbers, “56 percent say Obama does not have “a mandate to carry out the agenda he presented during the presidential campaign,” but rather should “compromise on things the Republicans strongly oppose” in the latest WaPo/ABC News survey, reports Bouie.
Bouie faults the public’s lazy assumption that “If both sides support something, it’s probably good. But if one side vocally opposes a measure, there must be something suspect — either the policy is bad, or the other side is not trying to meet the concerns of the offended party.” Further,

Congressional Republicans use this dynamic to great effect during Obama’s first term, and successfully portrayed his administration as hopelessly partisan. But this also has important implications for the next year of policy making. Republicans still want to weaken Obama’s presidency, and so the basic dynamic of his first term is still in effect. Take, for instance, immigration reform. If Obama tackles immigration reform from the left — or even the center — he will receive significant Republican pushback, if only because presidents polarize disputes they step into. And the mere fact of that pushback may sour the public on his package, even if they’re sensible reforms.

If Bouie is right, however, this will likely firm up the Latino vote for Democrats. And there may be a limit to how much more Republican obstruction the public can stomach, before it becomes obvious that GOP unwillingness to compromise is the real problem. But it seems likely that Bouie is correct that the Republicans will test the outer limits of public tolerance.