As some of you may know, Sen. John Kerry held a hearing yesterday about the future of newspapers, and it became something of a debate between traditional print journalists and online news aggregators (Arianne Huffington being there as the big symbol of the latter).
By all accounts, Kerry tried to hold a fair hearing, even though he was clearly motivated by the continuing near-death experiences of his hometown paper, the Boston Globe.
But probably the most interesting moment occurred when David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who is credited as being the creator of HBO’s show “The Wire,” sardonically observed:

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.

Simon’s quip reflects the oft-repeated suggestion that online journalism can’t possibly replicate the essential role played by newspapers in covering and policing state and local governments.
This argument was best expressed in a wonderfully-lucid article by Paul Starr that appeared in The New Republic in March. In Starr’s account, robust coverage of state and local politics and government by major newspapers was a luxury made possible by their monopoly positions and huge profits:

Insofar as newspapers have upheld a public-service vision, they have been engaged in cross-subsidy, using their profitable lines of business, such as the classifieds, to pay for news coverage that probably would have been hard to justify on a narrower view of return on investment. Especially in recent decades, when newspapers were cash cows, their owners could afford to pursue public-service journalism, and some of them did (others just milked their papers for all they were worth).

As profits have declined, so has coverage of state and local governments, and so far, says Starr, the internet has not supplied a substitute in the way that is has for other areas of reduced investment, like national and international news. Thus, the argument goes, we may be in for an era of increased corruption as governors, legislators, mayors and county commissioners evade journalistic scrutiny.
That all makes good sense, but the problem with this “watchdog” idea about traditional big-city regional papers is that many of the dogs have long been asleep. As Starr himself notes, some newspaper barons felt a civic obligation to cover state and local affairs, while others didn’t. Moreover, the corporate media chains that have bought up so many of the regional papers have rarely made good state and local coverage a priority, even as they inculcated a footloose attitude among their best reporters who moved “up the chain.” I’d have to say that in my home town of Atlanta, there have been long stretches of time over the last few decades, and long before the advent of online journalism, when coverage of state and local government by that city’s monopoly newspaper was so bad that it was arguably worse than nothing. Indeed, some regional papers have, ironically, improved their state-local coverage, or at least the quantity of it, in online editions because of their greater flexibility of the format.
None of these ruminations are intended to deny the genuine dilemma of how to finance journalism in the internet age beyond a handful of national newspapers. There may well be, as Starr implies, a built-in demand-side problem in that nobody’s willing to pay what state and local coverage actually costs. It’s a shame we can’t replicate the apparently successful business model of Politico, wherein a vast online readership is subsidized by crazy ads rates charged for access to a tiny but extremely influential print edition, but that’s a unique product of that unique city, Washington, DC.
But in looking clearly at the difficult future for journalism, we shouldn’t nourish too many myths about newspapers, or at least those that have never done a competent job of covering state and local matters. For one thing, the crisis in regional papers hasn’t necessarily afflicted the small suburban newspapers that hit millions of driveways every week, and that often provide strong local government coverage.
And as Matt Compton pointed out in a post here in March, the nonprofit model of financing online journalism is already showing some promise, as in the Center for Independent Media, which is supporting not only the up-and-coming Washington Independent, but online sites in five states. And there are all sorts of freelance folk around the country playing the state-and-local watchdog role, albeit on a shoestring and sometimes without respecting canons of High Journalism. I will assert that online journalists and bloggers (including the AJC’s excellent Jim Galloway) are probably providing better coverage of Georgia politics and government than anything I recall reading in the salad days of the Atlanta papers’ monopoly print edition.
So there’s certainly enough hope out there, and in many cities, enough of a longstanding vacuum, to avoid the conclusion that state and local politicians are going to get any more of a free ride from journalists than they’ve ever had.

Right after expressing contempt towards Kellyanne Conway’s pity party for poor, persecuted Sarah Palin, I ran across an article by the Boston Globe‘s Joan Vennochi that comes at the supposed victimization of the Alaska governor from a different angle. Palin’s getting attention, she suggests, because everybody loves to make fun of her, even though they know she has no national political future:

The Alaska governor is everyone’s favorite foil, from the left-wing Huffington Post to the ever-posturing Mitt Romney. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee who cynically chose her as his running mate, now snubs her with relish.
They all act like she has a real chance to win the White House, when they all know the truth. When it comes to be taken seriously by the general electorate as a potential president, it’s as over for her as it was for Dan Quayle.
Quayle was doomed even after he served four years as vice president. He was the proverbial heartbeat away from the first President Bush, but could never overcome the perception that he lacked gravitas.
Palin only ran for vice president; she never made it from Wasilla to Washington. And her political problem is bigger than Quayle’s, because it extends to her family.

I realize that early critics of Palin’s gaffes often made the facile Quayle comparison. But aside from the obvious vast differences in background and bearing (whether you consider Palin’s “class background” a handicap, or, as I do, an asset, it’s nothing like that of the classic Son of Privilege from Indiana), Palin has a real and abiding political base, and Quayle never did. As Vennochi herself acknowledges after treating Quayle as a once-hot political commodity comparable to Palin, the Alaskan remains the darling of the Cultural Right, and had the lead in an early sounding of Republican sentiment about the 2012 presidential nomination.
Quayle had a brief moment of conservative approbation after his famous “Murphy Brown” remarks criticizing single motherhood, but when he ran for president in 2000, he was toast from the very beginning, finishing eighth–eighth!–in the quadrennial Ames Straw Poll of Iowa Republicans that serves as the first test of candidate viability. Long before then, of course, the entire conservative movement, including both its Washington and right-wing-cultural-populist elements, had lined up behind George W. Bush as its champion against the dangerously independent-sounding John McCain.
Maybe Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee or Bobby Jindal or somebody we’re not thinking about can wrest the movement-conservative baton away from Palin between now and 2012, but all of the above-named worthies have their own problems, and Palin’s displacement ain’t happened yet.
At present, Palin’s biggest political problem isn’t media mockery or a Quayle-like deficit in “gravitas,” but the fact that her approval rating among the people she governs in Alaska is dropping like a rock. I don’t think we can blame that on elitist media or Tina Fey.
Meanwhile, the persistent treatment of Palin as some sort of brave and suffering St. Joan of the Tundra by conservative and some mainstream media probably builds a floor under her national appeal to Republicans. So long as they love her, the rest of us have every reason to take her as seriously as she takes herself.

David Wiegel of The Washington Independent has a good article up providing an introduction to the conservative network that will lead the charge against President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, whoever she or he turns out to be.
As Weigel explains, this fight will occur even if there is zero chance that the Senate will actually reject Obama’s nominee:

Movement conservatives are in a position to oppose the nomination of almost any nominee that the president puts forward. In conversation with TWI, activists portrayed the coming confirmation hearings as a chance to peel the bark off of the president’s bipartisan image, to unite the conservative movement, and to learn lessons for future hearings with higher stakes. Few imagined that the president could get a much more liberal pick than retiring Justice David Souter through the Senate. Their focus was not so much on defeating this pick — an incredibly difficult task with only 40 Republican senators — but on carving out an election issue for the 2010 midterms and on building capital for a theoretical future battle to replace one of the court’s conservatives.

There’s more in the piece about score-settling by conservative judicial activists who want to punish Democrats for alleged unfair treatment of the judicial nominees of the sainted George W. Bush; this is, after all, a career gig for a lot of these folks, some of whom cut their teeth back in the Bork era.
It wouldn’t be an article about conservative activists without at least one howler of a remark, and it was offered up by Kellyanne Conway, the sorta-kinda pollster and veteran television presence who’s now part of the GOP’s judicial agitprop ministry. Mentioning the high likelihood that Obama’s first Court nominee will be a woman, Conway complained:

“Can you imagine any of Obama’s nominees being treated the way that Sarah Palin and her family were treated by the media?” asked Conway. “It’s ‘interesting,’ as they say in Washington. Gender and class ended up being a huge obstacle for one person, and they’re likely to be a huge boost to this person that Barack Obama selects.”

Wow, talk about drinking your own kool-aid. Does Conway really think Sarah Palin’s gender was a “huge obstacle” to her success, compared, say, to what she said?
Amazing how yesterday’s talking points become instant history.

Kris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Stuidies Facing South web page takes on the “GOP is a regional party of the south” meme being parroted in the msm and blogosphere, and he makes a persuasive case that it is overstated, if not a facile generalization.
Kromm points out that 56 percent of House of Reps Republicans come from non-south states and “the three states where Obama did the worst weren’t in the South; they were Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.” Kromm adds that, in terms of political party self-i.d., the South has about 5 percent more Republicans than does the N.E., 1 percent more than the midwest and 3 percent more than the far west — hardly an overwhelming gap, especially considering both margins of error and the fact that the South is becomming more demographically-diverse every day. Kromm also provides a list of the “Top Ten Republican States” in terms of party self-i.d. (based on Gallup’s 2008 data) indicating only 2 of the top nine GOP states are in the South, AL and SC, with a three-way tie for the #10 spot between MS, SD and ND.
He could have also added that Democratic senators, governors, mayors and state legislators are competitive and holding offices in healthy numbers across the region. In an era when an African American progressive Democrat can win the electoral votes of two of the South’s largest states, the meme seems a bit outdated. Other than political campaign TV and radio ad-buys, what’s the practical use of making broad, regional generalizations about political opinion anyway?

Frank Luntz has resurfaced, after a long deep whale-dive into relative political obscurity. Luntz didn’t really disappear. He’s just been in a low-visibility mode since the election. He remains one of the more thoughtful GOP rhetorical strategists. So when he pops off, it’s worth a listen.
In a Luntz memo obtained by and published in Politico, he outlines a GOP battle plan for killing Obama’s health care reform goals. From the Politico report:

You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of REFORM,” Luntz advises in a confidential 26-page report obtained from Capitol Hill Republicans. “The status quo is no longer acceptable. If the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this document is useless.

Starts out lucidly enough. But then he heads south, as Politico reveals:

Instead, Luntz says Republicans should warn against a “Washington takeover” of health care, and insist that patients would have to “stand in line” with “Washington bureaucrats in charge of healthcare.”

Then with the fear-mongering cliches:

And he suggests they steer constituents toward keep the “current arrangement by asking at “every healthcare town hall forum”: “Would you rather … ‘Pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive,’ OR ‘Pay less for your care, but potentially have to wait weeks for tests and months for treatments you need.’”

And,

—“It could lead to the government setting standards of care, instead of doctors who really know what’s best.”
—“It could lead to the government rationing care, making people stand in line and denying treatment like they do in other countries with national healthcare.”
-“President Obama wants to put the Washington bureaucrats in charge of healthcare. I want to put the medical professionals in charge, and I want patients as an equal partner.”

Luntz’s memo is not all the same, tired palaver, voters turned their backs on a long time ago. He’s got some interesting tips on verbiage:

…Humanize your approach. Abandon and exile ALL references to the “healthcare system.” From now on, healthcare is about people. Before you speak, think of the three components of tone that matter most: Individualize. Personalize. Humanize.

And diabolically-clever:

Acknowledge the “crisis” or suffer the consequences. If you say there is no healthcare crisis, you give your listener permission to ignore everything else you say. It is a credibility killer for most Americans. A better approach is to define the crisis in your terms. “If you’re one of the millions who can’t afford healthcare, it is a crisis.” Better yet, “If some bureaucrat puts himself between you and your doctor, denying you exactly what you need, that’s a crisis.” And the best: “If you have to wait weeks for tests and months for treatment, that’s a healthcare crisis.”
…Nothing else turns people against the government takeover of healthcare than the realistic expectation that it will result in delayed and potentially even denied treatment, procedures and/or medications. “Waiting to buy a car or even a house won’t kill you. But waiting for the healthcare you need – could. Delayed care is denied care.”

Fear-mongering can be an art form, I guess. Then there is the inevitable blanket government-bashing:

…WASTE, FRAUD, and ABUSE are your best targets for how to bring down costs. Make no mistake: the high cost of healthcare is still public enemy number one on this issue – and why so many Americans (including Republicans and conservatives) think the Democrats can handle healthcare better than the GOP. You can’t blame it on the lack of a private market; in case you missed it, capitalism isn’t exactly in vogue these days. But you can and should blame it on the waste, fraud, and abuse that is rampant in anything and everything the government controls.

Not sure that dog will hunt like in the good ole days, back when Newt ruled. And for the finale, what passes for the health care “vision thing” in GOP circles:

It’s not enough to just say what you’re against. You have to tell them what you’re for. It’s okay (and even necessary) for your campaign to center around why this healthcare plan is bad for America. But if you offer no vision for what’s better for America, you’ll be relegated to insignificance at best and labeled obstructionist at worst. What Americans are looking for in healthcare that your “solution” will provide is, in a word, more: “more access to more treatments and more doctors…with less interference from insurance companies and Washington politicians and special interests.”

As much as this stuff strains credulity, it’s about the best ammo they have. For better or worse, Luntz is the GOP’s master wordsmith, if Huckabee is the go-to quipster. Dems would do well to take note of Luntz’s recommendations and be ready with sharp responses when his verbiage starts to appear in the GOP echo chamber, as it surely will.

As he is wont, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com has done exhaustive research on the impact of both successful and unsuccessful Supreme Court appointments on the approval ratings of presidents going all the way back to Eisenhower, and concluded there’s not much evidence such appointments pose a major political risk. The single biggest drop in approval ratings a president has experienced from the announcement to the disposal of a Supreme Court nomination was by George W. Bush (10 points) after the successful Roberts nomination. But this transpired between July 20 and September 29 in 2005, and as you may recall, there was some bad weather on the Gulf Coast during that period.
It’s also worth remembering that some appointments are controversial but others aren’t, and the former tend to make impressions more than the latter, whether they are successful or not. And these controversies tend to coincide with major political sea-changes, whether they are immediately evident or not.
The first fire-hanging Court nomination in the era Nate is assessing was that of Abe Fortas by LBJ, which occurred late in Johnson’s only full term in office; Republicans filibustered it in the hopes of a change of administration, and the president admitted defeat and withdrew it. Nixon’s failed appointments of two conservative southerners–Clement Haynsworth and Harold Carswell–in 1969 and 1970 were major signposts of his Southern Strategy, and probably helped him as much in the South as successful appointments would have. Reagan’s failed Bork appointment didn’t affect his approval ratings, but did inaugurate, via Bork’s provocatively ideological record and the reaction to it, a new era of bitterly contested confirmations. Bush 41’s nomination of Clarence Thomas was notable not just because it sparked the most contentious confirmation fight ever, but because it represented an overdue mortgage payment by the president to the Cultural Right, which was bitterly unhappy with previous GOP appointees O’Conner and Souter. The social-conservative veto on Republican Court appointments was confirmed by the forced withdrawal of Harriet Miers, and substitution of Samuel Alito, by Bush 43.
So Nate may well be right that Court appointments don’t of themselves represent major political peril for most presidents. But they do sometimes have a big impact, or portend bigger trends. And I also wouldn’t conclude from the polling data that the public never cares about these things, even if they are usually an elite preoccupation. I was working in the U.S. Senate during the Clarence Thomas confirmation fight, and I can tell you that the outpouring of violently expressed public opinion on the subject was way off the charts. It seemed everyone had an opinion, very strongly held.
The Thomas fight, of course, galvanized public opinion because it cast a harsh light on the previously submerged issue of sexual harassment and the vicious treatment often accorded victims in such cases (in case you don’t remember this, a senator from Pennsylvania named Specter was the chief mocker and tormenter of alleged victim Anita Hill). But you never quite know when something similar could happen again. If, for example, Barack Obama were to appoint an openly gay or lesbian Justice, I think the Christian Right might have a collective nervous breakdown, and force Republicans to confirm or refute their claim that they favor equal treatment for gays and lesbians, short of marriage and maybe combat roles in the military.

As I noted a week ago, the Supreme Court has taken up a case from Texas that could undermine or overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 is the provision that requires Justice Department “preclearance” of changing in voting procedures or districts to ensure that they do not dilute minority voting influence, mostly for jurisdictions in the South. The VRA was extended by Congress with few changes in 2006, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote, despite some preliminary conservative rumbling about major revisions, particularly with respect to the preclearance requirement.
Adam Serwer of The American Prospect explains in a recent article that comments by Justices Roberts, Alito and Kennedy during oral arguments in the present case raise some pretty strong suspicions that the Court could mess with Section 5, on the familiar grounds that the preclearance requirement is obsolete in its treatment of the South:

During the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, however, ongoing discrimination against minority voters took a backseat to the question of whether Section 5 discriminates against the South as a region. Gregory Coleman, arguing on behalf of the Northwest Austin Municipal District, said the evidence did “not justify a presumption that state and local officials in these areas are so racist that they cannot be relied on to pass and enforce fair voting laws.” The subsequent discussion was then framed by Coleman’s statement. Rather than being an evaluation of the ongoing need for voting protections, the case seemed to become a referendum on whether or not Southerners are still racist.
“Is it your position that today Southerners are more likely to discriminate than northerners?” Chief Justice Roberts asked the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Debo Adegbile, who was arguing in favor of the government’s position. Both Adegbile and Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal were repeatedly put in this position — whenever they cited the empirical evidence for ongoing discrimination, the conservative jurists on the court demanded to know whether they were casting aspersions on the South.

This “so’s your old man” argument that white southerners are no more racist than their yankee brethren has always been at the heart of southern conservative complaints about the VRA. Indeed, once they stopped opposing the VRA in its entirety, their next stop was to demand expansion of the preclearance requirement to the entire country. And as Serwer notes, this construction of distinctive racial problems in the South as being ancient history–and of concern about it being a sort of latter-day bloody flag–may have been reinforced by the general conservative argument that Barack Obama’s election as president means that the civil rights movement has achieved its purposes and needs to go away.
In a good, brief legal analysis of the oral arguments over the Section 5 challenge, Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center (which filed an amicus brief in the case) expresses alarm over the extent to which conservative members of the Court feel entitlement to second-guess the fact-finding power of Congress to determine that voting rights discrimination in the South justifies a continuation of the preclearance requirement:

Whether Congress could have written a different or even better Voting Rights Act in 2006—making pre-clearance voluntary for the entire nation (as suggested by Justice Scalia) or extending pre-clearance requirements to jurisdictions not previously covered (as Justices Alito and Kennedy seemed to find intriguing)—is thus the wrong inquiry. Here, Congress held 21 hearings, interviewed more than 90 witnesses, amassed a 15,000 page record, and found that jurisdictions required to pre-clear had engaged in thousands of discriminatory electoral practices between 1982 and 2006. This evidence is more than sufficient to support Congress’ extension of the Voting Rights Act under the standard of deference required by the Constitution.

No matter what the Supremes do in this case, there’s no question that in the court of public opinion there are plenty of white folks north and south who’d like to put all these messy racial questions behind us once and for all. As a white southerner who has spent a lot of time outside that region, I understand the resentment many feel about the hypocrisy involved in attributing racially discriminatory motives to us crackers exclusively (though there are VRA remedies other than preclearance for challenging voting rights violations outside the South).
But southerners do have to face their own history honestly, and get over the resentment. When will it be appropriate to stop presuming that voting rights violations might be especially prevalent in the former Confederate States? I’d say that fine day will arrive when there’s no longer a large cohort of living Americans who can remember being denied the right to vote altogether, along with the right to attend integrated schools or sit alongside white folks in restaurants or movies theaters or buses. That was a lot more humiliating than the current indignity of having to run voting changes through some lawyers at the Justice Department.

I realize I’m writing too much about Republican foibles this week, and I also understand that making fun of Joe the Plumber is like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. But, sorry, I can’t help but recommend for your reading pleasure an interview with ol’ Joe in none other than Christianity Today, the venerable evangelical publication. It’s a beaut; almost every line is a classic.
Joe’s social policies seem to be based on the idea of peaceful coexistence based on strict segregation: he wants states to determine abortion policy and gay marriage, but allows as how he’d only want to live in a state that bans abortions. And he seems to accept that gay people are “going to do their own thing,” but since they are, after all, “queer,” he doesn’t want them anywhere near his kids. Now you’d think there might be some tension between his concepts of truth and freedom, insofar as he thinks “God is pretty explicit in what we’re supposed to do.” But for Joe, freedom means Christianity, because “the Founding Fathers based the Constitution off of Christian values.” Similarly, his state’s rights view of what should and should not be allowed is based on this insight: “We’ve lost our American history. Every state has ‘In God we trust’ or ‘With God’s help’ in their constitution. God is recognized as, if you will, America’s religion.” That clears it up for me. But probably not for the guy that Joe singles out as an “emerging Christian leader,” one James Dobson.
Now some of Joe’s fans would probably accuse me of sneering elitism in making fun of his pithy thoughts; he is, after all, a regular guy, not some pointy-head with a string of degrees. But I dunno: he’s now a published author, and spends his time trotting around the globe opining on everything in sight. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of plumbing in his life these days. And for that matter, I’ve never noticed him expressing any regrets about being converted into a national celebrity by John McCain, not that he expresses any gratitude either (he’s strictly a Sarah Palin guy these days).
So if Samuel J. Wurzelbacher insists on playing politics and journalism–and now, God help us, even theology–then he’s subject to the same scrutiny and same standards of performance as anybody else.

Just in case progressive Dems needed one more reason to urge Joe Sestak to run in PA’s Democratic Senate primary and tear Arlen Specter a big, new one, TPM‘s Eric Kleefeld has a post quoting Specter in a New York Times Magazine interview: “There’s still time for the Minnesota courts to do justice and declare Norm Coleman the winner.”
Apparently Specter sees himself as a sort of Trojan Horse Democrat, entering as a gift, then doing as much damage on the inside as he can. As Kleefeld asks, “So what exactly are the Dems getting out of this whole deal?”
You couldn’t blame Sestak for balking at taking on Tom Ridge, but if ever he needed a “that does it” clincher to run, here it is.

It is a good thing that some Republicans, though hardly all, have come to the conclusion that their party’s problems are real, and that simply shrieking at Barack Obama and congressional Democrats while policing each other for any signs of heterodoxy isn’t a very effective strategy for making an electoral comeback.
Yes, many conservatives aren’t there yet and may never arrive, as they frantically look around, via slanted poll questions and vast exaggerations of the importance of “tea parties” that the polls somehow don’t pick up, for evidence that they can’t trust their lyin’ eyes about the trouble they are in. Yes, there’s too much quick-fix talks about social networking and grassroots organization that belie an inability to reconsider conservative ideology. Yes, far too many Republicans seem to believe that they can instantly wash their hands of the legacy of George W. Bush, who was somehow imposed on the party by “moderates” or space aliens (he was in fact the chosen and quasi-universal candidate of the conservative movement in 2000, and was nominated for near-divinity by conservatives in 2004). Some even seem to think that Arlen Specter has been the problem all along, and still others seem to have lost their minds and are yammering about secession and nullification like hormone-addled teenagers.
Nonetheless the “official” GOP has launched a National Council For a New America that at least pays lip service to the recognition that Republicans need “innovative solutions” to the challenges that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are working on, instead of simply denying them.
But I have a bit of advice for these Republican “reformers:” you need to take a fresh look at how you understand and describe what Obama and the Democrats are doing before you can offer credible alternatives.
If you look at the NCNA press release, and its vaporous statement of purpose, you will see a lot of nice rhetoric about using non-big-government mechanisms to solve big national problems. What you won’t find is any acknowledgement that Obama has already occupied much of that high ground.
For all the Republican hysteria about Obama trying to usher in “socialized medicine” or “government-run health care,” the fact remains that most Americans under Obama’s plan would continue to buy health insurance from private firms, and would continue to be treated by private-sector providers. Yes, there may or may not be a “public plan” in the competitive mix, but if that’s “socialism,” then perhaps Republicans want to call for the privatization of Medicare.
The same is true of Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal for reducing carbon emissions: it is precisely not a government regulatory effort to dictate to industry how it operates its business; it’s an effort to let markets determine innovative ways to adjust to an energy economy where carbon is priced according to its true costs. And the same is true of education policy, where Obama and most Democrats champion public school choice and competition. Republicans almost never acknowledge that. And then there’s that instrument called the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, which was one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite policy innovations, and a centerpiece of Republican efforts to find an alternative to welfare and support productive work. It’s now the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s tax proposals, and now Republicans are attacking it as “welfare.”
You can get away with some of this sloppy rhetoric and mischaracterization that Republicans continue to embrace, but after a while, it begins to affect your credibility.
And here’s the grand irony: if Republicans keep this up and offer “alternatives” to some fantasy-vision of the socialist extremist Obama, instead of the actual president, the public will indeed have a tendency to dismiss Republicans as offering “Obama Lite,” the terrible fate-worse-than-death that leads some conservatives to oppose the very idea of “alternatives.”
The point here is that you can’t graft an effective policy agenda onto a delusional understanding of public opinion and the opposition. That’s the lesson learned by Democratic reformers of the 1980s and 1990s who argued against a progressive “politics of evasion” that failed to take a realistic look at why Democrats were losing elections.