This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
House Republicans voted on Tuesday to pass a legislative version of “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” one of the newest and most disturbing of the many conservative oaths currently being sworn by large swaths of the GOP. Of course, the bill is not going to be enacted, and for some congressional Republicans, it will just serve as cover for some ultimate debt limit vote that will anger the conservative base. But the “Cut, Cap and Balance” measure explains a lot about the actual priorities of conservatives at a time when they are supposedly fixated on eliminating deficits and debts. Instead of reflecting a concern about balancing the budget, the measure prioritizes a radically limited government agenda at all costs. Its current popular ascendance in Congress will only intensify the already-enormous pressure on Republicans to just say no to any conceivable debt limit increase.
In its original form, as developed by the conservative ideological commissars of the House Republican Study Committee, CCB was a “framework” for budget negotiations, drafted as a list of demands:

103 House Republicans sent a letter to House Republican leadership calling for a solution that could resolve the current debt limit impasse and prevent the bigger, Greece-like debt crisis just over the horizon: Cut, Cap, and Balance.
1. Cut – We must make discretionary and mandatory spending reductions that would cut the deficit in half next year.
2. Cap – We need statutory, enforceable caps to align federal spending with average revenues at 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with automatic spending reductions if the caps are breached.
3. Balance – We must send to the states a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) with strong protections against federal tax increases and a Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) that aligns spending with average revenues as described above.

CCB aroused high hosannas from conservative opinion-leaders, and was heavily promoted by the RSC’s senatorial counterpart, Jim DeMint. It was soon converted into a “pledge” that omitted some of the original proposal’s specifics (i.e., the GDP “triggers”), but added the inflammatory promise to oppose any other approach, including any debt limit increase at all, until such time as Congress had acted favorably on CCB. The pledge was endorsed by a vast array of conservative advocacy groups, and was pushed especially hard on GOP presidential candidates, who were loath to offend DeMint in advance of next year’s potentially crucial South Carolina primary. By the time Michele Bachmann signed it on Monday (she initially refused on grounds of her own categorical opposition to any debt limit increase), every 2012 wannabee other than Jon Huntsman had signaled their commitment to the cause.
Meanwhile, of course, Republicans in Congress devised a legislative version of CCB, which passed the House last night by a vote of 234 to 190. It’s arguably a bit milder than the original proposal, as it exempts Social Security and Medicare from immediate cuts and phases in the GDP triggers on spending. But despite all the talk of the House vote (and a prospective, if doomed, vote in the Senate) being a meaningless Kabuki exercise that just wastes time before a “real deal” is negotiated between congressional leaders and the White House, it’s worth remembering that 38 House members and 12 Senators (plus those nine presidential candidates and virtually every conservative group you’ve ever heard of) not only endorsed the CCB legislation, but signed the pledge, which effectively makes them unavailable in any deal-making exercise. In other words, even if GOP leaders in Congress pull their forelocks in obeisance to the commands of Wall Street and endorse a debt limit deal, the lines to their office doors of Members seeking a sanctioned “free vote” against it will be very long, and many will cast a nihilistic vote for default no matter what.

Read more…

When marginal candidates make it momentarily big, and then start slipping towards their natural level of support, they generally have two choices: riding it all out with dignity and building up capital for future campaigns, or getting down and dirty with hard-core supporters and trying to bubble back up on a wave of notoriety.
2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain seems to be taking the latter path. For a brief moment this spring, he was the “It” candidate, beloved of the Tea Party folk and lighting up audiences in the early Caucus and primary states. Then his stock speech got a little old; he didn’t do well in the first big candidate debate; he didn’t raise much money; and his Iowa and New Hampshire staff started abandoning him, muttering that he wasn’t running a serious campaign.
So Cain has now apparently made his choice and headed for the fringes, making himself notorious as the candidate who, well, doesn’t like Muslims or maybe even Mormons.
Right when most of us had charitably forgotten the 2010 campaign cycle’s plague of Republican attacks on mosque construction and the phantom threat of Shariah Law, Cain has brought it all back up. He showed up at an anti-mosque rally in Murfreesboro, Tennessee–not an early primary venue–to fan the flames of bigotry in that community, and get some national attention.
And now he’s drifting across another civic line and gratuitously suggesting that Mitt Romney can’t win in the South because of his religion.
It’s not clear at this point if Cain thinks this sort of pandering to the worst instincts of GOP primary voters will revive his campaign, or he’s just building a future audience for radio shows and books. But in any event, the former pizza king is giving us all some heartburn we don’t need.

Princeton historian Julian E. Zelizer has an insightful post up at CNN Opinion, “President’s Bully Pulpit Is Not What It Used to Be,” which should be of interest to political junkies across the left-right spectrum. As President Obama takes to the bully pulpit today to win public support for his debt ceiling and budget plans, Zelizer provides an excellent mini-history of the use of the bully pulpit and then explains its limitations in 2011:

…The current structure of the media has emasculated the bully pulpit. Regardless of how good a president is on the stump, it is almost impossible for him to command public attention, because there is no singular “media” to speak of. Instead, Americans receive their media through countless television stations and websites.
During the 1960s, when Presidents Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon spoke, the choice was to hear them or turn off the television and radio. Today, if President Obama wanted to conduct a fireside chat, it is doubtful that many people would be listening.
With the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the media were also able to shed the appearance of neutrality and objectivity. Every perspective did not have to receive equal time. On many television and radio stations, objective reporters have been replaced with openly partisan commentators. Any presidential message is quickly surrounded by polemical instant commentary that diminishes the power of what he says.
Making matters worse, on the Internet, presidents can’t even fully control the time they have as they must compete with live blogs and video commentary as they try to share their message. Even within most households, the era of the single family television is gone. Now in many middle-class families everyone has their own media and is watching their own thing.

Zelizer may be overstating his case a bit — free live television time is nothing to be sniffed at, since most people still get their political information from TV. But there is no question that Zelizer is right about the multiplicity of options diluting the bully pulpit in recent decades. Nonetheless, a president who learns how to leverage multimedia tools to project a single message will gain an edge unavailable to his predecessors.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Michele Bachmann really wants you to know she’s a “constitutional conservative.” The term is featured prominently on her web ads. She mentioned it three times in her announcement speech. It’s in the first sentence of her official bio. But what exactly does it mean? While the term can signify different things to different people, it turns out it’s especially important to Bachmann. As a candidate who doesn’t want to get confined to a social conservative ghetto in an election year that is revolving around fiscal and economic issues–and as someone with a well-earned reputation for extremism–her strong “constitutional conservative” stance indicates, but only to those who are trained to listen, a decidedly radical agenda that is at least as congenial to rabid social conservatives as it is to property-rights absolutists or anti-tax zealots. In short, it enables her to run as a middle-of-the-road conservative who just wants to get rid of ObamaCare and balance the budget, even as she lets the initiated know she has other, more ambitious, plans for the country.
Despite the growing ubiquity of the “constitutional conservative” identifier in the Tea Party movement and the right-wing blogosphere, there’s no authorized definition of the term and some who proudly wear the label doubtless disagree about its meaning. Adam J. White of the Weekly Standard attributes its recent emergence to an influential 2009 essay in the Wall Street Journal by the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz. The Berkowitz formulation did indeed focus on the need for Republicans to return to first principles, with “the constitutional order” providing the key optic. But he also called “moderation” in the pursuit of liberty an essential constitutional concept, which is not a term one would normally associate with Michele Bachmann or Constitution-brandishing Tea Party activists.
Among this crowd, it more commonly connotes an allegiance to a set of fixed–eternally fixed, for the more religiously inclined–ideas of how government should operate in every field. Constitutional conservatives want to distinguish themselves from the more tradition-bound type of conservatives who adapt to changing social and economic needs and, for that matter, to the perceived wants and needs of the populace. They rarely come right out and denounce democracy, of course, but it’s clear they think their liberties are endangered by people who, say, would like government-guaranteed access to affordable health care.
Conservative polemicist and radio host Mark Levin offered an exceptionally clear explanation of the connection between this kind of affinity for the Constitution as the sum of political wisdom and a degree of hostility to democracy:

[F]or the Founding Fathers, individual liberty was not possible without private property rights. For the Founding Fathers, the only legitimate government was not only one that was instituted with the consent of the people, but one that would preserve and protect the individual’s right to property. Jefferson talked about it, talked about ‘tyranny of the legislature.’ So the consent of the governed is only part of it.

Levin’s words are an appropriate reminder that constitutional conservatives think of America as a sort of ruined paradise, bestowed a perfect form of government by its wise Founders but gradually imperiled by the looting impulses of voters and politicians. In their backwards-looking vision, constitutional conservatives like to talk about the inalienable rights conferred by the Founders–not specifically in the Constitution, as a matter of fact, but in the Declaration of Independence, which is frequently and intentionally conflated with the Constitution as the part of the Founders’ design. It’s from the Declaration, for instance, that today’s conservatives derive their belief that “natural rights” (often interpreted to include quasi-absolute property rights or the prerogatives of the traditional family), as well as the “rights of the unborn,” were fundamental to the American political experiment and made immutable by their divine origin.
This Restorationist character of constitutional conservatism was nicely captured by The Economist‘s pseudonymous American reporter w.w. in a commentary on Bachmann’s Iowa launch event:

[I]f one bothers to really think about it, constitutional conservativism, as construed by Ms Bachmann and her boosters, might be better labeled “constitutional restorationism”, which I think more clearly conveys the idea of a return to the system of government laid out in the constitution, interpreted as the authors intended. But this idea, if taken really seriously, is staggeringly radical.

No kidding. But that’s where the dog whistle aspect of calling yourself a constitutional conservative comes into play. The obvious utility of the label is that it hints at a far more radical agenda than meets the untrained eye, all the while elevating the proud bearer above the factional disputes of the conservative movement’s economic and cultural factions.

Read more…

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
If you had to sum up the favorable impression Representative Michele Bachmann has made thus far on the 2012 campaign trail, it might be with the words: “She doesn’t seem crazy at all!” Expectations surrounding Bachmann, based on her well-earned reputation as a fringe character in the House Republican Caucus, have made it easy for her to make a positive impression. Reading the reviews of her performance at the June 13 presidential candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, sprinkled with words like “articulate” and “polished” and “disciplined,” it’s very clear she’s had a low threshold to cross.
But this week, with the impeccably timed formal launch of her presidential campaign, Bachmann is about to enter a period of enormous peril in which her background, ideology, and rhetorical habits are about to get the kind of exposure only a Kardashian could enjoy. Can she possibly survive as a viable contender?
The hard-core Christian Right/Tea Party folk who are Bachmann’s base in Iowa and elsewhere, of course, don’t need any introduction to her. She’s been on the television and radio shows they patronize, and many have undoubtedly contributed to her vastly expensive congressional campaigns. They’re fine with the more outlandish things she’s said over the years, but also understand it may be necessary to bring Americans along slowly to the recognition of the high-stakes holy war that Bachmann is waging on their behalf as a self-described “constitutional conservative” (a heavily loaded term connoting a belief that liberalism–fiscal, economic, or cultural–is literally un-American and needs to be permanently vanquished) in the field.
For the rest of the GOP, however, attitudes towards Bachmann may depend on what tack her critics choose. The clear template available is the sort of questioning and mockery faced by Sarah Palin, with whom the media inevitably identify Bachmann for all sorts of good and bad reasons. You could call it the “civics test” approach, where the candidate is directly questioned about her knowledge of American history and world events, and “gotcha’d” for unforced errors (e.g., Palin’s recent revisionist account of Paul Revere’s ride, and Bachmann’s relocation of Lexington and Concord from Massachusetts to New Hampshire). As Palin’s experience shows, this sort of scrutiny can be devastating over time, particularly if the target reinforces it by constantly complaining about the treatment. But what if Bachmann, unlike Palin, keeps on proving she’s not “a flake” and doesn’t do the sort of thing that makes it hard to take her seriously–e.g., resigning her office?
Indeed, unlike Palin, the scrutiny to which Bachmann is most vulnerable is not about what she does or doesn’t know, but about what she believes. As Michelle Goldberg, an expert on “Christian nationalism,” recently explained, Bachmann’s worldview has marinated in many years of extremist training and advocacy:

Bachmann honed her view of the world after college, when she enrolled at the Coburn Law School at Oral Roberts University, an “interdenominational, Bible-based, and Holy Spirit-led” school in Oklahoma. “My goal there was to learn the law both from a professional but also from a biblical worldview,” she said in an April speech.
At Coburn, Bachmann studied with John Eidsmoe, who she recently described as “one of the professors who had a great influence on me.” Bachmann served as his research assistant on the 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy, and that it should become one again. “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God,” Eidsmoe wrote. “In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”

Bachmann’s long history of identification with truly hard-core Christian Right causes, from religiously oriented charter schools and home-schooling, to the picketing of abortion clinics, to her singular hostility to gays and lesbians, would surely trouble more than a few voters if fully exposed. The big question is who, specifically, will raise them, and how much credibility will the person have?
It’s doubtful, for instance, that Republican caucus-goers or primary voters will be upset by the sort of insult-laden outrage expressed recently by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi in his review of Bachmann’s ideological history. But you have to assume that more than a few Republican elites are worried about her recent ascendency, and the possibility that she could quickly eliminate the inoffensive conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, in Iowa, creating a divisive slugfest down the road.
On the other hand, Republican elites have long had to learn not to snicker out loud at some of the religious views of their Christian Right allies. This is probably why they chose to attack Mike Huckabee in 2008 on the basis of his heterodox economic policy sentiments rather than his theocratic leanings. Perhaps, then, they will find another angle to go after Bachmann, such as her occasionally isolationist-sounding foreign policy views. But the bottom line is that Bachmann’s moment in the sun makes her vulnerable to attacks that are being formulated as we speak, and we’ll know soon enough who takes the lead in cutting her down to size, and whether it actually works.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Among the many striking features of Georgia-based radio talk show host Herman Cain’s presidential announcement speech in Atlanta on May 21, the most surreal was to hear an African-American in front of a heavily white audience of hard-core conservatives, at a site within shouting distance of the Martin Luther King Center, end his remarks by declaring, “When Herman Cain is president, we will finally be able to say, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, America is free at last.'” Cain’s decision to appropriate those famous words from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is in many ways characteristic of the man himself and the kind of campaign he’s been running. But give him credit: Outperforming Tim Pawlenty in many recent polls, running tied for second in Tuesday’s latest PPP poll of Iowa, Cain is surging on the backs of the Tea Party faithful. He is nothing if not audacious, and his popularity is due in large part to the fact that he has come to embody some of the more dubious but emotionally central claims of the Tea Party Movement.
The first thing Cain has going for his fan-base is his biography. He’s a successful business executive who saved at least one company, Godfather’s Pizza. He made his bones on the national political stage by attacking the Clinton Health Reform plan in 1994. And after liquidating his business holdings, he became a motivational speaker and author, with many opportunities to hone his communications skills. Following his one, unsuccessful race for office–a surprisingly strong second-place showing in a primary won by now-Senator Johnny Isakson–Cain worked his way into the world of conservative talk radio under the tutelage of the veteran quasi-libertarian gabber Neal Boortz, who has a big national audience. He soon got his own syndicated show, in which he identified himself with one of the most durable conservative pet rocks, the Fair Tax proposal (a flat consumption tax that would theoretically replace federal income and payroll taxes). And unlike other pols who have since tried to ingratiate themselves with the movement, Cain was a big Tea Party proponent from day one, quickly becoming a fixture at Tea Party events in Georgia.
And then, of course, there’s one other item in Cain’s background that matters politically: his race. Cain’s popularity among conservative activists provides a sort of ongoing inoculation against the charges of racism that have been levied–sometimes speciously, sometimes fairly–against them, and he cleverly cultivates this element of his popularity with the stock-speech line, “People who oppose Obama are said to be racists–so I guess I’m a racist.” Like South Carolina congressman Tim Scott and Florida congressman Allen West, as a hard-core conservative African-American Cain has quickly become one of the most popular pols in the Tea Party universe.
But beyond serving as a counter-race-card, Cain’s rhetoric offers vital ammunition in the fight over the endlessly contested American value of “opportunity.” Indeed, at a time when many white Americans believe that anti-white bias is now a greater social problem than anti-black bias, Cain’s words and deeds coincide nicely with the common conservative belief that minorities who embrace traditional values, work hard, and become entrepreneurs can avoid the liberal “welfare trap” that leads to dependence on government, broken homes, and crime. And Cain’s angry defiance of liberals validates the Tea Party conviction that white liberal elites have corrupted minority Americans by, for instance, encouraging them to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford, thus triggering the recent housing and financial crises. In other words, Cain has become not a role model but an implicit living rebuke to his fellow African-Americans, who have, in the imaginations of many white conservatives, been led like sheep to the slaughter by the shadowy forces who use them as pawns in their socialist schemes.
Nothing illustrates Cain’s ability to turn his race into a weapon against white liberals than the racial spin he has placed on the abortion-as-Holocaust meme of the anti-choice movement (of which he is a long-time champion, at least since he spent most of his 2004 senatorial campaign attacking Johnny Isakson for favoring rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical ban on abortions). Here’s what he told the conservative website CNSNews.com in March of this year regarding his support for congressional Republican efforts to ban any use of public funds by Planned Parenthood:

Here’s why I support de-funding Planned Parenthood, because you don’t hear a lot of people talking about this, when Margaret Sanger–check my history–started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.
You don’t see that talked that much about … It’s not Planned Parenthood. No, it’s planned genocide. You can quote me on that.

This sort of talk is immensely useful–and powerful–for conservative activists who have a complicated view of minority Americans as both perpetrators and victims in the ongoing destruction of the country as they know it.
In this as in other areas, the third thing going for Cain is simple: He does not hold back. Indeed, he gives conservative audiences the full, rich, red-meat diet they crave, along with the occasional dog-whistle appeal only they can hear. For example, in his announcement speech, he made a casual reference to the Constitution’s language guaranteeing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Since the language in question appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, Cain was subsequently accused of an ignorant gaffe by observers who themselves did not seem to understand the Christian Right/Tea Party tenet that the former document was incorporated into the latter via the manifest intent of the Founders. This is how God and the idea of divinely derived “natural law” (including protection of the unborn and, for some, absolute property rights) are read into the Constitution by constitutional conservatives who consider twentieth-century social legislation and court rulings un-American.
Add all these factors up, and it’s not that surprising Cain has been wowing audiences in early caucus and primary states and developing the kind of online following that only Ron Paul can typically command among Republicans. He has routinely won audience straw polls after candidate forums–most famously, at the Tea Party Patriots convention in Arizona in February and at Steve King’s Conservative Principles Conference in Iowa in April. He also greatly enthused a focus group convened by conservative pollster Frank Lutz to watch the first televised candidate debate in South Carolina in May. As a result, he’s now surging in the polls (registering 8 percent in the latest Gallup poll of Republican presidential proto-candidates, 10 percent in the latest CNN poll, and 11 percent in a recent Insider Advantage poll), and regularly running ahead of supposedly more serious candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. And all this is happening, as Nate Silver has pointed out, in spite of the fact that Cain still has low name ID and hasn’t, until now at least, gotten much media attention (in both respects, this is the exact opposite of the context surrounding Donald Trump’s earlier surge in the polls).

Read more…

The following article by political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
In recent American political history, changes in political momentum typically revolve around a seminal political battle.
After the Republican sweep in 1994, that battle was over the GOP plan to cut Medicare to provide tax cuts for the rich. It featured Newt Gingrich’s government shutdown and his subsequent retreat in 1995. From that point forward, Clinton built momentum and ultimately defeated the Republican nominee Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points.
A similar decisive battle turned the tide ten years later, after the Republican victory in 2004. In the months following their defeat, Democratic prospects looked bleak. Republicans controlled the Senate, House and the Presidency and were poised to seize control of the Supreme Court for a generation.
But then Bush and his Wall Street allies launched a massive effort to privatize Social Security — a move designed both to eviscerate the social insurance program that lay at the foundation of the New Deal and to allow Wall Street to get its hands on the Social Security Trust fund. President Bush toured the country to stump for his plan, the Republican leadership signed on in support.
Democrats stood solidly against the proposal and together — with the labor movement and other progressive organizations — ran a campaign that ultimately forced the Republicans to drop the proposal without even so much as a vote in Congress. It turned out that privatizing Social Security — which would have simultaneously lowered guaranteed benefits, and increased the deficit — had zero traction with ordinary voters who believed that the money they had paid into Social Security entitled them to the promised guaranteed benefits.
The battle to privatize Social Security shifted the political momentum in America. Democrats got back off the floor after being thrashed in 2004, regained their footing and self-confidence and went on the offense — attacking the increasingly unpopular War in Iraq and capitalizing on the unbelievable incompetence surrounding Hurricane Katrina. After Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006, that momentum continued through Barack Obama’s victory in 2008.
After their defeat in 2008, Republicans used the battle over health care reform to turn the political tide themselves. They didn’t win the fight over the health care bill, but they won the political war. They used that momentum to invigorate their base and to capitalize on the slow pace of economic recovery after the financial catastrophe that was actually caused by reckless Republican economic policies coupled with wild excesses on Wall Street.
Politics is like war — or for that matter competitive sport. Momentum is critical to victory and changes in momentum inevitably center on turning-point battles. Just as important, turning-point battles reframe the terms of debate. They become emblematic of whether or not a political leader is “on your side.”
Political momentum shifts have an enormous effect on political psychology. For one thing, there is the band-wagon effect. People don’t like to sign on with losers — or political parties that are despondent and divided. Voters, candidates and donors, want to be with self-confident winners — not losers who are searching for direction. They get on the train when it’s picking up steam — not when it is grinding to a halt.
That’s why the perception that political momentum has changed can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Regaining the political momentum will do wonders for Democratic attempts to raise funds and recruit candidates for the elections in 2012. It has already encouraged several of the strongest contenders in the Republican presidential field to take a pass on the race.
And without iconic battles, momentum shifts in politics rarely occur.
After George Bush won the Presidency in 2000, the battle over the Bush tax cuts could have taken on that kind of iconic importance. Unfortunately, even though Democrats could have stopped his tax cuts for the wealthy, much as they stopped his attempts to privatize Social Security after 2004, some Democrats did not hold firm and draw a line in the sand. A few Democrats joined the Republicans to support the Bush tax cuts that have led directly to our current budget deficit. Their success passing tax cuts for the wealthy built momentum for the Republicans.
And, of course, there was another iconic moment that most defined the first years of the Bush Presidency: the attack on 9/11. The Republicans used that attack as a huge political momentum builder, and it served as the rationale for almost all of their policies for the next four years.
By proposing to eliminate Medicare, Republican Budget Committee chair Congressman Paul Ryan set the stage for exactly the kind of iconic battle that signaled fundamental changes in political momentum in the past. Over the last six weeks, that battle has played out in town meetings and talk shows across the country. It culminated last week in the stunning Democratic victory in New York’s blood-red 26th Congressional District, where it became crystal clear to everyone that the Republican plan to eliminate Medicare is a political kiss of death.
The fact that Ryan and the Republicans chose political low ground to engage this battle is not entirely a result of Republican hubris or dumb luck. David Plouffe and the Obama team deliberately laid in wait for the Republicans, holding back at engaging the budget debate until Ryan and company made their incredibly unpopular proposal — and then the President’s budget speech sprung the trap.
They knew that once the Republicans had elaborated their strategy to eliminate Medicare in gory detail they could demonstrate graphically just what America would look like if the Republican ideologues had their way.
Amazingly, this weekend, Republican leaders doubled down on their proposal, pledging to make it part of the terms Republicans will demand to avoid default of America’s debts.
Apparently the Republican leadership’s desperate need to pander to the extremist Tea Party element in their ranks has overwhelmed their good political sense – and that is great news for Democrats.
The battle over Medicare — and the entire Republican budget — puts the question of “who’s on whose side” in clear, unmistakable relief. As in 1995, the issue is simple. In their budget, Republicans proposed to cut – actually eliminate – Medicare in order to give tax breaks to millionaires.
During the 2005 battle over privatizing Social Security, the Republican leaders never even came close to actually forcing their Members to cast a vote to support Bush’s radioactive privatization plan — yet the battle still turned the political tide. This year, the Republicans were so cowed by the Tea Party that they actually corralled all but four Republican House Members — as well as forty Republican Senators — into voting yes on a bill to eliminate Medicare. Astounding.
The decisive battle that has changed the political momentum between the conservative and progressive forces in American society has happened — and once again Progressives have stood up straight and are on the march.
Now we must press our advantage and use this iconic engagement to demonstrate clearly that the radical conservatives are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CEO/Wall Street class – the wealthiest two percent of Americans — while Democrats and Progressives stand squarely with the middle class.

One of the most exasperating Democratic failures of the last two years has been the Dems inability to turn high unemployment into a winning political issue. To many progressive Democrats the failure seems literally incomprehensible. After all, millions of Americans are deeply and painfully affected by job losses and opinion polls show with absolute consistency that voters strongly accord “creating jobs” a higher priority than deficit reduction. This holds true across an extraordinarily wide variety of different polls and question wordings.
Given these two facts, many progressives conclude that the only plausible explanation for the Dems failure is their timidity and fear of challenging conservative myths with sufficient boldness. Had Democratic candidates and officeholders displayed sufficient passion and commitment on this issue — and championed genuinely aggressive action to create jobs — many progressives and grass-roots Dems argue that they would surely have been able to mobilize the huge latent well of support that the opinion data shows must exist within the electorate.
It is easy to sympathize with the intense frustration that motivates these views but the reasons why Dems have had less success with the jobs issue than seems warranted are more complex than simply a lack of sufficient passion or commitment. It’s important to understand these deeper causes because they suggest more effective strategies for the future.
Why the opinion poll data is less clear-cut than it appears.
The key problem that must be recognized is that the apparently unambiguous support opinion polls suggest for creating jobs is actually extremely misleading. While creating jobs is indeed consistently given a higher priority than reducing deficits, how this particular fact fits into the larger pattern of public attitudes is far from obvious.
As Democratic pollster guy Mark Melman notes:

It is in the connection [of deficit reduction] to job creation that Democrats misunderstand the tenor of public opinion. Economists, Keynesian and otherwise, along with Democrats, mostly recognize that federal spending creates jobs. Not so voters, at least many of them.
In (a recent) Bloomberg poll, by a nine-point margin, Americans said the better way for the government to create jobs was to cut spending, while smaller numbers opted for “invest[ing] in projects such as high-speed rail, expanding access to broadband Internet,” etc. Indeed, several polls suggest that voters judge cutting federal spending to be the single most effective step government can take to create jobs.
So when Democrats argue that the GOP is focused on spending cuts at the expense of job creation, most Americans shake their heads in disbelief, seeing those cuts as exactly the kind of “stimulus” we need.

For most progressives, who generally have at least a nodding acquaintance with the basic ideas of John Maynard Keynes, it seems almost impossible to believe that substantial numbers of voters can seriously accept this genuinely wacky notion. It appears simply irrational. But when one listens to enough focus groups and other real-world discussions it becomes clear that this view is indeed incredibly pervasive. People will frequently say that “Only private business creates “real” jobs. Government just takes money away from the private sector and transfers it to government bureaucrats and lazy civil servants”. The fact that this view is objectively false does not make it any less common or deeply held.
Another leading Democratic pollster, Guy Molyneaux, seconds Melman’s point:

The public-opinion data on this point, unfortunately, is unambiguous…To be sure, voters do still put jobs and the economy ahead of the deficit in a head-to-head contest of their leading concerns. However, such poll questions assume a choice — reduce the deficit or improve the economy — which voters do not actually perceive. Instead, the public believes deficit reduction is an important step for growing the economy. Indeed, other polling Hart Research conducted in February showed that by a margin of 50 percent to 40 percent, voters believe that reducing the deficit and cutting government spending is a better way to improve the economy than investing in America’s infrastructure, education, renewable energy, and new technology.

Read more…

The following article by political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
The ongoing battle over the federal budget and the role of government in America has certainly clarified the fundamental difference in the visions of the Republican and Democratic Parties — and the progressive and conservative forces within American society.
At the same time, however, the budget battle has also opened up two gaping rifts within the Republican Party itself. The first threatens to do massive damage to the GOP’s election chances in 2012. The second may cause the collapse of its 2011 legislative agenda.
First is the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the “Tea Party” class of GOP “young turks” — who want to go for broke to destroy the New Deal and impose their social agenda — and those elements of the Party whose highest concern is winning general elections.
More “moderate” Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Dick Lugar are terrified of being defeated in primaries by Tea Party insurgents who are eager to take advantage of any deviation from ultra-right orthodoxy. But they know very well that purist right wing positions like ending Medicare and privatizing Social Security are the kiss of death in general elections.
Last week, Newt Gingrich became the poster boy for the corrosive effect of this conflict, as the nation watched him pleading for forgiveness from the right for his characterization of Paul Ryan’s Republican budget as “extremist right wing social engineering.” Even though Gingrich himself remains a hard core right wing ideologue, he has had an experience many of the Tea Party newcomers have not: he knows what it’s like to lose.
Gingrich is smart enough to know that it’s one thing to prevent people from achieving their aspirations — it’s quite another to take something away that they already have — that they’ve already paid for — like Medicare and Social Security. He can read the polls that show almost 80% of the electorate wants Congress to keep its hands off Medicare and Social Security. And almost as many oppose cutting or restructuring Medicaid. Remember that Medicaid not only provides health care for the working poor, and children, but also provides nursing home care — and home care that lets seniors and the disabled stay in their own homes instead of institutions.
Of course it’s not just Gingrich that is caught in the vise between primaries dominated by well-organized right wing ideologues and a general electorate that has no use for candidates who want to abolish Medicare or defund Planned Parenthood. The entire Republican presidential field will have to cope with this virtually unsolvable conundrum every day during the upcoming primary season.
The same difficulty faces GOP Senate challengers and House incumbents. Sixty one D battles for House seats will be fought in districts won by Barack Obama in 2008 — and fourteen were won by Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004. In the 2010 elections, seniors voted Republican by 21%. Now that the Republican leadership and Ryan’s “young guns” have rounded up all but four members of the GOP House caucus and got them — incredibly — to cast a public vote to abolish Medicare — don’t expect seniors to flock to their cause again in 2012.
And in case the Republicans didn’t notice, it’s not just seniors who strongly oppose abolishing Medicare. All of those 45- to 50-year-olds who would be most directly affected and have paid their Medicare taxes all of these years aren’t too happy either.
Before this year is done, many Republican office holders and candidates will feel as though they’re on a political rack. On the one side they will find themselves and their colleagues pilloried at town meetings for voting to abolish Medicare. On the other, they will watch those who are bold enough to distance themselves from the Republican budget “Koolaid,” smacked back into line by Tea Party zealots.
This of course will be great news for Democrats in 2012. Many Republicans are taking the path of the least short-term pain in order to avoid humiliation in a primary. They are refusing to distance themselves from Ryan’s politically radioactive proposals. And of course candidates like Gingrich who try to head for a radioactive free zone — and then have to reverse themselves — look as though they have cast their principles to the winds. In politics, appearing to flip flop — to have no core commitment to values — is often the most toxic quality of all. Remember, Republicans beat John Kerry by — erroneously — convincing many swing voters that he was a “flip flopper.”
Already we’ve seen the power of the Medicare issue to drive swing seniors into the Democratic column. In the Special election for heavily Republican New York’s 26th Congressional District, Democrat Kathy Huchel has actually surged ahead of Republican Jane Corwin in last-minute polling — mainly on the strength of the Medicare issue.
But the Medicare issue doesn’t just move swing seniors. The Republican Budget — coupled with President Obama’s response — has drawn clear lines between the Democratic and Republican visions for our society. That clear distinction has already reinvigorated the Democratic Party base and will serve to rally Democratic turnout in 2012.
Paul Ryan has given Democrats the gift that will keep on giving right through November, 2012.
But the second great conflict in the Republican Party will have an impact in just a few months. That’s the conflict between the real base of the GOP — Wall Street and America’s corporate elite — and the Tea Party bomb throwers who are willing to risk allowing America to default on its debts to advance their ideological goals.
Now don’t get me wrong — much of the Wall Street/corporate CEO crowd would love to abolish Medicare and force draconian cuts in the Federal budget so they could have yet another round of tax cuts and free themselves of “meddlesome” government “regulation.” They would love to be freed to devise exotic trading schemes, sell worthless mortgage securities, decertify unions and slash middle class salaries, defund public education and all of the rest.
But they’re not interested in risking the collapse of the economy, and the markets to get it. They are smart enough to prefer the billions they have in their hot hands, to the risk that their portfolios will plummet in value once again as they did in 2008. And that is exactly what might happen if their erstwhile Tea Party allies force House Speaker John Boehner to play chicken with the nation’s debt limit in order to pressure the Democrats to scrap big portions of the New Deal.
Wall Street is terrified by guys like Illinois’ Republican Congressman Joe Walsh who said that default wouldn’t be so bad — that we should be thinking “outside of the box.” Or Congressman Devin Nunes who thinks that a default would benefit America by forcing politicians to go through a “period of crisis”. These “default deniers” just scare the bejezus out of the investor/CEO class.
But Boehner has a whole flock of these folks in his caucus, and before the default battle is over he may look like a pancake — squeezed by Wall Street on the one side, and by his Tea Party crew on the other.
It is likely that whatever deal to avoid default ultimately emerges from the Biden talks, will ultimately pass with more Democratic than Republicans votes in both houses. That means that the deal cannot contain poison pill proposals that are completely unacceptable to most mainstream Democrats. But that, in turn, may very well be unacceptable to the right-wing ideologues who see the debt-ceiling vote as their one chance to make big changes in the federal budget.
If Boehner allows a vote on such a proposal — and it does indeed pass with more Democrats than Republicans — he is afraid there may be a mutiny and he may no longer swing the big House gavel when the smoke clears.
This kind of division massively weakens the Republican’s bargaining position. As the prospect of default barrels toward us, looming larger and larger in the weeks ahead, the pressure from the Wall Street/CEO gang will grown unbearable.
The fact of the matter is that the Party’s big dogs will not allow Boehner to pull the plug on the grenade that sends the economy back into a major recession and causes markets to plummet. And of course, if they did, the political consequences for the GOP in 2012 would be catastrophic.
Had the Republicans simply continued to scream about deficits (as hypocritical as that may seem) they would have had a much stronger hand. Instead they handed Democrats a politically iconic example of exactly what the world would be like if they had their way — abolishing Medicare.
Now the Party’s candidates and its legislative leadership are divided, confused and in disarray.
In this situation, Democrats and Progressives need to remember one important axiom: when you’ve got them on the run, that’s the time to chase them.

As you may know, tomorrow is the day the End Times are supposed to begin, according to an odd but pervasive California-based “radio ministry” led by one Edward Camping. Perhaps you’ve even seen the group’s billboards or warning-emblazoned vans.
Now there’s nothing new about what theology wonks call “dispensationalist premillenialism,” which is basically the believe that it is possible to calculate the date of the Apocalypse as described in the New Testament Book of Revelation (which is taken quite literally) with clues from other parts of scripture. Camping himself earlier proclaimed the Apocalypse would begin on September 6, 1994, and then admitted to some calculation errors, since corrected.
There is certainly a ready audience for such predictions. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans believe that Jesus Christ will “definitely” (23%) or “probably” (18%) return to Earth by 2050. The total number rises to 58 percent among white evangelicals. Indeed, as is well known, the belief that the State of Israel will play a particular role in touching off the Apocalypse has strong currency in conservative evangelical circles, and is often associated with Christian Right support for an aggressive posture on expansion of Jewish settlement into areas long controlled by Arabs (e.g., Mike Huckabee’s recent claim there is no such thing as “Palestinians” and thus no reason for a two-state solution in the biblical Land of Israel).
Beyond the ranks of believers, doomsday predictions can disturb people prone to anxiety. Salon‘s Steve Kornacki has a post up today about his own vulnerability as a teenager to Camping’s earlier prediction, even though he was neither an evangelical or from a particularly religious background.
Catholic and mainline Protestant sources typically view dispensationalist premillenialism as misguided, beginning with its literal interpretation of Revelation, which is more conventionally interpreted as a warning of coming Roman persecution of Christians utilizing a common ancient literary form. Abuse of Revelation led Martin Luther, early in his career, to propose deletion of the book from the Canon of the Bible.
But even without specific religious sanction, fear of–or longing for–Doomsday are too deeply planted in our culture to go away just because one prophecy or another proves wrong. It takes an awful lot of false alarms to eliminate the human fear of “the fire.”