Bob Herbert’s latest New York Times column, “Our Crumbling Foundation,” updates the argument for major infrastructure upgrade projects as a near-perfect match for the nation’s employment needs. It’s a familiar argument that’s been made for decades, though seldom with such supportive economic realities, and Herbert makes his case about as good as can be done in the columnist’s limited format:

It’s not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It’s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts.
It’s about whether we’re serious about remaining a great nation. We don’t act like it. Here’s a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school…We can’t put our people to work. We can’t educate the young. We can’t keep the infrastructure in good repair. It’s hard to believe that this nation could be so dysfunctional at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. It’s tragic….The link between the need to rebuild the nation’s crumbing infrastructure and the crucial need to find rich new sources of employment in this economic downturn should be obvious, a no-brainer.

Over the years, numerous Democratic candidates for congress and the white house have urged making infrastructure upgrades as a major federal priority. Yet the idea never gets much traction, despite the clear logic of the need for action. The political will ought to be there, but it hasn’t emerged thus far. Democrats just didn’t have the votes in congress to significantly increase expenditures for fixing America’s decaying roads, bridges, sewerage systems, port security and other critical public facilities.
Herbert didn’t analyze opinion polls for clues to how voters feel about infrastructure projects as a major federal investment. If he had, he would have seen that there is strong public support for the concept of a major government investment in shoring up our infrastructure. A poll conducted 12/22/08 by Luntz Maslansky Strategic Research (yes, that Frank Luntz) for Building America’s Future, an organization which promotes infrastructure projects, found 81 percent would pay an extra 1 percent on their taxes to pay for infrastructure repairs, while 84 percent believe their state governments should increase spending on public works.
But he would also have seen that the government does have a persistent image problem, which prevents needed political action. The BAF poll found, for example, that 51 percent said their governor had been very effective in improving infrastructure in the last five years, compared with only 22 percent who said the same for political leaders in Washington. (although here I wonder if Luntz’s Republican leanings have biased questions to get a desired the result). Government-bashing is still fashionable among conservatives and some moderates, though to a lesser extent than a decade ago. Asked “…which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future: big business, big labor, or big government?,” 55 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll conducted 3/27-29 said ‘big government,’ compared to 10 percent for ‘big labor’ and 32 percent for ‘big business.’ Other recent polls show public opinion more evenly divided on the question of whether the federal government should do more or less.
Knee-jerk government-bashing is now boilerplate rhetoric for GOP politicians. Thus far the Democratic response has been decidedly limp, usually changing the subject or ignoring the Republicans. What is absent is any party-wide commitment to address the problem head-on — to use the resources of the white house and the Democratic Party to strengthen the image of the federal government. I’m not talking so much about individual Democrats more assertively defending the federal government. What is needed is a major national campaign to educate the public about the positive accomplishments of the federal government, including federally-funded documentaries on key government agencies broadcast on PBS and major networks, public service advertising on television, radio and the internet, and generally making more aggressive use of public relations to educate taxpayers about the bargain they get for their taxes.
Ken Burns is premiering his new 12-hour documentary series on America’s national parks on PBS this Fall.. Presumably he will show viewers the wonderful resources of the federal parks and also reveal the need to better protect those resources. After giving due credit to Burns as a great private-sector documentary-maker, the question arises, why isn’t there already a great federally-funded documentary series on the federal parks? Or the FDA, NTSB, the NLRB and numerous other federal agencies that save taxpayers’ lives and money.
That’s what the private sector does when a company or industry develops an image-problem. They educate and advertise, and they do it because it works. It makes little sense for the Dems, including President Obama, to cede the case for government-bashing to the GOP, especially when we have a strong counter-argument and the resources to publicize it. A public education campaign about the very real accomplishments of the federal government, on the other hand, might help millions of taxpayers to see the folly in the GOP’s trashing of government and be more supportive of Democratic reforms.

Like a lot of non-Rush-Limbaugh listeners, when I first heard that a large faction of Republican National Committee members was pushing for a formal resolution calling on GOPers to start referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party,” I thought it was a puerile joke that the adults in the Republican Party would quash.
Apparently not. According to sources speaking to Politico‘s Roger Simon, the Republican National Committee will approve the resolution at a special meeting of the RNC called for that very purpose.
Here’s how the sponsor of the resolution, Jeff Kent from Washington State, explained its rationale a few weeks ago:

There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.

I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”
The St. Paul of the “Democrat Socialist” rebranding, Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr., sent an encyclical around further explaining its purpose. Here’s a pertinent passage:

The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated. They are proceeding pell mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level, to strap future generations with enormous unsustainable debt, to debase our currency, to destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death, and to weaken our national defense and retreat from the war on terror. Unless stopped, we will not recognize our country in a few short years.

Yeah, I think the 60-plus-percent of Americans who approve of the job President Obama is doing are pretty happy with the plan to “destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death.” Or perhaps they don’t understand that returning the top marginal tax rate to where it was ten years ago, and at a far lower level than in those fine days when Ronald Reagan abolished the Soviet Union, represents “confiscatory” taxes. Who knows, maybe they even think that we don’t need to deploy barbaric torture methods to fight terrorists.
It’s easy to mock this stuff, but it’s actually pretty significant: we are not talking about some radio blowhard or self-promoting Fox “personality” in this case, but the Republican National Committee. If, as Simon predicts, it approves this resolution, Republicans who like to think of themselves as serious people need to feel some real shame. Comparing the Democratic Party to the leadership of a totalitarian society, and treating it as an enemy of the country, isn’t just ridiculous: it’s an incitement to crazy people to act crazy or worse.

Michael Steele’s chairmanship of the Republican National Committee continues to lurch from disaster to disaster. Even though he’s scaled back his media appearances, the ones he’s making aren’t helping matters. Late last week, he was on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and offered the following thoughts when asked by a caller if Mitt Romney had been denied the 2008 GOP presidential nomination by “liberals” and “the media” who were pulling wires for John McCain:

“Remember, it was the base that rejected Mitt because of his switch on pro-life, from pro-choice to pro-life,” Steele told the caller. “It was the base that rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism. It was the base that rejected Mitt because they thought he was back and forth and waffling on those very economic issues you’re talking about.”
“So, I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but before we even got to a primary vote, the base had made very clear they had issues with Mitt because if they didn’t, he would have defeated John McCain in those primaries in which he lost,” Steele concluded.

As Michelle Cottle of TNR’s The Plank observed today:

[B]y trying to make a simple, completely accurate observation about last year’s presidential primary, he managed simultaneously to pick a fight with Mitt Romney and tar the party’s base as a bunch of anti-Mormon bigots.
When oh when will someone put this man out of his misery?

Yep, Steele’s comments were something of a two-cushion scratch shot. But the maddening thing for Republicans is that they can’t dump him as chairman without courting the impression that they are bigots or small-tent types themselves. The chairman-in-waiting, South Carolina’s Katon Dawson (he of the recent memebership in a segregated country club) wouldn’t help much. One conservative blogger has suggested a very different name for
Steele’s replacement: a guy named Norm Coleman. If that idea has legs, it’s no wonder that Steele said “No, hell no!” to the suggestion that Coleman give up his guerilla legal challenge to his retirement from the U.S. Senate.

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?

The recent much-discussed report on “Rightwing Extremism” by the Department of Homeland Security has raised a very important issue of definition: What precisely is right-wing “political extremism” and how does it differ from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism”?
For most Americans, the most critical — and in fact the defining — characteristic of “political extremism” – whether left or right – is the approval of violence as a means to achieve political goals. Opinions on issues, no matter how “extreme” or irrational they may be do not by themselves necessarily make a person a dangerous “extremist.” Whether opinions are crackpot (e.g. abolish all paper money) or repulsive (e.g. non-whites should be treated as sub-humans), extreme political opinions are not in and of themselves incitements to or justifications for violence.
But there is actually one very clear and unambiguous way to define a genuinely “extremist” political ideology — it is any ideology that justifies or incites violence.
Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.
In recent decades we have unfortunately become accustomed to political opponents being defined as “enemies” rather than fellow Americans, but the notion was profoundly shocking when Richard Nixon first used the term in his famous “enemies list.” It marked a tremendous change from generally collegial attitudes of Senators and members of Congress, where a certain basic level of civility was almost always maintained, even among the most bitter political opponents. Unlike many other countries, until the Nixon era American politicians generally saw “politics” as the job of achieving rational compromises among democratically elected representatives and not as the task of crushing, purging or liquidating political enemies, as was often the case in totalitarian countries.
Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter temporarily derailed the trend toward defining politics as warfare, but the notion got a powerful “second wind” in the 1980’s – which came from two main sources.
The first was the culture and doctrines of counter-insurgency and covert operations that blossomed in the Reagan era. In combating insurgent movements, U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine carefully studied Leninist organizations and frequently imitated their strategy and tactics in order to dismantle them. The basic philosophy was frequently to “fight fire with fire” using any available tactics, including even blatantly undemocratic and morally indefensible ones.
During the Reagan years, there was a massive expansion of extremely secret counter-insurgency programs – primarily in Central America and Afghanistan – that were conducted outside the formal structure of traditional civilian-military control. Among the people involved in these programs, an ethos of loyalty developed to the secret military/intelligence hierarchy that was conducting these operations rather than to the formal elected government.
The hero and symbol of this trend was Oliver North. By showing up in his military uniform at congressional hearings called to investigate his role in the illegal funding of counterinsurgencies in Central America and Afghanistan (although he was actually a political appointee of the Reagan white house at the time and not on active military duty) North dramatically embodied the view that his primary loyalty was to the covert military/intelligence command running the secret operations around the world and not to the majority of Congress that had specifically prohibited the actions he had coordinated. He became a symbol of a perspective that viewed the majority of Congress (that had voted against funding the Nicaraguan “contras”) as an internal “enemy” just as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were an external enemy.
By the early 1990’s this general point of view had become deeply entrenched among many right-wing conservatives. As conservative talk radio shows grew in popularity, many hosts like Rush Limbaugh repeated and refined this militarized and combative version of conservative ideology.
These views became even more extreme after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the conservative view, Liberals quickly replaced communism as the principal “enemies” of America. Conservative leader Grover Norquist expressed the view quite clearly when talking to a former college classmate. He said: “For 40 years we fought a two-front war against the Soviet Union and statism in the U.S. Now we can turn all our time and energy into crushing you. With the Soviet Union it was just business. With you, it’s personal.”

Read more…

Underneath the daily headlines from Washington, conservatives are waging guerilla warfare against a number of President Obama’s appointees, and it’s getting pretty ugly. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has the rundown on efforts to block the nominations of Harold Koh as legal advisor to the State Deparment, and of Dawn Johnson as director of the Justice Deparment’s Office of Legal Counsel. In both cases, made-up or distorted allegations by the nominees have migrated from right-wing blogs to talk radio and eventually to congressional Republicans.
It happens quickly and seamlessly, says Lithwick:

There is no rest stop on the misinformation superhighway. Some senators apparently cannot be bothered to fact-check the claims they have read in the blogosphere. And that makes the rest of us responsible for fact-checking them as needed and for getting angry when good people are smeared for views they do not hold. One needn’t read all of the thousands of pages Koh has written over his career to find an opinion or argument with which you disagree. But the fact that his critics must fabricate Koh’s opinions in order to take issue with them suggests that they haven’t read any of them.

Lithwick’s theory is that conservatives are going nuts on these mid-level legal appointments as a sort of warm-up for how they intend to proceed once Obama makes major judicial appointments, particularly to the U.S. Supreme Court. “If what Koh and Johnsen have been facing is a practice-sliming from the far right, we should be very, very afraid for whoever it is that someday merits their scrutiny at the high court.”

If traditional print media are watching a disaster unfold, then it’s safe to say that conservative media are feeling the first tremors of their own looming crisis.
Sure, Rush Limbaugh — newly re-elevated by his fight with the Obama White House — claims that his numbers are better than ever.
But:

The dirty little secret of conservative talk radio is that the average age of listeners is 67 and rising.

It’s no different on television — the average age for viewers of Fox News is also somewhere in the mid-60s.
On top of everything else (falling advertiser revenues, the GOP’s identity crisis), conservative media institutions have an age problem which they have no idea how to fix.
Last year, David Kuo (the former head of the Bush White House office on faith-based initiatives) and Joe Carter (a Huckabee staffer and blogger) — with backing from William Bennett — decided to start an online magazine. They hoped to find a way for political conservatives to engage popular society in a way that was culturally relevant. If they succeeded, one obvious benefit would be making their brand of conservatism more appealing to younger generations.
Their model would be a conservative version of Slate — a little bit edgy but appreciative of books, TV, and movies.
They hired smart, young writers like Conor Friedersdorf , a journalist and graduate student at NYU; James Poulos, a PhD candidate in government at Georgetown; and Peter Suderman, a blogger and Libertarian.
They called their project Culture11 and quietly launched the site in beta during the late summer.
As Charles Homans reports in the current issue of Washington Monthly:

For a site that took as its starting point a retreat from the political arena, Culture11 actually had a lot to say about the election, and it was generally more eclectic and off-message than what other political publications had on offer as November approached. This had a lot to do with the fact that Culture11’s editorial brain trust was made up of people who had little concern for—or at least needed a breather from—the self-immolating Hindenburg of movement conservatism.

In many ways, it was the act of being off-message that made Culture11 interesting, and sometimes, very smart. But of course their willingness to flaunt conservative orthodoxy so deep into an election year guaranteed that the new magazine created plenty of critics among ostensible ideological allies.
It occasionally even created friction inside its own newsroom:

In December, when a pseudonymous contributor to Ladyblog, Culture11’s “conservative feminist” forum, posted an entry titled “In Defense of the ‘Hook-up Culture,’ ” Carter yanked it off the blog. (“I didn’t like the content,” he later said. “We wanted dissent within the conservative perspective, but to me that fell out of line.”) The move prompted an in-house uproar and an apologetic response from Kuo, reinstating the post but also averring that “Culture11 is a conservative site. We see the world through a culturally conservative lens. As such the post isn’t something that anyone here particularly agreed with. We don’t believe the hookup lifestyle is good for anyone.” (“I think our disagreements were healthy disagreements,” he told me later.)

It seems that there is a natural limit to what even the most open-minded conservatives can tolerate.
Late last month, after weeks of working the phones and crunching the budget, David Kuo came to the conclusion that Culture11 no longer had a future — at least not in its current form. He called his staff and told them that his board of directors had decided to lay them off. Today, the archives are active and William Bennett still updates his blog, but for all intents and purposes, the site is dead.
While it lasted, Culture11 was an interesting experiment. But even at its best, the writers and contributors were a band of insurgents with minimal establishment support and divergent goals and ideological viewpoints.
Was it all doomed from the start?
Maybe.
One of the overriding themes of the modern conservative movement has been its distaste (and occassional hatred) for popular culture (whatever it was at the time). Just as the old lions wrung their hands at Elvis and comic books, so do latter-day conservatives decry Jay-Z and video games.
Culture11 attempted to exist outside that bubble — written by people who listened to Lil’ Wayne, watched movies where people sometimes took off their clothes, and owned iPhones. But even they couldn’t help but feel superior when it came time to discuss their peers. More telling still was the occasional bit of self-loathing they let slip when it came time to look in the mirror.
Look no farther than Friedersdorf’s piece on the music played at his best friend’s wedding:

Our parents unselfconsciously played “Under My Thumb” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” during family car trips—we turned out fine! Even gangsta’ rap albums we sneaked in our youth hardly caused us to roll down the street “smoking indo, sippin’ on gin and juice.”
Yet we feel uneasy putting our iPods on shuffle if anyone under 15 is around. What explains this attitude shift? Were the prudes right? Is gangsta’ rap uniquely degraded?

Even while acknowledging hip hop’s cultural value, Friedersdorf concludes the piece hoping for a future where the music enjoyed by his children is less profane. Not exactly a message with a lot of Millennial resonance.
As Culture11 floundered, another group of conservatives led by Andrew Breitbart (of Drudge fame) unveiled their own website with superficially the same cultural-commentary mission — Big Hollywood. The new site was greeted with fairly significant praises in right-wing circles, and it gained traction just as quickly as Culture11 lost its footing.
Desipte the theoretical similarity, the two sites could not be more different. Big Hollywood exists to poke fun at the entertainment industry’s excess while Culture11 made a sincere investment in attempting to create intellectually honest criticism. Even the way each site was designed speaks to their differences. Culture11 embraced clean lines and rounded corners — if the editors of Slate unveiled a redesign with the same look and feel tomorrow, not one reader would bat an eye. Big Hollywood looks like The Drudge Report or the homepage for Fox News.
What better evidence exists that the two sites were meant for different audiences?
Big Hollywood is more chum for the conservative base. Yes, it’s an online outlet, and yes, that means that its publishing schedule is a little different. But its message and even its methods are intended for the Rush listener or the O’Reilly watchers. Which means an audience in its 60s.
Culture11 was an attempt to embrace free-form online modes of expression, find a solution to the youth problem, and force conservatives to think differently about popular culture. Given the difficulty of chewing a bite that size, perhaps its failure was no surprise.
But if conservatives are not prepared to grapple with all three problems now, they’ll be forced to confront the future soon. Demographics is destiny, as they say, and right now, the trends are all going the wrong way.

Peter Nicholas and Peter Wallsten are on to something in their L.A.Times article “On Economic Matters, Obama Lacks a Secretary of Selling It.”:

Aside from President Obama, the administration has yet to find a commanding figure who can carry economic policy messages and inspire confidence in White House prescriptions…In assembling his economic team, the President gave first priority to technical skill and intellectual achievement. So far, none of his senior advisors has shown the extra ability to inspire as well — both on Wall Street and Main Street…Because the programs are complex, costly and politically unpopular, the dearth of administration officials who can dominate the stage is becoming a serious handicap.

Economists can be eloquent fellows talking to each other and to other policy wonks. However,

“The ability to communicate with average people was not what these people were chosen for,” said Alice M. Rivlin, budget director under President Clinton. “They were chosen for their understanding of the problem and their ability to think creatively about it and to work out solutions to what is admittedly a very complex issue.”…Selling the president’s economic plans “clearly has not been their forte,” she said

Certainly no one has identified any nascent media stars on Obama’s economic team. But has there ever been a really impressive economic policy salesman or woman, as far as the average voter is concerned ? There’s a reason they call Economics “the dismal science.” If you want to clear out a party quickly, just start talking loudly about the Laffer curve or the velocity of M1.
It could be argued that President Reagan and Newt Gingrich were effective economic policy pitchmen. But what they were really selling was simple: deregulation and tax and federal budget cuts — less economic policy. Their pitch was well-timed, if ill-considered and simplistic. Never mind that they ended up tripling the federal deficit.
Like Obama, FDR was his own economic pitchman and by all accounts, he worked the press quite effectively. But it was a simpler time then, and radio, a media industry now dominated by right-wing gasbags, was the make or break p.r. tool. Pitching economic policy to voters is now more about television than any other media, with the influence of the internet rising just as print media begins to fade into history. Moreover, FDR was really selling himself. He was able to convey a bold persona and a sense that he knew what he was doing.
It is unclear whether Obama, his extraordinary speechmaking skills notwithstanding, can sell himself as effectively over time in our more cynical era. Communications tools are more complex, and that can be a good thing for a media-savvy president (see our staff post below). He has gotten high marks from economists for his media advocacy of economic policy reforms, according to Wallsten and Nicholas. But there is a fear among his staff of over-exposure, and worse, burnout. Tonight he will face the media in his second news conference, and hopefully will do as well as in his first press conference. Generally, however, he should play to his strength — speechifying.
Bottom line is a great many people are still bewildered or bored by economic policy discussions, despite the loud arguments about economic policy taking place in living rooms, bars and at water coolers across the country. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest salesman/woman in the world fronting your agenda. Bailouts for failed banks and auto companies, along with subsidies for imprudent homeowners are a tough sell, no matter how well-justified by the cold hard facts. Ditto for tax hikes and reassuring voters that their retirement assets will one day return from the market’s Bermuda Triangle.
President Obama’s hole card is that voters well-understand that he has inherited a horrible mess not of his making, and most get it that there is no quick fix. He has to be careful, though, not to parrot this meme so much that it starts to sound like whining. Leave that thankless task to his economic team.