In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,” TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira makes it clear that the Republican attempt to implant the meme that “big” government is the cause of the nation’s problems in the minds of a majority of Americans has failed. As Teixeira explains, “…Several recent poll findings suggest this claim is vastly exaggerated”:

Just 37 percent of respondents in a recent CBS/New York Times poll said they believe President Barack Obama has expanded the role of the government “too much” in trying to solve the country’s economic problems. The others said either “about right” (34 percent) or “not enough” (22 percent). This hardly sounds like a conservative tidal wave.

In addition, Teixeira notes,

Another finding comes from a recent Allstate/National Journal/Heartland poll, which asked people directly about their views of the proper role of government in the economy. Just 35 percent said they subscribe to the fundamental conservative ideological position on government that “government is not the solution to our economic problems, government is the problem.” Another 28 percent said that government must play an active role in regulation and ensuring that the economy benefits “people like me.” And 33 percent said they would like to see government play an active role in the economy to benefit people like themselves, but they were not sure that they could trust the government to be effective in doing so.

Teixeira concludes, “…The American public’s dissatisfaction with government is primarily performance-based and does not reflect a sudden ideological conversion to the conservative cause, no matter what conservative pundits and politicians say.” Despite the millions of dollars Republicans have spent trying to propagate this simplistic meme, it’s clear the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t buy it.

Democratic ad-makers should have a gander at Steven Leser’s post at op-ed news, “2010 Election – A Democratic Momentum Shift Begins to Materialize,” not so much for the optimistic outlook as for the way Leser frames his critique of several Republican candidates and their party. Leser cites his reasons for the Democratic surge, including:

Republicans have been trying to make the case since a month into the Obama administration that Obama’s policies were too extreme left (they aren’t, if anything they are center-left). Instead of trying to follow-up that line of attack with center-right candidates, they nominated the most radical right wingnut candidates this country has ever seen. While it seems like I am saying the same things the Republicans and conservative media are saying, from the opposite side of course, unlike the Republicans, I can back up my claim. Consider the following:
While we are accustomed to Republican candidates being against a woman’s right to have an abortion, five high-profile Tea Party Republican SENATE candidates, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska, Sharron Angle of Nevada, and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware, are even against a woman’s right to have an abortion in the case of rape or incest! Women would have to have their rapists baby. Girls raped by an uncle or cousin or their fathers would have to give birth to a child from a resulting pregnancy.
…How does that square with the two year long Tea Party talking point that says that government is too intrusive and should stay out of people’s lives? How about the continued Republican/Tea Party fight against gay rights including the right for gays to serve in the military and marry? If you do not have the freedom to have consensual sex with other adults and have a choice over whether you reproduce (particularly if raped), I’d say that the rest of the freedoms really don’t matter much.

Leser goes on to describe the lunacy of Christine O’Donnell’s ideas about religion and science, Carl Paladino’s ugly flirtations with racism and the GOP’s WV U.S. Senate candidate John Raese’s celebration of upper-class privilege, along with Newt Gingrich’s lack of cred as a spokesman for ‘family values.’
With respect to the Republicans’ Speaker in Waiting, Leser notes what a GOP takeover of the House would mean for the speakership:

Regarding the “Pledge” the Republicans put forth, Republican house minority leader Boehner made the lack of a plan in “the pledge” clear on Fox News last Sunday when he said “The Pledge just lays down the pathway towards the possibility of building a framework for possible plan to have a real plan in the future.”

Leser provides a video showing more of Boehner’s ridiculous jive-talk. Leser concludes:

…While most Americans are normally too busy to take note of the latest Republican manufactured outrage or conservative media hyperbole, when it gets down to the 60 days before an election, people start taking a closer look. The trend in polling shows that what the American people are seeing with that closer look is not to their liking. Republicans, of course, see the danger in what is happening and in response, many campaigns are pulling back from media appearances and canceling debates with their Democratic opponents. I think it is too late and the momentum has shifted. It became too late when the Republicans nominated these wingnutty teabaggers for house and senate seats.
…The polls say the American people are having second thoughts about putting the Republican/Tea Party bums in the driver’s seat. You can almost hear what they are thinking. What are these Tea Party folks trying to sell us? Who are these crazy candidates? Why is a more severe version of the same stuff that put us into the economic crisis we are in better than the policies that have stabilized the economy? With those questions, the Republicans are seeing the Senate slip away and their hope of a Republican majority in the House start to appear in jeopardy.

Leser’s analysis makes good sense. and Democratic candidates may be able to draw from some of his framing to good effect.

In trying to assign responsibility for the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that has followed, Democrats sometimes forget what they were saying before September of 2008: that middle-class Americans were losing ground throughout the two terms of the Bush administration.
Ron Brownstein reminds us of the bigger picture in a column utilizing new Census data. The recent economic troubles, he notes, simply exacerbated a already bad situation for all but the wealthiest Americans:

From 2000 through 2009, the Census Bureau found, the median income (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars) declined by 5 percent for white families, 8 percent for Hispanic families, and more than 11 percent for African-American families. That’s almost unimaginable over an entire decade. From 1991 through 2000 (again in inflation-adjusted dollars) it had risen by 13 percent for whites, 19 percent for Hispanics, and 28 percent for African-Americans.
Similarly, the total number of Americans in poverty increased by nearly 12 million in the last decade, more than obliterating the 4.1 million reduction during the 1990s. Especially troubling is that the number of poor children jumped by 3.9 million — again, more than erasing the 2.8 million decline during the 1990s.

No wonder even Republicans don’t much like to tout the 2000s as a period of great progress, preferring to go back to a fictional version of the 1980s for inspiration. But any comparison of the economic records of the 1990s and the 2000s should create some pretty obvious implications for current policy debates, as Brownstein suggests:

It’s worth noting that this dismal performance occurred almost entirely after the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were in place. That record offers little reason for confidence that extending the tax cuts will ignite recovery, as their advocates argue. The economy produced more vibrant and broadly shared growth in the 1990s after Bill Clinton raised taxes than it did after Bush cut them. That doesn’t mean that tax hikes are a panacea; but it certainly suggests that tax cuts are not.

The only thing that would surely be accomplished by making the high-end Bush tax cuts permanent is to accelerate even more the ever-growing inequality of the 2000s. And if Democrats cannot find a way to criticize inequality without engaging in the kind of “class warfare” that turns off some middle-class voters, they certainly aren’t trying very hard. Most Americans know it’s been a long time since they’ve gained any economic ground, and counting once again on bribing the wealthiest Americans–those the GOP refers to as “job creators”–to lift the economy is a scam that should get easier and easier to expose.

Democrats have plenty to worry about over the next five weeks, but it nonetheless behooves Dems to get up to speed on the latest voter suppression scams. In that regard, Demos and Common Cause have partnered to present a must-read report on the topic, “Voting in 2010: Ten Swing States: Problematic election laws and policies in ten swing states could impact enough voters to determine election outcomes.” (PDF Executive Summary here)
The report profiles ten states (AZ, KY, CO, IL, LA, MI, MO, NV, NC and OH), where close elections are expected. The report focuses on laws and policies built into the structure of state election codes, rather than the illegal suppression practices that popped up in FL and OH during recent presidential elections.
The fact sheet on Kentucky, for example, reveals the obstacles Democratic candidates face in that state, including cutting off registration 28 days before the election, draconian felon disenfranchisement disqualifying 24 percent of African Americans, no legal mandate to disseminate voter information and a poor record of complying with the legal requirement to register people at public assistance agencies.
The report also credits each state for “exemplary voting laws” where applicable.
There are also reports of a voter caging operation underway in Wisconsin. According to Karoli’s post, “Voter Suppression in Wisconsin, Courtesy of the GOP and Americans for Prosperity” at CrooksandLiars.com,

Here’s how it works: A mailer is sent to registered voters. Any mailers returned by the post office are put in a database and those voters are submitted to be purged from voting rolls. Of course, the targets are never Republican voters. They’re Democrats, and generally minority voters in particular….One Wisconsin Now has uncovered this plot with evidence, but don’t assume this is limited to Wisconsin. I guarantee you it isn’t. They are targeting as many states as they can, but particularly swing states. Expect Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona just to name a few to have the exact same operations afoot.

And here’s a recent report on voter suppression in Texas.
In addition to the aforementioned laws and policies, and ‘caging,’ Dems should be ready for other suppression practices, like switching poll places, intimidation, parking obstruction, misleading and incorrect poll information, inferior computer equipment at polls in minority neighborhood polling places,
Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan Hersh also have a contribution to the topic in their “Early and Often” post at the Boston Review, in which they note,

Registration problems create barriers to voting and make it difficult for administrators to communicate with voters, identify voters at the polls, and audit elections after the fact. Reforms following the 2000 election sought to improve the accuracy and currency of the voter-registration lists. Most important, all states now have statewide voter files. So how good are the files today?…
This summer the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University and the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project issued the first comprehensive, nationwide analysis of the quality of information stored on voter registration lists…Nationwide, approximately 1 in 16 entries on the registration lists is unmailable. The magnitude of the problem varies greatly throughout the country. In California, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., about 1 in 50 entries is problematic, but in Arkansas, that number is 1 in 5.

The authors provide a chart ranking every state. This is not just about incompetence and sloppy registration management. The states are all well-aware of their rankings and the reasons for it, and in most cases it’s a matter of political manipulation — almost always to the detriment of Democrats.

Jane Mayer has an interesting post at The New Yorker, based on her telephone interview with former Vice President and Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale in advance of his forthcoming memoir, “The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics.”
While it’s always good to give a fair hearing to the political advice of Democratic winners, like Bill Clinton, I think there is also value in hearing what smart candidates who have lost elections — those who have learned the lesson — have to say. I would say Mondale fits this description, perhaps better than his ticket mate Jimmy Carter, based on Mayer’s article and Carter’s recent comments about Senator Kennedy blocking health care reform.
Here’s Mondale, comparing his experience as Carter’s veep to the Democrats current predicament, as reported by Mayer:

…He could not help noting the similarities between Obama’s embattled White House and Carter’s. The problems that he and Carter faced from 1976 until 1980, he recalled, often seemed “overwhelming,” with “no good answers” in sight. As the economy was ravaged by what was known as “stagflation,” he said, the public “just turned against us–same as with Obama.” He went on, “People think the President is the only one who can fix their problems. And, if he doesn’t produce solutions, I’m telling you–when a person loses a job, or can’t feed his family, or can’t keep his house, he is no longer rational. They become angry, they strike out–and that’s what we have now. If you’re President, they say, ‘Do something!’ ”
…Mondale recalled that President Carter, as his standing in the polls slid, “began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public.” The President, he said, should have “got out front earlier with the bad news and addressed the people more.” He sees a similar problem with Obama: “I think he needs to get rid of those teleprompters, and connect. He’s smart as hell. He can do it. Look right into those cameras and tell people he’s hurting right along with them.” Carter, on the other hand, he said, might not have been able to. “At heart, he was an engineer,” Mondale said. “He wanted to sit down and come up with the right answers, and then explain it. He didn’t like to do a lot of emotional public speaking.”
…”In my opinion, Obama had a few false presumptions. One was the idea that we were in a post-partisan era.” The other was “the idea of turning things over to Congress–that doesn’t work even when you own Congress. You have to ride ’em.” Further, he suggested that Obama should stop thinking about what he can get from the Republican opposition: “You should explain clearly what you want, and, if they oppose you, attack them for it.”

Mondale worries about the public’s “outsized expectations,” but he says of Obama “he’s in a fairly good position to keep the Party united.” Coming from one of the lions of Democratic liberalism, that’s encouraging.

Wanna see what happens when a Democratic House candidate confronts a murky group spending big bucks on ads attacking him? Check out Amanda Terkel’s HuffPo post, “Rep. Peter DeFazio Turns The Tables, Confronts Shadowy Conservative Group Running Attack Ads Against Him (VIDEO).”
Terkel’s post is of interest for a couple of reasons: 1. These shadowy groups are popping up all over the country, with little accountability, in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision giving them free reign, and 2. DeFazio shows how to reveal their sleazy origins.
Here’s an excerpt of Terkel’s post:

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) is turning the tables on a political group launching attack ads against him in an attempt to bring its shadowy practices to light. On Friday, he went to the Capitol Hill headquarters of the Concerned Taxpayers of America to deliver a letter and speak with members of the organization about making its donors public. But the person who answered the door misrepresented himself and lied, saying he had never heard of Concerned Taxpayers, even though subsequent information shows that he is affiliated with the group…According to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filings, Concerned Taxpayers is spending $86,000 for ads to help DeFazio’s opponent, Art Robinson.

Terkel goes on to explain that the ads try to portray DeFazio as “a puppet” of Speaker Pelosi, even though he has opposed her on key legislation. Terkel notes that Concerned Citizens’ treasurer is Jason Miller, who is with a Republican political consulting firm, Jamestown Associates, according to the FEC filings and she continues:

DeFazio decided to confront Concerned Taxpayers on Friday, intending to deliver a letter requesting that the group make its donors public. “Since you intend to try and buy Art Robinson a congressional seat, by raising and spending ‘unlimited amounts of money,’ the voters of Oregon are entitled to know who is picking up the tab,” wrote DeFazio.
The Huffington Post, along with a couple of journalists from The Washington Post, accompanied DeFazio on the short walk from the Rayburn House Office Building over to Concerned Taxpayers’ headquarters, listed as 10 E St, SE, which turned out to be a small grey townhouse. DeFazio had to ring the doorbell, knock, and yell through the mail slot before someone came to the door. The man identified himself as Mike Omegna and he told the congressman that he had never heard of Miller or Concerned Taxpayers, nor was his voice on the organization’s voicemail…

Terkel adds,

It appeared that Omegna was dissembling. The Huffington Post called Concerned Taxpayers’ phone number, and the message, in Omegna’s voice, said:
You’ve reached Michael Omegna at Jamestown Associates. I can’t get to my phone right now, but if you leave me your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If this is regarding Concerned Taxpayers of America, please leave a detailed message and I will respond back as soon as possible.
So not only did Omegna clearly have an association with Miller — who works at Jamestown Associates — but he also has a tie to Concerned Taxpayers and his voice was on the answering machine, despite what he told DeFazio.

There’s more. But the important thing is that DeFazio got in their face and exposed their origins, as Terkel reports:

…”We’ve got to take it to them,” he told HuffPost. “I’m an activist, always have been my whole life, and I’m going there to confront them and say, ‘Who are you, and why are you so afraid to disclose where your money come from? Would it totally discredit your attacks on me and other Democrats? Would it totally discredit your organization?’ We don’t know who they are. And as I said earlier, how can we enforce existing law, which does say it can’t be a foreign government, a foreign entity, a foreign individual, but if we are allowed no disclosure, how will we ever know who funded these campaigns?”

It’s clear that, by revealing the source of the ads as something other than a genuine independent ‘citizens organization,’ — and showing his guts in getting a videotaped confrontation — DeFazio increased the chances that the ads will backfire. If DeFazio wins, it may be because enough swing voters admired his courage.

According to the settled and conventional view of things, Democrats are in trouble in this midterm election in no small part because progressives, unhappy with the Obama administration’s timidity and/or pro-corporate leanings, plan to stay at home. This is, indeed, the central conviction at the heart of all the talk about an “enthusiasm gap” between Democrats and Republicans.
That’s why Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen’s recent post on Obama approval ratings among his own 2008 voters is so very interesting.

Our national poll last week- which is conducted with registered, rather than likely, voters- found that 88% of people who voted for Obama still approve of the job he’s doing.
It’s a different story with likely voters in the 16 states we’ve polled since switching over to LVs for our horse race polling in mid-August. Only in 3 of those states- Alaska, North Carolina, and Texas- has Obama maintained that level of popularity with people who voted for him. And in several key states where Democrats are having a lot of trouble it’s dropped quite a bit.

So disgruntled 2008 Obama voters aren’t, by and large, progressives who are planning on sitting on their hands November 2. They are likely voters who are straying into the Republican column, even as many satisfied Obama voters don’t bother to go to the polls. That’s certainly how Jensen sees it:

What these numbers suggest to me is that Democrats staying home aren’t necessarily disappointed with how things have gone so far. The Democrats not voting are more pleased with how Obama’s done than the Democrats who are voting. And when you’re happy you simply don’t have the sense of urgency about going out and voting to make something change. That complacency, more than the Republicans, is Democrats’ strongest foe this year.

So the disparity in current likelihood to vote between Democrats and Republicans in part represents a “complacency gap” as much as an “enthusiasm gap.” You’d think it would be relatively easy, particularly as Election Day approaches, to convince satisfied Obama voters that the president and the country are in pretty hot water if Republicans retake Congress. But time’s running out for making that case, and sometimes voters need to be reminded graphically of the consequences of civic negligence, whether it’s rooted in happy or unhappy sentiments.

Ed Kilgore’s post above clearly highlights one very important aspect of a broader problem: the common assumption in media commentary that trends in voter behavior can be meaningfully condensed into just one or two simple factors like an “enthusiasm gap” or “disappointment.”
To a substantial degree this desire by commentators to present simple explanations is motivated by two factors – the 800 word limit for most political commentary and the desire to propose simple answers of the form “If the Dems would just do X, they could win the election.”
In the case of the “enthusiasm gap,” for example, most commentary quickly lumps all of the “unenthusiastic” Democrats into one of the following three categories (1) left critics discuss the trend as reflecting anger at Obama’s “betrayal” of his campaign promises (2) mainstream commentators point to “disappointment” with the lack of significant change and (3) conservatives explain the problem as clearly reflecting a rejection of Obama’s agenda.
It’s not often noted by political commentators that advertising professionals – the people who are held directly and personally responsible for the success or failure of their communication strategies — generally don’t think this way. Quite the contrary, Ad people are trained to try and segment any overall audience they are trying to reach into meaningful sub-groups with distinct outlooks and then create specific message that speak to those unique perspectives. In many textbooks, copywriters are taught to create a dozen or more “profiles” of audience segments. They are told to write short biographies e.g. “Jessie is a 24 year old graphic designer who lives in a studio apartment with a grey and white cat and furniture she bought at from Rooms to Go….” Often, copywriters and designers cut out pictures from magazines to go with the biographies and hang them on the walls of their offices so that they have a specific visual image of the particular kinds of customers they are trying to persuade.
Faced with a vague concept like “unenthusiastic” Democratic voters, most advertising specialists would immediately think about segmenting the group. Market research would fairly quickly produce a list of subgroups something like the following:

1. People who voted for Obama because of the unique “cool” excitement of the 2008 campaign but who are largely indifferent to politics and never bother to vote in off-year elections.
2. People who voted for Obama out of a sense of profound outrage against some particular aspect of the Bush administration but now do not feel a similar sense of anger compelling them to get out and vote.
3. People who voted for Obama and now feel frustrated with the lack of progress but do not blame Obama himself for the problem. Rather the political stalemate has just made them feel cynical about the value of voting.
4. People who voted for Obama and feel frustrated with him for failing to accomplish more than he has.
5. People who voted for Obama and feel that Obama betrayed them on one or more issues but who still prefer him to the Republicans. They would vote for Democrats if they were standing in the voting booth but have no real enthusiasm for going to the polls.
6. People who voted for Obama but now feel so betrayed by him on one or more issues that they flatly refuse to vote for Democrats.

Looking over this list, it is fairly easy to recognize the quite distinct outlooks of these different “unenthusiastic” Democratic voters and the lack of a simple common view. This quickly suggests one key conclusion:
If you were doing door to door voter canvassing and campaign work, you would vary almost everything in your approach depending on which of these different kinds of voter you were talking to – what you would say, your tone of voice, the degree to which you would express empathy and understanding – all these things would be substantially different depending on the particular person.
This, in turn, leads to one key political conclusion: the most important and effective form of pro-Democratic campaigning this year will be face to face personal communication. There is no single slogan or message that will do the job. The only thing that will reliably influence all these different groups – except perhaps the sixth — is being personally contacted by pro-Democratic advocates who sincerely and passionately insist that voting is still worthwhile.
So let’s stop looking for a “magic bullet” slogan, policy or last minute game-changer. The most important thing Democrats can do right now is person-to-person contact and communication.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
One intriguing thing about the Republican Party’s “Pledge to America” is that it doesn’t include that many goodies for the Tea Party–or, more precisely, that it concedes far more to the Tea Party in terms of rhetoric than actual policy.
Here’s the breakdown: The preamble and foreword are dominated by dog whistles and direct appeals aimed at the Tea Party movement. It contains all sorts of grave, don’t-tread-on-me rumbling about the unprecedented emergency facing the country, the arrogance of Washington Democrat elitists, and the righteous indignation of the people, as expressed “in town halls and on public squares.” There’s a big shout-out to constitutional originalism, and particularly to the Tenth Amendment, which many Tea Partiers rely on when they claim that states have the right to nullify expansions of federal power. In general, the language suggests that the Obama administration is not simply wrong, but lacks legitimacy.
The rhetoric also bows to the religious right–which overlaps heavily with the Tea Party Movement–with references to “protecting life” and “traditional families.” It also includes a finely tuned dog whistle that places the Declaration of Independence, with its references to the Creator and to natural rights, on a par with the Constitution as a founding document.
But when it comes to specifics, the Pledge limits its wrath to reversal of the Obama administration’s policies. By vowing to repeal TARP, the authors promise to carry their counterrevolution all the way back to September of 2008, but that’s it. There’s nothing about repealing No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription drug benefit, both of which have been routinely denounced by Republican congressional candidates this year. And the document doesn’t contain any proposals touching on the broader Tea Party agenda of revoking “unconstitutional” policies and practices dating back to the New Deal. Even though most Tea Party-affiliated GOP candidates have embraced a phase-out of Social Security and Medicare, or other radical changes to our welfare system, all the Pledge contains is vague language about “accountability” in these programs. It doesn’t even tout Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher proposal, and its one real reference to Medicare attacks the alleged benefit cuts contained in the health reform legislation. In other words, the White House is right to accuse Republicans of simply wanting to “take America back to the same failed economic policies that caused this recession”–but they haven’t gone back any further than that. That’s how thoroughly the House GOP has eschewed the more radical stance of the conservative movement and its Tea Party base.
Given all the dodges on spending, not to mention the document’s monomania about making Bush tax cuts permanent, it’s perhaps not surprising that it fails to promise a balanced federal budget, or even the hoary symbolic demand for a balanced budget constitutional amendment (which the Contract With America did contain in 1994.) As Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein quickly pointed out, the Pledge is about as good a recipe as can be devised for actually increasing deficits and debt, not to mention perpetuating a weak and inequality-ridden economy.
The reaction to this document from the conservative commentariat has been mixed, but generally negative. The editors of National Review rather defensively called the Pledge an improvement on the Contract With America because it promised actions rather than just votes on the House floor. More typical was the reaction of RedState blogger Erick Erickson:

The entirety of this Promise is laughable. Why? It is an illusion that fixates on stuff the GOP already should be doing while not daring to touch on stuff that will have any meaningful longterm effects on the size and scope of the federal government.
This document proves the GOP is more focused on the acquisition of power than the advocacy of long term sound public policy.

This is a stark illustration of the divide between professional Republican politicians and Tea Party movement activists. It can’t bode well for Republican unity that the House started out by identifying with the spirit of 1776, but clearly prefers the spirit of 2007.

This item is a guest post from Heather Hurlburt, Executive Director of the National Security Network. The views therein are her own.
As a colleague and I have written previously for TDS, the GOP spent the summer using Islam-bashing to paper over a canyon-sized fissure on national security. But the word “fissur makes the problem sound neat and orderly, where what is going on beneath the surface is more of a free-for-all among old-fashioned realists, neocons, paleocons, Tea Partiers and libertarians.
Republicans can be found on at least two sides of every key national security issue we face — how to combat terrorism, how (and even whether) to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction, how to conduct the war in Afghanistan, how to cope with untraditional threats such as climate change, how to work with and/or hedge against China and other ascendant powers. There is Senator McCain vs. Chairman Steele on Afghanistan; Senator Lugar vs. Governor Romney on arms control; Governor Palin vs. both Rand and Ron Paul on counter-terrorism.
Perhaps most fascinating – and most interesting for progressives thinking ahead to the problem of getting anything done in 2011 – is the crumbling of GOP unity on issues that have, in the past, been among the party’s biggest rhetorical cudgels. And it’s hard to think of a bigger one of those than the defense budget.
At a time when the Tea Party Movement has helped revive demands from the Right for a balanced federal budget, the largest single element of discretionary government spending is our defense budget. Its unfettered growth since 9-11 has left some inside the Pentagon, as well as many outside, uncomfortable; meanwhile, that growth has left key needs of our troops on the ground unfunded.
A number of centrist, conservative and libertarian defense intellectuals – such as Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution and Ben Friedman and Chris Preble of the CATO Institute — have spoken out in favor of spending cuts. They’ve been joined by mainstream media commentators such as TIME’s Fareed Zakaria (formerly of Newsweek). In Congress, Representatives Barney Frank and Ron Paul launched earlier this year a bipartisan Sustainable Defense Task Force (in which this author participated), which prepared a menu of $1 trillion in potential cuts over ten years. Against this backdrop, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has launched an initiative to rein in, if not actually reduce, overall spending.
That effort has produced anxiety in the military and consternation among some GOP thought leaders such as David Frum, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. In the neoconservative wing of the GOP, support not only for existing defense spending, but for increased spending pegged to GDP growth, regardless of the threat landscape, is an article of faith.
Even in a time of pinched budgets, the time-tested GOP arguments remain for unscrutinized high defense spending. The Heritage Foundation wonders, “Should the defense of their freedom be sacrificed to liberal lawmakers’ pet causes and to runaway automatic spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?” The Wall Street Journal editorial page posits that, “We learned on 9/11 that 3% isn’t nearly enough to maintain our commitments and fight a war on terror.” (As though a few more battleships or more nuclear weapons would have prevented 9/11.)
But how does the GOP square this circle with the parts of the party whose main focus is scaling back government and reducing the deficit? The same way they’ve addressed all the other internecine squabbles: intro Sarah Palin. As Josh Rogin has written, Palin is the “Tea Party’s Hawk.” Her message is this: When it comes to scaling back government, everything is on the table — except defense spending of course. That massaged position is an example of why Palin–or “Palinism”–is the glue that bonds the neocons and the more libertarian, deficit-conscious Tea Partiers together on defense spending. Palin’s position, though, is antithetical, or should be, to the libertarians and deficit hawks.
The specifics of the neocon defense budget position provides a ripe opportunity to incense the deficit hawks: Since neocons want to peg defense spending to a certain percentage of GDP, they’re essentially calling for an ever-expanding budget – not just refusing to cut the budget but a legislated, entitled, ever-increasing block of spending, Medicare for the Pentagon. By the unavoidable arithmetic of the federal budget, that means major and unpopular cuts in the actual Medicare program, along with radical changes in other strongly popular domestic priorities from Social Security to environmental protection, particularly at a time when Republicans not only oppose tax increases but are demanding new tax cuts.
Smart GOP strategists know that the contradictions between their positions on defense spending and the budget deficit make them vulnerable. Perhaps recognizing that anti-spending works much better as rhetoric than reality, Republicans did block Congress from creating a Deficit Reduction Commission, which the President ultimately created instead by executive order, but with merely the power to recommend. Reflexive GOP support for ever-higher defense spending is gradually coming underassault from within by Republicans Rep. Walter Jones and Sen. Tom Coburn, among others. When and if specific cuts are proposed, Members of Congress can be expected to engage in ugly bipartisan food-fighting to protect their local prerogatives. And this will only further confuse the GOP deficit-cutting message.
A muddied message from the extreme factions of the GOP will set the stage for a genuinely bipartisan effort to lead on principle and put Pentagon spending in a framework constrained both by our economic circumstances and the objectives we as a society wish to use our military to accomplish – both areas in which public opinion puts neoconservatives at a disadvantage and blunts arguments they have traditionally used on Democrats. It will also further dishearten libertarians, old-fashioned conservatives who favor a smaller military footprint, and Tea-Party-esque supporters who are dismayed by government bloat, waste and corruption wherever it resides.
Of course, there is an alternative – that GOP strategists recognize the perils of their conflicting positions, , and create a situation wherein the two parties find themselves competing to capture the experts and reform and rationalize our Pentagon spending. After all, the 60th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the excesses of a military-industrial complex arrives next January–not a bad time to start taking it seriously.