Lisa Mascaro of the L.A. Times Washington, D.C. Bureau has a wake up call for women political activists and all voters who believe more women are needed in congress. Madcaro’s article, “Women in Washington, Your Seats Are at Risk,” lends veracity to the recent Democratic slogan, “You put it in ‘D’ to go forward and ‘R’ for reverse.” As Mascaro explains:

…With this fall’s midterm elections, the number of women serving in Congress could drop for the first time in a generation — a twist on a political season many had dubbed “the year of the woman.”
If large numbers of Democratic incumbents lose in November, as expected, many women could be replaced by men. Female candidates tend to do better in Democratic years, and 2010 is shaping up as a successful year for Republicans.
Women now hold 90 seats in Congress: 69 are Democrats and 21 are Republicans. After the November election, Congress could end up with as many as 10 fewer female members, prognosticators now say, the first backslide in the uninterrupted march of women to Washington since 1978.

An unfavorable reversal of a three decades trend is a sobering thought for advocates of women’s political empowerment. And it’s not as if Republicans have much interest in making up the slack on their side of the aisle, as Mascaro reports:

In fact, just four women are among the GOP’s 46 “Young Guns,” as the party calls its frontline challengers who are considered future leaders.

So much for the “Mama Grizzlies” hype. The Republican Party remains a bastion of male dominance and if they win big in November, the GOP will further diminish the political empowerment of women in Washington.
All of which should serve as a rallying cry for all activists who believe America would be well-served by more women office-holders to (a.) contribute to the DSCC, DCCC and Democratic candidates and (b.) redouble campaign activism on their behalf.

The political websites are all abuzz about the latest Gallup generic ballot poll, which indicates an all time midterm GOP advantage of 10 percent. If that wasn’t downer enough for you, here’s a couple of nut graphs Harry Enten’s Pollster.com post, “Underestimating the Likely Gallup Voter Edge:

…As noted, a 10% Republican lead on Gallup’s generic ballot is unprecedented, and it will likely get worse once Gallup switches over to a likely voter model. Congressmen and political analysts alike have mentioned that Republicans could possibly do 4% better on a likely voter model. Upon further examination, however, I think it could be worse for Democrats. Why? History.
Gallup has a relatively famous likely voter model that has been in place since 1950. Therefore, we can compare past differences in the generic ballot between registered and likely voter models to give us an idea of how different they will be this year…

Entern then crunches data from final Gallup midterm polls since 1994, comparing rv and lv figures, along with “enthusiasm gap” data, and offers two observations:

First, Republicans have for the past four midterms always done better on the final Gallup likely voter poll than registered voter poll by at least 4%. This deviation is to be expected as midterm electorates tend to be older and whiter than presidential year ones.
Second, the gap between the likely and registered models benefited Republicans greatest in years where they had large leads in enthusiasm. In both 1994 and 2002 (where Republicans held at least a 8%+ edge in Gallup’s final measure of enthusiasm), the Republicans margin was 7% and 11% higher respectively on the likely voter model. In 1998 and 2002 when Democrats had a lead in enthusiasm, they “only” picked up 5% and 4%. The Republicans edge on net enthusiasm was 28% a month ago, which means that voters this year are even more enthusiastic than in 1994 or 2002….

OK, that’s bad. Worse, Enten concludes:

…I believe that it is quite possible that at least on the final Gallup generic ballot (prior ones may differ) the Republican margin on the likely voter model could be 5-10% greater than on the registered voter model.

Polling data for numerous individual races lends cred to the national polls, including Gallup. True, Gallup has had some issues on occasion with accusations of GOP bias. But now that most of the polls have turned quite sour for Dems, it’s hard to deny that Republicans have opened up a big lead in numerous races, whether or not Gallup overstates the GOP lead by a few points.
While there is little encouragement for Dems in recent polling numbers, at least it does appear that Democrats are getting together a decent ground game for the midterms. That doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t match or top it. And not to lard too much lipstick on the pig, but I’m also encouraged that Dems are targeting seniors — the “older and whiter” voters Enten cites above. As Chris Cilliza explains in his ‘The Fix’ post, “Can Social Security save Democrats this fall?” at WaPo:

Democrats, faced with a worsening national political climate and daunting historical midterm election trends, are turning to Social Security as an issue where they believe they can score political points and set the stakes of what a Republican-controlled Congress would look like.
At least a half-dozen Democratic House candidates as well as several Democratic Senators in tight re-election races have featured claims that the GOP wants to either privatize or eliminate the retirement plan entirely in new television ads, and party strategists promise there are far more commercials to come.

Cillizza spotlights an impressive video ad by Indiana Democrat Rep. Baron Hill, who blasts his Republican opponent, Todd Young, who called Social Security and Medicare “welfare programs.” Cillizza cites several other Democratic House and Senate candidates who have launched similar ads, and he adds,

The strategy behind the Democratic attacks is simple. Older voters are deeply suspicious of any changes to the retirement program — it’s not an accident that Social Security is referred to as the “third rail of American politics” — and they also happen to be the most reliable voters in lower turnout midterm elections.
According to exit polling from the 2006 midterms, nearly three in ten (29 percent) of voters were 60 and older; Democrats won that age group 50 percent to 48 percent.

Cillizza cautions that Social Security is a relatively low priority concern in voter rankings, well behind the economy. But with seniors, it’s always a hot button issue. Not all Republicans have attacked Social Security quite so stupidly as has Todd Young, although Sharron Angle and others could give him a run for the booby prize.
Ironically, the Democratic outreach to seniors seeks to tap their conservative (as in ‘cautious’) perspective — the wingnut campaign to eliminate Social Security is a radical idea, and few seniors would volunteer to be their guinea pigs. if Dems can gain an edge with seniors and turn out a larger than usual percentage of Latino and African American voters, and if the voter registration edge Dems now have translates into a better than average mid-term turnout, the much-trumpeted Republican takeover of congress will have to wait for another year.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Ben Bernanke’s “unusually uncertain” may be for our times what Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” was to the late 1990s–a phrase that captures the dominant mood without providing much policy guidance.
As dissent continued to rise in the ranks of the usually united Federal Reserve Board, unusual uncertainty reigned supreme at the annual Jackson Hole meeting. While the Reinhart-Rogoff thesis that downturns induced by financial collapses differ significantly from traditional cyclical downturns was broadly accepted, there was no agreement on their generalization (based on a large number of historical cases) that public debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent necessarily slow economic growth. Indiana University economist Eric Leeper’s call to focus more on fiscal challenges induced by demographic shifts was challenged by CBO director Doug Elmendorf (not exactly a fiscal dove himself): “Fiscal policy is intrinsically about distributional choices. … There is no scientific basis for saying how large the government deficit should be–any more than what my level of savings should be.”
As a non-economist and puzzled citizen, I find Elmendorf’s statement astounding and disturbing. Is it really true that we can say nothing valid about the relationship between the size of deficits in specific circumstances and the level of economic activity? If so, what is the basis for supporting (or, for that matter, opposing) fiscal stimulus during downturns? To say that the issue is “distributional” means that fiscal policy affects how the pie is divided, not the size of the pie. If so, the conservative critique would seem to have some merit: A “stimulus package” simply takes away from some groups and gives to others–usually core members of the political majority. (This is not to say that the distributional consequences of fiscal policy–or any other policy–are matters about which we should be morally indifferent.)
What makes this episode so baffling is that, less than a month ago, the CBO published an Issue Brief (with Elmendorf’s signature affixed) entitled “Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis.” The minimally alert reader will find the following on the first page:

Although deficits during or shortly after a recession generally hasten economic recovery, persistent deficits and continually mounting debt would have several negative economic consequences for the United States. … A growing portion of people’s savings would go to purchase government debt rather than toward investments in productive capital goods such as factories and computers; that “crowding out” of investment would lead to lower output and incomes than would otherwise occur.

A bit later on, but still on the first page, we read:

[A] growing level of federal debt would also increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow at affordable rates.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but to me these two quotations (and there are many others to the same effect) don’t sound like “distributional” observations. They are, rather, predictions about the consequences of excessive debt accumulation for the performance of the economy as a whole. If so, what’s the basis for Elmendorf’s disagreement with Leeper?
I may be making too much out of quotations drawn from much more extensive discussions. Or my emphasis may be wrong. If Elmendorf’s point is that fiscal policy can’t be conducted with “scientific” precision, who would disagree? It involves complex judgments about quantities, timing, and the responses of key actions in specific situations that are bound to have some unique features. The challenge is to get the broad thrust of fiscal policy pushing in the right direction at the right time, which means assessing the shifting balance between risks and opportunities. That’s what I took the CBO’s July Issue Brief to be doing.
We may well be in a Bernankean moment of unusual uncertainty, but there’s no need to make it worse with superfluous uncertainty. Will the real Doug Elmendorf please stand up and clarify?

President Obama’s announcement last night that all U.S. combat troops have left Iraq, on schedule, didn’t get much positive commentary. Many Republicans complained he didn’t give credit to the man who once promised to “liberate” Iraq and turn it into a model of democracy, George W. Bush. Many Democrats complained that he didn’t reminisce about the original decision to fight the war, or to stay in Iraq for years after formal military operations had largely ended. All sorts of observers wanted him to talk about Afghanistan, and how and when that conflict might finally end.
One center-left pundit, Mike Miller, seized the occasion to apologize for his own support for the Iraq War.
Personally, the only mea culpa I’m interested in, and the only gesture by the president that has any real value, involves a very simple lesson: don’t make the same mistake again by launching a “war of choice” with no clear justification or any feasible strategy for real victory.. That would apply most particularly to the next war on the agenda of many Middle Eastern warkhawks, the war to prevent a nuclear Iran. We don’t need it, can’t afford it, and certainly haven’t shown we can deal with the shattered country and region we’d soon have to deal with if we actually succeeded,
If the president gets that one right, then I really don’t much care if he succeeds in becoming the definitive score-keeper for Iraq.

The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:

Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’

Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.

When President Obama speaks from the Oval Office tonight about the final withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, you’d think most Republicans would remain silent, or if not, focus on Afghanistan or even Iran as the locus for a renewed militant U.S. posture.
But no: the general conservative take is that George W. Bush needs praise as the man who made it possible to withdraw more combat troops to Iraq by sending more of them in the first place.
We’ll soon see whether this bizarre the-more-troops-we-send-the-more-we-can-withdraw narrative works.

Drew Westen’s ideas about Democratic strategy are always worth consideration, as are his thoughts from his latest post at HuffPo, “What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November.” Westen provides an extensive and, in places, painful diagnosis of the Dems’ current political predicament, which is worth a read, if only so we don’t repeat some of the more costly miscalculations. Then Dr. Westen offers this prescription:

…Having recently tested messages on economics and jobs, including how to talk about deficits and taxes — widely assumed to be Democrats’ Achilles Heel, particularly now — there is little question that if Democrats and progressives from center to left simply say what they believe in ways that are evocative, values-driven, and speak to people’s worries and anger, many stand a good chance of surviving November, particularly when their opponents have nothing to say other than warmed-over rhetoric about cutting taxes to millionaires and multinationals and fiscal restraint except where it cuts into profits of their campaign contributors. Even the most evocative boilerplate conservative messages fall flat against honest messages that speak to the need to get Americans working again. And on issue after issue, no message is more resonant right now than one that sides with working and middle class Americans and small business owners against special interests, big business, and their lobbyists.

As for specifics, Westen advises:

…It may be too late for the kind of jobs bill we should have seen a year and a half ago, but it isn’t too late for Democrats to go on the offensive against the Republicans — virtually all of them — who opposed extending unemployment insurance to millions of Americans who were thrown out of work by the Republicans’ corporate sponsors. It isn’t too late for Democrats to contrast their support for the highly popular aid to state and local governments that just saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, and police all over the country with Republicans’ desire to throw them out onto the street. It isn’t too late to make a voting issue out of the bill the Republicans are stalling that would give small businesses a fighting chance in an economy stacked against them, and to make clear that one party stands for small businesses, which create 75 percent of the new jobs in this country, and the other party stands for big businesses that outsource American jobs and offshore their profits to avoid paying their fair share of American taxes. It’s not too late to pass a bill that would limit credit card interest rates to a reasonable percent above the rate at which credit is made available to credit card companies. It’s not too late to pass the first badly need “fix” to the health care reform act to demonstrate to Americans that Democrats mean it when they say this was just the first step, namely a law that stops insurance companies from increasing their premiums by 40 percent while cutting the size of their networks by 50-75 percent, which violates the principles of affordability and choice that were so essential to efforts to sell health care reform to the public. It’s not too late to vow to change the rules of the Senate to prevent the use of the filibuster to give every special interest veto power over every important piece of legislation. It’s not too late to introduce legislation that’s been on hold in both the House and Senate to guarantee fair elections, so that the voice of everyday Americans is heard over the voice of the special interests that finance political campaigns.
On every one of these issues, a strong populist message trounces anything the other side can say. But Democrats need to play offense. They need to take up-or-down votes on bill after bill, including those they expect the other side to block, knowing that every one of those votes has the leverage of a campaign ad behind it. They need to change the narrative from what sounds to the average American like a whiny and impotent one — “the Republicans won’t let us do it” — to a narrative of strength in numbers shared with their constituents. And they need to make every election a choice between two well-articulated approaches to governance — and to offer their articulation of both sides’ positions and values.

Westen’s point about the kind of tone Dems should project resonates especially well at this political moment. Then he gets down to particulars:

…What Democrats have needed to offer the American people is a clear narrative about what and who led our country to the mess in which we find ourselves today and a clear vision of what and who will lead us out…That narrative might have included — and should include today — some key elements: that if the economy is tumbling, it’s the role of leadership and government to stop the free-fall; that if Wall Street is gambling with our financial security, our homes, and our jobs, true leaders do not sit back helplessly and wax eloquent about the free market, they take away the dice; that if the private sector can’t create jobs for people who want to work, then we’ll put Americans back to work rebuilding our roads, bridges, and schools; that if Big Oil is preventing us from competing with China’s wind and solar energy programs, then we’ll eliminate the tax breaks that lead to dysfunctional investments in 19th century fuels and have a public-private partnership with companies that will create the clean, safe fuels of the 21st century and the millions of good American jobs that will follow.
That’s what Democrats stand for. It’s time they said it.

Westen’s challenge may seem ambitious this late in the midterm game, and a couple of readers’ responses after his article argue that he has overstated the Democratic reluctance to attack. There is no question in my mind, however, that our attack could be stronger and more focused along the lines Westen advocates. There is still time to implement some of Westen’s suggestions to good effect — not only for the midterms, but for 2012 and the long haul.

It’s now pretty much established that Republicans have a real chance, albeit still a long shot, of winning control of the U.S. Senate in November. This would require a net gain of ten seats, meaning that (to cite the most common scenario) they’d have to hold all their own seats and then win Democratic seats in PA, DE, AR, IN, IL, WI, CO, NV, CA, and WA. A slightly alternative scenario would give the Republicans 49 or 50 seats, plussed-up by a party-switch from Joe Lieberman and/or Ben Nelson (a complicating variable is the possible election of Charlie Crist in FL as an indie, which could theoretically create some sort of centrist “bloc” that would bargain with both parties for control).
But as the primary season continues, it’s increasingly clear that Republican infighting and upsets could change the chessboard significantly, and risk Republican Senate wins long thought to be certain. It’s already happened in KY, where Rand Paul’s primary victory has made the GOP’s hold on Jim Bunning’s seat tenuous, and in NV, where Sharron Angle’s nomination did wonders for Harry Reid’s previously toasty political standing. The Republican mess in FL is also illustrative; either Rubio or Crist would be heavily favored in a two-way race against Kendrick Meek.
And now all sorts of additional havoc in “safe” GOP states seems possible. In Alaska, election officials today are beginning to count absentee and provisional ballots affecting the extremely close Senate primary battle between incumbent Lisa Murkowski and insurgent Joe Miller, amidst an increasingly bitter atmosphere. Suddenly Democratic nominee Scott McAdams is getting a second look as a potentially viable candidate. His prospects did take a blow when the Libertarian Party decided against offering Murkowski a ballot line if she loses the GOP nomination, but still, the intra-GOP hatefest could make this seat vulnerable.
Elsewhere, the main financier of Miller’s campaign, the Tea Party Express, has decided to go all in to support an equally unlikely candidate, Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, who is challenging moderate Mike Castle for the Senate nomination to face Democrat Chris Coons, who’s running an unexpectedly strong race for Joe Biden’s old seat. If, say, Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund decides to back O’Donnell, all bets could be off.
In one of those Republican Senate seats assumed to be in the bag, in NH, Republican establishment candidate Kelly Ayotte may soon be in a dogfight with self-styled “true conservative” Ovide Lamontagne, whose endorsement by the New Hampshire Union-Leader has revived his campaign. Lamontagne is the one Republican candidate in NH who has been trailing Democrat Paul Hodes in general election polls.
Now perhaps Alaska Republicans will more-or-less unite around their ultimate primary winner, and Ayotte and Castle will win their primaries, and Crist will collapse in FL, and then Republicans will sweep all the close Senate races, as occured in “wave” elections like 1980, 1994, 2006 and 2008 (the latter two benefitting Democrats). But the bottom line is that the GOP’s path to control of the Senate is getting more, not less, complicated. Breezy predictions of total victory are colliding with the messy reality that the unprecedented ideological conformity of the Republican Party just isn’t enough for conservatives, and the equally messy reality that actual voters have to choose between actual candidates in individual states.

Having read in various places that Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington turned out to be an apolitical nothing-burger–albeit a bizarre attempt to appropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.–I resolved to watch a video of Beck’s entire 56-minute speech.
It was, without a doubt, one of the more vacuous and cliche-ridden speeches I have ever heard, with vague injunctions to the crowd to look to the future, take responsibility, love their children, get right with God, and stand up for their values. It even ended with that most cliched secular popularization of a fine old hymn, the bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace.” If it was, as so many observers suggested, a primarily religious address, it’s likely that the attendees could have heard a better-crafted and more instructive sermon in virtually any of Washington’s houses of worship.
So was it all just a Beck-a-ganza aimed at marketing his “brand” at the expense of any real purpose?
I might have thought so, until the final portion of his speech, when he started talking about “black-robed regiments” of clergy who, in Beck’s typically distorted reading of history, were the vanguard of the American revolution against godless Britain, and now, after more than two centuries of national infidelity, were being remustered by Beck himself as embodied by the clergy sharing his rostrum. They represented, Beck asserted, 180 million Americans, and they were determined to put God back in charge of the country. As Peter Montgomery of AlterNet (via Digby) has shown, the regiments were led by such theocratic warhorses as David Barton, the “Christian Nation” historian who has devoted his career to the destruction of church-state separation.
Beck’s rather frank appeal to theocracy–a non-sectarian theocracy, to be sure, but one that enshrined a “firm reliance on Divine Providence” as involving very clear rules of individual and national behavior–was the real thrust of his address. And in fact, the bland nature of most of his speech ironically reinforced its radical intent. Anyone who shared any sort of commitment to basic moral values, religious piety, or patriotism ought to go along with what people like Glenn Beck and his allies consider the obvious implications of such commitments in politics: a hard-core conservatism recast as a restoration of faith and national honor. Thus his core audience, the true believers who traveled to Washington to participate in this event, and those who watched it live on Fox, were comforted to know that their political preferences were a faithful reflection of the views of Moses, Jesus Christ, the Founders, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
Most readers will probably discern in Beck’s appeal the familiar M.O. of the Christian Right: an effort to divinize a secular political agenda–much of it revolving around the golden calf of absolute private property rights–while anathamizing any opposition as hostile to religion. And that’s why Beck’s game was best revealed not on Saturday, but on Sunday, when he attacked President Obama’s religion as a “perversion:”

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” which was filmed after Saturday’s rally, Beck claimed that Obama “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim.”
“People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity,” Beck added….
“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it,” Beck said.

But Beck is really attacking the idea that anyone can be godly who doesn’t believe God’s Will on this Earth happens to coincide pretty much precisely with the agenda of the right wing of the Republican Party of the United States, circa 2010. All the banalities of his “Restoring Honor” speech depend on identifying piety with his brand of conservatism. And in the effort to set himself up as prophet and pope, he’s in dire danger of setting himself up for a truly biblical fall.
As was illustrated by the strong reaction back in March to his injunctions to Catholics to fight the very idea of “social justice,” Beck is not in the best position to define orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Christian theology. As a Mormon, his own theology is often demonized by conservative evangelical Protestants as a perversion or worse. And in fact, you’d think that anyone associated with an often-persecuted religious minority would be afraid of the power of “black-robed regiments,” and more sympathetic to Barack Obama’s view that doubt about God’s Will on Earth is a distinctively Christian perspective on church and state.
But Beck’s made his choice, seeking to make his radical politics both more acceptable and more militant via identification with the very impulse of religiosity. In adopting the prophetic stance, Glenn Beck is perhaps making a bid to reconcile the Tea Party Movement with the Christian Right (not that they are necessarily two different groups of people), under his leadership. If that’s not what he’s up to, then maybe the “Restoring Honor” rally truly was a nothing-burger, and Beck himself is destined to spend his declining years not as a prophet, but as a late-night infomercial figure promoting motivational materials available at an affordable cost.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira presents some numbers deregulation-loving conservatives are not going to like. Says Teixeira:

Conservatives love to interpret the current sour public mood as rejection of the government’s role in the economy. In reality, that public sentiment is primarily traceable to the poor economy and has little to do with an embrace of conservative ideological views on government.
…A recent CNN poll asked the public whether it supported or opposed the new financial regulation reform bill, which it explicitly described as increasing “federal regulation over banks, Wall Street investors, and other financial institutions.” The public said it supported the new bill by a strong 58-39 margin.

Asked if they approve or disapprove of government regulation of business in the same poll, respondents said they approved of government regulation of business by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, adds Teixeira.
So much for the myth that a majority of Americans support Republican policies about government regulation of banks and business. As Teixeira puts it, “Conservative claims that the public is embracing their antigovernment ideology should be taken with a grain of salt — in fact, a whole cellar full.”