Yesterday James Vega made a compelling case for retiring “the left” and “centrists” in intra-party Democratic discourse, since both terms have widely variable meanings and are usually deployed as expressions of contempt.
I’d add a few other terms to the hit list, at least when it comes to the labelling of alleged party factions.
“Populist” is a useful adjective for describing a certain kind of rhetoric and message, and perhaps even a stance on clusters of specific issues (e.g., wealth concentration and progressive taxation, and maybe international trade). But “populism” is notoriously slippery as an ideological marker, since today’s self-styled “populists” aren’t calling for a revival of the platform of the People’s Party of the 1890s, with publicly-owned grain elevators and milleage of silver at a 16-to-1 ratio. There are also obviously left-of-center and right-of-center versions of “populism,” and the promiscuous use of the word suggests affinities between, say, Bernie Sanders and Mike Huckabee that are far less important than their differences.
“Social democratic” has a rich international pedigree, particularly in Europe, where it emerged as a common term for the non-Marxist left. It is often used in this country to denote the strain of public-sector activism introduced by the New Deal to shape post-World-War II liberalism. But like “populist,” the “social democratic” label is most useful in specific contexts, such as the perennial debate between universal and means-tested forms of social safety-net programs; it’s less evocative as a term for any comprehensive ideology or party faction.
Some–if you will temporarily excuse the expression–Democratic “centrists” are still using the term New Democrats, a monikker invented by the DLC around 1990 to underline the claim that it was applying traditional progressive principles to new social and circumstances. The predecessor to the “New Democratic” label was “neoliberalism,” associated with party reformers like Gary Hart in the 1980s who didn’t want to get confused with moderate-to-conservative dissenters from liberal orthodoxy. Like “liberalism” itself, “neoliberalism” suffered from a very different international usage, where it described the Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire ascendancy in modern conservatism. Any “neo” or “new” label, of course, doesn’t have a very long shelf life, and is best consigned to history after a decade or two.
The relatively low utility of intra-party factional terms these days isn’t terribly unique. I’ve recently been doing some reading about American politics in the 1920s; that was a time when the word “progressive” was claimed as a primary self-identifier by elements of both national political parties, including Western isolationist Republicans and the Bryan faction of the Democratic Party, which was culturally conservative and often aligned with the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, in 1920 one potential presidential candidate invariably described as “progressive” had significant support in both major parties: Herbert Hoover.
For all the terminological confusion, then, we should be pleased that “progressive” (or “progressive/liberal”) and “conservative” have found general acceptance as terms applicable to most people in the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, as explained by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira in their recent research for the Center for American Progress.
And ironically, though Vega is right in suggesting that “left” and “center” need to be retired as terms Democrats apply to each other, the term “center-left” remains a pretty good positioning marker for progressives and Democrats generally, denoting “left of center” within the distinctively American context of liberal egalitarianism.
I’m afraid for the time being that we’re all going to have to get by without the big broad factional labels of the recent past, sticking to specific and identifiable groupings of Democrats (e.g., congressional caucuses), specific issue positions, and even specific politicians. If the party continues to grow as it seems to be doing at present, we’ll eventually have enough variation in views and backgrounds that stable factions, and a vocabulary to match them, will re-emerge.

These two terms have been around for so long that the reality of their present uselessness may not seem immediately obvious. But, in fact, there are actually three very different political groups who are lumped together inside the vague term “the left” and six or seven very distinct meanings of the term “centrist.” For any serious intra-Democratic political discussion to be productive, Democrats have to start making the effort to clearly distinguish between these differences.
In the case of the term “the left,” the problem is obvious to any Democrat who listens to Fox News. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck and their imitators relentlessly hammer away at a succession of straw men called “the loony left”, “the hard left”, “the extreme left” and so on — a powerful group who, they assert, have substantial if not total control of the Democratic Party.
Aside from other political commentators, the only specific examples they offer are — not really surprisingly – such powerful and influential figures as junior professors at small state colleges, eccentric elementary school teachers in communities no one has ever heard of before and a variety of well-known (or just as often barely known) Hollywood actors – individuals whose views or actions are confidently asserted to reflect the absolutely typical or dominant attitude of the entire Democratic community.
The truth, on the other hand — as all serious observers know perfectly well — is that there are actually three profoundly distinct groups that compose “the left” and they are so different that it is essentially useless to make any generalizations about them as a whole.

1. The first group is the traditional social movement organizations dedicated to causes like the environment, civil liberties, labor and so on. The most distinctive characteristic of these groups are their single issue focus and political strategy of bargaining with candidates to win their support.
2. The second group is the multi-issue, internet-based organizations like MoveOn and Daily Kos. Their political stance tends to be militantly partisan and pro-Democratic but not ideologically extreme. Surveys have shown that the political attitudes within this group tend to resemble traditional post-war liberal and progressive views.
3. The third group is the genuine “radicals.” These days they are less often doctrinaire socialists than eclectic ecological/peace/anti-establishment militants. They are concentrated among graying tenured faculty members and young energetic protestors in movements like the anti-globalization coalitions. Although their attitudes are asserted to be the dominant ones in the Democratic coalition, in fact they generally have relatively little interest in standard electoral politics and rarely become involved in the grass-roots organizational activities of the Democratic Party.

The differences between these three groups are generally greater than the similarities, a fact that is relatively obvious when comparing the authentic radicals and the others, but is also evident between the netroots and the traditional organizations (The Daily Kos’s Markos devoted an entire chapter in his book Storming The Gates to outlining the Netroots’ disagreements with traditional single-issue organizations)
Since Obama’s paradigm-breaking campaign, there has mercifully been far less abuse of the general term “the left” within the Democratic Party then in the years preceding. But Democrats nonetheless need to officially retire the phrase and replace it with more specific discussion of issues and questions concerning the positions and actions of the three distinct groups.
Meanwhile, the term “centrist” is, if anything, even more desperately in need of retirement than “the left”. It does not only refer to several different groups, but more confusingly to a cluster of fundamentally different concepts — each of which needs to be clearly distinguished from the others.
When Progressives criticize “centrism” they are generally focusing on three very distinct and specific political behaviors or characteristics (1) an excessive conservatism in ideology, becoming at the extreme nearly indistinguishable from Republicanism (2) a marked timidity or even cowardice in political strategy and (3) corruption in financial and ethical standards.
It is not hard to understand why grass roots Democratic activists who live outside Washington find it relatively easy to feel that these characteristics do all substantially overlap in the group generally known as the “beltway insiders.” From a distance, these people all appear extremely intimate and chummy – appearing on the same think-tank panels and sitting amiably side by side on the Sunday talk shows, referring to each other by first names in the most friendly and collegial way.
But, regardless of how many canapés and podiums the “Beltway insiders” share together, the three characteristics above simply do not necessarily imply each other or overlap. Lumping them all indiscriminately together conceptually in a single term “centrism” is intellectually sloppy thinking and is deeply detrimental to the quality and usefulness of progressive thought.
Let’s untangle the distinctions.

Read more…

Every now and then a journalist pens a piece which seems to state the obvious, but actually provides a useful summary of what really matters about things we think we all know. That’s true of Politico’s Jonathan Martin today, with an article entitled: “Obama skates while Right fumes.”
Here’s Martin’s basic thesis:

Several times a month in his young presidency, Barack Obama has done things that cause conservatives to bray, using the phrase once invoked by Bob Dole, “Where’s the outrage?!”
The outrage is definitely there, in certain precincts of Republican politics. What’s notable, however, is that it mostly has stayed there — with little or no effect on Obama.
He has been blithely crossing ideological red lines and dancing on cultural third rails — the kinds of gestures that would have scorched an earlier generation of Democrats — with seeming impunity. Obama’s foes, and even some of his allies, are a bit mystified.

Martin goes on to note that Republicans have been going nuts over nearly everything the new president has been doing or saying, but it’s not sticking, particularly when it comes to culturally symbolic matters. And every time the conservative base of the GOP gets lathered up over Obama words and deeds that other Americans don’t find that scandalous, the Right marginalizes itself a bit more, making the next round of unechoed outrage look even stranger.
The piece quotes all sorts of folks in both parties who speculate over this pheonomenon, and some cite generational change, some cite Obama’s solid personality and careful style, some cite the experience Democrats gained during the Clinton years, and still others cite the economic circumstances that make symbolic politics less evocative.
You can read it all yourself, but the question I have is less about the effect of this dynamic on Obama, than its effect on the credibility of the Republican opposition. How many times can they go to the well with wedge-politics attacks that just don’t work anymore? How relevant can they be when perpetually trotting out the rhetoric of the 1990s, particularly when it’s the less-than-credible spokesmen of the 1990s, like Newt Gingrich, who’s hot to trot? And at a time when Republicans have no obvious national leader, who is in a position to police the cumulative party message? Certainly not RNC chairman Michael Steele, who is on permanent probation.
If, of course, Barack Obama’s agenda fails to work in the real world, Republicans will get some traction in criticizing him, and maybe they’ll even grow some new leadership. But right now they are giving the new administration a lot of breathing room by resorting to worn-down wedge issues, offered by worn-out politicians, to the self-destructive excitement of a whipped-up activist base that thinks Glenn Beck makes sense.

TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, both senior fellows and co-directors of the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress (CAP) have a co-written post up at The American Prospect, discussing new studies by CAP’s Progressive Studies program which debunk the conservative myth that the U.S. a ‘center right’ nation. The two new studies, “The State of American Political Ideology, 2009” (See also Andrew Levison’s two part TDS strategy memo on this study here and here) and “New Progressive America,” address beliefs and demographic trends. In a core graph, the authors note:

The 2008 presidential election not only solidified partisan shifts to the Democratic Party, it also marked a significant transformation in the ideological and electoral landscape of America. In two major studies of American beliefs and demographic trends–the State of American Political Ideology, 2009 and New Progressive America, both conducted by the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress–we found that the president’s agenda reflects deep and growing consensus among the American public about the priorities and values that should guide our government and society. Not surprisingly, conservatives are the ones who are out of line with the values of most Americans

The studies indicated that the U.S. is essentially an evenly divided nation in terms of political ideology, segmented into roughly equal ‘liberal/progressive’, ‘moderate/other’ and ‘conservative/liberarian’ thirds. Interestingly, however, only 35 percent of self-decribed conservatives rated the term ‘libertarian’ favorably and follow-up questions to moderates indicate they lean equally toward progressive and conservative views. So much for the “America is a center-right nation” meme. Halpin and Teixeira also provide a revealing analysis of responses to a series of 40 statements reflecting conservative and liberal ideas:

Nearly 80 percent of Americans agree that “government investments in education, infrastructure, and science are necessary to ensure America’s long-term economic growth.” Overall, the unanimity of opinion found on this issue is rare, showing that conservatives are out of step with the rest of the country in opposing new government investments. More than two in three Americans agree that “government has a responsibility to provide financial support for the poor, the sick, and the elderly,” while 15 percent are neutral and another 15 percent disagree. Democrats remain almost unanimously supportive, and independents lean strongly toward this progressive position. A slim majority of Republicans similarly agree.
While conservative elites have long held government regulation as an impediment to economic growth, nearly three in four Americans disagree, believing instead that “government regulations are necessary to keep businesses in check and protect workers and consumers.” Once again, there is surprising partisan and ideological harmony among Americans, with agreement topping 60 percent among both Republicans and conservatives. Seventy-six percent of Americans also agree with the president’s argument that “America’s economic future requires a transformation away from oil, gas, and coal to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar,” with 12 percent neutral and just 11 percent who say such a transformation is not needed. A major pillar of Obama’s economic vision, and the key to his cost-containment strategies, is ensuring affordable health coverage for all Americans. Nearly 65 percent of Americans are on board with this goal, including 44 percent who strongly agree that “the federal government should guarantee affordable health coverage for every American.”

The authors’ demographic analysis is all good news for Dems:

The share of black, Asian, and Hispanic voters in presidential elections has risen by 11 percentage points, while the share of increasingly progressive, white, college-graduate voters has risen by four points. But the share of white working-class voters, who have remained conservative in their orientation, has plummeted by 15 points. This pattern is repeated in state after state, helping to send these areas in a progressive direction. For example, in Pennsylvania the white working-class population declined by 25 points between 1988 and 2008, while white college graduates rose by 16 points and people of color rose by 8 points. And in Nevada, the white working class is down 24 points over the same time period, while voters of color are up an astounding 19 points and white college graduates are up by 4 points…By 2050, the country will be 54 percent people of color as Hispanics double from 15 percent to 30 percent of the population, Asians increase from 5 percent to 9 percent, and African Americans move from 14 percent to 15 percent.

But it’s not a slam-dunk future for Dems, note the authors, inasmuch as

…Voters are often fickle and prone to significant shifts in opinion if their demands and desires are not met or if leaders fall short of their expectations…The economy, public spending, and the financial bailouts are the most likely issues to trip up progressives; they are areas where our study found clear undercurrents of anti-corporate, anti-bailout populism across many segments of the electorate.”

Teixeira and Halpin nonetheless believe that the survey points strongly to a “marvelous opportunity” for progressives which could lead to “a real and durable political realignment” benefiting Democrats. By carefully addressing demographic change and rapidly-evolving political attitudes, Dems are in a strong position to make the coming decade a new era of progressive transformation in America.

In times like these, it’s important to acknowlege good news when it happens. And for me personally, along with countless other long-time advocates of voluntary national service, President Obama’s signing of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act today was good news that we’ve awaited for a long, long time.
When national service was first emerging as a serious issue in Congress back in the late 1980s (I was involved in drafting a bill introduced by Sen. Sam Nunn at the time), its support in both parties was limited, with many Republicans scoffing at the idea of compensated service and some Democrats worrying that participants might undercut public employees. Ted Kennedy successfully shepherded through Congress a small national and community service demonstration program in 1990, and I was lucky enough to help set up a pilot program in Georgia. Bill Clinton embraced the idea in 1992–against the advice of some of his political advisors–and in 1993 secured authorization of AmeriCorps, the first service program since the Great Society’s VISTA primarily focused on full-time service.
Though Democrats by then had largely come to support voluntary national service, AmeriCorps struggled for survival throughout the balance of the Clinton administration, as congressional Republicans repeatedly sought to kill it, mainly because it was a signature Clinton initiative. It didn’t get much better after 2000, even though George W. Bush devoted much of his 2002 State of the Union Address to a call for expanded national service (and then did little or nothing to implement it).
The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed a revival of interest in national service, as most of the Democratic candidates–most notably Barack Obama and Chris Dodd–made specific national service commitments, while Republican nominee John McCain had long supported a major AmericCorps expansion, once cosponsoring a bill with Evan Bayh that proposed much of what the legislation today accomplished.
But it’s still somewhat astonishing to see this expansion enacted after so many years of frustration. Yes, many conservatives still attack the very idea, and some told preposterous lies about the latest legislation, suggesting it would create re-education camps or lead immediately to compulsory service. But the Kennedy Service Act won 79 votes in the Senate and 275 votes in the hyper-polarized House, and the President didn’t have to look too far, for once, to find Republicans to share some credit with for a signature accomplishment of his own.
Another long-time national service warrior, Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall, had these pertinent words to say when the bill cleared Congress:

Although it didn’t get the attention it deserved, passage of the Serve America bill is a major breakthrough. It enables us to build a uniquely American approach to public problem solving that has proven its worth over the past 15 years in communities across the country. It multiplies opportunities for people to give back to their communities while earning money to pay for their education. It establishes a growth trajectory that eventually could move national service from the margins to the center of our national life, where it belongs.

I think this is an Obama achievement that’s going to be remembered positively for a long time.

At The New Republic yesterday, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber undertook the latest effort to define “Obamaism,” and concluded that the president represents a sort of hybrid liberalism that reflects the market-friendly attitude of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats tempered by a more traditional commitment to equality:

Like the New Democrats who ultimately shaped the Clinton administration’s agenda, Obama has a deep respect for the market and wants to minimize the state’s footprint on it. He has little interest in fixing prices or rationing goods or reversing free-trade agreements. But, while he basically shares the New Democrats’ instincts, he rejects their conclusions. Reacting against the overweening statism of their liberal ancestors, many New Democrats came to believe that if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity. You only need to view the extent of Obama’s domestic agenda to know he doesn’t agree.

They go on to talk about the Obamaite tendency to “nudge” or “harness” market forces to accomplish progressive means, instead of relying on direct government action, as reflected in both their banking and health care policies.
While I generally agree with their take on “Obamaism,” I do question, as a veteran of the whole New Democratic thing, Foer and Scheiber’s retroactive take on that ideology, which they describe as based on the belief that “if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity.” I don’t think New Democrats were ever as laissez-faire oriented as they describe it.
The closest anyone ever came to an ideological definition for the New Democratic “Third Way” was probably the 1996 Progressive Policy Institute document called “The New Progressive Declaration,” a self-conscious manifesto for the reform movement that was then sweeping through center-left parties all over the world. Here’s that document’s key principle when it comes to the fundamental relationship of markets to government and society:

The first cornerstone–the promise of equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none–has animated generations of American leaders and has attracted millions of immigrants to our shores. It is the ideal of a society in which individuals earn their rewards through their own talents and effort within a system of fair and open rules. It recognizes that there is no invisible hand that creates equal opportunity; it is a conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts: removing discriminatory barriers, providing meaningful arenas for self-improvement, a commitment to public investment, and a rejection of special-interest subsidies that give the influential a leg up.

Equal opportunity as a “conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts” doesn’t quite sound like getting government out of the way to let markets work their magic. And for all the talk about Obama’s agenda transcending that of his Clintonian predecessors, some of his signature progressive agenda items, like a market-based approach to universal health coverage and a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions, have been advocated by serious New Democrat types for years, along with a strong commitment to progressive tax rates.
That’s not to say that Obama is today merely echoing what the Clintonians were saying a decade or so ago. The real difference, I would argue, was not any New Democratic lack of interest in equality or public-sector activism, but rather a hostility to regulation based on a sense of triumphalism about technology and globalization as wholly positive developments, and a conviction that “information age” progressivism needed to rethink the social bargains associated with “industrial age” progressivism. It’s safe to say that New Democrats were irrationally exuberent about the economic trends of the 1990s, though not entirely wrong, either.
In general, I’d say the more we learn about Barack Obama’s domestic ideology, the more it looks like a “third way” progressivism chastened by the economic experiences of the last decade and yoked to a much firmer commitment to the necesssity of maintaining some of the “old” social bargains and regulatory practices of the New Deal and Great Society eras. And in international relations, it’s even more obvious that Obama represents a liberalism chastened by an Iraq War that so many Clintonians embraced, however tentatively or fleetingly.
As Foer and Scheiber conclude, Obama may find the elusive “third way” that Clinton “grasped for a decade ago,” whether or not his political thinking acquires a distinctive label or is articulated in books and manifestos. Right now most progressives would settle for success in sheparding America throught the present crisis, and in giving progressive governance a fresh chance.

Of all the questionable anti-administration agitprop being churned out by conservative media in recent weeks, one of the weirdest bits is the ongoing assault on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano over a routine DHS study suggesting that violent right-wing groups might target returing war veterans for recruitment. It reported that the FBI had begun investigating domestic terrorist efforts to recruit “disgruntled vets” in December–i.e., back when George W. Bush was still in charge.
The report has been blown up into a big “controversy” by Fox and its blogosperic and elected official echo chamber, and distorted beyond recognition into a claim that the Obama administration is ignoring Islamic extremists in order to spy on conservatives and veterans.
It’s hard to know where to begin pushing back on this hysteria. Yes, there are domestic right-wing terrorist groups that represent threats; that’s all te report was about, and DHS is required by statute to make such assessments periodically. No, the report didn’t represent some sort of major prioritization by DHS. Yes, the FBI watches terrorist groups and shares its information with DHS; if you have a problem with that, conservatives, you should have raised the issue with the Bush administration.
And of course veterans returing from combat are, as they have been throughout human history, ripe targets for terrorist recruitment, because they have recent military training, and because combat tends to be rather stressful. It also doesn’t help that vets are returing to a country in the midst of a deep recession. Anyone professing shock at this simple fact, or who thinks mentioning it represents an attack on veterans, flunks both history and logic.
Even if you concede some legitimate concern over this report, the abuse being dealt out to Napolitano over it is just a classic smear.

George McGovern, Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, will never get much respect as a political strategist, although he ran a good campaign up until the convention that year, followed though it was by a Nixon landslide. History, however, will be kinder to McGovern as a foreign policy analyst. He got it right about Vietnam and he gets it right about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan today in The Los Angeles Times. As McGovern writes in his op-ed:

Three years ago, public opinion polls indicated that a majority of Americans believed our policymakers were wrong in ordering troops into Iraq. It is widely accepted that this sentiment more than any other factor in the 2006 congressional elections resulted in Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have faded as a political priority. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll conducted March 12-15, 2009 found that “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ranked fourth (cited by 8 percent) as the “most important” priority, behind the economy (63 percent), health care (9 percent) and the federal budget deficit (8 percent).
When pressed, however, to respond in more detail, we see a slightly different result from poll respondents. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll conducted less than a month earlier, from Feb. 18-19, 2009, found that 75 and 76 percent agreed that “the situation in” Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively were “extremely important” or “very important,” compared to 95 percent for the economy. The economy, and the range of associated concerns contained inside the term, still trumps other issues. but when asked to think about it a little more, three out of four voters are still quite worried about what we are doing in those countries.
Not that the higher-rated priorities are unconnected to the economic cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. McGovern cites the economic effect:

Are we now going to ignore for another three years the public mandate of 2006 against this costly, preemptive war based on deceit? And how can we justify putting thousands more U.S. troops into Afghanistan? We have already exhausted our treasury…Can there be any doubt that the enormous war cost has contributed to the financial crisis here at home? The expense of waging two Middle East wars, plus the loss of revenue caused by the previous administration’s tax cuts, have skyrocketed the national debt to a record high. Do we ever consider what the interest alone is on our $10-trillion national debt — much of it paid to China?
Frankly, we cannot afford a two-war commitment year after year if we want to balance the federal budget and restore our economy. The huge bonuses that directors of failing corporations have awarded themselves and their chief executives have rightfully angered people, but those figures are peanuts compared with the $12 billion a month we have poured into Iraq and Afghanistan over the last six years.

But there is a significant distinction between public perceptions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet another CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll, this one conducted April 3-5, found that, when asked “Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?,” 53 percent said they favored the war, with 46 percent opposed. And 68 percent favored Obama’s plan to send 20 thousand more troops to Afghanistan, with 31 percent opposed. But the respondents in this poll took a very different view when asked “Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Iraq?” Only 35 percent favored the war, with 63 percent opposed.
The problem with military occupations is that they go on and on, eventually numbing the public and political decision-makers to the downside of having an imperial foreign policy. It’s the “just a little longer and we’ll get things under control” self-delusion. McGovern understands this better than most:

The Obama administration recommends we leave 50,000 troops in Iraq to “police” that troubled country through 2011. There may well be flare-ups that will keep them there indefinitely, struggling to police the war-induced chaos.
In June 1950, President Truman ordered our troops into Korea, stating it would only be a brief police action that did not require a declaration of war. Three years later and after 38,000 American soldiers had been killed, the new American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in World War II, promptly ended our involvement in the Korean War, to the relief of our combat soldiers and the American public.
Unfortunately, Washington left 40,000 American soldiers behind to police the 38th Parallel — for a brief time. Yet, more than 50 years later, nearly 30,000 American troops are still in South Korea. So much for brief police actions.

McGovern’s op-ed has other important things to say about the self-defeating effects of U.S. military occupations abroad. He goes on to urge an “orderly withdrawall” from Iraq by Thanksgiving. But a Newsweek/Princeton Survey Research Associates International poll conducted April 1-2 indicates that 46 percent of respondents said Obama’s plan to remove most U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2010 was “about right,” with 28 percent wanting them to “come home sooner” and 19 percent wanting them to “stay longer.” Disagree though many might with McGovern’s timetable, it’s hard to deny the common sense that undergirds his concluding sentence: “For our sake and God’s sake, let’s get out of there and begin healing our own bankrupted land.”

At The New Republic, Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein and Molly Reynolds have published a handy-dandy guide to the past use of budget reconciliation procedures–you know, that anti-democratic cramdown procedure that Democrats have “invented” to foist their socialist agenda on an unwilling or unwary America. It comes complete with a chart that briefly describes the circumstances and impact of the last nineteen times reconciliation has been deployed, mainly under Republican presidents or in Republican-controlled Congresses.
Mann, Ornstein and Reynolds suggest that reconciliation can best be used by Obama and congressional Democrats as a club to get Republicans to cooperate on complex issues like health care reform. That’s almost certainly what Democrats have in mind. But the idea that there’s anything revolutionary about the actual use of reconciliation for items other than strictly budgetary decisions is demonstrably wrong.

The dramatic upsurge during the last year or so of conservative use of the term “socialist” to describe Barack Obama, progressives generally, and such progressive goals as universal health care and carbon emissions limits, is usually attributed to a hyperbolic free-market mania that treats any public-sector activism as a way station to government direction of all economic activity.
That clearly is the predominant causal factor in latter-day red-baiting on the Right. But there’s another one as well: the determination of the pre-millenial faction of what’s left of the Christian Right to identify progressives with a one-world secularism that’s a sign of the rise of the Antichrist and the End Times.
You may recall the many hints dropped during last year’s presidential campaign by some Christian Right agitators that Barack Obama might be, well, if not the Antichrist himself, then maybe one of his agents.
Such “thinking” didn’t end with Election Day, and now some premillenialists are weaving together the global economic crisis, the interventionist policies of many Western governments, and the replacement of Bush-style unilateralism in Washington with Obama’s oft-repeated efforts to restore diplomacy and alliances as foreign policy tools, into Marks of a Red Beast.
Via that intrepid chronicler of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner, we are alerted to a special Easter Issue of the conservative tabloidy magazine Newsmax, which takes the temperature of conservative Christian activists on the question of whether the Second Coming is imminent.
While some Christian Right leaders (particularly those associated with postmillenialst theological traditions, like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land) quoted in this feature are quick to warn about the dangers of too much End Times speculation, others are not so reticent, and the prevailing theme is that global “socialism” of the mildly center-left nature could be, literally, the work of the devil. Check out this quote from Tim LaHaye, co-author of the bestelling “Left Behind” series of apocalytpic novels:

In an exclusive interview, LaHaye tells Newsmax: “What we see going on in the world is just like Jesus said — in the last days, perilous times will come. Well, they are perilous, not only in the political field. And socialism is sweeping the world. Even Newsweek magazine recently announced on its cover that ‘We Are All Socialists Now.’
“It’s a new thought, for the American people anyway. World socialism is the forerunner to the Antichrist kind of government that he is going to run during the Tribulation period.”

More ominous is Newsmax’s quotes from Fox’s Glenn Beck, who is now rivalling Rush Limbaugh as the most popular right-wing gabber in the country. Beck connects all the dots linking Obama, socialism, and the one-world agenda of the Antichrist:

America’s blatant move towards socialism has caught the eye of the world, especially those who love the idea of a one-world government. They think this could be their opportunity to achieve their goal, and they are attempting to cash in on socialism’s current favorable public view. The sad part is they are succeeding. The world views the European Union as a wild success and other leaders want to emulate the EU. Why do you think that Obama had such huge crowds in Germany? Because he thinks like they do….
The fact that, for the first time, Russia and Iran have alliances — something that has to happen for end-times prophecy to be fulfilled; America’s weakened standing in the world. America is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, implying that it would be crippled or taken out of the picture in some way.

For people like LaHaye and Beck, Obama’s foreign policy, and particularly his diplomatic initiatives towards Russia and Iran, are as significant as any of his domestic policies in signalling his alignment with Satan’s agenda. This is worth watching as the campaign of calumny, and in some cases demonization, against the 44th president continues.