The race for the Democratic nomination for President has rather clearly been narrowing down to a two person race between Obama and Hillary that leave John Edwards out of contention.
Damn. Edwards is still my preferred candidate. His vision of what America needs to be doing and becoming is, in my opinion, the best vision being offered. But the Democrats this year have an abundance of talent.
Hillary, in my opinion, is too trapped by the corporate-dominated past, but she clearly has the capability to get things done in Congress. Of course, once she gets out of the "window" of the election campaign in which every statement she makes will be carefully parsed and might lose her votes, she is very intelligent and quite educable. (This assumes that her aging 90's left-over advisers can be sidelined - not an assured process.) She is also probably the best "vetted" Democratic candidate and of the three remaining candidates for the nomination, she is the most likely to be able to deal with the expected Republican nasty and illegal politics which everyone knows will start as soon as the Democrats settle on a nominee.
Obama has clearly demonstrated an ability to draw enthusiastic voters who have not generally participated in the political process in the past, and at the same time his very candidacy promises to be another major step for America away from the curse of Racism that has bent our American politics and society in some very sick directions. Obama has shown the ability to organize the get-out-the-vote extremely effectively in both Iowa and South Carolina. I'll be looking to see if his ability extends to Super Tuesday. I have some (strong) doubts that Obama really understands what the Republican conservative movement means and what methods is is willing to use to get its way, and I don't think he is sufficiently Progressive to build the kind of effective America for the future that remains true to the dream of 1776 and which is embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Can he really repair the damage the conservative movement has done to America if he becomes President? I still have my doubts, but he certainly has convinced a lot of voters that he is the best person running for the nomination and may well get it. If he does, then all my quibbles go to the side and I support him 110% in the general election because there is no competent Republican running. Like Hillary, I suspect that he is very educable and is reality-oriented.
The real issue for November is not which of the three Democratic contenders gets the nomination. What really matters is that Democrats are appointed to fill the roughly over 7,000 Federal civil service leadership and support positions listed in the Plum Book. Those are the jobs that Dick Cheney was responsible for filling in the legislative
and executive branches of the Federal Government. They are generally subject to noncompetitive appointment (e.g., positions such as agency heads and their immediate subordinates, policy executives and advisers, and aides who report to these officials), and the people who fill those jobs are the ones who dominate the Federal government for the President's term of office.
It was Cheney's ability to fill those positions with his personal loyalists that has made Dick Cheney more powerful in many ways than George W. Bush himself. The result has been a federal government that is not only dominated by movement conservatives and religious nuts who ignore reality, but also one that reflects Dick Cheney's personal paranoia.
Whoever the Democrats elect as President (and they must elect the next President if any form of Constitutional American democratic government can hope to survive) needs to quickly strip out the authoritarian movement conservatives and Republicans from the "Plum book" positions and replace them with pro-American Democrats. That's what the election in November is really about.
To get there, it currently looks like Barack Obama is going to become the Democratic nominee. This is, of course, subject to the results of the primaries and caucuses held on super Tuesday, but the good bet today is that Obama will get more delegates than Hillary will. If the concept of political "momentum" has any real meaning, that will effectively give Obama the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.
So what happens to Hillary and Edwards is Obama gets the nomination? Matthew Mosk in today's Washington Post suggests that a President Obama appoint John Edwards as Attorney General. Not a bad move, but what if Obama takes Edwards on as Vice President? That would combine the ability of Obama to bring in younger voters, African American voters, and those of us who think he represents the best social vision of a great future America, with the Progressive policies championed by John Edwards. I think that combination would be a real win-win proposition.
But I don't want to leave Hillary out. She has shown that she is an effective Senator who is well-respected on both sides of the Senate aisle. I also understand that Harry Reid would like to leave the job as Majority Leader. That would be a perfect position for Hillary Clinton.
A real problem in the Democratic nomination race has been the abundance of talent. It's been hard to decide which single person to choose as the Presidential nominee. well, it looks like that problem is being resolved and will be resolved in the near future. Now, just imagine a President Barack Obama, Vice President John Edwards, Senate Majority Leader Hillary Clinton, and a Secretary of State Bill Richardson. Then I am sure that retired Gen. Wesley Clark would be a strong contender for the job of Secretary of Defense.
I'm not sure it could get much better than that.
Eggs. Yet to hatch. Counting Chickens. It's going to be a long, rough election this year. Still, a man can dream ....
Monday, January 28, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Washington D.C. Establishment
Glenn Greenwald has another very interesting article posted today. His focus is the surprise that the Washington D.C. establishment has had as it tried to pass the FISA extension that contains retroactive immunity for the criminal actions of the telecoms who aided the incoming Bush administration in its effort to spy on American citizens without any warrant or legal justification.
Don't forget - the Bush administration started those spy actions in February 2001 at a time they were denying that there was any terrorist problem other than state-supported terrorists. Those illegal spying operations were obviously for internal American political use, not for American security, and both the telecoms and the Bush administration knew such actions were illegal. They just never expected to be exposed. First I'll summarize Glenn's discussion, then I want to focus on who belongs to the Washington establishment and how they operate.
The "establishment" has standards that describe "How things in Washington are done." The members of the establishment become upset when those standards aren't followed. The process of passing the FISA extension has violated those standards. As Glenn points out, the FISA extension with retroactive telecom immunity is an issue that is a highly technical one that the Washington establishment normally would get quietly passed through Congress. The public would probably never know it had happened. Even in the unlikely case the public did learn of it, it wouldn't matter. It would have been a done deal. Essentially the Congressional leadership of both parties, as members of the establishment, would quietly include the telecom immunity in the FISA extension as requested by Dick Cheney and pass it. The Press, also a part of the D.C. establishment, would never bother to write about the issue.
As Glenn says that's just the way "The Establishment" has always handled things in Washington. It hasn't mattered if the leadership in Washington was Republican or Democrat. These issues are handled quietly so that they go away. The public is not to know of them.
Dodd himself has never been one to break with the establishment, and he's been a Senator for 24 years. Suddenly he is now going up against the wishes of the establishmentWhat happened? Dodd explained in a Senate floor speech:
Go read Glenn's article for the details. I want to focus on who belongs to the Washington Establishment. Who are they and how did they get there?
So who does that Establishment consist of? Let's recap. Clearly it includes all of the Congressional leadership of both parties. Then it includes the White House personnel and the top administrators in the various Cabinet offices. It also includes the main pundits, both Print and TV, who cover Washington. David Broder's unofficial title as "Dean of the Washington Press Corps" is recognition that he is a key member of the establishment. Arch Neo conservative William Krystol is also part of the establishment, which is why he recently got a sweetheart deal on the editorial page of the New York Times. So are the hosts of all the Sunday morning Talking Heads TV shows. After that the establisment includes many of the powerful lobbyists from K-Street as well as other former high bureaucrats and legislators. The most effective and highly paid lobbyists are establishment members who sell their ability to work their Washington establishment contacts. Corporations and other moneyed organizations that want something done in Washington are willing to pay a lot for such insider expertise. Additionally, certain individuals (like Sally Quinn) who give insider Washington parties are also part of the Establishment. If you want a list of who is part of the Washington Establishment, a good one could be compiled by seeing who was on the guest lists of the various Washington insider parties. A few establishment members wouldn't be on that list, but most would. Those parties are where a lot of their contacts are made.
What do all the establishment members have in common? They have all been in Washington D.C. and closely associated with politics at a high level for a long time. They all know each other, and they all have reputations as being "Serious People."
They also all want to work hard to remain members of the Establishment. Having been there a long time, they have been socialized and vetted by other in the Establishment, and they each know that as long as they remain as part of the Establishment they protected against personal error - as long as they act as expected.
This is the Washington D.C. establishment, and its members are proud that, as a group, they run American government. These are the people that Harry Reid and Sen. Jay Rockefeller have been trying to please as they worked to pass the FISA extension with telecom immunity included.
These are also the people who are afraid of political populists like both John Edwards and Mike Huckabee. The establishment members have no interest in real democracy since they do not control it. The members of the establishment consider the political netroots to be extremists because they are non-establishment people who make demands that are not establishment approved, and they are beginning to have an effect on Washington politics that "serious people" don't like. Outsiders are automatically rejected by the insiders of the establishment.
It is this establishment, both members and wannabee members, who have neutered media coverage of the federal government even before the Bush administration cut off intrusive reporters from normal handouts and leaks. Establishment reporters and editors don't rat out the handshake deals of other establishment members, not if they want to remain in the establishment. They do want to remain in the establishment because that's where their sources are. Their careers depend on being inside and in good graces of the establishment.
The reason why the Press is harder on Hillary, Obama and Edwards is that none of them are part of the establishment. Hillary rejected the party circuit back in 1993, and has never joined, while neither Obama nor Edwards have become sufficiently powerful in Congress to become "establishment-accepted."
It is this current establishment that is going to have to be converted, because they currently have accepted the ideas behind the Reagan Revolution as the way things are to be done. Conservative "free market, small government, low taxes and strong military" rhetoric is the core of current establishment rhetoric. Such conversion of establishment members will largely occur by turnover once the new administration gets in, but such turnover and conversion will be strongly resisted, just as it was when Bill Clinton took office in 1993. The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 saved the old Reagan/Bush 41 establishment. That establishment was still in place in 2001 and was passed off to the Bush 43 period. So the current Washington establishment has been in place nearly thirty years. They cannot imagine any other way things in Washington could operate.
This is going to be interesting. Watch for complaints from the "serious people" when the new Democratic administration comes in. It's going to happen, as sure as God make little green apples. The changeover is going to be a rough time for them members. The old establishment will find itself being pushed out of the limelight, and they will hate it.
But that's the Washington establishment. Even if its membership changes, the establishment itself will remain. That's where the handshake deals of government are done.
Don't forget - the Bush administration started those spy actions in February 2001 at a time they were denying that there was any terrorist problem other than state-supported terrorists. Those illegal spying operations were obviously for internal American political use, not for American security, and both the telecoms and the Bush administration knew such actions were illegal. They just never expected to be exposed. First I'll summarize Glenn's discussion, then I want to focus on who belongs to the Washington establishment and how they operate.
The "establishment" has standards that describe "How things in Washington are done." The members of the establishment become upset when those standards aren't followed. The process of passing the FISA extension has violated those standards. As Glenn points out, the FISA extension with retroactive telecom immunity is an issue that is a highly technical one that the Washington establishment normally would get quietly passed through Congress. The public would probably never know it had happened. Even in the unlikely case the public did learn of it, it wouldn't matter. It would have been a done deal. Essentially the Congressional leadership of both parties, as members of the establishment, would quietly include the telecom immunity in the FISA extension as requested by Dick Cheney and pass it. The Press, also a part of the D.C. establishment, would never bother to write about the issue.
As Glenn says that's just the way "The Establishment" has always handled things in Washington. It hasn't mattered if the leadership in Washington was Republican or Democrat. These issues are handled quietly so that they go away. The public is not to know of them.
The establishment media has virtually ignored these matters from the beginning. Most establishment-serving pundits who have paid any attention — the David Ignatiuses and Joe Kleins and Fred Hiatts — have done so by advocating, as usual, the Establishment position: retroactive immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers are the right thing to do. Although there is no citizen-constituency whatsoever crying out for telecom immunity or new warrantless eavesdropping powers, the forces behind those provisions are the ones which typically dictate what Congress does: namely, the largest corporations and their lobbyists, who have been working, as always, in the dark to ensure that the law they want is enacted.Only this time it hasn't worked. Harry Reid has been prepared to do his job as expected by the Establishment, only to find that some Senators (particularly Chris Dodd) have been blocking him, and they are supported by a movement of concerned citizens outside of Washington.
That’s typically the way Washington works — the most significant laws are seamlessly enacted with little real debate or attention, driven by corporations and lobbyists working in secret with Senators, cheered on by the Serious media pundits, with bipartisan pools of lawmakers silently and obediently on board. And once those forces line up behind any measure, it is normally almost impossible to stop it — not just stop it, but even disrupt it at all. That’s the insulated Beltway parlor, virtually impervious to outside influences, least of all the opinions of the citizen-rabble.
Dodd himself has never been one to break with the establishment, and he's been a Senator for 24 years. Suddenly he is now going up against the wishes of the establishmentWhat happened? Dodd explained in a Senate floor speech:
I’ve promised to fight those scare tactics with all the power any one senator can muster. And I’m here today to keep that promise. For several months now, I’ve listened to the building frustration over this immunity and this administration’s campaign of lawlessness. I’ve seen it in person, in mail, online — the passion and eloquence of citizens who are just fed up. They’ve inspired me more than they know.This is what's new, and it has clearly been a shock to Harry Reid. There is a counter establishment movement growing. It is aware of some of these secret establishment deals that are bad for the country, and that movement has begun to show some effectiveness in exposing them, and now even blocking the passage of telecom immunity (so far.)
Go read Glenn's article for the details. I want to focus on who belongs to the Washington Establishment. Who are they and how did they get there?
So who does that Establishment consist of? Let's recap. Clearly it includes all of the Congressional leadership of both parties. Then it includes the White House personnel and the top administrators in the various Cabinet offices. It also includes the main pundits, both Print and TV, who cover Washington. David Broder's unofficial title as "Dean of the Washington Press Corps" is recognition that he is a key member of the establishment. Arch Neo conservative William Krystol is also part of the establishment, which is why he recently got a sweetheart deal on the editorial page of the New York Times. So are the hosts of all the Sunday morning Talking Heads TV shows. After that the establisment includes many of the powerful lobbyists from K-Street as well as other former high bureaucrats and legislators. The most effective and highly paid lobbyists are establishment members who sell their ability to work their Washington establishment contacts. Corporations and other moneyed organizations that want something done in Washington are willing to pay a lot for such insider expertise. Additionally, certain individuals (like Sally Quinn) who give insider Washington parties are also part of the Establishment. If you want a list of who is part of the Washington Establishment, a good one could be compiled by seeing who was on the guest lists of the various Washington insider parties. A few establishment members wouldn't be on that list, but most would. Those parties are where a lot of their contacts are made.
What do all the establishment members have in common? They have all been in Washington D.C. and closely associated with politics at a high level for a long time. They all know each other, and they all have reputations as being "Serious People."
They also all want to work hard to remain members of the Establishment. Having been there a long time, they have been socialized and vetted by other in the Establishment, and they each know that as long as they remain as part of the Establishment they protected against personal error - as long as they act as expected.
This is the Washington D.C. establishment, and its members are proud that, as a group, they run American government. These are the people that Harry Reid and Sen. Jay Rockefeller have been trying to please as they worked to pass the FISA extension with telecom immunity included.
These are also the people who are afraid of political populists like both John Edwards and Mike Huckabee. The establishment members have no interest in real democracy since they do not control it. The members of the establishment consider the political netroots to be extremists because they are non-establishment people who make demands that are not establishment approved, and they are beginning to have an effect on Washington politics that "serious people" don't like. Outsiders are automatically rejected by the insiders of the establishment.
It is this establishment, both members and wannabee members, who have neutered media coverage of the federal government even before the Bush administration cut off intrusive reporters from normal handouts and leaks. Establishment reporters and editors don't rat out the handshake deals of other establishment members, not if they want to remain in the establishment. They do want to remain in the establishment because that's where their sources are. Their careers depend on being inside and in good graces of the establishment.
The reason why the Press is harder on Hillary, Obama and Edwards is that none of them are part of the establishment. Hillary rejected the party circuit back in 1993, and has never joined, while neither Obama nor Edwards have become sufficiently powerful in Congress to become "establishment-accepted."
It is this current establishment that is going to have to be converted, because they currently have accepted the ideas behind the Reagan Revolution as the way things are to be done. Conservative "free market, small government, low taxes and strong military" rhetoric is the core of current establishment rhetoric. Such conversion of establishment members will largely occur by turnover once the new administration gets in, but such turnover and conversion will be strongly resisted, just as it was when Bill Clinton took office in 1993. The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 saved the old Reagan/Bush 41 establishment. That establishment was still in place in 2001 and was passed off to the Bush 43 period. So the current Washington establishment has been in place nearly thirty years. They cannot imagine any other way things in Washington could operate.
This is going to be interesting. Watch for complaints from the "serious people" when the new Democratic administration comes in. It's going to happen, as sure as God make little green apples. The changeover is going to be a rough time for them members. The old establishment will find itself being pushed out of the limelight, and they will hate it.
But that's the Washington establishment. Even if its membership changes, the establishment itself will remain. That's where the handshake deals of government are done.
The right-wing culture war and its Communist antecedents
What happens to a society in which a minor segment of that society objects to the very premises of that society, then decides to change the basic political institutions that teach those premises and have them instead teach the ideology of the minority to everyone?
Paul Rosenberg explains that this is what movement conservatism has been attempting to do to America since the 1960's, and it is the basis of what is being called America's culture war. The strategy was first defined by the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, as he attempted to explain why workers did not become Communists as Communist theory said they would. His explanation was that the central institutions of existing society indoctrinated workers so that instead of becoming Communists, they instead aspired to become members of the bourgeois themselves. Gramsci's proposed solution was that ideological Communists had to take control of the basic social institutions and use them to teach Communist ideology.
This is a good description of what the American right wing conservatives have been doing for fifty years. Recently they have been somewhat politically successful, but have totally failed to change the ideological premises of the majority of Americans. This has caused them a great deal of frustration and has resulted in their redoubled and more extreme efforts to destroy basic American ideology and replace it with their conservative social, economic and religious ideologies.
Paul uses this discussion to briefly address Obama's Kumbaya politics. In Paul's view, Obama's idea is based on the assumption that the culture wars are the result of equal warfare between both the extremist right-wing and the left-wing Americans, but Paul considers this a flawed assumption. Instead the American "left-wing" has not been fighting to repress the right-wing. The aggressive fight and the attempt to repress the ideas of their opponents comes entirely from the side of the movement conservatives.
I think that Paul's description of the flaw behind Obama's Kumbaya politics is correct. America has simply not taken the movement conservative threat to basic American values seriously, since one of the most basic American values is that both sides in any argument should be freely heard and then Americans will independently decide which is correct. The movement conservatives use this basic American value to present their side, but then work extremely hard to repress their opponents is much the same manner as the Communist ideologues did. This leads to a failure of the American system to deal with the threat to its very existence. Paul attributes this to a failure to understand that there really is a highly organized and well-financed effort to create the culture war and use it to destroy America's basic values so that those of the right-wing conservatives can replace them.
I'm not yet sure how far I agree with Paul Rosenberg, but some of what he writes does strike a chord. He plans a series of articles which explain what the right-wingers have been doing, and that may clarify the situation and answer my questions. But in the meantime, he is offering an interesting explanation of what the culture wars is all about, one that certainly supports my belief that Obama's Kumbaya politics is both flawed and dangerous.
So go read his article and see what you think.
Paul Rosenberg explains that this is what movement conservatism has been attempting to do to America since the 1960's, and it is the basis of what is being called America's culture war. The strategy was first defined by the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, as he attempted to explain why workers did not become Communists as Communist theory said they would. His explanation was that the central institutions of existing society indoctrinated workers so that instead of becoming Communists, they instead aspired to become members of the bourgeois themselves. Gramsci's proposed solution was that ideological Communists had to take control of the basic social institutions and use them to teach Communist ideology.
This is a good description of what the American right wing conservatives have been doing for fifty years. Recently they have been somewhat politically successful, but have totally failed to change the ideological premises of the majority of Americans. This has caused them a great deal of frustration and has resulted in their redoubled and more extreme efforts to destroy basic American ideology and replace it with their conservative social, economic and religious ideologies.
Paul uses this discussion to briefly address Obama's Kumbaya politics. In Paul's view, Obama's idea is based on the assumption that the culture wars are the result of equal warfare between both the extremist right-wing and the left-wing Americans, but Paul considers this a flawed assumption. Instead the American "left-wing" has not been fighting to repress the right-wing. The aggressive fight and the attempt to repress the ideas of their opponents comes entirely from the side of the movement conservatives.
I think that Paul's description of the flaw behind Obama's Kumbaya politics is correct. America has simply not taken the movement conservative threat to basic American values seriously, since one of the most basic American values is that both sides in any argument should be freely heard and then Americans will independently decide which is correct. The movement conservatives use this basic American value to present their side, but then work extremely hard to repress their opponents is much the same manner as the Communist ideologues did. This leads to a failure of the American system to deal with the threat to its very existence. Paul attributes this to a failure to understand that there really is a highly organized and well-financed effort to create the culture war and use it to destroy America's basic values so that those of the right-wing conservatives can replace them.
I'm not yet sure how far I agree with Paul Rosenberg, but some of what he writes does strike a chord. He plans a series of articles which explain what the right-wingers have been doing, and that may clarify the situation and answer my questions. But in the meantime, he is offering an interesting explanation of what the culture wars is all about, one that certainly supports my belief that Obama's Kumbaya politics is both flawed and dangerous.
So go read his article and see what you think.
Movement conservative dynamics
Mike Lux reports an interesting train ride in which Rick Santorum shows how much movement conservatives hate John McCain.
Santorum demonstrates also what America is up against as it struggles with the conservative-caused economic problems. America won a big battle with Rick Santorum lost his bid for reelection. Those movement conservatives demand total control and they will stomp anyone in their way. Everything is pure power and irrational ideology. There is no discussion or compromise in them.
Hear that, Obama? How do you make your Kumbaya politics work with Rick Santorum on the other side?
[ h/t to Atrios ]
Santorum demonstrates also what America is up against as it struggles with the conservative-caused economic problems. America won a big battle with Rick Santorum lost his bid for reelection. Those movement conservatives demand total control and they will stomp anyone in their way. Everything is pure power and irrational ideology. There is no discussion or compromise in them.
Hear that, Obama? How do you make your Kumbaya politics work with Rick Santorum on the other side?
[ h/t to Atrios ]
Why is economic stimulus only now being enacted? The problem has existed for nearly a year.
David Sirota points to the fraud of economic stimulus and explains what it really means:
Compare that the to Congressional stimulus package of $150 billion, $70 billion of which is going to be given directly to businesses that are paying these year-end bonuses to their failed leaders. Those $39 billion in bonuses to banks who are now to afraid to lend money to get economic projects working amount to 26% of the $70 billion the government is going to give businesses as "stimulus." The taxpayers are paying for the bonuses that the failed financial industry just gave its failed executives.
That's fraud. Pure and simple. It is also the Reagan Revolution at work.
Why are we talking about “stimulus” only now? After all, most people have been hurting for quite a while. Paychecks have been stagnating, foreclosures have become commonplace, health care premiums continue their double-digit increases—and up until recently, conservatives greeted such hardships with saccharine fantasy.Think the stimulus is not a fraud? The banking industry is hemorrhaging money so badly they don't dare lend to most customers, yet the still give their executives $39 billion in year-end bonuses?
Following government reports showing a surge in income inequality, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson last year gushed that the economy is “as strong as I have seen it in any time.” In the summer, as the housing crisis exploded, President Bush said the economy was “thriving.” This month, as the Labor Department reported another drop in wages, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said not to worry, her state is doing just great because “we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.” And with word that there are now 195,000 homeless veterans nationwide, Bill O’Reilly insisted on Fox News that really, “there’s not many [homeless veterans] out there.”
Message: Nothing to see here. The economy is fabulous. Move along.
Lately, though, the rhetoric has switched. Paulson now says there is an “urgent need” for action, and President Bush is demanding a “stimulus” package from Congress.
And that gets us back to the critical question: Why the sudden shift? Because the group demanding help has changed.
Before, it was just commoners complaining—regular homeowners, wage earners, troops coming home from Iraq, you know, the 99 percent of us who can’t afford the thousand-dollar-a-plate political fundraisers.
But now Wall Street is panicking. In the last month, the financial industry’s profit margins dropped, thanks to mortgage defaults brought on by irresponsible lending. And when the corporate executives who underwrite campaigns start whining, politicians develop “stimulus” schemes using the blight of layoffs, foreclosures and wage cuts to justify tax cuts for those doing the laying off, foreclosing and wage cutting.
Specifically, most GOP presidential candidates are demanding corporate tax cuts as the “stimulus” to improve American competitiveness, ignoring a recent Treasury Department report noting that the United States already has among the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the developed world. Republicans like John McCain, fresh off a Merrill Lynch fundraiser, say we need not expand unemployment benefits and food stamps to help workers and give the economy a reliable Keynesian boost. No, they say we must hand over more cash to the same financial industry that just gave its executives $39 billion worth of year-end bonuses.
Leading figures of both parties seem eager to help limit the debate over “stimulus” and make the final package a corporate goodie bag. According to the Washington Post, Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana asked economists affiliated with the Hamilton Project—a Citigroup-backed think tank—to testify to Congress at its initial hearings on a stimulus package. Labor economists, by contrast, were not invited.
Compare that the to Congressional stimulus package of $150 billion, $70 billion of which is going to be given directly to businesses that are paying these year-end bonuses to their failed leaders. Those $39 billion in bonuses to banks who are now to afraid to lend money to get economic projects working amount to 26% of the $70 billion the government is going to give businesses as "stimulus." The taxpayers are paying for the bonuses that the failed financial industry just gave its failed executives.
That's fraud. Pure and simple. It is also the Reagan Revolution at work.
Tom Friedman has economic development all wrong
Chalmers Johnson offers a good review on an interesting book called Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang, a Cambridge Economist and historian who considers Thomas Friedman's book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" quite laughable. Here is a sample from Johnson's review:
In Chang’s conception, there are two kinds of Bad Samaritans. There are the genuine, powerful “ladder-kickers” working in the “unholy trinity” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Then there are the “ideologues—those who believe in Bad Samaritan policies because they think those policies are ‘right,’ not because they personally benefit from them much, if at all.” Both groups adhere to a doctrine they call “neoliberalism.” It became the dominant economic model of the English-speaking world in the 1970s and prevails at the present time. Neoliberalism (sometimes called the “Washington Consensus") is a rerun of what economists suffering from “historical amnesia” believe were the key characteristics of the international economy in the golden age of liberalism (1870-1913).This is a very different way of looking at economic development, and has a lot of historical support.
Thomas Friedman calls this complex of policies the “Golden Straitjacket,” the wearing of which, no matter how uncomfortable, is allegedly the only route to economic success. The complex includes privatizing state-owned enterprises, maintaining low inflation, shrinking the size of the state bureaucracy, balancing the national budget, liberalizing trade, deregulating foreign investment, making the currency freely convertible, reducing corruption, and privatizing pensions. It is called neoliberalism because of its acceptance of rich-country monopolies over intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.), the granting to a country’s central bank of a monopoly to issue bank notes, and its assertion that political democracy is conducive to economic growth, none of which were parts of classical liberalism. The Golden Straitjacket is what the unholy trinity tries to force on poor countries. It is the doctrinal orthodoxy taught in all mainstream academic economics departments and for which numerous Nobel prizes in economics have been awarded.
In addition to being an economist, Ha-Joon Chang is a historian and an empiricist (as distinct from a deductive theorist working from what are stipulated to be laws of economic behavior). He notes that the histories of today’s rich countries contradict virtually all the Golden Straitjacket dicta, many of which are logically a result rather than a cause of economic growth (for example, trade liberalization). His basic conclusion: “Practically all of today’s developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against neo-liberal economics.” All of today’s rich countries used protection and subsidies to encourage their manufacturing industries, and they discriminated powerfully against foreign investors. All such policies are anathema in today’s economic orthodoxy and are now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations, particularly the IMF and the World Bank.
Bankers are crooks.
Really. Was there ever any doubt? Read Robert Scheer. I had been unaware of Dennis Kucinich's history.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Congressional Resignations - Retirements, updated
I last posted a list of the Congressional resignations and retirements on December 8, 2007 and there are three more Congresspersons who have bailed out since then. So I am updating the list, and also adding the difference in the 2004 Presidential vote as a final column to show what the Democratic vs. Republican tendency is for each District or State.
I am also correcting an error in the earlier list. I had listed Michael R. McNulty of New York's 21st congressional district as a Republican. I sincerely apologize for insulting a good Democrat.
Each list is sorted first by party, then alphabetically by last name.
"Retiring" means serving to end of term. Will not run for reelection.
"Resigning" means announced resignation and intends to leave before end of term.
"Resigned" means has already officially left office during this term.
"At Lg" means the only congress person in the state.
The final column reflects the Presidential vote in 2004. D+13 means Kerry received 13% more of the vote than Bush did. Districts or states in which the difference was 5% or less are indicated by an asterisk (*) because they will be likely change, particularly if the winning presidential candidate has "coattails". Deborah Pryce's Ohio 15th district was effectively tie in the 2004 Presidential race, so it is shown as D+0. The score there is only an indicator and reflects political conditions three years ago, so while Virginia is listed a R+9, in 2006 Virginia elected Democrat Jim Webb as Senator so it is probably a tossup state.
In the House, 22 (10.9%) of the 202 Republicans have resigned, died, or announced they are not running for reelection. Of those 22, only Heather Wilson of New Mexico is running for higher office (the Senate in her case.) The other 21 Congress people are leaving politics.
Of the 233 Democrats, 5 (2.1%) have announced that they are not running for reelection, and three are running for Senate seats. Tom Udall is running for the same New Mexico Senate seat that Heather Wilson is, so one of them is gone from Congress after November.
Clearly Republican turnover is much higher than that of the Democrats, which suggests that the Republicans expect to remain in the minority after the 2008 election.
Bush and Gen Petreaus have greatly lowered American casualties in Iraq so that Iraq has moved out of the news. It will thus have less influence on the November 2008 election than expected unless something changes sharply. The Recession that is currently building will clearly have an effect, with voters being more likely to vote against incumbents and particularly Republicans. Because the Primaries have been moved to such early dates, the latest information on the coming Recession will not permit many intra-party challenges of incumbents. That's unfortunate, because there are a lot of Blue Dog Democrats who need to be challenged and removed from office.
I am also correcting an error in the earlier list. I had listed Michael R. McNulty of New York's 21st congressional district as a Republican. I sincerely apologize for insulting a good Democrat.
Each list is sorted first by party, then alphabetically by last name.
House
| 1 | Allen, Tom | D | ME-01 | Run for Senate | D+12 |
| 2 | Carson, Julia | D | IN-07 | Died | D+16 |
| 3 | McNulty, Michael R | D | NY-21 | Retire | D+13 |
| 4 | Udall, Tom | D | NM-03 | Run for Senate | D+9 |
| 5 | Udal, Mark | D | CO-02 | Run for Senate | D+17 |
| 6 | Cubin, Barbara | R | WY-At lg | Retire | R+40 |
| 7 | Davis, Jo Ann | R | VA-01 | Died | R+21 |
| 8 | Dolittle, John | R | CA-04 | Retire | R+24 |
| 9 | Everett, Terry | R | AL-02 | Retire | R+34 |
| 10 | Ferguson, Mike | R | NJ-07 | Retire | R+6 |
| 11 | Gilmore, Paul | R | OH-05 | Died | R+22 |
| 12 | Hastert, Dennis | R | IL-14 | Resigned | R+11 |
| 13 | Hobson, Dave | R | OH-07 | Retire | R+14 |
| 14 | Hunter, Duncan | R | CA-52 | Retire | R+23 |
| 15 | LaHood, Ray | R | IL-18 | Retire | R+16 |
| 16 | McCrery, Jim | R | LA-04 | Retire | R+19 |
| 17 | Pickering, Chip | R | MS-03 | Retire | R+31 |
| 18 | Pryce, Deborah | R | OH-15 | Retire | D+0 * |
| 19 | Ramstad, Jim | R | MN-03 | Retire | R+3 * |
| 20 | Regula, Ralph | R | OH-16 | Retire | R+8 |
| 21 | Renzi, Rick | R | AZ-01 | Retire | R+8 |
| 22 | Saxton, Jim | R | NJ-03 | Retire | R+2 * |
| 23 | Tancredo, Tom | R | CO-06 | Retire | R+21 |
| 24 | Walsh, Jim | R | NY-25 | Retire | R+2 * |
| 25 | Weldon, Dave | R | FL-15 | Retire | R+14 |
| 26 | Weller, Jerry | R | IL-11 | Retire | R+7 |
| 27 | Wilson, Heather | R | NM-01 | Run for Senate | R+3 |
Senate
| 1 | Allard, Wayne | R | CO | Retiring | R+5 * |
| 2 | Craig, Larry | R | ID | Retiring | R+38 |
| 3 | Domenici, Pete | R | NM | Retiring | R+1 * |
| 4 | Hagel, Chuck | R | NB | Retiring | R+33 |
| 5 | Lott, Trent | R | MS | Resigning | R+19 |
| 6 | Warner, John | R | VA | Retiring | R+9 |
"Retiring" means serving to end of term. Will not run for reelection.
"Resigning" means announced resignation and intends to leave before end of term.
"Resigned" means has already officially left office during this term.
"At Lg" means the only congress person in the state.
The final column reflects the Presidential vote in 2004. D+13 means Kerry received 13% more of the vote than Bush did. Districts or states in which the difference was 5% or less are indicated by an asterisk (*) because they will be likely change, particularly if the winning presidential candidate has "coattails". Deborah Pryce's Ohio 15th district was effectively tie in the 2004 Presidential race, so it is shown as D+0. The score there is only an indicator and reflects political conditions three years ago, so while Virginia is listed a R+9, in 2006 Virginia elected Democrat Jim Webb as Senator so it is probably a tossup state.
In the House, 22 (10.9%) of the 202 Republicans have resigned, died, or announced they are not running for reelection. Of those 22, only Heather Wilson of New Mexico is running for higher office (the Senate in her case.) The other 21 Congress people are leaving politics.
Of the 233 Democrats, 5 (2.1%) have announced that they are not running for reelection, and three are running for Senate seats. Tom Udall is running for the same New Mexico Senate seat that Heather Wilson is, so one of them is gone from Congress after November.
Clearly Republican turnover is much higher than that of the Democrats, which suggests that the Republicans expect to remain in the minority after the 2008 election.
Bush and Gen Petreaus have greatly lowered American casualties in Iraq so that Iraq has moved out of the news. It will thus have less influence on the November 2008 election than expected unless something changes sharply. The Recession that is currently building will clearly have an effect, with voters being more likely to vote against incumbents and particularly Republicans. Because the Primaries have been moved to such early dates, the latest information on the coming Recession will not permit many intra-party challenges of incumbents. That's unfortunate, because there are a lot of Blue Dog Democrats who need to be challenged and removed from office.
How long will the recession last and what caused it?
The American economy is now entering a recession, and it will be much harder and longer lasting than the two most recent economic downturns. This is primarily because of mismanagement of the macro economy by the Federal Reserve for the last twenty years combined with excessive deregulation by the Federal government as the theories behind the Reagan Revolution have been put into place.
Last Monday the Stock Markets around the world suddenly panicked. The collective bad economic news that has been appearing for nearly a year now in a drip - drip - drip process has allowed both Wall Street traders and government economic leaders to continually say that, while there are some difficulties in the economy (sub prime mortgage crisis, sharply increasing home foreclosures, general credit crisis world wide, increase in the unemployment rate in December, etc.) the American economy is both resilient and powerful, and all this bad news will soon go away. Finally a few stockholders decided that it wasn't going away, so they sold stocks, and the rest of the markets took notice. A lot of wealth disappeared in the stock market sell off.
The growing evidence that the economy isn't doing well for an awful lot of average people did not get the attention of either the federal reserve or the Bush administration, but the disappearance of a lot of wealth on the stock market got their attention. That's why the Fed took the unusual action of dropping the interest rate a large three quarters of one percent in an unscheduled meeting. Then Wednesday the New York Times published an article that questioned whether the economy has really been working well at all.
The interest rate manipulations have created an economy that is out of balance, which is why both stock and real estate remain too expensive. Both have to come down in price a great deal before the economy is back in reasonable balance. But the long period of artificially maintained growth had a negative effect on the financial markets. Lenders began to feel that the only way they could lose money was by not lending, so they threw out the rule book on reasonable standards for lending. Now no one knows which loans on the books are good and which ones are bad. This is complicated by the way banks have been packaging similar loans and selling the packages. This means that as bad loans go into default they also take down what might be good loans as they go bad, and no one knows which loans are bad and which ones might be repaid. It also means that there is little connection between the final purchasers of the loan packages, and in particular the people who own a loan have no mechanism for working out modified terms of repayment that could prevent default.
This is true for a great deal more than just mortgages, since lenders have sold mortgage loans to obtain more money to lend in other ways, but the mortgages they sold went with the right of the buyer to sell them back if they go into default. That means that taking back defaulted mortgages reduces bank capital to support other types of loans. There are at least two more big blocks of adjustable rate mortgages that are going to have payments sharply increased this year, and no one knows how many more mortgages will be driven into default as a result. So banks don't have funds to lend for other reasons besides home purchases because they literally have no idea how much they have in lendable funds.
That means that lending for any reason is going to be limited for at least a year, and there is uncertainty about how much longer. Uncertainty itself restricts lending. This is going to be particularly hard on mortgage lending since lenders are aware that much of the housing in Florida, California, the Southwest and the Northeast is still overpriced. Since increased activity in the housing industry is usually the first industry to lead the way out of a recession, that is going to make it even more difficult to end the recession.
The current economic downturn will be a Recession, and all indicators suggest that it will last until the bad loans are finally all identified and dealt with, until lending standards are cleaned up so that purchasers can trust the loans sellers sell them, and until housing prices come back to a level in line with what rental rates can pay for. That means that the American economy is very unlikely to recover in less than at least two years.
The cause of this Recession is primarily mismanagement of the macro economy by the federal government and the Federal Reserve. This is the easily predictable result of implementing the Reagan Revolution demands for deregulation of the financial industry along with Alan Greenspan's continued efforts to use the Federal Reserve to artificially prop up the economy. Without the Reagan Revolution prescriptions, the federal reserve mismanagement to try to cover up the problems caused by deregulations, and without Bush's economically irrational tax cuts for the wealthy and Bush's War in Iraq with the excessive borrowing and uncontrolled spending spending that has accompanied that war, America would currently have an economy that provided prosperity and stability. as it is, we have a perpetual war in Iraq together with at least a two year Recession that will probably be one of the most severe since the Great Depression.
Addendum 11:53 PM CST
Glad I didn't read this article by Robert Reich before I wrote the material above. He says much the same thing, but he says it a great deal better than I do. Here is his conclusion:
Now we are going to pay the price for the unrestrained lies, politics and greed.
Last Monday the Stock Markets around the world suddenly panicked. The collective bad economic news that has been appearing for nearly a year now in a drip - drip - drip process has allowed both Wall Street traders and government economic leaders to continually say that, while there are some difficulties in the economy (sub prime mortgage crisis, sharply increasing home foreclosures, general credit crisis world wide, increase in the unemployment rate in December, etc.) the American economy is both resilient and powerful, and all this bad news will soon go away. Finally a few stockholders decided that it wasn't going away, so they sold stocks, and the rest of the markets took notice. A lot of wealth disappeared in the stock market sell off.
The growing evidence that the economy isn't doing well for an awful lot of average people did not get the attention of either the federal reserve or the Bush administration, but the disappearance of a lot of wealth on the stock market got their attention. That's why the Fed took the unusual action of dropping the interest rate a large three quarters of one percent in an unscheduled meeting. Then Wednesday the New York Times published an article that questioned whether the economy has really been working well at all.
The recent financial turmoil has many causes, but they are tied to a basic fear that some of the economic successes of the last generation may yet turn out to be a mirage. That helps explain why problems in the American subprime mortgage market could have spread so quickly through the world’s financial system. On Tuesday, Mr. Bernanke, who is now the Fed chairman, presided over the steepest one-day interest rate cut in the central bank’s history.So the short story version is that the last two bubbles have made the economy seem to be protected from Recession, but both of those bubbles were created by excessively low interest rates as the federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan tried to manipulate the economy for largely political reasons. Those artificial manipulations have reached an end, so that the consumers can no longer support continued economic growth the way they have been for nearly two decades.
The great moderation now seems to have depended — in part — on a huge speculative bubble, first in stocks and then real estate, that hid the economy’s rough edges. Everyone from first-time home buyers to Wall Street chief executives made bets they did not fully understand, and then spent money as if those bets couldn’t go bad. For the past 16 years, American consumers have increased their overall spending every single quarter, which is almost twice as long as any previous streak.
Now, some worry, comes the payback. Martin Feldstein, the éminence grise of Republican economists, says he is concerned that the economy “could slip into a recession and that the recession could be a long, deep, severe one.” In Monday’s Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama made the same argument: “We could be sliding into an extraordinary recession,” he said. [Snip]
But a recession is now more likely than not. It may well have started already. The Philadelphia Fed reported Tuesday that the economy shrank in 23 states last month, including Ohio, Missouri and Arizona, and was stagnant in seven others. California and Florida, with their plunging home values, may soon join the recession list.
The bigger question is how severe the recession will be if it does come to pass. The last two, in 1990-1 and 2001, have been rather mild, which is a crucial part of the great moderation mystique. There are three reasons, though, to think the next recession may not be.
First, Wall Street hasn’t yet come clean. Even after last week, when JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo announced big losses in their consumer credit businesses, financial service firms have still probably gone public with less than half of their mortgage-related losses, according to Moody’s Economy.com. They’re not being dishonest; they just haven’t untangled all of their complex investments.
“Part of the big uncertainty,” Raghuram G. Rajan, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said, “is where the bodies are buried.” [Snip]
The second problem is that real estate and stocks remain fairly expensive. This shows just how big the bubbles were: despite the recent declines, stock prices and home values have still not returned to historical norms.
David Rosenberg, a Merrill Lynch economist, says that the stock market is overvalued by 10 percent relative to corporate earnings and interest rates. And remember that stocks usually fall more than they should during a bear market, much as they rise more than they should during a bull market.
The situation with house prices looks worse. Until 2000, the relationship between house prices and rents remained fairly steady. The same could be said about house prices relative to household incomes and mortgage rates. But the boom of the last decade changed this entirely.
For prices to return to the old norm, they would still need to fall 30 percent across much of Florida, California and the Southwest and about 20 percent in the Northeast. This could happen quickly, or prices could remain stagnant for years while incomes and rents caught up.
Cheaper stocks and houses will benefit many people — namely those who don’t yet own a home and still have most of their 401(k) investing in front of them. But the price declines will also lead directly to the third big economic problem.
Consumer spending kept on rising for the last 16 years largely because families tapped into their newfound wealth, often taking out loans to supplement their income. This increase in debt — as a recent study co-written by the vice chairman of the Fed dryly put it — “is not likely to be repeated.” So just as rising asset values cushioned the last two downturns, falling values could aggravate the next one. [Snip]
But it’s hard not to believe that the economy will pay a price for the speculative binge of the last two decades, either by going through a tough recession or an extended period of disappointing growth. As is already happening, banks will become less willing to lend money, households will become less willing to spend money they don’t have and investors will become more alert to risk.
[Highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]
The interest rate manipulations have created an economy that is out of balance, which is why both stock and real estate remain too expensive. Both have to come down in price a great deal before the economy is back in reasonable balance. But the long period of artificially maintained growth had a negative effect on the financial markets. Lenders began to feel that the only way they could lose money was by not lending, so they threw out the rule book on reasonable standards for lending. Now no one knows which loans on the books are good and which ones are bad. This is complicated by the way banks have been packaging similar loans and selling the packages. This means that as bad loans go into default they also take down what might be good loans as they go bad, and no one knows which loans are bad and which ones might be repaid. It also means that there is little connection between the final purchasers of the loan packages, and in particular the people who own a loan have no mechanism for working out modified terms of repayment that could prevent default.
This is true for a great deal more than just mortgages, since lenders have sold mortgage loans to obtain more money to lend in other ways, but the mortgages they sold went with the right of the buyer to sell them back if they go into default. That means that taking back defaulted mortgages reduces bank capital to support other types of loans. There are at least two more big blocks of adjustable rate mortgages that are going to have payments sharply increased this year, and no one knows how many more mortgages will be driven into default as a result. So banks don't have funds to lend for other reasons besides home purchases because they literally have no idea how much they have in lendable funds.
That means that lending for any reason is going to be limited for at least a year, and there is uncertainty about how much longer. Uncertainty itself restricts lending. This is going to be particularly hard on mortgage lending since lenders are aware that much of the housing in Florida, California, the Southwest and the Northeast is still overpriced. Since increased activity in the housing industry is usually the first industry to lead the way out of a recession, that is going to make it even more difficult to end the recession.
The current economic downturn will be a Recession, and all indicators suggest that it will last until the bad loans are finally all identified and dealt with, until lending standards are cleaned up so that purchasers can trust the loans sellers sell them, and until housing prices come back to a level in line with what rental rates can pay for. That means that the American economy is very unlikely to recover in less than at least two years.
The cause of this Recession is primarily mismanagement of the macro economy by the federal government and the Federal Reserve. This is the easily predictable result of implementing the Reagan Revolution demands for deregulation of the financial industry along with Alan Greenspan's continued efforts to use the Federal Reserve to artificially prop up the economy. Without the Reagan Revolution prescriptions, the federal reserve mismanagement to try to cover up the problems caused by deregulations, and without Bush's economically irrational tax cuts for the wealthy and Bush's War in Iraq with the excessive borrowing and uncontrolled spending spending that has accompanied that war, America would currently have an economy that provided prosperity and stability. as it is, we have a perpetual war in Iraq together with at least a two year Recession that will probably be one of the most severe since the Great Depression.
Addendum 11:53 PM CST
Glad I didn't read this article by Robert Reich before I wrote the material above. He says much the same thing, but he says it a great deal better than I do. Here is his conclusion:
How much worse can it get? The housing bubble drove home prices up 20 to 40 percent above historic averages relative to earnings and rents. So now that the bubble is bursting, you can expect prices to drop by roughly the same amount, and new home construction to contract. The latter plunged last month to its lowest point in more than 16 years. A managing partner of a large Wall Street financial house told me a few days ago the scenario could get much worse. He gave a 20 percent chance of a depression.[Editor's Note: The above paragraph was written before the Congressional agreement that removed $70 billion of the $150 billion and gave it to investors and Bush refused to permit an extension of unemployment benefits and expansion of food stamps. Don't forget that that the purpose of food stamps is to provide customers for grocery stores and agricultural distributors when unemployed customers can't get enough money to buy the product. So half the stimulus was removed from effective stimulus methods and tow of the most effective channels for stimulus were vetoed in negotiations with the white House because Bush doesn't believe the government should help people, just businesses, bankers and investors. This makes it much more likely that the stimulus effort will be overwhelmed by the housing slump. Now back to Reich's article.]
Even if a stimulus package were precisely targeted to consumers most likely to spend any money they received, the housing slump could overwhelm it. According to a recent estimate by Merrill-Lynch, the slump will hit consumer spending to the tune of $360 billion this year and next. That’s more than double the size of the stimulus package President Bush or any leading Democrat is now talking about. And the Merrill-Lynch estimate is conservative.
In reality, the crisis is both a credit crunch and the bursting of the housing bubble. Wall Street is in terrible shape and Main Street is about to be in terrible shape. And there’s not a whole lot that can be done about either of these problems — because they are the results of years of lax credit standards, get-rich-quick schemes, wild speculation on Wall Street and in the housing market, and gross irresponsibility by the Fed, the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency.Essentially our economy has been running on life-support since at least 2000 and probably even earlier, and the chicanery that was conducted to keep it from going into recession in the past has done a great deal of institutional damage to the economy.
Now we are going to pay the price for the unrestrained lies, politics and greed.
Iraq war and occupation - the confederacy of Republican fools
How utterly ignorant and out of touch are the entire crop of Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination? Here is the absolutely clear answer.
It's really a shame that Ron Paul is such an out-and-out crackpot and dangerous politician on so many other issues. Here he is the only honest man.
It's really a shame that Ron Paul is such an out-and-out crackpot and dangerous politician on so many other issues. Here he is the only honest man.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Progressives effecting media narrative of candidates but not media view of policy.
This is an interesting observation. dday writing at Digby's Hullabaloo point out how the media narrative on the Republician candidates has become pretty much the same narrative that progressives have been pushing since the various candidates for nomination began campaigning. Here's the transcript that he published as his example:
I suspect that this is a function of two factors. First, the Progressive Movement is very new, and still finding its way. There are not yet a lot of media-accepted spokespersons the media can quickly call on for "the other side of the issue." That is purely a matter of time and getting the right names onto TV Producer's and reporter's Rolodexes. Second, and probably more significant, the Republican candidates are clearly a poor bunch who demand explanation, and there is no entrenched explanation that has to be overcome. Since each of the candidates is working hard to establish an image nationally, it is relatively easy to point to the candidate himself and supply a reasonable but alternative image.
Most of the planks on the Progressive agenda do not have clear faces like the Republican candidates do. What is the "face" of a broken healthcare system? It is difficult to point to a clear image, so the no longer accurate entrenched existing ideas about the "greatest health care system in the world" is much more difficult to overcome. The facts no longer support that entrenched idea, but the insurance companies have a vested interest in maintaining it and they spend a lot of money on both advertising and lobbying to do exactly that.
It's no surprise, then, that the newly recreated progressive movement has made a lot less progress on getting the media to accept progressive policies as mainstream than they have in getting the media to accept the Progressive narratives on the Republican candidates for President. Both are true, both are really mainstream, but the media investment in the older policy prescriptions is a lot more entrenched deeper than are the images of the current crop of Republican candidates for nomination as President.
That would account for the slower adoption by the media of progressive prescriptions. It shouldn't take too long to bring the media into line, though. A majority of the American public is already there, and the media is caught between a large and growing portion of their public on the one side and the progressive movement on the other, while the reality of the economy is clearly closer to that described by the Progressives than that described by the conservatives. The media will be forced into line. It's just going to take more time and effort.
dday then goes on to point out that this is only the media narrative, and not a set of policy arguments. Progressive policy arguments have not yet taken root in the media, so they are still reported as "extremist." (My word, not dday's.)BLITZER: It wasn't exactly a shocker today, Jack, that Fred Thompson announced he's dropping out of this race. But let's take a look at the political fallout.[dday's comment on the transcript.] It has the usual Village cattiness, but these are themes that progressives pushed from the moment Thompson entered the race. He's lazy, he's an actor who wants to play the role of the President, he was pushed upon people by the establishment. And this is true across the line: Romney's an insincere flip-flopper, Rudy's a homicidal maniac, Huckabee's a Jesus freak, McCain wants to bomb the whole world (this narrative took hold until McCain dropped off the map and we stopped pressuring him), etc.
Among the Republicans, who gains, who loses?
CAFFERTY: Well, if he hadn't announced it, I'm not sure anybody would have noticed.
(LAUGHTER)
CAFFERTY: I mean I -- you know, it's like he hasn't -- he's only been here what -- you know, he wasn't that interested in campaigning. I think he would have liked it if somebody would have said you can be president. But he didn't want to work to get the job. And I'm not sure it means a heck of a lot for anybody. Somebody said that he might be trying to position himself to be vice president. He'll deny that.
BORGER: ...So watch for Mitt Romney, who is also running as a social conservative, to go after those six or seven Thompson voters that are out there.
(LAUGHTER)
BORGER: And he'll try -- he'll try and get them.
TOOBIN: You know, Wolf, you have to go all the way back to Rudolph Giuliani to find a campaign that has been singularly as unsuccessful as Fred Thompson's has been.
(LAUGHTER)
BORGER: That far back?
TOOBIN: You know, I just don't think it will have any impact at all, his departure...
BLITZER: Well, it could have a...
TOOBIN: ...just as his arrival didn't.
BORGER: You know...
BLITZER: It could have an impact in new episodes of "Law and Order," though.
BORGER: It could. It could. But, you know, this was such an interesting candidacy. It was created by the Republican establishment in Washington, who felt that they needed a new horse. They needed someone else. So they created this. They took a guy who was television. They said let's turn him into a presidential candidate. He will clearly appeal to the American public. And it totally flopped [...]
TOOBIN: That was the ultimate problem.
CAFFERTY: Take a look at all the other ideas the Republican establishment in Washington has had for the last seven years.
(LAUGHTER)
CAFFERTY: It's no surprise to me the Fred Thompson thing didn't go anywhere.
BLITZER: I can't tell you how many people in that Republican establishment -- especially here in Washington, the beltway, you know, the Republican lobbyists...
BORGER: Right.
BLITZER: ...the so-called elite, when they were even thinking of getting him in, they said this is the new Ronald Reagan. He's an actor.
CAFFERTY: Yes.
BLITZER: He's media-genic. He's powerful. And he's really going to turn things around.
(CROSSTALK) CAFFERTY: If you want to look at the definition of irrelevant, look up the Republican establishment in Washington, D.C.
BORGER: Right.
CAFFERTY: That's irrelevant.
(LAUGHTER)
TOOBIN: Fred Thompson definitely was the tallest candidate.
BORGER: Right.
(LAUGHTER)
BORGER: But, you know, it's so...
CAFFERTY: And the baldest.
BORGER: ...it's so arrogant, though, you know, to think that you can be anointed in Washington and you're pretty good on television and you look pretty good and you -- and you have great name recognition because you're in "Law and Order," and, gee, I can then become president.
And I think they talked him into it. And I think they said to him, you know, you don't have to work that hard.
(LAUGHTER)
BORGER: You can actually just get this job, get in late, let the public take a look at you. You're different. You're going to win. It didn't work out that way.
CAFFERTY: He bought that part about not having to work very hard. He liked that part.
(LAUGHTER)
CAFFERTY: You can sit in the trailer until it's time for your close-up, Fred.
(LAUGHTER)
Now, we're aided by a really terrible slate of candidates. But it's clear that progressives have shot these narratives into the media bloodstream. Initially, Thompson was the guy you could smell the Aqua Velva on, and Romney was a guy who has shoulders on which you can land a 747. I really think the movement is maturing and deserves a lot of credit.
I suspect that this is a function of two factors. First, the Progressive Movement is very new, and still finding its way. There are not yet a lot of media-accepted spokespersons the media can quickly call on for "the other side of the issue." That is purely a matter of time and getting the right names onto TV Producer's and reporter's Rolodexes. Second, and probably more significant, the Republican candidates are clearly a poor bunch who demand explanation, and there is no entrenched explanation that has to be overcome. Since each of the candidates is working hard to establish an image nationally, it is relatively easy to point to the candidate himself and supply a reasonable but alternative image.
Most of the planks on the Progressive agenda do not have clear faces like the Republican candidates do. What is the "face" of a broken healthcare system? It is difficult to point to a clear image, so the no longer accurate entrenched existing ideas about the "greatest health care system in the world" is much more difficult to overcome. The facts no longer support that entrenched idea, but the insurance companies have a vested interest in maintaining it and they spend a lot of money on both advertising and lobbying to do exactly that.
It's no surprise, then, that the newly recreated progressive movement has made a lot less progress on getting the media to accept progressive policies as mainstream than they have in getting the media to accept the Progressive narratives on the Republican candidates for President. Both are true, both are really mainstream, but the media investment in the older policy prescriptions is a lot more entrenched deeper than are the images of the current crop of Republican candidates for nomination as President.
That would account for the slower adoption by the media of progressive prescriptions. It shouldn't take too long to bring the media into line, though. A majority of the American public is already there, and the media is caught between a large and growing portion of their public on the one side and the progressive movement on the other, while the reality of the economy is clearly closer to that described by the Progressives than that described by the conservatives. The media will be forced into line. It's just going to take more time and effort.
Kuttner: our current economic woes were created by the Reagan Revolution and Carter deregulation
Robert Kuttner explains why America is now facing the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression:
Consider this. America's bankers and the movement conservatives have caused the removal of usury laws, the tightening of the bankruptcy law, and the allowance of refinancing and second mortgages to extract cash from the inflation and low interest rate driven housing appreciation are all just banking ways to farm the poor and middle class for money.
The working class and middle class are urged to spend, and the new money needed to expand consumption came from rising home prices because wages haven't gone up since 2000. Still the extraction of money from the poor and the middle class - the tax farming by bankers - continues. The mechanisms of the cash-farming are things like high-interest high-fee credit cards, sub-prime loans and student loans for the middle class and high-interest pay-day loans, sub-prime mortgage loans, super high interest rate loans on used cars, rapid refund loans that cost 500% annual rates on a loan that gets the money to a person two weeks earlier than the IRS would have, and so on.
The union busting program of the Reagan Revolution has made it possible for the economy to become more productive, but the additional profit from that productivity all goes to the wealthy. So not only has the extraction of money from the non-rich to be given to the wealthy expanded a lot, it has not been accompanied more cash going to the middle and lower classes. America under the Reagan Revolution has become a nation in which the poor and middle classes are taxed and farmed for money to give to the banks and the super-wealthy.
Then there is the deregulation of business and financial institutions during the Reagan Revolution to deal with. The deregulation of economy has returned to the boom and bust cycles that characterized America from about 1870 to the Great Depression. During the booms the rich get richer while the poor and middle class do not improve their lot. Then during the busts the poor get poorer, but the rich do not suffer. The absence of universal health care accentuates the lowering of the life styles of the poor and the middle class.
It's a system, planned to create a new vision of America. Welcome to the Latin American social model of a few very wealthy families surrounded by a lot of poor people and a struggling, small middle class.
When Condi Rice gives her speech that the American economy is strong and resilient, has she noticed that 70% of demand is consumer demand, and that since the failure of wages to rise along with productivity the only source of increased consumption has been rising home prices? Now that home prices will no longer rise, where does our economy get the demand that makes it function?
We are currently in a consumption-driven Recession, and the consumers have run out of new sources of funds to finance consumption. The structure of our economy is neither strong nor resilient. Instead it is the the design the Reagan Revolution has given us. Instead of competing with Europe and Japan, we are now competing with Mexico and Brazil.
This is not an accidental change in the American economy. Go look at The conservative opposition to government planning. The very wealthy and Wall-street Republicans want America to return to the Latin America style economy that characterized our economy as it first industrialized from just after the Civil War until it collapsed in the Great Depression. Those people will be happier in a more authoritarian theocratic America run by Pat Robertson's followers as in a middle class Republican where their money does not give them great power. As Sara Robinson points out
We Americans who still think that the vision of America that was rooted in 1776 and in the U.S. Constitution, enforced by the Rule of Law, and then updated to fit an industrialized society by FDR when the previous system failed completely, need to recognize the threat and eliminate it.
The solutions now—the Fed interest-rate cut, the stimulus package—is this enough, Robert Kuttner?So what has happened to the structure of the American economy?
ROBERT KUTTNER: No, it’s not the beginning of enough. And I think the place to start is to recognize why this recession is different from all other recessions. This began and is continuing with a collapse in credit markets, and the collapse in credit markets is, in turn, the result of deregulation gone nuts. And it’s a repeat of a lot of things that happened in the 1920s, where there was too much speculation with too much borrowed money and a complete lack of transparency. The regulators, the public had no idea of what these bonds that had been created out of subprime mortgages really contained, what they were worth. The people who packaged them were not subject to any kind of regulatory scrutiny.
And when it turned out that a lot of these loans were never going to be paid back, the layer upon layer upon layer of bonds and then securities based on the bonds—you know, if you can picture the World Trade Center collapsing floor by floor or you can picture the collapse of the Ponzi schemes of the 1920s, that’s a good—or horrible—analogy. And when you have a credit contraction, it means that banks have less capital against which to make loans, and lowering interest rates doesn’t fix that.
There are two other things that lowering interest rates and an ordinary stimulus package won’t fix. One, you alluded to in your opening comments, Amy, and that’s the collapse in housing prices. At the current rate of decline in housing values, American homeowners—and that’s about 70 percent of Americans—are going to lose $2.2 trillion of net worth this year alone. Well, when you lose $2.2 trillion of savings, you’re not inclined to rush out and do home improvements, you’re not inclined to rush out and buy durable goods. And again, compared to that kind of a loss, a stimulus—and they’re talking about $140–$145 billion, that’s one percent of GDP—that’s a drop in the bucket.
Lastly, this occurs on top of thirty years of increasing insecurity on a whole bunch of fronts: the greater risk of losing your job, the greater risk of having your paycheck not keep pace with inflation, rising energy costs, rising tuition costs, rising health insurance costs. All of the things that make you middle class have become more difficult to attain in the past thirty years. So you’ve got a three-layer cake here. You’ve got this thirty-year history of flat or declining living standards for most Americans, you’ve got this terrible weakness in financial markets, and you’ve got this housing collapse.
AMY GOODMAN: Thirty years would take us back to the beginning of Reagan.
ROBERT KUTTNER: A little bit before, actually. I mean, the great experiment in deregulation really started under Carter in the late 1970s. It was Carter who started the deregulation of trucking and natural gas and broadcasting. And the whole ideology of deregulation and the practice of deregulation was unfortunately bipartisan.
Consider this. America's bankers and the movement conservatives have caused the removal of usury laws, the tightening of the bankruptcy law, and the allowance of refinancing and second mortgages to extract cash from the inflation and low interest rate driven housing appreciation are all just banking ways to farm the poor and middle class for money.
The working class and middle class are urged to spend, and the new money needed to expand consumption came from rising home prices because wages haven't gone up since 2000. Still the extraction of money from the poor and the middle class - the tax farming by bankers - continues. The mechanisms of the cash-farming are things like high-interest high-fee credit cards, sub-prime loans and student loans for the middle class and high-interest pay-day loans, sub-prime mortgage loans, super high interest rate loans on used cars, rapid refund loans that cost 500% annual rates on a loan that gets the money to a person two weeks earlier than the IRS would have, and so on.
The union busting program of the Reagan Revolution has made it possible for the economy to become more productive, but the additional profit from that productivity all goes to the wealthy. So not only has the extraction of money from the non-rich to be given to the wealthy expanded a lot, it has not been accompanied more cash going to the middle and lower classes. America under the Reagan Revolution has become a nation in which the poor and middle classes are taxed and farmed for money to give to the banks and the super-wealthy.
Then there is the deregulation of business and financial institutions during the Reagan Revolution to deal with. The deregulation of economy has returned to the boom and bust cycles that characterized America from about 1870 to the Great Depression. During the booms the rich get richer while the poor and middle class do not improve their lot. Then during the busts the poor get poorer, but the rich do not suffer. The absence of universal health care accentuates the lowering of the life styles of the poor and the middle class.
It's a system, planned to create a new vision of America. Welcome to the Latin American social model of a few very wealthy families surrounded by a lot of poor people and a struggling, small middle class.
When Condi Rice gives her speech that the American economy is strong and resilient, has she noticed that 70% of demand is consumer demand, and that since the failure of wages to rise along with productivity the only source of increased consumption has been rising home prices? Now that home prices will no longer rise, where does our economy get the demand that makes it function?
We are currently in a consumption-driven Recession, and the consumers have run out of new sources of funds to finance consumption. The structure of our economy is neither strong nor resilient. Instead it is the the design the Reagan Revolution has given us. Instead of competing with Europe and Japan, we are now competing with Mexico and Brazil.
This is not an accidental change in the American economy. Go look at The conservative opposition to government planning. The very wealthy and Wall-street Republicans want America to return to the Latin America style economy that characterized our economy as it first industrialized from just after the Civil War until it collapsed in the Great Depression. Those people will be happier in a more authoritarian theocratic America run by Pat Robertson's followers as in a middle class Republican where their money does not give them great power. As Sara Robinson points out
... that's why the largest department of strategic foresight in the country is now emerging at Pat Robertson's Regent University. They've got a vision for the future, and are getting very systematic about implementing it.The Wall Street Republicans have had their vision since the earlier version of it collapsed in 1929, which is why they hated FDR so much. Their descendants still detest FDR, because he was the man who saved America from the Depression the free marketers created.
We Americans who still think that the vision of America that was rooted in 1776 and in the U.S. Constitution, enforced by the Rule of Law, and then updated to fit an industrialized society by FDR when the previous system failed completely, need to recognize the threat and eliminate it.
What is Obama doing right?
In reading the interview with Rick Perlstein by the Chicago Review of Books this statement about how Rick conducts his history of conservatism jumped out at me.
Decision-making by resentment or logic
First, as is so often clear in many conservative policy decisions and their justifications, conservatives make the decision about what they want to happen first, then build a justification for it.
An example of this is the ideological concept that the free market solves all problems and is always better than government solutions. This is not an idea, it is an ideological presumed truth, never to be questioned. Whether real markets between independent buyers and sellers exist is never questioned, it is simply assumed that anytime a buyer pays a seller for something it is a free market. Also, the high cost of collecting data on other market transactions so that each transaction is embedded in the pattern of all other similar transactions taking place at the same time is ignored. These costs will exist anytime a real market transaction occurs, even if it is just like the dozen or so others just like it before and after. The fact that by sacrificing a little of the flexibility of a market decision in exchange for an administrative decision to follow routine could sharply lower the cost of the product or service to where market-based competitors cannot effectively compete is ignored intellectually (but not in business practice.) Similarly, government is dismissed because it operates with relatively rigid bureaucratic rules, and therefore can never be as good as a free market. The fact that human beings cannot mentally process large amounts of data without breaking it down and routing it to specialists who handle especially defined parts of the overall situation and therefore need an organizational structure that incorporates departments and specialized work roles in order to function is ignored. So is the fact that all large organizations, including all large business organizations, have the same human limitations of data processing and thus require bureaucracy in order to function.
Conservatives ignore the complications. They are interested in getting the job done the way their ideology directs, and the ideology is not to be questioned. This is emotional decision-making. The decision is made first, and then justified. But since the decision was actually made emotionally based on faith in the ideology, all discussion of the complexities and possible points of failure which the ideology excludes are ignored by conservatives.
A second example is religious Creationism or its Trojan horse, Intelligent Design. The Bible states that the earth was created by God in seven days. That is the decision. The justification is a sales pitch to attract believers to accept the previously made decision, and any facts that contradict that decision must be ignored or repressed. The key is that for conservatives, the decision is made first and the explanation for the decision is then built to sell the decision to other people. Facts to be used in that explanation are limited to the facts the "prove" the decision was correct, and facts either predicting failure or showing that the policy has failed are ignored or actively repressed.
This approach to decisions is difficult for liberals to understand. Liberals collect facts and then develop theories that both explain those facts and suggest where to look for additional explanatory facts. They also look for facts that show the theory has failed and when those are found, attempt to develop a new and better explanatory theory that includes the facts that contradicted the previous theory. Theories thus grow out of history and experience, and do not take on an aura of perfection the way ideologically justified programs do. The high degree of emotional involvement in the theory that justifies an emotionally made decision doesn't exist for liberals. In fact, they are always looking for facts that disprove an existing theory so that a better one can be built to replace it.
What is the difference between conservatives and liberals? Whatever it is, it appears to be something each is born with. Psychologists would say that liberals have a personality structure that includes a Tolerance for ambiguity. "Ambiguity tolerance is the ability to perceive ambiguity in information and behavior in a neutral and open way." A liberal who makes a decision recognizes that the decision is imperfect and may well be wrong, either in detail or overall, and so he will build in measures to help recognize both problems and failure.
Conservatives tend to be different. They have an ambiguity intolerance. This "... was defined in 1975 as a 'tendency to perceive or interpret information marked by vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable, unstructured, uncertain, inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or potential sources of psychological discomfort or threat.'" That discomfort or threat will drive many people to a degree of anxiety. Anxiety creates "... the feelings that we typically recognize as fear, apprehension, or worry."
If making a decision and being aware that it is certainly imperfect and maybe wrong leads to fear, apprehension, or worry, then a very effective solution is to find a leader who will make the decision and who declares that the decision is perfect. Then the conservative needs only to justify a decision which he already knows to be perfect because his authority has told him it is. Not only is that decision presumed perfect, any effort to analyze it in detail that might lead to finding flaws in ti will also lead to that same ambiguity and anxiety that assuming the decision was perfect relieved him from.
Liberals without empathy for conservative feelings are blind to the different approaches to decision-making
Liberals running for office tend to reduce policy and decisions to sets of non emotional facts and expect the fact to speak for them. Conservatives are making decisions based on ambiguity intolerance and resentment that their feelings are ignored. This is exactly what was being said when voters said that Bush was someone that they could be comfortable drinking a beer with, while both Gore and Kerry were considered out of touch elitists. This is what the poll question "Do you feel that the (named candidate) is like you?" gets at.
The campaign approaches of the Democratic candidates
Obama offers rhetoric that suggests he understands how the conservatives feel, while Clinton is offering in-depth logical policy positions and Edwards is appealing to those liberals who consider conservatives to be bad people and who reject everything that is conservative because it has proven itself to be so destructive to America.
I'd say that Obama is avoiding describing conservatives as bad people and instead is trying to show that he recognizes and respects their feelings. He is also avoiding presenting much policy. Clinton is offering herself as best able to deal with the swiftboating the Republicans will conduct and as having more real Senate experience so that she can better deal with Congress. Edwards is offering his progressive ideas to counter the failed policies of thirty years of the Reagan Revolution.
Will Obama's approach work?
It's a shame we can't get all the characteristics in one candidate. The polls suggest that Obama has an appeal to independents using this approach, while Edward's results suggest that since he is going after the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, he's just not getting enough traction to get the nomination. The constant refrain that Hillary is "too polarizing" suggests that she is touching a raw nerve by ignoring the emotional needs of the conservatives.
Since it looks like the decision is between Clinton and Obama now, with each beginning to adopt some of Edwards' ideas, I'm not sure which approach will work. I do think that recognizing and empathizing with the feelings that drive conservatives will make America a lot less polarized place politically. But will Obama's approach work to get him elected, and if elected, will it make him a successful President.
Those are two separate questions, and while I have some guesses, I really don't know the answer. But I do think that the quotation I started this piece with should be carefully considered by Democrats as we all move to elect a Democratic President.
Addendum 2:55 PM CST
This is from a strong pro-Obama supporter, Mark Kleiman.
...if you can’t feel what they feel, then you can’t take them seriously as political opponents. You see only the flimsy intellectual foundations and miss the motivating power of strategically harnessed resentment. From Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry, high-minded liberals have acted as if they were blind to the root feelings that feed the followers of politicians like Nixon and Bush. Instead, they alternate between expecting a fair fight on the issues (and getting swiftboated instead) and imagining that once people realize what a bad person Nixon or Bush is, the people will turn against him.There is a lot in that statement.
Decision-making by resentment or logic
First, as is so often clear in many conservative policy decisions and their justifications, conservatives make the decision about what they want to happen first, then build a justification for it.
An example of this is the ideological concept that the free market solves all problems and is always better than government solutions. This is not an idea, it is an ideological presumed truth, never to be questioned. Whether real markets between independent buyers and sellers exist is never questioned, it is simply assumed that anytime a buyer pays a seller for something it is a free market. Also, the high cost of collecting data on other market transactions so that each transaction is embedded in the pattern of all other similar transactions taking place at the same time is ignored. These costs will exist anytime a real market transaction occurs, even if it is just like the dozen or so others just like it before and after. The fact that by sacrificing a little of the flexibility of a market decision in exchange for an administrative decision to follow routine could sharply lower the cost of the product or service to where market-based competitors cannot effectively compete is ignored intellectually (but not in business practice.) Similarly, government is dismissed because it operates with relatively rigid bureaucratic rules, and therefore can never be as good as a free market. The fact that human beings cannot mentally process large amounts of data without breaking it down and routing it to specialists who handle especially defined parts of the overall situation and therefore need an organizational structure that incorporates departments and specialized work roles in order to function is ignored. So is the fact that all large organizations, including all large business organizations, have the same human limitations of data processing and thus require bureaucracy in order to function.
Conservatives ignore the complications. They are interested in getting the job done the way their ideology directs, and the ideology is not to be questioned. This is emotional decision-making. The decision is made first, and then justified. But since the decision was actually made emotionally based on faith in the ideology, all discussion of the complexities and possible points of failure which the ideology excludes are ignored by conservatives.
A second example is religious Creationism or its Trojan horse, Intelligent Design. The Bible states that the earth was created by God in seven days. That is the decision. The justification is a sales pitch to attract believers to accept the previously made decision, and any facts that contradict that decision must be ignored or repressed. The key is that for conservatives, the decision is made first and the explanation for the decision is then built to sell the decision to other people. Facts to be used in that explanation are limited to the facts the "prove" the decision was correct, and facts either predicting failure or showing that the policy has failed are ignored or actively repressed.
This approach to decisions is difficult for liberals to understand. Liberals collect facts and then develop theories that both explain those facts and suggest where to look for additional explanatory facts. They also look for facts that show the theory has failed and when those are found, attempt to develop a new and better explanatory theory that includes the facts that contradicted the previous theory. Theories thus grow out of history and experience, and do not take on an aura of perfection the way ideologically justified programs do. The high degree of emotional involvement in the theory that justifies an emotionally made decision doesn't exist for liberals. In fact, they are always looking for facts that disprove an existing theory so that a better one can be built to replace it.
What is the difference between conservatives and liberals? Whatever it is, it appears to be something each is born with. Psychologists would say that liberals have a personality structure that includes a Tolerance for ambiguity. "Ambiguity tolerance is the ability to perceive ambiguity in information and behavior in a neutral and open way." A liberal who makes a decision recognizes that the decision is imperfect and may well be wrong, either in detail or overall, and so he will build in measures to help recognize both problems and failure.
Conservatives tend to be different. They have an ambiguity intolerance. This "... was defined in 1975 as a 'tendency to perceive or interpret information marked by vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable, unstructured, uncertain, inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or potential sources of psychological discomfort or threat.'" That discomfort or threat will drive many people to a degree of anxiety. Anxiety creates "... the feelings that we typically recognize as fear, apprehension, or worry."
If making a decision and being aware that it is certainly imperfect and maybe wrong leads to fear, apprehension, or worry, then a very effective solution is to find a leader who will make the decision and who declares that the decision is perfect. Then the conservative needs only to justify a decision which he already knows to be perfect because his authority has told him it is. Not only is that decision presumed perfect, any effort to analyze it in detail that might lead to finding flaws in ti will also lead to that same ambiguity and anxiety that assuming the decision was perfect relieved him from.
Liberals without empathy for conservative feelings are blind to the different approaches to decision-making
Liberals running for office tend to reduce policy and decisions to sets of non emotional facts and expect the fact to speak for them. Conservatives are making decisions based on ambiguity intolerance and resentment that their feelings are ignored. This is exactly what was being said when voters said that Bush was someone that they could be comfortable drinking a beer with, while both Gore and Kerry were considered out of touch elitists. This is what the poll question "Do you feel that the (named candidate) is like you?" gets at.
The campaign approaches of the Democratic candidates
Obama offers rhetoric that suggests he understands how the conservatives feel, while Clinton is offering in-depth logical policy positions and Edwards is appealing to those liberals who consider conservatives to be bad people and who reject everything that is conservative because it has proven itself to be so destructive to America.
I'd say that Obama is avoiding describing conservatives as bad people and instead is trying to show that he recognizes and respects their feelings. He is also avoiding presenting much policy. Clinton is offering herself as best able to deal with the swiftboating the Republicans will conduct and as having more real Senate experience so that she can better deal with Congress. Edwards is offering his progressive ideas to counter the failed policies of thirty years of the Reagan Revolution.
Will Obama's approach work?
It's a shame we can't get all the characteristics in one candidate. The polls suggest that Obama has an appeal to independents using this approach, while Edward's results suggest that since he is going after the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, he's just not getting enough traction to get the nomination. The constant refrain that Hillary is "too polarizing" suggests that she is touching a raw nerve by ignoring the emotional needs of the conservatives.
Since it looks like the decision is between Clinton and Obama now, with each beginning to adopt some of Edwards' ideas, I'm not sure which approach will work. I do think that recognizing and empathizing with the feelings that drive conservatives will make America a lot less polarized place politically. But will Obama's approach work to get him elected, and if elected, will it make him a successful President.
Those are two separate questions, and while I have some guesses, I really don't know the answer. But I do think that the quotation I started this piece with should be carefully considered by Democrats as we all move to elect a Democratic President.
Addendum 2:55 PM CST
This is from a strong pro-Obama supporter, Mark Kleiman.
Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. If (probably when) Hillary is the nominee, I'm sending her the maximum contribution and working my butt off to get her elected.We Democrats need to keep our priorities straight. Right now we squabble among ourselves, but once a nominee is chosen, he or she is the Democratic nominee and the goal is to defeat the Republican. Whoever it is, they will need all of us to beat back the true forces of darkness who are even now working to destroy the American Republic.
I'm angry about the tactics the Clintons are using in this race largely because they make things harder in November, whoever is the nominee. But while it would be nice to elect an inspirational, potentially transformational President who knows how to make a speech and knows that waterboarding is torture without waiting for his Super-Duper Top Secret briefing, it's essential to prevent four more years of Republican misrule.
If Clinton is nominated, my advice to my fellow Obamites is: Think about the Supreme Court. Think about war with Iran. Think about global warming. Think about the abuse of science. Buy yourself a clothespin. And then do the right thing. This is not a year for sulking in your tent.
And I'm dead certain that Barack Obama is going to be leading the charge.
Conservatism is a permanent facet of human nature
When we watch the rather amazing degree to which conservatives have worked to destroy America and make the government nonfunctional, it is difficult not to view "conservatism" as a form of mental illness, but if it is, it appears to be a natural aberration that people who have it are born with. Digby reports on a Profile of Rick Perlstein in the Chicago Reader.
Conservatism is not an aberration. It is a facet of human nature and a permanent fixture in American life. At the moment they have a successful political movement that first grew out of a genuine grassroots uprising and was soon funded by the aristocrats (who are always conservatives) to help them protect their interests.The interview with Rick Perlstien is worth reading.
We will not eliminate conservatism or even transcend it. But we might be able to win a governing majority for a while and do some good. This back and forth and give and take, between the polarities of our American philosophy --- freedom and equality, opportunity and security, tradition and progress--- is America. We are, as a people, both conservative and liberal.
The conservative movement is adept at advancing its agenda from the minority and keeping the movement alive when they are out of power.But they have a problem:Perlstein and other bloggers have been making the case that conservatism is a failure—not because of incompetence or cronyism but because it is not and cannot be a governing philosophy.Progressivism, on the other hand, is a governing philosophy. The key for us is to create a movement that pushes its political party to govern in both principled and effective fashion when it holds power and knows how to advance its agenda when it's out. It can be done. And progress most certainly can be made, in spite of conservatives' best efforts to thwart it.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The conservative opposition to government planning
The conservative opposition to government planning has long puzzled me. Everyone knows that if you want to take a nation to a better place then you build a vision of that better place, put plan for the resources needed and get them to where they have to be when they have to be there, and keep track of how the plan is progressing. Everyone know that except the conservatives, who have fought a thirty year battle to stop all government planning. For the most part they have succeeded.
But why?
It turns out to be that vision thing that starts the process out. The conservatives have a vision that most Americans don't want. The government was conducting the planning for most Americans, not for the wealthy or the evangelicals. Those conservatives have their own plans for America and to achieve them, they have to prevent the government from planning for the rest of us.
think not? Sara Robinson describes what has been done to America so that the wealthy can get richer and the evangelists can build their theocratic state.
Sara describes how the conservatives are stealing the America that was built around the vision of 1776 and built into the Constitution. They have taken away the America that planned, fought and won WW II and given us the Bush administration who not only could not anticipate the 9/11 terrorist attack after being repeatedly warned by the Clinton administration, but also could not adequately conduct a war and occupation in a third rate middle eastern county, then could not anticipate the problems that would occur in New Orleans when a Cat V hurricane hit there. And all the promises Bush made about rebuilding New Orleans? Unfulfilled. Why?
Because if the government were allowed to work by conservatives, then the conservative visions of a theocratic state run by wealth families (the Latin American model practiced in Mexico and Brazil) would not be possible.
But why?
It turns out to be that vision thing that starts the process out. The conservatives have a vision that most Americans don't want. The government was conducting the planning for most Americans, not for the wealthy or the evangelicals. Those conservatives have their own plans for America and to achieve them, they have to prevent the government from planning for the rest of us.
think not? Sara Robinson describes what has been done to America so that the wealthy can get richer and the evangelists can build their theocratic state.
Sara describes how the conservatives are stealing the America that was built around the vision of 1776 and built into the Constitution. They have taken away the America that planned, fought and won WW II and given us the Bush administration who not only could not anticipate the 9/11 terrorist attack after being repeatedly warned by the Clinton administration, but also could not adequately conduct a war and occupation in a third rate middle eastern county, then could not anticipate the problems that would occur in New Orleans when a Cat V hurricane hit there. And all the promises Bush made about rebuilding New Orleans? Unfulfilled. Why?
Because if the government were allowed to work by conservatives, then the conservative visions of a theocratic state run by wealth families (the Latin American model practiced in Mexico and Brazil) would not be possible.
Monday, January 21, 2008
The results of an unregulated financial market* is boom, bust, ending with government bailout for the wealthy*
Aw, poor bankers. They worked so hard to qualify so many people to lend money to, and look what happened? Now the borrowers can't pay the money back, and they will go into default on their mortgages.
But it's all the fault of greedy borrowers who wanted to act rich and got overextended, right? Someone has to save the poor bankers because when they go bust they take the entire economy with them.
Crap.
This is the direct result of the Reagan Revolution. First the Reaganites created the Savings and Loan Crisis because their deregulation of interest rates had made America's home lenders unable to attract enough funds to use to issue mortgages, so they "solved" that problem by deregulating the S & L's. The resulting failure of the entire industry required a massive government bailout using taxpayer funds to save the economy.
Let's not forget that St. Ronnie appointed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chief in 1987 as much of the S&L disaster was being worked out. The government bailout made a lot of investors extremely wealthy while many other people, those without great wealth to start with, lost everything. This was a part of the Reagan Revolution to make the wealthy even more wealthy and to put pressure on the middle class. It was written into law in the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA). The bank failures and government handouts had a lot to do with creating the recession of 1991 and 1992 that was a key element in the defeat of George H.W. Bush by Bill Clinton and also may have created a moral hazard that encouraged the poor lending practices that have created the current subprime lending disaster.
The certain pattern of an unregulated financial market is always a boom, then a bust, and then a demand that the government bail out the biggest banks and other culprits to save the economy. The middle class always gets hurt, while the most wealthy get even more wealthy.
Remember also that without an inheritance tax on great wealth, that wealth is passed down through families through inheritance to people who did nothing to earn it and usually could not do anything other than shepherd and defend their family wealth. Inheritors of great wealth are generally very conservative with aristocratic views of society who practice politics that itself damages the general productivity of the economy. An example is Richard Mellon Scaife who funded many of the conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, used millions just to attack Bill Clinton, and later created a sinecure as Dean of Pepperdine Law School for Ken Star's services in behalf of the Mellon fortune.
The inheritors of great wealth are so busy defending that wealth and their social position that they have no time or energy to add to economic productivity. That's because economic productivity is a result of the middle class. It is simply not something the inheritors of great wealth do.
The Reagan Revolution has been all about building up great fortunes while damaging the middle class. It was a system. It involved deregulating financial activity, eliminating the power of workers to organize and effectively negotiate for their share of the rewards from their own productive efforts, creating a boom and bust economy of the same kind that led to the Great Depression, and changing government rules so that big businesses were able to get government to tax the working and middle class and transfer the resulting wealth to the very wealthy. (See David Cay Johnston's excellent expose Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) for the details. Also see Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)
It's time to stop the wealthy from their power grab and return America to the middle class to whom this nation has always belonged.
* This is true of the financial economy, but Different rules apply to the real economy in which true competition can exist.
But it's all the fault of greedy borrowers who wanted to act rich and got overextended, right? Someone has to save the poor bankers because when they go bust they take the entire economy with them.
Crap.
This is the direct result of the Reagan Revolution. First the Reaganites created the Savings and Loan Crisis because their deregulation of interest rates had made America's home lenders unable to attract enough funds to use to issue mortgages, so they "solved" that problem by deregulating the S & L's. The resulting failure of the entire industry required a massive government bailout using taxpayer funds to save the economy.
Let's not forget that St. Ronnie appointed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chief in 1987 as much of the S&L disaster was being worked out. The government bailout made a lot of investors extremely wealthy while many other people, those without great wealth to start with, lost everything. This was a part of the Reagan Revolution to make the wealthy even more wealthy and to put pressure on the middle class. It was written into law in the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA). The bank failures and government handouts had a lot to do with creating the recession of 1991 and 1992 that was a key element in the defeat of George H.W. Bush by Bill Clinton and also may have created a moral hazard that encouraged the poor lending practices that have created the current subprime lending disaster.
The certain pattern of an unregulated financial market is always a boom, then a bust, and then a demand that the government bail out the biggest banks and other culprits to save the economy. The middle class always gets hurt, while the most wealthy get even more wealthy.
Remember also that without an inheritance tax on great wealth, that wealth is passed down through families through inheritance to people who did nothing to earn it and usually could not do anything other than shepherd and defend their family wealth. Inheritors of great wealth are generally very conservative with aristocratic views of society who practice politics that itself damages the general productivity of the economy. An example is Richard Mellon Scaife who funded many of the conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, used millions just to attack Bill Clinton, and later created a sinecure as Dean of Pepperdine Law School for Ken Star's services in behalf of the Mellon fortune.
The inheritors of great wealth are so busy defending that wealth and their social position that they have no time or energy to add to economic productivity. That's because economic productivity is a result of the middle class. It is simply not something the inheritors of great wealth do.
The Reagan Revolution has been all about building up great fortunes while damaging the middle class. It was a system. It involved deregulating financial activity, eliminating the power of workers to organize and effectively negotiate for their share of the rewards from their own productive efforts, creating a boom and bust economy of the same kind that led to the Great Depression, and changing government rules so that big businesses were able to get government to tax the working and middle class and transfer the resulting wealth to the very wealthy. (See David Cay Johnston's excellent expose Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) for the details. Also see Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)
It's time to stop the wealthy from their power grab and return America to the middle class to whom this nation has always belonged.
* This is true of the financial economy, but Different rules apply to the real economy in which true competition can exist.
WSJ predicts deep Recession
Apparently the editors of the Wall Street Journal have decided to quit listening to the optimists - those sales people who have thought they could talk people into more consumption and lending and thus prevent a recession or make it a mild one - and the editors have decided to start reporting on the basic economic problems that are leading the way to Recession. Here's their report:
University of Maryland economist Carmen Reinhart and Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff ... say the current crisis appears on track to be at least as bad as the five most catastrophic financial crises to hit industrialized countries since World War II.I guess it is time for the pundits to quit listening to the salesmen and start listening to economists who actually analyze what is happening rather than just try to wish it away.
If those past experiences are any guide, the economy is in trouble, they argue in a recent paper. Indeed, "if the United States does not experience a significant and protracted growth slowdown, it should either be considered very lucky or even more 'special' than most optimistic theories suggest," they write.
One reason that large crises inflict so much damage is that financial institutions have a hard time getting a handle on how bad their losses will be, and that uncertainty makes them less willing to lend. Citigroup Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. each reported billions of dollars in losses last week that were in addition to the billions in losses they reported in the fall. Citigroup said it was building its loan-loss reserves for auto loans and credit-card debt, in addition to mortgages, and that it was tightening credit-card lending standards.
"Part of the problem is just not knowing," Ms. Reinhart says. "The longer the process of not knowing what the losses are takes, the longer the resolution takes." Japan was the extreme example, she says, as the inability to appropriately gauge the losses from the 1990s real-estate and stock bubble collapse led to a "lost decade" of economic growth.
A critical difference between the U.S. and Japan is that the Federal Reserve has been cutting its target for its benchmark federal-funds rate and appears ready to cut it more deeply, whereas the Bank of Japan was still raising rates a year after Japan's bubble began to collapse. Also, Congress and the White House are both promising a fiscal-stimulus package, with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke pushing for a plan that would help boost spending this year.
Companies, at least those outside of the banking and housing sectors, might also take some of the sting out of a recession. Their finances are in far better shape now than they were in 2001, and credit so far is still widely available. As they repaired their balance sheets in the wake of the 2001 recession, companies were also slower to hire than in past economic expansions. That may mean they won't be able to cut jobs as deeply, says Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius.
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University in Illinois who is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research committee that determines (usually long after the fact) when recessions begin, is hopeful that overseas growth may continue to bolster the U.S. economy. He notes that exports, which have been growing rapidly and account for more than twice as large a share of GDP as home construction does, will continue to post strong growth, easing the pain of the housing decline.
Still, he thinks a recession is probably coming and that the challenges facing consumers, in particular, are more severe than they were in the two previous downturns. In addition to the housing troubles and mortgage-market woes, higher food and energy costs are cutting into household budgets, he says.
"While energy is not as important a part of the consumer budget as it was in the '70s -- nor is food -- nevertheless, the squeeze will push out consumption in everything else," Mr. Gordon says. "Across the board, I think we're going to have significant ongoing pressure in inflation-adjusted retail sales."
Democratic Party superdelegates
In the 1970's the Democratic Party established a system of primaries and caucuses to select the delegates to the Presidential Democratic Nominating Convention. This removed the selection of delegates from the control of elected Democrats and party officials and made it a more open and democratic process. While this removed the party power brokers from total control of who the nominee for President would be, those power brokers wanted to retain some power, so the concept of the "superdelegate" was adopted. [The Republican Party does not have superdelegates to their convention but do have 123 delegates who are representatives of the Republican National Committee.] So who are superdelegates?
Superdelegates are party officials and elected Democrats who are permitted to attend the Presidential convention and vote on the nominee even though they have not gone through the primary/caucus selection system. They are not bound to any particular candidate, although they can endorse whoever they please. Here is the official description of who superdelegates are, as found on the Democratic Party website:
The website 2008 Democratic Convention Watch is keeping track of which superdelegates have endorsed which candidate for the Democratic nomination. CNN Politics.com is performing a similar function. The two differ slightly but not significantly in the number of superdelegates each candidate has.
At the moment, Hillary Clinton has about 210 delegates to Obama's 123 and Edward's 52, with the magic number of 2,025 as the number of votes that will determine the Democratic nominee.
Superdelegates are party officials and elected Democrats who are permitted to attend the Presidential convention and vote on the nominee even though they have not gone through the primary/caucus selection system. They are not bound to any particular candidate, although they can endorse whoever they please. Here is the official description of who superdelegates are, as found on the Democratic Party website:
At present the total number of delegates to the Democratic Presidential Convention will be 4,049. That includes 3,253 delegates selected by either primary or caucus from the states along with 796 superdelegates. Superdelegates thus make up 19.66% of the total number of delegates at the convention. [These numbers exclude all delegates from both Michigan and Florida because the Democratic Parties in those states scheduled their primaries earlier than permitted by the Democratic National Committee. The convention will have the power to reinstate those delegates should it be considered desirable.]
- The individuals recognized as members of the DNC (as set forth in Article Three, Sections 2 and 3 of the Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States); and,
- The Democratic President and the Democratic Vice President of the United States, if applicable; and,
- All Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives and all Democratic members of the United States Senate; and,
- The Democratic Governor, if applicable; and,
- All former Democratic Presidents, all former Democratic Vice Presidents, all former Democratic Leaders of the U.S. Senate, all former Democratic Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic Minority Leaders, as applicable, and all former Chairs of the Democratic National Committee.
The website 2008 Democratic Convention Watch is keeping track of which superdelegates have endorsed which candidate for the Democratic nomination. CNN Politics.com is performing a similar function. The two differ slightly but not significantly in the number of superdelegates each candidate has.
At the moment, Hillary Clinton has about 210 delegates to Obama's 123 and Edward's 52, with the magic number of 2,025 as the number of votes that will determine the Democratic nominee.
Billionaires demand control of America
Think America is a democratic nation? Not if the billionaires behind Freedom's Watch have their way. Freedom's watch is an unregulated organization designed to collect unlimited funds and use them to attack Democratic candidates for Congress, particularly in rural districts where even small amounts of money can go a long way. The Sunday Washington Post has a good article on Freedom's watch.
Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker describes their operation.
Freedom's Watch is expected to resemble a much larger and much more deeply financed version of Texas millionaire Bob Perry's "Swift Boat Veterans," the organization that conducted the nasty, lying anti-Kerry campaign in the 2004 election. Their operations will begin during the general election and their targets will be Democratic candidates for office.
The 2008 general election is going to be the nastiest election campaign that living Americans have seen. Count on it. And the source of the nastiness is the Republican Party funded by anti-social self-centered billionaires.
Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker describes their operation.
To review the White House connections: the group is headed by Bradley Blakeman, a former Bush White House official, Mel Sembler, a millionaire former Bush admbassador to Italy, and Ari Fleischer, who serves as the group's spokesman. Much of its support so far has come from Sembler and casino magnate and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the sixth richest person in the world. (The group intends to "broaden its base" as time goes on, Fleischer says.) The group got off the ground with a $15 million effort to support the president's surge strategy in August, but it's sticking around for the long haul.So here's who we have so far:
- Ari Fleischer - FW Board Member - previously White House spokesman.
- Brad Blakeman - President and Chief Executive of Freedom's Watch (FW) and previously White House scheduler.
- Sheldon Adelson - FW Donor - Owner of the Las Vegas Sands company and listed by Forbes as the world's sixth richest man.
- Mel Sembler, - FW Board Member - a Florida Republican who was Bush’s ambassador to Italy
- William P. Weidner, - FW Board Member - president and chief operating officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corp.
- Matt Brooks, - FW Board Member - executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
- Anthony Gioia, - FW Donor - a Buffalo businessman who was Bush’s ambassador to Malta
- Kevin Moley, FW dononr - was Bush’s ambassador to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva;
- Howard Leach, - FW Donor - a former Republican National Committee finance chairman who was Bush’s ambassador to France
- Dr. John Templeton of Pennsylvania, FW Donor - chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation
- Ed Snider, FW Donor - chairman of Comcast Spectacor, the huge Philadelphia sports and entertainment firm;
- Richard Fox, FW Donor - chairman of the Jewish Policy Center and was Pennsylvania State Chairman of the Reagan/Bush campaign in 1980.
Freedom's Watch is expected to resemble a much larger and much more deeply financed version of Texas millionaire Bob Perry's "Swift Boat Veterans," the organization that conducted the nasty, lying anti-Kerry campaign in the 2004 election. Their operations will begin during the general election and their targets will be Democratic candidates for office.
The 2008 general election is going to be the nastiest election campaign that living Americans have seen. Count on it. And the source of the nastiness is the Republican Party funded by anti-social self-centered billionaires.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
The South Carolina Republican primary
John McCain won the primary, with Mike Huckabee coming in second. Fred Thompson was a distant third, but apparently drew enough conservative votes from Huckabee to assure McCain's win. Thompson may withdraw, but even his withdrawal announcement is being presented lethargically. Romney apparently was focused on last Tuesday's primary in Michigan, since without a win there he had no campaign going forward. Giuliani is saving his energies for Florida since South Carolina is not his kind of state, and Ron Paul got the maximum he could expect. Apparently the South Carolina Republicans have room for only one crazy, and they chose Huckabee over Paul as having the religion they preferred. Duncan Hunter has announced that he is dropping out of the race.
McCain gets 19 delegates and Huckabee gets 5, no one else gets any. Clearly loaded in favor of whoever wins. South Carolina will have 47 delegates at the Republican convention. Nope, I don't know who gets the other 23 delegates.
The Washington Post discusses how McCain was able to defuse the attacks by conservative Republicans who don't want him as the Republican nominee. Both Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay (among others) have been literally foaming at the mouth over the threat that McCain represents to the Republican Party, and the Republican voters in South Carolina rejected their fulminations. A number of conservative Republicans had blocked his run for the 2000 Republican nomination in the South Carolina Primary, but couldn't do it this time.
MSNBC offered these results for the Republican South Carolina primary:
Here are the MSNBC South Carolina exit polls.
One thing about the presentation is confusing. Within each category they list the percentage of the different answers in that category. The first column in each category totals to 100% of all those answers. So given 51% male voters and 49% female voters, between them they are 100% of all the voters in that category. But the rows are different. The numbers in each row to the right of the first column are percentages of the first number in the row.
Let me say that again. All the numbers to the right of the first number in the row total 100% of that first number and only of that first number. This is the confusing part. The first number in each row is a percentage of all the first numbers in each category in the first column total 100%, but the numbers in each row to the right of that first number are given as a percent of the first number in the row.
So 2% of all the male voters voted for Giuliani, 28% of the males voted for Huckabee, 32% of the males voted for McCain, and so on. All the numbers after the first number in the row for male voters total to 100% of that first number in the row for male voters. There is nothing in the display to show that the percentages to the right of the first column are not the same kind of number as the first number in the row.
Nothing in the presentation indicates that all the percentages to the right of the first number of each row are weighted by the percentage of males or females who voted. So why does that matter? In the "age" category for example, Huckabee bested McCain in the "age 18 to 24" groups by 34% to 26%. That appears important, but since only 5% of the total voters were age 18 to 24, that's a lot less important than the fact that of the 24% of the total voters who were over age 65 McCain won 40% to Huckabee's 26%.
When you see a presentation of a percentage, it is always extremely important to know what total it is a percentage of. In this case, the percentages in the first column are percentages of the total votes in that question, but every number to the right of the first number is a percentage of only the number in the first column. The two percentage numbers cannot be compared to each other.
With that minor piece of confusion in mind, let's look as some of the questions.
McCain and Huckabee were roughly equal with those who considered themselves Republicans, but McCain's big edge was with independents. That suggests that McCain probably will be weaker in the many states with closed primaries where independents can't help him.
McCain got significantly more self-identified moderates than Huckabee did, while Huckabee got more self-identified Conservatives. Without Thompson in the race, that probably would have been an even greater advantage for Huckabee.
It looks like Huckabee got the younger Republicans and McCain got the fogies, while income except at the extremes was pretty much the same for each.
Huckabee did get more of those with incomes under $30,000 a year while McCain really got the ones with income over $200,000 per year.
There are a number of questions on religion. The most significant such questions appeared to be "How much does it matter to you that a candidate shares your religious beliefs?" (Huckabee had a big advantage in "A great deal / Somewhat" while McCain had an even stronger advantage in the much smaller group that stated "Not much / Not at all".) While "White Born-again or Evangelical Christians" strongly preferred Huckabee to McCain. The religious issue appears to be a big advantage to Huckabee in the South, and probably a disadvantage everywhere else in the U.S. That's probably a large part of Giuliani's calculation for not contesting the South Carolina primary.
Education was not a big differentiator, except that McCain did get more of those with postgraduate degrees.
Those who think that abortion should be illegal went strongly for Huckabee.
Huckabee won strongly with those who said that he shared their values, while McCain got almost all those who said one of the candidates has the experience needed.
Overall I'd say that McCain "won" South Carolina because Thompson took just enough votes from Huckabee to keep him from winning, while there were enough independents to put McCain over the top. With Thompson out, McCain won't be especially competitive as the top vote getter in the Republican Southern state primaries. That will be even more true in closed primaries.
Tom DeLay represents those Republicans who detest McCain but like Huckabee. Limbaugh hates them both. Will he go for Romney or Giuliani? The money Republicans will go for Romney or McCain, but be effective only outside of the Southern states where evangelical religion won't matter so much. Since McCain remains weak with Republican voters, the close primaries will probably do him in and throw it over to Romney.
Giuliani is going to be a wild card, assuming that he still has any cards left to play. We'll know after Florida on Tuesday Jan 29th if Rudy is still in the game. If he can still do anything at all outside of the big city states of New York and New Jersey I'll be surprised. But I've been surprised a lot this year already.
I don't see anyone in the Republican party (yet) who can pull the Reagan Republican coalition back together, though.
McCain gets 19 delegates and Huckabee gets 5, no one else gets any. Clearly loaded in favor of whoever wins. South Carolina will have 47 delegates at the Republican convention. Nope, I don't know who gets the other 23 delegates.
The Washington Post discusses how McCain was able to defuse the attacks by conservative Republicans who don't want him as the Republican nominee. Both Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay (among others) have been literally foaming at the mouth over the threat that McCain represents to the Republican Party, and the Republican voters in South Carolina rejected their fulminations. A number of conservative Republicans had blocked his run for the 2000 Republican nomination in the South Carolina Primary, but couldn't do it this time.
MSNBC offered these results for the Republican South Carolina primary:
| Candidate | Votes | % votes | Delegates |
| John McCain | 143,224 | 33% | 19 |
| Mike Huckabee | 128,908 | 30% | 5 |
| Fred Thompson | 67,897 | 16% | 0 |
| Mitt Romney | 64,970 | 15% | 0 |
| Ron Paul | 15,773 | 4% | 0 |
| Rudy Giuliani | 9,112 | 2% | 0 |
| Duncan Hunter | 1,035 | 0% | 0 |
Here are the MSNBC South Carolina exit polls.
One thing about the presentation is confusing. Within each category they list the percentage of the different answers in that category. The first column in each category totals to 100% of all those answers. So given 51% male voters and 49% female voters, between them they are 100% of all the voters in that category. But the rows are different. The numbers in each row to the right of the first column are percentages of the first number in the row.
Let me say that again. All the numbers to the right of the first number in the row total 100% of that first number and only of that first number. This is the confusing part. The first number in each row is a percentage of all the first numbers in each category in the first column total 100%, but the numbers in each row to the right of that first number are given as a percent of the first number in the row.
So 2% of all the male voters voted for Giuliani, 28% of the males voted for Huckabee, 32% of the males voted for McCain, and so on. All the numbers after the first number in the row for male voters total to 100% of that first number in the row for male voters. There is nothing in the display to show that the percentages to the right of the first column are not the same kind of number as the first number in the row.
Nothing in the presentation indicates that all the percentages to the right of the first number of each row are weighted by the percentage of males or females who voted. So why does that matter? In the "age" category for example, Huckabee bested McCain in the "age 18 to 24" groups by 34% to 26%. That appears important, but since only 5% of the total voters were age 18 to 24, that's a lot less important than the fact that of the 24% of the total voters who were over age 65 McCain won 40% to Huckabee's 26%.
When you see a presentation of a percentage, it is always extremely important to know what total it is a percentage of. In this case, the percentages in the first column are percentages of the total votes in that question, but every number to the right of the first number is a percentage of only the number in the first column. The two percentage numbers cannot be compared to each other.
With that minor piece of confusion in mind, let's look as some of the questions.
McCain and Huckabee were roughly equal with those who considered themselves Republicans, but McCain's big edge was with independents. That suggests that McCain probably will be weaker in the many states with closed primaries where independents can't help him.
McCain got significantly more self-identified moderates than Huckabee did, while Huckabee got more self-identified Conservatives. Without Thompson in the race, that probably would have been an even greater advantage for Huckabee.
It looks like Huckabee got the younger Republicans and McCain got the fogies, while income except at the extremes was pretty much the same for each.
Huckabee did get more of those with incomes under $30,000 a year while McCain really got the ones with income over $200,000 per year.
There are a number of questions on religion. The most significant such questions appeared to be "How much does it matter to you that a candidate shares your religious beliefs?" (Huckabee had a big advantage in "A great deal / Somewhat" while McCain had an even stronger advantage in the much smaller group that stated "Not much / Not at all".) While "White Born-again or Evangelical Christians" strongly preferred Huckabee to McCain. The religious issue appears to be a big advantage to Huckabee in the South, and probably a disadvantage everywhere else in the U.S. That's probably a large part of Giuliani's calculation for not contesting the South Carolina primary.
Education was not a big differentiator, except that McCain did get more of those with postgraduate degrees.
Those who think that abortion should be illegal went strongly for Huckabee.
Huckabee won strongly with those who said that he shared their values, while McCain got almost all those who said one of the candidates has the experience needed.
Overall I'd say that McCain "won" South Carolina because Thompson took just enough votes from Huckabee to keep him from winning, while there were enough independents to put McCain over the top. With Thompson out, McCain won't be especially competitive as the top vote getter in the Republican Southern state primaries. That will be even more true in closed primaries.
Tom DeLay represents those Republicans who detest McCain but like Huckabee. Limbaugh hates them both. Will he go for Romney or Giuliani? The money Republicans will go for Romney or McCain, but be effective only outside of the Southern states where evangelical religion won't matter so much. Since McCain remains weak with Republican voters, the close primaries will probably do him in and throw it over to Romney.
Giuliani is going to be a wild card, assuming that he still has any cards left to play. We'll know after Florida on Tuesday Jan 29th if Rudy is still in the game. If he can still do anything at all outside of the big city states of New York and New Jersey I'll be surprised. But I've been surprised a lot this year already.
I don't see anyone in the Republican party (yet) who can pull the Reagan Republican coalition back together, though.
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