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:

The solutions now—the Fed interest-rate cut, the stimulus package—is this enough, Robert Kuttner?

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.

So what has happened to the structure of the American economy?

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.

...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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The interview with Rick Perlstien is worth reading.

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.

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.

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* 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.

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."

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.

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:

1. 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,
2. The Democratic President and the Democratic Vice President of the United States, if applicable; and,
3. All Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives and all Democratic members of the United States Senate; and,
4. The Democratic Governor, if applicable; and,
5. 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.

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 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.

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.

[Note: the above names come from Mike Allen's Aug 22, 2007 article at The Politico.]

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.

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:

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

The results of the Nevada Democratic caucuses

Yesterday there were caucuses in Nevada for both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as a Republican-only primary in South Carolina. The Democratic primary in South Carolina is next Saturday. I'll look at South Carolina later when there is more information.

In Nevada Mitt Romney walked away with the Republican delegates, while on the Democratic side Clinton and Obama split most of the Democratic delegates between them. Hullabaloo was in Nevada and made some interesting comments. Edwards essentially did not contest the caucuses strongly, while Hillary and Obama spent a lot of money to influence the national press. Let's look at the Democratic caucuses.

It was a beauty contest held for the national political press.

Nevada was a beauty contest. For the most part, the results of the Nevada caucuses are not much more significant nationally than a witch doctor killing a chicken and spilling the guts to divine the future.

Hillary's camp is claiming a win because she got 4% more Democratic caucus-goers to support her than supported Obama. Obama's camp is claiming a win because Obama gets 13 state delegates to the national convention while, because of the arcane weighting Nevada gives rural counties, Hillary only gets 12 national delegates.

Maybe. Those are "projected" national delegates, not selected delegates bound to a candidate. Those delegates selected yesterday were to the county conventions, not to the national convention. At the county conventions the parties will select delegates to the state convention, where delegates to the national convention will be selected. Delegates to the county and state conventions are not bound to a candidate. So there is no real telling who got how many delegates in Nevada.

Thus, yesterday was a beauty contest that has less real significance than a single, very local poll. Really, no one cares except the Nevadans and the national press looking for something to report before February 5th.

The rest of the Nevada Democratic delegates

Today's reports show that Hillary and Obama are splitting 25 delegates to the national convention between them, but as I posted earlier, Nevada gets 33 delegates to the national convention. That's eight missing. I just rechecked the New York Times, and 33 is what they reported. Where are the other eight?

Super delegates? That's my bet, but I don't know yet.

[Addendum #2 - 1/21/2008 12:39 PM - see Democratic Party superdelegates for a description of who the Democratic Party superdelegates to the convention are.]

Democrats showed they considered the 2008 election to be important.

There is one thing real about the Nevada caucuses. In 2004 about 9,000 Democrats came out to the caucus. This time more than 114,000 attendees showed up. That's more than a 1200% increase.

That means that more than a quarter of the number of Democrats who voted for Kerry in 2004 (397,190) came out to the caucuses, and it is harder and more time-consuming to caucus than it is to vote. Democrats are saying it is time for change in Washington. It is only the exact nature of the change and the person to make the changes that is still in question. [Michael Barone in his “Almanac of American Politics” describes Nevada as a basically Republican state, so comparing turnout across parties probably has little relevance for the national election.]

No evidence of voter suppression.

There were allegations that members of the Culinary Union were trying to coerce voters to support Obama rather than Hillary, but since Hillary got the majority at eight of the eleven special caucus locations on the Las Vegas strip, apparently if there was such an effort it didn't work. Prior to the caucus, but after the Culinary Union endorsed Obama, the educational unions that supported Hillary suddenly suspected that the Culinary Union would be in a position to herd an unrepresentative number of Obama caucus-goers to their "captured" caucus locations or to coerce caucus-goers at those locations step over to the Obama side. (No secret votes in a caucus.) So the educational union sued to prevent those caucus locations. They lost. The national Press loved it, though. It gave them something "sexy" to report. But the caucus results show that there was no "there" there.

Dday observed a lot of passionate disagreement on the candidates, but has no evidence that there was any voter suppression or manipulation . Such rumors make good, shocking news reports that will be widely printed, but those reports should be considered highly unreliable. Wait for any official investigations before they become believable.

It doesn't look like any investigations will occur. That's probably because there was no coercion. For someone with a conspiracy turn of mind an alternative explanation is that because the stakes in Nevada after the press leaves are so low that it isn't worth raising such very negative issues in what is an entirely internal Democratic Party process. My bet is that nothing remarkable happened. The Press hates that kind of result.

The Poor showing of Edwards.

Edwards got no projected national delegates at all. But as he points out, he did not advertise, while both other candidates spent heavily to get a good result that would influence the Press. Edwards didn't have the money to waste on a beauty contest.

If Edwards were to show a strong result on super Tuesday and after, nothing stops the Nevada Democrats from supporting him at the National Democratic Convention. So, except for the national press reports that Edwards did poorly, Nevada doesn't matter to Edwards. If his message starts resonating between now and the national convention, that won't matter, and Edwards has enough financial support to run all the way to the convention. His message should get more traction as the economy gets worse, and the Democratic Party is moving away from supporting corporations and towards supporting American workers largely because of Edwards. His message is the one that Democratic candidates running in Republican congressional districts in 2006 won on, and it is only because the national Democratic leadership and the national Press don't have a clue what his happening outside of Washington, D.C. that the Democratic generally are still running on the corporate K-Street dominated status quo. Edwards is changing that, and he is bringing his message at a time the nation is finding it appropriate.

Anything else?

The Nevada witch doctors have killed the chicken and spilled the entrails. This is as much as I can divine from the process so far, but I'm sure there will be more to read in the next few days.

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Addendum 5:08 PM CST
dday has a good report on the accusations regarding voter suppression and vote stealing. This is not a definitive guarantee that nothing untoward actually happened, but it describes why such reports have been spread.

As I say, don't take any accusations seriously until a real investigation is started, and even then check to see of that is a PR move. So far there is nothing but a few unsubstantiated rumors caused by clearly understandable administrative errors and decisions that were perceived as unfair but were not. If Obama is half the politician I think he is, he'll have a statement out shortly that he has had the issue looked into and there was no significant problem.

Clinton took Nevada

The caucuses in Nevada were close, but Hillary took more than Obama. here are the results of entrance polling, and interesting they are.

I find it especially interesting that while Blacks did tend to vote more for Obama, it certainly was not a knee-jerk vote. The same is true for Hillary. Whites did tend to prefer Hillary, but the percentage of White voters for Obama was roughly the same as Black voters for Clinton. Essentially, while race was a factor, it was not a dominating factor.

Edwards, my preferred candidate, did poorly. In the entrance polls roughly 9% of the caucus-goers initially preferred Edwards, but Josh Marshall points out that, like Iowa, if there were not enough delegates at a given caucus to meet a minimum threshold, they were invited to support one of the other candidates, so Edwards ended up with only about 4%.

Romney won the Republican caucuses rather as expected.

The reports are not in from the South Carolina primaries yet.

Well Duh. Tell the Press. It's the delegates, stupid.

If you watch the TV pundits or if you are one of those retrogrades who actually reads the press, it is abundantly clear that the choice of the Presidential nominee for each party will be determined by which candidate comes across the finish line in each state winning and thus builds up "momentum" for further races. Second place is losing right? The horse race is everything!

So why does Mitt Romney have a strategy of collecting delegates? Matt Yglesias describes Romney's delegate strategy and points out that Mitt has the largest number of delegates right now of any of the Republican candidates?

Think the news boys and girls would bother reporting on that little detail?

Giuliani - worst Presidential campaign ever

I have to admit that Rudy Giuliani has absolutely amazed me.

Last November 28 I made a prediction that Rudy would be the Republican nominee for President. It is now slightly more than eight weeks later, and Josh Marshall has posted a comment which describes Rudy's effort to become the Republican nominee for President as

Rudy’s collapse is the mark of the worst presidential campaign in history.

Having watched the disastrous efforts of both John Connolly and Phil Gramm to become President, I thought I had seen the worst of the worst, but Rudy Giuliani has left them far behind in the dust of disaster.

Of course, I had previously written off John McCain last summer when he went broke, too. Now he's back with a vengeance. The Republican candidates for the nomination may be drinking Zombie Water this year, so I'm not yet ready to simply ignore the end of the political candidate from the Mafia.

We need to watch him carefully to make sure he really is politically dead. Perhaps holy water and a stake through the heart will be required, but as good a job as Rudy has done committing political suicide, those items may just be wearing a belt with suspenders.

Huckabee the Dominionist

Think that Huckabee is just a very friendly smiling Christianist? Here you go. He's a dominionist, out to create an American theocracy. Nope. He gave it away with his demand that the Constitution be brought in line with his Inerrant Bible, as you can see here in Holy Constitution. Not enough? Look at how his friends are at "Huckabee's radical religious friends".

Theocrats know they are right, so they cannot be argued or disagreed with. They just convert you or kill you. That's religion when it has the power of the police or the military under its control. Always. There are no exceptions, only delays.

Further ruminations on the idiocy of Libertarianism

Here is another really good point on Libertariamism, from What's wrong with libertarianism.

Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

There is no set of ideas that government can safely act on unless they come from a tradition of science, experiment, and falsifiability.Government acts on behavior, not on what people think. If there are no facts which can be established as "True" by using scientific methods, then government is demanding the right to tell you how to think. That is religious or ideological coercion by government. History has clearly demonstrated that such coercion of thought or belief always leads to rebellion, the cost of which exceeds the expected benefits of the government effort.

Libertarianism and property rights

I discovered an interesting article entitled What's wrong with libertarianism which does a good job of debunking Libertarianism. Go read it.

The author points out that Libertarianism was essentially designed by the escapee from the Soviet Union, Ayn Rand, as the Uncommunism. This was quite interesting to me:

Communism	Libertarianism
Property is theft	Property is sacred
Totalitarianism	Any government is bad
Capitalists are baby-eating villains	Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes
Workers should rule	Worker activism is evil
The poor are oppressed	The poor are pampered good-for-nothings

That's a pretty good summary.

Let me comment on just one small part of the post I referred to. Note the contradiction between the two parts of Libertarianism I placed in Italics. Those are Property is sacred and Any government is bad.

Libertarians make property rights into an unquestionable area of faith. That reminds me of a recent speculation regarding where the idea of property rights may have come from. Property rights may have been a side effect of the taming of wolves in north east Asia when they first became because dogs. But the idea of property was not that of the dog owner. It was the idea of the dog.

Dogs are hierarchical animals, and they adopt leaders. It is thought by some that when the the dogs first adopted their own people as leaders or Alpha dogs, then other people recognized that certain dogs belonged to certain people. As a result, the concept of property rights was born.

But the concept came from the dogs first. The dogs adopted leaders, people recognized that certain dogs belonged to specific people, and the concept of "Property rights" was born. Dogs first acted as property, people then recognized the dogs behavior as property, and people later adopted the idea.

It is clear, though that there is nothing natural or religious about property rights. Property rights are a social concept which do not exist unless society enforces them. Natural law is garbage until its supporters can demonstrate (scientifically) a mechanism by which it can be shown to be enforced in society. They've had a long time, and failed totally.

A person does not own land unless that ownership is recorded by the government and enforced in the courts. The same is true of a person's car, their wristwatch, or anything else. Not only must the ownership be recognized by others and recorded, there must also be socially accepted rules that determine how such ownership can be transferred from one person to another.

That makes Libertarianism quite contradictory. It makes an article of faith of property rights but also declares any government as bad. The two cannot coexist. It is really that simple. No government means no property beyond that which can be personally enforced using force. [Note - this is another basic belief of Libertarianism - no one can use force on any other person.]

Is property ownership an innate characteristic of human society? No. It is a good idea, enforced by society through government. Ask the dog who owns you. Or the cat who owns both of you. They know that they only own you while they have you in sight and under their paw.

The primaries as America's Rorsach test

The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.

This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.

The Democrats

dday at Hullabaloo poses this description of what the top three Democrats appear to stand for.

Hillary Clinton is running to change the President; Barack Obama is running to change our politics; John Edwards is running to change the country.

This is the image each has acquired, and as image goes, seems to carry some truth. It encapsulates the rhetoric each candidate has been running on, together with the public response to that rhetoric. At the same time, it seems accurate for any one of the candidates in part because of the contrast with the other two. Does it really describe how each would act as President? Or is it establishing artificial distinctions between the individuals in order to try to impose some clarity on the race? I think it is more of the latter, but it's the best we have.

dday's description suggests that Hillary is a old line politician who knows how to both get elected and how to work the levers of power, while Obama represents a unique breakthrough for America in our long battle to overcome the American disease of racism. That would imply that both Hillary and Obama offer excellent candidates who are at the top of our political class, but are still trapped by the existing political system. Hillary can do what good politicians can do and can hold the nation together, while Obama offers a great deal less in policy terms but also offers a great breakthrough in dealing with the American problem of Racism. He is vague on policy but implies that his very candidacy for the Presidency is America's solution.

Which leaves Edwards as the candidate who recognizes that America is in the middle of unparalleled changes. Edward's rhetoric is that he is the only candidate who really recognizes those changes and that he is prepared to deal with them. All of this is implied in that three sentence description of the images of the campaigns.

If Edwards is correct about the fact of the need for structural changes and that there is a great deal of strong resistance to those changed in powerful corners, then the next question is whether Edwards' proposed solutions will deal effectively with the problems America rather clearly has. Of those two issues, the first is the more important, because the government will be better able to deal with big changes if the public has been prepared in advance during the political campaign and shows they agree with and support the candidate they elect.

If America really is in a situation that requires significant changes and new initiatives, then the image that Edwards has developed will make it easier for him to actually accomplish anything. His specific solutions proposed now are less important than the fact that he is preparing the American public to accept the need for changes. That's going to undercut the defensive moves from Wall Street and the economic conservatives when the time comes to make changes.

This is the description of problems and solutions as seen through the Democratic candidates. This "compare and contrast" for the Democratic candidates appears to have clarified what the issues really are, so let's expand the analysis and compare the images of the Republicans to each other.

The Republicans

In contrast to the Democrats who are running on the need for changes, the Republicans are all running by offering proposals from the Republican past. The consensus they have is that America's problems cannot be rooted in the America's existing social or economic structures and that something general and unspecific called "conservatism" is the answer. It is when they try to get at the specifics of what conservatism demands that they have no consensus. The variety of solutions the various candidate offer show they to not agree on what the problems are. The varied positions of the candidates shows that.

McCain and Giuliani agree that all of America's current problems can be described as being attacked by enemies, and they both offer to fight those enemies. Both are offering militaristic solutions. The distinctions between the two is that McCain focuses on enemies outside the U.S. and he appears competent to apply those militaristic solutions and maybe with less corruption. Rudy sees enemies everywhere, and will apply military and police solutions to immigrants and minorities as rapidly as to terrorists. I expect to see a Rudy slogan of "America uber Alles!" at any time. Rudy appears to be the least ethical Republican running for the nomination, and he is certainly the most likely to be influenced by organized crime.

Fred Thompson is running on a campaign of "Elect me. I'm the REAL conservative." He doesn't describe America's problems, but suggests that whatever they are, conservative ideology is the solution and he will apply it. Other than that, he has no real policy. He simply offers himself, the new Reagan, as the solution. He is also, as Reagan did and Nixon before him, catering to the Republican Racists and Nativists. Fred is also more low key (lethargic even) than Rudy, or any other Republican candidate is.

Huckabee is offering the Bible as the solution to all our problems. He identifies America's problems as resulting from the rejection of Biblical Truth, and he proposes solving those problems by enforcing the prescriptions that he reads from the Bible.

Ron Paul is running on the platform that the very existence of government, including most use of the armed forces, is the source of America's problems, and he will solve America's problems by eliminating most government services. The idea is that every individual is so limited by the controls placed on him that he cannot be fully productive, so the problem is the controls. Remove those controls to achieve greater social and economic productivity and freedom. His literal, nonhistorical , and extremely limited view of the U.S. Constitution attracts a lot of people but would certainly do away with the Common Law and stare decisis in the Supreme Court.

Which brings me to Mitt Romney. Mitt recognizes that the modern Republican Party has been a coalition of the Wall Street Free marketers and Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the militarists and Nativists. That coalition has broken up, and the problem Mitt is trying to solve is reconstructing the Republican coalition. The evangelical Republicans have gotten very little back from the Republican Party, making Huckabee very attractive. The other problems Mitt doesn't face up to include growing economic disparity because the government has been redistributing American income from the middle class to the wealthy and failing to act on the export of middle class jobs or on the failure of the health care system to protect so many Americans, it is going to be hard to sell conservative free market solutions to the evangelicals. Then the failure of the militarist Republicans to resolve anything with the invasion of Iraq, leaving the American military stuck there while both Afghanistan and Pakistan fall apart, Mitt is going to find it difficult to sell a return to the failed Republican coalition. So Mitt's problem, the one he is trying to solve with his candidacy, is nothing more than the collapse of the Republican coalition. He offers nothing beyond possibly getting him elected President as a solution.

So having looked at the individual candidates, what can we tell about the two parties and their view of the problems and solutions?

The Party differences

The Republicans now face the collapse of the Republican Party consensus on both problems and solutions. The Reagan Revolution was based on a shared consensus (at least in the Republican Party) that if government planning, controls and limitations were removed, then private enterprise consisting of individual corporations and people, all led by "The Right People" using the social and economic institutions of free enterprise and wealth accumulation, could solve all the problems America faced. They sold this to America, and they have tried it for thirty years with disastrous results.

Yet the Republicans never saw or acknowledged the real problems (terrorism, globalism and its rejection, Peak oil, the hollowing out of the American productive economy and its replacement by a largely financial economy in which the middle class is of much less importance, and now Global Warming just for a start) of the 21st century coming, and when those problems became too obvious to overlook, the Republicans had no tools with which to solve those problems other than military invasion, replacing the court powers of warrants and habeas corpus with police power unified in the Department of Homeland Security and directed by intrusive spying on everyone, all linked together with a corrupt form of unplanned and uncontrolled free enterprise to hopefully solve them.

The result of the Reagan Revolution is an economy that is rapidly eliminating much of the middle class by remaking America socially and economically along the Latin American model (Mexico and Brazil especially) while miring America in the same boom-and-bust process that existed from the end of the American Civil War until the Great Depression. That's not the worst of it.

Since the Reagan/Libertarian/Free enterprise model allows government no power to act outside of the military and police, we have become enmeshed in a series of expanding wars in the middle east while at home we find expanded police powers, elimination of the protections provided by the courts and the Rule of Law, and the growth of secret government run by a society of spies and spy-lovers.

The only response the Republican Party offers to this set of conservative-caused or accentuated problems is to accuse the Bush administration of not being real conservatives, because if Bush had been a real conservative, America would not be having the problems that we all recognize we are having. The Republican mantra is that Conservatism never fails. Only people fail by being insufficiently conservative.

The Democrats, on the other hand, recognize that there are problems which are big and growing bigger. Barack Obama seems to have the least understanding of the general magnitude of those problems. He is a product of America's greatest and longest running problem, Racism, and sees that if America elects him President that action will signal that American is overcoming the Race problem. He is right.

But Obama's solution to the rest of the problems America faces today is to try to stop the bickering with the conservatives, listen to them and honor their input and work out a set of consensus solutions to those problems. It's not clear that he even understands the problems America faces. He clearly does not understand the health care crisis. He offers himself as someone with the abilities to make a problem solving process that removes the "bickering" that has paralyzed Washington and thus lets both Republicans and Democrats come together and solve the real problems. The recent racial flap between Obama and Hillary showed he is fully capable bickering with the best of them, but he and Hillary have worked to quickly tamp down that bickering. But was the solution an example of Obama's Kumbaya politics, or of Clintonian triangulation? And how does Obama's promise to eliminate bickering in Washington differ from Bush’s promise in 2000 to being a kinder and gentler tone to Washington? Obama is repackaging the same old promises and selling then as “New and Improved” as far as I can see.

Edwards has expanded the message that America's problems are structural and now Obama has expanded the message that bickering between adults can be resolved. I agree with Edwards, but I simply don't believe that the Republicans can afford to give up their obstructionism in the Senate. They have nothing positive to offer as solutions, but they still have the old guerrilla tactics of preventing the government from functioning and thus challenging its legitimacy, then offering themselves to the public as the solution to getting a government that works. I don[t see how Obama can get around that Republican dynamic. They HAVE to obstruct government if they have any hope of retaining power at all.

So that's Obama and Edwards. How about Hillary? Is Hillary too mired in the corporate-dominated past that she and Bill Clinton had to live in during the 90's? That’s a part of her image I’m sure she would get rid of. It’ll be hard to do while she is collecting corporate money to run on, though. I don't know if that really is the modern Hillary or just the image she is stuck with.

Conclusion

Personally I prefer Edwards among the three Democratic candidates. I suspect that the Press is ignoring him in large part because he does not have a machine that can compete with the machine Hillary has built over the last eight years and the one that Obama has been building. The difference that large sums of money have on the Press is obvious. Maybe he’ll break out in the next six or so weeks. UNfortunately, it's probably between Obama and Hillary, and I am moving to choose Hillary. Obama is too insubstantial as a candidate. He clearly has no clue on health care, and he has tried to run on positions that are the the right of the DLC even. Still, I'd sure rather have any of the Democrats over the pack of blind and ignorant men who are offered by the Republican Party.

It’s hard to avoid the fact that the Republicans are so heavily mired in the past and in conservative ideologies that they can't even recognize the seriousness of modern problems or accept that the solutions will require abandoning the failed Reagan Revolution. (Huckabee is really mired in the past - two thousand years ago.) America's current problems have grown out of the past, and the answers that supposedly worked before will not solve them, even if they are mixed with unrestrained militarism. The conservative ideology is a major barrier to even recognizing what has caused current problems, as well as a barrier to determining what the solutions need to be. To rephrase St. Ronnie, Government is not the Problem. The conservative movement is the Problem.

The Democrats do recognize that there are real and modern problems, with, I think, Obama being the least publicly aware of them. But Obama may also be the least tied to his own past. I don't know, because he has only come on the scene nationally in the last two or three years and I can't say that I know enough about him to trust his reactions or abilities. Unfortunately, all three Democrats come out of legislatures, so there is less clarity in their images. Legislators simply cannot be held accountable for government actions the way executives can. But all three Democrats are looking towards the future, not the past.

This next six weeks is going to be especially interesting as all these contrasts play out against each other.

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Caveats
The initial statement by dday appears to me to be framed in a pro-Edwards context. That doesn't bother me much because I had already come to much the same conclusion about Edwards and I do prefer him as a candidate.

I am describing my reactions to the carefully crafted public images of each of the above candidates. Such crafted images are designed to conceal more than they reveal. Only Giuliani and Thompson seem to have lost control of their public images so that we have a better view of the flaws of the individual behind the image. McCain, interestingly enough, appears to have minimized the constructed image and redefines the flaws thus exposed as an advantage he calls "Straight-talk." The rough edges exposed now have become a sort of image of no-publicly-crafted image for him. It is, of course, carefully crafted.

I am then comparing those carefully crafted images with the public descriptions of America and the world that have been presented by the Press and those descriptions that I can find on the Internet. Overall, most of the data is of doubtful reliability, but it is the best I can get. This is my attempt to pull those disparate sources of data together into some form of rational structure that I feel comfortable with. The structure should then show what data is good and what does not fit. To pull it all together, I have made a lot of judgments about what to accept and a lot more judgments about what to ignore. So be it.

This analysis applies to the current situation. I am not trying to predict the future.

Given those caveats, I do not offer this as "The Truth." Any reader should look at it, see if it contains anything that resonates with them positively or negatively, and then accept or reject part or all of what I have written. I'm betting that this is worthwhile. It's up to the reader to decide if they agree or disagree.

Congress had approved torture for interrogation

Laura Rozen points out that although Congress has been quick to have hearings on the destruction of the interrogation-by-torture tapes in Thailand, the focus has been on the destruction of the tapes, not what was on them. Why?

Because Congress knew that torture was being used to interrogate prisoners, and approved of it. They're as guilty as the the Bush administration. Investigating torture would mean that Congress would have to investigate itself as well as the Republican administration.

That's sick. Our government, in its entirety, has abandoned American principles. The Republicans led the way, but the Democrats have gone quietly along with the crowd.

CNN's John King is a subservient bootlicker, and doesn't want it recognized

Glenn Greenwald reported earlier [*] on the extreme adulation demonstrated by CNN's John King in an interview was broadcast on "Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer. The transcript of the interview was presented in its entirety with out any part of it being left out.

King is pissed at how Glenn interpreted his fawning report on St. McCain, and sent Glenn an email, which Glenn has published, also in its entirety.

If you want to see what is wrong with TV political "journalism," go read Glenn's article.

There should be a psychiatric name for John King's behavior, but I don't know what that form of denial and insanity really is called by the professionals who work with psychiatric patients.

[*]Sit through the advertisement for the day-pass. The ad is short, 15 seconds or less, and it's worth it.

Onion "report" on Romney's tolerence - No! Wait! It's Cnn!

It's horrible. Horrible, I tell you. Just how utterly tolerent can Mitt Romney really be??


Mitt Romney Defends Himself Against Allegations Of Tolerance.

[h/t to Atrios.]