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The primaries, the conventions, and the media have focused so much attention on the presidential candidates that it’s sometime easy to forget all the other federal elections being held this year, for 34 seats in the Senate and 435 in the House (plus five nonvoting delegates). The next president’s chances of success will depend largely on the congressional majorities this election will produce.
The proudly coifed and teased hair, the desire to make a splash, the lust after wealth, the racist remarks: Donald Trump? Or Mark Twain? Today is Mark Twain’s birthday; he was born on 30 November 1835, and died on 21 April 1910.
April 2015 will go down in history as the month that the 2016 race for the White House began in earnest. Hillary Clinton’s online declaration of her presidential candidacy was the critical moment. With it America’s two major political parties have locked horns with each other. The Democrats intend to continue their control of the presidency for another four years; Republicans hope to finally make good on a conservative bumper sticker that began appearing on automobiles as early as the summer of 2009 and that read, “Had Enough Yet? Next Time Vote Republican.”
Anyone who expects bipartisanship in the wake of last Tuesday’s elections has not been paying attention. The Republican Party does not believe in a two-party system that includes the Democrats, and it never has. Ever since the Civil War, when the Republicans were convinced that their Democratic opposition was in treacherous league with the Confederacy, the Grand Old Party in season and out has doubted the legitimacy of the Democrats to hold power. While the Republicans have accepted the results of national elections as facts they could not change, they have not believed that the Democrats were ever legitimately holding power. Democratic victories, in the minds of Republicans, are the result of fraud and abuse.
Consider some examples: In 1876, Republicans in New York said the Democratic party was “the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason.” Half a century later, speaking of Woodrow Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge told the 1920 Republican national convention that “Mr. Wilson stands for a theory of administration and government which is not American.” When Senator Joseph R. McCarthy spoke of “twenty years of treason” in the 1950s, he was not joking. He meant the statement as literal fact. So too did an aide to George H.W. Bush in 1992 when he observed, “We are America. These other people are not America.”
So when Rush Limbaugh comments that “Democrats were not elected to govern,” or Leon H. Wolf of Redstate says Democrats “should not be even be invited to be part of the discussion lest their gangrenous, festering and destructive ideas should further infect our caucus,” they are reflecting an attitude toward the Democrats that is at least a century and a half old.
If, as many Republicans believe, there are elements of illegitimacy and evil in the Democratic Party under the leadership of President Obama, then a posture of intense resistance become a necessary GOP tactic. Meeting the threat that the Democrats pose in terms of such issues as same-sex marriage, climate change and immigration reform requires going beyond politics as usual and employing any means necessary to save the nation.
For contemporary Republicans, scorched earth tactics and all-out opposition seem the appropriate response to the presence of a pretender in the White House who in their minds is pursuing the collapse of the American republic. There no longer exists between Republicans and Democrats a rough consensus about the purpose of the United States.
The 2008 Republican National Convention. Photo part of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
How has it come to this? A long review of both political parties suggests that the experience of the Civil War introduced a flaw into American democracy that was never resolved or recognized. The Republicans regarded the wartime flirtation of some Democrats with the Confederacy as evidence of treason. So it may have been at that distant time. What rendered that conclusion toxic was the perpetuation of the idea of Democratic illegitimacy and betrayal long after 1865.
After their extended years in the wilderness during the New Deal, Republicans reasserted their presidential dominance, with a few Democratic interruptions from 1952 to 1992. Republicans thus saw in the ascendancy of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the two Bushes a return to the proper order of politics in which the Republicans were destined to be in charge and Democrats to occupy a position of perennial deference outside of Congress.
Then the unthinkable happened. Not just a Democrat but a black Democrat won the White House. The southern-based Republican Party saw its worst fears coming true. A man with a foreign-sounding name, an equivocal religious background, and a black skin was president and pursuing what were to most Republicans sinister goals. Under his administration, blacks became assertive, gays married, the poor got health care, and the wealthy faced both a lack of due respect and a claim on their income.
The Republican allegiance to traditional democratic practices now seemed to them outmoded in this national crisis. Americans could not really have elected Barack Obama and put his party in control of the destiny of the nation. Such an outcome must be illegitimate. And what is the remedy for illegitimacy, treason, and godlessness? To quote Leon Wolf again: “Working with these people is not what America elected you to do. Republicans, it elected you to stop them.” Pundits who forecast a new era of bipartisanship comparable to what Dwight D. Eisenhower, Everett Dirksen, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon B. Johnson achieved in the 1950s are living in a nostalgic dream world. Richard Nixon viewed politics as war and contemporary Republicans will proceed to explore the validity of his insight over the next two years. For the American voter, clinging to the naive notion of the parties working together, each taking part of the loaf, the best guide may be Bette Davis in All About Eve: “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Featured image: Members of the Republican Party gather at the 1900 National Convention. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
On any given day, a Google search finds the word “intransigent” deployed as though it automatically destroyed an opponent’s position. Charles Blow of the New York Times and Jacob Weisberg (no relation to the present writer) of Slate are only two of many, especially on the political left, who label Republicans “intransigent” and thereby assume they have won the argument against them.
The first intransigents, however, were on the extreme left. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the usage “intransigent” to 1873, when an extreme left party in the Spanish Cortes called themselves “los intransigentes.” Interestingly, the Spaniards did not think their self-description worked any harm to their political positions, which they felt deserved to be stated forthrightly, without compromise, and passionately.
By the early 1880s, Democrats in the United States reversed the political origins of the word when they pinned “intransigence” (as a noun) on “an uncompromising republican”. Since then, the left more than the right has mapped “intransigence” onto “extremism,” often assuming without substantive analysis that an unwillingness to compromise a position makes it not only untenable but also bizarre.
Of course, we live in a world that unhesitatingly accepts flexibility and compromise as basically good and even as a goal unto itself. However, a willingness – too often made into a norm – to compromise strongly held viewpoints has repetitively brought on destruction and death. Wouldn’t the outcome have been better if Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 had dealt obstinately and inflexibly with Adolf Hitler? Shouldn’t post 9/11 Americans have been less elastic in their willingness to negotiate away our country’s prior taboo on torture?
So it turns out that intransigence is not always bad and should not be used as a pejorative until the writer defines substantively the position he is attacking. Holding firm is sometimes good and sometimes bad, exactly as being flexible can be terribly wrong if what we give away to prove we are flexible is actually something that was good.
I define intransigence as “a resistance to the urge to shift malleably from positions thought to be sound.” This definition is neutral as to the merits or demerits of the deeply held viewpoint. That part is up to all of us, who should think through what is vitally important to us individually, stick to it, fight for it, and abandon the fallacy that even those whose positions we detest are clearly wrong because they, too, are intransigent. If we are right and they are wrong, the matter will be decided because of the position we take and not our inflexibility in propounding it.
President Obama has just publicly recognized that we should not have collectively caved in on the practice of torture. Those few people who adamantly refused from 9/12 onwards to compromise that taboo deserve to be called both correct and intransigent.
It began with John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. The choice of this incompetent, unqualified, inexperienced, and stupid person as a vice presidential candidate called McCain’s judgment into serious question. Had the old war hero turned senile? How could he have put such a person a heartbeat from the Presidency? The mere thought of Palin in the White House was frightening. But McCain’s choice was far more than a scare—it insulted America and unleashed a wave of violence and racism that continues.
Never forget the crosshairs map Palin posted on her Facebook page. She urged her Twitter followers, “Don’t retreat, reload.” Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ face was in one of the crosshairs. On January 8, 2011, Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the head outside a Tucson Safeway supermarket. Fortunately she survived and is making a remarkable recovery. But America is still coping with the incivility and insults initiated by Palin and taken up by the Tea Party and Congressional Republicans.
The insults continued after President Obama was elected and took office. With exhortations to “take back our country,” the Tea Party, overwhelmingly made up of whites, spread its unsubtle racist message. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “take back our country” meant take it back from the black guy who’s President.
Four days before the President was inaugurated, the tone was set by radio talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh. On January 16, 2010, Linbaugh said, “I hope Obama fails.”
During the President’s first term, Congressional Republicans took up Limbaugh’s mantra, deciding to do everything in their power to destroy the Obama presidency by holding up, blocking, weakening, misrepresenting, and voting against everything the President and Democrats wanted to accomplish.
Republican senator Mitch McConnell stated the Republicans’ position quite clearly: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told Major Garrett in an interview published in the National Review in October 2010. A month later, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he repeated his position: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” In another time, such a call of opposition to a sitting President would have been considered treason. But over the past two years, Republicans have, like obedient little soldiers, followed McConnell’s marching orders, turning their backs on their country and the people who elected them and abandoning their responsibility to participate in government.
Despite repeated attempts by the President to work in a bipartisan fashion, Republicans refused, becoming the “Party of No.” No to health care for all Americans. No to the President’s job creation bill. No to restoring regulations of the banks whose fraudulent practices caused the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. No to repealing the Bush tax cuts that added billions of dollars to the deficit. No to taxing millionaires and billionaires so they pay their fair share. Last summer, Republicans’ political brinksmanship with the debt ceiling resulted in the first downgrade in the national credit rating in U.S. history. In carrying out Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell’s dictum to bring about failure of the Obama administration, Republicans have made Congress dysfunctional and the economic recovery slower than it might have been had they spent more time working with the President instead of working against him. That President Obama has been able to accomplish so much despite Republicans’ intransigence is a tribute to his political skill, patience and intelligence.
Now we come to this election year and the line-up of potential Republican presidential candidates who are as insultingly unqualified as Sarah Palin. All celebr
1 Comments on Insulting America, last added: 2/5/2012
Boy, do I agree with you. It is maddening watching the debates and the parade of hypocrites that call themselves, Republicans. Do people really think that Mitt Romney can turn around the economy when he has spent most of his life as a CEO of a hedge fund which are nothing more than Corporate Raider who slice and dice companies created and built by others. It is easy to gut and strip a company, the hard part is building one.
It should now be clear to all that the highly polarized environment that is Washington is dysfunctional, and the disillusionment it is causing portends yet more headlocks and cynicism to come.
Here is the all-too-familiar cycle of American electoral politics in the last few decades. Campaign gurus draw sharp distinctions to get out the vote. The impassioned vote wins the day. Impatient voters watch their newly elected president or representative fail to pass in undiluted form the the reforms promised during the campaign. Disillusion ensues. The gurus step in with a new round of fiesty charges, and the cycle begins anew.
At some point, citizens are going to get tired of being stoked, poked, and roped, and all for nought. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are reactions against a system gone awry. The low approval ratings for the Congress and the president are another indicator. The Republicans’ perpetual search for an anti-establishment alternative is another.
And now we are facing a spectacular new failure. The “super committee” charged with reaching a budget reduction deal has proved itself anything but super. If twelve people can no longer agree to make hard decisions, it is reflective of the larger malaise of which we dare not speak. It is that democracy has run amok in a republic founded on the idea that our elected representatives should be able to make decisions on our behalf, and sometimes in spite of ourselves, because representation is a higher calling than mimicry. Maybe that is why Abraham Lincoln did not deliver a single campaign speech in 1860.
Each of the twelve men and women in the committee are thinking about their constituencies, their parties, and their base and so bluster and bravado must take precedence over compromise and conciliation. When the voice of the people, artificially stoked for shrillness, begins to infect the deliberative process even in between electoral cycles, there is no chance for serious inter-branch deliberation. We have reduced our representatives to sycophants whose mantra is do nothing but heap the blame on the other party.
The solution is not to exploit the disillusioned by way of new campaign slogans and negative ads to artificially jolt their temporary and baser passions, but for the noise and the trouble-makers fixated only on winning at the next ballot to be weeded out of the system. To do that, citizens must realize that the lion’s share of what counts as democracy today is making it nearly impossible for the representatives of our republic to make decisions on behalf of We the People. Remember: ours is a republic, if we can keep it.
Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.
So the Republican blockade of bills that might actually help the middle class and the poor continues—all held hostage to the party’s demand that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires be extended. You have to hand it to Republicans, they know how to practice togetherness. Not one independent voice among them. Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, and Tweedle-Dee-Dum—the Boehner, McConnell-Cantor corporate rap trio – lead their faithful lackeys in their continuing assault on government for the American people. It’s nothing new. Ever since President Obama took office, Republicans have turned their backs on the people whom they were elected to represent and have instead refused to participate in governing. President Carter called their behavior “irresponsible” in an interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm on Tuesday, November 30th. Along with raw sewage and flesh-eating microbes, Republicans are right up there with the most toxic elements in public life. Never before in my lifetime – and I’m a senior citizen – have I seen an entire political party work single-mindedly to bring down the country in order to bring down the President.
Congressional Republicans have become the most destructive force in American life. Their efforts to create more economic disaster to gain political advantage in the 2012 election displays disrespect for the Presidency and contempt for the American people, for democracy and for our Constitution. As if their actions hadn’t revealed their seditious strategy right out front, corporate rapper McConnell proclaimed the Republicans’ agenda baldly: “The single more important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he said in an interview with the National Journal’s Major Garrett on October 29, 2010. Note: not a single word about the good of the country or the American people. Now McConnell has sent his ultimatum letter to Senator Harry Reid basically saying, “It’s our way or the highway.” In the ultimate display of arrogance and hypocrisy, the Boehner/McConnell/Cantor trio refused to extend unemployment benefits for the 2 million Americans whose benefits expired midnight December 1st. For the past two years, this gang of naysayers has voiced support for only one thing – tax cuts for the super rich. In case you don’t remember, these are the Bush tax cuts that raided the U.S. Treasury, squandering the budget surplus left by President Clinton and creating the largest redistribution of wealth from the middle class to millionaires in the nation’s history. No matter that extending these tax cuts will add $700 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Well, you know, the country can afford a deficit that goes to “feeding” millionaires but not an $18 billion (the cost of extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed) deficit that goes to put food on the tables of people who’ve lost their jobs. Recall Rhett Butler’s line to Scarlet O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
It’s all so simple really – not all deficits are equal. Although the “party of No” proclaims cutting the deficit is the single most important thing that Congress must do, this deficit addition that will be created if Congress allows itself to be bullied into extending the millionaire tax cuts doesn’t count. Under a Democratic President, Republicans are for reducing the deficit; under a Republican President, they’re for racking it up. And rack it up, they did, creating the largest deficit in the history of all previous administrations put together. But that was THEN, you know, under the Bush/Cheney team of good ol’ corporate boys.
If the Tea Partiers, or anybody else who voted the new crop of Republicans in office, believes Republican propaganda about working for the American people, they should pay close attention to what Republicans have voted against during these past two years. Then decide what people Republicans are working to
2 Comments on Rappers for the Rich, last added: 12/5/2010
Loved this post! Just recently I was commenting that "Democrats" are incorrectly characterized as "Tax and Spend Liberals" - when a more accurate description in many cases is "investing rather than spending" by enacting policies to provide a better future for the majority of the population - ie- the health care bill provisions to eliminate loop holes for an insurance company to deny/limit coverage. Whereas "Fiscal conservatives" no longer applies to Republicans, a more accurate and appropriate description would be "Tax-cut and bankrupt hypocrites" - conservative people wouldn't have been so risky with the financial future of this country - and it is hypocritical to have it both ways "small/no government" for fiscal concerns and "intrusive" government for moral concerns (gay marriage, abortion, etc.).
Often overlooked in the sea of sound-bites is the fact that a "tax-cuts" and "taxes" aren't inherently good or bad - depends who benefits and why. A "tax-cut" doesn't come for free and therefore contributes to the deficit (directly or indirectly) and thus limits the programs that can be provided to society. A "tax-cut" doesn't equal more money in your pocket and a "tax" doesn't equal less money in your pocket if it doesn't apply to you.
Why is "unemployment insurance" so often characterized as if it were some "free money" the government was handing out to anyone without a job -- everyone eligible to receive unemployment benefits had contributions made by their employers while they were working. The maximum benefits $450 per week (in the highest benefit states) are only slightly more than minimum wage (California works out to $11.25 maximum an hour based on a 40 hour week vs. $8.00 minimum wage - lower benefit if you were actually earning minimum wage). Typically this is a level far below what a middle-class worker was earning on the job. It is far below the percentage of earnings formula many other high standard of living countries use to provide a true stop-gap while unemployed; albeit at higher tax rates. Still our system provides a lifeline for someone who finds themselves unemployed, hopefully preventing them from becoming homeless too. As the name states it is "insurance" not welfare. In periods of extended high unemployment it can become necessary for the federal government to step in and provide extended weeks of benefits (adds additional requirements requiring recipients to take "any job" not just one in their field) - remember this is still only to workers who were eligible in the first place (productive, hard working, tax-payers) not just to someone who doesn't have a job. With nearly 10% of the country out of work (higher in some segments of the population) hard to understand any politician voting against extending these benefits to their constituents (definition: the people who live in your district, not the ones who lined your pockets).
If you voted "no" perhaps the solution is for "your corporate buddies" to offer the unemployed jobs in lieu of extending the unemployment benefits. Alternatively, the benefits extensions could be funded with a 100% tax on any 2007-2010 bonuses received within the financial industry in recognition of the stellar work they did in putting the country in such dire straits in the first place. Immediate payback of all bailout money at 24% interest (the rate banks raise the credit card interest rate to on the unemployed) would also work. All "win-win" solutions without raising the deficit.
Great article. I am always amazed at how anybody but the wealthiest Americans can vote Republican. The Republican party certainly does not represent the middle and working classes, yet these low information voters believe the propaganda spouted by Fox News that poses as a real news network. I have actually spoken to people who believe that Obama's health plan will create "death panels' or who believe that Sharia law is taking place in the U.S. Where do they get these ideas? Obviously from Fox and the tea party.
It is amazing that the party that held up signs proclaiming "Country first" during the McCain campaign has as its goal the mission to have Obama fail. How unamerican is that?
When the dust has settled on the electioneering frenzy of these final days, 2010, the third “change” election in a row, will better be read as an equilibrium restoring election.
In the Senate, Democrats are about to hand back just over half of their recent wins (5 seats in 2006, and another 8 in 2008) to the Republicans. Most predictions for the number of seats the Republicans will pick up in the House hover around 50 because there are currently 49 Democrats occupying seats in districts that voted for McCain in 2008, and they are about to relinquish these seats. Put another way, Democrats picked up 31 seats in 2006, and another 21 in 2008, and they’re about to return just about every one of them back to the Republicans.
This is not coincidence. It is the revealed majesty of the Newtonian system that the Framers of the Constitution set up, and our subliminal internalization of its logic. The Founders weren’t too fond of waves of popular passion, which is why they applied “a new science of politics” and created institutions arrayed alongside each other with the specific principle that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
The invisible constitutional hand appears to be working. Now that Barbara Boxer has pulled ahead of Carly Fiorina in California, as has Joe Manchin over John Raese in West Virginia, it is likely that the Democratic firewall will hold just enough to prevent a Republican takeover of the Senate. To take over the Senate, Republicans must take the seats in CO, IL, NV, PA, and WA. Indeed, because Republicans are polling ahead in each of these last 5 races, a nearly perfect partisan equipoise is likely to occur in the Senate. That means the 112th Congress which starts business on January 3, 2011, will likely see a slim Republican majority in the House, and an even slimmer Democratic majority in the Senate.
Another way to think about this election as equilibrium restoring is to observe the net neutral effect of the Tea Party movement. In some places, Tea Party candidates are giving seasoned politicos a run for their money. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul now look like shoos-in for the senatorial seats in Florida and Kentucky, and Sharron Angle is in a statistical dead-heat with Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada – which means, given the enthusiasm gap in favor of Republicans this year, Reid has a mountain to climb in the next two days.
Other Tea Party candidates, however, have turned out to be poor candidates. Principally, they don’t know how to handle the media and the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics. Some, like Joe Miller, think it’s OK to hand-cuff journalists; others, like Christine O’Donnell failed to realize that telling us “I’m not a witch” does not kill a rumor but sustains it. Others who have been inducted into office, like Scott Brown from Massachusetts, have long since forgotten their patrons. Like all third party movements since time immemorial, the Tea Party movement – now a flick of sunshine on a strange shore – is not likely to last more than one or two more electoral cycles.
All told, the Republicans are going to regain the seats they lost in 2006 and 2008. But, the electoral tsunami would most likely not be enough, as it was in 1994 or 2006, to flip both houses of Congress. And because of the truncated constitutional calendar, this year’s wave will stop short of the White House. The greatest prize of them all will stay in Democratic hands (a prize that will become especially valuable now that the Vice-president’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate will likely be activated in the months to come.)
A tsunami which converts half a branch is, arguably, no tsunami at all. For this to be a really significant wave that is more than equilibrium restoring, Republicans would need
0 Comments on Toward Equilibrium We Vote as of 11/2/2010 8:46:00 PM
For the third election in a row, voters will be throwing incumbents out of office. In 2006, the national wave against Bush and the Bush wars gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress. In 2008, the same wave swept Obama into the White House. In 2010, incumbents are yet again in trouble. At least some of them will be expelled from Washington, and if so, the vicious cycle of perpetual personnel turnover and ensuing cynicism in Washington will continue. This is what happens when we become a government of men.
We need only look to the last anti-incumbent election, 2008, for lessons. The Republicans and the Tea Party Movement are running the risk of doing what Barack Obama did in 2008. They are promising change in the campaign, but they do not realize how difficult, by design, change is in Washington. But politicians aren’t usually in the habit of thinking about the election after the one right before them.
Should Republicans take over the House in 2011, they will quickly learn, as Obama has learned, that change does not come via elections in American politics. Elections only change the publicly visible personnel at the top; at best they open the door to potential change. The permanent government persists, the political parties survive, the interests endure. Most important, the constitution and its precise method for law-making remains. The political candidate who promises wholesale change makes a promise that cannot usually be delivered in a few years, and s/he runs the risk of becoming the victim of a new political outsider, a Beowulf who will promise to slay Grendel, but who shall soon find out that with Grendel dead, a dragon still remains to be slayed.
Watch the triumphant Republicans who sweep into office in January 2011. They will be filled with as much hubris as Obama was. Fresh from the winds of the campaign trail, they will think the world their oyster. How could they feel otherwise? The applause and rallies which flatter every politician confirm in their own minds that they are kings and celebrities, the invincible crusaders swept in by a tide of popular love.
Then government begins. And boy did the tough job of governing begin in 2009, Obama might now recall. When the tough sail of real governing fails to catch wind the way a campaign slogan did in the year before, a politician stands humbled. Befuddled, to be sure, but ultimately humbled. Worse still, a people sit dismayed. Tricked again, we withdraw into our private lives. Disgusted at government, resentful that we allowed our hopes to go up, furious that we believed the boy who cried wolf thrice. All signs point to this happening again in 2011, especially if there is divided party control of government and the Constitution is activated to do what it does best: check and balance, and thereby ensure gridlock. Then the cycle begins anew. With both sides disillusioned, the question will then become, which side will be less disillusioned to believe in a new anti-incumbent politician who shall cry wolf a fourth time?
This is a vicious cycle, and the only way to stop it is for every citizen to take a civic lesson or two in American government. Our Founders believed only in incremental change, in hard choices, in the give-and-take of inter-branch negotiation. The system of checks and balances was biased against seismic chances by design. No one, and certainly no branch monopolizes the truth, and no truth can be told ahead of time (i.e. as they are in campaigns) until all branches agree. Despite the message of the get-the-vote-out armies of either party, there are no messiahs, no crusaders in the system the Founders invented. The heroes we have constructed in modern campaigns are just demagogues exploiting the impatience of the frightened or the unemployed. There are no quick and easy solutions, and politicians know it, but they only want our votes for rig
0 Comments on How to Arrest a Spiral of Cynicism as of 1/1/1900
The generic Democratic ballot appeared to rebound a little last week, in part because of the Republican Pledge to America, the story of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware spreading in the liberal base, and in part because of anticipation of the One Nation march on the National Mall this weekend. Could it be that Democrats may actually be able to keep their majorities in Congress if this trend continues?A cold look at history tells us that the odds are still low. One of the iron laws of American politics is that the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in off-year, mid-term elections. Since 1870, there have been 35 mid-term elections and on all but four occasions, the president’s party lost seats in the House (the average loss is 34 seats).
On these four occasions, the gains made by the president’s party were minor. Republicans and Democrats respectively picked up 9 seats in 1902 and 1934 (perhaps having the last name, Roosevelt, had something to do with it.) In 1998, the Democrats picked up 4 seats in part because of the public backlash against the Clinton impeachment proceedings. In 2002, the Republicans did not lose any seats (or gain any) and bucked the historical trend because the country was rallying behind the president after September 11. (Democrats searching for hope this year should observe that three of these exceptions occurred in year two of a new presidency; 1998 was the only exception to the famous “six-year itch.”)
On average, Democrats have proven to be more adept at losing seats than Republicans, consistent with the conventional wisdom that the Republican party is a more orderly party and better able to act in unison than Democrats can. Democrats have typically lost 39 seats in the house in mid-term elections (exactly the number the Republicans need to take over to gain majority control this year), while Republicans have lost an average of 32 seats in mid-terms.
The virtue of being a not-so-big-tent party is that there tends to be less internal disagreement within the Republican party than in the Democratic party. It took a Tea Party movement to create dissension within Republican ranks, and yet some would argue that the movement has only rallied and unified the base.
On the Democratic side however, value, demographic, and ideological pluralism has always been a double-edged sword. For here is the telling history of 2009-2011: whereas Republicans are united that Obama was a mistake, Democrats are far from united about what mistakes Obama has made. The liberal faction of the Democratic party, for example, began losing faith in Obama when he compromised on universal health-care, and conservative “blue-dog” Democrats parted ways with their brethren just when the president proposed a middle-way in the form of a government sponsored “public option.” This is the perverse outcome of the party boasting more registered members than the Republican party (or for that matter, any other organization in the world.)
If Democrats, unlike Republicans, don’t do unity well, then it may well be that they could be better off, or at least no worse off than they are today, should Republicans take one or both Houses of Congress this year. If divided party control of government shall come to pass, it would be because the Democrats were already splintered from the very moment they were blessed with united or single party control of government. Put another way, it may not really matter what happens come November, because Democrats were only united in name in 2009-2011 (and that was possibly what made the infighting more intense).
Indeed, D
0 Comments on Democrats Don’t Do Unity Well as of 1/1/1900
The United States is in the midst of a “free lunch” campaign in which Republicans and Democrats alike promise painless resolution of our budgetary problems. As a result, neither party will have an electoral mandate for the hard choices necessary to tackle our fiscal quandaries. Both parties are squandering an important opportunity to mold public opinion and set the stage for meaningful budgetary discipline.
This conclusion should surprise no one. The history and current reality are there for all to see: In 2001 and 2003, the Bush Administration and Congress reduced federal income taxes significantly. Instead of decreasing federal spending to pay for these tax reductions, the Bush Administration presided over significant increases of military and domestic outlays as well as unrestrained growth of so-called “entitlement” spending – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. The Obama Administration has continued and exacerbated this trend. At the state and local levels of government, budgetary prospects often even worse as unfunded pension obligations and unfinanced retiree health benefits balloon.
To be sure, there is much contemporary political rhetoric about the need for fiscal discipline. President Obama has appointed a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Tea Party candidates successfully exploit growing public anxiety about budgetary deficits.
However, none of this should be taken too seriously. President Obama’s deficit commission is scheduled to report only after this November’s elections. We have become inured to public images of Tea Party activists denouncing federal spending – except for their own Social Security and Medicare payments. The House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” promises fiscal responsibility while also refusing to reduce defense spending or spending which affects seniors.
The net result has been a free lunch campaign in which Democrats and Republicans alike promise budgetary discipline but refuse to specify how they will achieve it. The bi-partisan message to the electorate is that public deficits can be controlled without pain.
This, of course, is untrue.
Undoubtedly, it is considered wise politics to promise tax reductions and vague spending restraints while ignoring the tough choices necessary to put our budgetary house in order. However, in the long run, the promise of a free lunch will prove to be poor politics.
Empty, anodyne campaigns result in elections without mandates. Postponing the real discussion until after the election forfeits the opportunity to establish an electoral basis for the painful actions necessary to eliminate federal and state budget deficits.
In ordinary times, off-year elections are low key affairs in which the President’s party typically loses some or all of the congressional seats it gained in the prior presidential election. Conventionally, such off-year elections are preceded by locally-oriented campaigns.
However, these are not ordinary times. We are barely recovering from the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s and confront current and projected budgetary deficits of unprecedented magnitude. In this historically unique setting, the 2010 campaign is an opportunity for the two parties to form electoral mandates by specifying how they wil
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Welcome to the final installment the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Read the first post here, and the second post here, and the third post here.
You mention John Kerry’s aversion to invoking democracy. It’s odd that the same John Kerry who spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in 1971 on behalf of the “Winter Soldiers” – an organization of antiwar Vietnam vets – could not bring himself to speak openly of Paine in the 2004 campaign. And even more pathetic that Kerry used Reagan’s favorite words from Paine, “We have it in our power…,” when he accepted the Democratic party’s nomination, and yet he did not refer to Paine. Which is to say that Kerry quoted Reagan quoting Paine! Is that plagiarism or flattery? Either way, it amazed me that conservative pundits never made anything of it.
But you ask if I think it’s possible to be both “populist” and “pro-government.” Here I turn to FDR , who did not hesitate to engage popular memory and imagination and mobilize popular energies in favor of recovery, reconstruction, and reform and who most certainly embraced and pursued government action. In a September 1934 Fireside Chat, Roosevelt said: “I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that ‘The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.’” And for what it’s worth…FDR was the first president since Jefferson to quote Paine, cite his name, and praise his contributions in a major speech while serving as president (see the Fireside Chat of February 23, 1942 and for audio click here.)
Before we close, I’d just note that in a recent national essay contest sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute and involving 50,000 high school stude
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
We have 99 Days to go before Election Day. How different things look today compared to Obama’s first 100 days. In the last year and a half, the national mood has turned from hope to uncertainty. The sluggish job market is the economic representation of this psychological state. Business are not expanding or hiring because they do not know what the future holds for them.
The White House, in acknowledging that it expects unemployment to remain at or around 9 percent, has conceded that voters will have to deal with this state of uncertainty even as they will be invited this Fall to make up their minds about whether their members of Congress deserve another term or if it is time for another reset. A certain act given an uncertain future. That’s the crux of the political game this year.
Come November, voters will be asking: do we stay the course and give the incumbents a little more time to bring back the test results, or do we throw the bums out and issue a new test? Republicans are chanting behind one ear saying, “no results means bad results” and Democrats are chanting in the other, saying, “wait for it, the good times are coming.” With no good news or an objective litmus test in sight, the election outcomes will turn largely on the perception of despair versus hope.
The emerging Republican narrative for Election 2010 is that all this uncertainty in the market was generated by big brother. A massive health-care bill which has made it difficult for business to predict their labor costs for the years to come; a financial deregulation bill has given new powers to government but no indication as to how such powers will be deployed; and now, talk of legislation that would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010 is only going to spook business out even more. The Republican headline is: despair; and it is time to move on.
Unless they can point to some specific pork they have brought back to their constituents, Democrats will have to deal with this national mood of uncertainty that can easily be turned into despair. The question of whether or not Democrats will lose one or both (because zero is nearly out of the question) houses of Congress will turn on how successfully, once again, they would be able to massage the reality of uncertainty away from the fairly contiguous sentiment of despair into the more unrelated sentiment of hope.
Now that was a lot easier done in 2008. When patience had run dry with Iraq and George Bush, even Independents found it easy to be optimistic about an alternative path. Anything but the status quo was cause for hope in 2008. Not so in 2010, where there is neither clear light at the end of the economic tunnel nor a wreck in sight. It would take a much bigger leap of faith this year for the same people who voted Obama into office to continue to hope that his friends in Congress will deliver on his promises. Indeed, at this point, Republicans and most Independents are probably done with hoping. They’ve heard the boy cry “wolf” too many times.
The only people who will see hope when there is only uncertainty are the Democratic party faithful. If Democrats want to avert an electoral catastrophe, their best bet is to turn out the party faithful who will
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“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Benjamin Franklin
The assault on a public option for health care is a mounting obscenity as Republicans, insurance lobbyists, and some Democrats roll out a propaganda campaign designed to scare Americans – and Congress – into turning their backs once again on the American people in favor of corporate greed.
Contrary to industry propaganda, the system we have does not work. High costs are bankrupting families and businesses and our quality of care is abominable. The United States is the richest country in the world but it provides the poorest health care among Western industrialized countries. According to the World Health Organization, The United States ranks 37th – lower than all the Western European countries. We rank lower than Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Israel, and Canada. (France is ranked #1, Italy #2, and Japan #3.) What a miserable shame we can’t – or won’t – do as well
Ranked by “Health System Attainment and Performance,” the U.S. was 72nd, between Argentina and Bhutan!
Nor is the U.S. isn’t any better than some Third World countries in average life expectancy. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s rankings for 2009, the U.S. ranks 50th, (78.11 years), between Wallis and Futuna (You aren’t alone if you never heard of these two tiny islands in the South Pacific.) and Albania. In comparison, Japan’s average life expectancy is 82.12 years, Canada’s 81.23 years, and France’s 80.98 years.
With respect to infant mortality, the U.S. has the worst rate in the Western world, ranking 37th with 6.37 deaths per 1,000 live births, between South Korea and Croatia. In comparison, Sweden’s infant mortality rate is 2.76 deaths per 1,000 live births. Keep in mind that these are average rates. In America’s inner cities, the rates are much worse. In 2007, Washington, D.C., had the highest rate: 12.22 deaths per 1,000 live births. In New York City, the infant mortality rate for black babies was 9.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births compared with 3.9 deaths for every 1,000 live births among white babies. Minnesota had the lowest infant mortality rate in the U.S.: 4.78 per 1,000 live births.
The U.S. maternal mortality rate is scandalous, ranking 41st among 171 countries surveyed by the United Nations. Even South Korea has a lower maternal mortality rate than the U.S. Based on the United Nations’ 2005 estimates, one in 4,800 American women carry a lifetime risk of death from pregnancy, something the anti-choice crowd doesn’t bother to mention. In contrast, among the ten top-ranked industrialized countries, fewer than one woman in 16,400 carry such a risk. The most probable reason is that many European countries and Japan guarantee women high-quality health care and family planning services.
For those who tout the U.S. health system as “the best in the world,” there’s an important qualification – IF YOU’RE RICH. Anyone in the top one percent of wealthiest Americans can buy the best health care in the world no matter where they have to go to get it. But the majority of American citizens have to fight their way through a maze of bureaucratic fine print to obtain health care that, in far too may cases, is no better than that in the Third World. Families have the triple financial whammy of foreclosures, lost jobs, and mounting healthcare costs while insurance executives and pharmaceutical companies rake in huge profits. Paying for health care is the major reason for personal bankruptcies, a situation that analysts say will continue unless Congress passes meaningful health reform.
Our current healthcare system is not only a burden for citizens, it also burdens physicians. By enabling insurance companies to run our healthcare system, Congress usurps physicians’ medical expertise and burdens them with voluminous paperwork and restrictions. The nation’s doctors want to be healers not secretarial assistants to health insurance companies. Doctors – not insurance companies – are the experts in providing medical services, yet in too many cases, insurers dictate medical decisions to doctors and hospitals. Sometimes patients die because an insurer has delayed or denied needed medical care. Yet those who support corporate profits rather than public health don’t seem to give a damn.
President Obama calls for a public option. The message of the last election is that the people support a public option. Now is the best opportunity since Clinton’s failure on health care for Congress to pass a real health reform bill. If our elected officials turn their backs on we-the-people this time, such an opportunity may not come again in our lifetime.
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The Conventions are over. As Americans, we’ve heard a lot of rhetoric and many attacks — on both sides.
I feel each of us, as teachers, must inform ourselves about the educational policies of both candidates so that each of us can make an informed decision about the policies that [...]
Boy, do I agree with you. It is maddening watching the debates and the parade of hypocrites that call themselves, Republicans. Do people really think that Mitt Romney can turn around the economy when he has spent most of his life as a CEO of a hedge fund which are nothing more than Corporate Raider who slice and dice companies created and built by others. It is easy to gut and strip a company, the hard part is building one.