overthinking it

Marc Ambinder:

Why did Democrats take a beating for passing a health care bill that was very similar in form to what Republican intellectuals had been urging for more than a decade? Because the Tea Party, conservative independents and Republicans have moved the political center to the right--marginally on a 0 to 100 scale, but enough to tip the scale away from Democrats. The electoral environment favors economic libertarians, and the Tea Party movement (or the conservative movement) has organized itself in such a way that really excites conservatives, while liberals, at a disadvantage ideologically (in the sense that conservatism has always been more organized and less diverse) cannot, as they did in 2008, build a tent around a larger coalition.

Holy hodgepodge of tendentious analogies, Batman!

The answer to why Democrats took a beating on HCR is actually quite simple. It's the same reason, in fact, that they took a beating on the stimulus and the bailouts.

They didn't listen to their base: liberals.

Liberals, not unions or minorities or women, are the engine of Democratic PR and campaign operations. They are the ones who send in letters to the editor and mount demonstrations and write on their shitty little blogs like this one. They're the ones who talk on cable news shows and fund commercials and 527s. They're the ones who get excited about politics and talk to their family and friends and argue Democratic policies and win converts.

Liberals by and large feel somewhere between disappointed and betrayed by the Obama Administration, and find their Senate delegation and its leader hopelessly gunshy. Despite Jonathan Chait et al.'s insistence that Barack Obama is "the most effective liberal president in at least four decades," it does not escape liberals that their president and massive, filibuster-proof majorities in Congress have so far given them Mitt Romney's health care plan, George W. Bush's tax cuts and bank bailouts, and were last seen working on Ronald Reagan's environmental regulation system. They are in general agreement that Barack Obama and Harry Reid gave away the store on health care with the public option. They worry that Obama screwed any liberal that will ever want to talk economics again by pushing a doomed stimulus plan that was less than half the size it needed to be, and nearly half of which was composed of inefficient tax cuts rather than public projects that keep people employed, giving the appearance of a Keynesian response but not enough oomph to sustain the recovery. They are sore that he wrote blank checks for Wall Street after its irresponsibility and craven behavior nearly destroyed the economy, but had no solution for putting people to work. They are outraged that he never fought for cramdown, and that his only attempt to deal with the housing market (HAMP) turned out to be not just unhelpful but downright predatory, cajoling people into staying in their homes just long enough for their lenders to squeeze a little more blood from their stones before evicting them anyway. And they are horrified by the Administration's war on whistleblowers, embrace of indefinite detentions, and decision to co-opt all of President Bush's illegal "war powers" rather than restore the Rule of Law.

And when they had the temerity to say something, the White House Press Secretary openly mocked them on national television. Mocked them, after all those hours and doors and phone calls and personal checks. Is there any other voting bloc in the country, any at all, that is ever openly derided by their own politicians?

Now we're a month and a half from the midterms and Democrats are wondering why they have no support, no volunteers, no campaign donations, and no one is applauding their policies on TV. It's a hell of a lot harder to motivate your base when they give you everything, and then two years later all you can say is, "at least I'm not the other guy, right?"

applauding the wrong state

Maureen Dowd, as usual, with so much cleverness and so little insight. Remember what I said about some stupid arguments flying around after this kind of court decision? Let's get one thing straight: the decision by the Iowa Supreme Court on gay marriage does not mean that Iowans are more progressive than Californians. There are a lot of specious arguments being pushed about this issue, but this one's so obviously dumb that she needs to get called out for it.

And no, her point is not bolstered by the fact that Iowa chose Obama and California chose Hillary in the primary. There was no small amount of debate between many very liberal people on which candidate was more liberal (Paul Krugman, for instance, was absolutely sure it was Clinton), as if that was the primary reason most Democrats voted for their respective candidate, anyway.

The galling thing about this bandwagon to crown the Midwest as the new home of Enlightened America is that it draws attention away from the really big and lasting gain for gays that occurred in Vermont last week, where the state assembly became the first body in America to legislate gay marriage, and did so over the governor's veto, to boot. Vermont opens the door for other like-minded states to follow suit, and if gay marriage is going to gain a footing in any part of the country, it's going to be in socially liberal New England, not in the Midwest.

presidential mythopoiesis

I'm seeing a number of myths about Barack Obama now starting to take shape due particularly to liberal reaction to his new administrative team, even among otherwise sane voices like Glenn Greenwald. Mostly they're of the strain that Obama is not, nor has ever been, liberal, and didn't vote like a liberal in the Senate.

This is simply not accurate. Barack Obama was one of the more consistently liberal voices in the Senate, voting with the Democrats some 96% of the time. He has a big fat 0% rating from the NRLC, an anti-Roe organization, and 100% from NARAL (higher than Russ Feingold). Despite the flak he's taken for not supporting gay marriage, he is a strong supporter of civil unions, supports ditching Don't Ask Don't Tell, and has an 89% rating from the Human Rights Campaign. He has a 100% rating from the NAACP. He voted against restricting bankruptcy protection and for repealing the tax subsidy for companies shipping jobs overseas. He voted for expanding the Pell Grant, for closing corporate tax loopholes and moving that money to education spending, and for increasing the amount of money sent to local education agencies. He voted to remove oil and gas exploration subsidies, to factor greenhouse gas emissions into federal project planning, to cancel oil contracts in ANWR, to raise CAFE standards 4%/year until 2018, and to allow states to set stricter environmental guidelines than the federal government, sporting a 96% rating from the League of Conservation Voters (the same rating as Ted Kennedy). He voted against CAFTA, and voted to add labor standards to NAFTA. He voted to establish a Senate Office of Public Integrity and sponsored a bill to disclose federal earmarks on the internet. He voted against extending the Patriot Act's wiretapping provision (though he did ultimately vote to reauthorize the Act itself), voted to preserve habeas corpus for enemy combatants, and to continue to require FISA warrants for overseas wiretapping. He voted against both Justices Roberts and Alito. He has voted consistently against cutting the capital gains tax and the estate tax, supports the Alternative Minimum Tax, and voted to increase taxes for people making more than $1 million.

This senator is not liberal?

I also find it funny that some of the same people now saying that Obama has "no one" in his administration advising him from the left criticized him in the primary for being less liberal than Hillary Clinton. After all, Clinton's superior progressive bona fides were repeatedly touted by no less than Paul Krugman, and she called herself a "progressive" at one of the early primary debates. Clinton voted with Democrats 96% of the time (same as Obama), and is labeled a "hard core liberal" by Ontheissues.org. Now Clinton is a centrist, too? Admittedly, his administration is not, say, as liberal as Bush's was conservative, but if you were expecting cabinet positions for Dennis Kucinich, Barney Frank, and Russ Feingold, you were bound to be disappointed. Most of the members of his administration are decidedly to the right of Obama the senator, and that is something we liberal Obama supporters have to deal with, but Obama's voting record was most certainly liberal. Perhaps the man has changed or somehow pretended to be liberal while a senator, but the far more likely explanation is exactly what he said it was: he wants a broad spectrum of opinions around him so as to keep his feet as firmly planted in reality as possible. There was a lesson in George W. Bush's appointments about filling the president's office with ideological fellow travelers, and it looks like Obama has taken that lesson seriously.

The appointments are also evidence of Obama-ism at its core, which is not so much a political ideology (though Obama is personally quite liberal) as a sociological or psychological one, one characterized by respect and optimism. The core tenet of Obamaism, as far as I can see, is the belief that all the different sides in a given political debate operate primarily from divergent worldviews that are legitimately held and intelligently deduced, rather than motivated by mere greed/stupidity/laziness/evil/cowardice. The primary ramification of this belief is that you cannot rely on your superior ideology to provide you all the answers; there may well be places where liberalism is wrong and conservatism right, and the only way to know is to have conservatives, centrists, and old hands on board to try to prove you wrong before you enact a bad policy. Another ramification is that experience and success generally trump ideological bona fides, something you can afford when you're only 8 years removed from a moderately success administration of your own party.

This diversity in the war room also provides three major boons to the president: 1. bipartisan cred and a reputation for giving the opposition their say, 2. a deeper well from which to draw out solutions, and 3. stances and opinions that are well-tested and evidence-based.

the regional party of the South

Reading these botched predictions and thinking about a conversation I had the other day, it occurs to me that the central reason the Republicans seem so out of touch is because they assumed there were always enough conservatives to win every election. The Democrats make a play for every demographic, to both their benefit and detriment, but that's a very different strategy than the Republican one. If you're not a social conservative, an economic conservative, or a foreign policy neoconservative, the Republicans are not interested in your vote, and will use you as a bogeyman to scare conservatives to the polls. The problem is those groups the Republicans have spent the last 30 years willfully antagonizing-- atheists/agnostics, feminists, liberals, immigrants, gays, religious non-Judaeo-Christians-- are among the fastest growing demographics in the country. Meanwhile, George W. Bush and the Christian Right made Republicanism uncool to a whole generation of Americans just now becoming politically aware, while congressional Republicans chased Hispanics and college-educated whites into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party. And yes, Americans are becoming slightly more liberal.

That's why it's so deathly important for Karl Rove and the rest to keep repeating "America is still a center-right country." They have to convince themselves, because the alternative is too scary.

new website showing 50 years of campaign commercials

Fascinating. www.livingroomcandidate.org allows you to view presidential campaign commercials going all the way back to Eisenhower.

I looked at some of the 1992 Clinton/Gore commercials, and one thing has become abundantly clear: we are a more liberal country than we were back then. Bill Clinton '92 would have been the most conservative candidate in the entire Democratic primary this year, and probably the most of any of the '04 crowd as well. Most of his commercials are geared toward cutting taxes, punishing criminals (prominently noting that he supports the death penalty), and "ending welfare as we know it."

16 years later, Barack Obama can openly attack his Republican opponent for not supporting "a woman's right to choose," and both candidates are trying to out-green each other, with frakin' T. Boone Pickens trying to outdo both of them!

Then again...

"Hey Mirror, you look like a retard!" by Jonah Goldberg

From the review of Jonah Goldberg's new steaming pile of... writing... on Salon:

To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I. [emphasis mine]

Yeah. He really did write that. You can tell this one's a winner, eh?

You can probably see how Goldberg's getting teed up even before you read it:

You've talked about Mussolini remaining on the left and remaining a socialist, and in your book you've got a lot of quotes from the 1920s about that, but I'm wondering -- how does that fit in with what he wrote and said later, especially "The Doctrine of Fascism" in 1932?

I'd need to know specifically what he wrote in "The Doctrine of Fascism." It's been about three years since I've read it.

He says, for example, "Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ', a Fascist century."

That's the moment where, in an academic conference, the grad students wince and the other presenters blanch. Goldberg just got served.

culture and politics, a poll

Check out this poll from Zogby and the Norman Lear Center on politics and culture, examining how liberals, conservatives, and "moderates" enjoy TV, the news, movies, music, and video games.

What surprised me most: "Fox, the home of anti-authority satires like The Simpsons, Family Guy and MADtv, draws daily more than three times as many conservatives as liberals." There is such a thing as a liberal who doesn't like the Simpsons? I'd never thought of FOX as particularly ideological, though I do associate it with a certain "trashiness," I guess from the days when it tended to delve further into the risque than other networks.

Nevertheless, rather than "anti-authority satire" being the turn-off for liberals and turn-on for conservatives (since when were "support the troops!" police-state conservatives anti-authority?), I would imagine it's the rest of their programming, nearly half of which consists of reality TV (I counted eight, including COPS and "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?"), that turns off liberals.

What I would really like to know: have we always been this culturally divided? Was it always the case that conservatives and liberals didn't listen to the same music, didn't see the same movies, and didn't watch the same TV (or even the same news, for God's sake!)? Combined with the fact that conservatives are now taking their kids out of public schools, is our society starting to pillarize?

we're all closet Kucinichites

Damnit, she's right. From Salon:

Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It's time to come clean and admit that we are a Dennis Kucinich-loving party trapped in Hillary Clinton-supporting bodies.
...
If you believe in universal, single-payer healthcare and that campaign finance and electronic voting are corrupt; if you hate the Patriot Act and believe it erodes civil rights; if you believe that gay people should have the same rights as straight people, that America should rejoin the Kyoto Protocol and take steps to halt global warming, that we should invest in alternative fuel sources, that our water and air need to be protected from pollution and overuse, that the government should reduce the amount of money it spends on war and instead work to improve the country's education system, and that going to war in Iraq was a terrible and tragic mistake, then you are [a Kucinichite].
...
If you don't believe me, take some of the presidential polls floating around out there, the ones that ask you to answer questions about the issues and then show you a graphic embodiment of the candidate with whom you are best matched. Try this one, for example. Watch as Kucinich's big goofy head floats toward you, taunting you with how far you've strayed from the reasons you originally invested in the democratic process. Here's a different version of it, in which your preferences are tabulated visually after each answer; you can watch for yourself as Denny the K makes his inevitable, inexorable climb to the top. This one and this one aren't as fancy, but answer the questions and see whom you get. Go ahead. And yeah, I know, you're also getting Mike Gravel: Doesn't that just drive the point home, folks?

3 Kuciniches and a Gravel for me. I think there's a conspiracy afoot to recalibrate all online political tests toward DK.

political compass

An oldie but a goodie. It's a test created by (so it sounds, at least) political scientists in the UK that plots your political ideology on an X/Y axis. The X axis-- that's the horizontal one for the geometrically challenged-- represents the economic spectrum. Thus, people on the positive, or right, side believe in varying degrees that the government should not meddle in the market, while those on the left believe the government is obligated to provide certain basic services and ensure fair play in the marketplace.

The Y axis is related more directly to political power, specifically whether it should be located in the authorities (for those with positive scores) or in individuals (for the negatives). This is your quintessential fascists vs. hippies axis.

My score this time: -6.0, -5.23
My score 2 years ago: -6.25, -4.92

Apparently I'm slowly becoming less leftist and more civil libertarian.

They've since added some helpful info. Here they've tracked all the candidates currently running for president. I think Republican primary voters would be especially shocked to see this, though you lefties won't be so surprised. And here, even more shockingly, is the graph of the 2004 presidential election. I really think that this shows what Kerry campaigned as in the general, rather than his record as a senator, because I'm virtually positive that he's well to the left of where they put him.

you ran as a WHAT?

The GOP is on the verge of nominating for president a guy who self-identified as liberal only 10 years ago. 1996.

That's how badly W torched the brand.

Are you starting to get a sense of why Giuliani hasn't been too enthused about a Youtube debate?

James Dobson is to Christianity as George W. Bush is to the GOP

This study on generational shifts in perceptions of Christians is fascinating. It confirms suspicions many of us non-brownshirt Christians have had for a while-- namely, that the Christian Right is soiling Christ's good name and turning the masses away from the faith.

Simply put, the bigots are f*%king everything up for the rest of us.

The "duck your head and wait for liberalism to blow over" tactic (I actually had a conservative Catholic theology MA use those words to explain the best strategy for the Church to handle these trying new times), while easier than actually adapting to our constantly deepening understanding of humans and creation, may well go down in history as the most boneheaded idea ever conceived. Even more than trickle-down economics, Napoleon's march on Russia, and no longer stopping the clock on first down, and that's saying something.

study: political beliefs may be linked to biology

From Scientific American:

Amodio and colleagues report in Nature Neuroscience that they scanned the brains of 43 subjects during 500 trials of a task designed to test their ability to break from a habitual response. Prior to beginning the experiment, volunteers were asked to rate their political leanings based on a scale from –5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (very conservative). They were then given a computerized test in which they were shown one of two stimuli for 100 milliseconds (0.1 second). If an "M" popped on the screen, the respondent had 500 milliseconds (a half second) to press a key on the keyboard before him or her; if a "W" appeared, the person was told to do nothing.

The task, known as Go/No-Go, is an example of "conflict monitoring," which Amodio says, "came about as a way to explain how we realize that we need to pay more attention." In this version, subjects became accustomed to pressing the button when they saw an "M," which appeared 80 percent of the time during the trials. Thus, when a "W" cropped up, participants faced a conflict between their trained response and a new stimulus.

Amodio says that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a forebrain region, "serves almost as a barometer for this degree of conflict."

"People who have more sensitive activity in that area,'' he notes, "are more responsive to these cues that say they need to adapt their behavior," reacting more quickly and accurately to the unexpected stimulus. On average, people who described themselves as politically liberal had about 2.5 times the activity in their ACCs and were more sensitive to the "No-Go cue'' than their conservative friends.

"They are more sensitive to the need for change and more sensitive to the need to change their behavior," Amodio says about the politically left-leaning subjects.

My partisan sensibilities are mildly offended at -5 being identified as "extremely" liberal, while 5 is only "very" conservative, but I'm willing to chalk that up to the desire to variegate the verbiage here.

I'm no scientist, and I do love to hear that liberals are more adaptive to change (which is how Darwin described those more likely to survive), but frankly, I'm just not sure this study tells us what the lede claims it does. Could it not also be that the embrace of an ideology centered around change trains one to be more sensitive to that need to change whenever it arises?

the Progressive Majority

This is a really important study, if all true. It's long past time we did away with the myth that regular Americans are generally conservative. I particularly wish, however, that Democrats would read this.

The people are on your side, assholes. Start acting like it.

the myth of the purple finger

Sez Josh Marshall:

Even among critics of the war, it's often accepted as granted that a key aim of this effort was democratization -- only that it was botched, like so much else, or that the aim of democracy, in a crunch, plays second fiddle to other priorities. Not true. The key architects of the policy don't believe in democracy or the rule of law. The whole invasion was based on contrary principles. And the aim can't be achieved because those anti-democratic principles are written into the DNA of the occupation, even as secondary figures have and continue to labor to build democracy in the country.

I've been wrestling with this graph all day, trying to figure out why it bugs me. On the surface, Marshall is right: the Bush Administration doesn't believe in the rule of law, as we've seen over and over again, and Cheney's and Bush's ideological adherence to democratic principles is in question as well (how can you have a democracy without the rule of law? without habeas corpus?). And yes, these tendencies have caused us all sorts of problems in Iraq, mainly in the form of fomenting distrust in us and the Iraqi government.

Nevertheless, my eyes keep getting drawn back to "a key aim of this effort was democratization" and its reference later as "the aim." I'm not accusing Marshall of this, by any means, but we would do well not to forget that the aim of this whole endeavor in Iraq is not democratization, but the discrediting and elimination of terrorism, specifically the terrorists that threaten us at home and our interests abroad. The democratization part was conceived of and remains merely as a means to that end. It's increasingly important as the occupation drags on to remember not only the order of our priorities there, but this crucial link in W's head between democratization and terrorism, a notion that I believe is truly dangerous, especially applied as cynically as it always is by human governments.

Back in the wonder years of the invasion, there arised a metaphor in the blogosphere (espoused principally, I believe, by Markos) called "the Myth of the Purple Finger." It was a play on the Iraqi elections and subsequent media manipulation by the Bush administration and their apologists, where they'd play, over and over again, videos and pictures of Iraqis during the election waving their fingers around celebrating the first (and second, and third...) votes in Lord knows how long (you may remember, their fingers were colored purple as proof that they had voted).

"The Myth of the Purple Finger" was a critique of the media hype that said that elections=progress even if they fail to create a government the people consider legitimate. There was a deeper fallacy at work, however: the myth, unwittingly at first, pointed straight at the idea, taken on faith by neoconservatives and classic liberals alike, that terrorism cannot persist in a free democracy, that democracy by its very existence deals a mortal wound to the morale and negative emotions necessary to engage in terrorist acts. One of the weirder aspects of national discourse in the run-up and early period of the war was hearing virtually identical arguments made in support of the war by, for instance, George W. Bush and Peter Beinart of The New Republic, showing a sort of intersection between the ideologies between these two normally-divergent groups.

This supposed power of democracy is, in the really-real world, non-existent. Democracy (especially the sectarian, exclusionary type that was the only outcome ever possible in Iraq) does not preclude terrorism any more than fabulous wealth precludes depression. If it did, we would have never had Timothy McVeigh or abortion clinic bombers, Germans would never have heard the names Bader-Meinhof, and has anyone ever heard of Northern Ireland? And how, then, do we explain all those supposed Islamist terror cells in the US and Europe that the same Bush administration keeps warning us about? All sorts of things can motivate people to resort to terrorism, usually related a tribe feeling excluded or oppressed, or related to some perceived moral imperative going unheeded by the current regime. Installing a democracy, however, does not automatically fix this problem, and as we're seeing in Iraq, can even make it worse.

The entire strategy for pacifying Iraq and alienating/eliminating the terrorists was based on this flawed logic, and thus, in respect to the core rationale for the invasion, whether or not Iraq achieved democratization is irrelevant. Even if the Bush Administration genuinely cared about democracy in the Middle East and achieved such in Iraq, there's no evidence that either international or domestic terrorism there would have disappeared.