Category: Elections

Matt Taibbi on the 2012 election season

Matt Taibbi on the 2012 elections:

Most likely, it’ll be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

There are obvious, even significant differences between Obama and someone like Mitt Romney, particularly on social issues, but no matter how Obama markets himself this time around, a choice between these two will not in any way represent a choice between “change” and the status quo. This is a choice between two different versions of the status quo, and everyone knows it.
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It was always annoying when these two parties and the slavish media that follows their champions around for 18 months pretended that this was a colossal clash of opposites. But now, with the economy in the shape that it’s in thanks in large part to the people financing these elections, that pretense is more than annoying, it’s offensive.

Taibbi also makes a sharp analysis about the general lack of relevance to the primary process and it’s rituals, as compared to vibrant protest movements which have emerged in response to a broken economy and political system. Though I write about the Republican primary frequently, I can’t say it feels very relevant to me, particularly for the reasons that Taibbi lays out. A poll of New Hampshire just doesn’t mean much to me while there are people occupying public parks and foreclosed homes, fighting for their lives and the future of this country.

Iowa results and looking forward at a new race

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

The final Iowa results:

Romney, 24.55% (30,015 votes)
Santorum, 24.54% (30,007 votes)
Ron Paul, 21.45% (26,219 votes)
Gingrich, 13.29% (16,251 votes)
Perry, 10.3% (12,604 votes)
Bachmann, 4.97% (6,073 votes)
Huntsman (745 votes)
No preference (135 votes)
Other (117 votes)
Cain (58 votes)
Roemer (31 votes)

Kombiz and Matt Ortega got the top three order correct, though none of us had them bunched so tightly.

Rick Perry has returned to Texas to “reassess the results,” which is what people usually do hours before they officially end their campaigns. On the up side, by not formally ending his campaign, he can still continue to pay his staff.

Michele Bachmann barely out-performed her Ames Straw Poll results, but did not bow out last night.

Newt Gingrich made clear in his speech last night that he’s angry about the negative attacks from Mitt Romney and his surrogate Super PACs. Gingrich will be going on the attack on Romney’s record, which Newt pointed out doesn’t mean he’s launching negative attacks if it so happens that Romney’s record of flip-flops doesn’t reflect well on him. Gingrich is an adept negative campaigner, so don’t underestimate his potential to hurt Romney in debates and on the airwaves in coming weeks.

Obviously the big winner of the night was Rick Santorum, who benefited from being the Last Anti-Romney Standing. He spent more time in Iowa than any other candidate and was successful at telling his store as a committed conservative., especially once he rose in the polls and suddenly had the air of viability. Romney, on the other hand, badly misplayed the expectations game in the press. As a result, an 8 vote win is universally being seen by reporters as at best a tie, or more likely a Santorum win.

Looking forward, this is a three candidate race between Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Anti-Romney. Anti-Romney for the moment seems like Rick Santorum, but he doesn’t have the campaign infrastructure needed to compete in a long primary. Either other campaigns (Perry, Gingrich, and Bachmann) will have to bow to Santorum through donors and endorsements, or there will have to be a resurgence from Gingrich into the role of Anti-Romney. Ron Paul has the grassroots support to be a competitor over a long primary, but I’m not convinced that the Gingrich’s and Perry’s of the world would lend their support to him to help defeat Romney.

Romney is going to go into New Hampshire and win with ease. The only question will be if Santorum can solidify conservative support and earn a meaningful result. Watch for who endorses Santorum in coming days and if there is a shift of donors to him, as well as the launch or refocus of any Super PACs to support Santorum and do the dirty work of going negative on Romney.

Romney went through Iowa without a single negative ad directed at him – that’s a streak that will probably be over before today is done. Given the impact that negative ads had in Iowa against other candidates, I have to assume that it’s reflective of the fact that Republican base voters are willing to take in new information about their candidates and consider it in their assessment of these candidates. This contributed to the volatility of the Republican field over the last year and does not yet show signs of stopping. Of course, when Republicans go negative on Romney it will look a lot like the sort of attacks the DNC have been making on Romney and will cut directly at his lack of conviction and ever-changing beliefs. Thus my belief that there is still space for an Anti-Romney to take the nomination, Rick Santorum or otherwise.

Gary Johnson & Civil Liberties

For what it’s worth, yesterday’s post on Ron Paul and the debate he has sparked in the progressive blogosphere focused on the fact that Paul was the only major party candidate holding positions traditionally held by liberals regarding civil liberties, war and peace, domestic surveillance, and drug policy. While this is true, Gary Johnson, the libertarian Republican Governor of New Mexico turned Libertarian presidential candidate, is in fact better than Paul and without the racist, anti-worker, anti-Semitic baggage of Ron Paul. The ACLU just rated Johnson higher than not only Paul, but Barack Obama, in their civil liberties report card (PDF).

Johnson is not a major party candidate, despite his attempt to run for the Republican nomination. He was functionally shut out of existence by the media and state Republican party’s which blocked his participation in all but one primary debate. I don’t know if Johnson will be a viable third party candidate. I assume he won’t, but could be wrong.

As I pointed out yesterday, voting is not locked into a binary option. Johnson will be on the ballot in many places and if a liberal was inclined to vote for Ron Paul for reasons related to civil liberties and war and peace, Johnson would likely be a more palatable option. As long as Paul is raising conflicts within liberal priorities at this point in time, Johnson should not be excluded from being a foil for the questions about liberalism being raised by people like Matt Stoller and Glenn Greenwald. This is, after all, not about electability, but ideology.

Ron Paul and The Propriety of Criticism

There’s been a recent debate in the progressive blogosphere, elevated out of numerous conversations on Twitter, about Ron Paul, which have in turn surfaced major questions about what it means to be a liberal in America today and how ideological views are expressed in the electoral context. These are hard questions, in part because so many people have invested their ideological hopes into political parties and individuals who don’t actual map well onto activists’ beliefs. Confronting the notion that your efforts to achieve the change you want in the world have not succeeded because you saw the vehicle as a politician who just doesn’t believe the same things as you is hard. When it’s extended beyond an individual to major swaths of one of our two political parties, it gets even harder to confront.

While there are many different facets of the debates that are being surfaced around Ron Paul, I see there as two primary thrusts to this conversation.

The first is that President Obama has not governed along the lines that he campaigned on (or, more accurately, as many of his progressive supporters expected him to campaign on – expectations built through Obama not being truthful and supporters believing what they wanted to believe). As Glenn Greenwald points out, some of Obama’s largest failings from the left have been in relation to his continuation of George Bush’s surveillance state, his codification of indefinite detention, his gross expansion of executive powers through things like assassinating an American citizen with no due process, and conducting a war in Libya that expressly lacked Congressional approval. This has included a war on whistleblowers which would make any Republican authoritarian proud. Additionally, Obama has stocked his administration with Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy and has coddled Wall Street while failing to help the 99% crushed by this collapse. Taylor Marsh details Obama’s (and the Democratic Party’s) failures to protect women’s rights, notably around Plan B. These are major failings. The President, ostensibly the largest representative of liberalism in America (by virtue of the Democratic Party’s past association with this set of ideas), is advancing radically conservative policies that were routinely decried by liberals when George Bush was responsible for them.

The second is that Ron Paul is a major party presidential candidate who occupies a very similar space as liberals on issues of war, surveillance, civil liberties and drug policy. These are not positions being advocated by any other Republican candidate and they are, as we saw above, not positions held by Barack Obama. Paul does not necessarily arrive at these positions through the same logical argument as most liberals – he opposes large-scale military spending not because he is a pacificist, but because he wants a tiny government. Matt Stoller has the definitive piece on the tensions Ron Paul creates for liberals, especially regarding the split between Ron Paul on foreign policy and Ron Paul on domestic and economic policies.

What’s remarkable to me is the extent to which any approving citation by liberals like Greenwald or Stoller of Ron Paul’s notably good positions on foreign policy and the drug war is how reflexively they get accused of supporting Ron Paul or condoning of Paul’s reprehensible racist newsletters. Greenwald goes so far as to spend eight paragraphs explaining and predicting how frequently people make tribal responses to any criticism or support of a given pol, thereby assuming statements like “Ron Paul is to the left of Obama on surveillance,” means “I support Ron Paul over Obama.” Nonetheless, that’s exactly the sort of response Greenwald received (as we see with tweets from these prominent liberal bloggers).

The mere mention of an alternative to Obama, be it a primary challenge, a third party challenge, a Republican to his left on many issues or whatever else, simply causes fits. It’s remarkable to watch, especially as it relates to positions where Obama has been unquestionably not what the Democratic Party has sold us for the last eighty years. This isn’t to say that Ron Paul is better than Obama or someone all liberals should vote for. As Greenwald frames it, it’s about making a choice as to where ones priorities are. Do you care about war and peace? The drug war? Well then Obama might not be the right person for you. But if you care about social programs and a government that provides services, Ron Paul is undoubtedly not the right person for you. Greenwald writes:

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:

Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.

Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

This is really tough stuff that’s hard to confront. Tom Watson makes a strong case against Ron Paul that’s worth reading, in that it mostly stays away from the ad hominem demonization and makes the case about Watson’s priorities.

As for me, I think I’m in a pretty similar place as Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who tweeted: “I have big problems w/Ron Paul on many issues.But on ending preemptive wars & on challenging bipartisan elite consensus on FP, good he’s in.” This also seems to be the position of Greenwald and Stoller. It doesn’t make a political statement of support (in my case, there is none) but acknowledges the value of having someone saying these things with a national microphone.

Stoller writes about his experience working with Ron Paul’s congressional staff while he worked for Alan Grayson. Paul has been a part of some strange bedfellows work with liberal Democrats – stuff that is really important and valuable and cannot be easily dismissed by any intellectually honest observer, like auditing the Fed. What Paul shows in his work on the Hill on these issues and what he shows as being a voice for anti-war, pro-civil liberties positions which are not held by any other major presidential candidate is that there is a rupture in the political spectrum as aligned by the Republican and Democratic Parties. There is no clean left/right breakdown in the parties. Rather, both parties are conservative and elite serving. Paul offers the rare example of the possibility trans partisan agreement, something that used to be common in American politics. For example, liberal northern Republicans worked towards a civil rights bill for years with liberal Democrats before it finally passed. It is entirely possible for people of different political parties to agree and work together on one issue and disagree vehemently on other issues. That this is considered complicated or controversial is fairly mind-boggling. Tribalism and fealty to party have made this less common and less possible, as we see by the angry reactions to liberals saying good things about some of Ron Paul’s positions.

But what makes me particularly mad is the notion that speaking approvingly of a politician who is anti-war, anti-surveillance state, and pro-civil liberties, while also seeking to reduce the power of the elite-serving Federal Reserve is something that is simply improper for liberals, especially when a Democrat sits in the White House. This is offensive in the highest degree and the responses to Greenwald and Stoller in particular rise to the level of attempted silencing of dissent. It simply doesn’t do to support the protest movements of the Egypt and Tunisia, while opposing protests against similar problems in the United States. Or to put it differently, you can’t be an honest supporter of Occupy Wall Street if you oppose criticizing the President on issues of war, surveillance, civil liberties, and Wall Street power.

And though no one mentioned in the post has yet come out in political support of Ron Paul, so what if they do? Who has standing to tell an anti-war activist that they can’t support the individual they deem to be the most anti-war person running for President? Certainly not people who condoned the President’s unauthorized war in Libya. As for me, I’m in a similar place to Taylor Marsh, who described her vote as “up for grabs.” I don’t know who is out there to grab my vote, but voting for Barack Obama again doesn’t sound so appealing to me. But neither does voting for Ron Paul, whose stances on most domestic issues are anathema to my liberalism. There’s a beautiful option available to all Americans: writing in the person they want to vote for. While I don’t know yet who I will vote for, the idea of writing someone in is certainly an option for me. Oh and before anyone objects that this would cost Democrats the election, I live in Washington DC, which tends to go 90% for the Democratic candidate. First, my vote is not crucial in any game theory of how the election will play out and second, it’s my vote, thank you very much.

There is a real debate to be had about the direction of the Democratic Party and how liberalism can best be served in American politics. But I’m getting really tired of people preaching about what is and is not appropriate criticism of the President, what is and is not helpful (to what and who, I don’t know), or who liberals can say nice things about. If Occupy Wall Street is an indication of anything, it’s that our current political and economic structures are broken. We need new solutions and I find it hard to believe that the new solutions will exist on the clean, partisan lines that currently exist. That means there are openings for trans-partisan organizing where we work with the people and organizations who agree with us on a particular issue. As Stoller notes, sorting out “the contradictions of modern liberalism” is going to be a tough process and debates like the one that is catalyzing around Ron Paul should become more common. And that’s fine by me.

The decline of the Iowa caucus

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Ari Melber has a very thoughtful piece at The Atlantic on the chances that the 2012 Republican presidential election could signal the end of the Iowa caucus as a major component of the primary process. Traditionally campaigns skipped Iowa at their own peril. But this cycle both Romney and Gingrich have functionally ignored the state until the end, relying on earned media coverage over traditional field organizing. Melber reports:

With the exception of Rick Santorum, whose underdog campaign arranged 227 events in all 99 counties, the contenders have simply declined to flood the state with staff or appearances. Rick Perry has spent just 17 days on the ground. Mitt Romney, who is playing down expectations, limited himself to eight days.

The newest “front-runner,” Newt Gingrich, has racked up 50 days in the state, but unlike years past, Gingrich’s appearances are far more ceremonial than organizational. After mass resignations this summer, he had literally no Iowa office or staff until last week. The campaign just opened one office in Urbandale, an affordable suburb of Des Moines, and hired about five local staff.

Gingrich’s phantom front-runner model is evident in the latest polls, which show him leading among potential Republican voters — even though only about 10 percent of them have actually heard from his campaign. That is under half the contact rate for the Bachmann and Paul Campaigns. It also trails the pace last cycle, when top campaigns had dozens of field offices and hundreds of staff in the state.

The notion that Iowa caucus goers will make the decision to support candidates that they haven’t had a chance to meet and talk with is anathema to the mythology of the first in the nation caucus. Melber floats an idea which I think could have traction, namely that Iowa caucus-goers could still reward an underdog who spent significant time in the state, like Ron Paul.

I’d hazard that any Iowa Republicans who want to keep their state’s campaign mythology in tact should be very hesitant to reward campaigns which have functionally ignored the state. Only Iowa and New Hampshire voters get real attention from candidates during the presidential primary process. While there are obvious problems with having two lily white states play this role, this is also a role that is culturally embedded in the states’ self-identity. Having lived in New Hampshire during the 2000 primary and worked on a presidential campaign, traveling extensively through both states in 2007-2008, I’ve seen first hand how rigorous these citizens can be in their scrutiny of candidates. The idea that campaigns have finally evolved to the point where media coverage and TV ads can replace actual conversations between voters and candidates is troubling and sad. If they were getting replaced by dedicated voters in California or South Carolina, that’d be one thing. But they’re getting replaced by Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews. No matter how little you think of Iowa and New Hampshire’s historic lock on attention from presidential campaigns, you can’t think that Blitzer and Matthews is an improvement.

Shifting narrative as Gingrich overtakes Romney

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Jon Ward at Huffington Post has a fantastic piece on the shifting political narrative that has happened while Newt Gingrich has overtaken Mitt Romney for the lead in the Republican presidential primary. At issue is while Romney has been running on a platform of inevitability, large swaths of the GOP base have chosen instead to be drawn to anyone who isn’t him. That has allowed the space to exist for an alternative to come forward. In this moment of the campaign, that alternative is Gingrich. Ward writes:

Yet as the Romney campaign has fought with the White House, Gingrich has developed a head of steam. He is now leading Romney in national polls, as well as in Iowa surveys, and got a big boost Sunday in New Hampshire when the Manchester Union Leader endorsed him.

Romney’s image, meanwhile, has taken some hits for running the misleading ad, and his criticism of Gingrich’s position on immigration provoked ridicule from Rush Limbaugh of Romney’s own muddled and confusing past statements on the issue. There are lingering questions about how much Gingrich’s softer tone about how to deal with undocumented immigrants may hurt him in Iowa, but so far he appears to have weathered the storm rather well, especially given how badly Texas Gov. Rick Perry was hurt by his stumble on the issue.

We are only weeks away from the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. There’s still a lot of politicking to be done, positive ads to air, and likely even more negative ads. The field operation of each campaign will be put to the test in the next two months. And finally we’ll be able to move away from scandal and gaffe driven horse race polling and into actual democracy. We will begin to have a picture of whether or not Romney can win the nomination on a mantle of inevitability or someone like Gingrich will carry the Not Mitt banner to victory.

Until then, the analysis of the race as provided by Ward will remain one of the best. Romney by no means has this locked up and I think we’re in for a whirlwind couple of months.

Obama fundraising 2012: True, but not accurate

Originally posted at AMERICAblog

During the Washington Post versus New York Times battle over whether Barack Obama’s reelection campaign did or did not raise more money from Wall Street than Mitt Romney and the other GOP candidates, the Obama campaign and its defenders arrived at a position which while technically true was not accurate in the spirit of, you know, facts. Namely, while the legal entity that is the Obama campaign had raised less money from Wall Street than Mitt Romney, the campaign plus the DNC had raise more Wall Street money than all Republican presidential candidates combined. Obama supporters positioned this as very important, since by the letter of the law it was true that Romney had outraised Obama on Wall Street. Of course, given that the DNC’s job in 2012 is to help President Obama win re-election, ignoring the money they raise from Wall Street as not being connected to Obama is completely disingenuous.

It seems the New York Times has found another area wherein the Obama campaign is technically correct in their messaging, but functionally inaccurate.

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

At least 15 of Mr. Obama’s “bundlers” — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.

Because the bundlers are not registered as lobbyists with the Senate, the Obama campaign has managed to avoid running afoul of its self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists.

The Obama campaign has a self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists. There is absolutely nothing illegal about taking political contributions from lobbyists. Even the ethics of taking money from lobbyists are debatable – for example, I would have no problem if the Obama campaign took money from people who lobby on behalf of unionized teachers, nurses, firefighters, and janitors. The point is that there is nothing within the job description of a lobbyist which makes them inherently evil. To put it differently, most political campaigns will vet large donations to make sure that the person who wrote them a check wasn’t, say, recently indicted for a felony crime. The reason campaigns do this is that they don’t like the optics of taking money from crooks. The Obama campaign has somewhat arbitrarily decided that lobbyists are like crooks and their money is bad, except in cases where the lobbyists don’t meet the legal standard of lobbyist, as we see here:

Take Sally Susman. An executive at the drug-maker Pfizer, she has raised more than $500,000 for the president’s re-election and helped organize a $35,800-a-ticket dinner that Mr. Obama attended in Manhattan in June. At the same time, she leads Pfizer’s powerful lobbying shop, and she has visited the White House four times since 2009 — twice on export issues.

So this individual was meeting with the President while the healthcare bill was being written and some of those meetings were about exporting US-made drugs. Yet by the letter of the law, Susman is not a lobbyist and therefore her money is good!

Oh and those $35,800-a-ticket dinners that Susman put together? Yeah, that money goes to the DNC.

The Obama campaign has a statement responding to the Times story. The basic thrust of it is that the Times is skewering them for letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good, punishing efforts to promote reform.” That may be the case and the Obama campaign is right to point out that all Republican candidates make no bones about taking cash from lobbyists and letting lobbyists bundle cash for them.

At the same time, the Obama campaign is trying to convince us that the influence of someone whose job is as a lobbyist giving $5,000 (the legal limit for primary and general election contributions in 2012) is greater than a lobbyist who bundles 100 times that amount. And that is pure bunk.

What’s more upsetting is the completely cynical analysis by the Obama campaign which defines the quality of their actions by the letter of the law or the letter of their pledges, while ignoring the larger context within which they occur. They take less money from Wall Street than Romney, but only if you ignore the DNC. They don’t take donations from lobbyists, but only if you ignore their bundlers who lobby. And if those bundlers who lobby as executives of major pharmaceutical companies find ways to avoid the rather high threshold to be counted as a lobbyist, well then since they do not meet the definition of lobbyist, the campaign can’t be criticized for taking their money.

These two stories, happening a week apart, show that the Obama re-election campaign is committed to a very cynical ploy to be true, while not being accurate, in their descriptions of their fundraising. The danger of this is that the energy of hope and change that fueled the campaign in 2008 will be completely non-existent in 2012. The remedy for that could be providing voters with genuine, honest reform. Or it could be taking more corporate or Wall Street cash. Seeing which course the campaign chooses will be easy enough, so I shall avoid any speculation as to what they will do.

Obama, Romney, & Reporting Wall St Money

Yesterday there was a Washington Post story on how much money Obama and Romney have gotten from Wall Street which directly conflicted with a New York Times article earlier in the week. The Washington Post story reported that Obama has raised more money from Wall Street than all of the GOP candidates combined. The Times, on the other hand, reported that “Romney has raised far more money than Mr. Obama this year from the firms that have been among Wall Street’s top sources of donations for the two candidates.”

Mike Allen isn’t happy with the Post’s coverage of this. Today he takes a hard shot at the Post:

the Times story got the big picture right, by basing the analysis on contributions to the CAMPAIGNS rather than lumping in PARTY money, which has higher limits ($30,800 per year v. $2,500 per election). And Romney can’t raise party money. The Post could have won by explaining both ends of the telescope.
–PLAYBOOK BEST PRACTICES: Acknowledging complexity makes your story MORE interesting, not less. And the most sophisticated readers have seen what’s been written before, so you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, or leave them scratching their heads.

But here’s the chaser, from yesterday’s Washington Post article:

“Put aside the DNC money, for example, and Obama’s numbers look much worse: just $3.9 million from the financial sector, compared with Romney’s $7.5 million.”

Before Allen starts talking about “best practices,” he should double check to make sure that the people he’s criticizing didn’t present exactly the facts that he’s demanding they present.

But more importantly, this is all very silly. The DNC exists to fundraise for the the President’s reelection. It is a temporary advantage for the President, as the Republicans don’t have a presidential candidate yet and the RNC can’t fundraise directly for that person until the nominee is set. Both the Times and the Post miss with their stories. The Times accepts the technically correct but functionally incorrect reality that DNC money is not the same as campaign money. The Post fails to recognize that the advantage is a temporary one and not particularly indicative of anything except a snapshot of where things are when the GOP doesn’t have a nominee.

The real crux of the matter is that Wall Street is giving tens of millions of dollars to both parties. When all is said and done, that number will probably be over $100,000,000. The people who broke our economy have completely captured both political parties and helped ensure that they are not held accountable for their crimes, while pushing for more bailouts for themselves, paid for on the backs of poor, working, and middle class Americans.

NYT editorial on Elizabeth Warren

The New York Times has an editorial in praise of Elizabeth Warren and her candidacy for Senate in Massachusetts. Interestingly (though also accurately) they highlight her ability as an effective messenger on the economy and class issues:

Democrats should not be cowed by conservative taunts that the speech advocated “collectivism,” and use this argument to push back against the Republicans’ refusal to raise the taxes of people who make more than a million dollars a year — sometimes far more. Senate Democratic leaders say they plan to employ poll-tested phrases like “Tea Party economics” and “Tea Party gridlock” in their campaign for a jobs bill and beyond. They would be better off listening to Elizabeth Warren.

I would hope that other Democrats do listen to Warren, though I’m less interested in them appropriating her messaging for its efficacy than adopting the ideology that stands behind the messaging. I don’t want to see a bunch of faux populist rhetoric from Democrats, but I do want to see politicians who are populist. I don’t think many incumbents are populists and I’m not excited by them trying to steal the thunder from those who are actually hearing the complaints of economically disenfranchised people and being responsive to them. That said, one of the supposed virtues of a Senator Warren would be her ability to bring this effective advocacy for the poor, working, and middle classes into an institution which his almost entirely captured by the wealthiest 1%. If the only way to bring conservative Democrats to a better place that gets better results is through cynical analysis of what is polling well, fine. But the existence of political success will be valuable only to the extent that the policies advocated in this messaging are enacted. And now does not seem like the right time to lie to angry voters about what you will or will not do for them.

Chris Christie & the confused Republican Party

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

If there’s one dynamic that has yet to be resolved within the Republican presidential primary, it’s the tension between the demands of the radically conservative Tea Party base and the 51% of Republicans who do not identify as or support the goals of the Tea Party. Presumably a large part of the Republican establishment and media talking heads fall into the 51% that don’t swing the Tea Party’s way. As a result, you get repeated expressions of dissatisfaction from both the far right and the slightly further right for candidates which better fit their ideological vision. Rick Perry was pitched as a savior, yet once he entered he was exposed both as more of a bumbling fool than any non-Texan would have thought and is being damned from the right for his completely sober and responsible notion that if we can stop teenage girls from contracting a virus which causes cancer, we should do it.

Over the last week and a half we’ve seen both Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie discuss entering the primary to fill this void. Most Republicans already know what they’d get with Huckabee – an extremely conservative member of the religious right who also displays some economic populist notes while being slightly to the left of Attila the Hun (and therefore unacceptable) in his immigration stance.

Christie is a different story. While he’s burnished his Republican credentials by aggressively seeking to bust public worker unions in New Jersey, he holds a number of other positions which are anathema to the Tea Party base. Specifically, all the Republicans clamoring for Christie to enter the race fail to recognize that he will have a problem for believing that climate change is real and humans contribute to it. And I shudder to think how the mouth breathers will react to seeing him rip apart the anti-Muslim bigots who oppose Chrisite’s appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the NJ state bench:

https://www.youtube.com/v/y83z552NJaw?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0

As a progressive, I worry about Christie entering the race. He’s smart, affable and a powerful communicator. But while he may not pass muster with the Tea Party crowd, he’s a radically conservative politician who would seek to destroy workers’ rights and make business unaccountable to the public.

At some point, I wonder if the Republican primary will hinge around electability. But until then, it will focus on the candidate who comes closest to complete ideological purity with the Tea Party base. Christie may get in. Huckabee may get in. But I doubt either will be sufficiently crazy to please the base and win the nomination.