Getting Paid to be Contrarian is One Thing....

Part of how you get commentary published, it seems, is coming at issues from an angle that at least some of your audience hasn't seen before. But sometimes, perhaps often, the angle tells us more about the person writing the commentary than about the issue they're addressing. Case in point, Megan McArdle's self-described counter-factual on why she would have preferred for Hillary Clinton to have won the 2008 election. The first counter-factual,

I think that Hillary Clinton would have been more cautious when dealing with Republicans, and therefore ultimately more successful in some ways. At the very least, she would not be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress.

Certainly there is no reason to believe that the Republicans would have opposed Hillary Clinton, ginned up fake controversies over her past or present actions, or ridiculed and sabotaged her health care reform. That is, if you ignore pretty much everything in Hillary Clinton's past, as it relates to the Republican Party. The party that is still wailing "Benghazi!" would have been deferential to Hillary Clinton? Really?

I think liberals really do not understand emotionally the extent to which the Tea Party was created by the Affordable Care Act and the feeling that its government was simply steamrolling it.

Except that the Tea Party movement did not grow out of healthcare reform. It grew out of the financial industry collapse and bail-out. It was carefully steered in the direction of healthcare reform through Republican demagoguery and strategic misinformation. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they would not have been led to oppose modest healthcare reform, or that their energies would not have been directed at other significant initiatives -- as has actually occurred with issues such as immigration reform.

(One suspects that McArdle has spent little if any time talking to actual liberals.)

From the Tea Party's perspective, you had an unpopular program that should have died in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Social Security privatization did: because sensible politicians saw that, no matter how ardently they and their base might desire it, this was out of step with what the majority of the country wanted (and no, you cannot rescue the polls by claiming that the only problem with the law was that it wasn’t liberal enough; when you dig down into what people mean when they say that, the idea that there was ever a majority or a plurality that was secretly in favor of Obamacare collapses).

Except... no. Social Security privatization died because the then-President's own party wouldn't get behind it. We're talking there about something that was easily recognized as benefiting a relative few, those privileged with "managing" our money, while creating significant risks for everybody else. While it's reasonable to say that you cannot sustain an argument that a "more liberal" plan would have been more popular, that question is moot for the same reason that the question of Social Security privatization is moot -- a "more liberal" plan would not have been voted into law. If you look at the actual content of the PPACA, other than the mandate (which we all know to be a necessary aspect of keeping private insurance companies on board while requiring them to insure people with pre-existing conditions) you'll find that the individual components of the bill are largely popular. You'll find that the most contentious aspects of the bill, such as "death panels", are Republican fabrications.

The rage was similar to what progressives felt as they watched George W. Bush push the country into a war in Iraq. That defined and animated the anti-war movement (which is why said movement collapsed when Bush left office, and not, say, when Bush agreed to a staged withdrawal of our forces).

For the most part, the anti-war movement collapsed when the war started. Whatever anti-war movement continued after that point was quite modest. Also, no, the rage and demonstrable ignorance of the Tea Party was nothing like what one saw in a typical anti-war protest, nor were Democratic politicians out, en masse, pushing misinformation or refusing to correct misinformation embraced by anti-war protesters.

Yes, those people would still have hated Republicans, even if there had been no Iraq War. But they would not have been as passionate, as organized or as powerful without it.

Who are "those people"? When I look at the Tea Party, I see a movement that has sent ripples through the Republican Party, has toppled incumbent politicians and had its own elected in their place, and has caused some of the most absurdly ignorant people to be elected to Congress since... I'm not sure when. The anti-war movement, by way of comparison, unsuccessfully advocated against the Iraq war and then... nothing? I'm not even sure where McArdle comes up with her canard that the anti-war protesters "hated Republicans", but hers seems to be a classic "hollow man" argument -- putting words into the mouths of "those people" in order to easily swat down an argument that few (if any) made, rather than having to address actual people and actual arguments. Counter-factual, indeed.

Liberals tend to write off this anger as racism, as irrational hatred of Barack Obama, or as perverse joy in denying health care to the poor, but at its root, it’s the simpler feeling that your country is making a mistake and you can’t stop it because the people in charge are ignoring the obvious.

It's not an "either, or". You (and by "you" I apparently mean, "anybody except McArdle") can recognize the actual racist statements and actions of people associated with the Tea Party, and can recognize the racism implicit in birtherism, the suggestion that President Obama is not a "full blooded" American, and the like, while also recognizing that the Tea Party is at its heart a fear-driven organization. It was quite obvious that when the Tea Party was screeching about death panels, or carrying around signs to the effect of, "Keep your government hands off of my Medicare", that they were afraid of change. It was also apparent that they were not approaching the issues in a rational manner, and that the monied interests and Republican politicians affiliated with the movement liked it that way.

Yes, a lot of money and energy was poured into the Tea Party by rich backers, but rich backers cannot create a grassroots campaign unless the underlying passion is there in the voters (paging Karl Rove and Crossroads). The Obama administration created that passion with Obamacare.

That, again, is nonsense. There's an element of truth to the notion that you can't astroturf your way into a massive grassroots movement, but what anybody but McArdle would have noticed is that the monied interests she mentions spotted an early opportunity to co-opt and direct the anger of the Tea Party movement. Those backers weren't interested in stopping the financial industry bailout. They were -- and remain -- interested in harming Obama's agenda. As with Mitch McConnell's stated goal, the priority was to try to make Obama a one-term president. They were not interested in educating Tea Party members about the issues -- to the contrary, they helped maintain a constant feed of misinformation. They would have been every bit as interested in harming Hillary Clinton's agenda.

I think that Hillary Clinton would have pulled back when Rahm Emanuel (or his counterfactual Clinton administration counterpart) told her that this was a political loser and she should drop it.

That may be true, but where McArdle sees that as a good thing I do not. Why not? Because unlike McArdle, who likely enjoys platinum quality employer-provided health benefits and sits on considerable family wealth, I actually needed to purchase insurance for my family. The PPACA permitted me to purchase insurance of a quality comparable to a good employer-sponsored plan at a fair price -- not necessarily at a cost savings over the cost of such a plan but with a more favorable pricing structure than what I had paid for COBRA coverage. Between the expiration of my COBRA coverage and the January 1 start date of the PPACA, I purchased a comparatively overpriced plan on the individual market, riddled with exclusions, and had to deal with the absurd arguments that insurance companies use to jack up premiums over "pre-existing conditions". For people not as lucky as McArdle, that's a big [Biden's Word] deal.

I’ve written before about how my Twitter feed filled up with comparisons to 1932 the night that Obama took the presidency, and it’s quite clear to me that the Obama administration shared what you might call delusions of FDR. It thought that it was in a transformative, historical moment where the normal rules of political caution didn’t apply. The administration was wrong, and the country paid for that.

So McArdle has looked down her nose at Obama from the start? And the country has "paid for" the president's pressing forward with the high-priority Democratic agenda item, healthcare reform, by actually getting healthcare reform? The horror!

That’s not to say that Republicans would have somehow been all kissy-kissy with Clinton -- they weren’t very nice to her husband, after all.

Not very nice.... That's quite a way to describe the constant attacks, inquisitorial approach to his background, and the use of impeachment as a political tool.

But I doubt she would have had the debt ceiling debacle or the deep gridlock of the last four years, because it was Obamacare that elected a fresh new class of deeply ideological Republicans who thought they were having their own transformative political movement, and they were willing to do massive damage to their party, their own political fortunes and, in my opinion, to the country in order to take a stand against “business as usual” -- business that included legislating or paying our bills.

Because using the debt ceiling as political theater, and shutting down the government, was something that the Republicans never dreamed of doing when Bill Clinton was President. That is, if we're again using the term "counter-factual" to mean, "ignoring indisputable fact." Further, if McArdle believes her own argument about the increasing polarization of the electorate, and was paying any attention to the likely outcome of the election, the difference is at most one of (slight) degree -- the odds of the Democrats holding the House were vanishingly small, and one would have expected the Republicans voted into formerly Democratic seats to be part of a new partisan wave. Predictably, McArdle offers no acknowledgement of the fact that the Democrats held the Senate, or the fact that a smaller Democratic loss in the House would not have changed the subsequent power dynamic in which House Republicans refuse not only to compromise, but refuse to legislate.

Besides, I thought McArdle was taking the position that the problem was healthcare reform, not the debt driven by the economic meltdown and financial industry bailout. Why does McArdle believe that the Tea Party would have ignored the issues that underlie their genesis, and become complacent in relation to the bail-out, but for healthcare reform? If they were so obsessed with healthcare reform, how is it that they (mistakenly?) voted into office those who chose to focus on the debt ceiling and force a government shut-down? For that matter, the Republican Party could have easily bypassed its relatively small number of Tea Party members and passed a funding bill, simply by allowing a funding bill to reach the floor -- so how is it that this isn't a problem inside the Republican Party, as opposed to one supposedly driven almost exclusively by the President's being Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton?

Of course, in my counterfactual, Hillary also probably wouldn’t have proposed ambitious health-care reform; she’d have done something more modest, like a Medicaid expansion.

More modest... except had McArdle been paying any attention to the Tea Party, she would have heard them complain about any program that directs money to the undeserving poor. She might have noticed the right-wing demagoguery over SCHIP, a program to insure children. She might have even noticed that Republican governors have gone out of their way -- to the point of litigating the issue to the Supreme Court -- to avoid accepting free money to expand Medicaid.

To my mind, however, that would have been a much better outcome for everyone. So there’s my counterfactual for the summer: If Hillary Clinton had won, Obamacare wouldn’t have happened, and Democrats -- and the country -- would be better off.

I'm sure that when McArdle and her husband offer their wealthy friends cocktails, perhaps with some sort of dipping sauce McArdle whips up herself in her Thermomix, that's the sort of observation that makes them chuckle. To notice how the PPACA helps actual people? That's beneath her notice. I don't personally believe that Hillary Clinton would have embraced McArdle's notion of modesty, or that she would have so easily folded on a more ambitious plan when faced with Republican opposition -- if I were to accept that counter-factual, I think we have to include the probability that Clinton would have been viewed within her own party as a failure, and would likely have faced a primary challenge after her first term. As Clinton would not have found that acceptable, it's reasonable to conclude that she would have found a way to stick to her guns.

Why Stop at Biting Off Your Nose?

In one of those "Polls don't tell you everything" moments, as by now pretty much everybody has heard, Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary race to a guy who appears to be wholly unqualified for public office by any objective standard -- but who happens to be a reactionary Tea Partier. A column in the New Yorker observes that, until now, the Republican establishment had been doing a good job at having their preferred candidates beat Tea Party challengers,

Jim Messina, Obama’s former campaign manager, tweeted gleefully, “Eric Cantor losing. So much for the R’s “tea party doesn’t control us” narrative.” He added, “That vomiting sound you hear is wise R’s who just realized what the ‘16 nominee will have to say & do to get thru primary.”

But this might be taking the argument too far. Clearly, the Tea Party hasn’t gone away, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. In most big primary contests around the country, the G.O.P. establishment candidates have won, and those from Tea Party have been routed.

It does appear that when the Republicans carefully select candidates for open seats where they will face Tea Party challengers, and carefully support incumbents likely to face strong Tea Party challenges, they have developed a pretty good skill set for defeating challengers in key districts. The lesson here seems to be that you can't trust the polls, and had best apply that type of energy and skill set to every race in which you don't want a Tea Party challenger to potentially score an upset victory -- or be prepared for some surprising upsets.

Among the joys of elevating the Tea Party as a core constituency, not only that you have to cater to their politics in a manner that can turn off independent and swing voters, it's that they don't seem at all likely to forget that their power is at the primary level. Cantor's defeat is going to re-energize them. These challenges are going to continue.

Facts Make the Tea Party Veer to the Political Left on Spending?

This isn't new, but I just came across it.

In fact, a sophisticated poll covering 31 budget items as well as revenue sources conducted around the 2010 elections found that, even then, Republican, Democratic and independent voters all agreed on much higher taxes and much deeper defense cuts as the most striking elements of how the budget should be crafted....

...[S]upport for government spending has varied somewhat cyclically since the[ 1964 election], but only within a relatively narrow range, as recorded by the gold standard of public opinion research, the General Social Survey [data archives here].

The GSS asks about more than two dozen specific problems or program areas, asking if the amount we’re spending is “too little,” “too much” or “about right.” Not only do most Americans think we’re spending too little in almost every area — most conservatives also think the same. Indeed — hold onto your hats — even most conservative Republicans feel that way as well....

The researchers also found broad agreement across party lines. Their first report noted, “Among a total of 31 areas, on average Republicans, Democrats and independents agreed on 22 areas — that is, all three groups agreed on whether to cut, increase or maintain funding. In 9 other areas there was dissensus.” That’s not to say there weren’t differences. Republicans cut much less from defense — $55.6 billion for core defense (versus $109.4 billion) — and much less overall — $100.7 billion (versus $146 billion) — than Americans as a whole. But even so, the position of Republican respondents overall was still dramatically to the left of the political conservation in Washington....

[Tea Party members were] more conservative than Republicans overall, but they still come across as wild-eyed socialists compared to their D.C. representatives:

Those who described themselves as “very sympathetic” to the Tea Party (14% of the full sample), as would be expected, raised taxes and revenues less than Republicans in general, and less than Democrats and independents. Even so, on average, Tea Party sympathizers found a quite substantial $188.2 billion in additional revenues to reduce the deficit ($105.2 billion in individual income taxes).

This sort of information makes it more understandable why the Republicans have proved to be such poor fiscal stewards when they hold power. They demagogue about taxation and spending, but prioritize budget increases in areas such as military spending and revenue reduction via tax policy that favors the wealthy and corporations. When it comes to actual budget cuts, they can read the polls as well as anybody else. In specific regard to Medicare and Social Security,

Combining GSS data from 2000 to 2012, and asking about Social Security and spending on “improving and protecting the nation’s health” (GSS’s closest match with Medicare), liberal Democrats thought we were spending “too little” rather than “too much” on one or both by a margin of 87.1 percent to 2.4 percent — a ratio of over 36-to-1. But all other groups of Americans held the same view, even conservative Republicans — just not by the same overwhelming amount. They “only” thought we were spending “too little” rather than “too much” by a margin of 59.2 percent to 13.1 percent — a ratio of 4.5-to-1. With figures like that — all well to the left of Democrats in D.C. — it’s no wonder that conservatives in Congress always talk about “saving” Social Security and Medicare, and forever try to get Democrats to take the lead in proposing actual cuts.

The Republicans are not willing to lose the next election by savaging domestic spending in a manner necessary to even make up for their spending increases and tax cuts, let alone make cuts dramatic enough to put the budget into balance or to create a surplus and spend down the debt. Instead, when they take power, we get Dick Cheney-type comments that "deficits don't matter". Instead, if you want a balanced budget, they offer the worst of both worlds -- tax policies that reduce revenue and spending policies that increase the overall budget, resulting in a significant increase in the nation's debt.

The Republican Party Can No Longer Blame Bush

Okay, I'm really turning that line back on the political right, specifically those factions that have tried to turn the War in Afghanistan into "Obama's War" and the slow economic recovery resulting from the Bush-era economic collapse into "Obama's economy". No doubt, memories of Bush did play a role in holding some voters in the Democratic column where they might otherwise have supported a Republican contender.

Nonetheless, when I read something like this, I think it's fair to say that it was the Republican Party that lost this election, not Bush. It is fair to say that Bush caused damage and that the Republican Party has not recovered from that damage, but I don't think that damage rises to the level that it either cost the party this election or, with more responsible leadership, would have remained a significant issue four years out.

But in reality the more pressing problem is that Republicans are still a party badly damaged by the George W. Bush years. The GOP has traditionally held huge advantages on foreign policy and the economy. That advantage is gone now. And Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate to give the party a refresh on those issues, particularly when the gettable voters were downscale whites. It isn’t that Republicans aren’t reaching enough voters; voters simply don’t believe the GOP is competent to govern.

The Republican Party has long held undeserved advantages on... I think it's more fair to call it "the military" as opposed to foreign policy, and on the economy. Past Republican Presidents did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "tax and spend", while running up record deficits. They did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "weak", while committing the U.S. to foreign military escapades that were of questionable value to national security, with sometimes disastrous results. Bush didn't depart from that formula - he simply kicked it up a notch.

But that's still not why the Republican Party lost. The Republican Party lost because it chose to nominate Mitt Romney. I'm certainly not convinced that any of the other declared candidates would have won, at least once the few who displayed any signs of "paleoconservatism" were drummed out of the pool, but let's recall a few things: Bush dreamed of an ethnically inclusive Republican Party. When he ran for office he favored immigration reform, albeit of a somewhat watered down nature. Senator John McCain was a champion of the DREAM Act. John McCain responded to anti-immigrant sentiments in his party by abandoning any support for immigration reform. Mitt Romney predictably tried to come down on multiple sides of the issue, but was not credible. And the Republican Party lost votes as a result - vote losses that cannot be blamed on Bush.

You want a party that is credible on foreign / military policy? Even though he chose to endorse President Obama, Colin Powell is still a Republican. No, I'm not saying run Powell, and I'm well aware of the positions taken by his critics, but I am saying that there are Republicans that continue to have credibility with the public. It was not the Democratic Party that chose to marginalize that faction of the Republican Party.

Obama did not really propose anything new on the economy or foreign policy fronts, but he did make contraception, rape, and Roe v. Wade a large part of this campaign. He constantly portrayed Romney as a man with “the social policies of the 1950s.” Apparently this worked.

I'm sure it played a role in President Obama's advantage among women, but again that's not something you can pin on Bush. G.W. ran as an unapologetically pro-life candidate, and implemented a lot of policies that made the pro-choice crowd angry, but he knew where to draw the line. He didn't come across as the type who wanted to ban contraception or who would make crackpot statements on sexual assault, and I don't think he would have left any ambiguity about where he stood on those issues. Romney tried to dance around the issues, and I doubt that anybody was left satisfied - the social conservatives he was attempting to appease, or the women who questioned whether he would stand up even for their right to access contraception.

The "back to the 1950's" issues, let's recall, arose in no small part from the statements of Tea Party candidates. In many ways the Tea Party is a reinvention of a certain bloc of Republican voters, but it was the Republican establishment and right-wing media that chose to amplify their voice and power. That helped the Republicans gain seats in 2010, but appears to have contributed to their loss in 2012. It definitely contributed to some of the Democratic victories in the Senate.

So let's say this: Right now it is fair to say that the economy is struggling back from collapse, and that the present economic conditions are in significant part an echo of the Bush Administration's mistakes, but that it would have been at least theoretically possible to have a more robust recovery had the President advanced (and if the Republicans would have allowed) certain recovery measures that were not tried, or were not strengthened when they proved inadequate. Right now it is fair to say that the echo of G.W. Bush played a role in why the public is suspicious of the Republican Party on foreign / military policy and economic issues, and probably contributed to the line-up of candidates from which Mitt Romney was deemed "the most electable".

But from this point forward, it's ownership time. It's Obama's job to keep the nation on a path to recovery. It's the Republican Party's job to find a candidate who is credible on foreign policy and economic issues. (As was obvious some months ago, Jeb Bush was already seeing the handwriting on the wall and has long been positioning himself to be that candidate four years from now.) Acknowledge his actual contribution if appropriate, but from this point forward the only politician who is entitled to say "It's G.W.'s fault" is Jeb, if he cannot get his own quest to be President back on track.

Yet Another Weak Argument Against Gay Marriage

Doug Mainwaring, "co-founder of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots", has decided that he doesn't support gay marriage. For some reason, the Washington Post decided that this was a sufficiently newsworthy development that Mainwaring should be given space to publish an editorial explaining his views. And thus we find one of the weakest arguments against gay marriage that I have seen presented in a major publication.

Mainwaring opens by describing an anti-gay marriage petition in Maryland, and describes how some proponents of gay marriage were surprised to see people they knew signing a petition in opposition. He then recites,

While only 56,650 certified signatures were necessary to get the measure on the ballot, more than 160,000 signatures were collected and delivered to the Maryland Secretary of State.

There are what? Close to 6 million people in Maryland? Why is Mainwaring's reaction tot the "160,000" figure, "Why are there so many," instead of "Why are there so few?" Mainwaring proceeds to give a breakdown by party alignment of the people who signed and, although noting that a majority were Republican, proclaiming, "It’s not just Republicans who object to this legislation. This is a common, mainstream concern."

Later, Mainwaring makes the implicit admission that his argument is weak: "A signature on a petition actually says very little". If it says so little, why is Mainwaring opening with an argument he implicitly concedes to be a house of cards?

What is Mainwaring actually trying to argue? That if support for or opposition to an issue breaks down along partisan lines we can dismiss it as "uncommon" or "outside of the mainstream"? If so, he's probably the only Tea Party leader in the nation who holds that position. Would we have found him arguing at his Tea Party meetings over the past few years, "Opposition to the President's agenda is breaking down along partisan lines, so we can only conclude that the opponents are unprincipled partisans whose positions should not be considered"?

Mainwaring complains that advocates of gay marriage should have pushed for something less than full marriage equality. Why? Because in 2010 it appeared that the push might backfire, and prevent the passage of any form of bill establishing marriage rights for gay couples. He insists that the argument remains correct, even though history proved it wrong with the passage of a marriage equality law.

Mainwaring argues,

I am certain that the vast majority are others who, like me, simply view “marriage” as an immutable term that can only apply to heterosexuals.

If it needs to be said, that is not a logical argument. Mainwaring could as easily argue on behalf of people who believe that the word "gay" should only apply to feelings of "happiness". More than that, his argument is self-refuting. If the petition he is supporting were merely to keep things exactly as they are, with full marriage rights given to gay couples but substituting a different term for "marriage", he might plausibly be able to argue that people were concerned only about the word "marriage". But he's supporting an initiative that is intended to strip gay couples of any right to marry - he would have to be obtuse to believe that most people supporting the initiative care only about semantics.

Mainwaring continues,

It’s undeniable that, from age to age, marriage has been humanity’s greatest success and source of prosperity, crossing all cultures and religions. We shouldn’t mess with it.

Dare I say, even without straying from the sphere of heterosexuality, over the course of human history we have "messed with" the concept of marriage in a considerable number of ways? "From King Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines, to the eleven or so wives of Muhammad, to the 27 wives of Joseph Smith, the same basic concept of marriage has crossed all cultures and religions...." Or, "When Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, he was supporting a tradition of marriage that dates back to Isaac and Jacob."

Similarly, would Mainwaring have applied the same argument to anti-miscegenation laws? If not, why not, and if so, how is it that making dramatic changes to the number of wives you can legally have, the age at which you can marry, or the race of your prospective spouse don't constitute "messing with" marriage in any meaningful sense? For that matter, would Mainwaring see a law permitting polygamy, permitting marriage to children and first cousins, allowing fathers to compel their daughters to marry designated husbands, or re-implementing anti-miscegenation laws as no big deal, because they're consistent with most of human and religious history?

More to the point, declaring that marriage is "marriage has been humanity’s greatest success" does not make it so. Insisting that it is "humanity’s greatest... source of prosperity" does not make it so. (By way of example, I personally would have a lot more money in the bank had I remained single).

Just as the concept of marriage has evolved over time while remaining viable, even within religions, there's no reason to believe that its further evolution through legal gay marriage will have any material impact on other married couples. Having examined every bit of evidence I can find, I feel quite comfortable asserting that gay marriages have absolutely no impact on my marriage - none at all. They are irrelevant to my marriage. What magical power does Mainwaring believe gay marriages hold that will weaken my marriage and others like it, and why haven't we seen the impact of that dark magic in any state or nation that permits gay marriage?

Then, of course, the kicker:

Full disclosure: I am gay.

Was that supposed to be an appeal to authority - "I am gay, and so my argument must be presumed to be carefully considered and selfless"? My reaction to the disclosure is less charitable: Had Mainwaring believed his argument to hold water, he would have allowed it to stand on its own. His declaration of his homosexuality is irrelevant - it does not make his argument any stronger or weaker - so if he believes he has made his case why present it as if it's some sort of trump card?

Same-sex relationships are different from heterosexual relationships, and gay men and lesbians need to accept that and design their own tradition.

I found a video of Mainwaring explaining the logic behind that assertion:

Okay, that wasn't actually Mainwaring, but his implied "square pegs and round holes' argument is right at the kindergarten level. When (if ever) can we expect more from Mainwaring than platitudes?

A few years ago, I was on the other side of the fence on this topic. But the more I read, thought, investigated and attempted to defend my position, the more I realized that I couldn’t.

I can't say that I'm surprised that Mainwaring had difficulty defending his former position, given his demonstrated inability to articulate a logical defense of his present position. I would like to read Mainwaring's old arguments, if they're available anywhere, because I suspect that I would find considerable amusement in an argument he made in earnest that's weaker than the one he presents in his current opinion piece.

David Brooks Takes On The Rebel Without a Cause

Taking Brooks out of context in a completely unfair manner,

My own theory revolves around a single bad idea.

Which of your theories doesn't, David?

Now to be more fair...

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.

If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition.

Brooks' example is of a guy who railed against organized religion in the name of Jesus, then retreated when confronted with scripture showing that "In fact, Jesus preached a religious doctrine, prescribed rituals and worshiped in a temple." The fact that he retreated in the face of authority, it would seem, undermines Brooks' point. When confronted with authority this person didn't say, "I don't care what facts you have, I'm entitled to my own views and interpretations," he folded. Brooks also overestimates how completely we can divorce ourselves from the society in which we are raised - from the values imbued by our social institutions, parents and families, peers, role models.... It was only a few days ago that Brooks was claiming that there's some form of unified white culture, breaking down on economic lines, with the top twenty percent having a different value set than the bottom thirty - so much so that he used the term "tribe" to describe each group. Now he would have us believe that each and every person in those groups formed their values in a vacuum and that the similar outcomes are a matter of pure coincidence?

Brooks tells us a lot about himself when he lectures,

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.

Brooks' conceit of the "young rebel", it would seem, is a college student who is expressing strong, unfocused opposition to the status quo but does not have an academic framework upon which he can hang his opinions. It's reasonable to say that if somebody who has that form of unfocused opposition doesn't find peers who share his views, a movement that shares his views, a credible history or movement that supports his views, he's unlikely to either persuade anybody to share his views or to create a movement. Why does this theoretical individual concern Brooks?

What I suspect Brooks is really trying to do here is to attack the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, to titter at them as a bunch of uninformed kids who don't really know anything other than that they're angry. "At least the Hippies¹ knew they opposed the draft, right?" Never mind that the Occupy movement wasn't driven by college students and had, at its core, a very clear impetus - "We don't know the means, but we need to reform a system that benefits the top 1% at the expense of pretty much everybody else." That inspiration is remarkably similar to the objections that brought about the Tea Party movement, a bail-out of wealthy bankers with taxpayer money. If anything, the rapidity with which the Tea Party movement was captured by corporate interests and channeled into a movement defending the status quo is much more deserving of Brooks rejection of "rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision" s "just a feeble spasm". Seriously - to go from vehemently objecting against the financial industry bailout to being a tool of the political party most wedded to Wall Street? How feeble is that.

Brooks continues his lecture to the theoretical "rebel without a cause" college student,

Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

So the message is, unless you can find a way to replace existing authorities and institutions with something better, don't bother? It's not enough to advocate unless you identify a means? And as you'll inevitably fail in that endeavor, why trying? Instead ally yourself with the authorities and institutions that give your ideas "focus and a means to turn passion into change" - that is, support the status quo and try to change things from the inside?

Indeed, a core idea worthy of David Brooks.²
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1. Brooks' editorial is titled, "How to Fight the Man". What decades does he believe this is?

2. This is the story of how "Don't trust anybody over thirty" becomes "Don't trust anybody under thirty", a story not of social change or revolution but of assimilation.

There's No Return in Backing a Loser

Some people in South Carolina are irate that their governor, supposedly a tea party type,¹ has backed Romney. Some people are puzzled that Jon Huntsman, having decided that he's the only major candidate who is never going to get a "bubble", is reportedly going to endorse Romney.

But there should be no surprise in any of that.

If you want to be on good terms with the man who is potentially the next President, you back him. You don't try to tear him down. Ask Hillary Clinton's backers how they have fared in terms of cabinet positions and political appointments in relation to those who backed President Obama.

Still, I sense no enthusiasm.
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1. Gov. Nikki Haley was troubled by Romney's healthcare reforms in Massachusetts. Not when she backed him in 1988, mind you, but only after it became fashionable to demagogue about the issue in order to curry favor with Tea Partiers. I'm sure the timing is a coincidence.

Tea Party Echoes of "Clinging to Guns and Religion"

According to former Member of Congress Tom Davis (R-VA) on Real Time,

Bill, what has happened is people aren't voting their pocketbook. They're voting culture. They're voting how they feel about gays, how they feel about God. They're voting Guns. They're not voting economic because they don't see their interests bound up economically. They see it, how does the world look at them.

Right-winger Dana Loesch agreed on the social issues, but disagreed on economics.

Couldn't the Davis comments be paraphrased as, oh, I don't know...

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Oh, right - then-Candidate Obama recognized the influence of economics, so it would appear that he was more in agreement with Loesch than with Davis. Or perhaps I should say, she with him.

In fairness to Davis, although I expect that old habits die hard and most Members of Congress spend years avoiding making statements that might be confused with candor, it's easier to be honest when you are no longer running for office. In fairness to Loesch, she seems to be way outside of her depths.

The Un-Exceptionalism of Kathleen Parker

Kathleen Parker has launched another insipid attack on President Obama - he doesn't use the word "exceptional" enough to satisfy her. No, not that he doesn't use it - she things he "studiously avoid[s]" using the word. Much like "the left" supposedly "demonizes" wealthy people by using words like "wealthy" to describe them, or her suggestion that use of the "passive voice" in a speech means that you're a passive person... let's just say "Mistakes were made" in that abysmal column.

This also reflects Parker's tiresome tendency to try to jump on a bandwagon that seems to have already passed her by. Perhaps she's simply trying to revive a tired, old attack. Perhaps she's just plain out of ideas, so she has to flip through her "2009 Washington Times Thought of the Day" calendar for inspiration. Yes, the roots of Parker's nonsense appear to lie in right-wing attacks that deliberately take out-of-context and distort a 2009 speech.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we've got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we're not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone.

If we reject the conclusion that Parker is stupid, that leaves lazy, dishonest or some combination of the two. I'm putting my money on "some combination of the two". We don't have to question the dishonesty part - Parker devotes about a fifth of her column to regurgitating right-wing calumnies about that speech.

Parker actually gets worse from there:

On the right, the word "exceptional" - or "exceptionalism" - lately has become a litmus test for patriotism. It's the new flag lapel pin, the one-word pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution. To many on the left, it has become birther code for "he's not one of us."

By "on the right", she presumably means "with right-wing columnists who push the same nonsense I'm pushing" - there are plenty of examples of that. Beyond that it's not clear what she's talking about. She, of course, provides no context for or example of this supposed tendency of "the right". As for her comical assertion about "the left", that's pure fabrication. A hollow man. After all, it's easy to fabricate an opponent, put nonsense into his mouth, then say, "That position is nonsense." Identifying the actual positions of your opponents and responding to them honestly and substantively? Not something that Parker is particularly good at....

Parker knows the reality, which is that there are people on all points of the political spectrum who take knee-jerk exceptionalism with a grain of salt. Why? Because they know enough history to understand how exceptionalism can be abused by political parties to lead the nation into self-destructive actions and policies. Because they read Ozymandias in high school and understand that you can be pretty damn special at a particular point in time but fade into oblivion if you don't do the hard work necessary to maintain and build upon the things that make you special. This doesn't mean that they don't tear up when they hear the National Anthem or enjoy a good 4th of July parade. It means that they understand that there's more to being exceptional than saying "I'm exceptional". That's the sort of self-esteem exercise that, in any other context, conservatives are supposed to make fun of.

Parker's prevarications continue:

Between left and right, however, are those who merely want affirmation that all is right with the world. Most important, they want assurance that the president shares their values. So why won't Obama just deliver the one word that would prompt arias from his doubters?

Okay, we can start out with the statistics Parker presented earlier in her column - that 58% of Americans "think Obama believes that the 'U.S. has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world,'" while 37% do not. That figure suggests that, to the extent "independents" are involved, we're largely talking about people who already lean to the hard right or are Tea Party-style "independents" - Republicans + Right-Wing Independents = 37%. Parker's column (and those like it) is penned for a population of readers who uncritically accept attacks on the President and the political left.¹ I suspect that, to Parker, the only thing that mattered out of the poll was the following "implication":

Given that Americans already believe that the U.S. is exceptional and that its status as the greatest nation in the world is at risk, Republican candidates' political challenges would be to convince voters that Obama's policies and actions on the world stage are to blame, and that he does not share their values on this issue.

Who cares about the truth, right?

Beyond that, as Parker is not stupid, she knows that the central thesis of her column depends on a false premise. Nobody was hovering over the State of the Union Address waiting to hear a specific, talismanic word drop from the President's lips. No, what Parker knows is that it's the media coverage of a State of the Union Address that shapes the public's reaction. By penning a column like this she all-but-admits that her goal is to advance the Republican Party's effort to make the speech a negative, and that when it comes to helping her Republican allies or attacking President Obama she has no scruples.²

Update: If you're not looking for a talismanic word, it's easy to find references to American exceptionalism in the President's speech.
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1. It's a natural human tendency to be less critical of arguments with which you agree; this isn't unique to the right.

2. By my count, in his various State of the Union Addresses, G.W. referred to the United States by the talismanic word, "exceptional," a whopping zero times.

Opposition to Globalization is Not That Sophisticated

Robert Lighthizer suggests that the Tea Party is opposed to free trade, and that its opposition could create problems for the political parties.

At first glance, the Tea Party’s position may seem contradictory: its small-government, pro-business views usually go hand in hand with free trade. But if you consider the dominant themes underlying its agenda, it makes sense that the movement would be wary about free-trade policies. For starters, Tea Partyers are frustrated with Washington, and that includes its failure to make free trade work for America. Our trade deficit in manufactured goods was about $4.3 trillion during the last decade, and the country lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs.

The anti-free trade sentiments of the Tea Party movement, and similar movements that came before it, is focused on that last word alone - jobs. Anti-free trade, anti-globalization movements gain steam when people perceive that "They're taking our jobs". (The same thing is presently inspiring heightened opposition to immigration, and the rash of demands for strong action against illegal immigration.) When jobs are plentiful and pay reasonably well, most people have better things to worry about - and, frankly, would just as soon continue to be able to buy cheap imported junk at the local Walmart.

If the economy and job market recover, free trade and globalization will again become a background issue, important to some voters but not at a level that's going to much concern our nation's political leaders. And that's before considering the amount of money and influence behind globalization. If the economy and job market remain bad then, yes, popular opposition is likely to continue and perhaps grow. That could create problems for the political parties, but I still wouldn't expect any anti-globalization legislation. The powerful interests that want globalization haven't gone away, and we already have sufficient dependence on globalized markets that "unringing the bell" would both be very complicated and take many, many years. To the extent that there is "a fundamental reorientation of our country’s attitude toward trade and globalization," I expect it to be rhetorical - politicians making anti-globalization statements when running for office, but continuing with business as usual after being elected.

When Table Scraps Are No Longer Good Enough

Kathleen Parker appears concerned that Sarah Palin may damage the Republican Party in the 2012 election.

But [Rep. Spencer] Bachus [who alleged that Palin cost the Republicans control of the Senate], possibly the highest-ranking member of Congress to confront the obvious, or to tempt the fates that now await him, was brave to speak foul of the princess party girl as he now invites the considerable scorn of the new and improved GOP base.

Although Tea Party members tend to be over-45 white men - no implication intended regarding Palin's popularity, but infer at will - there is considerable overlap with the demographic formerly known as the GOP base, a.k.a. white Southerners and social conservatives, libertarian streak notwithstanding.

A year ago, Sarah Palin appeared quite content to be part of the Republican Party, and to want to bring the Tea Party movement into the party. Now she appears to be on the verge of war with that faction of the Republican Party that prefers to serve the business and financial elite, and which increasingly appears to view Palin as a detriment to the party and a likely catastrophe as its Presidential candidate.

This highlights one of the difficulties the Republican Party has, in effect, made for itself in trying to bring together three factions that have little in common - in simple terms, the wealthy, libertarians/small government conservatives, and social/religious conservatives (a/k/a "the base") - and to hold that coalition by feeding the rich while appeasing the other two factions. Sarah Palin's supporters may not like the Democratic Party, but they appear almost as distrustful of establishment Republicans. Palin appears to have the present intention of maximizing her personal fortunes based upon her popularity with social/religious conservatives, but it appears that she also wants to be respected within the party both as a politician and a power broker. Or, as Parker says,

Not only would Palin the presidential candidate drive away other Republican candidates, but she would most certainly lose a national election. Thus, the GOP finds itself in a pickle: How to shed itself of this attractive nuisance?

Embrace her, and they may have to live with her as their candidate. Push her away, and they may have to deal with her as a third party candidate - and, unpopular though she may be with the public at large, it's nonetheless possible that she would be a spoiler extraordinaire, and that she would outpoll the Republican presidential nominee. Because the Tea Party movement has tasted power and, assuming somebody like Palin decides to peel the scales from their eyes, there's no reason to believe that they're going to knowingly settle for the usual table scraps while the Republicans serve the wealthy. ("Just don't look... Just don't look" - But you can't stop yourself, can you....)

Fixing the Mortgage Mess

An opinion column in the Times is skeptical that the mortgage documentation mess can be fixed with legislation:

The banks and other players in the securitization industry now seem to be looking to Congress to snap its fingers to make the whole problem go away, preferably with a law that relieves them of liability for their bad behavior. But any such legislative fiat would bulldoze regions of state laws on real estate and trusts, not to mention the Uniform Commercial Code. A challenge on constitutional grounds would be inevitable.

Asking for Congress’s help would also require the banks to tacitly admit that they routinely broke their own contracts and made misrepresentations to investors in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Would Congress dare shield them from well-deserved litigation when the banks themselves use every minor customer deviation from incomprehensible contracts as an excuse to charge a fee?

It may well be inevitable that some lawyers would attempt to challenge a federal law, but is there a reason to believe that the litigation would be successful? Federal law can bulldoze state laws - it's called preemption. For the most part, even now, homeowners don't seem particularly inclined to fight the foreclosure process. Legislation would further narrow the pool of people willing to litigate, and banks could redouble their efforts to document those transactions so as to moot their cases.

Perhaps the author is speaking of the potential litigation between the various financial institutions involved - attempts to force buy-backs of mortgages or securities, fraud actions, breach of contract actions.... But the players seem to know the risks associated with that game, which is why they're presently working through their lobbyists as opposed to their law firms.

There are alternatives. One measure that both homeowners and investors in mortgage-backed securities would probably support is a process for major principal modifications for viable borrowers; that is, to forgive a portion of their debt and lower their monthly payments. This could come about through either coordinated state action or a state-federal effort.

The large banks, no doubt, would resist; they would be forced to write down the mortgage exposures they carry on their books, which some banking experts contend would force them back into the Troubled Asset Relief Program. However, allowing significant principal modifications would stem the flood of foreclosures and reduce uncertainty about the housing market and mortgage securities, giving the authorities time to devise approaches to the messy problems of clouded titles and faulty loan conveyance.

Unless the documentation is in order, how do you know you're dealing with the correct party? Or is the author's assumption that, despite the irregularities and fraud in banks' attempt to document mortgages, they banks have it right in the vast majority of cases and eventually the paperwork will catch up?

Also, which is more likely to come out of the next Congress - a law making it easier for financial institutions to overcome deficiencies in their documentation of mortgages, or another bailout of the financial industry? It may be easy to forget now that the astroturfers have redefined the movement, but the Tea Party Movement grew out of popular disgust at the first bailout.

Update: Who could have seen this coming.

The Tea Party Purity Test

As I see it, the context of Michael Gerson's lament on the Tea Party is that he represents the faction of the Republican Party that is taking the long view - that an embrace of the Tea Party is likely to bring long-term political pain even if it results in short-term gain. But if Michelle Malkin is his "Exhibit A" of "childish political thought", perhaps he should take ownership of and responsibility for his own past actions and opinions.

In Tea Party theory, inexperience is itself seen as a kind of qualification. People like O'Donnell are actually preferable to people like Rove, because they haven't been tainted by public trust or actual achievement. This is the attitude of the adolescent -- the belief that the world began on their thirteenth birthday. It is also a sign of childish political thought.

So let's flash back to 1999, when the nation at large was introduced to G.W. Bush, with that introduction engineered in no small part by Karl Rove. His inexperience was of no concern, we were assured, because he would surround himself by experts. He was a different breed of Republican - an outsider; a uniter, not a divider; a compassionate conservative; an advocate for immigration reform. Don't ask about his "lost years" - he had become a sober, Christian conservative, and that should be enough for anybody.

From what I've read, a lot of Tea Party members haven't been politically active during their lives. They may have voted, but they didn't spend a lot of time reading about or thinking about the issues. That, frankly, is far from a surprise. You can read the paper before work (or, at least, you could have back in the day of most Tea Party members), work all day, watch the TV news before bed and think you're informed, and that would likely set you above and beyond most Americans in terms of your effort. But let's face it - at the end of the day that's likely to leave you with only a superficial understanding of the issues. Hence partisans like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and, yes, Karl Rove are able to identify opportunities to sink their hooks and reel people in, the goal not being to illuminate but to create a following. Had Karl Rove created the Tea Party movement in his own image, Gerson would be praising his genius.

I find it interesting that Gerson blasts Michelle Malkin, for her criticism of Karl Rove, as part of the problem - she's "childish". Why not go after Rush Limbaugh for saying what amounts to the same thing. Why not go after the big dog? Oh, that's right - because for doing that even Karl Rove can be called to heel, and Gerson's no Karl Rove. Malkin's prominent enough to be recognized, but not so prominent that Gerson is likely to face blowback.

Gerson's first complaint about the Tea Party approach is that it sends the message,

The facts do not matter. Politics is war carried on by other means. Anyone who doesn't consistently take one side is a traitor.

Would any of that bother Gerson if the warfere weren't internecine? Michelle Malkin has been using the same tactics ever since she gained prominence. What about Ann Coulter and her eager use of the word "Treason"? The facts don't matter now? When did they matter under Bush?

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

What about Ari Fleischer's infamous warning¹ (his very late explanation taken for what it's worth)?

Gerson continues with his explanation of what makes the Tea Party's political thought "childish":

Some conservatives have adopted the Bolshevik approach to information and the media: Every personal feeling, every independent thought, every inconvenient fact, must be subordinated to the party line -- the Tea Party line.

This reminds me of something....

When I was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a columnist for the Washington Post, I put away childish things.

Gerson's accusation is something of a hollow man - he doesn't name a conservative who fits his accusation, although by implication he's including Malkin. I doubt he can name a conservative commentator who truly fits that description, who has abandoned past opinions and principle and now subordinates his every opinion to the Tea Party. Were he to find such an individual he would do us all a very great favor, because we would finally know what the Tea Party stands for.

Gerson offers up a second criticism of "Tea Party purists", again without identifying a single such purist, as believing that "their ascendance makes other elements of the conservative movement unnecessary":

If Tea Party activists believe they can win in a political coalition so pure that it doesn't include strong, mainstream conservatives such as Karl Rove, they are delusional. And they are hurting their own cause.

Is this to be read with an eye toward history, with G.W. and Karl Rove deciding that they could rule the country based upon the support of 51% of the electorate, rejecting the qualms of the "paleocons", the "reality-based community", fiscal conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, and any other faction whose believes and agenda didn't match their own? If so, yes, he has a point - if you represent a minority of Americans you will not be able to sustain victory at the ballot box without expanding your base. If not, his complaint reduces to the question of whose elephant ox is being gored.

Gerson's third complaint is a magnification of his second,

Third, some conservatives seem to display special venom for those who are "compromised" by the experience of actually winning and governing. Rove, according to Malkin, is an "establishment Beltway strategist."

How much of the last few decades of political history, including campaigns involving Karl Rove, are we to ignore? Because in case Gerson missed it, everybody wants to be an outsider. One of G.W.'s remarkable feats in constructing his brush-cutting cowboy image was convincing the nation that he, grandson of a U.S. Senator, son of a former President, beneficiary of his family's vast wealth and generations of political connections, was a Washington outsider. When you work as hard as Rove has done to turn words like "insider" into slurs, you don't have much ground to stand on when your work is turned against you.

[Karl Rove's résumé] does not make him always right. But it means he has had responsibilities bigger than running a Web site. This is an advantage for a commentator, not a drawback.

I joked a while back that the most prominent people held up as possible Republican Presidential nominees - Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney - quit the jobs that supposedly qualify them for the White House. In their recent experience, the only thing they've been running is their mouths. I recognize that Gerson has no love for Sarah Palin, but what do his words say about the rest of his party?

But seriously, the number of prominent right-wing pundits whose most significant "real world" experience came from writing speeches for politicians is high. Can Gerson truly be surprised that many of them fail to 'put away' their 'childish things'?
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1. While I have some sympathy for the idea that Fleischer, in warning Americans to "watch what they say, watch what they do", meant something other than what he said, he had ample opportunity on the very same stage to correct himself and the Bush Administration could easily have issued a clarification. The fact that they did not suggests that, whatever Fleischer's intent, the Bush Administration was content to let the public perception of the remarks stand.

In Fairness to the Tea Party

Daniel Larison makes a point worth noting,

It’s also a fairly low blow to claim that Dinesh D’Souza’s atrocious “anti-colonialist” nonsense has something to do with “the Tea Party style.” As Weigel has pointed out, D’Souza’s horrible arguments about Obama are part of an entire career of horrible D’Souza arguments about a variety of things. Gingrich’s embrace of this nonsense is a function of Gingrich’s enthusiasm for all manner of ignorant demagoguery. Obviously, Beck loves this nonsense and has been pushing it on his show. That’s the only real connection with Tea Partiers, it’s one Brooks doesn’t make, and it would be a case of guilt by association if he did.

Some have a tendency to point to every crazy idea on the right and declare "Tea Party!" Perhaps when Brooks wrote,

I asked the election guru Charlie Cook if there were signs that the Tea Party was scaring away the independents. “I haven’t seen any,” he replied. I asked another Hall of Fame pollster, Peter Hart, if there were Republican or independent voters so alarmed by the Tea Party that they might alter their votes. He ran the numbers and found very few potential defectors.

he should have considered that the Tea Partiers and those who know them are aware of the distinction between what they believe and what Dinesh D'Souza believes, or for that matter between what they believe and what a (some faction of the) Tea Party-endorsed candidate believes.

Perhaps it's fun to think of the Tea Party as "crazy", or to want to attribute D'Souza's bad scholarship or Gingrich's nasty, shallow opportunism (or, as Larison puts it, his "enthusiasm for all manner of ignorant demagoguery") to something other than their own, personal failings. But that doesn't make it true.

No Newt is Good Newt

David Brooks laments how the Tea Party movement has corrupted poor Newt Gingrich,

The Tea Party style is beginning to replicate itself in parts of the conservative world. Dinesh D’Souza’s Forbes cover article, “How Obama Thinks,” contained the sort of untethered assertions that have become the lingua franca of this movement. Obama got his subversive radicalism from his father’s grave, D’Souza postulated: “He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and freedom are code words for economic plunder.” The fact that Newt Gingrich embraced this offensive theory is a sign of how severely the normal intellectual standards have been weakened.

Another version of this, from Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy.

While the Democratic attack on Boehner may or may not work this year, contrary to some Republican commentary, such attacks CAN work. I remember 1995–96, when Dick Morris’s campaign on behalf of Bill Clinton against Newt Gingrich destroyed Gingrich’s credibility, an attack from which Gingrich has still not fully recovered.

Oh, right, poor little Newt - the "intellectual" star of the Republican Party who for some completely unexplainable reason can't stop himself from saying and doing anything that he believes will advance his political aspirations or line his pockets. (No small wonder Lindgren turned comments off for that post.)

Nobody has done a better job of damaging Newt's undeserved reputation as an "intellectual leader" than Newt.

I'm Starting To Like Christine O'Donnell

Not to say I would vote for her, but with every nutty thing she's ever said being pulled out of her past, I admit it. She has a certain charm. Seriously, check out her 'notorious' video:

Look at the smile she serves up in this "mice with human brains" article.

For the most part, her brand of "crazy" seems to be well-meaning, borne of limited experience and intellectual curiosity, not mean-spirited or truly insane.

At one time or another, and at one level or another, haven't we all had a friend like this? A person who has a strong opinion on everything and substantive knowledge about... next to nothing? But they're amusing. If O'Donnell smoked pot, odds are she would be what we call a "granola hippie". "Hey dude, did you know that the man... the man has developed mice with human brains? Really, dude. And all we have to do to eliminate poverty is raise minimum wage to $40 grand a year! Think about it...." All those visits to "Politically Incorrect" and Bill Maher never got her to take even a single toke? (No offense, Bill, even though she's not a blonde it's hard to believe you wouldn't have tried.)

Update:

Nervousness About the Tea Party

Michael Gerson editorializes from the perspective of those GOP insiders who are nervous about how the Tea Party's candidates will affect their political future. Although his general attitude toward the Tea Party movement is one of condescension, Gerson's rhetorical questions are posed to candidates, not to members of the movement - the Republican Party appears to believe that it can coopt the Tea Party movement, but is worried that the political candidates associated with that movement will capture the movement's enthusiasm, and push (or pull) the movement in a direction that is not compatible with the Republican Party's long-term interests.

His column could be viewed as trying to identify wedge issues that would separate some of the Tea Party's candidates from the larger group. Do the candidates believe that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional, and that they should be abolished? Do they believe immigration diminishes the nation? Do they believe their rhetoric about armed resistance to the government's social programs?

Most Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement are understandably concerned about the size and reach of government. Their enthusiasm is a clear Republican advantage. But Tea Party populism is just as clearly incompatible with some conservative and Republican beliefs

At Tapped, Paul Waldman comments on Gerson's column,

Is the Tea Party the new religious right? By which I mean, the grassroots group the GOP uses to mobilize voters, then once in office, keeps serving up symbolic expressions of love without much to show in the way of actual policy goodies, while hoping to keep the crazies under wraps. The fact is that the Republican establishment has always been a bit uncomfortable with the religious right, as much as they need them to win elections. And that establishment may become increasingly unsettled with the Tea Party.

I sense that Gerson would like the Tea Party movement to become a new religious right. A reliable Republican voting bloc that can be kept inside the "tent" through a series of promises and mostly token gestures that don't interfere with the party's larger agenda. What he seems to fear is that the movement will not be coopted, and that its candidates will split the vote resulting in Democratic victories at the polls, or that it will not be content with tokenism and, to maintain a relationship, the GOP will have to adopt positions that are inconsistent with its long-term political viability.

As one would expect from Gerson, he takes no responsibility for the role of his former lord and master in creating the present economic debacle, what a more honest man might deem the cracked foundation upon which the Tea Party movement was built. He does not appear to be sufficiently reflective to consider his own role in the Bush Administration, although I grant that speechwriters are largely fungible. He snarks, "The Democratic political nightmare is now obvious and overwhelming", never mind that the nation continues to reel from an economic collapse and record deficits that started on G.W.'s watch, and that the policies that could have had the most impact on the recovery were broadly opposed by Republicans - he speaks for a party that appears to see benefit in perpetuating economic hardship and has no discernible ideas of its own for how to turn things around. (We're promised a set of ideas sometime in September, about three years late by my measure, timed for the election and not as part of a genuine policy initiative.)

In short, it's pretty typical stuff for Gerson, reflecting the worst aspects of the Republican Party's elite: How to save the Republican Party and ensure that it gains and holds power, even if it represents a policy void, a party with no ideas and no agenda to help or improve the nation.

False Controversy, False Equivalence from the MSM

The Christian Science Monitor offers up an example of drawing false parallels, and of pretending that there's a controversy where none can reasonably be said to exist:

On one side are largely-white "tea party" members depicting President Obama as an African witch doctor, sparking a condemnation from the NAACP last week. On the other is the charge that the Obama Justice Department is "openly hostile" to enforcing civil rights laws against black racists, including members of the New Black Panther Party.

Both charges of racialism, if not outright racism, are incendiary and more powerful because there could be some truth behind each.

First, the historic record is clear that the bulk of decision making on the New Black Panthers case preceded the Obama Administration. Second, there's no actual evidence that the Obama Administration's resolution of the case was racially motivated. Yes, it can be said that "there could be some truth" behind some of the allegations, but rampant speculation that seems to boil down to, "The President is African American and so is the Attorney General, so it must be racial bias" is rank, irresponsible speculation. Was the Bush Administration demonstrating racial bias when it chose not to pursue criminal charges? The difference between "then" and "now" would be what? If you look at the historic context and ignore the President's race, this appears to be a "par for the course" disposition:

[T]he decision not to further pursue the civil case reflected long-standing practice regarding Section 11(b), which prior to the Bush administration had last been used to stop a statewide voter-caging effort. The allegation that would have supported pursuing a broader case was the idea that there was a nationwide effort to place New Black Panthers at polling stations for the purpose of suppressing white votes -- the original complaint read that the NBPP "made statements and posted notice that over 300 members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would be deployed at polling locations during voting on November 4, 2008, throughout the United States." The career attorneys recommended dismissing the case on the basis that there wasn't enough evidence to support that claim.

Not only did no voters come forward to say they had been intimidated by the NBPP that day, there were no further incidents on Election Day 2008 that would have suggested a large-scale effort to intimidate white voters. According to a letter sent to Rep. Lamar Smith by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, the NBPP "suspended" its Philadelphia political chapter over the incident and subsequently disavowed their actions, which seems like an odd thing to do for an organization that is supposedly disclosing its attempt to intimidate white voters in its publicly available materials.

Second, there is no reasonable case that some of the imagery used by Tea Party members is racist, despite the protestation that the racial elements are "accidental". (Where have we heard that before.) I cannot imagine any reasonable person looking at the "Obama the Witch Doctor" poster and not seeing elements of racism.

I recognize that some people find it fun to race bait, then whine, "I didn't do anything racist - my message was completely different. So you must be a racist for thinking I did something racist." But really, if that wasn't the game and the proponent of the image isn't claiming to be exceptionally stupid, what's the defense? To the credit of the Tea Party movement, save for a handful of people who really don't seem very bright, I have not seen anything to suggest that the larger membership defends the use of the image, let alone endorses it.

With both of these controversies, the author paints with a very broad brush - maybe an obscure, isolated case means that somebody in the Justice Department is making decisions based upon race, and that stands as an indictment of the entire Obama Administration; and because a handful of idiots at Tea Party rallies proudly wave around "Obama as a Communist Witch Doctor" posters it somehow means that the tea party movement as a whole endorses the image. A better column would identify the actual parallel - using the actions of an individual or select few to attempt character assassination against a much larger group. (The logical fallacy of "Guilt by Association".)

Also, is it just me or does the entire article read like something you would find in a high school newspaper, or a mediocre college paper? Back in its print days, it's difficult to imagine the Christian Science Monitor running an article this poor.

Reckless Irresponsibility by Republican Political and Opinion Leaders

See Dana Milbank, "The tea party makes trouble with a capital T".

Remember Everything Bad That Happened In The Last Decade?

It actually happened in the last year That's right, folks, in a standard regurgitation of Republican talking points, Mark Thiessen is back with a new entry for the contest.

Now, those of you with memories may recall that George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus, and immediately launched a plan to turn that into a deficit avoid paying down the deficit too quickly by granting massive tax cuts to the wealthy. No, really, I'm being too fair to Bush. As you have a memory you recall that he had a one-size-fits-all tax policy - the economy is strong so we can improve it with a tax cut; the economy is weakening so we need a tax cut to restore it; we're in a recession and nothing improves a weak economy like a tax cut.... The only economic plan he had was to cut taxes for the rich, damn the consequences. (At least so far, Thiessen's distortions are at least on par with Gerson's.)

A quick dose of reality:

That is to say, virtually all of the red ink in the budget is attributable to an economic downturn that started under George "tax cuts will make the economy perfect" Bush, two wars started by President Bush, and those tax cuts that were supposed to fix every imaginable economic problem. TARP and the bailout, started under Bush, and recovery spending represent a very small part of the picture. When Thiessen argues, "Polls show that Americans want candidates for Congress who support spending cuts and consider the national debt the greatest threat to our country, on par with the threat of terrorism", he had best take heed that he is arguing that the public views the devastation caused by his former boss as on par with the 9/11 attacks.

Needless to say, facts be damned, Thiessen wants to put the responsibility for the Bush debacle (each and every one of them, but in this specific context the budget deficit) on President Obama's shoulders:

Last week in Wisconsin, he declared "We've got to get this debt and our deficit under control." This from the man who rammed an $877 billion stimulus bill and a $1 trillion government health-care bill through Congress. In just 17 months, Obama and the Democrats have increased the national debt by 23 percent, and have put the country on track for another decade of red ink.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....

There's also a legitimate question about whether this is the time for austerity or for stimulus spending. Yes, we can grant that Bush's economic incompetence placed the Obama administration in the position of having to deficit spend in order to fund the stimulus bill, and that it will again have to deficit spend to finance a new stimulus bill. But there's no sign that the economy is bouncing back without stimulus spending and, Thiessen's distortions aside, when the economy falters and housing prices are depressed, and unemployment is high, tax revenues go down. Perhaps Thiessen didn't notice that virtually every state is in the midst of a financial crisis, despite the austerity measures they've taken to date, because of the impact of the recession. Certainly, an argument can be made for austerity, but so far the facts suggest that additional stimulus spending is the far wiser choice.

I was agnostic on stimulus spending, and am fiscally conservative by nature - I completely disagreed with the Bush Administration's massive tax cuts backed up with their "deficits don't matter" prattle. (Where was Thiessen at that time? Oh yeah... writing speeches in defense of those policies.) I came to view the financial industry bailout as a necessary evil, albeit one that as implemented showered money on the undeserving and represents some of the worst lemon socialism in our nation's history. If the federal government is going to do something about unemployment, it seems obvious that its two principal tools are direct employment (hiring more federal employees) or stimulus spending.

One might suspect that hacks like Thiessen are arguing for cuts and against stimulus because they know as much - but feel that hurting the economy, the states, and the people of the nation will help the Republicans in the November elections. In fact, Dean Baker is presently making that argument:

While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans' behaviour. They have balked at supporting nearly every bill that had any serious hope of creating or keeping jobs, most recently filibustering on bills that provided aid to state and local governments and extending unemployment benefits. The result of the Republicans' actions, unless they are reversed quickly, is that hundreds of thousands more workers will be thrown out of work by the mid-terms.

* * *

The other argument the Republicans give is that these bills would add to the national debt. For example, the latest extension of unemployment benefits would have added $22bn to the debt by the end of 2011. This means that the debt would be $9,807,000,000 instead of $9,785,000,000 at the end of fiscal 2011, an increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio from 65.3% to 65.4%.

It is possible that Congressional Republicans, who were willing to vote for hundreds of billions of dollars of war expenditures without paying for them, or trillions of dollars of tax cuts without paying for them, are actually concerned about this sort of increase in the national debt. It is possible that this is true, but not very plausible.

The more likely explanation is that the Republicans want to block anything that can boost the economy and create jobs.

So Republican operatives like Thiessen create what can reasonably be described as a pessimism bubble (yes, I'm alluding to Douthat), in which the United States is on the verge of falling into the same trap as the weakest economy in the developed world, a line of nonsense that Douthat is unwilling to swallow:

But even now, there isn’t a major power in the world that wouldn’t happily change places with the United States. Our weaknesses are real, but so is our potential for resilience. While our rivals (in Asia as well as the West) face a slow demographic decline, our population is steadily increasing. The European Union’s recent follies make our creaking 200-year-old institutions look flexible by comparison. And China can throw up all the high-speed rails and solar panels it wants, but it won’t change the fact that most of the country is still sunk in rural poverty.

Republican fear mongering is red meat for the Tea Party Movement, a largely Republican force that the party wants to keep inside its tent. And yes, Douthat has a point that our nation does face problems that are different, and perhaps more difficult, than in the past (I would argue definitely more difficult), but that's not a justification for lies and misrepresentations designed to gin up fear about and opposition to legislation and spending initiatives that could both help the economy and position the U.S. for long-term growth.

Thiessen compares the outcome of the British election to a "Tea Party government". The election result in the U.K. is a bit odd - imagine a very close election that resulted in a Republican majority by virtue of people like Bernie Sanders choosing to caucus with the Republicans. The British government is taking the approach of austerity, in Thiessen's words, "necessitated by years of Labor profligacy, which produced the second-largest budget deficit in Europe" - recall that Labor came into power under Clinton and only lost power this year. So most of those years of what Thiessen sees as fiscal irresponsibility overlap with Bush's Presidency - yet somehow the Republican Congress that Bush inherited, and the massive tax cuts, war spending, and unfunded entitlements of the Bush era are flushed down Thiessen's memory hole.

Incredibly, in relation to a country that has a much higher tax rate than ours - and in which part of the austerity measure is to further raise taxes. Recall, Thiessen is arguing that the British budget would please the Tea Party movement. Where can I find the portion of the Tea Party platform (not that one actually exists, but let's go with the commercial ventures that are trying to profit from their organization of the Tea Party movement) or the Republican Party who is willing to admit that the people of this nation are not under-taxed? Thiessen defends the British budget as offering a "balance of spending cuts to tax increases is 77 to 23 percent" - okay, let's hear the Republican Party offer up a budget with a similar balance of tax increases and spending cuts, and see how it goes over with the Tea Party Movement. (I expect the Republican Party's silence to be deafening.)

Over the next couple of years we'll find out if Europe's new devotion to austerity delivers the robust economic growth predicted by its advocates. I'm not optimistic. I'm not going to speculate as to whether the nation's of Europe are in a position to attempt more stimulus spending, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but (fear-mongering aside) we are - and Thiessen's propaganda having been duly considered, another major stimulus bill won't bankrupt us and, if it works, should at least party pay for itself through increased tax revenue resulting from economic growth. With a stimulus bill we would have a clear exercise in contrasts - who pulls out of the economic slump first, the budget slashers or the stimulus spenders. I suspect that people like Thiessen believe it's the latter, which is why they (and similarly positioned newly fledged deficit hawks) advocate the former.