Thursday night, long after Al Gore and his lovely daughter Karenna left Lot 61 — the hip Manhattan club where his new political action committee, Leadership 2002, had a small, $50-a-head youth-themed event Thursday night — former KISS bassist Gene Simmons walked in.
“Did you come here for the Al Gore event?” I asked.
“Who?” he said. He hadn’t.
“Al Gore,” I said.
“Who?” he said again, laughing. He looked at his date who didn’t seem to get the joke.
“Al Gore,” I replied. “The former vice president? He had an event here tonight.”
“Why?” Simmons asked, matter-of-factly.
“Ummm … for youth,” I said. “For young people. To get them motivated, to tell them to vote for Democrats in November.”
That’s why, after all, several hundred young folks had splurged to show up at a club that more commonly hosts parties for the likes of Maxim magazine, which had an event there last month. There seemed to be two purposes to Thursday’s event. The first was to raise money for a Gore project to teach young Democrats about politics and campaigns. The main reason, though, seemed to be to remind people that Gore’s still around. Which did not sit too well with Mr. Simmons.
“I think it’s a bad time to talk about electing Democrats,” the aged rocker said. “Somebody got into the White House who nobody thought should have gotten into the White House and he went and did a bang-up job. He went and he rolled up his sleeves and he said it’s time for politics to stop and it’s time for ass-kicking to begin. I think the last thing the public wants to hear right now is politics. I think the last thing people want to hear is anything from the Democrats.”
And with that, Simmons and his coterie of silicone-augmented gigglers turned and left the building.
Simmons, of course, is not Joe Sixpack. But strangely, he had tapped into the chief insecurity of Democrats who are watching Gore go about rehabilitating his career. Gore backers swear that the rank and file love their boy — he won the popular vote, after all — and that the skeptics are ivory-tower Manhattan and Washington elites. But it’s tough to reason that now is as good a time for another Albert Arnold Gore Jr. presidential run than, say, when he was an incumbent vice president and the world was in a blissfully innocent state of peace and prosperity.
As he dips his toe back in the pool and reenters political life, the plumper, balder Gore, already too sensitive to criticism from should-be allies, seems to sense the whisperings. He feels he has been proven correct about Bush’s campaign deceptions — the deficit is back, the Social Security trust fund has been pilfered, environmental regulations are being rolled back, the economy is in the crapper — and seems a bit frustrated at the less-than-lusty reception he’s being greeted with.
He surely has plenty of detractors. “Gore smacks right now of a child star in the middle of an awkward adolescence,” an operative from a Democratic rival’s camp snarked earlier in the day. “He’s still showing up for auditions, and the casting crew is reluctant to tell him he’s the Tina Yothers of the Democratic Party.”
But naysayers be damned, all signs indicate that Gore is going to go for it again. “It’s been an interesting year, year and a half for me,” Gore understated Thursday night. The Gores just set up their new home in a very White House-looking $2.3 million estate in a tony section of Nashville. And in an interview with the Memphis Commercial-Appeal that hits the stands Friday, Tipper Gore — previously thought reluctant to see her main squeeze reenter the brutal fray — says that she finds the prospect of another Gore presidential run “exciting” and if asked for her advice she would tell her hubbie, “Let’s get going right now.”
Leadership 2002 has raised about half a million dollars since the beginning of the year — more money than the PAC of any other potential Democratic 2004 candidate with the single exception of Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., Gore’s erstwhile running mate who, with a wincing, almost regretful smile, has pledged not to run if Gore does. After Thursday night’s event Gore will head south, to Memphis, the home state that rejected him and in doing so cost him the presidency. There, where he pledged to “mend fences,” Gore will host a closed-door retreat with 60 or so of his biggest fundraisers.
Along the way, Gore does it in his own inimitably cloddish way, trying painfully, sadly, pathetically, tragically. Almost as if it were his first run, as if he hadn’t been in office since before most of Thursday night’s attendees were soiling their Pampers. It’s not that the message is bad. It didn’t seem like bad timing Thursday night when Gore called publicly — as the drip-drip-drip water torture of corruption on Wall Street continues — for the resignation of the controversial Harvey Pitt, director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, describing him as typical of Bush administration appointees.
For “every chicken coop,” Gore said, “they’ve gone out to look for the hungriest-looking fox to put it in charge.” He continued, questioning the “troubling change” from what he said he and President Bill Clinton had done, as now “investors are looking toward Europe instead of the U.S.” Not only was government supervision of corporate crookdom laughably lacking, he said, but Bushonomics resembles the WorldCom zeitgeist in that “they’re not telling the truth about future liabilities so they can shovel money to the few executives at the top.” The 2002 elections are an opportunity, Gore said, “to send a message that what they’re doing is wrong.”
The message was not without merit, but Gene Simmons, for all his days of fire-breathing and face paint, seemed more in tune with the American people. According to a Bloomberg News poll conducted June 11-16, Bush would beat Gore in a match-up today, 56 percent to 32 percent. Bush has a 68 percent approval rating as president, and 60 percent of the American people approve of his handling of the economy and foreign policy, with 70 percent approving of his handling of the war on terrorism.
The crowd Thursday, too, was polite if not entirely sold.
“I wanted to see some old acquaintances and support the former vice president and support the party,” said Ross Wallenstein, 24, the communications director for state comptroller candidate Alan Hevesi. Asked if he supported the prospect of another Gore presidential run, Wallenstein diplomatically said that “the Democratic party has a wide range of great candidates for 2004.”
His friend Jared Nussbaum, 24, who works in telecommunications, was even less psyched. “I support the party,” Nussbaum said. “The jury’s still out as far as I’m concerned in terms of what I’m looking for.”
Even the normally filially loyal Karenna seemed to have discerned the crowd’s hesitation. “It’s great that we can rally together and say, yes, we hate the terrorists … but we can also say we disagree with the administration,” she said in introducing her father.
While Karenna was speaking, a cameraman tapped on a hulking mass of a man, motioning him to get out of the way so he could get a better shot of the striking blond mother of two. The hulking mass he was shoving aside was the former vice president of the United States, the candidate who captured the 2000 popular vote — if not the electoral or the Supreme Court votes — two years ago. It recalled the farce just days before, when the geniuses at Midwest Express security singled out and selected Gore for random security screening at Reagan National Airport in Washington, before a flight to Milwaukee — and then again, before Gore flew from Milwaukee to New York.
Gore’s speech was full of the same jokes he’s been making at fundraisers and state Democratic Party events for the last few months. He’s a visiting professor — or “V.P. for short.” He misses motorcades. He and Tipper eat at Shoney’s. He’s concerned about the economy — “I was the first one laid off, a year ago.”
Laughter. Beat.
“That’s not funny.”
Chuckles, some a bit uncomfortable.
Then: hitting pitches that should be easily hit by any Democrat, given the Bush administration’s conservative record and the shameless corporate corruption of Enron, et al. And an attempt to tie them together: Pitt should be “the point man on ensuring the integrity of financial statements.” Instead he’s holding “private meetings” with the corrupt CEOs of companies whom he formerly represented as an attorney. “That’s wrong,” Gore said. “He ought to resign. They ought to wake up and realize that the Bush-Cheney economic policy is a total catastrophe for America.”
There were words he should have said more than two years ago: “I don’t care what anybody says, Bill Clinton and I did a damn good job.” Biggest cheers of the night.
With little style or cadence, he concluded by reminding a bunch of Manhattan liberal Democrats to support Democratic candidates in November. And bada-bing, it was mercifully over.
This weekend, the Memphis retreat will bring five dozen or so Democratic donors together. Three key Gore moneymen will be in the house — former finance director Peter Knight, former finance chair Johnny Hayes and longtime Gore moneyman Jody Trappaso — along with a trio of his closest advisors — general adviser Elaine Kamarck, foreign relations advisor Leon Fuerth, environmental advisor Katie McGinty. But few Gore political staffers will be there. Just the aforementioned wonks, Karenna and dog-loyal former traveling chief of staff Mike Feldman, plus 2000 campaign deputy Donnie Fowler. Many of his previous loyalists, for now, are elsewhere. Former Democratic National Committee field guy Michael Whouley is helping 2004 wannabe Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in his nothing of a reelection contest; media gurus Bob Shrum and Tad Devine are with wannabe Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who is holding his own private retreat for 50 or so supporters on St. Simons Island, Ga., at the same time. Former campaign manager Donna Brazile, disillusioned with Gore’s reluctance to actually try to “count every vote” during the Florida recount, is working for the Democratic Party. “That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” a senior aide close to Gore says of his former colleagues’ various activities. “The livelihood of these guys depends on some of these Senate Democrats; it makes sense for them to keep their powder dry.
“Especially since Gore has not said that he’s going to run yet.”
On Tuesday, a Senate Appropriations Committee vote effectively highlighted everything that is stupid about politics.
The Transportation Security Administration, a universally loathed government agency, is facing a shortfall, despite its more than $8 billion budget. Instead of having a debate over what effective airport security might actually look like and how much should reasonably be spent on the honestly rare threat of commercial-air-travel-based terrorism, there was a debate over how best to come up with the money needed for all the radioactive naked picture machines and bomb-sniffing dogs. The Democrats suggested passing on the cost of ineffective, cumbersome and intrusive security theater to citizens, via higher fees on airfares. The Republicans, even more predictably, suggested cutting spending that directly helps poor people to ensure there is enough to spend on stopping imaginary future 9/11s.
The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)
I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.
The growing likelihood that Richard Lugar will lose next Tuesday’s Indiana Republican Senate primary is the latest in a string of unexpected developments that have bolstered Democrats chances of hanging on to the Senate.
As I wrote yesterday, Lugar’s conservative primary challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, lacks the incumbent’s broad cross-partisan appeal and is closely identified with Tea Party-flavored Republicanism. Democrats, meanwhile, are poised to nominate Joe Donnelly, a moderate third-term congressman who defied the odds to hold onto his seat in the GOP tide of 2010. Mourdock would still probably be the favorite over Donnelly in the fall, just because of Indiana’s red tint, but the seat would be in play – something that would never be the case with Lugar as the GOP nominee.
The implications of a Democratic pick-up in Indiana could be huge. The party entered the 2012 campaign cycle in a defensive crouch, nursing a 53-47 edge in the upper chamber and facing a very challenging slate of races. The basic problem: Because of strong years in 2000 and 2006, the class of senators up for reelection in 2012 is dominated by Democrats, many of them representing marginal and Republican-friendly states. With a close presidential contest, the party won’t be benefiting from the national tide that lifted its congressional candidates in ’06, leaving Republicans with a host of pick-up opportunities – and Democrats with very few.
Well, that was the case early in the cycle, at least. Back then, there was only one clear Democratic pick-up opportunity on the board: Nevada, where John Ensign, the one-time rising GOP star, was forced into retirement by scandal. The race to succeed him, between the appointed GOP incumbent, Dean Heller, and Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, is a toss-up.
But since those bleak early days, Democrats have caught some breaks.
The first came in Massachusetts, where the state’s biggest Democratic names all begged off from running against Scott Brown, leaving an assortment of B- and C-list options to a vie for a nomination that looked worthless last summer. But then Elizabeth Warren stepped in and proved herself to be a powerful communicator and a prolific fund-raiser. The Massachusetts race is now among the most competitive in the country, giving Democrats a 50/50 chance of knocking off Brown.
Then came Olympia Snowe’s surprise February announcement that she wouldn’t seek a fourth term in Maine. Quickly, the state’s former independent governor, Angus King, announced his candidacy. King, who won by 40 points the last time he was on a Maine ballot, is now the overwhelming favorite to win in November. While he won’t say which party he’ll caucus with, Democrats in the state and nationally are treating him like one of their own. Chuck Schumer, one of the top Democrats in the Senate, referred to the Snowe seat this week as “ours.”
Two other races that weren’t supposed to be competitive are also on the radar now. In Arizona, Democrats have recruited a candidate with a compelling biography: Richard Carmona, who served as George W. Bush’s surgeon general only to turn on the administration. A Democratic poll has shown Carmona within striking distance of Republican Jeff Flake, while a recent nonpartisan survey put President Obama only two points behind Mitt Romney in the state. There is hope among Democrats that Arizona, with its growing Hispanic population, is more winnable for them than most assume – and that without favorite son John McCain on the ballot, the state would have been theirs in 2008.
There are subtler clues of an unexpectedly competitive race in North Dakota. When Democrat Kent Conrad announced that he wouldn’t run again, the state was written off as an easy Republican pick-up – and it still might be. But some early developments at least offer a glimmer of hope to Democrats. As Politico reported this week:
With a dearth of public polling, the case for former Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp is based on a body of clues.
A Democratic poll showed Heitkamp with a 5-point lead; no Republican data countered the finding. The latest Crossroads GPS air strike included $76,000 to bruise Heitkamp — a sign she’s on the radar of the cycle’s most notorious super PAC. Even Berg blasted an email to supporters recently claiming the state is “Harry Reid’s #1 target.”
Add Indiana to this mix and Democrats have a total of five opportunities (or potential opportunities) for pick-ups that didn’t exist at the start of the cycle. Obviously, they won’t win all of these races, and they may still get routed in a few of them. But when you’re clinging to a 53-47 majority, any seat gained could be the difference between majority and minority status next year.
Victories in two Pennsylvania House districts over two conservative Democrats who voted against healthcare reform gave liberals something to cheer about this week. And they’re quite right to focus on primary elections: Nomination contests are really fights over who will control the political parties. And yet liberals appear to be missing some major opportunities to influence the next round of Democratic senators, just when they have the chance to do so. A look at the websites of the 10 Democratic candidates most likely to become U.S. senators reveals that few of them are interested in several of the issues that have been the hallmark of liberal activism and often frustration during the Obama years: marriage equality, a public option on healthcare, filibuster reform and civil liberties.
Why should we care what candidates have on their websites? The truth is that politicians generally try to keep their promises once they are elected. Moreover, the more visible the promise, the more likely it is that the politician will consider herself bound by it – and face consequences if she votes the other way. Ideally, one would want to see what candidates talk about on the stump, and what they advertise in mailers, TV ads and other formats. But websites have some advantages, too. In addition to being easy to access, they also are open-ended. Presumably, candidates will list every issue they believe is important. Or at least, every issue they want to talk about. And those are the issues, again, that they’re likely to act on if they win.
So I looked through the Issues sections of the 10 Democrats who are most likely to be elected – either challengers rated as having a good chance, or open-seat candidates in Democratic or swing states. In Hawaii and New Mexico, that meant both candidates fighting in a contested primary; in six other states, it meant the odds-on favorite for the nomination.
The results should be disappointing for liberals. Two of the 10 candidates, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, don’t even have an Issues section on their websites. For the other eight, I’ll run down the numbers quickly. None of them mentioned support for adding a public option to ACA; indeed, three had no healthcare issues page at all, unless you count a page about protecting Social Security and Medicare, which was quite popular. Two of the eight support marriage equality, both of them in New England (Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Chris Murphy in Connecticut). Only two other candidates mentioned LGBT issues at all, Tim Kaine in Viriginia and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who featured it in her bio page. Filibuster reform also received only two mentions. For civil liberties and the array of issues related to torture and detention, only Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, had any mention at all.
By contrast, seven of the eight candidates had a whole section of their Issues pages devoted to veterans, usually alone but in two cases bundled with something else. Now, it’s certainly true that most liberals support help for veterans, but as campaign issues go, this is surely one of the most bland.
I was pretty surprised by all of this, but I was most surprised by the candidates in competitive primaries. In Hawaii, Mazie Hirono is attempting to beat Ed Case from the left, and yet Hirono doesn’t hit at any of these issues that might help her with liberal activists in Hawaii and nationally. And it’s not as if either Hawaii or New Mexico, the two states with contested primaries, is exactly Alabama; there are plenty of liberal Democrats who are going to be voting in those primaries, and liberal positions shouldn’t be the kiss of death in the general election.
So what’s going on? It’s possible that the candidates are being overly cautious. I suspect, however, that what’s really happening is that Democratic interest groups, activists and other party actors are not pushing hard on any of these issues.
And that’s a serious mistake. It’s almost certainly the case that the best time for partisans to influence legislators is while they are running for election to some office for the first time. After all, that’s when they need party support the most – especially for those who have tough primaries, but really for all of them. Once elected, they begin to build personal connections with their constituents, based on bringing home pork or on other personal relationships. Party becomes relatively less important. Certainly, that’s what politicians have an incentive to do – to increase support based on who they are, rather than being constrained by specific policy commitments that, odds are, will make someone unhappy.
Now, it’s true, of course, that it’s still early in the cycle, so some of this could change going forward. And as I mentioned, websites are only one form of candidate advertising. It’s certainly possible that some of these Issues sections were put together exactly how I suggested – by volunteers who didn’t have the authority to commit the candidate to potentially controversial positions – and that as the year goes on things will change.
But what they’re showing right now certainly isn’t what most liberals would like to see. If activists want change on these issues after November, they need to start targeting these candidates now, before it’s too late.
My March 4 post “What’s the matter with white people?” was Salon’s top story that week, and it got a lot of comments and online attention. I went on vacation a few days later, but I’ve wanted to address a few arguments, if belatedly.
I asked “What’s the matter with white people?” because my people are increasingly coming under fire from the right and the left. Republicans have begun to blame not the economy but “dependency” on government and rising rates of single parenthood for the economic troubles of the white working class. On the left, meanwhile, whites are dismissed as the backward base of the increasingly radical GOP, and working class whites, in particular, are derided as racists who won’t vote for Democrats because the party is now led by a black man (ignoring the fact that a larger share of working class whites voted for Barack Obama than for Caucasians John Kerry, Al Gore or Bill Clinton.)
The fact is, working and middle class whites have supported too many Republicans who’ve dismantled the opportunity structure that created the vast (white) middle class from the 1930s through the 1960s – but that’s at least partly because too many Democrats turned their backs on those policies, too. The larger point of the piece, if a 4,000-plus word article can be said to have a single point, was this:
The emerging multiracial Obama coalition has the potential to transform the way we all think about race and politics as we invent the next America — but only if we can all forgo petty racial score-setting and 20th century conceptions about identity. And only if more white people wake up to what they’ve let the Republican Party do to the country in the last 40 years, in the name of holding on to what they think they have.
I was making two related arguments: that whites must begin to face up to economic and political reality – that the party most of them support now stands for destroying not only the social programs they (incorrectly) believe benefit “other people,” but also programs they support, like Social Security and Medicare, food stamps and unemployment, as well as protections for workers who have jobs. My second point was just as important and less commonly heard: I asked that the multiracial left have more empathy for working class whites, and stop stereotyping them and dismissing their political choices, when we disagree, as merely “racist.” Interestingly, I got little or no push back on that point from anyone on the multiracial left, although I have been criticized for that argument many times, going back to the fractious 2008 Democratic primary. Maybe we’re making progress.
The criticism of my “White People” argument came almost exclusively from the right, and there were at least a few points worth engaging.
….
Of course, more than a few people reacted to the headline without thinking (or reading the piece), and I heard a lot of what I predicted I would in the article: I am a racist! How dare I generalize about white people? I would never talk about black people that way!
The best response along those lines came from Newsbusters, the fan club Brent Bozell runs especially to promote me. It featured a typically outraged harangue from Noel Sheppard: “Actual Joan Walsh Salon Headline: ‘What’s the Matter with White People?” and included this: “Maybe Walsh should check her own racist leanings given her hatred of white people.” Noel, I love white people! Some of my best friends are white. As I even revealed in the piece, that includes some of my own family. You can do better, Noel. Try again.
The reply from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was a little bit more substantive – although he kicked it off on Twitter by shrieking at Charles Murray that I’d accused Murray of “attacking white people!”
I didn’t accuse Murray of “attacking” all white people. I’d made the point that Murray now blames poor and working class whites for their economic struggles, much the way he has always blamed the black poor. Their poverty rate is climbing while their wages and family incomes are falling not because of huge shifts in the economy that favor the wealthy, but because they’re lazy and promiscuous and not terribly bright, and they just don’t follow the rules the way the poor are supposed to. This is the oldest argument around, of course, when it comes to explaining away social inequity and defending the economic status quo. You can find it in the Gospels, in clashes between that bleeding heart liberal Jesus Christ, and those who believed poverty was God’s punishment. In every age, the struggle for justice turns on how successfully the privileged can justify their wealth as the natural result of their hard work and superior talent and/or the innate shortcomings of their lessers.
In my lifetime, that argument has been racialized. As the nation struggled to right the wrongs of racism, some people began to argue that the problems of poor African Americans had more to do with their own personal and cultural shortcomings than society’s, and that our efforts to use government to help made the problem worse. But I was raised knowing that virtually every awful thing said about black people had once been said about Irish Catholics, and so I’ve spent a lot of my life refuting that racialized scapegoating, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Lately, though, I’ve felt that we’re getting some help with that task from Republicans, as they scapegoat working class whites in terms they used to only use against blacks — their economic problems are due to the fact that they’re lazy, too many don’t get married and they want government to take care of them (Charles Murray’s argument). Taranto misunderstands the point I’m making about the new GOP line:
When Walsh accuses Murray of “attacking white people,” she seems to be hoping that persons of pallor will be open to a similar appeal–that they will finally wake up and start voting what the left considers to be their “interests.” Essentially that means embracing government dependency: “Today, many white folks who are voting Republican don’t seem to know one important fact: they are, in fact, the ‘takers.’ ” Once they figure that out, Walsh thinks, they’ll join the blacks and the Hispanics and the professional elite, and the Democratic hold on the electorate will be secure.
That’s not what I was saying, at all. I’m not someone who makes the simplistic case that the working class is voting against its interests by backing Republicans. This is a debate in which I think the right has the better side. Claiming that working class Republicans – or black and Latino Republicans, for that matter — are “voting against their interests” is hugely condescending, a vestigial Marxism that assumes the only thing that matters is material conditions. It can also sound like we’re saying: “How dare you presume you have anything in common with the wealthy, peon?”
The Republican allegiance of some working class people may well be aspirational, as conservatives argue. Liberals like John Rawls’ famous theory of justice, which held that most people would want to design a society in which, should they find themselves at the bottom, they would be protected. It turns out that a lot of people prefer social policies that would protect them if they make it to the top, however unlikely that kind of economic mobility is turning out to be in the U.S. today. Voting Republican may also reflect genuine cultural and religious values. Growing up Irish Catholic, I can’t pretend that my relatives who vote Republican over the issue of abortion are dupes suffering from some kind of “false consciousness.” They care about that issue passionately. We can disagree with conservative working class white people, we can wish they had different priorities, but when we “assume” they’re voting against their own interests, as though we, not they, know their interests, our condescension shows.
….
On the other hand, I do not mean to disrespect working class whites, but I have to say: it would be great if their politics reckoned with reality. As I pointed out in the piece, red-state Republican areas enjoy the highest levels of federal spending. That’s an inconsistency that can’t be totally explained by culture war politics. White working class Republicans are simply wrong about the way government has worked, in their own lives and in the lives of others, and Democrats need to talk about that, respectfully.
Taranto hints at the case other Republicans make more forcefully – that the more Americans become dependent on government, the more they’ll vote Democratic, and that’s Barack Obama’s not-so-secret plan. “Republican supporters will continue to decrease every year as more Americans become dependent on the government,” Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint wrote in his last book. “Dependent voters will naturally elect even big-government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth and spend America deeper into debt.” I think DeMint’s notion is alarmist GOP propaganda. But I’d be happy to have a political debate about the role of government in our lives – one that’s untainted by racism, fears of a lazy, parasitic “other” or charges that Democrats are “socialists” seeking to impose some Soviet-style or lefty-European system on America. I think it should be clear that Democrats love capitalism, because twice in the last 75 years, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then under President Obama, we saved capitalism from itself.
Finally, Taranto (and a lot of letter writers who didn’t seem to read my piece), claimed that the “demographic doomsday” scenario, in which a declining white population leads to the gradual extinction of the GOP, is “overblown.” I agree – and I said so in the article. I regularly quarrel with liberals who insist that a magical “people of color” alliance is going to move the country to the left, permanently. It’s not going to happen. In the 80s and 90s, it was easy to imagine that Latinos and Asians might be receptive to Republican messaging around family, small business, religion, as well as hostility to big government, given that immigrants often came from countries ruled by oppressive governments (whether of the left or the right). Certainly Karl Rove once believed that. Republicans chased many Latinos, Asians and even conservative African Americans into the arms of Democrats by allowing racism and xenophobia to flourish in their party unchecked. As the GOP gets beaten in coming election cycles, it’s going to have to figure out a way to appeal to more than just white people — or perish as a party.
Also: most scenarios in which the white majority “disappears” in the next couple of decades ignore the fact that about 50 percent of the fastest-growing “minority” – Hispanics or Latinos – consider themselves white. (That’s why the Census has a category for “non-Hispanic whites.”) So do most mixed-race Americans in many studies. Besides, the definition of “whiteness” has regularly shifted throughout American history – Irish, Italians, Jews and other non-Nordic, Anglo immigrants all took turns in the “non-white” category in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s quite possible that our notion of whiteness – or let’s just say “the American mainstream” or “real Americans,” in Sarah Palin’s language – will expand to include some categories of Latinos, Asians and mixed-race folks, not to mention Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain and Condoleezza Rice.
To build a better, more inclusive country – to invent the next America – both parties are going to have to forgo identity politics and appeal to voters around principle and policy, not fear and contempt. Democrats are getting there; Republicans still have a ways to go before facing up to the fact that the identity politics practiced by the Tea Party represents a divisive dead end.
Look at it this way: If the Wall Street banking crisis had taken place in 2007 instead of 2008, George W. Bush wouldn’t be able to leave home without being jeered. (As it is, he rarely leaves Texas.) Hardly anybody would buy the brand of tycoonomics GOP presidential candidates are selling. People would understand that save-the-millionaires tax cuts and deregulation had dramatically failed. President Obama would get more credit for pulling the economy out of a nose dive.
Alas, people have short attention spans and a weak understanding of abstract economic issues. You have to tell them a story. The failure of policymakers to do that has been driving progressive MVP Paul Krugman crazy. How can it be, he asks, that governments foreign and domestic are repeating the mistakes of the early 1930s — slashing government spending to reduce budget deficits, putting more people out of work, reducing demand, and inadvertently increasing deficits? Rinse and repeat.
Part of it is that the lessons of the Great Depression belong to history, and, as such, are infinitely malleable. Arguments your grandfather would have dismissed — such as Mitt Romney’s plans to assure prosperity by topping off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion tank — are given credence today. Granddad may not have grasped Keynesian economic theory, but he remembered “Hoovervilles” and bread lines. Scrooge McDuck wasn’t a cartoon figure for nothing.
Professor Krugman acknowledges that some kinds of economic thinking seem counterintuitive. “Thus,” he writes, “it’s normal to think of the economy as a whole as being like a family, which must tighten its belt in hard times; it’s also completely wrong.” Yet it makes him crazy that even President Obama has used the belt-tightening analogy.
While deeply misleading, the family metaphor works politically because it sounds like common sense. Sometimes I wonder if Grandpa didn’t also have an advantage in living closer to the farm. Though innately conservative, rural people do understand that if you skimp on fertilizer in April, you’ll have a poor hay crop come September and a hard time getting your livestock through the winter.
But nobody ever puts it to people like that. Even somebody like Krugman can be brilliant at argumentation, less gifted at storytelling. Democrats generally have lost the knack.
The key is to stress government investment. In Arkansas, where I live, nothing could be clearer than the relationship between public investment and economic prosperity. It’s practically written on the landscape, yet many need reminding.
I recently read a beautifully written memoir called “A Straw in the Sun,” by Charlie May Simon, an Arkansas writer who homesteaded in Perry County (where I live) during the 1930s. Back then, rural Arkansans basically lived in the Third World. Simon and her neighbors grew their own food, made their own clothes, music and home brew. They had no electrical power, telephones, indoor plumbing or paved roads. Few in Perry County did. They walked to town, or hitched rides on mule-drawn wagons.
Enchanting as Simon makes it sound, the world she evokes feels not 75 years distant, but 175. After World War II, what brought Perry County into the 20th century was government investment. My 65-year-old neighbor was in high school when the main highway through the county was first paved after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bridged the Arkansas River at Conway.
So it came as something of a surprise to read that my ambitious state representative, a genial former neighbor now living over in Conway, has conceived a plan to return us to the bad old days. Supposedly by eliminating income taxes from 40 of the state’s less prosperous counties — along with concomitant cuts in public spending — GOP visionaries envision that nothing less than an economic miracle will take place.
Never mind why no such thing happened during Arkansas’s first 150 years or so of statehood. Thankfully, the proposal got nowhere. What’s amazing to me, however, is that otherwise intelligent people could be so blinded by ideology as to entertain so preposterous a scheme. Believe me; these fellows are rapt with sincerity. What’s more, their ideological brethren are taking over state governments from sea to shining sea.
That Conway, a pleasant town of approximately 60,000, should serve as the epicenter of this backward revolution strikes me as comically ironic. Although filled with Republicans, there are few cities of like size whose prosperity depends more obviously upon public largess. Located along Interstate 40, it’s also home to three state agencies and the University of Central Arkansas, a rapidly growing public institution. Trim UCA’s budget 20 percent, and Conway’s economy would go into a tailspin.
The city’s two private colleges are greatly dependent upon state-sponsored tuition scholarships, just as its nonprofit medical center relies upon Medicaid and Medicare. I could go on. Even Conway’s two newest large private employers are Internet- (hence government) dependent.
Around these parts, alas, Democrats have lost control of the story line.
(Credit: Reuters/Frank Polich) 
Charles Schumer and Harry Reid (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) 
(Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull) 
(Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh) 
