Joe Conason

The Patriotic Millionaires campaign, pulled together quickly by the Agenda Project in New York City, just happens to appear on the same day as a new study from the Center for Responsive Politics revealing that half of the members of the House and the Senate are millionaires. That contrasts sharply with the general population, of whom fewer than 1 percent can claim millionaire status.

Not surprisingly, some of the super-rich declined to join the Patriotic Millionaires when the Agenda Project reached out to them. At least two airily dismissed the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and above — which will cost well over $700 billion over the coming decade — as “small potatoes.” And a Manhattan hedge fund billionaire said he believes the cuts should be extended and added that “the moneys should be used to pay down debt” — which sounds like the magical Republican plan to simultaneously cut taxes, wage war and drastically reduce the deficit. The same investor also complained that “anyone who has money is made to feel that they’re bad.”

Bad? Only if they’d rather force Grandma to eat cat food than pay their fair share.

Topping the list of Rangel’s transgressions was the misuse of his congressional clout to raise money for a vanity academic “center” named after him at the City University of New York from private donors. Yet somehow McConnell got away with the same kind of dubious dealings at the University of Louisville — and was allowed to reward BAE Systems, donor of $500,000 to the McConnell Center, with $17 million worth of defense earmarks.

For years, the long list of corporate donors to the university’s McConnell Center for Political Leadership was kept secret, presumably out of deference to the senator and his well-heeled friends, including Toyota, AIG, RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris, among others. Perhaps the most questionable gift came from United Defense, a subsidiary of BAE Systems, the Pentagon contractor that finally settled a huge, transatlantic bribery case with the Justice Department last spring. United Defense gave $500,000 to the McConnell Center, and the senator has continued to perform for the company ever since, even while BAE was subject to a federal investigation that led to a record $450 million fine and three years of monitoring by a court-appointed “compliance officer.” Ironically, the chief accusations against BAE involved bribery of public officials (in Saudi Arabia, not Kentucky).

Everyone knew that BAE was suspected of serious corruption — and under investigation not only here but in Britain and Austria as well — when McConnell sponsored $25 million of earmarks for the company back in 2007. By the time he pushed through the FY 2010 earmarks last year, both the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office and the Justice Department were preparing to file criminal charges. BAE’s sales tactics in the Mideast and Central Europe were not only crooked but interfered with American oversight of sensitive defense technology, according to Justice Department officials.

So while McConnell and his caucus are (temporarily and reluctantly) giving up their power to reward dubious donors like BAE with earmarks, it is hard not to wonder how the stringent “reformers” of the Tea Party can support his reelection as Republican leader. 

Now Issa has announced that he expects the Oversight committee and its subcommittees to hold nearly three times as many investigative hearings over the next two years as Henry Waxman, an active and successful chairman, ran during the final years of the Bush administration. He may consider the federal government (and the White House) to be bottomless pits of waste, fraud and abuse, but are there really three times as many troubling issues for Issa and his colleagues to study now as there were in the Bush years?

The answer is yes, so long as the threshold for investigation is absurdly low, such as the question of whether federal agencies are spending too much money on signs to identify construction projects funded by stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Road signs displaying the names of various government officials and agencies are neither new nor scandalous, but local Republicans have been whining about the erection of signs bearing the president’s name and the Recovery Act logo as examples of Soviet-style propaganda. For months, Issa has been riding this issue, promoting stories in local newspapers that suggest waste, wrongdoing and political misuse of funds, with hints that the Recovery Act symbol bears a suspicious resemblance to the 2008 Obama campaign logo. Last August, World Net Daily, which did so much to promote phony scandals a decade ago, urged its gullible readers to “report” the ARRA signs to Issa’s office (under the byline of the foul-mouthed Swift boat hoaxter Jerome Corsi).

This week, Issa indicated that he will continue to pursue such small-time, seemingly bogus concerns with a tweet linking to an article complaining about stimulus project signage in the Greeley Gazette: “Citizen-watchdogs & new technology made this (http://tinyurl.com/28egdr5) possible … how can we do more of this? Would love your thoughts.”

It is hard to imagine that road signs represent more than a minuscule fraction of 1 percent of the $787 billion stimulus budget, but then again Republicans constantly bemoan minor spending items — such as congressional earmarks — that actually have almost no real fiscal impact. Perhaps their budgetary record is historically so miserable because they just can’t do the arithmetic. But that can scarcely be true of Issa, an entrepreneur who earned his own huge fortune and is still the wealthiest member of Congress.

Certainly Issa should provide serious oversight of the stimulus spending, which is a fundamental congressional responsibility assigned to his committee. He ought to stop taking potshots at road signs — and instead start examining the administration’s record in selecting and contracting projects.

Of course, that might not be quite as much fun as stirring up the Tea Party rubes with diversions like the road sign “issue.” According to the independent watchdogs at Pro Publica and Politifact, the administration has succeeded in contracting stimulus projects at considerably lower cost than originally anticipated so far. Lower bidding has meant millions of dollars saved, with those saved funds in turn financing thousands of additional projects — and many thousands of jobs — across the country.

The first is that he has tried vainly from the beginning of his presidency to engage the Republicans in negotiation over vital reforms, only to learn again and again that they aren’t really interested in anything but sabotage. The second is that compromising with the Republicans isn’t exactly what Clinton did — or not at first, anyway. Before he could do anything else, he had to push back.

Yes, Clinton made a rhetorical gesture toward the Gingrich “revolution” when he said that “the era of big government is over.” As things turned out, however, that remark was studded with asterisks, footnotes, and exceptions that gave “big government” a meaning entirely different from the standard conservative interpretation. Yes, he eventually signed a welfare reform bill — ending the family support entitlement “as we know it” — which he had promised to do in his 1992 campaign (although he later emended many of that bill’s worst features). And yes, he sought to balance the federal budget at a time when that seemed a heresy to the Democratic base.

Yet the most important political events in the first year following the ’94 midterm were not compromises over policy, but confrontations that swiftly became disruptive, angry, polarizing — and that Clinton won. When the Gingrich Republicans twice shut down the government at the end of 1995 in order to win their way on the budget, the president faced them down and portrayed them as right-wing extremists whose ideology portended chaos. He kept that message alive not only as he confronted the Republicans in Washington, but in a series of stealthy political commercials heralding his reelection bid that started airing in the summer of 1995, nearly a year and a half before the 1996 election.

Therein lies the pointed lesson that Obama might learn from his Democratic predecessor, and use to navigate the political and economic landscape after the midterm. What worked so well for Clinton was to recognize public concern over the leviathan of spending — and to defend popular social, health, and environmental programs at the same time.

Similarly, Obama can acknowledge the importance of long-term deficit reduction, while challenging the Republicans to show how balance can be achieved without taxing the wealthy whose pockets they invariably protect. The answer is that it can be done only with big tax increases on everyone else and programmatic cutbacks that would raise howls of protest from many Republican constituencies — starting with the elderly and rural voters that gave them their latest victory.

While the president need not endorse every recommendation of his bipartisan fiscal advisory commission — dubbed the “Catfood Commission” for its expected endorsement of cuts in Social Security — he can use their findings to insist that the House Republicans no longer attempt to “repeal arithmetic,” as Clinton himself often put it during this campaign.

Against that background, Obama should insist that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the incoming House Budget committee chair, name the specific programs that he thinks should be cut to finance continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent.

He should make sure Ryan explains that his plan would not simply cut Medicare costs — a feature of the health reform bill that Republicans have loudly opposed all year – but would actually abolish Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program altogether and replace those programs with inadequate private vouchers. He should tweak Ryan over the remarkable “bailout” provision in his Social Security proposal, which would leave taxpayers responsible for ensuring that privatized accounts be guaranteed against stock market declines, a vast potential liability that represents a gigantic gift to those same Wall Street houses supposedly hated by the Tea Party.

Perhaps most important, the president should ask Ryan to outline his plan for a 23 percent value-added tax — the equivalent of a national sales tax — while cutting taxes to historic lows for the very top brackets. He should question how the Ryan plan will reduce the deficit, when experts say it will actually make matters much worse. And he can point out that his own tax cuts, which were part of the stimulus package, were far more broad-based and fair.

By emphasizing those issues in the context of a budget-balancing debate, Obama can underline contradictions between the Tea Party radicals and the Republican establishment. By doing so, he may even tempt the Tea Party to overreach for another government shutdown, even though John Boehner (R-Ohio) , the incoming House Speaker, has vowed not to step into that trap again.

Perhaps he won’t — and perhaps he won’t be pushed by the Tea Party. But Obama should nevertheless seek to draw contrasts at every step, using his rhetorical gifts to outline the extremist Republican policies that an overwrought and furious electorate never meant to endorse. If he can competently expose what is behind the false promises of his Congressional opponents — who remain considerably less popular than he is — then the fickle independents will start to turn away from them, the enthusiasm gap will shrink, and he will have taken the first step toward reelection.

The former president always draws enthusiastic crowds, and they listened raptly to his latest political pitch, which included point by point explanations of the student loan reform, healthcare reform and the banking bill to his argument that he and his fellow Democrats — not the Republicans — deserve the affections of the Tea Party.

Repeatedly, he complained about the “cowardice” of the “Anonymously financed advertising” that has targeted Democratic candidates, courtesy of Karl Rove and the Supreme Court — and the real reasons why the funders of those ads want to remain unknown. “When I was growing up, my mother always told me that if I had a problem with someone, I should go straight up to them, put my shoulders back, make sure they knew my name, and say whatever I had to say — and not sneak around behind somebody’s back,” he said as he stood beside West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, the embattled Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. “The reason they don’t want you to know who’s paying for those ads against Joe is because if you knew who they were, it would make you more likely to vote for him.”

Like most Clinton speeches, the final version of his midterm pitch included pithy riffs on broad variety of policy issues — because, as he said later on the plane, the American people “are starving for explanations. They want someone to tell them what the hell is going on. And in the present media environment it is imperative to repeat the same message again and again for anyone to hear it.”

The reason that Democrats face such dire prospects in this campaign, he continued, is that the party’s elected leaders have spent the past year enduring a crescendo of attacks from Republican politicians and right-wing media — without answering them. He seemed mystified that the Democratic leaders had done so little to justify and promote their legislative achievements, which he has been touting at every stop. Conceding that “we made mistakes” that led to his party’s loss of 54 House seats in the 1994 midterm, he added that “now we know a midterm election can be nationalized and should act accordingly.”

That is why he tried to frame the election as a set of choices between destructive Republican policies that favor “people like me, who make more than a million dollars a year” and the great majority of Americans who don’t. In full populist mode, he concluded nearly every stop with a riff on fiscal responsibility, recent presidential history, and the false consciousness of the Tea Party.

“Last weekend, I read a touching story article about two ladies who started the Tea Party movement,” he said, referring to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. “They were outraged by the bailout. And who wasn’t? President Bush told me that signing the bailout made him sick.”

Yet the bank reform bill pushed through by the White House and the Democrats, against Republican opposition, will “outlaw” future bailouts and make financial executives and shareholders pay if they recklessly squander their assets. “So why would the Tea Party support the Republicans, who have promised to repeal that bill because their friends on Wall Street don’t like it?” he wondered.

But beyond that, he said, the Tea Party ought to look more closely at the past 28 years of American history before they reject the Democrats and embrace the Republicans. “During the 12 years before I took office, the Republicans quadrupled the national debt,” he said. “I balanced the budget after four years and left a surplus that would have erased the national debt by 2015 if they had left my budget in place.” Instead, the second Bush administration doubled the national debt again, bequeathed the nation a series of future deficits — and failed to create one-tenth as many jobs as Clinton did, while shrinking the size of government as a portion of the national economy.

And, he noted, it was President Obama and the Democrats in Congress who have actually cut taxes for most Americans in the stimulus bill — not the Republicans. If the Tea Party movement wants more jobs, balanced budgets, lower taxes and smaller government, he insisted, they should be supporting Democrats.

“Where is the love?” he cried. “I ought to be the Tea Party’s poster child.”

The crowds roared every time.

Neither Stewart nor Colbert is likely to exacerbate the risk they have taken by addressing such touchy questions directly. But some Democrats believe the “crazy” label will stick to Republican candidates, especially those associated with the Tea Party movement — and that sanity versus its opposite may well be the most effective meme to sway independent and undecided voters during the final days of the campaign.

Over the past several days, a group of progressive activists — including Erica Payne, Billy Wimsatt, Trevor FitzGibbon and Heather Hurlburt — has put together a hasty but creative effort to promote “Vote Sanity” as the closing argument against the Republicans. On VoteSanity.com, author and entrepreneur Wimsatt has adopted the colors and graphics of the rally logo, urging everyone going to Washington or attending one of the hundreds of satellite rallies around the country to bring “Vote Sanity” signs. (If that is too subtle, the site links directly to MoveOn.org.)

At VoteSanity.org, a site put up by the Agenda Project, there is an amusing video titled “Welcome to Crazytown” that reviews the kookiest antics of the Tea Party crowd, with the help of cartoon figures and a cuckoo clock, plus a helpful list of “ten signs someone is a complete wack-a-doodle,” with linked references to Sharron Angle, Carl Paladino, Glenn Beck and Nazi SS reenactor Rich Iott, among others. 

All of this may seem either desperate or whimsical, but “Vote Sanity” is based on more than simply ripping off Comedy Central. Behind the slogan is survey research conducted recently by Drew Westen, the Emory University psychologist and author of “The Political Brain,” who found swing voters strongly receptive to a one-line message: “We need leaders who hear the voice of the people, not people who just hear voices.” Whether those undecided voters actually know which candidates have displayed signs of derangement is another matter. 

But that is where Stewart and Colbert could provide important guidance — if they are sufficiently daring to “kid on the square” (as Al Franken would say) about where the anticipated GOP blowout might land us. Nobody should expect a partisan speech from these comic artists, but both can easily caricature the pretensions to fiscal responsibility, outdated nostrums, conspiracy mongering, shrill prejudice and nutso extremism that one party has exploited during this campaign.

Isn’t that what they do every night? And they wouldn’t even have to say “Republican.”