[Amazon's Lehigh] warehouse, Soper reported, is brutally hot in summer. In a nod to modernity, “computers monitored the heat index in the building and Amazon employees received notification about the heat index by email.” One day, the index “exceeded 110 degrees on the third floor.” A local emergency room doctor treated so many warehouse employees for heat exhaustion this summer that he called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment. A security guard called the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after seeing two pregnant women taken to nurses. Some workers would break out into a sarcastic chant: “End slavery at Amazon!”
There were occasions in June and July, Soper reported, when “Amazon paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have ambulances and paramedics stationed at its two adjacent warehouses.” The company refused to cool the warehouse by opening the garage doors because managers feared it would lead to theft.
That last sentence reminded me of something, as you've probably gathered from the title of this post: at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, "the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft by the workers," resulting in the deaths of many of those workers in the factory's infamous fire.
Gotta keep those doors closed to prevent theft, no matter what the consequences. Since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the consequences have been reduced from being burned alive to suffering heatstroke as a result of working in nearly intolerable heat. That's a century's worth of progress for you.
For some reason the youtube videos of Linda Thompson singing this, possibly the most beautiful and melancholy tune that Richard has ever written, have vanished. Anyway, Kate Rusby has an equally lovely voice (and an accent I'd like to buy breakfast).
Sorry for the lack of output. Part of it is the product of being really busy on both the professional and personal fronts, but a big part of it has been difficulty feeling like I have something adequate to say at the moment. I think that we are living through momentous times -- not in a good way -- and that it is difficult right now to assess precisely what is happening. As a result, blogging tends toward the repetitive assessment of day to day politics -- which can be amusing and even edifying, but there are times when you feel you have either said everything you have to say or that others are saying the same thing better. I keep trying to wrap my head around the broader economic and social trends that we all see -- the extraordinary increase in inequality, the profound doldrums in which the economy finds itself mired, the insanity of much of the political discourse ongoing in the face of this crisis, and the sense that the country is undergoing changes that will reverberate for at least a generation and will leave in their wake an incredibly altered socio-economic landscape.
Alas, I have not put together a unified theory of what this all means in my spare time.
So while I am working on that , I will leave you with my banal comment on the day-to-day politics of the moment.
In shocking news, it appears that Jews and organized labor are going to back Obama overwhelmingly. I particularly enjoyed the fact that Obama outpolls Rick Perry (whom I described to some friends today as the ultimate goy) 82-2 among likely Jewish voters in Florida. In other words, Perry's support is within the statistical margin of error, meaning he may actually have zero support in Florida's Jewish community.
Which is not to say that Perry will not go out of his way to pander to members of the tribe:
Oy!
And my laugh of the day, courtesy of big bad wolf -- you have to click the link once you get there.
Nate Silver confirms that the confluence of events that occurred yesterday, culminating in the Red Sox ultimate collapse and elimination from playoff contention, was not really statistically possible. And yet.
- Okay, when I bet on Perry to win the GOP nomination, I thought he could at least simulate a being with a three digit IQ. Jesus Christ, the guy has held statewide office for twenty years -- okay, I understand the state is Texas (sorry bbw) and the bar may not be set at the highest, but really. How bad do you have to be in a debate setting to send the right-wingers running scared? I am pretty confident though that no one else is going to join the race -- in other words, there is no magically mean fat man who is going to save them. Which oddly enough means that Perry might still get the nomination.
- Yeah, that's the ticket Paul. Go for it. Everyone wants tax cuts for the rich and for Medicare to be voucherized.
- Let's review Ted Leonsis's accomplishments. 1. He made a fuck load of money from the virtually defunct AOL by selling his stock before it went down the shit chute. 2. He owns a really unsuccessful basketball team That's it. If that's "carrying our country on his back" that might explain the current sorry state of the republic.
Listening to snippets of the Republican presidential debate this morning on npr, you could see that the Romney camp is going to try -- correctly I think -- to pound Rick Perry on the radical statements about Social Security that appear in his book. Romney's approach is both tactical and strategic -- on a tactical level, to try and peel off older GOP voters in places like Florida who might be frightened by Perry's rhetoric. and on a strategic level, to send the message to the broader Republican electorate that Perry will not be electable. I think this is both Romney's best bet, but a dangerous one as well. And it is one that is going to yield significant insights into the nature of the Republican electorate of today.
Romney is attempting to see if pragmatism can trump ideology in these contests, to see if the zeal to defeat President Obama is such that the GOP voters can back someone who is viewed as deeply suspect in terms of his political convictions. Romney's reputation as a political shape-shifter, along with the fact that he was governor of the most liberal state in the nation and belongs to a religion many in the Party view as suspect are huge impediments in his battle with Perry. He only overcomes these if a cool-headed assessment of electability carries the day with Republicans -- or Perry really steps on his own dick (hardly an inconceivable scenario).
My own sense is that the voters in the Republican primaries in many states -- especially the southern ones -- are going to react poorly to electability arguments and will see Romney as a traitor to conservatism if his attacks on Social Security are deemed overly sharp. Rush Limbaugh has already made noises on this score and I would bet we will hear much more from him on this subject. The interesting bellwether on this score will be Fox News, an organization that will enjoy unprecedented influence in its coverage of the nomination contest. I suspect that Fox can make or break Romney in this regard -- if they take the Limbaugh line and rally to Perry's defense, Romney is going to be in deeep trouble once the primaries are in places other than New Hampshire. (Perry should campaign like hell in New Hampshire by the way -- it is a place that has a lot of hardcore wingnuts in the Republican ranks and there is no reason he can't make a decent showing there.)
As I have noted here before, the Republican Party has become a hard core right wing party in which a kind of strange identity politics -- the poor beleaguered conservative -- have won the day. It is a white, southern, male dominated party, one in which Perry's stands are not viewed as generally extreme. More importantly, Perry's views are not so much a policy plank, but rather a kind of Rorschach test about who is and what it means to be an American to this electorate.
Romney has no choice but to fight this battle on these terms -- he is never going to out-American Perry the secessionist. (Irony doesn't really register with Republicans.) In the end, I think the quest for purity is going to trump pragmatism. (In that vein, Perry's biggest weakness is his support for in-state tuition for the children of undocumented workers -- something Romney is also hitting him on from the right, always a good bet in the party of hate.)
Again, my bet is on the guy who has the better feel for the base.
In honor of their break up. I couldn't embed the full video which shows David Letterman bantering with Peter Buck and Mike Mills while Michael Stipe sits on the drum riser hidden from sight. I believe that Stipe wasn't being too cool, but rather was painfully shy. It's hard to believe for those of us who saw him in later years, when he had become one of the most charismatic and engaging performers you'd ever see. I will always have a soft spot for these guys -- they are very evocative of my early days in DC in 1982. I listened a lot to their first EP, Chronic Town, when I first moved here and was living by myself and knew only a couple of folks. (It was actually released the week that I moved here.) Music was a constant and reliable companion when spending a lot of time alone. REM was at that time on the leading edge of new American bands springing up in places like Georgia and North Carolina, places that had previously been bastions of country and blues music, or overtly southern rock bands. Suddenly the cool kids weren't all from New York or Boston, LA or San Francisco.
I don't get the sense that the band produced much that was essential over the last fifteen years or so -- although I last saw them in 2004 and they could still really grab a crowd -- but for a period of ten to twelve years, they burned rightly -- a pretty nice run for any band. I was a huge fan of Peter Buck's guitar playing, which ranged from delicate to crunching, but was always tasteful. And Stipe was Stipe -- an artistic soul who grew into stardom and seemed to know how to enjoy it enough without letting it distort or destroy him.
Anyway, spent the day down in Richmond on Thursday and am heading off to Boston mid-day today to visit my parents and the lad for the weekend.
Yes, this thing is making the rounds. (hat tip to l-t c)
One of the things that tends to annoy me is when Democratic politicians suggest that they have a much harder time making their case to the electorate because their positions are so much more nuanced than those of the right wingers. Sometimes this is true, but for the most part it reflects bad messaging, usually do to a lack of conviction by said politician, compounded by poor thinking, and a habit of trying to muddle messages so as not to offend.
Elizabeth Warren illustrates here how to make a punchy and persuasive case as to 1) why we have had a burgeoning deficit; and 2) why it is appropriate for successful business people to be taxed in a progressive manner. She speaks with conviction and with impeccable logic, in short, clear, declarative sentences -- there is no "on the one hand this, on the other hand that nonsense", no attempt to blur where she stands, and a respect for the intelligence of her audience. It's really well done. And if you're going to lose, this is the way to do it -- while actually standing for something.
I was skeptical about Warren's prospects initially -- she is an outsider in a state that has a pretty parochial streak in its Democratic politics. But watching her interact here, she strikes me as someone who can really connect with voters.
If she can continue to do this sort of thing, I think she has a pretty good chance against Scott Brown, a guy who is going to have a difficult time countering her plain spoken ways given his need to try to campaign as a Republican in a very blue state during a presidential election. If Perry is the Republican nominee, I think Brown will go down.
- More appallingly accurate self-hatred from Yglesias. You'll never really make it in this town kid if you don't acknowledge that Israel is the linchpin of all good things -- not to mention the deeply-hoped-for fiery ending of the world.
(I really wanted to post the Mekons version, sung by the incomparable Sally Timms, but the fucker can't be embedded.)
So it seems to me that Obama has set forth the cornerstone of his campaign with the combination of today's announcement of his deficit reduction plan on the heels of the American Jobs Act proposal. The combined plans strike me as having mass appeal with the added virtue of being simple to explain: stimulate employment in the short term by helping states keep teachers and other public employees on the payroll, continue to help the long term unemployed, and hire people to build needed infrastructure and repair school buildings, while paying for it down the road through increased taxes on the extremely well to do. Just as important is what the the proposal doesn't do -- there is no proposed cuts to Social Security, including changes to the COLA formula, and no increase in the Medicare eligibility age.
This, if pushed vigorously and clearly, is (I believe) a winning formula for both the election and governance. Especially when contrasted with the Republican plans, which essentially provide that nothing be done to alleviate current unemployment, attack highly popular entitlement programs, and promise economic growth via tax cuts aimed at the wealthy and deregulation -- in short, the same program as was already enacted under Bush 43 that gave us the horrific economic performance and exploding deficit of the aughts.
This is precisely the turf on which Democrats should want to fight this battle. And to the inevitable claims of class warfare, the President already has a pithy response -- "it's not class warfare, it's math." He needs to stick to this line, even when the mainstream media predictably enough tries to give credence to these absurd charges.
We can count on the right to rally round the plutocrats in the most servile fashion -- curs humping the leg of capital with reckless abandon. Hopefully, even amidst the current gloom, the vast majority of Americans will see that there is nothing for them in this disgusting, morally bankrupt, approach.
"Pumped Up Kicks" - Foster the People (Acoustic Version)
All day meeting and a union dinner dance tonight, so a bit light on the posting. Had a lovely dinner last night with kathy a. and her daughter. One of the great pleasures of doing this has been to meet some of you -- big bad wolf, Mandos, Jeanne Marie, and now kathy -- over the last year or two.
Will try and digest some of the day's events when I get home depending on the hour and the degree of exhaustion.
- The attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul immediately made me think of a similar attack during the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War. Although Tet ended up with the NLF suffering a massive loss of cadre, its impact on American public opinion was devastating. It gave the lie to the Johnson Administration's claim that the war was being won and resulted in significant loss of public support for the war. The war in Afghanistan is already quite unpopular -- this incident, although far less lethal than Tet, creates the sense that Afghanistan simply cannot be secured. It's just one more reason for Obama to speed up our exit from there. (A friend of mine from law school who is over there promoting the rule of law -- poor bastard -- spent eight hours hunkered down in the embassy while the attack went on -- can't wait to talk about that over beers whenever he gets back.)
- The arrogance and intransigence of the Netanyahu government has had little in the way of negative consequences to Israel thus far. One gets the sense that this could be changing -- rapidly -- and that it poses huge risks to the U.S. as well. The recent assertion by the Prime Minister of Turkey that he will provide a naval escort for the flotilla seeking to break the Gaza blockade is a deeply serious threat to the stability of the region. Any military action by Israel against Turkish warships would theoretically require the U.S. and other NATO members to come to the defense of Turkey. Awkward, eh? And now Prime Minister Edrogan seems ready to up the ante further -- by possibly trying to physically enter Gaza while on a visit to Egypt -- an Egypt where there is increasing restlessness regarding its treaty with Israel. In the meantime, the U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood is looming, while Israel's fanatical supporters in the U.S. Congress are going to encourage the Israelis to be even more obdurate. This is a situation that could rapidly spin out of control, with no telling what the consequences will be.
- Friedman actually makes sense here as he expresses dismay at the Republican dismissal of the science behind climate change. If this is your big concern Tom, wouldn't it also make sense to stop clamoring for an imaginary party to fight climate change and actually voice support for the existing party that would have passed legislation of this kind but for a Republican filibuster.
- This and this continue to bode poorly for any kind of sustained economic recovery. What is terribly frustrating is that we are four years into this morass and meaningful steps to address the problem are either nowhere in sight or likely to be stymied by Republican intransigence aided by Democratic gutlessness.
What's making you crack up today? Consider this an open thread as well.
I was listening to Bruce DJing on E Street Radio today and he played this, so it's got his endorsement. (He's a wonderfully eclectic DJ -- I heard him go from Ry Cooder to the Dubliners to Tupac Shakur to Steve Van Zandt to the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy to King Crimson this morning.)
- Roy watches so I don't have to -- the only thing funny about the Republican presidential debate is Roy's description of it (and the accompanying comments). His essential take on the state of things: "This county is not merely fucked, it is ass-fucked. Pursue at a minimum dual citizenship." Me, I was finding solace in Tom Brady throwing for 500 yards -- solace I am going to need, given that the Red Sox seem on the verge of a 1978-style collapse. (Hopefully Toast isn't reading this one.)
- As the Democratic Party stands on the verge of losing Anthony Weiner's seat, I keep wondering why the fuck he had to resign? Why did Pelosi and others insist on calling for his head -- look at the Republican treatment of Ensign, Vitter, et al. and explain to me why the Dems feel duty bound to force someone out of office for an offense that had no legal implications whatsoever?
Wow, Krugman really turned it up to eleven today with a post entitled "Years of Shame" in which he characterizes "what happened after 9/11 . . . as deeply shameful." He doubles down, essentially repeating the same charge in his short post, just a paragraph later:
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
He then disables comments for pretty obvious, but I think incorrect, reasons. I think if you are going to use language this inflammatory on a day like today, you really should let people respond.
I'm torn by the post. On the one hand, I admire the sheer chutzpah of engaging in this kind of heretical statement on a day in which the rest of the media is engaged in what strikes me (on very casual viewing) as a grotesque manipulation of emotions in order to attract eyeballs. I would also concur that 9/11 was demagogued by people like Bush and Cheney to justify shameful acts -- acts committed in our name.
And yet, I can't quite endorse the sentiment. Yes, both the tragedy and heroism of that day have been hijacked by some for less than admirable ends. But they do not own the day -- unless, I suppose, we let them.
Mostly I wish that Krugman had written a more thoughtful piece if this was going to be his topic. I would imagine that even ten years after the fact the wounds remain quite raw for those who lost loved ones or were themselves injured on that day. A column like this can seem to trivialize their pain and their memories.
This strikes me as a post that was dashed off in haste and disgust. I think Krugman could have benefitted from approaching this with a cooler head -- it would have produced a more nuanced column or, perhaps, he might have refrained from posting it on this day.
What do you all think?
Update: Krugman wrote an additional post -- helpfully pointed out by nancy -- that spells out with greater specificity what he was getting at in his post yesterday. The new post contains this paragraph:
Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.
But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.
All he really needed to do was take the time to add this additional detail (and spell check his post) and I would not have had a problem with it. The fact is that a large chunk of the American populace behaved admirably both during and after the tragedy. It was our political leadership and its media cheerleaders who failed us.
Resorting once again to late 1970s Boston nostalgia. Another great local song from back in the day when there was such a thing.
We live in pretty strange and uncertain times. Tomorrow we are sure to be flooded with a ridiculous amount of coverage commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11, but my sense is that in the longer run this will not be the event that defines our times. I suspect that historians will focus instead on two phenomena that threaten to signal the end of post World War II America as we have known it -- first, the devolution of the Republican Party into a kind of nihilistic right-wing cult, impervious to empiricism and indifferent, if not hostile, to the fates of a large swath of its countrymen. As I have argued often here, it is a mass political party unlike any that has ever existed on American soil -- disciplined, cynical, deeply ideological, yet extremely unprincipled, remarkably vicious, and interested in power at any cost -- even to the point of trying to disenfranchise Americans and destroy the faith of the citizenry in their government.
The scary thing is that it seems to be working. From day one they have set out to thwart Obama at every turn and, in the process, convince the American people that there is no way for government action to make a meaningful difference in their lives. As Steve Benen, among others, has pointed out, Republicans want the economy to remain in the toilet -- they see no reason to cooperate in any policies aimed at improving it. For their efforts, the GOP was rewarded with an enormous landslide in 2010 and they could possibly emerge from the 2012 election with control of the White House and both houses of Congress -- due to the frustrations of the electorate with the continued economic doldrums. It is difficult to overstate what a disaster this would be.
At the same time, it seems increasingly obvious that something epochal is happening in the American economy. The presumption that we will continue to live in a country characterized by a large and vibrant middle class -- a place where upward mobility is an essential and defining aspect of the society -- is looking increasingly unlikely. Everything about this recession suggests something bigger and more ominous than the reaction to a real estate bubble and attendant deleveraging. All signs increasingly point to a very different kind of America emerging from the wreckage of this moment. A place that is increasingly defined by economic and political inequality and where effective political action aimed at making the economy work for the masses of people will be increasingly difficult.
I am trying to grapple with what this world looks like and what approaches -- in terms of politics and policy -- can reverse these trends. It seems worth a few posts, although I am not sure in the end I have anything to say beyond describing what many of us see.
I did not see it live and am only now listening to the whole thing. I've read the text and thought it well done -- the delivery strikes me as even better. I liked this part the best:
But what we can’t do – what I won’t do – is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global
I could not bear to watch last night's debate -- that much crazy in one place is just too much for me at my advanced age. But I think I've gotten the gist by scanning the blogosphere and I think it raises this fundamental question: Just how utterly bloody minded is the Republican electorate?
It seems pretty shockingly clear -- considering not a vote has been cast -- that this thing is going to come down to Mitt Romney versus Rick Perry. Sensible people like James Fallows think that Romney carried the day last night, largely by avoiding saying things like "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme." I have a very high regard for Fallows as a journalist, but my gut reaction (and really, what is the more appropriate measure in this circumstance) is that he is wrong. Matt Yglesias also agrees with Fallows, based on the idea that Republican base voters really want to beat Obama and will thus choose the pragmatic route in pursuit of this greater goal.
I tend to see things more as Doug J and Elias Isquith do -- that today's Republican voter is first and foremost committed not to specific policy outcomes, but rather to signifying a series of attitudes with respect to politics, attitudes that by and large stem from a desire to shock and disturb those that they perceive perceive themselves as their cultural betters. In other words, in the end, for a huge chunk of these people, it comes down to voting for the candidate who would most piss off liberals.
It remains to be seen whether this tendency is actually a majority one within the Republican electorate. Again, I think that in the post-Obama world that it is -- indeed, even those who once had a veneer of respectability can now be seen embracing extreme doctrine as a rebuke to arrogant social reformers who think that the government should be able to have a say in things like the number of hours that can be worked or the age of the worker who might work them.
"Wreck on the Highway" - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Sorry again for the disappearance. I spent a harrowing day of driving from Worcester to DC -- over 11 hours in a continuous rain, that was especially nasty when I was going down the New Jersey Turnpike. I kept thinking of this song -- and not in a good way. When finally we got to DC, just after midnight, the Beltway was closed one mile from our exit as a result of what looked to be a horrific crash. It was a fitting end to a wretched day of east coast driving, with the Beltway's four lines narrowed down to one and cop car lights flashing everywhere. (I will never understand how people can opt for long distance driving rather than flying because they are afraid -- I was white knuckling it for hours yesterday in a way I never have flying.)
Anyway, I hope to write more substantively from the empty nest tonight. I don't think there will be a very lengthy do walk to interfere with things based on the weather again today. It is truly miserable here again today, with an ungodly amount of rain falling. Stanley is not a dog who enjoys the wet weather.
I did want to link to this story about Jimmy Hoffa's remarks about the Tea Party that Joe mentioned in comments below. I am glad Hoffa did not back off of them a bit. He shouldn't.
Okay, Happy Labor Day sounds bitterly ironic without my intending it to be.
Sorry for neglecting things -- it is kind of a weekend of endings and beginnings -- we buried my mother-in-law's ashes in suburban Philly on Saturday and now have driven up to Worcester, MA, where the lad is going to be doing an internship for the year. Worcester looks to be like a lot of former industrial cities in the 100-200,000 population range -- depressed and lacking a clear direction to get out of it. We stopped in Hartford, CT for lunch and that appeared to be much the same.
The New York Times had several good pieces today in its Sunday Review section, the best of which was by Robert Reich, laying out the crisis of the American middle class and the ways in which our drift towards plutocracy and the primacy of finance over the last thirty years have culminated in disaster for the overall economy. Ryan Avent makes the case for denser cities as a means of helping the economy -- something I wish the well-heeled citizenry in DC (and I don't mean politicians) would understand. And Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer advance the idea that happier workers actually enhance the productivity of companies, a notion that is apparently hard for most managers to understand.
Krugman continues to beat the drum for changing the conversation in Washington back to jobs and away from deficits. He acknowledges that nothing Obama proposes is likely to pass, but advocates that the President find the tone and content most likely to get Washington to focus on the critical need for job creation. The Times editorial board weighs in with the specifics they would like to see the President propose, even if the Republicans will stymie him at every turn.
In the end, reasonable people tend to believe that we have a crisis, that there are steps that could easily be taken to alleviate that crisis, and that there is no chance of such steps being enacted given the nature of today's Republican Party. It's really a hell of a situation for a country to be in.
Update: I forgot to link to this wonderful piece in the Times Magazine about iron workers in NYC. My firm represents several iron worker local unions and they are a rare bunch. One of the things that comes across so nicely in this article is the love of the work that characterizes the trade. I had a client several years ago -- now a quite high ranking union official -- who described to me coming back from college and doing iron work for the summer and falling in love with it and never going back to school. (Several of my clients worked on the building of the World Trade Center and loved the experience -- one guy I knew took his one week of vacation post 9-11 and spent it doing clean up at the site.) It is the kind of work that engenders a sense of both independence and brotherhood -- an intoxicating combination. As someone with a healthy fear of heights, I am slightly in awe of the nerve this work takes. The piece also fits nicely with the one I linked to above about happy workers being more productive -- people who feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in what they do tend to be that way. Anyway, happy labor day to all the union iron workers out there.
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus notices that Rick Perry is a straight up right-wing fucknut. This is significant since Marcus is generally of the Broderesque "on the one hand, on the other" centrist Village school of thought. And while my first reaction was "my what a keen grasp of the obvious you have" my second was that it is extremely important that what many of us here find to be self-evident be pointed out in mainstream circles. Moreover, Marcus is right to suggest that Perry is quite a different animal than George W. Bush, although it may be difficult for some of us to fully realize this. But, and here is where the column falls short -- Perry is not an extremist in isolation. Instead, his full-throated anti-New Deal politics (hell anti-Progressive era politics) have quietly and quickly become mainstream thought in today's Republican Party.
This was not true of Bush 43. He not only ran on the maddeningly mushy "compassionate conservative" slogan, he actually governed that way in his first term. His signature domestic achievements, Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind were flawed, but progressive pieces of legislation, enacted with substantial Democratic support. Yes, Medicare Part D was badly structured and inefficient and a pay off to the pharmaceutical industry. But guess what -- it was also a massive expansion of the social safety net, a huge increase in entitlements, one which under PPACA will provide really good prescription drug benefits for senior citizens, which was a gaping hole in Medicare. I am not a huge fan of NCLB, but it too should be recognized as far more liberal than conservative, given its focus on a dominant federal role in education and its insistence on creating uniform national standards of expected achievement, both of which are anathema to the local control types who make up the right wing of the Republican Party. Both Part D and NCLB were calculated to increase Bush's appeal to senior citizens and white suburban women, constituencies that Karl Rove thought crucial to maintaining a Republican majority. (And remember immigration reform, which Bush and Rove also embraced before being beaten back by their base.)
This kind of coalition widening calculus has gone out the window with the Republicans since 2008. The critique of the 2008 election was that Bush was the problem because he was not a true conservative, a view that the true believers now feel was vindicated by the landslide in the 2010 mid-terms. As a result, Republicans are not in a compromising mood -- they are ready for a purity campaign, convinced, as they so often are, that they speak for a majority of Americans.
And it's not just Perry. Look at the congressional leadership in Washington, holding disaster aid hostage to budget cuts. Look at the way northern GOP governors -- a group that Broder once adored for their pragmatism -- have ruled since 2010. Governors Walker, Kasich, Snyder, LePage, and Daniels have all governed in a manner designed to alienate all but their hard core supporters. Each is making a bet that they can effectively crush their opposition early on and then smooth things over with the rest of the electorate by the time they face voters again. It is seriously high stakes poker, the opposite of the kinds of moves that even a hard nosed player like Rove attempted.
I think a couple of things are worth noting. The Republicans have won the popular vote in one presidential election in the last five -- 2004, in which Bush, a war time president managed to garner 50.7% of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes. They have not run a full on right wing campaign for the presidency since 1964 and we know how that went. Reagan, in 1980, spent the bulk of his campaign being not-Carter and not-Goldwater. He sanded down almost all of the hard edges, minimizing the culture war stuff, playing up the sunny optimism and the miracles that tax cuts would bring. (Well he did play the cold war angle in a pretty hard core way, but in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets, the nation was pretty receptive to a little vague saber rattling.)
I think if Perry is the nominee that Obama basically starts the election with Kerry's states pretty much in his pocket. Look at those states and see if you disagree -- is there a one in which you see Perry having a great deal of appeal? From there, Obama just has to put together one, in the case of Florida, or a couple of the other states he took in 2008 -- Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada in order to win.
Now I could be wrong. The economy looks to remain abysmal enough through 2012 that it should preclude victory for an incumbent president. But here is what I think has changed a great deal in the last 30 years. From 1966 until relatively recently, the culture wars worked for the GOP -- both because it mobilized their base and because middle of the road voters tended not to care.
I think that has changed. I think that changes in demographics and societal attitudes -- see e.g. gay marriage -- have now made the religious and social extremism of the Republican base a genuine liability in large parts of the country. Throw in the attacks on popular programs like Social Security and Medicare -- a tough sell in Florida methinks -- the usual casual racism against Blacks and Latinos, the ugly homophobia, and the ultimate indifference toward the unemployed, and I see a party that is going to have a hard time closing the deal with the American electorate -- even in a dismal economy.
At least I hope so. Because God help us if I am wrong.
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