The "birther" movement began not because Barack Obama's campaign refused to show proof of his citizenship, but because it did show proof. In June 2008, it responded to some rumors about whether Obama was born a Muslim or had different parents than had been reported by releasing the short-form certificate, the sort of form you get if you lose your driver's license and need to prove your identity to the DMV to get a new license. This launched a cottage industry of hilarious "document analysis" attempting to prove that the certificate was forged by the Obama campaign. And this is exactly what would happen again if the governor of Hawaii, who knew the Obama family in the 1960s, let reporters photograph more of Obama's documents. The birther crowd would cry "forgery," as the Kennedy assassination and moon landing hoax crowds look for anything that could unravel the official story in every new official analysis.
It's really simple, folks: They're just not that into facts. So providing more facts is a fool's errand. Generally, liberals & Democrats are much more attentive to facts--but the fact that facts just don't matter to conservatives? That's one fact they just can't seem to get, no matter how many times their noses are rubbed in it.
Pollster Reveal: Few Candidates Saw Deficit Reduction As A MajorIssue
Posted: 12-29-10 01:12 PM
NEW HAVEN -- It is expected as a fait accompli that President Obama, both in his upcoming State of the Union address and during his next year or two in office, will focus his energy and efforts on deficit reduction.
The administration has already announced a forthcoming freeze in both discretionary spending and federal worker salaries. And with a more heavily GOP-tilted legislative branch in the offing, this topic appears to be the best (and perhaps only) hope for a governing consensus.
There's a sound argument to be made on economic grounds that this makes little sense. But increasingly it has become clear that there is scant political upside as well, at least for Democrats. A CNN poll released earlier this week found that while a wide swath of respondents thought spending was a problem, only one in five believed "that deficit reduction should be the main goal of government today." That number mirrors other polling data that sets deficit reduction as a second-tier priority, as far as the public is concerned.
A more telling metric, however, may be that when actual congressional candidates were polling their own districts during the height of the 2010 elections they neither considered deficit reduction a major issue nor were handed data that suggested it was.
The Huffington Post reached out to half-a-dozen major Democratic pollsters to ask them what topics not only resonated most with the voting public but occupied their clients the most as the election approached. The deficit wasn't on the list.
"Deficit reduction was more a DC-driven narrative during the elections," said John Anzalone, a partner at Anzalone Liszt Research. "I think it will be a more salient issue in the next twelve months, but the reality is that if the deficit is the most important issue for a voter there is not much of a chance a Democratic candidate for Congress is going to get them anyway."
"Deficit reduction is very inside the beltway," said Tom Jensen, the Director of Public Policy Polling. "It was not something many voters spend a lot of time thinking about."
Stein goes on to report that health care reform was a worrying issue for Southern Democrats, according Jensen, while other pollsters talked about outsourcing and fighting job loss:
Is the conservative approach to job creation as deluded as attacking Iraq in response to 9/11? Or is it even more deluded? Either way, it's conceptually similar, in that rationale offered is an excuse, not a reason. The neocons wanted a new Cold War, and in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" they frankly admitted that they needed a "new Pearl Harbor" (p. 63) to get public opinion stampeded into supporting them. On the economic side, Naomi Klein wrote a whole book, The Shock Doctrine about how the "give the rich people all your money" scam works. (Put people into a total panic, then hit them with an avalanche of pre-fab theories telling them "there is no alternative.")
But most particularly on job creation--and comparing the two issues that are up right now: millionaires tax cuts and unemployment insurance--the evidence is overwhelmingly against conservatives as this CBO chart (page 11, slightly modified for visual purposes) clearly shows (unemployment insurance at the top, income tax cuts at the bottom, about 1/6th as effective):
Last night, Rachel Maddow had a real economist on to refute this nonsense (although Rachel holds up a different, earlier CBO document, that has the same data in a table, not a chart):
Once again, that surreal clip from John Shaddeg's interview with Mike Barnicle went like this:
On Friday, MSNBC replaced Countdown and The Rachel Maddow Show with a 2-hour special on Obama's encounter with the GOP House caucus at their Baltimore retreat, with Kieth and Rachel being joined by Chris Matthews as well. The consensus of all three was that Obama mopped the floor with the House Republicans. But as I watched I had more than a nagging feeling that they were somewhat missing the point--even as Rachel kept reminding folks that Obama might well be missing the point. Although not addressing them specifically, Paul Krugman brought things down to Earth when he wrote:
Look, Obama is a terrific speaker and a very smart guy. He really showed up the Republicans in the now-famous give-and-take. But we knew that. What's now in question isn't his ability to talk, it's his ability to lead.
The problem is not just "leadership skills"--though those are problematic enough. It's having even the vaguest notion of what our goals and direction need to be. In the same blog post, Krugman points out:
It's all very well to say "we're going to focus on job creation". But what does that mean? At this point, no major economic programs have any chance of getting passed. Think of it this way: a year ago the question was whether the stimulus would be $700 billion or $1.2 trillion, now we're talking about $30 billion jobs tax credits.
7. Don't take credit until after it's done. When my boyfriend and I were driving up to Syracuse for Chris and Natasha's wedding this past summer, somewhere on I-81 in central Pennsylvania, here's the first of these I would see:
Go Obama/Democrats/Keynesian economics, we both cheered!
90 minutes later had barely moved 10 miles because the construction traffic sucked so much, were late for the event, and were both muttering how much we hated the stimulus package. Lesson: finish the project, then take credit.
8. Don't forget the small projects. For all the talk of infrastructure highways and national parks- which both could put a lot of people to work and generate a lot of public goodwill by the sheer number of users- let's not forget the smaller projects. Here's a gorgeous new dog park in my neighborhood:
And there's a big "project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" sign on the other side of it. While it may not have put as many people to work to build it, in terms of the politics of demonstrating how the stimulus has built stuff and taking credit, sometimes the dog park visited multiple times per week by the same residents beats all the folks driving once up I-81 through Pennsylvania and forgetting who/what build it.
On Friday, we learned that the U.S. unemployment rate officially broke 10% for the first time since the early Reagan years. This is about as bad as it gets for a modern, developed economy. No economic force takes a heavier toll on a society than rampant joblessness, and few personal setbacks take a deeper psychological toll than being out of a job for months on end. If Congress and President Obama don't do something to create jobs fast, both are going to pay a hefty political price when next year's mid-term elections roll around.
So how bad is it? In October, the economy shed 190,000 jobs and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.8% to 10.2%. That percentage is the most optimistic reading of the labor market in Friday's report. If you take people who want full-time jobs but are settling for part-time work, then add those who have simply given up on finding a job, the rate is a massive 17.5%.
The problem is not that either Obama or Congress have failed to act on the problem, but rather that they have not done enough. When Congress was moving on Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package back in February, we were shedding upwards of 700,000 jobs a month. So the stimulus package has worked-it's probably helped keep unemployment from jumping to 12% or 13%. But this is cold comfort to the nation's 15.7 million unemployed, 5.6 million of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.
As Robert Reich notes for Salon, Obama's economic advisers dramatically underestimated how bad things would get when they crafted the stimulus package. As a result, the package was too small and unemployment has remained high. Obama needs to go back to Congress and demand more economic relief funding. Republicans will continue to whine about government spending to excuse their obstructionism, of course, and conservative Democrats will probably start sweating, too-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) helped cut back the original stimulus bill in February to help boost his "centrist" credentials. This of course had nothing to do with economics or policy. Government spending is what saves the economy in a recession. In a downturn as severe as this one, it takes a lot of spending to turn things around.
But as Reich notes, Nelson and his cohorts will have a lot more to worry about in the 2010 elections if the economy doesn't actually improve over the next year. And few economists think it will. The Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a conservative economist named Douglas Elmendorf, projects an average unemployment rate of over 10% in 2010. That's worse than this year. Democrats from swing districts need to support economic relief packages. Continued economic malaise will severely hurt them at the polls.
Congress finally took some action on joblessness on Thursday, voting to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks. If we want the economy to recover, we need people to spend money, but if people aren't working, they don't have any money to spend. So the government cuts people checks to help them get by and stimulate a demand for goods and services. Even most conservative economists thinks this is a good idea.
But as Kevin Drum notes for Mother Jones, the soundness of the policy did nothing to prevent Republicans from fighting the effort to extend benefits tooth-and-nail. The bill had to overcome three-that's right, three-filibusters in the Senate from Republicans, who held up the bill for weeks for no apparent reason. In a blog post for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen explains the economic cost of this obstructionism: In the weeks of delay, 200,000 people looking for work stopped receiving benefits.
But extending unemployment benefits will not solve our economic woes. The total program is just $2.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government put up to salvage Wall Street. $2.4 billion is not enough to reverse the unemployment trend. Cutting the checks certainly helps, but as Matthew Rothschild emphasizes for The Progressive, we need an economic policy that actually puts people back to work. We've known for months that the stimulus was too small and watched the labor market continue to deteriorate. We need more than tweaks at the economic margins, we need a robust job creation plan.
As Stephen Franklin notes for Working In These Times, we already know that the recession has created a significant jump in the nation's poverty rate. According to official government statistics, the rate climbed from 12.5% to 13.2% in 2008, the largest increase since 1991. But the National Academy of Science thinks the government statistics are misleading, as they account for rising costs associated with medical care, transportation, child care and different regional living standards, as Franklin notes. Taking these factors into account, the National Academy of Sciences calculates the actual poverty rate to be 15.8%. That's an additional 7 million people living in poverty, for a total of over 47 million. That's more than the entire population of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas combined. What's worse, we don't have poverty statistics for this year, when the most severe economic damage was been dealt.
Workers are facing tough economic prospects around the world. Writing for The Nation, Kristina Rizga details Latvia's economic turmoil. Just like the US, overexcited bankers in Latvia inflated a massive real estate bubble that took down the entire economy when it burst. But with the bubble burst, much of the country is now out of a job and stuck with a mortgage worth far less than what they paid for it. It's almost exactly the same story we've seen at home.
No domestic economic problem is more pressing than our epic levels of unemployment. We need another round of stimulus to get people working again. If not, we'll see the same public unrest here as in Eastern Europe.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Bloggger
Since the U.S. is officially in a recession, and the Congressional Budget Office has predicted the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, just about everybody acknowledges that times are tough.
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