It’s only been a week, and I am already sickened unto death of the re-positioning tango over how to re-position ourselves to win the next election. Of course, maybe one of the reasons I am sick of it is that it happens after every losing election. The biggest reason I am sick of it, though, is that none of it really matters at all to the voters Democrats lost in this election and need to win back. The swing voters we lost in this election, as I wrote about here, are the economically stressed working and middle class- the ones whose mortgages are underwater or in danger of getting there, the ones whose family members are losing jobs or having hours being cut back, the ones who haven’t gotten a raise in 2 or 3 years, the ones whose pensions and savings are worth a lot less than they were 3 years ago. And you know what: they couldn’t care less how Obama or other Democrats are positioned. What they do care about are having good jobs come back to their communities, and having their homes’ value start to edge up again.
That’s why the new memo from Third Way doesn’t do much for me. It doesn’t make me angry, either, although I know it is supposed to: you know, get the debate between liberals and moderates engaged and all that. What it does do is go to my friends at Third way’s favorite stalking horse, the fact that self-identified liberals only make up 20% of the electorate. You know what? Just so Third Way folks don’t feel like they have to keep beating this dead horse, I will be glad to stipulate that point in this and all future arguments: self-described liberals are a small minority of the electorate, and you can’t win elections with only their votes. See, we agree. And who ever said progressives couldn’t get along with moderates?
Today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has stood by his remarks about lefties criticizing the Obama administration:
Taking the podium after a day off to tend to a sore throat, Gibbs said he has not reached out to any Democrats to discuss his remarks, in which he chastised liberals for wanting to "eliminate the Pentagon" and pursue Canadian-style health care reform. Nor, he added, has he talked to the president about the matter.
On November 7, 2003, a strange new group no one had ever heard of called "Americans for Jobs & Healthcare" was quietly formed and soon thereafter began running a million dollar operation including political ads against then-frontrunner Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. The commercials ripped Dean over his positions or past record on gun rights, trade and Medicare growth. But the most inflammatory ad used the visual image of Osama bin Laden as a way to raise questions about Dean's foreign policy credibility. While the spots ran, Americans for Jobs-through its then- spokesman, Robert Gibbs, a former Kerry campaign employee-refused to disclose its donors.
I don't expect someone with such a past to apologize for slagging the left-wing of the party. Or, if they do apologize, I don't expect them to mean it.
However, it is stunning to me that the most prominent staffer responsible for outreach from the White House "said he has not reached out to any Democrats to discuss his remarks." Really? Gibbs didn't talk to a single Democrat about saying something that pissed off a lot of Democrats? And he is in charge of maintaining the White House's message?
As Mike wrote earlier today (and I encourage you to read his article if you have not already done so), this is pure outreach fail. Even if you are a huge Obama supporter who thinks that the lefties criticizing Obama are just a bunch of naïve, whiny brats, and that if Democrats get clobbered in 2010 it will be entirely the fault of said brats, then you should still be in favor of reaching out to them. That is, you should be in favor of reaching out to them, unless you are cool with Democrats getting clobbered in 2010, as long as the whining brats get blamed for the clobbering.
If you want to keep your coalition together, you have to do the outreach, even to members of the coalition you hate. And, right now, liberal support for Presidnet Obama is not where it needs to be. Even if you dismiss the Gallup polling, whose enormous, unparalleled subsample of liberals shows President Obama at 74% among the group, even the 85% approval rating the President has among liberals in other polls is not high enough (click here for a further discussion on President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals). Back in 2004, John Kerry got 85% of the vote among liberals, and that was not enough for victory. Democrats need very, very high numbers among liberals to win nationally. As such, those who want to win nationally need to be willing to engage in actual outreach to them rather than just standing by their insults.
Greg Sargent, Political Wire, and others have cited numbers from Public Policy Polling to argue that President Obama's approval ratings among self-identified liberals remain quite high. According to PPP, President Obama's job performance among self-identified liberals is still a robust 85%.
However, there is a serious flaw in citing these numbers: they are only based on a subsample of between 125-130, which gives them a margin of error of plus or minus 8.9%. That is, they are only based on a subsample of 125-130 registered voters if PPP's new national survey is anything like their national survey from last month, when 19% of their overall sample of 667 voters self-identified as liberal.
By way of comparison, across the last four Gallup weekly approval polls, which have a combined sample of 14,346 respondents, President Obama's job performance among self-identified liberals has only averaged 74%. With Gallup identifying 20% of the electorate as liberal so far in 2010, that would mean a liberal subsample of 2,869, that would mean a margin of error of only 1.8%. That makes the Gallup numbers far, far more reliable than the PPP numbers.
Looking across all other job performance polls taken over the past month, only one organization, YouGov, produced crosstabs based strictly on ideological self-identification. There are literally no other polls that released such crosstabs-only PPP, Gallup and YouGov.
Across 899 self-identified liberals surveyed in their last four polls, YouGov's does show President Obama's approval rating at 84%. That number is much closer to PPP's result than to Gallup's. Also, the subsample only has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3%, which means that random error alone cannot account for the difference between the Gallup and YouGov numbers. Further, both Gallup and YouGov are sampling "all adults," and cell-phone onlys, so the difference cannot be found there either. That YouGov is conducted over the Internet might be causing problems, but Polimetrix, which actually conducts the YouGov polls, actually has a decent track record.
So, where does Obama's approval actually stand among self-identified liberals? While PPP's sample size is too small to be taken seriously, it would be unwise to look for "The One, True Poll," and completely ignore either YouGov or Gallup, both of which have good sample sizes. Personally, I am a big believer in simple poll averaging as a way of providing an accurate snapshot of electoral preference, and the numbers back me up on that belief. I see no reason why simple poll averaging can't be applied in this situation as well, which would peg President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals at around 79-80%.
Those are not very good numbers for President Obama among self-identified liberals. However, they are too be expected given his overall approval rating of 44.6%, which is itself not a very good rating. Also, until the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats start passing public policy that has a more immediate, positive impact on the lives of most Americans, it is unlikely that this rating will improve. That is the case no matter the "political reality," and no matter much anyone sneers, or does not sneer, at progressives.
As a follow-up to my earlier post, "Identity economics--a major breakthrough?", here's a look at how differences in ideological identities produce different activities, while simultaneously revealing a major conceptual problem with the minimalist "Third Way" infatuation with "nudges".
A couple of weeks back, at the Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten called attention to a very interesting finding about how Cass Sunstein-touted "nudges" can work like a charm to reduce energy consumption with liberals, but utterly fail with conservatives, who actually increased their energy usage in response to nudges pushing them the other way. This is, I believe, a fascinating example of how Identity Economics can help shed light on the limits of more narrow-minded technocratic fixes--and possibly even help to craft them more intelligently. (It should be noted that Sunstein's "nudges" are presented within the context of "behavioral economics", and take into account deviations from perfect information along the lines of Akerlof's earlier work, but they still fall within the overall narrative framework pushed by market fundamentalists that privileges approaches that don't rock the boat, don't raise systemic questions, and don't challenge existing structures of power.) Here's Erik:
This is pretty startling evidence of how political polarization affects every day life choices, and not in a good way (although the effects are not huge). The NBER paper [by Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn] is here, a short discussion by the authors is here and the abstract is below.
"Nudges" are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that while the electricity conservation "nudge" of providing feedback to households on own and peers' home electricity usage works with liberals, it can backfire with conservatives. Our regression estimates predict that a Democratic household that pays for electricity from renewable sources, that donates to environmental groups, and that lives in a liberal neighborhood reduces its consumption by 3 percent in response to this nudge. A Republican household that does not pay for electricity from renewable sources and that does not donate to environmental groups increases its consumption by 1 percent.
In the discussion, the researchers add:
If the same message "turns on" greens but "turns off" more conservative individuals, then to reach out to all members of a diverse population requires a mixed-messages strategy....
To design nudges effectively, a "nudger" must anticipate how diverse subjects will respond. We have shown that while energy conservation nudges work with liberals, they backfire with conservatives. Greens may reduce their consumption in response to the receipt of a Home Energy Report because both private and social effects work in the same direction. They want to be good global citizens and suffer when they are made aware that they are "part of the problem."
The obvious lesson for field experiments is that on polarised issues even seemingly innocuous messages may trigger perverse effects. What works on average in this California county may not work on average in Lubbock, Texas if the proportion of greens is less.
Miller counts off the grim statistics of American society's most intractable problems: "40 million uninsured; 15 million working poor; 10 million poor kids in failing schools." Soon, making these costs seem trivial, baby boomers will retire. And the political system, distorted by money and special interests, refuses to seriously address these issues. Miller, a radio commentator and syndicated columnist, has a plan. With an increase of government spending of 2% of GDP, we can solve all these problems...
Gosh! 2%--it's such a tiny slice! Why can't we all just get along?
Well, perhaps because increasing government spending without increasing revenues is what the GOP has been doing for a long, long time--producing massive deficits which it then turns around and blames on Democrats. And because New Democrats like Barack Obama have pretty much given up on arguing that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization," as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. so neatly put it. Which is why it's so relevant to re-post a couple of charts that Chris put up during the week in "Federal taxes at historic lows":
The relentless decline in income tax rates--far more significant for the super-rich than for ordinary Americans--reveals Miller's pipe dream for the utter fantasy it is. Miller implicitly assumes a fixed difference between static liberal and conservative positions. But as with the Supreme Court, so with the tax rate--any failure to continue the relentless march to the right is considered "socialism" by conservatives, as would Miller's proposal, if anyone were to serious pursue it, say with health care reform (Publishers Weekly reviewed continued, precisely where it left off above...)
but it will require "grand bargains" between the parties, with Democrats agreeing to accept market-oriented programs if Republicans will generously fund them. For instance, Miller says many Republicans would support universal health coverage if Democrats would allow a plan relying on tax subsidies to cover private insurance policies.
Ha! It's only fair to note that Miller published this book in 2003, and that afterwards, Mitt Romney seemingly validated it... in Massachusetts! Of course, as Michael Dukakis can tell you, Massachusetts is not America, which is basically why this whole approach is detached from reality.
So, to summarize what's delusional about this sort of centrism:
The Political Foundations of A Liberal/Reform Coalition
In Part 1, I introduced Chris's idea of A Liberal/Reform Coalition, which he introduced in his post-2004 election diary, "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In that diary, Chris identified a non-ideological reform-oriented segment of the population, which has shown up in third-party presidential campaigns since the Populist era, which he talked about thus:
This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
In this diary, I want explore what it would take to actually do that, focusing on a few key foundational thrusts.
Millennial Foundations
To begin with, I want to argue that the Democrats have already started down the path Chris suggests, albeit not fully consciously. The Dean campaign was the start of this, and Dean's implementation of the 50-state strategy--which Chris also talked about in a couple of related posts at the time--continued the process. What's key to this was/is creating a vibrant grass-roots political culture in which ideas and initiative can come from below--and, indeed, are encouraged to do so. And the evidence of the success of this can be seen in a recent Pew report, "A Pro-Government, Socially Liberal Generation: Democrats' Edge Among Millennials Slips". This report shows both the enormous potential support among Millenials, as well how Obama's status quo presidency has undercut this support. It's my contention that the significant difference between Millenials and earlier generations you'll see in the chart below is due in large part to their shared perception of the liberal/reform coalition as logical political development--as already demonstrated by the Dean campaign and the 50-state strategy.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of this can be seen by comparing the ideological self-identification of Millennials to other generations:
The difference here is simply astonishing. Even the electorate the gave LBJ a 60-40 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater was significantly more likely to identify itself as "conservative" rather than "liberal" by a margin somewhere between 3-2 and 2-1, a range that the conservative/liberal ratio has stayed within ever since then. Of course, this has been counterbalanced by the fact that a large number of self-identified conservatives actually support liberal policies, particularly on core New Deal social spending issues. But the more that politics revolves around identity, the more this ideological ratio has favored conservatives. With Millennials, this is no longer so. The identification ratio hovers around 1-1 instead.
Immediately following the 2004 election, Chris engaged in nearly month-long period of analysis and reflection, which culminated in a post "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In it, Chris proposed a very different direction from that of a liberal/libertarian coalition along the lines proposed by Markos (in his Cato Institute "Libertarian Democrat" article) and others. Instead of aligning ourselves with anti-government types, Chris argued we should align ourselves with government-reformer types--voters who could be anti-government in some ways or circumstances, but who were just as much reachable by a messages of reform, transparency and openness. Howard Dean took the party in a promising direction with his 50-state strategy, nurturing the grassroots s never before, and Obama campaigned by appearing to stand for more of the same. But by aligning himself with Wall Street & other insiders, Obama has drastically undercut the logic of the direction Chris laid out, even as libertarians have turned sharply against him, as others, such as Ed Kilgore ("Liberals and Libertarians Finally Break Up") have recently noted. Chris was right on target, I argue in this diary, and to get out of the hole Obama & the Democrats have dug for themselves, we need to get back to the strategy that Chris proposed. It's going to be harder with Obama working against us--no question about it. But it's far and away the most realizable political path forward over the long haul. Let's look at the argument in more detail.
The Potential of A Liberal/Reform Coalition
Specifically, in "Eureka!" Chris wrote:
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
More specifically, Chris presented a series of seven maps of significant third party presidential vote strength:
There's a lot of rigidity visible in how many people's thinking has remained remarkably unaffected by the virtually unprecedented behavior of the GOP over the past year-plus. The rigidity itself would make an interesting topic to focus on, but it's more like the appetizer as far as I'm concerned, and I want to head straight for the entree: What people should have learned by now about liberals vs. conservatives, the left vs. the right. I've written about this before, how the right/conservatives see politics as war, while the left/liberals see politics as problem-solving. But I'm ready to tackle it again.
To do so, I'd like to step back a bit and take a look at really macro-history, courtesy of Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutiopn, in a mid-week post, "Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?" It wasn't his purpose to answer the question about the origins of left/right attitudes towards politics for us, but he did so, whether he realized it or not. Here's the crux of the matter:
extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation. They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.
Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself. That's a very delicate balance
Of course other things are important. Cowen also cites Britain's geography, and the influence of Christianity, especially as it evolved into Protestantism, some commentators cited the Enlightenment, which Cowen rightly notes came too late to explain how it got started, but is not so far-fetched if one sees it as the tail end of a secularizing, empiricizing and rationalizing triple-play: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. And, of course, the start of the modern information age via the printing press also gets noted in comments.
All these "secondary" explanations are importatnt, of course, but they're secondary in the sense that if predation could not be kept relatively at bay for long enough, none of them would have made a difference. It was the core power dynamic in the passage I quoted above that created the opportunity space in which the other factors could take hold. Without them, the Industrial Revolution wouldn't have happened. But with the core dynamic in place for long enough, it seems arguable that sooner or later good enough social/institutional factors would have enabled the start of the Industrial Revolution.
What's this got to do with left & right, liberal & conservative, you ask? Well, simple: the aristocracy is the core of the right, and it's based on two things: predation and inheritence. The European aristocracy is Europe's warrior class, and their values, outlook, social practices and habits define what it means to be conservative. (This is strongly reflected in the American South as well.) Of course, they aren't alone. But they're at the very core, along with the institutions they have long controlled--most notably, the Catholic Church.
Liberalism primarily evolved out of the city-based "middle classes", based in trade, small-manufacture and the professions--the bourgeoisie, although skilled workers (Tom Paine, anyone?) and even freed slaves (Frederick Douglass) played a part as well. In turn, socialism/social democracy evolved primarily out of the working class, although disaffected members of the bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels, anyone?) played a significant role as well.
The Marxist method of dialectical materialism highlighted the tendency for old forms to persist in new ones, in altered forms via the dynamic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, so there was sensitivity to the fact that the liberal bourgeoisie had more in common with the aristocracy than it generally realized. (Particularly when it took over the functions of running the state, setting up empires, running slave trades, etc.) But in fact, this analytically method actually understates the degree to which all sides tend to reflect one another in various ways, nor does it adequately account for similarities between the proletariat and the aristocracy, such as a tendency toward embodied forms of reason, and a more conflictual view of politics. Still, that does not negate the fact of profound differences in the basic logic of different social groups, nor the fact that generally speaking proletarian politics are to the left of bourgeois politics.
Things got quite a bit more mixed up in America, what with the lack of a national aristocracy, the presence of both an indigenous population to be predated and the imported slave population as a product of predation, and the post-Civil War emergence of monopoly capitalists whose essential logic was much more predatory than earlier capitalists had been, as well as the complex politics of race, ethnicity and region. But the last half century has been a period in which America's political parties--and its politics more generally--has become more aligned along traditional left/right divides--though some new forms were developed to facilitate this.
Digby writes admiringly of the move by several Democratic senators to surprise Sens Vitter and Coburn by co-sponsoring what they thought was a poison pill amendment to the Senate health care bill to require all members of Congress to enroll in the Public Option. It's a brilliant bit of bluff calling. The video clip she posts is enjoyable, Franken is proving worth the fight it took to get him there. One of Digby's commenters captures what happened here perfectly:
Like many conservatives, Coburn and Vitter have internalized their cynicism and assume that others are similarly corrupt and selfish. It must astound them that liberals actually want to rely on the services they would have the government provide.
Not understanding and appreciating one's enemies leads to truly stupid mistakes like this.
Xenos | 12.04.09 - 10:47 pm | #
It is this sort of thing that liberals need to get better at.
Looking over the vote in the House on the Stimulus Package, where almost all the Democrats and none of the Republicans voting for Obama's proposal (despite his extremely visible outreached hand, meetings, compromises on more than one issue, etc.), I realized that the Republican (read Neo-Conservative) Movement was still in full swing. It was one thing to go up against a majority of American economists, a growing number of unemployed workers, lower-middle-class homeowners whose mortgages were about to et their homes... but it is strictly another thing not to have any Party concessions (like one or two votes in favor) to show that the attempts at bipartisanship by the President would be somewhat acknowledged.
There are conventions, customs, and words, thought to be complementary. Consider; Fat and jolly. Short and sweet. Tax-and-spend-liberal. These words, while often far from tantamount, are in the minds of many, inexorably tied.
I was fat. However, I did not feel jolly during those days, months, and years. I am short. Sweet? I am not especially so; nor am I sour. Balanced might better describe me, which takes me to the next paired, or triad of adjectives. I like my taxes progressive, my spending minimal, and I am a liberal.
However, I do not support the oft-titled tax-and-spend-liberal Democratic President's appointment, Timothy F. Geithner. Perhaps, some would say, I do not appreciate the need for an economic expert. This duo of descriptive qualifiers, I believe, can be an oxymoron, just as the others might be. It seems those farthest "Left" on the political aisle may concur.
Russell Feingold [Wisconsin Democrat], Thomas Harkin [Iowa Democrat,] and Democratic Socialist, Bernard Sanders [Vermont Independent] voted nay when asked to approve Timothy Geithner for Secretary of Treasury.
Here is my take on the Forbes list of the 25 most influential liberals (compiled by some Hoover Institution hack, Tunku Varadarajan):
25. Michael Pollan: seems like a good guy but I detect a whiff of lifestyle liberalism about him.
24. Kurt Andersen: is he that influential?.
23. Kevin Drum: not my favorite, but much of the blogosphere seems to love him.
22. Ezra Klein: indispensable, although he is an apologist for RomneyCare, also a recovering liberal hawk.
21. James Fallows: deserved, I guess.
20. Gerald Seib: meh.
19. Andrew Sullivan: not a liberal.
18. Glenn Greenwald: I don' know if he considers himself a liberal, but he is awesome.
17. Hendrick Hertzberg: deserved, I guess.
16. Matthew Yglesias: deserved, recovering liberal hawk.
15. Maureen Dowd: whatever.
14. Christopher Hitchens: a drink-soaked neocon/Trotskyist popinjay.
13. Bill Moyers: well deserved, he is slowly making up for his years in the Johnson administration, will still serve a sentence in Purgatory.
12. Chris Matthews: the Fred Willard of cable news.
11. Fareed Zakaria: Thomas Friedman with an almost human face, Iraq war supporter.
10. Kos: deserved.
9. David Shipley: the Times op-ed editor, Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack's go-to guy.
8. TPM Josh: a very important liberal, recovering liberal hawk.
7. Maddow: fair enough.
6. Oprah: we can thank her for the mega success of The Secret, a collection of pseudoscience, pop-psychology and magic with regressive political implications.
5. Jon Stewart: he is a talented satirist of power, I don't think he advances a coherent political analysis on his show although his personal views are clearly left of center.
4. Thomas Friedman: a morally depraved, bloodthirsty individual and a terrible writer, must be stopped before he kills again.
3. Fred Hiatt: villager.
2. Arianna Huffington: a tycoon, her contribution to the liberal-left seems significant but is ultimately more entrepreneurial than political, recovering right-wing pundit.
1. Krugman: one of the least offensive neoliberals.
Final thought: this is why I don't identify as a liberal.
Pew Research Center for People & the Press has put out some interesting figures relating to this election and the media involvement of Americans. What caught my interest was the statistics on those of us following the the campaigns on the internet via blogs, online journalism and campaign web sites. One thing it has discovered is that more Liberal Democrats use this medium than Conservative Republicans - and the liberals top the conservatives in activism and financial donations.
Obama's sudden lurch to the right is all in accord with one of Versailles' most treasured, and most bogus narratives, the claim that America is a "center-right" country, and thus that it's both natural and necessary for any Democrat to attack the party's base and trample the things it believes in. After all, they're just a bunch of DFHs, whose views are hated and despised by real Americans (who read David Brooks religiously to know what they should think).
I'll have more to say about the center-right premise in another diary, but here I want to dramatically illustrate quite the opposite conclusion--that it's not the DFHs who are out of touch with the American people. It's the movement conservatives who are so far out there that even the vast majority of day-to-day conservatives are opposed to their fundamental agenda.
I will do this by looking at just two areas--albeit fairly crucial ones: social spending and abortion, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), the gold standard of public opinion polling. (The GSS is cited by social scientists more often than any other data source except the US Census.) In both cases, it turns out, conservative doctrine has little mass support.
Abortion
First, we take a look at a combined measure of support for abortion in three cases where a pregnant woman is under duress--in the case of rape, potential birth defect(s) or threat to her health. The hardline conservative position is that abortion is murder, period, and therefore cannot be allowed for any reason. This is, however, a clear minority position:
Well, 7.5%. That sure makes Mr. 23% seem like a popular guy, now doesn't it?
But we're just getting started!
Social Spending--Round 1
Next, we look at another combined measure, which measures support for social spending on aix national priorities:
A. Improving and protecting the environment.
B. Improving and protecting the nation's health
C. Solving the problems of the big cities
D. Improving the nation's education system
E. Improving the conditions of Blacks
F. Welfare
Again, the movement conservative position is clear: none of this is any of the government's business. Just to be merciful, I'm going to start off with a measure that lumps things together into big chunks. That way, conservatives can claim anyone who wants to cut more than they want to hold steady or increase spending--a much bigger group of people than those who want to cut everything. But even being exceedingly generous, the number of conservative believers is a tiny minority--again, even less than the 23% Bush dead-enders:
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