Open Left - ross perot

1994 and 2010: Could Dems Lose Perot Voters Again?

Chris Bowers — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:40:00 GMT

This is the first in a three-part series today that compares political conditions in 1993-1994 to our current environment. I argue that the current situation is much more favorable to Democrats than the one 16 years ago--Chris

Background
Perot voters were an essential part of the 1994 Republican turnaround--perhaps the essential part. Forming 12% of the congressional electorate in both 1992 and 1994 (40% of Perot voters skipped the House vote in 1992), they swung from evenly split between the two major parties (see 38%-38% in the presidential and Rep 37%--32% Dem in the House) to voting 67% for Republicans in 1994.

By itself, this swing formed an overall 3-4% Republican gain in the national House vote. Given that the GOP went up a total of 5.1% from 1992 to 1994 in the national House vote (from 44.8% to 49.9%), their gains from Perot voters represented roughly two-thirds of all their gains that year.

The NAFTA Disaster
The role of NAFTA in this swing difficult to overestimate. As I noted yesterday, just before NAFTA was passed in the House in late 1993, a plurality opposed it, 38%--46%. Notably, Perot voters opposed it overwhelmingly, 26%--63%. As Thomas Frank argued in What's the Matter With Kansas, Democratic support for NAFTA might have made both parties seem just as bad on economics to Perot voters. With equivalence on economic matters, Perot supporters may well have turned to Republicans because they tended to be populist, American-exceptionalist, cultural supremacists.

Granted, a much lower percentage of House Democrats voted in favor of NAFTA than House Republicans (40% for Dems, 75% for Reps). However, given that NAFTA was championed by the Clinton administration for months in the media, passed through a Democratic Congress, and climaxed with a famous CNN debate between Vice-President Al Gore and Ross Perot himself, Perot supporters would have had a justifiable sense of equivalence between the two major parties on NAFTA. Heck, given that Democrats were the public face of NAFTA, many probably blamed only Democrats for it.

****

Are we in for a repeat? I consider this possibility in the extended entry.
Can this happen again?
There are enough similarities between 1993 and 2009 to at least be concerned.

For one thing, there is a policy equivalent to NAFTA: the financial bailout. Like NAFTA, it was a rare moment where an unpopular piece of legislation passed through Congress. Also, like NAFTA, it passed with an unusual, bipartisan coalition. This could potentially prove troublesome for Democrats in the same way NAFTA did by providing a sense of economic equivalence between the two major parties. Further, even though the bailout was proposed by the Bush administration, passed with significant Republican support, and signed into law by Bush himself, Republicans are now voting and campaigning as though they were 100% against the bailouts from the start.

Fortunately, there are differences with 1993-1994 in this area as well. Most importantly among these differences, we live in a more polarized nation with far fewer dislodged voters than we did 16 years ago. Currently, third-party performance is below 3% and on the decline at both the congressional and presidential levels, even though turnout is up. Further, there has been a steady, long-term decline in the number of undecided voters in the weeks immediately preceding elections. So, while Perot had already peeled 19% of the electorate from the two-parties, voters are currently more attached to one of the two major parties then at any time in the last twenty years.

Further, Democrats have actually already won a post-bailout election. This raises doubt about not only the existence of a Perot-style undecided bloc, but also the viability of the cause of such a bloc to swing were it to suddenly manifest.

Finally, by many indicators (Obama favorability, Democratic Party favorability, job approval for congressional Democrats, and net Democratic advantage in partisan self-identification), Democrats have actually just returned to their levels of October 2008. Apart from a Rasmussen induced tie in the generic congressional ballot, there is no clear sign that the downward movement in Democratic poll numbers is anything but the end of a post-election bump.

Overall, a repeat of the Perot voter swing does not appear possible for Republicans in 2010. If the downward movement in Democratic poll numbers continues, I might be persuaded to revise this assessment. For now, there are good reasons to think it won't happen again.

The Perot Pseudo-Realignment-Lessons For Today

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:04:45 GMT

In my previous diaries, "Three Lies of Saint Ronnie And One Truth From Michael Moore" and "Drilling Down Into Reagan's Big Lie About The Economy", I looked at some founding lies at the core of modern conservatism under the banner of Reagan, focusing in one economics in the second diary. The bottom line there was that Reagan continued relying on Keynsian economics-but without crediting Keynes and without following the principles inherent in Keynesian models for managing the economy responsibly. Instead, the new conservative economics was presented in a barrage of distracting explanations that appeared to be designed for maximum gut appeal regardless of whether they actually made any sense or not.

Democrats generally were totally flumoxed by this approach. It simply confounded them what to say beyond, "But that's ridiculous!" Because Democrats did not want to cut domestic programs to balance the budget, and were sensitive to "soft on defense" charges when it came to the bloated military budget, and "tax and spend" charges when it came to trying to close the budget gap by restoring revenue balance, they ended up going along with a clearly unsustainable fiscal policy, which increasingly disturbed a certain centrist constituency, which Chris has argued elsewhere represents a long-term intergenerational presence of reform-oriented voters, who have voted populist, progressive, even socialist in various past elections dating back over a century now. Whether these are actually the same voters or their desecendents, we cannot actually say. But we can say that a certain level of these reformist sentiments seems to be an enduring feature of the political cultures of some states far more than others, and Perot's support came disproportionately from these long-term centers of reformist tradition.

In this diary, I want to discuss how Perot's Reform Party presidential bid precipitated a flipping of partisan allegiance among a segment of these voters sufficient to switch control of Congress from Democratic to Republican in 1994, and to "elect" George W. Bush in 2000. I also want to explain how this process fits into my larger framework of realignment theory, as well as how this contradicts the currently popular Versailles media meme that the Clinton Administration got into trouble by trying to be too liberal for the country. In doing so, I rely heavily on the book, Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence by Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone. All that begins on the flip.
Realignment Background

In Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone argue that third parties play a critical role in facilitating political change that's normally resisted by the two-party system. This is consanant with Walter Dean Burnham's realignment theory, which sees a succession of distinct party systems, which grow ossified over time, until the accumulating tensions result in a realignment of forces, around a new constellation of issues that have not been dealt with by the previous dominant and subdominant parties. Burnham sees the emergence of third parties as a symptom of the growing ossification. In the first two party systems (1796-1828 and 1828-1860), one of the major parties disappeared entirely as they came to a close, while the Third Party System (1860-1896) saw the merging of a rising third party-the Populists-with the subdominant Democratic Party, under the banner of William Jennings Bryan. Furthermore, the Fifth Party System (1932-1968) ended with emergence of the segregationist candidacy of George Wallace, a constituency that Nixon absorbed via his "Southern Strategy."

Things were a good deal messier with the Fourth Party system (1896-1932), which saw much stronger and varied third party activity in the middle decade (particuarly in 1912) than it did toward the end, and during the Sixth Party System (1968-2008), which similarly saw the highpoint of third party activity in 1992, a full 16 years prior to the realigning election which has just ended this period. The reasons for these anomalies are similar, in my opinion: both the elections that began these party systems were inherently more ambiguous than the other ones, with greater tensions within the dominant and subdominant party coalitions than during other party systems. Indeed, the 1968 election can better be thought of as a "de-aligning" election, in that it gave birth to a period in which party identification was significantly weakened, and divided government became the rule, rather than the exception. Thus initial divisions within a small, yet significant portion of the electorate had consequences that spread the blurring more generally. This was capitalized on in 1980, as I have described in the previous diary, when Keynsian economics was hijacked, disguised and used to confuse and confound the already fragmented Democratic Party, as described in the introductory paragraphs of this diary.

The Perot phenomena emerged in large part because of this confused state-though economics alone was not the sole factor involved. The book Three's A Crowd does not focus on the broader sorts of issues just described, but is generally (though not perfectly) consistent with them. I will quote some passages, and present some graphs to show how their argument fits into and provides supporting detail for the broader framework of realignment as I understand it.

Ross Perot, the 1994 Election And Beyond

The importance of the 1994 election can be seen most dramatically in the sharp increase in Southern GOP seats that it produced. Although the trend had long been underway, this represented a sharp shift that was only further consolidated in the following elections:

This is readily observed backdrop for the more precise analysis presented below.

At first, Perot appeared to have a stronger affinity with the Democrats, once Clinton emerged as the nominee. He even went so far as to withdraw from the race for a period of time. However, after the 1992 election, the Clinton Administration alienated both Perot and his supporters, most strikingly by pushing through NAFTA without any meaningful labor or environmental provisions, which they had promised during the campaign. Even though more Republicans than Democrats voted for NAFTA, the Clinton/Gore leadership was decisive in pushing the agreement through Congress-something Bush could never have accomplished.

The book then has a rather extensive discussion of how different forces within the Republican Party struggled over the question of whether to make a play for engaging Perot and his supporters. For example:

"As the dynamic of third parties suggests, after Perot identified and mobilized a large constituency, both major parties bid for its support in subsequent elections. The Republicans, as the party out of power in both houses of Congress and the presidency, had the greater opportunity and incentive to appeal aggressively to the Perot constituency. Beginning with the February 1993 Republican postelection retreat, a group of Republican leaders, spearheaded by Newt Gingrich and John Kasich, established close ties with Perot and his UWSA organizations. Despite initial reluctance form other party leaders, including Bob Dole and Haley Barbour, Gingrich and his collegaues brought the Republcian Party into line behind a Perot-base strategy. Most impresdsive in this effort was the Contract with America, which reflected both the form of Perot's checklist for candidates at the end of his book United We Stand America and many of the same issue priorities of Perot and his supporters, while ignoring issues--such as abortion and free trade--where differences between the GOP base and the Perot movement were sharp."

This was, in effect, an example of profound ideological deception. In fact, one can argue that the Contract With America was not very strongly believed in by the Republicans who advanced it. Many, for example, who pledged voluntarily to abide by term limits would later go on to seek continued re-election. More striking, arguably, was the greater importance that these Republicans placed on the missing issues-abortion, free trade, etc.-as opposed to the issues included in the Contract. This would eventually be reflected in the erosion of GOP seats held outside the South, and they were replaced by more Southern seats. But all that had not yet come to pass.

The authors go on to argue:

"The 1994 Republican landslide two years after Ross Perot's remarkable 1992 campaign was no coincidence, nor was it simply the culmination of long-term partisan trends. Rather, the GOP victory was firmly rooted in Perot's electoral success two years before and in the dynamics of third parties.

Figure 8.3 connects the size of the 1992 Perot vote in congressional districts with the Republican vote share and the chanced the district flipped from Democratic to Republican control in the 1994 elections. Only 2.2 percent of Democratic districts where Perot received 10 percent or less of the district vote flipped to the Republicans in 1994, while 42 percent of Democratic districts where Perot ran most strongly in 1992 switched to the GOP. The question is whether this relationship between the 1992 Perot vote in districts and Republican success in 1994 holds up in a more fully controlled analysis."

The authors then go on to demonstrate that it does. After doing that, they go one step further, and ask the question, "What would have happened if Perot's 1992 vote hadn't been that large?" They answer:

"Had Perot won the same popular vote as he captured in 1996 (8.4 percent, less than half of what he actually received in 1992), we estimate that the Republicans would have picjed up about twenty-nine seats over what they held in 1992, leaving Democratic control intact. If the Republicans had gained twenty-nine seats, their performance would not have been exceptional for a midtern election--the average number of seats lost by the president's party between 1946 and 1990 was twenty-six. If Perot had received the same popular vote as John Anderson did in 1980, the Republican total would have been even lower. Had Perot won the same popular-vote share that George Wallace secured in the 1968 presidential elections (13.5 percent), the Republicans would have won a bare majority of House seats. By our estimate, if the Perot vote in 1993 had been below about 13.2 percent, the Republicans probably would not have won control of the House in 1994.
"In sum, we have shown that the Republican victory in the 1994 elections resulted from the party's successful bid for the Perot constituency's support. That bid reflected coordinated actions by national party leaders in the form of the Contract with America, and it came in the form of individual decisions by strong potential House candfidates on the GOP side who saw opportunity signaled by the size of the Perot vote in their districts. Districts with the largest concentrations of Perot voters responded, in turn, by producing the change in party control and the GOP House victory."

The authors also go on to show that there is a correlation between Perot votes in 1994, and presidential votes in 1996 and 2000. Without the influence of Perot in 1994, they conclude, Bush would not have been "elected" in 2000.:

Conclusions

Several points can be drawn from this analysis.

First, that Perot's 1992 run had a significant realigning impact, but that this impact amounted to more of a reshuffling from one unbalanced state to another. It did not result in Clinton's defeat in 1996, nor did it result in a majority vote for Bush in 2000. Thus, it and its resultant shits to the GOP appear to have more in common with "failed realignments" like the Democratic victory in 1912 or the GOP victory in 1952 than it does with successful realignments. The bare Republican majority it created was highly unstable, and propelled the party to increasingly self-contradictory policies over the following decade and a half. These internal contradictions within the GOP appear to have taken the place of a resurgent third party-as can be seen most vividly in sharp divisions visible in the GOP presidential primary of 2008.

Second, it is obvious that Clinton did not suffer as a result of trying to govern too far left in 1993-1994. Rather, Clinton shifted to the right of where he promised to go-most notably by passing NAFTA-and thereby opened up space for the GOP to make a direct play for Perot's support. Thus, the same party that created a huge national debt, and outsourced millions of manufacturing jobs was able to gain the votes of millions of Perot voters who were most upset by precisely those same policies, precisely because Clinton moved right and aligned himself with the very policies that Perot voters most objected to. (This was not the sole fact, as Mike Lux recently pointed out-there was also a sharp drop in base Democratic voter turnout, due some the exact same reasons, as well as failure to deliver on promises such as health care.)

Third, although the timing and other factors strongly suggest that 2008 is a true realigning election, there remains a very high probability that if not handled properly, it could be a very ambiguous realignment, much more like 1896 or 1968 than 1932 or 1860. The blurring of alternatives currently being promoted by the political establishment is precisely the sort of thing that leaves voting blocks in a prolonged state of flux, and that is precisely what leads to policy incoherence of the sort seen throughout much of the Fourth Party Sytem (1896-1932) and the Sixth Party System (1968-2008).

What is needed--not just for progressives, but for the political system as a whole to function effectively in making decisive choices and forging proactive policies--is a significant clarification of ideological differences and alternatives. Such a clarification need not be incompatible with a subsequent negotiation of policies that can satisfy people across a signficant spectrum of opinion. Indeed, such clarification most likely is necessary in order to reach such agreement. Without a clarification of terms and alternatives, political discussions remain mired in multiple misunderstandings that leave large blocks of voters profoundly confused about the sources of their own discontent, and thus fundametnally powerless to do anyhthing about them.

P.S. On McCain

The authors also note that McCain qute consciously modelled his 2000 presidential campaign in terms of trying to capture the Perot/Reform vote. It appears vitally important to consider McCain's ultimate failure, and the many gyrations he went through over the past 8 years as further symptoms of the ultimate incompatibility of the Perot reformists and the GOP base. This is further complicated by McCain's own inability to decide exactly who "the Real McCain" ultimately was.

Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda? (Hegemony Is The Enemy Special Report--Pt3)

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:10:53 GMT

In Part II of this series, I referred to Jerry Lembcke's book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, and his examination of the myth that anti-war protesters commonly spat on returning veterans. I quoted from an interview in which he touched on an important aspect of his book, the attempt to make sense of the myth in terms of blame-shifting, similar to that which took place in Germany after WWI, blame-shifting that would, eventually lead to the rise of the Third Reich. In this installment, I want to quote extensively from some more recent work that Lembcke has done focusing on another aspect of that same phenomena--the demonization of Jane Fonda.

There is a striking similarity between the two subjects. Just as Vietnam vets and the anti-war movement were close allies, rather than antagonists back in the late 60s and early 70s, Jane Fonda was a very popular figure with the troops, one of the priniciple organizers of the counter-culture alternative to the Bob Hope USO shows, known either as "Free the Army," or in its more colloquial form, "Fuck the Army."
America's Lost War in Vietnam

In a paper you can read online, "Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory: America's Lost War in Vietnam", presented to the American Sociological Association, in Montreal, 2006, Lembcke begins by saying:

A session on pubic memory could hardly be timelier. The nation's will-to-war was mustered in the spring of 03 with a support-the-troops jingoism that would have never worked, save for the image of spat-upon Vietnam veterans vivid in the public mind. And the 2004 presidential election was arguably decided when the so-called Swift Boat veterans launched a campaign against John Kerry, charging that his record of military accomplishments in Vietnam was false and that his participation in the anti-war movement as a veteran was treasonous.....

He goes on to set up his subject by noting:

The outsized profile of Vietnam is undoubtedly due to its having been America's first lost war, its longest war, and very controversial.
U.S. military involvement in Vietnam began growing in the 1950s, at a time when the ideology of America first, and best, had its strongest grip on the nation's people. And from there the nation went down to defeat--defeat to a small, underdeveloped nation of Asians.
It was a tough pill to swallow for American patriots, a defeat that demanded explanation, and the explanation that worked best was the one that we did not lose the war to the Vietnamese but to betrayal on the home front--liberals in congress tied one hand behind our backs; radicals in the streets demoralized our troops and lent aid and comfort to the enemy.
It was alibi, not an explanation, and a dangerous alibi at that. It kept alive the belief that we could have won the war if . . . and that we could win wars like it again if . . .
The alibi had a cultural dimension that spelled additional dangers. It wasn't just that the anti-war movement had tipped the balance but that the rising of a counterculture sapped the very virility of America's capacity for war. The permissive hedonism of the 1960s and 1970s--ran the alibi--eroded the discipline of young men and challenged the productionist ethic, dominant since Jamestown. That challenge set the stage for the culture war, the subtext of Republican campaign strategies right through 2004.

In his book Wealth and Democracy, former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips draws parallels between the paths of the last three dominant world power and the United States. First Spain, the Holland and England rose to peaks of world power, during which time they experienced a broad rise in the material well-being of their people, only to be stung by an unexpected reversal at the height of there dominance. As a result they each experienced periods of reactionary politics lasting several decades, during which the elites did better than ever, while the large mass of people experienced stagnant or declining income. Each of these powers also experienced the same economic shift from production to finance that America has experienced since the period previous to Vietnam. Phillips did not discuss cultural mythology, but it would hardly be surprising to find similar examples of blame-shifting for the reversals faced by those previous world powers as well.

The good news is that each of them eventually returned to a more egalitarian political ethos. Thirty-five years after leaving Vietnam, it would seem that our time to change should be at hand as well. Unfortunately, the American people seem to be well ahead of the Democratic Party leadership on this score--and Barack Obama is no exception in still being in thrall to the reactionary cultural narratives of this fading era, even as he proclaims his intention to "turn the page." His buying into the notion that anti-war protesters brought everlasting shame to America is a salient example of how he is deeply enmeshed in the very backwards-looking assumptions he would pretend to free us from. The spitting myth is one driving force in those assumptions. The myth of "Hanoi Jane" is another.

War, Identity And "Hanoi Jane"

Lembcke continues setting the stage:

War in western society is a masculine endeavor: our warriors are men and war defines manhood--like childbirth for women, Nietzsche wrote, war is the rite of passage for males. Our military victories are fixed in our memories by gender-mediated images: an exuberant sailor bending aggressively over a limp nurse balanced on one leg in Times Square recalls for us the triumphalism that marked the end of World War II.
Lost wars are a blow to male identity--and not just to the defeated warriors, but to the collective identity, the masculinity, of the group. It is no surprise, then that from antiquity onward, losses to enemies abroad are attributed to failures at home and that those failures appear in gendered images: Lysistrata's sex strike against the Peloponnesian War and Malanche's betrayal of the Aztexs are well-known examples.
That literary tradition extends into the betrayal narrative for America's lost war in Vietnam wherein the spitters who greeted deplanning troops at the San Francisco airport are remembered as girls or young women--or male longhairs. Commenting on the Swift Boaters' criticism of Kerry's taste for French wine, Columnist Frank Rich observed that "French" in this usage was code for "faggot."

He next introduces his specific subject, sharping the question of why this particular icon:

The study of public memory necessarily involves the study of the icons that mediate our memories and, in the case of Fonda, "Hanoi Jane," the trope or phrase that carries the connotation of treason and betrayal that it does.
In the book I'm writing, I treat "Hanoi Jane" as a myth and like most myths there are matters of fact that cannot be ignored in her making.
Fonda went to Hanoi in July 1972 when we were at war with North Vietnam. She met with North Vietnamese leaders, talked to U.S. POWs held in Hanoi, made broadcasts over radio Hanoi denouncing the war, and was photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun.
But that's Jane Fonda and what she did differed very little from what some of the 350 other peace travelers did who had been to Hanoi before her. Indeed, in that number there are individuals who made more incendiary broadcasts than she did or who actually carried material support to the enemy. So why, and how, did Jane Fonda become "Hanoi Jane" when, say, Ramsey Clark didn't become "Hanoi Ramsey"?

The answer should be obvious. Ramsey Clark may have been the U.S. Attorney General. He was never Barbarella. But Lembcke lets such obvious observations lie, turning instead to the how of mythmaking, which in this case involves two salient aspects--the presence of a pre-existing archetype, and the inconvenient fact that Fonda didn't really fit it:

Debunking a myth involves both reconstructing its making--who made it and so forth--and understanding how it works in the present culture.
Where did "Hanoi Jane" come from? As a trope, of course, it mimics, "Axis Sally" and "Tokyo Rose," reputed betrayal figures from World War II who used radio broadcasts to propagandize American soldiers for the enemy Germans and the Japanese.
Newspapers commonly claim that Vietnam veterans dubbed Fonda "Hanoi Jane," Veterans supposedly hate her because her broadcasts from Hanoi demoralized them while they sat n the steamy jungle of South Vietnam. But that's not true. Fonda was actually quite popular among GIs for her anti-war variety show, know variously as Free the Army or Fuck the Army, that toured military bases. Moreover, by the time she made the broadcasts, there were almost no Americans left in the South.

Origins & Spread of A Myth In The Rightwing Infrastructure

Which, of course, meant that the fate of the war had already been determined. Still, knowing the historical record, Lembcke sought to discover what impact those broadcasts, and her other actions may have had on those who were directly touched:

I ran a classified ad in the magazine Vietnam asking to hear from veterans who heard the broadcasts [of Fonda from NV]. I got one response from a guy saying that he actually had photos of her that he had taken--in South Vietnam, of course. Of course, Fonda was never in South Vietnam, and I've never received copies of the photos.
Perhaps it was a subset of veterans--the POWs--who saddled Fonda with "Hanoi Jane." That's plausible because there are POWs angry that she met on frtiendly terms with teh Vietnamese officials who were holding them prisoners. But in the first thiry POW memoirs, those prior to 1990, by which time "Hanoi Jane" was a widely-used phrase, I found only two references to Fonda and one was positive.
Jane Fonda, in other words, didn't become important to the Hanoi POWs until long after their release--and until other social forces had made her important to them.
And what "social forces are we talking about? Like a detective, I've followed the trail of "Hanoi Jane" backwards from the present to see where it began. Along the way, I've found the fingerprints of The Minute Men, and ultra-right-wing paramilitary militia group, and the Lyndon LaRouiche organization, who some of you might remember campaigned against both Greenpeace and Jane Fonda on the slogan, "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales." The trail leads through the publications of the John Birch Society that spearheaeded the effort to have her charged for treason.

What Lembcke has found here is highly significant. What most people take to be proof of leftwing perfidy is actually proof of how powerfully extreme rightwing fantasists are able to influence our cultural narratives. David Neiwert, of Orcinus, has written extensively over the years about the way in which hard right ideas get transmitted from the extreme fringes into the mainstream of conservative discourse, and from there into the mainstream of political thought. His Koufax-winning series, "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism,", was devoted, in part, to examing the role that Rush Limbaugh plays in the process, along with varioius other figures, who are also involved in transmitting ideas between different sectors of the right. This part of series starts with Part VII, "The Transmission Belt", in which Neiwert introduces the basic ideas, starting with much lower-profile figure, Richard Mack, then sheriff of Arizona's mostly rural Graham County:

"Hitler was more moral than Clinton," intoned the nice-looking, dark-haired man in the three-piece suit. "He had fewer girlfriends."
....
the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable....
The similarities between Mack's 1994 sentiments and the hyperbole directed at Clinton in 1998 are not accidental. Rather, they offer a stark example of the way the far right's ideas, rhetoric and issues feed into the mainstream -- and in the process, exert a gravitational pull that draws the nation's agenda increasingly rightward. For that matter, much of the conservative anti-Clinton paroxysm could be traced directly to some of the smears that circulated first in militia and white-supremacist circles.
It's also important to understand how the migration of these ideas occurs. Richard Mack, for instance, doesn't compare Bill Clinton's morality to Adolph Hitler's at every speaking opportunity. His remark didn't show up, for instance, when he had his moment in the sun with the National Rifle Association.
It just pops out when he's in front of an audience of Patriot believers. That's when he knows it will gain the most appreciation. It mixes well with the fear of the New World Order he foments, in his quiet, almost sedate speaking tone.
Mack is a transmitter -- someone who treads the boundaries of the various sectors of America's right wing and appears to belong to each of them at various times. Mack's gun-control message still sells well with mainstream, secular NRA audiences. His claims that church-state separation is a myth resonate nicely with the theocratic right crowd as well. And he cultivates a quasi-legitimate image by taking leadership positions in groups like Larry Pratt's Gun Owners of America. But he is most at home in his native base: the populist right, the world of militias, constitutionalists and pseudo-libertarians. Mack even occasionally consorts with the hard right, as when he granted front-page interviews to the Christian Identity newspaper The Jubilee.

Neiwert also deals with official transmitters, such as Trent Lott, with his long-time white racist connections, and other media transmitters, most notoriously including Ann Coulter. The point is, Neiwert demonstrates-and other accounts confirm-that the right has long had well-developed networks for developing and transmitting their political narratives. Thus, the development of a bogus narrative about Jane Fonda in extreme rightwing circles and its later introduction into the mainstream is anything but a novel occurance. The myth is particularly effective in combining a number of rightwing messages, as Lembcke explains:

In their most generic forms, myths pair figures of good and evil. Often the story is about an evil person that tells us who to beware of and what acts should not go unpunished. We learn from the story what is "bad" and comport ourselves accordingly.
"Hanoi Jane" images someone who violated the trust of fellow Americans during wartime. She gave aid and comfort to the enemy, which encouraging them to continue the fight and prolonged the time behind bars for the POWs.
She betrayed the POWs. One story circulating on the internet says the POWs she met slipped her little pieces of paper with their names so she could tell their families they were alive; she betrayed them by turning the notes over to the guards resulting in the deaths of some of some of those prisoners.
That story isn't true but the "Hanoi Jane" it remembers stands for the values and behaviors of the social movement that opposed the war. It helps some Americans "know" that dissent during wartime is "bad" because "it's like what Jane Fonda did during the Vietnam War. In the context of the present war in Iraq, the memory of "Hanoi Jane" works to preclude opposition to the war while forming a template for the disparagement of those who dare.

Captivity Narratives, POWs & Creating Culture Heroes

Furthermore, it derives a good deal of power from echoing themes deeply rooted in the American psyche, going back to the earliest American literary genre, known as the captivity narrative:

The mythology of "Hanoi Jane" works so well as the core chapter of America's great betrayal narrative because, as it turns out, it resonates with the captivity mythology at the core of American identity.
....
The first literature produced by colonial America was the so-called captivity narratives, stories written by Americans who had been captured by Indians. John Smith's story is one of the classics. Smith was captured on a mission into Indian Territory in 1607. Spared from execution by Pocahontas, Smith negotiated his own release, receiving land for Jamestown in return for his promise of cannons and a grindstone for the Indians-a promise never kept. By this account, Smith saved Jamestown. Smith was a hero.
....
The captivity narrative became more complex after several instances of captives, many of them women and girls giving in to their inner Indian, rejected the Puritan path and chose to remain with their erstwhile captors. Those stories gave the literature the qualities it needed for an interface with the POW narrative coming out of Vietnam 250 years later.
The captivity literature constructed the tension between the Self and Other, what was American and what was not. At one pole, "them," a racialized figure, with a nomadic, libidinous, matriarchal, and pagan way of life, the attraction to which, forced Puritans to recognize the "them" in themselves.
At the other pole, "us," a Godly but fearful people besieged, and beset with doubt about the Puritan will to resist the wild within. America was born embattled and, the American, born with the values of discipline, self-denial, austerity, and subordination to authority, was born a warrior-hard and male.
The "Hanoi Jane" mythology has an almost perfect symmetry with the early-American captivity narrative. The image of the enemy-Vietnamese painted by the POW memoirs is Indian-like in its savage use of rope torture, ignorant and incompetent in its inability to interrogate prisoners without torture, and in its unbounded sexuality. All the guards were homosexuals, wrote one POW. But that's only the male guards-the women camp-workers were sex-starved heteros who couldn't keep their eyes off the buffed flyers-every one of them a Pocahontas with the hots for a fighter jock.
Eyes were one thing, hands another. The same memoirs record the self-restraint of the Aces: gratification could wait. Their self discipline would insure that Vietnamese hands, of any sexual orientation, stayed off the Right Stuff.
Structurally, then, "Hanoi Jane" works to compose her mythical opposite, the soldiers who continued the good fight behind prison walls-prisoners at war, not of war. Beyond the reach of Washington's sell-out bureaucracy and the corruption of the counter culture, they retained their dignity as warriors, defying the guards' demands for compliance to camp rules and resisting the temptation to fraternize with the enemy.

This passage, written in 2002, also provides insight into the canonization of John McCain, as well as his delusional belief (shared by Jim Webb, BTW) that America could have won in Vietnam, if only....

In no other conflict in centuries have POWs been considered heroes. But, then, this was a conflict we lost. And our need to construct heroes was so overwhelming that POWs were drafted into the role. Of course, the captivity narratives provided a template from an earlier era when we weren't such confident and consistent winners.

What's more, Richard Nixon deliberately manipulated them into this role. This is another piece of history I witnessed directly, but it is also described in another book abut another major myth of the Vietnam War, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America by H. Bruce Franklin. Faced with the unpleasant prospect of being the first American President to lose a war, Nixon sought a rhetorical way out, "Peace With Honor," and the key to pulling this off was deceptively simple: to alter the terms of the war, to make it about securing the Americans held as prisoners of war-prisoners who would ordinarily be returned at the end of the conflict anyway.

This last, annoying minor detail was dispensed with by the further demonization of the Vietnamese enemy, which necessitated the creation of a new bureucratic bastard category--POW/MIA--never before employed by US military, which combined those lost in battle and almost certainly dead with those who were captured live, and held prisoner. By holding the Vietnamese responsible for men they never captured, we could create an impossible demand that would leave them forever evil for the heinous act of fighting for their own freedom and self-determination. (Recall that Ho Chi Minh had been a US agent in World War II, OSS "Agent 19," and modelled Vietnam's "Declaration of Independence," issued at the end of that war, on America's original document.)

Nixon was aided in this ploy by H. Ross Perot, who, in his earliest political venture, set up an organization to... well, it wasn't exactly clear what. But defintely stir people's passions about the POWs, raise false hopes about men killed in action, and distract attention from the fact that (a) we were losing the war, and (b) our war-fighting policies constituted war crimes on a massive scale. The emotionally-inflamed, but sharply narrowed focused on POWs and those actually killed in action, but imaginatively kept alive with false hope allowed us to both ignore the enormity of the slaughter we had wrought, and the defeat we were running away from.

Above all, it allowed us to reinvent the notion that we were "the good guys." And if it required, in the end, that we embrace the notion that our nation had deliberately abandoned hundreds of POWs for some dark mysterious unfathomable motive, then so be it, we would forever accuse our own government, in the abstract, of treasonous betrayal. And so it is today, that the POW/MIA flag is the only flag other than Old Glory ever to fly over the White House, while every state flies it at capitals and public facilities, and mandates observance of National POW/MIA Recognition Day.

This is the larger cultural context out of which John McCain has become a war hero, about whom nothing critical may be said, until a general who had actually won a war-Wesley Clark-had the temerity to point out that heroism in captivity does not equate to command experience. What could not be explained about the recent brouhaha over Clark's remarks is that all the outrage was fueled by a fierce underlying attachment to the POW/MIA myth as a way of restructuring the Vietnam War as a moral victory. This mythic narrative simply cannot be allowed to be contaminated by logic, facts or historical accuracy. Truth is the enemy, and must be defeated at all costs.

Fonda As Betrayer: Peace Is The Enemy

Lembcke's point is that the construction of the POWs as culture heroes in the mold of the original captivity narratives was part of the same gestalt casting Fonda as a betrayer who went native, betraying her culture-as did the entire counter-culture she represented:

Structurally, then, "Hanoi Jane" works to compose her mythical opposite, the soldiers who continued the good fight behind prison walls-prisoners at war, not of war. Beyond the reach of Washington's sell-out bureaucracy and the corruption of the counter culture, they retained their dignity as warriors, defying the guards' demands for compliance to camp rules and resisting the temptation to fraternize with the enemy.
It is these hero-POWs that America welcomed home with parades and whose experience provided the basis for Hollywood's revision of the war as an American event-Americans against Americans. Displaced by that solipsistic exercise were the Vietnamese as agents of their own destiny.

So, if we couldn't eliminate the bastards by dropping more explosives on them than were used in all of WWII, we could at least eliminate them from our history. Which, of course, meant that the real enemy was the anti-war protesters. And hence, Obama's claim about "a national shame" that lasts "to this day" echoes this rightwing reframing of who and what the Vietnam War-and its loss-were all about.

Lembcke continues:

The "Hanoi Jane" mythology also reminds us that there is an "enemy within," the anti-warrior latent within the culture, the self-indulgent and rebellious underbelly of America that could and did turn hard men soft and cost the nation its victory in Southeast Asia. Fonda appealed to the inner-softness of the male psyche of the POWs and found it in the Hanoi Peace Committee, the anti-war POWs who met with her and made public statements against the war.
Their vulnerability to the seductions of "Hanoi Jane," this false prophet promising peace, warns us all of the constant need for internal vigilance-lest the Self, individual and collective, betray us.
Like captives who "went native" generations before, some of the anti-war POWs contemplated staying in Hanoi upon their release. For that, those Judases pay a price of course: today America remembers the heroes John McCain and John Stockdale; the modern-day John Smiths. But the members of the peace committee-or even that there was a peace committee among the POWs-is, like Eunice Williams who stayed with the Mohawks in 1704, gone from public memory.

It is, in fact, precisely the possibility of peace without dominance of the other that must be utterly annulled, driven out of the realm of possibility, and anyone who resists this effort must be relentlessly demonized, and forced or shamed into silence. And anyone who even incidentally defends them, or questions this process in any way must likewise be demonized as well. For the possibility of living outside the framework of domination is utterly abhorent to the authoritarian mind.

And, of course, as long as we cannot step outside of, and critique the framework of domination, we can never know peace. Because war is written into the very essence of the authoritarian worldview. And in this worldview, there is no alternative. Whoever pretends to want something else, to live in peace with mutual respect between cultures and nations, is either a deceptive charlatan or a naive dupe-just as the John Birch Society once accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist dupe.

This is a most convenient belief, since it means that one never has to defend one's beliefs based on reason. One simply assumes that no other alternative is possible, and that anyone advancing such alternatives is either a liar or a fool.

On its face, this seems utterly absurd. And yet, the triumph of the "Hanoi Jane" mythology and it's power to stifle dissent, along with the related myths of the POW/MIAs and the spitting protesters, has precisely this effect. Which is why official Washington is paralyzed in the face of solid majority opposition to continuing the Iraq War-and why we are nowhere close to beginning the process of re-conceiving the struggle to manage the threat of global terrorism.

The enemy within is central to the mythology of "Hanoi Jane" and an elemental component of America's new narrative as a nation betrayed. In the wake of Vietnam, the nation lost its sense of future-oriented hopefulness, its self-identity as destined people mandated to bring goodness to earth.
The far-right paramilitary movements that stepped out the shadows during the nineteen eighties and nineties were motivated by revenge, the need to recover something they believed to have been lost in Vietnam; their search for the "internal enemy" responsible for the defeat fueled the crusade against feminism, pacifism, intellectual culture, pernicious entitlement programs, and the federal government wherein they allege the ultimate traitors reside.

This is the culture war as Obama understands it. It is what he wants to end, and there's good reason to want to do this. But it's an underlying thesis of this series that he really doesn't understand the basis of the culture war, and in fact buys into fundamental aspects of the worldview of those who launched it in the first place.

And to fully understand this, there's a bigger picture to consider, which I will turn to in the next installment.

Ron Paul At The End Of Perotism

Chris Bowers — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Pat Buchanan on the need to impeach Bush over immigration policy:

Author Pat Buchanan says President Bush should be impeached for failing to stop the invasion of illegal aliens across the U.S. border with Mexico.

"I think he's committed an impeachable offense in refusing to enforce the immigration laws and in failing to uphold the Constitution by defending the states against this invasion," Buchanan told radio talk-show host Curt Smith this weekend on National Public Radio stations in upstate New York.

"When you have 6 million people apprehended on the border and several million got in on your watch ? and you have the ability to stop it ? I think you're derelict in your duty," he said. "And if the president says 'I can't do it,' you need a new president who will do it."

"This is not Ellis Island," said Buchanan. "This is an invasion."

John McCain on our national imperative to spread Americanism worldwide, by force if necessary:

Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The "strenuous life" was T.R.'s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America's pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. "We cannot sit huddled within our borders," he warned, "and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond."(...)

And for Roosevelt that common destiny surpassed material gain and self-interest. Our freedom and our industry must aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. We must live out the true meaning of freedom, and accept "that we have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither."

Some critics, in his day and ours, saw in Roosevelt's patriotism only flag-waving chauvinism, not all that dissimilar to Old World ancestral allegiances that incited one people to subjugate another and plunged whole continents into war. But they did not see the universality of the ideals that formed his creed.

The last major conservative split took place in the early 1990's, when Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were able to exploit conservative dissatisfaction with Bush Sr. over trade, immigration, the first Iraq war, and multilateral cooperation abroad. A McCain nomination has the potential re-open this exact same rift. It is ultimately a split between neoconservative imperialism and paleoconservative American exceptionalism. While McCain is a strong believer in the inherent superiority of American civilization, he draws many of the same internationalist conclusions from that belief that we have seen from the Bushes: spread American influence through foreign wars, free trade, religious evangelizing, and immigration policies that are relatively open when compared to those favored by other conservatives. This draws the ire of paleocons like Buchanan who are mainly interested in preserving what they see as the exceptionalism of American cultural identity through closed borders, closed trade, and a general disdain for involvement overseas.

With McCain as the nominee, a conservative split of this nature is almost inevitable. Like Bush, Iraq and immigration are two of the few areas where he simply refuses to pander to certain sections of his base. What is less inevitable is that this split will blow up into a full-scale primary and third party challenge ala 1992. In fact, that appears extremely unlikely, given what appears to be a remarkable decline in the political influence of paleoconservatives.

More in the extended entry.
Ron Paul carried the paleoconservative banner for Republicans in 2008, and despite his tens of millions of dollars he never once reached double-digits outside of a caucus. Buchannan, by contrast, regularly scored over 20% of the vote in 1992 and 1996 primaries. For all the talk of Ron Paul's activists as a rising force in the Republican Party or conservative politics, the influence of his supporters is actually in severe decline. Now, Republican candidates are winning primaries as a result of their internationalist (if imperialist) approach, while anti-immigration Republicans are getting crushed. The paleocons that led to the massive conservative split of 1992 have seen their coalition reduced to a rump of noisy, active, and increasingly alienated supporters. Even Bush, who bows to his base on just about everything, won't bow to paleoconservatives on issues like immigration.

The lack of influence of the paleoconservatives also arose in yesterday's flap over the picture of Obama in traditional Kenyan attire. The course of that argument was not about Obama wearing the attire, something that might offend American exceptionalists like Buchanan, but rather about whether the Clinton campaign was being sleazy in attacking Obama over wearing the garb. For the record, I don't think the Clinton campaign was behind the attack, and that Drudge just made that up whole cloth, so to speak. Anyway, the point is that when an attack like that itself becomes offensive, then paleocons have become utterly irrelevant in American politics. Consider further that while Ron Paul's crowds seem impressive, on Saturday his supporters held a GOTV rally in Austin that attracted 4,000 people, of whom only 54 actually voted. It is in this way that his campaign can be viewed as the last, desperate convulsion of a once powerful force in American politics that seems to be heading in the direction of the Dodo. That such a platform can't even succeed during a time when unpopular free trade, unpopular immigration, and an unpopular foreign war are all partially blamed for a poor economy is particularly telling.

Rocky Mountain Realities on Feb. 5

David Sirota — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:18:40 GMT

Note: My new nationally syndicated newspaper column out today features OpenLeft's very own Paul Rosenberg. Check it out here and check out the original OpenLeft post that I specifically reference. - D

When I took a leave of absence from my job in Washington in 2000 to work in the Montana Senate race, I didn't have much clue what I was in for. Growing up on the East Coast, I thought of the Intermountain West as a huge, far-off, mysterious place of square states and cattle herds - and like many people on the coasts, I didn't know much else.

In the years since that first campaign, I have been working in and reporting on the West, telling people what I say in my new nationally syndicated newspaper column today: That this region is the most politically misunderstood place in America.
Many people scoffed at my writing, saying the West was a backwater - one that would remain a Republican stronghold forever. That is, until the last few years when many Democratic strategists in Washington realized that the West has become a political swing region - one that could decide the direction of national politics for the next generation.

Sadly, when you read the typical national reporter's occasional article about the West or watch national politicians drop in for a visit, you sense either condescension, stereotyping - or both. The West is still portrayed as a weird hinterland whose politics supposedly adhere to Washington, D.C.'s inaccurate notions of lockstep "red state" behavior.

But as I say in the column, the West defies the professional pundits' portrayals. On issues from national security to energy to the role of government, the Rocky Mountain region's nuances are far more complex than "red state" stereotypes - just like most places in America. And as this region prepares to vote on February 5th and then take center stage in the general election, the candidates who ignore the fictions and appreciates these nuances are the candidates who will likely win here.

As the only nationally syndicated newspaper columnist living in and reporting regularly on this region, I felt it was particularly important to write this piece before Tuesday's voting because the West is only going to become more prominent in American politics as this election year progresses. That prominence, I believe, will either allow inaccurate stereotypes to flourish, or let the more complex realities shine through. I hope it is the latter.

Go read the whole column here. If you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site.

One additional note: You may have noticed that I am trying to use my column to promote solid progressive voices whenever I can. Today's, as I pointed out up top, includes the use of material from a diarist at OpenLeft.com - a terrific progressive site. I want to continue doing that kind of thing - the Right promotes its voices very effectively like this. And I want to do the same with my column.

Was Ross Perot Right?

David Sirota — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:44:03 GMT

NOTE: If you are tired of major issues like this getting no coverage in the face of a media blackout and thus you would like to see my nationally syndicated column in your local paper, see the bottom of this post on what to do to make that happen - and see how your support has helped widen the circulation of the column already! - D

Was Ross Perot right about the North American Free Trade Agreement and its effects on workers and immigration? That is the subject of my newest nationally syndicated newspaper column out this past Friday. This is a key question in the wake of Hillary Clinton trying to laugh off the topic at the last presidential debate (see the interchange here on YouTube).
Roughly 20 million Americans in 1992 thought that he was, in fact, right. Those are 20 million independent swing voters - a Ross Perot voter demographic that remains absolutely critical. Just take a look at this map - and make sure to roll your cursor over the states. Notice anything interesting? Yes, that's right: The states where Perot did best are some of the most closely divided and therefore politically important states in the country - states like Nevada, Colorado, Maine, Arizona and Oregon.

The Wall Street Journal notes, the debate over NAFTA is becoming ever more intense in the Democratic caucus race in Iowa. Ben Smith at the Politico puts the whole political question in stark relief in a story published one day after my column:

"Though Perot has been off the stage for a decade, strategists in both parties recognize that his supporters remain a key bloc and that voters' dissatisfaction at the end of the administration of the second President Bush has echoes of the mood when his father was booted from office. What's more, neither party has geared up to focus on pet issues of the Perot crowd: opposition to immigration, unfettered trade and foreign wars."

Substantively, whether Perot was right is pretty clear. Though the Washington Post this morning trumpets "NAFTA's record of raising living standards here and in Mexico," as my column shows, the actual facts prove that's a typical lie manufactured by the the same paper that, as economist Jeff Faux documents, worked overtime to silence all criticism of the original NAFTA. Since NAFTA passed, Mexican wages have plummeted increasing illegal immigration pressure at the southern border. Meanwhile, American wages have stagnated, and a million American jobs have been eliminate. That says nothing about the environmental degradation that NAFTA helped accelerate.

Since the column was published, some have asked me how its possible for Mexican wages to have decreased at the same time American jobs were shipped to Mexico. Part of it had to do with the Peso crisis, but the other part has to do with how NAFTA drove Mexican farmers off their land under a glut of corporate agribusiness subsidies. As Mexican farmers headed north to the cities and to the maquiladora border regions in search of NAFTA's manufacturing jobs (the giant sucking sound), there was a glut of cheap labor for these jobs, which was precisely the point. As we all know from our Economics 101 lessons about supply and demand, when there are more workers than there are jobs, wages go down. That's what happened in Mexico.

Strategically, I hope leading Democrats take a good look at the electoral map and stop going on television and laughing at Perot. But more important than even that, I hope Congress takes a good look at Perot's arguments, and factors them in before passing the new NAFTA expansion it is considering. Those who ignore the history are doomed to repeat it - and America's middle class can't afford to be trampled yet again.

Go read the full column here. And if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site.

On that topic, there's some great news: Thanks to reader support, the column's circulation is growing. The Seattle Times and TruthDig have been added to the list of publications now running my column regularly. Also, the San Francisco Chronicle (which runs the column in its print edition) has added the column to its website as well. So reader support really matters - thanks to all who have helped!