The political process has failed. Cap and trade legislation is dead in this Congress.
Kerry and Reid said as much last week. They said they don't have the votes in the Senate, so instead of introducing the legislation before the August recess, Reid will introduce a very minor energy bill instead, and that's it. Technically, the comprehensive legislation could still be offered in September, but the vote becomes more difficult, and less likely, as the election approaches. If they thought they had the votes, they would introduce it now. They don't have the votes, they don't expect to get them, and barring a miracle, after this November there will be no chance to get them. The legislative effort is dead. Our political system has failed to respond to the greatest challenge of our time.
The political process has failed. Cap and trade legislation is dead in this Congress.
Kerry and Reid said as much this week. They said they don't have the votes in the Senate, so instead of introducing the legislation before the August recess, Reid will introduce a very minor energy bill instead, and that's it. Technically, the comprehensive legislation could still be offered in September, but the vote becomes more difficult, and less likely, as the election approaches. If they thought they had the votes, they would introduce it now. They don't have the votes, they don't expect to get them, and barring a miracle, after this November there will be no chance to get them. The legislative effort is dead. Our political system has failed to respond to the greatest challenge of our time.
Today, tea partiers will be protesting the lowest tax rates in decades. Here are federal income taxes as a share of total taxes for the median family of four over the past few decades:
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.
Taxes have been cut--for almost everyone. They are at historic lows. This is probably a contributing factor to why only 20% of the country think the share of taxes they have to pay is "unfair."
But the protests will still dominate political news coverage today. Hopefully, this broader context will get some airtime, too.
The methodology by which progressive media has attempted to delegitimize the tea party has two main trhusts:
Focus on how it was generated through large media and financial backing, rather than as a bottom-up, grassroots effort;
Anecdotally focus on the craziest tea party protesters, implying that they are representative of the movement as a whole.
While #2 has been the most successful, the efforts of a progressive in Oregon is about to singlehandedly render it useless. By publicly declaring his intention to infiltrate the tea parties with protesters to use as anecdotes for #2, Jason Levin is going to call all anecdotal examples of tea party craziness into question, thereby legitimizing the tea party protests even more. Frakking genius:
Meet Jason Levin: possibly the scariest man in the tea party universe. An Oregon technology consultant, Levin is the leader of Crash The Tea Party, a plan to take down the tea party from the inside. Levin says he's got a crowing cadre of supporters across the country, and conservatives from the message boards to the set of the Sean Hannity's show are getting nervous.
"Our plan is not to shout them down," Levin told me yesterday, "but to infiltrate them and push them farther from the mainstream."
Yeah, conservatives should be rally nervous about this. Levin himself lays out how his plan will backfire:
"How do you spot a fake tea partier? Do they have a tea bag tattooed on their forehead?" he said. "Thanks to us, the next time you're at a tea party and you see a guy with a misspelled sign you'll have to say 'is this guy an idiot? Or is he just an infiltrator?"
Oh good! That will really deligitmize the tea party. By calling the authenticity of every single wacko at one of these protests into question, this will make it impossible to delegitimize the tea party movement by focusing on their craziest protests.
Levin's plan, however well meaning, is guaranteed to have the exact opposite effect of its intention. This is only going to make the tea parties more legitimate, not less.
Organizers say they "absolutely do not support a third party."
Well, that's that. Any hopes that Democrats will preserve their large congressional majorities in 2010 through a wave of tea party candidates who splinter conservative votes should be dashed.
Tea partiers are correctly identifying increasing their electoral power within an already powerful electoral institution--the Republican Party--as an easier path to overall power than a creating a new electoral institution altogether.
There is, without a doubt, a certain emotional satisfaction to third-parties. Whether it is the sense of rebellion, of getting back at politicians that have let you down, the feeling of breaking with a corrupt system, the promise of dramatic change, or of making an uncompromising public statements of your beliefs-siding with a third-party can feel very good. Having voted for a variety of Democrats and third-party candidates from 1992-2002, I know this from personal experience. Whatever the consequences, sometimes it feels good not to feel owned.
However, beyond the emotional, the bottom line is that third-parties have accomplished little to nothing in the way of electoral and legislative ends over the past several decades. Less than 1% of the people elected to Congress have been on third-party or independent tickets. Even the very few third-party and independent candidates who do make it to Congress caucus with the major parties and enter into their seniority systems, effectively making them no different from (usually) Democrats or (occasionally) Republicans.
How many Americans participated in tea-party protests this year? Well, if you believe a Republican pollster, the number is around 5,000,000:
Americans don't claim to be experts Tea Party movement, but that hasn't stopped them from getting behind what they think the movement is about. That's according to a new poll from Republican pollster McLaughlin conducted for National Review.(...)
The poll shows that 52% were sympathetic to the Tea Party's goals of, as the pollster described it, "protesting deficit spending and Washington's expanded role in the private sector." About 6% said they had personally participated in protests. Around 30% said they "did not agree" with the aims of the movement.
The McLaughlin poll surveyed people who were considered likely to vote in 2010. If one were to take an conservative estimate, and say that only 85,724,135 people were to vote this year (the same number that voted in 2006), then about 5.1 million people claim to have participated in tea-party protests in 2009. That is a number way, way beyond any estimation of participation in the protests.
I point this out not to try and discredit the poll, but rather to take a dig at the people answering the poll. This is hardly the first instance of Americans exaggerating their level of civic participation. For example, the current population survey taken by the Census Bureau estimates that total turnout in 2006 was over 96,000,000, even though, as I already pointed out, it was a shade under 86,000,000.
The kindest way it put all this in context is to say that millions of Americans exaggerate their level of their civic participation. A less kind way is to say that about 5-10% of Americans lie about their level of civic participation. This segment of dedicated exaggerators is one of the reasons why accurate likely voter models are difficult for pollsters to construct, and also a good reason to remember that public surveys are usually close estimates, rather than an exact measurement.
It will be weeks, if not months, before the analysis of 2009's off year election results fade from the forefront of political commentary, particularly among conservatives. While the White House spin machine is content with downplaying the results as purely a function of local issues, conservatives have attempted to paint these contests as a referendum on the Obama Administration, or more bizarrely, the next step in "the American people taking back their country". Most seasoned political observers know that off year, special and mid-term elections are characterized by low voter turnout and that party activists play a much greater role in determining the outcome. Viewed through that prism, the 2009 contests fall clearly into the pattern of typical off year elections. Thus, the primary question is this: If the 2009 elections exhibit all of the characteristics of other off year elections, how can they logically be seen as a referendum on the Obama presidency or the opening volley in some great populist uprising. After all, if the American people are so disgusted with the Obama Administration, would the rising chorus of conservative opposition not propel them to action and would we not observe a significant up tick in voter turnout?
Analyzing the Gubernatorial races first, it is impossible to deny that local issues dominated. Democratic strategist Steve McMahon pointed out that property taxes and the increase in insurance rates, both of which are state level issues, are a big part of why Jon Corzine was not re-elected. While not directly involved, scandals played a role in Corzine's demise as well, culminating in last summer's roundup of a cast of characters from politicians to rabbis. Corzine's affiliation with the investment firm Goldman Sachs and his aloof political style did nothing to endear him to the people of New Jersey. As one NPR reporter put it: "Corzine never mastered the art of retail politics." Political columnist A.P. Stoddard pointed on November the 3rd that if Corzine lost it would not be Barack Obama's fault as in New Jersey; Obama had an approval rating in the vicinity of sixty percent in contrast to Corzine's thirty nine percent. In the end, Corzine wound up losing by four percentage points to Chris Christie.
In Virginia, the issues that Republican Bob McDonnell focused on were improving the state's economy, job creation and solving longstanding statewide transportation problems. Of these, only job creation could conceivably be linked back to the Obama Administration. While many voters are skeptical as to just how many jobs the Administration's stimulus has created, most people still believe that Obama inherited a difficult situation, the blame for which cannot be laid at the door of his White House. In contrast to McDonnell, the Democratic challenger, Creigh Deeds was a relative unknown who struggled with name recognition till the very end.
What is notable about both races is that the Republican winners eschewed the currently fashionable conservative think tank groupthink, which prescribes a political philosophy that hews to the hard right. As you will recall, following the defeat in the 2008 election cycle, most of the outspoken conservative commentators and theorists claimed that when the G.O.P. moved to the center it lost elections and that future electoral victory could only come by moving further to the right, the further, the better. Neither of the winners in New Jersey or Virginia dwelled on aspects of the "Culture Wars" nor did they resort to the now hackneyed rant about "a slide toward European Socialism." Moreover, both Christie and McDonnell ran upbeat, politically moderate campaigns, devoid of the shrill histrionics that have come to dominate rightwing talk radio or the "political commentators" currently practicing their craft on Fox News. In contrast both Corzine and Deeds ran very negative campaigns to which the voting public now turns an increasingly deaf ear.
Another big issue that can't be ignored is voter turnout. Political writer Paul Loeb summarizes voter turnout as follows: "In exit polls, Virginia voters under 30 dropped from 21% of the 2008 electorate to 10% this year and from 17% to 9% in New Jersey. Minority voting saw a similar decline. In both states, over half the Obama voters of a year ago simply stayed home, more than a million people in both Virginia and New Jersey. With this collapse of the Democratic base, even relatively modest Republican turnout could carry the day, and did." That said if this off year election is characterized by such low turn out levels, how could conservatives make an argument that there is such a dramatic rejection of the Obama agenda? Were the races in New Jersey and Virginia truly a referendum on Obama? If exit polls are any indication, they apparently were not. Edison Research provided a view as to whether or not Obama was a factor in people's decision to vote by way of these exit poll results:
New Jersey:
Support for Obama - 19%
Oppose Obama - 20%
Obama not a factor - 60%
Virginia:
Support for Obama - 18%
Oppose Obama - 24%
Obama not a factor - 55%
Thus in both races over 70% of those who answered exit polls said that Barack Obama did not play a role in their getting out to vote in what were essentially local elections. So much for the idea that the results of this past election constitute a rejection of Barack Obama, whose approval ratings have only moved up since the August Town Hall Follies. Meanwhile, the G.O.P. is polling its lowest approval rating since polling began and only twenty percent of Americans identify with the Republican Party.
Let's now turn to New York's 23rd Election District, where a Republican has held the Congressional seat since 1871. It is in the 23rd, a district that has all of the demographics that favor Republicans, that the newly energized national Conservative movement chose to show just how effective it can be in both defeating a Democrat, upending a moderate Republican and turning the tide on Barack Obama. Prior to the election the district was besieged with conservatives from all over the country including volunteers from prominent conservative grass roots organizations like, The National Organization for Marriage, FreedomWorks, of Tea Party fame, and the Club For Growth, which spent one million dollars backing the conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. Such conservative luminaries like Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Dick Armey, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who predicted a conservative victory, tried in vain to nationalize the election. The cause of Mr. Hoffman was championed by both the Wall Street Journal's editorial board and by the NeoConservative organ, the Weekly Standard. In the face of this unprecedented conservative effort, Bill Owens won by endorsing the Obama Agenda, in an economically depressed region where unemployment has been north of ten percent for some time. This is the second time since the election of Barack Obama, that a Democrat endorsing Obama's agenda has beaten a Republican with national conservative support in a district that demographically favored the G.O.P. The other instance is the special election for Kirsten Gillibrand's vacated Congressional seat earlier this year.
What the outcome of the election in New York's 23rd Congressional District shows is that beyond the world of right wing talk shows, the blogosphere, tea parties and grass roots activism, the appeal of the radical right may be much more limited than had been previously assumed. Could it be that the "August Town Hall Follies" with their tenor of rejection, vitriol and political dramatics have convinced few that conservatives have anything meaningful to offer an electorate that is essentially moderate, but that has been trending to the left over the previous two election cycles? It certainly leaves one to wonder just how effective Sarah Palin can be as a national political figure, seeing as she has yet to have any significant outcome on any race in which she has been involved. After all, isn't she the darling of the base, the one individual that can really turn out a crowd?
Don't get me wrong; there is a wake up call for the Democrats in the results of the 2009 elections and in 2010 there is no guarantee that they won't lose more seats, the incumbent party usually does. If it happened to Ronald Reagan, it can certainly happen to Barack Obama. Obama has clearly lost support among independents and people are rightly concerned about the upward growth in federal spending. At the same time, Americans know that this is no ordinary time and that the situation we currently find ourselves in is not the work of the Obama Administration. But those jumping to the conclusion that 2009 is all that meaningful should heed the words of Purdue University Professor of Political Science, Bert Rockman: "I see no particular harbingers for 2010. While people are deeply unhappy about current conditions, they are also keenly suspicious of Republicans." But the bigger takeaway from all of this is that as far as 2009 is concerned, rumors of Barack Obama's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Based on the facts cited above, claims that a great anti-Obama populist revolution is underway cannot be substantiated. More to the point, the great citizen's revolt to "take back their country" seems only to be alive and well in the delusional fantasyland of tea parties, birthers and far right conservatives who can't seem to abide a climate of much needed political change.
I promised that I wasn't going to put much more work into estimating crowd sizes for yesterday's tea party events, but here is one last update. The important thing is that we now have a credible estimate for Atlanta at 15,000 persons; we were previously relying on an estimate of 7,000 that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had initially made yesterday evening but then pulled back upon.
It's not surprising that Atlanta had the largest turnout (in fact, the largest turnout by far, according to our collection of nonpartisan estimates). Turnout was much higher in state capitals than in other cities, and seems to have been much larger in the South than in other regions of the country. Atlanta, being by far the largest Southern state capital, therefore did very well
Are the Republicans Going Galt? by Nate Silver @ 1:36 PM
Are Republicans turning into libertarians?
Last week's Tea Party protests had their origins in the libertarian movement. Although many conservative groups were eager to co-opt their purpose, the core of the message -- anti-tax, anti-big government -- was about as libertarian as it gets. Participation in the rallies was also proportionately quite high in areas like New Hampshire and the Interior West, which are traditionally more sympathetic toward libertarian concerns.
I am a discontent and distressed taxpayer! "Disgruntled" is a word that might describe my deep dissatisfaction with how my tax dollars are spent. Yet, on April 15, 2009, typically thought of as "Tax Day," I felt no need to join my fellow citizens in protest. I did not attend a "Tea Party". I too believe, in this country, "taxation without representation" is a problem. One only need ponder the profits of lobbyists to understand the premise. Corporate supplicants amass a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investments. The average American is happy to realize a two-digit increase. Nonetheless, as much as I too may argue the point, assessments are paid without accountability, what concerns me more is my duty dollars did not support what I think ethical projects.
"Why not send my tax check directly to Wall Street execs?" asks Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies. "Normally," Anderson insists, she and her husband don't object to paying taxes because "we believe that strategic government investment is the way out of this crisis, and we're happy to contribute our fair share. But this year I cringed as I dropped that check in the mail, thinking about how I might as well have just handed it directly to a Wall Street executive."
Anderson's fears may not be far off base. Economist Jeffrey Sachs succinctly describes the latest iteration of the nation's mammoth financial bailout as a plan to "potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks." Other prominent economists have reached the same conclusion.
If economists and progressive think tankers were the only ones cringing, I'd be worried about the policy. But in the current national climate, I'm concerned about the politics as well. After all, Anderson may recognize that "strategic government investment is the way out of this crisis." But such clear thinking is not universal. The risk is that the irresponsible financial bailout will jeopardize support for the Obama Administration's more progressive economic agenda. We're seeing it today as a series of highly-orchestrated anti-tax tea parties are held across the country, the fruits of an effort by conservative ideologues to conflate the irresponsible bank bailout with the stimulus bill and other public investment the economy desperately needs.
Media spectacles notwithstanding, there's little evidence that they're gaining broad traction. The latest Gallup poll finds "Americans' views of their federal income taxes about as positive as any point in the last 60 years." No widespread anti-tax revolt is brewing. Still, I'd rather Grover Norquist were not smiling quite so broadly.
I'm on record as optimistic that the President will be able to channel justified populist rage to pursue policies that genuinely strengthen and expand the nation's middle class. Today, I'm feeling a bit less confident. When I pay my taxes, I'd rather be thinking about public libraries, air traffic controllers, municipal parks, Social Security, high-quality schools and public colleges, food inspections, safe streets, kids with health coverage, efficient transit, cutting-edge scientific research and unemployment benefits that are there if I need them. But those costly bank bailouts (and, yes, the mounting burden of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) are on my mind as well.
- If you haven't watched it yet, don't take a sip of anything as David Schuster explains conservative teabagging, you'll just spit it out all over your screen (via):
- Contracting and consulting: for the majority of those to whom these terms apply, this is polite code for, 'My take-home pay is an embarassment and I have neither job security nor benefits.'
- Dear wingnuts, defendingterrorists makes you seem a little unhinged. Kissy the face, n.
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