Taxes (4.00 / 3)

I saw on Tweety's show, about a year ago, that voters trusted Democrats with taxes more than Republicans.  Tweety, of course, couldn't believe it.  "How could they think Democrats are more trusted to cut taxes?" he asked.  He couldn't comprehend that a different question was asked.

They've been so beaten up over this, they can't see clearly.  They have no clue.

That, and the concern rich contributors my contribute less.

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by: Mark Matson @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 17:18:50 PM CDT

Precisely My Point (4.00 / 1)

The conservative strategy is premised on driving out rational thought.  (What else do they mean when they say "faith-based", anyway?)  They've been driving out rational thought for over 60 years now. They ain't about to stop.

We need more Dems that, like Grayson, will punch back.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 17:24:28 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Tweety is a very wealthy person. (4.00 / 1)

So who's tax policy preferences do you suppose he favors? Hint: it ain't librul Dems. Ditto for most of the Dem leadership. They're obscenely wealthy and they really enjoy all those taxpayer subsidies. But they're Dems, so have to lie to their own base, most of which would be appalled if they understood how these people "made" their fortunes.

I realize I'm being simplistic, but sometimes these things are really that simple. It's about money in their pockets.

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences..." - Winston Churchill, November 1936

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by: Emocrat @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 19:10:36 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

3 explanations (4.00 / 5)

Sargent: Dems fear they won't be able to cut through the noise and chatter to win the argument, a fear strongest among the marginal Democrats.

Digby: Dems see the numbers but figure the very subject of taxes has magical powers that will ensure their defeat, yes, they are that dumb.

Me: Major party leaders (not all), marginal Dems like the Blue Dogs and other ConservaDems (not all) are hoping, rhetoric to the contrary, to find a way ("forced by political reality" or otherwise) to extend tax giveaways for the wealthiest, the constituency about which they care the most, at least insofar as tax policy is concerned.

The first two presume a degree of good faith by the leading Dems I am not prepared to extend. After a long and nauseating track record of double dealing I am not prepared to take President Obama's recent rhetoric at face value, especially given signals that he is already taking the veto off the table.

Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? And cold comfort for change?

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by: T. Jacobsen @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 17:18:54 PM CDT

Well (4.00 / 1)

Don't forget my recent posts.  Obama's position is really not progressive. It's just not batshit insane.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 17:21:46 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

I vote for all of the above (0.00 / 0)

I think all these thoughts bounce around the heads of our Democratic 'friends' in congress.  Some consciously, some less so, but all there.

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by: Mark Matson @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 17:22:40 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Watch and See Them Capitulate! (4.00 / 1)

It immediately occurred to me that the reason Democrats are UNDERWHELMED with the idea of making eliminating the Bush tax cuts a big issue in the election is that they would be boxed into a position publicly opposing a "compromise" with Republicans come next January (or especially if they are being voted out of office this November during the lame duck session in December).

The "compromise" would be "extend the Bush tax cuts for everybody" and bill it as "middle class tax relief". The Republicans might grumble about tax cuts for persons earning under $250,000 (just as they did in 2001) but they'll go along as they did then.

1. Lots of them figure to be lame ducks at that point and will need lobbyist jobs in January. Having "I supported tax cuts for you corporate CEOs" will be a selling point on their resume and they will need all the help they can find since Democrats may be in the minority.

2. If they whip up base support (knowing that they will just turn around and cave) that will be another high-profile capitulation that will further alienate their base. Why bother when the benefit is likely to be marginal at this point?

There's really not much Democrats can do between now and November to whip up base enthusiasm. They left this till WAY TOO LATE. Anything they do now simply strikes people as rank opportunism and is unlikely to sway many votes.  

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by: Cugel @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 18:25:19 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Too late? (4.00 / 1)

There are three levels to the question about it being "WAY TOO LATE".

First, the actual economy is far more important than any rhetoric or even any action.  If the economy improved for any reason at all, even if Obama did the wrong things, Democrats would get credit at the polls.  Same in reverse.

Second, what can be swung due to rhetoric can still be done.  So I disagree with you, there.  At this time two years ago, McCain was leading Obama by about as much as Republicans are leading Democrats.  People are only beginning to pay attention and there is actually a ton of time.

Finally, for those that actually are paying attention, like the readers of this blog, then yes, I agree.  But you would be mistaken to assume that is a very high percentage of the electorate.

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by: Mark Matson @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 19:28:57 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

I have to say I think yours is the most plausible and realistic, not to mention logical--okay, I mentioned it. (4.00 / 2)

I'm growing increasingly weary of this notion that these Dems, some of the most powerful people on the friggin' planet, are somehow scared to death. That smell grew stale well over a year ago. But it's a nice rationalization people can use to justify their horrid behavior over the last... nearly two freakin' years.

Is Nancy Pelosi afraid of losing her seat? Only if she starts speaking honestly, since her district is pretty darn liberal, although also quite affluent. Harry Reid? He loves being attacked from the right, so he can double-down on his own dumb ass BS. Ditto for Obama. It's all about the excuses and whether or not they'll stick with the same people that put them in office with actual votes.

I also find the notion that they're "really that dumb" increasingly hard to buy. Yes, they are politically tone-deaf, as any upper-class twit would naturally be--so hurray for legacy promotions! But please, these are people more concerned with their own finances than the nation's finances. That much is clear by now. Let's remember these folks portfolios are filled with stocks paying rich dividends offered by corporations that have grossly increased their profits from off-shoring American jobs to Asia. And yet, some pundits dare to wonder why these very same people don't give a Tinker's Cuss about creating jobs here? IN this country? The mind boggles at the stupidity. And yet, even most of those pundits are also from Ivy League schools, so one has to really wonder about the depth and pervasiveness of intellectual and moral rot amongst our "betters." Sheesh. This is a bit crass, eh? (Still, it's a nice outlet for me and having a good outlet is key to preventing road rage!)

DC is swimming with upper-class twits, most of them with Ivy League degrees, who aren't actually stupid with respect to their careers. But when it comes to the Fate Of The Nation, they're USDA Grade A Morons.


"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences..." - Winston Churchill, November 1936

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by: Emocrat @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 19:31:42 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Pelosi isn't the problem... (4.00 / 4)

Everyone loves to equate Ben Nelson with the whole party, but that isn't fairb to the rest of the party.  Bayh and Nelson are not representative of the party as a whole.  the fact that they can have such power is a different problem, but it is really annoying to tar the entire party with Ben Nelson's stench.

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

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by: lord_mike @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 20:07:52 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Well, I only say that because she's.... Speaker Of The House. (4.00 / 2)

So this really has nothing to do with Ben Nelson. He's just  one of the anointed RWers the WH is so very much in love with.

But if you take a really good look at her management, you'll notice she bends over backwards to help out the Blue Dogs. This, coming from a woman with a well earned reputation as a Capital F Fighter. She controls, outright, the schedule of everything. She can make sure, by fiat, what goes to the floor and what doesn't. GOP Speakers never had any problem with that and neither did Tip O'Neil, for that matter. She possesses a great deal of POWER. Real power. Yet this is consistently ignored when it comes to being critical of her and her Office.

In other words, the House has worked the way it has largely because that's the way she wants it to work.

I know this kind of stuff doesn't go over well. She makes all the right noises when she needs to  and she does that really well, much of the time. And yet, even though she's Speaker of The House, she always seems to cave late on a Friday night and just make excuses about it Monday morning.

Remember the way she handled the bank bailouts. And the last  War Supplemental, in which she flat out lied to the Dem caucus and made most of them look like total morons in doing so. You can't claim she doesn't know what she's doing.

She's a phony as a three dollar bill. It's time to grapple with that simple fact.

There isn't one single person who qualifies as "The Problem." It's a leadership problem and that includes the entire party leadership. Pelosi is third in line of succession to become president. That's REAL power.

Do you honestly think she doesn't have a ton of leverage on Blue Dogs? I say this, because she's never hesitated for even one moment to shit on Progressives at the drop of a very expensive hat. But the Blue Dogs? Listening to her, you'd think these 30 or so people run the friggin' place. Well they don't. She does. That's what the Speaker does.

Indeed, there's no one in the entire House who is more cozy with Rahm Emmanuel than Nancy Pelosi.

Connect the dots. Please!

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences..." - Winston Churchill, November 1936

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by: Emocrat @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 20:43:15 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

That's 'cos the Blue Dogs have leverage... (4.00 / 3)

There are 50 of them and they love to be a pain in the ass.  Pelosi has managed them brilliantly, IMO.  The stuff she managed to get them to pass is incredible, really.  But, Harry Reid just couldn't break those dogs like our Speaker did in the house... and so the face of the party became Ben Nelson instead of Sherrod Brown... no wonder we are in trouble!

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

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by: lord_mike @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 22:05:00 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

I agree -- Pelosi isn't the problem (4.00 / 2)

Pelosi pushed hard for the public health insurance option and a lot of other progressive policies in this session.  And when I say "pushed hard" I mean really laid a lot on the line and showed very strong leadership.  If any single office holder deserves credit for the fact that any health care bill passed at all after the election of Scott Brown, it would be Pelosi.

She could have done a lot more if Rahm and the White House had put their weight behind twisting the arms of the handful of blue dog senators who kept negotiating further and further to the right -- rather than the many progressive members of Congress who had already passed a much stronger bill in the House.

It's important to be accurate and precise about who and what the problem is.  A small handful of conservative Democratic senators holding up every major piece of legislation is very different than the whole of the Democratic party.  More than a handful deserve a degree of blame -- and many characteristically succumb to the deer-in-headlights fear-based immobilization that Paul's discussing -- but still, I can count the biggest problems on my fingers.  

And that's more instructive about what we need to do to change the problem.

beyondthechoir.org - because social justice is intended for a broad audience

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by: Jonathan Smucker @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 07:10:48 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Intensity of opinion matters (0.00 / 0)

One voting system is range voting, in which different choices are assigned different values on a scale (such as 1 to 100), allowing a measurement of strength of preference.  With range voting, a minority, if its opinion is sufficiently intense, can overcome a majority opinion, if that position is not held as tightly.  The majority wins if it care enough.

I suspect that some (but not all) politicians mentally assess public opinion in a manner similar to range voting.  They would be more supportive of extending Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthy if they felt that there was a counter-balancing intense support for ending the Bush tax cuts for all economic classes.  Who wants to make an argument for that?  

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 21:00:53 PM CDT

Don't worry (4.00 / 3)

once we stop talking about terrorism, taxes, crime, and everything else, we can make some real progress on school uniforms.

Politics is the art of the possible, but that means you have to think about changing what is possible, not that you have to accept it in perpetuity.

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by: David Kaib @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 21:26:34 PM CDT

very astute (4.00 / 5)

This really gets to the heart of right-wing hegemony:

...when the Dems aligned nationally with Civil Rights, the GOP had a permanent fear-button to push, and they've never stopped using it ever since.

The issues digby cites are more recent examples, but they are all part of the same pattern.  If the GOP can turn anything into a flashpoint of fear, then they can keep on repeating it, and all thought shuts down--perhaps not for everyone, but for enough. But for them to be really secure, they need the Democrats to buy into their logic as well.  Once the Democrats are gripped with fear, and unwilling to talk about a given issue, then that issue belongs to the GOP.  Their position on it doesn't have to make any sense.  Making sense is beside the point.  The point is scaring people.  The point is, in a word, terrorism.

This is the nature of the asymmetry in the narrative battles between Republicans and Democrats.  Republicans stoke fear.  Democrats try to counter their arguments by speaking to those fears - rather than re-grounding and reaching past the fear to connect with people's better nature - and consistently come out the worse for it.  One wonders how many Democratic politicians today truly understand FDR's admonition that, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

beyondthechoir.org - because social justice is intended for a broad audience

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by: Jonathan Smucker @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 22:52:58 PM CDT

This Was, I Think, The Very Core of Obama's Betrayal of People's Expectatons (4.00 / 6)

He spoke as if he understood this--the need to conquer fear--when he spoke of hope and change. People really believed this of him.  Heck, even I believed it. I didn't believe he was all that progressive.  But I believed he understood he understood basic political psychology.  I believed he understood about the need for countering fear, rather than succumbing to it.  And I believed, as Mike argued, that once he discovered the GOP would not give an inch, that he would have to fight and move to the left, out of pure pragmatic necessity. (Remember pragmatism?) But Obama never did the second in part because he never did the first.

At bottom, I think that the person Obama fooled most was himself. He convinced himself that negotiating with fear was not succumbing to it.  He'd been negotiating all his life.  It was all he knew.  And though it might have worked just fine for him on the individual level (heck, it got him to the White House!) he simply lacked the perspective to stand outside his own skin and realize what he was doing to sell out the hopes and dreams that others had boughten into.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 07:18:54 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

precisely (4.00 / 1)

That was the biggest reason why I was reluctantly excited by the Obama campaign. I was counting on him to use his smarts and remarkable oratory skills effectively in his own interests -- which are very different than my interests, but the overlap because of the unique political moment was enough to make me cross my fingers and hope. I mean, the guy ran on a People's History narrative, retelling the story of America from the perspective of challenger movements.  It really seemed like he totally got the need to control the frame and speak to people's hopes (it was like the campaign trademarked the word itself) and better selves - and to weave a coherent values narrative.  And most importantly to not accommodate fear-based attacks.

(P.S. I'm copying your response into the comments section of my right-wing hegemony article posted at beyondthechoir.org)

beyondthechoir.org - because social justice is intended for a broad audience

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by: Jonathan Smucker @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 19:03:17 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Very clear analysis (4.00 / 1)

Thanks, Paul.

You have made the basic point contained in this post before, but here you make it more clearly and with simpler words. It s a very direct path of reasoning, and one that can be easily explained even to people with limited interest in politics or philosophy.

ec=-8.50 soc=-8.41   (3,967 Watts)

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by: Mark Wallace @ Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 23:26:46 PM CDT

Exactly what I've been trying to say for weeks now. (0.00 / 0)

And Newt already has it by the balls with his DVD. This is the same corruption as always. Thanks for the history lesson.

They only call it class war when we fight back.

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by: ezdidit @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 01:32:28 AM CDT

A little OT... (4.00 / 1)

but frankly I'm with the 15-20% who want to let all the Bush tax cuts expire.  I'm really annoyed the Dems have proposed extending any of them.  I would much prefer Democrats offer the tax cuts Robert Reich has proposed, no payroll tax for the first 20k in income, paid for by lifting the SS cap for incomes above 250k.  That's a progressive tax cut.

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by: mass @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 09:36:00 AM CDT

Me Too (4.00 / 2)

In fact, I think it was a bad move for Obama to take this line in the campaign.  But Obama was just so awesome with his eleventy-dimensional parcheesi, who could say no?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 11:25:54 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

you've inspired a user diary... (0.00 / 0)

The Centrality of Fear in Right-wing Hegemony

beyondthechoir.org - because social justice is intended for a broad audience

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by: Jonathan Smucker @ Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 10:29:30 AM CDT