Have House Republicans Given Democrats a Leg Up in 2012?

You know that House Republicans have stuck their foot in it when even the Wall Street Journal editorial page is calling them out:

"The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.  Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2012.  This should be impossible."

Let's stipulate to two things:  first, that having been out-maneuvered by Harry Reid, John Boehner and the Republican House caucus have some egg on their faces; and second, that a lot of voters are going to be pissed off when their paychecks suddenly get a little lighter after January 1 if the standoff between the House and the Senate isn't resolved.  Do either of those assumptions really give the Democrats a leg up in the next election?

More Surprising Polling Data

I've devoted a couple of posts lately to the disparity between what liberals presume the state of public opinion should be in light of facts on the ground and what it appears really to be. You might have thought, first, that, while we're still reeling from the Wall Street-induced financial crisis of 2007-8, ever larger numbers of people must be thinking that they have more to fear from big business than big government.  Alas, that appears not to be case.  And you might have thought, second, that with unemployment at 8.6% and with Occupy Wall Street and all, that people would be a lot more distressed about growing inequality in the distribution of wealth and income than they appear actually to be.

Something similar seems to be happening with respect to foreign policy as well.  Four or five years ago, when occupied Iraq was descending unmistakably into civil war, it seemed safe to say that people across the political spectrum we're beginning to agree that invading Iraq had been a dreadful mistake perpetrated by an administration that didn't know what it was doing.  Even a lot of the people who backed the troop surge in late 2007 and early 2008 on the theory that it was too late to turn back seemed to be thinking along these lines.  As I recall, most them weren't still putting up much of a fight if you suggested that we'd have been better off trying to contain Saddam going forward than getting rid of him back in 2003.

Who'd have thought that now, when the last troops are finally coming home, that public opinion would be turning back in favor of the Iraq war.  It appears, however, that something along those lines is happening.  Consider this poll of Americans (as opposed to registered or likely voters), from the Pew Research Center:

Are Voters Getting More Class-Conscious?

Here are two more graphs from Gallup, throwing more cold water on the idea that Democrats can engineer an electoral breakthrough in 2012 by positioning themselves as the party of (for the want of a better term) "class consciousness."  To my untrained eye, the first graph suggests that class-consciousness among the polling sample, or something like it, peaked sometime in 2008, and has been regressing to the historic mean ever since:      

Political Blackmail

Imagine an enterprising blackmailer shaking down a woman, her identity concealed behind dark glasses, in the already dark recesses of an out-of-the-way roadhouse.  "It would be a pity," the blackmailer observes, "if the world found out how little you really care about your wedding vows.  It's going to cost you to keep that from happening."  Trouble is, the blackmailer's talking to Kim Kardashian.

This report from the Associated Press suggests that the blackmailer and today's Democrat Party have a lot in common:

"Democrats backed away from their demand for higher taxes on millionaires as part of legislation to extend Social Security tax cuts for most Americans on Wednesday as Congress struggled to clear critical year-end bills without triggering a partial government shutdown.

"But Republicans, frustrated that a bipartisan $1 trillion funding bill was being blocked by Senate Democrats, floated the possibility of repackaging the measure and passing it Friday in defiance of President Barack Obama and his allies in control of the Senate. Stopgap funding runs out Friday at midnight."

Just a week or so ago, Democrats were congratulating themselves for backing Republicans into a corner by tying an extension of the payroll tax cut to a surtax on millionaires.  Democrats figured that, if Republicans didn't swallow the whole package, their dirty little secret would be revealed to the voting public: viz., that Republicans really care as much or more about shielding millionaires than middle class families from tax increases.

Trouble is,  Republicans have never made a secret of that.  Indeed, they've been proclaiming it to anyone who would listen for the last 30 years.  They're pleased to have the chance to show the world that Democrats are the only ones intent on making the country  choose between tax relief for millionaires and the middle class.  As far as Republican are concerned, Democratic blackmailers were threatening to make them a campaign commercial.

Moreover, Democrats could learn a thing or two about blackmail from Republicans who knew what they were doing when they countered by tying an extension of the payroll tax holiday to the approval of the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.  It is a dirty little secret of the Democratic Party that the interests of environmentalists and the private sector working class frequently come into conflict, and that when they do, the Democratic Party nearly always sides with the environmentalists.

None of this means that the Republican pitch on taxes is a recipe for electoral success in 2012, or that the Democratic pitch is a recipe for failure.  On that score, only time will tell.  But the fact that the Democrats try keeping a lot more such secrets from voters than Republicans goes a long way toward explaining how the party that controls the White House and the Senate manages to lose so many of  these legislative skirmishes.

Republican Demonology

Take a look at the latest Romney spot taking aim at Newt Gingrich:



What exactly, according to the Romney campaign, makes Newt an "unreliable leader"?

Electoral Battles, Ideological Wars

I've spent a lot of time on this blog lamenting the fact that, while Democrats have generally held their own in elections during my adult life, liberals have been steadily surrendering ground in the battle for American hearts and minds.  Here's a dramatic graphic representation of the phenomenon courtesy of Gallup:

Notice that, as you might expect, the concern generated by "big labor" is roughly commensurate with organized labor's declining influence in the private sector over the last 45 years.  And concern about "big business" stays pretty consistently in the mid-to-low 20s except for spikes during the recessions of 1979, 2001 and 2008.  That strikes me as a decent proxy for the success liberals have had over the years convincing Americans that big business wields too much political influence.  They've never been able to hold the ground they gained during recessions.

The Gravitational Pull of Movement Conservatism in the Republican Party

I’ve commented before on how Democrats’ decision to position themselves for the next election as egalitarian populists is raising the ideological stakes in the next election. Substantially the same thing is happening within the Republican Party. Remember the Paul Ryan budget that a Republican House passed last April to show the nation that it means business when it comes to getting a handle on unfunded entitlement liabilities? Suddenly, the Romney camp is doing its best to make sure that Republican primary voters don’t forget it. Take a look at its latest campaign spot:

Newt's Ideological Capital

Nate Silver furnishes a compelling answer to a good question. Why, he asks, does the Republican base bristle at the inauthenticity of Mitt Romney's conservatism while it readily acknowledges Newt Gingrich's ideological authenticity.  That's a good question because Gingrich has taken as many heterodox positions as Romney, and even some of the same ones (e.g., in favor of an individual health insurance mandate and doing something about climate change).

Silver's answer takes the form of a graph charting the position of the median House member on the ideological spectrum on the basis of a statistical analysis of roll call votes:



The larger red circles represent the House sessions over which Gingrich presided as Speaker.  Seeing all this laid out before us, it's hard to resist the conclusion that the Gingrich insurgency represented a genuine tipping point in the ideology of the chamber.  And since the House is the most democratic branch of the federal government, it's arguably the best measure we have of the ideological composition of the country as a whole.

Obama’s Osawatomie Speech

The speech the president delivered yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas has liberal pundits dancing in the streets. Robert Reich calls it “the most important economic speech of his presidency.” Michael Tomasky thinks the speech showed that Obama “finally gets it”: “[t]his was [his] best speech in a very, very long time, and it showed that he and his political people have finally figured out how to express the new quasi-populist mood in the country . . .”

Granted, Obama gave a nice speech inasmuch as it artfully wove together the themes that he'll be running on in the next election. But other than the strained historical comparison the president drew between himself and Teddy Roosevelt, can you find in it a single idea, even a single formulation of an idea, that you haven't heard countless times before? As far as I can tell, there was nothing new programmatically. It’s not as if we haven’t heard Obama say things like this before:

"But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math."

Newt: The Grandfather of Gridlock?

Most of us remember Newt Gingrich as the guy who spearheaded the political insurgency in the early 1990s that first expelled the Republican congressional leadership that was too comfortable in the role of a minority party, and then led Republicans to their first House majority in forty years by teaching complacent Democrats how political hardball is played. As Speaker, he forced not one but two government shutdowns before leading the charge on Bill Clinton’s impeachment. It wasn’t long before Gingrich's congenital abrasiveness wore out the patience even of Republican colleagues.

So it’s a little amusing that, now that Newt suddenly finds himself with a shot at the Republican presidential nomination, he wants us to think of him as a kindly old uncle from a gentler time:



Consider David Axelrod’s understandable, but misguided, reaction to the spot:

“I was amused by the Newt Gingrich ad because you talked about he was going to bring the country together to solve problems,” he said. “You’re talking about the godfather of gridlock here, the guy who two decades ago really invented the kind of tactics that have now become commonplace in Washington. So this is a whole new Newt.”

Liberals Doubling Down

From what little I know, Greg Sargent has put his finger on the strategic pulse of the administration and the Democratic Party going into the next election (my emphasis):

“[N]ow Dems think the battle has finally shifted on to turf favorable to them. Dems believe the public’s rising concern about inequality has created an environment in which their class-based argument will have newfound resonance. As Chuck Schumer said recently, Dems think this rising anxiety is rooted in a fundamental shift in the public’s perceptions of the economy: That the bottom has fallen out from under the middle class because the old rules — work hard, and you’ll get ahead — are no longer operative for anyone but those at the very top.”

When you boil this down to a campaign pitch, it means that Democrats from the president on down will be telling voters that raising taxes on high-earning families isn’t just a painful necessity dictated by hard times, but a matter of simple decency that Republicans oppose only because they’re shameless shills for rich people. The corollary is that it would be shameful of the Democrats not to insist on raising tax rates on families in the upper income brackets.  That suggests how much work the notion that there has been “a fundamental shift in the public’s perceptions of the economy” is doing in Sargent’s formulation.