Where Are The Pitchforks?
by digby
David Corn asks polling experts about populist anger at Wall Street and finds that:
Politicians Don’t Care. “People don’t know what to do with the anger they do have,” says Marttila, because they feel blocked by “senators, representatives, and [Treasury Secretary] Timothy Geithner, who speaks gobbledygook.” Wall Street, in other words, is protected by the people’s representatives. “There is a layer between Americans and the villains of Wall Street, and that’s Congress,” Marttila contends. With Obama adopting mostly mainstream positions on economic issues, no national figure has stepped in to rally the resentment. Nobody has put popular anger to good use, because nobody really wants to.
Fear, Not Loathing. As a leading Democratic opponent of the banking bailouts, Rep. Brad Sherman of California has thought a fair amount about public sentiment and the economic crisis. “The public is very angry at Wall Street,” he says. “But they are constantly told by all the respected voices that if we don’t protect and preserve the institutions on Wall Street, we’ll be fighting for rat meat on the streets.” And this fearmongering works. Fear, Sherman says, is generally stronger than anger. The resentment that does exist is diffuse; it is not channeled toward specific solutions. The fear, however, is specific: What will happen to me and my family? With authorities in government and the media incessantly bleating that what’s good for Wall Street is good for the country, Sherman adds, “we’re angry at those people and we’re too fearful to do anything about it.”
It’s Complicated. There’s no doubt Americans are upset about paying for the failures of banks and corporations, says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. But the financial issues involved appear “incredibly arcane and difficult to penetrate. How do you regulate derivatives when 99 percent of the public don’t understand it?” Marttila agrees: “The public policy implications are beyond the reach, vocabulary, and discussion of many. So the bad guys escape.”
Big Business vs. Big Government. For many decades, Americans have held negative attitudes toward the titans of industry. “It’s a constant,” says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. “You never go wrong vilifying big business.” But Americans also don’t fancy the counterbalance to corporate power: government. Since 1965, Gallup has asked survey respondents to choose the biggest future threat to the country: big business, big labor, or big government. Big government always wins—by a lot. In December 2006, 61 percent said they fretted about the government, compared with 25 percent who feared corporate power. Last spring, when Wall Street was in deep disrepute, the numbers changed only slightly: 55 percent still fingered big government as the greatest threat. “People always have concern about the government doing too much,” says Newport, “even when [it’s] regulating financial institutions they don’t like.” In fact, as recently as September, Gallup found that 45 percent of Americans believed there was too much government regulation of business. Only 24 percent said there was too little. “The lucky thing for business is that its foil is government,” concludes Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.
None of that surprised me in the least. It’s not like the Democrats have tried in the least to make a political argument about this that made any sense. But the Republicans have, and it’s a doozy. If things don’t improve quickly, a lot more people are going to be listening to it.
When you have a man-made crisis (or even a natural disaster) people will always look for someone to blame. It’s human nature. The out of power Republicans have a ready made boogeyman in the government, of course, to which they conveniently misdirect all the fear and anger since they are the ones who both led the charge to deregulate and profited from the excesses. The Democrats, either out of a severe case of regulatory capture or a quixotic political desire to “change the tone” and “look forward not backward” have left themselves holding the bag as the defenders of the one institution everybody now holds responsible for the mess.
What a weird place Democrats have in our political culture these days. They’re like the official sin-eaters. They do all the dirty work to clean up after Republican excess and take the blame for making the mess in the first place. What kind of people want a job like that?
.