Month: July 2011

The confidence fairy strikes back
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Dave Dayen has been tremendous in his coverage of the default crisis generally, and his latest take on the S&P shakedown of the U.S. economy is no exception:

This concern about the markets has happened very suddenly. All of a sudden there’s a belief that a clean increase or a small debt deal with a minor amount of spending cuts would not be enough to avoid a downgrade. Standard and Poor’s basically forced this by saying that they would downgrade if there wasn’t a $4 trillion deficit deal in the next 90 days. The claim is that this has been caused by political leaders attaching the debt limit to a deal on reducing the deficit, and the inability to reach an agreement, the political stalemate, has led the markets to lose confidence.

But this is absolutely crazy. The market was up 2% last week. 10-year Treasuries are at 2.96%. There’s no difference between this week and last week in terms of the country’s deficit problem. This is about perception, and it doesn’t seem to even be about the perception of the actual market. It’s about the perception of someone at Standard and Poor’s. The rating agencies, which played a major role in the financial meltdown, has just up and put a gun to the head of the country and demanded austerity in the middle of a jobs crisis. Are you kidding me?

Washington certainly deserves blame for attaching a huge lift of deficit reduction to the debt limit, which is so routine but which has such adverse consequences. But this is completely irresponsible on the part of not just DC but the rating agencies. The word “collusion” comes to mind, with the elites of the world demanding that their tax cuts be paid for with someone else’s money.

Dave is right to suspect some form of collusion, given the close relationship between Wall St. and Washington’s most powerful players in both parties. Anyone familiar with the history of the TARP fiasco and the effort to whitewash the MERS scandal would be wise to consider the possibility of foul play here.

But on the other hand, this is also an inevitable consequence of Washington gamesmanship when it comes to the markets. Contrary to deeply held conservative beliefs, markets are fundamentally irrational. Jokes about confidence fairies notwithstanding, markets are as susceptible to both panic and irrational exuberance as any herd of wild animals. When push comes to shove, the masters of the financial universe are no smarter or more rational than anyone else: they just happen to siphon a lot more money off the rest of the economy through esoteric means than do the rest of us.

And just like a herd of not-too-bright animals, all it takes to start a mini-panic is for just one of the players to get nervous. In the case of today’s financial markets, the first people to get nervous will be either the ratings agencies or the bondholders. The ratings agencies have taken a lot of fire for overinflated ratings in the past, and are now likely to overcorrect by trying to get ahead of the market, lest they be seen again as the functionally useless entities they really are. In that sense, it’s no surprise that S&P would be the first to get wet feet. The bondholders, on the other hand, have remained fairly confident that some sort of deal will happen to avert disaster–though that confidence could certainly evaporate by Monday, particularly if the ratings agencies get spooked and the Asian markets tank. Remember that the supposedly brilliant bondholders were dumb enough to believe that the initial TARP vote would sail through Congress, then panicked like schoolchildren before a crowd of vicious raptors immediately thereafter. Much as these people like to elevate themselves as the smartest guys in the room to justify their obscene wealth, they’re not terribly bright or savvy.

Have any economic fundamentals changed between now and last week? No they haven’t. It’s true that the economy is already being hurt to some degree by the ongoing impasse. But fundamentals don’t really drive the market. If they did, the market wouldn’t be soaring as the real economy continues to tank. The market is driven by perception, panic, exuberance and greed, particularly among the wealthy classes and their friends.

As I’ve argued before, market jitters are just the next act in the kabuki play, the necessary condition for nervous nellies in each caucus to give in and go along with whatever villager-approved Grand Bargain is on the table. It’s not a question of if it happens, but when.

The Village awakens

by digby

Chuck Todd tweets:

• So I’m now convinced the Friday breakup MIGHT be more show. So far this ayem, both Boehner and Geithner have signaled the big deal is alive.

• There’s a theory out there that claims Boehner has to do and say certain things publicly to bring his rankNfile along for a deal w/revenues

• both Boehner and POTUS need this bigger deal; they’ve now BOTH put themselves too OUT there to NOT get big deal done

Yah think? Is he saying that this is the first time this has occurred to him?

Ferheavensake.

Now it’s certainly possible that this isn’t happening. But it’s a little weird to me that the top political reporter at NBC news is just now considering it.

FWIW, Geithner also says that they will need to have Democratic votes to get this done. Pushing it up to the very edge of Armageddon is a very good way to make that happen.

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Death Panel
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Saturday Night At The Movies

A (not so) clear-cut case

By Dennis Hartley

Here’s a fascinating interview with Dr. Michael Hudson on KPFA called “Guns, Finance and Butter – Finance Is the New Mode of Warfare”

Excerpt:

“When I was in Norway one of the Norwegian politicians sat next to me at a dinner and said, “You know, there’s one good thing that PresidentObama has done that we never anticipated in Europe. He’s shown the Europeans that we can never depend upon America again. There’s no president, no matter how good he sounds, no matter what he promises, we’re never again going to believe the patter talk of an American
President. Mr. Obama has cured us. He has turned out to be our nightmare. Our problem is what to do about the American people that don’t realize this nightmare that they’ve created, this smooth-talking American Tony Blair in the White House.”

and…

“What is your assessment over the current debate in Washington concerning the raising of the debt ceiling? This debate seems to be taking place between the Obama administration and the Republicans without much input from Democrats.”

“It’s a good cop-bad cop charade. The Republicans are playing the role of the bad cop. Their script says: “You cannot raise taxes on anybody. No progressive income tax, no closing of tax loopholes for special interests, not even prosecutions for tax fraud. And we can get a lot of money back into the economy if we give a tax holiday to the companies and individuals that have been keeping their money offshore. Let’s free the wealthy from taxes to help us recover.’

“Mr. Obama can turn around and pretend to be the good cop. “Hey, boys, let me at least do something. I’m willing to cut back Social Security. I’m willing to take over what was George Bush’s program. I share yourworries about the budget deficit. We have to balance it, and I’ve already appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission to prepare public opinion for my cutbacks in the most popular programs. But you have to let me get a little bit of revenue somewhere.”

“In the end the Republicans will make some small token concessions, but they’ll get their basic program. Mr. Obama will have sold out his constituency.

“The problem is, how can Mr. Obama move to the right of where George Bush stood? The only way he can do this is for the Republicans to move even further to the right. So the Republicans are accommodating him by pushing the crazy wing of their party forward, the Tea Party. Michelle Bachman, Eric Cantor and their colleagues are coming with such an extremist, right-wing attitude that it gives Mr. Obama room to move way to the right as he triangulates, depicting himself a the less crazy alternative: “Look. I’m better than these guys are.”

I think he gets the script right. Obviously, sometimes the kabuki doesn’t go as planned. Players get carried away or someone falls off his platform sandals. But I think this is pretty much how it was designed to work.

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The Third Way to Irrelevance
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Let us grant for the sake of argument that the Obama Administration’s push to put Medicare and Social Security on the table in the Grand Bargain is not Wall St. fueled corruption, but an act of technocratic and political calculation that doing so is actually the right thing to do. That’s a postulate fraught with loaded assumptions of good will, but simply for the sake of argument let’s go down that road for a moment.

On the political side of the equation, no one better encapsulates that argument better than the people at Third Way, the newest reincarnation of the old corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The Third Way people have a new memo out called Democrats Winning the Battle of Reasonableness on the Deficit:

Republicans understood one part of their November mandate: reduce the deficit. But not the other: compromise. Now, Democrats are winning the battle of public opinion on Republican turf – the deficit – because they have been willing to put sacred cows on the table. If Republicans do the same, we may get the grand bargain budget deal the country needs, and it may also be good politics for Republicans as well.

Their white paper looks at recent polling on the default ceiling battle indicating that voters favor hard choices and compromise (as usual), that the GOP is losing support over their stance on this particular issue, while Barack Obama is seen as the adult in the room. All of which are true, insofar as that goes.

Digby has pointed out before that there’s a leadership issue involved here, in that many people see the President as the national leader, and that if he encourages “shared sacrifice”, many people will support that and the polls will follow. If he were to lead in a different, more progressive direction, the public would follow him there just as easily (within reason, of course.)

But beyond that, even if one grants the Third Way every argument they and their allies have made, their position is still hopelessly myopic.

It really doesn’t matter how voters view the current battle, in the long run. By the time November 2012 rolls around, the particular emotional character of the agents in this battle will be long forgotten. What will be remembered is the result: Did the economy improve? What services got cut? How many jobs were lost? Can I afford to go to the hospital? What will the attack ads say as a result of the consequences of those very real results that affect people’s lives?

None of which even even approaches a discussion of lost opportunities in the area of cognitive linguistics and the power of framing to shift people’s active metaphors about the respective roles and powers of government vs. the “free” market, deficits and surpluses, and the barriers to achieving the American Dream posed by massive income inequality. These are conversations that need to be happening, but they’re not even remotely on the table.

Which side of the debate was more “reasonable” to voters in 2011 will matter very little to them in 2012. This is the problem with tuning one’s policy pitchforks to the frequency of shifting public allegiances rather than to basic principles. In the end, principles matter because they affect real results, while today’s political posturing is forgotten with tomorrow’s headlines.

Which means that even if the Third Way types were right on the details, they are still hopelessly wrong on the big picture–which is really the only one that matters.

More than a corporation

by digby

I’ve been reading a lot about the News Corp scandal trying to figure out why people haven’t been able to put their fingers on the essential truth about this media conglomerate. I think Jay Rosen finally did it:

Here’s my little theory: News Corp is not a news company at all, but a global media empire that employs its newspapers – and in the US, Fox News – as a lobbying arm. The logic of holding these “press” properties is to wield influence on behalf of the rest of the (much bigger and more profitable) media business and also to satisfy Murdoch’s own power urges.

However, this fact, fairly obvious to outside observers, is actually concealed from the company by its own culture. So here we find the source for the river of denial that runs through News Corp.

Fox News and the newspapers Murdoch owns are described by News Corp, and understood by most who work there as “normal” news organisations. But they aren’t, really. What makes them different is not that they have a more conservative take on the world – that’s the fiction in which opponents and supporters join – but rather: news is not their first business. Wielding influence is.

Scaring politicians into going along with News Corp’s plans. Building up an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, which then admits Rupert into the back door of 10 Downing Street.

But none of these facts can be admitted into company psychology, because the flag that its news-related properties fly, the legend on the licence, doesn’t say “lobbying arm of the Murdoch empire.” No. It says “First Amendment” or “Journalism” or “Public Service” or “news and information.”

This really is the point. It’s true that hacking into crime victims voice mail and harrassing celebrities to the point of near terrorism for prurient tabloid fodder is awful. But that’s not the real problem. It’s the influence these people have over law enforcement and politicians, largely it appears, through the use of bribes and blackmail.

Read the whole piece. It discusses this in much more depth and I think it’s important.

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Compromising position

by digby

Via yesterday’s HuffPost Hill:

Obama, to a College Park audience today: “I was actually reading an article on the way over here, and the basic notion was that, well, Obama is responsible, but he doesn’t fight enough for how he believes, and the Republicans are irresponsible but all full of conviction. So this was sort of the way the article was posed. And this notion that somehow if you’re responsible and you compromise, that somehow you’re giving up your convictions — that’s absolutely not true.”

I don’t know which article he was referring to, but I think he may be missing the point. It’s not that people don’t understand that he has to compromise. It’s that he puts the defining issues of the Democratic Party on the table in exchange for gimmicks and promises from the other side. It would be as if George W. Bush had offered to tax evangelical churches and ban private ownership of handguns in exchange for Democrats agreeing to raise the cap on Social Security. When you do something like that, you should expect some blowback. Moreover, the real question at this point is what his convictions are, not whether he’s betraying them.

I think it would be different if long before the alleged default crisis he hadn’t said openly that he wanted to compromise on the safety net programs. He called it a Grand Bargain and laid out his vision of “shared sacrifice” in some detail. And the problem was always that he sees such compromise as everyone having “skin in the game”, when the people and ideology his party allegedly represents will suffer far more than the millionaires and corporations who are being portrayed as equal stakeholders in this “bargain.” It is preposterous to say that making the elderly give up some of their already painfully meager stipends in exchange for the wealthy having to pay taxes at the rates they paid during the Clinton years is in any way a fair compromise.

The president seems to see these things as abstractions: the poor give something and the rich give something and that will make it even-steven and everyone will share equally in the pain. That might sound fine if you’re talking to children, but adults surely know that the wealthy will feel no real pain from being asked to give up a slightly higher percentage of the wealth that’s being taxed now at historically low rates. And the elderly and disabled and children who will be sacrificing their benefits in “exchange” for that can’t work. How are they supposed to make up the difference? (This is where the catfood metaphor comes from.)

Look, I get that he thinks it would be great to tick off a bunch of items on the list of problems and say they were all solved through a a “balanced approach.” That’s his brand now and it works for him. But there are reasons this is so tough — the two parties have different constituencies to serve and different ideas of what’s necessary to solve them — or at least they used to. And even more importantly, it’s obvious that the Republicans are more right wing than they ever have been and are less likely to agree to anything reasonable than they ever have been before. So the idea that this, of all times, is the right time to do a Grand Bargain is the original error, as we can see by the current negotiations. His vision doesn’t fit the time or the circumstances and he hasn’t changed course.

The President believes that he can personally prevail with the “only adult in the room” strategy and will be rewarded by the voters in the end, no matter what deal is or isn’t made. And that may end up being true, but it’s not because he’s demonstrated how reasonable he is by offering up deep cuts in the safety net — it’s because most people can see that the Republicans are nuts. And rather than being prudent and cautious it’s actually risky as hell — after all, they might just take the deal, which would be terrible for the country (not that he sees it that way.)

Look what that deal was (is):

[I]t was a deal that, like Obama’s previous offers, was strikingly tilted towards Republican priorities. Among the provisions Obama to which Obama had said yes, according to a senior administration official, were the following:

Medicare: Raising the eligibility age, imposing higher premiums for upper income beneficiaries, changing the cost-sharing structure, and shifting Medigap insurance in ways that would likely reduce first-dollar coverage. This was to generate about $250 billion in ten-year savings. This was virtually identical to what Boehner offered.

Medicaid: Significant reductions in the federal contribution along with changes in taxes on providers, resulting in lower spending that would likely curb eligibility or benefits. This was to yield about $110 billion in savings. Boehner had sought more: About $140 billion. But that’s the kind of gap ongoing negotiation could close.

Social Security: Changing the formula for calculating cost-of-living increases in order to reduce future payouts. The idea was to close the long-term solvency gap by one-third, although it likely would have taken more than just this one reform to produce enough savings for that.

Discretionary spending: A cut in discretionary spending equal to $1.2 trillion over ten years, some of them coming in fiscal year 2012. The remaining differences here, over the timing of such cuts, were tiny.

The two sides had also agreed upon a basic structure for the deal. The agreement was to specify the discretionary cuts and implement them right away. But the entitlement cuts and new revenue were to be in the form of instructions to Congress, leaving it committees and eventually each chamber to write the legislative language and enact the changes. To make sure Congress followed through, the agreement was to include a failsafe: If Congress failed to enact the changes and produce the necessary deficit reduction, then automatic reductions to Medicare and Medicaid as well as automatic tax increases (mainly, expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy) were to take effect.

The main difference, as both sides acknowledge, was over the size of the new revenue. They’d basically settled the basic principles of how to get the money: By closing loopholes, broadening the base, and lowering rates overall. Boehner had offered $800 billion, or roughly the equivalent of letting the upper income tax cuts expire. Obama had counter-offered $1.2 trillion. But even the $1.2 trillion Obama was seeking – and remember, this was a proposal over which the White House says it expected to keep negotiating – was still far less than the revenue either the Bowles-Simpson chairmen or the Senate’s Gang of Six, two bipartisan groups, had recommended.

As Krugman says this morning, “it’s horrifying”:

Above all, the proposed rise in the age of Medicare eligibility was a real betrayal of both Democratic principles and good government.

Let’s recall how the health care debate went. Progressive reformers, myself included, would very much have preferred a simple single-payer system — Medicare for all. And there’s a reason: Medicare has lower costs than private insurance, and it’s also a much better vehicle for cost control. Also, the simplicity — if you’re a citizen, you’re covered — makes it much less likely that people will fall through the cracks.

Most of us were willing, however, to accept the Rube Goldberg scheme actually passed — in which community rating, a mandate, and subsidies are combined to more or less simulate the effects of single-payer — as much better than nothing. If political reality dictated that health care be directed through private insurance companies, even though this made no sense in policy terms, well, that was a price we were willing to pay.

But it’s quite something else to take people who are currently being covered by a rational single-payer system, and force them back into the inefficient, parasitic world of private insurance. That’s terrible. And it’s also politically stupid: if you think for a minute that Republicans wouldn’t turn right around and run ads about how Obama is taking away your Medicare, you’ve been living under a rock.

There’s compromise and then there’s giving away the store. Even if the Republicans agreed to the revenue in this deal, it could not in any way be seen as shared sacrifice. The cuts are far more onerous to average Americans than whatever “revenue enhancements” they come up with. (This notion of broadening and flattening and lowering rates is a recipe for bullshit, not deficit reduction.)

And sadly, even if the deal never materializes, by putting these drastic cuts on the table they are going to become the centrist and conservative baseline going forward. After all, “even the liberal Democrat Barack Obama thought this needed to be done.” I had not heard anything about raising the age of Medicare eligibility before this debate and now it’s everywhere, pushed by the White House and by the health care technocrats who think that everyone should be thrilled to get into the untested Rube Goldberg health care program as soon as they can buy their way in.(If they can afford it.)

And as Krugman points out, the Republicans may solemnly promise that they won’t use any of this against the Democrats if they all agree, but I don’t think Karl Rove or the Koch Brothers have signed on. In the age of Citizens United there is no political advantage to “holding hands and jumping together.” Since the White House is not staffed with children or the developmentally disabled, I assume they know this, which means the White House thinks that citizens either want these cuts or they are willing to take the political heat to get it done because they really believe this policy is the correct one.

The President has mostly been relying on talking points about the need for compromise and balance up to now, but recently he’s been making the affirmative case that we should be happy about these cuts. He bragged about it in his press conference yesterday saying that he was willing to persuade progressives that they should want to do it (even as he made a good case for why these cuts are especially painful to seniors, the poor and the sick!?)So, at this point it’s really not shrill to conclude that the politics of this are secondary to the policy objectives. Otherwise none of this makes a lot of sense. (After all, we would be no worse off today if the President had said that he wouldn’t allow the debt ceiling to be held hostage and used the bully pulpit to draw a line in the sand.)

That’s why the President’s liberal critics are mad, not because they don’t believe in compromise. They simply don’t agree that we should “want to get our fiscal house in order” by cutting SS benefits or raising the Medicare age or throwing a bunch of poor people off the health care rolls while the wealthy are making huge profits and income inequality grows and grows and grows. And we certainly aren’t persuaded that once we do that we will be able to pursue all kinds of wonderful programs that require new spending. That’s fatuous and frankly, insulting.

There are alternatives out there if deficit reduction is so damned important. The House Democrats’ plan, for instance, which I doubt the White House has even bothered to read since they had already offered up half the New Deal before it even came out. There’s also the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The fact that their reinstatement alone would substantially solve the problem should tell people something about the cause of the deficit. I realize that nobody wants to raise any taxes, ever, but nobody’s even tried to make the argument for doing it to solve the deficit so we don’t have any clue how it would come out.

And in any case, the deficit issue itself is a disaster capitalist construct designed to confuse people into thinking that this is the cause of their problems when it is actually a symptom of a larger one that nobody wants to deal with. Even engaging in it at this point it is a capitulation to magical thinking and up-is-downism along the lines of the Iraq war debate. It seems this is what we do now (on a totally bipartisan basis, so that’s nice): we make our serious problems worse by putting all our energies into “solving” those that are irrelevant.(And botching even that.) It’s the sign of a totally dysfunctional system led by people who either don’t know or don’t care enough to fix it. It’s monumentally depressing.

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The Souls of White Folk
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Some disturbing but not altogether unsurprising news courtesy of Pew:

GOP Makes Big Gains among White Voters
Especially among the Young and Poor

As the country enters into the 2012 presidential election cycle, the electorate’s partisan affiliations have shifted significantly since Barack Obama won office nearly three years ago. In particular, the Democrats hold a much narrower edge than they did in 2008, particularly when the partisan leanings of independents are taken into account.

Notably, the GOP gains have occurred only among white voters; a 2-point Republican edge among whites in 2008 (46% to 44%) has widened to a 13-point lead today (52% to 39%). In sharp contrast, the partisan attachments of black and Hispanic voters have remained consistently Democratic.

While Republican gains in leaned party identification span nearly all subgroups of whites, they are particularly pronounced among the young and poor. A seven-point Democratic advantage among whites under age 30 three years ago has turned into an 11-point GOP advantage today. And a 15-point Democratic advantage among whites earning less than $30,000 annually has swung to a slim four-point Republican edge today.

On the other hand, African-American and Latino voters haven’t moved away from Democrats in significant numbers since 2008: just a 2 percentage point shift away from Dems for each segment. And even among whites, the Republicans aren’t doing quite as well as these numbers might suggest:

Yet, the Republican Party’s growth has been limited in two important ways. First, the steep gains in GOP leaning that helped the party in the 2010 midterms have not continued, as the overall balance of partisan attachments has held steady in the first half of 2011. Second, while more independents say they “lean” toward the Republican Party, the GOP has not gained in actual party affiliation since 2008 – just 28% of registered voters, in both years, call themselves Republicans. Instead, the growth category continues to be political independents, with a record high 34% of registered voters choosing this label in 2011.

Indeed, Latinos, by far the fastest growing voting demographic in the U.S., have been driven by overt Republican racism away from the GOP in droves, going from 28% GOP identification in 2008 to 22% in 2011. Given the lack of increased party identification for the GOP, what we’re seeing here is less a mandate for Republicans and their policies, than a disaffection for the Democratic brand. Still, the numbers among white voters, particularly younger and poorer white voters, are very scary especially when measured demographically against a characteristically similar population Pew identified as “non-voters” back in 2010.

There are two big lessons to be learned here just at first glance:

1) Being the adult in the room doesn’t work. There is a widely held belief in certain Democratic circles that independent and moderate voters will come home to Democrats en masse if Democrats just show themselves to be the reasonable alternative to an increasingly extremist Republican Party. This isn’t so much a theory of triangulation (though it does suit the Third Way crowd nicely), as it is a theory that trusts that the center of opinion among the American public remains constant, that the public pays enough attention and has enough understanding about current events to know who has extremist views and who does not, and that voters will make rational choices in their own self-interest so long as the facts are laid bare for them.

None of the above is correct. The endless parade of Republican extremism since the 2010 election has not served to significantly weaken the GOP’s position, beyond the normal loss of a honeymoon period shortly after Boehner took the gavel. The willingness of the Obama Administration to act the straight man to the GOP’s clown has not won the Democrats any friends among independents. In fact, the reality is quite the opposite.

The reality is that 2006, 2008 and 2010 were three consecutive wave elections: a phenomenon unprecedented in at least recent, if not the entirety of American history. Wave elections occur either during realignments, or periods of intense voter frustration, or both. Realignments tend to produce one-sided waves that lead to lasting majorities, periods of relative calm and a new set of regional and factional affiliations. That has not been the case in recent years. What has happened, rather, is that a tired, dispirited and confused public has lashed out at whatever party they perceived to be in power and doing damage, and have chosen to variously stay home from elections and/or vote in the opposite party just to shake things up and see if something will change. Democrats gained from this impulse in 2006 and 2008, but fell easy prey to it in 2010 when the promise of “hope” and “change” fell drastically short of expectations–expectations that, despite the gnashing of teeth among a small number of progressives about Guantanamo, torture, Afghanistan, and the like, were almost entirely economic in nature. Counting on voters to pick the moderate, even-tempered candidates and go for the “reasonable” choice in 2012 is a fool’s errand. With no significant change in the economic climate since the Crash and even before, a wise prognosticator would count on the voters to make the unreasonable choice in 2012 just to make something happen to change the status quo. As much as every poll shows that voters want compromise, what they really want is answers.

2) It is clear that the Democratic Party is not offering much of value to less-educated, younger white voters. The Democratic Party has pretty much abandoned them. As a Democratic official and volunteer, I can see that every day, and hear it every time I phonebank on behalf of a candidate.

Suppose you’re a 28-year-old straight white guy who graduated high school as a D student, and now work a blue or pink collar dead-end private-sector job somewhere. You’re vaguely Christian, but not a fervent believer. You’ve got a live-in girlfriend, and maybe a kid on the way. What does the Democratic Party offer you?

Not much. The entire Party is obsessed right now with defending Medicare and Social Security, two programs that you don’t think you’ll ever see anyway, and age 65 seems like it might as well be 300 years from now–not that you figure you’ll be able to retire regardless. The only workers the Party seems to care much about are in the public sector: people who make way more money and have better job security than you do for about equivalent labor. You have no issue with school bus drivers and firefighters, but their salaries do make you resentful and wonder why your tax dollars are supporting them when you’re barely keeping your head above water. The Democrats keep saying that a college education and universal Pre-K are the golden bullets to solve our economic problems. You don’t believe that and for very good reason, but it doesn’t help you anyway: you have neither the time nor money nor interest to go back to school. And your kid? You’re too worried about keeping her fed to bother about Pre-K. And besides, your school district isn’t great, you have no money to move to a better one, home prices are still far out of reach even as politicians want to drive home prices up, and the school system just seems to a huge money sinkhole that never gets better. You have no problem with the Latinos you went to school with, and you know some really nice undocumented families, but you’re also afraid for your job security. The wars overseas seem to keep going no matter who is in power, which makes the military less than attractive as an option. You’ve got nothing in common with the crazy evangelicals you know, and you have no problem with gay people, but your liberal friends who went to college seem pretty condescending and know-it-all to you, which makes you less than thrilled to be associated with them.

Why should you vote for a Democrat? Good question. Back in 1936, even as recently as in 1966, there was a reason for that guy to vote for a Democrat. Democrats used to have answers for that guy. Democrats used to have a solid economic message for workers without a college degree, and the fire in the belly to call out even the more reasonable conservatives for being the heartless toadies of corporate power they are. Today? I can’t think of a good reason that guy would vote for the modern Democratic Party. It does next to nothing for him. Nor will fear of losing abortion rights be quite enough to sway his girlfriend, either. That stuff used to work in more normal times. But these are not normal times. These are times of crisis, times when bold leadership is necessary, and when strong and wrong is more appealing than weak and right.

When push comes to shove, that guy will vote for Rick Perry, an unreasonable jackass who actually speaks to angst and insecurity he feels, over Barack Obama, that most “reasonable” arbiter of technocratic tranquility who does next to nothing to address the issues that really matter, and seems never to get really fired up about much of anything at all even at a time of universal distress.

That guy will help sway the election not only of the President, but of all the sorry saps with a “D” by their name downballot as well. And the Democratic Party will have no one and nothing but itself to blame for it.

Grover comes over

I suspect that will mean something to enough Republicans that Boehner can cobble enough votes to get this one over the line.

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