Month: May 2012

Omaha beefs

by digby

According to Charlie Pierce, Nebraska is likely to replace Ben Nelson with a young, certified Tea Partier who will probably end up calling Jim DeMint a liberal. Not that it matters to me, really. Nelson was captive of the same people who are going to elect this extremist and I doubt it will alter the outcome of much Democratic legislation. (Recall, even after all the sturm und drang over the healthcare bill, he voted against it in the end.)

But this race in Nebraska is a real barn-burner. Pierce’s piece is all good, but this gets to the heart of the issue:

The second question, and the last of the night, was about income inequality.

Don Stenberg said the greatest thing about America was that everybody has a chance to “rise up.”

Jon Bruning said he hoped your kid will have a chance “to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and invent the next Facebook, or to be the next Bill Gates…. That’s the special thing about America.”

Deb Fischer said she was opposed to “class warfare” and that we should be discussing “the real issues, like the mounting national deficit.”

And that was pretty much it. In case you didn’t notice, none of them actually acknowledged that people might be having a hard time of it out there, except for Stenberg’s kids who are spending too damn much of their money on beer and video games. The other night kindly Doc Maddow mentioned that she doesn’t believe that Republicans actually think there are women who have trouble getting paid what their work is worth. Here, it is plain that none of these three people actually believe that there are enough uninsured Americans, or underpaid Americans, for them to care about.

That’s the Republican party: You can believe us or believe your lying eyes. The only Americans who aren’t doing just fine are lazy parasites.

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Forward Ho! The conspiracy theory of our time

by digby

Fox’s Lou Dobbs: “I’m Not Saying Anybody Is A Communist,” But Obama 2012 Slogan, “Forward,” Is Tied To Communists, Fascists

How could he forget the Jews? (Why, it’s infiltrated Israeli politics too!) Or, for that matter, basketball and soccer players? The Japanese are involved. Entire towns are in on it.

In fact, if you stop and think about it, isn’t the word “progress” a synonym for the word “forward”? Progress— progressive — forward — communist. You just have to connect the dots.

This is one hell of a conspiracy. I think someone needs to call Glenn Beck.

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But he has exceeded those expectations. For instance, his coverage of the mistreatment of NCAA athletes has been both well done and is long overdue. Just this past weekend he wrote a column that displayed courage, humility and a willingness to state some unpleasant truths about retirement planning in the United States as he approaches his 60th birthday:

I can’t retire. My 401(k) plan, which was supposed to take care of my retirement, is in tatters…..

The bull market ended with the bursting of that bubble in 2000. My tech-laden portfolio was cut in half. A half-dozen years later, I got divorced, cutting my 401(k) in half again. A few years after that, I bought a house that needed some costly renovations. Since my retirement account was now hopelessly inadequate for actual retirement, I reasoned that I might as well get some use out of the money while I could. So I threw another chunk of my 401(k) at the renovation. That’s where I stand today.

As the column notes, he is not alone. Many Americans find themselves with much less saved than they’ll need to carry their lifestyles into retirement. A major reason for this is the gradual replacement of pensions plans with 401(k) plans.

A pension is a fixed payment that an employee receives for the rest of her life upon retirement depending upon time of service, retirement age and income earned. This payment is known in advance–that is, it’s a guaranteed amount, and stays in place until retirement. If you worked for two companies for long enough, you would qualify for a pension from each, an amount fixed at your termination. So retirement planning is easy and certain–you know how much you’ll get from your pensions, and from Social Security. You can then figure out whether you need to sell the McMansion and move into a condo to make ends meet–and you can also make supplemental savings with known values.

Pension plans are funded and managed by employers or unions, like CalPERS–there is one huge pot of money that funds current and future pension payments. They are regulated under ERISA and backed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.

Defined contribution plans, like the 401(k), are funded and managed by the employee. The contributions come from the employee’s salary, before tax, and are generally partially or fully matched by the employer, although (remember Enron!) the match is frequently in the form of company stock. The employer provides employees with a menu of investment options, usually different kinds of mutual funds–growth stocks, bonds etc.–to allocate their savings to. The value of a 401(k) fluctuates as the value of its securities fluctuates. Retirement planning is complicated by the attendant uncertainty of its value at and during retirement, and, of course, by the uncertainty of when you’re gonna die.

401(k) plans are also regulated under ERISA.

If you’ve been following along, you can see that pensions are pretty good.You get them in addition to your salary. They’re managed by professionals who can use the sheer size of the funds to minimize trading costs. They generate a certain monthly value, for life. And you can’t get stupid and spend the funds on a mistress and a red convertible when you hit your midlife crisis.

401(k)s,on the other hand, basically suck. They come out of your salary; that is, the contribution reduces your take home pay, which means you will almost certainly underfund it.

Nocera again:

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, for instance, only 22 percent of workers 55 or older have more than $250,000 put away for retirement. Stunningly, 60 percent of workers in that same age bracket have less than $100,000 in a retirement account. [Behavorial economist Theresa] Ghilarducci told me that the average savings for someone near retirement in America right now is $100,000. Even buttressed by Social Security, that’s not going to last very long.

A 401(k) forces you to manage it yourself, or to pay someone to manage it for you. You’re locked into a menu of mutual funds with significantly larger management costs than the pension funds pay–you’re paying retail while the pension fund manager pays wholesale. The amount you can pull out per month is uncertain at retirement, and the value of your holdings will fluctuate throughout your retirement. Worse, you have a nearly unlimited opportunity to do something stupid and screw the pooch:

“People tend to be overconfident about their own abilities,” said Ghilarducci. “They tend to focus on the short term rather than thinking about long-term consequences. And they tend to think that whatever the current trend is will always be the trend. That is why people buy high and sell low.” Financial advisers — at least the good ones — are forever telling their clients to be disciplined, to create a diversified portfolio and to avoid trying to time the market. Sound as that advice is, it’s just not how most humans behave.

So why would companies replace a pretty good pension system with a 401(k) system that sucks? One reason is they stopped caring about employee retention. Pensions are great mechanisms for keeping people on board–you’ve gotta stay for a period of years before you’re fully vested in the plan, and the pension grows as your term of service and salary grows. There was a time when it was the goal of management to retain workers, to hold onto their institutional memory, and reward them at retirement. But that time has passed.

In an environment where workers are viewed by management as easily replaced, there’s no reason to consider employee retention as an important criterion, so getting rid of pensions meant a reduction in labor costs–remember, 401Ks come out of your paycheck, not corporate earnings.

But I think the elimination of pensions has more to do with the reduction in Federal tax rates for high income earners. Under a progressive federal income tax with high marginal rates at the top, pensions allowed big suits to reduce their tax burden by moving income to the time after they’d left the executive suite. ERISA requires that companies offer pensions to everyone if they were offered to senior management, so if senior executives wanted to use them to defer taxes, they had to extend them to everyone. The reductions in tax rates for top earners that began with the Reagan administration and continued through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations made it no longer worthwhile for CEOs to provide a decent retirement to their loyal, long term employees.

Jay Aykroyd contributes to Eschaton and runs the progressive online radio network Virtually Speaking. He also spent time on Wall Street, but don’t tell anyone.

Worst ad of the season

by digby

Wow. Americans For Prosperity are just going for it:

Here’s the story:

Although it still enjoys support from a broad coalition, legislation to turn some foreclosed homes into affordable housing now also faces deep-pockets opposition.

Americans for Prosperity, an economic policy group launched by coal billionaire David Koch, is mounting an advertising campaign on radio and television trying to rally public opinion against the proposal — Senate Bill S-1022.

“A lot of people don’t even know this is happening, or the significant negative impacts this bill will have on our neighborhoods,” said Steve Lonegan, the former Bogota mayor and gubernatorial candidate who is the state director of Americans For Prosperity.

He echoed the TV spot, which suggests the effect would be to “move in drug addicts, ex-cons, sex offenders, and homeless people.”

“Any local official would have to be crazy to support this,” Lonegan said of the legislation, whose primary sponsors are state Sens. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) and Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex) and Assemblyman Jerry Green (D-Union).

The proposals’ backers include the state League of Municipalities, the New Jersey Builders Association, the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, the New Jersey Bankers Association, and other groups not often found lined up together.

Supporters said the criticisms reflect a misreading or misunderstanding of key provisions of the bill. At least, those who responded politely said that.

“There’s a special place in hell reserved for Steve Lonegan,” Lesniak said, repeating it with the admonition, “that’s on the record.”

To be honest, I don’t even understand the financial motivation behind this. In fact, there isn’t any. It’s simply that these rich pricks hate poor and middle class people and don’t want anyone to help them ever.

They are calling it a “bailout” which is just hilarious coming from these people, but since they are shameless it’s unsurprising that they would appropriate the word for their own benefit:

Lonegan said attempts to deal with the fallout from the most recent crisis have amounted to an expansion of government while putting taxpayers on the hook for private interests. The new legislation is “another bailout for the banks,” he said.

“Every special interest in the state with something to gain is lined up behind this,” he said. “But thank God the bankers association, the builders association, the realtors association don’t run the State of New Jersey.”

Right. American for Prosperity are brave warriors for the little guy.

Here’s what it actually is:

The bills would establish a temporary agency, the New Jersey Foreclosure Relief Corp. Working through the state Housing and Mortgage Finance Authority for five years, the corporation would acquire houses in foreclosure and make them available to towns, non-profit groups, or private investors as low- and moderate-income housing.

In a time when New Jersey faces an estimated backlog of 50,000 to 100,000 foreclosure cases, as well as new ones, Lesniak portrayed the initiative as “a way to support property values and reduce crime by getting people into vacant homes, provide municipal tax revenues while stabilizing the housing market.”

“It’s based on the very successful model of the Resolution Trust Corp., which cleaned up the housing mess left by failed Savings and Loans during the 1980s by taking over and selling off their portfolios,” he said.

The RTC, which was in operation from 1989-95, closed or otherwise resolved almost 750 troubled financial institutions in the wake of a previous housing bubble. This time, the economic problems have been compounded by related securities frauds, spreading the current downturn beyond the borrowers and lenders whose transactions were not adequately secured.

Like I said, they just hate anyone who isn’t rich. There’s no other rational explanation for this. It’s based on a highly successful program that should have been instigated much earlier. It would help business, help property values, help municipalities and help people. But it might also be perceived as a useful government program which means it must be stopped.

And to do it with this message is just evil:

The TV spot zeroes in on an amendment to allow state agencies to acquire foreclosed properties for use as halfway houses, assisted living centers and other facilities for “special needs” populations.

In the language of the bills, that “means individuals with mental illness, physical or developmental disabilities, victims of domestic violence, ex-offenders, youth aging out of foster care, disabled and homeless veterans, individuals and households who are homeless, individuals with AIDS/HIV, and individuals in other emerging special-needs groups identified by state agencies. Individuals shall be at least 18 years of age if not part of a household.”

That confers power to “take these problems to places across the state, to suburbs across the state,” Lonegan said. “This is COAH on steroids.”

That’s reference to COAH is another hideous conservative e initiative to abolish low income housing.

I really hope that Democrats understand that when someone like Paul Ryan blathers on about “using conservative means to save the safety net” this is what he’s talking about. These people don’t just not care about the poor and the vulnerable. They want them punished for being the parasites, moochers and looters they think they are.

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The awful logic of Edward Conard

by David Atkins

Yesterday Digby highlighted the atrocious moral ethic of financier and Romney backer Edward Conard. There are many simple and empathy-based emotional arguments to be made against Conard’s worldview, but this rational argument is perhaps the most important. Conard argues:

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

“It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks,” he said. “We need twice as many people. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.

One could say many things here. One could say that not everyone wants to live a hyper-competitive life, and that they shouldn’t be forced to. Or one could point out that while the financiers usually take home most of the loot, the actual dreamers and inventors rarely get rich (if they’re employed by a corporation, they don’t get the bonanza from their ideas except in the form of a paycheck that will never make them wealthy.) One could demonstrate that corporate patent laws and legal fees are the chief obstacle standing in the way of bright people with inventive ideas. One could note that there are a great many individuals whose moral compasses are intact enough that no amount of money on this green earth would convince us to profane our values enough to work for Goldman Sachs (some of us would prefer to go into prostitution instead, as it’s less harmful to society.) Or one could point out that simply getting in the way of Mr. Conard’s sociopathic agenda is more valuable to society than all his collective investments in minor changes to aluminum cans.

But perhaps the most important point to make would be this: it takes a remarkably materialistic and delusional mind to believe that a person not enticed by the prospect of earning tens of millions of dollars, would somehow be more enticed by the prospect of hundreds of millions (to say nothing of the fact that when it comes to Mr. Conard’s kind of wealth, we’re really talking about hundreds of millions versus billions.) Mr. Conard simply can’t understand why more intelligent younger and middle-aged people don’t take entrepreneurial risks. He assumes it must be because the rewards aren’t big enough, despite record income inequality that has mostly gone to the new rich.

I can speak from personal experience on this one. I consider myself something of a risk-taker. I’ve never held a “normal” 9-5 job, I’ve radically switched industries and life plans a few times, and I’ve spent most of my life running my own business. I’m a type A personality and consider myself modestly creative. Obscene wealth doesn’t interest me, as I’m much more interested in my legacy after I’m gone from this world than in my comfort while I’m here, and passive income makes me uncomfortable as I believe a person should actually work to earn their daily bread. But I’m not averse to the idea of creating a innovative product and being rewarded for it in such a way that I could afford to live comfortably while funding progressive infrastructure (for one, I’d love to give a bunch of great part-time progressive bloggers the ability to do their thing full-time, in coordination, without worrying about where the next meal was going to come from.)

And I’ve had a couple of ideas that I think might be million dollar ideas, given enough time and investment. So what prevents me from pursuing them? It’s not insufficient reward. It’s the fact that I would have to abandon my current business, my blogging and my volunteer life to pursue them, knowing full well that success would be a longshot, with any number of trip-ups possible along the way. And it’s the knowledge that if I failed, there would be no one there to pick me up. If I got hurt, I couldn’t afford to cover the expense. I couldn’t afford to have kids. I couldn’t even afford to stay in my apartment.

In other words, the reason even creative, inventive Type A personalities with potential ideas don’t do what Mr. Conard suggests they should isn’t about the lack of rewards for success. It’s not even about our ideals.

It’s about the risk. Risk that puts us in danger of losing everything should we fail. Risk that could, in theory, be mitigated by a society that doesn’t let people go bankrupt for getting sick. Or punish them extravagantly in the wallet for daring to have children. Or pay a pittance in wages for more and more soul-crushing jobs with longer and longer hours and less and less job security. Or force people to live in ridiculously high-cost-of-living areas just to have decent schools for their kids.

Risks that a decent social welfare state would help reduce so that people without rich parents could afford to fail and still live to tell the tale.

Even Mr. Conard’s own dystopian view of a world without liberal arts and public service, a horrific society driven purely by corporate growth and consumerist greed, would be better served by a decent social welfare state. But he has dedicated himself to destroying what vestiges are left of it.

And that is why I devote my life to stopping men like him, and putting much their wealth to more productive public use if possible. That would be a far greater gift to this world than any million-dollar consumer product idea I might invent, regardless of its success or ability to furnish me a yacht I don’t want or need.

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Randroids on parade

by digby

From Paul Ryan’s 2009 Ayn Rand speech:

RYAN: You know, it doesn’t surprise me that sales of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in, because it’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living right in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.

But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most. It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big, the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of comment more and more than ever.

And if you think he’s alone, read this profile of the hideous man who’s written what’s sure to become the new Randroid manifesto. Here’s a little taste:

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.”

Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

And if you don’t happen to be one of those “risk-takers?” Well, fuck you, you useless art-history parasite.

Read the whole thing, but only if you’re trying to cut down on calories. You’ll lose your appetite.

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Shocking taser news

by digby

I’m fairly sure nobody will pay the least bit of attention to this:

The electrical shock delivered to the chest by a Taser can lead to cardiac arrest and sudden death, according to a new study, although it is unknown how frequently such deaths occur.

The study, which analyzed detailed records from the cases of eight people who went into cardiac arrest after receiving shocks from a Taser X26 fired at a distance, is likely to add to the debate about the safety of the weapons. Seven of the people in the study died; one survived.

Advocacy groups like Amnesty International have argued that Tasers, the most widely used of a class of weapons known as electrical control devices, are potentially lethal and that stricter rules should govern their use.

But proponents maintain that the devices — which are used by more than 16,700 law enforcement agencies in 107 countries, said Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser — pose less risk to civilians than firearms and are safer for police officers than physically tackling a suspect. The results of studies of the devices’ safety in humans have been mixed.

Medical experts said on Monday that the new report, published online on Monday in the journal Circulation, makes clear that electrical shocks from Tasers, which shoot barbs into the clothes and skin, can in some cases set off irregular heart rhythms, leading to cardiac arrest.

“This is no longer arguable,” said Dr. Byron Lee, a cardiologist and director of the electrophysiology laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. “This is a scientific fact. The national debate should now center on whether the risk of sudden death with Tasers is low enough to warrant widespread use by law enforcement.”

The rest of the experts interviewed (aside from the Taser international representative, of course) suggested that the use of tasers be limited in light of these findings. As I have said many times before, if tasers were a drug that killed this many people they would have been banned long ago.

This is simple common sense. And not just because they quite obviously are deadly to some people, although that should put any further debate to rest. The fundamental reason they should be limited is because in a free society the police should not be allowed to inflict terrible pain on citizens for any reason they choose, no matter how petty or inconsequential. If police are to be allowed to carry tasers they must be strictly controlled. At the moment, this is far more common than not:

“I’m placing you under arrest because you did not follow my instructions.”

He “refused to comply, made incoherent statements.” Of course, he had a broken back.

Those were just random Youtubes I found with a cursory search. There are many, many more.

And those are just events that happened to be videotaped.

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A well-paid idiot

by David Atkins

Sometimes I think the best punishment for “centrist” political pundits would be to force them to ply their trade as campaign managers in the real world, without the ability to outspend their opponents. Force them to actually connect with real voters as they exist in the real world, with their salaries dependent on their electoral outcomes.

Consider this brilliance from David Brooks:

The campaign-as-warfare metaphor may seem sensible to those inside the hothouse. It may make sense if you think today’s swing voters hunger for more combat, more harshness and more attack.

But it’s probably bad sociology and terrible psychology, given the general disgust with conventional politics. If I were in the campaigns, I’d want to detach from the current rules of engagement and change the nature of the campaign. If I were Obama, I’d play to his personal popularity and run an “American Idol” campaign — likability, balance, safety and talent. If I were Romney, saddled with his personal diffidence, I’d run a plumber campaign — you may not love me, but here’s four things I can do for you.

These would be very different campaigns than the ones we are seeing so far: more positive psychology, less negative psychology. A few big messages about fundamental change, less obsession with the daily news cycle. More attention devoted to those turned off by politics, less to the hard-core denizens who are obsessed by it.

Please, please, please let me be lucky enough to someday run a campaign against this guy. Unfortunately, that won’t happen. Brooks will continue to live a comfortable life well paid by the New York Times to dispense totally disconnected anodyne fantasies about voters without any danger of accountability or verification.

It shouldn’t need saying, but the reason the negative campaigning works (beyond basic human nature that responds more actively to threats than to rewards) is that voters are angry. Most people both liberal and conservative feel in turmoil and realize that something is seriously out of joint with this new world order our betters have established for us. Racists, misogynists and the less educated will be easily led to believe that it’s all the fault of gays, minorities and liberal professors taking what should be “theirs” and giving it to the “other.” People with empathy, education and sense understand that the new global economy has shifted power dramatically into the hands of the ultra-wealthy, financial markets, and multinational corporations.

But voters on both sides of the aisle know that someone is to blame. The political battle of this generation is to properly identify who it is. That’s why the partisan divide is going to get stronger, not weaker, and why the politics-as-war metaphor is going to be increasingly relevant over time, not less so.

The only sort of people comfortable enough with their lives not to need someone to blame for this awful mess are the likes of David Brooks. People like him just don’t understand all the anger. After all, they’re sitting pretty. Shouldn’t everyone else feel the same way?

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Who’s his daddy?

by digby

Everyone supposedly wonders how Mitt would deal with the religious right. Well, here you go:

Mitt Romney hired Richard Grenell to work on foreign policy, not social issues, but Christian activists freaked out over his hiring in April because Grenell is gay. Well, Grenell has quit Romney’s campaign, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin reported Tuesday. Rubin reports Grenell decided to quit “after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.” Grenell told Rubin that his “ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.” But the discussion of personal issues was an intra-party fight, not one with Democrats or their supporters.

Actually Democrats were plenty angry at Grenell for his creepy sexist tweeting, but nobody in the Romney camp cared about that. They decided to muzzle him because the Christian Right was having a fit.

If you want a glimpse of the dynamic that would govern a Romney administration, I think you just got one. The guy worked for John Bolton. It’s not like they couldn’t have made a case for him.

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Polar Freeze

by digby

If it’s Tuesday, there must be more handwringing over “polarization”:

“I think what we have seen in recent years — it’s really been playing out over decades — is that we’ve seen an alignment of the two major parties with the ideological base at the heart of those parties,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). “In the past, we have had a big segment of Southern Democrats who were more conservative than most Republicans. We had Northeastern Republicans who were more liberal than many Democrats. And now, we simply have more alignment of ideology and party.”

Consider the plight of GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch, who read the writing on the wall last year and promised a conservative conference that he “was prepared to be the most hated man in this godforsaken city in order to save this country.” What he basically meant was he was ready to do everything in his power to please the right.
[…]
But in a political environment where all the current incentives — such as super PAC money, cable news appearances, direct mail and Internet fundraising — are geared toward the extremes, the ideological middle is a political no man’s land.

This dynamic is hardly unique to Republicans, as much as President Barack Obama and Democrats want voters to think otherwise.

Centrist Democrats got that memo in 2010 — they saw how labor almost took down Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who ended up getting crushed in November anyway.

That’s just the Senate.

In the House, where the conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs saw their numbers cut in half in 2010, the climate isn’t much different. Five of the remaining Blue Dogs have already announced their intention to retire; two more lost reelection bids last Tuesday in Pennsylvania.

Among their sins: Departing from the party line to vote against the president’s health care plan.

“The lower the number of people who are from the center means the worse the environment is going to be,” said Rep. Jason Altmire, one of two conservative Pennsylvania Democratic incumbents who lost their reelection bids last week. “It’s certainly fair to assume that there will be more partisanship. There will be a wider divide than we have ever seen before in Congress.”

I think it’s fairly clear that the Republicans have led the way in this sort of hyperpartisanship. We can look to Newt Gingrich’s illustrious career for how it was done:

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party:

abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
“compassion” is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive
intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor …)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare

That method of demonization, among hundreds of others, was extremely successful I’d say. The Democrats responded to such tactics by creating the Blue Dog caucus and the DLC. That dynamic is something you’ll notice as you read the rest of the article:

Twenty years ago, moderates constituted 40 percent of Senate Republicans, and a third of the House GOP. Today, Republican moderates number 1-in-10 in the Senate and have all but disappeared from the House.

The Democratic Party exhibits a similar, if less pronounced pattern: Moderate Democrats make up 12 percent of the party’s House ranks in the current Congress, down from 35 percent in 1989. In the Senate, moderate Democrats make up 15 percent — down from 27 percent 20 years ago, all of this according to Poole and Rosenthal.

“In light of what happened in Pennsylvania — you see a guy like Tim Holden lose a primary, who was very middle of the road, reasonable, worked with both sides. You see him losing a primary to someone who’s a good bit more liberal — I think we’re seeing this loss of the middle,” said former Rep. Michael Arcuri, a Blue Dog Democrat.

“It just leads me to believe that it’s going to be harder and harder to get things done. It’s not that you don’t have good people there that want to work together, it’s just that their views are so far apart.”

It’s not just the parties that are the problem. The interest groups aligned with them are also helping to eliminate the center by serving as enforcers of ideological orthodoxy.

“The well-financed ideological advocacy groups also compound the problem, so that when you have someone from a safe seat, they have to spend their time making certain they’re extreme enough to avoid a primary challenge,” said Earl Pomeroy, a former North Dakota Democratic congressman who lost in 2010. “Basically, in the political marketplace, the elevation of the value of inflexibility over getting things done has been a big negative. And it’s largely fueled by well-financed interest groups that can take someone out.”

In interviews with numerous public officials, they all concede it’s going to get worse — and their only hope is that this is cyclical and that voters will eventually demand a functional government.

“We are not going to take back the majority if we don’t win moderate districts,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). “They’re the ones that are in contention. They’re the ones that are in play.”

It’s interesting that they couldn’t seem to find even one Republican to do on the record complaining about this situation, don’t you think? Look at Toomey’s quote at the beginning. They don’t see it as a problem. They simply see it as an ideological realignment of the two parties. Apparently, these corporate Democrats do see that as a problem, despite their two huge wins in 2006 and 2008. I wonder why that is?

After all this garment rending over polarization, you have to love the final paragraph:

This isn’t political posing. The Republicans and Democrats the modern system produces literally come from different worlds and see no middle ground on the biggest issues of the day. They see elections — not the legislative process — as the place to settle their differences. Hence, the congressional elections unfolding before the country.

Bring the smellin’ salts Miss Mellie! There’s democracy bustin’ out in America.

Here’s the thing. The people haven’t changed. All that happened was that the Southern Democrats switched parties with Northern liberals. The country didn’t suddenly polarize, it was always polarized. Now it’s sorted itself into two more or less ideologically consistent parties which means that elections have more meaning. I realize that this makes Washington social life a little bit less congenial but that’s not really the concern of average Americans.

Our current system doesn’t work all that well under these circumstances because it gives voters the impression that they have the ability to enact an agenda on their own behalf through the party of their choice and many of them get frustrated when it turns out the country is actually run by a bunch of wealthy aristocrats and corporations who don’t give a damn what they say about anything. But that’s not the voters’ fault.

Perhaps the clarity this polarization brings will have the ironic consequence of eventually making people confront this common problem together. We live in hope.

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