Month: April 2013

When a stable voting bloc disintegrates in an instant

by digby

In the latest installment of Rick Perlstein’s series questioning the “demographic inevitability” of a long term Democratic reign, he discusses what really does make for long term political change:

Seemingly stable blocs can shatter in something like an instant. Even, for example, urban blacks, which Democrats can reliably count on to vote their way at numbers upwards of 90 percent in every election. Little more than a generation ago, though, urban blacks in industrial states were considered a swing vote. Teddy White energy to the point in Making of the President 1960: Yes, a majority would vote Democrat, but the Party of Lincoln still retained the loyalty of a significant number of “Negroes” that just how many voted Republican in states like Illinois would determine—did determine, in fact—whether John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon became president. Within four short years, of course, that once-solid conventional wisdom had melted into air. It changed in a flash: A Democratic president signed a historic Civil Rights Act and the Republican presidential nominee voted against it. Lyndon Johnson told Bill Moyers “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.” There was a corollary: just as indubitably they’d delivered themselves the loyalty of blacks.

There’s a moral to this story: it is what a party and its leaders do that determines the loyalty of its voters.

As much so, what determines the loyalty of voters is how well a party and its leaders tell clear, effective stories about what they do.

Imagine that. He then talks about the confusion surrounding Obamacare and how people think it lacks features it wants when it actually has them and vice versa. And he compares it to another major program that had a similarly slow roll-out:

While the Social Security system did not kick in right away either, people were confident about what it would do—because it was communicated so effectively. After he signed the law in 1935 he had signs hung in every post office reading, “A Monthly Check to You for the Rest of Your Life.” That was the year before Roosevelt won the biggest reelection landslide in history. Then, the program really started delivering. It was one of the ways Roosevelt ensured new Democratic politicians were minted for another seventy-five years and counting.

Rick concludes by saying that he sometimes thinks every generation of Democrats should create a program that will mind followers for the next 75 years and wonders if Obamacare will do that. I think it’s possible, if over time they are able to make the case for making it universal in a seamless way. They have to figure out how to hide this Rube Goldberg system they have crated so that people only see the result, which is affordable, universal health care that can’t be taken away. Other countries manage to do this.

But I couldn’t help but wonder if we’ll have 75 years of newly minted Democrats if, in the same breath, the Party sells off those signature New Deal programs for a “new deal” for the sake of some temporary deficit reduction that no one will remember after the day it was signed. I don’t know if it will cause a stable voting bloc to “disintegrate in an instant,” but I’m going to guess that the lasting effects of that agreement would put a damper on any 75 year project.

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Dancing with the GOPers

by digby

Even as the Sunday shows were atwitter with predictions that a deal is close on immigration reform, Greg Sargent reports that Marco Rubio took the occasion to cast doubt on the prospects for success by joining other Senators who are calling for the process to slow down:

“We will need a healthy public debate that includes committee hearings and the opportunity for other senators to improve our legislation with their own amendments,” he said on Sunday. “Excessive haste in the pursuit of a lasting solution is perhaps even more dangerous to the goals many of us share,” he said on Saturday.

As my Post colleague Evan Soltas points out, Rubio has effectively built himself a “very clear escape hatch” on immigration. If he needs to bail, he’s got his excuse: The process was rushed, or Democrats were unfair procedurally to Republicans.

As Greg points out, the opponents of reform are the ones who’ve been saying the process is going too fast and should be slowed down. So Rubio’s really playing both sides and in a rather crude and obvious way.

But I don’t really get why Rubio’s so nervous about this. He’s the perfect (possible) presidential candidate to convey the message. He could be a hero to some Hispanics and with his personal story and accomplishments he gives hardcore GOP types who want to do this but can’t find a way out of their position, permission. Why is he balking?

This makes me think that the GOP establishment is more conflicted about this than they’re letting on. They know their voters and while it’s obviously imperative that they at least try to attract latinos, they are having a very hard time figuring out how to do it without causing an uprising. After all, they’ve just recently had to slack off on gay rights and I think they may be concerned that this will be a bridge too far. They’re going to have to do a very delicate dance. And it looks to me as if Rubio, who should be the best on to lead it, has two left feet.

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You poor kids had better perform or we’ll starve your whole family

by digby

Dickensian England was a compassionate welfare state by comparison:

According to KnoxNews, Tennessee legislators are attempting to pass legislation to cut the welfare benefits of parents with children who don’t meet attendance and performance requirements. The bill, SB 132, is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah, and has passed committees in both the House and Senate, and now heads to another House committee, and to the Senate floor for vote.

The state Department of Human Services originally opposed the bill, but then worked with Campfield and Knox to add exceptions for kids with disabilities (both physical and learning) or if parents take school-approved steps to attempt to improve the child’s progress.

Dennis told the House Health Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.” He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”

Sorry Junior. If you don’t do your homework, little sister doesn’t get any dinner. I hope you’re proud of yourself, you little bastard. Sure, mommy’s sick and you have to care for the little tyke, but I’m afraid that’s no excuse. Get A’s or starve. It’s character building. (Of course there’s no need to build the characters of the kid who come from well-off families and fail in school. They’re born with good character, amirite?)

Needless to say this will do wonders for the state budget. If you can stop feeding all those lazy schoolkids and their families, you’ll automatically have more money for tax cuts! Which is the best thing for everyone.

This punitive behavior toward the poor is nothing new, but it seems to be getting worse. Perhaps when all of our elites are pushing austerity it gives some people permission to unleash their worst instincts. In any case, they seem to be doing it.

More on this at Think Progress

Too bad about the poor people

by digby

This was tweeted by the National Republican Campaign Committee this morning:

None of that is true, so why do they remain so hostile?

Because Republicans hate Medicaid, of course:

“Not in South Carolina,” Gov. Nikki Haley declared at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. “We will not expand Medicaid on President Obama’s watch. We will not expand Medicaid ever.”

Widening Medicaid insurance rolls, a joint federal-state program for low-income Americans, is an anchor of the law Obama signed in 2010. But states get to decide whether to take the deal, and from Virginia to Texas – a region encompassing the old Confederacy and Civil War border states – Florida’s Rick Scott is the only Republican governor to endorse expansion, and he faces opposition from his GOP colleagues in the legislature. Tennessee’s Bill Haslam, the Deep South’s last governor to take a side, added his name to the opposition on Wednesday.

Haley offers the common explanation, saying expansion will “bust our budgets.” But the policy reality is more complicated. The hospital industry and other advocacy groups continue to tell GOP governors that expansion would be a good arrangement, and there are signs that some Republicans are trying to find ways to expand insurance coverage under the law.

Haslam told Tennessee lawmakers that he’d rather use any new money to subsidize private insurance. That’s actually the approach of another anchor of Obama’s law: insurance exchanges where Americans can buy private policies with premium subsidies from taxpayers.

Yes, the new plan is to allow states to come up with some way to pretend to be covering the working poor with sub-standard insurance policies that make corporations rich and keep poor people sick. But until they get that lovely “tweak”:

Yet for now, governors’ rejection of Medicaid expansion will leave large swaths of Americans without coverage because they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid as it exists but not enough to get the subsidies to buy insurance in the exchanges. Many public health studies show that the same population suffers from higher-than-average rates of obesity, smoking and diabetes – variables that yield bad health outcomes and expensive hospital care.

“Many of the citizens who would benefit the most from this live in the reddest of states with the most intense opposition,” said Drew Altman, president of the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

That’s just such a shame. The Medicaid expansion was one of the pillars of Obamacare, perhaps the most truly liberal new policy to come out of this administration. Which I suppose explains why Republicans who would benefit from it are against it. They just assume that if the other team thinks it’s a good idea it must be wrong. (Also too: it will help certain subsets of the population they don’t think deserve it.)

Whit Ayers, a leading Republican pollster, was more measured, but offered the same bottom line. “This law remains toxic among Republican primary voters,” he told The Associated Press.

Sad.

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The recurring Guantanamo nightmare

by digby

I wish this was an April Fool’s joke, but it isn’t:

There are a hundred and sixty-six prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Military officials told reporters earlier this week that thirty-one—almost one in five—were engaged in a hunger strike. By Friday, the number was thirty-seven, or closer to one in four. Eighty-six—more than one in two—have been cleared for release, meaning that the government doesn’t think that it has a case against them or even that they pose a threat, but it is keeping them locked up anyway, and has no imminent plans to let them go. Only six of the prisomers—just about one in twenty-eight—are facing trial. That means that there are six times as many prisoners on hunger strikes as there are those who have actual charges lodged against them.

Why a hunger strike? Those fractions—one in four, one in two, one in twenty-eight—are, by all accounts, related. The strikers have some specific complaints—like about searches of Korans—but there is no doubt that people are refusing to eat because of frustration about this story having no end at all. Many of the hunger-strikers had been the most compliant prisoners, the ones who got to go to art classes and live in group settings, not the most recalcitrant. Rosenberg, on a recent trip, saw the guards throwing out lunch after lunch that the prisoners in communal cellblocks had refused.

Six and eighty-six, as bad as those numbers are, do not account for the full roster of prisoners. There are dozens more whom the Administration has decided to just hold, even though it does not have enough evidence to charge them, supposedly on the grounds that they seem scary. Because of their pasts, or because of the embarrassment that the story of their time at Guantánamo might cause? Without a trial, who can say?

Apparently, Gitmo is currentlybeing run by one of those General Geoffrey Miller types who is cracking down, thus bringing the prisoners understandable frustration to the boiling point. Also too: indefinite detention and the Monte Cristo effect.

President Obama may not be able to close Guantanamo and maybe the congress had tied his hands and made it impossible for him to release certain prisoners. Very Serious People tell us endlessly that the president of the United States is mostly a ceremonial position that has no power to do much of anything, but there is no reason in the world that the administration cannot make it a priority to at least treat the prisoners who have been determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing with humanity, generosity and decency. Why are they subject to punitive measures by prisoner officials at all? Making Guantanamo comfortable wouldn’t make up for the fact that they are being wrongfully imprisoned, nothing will. But it’s honestly the least we can do.

The Commander in Chief of the armed forces can do something about this and he must. It’s completely unacceptable.

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Get ready for more from the Appalachian trail

by David Atkins

It looks like prodigal son Mark Sanford will be coming back into the fold:

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s opponent is showing some momentum in the closing days of the Republican primary campaign for the state’s open House seat — but it may be too late to help him win Tuesday’s vote.

Attorney Curtis Bostic, who finished second to Sanford in a preliminary vote March 19, has secured some high-profile backing in the final week of the campaign.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) stumped with him last Wednesday in the district and conservative commentator Ann Coulter also endorsed him.

Coulter called Sanford the “Todd Akin of South Carolina” — a reference to the failed GOP Senate candidate in Missouri — because of scandal over the ex-governor’s past marital infidelities…

But Bostic, a social conservative and former Charleston city councilman, has a steep hill to climb if he is to mount an upset.

He finished a distant second in the first round of voting, with 13 percent, compared to Sanford’s 37 percent.

And despite the high-profile endorsements, there are no clear evidence Bostic has done much to rally the voters who backed other candidates in the first round of voting.

I don’t much care about the sex lives of politicians. It matters far more how they vote on issues than what they do in their private lives, which is mostly a problem for themselves and their families. But it’s jarring to hear the hypocrisy of those who make a big deal of of sexual morality in public claiming to know that God has forgiven them when they transgress themselves.

Of course, “redemption” is an important part of the social conservative ethic as well. It’s part of the culture that one can preach fire and brimstone about the moral lives of others while committing flagrant ethical transgressions oneself, provided that those transgressions be followed with sackcloth and ashes contrition and even more vocal protestations of faith. Sanford knows his audience, and he’s playing them like a fiddle.

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Your helpful charts ‘o the day

by digby

These were compiled by Dave Johnson at Campaign for America’s Future:

In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office. 

Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then:

Working people’s share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down:

This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top:

And forced working people to spend down savings to get by:

Which forced working people to go into debt: (total household debt as percentage ofGDP )

None of which has helped economic growth much: (12-quarter rolling average nominalGDP growth.)*

There are, of course, many reasons for all this. But there is no doubt that we’ve been in the clutches of conservative economic orthodoxy since 1980 and this is the result. Whether it’s the cause or whether it’s because it has no capacity to react to external events properly doesn’t matter. It has failed. And is still failing. #Austerity

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