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The Nutty Professor Reads the Polls

Feb 13

Posted by R. Stanton Scott in Economy, Polls and Surveys, President Obama, Public Policy, US Politics, Whack Jobs

Donald Douglas writes at American Power that the latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows “disastrous” numbers for Democrats.  To make his case, he cites two results which indicate a preference for smaller government, and a third showing more concern over the economy and jobs than health care.  Douglas then points out that a bare plurality has more faith in Republicans to “ensure a strong economy” and a bare majority who don’t think the President has offered reasonable solutions to the economic problems faced by their families.

Not so fast.  These cherry-picked results don’t tell the whole story, and “it doesn’t take a statistician” to see that this grossly exaggerates the bad news in the poll for the President and Democrats.  That’s a good thing, because for a political science professor, Douglas isn’t much of one if that’s what he gets from this poll.

Now on the face of it, this looks like a solid argument: Americans care about the economy, they think the GOP could fix it, and they think Obama doesn’t have his eye on the ball.  If all of this is so, perhaps The Nutty Professor™ is right.

Not so fast.  Douglas’ analysis ignores other results from the poll, not to mention the behavior or real life politicians.  For starters, the same poll shows a 47-34 plurality approving Obama’s handling of terrorism, and a 55-34 majority approval of his foreign policy, suggesting that not all has gone south for the Administration.  Moreover, only seven percent each say they blame the President for the current state of the economy or federal budget deficits, which suggests that even those who don’t think he’s found the right solution yet may not be prepared to turn to someone else in a search for it.  And the respondents were evenly split on whether or not the stimulus package will make the economy better–suggesting that the American popular jury is still out on whether they think it was a mistake by an overactive government.  Finally, though somewhat more respondents said that they think the GOP would be more likely to ensure a strong economy, the same group had more faith in Democrats when it comes to creating jobs or fixing health care.  It is not clear from these contradictory results that the President or his Party are in trouble.

Douglas’ claim that this poll shows an American preference for smaller government also stands on less solid ground than he thinks.  Respondents said they thing government should spend to create jobs, 47-45%, and 62% think Congress should let the Bush tax cuts expire, even though this would raise taxes on high earners.  Fifty-six percent would like to see more regulation of banks and financial institutions, and 52% think the President should do more to fix the economy.  Half say they would change Senate rules to make legislation easier to pass, and 58% think that Obama has expanded government “the right amount” or “not enough.”  It looks like Americans worry less about the size of government than they do its effectiveness–they want more policy that works and less that doesn’t.

It’s no secret that politicians–even conservative, small government politicians–don’t behave as if their constituents want smaller government.  Indeed, according to the Washington Times, over a dozen Republicans wrote letters to one agency alone seeking money from the stimulus package, even though they had voted against it and claimed it had no effect (except in letters like Kit Bond’s request from the USDA for stimulus money for a project in his state on the grounds that it would “create jobs and ultimately spur economic opportunities.”  Even Republicans know that Americans want more government action to solve problems on the ground.

Donald Douglas is not a very good political scientist and an even worse poll analyst, based on this example of his work.  He pulled a few results that support his preconceived notion of the state of American public opinion from a long survey while ignoring data points which might refute his claim.  This poll contains nothing particularly disastrous for Democrats or President Obama.  If Douglas cared about good analysis, he would have pointed this out.


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Clean Sweep

Nov 6

Posted by R. Stanton Scott in Conservatism, Conservative Counterrevolution, GOP, President Obama, Reactionaries, Virginia Politics

I’m no expert on Virginia Politics, but it seems to me that this analysis, while it contains some good insight and suggestions, leaves a bit to be desired.  Certainly Virginia Democrats should ask their statewide leaders to take control of the Party, find new high-level donors, and begin developing a redistricting strategy.  But only one of Mr. Goldman’s ten suggestions–figure out why the Democratic Get Out the Vote effort failed so miserably–addresses the real reason all three major statewide offices went to Republicans during this cycle.

Republicans swept these races–and did well down ballot, by the way–because conservatives have been whipped into a frenzy during the last few months by a steady deluge of tea-bagging, birther frenzy, tax revolt, Fox News misinformation, ACORN bashing, Glenn Beck demagoguery, and scaremongering against immigrants, terrorists, and cultural change.  The liberal revolution faces a growing counter-revolution, and the radicals are ready to fight it.  McDonnell’s people had to know that they had this cohort of voters in hand, and they could count on them to show up.  He could therefore run away from his thesis and actual conservative views on social, cultural, and policy issues with a vague promise of pragmatic leadership on job promotion and economic development.

To win, Deeds needed to counter this by  motivate his own base and attracting moderates with the same popular liberal vision that earned a win for President Obama.  To do this, he had to both cozy up to Obama and his policies, which energized liberals last year, and propose practical solutions to Virginia’s problems based on liberal principles.  He should have promoted policies that would create new green energy jobs, for example, or proposed increases in education funding that would put people to work in construction and teaching.  He should have promised to work with the Obama Administration for more stimulus money, this time concentrated on public transit and other transportation improvements that would both create new jobs and position Virginia to take advantage of the inevitable economic recovery.   This would, to be sure, have  annoyed some voters–but none who could have been expected to vote for Deeds.

While negative campaigning can depress turnout, he could have used some subtle techniques to make McDonnell take ownership of the ideas presented in his thesis (e.g., simply point out that he believes what he wrote without passing judgment on what he wrote), and used the thesis not to attack his opponent but to energize his base.  He should also have made some effort to tie McDonnell and Cuccinelli to the tea party movement.  He needed ads showing the Republican candidates next to Sarah Palin and other radical national GOP officials (there’s a reason why McDonnell kept Palin at arm’s length).  When making these attacks, he would want to stress that he is simply pointing out who his opponents call “friends” so that Virginians will know that they have a clear choice between competing visions for the Commonwealth.

Some would argue that this would alienate independents, and Mr. Goldman wonders why independent voters went heavily Republican in these elections.  To be sure, some blame belongs to Deeds’ lackluster campaign.  But I believe that of traditional independents who voted, most probably went Democratic–their support changed only in terms of enthusiasm and turnout.  Exit polls incorrectly show that independents broke Republican because many of these respondents are not actually independents–they are conservative voters who could not be expected to vote for a Democrat under any circumstances, but identify as independents because they no longer feel at home in the GOP.

Rather than go after his own base by supporting national Democratic policies and picking off moderates with pragmatic proposals for solving Virginia’s economic, transportation, and taxation issues (and doing both at the same time by for example proposing reform of Virginia’s regressive revenue generation scheme), Deeds ran vacuous ads meant to appeal to homespun rural voters and vacillated on taxes, health care reform, economic stimulus, and budget planning.  This of course turned out to be a recipe for disaster.

As the right-wing blog discussion of the race in New York’s 23rd district showed, radical conservative counter-revoultionaries have begun their effort to purge the Republican Party of moderates.  They believe that conservatives can win more elections by further radicalizing the movement.  While this may work in certain gerrymandered disctricts (Eric Cantor, call your office), and in certain states, last year’s election showed that Virginia’s well-educated and pragmatic citizens want leaders who will give them practical solutions to real issues like job outsourcing, finance and capital bubbles, runaway capitalism, and rising energy costs.  To win in the future, Democrats need to make a case that liberal policies can do solve problems in a holistic way, by creating new green industries, regulating financial transactions, and generating revenue in a progressive, sensible way.

At the same time they need to show that today’s GOP prefers a radical agenda of shrinking government, increased income and wealth gaps, million dollar bonuses for capitalist gamblers, discrimiation against non-Christians, regressive taxation, and growing power for political and economic elites.  Protecting the political economic, and cultural status quo is, after all, the definition of “Conservative.”

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Rules for Whack Jobs

Sep 9

Posted by R. Stanton Scott in Capitalism, Conservatism, Economy, Government, Health Care, President Obama, Reactionaries, US Politics, Whack Jobs, Wingnuts, Wingnuttia

Roy Edroso does everyone a public service by wading through the mud of the right-wing-nutjob attack on President Obama’s speech to school kids.  I’m almost sorry I clicked through to any of the blogs he cites: the stupid, it burns.

It is difficult to overstate the amount of ignorance permeating the discussions and essays on these blogs.  The discussions of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, for example, suggest that few have actually read the book.  Click over from WikiPedia to Amazon, folks, and order it.  Read it.

James Lewis, who may be an American but is not much of a thinker (he thinks socialists are “deeply committed” to the “Internationalist Ruling Class!”), asserts that Alinsky’s prescription to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” has something to do with scapegoating groups:

“That slogan defines mob scapegoating, of course. It is an exact prescription for whipping up mobs — by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by religion.”

This makes, of course, very little sense.  Personalizing and polarizing the target is about putting an individual, and preferably evil, face on class oppression, not about blaming rich white mortgage lenders for the problems caused by all those lazy poor people who bought houses they couldn’t pay for.

But what about Alinsky?  Lewis wants to paint him as a dangerous radical who means to bring down capitalism and the American way of life with the help of his protege, President Obama.  Capitalism has, of course, quite effectively begun the process of destroying itself without Alinsky’s help, thank you very much.

Lewis is bent out of shape because President Obama is scapegoating the “capitalists who run General Motors and Wall Street,” and some B-list comedienne thinks the tea partiers are racist, don’t you see.  Never mind that the executives who brought down our economy by mismanaging both its industrial and financial sectors sort of brought the blame upon themselves.

Saul Alinsky wrote Rules to show the politically weak how they could effect social change despite the efforts of the powerful to hold their priveleged economic and political positions.  He compared the book to The Prince:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

Alinsky suggested that organizers identify privileged individuals and personalize social injustice–that is, show exactly who benefits from the perceived class differences they had organized to fight.  Lewis does not support his claim that the President has decided to use this technique to demonize groups rather than individuals except by assertion: he just knows they are doing this, because this is what the Dixiecrats did to blacks, don’t you see.  But the evidence suggests that people who wish to curb the excesses of Capitalism and capitalists have followed Alinsky’s lead by targeting the individual executives who made corporate decisions on things like bonuses.

This article, for example, targets Edward Liddy, the CEO of AiG, not capitalists in general.  Other discussion of Wall Street bonuses challenge them on capitalist grounds by making the credible claim that the poor performance of financial wizards should preclude bonuses–they should not be rewarded for destroying their companies.

“These bonuses should be zero,” wrote one poster on the firedoglake.com blog. “Not down 44%. Zero. These banks should be using their profits to reinvest in the shoring up of their capital reserves, so that they [can] start underwriting and lending again, not paying discretionary bonuses. It’s not about keeping the “best and the brightest”…if they were that sharp, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we now?”

Janeane Garafalo’s assertion that racism pervades the Tea Party movement also has merit–at least StormFront thinks so.  They have asked members to join the Tea Parties, and along with other white supremacist groups believe they would find a fertile recruiting ground at such meetings.

In no sense can anyone characterize either as scapegoating.  Neither Wall Street bonus babies nor teabaggers are taking blame for others.  To the extent liberals use Alinsky’s methods to effect social change, they target the actual malefactors of wealth and privelege–along with the rubes who support an unjust system.  They do not blame innocent individuals or groups for the sins of others.

Indeed, it is arguably the right that favors Alinsky’s techniques.  They make a din that creates the impression of a larger movement at boisiterous town hall forums.  They force rules of civil conduct on liberals even while violating them.  They bully and ridicule, and attract activists who enjoy using these methods.  They use any event as a reason to attack, and offer no constructive alternatives.  And they picked, froze, personalized, and polarized Obama.

They also scapegoat amorphous groups–the liberal media, academic or Hollywood elites, unions,  socialists, communists,  and all those welfare mothers who think rich people owe them a Cadillac.

We should of course expect reactionaries–capitalists, corporatists, and religious leaders who see their base of political and economic power crumbling before changing social norms, demographics, and economic and scientific realities–to protect the foundations of their power.  They have to demonize cultural, political, economic and demographic changes as socialist in order to hold the support of uninformed masses who fear out groups, “socialism,” “secularism,” and “liberal elites” more than they fear losing everything when some corporation sends their job overseas or refuses to pay for the cancer treatment because they had acne ten years ago.  This is how they preserve the every-man-for-himself system that allows a small group of wealthy patriarchs to control the vast majority of US wealth.  But they have no stronger a claim to America, and what it means to be an American, than liberals who believe that we can improve society by acting collectively.

And if they believe that socialism is about commitment to the “International Ruling Class,” they come to the intellectual gun fight without a good understanding of what bullets are.

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School Daze

Sep 4

Posted by R. Stanton Scott in Cognitive Dissonance, Conservatism, Culture Wars, President Obama, Reactionaries, US Politics

It is hard to imagine a more conservative message for kids than “your education is your responsibility–work hard.”  So the right-wing-nutjob reaction to President Obama’s plan for an inspirational online chat with school kids must have another explanation.

Conservative leaders have figured out that their base, as well as non-trivial numbers of independents, are susceptible to propaganda about liberal leaders and policies.  They know they can lie about what a particular bill contains, or about the policy preferences of Democratic politicians and other leaders.  This is partly a cognitive dissonance problem–whack-jobs simply disregard facts if they don’t support their beliefs.  It also depends on a general failure to pay attention, leaving the field to the loudest most obnoxious voices, whether or not they truthfully describe events.

Conservatives also understand that given their performance over the last few years, anything that resembles successful liberal leadership or policy could leave them in the political wilderness for decades.  It could also degrade the utility of their strongest argument: that government cannot competently solve social problems.

So Republican leaders and conservative activists have to stop any policy change contemplated by the Democrats or President Obama.  Anything the liberals implement might work, and indeed simply making necessary changes makes them look effective, whether or not the policies themselves improve the lives of Americans.  This explains the GOP recalcitrance on health care reform.  They cannot allow anything at all to pass, since this will look like a political victory just because something got through, and whatever passes will likely improve the system we have now.

It also explains the conservative attack on the President as a “socialist,” and their comparison of him to Hitler and Stalin.  They have to mischaracterize his policies, and one way to do that is to paint them with a broad brush–they know the base will fear the worst, and many others will accept the signal as sent without investigating its veracity.  This is the only way they can build opposition to policies that most Americans have said they support in the past.

To win in a political, social, and demographic climate that increasingly favors liberals, the Republicans must mischaracterize both their own leaders and policies and that of their opponents.  Nothing else explains their rejection of the most conservative message possible: take responsibility for yourself.  Further proof that Democrats are the real conservatives.  Conservatives are simply reactionaries (more on that later).

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