It's not the Tea Partiers, as fun as they are. It's not the debate over whether or not Christine O'Donnell is a witch. It's not even the passage of landmark legislation like health care and financial reform, with all their historic implications.
It's that with the Citizens United decision, the flood of multinational corporation money have been unleashed. And when I say multinational, I'm not even talking about American-based companies who sell goods and operate factories overseas, I'm talking about foreign corporations through and through.
Read the story below in its entirety, I am republishing it here to emphasize how big a deal this is. The Chamber of Commerce is raising money from foreign companies and using it to run attack ads here against Democratic candidates.
Rachel Maddow did a hilarious piece on her show last night about all the Republican candidates who are making bizarre and provably false claims about their status as former secret agents or undercover cops or hostage negotiators or- my personal favorite- holders of security clearances so high not even the President can attain one. This Republican crop of candidates has some truly nutty folks in it. But worse even than the loons are candidates like Alaska Republican nominee Joe Miller who has a track record of skating on the edge of the law to get government subsidies and checks while denouncing government spending and welfare.
Miller is on record saying unemployment compensation is not "constitutionally authorized" and should be looked at for repeal- which is a little odd given his family's history with unemployment comp. But it's a story with an even odder twist than just the fact that his wife got unemployment comp. What happened was that Miller was a part time federal magistrate in 2002-2004. Upon getting the job, he hired his wife even though the rules about nepotism were quite clear in this position. Miller claims he received clearance from the federal court to do that, but there doesn't seem to be any documentation of this "clearance" conversation, and shortly thereafter he discovered that- oh, my God- there was a nepotism law and she would have to be laid off. As a newly laid off person, Miller's wife was eligible for- you guessed it- unemployment comp, and even though it was not constitutionally authorized, she decided to take it anyway. A cynical person might think Miller hired his wife, knowing he would have to lay her off because of the nepotism law so that she would be eligible for unemployment comp, but thankfully for Miller I am not a cynical person.
Here's another quirky thing in hard core conservative Joe Miller's past. It seems that when Miller came to Alaska in the mid 1990s, he applied for a hunting license, but applied as an indigent in 1995. The eligibility for that indigent license was a person making under $8250 in household income annually. As ProgressiveAlaska reports:
Miller's mortgage in 1994 with Countrywide for the house on the hillside was a 7-year, $92,000loan @ approximately 8%. (Monthly payment approximately $1400 for interest and principle only.)
Add insurance and taxes and the monthly is over $1600. $1600x12=$19,200. Substantially more than the $8250 annual gross family income limit for an indigent license.
Miller family's gross income in 1994 (qualifying year for 1995 indigent license) included income from the sale of a portion of his Kansas farm acreage, Joe's Army Reserve pay as a First Lt., his farm rental payments from Farmer's Coop, Alta Vista, Kansas, his farm subsidies, legal intern salary from Condon, Partnow & Sharrock (May, 1994) and from the Alaska Dept of Law (June through December, 1994, at least $2,000/month) and child support Kathleen received for two children.
The total is greatly in excess of $8250 and was enough to qualify them for the $92,000 mortgage from Countrywide.
Additionally, in 1996, his wife again applied for a Class 5A license - claiming gross family income of less than $8250 when she was still receiving child support, Joe was still receiving Army Reserve pay, farm rental income and subsidies and had gone to work in May 1995 (1995 was the qualifying year) at Partnow, Condon & Sharrock for $70,000 year.
If he was truthful on the fishing license application then he had to have lied on his home loan application.
Now who knows, maybe the folks at Progressive Alaska missed some kind of explanation here, maybe there is some bit of info about Miller's financial situation they don't have. But for a guy who doesn't believe the government should do very much to help poor people, the idea that he probably defrauded the state of Alaska by claiming indigence when he seems to have had a fair amount of resources seems doubly wrong.
Conservatives like Miller are the worst kind of hypocrites- denouncing unemployment comp when they have taken advantage of it themselves, denouncing programs to help the poor while taking advantage of them when they apparently aren't even poor themselves. Miller will never get the attention that Christine O'Donnell does because, well, he doesn't have to run TV ads like this one denying that he's a witch. But his track record deserves some serious attention, because this guy might become a Senator.
Coverage of the Brazilian election on Democracy Now! yesterday highlighted the fact that Brazil no longer has a true rightwing party at the presidential level. And being in Latin America, it's not even that surprising that two of the top three presidential candidates in Sunday's first round of presidential elections were women--accounting for almost 70 percent of the vote. Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party fell just a few percentage points short of 50 percent, necessitating a run-off, while Marina Silva, a former high Workers Party official lead the Green Party to its strongest showing ever, roughly 20 percent. She did not make the run-off, but the Social Democratic Party candidate, José Serra, himself with some progressive credentials, can't realistically run right and gain much support from Silva's backers in the run-off.
Although I've long been accustomed to thinking of Lula's Worker's Party government as a disappointing sell-out for its acceptance of neoliberal international finance & trade relations, it has still made dramatic progress towards improving the lives of the poor, and raising record numbers out of poverty. My perspective is still much more closely aligned with the social movements out of which he originally emerged, and he has moved away from them in a trajectory somewhat similar to that of Barack Obama moving away from his early community organizer roots, though not as extreme. So I'm glad that the Workers Party has opposition on the left. But even what passes for its opposition on the right this time around is more properly described as modestly center-left on domestic policy, while supporting the US line in foreign affairs. This came into focus though the comments of one guest, Greg Grandin, author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and Fordlandia presented a very different slant on things, one in which Brazilian elections this time were a three-way race between different center-leftish parties, all somewhat pressured by more militant social movements. Here's what he said:
GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, it's remarkable. Here's a country, the most populous country in Latin America, the largest economy, by far, in the Americas, short of the United States and Canada, you know, one of the most strongest growing economies in the world, and 70 percent of the population voted either for an ex-Marxist urban guerrilla [Rousseff] or an Afro-Brazilian rubber tapper [Silva] who broke with the Workers' Party to run on the Green Party ticket. The Green Party got 20 percent of the vote. It would be interesting to know if that's the highest-compare it with Germany, for instance-if a Green Party won 20 percent of the vote, that's a remarkable-that's a remarkable turnout....
GREG GRANDIN: Well, what's remarkable is that Serra and Dilma share a remarkable overlap of agendas. I think that this speaks to the success of Lula, both for Brazil, leaving Brazil a much stronger country, but also leaving Latin America a much stronger country. I think, you know, not only were these two women of the left women of the left, the opposition candidate was not a man of the right. I mean, he was a Social Democrat. In some ways--
AMY GOODMAN: José Serra.
GREG GRANDIN: You mentioned in your introduction his contribution to challenging the international pharmaceutical regime, and in a lot of ways the Social Democratic party--government before Lula put into place a lot of--increased social spending that Lula was able to capitalize on. Serra agreed, and he actually tried to run in the shadow of Lula, you know, as the true heir of Lula. But that obviously didn't work to a large degree.
What's interesting is that Serra is actually more progressive on one issue, and that's finance interest rates. He wants--Lula has actually kept interest rates fairly high, lowered them a little bit during the recession as a way of a kind of stimulus. But for the most part, he's been quite orthodox, keeping the bond markets and the international bankers happy. Serra represents, I think, a certain kind of industrial sector within Brazil that wants lower interest rates. I think domestically what he would do, he'd probably be more willing to also to try to impose some kind of neoliberal reform on labor law, which Dilma won't do. I think, you know, part of the Workers' Party will not--they won't go for that kind of structural reform.
So none of these is a real left party, both the Workers Party and the Social Democrats have elements of conformity to neo-liberalism, as well as divergences, and the Greens represent more pressure on the left But there is no traditional right, at least not now at the presidential level. The Social Democratic candidate has taken positions friendly to Washington on foreign affairs, but even these have been somewhat muted.
Over the last few months, we've seen some serious - and potentially groundbreaking - fractures in the old consensus over defense spending. In particular, we've seen the rise of rank-and-file conservatives who have been more willing to connect their deficit grievances with the bloated Pentagon budget. Indeed, I saw this firsthand when I interviewed top-tier Republican congressional candidate Ryan Frazier on AM760 - a veteran, he said that we need to look seriously at defense spending cuts.
Now, though, the blowback is starting. As The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder reports:
In an op-ed to be published in the Wall Street Journal, the heads of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Foreign Policy Initiative warn that there will not be "long-term prosperity" if the US military is "hollowed out" and can't defend the country.
Although the op-ed, written by FPI's Bill Kristol, AEI's Arthur C. Brooks and Heritage's Edward Fuelner, sets up the Obama administration as its foil, the real purpose to nudge Tea Party conservatives back into line on defense spending, according to a Republican strategist who is working on the program.
Ambinder quotes a D.C. Republican strategist saying that "The goal is to make sure we're not boxed on by both sides" - ie. by liberals and conservative critics of Pentagon waste.
This, of course, is why this new scrutiny of defense spending is so important - precisely because it has the potential to attract a powerful transpartisan coalition of both anti-militarist liberals and deficit hawk conservatives. The Establishment Republicans in Washington - who, mind you, represent no mass audience but do represent huge amounts of money - realize this potential threat to their military-industrial sugar daddies. And so they are starting to fight back.
But the battle has already started - and it is a battle progressives and honest conservatives can win.
We are still in the age of Obama, and hence Reagan. Progressive ideas do not frame our debates as a whole. But in California this past week there have seen definite signs of a tentative turning taking place, and one of the most important came out of the echoes of Meg Whitman's undocumented housekeeper scandal, when Jerry Brown fell back on his Catholic upbringing to support the California DREAM Act and call Whitman's disposable people attitude "immoral".
This scandal has the potential to do big damage to Whitman on at least two levels. First, it shows her right-wing immigrant-hating base that she is no different than the other corporate hacks who hire undocumented workers instead of "real Americans." ....
Second, and more ominously for Whitman, this could crush any remaining hopes she had of winning significant portions of Latino votes....
Still, there's more to the story than the immigration issue. Santillan also told of her exploitation at the hands of Whitman, including overworking her, engaging in "emotional and financial abuse," and even denying Santillan family leave when she was pregnant. The term "pregnancy discrimination" was used by Santillan's attorney, Gloria Allred, which is itself pretty damning if proven.
Over the weekend, Brown and Whitman held a second debate, in Fresno, carried live statewide on Univision. What grabbed the most attention, immediately, was Whitman's attempt to shift blame to Brown, and his scathing push-back (via HuffPo):
"The real tragedy here is Nicky. After Nov. 2, no one's going to be watching out for Nicky Diaz," Whitman said, referring to the former housekeeper, and turning to face Brown directly shortly after the start of their second debate. "And Jerry, you know you should be ashamed, you and your surrogates ... put her deportation at risk. You put it out there and you should be ashamed for sacrificing Nicky Diaz on the altar of your political ambitions."
Brown responded by saying Whitman, the billionaire former chief executive of eBay, was trying to evade responsibility.
"Don't run for governor if you can't stand up on your own two feet and say, 'Hey I made a mistake,'" Brown said in a moment fraught with tension as the two candidates, neck-and-neck in the polls, turned away from the audience and faced each other directly. "You have blamed her, blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions. But you don't take accountability."
[T]here was a far more meaningful moment later on, pertaining to immigration, that showed a huge contrast between the candidates and the cruelty of Whitman's approach. If it gets the attention it deserves, it might even cost Whitman the election....
I have had my share of disagreements on political analysis with Third Way over the past few months, but they have come out with a new memo on the 2010 races that is hard to argue with. Its message is that moderates and swing voters still matter in winning elections, and that we can't do well in the competitive 2010 elections without both appealing to the base and to those swing voters.
Like I said, tough to disagree with that. I do have some friends in progressive politics who believe that most elections can be won by focusing totally on registering and turning out Democratic base voters, but no matter how much money, effort, and message you focus on that goal, it is not enough to win most elections. The best example I know of is 2004, where the combination of America Coming Together, unions, ACORN, Project Vote, America Votes, many other non-profit groups, plus all the Democratic party campaigns and committees spent literally several hundred million dollars on black, Hispanic, youth, unmarried women, and other base Democratic groups' turnout. It was several times more than had ever been spent before on such efforts, turnout was very high with those demographic groups, and we still didn't win. We still needed a higher percentage of swing voters, we didn't get it, and we lost. Getting the base vote to turn out in higher numbers is just as important, but you have to win a solid percentage of the voters in the middle to win close races.
The key question the memo raises but then leaves unaddressed is how Democrats in a tough cycle can win over those folks in the middle. It is not an easy task, not with voters this cynical and disillusioned, not with the economy hurting this badly. And unfortunately, what passes for appealing to the middle in Washington, DC has no resemblance to what actually appeals to swing voters out there in the real world beyond the beltway. In Washington, being a moderate means being for raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for Social Security. In the rest of America, fighting to preserve Social Security is a huge plus for voters. In Washington, being a moderate means being for "free trade" deals. In the rest of America, working class swing voters hate the trade deals that they know are shipping their jobs overseas. In Washington, being a moderate means being for extending all of the Bush tax cuts even those for millionaires. In the rest of America, it is those working class swing voters who don't like those kinds of tax cuts.
Most of all, being a moderate in Washington means getting along nicely with all those corporate lobbyists who keep coming to see you (and dropping off checks). In the rest of America, swing voters and base voters are completely united that Washington is too controlled by wealthy and powerful special interests, and that their power needs to be rolled back. The polling numbers on strict new lobby reforms, on rolling back the Citizens United decision, on public financing so that candidates aren't dependent on special interests for campaign cash are incredibly strong. Voters are disgusted by the kind of business as usual described in this article from Roll Call. If Democratic candidates spent their time attacking that kind of special interest funding and the attack ads being generated by corporate cash, they would have swing as well as Democratic base vote standing up and cheering.
The brain-dead DC establishment still doesn't get this, of course. My favorite recent example was the hand-wringing by the "moderates" in DC over the appointment of Elizabeth Warren. Somehow the logic went that because progressives liked her, appointing her would be a political disaster with the middle. Dana Milbank, in one of his classic diatribes no doubt fed to him by a White House insider fearful of losing his influence, did a long piece full of nasty innuendo from unnamed sources about how Valerie Jarrett was leading the President to disaster, and his leading example was that Jarrett was one of the people in favor of the "politically radioactive" Warren getting her job. Having seen focus groups where working-class swing voters react to clips of Elizabeth talking about the financial industry, with them applauding and talking about how they would support her for President if she ran, I can assure Dana: you can stop worrying about Elizabeth's political radioactivity. Swing voters love her for the same reason progressives do: because she pulls no punches and takes on the powers that be. The only folks that she is radioactive with are the Wall Street execs and their friends in Congress.
Democrats need moderate swing voters to win elections: there is no doubt about that. The question is how best we get them. Some Democrats' theory is that they get them by distancing themselves from Obama and Pelosi, and perhaps a few Democrats from very conservative districts will survive by doing that. But what is clear to me from the polling and focus groups I am looking at is that instead democratic candidates should take on the causes that unite and motivate both Democratic base voters and swing voters: rolling back the power of corporate special interests, standing up to the big banks and energy and insurance industries, fighting the outsourcing of jobs. The path toward a winning electoral coalition in most swing districts and states is to reject Washington centrism and embrace the values of working families in the real America.
Yesterday in Quick Hit Comments, Bruce Dixon said about the "One Nation" rally:
it was a Democratic GOTV pep rally
like I've been saying for a couple months. How could it be anything else.
A march to make the administration do something would have taken place in the early spring of 2009, not a month before the mid-term.
And on Democracy Now! yesterday, at somewhat greater length, Danny Schecter said:
But, what was missing, it seemed to me, were one of two things: first, trying to educate the audience. Here they had a big television audience. They were speaking not just to themselves, but to America. And in doing that, instead of speaking to the base, they missed an opportunity, I believe, to offer their analysis to the American people, who don't get it in the media, specifically, what Wall Street has been doing to our country and what actually has happened so that 14 million families face foreclosure. This was the week that all the big banks stopped foreclosing in twenty-three states because they had been illegally taking people's homes with phony signatures and the like. And that wasn't even referenced. It wasn't even mentioned. There was no, really, appeal to all these homeowners. There was very little appeal to unemployed people and young people who have been unable to get jobs, which is really a core constituency.
And there was very little offered about what to do about all of this, except voting in November. And we all know that voting in November to return to Congress even people who are supposedly, you know, trying to do the right thing is very probematic, because we know that-how badly they've done. You know, even the Democrats are saying, you know, "Even if you don't like us, vote for us, because we're better than the other guys." That's not much of an appeal.
So, where was the strategy? Where was the plan for the future? Where was the organizational vision for how to bring these people to stay together to work together to move for change? That was sort of missing, and I think it became, in a way, more of an event, more of a movie than a movement. And that was bad, I think, you know, and disappointing at the end, when you really thought about it. What did we accomplish? And I'm not sure.
Now, I think these are both fair and important critisms, but I don't think they are reasons for disappointment or despair. They are guides towards improvement for the future. After all, the groups who pulled together to put on this rally had largely demobilized themselves at Obama's request over a prolonged period of time. That was extremely regretable, to say the least, but we should rejoice to see them finally moving in the right direction, and do everything possible to encourage them in going further.
Even "merely" a GOTV pep rally is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It means that Dems will owe us something, and, more importantly, it shows them that we're not going to just keep on cowering in silence and hiding in despair. Of course, that means nothing if we don't make demands based on it, but that's just the point: we now have a basis for doing so. That's still a very long way from where we need to be, but it's better than where we've unfortunately been. Crawl, walk, run, fly. That's the order of mobilization.
Is this a pathetic place to be? Of course it is! But a lot more people now realize it. Which means there are a lot more of us who can work together to do something about it. We can be sure that whatever happens in November, Versailles will take it to mean that the Dems should move farther to the right. It's our job--among others--to make the opposite argument. And we should do everything we can do now to make our position stronger for pushing that argument over the next two years.
My position, as always: Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
Maddow set up the discussion by talking about the left-wing People's Bicentennial Commission:
MADDOW: In 1974, two years before America turned 200, lefties started a Tea Party movement. A lefty group called the people's bicentennial commission published what they called a planning and activity guide for citizens' participation during the bicentennial years. And in that guide, in 1974, they suggested that people form Tea Parties because they said the country needed, quote, "A new party, a movement that will treat tax reform as one aspect of a fight for genuine equality of property and power." Equality of property? Hmm. Yes, the lefty Tea Party idea from the '70s, was that the T, the T in Tea Party should stand for tax equity for Americans. Equity as in equality.
They made some suggestions for lefty Tea Partiers including, quote, "How about a King George exhibit of tax avoiders in some public park with pictures and charts of the loopholes they used?" Why not use the example of the Boston Tea Party to highlight all the loopholes and tricks that rich people and corporations use to avoid paying their fair share of taxes! Why not? The people's bicentennial commission again, this is 1974 also suggested that left wing Tea Partiers of the 1970s use the slogan, "Don't Tread on Me." Doesn't that just burn you up, conservative Tea Partiers that just one generation ago a bunch of dirty hippies looked at the same Gadsden flag, the same chapter in the history of book about throwing the tea in the Boston harbor and they took exactly the opposite political message from it for today? Doesn't that burn you up?
And then she segued gently into her discussion with Lepore, and how she came to write the book, which flowed out of her own encounter with Tea Partiers, as a result of teaching about the Revolution:
