Government Is Not The Problem

Robbie Conal

Democrats have been on the defensive about the role of government at least since Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address that  "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."  Reagan was so effective in portraying government intervention as nothing more than providing assistance to Cadillac-driving welfare queens that his successor, Bush the Elder, was able to  disparage his opponent Michael Dukakis merely by referring to him as a "liberal."  And when the Democrats finally took back the White House, it was Bill Clinton who boasted in his second State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." 

E.J. Dionne argues in an excellent column today that we must "turn Ronald Reagan’s declaration on its head: Opposition to government isn’t the solution. Opposition to government was and remains the problem."

Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth.

Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. It was thus salutary that Douglas Elmendorf, the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a congressional hearing last week that 80 percent of economic experts surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus got the unemployment rate lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise. Only 4 percent disagreed. The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession.

So when conservatives say, as they regularly do, that “government doesn’t create jobs,” the riposte should be quick and emphatic: “Yes it has, and yes, it does!”

Indeed, our unemployment rate is higher today than it should be because conservatives blocked additional federal spending to prevent layoffs by state and local governments — and because progressives, including Obama, took too long to propose more federal help. Obama’s jobs program would be a step in the right direction, and he’s right to tout it now. But he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus from the beginning. The anti-government disposition has so much power that Democrats and moderate Republicans allowed themselves to be intimidated into keeping it too small.

As Dionne concludes, "It is past time that we affirm government’s ability to heal the economy, and its responsibility for doing so."

Voters Get It, Elites Not So Much

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

Throughout American history, some of our greatest political thinkers have understood that at the end of the day, democracy works better when average Americans rather than elites run things, because regular people instinctively get the truth of what is going on in the real world — on Main Street — more than out-of-touch elites. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine got this; as did Abe Lincoln, who believed in a government of, by, and for the people. So did the reformers and organizers of the 20th Century like Saul Alinsky and Walter Reuther. They all knew that the people might get things wrong some of the time, but that ultimately it was better to trust and empower regular folks because the elites generally messed up a lot more of the time than democracy did.

When I read the great memos and reams of data that Stan Greenberg and James Carville at Democracy Corps put out, and read focus group and polling reports from other pollsters I respect, I am reminded of that truth once again. It is striking how much better regular folks understand, than most of the elites in this country, what is really going on with this economy. They aren’t following the moment-to-moment blips in the job or GDP numbers so much as they know deep in their guts that the American middle class is in real danger, that it is on a long downhill decline, and that there needs to be big fundamental changes. This has big implications for the 2012 election.

The swing voters swing because they go back and forth on whom to blame more — Wall Street and big business or the government — and what then to do about it. They think both sides of that equation are bad: that Wall Street screwed up the economy, and that government can’t succeed because it is bought off by Wall Street and other wealthy special interests. They think both political parties are bad. And they for the most part aren’t feeling like the economy is getting much better, or that, as President Obama put it in his State of the Union address, “America is back!” They are pessimists (at least in the short term), populists, alienated from the establishment. That is why I continue to fear a more upbeat message on how the economy really is getting better from the Obama team will cause him to lose. Stan and James reminded me recently of the last ad we ran in the 1992 Clinton campaign, the single most effective ad we ran that fall. I wish I could find the video for you, but I haven’t been able to. It was a 15-second ad that had a clip of George Bush talking about how the economy really was getting better and jobs were starting to pick up again (both of which were technically true), and then the screen just cut to lettering and a voice saying “How ya doing?” People responded strongly to it, feeling in their gut that the economy the last four years had not been getting better, and that Bush was out of touch for saying so. It turned a race that had been tightening into an easy six-point win.

My concern isn’t just, as I have written about before, that the Obama team doesn’t brag too much about economic improvements that most voters aren’t feeling yet. My bigger worry is that Obama, other Democrats, and the broad progressive movement will just miss the moment we are in: middle-class voters have a deep understanding that something is profoundly wrong with the direction our economy has been heading for the last 30 years. They understand, far better than most elites, the underlying trends that are grinding middle-class families into the dirt, and are making it harder and harder for poor people and young people to climb the ladder into the middle class. They are cynical about politicians bragging about job growth because they know that most new jobs don’t pay what the ones that were lost used to, or are temp jobs that will be gone all too fast. They know that wage growth is flat, housing prices are down, and the costs of necessities — gas, groceries, health care — keep going up. They worry about being able to retire with enough money to live on, about taking care of their elderly parents and grandparents, and about sending their kids to college with tuition rates skyrocketing.

This kind of frame of mind for voters makes things challenging for an incumbent President trying to win re-election, but it also presents an opportunity. The Osawatomie, Kansas speech, where Obama cast himself as the fighter for the middle class in tough times, is a part of the answer, and I am glad he has taken on that mantle. But I think he needs to be more explicit and more expansive in creating the narrative, telling the story, of how we got here. The 30-year frame is helpful in part because that is clearly where voters are — that our problems started quite a while back and we have been in decline too long — and in part because it doesn’t make it seem like Obama is just trying to blame Bush, which feels too partisan and blame-gamy. (I also like the fact that it is true. It was Reagan’s policies 30 years ago which decimated our manufacturing base, started us on our current path of massive trade deficits year after year, began the massive deregulation of the financial sector, and embraced supply side economics that first led to massive tax cuts for the wealthy, big budget deficits, and a concentration of both income at the top and industry concentration in one sector of the economy after another.)


The point wouldn’t be to launch an assault on Reagan, though, but to sketch out the bigger, deeper narrative. Here’s what I’d like Obama to be saying:

About 30 years ago, our country started on a track that led us to where we are today. We let our manufacturing base wither away; wages flattened out, and raises became hard to come by; pensions started disappearing; health care costs and college tuition rates started spiking; and both incomes and entire industries started to become all too concentrated at the top. The middle class and the entrepreneurial small business people who have built this country and have been the pillars of their communities, have been under steady assault, and too much of the time government stopped being on their side because it was captured by special interests that got more and more wealthy. The rich got a lot richer, millions of local small businesses closed down under predatory competition from the big boys, and poor and middle income people got continually squeezed.

It is our generation’s task to turn this around. We need to have a plan that is very focused and intentional about changing things and putting government firmly and definitively on the side of the great American middle class and the young and poor people trying to climb the ladder into it. We need to create jobs- not just low wage temporary jobs, but long term jobs with good pay and benefits. We need to rebuild our schools, our roads, our bridges, and our manufacturing base by investing in the future of our middle class. We need to invest in R&D and high-speed internet for all Americans, and to make sure the Internet doesn’t get messed with and remains open to the innovators of the future. We need to be very clear with Wall Street bankers who ran roughshod over the economy and the corporate CEOs who have been making 400 times what their average workers were making that we will finally be holding them accountable, and will be requiring them to be good community members again — including paying their fair share in taxes. We need to demand that major companies create good jobs here, not just outsource them where the labor is cheap and there are no environmental regulations.

This will not be easy, and it will not happen overnight. But this economy will never get back on solid ground for the long term unless we get to work on it right now.

President Obama gave a version of that kind of speech in Kansas, and it was a great speech, but I think he needs to be even more explicit in the how we got here, and about spelling out the narrative creating a path to a prosperous growing middle class again. He needs to be very clear that he doesn’t just want to create jobs, but good long term jobs that have staying power in the economy. And he needs to be 100 percent forceful and definitive that his entire economic policy — from job creation to helping small business compete with the big boys, from cleaning up government waste due to special interests to reforming the tax code, from health care to education and student loans, from battling the oil companies and speculators on the price of gas to battling Wall Street on behalf of homeowners and consumers — is centered around being on the side of the 99 percent.

The USA is at a historic juncture in its politics and economic system. The events of the last five years have convinced the clear majority of Americans that we are on the wrong track not only in the short term but for a long time now, and that the biggest, broadest, most prosperous and dynamic middle class in world history is on the verge of being crushed. To win re-election, Obama needs to show voters that he understands that danger, and that he has a plan and a passion for turning things around. As entertaining as the Republican primary comedy of errors has been, as bad a candidate as Mitt Romney is, to win this election the President has to keep demonstrating, over and over on issue after issue, that he will take on the special interests crushing the middle class.

Birthday For Bonzo

Robbie Conal

Yesterday was Ronald Reagan's 101st birthday.  While Republicans candidates for president ignore the Bushes and pretend that Reagan was the last Republican president, it is important to remind ourselves what a destructive force he was.  So, as a public service, I've re-posted the piece I did last year to dishonor his centennial.

   

The Reagan Years: Mourning in America 

(originally posted January 20, 2011)

Brace yourself for the bipartisan celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth on February 6, 2011.  In anticipation of the sanitized and romanticized Centennial celebration, I thought I would provide a primer on some of the darker aspects of Reagan's Presidency. 

1.  Hostility to civil rights.  As Bob Herbert stated, "Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people."  Reagan launched his first presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place notorious for the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers, and gave a speech about states' rights.  Herbert explained that Reagan was "tapping the code;" that talking about states' rights in that particular venue was a clear signal that he was not going to favor African Americans over whites.  And this proved true throughout his presidency.  He was also speaking in code when, as Paul Krugman related, he "repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud."  Herbert summarized:  "As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation."

2.  Trickle Down Economics.  As the theory goes, cut tax rates for the wealthy, and their increased spending will trickle down to the rest of us.  In a classic parody in 2007, The Onion nails the absurdity: "26 years after Ronald Reagan first set his controversial fiscal policies into motion, the deceased president's massive tax cuts for the ultrarich at last trickled all the way down to deliver their bounty, in the form of a $10 bonus, to Hazelwood, MO car-wash attendant Frank Kellener."  As Krugman points out: "While the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen"  Here is a clip from Rachel Maddow which completely dismantles the theory that cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cutting social spending, and cutting regulation was sound or fair economic policy.

3.  Ketchup is a vegetable.  Emblematic of Reagan's efforts to drastically cut social spending was the attempt by his administration to reclassify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables, which would have saved money by allowing public schools to eliminate vegetables from the hot lunches.  Reagan severely cut spending on social programs, including substantial reductions in federal subsidies for low-income housing, and spending on Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and federal aid to education.

4.  From Bag Ladies to the The Homeless. Reagan drastically cut subsidies for low income housing, and together with cuts in welfare and other social programs, this led to a steep increase in the homeless.   Under Reagan, the number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 24.5 million in 1978 to 32.5 million in 1988.  By the late 1980s, the number of homeless had increased to 1.2 million a year.  Reagan, in a revealing moment, claimed on Good Morning America that people sleeping on the streets "are homeless, you might say, by choice."




5.  Justice Scalia.  Ronald Reagan appointed three justices to the Supreme Court:  Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Court, Anthony Kennedy, and Antonin Scalia.  (Reagan was unsuccessful in his efforts to appoint Robert Bork, whose nomination failed when his extremely unorthodox right wing views were aired in his confirmation hearing.)  Justice Scalia has proven to be one of the most reactionary justices in modern times.  Most recently, he stated that he did not believe the Constitution protected women from discrimination.  All three of these Reagan justices were in the majority in Bush v. Gore, one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Supreme Court.

6.  Reshaping the Federal Bench.  Ed Meese was a highly influential adviser to Reagan, with their relationship dating back to when Reagan was Governor of California.  In the Reagan Administration, Meese was first given the title of Counselor with a cabinet rank and later was Attorney General, before resigning due to a corruption scandal.  Of his many dubious contributions to the Reagan Presidency, one of the most significant was in helping to aggressively re-shape the federal judiciary by appointing extremely conservative judges. Potential nominees underwent intense screening and scrutiny to ensure their conservative credentials.  By the time Reagan left office, he had appointed more than half of the judges on the federal bench and he left a blueprint for appointing judges that was followed by his Republican successors.

7.  Freedom Fighters.  The Reagan Doctrine's stated policy was to support so-called anti-communist rebel movements that were seeking to overthrow Soviet-supported governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua and other countries.  This resulted in the U.S. providing substantial backing to groups that did not necessarily have support of their own people and who were linked to human rights abuses and, in some cases, drug trafficking.  Perhaps most cynically, Reagan referred to the CIA-trained and financed Nicaraguan Contras as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers."  At the same time Reagan backed right wing dictatorships with egregious human rights records because they supported U.S. interests and thwarted left wing insurgencies, including in El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, and the Philippines.

8.  Iran-Contra.  The Reagan Administration sold weapons to Iran, ostensibly to secure the release of hostages, and then used the money from the arm sales to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.  However, there was an embargo on arms sales to Iran and legal prohibition against funding the Contras. The ensuing scandal revealed evidence of money-laundering, arms smuggling and drug trafficking, and resulted in the the indictment of 14 participants, 11 of whom were convicted.  Some of the convictions were overturned and President George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scandal, pardoned six of those convicted.  The failure of any real accounting for the abuses of power stemming from the Iran-Contra Scandal lead directly to the excesses of the George W. Bush Administration, which operated under the belief that the executive branch could run foreign policy as it saw fit regardless of  laws, treaties and the Constitution.

9.  James G. Watt.  Reagan continually tried to undermine the mandate of government agencies by appointing people to head them who were opposed to the agencies' missions.  The Labor Department became anti-labor.  The EPA became anti-environment.  Reagan actually tried to abolish the Department of Education.  The classic example was the appointment of James Watt to be Secretary of the Interior.  Watt was hostile to regulations protecting the environment and  supported the unfettered development and use of federal lands by foresting, ranching and other commercial interests.  Another incongruous appointment was tapping Clarence Thomas to head the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.  

10. AIDS.  We can't forget Reagan's "shameful abdication of leadership in the fight against AIDS."  The first AIDS cases surfaced in 1981.  With the growing national health crisis and the dire need for federal funding and research, as well as leadership to quell the homophobic reaction to the disease, Reagan did nothing and said nothing.  On the contrary, his communications director, Pat Buchanan, said, that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."  By Feb. 1, 1983, over 1000 AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the U.S. Reagan remained silent.  Over two years later, in 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman said in the Washington Post:  "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence.  Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals."  Still nothing.  Reagan would ultimately address the issue of AIDS in 1987, towards the end of his presidency, but by then over 36,000 had been diagnosed with AIDS and almost 21,000 had died.

Ronald Reagan's True Legacy: Republicans Continue To Create Their Own Reality

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."  -- Ron Suskind, quoting unnamed Bush aide in 2004 NYT Magazine article.

Robbie Conal

On "60 Minutes," after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor signaled a reluctance to compromise with Democrats, interviewer Leslie Stahl noted that Cantor's idol, Ronald Reagan, compromised by raising taxes.  At which point, Cantor’s press secretary, off camera, bizarrely began yelling that Stahl was lying.  As Stahl told “60 Minutes” viewers, “There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982 during a recession.”

Paul Krugman, Steve Benen, Ezra Klein and others weighed in and demonstrated that President Reagan unequivocally raised taxes during his time in office.  Indeed, ThinkProgress documented that Reagan did not “compromise” just this once, but actually increased taxes “in seven of his eight years in office, including one stretch of four tax increases in just two years.”

Eric Alterman makes the critical point about this incident: "The real story here is the vehemence of the conservative movement’s commitment to ignoring all forms of evidence that it finds inconsistent with its ideological preconceptions, regardless of circumstances or even consequences."

Alterman goes on to say that Reagan's "true legacy" is the tendency among conservatives to "ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence."

The president tended to “build these little worlds and live in them,” noted a senior advisor. “He makes things up and believes them,” explained one of his kids. President Reagan thought he'd liberated concentration camps. He invented what he called "a verbal message" from the pope in support of his Central America policies, news to everyone in Vatican City. In 1985 President Reagan one day announced that the vicious South African apartheid regime of P.W. Botha had already "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country." And note that I have not even mentioned the words “Iran Contra,” a scandal that was filled with more presidential lies than one can comfortably recount here.

Ronald Reagan's "preference for fantasy over fact" proved to be such a successful strategy that, as Alterman says, "it became a template for the modern conservative movement, and hence underlies its leaders' statements on virtually every topic from economics to the environment to the beliefs of this country’s founders."

Alterman aptly concludes that it is a "is a shame for Americans, liberals, and conservatives both" that the right wing insists on maintaining falsehoods in the face of reality, and "it is our media’s shame that such lies are rarely, if ever, identified as such."

The Wall Street Occupiers And The Democratic Party

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Will the Wall Street Occupiers morph into a movement that has as much impact on the Democratic Party as the Tea Party has had on the GOP? Maybe. But there are reasons for doubting it.

Tea Partiers have been a mixed blessing for the GOP establishment – a source of new ground troops and energy but also a pain in the assets with regard to attracting independent voters. As Rick Perry and Mitt Romney square off, that pain will become more evident.

So far the Wall Street Occupiers have helped the Democratic Party. Their inchoate demand that the rich pay their fair share is tailor-made for the Democrats’ new plan for a 5.6 percent tax on millionaires, as well as the President’s push to end the Bush tax cut for people with incomes over $250,000 and to limit deductions at the top.

And the Occupiers give the President a potential campaign theme. “These days, a lot of folks who are doing the right thing aren’t rewarded and a lot of folks who aren’t doing the right thing are rewarded,” he said at his news conference this week, predicting that the frustration fueling the Occupiers will “express itself politically in 2012 and beyond until people feel like once again we’re getting back to some old-fashioned American values.”

But if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it than the GOP has had with the Tea Party.


After all, a big share of both parties’ campaign funds comes from the Street and corporate board rooms. The Street and corporate America also have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do their bidding – not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey’s and Karl Rove’s SuperPACs. Even if the Occupiers have access to some union money, it’s hardly a match.

Yet the real difficulty lies deeper. A little history is helpful here.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party had no trouble embracing economic populism. It charged the large industrial concentrations of the era – the trusts – with stifling the economy and poisoning democracy. In the 1912 campaign Woodrow Wilson promised to wage “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that have set us in a straightjacket to so as they please.” The struggle to break up the trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, nothing less than a “second struggle for emancipation.”

Wilson lived up to his words – signing into law the Clayton Antitrust Act (which not only strengthened antitrust laws but also exempted unions from their reach), establishing the Federal Trade Commission (to root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce”), and creating the first national income tax.

Years later Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security. FDR also instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street and big business went on the attack. In the 1936 campaign, Roosevelt warned against the “economic royalists” who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor … these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake, Roosevelt thundered, was nothing less that the “survival of democracy.” He told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him. “Never before, in all our history, have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred!”

By the 1960s, though, the Democratic Party had given up on populism. Gone from presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers. This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity grew the middle class and reduced the gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers got generous wage and benefit increases.

By then Keynesianism had become a widely-accepted antidote to economic downturns – substituting the management of aggregate demand for class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed “we’re all Keynesians now.” Who needed economic populism when fiscal and monetary policy could even out the business cycle, and the rewards of growth were so widely distributed?

But there was another reason for the Democrats’ increasing unease with populism. The Vietnam War spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much if not more than it distrusted Wall Street and big business. Richard Nixon’s electoral victory in 1968 was accompanied by a deep rift between liberal Democrats and the New Left, which continued for decades.

Enter Ronald Reagan, master storyteller, who jumped into the populist breach. If Reagan didn’t invent right-wing populism in America he at least gave it full-throttled voice. “Government is the problem, not the solution,” he intoned, over and over again. In Reagan’s view, Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement.

The Democratic Party never regained its populist footing. To be sure, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 promising to “fight for the forgotten middle class” against the forces of “greed,” but Clinton inherited such a huge budget deficit from Reagan and George H.W. Bush that he couldn’t put up much of a fight. And after losing his bid for universal health care, Clinton himself announced that the “era of big government” was over – and he proved it by ending welfare.

Democrats have not been the ones to engage in class warfare. That was the distinct product of right-wing Republican populism. Anybody recall the Republican ad in the 2004 presidential election describing Democrats as a “tax-hiking, government spending, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak Show”?

Republicans repeatedly attacked John Kerry as a “Massachusetts liberal” who was part of the “Chardonnay-and-brie set.” George W. Bush mocked Kerry for finding a “new nuance” each day on Iraq – drawing out the word “nuance” to emphasize Kerry’s French cultural elitism. “In Texas, we don’t do nuance,” he said, to laughter and applause. House Republican leader Tom DeLay opened his campaign speeches by saying “Good morning or, as John Kerry would say, Bonjour.”

The Tea Party has been quick to pick up the same class theme. At the Conservative Political Action Conference of 2010, Minnesota Governor Tom Pawlenty attacked “the elites” who believe Tea Partiers are “not as sophisticated because a lot of them didn’t go to Ivy League Schools” and “don’t hang out at … Chablis-drinking, Brie-eating parties in San Francisco.” After his son Rand Paul was elected for Kentucky’s Senate seat that May, Congressman Ron Paul explained that voters want to “get rid of the power people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everyone else.”

Which brings us to the present day. Barack Obama is many things but he is as far from left-wing populism as any Democratic president in modern history. True, he once had the temerity to berate “fat cats” on Wall Street, but that remark was the exception – and subsequently caused him endless problems on the Street.

To the contrary, Obama has been extraordinarily solicitous of Wall Street and big business – making Timothy Geithner Treasury Secretary and de facto ambassador from the Street; seeing to it that Bush’s Fed appointee, Ben Bernanke, got another term; and appointing GE Chair Jeffrey Immelt to head his jobs council.

Most tellingly, it was President Obama’s unwillingness to place conditions on the bailout of Wall Street – not demanding, for example, that the banks reorganize the mortgages of distressed homeowners, and that they accept the resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act, as conditions for getting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars – that contributed to the new populist insurrection.

The Wall Street bailout fueled the Tea Party (at the Utah Republican convention that ousted incumbent Republican Senator Robert Bennett in 2010, the mob repeatedly shouted “TARP! TARP! TARP!”), and it surely fuels some of the current fulminations of Occupy Wall Street.

This is not to say that the Occupiers can have no impact on the Democrats. Nothing good happens in Washington – regardless of how good our president or representatives may be – unless good people join together outside Washington to make it happen. Pressure from the left is critically important.

But the modern Democratic Party is not likely to embrace left-wing populism the way the GOP has embraced – or, more accurately, been forced to embrace – right-wing populism. Just follow the money, and remember history.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

Tonight's Republican Debate: The 19th Century Or The Stone Age?

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

William McKinley

Tonight a bevy of Republican presidential hopefuls hope to emerge as finalists. Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann will battle for the right-wing nut Tea Party finals. Mitt Romney and John Huntsman will position themselves for the moderate right-wing finals. The putative winners in both these rounds will take on each other in the months ahead.

Nonetheless, listen tonight (if you can bear it) for anything other than standard Republican boilerplate since the 1920s — a wistful desire to return to the era of President William McKinley, when the federal government was small, the Fed and the IRS had yet to be invented, state laws determined worker safety and hours, evolution was still considered contentious, immigrants were almost all European, big corporations and robber barons ran the government, the poor were desperate, and the rich were lived like old-world aristocrats.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Republican Party had a brief flirtation with the twentieth century. Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, and presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such leftist adventures as Medicare and a clean environment. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public-works project in the history of the United States — the National Defense Highway Act, which linked the nation together with four-lane (and occasionally six-lane) Interstate highways. The GOP also supported a large expansion of federally-supported higher education. And to many Republicans at the time, a marginal income tax rate of more than 70 percent on top incomes was not repugnant.

But the Republican Party that emerged in the 1970s began its march back to the 19th century. Ronald Reagan lent his charm and single-mindedness to the charge but the foundations had been laid long before. By the time Newt Gingrich and his regressive followers took over the House of Representatives in 1995, social conservatives, isolationists, libertarians, and corporatists had taken over the GOP once again.

Some Democrats are quietly rooting for Perry or Bachmann, on the theory that they’re so extreme that they’ll bolster Obama’s chances for a second term and make it easier for congressional Democrats to scare Independents into voting for a Democratic House and maybe even Senate.
I understand the logic but I’d rather not take the chance. A Perry or Bachmann wouldn’t just take us back to the 19th century. They’d take us back to the stone age.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

The Normalizing of Political Lies

The embarrassing spectacle of a sitting president having to issue his long-form birth certificate in what promises to be a futile effort to satisfy conspiracy theorists perfectly illustrates Rick Perlstein's thesis about how right wing liars are enabled by the mainstream media.

Last November, Perlstein wrote about President Obama's refusal to challenge the outright falsehoods perpetrated by the opposition prior to the mid-term elections.  ("How Obama Enables Rush.")  Perlstein lamented that "we live in a mendocracy," i.e. rule by liars.  A prime example was that "Republican politicians, and conservative commentators" lied that "Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic," and because neither the mainstream media nor the White House corrected them, people believed it:  "When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes 'uncivil' to call out liars, lying becomes free."

Perlstein, whose research has focused on the birth of the modern conservative movement around the Barry Goldwater campaign and the Nixon Era (See Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Before The Storm:  Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of America), is perfectly positioned to more broadly explain the historical factors that have shaped the "the modern political lie," which he does in a must-read article, Inside the GOP's Fact-Free Nation, just published in Mother Jones. (As Rick says, you can read it on line, but buy it anyway.)

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it. The former has always been with us: Kings, corporate executives, politicians, and ideologues from both sides of the aisle have been entirely willing to bend the truth when they felt it necessary or convenient. So why does it seem as if we're living in a time of overwhelmingly brazen deception? What's changed.
Today's marquee fibs almost always evolve the same way: A tree falls in the forest—say, the claim that Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction," or that Barack Obama has an infernal scheme to parade our nation's senior citizens before death panels. But then a network of media enablers helps it to make a sound—until enough people believe the untruth to make the lie an operative part of our political discourse.

Perlstein takes us from the sinking of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba in 1899 to the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 to the 1970s, when thanks to the examples of courageous truth-telling by Walter Cronkite and Daniel Ellsberg, "all sorts of American institutions—Congress, municipal governments, even the intelligence community . . . launched searching reconstructions of their normal ways of doing business."  One "keynote of 1970s culture" was "a willingness to acknowledge that America might no longer be invincible, and that any realistic assessment of how we could prosper and thrive in the future had to reckon with that hard-won lesson."  But then, as Perlstein writes, "along came Reagan."

Ronald Reagan explicitly built his appeal around the notion that it was time to stop challenging the powerful. A new sort of lie took over: that the villains were not those deceiving the nation, but those exposing the deceit—those, as Reagan put it in his 1980 acceptance speech, who "say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith." 

While as Perlstein writes, Reagan "ushered in the 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' era of political lying, . . . it took a deeper trend to accelerate the cultural shift away from truth-telling-as-patriotism to a full-scale epistemological implosion."  What had been building since "at least the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when many viewers complained about the media images of police beating protesters," became fully apparent by the 1980s -- "news became fluffier, hosts became airier—less assured of their own moral authority."

And what evolved was "a new media definition of civility that privileged 'balance' over truth-telling—even when one side was lying."  As a result, "right-wing ideologues" are able to lie successfully and without consequence because they "are amplified by 'balanced' outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said 'controversy.'"

And, here, as Perlstein explains, is the "the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now:

Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone—a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera—who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence—that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs—the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

[Related posts:  Odor of Mendacity]

The Reagan Years: Mourning in America

Brace yourself for the bipartisan celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth on February 6, 2011.  In anticipation of the sanitized and romanticized Centennial celebration, I thought I would provide a primer on some of the darker aspects of Reagan's Presidency. 

1.  Hostility to civil rights.  As Bob Herbert stated, "Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people."  Reagan launched his first presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place notorious for the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers, and gave a speech about states' rights.  Herbert explained that Reagan was "tapping the code;" that talking about states' rights in that particular venue was a clear signal that he was not going to favor African Americans over whites.  And this proved true throughout his presidency.  He was also speaking in code when, as Paul Krugman related, he "repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud."  Herbert summarized:  "As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation."

2.  Trickle Down Economics.  As the theory goes, cut tax rates for the wealthy, and their increased spending will trickle down to the rest of us.  In a classic parody in 2007, The Onion nails the absurdity: "26 years after Ronald Reagan first set his controversial fiscal policies into motion, the deceased president's massive tax cuts for the ultrarich at last trickled all the way down to deliver their bounty, in the form of a $10 bonus, to Hazelwood, MO car-wash attendant Frank Kellener."  As Krugman points out: "While the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen"  Here is a clip from Rachel Maddow which completely dismantles the theory that cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cutting social spending, and cutting regulation was sound or fair economic policy.

3.  Ketchup is a vegetable.  Emblematic of Reagan's efforts to drastically cut social spending was the attempt by his administration to reclassify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables, which would have saved money by allowing public schools to eliminate vegetables from the hot lunches.  Reagan severely cut spending on social programs, including substantial reductions in federal subsidies for low-income housing, and spending on Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and federal aid to education.

4.  From Bag Ladies to the The Homeless. Reagan drastically cut subsidies for low income housing, and together with cuts in welfare and other social programs, this led to a steep increase in the homeless.   Under Reagan, the number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 24.5 million in 1978 to 32.5 million in 1988.  By the late 1980s, the number of homeless had increased to 1.2 million a year.  Reagan, in a revealing moment, claimed on Good Morning America that people sleeping on the streets "are homeless, you might say, by choice."  

5.  Justice Scalia.  Ronald Reagan appointed three justices to the Supreme Court:  Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Court, Anthony Kennedy, and Antonin Scalia.  (Reagan was unsuccessful in his efforts to appoint Robert Bork, whose nomination failed when his extremely unorthodox right wing views were aired in his confirmation hearing.)  Justice Scalia has proven to be one of the most reactionary justices in modern times.  Most recently, he stated that he did not believe the Constitution protected women from discrimination.  All three of these Reagan justices were in the majority in Bush v. Gore, one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Supreme Court.

6.  Reshaping the Federal Bench.  Ed Meese was a highly influential adviser to Reagan, with their relationship dating back to when Reagan was Governor of California.  In the Reagan Administration, Meese was first given the title of Counselor with a cabinet rank and later was Attorney General, before resigning due to a corruption scandal.  Of his many dubious contributions to the Reagan Presidency, one of the most significant was in helping to aggressively re-shape the federal judiciary by appointing extremely conservative judges. Potential nominees underwent intense screening and scrutiny to ensure their conservative credentials.  By the time Reagan left office, he had appointed more than half of the judges on the federal bench and he left a blueprint for appointing judges that was followed by his Republican successors.

7.  Freedom Fighters.  The Reagan Doctrine's stated policy was to support so-called anti-communist rebel movements that were seeking to overthrow Soviet-supported governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua and other countries.  This resulted in the U.S. providing substantial backing to groups that did not necessarily have support of their own people and who were linked to human rights abuses and, in some cases, drug trafficking.  Perhaps most cynically, Reagan referred to the CIA-trained and financed Nicaraguan Contras as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers."  At the same time Reagan backed right wing dictatorships with egregious human rights records because they supported U.S. interests and thwarted left wing insurgencies, including in El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, and the Philippines.

8.  Iran-Contra.  The Reagan Administration sold weapons to Iran, ostensibly to secure the release of hostages, and then used the money from the arm sales to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.  However, there was an embargo on arms sales to Iran and legal prohibition against funding the Contras. The ensuing scandal revealed evidence of money-laundering, arms smuggling and drug trafficking, and resulted in the the indictment of 14 participants, 11 of whom were convicted.  Some of the convictions were overturned and President George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scandal, pardoned six of those convicted.  The failure of any real accounting for the abuses of power stemming from the Iran-Contra Scandal lead directly to the excesses of the George W. Bush Administration, which operated under the belief that the executive branch could run foreign policy as it saw fit regardless of  laws, treaties and the Constitution.

9.  James G. Watt.  Reagan continually tried to undermine the mandate of government agencies by appointing people to head them who were opposed to the agencies' missions.  The Labor Department became anti-labor.  The EPA became anti-environment.  Reagan actually tried to abolish the Department of Education.  The classic example was the appointment of James Watt to be Secretary of the Interior.  Watt was hostile to regulations protecting the environment and  supported the unfettered development and use of federal lands by foresting, ranching and other commercial interests.  Another incongruous appointment was tapping Clarence Thomas to head the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.  

10. AIDS.  We can't forget Reagan's "shameful abdication of leadership in the fight against AIDS."  The first AIDS cases surfaced in 1981.  With the growing national health crisis and the dire need for federal funding and research, as well as leadership to quell the homophobic reaction to the disease, Reagan did nothing and said nothing.  On the contrary, his communications director, Pat Buchanan, said, that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."  By Feb. 1, 1983, over 1000 AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the U.S. Reagan remained silent.  Over two years later, in 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman said in the Washington Post:  "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence.  Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals."  Still nothing.  Reagan would ultimately address the issue of AIDS in 1987, towards the end of his presidency, but by then over 36,000 had been diagnosed with AIDS and almost 21,000 had died.