How Close Was Another Nader-Screwed Presidential Election? Yellow Dog Blog

Fear and Loathing in Post - Election Amerikka

Well, after snorting 20 mg of Celexa, booting 4 hits of Paxil, ingesting a gram of Prozac and anally suppositing a liter of Welbutrin, I am somewhat prepared to look into the vortex know as the second Bush term as President. We as Progressives spent billions on this election (which they apparently stole fair and square). We held lavish dinner fund raisers for Kerry in the palisades above the pacific in the likes of Mo Ostin's house. We schlepped tired old single black moms to canvass in Harlem phone banks, the Boss sang a thound hit tunes to massive audiences. We registered millions of new young and minority voters. We ran 527s until we were blue in the face. Michael Moore created a documentary that destroyed the opponent for all to see - and there was no one who didn't see it! The war hero candidate of our choice won all three debates against a sitting draft dodging President while an unpopular American Occupation plodded onward in Iraq. We threw everything the Democratic National Committee had at them. We marginized Ralph Nader. We selected two candidates who were bereft of skeletons. We had minorities registered and organized up the kazoo. For almost three weeks down here in Palm Beach County, Florida massive amounts of voters stood stoically in the rain and the broiling sun for up to four hours to cast their votes early in this Presidential elections. This was the Ground Zero of the 2000 election debacle and everyone demanded that this electioon their vote would be counted no matter what. I stood in awe as I walked the long snaking lines around polling places examining the faces of these local voters. One word could describe them - determined. Determined to be heard this time around. Determined to leave their mark on history. Their name on the wall. Their blood on the tracks.In the end, we had nothing left. There was no more that could have been done. No one left to convince. The game clock had run out. I spent 12 long hours manning phone banks in the local Palm Beach County fire fighters union hall along with many others in a coordinated effort to get any and all Democratic votes out on Election Day. I don't think we missed a living, breathing Democrat in the entire county (Well, some were not exactly breathing now that I think about it.)

Early exit polling reflected our hard work and the work of thousands on the campaign trail. Kerry was leading in time tested exit polls by a small bit in almost every single contest. We knew it would be a long night. What we didn't know was that this would be the Republican equivalent of the Night of the Long Knives.
Here's what we were told when the dust settled: This is from today's (Thursday Nov 4) Palm Beach Post: "The second part of the plan, the part about getting massive turnout, didn't happen for the Democrats" Palm Beach County, a key Democratic stronghold, gave Al Gore 270,000 votes in 2000 and gave Kerry 275,000 votes this year." (Now don't forget, this is without the Buchannan mis-vote and the hanging chad problems and vitually no Ralph Nader influence.)
"The percentage of county voters actually DROPPED from 70% in 2000 to 62% in 2004. The same story line, with even more damaging results for Kerry, held in Broward County, which gave Gore a 210,000-vore margin in 2000 and Kerry a 205,000-vote margin this year."

Let me say this, I have spoken with the local veteran Democratic folks I worked with down here. No one is buying it. It ain't gonna fly. No one has any solild explanation for it, but that doesn't make them able to accept something that is completely illogical and without probablility. No one even KNOWS any Republicans down here!

Did you call yet? Call your senators, call your congress critter, call the White House.

Nobody likes the chained CPI. And yet, the Very Serious People are still Very Serious about it:

On the news that President Obama’s budget indeed contains a highly unpopular proposal for Social Security cuts known as “chained CPI,” a new poll by the American Association of Retired Persons shows us exactly how unpopular it is.

The AARP reveals that 70 percent of voters age 50-plus oppose the use of the chained CPI to cut benefits, and two-thirds of them – including 60 percent of Republicans — say they would be “considerably less likely” to support a congressional candidate if he or she backed a new way of calculating consumer prices. And 84 percent of voters over 50 say Social Security has no place in budget-deficit discussions, since it is self-financed.

On every single question, Republicans lag only a point or two behind Democrats in their opposition to Social Security cuts.

Michael Lind explains why it’s such a bad deal on policy terms here. I’ve written about it many times, including here. The AARP opposes it on policy terms. Now its new survey shows how risky it is politically.

“The chained CPI reduction snowballs over time and would increase taxes for most taxpayers — at the same time that it cuts benefits for children, veterans, widows, retirees, and people with disabilities,” said AARP executive vice president Nancy LeaMond in a statement. “As this survey shows, older Americans oppose the chained CPI and they’ve historically made their opinions known to their elected officials.”

Just remember, a lot of the people who will make angry statements over the next few weeks are the same people who insisted they wouldn't support the affordable care act without a public option. So time will tell who's full of shit.

Praise be to Judge Antonin Scalia, for he sees what the rest of us do not. The man for whom nasty, brutish and short is not simply a political formulation, but a mirror image, can look at hundreds of years of slavery, 100 more of legalised segregation and another 50 of daily discrimination and see "racial entitlement" in the basic right to vote in America. I guess it's kind of like the right-wing-clown entitlement enjoyed by our current Supreme Court.

Scalia, of course, was a modern Republican (in a robe) before it was even cool. I mean that in the sense that it's clear to anyone taking so much as a gander at what animates the GOP of 2013 - as well as Scalia's immunity to legal reasoning - that it's not any set of policy ideas, but simple emotion: all-consuming, blood-curdling, vein-bulging-out-of-the-forehead, Mel Gibson-watching-Fiddler-On-The-Roof ANGER.

Policy-wise, the GOP is an entity that literally lacks any new ideas, has no interest in governing and has rejected all of its own policy positions from as recently as early 2008 as "oh-my-God-we're-all-doomed!" creeping Socialism (see: cap and trade, earned-income tax credit, individual healthcare mandate). Rejecting anything right wingers sneeringly see as created by them-there libruls is the secret handshake of modern conservatism.

You believe in global warming? Then they don't, dang it! You accept that human beings didn't ride saddleback on a brachiosaurus into the Battle of Little Bighorn? They have an App for that, the Creation Museum, where you can ride Noah's Ark with your friendly Triassic-period imperial walker. You offer them way-too-friendly a deal on the budget? Then as Cartman from South Park says, "screw you guys... I'm going home".

The most potent example is the rise and fall of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as conservative heartthrob. He was a Republican Superhero just a year ago, when he headlined what Republican consultant Steve Schmidt called "The Star Wars Bar" of conservative gatherings, the CPAC Conference. Yet, he was quite publicly not invited to this year's CPAC.

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Right wing forces in this country are obsessed with the size of government, but the fundamental debate we should be having is not about size but what the goal of government should be. What is government’s central mission?

There are four major views on this question in modern American politics, two in each political party.

The first Republican view is boiled down to the central organizing principle that government should be as small as possible. That’s it.

Size (the small variety) not only matters, but is the only thing that matters. Any mission or goal that government has is overridden and overwhelmed by the urgent desire to make it smaller. Whether cuts in the size of government are rationally planned doesn’t matter, as their rhetoric on the sequester makes clear. Whether cuts in the size of government hurt people or hurt the economy as a whole doesn’t matter either. I've heard heart-breaking stories, for example, of parents with disabled kids lobbying against the cuts that will devastate the programs that help their children, with Republican congressmen telling them it doesn’t matter, we just have to cut the size of government. Grover Norquist famously said that he wants to make government so small that he can drown it in a bathtub, and his Tea Party comrades are clearly trying to do exactly that at the cost of everything else.

While all Republicans talk about wanting to make government smaller, the other Republican view on what the mission of government should be is less focused on size, and more focused on this central thing: serving the needs of big business. This idea was most famously (or infamously) articulated by the former Republican chair of the House Committee on Financial Services in 2011 when he said “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

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I know everyone was entranced by Bill Clinton's speech last night, as well they should have been. The man has more charisma in his pinkie than the biggest rock star has in their entire body. And there's no question he laid out the most compelling case possible for re-electing President Obama. But the really important speech last night in terms of raw substance, by far, was Elizabeth Warren's 15 minutes.

Because Warren made clear, even more than Clinton, what really is at stake in this election. It's down to a simple choice for Americans: Do they want democracy, or do they want oligarchy, rule by the rich? It's really that simple, that stark, and that significant.

Here's Warren last night:

I’m here tonight to talk about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids, their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth--the game is rigged against them.

... People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs--the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs--still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do.

... The Republican vision is clear: “I’ve got mine, the rest of you are on your own.” Republicans say they don’t believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends. After all, Mitt Romney’s the guy who said corporations are people.

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that’s why we need Barack Obama.

As D-Day puts it:

That’s simply a far more honest portrayal of the America we actually live in than anyone usually articulates on stage at a national political convention. She told the story in broad strokes, the story people feel in their core, the story that anyone paying attention since the Great Recession knows. We’re not a fairy-tale land where everyone can grow up and be whatever they want. We’re not a land of social mobility and equality of opportunity. We’re in an economy that’s unraveled pretty badly, and over a 30-year period, that has cut off those avenues for mobility, and now has become a favor factory for the rich and powerful. People may not want to hear this; but they know it.

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As a lot of people have been noticing recently, it's past time we had an honest conversation about race in this country. The problem is what happens to the conversation as soon as conservatives get involved.

Of course, the real problem with race in America originates with conservatives, so perhaps that's not surprising. This is a historic problem. After all, it is conservatives who resisted the end of slavery. It is conservatives who instituted, and then protected with a fifty-year campaign of terrorism known as lynching, Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South. It is conservatives who resisted the Civil Rights Movement with every ounce of their energy. And it is conservatives today who resist any kind of advancement in civil rights for minorities.

As we've explained previously, their favorite rhetorical technique in pursuing this anti-rational course is what we call "the bloody shirt gambit": Converting perpetrators into victims and victims into perpetrators by claiming that the very discussion of the atrocities committed by violent right-wingers is an act of demagoguery and thus more vile than the original act in question itself. They scream, "You're waving the bloody shirt!" any time someone talks about the realities of their racial bigotry -- or, in more recent vintage, "You're playing the race card!" -- and suddenly the very discussion of the matter is placed off-limits.

A good example of this happened recently, when Time's Joe Klein appeared on Chris Matthews' Sunday news show on NBC, and the discussion of how President Obama was discussed by the panel, including Klein and Helene Cooper. At one point, the discussion ran like this:

Cooper: Four years of covering Barack Obama, he does not play the race card. Not in a negative way. He does not do that.

Klein: He hates it. He hates it. He probably should, though -- he probably should address it because the bitterness out there is really becoming marked.

Immediately, the headlines on Drudge followed those that appeared at Dan Riehl's wingnutofastic joint, to wit, that Klein was urging Obama to "play the race card" -- even though what Klein clearly said was that what Obama needs to do is address the rising tide of racial animus that's being whipped up out there by the right-wingers playing the race card.

Such nuance, of course, was well over the heads of the folks at Fox News, who followed the Drudge lead and featured a segment on The Five discussing Klein's alleged faux pas as having urged Obama "play the race card". They all agreed that it would be a bad idea for Obama to "play the race card" by discussing racial tensions.

So Klein posted this response:

According to Mr. Drudge and Real Clear Politics, I’ve advised the President to play the race card on the Chris Matthews Sunday show. I didn’t, of course. The question to the panel was whether the President was going to have to address what appears to be a growing racial bitterness in the country. My response was that he should. That’s different from “playing the race card,” which is a term I’ve never used–it’s a cliche and a bad one, implying a political gambit or stunt. Political stunts that involve race are obnoxious. But race and ethnicity are issues that the President has addressed with intelligence in the past and, if the current Republican dog-whistling continues, may be something he might want to address in the future.

I don't normally defend Joe Klein -- the classic Beltway Villager -- but this was a sterling response that addressed the core issue: namely, the Republican campaign to clearly stir up racial resentment against Obama among working-class white voters, which even the most "centrist" observers can see is occurring.

Nonetheless, it naturally drew the ire of the natterers at The Five the next day:

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Following a tip, I began looking around recently for the federal Financial Disclosure Statements for the Democratic candidates involved in Washington's 1st Congressional District primary race, the election for which will be next week (but for which mail-in voting is currently under way).

But when I contacted the office the Clerk of the U.S. House, where these statements are filed, I was told that DelBene had not filed any Financial Disclosure Statement for 2011.

This is most peculiar. These statements are in fact required by law -- the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which clearly states:

Title I of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, as amended (5 U.S.C. app. 4 §§ 101-111) (EIGA) requires Members, officers, certain employees of the U.S. House of Representatives and related offices, and candidates for the House of Representatives to file Financial Disclosure Statements with the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

…

Individuals are required to file a Financial Disclosure Statement once they qualify as a candidate by raising or spending more than $5,000 in a campaign for election to the House of Representatives.

It is, in fact, a federal felony to fail to meet these requirements, punishable by heavy fines of up to $50,000 and, in the case of falsification, jail time. (See Page 9.)

Yet we know, from the forms that she filed with the Federal Elections Commission, that Suzan DelBene spent well over $5,000 in 2011 on her campaign for Congress in 2012.

We also know, from looking at the first quarter 2011 report, that she was designating these expenditures as going toward the 2012 primary (see the check boxes on the individual listings beginning on Page 6), as they were indeed for all the subsequent FEC filings for 2011.

We also know that, beginning in the fall of 2011, she began paying a salary to her campaign's finance chief (see Page 6).

It was kind of a startling and disturbing discovery. Why would a major candidate for federal office even run the risk of being investigated for this?

So I wrote to the DelBene campaign last Thursday and asked them to explain it. Here's my letter:

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One of the reasons the Wisconsin recall is such a huge event is this: Unions are being weakened, and as they are weakened, corporations will represent the majority of organized political activity, leaving people -- actual real, flesh and blood people -- without any voice at all. Unions are, after all, best at organizing and deploying people to get out the vote, to galvanize voters, and to push back on corporate messages.

The statistics on union membership in Wisconsin post union-buster bill passage are stunning. As Rachel explains, in one year public sector union membership in Wisconsin has shrunk with frightening rapidity. Before the union-buster passed, AFSCME membership in Wisconsin was 62,818 members. Today, post-passage, membership has shrunk to 28,745. AFT membership pre-passage was about 17,000 members. Post-passage, 11,000.

That's in one year. ONE single year.

From the transcript:

We've shown this chart a bunch of times on this show. These were the heavyweights when it came to outside spending in the 2010 election cycle. These were the ten groups that spent the most money on the election that year. Six of the ten spent big time on the right. They spent on the republican side. They were led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The biggest spender in 2010. Almost all the of groups spending on behalf of the republicans were corporate funded groups like that, business groups.

The only major spenders on behalf of Democrats in 2010 were unions. That was it. They made up only three of the top ten spenders. The only thing that Democrats had were unions. If you kill public sector unions in Wisconsin, you can kill unions altogether and you can kill this key source of strength. It's true around the country. They're doing it in Wisconsin.

Republicans set out to kill the unions and that's what is they have done. Look at this headline. Wisconsin unions see ranks drop ahead of recall vote. This is the membership for Wisconsin's second largest union of public sector workers. This is before the union stripping law. Here is that same union's membership today. We don't have the stats on all public unions but what we have looks the same. This is the American Federation of Teachers before the stripping law went into effect and this is the membership now.

A year after Scott Walker's law took effect. That's what they have been able to do in a year. Now because they could not stop the implementing of this law, the Democratic side in the Wisconsin recall effort doesn't have the means to compete politically that they usually have the unions play a political role. To the extent that unions are going away, they can play less of a political role.

It's a big reason why the Republican side has had a spending advantage that's reached at times 25 to 1. $25 on the republican side for every single dollar on the Democratic side. This recall election on Tuesday is really close. Democrats might yet pull it off. They say that the ground game is key.

Who used to be best at the ground game? Unions. Killing off the unions is what Republicans want to do in every state of the country. That's why Scott Walker is the poster boy for the Republican Party this year. They understand this is the way they can win not just now but forever. Republicans get this, and they want it to happen in every state in the country. Do Democrats get it? Do they understand what's at stake?

I would ask the question a little differently. I would ask whether people in general get it or whether they're so thoroughly spellbound by corporate mumbo-jumbo that they've lost their ability to reason. I say that because one of the most disappointing emails I ran across in the big email dump earlier this week was one from a union member to Scott Walker before the union bill was introduced, commending him for his approach.

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Washington, DC - Last week we witnessed the capo di tutti capi of political and policy evolution. President Barack Obama, after Vice-President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan played the role of his social-issue Shofar, came out in favour of the equality of marriage for all in the US, regardless of sexual orientation. To put it in simple terms: for the first time in the history of this country, the president of the United States supports gay marriage.

This is obviously a big moment. For those seeking to enter loving relationships recognised by law, nothing has changed in that realm. But culturally, when the president or other major political figures make strong statements on issues, it changes everything. To quote Republican House Leader Shelley Runyon in the film The Contender: "What I say, the American people will believe. And do you know why? Because I will have a very big microphone in front of me."

This rhetorical power is why a concomitant devolution by many in the Democratic Party, in protecting one of the two or three most important programs of the past century, the creation of social security, is so disturbing.

During the 2011 debate over the cliched "Grand Bargain", when right-wing Congressman were doing their darndest to moonwalk this country into financial default, perhaps just as frightening is what Democrats were willing to put on the table to appease the economic Morlocks. Namely, Medicare and the aforementioned social security (an issue that I work on), the latter so successful and politically powerful that it was responsible for taking millions of seniors (and children) out of poverty and helping cement an economically populist coalition within the Democratic Party that lasted a half century.

Why would Democrats be willing to touch this program, the crown jewel of progressive accomplishment, to deal with people who don't believe in compromise and have been trying to destroy the programme for decades? Likely, because too many Democrats have done their own evolving into a form of species known as Midcenturia Republicanus. Or Washington GOPers from the 1930s-1970s, who went along to get along, tried to always seem more "reasonable" than Democrats and, most importantly, remained a loveable minority in the halls of Congress.

Today, the consensus is rigged in the other direction. As Trudy Lieberman pointed out in her great piece in The Columbia Journalism Review:

"For nearly three years CJR has observed that much of the press has reported only one side of this story using 'facts' that are misleading, or flat-out wrong, while ignoring others ... news outlets have given the public a skewed picture of the financial health of this hugely important programme, which is the sole source of retirement funds for millions of Americans and will continue to be for decades to come."

When President Obama seems willing to talk about cutting social security, House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi refuses to rule it out and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer seems like a lion on the Serengeti eyeing a gazelle, this just sends a signal that it is OK for others to go even further - which bodes very badly for the future.

As Lieberman goes on to say, "the program can pay full benefits until 2036, and three-quarters of the benefits after that without new revenues. Many experts believe small fixes like lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes - $110,100 for 2012 - will make Social Security solvent for decades. But that option is not on Washington’s table, nor has it been discussed much in the press".

Why not?

Then there are ideas such as trimming the bloated, out-of-control defence budget, or allowing the US government to bulk negotiate for lower-priced prescription drugs for Medicare (like virtually every other post-industrial nation does) - or not imprisoning a larger share of our population, per capita, than Ming The Merciless.

Save billions on these wastes of funds and human potential, sprinkle some taxes on Kimye and poof. No deficit.

Yup, I hate to ruin it for any adrenaline junkies reading this, but not only is there no deficit crisis, but there are myriad ways to cure any minor ills without defenestrating social security, a programme that protects the 99 per cent of us - or one that you could say is more streetcar than car elevator. Additionally, recent elections in France and Greece reminded their elites that austerity is not only completely unnecessary and economically ahistorical, but ridiculously unpopular. Even 76 per cent of self described Tea Partiers - or people who think Christian rock is cool and lipids are a food group - don't want anyone touching their social security. Clear enough?

The United States has only two major parties, but nobody can make voters who are unenthusiastic trudge on over to their local polling place this November. Democrats need to stand up and protect social security, because it is the right thing to do, because there is simply no reason to cut it and because it shows strength politically (especially to those older voters who might not like the gay marriage decision). In other words, when it comes to social security: re-evolve already!