U.S. 2012 Election

[cupper]

That's interesting and all of that, and I'd waste hours debunking most of it, but I'm going to remain on my current long standing track and relegate Sarah Palin to the footnote of history that she somehow made herself to be. She's been irrelevant to the party since the results of the 2008 election came back, and irrelevant she should remain.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I doubt you can make a very strong case that she was irrelevant to the fortunes of the Republican Party in 2010.  Perhaps you are too fixated on the presidential election, which is but one among many.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I think she does matter, but less and less each election cycle. I think her endorsement is being actively sought by every serious GOP candidate - even Romney.

The question, my question anyway, is what's her AIM? Is it to defeat Obama or is to radicalize American politics?

If she were to endorse Romney, for example, at a key moment early next year he would, likely, have little difficulty beating Obama because he's already the favourite with many Republicans, a lot of independents and possibly even some conservative Democrats; it's only the right wing of the GOP that doesn't like or trust him. If Palin could give him the right wing of the GOP and,therefore, the White House, she would be well placed to influence America for four years.

 

[Kirkhill]

I think she does matter, but less and less each election cycle. I think her endorsement is being actively sought by every serious GOP candidate - even Romney.

The question, my question anyway, is what's her AIM? Is it to defeat Obama or is to radicalize American politics?

If she were to endorse Romney, for example, at a key moment early next year he would, likely, have little difficulty beating Obama because he's already the favourite with many Republicans, a lot of independents and possibly even some conservative Democrats; it's only the right wing of the GOP that doesn't like or trust him. If Palin could give him the right wing of the GOP and,therefore, the White House, she would be well placed to influence America for four years.

A Romney-Cain ticket endorsed by Palin perhaps?

 

[Edward Campbell]

The current numbers, the ones that I have seen, anyway, indicate that Romney can beat Obama IF he can get at least some of the Republican right on board. It may be through a VP candidate or Palin.

The GOP, with our without Palin, have to address the same question: what's the AIM? Is it to beat Obama and take back the White House or is it to die in a ditch for ideological purity?

 

[Brad Sallows]

Your strategy should be unfathomable, even if you don't plan it that way and are just lucky (but fortune does favour the prepared and the bold).  All the attention is on the big ticket races; little on what happens at the state level.  There was a lot of quiet, rightward shift in 2010 that didn't draw much attention; there will be more in 2012.  The further right the centre moves, the better overall for Republicans (country club, paleocon, libertarian, TP, or any other stripe).  It's not really much different from what Harper is doing, but of course Harper is the PM and our system is such that our head of state and senate distract no-one away from him.

Palin serves the Republican Party just by acting as a lightning rod, even if she never endorses a single candidate.  All the time and money spent attacking her is unavailable to attack anyone else.

 

[ModlrMike]

Underestimating Sarah Palin has been the left's fools' errand since she appeared on the last Republican ticket. She brings much more to the process than her detractors give her credit for.

 

[cupper]

I doubt you can make a very strong case that she was irrelevant to the fortunes of the Republican Party in 2010.  Perhaps you are too fixated on the presidential election, which is but one among many.

Forgive me for my jadedness. You really have to live around DC to understand how the election cycle never really ends, just morphs from one to the other. After 10 years of endless campaigning you start to get jaded and cynical.

The GOP is currently in a struggle within itself, the hard conservative right and TP vs the party's mainstream. And as a result, the current group of candidates leave a lot to be desired for either group. And this causes problems when the need extend beyond their base to win the presidency. The Hard right candidates either won't survive the primaries, or won't be electable in the general election because the independents who make up the center get turned off.

The center right candidate suffers because the others are ganging up in an anyone but Romney campaign. Romney has way too many vulnerable areas that leave him open to attack for flip flopping, and again he independents will question the true position. And the hard right support will drop off.

Their only saving grace right now is that the Dems have no idea how to use the power when they do win, and how to fight to get it back when they lose it.

I said it before and I will say it again, I'm glad I can't vote, because I would hate wasting it.

 

[Brad Sallows]

It doesn't matter if the current crop of candidates leave much to be desired.  The winner of the primary will face Obama, not Bill Clinton.

The TP has already shown it will get behind candidates even if they are not TP-favoured candidates.  Romney is the most likely to win the GOP primary.  The TP will support Romney.  The GOP "establishment" will support Romney.  The independents will not find much to dislike in Romney.  And the alternative will still be Barack "Pivoting to Jobs and the Economy Now...No, Really, I Mean It This Time" Obama.

 

[a_majoor]

The real importance of candidates and political activists like Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Governor Palin are the way they expand the parameters of the debate by exploring solutions outside of the GOP establishment.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Democrats right now is they have no other "voices" exploring new approaches to government (the OWS movement is parroting ideas that were current with the 1930 "Wobbly" movement, ideas not too much different from the administration itself).

Even Democrat party supporters are looking for new or different ideas:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204002304576628673446417268.html

The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire
Real-estate and newspaper mogul Mortimer Zuckerman voted for Obama but began seeing trouble as soon as the stimulus went into the pockets of municipal unions.


By JAMES FREEMAN

New York

'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn't seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.

The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision" in Washington and "desperate for strong leadership." Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor's, he wrote, "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country."

His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, "there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country." Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, "The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he's not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing."

We are sitting on the 18th floor of a skyscraper the day after protesters have marched on the homes of other Manhattan billionaires. It may seem odd that most of the targeted rich people had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis. But as Mr. Zuckerman ponders the Occupy Wall Street movement, he concludes that "the door to it was opened by the Obama administration, going after the 'millionaires and billionaires' as if everybody is a millionaire and a billionaire and they didn't earn it. . . . To fan that flame of populist anger I think is very divisive and very dangerous for this country."

This doesn't mean that Mr. Zuckerman opposes the protesters or questions their motives. When pressed, he concedes that the crowd in Lower Manhattan may include some full-time radicals, but he argues that the protesters are people with a legitimate grievance, as the country suffers high unemployment and stagnant middle-class incomes.

It is a subject he has obviously studied at length, and he explains how the real unemployment rate is actually well above the official level of 9.1%, which only measures people who have applied for a job within the previous four weeks. In fact, he says, unemployment has even surged beyond the Department of Labor's "U-6" number of 16.5% that has received increasing attention lately because it includes people who have given up looking for work within the past year, plus people who have been cut back from full-time employees to part-timers.

Mr. Zuckerman says that when you also consider the labor-force participation rate and the so-called "birth-death series" that measures business starts and failures, the real U.S. unemployment rate is now 20%. His voice rising with equal parts anger and sadness, he exclaims, "That's not America!"

It certainly isn't the America that Mr. Zuckerman discovered when he moved south from Canada to study at Wharton and Harvard Law School, graduating from both in the early 1960s. He reports feeling immediately at home and says he never considered returning "because of the sheer openness and energy of life in America."

The U.S. "has fundamentally great qualities," he says. "It's a society that welcomes talent, nourishes talent, admires talent . . . and rewards talent." But he sees "potentially catastrophic" political and fiscal problems. Mr. Zuckerman reports that when he was a young man, 50% of the top quartile of graduates from Canadian universities moved to the U.S. Now, he says, "I don't want my daughter telling me, 'Dad, I want to move back to Canada because that's the land of opportunity.'"

Mr. Zuckerman's bearish outlook since 2006 has been good for his business. That's when he decided that there was a bubble in commercial real estate and his publicly traded real estate investment trust needed to sell some of its office buildings.

'We've had a strategy in our business of trying to have 'A' assets in 'A' locations. I think we had 126 buildings at that point and we came to the conclusion that 16 of them were either A assets in B locations or B assets in A locations, like 280 Park [Avenue in New York]—it was a great address but not a good building. So we sold. We got through 15 of the 16 and we raised in the range of four and a half billion dollars," he says.

Once the downturn began, that cash pile helped him buy some famous properties at depressed prices, such as the General Motors building in New York and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. But he says his firm is still prepared for possible rough economic times ahead. "We're keeping it very liquid," he says, "because I don't know where this is going."

Mr. Zuckerman maintains that America will solve its problems over the long haul—"I am not somebody who's pessimistic about this country. I have had a life that's been better than my fantasies," he says—but he's certainly pessimistic about the current administration. That began shortly after inauguration day in 2009.

At that time he supported Mr. Obama's call for heavy spending on infrastructure. "But if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program," says Mr. Zuckerman, "roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic Party." He adds that "the Republicans understood this" and it diminished the chances for bipartisan legislating.

Then there was health-care reform: "Eighty percent of the country wanted them to get costs under control, not to extend the coverage. They used all their political capital to extend the coverage. I always had the feeling the country looked at that bill and said, 'Well, he may be doing it because he wants to be a transformational president, but I want to get my costs down!'"

Mr. Zuckerman recalls reports of Mr. Obama consulting various historians on the qualities of a transformational president. "But remember, transformations can go up and they can go down."

Now comes the latest fight over Mr. Obama's jobs plan, which has as its centerpiece a tax increase on the wealthy with obvious populist appeal. Mr. Zuckerman supports raising taxes on the rich but says such a proposal cannot be taken seriously unless it's paired with other measures to grow the economy and restrain deficit spending. He also wonders why, if the president wanted to get a plan enacted, he didn't begin with private bipartisan discussions with House and Senate leaders, instead of another address to a joint session of Congress.

"Even if you want to do this to revive your support in the base, to revive your credibility on the issues of the economy and jobs, which has fallen off the table, this isn't going to accomplish it. Another speech from this guy? The country knows this is just another speech. They understand it almost instantaneously, and his numbers have continued to go down for that reason. What the country wanted was some way of coming up with a solution."

The only solution Mr. Zuckerman sees now to juice the economy "is to broaden the tax base and simplify and lower tax [rates]. To me that will be as close to revenue-neutral as you're going to have so it isn't going to be seen as a budget buster." He views GOP candidate Herman Cain's "9-9-9 plan" as a "little bit simple-minded," but he says that a reform that closes loopholes and reduces compliance costs will stimulate both business and consumer spending.

Mr. Zuckerman sees a need for a cooperative effort like that of President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill when they reformed Social Security in 1983. That wasn't a permanent solution, of course, as Social Security needs more significant changes now, but Mr. Zuckerman sees it as a model of bipartisan progress.

Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.

Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. "I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan," says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff's release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.

"Reagan surprised me," says Mr. Zuckerman. "He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts."

'I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him," continues Mr. Zuckerman. "And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don't want to do and to like it. And that's what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That's what this president has lost."

"Democracy does not work without the right leadership," he says later, "and you can't play politics." The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. "The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you're doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country."

Mr. Freeman is assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page.

 

[a_majoor]

Spin the Crony Capitalist wheel one more time:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-has-more-cash-from-financial-sector-than-gop-hopefuls-combined-data-show/2011/10/18/gIQAX4rAyL_print.html

Obama still flush with cash from financial sector despite frosty relations
By Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam, Published: October 19

Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.

Obama’s key advantage over the GOP field is the ability to collect bigger checks because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort.

As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. The numbers show that Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate four years ago.

Obama’s fundraising advantage is clear in the case of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private-equity firm that was co-founded by Romney, and where the Republican made his fortune. Not surprisingly, Romney has strong support at the firm, raking in $34,000 from 18 Bain employees, according to the analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

But Obama has outdone Romney on his own turf, collecting $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he needed only three donors to do it.

The battle for Wall Street cash has become a crucial subtext in the 2012 campaign, which is shaping up to focus heavily on federal banking and markets policies and the struggling economy.

Top Republicans have courted major U.S. bank executives and financiers, arguing that Obama’s policies have hurt them, while Democrats are seeking to turn the erosion of support on Wall Street to their populist advantage.

Channeling ‘Occupy’ anger

Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the Occupy Wall Street protests that have gone global over the past week.

In response to the protests, the Obama campaign and other Democrats have stepped up their attacks on Romney and other Republicans for their opposition to Wall Street regulations.

One top banking executive who raises money for Obama, discussing fundraising efforts on the condition of anonymity, said reports of disaffection with the president “are exaggerated and overblown.” He said a strong contingent of financiers in New York, Chicago and California remains supportive of Obama and his economic policies, even as some have turned on him.

But, this donor added, “it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy.”

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said the former Massachusetts governor’s success in the financial sector is evidence of the business community’s confidence in him as well as its unhappiness with Obama.

Donors support Romney because of “the state of the economy and the president’s failure to create jobs,” she said. “President Obama and his campaign will say anything to distract voters from his failed economic record.”

Unlike the Republican candidates, Obama can raise money for both his own campaign account, which can take donations up to $5,000 for the 2012 cycle, and for his party’s national committee, which can accept $30,800 per individual each calendar year. The same donors will be able to give another $30,800 to the DNC next year.

The result is more money from fewer donors in the finance business.

Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from employees in the industry, according to the Post analysis. Nearly $12 million of that went to the DNC, the analysis shows.

Romney has raised less than half that much from the industry, while Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought in about $2 million. No other Republican candidate has raised more than $402,000 from the finance sector, which also includes insurance and real estate interests.

Even so, Obama clearly has trouble appealing to Wall Street fundraisers, who have emerged in recent years as among the most important sources of campaign cash for major national politicians.

Put aside the DNC money, for example, and Obama’s numbers look much worse: just $3.9 million from the financial sector, compared with Romney’s $7.5 million.

Obama’s campaign committee has raised notably less money from major banking firms such as Goldman Sachs, whose employees gave him more than $1 million in the 2008 cycle. So far this year, about two dozen Goldman employees together have given Obama’s committee about $45,000, one-sixth of the amount Romney’s campaign has taken in.

But six Goldman employees also gave a total of $92,000 to the DNC side of Obama’s fundraising effort.

Limits on GOP candidates

Obama’s financial advantage is almost certain to narrow in the months ahead. Once chosen, a GOP nominee will be able to raise money jointly with the Republican National Committee.

Romney is particularly reliant on money from the finance sector, which accounts for about a quarter of his total contributions, the data show. By contrast, about 5 percent of the $90 million Obama’s campaign committee has raised this year came from finance and banking interests.

Obama retains a core group of supporters on Wall Street who are central to his fundraising efforts. About a third of his top 40 fundraisers, who have helped bundle together $500,000 or more in contributions, hail from the finance sector, including big names such as former New Jersey governor Jon S. Corzine of MF Global, hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer and UBS executive Robert Wolf.

Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, was also vice chairman at J.P. Morgan Chase before coming to the White House this year.

Obama’s support within the financial industry tends to be more diffuse than the top Wall Street firms. One of his primary sources of cash, for example, is a small Chicago firm called Chopper Trading, which employs a technique of rapid, computer-assisted trading that some experts blame for volatility in the stock market.

Employees of the company gave Obama $222,000 after Vice President Biden held a fundraiser at the home of the company’s chief executive, Rajiv Fernando, a campaign bundler. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Obama aides regularly point to his $155 million joint fundraising total with the DNC as evidence of the campaign’s momentum but have tended to ignore DNC money when discussing Wall Street.

In a memo issued Tuesday, for example, DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said Romney’s campaign “seems quite proud of the fact that they are leading the money race for campaign cash from Wall Street.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement that contributions from the financial sector show that many corporate leaders agree with Obama on the need for “an economy that’s built to last, not on loopholes and outsourcing.”

“There are business leaders across industries who agree with the president that steps needed to be taken to ensure that the American people are never again held hostage by risky Wall Street deals that threaten our entire economy,” LaBolt said. “Mitt Romney and all the Republican candidates believe the opposite.”

 

[Haletown]

Welcome back Mr. Carter

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/10/oh-this-is-good.php

What goes around, comes back even worse it seems.

 

[a_majoor]

The TEA Party movement already gets this, now if the Establishment Republicans start making the election contest a referendum of the Obama administration's policies, there will be a mass toppling of Democrat politicians all downline:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-years-4-trillion-and-all-the-right-choices-later/?print=1

Three Years, $4 Trillion, and ‘All the Right Choices’ Later
Posted By Tom Blumer On October 23, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Column,Money,Politics,US News | 47 Comments

On October 14 (a Friday, naturally), Tim Geithner’s bunch released the final Monthly Treasury Statement of the 2011 fiscal year. It showed that for the third consecutive year, the federal government’s reported deficit was well over $1 trillion — $1.298614 trillion [1], to be exact.

That brought the three-year deficit total to just over $4 trillion. Less than $400 billion of that occurred while George W. Bush was still president. Since Barack Obama entered the White House bound and determined to “stimulate” the economy with dramatic — and, it’s now clear, intended to be permanent — increases in federal spending, the rest is largely on him, with unfortunate recent assists from a too-timid House GOP majority.

The reported deficits don’t even tell the whole story. From Inauguration Day 2009 through September 30, 2011, the national debt increased by $4.16 trillion to almost $14.8 trillion. In the first 19 days of October alone, we’ve seen another $141 billion piled on. Almost $600 billion has been added since the conclusion of the debt-ceiling melodramatics on August 1.

As has been the case since Obama became community-organizer-in-chief, we must continue to question whether the damage he and his team have wrought, which has brought us from economic peril to the brink of economic calamity, is the result of incompetence or intention. The evidence in support of the latter continues to grow.

Obama recently told ABC’s Jake Tapper [2], “the economy is not where it wants to be and even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances.”

Those who believe that economic improvement is not paramount on the president’s priority list pick up plenty of ammo from this revealing sentence. Obama spoke as if the economy is a living, breathing animal with its own wishes and desires separate from the rest of us. It seems that he didn’t want to tell Tapper that “it isn’t where we want it to be,” because to do so would have been an admission that meaningful economic improvement is a really important goal. That gambit left the next phrase wide open, giving the president free rein to express a belief about all of the administration’s “choices we’ve made” being right, without specifically saying what they have been right for.

If the goal really is to bankrupt the country, Obama, his administration, and his party (again on their own, until very recently) could hardly be going at it more effectively. From an already ridiculous $2.73 trillion [3] in fiscal 2007, annual spending has increased by 32% to $3.60 trillion in the fiscal year just ended. The “stimulus” was far more than a failed initiative by any reasonable measurement; it was also used as a vehicle to move the “you can’t cut anything from this without being labeled a heartless meanie” baseline to an absolutely unsustainable level. The baseline continues moving ever upward: While Washington whined about austerity and making supposedly tough choices, fiscal 2011 spending came in 4% ahead of last year.

On October 19 [4], Harry Reid perhaps inadvertently gave away the likelihood that the economic well-being of all Americans is not uppermost in the minds of the POR Economy’s [5] architects (Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and Reid) when he asserted on the Senate floor: “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

If the economy could talk, it would have vocally objected [6] (all employment figures are seasonally adjusted):

The private sector is still down 6.2 million jobs from its January 2008 peak.
Non-postal federal government employment has increased by 339,000 in the past four years.
Employment in primary and secondary public education, which unjustifiably leaped by 290,000, or 3.7%, from January 2005 through September 2008, while enrollment barely budged (up by less than 0.2%), is now back to where it was.
Yet in the legislation to which Reid refers, he and his Democratic colleagues want to [4] “save 400,000 teacher jobs and thousands of first-responder jobs that have either been cut or could soon be cut.” What’s really behind this, as Rush Limbaugh accurately discerned on October 20 [7], is Reid’s need to fund his party’s 2012 election campaigns with public-sector union dues — the private sector be damned. The prospect that the campaign money well won’t be sufficiently deep has Joe Biden babbling, and doubling down [8] with full White House support [9], about how rapes will increase and it will all be the fault of Republicans if the bill doesn’t pass.

Oh, and I almost forgot to note that this $35 billion boondoggle, suddenly more important than building roads and bridges, which was supposedly the big priority just a month ago [10], is supposed to be funded by a surtax on “millionaires” — y’know, the people who would likely be creating jobs by growing their businesses or investing more aggressively if they weren’t already so intimidated by the administration’s regulatory and authoritarian overhang.

The placement of public-sector jobs over private, even though without the private sector’s taxes the public sector can’t exist, is only the latest evidence that Obama’s “choices we’ve made” — he, his administration, and his party — are about something other than economic growth and the country’s fiscal well-being. Meanwhile, real incomes have fallen dramatically [11], and millions of former jobholders are slowly but surely becoming virtually unemployable [12] beyond entry level through no fault of their own. The government’s “investment” choices could hardly be more corrupt or crony-driven. Its green-obsessive determination to stifle domestic energy exploration and development could hardly be more immovable. The hostility of labor, environmental, and other regulators could hardly be more obvious.

Presidential candidate Herman Cain is largely right [13] when he says that the mostly misguided Occupy Wall Street crowd should relocate its primary headquarters to just outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I would also suggest deploying a contingent to the Capitol. Far more important are the required deployments of sensible citizens to the voting booths in 2012 to give Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and so many others who are ruining the futures of so many a chance to join the ranks of those who have lost their jobs. Whether we can hold out that long — or until January 20, 2013, given potential for last-minute presidential mischief — remains highly problematic.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-years-4-trillion-and-all-the-right-choices-later/

URLs in this post:

[1] $1.298614 trillion: http://fms.treas.gov/mts/mts0911.txt
[2] told ABC’s Jake Tapper: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/transcript-abc-news-jake-tappers-exclusive-interview-president/story?id=14764446&singlePage=true
[3] $2.73 trillion: http://fms.treas.gov/mts/mts0907.txt
[4] On October 19: http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/188443-reid-says-public-sector-jobs-must-take-priority-over-private-sector-jobs
[5] the POR Economy’s: http://www.bizzyblog.com/2008/07/03/the-pelosi-obama-reid-recession-porr-may-have-begun/
[6] vocally objected: http://www.bizzyblog.com/wp-images/PrivateFedAndLocalEdJobs2005to2011.jpg
[7] discerned on October 20: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/10/20/dingy_harry_reid_the_private_sector_is_doing_just_fine
[8] and doubling down: http://www.bizzyblog.com/2011/10/20/joe-bidens-doubles-down-on-rapes-will-rise-claim-after-denying-initial-on-record-statement/
[9] full White House support: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/20/white-house-backs-biden-rape-murder-comments/
[10] just a month ago: http://www.bizzyblog.com/2011/09/22/brent-spent/
[11] have fallen dramatically: http://nation.foxnews.com/united-states/2011/10/19/americans-standard-living-drops-sharply
[12] virtually unemployable: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46829
[13] is largely right: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/cain-why-dont-you-move-demonstrations-white-house

 

[cupper]

now if the Establishment Republicans start making the election contest a referendum of the Obama administration's policies

Where the hell have you been since January 2009?

That's all the GOP has been doing since the inauguration.

 

[a_majoor]

The establishment GOP and the TEA Party movement are not one and the same, as many establishment Republicans discovered when they were turfted in the primaries where they were running as incumbents.

Please try to pay closer attention....

 

[cupper]

The establishment GOP has been pushing to make Obama a one term president since his first day in office. Mitch McConnell has made this his stated goal since day 1.

The TEA PARTY has only focused on him since the 2010 election cycle started.

Believe me, I've been paying attention. Can't do anything but considering that's all we get on the news here.

 

[a_majoor]

The power of example will add to the efforts fo the TEA Party movement and others in changing the electoral map of the United States. In some ways, this may be more important than the results of the Presidential, Senate and House elections, since the State legislatures and local governments are much "closer" to the voters, and the decentralized nature of the US government system gives the States much more latitude than Canadian Provinces or the nations in the EU to name two counter examples.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/10/21/the-red-state-in-your-future/

The Red State in Your Future

Merrill Matthews
Contributor

I have spent 20 years working in nonprofit think tanks, the last 11 as a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas. I also ran the Washington, D.C.-based Council for Affordable Health Insurance for nearly nine years. While I cover a range of political, economic and policy areas, I specialize in health policy. Prior to joining the think tanks, I taught philosophy and wrote a column for a Dallas-area suburban newspaper chain. I received all three of my degrees—BBA in economics, masters in divinity and Ph.D. in humanities—from Texas universities. I was an ethicist for a medical school's panel reviewing human experimentation. I'm the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Texas Advisory Committee. For several years I was a political analyst for the USA Radio Network, and I hold a 5th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and still teach.

Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead—applying a whole meaning to an old phrase.  If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future.  Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 25 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans and 16 by Democrats, with eight split (i.e., each party controlling one house).  There are 29 Republican governors and 20 Democrats, with one independent.  And there are 20 states where Republicans control both the legislature and governor’s mansion vs. 11 Democratic, with 18 split (one party controls the governor’s office and the other the legislature).

And though we are a year away from the 2012 election, generic Republican vs. Democratic polls have given Republicans the edge for more than a year.  If that pattern holds—and if blue-state leaders refuse to learn from their policy mistakes, just like their true-blue leader in the White House—it likely means there will be even more red states in 2013.

One reason for that shift is that red states are taking fiscal responsibility while many blue states aren’t—and it shows.  The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a bipartisan association of conservative state legislators, recently released its fourth edition of “Rich States, Poor States,” by the well-known Reagan economist Arthur B. Laffer, the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore, and Jonathan Williams of ALEC.

The study looks at factors that affect state prosperity and economic outlook, such as tax burdens and population change.  What’s clear is that red or red-leaning states dominate the top positions while blue states have the dubious distinction of dragging in last.  In the economic outlook section, for example, the top 20 states are bright red or lean red, while eight out of the bottom 10 are very blue: New York, Vermont, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon and Rhode Island.

Most of the “poor states” states, as ALEC calls them, have the highest personal income tax rates and the largest unfunded state pension liabilities.  But instead of taking the red-state approach by lowering taxes and/or cutting spending, the blue states tend to want to raise taxes even higher, just like their White House mentor.

The result of their overpromising and overspending, and their knee-jerk response to solving their fiscal problems by raising taxes, is that people are increasingly fleeing the blue states.  As commentator Michael Medved points out: “Between 2009 and 2010 the five biggest losers in terms of ‘residents lost to other states’ were all prominent redoubts of progressivism: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey.  Meanwhile, the five biggest winners in the relocation sweepstakes are all commonly identified as red states in which Republicans generally dominate local politics: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia.”

The good news is that some blue states [at least five in the nearby map] have seen the light and are turning red, embracing the limited government/low taxes red-state vision and are coming back from the brink.  Maine, for example, is one of ALEC’s bottom 10 states.  But as of the last election, Maine now has a Republican state house and governor.  And the new governor has been pushing for the red-state approach, cutting both taxes and state spending.

The Washington Times recently pointed out that “at least a dozen [mostly red] states ended fiscal 2011 with surpluses.”  Maine was one of them.

And Maine is not alone.  Blue-leaning Michigan and Wisconsin both have elected Republican legislatures and governors, as has swing-state Pennsylvania.  And blue Minnesota now has a Republican legislature.

By contrast, some blue states appear determined to spend themselves into bankruptcy.  The AP reported on Oct. 16, “Drowning in deficits, Illinois has turned to a deliberate policy of not paying billions of dollars in bills for months at a time.…”  So that big tax increase passed by Obama’s home state, which likes to do things the Obama way, didn’t fix the revenue problem.  Someone needs to call the president and explain that to him.

And California, another of the bluest states, faces similar problems.  Just last year it was handing out IOUs because it couldn’t pay its bills.  High taxes and chronic fiscal problems have Golden Staters leaving in droves.

Why won’t some of these blue-state fiscal basket cases learn the lesson that a state can’t tax and spend its way to prosperity?  Well, for one thing, many of them have been hoping for a federal bailout—and President Obama tried.  A Wall Street Journal article points out that about $200 billion of the president’s misnamed “jobs bill” was little more than a state bailout for teachers and construction workers.

But Republicans are refusing to be complicit in state fiscal irresponsibility.  Call it tough love, but blue states will sink or swim on their own.

Many fed-up citizens in those blue states are leaving.  But others have decided that if anyone is going to leave, it’s those big-spending politicians who brought on the fiscal disaster.  It’s a lesson blue-state politicians better learn: It’s better to be red than dead.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him at http://twitter.com/MerrillMatthews

 

[a_majoor]

An analysis of the Perry plan. The dynamic analysis reminds me of the situation in the early 1980's under a previous Republican President....:

http://blog.american.com/2011/10/the-revenue-and-gdp-impact-of-the-perry-flat-tax-plan-now-with-actual-numbers/

The revenue and GDP impact of the Perry flat tax plan — now with actual numbers!
By James Pethokoukis

October 26, 2011, 12:48 am
As I wrote in an earlier post, an outside consulting firm hired by the Rick Perry presidential campaign has analyzed the revenue and growth impacts of his flat tax plan as follows:

1. Under static scoring — assuming no growth impact from a more efficient, pro-investment tax code — the Perry Tax Plan (call it PTP-SS) would raise $4.7 trillion less than the Congressional Budget Office baseline forecast from 2014-2020. Of course, that forecast assumes all the Bush tax cuts expire, which is highly unlikely. Yet even under that scenario, revenue-to-GDP would be back to its historical average of around 18 percent of GDP by 2019. (Interestingly, income taxes as a share of the economy would be the same in 2020 as they are now, but corporate tax revenue would double despite cutting the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent.)

2.  Under dynamic scoring, the Perry tax Plan (call it PTP-DS) would raise $1.7 trillion less than the unrealistic CBO baseline. But revenue would move above 19 percent — a historically high number — of GDP in 2019 and 2020.

3.  Under PTP-DS, the U.S. economy would be $3.5 trillion bigger in 2020 than under the CBO baseline forecast. And this gap would widen since CBO has some pretty sluggish growth forecasting moving forward. As consultants John Dunham & Associates put it:

Overall, based on the type of static analysis generally used by government tax estimators, JDA found that the tax plan would generate $2.781 trillion in federal income in 2014 – the first year that it would be assumed to go into effect and as much as $5.138 trillion by 2020. The revenues in 2020 would be equal to approximately 19.5 percent of GDP. Based on a dynamic tax analysis, revenues would be $406.8 billion higher than those currently assumed in the Congressional Budget Office’s forecasts and will equal approximately 19.5 percent of the forecast GDP, under a static analysis, revenues would be about $588.9 billion lower, and equal about 18.1 percent of GDP.

Based on the higher GDP estimates forecast by the dynamic scoring exercise, the Perry proposal will not only lead to an increase in overall economic activity and jobs, but will also lead to higher federal revenues in the long term. In fact, the analysis suggests that revenues could be as much as $406.8 billion higher than under the static model by 2020, and could be as high as 19.5 percent of GDP. The dynamic score of the proposal suggests that lower flatter taxes could generate both more revenue than the current tax code, and significantly more economic growth over time. With increasing demands on the Federal government from growing entitlements, higher pension expenses and interest on the debt, it will be necessary to increase the size of the economy – and the tax base – in order to generate significantly higher revenues.

Bottom line: If a President Perry could balance the federal budget by 2020 and cap spending at 18 percent of GDP — and if you buy the JDA analysis — the result would be a more financially stable America and a richer America than the current economic and budgetary trajectory would indicate.

 

[a_majoor]

Campaign narrative for the Democrat Party, and the historic results:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/10/28/obama-campaigning-like-its-1936

Obama: Campaigning Like It's 1936

While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing variations of a flat income tax, President Obama’s tax-the-rich campaign strategy is looking backward—to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign.  FDR won his reelection, but the American people lost: Roosevelt’s new taxes on business and the “economic royalists” gave us the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937-38.

By August of 1935, Roosevelt had achieved some of his signature pieces of legislation: a new entitlement program known as Social Security, banking reform, pro-union reform, infrastructure expansion and massive transfers of wealth to the poor and middle classes.  Sound familiar?
FDR also ran up federal spending significantly: from 6 percent to 9 percent of the economy.

However, FDR needed more revenue to support his big-government schemes.  More importantly, he needed a villain to explain why, given the passage of his New Deal legislation, government spending and regulations, the economy was still struggling.

So he proposed raising taxes on the rich, which he dubbed a “Wealth Tax.”  As he explained to Congress in June 1935, “Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent the unjust concentration of wealth and economic power. … Social unrest and a deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must minimize by rigorous methods.”  President Obama couldn’t have said it better himself.
There were several components to FDR’s plan.  First he wanted very high taxes on the rich—up to 79 percent—and to lower the thresholds so that more high-income earners paid more taxes.  He also wanted to increase the estate tax.  As for business, he wanted to close the “loopholes,” a graduated corporate income tax and a tax on intercorporate dividends.

But the bill that actually passed the Democratically controlled Congress in 1935 would not raise much money—estimated at about $250 million, which initially seemed like enough to cover budgetary shortfalls.  FDR’s associates acknowledged at the time that the Wealth Tax was more about politics than policy, or as Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau put it, “it was more or less a campaign document.”

However, by 1936 Roosevelt needed yet more revenue and had apparently grown to relish his new class warfare and railing against “organized money.”  So he proposed another business tax: an undistributed profits tax.

Like Obama, FDR faced what he saw as a big problem: Businesses had a lot of cash on hand but weren’t spending it.  “Regime uncertainty,” the reluctance of business to hire and invest when faced with a growing onslaught of new taxes and regulations, suppressed capital spending.  No one knew what the future held so businesses held on to their cash hoping to survive.  Again, sound familiar?

Roosevelt believed that forcing businesses to spend that money would create jobs.  So he proposed, and got, his undistributed profits tax.  If the government were going to tax idle money anyway, maybe businesses would put it to work.

The irony, of course, is that the more FDR dreamed up new taxes and regulations to get the economy moving, the more regime uncertainty he created.  And those efforts had a predictable effect: the economy began to turn south in 1937, resulting in the Roosevelt recession.  Unemployment had fallen from a high of 24.9 percent in 1933 to 16.9 percent in 1936, the year of FDR’s first reelection—still significantly higher than the post-war high of 7.5 percent during Reagan’s 1984 reelection and the current, and likely to remain, 9.1 percent unemployment rate under Obama.

However, unemployment under Reagan and Roosevelt were dropping quickly in their reelection years, which boosted voter confidence.  Not so with Obama.  And Obama’s embracing of FDR’s “soak the rich” tax policies—as FDR’s critics called it—will do just as much economic harm now as they did then.  While the unemployment rate fell to 14.3 percent in 1937, it rose to 19 percent in 1938 and only declined to 17.2 percent in 1939.*

If President Obama is trying to draw lessons from FDR’s 1936 reelection, he is learning the wrong ones.  FDR had a huge majority in both houses of Congress, so he was able to get his class-warfare agenda passed—though his efforts expanded the growing divide between conservative and liberal Democrats.  Obama may complain about the need to tax the rich; Republicans won’t let him do it.

In addition, the country leaned more to the left then, with several national demagogues—including Louisiana Senator Huey Long, Francis Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin—constantly pulling FDR leftward (whether FDR really resisted that leftward tug is a matter of opinion).  There really is no strong national voice to the left of Obama, except for MSNBC and perhaps Occupy Wall Street.

The lesson Obama should be learning from the 1936 election is that FDR’s Wealth Tax and class warfare set the economic recovery back years.  Obama’s effort to channel FDR’s policies and reelection success would have exactly the same impact.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow at http://twitter.com/MerrillMatthews
* For a discussion of the best figures for pre-war unemployment rates see Robert A. Margo, “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993.

 

[a_majoor]

The TEA Party movement is probably the most visible manifestation of this trend, I believe there are some rumblings here in Canada as well, but not anywhere near the critical mass the TEA Party movement has achieved in its short existence. The idea of political parties as "flags of convienience" is important; the Ontario election was essentially a contest between OPSU and the taxpayers, where the taxpayers, being less organized, lost. The other end of the spectrum is the Libertarians as a social movement meme; politics is about allocating scarce resources but people are finding new ways to access resources without the traditional gatekeepers, hence the decreasing need to be involved with the politcal process at all.

The frightening thought is the situation as described has some resemblance to the late Res Publica Roma before the civil wars and the establisment of the Imperium. We will live in interesting times.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/10/31/the-american-political-parties-are-breaking-down/

The American Political Parties Are Breaking Down
Walter Russell Mead

The decay of American political parties continues as the real money and power in politics shifts inexorably away from party organizations to informal and ad hoc groups.  The combination of citizen grassroots movements, decentralized party structures and the vast sums of money short-circuiting the official party structures is changing the way politics works.  As this story in the New York Times details, the real conversation among Republican-affiliated power brokers now takes place outside party structures.

American political parties are increasingly being reduced to flags of convenience; party organizations and party institutions have little influence over events.  That didn’t use to be true.  Party leaders and officials once exercised significant power over the choice of nominees, over the careers of aspiring pols, and over patronage.  These days, outside Chicago and a handful of other places, we no longer think of party “bosses”.

The weakness of political parties is one thing that foreigners often don’t grasp about the United States.  Elected officials are usually much more worried about their popularity among voters than about their popularity with party officials. Party organizations are only one among many sources of funding; most US politicians raise pots of money on their own, rather than relying solely on subsidies from party HQ.

This makes American politicians much more independent of party control than are politicians in many other democratic countries.  Members of parliament and representatives in many countries know that their careers depend on their parties and leadership; they vote against their parties much less often than their American counterparts.

The results can be paradoxical.  On the one hand, American politics is more populist than politics in many countries, with politicians scrambling to respond to strong feelings in the public.  On the other, money plays a greater role as individual politicians are more easily influenced by the prospect of campaign contributions than large party organizations would be.

Plutocracy and populism are often thought to be polar opposites.  In American politics today they are two sides of the same coin.  The same forces that allow insurgent candidates and movements to rise up in our politics also create the conditions that allow donors outsized influence. With a few exceptions, voters today are no longer content to think and vote in blocs; they are less likely to belong to one of the two major parties, are more likely to split their ballots, and they are not easily swayed by endorsements from powerful political figures.  That works for two kinds of candidates: insurgency candidates with strong and committed grass roots support, and candidates who can buy the advertising time to make an impression on the voters.

American politics today occupies a space that is institutionally weak.  A candidate with a lot of money (his own or raised from donors) can make an instant name and reputation; a movement that energizes the public can push aside established party figures to anoint its own candidates for public office.  President Obama’s victory in the 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination was a triumph over the pro-Clinton party establishment as surely as the surprising Tea Party victories in GOP senatorial primaries showed the weakness of the Republican establishment.

At the same time, the absence of strong party structures (and the large war chests the parties used to command) means that candidates must seek out more donors on their own.  This obviously provides many opportunities for alert lobbies, individual donors and others to impress their views on candidates.

Money and populism don’t always work at cross purposes.  GOP money people boosted some Tea Party candidates and themes; big liberal anti-war and anti-Bush donors supported the center-left populist surge that delivered Congress to the Democrats in 2006 and put President Obama in the White House a year later.  Nevertheless, a political system that is increasingly driven by both populist mobilizations and big money donations is not going to be particularly stable.

The appearance of unconventional figures in politics is one reflection of this trend.  Strong party machines tend to produce dull and forgettable candidates.  A candidate selected by a party machine might have to tell voters that “I am not a crook;” such a candidate would probably not need to make a television commercial to explain to voters that “I am not a witch.” Populist politicians tend to be more flamboyant; they have to be able to mobilize their followers.  From Jesse Ventura to Al Franken and Sarah Palin, we are seeing more politicians whose ability to command attention and mobilize the base counts for more than their ability to rise patiently through the ranks of a party machine.

Our weak party structures also contribute to one of the worst features of contemporary American politics: the rise of political dynasties. While these were not unknown in the country’s past, ever since the Kennedy clan made its bid for permanent political power, we have seen more sons and daughters of politicians try to carry on the family trade.  In general, organized political parties try to fight that trend; advancement in politics is given to the loyal as a reward for long service, not to glamorous upstarts as a reward for their genes.

Family candidates flourish in an era of weak parties; the high name recognition and celebrity status of political heirs combines with a ready made fundraising network.  Daddy can make the introductions and the calls.

While I cannot call the age of Boss Tweed a golden age of American political virtue, populism, plutocracy and dynasticism have traditionally been seen as signs that a republic is in trouble.  The rise of populism means that a gap has opened up between the leadership elite of a society and ordinary voters.  Alienated from a system that is no longer seen to be working, populist voters believe that the system and the establishment are the enemy.  Clearly, an establishment which allows such a climate to flourish is an establishment without the skills or the character to lead.

Plutocracy is traditionally seen as the result of a loss of restraint by society’s elite.  Not content with mere wealth, plutocrats seek immense fortunes and then want to buy power and influence.  Whether they enter political life themselves or stand contentedly off to one side, paying proxies to fight their battles, they corrupt and degrade the political process.  The combination of the power of private wealth with the power of the state — something that Silvio Berlusconi has done so effectively in Italy — undermines the health of a republic.

Add dynasticism to that mix, and you have the potential for a serious erosion of republican values and institutions.

For these and other reasons, the Founding Fathers believed that populism and plutocracy were the enemies of republican government.  In this, they were in the mainstream of world political thought; back to the ancient Greeks populists and plutocrats have been considered dangerous to the health of democratic societies — with plutocrats generally seen as the more insidious danger.

Historically, the common sense of the American people and the public spirit of American wealth have helped keep our politics on a relatively even keel.  We still have plenty of patriotic and generous, spirited rich people, and the American people continue to have a healthy respect for laws and the limits of democracy.

Also, the diversity of the country means that no single “brand” of populism is likely to sweep the whole country at the same time.  The anti-Iraq war movement, the Tea Party, and the OWS movement are all examples of popular mobilizations that the Founders would have considered populist, but none of them was or is likely to be strong enough to sweep the whole country.  A populist demagogue in America would face soon learn that the stirring words that bring crowds to their feet in Alabama don’t have much impact in Vermont. The populism of the Bay Area is not the populism of Cedar Rapids.

Even so, the decline of party structures leaves our politics less coherent and more subject to rapid mood swings.  There is not much to be done about the underlying trends driving the process; Americans are becoming more individualistic and more enamored of direct democracy all the time.  But our political institutions have a lot that they need to accomplish in the next few years; as the old forms of political organization wither away our society needs to find new ways to make the political process more coherent.

Otherwise we risk something like a national version of California’s political death spiral: dissatisfaction with the status quo leading to populist interventions that make the political system more dysfunctional, increasing voter dissatisfaction, and so on down the chute.

Bringing coherence to the politics of a diverse country of 300 million is a difficult task.  The answers to our problems are seldom obvious, and even when they are, the path to achieving them is not.  And because the United States is on the cutting edge of world history, and our effort to build mass prosperity in a post-industrial era is something that has never really been tried before, we need political movements and leaders with the ability to imagine new ways forward and to inspire faith.

Business as usual isn’t good enough; our next cohort of political leaders need to think harder and engage more deeply than the current crop.  When that happens, and our parties start to stand for something less superficial and knee-jerk, party structures may regain some importance — not as channels for patronage and influence-peddling, but as living movements seeking to bring vital changes into the world.