The Debt Ceiling Debate in Plain English

First off, what exactly is the debt ceiling? Most people seem to think it's a license for the federal government to take on deeper debt, but Bruce Bartlett has the clearest explanation I've read:

The debt ceiling is a cap on the amount of securities the Treasury can issue, something it does to raise money to pay for government expenses. These expenses, and the deficit they've wrought, are a result of past actions by Congress to create entitlement programs, make appropriations and cut taxes. In that sense, raising the debt limit is about paying for past expenses, not controlling future ones. For Congress to refuse to let Treasury raise the cash to pay the bills that Congress itself has run up simply makes no sense.

Failure to raise debt ceiling will mean:

• The US currency is no longer the world standard
• We'll have to pay much higher interest on everything we borrow as a country
• And after a short time juggling the books, government spending for everything will be instantly cut by 44%.

Despite this, the GOP has insisted that any vote to raise the debt ceiling be accompanied by huge cuts in federal spending and they are adamantly opposed to raising any taxes to increase federal revenues (this extends to ending any existing tax cuts as well). On June 23, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA) walked out of the talks due to the inclusion of some revenue increases. There was then some talk about returning to the earlier plan involving $2 trillion in budget cuts, but again, the GOP was insistent that no new revenues be included in the package while Democrats were adamantly opposed to cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

On July 7, Obama changed the equation. According to the Washington Post,

Obama and Boehner have emerged as the most enthusiastic proponents of a big deal that would save as much as $4 trillion over the next decade by overhauling the tax code and tackling all the major drivers of federal spending, including the Pentagon and health and retirement programs.

However, resistance to revenue increases in the proposed package led to abandonment of the idea by the GOP.

Today, Obama announced that Social Security payments would be delayed if the debt ceiling was not raised, and 470 CEOs of many of America's largest corporations signed a statement urging Congress to end the impasse. This afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) announced a new plan to give the President authority to raise the debt ceiling himself. Congress would then be free to vote on a resolution of disapproval, which the President could then veto, after which President Obama would raise the debt ceiling in three increments over the next year. Essentially, this would pass responsibility for raising the debt ceiling to the President and would draw attention to the raise throughout 2012, an election year. As Kevin Drum put it, "This is possibly the most juvenile, most buck passing, most transparently mendacious proposal I can recall from any party leader in recent memory."

What’s behind the political battle over the debt ceiling?

Since most people’s eyes glaze over when the subject is economics, here’s a plain English explanation of the ideas and interests underlying the debt ceiling debate.

Does Deficit Reduction Stimulate the Economy?

1. Would it be safe to say that progressives believe that if the government spends money, the economy will be stimulated and grow, and more people will have jobs?

Well, not just that it spends money, but that it does so in targeted ways. According to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's, the most effective government spending to counteract a recession is food stamps & unemployment insurance (see chart below). Why? Because people who get that aid need it, so they spend the money right away & it starts circulating through the economy.

Zandi found that among the least effective government spending would be the Bush tax cuts (see chart below). Why? (i) The Bush tax cuts were never targeted to boost the economy. They were set up, quite literally, to reward Bush's biggest donors (i.e., fat cats). (ii) Nobody spends money they don't need to in a recession. Our natural tendency is to hunker down. Do rich people have to spend the money they get in tax cuts? No. Do they? No. Ergo, no additional money circulates through the economy, so it doesn't grow.

2. Government spends on people, people spend money, other people receive that money, the economy is stimulated. This is good.

Basically, yes. In economic terms, government spending in a recession starts the process. The rest of the process you mention is called the multiplier effect.

3. Republicans believe that we have to reduce the deficit by cutting government spending in order to reduce the deficit because we have to reduce the deficit because....you get the point.

Republicans SAY they believe that, but they're the ones who created 90% of the current deficit, directly or indirectly, in the first place. They held an extension of unemployment insurance hostage over their demand for continuation of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010, further deepening the deficit. And they're now insisting that (a) no taxes be raised to reduce the deficit and (b) any increase in government revenues via elimination of tax loopholes be offset by additional spending cuts. So there's no reason to take seriously any statements they make about their supposed concern about the deficit. They love deficits. So if they're not concerned about the deficit, what are their ulterior motives for all the posturing?

Republicans believe several different things that underlie what they say they believe about the economy, all of them wrong:

a. The smaller the government, the greater the individual freedom. Conversely, the bigger the government, the greater the encroachments on individual freedom: This sounds straightforward. In fact, it has deep roots in American culture, having been expressed directly by Thoreau in the early 19th century. More recently, Friedrich Hayek enunciated it when he predicted that the development of Britain's National Health Service (universal health care to you & me) would turn the UK into another Soviet Union. His prediction obviously was wrong, but that didn't stop conservatives from continuing to believe it with their typical fervor. There are lots of other problems with this (what measure is used to determine the size of government? i..e, how do we know if a government is too big or too small?), but limits of space & time preclude further elaboration.

b. Tax cuts pay for themselves by increasing economic activity: Reagan tried it with huge tax cuts in 1981. The enormous resulting deficits led him to pass 8 consecutive tax increases (yes, increases), but nobody in the GOP seems to remember that part of the story. Bush, as we know, gave us the closest thing to a pure scientific test of this we're ever likely to have: With the GOP in control of all 3 branches of government, he passed enormous tax cuts & didn't subsequently offset them. He had the worst economic growth record of any president since Hoover. Conversely, Clinton raised taxes & had the biggest economic expansion in our country's history. So much for tax cuts stimulating growth. Again, the evidence has had no influence on GOP thinking.

c. Starve the beast: Grover Norquist famously said he wanted to shrink government to a size that would enable him to "drown it in a bathtub." Again, see Bush. He cut taxes, waged two wars without paying for them, & passed the Medicare Part D unfunded mandate. Money was drained from the Treasury, but did government shrink? No, it grew. The only president to preside over a shrinkage in the size of government was Clinton, who raised taxes, as previously noted. Again, no correlation backing up the claim, and no acknowledgment of the fact by the GOP.

Lastly, remember who funds their campaigns. The GOP always knows which side their bread is buttered on.

4. Obama believes that we have to reduce the deficit by cutting government spending because ________?

See my answer to #7 below.

5. Obama wants the economy to be stimulated because if more people have more money they will vote for him. Also theoretically he does actually want people to have more money.

One would think...

6. Does Obama think that cutting the deficit is going to stimulate the economy?

I guess he must, but I don't know.

7. Does deficit reduction stimulate the economy?

For an economy stuck in a severe recession? Hell, no. See #1 above. Just as there's a multiplier effect, there's also a negative multiplier effect. Think about it like this: As rain falls on crops, the water circulates into the soil, around the roots of plants, and the plants are fed, enabling them to grow. Imagine what happens when there's a drought. Water no longer circulates, plants are not fed, and they die.

Right now, not enough money is circulating through the economy--at least, not to ordinary people (the banks have oodles of the stuff--much of it from the bailouts--but they're not issuing much credit, businesses are not expanding & hiring, unemployed people are not making ends meet, so they're not spending, so there's little demand, so businesses aren't expanding & hiring, rinse & repeat). Since interest rates are near zero, the Fed can't lower interest rates any more to stimulate the economy. And the consensus in Washington is that we don't dare--no, no, no--do further stimulus spending to boost the economy. So we're stuck.

All deficit reduction will do in this context is remove more money from an economy that already has too little circulating through it. Take a look at what's happening to public service employees. State employees are being laid off right & left. All of them have families, most have houses, cars, bills to pay, etc. but there's no money to be had. All this is creating enormous strain on state budgets because the demand for Medicaid is going through the roof due to all these people becoming unemployed. So what are the GOP & now Obama talking about? Making enormous cuts to the federal budget (including aid to the states, which is already failing to meet the exploding need). But all the Very Serious People to whom Obama seems to be listening in DC make 6- or 7-figure salaries. None of them know anybody who's unemployed, I'd venture to guess. Economists have declared the recession over (that's the recession defined in technical terms, not in terms of what's actually happening to ordinary people). So I guess Obama thinks that if the technocrats say it's over, it's over, & it's time to start reducing the deficit. Now that I think of it, this brings to mind a recent thread about epistemic closure among conservatives that appeared in blog posts by Henry Farrell, Julian Sanchez & some other smart people. But obviously, conservatives are not the only ones susceptible to that dynamic (of course, reasonable people may disagree about whether Obama is a liberal, a conservative or something else).

One Final Note

As Kevin Drum and others have remarked tonight after Mitch McConnell's plan was announced, it seems that the GOP may have boxed themselves in with their insistence on drastic budget cuts with no revenue increases under any circumstances. Speaker of the House John Boehner himself told fellow House Republicans earlier today that they were going to lose leverage steadily as the August 2 deadline drew nearer. Judging by McConnell's announcement, that leverage may be ebbing more quickly than they'd anticipated. It's always a stretch to try to read the minds of others, and some of my comments above may go further in that direction than the evidence supports. Whether Obama is a fool or a genius (or both) is probably best evaluated with greater temporal and emotional detachment than I possess. My own perceptions of him are susceptible to changes in the political winds so I'm probably well advised to restrict my analyses to the economics and politics of the issues at hand. That said, I do think that allowing the entire debate over the budget to take place on GOP terms--i.e., with a focus on the deficit rather than on job creation--is a huge unforced error on Obama's part. We still don't know how the whole debt ceiling debate will play out; nor do we know what will happen vis a vis the deficit. But it's hard to see how we get from our current situation of high unemployment and low job growth to one that returns our economy to health. This short-term deficit obsession is a detour that doesn't help us get where we need to go, and may actually make the situation far worse.

An earlier version of this was cross posted at http://www.greaternycforchange.org/?p=676.

How To Wreck an Economy in Eight Short Years

This pretty much says it all:

How To Wreck an Economy in Eight Short Years

(HT Kevin Drum)

Hoodlum in the House--er, Town Hall

Here's a great Rachel Maddow segment about the staged disruptions of Democratic representatives' town hall meetings around the country.

These organized mobs remind me of Mussolini's black shirts. After the Brooks Brothers riot in Florida (2000), I can't say I'm completely surprised, but it still does amaze me that a major political party and its allies are willing to stoop this low.

I guess the only antidotes are intense blogger pressure on the media to report on the groups involved and their leaked strategy memo, and large crowds of people genuinely interested in rational public discourse.

Eric Cantor's Nose is Growing

Yesterday, GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor was interviewed on NPR by Steve Inskeep. A transcript follows, minus introductory statements:

Q: Here’s something I’d like to know. In your mind, what is a reasonable amount of time to give this admin to do whatever it can to turn the economy around that it says it inherited?

A: Steve, I don’t actually think that’s the right way to approach this question. When we considered the first stimulus bill in January, representations were made, promises were made by President Obama that if we acted quickly and passed the bill, we’d be able to stave off job loss and stop the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 1/2%. So I think that the proper test is, representations and promises that were made did not come to fruition.

Q: But the reason I ask that is because, as you know, the administration has said, “Wait a minute, we never said it would work in the first few months, we have not even gotten around to spending all the money yet, give us a little bit of time.” What is a reasonable amount of time to give them?

A: Again, this is not what the administration said. The administration said that we needed to act with a sense of urgency, that is how we were going to be able save jobs and avoid folks from having to go on the unemployment lines. That should still be our goal. We shouldn’t have been expediting the review of an 11-hundred page bill without anyone in the House reading it if the course that we expected was going to be a one- or two- or three- or four-year period in which to see the money go out. That’s where we get into the situation where you waste taxpayer dollars.

Q: Although the administration is saying now it took years to get into this mess; it’ll take time to get out. What’s a reasonable amount of time? What’s the time on the clock for him as far as you’re concerned?

A: Steve, there’s not a question—we shouldn’t be arguing about how we got here because that’s pointing blame. I think the American people are tired of that. They want to know how we’re getting out of this situation. Republicans had a plan, I went and personally gave him our stimulus plan back in January. We still want to work with this president. The way we see an economic recovery coming about is through investment. We’ve got to get small businesses back into the business of putting their money to work, taking risks, so that jobs can be created.

Q: Do you think that the economy will be the heart of next year’s congressional elections?

A: Well, listen, no one has a perfect crystal ball. But clearly I think that the economic situation before us needs to be satisfied in order for the electorate to begin to have some confidence in their leadership. I think what you’re seeing in polling right now is a reflection of the fact that this president & this congress own this economy.

Q: How many Democrats do you think are vulnerable?

A: Steve, again, you look at the numbers out of the last election. There are 49 Democrats sitting in seats that John McCain won. Obviously not all of those are vulnerable, but I do think you start there. And then you also look at the seats that have individuals who are new to Congress that perhaps were in seats that were held by the Republican candidate prior. I do think there are a sufficient number of vulnerable Democrats that will allow Republicans to make significant gains, if not take over the Congress and the U.S. House in 2010.

Note Cantor's insistence on portraying Obama's recovery plan a failure while refusing to say how much time a plan should be given to take effect, all while claiming he doesn't want to assign blame--but that Obama and the Democrats "own this economy." One wonders how many more sides of his mouth Cantor has from which to speak.

Cantor claims that Obama didn't say that time would be required for the recovery plan to take effect. A turn to google shows that not to be true. Here's what President Obama had to say on the subject during his January 8, 2009, Fairfax, VA speech introducing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:

It will not come easy or happen overnight, and it is altogether likely that things may get worse before they get better. But that is all the more reason for Congress to act without delay.

Of course, Obama's economic package was passed without a single GOP vote in the House of Representatives, and it got through the Senate only after four GOP "moderates" forced a compromise which included removal of federal funding to states for school construction (considered one of the more effective recession-fighting tools, as it would have created jobs) and cuts to state fiscal stabilization programs, also important during a recession. Nor did the GOP offer anything like coherent objections to Obama's plans, as noted by economist Brad DeLong.

There was a strategy behind the monolithic opposition, as noted by Greg Sargent. In fact, a GOP Representative responsible for "messaging" admitted as much in public.

Months of consistent opposition and obstruction didn't work very well for the GOP. Their poll numbers were (and still are) in the sewer. On March 26, they attempted to unveil an economic (ahem) plan of their own, but that didn't work very well.

They put out something a little more substantive on April 1 (how fitting), but as noted by Ezra Klein, among many others, the plan offered little in the way of details and was completely unrealistic.

Meanwhile, here’s what the stimulus IS doing:

Ezra Klein cites a study by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities showing that the stimulus is closing 30-40 percent of state budget deficits. Why does that matter?

States must balance their budgets, as mandated by their respective state constitutions. How can they do that?
1. Raise taxes (Conservatives all raise your hands if you’re in favor. Ahh, I didn’t think so.); or
2. Cut spending. What happens if they do this during the worst downturn since the Great Depression?
a. States would have fewer resources at a time when they need them most to cope with the crisis.
b. State employees would lose their jobs (further deepening the recession).
c. The social safety net would collapse (imagine what happens if, as state employees lose their jobs, SCHIP funding is slashed).

It's not enough, God knows. People need jobs, and it takes a long time for an economic plan to take full effect. But surely we shouldn't be taking seriously complaints about the economic recovery plan from a party as completely cynical, dishonest and deeply unserious as the current GOP.

Portrait of Political Irresponsibility

Starting in the 1970s, the GOP in Congress (with help from some Dems) removed the Depression-era oversight of the banking industry & prevented regulation of complex financial instruments such as credit-default swaps.

Congress (still under Dem control but totally craven in the face of GOP attacks) passed the Reagan tax cuts in 1981, resulting in federal deficits bigger than those of all previous presidents combined. (Reagan did a U-turn a year later, increasing taxes to refill the coffers, but that never made it into conservative mythology.)

In 1995, the Gingrich-era GOP Congress shut down the government in an effort to force President Clinton to slash social spending and cut taxes. Millions of people around the country, dependent on the federal government for social security payments, paychecks, various services, etc., were hurt by this stunt & the GOP had to back down.

The GOP-led Congress under President Katrina passed enormous tax cuts, turning the biggest budget surplus in U.S. history into the biggest deficit in a year. This in spite of our involvement in 2 wars simultaneously.

The GOP-led Congress voted in lockstep with President Katrina’s administration from 2001 through 2006, authorizing spending on the Iraq War, etc. It exercised no oversight during that time.

The GOP has argued, contra historical evidence, that tax cuts are the answer to the current economic crisis. Economists—including conservatives, agree that tax cuts would turn the current crisis into outright catastrophe.

In mid-September, 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed and there were large withdrawals from the Reserve fund. Against that backdrop, the bank bailouts (which I certainly agree are due for criticism on a number of grounds) began. Obama’s economic plan was crafted in response to the situation he inherited—one caused by the combination of factors mentioned above (not primarily due to activities of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, as the GOP & its wingnut chorus would have us believe). Obama’s economic plan only passed in the Senate due to a compromise with 3 GOP “moderates” & some blue dog Dems. The so-called compromise eliminated federal funding for state unemployment programs in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1940s—this despite the CBO’s study showing that one of the most effective mechanisms for reviving the economy in a recession is unemployment insurance (the people who get it need to spend it; therefore it cycles through the economy, boosting economic activity via the multiplier effect). So if the recession lasts longer & gets deeper, we all know who to thank for it.

The CBO, the Commonwealth Fund and others analyzing the numbers project that without the public option, health care costs are projected to increase to 60% of the federal budget by 2030, crowding out other federal programs. The GOP in Congress is universally opposed to Obama’s health care reform plans, especially the public option.

The GOP-led Congress refused persistently to do anything in response to global warming, making our ability to do anything about it now much more difficult—and expensive.

Despite all the above, die-hard wingnuts continue to argue that Obama is a socialist, he’s throwing money around recklessly, and we need a return to GOP govenance. Try to imagine what shape we’d be in now if the party whose only principle is tax cuts (for the richest 1% of the population, at that) were in power now. God protect us from such a fate.

Some still claim, despite all the above, that there’s no real difference between the two major parties—that “everyone does it.” The record is clear that, despite definite cravenness on the part of some Dems, overwhelming responsibility for the mess we face lies with the GOP.

In Case You Thought It Would Be Easy...

In case anyone was expecting the Obama healthcare plan to sail through Congress without a hitch, here's a foreshadowing of the coming opposition.

It is certainly true that the opinion of a writer at the Cato Institute is not necessarily indicative of the points of view of all who come to oppose the Obama healthcare plan; however, history has already given us multiple examples of precisely this sort of nihilistic cynicism on the part of many in the GOP. (The Democrats have not historically been immune to obstructionism either, but they've never taken it to levels anywhere near those of the GOP. And where cynicism is concerned, the GOP wins the race, hands down.)

So I propose a fairly unproblematic test: when the opposition arises, scrutinize the rationale given by each opponent of the legislation. If it's logical and fact-based, fine. People are, of course, free in a representative democracy such as ours to disagree, debate and perhaps change the legislation in question. But if the logic and evidence don't add up, remember the comments above. After all, such behavior would certainly be consistent not only with the Cato prescription, but with that of the Republican members of the current Congress, who (to give just one example) after threatening to eliminate the filibuster altogether in a flap over Bush judicial appointees, used the filibuster more in the past 2 years than any other Congress in history. On principle, of course.

The Obama website had better gear up for this--it's going to be an epic struggle, & the new administration is going to need all the help it can get.

Fired Up

Here are some sights and sounds from the campaign trail, courtesy of Barack Obama and Joe Biden (h/t to Brad DeLong):

First, Joe Biden

And here's Obama

There are 60 days (roughly) until the election. The time is now.

If you’re not registered to vote, for God’s sake, please do so now.

Go to the Obama website, sign up if you haven’t already, and volunteer. Donate. Help get other people registered to vote. Donate again.

No one can say any longer that they don’t know what we’re going to get if we let the GOP win this election.

Straight Talk Simulacra

McCain calls his campaign “the Straight Talk Express.”

McCain has completely reversed his position on almost every issue except support for the war in Iraq and opposition to abortion:

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/flipflops

He has deliberately and systematically misrepresented Barack Obama’s views on a multitude of issues.

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/5/27/1842/82920
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/soft_on_iran.html
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/distorting_obama.html
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/factchecking_mccain.html

Having campaigned on a claim to experience far superior to that of Obama, he has chosen as his running mate a person with absolutely no relevant experience or expertise for the position. A heartbeat away. With little or no prior vetting, apparently.

His chosen running mate gave a speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday in which she repeatedly misrepresented Barack Obama’s record and attitudes, as well as her own.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/04/ap-attacks-praise-stretch_n_123771.html
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/gop_convention_spin_part_ii.html
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/campaign_2008_/2008/09/palin_v_reality.php
http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/09/calling-bullshit.html
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/09/open-thread-rnc.html

Now it turns out that even the photographs of black people used by the McCain campaign as part of the backdrop at their convention were purchased stock photography.

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/5/153224/4904/749/588112

I’ve long marveled at the expertise with which the GOP obscures its agenda and distracts voters from the nature of its governance. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many in the GOP railed against the supposedly sinister influence of postmodernists on college campuses. By now it should be obvious to everyone that the GOP is the true party of postmodernism. How anyone can believe anything they say is beyond me.

It's Not Arugula, It's Race

In It's Not Race, It's Arugula, Noemie Emery rejects the widely accepted argument that racism is behind much of the reluctance among working class white voters. (Roy Edroso has commented briefly on this article here, but I feel compelled to take it further, for reasons to be explained below.)

“In this view,” writes Emery, “race is the issue, and the big years in history were 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson did the Right Thing, signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and consigning his party to electoral darkness by losing the South for the next several eons. By these lights, bigotry and fear are the main factors, and all the others are thinly masked surrogates for them. If Obama loses, this will be the excuse of the campaign and of the press that supports it."

Instead, Emery borrows a simplistic classification scheme from Michael Barone and Ron Brownstein between “academicians” (or to Brownstein, “priests”) and “Jacksonians” (Brownstein’s “warriors”).

The academicians, according to Barone, like peace (and/or appeasement) and moral equivalence; are against force; “traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise;” love nuance and fairness; disdain Jacksonians; and their theme songs are "Kumbaya" and "Imagine.” (You can add Volvos, Birkenstock sandals, lattes, etc.) Incidentally, public employees are included in the above category, for reasons Emery does not explain.

Jacksonians, according to Barone, valorize the warrior ethos; dismiss the work of academics and public employees; favor “a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor;” like men of action, clarity, justice and just force; think academicians are inconsequential; and like country music. In other words, real men.

Until 1968, according to Emery, Democrats “frequently sported a veneer of priesthood, but it covered a Jacksonian heart.” After they “lost their warrior edge...Democrats started losing the White House.” Emery claims that Reagan Democrats abandoned the Democratic Party due to resentment of “post-1968 liberal activism--and racial preferences and busing much more than the original Civil Rights measures--but they also were drawn to the muscular foreign policy, democracy promotion, and unabashed patriotism of the FDR-HST-JFK line.” Academicians who claim that the GOP uses race to convince white working class voters to vote against their interests, according to Emery, are forgetting that national defense and security are the most important issues to such voters.

Apparently not recognizing the image reflected in her mirror, Emery asserts that “[t]his neglect often leads to a reading of history that aligns rather poorly with the facts.” She then lists a succession of electoral contests in which the Democrats nominated an academician and, predictably (if the Barone/Brownstein/Emery theory is your guide), lost.

Why Reject Racism as Causal?

Emery remarks in a tone of sarcasm that LBJ did “the Right Thing” in signing the Voting Rights Acts. What’s the point of the sarcasm? Does Emery doubt that it was right to enable black people to vote in this country 100 years after the end of the Civil War?

She goes on to say, “[b]y these lights, bigotry and fear are the main factors...If Obama loses, this will be the excuse of the campaign and of the press that supports it.” The term “excuse” is generally used as a synonym for ‘rationalization’; i.e., an explanation used to deflect attention away from the genuine cause. The generally sarcastic tone of the paragraph and the phrase “[b]y these lights” make clear Emery’s rejection of the idea that racism is at cause. However, she makes no effort to articulate any reason she might have for that rejection. This is all the more striking given the history of racism in electoral politics since 1964.

Lyndon Johnson famously said upon signing the first Voting Rights Act into law that he’d just signed away the South to the GOP for a generation. In this he was optimistic, as events would prove. When George C. Wallace gained unexpected primary strength in 1968, the GOP presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon, took note and began appealing to southern white racism in an effort to put the South solidly in the GOP column going forward. This was the result of a conscious strategy developed by Nixon in conjunction with his aide Patrick Buchanan, among others.

From then until now, the GOP has relied on appeals to white racism, whether overt (Sen. Jesse Helms’ ad against affirmative action, featuring a pair of gnarled white hands crumpling a job rejection letter) or covert (arguments for states’ rights serve as a dog whistle to those adhering to the view that the Confederacy, which fervently argued in exactly those terms, was on the side of right in the Civil War). There’s no need to recite the endless stream of examples—just a few will suffice: The Willie Horton ad, Reagan’s campaign opening in Philadelphia, MS, the GOP pandering over the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state capital, the racist button for sale at the recent Texas state GOP convention. Is Emery arguing that these things haven’t happened? If not, does she claim that they were ineffective? Considering that the GOP has adhered to these techniques for the past 40 years, isn’t it logical to conclude that either (a) they are effective or (b) the GOP is incredibly stupid to continue relying on them?

Then there are the exit polls. In West Virginia, 30% of whites stated openly that they voted against Obama because of race. The result was similar in Kentucky. Moreover, due to reactive measurement effects, it is reasonable to suppose that the same dynamic was at work in Texas and elsewhere. (Ohio may be a special case due to the intrusion of Canada’s conservative government in the primary with its now questionable report on a conversation with one of Obama’s top economic advisers.) Is there some particular reason why Emery discounts this evidence?

Given the enormous amount of evidence supporting the theory that race is at cause in Obama’s problems with working class white voters, why does Emery reject the theory out of hand? She does not say.

The (Ahem) Theory

Here’s Emery’s rather remarkable rundown of the distinctions between her two ideal types:

“While the term Academician explains itself, Jacksonian comes from Andrew Jackson, the first of the Democrats' warrior heroes (with an echo perhaps of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who seems now to have been one of the last)...In this reading of history, the critical year would be 1968, when the Democrats splintered on crime and security issues, and afterwards became the party of peace (and/or appeasement), of moral equivalence, and of aversion to force. In this reading, the Jacksonians or warriors reject Obama less because he is black than because he is a priest or academician...”

Notice the long chain of binary oppositions above. Is it just coincidence that the qualities associated with each echo the smears and taunts directed, overtly or by implication, by the GOP against Democrats in every election since 1976? One wonders whether the attributes listed above were arrived at through the research of Barone/Brownstein/Emery, or whether they started with the former and then shaped the latter to fit. (Of course, the latter approach would be totally out of character for neoconservatives, as observers of the prelude to the invasion of Iraq know.) At the very least, it seems that Barone and Emery have trouble distinguishing between ideal types and politically motivated stereotypes. Anyone trying to use such obviously biased classifications in the social sciences would be laughed right out of academia—by social scientists of all political persuasions.

Note also that peace is equated, in true neocon fashion, with appeasement—in reference to 1968, no less. This clearly reflects a frame of reference according to which Vietnam was, in Ronald Reagan’s formulation, “a noble cause” that was betrayed (here the right wing updates Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s responsibility-deflecting “stab-in-the-back thesis,” transferring blame from the Jews in the original thesis to hippies, intellectuals, liberals and the Democratic Party in its post-Vietnam reincarnation. Those manly Jacksonians/warriors would not have appeased communism, as we morally equivalent latte-sippers supposedly did by opposing the war in Vietnam (and again, of course, in re the current war in Iraq). No siree—they would have stayed the course (in the words of President Katrina) and fought on, no matter how long (a la McCain), simply because, having gotten in, it would be supposedly ignoble to, y’know, bother to notice whether there was (a) a convincing reason for our involvement in the conflict in the first place; (b) any understanding on the part of our government of the culture and history of the country we’d invaded; (c) a realistic goal motivating our efforts; (d) the means and methods sufficient to achieve such goal consistent with our values and interests; and (e) lacking the above, stop and withdraw. Never mind (a) the fact that, in both conflicts, the arguments given the American public for our involvement in the conflict were patently false; (b) each case essentially amounted to the U.S. attempting to reengineer an existing society (of whose culture and history we were essentially ignorant) to more closely resemble our own, regardless of what the inhabitants of each country wanted; (c) consistent military superiority by U.S. forces in each conflict proved to be almost irrelevant to the outcome because of the arrogance and ignorance of our civilian leadership as to the limits of our capabilities in re (b) above, and the political nature of the underlying conflict; and (d) oh, by the way, perhaps Emery and her neocon friends never noticed this, but the monolithic communism against which we were supposedly fighting in Vietnam and which would take over all of Southeast Asia if we didn’t? Well, it wasn’t monolithic in the first place, as border wars between China and the USSR, between China and Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal, and between Vietnam and the Pol Pot Regime of Cambodia made abundantly clear. Secondly, rather than taking over Southeast Asia, communism took a different shape in each communist country, and that shape had to do with the culture, history and political realities faced by each country rather than some supposedly shared overarching ideology. In other words, just as with Iraq, one of the most important stated reasons for our involvement was false.

The reference to 1968 also reflects the inability of neocons to recognize (or at least, to admit) that there was another limitation on our options in Vietnam—contra Barone’s and Emery’s pathetic attempt to rewrite history, China made explicit at the time that extention of U.S. ground forces and bombing any closer to the Chinese border would have triggered direct involvement in that conflict by the People’s Republic of China—something feared not only by those nuance-loving civilians in the White House at the time, but many in the military brass as well. (Gen. Maxwell Taylor, for one, had been a member of the Never Again Club after the Korean War—the title referring to a land war in Asia. Gen. Curtis LeMay wanted to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, as he famously said, but his was by no means the only view in the Pentagon.)

If this argument involving the Vietnam War seems a little off-topic, that’s only because the underlying premise of Emery’s piece is a decidedly non-reality based alternative (ahem) history of that conflict.

Emery’s (and Barone’s and Brownstein’s) argument is an insultingly stupid example of reductio ad absurdem. If you doubt that, consider the number of latte-sipping, arugula-eating lefties who supported the invasion of Afghanistan (not to mention our involvement in World War II) but who opposed the war in Iraq. Here’s a really difficult concept for neocons to get their little heads around—one war involved an organization that attacked us and had a symbiotic relationship with the government that shielded them in Afghanistan; the other had no justification whatsoever and has brought nothing but grief to both Iraq and the U.S. What do you know—logic, evidence and the moral and intellectual rigor required to refrain from acting in the absence of both really matter. When the neocons contrast their belligerence to our opposition to senseless wars it’s not evidence of disproportionate allocations of testosterone between the two groups; rather, it reflects a refusal on the part of the neocons to think. And if arguments like Emery’s are any evidence, perhaps it’s because they don’t know how.

Emery’s argument is frankly ridiculous—and ordinarily I wouldn’t devote so much time to something so preposterous. What motivated me to write this response was the fact that it was recommended by an Obama supporter! I find that frankly astounding and disturbing. Surely we must be able to see through foolishness such as Emery’s article. We ought to be aware as well of the nature of The Weekly Standard, on whose website Emery’s article appeared. The Weekly Standard is generally considered to be the house organ of the neoconservatives and of the Bush Administration. Its editors are William Kristol and Fred Barnes. Kristol, in addition to infesting the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, was also one of the founders of the Project for a New American Century, a neocon group formed to push U.S. foreign policy into greater belligerence, and among whose members were many future top officials of the Bush Administration—such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. The mentality of The Weekly Standard is typified by a recent commentary in its pages by Michael Goldfarb arguing that obedience to the president overrides the rule of law (See Glenn Greenwald’s comments on this here.). Why anyone supporting Barack Obama would recommend such a discreditable source I cannot understand for the life of me.

History and Geraldine Ferraro

Just about everyone has already opined on Geraldine Ferraro's statements about Barack Obama's supposed race-based advantage in the current primary contest. I see no reason why I should be left out. Rather than rehash the whole chain of events, I'd like to propose a reading list for anyone (certainly including Ms. Ferraro) who is still a bit hazy as to the history of racism and slavery in this country. I do not claim that the list below is anywhere near exhaustive; time limitations preclude comprehensiveness, I'm afraid. What follows therefore, is a list of some of the most powerful and influential books on the subject. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in Comments.

A parade of evidence and book titles ran through my mind when I read and heard Ferraro's comments--facts and titles of which, I'm certain, Ferraro is (amazingly, at this point in our history) unaware.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Among those books are The Peculiar Institution, by Kenneth Stampp, a meticulously researched and dispassionately written explanation of the conditions and practices of slavery in the United States. This book (written in 1955) demolished the long existing pattern of rationalizations in defense of slavery within the American history profession. After this book was released, no knowledgeable person could honestly claim that slavery had been anything but an extraordinarily cynical economic enterprise dependent on the thoroughgoing dehumanization of one group of people by another.

Nor did emancipation eradicate the physical, social, political or psychological conditions of slavery. In fact, Reconstruction at best temporarily interrupted some of those factors in specific locations. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner, is a magisterial account of the gradual unraveling (under relentless pressure of unreconstructed former slaveholders and other bigots and opportunists) of efforts to establish legal and social equality for African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War.

After the secret bargain between Republicans and Democrats in the 1876 election, Rutherford B. Hayes became president and formally ended Reconstruction. What followed, a series of laws formalizing the legalized racial oppression of African Americans throughout the south know as Jim Crow, is outlined in C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This was the system that remained in place until the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.

It is amazing to consider that only 45 years ago, black and white citizens of this country could not drink from the same water fountains, go to the same schools, ride the same buses, or live in the same neighborhoods; nor could black Americans even vote in many states. Nor has the bigotry underlying such laws disappeared from our society, although its expression continues to bubble, usually under the surface. If you doubt that, please try to explain honestly the obvious success of GOP campaign tactics such as the Willie Horton ad, and claims in the 2000 South Carolina primary that John McCain had supposedly fathered a black child. Then consider the murder of James Byrd a few years ago in Texas, and the consistent study results, year after year, showing clear evidence that black mortgage applicants and renters with the same credentials as white applicants are steered to "black" areas and "black" neighborhoods. See also the consistent study results showing that black job applicants with credentials identical to those of whites have their applications rejected at a much higher rate than the latter. And while we're at it, consider the various efforts by the GOP to repeal or limit the civil rights laws and their (allegedly) principled opposition to affirmative action.

Consider all of the above and try to convince me that Geraldine Ferraro's statements were not ignorant and/or perverse.