Politics : The Atlantic

YellowShirtGirl: Finale on 'Ominous Asian' Imagery

2012-02-08T15:01:46-05:00

Finale, at least from me. A few incoming items on the "we take your jobs" / "YellowShirtGirl" discussion.

1) From Julia Kim Smith, a further HTML exploration.

[If you're tempted to write in: No, that's not what the HTML actually shows. ]

2) From Funny-or-Die, a parody that is not exactly Oscar Wilde-like in its rapier subtlety but that has its moments. My favorite is in the first 20 seconds, a joke on the theme of "my excellent math ability!" Plus a Jeremy Lin reference right after that.

3) From a reader who notes our old friend "false equivalence" in an NYT item on the controversy:

While I think this is a relatively minor offense, I just thought it was interesting that the New York Times article you linked to in today's blog made certain to include this:
>Senator Stabenow has done some China-blaming of her own. From her Senate Web site: "China has a clear pattern of flagrantly violating trade rules and it is long past time to stand up to them." And on Monday, in a conference call with reporters, she said, "We can't continue to sit back and let China's policies cost us jobs.''<

How is this even remotely comparable to the offensive commercial in question? Why does it deserve inclusion? It just serves to tar Senator Stabenow, unfairly, with the same brush.

I liked the NYT item but the reader has a point. It's one thing to talk about trade rules, currency valuation, etc and something else to run "me likee!" ads. The "to be sure" reflex really is deep, for all of us in the journalism business.

4) From Chauncey DeVega at Daily Kos, a clip that exactly matches the "visual dog-whistle" that I said the video was evoking, with its use of a smiling but treacherous young Asian beauty, issuing broken-English come-ons to the unsuspecting Yanks. This is a scene not from Apocalypse Now but from Full Metal Jacket -- a movie made 25 years ago about events 20 years before that, but whose imagery left a mark in the public mind. Someone involved with this ad had seen this movie. Really, the scene is a remarkable match to the Hoekstra ad:

Up-to-date bonus: The Nancy Sinatra soundtrack can be a hipster allusion to today's Lana Del Rey controversies.

5) From a reader of the Vietnam Generation, with extensive experience in China -- and it's not me! -- spelling out the imagery:

* The ad is actually aimed at angry, declining Vietnam-era people. The imagery is of southeast Asia. The young lady looks far more Vietnamese than she does Chinese. If the ad agency is that smart (and not simply guilty of "seen one Asian/seen 'em all"), they aimed at a specific demographic in Michigan, the fat droopy-mustached "men" left over and falling into the shadows ever since Vietnam.

* The young lady is overwhelmingly Asian American. [Versus actually foreign.] Just listen to her. This ad's real insult is to millions of American young women of Asian descent,who look and speak like this young woman.

* Most important, Hoekstra with this pathetic loser's cri-de-coeur hands to the cynics and the tough hombres in Beijing the tool with which to bolster their own grip; they point to stupid China-bashing artifacts like this one (and all the others at the TPM site) and say, whenever some American rightly calls attention to some rotten thing they're doing, "There they go again! It's just more China-bashing." Thanks, Pete, for making all the things you don't like about China all the more likely to succeed.

I think that's it; thanks to all.

Video of the Day: Ron Paul's Theme Song

2012-02-08T14:52:11-05:00

The unorthodox Texan has adopted an anthem by a singer who claims the CIA tried to suppress her debut record for inciting revolution.

Here are some tunes to enliven a chilly mid-February afternoon. This song, "Revolution," by singer Aimee Allen, celebrates Rep. Ron Paul's run for president, and Paul has adopted it as pump-up music before speeches and stump appearances.

The video itself is a thing to behold -- a grimy, industrial, dystopian aesthetic that is something like George Orwell meets the Wachowski Brothers, or perhaps the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo joins the John Birch Society. And it's not just standard End-the-Fed rhetoric: there's even a reference to the Bilderberg Group. In a nod to the Paul's largely male support, there are some scantily clad women cavorting, just for kicks.

Allen has an interesting story. The song isn't new -- it actually got some attention on MTV in 2002. Allen was signed to Elektra, and "Revolution" was to be one of the songs on her debut record, I'd Start a Revolution (If I Could Get Up in the Morning). What happened next is a matter of debate. She claims Elektra refused to release the record because the CIA objected to her use of the term revolution, but it also refused to spring her from her contract. In 2004, however, Warner shut down Elektra, incorporated it into Atlantic Records (no relation to the magazine), and culled its roster; Allen was among those cut.

Paul's adoption of her song as his theme makes her a libertarian counterpart to Krista Branch, the Tea Party siren whose "I Am America" became Herman Cain's anthem; like Allen, Branch has a compelling back story. Allen is from California, Branch is from Oklahoma, which seem like good geographic stand-ins for the respective movements. (Branch's song is catchier than Allen's, but Allen's video is far more entertaining.)

Beyond Hacktivism: Komen and SOPA Fights Show the Way to Win Online

2012-02-08T13:20:03-05:00

Hacktivist protests have had a lot of collateral damage, and the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street all required a physical space. Now there's a new model.

Buried amid news last Friday of Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's decision to re-fund Planned Parenthood in light of intense online objections was a little-noticed item about the hacking of a conference call between British law enforcement and the FBI. The relative weight given to each of these stories is revealing. After all, it was only a year ago that the world seemed overrun by hackers prosecuting a kind of vigilante-style digital justice. With exploit after exploit, groups like Anonymous and Lulzsec were putting paid to that adage, "the geek shall inherit the earth." But the force that dealt deathblows to SOPA and PIPA before bending Komen to its will wasn't a hacktivist mastermind -- it was a transparent bunch of civic-minded citizens. What we've seen in the last several weeks is a new kind of 21st-century protest, different even from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. It's fast, effective, takes place almost exclusively online and, most of all, helps tell a larger story about the rise and fall of hacking as a legitimate form of Internet politics.

For a moment last year, it was as though the Internet had suddenly wandered into a Philip K. Dick novel. Hackers chafing against what they saw as authoritarian systems of control seized the Western world's attention in May. They staged high-profile attacks on Sony and the Arizona state police, among other targets. Aspiring revolutionaries left provocative and conspiratorial messages on YouTube, forums and chatrooms exhorting the sleeping masses to action. Painting the picture of a dystopian present, the hacktivists announced they sought nothing less than an overthrow of establishment orthodoxies. Not knowing when and how the hackers would strike next only heightened the sense of their potential power.

But then came the inevitable police crackdown, followed by a creeping public skepticism that gradually eroded hacktivism's credibility. The latter was far more damaging. When it was discovered that Lulzsec had gotten a hold of -- and was releasing to the open -- highly sensitive data like credit card numbers, passwords and even home addresses, onlookers began questioning whether hacktivism's dark side was worth tolerating. It didn't help that Lulzsec took a casual attitude to the collateral damage, nor that their reputation as codemasters collapsed when their amateur techniques were revealed. The group's tone-deafness, indiscriminate behavior and technical brutishness gave disenchanted supporters reason to look elsewhere for inspiration.

No account of Internet-enabled protests would be complete without mention of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Yet in many ways, to view these movements as hacktivism's foil would be a mistake. As many were quick to point out in the days following successful regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt, the Internet actually played a peripheral role in what were fundamentally offline demonstrations. Physical protests were also a hallmark of the Occupy movement. And though these attempts at political action netted more dramatic results than the hacktivists could ever claim, the ultimate outcomes remain inconcluslive (see Egypt, Syria and Yemen).

By contrast, the kind of political expression that killed SOPA and PIPA and that convinced Komen to reverse itself last week took place almost entirely on the Internet, and produced decisive and nearly immediate results. Regime change and social reform are no doubt far more complex than stopping legislation or petitioning a board of directors with executive powers. But as any political advocate can attest, achieving limited aims will always be easier than shooting for the moon. Making the movements all the more potent were key Internet companies such as Reddit, whose early steps to protest the Internet bills established a precedent for others, and public figures like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in response to Komen's actions pledged on Twitter to match donations to Planned Parenthood up to a limit of $250,000. The rippling influence of these major anchors not only spread the word about what was happening, but also helped persuade average citizens that they could play a role in the unfolding drama. As one reader of Andrew Sullivan's wrote in:

When I heard that [SOPA and PIPA] would not be brought to the floor of their respective chambers of Congress, I honestly couldn't believe it. Something that I did had real-world impact. And fast. This is the kind of revolution that my generation can get behind. Relatively tiny victories, but quick.

This year's cyberactivists have been more transparent, more popular and more directly successful than their hacktivist predecessors. They took an inclusive approach to advocacy, helping newcomers understand the precise issues at stake and what they could do to help. Participants grasped intuitively that coalition-building would be vital, and they all set out to activate the social networks they'd been carefully tending for so long for fun. There will no doubt be more of these to come, but the crowning moment so far in the short history of virtual protests came on Jan. 18, when a slew of respected websites -- Reddit, Google and Wikipedia, among others -- all announced they'd black themselves out to call attention to the perils of SOPA and PIPA.

Compare that collaborative, constructive model of online politics with the hacktivist approach -- a system that depends on the technical skills of an elite few who choose their own targets, despite claiming to speak for all; a system that envisions political action more as fait accompli than as part of a collective dialogue about what ought to be; a system that has led to a great deal of collateral damage -- albeit with some successes, such as a website supporting Iranian democracy activists.

Unlike those who protested SOPA, PIPA and Komen, groups like Anonymous operate on the assumption of democracy but are neither accessible nor accountable to the general public. In some ways, they are the definition of opaque. This creates problems when it comes to their representative claims -- theirs is a self-appropriated form of support. Moreover, although hacktivist methods can come off as highly technical, to achieve the kind of revolution such groups imagine would require vastly more sophisticated tactics. As it happened, hacktivists have had to settle for what they could get away with, which meant only indirectly addressing their grievances.

All of which is to say that, almost as quickly as it came, hacktivism is being replaced as a form of 21st-century protest. In its place is emerging a more evolved form of digital politics related to -- but distinct from -- the online manifestations of Occupy and the Arab Spring. The new digital activism draws from the Web's best traditions: transparency, network effects and an opt-in mentality -- and is proving surprisingly effective. A week after Reddit administrators announced what would become the world's biggest virtual protest, SOPA and PIPA were both postponed indefinitely in Congress. It took just three days for Komen to buckle under public pressure last week. How long the next virtual protest will last is anyone's guess, but to measure it in hours wouldn't be a bad bet.

Image credit: REUTERS/Gary Cameron

Birth Control and the 'Obama Independents'

2012-02-08T11:50:00-05:00

Sarah Kliff parses the numbers on birth control, insurance, religion and the illusive independents:

And a lot of this likely isn't about Catholic voters at all. Rather, it may well be about the demographics that are most supportive of this particular health reform provision: young voters and women. In the PRRI poll, both groups register support above 60 percent for the provision.

Those two demographics are important here for a key reason: they were crucial to Obama's victory in 2008. Third Way crunched the numbers earlier this month and found that the "Obama Independents" -- the swing group that proved crucial to his 2008 victory -- are, as Ryan Lizza put it, "disproportionately young, female and secular..."

These voters have tended to be difficult for abortion rights supporters to engage on reproductive health issues like abortion. Research from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which I wrote about last weekend, found a significant "intensity gap" there, with abortion rights supporters much less likely to see it as a crucial voting issue than their anti-abortion counterparts.

But when the conversation moves away from abortion to contraceptives - as it has this week - the intensity gap flips: A much larger segment of voters are willing to penalize a legislator who votes to defund family planning. That became apparent in polling that Democratic firm Lake Research Partners did earlier this year, which found that 40 percent of voters would be less likely to support a member of Congress who votes to defund family-planning programs. Just 22 percent would be more likely to support such a lawmaker.

Two things:

1.) I think it really helps to separate Obama independents--disproportionately "young, female and secular"--from the broad nebulous "Independent voters" that we are all so fond of invoking. Everyone claims to appealing to "independents." I think that has more to do with connotations and branding (independent="thinks for self") than the actual make-up of a candidates support.

2.) The difference numbers for Catholics and White evangelicals are really interesting. It's almost as if the issue for Republicans, isn't so much a hard pitch to Catholics, as it is a hard pitch to white Evangelicals, with the hope of clipping off some conservative Catholics along the way.

The Worst Mission Statement in the History of D.C. Journalism

2012-02-08T11:37:19-05:00

A new conservative website is online, backed by millions, and modeled on publications its own editor regards as vicious and unfair.

In national politics, imitation is less often a form of flattery than an admission of hypocrisy: "What I maligned when done by my opponents is so effective I'll now do it myself." In this way, folks outraged by media bias celebrated the Fox News Channel; partisans who saw the distortions of lobbying launched the K Street project; bitter critics of right-wing talk radio started Air America; conservatives who mocked the celebrity of Barack Obama cheered Sarah Palin; and progressives who called Dick Cheney a fascist for his national security policies continued to embrace Obama even after he transgressed against civil liberties in some of the exact same ways.

Seeing this inversion of Gandhi's maxim, this being the change one doesn't want to see in the world, shocks some people into disaffection: they find it glaringly obvious that picking a side and participating in a never-ending ideological arms race makes about as much sense as a cantankerous snake eating its own tail. Others choose a party or clique, survey the most effective new weaponry on the other side, and copy the form of the thing that they regard as most malign.

Take The Washington Free Beacon.

The new D.C.-based Web publication was started by conservatives who regard the Center for American Progress as so beastly that they liken the progressive non-profit to a vicious wolf. Their plan? Clone it! I am not imputing motives that aren't there. Says Matthew Continetti, The Washington Free Beacon's talented Editor-in-Chief, in an inaugural essay titled Combat Journalism:

Republicans were routinely outspent, divided, and distracted by the messes they had made for themselves. They lacked, too, the means by which the progressives had so effectively identified, frozen, personalized, and polarized their targets: the wolf pack. Tony Blair, in a 2007 speech, described the press as a "feral beast" that tore "people and reputations to bits." But the feral beast is not a solitary creature. Hunting in a pack, he surrounds his targets and devours them in swarms. The Counter-Counter-Establishment's greatest achievement was in serving as the wolf pack's sleigh driver. The left-wing groups, in concert with the Democratic Party, would select the Republican politicians, institutions, and media figures on which the beast would feed.
Whether the victim was George Bush, Joseph Lieberman, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Charles and David Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, Fox News Channel, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney, the technique was the same. The left blogosphere would manufacture a smear or distortion or line of attack. Larger blogs and liberal news sites like Huffington Post or Talking Points Memo would pick it up and publicize it. From there the critique would jump to liberal radio and MSNBC and Comedy Central's news parody shows. Before long, the mainstream media would be reporting the misinformation as news that was fit to print. By the time the wolf pack reached that point in their meal, the prey had little hope of survival.

Sounds vicious and unethical, doesn't it?

Yet here is what Continetti told Politico about the new publication he's running: "Our models are the Center for American Progress/Think Progress, TPM, and Huffington Post politics. These outlets have been at the cutting edge of ideological journalism for years, and it is time for the right to emulate their success."

This is what D.C. does to some people.

Among conservatives, it isn't even noteworthy that the editor-in-chief of a new publication is openly modeling his enterprise on a sort of journalism he regards as corrosive and dishonorable when others do it. Neither Jennifer Rubin nor John Podhoretz thought to mention it in their write-ups. Nor is anyone remarking upon the irony of the publication's name. It is inspired by a Ronald Reagan speech: "How stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."

Reagan's words were hardly a call to build a publication devoted to turnabout as fair play, though if The Washington Free Beacon functions as one, drawing like-minded people as if by a magnet, it has chosen a perfect location: the publication is headquartered at 1600 K Street.

There is a part of me that hopes this new publication will transcend its flawed, soulless mission and do good work -- that Continetti realizes he's too talented to write hyperbolic apologias for pols like Sarah Palin; that Sonny Bunch, a staffer, lives up to the integrity I've seen in his past work; that the whole editorial staff (I know nothing of the rest of them) takes its cues from the best rather than the worst progressive and mainstream journalism have to offer, trying to cover politics with integrity rather than mirroring every pathology they perceive to be aimed against their allies. I've very much wanted that sort of outfit to thrive on the right for going on 5 years now.

But I'm not sure any amount of talent or integrity can triumph over a vision as flawed as the one Continetti has laid out -- and mimicking outlets he regards as vicious wolves is just the biggest of its problems.

In America there are so many conservatives doing first rate journalism. Upstarts would do well to emulate the best of what is published in City Journal, The Claremont Review of Books, The American Conservative, National Review, or National Affairs; or to take as their models Andrew Ferguson or Ross Douthat or George Will or Peter Robinson or Matt Labash or Heather Mac Donald (or even the best stuff Continetti has published) or any number of others.

But Continetti invokes different trailblazers when he describes the journalistic subculture he seeks to join:

Andrew Breitbart pioneered the new approach. His websites were dedicated, impassioned, and broke news. Glenn Beck exposed White House czar Van Jones's radical, 9/11-Truth past. Guerilla journalist James O'Keefe performed sting operations that led to ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and NPR having very bad days. Tucker Carlson's website, The Daily Caller, published excerpts from the Journolist, which showed liberal writers coordinating their party line.

Breitbart, Beck, O'Keefe: all three are firmly in the "be the change you don't want to see in the world" tradition. Breitbart, whose biggest pet peeve is when dubious charges of racism are cynically used as a cudgel, is best known for publishing a misleadingly edited video of Shirley Sherrod in order to persuade people that the NAACP is racist. Beck, lauded above for exposing another man's conspiracy mongering, did more than anyone else in America during his tenure at Fox News to spread dubious, conspiratorial nonsense. O'Keefe, who reacts with righteous indignation anytime he thinks he's caught a professional journalist behaving dishonorably, has released misleadingly edited videos; and he once tried to lure a female reporter aboard a boat in hopes that he could cruelly seduce her as a joke while secretly recording it.

I mean, really. Here is one of the guys Continetti is praising:

Whatever you think of The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson's Web site, it shouldn't be lumped in with that trio. Its story about Journolist, the liberals-only email listserv, does have one thing in common with every Breitbart scoop, the Van Jones story, and the James O'Keefe sting: each was seen by hard core conservatives as a game-changing triumph, when actually they changed little of consequence. The ostensible goal of conservatism is shrinking government, ensuring public policy is consistent with the Constitution, and upholding the values of civilization. Why get so excited at forcing a re-branding at ACORN or a management change at NPR?

Later on in his manifesto, after going on about the poor performance of the mainstream media, Continetti writes:

What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times--but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation? You are about to find out.

Once again, he is aspiring to mimic a product he regards as unfair and lacking in quality, but never mind that -- I quoted the above passage so I could point out that we are not, in fact, going to find out what the world would be like if a right-leaning publication covered the world like The New York Times. There isn't going to be any left-leaning equivalent of William Safire or David Brooks or Ross Douthat publishing opinion pieces at The Washington Free Beacon. There won't be an independent public editor who'll take the staff to task when they've behaved badly. Deliberately neutral language won't be adopted when matters of ideological dispute are characterized. Continetti is smart enough to understand that it makes no sense to say that you're modeling yourself on TPM and the Huffington Post... and that you're going to show the world what things would be like if the right were running The New York Times.

Near the end of Continetti's piece, there is one sentence that grabbed me. "Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama's Washington," he writes. That isn't an awful vision for a publication. If Obama is re-elected and the publication hews to that vision, forgetting everything else Continetti has written, it'll be useful for four years. Honest partisan watchdogs have their place. The only trouble will come when a Republican is next elected, for The Washington Beacon has set itself up as an enterprise more interested in getting to the left than getting at the truth.

There were a lot of outfits like that when George W. Bush took office. Boy were they determined. Their mission was to keep attacking the left and defending the right no matter what, and they did it -- boy, did they do it -- even as the Republican Party ballooned the federal budget deficit, expanded entitlements, spied illegally on Americans, mismanaged two wars, created a new cabinet level agency, and so discredited conservatism in the minds of voters that they elected Barack Obama (who has proceeded to violate civil liberties and wage illegal wars as CAP looks on).

Maybe what Washington, D.C., needs isn't a new publication that targets the left, so much as one that targets bad policy, people abusing power, dubious ideas and nefarious behavior generally. Why can't money be raised to fund that sort of enterprise when The Washington Free Beacon's parent non-profit is reportedly being bankrolled to the tune of seven figures? Of course, if there's no ideological bogeyman, I guess then there'd be no convenient enemy at hand, no consistent other to blame for everything, no opportunity to tell yourself that you're doing "combat journalism," absurdly running an old AP photo of actual combat troops at the top of your piece, as if your "taking the fight to the left" resembles in any way the fights that they were waging.

Worst. Mission statement. Ever.

Why Politicians Keep Calling Your Home Phone

2012-02-08T10:53:34-05:00

The chairman of the RNC acknowledges that voters are annoyed by recorded calls urging them out to the polls, but he insists they work anyway.

The phone rings. You answer. But instead of a person on the other end, it's a recording. The voice is familiar, but it isn't a family member or a friend. It's a politician. He or she wants you to vote. "People are getting recorded phone calls all over the country," Hugh Hewitt remarked recently on his talk-radio show, prompted by emails from listeners complaining about the practice.

As it happened, he was interviewing Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. "What's your view," Hewitt asked, "of the utility of recorded phone calls when they come in waves?"

You're not going to like the answer.

"You know, it's surprising. What studies show is that when you get six calls, the seventh call, you're more likely to vote... people just want to drive right off the highway when they hear that," he said. "The reality is that recorded messages from the right people really help drive out the vote."

There's just one thing that's even more effective.

"I and others at the RNC, we think that volunteer calls are the way to go. And that's why I emphasize so much our voice-over-Internet program," he said. "We have a phone-from-home program that we've developed here where any person, no matter where you are. You could be in Alaska. And if you want to call into Missouri or Pennsylvania for the presidential election, we can hook you up with a phone-from-home program on the Internet where you have the phone numbers, you have the voters, and you can call. Okay, this is Hugh Hewitt, and we're going to give him a call, and we're going to find out whether he voted, and who he voted for, or what he needs to vote, or whether he turned in his absentee ballot. I think volunteer calls are the way to go."

He suggested the script might go like this:

I'm Phil Johnson, and I'm calling as a volunteer from the local GOP here, and I'm just really working hard for candidate X. I just really hope you consider him, and help us get our country back on track.

So there you go. If you're a registered Republican with a land line who lives in a swing state, expect a call like that -- or perhaps 6 or 7 calls like that -- before year's end. And if you're frustrated by it, marvel at the fact that out there in America the average recipient of such a call is more likely to do what the person on the other end urges, so long as they're polite about saying it.

Image credit: Reuters

Romney's Squeeze: Struggles With the Base and Independents Alike

2012-02-08T09:47:32-05:00

Though he's still the frontrunner, low turnout in three conservative states, along with slipping independent support, are worrying trends for Romney.

Rick Santorum's clean sweep of Tuesday's lightly-attended GOP contests underscored front-runner Mitt Romney's continuing struggles with the Republican base, even as recent national surveys show the former Massachusetts governor's standing eroding among independents.

Although exit polls were not conducted Tuesday night, the three states that Santorum swept -- Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri -- are all places where social conservatives represent a central component of the Republican electorate. And in all three states, one of the most striking aspects of Tuesday's results was the sharp decline in the number of people who came out to vote for Romney, compared to four years ago.

Photos of the Day: The Most Bourgeois Obama Campaign Gear

2012-02-08T09:01:20-05:00

If the merchandise the president is hawking is any indication, all the stereotypes about his supporters are true.

There's a controversy bubbling over an Obama campaign event Tuesday night in New York. The "Runway to Win" event featured designs made for the president's re-election push by big-name fashionistas like Derek Lam and Thakoon Panichgul. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the Republican National Committee sniffs a controversy, alleging that because the items costs less than typical clothing from the same designers, they may constitute a contribution to Obama and therefore violate campaign-finance laws. The RNC probably doesn't really expect to snag Obama in legal trouble. More likely it's a ploy to call attention to a campaign event featuring fashion-conscious Manhattanites -- just the East Coast elites whom flyover-country Americans imagine make up Obama's base.

The truth is you don't have to look at the Runway to Win gear on Obama's site to find merchandise that offers a caricature of Democratic voters from the Beacon Hill to Hyde Park to the San Francisco Bay. Here are the most self-parodic products from the Obama campaign.

Romney Rebuked in 'Mini-Tuesday' GOP Primaries

2012-02-07T20:45:31-05:00

Rick Santorum emerges as the front-runner's new antagonist as voters cast ballots in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado.

No delegates were directly awarded by Tuesday night's primary in Missouri (it was non-binding) or caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota (as in Iowa, they were merely precinct-delegate elections accompanied by a presidential poll). But the results -- Rick Santorum's stunning sweep of all three states -- were nonetheless a major rebuke to Mitt Romney.

Santorum could not have had a better night. He won Missouri by a stunning 30 points over the second-place Romney. In Minnesota, Romney polled a distant third, with Ron Paul in second place. And in Colorado, where Romney thought he had a safe lead, Santorum staged an upset.

Giving his victory speech in Missouri, Santorum made the most of the opportunity, giving a rallying cry of a speech that emphasized his strengths: authenticity and passion. He mounted a tough-talking attack on President Obama that made him sound like a nominee-in-waiting -- "He thinks he knows better. He thinks he's smarter. He thinks some privileged person should be able to rule over all of you" -- while never losing sight of Romney, either.

"I care about the very rich and the very poor," he said. "I care about 100 percent of Americans."

Romney's speech, on the other hand, was awkward -- a speech he probably didn't think he'd have to give. His syllogistic argument that Obama must be rejected because he had failed on his own terms was oddly facile.

Had Romney rolled through the three low-octane contests, which some were dubbing "mini Tuesday," the analysis would have been that Republicans around the country, weary of petty squabbling, were rallying around their inevitable standard-bearer. Instead, the opposite happened: Iowa-like electorates, with large segments of rural evangelicals, went out of their way to send a message of not being ready to settle for Romney.

Newt Gingrich failed to qualify for the Missouri ballot. That gave Santorum a chance to compete in a situation where he was the sole mainstream alternative to Romney, and he aced it. That will allow him to make the argument that Romney is only winning because the voters who oppose him are normally split between Santorum and Gingrich.

It is still hard to imagine the Romney train getting derailed, but this result will elevate Santorum as his chief antagonist of the moment and force Romney to continue to answer his conservative critics awhile longer, rather than proceeding to a coronation.

Romney's campaign argued that the results would have no bearing on the ongoing primary contest. But the reason for this argument was not because Romney's camp had suddenly discovered the importance of delegates -- it was because he was losing.

Romney's political director, Rich Beeson, made the case in a memo released Tuesday morning:

As the campaign moves forward toward Super Tuesday, it has become apparent that Mitt Romney is the only candidate with the organizational strength and broad-based appeal to secure delegates in all remaining primaries and caucuses. Of course, there is no way for any nominee to win first place in every single contest -- John McCain lost 19 states in 2008, and we expect our opponents to notch a few wins too. But unlike the other candidates, our campaign has the resources and organization to keep winning over the long run. A winning conservative message, hard work and old fashioned delegate math will win this race for Governor Romney.

There is, actually, a way for a nominee to win first place in every single contest. It's by getting the most votes in each state's primary, and Romney would not have minded such an outcome.

Instead, Romney heads to the unfriendly audience of this week's Conservative Political Action Conference, beginning Thursday in Washington, with even more explaining to do.

Image credit: Reuters/Sarah Conard

McCarthy, Beck, and the New Hate

2012-02-07T17:40:55-05:00

For more than 60 years, a feedback loop of conspiracy theories has flared when tough times make people long for order and control.

Flash back half a century and you'll hear much of the same agitated rhetoric that we hear today. On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy stood before a woman's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and declared that the U.S. was engaged in "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity." The odds, he intimated, were very much against us.

"The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency," he said, is "because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation."

It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer--the homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give. This is glaringly true in the state department . . . .In my opinion the State Department . . . is thoroughly infested with Communists. I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or are certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.

McCarthy was right about the high stakes of the Cold War; it was also true that of the handful of high-placed traitors who had been exposed, at least one of them had attended prestigious schools and won conspicuous honors (though he'd endured a childhood that was filled with privations and tragedies). History has not been kind to Alger Hiss; the overwhelming consensus today is that Whitaker Chambers told the truth about him. But if there was a whiff of factuality in some of McCarthy's accusations, he demagogued them shamelessly. McCarthy's infamous list of State Department employees (which he initially claimed had more than 200 names on it) was never made public and almost certainly never existed.

Six weeks after the Wheeling speech, at a press conference in Key West, Fla., a reporter asked Harry Truman if he thought that McCarthy could prove that "any disloyalty exists in the State Department." The president didn't mince his words. "I think the greatest asset the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy," he said. When pressed, Truman explained himself further, sounding very much like one of the combative, center left-leaning commentators on the political scene today -- E.J. Dionne, perhaps, or Mark Shields:

The Republicans have been trying vainly to find an issue on which to make a bid for the control of the Congress for next year. They tried "statism." They tried "welfare state." They tried "socialism." And there are a certain number of members of the Republican Party who are trying to dig up that old malodorous dead horse called "isolationism. And in order to do that, they are perfectly willing to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States. And this fiasco which has been going on in the Senate is the very best asset that the Kremlin could have in the operation of the cold war. And that is what I mean when I say that McCarthy's antics are the best asset that the Kremlin can have.

Six decades later, Glenn Beck reminded his viewing audience that if McCarthy was "an imperfect vessel," the era he gave his name to was "America's turning point." "It's frightening. It's frightening," he emoted. As reviled and mistreated as McCarthy's memory may be, he might well have saved the Republic from its own worst elements. "It's the truth and here is why you need to know history, because it's repeating itself," Beck continued, wielding the tactic of guilt by association that was McCarthy's metier.

I want to talk a little bit about the parallels between the Obama administration and the FDR administration as it comes into play with communists. We have Marxists, Maoists, communists in and around the White House influencing and actually working with [it]. We had that with FDR. Both denied it at the time.

On July 21, 2010, Glenn Beck appeared on the air with a copy of a "plan to destroy the United States of America." "If you want to understand what is happening in this country," Beck said, "if you want to understand how this is all coming together and what their designs are, all you have to do is read You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows." Surely the word "plan" excessively dignifies the Weathermen's manifesto, a pastiche of over-heated revolutionary rhetoric, most of it channeled from the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse Tung, but there's no denying that its authors sought to fan the flames of revolution. The Weathermen were Marxist Leninists; they preached and practiced violence.

But what relevance could this artifact of late '60s campus radicalism have to do with anything that's happening today? It's simple--some of the people who wrote it are still alive, and active in politics. One of them--a Chicago academic--even had some dealings with Obama before he became president. "We see it was submitted by Bill Ayers," Beck explained, "Who is friends with the president, no matter what they say." And then he connected the rest of the dots, from Ayers' spouse Bernadine Dohrn all the way to the billionaire George Soros.

As long as we're on the subject of history repeating itself, it's worth pondering what Harry Truman might have made of the likes of Glenn Beck. Perhaps he would have pointed to this telling passage from the bestselling book Glenn Beck's Common Sense:

If the Progressive cancer were limited to defined political systems, it would be fairly straightforward to isolate it, treat it, and eventually be free from the disease. But it's not. It's infiltrated both political parties and the entire political class . . . The Progressives on the right believed in Statism and American expansion through military strength, while the Progressives on the left believed in Statism and expansion through transnationalist entities such as the League of Nations and then the United Nations . . . One of the hallmarks of Progressive thought is the concept of redistribution: the idea that your money and property are only yours if the State doesn't determine that there is a higher or better use for it.

Beck tells the same story that McCarthy did and he harnesses it to the same political purposes. All of the Republican talking points that Truman identified back then are present in Beck's ostensibly non-partisan rant today: the evils of Statism and the Welfare State, the virtues of Isolationism and the specter of internal subversion. Except in Beck's telling the enemy is Wilsonian Progressivism rather than international Communism (though to Beck they amount to essentially the same thing). Reading McCarthy's words out of context, you'd hardly know that the US was flush from its enormous victory in the Second World War and well on its way to an enormous, decades-long economic expansion. Reading Beck's today, you might think that the world was still poised on a knife's edge, divided between "two vast, increasingly hostile armed camps."

Anyone can play six degrees of Kevin Bacon--it doesn't take many steps to connect Glenn Beck to political pariahs who were as subversive in their day as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were in theirs. If you wanted to smear Beck by association, you could start with the author of the original Common Sense. "Our churches, our synagogues, our mosques--we must stand for the things we know are true," Beck orated from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August, 2010. But In The Age of Reason, Part First, Section 1, Beck's admitted idol Thomas Paine--a man he has called a "heroic patriot"-- stated that "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Imagine if Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, or for that matter Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt had formulated such an anti-Credo.

But perhaps all that Thomas Paine stuff was just a subterfuge. Maybe Beck was really paying a sly tribute to Conde McGinley's infamous magazine, also called Common Sense, which was active from about 1947 to 1972. "Anti-Semitism is the chief stock in trade of Common Sense," stated a preliminary report on neo-Fascist and hate groups that was prepared in 1954 for the House Un-American Activities Committee (not exactly a bastion of leftism). Common Sense "distortedly defines communism as 'a false face for Judaism,'" it continued.

Typical of headlines which appear in the publication are: 'Jewish Leaders Are Crazy For Power,' 'Zionists Threaten Russia With War,' 'Brotherhood'-Jew Trap for Christianity', and 'Invisible Government Rules Both Parties: Adlai and Ike Marxist Stooges.' Articles in Common Sense have even attacked water fluoridation as a Red plot by 'the Invisible rulers,' aimed at mass destruction of the American people.

Both Eustace Mullins and Elizabeth Dilling were frequent contributors to Common Sense--and books by both authors have been touted on Glenn Beck's TV show. Tit for tat. If Glenn Beck can draw lines on a chalkboard, so can I.

Mind you, I don't for a moment believe that Beck endorses or emulates McGinley's brand of anti-Semitism. Most likely, he hasn't even heard of him. It's not unlikely that Beck's first-hand knowledge of Thomas Paine's writings doesn't extend very far beyond the extracts that he and his co-writers padded out Glenn Beck's Common Sense with. He probably doesn't know about Paine's favorable views on progressive taxation or what Paine had to say about the Bible: "It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man."

"Beck has successfully grown a mass following," Alexander Zaitchek marveled in Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, "while stumbling through a remedial self-education in U.S. democracy, which reflects the carnival mirrors inside his mind as much as it does the reality he struggles, in ever-so-profitable futility and desperation, to comprehend." For $9.95 a month, his fans can learn along with him, by taking on-line courses at Glenn Beck University, "a unique academic experience bringing together experts in the fields of religion, American history and economics."

Anyone can quote selectively; anyone can hurl irresponsible and inflammatory accusations. But I do admit that it puzzles me how, on the one hand, Beck can ascribe such awesome powers to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the marketplace, while on the other believing that we live in a world that is almost entirely shaped by the machinations of a malign few, a world in which the likes of Bill Ayers--the leader of a fringe movement forty years ago that accomplished exactly none of its goals and a distinctly minor league academic today--is yet believed to be a formidable power behind the throne, and in which a community organizing group like ACORN (now defunct, thanks to Beck's and his peers' untiring efforts) can marshal enough strength to subvert our whole political process. But neither Beck nor his listeners are going to be swayed by anything I might write. To quote Thomas Paine again (The Crisis, Number Five), "To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason . . . is like administering medicine to the dead."

Though Beck's visibility on television has decreased since his contract with Fox News expired at the end of 2011, his paranoia-fueled flag waving has already earned him a fortune; the passion he puts behind his message--of "self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism--the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2,000th time on the lightbulb," as he puts it--is clearly heartfelt. But why does it resonate so powerfully with so many ordinary Americans who, lacking his extraordinary vocal endowments and his vast talent for self-promotion, can ill afford to give up such government entitlements as Social Security and Medicare?

Richard Hofstadter provides historical perspective. In his essay "Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited" he cited Symbolic Crusade (1963), Joseph R. Gusfield's study of the temperance movement, for its insights into politics that are driven by status values rather than economic ideas. Gusfield distinguished "between the political aims of those he calls 'cultural fundamentalists' and 'cultural modernists' . . . Both are engaged with politics, but the fundamentalists have a special edge because they want to restore the simple virtues of a bygone age and they feel themselves to be fighting in a losing cause."

On many occasions they approach economic issues as matters of faith and morals rather than matters of fact. For example, people often oppose certain economic policies not because they have been or would be economically hurt by such policies, or even because they have any carefully calculated views about their economic efficacy, but because they disapprove on moral grounds of the assumptions on which they think the policies rest.
A prominent case in point is the argument over fiscal policy . . . As a matter of status politics, deficit spending is an affront to millions who have been raised to live (and in some cases have been forced by circumstances to live) abstemious, thrifty, prudential lives. . . when society adopts a policy of deficit spending, thrifty small-businessmen, professionals, farmers, and white-collar workers who have been managing their affairs by the old rules feel that their way of life has been officially and insultingly repudiated.

Like Father Coughlin, Billie James Hargis, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and so many other right wing media crusaders before them, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham understand that for many religious Americans, "evil" is not just an adjective but also a noun. When the Puritans first arrived in New England, they believed they were reclaiming a wilderness from Satan. Many traditionalists on the right, whether Christian Millennialists or not, feel much the same way.

To them, Godless Communism or Secular Humanism isn't the absence of a religious orientation so much as they are Satanic religions in and of themselves, whose acolytes glorify evil, promote the slaughter of innocent, unborn babies, and persecute believing Christians. Blue State America is Rome in the time of Christ. Whether its depravity is manifested in the form of sexual libertinage, income redistribution, spiritual or economic incontinence, blasphemy, women's and gay rights, or the threat of "race mixing," anathema and even violence are completely appropriate responses to it.

As melodramatic and overwrought as Glenn Beck's and W. Cleon Skousen's forebodings for the Constitution might be, I suspect they are informed by a specific Mormon prophecy that resonated with both men's sense of self-importance. "When the Constitution of the United States hangs, as it were, upon a single thread," Brigham Young wrote in 1855, referring to Joseph Smith's still earlier "White Horse" prophecy of 1843, "They will have to call for the 'Mormon' elders to save it from utter destruction; and they will step forth and do it." Above and beyond that, I suspect that Beck's conspiracy theories serve an essential psychological purpose--they provide both him and his listeners with a sense of order and control (something that was clearly missing from Beck's life during his alcohol and cocaine-addled years in the radio wilderness). Conspiracy theory has been a goldmine for Beck as an entertainer too, both figuratively and literally--not only has it made him rich, it provides him with an inexhaustible source of material, no small thing for someone whose job requires him to extemporize for hours every day. If Beck has made himself more ridiculous than his rival Rush Limbaugh (who also failed on television) ever did, he can still indulge his megalomania with a radio audience that is larger than the populations of many countries.

For politicians, conspiracy theory provides both a ready-made rallying cry (I know who's responsible for your misery; follow me and we will bring them to grief) and an all-purpose escape hatch (how can we possibly prevail against an enemy that's so elusive and powerful?). Cult leaders, dictators, and demagogues are all avid promoters of conspiracy theories--nothing fosters dependency on a leader and solidarity among followers like the threat of persecution. "Collective fear," Bertrand Russell wrote in "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" in 1943, "stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd . . . Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."

Whether a product of one's own forebodings or a cynical attempt to promote them in others, conspiracy theory creates a feedback loop that is almost impossible to escape from.

And thus it has always been.

Image credit: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Ron Paul's Fans Want Him to Make a Third-Party Run

2012-02-07T16:54:14-05:00

The GOP presidential contest isn't over, but Paul's backers have made him the early favorite in Americans Elect's effort to draft an independent contender.

Americans Elect, the wacky but well-funded effort to put an independent "unity ticket" on the ballot in all 50 states through a public online voting process, opened its virtual floor to nominations last week. And already, one candidate is running away with first place, with over 1,000 votes: Ron Paul.

Paul may still be a contender for the Republican nomination, but his avid fanbase, it seems, already has begun to clamor for him to run outside the framework of the two-party system.

Paul has repeatedly said he doesn't plan to do this, though he has left the door slightly ajar by declining to totally rule it out. (There is, in political-speak, a world of difference between "I have no intention of doing that" and "I promise never to do that," even though politicians' promises are hardly any more permanent than their current intentions.)

Second in the Americans Elect "draft" balloting as of Tuesday afternoon was a former Republican candidate, Jon Huntsman, followed by Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont.

In fourth, oddly enough, was President Obama -- could he be his own spoiler? -- followed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Buddy Roemer, the long-shot GOP presidential candidate and former governor of Louisiana.

But it's early. The "drafting" process goes through early May. After that, there will be three rounds of voting to reduce the field to six candidates, each of whom must pick a running mate of the opposite party or ideological persuasion. The ticket will be chosen at an online convention in June.

The group has secured access to the ballot in 16 states, is pending certification in two and has completed the requirements for access in another 14.

Were Paul to win the Americans Elect sweeps, he could always turn it down. But the group hopes that the prospect of instant ballot access, plus the groundswell of grassroots support, would be difficult for any candidate to refuse.

Image credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking

Even Lewis Carroll Knew Caucuses Were Silly

2012-02-07T15:20:17-05:00

"But who has won?": Nearly 150 years ago, the author mocked the idea of "a caucus-race" in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

In the wake of vote-counting snafus in both of the states to hold caucuses this year, Iowa and Nevada, the old-school precinct meetings have come under fire. Opponents call them undemocratic, antiquated, and lacking in professionalism.

Criticism of caucuses, it turns out, is far from new. In fact, it dates back to at least the 1860s, when the idea of a caucus was mocked in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

"What I was going to say," said the Dodo in an offended tone, "was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race."
"What is a Caucus-race?" said Alice; not that she much wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
"Why," said the Dodo, "the best way to explain it is to do it." (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle ("the exact shape doesn't matter," it said), and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there.
There was no "One, two, three, and away!" but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out "The race is over!" and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, "But who has won?"

That's exactly what they found themselves asking this year in Iowa. Via Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, who called attention to the reference in an article in the Las Vegas Sun.

Planned Parenthood's Deep Bench

2012-02-07T15:20:13-05:00

The backlash against Komen has claimed Karen Handel:

In an interview, Handel acknowledged she played a role in Komen's decision to defund Planned Parenthood, but also pushed back against allegations that she was the sole actor in the decision. "I clearly acknowledge [my role] in the process, but to suggest I had sole authority is just absurd," Handel told Fox News Tuesday afternoon.

"The policy was vetted at all appropriate levels." Handel reiterated that Komen had stopped funding Planned Parenthood because of new grantmaking policies, further explaining that "controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood" also played a role.

I don't think that Handel, or her allies, quite understood the nature of their adversaries. I mentioned this in comments the other day but it's interesting to look at how Plannned Parenthood has weathered under targeting from the Right, as compared with other groups. This is not like ACORN. Whatever their significant work in poor communities and black and Latino communities, Planned Parenthood has touched women across race and across class, and thus indirectly, touched men across race and class too.

Consider this testimony from one of the young ladies pictured below:

That's me and my best friend, three years after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. We were holding a fundraiser in 2008 for breast cancer research/awareness and celebrating another year of being cancer free. I am 27 years old and have been a breast cancer survivor for 7 years now. When I was originally diagnosed and treated, I was lucky to still be covered by my mother's insurance plan. The related medical costs were easier for us to handle.

Once I graduated college, I was no longer eligible for coverage under my mother's insurance. So when I took my first job, I readily opted into my employer's insurance plan. After submitting my application, I was told that the insurance company would not cover any tests/procedures/expenses related to my pre-existing condition...breast cancer. Not only did I require biannual mammograms, I frequently required breast ultrasounds whenever something seemed out of the ordinary with my breast exams. These procedures are extremely expensive out-of-pocket.

Additionally, I am limited as to what hormonal birth control I can take as a result of the cancer. I am limited to two types...and they are expensive. And naturally, my insurance company would not cover either of the two options that I am allowed to take. I've been in a relationship with my significant other for about six years. While we have regularly discussed the possibility of children, we are simply not ready.

Birth control is essential for our life plan. Luckily, not only was I able to turn to Planned Parenthood for my mammogram needs, they became my ONLY source for affordable birth control. Early detection is the key against any type of cancer. The resources provided by Planned Parenthood have been invaluable to me personally. It has given me peace of mind to know with 100% certainty that I have remained cancer free. You cannot put a price on peace of mind. Thank you Planned Parenthood.

The thing about Planned Parenthood is when you run against them you aren't just fighting welfare, or chastising lazy food stamp addicts. And you aren't simply bashing East Coast elites. You are making war against a free-floating nation with vassals, of all color and stripe, at the ready.

It's often said that the diffuseness of gender poses a problem for feminists activists. But here you see how that very diffuseness can be transformed from weakness into power.

Photo of the Day: Shock and Awe at the White House

2012-02-07T14:31:36-05:00

President Obama gets a thrill after inviting young scientists and inventors to his home.

Playing with your food? Shooting things at the White House? It seems like a recipe for disaster and/or arrest, but somehow Joey Hudy managed to play with his food while hanging out at the Executive Mansion and still get this look of amazement out of the president. The 14-year-old Phoenix resident designed this Extreme Marshmallow Cannon and demonstrated it at the second White House Science Fair Tuesday.

In addition to watching Hudy fire sweet treats across the State Dining Room, the president told participants about helping his daughter Sasha prepare for an egg-drop competition by dropping eggs off the Truman Balcony, and quipped to the young inventor of a dissolvable sugar packet, "Tell me when I can buy stock." The event is intended to celebrate and encourage science, technology, engineering, and math education in the United States.

Image: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Even Bill Maher Has Turned on Occupy Wall Street

2012-02-07T13:12:11-05:00

The loudmouthed liberal comedian's critique of the movement is inaccurate, but it shows how attitudes about OWS are changing -- including on the left.

Says Bill Maher, once an Occupy Wall Street supporter:

Similar to Afghanistan, when you occupy anything for too long, people do get pissed off. And as I watch them on the news now, I find myself almost agreeing with Newt Gingrich. Like, you know what? Get a job. Only because the people who originally started, I think they went home, and now it's just these anarchist stragglers. And this is the problem when your movement involves sleeping over in the park. You wind up attracting the people who were sleeping over in the park anyway.

And I think that's where we're at now with the Occupy movement. They did a great job of bringing the issue of income inequality to the fore. But now it's just a bunch of douche bags who think throwing a chair through the Starbucks window is gonna bring on the revolution.

This isn't particularly accurate. As accounts of the movement's origins make clear, the original organizers of the protest were much more politically radical than the subsequent masses that flooded into the streets. And summing up their present activities as throwing chairs into Starbucks windows is misleading at best.

But Maher's comments are nevertheless of interest, if only because his perceptions and commentary on the protest movement are a sign of changing cultural attitudes about its current standing.

HTML to the Rescue! The Saga of Hoekstra and 'Yellow Shirt Girl'

2012-02-07T13:09:19-05:00

Who says that the people behind Pete Hoektra's "Your economy get very weak" ad are insensitive?

They haven't changed the ad itself, or the "Debbie Spend It Now" site festooned in nonsense Chinese and even more nonsense economics. (Best headline about all this, from the NYT: "Asia Bad. Take Many Jobs. Not Fair." )

But fortunately they have changed the HTML code! Here's what we saw last night, as part of the code referencing the comely and smiling "we take your jobs" Asian woman:

But now:

Who wouldn't call that progress! I know that I feel better. As I bet does the actress who appeared in the spot. I'm looking forward to hearing about it from her side some day.

Waging War in Secret vs. American Democracy

2012-02-07T12:36:44-05:00

By fighting terrorism with covert CIA actions, President Obama deprives us of the ability to meaningfully evaluate American foreign policy.

The War in Iraq is mostly over. We're drawing down forces in Afghanistan. Barring an unexpected terrorist attack or another Libya-style troop deployment, Election 2012 will proceed in a world where the War on Terrorism is being waged by intelligence agencies making drone strikes in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and one in which we may be taking covert action inside Iran too.

In others words, much of American foreign policy will be a state secret.

Think about what that means for democracy.

The Iraq War was a major campaign issue in 2004 and 2006. President Obama owes his victory in 2008 partly to the fact that he opposed it, persuaded voters he'd exercise better judgment if faced with a "3 a.m. phone call," and vowed to double down on winning the War in Afghanistan.

But in 2012, Americans won't benefit from as freewheeling a debate about the War on Terror, nor will we be afforded the opportunity to make as informed a judgment about how it is being waged. There are no images from the front, reporters embedded with troops, or generals hauled before Congress. There are, rather, an unknown number of drone strikes and other covert activity in an unknown number of countries, where an unknown number of people have been killed based on secret evidence that may or may not be required to meet an unknown standard. Whether we are trying to kill militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, or perhaps assassinating nuclear scientists in Iran, official secrecy makes robust civic debate impossible.

Consider the CIA's drone program.

Until recently, President Obama hadn't even explicitly acknowledged the covert strikes. They're officially classified -- the White House spokesman carefully avoids confirming that they're happening -- although anonymous administration officials brief reporters on the subject when doing so benefits them. That's why it was unexpected when the president acknowledged the program during a question-and-answer session on YouTube and Google+.

Here's a transcript of the exchange:

QUESTIONER: Mr. President, since you took office you've ordered more drone attacks in your first year than your predecessor did in his entire term. These drone attacks kill cause a lot of civilian casualties. I'm curious to know, how do you feel they help the nation? And whether you think they're worth it?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I want to make sure that people understand drones have actually not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part they have been very precise, precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates. We are very careful about how it's been applied. I think there's this perception somehow that we're just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities and bases, and so on. It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash. It's not a bunch of folks in a room somewhere just making decisions. And it is also part and parcel of our overall authority when it comes to battling Al Qaeda. It is not something that's being used beyond that.

In that short, on-the-record response to a voter's concerns, Obama has made claims about the number of civilian casualties drone strikes are causing, their precision, who is targeted, the degree of oversight, who is empowered to order a drone strike, and the legal authority that governs them. But voters should be wary of his claims. That's because officials privy to contrary information are legally prohibited from going public with the truth, or even acknowledging the program. Blowing the whistle on the Obama Administration could land them in jail. And the notion that Obama is telling untruths is a real possibility. What little we know about the CIA drone program is directly at odds with the account he gave the public in his Web interview.

Conservative estimates suggest hundreds of noncombatant civilians have been killed in Pakistan alone, which is a huge number given that the Obama Administration itself estimates that just two high-value operatives remain the country, and at most hundreds of low-value militants. Though Obama claims those targeted by drones appear on a list of known terrorists, the fact of the matter is that the CIA often doesn't even know the names of the people it is killing. And it is in fact "folks in a room somewhere" who've often decided that drones should kill. As The Wall Street Journal reported in a November story, "The CIA has had freedom to decide who to target and when to strike. The White House usually is notified immediately after signature strikes take place, not beforehand, a senior U.S. official said." Have the rules changes since then?

That's classified.

It's always troubling when a president tells voters blatant untruths about foreign policy. In an election year, the combination of untruths and state secrets is particularly pernicious. And it is making it significantly harder to judge whether Obama is an effective, moral steward of our interests.

Jane Mayer put it this way in her landmark 2009 story on America's drone war:

The Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the C.I.A. program's secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war. Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.'s program -- last month, the Air Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan -- it's unclear what the consequences would be.

My colleagues Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder showed two years later that Obama's policies toward Pakistan caused that country's leaders to start moving its nuclear arsenal around in lightly guarded conveys on public highways. Other critics of Obama have suggested that his frequent drone strikes are likely to create as many terrorists as they eliminate. Says my colleague Robert Wright:

The inevitable drone-induced civilian casualties tend to make life easier for recruiters for al-Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups. It's one thing if, in thus expanding the ranks of terrorists in the long run, we're at least doing major damage to al-Qaeda in the short run; it still may be, on balance, bad anti-terrorism strategy, but at least you'd have to do the math, comparing short-term benefits to long-term costs, before being sure of that. But if -- as seems to be the case -- most of the drone strikes are protecting American soldiers in Afghanistan from attacks by the Taliban, then there may be no big upside in terms of homeland security.

Just as the Obama Administration's secrecy makes it impossible to have a robust national debate about the efficacy of its strategy, it also makes it difficult to make judgments about its morality.

The American people are being told that our intelligence agencies are on "a short leash," that its targets are al-Qaeda operatives intent on harming America, and that there aren't many innocents killed. Many voters are willing to go along with the policy with those caveats in mind. But a new report by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism alleges that after the Obama Administration orders drone strikes on suspected militants, it is common practice for the drones to stick around until rescue workers show up and to fire on them too. Eyewitnesses also say that the United States has attacked funerals held for militants killed in drone strikes. And that strikes on rescue parties and funeral mourners have killed some innocent noncombatant civilians.

Glenn Greenwald argues persuasively that we ought to take allegations from this group very seriously:

As I noted at the time -- and again when I interviewed Chris Woods of the Bureau -- their methodology virtually guarantees significant under-counting of civilian deaths (and, indeed, their July, 2011, count was much lower than other credible reports) because they only count someone as a "civilian" when they can absolutely prove beyond any doubt that the person who died by a drone strike was one. The difficulty of reporting and obtaining verifiable information in Waziristan ensures that some civilian deaths will not be susceptible to that high level of documentary proof, and thus will go un-counted by the Bureau's methodolgy.

The point is that the Bureau is extremely scrupulous, perhaps to a fault, in the claims it makes about civilian drone fatalities. Its findings here about deliberate targeting of rescuers and funeral attendees are supported by ample verified witness testimony, field research and public reports, all of which the Bureau has documented in full. As Woods said by email: "We have been working for months with field researchers in Waziristan to independently verify the original reports. In 12 cases we are able to confirm that rescuers and mourners were indeed attacked."

And how has the Obama Administration responded? Take a look at The New York Times writeup of the report:

The bureau counted 260 strikes by Predator and Reaper drones since President Obama took office, and it said that 282 to 535 civilians had been "credibly reported" killed in those attacks, including more than 60 children. American officials said that the number was much too high, though they acknowledged that at least several dozen civilians had been killed inadvertently in strikes aimed at militant suspects.

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report's findings, saying "targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation." The official added: "One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let's be under no illusions -- there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed."

Note that the Obama Administration official doesn't rebut the veracity of the civilian death numbers -- he or she asserts that "intensive intelligence collection" goes into drone strikes, which isn't inconsistent with subsequently firing on rescuers or funerals; that there is a lot of misinformation out there, which is undoubtedly true regardless; and that critics of the Obama Administration are acting like Al Qaeda sympathizers, the sort of scurrilous charge that the executive branch typically throws out when it wants to distract everyone from the substance of the matter.

Before we choose our next president, we deserve an honest accounting of our drone policy: the rules of engagement, the legal authority that supposedly justifies the killings, how frequently innocents are killed, and testimony under oath about whether rescue workers or funeral-goers have been targeted.

Secrecy can be useful in foreign affairs. But if its benefits come at the cost of a citizenry that can no longer meaningfully decide whether its country's foreign policy is in accordance with its interests and values, the price is too high. The American people are arguably being made complicit in policies we'd never permit if we knew about them. Disagreements about how we ought to conduct ourselves abroad are always going to persist. As we hash them out during presidential elections, we ought to at least agree on the need for accurate information about the status quo.

Image credit: Reuters

Video of the Day: Gay Rights Protest at Gingrich Event Gets Physical

2012-02-07T11:19:27-05:00

Forget "Minnesota nice": not only is the state a hotbed of hecklers, one speech attendee got aggressive in squelching a protest.

Minnesota -- a mostly blue state that sometimes elects Republicans -- is proving to be treacherous territory for GOP presidential candidates. It seems they can barely set foot in the state without being targeted by activists of various stripes, usually advocating for gay rights. Both Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann were "glitter bombed" earlier in the campaign, and Mitt Romney got the treatment last week, though he skillfully played it off as celebration for his Florida primary win. And Tuesday morning in Bloomington, Minn., gay-rights activists heckled Newt Gingrich as he gave a speech.

As the video shows, things got a bit nasty. After one heckler was escorted out of the room, another stood up and took over. Before police could get to the second protester, a member of the audience took matters into her own hands, giving the heckler a solid shove and waving her fist while pointing out of the room.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ron Paul was glitter bombed Monday night in Minneapolis.

Obama's Super PAC Reversal: A Necessary Risk?

2012-02-07T09:30:32-05:00

A significant shift by the president's team on outside funding carries political risks, but he could no longer afford to sulk on the sidelines.

The Obama campaign's announcement late Monday that it plans to publicly support fundraising for an allied outside political group is the final, stark admission that the president can no longer afford to keep the lightly regulated but increasingly influential political organizations at arm's length.

Writing in a blog post e-mailed to President Obama's supporters, campaign manager Jim Messina said that outside organizations known as super PACs have already raised tens of millions of dollars for Republican presidential candidates, thanks in large part to a change in campaign finance rules that allowed uncapped contributions. If it wanted to keep up, he said, the Obama campaign needed to "face the reality of the law as it currently stands" and support its own outside group, Priorities USA Action.

Obama vs. Romney on the 3 a.m. Call

2012-02-07T09:09:14-05:00

Last evening I had an interesting chat with Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word, considering how President Obama has done answering the "3 a.m. call" versus how Mitt Romney might answer the crisis call.

One of my friends said the key issue with Romney is how many layers of staff (or servants?) he might have stacked up to answer that call.

The Atlantic's Steve Clemons speaks to Lawrence O'Donnell about the "3 am call"

And yes, I know that I should 'never' use sports metaphors when talking politics.

In the clip above, I mention Obama's nuanced use of the clock with Iran, comparing it to "that football game we just saw. . .uh, the Superbowl."

We use what we have in our experience to communicate -- and for the first time in many years, I watched the big game and got obsessed with the clock and those final plays. I bet something like this shows up in President Obama's White House Correspondent's Dinner speech.

A Dubious Bill of Good Health for Conservatism

2012-02-07T08:16:08-05:00

In a symposium on the ideology, a National Review writer proclaims it healthy, even as he notes that it has no good solutions for most problems.

Asked by Time magazine, "Is there a crisis in conservatism," Ramesh Ponnuru begins his answer by arguing for its health. "At the opening of the Obama Administration, many observers -- some of them in TIME magazine -- were willing to give the last rites to conservatism. The patient has made a speedy recovery," he writes. "It is entirely possible that within a year, control of the White House, Senate and House will belong to people who call themselves conservative and were elected by conservatives." But isn't that a dubious metric? During the Bush era, there was a period when control of the White House, Senate and House belonged to people who called themselves conservatives and were elected by conservatives. But neither the foreign nor the domestic policies that resulted were conservative. Deficits got bigger, entitlements expanded, the feds accrued power. And attempts to remake Iraq and Afghanistan failed.

If that sounds like a gloomy assessment of the past, Ponnuru is no sunnier about the future.

Here's his assessment:

The past few years have seen a heartening revival of popular interest in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as documents that should guide our political life generally and not just the deliberations of judges.

But the conservative defense of the country's founding principles is incomplete so long as it fails to apply them to the pressing challenges of our day: to show, rather than just say, that those principles amount to timeless wisdom. Conservatives have barely begun to outline a plausible alternative to Obamacare. Our economic ideas too often seem like well-developed answers to the problems of 1981. We have failed, and in some ways have hardly tried, to persuade black, Hispanic and Asian citizens that our philosophy promotes the interests of the whole nation. And none of us is quite sure what to do about the intolerable fact that in our society, familial stability seems increasingly to be becoming a luxury good.

It is confusing when a man who diagnoses conservatism as having returned to health asserts that it has nothing practical to offer on health care, the economy, the governance of an increasingly diverse nation, or family breakup among the middle class? If an ideological movement can tout the right principles, but isn't capable of translating those principles into reality, wouldn't that be a time to declare it gravely ill, rather than signing off on its health?

Image credit: Reuters

This Is So Classy: 'Yellow Girl'

2012-02-06T23:05:27-05:00

Thanks to TPM for a tip to what you see if you examine the HTML code* of the Pete Hoekstra / Fred Davis "we take your jobs" video.

The image of the "Chinese" girl in the video, who speaks American-accented English, is labelled as ... well, see for yourself:

Now, in context, they could have been referring to the color of her shirt, as seen in the picture below. Perhaps. Although in that case "orange girl" is the term that might occur to most people. (As illustrated by comparison with the actually yellow lettering in front of her.)

I suppose it's as if you were using a picture of Colin Powell or President Obama wearing a black shirt. If you were producing one of these ads, by the same logic you could just label it "black boy," right? I mean, why not?

__
* Either you know how to do this, or you can look it up.

The Bizarre Republican Freakout Over the Clint Eastwood Superbowl Ad

2012-02-06T20:43:08-05:00

I watched the Super Bowl online and considered myself lucky, because I was -- for the most part -- spared the commercials. But the commercials are us, and the unfortunate part of opting out is that you often find yourself left out. So here I am, catching up with the flap over the Clint Eastwood commercial.

I just watched the ad seconds ago, after reading about the Republican freak-out, which I have to say is bizarre. This is the exact sort of gauzy nationalism (to paraphrase Jonathan Chait) that corporations have put out for years and Republicans have, themselves, often alluded to. This is the America of their imaginations and to see them lambasting it, evidently for name-checking Detroit and softly alluding to the bail-out, really displays a party that actually isn't.

When Republicans line up against Clint Eastwood and cars, one has to ask, "What could they possibly be for?" Child labor? Charters for blah people? Midnight Basketball?

Studies: Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From Venus

2012-02-06T19:00:24-05:00

How research in political psychology explains the fierce clashes between Republican and Democrats in our polarized system.

In October, 2010, Thomas B. Edsall wrote a story for The New Republic -- "Limited War: How the age of austerity will remake American politics" -- that took a look at the resource war that animates so much of contemporary politics. That article is now a book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, published by Doubleday. In an excerpt, below, Edsall explores the research into the characteristics of the partisans increasingly squabbling over government funding in America.

* * *

The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.

A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.

Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" ¹ are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." ²

Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.

In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. ³

Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. ⁴

These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.

* * *

The Pew questions are designed to test opinion on public policy issues. The strength of the Pew surveys and other comparable, well-designed polls is that the sample is carefully selected to be representative of either the general public or of all voters. The limitation of such surveys is that they are not designed to reveal more subtle distinctions that can be equally or more significant.

This less easily answered question has been explored by a team of academic researchers collaborating at a website -- "www.YourMorals.org" -- designed to test a variety of theories about the connection between views on morality and politics. Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Winter of the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, have collected and systematized very large numbers of responses to questions designed to elicit new information about political values orientation. Haidt et al. have ranked responses to a set of online public opinion surveys to show where self-described liberal/moderates differ most sharply from conservative/moderates. The strength of the YourMorals.org surveys lies in the large number of respondents; the weakness grows out of the fact that the participants are self-selected, and represent well-educated elites on the left, right, and center, with little representation of the poor, working class, or lower-middle class. ⁵

The findings published by Haidt et al. powerfully reinforce the paradigm of two roughly equivalent political coalitions: the first, a socially and economically dominant coalition on the right; the second, a coalition on the left composed of relatively disadvantaged (subdominant) voters in alliance with relatively well-educated, well-off, culturally liberal professionals ('information workers,' 'symbol analysts,' 'creatives,' 'knowledge workers,' etc.). ⁶ The Haidt et. al. data sheds new light on what it means, across a gamut of issues, when someone says he or she is a liberal or a conservative. ⁷

What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: ⁸

1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:

On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe peace is extremely important"; "Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature"; "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal"; "How close do you feel to people all over the world?"

On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict"; "There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you."

2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:

Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."

On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: "People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed"; "Respect for authority is something all children need to learn"; "I believe that 'an eye for an eye' is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders"; "The 'old-fashioned ways' and 'old-fashioned values' still show the best way to live"; "It feels wrong when...a person commits a crime and goes unpunished."

3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:

Liberal high, conservative low: "It feels wrong when . . . an employee who needs their job, is fired"; "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."

Conservative high, liberal low: "[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self"; "[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share"; "[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources."

4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:

Liberals high, conservatives low: "I see myself as someone who . . . is original, comes up with new ideas"; "Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."

Conservative high, liberal low: "If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;" "People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;" "Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide"; "[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms."

Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. ⁹ On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. ¹⁰ Conservatives are more likely to believe in an "eye for an eye," are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition -- all views rejected by liberals. ¹¹

From a different vantage point -- taking data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004, the University of Virginia's Nicholas Winter analyzed the words respondents used to describe the two political parties. In "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties," Winter categorized words respondents volunteered as stereotypically "male" or "female:"

[M]asculine men are thought to be active, independent, and decisive; feminine women are thought to be compassionate, devoted to others, emotional, and kind. These core traits are linked with a range of other features, including other traits (masculine men are aggressive, practical, tough, hardworking, and hierarchical; feminine women are gentle, submissive, soft, ladylike, and egalitarian); physical characteristics (masculine men are big, strong, and muscular; feminine women are small, weak, and soft spoken). ¹²

Image: Composite Image, Reuters

Winter found that in describing what they like about each of the two parties, voters used more words and phrases that Winter coded as "masculine" in describing the GOP than in describing the Democrats, by an overwhelming ratio of 7 to 1. Conversely, voters used more words and phrases Winter coded as "feminine" to describe the Democrats than they used for Republicans, again by a strong ratio of 5.7 to 1. ¹³

At the same time, Winter writes, polls show:

Republicans are thought to handle better such issues as defense, dealing with terrorism, and controlling crime and drugs; these are precisely the sorts of issues that Americans associate with men or with masculine traits. Conversely, Democratic-owned issues include education, health care, helping the poor, protecting the environment, and promoting peace; these are all also associated with women or with feminine traits. ¹⁴

In summary, Winter found:

During the past three decades Americans have come to view the parties increasingly in gendered terms of masculinity and femininity. Utilizing three decades of American National Election Studies data . . . this paper demonstrates empirically that these connections between party images and gender stereotypes have been forged at the explicit level of the traits that Americans associate with each party, and also at the implicit level of unconscious cognitive connections between gender and party stereotypes. These connections between the parties and masculinity and femininity have important implications for citizens' political cognition and for the study of American political behavior. ¹⁵

When it comes to partisan confrontation, Democrats and Republicans are, arguably, different breeds. As Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia writes,

[T]hink of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment. ¹⁶

A 41 percent plurality of Republicans surveyed in a USA Today-Gallup poll shortly after the November 2010 election said that political leaders should stand firm in their beliefs even if little gets done, compared to just 18 percent of Democrats. Nearly three fifths of Democrats, 59 percent, said leaders should be willing to compromise to get things done, compared to just 31 percent of Republicans. ¹⁷

A similar Wall Street Journal/NBC poll conducted in early December 2010, found that Democrats believe that elected officials should "make compromises to gain consensus on legislation," as opposed to "stick[ing] to their positions even if this means not being able to gain consensus," by a margin of 63-29, while Republicans were split, 47-47. ¹⁸

These differences are more than skin deep, and become significant in political fights over scarce resources. Republican resistance to accommodation can have serious consequences: austerity policies adopted by Congress -- as well as by state and local governing bodies (which are bound by law to maintain balanced budgets) -- will fall heavily on domestic spending, especially on programs and services for the disadvantaged and the poor, i.e. Democratic voters.

Not only are the disadvantaged less well-equipped to press their case, insofar as power correlates with cash, but their primary defenders, contemporary liberals, often flinch in warfare over resources. Scarcity seems to play to the psychological and competitive strengths of conservatives, reinforcing their hierarchical and authoritarian preferences, while increasing the likelihood that those on the left will compromise and concede on matters large and small.

Dana Carney of Columbia University, John Jost of New York University, Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas, and Jeff Potter of Atof, Inc., in their 2008 paper, "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind," published in the journal Political Psychology ¹⁹theorize that there are certain personality traits associated with liberal or left-wing orientations and conservative or right wing orientations, as described in Figure 1. ²⁰

FIGURE 1
Personality Traits Theorized to be Associated with Liberal (or Left-Wing) and Conservative (or Right-Wing) Orientation, 1930--2007

Liberal/Left-Wing

Slovenly, ambiguous, indifferent, eccentric, sensitive, individualistic; open, tolerant, flexible; life-loving, free, unpredictable; creative, imaginative, curious; expressive, enthusiastic; excited, sensation-seeking; desire for novelty, diversity; uncontrolled, impulsive; complex, nuanced; open-minded; open to experience.

Conservative/Right-Wing

Definite, persistent, tenacious; tough, masculine, firm; reliable, trustworthy, faithful, loyal; stable, consistent; rigid, intolerant; conventional, ordinary; obedient, conformist; fearful, threatened; xenophobic, prejudiced; orderly, organized; parsimonious, thrifty, stingy; clean, sterile; obstinate, stubborn; aggressive, angry, vengeful; careful, practical, methodical; withdrawn, reserved; stern, cold, mechanical; anxious, suspicious, obsessive; self-controlled; restrained, inhibited; concerned with rules, norms; moralistic; simple, decisive; closed-minded; conscientious.

Carney's team describes conservatism "as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear. . . Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be linked to the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of inequality." ²¹ (emphasis added)

Working along parallel lines, Harvard professor of psychology James Sidanius and colleagues have developed a measure of what they describe "social dominance orientation," or, in academic shorthand, SDO. Sidanius and his associates use a 16 question survey to place respondents on a scale of high to low SDO. Those high in SDO gave favorable responses to the first eight statements and negative responses to questions nine through sixteen: ²²

1. Some groups of people are just more worthy than others

2. In getting what your group wants, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups

3. It's OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others

4. To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on other groups

5. If certain groups of people stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems

6. It's probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom.

7. Inferior groups should stay in their place

8. Sometimes other groups must be kept in their place

9. It would be good if all groups could be equal

10. Group equality should be our ideal

11. All groups should be given an equal chance in life

12. We should do what we can to equalize conditions for different groups

13. We should increase social equality

14. We would have fewer problems if we treated different groups more equally.

15. We should strive to make incomes more equal

16. No one group should dominate in society

Sidanius et al. found that SDO is higher among whites than among African Americans; is negatively related to empathy, openness, and agreeableness; and is positively linked to aggressivity, vindictiveness, coldness, tough-mindedness, and to a belief that "the world is a zero-sum game." In addition, those ranking high on a SDO scale "will use others to get ahead . . . they believe that harming people is legitimate, are observably disagreeable, cold, and vindictive, are low in benevolence, and do not hesitate to humiliate others. Their dog-eat-dog mentality leads them to support economic competition and war over social welfare programs . . . people high in SDO tend to be callous, confident, and cruel." ²³

In a separate set of studies, published in the paper "Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes," Sidanius and colleagues found that "Republican political party preference correlated positively and significantly with SDO in six out of six samples." ²⁴

While Carney, Jost, Sidanius, et al. describe conservatives in pejorative terms, the University of Virginia's Jon Haidt and Jesse Graham of the University of Southern California, contend that liberal scholars may be restricting their definition of morality by failing to acknowledge values and principles important to conservatives.

Haidt and Graham submit that conservatives are concerned not only with the welfare and rights of the individual, but also with the institutions of family, patriotism, loyalty to one's group, and recognition of the legitimacy of hierarchy and order as beneficial to the larger society. As a result, according to Haidt and Graham, conservatives will sometimes take what they see as moral stands -- attacking abortion and divorce as undermining the family -- that liberals may well see as immoral impositions on the autonomy of individuals, especially women.

Haidt and his colleagues, in their paper "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations," graphed five "moralities" -- (a) harm/care (strong empathy for those that are suffering and care for the most vulnerable); (b) fairness/reciprocity (life liberty and justice for all); (c) ingroup/loyalty (tribalism, patriotism, nationalism); (d) authority/respect (mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates); and (e) purity/sanctity (related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble) -- to show how liberals give priority to only to the first two, harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, while conservatives give roughly equal weight to all five. ²⁵

FIGURE 2

²⁶

In interpreting their data, Haidt and Graham write that

"justice and related virtues . . . make up half of the moral world for liberals, while justice-related concerns make up only one fifth of the moral world for conservatives. Conservatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns. When conservatives talk about virtues and policies based on the in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity foundations, liberals hear talk about theta waves [i.e., from outer space]. For this reason, liberals often find it hard to understand why so many of their fellow citizens do not rally around the cause of social justice, and why many Western nations have elected conservative governments in recent years." ²⁷

Haidt and Graham look at the issue of 'harm' not from the viewpoint that conservatives are more willing to inflict it, but from the other end of the telescope, that liberals place a higher value than conservatives on avoiding inflicting harm.

This distinction is crucial. There is a strong tendency in the social sciences to demonize Republicans and the right. The result is often a caricature rather than an accurate portrayal of conservatism and the values it represents. Without an accurate portrait of conservatism, the outcome of elections in which majorities periodically back conservative candidates cannot be fully understood.

Recognizing the danger that "behavioral research . . . runs the risk of becoming an extension of the political struggle between left and right," two other researchers, Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School, and Gregory Mitchell of the University of Virginia Law School, have tried to look objectively at "flattering and unflattering cognitive and motivational characterizations of liberals and conservatives," and with the aim of producing a more balanced view of the competing value systems of left and right.

Four excerpts from their research paper, "Liberal and conservative approaches to justice: Conflicting psychological portraits," are instructive: ²⁸

1. Flattering liberal portrait:

"They [Liberals] do not equate downtrodden or impoverished status with inherent unworthiness or inability . . . In a nutshell, liberals are less selfish and more empathic and tolerant than conservatives. Their fear of aiding the undeserving is outweighed by their fear not helping the truly needy . . . Liberals do not need to bolster their self-esteem by living in a stratified society in which they can claim superiority over this or that group . . . Finally, liberals do not blame the victim or make defensive attributions . . . Liberals acknowledge that fate can be capricious and that bad things happen to good people."

2. Flattering conservative portrait:

"Conservatives realize the importance of incentives and that no, or little, aid is often the best help of all. The conservative response to social problems avoids the simplistic first response of treating the symptom by creating a new and expensive government program . . . conservatives are more integratively complex than liberals because they understand how often well-intentioned political reforms have unintended consequences or perverse effects . . . Finally, conservatives understand how free markets work, [they] recognize that the invisible hand of free market competition leads in the long term to incentives to produce good at levels of quality and quantity that satisfy effective demand for those goods."

3. Unflattering liberal portrait:

"They practice, in effect, a kind of social homeopathic medicine that treats symptoms rather than underlying causes . . . They fail to take into account the growing burden on the economy and the perverse incentives that dependency on public programs creates . . . Liberals not only exaggerate the efficacy of government; they underestimate the creativity of the free market. Many liberals mindlessly condemn capitalism as a culture of greed and ignore the power of the market to stimulate hard work, investment and entrepreneurship . . . [Liberalism] is a reflection of the widespread 'psychology of dependency' in which government, by transference, takes on the role of nurturant, powerful parent."

4. Unflattering conservative portrait:

"[C]onservatives do not understand how prevalent situational constraints on achievement are and thus commit the fundamental attribution error when they hold the poor responsible for poverty . . . [C]onservatives are too prone to engage in zero-sum thinking, either I keep my money or the government takes it. They fail to appreciate the possibility of positive-sum resolutions of societal conflicts . . . Conservatives cling to the comforting moral illusion that there is a sharp distinction between allowing people to suffer and making people suffer. Finally, conservatives fail to recognize that even if each transaction in a free market meets their standards of fairness, the cumulative result could be colossally unfair. Some people will acquire enormous power over others . . . [C]onservatism and compassion are antithetical." ²⁹

The competing value systems of liberals and conservatives are further illuminated by American National Election Studies (ANES) poll data which supports research finding that conservatives and Republicans are more willing than liberals or Democrats to endorse free market solutions even when high costs are imposed on those less able to compete. ANES asked in 2004 and 2008 whether the government has an obligation to provide its citizens a good job and decent standard of living. Democrats and liberals agreed that government has the obligation by 40.5 - 26.5 and 47.5 - 24.5 margins respectively. In contrast, Republicans and conservatives said people should get ahead on their own by margins of 63.5-15 and 68-14, respectively. ³⁰

These findings demonstrate the danger of demonizing the left or right. Instead, a balanced approach to the strengths and weaknesses of each position -- recognizing the salience of Tetlock and Mitchell's 'flattering' and 'unflattering' characterizations -- is essential to understanding how it is possible for the electorate to shift back and forth from election to election.

At the state and federal level, Republicans justify budget cuts in basic health and welfare programs by positing that the poor are responsible for their condition; emphasizing the costs of social welfare policies and the tax burdens that such benefit programs impose on the middle class; alleging that the consequences of denied food stamps or medical care can be absorbed in the larger scheme of things; asserting that market forces provide better solutions than government handouts; and believing that requiring people to shoulder hardship has salutary effects.

Under conditions of scarcity, a significant number of 'discipline' oriented Americans will be drawn to the hard-edged doctrines of conservatism, providing support to the Tea Party and to the moral orientation of the current Republican House. Conditions of scarcity work to the advantage of conservatives, undermining the willingness of voters to sacrifice -- pay higher taxes -- for the less fortunate.

In contrast, periods of economic growth work to the advantage of those on the left, who are more committed to values of 'nurturance' and care. These voters feel the suffering of others, their compassion is intensified by the sight of the jobless and homeless and hopeless. They believe that a helping hand is morally appropriate and benefits the larger polity. Democrats depend on such voters for core support. In times of plenty, voters in the center can find themselves sympathetic to this position.

For both left and right, packaging is crucial -- placing political ideology and public policy in the most 'flattering' light -- to use the Tetlock-Mitchell template. In the 2000 election, for example, the concept of 'compassionate conservatism' was key to George W. Bush's victory. Similarly, Democrat Bill Clinton's 1992 promise to "end welfare as we know it," to press for "more empowerment and less entitlement," to seek a "government that is leaner, not meaner; that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy" was designed to win wary independent voters. Along the same lines, during the 2008 campaign, Obama -- seeking to reframe 'unflattering' stereotypes of Democrats -- supported the death penalty and the right to bear arms, ³¹ announced his approval of a House-passed intelligence surveillance law, ³² and urged absentee fathers to "realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child -- it's the courage to raise one." ³³

***

In many ways, the politics of austerity go to the heart of the problem of 'loss allocation' posed by MIT economist Lester Thurow in his 1980 book, The Zero-Sum Society.

Republicans are willing to allocate losses in ways that harm their adversaries, if the outcomes favor their own interests and are consistent with conservative value systems. Large numbers of voters -- indeed, intermittent majorities -- appear to agree with GOP values when decisions about loss allocation must be made, even though these values are anathema to the disadvantaged and to ideological liberals.

Values clashes of this nature are stark -- and result in the contemporary phenomenon of acute political polarization. Conditions of scarcity magnify and intensify the conflicts underlying polarization. The electorate is now divided into two roughly equal but ideologically antithetical blocks. The swing segment of the electorate -- i.e. those who have "an unstable attachment to the major political parties," according to analyst Mark Gersh, ³⁴those who switch their votes from Republican to Democrat, and back again, from one election to another -- is very small, ranging from just 5 percent or 6 percent, according to estimates by former Republican strategist Matt Dowd, ³⁵ to 10 percent, according to political analysts Alan Abramowitz and Bill Bishop. ³⁶ In many elections this 5 percent to 10 percent slice of the electorate proves crucial to the electoral outcome. The candidate who successfully identifies and mobilizes the key moveable segments of the electorate -- swing voters -- often proves to be the winner.

In 2008, for example, Obama's core constituency of blacks, 'netroots," creatives, single women, young voters, and Hispanics was augmented by a sizeable number of white swing voters who were put off by Bush himself, by the Iraq war, and by the financial collapse of September 2008 -- as well as by John McCain's weak campaign and by his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Two years later, many of these same swing voters, angered by continuing unemployment, ballooning deficits, and the perceived distributional impact of health care reform, swept House Democrats out of office.

The 2012 election will be a battle for the hearts and ballots of these same voters in what is shaping up as the most ideological confrontation in recent memory.

From the book THE AGE OF AUSTERITY by Thomas Edsall. Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Edsall. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.

¹Philip E. Tetlock, "Cognitive style and political ideology," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (1983): 118-26, available at http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/Vita/Philip%20Tetlock/Phil%20Tetlock/1977-1983/1983%20Cognitive%20Style%20and%20Political%20Ideology.pdf

²Linda J. Skitka and Philip E. Tetlock, "Providing Public Assistance: Cognitive and Motivational Processes Underlying Liberal and Conservative Policy Preferences," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 1205-23, available at http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/Vita/Philip%20Tetlock/Phil%20Tetlock/1992-1993/1993%20Providing%20Public%20Assistance....pdf.

³Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. "Independents Oppose Party in Power . . . Again: More Conservative, More Critical of National Conditions," September 23, 2010, available at http://people-press.org/report/658/.

⁴Ibid.

⁵YourMorals.org. Accessed March 21, 2011, available at http://www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php.

⁶Thomas B. Edsall, Building Red America. New York: Basic, 2000. "The Democratic Party, conversely, is the party of the so-called 'subdominant' and of those who identify with the subdominant, including those upper-income voters who have taken the side of the insurgents in the sexual, women's rights, and civil rights revolutions. Roughly two-thirds of the Democratic party's adherents are Americans who struggle to survive in an increasingly brutal competitive environment. The party is also the representative of organized labor and of the leadership of old-line religious denominations -- institutions in decline." p.1.

⁷Polipsych.com. Accessed March 21, 2011, available at http://www.polipsych.com/.

⁸ Polipsych.com. "Differences between White Male Liberals and White Male Conservatives," October 27, 2010, available at http://www.polipsych.com/2010/10/27/differences-between-white-male-liberals-and-white-male-conservatives/. The site has a link to the same data for white female liberals and conservatives.

⁹Thomas B. Edsall, "Women's Political Muscle Shapes 2000 Race," The Washington Post, March 11, 1999.

¹⁰James C. Dobson, Dare to Discipline. Illionois: Tyndale House, 1977. "[P]ain is a marvelous purifier . . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely," p. 16 and p. 23.

¹¹ George Lakoff, Moral Politics. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002. "The conservative/liberal division is ultimately a division between strictness and nurturance as ideals at all levels -- from the family to morality to religion and, ultimately, to politics. It is a division at the center of our democracy and our public lives, and yet there is no overt discussion of it in public discourse. The reason is that the details are largely unconscious, part of what cognitive scientists call the Cognitive Unconscious -- a deep level of mind that we have no direct access to. Yet it is vitally important that we do so if Americans are to understand and come to grips with, the deepest fundamental division in our country, one that transcends and lies behind all the individual issues; the role of government, social programs, taxation, education, the environment, energy, gun control, abortion, the death penalty, and so on. These are ultimately not different issues, but manifestations of a single issue; strictness versus nurturance." p. x.

¹² Nicholas Winter, "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties." Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Toronto Meeting, 2009, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1451343.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶Jonathan Haidt, "What Makes People Vote Republican?" Edge, September 9, 2008, available at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html.

¹⁷Susan Page, "Poll: Dems, GOP divided on how to move forward," USA Today, November 8, 2010, available at http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2010-11-08-post-election-poll_N.htm.

¹⁸Jonathan Weisman and Danny Yadron, "Poll Supports Shift to Center," Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2010, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704828104576021900230935000.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5.

¹⁹ Dana R. Carney, John T. Jost, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter, "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Proﬁles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind," Political Psychology 29 (2008): 807-40, available at http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/Carney,%20Jost,%20&%20Gosling%20(2008)%20The%20secret%20lives%20of%20liberals%20.pdf.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹Ibid.

²²Felicia Pratto, Jim Sidanius, and Shana Levin, "Social dominance theory and the dynamics of intergroup relations: Taking stock and looking forward," European Review of Social Psychology 17 (2006): 271-320. The appendix lists the questions used to determine SDO.

²³Ibid.

²⁴Felicia Pratto, James Sidanius, Lisa M. Stallworth, and Bertram F. Malle, "Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 741-763, available at http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3207711/Sidanius_SocialDominanceOrientation.pdf?sequence=1.

²⁵ Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (2009): 1029-46, available at http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/rt/null?&exclusive=filemgr.download&file_id=7214828&rtcontentdisposition=filename%3DGraham_Jesse_paper.pdf.

²⁶Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009, Vol. 96, No. 5, 1029--1046, American Psychological Association, available at http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/

²⁷Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, "When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize," Social Justice Research (2007), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=872251

²⁸ P.E Tetlock and P.G. Mitchell, "Liberal and conservative approaches to justice: Conflicting psychological portraits," in Psychological Perspectives on Justice, edited by B. Mellers & J. Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), available at http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/Vita/Philip%20Tetlock/Phil%20Tetlock/1992-1993/1993%20Liberal%20and%20Conservative%20Approaches%20to%20Justice.pdf.

²⁹Ibid.

³⁰American National Election Studies. "Military Spending, 7 Point Scale (1980-2008)," accessed July 12, 2011, available at http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab4d_3b.htm.

³¹ Suzanne Goldenberg and Elana Schor, "Obama supports supreme court reversal of gun ban: Candidate's stance at odds with former position: Democrat backs death penalty for child rapist," GuardianUK, June 27, 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/27/barackobama.usa.

³² Paul Kane, "Obama Supports FISA Legislation, Angering Left," Washington Post, June 20, 2008, available at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/06/20/obama_supports_fisa_legislatio.html.

³³Barack Obama, "We Need Fathers To Step Up," Parade Magazine, June 21, 2009, available at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/06/barack-obama-we-need-fathers-to-step-up.html.

³⁴Mark Gersh, "Swing Voters," DLC, accessed June 12, 2011, available at http://www.dlc.org/print.cfm?contentid=252802. ³⁵Michiko Kakutani, "The Republican Collapse May Not Be So Imminent," New York, Times, September 12, 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/books/12kaku.html?pagewanted=all.

³⁶Alan I. Abramowitz and Bill Bishop, "Myth of the Middle," Washington Post, March 1, 2007, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/28/AR2007022801817.html.

Rick Santorum's New Hopes

2012-02-06T17:42:32-05:00

Tuesday's contests could keep him in the race -- or persuade his supporters that he has no shot at the nomination.

For Rick Santorum, Tuesday's primary in Minnesota is key. Is his candidacy doomed? Or is there reason to stay in the race?

The former Pennsylvania senator finished first in Iowa, tied for fourth in New Hampshire, finished third in South Carolina, third in Florida, and came in last on Saturday in Nevada. In other words, he is trending in the wrong direction.

But he's got an optimistic theory about why that is so.

"Now, we're getting to the states where people don't have the natural advantage, don't have the time commitment, the staff commitment to really build out an organization like they did in these first five," he told Fox News Sunday, predicting a strong performance in upcoming contests. "I think we're going to do very well here in Minnesota. I think we're going to do very well in Colorado, and we've got a one-on-one match up against Mitt Romney in Missouri. While there's no delegates, it is a key state, it is a primary. And we think we can do exceptionally well in the state of Missouri."

At least one poll, the latest from PPP, puts Santorum slightly ahead in The Land of 10,000 Lakes, where Romney won in 2008. But Romney's final push includes campaign appearances with supporters Tim Pawlenty, the state's former governor, and conservative favorite John Bolton. Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, in contrast, had no plans to endorse when pressed by reporters. "Let me be absolutely clear - there are absolutely no negotiations between me and the Romney campaign regarding any pending endorsement of Governor Romney," she said. "I continue to speak with all the candidates and plan on uniting behind the presumptive nominee."

Even with a win in Minnesota, there is little chance that Santorum would emerge as the GOP nominee. But it would permit him to raise more money and enjoy a platform in the press to keep touting his socially conservative message. The result could even be a field of four candidates running all the way to the GOP convention: Gingrich has already pledged that he'll stay in the race; and Ron Paul, intent on spreading his own unique message, has no reason to withdraw.

Image credit: Reuters