Open Left - Front Page

SOTU warm-up & open thread

Paul Rosenberg — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:30:00 GMT

First off, from Bob Herbert's excellent NYT Op-Ed, on Social Security, "Raising False Alarms" that begins with the line, "If there's a better government program than Social Security, I'd like to know what it is," there's this passage where CAF's Roger Hickey hits it out of the park:

"If we didn't have Social Security, we'd have to invent it right now," said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future. "It's perfectly suited to the terrible times we're going through. Hardly anyone has pensions anymore. People's private savings have taken a huge hit, and home prices have been hit hard. So the private savings that so many seniors and soon-to-be seniors have counted on have just been wiped out.
"Social Security is still there, and it's still paying out retirement benefits indexed to wages. It's the one part of the retirement stool that is working."

Too much common sense all in one place for Obama to grasp, or else he'd say the exact same thing himself tonight.

Second, from Public Citizen"GUIDE TO SOTU ON EXPORTS, JOBS":

Whether trade creates U.S. jobs depends on net export gains and reducing the trade deficit, which our past policies have not done: The question is how to expand trade in a way that creates U.S. jobs. Under past trade policies and pacts, the U.S. has served as the target market for imports from around the world. This has resulted in a huge trade deficit - $810 billion before the economic crisis-related collapse in trade and now again rising....

As Paul Krugman wrote in a recent column "Trade Does Not Equal Jobs: "If you want a trade policy that helps employment, it has to be a policy that induces other countries to run bigger deficits or smaller surpluses. A countervailing duty on Chinese exports would be job-creating; a deal with South Korea, not."

U.S. export growth under past Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) has been less than half that to countries with which we do not have FTAs: President Barack Obama is expected to urge passage of more FTAs as a means to boost exports and create U.S. jobs. However, Public Citizen examined the relative U.S. export growth with the 17 countries with which we have FTAs to date and found, counterintuitively, that the FTAs are associated with an export growth penalty. 3 U.S. exports to FTA partners grew only half as fast as exports to countries with which the United States does not have FTAs (0.8 percent vs. 2.2 percent on an annual average)....

The U.S. International Trade Commission's official study of the Korea FTA that Obama will emphasize concluded that the deal would increase the U.S. trade deficit: The USITC, the independent federal body that analyzes likely effects of trade pacts for Congress and the executive branch, found that the Korea FTA would result in an increase in the total U.S. goods trade deficit of between $308 million and $416 million. I

Third: More evidence that Obama's callous disregard for homeowners has not been a good idea, from Clusterstock:

The Housing Double Dip Is Accelerating
This chart is pretty clear. From the just-released Case-Shiller, it's clear that the year-over-year decline accelerated in November.
If you assume that housing has to be part of a recovery, this obviously isn't good.

What about you? What are you thinking about, before, during and after?

Barney and the Banks

Mike Lux — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Elizabeth Warren likes to tell the story about how when she first met with Barney Frank about the financial reform issue, he told her, in no uncertain terms, that the banks would win on the issue of establishing a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and that she had no hope of getting the CFPB as part of the law. She tells the story not to embarrass Barney -- who was very supportive of Elizabeth in her fight to get the CFPB in place -- but to rally people who feel like there is no hope of beating the banks on anything. However, the story does, in fact, carry a lesson about Barney: he is intimately familiar with what the big banks want and don't want, and is not inclined to take on the bankers unless people as strong as Elizabeth refuse to take no for an answer.

The latest example is that Barney has jumped on board with the big banks and their credit card company subsidiaries on the debit card "swipe fee" issue. He has been saying he would be happy to work with Republicans in Congress to roll back the related new Federal Reserve regulations.

Now, I love Barney Frank, and he is a good guy on most issues, but this is pure craziness. The basic question is: Politically or policywise, why would you want to help the big banks in opposition to Main Street businesses? On one side, you have six big banks that already own assets equal to 64 percent of our country's GDP. They own 80 percent of the debit card market, and the swipe fees they charge, by their own admission, are almost pure profit. On the other side you have retail stores, restaurants, hairdressers, cabbies - representatives of Main Street businesses who have lacked the ability to bargain with these behemoth credit card companies. Is there any question policywise as to who it would be better to help? What about politically -- which side do you think is more popular with the American public?

Here's the other thing that is nuts about what Frank is doing: Why would you want to give the Republicans the political cover and opportunity to re-open the financial reform bill just passed? Does Barney really think Republicans would stop with debit cards if Congress were to start debating financial reform again? Thinking about all the changes banking lobbyists would make in John Boehner's conference room if the financial reform legislation passed last year were re-opened is enough to make my head spin. (A little "tweaking" of derivatives regulations here, a little amendment or two to the CFPB there... Oh, and don't forget the legal bailout we need so that we can foreclose on people faster.) I can see the whole bloody scenario pass in front of my eyes, with Republicans just telling the media, "Well, even Barney Frank said we should fix a few of these things."

I think that Democratic members of Congress who have been in Washington a long time sometimes forget what is really at stake in issues like this. They have old friends -- former staffers in many cases -- who have gone on to work for the banks talking to them at fundraisers about little tweaks they want to make on this issue or that issue, and they forget what matters to the American public. Members of Congress -- even the good ones sometimes -- get to think it is just a battle between lobbyists, and they forget what really matters. I got involved in this swipe fee issue, helping retailers and consumer groups that care about the issue, because it is a $15 billion battle in which the money either will go straight into the pockets of the big banks or back into the Main Street economy. It is easy for me to pick sides, and it should be easy for Barney Frank as well.

GOP: Obama won't be crazy enough on cutting spending in SOTU

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:30:00 GMT

He may not be ready to gut Social Security just yet, but he has definitively jettisoned 70 years of economic history. Government no longer steps in to spend money when consumer demand fails. Instead, government works hard to make matters even worse. With state and local budgets once again being cut across the country, there will clearly be net decreases in government spending as far as the eye can see. Herbert Hoover would be so proud! And yet, it's not enough, as the WSJ reports:

Obama to Call for Nonsecurity Spending Freeze
By DAMIAN PALETTA And JONATHAN WEISMAN

William McKinley: NOT A Kenyan

WASHINGTON-President Barack Obama will call for a five-year freeze on nonsecurity discretionary spending in his State of the Union address Tuesday night "as a down payment toward reducing the deficit," a White House official said.
The freeze won't touch some of the budget's biggest items, such as Medicare, Social Security and defense spending, nor will it apply to homeland-security spending or foreign aid.
But Mr. Obama will look for "cuts and efficiencies" in other areas, the official said. For example, the president is pushing the five-year plan designed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to slow the growth of military spending, which officials believe would save $78 billion.
The president's plan would save about $26 billion over five years, according to the White House budget proposal for the current fiscal year. Those savings would be dwarfed by the $100 billion in cuts for this year alone that many House Republicans are pushing.
Republicans said Tuesday that Mr. Obama's proposal wouldn't do enough to rein in spending.

So why is this? Why has 70 years of macro-economic history and understanding been tossed out the window, in favor of returning to the darkness of pre-macro ignorance? This is a variant of the question that Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman have been asking in anguish for many moons now. Why has a rage to punish the poor, and even the middle class completely taken over and displaced the commonsense interest in preserving the basic stability of the economy through as quick a recovery as possible?

A fascinating post late last week from Mike Konczal, "Kristol, Kalecki, and a 19th Century Economist Defending Patriarchy all on Political Macroeconomics" provides surprising insight....

I wont try to reprise or summarize the whole sweep of this post, though I will pluck a couple of tidbit out of the middle, before proceeding to the concluding section:

From time to time I get to meet people in what you would call the Professional Class. Lately I've noticed there's a common critique of President Obama. Are you ready for it? It goes something like "He's alienating business. No wonder employment is suffering if he's done a terrible job with including the business community." I wish I could tell you I say something clever in response, or drop a neat factoid or statistics, but normally I am just concentrating on keeping my head from exploding like in that movie Scanners.

The idea that top businessmen would debliberately make less money to spite the president for not drooling all over them strikes me as absurd on multiple levels. Hence the Scanners reference. And yet, there actually is a deep logic there, as Konczal explains, quoting from Kalecki about how the business class in the good old days controlled the economy by the strength of their influence over public confidence--or so they imagined:

Under a laissez-faire system the level of employment depends to a great extent on the so-called state of confidence. If this deteriorates, private investment declines, which results in a fall of output and employment (both directly and through the secondary effect of the fall in incomes upon consumption and investment). This gives the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis. But once the government learns the trick of increasing employment by its own purchases, this powerful controlling device loses its effectiveness. Hence budget deficits necessary to carry out government intervention must be regarded as perilous.

With that in mind--a passage that Konczal did not credit so much when he first read it as he does today--let's skip to the amazing closing section, where he takes us back to the rather amazing "logic" that prevailed in McKinley's time:

A 19th Century Economist Defending Patriarchy
In 1889, Harvard economist Francis A. Walker wrote a book titled Money in Its Relation to Trade and Industry. Among many other things, he argued:
The social effects of a paper-money inflation are so fresh in the mind, through our recollections of our own Greenback Era, that I need not recall the wanton bravery of apparel and equipage; the creation of a countless host of artificial necessities in the family beyond the power of the husband and father to supply without a resort to questionable devices or reckless speculations, or to drafts on the proper business capital or the once sacred family reserve; the humiliating imitation of foreign habits of living, with but the faintest conception of the modes of thought and feeling and the customs of social intercourse which underlie them abroad; the loss of that fit and natural leadership of taste and fashion which is the best protection society can have against sordid material aims, and manners at once gross and effeminate, against democracy without equality or fraternity, and exclusiveness without nobility or pride of character.

Paper money decreases the power of the husband over his wife and the father over his family, loosens the natural leadership that serves as the best protection against "effeminate" manners, and gives us a democracy without nobility.
Which is to say, if you are a person who tends to use a capital N "Natural" to describe your political ideology ("I believe in a Natural Order with a Natural Hierarchy, which I get from my engagement with Natural Rights as observed through Natural Law...."), as many conservatives do, then you are going to be likely to think that the dollar is a Natural Thing too. Like women wearing pants and voting, any attempt to disrupt the Natural Order is going to be dangerous. That the value of a dollar is a social creation, and that if there is excessive demand for money the government should provide extra supply for money, isn't going to be a convincing argument.
Michael O'Malley has written (h/t matthewstoller) some excellent stuff about this fight from a century ago ("Gold-standard arguments reflected a more generalized concern about and fascination with the insubstantiality of character, race, and value in labor...").
So if you are a type who believes the government can only do bad, who believes that prosperity flows from how appreciated the business community feels, and who believes strongly in the Natural Order, then you are not going to be in favor of activist monetary and fiscal policy to fix the economy. You also won't have any actual coherent view of what is wrong with the economy.

What this amazing little flashback into the primitive beliefs of our 19th century ancestors has to tell us is just how deeply grounded in culture war politics our current economic dysfunctions really are. From the beginning, Obama ran on the notion that the culture wars were some sort of Boomer insanity that he would help wash from the land, bringing everyone together in a technocratic clean-up operation.

This had always seemed deeply delusional to me. There had, after all, been a Civil Rights struggle before the Boomers arived, and even a Civil War nearly a century before they were even born. But this particular revelation shows a degree of direct connectedness between culture wars past and the abandonment of macro-economic reason that even I found quite surprising.

Put simply, the fantasy of objectively bringing everyone together in a realm free from culture war politics has never been more fully discredited than it is today.

And yet, President Obama moves bravely onward, as if nothing had changed, obediently fighting fire with gasoline in a fruitless attempt to find "common ground" while the Republicans jeer him on, "Not enough gasoline!" they shout.

"Not enough gasoline! Not nearly enough!"

p.s. Ron Paul, as a goldbug, is staunchly in the tradition of McKinley, even as he vociferously claims to be a populist--in the utterly opposite tradition of Bryan and those even further to Bryan's left. Now Obama's politics are approaching the same degree of incoherence and self-delusion as Paul's.

Pretty fricken amazing. If only it were comedy instead of real life.

France Fox Piven & the spread of Beck's crazy, violent worldview

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Cenk Uygur had a very good debut show, IMHO, and this segment with France Fox Piven was particularly good. This story needs to get as much attention as possible:

What I want to underscore is that, as crazy as Beck's thinking seems, it's entirely characteristic of the reactionary right. There is no need for an empirical foundation, magical causation putting the fate of the world into the hands of obscure individuals is how the world works, according to their occult way of seeing things.

(I explored this worldview somewhat in a couple of diaries from late in the 2008 primary season, "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1" and Part 2," which I'll return to below.)

This explanation in terms of hidden, occult forces is how the deposed reactionary class of French aristocrats and their hangers on saw the French Revolution. It gave birth to the myth of the Bavarian Illuminati as the hidden force behind the Revolution, and even though the Illuminati had been in Bavaria, not France, and had been disbanded for over a decade before the Revolution, the myth was still widely believed--so much so that when the Federalists lost the election of 1800, belief in the Bavarian Illuminati spread to America as well. Even an ocean--a very formidable barrier in that day--was not enough to make the threat seems ludicrous to the Federalist true believers.

The history of how strong, though ill-founded, conspiracist beliefs are strongly supports the view that this represents a distinctly different mode of thinking that naturally appeals to certain sorts of people, and that the sorts of logical/empirical arguments that most people weigh seriously in rejecting such elaborate fantasies simply don't register with a certain hard-core sub-population. This sub-population appears to be rather small, but it's often exremely influential--as it was with the French aristocracy. What's more, a significantly larger group of people can be appealed to in times of distress, particularly if there is a dearth of other plausible explanations--and alternatives for action--presented to them.

So long as people continue to think of Beck, Bachmann and others like them as fundamentally no different than you and I, we will not come to grips with them. They are not like you and I. They are a certain species of crazy people. And they vehemently believe in their crazy world--and want to take all the rest of us with them to live their for the rest of our paranoia-drenched lives.

In "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1", I wrote:

While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".

Glenn Beck has risen to prominence at Fox precisely because he does such a spectacular job in doing this particular sort of work. I went on to say:

It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group.

Creating of this "shadow" elite is all the easier if there is no actual political counterforce that opposes such a fantastical process. This is why Beck attacks the Tides Foundation so intensely rather than the Rockefeller or Ford foundations. Frances Fox Piven is a similarly easy mark--very highly regarded by those who know her and her work, yet anything but a household name, thus assuring that it's relatively easy to make her out to be some sort of hobgoblin.

Our job, therefore, is to make the easy thing hard.

It's Not "Competition," Stupid - It's the Difference In Wages/Standards

David Sirota — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:26:21 GMT

In my newspaper column last week, I noted the problem with our government refusing to systematically incentivize domestic purchasing - and, thus, production. That said, there are corners of our government that are pursuing "Buy American" policies, and the initial results show us how those policies - not cheap State-of-the-Union platitudes about better "competitiveness" - can be the real game changers.

Check out this piece in the New York Times about a little-noticed "Buy American" provision slipped into the Defense Authorization bill, mandating that the Pentagon buy more of its renewable energy equipment right here at home:

Ocean Yuan, the chief executive and president of Grape Solar, a company based in Eugene, Ore., that distributes mostly mainland Chinese solar panels but also American, Japanese and Taiwanese panels, said that imported panels typically cost 20 percent less than American-made panels.
Mr. Yuan predicted that the new legislation would have a big effect on the American solar panel market, by encouraging Chinese solar panel manufacturers to establish factories in the United States. "This policy will certainly have a negative impact on the imported solar panels from China, which have lower cost over all due to lower labor and overhead costs," he said.

The comment from Yuan is telling on two levels. First and foremost, he admits that the Buy American provisions will push solar manufacturers to build their products here in America, thus employing more Americans. He also is quite explicit about why Chinese products cost less than similar American products. It's not because they are made any better or because the Chinese are out-competing us - it's simply because China has lower wages and a government that doesn't enforce the kind of minimum wage/labor standards/environmental standards we have at home.

Those lower wages/standards create an artificial economic incentive for companies to move production facilities to China. President Obama tonight in his State of the Union may claim that we can fix things by just becoming better "competitors," but the only way to reverse this inequity in standards is to put in place policies (like, say, Buy American or reformed trade laws) that directly counter the real problem.

Building a national left-wing media: a modest start

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, my diary, "The larger lesson of Olbermann's departure" which concluded thus:

We can either continue to fight these sorts of battles with both hands tied behind our backs, and both feet in concrete, or we can get serious about a long-term effort to build our own media infrastructure. It's really just that simple.

had a lot of people saying either that we aren't up to the task of building a left media, that it's impossible because of corporatism and imbalance of money, or that since I brought it up, WTF is my plan.

I want to start off by pointing out that all these responses, while they contain a grain of truth, are also forms of resistance to actually solving the problem. I'm not trying to finger-point by saying this, because I've had all those thoughts myself at one time or another. I just want to suggest that people notice this, ponder it awhile, and look for ways to move beyond it.

Here's one suggestion: Create an Internet-based national newspaper that can be automatically customized to be as local as you want to be. The accelerating death of newspaper journalism is one of the causes of the sorry state of American politics, but it's also an opportunity.

As a newspaper journalist myself, I mourn what is happening, but if professional print journalism is a dying profession, it would be far better to see well-trained, dedicated citizen-amateurs take over as much as possible, rather than nothing but a void filled by corporate flacks.

What I have in mind is simple: connect citizen reporting of local events--particularly local government meetings and the issues they deal with--all the way up to state, national and international government. Don't just limit it to government, of course. Also cover what civic organizations are doing, local arts and culture, and yes, even sports. Everything you might want to know if the daily paper you grew up with had routine coverage of your community.

By using a hierarchical geographic structure, and selectively promoting stories at one level to a higher level based on some combination of reader interest and editorial judgment, this would provide a means for tens of thousands of citizen journalists to create something unique together--and in the process to create a platform that could also highlight existing progressive voices and media projects--such as Democracy Now! and GRITtv--potentially giving them a much larger base audience.

As a unified structure that starts off giving people information about what's happening in their community--even as fine-grained as who's playing at local pub, and how the high-school girls basketball team did last night--right alongside headline coverage of national labor, environmental and social justice issues, the potential for building a large national audience is quite real. Considering how small cable news audiences are compared to the total population, it would be quite feasible for such a site to equal or even substantially exceed their audiences.

Of course it would take money to do this. But it would take a lot less money compared to the amount of volunteered individual time and effort than just about anything else I can think of. And this is just the sort of formula that meshes with our most fundamental politics on the left.

Mis-state of the union

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:30:00 GMT

In the run-up to the State of the Union, the good news is that Obama won't directly undermine the Democratic brand by coming out for Social Security benefit cuts. The bad news is that he won't reinforce and revive the brand by vigorously defending Social Security, either. What's more, his recent staff changes pretty much assure that this is about as liberal as Obama is ever going to get. It's been deja vu all over again, as we've been told repeatedly--just as we were between the 2008 election and Obama's inauguration--that a flood of center-right appointments didn't mean a thing, since Obama would still be calling the shots. But the reality was made starkly clear in this short headline report from Democracy Now! yesterday:

Obama Unveils GE CEO as Top Economic Adviser
President Obama has publicly introduced General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as his new top economic adviser. Immelt will head the newly formed President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which takes the place of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board led by Paul Volcker. On Friday, Obama said Immelt would drive the administration's stated goal of creating jobs.
President Obama: "Our job is to do everything we can to ensure that businesses can take root and folks can find good jobs and America is leading the global competition that will determine our success in the 21st century. And so now, to help fulfill this new mission, I'm assembling a new group of business leaders and outside advisers. And I am so proud and pleased that Jeff has agreed to chair this panel, my Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, because we think GE has something to teach businesses all across America."
Immelt's appointment has come under scrutiny on multiple fronts. He'll retain his position at the helm of GE, creating a potential conflict of interest. As one of the nation's largest corporations, GE has a variety of business and issues before the federal government, including media mergers, military sales, environmental cleanup, and a $16.1 billion bailout in 2008. And while Obama has touted Immelt's mission to create jobs, the United Electrical Workers Union says GE has closed 29 plants in the United States in the past two years, laying off around 3,000 workers.

So, a top corporate job-cutter to help create jobs "because we think GE has something to teach businesses all across America." What could be clearer?

Maybe this, from Kos's frontpage post on results from the latest Kos/PPP poll:

Currently, workers pay social security payroll taxes on up to $106,800 of their salary. To ensure the long-term viability of Social Security, would you rather have people pay social security taxes on salaries above $106,800, or would you rather see benefits cut and the retirement age increased to age 69?
           Raise 
        payroll cap   Cut benefits

All         77            10

Dem         84             4 
GOP         69            17 
Ind         77            11

Tea Party   67            20

18-29       80             0 
30-45       69            17 
46-65       82             8 
65+         75            13

$0-30K      79             5 
$30-50K     75            11 
$50-75K     79             7 
$75-100K    78            13 
$100K+      72            18
....Yet outside of the punditry, the DC political class, and a tiny fringe, no one wants benefits cuts.
Democrats could be scoring mad political points by going on the offensive, vowing to defend Social Security against all enemies, and fighting to equalize the program's tax burden. (I wouldn't just raise the cap on payroll taxes entirely, but I'd also use the increased revenues to lower payroll taxes on the low and middle classes and/or lower the retirement age.)
But no, raising the cap is off limits, and the entire political establishment is focused on delivering more pain to seniors.
There's no better illustration of how DC is broken than this.

No better illustration except Obama touting Jeffrey Immelt as having "something to teach businesses all across America" about creating jobs. What he has to teach about creating jobs is pretty damn simple: Don't.

I'd call it a tie.

It's going to be a long night. But an even longer two years.

p.s. If you don't believe me, check out the rest of the poll where you'll find that only 23% of liberals think Obama is "too conservative". Overall, the American people think he's "too liberal" (44%) rather than "too conservative" (10%) or "about right" (42%).

A very long two years.

The Middle Class and the Political Center

Mike Lux — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:00:00 GMT

In the State of the Union address tonight, Barack Obama can set the stage for a political comeback from 2010's "shellacking" that would, in fact, be even stronger than Bill Clinton's storied comeback in 1996 -- because Obama has a chance to sweep a Democratic House back into office with him if he does the right things politically and policywise. However, he has to resist the siren call of a D.C. political and media establishment, with their deeply flawed version of what "centrism" is, and instead focus on the real center of American politics: the hard pressed middle class. He has to focus like a laser beam on the policies that help the middle class by creating new jobs, rebuilding the American manufacturing base, helping small business to grow, and preserving the parts of government that directly help the folks in that middle class: Social Security, Medicare, education and student loans, and rebuilding our roads and bridges.

It is certainly unsurprising after all my years in politics -- in fact, it is the most predictable thing in the world -- to see the D.C. version of centrists argue in favor of things that would damage, and politically anger, the middle class. Nevertheless, it has been disturbing to see what groups like Third Way are calling for in their recent policy memoranda: cuts in Social Security and handing legal bailouts to the big banks so that it will be easier for them to foreclose on homeowners. Other D.C. establishment centrists like Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution are calling for Democrats to willingly accept big cuts and/or a private voucher program for Medicare. D.C. establishment folks think Democrats shouldn't press so hard to safeguard consumers from the banking industry.

Here's the thing that is stunningly obvious from all the available polling data, though: voters, most especially swing voters, hate the idea of policies that do even more damage to their already shaky economic standing. As pollster Guy Molyneux from Hart Research Associates so eloquently put it recently: "When it comes to Social Security, opinion elites are from Mars, voters are from Venus." In fact, pollsters like Molyneux, Stan Greenberg, and Celinda Lake argue that Obama's willingness to put Social Security cuts "on the table" has done as much to damage to him as any other issue. Thank goodness he has decided not to endorse cutting Social Security or raising the retirement age in the SOTU. Hopefully this will help him stop the bleeding with seniors and other Americans violently opposed to Social Security cuts (which is most of the population).
Every poll I've seen shows voters overwhelmingly hate the idea of Social Security and Medicare cuts, and of raising the retirement age. Every poll I've seen shows voters want the government to rein in the big banks and protect consumers. Every poll I've seen shows that voters want government to help American manufacturers gain protection from unfair competition abroad, want to stop outsourcing, and want to invest in infrastructure and education. The D.C. centrists never seem to quote polling numbers when advocating cutting Social Security or legal bailouts for big banks or policies that promote outsourcing, simply because no such polling exists. None. Yet they still argue that this kind of "moving to the center" will solve all of Obama's problems.

There's a telling sequence of questions in the last Democracy Corps poll that came out last week. When asked a generic question about the Deficit Commission proposals with no details except for that the plan would cut the deficit by $4 trillion dollars by 2020, folks were enthusiastic, supporting it 57-19. When the very next question in the poll gave a three-sentence description of the major policies actually proposed, the numbers went to 34 percent in favor and 54 percent opposed. So it was plus plus-38 when it came to cutting the deficit generically, and minus-20 when you spelled out cuts in Social Security, raising the retirement age, and other key components of the plan. Want another example? On a contrast question in the same poll where a strong pro-deficit commission argument was laid in contrast to an argument for investing in education, infrastructure, research, and "a clear plan to make things in America once more," the pro-investment argument won 58-35.

These D.C. centrists need to take just one minute and focus on what the white middle-class swing voters -- who they claim to be obsessing about -- actually want. As I wrote right after the 2010 election:

"Check out these numbers from a Stan Greenberg poll done for the Campaign for America's Future. Stan did a careful analysis of which voters were the key swing voters, and what he found is striking:

Swing voters supported a message about challenging China on trade, ending subsidies to corporations that send jobs overseas, and stopping NAFTA-like trade deals over a message about increasing exports, passing more trade agreements, and getting government out of the way by 59-28

Swing voters supported a message about ending tax cuts for those making over $250,0000 a year, adding a bank tax to curb speculative trading, cutting wasteful military spending and ending subsidies to oil companies over a message about cutting 100 billion dollars from domestic programs, raising the Social Security retirement age, and turning Medicare into a voucher program by 51-37

Swing voters supported a statement about politicians keeping their hands off Social Security and Medicare over a statement about raising the retirement age by 62-36

89% of swing voters supported a statement about full disclosure of campaign donations and limiting the power of lobbyists

90% of swing voters supported a statement about cracking down on outsourcing and creating jobs by fixing schools, sewers, and roads in disrepair

Even when framed in direct opposition to a statement about stopping increasing government spending and tax increases, swing voters said they were more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy by 54-44"

Now, I think it is important to note something here about the polling I am seeing: swing voters are swing for a reason. They do not respond as well to the same fire and brimstone purely progressive/populist message I would delight in. Swing voters are very skeptical of government and new taxes; they think there is a lot of waste in government, and need to be convinced that Democrats want to be accountable for cutting that waste; and although they hate the big banks and are very skeptical of corporate power over government, a lot of them work for big companies and get nervous when all they hear is corporation bashing. In the DCorps poll, a purely progressive contrast message attacking tax cuts for the rich and corporations compared to the same pro-deficit commission message that I mentioned above was only in a statistical dead heat rather than winning 58-35 as it did regarding the investment in jobs message.

The focus when talking about economics needs to be on jobs, and on fighting for the middle class. Democrats need to be entrepreneurial populists. We should be pro-small business, pro-manufacturer, pro-technology company, willing to help get the banks to invest in businesses, and willing to reduce paperwork and regulations for small businesses, tech companies and manufacturers as long as their workers, consumers, and the environment are not hurt in the process. We can do all that while fighting the big banks who are speculating and giving themselves big bonuses while not lending to the Main Street businesses that are actually creating jobs; we can do all that while taking on the big insurers who have been making the health care system dysfunctional for everybody; we can do all that while challenging the big oil and coal companies to clean up their act.

In the SOTU address, President Obama has a great opportunity to reframe the entire debate, changing it from the broad philosophical Republican talking points about cutting spending and the size of government, and moving it to focusing on what is the best thing to do for the great American middle class. In his speech, he should clearly lay out a strong, unequivocal pro-middle class agenda:

He should go a step further than just not endorsing the deficit Commission's suggested Social Security and Medicare cuts: he should make 100 percent clear that under no circumstances will he support cutting Social Security, privatizing Medicare, or raising the retirement age. He should lay down the gauntlet and announce that he will veto any bill that comes to his desk that does any of those things.
He should make as the central policy platform of his speech a bold new plan to create middle class jobs, including new spending on roads, bridges, research and development, expanding access to the best technology for everyone, and education; new help for small business to get loans from banks hoarding their profits; and creating a new plan for developing new manufacturing sectors in green jobs and other industries of the future. To fund these new programs, he should call for a financial transactions tax, so that the speculative bankers who did so much to cause our economic crisis can help pay for getting us back on track.
He should make clear that he going to be taking on the banks, pushing them hard to invest in American businesses and to write down the mortgages of middle-class homeowners whose mortgages are underwater.
He should show the American public that he is absolutely serious about rooting out government waste by reforming wasteful government contracting; ending corporate subsidies to big energy and agribusiness companies; allowing Medicare to negotiate cheaper drug prices; and cutting waste in the military budget.
He should announce that his new Chief of Staff Bill Daley and his new Economic Adviser Jeff Immelt, two figures who know the business community well, are going to sit down with every CEO of a Fortune 500 company which is making profits right now to discuss how they can do more to create American jobs over the next couple of years.

As the pragmatic progressive that I am, I have absolutely no problem with rhetorical moves to the center in terms of showing how the deficit can be cut and how waste can be removed from the budget, or showing how the administration is eager to help small business and American manufacturing companies prosper, because a Democratic president can do those things while still holding true to progressive values. What I would have a problem is moving to the Washington center, a well-off elite that supports cuts in the Social and Medicare that middle-class retirees count on, and that supports legal bailouts for the big banks in helping them foreclose on middle class homeowners faster. The people in this country understand what the D.C. establishment, dominated by its big business lobbyists and corporate-funded think tanks, doesn't get: that the budget can move toward being balanced; that new jobs can be created; that the big banks can be said no to -- all without cuts to Social Security and Medicare or the other things in the federal budget important to them.

President Obama has been appointing a lot of people close to big business lately, but I'm not going to care if he shows that he is going to come out fighting for the real center in American politics, the middle class.