It May Not Be “The Economy Stupid”: Americans Just Might Favor Social Issues Over Their Pocketbooks
It’s one of the oldest adages in American politics—when all is said and done, Americans vote their pocketbooks rather than their principles.
But is it true?
Both Democrats and Republicans seem to think so.
Indeed, accepting this bit of established political wisdom has long led progressives to argue that millions of middle-class, working Americans, who support Republican candidates and policies, do so in contravention of what is in their own interests. The argument, for the most part, rests in the belief that the “trickle down” approach favored by conservatives—a theory suggesting that when those at the top of the chain are doing well, jobs and money trickle down to the middle and lower class workers—has never really proven to be beneficial to anyone but the wealthy and comes at the expense of the many who, nevertheless, continue to vote for those who would continue the policy.
A true conservative, of course, would argue that such cynicism is vastly misplaced and that a vibrant economy can only happen when those at the top are flourishing—allowing the job creators the confidence and financial wherewithal to grow their businesses and, in the process, create the jobs necessary to allow good fortune to trickle down to the working classes.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that our presidential election, once again, is putting these conflicting belief systems to the test as, in the red corner— standing up for the notion that tax cuts for the wealthiest are the best way to drive the economy forward—is the GOP challenger, Governor Mitt Romney while, in the other corner, representing those who believe that more tax cuts for the wealthy will only result in the rich getting richer at the expense of everyone else, is the blue squad, led by our returning champion, President Barack Obama.
But is this really what this election is all about? Are Americansactually preparing to vote for the candidate who represents the side that appears most likely to put more money in their respective pockets or are there other, more important, factors at work as we get ready to make our choices in November?
It turns out, conventional wisdom might just have this all wrong.
A new website called Politify—claiming to be non-partisan and which garnered some national attention during the primary season— has employed tax information provided by the Internal Revenue Service along with data from the U.S. Census Bureau to create an interesting way to determine whether you and your neighbors may be favoring economic policies that might actually turn out not to be the best thing for you.
The results are pretty interesting.
According to Politify, if we are to take the economic, tax and budget proposals of our two presidential candidates at their face value—policies that each candidate contends hold the answers to making our economic lives better—the results indicate that it is the Obama proposals that dramatically benefit a wide swath of Americans who are expected to cast their vote for Governor Romney.
Indeed—again accordingly to Politify—if Americans truly voted their pocketbooks, President Obama would be re-elected in an historic landslide as the website calculates that the Obama economic agenda benefits 69.8 percent of Americans when compared to Romney’s proposals which only improve the financial lot of 30.2 percent. What’s more, using the official budget information provided by each campaign’s website, the site determines that the Obama proposals will lessen the national deficit by $273 billion by 2015 as the Romney budget would increase the deficit by $566 billion during the same period.
Now, before the more conservative readers here go into cardiac arrest, you might want to visit the website to review the methodology Politify has employed to reach their conclusions. Only then can you determine how much you do—or do not—value their conclusions.
If you do visit the site, you might also enjoy ‘plugging in’ your personal and community data to see how the respective tax and economic policies of the candidates impact directly on you and your neighbors.
There is an additional ‘twist’ worth pointing out—according to the data, it is not just the millions of rural white people expected to cast their votes for the GOP presidential candidate who are behaving contrary to what would appear to be in their self-interest. It turns out that some of the nation’s most liberal neighborhoods are also likely to vote for a candidate whose policies are more harmful to their economic well being that what is being offered by the alternative choice.
Take, for example, my own upper west side of Manhattan neighborhood—a liberal enclave if there ever was one.
Despite the fact that there is a stronger likelihood that hell will freeze over than there is that my zip code will get behind Governor Romney’s candidacy, Politify projects that 62 percent of my neighbors would benefit more from Romney’s economic proposals than those put forth by the President.
Go figure.
What we may be learning here is that people may not be voting their pocketbooks to the extent the experts and pundits would have us believe. Indeed, it may be this very fact that has led the conversation away from the anticipated referendum on the Obama economy and in the direction of social issues such as Medicare and abortion.
While many would be quick to blame the “liberal media” for steering the national conversation towards social issues because it is imagined—possibly incorrectly—that the President holds the winning hand on these subjects, the truth is that neither of the campaigns has been particularly responsive to the media. Accordingly, it may not be reasonable to imagine that it is the media driving the direction the campaign is taking.
Indeed, the GOP campaign’s willingness to engage on these topics may be more by design than by circumstances as, maybe, the Romney campaign knows something that the pundits do not. In an election sure to be about strength of voter turn-out, it may not, as conventional wisdom instructs, be all about the economy after all.
With voters unsure as to either candidate’s ability to do much of anything to reverse the current economic difficulties in four years time—and instinctively understanding that the depth of our problem is such that there is no quick and easy answer or way out—it may be the social issues that allow the voters to find a more definitive position and send them racing to the polls on election day to vote for the candidate who stands for those positions.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, August 26, 2012
“The Projection Party”: A Story In Which Republicans Are Strangely Absent
Of all the things Republicans have called President Obama in the last four years—socialist, radical, un-American, anti-American, elitist—perhaps the strangest is “divisive.” It seems so odd to the rest of us when we look at Obama, whose entire history, even from childhood, has been about carefully navigating through opposing ideas, resolving contradictions, and diffusing tensions, who has so often infuriated his supporters with compromises and attempts at conciliation. Yet conservatives look at him and see someone completely different. They see Obama plotting to set Americans at war with one another so he can profit from the destruction, perhaps cackling a sinister laugh as thunder rattles the windows on the West Wing and America’s demise is set in motion.
There has seldom been a clearer political case of what psychologists call “projection,” the propensity to ascribe to someone else one’s own thoughts, feelings, and sins. It’s true that we are in a polarized moment, and what is called nastiness often turns out to be genuine substantive differences between parties that represent distinct groups of Americans. But Republicans have been, shall we say, vigorous in their opposition to this president, both completely unified and unrestrained in their criticism. Yet they remain convinced that Barack Obama is the one who bears responsibility for whatever division has been sown.
Just a few examples, to let you know I’m not pulling this from nowhere. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, the man who proudly proclaimed, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” calls Obama “the most divisive [president] I’ve served with.” “We have not seen such a divisive figure in modern American history than we have over the last three and one-half years” says Senator Marco Rubio. “President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history,” charges GOP uber-strategist Ed Gillespie. RNC chair Reince Preibus calls Obama “divisive, nasty, negative.” Mitt Romney tells Obama to “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”
The “divisive” charge isn’t just an accusation, it’s an entire narrative arc, awaiting only the conclusion in which the American people send Obama and his divisiveness packing. As the conservative Washington Times editorialized, “He said he would be a unifier, that he would reach across party lines, that he would forge consensus. Once he took office, however, armed with a hard-left agenda and backed by a supermajority in Congress, the arrogance of power overwhelmed the better angels of his nature.” This is a story Republicans tell often, a story in which Republicans themselves are strangely absent. That “hard-left agenda” wasn’t just inherently divisive, it was also enacted divisively; for instance, one often hears Republicans claim that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through” Congress without Republican support. You might recall that in fact the ACA went through over a year of hearings, negotiations, conferences, health care summits, endless efforts to cajole and encourage and beg and plead for Republican support, before those Republicans successfully kept every last one of their troops in line to vote against it. But as on so many issues, all of that is washed from the story, leaving only Barack Obama and his divisive actions.
Don’t ask about Republicans’ unprecedented use of the filibuster to stifle Obama’s appointments and legislation, or how the Tea Party Republicans took the country to the brink of financial catastrophe, or how many elected members of their party question Obama’s patriotism and genuinely believe he isn’t actually an American. Don’t ask about conservative media figures who continually race-bait and encourage their legion of listeners to nurture a white-hot hatred for the president and liberals in general. No, the real viciousness belongs only to Barack Obama, and its horror can be seen in things like his suggestion that that the wealthiest Americans could tolerate an increase in the top tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent (a suggestion always accompanied by encomiums to success and the reassurance that the wealthy are fine people). Not only is Obama “demonizing the rich,” as Romney surrogate John Sununusays, “when he says ‘rich’ he says it with a snarl.” You may believe that no human being on this plane of reality has actually ever seen Barack Obama snarl, but that would just mean you aren’t looking closely enough.
The New York Times reported over the weekend that Romney’s advisers are now “convinced he needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters,” so they are making clear that this election is about us and them. If there’s any confusion about who’s who, you can turn on your television to find out. Romney is currently running ads charging falsely that Obama is taking tax money from hardworking people like you to support layabout welfare recipients who no longer have to satisfy work requirements, and has now turned to telling seniors (again, falsely), that “the money you paid for guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.” But I’m sure Romney does this more in sadness than in anger. After all, when faced with someone as divisive as Obama, what choice does he have?
Opinions of Obama are certainly polarized—Democrats love him and Republicans hate him. But is that a product of his actions, or of a time when the parties increasingly represent two distinct, non-overlapping ideologies? In his third year, Obama’s average approval in Gallup polls among Democrats was 80 percent, compared to only 12 percent among Republicans. This 68-point gap is large by historical standards, but it was smaller than the 70-point gap in George W. Bush’s sixth year. And the 72-point gap in George W. Bush’s fifth year. And the 76-point gap in George W. Bush’s fourth year. It would seem that Bush was actually the most polarizing president.
And like Obama, Bush came in to office hoping to heal partisan divisions. “I don’t have enemies to fight,” he said in his 2000 convention speech. “And I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect.” I suppose Republicans might say that Bush’s failure to succeed in that goal wasn’t the president’s fault but that of the opposition, while the continued acrimony during the Obama years isn’t the opposition’s fault but that of the president.
Ask Republicans what Obama might have done to be less divisive, and the most common response is that he could have abandoned his own agenda and adopted theirs instead; had he done that, they would have been happy to work with him. Which gives us a clue to the terrible thing Obama did to them. By making Republicans hate him with such a burning fire—by having the gall to win the presidency, then brazenly pursuing his party’s longstanding goals like health care reform—he brought out the worst in them. And they really can’t be blamed for that, can they?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 27, 2012
Republicans And “Humane Self-Deportation”: A Nightmare Of Perpetual Harassment
It didn’t get the attention it merited because of the focus on the GOP’s usual platform plank endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban abortions without rape-and-incest exceptions, but the Romney-approved 2012 platform confirmed the party’s lack of interest in out-performing John McCain among Latinos. Julia Preston of the New York Times has a succinct summary:
In their debates this week in Tampa, Fla., over the party platform, Republican delegates hammered out an immigration plank calling for tough border enforcement and opposing “any forms of amnesty” for illegal immigrants, instead endorsing “humane procedures to encourage illegal aliens to return home voluntarily,” a policy of self-deportation.
I like that modifier “humane.” I suppose the idea is that it is more “humane” to make the lives of undocumented workers–and perhaps some documented immigrants as well–an un-American nightmare of perpetual harassment than to pursue some unstated alternative: presumably loading whole families into cattle cars and shipping them south (which would also be monstrously expensive). The trouble, of course, is that the “humane” strategy depends implicitly on making like miserable for anyone who might conceivably be undocumented in the eyes of the various authorities charged with various elements of the campaign to “encourage” self-deportation. We are somehow expected to believe this will not lead to “ethnic profiling” of Latinos, but nobody much buys it. To put it bluntly, jurisdictions like Alabama and Georgia, not to mention Joe Arpaio’s Arizona, do not have a great deal of credibility when it comes to disinterested enforcement of laws clearly aimed at particular demographic categories of the population.
So even as Republicans continue to claim they only want to enforce existing immigration laws, they are pursuing not only policies but a general philosophy guaranteed to repel Latino voters. Ron Brownstein estimates that Romney will need a percentage of the white vote equivalent to that won by George H.W. Bush in his easy 1988 victory over Mike Dukakis. No wonder Republicans are going to lengths in appealing to white voters that are so highly reminiscent of Lee Atwater’s strategy that year.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 27, 2012
“What Are You Going To Do About It?”: Mitt Romney And His Despicable Race Baiting Lies
Regular readers of Political Animal should find this analysis of Mitt Romney’s stretch-run strategy and message, as articulated by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times, very familiar:
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second. The ads are meant to work together, to mutually reinforce each other’s claims.
Edsall, as you may recall, has been suggesting for a good while that this is the sort of politics the Tea Party Movement is all about.
So that’s the most important sense in which the Romney campaign has finally surrendered unconditionally to the Right: not simply accepting its political positions or promising to make its priorities his own, or placing on his ticket their favorite politician–but also adopting its meta-message about the kind of people Obama represents (those people) and the kind of people who are suffering from his redistributionist ways.
It’s clear by now that the Romney campaign is going to shrug off the almost universal denunciation of his welfare ads (and to only a lesser extent, his Medicare ads that show a white senior frowning as the narrator says ObamaCare is “not for you”) as a pack of despicable, race-baiting lies–or use the so’s-your-old-man argument that Obama’s campaign tactics justify his own. If nothing else, his wizards probably figured out some time ago that the “welfare” crap offered a rare opportunity to hit notes equally effective with “the base” and the non-college educated white voters who make up a high percentage of this election’s “swing.” Add in the thick armor conservatives have built for themselves against any accusations of racism–now, almost by definition, they believe only liberals are racists, and only white people are targets of racism–and it was probably an easy call for Team Mitt, particularly since truthfulness is not a factor at all.
The Romney campaign’s attitude seems to be that of the famous nineteenth century rogue William (Boss) Tweed, who when confronted by journalists with his misdeeds, said: “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Romney’s not going to be shamed out of his unsavory tactics. But on the other hand, if his gambit fails, not only will his presidential ambitions perish once and for all, but just maybe the kind of politics he has come to exemplify–rich people encouraging the middle class to “kick down” at “those people”–will take a hit as well.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 27, 2012
“The Comeback Skid”: Chris Christie’s “Jersey Comeback” Is Playing The Same Paul Ryan Game
There will be two big stars at the Republican National Convention, and neither of them will be Mitt Romney. One will, of course, be Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate. The other will be Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who will give the keynote address. And while the two men could hardly look or sound more different, they are brothers under the skin.
How so? Both have carefully cultivated public images as tough, fiscally responsible guys willing to make hard choices. And both public images are completely false.
I’ve written a lot lately deconstructing the Ryan myth, so let me turn today to Mr. Christie.
When Mr. Christie took office in January 2010, New Jersey — like many other states — was in dire fiscal straits thanks to the effects of a depressed economy. Unlike the federal government, states are required by their constitutions to run more or less balanced budgets every year (although there is room for accounting gimmicks), so like other governors, Mr. Christie was forced to engage in belt-tightening.
So far so normal: while Mr. Christie has made a lot of noise about his tough budget choices, other governors have done much the same. Nor has he eschewed budget gimmicks: like earlier New Jersey governors, Mr. Christie has closed budget gaps in part by deferring required contributions to state pension funds, which is in effect a form of borrowing against the future, and he has also sought to paper over budget gaps by diverting money from places like the Transportation Trust Fund.
If there is a distinctive feature to New Jersey’s belt-tightening under Mr. Christie, it is its curiously selective nature. The governor was willing to cancel the desperately needed project to build another rail tunnel linking the state to Manhattan, but has invested state funds in a megamall in the Meadowlands and a casino in Atlantic City.
Also, while much of his program involves spending cuts, he has effectively raised taxes on low-income workers and homeowners by slashing tax credits. But he vetoed a temporary surcharge on millionaires while refusing to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which is the third-lowest in America and far below tax rates in neighboring states. Only some people, it seems, are expected to make sacrifices.
But as I said, Mr. Christie talks a good (and very loud) game about his willingness to make tough choices, making big claims about spending cuts — claims, by the way, that PolitiFact has unequivocally declared false. And for the past year he has been touting what he claims is the result of those tough choices: the “Jersey comeback,” the supposed recovery of his state’s economy.
Strange to say, however, Mr. Christie has told reporters that he won’t use the term “Jersey comeback” in his keynote address. And it’s not hard to see why: the comeback, such as it was, has hit the skids. Indeed, the latest figures show his state with the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Strikingly, New Jersey’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate is now significantly higher than the unemployment rate in long-suffering Michigan, which has had a true comeback thanks to the G.O.P.-opposed auto bailout.
Now, state governors don’t actually have much impact on short-run economic performance, so the skidding New Jersey economy isn’t really Mr. Christie’s fault. Still, he was the one who chose to make it an issue. And even more important, he’s still pushing the policies the state’s recovery was supposed to justify.
You see, all that boasting about the Jersey comeback wasn’t just big talk (although it was that, too). It was, instead, supposed to demonstrate that good times were back, revenue was on the upswing, and it was now time for what Mr. Christie really wants: a major cut in income taxes.
Even if the comeback were real, this would be a highly dubious idea. By all accounts, New Jersey still has a significant structural deficit, that is, a deficit that will persist even when the economy recovers. Furthermore, the Christie tax-cut proposal would do very little for the middle class but give large breaks to the wealthy.
But in any case, the good times are by no means back, and neither is the revenue boom that was supposed to justify a tax cut. So has the very responsible Mr. Christie accepted the idea of at least delaying his tax-cut plan until the promised revenue gains materialize? Of course not.
Which brings me back to the comparison with Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan, as people finally seem to be realizing, is at heart a fiscal fraud, boasting about his commitment to deficit reduction but actually placing a much higher priority on tax cuts for the wealthy. Mr. Christie may have a different personal style, but he’s playing the same game.
In other words, meet the new boaster, same as the old boaster. And pray that we won’t get fooled again.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 26, 2012
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