“Christie To CPAC, I’m One Of You”: An Invitation To Mainstream Voters, Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Me
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) carefully cultivated “brand” includes a few key pillars. The first is that he’s a different kind of politician with no use for “politics as usual.” The second is that he’s a tough leader who won’t back down when conditions heat up. And finally, the blue-state Republican has tried to distance himself from much of the extremism that’s come to define contemporary conservatism.
Christie’s multiple, ongoing scandals have effectively destroyed the first pillar. Christie’s approach to governing has knocked down the second, too.
As for the third, the governor threw it out the window with his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday.
Before digging in, it’s worth appreciating the context. CPAC is generally considered the premier conservative event in the country held every year, and ambitious Republicans are always eager to curry favor with conference attendees. Last year, Christie wasn’t invited – he was deemed insufficiently conservative.
Yesterday, in his first appearance in the national spotlight since his scandals erupted, the governor did his best to make up for lost time. Benjy Sarlin helped capture Christie’s pitch:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may not always get along with the grassroots right, but he hates the press and thinks President Obama is a failure. Isn’t that enough?
When the governor is making the case for his presidential ambitions, he emphasizes how mainstream he is. When Christie is wooing CPAC, where “mainstream” is a basically a dirty word, he effectively tells the far-right activists that he and they are on the same team.
Mitt Romney’s transition from moderate Republican to conservative champion took a few years. Christie’s trying to play both roles at the same time, hoping audiences don’t notice the contradictions.
The governor’s CPAC message was practically an invitation to mainstream voters to forget everything they thought they knew about him. CPAC Christie wants to take away a woman’s right to choose. CPAC Christie hates the media (which, incidentally, has spent years fawning over the governor and giving him a national profile).
CPAC Christie loves the Koch brothers and considers them “great Americans.” CPAC Christie is certain the United States doesn’t have “an income inequality problem.”
CPAC Christie wants conservatives to believe Democrats are “intolerant” people who refuse to let anti-abortion speakers appear at their national convention (a bizarre claim that is plainly untrue). CPAC Christie got huge applause condemning President Obama for refusing to work with Republicans on debt reduction, which was a rather brazen lie given that Obama has made multiple attempts at a compromise, only to be rebuffed by GOP leaders who refuse to make concessions.
CPAC Christie, in other words, bears no meaningful resemblance to New Jersey Christie.
By most accounts, the governor was well received yesterday, which no doubt gave him a morale boost after months of struggling through several scandals. But in electoral terms, it was a Pyrrhic victory – by moving sharply to the right, Christie satisfied far-right activists and alienated everyone else simultaneously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 7, 2014
“Mad About Vlad!”: The Increasingly Awkward Conservative Crush On Putin
All the way back in 1946, with Nazi Germany defeated and the cold war commencing, George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay on James Burnham. The author of The Managerial Revolution and a leading political philosopher, Burnham was a frequent contributor to the young National Review, and, more broadly, a leading voice of postwar American conservatism.
What Orwell found in his analysis of Burnham was that this ostensible democrat and cold warrior held deep regard for–and even envied–authoritarian or totalitarian powers, including Stalin’s Russia. This is why, Orwell explained, Burnham originally predicted a Nazi victory in World War II. (Britain, typically, was considered “decadent.”) In later years, Orwell continued, Burnham would write about Stalin in “semi-mystical” terms (with a “fascinated admiration”), comparing him to heroes of the past; Burnham didn’t like Stalin’s politics, but he admired his strength. Of Burnham’s odd quasi-regard for Stalinism and its supposedly destined victory over the forces of sickly democratic regimes, Orwell added: “The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.”
Orwell, then, was not merely critical of Burnham’s pessimism (Orwell himself could be overly pessimistic.) He also saw this pessimism as reflective of a mindset that prioritized vicious power-wielding and coercion over other things that allowed states to succeed and prosper.
This variety of pessimism did not end with Burnham, unfortunately. During the nearly 50 year Cold War, Americans were informed time and again by rightwingers that the Soviet Union did not allow dissent, and could therefore pursue its desired policies without protest. While the Soviets were single-minded, we were, yes, decadent. Soviet leaders could fight wars as they pleased, but freedom-loving presidents like Ronald Reagan had to put up with what Charles Krauthammer laughably called an “imperial Congress.” (Some of the same type of commentary shows up about today’s China: look how quickly the Chinese can build bridges! And, as Thomas Friedman proves, it isn’t coming solely from the right.) But more unique among conservatives is the desire for a tough leader who will dispense with niceties and embrace power.
The reason for all this ancient history is the situation today in Ukraine, where an autocratic Russian leader who exudes manly vibes has ordered his armed forces into Crimea. It is unclear whether this move on Russia’s part will prove successful, but, amidst uncertaintly among western leaders over what to do, there has arisen a new strain of the Burnham syndrome. Conservatives don’t just see the west and President Obama as weak; they also seem envious of Putin’s bullying. “There is something odd,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in New York magazine, “about commentators who denounce Putin in the strongest terms and yet pine for a more Putin-like figure in the White House.”
Sarah Palin, for example, said this last night to Sean Hannity:
Well, yes, especially under the commander-in-chief that we have today because Obama’s — the perception of him and his potency across the world is one of such weakness. And you know, look, people are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates. We are not exercising that peace through strength that only can be brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue, that only a strengthened United States military can do.
Put aside the syntax for a moment and ask: is there not a bit of envy here? Isn’t Palin very clearly desirous of a tough-guy president who wrestles bears and drills for oil? (The swooning over Bush’s landing on that aircraft carrier was a telling sign.) Now read Rush Limbaugh:
In fact, Putin—ready for this?—postponed the Oscar telecast last night. He didn’t want his own population distracted. He wanted his own population knowing full well what he was doing, and he wanted them celebrating him. They weren’t distracted. We were.
If only America wasn’t distracted by silly things like the Oscars, perhaps we would have the strength to stand up to the tough Russia. (On his web page, Limbaugh has a photo of a shirtless Putin.) In case the point isn’t obvious enough, Limbaugh continues:
Well, did you hear that the White House put out a photo of Obama talking on the phone with Vlad, and Obama’s sleeves were rolled up? That was done to make it look like Obama was really working hard—I mean, really taking it seriously. His sleeves were rolled up while on the phone with Putin! Putin probably had his shirt off practicing Tai-Chi while he was talking to Obama.
Limbaugh quite clearly wants this kind of leader.
Also on view over the past few days is the idea that Putin must be smarter and cagier and stronger: “Putin is playing chess and I think we’re playing marbles,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The Russians are thus necessarily craftier than our weak and vacillating (key word) democratic leader.
The silliness inherent in all this talk is that when American presidents have generally acted above the law, or engaged in stupid and immoral wars, or bullied neighbors, or cracked down on domestic dissent, it has backfired in the worst ways on them and the country. (The examples are too obvious to list.) Moreover, I notice that conservatives seem to view some of Obama’s domestic actions–appointing czars, for example–as being the result of a vindictive, bloodthirsty, and authoritarian mindset. However absurd the particular claims may be (Cass Sunstein as Stalin), it is proof that the people who seem to secretly pine for an American Putin don’t really want one.
Orwell’s response to this sort of thinking was to write, of Burnham, “He ignores the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country.” Of course this is not a guarantee that this crisis will play itself out in a way that is beneficial to American or Western (or Ukrainian) interests. But the presumption that Russia has just masterly played the Great Game, and that our weakness will doom us, is nearly automatic among large segments of the American right. (Olga Dukhnich, in The New York Times, makes the point that this crisis may backfire just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did. Whether correct or not, it is a nice counter to the reigning right-wing ultra-pessimism.)
Orwell closed his essay as follows:
That a man of Burnham’s gifts should have been able for a while to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order, shows what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism’.
It is now Team Obama that styles itself realist, in quite a different way than Orwell was talking about. And large chunks of the American right would now also scorn the term. What they haven’t scorned is the mindset, which is the problem in the first place.
By: Isaac Chotiner, The New Republic, March 4, 2014
“Another Embarrassing Pothole”: How Ugly Racial Ideology Mars CPAC, Year After Year After Year
Efforts at “rebranding” the American right have plunged into still another highly embarrassing pothole at the most anticipated conservative event of the year. Almost as soon as the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) kicked off just outside Washington, D.C., the event became mired in a controversy over white nationalism.
ProEnglish, the white nationalist-led English-only outfit that created serious headaches for the conference back in 2012, has been quietly allowed to return as an official exhibitor at CPAC 2014, which opened on Thursday.
According to the CPAC 2014 website, the ProEnglish booth is number 538, sandwiched between the booth for a movie about the IRS “scandal” and one occupied by Tradition, Family, Property, a right-wing Catholic organization.
The site lists the ProEnglish contact for CPAC as Robert Vandervoort.
Prior to becoming executive director of ProEnglish, Vandervoort was the organizer of the white nationalist group Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance, while he lived in Illinois. During that period Vandervoort was at the center of much of the white nationalist activity in the region.
While Vandervoort was in charge, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance often held joint meetings with the local chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He also made appearances at white nationalist events outside Illinois, for instance participating in the 2009 Preserving Western Civilization Conference.
Vandervoort was hired by the Tanton-founded English-Only group ProEnglish during the autumn of 2011, after the organization lost three other executive directors in less than a year. Shortly after Vandervoort took the job, ProEnglish hired Phil Tignino as the group’s webmaster and social media coordinator. Tignino was the former head of the Washington State University chapter of the white nationalist college group Youth for Western Civilization.
The Vandervoort problem shouldn’t be new to CPAC staff. After the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights raised concerns over Vandervoort’s white nationalist attachments during CPAC 2012, a significant discussion ensued. The Kansas City Star, the Wichita Eagle and Mother Jones were among the publications to take note of these events. American Spectator, a decidedly conservative periodical, weighed in with the comment that “if Vandervoort indeed organized events for an American Renaissance affiliate … he should explicitly and publicly renounce his old associates; that is a crowd that no one should touch with a 10-foot pole.”
Instead of taking that advice, Vandervoort tried to bamboozle the public by claiming, “I have never been a member of any group that has advocated hate or violence.” No one has accused Vandervoort of advocating violence. But the record clearly shows that he not only acted on behalf of American Renaissance, but that he shared its white nationalist views. Which, as American Spectator aptly noted, should not be touched with a 10-foot pole by CPAC, or anyone else.
White nationalism has become a recurring problem for CPAC. On the eve of last year’s conference, the group responsible for organizing CPAC chose to feature the work of a controversial white nationalist professor on its website. The American Conservative Union (ACU) website featured an article by Dr. Robert Weissberg, a retired University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign political science professor with a second career as a white nationalist. Like Vandervoort, Weissberg has been active with the white nationalist group American Renaissance. Inside the hall last year, CPAC’s problem with white nationalism flared at a Tea Party Patriots workshop entitled, “Trump the Race Card.” White nationalists turned the workshop into a pro-segregation apologia for slavery. There was a speaker who had previously advocated the execution of gays and lesbians. There were birther bigots and Islamophobes.
In 2012, white nationalists had officially broken down the gates to CPAC. That year, the conference featured Vandervoort on stage — twice. He was on a panel with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and he also moderated a panel entitled “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity is Weakening the American Identity.” The other speakers on that panel included Peter Brimelow, editor of the white nationalist website VDARE; Serge Trifkovic, an Islamophobic Serbian expatriate who before becoming the foreign affairs editor at the paleo-conservative magazine Chronicles was a spokesman for the convicted war criminal Biljana Plavsic; ProEnglish board chair Rosalie Porter; and John Derbyshire, once a contributing editor at National Review (until his racism got him fired), who now works with Brimelow at VDARE.
The organizers of CPAC don’t seem to have trouble changing their minds regarding to whom they sell exhibit space. On February 25, after an uproar, CPAC organizers reversed their decision and decided to not allow American Atheists to have an exhibition booth at this year’s event. Will CPAC do the same for a group run by a white nationalist?
By: David Burghart, The National Memo, March 6, 2014
“The ‘Texas Miracle’ Fraud”: Turns Out It Involves Taxing The Poor To Help The Rich Get Richer
Remember “The Texas Miracle”? It was the story of how Rick Perry was going to be president because his state, Texas, was doing so much better than all the other states. Texas was doing so well, we were told, because it was very conservative: Low taxes, light regulation, and few pesky unions. We were supposed to compare Texas to California, which, we were told, was an apocalyptic mess because it was run by liberals.
Then we sort of stopped hearing about The Texas Miracle for a while, because Rick Perry forgot how to count and it no longer seemed like he was personally responsible for managing the economy of his vast state, but conservatives still enjoy telling themselves that Texas proves that their economic policy preferences are objectively superior to those of liberals. Except, well, maybe Texas isn’t that miraculous.
At Washington Monthly, Phillip Longman argues that Texas’ growth is fueled primarily by the energy boom and by population growth. And that population growth is not happening because people from other states are fleeing to Texas to avoid high taxes and onerous regulations, but because of immigration from Mexico and a high birthrate. More importantly (and probably obviously, to people who care about such things), the spoils of the Texas miracle have not been shared equally: Economic mobility is higher in California’s major urban areas than in those of Texas. Plus: “Texas has more minimum-wage jobs than any other state, and only Mississippi exceeds it with the most minimum-wage workers per capita.” Texas is falling behind various states in terms of per capita income.
As Longman concludes:
But regardless of its sources, population growth fuels economic growth. It swells the supply and lowers the cost of labor, while at the same time adding to the demand for new products and services. As the population of Texas swelled by more than 24 percent from 2000 to 2013, so did the demand for just about everything, from houses to highways to strip malls. And this, combined with huge new flows of oil and gas dollars, plus increased trade with Mexico, favored Texas with strong job creation numbers.
But for some, the good news on Texas continues apace. J.D. Tuccille, at the libertarian magazine Reason’s Hit & Run blog, points to a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showing that Texas created more high-wage jobs than low-wage ones between 2000 and 2013. Tuccille also points out that “in 2012, ’63,000 people moved from California to Texas, while 43,000 in Texas moved to California.’” (That… actually seems pretty statistically insignificant when we’re talking about the two most populous states in the union, each with more than 25 million residents, but ok, sure.)
Even if it is the case that the Texas miracle is driven primarily by a resource boom and population growth, conservatives and libertarians could still argue that Texas is booming because of their preferred policies. They support exploiting natural resources, and libertarians, at least, support open borders. To use another example, while it’s a fact that North Dakota’s economic boom is happening almost solely because North Dakota happens to be on top of tremendous amounts of very valuable natural resources that recently became easier to extract, conservatives would argue that they are the ones who support drilling that oil, damn the environmental consequences.
But here’s one important fact that Texas’ conservative and libertarian boosters reliably fail to mention (perhaps because they don’t know it): If you’re not rich, Texas is not actually a low-tax state. In fact, most Texans pay more taxes than most Californians. That seems strange and incorrect at first — Texas doesn’t even have an income tax! — but it’s true. Thanks to sales and property taxes, Texas is among the states with the ten most regressive tax systems. Texans in the bottom 60 percent of income distribution all pay higher effective tax rates than their Californian counterparts. Texas’ top one-percent are the ones enjoying the supposed low-tax utopia, paying an effective rate of 3.2 percent. The rate for the lowest 20 percent is 12.6 percent. Kevin Drum has a helpful chart.
This is not unusual for a conservative state. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says: “States praised as ‘low tax’ are often high tax states for low and middle income families.” So… is this part of the conservative policy package that we are supposed to introduce everywhere to spur growth? Slash taxes for the rich and raise taxes on… the poor and middle class? It seems like it might be difficult to campaign on that.
When “growth” is its own self-justifying goal, creating an economy that only delivers for a privileged few doesn’t really seem like a problem. Still, don’t move to Texas expecting a better life, unless you own a petrochemical refinery.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 7, 2014
“The Hammock Fallacy”: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Report, Like His Famous Budget Plan, Is A Con Job
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.
And the big new poverty report from the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul Ryan, offers additional reasons for optimism. Mr. Ryan used to rely on “scholarship” from places like the Heritage Foundation. Remember when Heritage declared that the Ryan budget would reduce unemployment to a ludicrous 2.8 percent, then tried to cover its tracks? This time, however, Mr. Ryan is citing a lot of actual social science research.
Unfortunately, the research he cites doesn’t actually support his assertions. Even more important, his whole premise about why poverty persists is demonstrably wrong.
To understand where the new report is coming from, it helps to recall something Mr. Ryan said two years ago: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” There are actually two assertions here. First, antipoverty programs breed complacency; that is, they discourage work. Second, complacency — the failure of the poor to work as much as they should — is what perpetuates poverty.
The budget committee report is almost entirely concerned with the first assertion. It notes that there has been a large decline in labor force participation, and it claims that antipoverty programs, which reduce the incentive to work, are a major reason for this decline. Then come 200 pages of text and 683 footnotes, designed to create the impression that the scholarly research literature supports the report’s claims.
But it doesn’t. In some cases, Mr. Ryan and colleagues outright misstate what the research says, drawing outraged protests from a number of prominent scholars about the misrepresentation of their work. More often, however, the report engages in argument by innuendo. It makes an assertion about the bad effects of a program, then mentions a number of studies of that program, and thereby leaves the impression that those studies support its assertion, even though they don’t.
What does scholarly research on antipoverty programs actually say? We have quite good evidence on the effects of food stamps and Medicaid, which draw most of Mr. Ryan’s ire — and which his budgets propose slashing drastically. Food stamps, it seems, do lead to a reduction in work and working hours, but the effect is modest. Medicaid has little, if any, effect on work effort.
Over all, here’s the verdict of one comprehensive survey: “While there are significant behavioral side effects of many programs, their aggregate impact is very small.” In short, Mr. Ryan’s poverty report, like his famous budget plan, is a con job.
Now, you can still argue that making antipoverty programs much more generous would indeed reduce the incentive to work. If you look at cross-county comparisons, you find that low-income households in the United States, which does less to help the poor than any other major advanced nation, work much more than their counterparts abroad. So, yes, incentives do have some effect on work effort.
But why, exactly, should that be such a concern? Mr. Ryan would have us believe that the “hammock” created by the social safety net is the reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty. But the evidence says nothing of the kind.
After all, if generous aid to the poor perpetuates poverty, the United States — which treats its poor far more harshly than other rich countries, and induces them to work much longer hours — should lead the West in social mobility, in the fraction of those born poor who work their way up the scale. In fact, it’s just the opposite: America has less social mobility than most other advanced countries.
And there’s no puzzle why: it’s hard for young people to get ahead when they suffer from poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and lack of access to good education. The antipoverty programs that we have actually do a lot to help people rise. For example, Americans who received early access to food stamps were healthier and more productive in later life than those who didn’t. But we don’t do enough along these lines. The reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty isn’t that the government helps them too much; it’s that it helps them too little.
Which brings us back to the hypocrisy issue. It is, in a way, nice to see the likes of Mr. Ryan at least talking about the need to help the poor. But somehow their notion of aiding the poor involves slashing benefits while cutting taxes on the rich. Funny how that works.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 6, 2014
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