Whose Tea Party Is It?
Newt Gingrich’s brief turn as presidential front-runner was only the latest paroxysm of a tumultuous Republican primary season. What’s going on? Tensions within the Tea Party help explain the volatility of the Republican primary campaign, as candidates seek to appeal to competing elements of the Tea Party with varying success.
For our new book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” we interviewed Tea Party activists across the country over a sixteen-month period and found that the movement is not the monolith it is sometimes portrayed as. The conservative political upsurge has grassroots and elite components with divergent interests and goals. Mitt Romney, no favorite of the Tea Party grassroots, is currently pitching his candidacy to Tea Party elites, while Newt Gingrich and other contenders are vying for the rank-and-file Tea Party supporters.
We learned about grassroots Tea Party groups by attending their meetings, interviewing active members and reading hundreds of their websites and message boards. In early 2011, these Tea Partiers had no consistent favorite for the Republican nominee, supporting everyone from Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Donald Trump, but they did have one goal in mind for 2012: beating Barack Obama. As one Tea Party member we met in Virginia put it, “we have to get Obama out. Obama and the Communists he’s surrounded himself with.”
In recent weeks, Gingrich has reached out to these grassroots Tea Party voters, older white middle-class conservatives who remember him from his glory days as an insurgent Democrat slayer. Gingrich’s aggressive style and blistering critiques of the Democrats resonate with Tea Party voters. Gingrich has accused Democrats of socialist tendencies for decades; as early as 1984, he claimed that a Democratic member of the House of Representatives was distributing “communist propaganda.”
But Gingrich has also tapped into what we identified as Tea Partiers’ most fundamental concern: their belief that hardworking American taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill for undeserving freeloaders, particularly immigrants, the poor and the young. Young people “just feel like they are entitled,” one member of the Massachusetts Tea Party told us. A Virginia interviewee said that today’s youth “have lost the value of work.”
These views were occasionally tinged with ethnic stereotypes about immigrants “stealing” from tax-funded programs, or minorities with a “plantation mentality.” When Gingrich talks about “inner-city” children having “no habits of working,” he is appealing to a widely held sentiment among the Tea Party faithful.
What’s more, Gingrich’s comparatively humane stance on immigration reform — offering immigrants a path to legal status with the approval of local community members — is more palatable to Tea Party members than one might expect. First, it reduces federal authority over a key Tea Party issue, a policy that appeals to the “states’ rights” conservatives who fill the seats at Tea Party meetings. Crucially, Gingrich is not offering, as Rick Perry did, taxpayer-funded benefits to unauthorized immigrants, a policy described by one Tea Party activist we spoke to as money wasted on “moochers.”
Immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern expressed by Tea Party activists, usually as a symbol of a broader national decline. Asked why she was a member of the movement, a woman from Virginia asked rhetorically, “what is going on in this country? What is going on with immigration?” A Tea Party leader in Massachusetts expressed her desire to stand on the border “with a gun” while an activist in Arizona jokingly referred to an immigration plan in the form of a “12 million passenger bus” to send unauthorized immigrants out of the United States.
In a survey of Tea Party members in Massachusetts we conducted, immigration was second only to deficits on the list of issues the party should address. Another man, after we interviewed him in the afternoon, took us aside at a meeting that evening to say specifically that he wished he had said more about immigration because that was really his top issue.
Tea Party activists are not uniformly opposed to government social programs, however. Our interviewees were very anxious that Social Security and Medicare be maintained. “I’ve been working since I was 16 years old, and I do feel like I should someday reap the benefit. I’m not looking for a handout. I’m looking for a pay out of what I paid into,” one Tea Party member explained. Their support for these programs was not just self-interested; several Tea Partiers said they would take a benefit cut if the savings stayed in the Social Security fund. One woman, a regular attendee of her local Tea Party, offered solutions that seemed totally out of keeping with the stereotypes of Tea Party members as knee-jerk tax cutters. After suggesting that any benefit cuts be aimed at those in the “upper income brackets,” she went so far as to say that she “would not mind a tax increase to try to get the country right again.”
Given the Tea Partiers’ abiding support for two key pillars of the American social safety net, it is no surprise that Gingrich’s plan for a Social Security overhaul is aimed only at young workers, not the retirees filling the rows at Tea Party meetings. But Mitt Romney has taken a different path, expressing his support for the Ryan budget plan that features huge tax cuts for the very wealthy paid for with relatively near-term Medicare cuts.
Many observers have suggested that Romney’s support for the unpopular Ryan budget was a misstep. But considered from another perspective, Romney is making a strategic move to aim for a different part of the Tea Party, the free-market elites and funders.
Long-standing elite advocacy organizations that rallied around the Tea Party label in 2009 and 2010, like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, were crucial to the Tea Party phenomenon, providing funding for national rallies and conservative candidates, and focusing attention on well-practiced spokespeople to represent the Tea Party in the media and in Washington. But the national advocates have only tenuous ties to the grassroots Tea Party groups and are in no way accountable to the Tea Party at the local level. Their policy agenda is different as well. FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have sought major reforms of Social Security and Medicare for years — long before the Tea-Party label gained currency.
Cutting these programs is unlikely to appeal to the grassroots Tea Party, but local Tea Party members are only marginally aware of the national advocacy occurring in their name. Asked about national groups, local activists tended to shake their heads in confusion. In a typical complaint, one leader of a local Arizona Tea Party group told us, “sometimes when you sign up for a site, it puts out tentacles,” sharing information so that visitors receive a bewildering array of emails from other groups.
Tea Partiers also receive their information primarily, or in some cases exclusively, from Fox News and talk radio, outlets that are unlikely to turn a critical eye on conservative advocacy organizations. This lack of connection between grassroots and elite Tea Party-ism may allow Romney to placate the wealthy opponents of Social Security and Medicare without irking the Tea Party base.
For both Romney and Gingrich, appealing to the Tea Party is a bit of a stretch. Both men have been around too long not to have taken positions too moderate for the new, extreme-right, tea-infused Republican Party. In particular, there is little Romney can do to make Tea Party activists enthusiastic about him during the primary season. Though his claims to a businessman’s expertise should appeal to the many small business owners in the Tea Party, no one we interviewed had good things to say about anything but his potential electability.
But Republican primary voters, including those in the Tea Party, want to win the 2012 general election. As one Tea Partier told us, Romney is “not quite conservative enough – but we have to get Obama out.” They will overlook past heresies, even “RomneyCare,” in a candidate they believe can win the general election.
As long as the big Tea Party funders back Romney’s candidacy or stay on the sidelines, Romney has a good chance of riding out other candidates’ surges in popularity and using his vast organizational and financial advantages to beat out his opponents for the Republican nomination. At that point, the grassroots Tea Party members will have little influence; instead, momentum will shift even further towards the elite policy advocates. And these well-funded groups, which benefited from the Tea Party’s momentum in the first years of the Obama administration, will continue to seek their own policy goals, including those at odds with the positions of local Tea Partiers.
By: Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The New York Times, December 26, 2011
Understanding Republican “Suicidal” Political Episodes
It wasn’t a great week for congressional Republicans, who ended up hurting themselves twice — they looked bad fighting to raise middle-class taxes, and then looked worse caving when the heat was on.
Jon Chait argued this week that GOP policymakers were so far around the bend, they looked politically “suicidal.”
The payroll tax debacle is now the third suicidal episode undertaken by the House Republicans since they took control of it at the beginning of the year. The first was when they voted almost unanimously for Paul Ryan’s budget, which was filled with grist for attack ads — huge cuts to Medicare, big tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulating Wall Street — despite it having no chance of passing this term.
The second was when they played chicken with the debt ceiling and turned a once-routine procedure into a white-knuckle game of chicken with the world economy.
And then this week, when they attempted to extract concessions in return for extending the payroll tax holiday, an anti-recessionary measure with strong support from economists, businesses, and voters. These are not just gestures. The right-wingers are really trying to off themselves.
I found all of this quite compelling, but it got me thinking about why Republicans, especially in the House, would be so cavalier about their own electoral futures. Usually, elected politicians want to win re-election, and take some steps while in office that voters will respect and appreciate. As part of the efforts that make it seem as if GOP officials “really trying to off themselves” politically, congressional Republicans appear to be making themselves less popular, almost on purpose.
Why on earth would they do this? I’ve been kicking around a few theories.
1. Republican lawmakers assume voters aren’t paying any attention. Politicians can get away with quite a bit if they think the public won’t know either way.
2. They assume Democrats, when faced with any pressure at all, will invariably surrender and give Republicans whatever they demand. That’s generally not a bad strategy, but it failed miserably in the fight over the payroll tax cut.
3. They assume the media will, under all possible circumstances, continue to tell the public “both sides” are always to blame for everything. This, too, is a pretty safe bet, but when even Republican media outlets turn against the GOP (take the Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example), this starts to fail.
4. They fear primary challengers. Under this model, Republicans know their extremism will offend the American mainstream, but if they’re defeated by even-more-conservative primary opponents, their careers are over anyway.
5. They figure major right-wing money — from the Koch Brothers, Crossroads GPS, assorted Super PACs, etc. — will come in before the election, destroy their Democratic challengers, and keep them in office no matter what they vote for.
6. They’re just nuts.
Why else would congressional Republicans take such breathtaking risks with their own electoral fortunes?
Update: Paul Krugman argues that I missed one: “reliable conservatives are assured of a safe landing even if they are defeated,” thanks to “wingnut welfare.” It’s a good point.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 24, 2011
Mitt Romney Relied On Corporate Welfare: How Bain Capital Leveraged Government Assistance To Boost Profits
During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has lashed out at the Obama administration’s taxpayer subsidized grants to clean energy start-up companies. “The U.S. government shouldn’t be playing venture capitalist,” wrote Romney in October. “The very process invites cronyism and outright corruption.” But public records show that Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, repeatedly persuaded the government to play venture capitalist when it came to its own portfolio of companies.
News outlets have recently focused attention on Romney’s history as a businessman at Bain, which he founded in 1984. What hasn’t been reported, or fully explained by the candidate, is how Romney often got ahead in the private sector by using government help.
The likely GOP nominee made much of his estimated $250 million fortune buying companies, reorganizing them, and selling them for a profit. Though Romney, whose only government experience is his one term as Massachusetts governor, is quick to claim that he turned around investments using sound management and data-driven strategies, he does not mention one aspect of his success. Bain Capital owned companies that padded their profits using millions in public subsidies. In other cases, firms owned by Bain employed K Street lobbying firms to pursue lucrative government programs.
Consider two of Romney’s first major investments: office supply company Staples Inc. and photo album manufacturer Holson Co. Both persuaded state officials to subsidize their growth.
Shortly after Bain took control of Holson in 1987, executives pushed for the company to expand in the South. Officials from the firm had negotiated with Gov. Carroll Campbell, a Republican, to extend $200,000 in utility support for a new Holson plant in the city of Gaffney. The local city council also approved a $5 million bond for construction, after meeting with representatives from Holson. Five years after South Carolina’s taxpayers had helped finance the factory, Bain chose to sell Holson’s Gaffney facility for $2.8 million. Romney’s firm reaped the profits on the taxpayers’ expenditure.
The history of Staples, a company that Bain grew from a single store, is a hallmark of the Romney record. Staples’ rapid growth, however, drew on substantial state subsidies.
In 1996, Tom Stemberg, a close Romney business partner leading Staples, met with Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, a Democrat, to negotiate a package of taxpayer sweeteners to build a new distribution center in Hagerstown. The Glendening administration, using a “Sunny Day” fund of discretionary development money, awarded Staples $2.3 million in grants and low interest loans. The following year, as Glendening prepared for his reelection campaign, top Staples executives maxed out in donations. Stemberg and his colleagues gave a total of $16,000.
A similar story played out in Connecticut, where Staples landed a deal in which taxpayers subsidized over $6 million in low-interest loans for the company to construct a distribution center in Killingly in 1998.
Tapping Washington
The federal government also played a pivotal role in Romney’s ascendant path through corporate America.
GS Industries, a steel company purchased by Bain in the early ’90s, faced fiscal problems as Bain withdrew large dividends and management fees. Under Bain’s leadership, the steelmaker hired the K Street lobbying firm of Wiley Rein to seek government support. In 1998-99 the firm paid $140,000 for a lobbying team that included former Democratic Rep. Jim Slattery. GS Industries eventually won a federal loan guarantee, but before the loan could be delivered, the company fell to bankruptcy in 2001. Bain’s executives still made $50 million from their involvement with the firm.
In 1999, Romney departed Bain to take over as the chief executive officer of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. The experience, turning an organization in disarray and deeply in the red into a popular event that actually earned over $100 million in profits, is portrayed as yet another example of the candidate’s private sector management skills. Yet the turnaround was achieved in part through the use of professional influence peddling. Under Romney’s management, the Olympic organizing committee spent over $3.3 million on Beltway lobbyists to secure federal funding for the 2004 Winter games.
Olympics lobbyists from firms like Patton Boggs and King & Spalding helped secure federal grants for communications equipment, educational money and public transportation. Millions of dollars were procured from federal officials, who wanted to allay safety concerns in the aftermath of 9/11.
As the New York Times reported earlier this week, Romney’s has continued to earn a windfall from Bain. When he left the firm, he signed a severance package that allowed him to share in the company’s profits in perpetuity. The arrangement might come back to haunt the candidate, given Bain’s increased reliance on lobbyists over the last five years.
Starting in 2007, Bain Capital began retaining various lobbying firms to pressure lawmakers to keep open a loophole that allows much of the earnings by private equity managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than the top income bracket of 35 percent. Given Romney’s profit-sharing retirement deal, the campaign to extend the loophole, which still hasn’t been closed, likely boosted the candidate’s fortune. (Romney has refused to release his tax return, leaving questions about his income.)
As Romney pillories Obama for using the government to fix problems in society (health reform, the auto bailout, etc.), he invites a closer examination of his own career. A balanced view of the Romney record shows he has never had any qualms about government help when it came to his own bottom line. Whether through hiring insider lobbyists or funneling taxpayer subsidies to his companies, government assistance has been part and parcel to the rise of Romney.
By: Lee Fang, Salon, December 21, 2011
The “Non-Romneys” And The GOP’s Iowa Chaos
Is Rick Santorum the next non-Romney to emerge from the pack? Could he conceivably win Iowa?
That these are plausible questions tells you all you need to know about the unsettled nature of the Republican presidential contest — particularly here, the state whose caucuses on Jan. 3 have become a bookie’s nightmare. At the moment, anyone among the six major candidates has a reasonable chance of coming in first or second, and the contest is becoming less settled as the brief Christmas interlude in campaigning approaches.
For example: If libertarian Ron Paul has a chance of triumphing anywhere, it’s in Iowa, where all his competitors acknowledge the energy of his organization. Establishment pick Mitt Romney’s opposition is so badly split that he could conceivably come in first and begin locking up the nomination — or he could emerge deeply scarred by finishing in the bottom tier. The line between success and failure is that thin.
Newt Gingrich seems to be surrendering the lead he briefly held, the target of millions of dollars in negative advertising. He still hopes to use jujitsu to turn all those negative ads in his favor, and at a factory here on Tuesday, he denounced Romney as “purely dishonest” for refusing to push his super PAC — theoretically independent of the campaign but closely connected to Romney’s supporters — to stop running anti-Gingrich ads.
Gingrich mocked the attack ads his opponents are running, winning laughter when he declared: “I think these guys hire consultants who get drunk, sit around and write stupid ads.”
Yet the ads, however stupid, are hurting him. He spoke here at the Al-jon company, which manufactures recycling and compacting equipment, and stood in front of a giant, bright orange contraption. An Al-jon official explained that the machine could take a large truck “and in two minutes, it cubes that truck into a bundle the size of a refrigerator.” Figuratively speaking, that’s what Gingrich’s opponents threaten to do to his candidacy.
This explains Santorum’s opportunity. If Gingrich’s chances depend on uniting the overlapping Tea Party and evangelical constituencies against Romney, his rivals for conservative hearts — Santorum, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann — refuse to give way.
Santorum has spent so much time here that, as the former Pennsylvania senator told a gathering at the Royal Amsterdam Hotel in Pella, he can challenge lifelong residents to Iowa trivia contests. Bachmann threatens to shatter Iowa records for the most campaign events per day. Perry, desperate to salvage his campaign after many verbal missteps, is spending lavishly on television and radio commercials that plant him proudly on the right wing of the right wing.
Santorum has going for him what’s been going against him until now: Having never emerged as a top candidate, he has avoided attacks from his opponents and is the only conservative left unscathed. He has kept his focus on the very religious voters who have played a central role in Iowa Republican caucuses since the Rev. Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign.
Speaking before a banner touting his “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour, Santorum combined detailed proposals — including tax policies aimed at reviving American manufacturing — with harsh attacks on President Obama. But he tries to close the deal with frankly theological reflections. “I approach every problem in my life through faith and reason,” he said. “If your reason is right and your faith is true, you’ll end up in the same place.”
The bad news and the good news for Santorum came together on Tuesday when Family Leader, a conservative Christian group, announced its formal neutrality in the contest (the bad news reflecting the fragmentation of the religious right), even as the organization’s CEO, Robert Vander Plaats, and another prominent Iowa Christian conservative, Chuck Hurley, gave Santorum strong personal endorsements. The net effect was to add to the sense that Santorum is on the move, while leaving open the question of whether he is moving fast enough.
Thus the tale of Iowa: a grass-roots Republican Party dominated by a right wing that cannot come together; Paul trying to build on a solid core; Gingrich desperate for unity on the right but under a relentless pummeling; Santorum hoping to be the last person standing; and Romney seeking only to survive Iowa in a strong enough position to profit later from dissension among his foes. For Republicans, it is a campaign in which faith may not be enough, even in the Iowa caucuses, and reason leads more to confusion, perhaps even chaos, than to clarity.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 21, 2011
The Method Behind Mitt Romney’s Big Lie Strategy
In a speech late yesterday, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of trying to use government to “create equal outcomes.” Romney argued that Obama wants to create an “entitlement society,” in which “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk.” He made a concerted case that under Obama’s ideal vision, everyone will “get the same rewards.”
This is a Big Lie — it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything Obama has ever said, proposed or accomplished. And many liberalwritershavenoted today that this is Glenn Beck-level craziness, suggesting that Romney is willing to say and do anything to win.
That’s true, but another thing it’s also important to understand about Romney’s falsehoods is that they all serve a larger story that he and his advisers have been deliberately developing over time. When you look at all the Big Lies Romney has told in recent months, you’ll see a common thread running through them all.
They’re all about conveying a sense that you should find Obama’s intentions towards America vaguely suspect; that Obama harbors a deep seated indifference or even hostility towards the fundamentals that make America what it is; and that Obama is in some basic way undermining the foundation of American life as we know it. Let’s go through them all:
* The claim above that Obama wants a society in which everyone gets the “same rewards” is obviously designed to suggest that Obama doesn’t believe in American competitiveness and ingenuity.
* In that same spirit, Romney claimed the other day that the Obama/Dem criticism of his Bain years shows that Obama intends to “put free enterprise on trial” during the general election.
* Romney’s frequent falsehood that Obama “apologized for America” is about suggesting that Obama is apologetic about America’s relative advantages over other countries; that on some basic level, he doesn’t wish the country well.
* Indeed, Romney’s book, which he has frequently described as a kind of foundation of his presidential run, is called “No Apology: The case for American Greatness,” as if Obama is apologizing for American greatness.
* Romney recently accused Obama of pursuing policies that he “knows” are bad for the country.
* Romney recently claimed that he doesn’t believe Obama “understands America.”
* The speech Romney gave when he announced his presidential run traded heavily on these themes: He claimed that we are “inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,” adding: “We look at our country, and we know in our hearts that things aren’t right.”
* As far back as 2010 Romney revealed he would campaign on the idea that Obama “has not understood the nature of America,” and on the idea that Obama does not share American “values” such as “love of liberty, of freedom, of opportunity.”
And so on. At this point, the pattern here is obvious, and it’s clearly not an accident. And Romney and his team will remain secure in the knowledge that most of the media will politely look the other way as the Big Lies keep flowing, and will continue to treat them as just part of the game.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, December 21, 2011
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