Tea Party Tailspin: Anger And Shifting Momentums
The Tea Party is synonymous with anger. Anger defined it. Anger fueled it. Anger marred it. Anger became its face and its heart. But anger is too exhausting an emotion to sustain.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that anger at the government among Tea Party supporters fell by 40 percent from September 2010 to this month. Furthermore, anger among Republicans fell by more than half, and anger among whites, the elderly and independents fell by 40 percent or more.
On the other hand, the percentage of Tea Party supporters who said that they trusted the government always or most of the time doubled from last March to this March, and the percentage of Republicans saying so nearly doubled. In fact, the percent of both Republicans and independents saying so is now higher than it has been since January 2007.
Less anger? More trust? What happened? The midterms happened, that’s what.
Elections have a way of cooling passions, especially when voters get what they want. (Remember how lethargic many Democrats became after November 2008?) Electoral success not only satisfies, it pacifies. The enormous gains by Republicans during the midterms assuaged much of the country’s grief. The pressure began to subside. The novelty dimmed. The urgency evaporated.
Yet Tea Party leaders are still sniping from the sidelines, holding politicians to overreaching promises made when the electorate was still stewing. Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, wrote a post on its Web site this week saying the House speaker, John Boehner, looks “like a fool” and should face a primary challenge in 2012 for not pursuing enough spending cuts this year.
For these Tea Partiers, any concession is a crime worthy of expulsion.
A September Pew Poll found that only 22 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party admire political leaders who make compromises. This is not the way the rest of the country feels. Fifty-five percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans said that they admired politicians who compromise.
Staunch Tea Partiers seem to be guided by the worst kind of fundamentalist political extremism — immutable positions derived from a near-religious adherence to self-proclaimed inviolable principles. This could well be their undoing.
During the right’s season of anger, passion and convictions galvanized Tea Party supporters into an army of activism. But the vehicle is outliving its fuel. The movement is losing momentum. In fact, Tea Party-backed governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin could be providing the rallying cry on the left to pick up the mantle of anger and send the momentum back the other way.
If Tea Party leaders continue to operate as if anger is still a major part of their arsenal and Republican politicians continue to feel pressured into untenable positions, Democrats could enjoy their very own Charlie Sheen-ism come 2012: “Winning!”
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed columnist; Original article published in The New York Times, March 4, 2011
How To Kill A Recovery-Republican Style
The economic news has been better lately. New claims for unemployment insurance are down; business and consumer surveys suggest solid growth. We’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole, but at least we’re climbing.
It’s too bad that so many people, mainly on the political right, want to send us sliding right back down again.
Before we get to that, let’s talk about why economic recovery has been so long in coming.
Some economists expected a rapid bounce-back once we were past the acute phase of the financial crisis — what I think of as the oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die period — which lasted roughly from September 2008 to March 2009. But that was never in the cards. The bubble economy of the Bush years left many Americans with too much debt; once the bubble burst, consumers were forced to cut back, and it was inevitably going to take them time to repair their finances. And business investment was bound to be depressed, too. Why add to capacity when consumer demand is weak and you aren’t using the factories and office buildings you have?
The only way we could have avoided a prolonged slump would have been for government spending to take up the slack. But that didn’t happen: growth in total government spending actually slowed after the recession hit, as an underpowered federal stimulus was swamped by cuts at the state and local level.
So we’ve gone through years of high unemployment and inadequate growth. Despite the pain, however, American families have gradually improved their financial position. And in the past few months there have been signs of an emerging virtuous circle. As families have repaired their finances, they have increased their spending; as consumer demand has started to revive, businesses have become more willing to invest; and all this has led to an expanding economy, which further improves families’ financial situation.
But it’s still a fragile process, especially given the effects of rising oil and food prices. These price rises have little to do with U.S. policy; they’re mainly because of growing demand from China and other emerging markets, on one side, and disruption of supply from political turmoil and terrible weather on the other. But they’re a hit to purchasing power at an especially awkward time. And things will be much worse if the Federal Reserve and other central banks mistakenly respond to higher headline inflation by raising interest rates.
The clear and present danger to recovery, however, comes from politics — specifically, the demand from House Republicans that the government immediately slash spending on infant nutrition, disease control, clean water and more. Quite aside from their negative long-run consequences, these cuts would lead, directly and indirectly, to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs — and this could short-circuit the virtuous circle of rising incomes and improving finances.
Of course, Republicans believe, or at least pretend to believe, that the direct job-destroying effects of their proposals would be more than offset by a rise in business confidence. As I like to put it, they believe that the Confidence Fairy will make everything all right.
But there’s no reason for the rest of us to share that belief. For one thing, it’s hard to see how such an obviously irresponsible plan — since when does starving the I.R.S. for funds help reduce the deficit? — can improve confidence.
Beyond that, we have a lot of evidence from other countries about the prospects for “expansionary austerity” — and that evidence is all negative. Last October, a comprehensive study by the International Monetary Fund concluded that “the idea that fiscal austerity stimulates economic activity in the short term finds little support in the data.”
And do you remember the lavish praise heaped on Britain’s conservative government, which announced harsh austerity measures after it took office last May? How’s that going? Well, business confidence did not, in fact, rise when the plan was announced; it plunged, and has yet to recover. And recent surveys suggest that confidence has fallen even further among both businesses and consumers, indicating, as one report put it, that the private sector is “unprepared to fill the hole left by public sector cuts.”
Which brings us back to the U.S. budget debate.
Over the next few weeks, House Republicans will try to blackmail the Obama administration into accepting their proposed spending cuts, using the threat of a government shutdown. They’ll claim that those cuts would be good for America in both the short term and the long term.
But the truth is exactly the reverse: Republicans have managed to come up with spending cuts that would do double duty, both undermining America’s future and threatening to abort a nascent economic recovery.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 3, 2011
Republicans Stampede Toward The Cliff
Interesting findings from the NBC/WSJ poll. Asked about deficit reducing options, the options the public overwhelmingly favors are ones Democrats favor, and the options they overwhelmingly oppose are ones Republicans are promising to propose:
[The survey] listed 26 different ways to reduce the federal budget deficit. The most popular: placing a surtax on federal income taxes for those who make more than $1 million per year (81 percent said that was acceptable), eliminating spending on earmarks (78 percent), eliminating funding for weapons systems the Defense Department says aren’t necessary (76 percent) and eliminating tax credits for the oil and gas industries (74 percent).
The least popular: cutting funding for Medicaid, the federal government health-care program for the poor (32 percent said that was acceptable); cutting funding for Medicare, the federal government health-care program for seniors (23 percent); cutting funding for K-12 education (22 percent); and cutting funding for Social Security (22 percent).
But the public demands deficit reduction, right? Well, actually, they care more about jobs:
In the poll, eight in 10 respondents say they are concerned about the growing federal deficit and the national debt, but more than 60 percent — including key swing-voter groups — are concerned that major cuts from Congress could impact their lives and their families.
What’s more, while Americans find some budget cuts acceptable, they are adamantly opposed to cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and K-12 education.
And although a combined 22 percent of poll-takers name the deficit/government spending as the top issue the federal government should address, 37 percent believe job creation/economic growth is the No. 1 issue.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, says these results are a “cautionary sign” for a Republican Party pursuing deep budget cuts.
He points out that the Americans who are most concerned about spending cuts are core Republicans and Tea Party supporters, not independents and swing voters.
“It may be hard to understand why a person might jump off a cliff, unless you understand they’re being chased by a tiger,” he said. “That tiger is the Tea Party.”
By the standards of these things, those are extremely sharp comments from McInturff. Leaders are usually more worried about internal threats than external threats. Boehner needs to make sure he doesn’t get deposed as speaker before he worries about winning a showdown with Democrats.
The specifics of the fight — Republicans promising to cut overwhelmingly popular programs, being willing to shut down the government, and pushing a plan that private analysts predict will reduce jobs — put them in a very tough position. Republicans are working really hard to buck each other up and ignore data about public opinion. Democrats have the upper hand here. President Obama may decide to cut a deficit deal, but both the politics and the policy say he should hand the Republicans their head first.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, March 3, 2011
Can Seven Reports Be Wrong About The Risks of Spending Cuts? GOP Says Yes
Could two independent economic reports, a liberal think tank and four bipartisan reports on debt reduction be wrong? They all conclude that slashing federal spending this year could cause job losses and threaten the economic recovery.
The latest report, from Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, says 700,000 jobs could be lost by the end of 2012 if Republicans succeed in their quest to cut $60 billion from domestic programs this year. Cuts and tax increases are necessary to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, Zandi said, but “cutting too deeply before the economy is in full expansion would add unnecessary risk.” The report largely echoes earlier analyses by Alec Phillips of Goldman Sachs and the Center for American Progress.
House Speaker John Boehner famously responded, when asked about potential job losses earlier this month, “so be it.” On Monday his office pointed to a new counter argument offered by Stanford economist John Taylor – that “a credible plan to reduce the deficit” will help the economy, not hurt it, and that $60 billion – the amount the other analyses assume will be cut this year – is an inaccurate, inflated figure.
Taylor is a former Bush administration official based at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford; last year he received an award from the conservative Bradley Foundation. Zandi, founder and chief economist at Moody’s, was an adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008. However, he is a registered Democrat. (Update: Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, named by Republican George W. Bush and re-appointed by President Barack Obama, also disputes the Zandi and Phillips reports).
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel called Zandi “a relentless cheerleader for the failed ‘stimulus,'” who “refuses to understand that ending the spending binge will help the private sector.” That led the Chicago Tribune’s Mike Memoli to tweet, “Today, GOP discredits Mark Zandi. Last fall, cited his analysis in arguing against tax hikes.”
It is an article of faith among Republicans that 2009 stimulus package has “failed.” But the Obama administration, Zandi and many others disagree with that assessment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus created or saved up to 3.5 million jobs, raised the GDP and stabilized an economy that had been in free-fall.
There is no sign the stimulus will ever be anything but a partisan flashpoint. Yet there is bipartisan consensus to be found in the reports from various deficit and debt commissions. They are unanimous in suggesting either increased stimulus or steady government spending in 2011.
“Don’t disrupt the fragile recovery,” the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform warned in December. Its plan – adopted by 11 of the 18 panel members – calls for “serious belt-tightening” to begin in 2012. A report from the Bipartisan Policy Center suggested gradually phasing in steps to reduce deficits and debt “beginning in 2012, so the economy will be strong enough to absorb them.” The 2009 Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform put off cuts to the same year, as did a recent proposal from Brookings fellow Bill Galston and Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
MacGuineas has mixed feelings about the GOP drive to slash spending and slash it now. “It’s good that we’re actually talking about spending reductions” instead of putting it off, she said in an interview. “On the one hand, that’s helpful. On the other hand, they are focusing on the wrong time frame — this year instead of this decade, and focusing on the wrong part of the budget — a very thin slice instead of the real problem areas” such as Medicare and Medicaid.
The ideal scenario in the view of MacGuineas and the bipartisan commissions would be for politicians serious about debt reduction to spend 2011 on a long-term plan to reduce domestic and defense spending, raise taxes, ensure long-term health for Social Security and solve the riddle of controlling Medicare and Medicaid costs. “The right model is to put in place this year a multiyear plan to get there,” MacGuineas said, adding she has high hopes for a bipartisan group of senators led by Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.
The skirmishes over spending – destined to repeat themselves constantly this year as Congress confronts potential government shutdowns and loan defaults – have provided political fodder for all sides. Democrats seized on Boehner’s initial response to the prospect of job losses and now refer often to the GOP’s “so be it” jobs policy. Republicans, though they only control half of Congress, are making good on promises to the tea party movement and other voters who put a premium on cutting government spending.
If Republicans can’t secure Senate passage and Obama’s signature for their spending cuts, they will have at least made clear to their base that they tried. If by some political miracle they win the $60 billion in cuts they are seeking, and the recovery picks up, they can take credit. If the economy dips back into crisis, or even if the jobless rate is flat, they can blame Obama and bolster their case to take back the White House.
Unless of course Obama and the Democrats, equipped with who knows how many reports by then, figure out a way to blame them first.
By: Jill Lawrence, Senior Correspondent-Politics Daily, March 1, 2011
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