Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 12/18/2011

The standings look pretty much like you think they do:

Gingrich, Paul and Romney remain the front runners:

 But Perry, Bachmann and even Huntsman have been flirting with a new surge:

And, while Ron Paul is still off in his own little world, the population of that world is starting to look competitive.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 12/3/2011

Newt Gingrich has a solid lead:

While Cain appears strong in the snapshot above, his high numbers this week are a mirage brought about by affair accusations and speculation about his Saturday announcement. The timing of his bumps this week supports this analysis:

The actual Cain numbers probably approximate the trough in the 7-day rolling trend -- and no doubt continue to fall:

The mention space has become more muddled, not less. It appears that much of the GOP base are still talking about multiple candidates; and a surprising number of politically engaged GOP tweeps are not talking about any of the candidates.

In the subtext: Watch Rick Santorum in Iowa and Ron Paul in New Hampshire.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 11/19/2011

Newt's ascension is complete:

But there is no clear front runner:

Newt and Cain have been trading the lead all week:

Which has been no help to Romney. If any thing, the rise of Newt and fall of Cain have merely reset the race to it's early -- and highly confused -- state.

One thing's clear, Ron Paul's still off in his own little world -- and a surprising number of conservatives aren't talking about any of the candidates.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 11/12/2011

The "bubble" generated by the Cain scandal seems to have burst.

But his losses may be only "negative mentions" so we'll have to wait and see whether he suffers a net loss of support since the beginning of the allegations. He seems to have gained ground over the course of the last two days.

Meanwhile, Gingrich has continued his rise into the leaders' pack:

The shape of the mention space has changed significantly. I have to admit that it may take me a few weeks to be satisfied that I know how to interpret it.

My two cents today:

1. For the first time, most political discussion centers on the GOP primary;
2. The GOP electorate is a confused, uncommitted mess;
3. Newt Gingrich is benefiting greatly from the party's confusion;
4. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are still off in their own little world;

See y'all next Sunday.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 11/5/2011

Everyone was talking about Cain this week:

Meanwhile, Newt continued his climb into the lead pack:

And Perry's slow decline continued all week:

The mention space is complicated by the harassment scandal dogging Cain. The scandal may prove to be a net positive in the long run (in the primaries), but I have no doubt that significant portions of Cain mentions this week were "negative" mentions. (I also suspect that negative mentions may not have been reliably distinguishable from positive mentions by off-the-shelf sentiment analysis.)

Paradoxically, the Cain story has been so dominant in the past week that the mention space visualization may tell us more about the positioning of the candidates than usual.

Rick Santorum, like Ron Paul, is isolated from mainstream networks. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand,  is well positioned to see a surge of support in the weeks or months to come. Rick Perry has faded into the background with Michele Bachmann. Romney sits behind Gingrich and Cain, steady but uninspiring.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 10/29/2011

Herman Cain maintains a lead. But that lead appears to have softened slightly since last week.

Most of the Cain loss appears to be driven by a Perry bump:

 

But the "Perry bump" may just as likely be a result of negative mentions as of positive mentions. Indeed, it appears to be centered around a number of Perry news items mid-week -- a fairly even split of "negative" and "positive" news, from the perspective of the GOP electorate. This is the first week that I wish I had implemented some sentiment analysis. I'd suspect that the (net) Perry mentions mid-week were an even split (or worse) between "positive" and "negative" mentions. In any event, the bump appears to have no staying power:

A closer look at the mention space shows Ron Paul still "off in his own little world" and Newt Gingrich building a base of conservative support similar to that seen with Cain before his surge. I still expect a Cain stumble will be needed for Newt to exploit this positioning.

As usual, I hope to be able to add some new features for next week's poll. I may be settled enough in my new job for that to be actually possible this week.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 10/22/2011

Herman Cain continues his comfortable lead while Perry falls farther into the middle of the pack:

Average mention share for the week suggests a three-way race between Cain, Romney and Ron Paul:

Like Bachmann, Newt's debate performance lead to a small bump at Cain's expense, but the bump quickly faded.

 Cain and Romney dominate the "mainstream" discussion. Meanwhile Ron Paul is off in his own little world -- drawing significant mention share from conservatives and "independents" but virtually none from progressives and politically-engaged centrists.

Newt has a lot of conservative mention share. I wouldn't rule out a surge, but would expect a Cain stumble first.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 10/15/2011

Herman Cain remains the most mentioned GOP primary candidate this week.

Although Romney did see a debate bump, it faded fast. Cain was consistently most mentioned all week:

Average mention share for the week suggests that the primary is settling into a two candidate contest between Romney and Cain -- with Perry and Ron Paul both slipping into the middle pack of also-rans.

A closer look at the mention space re-enforces the sense of Cain/Perry dominance -- and confirms that both are drawing robust volumes of mentions all across the political spectrum.

As I mentioned last week, I'd like to metricize the purpleness and overlap of the candidates' mentioners. But this week was my first at a new full time role. Stay tuned ... and see y'all next week.

Twitter Poll: GOP Primary -- Week Ending 10/8/2011

Herman Cain has maintained a substantial lead in Twitter mention share this week.

Cain lead comfortably all week, but discussion of Rick Perry's "camp problem" exaggerated both Perry and Cain mention share early in the week. Following the dust-up, Romney re-centered to his typical 20% share and Perry continued his steady decline into the middle of the pack.

On average, mention share analysis this week gives Cain a solid lead, followed by a 3-way race of Romney, Perry and, sometimes, Ron Paul.

Analysis of the mention space suggests that Cain's mention distribution has grown increasingly "purple" -- even showing a large number of "blue" mentions. This seems to be the norm for well-established candidates, which I would suggest Cain has now become:

In the coming weeks, I hope to be able to metricize both the "overall purpleness" of a candidate's mentions and their "supporter overlap" with other candidates. Also stay tuned this fall for a number of text-mining aggregations that have been in the works. And, of course, check back next Sunday for the latest Twitter Insta-polling from Take America Forward.

Twitter GOP Primary Poll -- Week ending October 1, 2011

Since the Florida straw poll Herman Cain has seen a huge boost in Twitter Mention Polling, moving from the center of the pack to clear front-runner status:

For the week of September 26 to October 1, Cain's mention share of 30%+ eclipsed those of his closest competitors -- Willard M Romney and Rick Perry, who each command roughly 15% of this week's mentions:

A look at the daily breakdown shows an uninterrupted Cain lead for the entire week, with Romney and Perry in a back-and-forth battle for second -- occasionally joined by Ron Paul.

Closer inspection of the mention space suggests that Cain dominates the discussion among conservatives, while Romney and Perry are mentioned more broadly on the political spectrum:

Please check back at Take America Forward each Sunday for weekly updates. Also expect an expanding range of analysis and a detailed discussion of Twitter aggregation methodologies.

Back from "Summer Vacation"

Apologies for the long silence. This spring, my wife was transferred from the San Francisco Bay Area to South Jersey (near Philadelphia). Although you can always follow my latest political thoughts in amuse bouche form on Twitter as @TheLoki47, our cross-country move pushed my political blogging to the back seat for the summer.

Since arriving in Philadelphia this July, I've been focused on developing accurate Twitter polling for the upcoming elections. Sunday morning, I will release the first set of weekly results. These results represent my best efforts to aggregate political energy on Twitter.  Posting these early (likely buggy) results, is an effort to share more broadly some insights on campaign buzz and grassroots energy that I've had at my disposal for the past several weeks.

As a preview, below is a visual aggregation of candidate mentions for the past week.

I will explain (and improve) the algorithms over time. For now it suffices to note that these are "active" Tweeps (25+ political tweets this week) with "frequent" mentions (5+ this week) of a political candidate. Colors are a best guess at political lean and node size is indicates a higher volume (of tweets for tweeps; of mentions for candidates) and the red and blue nexuses are the hashtags #p2 and #tcot.

The biggest takeaways are:

1. The Herman Cain phenomenon is real (at least this week).
2. Fading candidates seem to show a high volume of "blue" mentions.
3. Although the Eastern Conference/Western Conference metaphor promoted by Chris Matthews is a convenient first approximation, the competing factions in the GOP are likely far more complex and overlapping than the metaphor suggests .

See y'all Sunday with much more.

Owning It: Killing the "Liberal Bias" Myth

Cenk Uygur joked on MSNBC on Thursday that history has a "liberal bias" -- amending a line made famous in Colbert's coup de grace performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality". And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.

The hipster in me says: But Monty Python has already flung a cow, so it couldn't possibly be funny again. The political analyst in me says: Now that's how to inoculate an insidious right wing meme. Imagine a world in which the very phrase "liberal bias" has become so cliche that it is a liability.

In short: Lean into it.

Government is what we choose to do together

A shocking new survey of government aid recipients shows even these programs' participants are unaware that they have been receiving government aid.

529 or Coverdell	64.3
Home mortgage interest deduction	60.0
Hope or Lifetime Learning Tax Credit	59.6
Student Loans	53.3
Child and Dependent Tax Credit	51.7
Earned income tax credit	47.1
Social Security - Retirement and Survivors	44.1
Pell Grants	43.1
Unemployment Insurance	43.0
Veterans Benefits (other than G.I. Bill)	41.7
G.I. Bill	40.3
Medicare	39.8
Head Start	37.2
Social Security Disability	28.7
SSI - Supplementary Security Income	28.2
Medicaid	27.8
Welfare/Public Assistance	27.4
Government Subsidized Housing	27.4
Food Stamps	25.4

This chart speaks for itself, but I'll accentuate two important points: over a quarter of even food stamp recipients are unaware that they are benefiting from a government program; over half of the benefactors of major tax and household credits are entirely unaware of their "dependence" on government aid.

Many of these programs are important to the American safety net and to middle class prosperity, but I leave line-by-line budget and efficacy analysis to those more qualified than I. My point here is rhetorical: How is it that so many Americans are entirely unaware of the important role played by government in modern economies -- even in "free market" economies such as the United States?

The standard response is to blame "the media" or conservative framing. This is as lazy as it is defeatist. The fact is that Republican claims about government are demonstrably false and ring of a deeply amoral selfishness that is at odds with the truly compassionate nature of real Americans. If Democrats are not out there every day making exactly these two points, then they have only themselves to blame when they are "outframed" by Republicans.

Twitter's Top 40 Political Influencers in January

I've been looking closely at how ideas and talking points spread on Twitter. My algorithms are all tied together with duct tape and require significant hand-holding, but some results are finally beginning to come together.

As Take America Forward readers are no doubt aware, I've been watching the hashtags #teaparty, #tcot and #p2 particularly closely. On those hashtags, an elaborate economy of tweets, retweets and mentions exposes a hierarchy of influence. Based upon some early influence metrics, the political Twittersphere would have the following "Top 40 Influencers" in January.

The algorithms currently assume tweet and mention counts are important, and also the number of unique mentioners. The actual breakdowns for these users would be:

I could use some feedback if you have any ideas about how to improve this analysis. In the meantime, enjoy this primitive network model for January (colors and sizes have equivalent meaning: greater influence).

Message Discipline: Calling out Climate Denial with Effective Language

Last Wednesday, a Washington Post article on "the new tone" caught my attention. Discussing conservative distaste for the use of the phrase climate denier by climate change activists, Andrew Freedman lends unfortunate credibility to their demands that the expression be put off limits:

Blogs like Watts Up With That (known in climate circles as WUWT), which is run by former TV meteorologist [and climate denier] Anthony Watts, helped propel the climategate story onto front pages in late 2009 and early 2010. ...
 

"I did ask Dr. Trenberth, who is at the top of the climate food chain, to stop using a derisive term. He clearly refused. I also sent him an email offering my forum for rebuttal should he wish. No answer. This speaks poorly for his leadership, it speaks equally poorly for the rest of the climate science community that they haven't asked for him to publicly stop using a term," Watts wrote. "In the climate science debate, the scientists are the leaders, yet they have embraced this word, 'denier' with all of its holocaust connotations. Dr. Trenberth's AMS address using that word six times is the pinnacle of abuse of that word so far." [Emphasis and context added]

Nonsense. If climate deniers don't want to be called climate deniers then they should stop denying climate science. It's that simple.

But a closer reading of the story shows a troubling rhetorical asymmetry: contrarian language from the left; threats and intimidation from the right. Lawrence Livermore's Ben Santer, a lead author of the 1995 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Second Assessment Report, notes that climate scientists "are being subject to really intolerable nonscientific interference in their work simply because of what they're doing and what they've learned." Death threats keep coming from those egged-on by the climate deniers, but the scientific community should dispense with their most descriptive language to date?

Climate deniers deserve to be intellectually marginalized. Democrats must find uncharacteristic discipline and speak of climate deniers frequently in unambiguous language. Furthermore, they should feel no ethical qualms about doing so. Time and time again, Republican success can be tied directly to the word-choice recommendations of pollster Frank Luntz. This observation is hardly new. The American left has been wringing its collective hands over Frank for nearly two decades. But rarely do you hear discussions about how to neutralize or replicate this strategy for Democrats.

Let's start with the first possibility: neutralizing the Luntz strategy. This won't work in the short term. The simple fact is that conservatives are not constrained by cries of shame originating on the left. And a focused campaign to inoculate the public against the right's messaging strategies would require extensive research and publicity -- neutralization requires much more than merely pointing out that the GOP insists on referring to the estate tax as the death tax. No matter how funny Jon Stewart's video montages of him repeatedly saying job-killing and government takeover, Boehner's still out there every day saying these things. As PR strategists say, there's no such thing as bad publicity; and the more we talk about death taxes, the more the public believes they actually exist. We would need to look more deeply and talk more openly about why these phrases are deceptive and manipulative. We can do that. But not overnight.

The second possibility -- replicating the Luntz strategy -- is much more promising. The two biggest obstacles are both psychological: Democrats lack the nerve and discipline to adopt the strategy. The former is a matter of perceived ethics; I will spend the remainder of this post addressing the ethics so as to convince others on the left to focus a little more on addressing the discipline.

Freedman argues [emphasis added]:

Simply put, the rhetoric on all sides has been out of hand for far too long, and it needs to be reined in, not only to avoid something horrific - a climate science equivalent to the Arizona shootings - but also because of the damage it's doing to the public dialogue on climate change. At the end of the day, when climate scientists are fearful of engaging with the media or the public, it's the American public that loses out on potentially critical insights into what is happening to the climate system and what would best be done about it.

Of course, this would be true if the debate were about how to ameliorate the climate crisis. It is not.

Perhaps the biggest issue facing the world today is global climate change. Although many analysts believe we may have already passed a tipping point beyond which corrective measures will have no effect, a large segment of the American right has latched onto pseudo-science and creationist-style attacks couched in the language of "skepticism." As with evolution, the alternative climate hypotheses are not taken seriously in mainstream scientific circles. Nevertheless these hypotheses are held up as evidence of contrarian viewpoints, amplifying the appearance of scientific doubt to levels unsupported by the facts.

Two rhetorical surrenders on this front would prove fatal for efforts to realistically confront climate and energy issues moving forward: we must never cease pointing to the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting a warming trend; and, perhaps just as importantly, we cannot allow Republicans to frame themselves as mere skeptics, when they are truly deniers. They are atheists not agnostics. Even the Skeptics Society accepts the premise of global climate change -- with an eye toward amelioration.

Skepticism is cute. And admirable. Denial, not so much.

But even worse, the claims of rhetorical moral equivalency are vastly overblown. Parallels with Holocaust denier are accidental and irrelevant. They do not justify the elevation of deniers to skeptics. I should be clear: climate change activists should not make overt Holocaust comparisons, but they also should not back down from their perfectly acceptable use of the term denier when they make reference to climate deniers. While Nazi references should absolutely be off limits, the expression climate denier does not make any such references.

But how does climate denier compare to Luntz-generated phrases from Republicans? Death panel, death tax, job-killing and job-crushing all activate extremely negative networks -- networks related to death and destruction. And unlike climate denier, which only activates negatively charged networks through its association with a similar (but still entirely unrelated) collocation, the GOP stock phrases activate such networks directly.

But these talking points have one additional property as well: they are all lies. There are no death panels; the estate tax impacts only a small number of people; and, as the CBO reports, the Affordable Care Act frees workers -- it does not eliminate jobs. On the other hand, climate denier is a true claim about climate deniers. To decide if climate denier is a true description, we must look more closely at the nominalized verb denier. Does deny make any claims about the truth of its complement? In other words, if a speaker A is called an X denier does it unfairly imply that A knows X is true, but is lying anyway? The short version is no. In more technical terms, deny is not a factive verb. So, even if you buy the climate deniers' premise that climate science is unsettled (which you should not), climate denier is a perfectly honest description of climate deniers.

As I've argued in the past, the only way for progressives to fight the rhetorical dominance of the right is to know exactly where the ethical line is drawn; be unafraid to walk right up to it; and be committed to calling out conservatives every time they cross it. Those who would like society to exist for future generations should use the expressions climate denier and climate denial proudly and frequently.

Two Months at Salon

Over the past two months, I've had the pleasure of an unpaid news editorial fellowship at Salon. As a result, I was given the opportunity to generate a few Salon bylines. These are the highlights.

Ohio to put prisoners down like dogs, literally
The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced Tuesday that it will use pentobarbital, a common anesthetic used by ...
By Christopher R. Walker -- January 25, 2011

Democrats discuss repeal debate language
Democrats contemplate branding: "No Care" sounds way cornier than "Patients' Rights Repeal," but it's shorter
By Christopher R. Walker -- January 16, 2011

T-shirtgate: From meme to Malkin
Pundit class and grassroots alike, partisan ideologues on right find fault with Obama at Tucson memorial event
By Christopher Walker -- January 13, 2011

Study: Conservatives have larger "fear center"
University College London researchers say brains of the right-leaning have big amygdala, small anterior cingulate
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 29, 2010

Home for the holidays: Soldier reunions
Get your hankies ready: Our favorite videos of soldiers returning home to their families
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 25, 2010

Flash mobs spread holiday cheer
Twitter allows Christmas carolers to plan spontaneous performances and to surprise shoppers; or to overwhelm them
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 21, 2010

A brief history of Operation Payback
An aggressive cyber war has erupted between WikiLeaks supporters and opponents. Who's been hit so far, and how hard
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 9, 2010

Calling Captain Awesome
Unemployed Ore. cabinet maker legally changes his name and signature, with inspiration from the NBC series "Chuck"
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 8, 2010

What does NASA's new life-form discovery mean?
Scientists' announcement of a new form of microbe raises questions about extraterrestrial life. An expert explains
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 3, 2010

NASA teases world with mystery announcement
Tweeple have been speculating all day about what a panel of E.T. hunters will announce on Thursday
By Christopher R. Walker -- December 1, 2010

The biggest implication of my departure from Salon is more time to produce the long-form writing and analysis that Take America Forward was designed to deliver. It's good to be back.

Pragmatic Politics and the "Move to the Center"

It's time for adults to rule in Washington. The great majority of Americans who do not blindly support either political party demand it. Structural deficits. Enormous wealth imbalances. Failing schools and public institutions. Moderates in America are right to demand these problems be addressed.

But the great horse race debate engages the two poles of the discussion in a vitriolic hate-fest, blinded by ideology and righteousness. The media pokes, films and repeats -- with flavoring suited to increasingly segregated audiences hungry for the dirt on their sworn enemies in government.

Enough already.

I've argued in the past that third parties will not help bring us out of the mess. But that doesn't mean that the so-called "middle" in American politics does not hold enormous sway over the power of the two parties.

While partisan zealots have enormous power over the outcome of party primaries, the general election belongs to independents. Especially high turnout by party members can push a "wave" election, but the swing voter determines the outcomes of close purple races. And close purple races are where federal politics are decided.

Pragmatic Americans should withhold their votes from candidates who refuse to address the real problems we face with seriousness and flexibility. Moderates should demand of their candidates some simple admissions.

Democrats must admit:

• Some problems are best solved with market solutions
• Some government programs have outlived their usefulness
• Some government regulation is harmful to American prosperity
• Demographic politics are divisive and ignore our real problems as Americans.

Republicans must admit:

• Some problems are best solved with government solutions
• Some new government programs are necessary to solve new problems
• Some government regulation is helpful to American security, health and prosperity
• Oil is finite. Gas prices will soon exceed $7/gallon. We must act now to find alternatives.
• Our schools, energy and transportation network are outdated and in urgent need of repair.

Any politician unwilling to make these simple concessions is not prepared to lead us through these difficult times.

The GOP's Job-Killing Message Discipline

I joked earlier:

The Republican party's penchant for meaningless theatrics should be as predictable as their use of the words "job-killing" to mean "Democratic" and "common-sense" to mean "Republican."

I wrote that piece last night, so I had no idea that the epithet "job-killing" would be such a hot topic with all the wonks today. Steven Pearlson kicks it all off with a well-timed rant in the Washington Post. You get the feeling he started the piece just after the moment he broke, since he begins:

Republicans these days can't get through a sentence without tossing in their new favorite adjective, "job-killing."

There's "job-killing legislation," in particular the health-care reform law. And "job-killing regulations," especially anything coming out of the EPA and the IRS. Big deficits are always "job-killing," which might come as something of a surprise to all you Keynesians out there, along with the "job-killing spending binge" and even "job-killing stimulus projects."

President Obama, we are told repeatedly, runs a "job-killing administration" with a "job-killing agenda" carried out by, you guessed it, a "job-killing bureaucracy."

Indeed. Since I've been following Boehner on Twitter for over a year, I crossed that line long ago. Pearlson sums up why this messaging is so cloying:

I wonder how Republicans and their media posse would like it if Democrats started referring to "genocidal" deregulation or the "murderous" repeal of health-care reform. Or if Republican economic policies were likened to the infamous neutron bomb - they kill the workers but leave their jobs intact.

Unfair? No doubt. But no more so than portraying as "job-killing" every regulation, every tax and every dollar of government spending.

There is an unmistakable redbaiting quality to the "job-killing" rhetoric, a throwback to the McCarthy era. It reflects the sort of economic fundamentalism better suited to Afghan politics than American. Rather than contributing to the political dialogue, it is a substitute for serious discussion. And the fact that it continues unabated suggests that Republicans are not ready to compromise or to govern.

This is the central advantage of the Republican Party in electoral politics. Period. Nothing threatens the success of the Democratic Party and its middle-class agenda more than this poll-tested "message discipline" on the right. Greg Sargent argued this point today:

Yes, yes, I know, media FAIL. But let me ask you a question. We now know that Dems have settled on a core set of messages to push back on repeal, mostly centered on the idea that it will take away crucial safeguards and run up the deficit. And that's all very well and good.

But is there a single phrase you can point to that Dems have uttered along these lines in recent days that's anywhere near as memorable as "job killer" or "government takeover?"

I mean, we haven't heard anything pithy summarizing the Dems' message that repealing reform will put countless children at grave risk, and we haven't heard anything along the lines of "deficit busting" or "deficit destroying" or anything like that. Okay, those aren't too good. Anyone else have any better ideas?

Dems simply have to get better at this game.

This is the most important lesson for Democrats to internalize. Most Americans don't actually know about the contents of legislation that gets passed. They vote for the person with the best message. Parties no doubt influence this perception, since they allow voters to fill in gaps with stated principles or party stereotypes -- so the message of both the party and the candidate must be consistent, memorable and compelling. Democrats have succeeded on none of those three points since at least the Clinton Administration.

I started this blog specifically to discuss this aspect of election strategy, so I will expand more on it in the weeks to come. For now, I just want to tweak Sargent's call to arms slightly. I agree that Democrats need to embrace certain aspects of the Luntz strategy of linguistic marketing -- if only so that their message can be identified and repeated reliably. But most Democrats see the Luntz approach as dishonest, so they don't have the stomach to push the program to its limit. They will always be outgunned by Republicans if the race is to be decided by a game of ethical chicken.

Steve Benen models pushback with the right levels of indignance and aggressiveness:

The GOP arguments aren't just wrong, they're backwards.

And yet, they'll continue to use inane phrases because, well, it's easier than thinking. Pearlstein concluded today, "[T]he next time you hear some politician or radio blowhard or corporate hack tossing around the 'job-killing' accusation, you can be pretty sure he's not somebody to be taken seriously. It's a sign that he disrespects your intelligence, disrespects the truth and disrespects the democratic process. By poisoning the political well and making it difficult for our political system to respond effectively to economic challenges, Republicans may turn out to be the biggest job killers of all."

What Democrats really need to do is to find the actual line on the Luntz-continuum that they refuse to cross, and then relentlessly expose everything that crosses that line for what it is: unethical.

A Party of Symbolic Action

After two years of the Tea Party issuing unrealistic demands and the Republican Party responding with unrealistic promises, an obvious question is how the latter can possibly keep the former happy. No Congress can provide both deficit reduction and tax cuts; both smaller government and a sounder financial system; both strict adherence to the originalist enumerative Constitution and modern governance. So, if the GOP wants to deliver, it will need to make moves that suggest not only that these things are all possible, but that they are underway. Suffice it to say, this is no small feat.

Certainly, there will be some broken promises and some backpedaling. Only two days in, Majority Leader Eric Cantor has walked back promises of cutting $100 billion as "number parsing" and Speaker John Boehner has defended the fast-tracking of Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal by saying that he didn't promise "every single bill" would have a transparent, committee-driven amendable process. More of this can be expected as the session wears on, but the party will eventually need to deliver red meat to its base. For that, they will engage heavily in symbolic action.

The modern Republican Party is prone to symbolism, so the GOP caucus in the 112th Congress has cooked up a long docket of actions rich in symbols, but light on results. Of course, the religious role the Constitution plays in party mythology makes it no surprise that the theatrics start there.

• For the first time ever, the Constitution was read on the floor as Congress' first act. The #tcot Twitterverse was no doubt moved to tears, but no one expects this move to effect the "constitutionality" of legislation one way or the other. Along the same lines, the House will require a citation of the Constitutional authority for all legislation. While this is another purely symbolic (and redundant) move, it is interesting to note that ACA repeal does not bear such a citation.
• Despite a widespread bi-partisan acknowledgment that an increase on the debt limit is unavoidable, Republicans plan to make the increase contingent upon spending cuts. While most Republicans are merely engaged in a game of chicken here -- attempting to pack any bill with their own desired cuts -- the stance itself betrays a symbolic bias in some. If only some enlightened Congress would just legislate an upper bound, then surely someone else will make the difficult choices about what to actually cut. It's more of the same "starve the beast" philosophy.

More than just theatrics, Republicans are intent on fighting some hopeless legislative battles thick with symbolism:

• Aside from ensuring the renewal of the Bush tax cuts, the biggest GOP victory in the lame duck was blocking the passage of the budget, due to earmarks. The size of these expenditures is a tiny  fraction of the federal budget. Worse, ending earmarking doesn't even cut the money from the budget, it just changes who is responsible for allocating it. Symbolic of corruption and lavish spending, earmarks provided a convenient target for a trapped party on an anti-climactic victory lap. Ironically, the symbol ensnared them further -- making the promise of $100 billion in cuts virtually impossible. 
• Most notably, the 112th Congress intends to pass a repeal of ACA that has no chance of becoming law. This was a major promise during the election and Boehner intends to deliver this purely symbolic victory. One need merely look at the name of the bill to see what Republicans are really up to: "The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act."
• Thursday, legislation was introduced to eliminate "czars" in the White House. While it's doubtful that this bill will ever become law, it clearly lacks any substantive policy impact. Although "czars" have become a potent symbol of Obama statism in conservative mythology, this legislation would do little more than hamper the efficiency of the White House and create an additional avenue for GOP obstruction in the Senate.
• To date, the only concrete spending proposal from Boehner is to cut staff budgets. While starting close to home is a potent symbol, this move will cut 0.001% from the federal deficit.

We should have seen it coming. After two years of waving the Gadsen Flag, donning tri-cornered hats and stitching together Luntz-tested platitudes into an election-gimmicky Pledge to America -- which contains more preamble and photography than policy proposals -- the Republican party's penchant for meaningless theatrics should be as predictable as their use of the words "job-killing" to mean "Democratic" and "common-sense" to mean "Republican."

Their determined focus on reducing taxes for the wealthy and eliminating government regulation gives the Republican party two enormous advantages: their ideology is so simple it can be expressed with just two words ("small government"); and most of the time their only responsibility is to obstruct, which is far easier than to legislate. But the party's dependence on symbolic action involves much more than the simplicity of their message and the advantages inherent playing the opposition.

On a much deeper level, all Republican victories are ideological. The modern party's only end is the advancement of the "principles" that underlie its philosophy -- an end that justifies itself in modern conservative orthodoxy and cannot be measured from the perspective of such real-world metrics as the impact on American workers. In the end, the measure of a conservative is their adherence to principle, not their ability to solve problems. Only a RINO -- or worse, a liberal -- would leave that work to anything other than the invisible hand that seems intent on moving greater and greater concentrations of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Today, a conservative's only concern should be to unshackle that hand so it can act more efficiently.

To misunderstand the problem as one of cynicism is to see only part of the picture. Sure, many Washington GOP insiders may be guilty of viewing the process as little more than a game; and their involvement as little more than a business. But often they are more guilty of pursuing their ideological ends -- that of "starving the beast" -- than they are of manipulating public opinion for cynical personal interest.  On Thursday, Red State telegraphed the symbolic path out of the deficit trap, arguing:

Yesterday’s swearing in of the new House and Senate, including the transition of power to Speaker Boehner and the new Republican majority in the House, inaugurates a new political season, in which “the deficit” promises to be front and center. President Obama is already sending up trial balloons about various proposals made by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission. But Republicans should resist efforts to frame the debate as being about “the deficit,” because that term itself focuses on the wrong measurement.

 Democrats like to talk about the federal government’s operating budget deficit as if it is a matter of balancing income against spending. It’s not.

 ... the problem isn’t that the government is spending more than the government takes in, but that the government is spending too much of what we create.

"Corrupt" may be too strong a word, but certainly this is not a party of "grown-ups." The 112th Congress really wants to deliver for its base. But it can't. No one can. So we can expect two years of investigations, gridlock and most of all ... theatrics.

The Constitution is not a Religious Text

From a sanitized 1950s paradise to Reagan the deficit hawk, modern conservative orthodoxy makes heavy use of a mythical American history. The fabrications are myriad: Hayley Barber recently tried to claim that citizen's councils drove integration efforts in the civil rights era south; cultural conservatives everywhere have claimed that the Civil War really had nothing to do with slavery; and the Texas Board of Education recently decided that Thomas Jefferson wasn't quite important enough to be considered a Founder. Other times, the history is true but ignores important changes that took place in intervening years: Republicans can't be racist because of Lincoln; Democrats must be racist because of Dixiecrats.

These fabrications are often easy to dismiss as typical political game play -- game play that GOP pols are often more willing to push to the ethical limits than their Democratic counterparts. After all, many Republicans have been vociferous in their belief that the insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional despite putting forward the idea as their own no more than two decades ago. And Orrin Hatch was recently caught reversing his stance on the DREAM Act, due to primary pressure on the right edges of his party.

Sometimes there is political advantage in distancing yourself from former beliefs. And one thing Republican strategists are not guilty of is incompetence -- at least in short-term politics.

But to dismiss conservative efforts to rewrite more distant history as the same sort of predictable political game play is to miss a more dangerous trend. Harvard historian Jill Lepore has argued that much of the animus behind the Tea Party movement -- specifically the central conservative governing doctrine of "originalism" -- is not so much traditionalism as fundamentalism. Just as religious fundamentalists make selective use of scripture to promote or even enforce their own narrow set of beliefs, historical fundamentalists scour the historical record for evidence supporting the rightness of their beliefs -- beliefs which invariably precede the search.

Anyone familiar with the conservative Twitterverse (#tcot, #tpp, #teaparty, #ampat, #ocra) know that the conservative grassroots have an elaborate mythology. The more insane have a version that views all activity by the Obama administration as an elaborate effort to destroy America by imposing socialism and promoting terrorism. Sadly, we will continue to listen to Glenn Beck weave this particular version of the story idefintely, since the left abhors censorship and FCC sanctions would only add credibility to the story among its believers. Alas, there is little point in addressing this type of insanity head on. Suffice it to say, this is clearly not what Obama is up to.

At the other end of the spectrum, though, is a more innocent-seeming originalism that pervades right-wing thinking. The crucial era for the movement is the founding era. The American Revolution lies at the heart of originalist beliefs. Indeed, the Tea Party take their very name from an act of defiance central to American folklore. As Lepore is careful to point out, this is not the first time that the mantle of the Revolution has been claimed by one group or another. At the bicentennial Boston Tea Party reenactment, a banner reading "Impeach Nixon" was unfurled over the side of the ship by left-wing activists claiming to be the rightful heirs of the Revolution.

No single strain of thought defines the Founders. Indeed, as the Texas curriculum debacle makes clear, there isn't even a definitive list of Founders. You can say, for example, that the United States is a "christian nation" but only if you ignore important figures such as Ben Franklin (who seems to have had no use for religion) and Thomas Jefferson (who cut all the miracles out of his bible, which included the Koran); and the well-documented debate on the role of religion in government that took place during the founding era; or the prohibition against religious tests set forth by the Constitution. You can say that the Federalist Papers make clear that the Constitution intends enumerated powers, but only if you ignore the equally prolific writings of the "anti-federalists" -- who refused to sign the constitution without a promise to add the Bill of Rights.

But there are other problems with originalism as well. As conservative David Frum -- who advised Bush but has recently been excommunicated from GOP circles for his rejection of conservative purity tests and "epistemic closure" -- reminded his readers on Thursday, the question "were the Founders Libertarians" is completely meaningless. To ask such a question ignores vast differences in historical context and over 200 years of scientific, cultural and political development. As Frum puts it: "This seems to me a question approximately as meaningful as asking whether the Founders would have preferred Macs or PCs: it exports back into the past an entirely alien mental category." As at least one tweeter suggested, it's like asking "was triceratops vegan?"

Despite the importance of the Revolution in the rhetoric of the movement, the most pervasive policy role in conservative originalism is played by the Constitution. The Republican-controlled 112th House will read the entire document as their first act; and all legislation in that House will be required to bear "constitutional justification." Ezra Klein takes this requirement to task in his Thursday column, arguing:

My friends on the right don't like to hear this, but the Constitution is not a clear document. Written more than 200 years ago, when America had 13 states and very different problems, it rarely speaks directly to the questions we ask it. [ ... ] as the seemingly endless series of 5-4 splits on the Supreme Court shows, even the country's most experienced and decorated constitutional authorities routinely disagree, and sharply, over what the text means when applied to today's problems.

Worse, as Steve Benen reminds us: "congressional Republicans haven't just endorsed bizarre legal concepts; they've advocated constitutional concepts that were discredited generations ago." The question of how the constitution enumerated and constrained federal power was hotly contested, even as Madison drafted the document and the states debated ratification.

So the right-wing response to Klein is as predictable as it is telling. The predictable part is that organizations such as Heritage conveniently made their own clause-by-clause readings of the Constitution available. The telling part is the simplicity that they attribute to the constitution -- and the certainty with which they make that attribution. This is representative of the historical fundamentalism Lepore warns of: the ideas precede the selection of evidence; and contrary evidence is ignored, vilified, marginalized or ridiculed. Indeed the very argument put forth by Klein -- that over a century of legislative action and judicial interpretation have rendered modern constitutional law inexpressible by the mere extraction of quotes from the document itself -- is entirely ignored in all the criticism.

The Constitution is not a religious text -- and it's certainly not a suicide pact. Nobody owns the Founders. And none of us is the rightful heir to the Revolution. Now is an important time for all of us to work together in solving America's difficult problems without all these games.

** Jill Lepore, (2010). __The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History__ http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9389.html