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• Our schools, energy and transportation network are outdated and in urgent need of repair.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