The Republic of T.

“America has spoken.”

It’s a phrase we’ve heard from the right after every election — special election, run-off or midterm — following the 2008 election in which voters sent Barack Obama to the White House and Democratic majorities to both houses of Congress. Though more Americans voted in that election than any that has followed, conservatives would have us believe that Americans did not speak in 2008, but really spoke in the most recent midterm elections. The reality is that Americans did speak in 2008. They’ve been speaking ever since then. The reason the midterm elections turned out as they did is because almost no one in Washington has been listening. (more…)

• After Condom Remarks, Vatican Confirms Shift

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It hasn’t even been a year since the Heritage Foundation placed Ireland among the top ten countries on its Economic Freedom Index. I wasn’t intending to write about Ireland at the time, but any time the Heritage Foundation holds up any country as an economic example attention must be paid. It’s an invaluable opportunity to learn what not to do, in terms of economic policy.

Even way back then, in April of this year, Ireland’s economic crisis was serious enough to make it a real head-scratcher that anyone would place it on top ten list, and hold it as an example of economic success, as the Heritage Foundation’s Index is intended to do. Ireland is indeed an example. It’s nearly a textbook example of the epic failure of conservative economics to grow an economy and austerity to spark a recovery.

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• Destroying the Village
• Inequality becomes injustice when it is passed on, generation to generation
• Warren Buffet: Don’t Extend Bush Tax Cuts to the Wealthy
• The losing fight for sanity in the GOP
• Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson: Warren Buffett vs. the Broken-Clock Brigade
• Public vs. Private
• Unemployment Extension Standoff 'A Crummy Deal For The American Public'
• Boehner struggles to find 'adults' within his party
• Sins of Commissions: What $1 Billion Can’t Buy
• The Mean Old Man Party looks forward to a bloodbath & rubs its hands in glee
• What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us.

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Holy crap. We’re in the home stretch. I’m in a bit of a state of disbelief that week three of National Novel Writing Month is behind me. It dawns on me that I’ve gotta finish this thing. Soon. Though the guidelines seem to allow for not finishing the story in 30 days, I’m not inclined to go that route. On November 30th, I want to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Period.

How I get there is … well … another matter.

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Ya gotta love Alan Grayson. It’s a shame he’s not going to be in Congress anymore. That’s one less Democrat with the guts to say what desperately needs to be said, though it may be impolitic. Here’s hoping he won’t go quietly.

His latest, “What the Rich Can Do With Their Tax Cuts,” gives me some assurance he won’t.

So, conservative don’t want to give someone like Chrissandra Walker, one of the 2 million unemployed whose unemployment benefit extension the GOP killed in the House, $11,000 a year to keep her head (barely) above water. But they want to give every millionaire a tax cut of $83,000 a year?

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A couple of years ago I started writing about something I called "Drop Dead Conservatism," and attempted to define it:

High on delusion, denial, and derision, it’s the face of a conservatism unequipped to recognize — let alone meet — the challenges America and the world now face, and blind to the possibility drowning itself in irrelevance. It’s the face of a conservatism that, facing the failure of its ideology, has more anger than answers.

That was just after the 2008 election, when I thought perhaps We were rid of that kind of conservatism.

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Faced with a foreclosure fiasco of astounding proportions — as duly chronicled by fellow bloggers Zach Carter and Richard Eskow —  in which banks literally kick down doors to foreclose on houses even though they can’t prove they own the mortgages, president Obama fretted that a foreclosure moratorium would help people who “don’t deserve it.” He needn’t have worried. Since the housing bubble popped and sent the economy into free-fall, the government has been helping people don’t deserve it.

Of course, I mean the banks and financial institutions bailed out by the very taxpayers they are throwing out of the homes, without being able to prove they have the right to do so. Reading the stories of what has gone on, makes it hard to imagine how this has gone on without so much as a ripple of outraged. It’s simple, the banks — and I believe they know this, and count on it — have their biggest allies in the American people themselves.

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• Op-Ed Columnist: This Raging Fire
• Robert Creamer: When Voters Find Out They've Been Conned
• The Cowardice of America at War
• The Delusional People Who Want to Frack This Country Up
• The post-truth era
• Progressives Want GOP To 'Put Up Or Shut Up' On Bush Tax Cuts
• The first step in protecting Social Security
• The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum
• Driver kills boy on bike, sues boy’s parents
• Why Simpson/Bowles Should Be DOA.
• Dems urge vote on extending middle-income tax cuts
• What Life In the Anti-Tax Dystopia Looks Like
• A marriage hack?
• Robert Kuttner: What Planet Are Deficit Hawks Living on?
• When You’re Forced to Cheer for the Man Who Raped You

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It’s already week three of National Novel Writing Month. That means I’ve survived week two. So far, so good. Even with a weekend of kids birthday parties and other events, I managed to keep up with my daily word count and move the story along. In the process of writing, though, I’m realizing that I may have done what I typically do as a writer: try to do too much.

In the spirit of “silencing the inner editor,” I’m just making mental note of it, and not trying to fix anything right now.

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It’s already week three of National Novel Writing Month. That means I’ve survived week two. So far, so good. Even with a weekend of kids birthday parties and other events, I managed to keep up with my daily word count and move the story along. In the process of writing, though, I’m realizing that I may have done what I typically do as a writer: try to do too much.

In the spirit of “silencing the inner editor,” I’m just making mental note of it, and not trying to fix anything right now.

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Today’s Veterans’ Day. (Thanks, Vets!) That means I have the day off, as it’s a federal holiday. But, that also means that the hubby’s at work and the kids are at school and daycare. Which means I really have a day off. I’ll be taking a day off from blogging. That’s partly because I want to go to the Smithsonian Museums and check out some exhibits I haven’t had a didn’t have a chance to see the last couple of times I went with Parker. Maybe I’ll visit the American History Museum, which I haven’t been to in ages.

It’s also partly because I have some other writing I mean to do. (more…)

A word of advice to the folks at the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform: it may be time to "slow your roll" as, we used to say where I come from. Based on their own admissions, and Alan Simpson’s bedraggled look at the commission’s surprise press conference to announce their "chairman’s mark," it’s clear the commission is in too big of a rush to do justice to what they admit is a huge job.

They could start by really making Social Security separate from deficit reduction — as the commission’s co-chairs stressed that it is in their draft recommendations.

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If, in the future, Republicans ever again ask “Where are the jobs?” it will be because they’ve forgotten where they buried the ones they killed. For now, though, it’s clear they remember all too well. Like a serial killer returning to a favorite dump site to reminisce or further ravage a corpse, Republicans are returning to the scene of the crime for a bit of fun with the still-fresh remains of 240,000 jobs the GOP killed off last month.

They’re coming back for more.

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I wrote earlier about toying with the idea of doing National Novel Writing Month again, and later about my decision to take the plunge again. Well, week one is behind me now. And despite some trepidation about whether I could really do it this time, being a parent of two as opposed to one last time around, its going quite well.

As you can tell from the widget in this post, I’m now 10,153 words into the mystery novel I decided to work on this time around. I rounded that corner last night, and managed to meet yesterday’s goal of 10,002 words. Of course, every day there’s a new goal. I’ve got to write at least 1,667 words a day to meet the goal of producing a manuscript of at least 50,000 words by the end  of the month. (more…)

President Obama is right. The Democrats got a “shellacking” in the midterm election. But not from the people who voted. And in a sense, the pundits and prognosticators are maybe half right. The president and his party were sent a message in this election. But not from the people who voted. Want to know who administered this midterm “shellacking” and delivered the message of the midterm elections of 2010? Want to know what how to avoid another “shellacking” in 2012?

Do the math.

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It Won’t Work

Not to pick on Kathleen Parker, but the “narrative” she suggested the Democrats take from midterm elections — “You can’t sell people what they don’t want” — is more likely to end up being the narrative the Republicans take from 2012 — if the president and the Democrats do what they need to do. Karl Rove was half-right when he said voters didn’t toss out the Democrats because are “enraptured with the GOP.” People are angry sure, but the numbers tell a different story.

People are angry not at what the Democrats did after 2008, but what they didn’t do. They didn’t “buy” what the GOP was selling. Like a shopper who ordered one thing and got another, American voters ordered transformative change in 2008 but got the same old transactional politics instead. The midterms of 2010 is their letter or complaint.

Here at Campaign for America’s Future, we just released a voter survey that shows voter fears about the economy and anger at government failure to help middle- working-class families even as Wall Street got bailed out.

Findings include:

• Compared to a candidate who attacked Democrats for the economic stimulus and health care reform, 57 percent of voters said they were much or somewhat more likely to support a candidate with a “made-in-America” campaign message that points out that Republicans have “pledged to support free trade deals and protect tax breaks for companies that send American jobs to India and China.”
• Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that “America is falling behind” in the global economy and that “we need a clear strategy to make things in America, make our economy competitive, and revive America’s middle class.”
• Sixty-nine percent said that “politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare” as they attempt to address the national deficit.
• A majority opposed the Republican plan to cut $100 billion from domestic spending programs while extending the Bush tax cuts to those earning more than $250,000, while 51 percent said they agreed that those top-end tax cuts should expire and with proposals offered by Democrats to reduce the deficit over time.
• Significant majorities in the poll supported new investments in infrastructure through a national infrastructure bank, a five-year strategy for reviving manufacturing in America

Why stop at one poll?

The GOP is not popular with Americans, nor is its agenda. Poll after poll leading up to the election bear this out. Their approval/favorability ratings were low going into the election, lower than the Democrats in many cases.

This is in the context of low approval ratings for Congress overall. But, as I said in the previous post, The Democrats’ problem is failing to deliver on the agenda Americans voted for in 2008. The Republicans problem is an agenda that remains toxic to most Americans.

Americans offer tepid support for much of the Republican Party’s domestic agenda, including repealing the new healthcare law and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center.

The results suggest Republicans could struggle to pass legislation advancing many of the smaller-government themes that have dominated their campaigns in the midterm elections, even if the party wins control of one or both houses of Congress in November.

In particular, the party appears to risk a backlash from senior citizens, a critical voting bloc that harbors deep skepticism about tinkering with entitlement programs.

The survey is the most comprehensive polling look so far at the major elements of the agenda that key Republicans have been discussing in the weeks leading up to the election.

Not all the news was good for Democrats…

…Still, the poll offered little to suggest that the surge in voter support for Republican candidates, whom analysts project to win major gains this fall, carries over to support for policies championed this fall by Republican leaders in Washington and on the campaign trail.

Kos posted a handy breakdown when the poll came out.

• 29% of Americans support extending all of the Bush tax cuts.
• 32% support repealing the newly passed health care law.
• 33% support replacing Medicare with vouchers.
• 58% support creating Social Security private accounts.
• 46% support amending the Constitution to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants (49 are opposed).
• Fewer than half of Republican respondents favored extending all the Bush tax cuts or replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers.
• Poll respondents continue to disapprove of President Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, 45% to 38%.
• Three-quarters said they could not name the leader of the Republican Party, or that the party does not have a leader.

What do Americans want? Here’s a hint, it’s not what the Republicans campaigned on.

• A September AP poll said that Americans who wish health care reform went further outnumber opponents of health care reform by 2-to-1.
• An October poll by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard university found that six in ten Americans say they want their representatives to fight for more government spending in their districts, to spur job growth.
• That’s compared to 39% who said they want cuts even if it means fewer local jobs. (That’s a flip from 1994, by the way, when 53% wanted their Reps. to fight for cuts, while 42% were on the other side.)
• In the same poll, 50% supported more government spending to boost the economy, while 46% prioritized deficit reduction.
• Not only did voters defeat major anti-tax measures in several states, but an AP poll less than 50 days before the election showed that 54% of Americans favored raising taxes on the highest earners, compare to 44% opposed.
• A Stanford University poll showed that 86% of Americans want government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit.
• And 76% favored government regulating greenhouse gasses in particular.
• Another poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks and designed by Yale researches showed that 77% believe that global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress.
• And 94% believe that developing sources of clean energy should be a priority for the president and Congress.
• Meanwhile, 77% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

And that’s an overview, because a detailed analysis is more than I have space to do here.

Not of the above adds up to what the GOP was “selling” in this election. But it’s what more Americans “bought” in 2008 than voted in the midterm elections and any number of special elections since.

Parker follows the example of other conservatives who, after every election election since November 2008 have rushed to declare that “the people have spoken.” When voters in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey elected Republicans, they somehow “spoke” louder than those Americans who spoke in 2008. When 45 million fewer vote in 2010 than voted in 2008, “the people have spoken.”

The people spoke in 2008, and have been speaking since then. It’s just that neither party has listened.

The people spoke in 2008, upwards of 130 million of them, compared to 82.5 million in 2010. The numbers above, all from polls taken in the last half of this year, reflect what they voted for then and have wanted since.

From Democrats they got health care reform with no public option; and no fight to defend it; financial reform that left “Too Big To Fail” standing; a stimulus that was too small for the jobs crisis the country faces; a foreclosure prevention program that, in order to avoid helping the “wrong people,” helped almost no one; and no climate/energy legislation, given up without much of a fight.

From the GOP they got an agenda written by and for corporate interests.

The GOP is in an unenviable position. It is constitutionally incapable of delivering what Americans truly want. Meanwhile, the party must content with an extreme right that wants what Republicans cannot deliver without angering a great many Americans.

It won’t work.

The Democrats have a chance to come back if they want it. But they need a plan to finish what the started, and deliver what Americans said they wanted in 2008 and are still waiting for.

Then they have to convince us that they mean it.

• Time to call GOP the TP Party

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It Hasn’t Worked

Karl Rove actually gets it. Sort of. He at least understands that voters didn’t toss out the Democrats because they are “enraptured with the GOP,” when he tells Republicans that it’s “time to deliver.” It just too bad for the GOP — and, now, the rest of the country — that they won’t anything Americans haven’t already sent back to the kitchen.

If what we heard and saw from them leading up to the election is any indication, the GOP doesn’t have any new ideas. Their platform recycles the same old conservative policy that failed before, and got us into a mess we’ll be trying to get out of for a while.

Late into the Bush administration, it became something of a joke that the president’s answer to everything was “Tax cut!” It was like he had a bad case of “Tax Cut Tourette’s Syndrome.” If so, today’s GOP has it just as bad. Tax cuts are their answer to everything, too. And we know how well that worked last time.

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First, let’s just face it. For the next couple of years, at least, this is the end of any progress on jobs or the economy. Whatever legitimate gripes progressives had with the outgoing Democratic Congress, the got a lot done. More, in fact, than most others. Ezra Klein called it a “Do-Something Congress.”

That this has been the most “do-something” Congress we’ve seen in 40 years hasn’t made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That’s true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington toz do.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post dubbed the 110th Congress a “Do-Something Congress”, when the Democrats took over in 2007, in hopes it would get more done than the outgoing Congress.

WHEN DEMOCRATS take over the House next year, the regular workweek will stretch to a backbreaking five days — up from the now-customary Tuesday-through-Thursday arrangement. Members of the House and Senate — no doubt reeling from the two weeks they’ve worked since the election — will have a mere four weeks off after they leave town Friday. Hard to believe, but the new leadership actually expects them to come to work on Jan. 4 rather than enjoy the usual elongated holiday break as they wait around for the president to deliver his State of the Union address in late January. In the Senate, the weeklong March break is being eliminated and the two-week April vacation cut in half.

…It would be quite a change. The 109th Congress will have been in session for a grand total of 103 days this year, which, as Lyndsey Layton pointed out in yesterday’s Post, is seven days fewer than the “Do-Nothing Congress” of 1948. An ordinary full-time worker with a generous four weeks of vacation would have clocked 240 days of work during that same period.

With the GOP taking over the House, the likelihood is that we’re faced with another “Do-Nothing” Congress, at least in term of creating jobs, fixing the economy, etc. As Bill pointed out before election day, the country is about to be saddled with a Congress that not only doesn’t work, but one determined not to let the President work either.

That’s not just because of gridlock, though there will be gridlock. It’s because conservative philosophy basically holds that a “Do-Nothing Congress” is exactly as it should be. And that’s exactly the GOP’s victory may be a Pyrrhic victory. Hemmed in by by a base that wants one thing, major (though anonymous) donors that want another, and an American voters angry that not enough been done to ease their economic pain — and who want more done — Republicans won’t be able to make it work without abandoning their base, their donors, the basic tenets of conservatism, or Americans demanding solutions the GOP just doesn’t have.

It won’t work. That’s what we face for the next two years. The best chance Democrats have for 2012 is to give voters a clear choice that does work, by offering solutions founded in progressive values, making the case for them, and fighting for them.

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