Category Archives: Republican Party

Like, It Could Get Worse?

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I always cringe when I hear someone say, “It can’t get any worse.” That’s absurd; it can always get worse. I don’t think “worse” has a floor, unless you count the End of the Universe. And maybe there’s a “worse” beyond that that’s unreachable by human understanding. But let’s leave that for another post.

It is beginning to sink into the rightie hive mind that they could lose the White House as well as more seats in Congress. And they are flapping about frantically trying to warn us of how dangerous it would be to elect Barack Obama.

Like, it could get worse?

For example, Jonah “the Doughboy” Goldberg warns us that electing Obama would be returning to the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

For some reason, I’m not quaking in my boots.

Goldberg also displays his firm grasp on American history by calling Woodrow Wilson our “first progressive president.” Please. Wilson was a damn sight less progressive than one of his predecessors, whose birthday happened to be yesterday, btw. The Wilson administration and World War I marked the end of the Progressive Era and ushered in the Republican Era of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, which took us to the Great Depression Era. But I’ve ranted about that before.

Today the righties are screaming that Obama would undermine the Constitution, never mind that the current GOP administration did more to undermine the Constitution than the previous 43 administrations put together.

And for all their hysteria about “redistribution” of wealth, I second biggerbox — “Pallet loads of cash to Iraq? No-bid contracts for Haliburton, and so many others? Jack Abramoff? Dick Cheney? Ted Stevens? Seven-house McCain?” While the GOP controlled the federal government the Republicans redistributed wealth wholesale — to their supporters and themselves.

We liberals have a crazy notion that people who create the wealth through their labor — i.e., workers — ought have something to say about what happens to the wealth. And that maybe a part of the wealth could be used to benefit the nation and its citizens, and not just the wealthy and powerful at the top of the pyramid. We think that’s democracy. The Right claims it is “socialism,” but it is not socialism by any objective definition of socialism.

Gary Kamiya writes (in an article well worth reading all the way through),

William Kristol warned that an “Obama-Biden administration — working with a Democratic Congress — would mean a more debilitating nanny state at home and a weaker nation facing our enemies abroad.” It takes a deep obliviousness to reality for an ardent Bush supporter to be sounding the alarm about the “nanny state” at the same time that his beloved president and party are solicitously spoon-feeding their wailing Wall Street brat out of a $700 billion jar of Gerber’s.

And then there’s the Religious Right. Sarah Posner tells us,

Religious-right honchos are girding the troops for political apocalypse. Townhall magazine, owned by Salem Communications, one of the largest Christian broadcasters in the country, ran a September feature, “Obamageddon: Could We Survive a Barack Presidency?” This month evangelical publishing giant Stephen Strang, whose magazine Charisma endorsed McCain, predicted that “life as we know it will end if Obama is elected.” Last week, the political arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family sent out a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America”, a 16-page (pdf) parade of horribles, and talk radio show host Janet Porter imagined that Christians will be imprisoned with Obama in the Oval Office.

I say they are already imprisoned in their own lunacy. If it gets worse for them, it will be entirely their own doing.

As I said in the first paragraph, it can always get worse. A great many things are outside the control of an American government and could get worse no matter who is elected. The global financial crisis might worsen, for example. The Middle East could become more unstable. Giant sea creatures could swallow Indonesia. The next big, frightening thing might be something no one is anticipating now.

But the issues the Right is trying to use to frighten us just aren’t that frightening — except to them. To everyone else, “worse” has already arrived.

Update: Via Balkinization — Steven Calabresi, Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School and Co-Founder of The Federalist Society, warns us what will happen if Obama is elected —

“[A]ny or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants…”

These people are bleeping insane.

Update: Here’s more. In her trademark lyrical prose, Sarah Palin said,

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record… Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you.”

“And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us”? This from a woman who wants the government to make our reproductive choices for us?

Why Righties Are Living on a Different Planet

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As if you didn’t already know that they’re living on a different planet — see Bill Whittle’s post at NRO — Barack Obama is quoted from a radio interview he gave in 2001 on the subject of funding schools equally after the Brown vs Board of Ed. decision. — keep that context in mind —

Obama speaks:

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

A caller asks, “The gentleman made the point that the Warren Court wasn’t terribly radical. My question is (with economic changes)… my question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work, economically, and is that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place?”

Obama replies:

You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.

So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it, legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.”

Whittle and the entire Right Blogosphere believe they’ve found the smoking-gun proof that Obama is a socialist. I’m serious. That’s how insane they are. Righties are absolutely bouncing off the walls convinced they’ve found “the bombshell” that will sink Obama’s campaign. Just read Whittle’s “interpretation” of Obama’s remarks. They are pathological.

As Prometheus 6 says, “What they are doing is standing strong against equal rights for all Americans with this attack. And The National Review is right in the mix. And all of them disgust me.”

The McCain campaign is putting out the lie that Obama called it a “tragedy” that the courts didn’t order “redistributive change.” As Greg Sargent notes,

As you can see, Obama simply didn’t say that the court’s faiulre to take up redistribution was a tragedy. Rather, he was arguing that it was a “tragedy” that the Civil Rights movement expected the courts to do too much in this regard, which led the movement away from other ways of accomplishing redistributive goals, such as organizing and legislative politicking.

And taking such matters out of courts and instead working through the legislative process is something righties have said they favor, or so I thought.

The problems is, of course, that if the entire noise-making apparatus of the Right jumps on this lie and pounds on it together, they could peel some votes away from Obama. So even though it’s absolute nonsense, it could do some damage. Stay tuned.

See also Oliver Willis and Martin Lewis.

The Al Sharpton – Sarah Palin Connection

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Sarah Palin is countering the $150,000 wardrobe story by saying the clothes are not her property.

“Those clothes, they are not my property. Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the RNC purchased, I’m not taking them with me. I am back to wearing my own clothes from my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska. You’d think — not that I would even have to address the issue because, as Elisabeth is suggesting, the double standard here it’s — gosh, we don’t even want to waste our time.”

Palin, however, forged on.

“I am glad, though, that she brought up accessories also. Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of accessories, didn’t think that we would be talking about it, but my earrings — I see a Native Americans for Palin poster,” she said. “These are beaded earrings from Todd’s mom who is a Yupik Eskimo up in Alaska, Native American, Native Alaskan.

“And my wedding ring, it’s in Todd’s pocket, ’cause it hurts sometimes when I shake hands and it gets squished,” she continued. “A $35 wedding ring from Hawaii that I bought myself and ’cause I always thought with my ring it’s not what it’s made of, it’s what it represents, and 20 years later, happy to wear it. And then finally the other accessory, you bet I’m a gold — I’m a blue star mom. I’m wearing this in honor of my son who is fighting over in Iraq right now defending all of you.”

This triggered a dim memory. It took me some time to find it, but this is what Palin reminds me of —

Asking How Sharpton Pays for Those Suits; Case Offers Glimpse of His Finances

By ALAN FEUER
Published: December 21, 2000 [New York Times]

He says he owns no suits, but has ”access” to a dozen or so. He says he owns no television set because the one he watches in his home was purchased by a company he runs. He says he has no checking accounts, no savings accounts, no credit cards, no debit cards, no mutual funds, no stocks, no bonds, no paintings, no antiques. The only thing he admits to owning is a $300 wristwatch and a 20-year-old wedding ring.

The finances of the Rev. Al Sharpton have a somewhat troubled history. He was indicted on charges of income tax fraud and stealing from charitable donors in 1989, but was eventually acquitted at a trial. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to file a tax return for 1986. His eponymous promotional company has no official documents on record with the state. As recently as two years ago, he drew no salary, but he still manages to send his daughters to an expensive and respected private school.

Mr. Sharpton has always been studiously circumspect when talking about his pocketbook in public, yet this month he suddenly announced that he could not afford to pay a judgment entered against him in the Tawana Brawley defamation case. As a result, he gave a lengthy deposition to lawyers for the man that he was found to have defamed, Steven A. Pagones, a former prosecutor whom Mr. Sharpton claimed had raped Ms. Brawley 13 years ago.

The deposition was never made public, though excerpts from it were given to The New York Times by a supporter of Mr. Pagones. It offers a privileged peek into the byzantine world of Mr. Sharpton’s personal finances as he considers running for mayor. In its combative back-and-forth and unintended humor, it sketches a portrait of the fiscal Al Sharpton, a man who claims to own virtually nothing but has almost everything he needs.

Yes, the old “this is not my designer suit even though I’m wearing it” dodge.

See also “Palin’s Nightmare.”

The Usual Slop From David Books

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David Brooks begins his latest column this way:

There are two major political parties in America, but there are at least three major political tendencies. The first is orthodox liberalism, a belief in using government to maximize equality. The second is free-market conservatism, the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom.

So, Brooks says, orthodox liberalism is “a belief in using government to maximize equality.” What does he mean by “equality”? If he means “equal treatment under the law,” then I agree. If he means equal opportunity, I agree. But I infer that’s not what he means, based on what he writes later. But first let’s deal with the next sentence.

“Free-market conservatism,” Brooks says, is “the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom.” But “maximizing freedom” is not at all what “free-market conservatism” does. In effect, “free-market conservatism” is about turning most of the population into a cheap labor resource, to be exploited for the benefit of the wealthy few. In truth, there is little “freedom” in the lives of most workers under a “free market” system, especially during times when jobs are scarce and quitting one means cutting yourself off from health care, not to mention losing your home.

But there is a third tendency, which floats between. It is for using limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This tendency began with Alexander Hamilton, who created a vibrant national economy so more people could rise and succeed. It matured with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Republicans, who created the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act to give people the tools to pursue their ambitions. It continued with Theodore Roosevelt, who busted the trusts to give more Americans a square deal.

The “Civil War” Republicans, more often called “Radical Republicans” in the history books, were the flaming liberals of their day. They not only drafted civil rights legislation that would have been considered radically liberal a century later, they also created what I believe was the first large-scale social welfare federal bureaucracy, the Freedmen’s Bureau. The purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau was to assist newly freed African Americans in their transition from being slaves to being productive members of an industrial, capitalist society. Unfortunately, the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau was effectively kneecapped by President Andrew Johnson, so that most of the freed people were little better off “free” than they had been before.

Brooks mentions Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal.” The Square Deal was, IMO, the real foundation of American “orthodox liberalism.” And TR was no “small government” guy. He believed strongly in using the federal government in a pro-active, progressive way to balance the interests of the “little guy” against the “big guy.” TR was not against the accumulation of wealth, but he was very much against even a whiff of plutocracy.

But Brooks cannot have anything called “liberalism” be the hero of the story. So he re-invents liberalism as something in favor of a sloppily defined “equality.” What does he mean by “equality”? And how is “equality” different from “freedom”? I think most of us liberals would argue that there is no freedom without equality (meaning, equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, equal access to justice). But I think Brooks is using “liberalism” to mean something closer to “socialism,” and liberal orthodoxy in America was never socialistic. There have been and are moderate socialists among us, yes, but they were never a majority. I’m not saying whether that’s good or bad, just that that’s how it is.

Anyway, after re-defining American liberal orthodoxy into something it never was, Brooks then takes genuine American liberal orthodoxy, waters it down a lot, and re-names its proponents “Americanized Burkeans, or to put it another way, progressive conservatives.” See, anything virtuous has to be called “conservative.” It’s a rule.

Brooks continues,

McCain shares the progressive conservative instinct. He has shown his sympathy with the striving immigrant and his disgust with the colluding corporatist. He has an untiring reform impulse and a devotion to national service and American exceptionalism.

Translation: McCain is a standard “free market conservative” whose soft bleatings about immigration are more about cheap labor than altruism. He has also paid lip service to ending corruption but hasn’t accomplished much in that direction. His economic policy ideas are still all about favoring the rich and powerful at the expense of workers. And “national service and American exceptionalism” is code for “he’ll start more stupid wars.”

“McCain would be an outstanding president,” Brooks says, without offering much in the way of evidence. It’s possible the McCain that lives in Brooks’s head would make a decent president, but the flesh-and-blood McCain who is actually campaigning would be a disaster.

See also No More Mr. Nice Blog, Prairie Weather, and M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Cafe.

Update: Some rightie actually refers to “Bull Moose conservatism.” Please. TR’s Bull Moose party was progressive, not conservative.

No Fear

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North Carolinian Terry Mancour looks on the bright side of having his car keyed:

The anecdotal reports from our fellow Obamanauts have documented a string of petty vandalism across New Carolina, with cars bearing Obama stickers getting viciously hacked like this every day. It was an erratic and not particularly successful attempt at voter intimidation. At least I didn’t feel intimidated. And I tried to keep things in perspective.

A century ago there would have been lynchings and homes afire, doors being busted down at 4am, the kind of cruel guerrilla warfare one tends to associate with banana republics and Asian despots. Even a few decades ago there would have been angry meetings, axe-handle wielding thugs, vicious dogs and fire hoses. If the sum total of politically oriented violence in North Carolina was reduced to a few angry words, a scuffle or two and poorly worded public attacks, well, I had to count that as progress.

It’s progress on several fronts, I think. Four years ago I heard from several southerners who said they did not dare put a Kerry bumper sticker on their cars or a Kerry sign on their lawns, and petty vandalism was the least of their fears. Of course, according to righties, the only vandalism that went on was against people with Bush signs. And maybe there was more retaliation against people with Bush signs, if only because in many parts of the country it took a ton of courage to display a Kerry sign at all.

Maybe southerners are less fearful of openly supporting the Democrat this year. See, that’s progress.

Mancour continues,

“You don’t seem very intimidated,” he said, surprised. He was from California and he had been watching the circus that is southern politics with a mixture of amusement and anxiety. Clearly he had been expecting dogs and fire hoses and race riots by this point.

“I’m not,” I shrugged. “Like I said: they’re scared. And I’m not. I’m not even particularly angry. If my cherished ideas of political philosophy were getting flushed down the toilet every day, I’d probably be scared to. I guess it’s because I’m a parent. When I see stuff like this, it reminds me of my kids drawing on the walls. You can get upset about it, but they’re just kids.”

It may be that the most devastating thing you can say to a rightie is we’re not afraid of you any more.

The Play’s the Thing

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Idle speculation for a Saturday — if John McCain were a Shakespearean character, which would he be?

I began to wonder after reading “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain” by Robert Draper. In this narrative, the once-honorable hero listens to the bad advice of others and comes to a tragic end. It reminds me a bit of Brutus in Julius Caesar, who was persuaded to go along with the assassination of Caesar for the good of Rome, only to see all his good intentions come to ruin. But that’s not exactly right.

Then there’s Hamlet, who was charged with avenging his father in the first act but spent the entire play working up the nerve to do the job. In his anxiety and indecision he drove his girlfriend to suicide and accidentally killed her father — not to mention what happened to poor old Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I see a touch of Hamlet in McCain, who is stumbling around from one contrived theme to another instead of engaging in a straightforward, honest campaign.

Then there’s Macbeth, who began the play as a military hero but who was easily corrupted by ambition. And crazy King Lear who trusted the wrong daughters. But maybe he was twisted old Richard III all along, and we just didn’t notice.

End of Days, the Prequel

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The Asian and European markets are tanking this morning. It’s shaping up to be a fun day on Wall Street.

Now, for the good news — Nate Silver says the McCain campaign is on life support. In “Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad,” Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen and John F. Harris of The Politico document the unraveling of the GOP political machine. There will be some juicy books written about the McCain campaign when this is over, I bet. The GOP also expects to be routed in the House.

Headline in today’s Los Angeles Times: “McCain’s homestretch strategy: paint Obama as a socialist.” Brilliant.

Even Scott MClellan endorses Obama.

According to Nate Silver’s “scenario analysis,” McCain absolutely must win Florida and Ohio to win the election. Both states are leaning blue at the moment, but, y’know, stuff happens, especially in Florida and Ohio. On the other hand, Obama can lose both Ohio and Florida and still win the election, Nate says.

It’s looking about as good as it could possibly look for Obama.

In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne makes the interesting observation that the GOP seems to be splitting into McCain and Palin camps. The stats say Palin is a drag on the ticket, Dionne says,

Yet the pro-Palin right is still impatient with McCain for not being tough enough — as if he has not run one of the most negative campaigns in recent history. This camp believes that if McCain only shouted the names “Bill Ayers” and “Jeremiah Wright” at the top of his lungs, the whole election would turn around.

Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party” (David Brooks), as someone who “doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin” (Kathleen Parker), as “a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics” (Peggy Noonan).

If you think about it, Dionne continues, you see the split forming between the party elite and its rank and file.

Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

They’re all scapegoating Bush, of course. But “movement conservatism” is coming unglued, and this is not Bush’s fault alone.

Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush’s apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the “real America” is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin’s speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.

Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

When the dust settles after election day, it will be interesting to see how working-class Americans voted.

End of Days, Sort Of

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Following up the last post — Marc Ambinder argues that Sarah Palin is setting herself up to be “THE voice of the angry Right in the Wilderness” in the years ahead, and the GOP standard-bearer in 2012.

I don’t know about the last part, but I think it’s possible she has it in her to keep some shreds of the Reagan coalition together in the immediate future. Unlike most GOP leaders today, she appeals to both the religious Right and the bomb-’em-all warhawk Right. She speaks the language of both groups.

As I said earlier this week, I don’t think Palin is stupid. I think she was grossly unprepared for national scrutiny, but she could learn.

However, I’m not sure Palin could redeem herself as anything but a whackjob to the saner parts of the electorate. It’s even possible she won’t win re-election in Alaska. That’s not a prediction, just a speculation. However, I think it’s likely that by 2012 the GOP will be in the process of re-aligning itself into a more moderate party, the whackjob Right will be shut out, and Sarah Palin will have moved on to a career as a right-wing “personality” on Faux News.

Ambinder also says,

There’s a suspicion in some McCain loyalist precincts that Gov. Sarah Palin is beginning to play the Republican base against John McCain — McCain won’t let her campaign in Michigan…McCain won’t let her bring up Jeremiah Wright… McCain doesn’t like her terrorist pal talks….

She’s in this for herself now.

Time and Tides

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These days events and issues and the nation seem to be sweeping toward some irresistible something that’s bigger than all of us. It feels like river currents rushing toward a waterfall. Have you felt that, too?

History shows us that no status quo lasts forever, no matter how solid and immutable it seems. Sometimes changes are slow and imperceptible, but occasionally some confluence of events breaks the old order apart and sets up a new one almost overnight, or at least within the space of a few years instead of a few decades. Most of the time invasion or insurrection are involved in these changes, but not always. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a prime example of events taking over and forcing change almost overnight without gunfire.

I’m not saying I expect armed revolution or a change in our form of government. I am saying that the political status quo that has prevailed in America for the last few decades is disintegrating rapidly. I suspect the next two or three years will be disorienting for most of us.

Assuming Barack Obama wins the election — it’s looking good, folks, but it ain’t inevitable — I don’t expect a replay of the Clinton years, in which a huge right-wing juggernaut worked relentlessly to destroy the Democratic administration.

Oh, they will try. I fully expect that within two weeks of an Obama inauguration, Tony Blankley will be all over cable television explaining ever so unctuously that the Obama administration has already failed. Hell, he might not even wait until Obama is inaugurated before declaring the Obama administration has already failed.

But Blankley is complaining that other “conservatives” are abandoning the cause, leaving him to fight on alone. His old comrades in arms, like George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks have left the field of battle, he thinks.

In an Obama administration, George Will will still be an insufferable prick, Peggy Noonan will still mistake her psychological projections for insight, and David Brooks will still be an idiot. Some things will not change. What will change, I believe, is that the Right’s ability to dominate the national conversation and overwrite real issues with its phantasmagorical agenda will be much diminished. This will happen not because they’ve changed, but because the political climate of America will have changed.

The powerful Rabid Right is becoming old and shabby and, like, so last decade.

Please let me be clear that I do not expect to wake up on January 21 living in political utopia. I’m a Buddhist, remember; all phenomena are dukkha. And as I said, there will be massive disorientation while the Powers That Be figure out the new rules — indeed, until they begin to notice there are new rules. And there will be disorientation across the political spectrum, not just on the Right. It will take some time yet before Democrats in Congress stop cringing in fear of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

We see disorientation already in the way the McCain campaign evokes a “real” America that looks like the America they thought was out there somewhere, but which they are finding strangely elusive. Rosa Brooks writes,

The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the “real” America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are … well … white. … But with each passing year, the “real” America of GOP mythmaking bears less and less resemblance to the America most Americans live in.

At the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that “the tax argument still works.” He lays out the arguments that he thinks McCain might still employ to pull off a win. Remarkably, these are the same arguments McCain has been employing and which are not working.

Meanwhile, Karl’s masterpiece, his personal Frankenstein monster, is a pariah even in his own party. People still listen to Karl … why, exactly?

The GOP is losing because they are marketing to a demographic that doesn’t exist — America circa 1980-2004. The political shift began with Katrina. It is being accelerated by the financial crisis. We are rushing toward something that is very different from where we have been. My hope is that Barack Obama is the leader he seems to be, and will steer us into a soft landing.

See also: Joe Klein, “Why Barack Obama Is Winning.”

The 44 Percent

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Now we know: 95% of Americans will get a “tax cut” under Barack Obama after all. Those on the receiving end of a check will include the estimated 44% of Americans who will owe no federal income taxes under his plan.

In most parts of America, getting money back on taxes you haven’t paid sounds a lot like welfare. Ah, say the Obama people, you forget: Even those who pay no income taxes pay payroll taxes for Social Security. Under the Obama plan, they say, these Americans would get an income tax credit up to $500 based on what they are paying into Social Security.

Just two little questions: If people are going to get a tax refund based on what they pay into Social Security, then we’re not really talking about income tax relief, are we? And if what we’re really talking about is payroll tax relief, doesn’t that mean billions of dollars in lost revenue for a Social Security trust fund that is already badly underfinanced?

I googled for some statement by the Obama campaign that FICA taxes will be reduced, and found nothing. Maybe your luck will be better, if you want to look. Possibly the genius who wrote the WSJ editorial has never looked at a standard paycheck and doesn’t realize that withheld income taxes and withheld FICA taxes are two separate line items and not the same thing. Can anyone else explain what this guy is talking about?

Further, it’s important to understand that in McCain World, payroll taxes are taxes paid by the employer and not the employee. In other words, the income taxes withheld from paychecks are not being “paid” by the employee. Hence, workers whose taxes are paid through payroll taxes do not actually pay taxes.

That’s where they’re coming up with “the estimated 44% of Americans who will owe no federal income taxes.” They “owe” no taxes because taxes are withheld from their paychecks, and they have no other income to declare.

[Update: The Anonymous Liberal says these are people who don’t earn enough to pay income taxes. Maybe, but are we talking apples and oranges? Is Obama talking about 95 percent of wage earners getting tax cuts, as he says, while McCain is talking about 44 percent of all Americans? I’ve never seen a paycheck so small that there wasn’t a teeny bit of income tax taken out of it.]

And in the minds of the conservative elite, such people do not deserve tax breaks. Giving them a tax reduction is welfare, since they didn’t pay taxes, anyway. And, in fact, a few days ago, some right-wing TV bobblehead actually said that most average-income bus drivers, teachers, and autoworkers “don’t pay any taxes.”

Of course, most working people don’t think that way. To most working people payroll tax deductions are taxes they pay. But to McCain, giving most working people a tax break amounts to “welfare,” because, you see, they don’t pay taxes. That makes a tax break for them a “transfer of wealth” and not a tax break.

A number of rightie bloggers have picked up this argument and are running with it, including Betsy Newmark, who says “Barack Obama is planning to give a tax break to [people who] don’t pay income taxes.” Betsy Newmark is a teacher. Very likely Betsy in the 44 percent.

And she doesn’t know. She assumes the “44 percent” are some other people, not her. As Atrios says,

I’m really never quite sure who this “don’t pay any taxes” stuff is aimed at. Though, thinking about it just this second, maybe I do. Basically everybody pays taxes. So you when you’re talking about giving free money to people who don’t pay any taxes, that must be somebody else because, you know, I pay taxes.

I suppose that works.

That’s exactly it. It must be some other bus divers, teachers and auto workers who don’t pay taxes. Or maybe the 44 percent are people who don’t work. But Obama specifically says his tax cuts are for working people. So that can’t be it.

Don’t any of these people, you know, think?