OurFuture.org Blogs: Rick Perlstein

What's Really Driving EFCA Opposition: The Smoking Gun

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:21:54 -0500

The forces of workplace authoritarianism have gotten far too far with their propaganda that the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to make it easier for workers who want to join a union to do so, only oppose this common-sense reform because it is un-American: that it eliminates the "secret ballot" in union elections.

Well, a recent scoop from Tom Frank reveals that, surprise, surprise, that's nothing like the real reason they oppose it at all. Frank got hold of remarks made by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott that, surprise, surprise, the reason corporate America needs to defeat EFCA is, "We like driving the car and we're not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us."

Get ready for a nasty fight. You might say the workplace authoritarians have just declared a class war—on you and me.

Romney to City: Drop Dead

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:11:04 -0500

My fine colleague Terrence Heath has been riffing out a new concept to explain the latest turn of our right-wing friends: "drop dead conservatism." As in the infamous 1975 New York Post headline, "Ford To City: Drop Dead," reporting on the 38th president's avowal that he would rather see New York City go bankrupt than approve a bailout of its finances. The latest such voice is Mitt Romney, opining from atop the New York Times op-ed page in a nasty workout against the management of the Big Three automakers to Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.

What's going on here? Partly, obviously, a bid to appeal to the conservative activist base in the early innings of the 2012 Republican nomination fight. Partly, perhaps, what he claims it to be: a good-faith public policy argument about how best to save the auto industry in a way that moves the American economy forward. (It's easy to forget that before he began palling around with ideological terrorist Ann Coulter he yoked his candidacy to a semi-progressive vision of Republican industrial policy, opening his campaign with a hybrid car as a backdrop, pronouncing, "We have lost our faith in government--not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government."

But part of it may simply be Oedipal. (Did you know the Washington Times recently pronounced me one of the "Top Five Armchair Shrinks to the Famous," alongside the Norman Mailer who theorized that what made Hitler evil was over-fastidious toilet training?)

This argument isn't complicated. Mitt badly besmirched the progressive Republican legacy of his father the late Michigan govern George Romney, a stalwart and brave civil rights supporter who gave his all to fighting the Republican Party's lurch to the far right. Maybe Mitt's Big Three-bashing is a belated debt offered to dad, who, as I've written about before has been saying "drop dead" to the big three since the 1950s:

o industry was only getting what it deserved, George Romney, then chairman of American Motors Corp., would thunder "wherever he could find a soapbox," as Time magazine put it in a 1959 cover profile. He would pull a toy dinosaur from his briefcase: "This fellow here is triceratops. He had the biggest radiator ornament in prehistoric history. It kept getting bigger and bigger until finally he could no longer hold up his head. He had a wheelbase of nearly 30 feet."

Dramatic pause.

"Who wants to have a gas-guzzling dinosaur in his garage?"

Mitt's bid to honor George should perhaps be welcomed as a promising first step. Next he should acknowledge along with his dad that the right-wing cult of "individualism" is actually, as Romney put it in a speech to the Republican platform committee in 1964, "nothing but a cover for greed".

Perlstein, Sorensen, and Blumenthal on the Way Forward

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:15:49 -0500

I haven't done much blogging here this week and last, partly because I'm still cogitating upon what the hell really happened to conservatism on November 4, and partly because I've been doing much of that cogitating aloud, on the road, in speeches and panel discussions that obliging souls booked me for long ago on the presumption that I would have something wise and useful to say about "Nixonland" and this year's election. I'm not sure I do; the wake of the campaign finds me very much in "scholarly reflection" mode, reluctant to make grand pundit-like pronouncements on what may or may not happen in the future (as I explain here).

But a gig's a gig, and, facing an expectant crowd at a recent panel at NYU's Center for Law and Security, I hope I managed something to warble something coherent nonetheless. Here's an edited (as in, they edited out the guy who show up at every panel to ask why the participants are covering up the malign, conspiratorial role played in all this by the Council and Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission) transcript; and, below that, a photograph from the event courtesy of the imcomparable Lindsay Beyerstein.

Many of the themes you'll recognize as outright larceny from recent work by my colleagues seen here at OurFuture.org:

Open Forum: November 11, 2008

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: A LOOK FORWARD

Sidney Blumenthal – Fellow, Center on Law and Security; former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton; author most recently of The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party

Rick Perlstein – Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future; author most recently of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Ted Sorensen – former special counsel and advisor to President John F. Kennedy; of counsel, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; author most recently of Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Prof. Stephen Holmes, Moderator – Faculty Co-Director, Center on Law and Security; Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

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Sidney Blumenthal: Presidential transitions can be momentous, or not. The entire South seceded from the union during Lincoln’s transition. The Great Depression deepened between FDR’s election and his taking office. The transition period is when we see the character and the complexion of an administration through its appointments, which we have not yet seen for President Obama.
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We also have a new Congress. The Democrats have gained much but the history of simultaneous Democratic presidents and Congresses has been tragic. Franklin Roosevelt lost control of the legislative branch in 1938, when the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party allied with the Republicans. Progressive social policy was blocked from then until Lyndon Johnson, including President Kennedy’s great initiatives in education and other areas. Harry Truman lost Congress to the Republicans in 1946. Jimmy Carter was torn apart by the fractiousness and fragmentation of a Democratic Congress. The same is true of President Clinton’s first two years in office. The Democrats, having been in power in Congress for 40 years, acted as though they would be there forever and there would no consequences to their actions. They destroyed their credibility, leading to the election of a radical Republican Congress in 1994.

This new Congress is a little different. It does not have much of a conservative wing to it for the first time. Nonetheless, President Obama is going to have to devote a good deal of attention to holding Congress together. It has its own needs and members of Congress have their own interests even if they share the same partisan identification as the president.

Regardless of the problems that may emerge, we are now at the beginning, and it is refreshing. An old order has died; a new one is struggling to be born. William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” After this election, I think we can say that at least some of the past is dead. It is a pleasure to be at the beginning again.

Rick Perlstein: My book Nixonland covers the years from 1965 to 1972. It does not really address Watergate. The book that I am working on now covers the period from 1973 to 1980. The idea of reckoning is going to be one of its primary themes. How does a nation reckon with trauma? We had the traumas of losing in Vietnam, of stagflation, and of Watergate. I will be interviewing all kinds of people, from all walks of life, and asking them what it was like to watch the veneer of American decency stripped away on television day after day during the Watergate hearings.

As part of my research, I recently read Kathryn Olmstead’s book Challenging the Secret Government. It is about an event that occurred immediately after Watergate. In December 1974, the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh discovered that the CIA was spying on American antiwar groups. He broke the story in The New York Times. It was a sensation. The Ford administration, which had promised that our long national nightmare would be over, was suddenly thrown into damage-control mode. It instituted a commission ran by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to try to simultaneously air these scandals and put a lid on them. That didn’t work, because Congress impaneled a House committee led by Otis Pike and a Senatorial Committee led by Frank Church to investigate the secret government’s conduct.
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How does this relate to Barack Obama and the adventure we may face in the next four years? Here is how the journalists who exposed the information were thanked: A train of enraged editorialists, including in The New York Times and The Washington Post, reacted by attacking the messenger. Seymour Hersh lost the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Daniel Schorr lost his job at CBS and almost went to jail. Our long national nightmare, which had turned out to involve not only Nixon but the whole architecture of the secret government, was supposed to be over, and here the journalists were rubbing our faces in it.

Americans, especially the elite and the mandarins who tend to control the boundaries of polite opinion, have a deep discomfort with conflict and change. We have now had two consecutive elections that the Democrats have won overwhelmingly. The American people voted for the president-elect despite the Republicans screaming that he was running on a platform of socialism. Many of us would agree that Obama has a strong mandate for change. The media and the independents have responded by saying that he shouldn’t be fooled, that this is really a center-right country and his is a center-right mandate.

The idea that we need a reckoning and a break with the past is something we can expect to find resisted at every turn. Much will depend on the character and courage of the people who accede to the White House and congressional and executive offices. They should not to be intimidated into thinking that it was a mandate to do not much at all.
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Prof. Stephen Holmes: Is Barack Obama a post-partisan candidate or is he a progressive? Is he someone who is simply going to fix the broken government or does he have an agenda?

Rick Perlstein: In a recent interview, I was asked to respond to the fact that few people describe themselves as “liberal.” My response was that I don’t care if people call themselves liberals, conservatives, or ham sandwiches. The fact is that Americans are backing progressive policy positions. The Pew polls that have been tracking our positions on spending priorities since the 1980s indicate that this has been true for some time.

In his 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan said that “there is no such thing as left or right,” and “that there is only an up or down.” He rarely called himself conservative or appealed to conservatives as such, but he was obviously conservative, and his policy preferences were right-wing. He made conservative principles sound like common sense. I would argue that Barack Obama has taken the same approach since at least 2004, when he first came to my attention. He spoke all the time about the things that government could do for people, the importance of government in people’s lives, the idea of a commonwealth, the idea that we can’t just do it on our own, and the idea that conservatism is a failed philosophy (although he never used those words). There is something exquisitely Reagan-like about his ability to speak in a popular language, but anchored in basic social-democratic principles. His promise is in his ability to recover the notion of a commonwealth and a government for the people, by the people, and of the people in a language that transcends an argot that people are no longer comfortable with.

Ted Sorensen: I am not a ham sandwich. I am a liberal and I think that Barack Obama is a liberal. When he talks about our domestic goals being fulfilled – including health care, education, equal opportunity for all races, and the separation of church and state – they are all liberal goals that he is referring to. The fact is that we have not made much progress on all of the things that have been waiting to be done, including repairing the safety net beneath those at the bottom of the ladder. That safety net did not get much help from the Clinton administration, despite President Clinton’s marvelous communication skills and the fact that he had eight years in office, for the first two of which he had a Democratic Congress.

I have very high hopes for Obama as president, especially in terms of foreign policy, an area in which both Democratic and Republican presidents in recent years have backed away from a truly multilateral emphasis on diplomacy rather than military solutions. The fact that Obama makes it sound like common sense is a pretty good strategy. John F. Kennedy used that strategy to get himself nominated and then to sell the American people on some pretty far-reaching moves.

Sidney Blumenthal: In defense of President Clinton’s record, we remember the 1990s. Barack Obama campaigned on them towards the end, and in his speeches mentioned the 22 million new jobs created, the rise in family income in real wages, and the 25% reduction in poverty.

I believe that Obama’s prospects in terms of partisanship are better than they were for Bill Clinton. Obama did not win over Republicans in the election, although he may have won over some. The Republicans were disillusioned and did not show up. We have also seen the Republican Party collapse in important parts of the country, especially the Northeast. After this election, for the first time since the founding of the Republican Party, there is not a single Republican member of the House of Representatives from the Northeast. That is a historic move.

The House Republican Conference will be the party’s center of gravity in the early period of the Obama administration. They are far to the right and radical. They repudiated the financial bailout package. They had decided to throw John McCain overboard. They preferred defeat and destroying their nominee to victory because they wanted to become a rump group. They understood they were a minority and believed they could replicate their experience in 1993 and 1994 when they then became a majority by wrecking a Democratic presidency.

That is unlikely to happen this time. They are a greater minority than before, they will define their party as right-wing, and there is not a similar factor in the Senate, in which Bob Dole wanted to be president.
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Jay Furman (from the audience): President Clinton became a centrist by moving towards a budget surplus. That is where he brought the Democratic Party. Strikingly absent from the current discussion are the economic circumstances that Obama is inheriting and the constraints they put on him. Short-term approaches can be consistent with liberal policy because they require deficit spending, which may lead to many social programs, but that is only short-term.

Rick Perlstein: Creating a surplus during the current economic situation would be wildly irresponsible. It would be neo-Hooverism. What we need now is a strong dose of deficit spending. One of the strong policy markers the Obama team has presented so far has been Rahm Emanuel saying on national television that we are not just going to have a stimulus package but an investment package. He did not back away from things like the promise to fund technology that will produce green jobs. He did not back away from healthcare. Moderators during the presidential debates pressed the candidates on which programs they would cut. That is what Herbert Hoover did, which is why Franklin Roosevelt inherited an economy in which thousands of banks had just failed.

Ted Sorensen: Bringing in institutions to regulate speculation and other ills of the free market was an essential part of what Roosevelt did. That is once-again popular and recognized as necessary. I believe that Obama will do that. It is essentially liberalism, and has been opposed by the Republicans ever since Roosevelt and largely backed away from most of the Democratic presidents since.
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John Brademas (from the audience): I was the majority whip for the last four years that I served in the House of Representatives. Every other Tuesday, I joined the speaker, the Senate and House majority leaders, the other whips, and Senate President Pro Tem Hubert Humphrey for breakfast at the White House with President Carter and Vice President Mondale. We were all Democrats. We talked politics and policy. We will now have a Democratic president, increased Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, a president and vice president who came from the Senate, and a White House chief of staff who came from the House. What prospects do you see for strong cooperation between the Obama White House and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate? Do you think renewing those meetings would be a good idea?

Ted Sorensen: I also participated in those weekly meetings and I think they are a very good idea. I think there will be cooperation between the executive and legislative branches, at least in the first years of Obama’s presidency. I also think that many of the less-liberal Democrats and some Republicans will be reluctant to challenge a president who has Obama’s ability to appeal to the country and get the people on his side. I think it is going to be good.

Sidney Blumenthal: It is a crucial question. Rahm Emanuel will try to coordinate it. The Democrats feel an imperative to coordinate and be disciplined, having seen what happened in 1994. On the other hand, members of the House and Senate, especially committee chairs, like to exercise their prerogatives and at certain times remind presidents that they come from a co-equal branch of government. We will find out what the issues are and what happens, but I think we will see some efforts at coordination and also some strong assertions of congressional power. They are the power in this new Democratic era as well as the president.

Right Minded

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:01:01 -0500

One of the jobs we'll be taking on here at the Big Con will be to monitor the Obama Hate. Please do send in your ripest examples to me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org. Forthwith, our first plunge.

One of the right-wing listservs I monitor is targeted to conservative academics. (And, may I say, the level of intellectual discourse on it is shockingly low. Right-wingers are always whining about being shut out of academia by a liberal conspiracy. When will they start taking some personal responsibility for too often not deserving to play the intellectual game at the highest level?)

The first response to Obama's election, hitting the inboxes at 7:32 PM on November 4, was this: "Welcome to America's Weimar Era."

Which was curious. Was the point that our nation's turn to liberalism would be followed by a fascist reaction? Not something a conservative should want to admit.

The next guy pleaded for calm: "Regardless of who wins, it is NOT the end of the world. America goes on. It is true that conservative philosophy will finally triumph..."

I haven't heard political chiliasm since the heyday of V.I. Lenin.

Another contributor grounded his hope in experience—the experience of observing a great political mind come to the fore:

Palin will be interesting on just this count. It's a mistake to equate stump speeches for what' going on inside the speaker's head [ed: true, dat; after all what was going on inside Obama's head during his stump speeches was: "how can I manage to get away with giving Bill Ayers a corner office in the West Wing?"] ; her performance at the RN Convention and in debate against Joe Biden showed an awake intelligence.... It's a mistake to disqualify someone from small town Alaska from the august intellectual precincts of power politic.... she is bright. Not Ivy League bright. Not intellectual bright. But bright as in real world bright..... No Peter principle one-step-too-many end-stop with her quite yet, I don't think.

He's seconded by this fellow (whose only published output I can find, despite his presence on a listserv of conservative academics, is comments on right-blogs like, "Some college students went to a frat party dressed as the Jacson 5 - with blackface. Perhaps bad taste, but again they were imitating a group they obviously liked. Racist? Only if they thought the Jackson 5 were inferior people."):

I am totally amused at those elites who trash Palin's experience and intelligence.... Amazing that Democrats trash Palin's intelligence, yet claim there are 'different learning styles" for minorities and others - in other words, IQ tests and school grades mean nothing - except for Republicns. It took some smarts and choice of advisors (? Mr Palin ?) to help her win in Alaska against some heavy hitters, and to arrange a gas pipeline and taxes on big oil.

And she isn't "nerdy", which is apparently essential for "intelligence" if you are a Republican.

He later opined that McCain deserved to lose "because he is more afraid of being called 'racist' than losing an election."

One of the paleocons (I love the guy's Wikipedia entry: "Gottfried has also been a close friend of important political and intellectual figures: Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, John Lukacs, Christopher Lasch, Robert Nisbet, and Murray Rothbard....") offered Wednesday-morning quarterbacking—"The strategy of going with the most Democratic-looking Rep[ublican] in order to defeat the most leftist possible Dem was pure idiocy"—while another offered the following sophisticated theory of Tuesday's dynamics:

Us old folks won't be the 'deciders' in this election [ed: I love the presumption that everyone on a listserv of conservative academics must be old—how hopeful. Obama has already loaded this election with first-time voters who identify with him in the following two ways: (1) "Obama is Black like me," and (2) "Obama is cute, polished orator [sic] who promises to save the world from war and Global Warming for us young idealists."... But, lucky for us, this Presidential race was not close, or else there would have [sic] a total lack of faith in our election process.

Same guy also mocked the conciliatory tones of McCain's concesssion—"Unlike you stick-in-the-mud Republicans, I am rejoicing with your standard-bearer John McCain that 'we have overcome the prideful arrogance of our bigotry.' What could be nicer than that?"

And finally, speaking of Weimar, there was the guy (author, most recently, of that towering tome Better in the Poconos: The Story of Pennsylvania's Vacationland who actually develops a theory of the imminent Obama fascist takeover. Who will the storm troopers be? Take a bow. It's you, dear liberal blog afficianado:

My first fear is less a civil liberties issue than one involving the political process. If the Daily Kos crowd has its own way, the verdict on the Bush years will not be left up to history. Instead, there will be massive investigations into the Bush administration's foreign policy that will culminate in criminal indictments. Criminalizing the opposition is something that has never happened before in this country. It is the beginning of a slippery road to dictatorship. At the very least, the Republicans will reciprocate when they eventually return to power. Will this happen? We do not know. Obama is such a blank slate that anything is possible.

Oh, but it will get worse—much worse:

Another danger is that the so-called fairness doctrine is invoked and talk radio is shut down. The issue is not Rush Limbaugh. The issue is simply that the Obama administration will be shutting down the opposition media . The justification that the Limbaughs of the world do not give equal time to dissenting views is specious. The Nation magazine does not publish right-wing rants. Nor does National Review print defenses of liberalism. If either magazine offends us, we are told not to buy it. If one does not like Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, one can do what liberals tell conservatives to do with obscene comedians -- ignore them. Shutting down talk radio means silencing the opposition's strongest media. If this happens, we are living in a soft dictatorship. Have no illusions what the end of talk radio means. Will it happen? Some Democrats have talked of silencing talk radio. Now that they control the presidency and Congress, they can do it.

Still another danger is hate speech legislation modeled on the campus speech codes that for all practical purposes have ended free speech in the academy. Free speech is not only the freedom to attack Christianity, capitalism, the U.S. military, and to proclaim the virtues of socialism. That much was allowed in the Soviet Union. Free speech is saying in public what we have been reduced to saying in private. Free speech means that Larry Summers does not lose the presidency of Harvard because he dared to say that men and women are different. So-called hate speech laws will be written in generic language but in practice they will mean that Louis Farrakhan and his buddy, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, will still mouth off but criticizing them will be a hate crime. Can speech codes become law? We must consider the reality that they are a fact of life on most campuses and the cancer can easily spread. We must also consider that the Europeanization of America may not consist only of having an expanded welfare state. It might also mean laws like the ones that in France forbid the criticism of Islam (although not of Christianity) and in Austria deny idiots the right to deny the Holocaust. Free speech means the freedom to say stupid things.

If Congress and the president do not give us speech codes, the codes might slip into the law through the courts. President Obama will appoint many judges and God knows what they will be like. After all, the constitution is simply what judges say it is.

During the campaign, the Republican focus was on Obama's redistributionist schemes and his inexperience. The real dangers of the Obama presidency might be the havoc done to free speech, which after all is the bedrock of our system.

Tremble, fellow progressives. These are the intellectuals arrayed against us.

How My Blogging Used To Work

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:13:40 -0500

Blogging on conservatism used to be easy. I'd just link to some Third World-like example of infrastructure failure in an American city, often involving a bursting one-hundred-year-old water main like this one yesterday in Staten Island...

...recycle my hoary crack about the sinking feeling with which conservative "governance," with its regime of tax-cuts-at-any-cost, has willfully plagued us, and—day is done!

Now, I just don't know what to say.

Maybe that hope is on the way?

Obama's promised sixty billion dollars and two million new jobs to fix our infrastructure. Remember: hope, but verify.

"Center-Right Nation": This Is Getting Boring

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:00:51 -0500

Eugene Robinson shows how it's nonsense. So do, um the facts:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — It was one of John McCain's closing arguments: "We're getting a glimpse of what one-party rule would look like under Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. Apparently it starts with lowering our defenses and raising our taxes," the Republican presidential nominee said repeatedly on the campaign trail in the final weeks leading up to Election Day.

But a new national poll suggests why a majority of voters didn't seem to buy that argument, as Barack Obama beat McCain in the presidential election and the Democrats made major gains in both the House, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate, under Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday, 59 percent of those questioned said Democratic control of both the executive and legislative branches will be good for the country, compared with 38 percent saying such one-party control will be bad.

"That much good will from the public opens a window of opportunity for the Democrats," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "But the public expects results, and may not listen to excuses for very long if a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House can't get their act together in time."

The poll also indicates that the public has a positive view of the Democratic Party, with 62 percent saying they have a favorable opinion and 31 percent an unfavorable opinion of the party. For the Republicans, a majority, 54 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of the GOP while 38 percent hold a positive view.

"The public has a positive view of the Democratic Party while the GOP 'brand' is hurting," Holland said. "Overall views of the Democratic Party have gone from 53 percent favorable in October to 62 percent favorable now; the GOP overall has seen a 5-point drop in its favorable rating."

The 62 percent figure is the "the highest opinion of the Democrats in at least 16 years, since before Bill Clinton got elected," said CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider.

"When has the Republican Party image ever been that bad? Answer: When the Republican Congress impeached President Clinton at the end of 1998," he added.

The poll indicates the public is split regarding the top Democrats in Congress. And that's an improvement.

"Democratic congressional leaders, much maligned this fall, have also seen a boost in their approval rating," Holland said. "Nearly half of those polled now approve of how congressional Democrats are handling their job, up from just a third who felt that way a month ago."

Schneider added, "Same thing happens when you ask them about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Good-bad, 50-50, among voters who even know who they are."

It's a different story for the GOP, with just 24 percent approving of how Republican leaders are handling their jobs and nearly three in four disapproving....

Michael Barone Lost It Long Ago

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:37:42 -0500

Like Digby, I 've been struggling to come up with something profound to say about the election, and finding myself a bit overwhelmed.

Nine days ago, writing this blog was easy; being in opposition is a progressive habit of long standing. Now I have to start off on a whole new plot. I'll get there.

But in the meantime, a quick hit: There's much discussion in the progressive blogosphere about Michael Barone's credibility-surrendering quote that journalists only criticized Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin because "she did not abort her Down syndrome baby." Steve Benen reflects that he didn't realize Barone was this far gone..

Well, I'm here to say that he was nearly this far gone as far back as 1966.

Obama: Liberal Shock Doctrine?

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:35:25 -0500

From the Financial Times

US President-elect Barack Obama intends to push a comprehensive programme of social and economic reform beyond an immediate emergency stimulus package, Rahm Emanuel, the next White House chief of staff, indicated on Sunday.

Mr Emanuel brushed aside concerns that an Obama administration would risk taking on too much when it takes office in January. He said Mr Obama saw the financial meltdown as an historic opportunity to deliver the large-scale investments that Democrats had promised for years....

Sunday’s comments also reinforce the impression that Mr Obama’s transition economic advisory board – which includes leading lights of the Clinton era, such as Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin – is tilting heavily towards a “big bang” approach that would combine a short-term stimulus with large public investments to raise the longer-term US growth rate.

In a radio address to the nation on Saturday, Mr Obama emphasised the urgency both of passing a fiscal stimulus package, which could include a middle-class tax cut, and of moving swiftly ahead on long-term public investments.

“We can’t afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, healthcare, education and tax relief for middle-class families,” said Mr Obama. “We also need a rescue plan for the middle class that invests in immediate efforts to create jobs and provides relief to families watching their paychecks shrink and their life savings disappear.”

Are they listening?

"Nixonland": Uber Allis, Interruptus, or Finis?

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:06:24 -0500

It's been an interesting few days.

I've been on vacation—two weeks in London, England (I may have more to say about that when I return to regular blogging on Monday), then two weeks, of which the present week is the second, spent working on the proposal for my next book. Not much longer than a week ago, I received an invitation from to fly out to Los Angeles to report on what Election Day looked like from the neighborhood of Watts—the site of the epochal 1965 riot which, according to my Nixonland, kicked off the chain of events that led to, well, Nixonland: as I defined it,

the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears co-exist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans. The first group, enemies of Richard Nixon... take it as an axiom that if Richard Nixon and the values associated with him triumphed, America itself might end. The second group...believed, with Nixon, that if the enemies of Richard Nixon triumphed--the Alger Hisses and Helen Gahagan Douglases, the Herblocks and hippies, the George McGoverns and all the rest--America might end.... "Nixonland" is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States.

So there I was, straight outta Compton (the Willow Tree In off Central and Artesia—free continental breakfast!), chasing around South Central Los Angeles on city buses, importuning strangers about the meaning for them of this most historical of days. (I end up concluding that a surging civic engagement and profoundly Obama-ite good will and optimism is being tempered there by an impressively mature sense of the just how long and hard the road to truly transformative change will be in these United States.)

Meanwhile, my phone is ringing off the hook (to the extent that a cell phone has a hook), Monday, yesterday, and today.

This, that, and the other magazine, newspaper, and web site seeks to retain me for an essay on the dénouement of "Nixonland." Political reporters seek pithy bromides on whether and how the Republican coalition has gone off the rails. Friends, acquaintances, readers, flood my inbox for conclusive conclusions. Which is, of course, flattering, and plenty fun (Insistently schooling the reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, over somewhat baffled protestations—because, you know, America is always and forever a center right nation!!!!!—that yesterday's debacle for the Republicans had little to do ultimately with the accident of George W. Bush, or the accident of Sara Palin, but was all about the systematic failings of the theory and practice of conservatism, and that the Republican Party will be in the howling wilderness until it reckons with the fact—practically felt better than sex.) But ultimately, the whole business has made me feel a bit uncomfortable.

I'm a historian. To the extent that my musings add value to the vast offerings of political punditry this or any year it is because I've taken the time to slow waaayyyyy down and study, to use one of Richard Nixon's favorite phrases, The Long View. And the long view undermines any conclusion about the awesome results yesterday except that there are no easy conclusions.

Realignment? Liberal epoch? They said that in 1964. And two years later, in 1966, due largely to unforeseen developments for which the Watts riots were Ground Zero, Ronald Reagan was governor of the nation's largest state, 47 liberals were turned out of the House of Repreenatives, and if these weren't enough to turn back the Great Society an over-extended American neo-imperium proved impossible to control, and a faraway guerilla war that was supposed to be easy to end responsibly proved very, very, very hard.

A redemptive figure pledging hope, leading a damaged and disillusioned nation out of a cesspool of crises by promising a newly conciliatory brand of pure and honest-anti-politics? Well, make no mistake, as a politician Jimmy Carter is no Barack Obama, and his election in 1976 brought no dancing in the streets that I'm aware of, but it's easy to forget that the goodwill toward him upon his ascension was profound, even in the elite media, and that the structural position of the Republican Party in Congress was almost unimaginably in tatters. Following the sterling performance of the Democrats (shades of our 2006) in the 1974 elections, and Carter's apparently triumphant performance in the opening months of his term (his approval rating in April of 1977 was 75 percent), Sean Wilentz has pointed out, "it looked as if the country had found the leader it had been searching for since Richard Nixon's downfall." The political scientist Everett Carl Ladd crunched the numbers and argued that the Republican Party would probably go out of business. It was published in 1978, the year an unanticipated tax revolt drove the best Republican year in decades, prelude to the Age of Reagan.

Only one conclusion: it's shoulder to the wheel time. The opportunity is once-in-a-lifetime. And there are no guarantees. History is a cunning master. Hope, but verify.

The bottomless well of evil

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:01:10 -0400

I just incinerated a comment. I hardly ever do that (when I do it's usually someone pointing out a typo; I fix the error then erase the evidence of my crime...). But, before I deleted it, I copied it, because you need to see it:

By Payday Loan Advocate | October 3rd, 2008 - 1:40am GMT
With our economy going into a slump, why is it that political figures are destroying valid financial options? Payday Loans are an essential part of the U.S. financial system, providing loans to those who have bad or no credit that need the money fast. Yet, for one reason or another, legislators are targeting this financial system. Some states, such as Georgia and North Carolina, have even banned the industry all together! The politics behind it is simple; banks are lobbying the legislators to try and destroy their oncoming competition, and the legislators are falling for it. Even taking out the fact that banks are trying to take away your financial choices and freedoms so they can have a monopoly on loans, the corruption of our politics is simply wrong. Our opinions must be heard, and our freedom of choice, financial or not, should not be dampened on the soul fact on one person's financial gain.

Obviously someone's paying someone to astroturf on behalf of the most monstrous sector of the banking industry.

Must be ACORN's fault.