Tag Archive for 'GOP'

The spectre of Specter

Published
by
Kim
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in Feminism, Media, Politics, Polls, USA and Women
. 15 Comments

Game changing. Displays the irrelevance of the GOP. Tea bag parties inspired by Fox News and all that crew coincide with a drop in partisan identification to 25% of the electorate. Etc.

Certainly, the party swap of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a fillip for the Democrats.

Although, those with a long memory for the ‘Clarence Thomas hearings’ might question the elderly gentleman’s progressivism when it comes to issues of concern to women. Anita Hill, wherever she is now, probably isn’t over the moon:

Continue reading ‘The spectre of Specter’

Blindsided?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics and Media
. 31 Comments

[Via Gary Sauer-Thompson] Dennis Shanahan in The Australian claims that the Liberal decision to vote against the stimulus package:

has blind-sided the Government over the $42 billion stimulus package… left Kevin Rudd politically flat-footed and frustrated…and given the Opposition an early advantage….Caught off balance and unprepared, Rudd is cranking up his depiction of Turnbull as being uncaring, out of touch and irresponsible, as the Labor leader tries to claw back Turnbull’s initial break and gain ground in the longer term.

Huh?

Continue reading ‘Blindsided?’

In defence of Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics
. 70 Comments

It’s been suggested – apropos of the title of my last post on the federal government’s stimulus plan – that I was expressing cynicism by calling the piece “Never get between Australians and a pile of money”. Actually, that was meant to be a bit of a riff off a famous quip by one Paul Keating about Premiers… In general, if there’s one thing I dislike in political debate it’s unreflective cynicism and the post was supposed to gesture to – jocularly – what I think is a massive own goal by Malcolm Turnbull. On Tuesday, I noted a ton of people I know on Facebook discussing how they’d spend the dosh, and it was rightly pointed out on the previous thread that many people have a stake in school communities and there would have been a lot of genuine excitement about the measures for education infrastructure. I think that discussion of the package among the general public has far exceeded the way budgets are generally received, and that we’re seeing a defining moment in this electoral cycle. Everything I’ve seen in terms of newspaper headlines and tv coverage suggests that Turnbull’s stuffed up badly in getting whatever message he thought he was sending across, and I also think the heat with which people are discussing the whole thing is very significant.

But I also don’t want to be interpreted as suggesting that the measures are bad policy. I’m probably more critical of Kevin Rudd most of the time than not, but there’s actually a fair bit to praise about this package. Continue reading ‘In defence of Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package’

Never get between Australians and a pile of money

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics and Politics
. 105 Comments

THE Opposition will vote against the Government’s $42 billion financial stimulus package, Malcolm Turnbull says.

“Someone has to stand up for fiscal discipline,” Mr Turnbull told the House of Representatives. “Someone has to stand up for levels of debt for future generations.”

Whatever the House Republicans can do, we can do better? Conciliating his own party? Trying to be relevant?

Turnbull’s decision reminds me of the biggest mistake Kim Beazley made – trying to block the tax cuts in the 2005 budget. The argument about fairness was complex. The then government said “he doesn’t want you to have money”. Eventually Beazley caved, but his poll numbers never recovered, and the rest of his career was a short prelude to its end.

Update: Turnbull makes his case.

Update: Bernard Keane on Malcolm Turnbull committing political suicide.

The politics of failed economic doctrines

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics, International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 24 Comments

I’ve made the point before that real incomes in the United States have been more or less stagnant since 1974. It’s interesting to see John Quiggin dissect the reasons for this in the latest of his series of posts on economic doctrines which have been refuted by the global financial crisis:

Overall, the main factors sustaining growth in living standards for American households outside the top 20 per cent have been an increase in the labour force participation of women and a decline in household savings. Over the period since 1999, consumption financed by borrowing against home equity has been the main factor offsetting stagnant or declining median household incomes.

If one wanted to be reductionist about it, the end of the capacity to prop up living standards via credit (and the increasing costs of healthcare and middle-class positional goods such as higher education) explains much about Barack Obama’s victory (and his victory in the suburban vote was a significant component of the overall win).

Quiggin is a little more confident about the political implications of the end of the trickle-down theory than I am: Continue reading ‘The politics of failed economic doctrines’

Truthiness versus Truth II: Now with graphs!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Foreign Elections, Sociology and USA
. 6 Comments

More on the instant revisionism from the Republican Noise Machine in the wake of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ victory – this time scatterplot and red state blue state rich state poor state make a graphic point about the claims that the Republicans’ loss was somehow artefactual. It’s worth adding that the problem of the under-representation of Democratic votes in terms of seats adduced also goes to the horrendous architecture of the American political system – entrenched and partisan gerrymandering in many states, the two party monopoly, disenfranchisement and appallingly conducted elections, and all the other factors which distort popular will and poorly represent it.

Continue reading ‘Truthiness versus Truth II: Now with graphs!’

Truthiness versus Truth

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 4 months ago
in Australiana, Blogging, Foreign Elections, Media and USA
. 83 Comments

The fiercely independent thinking RWDBs of the Australian media and blogosphere have been out and about reciting talking points from the discredited Republican Noise machine ever since Barack Obama won the Presidency last week. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Antipodean wingnuts take their wingnutty duties so seriously, but I’m sure that many are still firmly in the faith-based alternative universe, and thus allergic to facts. But for anyone who’s been wondering about some of the most egregious memes around the joint, here are some links to set the record straight.

Myth #1: The Obama turnout meant that Prop 8 won in California.

But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters — the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) — voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin

- Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com

Myth #2: The Democrats’ victory wasn’t comprehensive.

What happened? Overall, the Democrats gained a bit in 2004, a lot in 2006, and some in 2008. But we knew that (see the time series plot in the blog entry linked above). We also see a bit of scatter. Beyond this, yes, there are some patterns. In 2006, the Democrats particularly gained in Republican areas–see how those dots in the lower left of the second graph are way above the 45-degree line? In 2008, the swing is more uniform… Returning to the “How well did the Democrats actually do in 2008″ question, I think that one problem is that people are comparing Obama’s vote to Kerry’s vote but then comparing the congressional Democrats in 2008 to the congressional Democrats in 2006. I think it’s more appropriate to compare 2008 to 2004 in both cases. As Paul Krugman put it, “Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections.”

- Andrew Gelman.

Myth #3: Obama would be politically sensible to govern as a moderate gradualist.

So a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn’t listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself.

- Paul Krugman.

Obama: The predictability of right wing predictions?

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 4 months ago
in Foreign Elections, Media, Sociology and USA
. 104 Comments

We’ve heard all this before. Remember when Kevin Rudd won, and we were told his election was a victory for John Howard?

Right wing commentators couldn’t have been quicker out of the starting blocks to proclaim “America is still a Centre Right nation”. In fact they were at it before the votes were counted – Bill Bennett’s lugubrations on CNN is one example folks here might have seen in watching the election coverage. The memes abound. McCain still got 46%! Obama’s win wasn’t big enough!

Such exciteable commentary doesn’t stop to consider, of course, that in a two party system, without the presence of a strong third party challenger, landslides aren’t that common. Ronald Reagan in 1980 received 50.1% of the popular vote, in an election which everyone agrees ushered in an “Era”. Barack Obama did somewhat better than that. And John McCain still pulled in a significant number of independent voters – it’s not too difficult to imagine how wrong the claims that a more conservative candidate would have run better are. Let’s not forget that McCain continually sounded the note that he was someone who often differed from his own party.

Let’s make a couple of quick points here. Most of this speculation – and the accompanying predictions that Obama may be a steady as she goes moderate – is just that. It’s basically worthless, except for what it reveals about the politics of those doing the predicting. We don’t know exactly how Obama will govern. We do know that he’s stated that big challenges will require bold measures. And we do know that an agenda of de facto universal healthcare, economic revival and redressing the plight of middle and working class voters is what he won on. That’s surprisingly radical in the American context. And this election saw a lot of the anti-government rhetoric Reagan ran into town with finally kicked to the curb.

Secondly, let’s consider the fact that the “liberal” scare didn’t work (and the sorts of voters who were ready to believe Obama to be a “socialist” were always going to be in the GOP tent):

Perhaps the most revealing post-election data on that question came from within the defeated McCain campaign. In an interview with Roger Simon of Politico, the Republican candidate’s speechwriter and friend, Mark Salter, disclosed that in the campaign’s own internal polling data, 60 percent of Americans regarded Obama as “liberal.” The campaign thought that would be enough to defeat him, which is why it hammered on the “left-wing” themes.

Baiting the liberals didn’t work this year. Disgusted with the Republican right, voters wanted something different and weren’t afraid to look leftward. That is what “realignment” means.

Continue reading ‘Obama: The predictability of right wing predictions?’

US election: the demographics

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Culture, Foreign Elections, Polls, Race, Religion, Sociology and USA
. 22 Comments

The big note of caution should be that this data is drawn from exit polls which don’t take into account the very large early vote, and that exit polls have certain problems of validity and reliability.

However, there’s some interesting reading at both RedBlueRichPoor and FiveThirtyEight. I suspect the absence of the early vote in the sample diminishes the increases in youth and African-American turnout. And it’s just as well to remember that the election was actually reasonably close in the popular vote, and that the electoral vote map has been tweaked rather than transformed. Trends which were operating this year need reinforcing through the upcoming electoral cycles, and much will depend on Obama’s performance in government. You can never claim that there’s a realigning election on the basis of one cycle (06-08), though my bet would be that this will turn out in retrospect to have been one, for a whole host of more qualitative and interpretive factors.

I haven’t seen any comprehensive data as yet on Hispanic and youth votes’ partisan composition, but some evidence presented during the CNN coverage suggested very strong 60+% Obama votes in both populations. It’s worthwhile noting that the demographics of many states which are swinging to the Democrats strongly – or showing signs of such swings (ie in Texas, Arizona and South Carolina) – are fast changing to a much more heterogenous composition. And that generally, the younger cohort is more socially liberal and less hung up on racial barriers and all the baggage of the culture wars – including among younger Evangelicals.

There’s a lot here for Obama and the Democrats to make hay with in terms of partisan and geographic realignment, if they play their cards well.

Continue reading ‘US election: the demographics’

US election: What to expect and what to watch

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 4 months ago
in Foreign Elections, Polls and USA
. 41 Comments

I’ll be updating this post as we get closer to Wednesday, but it’s worth making a few points at the outset:

Exit Polls: Take these with a grain of salt. In the states which allow early voting, almost 30 million have already turned out – with big advantages in many states in terms of the proportion of registered Democrats and independents voting over registered Republicans. Obama has “banked”, if you like, a lot of the support he had at the top of the range of his poll results. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t get a lot of support on election day – the number of genuine undecideds would be very low at this point. The race is basically frozen – there hasn’t been much “tightening” and McCain has run out of time. The early voting advantage also means a smoother turnout the vote operation on the day itself, and all the evidence is that the Republicans’ much touted turnout advantage has been completely reversed. In fact, if you put together a lot of what we know about the lack of volunteers and enthusiasm in the GOP camp, this could be quite important.

In addition, the chance of dirty dealing on the results is lessened because a lot of the African-American vote has deliberately turned out early to minimise shenanigans and maximise the chance of votes being counted. So… that takes us to…

Why people are still saying the race could go either way… It’s partly the meejah trying to maintain interest, and partly both campaigns have an interest in making sure their voters think it’s important to turn out. And then there’s Republican denialism and their well known habit of assuming that you can create your own reality. And Democratic nerves.

States in play: Here’s the Kerry/Bush map from 2004 (courtesy of Wikipedia):

The latest polls have Obama ahead in all the Kerry states, and leading in the following Bush states – New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada and Iowa. Outside chances are Georgia, North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and McCain’s home state of Arizona. McCain appears to have a lot of eggs in the Pennsylvania basket, but it doesn’t look likely. The invaluable Nate Silver discusses possible McCain electoral math scenarios here, and the key states to watch here.

Update: Nate Silver sums up where the latest polling leaves the race:

Far more important, of course, is the race for 270 electors. It appears almost certain that Obama will capture all of the states won by John Kerry in 2008. Pennsylvania, while certainly having tightened somewhat over the course of the past two weeks, appears to be holding at a margin of about +8 for Obama, with very few remaining undecideds. Obama also appears almost certain to capture Iowa and New Mexico, which were won by Al Gore in 2000. Collectively, these states total 264 electoral votes, leaving Obama just 5 votes shy of a tie and 6 of a win.

Obama has any number of states to collect those 5 or 6 votes. In inverse order of difficulty, these include Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana. Obama is the signficant favorite in several of these states; winning any one of them may be fairly difficult for John McCain, but winning all of them at once, as John McCain probably must do, is nearly impossible.

Robert Corr has tweaked a map of poll closing times in the various states, adding Australian times to it as a guide for tomorrow, and Nate Silver has prepared an hour by hour guide of what to look for as the results come in.

Update: Related post: Election eve links.

Update: Howard Dean’s pollster at Salon on how to read the numbers.

Update: Related post: What to watch for in the Senate races.

Update: Nate Silver on ten reasons why you should ignore exit polls.

More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Foreign Elections, History, Howardia and USA
. 35 Comments

In a previous post on expectations of whether an Obama win will reshape politics and end the culture wars, I briefly discussed Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I read recently. The title, incidentally, comes from a passage in a speech by Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 Presidential election, when the Democrats played on Eisenhower’s recent heart attack to stir up fears of Nixon becoming President – convinced as they were that attacking the genial Ike himself would be in vain:

Our nation stands at the fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

Perlstein emphasises the dissonance between Stevenson’s claims to high minded political virtue and his own tactics:

The courtly type, he couldn’t campaign directly against a dying war hero; instead he ran against the man who might replace him. And he did it in a singularly uncourtly fashion. He wrote his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the (courtly) Harvard economist, “I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.” Galbraith acknowledged that as a “noble compliment.”

There isn’t much evidence that Stevenson’s “jeremiads” helped his cause much. His loss to Ike in 56 was comprehensive, and its dimensions were greater than those of his first defeat in 52.

In another excellent book on Nixon, in this case on his various images in the American cultural imagination, David Greenberg emphasises that liberal attacks on the Republican’s devilish character tended to backfire. Nixon’s Shadow highlights the genuineness of the identification between Nixon and many voters, and debunks the claims that such identification was nefariously produced by artifice. Artifice is one of the perennial political arts. Continue reading ‘More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars’

Those shifty Ayrab eyebrows

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 4 months ago
in Film, TV, Video etc, Foreign Elections, Levity, Race and USA
. 5 Comments

Not the Sarah Palin campaign… or???

The Reds are coming!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in China, Developing world, Economics, Europe, Foreign Elections, Health, International, Markets, Polls and Sociology
. 27 Comments

I’m not sure if I’m the only one who found the juxtaposition on the news last night of discussion of global regulation at a meeting between Chinese and EU leaders and George W. Bush’s “free markets are great!” remarks rather odd. I suspect two things are at work here – first, the defensive reaction to loudly proclaim your ideological purity even at a time when your actions belie your words, and secondly, the related posturing of the Republicans doing their level best to damn Obama as a socialist (which is also rather strange as John McCain wants to spend $300 billion buying up mortgages). For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like the red smear is working – unsurprisingly polls are finding that a large majority of US voters don’t mind the idea of higher taxes on those earning more than $250000 a year to fund a healthcare plan. Conjuring up these atavistic spectres (“communism!”, “socialised medicine!”) isn’t spooking too many people.

The GOP might also be a tad influenced by Alan Greenspan’s concession that his ideological predispositions led him into errors which contributed to the global financial crisis, which John Quiggin argues illustrates the bankruptcy of the “efficient markets hypothesis” and demonstrates that financial markets have a tendency towards creating instability, rather than the other way around.

So, I think there’s a bit of projection going on – amidst the ruins of their ideological landscape, the GOP are trying to cast the Democrats in the role of the enemies of market freedoms, whose benefits (in the form in which they existed) are looking quite illusory. Continue reading ‘The Reds are coming!’

Palin forever?

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 4 months ago
in Foreign Elections and USA
. 58 Comments

I’m not sure what it is about the dynamic of this campaign, but I haven’t turned my mind to what will happen to the GOP if the McCain/Palin ticket loses. I’m not sure all that many others have either, outside the backwoods of the right wing blogosphere where a lot have written off McCain and are feverishly discussing the 2012 ticket. There’s certainly been a fair bit of speculation around about the Dems’ future if Obama/Biden lose, and maybe all this is a reflection of the residue of the well known Democratic habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, or a fear that while the uber negative campaigning so far doesn’t appear to have got much traction, that might just shift as we come closer to the election itself (which could also be why there’s been so much focus on Obama’s present level of support being “locked in” through early voting while he’s got momentum and on voter registration).

But, while the possibility that the Republicans could win can’t absolutely be excluded, it certainly is worthwhile posing the question of what happens if they do in fact lose.

Jonathan Freedland is one who has been thinking about where the GOP goes under an Obama presidency, and he makes quite an interesting case that Sarah Palin could position herself as a potential 2012 frontrunner. This is interesting for at least two reasons. First, Palin’s selection – among all the other obvious reasons – was a reflection of the failure of the “conservative movement” to produce a convincing Presidential candidate in the first place. One of the real stories of the swing away from the Republicans is the exhaustion and fracturing of many of the activist factions that were on a roll from the late 90s until just a few years ago. Secondly, it might explain some of the stories about friction between McCain himself and Palin over her tactics in this race recently.

Rational or “values” voting?

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 5 months ago
in Culture, Ethics, Foreign Elections, Media, Race, Religion and USA
. 10 Comments

Gary Sauer-Thompson has a really good point to make about the way that Colin Powell has justified his decision to endorse Barack Obama:

Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press was based on a form of public political reasoning reasoning that addresses issues not personalities, and engages in analysis not demonization. It is a thoroughgoing critique of McCain’s issue-free, fear-mongering campaign and a rejection of the politics of scapegoating and bullying that have defined the Bush years.

As Sauer-Thompson observes, Powell’s response to the constant invocation of Obama’s “Muslim” middle name is also equally as significant (and there can just be no doubt that the McCain campaign’s linking of Obama to “terrorists” is meant to reinforce such suspicions – which have been put about all year by the noise machine). Powell has joined an increasing number of prominent moderate Republicans – such as Susan Eisenhower and Lincoln Chaffee, to name only a few, who have rejected the political tactics of division and emnity which have characterised recent GOP campaigns. While the wingnuts would no doubt live to shriek another day under an Obama presidency, a popular rejection of the poisonous culture wars would be a very significant event indeed.