The weird thing is that the twelve percenters won the election resoundingly.
Voters last week sent Washington a strong message about fixing the federal budget, according to exclusive numbers from a new poll obtained by TPM: Raise taxes on the wealthy and cut the military budget before you touch the nation’s largest entitlement program, Social Security.
The survey of voters who cast ballots last Tuesday — conducted by Democratic pollster PPP and commissioned by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — found that when respondents were given the choice between cutting the defense budget, raising taxes on the wealthy and cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit, just 12% said they’d like to see the entitlement program cut. Forty-three percent said they’d prefer to see taxes on the wealthy go up, and 22% said cutting the huge defense budget was the best way to go.
There are a handful of incoming Republicans, like Rand Paul, who have expressed a willingness to cut defense spending, but they also want to do away with or privatize Social Security. It’s really quite amazing how incredibly uninformed or misinformed the electorate was about who they were voting for and what they were likely to do once elected.
For one example, people said their number one priority was jobs, but the government has a limited ability to create jobs. And the only tools at their disposal are making direct hires (thereby, expanding the size of government), contracting out work (more stimulus and, therefore, debt), targeted tax cuts (already being done, with the GOP opposing the latest effort to expand them for small businesses), and some tinkering by the Fed.
The Tea Party candidates explicitly opposed all these efforts except the targeted tax cuts, and their number one issue is the deficit, which most tax cuts will only exacerbate. More mainstream Republicans also oppose all these solutions. So, basically, people said they want the government to create jobs but they voted in people who don’t support using any of the tools the government has to create them. That’s stupid.
I still maintain Booman that you’re reading this incorrectly. I think the electorate generally does understand that these Republicans are “out there” even if they don’t have a cohesive understanding of tea party ideology and its practical implications for governance. I think a lot of people who are generally non-ideological are fed up with what they perceived as ineffective government and hit the reset button once again, and there is a certain logic to that-its not on its face crazy. I think a lot of right leaning voters made peace with the tea party candidates because they recognize that their crazy policies won’t go into effect, but they will skew our politics to the right, which is the exact outcome they want.
And a lot of this is possible because Obama is not finding ways to wedge the moderates in the GOP from the extremes. I’m starting to wonder whether Obama has the political chops to fight back against the GOP and I’m not trying to be a downer there.
Obama will have to find the chops because he isn’t signing what Congress produces the first time around. But, that’s a great opportunity for him. People need to see him fighting for them.
how do you know? yesterday he was signaling “compromise” on the bush tax cuts.
It’s stupid if you believe that voting is a rational exercise where people look at all the choices in front of them and then vote in a manner that will make their lives better.
It’s not stupid if you understand that voting for a good-sized chunk of the population is an emotional exercise of stating their opinion. They show up to express anger, or they don’t bother to show up to express disgust. They sometimes show up out of fear of what the other guy will do. And sometimes they show up because they are emotionally “wowed” by a candidate. They are less invested in the choices behind their vote than they are in an average Facebook post.
They weren’t making rational choices. Don’t expect voters to make rational choices. This is the biggest downfall of the Democratic Party post, oh, LBJ probably. A person is rational, people are easily frightened and led by their emotions. Pretty much every election cycle I’ve watched since I started watching politics has involved this dynamic. About the only one that doesn’t fit was the 2000 election which was weird for a lot of reasons, but leads me to believe that if people are too fat and happy they just get apathetic and don’t worry about it.
I used to be really idealistic about voting, but now I’m just convinced that it’s less worse than any other system available to us. It might be slightly better if there were mandatory voting (at least you could make a convincing argument that forcing the apathetic to state an opinion might lead to a better measure of what people really want), but I’m not convinced that even that is true.
Agreed. Our assumptions about how voting works don’t really hold up against empirical evidence-we’re the idiots, not the voters. I think we need to stop wringing our hands and talking about how stupid people are start talking about how to play politics better than the GOP? How do we outplay these so-called idiots like Boehner, McConnel and Palin? Boo you’re a bright guy, please float some ideas.
I try not to overstate the role of the media. The country’s attention is far too fractured. Beck is a mountebank but his audience is a small percentage of america. I kind of think lefty blogs promote these guys too much sometimes, rather than focusing on where we need to go. Our message is better, we’ve got a brighter future, and we can speak to a far broader part of america than they can. Corporate interests may control much of the political media and government, but they can’t possibly control more than a small part of the total cultural universe. I imagine Beck’s audience is tiny compared to the audience for say, professional football.
Here’s what I would like to see: an honest, easy to understand infomercial that explains what taxes are and how they work. People don’t seem to understand that paying taxes is a necessary thing, and that cutting taxes is not the end-all to economic problems.
I remember a Bill Moyers article about that, and it made such good sense. The Right Wing knee-jerk answer to everything is CUT TAXES. And unfortunately that’s all the voters want to hear.
I would like to see higher corporate taxes and a tax on churches, too, but that ain’t gonna happen. 😉 What would really be good is if the taxes we pay were wisely spent and not wasted. Talk about being unrealistic!
Do you have to guess very hard to figure out why civics is not taught in school?
Great comment.
What’s The Matter With Kansas? needs to be republished/updated.
if only there was a party that was the exact opposioe of the GOP, one that aggressively promoted liberal alternatives to conservative policies, one that made aggressive moves to rein in the banks and insurance companies, one that argued strongly in favor of letting the bush tax cuts expire while marketing their own middle class tax cut. one that prosecuted war crimes instead of continuing them. One that you could tell the difference between the parties easily, no blurring the differences.
there used to be a party like that. i think i might have even voted for it in 2006 and 2008. What were they called again? And whatever happened to those guys?
These are valid criticisms of democrats, but I can’t agree that the party of 2006 was somehow better than today’s (2008’s) version. That party went along with the surge. That party had nothing to say about wall street.
“That party went along with the surge.” ahem, cough cough cough.
“That party had nothing to say about wall street.” cough cough ahem ahem cough cough
and anyway, the party of 2006-2008 was in campaign mode. I’ve seen how they’ve acted since being elected.
It’s serious problem. But it didn’t just happen. And it’s not going to change easily, obviously.
it’s especially not going to change if we keep pretending the democrats are the best we can do, or that the duopoly is the only model of government.
What consistently holds true is that the Rep are the Party of the Bought & Paid For. They eat up the Malinformation like it’s a Happy Meal!
Still laughing over Palin (I read ’em all) going after Jim Vandehei @ Politico. And then I picture her at the G20 Summit this week. So much stupid so little time.
Really?
It is not the job of the news media to inform citizens of their options. It is their job to listen to partisans make their emotional appeals regarding which questions are most important and judge which will prove most effective at swaying public opinion. Important questions don’t have to concern real things. They might be about death panels or a President’s foreign citizenship.
As to the truth or falsehood, exaggeration or understatement of either party, received wisdom dictates that they are exactly and eternally the same for each party. Of course it’s not true, but that is the only way to be unbiased.
Because the Truth is not knowable, not even by the smartest, hardest-working people on the planet, the American media people. While it may seem true, for example, that massive tax cuts for the wealthy empty the government’s coffers and don’t lead to increased domestic investment, and it seems possible to trace exactly these poor results to both the Reagan and Bush Jr. Administrations’ tax cuts, somewhere there is a study by the AEI showing it works great, so who can tell for sure? And besides, Republicans keep saying it’s true and Democrats keep saying it isn’t, so it’s in contention and it would partisan to point out that the Republicans represent the most rapacious among the wealthy and that they have their own interests at heart. Only partisans would dispute how fair this system is. And those who give a sh*t about what happens to their country.
It has been this way since this Knowledge about fairness was revealed at the birth of the Reagan Administration. I promise younger people that once upon a time our news people actually knew a blatant, self-serving lie when they heard one and occasionally pointed it out and let it form part of the background of their stories. There used to be much more news devoted to what might happen if bill X were passed or foreign policy initiative Y were undertaken, and much less devoted to what color suit a man wore or the neckline of a dress a woman wore. It was so boring.
Citizens were expected to sit down and think about their own futures and which party and candidates would best serve them. Means were made available by the news media to do so. You now are encouraged to think about anything else, and if you wish to think as before, you are going to have to wade through vast swamps of pseudo-journalistic mire to find out what you need. Good luck, citizens.
I know you mean this as snark, but I think a lot of folks misunderstand how governance in America works precisely because they have unrealistic expectations for the various power-players:
It is not the job of the news media to inform citizens of their options.
Well, no. It isn’t. I’d like it if that were the job of the “news media” but in fact the “job” of the “news media” is to make as much money as possible for the folks who own the various media outlets and to expand the political influence of the owners as much as possible. Anyone who lets that escape their notice is already setting up themselves up for an EPIC FAIL because reality and expectations will never match.
A century ago people knew where they stood because you knew which paper in town was the Democratic paper and which was the Republican paper. You knew they were biased. You also knew that they were sensationalist rags that purposefully had lurid and eye-catching headlines to try to get your nickel. And there was no myth of an “objective press” – everyone pretty much knew that the press in a town was biased as hell and expected it. I’d also point out that it didn’t matter – the press was still successfully able to lie us into war even back then.
We had a stint in there where we were artificially lulled into a sense of complacency because of FCC regulations on political speech over the airwaves. But it was artificial – and notice that that was ALSO the time span where the military-industrial-media complex had its largest amount of growth in influence over the country’s politics.
So don’t kid yourself – the media has never been about educating the citizenry. You can even go back to the Revolution when the press in the US was working on behalf of the aristocrats to convince poor dirt farmers that they should rise up in revolt because the aristos in England weren’t recognizing the legitimacy of the aristos in the US. It worked then and it’s worked ever since.
We really need to get away from thinking that the public is stupid. They aren’t. It is just that outside of the core liberal and conservative voters, most members of the public do not pay nearly as much attention to politics as we do and they tend to vote based on results rather than ideology or positions.
Last week’s election results were due to two things. First, President Obama and the Democrats failed to do enough to achieve a full economic recovery. Obviously, Republican obstructionism played a huge role in that, but the Democrats’ taking the cautious Blue Dog/centrist approach of accepting too small of a stimulus, not fighting for cramdown, appointing Summers and Geinthner, etc. played a large role in both the economy not recovering and the public believing that the Democrats did not do enough to achieve recovery. Second, the make up of the electorate shifted, with a lot more older conservative voters showing up, and a lot fewer younger, more Democratic voters showing up.
Moving forward, Democrats need to be bold and spend the next two years making a clear contrast on Social Security, jobs, the economy, and taxes so that voters who do not pay a lot of attention but who will continue to be concerned about the economic malaise that we will almost certainly still be mired in will know which side is fighting for them and which side is not.
“Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”
~Random woman at an Adlai Stevenson rally
“That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
~Adlai Stevenson’s response to that random woman
They knew what they were voting for, they just didn’t state it overtly. Make the survey truly anonymous and include the following options to see why they voted for whom they voted:
That’s what truly drove this election, and little else.
No, not the whole country. Just us white folks.