What Do Voters Really Want?

A study released yesterday by the Washington Post paints a picture of an angry, confused, and overwhelmingly ignorant electorate. They're mad at government's inability to solve problems but seem to be willing to turn to the source of that inability-- the Republicans-- to make things right.

[M]ost Americans who say they want more limited government also call Social Security and Medicare "very important." They want Washington to be involved in schools and to help reduce poverty. Nearly half want the government to maintain a role in regulating health care.

...Even as Americans generally hold Washington in low regard, they still like much of the work it does. Support for government action on such issues as national defense, health care and fighting poverty remains high, in some cases just where it was a decade ago.

Nearly six in 10 say they want their congressional representatives to fight for additional government spending in their districts to spur job creation; fewer (39 percent) want their member of Congress to cut spending, even if that means not as many local jobs. This is a turnabout from September 1994, when 53 percent said they wanted their representative to battle against spending and 42 percent were on the other side.

Despite evident public dissatisfaction with the growth of the federal deficit, 50 percent of those polled say they would prefer more government spending to try to boost the economy.

How does this play out in local races? The worst "welfare states," where a dollar paid into the federal government yields far bigger dividends-- primarily deep red states in the South-- include Alaska and Kentucky, where Tea Party extremists Rand Paul and Joe Miller are campaigning on abolishing federal subsidies. For every tax dollar Kentuckians send to the federal government, they get back $1.51, a great deal-- subsidized entirely by states like New Jersey, California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut and the other states that pay far more than they get back. "Paul is in effect saying that if he is Kentucky's next Senator, he will work to reduce his state's share of federal spending, thus hurting his own constituents." He sounds almost as crazy as... Joe Miller, the Alaska fringe kook who doesn't recognize the great deal Alaskans get ($1.84 for ever dollar) and, like Paul, promises to be an advocate for making his own constituents' lives much poorer. Mississippi gets back $2.02 for every dollar they send into the federal government in taxes and yet their politicians persuade them to "feel" oppressed by the federal government and over-taxed. In Alabama it's $1.66 back from every dollar they send in. In Louisiana it's $1.78 and in Virginia it's $1.51. Yet in all these states, the GOP is built on demonizing the federal government-- and instead of a strong and vigorous Democratic pushback, we find weak and craven Blue Dogs like Travis Childers (MS), Bobby Bright (AL), Glenn Nye (VA), and Charlie Melancon (LA), as well as arch-conservative Senator Mary Landrieu (LA) validating the absurd Republican propaganda. In West Virginia, where $1.00 in taxes yields a stupendous return of $1.76 in federal expenditures and subsidies, both extremely reactionary Senate candidates, Machin and Raese, are convinced that the key to winning is to denigrate Obama and the federal government. If the federal government stopped spending in West Virginia and left them to their own devices, there would be starvation in the streets and probably social upheaval.


Ohioans are excited that they may have, in John Boehner, the next Speaker of the House. So is China, who is helping to finance his attempt to seize control. China has far more reason to want this outcome than Ohio. Yesterday's Dayton Daily News, one of the two big newspapers in his district, asked the question most people there haven't thought much about in any substantive way-- other than "rah, rah, one of us"-- Would Are Be Helped If Boehner Is Speaker?.

The answer, of course, is a resounding NO. Boehner doesn't do anything for his district. His support of trade policies that have shipped tens of thousands of Ohio jobs to low wage countries-- at the behest of his backers in China, for example-- have destroyed manufacturing in his own district. His actions were key, for example, to the loss, 3 years ago, of thousands of jobs in Ohio's once-thriving paper industry. Smart Paper in OH-8 was forced to shed hundreds of jobs because of Boehner's refusal to back efforts to take on systematic dumping policies and currency manipulation by China, who are now rewarding him with millions of dollars funneled through the treasonous U.S. Chamber of Commerce into GOP campaigns.

Yet all that status and power won’t mean much to the Miami Valley, said Kelly Gillis, chairman of the Miami County Democrats. He said Boehner “won’t care about us” if he becomes speaker. “He doesn’t even care about his district. All he cares about is being speaker of the House.’’

Don’t look for him to change his policy on earmarks, however. Whether or not he becomes speaker, Boehner says he’ll continue refusing to insert into spending bills money for local projects.

His Democratic opponent, Justin Coussoule, said Boehner’s earmark policy has shortchanged his southwest Ohio district.

But Democrats-- for one reason or another-- seem to be in trouble, even in the bluest states and districts. In Massachusetts Barney Frank has been struggling with a teabagger counting on the ignorance of low information voters to get across what has become an out and out Republican attack on what's left of the New Deal and on the philosophical underpinnings behind it. Like so many Republicans this year-- and unlike so many Republicans in past years-- Frank's opponent, Sean Bielat, brazenly admits he wants to dismantle Social Security, long the secret GOP dream, the one that comes even before the establishment of serfdom.

Brookline’s Sean Bielat, the Republican challenger of longtime U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, said securing retirement benefits for future generations means increasing the retirement age for younger workers and placing portions of Social Security contributions into private investment accounts.

“If we’re going to be realistic about keeping Social Security solvent, and have a program that you and I can depend on in our retirement, we’ve got to make some significant changes,” said Bielat, in an interview with GateHouse Media on Thursday.

...Bielat’s proposal would allow taxpayers to put a portion of their Social Security contributions into private investment accounts, or the option of investing in government bonds. He balked at calling the proposal a “privatization of Social Security.”

“Maybe you’ll lose, maybe you’ll win, but at least you have a chance of getting more back. And if you think people are too dumb to make their own decisions, which is essentially the counter argument... You default the program into government bonds, which are considered zero risk,” said Bielat on Thursday.

The Democrats' ability to push back against Republicans for taking illegal foreign money and serving foreign masters-- as they attempt, rather weakly, in the video below-- is hampered by the Chamber spreading some of those illicit funds around to conservative Blue Dogs who also back Chinese and other foreign interests over American interests, specifically, Frank Kratovil (MD), Glenn Nye (VA), Travis Childers (MS), Jim Marshall (GA) and Bobby Bright (AL), all of whom the DCCC are running ads for, interspersed with the U.S. Chamber ads paid for with illicit yuan and rubles. Once again, the Democrats are thwarted in an attempt to stand up for ordinary working American families by their attempts to maintain a Big Tent holding ultra conservatives fighting against their very raison d'être.



The Washington Post story goes into some of the fears ginned up by Republicans that are afflicting low-information voters who haven't paid any attention to the GOP obstructionism since Obama has become president.

"I think the less the government governs us, the better we do," Norma Osuna, 48, said in a follow-up interview to the survey. A stay-at-home mother, she sees the country as going in a "socialistic" direction.

Nearly half of the 2,054 adults polled say the federal government threatens their personal liberties. There is a creeping sense-- now shared by one in five Americans-- that it is not possible for the federal government to be run well, given all the problems in the country.

The whole concept of rightists protecting personal liberties, which has become a mantra within the GOP, isn't just historically suspect. It's historically absurd. The right is by nature authoritarian in all ways short of allowing the rich to have the "freedom" to exploit the poor and the powerful the "liberty" to exploit the weak. This was brought into focus again why the Joshua Green exposé of a neo-Nazi GOP candidate, a party priority candidate in Ohio, Richard Iott, who is running against working family champion Marcy Kaptur. Forget for a minute that Iott love dressing up as a Waffen SS officer and participating in Nazi re-enactments. That kind of mindset is integral to Republicans; most just have the hood sense not to actually do it. What's interesting about Green's piece in The Atlantic was how the American right relates to the Nazi butchers and excuses their "excesses" since, like Republicans, they just wanted to "protect individual liberties and personal freedoms."

Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a "New and Free Europe," free of the threat of Communism. National Socialism was seen by many in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and other eastern European and Balkan countries as the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life, despite the true underlying totalitarian (and quite twisted, in most cases) nature of the movement. Regardless, thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free. 

Historians of Nazi Germany vehemently dispute this characterization. "These guys don't know their history," said Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., a retired history professor and author of "Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-45," which chronicles an SS division. "They have a sanitized, romanticized view of what occurred." Sydnor added that re-enactments like the Wiking group's are illegal in Germany and Austria. "If you were to put on an SS uniform in Germany today, you'd be arrested." 

The actual Wiking unit has a history as grisly as that of other Nazi divisions. In her book "The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945," Eleonore Lappin, the noted Austrian historian, writes that soldiers from the Wiking division were involved in the killing of Hungarian Jews in March and April 1945, before surrendering to American forces in Austria. 

"What you often hear is that the [Wiking] division was never formally accused of anything, but that's kind of a dodge," says Prof. Rob Citino, of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, who examined the Wiking website. "The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of 'subhumans,' Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That's what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend."

Although the embarrassed NRCC's bosses, Boehner, Cantor, McCarthy and Sessions, have purged Iott from their website since the story broke-- he's completely disappeared, like he never existed-- they have no problem proudly calling "Young Guns" those stalwart defenders of personal freedom (of men only), Tom Ganley, who attempted raping a volunteer in his campaign, a mother of four; David Rivera, who has a public record as a vicious woman beater; and Daniel Webster, who belongs to a cult that advocates stoning disobedient women (and gays) to death.