Turning Their Own Right Wing Extremism Against The Republican Party

If we lived in a completely rational world, Paul Krugman's spectacular Sunday column, The Real Referendum would translate to the congressional races and there basically wouldn't be any more Republicans outside of the Old Confederacy. The world, I'm sure you've noticed, isn't completely rational. Still, as he says, "Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as 'collectivist' (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for their lives?"

And Krugman answers his own question by pointing to the polls which are uniformly-- yes, even Fox's and Rasmussen's-- auguring "a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age."

Interestingly enough, Public Campaign and Democracy Corps. put out a poll yesterday that clearly shows that voters, from all across the partisan spectrum, are intensely concerned about the corruption of our democratic system by big donations... and that they're willing to vote their displeasure with politicians who seem the most corrupt. Speaking of the key battleground districts, pollster Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps, said that "the incumbents in these districts are vulnerable and their opponents would be wise to run against them by linking their policies to special interest cash and championing reform and transparency." Here are the key findings:

• By more than a two-to-one margin, voters believe there is a corrupting quid pro quo at stake in big campaign donations to Super PACs. More than half of all voters favor replacing large political donations with small donations and limited public funding, and it measured strongly (62.9) on a thermometer scale. Voters choose limiting Super PACs and small-donor public financing over getting “government out of the business of regulating how people contribute” by a two-to-one margin (60-30 percent).

• Voters will take this to the ballot box for candidates who are willing to run against big money. By an overwhelming 58-point margin (78 percent to 20 percent) voters say it is important that their candidates for Congress come up with a plan to dramatically reduce the amount of money in politics and Super PACs.

• Voters believe big money has an impact on policy choices and they are willing to punish candidates who put big funders’ interests ahead of voters. Specifically, taking insurance money and voting for the Ryan budget that turns Medicare into a voucher program is strikingly powerful in persuading voters of all political stripes.

• Two thirds (64 percent) say our current system undermines democracy because big donors and secret money control which candidates we hear about. By contrast, just 29 percent believe that in the end it is the voters who get to decide.

This is especially perfect information for Congress' most egregiously corrupt members, Like David "The Gangster" Rivera (R-FL), Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY) and Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), all three involved in one sordid corruption scandal after another, several that involve organized crime. McKeon, for example is still reeling from a report from Darrell Issa's congressional committee that proves he took bribes from Countrywide in the form of a special VIP mortgage deal, when, he got clobbered by the FEC for violating campaign finance laws and was fined $4,600. (Brazenly, he paid the fine with donors' money.) McKeon kept the fine secret but the information is available in the public FEC files. McKeon's opponent, Lee Rogers, pointed that that “FEC reports assure transparency for campaigns. The public needs to know who is donating money to the candidate and who is receiving money from the campaigns. But donors give money to candidates expecting that they’ll use it for campaigning. They don’t expect it to be used on fines for violating the law. McKeon has a pattern of using donor money for expenses not related to campaigning. He’s given away thousands to support Proposition 8 and for the legal defense fund of former Representative Tom Delay, who was found guilty of money laundering.”

McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, takes more money from arms manufacturers and war contractors than any other two Members of the House combined. In return, he is the chief proponent of their corporate agendas (more profits at the expense of taxpayers). In D.C., McKeon is widely considered Congress' biggest porker and most profligate spender, quite a clash with the image he's tried to build for himself back in his district. The ultra-conservative Madison Project, which only supports Republicans, gave McKeon a failing grade and named him to their Hall of Shame in no uncertain terms: "In his 19 years in the House, McKeon has been a consistent vote for big government and spending. In 2011, he voted for all the debt and spending bills and against the RSC budgets and spending cuts. In past years, he voted for Cash for Clunkers, TARP, and the Freddie/Fannie bailout. Throughout his tenure on the Education Committee, McKeon has been a strong supporter of federal involvement in education... [H]is record on fiscal issues is terrible." 

Now let's go back to that Paul Krugman column we were looking at up top. The real point was to talk about the Austerity Agenda Republicans like McKeon are pushing and the so-called "Grand Bargain" that conservatives are hoping to move through Congress between the elections and the seating of the new Congress-- during the lame duck session. Krugman referred to it as "a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that [Obama] immediately return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls-- as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention-- for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole)." The clamor will come primarily from the most corrupt members of the political elite, the two party Beltway Establishments and the Members, like McKeon, most beholden to special interests who want to balance the budget on the backs on working families without risking their own sacred cows being gored. Krugman is urging Obama to just say NO-- and for 3 reasons.

First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis. Indeed, U.S. borrowing costs are at historic lows, with investors actually willing to pay the government for the privilege of owning inflation-protected bonds. So reducing the budget deficit just isn’t the top priority for America at the moment; creating jobs is. For now, the administration’s political capital should be devoted to passing something like last year’s American Jobs Act and providing effective mortgage debt relief.

Second, contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, America does not have an “entitlements problem.” Mainly, it has a health cost problem, private as well as public, which must be addressed (and which the Affordable Care Act at least starts to address). It’s true that there’s also, even aside from health care, a gap between the services we’re promising and the taxes we’re collecting-- but to call that gap an “entitlements” issue is already to accept the very right-wing frame that voters appear to be in the process of rejecting.

Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders-- the same people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave truth-teller-- the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one that would undermine some key pieces of our safety net. And if a re-elected president were to endorse it, he would be betraying the trust of the voters who returned him to office.

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves-- but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated-- the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

Now, there’s no mystery about why Simpson-Bowles looks the way it does. It was put together in a political environment in which progressives, and even supporters of the safety net as we know it, were very much on the defensive-- an environment in which conservatives were presumed to be in the ascendant, and in which bipartisanship was effectively defined as the effort to broker deals between the center-right and the hard right.

Barring an upset, however, that environment will come to an end on Nov. 6. This election is, as I said, shaping up as a referendum on our social insurance system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear mandate for preserving and extending that system. It would be a terrible mistake, both politically and for the nation’s future, for him to let himself be talked into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

That's a clear call to replace backers of Austerity-- basically Voodoo Economics-- with supporters of what we call Prosperity Economics based on Growth. Here are 16 Democrats who have campaigned on protecting working families from the ravages of the Austerity agenda, running against miscreants like Paul Ryan, Buck McKeon, Patrick McHenry, Joe Pitts, Ed Royce, and Mike Rogers, none of whom are being targeted by their friendly DCCC faux adversaries.