Too Much Wishful Thinking on Middle-Class Tax Rates

From Greg Mankiw, at the New York Times, "Wishful Thinking and Middle-Class Taxes":

IN the continuing fiscal negotiations between President Obama and House Republicans, both sides have, from the very beginning, agreed on one point: Taxes on the middle class must not rise. But maybe it’s time to reconsider this premise. An unwavering commitment to keep middle-class taxes low could be one reason the political process has become so deeply dysfunctional.

Let’s start with the problem: the budget deficit. Under current policy, the federal government is spending vastly more than it is collecting in tax revenue. And that will be true for the next several decades, thanks largely to the growth in entitlement spending that will occur automatically as the population ages and health care costs increase. As a result, the ratio of government debt to the nation’s gross domestic product is projected to rise, substantially and without an end in sight.

That can happen for a while, or even a long while, but not forever. At some point, investors at home and abroad will start questioning our ability to service our debts without creating steep inflation. It’s hard to say precisely when this shift in investor sentiment will occur, and even whether it will strike in this president’s term or the next, but when it does, it won’t be pretty. The United States will find itself at the brink of an unprecedented financial crisis.

Republicans and Democrats agree on the nature of the problem, but they embrace very different solutions. My fear is that both sides are engaged in an excess of wishful thinking, with a dash of mendacity.

If Republicans had their way, they would focus the entire solution on the spending side. They say that reform of the entitlement programs can reduce their cost. The so-called premium-support plan for Medicare, from Paul D. Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice-presidential candidate, would let older Americans use their health care dollars to buy insurance from competing private plans. (Interestingly, it’s similar to the system envisioned for the nonelderly by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.) The hope is that competition and choice would keep health care costs down without sacrificing quality.

The premium-support model may well be better than the current Medicare system, but its supporters oversell what it would be likely to accomplish. The primary driver of increasing health care costs over time is new technology, which extends and improves the quality of life, but often at high cost. Unless the pace or nature of medical innovation changes, this trend is likely to continue, regardless of structural reforms we enact for Medicare.

Democrats, meanwhile, want to preserve the social safety net pretty much as is. They balk at any attempt to reduce this spending, including even modest changes like altering the price index used to calculate Social Security benefits. They focus their attention on raising taxes on the most financially successful Americans, contending that the rich are not paying their “fair share.”

Fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately, people’s judgment is often based on anecdotes that distort rather than illuminate. The story of the undertaxed Warren Buffett and his overtaxed secretary looms larger in the public’s mind than it should.

Here are some facts, so you can judge for yourself....

Even if President Obama wins all the tax increases on the rich that he is asking for, the long-term fiscal picture will still look grim. Perhaps we can stabilize the situation for a few years just by taxing the rich, but as greater numbers of baby boomers retire and start collecting Social Security and Medicare, more will need to be done.

Continue reading (via Memeorandum).

RELATED: I'm for shrinking government, so this is the bottom line for me, at The Lonely Conservative, "People Should Pay For the Government They Voted For." Raise taxes. Go over the cliff.  I guarantee you that Obama won't get off cost-free. The real cost of the election will start biting people in the ass.

ObamaCare Medical Device Tax Will Deal Crushing Blow to Orange County Businesses

My previous report is here, "Democrats Seek Delay of ObamaCare Medical Device Tax."

And here's this at the Orange County Register, "A prescription that kills innovation":

No state will be more adversely effected than California by the 2.3 percent tax increase on medical devices, which the Obama administration expects to raise nearly $3 billion over the next decade.

Indeed, while the United States is the world leader in medical devices and diagnostics, the Golden State is by far the nation's leader, accounting for a fifth of total U.S. sales and employment.

The threat of the federal tax hike on medical devices will be especially damaging to Orange County, which is the hub of California's medical device and diagnostics sector. The sector accounts for more than $11 billion in economic activity within the county, according to life-science association BIOCOM Southern California. The average O.C. salary for those employed in the sector is $108,799.

The Medical Device Manufacturing Association points out that the Obamacare tax hike will be levied on a company's total revenues, regardless of whether it makes a profit.

That means that many companies will owe more in taxes than they generate from their operations.

As MDMA President and CEO Mark Leahy recently told lawmakers in the Nation's Capital, "We are already seeing the negative impact this onerous policy is having on jobs and innovation, and America's med-tech innovators can't afford to find out what implementation of the device tax would bring."

That's why we urge senators Feinstein and Boxer to add their voices to those of their fellow Democratic senators to delay, if not repeal altogether, the scheduled implementation of the innovation-killing tax hike on life-saving medical devices.

Clueless freakin' progs.

Stimulus Forecasts Show Obama Can't Blame GOP for Poor Economy

At IBD, "Obama's Attacks On GOP Tax Policy Blunted By Own Data":

President Obama continues to blame the soft economy and record red ink on Republican policies, including "tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans."

But three years ago he seemed convinced the economy had made a clean break from those old policies, and would soon roar back on the strength of his own policies. The proof is in his economic projections.

In his 2010 budget, Obama predicted his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would "jump-start our economy" and "create new jobs" and "many years of economic growth."

Stronger economic activity, he promised, would bring in more government revenues and "cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office," putting "our nation on sound fiscal footing."

"The time has come to usher in a new era — a new era of responsibility in which we act not only to save and create new jobs, but also to lay a new foundation of growth," the president said.

Didn't Deliver

His recovery plan included more than $1 trillion in new government spending. A Democrat-controlled Congress passed it without a single Republican vote.

Based on the new economic program, the White House forecast real GDP in 2012 would grow at a robust 4.6% clip, cutting the unemployment rate to 6.0%. It also saw the budget deficit dropping to 3.5% of the economy.

The projections didn't come even close to panning out. Real GDP growth has stagnated at 2%, while unemployment hovers near 8%. Far from being halved, the deficit had soared to 8.5% of GDP.

As the jobless rate soared to 10% — well beyond the promised 8% high point — the White House had to adjust its assumptions and timeline. In its 2012 budget, however, it still projected 4.0% economic growth.

Despite White House spin, it became clear the president's economic plan had failed to deliver on its promised stimulus.

They all knew this. Obama, David Axelrod, Stepanie Cutter --- they all knew all of this.

Which is why they lied 24/7 about the problems facing the country and launched the most unprincipled demagogic smears against private property and wealth accumulation in modern history. And it worked! I doubt four more years of economic stagnation will help the party maintain its general election majority, but then again, I was wrong about 2012, so who knows? Maybe another paradigm of lies will lift these criminal authoritarians to yet another presidential win in 2016. Democracy doesn't just collapse in one big instant, it withers away in the slow death of a thousand cuts. It's withering now under the Democrats, but all is not lost. The republic will survive when enough people who've been butt-reamed and had the wool pulled over their eyes wake up and scream, "I'm not going to take it anymore!"

'Who's Paying Your Salary?'

I actually flipped over to MSNBC late last night and caught part of this, and it was bizarre.

At NewsBusters, "Unhinged Chris Matthews Berates Conservative Guest 13 Times: 'Who's Paying Your Salary?'"

Democrats Seek Delay of ObamaCare Medical Device Tax

Hey, suck it up idiot progs.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Senate Democrats Seek Delay in Medical-Device Tax":

A group of 17 Democratic U.S. senators and senators-elect have signed a letter urging for a delay in implementing a tax on the medical-device industry that is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, said two people familiar with the matter.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, was addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and said the “the medical device industry has received little guidance about how to comply with the tax–causing significant uncertainty and confusion for businesses.” It requested a delay be included in the bill Congress is negotiating to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

The Democrats’ support could give new momentum to the industry’s intense lobbying campaign to repeal or delay the 2.3% tax on device sales, which companies say will hurt profits and lead to U.S. job losses. However, they face a battle because other Democrats, as well as the White House, oppose any postponement.

And see Geoffrey Norman, at the Weekly Standard, "Special Treatment."

Bill Whittle at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend 2012

This is fifteen minutes long and I only first found time for it yesterday during office hours. It's well worth it when you have a chance.

GOP Limits Union Power in Michigan

At the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Right-to-work legislation in Michigan puts labor unions on the defensive: A Closer Look."

More at The Lede, "Protesters Arrested Before Vote on Michigan Union Law." And at Memeorandum.

Campaign for America's Future, Top Democrat Activist Group, Launches Class-Warfare Website

In a stunning embrace of political terminology normally associated with political polarization and vile anti-Americanism, top Democrat Party activists, led by long time progressive leader Robert Borosage, have launched an initiative to push economic warfare against conservatives and Republicans. Aaron Klein reports, at WND, "Democrat Operatives Launch Class-Warfare Website":

A George Soros-funded radical think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party has launched a new website urging politicians and activists to wage class warfare while hailing what it calls a new era in politics – the use of class warfare to win elections.

WageClassWar.org was launched last week by the Campaign for America’s Future, or CAF.

CAF’s co-director, Robert Borosage, explained the need for such a website.

“America’s growing diversity and its increasingly socially liberal attitudes played a big role in this election. But looking back, we are likely to see this as the first of the class warfare elections of our new Gilded Age of extreme inequality,” he wrote in a statement.

“More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare – only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on,” he wrote.

Continued Borosage: “In 2012, candidates who supported the economic interests of the many over the few won their elections. Populism was the voice, but economic opportunity was the message. The pundits may wring their hands, but in the future it won’t be values voters, angry white men or soccer moms that win elections. It will be class war.”

The website does not feature a mission statement and is unclear about exactly how the group will go about attempting to wage class warfare.

The site explains how Obama’s 2012 campaign utilized class warfare and set the stage for the deployment of such tactics in future elections.

Continue reading Klein's report here.

But readers can go right to the website, which features Borosage's introductory exhortation for the progressive class-warfare agenda, "Waging Class War":

Needless to say, Obama is neither by temperament nor predilection a populist class warrior. But faced with potential defeat, he turned to what works. The depths of the Obama presidency came in the summer of 2011 after the debt ceiling debacle, in which the president was roughed up by Tea Party zealots, and emerged looking weak and ineffective.

Obama came back by deciding to stop seeking back-room compromises with people intent on destroying him and to start making his case. In the fall, he put out the American Jobs Act and stumped across the country demanding that Republicans vote on it. His standing in the polls began to rise. Then Occupy Wall Street exploded, driving America’s extreme inequality and rigged system into the debate. In December, the president embraced the frame: He traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, revisiting a campaign stop Teddy Roosevelt had made in the first Gilded Age. He indicted the “you’re on your own” economics of Republicans while arguing that “this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

In the run-up to the election, the president’s campaign employed two basic strategies. First, the president consolidated his own coalition. He defended contraception and pay equity while his campaign attacked the Republican “war on women.” He reached out to Hispanics by ending the threat of deportation for the Dream kids. He not only ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but also moved to embrace gay marriage. Widely described as socially liberal measures, these were also profoundly bread-and-butter concerns. Could women choose when to have children? Could Hispanic children be free to pursue the American dream? Could gay people gain the economic benefits of marriage?

At the same time, the president’s campaign made a risky but remarkably successful decision. Their opinion research showed that painting Romney as a flip-flopper had little traction, but the attacks on vulture capitalism hit home. They decided to spend big money early in such key states as Ohio on a negative ad barrage defining Romney as the heartless vulture capitalist from Bain. Both campaigns believe that Romney never recovered.

And the conclusion to Borosage's declaration of war:

More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare — only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on. Politicians in both parties are now hearing CEOs telling them that it is time for a deal that cuts Medicare and Social Security benefits in exchange for tax reform that lowers rates and closes loopholes. Before they take that advice, they might just want to look over their shoulders at what will be coming at them.

This is very useful, for it puts the lie to the left's own words that this president was going to heal the country's divisions and govern as a post-partisan leader amid the emergence of transcendent progressive benevolence. There have been so many lies over the last few years, but this is one of the biggest, now actually embraced by top Democrats as a badge of honor and a program to destroy the enemy.

This is also useful as a reminder of just how far left the mainstream of the Democrat Party has moved. Here's the Borosage entry at Discover the Networks:

A former New Left radical and onetime Director of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Robert Borosage co-founded (with Roger Hickey) both the Campaign for America’s Future and the Institute for America’s Future. He also founded and currently chairs the Progressive Majority Political Action Committee, the activist arm of a political networking organization whose aim is to help elect as many leftist political leaders as possible. In addition, he is a contributing editor at The Nation magazine and a regular contributor to The American Prospect.

Borosage attended Yale Law School and earned a graduate degree in International Affairs from George Washington University. In 1974 he established the Center for National Security Studies, a civil rights / civil liberties organization that regularly accuses the CIA and the FBI of rampant abuses.

From 1979 to 1988 Borosage was Director of the Institute for Policy Studies. In 1988 he left IPS to work on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, for which he served as a speechwriter and an assistant in framing responses to policy issues.

Borosage also has worked for such political figures as Senators Paul Wellstone, Barbara Boxer, and Carol Moseley-Braun.

In 1989 Borosage founded the Campaign for New Priorities, which called for decreased federal spending on the military and greater allocations for social welfare programs.

In 1996 Borosage and Roger Hickey co-founded the Campaign for America's Future (CAF), and three years later they established a sister organization, the Institute for America's Future (IAF).

Each year, CAF holds a “Take Back America” conference which the organization describes as “a catalyst for building the infrastructure to ensure that the voice of the progressive majority is heard.” Speaking at one such event in Los Angeles in June 2001, Borosage characterized President George W. Bush’s policies as a mélange of “tax cuts for the wealthy,” “arsenic in the water,” and “salmonella in the food”....

In a November 2002 L.A. Weekly article, The Nation editor David Corn quoted what Borosage had said backstage during a recent anti-war rally sponsored by International A.N.S.W.E.R. According to Corn, Borosage stated: "This [rally] is easy to dismiss as the radical fringe, but it holds the potential for a larger movement down the road…. History shows that protests are organized first by militant, radical fringe parties and then get taken over by more centrist voices as the movement grows. They provide a vessel for people who want to protest."

Backstage at an A.N.S.W.E.R. rally? International ANSWER is the residual protest arm of the Stalinist World Workers Party. It's been on the leading edge of the most radical left wing agitation since the early George W. Bush administration. There are all kinds of interlocking ties between groups like this and the mainstream of the Democrat Party, although President Obama and institutional Democrats have long attempted to mainstream their activities and distance themselves from the revolutionary shock troops.

Here's more background, on the founding contingents of the Campaign for America's Future:

Approximately 130 people played a role in co-founding the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) in 1996. Among these individuals were: Mary Frances Berry, Julian Bond, Heather Booth, Robert Borosage (co-founder), John Cavanagh, Richard Cloward, Jeff Cohen, Ken Cook, Peter Dreier, Barbara Ehrenreich, Betty Friedan, Todd Gitlin, Heidi Hartmann, Tom Hayden, Denis Hayes, Roger Hickey (co-founder), Patricia Ireland, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Steve Max, Gerald McEntee, Harold Meyerson, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Reich, Mark Ritchie, Arlie Schardt, Susan Shaer, Andrew Stern, John Sweeney, and Richard Trumka. To view the full list of co-founders, click here.

It's also useful to troll around over at the CAF website, where one finds Borosage agitating on the current fiscal cliff negotiations, "The Grand Betrayal":

The battle lines are being drawn. The AFL-CIO, SEIU and AFSCME have announced labor’s opposition to cuts in entitlement programs and to continued tax cuts for the rich. Groups representing the base of the Democratic Party—from African-Americans to Latinos, women and the young—are lining up around a four-point program calling for jobs first; protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; letting the top-end Bush tax cuts expire; and protecting programs for the vulnerable.

Reaching no deal is preferable to a bad one that cuts entitlements. Going over the so-called fiscal cliff is perilous, but probably preferable to a bargain under the terms currently in play. With no agreement, the Bush tax cuts would expire. In January the Senate would immediately push to revive the lower rates for everyone but the top 2 percent. Republicans could vote for tax cuts, but rates at the top would rise. The automatic spending cuts would not kick in immediately (although the stock market might feel the hit quickly). But the thing to remember about failure to reach a deal before January is that Medicare, Social Security and many programs for the most vulnerable are shielded from the cuts. And the new Congress would likely act rapidly to reverse the cuts to military and domestic spending. The already faltering recovery would surely weaken, threatening the loss of more jobs. But that might force Congress to address the real crisis—jobs and growth—rather than court a ruinous austerity.

Whatever the outcome, the battle is likely to be only the first skirmish of a defining struggle over the future of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. We’ve just had what might be called the first of a new era of class-warfare elections. The plutocracy ran one of their own, on their agenda and with their money. The American people’s rejection of Mitt Romney, despite the lousy economy, demonstrated the declining appeal of the conservative, trickle-down agenda. The budget debate will draw battle lines within the Democratic Party, between the Wall Street–dominated New Democratic wing and the progressive wing fighting for the change this country desperately needs.

We are headed into a new era of upheaval. Our money-soaked politics may suffocate growing demands for change. But if Democratic legislators join the president in a grand betrayal, they may witness a powerful Tea Party movement from the left, as Republican legislators have from the right.

Well, the battle lines are being drawn alright.

But remember, as Rush Limbaugh warned, the politics of the fiscal cliff aren't really about fiscal policy. They're about destroying the Republican Party. This Wage Class War initiative just comes right out in the open with it, which is good. Let's not pretend that Americans are one country with a few minor differences on the margins. We're indeed in a political war for the survival of the America that we grew up with, one, in my lifetime, marked by decency in overcoming oppression, and in expanding political and economic opportunity to growing numbers. But progressives don't care about any of that. They have been taken over by the most radical elements of the '60s counter-culture and New Left revolutionary cadres. These are Marxist-Leninists in suits. Their man is now in office for a second term after having bludgeoned the so-called political embodiment of corporate power, GOP nominee Mitt Romney --- a man who was wholly unprepared for the onslaught of progressive blood libel and demonization that was thrown down throughout the campaign.

So conservatives can just suck it up and man the ramparts for the battles that are coming. The left's isn't even pretending to hide its program of fundamental transformation of the country, enunciated so well and violently by top Democrat Party hack Robert Borosage and his fellow subversives of the progressive movement.

Unaffordable Cost Seen for Some Under Affordable Care Act

We're seeing report after report on just how disastrous this legislation is, at Bloomberg, for example:

To Megan Hildebrandt, President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act means she can no longer be denied health insurance because of her lymphatic cancer.
There’s a big catch: Coverage for the 28-year-old artist and many other Americans without insurance will come at a potentially unaffordable cost.

Hildebrandt, who relies on hospital charity, will face more than $1,000 in annual premiums, by one estimate, and probably more in out-of-pocket expenses even with new federal subsidies. She and her husband have a combined income of $25,000.

“It’s great that I’m not going to have to pay some hugely impossible amount,” said Hildebrandt, who lives in Austin, Texas. “Though now I’m in the health-care system and still have to pay money that we can’t really afford.”

The landmark health-care law, which survived the threats of repeal and a Supreme Court review, now confronts another hurdle: living up to expectations. As the administration spells out the details, many uninsured will be surprised at how much they will have to pay. It may involve “very substantial amounts,” and “there still will be a significant number of people who can’t afford health coverage,” said Ron Pollack, head of Families USA, a consumer group that backs the law.

A family of four earning $75,000 will pay $7,125 in annual premiums and as much as $8,333 in co-pays and deductibles, according to a preliminary estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation. A single 40-year-old earning $30,000 will pay $2,509 in premiums and as much as $3,125 in cost sharing. For a 60- year-old making $40,000, the amount will be $3,800 in premiums and up to $4,167 in out-of-pocket costs, according to Kaiser.

I vaguely remember (snark!) how the president kept claiming that costs would go down. Maybe they will, although meanwhile untold numbers of Americans will be driven from their homes by mandatory costs imposed by faceless ObamaCare bureaucrats in Washington. What a f-king monstrosity.

Continue reading at the link.

Republicans and the Hispanic Vote

Two articles getting some attention: Kim Strassel, at the Wall Street Journal, "The GOP Turnout Myth," and Byron York, at the Washington Examiner, "Hispanics favor Dems but didn't decide election."

I don't think Hispanics are naturally conservative (as Charles Krauthammer argued recently, erroneously), although I do think that Republicans can pick up enough Hispanics to reduce the Democrat electoral advantage in key swing states. Strassel's essay points that out:

In Florida, 238,000 more Hispanics voted than in 2008, and Mr. Obama got 60% of Hispanic voters. His total margin of victory in Florida was 78,000 votes, so that demographic alone won it for him. Or consider Ohio, where Mr. Romney won independents by 10 points. The lead mattered little, though, given that black turnout increased by 178,000 votes, and the president won 96% of the black vote. Mr. Obama's margin of victory there was 103,000.

This is the demographic argument that is getting so much attention, and properly so. The Republican Party can hope that a future Democratic candidate won't equal Mr. Obama's magnetism for minority voters. But the GOP would do far better by fighting aggressively for a piece of the minority electorate.

And that, for the record, was the GOP's real 2012 turnout disaster. Elections are about the candidate and the message, yes, but also about the ground game. Republicans right now are fretting about Mr. Romney's failures and the party's immigration platform—that's fair enough. But equally important has been the party's mind-boggling failure to institute a competitive Hispanic ground game. The GOP doesn't campaign in those communities, doesn't register voters there, doesn't knock on doors. So while pre-election polling showed that Hispanics were worried about Obama policies, in the end the only campaign that these voters heard from—by email, at their door, on the phone—was the president's.

Often missed in talk of the GOP's "demographics problem" is that it would take relatively modest minority-voter shifts toward Republicans to return the party to a dominating force. The GOP might see that as the enormous opportunity it is, rather than a problem. The key to winning turnout is having more people to turn out in the first place.

Katie Pavlich Analyzes GOP's Electoral Prospects

An interesting discussion, and note that Pavlich eschews the Democrat Hispanic realignment thesis.

RELATED: At Legal Insurrection, "Demography Schmemography."

The Current American Electorate Is Hardly Stacked Against the Republican Party

An encouraging piece from left-wing polling guru Andrew Kohut, at the Wall Street Journal, "Misreading Election 2012":

Despite their weak candidate, Republicans increased their share of the presidential vote among many major demographic groups. Compared with 2008, they made significant gains among men (four percentage points), whites (four points), younger voters (six points), white Catholics (seven points) and Jews (nine points). Mr. Romney also carried the independent vote 50% to 45%. Four years ago, independents voted for Mr. Obama 52% to 44%.

Republicans can take some solace from these gains. In addition, only 43% of voters this year said they wanted an activist government (compared with 52% in 2008), and 49% continued to disapprove of Mr. Obama's health-care law (compared with 44% approving).

In short, the current American electorate is hardly stacked against the Republican Party. But Republicans should recognize that, on balance, Americans remain moderate—holding a mix of liberal and conservative views. They generally believe that small government is better and that ObamaCare is bad. But the exit poll shows that 59% believe abortion should be legal, 65% support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and a surprising plurality support legalizing same-sex marriage in their states.

Threading the ideological needle with this electorate is vital for the Republicans in the future—and for the Democrats, too.

There's still a lot of work to do, but I think digging down into the data will help Republicans (if not conservatives) grapple with their loss last week. That said, I think spirits are still pretty depressed on the right, so it's going to take a lot more than a few poll analyses for a lot of folks to snap out of it. Of course, this Petraeus scandal is dramatically weakening the credibility of Obama's reelection, so there's promise not only in congressional investigations, but in the invigoration of the grassroots against the historically corrupt administration. People gotta start taking this country back. It can be done and it will be done.

Image Problem: Cathy McMorris Rodgers Says GOP Needs to Become 'More Modern'

This is interesting.

McMorris Rodgers is making the case for better salesmanship, or "saleswomanship," as the case may be.

At The Hill, "McMorris Rodgers: GOP needs to be more ‘modern’ not ‘moderate’":

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) on Sunday said the GOP didn’t need to adopt “more moderate” positions, but rather needed to become “more modern” by being better inclusive of women and minorities.

“I don't think it's about the Republican Party needing to become more moderate. I really believe it's the Republican Party becoming more modern,” said McMorris Rodgers, during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

More at the link.

Former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, seen at the longer clip at the link, is having none of it. He blusters about how moderate vs. modern is "a distinction without a difference."

Right.

My sense is that McMorris Rodgers is hesitant to sell out conservative values --- she's been a leader on fiscal conservatism in Congress --- and wants to make the case for the better articulation of conservative principles. I don't know if the "modern" argument is the winner, but ether way, adopting "moderate" positions will only strengthen progressivism. This is the left's meme since the election, that the GOP is extremist, although it's just more of the same "Operation Demoralize," only of the post-campaign variety.

2012 Election Marks a Political Realignment

Here's more along the lines I argued the other day, at the Los Angeles Times, "Nonwhite voters and cultural shifts make 2012 election pivotal":

The 2012 election marked the point at which a new American electoral coalition solidified its hold on politics, one built on the country's growing nonwhite population and on cultural changes that have given younger voters of all races a far different outlook on political issues from that of their elders.

The impact could be seen not just in Obama's reelection and Democratic successes in the Senate, but also in statewide referendums on same-sex marriage in which advocates of equal rights for gays and lesbians unexpectedly won four out of four. In 2004, conservatives put marriage referendums on the ballot in hopes of boosting their prospects; just eight years later, the political impact had completely reversed.

If the new coalition holds, future historians will look back at this campaign as one, like Franklin D. Roosevelt's in 1936 and Richard M. Nixon's in 1972, that marked a long-term realignment of the nation's politics.

If it holds. One enormous difference separates Obama's reelection from Roosevelt's and Nixon's: Those were landslides; Obama won narrowly. Millions of votes remain uncounted, but the president's victory margin probably will be about 2.5 percentage points. Nor did he succeed in carrying large numbers of House candidates into office with him.

That difference measures the enormous weight of a poor economy, which pulled down Obama's prospects and imperils the support he assembled.

"One way to interpret this involves changing cultural values and demographics. When those things come together, you get these pivot elections, and that's what this was," said UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck.

But "the economy is a huge thing here," she added. The economy this year grew just fast enough for a candidate with the advantage of incumbency to win. "If it doesn't grow more quickly, the Republicans will win in 2016," she said.

As noted, the thing about realignments is that the evidence for them is in future elections. If the GOP takes back the presidency in 2016, or even 2020, the current Democrat resurgence will look like a function of a particular time and a particular candidate --- not a long term secular trend toward large-state progressive governance. It sure does look like something deeper and structural, no doubt. But Republicans still control the governorships in a majority of the states, and they retained control of the U.S. House of Representatives. We won't be seeing Democrat Party hegemony in government, which is the true hallmark of realignment. And we're still too polarized around competing conceptions of the role of government in society. That's quite different from the years of the New Deal realignment, where government continued to expand even during the 1950s under President Eishenhower.

Data Show Tectonic Shifts

I've been using the concept of plate tectonics in my discussions of Tuesday's elections. I'm seeing the term thrown out elsewhere as well, although I think it's better to really get a handle on the scope of things before jettisoning the demographic narrative outright, as some on the right are suggesting. That's not to say folks should cave to the left's demographics-is-destiny thesis. These idiots will call you racist no matter what you do. The point is to consider the real demonstrable shifts that are taking place. Here's this, from the Wall Street Journal, to that end, "Vote Data Show Changing Nation":

President Barack Obama's election victory exposed tectonic demographic shifts in American society that are reordering the U.S. political landscape.

The 2012 presidential election likely will be remembered as marking the end of long-standing coalitions, as voters regroup in cultural, ethnic and economic patterns that challenge both parties—but especially Republicans.

Older voters and white working-class voters, once core elements of the Democratic Party, have drifted into the Republican column. Rural and small-town voters, whose grandparents backed the New Deal, now fill the swath of the U.S. that leans reliably GOP.

But in cities and dynamic suburbs, a rapidly growing force of Latinos, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and higher-income whites emerged this week as the strength of Mr. Obama's winning Democratic coalition.

"The Democrats now own a coalition of emerging metro areas where the whites and minorities live together, and where they vote Democratic," said Robert Lang, a demographer who directs the Brookings Mountain West, a research center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In northern Virginia's Fairfax County, for example, Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly represents a district where 20 years ago, he said, 3% of residents were born outside the U.S. Now, it is nearly 30%, with the majority Asian immigrants.

Mr. Obama won big there Tuesday, helping him to tally the once reliably Republican state of Virginia for the second straight general election.

Similar shifts throughout the U.S. help explain how Mr. Obama was returned to the White House on support from young people, minorities, women and upscale whites, a coalition virtually identical to the one that carried him to victory four years ago.

Some political analysts thought that coalition came together only because of the historic nature of Mr. Obama's 2008 victory and wouldn't prove durable. That belief didn't hold up this week.

The question now is whether Mr. Obama and other members of his party can solidify this coalition into a foundation of the Democratic Party.

Republicans said their party won a smashing victory in congressional elections just two years ago, when they took control of the House of Representatives, illustrating that there is no clear claim for either party.

The 2010 election, they said, shows that even with modest inroads among Latino and Asian-American voters, the GOP can build a solid majority on the foundation of its strong white support. Republicans enjoy historically high levels of control over governorships and state legislatures, which they say shows the party's potential if it can improve its message to minorities.

In any case, both Democrats and Republicans see new contours of a split electorate.

I've placed in bold a key point I raised as well, in my essay, "Democrat Partisan Relignment."

More later...

Against Despair

From Jonah Goldberg, at National Review:

I’ll be blunt: I do not think Mitt Romney ran a good campaign. Don’t get me wrong, I think he worked his heart out as did many who worked for him. I think he made himself into the best candidate he could (which is different from saying he was a great candidate). But I also think that Romney’s theory of the contest was wrong. As I wrote at the time, the Republican convention was a mess. I think Romney strategist Stu Stevens’s contempt for ideas — never mind conservative ideas — was absurd. I think the failure of the Romney campaign to offer a compelling explanation of any kind (at least until the second debate) for how it wasn’t a third Bush term was fatal (as I discussed here and elsewhere). Politics is about persuasion. And persuasion requires making serious arguments. Stevens, by all accounts, has contempt for serious arguments.

None of this means that all of the talk about changing demographics and long-term structural challenges for the GOP is without merit. I have strong views about all of that as well.

In fact, I have a different view from some about the coming wave of recriminations: I welcome it. I don’t know that things need to be vicious or personal, but they do need to be honest. And honesty requires we say things that may feel personal to our friends. This is one of the great and abiding strengths of the conservative movement and the thing I love about it most. Contrary to the conventional wisdom among liberals, conservatives are actually far more willing to examine their dogma and their first principles than liberals or “centrists” are. This has been the source of conservatism’s lasting strength.

It’s going to take a while to sort through this mess...

I like that part about Mitt's seriously flawed campaign.

I said so much in September, although Mitt's debate performances were excellent (even the third debate, which Bill O'Reilly pegged as weak and costing Romney the election, which is absurd).

But read Goldberg's piece in full, at the link.

Democrat Partisan Realignment

Sometime early this morning it dawned on me that the Democrats are consolidating a partisan realignment in American politics. It's not a full realignment --- the party would need unified control of Congress for that --- but the demographic shifts are so substantive, and the Tuesday victory so decisive, that there's no doubt that some tectonic movement is at work in today's polity.

So cruising around the web today I've seen folks hinting at a realignment here and there. Mostly it's in the raft of horrible dread that's been plaguing movement conservatives, which I noticed first on Twitter and then more lastingly at Memeorandum. Among those found in the latter category is Ross Douthat's piece at Campaign Stops, "The Obama Realignment":

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.

The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.

But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

There were plenty of both during the president’s first term....

But the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.

Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year. In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era. Romney’s final month of campaigning was nearly flawless, though. His debate performances were the best by any Republican since Reagan and he will go down in history as one of the few losing challengers to claim a late lead in the polls. A weak nominee in many ways, he was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn’t particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012.

Read the whole thing.

Interestingly, that's exactly my argument, that Romney ran a flawed campaign for most of the year but came on like lightning in the last month. It was very close in the end, but the Democrats outperformed all expectations, and that's after Obama got some political wind at his back ---- really big wind, in fact ---- from Hurricane Sandy.

And the part about not understanding the nature of the Obama beast echoes Jonathan Tobin's penetrating comments from last night.

But the real test of realigning elections --- and realignment theory --- is historical sweep. Folks might be awestruck now at the commanding Democrat victory last night, but the proof of partisan hegemony comes in future elections. The New Deal Coalition that began with FDR's 1932 election lasted nearly uninterrupted until 1968. Only Eisenhower's two terms in the 1950s punctuated nearly 35 years of Democrat Party dominance of the executive branch. And it wasn't until the GOP took majorities in both chambers of Congress in 1994 that the Democrats' half-century legislative dominance was crushed. I'll have more on the demographics of the vote in the next few days. There's no doubt that the share of the conservative white ethnic vote is declining as a powerful force in the overall electorate. An urban progressive voter-of-color coalition has propelled the Democrats to a second term in the White House. It's simply astonishing to so many, and literally soul-crushing for movement conservatives. But it is what it is. There are cycles in American politics, so I'm not one to lose faith whatsoever. The political and economic system literally can't sustain for long the kind of policies the Obama administration has been pushing. The outstanding debt alone is now more than 100 percent of GDP. These are systemic changes to the political economy and the bills are going to come due. Democrats won't be able to deal with them effectively. Conservative realists of the tea party stripe are the only ones currently grasping the enormity of the situation, and people like this made some good showings in yesterday's results. I'll have more on some of those local deviations from the Democrat juggernaut later. The key thing will be whether Obama indeed moderates his extreme partisanship and works cooperatively to solve problems. He needs to be more like Bill Clinton than Franklin Roosevelt. If he's able to shift the party toward rational macroeconomic reforms he'll perhaps pave the way to greater economic prosperity for the nation and another term or two for the Democrats at the helm of the executive branch. This is bitter tonic for conservatives to swallow. But it's going to take a midterm election cycle before folks on the right will have a real sense of where they stand in this new landscape of Democrat consolidation. Tuesday's election was historic. But it wasn't the first time that the ground gave way beneath the parties. Things could well swing back toward the Republicans, sooner rather than later.

More on all of this later...

After Loss, GOP Faces Struggle Over Party's Direction

At the New York Times, "Republicans Face Struggle Over Party’s Direction":

Mitt Romney’s loss to a Democratic president wounded by a weak economy is certain to spur an internecine struggle over the future of the Republican Party, but the strength of the party’s conservatives in Congress and the rightward tilt of the next generation of party leaders could limit any course correction.

With their party on the verge of losing the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, Republicans across the political spectrum anticipate a prolonged and probably divisive period of self-examination.

The coming debate will be centered on whether the party should keep pursuing the antigovernment focus that grew out of resistance to the health care law and won them the House in 2010, or whether it should focus on a strategy that recognizes the demographic tide running strongly against it.

“There will be some kind of war,” predicted Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican Party consultant, suggesting it would pit “mathematicians” like him, who argue that the party cannot keep surrendering the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger voters and college-educated women, against the party purists, or “priests,” as he puts it, who believe that basic conservative principles can ultimately triumph without much deviation.

Continue reading.

Actually this isn't a new war. The coming battle will be a repeat of the "internecine" struggles from the 2008 loss, when John McCain was widely seen as a floundering candidate and over-accommodating moderate. Romney will be attacked in like fashion to a large extent, although I think the ticket's last month of the campaign was absolutely dialed in. It's too bad Romney couldn't have campaigned like that since wrapping up the nomination.

Oh well...