Blogs: Rick Perlstein

Must read post of the day

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:22:07 -0400

Over at Hullabaloo, DDay writes brilliantly about an emerging conservative strategy: framking Barack Obama a scary, because he's popular.

Like, you know, Hitler was popular.

As DDay eloquently explains, it fits perfectly with the conservative horror at mass political participation. You know, what's known, in other contexts, as "democracy."

Let them eat toxins

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:02:25 -0400

Tom's new book is one of those brilliant hammers that makes everything you see after you read it look like a nail. Such as, perusing the morning news, this:

Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers' on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.

The agency did not disclose the proposal, as required, in public notices of regulatory plans that it filed in December and May. Instead, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao's intention to push for the rule first surfaced on July 7, when the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted on its Web site that it was reviewing the proposal, identified only by its nine-word title.

The text of the proposed rule has not been made public, but according to sources briefed on the change and to an early draft obtained by The Washington Post, it would call for reexamining the methods used to measure risks posed by workplace exposure to toxins. The change would address long-standing complaints from businesses that the government overestimates the risk posed by job exposure to chemicals.

The rule would also require the agency to take an extra step before setting new limits on chemicals in the workplace by allowing an additional round of challenges to agency risk assessments.
ad_icon

The department's speed in trying to make the regulatory change contrasts with its reluctance to alter workplace safety rules over the past 7 1/2 years. In that time, the department adopted only one major health rule for a chemical in the workplace, and it did so under a court order. ...

That's another sort of maneuver that we'll learn, working our way through The Wrecking Crew, is baked into the cake of conservative "governance." Recently one of the small group of conservative friends I debate with online argued that the only truly admirable member of Bush's cabinet is Elaine Chao. This sort of thing is the reason why. If you're a conservative, stuff like this means she's doing her job.

Let them eat rubble

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:52:50 -0400

Bipartisan Push to Fix Infrastructure Horrifies Conservatives

Iraq is still a dangerous place, which is presumably why Chuck Hagel tagged along on Barack Obama's trip to the war zone. The danger is not from insurgents but that the Chicago wunderkind might say or do something that reinforces his image as a lightweight on national security issues. Being a Republican from Nebraska and a Vietnam War vet, Mr. Hagel is supposed to give Mr. Obama cover on the right. Some are even whispering his name as a possible Veep choice.

But that's not the only thing drawing them together. If Mr. Hagel ever had any free-market bona fides that could have helped balance the left-leaning track record of the Illinois Senator, they were lost long ago. In fact, both Senators believe in an ever-expanding role of the federal government in our lives. Exhibit A is their shared philosophy that what America lacks right now is a "national infrastructure bank."

All we need, says Mr. Obama on his Web site, is a big "infusion of federal money, $60 billion over 10 years," to finance projects and the bank will be able to "create" two million new jobs. Now why didn't anyone else think of that? The government funnels billions of dollars into pork barrel and job growth takes off.

To be fair, someone else did think of it. It was Mr. Hagel, together with Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, who authored a Senate bill that would create such a bank. Also claiming co-parentage during the campaign was Hillary Clinton, evidently irritated that Mr. Obama was pitching the idea as his own. "I'm proud to co-sponsor Senator Dodd and Senator Hagel's National Infrastructure Bank Act that we just introduced to establish a federally-backed independent bank that will evaluate and finance large infrastructure projects by subsidies, loan guarantees, and bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the United States."

This, even as two similar such institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are already threatening to pull us all down into a sink hole. Such development banks are what Latin American reformers have been fighting to get rid of for 20 years. They are notoriously inefficient but politicians love them for the centers of graft and patronage they become.

That's from the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, of course. We'll be writing more about this right-wing theme—that the only reason politicians want to commit public resources to fix public problems is to feather their nests—as we work our way through Tom Frank's book. Watch this space.

The Predator State

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:43:47 -0400

Another forthcoming book I'm excited to read and share with you, previewed here.

Let them eat cake

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:29:16 -0400

Just finished Tom Frank's new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, which hits the stores in a couple of weeks. Like his last book What's the Matter With Kansas? it's stunning: it gets to the guts of the conservative derangement better than just about anything I've ever read. Everyone's familiar with Grover Norquist's famous quote about getting government small enough to drown it in the bathtub. This one is even more revealing. It's in Tom's chapter "Win-Win Corruption," on why there are so many scandals every time the right rules Washington. It's not an accident; conservatives basically see it as their duty to loot the government—or, at the very least, they cannot help it:

The problem is that the federal government hands out billions of dollars, and people will lie, cheat, steal, or bribe to get it. If you have a big cake, and you put it under the sink and then you wonder why the cockroaches are in your kitchen, I don't think any sprays or blocking the holes in the walls are going to get rid of the cockroaches. You've got to throw the cake in the trash o that the cockroaches don't have something to come for.

Reflects Tom:

If you don't like what Norquist and his buddies are doing in Washington, your only alternative is to give up on economic justice altogether, to throw the whole thing in the trash. Although Norquist made this analogy back in 1997, it was the conservative movement's standard, all-purpose reaction to the scandals of 2005 and 2006. If you don't like corruption, you must do away with government.

He quotes Jack Abramoff saying much the same, and concludes:

When a free-market theorists says the answer to corruption is no government and is then seconded by the leading corruptionist of our time, a "free-marketeer" who says that no government is the only way you will stop people like him, we have come very close to a union of theory and practice.... Corruption has now become just another way to attack the liberal state, a sort of street theater in which the right-wing provocateur makes his point about government by demonstration. Give him what he wants, or he'll do it again.

As he puts it in his introduction: "They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives.... In right-wing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time."

Duck!

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:40:23 -0400

Pat Buchanan's latest column just slapped me right upside the head: You go hunting where the ducks are," said Barry Goldwater," it begins.

That, of course, was Goldwater's way of saying, at a 1961 Republican fundraiser in Atlanta, that the Republican Party would be best off in the future chasing the votes of the segregationist South, and writing off the votes of black Americans.

Here's why Pat is mad: "The successor to Barry's Senate seat apparently believes that ducks come from Mexico and speak Spanish. For in July alone, John McCain made three separate appearances before Hispanic groups. "

Rarely is a preference for white people stated so bluntly these days.

Bedfellows

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:59:08 -0400

Exxon blocking toy safety bill. And with sharp eloquence, my colleague Eric Lotke reminds of the background for such outrages in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

Deep Question

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:14:51 -0400

If John McCain thinks we shouldn't leave Iraq until we "win" does that mean he thinks we should fight to the last man like the Japanese on Iwo Jima?

Progressives: Stop Being Suckers

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:38:43 -0400

You can watch me, Digby, Paul Krugman, and Atrios yap about how the media learned to bend over backward to please the right here.

I told one of my favorite stories from the book: the media's trauma after the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, when they believed themselves to have revealed to the nation a moral outrage—cops indiscriminately beating up both defenseless anti-war protesters and defenseless reporters and cameramen—then watched, helplessly, as the nation side with the police. It brought on a bout of morbid self-obsession among the media, as its mandarins tied themselves in knots wondering if they were showing contempt for "the heartland," and displaying "liberal bias," if they reported accurately about police abuses. Here was Joseph Kraft in 1969, whom I described as the David Broder of 1969 (then I corrected myself: David Broder was the David Broder of 1969, too):

...Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?...

The answer, I think, is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the kind of presidential candidate who appeals to them.

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of themselves and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.... those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America.

One of the ways he resolved to do that was to be nicer to Richard Nixon. In fact, he had already begun, writing of his inaugural speech," The ground has been prepared for an era of better feeling."

Reading Digby today, I realized, to my regret, the part of the story I forget. Digby writes about her trip to the airport in Austin with a cab driver, a devout Christian, who seems to hate Republicans and all their works, is thrilled about Barack Obama, but is "afraid that if he gets in he's going to put Hillary Clinton on the Supreme Court and she's going to outlaw everything I believe in." She notes this in the context of yesterday's New York Times Magazine article about, well, Democrats bending over backward to please the religious right—for instance, embracing a preacher who mocks those who prefer medical science to faith healing:

Dancing down front, in an aisle between pews, was a woman in an elaborate dress with a lace corsage whose breast cancer had been eradicated, Daughtry had said, through the prayers of her church sisters: “The eggheads will say her chemotherapy worked, but everyone who uses chemotherapy isn’t cured.”

Clearly the pander isn't working : millions of Americans still insist that, if the Democrats get in the White House, the eggheads will ban religion.

Such "outreach," in fact, never works. In 1947 President Truman bent over backward to accommodate the most hysterical "anti-Communists" by passing the most thorough "loyalty-security" program in American history. The AFL-CIO bent over backward by purging former Communists from their ranks. Conservatives rewarded them with...the McCarthy Era.

In 1969, Joseph Kraft raised a full-throated cry for his fellow "Eastern establishment liberal journalists" to bend over backward to be nice to conservatives, and stroke Richard Nixon. Do you know how he was rewarded? Reader, Nixon bugged him. From NIXONLAND:

The President wanted to monitor Henry Kissinger. So John Ehrlichman called on John Caulfield, a new addition to the White House staff, a former detective on New York's version of the Red Squad who'd known Nixon since he'd protected him on the campaign trail in 1960. Caulfield called a friend, who'd worked sweeping Nixon's hotels for bugs during the 1968 campaign. Together, they cased the target's Georgetown townhouse and told Ehrlichman the job would be difficult. Ehrlichman insisted they try anyway, because national security was at stake. So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and shimmied up a pole to affix a bug to the writer's phone wire. He was Joseph Kraft, the same journalist who'd lectured his fellow media professionals to stop coddling liberals. But he also was Henry's favorite journalist friend...

Believe in what you believe because you believe it. Promote what you promote because you believe it. Don't promote something halfway between what you believe, and what you believe some mythic conservative "middle America" wants you to believe. You just end up being played for the fool.

Lessig at Netroots Nation

Rick Perlstein — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:14:20 -0400

In a Netroots Nation keynote speech, Larry Lessig made the point that Al Gore proposed that the 1994 Telecommunications Act contain a title deregulating cable and DSL. Congress, Lessig reports, went berserk: "How can we extort donations from the telecommunications industry," they basically said, "if we don't regulate them?"

The title was struck.

Lessig's point was that conservatives, too, should support public financing of elections. Because that means there might be less regulation—which the right claims to want. Because a considerable amount of regulation exists to make it easier to extort campaign contributions.

What do you think of the argument? Too clever by half?