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It's the right word.

Posted by stress at April 18, 2004 09:32 PM

Democrats as the responsible fiscal party

Hahahaha. Have some kind of warning when you're going to write funny shit like that. I almost spit out my coffee.

Posted by Karol at April 20, 2004 11:49 AM

Tom McDonald wrote elsewhere: "In general, it's impossible to determine the daily numbers from a rolling-average poll without at least one known daily number to start from."

In fact, for a series of 3-day rolling averages (as in the case of the Rasmussen polls), you would, in principle, need 2 additional constraints, e.g., 2 daily numbers or 2 weekly averages. Otherwise you would be trying to solve for n unknowns given only n-2 linear equations. [In general, for a series of p-day rolling averages, you would need p-1 additional constraints.]

Since Rasmussen now appears to be releasing weekly averages as well, you're in business. All you need are the numbers for a two-week period (12 3-day rolling averages and 2 weekly averages) giving you 14 linear equations in 14 unknowns. The rest is textbook algebra.

Posted by Lara Inis at April 21, 2004 03:20 AM

It's not just libertarian minded folk who would scoff at the notion. It's also those of us who live here in Washington -- we who work for the Government, or are married to those who do, or have friends who do. When you see how the bureaucracy runs, and you know the people running it, it makes you despair. Smarter government may be the answer, but it is simply not possible.

Posted by Mike at April 21, 2004 12:02 PM

It may take a while for opinions on fiscal topics to change. Even with the Clinton budget surpluses compared to Bush literally saying we can have a massive spending increase (which as the Heritage Foundation said is mostly for domestic programs, not terrorism and defense) as well as massive tax cuts, people in general still think of Republicans as fiscal conservatives. Democrats should continue to hammer the issue, since that is the only way to change perceptions of it, but it won't happen for several years.

The Republicans' biggest problem is that the bill is soon to come due for the bargain they made in the 1960s to build themselves into a majority. At the time, they were moribund. They were a party that had been against new spending and against tax cuts in the name of fiscal responsibility. They had also not been demagogues on race as Southern Democrats had.

At the time, the Democrats were pushing big tax cuts and massive spending at the same time. (In the 1964 State of the Union, LBJ proposed both a huge tax cut and the creation of Medicare). The Southern Democrats'anti-civil rights position made them unbeatable. While somewhat messy, the Democrats' coalition was big enough to be a comfortable majority. The only GOP President between 1932 and 1968 was Eisenhower, who was more an apolitical national hero than a Republican politician.

The Republicans saw an opening when the Democrats decided that their position as the ruling party required that they bite the bullet and force an end to segregation in the South. At some level it was a moral decision, but in large part it arose out of concern that America would lose its moral legitimacy in the world during the Cold War if segregation continued.

Starting with Nixon, the Republicans decided to drop their role as fiscal watchdogs, and began to support tax cuts and spending increases. They also in large part adopted the Southern Democrats' position on race, opposing civil rights laws. Like the segregationist Democrats, they raised concerns based on private property rights and states' rights grounds, but white people knew what they were getting at. As Democrats became increasingly identified with a concern for protecting minority rights, Republicans offered disillusioned whites (and not just Southerners) a place to go. They were more willing to come now that the Republicans also wouldn't tell them that they had to pay higher taxes and get less services to balance the budget.

As a political strategy, it is brilliant, even if of dubious morality. It has led to what has been a primarily Republican era since 1968, with a couple of exceptions, mostly caused by Watergate, the first Bush's political ineptitude, and Ross Perot's ego.

Now the Republicans have a problem, and they know it. Being the party of white people in a country that is less white every day is a sure ticket back to minority status. They are doing two things to try to change the emerging equation:

(1) Demonizing gays as a way to both up their base turnout and to split off some percentage of nonwhite voters who are socially conservative.

(2) An increased level of outreach to minorities, mostly Hispanics. Some of the outreach is a legitimate attempt to improve their minority vote percentage, but a lot of the effort is an attempt to reassure a moderate whites that Republicans are not so repugnant on race that they cannot consider voting for them. Hence the effort seems to involve robot-like on message comments from shills like Ralph Reed and immigration proposals that get no follow through, rather than actual attempts to enact laws that improve the lot of minorities.

Despite the cocky rhetoric from people like Reed and Karl Rove, Republicans will have a tough time remaining a majority party over the next twenty years. To improve their prospects, Republicans have to change their image in a fundamental way, considering that their appeal since the 1960s has been the very exclusion that now threatens their majority status. Changing that imagine goes right at the reason much of their base vote is in the Republican Party in the first place.

The challenge for Democrats is to make sure that the emerging electorate holds the Republicans to account for the deal they cut with the devil almost forty years ago. Democrats need to find a way to remind the voters about what the Republicans really are without looking like they are shrill or race-baiting. If they can do that, a solid Democratic minority will re-emerge within a decade.

Posted by Observer at April 22, 2004 12:43 AM

That last sentence was obviously supposed to say "a solid Democratic majority"

Posted by Observer at April 22, 2004 12:55 AM

If the economic illiteracy wasn't enough to convince you, the ad hominem argument

"Starting with Nixon, the Republicans decided to drop their role as fiscal watchdogs, and began to support tax cuts and spending increases. They also in large part adopted the Southern Democrats' position on race, opposing civil rights laws. Like the segregationist Democrats, they raised concerns based on private property rights and states' rights grounds, but white people knew what they were getting at."

demonstrates that Observer has nothing serious to say about this issue.

Posted by Jonathan Sadow at April 22, 2004 03:17 AM

I have to say that I find it amusing that Mr. Sadow would use an allegation of an ad hominem argument as a way of not addressing the substance of what I said. Does that qualify as irony?

To address the two allegations you made:

(1) economic illiteracy: I presume that this is an attempt to invoke conservative rhetoric asserting that persons who are concerned about the size of the federal deficit do not understand economics. Setting aside the issue of whether they (sometimes called supply-siders) are correct, I was not addressing the substance of Bush's economic policy. I was only observing the political calculus that has led to Reagan and Bush II supporting large federal tax cuts while doing nothing of consequence to control federal spending. In fact, both GOP Presidents supported large spending increases, both in domestic programs and defense programs. (If you would like to review the Heritage Foundation report I referenced that shows that Bush II's new spending is mostly domestic, it is at www.heritage.org/research/budget/bg1703.cfm.)

I happen to believe that many Democrats' budget and tax cut rhetoric is a political loser. My opinion on that has nothing to do with my opinion about whether it is in fact good policy to reduce or eliminate budget deficits rather than cut taxes and/or increase spending. While poll results repeatedly state that people will say they would rather reduce the federal debt than have tax cuts or new spending, that is like polling whether people think they should be eating fresh vegtables rather than hitting the McDonald's drive thru several days a week. They'll tell you they would rather eat the vegtables while if fact still ordering combo meals. At the voters' decision time, having people think you want their taxes to be higher (and maybe also their government handouts to be lower) is not a good way to win elections.

(2) That the paragraph you copied was an "ad hominem attack": Stating that the attack is ad hominem requires that you show that what I said did not criticize what Republicans' as a group did, but rather them personally. I don't think that is true.

As for whether what I said is true, do the research yourself and try to disprove it. It is quite interesting to read the news coverage of LBJ's 1964 State of the Union. He uses rhetoric on tax cuts that is very similar to modern GOP rhetoric, right down to an insistence that the tax cuts be across the board and include the top rate. At the time, advocacy of tax cuts was considered a "liberal," rather than a "conservative," position.

The Republicans of 1964 used much the same rhetoric as many modern Democrats, saying the tax cuts will run up the already large deficit, and attacking LBJ as irresponsible for proposing new spending and tax cuts at the same time. The effectiveness of that strategy is summed up in the 1964 election results, which were a massive defeat for the GOP.

I think any informed observer would agree that modern Republican rhetoric on tax cuts is now the opposite of the position they had in 1964.

As for the observation on Republican racial tactics, I challenge you to find a circumstance post-1970 where Congressional opposition to new civil rights laws was not almost entirely Republican. The opposition to the renewal of the various laws in the 1970s and 1980s came almost entirely from conservative Republicans (there may have been a few holdout Dixiecrats in the 1970s, but they are the exceptions).

There is so much other proof of my assertion, I can't possibly repeat it all, but here are some highlights:

-During the 1980 campaign, Reagan visiting the county fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi on the 16th anniversary of the discovery of the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers, and telling the crowd that he shared their belief in "states rights."

-Reagan attacking federal spending by invoking "welfare queens."

-The 1988 Bush campaign deciding to call William Horton "Willie" (which he was never called by anyone else) to his name sound more black.

-Republicans in Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama protesting some sort of removal of official Confederate imagery in campaigns against Democrats who removed it (or tried to). Those doing this include none other than former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour in his successful 2003 race for Mississippi Governor. This, in fact is a total historical reversal, since each of the Confederate symbols at issue were put up by Democrats before the Southern Democrats' metamorphisis on race.

-Our current U.S. Attorney General's successful campaigns for Missouri Governor, which had major protestations of federal court orders to desegregate St. Louis public schools.

If you have some evidence to disprove any fact I asserted in my previous post or this one, please post it so I can inform myself. If you have any substantive counter-argument to my conclusion about what the nature of the modern Republican Party means for its medium-term future, I'd love to read that also.

Posted by Observer at April 23, 2004 01:32 AM

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