Campaign 2010: Where to Put Blame

Perhaps the biggest political question in 2010 is whether the American people will blame the nation’s mess on the long-term impact of Ronald Reagan’s ​“government is the problem” ideology (and on his successors from the Bush Family) – or on Barack Obama for not solving enough of the problems in less than two years.

The Republicans hope that public impatience with Obama will work to their advantage, while the Democrats must pray that the voters will recognize that the mess developed over several decades and that it makes little sense to hand power back to the party that dominated those years of national decline.

While most smart money is on the American people’s famous lack of historical memory (thus favoring the Republicans), there is a case to be made that it was Reaganism – a combination of anti-government ideology at home and tough-guy policies abroad – which led to many problems that America now faces.

Over the past 30 years, Reaganism and its spinoffs under George H.W. and George W. Bush caused or contributed to: Deregulation of corporations, union-busting, tax cuts for the wealthy, a shrinking middle class, lost manufacturing jobs, unprecedented federal debt, unbridled Wall Street greed, bubble-and-bust cycles, the worst recession since the Great Depression, two unfinished wars, erosion of civil liberties, environmental degradation, and a continued dependence on fossil fuels, especially foreign oil.

Yet, many U.S. pundits suggest that the American people are up in arms, Tea Party-style, against Big Government, that they want more unrestrained capitalism, less regulation of Wall Street banks, continued freedom for health insurance companies to operate as they wish, more tax cuts tilted toward the well-to-do, reductions in social programs like Social Security and Medicare, more belligerence toward enemies abroad – in short, more Reaganism.

So far, however, this analysis has not been confirmed by election results, including those on Tuesday. To the surprise of many pundits, a relatively conservative blue-collar district in Pennsylvania, which voted against Obama in 2008, elected Democrat Mark Critz to fill the seat of the late Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat who used government programs to get his constituents jobs.

Granted, other special elections and primaries have delivered other messages about what American voters want. Conservative Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts to fill the seat of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, although his victory may have been more a rejection of his over-confident Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, than a referendum on Reaganism v. Obama’s ​“change you can believe in.”

In other states, incumbents and party-backed candidates have lost primaries to insurgents, from the defeats of Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, to the victories of Tea Partier Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, and Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pennsylvania. Also, Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a conservative Democrat criticized for her pro-corporate positions, was forced into a run-off in Arkansas by Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

However, the Critz victory in Pennsylvania – combined with Sestak beating party-switcher Specter in the state’s Democratic primary and Lincoln’s troubles in Arkansas – suggest that many voters may not be looking for a retreat to Reagan’s anti-government ideology but rather want pragmatic efforts by government to address the nation’s 30-year economic and fiscal decline.

Organized labor, in particular, played important roles in some of the recent election results, as union workers try to recover after three decades during which Reaganism was dominant. In a recent conversation, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told me that he traced the sharp decline in good-paying jobs for average Americans to Reagan’s anti-union policies.

“It was like night and day,” Trumka said, regarding how the fortunes of organized labor and its members turned with Reagan’s election in 1980.

Tea Party Goals

Though the rightist Tea Party movement has received lavish coverage from both the right-wing media and the mainstream press, the recent election results also don’t prove that Americans are eager to dial the clock back to days even before Reagan, to the laissez-faire capitalism of the early Twentieth Century, policies that led to the Great Depression.

It’s even less clear that Americans favor a more distant trip back into the past – to the Andrew Jackson-era battles over the rights of ​“sovereign” states to ​“nullify” federal laws, a struggle that both in the 1800s – and later in the 1960s – gave cover to white racists opposed to granting blacks and other minorities their civil rights.

The Tea Partiers bristle at suggestions that they are racist, but their excessive hostility to President Obama and their neo-Confederate attitudes about states’ rights have created a reasonable suspicion that many Tea Party activists don’t like the idea of a black man in the White House and favor putting racial and ethnic minorities ​“back in their place.”

Tea Party favorite Rand Paul, the son of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, fed those suspicions after winning Kentucky’s Republican primary. In interviews, Rand Paul indicated he was opposed to the part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that required restaurants and other businesses to serve blacks.

After offering a theoretical defense of owner rights and doubting the constitutionality of that section of the law, Paul was asked by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, ​“How about desegregating lunch counters?”

While not answering the question directly, Paul suggested that he would place the rights of an owner over the rights of a customer.

His emphasis on owner rights gets to a central political question facing the country: Should the federal government do what it can to advance the nation’s ​“general welfare,” whether that means addressing social injustice (like segregation or other forms of discrimination) or alleviating economic pain (like high unemployment and lack of health care)? 

Bush’s free pass

The suspicions that Tea Partiers harbor racial and other prejudices also have been fed by the failure of many on the Right to object when President George W. Bush was claiming his unilateral authority to declare anyone he wished an ​“enemy combatant” and then denying basic rights such as habeas corpus.

It’s true that some libertarians did criticize Bush’s power grab, but many of today’s right-wing activists didn’t seem to mind as long as Bush was negating the rights of Muslims.

Indeed, two of the recurring Tea Party themes have been to claim that Obama was born in Kenya and that he is a secret Muslim, false racist-tinged claims that have been cheered at Tea Party rallies. There’s also the wacky stuff about Obama as the anti-Christ, as Hitler, as a Communist, as pro-terrorist, etc., etc.

Arguably, this anti-Obama hatred derives in part from his race, though it’s also true that President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton experienced ugly personal attacks in the 1990s, especially from the emerging right-wing powerhouse media, from the likes of talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The Republican Party learned from the Clinton years that the ​“politics of personal destruction” works, as long as the themes are amplified enough through a dedicated media echo chamber. Many people end up believing what they hear if it is repeated often enough, even if the allegations lack any evidentiary support.

So, in 1993-94, Limbaugh and other right-wing media personalities pounded away at the Clintons, with suggestions that they were murderers and drug traffickers who ran a kind of Third World regime in Arkansas, a theme that amazingly spread beyond right-wing crazies into traditional conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal and into centrist and even liberal publications, from The New Republic to The New Yorker.

When I was working at PBS ​“Frontline,” there was internal pressure to adopt this odd conventional wisdom that Arkansas was Haiti and Clinton was its Baby Doc. Some national journalists even fancied themselves as risking their lives by daring to travel to Arkansas to report on Clinton’s ​“crimes.”

As silly as much of this was, the dark suspicions about Clinton played an important role in the 1994 congressional elections. The Right – energized by its newfound media clout – turned out its voters in big numbers, while the Left, which lacked an effective media and had become disillusioned by Clinton’s cautious centrism, sat back.

The result was a resounding Republican victory, with House GOP leader Newt Gingrich’s ​“revolutionaries” seizing control of Congress. Limbaugh – for his work as the Republicans’ ​“national precinct chairman” – was made an honorary member of their House caucus.

In the following years, the Republicans successfully pressed for more and more ​“free trade” and more deregulation (aided and abetted by Clinton and other pro-corporate Democrats). For instance, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which knocked down the Depression-era wall built to separate Main Street’s commercial banks from Wall Street‘s speculators, was backed by Clinton’s Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers and was signed by Clinton.