I anticipated the State of the Union Address, more or less, correctly, though I underestimated Obama’s forthrightness. He entered softly, calling for bi-partisanship, but he followed up with a pretty big stick, strongly arguing for his agenda, including, most spectacularly, the matter of class and class conflict, daring the Republicans to dissent, ending the speech on a high emotional note on gun violence and the need to have a vote on legislation addressing the problem. Before the speech, I wondered how President Obama would balance assertion of his program with reaching out to Republicans. This was an assertive speech.

The script was elegantly crafted, as usual, and beautifully performed, as well. He embodied his authority, with focused political purpose aimed at the middle class. This got me thinking. As a sociologist, I find public middle class talk confusing, though over the years I have worked to understand the politics. I think last night it became clear, both the politics and the sociology.

Obama is seeking to sustain his new governing coalition, with the Democratic majority in the Senate, and the bi-partisan coalition in the House, although he is working to form the coalition more aggressively than I had expected. He is addressing the House through “the people,” with their middle class identities, aspirations and fears.

In my last post, I observed and then suggested:

“Obama’s recent legislative victories included Republican votes on the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling. I believe he will talk about the economy in such a way that he strengthens his capacity to draw upon this new governing coalition. He will do it in the name of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class. This is the formulation of Obama for ordinary folk, the popular classes, the great bulk of the demos, the people. In this speech and in others, they are the subjects of change, echoing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: government of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, by the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, for the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class.”

Americans in large numbers think of themselves as being middle class, though this is hardly an identity that distinguishes much. The middle class, in the American imagination, ranges from people who barely sustain themselves to people who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, own multiple homes and all the latest consumer trophies. The imagined middle class includes all the workers who earn a living wage in a factory, and the owners of the factory, and the managers and clerks in between. If Marx were alive, he would roll over in his grave. This American sociological imagination seems to be an illusion, a case of false consciousness if there ever was one. The puzzle: “What is the matter with Kansas?

Yet, I think it was quite clear last night that the way the middle class is imagined opens American politics. Both Obama and Marco Rubio (in his Republican response) delivered their messages in the name of the middle class. While Rubio used it to denounce Obama, big government, taxing of the wealthy and spending for the needy, Obama invoked the great middle class to defend and propose programs that clearly serve “the middle class” directly, especially Social Security and Medicare, but also aid to education, infrastructure investments and the development of jobs. The undeserving poor loomed behind Rubio’s middle class, (and made explicit in Rand Paul’s Tea Party response), while those who need some breaks and supports were the base of Obama’s middle class. Thus, the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, as I anticipated, was Obama’s touchstone.

I, along with many progressive friends, have been impatient with all the talk about the middle class over the years. I wondered: where are the poor and the oppressed? In this State of the Union, the President made clear that they are central to his concern: an endangered middle class, both those who have been down so long that they haven’t been able to look up, and those who through recent experience know that they and their children are descending. Obama spoke to both groups, the frightened middle class, working people who have experienced rapid downward mobility, and those who have long been excluded from work that pays sufficiently to live decently.

Obama, using straightforward prose, addressed the members of Congress through this middle class. He advocated for “manufacturing innovation institutes,” for universal high quality pre-schools, strengthening the link between high school education and advanced technical training, addressing the costs and benefits of higher education, and raising the minimum wage. In other words, along with his discussion of Medicare, Social Security and Obamacare, he raised the immediate economic concerns of a broad swath of the American public. Noteworthy is that the concerns of the “aspiring middle class” (i.e. poor folk) were central in his presentation.

And then there was the passion focused on immigration, voting rights and gun violence. The closing crescendo, with Obama calling for a vote from Congress on gun violence, dramatically referred back to Obama’s opening, calling for concerted bi-partisan action on the crises of our time. As I heard it, this was about gun violence and its victims, but also the victims of Congressional inaction on jobs and the economy, on the sequester, on the need to invest in our future, i.e. on pressing issues concerning the middle class and those who aspire to be in the middle class. The closing was powerfully delivered, as the response to the delivery was even more powerful. As Obama takes his message to the country in the coming days, and as Democrats and Republicans start negotiations about the budget, I think that there is a real possibility that the coalition that formed in negotiating the resolution to the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling conflicts may very well lead to necessary action, at least to some degree, and they will be debating about the right things, at last.

The American president has signed the bill drafted by Democratic and Republican leaders, which allows the United States to avoid “fiscal cliff.” The solution adopted by the Congress does not, however, solve the problem, but only touches some of its elements and postpones dealing with the others for a few weeks. So who won in this dramatic battle, fought late into the first night of the New Year? Choosing the winner depends on one’s point of view, but no matter the viewpoint we take, one thing seems to be certain – the national interest has lost.

Regardless of who we consider to be the main wrongdoer, it is difficult to identify a clear winner. Obama’s spin doctors are striving to present the agreement as a triumph of the administration, since it succeeded in making many Republicans vote in favor of tax increase for the first time in 20 years. For the richest Americans, with annual revenues of more than $ 400,000, the tax rate will rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, i.e. to the rates existing under Bill Clinton before George Bush’s cuts. The problem is that President Obama wanted to set up a new tax threshold at $ 250,000 of annual income. That’s a significant difference. The White House hoped the tax increase would bring $ 1.5 trillion over the next decade, but according to the current arrangements the federal government will receive a modest 600 billion. Given the scale of the U.S. debt, it’s not much, and what’s more, this money will only contribute to the U.S. budget, if all the citizens who should pay more actually do. But will they?

The main problem with taxing the rich is that while these are the people who have the most money to share, they also have the most money to find ways to avoid sharing. When a few months ago Mitt Romney (remember him?) revealed his 2011 tax return, it turned out he paid tax rate of 14 percent instead of 35 percent or, to put it in dollars, 1.9 million instead of 4.8 million. If every American taxed at a new rate follows Romney’s example, the increase in state revenue will have virtually no effect on American finances. President Obama used to say that even closing all the loopholes in the U.S. tax system – which ironically enough was something Romney argued for – would not suffice to fix the budget. He is certainly right, but just rising the taxes for the rich, without ensuring they actually pay them, will not do the job either.

When the French president François Hollande announced his will to introduce the 75% tax rate for the richest, it was supposed to affect only a tiny fraction of the French society and only for a “trial period” of two years. Yet the government’s intentions sparked a vehement national debate. Many rich Frenchmen announced they would leave the country, the others – like singers Johnny Hallyday and Charles Aznavour, or actors like Daniel Auteil and Alain Delon – have already left. And even if the American rich do not follow suit in terms of leaving the country, their incomes might do exactly that.

Does the above mean the Republicans won? Hardly. In two months, they will have to persuade the American public that it is necessary cut social benefits for the poor and elderly. Our society is aging, they insist, and soon the government will be unable to meet its obligations. There is some truth in this argument, although it remains a mystery why it is better to cut social benefits rather than military spending at a time when the United States spend more money on defense than the next 10 military powers – such as China, Russia, France, England, Germany and Japan – combined.

So probably in a few weeks, when the night falls over Washington D.C., American legislators will once again sit down to their own version of the game of chicken. When they reach an agreement – because probably some agreement will be reached – in the very morning they will reappear in front of the cameras in wait for appraisals. Some journalist might again express their admiration, yet as was aptly noted by Andy Borowitz in “The New Yorker,” praising Congressmen in this case is like praising an arsonist for putting out his own fire.

In pre-1989 Poland there was a similar joke about the communists in power which said: “The Party solves only those problems, which it has itself created.” There was also another one that comes to mind after congressional negotiations: “In 1945 [the year communists took over the power], Poland was standing on the edge of a precipice. And what happened next? We’ve made a great leap forward”…

*Łukasz Pawłowski is a contributing editor for ‘Kultura Liberalna’ and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw.

Did they “2” it again? Only if they were Democrats.

As the 113^th Congress was sworn in many were pleased about the increased numbers of women in both houses. This was also true for the state legislatures, though not for all of them. While more women are welcome, it’s important to understand that this progress is one-sided, or more accurately, one-partied. In the 2012 election, Democratic women got a big boost. Republican women didn’t.

In January of 2013, women were 29 percent of the Democrats and 9 percent of the Republicans in both houses of Congress. Whereas women increased their presence in the Democratic Caucus from last year, they decreased their presence in the Republican Conference in both numbers and percentages.

After the 2012 election, the number of women Republicans elected to Congress went down twenty percent, from 24 to 20 in the House and from 5 to 4 in the Senate. The number of women Democrats increased by ten and twenty percent respectively, from 53 to 58 in the House and 13 to 16 in the Senate.

Something similar happened in the state legislatures. Republican women decreased their presence by 7 to 8 percent and the Democratic women increased theirs by 3 to 10 percent. As of January, 2013, women are 37 percent of all Democratic state house members and 28 percent of Democratic state senators. They are only 18 and 13 percent, respectively, of their Republican counterparts.

Two factors account for this: Women candidates do well in election years that end in “2.” Women candidates win when the Democrats win. What’s magical about “2” years is that the first legislative contests after the decennial reapportionment are held in those years. New districts create new opportunities. More seats are open — i.e. have no incumbent — in “2” years than in others, and even incumbents must appeal to new constituents within their new district lines.

This has been a factor only since the 1960s when the Supreme Court ruled that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. Until compelled to do so, many states did not change their legislative district lines, or even those of their Congressional districts. The members of the state legislatures who were charged with that duty liked to keep things as they were.

The modern women’s movement also emerged in the 1960s, and by 1972 public awareness was growing about the dismal lack of women in public office. Consciousness was raised by Rep. Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for President that year, even though she insisted that she was not running as the women’s candidate. The impact of the 1972 redistricting and the feminist movement could be seen in the 18.8 percent increase in the number of women sworn in as state legislators in 1973. The numbers were still tiny, but they continued to rise steeply for the next twenty years.

Women could respond so fast to the opportunities offered by the 1972 redistricting because they hadn’t been out of politics in the previous 50 years, just out of sight. Not only were women a significant majority of campaign workers, but organizations like the League of Women Voters had been training them to do legislative work for decades and implanting many with the idea that they could do it better inside the legislature.

In 1992, the number of women elected to Congress took a great leap upward, from 29 to 47 in the House and from 2 to 7 in the Senate. After crawling from two to six percent during the previous two decades, women were ten percent of the 103rd Congress.

Once again, redistricting created opportunity, but only where women were ready to take advantage of it. In the previous twenty years, women had gone from five to twenty-one percent of state legislators, a major source of Congressional candidates. The states which had elected women to the state legislatures in larger numbers began to elect them to Congress.

This increase was not bipartisan. The 1992 election brought a big increase in the number of Democratic women, but only a small one for Republicans. In the 1980s women had been a greater portion of Republican than Democratic members of Congress. The “party gap” this created in Congress had emerged a decade earlier in the state legislatures. In 1981, women were about 12 percent of both the Republican and Democratic state legislators. Their proportion among the Democrats rose slowly but steadily to over 31 percent in 2009. Among Republican state legislators the proportion of women rose more slowly, flattened out in the mid-1990s, and fell as the new century began. There are fewer Republican women serving in the state legislatures in 2013 than in 2000. There are ten percent more Democratic women.

The number of women state legislators peaked at 1,809 before the 2010 elections. When the voters favored the Republicans that year they reduced women’s presence. Many more Democratic women lost their seats than Republican women won theirs. They have not yet caught up.

There are many reasons why Republican women are less likely than Democratic women to become legislators. Some have to do with the voters; some with how each party recruits (or doesn’t recruit) its candidates. The bottom line is that hallelujahs for the greater number of women in the 113th Congress are coming a bit too early.

The Republicans elected to the state legislatures in 2010 were able to draw districts which will favor Republican candidates for the next decade. The type of voters who vote in the midterm elections are more likely to favor Republicans. That means that women’s progress into elected office will stall unless the Republican Party decides to practice a little affirmative action, or the voters swing heavily to the Democrats.

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I am thinking about the Obama Presidency. I reject the simpleminded criticisms of Obama in the name of King, such as those presented by Cornell West. I think we have to look closely at the political challenges the President has faced. In an earlier post, I assessed Obama’s political performance on the political economy working with a Democratic Congress. Today I consider his work with Republicans. I think it is noteworthy that he kept focus on long-term goals, even as he experienced ups and downs in the day-to-day partisan struggles. I believe he kept his “eyes on the prize.” Although King’s project is incomplete, Obama is, albeit imperfectly, working to keep hope alive. This is more apparent as Obama is now working against the Republicans, pushed by the winds of Occupy Wall Street, the topic for another day. It is noteworthy, though, that it was even the case during the less than inspiring events of the past year.

Responding to the Republican victories in the 2010 elections, the President had to face a fundamental fact: elections do indeed have consequences. While his election provided the necessary mandate for his economic policies and for healthcare reform, the Republican subsequent gains in the House and Senate, leading to a smaller majority for the Democrats in the Senate and the loss of the House, empowered the Republican calls for change in policies. And, even though divided government became a reality and gridlock was the basic condition, action was imperative. The sluggish economy, long-term budget deficits and the debt ceiling defined the agenda after the bi-election. The approaches of the Republicans and the Democrats could not have been more different.

Obama had a choice, to fight the Republicans head on, or to try to accommodate the new political situation and seek compromise. He chose compromise. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it particularly successful as a political tactic.

The Republicans made clear that their first priority was to turn Obama into a one-term president, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell infamously put it. With this opposition, Obama faced a dilemma between the demands of an ethics of responsibility and the demands of the ethics of ultimate ends, as Max Weber would have put it. Trying to be responsible, led to mixed results. The Bush tax cuts were extended, as were unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut. And while there was no government default, as Tea Party Republicans seemed to seek, as they held the government hostage to an increase in the debt ceiling, they did successfully veto a grand compromise on the deficit that Speaker Boehner and Obama negotiated.

The President appeared ineffective and weak. He seemed to negotiate poorly, giving more to his opposition than they gave to him. He seemed to lack core principles: accepting Republican and Tea Party deficit and debt priorities. The substance and theatrics of his performance disappointed his supporters, left and center, confirmed the convictions of his opponents on the right.

Most of my academic friends, and, I imagine, most of the readers of Deliberately Considered, have been disappointed, convinced that on one issue after another Obama followed rather than led. The Republicans pushed him around. As he pursued, in the eyes of many on the left, Bush-lite policies in foreign affairs in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond, and on human rights and national security (I promise more on that in a future post), he seemed to be at best a moderate Republican on the political economy.

Centrists also saw a problem. For them, form was more important than content.  He seemed weak, as he was trying to move to the center and appeal to moderates. I remember a brief conversation I had with a neighbor. He proudly explained to me that he was a person who voted for the man, not the Party. He had voted for Obama in 2008, for Kerry in 2004, Bush in 2000, and now he was against Obama. Obama is ineffective, doesn’t lead, and doesn’t deserve another term, in my neighbor’s opinion. We need someone who gets things done during these hard times, a leader, not an amateur who is in over his head.

My neighbor knew where I stood. We were chatting across from my car, which already had a re-election sticker on it. He, on that summer day, didn’t know who he was for, but knew who he was against. This meeting was before the primary season. I assume that my neighbor is now a less than enthusiastic supporter of Governor Romney, hoping that the Governor doesn’t mean some of the things that he is now saying, mirroring die-hard conservative distrust of the Massachusetts moderate.

As I have already indicated here, I think my friends on the left don’t understand the nature of Obama’s political stance, a principled centrist trying to move the center left, in terms of today’s holiday, mainstreaming King’s dream of social justice. I also think that they, along with centrist skeptics, don’t appreciate the President’s continued commitment to civility in public life.

There is an unrecognized tactical dilemma. The moderates want him to reach out to left, right and center and address pressing problems, but when he does, they think he is weak, following, not leading. He is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Although this was, to a large extent, a no win situation, presenting impossible tactical difficulties, I do recognize that Obama didn’t handle the situation very well. As a supporter, I often want him to be more cunning in his negotiations with the Republicans. I feel that he should be tougher in negotiations, clearer in expressing his core convictions. Nonetheless, I think it is also important to understand what the long-term challenges were and recognize how tactical performance ultimately was less important than the pursuit of long-term strategy and goals. It is notable that Obama’s commitment to his ultimate ends, King’s dream of justice, in the political economy has been quite steady. And as far as tactics, I am not sure that a tougher stance toward the Republicans would have a achieved better results, though I know it would have felt better for many, including me.

The President’s long-term view and commitments were on clear view, appropriately in his last State of the Union Address, as I pointed out at the time.

The President offered a balanced approach. He recognized that Republican concerns about deficits were serious and accepted the proposition that cutting spending had to be a part of the long-term goal of reducing deficits, but he underscored that in doing so “…let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.”

He engaged a political debate with Republicans on their terms, accepting the problem of the deficit as a priority, but he emphasized the continued need for public investments in education, alternative energy sources and public infrastructure, in transportation and communications. He supported tax reform, including the lowering of corporate taxes, and he spoke about free trade, but he emphasized what he asserted were the accomplishments of his first two years in office, specifically health care reform. He proposed cutting dramatically discretionary spending, but he also called for the end of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The speech included calls for investment and reduced deficits, intelligently focused, clear moves to recognize the interests of his opposition, but without giving up on his fundamental commitments.

I think it is striking how last year’s State of the Union address summarizes the course Obama has followed through the year. This includes both the attempt to find common ground with Republicans, which led to great tension and minimal accomplishment, avoiding the worse, but not much more, and also his move to a more confrontational approach, specifically as it has to do with jobs and caring for the least fortunate. He has held a steady position, and now has the initiative – I think importantly with the help of Occupy Wall Street.

The economy improved a bit this year, but many still suffer. Obama presented a balanced approach, strikingly different from what the Republicans offer and he has been able to pursue this approach despite sustained opposition empowered by a major social movement, The Tea Party. But as that movement seems to be weakening and with the presence of another social movement, OWS, pushing the issues of social justice and inequality onto the public agenda, Obama is moving forward.

When I look at his tactical moves, in the day to day attempt to govern with the Republicans, I worry, sharing concern with his critics on the left that he has not been the real deal and his moderate critics that he has not been an effective leader, but over all in the long run, it seems to me that people have rushed to their negative judgments. Obama achieved a great deal in his first two years and has managed to minimize the damage of the last year, and is now poised to move forward. More on that in my next post.

There have been three distinct phases of Barack Obama’s presidency, thus far. There was the period when the President worked with the Democratic Party dominated Congress, the period when he attempted to work with the Republican Party dominated Congress, and the present period, with Obama fighting against the Republican Party dominated Congress and starting his re-election campaign. He has engaged in different tactics in each of these phases, geared to the prevailing political environment, but he has also revealed himself as being a political leader with a long-term strategy meant to change the environment, not simply adapt to it.

While most political coverage over the last three years has been focused on the tactics and the day-to-day ups and downs, serious assessment of the first term of the Obama presidency requires evaluation of the strategy, and its successes, failures and continued promise.  President Obama is a principled politician with clear commitments, even if without a unifying simple ideology. He is a centrist, working to move the center to the left, trying to make the American Dream more inclusive and politics more civil, serious and participatory. He is working for a major political transformation, as I have explored carefully in my book, Reinventing Political Culture and have examined here at Deliberately Considered as well. In this post and in two future posts, I will review what we have learned about his attempt to move the political center to the left, specifically as it involves economic policies and social reform. I will review other dimensions of the Obama transformation in further posts as the Presidential election season develops.

Obama with Democrats:

Given the global crisis that greeted the new president, the economy was the initial focus of Obama and his administration. Even before he became president and then in the early days of his administration, Obama was involved in major actions to forestall a complete meltdown of the financial system and a global depression. The “Wall Street bailout” (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), the rescue of the auto industry, and the stimulus package ( The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) presented aggressive policies that undoubtedly made a difference, even though today it is convenient for Republicans to label all as wasteful. One of the first signs that Obama recognized the hard times was in his inaugural address. The public and commentators expected an upbeat “yes we can” speech. He gave instead a sober appraisal of a country in crisis, seekingto address serious problems. He included ambitious plans, concerning jobs, economic recovery, healthcare, education and energy and the environment. He recognized that realizing the plans would be difficult.

He, along with his allies in the Democratic Party, fought long and hard for healthcare reform. This battle overshadowed much else that was happening in first stage of his administration. The passage of what his opponents call “Obamacare” into law is a singular achievement. I am convinced that in the long run the label will be understood positively. But it certainly wasn’t at first. While much was being done to get the economy going again and to try to create jobs, the controversies around the healthcare reform focused a great deal of his opposition’s and the public’s attention. The Republicans attempted to use it to sink Obama’s presidency, while he worked to make pragmatic reform a reality. They linked healthcare reform with the necessary measures to address the economic crisis, TARP, the stimulus package, and the Auto Industry Rescue, and criticized what they took to be government overreach, politely put, or more aggressively put, the imposition of socialism and worse. The word fascism was casually introduced by Glenn Beck and many others.

There was a strange a-symmetry in public debate. Obama compromised and tried to work with Republicans to achieve a broad bi-partisan agreement on healthcare reform, while he was denounced as an alien-being imposing European socialism on a free society.

Between conservative Democrats (notable that Ben Nelson announced his retirement yesterday) and the united Republican bloc, normal politics proved to be impossible. His liberal critics wanted more, but Obama did everything possible to establish the principle of universal health coverage in the United States. Short of a constitutional challenge, this has been achieved. We observed this here.

Note: most of the media attention has been focused on the news of the passage of legislation and the developing tea party tempest in opposition. But also note that there is a major change in American life. Decent healthcare has been established as a citizen right.

Yet, the political fallout was significant. Obama worked to credit the Democratic House and Senate and his Presidency for this achievement and for the (limited) progress on the economic front. But he was working against the momentum of a major social movement, The Tea Party, and even when he made clear what principles were at stake in powerful partisan speeches, the media tended to not pay attention. It didn’t fit their narrative. They reported on the ups of the right and the downs of the left, Tea Party theatrics, and not Obama’s substantive arguments.

The media focus on short term tactics did anticipate the political contest of the past year, with the high stakes show downs on the debt ceiling and the deficit, taxing and spending. But the long term debate about defining the center of public discussion, which Obama has steadfastly worked on, is again gaining attention. Tactically, this can be and has been explained by Republican overreach and blunders, but it is positively connected to Obama’s leadership and developing social movements concerned with social justice, which I will address in future posts next week (year).

In my last post, I argued that Occupy Wall Street had clear, present and positive goals. I made my argument by focusing on one part of the New York occupation, the Think Tank group. I highlighted its principled commitment to open discussion of the problems of the day, based on a radical commitment to democracy: social, cultural and economic, as well as political. This is serious business. It can be consequential as OWS figures out ways to not only speak in the name of the 99%, but also in a language that the 99% can understand, so that it can respond and act. I promise to analyze directly the challenges involved in a future post.  But I’ve been working hard these past weeks, and don’t have the energy to do the hard work required. Today, I feel like something a bit lighter, and will be suggestive and less direct about the big challenges, reviewing the Republican Presidential field, and some other more comic elements of the present political landscape in the United States in the context of the opening that OWS has provided.

Commentators broadly agree: the Republican field for President is weak. The likely nominee, Mitt Romney, appears to be cynical to the core. Making his name as a reasonable moderate Republican Governor of Massachusetts, he is now running as a right-wing ideologue. Once pro-choice, he is now pro-life. Once for government supported universal health insurance, now he is violently opposed to Obamacare. Once in favor of reasonable immigration reform, now he is an anti-amnesty radical. David Brooks, the conservative columnist we of the left like to quote most, supports Romney with the conviction that he doesn’t say what he means.

After Romney, things get even stranger. If these people mean what they say (and I think they do), we are in real trouble, because one of them could be the next President of the United States, insuring its decay as the global power. Perhaps this is a reason for radicals to support Republicans? But then again, this was the reason for the socialist radicals to support Hitler in the thirties.

Bachmann, Perry, Cain and now Newt Gingrich have successively led the national polls over Romney. They are increasingly outrageous as the true-believing candidate. Bachmann seemed to be so uninfluenced by the facts that she burnt out. Perry seemed to forget who he is, or at least who he claims to be, one too many times. Cain not only conveniently forgot about his history of serial sexual harassment. He appeared to not have ever known much about the world beyond his motivational riffs and his slogan for his 999 program. And now the American blowhard-in-chief, Newt Gingrich, is back, appearing as the last man standing. Said to be the intelligent conservative, filled with innovative ideas, thinking that he is always the smartest guy in the room, his willful ignorance is stunning.

About the Arab Spring:  “People say, ‘Oh isn’t this great, we’re having an Arab Spring,’” he said. “I think we may in fact be having an anti-Christian spring. I think people should take this [assertion] pretty soberly.”

About the most significant danger facing America:

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,”  Gingrich said. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

And in a report today, on the grey non-partisan Congressional Budget Office: “a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”

These are but a quick sampling, brought to you thanks to the remarkable power of Google. “A Little Red Book of Gingrich” would be pretty funny if he remains an outsider, but that such a pillar of wisdom could become the candidate of a major political party, not to imagine President Gingrich, is truly horrifying.

The poor quality of the Republican field is, I think, not just a consequence of a chance collection of unqualified and undistinguished individuals. It is, rather, a manifestation of a deep crisis in American political culture. The Republican Party has become a bastion of know-nothing ideological true-believers. The Reagan revolution has become radicalized. Christian conservatives, market fundamentalists and nativists (ascendant in response of the election of Barack Hussein Obama) each demand ideological purity. The contradictions among these fundamentalist positions, and the tension between them and factual reality, guarantee that the serious and the responsible need not apply. The only way they can is by hiding their more sober qualities. This is Brooks’s hope for Romney.

Obama and the Democrats are not so constricted, but they have been profoundly and negatively affected by the ideological madness of the right. Given a polarized public, Obama has tried to work with Republicans and the results have been mixed at best, outraging his supporters and critics on the left, perplexing his previous supporters in the center and even on the right (e.g. Brooks and Company). The Democrats have not distinguished themselves in addressing some enduring and profound problems the American public faces. This is where I think the significance of Occupy Wall Street comes in. It helped to put forward some stark facts about the American social condition, concerning the issues of inequality, the structural restrictions on social mobility. It opened public discussion about these and other outstanding issues concerning social justice, providing the opportunity for debate and action. Thus far, it has been very successful.

But I am worried as I look around the blogosphere and as I look at some demonstrations close to home. Some attached to the OWS movement want to push it in a direction that will assure its insignificance and destruction. They would rather play at revolution than work for significant social change. While they dream of and chant slogans about “smashing capitalism,” something that makes no sense to the American public at large, and among serious economists and to most serious social and political scientists as well, they may fail to seize the day.

In the absence of Occupy Wall Street, such sloganeering is quaint and comic, a tragedy of the twentieth century repeating itself as farce in the twenty first. But because there is a real opening right now for significant change, there is the danger that we may face tragedy yet again in the form of a lost opportunity.

Now is the time when control over corporate excesses may be a real possibility. Now is the time when links among significant social forces, including labor unions, feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian rights movements, environmental movements and the like, and indeed, the Democratic Party, could move a broad public. The unions, especially, are social organizations that have the institutionalized power to address the concerns raised by OWS. The unions need the energy and imagination of OWS, as OWS needs the power of the unions. Now is the time that Barack Obama can be pushed to be the president he promised to be. The Democratic Party is the political force that can put an end to the party of the American Tragedy, the GOP in its present configuration, so strikingly revealed by their leaders who would be President of the United States of America.

Or we could denounce liberals, Democrats and play revolution. That would be pretty funny if it weren’t so serious.

Like many, I have serious reservations about elements of the debt deal. But from a standpoint concerned only with the legislative process, the debate in Washington has not been “business as usual.”  In recent months we have witnessed two primary, parallel attempts at compromise: The “Gang of 6” in the Senate, and the Obama-Boehner-Cantor talks at The White House. To me, the failure of the “Gang,” and the ultimate success of the White House talks, is a sign that our government is undergoing a significant shift in the way it legislates.

Change in the legislative paradigm is not a radical event – it has been the norm in our Congress’ history. Compromise, specifically over “perceived truths,” as Jeffrey Goldfarb notes, is the heart of the legislative process. Among the oldest approaches to compromise was John C. Calhoun’s “doctrine of the concurrent majority,” where the goal of legislation was to accommodate all ideas. During the “Golden Age,” Henry Clay championed the idea that “all legislation…is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.” Now, Obama’s inability to strike a “Grand Bargain” should not be seen as an unqualified failure; grand bargains can only be made within a legislative framework where both sides are willing to sacrifice equally, a point I will return to shortly.

Turning to the present day, we find two curious episodes in the Senate. First, we have an attempt by the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to cede portions of the Senate’s power to the Democratic President. The Senate has always fiercely defended its own sovereignty with a ferocity that can only equal debates over world-shattering policy changes. William S. White, perhaps the most eminent scholar on Senate history, noted that it is “harder to change a [standing] rule than to vote to take a country to war.” For McConnell to suggest that the Democratic president takes the reigns is a clear act of desperation, a sign that the existing framework of compromise familiar to McConnell no longer applies.

Second, we have the “Gang of 6.” The Gang represents the driving force of contemporary compromise: bipartisanship. All too often, however, bipartisanship simply means party parity. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans negotiating becomes a ‘”compromise.” Nothing needs to be conceded by either party, and concessions need not be equal. The Gang of 6 at least attempted to include a spectrum of political opinion, including Southern conservatives like Saxby Chambliss and Northern liberals like Dick Durbin, whereas the “Gang of 14” was almost entirely composed of centrists from the Southwest and Midwest. But in an age of unprecedented partisanship, the gang model seems increasingly unsuited to its environment. The Gang of 6 proposed sweeping spending cuts and revenue increases: cut the deficit by $4 trillion in a decade, overhaul the tax code, and ensure the solvency of social security. The proposal provided significantly more spending cuts than revenue measures, but, even as Senate Republicans lined up in support, the House summarily dismissed it. The Gang did not receive the adulations that its predecessors enjoyed – it was derided by the Tea Party as the “Gang of 666.”

Contrast the effort of the Gang of 6 with the deal just reached. Substantively, there are similarities in the legislation and the Gang’s proposal. Where they differ, the latter tends to be more moderate. Both are worded so as to ensure both domestic non-discretionary spending and military budgets are cut, and both ensure deficit reductions in the trillions. In fact, the current deal presents a much more modest goal of $2.7 trillion in cuts. However, many large issues, including where the bulk of the cuts come from, have been deferred to a joint Congressional “supercommittee.” In very real ways, the substance of the deal will not be known until the supercommittee submits its legislation on December 23^rd.  But, at this early stage, it appears the White House deal achieved what the Gang could not.

When President Obama was elected, I had hoped that Washington might move past the ‘bipartisan’ era into a “nonpartisan” era. Democrats and Republicans would still fiercely compete to enact their agendas, but the legislative process would not be determined solely by party strength. The old cliché “be careful what you wish for” holds true. More often than not, we saw Cantor and his “Young Guns” undermining Boehner, Tea Partiers versus chamber deans, and the Senate versus the House. Obama played this advantage to the hilt and showed a shrewd control over the process of compromise that had eluded him during previous big-ticket debates. Gary Alan Fine correctly observed, for instance, missed opportunities in ARRA). Obama stayed firm to several core values. He was insistent on vetoing a short-term deal, and appalled at the idea of forcing students to pay interest on loans without deferral. Lo and behold, the final deal includes a long-term fix, if not the grand bargain he initially wished for, and an increase in Pell grants. In contrast, Republican negotiators drew a line in the sand in front of every issue; if everything is a core value, can one really stand for anything? Boehner and his colleagues succeeded in framing much of the debate, but it came at the cost of ceding their bargaining power to parties that were actually willing to solve the problem in good faith.

What this means for the future of the legislative process rests largely in the hands of the supercommittee. Composed of six members from each party, it still has significant differences with the “gang” model. It will force members of each chamber and faction to directly engage with each other. It gives a national platform where voices of reason and conciliation might be heard. This is only the second joint committee in history with the authority to write legislation. Its mere existence will change the landscape. As a couple of ABC News bloggers write, paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin, for now we only have “a deal – if they can keep it.”

From the fracas in Washington, it would be impossible to know that Americans still live in the world’s richest country. In 2010, the U.S. GDP was about two-and-a-half times that of its nearest competitor, China—you know, the country that’s building new cities everywhere and a bullet train system to ferry citizens among them. But to listen to the political discourse that currently dominates the airwaves, the U.S. is facing financial collapse, if not now then in another decade, and it cannot afford another dollar for many collective goods, whether an improved mass transportation system or health care for senior citizens.

As a number of commentators have observed, the political crisis over the debt ceiling is a distraction from graver and more urgent problems: especially the stagnation of the economy, which is not generating enough jobs to make much of a dent in the unemployment rate or to give young workers solid footing for the beginning of their career climbs. The Great Recession, supposedly over, is threatening to turn into a Japanese-style stagnation that could endure for a decade or more.

The state of the U.S. economy is bound up with the plight of the American middle class, as Robert Reich has acutely observed. That plight has been developing for decades, a lot longer than the debt problem, which dates back just a decade, to George W. Bush’s entry into the White House. The economic gains since the 1970s have been concentrated at the top of the income distribution, in the top few percent, and little has trickled down into the middle class. One widely cited statistic has it that the top 1 percent now take home about a quarter of the national income, up from just 9 percent in 1976;  the distribution of wealth is even more unequal. (By the standard statistical measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, the U.S. is now considerably more unequal than any other economically developed country and more resembles a developing nation like Nicaragua.)

The lack of economic gain by the middle class has fed directly into economic stagnation. In order to keep up their standard of consumption, many families have been going deeper and deeper into debt, encouraged in the last decade by the inflation of the values of their homes. The aggregate level of household debt in relation to GDP is higher than it has been since the Depression of the 1930s and is responsible for the weak demand that is keeping the U.S. from enjoying a robust economic recovery. Robert Reich’s basic message seems fundamental:  America has prospered when its middle class has done so; but their economic situation today is parlous.

The great damage of the current conflict over the debt ceiling is that it takes place, as Gary Fine rightly points out, on the terrain of conservatives. The Tea Partiers’ strategy of intransigence has worked. Accordingly, the discussion of remedies has been narrowed to the spending side: where are the cuts going to come from? Yet it isn’t that the federal government spends so much money, anyway. In 2010, the total level of spending of all levels of government in the U.S. amounted to 40% of GDP. That tied us with Canada but placed us well behind the levels of spending in Germany (44% of GDP), the United Kingdom (47%), and France (53%), all countries less wealthy (in terms of GDP per capita) than the U.S. As I noted in an earlier post, the increases in spending at the federal level under Obama so far are in line with those under Bush, with the exception of fiscal year 2009, a year of extraordinary economic turmoil that is divided between the two Presidents.

Not fully recognized is that a fall-off in government revenue plays an outsized role in the budget deficit. In nominal dollars, federal revenues today are about where they were in 2000, which means that in real dollar terms they are down by 16 percent. As a fraction of GDP, they have dipped to a level, less than 15%, that hasn’t been seen in six decades. The Bush tax cuts are an important part of the story, and most analyses point to them as the largest single factor behind the deficit. The recession and the halting recovery have also lowered federal revenues. Obama and the Democrats are right to insist that revenue increases must be a part of any solution, but in terms of the legislation under consideration to raise the debt ceiling this time around, they have lost the argument.

(And don’t listen to the right-wing whine that the affluent already pay more than their fair share in taxes. Conveniently for their argument, conservatives mention only federal income taxes, which amount to about 40 percent of federal revenue.  Almost as much is collected through payroll taxes, which, thanks to the cap on the income subject to Social-Security taxes, are mostly paid by ordinary workers.)

The resolution of the current tempest will last only for a while, six months if the Republicans are successful, eighteen if the Democrats are. The duel will be resumed, but we now see with clarity what the positions of the two sides will be. On the right, the prime target will be the entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, along with Medicaid, since the retirement of the baby boom over the next quarter century will ensure that the expenditures on these programs as they are currently configured will rise massively. On the center-left, the argument will be for more balance by raising revenues, but there has already been a concession that entitlement programs need to be cut back.

Any reduction in entitlement programs is equivalent to an additional tax on the middle class and the less affluent. For instance, Social Security is fully funded through 2037 because, since the Reagan administration, workers have paid extra amounts into the trust fund to build it up for the day when the baby boomers begin to retire. (The extra payroll taxes were recycled into the federal budgets of the time and spent.) To make the payments required in coming years, Social Security will need to go beyond incoming payroll taxes and tap into these savings, which effectively means that the money comes from elsewhere. Slowing down the rate of increase in Social Security payments to retirees, a proposal part of the Obama-Boehner negotiation, will slow down this transfer process and the need for more federal revenue. It will also give the retirees measurably less money over their lifetimes.

The debt ceiling crisis has pulled apart the curtains on a Washington political class that is at an impasse, unable to strike a “grand bargain” that would take the issue off the table. A “solution” therefore awaits the 2012 election, which may prove as momentous for the nation’s course as were the elections of 1980 and 2000. The Democrats under Obama’s leadership have given up considerable ground to the Republicans. But if the Grand Old Party takes the Presidency or the Senate while retaining the House, watch out!

I’m puzzled. For as long as I can recall I have been assured that the Grand Old Party will do just about anything to advantage their wealthy friends and benefactors. Of course, no party desires no taxes – not even Republicans — and none – not even Democrats – want full confiscation. So the issue always comes down to the question of how one will square the circle. Should the top marginal rate be 35% or 40%? Aside from the flat tax advocates and a few outré progressives, few are now arguing for 25% or 50%.

Statecraft inevitably involves a distribution of responsibilities and benefits. And, as I have noted, it is traditionally the case that Democrats ask for more sacrifice from the wealthy and Republicans advocate for fewer benefits for the needy.

This being part of our political logic, how then do we explain a central feature of the Republican plans for Medicare and for Social Security, and how do we explain the hesitancy of most elected Democrats to embrace this plan?

One area in which there appears to be some measure of agreement between President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner is that means testing Medicare and perhaps even Social Security should be “on the table” – a Thanksgiving turkey, as it were. The argument is that the wealthy might receive fewer benefits or should have to ante up more in the way of co-payments. What’s up with that? In important ways, one should appreciate why Democrats would like that idea and why the Republicans should resist, but things have not quite transpired in that logical way.

Despite the element of soaking (or at least dampening) the rich, some Democrats have pushed back on the idea of means testing Social Security and Medicare. One could readily make the argument that it is unjust or undesirable for the federal government to send out checks to those same rich folks on whom Democrats wish to raise the marginal tax rates. Couldn’t receiving fewer benefits be a form of shared sacrifice so integral to Democratic talking points?

Historically there have been reasons why means testing some social benefits have been problematic (although not for others, such as food stamps). Social Security, and to some degree Medicare, has long been defined as an insurance program and not a welfare program, even though they were designed to help seniors who needed a safety net after retirement. Still, the rationale for their passage was that everyone would partake; the benefits applied to everyone and the program was politically palatable. The assumption – an assumption that in 2011 is somewhat implausible – is that if these insurance plans become welfare programs that are means tested, they will be more vulnerable to sharp cuts for the most needy, even leading to calls for dismantling that safety net entirely. That everyone receives these social benefits means that everyone is invested in their success. In a somewhat similar way, although with a different perspective, we find Republicans worried that we are nearly at the point at which half of all Americans do not pay income tax. In such a circumstance, what incentive is there for those who do not pay to keep rates low? (The answer seems to be wealthy interest groups that both parties rely upon.) By opposing means testing, Democrats are pandering to the very same upper middle class to which they accuse Republicans of pandering. Pandering is politically addictive.

When one thinks about it, the desire of Republicans to means test these programs flies in the face of our convenient and easy beliefs, and it is a breath of fresh air. Means testing would in effect mean that the well-to-do will be paying more for their retirement and their health care. Perhaps this is a reason that President Obama, although not many of his supporters, such as the AARP, is willing to consider this particular option. For those who wish to redistribute government support towards the bottom and for those who wish to redistribute sacrifice towards the top, means testing makes sense.

It is not the case that all of the Republican plans for Medicare and Social Security will necessarily have this (salutary) effect. Privatization benefits some wealthy people at the expense of those less able to find suitable coverage, and the changes in determining inflation-based growth rates have problems of their own.

Still, at this parlous time in which we must consider how to have the most fortunate among us pay a larger share of the cost of necessary programs, a reasonable means-tested Medicare and Social Security can help close the budget gap. So let us all hail the Republicans as they propose means testing. On this, they are the party of class warfare, as they might say if they considered the matter carefully. Let us be thankful that they haven’t. And let Democrats take this option to reach across the aisle to achieve the very ends for which the party has been calling. Let us agree by all means.

“The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.”

The editorial is accompanied by a chart to illustrate the basic claim–witness the remarkable uptick of the curve between 2008 and 2009:

At first sight, the chart appears to sustain the WSJ charge and to indicate that federal spending under Obama is of a different order of magnitude from the past. For a moment, it shook my own antipathy to the Republican position; maybe, in all fairness, the blame deserves to be more evenly divided between the two sides of the political aisle. My curiosity aroused, I probed more deeply into the numbers (which come from the OMB website). I’d like to share what I discovered. I make no claims about any special knowledge of the intricacies of the federal budget, just an affinity with numbers.

If you have followed me this far, you may have guessed what is coming—the discovery of a deceptive use of data. It begins with a disturbing piece of disingenuousness, if not dishonesty, in the WSJ editorial, which places the responsibility for remarkably high level of fiscal year (FY) 2009 expenditures entirely at Obama’s door.  But a federal fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior year, and the Bush White House was therefore the source of the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and responsible for spending some of the money. The budget as proposed authorized $3.1 trillion in expenditures (and didn’t include the full costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars); actual expenditures rose to $3.5 trillion, an increase that does not appear so remarkable in light of the enormous economic turmoil of late 2008 and the first half of 2009. Unsurprisingly, a large part of the increase from the prior fiscal year, $260 billion, can be found in the human-resources category, as unemployment and Social-Security payments rose.

Then, there is the editorial’s insistence on viewing federal spending in relation to GDP. The problem is that the expenditures-to-GDP ratio has two sources of variation, not one. Indeed, the ratio is so high in FY 2009 in part because the GDP declined between 2008 and 2009 as a consequence of the recession. And it hasn’t risen much since. As a consequence, the ratio tends to inflate the apparent spending levels since Obama became President. It is useful, then, to look directly at the nominal levels of federal expenditure from year to year.

Looked at this way, the expenditures of the Bush years reveal a momentum of steady increase that averages $160 billion per year. In the first budget year that the Bush White House fully “owned,” FY 2002, expenditures amounted to $2.01 trillion (in nominal, not inflation-adjusted dollars); in the last, FY 2008, they rose to $2.98 trillion—in other words, an increase of just under $1 trillion. The drivers of increasing expenditures were mainly twofold: defense spending (two wars, of course); and human resources, with Social Security and Medicare sharing lead roles.

The same drivers have been at work so far during the Obama years, so the same momentum should be present. In fact, the expenditures in FY 2010 are almost exactly in line with the year-to-year increases of the Bush years: that is, the $3.46 trillion actually spent is not much above the $3.30 trillion one would anticipate by straightforward extrapolation from FY 2008 (see chart below). Given the slow recovery and high unemployment rate, the bump up seems reasonable.

OMB projects the FY 2011 expenditures to come in at around $3.82 trillion, admittedly a sizable increase from the prior year, but expenditures are then expected to level off. These projections may turn out to be off the mark. But the main point is that during the Obama years so far, with the exception of FY 2009, a year that the Bush administration at least partly owns, the year-to-year changes in federal spending are not much above those of the Bush years, and any differences seem easy to explain in terms of the needs of more economically difficult times.  There is no sign here of a runaway federal budget.

Intent on its narrative, the WSJ editorial omits any analysis of federal income, which, as is widely known, has reached its lowest level as a percent of GDP since the 1950s—14.9%. In nominal dollars, income fell during the early years of the oughts decade as a result of the Bush tax cuts and was just starting to recover when it dropped precipitously, by $400 billion, in FY 2009, because of the recession. Unlike federal spending, federal revenue is, in 2010, barely above (in nominal dollars!) what it was a decade before (see chart):

The big story, in other words, is not the rise of federal spending but the stagnation of federal receipts. Taking inflation into account, they have suffered a significant decline since 2000, of about 16 percent. There would seem to be no way to rectify the budget situation without doing something to correct this slide downward.

The WSJ editorial gets it exactly wrong!