True Fiscal Conservatives Vote Democratic

True fiscal conservatives vote Democratic. It’s a piece that pops up every once awhile but not nearly enough (that’s what she said). This is evident because, by and large, the conventional wisdom says that if fiscal prudence is most important to you, then you should vote Republican. As it turns out though, not so much.

The idea makes enough intuitive sense I guess. Republicans have engrained well their supposed dictum of fiscal responsibility into the collective consciousness of American society. And they’ve done an equally admirable job of fostering the self-contradictory image of Democrats, who are at the same time portrayed as both lazy, incapable, whiny cry babies who couldn’t compete in the harsh throws of the business world and a rigidly disciplined army of unstoppable malignant liberal hobos who must be stayed at all costs. A bipolar Robin Hood; on the one hand meticulously orchestrating cooperative partisan efforts on schemes to steal money from the rich and on the other acting in reckless and careless discord, tossing the stolen loot over their shoulder to any freeloader from the ghetto who can catch. While it may be said that the Democrats have done their fair share to merit their caricature, the same cannot be so easily said for the Republicans.

And for many voters who, for whatever reason, don’t have the time or inclination to dig deeper, providing anything that passes upon first glance as a logical causal explanation in support of the caricature is more than enough to keep them loyal. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the foremost virtuosos of this technique. Their preferred tactic is to stack ad hominem attacks - which reinforce the existing party caricatures in the viewer’s mind - atop straw men arguments that sound enough like the real thing to pass for it, and wrap them up succinctly in a package of folksy appeal by stating matter-of-factly that, “It just makes good sense”. Content with the result as if they’d just finished alphabetizing their Ronald Reagan biographies, they wipe their hands with the given issue and move on in a gesture that says, “Well, that’s settled, what’s next?”

The sense that is supposed to be made is of course predicated, not from evidence or empirical data, but from the caricature itself which has no logical value whatsoever. It only seems to make sense because it's reinforced by the images we have in our heads of what Democrats and Republicans are supposed to be. This bundle of bullshit posing as logic falls apart quickly however with the most ginger tug at the strings struggling to contain it. And when it all comes apart, there in plain sight for the discerning eye is the reality, that not only are the caricatures inaccurate, but the data proves the opposite true.

Michael Kinsley, updating a previous piece that he had done for the Los Angeles Times, wrote an article for Slate in September 2008 that illustrates this point nicely. In it, Kinsley correctly points out that the metrics the report uses to define fiscal responsibility are those that Republicans themselves would define as most important. It excludes the typical so called “class warfare” metrics like income gap or real wages - which are of course completely relevant - and focuses instead on very straightforward data like per capita GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, federal taxation, federal spending, and today’s most overused buzz metric, the deficit. Or as Kinsley puts it, “There is nothing here about how clean the air is or how many children are growing up in poverty. The only point is that if you find the Republican mantra of lower taxes and smaller government appealing, and if you care only about how fast the economy is growing, not how that growth is shared, you should vote Democratic.” That the indictment can be unequivocally made based solely on the results of examining hand picked Republican data nuggets allows it to stand that much more resolutely on its own merit.

The report considers data compiled between 1959 and 2007 and factors for potential biases like lag time. Lag time is the idea that a newly inaugurated president is normally not as responsible for the state of the economy his first year in office as he is for the following four years. That’s because the policies of the previous administration tend to overlap with the new one and more strongly affect economic performance, and so on with the next administration. As we saw in 2009 when President Obama inherited an economy teetering on the brink of disaster and reeling from the late 2008 economic actions implemented by President Bush, like the galactically irresponsible TARP, lag time is legitimate.

Aside from unemployment and inflation, which can be accurately compared over time between administrations using traditional methods, Kinsley uses Change in Real GDP per Capita as his gauge for the other metrics. As he explains:

The most important measure of a nation's economic strength is gross domestic product. But comparing GDPs among various presidents would be unfair. Since the economy does tend to grow over time (or always has), more recent presidents would enjoy an unfair advantage. And every president inherits a situation; the question is what he does with it.

So the measure I use is "Change in Real GDP Per Capita," which corrects for inflation and also for population growth.

Factoring for lag time as a legitimate bias, the report yields the following results. (Detail available via link).

1. The economy grows substantially faster under a Democratic administration.
2. Unemployment is much lower under a Democratic administration.
3. Federal spending is reduced when Democrats have the presidency.
4. The federal deficit grows much faster under a Republican administration.
5. Inflation and defense spending is not strongly correlated to either party.
6. Republicans tax on average under 1% less annually than Democrats do as compared to GDP.

To anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the past thirty years these results shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Since 1980 we’ve witnessed vast growth in the national debt under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Only the detested tax and spend liberal Bill Clinton was able to reduce debt whatsoever. The big government Socialist was so effective in fact that he left a budget surplus to his successor. Bush, for his part, of course wasted no time squandering every penny of it and drove up the debt once again as a testament of his dedication to modern Republican fiscal policy.

In addition to the results from the report, everything we’ve witnessed in the last thirty years has unambiguously demonstrated that there is one party who has been fiscally responsible and another whose experimentation in implementing never before proven economic theories has had disastrous effects on our economy. How we’ve managed to confuse which was which is a tribute to the effectiveness of modern image spin.

The Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility only because they tell us that they are. They tell us every day, all day long, and through every channel imaginable. Their pundits try to prove it to us everyday and use "common sense" because if they had to use empirical data they couldn’t convince anybody.

When you peak through the facade that is image and spin, the hard facts expose Republican fiscal policy for what it is. True fiscal conservatives vote Democratic. It's just common sense.

The Republican Puppet Master

As is often the case, the Republicans spoke with one resounding voice at yesterday's Health Care Summit, and that voice said, "Start over". From the Daily Show to Hardball, news outlets picked up on this and spliced together clip after clip of the Republicans invited to partake in the ceremonies yesterday employing the tried and true method of:

1. Testing issue framing and language.
2. Crafting a simple message based on the results of that testing.
3. Repeating it over and over again.

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lamar Alexander, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and the rest of the creepy talk bots all got in line and parroted the preselected and well rehearsed party message, “Start over”.

Anyone familiar with Frank Luntz's work immediately knew what the score was. A quick Google search for "Frank Luntz Start Over" directs to his October 2009 memo detailing "Words That Work" for the ongoing healthcare debate. It is the updated version of his original piece, "The Language of Healthcare" from May 2009 which was responsible for such catchy 2009 phrases as "Washington bureaucrats standing between you and your doctor" and "Washington takeover of healthcare". Over the last year Americans have heard these phrases and many like them--all of which emanated from the Luntz doctrine-- repeated ad nauseum by Republican politicians and pundits alike in an attempt to sway public opinion, and thus the actual scope of the bills, while Congress was attempting to craft legislation on the issue.

That yesterday's talking points came from Luntz was a lock, they just had to be located in the updated playbook. Sure enough, on page 7 of the Luntz memo in the "Words That Work" section, yesterday's mantra was outlined. (The words and phrases in bold type below were those regurgitated and repeated most often at the Summit).

"Most Americans wanted to hear the president tell Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and the rest of Congress that it's time to start over on a common-sense, bipartisan plan focused on lowering the cost of health care while improving quality. That's what I've heard over the past several months, in talking to thousands of my constituents."

Unsurprisingly, the message incorporates a pot shot at President Obama, attempting to take him down a peg by alluding that he doesn't have the courage to stand up to the right's favorite punching bags, Pelosi and Reid, and thereby grouping him with the hated liberal Congressional leadership.

Also particularly interesting is the part about “hearing it” from thousands of their constituents over the past several months. Identical verbiage was repeated tirelessly by the right yesterday during the meeting. This is no doubt true of course, so long as you replace "heard in talking with thousands of my constituents" with "read in a memo that I got from Frank Luntz".

Why this isn't trumpeted through the megaphones of the liberal news outlets is perplexing. Exposing the right for what they are, as a consortium of politicians so hopelessly out of touch with the people they purport to represent that they need to be told what to say, and so spineless that they can be told what to say is powerful stuff; especially when the marching orders are based on the results of focus group testing and orchestrated from on high by some porky little schlub like Luntz. The notion itself is incongruent and inimical with the Republican image of strength and individualism.

MSNBC should be running a split screen picture of Luntz on one side and clips of Republican congress members parroting Luntz’s words on the other. Luntz’s words should be streaming across the bottom of the screen with a little white ball bouncing over them like in the old Cal Worthington commercials as they’re regurgitated by the GOP talking heads. And they should run it twenty hours a day as if Luntz were Jeremiah Wright with a giant caption across the top of the screen that reads, “The Republican Puppet Master”.

This is the hammer that shatters the sacred stained glass window of Ronald Reagan that watches proudly over the Republican Party. Someone needs to pick it up and start swinging. Now.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21886488/Frank-Luntz-Memo