Tag Archives: conservatism

by | February 5, 2012 · 5:49 PM

Study: Obama Most Conservative Democratic President in Recent History

By Luke Brinker

If President Barack Obama truly subscribes to a political philosophy based on “Saul Alinsky radicalism,” as Newt Gingrich alleges, he has a funny way of showing it. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia recently plotted the public positions of presidents from Harry Truman to Obama on a liberal-conservative scale. Poole found that, contrary to Tea Party mythology, Obama is far from a hard-core leftist. In fact, he’s to the right of every Democratic president since Truman:

Poole has also examined the phenomenon of party polarization, the topic of endless Beltway punditry. Polarization, Poole has found, is real, but it’s not the result of “both sides” moving toward the extremes. Republicans have moved much further to the right than Democrats have to the left. (Read this post for more, including some nifty charts that illustrate the point.) This is important to bear in mind when considering some of Obama’s purportedly “liberal” policies on issues like health care, the environment, and economic stimulus. Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 – is grounded in the “individual mandate,” a requirement that individuals buy health insurance or pay a penalty. The intellectual origins of the mandate are on the right; the Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney are among its past backers. (It’s easy to see why: by discouraging free riding,  the mandate upholds conservative notions about personal responsibility, as Romney wrote in a Wall Street journal op-ed in 2006. It also preserves the for-profit, private insurance model at the expense of a more efficient single-payer solution, which many on the left favor.) On climate change, Obama’s proposed solution has been a cap-and-trade scheme, which was also the position of the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008. George H. W. Bush implemented a cap-and-trade program to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions in the early 1990s; that market-based approach has proven remarkably successful, decreasing sulfur dioxide emissions by 40 percent since 1990. As for Obama’s economic stimulus policies, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 drew on many conservative ideas; in fact, one of economists’ chief critiques of the bill was that it was too reliant on inefficient tax cuts (which Democrats inserted in a futile effort to gain substantial GOP backing) and too light on large-scale infrastructure spending. Even where Obama has supposedly governed as a “liberal,” he’s hardly been a bona fide New Deal type.

The Tea Party may characteristically refuse to acknowledge reality on this score, but it’s clear that Bruce Bartlett is right: Obama is essentially a moderate conservative.  The Tea Party Jacobins have so radically redefined conservatism that it’s hard to remember that Burkeans still exist – they’re just Democrats now.

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by | February 2, 2012 · 10:51 AM

Kristof Gets Romney Wrong Again

By Luke Brinker

In an otherwise thoughtful column on the decline of Republican moderation, Nicholas Kristof expresses wishful thinking that likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney can reverse the trend. “[I]f Romney somehow manages to make the Republican Party safe for moderates again, that’ll be a triumph for his party — and for the country,” Kristof writes.

Oy. This isn’t the first time Kristof has flirted with the “moderate Mitt” theory — the notion that in his heart, Romney remains the centrist Republican he was in Massachusetts and is only spouting right-wing boilerplate to win the nomination. Once elected, the theory goes, Romney will govern as a pragmatic moderate.

The overarching problem with Kristof’s argument is that it rests upon Kristof’s conceit that he knows what Romney really believes. Anyone familiar with his record, however, would have a hard time discerning any clear core convictions, other than that Mitt Romney should be in elected office. Romney ran for office in Massachusetts as a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, eco-conscious, gun control-supporting “progressive,” but before running for the Senate in 1994, Romney evinced signs of social conservatism. It’s pointless to waste time trying to get inside Romney’s head, but there’s a case to be made that Romney has always been far more conservative than his father, Michigan Gov. George Romney, who opposed the Vietnam war even as Mitt supported it. Now that he’s running to be the national leader of a conservative party, Romney may feel liberated to be his true, conservative self.

Moreover, research by political scientist Jonathan Bernstein finds that presidents tend to keep their campaign promises. Romney is running as a tax-cutting, anti-abortion, pro-Ryan budget, and anti-climate science conservative, so there’s every reason to suspect that he’ll govern as one. With a narrow five to four pro-choice majority on the Supreme Court, it’s quite possible that whomever wins in November will appoint a justice to replace the aging swing-voting Justice Anthony Kennedy and either maintain or reverse the high court’s consensus on Roe v. Wade. Does anyone seriously believe that a President Romney, beholden to the conservative GOP, will appoint a pro-choice moderate? Likewise, does anyone take seriously the notion that after coming under relentless assault for shameless shape-shifting, a President Romney would govern contrary to how he campaigned?

I suspect that a great deal of Romney’s persistent reputation as a “moderate” has as much to do with his generally moderate temperament as it does with his record in Massachusetts. But a moderate disposition does not a moderate politician make. Another reason media figures like Kristof downplay Romney’s red-meat rhetoric may be socialization. Romney is a product of elite American institutions – Harvard Business, Harvard Law, the Boston Consulting Group, and Bain Capital. His milieu is similar to that of many of the nation’s top political commentators, including Rhodes Scholar Kristof. Many pundits are probably saying to themselves that with such a respectable pedigree, surely Romney is not the kind of Neanderthal who would overturn abortion rights, ignore climate science, and pursue policies even further to the right than those of former President George W. Bush. But they discount Romney’s conservatism at their peril.

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by | January 15, 2012 · 1:21 PM

Bain Capital and the Intra-GOP Culture Clash

By Luke Brinker

Besides Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry has been the highest-profile GOP critic of Mitt Romney’s tenure as CEO of private equity firm Bain Capital. Employing language that wouldn’t be out of place at an Occupy Wall Street rally, Perry denounced the private equity business model as “vulture capitalism,” as ABC reports:

 Texas Gov. Rick Perry categorized venture capital firms like the one once headed by Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, as “vultures” who prey upon sick companies and “leave the skeleton” behind.

“Allowing these companies to come in and loot the, loot people’s jobs, loot their pensions, loot their ability to take care of their families and I will suggest they’re just vultures,” Perry said during a townhall at a retirement community here. “They’re vultures that sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton.”

Asked by reporters to clarify whether he was directly referencing Bain with that comment, Perry answered, “Sure that’s exactly what I was making. They sit there, and they wait until they see a distressed company, and then they swoop in and you know pick the carcass clean and fly away.”

The Texas governor upped his attacks against Romney, arguing that voters in the Palmetto State will not want to elect a candidate who “gutted” and “looted” companies in South Carolina.

Cynicism and opportunism certainly go some distance toward explaining why a fervent free marketeer like Perry is taking Romney to task for his corporate practices. But the Perry-Romney divide on private equity illuminates a culture clash within the Republican Party. There’s not only a divide between white working class Republicans and the party’s country club set. There are also fissures within the party’s business wing, and those fissures are on display in Perry’s Bain attack.

The oil and gas industry has been Perry’s most generous supporter throughout his political career. Big Oil has funded Perry’s Texas campaigns to the tune of over $11 million, and among the 2012 presidential candidates, Perry was the top recipient of energy industry donations in 2011. That the conservative Perry would receive substantial energy industry backing is not surprising. The industry is headquartered primarily in conservative states like Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Perry’s Texas, and of its campaign contributions, an average of 77 percent go to Republicans.

The financial industry, on the other hand, is nowhere near as uniformly Republican as the oil and gas industry. Since 1990, finance has given 55 percent of its donations to the Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats. While Romney, as a former industry titan himself, is the top recipient of financial industry cash for the 2012 cycle, Barack Obama bested John McCain in industry donations in 2008. What’s behind finance’s friendliness toward Democrats? While the deregulatory, Wall Street-friendly policies of the Clinton administration proved pivotal in convincing many masters of the universe to back the Democratic Party, the industry’s support for Democrats isn’t entirely a matter of Democrats adopting big finance’s policies. (President Obama signed the toughest financial regulation since the Great Depression, for instance.) Financial executives themselves are remarkably liberal in many of their political views. They may express skepticism toward Dodd-Frank, the Occupy movement, and Obama’s alleged stigmatization of “fat cats,” but many are financially secure enough not to have to worry about a return to the Clinton era’s top income tax rate of 39.6 percent. Wall Street types tend to be pro-choice, environmentally conscious (unlike conservative oil and gas executives), and cosmopolitan in outlook. When New York legalized same-sex marriage this summer, Wall Street figures were crucial in securing support for marriage equality. The increasingly socially conservative, anti-climate science, anti-evolution, and anti-intellectual bent of the GOP means that many Republican candidates no longer pass the cocktail party test – that is, it would simply be too embarrassing for a Wall Streeter at an Upper East Side cocktail party to admit he supported, say, Sarah Palin.

In a New York Times story today on the styles of life among the top one percent, Shaila Dewan and Robert Gebeloff noted a Columbia University study that found that wealthy people in poorer states overwhelmingly support Republicans. In more affluent states, wealthy people are less likely to skew Republican. Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York – which respectively rank first, second, third, fourth, and eighth in per-capita income – have significant financial industry presence, and all supported Obama in 2008. (You have to go down to number 14 Alaska before you find a red state.) Texas rank 32nd, Oklahoma 43rd, and Louisiana 47th in per-capita income. All were McCain states in 2008. In short, cultural liberalism correlates with both affluence and financial industry strength, while states dominated by the oil industry are both more socially conservative and poorer. Romney’s probable nomination, then, is at odds with the prevailing trends in his party. A coastal elite from the financial industry is poised to stand for president as the candidate of a party concentrated in the Plains, South, and non-financial businesses. That helps explain why much of the GOP base continues to view Romney with suspicion.

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by | January 10, 2012 · 10:40 AM

Santorum’s Asinine Closing Argument

By Luke Brinker

As New Hampshire primary voters prepare to cast their ballots, Rick Santorum is pleading with GOP voters not to settle for a “moderate,” “establishment,” candidate, The Hill reports:

“Let’s put up Bob Dole, because it’s his turn,” Santorum said ironically of the 1996 GOP nominee. “Let’s put up John McCain, because it’s his turn.”

Some in the crowd started booing, while others cried out “No!”

Dole and McCain did not lose in 1996 and 2008, respectively, because voters perceived them as too centrist. Bill Clinton, elected amid a torpid economic climate in 1992, coasted to re-election thanks to robust economic growth. Because economic performance drives electoral outcomes, it followed that McCain stood little chance of defeating Barack Obama in 2008. Coming shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Democratic triumph in 2008 was the natural result of a severe recession occurring under a Republican president. Does Santorum really believe the GOP would have stood a better chance in 1996 by nominating Bob Dornan or in 2008 by putting up Tom Tancredo?

It’s also worth noting that by historical standards, Romney hardly qualifies as a centrist Republican. (And don’t expect a return of moderate Massachusetts Mitt.) Unlike Santorum, Romney tends to steer clear of inflammatory culture warrior rhetoric, so one could argue that he’s a temperamental moderate. But he still opposes abortion rights, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage. On economic issues, he endorses a full repeal of the estate tax, offers a regressive tax plan, and supports the Paul Ryan budget proposal, which would privatize Medicare. For a Republican presidential nominee who would really ruffle Santorum’s feathers, look to Gerald Ford, a pro-choicer, or Richard Nixon, the instigator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

It certainly suits Santorum’s ideological purposes to blame Republican defeats on insufficient conservatism, but a cursory knowledge of political history dispels his self-serving myth.

 

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by | January 8, 2012 · 2:48 PM

Santorum, the Catholic Church, and Child Sex Abuse

By Luke Brinker

As a follow-up to John’s post on Rick Santorum’s conservative brand of Catholicism, I thought it would be appropriate to examine how Santorum handled one of the gravest scandals to confront his religion. The sexual abuse of children by priests and the hierarchy’s decades-long cover-up of the crimes prompted this 2002 response from Santorum:

“Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture,” Santorum wrote. “When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”

Boston was indeed the “center of the storm” when the scandal erupted ten years ago. It’s worth noting that Cardinal Bernard Law, the top Catholic cleric in Boston who aided and abetted the Church’s cover-up, was a staunch conservative, unaffected by his city’s “academic, political, and cultural liberalism.” Moreover, it soon became apparent that child rape by priests was not confined to any one region of the country, or even to the United States alone. The problem was particularly widespread in Ireland, whose culture would hardly meet Santorum’s definition of libertine liberalism. The country prohibits abortion and did not even allow divorce (and even then only under limited circumstances) until 1997. That such a devout nation as Ireland was rocked by priestly pedophilia must confuse a committed theocrat like Santorum.

I’ve written that Mitt Romney is virtually guaranteed to win the Republican nomination, but that doesn’t mean that the ideas of his fellow candidates are irrelevant. Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Santorum’s sizable constituencies in the GOP tell us much about the popular impulses of one of our country’s two main political parties. And Santorum’s rise to prominence, however transient it will prove to be, is particularly troubling for more reasons than his anti-contraception, rabidly anti-gay views. That he would cavalierly dismiss child rape and its systematic concealment as nothing more than a byproduct of one region’s liberalism is demeaning, disgusting, and, in a sane world, disqualifying.

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