Invasion of the Party Snatchers

Kind of a follow up to the last postActor 212 and David Frum both discuss the destruction of the Republican Party as we know it. By “as we know it,” I mean a political party in the tradition of American political parties.

This is not to say that the GOP is going to disappear; far from it. It’s saying that the thing we call the Republican Party is being replaced by an alien entity that is a political party only in the broadest and loosest sense of the word.

The last post was about how the direction of the party is being steered by a self-selected external committee and not the elected Republican National Committee. Today, Actor and Frum write about the destructive influence of the Tea Party. But the Tea Party is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster fabricated directly or indirectly by some of the same outsiders on the self-select committee, such as the Koch brothers and Karl Rove.

(Karl may not like the baggers, but he made baggerism possible. They were spawned in the toxic swamp of Karl’s brand of politicking.)

The Republican Party is rapidly turning into the wholly owned instrument of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, with a base made up of zombie baggers trained to lurch in whatever direction the dog whistles tell them to lurch. The party is no longer responding to the opinions and needs of voters at all, and it represents no one but its owners.

Happy Halloween.

What Citizens United Hath Wrought

Here’s a fascinating article by Nicholas Confessore in the New York Times. Apparently the Republican Party is no longer being run by the Republican Party. Instead, its direction is being managed by a dozen or so powerful men —

But almost none of them hold office or a job with the Republican Party itself. Instead, they represent conservative groups that channeled tens of millions of dollars into last year’s Congressional campaign. And as 2012 approaches, the groups — among them the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, the American Action Network and Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers — have gathered into a loosely organized political machine poised to rival, and in many ways supplant, the official Republican Party apparatus.

This crew has taken over efforts to defeat Obama and pick off vulnerable Dems in the House and Senate.

Like the party committees they are rapidly coming to eclipse, the independent groups are financed by some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors and operated by some of its most respected operatives and strategists. But thanks to the Citizens United decision, the independent groups can raise money in unlimited amounts and with negligible overhead. Much of the money will be spent through not-for-profit organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.

Most of the groups answer only to a few dozen deep-pocketed donors, rather than the elected officials who oversee traditional party efforts.

This is the 1 percent of the 1 percent. And they own the Republican Party. Not so much the Dems:

Democrats are also setting up independent groups that are staffed by party veterans. But those efforts appear to be progressing more slowly, in part because there is less of a vacuum to fill. Mr. Obama, the most prodigious fund-raiser in the country, has been able to inject tens of millions of dollars in campaign financing into the Democratic National Committee.

This is truly dangerous stuff.

Making It Up

Via Krugman — the Columbia Journalism Review analyzes a post at the American Enterprise Union on why income inequality is a myth. The remarkable thing about the post is that the author doesn’t even try to manipulate data; he just flat-out lies about it. He cites studies revealing income inequality and claims they say just the opposite.

See also Charles Pierce, “Everybody Is the 99 Percent,” and while you are there, see “The Republican Addiction to Attack Politics Has Backfired.”

The Empty Shell of Movement Conservatism

George Will writes a floundering column about what a shame it is that Romney is the most “electable” GOP candidate running for office. “Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?” Will wails.

Alexander Burns clarifies at Politico,

Even as Republicans come around to the idea that Romney may be their strongest opponent for President Obama, many are still convinced that a Romney presidency would represent a historic missed opportunity for the right.

At a moment in history when the Democratic incumbent in the White House ought to be extremely vulnerable, not to mention a Republican majority in both houses of Congress easily within reach, the Republican presidential field looks like a collection of rejects from the Island of Misfit Toys. And the one candidate who might possibly win the general election is, in some ways, the biggest “misfit” of all — someone movement conservatism considers to be an outsider.

How did this happen? How is it that such a dominant movement does not have a “deep bench,” so to speak, of respectable candidates that the establishment could market to the masses?

Part of the answer, IMO, is that “movement conservatism” has long been an empty shell of a movement. Beneath the facade of long-discredited ideas and deceptive talking points are nothing but resentment, bigotry, greed, and a deep sense of privileged entitlement.

Plus, the several factions within it don’t seem interested in going in the same direction. The neocons these days seem well outnumbered by isolationist social conservatives, for example, although the neocons still have a pretty big media megaphone.

On top of that, years of “politicking” with nothing but lies and dog whistles have left Republicans with a base that is utterly out of touch with majority public opinion, not to mention reality. Any candidate who might clean up well enough to have a shot at the general election couldn’t possible pass muster with the base.

I’m not saying that movement conservatism is about to dissolve away into the political ether. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy still has the money and the media. And between gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, they are as much as glued into federal and state legislatures. I expect them to continue to hold power way out of proportion to their actual support among voters for many years to come.

No, I’m just explaining to George Will how movement conservatism came to this.

Stuff to Read

Republicans’ “job-creating” spending cuts destroyed 370,000 jobs.

68% of millionaires are OK with paying more taxes.

John Boehner complains that the President is overstepping his constitutional authority. In the next breath, Boehner says the President has given up on governing and is doing nothing but campaigning. Our President is one talented guy — a slacker authoritarian?

An article at Bloomberg/Business Week explains why flat tax plans don’t perform as advertised. But Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal think they work just fine —

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry must be onto something with his flat tax. Liberals wasted no time on Tuesday shooting arrows at the Texas governor’s proposal, labeling it a giant-sized tax cut for millionaires and billionaires that’s paid for with higher taxes on the middle class.

See? Flat tax plans annoy liberals. What more do you want?

Obama administration spokesman Ben LaBolt said the flat tax “would shift a greater share of taxes away from large corporations and the wealthiest onto the backs of the middle class.” Mr. Obama’s team just can’t get away from the class warfare theme.

And on and on. Moore doesn’t refute any of the criticisms of flat tax plans; he just thinks they’re trivial little details that shouldn’t concern anyone.

Polls and Predictions

If you can stand another post about Herman Cain this morning — Nate Silver has a post about Cain’s chances for winning the nomination.

If all you had to go on was the polls, you might think that Mr. Cain was the favorite to win the Republican nomination.

But then there are the nonpolling factors, some of which can be objectively measured and some of which cannot, but which would generally point toward Mr. Cain as being a second- or third-tier candidate. Mr. Cain has no endorsements from Republican members of Congress or Republican governors, and very few from officials in key early voting states. He has raised very little money. He has not hired well-known names for his campaign staff. He does not have traditional credentials. He has run for elected office just once before. He has begun to get a fair amount of media coverage, but the tenor of it has been fairly skeptical. His campaign commercials have been … interesting.

Has there ever been a candidate with such strong polling but such weak fundamentals? Almost certainly not, at least not at this relatively advanced stage of the race.

I’m just speculating here, but what this might be telling us is that endorsements and positive media coverage may mean much less to the Republican voting base than it used to.

According to (don’t click if you’re at work) this video, Cain coverage has been dominating Fox News lately. This is not all good coverage, mind you, but Fox viewers sure as heck have seen a lot of Cain.

Recently Karl Rove did a takedown of Cain on Fox News that was supposed to be devastating. Politico ran a headline about it that said “Karl Rove sticks a fork in Herman Cain.” I did a quick survey of rightie blog reaction to this, and I saw not one post or comment that agreed with Rove; most just yelled at him to get off the lawn, so to speak. Rove appears to have no authority at all with the base.

On the other hand, I take it Rush is still promoting Cain, who is running ads on Rush’s show.

Nate says you can find examples of candidates with strong “fundamentals” (endorsements; the support of the establishment) and weak polling. One example that comes to mind was Haley Barbour, whom the GOP establishment and bobbleheads kept promoting as a real contender, but the base ignored him. But it’s unprecedented, at this point in the campaign cycle, to have a candidate who is polling this strongly but whose fundamentals are next to zilch.

Would the Republican voters nominate a black candidate? I’ve said for some time that the dynamics of racism on the Right are more complicated than they were when Lester Maddox and his axe handle ran for governor of Georgia on a segregation platform. The wingnuts might vote for a black candidate who (a) assures them they are not really racists, like those liberals keep saying; and (b) is not likely to come anywhere near their womenfolk.

Clue: CEOs Can Be Clueless

“As a result of his efforts, Godfather’s Pizza sales were reduced from $275 million in 1986 to $242.5 million in 1988.” — Herman Cain’s Wikipedia bio

Herman Cain is touting is business management experience as his chief qualification to be President, but Susan Saulny writes for the New York Times that managing Cain is like managing a herd of cats.

But interviews with Mr. Cain’s former staff members, volunteers and supporters give a glimpse of a candidate who appeared to show ambivalence toward basic campaign management, which led to problems in hiring, scheduling, fund-raising and messaging.

Together, these problems are at odds with a central theme of his candidacy. Because Mr. Cain does not have a legislative or political track record, his campaign rests heavily on the contention that he would bring proven, executive-level expertise from the business world to the White House.

Ex-staffers also say that Cain maintains distance from his staff, who have been told to not speak to him unless spoken to.

Some former aides said they had longed to see the problem-solving side of Mr. Cain, or to see Mr. Cain at all. Over the spring and summer, he did not spend much time with workers. He did not plan conference calls or staff meetings and was given to changing his mind about appearances, sometimes with little notice, a tendency that angered his field workers.

“It was frustrating because we couldn’t get him here as much as I was led to believe he was going to be here,” said Kevin Hall, who worked for Mr. Cain in Iowa in June.

“Everything we tried to do was like pulling teeth to get accomplished,” said a former staff member in Iowa, who asked for anonymity. “I’ve never been involved in a job that was as frustrating as this one. We couldn’t get an answer on anything. Everything was fly by the seat of your pants.”

This is actually standard behavior for CEOs in Corporation World. Most big companies don’t get things done because of the brilliant leadership of the head of the corporation. They get things done because over time they’ve put procedures in place that delegate responsibilities and that enable staffs to work together to accomplish complex tasks without having to re-invent the wheel every other day. Institutional memory helps, also, as do having competent employees in key positions far, far below executive level.

Wikipedia defines “business management” this way:

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. Resourcing encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources and natural resources.

What has Cain actually managed? In the 1980s he was in charge of 400 Burger Kings in Philadelphia for three years, and during his tenure his Burger Kings gained considerably in profitability. So Pillsbury promoted him by putting him in charge of Godfather’s Pizza, which he royally screwed up. Then he and some other upper-level executives bought Godfather’s from Pillsbury, and after that sales were steady, but when he resigned ten years later the business still wasn’t making as much money as it was making before Cain became CEO.

Then he was CEO of the National Restaurant Association, a lobbying group; chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City; and he sits on a number of corporate boards of directors. While all that makes for a respectable resume, and certainly requires him to have some control of an organization, I don’t see that he’s had much success with enterprises that involve complex logistics, and he doesn’t seem to have ever been part of a team that produced anything tangible, like a new model of toaster.

In my experience, CEOs rarely come up through the ranks of production, manufacturing or engineering. They come from finance, advertising, marketing. They make decisions about money, sales, acquisitions. Often they have only a vague idea how the products their company sells actually get made. Nor do they care. As a rule they don’t deal with employees below the upper management level. Often they aren’t even that bright; they’re just really aggressive and narcissistic and intimidate everyone around them into obedience. Their success often depends on the quality of the staffs they assemble around them who take care of the details, like actually managing.

That’s a generalization, of course, and I’m sure there are exceptions. Most of my experience with them comes from dealing with CEOs who had written books, and I was the editorial production manager responsible for getting the manuscript edited, typeset, printed, and bound. So they had to deal with a peon like me. There was only one author in my how-to-succeed-in-business group who was a nice guy, but he wasn’t a CEO but a consultant who specialized in taking over failing companies and turning them around. He cleaned up after the standard CEO type had crashed and burned, in other words. I could tell he was a good manager, because he respected the process. He did what I asked him to do and kept to the schedule.

My other CEOs thought the schedule was a nuisance, but they still expected their books to be published when they wanted them published. We underlings were magically supposed to make up for the time they lost.

Talk to just about anybody who has worked in the product development, engineering, production, or manufacturing department of a big corporation, and they’ll tell you the same thing. The people at the head of the company were completely cut off from the process of making the products and getting them on the shelves. Their only involvement with products is to declare they want X product on the shelves in 3 months, even though the process would normally take 9 months. They don’t care, and nobody ever says no to them. So the little ants in the cubicle farm spend the three months working 12-hour days and cutting every corner in creation, praying that nobody makes a mistake and orders bottle caps that don’t fit the bottles.

From the beginning I’ve suspected that Cain was that sort of CEO, the type who “manages” by barking out an order and expecting his underlings to figure out how to give him what he wants. You could see the same trait in G.W. Bush, who seemed to think that declaring an intention to do something was the same thing as actually doing it.

Cain’s campaign staff is stymied at every turn over what ought to be simple tasks, like acquiring an email address or having bumper stickers made. He needs to hire someone to manage that, and apparently he hasn’t, and he is too disorganized to do it himself.

You could argue that a President doesn’t have to know how toasters get made, either. But the interesting thing about a President is that they actually have less power in their organization that CEOs do in theirs. If a future CEO-president ever tries to run the country like they run corporations, by capriciously barking out orders and expecting the underlings to carry them out (which, I understand, is how Rick Scott is trying to govern Florida), he’ll be in for a shock.

Economic Injustice

In a graph, from the Congressional Budget Office:

There’s your class warfare, folks, and we’re losing.

And then there’s the student loan issue (click image for full size) —

Click for full size

This isn’t just a problem for the young folks; it promises to strangle our economy for years to come. President Obama has proposed a relief program that would cap student loan payments at 10 percent of income and forgive the balance after 20 years of payments. Think about that — 10 percent of income for 20 years, and that’s a reprieve from what they have to pay now. We’re going to have to do better than that. This is ridiculous.

And where is that money going to, really? I have a hard time believing that the cost of educating most young people is really that high.

Meanwhile, true to form, GOP candidate Rick Perry has proposed a tax plan that he says would cut taxes on all income groups, but which independent analysis says would actually only cut taxes for the very wealthy and increase them for everyone else. Elsewhere, GOP candidate Mitt Romney takes being an empty suit to Olympic levels. At Salon, Steve Kornacki has written one article after another about how Herman Cain’s campaign is about to implode. Now he’s finally admitted that, given the quality of Cain’s competition, maybe it won’t.

At the front — here’s an interview of historian Michael Kazin, who has a very smart analysis of OWS, with which I entirely agree. See also Paul Krugman, “Say Anything.”

Chris Hedges on OWS

I respect Chris Hedges as a smart guy who sees big pictures, so I always consider his opinion carefully. His take on OWS is worth reading.

He puts his finger on some issues that have long bothered me, also, and any liberal who sees the New Left caused more problems than it solved is brilliant in my book. But in other ways I think he misses some things —

The occupation movement’s greatest challenge will be overcoming the deep distrust of white liberals by the poor and the working class, especially people of color. Marginalized people of color have been organizing, protesting and suffering for years with little help or even acknowledgment from the white liberal class. With some justification, those who live in these marginalized communities often view this movement as one dominated by white sons and daughters of the middle class who began to decry police abuse and the lack of economic opportunities only after they and their families were affected. This distrust is not the fault of the movement, which has instituted measures within its decision-making process to make sure marginalized voices are heard before white males. It is the fault of a bankrupt liberal class that for decades has abandoned the core issue of economic justice for the poor and the working class and busied itself with the vain and self-referential pursuits of multiculturalism and identity politics.

Now, I mostly agree with this, but … “identity politics” and the abandonment of economic justice issues were as much choices of African-Americans in the New Left as it was whites. I remember that well. What you ended up with in the late 1970s, once the dust settled, was that all the different factions of the New Left, including the Black Power movement, had scampered off in different directions and mostly had abandoned the poor.

I also think bringing in economically marginalized whites, who have been taught to distrust liberals also, is just as important as bringing in people of color.

But I am encouraged that OWS recognizes one has to level the organizational playing field and not let white guys take over, as they do tend to do.

Very far down in the article, he says,

The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it has not replicated the beliefs of the New Left. Rather, it is rooted in the moral imperatives of justice and self-sacrifice, what Dwight Macdonald called nonhistorical values, values closer to King than Abbie Hoffman. It seeks to rebuild the bridges to labor, the poor and the working class. The movement eschews the hedonism of the New Left; indeed it does not permit drugs or alcohol in Zuccotti Park. It denounces the consumer culture and every evening shares its food with the homeless, who also often sleep in the park. But, most important, it eschews, through a nonhierarchical system of self-governance, the deadly leadership cults that plagued and ultimately destroyed the movements of the 1960s.

Most of that sounds good, but I’ll have to think about that last part. Was it really “leadership cults” that destroyed the movements of the 1960s? Does anyone else see it that way? That’s not how I remember it. There were some personality cults, but they tended to come and go. I’m a few years older than Hedges, and my memories are no doubt different.

Then Hedges loses me for a few paragraphs, until I got here —

In line with the occupy movement, we must not extol the power of the state as an agent of change or define progress by increased comfort, wealth, imperial expansion or consumption. The trust in the beneficence of the state—which led most liberal reformers to back the wars in Vietnam and Iraq at their inceptions, as well as place faith in electoral politics long after electoral politics had been hijacked by corporate power—ceded uncontested power to the corporate state.

He’s off here, I think. I don’t think “trust in the beneficence of the state” was really the main culprit behind ceding power to the corporate state. It was more the distrust of the state, the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the abandonment of party politics by the New Lefties.

Liberals and liberal groups, such as MoveOn, which urge us to appeal to formal structures of power that no longer concern themselves with the needs or rights of citizens have become forces of disempowerment.

I need that explained to me. Examples?

The rest of the article, about toppling the corporate state, certainly sounds stirring, but he’s not telling me how the corporate state is going to be toppled. If we’re not going to use the levers of government, which seems to be what he’s saying, then what? Revolution? Is he nuts?