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Obama The Confidence Builder

Obama The Confidence Builder

WASHINGTON — When President Obama spoke to the nation Tuesday evening, his way was that of a politically moderate, temperamentally optimistic Democratic governor. He offered a long list of relatively modest but helpful programs that many voters will warm to and Republicans ought to have a hard time opposing.

Obama took a State of the Union address that began as a critique of economic inequality and turned it into case for restoring opportunity. Anyone who saw class warfare here is spending too much time with Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.

Yes, mention of a moderate Democratic governor kindles memories of Bill Clinton. His State of the Union productions consisted of thick catalogues of proposals that the pundits often panned but listeners usually liked. Most voters do not have an ideological view of government. They simply want it to solve some problems. Most Americans also reject a theological faith in the market. They think it’s a fine system until it acts unfairly.

So consider Obama’s latest effort as a set of confidence-building measures. It’s a bid to move the national conversation back to the economic basics: to “opportunity for everybody,” as he said in a follow-up speech on Wednesday at a Costco store in Maryland, and to the idea that “treating workers well is not just the right thing to do, it’s an investment.”

Obama hopes to demonstrate that government can take sensible steps — on wages, job training and income supplements, on savings, pensions and education — and encourage voters to ask Republicans why they would prevent such initiatives from being enacted on a larger scale.

After years of hoping in vain that he could break Washington’s “fever,” the president is responding to a systematic disconnect between the politics of the executive branch and the politics of the legislative branch.

Nationally, the country is moving steadily toward the center-left. Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections and never received fewer than 252 electoral votes. Generational change will reinforce this trend — conservatives are older as a group than the country as a whole — and the non-white share of the electorate will continue to grow.

But the legislative branch tilts rightward structurally, even when the national vote goes the other way. Republicans lost the popular vote in House races in 2012 by 1.7 million, but held the House because the GOP had disproportionate control over how congressional district lines were drawn. Democrats, for now, have a majority in the Senate. But the upper chamber over-represents conservative and rural interests. Thus do Idaho and Wyoming have the same number of senators as New York and California.

The Senate’s filibuster rules further empower a willful minority, while House rules confer enormous sway over the legislative agenda to the party that holds the speakership.

All of this means that initiatives such as an increase in the minimum wage, background checks for gun purchases, expanded pre-kindergarten programs and the extension of unemployment insurance can be foiled even when they enjoy broad national support. Obama pushed for them all again. But absent legislative action, he said he would accomplish what he could in each area on his own.

Moreover, to have real influence (and to help Democrats in this fall’s elections), Obama needs to boost his ratings. The most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll pegged his approval at 46 percent, up from 42 percent in November but still down from 55 percent in January 2013.

The Post/ABC News poll found that over the last year, Obama has lost the most ground among moderates and independents, moderate-to-conservative Democrats, women, and middle-income voters. This is close to the definition of the center ground of American opinion.

His “concrete, common-sense proposals,” as Obama called them on Wednesday, are aimed directly at these groups, particularly his initiatives on behalf of working women for equal pay and family leave. His unapologetic defense of the Affordable Care Act — he mocked the GOP House for staging 40 votes to repeal it — reflected his view that whatever their doubts, Americans are pragmatic in their approach to the new law and reluctant to see its benefits disappear.

It’s natural to contrast Obama’s soaring legislative ambitions of a year ago with this week’s less adventurous “I’ll do it myself” speech. But he has to deal with the Congress he has, not the Congress he wishes he had. The path forward is a lot more crooked than Obama once imagined it would be, and realism in pursuit of a degree of social justice is no vice.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne

AFP Photo/Jewel Samad

Class Warfare? Most Americans Support Higher Taxes For The Rich

Before the GOP presidential hopefuls take the stage for tonight’s debate and prepare to decry Obama’s “class warfare,” they might want to mull over the fact that most people — including 53 percent of Republicans — support higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Even so, not a single politician participating in the debate has backed a tax increase on households with more than $250,000 in annual income. Despite outrage by Republican politicians at the mere suggestion of more taxes for the rich, a new poll reveals that most people think it’s not such a bad idea:

More than two-thirds of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say wealthier people should pay more in taxes to bring down the budget deficit, and even larger numbers think Medicare and Social Security benefits should be left alone.

That sentiment on taxes is at odds with the Republican presidential candidates, who will meet tonight in a Bloomberg- Washington Post-sponsored debate focused on economic issues.

More than 8 out of 10 Americans say the middle class will have to make financial sacrifices to cut the federal deficit even as the public just as strongly opposes higher taxes on middle-income families, according to a Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted Oct. 6-9.

Why Occupy Wall Street Should Scare Republicans

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — In Florida this week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was asked about the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. “I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare,” he said.

Romney’s right. It may be dangerous — to his chances of being elected.

Occupy Wall Street, now almost three weeks old, isn’t like the anti-globalization demonstrations that disrupted summits in the 1990s or even the street actions at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, though some of the same characters are probably in attendance. With unemployed young protesters planning to camp out all winter in Zuccotti Park (with bathrooms available only at a nearby McDonald’s), it’s more like a cross between a Hooverville and Woodstock — the middle-class jobless of the 1930s and the hippie protesters of the 1960s.

With the help of unions and social networking, the movement has at least some chance of re-energizing Democrats in 2012 and pushing back against the phenomenal progress Republicans have made in suppressing voter turnout in several states.

Why? Because the tectonic plates of U.S. politics are shifting in ways we don’t yet fully understand. We don’t know whether Occupy Wall Street is a carnival party — a piece of left-wing street theater that gets old fast — or a nascent political party that revives a long-dormant tradition of class-based politics.

It’s possible that these demonstrations, which have now spread to about 150 cities and campuses, will be hijacked by extremists or dissipated by obnoxiousness; the American left has practice in committing suicide. The whole thing could fade as young people find a better way of hanging out offline.

Something Consequential

But my visits to Zuccotti Park made me think it’s the beginning of something consequential. So far it looks like a younger, lefty version of the early days of the Tea Party — a leaderless, mostly organic movement with a catchy symbolic name that captures the public imagination by channeling anger against elites.

Like the Tea Party on the Republican side, Occupy Wall Street makes the party establishment nervous. It’s not just that Democratic candidates have done well fundraising on Wall Street in recent years. The bigger problem is getting the activists to draw a distinction between bringing specific greedheads to justice and mocking those parts of Wall Street that are blameless in the 2008 crash and do plenty to invest in the future of the country.

Directing Anger

But a healthy rebalancing of the national conversation is nonetheless under way. The Tea Party directed public anger against the federal government in general and President Barack Obama in particular; Occupy Wall Street directs that ire against Wall Street in general and — inevitably — Romney in particular.

This will have no effect on Romney in the Republican primaries, of course, but in a general election it could make him the poster boy of the big banks that many see as the cause of their woes. The specifics of his record running Bain Capital LLC will be subsumed in the image of his rationalizing the actions (resisting any tax increases) of the “1 percenters.”

The arguments I heard from the often-articulate protesters in the park were economic, not partisan. None of the posters depicted Romney, House Speaker John Boehner, or any other Republicans. Instead they said things like “Top 1% Want Everything,” “Listen to the Drumming of the 99% Revolution,” “Stop Off-Shore Tax Evasion,” and “Protect Medicare, Not Billionaires.”

It’s easy to denigrate the movement for simplistic sentiments that lack a clear agenda. But as the Tea Party demonstrations showed in 2009, that very shapelessness is a huge asset (to use the Wall Street term). If “We’re the 99 percenters” catches on, and the crazies can be marginalized, then the challenge will be to move from the streets to the ballot box, as the Tea Party did in 2010.

Voting Barriers Multiply

Lack of enthusiasm for Obama would be one problem. But the young people brought into activism by Occupy Wall Street may face other impediments. Today’s Republican Party is not just anti-Democratic but anti-democratic. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University just released a disturbing report showing that changes in state laws could make it much harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012. Some states are putting barriers in the way of early voting and student voting, both of which are used heavily by the liberal base.

The most appalling laws make it almost impossible to vote without a driver’s license, which 11 percent of U.S. adults don’t have. College ID cards are not an acceptable substitute in several states. Texas Governor Rick Perry recently signed a bill saying you can vote with a concealed-handgun permit but not with identification from the University of Texas.

Discipline Needed

It isn’t hard to see what Republican-controlled legislatures are trying to do. They want to make sure that the kind of free-floating anger expressed by Occupy Wall Street doesn’t end up helping Obama’s reelection. The claim that the purpose of the new election laws is to prevent voter fraud is itself a fraud, given that there’s no widespread evidence of ballots cast under assumed identities.

To make something lasting of this movement, the left must move from legitimate moral outrage to a disciplined approach for electing candidates who want to make Wall Street more answerable for the mess we’re in. Even as they’re outspent by the Koch brothers and their corporate ilk, the 99 percenters will make 2012 a helluva lot more compelling.

(Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

Copyright 2011 Bloomberg.

IMF: Want To Fix The Economy? Tackle Income Inequality.

To solve our economic woes, it turns out the government should focus less on free trade and debt and more on alleviating income inequality: A new study — by the IMF, no less — found that countries with more equally distributed income tended to have longer growth spells. This information, in light of a rapidly expanding gap between rich and poor in the United States, could explain the country’s slow economic recovery. Even so, politicians wary of “class warfare” and “socialism” slurs will still probably ignore income inequality as they search for quick economic fixes.

The study appeared in Finance & Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund — not exactly the most progressive institution out there. Even so, the findings supported the radical idea that governments should tackle income inequality first if they want to have longer periods of economic growth. Mother Jones reports:

Comparing six major economic variables across the world’s economies, [study author Andrew] Berg found that equality of incomes was the most important factor in preventing a major downturn.

In their study, Berg and coauthor Jonathan Ostry were less interested in looking at how to spark economic growth than how to sustain it. “Getting growth going is not that difficult; it’s keeping it going that is hard,” Berg explains. For example, the bailouts and stimulus pulled the US economy out of recession but haven’t been enough to fuel a steady recovery. Berg’s research suggests that sky-high income inequality in the United States could be partly to blame.

So how important is equality? According to the study, making an economy’s income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent.

So Obama has been facing unsubstantiated accusations of “class warfare” lately, but it turns out maybe tackling inequality is exactly what the country needs to fix the economy. Somehow, it’s hard to see conservative politicians jumping on this data as they develop economic recovery plans.