PAR POL AM

A course blog for Party Politics in America POL SCI 421 at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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This election, social media will determine the outcome.... money is just a proxy for votes. That is what makes politics so vulnerable to social media. Social media can deliver a relationship much more effectively than these field techniques.

Sean Parker, entrepreneur and founding president of Facebook

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Culture War? (through the years).

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Yesterday President Obama gave a speech focused on inequality in Osawatomie, Kansas. Osawatomie is the same location where Theodore Roosevelt laid out his own populist flavored campaign themes. Obama:

I'm here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we're greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren't Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values or 99% values. They're American values. And we have to reclaim them.

and

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the 50s and 60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory.

Ezra Klein points to the influence of Occupy Wall Street on Obama's choice of inequality as a campaign theme:

Which sets us up for an unusually populist election -- on both sides. Republicans have taken their message from the Tea Party. Democrats are borrowing their theme from Occupy Wall Street. In both cases, citizen-driven grassroots groups are setting the agenda.

The paralel to the Tea Party is apt. But I wouldn't suggest that these groups are setting the agenda so much as they have discovered ideas and positions that are resonating throughout the electorate. And as we've seen before, parties and politicians are quite adept at appropriating populist enthusiasms and steering it toward their own needs to win elections.

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There are gendered patterns in primary candidate favorability ratings. According to Gallup, Republican women don't like Herman Cain anymore, but they really aren't that fond of Gingrich, Paul, and Perry relative to Republican men. Meanwhile, Republican sentiments toward Mitt Romney are more or less balanced across women and men.

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Snopes reveals a bit of popular political lore to be rather mythical:

During a photo opportunity at a 1988 grocers' convention, President George Bush was "amazed" at encountering supermarket scanners for the first time.

Status: False

Snopes link via the myth busting Brendan Nyhan, who points to the New York Times engaged in continued spreading of this tall tale.

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Taegan Goddard quotes Rich Galen who uses the 2008 Democratic contest to explain Newt Gingrich's ability to capturing the GOP presidential nomination:

Sixty-two percent of Iowa voters wanted someone other than Barack Obama four years ago. The only reason he won was because Hillary and Edwards almost precisely split 60 percent of the votes.

Hmmm... I guess Galen thinks that none of the Clinton or Edwards voters had ranked Obama as their second choice.

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Steve Holland and David Alexander writing for Reuters call John McCain "the most prominent politician forecasting Americans will look to another party to compete with Democrats and Republicans."

McCain:

Unless both parties change, then I think that [the possibility of a third party is] an inevitability. We aren't doing anything for the people

On the Tea Party:

The Tea Party was a movement, not an organization, as we know. And so they've kind of receded. There was never any permanency to them.... But I think that you could see a national movement, that there's a group of people saying 'look we may disagree on some specific issues but we're not one of them.'

On his (oft-strained) relationship to the GOP:

I will continue to complain about things but ... I still haven't given up on the Republican Party.

Via Teaegan Goddard.

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The Redistricting Song

A music video about redistristricting from ProPublica. Who knew that studying politics could be this much fun?

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POL SCI 421 student politicalpartydown makes a cogent observation about the incipient Occupy Wall Street movement:

OWS, an anti establishment movement, has a real problem on its hands as its most viable candidate in 2012 would be the current establishment head, President Barrack Obama.

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How does One Become a Democrat Anyway?

According to the Journal Sentinel Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele doesn't seem like much of a liberal to some of the interest groups who supported his campaign. And Abele himself doesn't care much for partisan politics:

Partisan politics complicates things and doesn’t help with solutions.... everyone should be an independent.

We could literally identify a chorus of pundits and politicians who blame political problems on parties. Party critics tend to be a bit ego-centric — they know the best policies and those officials or voters who disagree must somehow be clouded by a partisan bias. I'd submit that more often than not, their isn't a best policy so much as there are different preferences over policy options. Most of the time, disagreement doesn't stem from party competition, but from differences in underlying preferences, ideologies, and world views held by citizens and elites.

However, it can be true that partisan teams can exaggerate the differences between partisan groupings in the electorate. We will be tackling that phenomenon with the Culture War? book at the end of the semester.

So if Abele doesn't like parties very much why did he campaign as a Democrat? We will be tackling that question with the Why Parties? book after the midterm exam.

But so how did Abele get to be a Democrat if he isn't very liberal? Just like nearly every other partisan elected official in the United States, he won a primary.

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein considering a related question about who gets to attend a recent Republican presidential debate:

What should happen is that the political parties choose who gets to be invited to the debates, using any criteria they believe is appropriate. But there’s a paradox involved, because the nomination process is in part all about choosing who gets to make party decisions — so at this point, no one really has the uncontested authority to do so. That’s presumably a piece of any party nomination process, but it’s especially problematic for American political parties because the formal party structure isn’t necessarily central to what “the party” actually is. Nor are there formal party members, who could then elect party officials and give them some legitimacy. Instead, there’s an odd situation in which formal parties set some of the ground rules, but are otherwise often unimportant to party governance, all of which makes whatever they do contested when candidates believe they have been wronged. Which also means that those formal party officials themselves are on precarious ground. All of this, of course, applies not just to relatively trivial stuff such as whether Gary Johnson gets to debate, but also to things such as the timing and rules of the various primaries and caucuses. The debates are relatively easy; turn it over to the network sponsor and hope no one makes a fuss. The schedule of primaries and caucuses is a lot harder.

One of our course themes is that parties are made up of people who don't always agree but still often find ways to cooperate or cooperate enough to achieve some of their common goals.

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Ezra Klein argues that liberals are out building their version of the Tea Party in southern Manhattan:

What these Democrats and liberal-activist groups are looking for is something similar to what conservatives found in the tea party: an opportunity to recharge and rebrand. Governance exhausts a movement. The compromises sap it of its purity; the institutional ties rob it of its authenticity; and in times when the American people are unhappy, the consequences undermine its agenda. In 2009, that’s where the Republicans were. The Bush administration had left them identified with an unpopular president, yoked to a terrible economy and discredited as a governing force. So they stopped being Bush Republicans and became Tea Party Republicans.

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Sarah Palin:

This is going to be such an unconventional election cycle. ... Mark my word, it is going to be an unconventional type of election process.

Politico also reports that a recent McClatchy-Marist horse race poll between Palin and Obama revealed that Obama remains ahead, but by less than before. Fox News reports that Palin trails Obama by only 5 percentage points.

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I've just posted a some important notes on blogging on our D2L Course Announcements page.

I still haven't figured out which things to post where. But please go check it out while you are composing your posts for this week or if you've done so already, for next week.

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The Economist somewhat famously declared, "The only good central bank is one that can say no to politicians." But Monday night members of Republican Congressional leadership (Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Jon Kyl, and Eric Cantor) wrote a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to "resist further extraordinary intervention in the U.S. economy." The Republican leadership are worried that further increases to the U.S. money supply (using quantitative easing) by the Fed will lead to inflation.

Bernanke has nearly become the whipping boy for some Republicans of late. But Ezra Klein argues that GOP's stance against Fed action isn't based on a fear of inflation per se, but on a fear that the Fed could produce a measure of economic recovery: "The worse the economy is, the better Republicans will do in the 2012 election." Conservative commentator David Frum more or less agrees with Klein's assent and claims he is "shocked" by their alleged concern with inflation instead of deflation.

Many academic discussions of central banks involve the importance of their maintaining independence from political tides which might favor increasing the money supply as a mechanism to decrease unemployment with the potential expense of increasing inflation. But the Fed has a bit of a contradictory dual legal mandate to maintain both price stability and full employment. Accountability to the mission is thin: U.S. law requires The Federal Reserve System to report to Congress twice a year when the Fed chair delivers the Monetary Policy Report to the Congress. But Congress does not actually interfere with the way in which the Fed regulates the U.S. money supply let alone set target inflation rates for the economy. This week's message from the Republican leadership seems to contain an implicit desire to renegotiate the terms of the Fed's independence.

The gravest theoretical concerns about diminished central bank independence are typically found among conservatives worried that politicians attempting to direct monetary policy are likely to be too quick to trade inflation in order to spur economic growth and job creation. So it's typically liberals who are more than willing to argue against central bank independence. In that very vein, a more explicit call for redesigning U.S. monetary institutions is being made by a noted liberal, the ranking Democratic member and former chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank. The Wall Street Journal objects:

The Fed is a creature of Congress and shouldn't be off-limits to political debate and scrutiny. But countries that let politicians dictate monetary policy—e.g., Argentina—typically come to grief. Our complaint is that the Fed under Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke has grown too close to the Treasury and White House, and too involved in fiscal policy and the allocation of credit. …as long as we have fiat money, the Fed needs a structure that insulates its monetary decisions from political meddling.... Mr. Frank is giving Republicans an opening to stand up for Fed independence and speak up for the purchasing power of the American middle class.

Somewhat ironically, while the Republican leadership pressures against inflation today, moving to weaken the Fed's independence might very well provide future liberals the opportunity for dreaded political meddling. It's probably best to see this quirky set of announcements as trans-partisan frustrations rather than likely to produce bipartisan institutional reform.

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Sometimes D2L tries a bit too hard to hold onto you. There might be a new web page that you would like open but D2L will open it inside of a frame, if you're working on a small laptop display you end up losing a bunch of the screen to D2L clutter that you really don't need at the moment. Sometimes you might simply want to have a few webpages open at the same time.

So, here's another pro-tip.

A right mouse button click on a link (or a two-finger click on a track pad or a click while holding down the control button on your keyboard while using Mac OS X) will give you a little menu that will allow you to escape the confines of D2L. Choose to open the link in a new browser tab or window (see the helpful image above) and you'll be free.

This tip will work in any modern browser (e.g. Safari, Firefox, or Chrome). I don't know what Internet Explorer is like these days. But I bet it works there too.

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Folks,

I know what you are saying: “I love putting links into my blog posts, but I hate how ugly it looks when I just paste the whole URL into the text.”

Well be sad no more.

Just highlight some text you want to create a hyperlink for, tap the little Tumblr link button at the top of the editor, and then paste then URL of the link into the little box that pops up.

Boom. You’re almost a pro-blogger now.

Originally posted by me on the Elections Markets and Networks blog (Spring 2011). I really know how to name a blog, huh? Maybe we should have a contest. Who ever scores the highest on the Midterm gets to rename my course blog. Something like that.