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Newt's appeal in the Fox News age

A pugnacious attitude and selective exposure in the base propelled Gingrich

Newt Gingrich's big win in the South Carolina has frightened Establishment Republicans who look at Gingrich's favorability numbers. (Source).

Gingrich winning the nomination brings with it the very real prospect of not only losing to President Obama but also big losses in congressional and state elections.

But Newt's zombie success -- coming back after being written off for dead, more than once -- is not only due to Mitt Romney's incompetence as a candidate (a friend the other day described him as the worst national candidate since Thomas E. Dewey, which I think is unfair to Dewey). 

No, Newt's comeback is due to a match between him and a base that's been in a media bubble. As George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote:

The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). 

Indeed, selective exposure -- the tendency to gravitate toward media outlets that are consonant with one's world view -- is especially strong among conservatives. As a recent PPP TV News Trust poll shows, conservatives trust only Fox News while independents and Democrats trust a much wider array of news sources, but not Fox.

And this goes beyond TV news, with conservatives gravitating toward content providers that create material supportive of their world views. Billionaire funders have created organizations that claim to be legitimate think tanks, but are not. As Frum states: 

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

And so along comes Newt, with his ability to push emotional buttons sensitized by Fox and others. 

The South Carolina acceptance speech showed how good Gingrich is it at playing to the emotions of the right. In it, he chastised elites, elite media or just the media seven times; Saul Alinsky, four; religious bigots, three; food stamps, three; and added pokes at San Francisco, socialism and bowing to Saudi kings for good measure. (Politico)

Gingrich's victory speech even evoked Obama's teleprompter, a tool used by speakers for decades, but portrayed by Fox News and others as an indication of a lack of ability. David Frum explains:

Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

In evoking this "pitiful nothing," Gingrich portrayed himself as the more electable, largely based around the message that he would do a better job in the fall 2012 debates. One Gingrich SuperPAC ad promoted this message, portraying Romney as unable to counter certain attacks from the President. 

Gingrich's last South Carolina debates featured him confronting media questioners, as South Carolina voters looked for a pugnacious man. Listen to this voter interviewed by the Washington Post: 

“I think Mitt Romney is a good man,” said Harold Wade, 85, leaving a polling place in this picturesque seaside suburb outside Charleston. “But I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean.” And Gingrich, he said, was the only one mean enough.

In a region that prizes pugnaciousness, being mean matters. But, with national polls showing Romney falling and Gingrich rising, it also appeals elsewhere.

No, not everywhere -- but the media bubble surely affects many Republican voters' views of the candidates and their electability.

Voter photo ID — another bad, and costly, idea

This piece was published by the Bangor Daily News on January 17, 2012.

With Maine’s strong, accessible system of voting, why mess with success? And, given all our urgent budgetary needs, why ask Maine’s taxpayers to pay for all the U.S. Supreme Court requires for a system of photo identification for voters?

Maine’s legislators voted twice on voting last session. The Legislature passed and Gov. Paul LePage signed a bill to end Maine’s nearly 40-year tradition of Election Day registration. Through a people’s veto, Maine people spoke loud and clear, turning aside evidence-free claims of fraud and restoring the practice by a resounding 60-40 landslide.

In the same session, the House passed LD 199, which would require photo identification to vote. After the Senate voted “no,” it was put aside and is scheduled for the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee next week.

Problems with ending Election Day registration were easy to see. People who recently moved within Maine or worked many hours or came to Maine for military service, studies or a new job or changed their names would have faced new barriers to casting their votes.

Photo identification also has problems and, unlike ending Election Day registration, would be very costly.

And by costly, I mean real dollars. At the same time, a photo ID requirement would have a differential effect on some citizens, making it harder for them to vote. In fact, the finances and the impact are linked.

A study by the respected Brennan Center finds that nationally, “11 percent of American citizens do not possess a government-issued photo ID; that is over 21 million citizens.” If that percentage sounds high for Maine, it isn’t. The Fiscal Note for Maine’s LD 199 assumes that “10 percent of registered voters do not currently have either a driver’s license or identification card, that would equal 97,000 people.”

In other words, nearly 100,000 Maine people could have their access to the vote limited should a photo identification bill be adopted. And the requirement will bring new costs because, while the U.S. Supreme Court found photo identification constitutional, the court required states to provide these free to people needing them to vote who cannot afford them. That’s because the 24th Amendment prohibits poll taxes.

As the Brennan Center points out, “providing free IDs will be a recurring cost … and states will have to bear the costs of re-issuing new IDs for these voters whenever their names or addresses change.”

Requiring voters to show a driver’s license or its substitute for nondrivers would be very expensive, since states with this requirement have been required to add new workers and locations to issue these government IDs. (In Wisconsin, politics came into play with plans to shut down locations in Democratic areas and open new ones in Republican-leaning ones.)

Since the implementation of the federal REAL ID, you can’t get a state ID without producing other documents, such as a passport or a birth certificate. Women, who often change their names when marrying or divorcing, are less likely to have those with their current names. Taxpayers would have to pay for these documents for Mainers who don’t have and can’t afford them.

Imagine an elderly person who has moved out of her decades-long home since last voting. She hasn’t had a driver’s license since her eyesight began failing five years ago. Without a passport, she’d have to get a copy of her birth certificate — something not always possible for people born before modern record-keeping — and have someone take her to get a photo ID. These multiple steps would have to be done before voting and likely would be hard to arrange.

Now, Maine’s proposed law doesn’t actually spell out what identification would be required. But with ID requirements, the devil is in the details, leaving room for political mischief. You can see that in Texas, where a concealed gun permit is OK for voting but a college identification card is not.

Maine’s LD 199 leaves it to the secretary of state’s discretion to create the “technical rule” that would determine the identification needed to vote. The bill’s lack of specifics create uncertainty, even mystery.

Mainers shouldn’t discover what reality unfolds from that mystery nor bear the costs of a new law affecting voters.

Misquoting Tocqueville, Disdaining Democracy

Why getting Tocqueville wrong matters

The Frenchman Alexis Tocqueville published Democracy in America in two volumes in 1835 and 1840 and it's still garnering attention.

I teach the work in my American Political Thought course, in which we read quite a lot of it over a 3-4 week period, and have written about Tocqueville* and how his work is used today.

While people seem to love Tocqueville, there are some things people say Tocqueville said that he never said.

My own Governor, Paul LePage, has done that. 

In his January 14, 2012 radio address, LePage said:

Another great quote from Alexis de Tocqueville is, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Think about it.

As political scientist John Pitney (a professor at Claremont McKenna College with a fine scholarly record and experience in Republican politics) notes, this quote is bogus. (Back in 1995, Pitney pointed out that another purported Tocqueville statement, that "America is great because she is good" is a fraud.)

As an academic, I don't like it when people get quotes wrong, but this is not just an academic matter.

The misquote disparages fundamentals of democracy

Just take a look at the core notion, the idea that funds expended by government that go to members of the public are bribes.

Bribes, quite obviously, have a negative connotation.  Typically they are not just unethical, but illegal. 

According to this faux quote, citizens not only should not be receiving money from the public coffers, but the action is quite wrong.

Yet it's quite clear from the U.S. Constitution that monies are to be collected by government and distributed in order to serve the people and their needs.  As Article I, Section 8 states:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States

And, in a broader statement about the purposes of the U.S. government,  the Preamble to the Constitution states: 

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Now, to be sure, the U.S. government and its programs have changed since the Constitution was ratified.

But what's absolutely clear is this:

1. The founders wished to serve "the common defense" and the "general welfare." Both phrases appear both in the Constitution's Preamble and in Article I, Section 8.

2. Those purposes would be funded by what the fake-Tocqueville quote calls "the people's money."

For one, it's hard to imagine what else could be used to fund them.  Moreover, Article I, Section 8 references both these public purposes and the means of funding them.

3. The Constitution also described how representatives of the people would be selected and guarantees that each state will have decisions made in a democratic fashion via a "republican form of government."

Thus those voting on budgets -- both taxes and spending -- were chosen by the people.  The people are sovereign in democracies -- democracy literally means "rule by the people" -- and surely it is a democratic principle that their needs and desires are pursued by public officials.

How, then, could it be inappropriate -- to the point of calling it bribery -- for elected officials to decide to spend money on behalf of and directly to the people?

The phrase "bribe the people" expresses disdain for democracy itself.

I suspect that those using the misquote would not like Tocqueville as much if they knew how central equality was to his analysis.

The very start of the massive Democracy in America begins:

AMONG the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.

I soon perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less effect on civil society than on the government; it creates opinions, gives birth to new sentiments, founds novel customs, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.

Now, to be sure, there were far fewer government programs in the U.S. when Tocqueville visited than there are today. But government was involved in a variety of projects. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton had pressed for a policy on manufactures and, in Tocqueville's time, there was a large-scale infrastructure effort involving canals for trade and transportation. 

Those weren't bribes and neither is spending for health care and other public purposes today, for the government exists to serve the people and the common good, as determined via representativte democracy.

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* My work on Tocqueville to which I linked in the second paragraph is based on a conference paper that was awarded the 2000 John C. Donovan Prize by the New England Political Science Association for the best paper presented at their 1999 Annual Meeting.

What one advocate of health care cuts doesn't understand about emergency room care

ERs are expensive and focused on...emergencies

Emergency rooms are made for emergenciesWith cuts to MaineCare on the table, doctors and health policy analysts have made the point that people who can't get their care through clinics and doctors' offices will be going to emergency rooms.

This will stress those hospital-based facilities and deliver far more expensive care.

To one of the main advocates of these proposed cuts, the coming shift to ER care doesn't quite add up.

Opponents of the Governor’s proposal have tried to argue a two-front war. On one hand, they argue, limiting access to free health care is bad for those who face cuts. On the other hand, those facing cuts will not really be denied health care, but their over-utilization of emergency rooms for care makes it a greater public burden than simply extending free benefits. The results of this study show clearly that the latter argument is entirely without merit.

Another argument pushed by the Bangor Daily News and others opposed to LePage’s cuts is that, as Eric Russell of the BDN reported a Democrat insider saying, ‘people will die’.

This advocate's take is wrong. Here's why:

1. The care delivered outside of emergency rooms is not the same as what ERs do. Thus the claim that "those facing cuts will not really be denied health care" is wrong.

ERs do not provide screenings or on-going care.

A diabetic will not get the monitoring he needs. Thus a small issue that could be caught in a regular clinic visit will turn into something much more serious -- and expensive.

The result could even involve a disability, such as when a small foot sore, not uncommon to diabetics, is untreated, becomes severely infected, perhaps gangrenous, and the man's foot cannot be saved. An amputation is both costly and affects his life quite a lot.

2. While saying "people will die," is strong language, studies indicate 45,000 Americans die each year because they did not receive the care they would have if they had health coverage.

As I wrote recently, "Consider a man who doesn’t know he has colon cancer until a large mass is discovered and the cancer has spread, or a woman whose high blood pressure is not treated until she has had a massive stroke. Yes, both can be seen at the emergency room, but not for screening or ongoing treatment. Untreated conditions damage the body, cause death and cut short individuals’ work lives."

ERs do not perform screening colonoscopies nor mammographies. These can find pre-cancerous conditions or cancers when they are relatively small. Early detection leads to treatments that may prevent any problem from developing or which nip the cancer in the bud.

The very study cited by the supporters of health care cuts found that people who received Medicaid had 60% more mammographies than those without.

(And, of course, if a screening test detects cancer and treatment is needed, it's not going to be treated in the emergency room.)

The only way that the argument that ER care is perfectly adequate makes logical sense is if the supporter of these cuts quoted above thinks that colonoscopies and mammograms -- not to mention blood pressure and diabetes screening and care -- don't save lives. And, while that would be logically consistent, it would be incorrect. Screenings and on-going treatment do save lives.

In short, it's certain that "limiting access to free health care is bad for those who face cuts." ERs are no real substitution for that care, while shifting care to these venues undermines health and leads to crowded conditions for those with true emergencies.