Jon Taplin's Home Page

Democrats should be rooting for Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination. A new Pew poll shows that Romney is the perfect opponent for Obama

About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor in the United States, a survey by the Pew Research Center found, a sign that the message of income inequality brandished by the Occupy Wall Street movement and pressed by Democrats may be seeping into the national consciousness.

What is astonishing about the Pew Poll is that 55% of Republicans believe that income inequality is a serious issue and the largest strain in American society. This of course is why both Gingrich and Perry believe they can run against Romney as a Vulture Capitalist. Let’s hope Mitt wins South Carolina so he can represent the 1% in the election.

As the European fiscal crisis continues and political instability worsens across the Middle East, it is perhaps time to rethink our country’s deep embrace of globalization. Instead, we should concentrate our economic and cultural energies on the Americas, the Western Hemisphere of land from Wainwright, Alaska , to Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. Within this vast territory lies every natural and human resource we need. With vast new energy resources in Brazil, Venezuela and Canada, we would have no need to deal with Petrol autocrats in Saudi Arabia or Russia. The anti-colonial roots of both North and South America stem from both Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar’s reading of Voltaire, Adam Smith and Montesquieu. And while these rooted democracies of the American hemisphere may be flawed, they are strong enough to deal even the toughest of caudillo’s like Chavez, electoral setbacks. From a human capital perspective, while much of Europe is entering a demographic death spiral, the America’s are full of young workers who pay taxes that can provide a healthy safety net for the old and infirmed.

And within the creative urban economies of our hemisphere are the young workers who are making the knowledge goods that the rest of the world consumes. From brilliant film directors working in Mexico City, to innovative software designers in Silicon Valley to wonderful musicians in Rio like Zelia Duncan—the next economy is firmly rooted in the Americas. Read more…

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born.  In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”-Gramsci

The etymology of the word “morbid” is the Latin word morbidus meaning disease. Let us consider the particular disease that grips America right now. Students of Germany in the early part of the Great Depression (1929-1934) might recognize the conditions for a Fascist democratic coup that took place in that period. Here are some of the symptoms:

Paranoia-The Wall Street Journal reports that if you had been savvy enough to invest in an Armageddon portfolio this year you would be sitting pretty.

It is the ultimate bunker portfolio.

Amid the market tumult, a handful of stocks have seen their share prices ratchet up to record highs in recent weeks. And many of them are connected by a curious, if disconcerting, thread: Between them, they provide an investor with essentials for any respectable fallout shelter—makers of bottled water, canned goods, dehydrated broth, gas masks and auxiliary generators.

As with the Goldline Scams, Beck and the end of the world brigade that are pushing the notion, that Spam is the protein source of the future, is part of a completely dystopian fantasy that I think bears little touch with reality but feeds the all important “fear quotient” that is so necessary to fascist politics. A strong man is needed in a time of chaos. Read more…

Hardball opener- Matthews has the “Obama opening lead” poll story. Charlie Cook to Chris Matthews’ question ‘does McCain have to go real dirty now to stop Obama’s advance?’-”Go to the Reverend Wright Well?”. Says Cook- ”They have to. This thing is setting like concrete“.

For Hillary to say with a straight face on Meet The Press this morning that she does not want “to inject race or gender” into the campaign is ridiculous. She is asking us to believe that the Clinton Machine is the most undisciplined, out of control campaign in the history of modern politics and that none of the dirty tricks or slander directed at Obama were authorized. Consider just part of the list:Iowa staffers circulating email saying Obama is a Muslim. Bill Shaheen accusing Barack of being a drug dealer. The phony ”Iron my shirt” plant followed by tears the next day.Bill calling Obama “a kid” and saying his opposition to the War in Iraq was “a fairytale”. Hillary saying Lyndon Johnson did more for the Civil Rights Movement than Martin Luther King. Andy Cuomo saying Obama’s appeal was just “shuck and jive”.

I for one, believe the Clinton’s have built a sophisticated attack machine and that none of these tricks were left to chance.

To top it all off today, BET founder Bob Johnson (with Hillary right behind him)said that while the Clinton’s were working so hard for Civil Rights, “Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood –­ and I won’t say what he was doing.” The Big Lie from Johnson who made his billions thanks to the Clinton’s telecom deregulation in 1996. I’m sure he’s grateful to Bill, but he doesn’t need to slander Barack to prove his gratitude. Barack has worked for Civil Rights since he wasin college, but I can’t find anything in Hillary’s biography in the critical years of the Civil Rights Movement (1963-1965) that shows that she did anything to further the cause. Many of us marched, sat in and some got arrested (including my brother). Her political hero in 1964 was Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona who voted against the Civil Rights bill, remarking, “You can’t legislate morality.”

 To Russert this morning, Hillary said, “Dr. King didn’t just give speeches. He marched, he sat in. He got arrested.” We had an old saying in the 60′s Hillary; “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.”

In all the excitement over the New Hampshire primary, a little noticed article about political turmoil inside Iran points to the danger of the Clinton approach to relationships with Iran and to Military policy in general. When Hillary voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment (what Jim Webb called “Bush’s fondest pipe dream”)to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist organization”, the U.S. was denounced by Iran’s Supreme Leader who indicated full support for President Ahmadinejad. But as tensions rose and oil prices pushed higher, cooler heads inside the U.S. Intelligence community prevailed by releasing the N.I.E. that showed that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program. As with her refusal to apologize for backing Bush on the Iraq war vote, Hillary has not apologized for her Iran war vote. Since the release of the N.I.E. a split has developed between Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. As New York Times reporter Nazila Fahti files from Tehran,

There are numerous possible reasons for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s loss of support, but analysts here all point to one overriding factor: the United States National Intelligence Estimate last month, which said Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure. The intelligence estimate sharply reduced the threat of a military strike against Iran, allowing the Iranian authorities to focus on domestic issues, with important parliamentary elections looming in March.

“Now that Iran is not under the threat of a military attack, all contradictions within the establishment are surfacing,” said Saeed Leylaz, an economic and political analyst. “The biggest mistake that Americans have constantly made toward Iran was adopting radical approaches which provided the ground for radicals in the country to take control.”

Hillary is surrounded & supported by Democratic hawks like Peter Beinart ,seen here in classic Georgetown schmooze role. She’s also the biggest recipient of money from the Military Industrial complex and the second biggest recipient of military earmarks (The Hill newspaper pointed out on June 13, Clinton secured 26 earmarks in the new Defense appropriations bill worth $148 million, more than any other Senator except the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee).

As Leonard Doyle of the Independant pointed out, long before the major Presidential campaign fundraising began,

While on the armed services committee, Mrs Clinton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran NATO’s war in Kosovo. A former presidential candidate himself, he is spoken of as a potential vice-presidential running mate.

Mrs Clinton has been a regular visitor to Iraq and Afghanistan and is careful to focus her criticisms of the Iraq war on President Bush, rather than the military. The arms industry has duly taken note.

So far, Mrs Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates

As Obama has pointed out, we can either live in a politics of fear, like we have since the election of Ronald Reagan, and have all of our domestic needs subservient to the Military’s unbounded spending–or we can have true change. The Clinton’s never gave us our “Peace Dividend” in the 90′s when we had no enemies. What would make one think that they would do any thing different in the next 8 years? President Eisenhower in his farewell address saw the danger we now live in:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together

Change is not a slogan the Clinton’s can adopt with a wink, a nod, and a crocodile tear. They ruled over one major chance to tackle the Military Industrial complex from 1992-2000 and did nothing. If you read the work of Obama’s key foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, you will see that real change is possible. It’s time to let the Obama team take their shot at tackling the overarching problem of our age. If not, as Warren Buffet has reminded us, we will end up as a “Sharecropper Society.”

Three thoughts on tonight’s New Hampshire results. Older women clearly thought Hillary was getting ganged up on during the Saturday debate, and in that sense Edwards was the one doing most of the ganging. When she “teared up” yesterday, it enforced that mood and of course Edwards took the bait and made an inept comment. Ironically,this ended up hurting Obama, as older women swung to Hillary unlike in Iowa. Second, the students did not come out in the same numbers as in Iowa. Did they just get lazy because the polls suggested Obama could coast to victory? Finally there is what NBC political director Chuck Todd called the “Bradley Effect”, named for the African American candidate for California governor who led in all the polls, but was beaten in the election. The theory is that whites will not tell a pollster their true feelings about a black candidate. Time and the South Carolina primary will tell if this is true.

As long as John Edwards stays in the race, the “not Hillary” vote will be split. Bill Clinton will continue to dissemble about Obama’s record and the press will not call a former President on the carpet. For Bill to say that “it’s a big fairy tale” that Obama has been against the war since the start, after Clinton lied about his own stance on the war, seems to be the height of hypocrisy. My guess is that Barack is going to have to confront the former President directly on this one.

With Drudge predicting Hillary’s exit and Barack Obama increasingly building excitement towards locking up the nomination on Feb. 5, I’m thinking about the role Mike Bloomberg could play as Obama’s running mate. The Republican battle could last all the way until a brokered convention in August. Romney has too much money to retire easily, McCain could take New Hampshire, Huckabee wins South Carolina, Rudy wins Florida and the Feb 5 races could be split with no clear winner. That leaves Barack with time to consolidate the Democratic Party, raise money for the general and choose a running mate while the Republicans remain in a squabble, spending their limited resources on the primary. Conventional wisdom has it that Bloomberg might take the Republican chaos as a sign to get in but,

Obama told Diane Sawyer on Sunday that he thinks Bloomberg will stay out of the race if he wins the Democratic nomination. “I suspect that if I’m the nominee, I’m not sure that’s the best of scenarios for him to want to get into the race,” he said, though he added that he and Bloomberg haven’t discussed that prospect in detail. “What I do agree with is that people just want to get stuff done. They’re really tired of the pettiness and the back biting and the trivialization of our democracy.”

If Obama and Bloomberg both really believe we have entered a Post Partisan Age, why not team up? With Bloomberg as Vice President, the Republican business coalition and the Green Cities movement would move firmly into the Obama camp, especially given the possibility of a Huckabee nomination.

The back to back debates last night left one powerful impression. There are three candidates who understand that we are entering a new era, where the old left-right labels do not make any sense. They are Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. The rest of the field are fighting the last war. The New York Times had a wonderful piece this morning  by Kirk Johnson about how often the public senses a change long before the politicians. I’ve been writing about this phenomena which I call “The Interregnum” for years, most recently in an article about California’s move towards a New Federalism:

The notion of an interregnum has classically been tied to those periods when one king has died and there is no clear successor, but I have used the term to refer to a political and cultural crisis that encompasses both a loss of leadership and the possibilities of renewal and reform. Historical study of interregnums such as the 12 years of parliamentary rule in England after the beheading of King Charles I in 1649 have always noted extreme swings of political and spiritual sentiment while the battle for a new direction was being fought. For our purposes, the interregnum refers to those hinges in time when the old order is dead, but the new direction has not been determined. Quite often, the general populace and many of its leaders do not understand that the transition is taking place and so a great deal of tumult arises as the birth pangs of a new social and political order.

In his piece, Johnson makes a similar point:

POLITICS might be stuck in the slow lane, but science, capitalism and American culture and society are decidedly not, and all are making creative end runs around the gridlock. Mr. Obama’s call in his Iowa victory speech — for “a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states” — evokes an earlier time in America, but it also suggests a future that may be unfolding no matter what politicians like him say or do.

Obama, Huckabee and Paul are all drawing support across traditional party lines and have (as Paul pointed out) attracted the lion’s share of the youth vote and money. Obama and Huckabee are from a younger generation of politicians and as Andrew Sullivan so trenchantly stated, Obama is moving beyond the old fights of the 60′s that the Clinton’s are still engaged in. History has shown that Interregnums occur about once a century, and when they show up, the political ruling class (both politicians and pundits) at first ignore them and then fight like mad to resist them. Last night Obama, Huckabee and Paul talked about the power of the “bottom-up” forces that have fueled their rise. None of them were the “top-down” establishment candidate, but as the accompanying chart (click to enlarge) created a couple of years ago by GBN, the future belongs to the forces of the bottom-up, networked era, not the top-down, hierarchical world of George Bush, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The Republican party has long been dominated by its establishment and so Huckabee and Paul have a harder road to the nomination than Obama, who now looks like a strong favorite to be the Democratic candidate. My guess is that if they fail, many of their supporters will vote for Obama next November.

A college roommate writes from New Hampshire:

I tried to get into an Obama event this morning at a high-school here in Nashua, but after waiting in a traffic jam (a decidedly uncommon occurrence in Nashua) and driving around the parking lot only to find no spaces, I gave up and left. He is drawing BIG crowds following the success in Iowa and it bodes well for next Tuesday. Four years ago I attended a number of candidate meet & greets with no trouble. But Obama has definitely become an unusual phenomenon.

The Iowa bounce should carry Barack across the New Hampshire finish line. Rasmussen’s first poll after Iowa shows Obama up by 10 points! Meanwhile in the Left Blogosphere, Markos at Daily Kos is still trying to spin the fact that he pulled back his enthusiasm for Obama, days before Barack wiped out his new candidate choice, John Edwards. It’s like deciding to change your bet from the Patriots to the Giants based on the first Giant touchdown last week. Markos’ spin is that he was actually correct that Edwards would get the most second choice votes, but the flaw in his logic is that those votes (as the Times exit poll proves) came from the most conservative voters who could not bring themselves to vote for either a woman or a black man once Dodd or Biden didn’t clear the bar. Bob Herbert put Obama’s appeal in the right context this morning.

Mr. Obama has shown, in one appearance after another, a capacity to make people feel good about their country again. His supporters want desperately to turn the page on the bitter politics and serial disasters of the past 20 years. That they have gravitated to a black candidate to carry out this task is — to use a term I heard for the first time this week — monumentous.

The Clintons, especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently. Senator Hillary Clinton has had a devil of a time trying to cope with the demand for change while shouldering the legacy of an administration that defined the 1990s.

Barack Obama has none of that baggage.

Markos and Krugman seem equally “baffled by the winds of change”. It will be interesting to watch their back pedalling in the next two weeks.