Obama Supporters: a couple of questions

… but I’d like to draw attention to the ABC Radio National podcast of a Paul Krugman speech to the Commonwealth Club

Paul Krugman, “Where is the Middle Class” (ABC Radio National Background Briefing, 25 November 2007)

He poses the question of how the aggressive attack on the middle class could be sustained, despite the fundamental unpopularity of that as a policy goal:

Key institutions of Movement Conservatism actually believe and try to do exactly that. So a fund-raising letter from the Heritage Foundation will say that ‘Never forget, connect the dots, our goal is to undo the New Deal and the Great Society’. In other words basically social security and Medicare, that these are alien, these are bad institutions. They want to roll this back.

This kind of hardline right position seized the Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater, but then went down to terrible defeat, and when the Republicans did get the White House under Richard Nixon. Nixon was not – actually in many ways Dick Nixon governed as a Liberal. Nixon didn’t seem to have much of any ideology, except that he should be running things. But what Nixon did, what made it possible for this to change America was the ability to win elections. And so the question has to be if you have what is essentially an anti-populist, elitist, economic philosophy that has taken over one of America’s two great parties, during a time of rising inequality, how is it that this can win elections?

And the answer actually is that it has never done so by running on the economic ideology. Economics is what it’s about. If you actually ask what does Heritage Foundation care about? What does management really want? It is about economics, it is about trying to roll things back.

…

All right. When I looked in some detail at the political history, it turns out that although there’s a chapter entitled ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’, it turns out that the core of it, although national security clearly swung the 2002 and 2004 elections, and actually the moral value stuff much less important. The enduring source of the ability of a Movement Conservatism to win elections has in fact not been that, it has been race. The centrality of race to the American political story was not something I expected to find when I began working on this book, but it just becomes overwhelmingly clear once you start to do the work.

However, there is good news, and this is why Paul Krugman is optimistic that we may just be coming to an end of the dominance of American politics by this anti-popular economic program, gaining power on the back of racialist politics:

The divisions that have been exploited so well, I think are losing their – more than I think, I think you can document that they are losing their effectiveness. Not gone, but losing their effectiveness. For one thing on race, we’re becoming a more diverse country. It’s quite simply the Latino and to some extent the Asian vote that are just transforming the demographics of the electorate in a way that means that you can’t play racial politics the way you used to. But there’s a more fundamental, I think a more uplifting reason. We’re just a better country. Racism is much diminished. I like to look at some of the hot button issue polls – they’re not really about politics in any direct sense, but give you a sense of how people think. So what do you think of inter-racial marriage? And in 1978, more than 50% of the public said No, it’s unacceptable, and 36% said it was OK. Today, 77% think it’s fine. So we’ve changed in that respect. I thought the defining moment of the 2006 campaign, the real tell-tale moment was the Macaca incident. George Allen actually a Californian yuppie, but reinvented himself as a Southern good-old-boy, burst into an obscure racial slur against a young American man of South Asian descent, who was trailing him with a video camera for the web campaign. The racial insult, that’s nothing new in American politics. What is new is that Americans won’t stand for it. Virginians won’t stand for it. We’re not that country any more. And so that’s a transformation in the kind of country we are which suggests that there’s a huge opening now for a big change in direction.

Which is a long way around to what I have said with far more brevity about Senator Obama in the General Election in my home state, Ohio … the racist vote is locked up inside the Republican vote, and if there’s going to be any more coming out because Senator Obama is running, then with an honest Sec’y of State the increase in black and University turnout will certainly cancel it out, and probably more.

So it comes down to the head-on-head as politicians.

In Ohio, I’d reckon:

• Guliani vs Obama … Obama slaughters him, Guiliani is too slimy
• Thompson vs Obama … Obama slaughters him, Thompson is too lazy
• Huckabee vs Obama … this one could be tight
• McCain vs Obama … can’t say why exactly, but I think Obama would have this one.