This morning, Thomas Frank wrote, We Are Such Losers. In it, he made an argument that liberal voters need to get past the idea of post-partisanship. I don’t think the argument is that solid. For one thing, are we liberals really attracted to milquetoasts like Carter and Obama? I don’t think so. Rather, I think it is the funders who like these kinds of candidates because it is a good way to convinced the voters to pick a moderate (or even conservative) candidate.

One of the most exasperating things about the coverage of politics on television is the tendency to pair a flame-throwing conservatives with a mild-mannered “liberal.” When people at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) complain, the justification is always the same: there just aren’t any passionate liberals. Of course this is patently false. There are no passionate moderates (almost by definition), and since news shows insist upon putting moderates on as “liberals,” it isn’t a surprise that they can’t find any who are passionate.

If there is a problem with the liberal voter, it is that we have internalized the decades-long conservative attacks on liberalism. And this is a kind of curse on our more moderate brethren. But notice that the Democratic primary voters chose Obama over Clinton — because he was seen as more liberal. The fact that he wasn’t hardly matters. The only thing that really separated those two was the individual mandate in healthcare policy. And once in office, Obama collapsed on that issue (because he had to).

But Frank’s comparison of Obama and Carter is basically correct. It is a different comparison than the Republican comparison that we heard so much during the 2012 election. To conservatives, Carter is just a dirty world. Comparing Obama to him was just their way of calling Obama “doody pants.” Carter is an insult because he lost to Reagan and that is all the comparison that they need. But it’s strange how Bush the Elder does not occupy the same space, given that he too lost to the supposed Democratic savior Bill Clinton.

There is a comparison to be made here. I suspect that conservatives would claim that Bush was more liberal than Reagan, so Democrats are not inclined to vilify him. While that’s not even true, Carter was far more conservative than any Democratic president before him for almost half a century. Thomas Frank noted this:

I’ve been writing for a long time that Carter was pretty much the first New Democrat. When it came to economic matters, he was very conservative. And this was ultimately his own undoing. But this is the undoing of all the recent Democratic presidents. The only reason Clinton still has a good reputation is that he was president during an economic boom. But in none of these cases — Carter, Clinton, Obama — did the presidents’ conservative economic policies help the economy, much less the American worker.

The main thing is that Frank is right: being idealistic is not the same as being liberal. In fact, what we see is the that the kind of “above the fray,” ambiguous idealism of Carter and Obama go along with a kind of economic conservatism that has been as effective in destroying the American middle class as the Republicans have. (Clinton at least was an outspoken neoliberal.) The lesson is clear: when we vote for someone who won’t take a side, we can be sure that he won’t be on our side.

Earlier this week, I woke up with a thought in my mind, “I can’t believe Colorado is going Republican!” I wasn’t really thinking about Governor John Hickenlooper, who has been running neck-and-neck with Bob Beauprez the whole campaign. That’s bad enough. But Mark Udall has been losing to Cory Gardner. That’s right, extremist Cory Gardner! And he isn’t losing by a little. Daily Kos currently has him down by four percentage points.

It isn’t that I had been thinking much about it before. In general, I haven’t focused on specific races. But it clearly had been eating away in the back of my mind. My subconscious was screaming at me, “How can this be?!” This, after all, is Colorado: the Amsterdam of America! But you know, maybe that isn’t really the issue. I’m sure that I was effected by a great Jason Jones’ segment on The Daily Show last year, Not-So-Angry Voters.

In the segment, Jones went to Colorado to talk to John Morse, the former state senator who got recalled for his support of incredibly minor gun control legislation. The joke (in more ways than one) is that the legislation was super popular. Morse lost his seat anyway. It’s a funny and anger inspiring segment:

It still isn’t clear why Gardner should be leading Udall by an increasing margin. Is it just that only the right wing freaks have gotten the message and that, like all the people Jason Jones interviewed on streets, the reasonable majority just isn’t engaged? Earlier today, Martin Longman at Political Animal tried to answer this question, A Look at the Colorado Senate Race. He discussed a number of issues, but the most relevant is that Udall has been saving his advertising muscle for the end of the campaign as Jerry Brown did here in California so successfully back in 2010:

We can hope. There are only ten days left until election day. And the strategy doesn’t make that much sense. When Brown used it, he was forced to. He was running against a billionaire who simply could not be outspent. I would think that Udall, being an incumbent, would have had no problem with money. And if he were going to start hammering on Gardner, he would have done it earlier. But what do I know? Really.

There are other reasons to feel hopeful. There is, of course, the fact that midterm polling tends to be pretty far off. But again, Udall is down by four percentage points — that’s a lot. There is also the thought that maybe the Bannock Street Project — the Democrats’ increased get-out-the-vote effort — will help, as may be Colorado’s new all-mail voting system. But as Longman noted, “If the Bannock Street Project is working as anticipated, it should be at least partially evident in the current polls.” That may or may not be true; I’ve always had big questions about the polling outfits’ “likely voter” screens.

If Udall’s ad campaign is going to work, we should start to see it. And there is a tiny data point that does indicate this. The most recent poll shows Udall up by one percentage point. It is a Udall campaign internal poll and those tend to be heavily skewed toward whomever pays for them. (This doesn’t mean the poll itself is bad; but campaigns are unlikely to release bad poll results.) But looking inside the poll, it looks reasonable. For example, Udall is winning the Latino vote 57-30%. That actually seems low to me — indicating that maybe even it is underestimating Udall’s strength.

We will know what’s going on soon enough. It will all come down to who votes. The only thing necessary for the triumph of crazy is for good men to do nothing. “Vote you a**holes!”

This morning, Digby wrote a few choice words about what she rightly calls, The New “Blame America First Crowd.” It follows from an interview with Douglas MacKinnon about his recent book, The Secessionist States of America: the Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country… Now. He wants to found a new country called “Reagan.” Digby quoted him arguing that the Civil War was illegal, and that Lincoln went to war because the “North realized very quickly that it could not survive economically without the power of the South.” That’s a thigh-slapper! The South had largely missed the industrial revolution because of its reliance on slaves. It was an economic backwater then and to a large extent remains one to this day.

But the point of Digby’s article isn’t that MacKinnon is delusional; it is that MacKinnon, like so many on the far right, hates America. People like him love “America,” of course. “America” is some ideal that they have in their minds in which everyone agrees with them and they are never taxed, yet the Social Security checks keep coming. Mostly, “America” is a big deal in areas where people get a lot more from the federal government than they pay. But most of all, America constantly and always disappoints “America.”

Digby expressed my frustration perfectly:

It is extremely weird that we on the left have been labeled un-American when all we want are marginal changes to the current state of things. On the right, they are quite explicit that their patriotism is entirely dependent upon America doing exactly what they want. And despite what many people think, this is not a new phenomenon. It was true at least as far back as the 1950s. The most striking thing in Claire Conner’s Wrapped in the Flag is how often the people at that time repeated what is now the clarion call of the Tea Party, “Take our country back!” The implication is that America as it actually exists is invalid.

What it really all comes down to is that we liberals are supposedly wrong because we complain about foreign policy. But you see, this is part of the whole “America” love problem. Part of the conservative love of “America” depends upon the country being able to do whatever it wants militarily. This is why despite the US spending almost as much as the entire word combined on the military, conservatives claim that we must spend more on the military. The point, however, is that liberals are blaming “America” because we are against fascism and imperialism.

Conservatives think they are the arbiters of what America is all about. Liberals do not share in that delusion. In fact, liberals are quite explicit in thinking that there is a battle for the soul of America. So when a conservative bloviates about how abortion should be illegal, liberals may disagree, but they don’t claim the country wouldn’t be America if Roe v Wade were overturned. It’s all about purity, which is a well established conservative obsession. And this is what allows conservatives to claim that liberals hate America, when it is the conservatives who are always wanting to separate from the country. They care about “America,” and “America” only exists in their minds.

Andrew Prokop reported over at Vox yesterday, Election Forecasters Now Give Democrats a Slight Edge in Georgia. And that’s true. Michelle Nunn has been hammering David Perdue who spent most of his career outsourcing, and thinks it is something people should applaud him for. They haven’t been applauding.

It’s the same old story: the things Republicans actually believe in are really unpopular. But I’m sure in the social circle that Perdue is in, it’s a different universe. In it, outsourcing is great, only property owners should be allowed to vote, and taxes must be eliminated for the “job creators.” They are shocked when they get out into the real world and find that these are not widely supported ideas. And this is why conservatives think that liberals shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Unless they understand what “everyone I talk to” knows, they must be ill informed.

If you look at the polls, Nunn really does look like she is beating Perdue — by roughly 2 percentage points. But don’t get too excited. She doesn’t just have to beat Perdue. She has to get over 50% of the vote. If she doesn’t, it goes to a runoff in January. There are two problems with that. First, there is a libertarian, Amanda Swafford, who is consistently getting about 5% of the vote. As I’ve discussed before, libertarians tend to vote Republican. So most of those libertarian votes will go to Perdue in January. The second problem is bigger: voter turnout will be even worse in January, which will help Perdue.

But it is possible that Nunn could get to 50% in the general election. The Daily Kos election model currently has Nunn getting 48.2% of the total vote. As I discussed yesterday, the nationwide polling data for midterms has been off by an average of 2.9 percentage points. The polling for Nunn would only have to be biased against her by 1.8 percentage points. It isn’t out of the question. Just the same, maybe the polls are biased the other way around and Perdue will get 50%. (That’s unlikely; they would have to be running 3 percentage points against him.)

Let’s give the runoff a thought. I think if Nunn loses but still forces a runoff, it’s over. But if Nunn wins and they go to a runoff, I think there will be a lot of resources put to her campaign. And I don’t especially seeing the Republicans’ resources as changing things all that much. Nunn would have two months to continue to beat up on Perdue about how much he thinks it rocks to send jobs overseas. And with an aggressive get-out-the-vote operation, she might just be able to win. But I think it is clear that this is less likely to happen than that she is going to out perform the polls and win outright on 4 November.

It is important to remember, however, that none of this should even be possible. The Georgia electorate is changing, but it hasn’t changed that much. According to the polls, the Democrats are greatly out performing expectations. The Republicans really have nothing to feel good about in this election. And if the Democrats do manage to hold the Senate, there really ought to be suicides on K Street. I don’t expect to see this, however. The Republicans will take what will regardless be gains in the Senate as another reason to continue on with their scorched earth resistance to actually helping the country. Regardless of what happens, this will be the election that people will look back on and say, “That’s when the Republican Party started to lose its grip on national politics.”

Dean Baker wrote a very short but action packed article this morning, The Banking Industry Wins on Risk Retention With Mortgages. It is following up on Floyd Norris’s article in The New York Times, Banks Again Avoid Having Any Skin in the Game. It is all about the securitization of home loans. This probably sounds familiar because this is what wrecked the economy back in 2008. Given that the financial industry didn’t get harmed for what they did before, like a spoiled child, they never learned.

Norris explained that part of the Dodd-Frank law was to have required “risk retention” or “skin in the game” in their real estate securities. So when a bank bundled up a bunch of mortgages and sold them, it would have to keep a 5% interest. But there was a way around this. If the mortgage was considered super safe, this 5% risk retention wasn’t necessary. What made a loan super safe was if the borrower had a substantial down-payment. For example, if someone put down $100,000 on a $200,000 house, it was unlikely to be a problem because the home would have to go down in value by 50% in order for the bank to lose any money.

But this isn’t going to happen. The problem is that the banks had a lot of support in wanting to get rid of any requirements on loans. The economy is sluggish and people are having a hard time getting loans. So a chorus of voices rose up and said that we must do everything we can to encourage the banks to loan. Sigh. I am so tired of this. This is the neoliberal hellscape we now live in. It would be easier if the government just loaned the money directly. But instead, we have to allow private banks to enrich themselves making home loans, which the government guarantees. The banks do a useless job for a lot money at no risk to themselves.

The bottom line is expressed by Barney Frank, “The loophole has eaten the rule…” Except it is worse than that; maybe it would be better to say, “The loophole ate the rule and then died of poisoning.” And the truth is that it probably doesn’t matter. But bad policies are always enacted when they seem reasonable. It seemed reasonable for Bill Clinton to destroy welfare as long as the economy was doing great. It was only after the dot-com crash that it became clear that we still needed welfare as we had known it. So sure, the securities will be fine this year and net year. They may even be fine for the next decade. But eventually, we’ll see the same thing happen again.

Dean Baker pointed out that loans with no down-payments were four times as likely to default as loans with a 20% down-payment. He added, “It is also worth pointing out that the cost of requiring that banks retain risk on low down payment loans did not mean that people could not get loans without large down payments as often claimed.” It simply would have made loans slightly more expensive. But that was not how it was presented.

The the banks have won. Again. Just as expected. I remember back when we were in the middle of the crisis in 2008, there were bankers saying that the government really did need to regulate the banks because the bankers just couldn’t help themselves. But after the government stepped in and saved them, their tunes changed. Even the most minor of regulations were met with screams, “Socialism!” The bankers managed to water down the initial Dodd-Frank law, which was bad enough. But laws always have to be turned into policies by the bureaucracy. So the bankers have been working that system as well. And in the end, the people of the United States get the Michael Corleone deal that we can’t refuse, “Nothing.”

I’ve written before about the fiasco that’s been going on in Kansas, Art Laffer’s Toxic Prescription. Since the 1970s, Laffer has been selling the same old supply side snake oil. The idea is that cutting taxes will so stimulate the economy that it will actually bring more money into the government in the form of taxes. It isn’t true that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but this supply side myth is not one of those free lunches. Given our low level of taxation, it literally never works. But over three decades of failure has not stopped Laffer from continuing to push this idea.

Kansas is ground zero for this right now. Sam Brownback used Laffer’s ideas as an excuse to do what Republicans always want to do: cut taxes. This is not about economics. This is religious faith, which is why intellectual mediocrities like Art Laffer are held up as heroes on the right. But things have not worked out. The tax cuts have not spurred growth — unemployment is higher than it is in surrounding states. And the government has had huge deficits. The response from Brownback is that these things take time. Just keep waiting and eventually all will be well. Of course, the cuts to education are here today. And if the tax cuts were going to work, they would have worked by now.

But I learned something new about the Kansas story from an article by Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone, The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster. He noted, “Back in 2011, Arthur Laffer, the Reagan-era godfather of supply-side economics, brought to Wichita by Brownback as a paid consultant…” Interesting. I knew that Laffer had consulted on how to destroy the Kansas economy, but I didn’t know it worked that way.

Here’s the thing. Since supply side economics is a religious faith, you don’t go hire an expert who will look at your options and decide on the best one. You decide what you are going to do and then you hire Art Laffer as a way to justify it. Laffer isn’t an economist; he’s a public relations device. So bringing him in to “consult” is picking your solution, because you know that Art Laffer has only ever had one idea (and it isn’t even his). So if you hire him, that’s the idea that you will get.

Many years ago, I was the head of software development at a high tech start-up. We did amazing work — arguably the best work I’ve ever been part of. But there was a shake-up among the owners and the brilliant founder of the company was pushed out. Suddenly, the company was controlled by a bunch of money guys who didn’t understand anything about technology. They hired a friend with a technological bent, but who was totally unqualified for the job. And he proceeded to destroy pretty much everything that was developed under the company’s founder. That was mostly on the hardware side. But at one point, they decided to hire a software consultant. This guy did work on web-based applications. So he studied what we were doing and — What a surprise! — he decided that we should convert the software to be a web-based application.

This is my experience with consultants. In general, they aren’t the generalists you would think. Instead, there is one thing they know and when hired, they always find that the best solution is that one thing they know. In the case of my clueless employers, I don’t think they understood what they were doing. They probably met the guy at a bar and that was good enough for them. But clearly Brownback knew what he was getting. Laffer was not going to surprise him.

The whole thing is remarkably disingenuous. We actually know pretty well what works in terms of economic policy. But there are always conservative economists around to tell conservatives whatever it is that they want to hear. Alberto Alesina is there to tell them that budget cuts in a recession will create a boom. Greg Mankiw will tell them that stimulus spending is good when a Republican is in the White House, and that it is bad when a Democrat is in the White House. Funny that. And Art Laffer, the one trick pony, will tell them tax cuts will pay for themselves. We would be dealing with more open-minded people if we were dealing with the Spanish Inquisition.

H/T: Ed Kilgore