You say you want a revolution

Today we’re going to talk about a white guy from Vermont who changed the world.

No, not Bernie Sanders. We’ll get to him in a second.

When Howard Dean ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004, he was the first candidate to really leverage online fundraising. Maybe he noticed that some of those small-amount contributions were coming from states that typically went “red,” but where Democrats and Independents did live. Maybe he was just smart. IDK. But after Dean lost the nomination, he founded Democracy for America and was later elected to head the Democratic National Committee. As DNC chair, Dean ruffled some feathers when he announced a goal of organizing every voting precinct in the country.

(In case you’re not a party nerd: voting precincts are small areas that you usually only even notice because your precinct determines where you vote. For political parties, party members in each precinct can “organize,” basically meet, talk about any issues and elect delegates to that party’s county convention… Where delegates from other precincts meet, talk about issues, and elect delegates to the Congressional district convention. Then the state party convention, then the national convention. I promise this is more fun than it sounds.)

The conventional wisdom in the DNC at the time was the party could only compete nationally in a handful of states, and that’s where efforts should go. Dean’s 50-state strategy was ambitious, to put it mildly. But he persisted in establishing a Democratic presence in places like North Carolina, which the DNC had written off since Nixon.

In the 2006 mid-terms, Democrats won massive victories at the national and local levels. They didn’t just win back the House and Senate. “For the first time since the creation of the Republican party in 1860, no Republican captured any House, Senate or gubernatorial seat previously held by a Democrat.” Furthermore, “Almost all of the gains made by Democrats came from large gains among independents, not Republicans… In 2004, independents split 49-46, slightly in favor of Democrats, but in 2006 they voted 57–39 for Democrats, a 15-point swing and the largest margin among independents for Democrats since the 1986 elections.”

While the 2006 results certainly were driven by dissatisfaction with President Bush, it’s not the whole story. Dean’s emphasis on party organization announced that the DNC was no longer going to cede whole swaths of the country to the GOP.

I helped organize a few precincts in my county in 2008. Basically, this means finding a consistent Democratic voter and asking them to host a precinct meeting. Then you go through the records of other consistent voters in that precinct – anyone who’s voted in, say, three of the last four elections, including primaries – and ask them to come to the meeting. Precincts, and party organization in general, matter for a couple of reasons. They give rank-and-file voters a voice. Something your precinct resolves to do could theoretically wind up in the national party’s platform, just by working its way up through the conventions.

More importantly, at least for me, organized precincts engage voters and connect them to one another. In one of the precincts I organized, a woman told me she had no idea there even were other Democrats in her area. Precincts are the essential building blocks of a party. Precincts fire people up to get out the vote, and they provide a vehicle for educating voters about candidates and issues. They give ordinary voters hands-on experience with elections, and oftentimes those voters go on to run for local elected office themselves. It’s painstaking, tedious, usually thankless work to which volunteers devote hours because they know it matters. Dean’s strategy laid the groundwork and basically handed a playbook to the Obama campaign in 2008.

All that is a long way of explaining why Bernie Sanders and so many of his supporters annoy the shit out of me.

Sanders has been an Independent for his entire political career. That’s no secret. Even though he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, he has not been shy about criticizing them, calling the Democratic Party “intellectually bankrupt.” If Bernie were running for president as an Independent, I’d have no problems with him. (Well, ok, a few.) But gleefully eschewing a party for 40 years, only to swoop in and take advantage of the party structure that he had NOTHING to do with building now that he wants to be president? Sorry, that’s sketch.

But that’s a small quibble in comparison to the fact that, while Bernie and his voters talk all day about radically remaking American politics, they’re not doing anything to make it happen. Say Bernie gets elected. Now what? Unless he plans on setting policy exclusively through executive order, he’s going to have to talk to Congress at some point. Congress passes legislation, not the president. And please don’t tell me how the force of Bernie’s personality will bowl over that herd of 535 cats. President Obama had rabid support of voters who’d just put him in the White House by a landslide, his party had control of both houses of Congress for the first two years of his term, and he STILL couldn’t get shit done.

But wait! It gets better. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that Congressional districts are drawn at the state level. That’s why Art Pope dumped literal millions into state legislative races in parts of North Carolina I’ve never even heard of in order to hand the General Assembly to the GOP for the first time in a century (later giving us the magic of HB2). Because Art Pope understands that even the most national-level of policy wins starts at the state level. Probably even the county level.

Electing one person to president will not accomplish a single thing. I don’t know how many ways I can say that. 

If Sanders and his supporters actually wanted to reshape our country’s election/lobbying/highest bidder wins system, they would do what Dean did. They would go house by house, street by street, organizing voters and recruiting candidates to run for office starting at town frickin’ council. Hell, even the Tea Party managed that. In the space of – what, a year? – the Tea Party movement moved from holding tax protests to electing giant chunks of Congress. Even today, the Tea Party’s focus is – guess where? – the local level. Even people who don’t know Medicare is a federal program grasp that real change doesn’t start at the top.

If you want a revolution, you’re going to have to do more than tweet some memes and cast one whole vote. You’re going to have to have meetings. (Sooooo many meetings…). You’re going to lose sometimes. You’re going to spend years at this, and you’re still only going to make incremental progress because most of the country does not agree with you. You are going to have to vote. Every. Time.

Have you ever taken a close look at voter turnout numbers? There’s a drop-off from general elections to mid-terms going back decades. First-time voters broke for Obama in huge numbers in 2008. Do you know why the GOP chalked up historic gains in the 2010 midterm? Because that typical drop-off disproportionally slanted toward Democratic voters. Those first-time voters and Democratic-voting Independents who put Obama in the White House are the ones who ended up costing him the chance to accomplish his agenda. Because they didn’t show.

How will today’s Bernie voters be different? I’m not confident. Ideological purity tests don’t really work in a country as large and diverse as ours. A Democratic Senator from tiny, homogenously liberal Vermont is not going to have the same set of opinions or priorities than one from, say North Carolina. Or Minnesota. Here’s how BernieBros handle that:

I’m supposed to trust them with overturning the Hyde Amendment? Thanks, but no thanks.

I’m not telling you not to vote for Sanders if you agree with him on issues. I’m telling you that, if those issues really do matter to you, it shouldn’t take an election to motivate you. Those problems are still going to be there after Election Day, regardless of who wins. You want a revolution? I know I sound all “you kids get off my lawn,” but it really is this simple: Start where you can actually make a difference, don’t take your ball and go home the first time you hit a road block, and – sorry, but it’s true – stay focused on the boring stuff like precinct meetings in an off-election year.

Because those millions of other voters who don’t agree with you? That’s exactly what they are doing.

Lipstick on a pig

CPAC was this weekend – don’t feel bad, Chris Christie, I wasn’t invited either. CPAC is the annual convention/pep rally held by conservatives, and it gets a lot of attention from the media because it’s an early opportunity to identify the rising stars in the Republican Party. And there’s not much a media talking head loves more than being able to say “I TOTALLY called the Rand Paul ascendency back in 2009 when you all were still on Bobby Jindal.”

CPAC is fascinating because it’s so focused on the die-hard party faithful. By contrast, the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions – while still pep rallies – have to function as an introduction of candidates and policy ideas to voters who aren’t hyper-partisan. They have to smooth the extremes.

Not CPAC. NOTHING gets moderated here. It’s just pure unadulterated conservative id for three days, and on camera. It’s like Almost Famous for people who’ve never seen marijuana in person. Sarah Palin mean-girling the mayor of New York City? A panel on why we’re not racists turning into a discussion about how slaverywasn’t really that bad? Mitt Romney? It’s all happening!

But for me the most interesting development of the weekend was the unveiling of RNC Chair Reince Priebus’s plan to rebrand the GOP and focus on outreach to minorities. Since this is part of what I do for a living, and since marketing is one of those things everyone thinks they know how to do, I have a great deal of experience with people who throw around words like “brand” without totally understanding them. So I’m always a little skeptical… But I actually agree with Priebus that the GOP needs to do a much better job of presenting itself. And it seems that they’re going about it the way one should. They’re not just coming up with a new logo and calling it a day. (For the last time – branding =/= logo.)

For the moment, I don’t buy the narrative that the GOP is foundering. Here in North Carolina we just elected exactly the second Republican governor in my lifetime, and Republicans won the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in a century. While Romney lost, and a few Senate races didn’t go the GOP’s way, they still control the House and a majority of governerships. They still got to oversee the last round of redistricting. But Priebus is looking at what his party will face 20 years from now, which is a good thing.

In a nutshell… Marketing is essentially about differentiation. Why do I buy this widget and not that widget? A lot of factors go into making that decision, and their weight varies depending on the product you’re talking about. For instance, if you’re buying window cleaner, price might be the most important thing you consider – the cheaper the better. But when you’re buying a car seat for your newborn, you’re probably going to focus less on price and more on the safety rating.

“Brand” is more about how buying this widget makes you feel. I tend to use the term “positioning” because it’s a word people can actually understand (unlike “brand,” the meaning of which no two marketing people can agree on). What’s your widget’s position in the market of all similar widgets? Is it the Best Widget (According to Consumer Reports)? The Yuppie Widget? The Quirky Widget? The Who Cares, it was the Cheapest Widget? And the best way to find out how people feel about your product – and therefore why they decide to buy or not buy it – is to ask them.

So I was pleased to see that the RNC had conducted focus groups. I’ve done focus groups, and it can be pretty humbling to hear what people truly think of you – sometimes negative, sometimes even based on inaccurate information. But you need to hear it. Today Priebus said that it was “painful” to learn from focus groups that they thought of the GOP as being the party of “stuffy old guys.” I’m sure that it was, and I’m sure that he was at least a little tempted to run into the focus group session screaming “MARCO RUBIO! NIKKI HALEY! PAUL RYAN IS ONLY 42!!!” (Oh wait! He did – only on national television.)

But here’s where Priebus and I disagree… or at least where I’m hoping he was merely spinning his heart out this morning. Romney didn’t lose last November because he didn’t communicate well enough. Women didn’t turn practically wholesale against Republicans because of Todd Akin’s one little bad interview. Latino voters didn’t stand in line to vote against Romney because they didn’t “get” the GOP policies on immigration – it’s because they DID.

Here’s the thing about brand. It may be nebulous or hard to articulate or intensely individual, but it also needs to be accurate. In other words, marketing that emphasizes brand needs to match the experience of actually using that product. There’s a reason no one markets full-sized pickup trucks to Brooklyn hipsters. There’s a reason you’ll never hear a Taylor Swift song in an Apple ad.

Remember the “Mad Men” episode where a dog food company’s sales plummeted when it came out that they used horse meat in their recipe? The solution was to change the name of the company to wipe away all the bad publicity and start fresh. Well, yeah… but also stop putting horse meat in your dog food.

If the RNC wants to appeal to minority voters and younger voters of any race, communication isn’t the problem. Substance is the problem. As long as Priebus represents a party that is hostile to people who aren’t white and/or have vaginas, and doesn’t acknowledge basic truths about economics, foreign policy, history and how science works, all the outreach in the world means nothing. Successful rebranding is about informing the public that you’ve changed – which means you actually need to change. And no, slapping a trendier shade of lipstick on your pig doesn’t count.

Reince – I know as a Democrat that I should be rooting for y’all to keep doing exactly what you’re doing. But as an American I can’t do that. This country needs functioning parties to refine policy ideas, because it’s only through competition of philosophies that we’ll develop something that actually works. We need gun-owning farmers and loft-dwelling freelance graphic designers, Pentacostal ministers and atheists, oligarchs and welfare moms to talk to each other and find what works for all of us, even if none of us get our way 100 percent. That’s how our system is supposed to function, and it only can do so if both sides are bringing serious ideas to the table.

So, Reince – don’t take from this process of self-examination that what you really need to do is spend more money manipulating voters more effectively. Maybe shift a little – not the message, but the substance. Stop putting horse meat in your dog food and see what happens.

Are the president's kids more important than yours?

Yes. 

I'm sorry, was there some confusion over that? I mean, his kids aren't more important to him than your kids are to you, of course. But they're more important in terms of national security, because when the president's kids are threatened it impinges on his ability to do his job - which puts America's security at risk.

That's why Congress requires that the Secret Service protect not just the president, but his family. The president couldn't turn down Secret Service protection if he wanted to.

That's another thing - those "armed guards" who protect the Obama daughters when they're at school are not employed by the school. (They go to a Quaker school, which - if it's anything like the Quaker college where I worked for four years - doesn't have armed security, period.) Those "armed guards" are insanely-highly trained Secret Service agents who guard the girls at school and anywhere else they go. Because federal law.

The NRA is all concerned about hypocrisy now? Okay. When the armed personnel you want in every school in America have to undergo the selection process, the background checks, the training and all of the other weeding-out that those agents go through in order to have the privilege of watching the president's kids, then we can talk.

You're up, gun owners

There’s just too much left to say about the shooting a week ago this morning in Newtown, Conn., and it’s hard to know where to begin. After most mass shootings (and isn’t that a telling, sad thing to write), there are clearly drawn sides on either pole of the gun control debate. One tiny silver lining in the aftermath of this shooting has been that its severity, and particularly the targeting of small children, has seemingly prompted a more serious reflection. At least in my experience – I can’t tell you how may times in the last week I’ve heard my most conservative friends and co-workers complain that assault weapons are too easy to come by in the U.S. The normally silent majority finally seems to be willing to drown out the pontificating of our corporate lobby-funded elected officials to say that there IS a happy medium between you owning a rifle or handgun and some nutcase owning an assault rifle, and it’s high time we found it.

I feel like the people in charge of our public policy on this issue only acknowledge that there’s no one solution when they’re looking for an excuse not to do anything at all. As in, banning semi-auto weapons/X type of ammo/all guns EVER won’t stop criminals from getting their hands on illegal weapons, so let’s not make any new gun control laws at all. (Which is the equivalent of saying that we should do away with highway speed limits because of how I drive every morning.)

But in this case I think it’s become clear that preventing the next tragedy isn’t about making one single policy change. That’s not a cop-out. Connecticut has an assault weapons ban; Adam Lanza’s mother purchased her guns legally (thus becoming part of the statistic that gun owners risk being killed by their own weapons). While the U.S. far outpaces the rest of the world in firearm ownership, we’re not exactly the only place in the world where lots of people own guns. We’re looking at a health care system with fewer resources for the mentally ill, and a culture that offers too many role models to an angry, pathetic person who can only make a name for himself by hurting others.

“Guns” as a concept in and of themselves don’t automatically turn their owners into killers. But it’s also true that killers tend to go forguns. In 2007, over 31,000 people died from being shot, the majority being suicides – which still leaves about 11,000 gun-related homicides in the U.S. in any given year. Meanwhile, another 75,000+ are injured by guns, either deliberately or accidentally. By comparison, between 10,000 and 11,000 people die in car accidents caused by drunk drivers in the U.S. each year. Where’s the MADD-style public awareness campaign about the dangers of guns in the wrong hands?

Which brings me to what should be an obvious point: When I have a cold and want to buy too large a box of cold medicine, someone at the drug store takes down my personal information. They do this so that, if I go across town and try to buy another economy-size box of Sudafed, law enforcement will know about it. Ok, I have a “right” to buy a legal and regulated product, but thanks to the meth labs of the world I can no longer do so in unlimited quantities. I have to wear a seatbelt. But no one keeps track of how many bullets you buy online (like the Aurora shooter did). If I buy a beer for a 20-and-three-quarters year-old, I go to jail; if I buy an assault rifle for a 10-year-old, I’m cool.

Even in a free society, we take for granted that there are stupid, sometimes even evil people in the world and we have to work around them as best we can. Except when it comes to guns. Too many people are making too much money making gun ownership and use a “culture war” issue for us to be able to rely on our political leadership to ever tell us what we need to hear, vs. what we want to hear.

And I put the blame for that on the NRA, which today unleashed its “meaningful contribution” to the debate: putting armed guards in all schools pronto. (Oh, okay. We spent five years debating the 1994 assault weapons ban, but we should rush armed guards into kindergarten next week.) Never mind that an armed, trained guard at Columbine High barely slowed up those shooters. Never mind that communities across the U.S. can barely maintain the police forces they already have. Who’s going to pay for this isn’t the NRA’s concern. They haven’t been about policy, or about advocating for actual gun owners, for some time. Take a look at the donors to the NRA’s foundation. They exist to convince people to buy more guns and bullets, that’s all.

If the NRA actually cared about sustaining the tradition of responsible gun ownership in this country, they’d be doing everything possible to distance Adam Lanza and his ilk from the rural hunter who takes his kids out twice a year. They’d take a hard look at what happened to the tobaccoindustry, who dug in their heels until public opinion turned so violently against them that the largest companies were forced to pay hundreds of millions into a fund that, among other things, pays for those annoying “don’t smoke or you’ll die” TV commercials. It’s not going to take too many more days like last Friday to convince a critical mass of Americans that guns run amok are a public health issue.

Because the one thing that I haven’t heard said in the last week is this: while the mass shootings get the press because they’re so indiscriminate (the “it could happen to you” factor”), something like 80 Americans are killed by guns each day on average. That’s more than three Sandy Hooks every day. You just don’t hear about them.

So I have something to say to all the gun owners out there. You know who you are. You’re the ones whose instinctive response when you learn about 20 6-year-olds being mown down in their classroom is to run to Facebook to remind us that “guns don’t kill people! People kill people!!” If you want to make sure that your kids and grandkids can buy handguns or shotguns if they want, then it’s up to you to figure this out. Right now you’re not drawing any distinction between military-style guns and “cop-killer” bullets and that shotgun in my dad’s closet. There are weapons that civilians should have access to, and those that they shouldn’t.

So y’all figure this out. National registration database? Limit on bullet purchases? Close the gun-show loophole on background checks? Required training to buy weapons over a certain firing capacity? Annual licensure? It’s up to you at this point. But right now most Americans see you as the people who put your hobby above the lives of American children, and that means that your window to police your own community is closing. If you all don’t come up with a solution, then people who know less about your tools and how you use them will gladly do so – and you most likely won’t like the result.

What happened last week doesn’t happen outside America, at least not with the regularity it does here. We will always have disturbed, inadequate types who will lash out at others. But they don’t always have to have such easy access to weapons, any more than a meth cooker has unfettered access to cold meds. A change is coming, and the people who think of themselves as the good guys need to be leading the way – not fighting for the right of the next Lanza to kill.

Fiscal Cliffhanger

Today in “things that would’ve made a killer episode of ‘The West Wing’ but that suck in real life,” our nation’s leaders are still arguing about the so-called fiscal cliff that our federal budget will hit at the end of the year.

In a very large nutshell, this started last summer when the federal government was approaching its debt ceiling. Instead of raising the debt ceiling, preserving the U.S. credit rating (as it has done many times before), Congress instead acted like that one kid in my 7^th grade math class who deliberately didn’t do his homework in order to keep our class from getting the merit-based pizza party that EVERY OTHER CLASS GOT that year… but 20 years later I still remember his attention-whoring ass, which I guess is the Tea Party’s end-game as well.

As a backstory, Congress and the Obama Administration had previously faced off over the Bush tax cuts – signed into law in 2001 and 2003 and set to die naturally in 2010. In 2010, President Obama and Democrats in Congress wanted a jobs bill; Republicans held the tax cut renewal as leverage. Their compromise was a jobs bill that included a two-year extension of all of the Bush tax cuts.

Welp. It’s been two years, so here we are talking about the Bush tax cuts again. It’s not just that they’re set to expire (again), but that they’re a key point in the debate over how to resolve the fiscal cliff issue. Because the last-minute Budget Control Act of 2011, which temporarily resolved the debt ceiling problem, gave Congress until the end of this year to reach a long-term deal on deficit reduction. If they can’t, then automatic cuts kick in across the board. Automatic meaning, there’s nothing anyone can do about them. Across the board meaning EVERYWHERE, including the Department of Defense, which – apologies to Social Security – is the actual third rail of American politics.

So, the fiscal cliff and the death-date of the Bush tax cuts are separate things, and the fact that they’re coming to a head at the same time is A) cosmic sh*ts and giggles, or B) proof that we really are living in an Aaron Sorkin TV show, in which case I should have better dialogue and more scenes with Bradley Whitford.

But unfortunately, this isn’t TV. This isn’t something we can or should observe ironically from great remove in between checking our fantasy football scores and reruns of “30 Rock.” One of the proposals for resolving the whole fiscal cliff/deficit reduction/tax cut brouhaha – which, for the sake of clarity, will now be referred to as “Roscoe” – will directly impact the class of Americans whose direct expenditures drive our entire economy, and the other proposal for dealing with “Roscoe” will affect a vastly smaller number of Americans. So I feel like we should understand our choices.

Choice #1: No increases in tax rates for anyone, but eliminate tax deductions such as those for mortgage interest payments and some charitable contributions. Cut $1.2 trillion in spending on health care and entitlements, and raise the eligibility age for Social Security.

Choice #2: cut federal spending, keep the Bush tax cuts for most, but allow the tax cuts for incomes over $250,000 to expire like they’re going to anyway if we can’t agree on a deal.

Choice #2 asks the wealthiest Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid in the 90s, when, to my knowledge, people making six figures were not, in fact, reduced to panhandling. Look, no one’s saying that an AGI of 250k+ makes you “own your own yacht” rich, but you’re not exactly hurting. And no, I’m not advocating some draconian tax rate that de-incentivizes your success – just reminding that that the American Utopia y’all conservatives love to wax poetic about was also the era when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent. So you’d think that going back to the much lower rate you paid when I was in high school would be a reasonable compromise.

Because under Choice #1, we’d kiss goodbye to the public incentives that are available to basically any American who owns a house or donates to a charity. I own a house, and my mortgage interest deduction is a big part of the reason why I’ve held on to my house. There’s not a nonprofit in this country that could survive without contributions from individuals or corporations. For high-wealth Americans, charities are a key part of their wealth management. You mess with that by nixing charitable deductions, and you’re screwing with the foundations and non-profits that allow the well-off to maximize their wealth, not to mention the thousands of jobs created by nonprofit organizations.

So, we can do all that, and STILL not fix Roscoe, or we can extend all of the Bush tax cuts minus one and be closer to okay.

Now would be a good time to ask a question I’ve always wanted to ask the John Boehners of the world. If funneling cash to the very wealthy is the best way to create jobs… when do they start? Because – again – tax rates on high income households are the lowest they’ve ever been – ever – and this isn’t something that happened last week. The first round of Bush tax cuts happened 11 years ago. What are they waiting for? Am I to believe that the wealthiest one percent have portfolios full of sure-fire investment opportunities that would put thousands of Americans to work and make even more millions for themselves, but they’re holding out for another one or two percent drop off their tax rate?

The tax cuts are among the largest contributors to the federal debt. We did this because letting the uber-rich keep their cash was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, but doing so has coincided with the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression. If they are the ones to save us, then apparently the uber-rich are very bad at this. So maybe we should just stop listening to them.

The universally acknowledged “best ever” times for our country economically were those when a guy like my grandfather could work decades for a local manufacturer, buy a house and put three sons through college though he himself had only a high school degree. You can’t do that in many places in America these days, and federal spending is NOT the reason why. No, Congress shouldn’t be in the business of redistributing wealth. What it should do is set fair tax rates and get out of the way. What Republicans in Congress are proposing is the opposite of that.

Sad juxtaposition: Election Day and Veterans Day

I know this feels anti-climactic, given that it's my first post since the election last week... But, honestly, what to say about the election? Polls that were conducted well were right. The president won every state he was expected to win and lost every state he was expected to lose, and only people who consume exclusively non-fact-based media were surprised by this. Now we move on.

Except for the sad people in 20 (20!) states who've signed secession petitions in the last week. I say "sad" because, first of all, it's downright pitiable that news of this would come out on Veterans Day, which for nearly a century has honored the men and women who fought (and died) in our nation's wars. Even more sad that many of the people signing these things probably genuinely believe that it's they who represent American ideals, as opposed to the millions of Americans in a diverse coalition who re-elected President Obama a week ago.

They're wrong. No, I'm not saying that people who voted for Romney are un-American - nothing could be further from the truth; they're just people who want to solve our common issues differently. No, I'm not saying that every long-gone past veteran would've voted for Obama, because that's stupid. (But you can bet that some of them would've.) But one thing the "greatest generation" and other past Americans, whether veteran or not, had in common was this: when a single election didn't go their way, they didn't take their ball and go home.

Any historian will tell you that the reason the election of 1800 was so remarkable is that it's the first time that the direction of executive power changed hands. George Washington and John Adams were on one side, and president #3 Thomas Jefferson on the other. When Jefferson beat Adams for the presidency, it would've been the easiest thing in the world for then-Federalists in a country less than 25 years old to have seceded and formed their own country. America would've broken into a number of countries, possibly warring over the years for territory and supremacy. In other words, we'd be Eastern Europe right now. We certainly wouldn't be the geographically, culturally unified country that, a century after its founding, was already one of the world's super-powers.

But, for the 1800 losing side, the idea of America as America was more important than having a continent full of small territories that each believed different things. The country as one country was more important than them having their way. It's astonishing that people who fetishize the Founders don't understand this, because it's all there in contemporary accounts that most of us studied in high school history classes. And this is a pattern anyone can see repeated throughout U.S. history: your ideas lose, and you either get better at convincing others that you're right or you change your ideas. You don't just quit.

It's particularly disgusting to me to think that the people signing these petitions are doing so not because they really don't want to be part of the U.S. (unless they've been refunding their Social Security checks en masse and I just missed it), but because they see this as a valid act of protest over the results of the election. Are we really here now? Because, if Mitt Romney had somehow managed to win last week and you had 20 state's worth of Obama supporters signing their names* asking to be straight up let out of the country, well, I don't even want to think about the size of the mushroom cloud that would be floating over Fox News HQ right now.

Do the people who don't think that the president or his supporters are "America" enough think that they're being clever? They're not, and they're setting a seriously dangerous precedent for future elections. What could be more divisive, and threatening to our republic, than the faction that loses thinking they can just opt out when they don't get their way? It's crap like this that led to Fort Sumter. And if you think that's a good thing, maybe you should leave.

Because when my dad was drafted into the Army, when two of my grand-fathers signed up (Navy and Marine Corps), when my aunt and uncle enlisted (Air Force), and when countless Americans sign up to represent and defend our country, the one thing they DON'T ask them is who they voted for for president. Because that's just about the last thing that matters.

*Re: "signing their names"... These petitions exist because the White House allows any American with a modem to start an online petition, and publicly posts those that reach 50,000 signatures, something I'm fairly sure doesn't happen in China. "Petitioners only have to put a first name and last initial on the site," says the Washington Post. Wow, that's really courageous of you, online secession petitioner. You're totally right up there with the men who openly signed their (full) names to a Declaration that was mailed to King George knowing he could hang them for treason if they lost. *Applause* *Applause*

Class warfare and the 47 percent

I was going to write about Mitt Romney’s “China cheaters” ad that’s been all over my TV all week, but then this happened.

Yesterday, Mother Jones posted online a snippet of a video shot secretly at a Romney fundraiser back in May. They’ve since posted the entire thing, but it was the initial excerpt that got people all riled up, myself included. Here’s what Romney said:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

There’s so much to refute here that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with my annoyance that once again Romney is conflating two things that have little to do with one another either because he doesn’t understand them or he does, and just hopes that you and I don’t. It’s true that nearly half of Americans don’t write a check to the IRS each year, and it’s probably true that half of Americans get some form of assistance from the government. But these aren’t the same people, and they sure as hell aren’t all Obama voters.

First, the tax thing. It’s a well-worn right-wing talking point that 47 percent of Americans “don’t pay taxes,” usually presented in such a way to make whoever’s hearing it feel outraged because he or she is a hard-working American and those 47 percent are probably sitting at home playing X-box and lighting their cigars with your tax dollars. The problem is that the hardworking American who’s hearing about the 47 percent – and the person who’s telling them – are both likely part of it.

Let’s throw it to the AP:

“Forty-six percent of the country's households -- some 76 million -- paid no federal income taxes last year, according to a study by the Tax Policy Center.

While it's true most of those families are poor, the numbers include many others who got tax breaks because they are old, have children in college or didn't owe taxes on interest from state and local bonds. And of those who didn't write checks to the IRS, six in 10 still paid Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, and more than that paid federal excise taxes on items such as gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes, said Roberton Williams, who analyzes taxes at the center.”

Now, Romney quoting the easily refuted tax thing is ignorant and/or deliberately misinformative . Romney pulling out the “people who get government money are lazy and entitled” thing is just offensive.

You know who gets government money? My dad, a Vietnam vet who’s on 100 disability from the VA from that time 40 years ago when Uncle Sam sent him to jungle to get shot four times. My grandfather, who gets the Social Security benefits he paid into his entire working career. Me, who got through college thanks to the low-interest, government-backed student loans that I’m now paying back. Anyone who got a small-business loan to help “build that.”

Oh, I know, I know. Romney wasn’t talking about us. He meant the bad ones, the ones who abuse the system. The mythical welfare queens driving Cadillacs and managing to use their food stamps on liquor, even though that’s illegal.

Except that he didn’t do that. He said this: everyone who doesn’t pay income taxes only survives because they live off the government, and everyone who gets a dime from the government is also a free-loader who doesn’t pay into the system. And they’re all automatic Obama voters because we’re terrified that a President Romney will make us actually get off the couch and wash ourselves.

The fact that none of this is true doesn’t seem to bother Romney, which I guess is just par for the course at this point. He’s shown himself to be concerned less with fact and more with how lies make his supporters feel: superior to those of us that think a progressive tax rate has worked pretty well, actually.

Here’s a thought… what about the other 47 percent? So to speak – I’ve no idea what the actual percentage is of people who would vote for Mickey Mouse if he were running against Barack Obama, but they’re out there. They’d do so despite demonstrated evidence that our economy grew faster when the tax rate on the highest earners was higher than it is now; or that our country is a better place now that we require kids to go to school instead of to factories; or that 21^st century Democrats really do have no interest in taking their guns. Why isn’t Romney tsk-tsking about the rationality of those voters? Why isn’t he publicly worried about fraud in federal welfare programs like subsidies for oil companies, or tax loopholes that allow a retired investment banker earning millions a year to pay a lower income tax rate than I do?

It’s okay. We already know why Romney’s not talking about those things. It’s because you talk about what’s important to you, and I guess if you’re Mitt Romney, you just make up the rest.