In the National Journal on Saturday, Ron Brownstein addressed the
political effect of the Obama spending spree. Its easy to get lost in the fog of Brownstein's argument about governmental effectiveness, but he clearly identifies the cause and extent of the anti-Democrat mood as this:
- [A]fter the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the stimulus, and health reform, Democrats are facing a backlash against federal spending and reach that stretches beyond working-class whites into the white professional class (especially among men).
Brownstein nods in the direction of the arguments that those sectors of the public are racist, and that, for the moment, they believe the government is ineffective but he wraps it all up in the last paragraph:
- [S]o long as most white voters conclude that an activist Washington produces more costs than benefits for their families, Democrats will struggle.
The problem that the middle income voters recognize is that they send the bulk of the income taxes to Washington. They know that Social Security and Medicare are largely paid for by dedicated payroll taxes. They also know that after the Democrats pay off their lower income voters with Medicaid and welfare and their upper income voters with growth-killing environmental programs and bailouts to the New York financial centers, there is little benefit left for them. The ultimate breakwater against the which progressive wave must founder is that there is simply not enough income tax revenue to be had out of the high earners.
Since Brownstein is so on target, it is amusing that early in the piece he mis-identifies those swing voters as "Clinton Democrats." Including, as that does, all the Democrats who are still with Obama, it misses the point entirely. The voters who are now swinging away from the Dems, and who swung back to Clinton after the Reagan-Bush years, were traditional Democrat voters for decades until Reagan articulated the problem I just described and persuaded them to vote Republican.
These longtime, then sometime Democrats were the most critical piece of the Reagan Coalition. They are the Reagan Democrats, and the leftist swing of the Democrat party has reawakened them to reality.
