Here's a history lesson from the fall of 1973: it's been very, very hard for the right to bamboozle the country into agreeing with them that big government is bad for their well-being. Their progress has been halting, fragile, and easily reversed. Because, of course, it is not bad for their well-being—it is imperative—for really, people are not all that stupid. But they keep trying, and they will keep trying, with far too many assists from people in our own beloved and benighted Democratic Party—because weakening government is all too good for the well-being of powerful interests that, well, are not good for the the well-being of the country at all.

In 1973 Ronald Reagan got really got serious for the first time about running for President. His vehicle, Team Reagan decided, would be a ballot initiative designed to show the world that the people of California agreed with their governor: government wasn't the solution to our problems. Government was the problem. Then, once the ballot initiative passed, he would barnstorm the country selling the idea to other states, and be hailed as a hero.

The idea was born because that year, some bad accounting and an improving economy had left the state of California with a nearly $1 billion fiscal surplus. Reagan's announced intention was to "return the money to taxpayers," writing into the California constitution a cap on both taxes and government spending.
The architects included an economist named Milton Friedman and his gubernatorial chief of staff Edwin Meese—appropriate names, because in every respect "Propostion 1" was a perfect template for a generation of conservative movement appeals to follow that—well, let's quote Ronald Reagan himself:

"Are we automatically destined to tax and spend, spend and tax indefinitely, until the people have nothing left of their earnings for themselves? Have we abandoned or forgotten the interests and well-being of the taxpayer whose toil makes government possible in the first place? Or is he to become a pawn in a deadly game of government monopoly whose only purpose is to serve the confiscatory appetites of runaway government spending?"

Ronald Reagan put everything he had into selling Proposition 1. It was a brilliant, deeply Reaganite political performance. The leader of the anti-Proposition 1 forces, Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Moretti, said he was in favor of lowering taxes too, just like he was "in favor of motherhood" and "against sin." He just thought turning the state Constitution into an iron corset was madness. He, too, marshaled an array of statistics to demonstrate why Proposition 1 could not do what it was intended to do, and challenged the governor to debate. Reagan refused him. Moretti explained why he thought Reagan was ducking him: because in any tax limitation program that included, as Reagan's did, an expenditure ceiling, programs would have to be cut, and "He knows he cannot answer the questions we raise as to which programs will be cut." So he challenged the governor again and again and again and again—and five times Reagan refused him.
Reagan was playing an entirely different game.

When he made statistical claims, he blithely let them contradict each another. For instance, they said his plan would create deficits. He responded it would produce $41.5 billion in 15 years in new money. But then he also stated as the plan's fundamental intention giving the state less money to spend. His critics would scratch their heads—and unveil another brace of statistics. Then he would respond with moralistic perorations, making them look like pedantic asses—which was the game he was playing: "When the advocates of bigger and bigger government manage to get their hands on an extra tax dollar or two," he would quip, "they hang on like a gila monster until they find some way to spend it."

Again, his opponents opponents threw up their hands. If Reagan wanted to cut taxes and spending, what of his last seven years as governor? California's secretary of state, who was also the son of the governor Reagan replaced in 1966 and who himself hoped to succeed him in 1974, pointed out that he'd increased both dramatically. And already had a line-item veto, which he had never effectively used. "How can a magic formula, written by invisible lawyers," Jerry Brown asked, "do what Ronald Reagan has been unwilling or unable to do?" The same services Reagan had been refusing to cut in the last seven years as governor, critics would logically observe, would suffer. Reagan would indicate the emergency fund would protect them. But then he would say he didn't even want to protect government bureaucrats anyway.
But if government employees were all money-sucking monsters, why was the state budget in surplus in the first place?

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(Rick Perlstein joins Chris Matthews on Hardball in above video)

Rick Perlstein is a damn good piano player with a love of fusion, a great guy and an incredible historical writer. He said on Hardball Thursday:

PERLSTEIN: Chris, forget the word left. Ronald Reagan, let's quote him. "There is no left and right. There`s only up or down." Up for the middle class means some kind of protection of their economic interests. I mean, Obama is worried that if he talks about this stuff, he`s going to sound divisive. History suggests that people who talk about this stuff aren't divisive. They're uniters. I mean, look at -- look at Franklin Roosevelt. This is the guy who said the kind of stuff you -- you heard in that clip. This is also the guy who built the strongest, the biggest, the most diverse political coalition in American history, and then he united the whole country to defeat Hitler. The idea that talking about malefactors of great wealth, about -- about people who are taking away the birthright of every American, is going to make people think that you`re somehow creating class war, history doesn't suggest it. It`s just not there in the record. This is the kind of stuff that makes people feel that the Democratic Party is on their side, that Democratic leaders are going to lay down the tracks for their interests

Rick's latest piece in Time is very instructive to you and to me and to hopefully President Obama. How Democrats Win: Defending the Social Safety Net

I was flattered to learn from Joe Klein’s Aug. 15 column in TIME that Barack Obama is reading my book ­Nixonland. The book is about the “separate and irreconcilable fears” over the past 50 years that have come to define the increasingly acrimonious cohabitation of Americans on the left and on the right. I assume Obama turned to it for insight about how he might help turn down the volume in our political conversation. But there’s also a story in Nixonland about how the Democratic Party wins, why it loses and the good things that happen when the party gets the formula right. I surely hope Obama did not miss it.

It concerns the two major axes upon which major national elections get fought. Sometimes they become battles over the cultural and social anxieties that ordinary Americans suffer. Other times they are showdowns about middle-class anxieties when the free market fails. Normally, in the former sort of election, Republicans win. In the latter, Democrats do — as we saw in 2008, when the tide turned after John McCain said “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

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As I was knee-deep in researching our book Over The Cliff, where we examine how the Tea Party was created and by who, I came to understand how vitally important it was to understand our political history. I've written some pieces on C&L that reflect some of what I found out.

I also learned which historical politician had the strongest influence among modern-day conservative operatives. You might think it was Barry Goldwater, since he got the ball rolling as the New Right was born to follow him, but in reality it was Richard Nixon who set the tone for our current state of politics with his 'dirty tricks" and "the ends justify the means" tactics. If you need an example of his influence and how far it goes back, just read up on Karl Rove and Alan Dixon back in 1970:

In the fall of 1970, Karl Rove, current Bush Administration Deputy Chief of Staff, used a false identity to enter the campaign office of Alan J. Dixon, who was running for Illinois State Treasurer, and stole 1000 sheets of paper with campaign letterhead. Rove then printed fake campaign rally fliers promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters, with the effect of disrupting Dixon's rally (Dixon eventually won the election). Rove's role would not become publicly known until August 1973. Rove told the Dallas Morning News in 1999, "It was a youthful prank at the age of 19 and I regret it."

Rove has continued on this path of ratf*&king his opponents ever since. By extension we then had the Lee Atwater-Willie Horton ad, Swift Voters For Truth's smear of John Kerry, and the latest version, the O'Keefe videos. The slime continues along on its merry way to destroy people.

Rick Perlstein writes an excellent piece for Mother Jones which outlines the history of the GOP's Fact Free Nation:

Reagan rode into office accompanied by a generation of conservative professional janissaries convinced they were defending civilization against the forces of barbarism. And like many revolutionaries, they possessed an instrumental relationship to the truth: Lies could be necessary and proper, so long as they served the right side of history.

"We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means," wrote evangelist C. Peter Wagner in 1981. "If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method."

This virulent strain of political utilitarianism was already well apparent by the time the Plumbers were breaking into the Democratic National Committee: "Although I was aware they were illegal," White House staffer Jeb Stuart Magruder told the Watergate investigating committee, "we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a legitimate cause."

Even conservatives who were not allied with the White House had learned to think like Watergate conspirators. To them, the takeaway from the scandal was that Nixon had been willing to bend the rules for the cause. The New Right pioneer M. Stanton Evans once told me, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."

Though many in the New Right proclaimed their contempt for Richard Nixon, a number of its key operatives and spokesmen in fact came directly from the Watergate milieu. Two minor Watergate figures, bagman Kenneth Rietz (who ran Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign) and saboteur Roger Stone (last seen promoting a gubernatorial bid by the woman who claimed to have been Eliot Spitzer's madam) were rehabilitated into politics through staff positions in Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign. G. Gordon Liddy became a right-wing radio superstar.

"We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means," wrote evangelist C. Peter Wagner in 1981. "If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method." Jerry Falwell once said his goal was to destroy the public schools. In 1998, confronted with the quote, he denied making it by claiming he'd had nothing to do with the book in which it appeared. The author of the book was Jerry Falwell.

Direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie made a fortune bombarding grassroots activists with letters shrieking things like "Babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood." As Richard Nixon told his chief of staff on Easter Sunday, 1973, "Remember, you're doing the right thing. That's what I used to think when I killed some innocent children in Hanoi."...read on

And so the lying liars were born. Today they continue on their path of corruption -- one sanctioned even by their supposed men of God, because their hearts were in the right place when they lied. Most Americans don't live their lives this way, so it's kind of foreign to them to even think about such things, but there is no excuse for the Beltway media being as complicit as they are. Then again, they do love their access. But the corrosive nature of the right wing oppo-men has had a truly corrosive affect on our entire political system.

Digby writes:

This history provides an important foundation for my ongoing quest to understand the right's ability to operate without the constraints of hypocrisy or consistency in an environment of epistemic relativism so extreme that we end up believing that wrong is right. It's literally mind-boggling.

A year ago, Alexander Zaitchik and Rick Perlstein discussed how much attention should be paid to Glenn Beck, and why Democrats seem to have ceded the field on populism.

Like Rick Perlstein, I'm baffled by Obama's unwillingness to engage with any liberal movements outside his organizational control. Why did the White House sidestep the union protests in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and other states? What's the upside of that strategy? In contrast, Republicans have (at least publicly) embraced their farthest fringe:

Historically, grass-roots movements have been an extraordinary resource for Presidents seeking to move history in a new direction. The ability to place oneself at the head of a protest - while also directing its unruly energies - has been a perquisite for successful presidential leadership.

One of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression was to give workers the right to collectively bargain. However, some found their unions' umbrella organization, the American Federation of Labor, too timid. So at a 1935 labor conclave, John Lewis, the leader of the insurgents, strode across the podium to punch the leader of the old guard in the nose, an act that would lead to the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which turned labor into a social movement.

These days, conservatives who seek to discredit the Wisconsin protesters as hooligans point to the alleged damage their posters did to the state capitol's walls. In 1937, CIO strikers in Flint kept GM from producing all but 125 cars in February of 1937. Now that was unruly.

But unlike Obama, FDR supported the strikers, directing GM to negotiate with the union.

Eighteen steelworkers were killed in one of the violent labor conflicts that followed; FDR backed away from the CIO and its militant tactics. Be that as it may, his original intervention on the side of the masses - combined with his savvy in distancing himself from their excesses - paid dividends to the Democratic Party.

In Wisconsin, there have been no such excesses on the protestors' side. And yet Obama has kept his distance.

Lyndon Johnson achieved a trick similar to FDR's: In 1964, he cast his lot with the outraged masses of the civil rights movement. That came with its share of political hardships, but Democrats stuck close enough to their guns to produce an African-American loyalty that remains steadfast to this day.

Nor is this just a strategy of the left. The Christian right entered national politics in the second half of the 1970s. The nation's preeminent conservative aspirant for the presidency, Ronald Reagan, had to decide whether to abjure or embrace this powerful new group.

He managed to do both. Every year, he addressed the March for Life - but only by telephone, lest he be seen in a photo with zealots. Right-wing social movements, in fact, were an enormous pain in his presidential derrière, but Reagan was far too wise to betray that publicly.

Obama is the opposite. The demands of liberal social movements seem to annoy him terribly - when he deigns to actually acknowledge them.This is a curious stance for a leader who has put the semiotics of social movements at the center of his appeal. And maybe, for his reelection, it will work again.

But if he wants to truly change, he has to master a crucial precedent: That avoiding unprecedented outbursts of mass mobilization on his side of the ideological divide is not a smart option.

The only "social movement" I see Obama in front of is the charge to cut Social Security and Medicare. One minute, he's attacking Republicans for their "radical" plan, and the next, he's pushing the need to cut the country's most popular and needed social programs, only his ideas are Republican-lite. Does he really want that to be his legacy? For our sake, I hope not.

The great historian Rick Perlstein gave a great talk to Vanderbilt University.

I was going to cut some parts out, but he's such a great source of information that you should see him whenever you get the chance.

And his last book, "Nixonland" is really a treat to be savored.

Our friend Rick Perlstein had an interesting interview on Big Think that is a good morning starter. He opens up with a really important point:

Question: Has Obama succeeded on his promise of being a “post-partisan” President?

Rick Perlstein: Well, the problem with Obama’s post-partisan agenda is that he came into it. He came into his presidency at a time when millions of Americans, perhaps even tens of millions of Americans don’t consider a Democrat president legitimate. Don’t consider liberalism legitimate. Don’t consider the idea of the state forming new programs to help people legitimate. So, he’s in a situation a lot like, you know, Abraham Lincoln faced in 1860 when you had millions of Americans who didn’t even consider what was going in Washington to have anything to do with them.

Yep. And the mainstream right-wing media is explicitly promoting the view that Obama is not a legitimate president.

We knew that Bill O'Reilly had done a nasty segment on Rick Perlstein -- including running his picture -- tonight on Fox News because Perlstein called me shortly afterward and asked:

"Hey, did Bill O'Reilly or someone on Fox do something with me in it tonight?"

"I dunno. I'm recording but not watching. Why?"

"My inbox just started getting deluged with hate mail a little bit ago."

"What time did it start?"

"About 7:30 [Chicago time]."

"Yep, that would be O'Reilly."

"I think they ran my picture. A lot of the mail is about how ugly I am."

I pulled my recording and yep, sure enough, there was a segment attacking Perlstein for his Newsweek op-ed column this week. He invited on his frequent guest, Bernard Goldberg, to talk about it.

As you can see, what set O'Reilly off was Perlstein's characterization of O'Reilly's audience as working-class whites whose more unstable elements sometimes act out violently:

O'Reilly: The most recent Newsweek contains a nasty piece on Sarah Palin that implies she is an intellectual moron supported by poorly educated conservative idiots.

[Hmmmm. Read the piece for yourself. As you can see, it certainly does not use language like that, and in fact discusses to working-class whites in largely respectful tones -- but points out that they don't get much respect among Republican elites. O'Reilly's caricature of the column is actually rather self-revealing.]

O'Reilly: The article goes on to say that these stupid conservatives are influenced by extremist commentators. Quote:

Now [William F.] Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen -- the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Becks—can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. ... Fox heavily promoted anti-administration "tea party" events this past Fourth of July -- rallies in praise of secession ...

Well, obviously, that paragraph is pure propaganda.

Actually, let's read the whole passage, and you can judge for yourselves. Again, what O'Reilly omits is telling:

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(h/t Heather for both videos)

While there have been some disappointments, there's no denying that Barack Obama has accomplished an amazing amount in his first thirty days in office. Considering the absolute clusterf&%k he inherited from his predecessor and how many roadblocks and petty games have been placed in his way, let's give the man some props for getting the job done.

Rachel Maddow lists Obama's presidential accomplishments:

Announced strict new rules for lobbyists

Paycaps for WH staff

Hillary Clinton confirmed Secretary of State

Signed an Executive Order closing Gitmo and secret CIA prisons overseas

Named George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke Special Envoys to Middle East

Made first agency visit to the State Dept, symbolically reviving diplomacy

Appeared on Arab TV network,

Signed Lily Ledbetter Act,

Eric Holder confirmed;

Signed S-ChIP legislation;

Canceled 77 land leases around Arches National Park;

Signed the Stimulus Bill;

Announced his home foreclosure prevention plan;

Took first foreign trip to Canada;

Banned budget gimmicks, like emergency funding for Iraq;

Met with mayors;

Signed Executive Order for Office of Gulf Coast Recovery.

Perhaps not everything we wanted, but a big list nonetheless. Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, speaks with Rachel on just how quickly Obama is fighting the inertia of Washington.

Our Future: Seventeen months ago, Rick Perlstein wrote an essay predicting exactly how the 2008 campaign would go down. Turns out the only thing he didn't predict was the Paris Hilton reference.

Tomgram: Thomas Frank on Washington's Lords of Creation

collateral: The next crisis to hit our sinking ship of state may be a pension fund debacle that, had we stuck to a sensible tax policy, could have been avoided.

Mock, Paper, Scissors: The MPS Guide to GOP vice presidential candidates. In a handy print-out and keep format for further reference, it brings you the Pro, the Con, and the Baggage for each of the whispered candidates!

earthfamilyalpha: Change I Can Believe In

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Morning Martini, Conservative Truths, Montreal Simon, WTF Is It Now?!?

Gin and Tacos: Conservatives' states benefit the most from the federal tax policies they often oppose.

Shakesville: "Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch Part Forty-Three and Clinton Sexism Watch Part Ninety-One." Now with Bigot Bingo!

Huffington Post: Ali Eteraz debunks Edward Luttwack's claims that the Muslim world might seek to execute Barack Obama as an apostate. (Funny how the New York Times is essentially recycling the same, long-debunked concern trolling of Daniel Pipes and other right-wingers from four months ago.)

Campaign for America's Future: Bill Scher examines McCain's move "from independent maverick to incoherent conservative" on the environment, and Rick Perlstein's Nixonland book tour might be hitting your city this very week.

Media Bloodhound: Not even Tim Russert and his dry erase board can compete with John King's "months-long affair" with his interactive election map. (The map could do sooo much better.)

Guest roundup by Batocchio. Please e-mail submissions and tips to Batocchio9 at yahoo dot com. Thanks!