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2011: The Year of the Recall Election |
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Thursday, 29 December 2011 09:14 |
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Spivak writes: "This year an enraged electorate has made its presence felt...the most obvious sign of political activism has been the unprecedented use of recall elections. ...In 2011, at least 150 elected officials in 17 states faced recall votes.... Thanks to the Internet, email and social media, previously unconnected voters can easily be drawn into a fight over a politician's alleged misdeeds. Smartphones and spreadsheets and demographic data at a political consultant's fingertips can maximize signature-gathering efforts."
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at the State Capital in Madison. (photo: Reuters)
2011: The Year of the Recall Election
By Joshua Spivak, Los Angeles Times
29 December 11
 his year an enraged electorate has made its presence felt, through Occupying events and a roller-coaster Republican presidential primary process. But the most obvious sign of political activism has been the unprecedented use of recall elections. The numbers tell the tale: In 2011, at least 150 elected officials in 17 states faced recall votes.
Recalls stretched from the Arizona state Senate to the Miami-Dade mayor's office to the school board in Grenora, N.D. Eleven state legislators faced recall - including nine in Wisconsin. Thirty mayors were subject to recall votes in 2011. At least three municipalities adopted the recall. Nineteen U.S. states allow recalls, with more - South Carolina among them - seriously considering adopting the process. It's even grown internationally, with governments in India, Britain and Australia all considering adopting the recall in some form.
Next year may be an even bigger one for recalls. Nationally, there are more than 100 active recall petitions seeking signatures, and 22 have already been scheduled in 2012. Most notably, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is likely to be only the third governor in U.S. history to face a recall vote.
Voter anger, especially over the downturn in the economy, unquestionably fuels the recall mania. But voters have been angry plenty of times in the past; why has the recall suddenly become so popular?
The reality is that the 2011 recalls are the culmination of a 30-year trend. Since states first adopted the recall - Oregon and Michigan, in 1908 - a total of 32 state legislators have faced recall elections. From 1908 to 1980, there were just seven state recall attempts. From 1981 through 2009, there were 14. The 11 state recall votes this year nearly doubled the total for any other decade.
The recall's increasing popularity and effectiveness is directly connected to technology. Campaigning, fundraising and, critically for the recall, signature gathering have become easier thanks to the digital revolution. It may seem like a paradox: At the same time that we are witnessing billion-dollar campaigns for president, the most basic political action launched by non-professionals is becoming cheaper and more effective.
Thanks to the Internet, email and social media, previously unconnected voters can easily be drawn into a fight over a politician's alleged misdeeds. Smartphones and spreadsheets and demographic data at a political consultant's fingertips can maximize signature-gathering efforts.
And the more recall elections there are, the more it sinks in with voters: Recalls cause change. Incumbents generally have a big advantage and get reelected when they run in regular elections. The recall turns that stat on its head.
It's true that in record-setting Wisconsin this year, only two out of nine state Senate recall elections overturned the incumbent, but over time, recalls in the U.S. have had a better than 50% success rate. In 2011, 84 officials lost their seats to recall (75 were kicked out by voters, and another nine quit before the recall vote was held). Going back to the historical data, of the 32 state legislators who faced recall votes, 17 were kicked out. And both of the governors who have so far faced recall elections, California's Gray Davis in 2003 and North Dakota's Lynn Frazier in 1921, lost their jobs.
The success of recalls is partly explained by the nature of the election. Recalls are generally held as special elections, which draw fewer voters and attract those most committed to whatever cause is on the ballot. Unsurprisingly, that favors those who supported the recall in the first place. There are counter-examples, most prominently the circus-like recall of Gray Davis, in which turnout was higher than at his election. But generally turnout is heavily depressed.
Voter anger may have helped drive the record-setting year for recalls, and it certainly made life miserable for 150 officials throughout the country. But the growth of the recall is a long-developing trend. Don't expect it to disappear any time soon.
Joshua Spivak is a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in Staten Island, N.Y., and blogs at http://recallelections.blogspot.com/
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Get Money Out of Politics in 2012 |
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Wednesday, 28 December 2011 17:40 |
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Moore writes: "This destruction of our democracy can only be stopped if the majority of us make it clear that we will ONLY vote for those candidates who sign a pledge to make it their TOP legislative priority to push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting any person or entity from donating ANY money to a candidate's campaign (and that includes a millionaire candidate buying his own election)."
Portrait, Michael Moore, 04/03/09. (photo: Ann-Christine Poujoulat/Getty)
Get Money Out of Politics in 2012
By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog
28 Decemeber 11
 have many things I'm planning to do in the New Year - walk three miles a day, use an eco-friendly laundry detergent, write fewer anonymous letters to Wolf Blitzer - but I want to declare, right here, that one of my top priorities in 2012 will be to spearhead a drive to remove ALL money from our electoral process, period. Nothing - and I mean NOTHING - we want to accomplish, from creating jobs to protecting the environment to preventing wars, will happen as long as those who hold the purse strings are the ones who own our Congress.
This destruction of our democracy can only be stopped if the majority of us make it clear that we will ONLY vote for those candidates who sign a pledge to make it their TOP legislative priority to push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting any person or entity from donating ANY money to a candidate's campaign (and that includes a millionaire candidate buying his own election). Plus, they must pledge to back a law banning elected officials from working as lobbyists after they leave office.
The majority of Americans already support strong campaign finance reform and lobbying bans. So what are we waiting for? Now is the time to act!
Here is the wording to the constitutional amendment we need:
Section 1. All elections for President and members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate shall be publicly financed. No political contributions shall be permitted to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. No political expenditures shall be permitted in support of any federal candidate, or in opposition to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. Nothing in this Section shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.
Section 2. The Congress shall, by statute, provide limitations on the amounts and timing of the expenditures of such public funds and provide criminal penalties for any violation of this section.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) has already introduced a "Plan for Washington Reform" that, among other great things, creates a lifetime ban on any member of Congress becoming a lobbyist.
So here is the copy of the pledge we expect those running for office to sign this year:
"I, (name of candidate), promise to make it one of my TOP priorities to introduce and vote for a constitutional amendment that bans all financial contributions to all candidates running for office. I will support legislation that publicly funds all elections and legislation that bans lawmakers from working as lobbyists after they leave office. If I do not do this, I promise not to run for re-election."
One of the first candidates running for Congress to sign the pledge removing money from politics this year is in my hometown Congressional district of Flint, Michigan! His name is Dan Kildee. He not only wants the money out of the electoral process, he wants corporations declared as NOT people. Dan is already refusing to take any corporate PAC money or any money connected to Wall Street or the banks.
And how have the people in Michigan responded to a candidate like this? The early polls show Dan in the lead - because the voters are sick and tired of the way it's been for so long.
But, until Dan (and others like him) get elected so they can overturn the rule of the 1%, none of this will change. And under the current system - irony alert - they can't get elected without money. Wouldn't it be great if this were the last election I'd have to write a sentence like that?
Will you help me show how powerful the public's support is for cleaning up Congress by backing the only person running for Congress from Flint who is on our side? This is not just some symbolic cause. I believe Dan will get elected - especially if he has our grassroots support.
Please take a minute to click here and donate $10, $25 or more to Dan's campaign. He's pro-peace, pro-choice, and ahead in the polls. He will fight to tax the rich and the corporations like General Electric and Bank of America who pay no taxes at all. I have known this man since he was 18 - when he first won a seat on the Flint School Board. He comes from the working class and he has been a local public servant his entire life.
I'm asking you to do this also as a personal favor to my hometown which is still suffering from crushing unemployment. More people per capita live in poverty in Flint than any other city (100,000+ population) in America. They have no money to donate to a fighter like Dan. That's why I'm asking you to help in their stead.
Many of you have been writing to ask me what "practical" things you can do to be part of the movement sweeping the country. Well, here's your chance to do something tangible, even if it's just kicking in five bucks. Send Dan Kildee to Congress!
And insist that those running for Congress in YOUR district sign the pledge and commit to removing money from politics. We have to start somewhere - and I guess Flint, Michigan, is as good a place as any to begin! Please join me in doing so.
P.S. The New York Times this week had a story about how nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires - and many of them got that way after getting elected to Congress. This is a disgrace. Congress's wealth has gone up 15% in 7 years while the average American's has gone down. Congress is bought and paid for by the 1%. Instead of the rich having just 1% of the influence in Congress, they have 100% of the say. This has to stop now. Let's elect 435 Dan Kildees this coming year!
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Mitt Romney: The Real Austerity Candidate |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 28 December 2011 17:36 |
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Pierce writes: "He is really the only true class warrior in the race. He's counting on prejudice and ignorance because he is running in the Republican primaries and that's the coin of the realm. But he's also counting on the desperate dreams of desperate people who want to believe that there is a big bag of money out there that's going to the Wrong People, and that, if someone would only re-direct it, their lives would be better."
Mr. 1 Percent, Mitt Romney, 12/27/11. (art: DonkeyHotey/flickr)
Mitt Romney: The Real Austerity Candidate
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine
28 December 11
 ver the holidays, Willard Romney has been seeking once again to define himself, a job that is very similar to that undertaken by the people who renovate old country homes. The first thing you have to do is to tear down the accumulated improvements and renovations of the past 40 or 50 years, and get back down to the basic intent of the original architects. (Maybe changing the solarium into a replica of the Jungle Room at Graceland back in '62 wasn't the smartest move in the world.) So, basically, Willard is taking the sledge and the pry-bar to everything he's done politically since he bum-rushed his way into the governor's chair in Massachusetts to reveal the original moral architecture of Willard Romney, International Man of Privilege.
And, yeah, it turns out he's pretty much a smug, arrogant, and, yes, entitled rich kid who divides the world mentally into two kinds of people - himself and The Help. Lately, he's been sounding a new theme in his campaign to be our national CFO. He's railing against what he calls President Obama's attempts to turn the United States into "an entitlement society." (This charge, of course, coming as it does from a guy whose gifts as a liar are as rudimentary as his skills as a demagogue, is utterly false, but let's all be big-boy pundits and pretend for a while that truth isn't necessarily ever the point.) What is important is how easily Romney has managed to slide into the essential character of the most rabid evening-drive radio morons on your dial. Willard Romney has never known a day of peril in his life. He grew up with a silver spoon lodged so deeply in his gums that he had his baby teeth until he was 25. He did his Mormon mission in Provence, for the love of god. He moved onto a lucrative career in predatory capital. If, as was said, George W. Bush was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, then Willard Romney was born in the dugout with four runs in, nobody out, and the bases loaded.
Comes now this pure piece of manufactured product, this vacant replicant of American plutocracy, to lecture a country in the middle of a fragile recovery from an economic disaster brought on by the other soulless replicants on the topics of our vanishing work ethic, and the great moral cleansing power of onrushing poverty. And, because he cares less about the country he's planning to lead than he does about the next nickel he can squeeze out of it, he's doing so with rhetoric that owes more to George Wallace than it does to George Romney, who was a decent Republican in the days before greasy-beaked vultures like his spalpeen hijacked the party. (Which is pretty much what E.J. Dionne was saying recently.) Willard is working the old poor-people-are-robbing-you-blind melodeon again while his real targets are anyone who receives any kind of federal government assistance of any kind whatsoever. And don't fall for the old "states do it better" dodge. Willard knows full good and well that the states can't carry this kind of load, either, and that the costs will just get passed down to lower and lower levels of government until nobody can pay for anything, and the programs that he'd like to see eliminated because it will help him get elected simply disappear.
He is the real austerity candidate, the guy who will run the ball here for the banksters who are crippling Europe, and a lot of Europeans, with economic strategies that keep themselves afloat while children die of preventable diseases, and guaranteeing that whatever recoveries there will be in places like Ireland and the UK will be the sole property of the people who most deserve them. This is what Willard Romney would like to bring to America. He just has to convince enough people that the pain will be imposed upon the undeserving Them. It is a vicious puppet show of a campaign he's running.
He is really the only true class warrior in the race. He's counting on prejudice and ignorance because he is running in the Republican primaries and that's the coin of the realm. But he's also counting on the desperate dreams of desperate people who want to believe that there is a big bag of money out there that's going to the Wrong People, and that, if someone would only re-direct it, their lives would be better. Well, there is a big bag of money out there, and it is indeed going to the Wrong People, and those would be the people in whose company Willard Romney has spent his entire, cosseted, entitled existence. He has embarked on a divisive campaign of misdirection, hoping against hope that nobody notices that he mortgaged himself to his ambition on an adjustable rate, and that he's underwater on his soul.
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FOCUS | Why Ron Paul Terrifies the GOP |
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Tuesday, 27 December 2011 14:04 |
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Beinart writes: "Washington Republicans and political pundits keep depicting Paul as some kind of ideological mutation, the conservative equivalent of a black swan. They're wrong."
Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, speaks during a campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa, 12/22/11. (photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)
Why Ron Paul Terrifies the GOP
By Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
27 December 11
The libertarian upstart isn't just stirring controversy; he's threatening to expose profound divisions within the GOP. Peter Beinart on how Paul will change the Republican Party in 2012.
 e haven't even said goodbye to 2011, but I want to be first in line with my person of the year prediction for 2012: Ron Paul. I don't think Paul is going to win the presidency, or even win the Republican nomination. But he's going to come close enough to change the GOP forever.
Washington Republicans and political pundits keep depicting Paul as some kind of ideological mutation, the conservative equivalent of a black swan. They're wrong. Ask any historically-minded conservative who the most conservative president of the 20th Century was, and they'll likely say Calvin Coolidge. No president tried as hard to make the federal government irrelevant. It's said that Coolidge was so terrified of actually doing something as president that he tried his best not even to speak. But in 1925, Silent Cal did open his mouth long enough to spell out his foreign policy vision, and what he said could be emblazoned on a Ron Paul for President poster: "The people have had all the war, all the taxation, and all the military service they want."
Small government conservatism, the kind to which today's Republicans swear fealty, was born in the 1920s not only in reaction to the progressive movement's efforts to use government to regulate business, but in reaction to World War I, which conservatives rightly saw as a crucial element of the government expansion they feared. To be a small government conservative in the 1920s and 1930s was, for the most part, to vehemently oppose military spending while insisting that the US never, ever get mired in another European war.
Even after World War II, Mr. Republican-Robert Taft-opposed the creation of NATO and called the Korean War unconstitutional. Dwight Eisenhower worked feverishly to scale back the Truman-era defense spending that he feared would bankrupt America and rob it of its civil liberties. Even conservative luminaries like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater who embraced the global anti-communist struggle made it clear that they were doing so with a heavy heart. Global military commitments, they explained, represented a tragic departure from small government conservatism, a departure justified only by the uniquely satanic nature of the Soviet threat.
The cold war lasted half a century, but isolationism never left the conservative DNA. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, some of America's most prominent conservative intellectuals-people like Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Pat Buchanan-argued that the GOP should become the party of Coolidge and Taft once again. The Republican Congress of the 1990s bitterly opposed Bill Clinton's wars in the Balkans, and Buchanan, running on an isolationist platform, briefly led the GOP presidential field in 1996. Even the pre-9/11 Bush administration was so hostile to increased military spending that the Weekly Standard called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.
Given this history, it's entirely predictable that in the wake of two disillusioning wars, a diminishing al Qaeda threat and mounting debt, someone like Ron Paul would come along. In Washington, Republican elites are enmeshed in a defense-industrial complex with a commercial interest in America's global military footprint. But listen to Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and see how often you hear them demanding that America keep fighting in Afghanistan, or even attack Iran. According to a November CBS News poll, as many Republicans said the U.S. should decrease its troop presence in Afghanistan as said America should increase it or keep it the same. In the same survey, only 22 percent of Republicans called Iran's nuclear program "a threat that requires military action now" compared to more than fifty percent who said it "can be contained with diplomacy." Almost three-quarters of Republicans said the U.S. should not try to change dictatorships to democracies.
There are certainly Republicans out there who support the Bush-Cheney neo-imperialist foreign policy vision. But they're split among the top tier presidential candidates. Paul has the isolationists all to himself. Moreover, his two top opponents-Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich-not only back a big-government foreign policy agenda, but have periodically backed a big-government domestic agenda as well. In other words, they personify the argument at the heart of Paul's campaign: that if you love a powerful Pentagon, you'll end up loving other parts of the government bureaucracy as well.
Since the Iowa caucuses generally reward organization and passion, I suspect Paul will win them easily. That would likely propel him to a strong showing in libertarian New Hampshire. Somehow, I think Romney and the Republican establishment will find a way to defeat him in the vicious and expensive struggle that follows. But the dominant storyline at the Republican convention will be figuring out how to appease Paul sufficiently to ensure that he doesn't launch a third party bid. And in so doing, the GOP will legitimize its isolationist wing in a way it hasn't since 9/11.
In truth, the modern Republican Party has always been a house divided, pulled between its desire to crusade against evil abroad and its fear that that crusade will empower the evil of big government at home. In 2012, I suspect, Ron Paul will expose that division in a way it has not been exposed in a long time. And Republicans will not soon paper it over again.
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y political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State - a position he's apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President.
