Who Stole the American Dream? (56 page)

If we genuinely want government of the people, by the people, and for the people to fix the deep problems that plague our country, then millions of average Americans will have to become directly involved once again in citizen action—making their presence felt, taking to the streets, just as millions did in the 1960 and 1970s—to restore the vital link between Washington and the people.

There is ample tinder to fire a new populist rebellion.
Public discontent over the gaping economic inequalities in America today is at a new high. Two-thirds of Americans now say there are “strong” conflicts between rich and poor—up roughly 20 percent from just two years ago. And this is not the view just of liberals. The perception of class conflict has risen sharply among white people, middle-income earners, political independents—even among a majority of Republicans (55 percent).

Confidence in government, especially in Congress, has plunged to historic lows. The popular sense of alienation is acute. Americans are fed up with the mean-spirited partisan warfare in a Congress that fails to do the people’s business. In the summer of 2011, 70 percent told a CBS News poll that
special interests have too much influence in Washington, and 85 percent said that ordinary people have too little influence. Voters in focus groups told Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg: “There’s just such a control of government by the wealthy….
We don’t have a representative government anymore.”

Hard facts support this conclusion. Political scientists have documented in detail that without active grassroots pressure, Washington ignores large majorities of Americans. When Larry Bartels of Princeton University analyzed a host of congressional votes in the 1980s and 1990s, he found that
senators were “vastly more responsive to affluent constituents” than to middle-class and poorer voters.

In 2005, Martin Gilens, another Princeton political scientist, made a detailed comparison of the policies that voters preferred with the policies Washington adopted and concluded that
politicians had disregarded the views of middle-class voters. “Influence over actual policy outcomes,” wrote Gilens, “appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.”

Correcting the obvious inequalities in our democracy, as well as in our economy, will require political reforms—pushed from the bottom up.

Step #9 is to regenerate the centrist core of American politics both by rejecting extremist candidates in both parties and by opening up our political process in every state to give more influence to moderate and independent voters.

Historically, when there has been mass disenchantment with both major political parties, public anger has spawned third party movements. In the 1992 presidential election, Texas billionaire Ross Perot ran for president and won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote running as an independent.

At that time, 39 percent of the voters voiced dissatisfaction with how government was being run. Today,
dissatisfaction with both parties in Washington is far higher—81 percent—and it has once again spurred an urge to reach beyond party lines and revive the political center. The 2012 political year has seen a wave of new political movements such as Americans Elect, Votocracy, Third Way, and No Labels. “
There is just so much unrest out there that something is going to explode,” commented Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

Americans Elect is the most ambitious effort to promote a bipartisan middle ground in the presidential election. Capitalizing on the Internet, Republican strategist Kahlil Byrd and wealthy philanthropist Peter Ackerman have been promoting what Byrd calls a “widespread draft movement for presidential candidates,” with strong appeal to moderate and independent voters. Their idea is to bypass the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions with more direct democracy: Offer registered voters a forum to nominate their own presidential candidate via the Internet, with the proviso that whoever is chosen as presidential nominee must select a running mate from the opposite party.
By early 2012, Americans Elect accomplished
a major goal—getting the organization listed on the ballot in all fifty states.

The key, of course, is fielding a high-profile, vote-getting candidate and sustaining the movement. After the 2010 midterm elections, New York’s Republican mayor, Michael
Bloomberg, seemed to cast himself as a centrist contender with his broadside blast at both major parties. “Despite what ideologues on the left believe, government cannot tax and spend its way back to prosperity, especially when that spending is driven by pork barrel politics,” Bloomberg declared. “… Despite what ideologues on the right believe, government should not stand aside and wait for the business cycle to run its natural course. That would be intolerable….” But having staked out the political middle, Bloomberg did not throw his hat in the ring. Even when third-party movements have run a potent vote-getter, such as Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party in 1912 or Ross Perot in 1992, third parties have never offered a long-term solution to a sharp divide between the two major parties. Perhaps the most important role of Americans Elect in the future may be in state and Congressional races because it has gotten its own ballot line all across the country.

Another sign of rising protest against political extremism—at the state and congressional level—is the birth of No Labels, a group formed by longtime Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and Republican Mark McKinnon, a media strategist for the Bush presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004. No Labels won early blessings from Mayor Bloomberg, Florida’s former Republican governor Charlie Christ, and former Clinton administration official Jonathan Cowan. As Cowan puts it, the goal is
to counteract “this kind of hyper-partisanship, my party, right or wrong, damn the consequences” and to pressure politicians in all 435 congressional districts into “setting aside their [party] labels” and moving toward compromises on the nation’s most pressing issues.

But Third Way, a think tank linked to No Labels, has a more focused and practical agenda.
Its leaders see parties as the main cause
of today’s “pathological polarization” of politics, and they want to break party control over primary elections, the gerrymandering of congressional districts, and party line election of congressional leadership. “Political parties have turned out to be a disaster,” argues former conservative Oklahoma Republican congressman Mickey Edwards. “
The problem is the party system itself. And No Labels has on its mission statement to move toward
open primaries and to take away party control over districting.”

To revive the political center, Third Way asserts, it’s essential to break the iron grip of parties by opening primaries to all voters and turning over the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional district lines to nonpartisan commissions. Such moves, reformers assert, will change the mix of voters and the dynamics of political campaigns. The idea is that open primaries would expand the electorate and therefore push candidates to cater more to moderates, who at 44 percent of the electorate in the presidential election of 2008 outnumbered both conservatives (34 percent) and liberals (22 percent). Third Way argues that open primaries should lead to the election of more moderates, making Congress less polarized and more prone to compromise.

Actual experience is limited, but it supports Third Way’s logic. Twice since the 1970s, California’s legislative redistricting was forced into the courts and carried out by a panel of retired federal judges instead of the legislature. Each time,
the parties wound up with less of a lock on legislative districts. Elections swung from Republican to Democrat and vice versa. Voters had more sway.

So far, eleven states have so-called open primaries in the presidential nominating contest for both parties—that is, primaries where each party, running its own candidates, opens the balloting to all voters, whether they are registered in that party or are independents or in the opposite party. Eighteen states follow the same pattern in congressional elections—all voters can take part and vote for that party’s candidates.

So far, only Washington State has taken the next step—running one nonpartisan primary in congressional races, where candidates for both parties run together in a single primary race and voting is open to everyone. The top two vote getters then oppose each other in the general election. Washington State did that in 2010 and the impact was dramatic. The average vote in Washington State’s nine congressional districts tripled the turnout in 2008. That seemed to
favor more moderate candidates because higher turnout typically reduces the pull of extremist candidates. California has now decided to follow Washington State in its congressional elections in 2012, and if it works well there, the idea may spread.

Since American elections with low turnout usually go to the party that can fire up the political emotions of its most ardent partisan supporters, the most obvious way to increase the influence of moderate and independent voters would be
to increase American voter turnout. In 2010, just 37 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. When so many Americans move their residences from year to year, local variations in voter registration pose obstacles to higher turnouts. In the 2008 president election,
an estimated 2.2 million Americans were unable to cast ballots because of voter registration problems, according to the Pew Center on the States.

The Pew Center and other groups have urged states to adopt automated online voter registration and computerized voting, to make voting more accessible to people whose jobs are distant from their homes and voting sites. A few states such as
Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have instituted election-day voter registration and seen voter turnouts rise. Other countries have gotten better turnouts by putting election days on weekends or holidays to reduce conflicts with work schedules.
In America, 25 percent of eligible voters have told pollsters that work and schedule conflicts impede their ability to vote.

To boost turnout,
about thirty countries have compulsory voting
and some actually penalize voters for failing to exercise their franchise. Australia achieves roughly 95 percent voter turnout by holding elections on Saturdays and fining citizens A$20 for not voting, with the fine escalating each time a voter misses an election. This system changes the dynamics of the campaign and elevates the caliber of debate in Australian elections, according to Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

“
The way to gain votes does not come from working your base to fever pitch, it comes from persuading the persuadables, the centrists who are increasingly left out of the American political process,” Ornstein has written. “Appealing to the extremes is a formula for failure. If there were mandatory voting in America, there’s a good chance that the ensuing reduction in extremist discourse would lead to genuine legislative progress.”

The toughest nut in U.S. politics today is how to reduce the influence of money in elections and on legislative policy making. As Arizona’s Republican senator John McCain once admitted, “All of us [politicians] have been
corrupted by the process where big money and big influence—and you can include me in that list—where big money has bought access, which has bought influence.”

So far, legislative efforts at reform have repeatedly been undermined. Each time Congress has tried to impose limits on donations to political candidates, either
the Supreme Court has voided those measures as unconstitutional limits on free speech or ingenious political operatives have found ways around the laws. In its January 2010 decision on the
Citizens United
case, the Supreme Court rejected two precedent decisions and ruled that government may not ban campaign spending by corporations on behalf of political candidates. The high court gave the green light to unlimited donations to independent groups, meaning technically independent of candidates
and parties. That decision, reinforced by the loose rules for independent groups adopted by the Federal Election Commission, has effectively nullified the existing $2,500 limit on personal contributions to political candidates and opened the floodgates to hundreds of millions of campaign dollars flowing from super-rich donors and corporations to theoretically independent Super-PACs.

Very quickly in the 2012 elections, Super-PACs emerged to play a commanding role, acting as surrogates for the candidates they favored.
In Iowa’s Republican caucuses, Restore Our Future, the Super-PAC backing Mitt Romney, demolished Newt Gingrich with a multimillion-dollar television ad blitz.
In South Carolina, the pro-Gingrich Super-PAC, Winning Our Future, crippled and defeated Romney. Other candidates, such as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and Governor Rick Perry of Texas followed suit. “
The Super-PACs are plainly an avenue for candidates to evade the law that limits contributions,” Mann and Ornstein commented ruefully.

By late spring,
Super-PACs had raised $160 million, bankrolled mainly by
a small group of billionaire would-be kingmakers such as Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam; Harold C. Simmons of Dallas and his chemical and metals conglomerate, Contran Corporation; Houston home builder Robert J. Perry; PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dream-works; and hedge fund managers John A. Paulson and Paul Singer of New York. Just three super-donors—the Adelsons, Simmons/Contran, and Perry—contributed close to one fourth of all the Super-PAC cash.

In the 2012 general election campaign, Super-PACs have cast themselves as weapons of political mass destruction. Long before the party conventions actually nominated presidential candidates, runaway campaign fund-raising by Republicans, Democrats, and independent groups was on track to outspend the
record-breaking $1.8 billion presidential election of 2008.
Charles and David Koch, billionaire
owners of Koch Industries, an energy conglomerate headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama and recruited other wealthy conservative super-donors to help raise $100 million.
American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the Super-PACs masterminded by Karl Rove, longtime political strategist for George W. Bush, set a goal of raising $300 million to blitz Obama.
Initially, President Obama had rejected Super-PACs. But facing a Republican Super-PAC offensive, Obama relented and gave the go-ahead for Democratic funders to try to match Republicans, presaging a fierce crossfire of negative attack ads in the fall campaign.